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700 square kilometres, have been retreating for several decades. The surface area covered by ice in the interior mountains declined 11 per cent between 1985 and 2005, and nearly 20 per cent in the eastern slopes of the Rockies.
"We are getting a big signal from the glaciers about what the climate is doing," said lead author Garry Clarke, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.
Using comprehensive modelling, which includes ice flow physics, the study found that rising temperatures caused by fossil fuel emissions will wipe out most glaciers in the interior of British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains of Alberta under most scenarios.
The Columbia Icefield, which waters both Banff and Jasper national parks, will disappear altogether by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are allowed to triple beyond current levels under what Clarke called "the bad guy" scenario.
"We won't see ice in the Rocky Mountain Parks. That would be a sad cultural loss and aesthetic loss for Canada," said Clarke.
If humans can restrain their fossil fuel spending and keep carbon dioxide emissions below 450 parts per million ("the good guy scenario," as Clarke puts it), and thereby prevent temperatures from rising more than two degrees, many glaciers will have a better chance of keeping their ice -- albeit in a diminished state.
"There is a reward to be reaped with low carbon constraints," said Clarke. But in order to slow the disappearance of glaciers and sustain others for future generations, society must radically reduce carbon emissions and maintain those reductions for the next 25 years, he said.
Without glaciers, many fresh water fisheries will go extinct. "Glaciers melt in late summer and keep mountain streams flowing and cold. That's one of the services we will lose," explained Clarke.
Retreating glaciers could also have a significant impact on the Columbia River, which "yields the largest hydroelectric production of any river in North America," he said.
Most of the rapid glacial decline will occur between 2020 and 2040, when the majority of glacial melt will run off into streams and rivers into the ocean.
The big uncertainty
In the study's modelling, only glaciers in northwestern B.C. along the Yukon and Alaska border manage to survive as a significant mass of ice by 2100 due to what Clarke calls "their height advantage."
In contrast, glaciers in the B.C. Interior and Rockies "will experience total or near-total losses of ice area and volume."
"The time to act is now if we want to defend glaciers" and their critical contribution to water systems in the Canadian West, added the 73-year-old Clarke who has studied glaciers since the 1960s. "The big uncertainty is how humans will behave."
Federal and provincial governments need to take a cold, hard look at bitumen pipeline proposals, liquefied natural gas projects and shale gas mining, because all of these export-orientated projects are geared to "putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. We have to stop that," he said.
A 2014 ranking of 58 nations on how they have responded to the threat of climate change found that Canada "still shows no intention of moving forward with climate policy and therefore remains the worst performer of all industrialized countries."
Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe, which conducted the ranking, found only three countries ranked lower: Iran, Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan.
Canada is one of the world's 10 largest emitters of carbon dioxide, a club that includes China, the United States, Russia and Japan.
The global oil sector, which dominates motorized transportation, accounts for more than one-third of all reported greenhouse gas emissions.The seven foot tall bronze statue was made in Andhra Pradesh
An iconic statue of Mahatma Gandhi in the UK has been vandalised in the city of Leicester apparently in protest against the 1984 Operation Bluestar military raid on the Golden Temple. Graffiti saying “Never forget 84” and “We want justice #84” has been sprayed on the base of the statue in Leicester’s famous Golden Mile of Indian-origin restaurants and shops.
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It is believed that the messages are in reference to Operation Bluestar in June, 1984, when the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest Sikh shrine, was raided by the Indian Army to flush out Sikh extremists holed up inside. Police are investigating after the vandalism was discovered on Saturday. Sikhs from Leicester and around the UK on Sunday marched through London to mark the 30th anniversary of the siege.
Reacting to the incident, Leicester East MP Keith Vaz said damaging the Gandhi statue was “foolish”. “To think that somebody has felt it necessary, either an individual or a group of people, to vandalise in this foolish and idiotic way, such an important part of the heritage of India, as well as the heritage of Leicester, I think is a disgrace,” he said.
Leicester City Council workers removed graffiti from the plinth of the bronze monument this morning. Leicestershire Police is treating the incident as criminal damage and have appealed for anyone with information about the incident to contact them.A member of the Saudi security forces next to a replica of a fighter jet during a daily media briefing on the Saudi-led coalition’s airstrike operation against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, April 2, 2015. Fayez Nureldine / AFP / Getty Images
John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has accused the Obama administration of going soft on Iran’s regional ambitions in pursuit of what he sees as a bad nuclear agreement with Tehran, and has praised “our Arab partners” for intervening in Yemen. “The prospect of radical groups like Iranian-backed Houthi militants” was “more than [U.S. Arab allies] could withstand,” he said. But a large contingent of senior U.S. military officers believes the Saudi-led military operation will fail, and possibly turn into a quagmire.
The fact that the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen was planned and launched independently of the U.S. was, in McCain’s eyes, a rebuke of the administration’s policies. “These countries, led by Saudi Arabia, did not notify us nor seek our coordination or our assistance in this effort,” he said during a March 26 committee hearing, “because they believe we are siding with Iran.”
A senior commander at Central Command (CENTCOM), speaking on condition of anonymity, scoffed at that argument. “The reason the Saudis didn’t inform us of their plans,” he said, “is because they knew we would have told them exactly what we think — that it was a bad idea.”
Military sources said that a number of regional special forces officers and officers at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) argued strenuously against supporting the Saudi-led intervention because the target of the intervention, the Shia Houthi movement — which has taken over much of Yemen and which Riyadh accuses of being a proxy for Tehran — has been an effective counter to Al-Qaeda.
Michael Horton, a Yemen expert close to a number of officers at SOCOM and a consultant to the U.S. and U.K. governments, picked up on this debate. Within days of the Saudi intervention’s start, he said in an email that he was “confounded” by the intervention, noting that many in SOCOM “favor the Houthis, as they have been successful in rolling back AQ [Al-Qaeda] and now IS [the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL] from a number of Yemeni governorates” — something that hundreds of U.S. drone strikes and large numbers of advisers to Yemen’s military had failed to accomplish.
Later, in a telephone interview, Horton expanded on that. “These constant reports that the Houthis are working for the Iranians are nonsense, but the view is right out of the neocon playbook,” he said. “The Israelis have been touting this line that we lost Yemen to Iran. That’s absurd. The Houthis don’t need Iranian weapons. They have plenty of their own. And they don’t require military training. They’ve been fighting Al-Qaeda since at least 2012, and they’ve been winning. Why are we fighting a movement that’s fighting Al-Qaeda?”Though it has gained popularity in the West as medically and psychologically beneficial, meditation can produce a much wider variety of outcomes, not all of them calm and relaxing, according to a new study that analyzes meditation-related challenges.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Meditation is increasingly being marketed as a treatment for conditions such as pain, depression, stress and addiction, and while many people achieve therapeutic goals, other meditators encounter a much broader range of experiences — sometimes distressing and even impairing ones — along the way.
That’s according to a new study in PLOS ONE, in which Willoughby Britton, assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, and co-authors chronicled and categorized such experiences as well as the factors that influence them.
“Many effects of meditation are well known, like increased awareness of thoughts and emotions, or improved calm and well-being,” said study lead author Jared Lindahl, visiting assistant professor in Brown’s Cogut Center for the Humanities. “But there is a much broader range of possible experiences. Exactly what those experiences are, how they affect individuals and which ones show up as difficult is going to be based on a range of personal, interpersonal and contextual factors.”
The Varieties of Contemplative Experience study
The study purposely sought out “challenging” experiences because they are underrepresented in the scientific literature, the authors said. With that goal, the study therefore was not designed to estimate how common those experiences are among all meditators. Instead the purpose of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study was to provide detailed descriptions of experiences and to start to understand the multiple ways they are interpreted, why they might happen and what meditators and teachers do to deal with them.
Though rare in the scientific literature, the broader range of effects including meditation-related difficulties have been documented in Buddhist traditions, the researchers wrote. For example, Tibetans refer to a wide range of experiences — some blissful but some painful or disturbing — as “nyams.” Zen Buddhists use the term “makyō” to refer to certain perceptual disturbances.
“While the positive effects have made the transition from Buddhist texts and traditions to contemporary clinical applications, the use of meditation for health and well-being has obscured the wider range of experiences and purposes traditionally associated with Buddhist meditation,” Lindahl said.
To understand the range of experiences encountered among Western Buddhists practicing meditation, Britton, Lindahl and their co-authors interviewed nearly 100 meditators and meditation teachers from each of three main traditions: Theravāda, Zen and Tibetan. Each interview told a story, which the researchers meticulously coded and analyzed using qualitative research methodology.
The researchers also employed standardized causality assessment methods that are used by agencies like the U.S. Food and Drug Adminisration to ensure that meditation likely played a causal role in the experiences they documented.
Experiences and influences
Based upon their interviews, the researchers developed a taxonomy of 59 experiences organized into seven types, or “domains”: cognitive, perceptual, affective (i.e. emotions and moods), somatic (relating to the body), conative (i.e. motivation or will), sense of self and social. They also identified another 26 categories of “influencing factors” or conditions that may impact the intensity, duration or associated distress or impairment.
All meditators reported multiple unexpected experiences from across the seven domains of experience. For example, a commonly reported challenging experience in the perceptual domain was hypersensitivity to light or sound, while somatic changes such as insomnia or involuntary body movements were also reported. Challenging emotional experiences could include fear, anxiety, panic or a loss of emotions altogether.
Britton noted that the duration of the effects people described in their interviews also varied widely, ranging from a few days to months to more than a decade.
Sometimes experiences were ostensibly desirable, such as feelings of unity or oneness with others, but some meditators reported them going too far, lasting too long or feeling violated, exposed or disoriented. Others who had meditation experiences that felt positive during retreats reported that the persistence of these experiences interfered with their ability to function or work when they left the retreat and returned to normal life.
“This is a good example of how a contextual factor can affect associated distress and functioning,” Lindahl said. “An experience that is positive and desirable in one situation may become a burden in another.”
Moreover, in some cases, an experience that some meditators reported as challenging, others reported as positive. To understand why this was the case, the researchers also aimed to determine the “influencing factors” that affect the desirability, intensity, duration and impact of a given experience.
The researchers documented four main domains of influencing factors: practitioner-related (i.e. the meditator’s personal attributes), practice-related (such as how they meditated), relationships (interpersonal factors) and health behaviors (such as diet, sleep or exercise). For example, a meditator’s relationship with the instructor was for some people a source of support and for others a source of distress.
While many teachers cited the meditator’s practice intensity, psychiatric history or trauma history, and quality of supervision as important, these factors appeared to play a role only for some meditators. The researchers wrote in PLOS ONE that in many cases, challenging experiences could not be attributed to just those factors:
“The results also challenge other common causal attributions, such as the assumption that meditation-related difficulties only happen to individuals with a pre-existing condition (psychiatric or trauma history), who are on long or intensive retreats, who are poorly supervised, who are practicing incorrectly, or who have inadequate preparation.”
Toward improved understanding and support
Rather than conclusive causes, Britton described the influencing factors the research identified as “testable hypotheses” of what might impact a meditator’s trajectory. For example, future research could investigate whether certain types of practice are associated with different kinds of challenging experiences, or whether the degree of perceived social support influences the duration of distress and impairment.
“It is likely that an interaction of multiple factors is at play,” Lindahl said. “Each meditator had their own unique story.”
It’s important to acknowledge that this study represents an initial step in a much longer discussion and investigation, Britton said: “The take-home message is that meditation-related challenges are a topic worthy of further investigation, but there is still a lot more to understand.”
For example, the study did not investigate meditation-related challenges in the context of mindfulness-based interventions, in children or in clinical populations. Furthermore, Britton said, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms of these experiences. The authors have already developed one potential model for some experiences, but there likely will be different mechanisms for different experiences, and they hope other researchers will join the inquiry.
If research can uncover why challenging experiences arise, then meditators and teachers might be in a better position to manage them, Britton and Lindahl said. But even before that, they hope the new study can help people recognize that adverse experiences are not necessarily unique to them or their fault. Britton noted that in a societal context in which meditation is often discussed as producing only positive results, meditators can feel stigmatized and isolated if they experience a problem.
“During the interviews, some people learned for the first time that they are not completely alone in having had this experience,” Lindahl said. “The social awareness we think this project can raise could be a key way of addressing some of the problems.”
One of the remedies people cited for dealing with problems was simply having someone they could talk to who was familiar with challenging meditation experiences, the researchers said. Britton recently started a weekly online support group where meditators can share their challenges with each other.
“Our long-term hope is that this research, and the research that follows, can be used by the meditation community to create support systems for the full range of meditation-related experiences,” Britton said. “Really, the first step is acknowledging the diversity of experiences that different people can have.”
In addition to Lindahl and Britton, the paper’s other authors are Nathan Fisher of the University of California at Santa Barbara, David Cooper of Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School and Rochelle Rosen of the Brown University School of Public Health.
The study was supported by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, the Bial Foundation, the Mind and Life Institute, and the 1440 Foundation.ME: Luis Rodriguez died of cardiac arrhythmia due to physical restraint
The Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office has ruled a death at the Warren Theater a homicide.The ME's office said Luis Rodriguez died of cardiac arrhythmia due to physical restraint.The report said postmortem examination revealed evidence of a physical struggle. The physical injuries were not enough to cause death, though, according to the ME's office. Rodriguez had a preexisting medical condition: an enlarged heart.The ME's office said homicide as a medical term does not indicate wrongdoing or criminal intent.“The Medical Examiner’s report indicates minimal physical trauma to Mr. Rodriguez, which commonly occurs when an individual physically resists,” Moore police said in a statement to the media.They also said homicide “is a ‘neutral’ term and neither indicates nor implies criminal intent.”Rodriguez died while in police custody at the Warren Theater on Feb. 15. He was restrained during a domestic incident at the theater between his wife and daughter.Rodriguez's wife recorded the confrontation as it happened on her cellphone. That controversial video went viral. The Rodriguez family says it has been confident all along the death would be ruled a homicide.“A badge doesn’t give you the right to murder an innocent man,” said Rodriguez’s daughter, Yashira Jantes.Three Moore officers are still on leave with pay as the OSBI is investigating. Authorities will present their findings to the District Attorney.
The Oklahoma Medical Examiner's Office has ruled a death at the Warren Theater a homicide.
The ME's office said Luis Rodriguez died of cardiac arrhythmia due to physical restraint.
Advertisement Related Content Family: Private autopsy finds Norman man died of asphyxiation while in police custody at Warren Theater
The report said postmortem examination revealed evidence of a physical struggle. The physical injuries were not enough to cause death, though, according to the ME's office. Rodriguez had a preexisting medical condition: an enlarged heart.
The ME's office said homicide as a medical term does not indicate wrongdoing or criminal intent.
“The Medical Examiner’s report indicates minimal physical trauma to Mr. Rodriguez, which commonly occurs when an individual physically resists,” Moore police said in a statement to the media.
They also said homicide “is a ‘neutral’ term and neither indicates nor implies criminal intent.”
Rodriguez died while in police custody at the Warren Theater on Feb. 15. He was restrained during a domestic incident at the theater between his wife and daughter.
Rodriguez's wife recorded the confrontation as it happened on her cellphone. That controversial video went viral. The Rodriguez family says it has been confident all along the death would be ruled a homicide.
“A badge doesn’t give you the right to murder an innocent man,” said Rodriguez’s daughter, Yashira Jantes.
Three Moore officers are still on leave with pay as the OSBI is investigating. Authorities will present their findings to the District Attorney.
AlertMeThere's nothing quite like an effective movie twist. You've been sitting in the dark for hours, carefully following plot points, through-lines and character development only to be completely blindsided by the big reveal.
The movie seemed like it was telling one story, but there was this other thing going on the whole time! You can hardly wait to start it over and watch it again with your newfound knowledge. Were there clues? Are there plot holes? Time will tell!
Unfortunately, a tiny number of films have set the bar unreasonably high and have gotten viewers on the constant lookout for forthcoming twists. This has led to increasingly convoluted and nonsensical endings, all in the pursuit of that great aha moment where the audience gets the rug swept out from under them.
In the best-case scenario the twist is plausible but still unexpected, leaving the viewer satisfied as well as a bit mystified as to how they didn't see it coming. The films on this list make up the other side of the spectrum.
A twist has been shoehorned into the movie, and the only reason it is surprising is because it is so flabbergastingly out of place. An almost great piece of cinema now leaves viewers feeling cheated and usually manages to destroy the goodwill the first three quarters of the film built up. For shame, bad twist.
This list contains spoilers, obviously.Full scorecard
Only 72 overs were bowled on a rain-affected day one at Stormont, allowing just enough time to for Smith to raise the bat. His 104 not out came off 176 balls, producing 14 fours and a solitary maximum to rebuild the Australia A innings after two quick wickets rendered them 2-22 in the seventh over. Richie Benaud might have enjoyed the score, but Brad Haddin and the boys didn’t as Smith and Alex Doolan set out to rebuild. The pair put on 39 before Doolan played a loose drive outside off-stump, edging Trent Johnson behind for a smart 40 from 49 balls. Fifteen balls and four runs later skipper Haddin became the third victim bowled in the morning session, losing his bails to one that nipped back from the impressive Johnston. At 4-65 Ireland were buoyant in the field and rightly so – they couldn’t have asked for a better start after Kevin O’Brien won the toss and elected to bowl. Smith and new partner Moises Henriques then proceeded to deflate the Irish mood in the gusty and bitter conditions. The pair put on a master class of batting in UK conditions, starting slow, watching closely and jumping on anything overpitched. As they drew closer to their half-centuries the sun began to shine, relieving the onset of frostbite for a few moments more. Henriques though would have a chance to get warmer sooner, mistiming an on-drive to mid-on to fall for crisp 47. One-brings-two, or so the saying goes, and it has never rung truer than in this match. For the third time in the day another wicket was neighboured, this time Scotland centurion Peter Siddle for naught. That brace of wickets brought Max Sorensen’s tally to four for the day, just reward for his nagging line and length. Another partnership was ordered and delivered by Smith and James Pattinson, who advanced the score from 6-139 to 6-248 in 31.1 overs. Pattinson cut lose on anything short, especially off Paul Stirling’s gentle spin. His composure in what were the best conditions of the day underlined the strength in Australia’s tail-order talent with the bat. It was Smith though that rescued the day better than MacGyver, Bond, and Jones combined. His decision making in particular – leaving and playing – showcased his knowledge of the conditions and game situation. He was ruthless on the drive, picking up the three he needed with a sweetly timed shot through cover. More rain is expected tomorrow, but if it doesn’t Smith will be looking to dampen Ireland’s spirit with more runs and more time in the middle.Are you ready for a gorgeous looking ZX Spectrum title that's set for release this month, available to pre-order right now? If not you should be, as "Balachor's Revenge" developed by Lasasoft and published by MONUMENT MICROGAMES is coming to a ZX Spectrum near you. Classed as a collect em up, RPG mix and a sequel to their first release, BR allows you to roam the village of Greenbury, gathering weapons, items, and even advice to use against the notorious wizard, who is once again causing trouble.Embark on side-quests, defeat Balachor’s guardians, and avoid the henchmen that give chase. Maybe then you can find a way into the fortress and lay this wizard down once and for all!BALACHOR’S REVENGE isn't just a tape on it's own either, as it features an 8-bit audio CD, PC Windows CD containing emulator files and making of, button badge, double sided map, cover-art poster, Beekeepers journal and an instruction booklet. Available for ZX Spectrum 48/128k and available to pre-order NOW for £12.50 you'll be able to play this pretty awesome 8-bit title before the 25th of December, it's a game your ZX will be thankful for.Have you ever paid close attention to the signs on the door of restaurants and grocery stores that say, “No shirt, No shoes, No service”? Well, apparently a manager at the Sunset Hills Burger King in Missouri takes it to the extreme. On Tuesday, August 4th, a young mother ordered at the Burger King. With her was her six month old baby. The baby did not have shoes on. Babies do not walk around, or get their feet dirty and grimy. The mother stated the baby’s feet were too small for shoes. The manager of the Burger King told the mother to either put shoes on her barefoot baby or leave.
With the continuous demand of the Burger King manager, the group the mother was with ate as fast as they could and then left. The manager continued to insist that the mother leave because she would not put shoes on the baby. The mother of the barefoot baby, having no shoes for the baby, pulled out some socks to try and comply. The manager then threatened to call the police if no shoes were put on the baby. The mother, clearly upset, put the message on facebook about her barefoot baby. She said she felt that others should know that she was asked to leave because her baby did not have shoes on. Barefoot babies were not welcome at Burger King.
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The signs put on the doors of these businesses are for the safety of others. Dirty, grimy feet can be a health hazard in an eating atmosphere. However, was the law meant for barefoot babies, the smallest of us all? With the heat, most mothers leave their baby’s feet bare in order to keep them cooler. Shoes and socks can overheat babies. Six month old babies cannot even walk. Yet, apparently, babies may be asked to leave if they are barefoot, even though their feet are often the cleanest feet to enter a restaurant.
Unfortunately, the manager of the Burger King did not understand the law meant to provide protection for public health. Hopefully this was an unfortunate incident and mothers can bring their babies into restaurants and not have to worry about putting shoes on the baby’s feet. Hopefully barefoot babies will once again be welcome at Burger King!
Source: FOX NewsSend President Obama a bill he can laugh at, Mr. Speaker!
Send President Obama a bill he can laugh at, Mr. Speaker!
While Republicans may fret about President Obama's increasing demands, firm line on Social Security, and tough negotiating position, there is one thing they haven't gotten around to: putting a proposal on the table.
There is one thing the Republicans want, which is for the White House to start offering them what they want without having to demand it themselves. The White House has done this sort of negotiating before. In fact, it was their template in the stimulus bill negotiations; the health care bill negotiations; the financial services bill negotiations; the Bush tax cut extension negotiations; and the debt ceiling negotiations. In each case, the Democrats would offer something designed to attract Republicans, they would happily take it and then demand even more. In each case, Republicans got far more than they would have gotten ordinarily and far more than they deserved. Since last September, the president no longer negotiatiates like that. If Republicans want something they're going to have to demand it themselves. President Obama is refusing to negotiate with himself.
The key question is this: When will Republicans get specific about cutting spending?
If they don't then it should be clear to all that the Republicans aren't serious about cutting the deficit.CORINTH, Texas — Controversy is stirring over reports that “prophet” and speaker Chuck Pierce of Glory of Zion International Ministries ceremonially gave a “mantle” to popular radio host, author and speaker Glenn Beck, who identifies as a Mormon.
Beck appeared at Pierce’s Global Spheres Center in Corinth, Texas this past Sunday, as Falma Rufus, a black civil rights speaker, had reportedly asked Pierce if he would host her family and Beck’s. Pierce posted a photo of Beck’s appearance later that day, which showed Beck being imparted with a spiritual “mantle” as a Jewish tallit was wrapped around him and his wife.
“We were so honored to have Glenn Beck and his family with us at Global Spheres Center this morning!” Pierce wrote. “Here is Glenn receiving his new mantle for the future!”
But some of Pierce’s followers expressed disapproval and were perplexed as to why Pierce would have spiritually embraced a follower of Mormonism.
“I am not saying to not show Christ love and kindness to Glenn, but he is an open LDS member and his belief system is not of a Christian, period,” one commenter wrote. “The church cheered when he talked about being baptized, [but] he was referring to being inducted into the LDS and the church cheered! Smh.”
“I like and pray for Glenn and his wife. I hope they find true spiritual liberty in Christ alone,” another stated. “However, bestowing alleged authority on those who are still avowed members of a non-Christian cult only muddies the ecclesiastical waters in an hour when the Church greatly needs pure fountains that run with the authority of the Word of God.”
Pierce soon stepped in to offer a defense of his invitation and actions, stating that the mantle was to have been on behalf of the nation of Israel since Beck shares “common ground” with Christians in that he supports Israel and its people.
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“Glenn Beck is devoted to Israel. The mantle was given from Israel,” he wrote. “Many Jews have never had salvation experiences. Many individuals in Methodist, Baptist, Catholic churches, etc. may have never ever had salvation experiences. However, one could bear witness to Glenn’s testimony.”
On Monday, Pierce provided a separate and more thorough explanation on Facebook.
“Concerning Glenn Beck and his family, I enjoyed being with and hosting them. Jesus would have done the same,” he said. “Glenn is a Mormon. However, many prophets have prophesied that those in the Mormon religion will have revival. How would that ever happen without someone like Falma praying and someone like me opening my heart to embrace the opportunity?”
“Glenn Beck, like Cyrus, has a voice to change this nation. Cyrus had God’s mantle to do so. Mr. Beck also has a mantle now that can be used to spread a new fire in this land,” Pierce continued. “He has a heart to see our nation continue to embrace Israel. That is our common ground. If he continues to embrace the God of Israel, then he will eventually know His fullness.”
But some state that Pierce’s reasoning is faulty and demonstrates a lack of discernment.
“I am deeply saddened by the actions of Chuck Pierce. Any credibility in this man ever had is destroyed by this act,” Ed Decker of Saints Alive in Jesus, a former Mormon of 20 years, told Christian News Network on Thursday.
“Chuck Pierce has the audacity to proclaim that his actions come from the throne of the Holy God,” he said. “This is a man who claims to be a pipeline from God, filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit, anointed of God to proclaim the living word of God.”
“Having proclaimed that position for himself, he then does a thing so blasphemous that he should be drummed out of the real Church as a false prophet and a man bringing doctrines and actions of demons,” Decker stated. “For Chuck Pierce to claim that he was instructed of God to lay hands and [bestow] a holy mantle … for a man claiming a false priesthood, who sits under an exalted man-god who lives on a planet near the great star Kolob with his many goddess wives—that claim is of the father of lies, coming from the mouth of a very false prophet.”
Photo: FacebookDecades after the closure of its grand theatres, the stars are aligning for a permanent return of cinematic screenings to Footscray.
Michael Smith, co-owner of Yarraville Sun Theatre, has confirmed he plans to open a new cinema complex in the heart of Footscray as part of the redevelopment of the former Forges site on Albert Street.
Mr Smith told the Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly the new cinema will feature up to eight screens within a new Banco Group development, approved by Maribyrnong Council at last week’s council meeting.
“We have been in discussions with [director Mario LoGiudice] from Banco Group for two years now,” he said.
“We are really excited by the proposal. It’s a new building so it won’t be quite like The Sun, but we really think we can do something that is pretty special and will have its own feel.”
Mr Smith said rather than simply double up with The Sun theatre, the new cinema will provide greater flexibility for broadening the local film offering.
“We will have eight screens at Yarraville and eight screens at Footscray, 16 screens all together, which is going to give us the opportunity to increase the range of films we show, to show more arthouse films,” he said.
The new cinema will be part of a $70 million complex that also includes a new supermarket, retail, 120-place nursing home and more than 200 apartments.
Mr Smith is hopeful the project will breathe new life into Footscray in the way The Sun Theatre proved a catalyst for Yarraville’s renewal.
“At the time a lot of people asked ‘why would you want to open in Yarraville?’, but we have loved that journey,” he said.
“With things like the Council doing work in improving the mall, there is clearly already some change happening in Footscray.”
Mr Smith anticipates the cinema could be open as soon as 2019, but concedes a project of this size could take longer than expected.
However he has more immediate plans to fast-track the return of cinema to Footscray.
“Next summer and the summer after, we are going to whet the appetite of people with some outdoor screenings on the rooftop of the building next to the site,” he said.
“We are planning two or three screenings each summer.”
Maribyrnong and Hobsons Bay Star Weekly#SocialMediaBlackout
Johannesburg - A planned protest against the high cost of data crashed spectacularly when it became a trending topic on Twitter. The protest asked South Africans to do away with social media today under the hashtag #SocialMediaBlackout, but contradicted its purpose by becoming a top trend on a day meant to encourage users to boycott social networks.
Yesterday morning poet Ntsiki Mazwai’s called on South Africans to not buy data and not to log in to their social profiles, in an attempt to put pressure on cellphone providers such as Vodacom, MTN and Cell C to lower their data costs.
Internet analyst and expert, Arthur Goldstuck told Fin24 the fact that #SocialMediaBlackout trended made it apparent that the campaign had fallen short. “But in one respect the trend has highlighted the consumers’ frustration in dealing with the high cost of data.”
He ran a poll from his Twitter account, on the day of the blackout, asking: “Are you joining the #SocialMediaBlackout today? Yes, no, or haven't heard of it? Please choose one option below.” In three hours 47% of respondents said “I am not joining in”, 45% answered “I haven't heard of it” and 8% indicated that “I am joining in”.
Goldstuck believed Another reason that led to the campaign's failure, is the lack of preparation time beforehand. “A campaign like this normally takes weeks to prepare for whereas this campaign was attempted the day after on very short notice.”
He added that the campaign was not geared correctly to have maximum impact.
Do you think a #SocialMediaBlackout will aid in reducing the cost of data in South Africa? — Fin24 (@Fin24) June 21, 2017
“The real issue is that the heaviest data users tended to have a fixed ADSL or Fibre line. The most affected users use the least use of data because of its high cost. Many are prepaid users who use data off their airtime,” he said.
Goldstuck said that networks were punishing users who could not afford to buy bundles with out-of-bundle rates, which consumed more airtime from users.
“Data has fallen for the rich, but it is still punitive for the poor. There needs to be a more nuanced understanding. The issue that needs to be addressed is that data has to fall for the poor. Ad hoc data must come down dramatically, blunt uninformed campaigns need to stop. Instead campaigns with sharp edges has to be carefully crafted to address the real issue,” he said.The word electricity refers generally to the movement of electrons (or other charge carriers) through a conductor in the presence of potential and an electric field. The speed of this flow has multiple meanings. In everyday electrical and electronic devices, the signals or energy travel as electromagnetic waves typically on the order of 50%–99% of the speed of light, while the electrons themselves move (drift) much more slowly.
Electromagnetic waves [ edit ]
The speed at which energy or signals travel down a cable is actually the speed of the electromagnetic wave traveling along (guided by) the cable. i.e. a cable is a form of a waveguide. The propagation of the wave is affected by the interaction with the material(s) in and surrounding the cable, caused by the presence of electric charge carriers (interacting with the electric field component) and magnetic dipoles (interacting with the magnetic field component). These interactions are typically described using mean field theory by the permeability and the permittivity of the materials involved. The energy/signal usually flows overwhelmingly outside the electric conductor of a cable; the purpose of the conductor is thus not to conduct energy, but to guide the energy-carrying wave.[1]:360
Speed of electromagnetic waves in good dielectrics [ edit ]
The speed of electromagnetic waves in a low-loss dielectric is given by
v = 1 ϵ μ = c ϵ r μ r {\displaystyle \quad v={\frac {1}{\sqrt {\epsilon \mu }}}={\frac {c}{\sqrt {\epsilon _{r}\mu _{r}}}}} [1]: 346
where
c {\displaystyle \quad c}
μ 0 {\displaystyle \quad \mu _{0}} permeability of free space = 4π x 10−7 H/m. μ r {\displaystyle \quad \mu _{r}} magnetic permeability of the material. Usually in good dielectrics, eg. vacuum, air, Teflon, μ r = 1 {\displaystyle \mu _{r}=1} |
a bit. With James Jones, Randall Cobb, Demaryius Thomas, Marvin Jones, etc on a bye this week Woods could be a solid fill-in this week.
The Purple Play
Stefon Diggs - Vikings (53%)
In my last purple play blurb I recommended picking up WR Stefon Diggs if you had the space. I wish I had heeded my own advice. I'm in a few leagues and I couldn't justify dropping anyone for a guy in a last-place passing offense, but wow did Diggs show he's got a spot in this league (and your fantasy lineups) last week. With Charles Johnson coming back, some wondered if he'd stay in the starting lineup, but it sure seems so, and that's great for both he and the Vikings. If he weren't in the PP section he'd be in the salivatory starts, as the matchup with the Lions (22nd against pass and 24th to WR's specifically) is very attractive. Take some Diggs at your opponent this week.
Sneaky Snags and Slick Strategery
Dorial Green-Beckham - Titans (14%)
The main thing holding back DGB thus far has been the coaching staff, and fantasy-hater Head Coach Ken Whisenhunt. We already loathed his approach on running backs and he's been reluctant to give the tantalizingly talented (6'5'' with 4.5 speed) rookie WR much run. But, his snap percentage has been on the rise and fellow wideout Harry Douglas has been hurting this week, which could open up more opportunity. It sounds like Harry Douglas is likely to miss this game which would elevate DGB to new heights in the playing-time realm. Coming off a six target, three reception for 51 yard game, he'll look to increase those numbers vs the Falcons beatable (he shouldn't get shadow treatment from stud CB Desmond Trufant) secondary. If you've got the space, snag him now and see what he does the next couple of weeks.
Jordan Reed - Redskins (51%)
The story has (and probably always will be) health when it comes to Reed. He got off to a torrid start this year, averaging 80 YPG and grabbing a TD during the first three weeks of the season. He was clearly QB Kirk Cousins favorite target (especially with Desean Jackson out with an injury) before he suffered a concussion during his week four game. He's had a history of those (amid many other injuries) but he has vowed that he is 100% and playing this week. He's only owned in half of Yahoo! leagues so if your TE situation is gross, go with the Reed option.
Brandon LaFell - Patriots (59%)
I've already talked about LaFell, so this will be the last time, but he's still only owned in just over half of Yahoo! leagues. He will still need to shake off rust, but he's off the PUP list, back at practice and very well could be a strong WR3 for your team the remainder of the way. The Patriots and Tom Brady are passing the heck out of the ball and the duo hooked up for 953 yards and seven touchdowns last year.
James Starks - Packers (52%)
Boy has Eddie Lacy had a rough go of things this year. Injuries and ineffectiveness have led to 260 yards rushing and one touchdown through six weeks. Hopeful owners point to his slow start last year as well, and then eventual 1,100 yard, nine touchdown finish, but things seem drab these days. The Packers are hopeful that rest during the bye week is what Lacy needs, but if you can pick up running mate James Starks I would. The difference has been night and day when it's a "Starks drive" this year, Starks having a 4.5 YPC (versus Lacy's 3.9) McCarthy has hinted that he may continue to shuffle the RB's a bit, but if Starks does eventually grab hold of the job, you've got a starter in a great offense for cheap.
Track of the Week
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Thanks for reading!The major hurdle in treating addiction is enabling a person to not return to the abused drug or substance. This has proved extremely difficult for researchers and patients alike, as even with the best rehabilitation therapy and the most supportive friends and families, many addicts of psychostimulant drugs--methamphetamine, cocaine, and MDMA--relapse soon after therapy ends, often because the memory of the drug’s effect is too strong for that person to resist. But researchers are the University of Florida have come up with a way to in essence, “erase” the memory of the drug’s effect from the brain and thus help prevent that person from returning to the substance. The study was published this week in the journal, Molecular Psychiatry.
While the idea of erasing a memory may seem perilous, the researchers showed in mice that the drug only affects the memory associated with a psychostimulant’s addictive response. However, the drug is in its earliest stages: It has yet to be tested in humans and depending on future safety tests, may never actually make it to the market. If it does, it won’t be for at least another five years, The Washington Post reported.
The mechanism behind the drug utilizes properties involved in how memories form. Prior to this study, the researchers found in 2013 that the memories created after using a psychostimulant drug (in the experiment’s case, they gave methamphetamine to mice) were inherently different than those made from normal memories. “Normal memories” of say your first day of school or a vacation you went on are sitting in your brain as a connection of neurons which are supported by the protein, actin. The actin quickly stabilizes and the memory is secured in your brain. But in the case of a memory created using amphetamine, the actin never actually stabilizes. The researchers took advantage of this instability and created a drug that would disrupt the actin and thus, the memory. However, because actin is involved in more than just memories (it makes muscles works and helps the heart to contract), disrupting actin would be extremely dangerous.
In this new study, however, the researchers utilized another molecule, nonmuscle myosin IIB, that helps actin work, but is further up in the biological cascade, so it doesn’t affect how actin is involved with muscle or heart function. The drug they created, called Blebbistatin, or Blebb, disrupts nonmuscle myosin IIB interrupting the unstable actin and “erasing” the memory associated with the psychoactive drug. The medicine works on only that memory and disrupts it for at least 30 days, the authors write. They also say this can be done with just a single dose.
Before the treatment can be used or given the okay for human trials, the researchers have to test the medicine’s effect on other drugs and make sure it is safe for human use.
And lastly, as The Washington Post reports, “There is the hurdle of convincing people to erase--or at least suppress--parts of their memories.” However, the article also notes, these memories may be the exact ones that those affected by drug addiction are desperate to delete.For the first time, Tony Blair has said he and other world leaders were wrong to give in to Israeli pressure to boycott Hamas after it won the Palestinian elections in 2006.
Mr Blair, who was Prime Minister at the time, supported President George W Bush’s push to halt aid to and cut ties with the newly elected Hamas-led authority in Gaza unless it agreed to recognise Israel and renounce violence.
A year after Hamas rejected the terms. The boycott and Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza came into force, and remains in effect today.
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Mr Blair was appointed special representative of the Middle East Quartet, which comprises the US, EU, UN and Russia, the day he resigned as Prime Minister.
In an interview with The Observer, the former Prime Minister said: “In retrospect I think we should have, right at the very beginning, tried to pull [Hamas] into a dialogue and shifted their positions. I think that’s where I would be in retrospect.
“But obviously it was very difficult, the Israelis were very opposed to it. But you know we could have probably worked out a way whereby we did – which in fact we ended up doing anyway, informally.”
Shape Created with Sketch. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict intensifies Show all 10 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict intensifies 1/10 Medics evacuate a wounded man from the scene of an attack in Jerusalem. A Palestinian rammed a vehicle into a bus stop then got out and started stabbing people before he was shot dead AP 2/10 Israeli ZAKA emergency response members carry the body of an Israeli at the scene of a shooting attack in Jerusalem. A pair of Palestinian men boarded a bus in Jerusalem and began shooting and stabbing passengers, while another assailant rammed a car into a bus station before stabbing bystanders, in near-simultaneous attacks that escalated a month long wave of violence AP 3/10 Getty Images 4/10 Palestinians throw molotov cocktail during clashes with Israeli troops near Ramallah, West Bank. Recent days have seen a series of stabbing attacks in Israel and the West Bank that have wounded several Israelis AP 5/10 Women cry during the funeral of Palestinian teenager Ahmad Sharaka, 13, who was shot dead by Israeli forces during clashes at a checkpoint near Ramallah, at the family house in the Palestinian West Bank refugee camp of Jalazoun, Ramallah AP 6/10 A wounded Palestinian boy and his father hold hands at a hospital after their house was brought down by an Israeli air strike in Gaza Reuters 7/10 Palestinians look on after a protester is shot by Israelis soldiers during clashes at the Howara checkpoint near the West Bank city of Nablus EPA 8/10 A lawyer wearing his official robes kicks a tear gas canister back toward Israeli soldiers during a demonstration by scores of Palestinian lawyers called for by the Palestinian Bar Association in solidarity with protesters at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, near Ramallah, West Bank AP 9/10 Undercover Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian in Ramallah Reuters 10/10 Palestinian youth burn tyres during clashes with Israeli soldiers close to the Jewish settlement of Bet El, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, after Israel barred Palestinians from Jerusalem's Old City as tensions mounted following attacks that killed two Israelis and wounded a child 1/10 Medics evacuate a wounded man from the scene of an attack in Jerusalem. A Palestinian rammed a vehicle into a bus stop then got out and started stabbing people before he was shot dead AP 2/10 Israeli ZAKA emergency response members carry the body of an Israeli at the scene of a shooting attack in Jerusalem. A pair of Palestinian men boarded a bus in Jerusalem and began shooting and stabbing passengers, while another assailant rammed a car into a bus station before stabbing bystanders, in near-simultaneous attacks that escalated a month long wave of violence AP 3/10 Getty Images 4/10 Palestinians throw molotov cocktail during clashes with Israeli troops near Ramallah, West Bank. Recent days have seen a series of stabbing attacks in Israel and the West Bank that have wounded several Israelis AP 5/10 Women cry during the funeral of Palestinian teenager Ahmad Sharaka, 13, who was shot dead by Israeli forces during clashes at a checkpoint near Ramallah, at the family house in the Palestinian West Bank refugee camp of Jalazoun, Ramallah AP 6/10 A wounded Palestinian boy and his father hold hands at a hospital after their house was brought down by an Israeli air strike in Gaza Reuters 7/10 Palestinians look on after a protester is shot by Israelis soldiers during clashes at the Howara checkpoint near the West Bank city of Nablus EPA 8/10 A lawyer wearing his official robes kicks a tear gas canister back toward Israeli soldiers during a demonstration by scores of Palestinian lawyers called for by the Palestinian Bar Association in solidarity with protesters at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's Old City, near Ramallah, West Bank AP 9/10 Undercover Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian in Ramallah Reuters 10/10 Palestinian youth burn tyres during clashes with Israeli soldiers close to the Jewish settlement of Bet El, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, after Israel barred Palestinians from Jerusalem's Old City as tensions mounted following attacks that killed two Israelis and wounded a child
Although Mr Blair did not elaborate on the nature of the British Government’s “informal” contact with Hamas, he appeared to be referring to talks between MI6 and Hamas representatives to secure the release of a British journalist kidnapped in Gaza in 2007.
His remarks come as Hamas agreed to hold general elections in Gaza in order to bring about its long-running feud with the Fatah movement.
The rival factions signed a reconciliation deal in Cairo last week after two days of negotiations brokered by Egypt. The groups fought a short civil war in Gaza in 2007. Since then Hamas has governed the small coastal enclave.
Hamas has refused to recognise the state of Israel or denounce the use of violence but earlier this year changed its founding charter to suggest it would be willing to assent to a Palestinian state along the lines of the 1967 Green Line.
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Subscribe nowThe most senior House Democrat serving on the committee with jurisdiction over the nation’s debt ceiling says President Obama got it right when he foreclosed on the idea that he could use executive powers to circumvent the limit on the country’s borrowing authority.
At a Tuesday breakfast roundtable with reporters in Washington hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) said ideas like ignoring the debt limit by invoking the 14th Amendment or creating new currency to continue meeting financial obligations without resorting to new borrowing are problematic both on the merits and strategically.“I really think the President had no choice but to essentially say to the Republican Party, ‘You should not dabble with the debt ceiling,'” Levin said in response to a question from TPM. “That ‘it’s something that would have such serious consequences, and I don’t want to essentially see if I can find ways around it. Those ways are very problematic and essentially what we have to do is to face up to the need to address the sequester and then move on and I don’t want you to use as a weapon the debt ceiling because it’s not a weapon against me, it’s the weapon against the full faith and credit of the U.S. and therefore it’s essentially a weapon against the citizens of this country, our economy, and the global economy.'”
That puts Levin at odds with Democratic leaders in the House and Senate who called upon Obama to defuse the threat of breaching the debt limit by executive fiat — making clear that all of the country’s financial obligations would be met even if Republicans fail to increase the Treasury Department’s borrowing authority.
But by taking executive action off the table, Obama has clarified to key interest groups — including seniors, veterans, and military contractors — that if Republicans refuse to increase the debt limit absent controversial policy concessions from Democrats, they’ll be jeopardizing the government’s commitment to meet its obligations, including benefit checks and payments to public and private-sector workers.
“The Republican party really has to decide how much it’s willing to gamble with the economy of the United States,” Levin added. “I think it would be a dangerous gamble, and I think the President was correct to essentially say it straight out.”Will green technology save the planet?
Wind turbine magnets Bingham Canyon mine No. Wind turbines, solar PV panels, and the grid itself are all manufactured using cheap energy from fossil fuels. When fossil fuel costs begin to rise such highly manufactured items will simply cease to be feasible. Solar panels and wind turbines aren’t made out of nothing. They are made out of metals, plastics, and chemicals. These products have been mined out of the ground, transported, processed, manufactured. Each stage leaves behind a trail of devastation: habitat destruction, water contamination, colonization, toxic waste, slave labor, greenhouse gas emissions, wars, and corporate profits. The basic ingredients for renewables are the same materials that are ubiquitous in industrial products, like cement and aluminum. No one is going to make cement in any quantity without using the energy of fossil fuels. And aluminum? The mining itself is a destructive and toxic nightmare from which riparian communities will not awaken in anything but geologic time. From beginning to end, so called “renewable energy” and other “green technologies” lead to the destruction of the planet. These technologies are rooted in the same industrial extraction and production processes that have rampaged across the world for the last 150 years. We are not concerned with slightly reducing the harm caused by industrial civilization; we are interested in stopping that harm completely. Doing so will require dismantling the global industrial economy, which will render impossible the creation of these technologies.
Aren’t renewable energies like solar, wind, and geothermal good for the environment?
No. The majority of electricity that is generated by renewables is used in manufacturing, mining, and other industries that are destroying the planet. Even if the generation of electricity were harmless, the consumption certainly isn’t. Every electrical device, in the process of production, leaves behind the same trail of devastation. Living communities — forests, rivers, oceans — become dead commodities. The emissions reductions that renewables intend to achieve could be easily accomplished by improving the efficiency of existing coal plants, businesses, and homes, at a much lower cost. Within the context of industrial civilization, this approach makes more sense both economically and environmentally. That this approach is not being taken shows that the whole renewables industry is nothing but profiteering. It benefits no one other than the investors.
Does “renewable” mean that they last forever?
No. Solar panels and wind turbines last around 20–30 years, then need to be replaced. The production process of extracting, polluting, and exploiting is not something that happens once, but is continuous - and is expanding very rapidly. Renewables can never replace fossil fuel infrastructure, as they are entirely dependent on it.
Will renewable energy save the economy?
Renewable energy technologies rely heavily on government subsidies, taken from taxpayers and given directly to large corporations like General Electric, BP, Samsung, and Mitsubishi. While the scheme pads their bottom lines, it doesn't help the rest of us. Further, this is the wrong question to ask. The industrial capitalist economy is dispossessing and impoverishing billions of humans and killing the living world. Renewable energy depends on centralized capital and power imbalance. We don't benefit from saving that system. Instead of advocating for more industrial technology, we need to move to local economies based on community decision-making and what our local landbases can provide sustainably. And we need to stop the global economy on which renewable energy depends.
Ok, metal extraction is harmful. What about recycling the materials?
Recycling lead Recycling may be “more efficient” than virgin extraction, but it is not a solution to environmental problems. In fact, it contributes to them. Recycling the aluminum, steel, silicon, copper, rare earth metals, and other substances used in “green technologies” can only be done at great cost to the planet. Recycling these substances is extremely energy intensive, releases large amounts of greenhouse gases, and contributes to groundwater pollution and toxification of the planet. Recycling metals requires global trade, as the recycling mostly takes place in impoverished countries with lax environmental and health regulations. It is extremely dangerous for the workers. Many parts of renewable technologies cannot be recycled.
Ok, renewable technologies have some impacts, but they’re still better than fossil fuels, right?
Signs of Insanity
Dig up non-renewable metals Ship them across the world Transform them Call it Green and Sustainable Renewable energy technologies are better than fossil fuels in the same sense that a single bullet wound is “better” than two bullet wounds. Both are grievous injuries. Do you want to shoot the planet once or twice? The only way out of a double bind is to smash it: to refuse both choices and craft a completely different path. We support neither fossil fuels or renewable tech. Even this bullet analogy isn’t completely accurate, since renewable technologies, in some cases, have a worse environmental impact than fossil fuels. More renewables doesn’t mean less fossil fuel power, or less carbon emissions. The amount of energy generated by renewables has been increasing, but so has the amount generated by fossil fuels. No coal or gas plants have been taken offline as a result of renewables. Only about 25% of global energy use is in the form of electricity that flows through wires or batteries. The rest is oil, gas, and other fossil fuel derivatives. Even if all the world’s electricity could be produced without carbon emissions, it would only reduce total emissions by about 25%. And even that would have little meaning, as the amount of energy being used is increasing rapidly. It’s debatable whether some “renewables” even produce net energy. The amount of energy used in the mining, manufacturing, research and development, transport, installation, maintenance, grid connection, and disposal of wind turbines and solar panels may be more than they ever produce; claims to the contrary often do not take all the energy inputs into account. Renewables have been described as a laundering scheme: dirty energy goes in, clean energy comes out. Biofuels, another example of “green tech”, have been shown to be a net energy loss in almost every case. Those biofuels that do produce net energy produce an exceedingly small amount. These fuels are often created by clearing natural ecosystems such as tropical rain forests or prairies for agricultural production, a process which releases even more greenhouse gases, reduces biodiversity, and reduces local food availability. Biofuel production is considered a major factor in rising food prices around the world in recent years. These rising food prices have led to widespread starvation, unrest, and violence. Some people like to promote hydroelectric energy as a source of “green power”. This is false. Dams have enormous environmental impacts on rivers, beaches, and estuaries. Beyond these impacts, many dams are a large source of methane gas due to decomposing organic matter at the bottom of the reservoir. Methane from hydroelectric dams may be responsible for 4% or more of global warming.
What are the fundamental differences between fossil fuels and green technologies?
Fossil Fuels Green Technologies Extraction Require large-scale unsustainable extraction of metals and other resources. Require large-scale unsustainable extraction of metals and other resources. Production Globalized industrial production process requiring energy-intensive technologies. Globalized industrial production process requiring energy-intensive technologies. Pollution Extreme pollution released from initial exploration through extraction and consumption. Pollution often visible at site of consumption. Extreme pollution released from initial exploration through extraction and disposal. Pollution often invisible at site of consumption. Human Rights Contribute to resource conflicts, exploitation of labor, and human rights violations worldwide. Contribute to resource conflicts, exploitation of labor, and human rights violations worldwide. Democracy Technologies largely controlled by multinational corporations. Massive capital required. Community implementation largely impossible. Technologies largely controlled by multinational corporations. Massive capital required. Community implementation largely impossible.
What about solar power?
Solar panel factory Solar panel production is now among the leading sources of hexafluoroethane, nitrogen triflouride, and sulfur hexaflouride, three extremely potent greenhouse gases which are used for cleaning plasma production equipment. As a greenhouse gas, hexaflouroethane is 12,000 times more potent than CO2, is 100% manufactured by humans, and survives 10,000 years once released into the atmosphere. Nitrogen Triflouride is 17,000 times more virulent than CO2, and Sulfur Hexaflouride is 25,000 times more powerful than CO2. Concentrations of nitrogen triflouride in the atmosphere are rising 11% per year. From a report by the Silicon Valley Toxics coalition: As the solar industry expands, little attention is being paid to the potential environmental and health costs of that rapid expansion. The most widely used solar PV panels have the potential to create a huge new source of electronic waste at the end of their useful lives, which is estimated to be 20 to 25 years. New solar PV technologies are increasing efficiency and lowering costs, but many of these use extremely toxic materials or materials with unknown health and environmental risks (including new nano materials and processes).
What about wind power?
Assembling wind turbines One of the most common wind turbines in the world is a 1.5 megawatt design produced by General Electric. The nacelle weighs 56 tons, the tower 71 tons, and the blades 36 tons. A single turbine such turbine requires over 100 tons of steel. This model is a smaller design by modern standards. The latest industrial turbines stand over 600 feet tall and require about eight times as much steel, copper, and aluminum. This material comes from somewhere, and that somewhere is always someone’s home, someone’s sacred site, someone’s source of food and water and air. We just don’t hear about them, because if they are humans, they are usually poor and brown. This is where racism, colonialism, environmentalism, and extractive economics come together. The largest producer of wind turbines in the world is Vestas, a $15 billion corporation. The largest U.S. producer of turbines is General Electric, which has assets of more than $700 billion and is the fourth-largest producer of air pollution.Can anyone really think - after Fukushima, Hanford, Bhopal - that these massive corporations are concerned about justice or sustainability? Profit is their bottom line, and life will always remain secondary to that.
What about hybrid and electric vehicles?
The production of electric cars requires energy from fossil fuels for most aspects of their production and distribution. This requirement is perhaps even more extreme with electric cars as there is a need to manufacture them to be as lightweight as possible, due to the weight of the battery packs. Many lightweight materials utilized are extremely energy intensive to produce, such as aluminum and carbon composites. This is why you will probably never see an electric truck – they are just too heavy. And of course, trucks are required for extraction, and fossil fuels drive all trucks. Electric/hybrid cars are also charged by energy that, for the most part, comes from power plants using natural gas, coal or nuclear fuels. A recent study by the National Academies, which analyzed the effects of vehicle construction, fuel extraction, refining, emissions, and other factors, has shown that the lifetime health and environmental impacts of electric vehicles are actually greater than those of gasoline-powered cars.
Should we focus on dense urbanization and public transit?
In some cases, dense urban development is preferable to suburban sprawl. It can reduce the impact on local wild places significantly. However, the focus on dense urban communities and public transit that is found in the modern environmental movement is problematic in several ways. The main problem with this approach is that it takes for granted the existence of cities. Cities are unsustainable, because they require the routine importation of resources — food, timber, minerals, and fuels — from the surrounding land, and give nothing back. The land that the city is on cannot supply the citizens with enough food, shelter, fuel and other material goods. This is in contrast to villages, camps, and other small settlements, which throughout history have served as a sustainable model for human communities. Cities are always drawing resources from their surrounding region, and in the modern world, from the entire globe. Densely populated cities may reduce the impact of so-called “development” on their immediate area, but they do not address the fundamental impacts of cities, or of the modern globalized city. For example, while some neighborhoods in New York City are extremely dense and use relatively low amounts of energy, this is a limited point of view. Rainforests are falling and mountains are being mined away to supply these dense cities with resources. Any serious attempt at environmentalism must take into account the impact of producing and transporting materials into the city, and must address the fundamental issues of resource extraction and the expansion of global industrial civilization. At best, dense urban growth and public transportation are mildly effective “harm reduction” strategies. At worst, these approaches to environmentalism provide a green veneer to corporatized, profit-driven, and extraction-dependent cities. They obscure the problem, and thus contribute to it. To learn more about cities, how they function, and why they are unsustainable as a form of social organization, read our definition of civilization and the resources at the end of this page.
But we need electricity, don’t we?
Ivanpah solar plant Humans, like other animals, get our energy mainly by eating other plants and animals. Plants gather energy from the sun. No species needs electricity for survival. Only the industrial system needs electricity to survive. Right now, food and habitat for living beings are being sacrificed to feed electricity. The infrastructure, mines, processing, and waste dumping required for electrical generation is destroying forests and other natural places around the world. Ensuring energy security for industry requires undermining life security for living beings (that’s us).
What is your alternative?A video shows a 400 ft wide Antarctic waterfall. (Wong Sang Lee/Korea Polar Research Institute)
The surface of the remote Antarctic ice sheet may be a far more dynamic place than scientists imagined, new research suggests. Decades of satellite imagery and aerial photography have revealed an extensive network of lakes and rivers transporting liquid meltwater across the continent’s ice shelves — nearly 700 systems of connected pools and streams in total.
“A handful of previous studies have documented surface lakes and streams on individual ice shelves over a span of a few years,” glaciologist Alison Banwell of the University of Cambridge wrote in a comment on the new research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature. “But the authors’ work is the first to extensively map meltwater features and drainage systems on all of Antarctica’s ice shelves, over multiple decades.”
The findings, presented Wednesday in a pair of papers in Nature, could upend our understanding of the way meltwater interacts with the frozen ice sheet. We now know that, rather than simply pooling where it melts in every case, liquid water may run for miles across the continent first — and that discovery comes with some worrying implications.
The major problem is that these drainage systems can carry meltwater from other parts of the ice sheet onto the continent’s vulnerable ice shelves. These are large, floating blocks of ice that jut out into the ocean from the edges of glaciers, helping to block and stabilize the flow of ice behind them. If these ice shelves weaken and break off, they can release a flood of ice into the ocean, raising sea levels in the process.
Now, the authors of the new research suggest that the transport of moving water onto and across Antarctica’s ice shelves could make them increasingly vulnerable to collapse as melt rates accelerate under future climate change.
When meltwater flows onto a shelf, it can run off into existing cracks in the ice, where it may freeze and expand, causing the cracks to widen, said Robin Bell, a glaciologist at Columbia University and co-author of the new research. Or the water might collect in a pool, where “it’s basically acting like an additional load on the ice shelf, which stresses it and causes it to fail,” she told The Washington Post.
Scientists have discovered that seasonally flowing streams fringe much of Antarctica’s ice. Each red “X” represents a separate drainage. Up to now, such features were thought to exist mainly on the far northerly Antarctic Peninsula (upper left). Their widespread presence signals that the ice may be more vulnerable to melting than previously thought. (Adapted from Kingslake et al., Nature 2017)
Bell pointed to the famous collapse of the Antarctic Peninsula’s Larsen B ice shelf as an example of how meltwater can destabilize a glacier. Larsen B suffered a near-total disintegration in 2002, and scientists believe that the accumulation of meltwater — much of which may have originated on the shelf itself — had a lot to do with its demise. Shelves like Larsen B may become all the more vulnerable if they’re subjected to even more liquid water flowing in from other parts of the continent.
The new research included an examination of satellite imagery dating to 1973 and aerial photography from as far back as 1947, led by geophysicist Jonathan Kingslake of Columbia University and described in the first of the pair of papers. The analysis has revealed a number of previously unreported drainage systems carrying water onto and across some of the continent’s most notable ice shelves. Among these is the rapidly flowing Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, which scientists have identified as one of the top potential contributors to global sea level rise — it’s already losing about 50 billion tons of ice each year.
Even more worryingly, the researchers have suggested that the destabilizing effect of flowing meltwater on Antarctica’s ice shelves could result in a dangerous feedback loop on the ice sheet.
The researchers have found that most of the drainage systems originate within a few miles of regions dominated either by exposed rock or “blue ice,” places where the snow has become compressed and appears blue rather than white. Without a covering of white snow to reflect sunlight away from the surface, these parts of the ice sheet tend to absorb more solar energy and become warmer than surrounding areas, thereby producing more meltwater, which may then drain away and flow onto nearby ice shelves.
If the ice shelves then weaken and break off, they’ll allow a flood of ice behind them to go pouring into the ocean. This massive ice loss causes the ice sheet to become thinner, leading to more areas of exposed rock and blue ice — which in turn may increase the flow of meltwater.
Massive summer melting on East Antarctica’s Amery Ice Shelf, seen from NASA’s Landsat 4 satellite. The image shows about 520 square miles. (NASA)
That said, the new research has turned out at least one bit of promising news. In the second paper, led by Bell, the scientists have pinpointed one drainage system that actually appears to be stabilizing an ice shelf rather than weakening it.
A network of streams and ponds on East Antarctica’s Nansen Ice Shelf have produced a waterfall that exports liquid water straight off the surface of the ice, dumping it into the ocean before it has a chance to pool and cause damage. The researchers observed that as more meltwater is produced — during unusually warm periods, for instance — the drainage system adapts and expands so that it can transport more water. It’s capable of carrying an entire year’s worth of meltwater off the ice shelf in just a week’s time.
“This is the first time, to my knowledge, that such adaptability has been documented so comprehensively,” said Knut Christianson, a glaciologist at the University of Washington who was not involved with the new research, in an emailed comment to The Washington Post. But he added that it remains unclear how the drainage system might react to more dramatic environmental changes in the future.
A 400-foot-wide waterfall atop the Nansen Ice Shelf in Antarctica. (Robert Fletcher)
However, the finding does suggest that, at least in some cases, these water transport systems may actually work to a glacier’s advantage. Where they may become a stabilizing force in the future vs. where they might cause damage will likely depend on a complex suite of physical factors, including snow cover, topology and various other landscape features in any given area that affect the way water flows.
Gaining a greater understanding of these processes will depend in large part on updating ice sheet models, which — until now — have generally failed to account for the movement of meltwater across the Antarctic ice sheet.
“Incorporating surface hydrology into ice-sheet-scale modeling is a relatively new endeavor,” Christianson noted. Observations like those described in the new research are a good start, but there are many physical processes affecting the flow of water that need to be better understood before the models can be improved.
“Work in these areas has begun, but the continental-wide observations (requiring high-resolution imagery) have only recently become available, and the scientific understanding must be grounded in these new observations, so there’s still much to be done,” Christianson said.
For now, just pointing out that water actually flows from one place to another across the Antarctic ice sheet — and has been doing so for decades — is an important service in and of itself, according to Bell. While there’s much uncertainty about how these systems will behave in the future, and how their behavior will influence the fate of the ice sheet, realizing how widespread they actually are is a critical step in our understanding of the processes shaping the Antarctic continent.
“The really important finding in both these papers is that water moves in Antarctica and isn’t just a stationary player,” Bell said.
More from Energy and Environment:
The pristine Arctic has become a garbage trap for 300 billion pieces of plastic
Top Trump advisers at odds over Paris climate deal
As coral reefs die, huge swaths of the ocean floor are eroding along with them
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Some wait only for independence for the mine to regain its former glory, but will they wait in vain?
At first sight it seems completely abandoned apart from one person manning the main gate. Then one old miner appears to guide us up four flights of stairs, through a white-tiled building which is deserted and neglected, the white tiling cracked and dirty.
Then we mill about for a bit by one entrance to the mine. Over the door is a sign saying ‘Good luck’!
Tracks disappear inside and I venture a short way into the mouth of the tunnel, but it doesn’t look desperately safe. Some more miners appear. There are no youngsters among them, their faces are tired and lined and several look as though they should be at home, enjoying their pension.
At its height, more than 5,000 people used to work here. But the men tell me there are now only about 600 of them, trying to keep the creaking beast ticking over.
They say when the Serbs left, they stripped the mine of all its equipment. Now, no ore is processed here but sent via two companies, one Swiss and one British.
Wartime attack
One man tells me that during the war he fled his village on a tractor with many relatives. But under attack by Serbian troops they had to run. He had to leave his aunt behind because she was disabled. He says she was burnt to death. This is the sort of thing they are all trying to forget, and which perhaps forces them to be optimistic about the future.
He says: “Kosovo is rich in minerals and rich in farming land, is rich in all other aspects. Here, we |
of 1,504 polled said they think the government has gone too far.
US media response
The New York Times says "the expiration of surveillance authority demonstrates a profound shift in American attitudes since the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when national security was pre-eminent in both parties". It also suggests the spy agencies might find "workarounds" to avoid gaps in surveillance
The Washington Post quotes national security expert Elizabeth Goitein as saying that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had gambled and "badly overplayed his hand"
Time magazine says that Mr Paul scored a victory that was "messy and almost certain to be brief" but for him "the real audience was the Republican electorate that will pick a White House nominee next year, along with potential donors who can fund his campaign"
The Daily Beast called Rand Paul "GOP Enemy No. 1", quoting Republican Sen. Mark Kirk as saying, "I don't stand with Rand," poking fun at his campaign slogan.Brexit, Trump … and now Italy.
Italian voters have set off a political earthquake, massively rejecting constitutional reform, forcing their prime minister from office and clearing the way for Trump-inspired political parties to grab control.
Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he will resign after voters rejected a set of changes he demanded to the constitution. They were meant to reduce the size and power of the Senate — and prevent it from bringing down governments.
Italy has had 63 governments in 70 years.
“’No’ has won in an extraordinary fashion,” Renzi said on Italian television, struggling to fight back tears. “Fighting a political battle against someone is easy, but fighting for something is more beautiful.”
The fate of Renzi is set to rattle Europe because of who might replace him. Though it was not a referendum on the European Union, the massive ‘No’ vote opens the door to opposition parties with plans to exit the currency union.
Italians have angrily turned against their pro-European government over a lifeless economy as well as the failure of the EU to come to their aid while a record number of refugees and migrants flood the country’s borders.
Here are the biggest winners and losers from Italy’s landmark ‘No’ Vote.
Winners
.
Beppe Grillo and “The Amateurs”
Millions of Italians are giving the ‘V’ sign as the symbol of the Five Star Movement, while its founder, comedian Beppe Grillo, is calling for snap elections. Traditionally, for his supporters, the V sign stands for both victory and a vaffanculo! (“Fuck Off!”) to the political powers that be.
Polls show Five Star is now the country’s most popular political party by a narrow margin, and that it stands to benefit the most if early elections are called. The party has already won local elections in Rome and other cities earlier this year.
Despite his environmentalism and proximity to the political left, Beppe Grillo is fixated with Donald Trump. In the run-up to the referendum, Grillo recorded a bizarre video in front of a TV playing Donald Trump’s US Election Night speech.
Grillo has hailed both Trump’s victory and the Brexit vote, declaring in a Euronews interview: “The amateurs are conquering the world because the ‘experts’ destroyed it.”
Italy’s most popular comedian, Grillo launched the Five Star Movement to fight the endless corruption of the Italian government. His stage performances dwarf any Trump rally, filling a piazza, or stadium, with a hundred thousand people shouting “vaffanculo!”
“The world is changing,” Grillo told his Rome supporters the week before the referendum. “We have to throw our ‘No’ back in their faces. This is not a political ‘No’, it is an existential ‘No’ and a social ‘No.’ ”
Silvio Berlusconi
The referendum vote improves the chances that the 80-year-old former prime minister, Europe’s Trump doppelganger, could make a comeback.
One might think the Italians have had enough of his Bunga Bunga, but Berlusconi can now play kingmaker despite recent heart surgery and a ban on holding office. Polls suggest his center-right Forza Italia party, if it joins forces with the far-right Northern League, could compete with Renzi’s center-left Democratic Party or Five Star. Though it’s unlikely, he could even form a coalition with the Democrats.
The Immigrant-Bashing Northern League
The ‘No’ vote will encourage this movement’s youthful leader, Matteo Salvini, in his quest to transform the Northern League into a mainstream party with Trump as its role model.
Salvini, arguably the most racist politician in Italy, met with Trump last spring in Philadelphia. Trump said he hoped he would become the prime minister of Italy, according to Ansa news.
In the wake of Trump’s victory, Salvini has decided on a run to be the country’s next prime minister.
Losers
.
Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and the Democratic Party
Renzi’s decision to spend much of 2016 fighting for constitutional reform was a gamble. His pledge to resign in the event of a ‘No’ vote was political suicide. The former mayor of Florence, Renzi, 41, has just celebrated 1,000 days in office.
One of Europe’s political stars, and a self-styled “Demolition Man” for his determination to shake up Italian politics, Renzi has demolished his premiership and maybe his party, too. It didn’t help that leading members of his Democratic Party (Partito Democratico) were opposed to his proposals.
Renzi has unwittingly advanced Five Star’s prospects by pushing a new electoral law – the Italicum – that gives the most popular party in an election a jackpot of extra seats in the lower house of parliament (40% of the vote = 54% percent of seats). He did this assuming his Democratic Party (PD) would be the beneficiary.
In the wake of Renzi’s departure, there could be snap elections, but it is more likely that his party will form a new “caretaker” government for at least a couple of months.
Italian Banks
The behind-the-scenes battle to prop up Italy’s banks suddenly threatens to become a lost cause.
Last week, the British daily The Financial Times warned that a “No” vote could lead to multiple bank failures in Italy.
The Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, needs $5.3 billion in the next few weeks or it will collapse.
At least half a dozen other Italian banks are on the verge.
The Euro
The euro is potentially the biggest loser – and that’s why financial markets are already freaking out.
Beppe Grillo has long argued that Italy should drop out of the euro and promises to hold a referendum on exactly that. Matteo Salvini has pledged to quit the euro if he wins the next national elections. Even Berlusconi has written on his Facebook page that “Leaving the euro is not a blasphemy.”
There are massive legal and technical hurdles that would make it difficult for an Italian government to bring back the Lira. For one thing it would require changing the constitution. But a looming debt crisis could be the trigger.
By any measure, Italy’s 15-year experiment with the euro has been a disaster. After a triple-dip recession, unemployment is almost 12% and youth unemployment is almost 40%. Two-thirds of Italy’s millennials (aged 18-34) still live at home.
The McKinsey Global Institute published shocking statistics earlier this year showing that 97% of Italian households experienced flat-to-falling incomes from 2005 to 2014.
Italy’s government debt has arguably spiralled to a point of no return. At almost 133% of GDP, its level of debt is second only to Greece in the eurozone. Its economy cannot grow its way out of the debt trap, in part because Italy replaced a currency it could devalue, the Lira, with one it can’t. The International Monetary Fund says the Italian economy will not regain its 2008 level until 2025.
A sovereign debt crisis might force Italy, like Greece, to put itself under the control of the “Troika” — the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF. Like Greece, Italy would become an EU protectorate, run by EU decree.
But Italians might decide they would rather live without the euro than without democracy.
Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Splendor of Rome (Miwok / Flickr – CC0 1.0)
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Our Comment Policy Keep it civilized, keep it relevant, keep it clear, keep it short. Please do not post links or promotional material. We reserve the right to edit and to delete comments where necessary. Related printAOL Instant Messenger (AIM) officially closed down on Friday, ending a twenty-year run.
According to Fortune, “All personal data associated with AIM will be deleted after December 15, 2017.” However, users “will still be able to use their @aim.com email address to send and receive email.”
The instant messaging service, which launched in May 1997, has since been replaced by more advanced services such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Discord, and Google Hangouts.
AOL announced the closure of AIM in October, prompting former users to reminisce over the platform.
In a statement, Michael Albers, vice president of AOL parent company Oath, claimed, “If you were a 90’s kid, chances are there was a point in time when AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was a huge part of your life.”
“You likely remember the CD, your first screenname, your carefully curated away messages, and how you organized your buddy lists. Right now you might be reminiscing about how you had to compete for time on the home computer in order to chat with friends outside of school,” he continued. “You might also remember how characters throughout pop culture from ‘You’ve Got Mail’ to ‘Sex and the City’ used AIM to help navigate their relationships. In the late 1990’s, the world had never seen anything like it. And it captivated all of us.”
“AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed,” Albers explained. “As a result we’ve made the decision that we will be discontinuing AIM effective December 15, 2017. We are more excited than ever to continue building the next generation of iconic brands and life-changing products for users around the world.”
According to AOL’s official website, the company will not be releasing a replacement for AIM.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.Police arrested an Alaska man who they say was driving a motorized shopping cart while drunk and in possession of stolen cookies and cake mix.
Merrill K. Moses, 63, was arraigned this week in Fairbanks on charges of drunken driving, shoplifting and refusing to take an official sobriety test. A preliminary hearing has been scheduled for Aug. 5, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported Saturday.
A grocery store employee called police Wednesday night after seeing Moses drive into parking lot traffic. The employee was worried that Moses would collide with a car.
"When an officer arrived, a store employee was holding onto the handlebars of the cart to keep the suspect from driving any further," said Sgt. Bruce Barnette at the Fairbanks Police Department.
Another employee told police that drinking while driving a motorized shopping cart has been a regular problem for Moses. He has previously tried to run over employees who attempted to stop him, police were told. And every time they confront him, Moses is drunk.
Barnette said Moses does not appear to be disabled, but he could not stand without assistance Wednesday night. A preliminary test measured his breath-alcohol content at 0.31, almost four times the legal limit of 0.08 percent. He later refused to provide an official breath sample at police headquarters.
Moses was charged with shoplifting because his cart allegedly contained items he had not paid for -- chocolate chip cookies and Betty Crocker cake mix.
Moses has a long criminal history, the News-Miner reported, including a 2011 DUI conviction in Delta Junction. He also has convictions for domestic assault, drinking in public, open container, criminal trespass and theft.The bomb was destroyed in an area east of the Isle of Wight
A controlled explosion has been carried out on a WW2 bomb which was dislodged from the seabed in Portsmouth Harbour.
The 500lb explosive was found during routine dredging work for the next generation of Royal Navy aircraft carriers.
Its discovery prompted the closure of the port, as well as the evacuation of shops and residential areas at Gunwharf Quays.
The bomb was towed to an area east of the Isle of Wight, where a controlled explosion was carried out by the Royal Navy's Fleet Diving Squadron.
Image: The device was dislodged from the seabed
An area of restricted air space was established while the bomb was destroyed.
The discovery came after another 1,100lb German bomb was found at the end of September during dredging work, which led to the evacuation of Gunwharf Quays. A torpedo was also found earlier in September.
Commander Del McKnight, the diving squadron's chief, said the incident was "business as usual" for the Royal Navy.
WW2 bomb detonated by Royal Navy
He said: "We've had more callouts to Portsmouth than we would usually see because of the extent of the dredging works being done to make way for HMS Queen Elizabeth.
"But we have teams on standby at 10 minutes notice around the UK ready to deal with these things."
Vice Admiral Jonathan Woodcock said the bomb disposal team which dealt with the device was "cool as a cucumber".
After the explosive was discovered the Wight Link terminal, Old Portsmouth, Portsmouth Harbour station and Gosport ferry station were placed behind a 300m safety cordon.
Image: A bomb disposal team tow the device (not pictured) out to sea
Staff at the naval base were moved outside the cordon while attractions in the port city were also closed to visitors, including Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
Around 200 people were stranded in a ferry off the harbour as a Commodore Clipper was held away from the area.
A Royal Navy spokesperson said: "The device was found by a dredging barge carrying out work in the harbour before the arrival of HMS Queen Elizabeth - the Navy's new 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier - into the naval base next spring."Twenty-four year old Catt Gallinger may be permanently blind after a tattoo she received left her eye oozing with purple liquid.
Gallinger, an alternative model, wanted to add a sclera tattoo to her long list of body modifications. Sclera tattoos – tinting the white outer layer of the eyeball by injecting it with diluted ink – have seen an uptick around the world in recent years.
The Canadian, who already has several tattoos and piercings, had planned to try the trend for herself by coloring her sclera with purple ink, but ended up being rushed to the hospital with horrible pain and a leaking eye.
At the hospital, Gallinger was given antibiotic eye drops for the first week and a half and then was given steroid drops for four days to bring down the internal swelling, she wrote in a Facebook post, which has since been shared over 3,500 times.
MADONNA USES $600 MASK ON HER BUTT TO KEEP THE SKIN SOFT
Now, nearly a month after the botched tattoo, she is urging people on her Facebook to use caution when it comes to body modifications and says that her eye was swollen for almost a week following the failed sclera tint attempt.
“For everyone inquiring about my eye,” Gallinger writes. “So this was done by Eric Brown three weeks ago. As it stands I will have to see a specialist and am as risk of being blind if it doesn’t get corrected.”
“I am NOT sharing this with you to cause trouble, I am sharing this to warn you to research who you get your procedures by as well as how the procedure should be properly done,” she said after blaming “undiluted ink, over injection, [and] not enough/smaller injections sights” as the reason for what went wrong.
Though Gallinger has said her vision has improved over the past few weeks, medical professionals have informed her than she will probably never completely recover her sight in the damaged eye.
Gallinger is continuing to see eye specialists about her condition and says she is determined to create awareness and keep others educated and safe so they don’t make the same mistake as her.
“Just please be cautious who you get your mods from and do your research. I don't want this to happen to anyone else,” she said on Facebook.
The practice of eye tinting is fairly new, but according to Dr. David Flug, an ophthalmologist in New York, the practice is extremely dangerous.
“Basically my feeling is that it’s insane. It can be done, but it has no long-term testing for safety. You have to be nuts to do it,” Dr. Flug told Newsweek.
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Luna Cobra – the man credited with popularizing the procedure – has said he’s trying to outlaw the tattoo.
Cobra told Newsweek he was the first artist to refine the procedure of the sclera tattoo and would film his process, leading to copycat artists.
“I didn’t think people would think so lightly of this [tattooing the eye]." said Cobra. “I thought they would take it more serious. It looks like people are not taking it so serious.”
However, the tattoo is incredibly serious and unsafe. Sclera tattoos can lead to extreme sensitivity to light, permanent partial or complete blindness and even possible enucleation – removal of the eyeball.Women who don’t support abortion aren’t real women, according to many modern feminists. Here’s why they should read more history.
In a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, a group of millennial women visit the historic home of suffragette Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, New York. Devout feminists one and all, they decide before leaving to invoke the ghost of Anthony by saying her name three times. Lo and behold, she appears, played by Kate McKinnon—bun, lace collar, and all.
Hilariously, the modern feminists find Anthony quite boring. She drones on about women’s rights and dignity, while they check their smart phones and argue about dinner. Until finally she says something that wakes them all up: “Abortion is murder!”
Doubtless many modern feminists were taken aback by this Saturday Night slip-up, given the show’s liberal leanings. But as Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life told National Review, all of the “feminist foremothers…without known exception, spoke out against abortion.”
That’s right. The suffragettes—Susan B. Anthony in particular—were fiercely pro-life, calling abortion a “crime against humanity,” “feticide,” and “child murder.” In fact, one of the primary organizations backing pro-life candidates today—the Susan B. Anthony list—does so in her name.
Given how close the unborn were to the hearts of the earliest women’s rights crusaders, it’s troubling to see how unwelcome pro-life women are on the modern feminist stage. We saw this discrimination vividly last week during the nationwide Women’s March.
Muffled but not quite absent were the voices of pro-life women. Several prominent pro-life organizations that applied as partners of the women’s march were either dis-invited or ignored, though several showed up anyway. Even the New York Times, in a surprising and praiseworthy piece, documented the virtual blackout of pro-life messages at the demonstration.
After booting a Texas anti-abortion group, Women’s March co-chairwoman, Linda Sarsour, told the Times, “If you want to come to the march you are coming with the understanding that you respect a woman’s right to choose.”
In other words, pro-lifers not welcome!
“This is what we conservative women live with all the time,” said Charmaine Yoest, senior fellow at American Values: “This idea that somehow we aren’t really women and we just reflect internalized misogyny.”
The Women’s March was, Yoest concluded, a “wholly owned subsidiary of the abortion movement.” And were it not for the unexpected coverage by the Grey Lady, these organizers may have succeeded in drowning out the pro-life message.
But as Bob Dylan sang, the times, they’re a changin’. Just this month, the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute reported that abortions in the United States have fallen to their lowest rate since Roe v. Wade.
A lot has contributed to this decline, from pro-life legislation and ultrasound availability, to widespread contraception use and the acceptance of unwed motherhood. So the news isn’t all good. But when you consider the growing movement of young people who see the rights of the unborn as a social justice issue, the tired assumption that feminism equals abortion support really begins to falter.
Even pop culture and late night TV are straying from the pro-abortion script. And as Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote in National Review, this may be our chance to reintroduce an older, better women’s movement—one that didn’t pit the rights of mothers against the lives of their unborn children.
And speaking of life, I hope you’ll join me, Eric Metaxas, and tens of thousands of others at March for Life activities this weekend in Washington, D.C. If you can’t make the trip, we still need to make our voices heard. Even more, we need to join in prayer! Our 21 Days of Prayer for Life guide is available for free as an app or a digital download. Find it at BreakPoint.org/21days.
Further Reading and Information
Pro-Woman, not Pro-Abortion: Stand for Life, Like Susan B.
Let your voice be heard–stand, and pray, for life. Join us at the March for Life this Friday, and/or use the 21 Days of Prayer for Life prayer guide–it’s available all year long as an app on your smart phone. Or download a pdf of the prayer guide here. It’s a great resource to use for individual, small group, and congregational prayer.
Resources
Dissing Susan B. Anthony
Kathryn Jean Lopez | National Review | January 23, 2017
Views on Abortion Strain Calls for Unity at Women’s March on Washington
Sheryl Gay Stolberg | New York Times | January 18, 2017
Secular, Feminist, and Pro Life: The Message Goes Mainstream
John Stonestreet | BreakPoint.org | October 25, 2016
21 Days of Prayer for Life, pdf
prayer guide
Available at the online bookstore
The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture
Scott Klusendorf | Crossway Books Publisher | March 2009OCTOBER 3--Cops were called to a South Carolina school after a nine-year-old boy went on a rampage after a teacher took away an iPad he was using in class, according to police.
The young suspect became enraged last week after a 26-year-old teacher at Oakdale Elementary School in Rock Hill confiscated iPads being used by several students who were being loud and unruly.
Deprived of his Apple tablet, the child crawled under a desk, then emerged to begin flipping over chairs in the classroom. After being ushered into a hallway by the teacher, the 5’ 2”, 125-pound boy “began to stomp on her feet repeatedly.”
The child, whose name is redacted from the police report, had to subsequently be restrained by two other teachers and an assistant principal. The boy’s stomping left his teacher with a “bruised and swollen” left foot, according to a Rock Hill Police Department incident report.
After officers arrived at the school, the boy--who was not arrested for his iPad outburst--was released into his mother’s custody.
Two fellow students “were disorderly” during the September 26 iPad incident and had to be separated by school administrators, though they “were able to be calmed.” (2 pages)Please enable Javascript to watch this video
LAKEWOOD, Colo. -- Several businesses from Colorado Mills held a job fair Tuesday as they try to find new employees before the mall reopens next month.
More than 20 companies with more than 500 positions available were at the hiring event at Jefferson County Human Services.
Several people showed up looking for work and interested in helping businesses in the mall get back going just in time for the holiday shopping season.
"It is a lot easier," Evangeline Rueda from Off Broadway Shoes said about the event. "A lot of the time it is hard to get interviews and everything set up at different locations. This makes it easy."
Colorado Mills was forced to close after damage from a severe May 8 hailstorm caused leaks in the roof and flooded out dozens of retailers inside the mall.
Although some of the mall’s exterior stores reopened earlier this month, most of the 210 stores inside have remained closed.
Jefferson County officials said Colorado Mills plans to reopen at 10 a.m. on Nov. 21.
Colorado Mills will close on Thanksgiving and then open at 8 a.m. on Black Friday. The mall will be open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. most other days during the holiday season.The Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh says he stepped on Aaron Rodgers twice because his feet were numb with cold, according to ESPN.
Suh was originally suspended for one game after he appeared to stamp on the quarterback’s legs during Green Bay’s victory over the Lions on Sunday. That ban was changed to a $70,000 fine after Suh’s successful appeal on Tuesday. A source told ESPN that part of Suh’s defense was that he couldn’t tell Rodgers’s legs from the ground due to numb feet.
The Lions face the Dallas Cowboys in the playoffs on Sunday, and Suh will play a crucial part in stopping the NFL’s leading rusher, DeMarco Murray. The Lions’ opponents average 2.84 yards per rush when Suh is on the field and 4.12 yard when he absent.
Speaking on Tuesday, Rodgers seemed sceptical that Suh’s action were accidental. “The only thing I can say is if you step on something in your everyday life or if you step on somebody on the field, the first reaction seems to be looking back and maybe apologizing with your hands or maybe pulling your foot back right away, and I’m just not sure that’s what happened on Sunday,” he said.
Suh has been fined more than $200,000 over his career for ill-discipline. He was suspended for two games in 2011 after he stepped on another Green Bay player, center Evan Dietrich-Smith. This week’s fine is Suh’s first of 2011, his last one was at the start of last season when he was docked $100,000 for a chop block on Minnesota Vikings center John Sullivan. It was the NFL’s biggest ever fine for on-field conduct.I’m currently writing a play called The Secret of the Biological Clock, about a former girl detective who is turning 37 and wants to solve the mystery of what makes a family. I have spent the past two months flipping out about stage directions.
Stage directions.
The play itself is a mystery with overtones of spy movies. There are daring escapes and bomb plots. I’ve reread a bunch of Nancy Drew mysteries and I wanted to incorporate all the various outlandish plot points into this play, keeping it in balance with the very real aspects of someone not dealing with aging and wondering if she really wants to have a kid.
You would think this play would have me running off blithely into the land of the impossible stage directions. It has to – right?
Except I’m terrified of them.
It seems silly to say terrified – but I have spent the past month or so double and triple guessing something as simple as “The figure escapes out the attic window.”
This is not something that a rational person would be flipping out about. This isn’t something that I would have flipped out about when I started out as a playwright. I went through some really amazing training during my time at DePaul University, mostly with the excellent Carlos Murillo, who while not a fan of stage directions in general, did like assignments that included impossible ones.
This is new found fear is born of a bunch of various messages that I have internalized since graduation.
Some of these messages are pretty explicit. I’ve been told that my writing isn’t dramatic. That was a comment from a concerned (and otherwise pretty cool individual) that kept me from writing anything for three years. I’ve been told that I “can’t do that on stage,” and shouldn’t I be writing a screenplay or novel instead.
But most of the messages aren’t that direct. As a female playwright, the odds are already against me getting produced. They’re even worse in Miami, which has a hyper-masculine theatre culture and artistically prefers what I’ve called “plays where people throw chairs.” 1970s Steppenwolf is idolized by many of our artistic directors, and while we share a tendency to romanticize Chicago theatre – the Chicago Theatre I’m romanticizing is a completely different genre.
I’ve been part of conversations among playwrights that I love and respect on how Sarah Ruhl is too cutesy and trying too hard. Even worse, I’ve seen local productions of truly amazing women’s plays get trashed for being too whimsical. I think Deborah Zoe Laufer’s End Days is a delightful script with the amazing choice of having the characters of Jesus and Stephen Hawking played by the same actor. But Florida Stage’s production wasn’t well received by many local artists and Florida Stage’s audience. It wasn’t nominated for the Best New Work Carbonell the year it won the Steinberg Award. I’ve heard that whimsical plays are clever, but that a much more straightforward play can really get at the gut of the human experience.
It took a reading of In Common Hours for two of the smartest dramaturgical minds I know to get the play. It’s a delicate, domestic comedy and the charm of the play only landed for them in the hearing of it, and not on the page.
As playwright, you want everything to land on the page – so I worked to fit into the mold. I could write smaller, more straight forward, more realistic, more traditionally structured. I would write something that would be respectable. I boxed myself in and wrote a traditionally structured, five character play.
If I followed all the rules, then I would be a real playwright.
Except I was a real playwright all along and the play where I only partly followed the rules is the play that has been produced.
I’ve only now found the courage to go back to telling the types of stories that I was completely comfortable telling in college. I graduated seven years ago. And even now, I don’t have the ease of writing those stories that I had back then. Instead I flip out about stage directions.
It took flipping out about stage directions for me to realize how much I have internalized all the various messages I’ve heard and witnessed over the past seven years. And it’s even sadder that I felt the need for permission from others to embrace something that used to be instinctual to my process.
For those of us who work in this field – what are the messages we’re sending out about the value of women’s stories and storytelling? There’s been a lot of wonderful mobilization around gender parity since the Guthrie, but in addition to fighting for more women’s stories, what are we saying about those stories themselves? And what messages are we sending to women playwrights, intentionally and unintentionally?
And to the folks (admittedly all male) who have told me over the past week or so that if people don’t understand my play, they shouldn’t be directing it, I would like to say thank you. It’s unfortunate that I needed to hear that from multiple sources for this greater realization to sink in. Just because I work in this community doesn’t mean I have to let it define me as an artist. I can define myself on my own terms.In 1544, it was apparent that Queen Katherine Parr had been acquainted with the terms of King Henry VIII’s will for it named Katherine regent for the young Prince Edward if he were to die while in France. The fact that Katherine had been named possible regent in the event of the sudden death of the king makes one wonder what the will of King Henry looked like when he died on 28 January 1547. For three days after the King’s death, the council convened while the outside world was unaware of what had happened. Even Henry’s other children were not told. This extremely disturbed the Lady Mary who at one time had been named Princess and heiress to her father’s throne.
After the death of King Henry, Mary was not told of his death for several days. Edward’s minority council took elaborate precautions to ensure all was in place before they made an official announcement. This action made Mary extremely angry, but she could do nothing about it. Yet how ever wary Edward’s councillors were, nothing could alter the fact that Mary was in her own right heiress to the throne. For the time being, Mary would stay with the now Dowager Queen, Katherine, who was again for the third time, a widow. At the time of her father’s death Mary was aged 31. Mary’s reaction to her father’s death was never recorded as she never publicly mourned his death. She was apparently more irritated at the fact that no one had told her that her father had died until days later. Most likely her reaction to the news was mixed grief and some kind of relief.
As for the Will of Henry VIII, it is quite possible that during those three days the men of the council were convening on how to alter the will to exclude the now Queen Dowager from any further power or influence over the boy King Edward. These conspiracy theories have been examined within Susan James’s biography on Queen Katherine. One theory is that Henry’s will was originally set up to pass the kingdom to his heir and that the regency council was to be led by the Earl of Hertford. Another version has Sir Anthony Denny, Sir William Paget, and Sir William Herbert (the Queen’s brother-in-law) rigging the whole will to give the Earl full control and some even go as far to name them as the masterminds of the fall of Gardiner and the execution of the Earl of Surrey. This theory of course can be refuted as the king was in control of his kingdom up until the last few hours of his life.
Although the king’s abilities had been diminished it is true that Sir Anthony Denny and Sir William Paget had control of those who accessed the privy chamber but not against the king’s will. In December 1546, the Privy Council meetings no longer took place at Westminster and were now being held at Hertford’s Somerset House. So if the queen had been summoned to the king at some point, the command would have been obeyed, but it is not for certain if the queen gave a command to see him that it would have been honored. It is not even sure whether or not the king would have been informed if she had demanded to see him.
Another theory to support that the will had been tampered with is the final will that was produced did not have a signature, but was stamped and was registered a month later. So in that is a possibility that the will had been changed in support of the Earl of Hertford’s wishes. It seems obvious to readers that the men of the council, including Hertford, didn’t want to be dependent upon a woman’s approval. The actions of King Henry and his mission to produce a male heir instead of depending upon his only daughter from his first marriage shows that men were still not willing to depend upon or even accept a woman governor of the realm. I tend to find this odd seeing how in other countries, including that of their neighbor Scotland, consorts had been given the position of Regent. In fact, Henry’s sister Margaret, for a time had been Regent in Scotland and even Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon acted as Regent for a longer period then Queen Katherine Parr had. Still, the feeling of having a woman in a position of power was not accepted and in some cases like Katherine of Aragon’s sister, Juana I of Castile, they were driven out by other men. Juana was driven out by the men in her life; her husband, father, and eventually her son who took over as the Holy Roman Emperor.
It is also thought that perhaps Katherine’s moral sense might have been an impediment as to the acquisition of Crown lands to which the council helped themselves to after they had been established. Henry’s second wife and queen, Anne Boleyn, had at one time felt the same way during the dissolution of the monasteries. Her opinions and interactions that condemned the way the properties and money were being dispersed had some doing in her downfall. Katherine completely disapproved of the way the lands were dispersed and her opinion was recorded as such. In 1549, Sir Robert Trywhitt testified that Katherine had said, “Mr. Trywhit, you will see the king, when he cometh to his full age, he will call his lands again, as fast as they be now given from him.”
“The enraged presence of a mother defending her son’s inheritance from the depredations of his omnivorous council would have been the last thing the lord protector or the council wanted.”
Yet despite all of this, the one responsible may in fact have been King Henry himself. Henry’s opinion of having women rule was and is more then obvious due to his split with Katherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn. Henry did not believe that a woman could rule alone. It was one thing to use Katherine as an unofficial councillor during her lifetime, but to leave her to run the kingdom while his son was a minor was a completely different thing. He didn’t want a wife to tell him what to do in pretty much anything so it is understandable as to why he sent Katherine away at the end of his life. He obviously didn’t want to deal with her suggestions on how to dispose of his crown. That he did not inform Katherine of his decision left her to suppose in a way that she was to be head of the regency council upon his death. Henry left Katherine this bitter gift after all that she had done as queen, including enduring his constant immortalizing of his “true wife”, Jane Seymour. He did this not only in his painting of the royal family but in his request to be buried next to her upon his death.
The fact that Henry sent all the women in his life away a month before his death may have also influenced him in his final decisions. In not having them around he wouldn’t have been prone to lamentations and fuss made by the women who might have been brought in to be included in the rule of |
16_t)disp16 LDAH Ra, disp16(Rb) ; Ra = Rb + (int16_t)disp16 * 65536
The first instruction applies a signed 16-bit displacement to a value in a register and puts the result in the Ra register.
The second one is a little trickier. It takes the signed 16-bit displacement and shifts it left 16 positions before adding it to the Rb register.
Both of these operations operate on the full 64-bit register, so they can produce non-canonical results.
The basic idea behind loading a 32-bit constant (in canonical form) is as follows:
Use the LDAH relative to the zero register to load the high-order 48 bits of the 32-bit constant. Use the LDA instruction relative to the destination register of the previous instruction to load the low-order 16 bits.
However, the fact that the 16-bit values are sign-extended makes things a bit more complicated.
Let's say that the 32-bit constant we want to load into the t0 register is 0xXXXXYYYY.
Let xxxx be the result you get when you treat XXXX as a signed 16-bit value. Similarly, yyyy and YYYY.
Let S be the sign bit of XXXX. The canonical form of the constant we want to load is 0xSSSSSSSS`XXXXYYYY.
If yyyy is nonnegative, then we can just load up the two halves of our constant and they won't interact with each other.
LDAH t0, XXXX(zero) ; t0 = 0xSSSSSSSS`XXXX0000 LDA t0, YYYY(t0) ; t0 = 0xSSSSSSSS`XXXXYYYY
(Throughout, I will leave out the obvious simplifications if XXXX or YYYY is zero.)
If yyyy is negative, then the LDA is going to undershoot by 0x10000, so we compensate by adding one more to xxxx.
LDAH t0, xxxx+1(zero) ; t0 = 0xSSSSSSSS`XXXX0000 + 0x10000 LDA t0, yyyy(t0) ; t0 = 0xSSSSSSSS`XXXXYYYY
Aha, but this trick doesn't work if xxxx is exactly 0x7FFF, because 0x7FFF + 1 = 0x8000, which has the wrong sign bit. In that case, we need a final adjustment step to put the result into canonical form.
LDAH t0, -32768(zero) ; t0 = 0xFFFFFFFF`80000000 LDA t0, yyyy(t0) ; t0 = 0xFFFFFFFF`7FFFYYYY ADDL zero, t0, t0 ; t0 = 0x00000000`7FFFYYYY
Constants that are in the range 0x7FFF8000 to 0x7FFFFFFF suffer from this problem.¹
All of this hassle about creating 32-bit constants has consequences for the Windows NT memory manager, as I discussed a few years ago.
Okay, so that's it for loading constants. Next time, we'll start looking at memory access.
¹ There is a special shortcut for the value 0x7FFFFFFF :
LDA t0, -1(zero) ; t0 = 0xFFFFFFFF`FFFFFFFF SRL t0, #33, t0 ; t0 = 0x00000000`7FFFFFFFReview: Rapsody, 'She Got Game'
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of the artist Courtesy of the artist
A young rapper from North Carolina, Rapsodydoesn't want to be labeled or limited as a woman in hip-hop; she wants you to know that she's as good as any of her male peers — and better than quite a few of them. With her newest project, She Got Game, Rapsody is in her own lane, one that skirts music industry norms for female musicians regardless of genre (read: bikinis, rescue fantasies, twerking).
Influenced by greats like Lauryn Hill, MC Lyte and Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), Rapsody is grittier than Hill and more soulful than Lyte, with a knack for brutal realness that recalls Bey. The production here, helmed by Little Brother's 9th Wonder, is a masterful mix of '90s-esque beats derived from soul samples and sunset tones. Rapsody's deliberate voice flows smoothly over them; she's got purpose here, but She Got Game can help listeners unwind, too.
Rapsody is unafraid to spar with veteran rappers Raekwon and Common, as well as newcomers like Mac Miller, Chance the Rapper and Ab-Soul. DJ Drama has put his name behind her by including She Got Game in his Gangsta Grillz mixtape series, where it will be available on August 20. Going that route — one dominated by male rappers — directs her toward a broad and discerning audience. The record provides a showcase for her skills, smart positioning of her aesthetic among the old and new guard of rap, and a cool-headed voice in a sweaty, overbooked room.It’s kind of funny that after Game 81, the media got admonished for allegedly being too negative and saying the Wild was backing into the playoffs and tonight after Game 82 coach John Torchetti voiced the frustration that we all expected after Game 81.
If the Wild’s trying to lower expectations this postseason, it has done a magnificent job these last few weeks.
The Wild and its fans better hope this team can magically rediscover its mojo in the playoffs against Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin, Jason Spezza and the powerhouse Dallas Stars. If it doesn’t, the Wild will, to steal Devan Dubnyk’s word after Game 80’s loss in Winnipeg, get absolutely “throttled” in the first round.
The series starts Thursday. The full schedule will be released Sunday.
Tonight, in a season-ending 2-1 loss to the Flames, the Wild entered the postseason losers of five consecutive games and outscored 16-6 in those games. Torchetti continued Mike Yeo’s Game 82 trend of the last couple years by ripping into his team afterward.
The Wild played two solid periods, had a 31-11 shot advantage through two periods, at one point had a 24-5 shot advantage and took a 1-0 lead on Zac Dalpe’s first goal with the Wild.
And then the Wild completely mailed in the third period, gave up the tying goal late in the third and like he so often does, Darcy Kuemper then let that affect him by giving up a stinker 31 seconds later with 5:54 left.
The Wild was outshot 14-6 that final period and Niklas Backstrom earned a well-deserved 35-save victory in what may have been his last NHL game. Check out Backstrom’s emotional words after the game and also my season wrapup and a look ahead.
Here is my NHL Insider with my season-ending league awards.
The Wild enters the playoffs 0 for its last 5. The Stars, who finished with 109 points to win the Central and the West, enter the playoffs winners of 9 of their last 11 and 12-3-2 in their past 17.
The Wild’s power play yet again was a monster failure tonight. The No. 1 unit is plodding and deliberate and beyond predictable. It went 0 for 5 and enter the playoffs 0 for 16 the past six games.
“We got frustrated because we didn’t get the goals on the power play and then we tried to do it a little too much individually and two neutral-zone turnovers, just what we stressed about going into the game, looking for something that’s not there,” Torchetti said, bristling.
On Dallas, Torchetti said, “Well, we know special teams is big for them, so we’ve got to stay out of the box, and I think that we’ve got to get dialed in on our special teams ourself, moving forward, both of them, and little bit more hunger in front of the net. Didn’t get enough net identity tonight. That was something we stressed A LOT, and didn’t get it.
“It’s frustrating. It’s frustrating. It’s definitely frustrating. Because that’s a detail we have to do. Teams that win championships have to do the details and make the adjustments. With Chicago, you ask Jonathan Toews to stand in front of the net, he stands in front of the net, bottom line.”
On the team right now, Torchetti said, “Well, we’ll see in the playoffs. Whoever’s playing the right way is going to be playing, and that’s the bottom line.”
Is he concerned the light switch can come on in five days, Torchetti said, “Well, we have to. We have to recognize it. Certainly we played two great periods. I liked everything about our game. I thought certain guys were buying into the right way of doing it and getting in on the forecheck, guys like Porter had an outstanding game. I don’t like to say ‘one player this, one player that’ but we’ve got to all 20 players going and that’s the bottom line. We don’t have all 20 players going here.”
Torchetti indicated a lot of guys were given chances tonight to see if they’ll be in Game 1.
“See who wants it,” Torchetti said.
Mikko Koivu said he liked everything about the Wild’s game in the first two periods. But he said it was different going into the game knowing they were in after battling for a few months.
“Not an excuse, but that’s reality,” he said. “Some good parts, but emotionally, I don’t think we were there 100 percent for 60 minutes, especially when you know that we’re in. You’re just trying to play the right way, play right system wise, and I think we did that the first 40 minutes.”
There will be a ton of coverage the next several days, including a closer look at the Stars in Monday’s paper. On the previous blog is a quick look.
I will talk to you after Sunday’s practice.
But,...Take Your Seat, The 'No Photography' Sign Is Lit
Enlarge this image toggle caption Joe Raedle/Getty Images Joe Raedle/Getty Images
You probably saw this bit of Internet virality earlier this week — showing a woman getting kicked off an American Airlines flight for channeling Whitney Houston.
What caught our attention was the sound of flight attendants repeatedly ordering passengers not to take pictures or (presumably) videos.
Apparently, it's an official rule at American Airlines:
"The use of still and video cameras, film or digital, is permitted only for recording of personal events. Unauthorized photography or video recording of airline personnel, other customers, aircraft equipment or procedures is strictly prohibited."
And other airlines have similar policies. United Airlines recently kicked a travel blogger off an international flight for camera use. Here's his version.
Jeff Hermes, director of the Digital Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center, says the airlines are within their rights to do this. The plane is a private space, they set the rules, and if you defy them on those rules, you could be found guilty of a form of trespassing. Trespassing, because in most private spaces, you have the option of obeying the owner's rules or leaving the premises.
"There's an interesting issue when you talk about airplanes," Hermes says. "Because it's very clearly a situation in which — so long as you're in the air — you can't leave. So your only option is to comply."
The fact that airlines seem to enforce the rule arbitrarily — in this case, to try to head off embarrassing videos — doesn't undermine their legal position, Hermes says.
Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel at the National Press Photographers Association, says he had no idea that American had such restrictions, but that professional photographers have long had to deal with seemingly arbitrary rules like this. What's changing now, he says, is that those rules are starting to affect the general public.
"News these days is just as likely to come from somebody with a cellphone camera as somebody with a press credential," Osterreicher says.
While private companies can restrict photography on their premises, police officers may not. They often try, ordering people to stop videotaping them and sometimes arresting camera-wielding civilians and charging them with disorderly conduct or interfering with the police. But the courts have clearly stated that the public has the right to photograph the police, a right recently reaffirmed by the Justice Department.
The public's right to videotape police is being tested in a potentially explosive case in California, this week. The details are still unclear, but witnesses accuse law enforcement of deleting a video of a police beating.
Police may confiscate videos, if there's evidence of a crime and a warrant. But private entities, such as airlines, may not. No matter what the rules on a airplane, once you've shot a video, airline employees have no right to demand that you delete it or hand it over.
And once you have that video, you enjoy much greater freedom to "publish" it, such as uploading it to YouTube.
"If it's just a matter of something that's embarrassing to an airline, it's going to be hard for them to get it suppressed — to get it taken down," says Ryan Calo, a University of Washington Law professor specializing in privacy.
He says the First Amendment is "pretty generous" in this regard. "Even though the press are singled out by the very text of the Constitution, most of us enjoy many of the same rights that the press do."iMessage Tutorial on El Capitan and Yosemite
Works on OS X 10.10+
Requires Clover boot loader, and has been tested up to macOS 10.12
Clover Configurator: http://mackie100projects.altervista.org/download/
Sometimes Necessary: Set Up Network Configuration
IMPORTANT: Make sure that your primary network is set as en0. A lot of the time, this is a major issue and is often overlooked. If you use WiFi as your primary network, it has to be en0. Open System Profiler, click Ethernet or Wifi, depending on how you receive your internet, and make sure the network is listed as en0. If not, delete NetworkInterfaces.plist and Preferences.plist in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration. In many cases, this is unnecessary.
Open System Profiler in Spotlight In my case, I use a WiFi adapter. I have en0, so I don't have to make any changes, but if you have en1, continue.
Open a Finder window and press ⌘ + Shift + G. Then type /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration
Delete NetworkInterfaces.plist and preferences.plist, then reboot! How To Get iMessage Working on Yosemite and El Capitan
Download Clover Configurator and run the program.
Mount the EFI partition and open the config.plist
Import the config.plist
Go to the SMBIOS tab and click the magic wand icon
Select the computer most similar to yours (My PC is most similar to an iMac)
For the tutorial, I've selected the iMac 8,1, but I do not recommend it.
If you have a desktop Haskell or Skylake processor: Select iMac 14,2
Since I have a Haswell i5 processor, the Mac closet to mine would be the iMac 14,2.
Click both shake buttons a few times, and press OK.
Visit https://checkcoverage.apple.com and test your serial.
If the error shown above appears, than you are good to go!
If not, make another serial by repeating the above step.CLOSE New helicopter business owner hurt by temporary flight restrictions set anytime President Donald Trump arrives at National Golf Club, Bedminster. Matt Fagan/NorthJersey.com
President Donald Trump, spending Independence Day weekend in New Jersey, flew on Air Force One into Morristown Municipal Airport before heading to his Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster on Marine One on July 3. (Photo: Bob Karp/Staff Photographer)
LINCOLN PARK — Business at Lincoln Park Airport has been hurting lately, and area pilots said it's all due to President Donald Trump's presence in the area.
The dip in profits and flights coincides with Trump's visits to his Bedminster property.
With the arrival of the president and U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Aviation Administration placed a temporary flight restriction (TFR) for a radius of 30 miles around Trump National.
Lincoln Park is one of 20 North Jersey airports within the TFR. As a result, business at Lincoln Park and other airports in the zone drops "drastically" each time the president arrives in Bedminster, airport officials said. His current 17-day stay, however, seems to be particularly egregious.
Frank Galella of Lincoln Park Aviation said there has been an 80 percent drop in aviation fuel sales in the three weekends the president has been in New Jersey. He wouldn't discuss just how much he's lost in sales.
"The domino effect starts there. If people don’t fly, they don’t burn gas. If they don’t burn gas, they don’t require maintenance," said Galella, who is a West Milford resident.
Then there's the fact that there are no drone flights permitted in the restricted flight area. Galella says his company typically performs around four commercial drone flights a week.
Lincoln Park Airport is suffering financial losses because of the president's visits to Bedminster, say airport officials. (Photo: Matt Fagan/NorthJersey.com)
Pilot Mike Pirot of Bloomingdale, who started Garden State Helicopters a year ago, said the flight restrictions are having a profound effect on his bottom line. He needs about 20 hours a month of paid flying time in each of his two helicopters just to pay the cost of his leases. Most of those come from flight instruction.
Take out 17 days, the time the president is expected to remain in Bedminster, and it affects his ability to become profitable. It's even worse that it is happening during the summer, which is prime time for helicopter flights. Tack on the six previous days this summer when Trump was in Bedminster and it hurts, Pirot said.
"Losing August is like a shore town losing the entire month of summer," he said.
Linda Scully of Aero Safety Training, a flight school at the airport, said the TFR has a dampening effect on pilot training. Pilots are allowed to take off with a valid flight plan and receive a special code for their transponders from the air traffic controllers, but they are not allowed to tarry within the restricted area.
A plane at Lincoln Park Airport. (Photo: Matt Fagan/NorthJersey.com)
They can travel outside the TFR to conduct lessons. However, to return they have to contact air traffic control to get a new code. This can take time, and time when taking flying lessons is money. Each extra hour is around $170, Scully notes.
"Students worry about getting back in," Scully said.
"Getting back in can be a big issue," agreed Ron Reinartz, who is a flight instructor at the airport. He added that for a student soloing, dealing with a TFR can be a bit intimidating.
Anyone who strays off the flight path is likely to encounter a helicopter or maybe even an F-15, be forced down and be interrogated by the Secret Service. That makes students and amateur pilots inclined to pass on flying while the restrictions are in place, officials said.
Scully said the timing of the president's stay hasn't been great, as this week the airport is holding an aerocamp, where teens learn about flying. A key selling point is the introductory ride, which cannot be easily done given the restrictions.
While the presidential TFR has hampered operations at Lincoln Park, it has crippled operations at other airports. Andover Flight School and Skydive New Jersey have also been severely affected, officials noted.
Damien Del Gaizo, owner of Andover Flight School, said, "This is horrible. It is putting us out of business."
Andover flies vintage planes such as the 1946 Stearman, a bi-plane once used for military training. Because of the lack of transponders in his planes, he is effectively grounded.
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"Losing 2½ weeks at the height of summer impacts us severely," Del Gaizo said. "It is a tough enough business to make it in anyway."
While pilots at Lincoln Park and Andover still technically can leave the TFR, two airports, Solberg and Somerset, are effectively closed, as no flights are permitted because they fall within the 10-mile radius, which is a no-fly zone.
"We are totally hamstrung in any effort to advance our business in the future," said Thor Solberg Jr., who owns the Solberg airport with his sisters, Suzanne Nagle and Lorraine Solberg.
Nagle said that because of the no-fly zone, there are no fuel sales, no flight training, no aircraft rental, no radio-controlled model aircraft flying, no hot air ballooning, no Civil Air Patrol, and no aircraft flying for business or pleasure.
"This is not Wyoming or Nevada," Nagle said. "This is not even West Palm Beach, where at least a portion of the 60-nautical-mile diameter is over the Atlantic Ocean."
Worse, potential corporate clients may take their business elsewhere, Nagle said.
New Jersey's congressional delegation is sympathetic to airports' and related businesses' plight. On June 29, the congressmen wrote a letter to Secret Service officials imploring them to modify the TFR protocols.
"Most of these general businesses rely on summer flying and tourism to generate sales and generate revenue to keep them afloat during the off season," the letter reads.
Congressman Leonard Lance, R-Clinton, was one of the signers and says that while he doesn't begrudge the president time off, he does want to see something done for the local airports.
"I hope and expect the Secret Service will review our request," Lance said. He said the TFR also affects airports around Palm Beach when the president spends time there.
In the June 29 letter, Lance and others, including Reps. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-Harding, Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, and Josh Gottheimer, D-Wyckoff, said they hoped the Secret Service could strike a balance between protecting the president and minimizing the impact on New Jersey's general aviation businesses.
When asked about potential modifications to the presidential TFR, FAA spokeswoman Arlene Salac deferred to the Secret Service. U.S. Secret Service Special Agent/Spokesperson Joseph A. Casey said the agency had "no comment" on the letter.
Read or Share this story: https://njersy.co/2vQpXdNThe Tinker Burgeoning her pack, a leather satchel sprouting Hzelraw and Dande-Lion from the fecund fabric, she followed the crew towards the bleak mountain's peak. She applied a small poultice of Grottweed to her blistering arm and stifled a groan at the switchback ahead. Knowing the familiar feeling of herbal medicine as it swelled through her shoulder, she knew the trip hed begun to take a turn for the better. His hands, shaking violently with nervous anticipation, made it difficult to hold the small metal cluster in his massive fingers. Before he could second-guess himself he was bursting through the arched doorway following a breaching charge and with an overhand lob the musky half-orc threw the three devices into the crowd of Duergar. His cringe at the small metalic clink, so often the sound of failure, was quickly alleviated by the magnificent burst of red lightning forking through their midst. Hanging from the roof's edge, the masked human skulked in the overhangs shadow. Held aloft by a trusty grappling hook attached to his belt, his free hands toyed with a smoking wooden canister. No sooner had the villain stepped through the threshold when a jet black fume erupted between him and the guard waiting outside. The drow was prone, bleeding from a frozen spear in his chest, when the belindered guards reached him. The mark of “The Freeze”, signed on the cold wooden shaft, burst among them moments later and the vigilante made his escape. The origin of a Tinker are broad and diverse. Some seek justice, some seek fortune and glory, while yet others seek the improvement of their world. This diverse grouping of reasons is combined by related by one single factor: a magnificent skill at crafting. The Tinker is focused on improving their art and their ambitions is their own. But through the use of available technology, they craft their future. Destiny of Invention Many Tinkers find their calling through a desire to create. Their path in life is shaped by their mastery of mechanism. Empowered by their success, and encouraged by their failure, the Tinker’s the study of their art is part of their very being. Because they have the ability to create, they are also responsible for an untold story of the future. For many the allure of destiny is a settling thought. The destiny of a Tinker, however, is wholly their own, and they revel in creating their life with every strike of genius. Trial and Error If there's one thing more important than crafting a new invention, it's the curiosity and anxiety of testing it. Many Tinkers spend long grueling hours learning the best or quickest way to create something. True invention isn’t a particularly common event even for a Tinker. But the moment of knowing that you have succeeded and triumphed over mechanism, even in the face of danger (or worse, failure), is well worth the trial. It's the mark of a true Tinker that most of their life isn’t spent cloistered in a lab, but out testing and improving their equipment in the field. 1
The Tinker Level Proficiency Bonus Features Devices Device Level 1st +2 Devices, Tinker's Talent 2 3 2nd +2 Tinker's Profession, Profession Features 2 3 3rd +2 Nervous Habit 2 3 4th +2 Ability Score Improvement 2 3 5th +3 Extra Attack 2 4 6th +3 Rapid Testing 3 4 7th +3 Profession Feature 3 4 8th +3 Ability Score Improvement 3 4 9th +4 3 5 10th +4 Effective 3 5 11th +4 Profession Feature 3 5 12th +4 Ability Score Improvement 3 5 13th +5 3 6 14th +5 Confident Testing 4 6 15th +5 Profession Feature 4 6 16th +5 Ability Score Improvement 4 6 17th +6 Invention: Prototype 4 7 18th +6 4 7 19th +6 Ability Score Improvement 4 7 20th +6 Invention: Masterwork 4 7 A Tinker always starts in the same place: a field of curiosity. Many Tinkers end up serving one purpose or another whether it be moral or material. But their freedom to travel, explore, and invent is always mandatory. As such, Tinkers live dangerous lives. But the cost of invention, even if its their own life, is worth the experiment. So even while Tinkers aren’t particularly common in the world, they are absolutely necessary for its future. Tinkers find themselves with a group of adventurers for a variety of reasons. From searching out new supplies to finding moving test subjects, a Tinkers skills are a great asset to any party. Their ability to hold their own, and their diverse skill set, means a Tinker often finds a happy home within a group of adventurers. Creating a Tinker The most influential aspect of a Tinker’s life is how and why they choose to shape the world. Sentient life has always found power a tempting force, and a Tinker is no different. Their lives are often filled with morally ambiguous moments, and the threat of someone abusing their creations haunts their work. For some, however, this shadow is what drives them. Are you a created of a better world? Do you care about what happens with your inventions? What spurs your creative genius? These are important questions for a Tinker, and many of them can only be answered truthfully in time. Class Features As a Tinker, you gain the following class features Hit Points Hit Dice: 1D8 Per Tinker Level
1D8 Per Tinker Level Hit Points at 1st Level: 8 + your Constitution Modifier
8 + your Constitution Modifier Hit Points at Higher Levels: 1d8 (or 5) + your Constitution modifier per Tinker Level after 1st Proficiencies Armor: Light armor
Light armor Weapons: Simple weapons
Simple weapons Tools: Tinker's Tools, one set of Artisan's Tools Saving Throws: Intelligence, Wisdom
Intelligence, Wisdom Skills: Choose two from Deception, History, Insight, Investigation, Medicine, Perception, Persuasion Equipment You start with the following equipment, in addition to the equipment granted by your background: (a) a light crossbow or (b) any simple weapon
(a) a scholar's pack or (b) a dungeoneer's pack
Tinker's Tools, on set of Artisan's Tools
Leather armor, any simple weapon, and two daggers 2
Devices Your strength comes from your ability to craft devices. Whether they're chemical concoctions or incendiary traps, you create tools of power and destruction. All Tinkers have certain knowledge in common, and often use similar components. They all have varying effectiveness with certain creations, but can produce certain effects with consistency. These devices are easily comparable to magic with how they work. When not otherwise specified, they function under the same rules as spellcasting. See Chapter 10 for the general rules of spellcasting. See the Tinker Effect Table and the Full Device Rules section at the end of this document for more information. Prepared Devices Starting at 1st level, a Tinker may only have 2 devices prepared at once. A Tinker is primarily focused on testing their devices, and in order to do this safely and efficiently, they prepare a number of devices they can handle. You may craft devices once per short rest. It takes ten minutes to craft one device. No roll needs to be made during the crafting of the device, as the testing (attack roll) determines if the device was crafted effectively. Device Level The maximum Device Level is noted on the Tinkers Table for each level. A Tinker starts with a Maximum Device level of 3. This increases at 5th, 9th, 13th, and 17th levels. This determines how much uncertainty a Tinker allows when creating new devices. As a Tinker increases in level, their confidence and skills allows them to increase this number. For example, a level 10 Tinker has a Maximum Device level of 5 and a maximum of 3 devices per short rest. This means they can create three devices of 5th level such as: One Custom Device of (4 Effect Level + 1 Mechanism Level) like a 4th level Fire Vial
One Custom Device of (3 Effect Level + 2 Mechanism Level) like a Slow Cluster.
One Standard Device of 5th level like a Descent Device. Device Ability Intelligence is your ability for your Tinker Devices since you learn their use through practice, improvement, and specific knowledge. You use your Intelligence whenever a device refers to your Device Ability. In addition, you use your Intelligence modifier when setting the saving throw DC for a Tinkers device you use and when making an attack roll with one. Device save DC = 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier Device attack modifier = your proficiency bonus + your Intelligence modifier Creating a Device A Tinker may only craft a device which is within their capacity to use effectively. Whether it’s outside of their knowledge, their skill, their ethics, or their courage, a Tinker doesn’t craft a device that could hurt them or those they care about. As such, each device has a maximum Device Level. The maximum Device Level is shown on the Tinkers Class table. The rules are simple. Primarily, keep the total cost of the device at the device level, similar to spells and spell levels. Included below is a simplified list of rules. The full list of rules is noted in the Full Device Rules section. Device Level > or = (Effect Level + Mechanism Level) There may only be 1 Effect and 1 Mechanism per Device 3
Tinker's Talent Your talent as a tinkerer has many roots. However, one things is constant among all tinkerer's: their destiny of curiosity and exploration. More than shut-ins, tinkers are often go into the field to practice and test their equipment. At this point in their career, despite their nature, they often find a calling to the lands outside their cozy caves. At 1st level, a Tinker gains proficiency with Tinker's Tools. These have several common uses. While adventuring, being a tinker necessitates being able to fix equipment on the road. A tinker is always equipped with their Tinker's Tools and knows how to use it. A Tinkers kit can be used for several things: Repairing clothing, equipment, and simple creations
Crafting basic alchemical concoctions
Creating small trinkets These are all some standard uses of the Tinker's Tools. It's up to the DM's discretion if something requires more than a Tinkers Tools Whenever the use of a Tinkers Tools is required, the DC for a Tinker is 8 + Proficiency Modifier + Intelligence Modifier. Several checks may be required. When a check is failed, the consequences are up to the DM. Sometimes the device explodes on the spot. Other times it seems functional until you go to use it and find it leaking all over your +1 Boots of Karma. Once a Tinker chooses a Profession, their Tinker's Tools become specially equipped by the other necessary tools of their trade. Modifier Tinker's Tools are known as a Tinker's Kit. While the Tinker's kit has certain extra capabilities, the primary uses noted above remain the same. Nervous Habit Tinkers are often finding their hands busy with some project. Whether it be roaming on the long roads playing with an arrowhead or slogging through a marsh crafting a bell, the Tinker is always making something. Starting at 3rd level, the Tinker now has the ability to craft small devices. These are not the incindiary sort, but may be just as effective. While spending 5 minutes with their Tinkers Kit, a Tinker can craft one small object. Due to their ephemeral nature, they break if they are not used before the next short rest. Here are several examples: Clockwork Toy: This toy is a clockwork animal, monster, or person, such as a frog, mouse, bird, dragon, or soldier. When placed on the ground, the toy moves 5 feet across the ground on each of your turns in a random direction. It makes noises as appropriate to the creature it represents.
This toy is a clockwork animal, monster, or person, such as a frog, mouse, bird, dragon, or soldier. When placed on the ground, the toy moves 5 feet across the ground on each of your turns in a random direction. It makes noises as appropriate to the creature it represents. Music Box: When opened, this music box plays a single song at a moderate volume. The box stops playing when it reaches the song’s end or when it is closed.
When opened, this music box plays a single song at a moderate volume. The box stops playing when it reaches the song’s end or when it is closed. Timer: This device counts down accurately a certain amount of time. When it reaches a certain time, or at the end of its count, it can be make a loud noise
This device counts down accurately a certain amount of time. When it reaches a certain time, or at the end of its count, it can be make a loud noise Lock: A simple lock, crafted out of spare parts. The mechanism can be a key, or a series of numbers/letter input into the device. This is broken with a DC 15 Strength Check Extra Attack Beginning at 5th level, you can attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack Action on your turn. Rapid Testing Starting at 6th level, you think you've got the knack of how many devices you can oversee at once. You may now have 3 Devices prepared at once per short rest. Effective Starting at 10th level, through trial and error you have learned what does and does not work. Subsequently, you make more reliable equipment. Choose either the Touch, the Pressure Vessel, or the Aerasol mechanism. This mechanism now costs one less to craft. Confident Testing Starting at 14th level, your experience with all of your devices has given you a solid understanding of how many devices you can effectively keep track of. You may now have 4 Devices prepared at once per short rest. Invention: Prototype You have expanded beyond the knowledge of most in your profession. You have seen the good and the bad, and have seen that even now there truly is room for invention. This invention is still in the prototyping stage, and the consequences of failure for this device may be extreme, but that's hasn't stopped you before. Starting at 17th level, you have begun to research and crafting a miraculous device. If it is available, you may use an Invention once per long rest. The mechanical error for this device is a roll of 7 or lower. This error is not reduced by the Effective ability. The list of Invention devices is listed in the Devices table. The necessary components are up to the discression of the DM. Invention: Masterwork The masterwork of your experimentation has come at last. Standing as a crowning achievement of your work, you have discovered and created a unique device and expanded changed humanity forever. And better yet, it usually works! Starting at 20th level, your Invention has a mechanical Error Roll of 3 or lower. This is not reduced by the Effective ability. 4
Tinker Professions You have begun to expand into one specific field of your interest. Whether this is because of a pension for destruction, or the need to improve the world, a Tinker chooses his path early on. The Botanist You skills as a cra |
in Los Angeles (built in 2010).
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.Neutron beams have been used to create holograms of large solid objects for the first time. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have shown that these neutron holograms are better than ordinary laser light based visual ones in that they can reveal details about the interior of the object.
Holograms are flat images that give the sense that they are three-dimensional objects as they change depending on the viewer’s perspective. This illusion is created by what is called an interference pattern. Photon and neutron beams can act like rippling waves with valleys and peaks. This ability can be likened to a water wave hitting a gap between the two rocks. When the wave hits the gap, it splits up and then re-combines to create interference patterns that are rich in information.
When an optical hologram is made, a laser is shone at an object. A recording is then made of how the reflected laser light waves interfere with each other, instead of simply photographing the light reflected from the object. The resulting patterns, based on the relative positions of the waves’ peaks and valleys or phase differences, contain more information about an object’s appearance than a photo does. This technique does however not tell us much about an object’s hidden interior.
Animation of neutron scanning data, demonstrating that scientists can use neutron beams to create holograms instead of the usual laser light.
Neutron scientists explore the hidden interiors of objects. Scientists who create a new substance and want to investigate its properties use neutrons beams as these are able to penetrate metals and many other solids. Neutrons do however have limitations, as they are not very good for creating visual images. Neutron experimental data is therefore usually expressed as graphs and the data typically shows how a substance is made in general. This is handy if scientists wants approximate data about an object built from a bunch of repeating structures such as a crystal, but it does not help much if they want to know the details about one specific part of it.
The research team has now found a way in which they can have the best of both worlds.
In previous work performed by the team at the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR), neutrons were passed through a cylinder of aluminum that had a small spiral staircase carved into one of its circular faces. The cylinder’s shape conveyed a twist to the neutron beam. The team did however notice that the beam’s individual neutrons changed phase depending on what section of the cylinder they passed through – the phase shift was bigger with a thicker section. They eventually realized that this was the information they needed to create holograms of the objects’ interior. This method is detailed in their new paper.
Animation of neutron scanning data, demonstrating that scientists can use neutron beams to create holograms instead of the usual laser light.
The discovery adds to the range of techniques scientists have available to explore solid materials. The team has shown that direct visual representations of an object can be created and details about specific points within it revealed by using a beam of neutrons and an interferometer. An interferometer is a detector that measures interference patterns.
Michael Huber of NIST’s Physical Measurement Laboratory notes that although other techniques measure small features as well, they are limited to measuring the surface properties only. He adds that the new method might be a more prudent technique for measuring interfaces buried inside the bulk of the material, as well as small, 10-micron size structures.
Full study has been published in the journal Optics Express.
SavePaul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
April 27, 2011
The “logistical coordinator” for a top Mexican drug-trafficking gang that was responsible for purchasing the CIA torture jet that crashed with four tons on cocaine on board back in 2007 has told the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago that he has been working as a U.S. government asset for years.
Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla is the son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, one of the top kingpins of the Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization. Niebla was arrested in Mexico in March 2009 and extradited to the United States to stand trial last February.
“The indictment pending against Zambada Niebla claims he served as the “logistical coordinator” for the “cartel,” helping to oversee an operation that imported into the U.S. “multi-ton quantities of cocaine … using various means, including but not limited to, Boeing 747 cargo aircraft, private aircraft … buses, rail cars, tractor trailers, and automobiles,” writes Narcosphere’s Bill Conroy.
In a two page court pleading filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago, Niebla claims that he was working on behalf and with the authority of, “The U.S. Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration (“DEA”); and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”); and the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”),” since January 1, 2004.
Niebla is also connected to the Gulfstream II jet that wrecked with four tons of cocaine on board on September 24, 2007. European investigators linked the plane’s tail number, N987SA, to past CIA “rendition” operations. The bill of sale for the Gulfstream jet, sold weeks before it crashed, listed the name of Greg Smith, a pilot who had previously worked for the FBI, DEA and CIA.
A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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The plane was purchased by Niebla’s Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization through a syndicate of Colombian drug-traffickers that included a CIA asset named Nelson Urrego, according to another undercover CIA operative, Baruch Vega, who was involved in the deal.
“The Gulfstream II jet, according to Mexican authorities, was among a number of aircraft acquired by the Sinaloa drug organization via an elaborate money laundering scheme involving a chain of Mexican casa de cambios (currency exchange houses) overseen by alleged Sinaloa organization operative Pedro Alfonso Alatorre Damy, according to Mexican government and U.S. media reports,” writes Conroy.
Sinaloa bought the jet by wiring money through the U.S. banking giant Wachovia, now a subsidiary of Wells Fargo. “In total, nearly $13 million dollars went through correspondent bank accounts at Wachovia for the purchase of aircraft to be used in the illegal narcotics trade. From these aircraft, more than 20,000 kilograms of cocaine were seized,” states Wachovia’s deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. Wachovia was forced to pay a penalty of around $160 million dollars for allowing the money to be laundered through its correspondent bank accounts.
“So, the criminal cases pending against alleged Colombian narco-trafficker Urrego, accused money-launderer Damy and Sinaloa organization logistics chief Zambada Niebla all appear to connect through the Gulfstream II cocaine jet at some level,” summarizes Conroy.
Another private aircraft that was full of cocaine crashed in New Mexico on Sunday morning, but the plane has yet to be identified.
In addition to smuggling narcotics into the United States, Niebla is also accused of obtaining weapons from the U.S. with the intent to use them to cause violence in Mexico City, leading to the murders of several innocent people. Despite the fact that the Obama administration has cited the flow of guns from the U.S. into Mexico as an excuse with which to attack the second amendment rights of Americans, it was recently revealed that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives deliberately allowed guns to be smuggled from the U.S. into the hands of Mexican drug lords under “Operation Fast and Furious”. President Obama later denied that he had any knowledge of the program.
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Niebla’s assertion that he smuggled drugs from Mexico into the United States while working for the U.S. government adds further weight to the already voluminous body of evidence that confirms the CIA and U.S. banking giants are the top players in a global drug trade worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, information made public by the likes of Gary Webb, who it was claimed committed suicide in 2004 despite the fact that he was found with two gunshot wounds to the head and after Webb himself had complained of death threats and “government people” stalking his home.
For more background information on the story, be sure to read Bill Conroy’s excellent article over at Narco News entitled Mexican Narco-Trafficker’s Revelation Exposes Drug War’s Duplicity.
—
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.I imagine, if you clever folks all made your spot checks, that you’ve noticed some changes around here.
First off, the new site design is up and running! I think it looks pretty shiny. There’s a brand-new links page, and there’s actually stuff up on the extras page now! There’ll be a bunch more content coming in the next few days, so keep checking back.
Secondly, today is June 23rd. Those of you not familar with the awesomeness that is Firefly may be wondering what in the gorram hell is goin’ on with today’s comic, which clearly isn’t a part of the current storyline. Well, tough. Today’s strip is purely for the Browncoats out there. ;P (Besides, Dustin and Abbie both needed a little screen time…)
Go out, find yourself a screening of the Serenity movie [link], or just curl up at home with some DVDs of the first season and enjoy. Oh, and wish Joss Whedon a happy birthday while you’re at it.Top 15 Sustainable Initiatives in Newfoundland
What is it that differentiates Newfoundland from all other Canadian provinces? Is it people with their awesome accents? Its sheer size? Its breath-taking sunsets? I’d say all of these are definitely up there, but the one major thing that stands out is their motivation to go green. After talking with many companies in Newfoundland, and lots of research on the Newfoundland’s sustainability gems, we found out the top 15 sustainable initiatives of Newfoundland.
If you believe you should be in Newfoundland’s Top 15, feel free to contact us and we will evaluate your sustainable initiatives in Newfoundland.
Artist Studios on Fogo Island
Fogo Island Arts Studios have grown to be quite popular with its magnificent landscape of the North Atlantic, on the North coast of Newfoundland, Canada. These artist studios on Fogo Island are modern, ecologically sound (completely solar-powered) and creative spaces complimenting the incredible surrounding architecture of ocean, rock and wildlife. What better place for an artist to go and find his/her inspiration?
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Fogo Island Inn
Fogo Island Inn has a concrete and accredited environmental strategy, works with ethical suppliers, and think forward to protect the environment. Local suppliers are always prioritized, and energy-efficiency tactics were implemented in the design of the inn. For example, the Inn’s steel frame is highly insulated, and the windows have the equivalent rating of triple pane glazing. Rainwater from the roof is collected into two cisterns in the basement and subsequently filtered for use in toilets, laundry, and kitchen appliances.
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Sustainable Energies Inc.
Sustainable Energies Inc. is owned and operated in Conception Bay South, NL and specializes in the most efficient heating and highest output renewable energy products on the market. They service the residential and commercial markets and offer products that combine renewable energy and heating such as solar air heaters, solar hot water, solar assisted heat pumps and solar mini-split systems.
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Conservation Corps Newfoundland and Labrador
Conservation Corps Newfoundland and Labrador (CCNL) is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing youth with training and employment in environmental and cultural heritage conservation.
Some of their programs include:
Climate Change Education Center – This program helps youth learn about climate change and how to help solve the issue.
Greener Futures – This program helps businesses “go green” by providing them with the necessary tools and education to make their establishment and business practices more eco-friendly.
Internships – The CCNL helps individuals secure internships in the field of sustainability, allowing for growing talent to invest themselves fully in a blossoming and increasingly important field.
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Fishers’ Loft Inn
Fishers’ Loft Inn in Port Rexton is a leader in the use of local foods. Very local. The inn produces 40% of the vegetables consumed by customers on-site. In addition to its food and composting efforts, the the inn employs a number of sustainable strategies. For example, it uses fabric hand towels and table napkins eliminating the use of disposable paper products and saving on energy needs.
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Petty Harbour Mini Aquarium
The mission of the Petty Harbour Mini Aquarium is to foster curiosity about local marine life and inspire action toward personal and global sustainability through display, interpretation and direct action. The aquarium puts fish on display for just four months, and after helping teach the importance of environmental protection to the locals, all the animals are returned to the ocean. This is the largest source of pride for this neat aquarium.
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By d’Bay Cabins
By d’ Bay Cabins in Port Blandford has one of the most extensive waste management strategies for an operation of its size in the province. The management provide recycling containers in the cabins and on the grounds, as well as a kitchen composting program – complemented by information pamphlets to visitors to help them participate. The compost is then used in landscaping operations on the grounds. This business is a great example of how we can incorporate a full-cycle approach as a waste management solution.
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Newfoundland & Labrador Environment Industry Association – NEIA
Newfoundland and Labrador Environmental Industry Association is a not-for-profit association of businesses that promotes the growth and development of the green economy in their region. Over the years they became an important factor behind the growth in sustainable initiatives in Newfoundland, providing tools for green businesses to succeed within their region.
Some of their annual events include:
The Newleef Social – This social brings together businesses of all sizes to converse and get to know each other. These types of events are great to foster new business relationships that can bring longterm sustainable change within the sustainability sector.
NEIA’s Annual Christmas Social – Every year NEIA provides its members and environmental sector stakeholders the opportunity to meet and network in a casual setting. Not only are members encouraged to attend, they are also encouraged to participate in formulating the event.
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Bitters Pub & Restaurant
Bitters Pub & Restaurant, owned and operated by GSU MUN in St. John’s, has completed Level one L.E.A.F. certification. Students can feel good about grabbing a bite in an eco-minded establishment were waste is composted, recycles get picked up, windows have been resealed to improve energy efficiency, and they have increased purchases from local food sources.
Keep up the great work guys!
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TakeCHARGE NL
TakeCHARGE NL combines the expertise and customer reach of Newfoundland and Labrador’s two electricity utilities: Newfoundland Power Inc. and Newfoundland Labrador Hydro. They work together to bring energy efficiency awareness and rebate programs to everyone in Newfoundland and Labrador. Energy efficiency is important for the whole province, as it helps reduce the demand on the electricity system, which also lessens the costs to produce energy.
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Multi Materials Stewardship Board
The Multi Materials Stewardship Board (MMSB) is guiding Newfoundland to a greener future through waste reduction education programs and waste diversion programs! Some of these include composting programs, recycling programs, and even funding programs.
The MMSB is a Crown agency of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, reporting directly to the Minister of Environment and Conservation. It is great to see that the government is also involved in making Newfoundland a more sustainable ecosystem.
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Jumping Bean Coffee
Jumping Bean Coffee is a premium coffee roaster based in St. John’s. Their Eco2 Roast coffees mix the perfect blend of sustainability with premium beans, selected from fair trade growers around the world and handcrafted in small batches for the perfect, consistent cup. It produces 85% less Co2 emissions during roasting. For every 1lb. (454 g) of ECO2 ROAST Coffee your carbon footprint reduction is equivalent to a 60 watt light bulb burning for 17 days. That’s pretty impressive if you ask me!
They even sell their coffee beans online so be sure to check them out!
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Food First NL
Food First NL‘s mission is to actively promote comprehensive, community-based solutions to ensure access to adequate, healthy food for all. With many projects in hand, they are demonstrating the importance of buying local food and investing in your local farmers.
One of the coolest features of their website and services are their heartwarming stories. With this organization, you truly feel how close they are to their community and how much they have helped over the years.
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Empowered Homes
Empowered Homes provides residential energy audits to help homeowners learn how they can make their homes more energy efficient. For example, their comprehensive recommendation reports detail all of the energy saving measures identified during the energy audit. The energy saving measures are prioritized based on their energy savings to make it simple for homeowners to decide which upgrades they should complete first.
If you are a resident of Newfoundland then this is a service you should certainly use.
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Resource Innovations Inc.
Resource Innovations Inc. is an international consulting firm providing forest and environmental management and planning services that promote healthy forest ecosystems, sustainability and environmental stewardship!
Some of the services they offer include:
Forest Resources Inventory
Ecological Land Classification
Geographic Information Systems
Unmanned Aerial Systems
Environmental Consulting services
This is a great company to work with if you have the next big sustainable initiative in mind!
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And there it is! The Top 15 Sustainable Initiatives of Newfoundland
This was the third of ten posts; one for every Canadian province. By the end of 2016 you can expect a Top Sustainable Initiatives article for every province of Canada! To stay updated on the up and coming initiatives subscribe to our monthly newsletter and like us on Facebook. Also please comment if we have left out any important sustainable initiatives in Newfoundland that you believe should be part of the top 15, or if you have any thoughts/ comments on the article.
Check out our other provinces:
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Help us activate your sustainable lifestyle,
L’Autre Couleur TeamDecember 1, 2010 1:42 AM | Michael Rose
The Indie Games Winter Uprising has begun, and it's off to a great start with an absolute corker. Epic Dungeon is a quick-fire roguelike with loads of content to discover and four different classes to play around with.
You pick your character type and then venture deep into the Epic Dungeon, fighting rats, witches and other such nasties. Enemies are constantly spawning and there is barely a minute to breathe as you fight back, leveling up as you go and picking up extra items, potions and scrolls. Along the way there are random encounters to be found with short bits of dialogue here and there, and plenty of stats to keep RPG fanatics entertained. Since every dungeon is randomly-generated, every playthrough is different, giving the game tons of replay value.
There are plenty of other reasons to keep playing too - scoreboards document your previous attempts, from how long you survive to how deep you ventured into the dungeon, giving you a rank for how well you did. If you then manage to reach that floor again, you'll find a grave where your original character died, which will contain the best weapon you were carrying at that point.
So many lovely ideas, so much to see and do, and all for 80 MS Points ($1). Yes indeed, it looks as though the Winter Uprising will be worth keeping tabs on. Go give this a download from the Xbox Live Marketplace without hesitation.1 of 15 View Caption
Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Marcy Rizzi, owner of Booked on 25th, receives the award for best new bookstore at the 2016 Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Comedian and host Marcus Hardy with Maggie Alvarez, co-owner of Tupelo, the 2016 Salt Award Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Winners receive awards at the 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City, Wednesda Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Bhim Shrestha, owner of Everest Curry Kitchen, accepts the 2016 Salt Award for best new Ind Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Winners receive awards at the 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City, Wednesda Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Comedian and host Marcus Hardy presents the Editors' Pick Salt Award for best new cheap eat Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Comedian and host Marcus Hardy presents the Readers' Choice Salt Award for best brunch to D Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Manoli Katsanevas and his wife, Katrina Cutrubus, accept the 2016 Salt Award for their rest Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune The 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City, Wednesday October 12, 2016. Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune The VIP party for the 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City, Wednesday October Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Marcus Hardy hosts the 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City, Wednesday Octobe Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Jennifer Napier-Pearce at the 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City, Wednesday Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Jennifer Napier-Pearce and Marcus Hardy at the 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lak Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Tori A. Baker of the Salt Lake Film Society accepts a Salt award from Marcus Hardy at the 2 Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune Marcus Hardy hosts the 2016 Salt Awards, at The Gateway in Salt Lake City, Wednesday OctobeThe Nakajima Ki-27, the first monoplane fighter of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service (大日本帝國陸軍航空隊), proved to perform well in combat, and so the Army again turned to Nakajima for its successor. Where other nations were prioritising top speed and heavy armaments in the late 1930s, long range and manoeuvrability remained the focus of the Japanese military. The Ki-43 therefore had the smallest and lightest possible airframe so as to keep wing-loading low, forgoing self-sealing fuel tanks and armour protection.
Click here to read the full article!
The Ki-43 was known by several names. Ki-43 (written as “キ43”) was the kitai (airframe) number, a unique number assigned to each type of Army aircraft. It was designated as the Army Type 1 Fighter from its year of introduction (1941, 2601 in the Japanese calendar) and named “隼” Hayabusa (Peregrine Falcon). The Allies also assigned their own code names to Japanese aircraft, the Ki-43 being "Oscar".
For the prospective Japanese fighter pilot in War Thunder, there is a smooth transition from the starting Ki-10 biplane through the Ki-27 to the Ki-43-I and -II. Agility is their defining characteristic - in a turning dogfight the Ki-43 can get onto the tail of most monoplane opponents. If you fly with a mouse in Arcade or Realistic mode you can make a tighter turn by using keyboard controls as well the mouse - the default keys for elevators are either 'W' and 'S' or 'Left Shift' and 'Control', depending on your setup (the other keys will increase/decrease throttle). Pilots found the manoeuvrability of early Ki-43 prototypes disappointing until the addition of Fowler-type flaps; these can be deployed to combat settings in the game ('F' by default) to further improve manoeuvrability.
The Ki-43 was the principal Japanese fighter in the South East Asian Theatre facing the RAF and the "Flying Tigers" of the American Volunteer Group, but has been overshadowed by the Navy's Mitsubishi A6M Zero. The South East Asian Theatre in general is often neglected compared to the Pacific Theatre, and the broad resemblance of the Ki-43 to the more famous Zero (both low-wing radial-engine monoplanes with a bubble canopy) meant they were consistently misidentified by Allied pilots. Nevertheless the Ki-43 remained in production and service throughout the war
At first they performed extremely well against the Commonwealth ‘Buffalo’ and battle-worn ‘Hurricane’, the RAF's Far East forces having a low priority for men and equipment, but as Allied training and equipment improved, the Hayabusa faced much tougher opponents including Spitfires and Thunderbolts. The Ki-43-II received a modest engine upgrade and some armour for the pilot, entering service in 1942, but the armament remained a weakness until two Ki-43-IIIb prototypes were fitted with 20mm cannons at the very end of the war (as seen in Rank III of War Thunder, to be covered in another Profile).
The Ki-43-I is initially equipped with a pair of 7.7mm machine guns. These are adequate against biplanes, but less than ideal against sturdier aircraft, so a priority for research should be the Otsu and Hei modifications. The first gives the option of a mixed armament of one 7.7mm Type 89 and one 12.7mm Ho-103, a common configuration in the war; the second allows twin 12.7mm MGs. Once researched you can switch between gun configurations under “Offensive Armament” in the Modifications screen. The Otsu configuration is an improvement but two 12.7mm MGs are still a light armament, both historically and in the game. Hayabusa pilots exploited weak points of enemy aircraft where they could, for example aiming for the radiator of a Hurricane where a single hole could drain the coolant and shut the engine down; in War Thunder hitting an enemy pilot is the quickest way of securing a kill, though picking a specific target is seldom straightforward in a hectic dogfight.
Enemy fighters should be the primary target of a Ki-43 pilot; the armament is unsuited to bringing down medium and heavy bombers and the light construction makes the Hayabusa vulnerable to fire from defensive turrets. Even the rear gunner of two-seater heavy fighters and bombers should be treated with some caution. Do not make yourself an easy target by flying straight and level behind them. If facing faster opponents, you can be exposed to "boom and zoom" attacks from above, so keep an eye on your surroundings and, if bounced, make a tight turn just before the attacker gets into gun range (about 1km away); if they turn to stay with you then you have a good chance of getting on their tail.
The Ki-43 provides a good path into Rank II for newer players, and is enjoyable to fly for more experienced pilots looking for a different style of flying. Despite its fragility and light armament, its manoeuvrability makes it a dangerous and elusive target.
Author: John “Zoso” MooreA prosecution document unsealed on Tuesday provides the government’s most detailed public account of a shooting last year of an unarmed black man by the police in a Brooklyn stairwell.
The officer who fired the fatal shot, Peter Liang, has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and other offenses. In the court document, prosecutors say he and his partner failed to aid the man who was shot, Akai Gurley, 28.
Prosecutors have not said Officer Liang intended to shoot Mr. Gurley, who had been visiting his girlfriend in a housing project and was heading down a stairwell with her when he was struck by a ricocheting bullet. But they have said that Officer Liang acted recklessly in his handling of his weapon and that he and his partner, Officer Shaun Landau, did not assist Mr. Gurley after they realized that the shot had struck him.ES News Email 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
A defiant Spanish train driver left over 100 passengers stranded 300km from their destination after stopping apparently because his shift had ended.
The train from Spain's north coast suddenly stopped in the village of Osorno at 9.15pm, two hours away from its destination of Madrid.
After waiting for 15 minutes, confused passengers eventually discovered the driver was refusing to work overtime so had simply stopped for the day. He had reportedly requested a replacement numerous times.
One passenger told newspaper El Diario Montanes: “They said the driver had decided to stop because he had finished his day’s work and didn’t want to risk an accident by working excessive hours.”
Passengers on the train, operated by Spanish state rail network Renfe, were told that a replacement bus service was on its way. However, the bus to Madrid did not pick them up until 11.30pm.
“Would it not be easier to find another train driver,” complained a disgruntled passenger.
An image published by El Diario Montanes shows fed-up passengers waiting in their seats for news. It was captioned (in Spanish): "The driver asked for a replacement "several times" before he stopped the train."
Renfe has since apologised, refunded all the passengers’ fares and launched an investigation.
A spokesman for the Semaf rail workers’ union described the case as “exceptional”, stating that the driver had asked for another driver to travel on board in order to replace him.
“They should have had a substitute driver lined up but it didn’t happen. We’ve seen similar things in the past,” said Semaf secretary Carlos Segura.EDGEBROOK — When Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced last fall that Wildwood Elementary School would finally get an annex to relieve severe overcrowding, Holly Gutierrez was one of many parents who began to sob with joy and relief.
But on Tuesday, when Emanuel returned to the school Tuesday to break ground on the three-story, $15 million annex, Gutierrez was all smiles, hopping from one foot to the other with excitement as construction officially got underway.
"This is very emotional," said Gutierrez, who is president of the school's Parent-Teacher Association. "But it is all joy and excitement that this is really going to happen."
Heather Cherone was at the event, and she says it was a real "love fest" between Mayor Emanuel and Ald. Mary O'Connor:
Mayor Rahm Emanuel praised Wildwood parents for their "resilience and persistence," and recalled how many attended city and school meetings waving signs shaped like the letter "W" to lobby for an annex. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Heather Cherone
Wildwood Principal Mary Beth Cunat said the annex, which will include a new lunchroom/multipurpose room, 12 classrooms, a computer lab, library, art room and administrative offices, would allow the school — already ranked among the city's best — to keep "getting better and better."
Ald. Mary O'Connor (41st) said the annex would make it possible for the school's students to lead "exemplary" lives.
O'Connor thanked the parents and teachers who lobbied school and city officials for years to relieve the overcrowding that had students studying in hallways, the cafeteria and broom closets at the Edgebrook school.
O'Connor praised Emanuel for "rolling up his sleeves" and ending "decades of inaction and decades of lip service" by other city officials that forced students to study in classrooms bursting at the seams.
"This annex is a gigantic step forward," O'Connor said.
Emanuel returned O'Connor's compliment, calling her a "very strong advocate" for the Edgebrook community, and joking that there was nothing gentle about her repeated requests that he address overcrowding at Wildwood.
Both Emanuel and O'Connor are up for re-election.
Although though the main building was meant for 240 students, 424 students were enrolled at Wildwood during the 2013-14 school year. That gave the school a utilization rate of 177 percent, one of the highest in the city, according to CPS data.
Even with a four-classroom modular building, the school had an adjusted utilization rate of 128 percent, which is still considered overcrowded, according to data provided by CPS.
Forcing students to study in such cramped conditions limits their potential, Emanuel said.
"You can't do it when you are all sitting in the hallways," Emanuel said.
Schools throughout the Far Northwest Side are filled to overflowing with students because of an influx of families looking for affordable homes in a relatively safe area of the city, according to city and school data.
Emanuel began his remarks on Wildwood Park's broiling-hot basketball courts — which will be removed to make way for the annex — by thanking the parents who lobbied him and the school board for their "resilience and persistence," and recalled how many attended city and school meetings waving signs shaped like the letter 'W.'
The annex, which is expected to be ready in September 2015, will double the size of the school at 6950 N. Hiawatha Ave.
Enrollment at the school, which offers a magnet program and an International Baccalaureate curriculum, is expected to grow for the next three to four years, district officials said.
The annex, which will be built on what is now Wildwood Park's basketball court and water play area, was criticized by members of Friends of the Parks for setting a bad precedent that open space can be removed for other needs.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:Japan's Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki and the Ikaros solar sail launch into space atop an unmanned H-2A rocket on May 20 (U.S. Eastern Time) from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. It was early morning Friday, May 21 at the Japanese launch site.
A powerful new Japanese spacecraft and experimental solarsail blasted off together on Thursday (Eastern Time) to start a six-month trekto explore Venus and cosmic parts beyond.
One mission is aimed at uncovering the secretsof Venus and its cloud-covered surface, while the other could become thefirst interplanetary solar sail to successfully fly in space. The JapanAerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is backing both spaceflights.
A Japanese H-2A rocket lifted off with the VenusClimate Orbiter, named Akatsuki, as its main payload at precisely 5:58:22p.m. EDT (2158:22 GMT).?By coincidence, it was early Friday morning local Japantime at the Tanegashima Space Center at the time of launch.
The Akatsuki spacecraft's name means "Dawn inJapanese. If all goes well, it should arrive at Venusin December.
JAXA hoped to launch Akatsuki and its Ikarossolar sail companion earlier this week, but low clouds and foul weather preventeda liftoff initially scheduled for Tuesday morning (local Japan time).
Unveiling Venus
Akatsuki has set sights on a planet that scientists consideras Earth's moodier, more hellish twin.
One of the main goals is to understand the "super-rotation"of the Venus atmosphere, where violent winds drive storms and clouds aroundthat planet at speeds of more than 220 mph (360 kph), some 60 times faster thanthe planet itself rotates.
"Akatsuki is the first'meteorological satellite' of aplanet other than the Earth," said Seiichi Sakamoto, director for spacescience outreach at JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. "Detailedstudy of Earth's sister planet will provide us with breakthroughs in the fieldof atmospheric science."
Solar sail rides shotgun
Japan's new solarsail, named Ikaros (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Ofthe Sun), also hitched a ride as one of five smaller secondary payloads builtby private universities and corporations.
The solar sail craft will take the same starting trajectoryas Akatsuki, but is only scheduled to pass the orbit of Venus during its ambitiousthree-year journey to the other side of the sun.
Ikaros is designed to rely only upon the pressure ofsunlight to push it along, but it also carries thin film solar cells embeddedwithin its kite-like frame that can generate electricity. Such a design mightallow future spacecraft to draw electricity for ion-propulsion engines, even asthey also use the solar sail for backup — not unlike a sailing boat that alsouses a solar-powered engine.
The mission launch involved an unusual maneuver for the H-2Arocket, which typically separates its main payload before the smaller payloads.
"This time we separated three piggyback satellitesbefore Akatsuki," Sakamoto told SPACE.com. "This is new to H-2A."
A JAXA publicity campaign to send names and messages toVenus has received more than 260,000 names and messages from around the world, accordingto Sakamoto. Akatsuki's study of Venus is planned to last at least two yearsafter it enters the planet's orbit.
The Japanese space agency also launched a new spacefreighter late last year aboard an H-2B rocket, which represents the newer andbigger descendant of the H-2A rocket that kicked off the Venus mission.This tank was received free of charge for the purposes of this review. As always views are my own.
Can it make an impact in a crowded marketplace? Lets check it out.
Innokin have steadily been releasing a new range of products over the last few months such as the excellent Disrupter mod and the iSub tank range, the latter of which has a new addition. That new addition is of course the iSub Apex tank.
As would be expected from Innokin the packaging is tidy and well designed.
The Apex Tank Looks & Build:
First impressions of the tank are good. I’m personally a fan of clean lines and designs and the Apex definitely fits into that mould.
The tank is split into four sections that surround the 3ml capacity pyrex tank and has a good quality feel in the hand.
Starting from the top we have the top filling section, then the airflow, the main body windows and the removable base.
The tank as a unit cannot be dissembled apart from the base which conceals the coil and |
; the Codex Theodosianus promulgated under Theodosius II extended these restrictions. The legal status of adscripti, "bound to the soil",[9] contrasted with barbarian foederati, who were permitted to settle within the imperial boundaries, remaining subject to their own traditional law.
As the Germanic kingdoms succeeded Roman authority in the West in the fifth century, Roman landlords were often simply replaced by Germanic ones, with little change to the underlying situation or displacement of populations.
The process of rural self-sufficiency was given an abrupt boost in the eighth century, when normal trade in the Mediterranean Sea was disrupted. The thesis put forward by Henri Pirenne supposes that the Arab conquests forced the medieval economy into even greater ruralization and gave rise to the classic feudal pattern of varying degrees of servile peasantry underpinning a hierarchy of localised power centers.[citation needed]
Description [ edit ]
The word derives from traditional inherited divisions of the countryside, reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or seigneuries; each manor being subject to a lord (French seigneur), usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord (see Feudalism). The lord held a manorial court, governed by public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were secular; bishops and abbots also held lands that entailed similar obligations.
By extension, the word manor is sometimes used in England to mean any home area or territory in which authority is held, often in a police or criminal context.[10][11]
In the generic plan of a medieval manor[12] from Shepherd's Historical Atlas,[13] the strips of individually worked land in the open field system are immediately apparent. In this plan, the manor house is set slightly apart from the village, but equally often the village grew up around the forecourt of the manor, formerly walled, while the manor lands stretched away outside, as still may be seen at Petworth House. As concerns for privacy[dubious – discuss] increased in the 18th century,[citation needed] manor houses were often located a farther distance from the village. For example, when a grand new house was required by the new owner of Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire, in the 1830s, the site of the existing manor house at the edge of its village was abandoned for a new one, isolated in its park, with the village out of view.[citation needed]
In an agrarian society, the conditions of land tenure underlie all social or economic factors. There were two legal systems of pre-manorial landholding. One, the most common, was the system of holding land "allodially" in full outright ownership. The other was a use of precaria or benefices, in which land was held conditionally (the root of the English word "precarious").
To these two systems, the Carolingian monarchs added a third, the aprisio, which linked manorialism with feudalism. The aprisio made its first appearance in Charlemagne's province of Septimania in the south of France, when Charlemagne had to settle the Visigothic refugees who had fled with his retreating forces after the failure of his Zaragoza expedition of 778. He solved this problem by allotting "desert" tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the royal fisc under direct control of the emperor. These holdings aprisio entailed specific conditions. The earliest specific aprisio grant that has been identified was at Fontjoncouse, near Narbonne (see Lewis, links). In former Roman settlements, a system of villas, dating from Late Antiquity, was inherited by the medieval world.
Common features [ edit ]
The mustard-colored areas are part of the demesne, the glebe.
William R. Shepherd, Historical Atlas, 1923 Generic map of a medieval manor.The mustard-colored areas are part of the, the hatched areas part of theWilliam R. Shepherd,, 1923
Manors each consisted of up to three classes of land:
Demesne, the part directly controlled by the lord and used for the benefit of his household and dependents; Dependent (serf or villein) holdings carrying the obligation that the peasant household supply the lord with specified labour services or a part of its output (or cash in lieu thereof), subject to the custom attached to the holding; and Free peasant land, without such obligation but otherwise subject to manorial jurisdiction and custom, and owing money rent fixed at the time of the lease.
Additional sources of income for the lord included charges for use of his mill, bakery or wine-press, or for the right to hunt or to let pigs feed in his woodland, as well as court revenues and single payments on each change of tenant. On the other side of the account, manorial administration involved significant expenses, perhaps a reason why smaller manors tended to rely less on villein tenure.[original research?]
Dependent holdings were held nominally by arrangement of lord and tenant, but tenure became in practice almost universally hereditary, with a payment made to the lord on each succession of another member of the family. Villein land could not be abandoned, at least until demographic and economic circumstances made flight a viable proposition; nor could they be passed to a third party without the lord's permission, and the customary payment.
Although not free, villeins were by no means in the same position as slaves: they enjoyed legal rights, subject to local custom, and had recourse to the law subject to court charges, which were an additional source of manorial income. Sub-letting of villein holdings was common, and labour on the demesne might be commuted into an additional money payment, as happened increasingly from the 13th century.
This description of a manor house at Chingford, Essex in England was recorded in a document for the Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral when it was granted to Robert Le Moyne in 1265:
He received also a sufficient and handsome hall well ceiled with oak. On the western side is a worthy bed, on the ground, a stone chimney, a wardrobe and a certain other small chamber; at the eastern end is a pantry and a buttery. Between the hall and the chapel is a sideroom. There is a decent chapel covered with tiles, a portable altar, and a small cross. In the hall are four tables on trestles. There are likewise a good kitchen covered with tiles, with a furnace and ovens, one large, the other small, for cakes, two tables, and alongside the kitchen a small house for baking. Also a new granary covered with oak shingles, and a building in which the dairy is contained, though it is divided. Likewise a chamber suited for clergymen and a necessary chamber. Also a hen-house. These are within the inner gate. Likewise outside of that gate are an old house for the servants, a good table, long and divided, and to the east of the principal building, beyond the smaller stable, a solar for the use of the servants. Also a building in which is contained a bed, also two barns, one for wheat and one for oats. These buildings are enclosed with a moat, a wall, and a hedge. Also beyond the middle gate is a good barn, and a stable of cows, and another for oxen, these old and ruinous. Also beyond the outer gate is a pigstye.[14]
Variation among manors [ edit ]
Like feudalism which, together with manorialism, formed the legal and organizational framework of feudal society, manorial structures were not uniform or coordinated. In the later Middle Ages, areas of incomplete or non-existent manorialization persisted while the manorial economy underwent substantial development with changing economic conditions.
Not all manors contained all three classes of land. Typically, demesne accounted for roughly a third of the arable area, and villein holdings rather more; but some manors consisted solely of demesne, others solely of peasant holdings. The proportion of unfree and free tenures could likewise vary greatly, with more or less reliance on wage labour for agricultural work on the demesne.
The proportion of the cultivated area in demesne tended to be greater in smaller manors, while the share of villein land was greater in large manors, providing the lord of the latter with a larger supply of obligatory labour for demesne work. The proportion of free tenements was generally less variable, but tended to be somewhat greater on the smaller manors.
Manors varied similarly in their geographical arrangement: most did not coincide with a single village, but rather consisted of parts of two or more villages, most of the latter containing also parts of at least one other manor. This situation sometimes led to replacement by cash payments or their equivalents in kind of the demesne labour obligations of those peasants living furthest from the lord's estate.
As with peasant plots, the demesne was not a single territorial unit, but consisted rather of a central house with neighbouring land and estate buildings, plus strips dispersed through the manor alongside free and villein ones: in addition, the lord might lease free tenements belonging to neighbouring manors, as well as holding other manors some distance away to provide a greater range of produce.
Nor were manors held necessarily by lay lords rendering military service (or again, cash in lieu) to their superior: a substantial share (estimated by value at 17% in England in 1086) belonged directly to the king, and a greater proportion (rather more than a quarter) were held by bishoprics and monasteries. Ecclesiastical manors tended to be larger, with a significantly greater villein area than neighbouring lay manors.[citation needed]
The effect of circumstances on manorial economy is complex and at times contradictory: upland conditions tended to preserve peasant freedoms (livestock husbandry in particular being less labour-intensive and therefore less demanding of villein services); on the other hand, some upland areas of Europe showed some of the most oppressive manorial conditions, while lowland eastern England is credited with an exceptionally large free peasantry, in part a legacy of Scandinavian settlement.
Similarly, the spread of money economy stimulated the replacement of labour services by money payments, but the growth of the money supply and resulting inflation after 1170 initially led nobles to take back leased estates and to re-impose labour dues as the value of fixed cash payments declined in real terms.[citation needed]
See also [ edit ]
Specific:
General:
References [ edit ]Ross McLaughlin & Carly Yoshida, CTV Vancouver
A hidden camera investigation has revealed that an auto dealer who had his licence revoked and was ordered to stop selling cars was still trying to sell on Craigslist.
Arthur Tong, 69, was stripped of his dealer’s licence in May for admitting to rolling back odometers on 39 vehicles and then selling them on the classifieds site Craigslist.
Two months after the hearing, he tried to sell a vehicle in Richmond to an undercover crew from CTV News.
Tong posted an ad on Craigslist for a used Honda CRV. He told the CTV crew he’d owned the car for the last four years and was selling the vehicle because he bought a minivan. However, after searching the Honda’s VIN number, a Carfax Report showed the vehicle had two new registered owners in the last year.
“We confirmed that he only obtained the vehicle on May 2nd of this year,” said Doug Longhurst with the B.C. Vehicle Sales Authority.
When confronted by CTV News about advertising the vehicle online and trying to sell it after his licence was stripped, Tong said it was challenging for him to stop selling.
“You cannot change my hobby or habit overnight. It takes time for me to digest,” he said.
But Tong says he learned his lesson and that rolling back the odometers on vehicles did not pay off. Tong admitted to rolling back odometers and eventually bought back four vehicles and compensated 26 other customers out of pocket.
“I did apologize to each one of the clients, the customers who bought the car from me,” he said.
He also says he is now permanently out of the business of selling cars and plans to take the Honda CRV back to a public auction.
“Unfortunately they don’t want me to be in the car business anymore,” he said. “I am done with this.”
The province has limited authority to go after Tong and can only issue a $288 fine for curbing, which is the practice of selling cars to make a profit. Curbers are unlicensed people or businesses who sometimes pose as private sellers. If you sell five or more vehicles in a year, you are considered to be in the car selling business and should be licensed. However, changes are expected next year to allow the B.C. Vehicle Sales Authority to levy harsher penalties against curbers.
Tomorrow on CTV News at 6: How to spot a curber, and how to protect yourself if you’re buying a used car online.Angela Merkel on Thursday warned that Europe risks a “return to nationalism” if it does not secure its external borders, as polls showed support for the far-Right is rising in Germany amid growing fears of Islam.
“The future of Europe is at stake,” the German chancellor said in a passionate plea to preserve freedom of movement and the Schengen Agreement on border-free travel within the continent.
Even as she spoke, a new poll released on Thursday showed support for the far-Right Alternative for Germany(AfD) party is at its highest ever.
“Europe stretches from the North Pole to the Mediterranean. We must defend the Schengen Treaty and the external borders, or we risk a return to nationalism,” Mrs Merkel said.
She was speaking at a joint press conference in Rome with Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister.
Both leaders spoke out against plans by Austria to close its border with Italy at the Brenner Pass, to prevent migrants entering.
The AfD is riding high in the German polls on a wave of public discontent over the migrant crisis, and recorded its highest ever support less than a week after it adopted an anti-Muslim manifesto.
It is now in third place on 15 per cent, just five points behind Mrs Merkel’s main coalition partner, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), who have slipped to 20 per cent.
Mrs Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats (CDU) remain in first place in the monthly ARD survey, with 33 per cent.
But, perhaps more worryingly for the German chancellor, a second poll found the AfD may be in step with voters with its overtly anti-Muslim stance.
Only 22 per cent of Germans believe Islam belongs in their country, according to the poll for Bild newspaper by the Insa institute.A list of attendees at a climate-change seminar the BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds trying to keep secret has been unearthed on an internet archive. The listed names emerged after the publicly-funded broadcaster fought off requests for the list under freedom of information (FOI) laws.
This surreal story is only tangentially about climate change: the disclosure raises questions about the evidence submitted to the information tribunal by the BBC and Helen Boaden - its director of news who "stepped aside" this week.
The case also highlights once again the BBC's corporate strategy of using an FOI derogation, or legal "opt-out" clause, to withhold a wide range of material from citizens who wish to know whether the BBC is fulfilling its statutory obligations under its royal charter.
And it raises further questions about the effectiveness of the BBC Trust. The trust, which replaced the Board of Governors, was created with a mission: an "unprecedented obligation to openness and transparency". It has yet to enquire into the corporation's use of FOI derogation to withhold data such as the BBC's US tax contributions, website statistics, and strategic policy-making decisions.
A 'brainstorm' that became historic
The seminar whose attendees the Beeb sought to keep secret was birthed by three organisation. In 2004, the International Broadcasting Trust - a lobby group funded by a number of charities, including many involved in campaigning on climate change - devised the first in a series of seminars on development issues, where the lobbyists could address broadcasters.
One event on 26 January 2006 was a "brainstorm", in the IBT's own words, "focusing on climate change and its impact on development". The BBC sent 28 senior staff, and 28 outsiders were invited. The event was also organised by CMEP, its second parent - a now dormant or defunct outfit operated by BBC reporter Roger Harrabin and climate activist Dr Joe Smith, and once funded by the Tyndall Centre at the University of East Anglia (UEA) and pressure groups.
Harrabin later explained that the BBC's head of news in the 1990s, Tony Hall, had invited him "to devise meetings with politicians, business people, think tanks, academics from many universities and specialisms (science, technology, economic and social sciences, and history), and policy experts and field workers from NGOs – particularly from the developing world".
The third parent of the seminar was the BBC.
Normally such a talking-shop would have no great significance. The 2006 seminar, however, subsequently became very important indeed. The following year a thoughtful BBC Trust report on impartiality cited the discussion there and said it had settled the argument - as far as the BBC was concerned - on climate change.
Filmmaker John Bridcut wrote:
The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts [our emphasis] and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].
The BBC is under a statutory obligation to remain impartial, so this gave the "brainstorm" a historic significance: the BBC has not previously abandoned impartiality in peacetime.
A blogger, Tony Newbery, was struck by the difference between contemporary evidence that the seminar was educational and composed largely of activists - as confirmed by Harrabin - and the trust's insistence that it was a sober scientific presentation that could justify a historic policy change. (The BBC Trust has done nothing to disown or qualify Bridcut's description of the event.)
Fresh light was shed on Harrabin's CMEP in 2010, in the second batch of Climategate emails. An email from Mike Hulme, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climatic Change Research at UEA, complained about a BBC Radio 4 item broadcast in February 2002. The piece featured global-warming sceptic Professor Philip Stott and Sir John Houghton, who was a Met Office chief and the editor of the first three IPCC reports on climate change. Houghton came off worst, and an infuriated Hulme wrote:
Did anyone hear Stott vs Houghton on Today, Radio 4 this morning? Woeful stuff really. This is one reason why Tyndall is sponsoring the Cambridge Media/Environment Programme to starve this type of reporting at source.
Newbery filed his FOI request for the seminar's attendees to the BBC in 2007 and was rebuffed, setting him on a long path that culminated in a second round of information tribunal hearings a fortnight ago. The cross-examination of the BBC's Helen Boaden in a court room was reported here.
The BBC is regarded as a public authority by the Freedom of Information Act 2000, but it can withhold information held "for the purposes of journalism". But how wide should this derogation be?
In an earlier and separate FOI case against the BBC, Supreme Court Judge Neuberger argued the opt-out should be interpreted narrowly - otherwise the BBC could withhold information about "cleaning the board room floor" using the journalism get-out clause - an absurdity.
In the Newbery case, the BBC maintained that archival material on the seminar could not be found, but also it should not be found: as a back-up argument it argued that the seminar was held under the Chatham House Rule - an agreement of etiquette, rather than a law, to prevent quotes being attributed to particular speakers at a meeting - information that Newbery did not seek.
On Friday the tribunal ruled decisively against Newbery, and for the the BBC.
Case closed? Think again
However science writer Maurizio Morabito has unearthed a list - once hosted on the IBT's website and now stored in the Wayback Machine's cache of the internet.
It confirms the accuracy of Harrabin's description of the composition of the invitees, with most coming from industry, think tanks and NGOs. And as suspected, climate campaigners Greenpeace are present, while actual scientific experts are thin on the ground: not one attendee deals with attribution science, the physics of global warming. These are scarcely "some of the best scientific experts", whose input could justify a historic abandonment of the BBC's famous impartiality.
Intriguingly, Tony Newbery had been supplied with a later version of this document, he tells us - but with the attendee list stripped out.
Newbery says he has written to the BBC's solicitor to confirm whether the Wayback Machine IBT list is accurate.
The dramatic appearance of the list raises many questions. Did the BBC know the information was publicly available? If so, why were corporation lawyers spending thousands of pounds to keep a public document "secret"? (FOI requests for public information typically state, quite simply, "this information is public".) How much is this legal strategy costing TV licence-fee payers? (An FOI attempt to obtain legal costs in the similar case Sugar vs BBC was rejected by the BBC.)
Questions abound this morning on Twitter about the ability of the BBC Trust to maintain its duty to transparency. The BBC's legal strategy entails the indiscriminate application of its FOI derogation "for the purposes of journalism" - this effectively rewrites the 2000 Act, and redefines the BBC as a private body. The trust is surely aware of this; it has a small mountain of correspondence on the subject. But it has yet to enquire, let alone pronounce on whether this is healthy - or legal.
The trust could do worse than start here - where the BBC refused to disclose how much US tax it paid, because - you've guessed it - the information is required "for the purposes of journalism".
Click to the next page for the list of attendees, according to the discovered IBT document. ®Right-handed Washington prospect Lucas Giolito recorded his spring debut this afternoon in Florida, producing a 3:0 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 2.0 innings while conceding no runs and just a single hit against the Miami ball club (box).
If certain, possibly British sources are to be trusted, the three strikeouts were facilitated, at least in some part, by means of Giolito’s breaking ball — a breaking ball described recently by former Mets GM Steve Phillips as “bowel-locking.”
Because Evil is both real and constantly among us, video footage of those particular curveballs isn’t available for public consumption. What is available, however, is the educational film above, excerpted from the right-hander’s August 14th start against Double-A Baltimore affiliate Bowie. Within that footage, one finds a specimen of Giolito’s curveball, both in real time and also provocative slow-motion.
The reader is advised to locate his or her keys before consuming said video, however, so that it might be easier to unlock his or her bowels after examining it.
Brian Reinhart is a stranger, even to himself. He’s also responsible for bringing this series of events to the author’s attention.Allegations claiming Donald Trump once raped a 13-year-old girl resurfaced on Wednesday following news that the alleged victim, who is now in her mid-30s, was prepared to speak publicly for the first time.
The alleged victim—“Jane Doe,” known by the pseudonym “Katie Johnson” in an earlier lawsuit—failed to appear, however, at a scheduled press conference at the Los Angeles office of a prominent attorney, Lisa Bloom, who also represents three women who have accused Trump, the Republican nominee, of inappropriate sexual contact. Speaking briefly to reporters gathered in her office Wednesday afternoon, Bloom said Doe’s decision to cancel the press conference was prompted by threats.
“Jane Doe has received numerous threats today, as have all the Trump accusers that I have represented,” said Bloom. “She is living in fear. She has decided that she’s too afraid to show her face. She’s been here all day, ready to do it, but unfortunately, she’s in terrible fear. So we’re going to have to reschedule.”
It is unclear when or if Doe will come forward, but with the presidential election less than a week away, a slew of news outlets, many of which have approached the accusations in the past with cautious skepticism, now appear eager to spotlight the case. It’s impossible to predict what impact the story could have on the election given that more than a dozen women have already accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Recent polls show those stories don’t appear to have troubled Trump’s ardent supporters, and even critics of his behavior within the Republican party say they won’t be voting for Democrat Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, with whom Trump has frequently quarrelled, confirmed this week that he voted for his party’s nominee.
Trump has adamantly denied ever sexual assaulting or inappropriately touching anyone and claims a 2005 recording in which he describes sexually assaulting women was nothing but “locker room banter.”
For better or worse, Doe’s anonymity is the primary reason her story hasn’t gained much traction: Being forced to retract an anonymously sourced story, in the event the allegations of a serious crime are disproven, can swiftly end the career of a reporter if not permanently tarnish the reputation of his or her publisher. As Ryan Grim, a reporter for the Huffington Post, wrote in dissecting the media’s reservations:
“To go forward with an anonymous source shifts responsibility for the veracity of the claims from the accuser to the reporter. If the person is named and on record, the reporter can argue that he or she is merely reporting what the person is saying, and people are free to believe her or not. But giving anonymity says something different to an audience. It suggests, I, as a journalist, have investigated this person and these charges, and find them sufficiently credible to bring them forward without a name attached.”
So far, no reporter has been willing to make that leap of faith, to sign their own name where Doe’s would be, had she a face and name. This has drawn the ire of many readers on social media who have accused the media of simply ignoring the case. Compounding the problem, reporters who have started to investigate the veracity of Doe’s claims encountered a cast of characters who appear financially and politically motivated to get the story out. (A person who appears to represent Doe to reporters, and who previously tried to sell her story to Gawker Media, was recorded telling a Jezebel reporter, “Suck my dick, bitch.”)
Meanwhile, Doe hasn’t trusted any reporters with her identity. The only journalist to ostensibly speak with Doe was apparently left unsatisfied by the encounter: “I don’t know if the Katie Johnson I spoke to is the same girl who Trump allegedly raped in 1994, or if that girl even exists,” wrote Emily Shugerman, a writer at Revelist, whose interview was arranged by Doe’s attorney.
Despite the lack of context surrounding the allegation, it is nevertheless newsworthy given its proximity to the presidential election. With that in mind, below is an abridged version of Doe’s account, as well as information gathered by reporters concerning her associates.
Doe’s allegation is not new
Doe previously represented herself in a case alleging rape by Trump in California, but the case was tossed out by a judge on procedural grounds. The new case, filed in Manhattan, is essentially a repeat, only this time Doe is represented by a New Jersey patent lawyer named Thomas Meager and is no longer referring to herself as “Katie Johnson.”
Doe alleges that in the summer of 1994 she was raped repeatedly at parties thrown by Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier who was convicted in 2008 of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. Trump and Epstein were known friends at the time, though as reporters have pointed out, this is not evidence Trump was aware of Epstein’s illicit activities. Epstein had numerous famous friends who frequented his mansion, including Katie Couric, Charlie Rose, and others. Former President Bill Clinton also once flew on Epstein’s plane with actor Kevin Spacey; presumably neither were aware Epstein was having sex with minors at the time.
“She is living in fear. She has decided that she’s too afraid to show her face.”
In Doe’s account, she was “enticed by the promises of money and a modeling career to attend a series of parties” at Epstein’s home. She claims Trump attended at least four of these parties. According to an interview Trump gave to New York Magazine, he had known Epstein for seven years at that time. (Trump mentioned once that Epstein loved beautiful women, as he did, but preferred them “on the younger side.”) Doe alleges that Trump knew she was 13 and at each of the parties engaged with her sexually. The claimed rape, described in vivid detail, allegedly occurred on the fourth encounter. Doe alleges Trump tied her to a bed, raped her—at the time she was still a virgin, she says—struck her with his open hand and told her he would do “whatever he wanted.”
According to Doe’s court complaint: “Immediately following this rape, [Trump] threatened [Doe] that, were she ever to reveal any of the details of the sexual and physical abuse of her by [Trump], [Doe] and her family would be physically harmed if not killed.” Epstein also allegedly threatened Doe and her family.
Doe has stated that she has suffered, as a direct result of the rape, “stress, emotional distress, and mental pain and suffering, as well as adverse physical consequences.” Further, she has been subjected to “public scorn, hatred, and ridicule and has suffered threats against her life and physical safety,” the complaint says.
Doe has witnesses
An individual identified in Doe’s complaint as “Tiffany Doe” is reportedly a former employee of Epstein’s willing to corroborate the story in court. According to a signed affidavit to Jane Doe’s lawsuit, Tiffany Doe says she met Epstein in 1990 when she was 22. “In the year 1991, I was promoted to the occupation of party planner in which my duties were to get attractive adolescent women to attend these parties,” Tiffany Doe states. She goes on to explain how she met Jane Doe at the Port Authority in New York City and persuaded her to attend one of Epstein’s parties. “I told her that, if she would join me at the parties, she would be introduced to people who could get her into the modeling profession and she would be paid for attending.”
Tiffany Doe claims at one of these parties she witnessed Jane Doe being forced to perform “various sexual acts” with Trump and Epstein. “Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were advised that she was 13 years old,” she states. She also alleges witnessing Trump force a 12-year-old girl identified as “Maria” to perform oral sex. Like Jane Doe, Tiffany Doe claims that Epstein threatened her life if she ever disclosed any information about the physical or sexual abuse she allegedly witnessed.
A second witness, identified as “Joan Doe,” has also reportedly agreed to testify that she was a childhood classmate of Jane Doe’s and that she was informed about the rape during the 1994-95 school year.
Some of Doe’s backers have political ties
An article by Jezebel reporter Anna Merlan details a months-long attempt to scrounge up enough information to do the story justice, or at the very least make it newsworthy. Unable to do so, Merlan wrote instead about her attempts to reach Jane Doe—then known as Katie Johnson—and the roadblocks encountered during her investigation.
“The story quickly became about the people guarding access to this person, and whether or not she existed,” Merlan told the Daily Dot. “I wasn’t sure if people would be interested in how this sausage was made, but it really seemed worth noting that the alleged victim herself was being shielded from view pretty hard.”
According to Merlan, she received an unsolicited email from a group called “Vote Trump Get Dumped,” which offered to connect her with Steve Baer, a politically active conservative, allegedly in touch with Doe. Baer, it turned out, was also the father of Chandler Smith, the founder of the anti-Trump group. The group appeared eager to revive the rape allegations, Merlan wrote, even if they proved false. (Baer reportedly insisted the story was worth writing even if it were an “incredibly elaborate hoax.”)
Baer told Merlan by phone that he had learned about the allegations from a man named “Al Taylor,” whom Merlan says previously tried to sell information related to Doe’s lawsuit to Gawker Media.
“The story quickly became about the people guarding access to this person, and whether or not she existed.”
Merlan later received a video from an anonymous tipster purporting to depict Doe telling her story. The interview subject, pixelated from the neck up and apparently dressed in a wig, described being raped by Trump at Epstein’s mansion. “I was 13,” she said. The subject went on to described Trump behaving one evening like “a different person,” tearing her clothes from her body while she was tied to a bed. He called her a “bitch,” and robbed her of her virginity as she cried and begged him to stop, she said.
Both Taylor and Baer seemed unable, or unwilling, to connect Merlan with the person known as Katie Johnson. However, Baer continued to push Merlan to write about the allegations while, it seems, attempting to play on a reporter’s fear of getting scooped. Merlan obliged a couple of weeks later, but turned her focus on the “cadre of men” pushing the rape story, approaching the tale with heavy skepticism. During this time, Doe was a phantom, represented only by legal documents and an unattributed video apparently shot in a hotel room.
Taylor is allegedly lying about his identity
The media’s skepticism was furthered by a report in the Guardian in early July, which claimed Al Taylor was, in fact, Norm Lubow, a former producer on the Jerry Springer TV show. The Guardian reported that Lubow “has previously been involved with disputed allegations that OJ Simpson bought illegal drugs on the day Simpson’s wife was murdered, and that Kurt Cobain’s widow had the Nirvana frontman killed.”
Taylor has adamantly denied being Lubow; according to the Guardian, however, Taylor communicated using a phone number tied to Lublow. A “longtime associate” of Lubow also confirmed he had used the name “Al Taylor” in the past.
Four days after publishing her story, Merlan received a text message purportedly from “Katie,” which was sent from a phone number listed in court filings from Doe’s first now-dismissed case. But when she called the number, Taylor answered instead, and Merlan began recording the conversation. Upset about her story, Taylor lashed out at Merlan, at one point yelling: “I think you’re a piece of shit and you can suck my dick, bitch.” Daily Beast reporter Brandy Zadrozny, who had also covered the case, also reported receiving harassing phone calls from Taylor—“about a dozen each night since the article ran,” she told Merlan—who called from the same number.
Doe explained her relationship with Taylor, whom she reportedly met a Christmas party, to the Revelist’s Shugerman this way: “He knows a lot about a lot of different fields that just have been really helpful to this entire thing, and I couldn’t have done it without him. I wouldn’t have done it without him.”
Doe’s new lawsuit differs slightly
Doe’s first lawsuit was reportedly filed without any legal guidance, so naturally it would be formatted much differently than the one filed in Manhattan. The New York Daily News first reported on these differences:
“Gone from the new lawsuit is an allegation that Trump threw money at the plaintiff for an abortion when she expressed fear about getting pregnant after being raped. Gone, too, is the allegation that Trump called co-defendant and accused pedophile and sex party host Jeffrey Epstein a ‘Jew bastard,’ and her request for $100 million in damages.”
An assistant to Lisa Bloom, Doe’s new attorney, listed on Wednesday’s press release did not return multiple requests for comment.
Trump is scheduled to appear before a federal judge for a status update on Dec. 16, more than a month after Election Day.
Update 7:57pm CT, Nov. 4: On Friday, Jane Doe formally dismissed her lawsuit against Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. Her lawyer, Lisa Bloom, issued a tweet about Doe’s decision that evening.Previous encounters with Roberts have seen us discussing the game's zoning & instancing plans in great depth; since then, the Roberts has brought-up the system numerous times, expressing similar excitement each time. It is clear to us that the zoning and instancing architecture have required a clever approach to problem solving, evidenced to us by a previous pre-interview conversation with the CIG CEO. In a pre-shoot talk, Roberts told us that he “loves engineering problems,” and had considered the instancing system to be one of the larger engineering challenges facing Star Citizen. The topic of instancing was again revisited in this sit-down, though at a lower, more technical level.
Our most recent interview with Cloud Imperium Games' Chris Roberts became a two-parter, following an initial discussion on DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs. Part two dives deeper into the render pipeline, network and render optimization, zoning, data organization, and other low-level topics relating to Star Citizen. A lot of that content strays from direct Star Citizen discussion, but covers the underlying framework and “behind-the-scenes” development operations.
Canonical View of the Render Pipeline & Graphics Optimization
This part of the interview was almost entirely for my own knowledge. We review a lot of hardware – especially graphics hardware – and understanding the underlying software empower our ability to competently test components. Seeing an opportunity to learn (and, ultimately, produce more content), I asked for a canonical view of the render pipeline as it pertains to Star Citizen and CryEngine.
“Because it is threaded, essentially stuff gets pushed onto the render thread. So what happens [in] the cumulation of the main thread, render gets called, and render basically – on the main side – starts pushing the objects. In CryEngine they're, called'render objects.' They get pushed off to the render queue. It gets pushed on with the information about the object, including its location in 3D space, because it's got to be threaded so you can't [depend] on the stuff that's sitting in the main thread. So [the engine] pumps all this stuff onto the render thread, then the main loop goes about doing its stuff again, while the render thread carries on doing its stuff.
“The rendering and the main loop are happening concurrently all the time. Just toward the end of the main loop, the work the main loop has done gets pushed to the render thread and the render thread goes about the work |
days of delayed viewing, Ryan Murphy’s new horror-comedy has already drawn an audience of 1 million on streaming platforms FOX NOW and Hulu – the largest three-day non-linear lift ever for a FOX premiere.
According to Nielsen’s standard Live + 3 ratings, SCREAM QUEENS rose +59% from its same day viewership on TV, marking the highest percentage lift of any new broadcast show to date this season. It is also the No. 1 new series among Adults 18-34 and Teens so far in the Nielsen Live +3s. Including all viewing of the episode within the first three days, SCREAM QUEENS has already increased its average audience to 7.3 million, up +80% from its same-day viewership. In addition, the premiere’s encore on Thursday added another 2 million viewers within the three day window.
The show’s social conversation also remained dominant even after the premiere aired – its total social activity over the first three days grew from 1 million to 2.3 million. In fact, on Twitter, tweets about SCREAM QUEENS were seen 32 million times across the three-day window.
“SCREAM QUEENS is a model for contemporary viewership. Today’s numbers clearly demonstrate that not only is the show being watched heavily across multiple platforms, but those viewers watch it with urgency and want to be part of the global conversation before the next episode airs,” said Dana Walden and Gary Newman, Chairmen and CEOs, Fox Television Group.
“It also represents exactly what we strive for as a company: Bold, distinctive, original programming that is launched on the network, travels through owned platforms like FOX NOW and Hulu – as well as our MVPD partner VOD platforms – and then can migrate to our library,” continued Newman and Walden.
SCREAM QUEENS resonated significantly with the hard-to-reach millennial and younger adult audience. The median age for SCREAM QUEENS’ premiere episode on linear television was 36 – far lower than the average age for broadcast series (52). Hulu and FOX NOW viewers already make up 14% of SCREAM QUEENS’ total multi-platform audience to-date, the highest concentration of non-linear viewership ever for a FOX debut over its first three days. This percentage will get even larger as growth as additional non-linear viewing occurs outside the Nielsen window for time-shifting measurement (Live + 7 Day).
SCREAM QUEENS airs Tuesdays (9:00-10:00PM ET/PT) on FOX and full episodes are available next-day on FOX NOW and Hulu.ES 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
We are collecting more plaudits than points at the moment - and that concerns me.
Of course, it is good to hear pundits like Phil Neville praise the team for their performance at Manchester United but the top line, bottom line and everything in between is that we lost.
Points on the board is what every manager looks for and we haven’t picked up as many as we should have. We have seven from six games but with more clinical finishing and better defending at the other end, we could and should have almost doubled our tally.
To be honest, I don’t do praise or criticism, really. I just try and do the job for which I’m paid.
As a young player, I would scan the Sunday papers, looking to see how many marks out of 10 I’d been given but as time moves on you become less bothered by those things and more concerned with what the manager thinks about your performances.
You come to realise that both praise and criticism come with a health warning. Too much of one and you can lose your confidence; a surfeit of the other can go to your head.
The same thing happened when I was a fledging manager. Criticism became hard to take and praise, when and if it came, sometimes became a distraction. You soon found out to your cost that, if you eased off, your players soon followed suit.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s always good to hear nice things said about you or your team but the reality is that, if you have 10 good things said about you and one bad thing, you’ll remember the bad thing. That’s human nature for you. My focus now is how to convert those good performances into more positive results? I want my players to think about what they could do better, to remember that football is a team game, out of possession as well as in it.
Yes, we’ve impressed a lot of people but we’ve not managed to carve out one clean sheet in six games and that has to stop without compromising our attacking ability.
I’ve heard and seen that Teddy Sheringham, our forwards coach, has been given much of the credit for our offensive improvement. That’s natural and we have plenty of time for Teddy to make the players even better. It’s good to have him here and leave him with that responsibility but it’s not right to single out any individual - everyone here takes an equal share of the credit and the criticism and that’s how it should be. Teddy is enjoying it at the club, though, and we’re enjoying having him. He brings us something else - it’s a nice fit.
People have also assumed that we went looking for a different type of player in the summer. That’s not quite accurate. What were searching for was better players and sometimes things evolve quickly and not as you have anticipated.
Alex Song, for example, was not on our radar when we began our recruitment programme but then, lo and behold, in early August, we heard that he wanted to return to the Premier League and would consider coming to West Ham.
What we did then as a club, from top to bottom, was make Alex feel that this was the place to come.
Enner Valencia is another case in point. He wasn’t at the top of our list because we didn’t think we had any chance of getting him. Diafra Sakho was a similar case because Metz had just won promotion and we didn’t believe they would sell.
In the end, though, once all the business is done, you don’t know how things will gel. The biggest plus for me and a real pleasant surprise, is how quickly they have settled in - all nine of them.
Before the season I was veering towards tightening things up defensively because players such as Sakho, Valencia, Cheikh Kouyate and Mauro Zarate would, I thought, find it a struggle early on. But they have hit the ground running in a better way than many other clubs’ new signings.Hiroyuki Ito covered a lot of ground this summer: Moji, Dazaifu, Hakata, Yanagawa and Kumamoto on Japan’s Kyushu Island; Kochi-city and Cape Ashizuri in Kochi; Atami in Shizuoka and Omiya, Saitama. 54 cities in 18 prefectures, to be exact.
He was looking to capture the way people live outside of Tokyo — the faces, architecture, even, sometimes, what he sees in a trash can.
“I like to document the small things people do on a daily basis that are not significant enough to be listed in the history books,” he said. “I would like to think that that’s part of history, too, but not in an obvious or romantic way.”
With that in mind, the Mr. Ito got in a car with three of his best friends from elementary school and drove 90 minutes from Tokyo to Atami, a kitschy seaside city that is a popular destination for family vacations. “I think that’s part of Japanese culture, too,” he said of the country’s goofier tourist attractions.WASHINGTON — A federal judge has forcefully put Yemeni citizen Mohammed Mohammed Hassan Odaini on the path to freedom after eight years of incarceration at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In a 36-page opinion formally released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. called Odaini's continued detention "unlawful" and said he'd "emphatically" grant Odaini's petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
The ruling issued secretly last month but published Thursday sets the 26-year-old Odaini up for potential release, though when and where he'll go remains unclear. The ruling also represents the latest defeat for U.S. officials in their efforts to keep Guantanamo detainees behind bars.
"(U.S.) officials kept a young man from Yemen in detention in Cuba from age eighteen to age twenty-six," Kennedy wrote. "They have prevented him from seeing his family and denied him the opportunity to complete his studies and embark on a career."
Pointedly, Kennedy added that "the evidence before the court shows that holding Odaini in custody at such great cost to him has done nothing to make the United States more secure."
Kennedy's ruling brings to 36 the number of Guantanamo Bay detainees who have successfully challenged their detentions through U.S. court proceedings. Over the Bush administration's objections, a divided Supreme Court two years granted the Guantanamo detainees the right to file habeas corpus challenges.
In a decision striking both for its extensive redactions and its occasionally passionate language, Kennedy noted that Odaini's story has remained consistent throughout his long incarceration.
Odaini was born in Taiz, Yemen, on Sept. 20, 1983. After high school, he traveled to Pakistan in 2001 to study Islam. In November 2001, he enrolled in Salafia University, where he was one of approximately 200 students.
On March 27, 2002, Odaini had the misfortune to visit a house raided that night by Pakistani police. After his initial detention, Odaini was held in Lahore and then taken to Islamabad. He was transported to Afghanistan, and ultimately to Guantanamo.
Odaini has always denied being affiliated with al Qaeda, insisting that the first time he heard of the terrorist organization was when he arrived at Guantanamo. Interrogators came to believe him.
"He was told shortly after being taken into custody and upon arrival at Guantanamo Bay that he would be released within two weeks," Kennedy noted.
By 2004, a Pentagon official had concluded Odaini could be cleared for release, and a task force evaluating Guantanamo detainees likewise concluded "there is no information to confirm Taliban or al Qaeda ties on his part." Each of the men who identified Odaini stated that he was, as he asserts, a student, Kennedy noted.
More time passed, and in 2007 Odaini's pro bono attorney was advised that his client had been approved for release.
"Needless to say," Kennedy wrote acerbically, "Odaini was not released from Guantanamo Bay."
In January, following an attempted Christmas Day airliner attack that U.S. officials believe originated in Yemen, the Obama administration declared that no Guantanamo detainee would be released there.
Three other men captured in the same March 2002 raid as Odaini previously have been ordered released.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said Thursday that officials were still reviewing the full opinion.
ON THE WEB
Read Judge Kennedy's opinion
Information on Odaini's case
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Follow the latest politics news at McClatchy's Planet WashingtonBy Josh Hart
Imagine this scenario:
You just got a bonus at work, bought a new barbecue smoker and a large hot tub at your suburban home. Your 5-year-old son (whom you have custody of) is at his mother’s home for the Thanksgiving holiday and you decide to invite a few pals over to watch the game on TV, and kick back and drink some beers.
As the evening passes, vodka shots are downed, more beer is drunk, people are enjoying the hot tub. It gets late, and you decide to go to bed. A couple of your friends are still in the jacuzzi. You go inside the house and get in bed, lay around and text some friends, and make a few drunk, aborted calls. You drift off to sleep, wake up around 9:30am the next morning, walk out into your kitchen, look out your back window, and see one of your guests from the previous night face down in the hot tub, apparently drowned and not responding. You call 911. The police and then the coroner come.
This is what happened on the night of November 21st, 2015, according to the host of the party, James Bates, a resident of Bentonville, Arkansas.
Three days later, still reeling from the tragic events of that night, the police told Bates that they believed his friend Victor Collins, a former law enforcement officer, was murdered.
Then, 3 months after the incident, police came and arrested Bates on the charge of 1st degree murder. The arrest was based largely on smart water meter readings they obtained–without a warrant–from the City of Bentonville Water Department.
Police claim that this data shows that Bates used a significant amount of water between 1am and 3am, water that prosecutors say was used to spray down his patio. The police case is outlined in this affidavit.
In an exclusive interview with Stop Smart Meters!, Bates insisted on his innocence and said that his friend’s death was a tragedy, and must have been the result of combining a lot of liquor, a jacuzzi, and a late night. He told us that Collins was found by medical examiners to have had a.32 blood alcohol content when he died.
Bates also speculates that the smart meter data is not accurate and that the timing on the meter must have been off (possibly switched between AM/PM). He asserts that he can prove he used approximately that same amount of water to fill the hot tub earlier that day. He says it is notable that the smart meter data report obtained by the Bentonville police department does not reflect any large consumption of water used earlier that day.
The use of smart meter data by law enforcement to charge someone with murder is a stark example of where violations of privacy can mean the difference between a life of freedom and a life in prison.
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With the numerous reports of inaccuracies, switched meters, and wireless transmission problems with smart meters, it is more than a little disturbing that law enforcement is now basing criminal indictments on spy devices installed stealthily–and most of the time without permission–in your home. If accessing private data from your smart meter without a warrant is considered acceptable by society, then why not deploy CCTV in everyone’s living room, and have live feeds direct to police headquarters. Where does the creeping surveillance end?
This case shows that detailed monitoring of activities within the home is a key design feature of the smart grid and smart meters, and that law enforcement is presently using this detailed data about one’s private activities in the home–without a warrant–to prosecute individuals on charges as serious as murder. This is what Stop Smart Meters! and many other privacy advocates have warned would happen if we accepted smart meters onto our homes and businesses. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and like everything else related to the smart meter program, the utilities and the governments who cover for them continue to lie through their teeth.
Exhibit A: In Naperville, Illinois, where a 4th amendment case against the city’s smart meter program continues to simmer in the courts, one of the arguments that the city has used to defend against the charge that their smart meters are violating the Constitution, is that if the police needed smart meter usage data, they would first obtain a court-ordered search warrant. The James Bates case shows that in practice, law enforcement is obtaining this data routinely without a warrant, and in direct violation of the 4th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Following are two citations from the legal record, showing a blatant inconsistency in how the promise of smart meter data confidentiality by authorities contrasts with the reality of an official lack of regard for due process and protection of individual privacy.
The Promise (from Naperville’s 4th amendment case):
The Reality (from Bentonville, AR Police Affidavit):
The repercussions of these clear 4th amendment violations are deadly serious–for James, and for everyone who values privacy, truth and justice.
Local Mainstream Media Coverage:
You can contact James Bates’ attorney, Kim Weber, via email, at [email protected], or by phone at (479) 381-0865. Those with a technical or detailed knowledge of wireless water meter mesh network systems are encouraged to contact.
Josh Hart writes for Stop Smart Meters!, where this article first appeared.A large "Opportunity Made In Detroit" banner is seen on the side of one of the buildings owned by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert in downtown Detroit, Michigan January 30, 2013. Gilbert has a vision for downtown Detroit that many would find hard to square with the long, painful decline commonly associated with this city: a vibrant urban core full of creative, innovative and talented young people. Yet Quicken Loans, the mortgage lender Gilbert co-founded in 1985, has invested $1 billion over three years, bought some 2.6 million square feet of commercial space in the downtown area and moved 7,000 employees there in a bid to make that vision a reality. Picture taken January 30, 2013. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook A Michigan judge says the city of Detroit's Chapter 9 bankruptcy filing Thursday was unconstitutional, and she demands that it must be withdrawn.
At issue are the city's pension obligations, which would be reduced in the bankruptcy process.
However, Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie E. Aquilina says that would cause irreparable damage to pensioners, and asserts that in order to rectify the situation, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder must order the bankruptcy filing to be withdrawn.
Bloomberg's Steven Raphael and Megan Durisin report that Aquilina can't make that happen, though:
Kenneth Klee, the bankruptcy lawyer who spearheaded the bankruptcy restructuring of Jefferson County, Alabama, said a state judge can't force Detroit out of federal bankruptcy, even if Snyder agrees to try to withdraw the petition.
Once Detroit city filed the bankruptcy petition, it came under federal jurisdiction and the case cannot be withdrawn, even by Snyder, said Klee, of Klee Tuchin Bogdanoff & Stern LLP in Los Angeles. A federal judge would have to agree to dismiss the case, according to Klee.
"If the governor changes his mind, it doesn't matter," he said. "Not only can't she do that, but her order may be in contempt of a federal court, and a federal judge can put her in jail."
Snyder is appealing Aquilina's decision. She is holding a hearing on the case on Monday morning.Image caption Ponty Chadha was a controversial businessman
One of India's most controversial tycoons Ponty Chadha was killed in a shootout with his brother at the weekend. Shantanu Guha Ray profiles the man who ran a vast business empire, estimated at $10bn (£6.2bn).
The death of Gurdeep Singh 'Ponty' Chadha, one of India's most powerful businessmen, remains mired in mystery.
The 55-year-old drinks and property baron and his younger brother, Hardeep, were killed in a farmhouse on the outskirts of the capital, Delhi, following a property dispute during the weekend.
Exact details of the incident on Saturday are still unclear.
According to one version, Hardeep shot his brother, leading to an exchange of gunfire between two sides. The dispute apparently was over the ownership of the sprawling farmhouse, reports said.
The brothers were apparently at loggerheads over their family business - estimated at around $10bn and spread over four states - after the death of their father Kulwant Singh Chadha last year. They had interests in real estate, shopping malls, sugar mills and film production.
A fortnight ago, Ponty Chadha, usually guarded by 36 armed guards, had met Delhi police chief Neeraj Kumar and sought increased protection. He had told Mr Kumar that he feared for his life.
'Mysterious tycoon'
The businessman did not find time to submit a mandatory written request to the police giving details of people who posed a threat to his life.
However, Gaurang Kanth, a lawyer for Hardeep Chadha, said he was encouraged by his client to file a complaint with the police against his elder brother.
"It is a strange death for a mysterious tycoon," said Gopal K Pillai, India's former home secretary.
After an accident while flying a kite which got entangled in a high voltage electricity line and left him partially handicapped (he lost one arm and two fingers of his other hand), Mr Chadha, a school drop-out, began his life in business by selling snacks outside an alcoholic drinks stall along with his father.
Later, his father bought a drinks stall and the father-son team began expanding the family's alcohol business.
His fortunes saw a dizzy rise in the last five years, as he went on to control 80% of the alcoholic drinks trade in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and expanded into other businesses.
Image caption Mr Chadha was known for his proximity to politicians
The drinks baron, known for his proximity to powerful politicians, was aggressive in his dealings.
In 2009, the Indian government received complaints that Mr Chadha, along with exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, was trying to lease over 700,000 hectares (1,729 acres) of land in Ethiopia for farming with labour from Punjab.
The deal fell through.
But a determined Mr Chadha recently concluded the deal and reportedly acquired a little over 800,000 hectares.
His influence in Uttar Pradesh, where he had a monopoly on the drinks trade, was well known.
He courted political leaders, specially Mayawati, the state's powerful former chief minister.
This, many believe, helped him buy several state-owned sugar mills at deeply discounted prices.
Mr Chadha's Wave Group also held a government contract to provide mid-day meals to millions of poor school children.
"He offered milk to the children and liquor to their parents. He had the power, the connections and hence got contracts for both," said Ashish Nandy, a top political psychologist.
Allegations that he purchased influence dogged Mr Chadha, but the charges were never proved.
Earlier this year, a massive raid by tax inspectors at his offices and residences yielded nothing.
Instead, SS Rana, a senior tax official who ordered the 25-location raid across Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, was removed from the position.
"Mr Chadha's enormous money power - mostly from his liquor business - helped him buy political clout," said Prakash Singh, former chief of India's Border Security Force who also commanded the Uttar Pradesh state police.
"When Mayawati and her Bahujan Samaj Party lost power in Uttar Pradesh, he switched allegiance to the new Chief Minister, Akhilesh Singh Yadav, of the Samajwadi Party and bought peace."
'Media neglect'
Aware that his drinks business drew more flak than praise, the tycoon tried hard to acquire a larger-than-life image.
His Wave Group started financing and distributing Bollywood movies, got into the property business and acquired franchises of two teams of a hockey tournament modelled on the lines of the highly successful Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament.
There were plans for a foray into India's thriving poultry market with a four-acre plant close to Delhi.
Image caption There were income tax raids on Mr Chadha's house earlier this year
He also ran a school for disabled children in the suburbs of Delhi and restored temples (gurdwaras) of his Sikh religion.
At his expansive farmhouse, Mr Chadha would take guests for a ride in his golf carts. He would offer them jasmine tea, imported Huntley and Palmer biscuits, and lament how he was a victim of "India's political system and media neglect".
"There are other liquor barons who have wasted millions of dollars in their failed businesses and are now on the verge of selling their family assets, but they have a better image than me," he told me in May 2012 in a rare interview.
During the interview, he made it very clear that he hated being called a "liquor king".
"No one wants to handle liquor in my family. I have no option but to push other businesses. It is the most challenging phase of my life," he had then said.
Earlier this year, Mr Chadha started promoting his son, Manpreet, in the family business. The latter would meet investors and attend business meetings around the world.
The move was seen as an image building exercise for the group mired in controversy.
"He is the face, he is the future. He does everything. I rarely go out of my farmhouse," Mr Chadha had said of his son.
Dressed in an Armani suit, Mr Chadha had then stepped out of his living room to show his collection of exotic cockatoos and macaws in a wired enclosure that lay close to his collection of Bentley and Ferrari luxury cars.
Nearby, a gigantic statue of the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman, stood in mute silence.
Mr Chadha had installed it some years ago. Like many Indian families, he also believed the mighty monkey deity, worshipped as a symbol of physical strength, perseverance and devotion, would protect the family from any crisis.
But the protection could not help him on Saturday, nor could Mr Chadha's 36-strong security cover.
Shantanu Guha Ray is a senior Delhi-based journalistRobert VerBruggen’s piece “ The Stigma of Racism ” at RealClearPolicy.com has been widely noted on the race-realist websites, mainly for purposes of mockery.
The topic of the piece is a study conducted by a Harvard professor on people’s willingness to admit having noticed race. The setup for the study is:
A screen showing twelve faces, six white and six black.
Volunteer X, who silently selects one face from the twelve.
Volunteer Y, who has to discover which face X selected by asking X a series of yes-no questions.
By asking “Is the person black?” Y could eliminate half the faces right away. However, most Ys did not ask this question, nor mention race at all, especially when X was black.
Yet that majority of Ys who did not mention race were more likely to be perceived as racist by X—more likely, that is, than the minority who did mention race. [The Costs of Racial “Color Blindness”, by Michael I. Norton and Evan P. Apfelbaum, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2013]
So far, so good, although nothing very surprising. As VerBruggen says:
[Many whites] place so much importance on demonstrating that black people don’t make them nervous that black people make them nervous.
Going from Jim Crow to white people who refuse to utter the words “Is the person black?”—often categorically, but frequently in deference to a nearby person of color [sic]—in 50 years is a remarkable accomplishment for the civil-rights movement, both as a social force and as a driver of government policy.
So, a knave who... praises as “a remarkable accomplishment for the civil rights movement” the fact that we have gone “from Jim Crow to white people refusing to utter the words” is all of a sudden upset when white people self-censor and engage in informal affirmative action.
But he then goes on to tell us that this is a jolly good thing:As I said, the piece drew some mocking responses. The Countenance blog was particularly scathing AmRen posted an edited version of VerBruggen’s piece which generated a long comment thread. Several commenters stated the obvious thing: that the “remarkable accomplishment for the civil rights movement” that VerBruggen [ Twitter ] rhapsodizes over consists in having instilled justified fear in nonblacks —the fear that they will lose their jobs if they venture outside the narrow bounds of approved discourse by so much as a millimeter.
By that criterion, the greatest social “accomplishments” of the 20th century were those of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot.
Chuck at glpiggy.net noted the piece but eschewed mockery, only adding an anecdote of his own.
I was in 4th grade—9 or 10 years old. I was asked to explain latitude, as in the east-west running lines on a map or globe. I tiptoed around the best explanation I’d heard up to that point which was that latitude rhymes with fatitude and the latitude lines at the equator on a map look like the waist line of a fat person. But I avoided saying ‘fat’ because there were some chubby kids in my class. So I stammered around and made up some other explanation.
It’s a nice anecdote, but not really relevant. Pointing out a fat person’s fatness might hurt his feelings, a thing polite people are naturally reluctant to do.
I have childhood memories—no doubt we all do—of being scolded by parents for staring at people who were hunchbacked, birthmarked, one-armed, or physically abnormal in some other way. “It’s not polite. He can’t help it...”
I can’t see how this relates to blackness, though. A hunched back, a birthmark, or a missing arm are all pitiable conditions. So, at a slight stretch, is obesity. What’s pitiable about being black?
I’m assuming that Robert VerBruggen has left National Review, where we used to meet around the editorial table on alternate Mondays. (He hasn’t posted there since June, and his byline says he’s “editor of RealClearPolicy.”) I have retained no very strong memory of him, but that’s no reflection on his character. He was a rather quiet and unassuming person, and my memory isn’t very good.
I do vaguely recall thinking that VerBruggen was sound on Second Amendment issues, but unsound—from the point of view of a traditionalist conservative—on others. A couple of data points:
At one editorial meeting he waxed indignant about “bullying” in schools, an issue then beginning to be promoted by the Cultural-Marxist left. I said that the “bullying” fuss was cover for a campaign by homosexualists to normalize buggery among high-schoolers.
It was he that was editor for my February 2011 diary at National Review Online. The diary as submitted included a segment on the scuppering of that year’s American Renaissance conference by the Mayor pro tem of Charlotte, North Carolina.
VerBruggen was profoundly shocked. Plainly my dart had landed well wide of his personal Overton Window. I can’t remember what he said, but I remember the tone of muted outrage in which he said it. The tone expressed something like: I have never in my life heard anyone say anything so shockingly disgraceful.Knowing how race-whipped National Review is, I strove to present the issue in terms that would be acceptable to them, as a matter of free speech.
My efforts were in vain. When the diary appeared on NRO’s website, that segment had been excised.
Whether VerBruggen dropped the segment on his own initiative, or whether he sought a ruling from further up the NRO chain of command, I don’t know.
Reading VerBruggen’s piece, and the race-realist responses to it, my first thought was that the gulf here is generational. VerBruggen (pictured right) is a young fellow—hardly more than thirty, I would guess. If that’s right, his key educational experiences were in the 1990s, when Cultural Marxism was settling on the U.S. educational system like poisonous ash from a volcanic eruption.
My own kids, born 1993 and 1995, were only a few years behind that, and I saw how intensely they were schooled to pretend not to notice race.
I recall one dinner-time conversation when my daughter was in high school. Mrs. Derbyshire mentioned some family we knew very slightly—call them the Blanks—whose son had been accepted into Columbia University.
Me: “Good for him. The Blanks... They’re Jewish, aren’t they?”
My daughter: “Da-ad! Really! You’re terrible!”
I can’t honestly remember whether she left the table in disgust, but she was in a mood to. You’re not supposed to notice.
To a person of my generation and background, such things are interesting features of the social landscape, with no particular emotional coloring. They’re Jewish... He’s black... She’s a lesbian... That kid’s adopted... Sam should really lose some weight...
These are things we notice about persons, and bring up in conversation, without any intent to commit violence against those persons, nor even to strip them of their civil rights!
To most people of less than middle age, however, there is something morally suspect about noticing any person’s racial, sexual, ancestral, or physical characteristics other than the most innocuous. The minefield begins somewhere not far beyond: “He’s pretty tall.”
These exquisite sensitivities seeped down from the media and educational systems across the closing decades of the last century. Twenty years ago they had still not infected many ordinary citizens. I told the following story in Chapter 6 of my worldwide bestseller We Are Doomed:
I came home from work on the Long Island Railroad one day in December, 1993. My train was right behind the one in which Colin Ferguson went berserk and shot 25 people. We were held up for a long time, and there were no cell phones. My poor wife was at home, watching news of the shooting on TV. For all she knew, I might have been among the dead. Kind neighbors came round to keep her company. Telling me about it afterwards, she remarked: “They kept saying the same thing: ‘It must be a black guy. If it was a white guy, they would have told us...’”
I don’t think so many people would say nowadays what my neighbors said in 1993. The indoctrination is now more nearly complete. We love Big Brother.
Robert VerBruggen sure does.
The campaign to stigmatize anti-black racism—the most corrosive force in this country’s history—has been remarkably successful. In fact, while we love to talk about this or that as “the last acceptable prejudice,” it would be more accurate to say that racism and sexism are the only prejudices that are thoroughly unacceptable.
Today the term racism has come to mean almost any recognition of race... and of difference (or average differences) between groups.
The definitions of “racism” and “sexism” VerBruggen has in mind there are presumably the ones in current use, the first as defined by Ed West in the book I noted here The phrase “anti-black racism” therefore means any verbal attention to negative group characteristics of blacks.
Suppose for example I say the following thing:
Among European whites, the portion that is dumb, feckless, anti-social, and inclined to violence—call them the DFASIVs—is 10-15 percent. This is small enough that the rest can “carry” the DFASIVs, given a modest collective investment in social welfare, law enforcement, and feelgood make-work.
Among blacks, the DFASIV portion is much larger, 40-50 percent. The good news there is that most blacks—50-60 percent—can function perfectly well as useful, law-abiding citizens of a stable nation. The bad news is that the DFASIV portion is too big for the majority to “carry.” That’s why all-black polities are failures.
I guess I just committed an act of “anti-black racism,” even though my negativity is aimed at only a minority of blacks (along with a minority of whites). I guess my utterance needs to be “stigmatized.”
But what if the thing I just said is true, as I believe to be the case? If there actually are average differences between inbred human groups of different deep ancestry, then what has been stigmatized by that “campaign” VerBruggen applauds are true facts about the world.
And of course there are such differences. It would be biologically astounding if there weren’t. Those differences are the origin of species. Thus a truth has been stigmatized and a lie permitted to prevail; and Robert VerBruggen is fine with that.
There you see the poisonous, suffocating effects of all that volcano ash. Noticing things is basic to intelligent thought. If you school yourself not to notice things, you become stupid.
Worse yet: If you school yourself to pretend not to notice things, while some lower region of your brain none the less does notice them, and acts on its noticing, then you are not merely stupid, you are a stupid hypocrite.
For a look at one aspect of the stupid hypocrisy into which the Western world has sunk, I commend to your attention the brilliant historical survey of residential segregation at Those Who Can See, posted a few days ago.
These are the depths we have sunk to, even the intelligent among us. Moral preening and wishful thinking are celebrated; true and obvious facts are stigmatized. Out of petty fears we enstupidate ourselves; for social applause and careerist opportunities, we become liars and hypocrites; and Robert VerBruggen is fine with it all.
“Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.”
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him. He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. His most recent book, published by VDARE.com com is FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle).His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.
Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire's writings at VDARE.com can do so here.As the Super Congress eyes trillions in budget cuts that will undermine the quality of life for most Americans, here's a stunning fact to contemplate: Twenty-five hugely profitable U.S. companies paid their CEOs more last year than they paid Uncle Sam in taxes.
That's the key finding of a new Institute for Policy Studies report, Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging, which I co-authored.
The report has been a catalyst to getting more people engaged in street heat and grassroots lobbying to press Congress to stop abuses. After reviewing the report, US Representative Elijah Cummings called for Congressional oversight hearings into excessive compensation and aggressive tax avoidance.
Twenty of the 25 companies spent more lobbying Congress last year than they paid the IRS in federal corporate taxes.
These artful dodgers include the CEOs of |
presidency, he'll pick the ones that work best for him. Trump's own business enterprises, like many, rely on limited barriers to trade and on immigration. These are the issues that seem to motivate a lot of core Trump supporters, and Trump used those issues to get him as far as he's gotten. But his current stances (such as they are) on those issues might not offer such a good negotiating position from the White House. He's already cuckolded the Republican Party as an institution. He may yet get the chance to cuckold the supporters who enabled that.Close
A new study sheds light on what is happening in the brain throughout the disease process, specifically with respect to the part of the cerebral cortex responsible for integrating visual information.
Studying a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, neuroscientists at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) have observed correlations between increases in both soluble and plaque-forming beta-amyloid — a protein implicated in the disease process — and dysfunctional developments on several levels: individual cortical neurons, neuronal circuits, sensory cognition, and behavior.
"Our results provide important new insights on the cause that may underlie the impaired behavior, by identifying in the visual cortex a fraction of neurons with a strongly disturbed function," said Professor Arthur Konnerth, a Carl von Linde Senior Fellow of the TUM Institute for Advanced Study and the lead researcher of the study.
Their results, published in Nature Communications, show that these changes progress in parallel and that, together, they reveal distinct stages in Alzheimer's disease with a specific order in time.
Using a technique called two-photon calcium imaging, the researchers recorded both spontaneous and stimulated signaling activity in cortical neurons of living mice: transgenic mice carrying mutations that cause Alzheimer's disease in humans, and wild-type mice as a control group.
By observing how neuronal signaling responded to a special kind of vision test — in which a simple grating pattern of light and dark bars moves in front of the mouse's eye — the scientists could characterize the visual circuit as being more or less "tuned" to specific orientations and directions of movement.
"An important conclusion from this study is that the Alzheimer's disease-related changes on all levels — including behavior, cortical circuit dysfunction, and the density of amyloid plaques in diseased brains — progress in parallel in a distinct temporal order," Konnerth said.
"In the future, the identification of such stages in patients may help researchers pinpoint stage-specific and effective therapies, with reduced levels of side effects," he added.
See Now: What Republicans Don't Want You To Know About Obamacare8 p.m. EST Sunday. Update: Jesse Rosenfeld has been released from custody, says family, and is doing well.
A journalist on assignment for The Guardian newspaper was arrested and beaten by police officers at the site of a peaceful demonstration on The Esplanade near the G20 security fence in downtown Toronto at approximately 11:00 p.m. on June 26, 2010. Having been punched in the stomach and elbowed in the back by officers, it is believed that Jesse Rosenfeld, a 26-year-old writer from Toronto, was then taken to the temporary detention facility on Eastern Avenue in Toronto.
Rosenfeld had already filed a story for The Guardian, the United Kingdom--based newspaper founded in 1821, but was not able to receive media accreditation as the RCMP had dragged its heels through the accreditation process. However, Rosenfeld clearly identified himself to police as a journalist.
Steve Paikin, the Gemini-nominated TVOntario personality who was also covering the protest via Twitter witnessed the incident. The following are Paikin's tweets journaling the arrest and beating:
"they repeated they would arrest me if i didn't leave. as i was escorted away from the demonstration, i saw two officers hold a journalist."
https://twitter.com/spaikin/status/17137794505
"the journalist identified himself as working for 'the guardian.' he talked too much and pissed the police off. two officers held him...."
https://twitter.com/spaikin/status/17137826780
"a third punched him in the stomach. totally unnecessary. the man collapsed. then the third officer drove his elbow into the man's back."
https://twitter.com/spaikin/status/17137863106
"the officer who escorted me away from the demo said, 'yeah, that shouldn't have happened.' he is correct. there was no cause for it."
https://twitter.com/spaikin/status/17137918390
"the demonstration on the esplanade was peaceful. it was like an old sit in. no one was aggressive. and yet riot squad officers moved in."
https://twitter.com/spaikin/status/17138017712
Rosenfeld's family is livid that police would violate the rights of anyone but especially a journalist on assignment, and are supporting Jesse in this matter. Rosenfeld's father, Mark, is available for comment, as is Jesse's girlfriend and fellow journalist Carmelle Wolfson. Rosenfeld will be available for comment following his release.
Contact information:
Mark Rosenfeld, father
Carmelle Wolfson,
Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler, friend
Rosenfeld spoke at a rabble-sponsored event this week. You can watch the video here.This year's Electronic Expo is still over a month away, but the show is already shaping up to be a bit different from all those that came before. Not only is Bethesda Softworks hosting its first-ever press conference in the days before the show, but now Sega has confirmed that it will not be hosting an E3 booth for the first time in the show's 20+ year history.
A Sega spokesperson has confirmed to Game Informer that the storied publisher and one-time console maker will not have a booth on the show floor. While Sega will still be "collaborating with our various business partners" to show games like Total War: Warhammer at other booths, there won't be a giant SEGA logo guiding people to a specific Sega-focused area of the show floor this year.
The official reason for the move? Apparently, Sega is too busy with its recently announced restructuring and headquarters move to make time for an E3 booth.
“Over the next months, Sega of America will be focusing on the restructure and relocation to Southern California, and we have decided to not attend E3 with our own booth this year,” a Sega rep told Game Informer. “With the majority of our bigger titles launching later in 2015/2016, particularly those from our AAA studios Relic Entertainment, Sports Interactive, and Creative Assembly, we are concentrating our efforts for some of these major announcements after our relocation."
It's not unheard of for major game companies to take a short break from time-intensive promotional efforts to focus on actually making games. Blizzard didn't hold a 2012 edition of its Blizzcon gathering, but the show has come back stronger than ever in the years since.
Still, skipping E3 isn't a great sign for the overall health of Sega, which will be cutting hundreds of jobs and retrenching to focus on mobile titles as part of the aforementioned restructuring. Despite slightly improved sales for its core gaming business this year, the company was still losing money even before the costs associated with the current complete structural overhaul.
Sega has had a booth at every E3 since the show started in 1995 and was a major player in the video game sections of the Consumer Electronics Show well before that. In fact, Sega made a big splash at that first E3 20 years ago this month when it announced the surprise launch of the Sega Saturn, which was made instantly available in select stores well ahead of a previously announced September launch. The announcement would be remembered as one of Sega's biggest blunders, as the system's limited marketing and launch software library led most gamers to wait for the lower-cost Sony PlayStation. Sega would give up on video game hardware years later, with E3 2001 serving as the company's last hurrah as the maker of the Dreamcast.Many millennials may not be living in their parents' basements after all.
A new report by BMO Economics suggests that young Canadians, specifically those between 25 to 34 years old, are richer than their parents were at that age.
Using Statistics Canada data, and other metrics, the study found that millennials today have more money than the generation preceding them at the same age.
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Millennials had a median income of $34,700 in 2011, up from $33,900, when adjusted for inflation, among those in the same age bracket 30 years ago, says the report.
"This means millennials can buy about 2 per cent more goods and services than their parents could in the mid-1980s," writes BMO senior economist Sal Guatieri. "That doesn't sound like much, but the difference adds up over time."
The report suggests young families are also wealthier than their parents were. Net median incomes for the head of a household aged 25 to 34 years old was $52,0900 in 2012, nearly double the $28,752 income of their counterpart in 1984.
But although they may be richer, millennials also have more debt than their parents did when they were their age.
BMO says 84.4 per cent of households headed by young people owe some form of debt, compared with 82 per cent of the same households in 1984. The number of millennials who have a mortgage, at 85.6 per cent, is also higher than those in the same age group, at 79.2 per cent, in 1984.
"Though saddled with more debt and costlier homes, young people tend to be wealthier, have a little more spending power and enjoy better job opportunities than three decades ago," wrote Guatieri.
The report noted that one area that has worsened in the last 30 years has been the rising cost of housing, which has attributed to bigger mortgages and more debt.
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"Although earning slightly more than their parents did in the 1980s, millennials need to pay more to get their foot in the housing door," he said, adding that the average house price in 2011 was ten times the median salary of a young family. In 1984, this ratio was only about five times more.
"While many baby boomers prospered financially in the past thirty years, one could say that their children are starting new careers and families on an equal, if not firmer, footing in most regions," concluded Guatieri.
A number of reports have suggested that the wealth of millennials have been negatively impacted by a variety of factors including higher rates of unemployment and higher tuition rates.Media Watch: With the 24 November deadline looming for nuclear agreement with world powers, there is nervousness in Tehran as fundamentalists step up attacks on the talks and on Iran’s negotiators
As talks between Tehran and world powers near a 24 November deadline for an agreement over Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, the fundamentalist media in Iran have ramped up their efforts to undermine negotiations and bolster their position on the domestic scene.
Leading the charge has been Kayhan, the most influential newspaper on the authoritarian right and edited by Hossein Shariatmadari, an appointee of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A few days after the mid-term congressional elections in the United States, Kayhan ran an article dismissing as “pointless” the change of venue for the nuclear negotiations to Oman, where back-channel talks in 2013 between the US and Iran helped pave the way for the interim Geneva agreement.
Kayhan called US policy “war-seeking” and described Obama as a “scarecrow” who was in no position to make an agreement. The article concluded that “a deal with the US has been an illusion from the very beginning.”
A reformist journalist in Tehran gave Tehran Bureau an interpretation: “The defeat of the Democrats in the US mid-term elections gave Shariatmadari’s team a chance to label Obama as an ineffectual ‘scarecrow’, something which is in line with their more general strategy of convincing Khamenei that even if Iran should reach a strong agreement with Obama’s government, the inevitable power shift after the next US presidential elections will make all these efforts fruitless. This is the current tactic to disrupt and delegitimise the negotiations in Muscat [in Oman].”
On October 29 Vatan, a newspaper owned by Mehrdad Bazrpash, a confidant of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, attacked the media for paying too little attention to the nuclear talks. Vatan contributor Amir Ali Jahandar predicted that a “harmful agreement” was looming, with the public distracted by presumably more frivolous topics like the recent acid attacks on women in Iran.
“Beyond our borders there is a wealth of news regarding the negotiations, an issue which unfortunately remains far from the minds of the people at present. This news speaks of the current round of negotiations which...could result in an agreement that would be detrimental in every sense of the word and further endanger Iran’s national rights. In all of this, it is crucial that revolutionary media correctly interpret the news they receive and refrain from publishing items simply for their exciting content.”
More recently, Vatan published an article snidely suggesting the negotiations were simply a means for foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his lackeys to preserve positions within Iran’s political system: “Those brave and sombre actors currently shouldering the task of the nuclear negotiations, in order to remain active on the domestic scene and further obscure their affinity for the west with smoke and mirrors, will submit to an agreement at any cost, so long as it does not affect their domestic brand.”
But this article, contrary to the earlier one, goes on to suggest there is no chance of an agreement. “The red line that has been drawn by the supreme leader can only be changed by the leader himself. The leader has also consistently shown that in implementing the country’s broader policies - something which is his legal and divine right - he considers the interests of the country above all personal and material considerations. There is indeed no cause for worry that this red line will be crossed, for there are forces at home with whom these rational actors wouldn’t want to find themselves at odds.”
This was apparently a rebuttal to Alireza Zakani, a fundamentalist member of parliament from Tehran, who had warned the assembly of “a possibly tacit crossing of the red line that will undoubtedly lead to a defeat for Iran’s national rights and a serious setback for our many nuclear achievements thus far.”
Also responding to Zakani’s remarks has been Marzieh Afkham, foreign ministry spokeswoman. She insisted that “the negotiation team is completely aware of the red line and is acting with care and sensitivity to respect it”. She implicitly threatened Zakani with legal action over his “smear” and accused him of being “disrespectful of the broader effort by the country’s leadership to improve the situation at home for all Iranians.”
But no matter how often Zarif and his team have insisted they have kept Ayatollah Khamenei informed throughout the negotiations, the media barrage has continued.
Ramze Obour, a fundamentalist weekly magazine, also took up the idea of Iran’s negotiators as thespians, headlining a special report on the negotiations “The actors and their final mission”.
This explicitly targeted former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is close to president Hassan Rouhani and many of the Iranian negotiating team, and rings with a desire to settle old, lingering scores.
“In the past few years, Mr Rafsanjani has always talked about a letter he wrote in 1988 to Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini [supreme leader until his death in 1989] in which he beseeched the founder of the Islamic Revolution to solve the problem of Iran’s relations with the US during his lifetime, arguing that no one else would be able to do so after his death. Even in the aftermath of the weak agreement reached in Geneva during the first 100 days of Rouhani’s presidency [the November 2013 interim agreement], which has resulted in an overall loss for the country and has even made the negotiators’ job more difficult, Mr Rafsanjani holds on to this cherished memory. It seems as though his only wish - or perhaps, it could be said, his sole mission in life - is to see Iran in a permanent relationship with the US.”
A member of Moharekat (Participation Front), the main reformist political party, told Tehran Bureau these fundamentalist attacks were predictable and cautioned against exaggerating their importance.
“This is all very natural. They are betting on the eventual paralysis of the Rouhani government, and their most important card is his defeat in these nuclear negotiations. They know that if the negotiations fail, further sanctions will kick in, economic stagnation will worsen, and they will reap the benefits of widespread public disenchantment.”
But the Mosharekat member insisted the fundamentalists were not driving the process. “These articles don’t really bear on the decisions of the current government. The main deciders are Ayatollah Khamenei, president Rouhani, the higher-ups at the Revolutionary Guards, and maybe [parliamentary speaker] Ali Larijani. The big decisions simply aren’t made or even affected by the fundamentalist press.”
But there is nervousness in Tehran. A year ago, Ayatollah Khamenei came out in strong support of the negotiating team during a speech on the anniversary of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran. Now, as the November deadline draws ever nearer, Khamenei’s website has published an expression of thanks to the leader from deputy foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, for his “effective and heartwarming” support, and a Twitter account associated with the leader has expressed support for “innovative diplomacy in foreign policy and international affairs”. But Khamenei himself has maintained a silence.Peak Curiosity is a new, community-driven reporting series from 91.5 KRCC. We ask listeners to submit their questions about the Pikes Peak region and Southern Colorado, and then we answer them. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to submit your question!
For this installment of Peak Curiosity, we set out to answer a question from a resident of Pueblo, CO:
"I read that Pueblo's Temple Emanuel on Grand Ave. was founded in 1900. Tell us about the Jewish history of this region."
The story starts as you might expect.
Anti-Semitism was rampant in Europe in the mid-1800s, and there was economic opportunity in the United States. Two German Jewish brothers, Abe and Henry Goldsmith, were among those who sought a better life in the US. They settled in Denver to farm. Henry married a Jewish woman named Clara, and together they had a daughter, also Clara.
“She was born in 1860, and she was the first Jewish girl born in Denver,” says Thyria Wilson, an archivist at the Rocky Mountain Jewish Historical Society in Denver. She says this Jewish birth is the first documented in Colorado.
Wilson says the Goldsmiths did not do well in Denver. Baby Clara’s mother died during childbirth. A flood ruined the family’s harvest. So the remaining family turned south to Pueblo to open a store. But life was tough there too. In Pueblo, Clara was captured by Ute Indians and ransomed back to the family. They got her back, Wilson says, for “a bolt of calico, flour, and, of all things, pork rinds.”
The Goldsmiths were part of the first wave of German Jewish Immigrants to settle in Southern Colorado beginning in the 1860s. By 1877 there were 400 Jewish families in Colorado, three-quarters concentrated in Denver and the rest spread throughout the state. Many opened stores in mining towns - selling food and general goods to the miners.
According to Wilson, “Some built businesses, not so much farming, but ranching. We did have Jewish cowboys in the early days.”
In the early 1900s a second wave arrived.
“They were Eastern European, and were more religious, and the groups kind of separated some,” Wilson explains.
Synagogues in the south came drip by drip, as they were supported by a small, but active, number of Jews. In 1905 the Jewish population in Colorado Springs was about 75 and Pueblo about 300. Resources were thin, so rabbis came from Denver. People traveled from New Mexico up to places like Temple Aaron in Trinidad. It was a regional effort to keep the temples open.
Dr. Perry Bach is a member at Temple Shalom, one of three synagogues in Colorado Springs. He’s currently working on a book about the history of Jews in Colorado Springs. He’s also a child psychiatrist. He says in the early 1900s, many Jews came to Colorado to escape overcrowding on the East Coast.
“In fact so many of them settled in New York and Brooklyn that a group of them decided ‘Why don’t we arrange for many of the immigrants to move farther West,’” Bach says.
Like many other Colorado transplants, Jewish immigrants also came to seek treatment for tuberculosis with dry weather and clean air. They were treated throughout Colorado, including at the renowned Cragmor Sanatorium in Colorado Springs.
Some, Like Dr. Otto Einstein, even worked at the sanatoriums. Einstein fled Nazi Germany in 1939 with the help of his very famous 4th cousin, Albert. Dr. Otto Einstein called Colorado Springs home for a few decades.
Tanja Britton is a native German, and resident of Colorado Springs. She says she fell in love with the story of Dr. Einstein because it was like her own story.
“He was German, I was born in Germany, He was a medical man and at some point I was a medical woman,” Britton says.
In Germany, Dr. Einstein was a pediatrician, but he reinvented himself as a tuberculosis expert in Colorado Springs, says Britton. Einstein was revered at Cragmor as a kind doctor who bridged cultural barriers by treating Navajo patients.
Imagine, Britton says, “a German physician with a heavy accent who treated Navajo patients with accented English who also had very very different backgrounds.”
Colorado Springs is now home to the second largest Jewish population of in the state. Bach estimates there are around 400 families involved in the Jewish community, and about 4,000 ethnic Jews in the area. I asked him why it’s important to remember the history of Jewish people in this region.
Dr. Bach says children who know their family history, "have a better sense of identity and don’t feel as if they just ended up here.”
And with only a handful of third-generation Jews left in Colorado Springs, there aren’t many who can tell that original story.
If you've got a question about Colorado Springs or Southern Colorado that you'd like us to investigate, submit it below!
_Joe Biden will write two books, while Jill Biden will write one. | Getty Joe and Jill Biden sign multi-book deal
Former vice president Joe Biden and former second lady Jill Biden have signed a multi-book deal with Flatiron Books.
Joe Biden will write two books, while Jill Biden will write one. The first book from the former vice president will examine his experiences during 2015, describing the death of his son Beau and his decision to not run for president.
Story Continued Below
"We're so deeply honored to be the publisher of these books by Vice President and Dr. Biden," Bob Miller, president and publisher of Flatiron Books, said in a statement. "The Vice President's book promises to give us all a deeper understanding of recent political history, but it will clearly also be a book about the values that have given the Vice President strength in both good times and bad."
The cost of the deal and focus of the other two books were not released. Flatiron Books is a division of Macmillan Publishers.
The deal follows a similar book deal former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama signed with Penguin Random House. The Financial Times reported the deal was for more than $60 million.Initial Publication Date: 12/1/2014
Georgia Department of Transportation: Let’s have safe human-powered transportation choices, connecting transit nodes, medical facilities, employees, residents, employment and commercial centers across & through the barriers known as Georgia 400 & I-285.
GDOT Project info site here: Combined Project Info Website
Our Asks:
#1: GDOT Build Trails / Multi-Use Paths along both SR-400 & I-285. (National Examples below)
#2: Complete Streets “Best Practices” on all on-street segments of the projects (intersections, underpasses, bridges). Go above & beyond a simple 4-ft wide bike lane with a white painted stripe – (Examples below). Don’t mix bikes & peds on the same facility.
#3: Bring Georgia Bikes, PEDS & Advocates to the planning table. Let us review the designs & have input.
Sign the On-Line Petition
Click HERE
Environmental Review Process
Please go to this PAGE to understand how the process works. GDOT has to go through the US Federal Highway Administration to receive final approval, based on Environmental impacts. Click HERE to review & understand.
A Picture Speaks a Thousand Words:
Perimeter CIDs Employee-Commuter Desire Paths. Accommodate human-powered transportation choices across & through these concrete barriers known as Georgia 400 & I-285.
Reference: Perimeter CIDs Bike/Ped Trail Plan.
Update as of 5/29/2015:
AWESOME NEWS: Trail to be included along GA-400 through I-285 interchange!
As reported in the Neighbor Newspapers on May 29th, the Georgia Department of Transportation as agreed to have a trail included along GA-400 through I-285 interchange! Many thanks go to the City of Sandy Springs for committing $1 Million towards the trail. Specific thanks also go to the PATH Foundation, Perimeter CIDs (in support of their Trail Plan), and the Cities of Dunwoody, Brookhaven, Chamblee, Doraville and many civic organizations and the business community for their support.
More details click HERE
Update as of 5/10/2015: The Georgia Division of the Southern Environmental Law Center has submitted a formal letter to GDOT referencing legal reasoning to support accommodating bicycle and pedestrian users of the adjacent roadway within these projects.
For a copy of their letter, please click here: SELC – GDOT letter – Bike Ped Accommodation on 285-400 Interchange
Update as of 4/22/2015: The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) has agreed to review a proposal presented by PATH and other bicycle and pedestrian advocates to make provisions for the PATH400 Trail through the new I-285/Georgia 400 interchange project!!
For more details, checkout the update on the PATH Foundation’s website HERE.
Update as of 4/21/2015: The Doraville City Council voted on March 16th to endorse a resolution in support of having the Georgia Department of Transportation provide trail accommodation & applying Complete Streets designs for the $1 Billion dollar I-285/SR-400 Interchange project.
To download, click here: Doraville PATH_Resolution0001
Update as of 3/17/2015: The Chamblee City Council voted unanimously to endorse a resolution in support of having the Georgia Department of Transportation provide trail accommodation & applying Complete Streets designs for the $1 Billion dollar I-285/SR-400 Interchange project.
To download, click here: Chamblee Resolution of Support
Update as of 3/9/2015: The Dunwoody City Council voted to endorse a resolution in support of trails & applying Complete Streets designs for the $1 Billion dollar I-285/SR-400 Interchange project.
To download, click here: Dunwoody Resolution GA400 Trail Ext
Update as of 3/4/2015: Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Resolution of support.
To download, click here: CHOA Letter of Support
Update as of 2/19/2015: City of Brookhaven Resolution of support.
To download, click here: Brookhaven Resolution20150202Trails
Update as of 2/4/2015 – Part II: Sandy Springs Perimeter Chamber of Commerce Resolution of support.
To download, click here: SSPC – RESOLUTION IN SUPPORT OF Trails
Update as of 2/4/2015: Sandy Springs Conservancy Board of Directors Resolution of support.
To download, click here: Sandy Springs Conservancy – Resolution of Support for Trails
Update as of 1/30/2015: Buckhead CID Board of Directors Resolution of support.
To download, click here: Buckhead CID – Resolution of Support
Update as of 1/21/2015: Livable Buckhead Board of Directors Resolution of support.
To download, click here: Livable Buckhead – TRAIL RESOLUTION I285 AND 400
Update as of 1/7/2015: Thanks to the Dunwoody Chamber of Commerce for their Resolution of Support!! Click HERE for their resolution.
Update as of 1/2/2015: Ed McBrayer, the PATH Foundation Executive Director Article, “Divided by Highways” as posted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in support of this effort
For the story, click HERE.
Update as of 12/3/2014: Thanks to PEDS – Pedestrians Educating Drivers on Safety – for their Resolution of Support.
To download, click here: PEDS Atlanta Resolution of Support
Update as of 12/1/2014: Georgia Trail Summit Board of Directors Resolution of support.
To download, click here: GTS Board Resolution of support
The following is a sample letter that you can send to GDOT and other public officials
Hi All,
Please see the below letter. You can detach & download it here: GDOT 285-400+400CD – Trail + Bike-Ped Facility Letter+Info Sheet – 2.13.2015
You can leverage / copy / forward this to:
Marlo Clowers, Mike Lobdell, Meg Pirkle, Russell McMurray, Todd Long, Katelyn Digioia at GDOT. Jennifer Giersch with the Federal Highway Administration and Byron Rushing at the Atlanta Regional Commission with your comments.
Forward to your networks and ask them to also provide on-line comments & feedback at the following links:
GA-400 Collector/Distributor, click HERE.
285/400 Interchange, click HERE.
Copy/Paste email addresses:
mclowers@dot.ga.gov; mlobdell@dot.ga.gov; rmcmurry@dot.ga.gov; todd.long@dot.ga.gov; mpirkle@dot.ga.gov; Jennifer.Giersch@fhwa.dot.gov; KDigioia@dot.ga.gov; BRushing@atlantaregional.com
Sample Letter Follows
TO:
Ms. Marlo L. Clowers, P.E. Senior Project Manager Office of Innovative Delivery, Georgia Department of Transportation 404.631.1713 office / 404.293.7406 cell mclowers@dot.ga.gov Mike Lobdell Assistant State Innovative Delivery Engineer Georgia Department of Transportation 770-986-1765 mlobdell@dot.ga.gov
CC:
Russell McMurry Commissioner, GDOT rmcmurry@dot.ga.gov Todd Long Deputy Commissioner, GDOT todd.long@dot.ga.gov Meg Pirkle Chief Engineer, GDOT mpirkle@dot.ga.gov Jennifer Giersch Environmental Coordinator Federal Highway Administration Jennifer.Giersch@fhwa.dot.gov Katelyn Digioia Bike & Pedestrian Coordinator, GDOT KDigioia@dot.ga.gov Byron Rushing Bike & Pedestrian Planner, ARC BRushing@atlantaregional.com
Date: February 13, 2015
Subject: Separated Bike/Ped Facilities (Greenway/Multi-Use Path) & On-Street Bicycle Facilities Design for Projects:
I-285/SR 400 Interchange Reconstruction P.I. # 0000784
SR 400 Collector-Distributor (CD) Lanes P.I. # 721850
Combined Project Info
Dear Ms. Clowers & Mr. Lobdell:
For the above mentioned projects, we strongly recommend and encourage the Georgia Department of Transportation to:
Build a Multi-Use Path along the project boundaries for dedicated separated bicycle/pedestrian facilities Greenway along both GA-400 & I-285. The GA-400 trail would eventually link to the south to the PATH400 trail in Buckhead running along the GA-400 ROW (planned to connect to the Atlanta Beltline), and north into the Roswell & Alpharetta trail network. Along I-285, the trails will provide connectivity from the heart of Perimeter CID into their work-in-progress “Commuter Trail Plan” network where over 100,000 employees work each day; eastward to Dunwoody, Chamblee and the redevelopment-in-progress former GM plant in Doraville; south to Medical Center MARTA and Brookhaven; and west to the new Sandy Springs City Center and commuters from East Cobb. As a minimum, with formal coordination with the PATH Foundation, leave accommodation within each project space for a future Multi-Use Trail to be built; designating in project design documents the physical space allocated for the trail. Follow urban-setting best practices and context-sensitive bicycle facilities for on-street segments of the project areas, including all bridges. Insure facilities follow the GDOT Complete Street Design Policy & Manual and allow the use of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide (adopted by the City of Atlanta & supported by the FHWA ) for these facilities and minimize or eliminate the use of “Sidepaths”, and instead use “Cycle Tracks” aka “Protected Bicycle Lanes”. Refer to the “Green Lane Project” for use within the US. With the Diverging Diamond Interchange at Abernathy & SR-400, build continuous bicycle and pedestrian pathways separated from vehicular traffic with grade separated undercrossings at the freeway ramps. This will be a dedicated, separated Multi-Use Path that is outside the motor vehicle travel space. One will be running north & south along SR-400. The other will run east & west on Abernathy. Refer to the US-36 interchange in Sacramento, California that was opened in 2014 for an example. Design sidewalks on both sides of streets along all segments Hold planning review meetings with appropriate GDOT Staff, Engineers and Stakeholders including Georgia Bikes, ARC Bike/Ped Planners and the PATH Foundation; to ensure these items are incorporated into each project’s design and approved by GDOT Senior officials, as well as the respective jurisdictions.
Providing these safe accommodations will lead to increased commerce and jobs, reduce on-street motor vehicle congestion, increase adjacent residential property values, improve public health and attract & retain employee talent — especially Millennials who insist on these amenities — which will comprise 75% of the workforce by 2025.
In Georgia, 81% of respondents to a GOHS / UGA survey either strongly agreed or agreed that they would ride a bicycle more frequently if their community had better bicycle facilities such as bike lanes or multi-use paths.
The adjoining cities of Sandy Springs, Brookhaven and Dunwoody have a combined population of nearly 200,000 people. Nearly fifty percent of all trips in metropolitan areas in the United States are three miles or less and 28 percent are one mile or less – distances easily covered by foot or bicycle. SR-400 & I-285 are considered as barriers to many persons who may wish to choose a non-motorized transportation option to go to work in the Perimeter area each day. With even a single-digit percentage mode shift away from motor vehicle commuters to bicycle or pedestrian transportation, congestion mitigation can be attained.
These projects are in great part being built to accommodate future growth in a Transit Oriented Design region. Accordingly, the GDOT Complete Streets policy mandates accommodation of multi-use paths, sidewalks and bike lanes throughout. Applying safe Multi-Modal options for pedestrians and bicyclists last mile connectivity of “Safe Routes to Transit” with access to the three MARTA rail transit stations and get to their offices can ease on-street motor vehicle congestion. To build the project in the heart of a TOD without fully accommodating the alternative modes will greatly shortchange the project achieving its goals. In contrast, incorporating these alternative modes as we suggest will both achieve the project goals and serve as a national model.
Sincerely,
Background Information, References and Statistics
SR-400 Collector-Distributor & I-285/400 Interchange Redesign Projects
Multi-Use Trail & On-Street Facilities Request
On-Street Bicycle Facility Design
Follow the GDOT Complete Street Design Policy & Manual
Please apply the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide (Adopted by the City of Atlanta)
FHWA Support of NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide. (Dated 8/20/2013)
FHWA Diverging Diamond Interchange Informational Guide, August, 2014. Chapter 3, Multimodal Considerations. Clearly identifies 3 basic options for accommodating bicycles at a DDI.
Sidepaths have inherent difficulties in built-up urban areas. Need to consider transition areas at the project boundaries. What facilities are existing & planned to connect to the project area? One-way or two-way?
Consider Cycle Tracks / Protected Bike Lanes per the “Green Lane Project” guidelines. See example on 10th Street in Midtown Atlanta.
Multi-Use Trail / Greenway / Separated Bicycle & Pedestrian Facilities
City of Sandy Springs Bike/Ped/Trail Plan: Multi-Use Trail along both 400 & 285
Approved & adopted by their Mayor & City Council in December, 2014. Plan & details click HERE
Georgia Examples:
PATH-400 Multi-Use Trail along SR-400 Right of Way
SR-166 in Carrollton
US 278 west of Rockmart
US Federal Highway References:
I-70 in Colorado, west of Denver
Austin, Texas: Building a bike/ped path as part of the MOPAC highway project. They justified using federal CMAQ funds for it by showing that the completion of the missing link in the bikeway system would reduce congestion on the highway, allowing them to delay or eliminate the need for an additional lane on the highway, which would be way more expensive.
http://austintexas.gov/mopac-bicycle-and-pedestrian-bridge
http://www.mopacexpress.com/enhancements/bike-pedestrian.php
US-36 between Boulder and Denver:
After lengthy process, the final EIS included addition of a separated bikeway running along the entire 18 mile corridor.
News article here
Colorado DOT Official Bikeway Construction Website click here
Approved Environmental Impact Statement click here
US-50 Interchange, Sacramento, California
Constructed a continuous bicycle and pedestrian pathway separated from vehicular traffic with grade separated undercrossings at the freeway ramps.
Think of having something like this for the Abernathy / SR-400 Interchange, on the underpass of SR-400. It is proposed that interchange become a “Diverging Diamond”, similar to what is on the Ashford-Dunwoody bridge over I-285.
For the news article, click here
TV coverage of ribbon cutting, click here
Why do we want a separated |
received only an obscure warning. Merb now raises an error when you attempt to override a non-overridable method in your controller. If you want to override something anyway, call override! :your_method before doing so.
merb -i was silently failing for users who did not have webrat installed. We now print a warning and allow merb -i to load. Webrat is required for some advanced features that allow you to emulate the browser in the console.
An issue with numeric routes (ticket 1036) is now resolved.
An issue with cookies (ticket 1022) is now resolved.
In case people were wondering, we are working on 1.0.x in parallel with 1.1. The 1.0.x will continue to provide bugfixes for the 1.0 release, while 1.1 will add additional features in the march toward 2.0. You can get the nightlies of both the latest 1.0.x release and the 1.1 release at the edge.merbivore.com gem server.The Philippine National Police on Monday stunned the parents of Reynaldo “Kulot” de Guzman by announcing that the body in the coffin at the mortuary in their village was not that of their son.
“Based on the results obtained the source of the DNA profile obtained from the male [corpse, it] cannot be the biological offspring of Eduardo Gabriel and Nina de Guzman,” PNP Deputy Director General for Operations Fernando Mendez told reporters.
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Insp. Lorna Santos, chief of the PNP DNA Laboratory, said the result of the DNA test was “99.9 percent accurate.”
Mendez said the PNP tried to reach the De Guzmans but “apparently the numbers that they gave [had been] changed or could not be contacted.”
‘Missing person’
For the PNP, he said, De Guzman is now technically a “missing” person.
He said the PNP would continue to investigate the boy’s case.
De Guzman, 14, was the last known companion of 19-year-old Carl Angelo Arnaiz, who was killed by police in an supposed exchange of gunfire after a taxi robbery in Caloocan City last month.
The body supposedly of De Guzman was found with 26 stab wounds in a creek in Gapan City, Nueva Ecija province, last week.
Gabriel, who traveled to Gapan to bring home the body of his son, said on Monday he could not believe the PNP announcement about the DNA test.
He demanded another test.
Public Attorney’s Office (PAO) chief Persida Rueda-Acosta said the positive identification of the body by the parents outweighed the PNP findings.
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Acosta said somebody was trying to mar the investigation of the boy’s killing.
‘Whose body is it?’
Mendez said the PNP had no idea whose body was found in the Gapan creek.
Quoting the Nueva Ecija police, he said there was no missing person on record in the province.
Contrary to that claim, three people were reported missing in Nueva Ecija before the boy’s body was found: Jayson Flores, 25, of Santa Rita, Cabiao town; Joyland Lucero, 38, of San Antonio town, and Shibani Paul Garcia, a Grade 11 student from Cabanatuan City.
Flores has been missing since Sept. 5. Both Lucero and Garcia have been missing since Sept. 4.
Santos said the PNP crime laboratory in Nueva Ecija requested the DNA test.
She said the boy’s parents gave a sample through a cheek swab.
The police also took a sample from the corpse, she said.
Santos described the sample taken from the body as “good.”
She said the PNP leadership directed the crime laboratory to expedite the test. She added that the PNP had state-of-the-art technology in DNA testing.
Santos said she was aware that the public was skeptical about the result of the DNA test, but that she stood by its integrity.
To dispel any doubts, she suggested tests by other parties.
Supt. Peter Madria, Gapan police chief, confirmed that it was he who requested the DNA test.
“Yes, I made the request because that was the standard operating procedure. But if I am not entitled to the results of the test, that would be OK,” Madria said.
He said he requested the test on Sept. 6, when the boy’s parents claimed the body.
Chief Supt. Amador Corpus, Central Luzon Police director, said the crime laboratory took samples from the body to help in the investigation and because the surnames of the parents were different from the boy’s.
The boy took the surname of his grandmother.
Physical profiling
The forensic expert of the PAO said on Monday his office would conduct physical profiling on the body that was fished out of a creek in Nueva Ecija.
Dr. Erwin Erfe, PAO forensic laboratory director, said he stood by the parents’ claim that the boy was their son.
In a phone interview with Inquirer, Erfe said the DNA test result may not be “conclusive,” as several factors could affect tests.
“Factors include sample collection from the subject and the transport, as well as the processing in the laboratory itself,” he said. “You also have to consider the interpretation [of their experts].”
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MOST READThe multi-dimensional world of Nhagardia is quickly becoming paralyzed by the evil lord Grimnoth’s terrifying plague of darkness. As Prince of Alonia, you now have 100 days to keep the world from being cast into eternal despair!
But is 100 days enough? After all, in addition to confronting Grimnoth’s evil forces, you’ll have to unlock the many mysteries behind his power. And you’ll need to overcome the myriad obstacles that dot each realm!
Defeat a menacing band of traitors intent on conquering your kingdom; journey beneath the ocean to a vast underwater land; venture into the core of the world to find hidden secrets; fly to the majestic kingdom of the sky and experience the magic and wonder of the enchanted forest.
Your actions will determine the fate of Nhagardia as you journey through Challenge of the Five Realms, an original fantasy role-playing adventure from gaming hall-of-famer Marc Miller.Rep. Sanford says people at his town hall were local and passionate, not “artificial crowd” https://t.co/ylK2ewgMTh https://t.co/i4mmx2OFQj — CNN (@CNN) February 22, 2017
Republican congressman Mark Sanford is one of many legislators who’s faced off with angry constituents at town halls recently, and this afternoon he pushed back against the suggestion that professional protesters are crashing the proceedings.
Sean Spicer said today that some of these rowdy town halls are a hybrid of real people with real concerns and manufactured anger. President Trump weighed in on the rowdy town halls this week too.
Sanford said on CNN late this afternoon that he wasn’t aware of anybody coming in from outside the state, instead that he saw a lot of local people who were just passionate about their beliefs.
“This wasn’t an artificial crowd, it wasn’t manufactured,” he said. “It was real people with real concerns.”
Watch above, via CNN.
[image via screengrab]
— —
Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comNetflix is warning Australian users that they could soon face delays seeing new shows because classification of the content is taking too long.
Global public policy manager Josh Korn has called on the federal government to allow streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) providers to self-classify content, similar to schemes used by traditional broadcasters and the games industry.
“As Netflix increases its investments in content, more and more titles will need to be given an Australian classification,” Korn said.
“However, there are significant obstacles associated with classifying large volumes of content.
“Processing delays could result in content being premiered later in Australia than in other Netflix markets.”
Broadcasters – traditionally one of the largest distributors of first-run content – employ in-house content assessors to classify shows according to Australian standards.
The games industry, meanwhile, can use an “approved classification tool” developed in collaboration with the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC). The survey-like tool can be used to quickly classify games for digital release, and trials showed it substantially quickened the pace of classification.
“There is currently no capacity for SVOD providers to self-classify the content supplied to their customers,” Korn said.
“Classification costs for the SVOD industry will continue to increase as the range of online content choices for Australian consumers continues to expand.
“Netflix adds thousands of hours to its Australian catalogue each month. Many of these titles, including Netflix original content, have never been shown in Australia and need to be given an Australian classification and labelled with appropriate consumer advisories.”
Netflix wants to see a “technology-neutral” approach to content classification adopted in Australia, addressing what it sees as a “regulatory gap” that could stifle the rapid growth of the SVOD sector.
It is backing a draft proposal by the government to consolidate all classification functions in Australia under a single regulator - the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
But while the current Classification Board agrees that the present system “has been slow to keep pace with technology”, it is against the prospect of being folded into the ACMA.
It claims ACMA assessors lack the breadth of skill that would be required to assume full responsibility for classification functions. The Board argues instead that it should be expanded.
The release of content simultaneously on multiple platforms and in multiple territories has grown in importance in recent years as staggered worldwide release dates are circumvented by internet users.France slays China and advances to next round
The third of the matches in the Overwatch World Cup playoffs featured a matchup between the mix team of China and ex-Rogue legends France. Though China came out strong on Nepal, France came back strong and took a convincing 3-1.
Map 1: Nepal
aKm's legendary Soldier made its return, shredding through China's line. leave's Tracer just didn't have the effect it needed to. SoOn's Junkrat popped off, significantly outclassing his Chinese counterpart Eileen, and earning France an easy 100-0.
aKm rolled out on a Pharah, supported by uNKOE's Mercy. France took an easy first point capture. China made a retake on the back of strong Genji play from Eileen. France then forced a point flip, but lost it back again to a quick Lucio pick from Leave. aKm's Pharah showed up again, but it's not enough, as China takes smart fights and continues their control to a point take.
Eileen brought his junkrat out again, to great success, making a significant impact and pressuring France into allowing a Chinese point take. China maintained their strong DPS play, with significant support in the form of zhufanjun's Zenyatta damage. France forced a retake after an extended fight, after allowing China build up to 99-0. With their significant ultimate bank built up, France maintained control of the point for a time, but China, having built up an ultimate bank of their own, took the point back convincingly and take the map for a series advantage of 1-0.
Result: 2-1 China
Map 2: Numbani
Eileen's Genji decimated SoOn right out of spawn, delaying France's attack immediately. Picks from China continued to keep France at bay, until finally they were overwhelmed off of France's strong zoning play. In the payload stage, aKm's soldier continued to pressure China into conceding the second point, with a significant time bank of just under 4 minutes left. A strong fight from China forced France off the point, and China continued their defense with intelligent support and tank play. After going down to under two minutes left, France took a strong fight, with help from aKm's McCree switch and KnOxXx's Orisa switch, finishing the map with 53 seconds to go.
China started their attack with zhufanjun on Ana and YuanFang2 on Mercy, but were delayed after leave went down early. China tried to move forward aggressively, but were foiled after YaoYao went down. After another failed fight, China were faced with France's six ultimates. China attempted to make a play off of Eileen's Nano Blade, but a clutch transcendence from winz quickly countered the katana. Despite this, strong teamplay from China allowed a point take. France took some time to spawn camp China, burning some of China's precious time bank. France played a delay game in the middle of the streets phase, but it was ultimately ineffectual, despite strong McCree play after aKm switches off his soldier. leave went off again, and China took the second point with just under three minutes. China continued their aggression, pushing nearly to the end and forcing France to take a fight. France utilized their spawn advantage to stall the capture and force China back. A clutch D.Va bomb from NiCO took out YuanFang2's Mercy, and France took the opportunity to wipe China again. With under 30 seconds left, china makes their final push, clearing out France, but with the payload drifted back, it was an uphill battle. China captured the point in overtime, thanking their lucky stars that France did not have more than a minute left.
For their second attack, China went again with an Ana-Mercy support duo, seeming to be banking on Eileen's Genji blade again. Despite building up a blade, Eileen was not able to use it, and with under 20 seconds left, China was not able to coagulate a push, and walk away with zero percent. France chose to use a Zenyatta-Mercy on their attack, with aKm on Soldier and SoOn on Tracer. An early pick on Winston looked like it would be the point for France, but it was SoOn's sneaky back cap that took the point under China's Nose, giving France the map.
Result: 4-3 France
Map 3: Hanamura
France utilized an Orisa and McCree on Defense, up against Eileen's Junkrat and leave's Widowmaker. KnOxXx's Orisa served its purpose early, keeping Widowmaker ineffective and allowing aKm's McCree play to be fully effective. After an acceptable French defense, Time got a devastating D.Va bomb and China took point 1, with about 5 minutes to take point 2. With Eileen's headline Genji play and leave's consistent Tracer play, China effectively wiped France, but France again used their spawn advantage to stall the point and force China back. China repeatedly attempted to clear out France, but their strong spawn management and consistent defensive DPS play allowed them to deny China any percentage on the second point.
France rolled out with aKm on McCree, but he was trapped and blown sky-high by Eileen on Junkrat. He immediately switched to Pharah, and helped his team quickly take point 1, leaving them 6 minutes and 30 seconds to take one tick on point 2. With a switch from aKm to soldier, China was forced to use all of their ultimates to defend against France's relentless aggression. With both Mercy and Zenyatta ultimates available, France applied pressure to China through key picks, and take the point and the map with help from a critical aKm Tactical Visor.
Result: 2-1 France
Map 4: Junkertown
Frances utilizes a Junkrat/Widowmaker defense, but were overwhelmed early on by China's unconventional single support comp, with zhufanjun playing Bastion instead of his usual support. After a quick take of point 1, China continued the battle boat strategy through point 2, rolling over France despite aKm switching back to his soldier. France continues to fall down at the might of the support player on Bastion, taking the final point with just under 4 minutes left.
China set up on defense, with zhufanjun refusing to play support, instead playing a Torbjorn. However, his Omnic counterpart SoOn on Bastion quickly shredded trough YaoYao's Orisa, and allowed aKm to run free on his Widowmaker. With zhufanjun finally conceding to switch to Zenyatta, Eileen switched to Bastion and, aided by YaoYao's Reinhardt, battened down the hatches and stopped France in their tracks. France continued to throw themselves into China's meat grinder, and eventually managed to capture point 2, leaving themselves just 1 minute and 30 seconds to take point 3. Tenacious play from France, especially NiCO's Genji, allowed France to finish the map in overtime.
With just a minute to attack, France took the risk of playing with aKm on the Bastion, this time with KnOxXx on Reinhardt. With additional barrier support from NiCO on Orisa, they take point 1, and brute force their way through point 2, dominating China's bastion/reinhardt by having more barriers available. They manage to take point 2 in a heroic push, With incredible ultimate management and immaculate team play, France pushed all three points in one of the most incredible pushes in recent competitive Overwatch history.
China began their attack with nearly five minutes left, and manage to clear rogue, who set up as close as possible to China's spawn in order to take a second fight. Bastion and Orisa again showed up on both sides, but it was leave on Tracer that provided massive damage, and carried China to a point one capture, with three minutes left in their time bank. France managed to stop China in the middle of point 2, forcing China to switched to a Junkrat/Winston comp with Time playing D.Va. leave again took charge, and danced in and around team France, laying down a hail of damage and allowing China to capture point 2 and penetrate into point 3. With overtime looming, France forces a decisive fight and deny China their push, taking the map and the series.
Result: 6-5 FranceMorning Spoilers If there’s news about upcoming movies and television you’re not supposed to know, you’ll find it in here.
A producer for The Wolverine explains precisely why Logan ends up in Japan. Sam Raimi talks about the relationship between Oz the Great and Powerful and previous Wizard of Oz stories. One of cinema's greatest batshit insane directors wants to bring Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan back to the screen. Plus a bunch of new photos for upcoming superhero movies!
It's all spoilers from here on out!
Top image from Oz the Great and Powerful.
Iron Man 3
Star Robert Downey, Jr. discusses a sequence from the movie and what returning costar Don Cheadle brings to the part of James Rhodes, otherwise known as War Machine:
We've just been talking about one sequence –- the top-secret name is the Boot/Glove Sequence, I can tell you that, just between you and me -– it's where Tony only has one gauntlet and one boot and he has to escape multiple captors. It's really fun, dude. We're taking everything from his first gauntlet test in the first movie up through the most extreme stuff we thought up for Iron Man 2 and The Avengers and pulling on all of it and making this one big, extended challenge of physics... Rhodey is much more in the dead center of things. He's much more dynamic. We've made this decision that while Tony is a technical guy, he's not really a trained guy. There's a lot of fun to be had with Don because he's really good with hardware and he's a martial artist, so it's been really fun exploiting this possibility of Tony having moments like the one in Avengers, like the one with Cap where he decides, "Oh screw it, he probably knows what he's doing." So there's a lot of that and a lot more fun and a lot more depth to Rhodey this time around.
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[EW]
Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and Iron Man 3 writer-director Shane Black discuss with Empire Magazine the new character Maya Hansen, as played by The Town's Rebecca Hall:
Feige: Maya is a scientist who makes a pretty astounding discovery that leads her to places - and some are healthier than others. It's not dissimilar to what Tony's been through, and it's a great parallel. Black: It's one thing we loved about the comic book, which was that it's someone Tony meets in one capacity at one point in his life, and he proves to be touched by that encounter. We needed a snappy and exciting actor to play the part, and not make it this 'female scientist who takes off her glasses and suddenly she's beautiful!' There's a certain element about her being the female Robert Downey Jr in a way.
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[Comic Book Movie]
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
While the big casting news is that Marc Webb is apparently trying to build a Sinister Six composed entirely of stars of the 2004 Best Picture Nominees — next up, expect to see Thomas Haden Church back as Sandman, plus Leonardo DiCaprio as Mysterio, Johnny Depp as Morbius, and Clint Eastwood as Vulture, obviously — there are also reports of another new cast member. British actress Felicity Jones, who is probably best known in the US for her main role in the 2011 romantic drama Like Crazy, is reportedly in negotiations for an undisclosed role. [Heat Vision]
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X-Men: Days of Future Past
Returning director Bryan Singer discusses what to expect from the First Class followup:
"It's epic. I don't think people realize how big this movie's going to be. We get to bring both casts together. We've cracked it in a way that it makes sense. I had a two-hour conversation with James Cameron about time travel, string theory, multiverses and all that. You have to create your rules and stick wtih them. That's why Terminator and Back To The Future work so well. And there are certain mechanisms in X-Men, certain powers, perceptions and characters, that make this possible. It has a lot of aspects of the comic. The actual comic of Days Of Future Past had a whole ton of stuff going on, so it's like any of these things; you have to distill it. But I think the fans will be pleased that some of the most exciting parts of Days Of Future Past are going to be connected to this movie."
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He also reveals that the film will acknowledge the continuity of all previous X-Men movies, including The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, even if no one particularly required that of him:
I'm taking into account every movie – I'm not just grabbing my first two movies and First Class and smashing them together. I'm taking into account the entire universe as it's been laid out so far on the screen, and really respecting it and trying to work with that. People took things in various directions, so there's some clean-up. But ultimately I'm not just ignoring them either."
[Empire Online]
The Wolverine
Producer Hutch Parker offers the most detailed explanation yet as to just why Wolverine finds himself in Japan, and he also confirms that the World War II prison camp seen in set photos is part of a flashback sequence:
We pick up Logan in a very isolated state, full of self-loathing. He is sought out by a young Asian woman for reasons he doesn't fully understand, who is asking him to follow her to Japan where he is meant to reconnect with someone he spent prison-time with in Nagasaki. And the legacy of that experience - effectively Logan saved him - is that this man is on his deathbed, and is looking to give him a gift, to thank him for the life he's had. But this gift draws Logan into a very complex and very unexpected world within both contemporary Japan, and to some degree the feudal history of Japan. The quality of this story is that it takes Logan on such a challenging personal journey. He's so in isolation, so out of his element. It's a much more powerful distillation of his character than you've seen before. It's why people have always love this particular story.
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[Comic Book Movie]
A bunch of new promo photos — albeit not always super high quality — have surfaced for various superhero movies. Let's run through them, starting with The Wolverine. [/Film]
Thor: The Dark World
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Next up, the Thor sequel. [/Film]
Man of Steel
And now onto Zack Snyder's Superman movie. [/Film]
Kick-Ass 2
Finally, a couple photos from the Kick-Ass followup. [/Film]
Oz the Great and Powerful
Spider-Man director Sam Raimi explains how his Wizard of Oz prequel connects both to the 1939 film and L. Frank Baum's original books:
"I think The Wizard Of Oz is such a great film and I would never attempt to [remake that]. You could call [Oz] a prequel, that would be accurate - but I didn't have to re-invent any of that fantastic history. Mitchell [Kapner, screenwriter] took about 40 per cent of the events that were sprinkled here and there about Oz from Baum's books and really created the other 60 per cent himself out of his imagination, because there just wasn't enough there. I gave him notes, I brought aboard a second writer to help fill out some other areas of the story, my brother did a little work on the script, and all the actors contributed. It really was a very big collaboration."
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[Total Film]
Here's a teaser for the movie's upcoming Super Bowl ad. Yes, it's a commercial for a commercial. [Coming Soon]
The Legend of Conan
As a general rule, I try to avoid stories where it's just some random, unconnected person saying they would like to be involved in a project. But when it's Paul Verhoeven saying he wants to reteam with his Total Recall star Arnold Schwarzenegger to make a new Conan the Barbarian movie, well... yeah, exceptions must be made:
"If they asked me, I'd certainly love to — let's put it that way. But I don't know what the script is. I don't know what Arnold wants. I'm a big fan in fact of Conan. That's a great movie and I found that the composer, Basil Poledouris, basically inspired many of my movies [the soundtracks] like Flesh and Blood, RoboCop, Starship Troopers and Total Recall. The score of Conan is great. The style of editing that Milius used was very beautiful, and Arnold does a great job. He was really the perfect choice."
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For what it's worth, the creative team has said they want an A-list director to helm Schwarzenegger's return to one of his more iconic characters. Verhoeven probably doesn't qualify as A-list these days, but he's got the kind of style and cachet that distinguishes him from a lot of other likely contenders. [IGN]
Person of Interest
[gallery 5979414]Here are some promo photos for this Thursday's episode, "Dead Reckoning." [SpoilerTV]
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Once Upon a Time
Here's the description for episode fourteen, "Manhattan", which airs February 17:
WHILE MR. GOLD GOES IN SEARCH OF SON BAE IN NEW YORK, CORA ATTEMPTS TO TRACK DOWN ONE OF RUMPLESTILTSKIN'S MOST TREASURED POSSESSIONS, ON ABC'S "ONCE UPON A TIME" – While Mr. Gold, Emma and Henry go in search of Gold's son Bae in New York, Cora, Regina and Hook attempt to track down one of Rumplestiltskin's most treasured possessions. Meanwhile, in the fairytale land that was, Rumplestiltskin realizes his destiny while fighting in the Ogres War.
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Touch
Here's a promo for season two.
Here are some promo photos for episode three, "Enemy of My Enemy." [SpoilerTV]
Supernatural
Here are two promos for tomorrow night's episode, "As Time Goes By."
Arrow
Here's a pair of promos for this Wednesday's episode, "Vertigo."
The Vampire Diaries
Here are some promo photos for this Thursday's episode, "A View to a Kill." [SpoilerTV]
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Being Human (UK)
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Here's a cast photo of the series five cast. [SpoilerTV]
Here's an extended promo for the fifth series premiere, "The Trinity."
Being Human (US)
Star vampire Sam Witwer discusses what changes to expect both off-camera and on-camera in season three:
Anna Fricke is now our sole showrunner. The first two seasons, it was her and her husband Jeremy Carver, so she is really staking her claim and is doing a version of the show that, frankly, I have been waiting to do since I read the pilot. Jeremy helped write the first five or six scripts, then went over to Supernatural [where he is showrunner]. Even though there is this flu killing vampires, it still seems lighter than Aidan's brutal storyline last year.
It was really dark. My character was dealing exclusively with the vampires and was kind of removed from the roommate situation. This season, if Aidan isn't dealing with the roommates, he's with some other very interesting human beings. And I emphasize that they are humans, because that is when my character is at his best. He's scarier because we know who he is and how he can hurt people, he's sadder because he wants to be like them, and he's more interesting because he's living this double life. You get to see all of that this season. He's introduced into the general population but how can he just turn off the killer part in him? He's a blood addict and a trained killer!
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[TV Guide]
Additional reporting by Amanda Yesilbas and Charlie Jane Anders.When Donald Trump announced he was running for president on June 16, the idea seemed faintly ridiculous. The Washington Post said that he faced “an uphill battle to be taken seriously by his rivals, political watchers and the media.” The New York Times described it as an “improbable quest for the Republican nomination.” He was polling at less than 3 percent.
A month later, Trump was at 15 percent. Despite a stream of what would seem like embarrassing gaffes for most candidates, he is now over 27 percent in the RealClearPolitics averages—well ahead of anyone else. The big loser seemed to be the former front-runner, Jeb Bush, who is now mired in the single digits.
How did Trump manage this feat? Will we look back at this next year as just a reality TV episode gone wrong? Or is this a real disruption in American politics with a large block of disaffected voters having found their oracle? We don’t pretend to be able to predict the future, but we think that a lot of the press coverage of Trump misreads who is supporting him and what it means.
Related: Ted Cruz and the Hunt for Trump Supporters
First, Trump’s support is not particularly ideological. In recent YouGov polls, 20 percent of his supporters describe themselves as “liberal” or “moderate,” with 65 percent saying they are “conservative” and only 13 percent labeling themselves as “very conservative.” Less than a third of his supporters say they are involved with the Tea Party movement. Their views put them on the right side of the American electorate, but they cover the Republican mainstream.
In terms of demographics, Trump’s supporters are a bit older, less educated and earn less than the average Republican. Slightly over half are women. About half are between 45 and 64 years of age, with another 34 percent over 65 years old and less than 2 percent younger than 30. One half of his voters have a high school education or less, compared to 19 percent with a college or post-graduate degree. Slightly over a third of his supporters earn less than $50,000 per year, while 11 percent earn over $100,000 per year. Definitely not country club Republicans, but not terribly unusual either.
On Aug.18-20, we re-contacted 1,418 people who had taken YouGov surveys between May 9 and June 9 of this year and asked them who they were supporting for president. None of our surveys in May and early June offered Trump as an option for the Republican nominee. Of the individuals in our sample, 608— or 43 percent—identified themselves as Republicans or leaning toward the Republican Party. Unlike most polls, which interview people only once, we can trace how these Republicans have changed their allegiances over the past three months.
While the attention devoted to Trump has taken the exclamation point off of Jeb!, we find that Trump peeled off less support from Bush than from any other candidate. Overall, Trump has drawn disproportionate support from the bottom dozen or so Republican candidates, but he has taken a good deal of support from nearly everyone except Bush.
Pre-Trump, the top five candidates were Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker, capturing together the support of about 60 percent of Republican primary voters. Since regular Republicans are more likely to vote in primaries and attend caucuses than are leaners, we break the 608 Republican respondents into 471 regular and 137 leaning Republicans.
Looking at the numbers pre and post Trump’s announcement reveals that among May’s top five candidates, Paul, Walker and Bush lost 18, 17 and 11 percent, respectively, of their supporters to Trump, while Rubio lost 21 percent and Cruz an astonishing 47 percent to Trump. Among “leaning” Republicans, all candidates (save Rand Paul) hemorrhaged more than 20 percent to Trump, ranging from Walker’s 34 percent to Cruz’s 25 percent loss. Overall, among the top five back in May, Bush was hurt the least and Cruz the most, though all lost votes in the double digits to Trump.
Among the candidates in May who weren’t in the top five, Trump’s entry cost them dearly among regular Republicans. Only one lost less than 20 percent of his support to Trump—Rick Santorum—and he lost 17 percent. John Kasich, Bobby Jindal and Ben Carson lost roughly a quarter of their support to Trump, while Huckabee and Fiorina lost over a third to Trump.
Chris Christie and Rick Perry lost over 60 percent of their regular Republicans, dropping Christie from over 5 percent to less than 3 percent and Perry from about 3 percent to about half that.
Overall, Trump’s support came about equally from the top five candidates (42 percent) and the second-tier candidates (38 percent), with the remaining 20 percent coming from those with “no preference” or “don’t know” responses prior to June 2015. Among those most likely to vote in the Republican nomination process, Trump took 40 percent from the leading candidates and 47 percent from the other 14 candidates, with the remaining 13 percent coming from those uncommitted before Trump.
The Donald appears to have a special appeal to Texans: he took the highest proportion of support from Ted Cruz, then from Rick Perry, which may explain their non-passive reactions to Trump’s candidacy. Cruz publicly extols Trump, praises his followers, and organized a joint appearance with him on Capitol Hill. In Perry’s case, the response was spirited hostility (“What Mr. Trump is offering,” the former Texas governor said, “is not conservatism, it is Trumpism—a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense.”)
If the Trump campaign were to end, would his votes go back to the candidates from whence they came? We also asked people who their second choice for the nomination was, and the results for Trump voters are somewhat surprising. Only three candidates in the large Republican field get into double digits and just barely, at that. Ben Carson is the second choice for 13 percent of Trump backers, and Carly Fiorina is the choice of 10 percent. Jeb Bush is also the second choice of 10 percent of Trump voters—about the same proportion that abandoned him for Trump. After these three candidates, second choices are widely spread, with the exception of Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, Jindal, and Perry at roughly zero percent or within error variance of zero. Sen. Cruz, who lost the most support to Trump, is the second choice of only 9 percent of Trump supporters.
What do these results tell us about the Trump candidacy?
First, that most of his support comes from candidates already in the race and not from newly inspired voters. Second, his campaign drew from both the front-runners and the second-tier candidates and hurt Ted Cruz among the front-runners and Rick Perry among the second-tier candidates the most.
Third, his support comes from across the full range of Republican identifiers but is slightly higher among those who are less well educated, earn less than $50,000 annually and are slightly older.
Fourth, Tea Party respondents supported Trump at slightly lower levels than the totals for Cruz and Fiorina but higher than for the rest of the field.
Fifth, if his candidacy falters or he quits the race, no single candidate benefits in more than the low double digits, and those he hurt the most—Cruz and Perry—probably do not make up their losses, notwithstanding Cruz’s machinations.
David Brady is a professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Douglas Rivers is a professor of political science at Stanford and chief scientist at YouGov.
David W. Brady is a professor of political science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.Americans hate filing tax returns, but they love getting refunds. More than three in four taxpayers get refunds, and the average amount they get back is close to $3,000, according to IRS data. That means that for many Americans, their annual refund is the biggest single check they’ll get all year.
But if you’re among the millions expecting a payout from the IRS this spring, make no mistake: That money was yours all along. Getting a refund means you paid too much in taxes last year and the government is paying that money back — without interest. People who underpay, on the other hand, owe interest and possibly a fine as well.
Our handy refund calculator shows you how much you gave up by lending your money to the government interest-free. Play around with it and you’ll see that the answer depends heavily on what you would have done with that money if you’d had access to it over the past year.
Suppose, for example, that you’d put the money in a savings account instead. Interest rates right now are low — really low. If your refund is $3,000, the interest you could have accrued might have been enough to buy yourself a small cup of coffee. But suppose you’d invested the money instead. Last year was a good one for the stock market. If over the course of the year you |
't there, naturally we would approach slowly and carefully and see what other people were doing and filter through, but the traffic lights make us speed up to beat them.
But what about the maniacs? If we had no traffic control, what would happen?
You can't even legislate for maniacs, so why hobble the vast majority with "one size fits all" rules devised to catch the hypothetical deviant?
My solution is to remove the fatal flaw at the heart of the system - the original sin of priority, because once you've removed priority you've removed the need for traffic lights and the need for speed because we're in no rush any more.
Image caption Do traffic lights make congestion worse?
We're not rushing to beat that light, we're not stressed out waiting in a queue that's caused purely and simply by that red light.
Traffic volume can be a drama but volume plus control equals crisis. If you're leaving say, a pop concert in a car, the volume of traffic we can live with. What gets our goat is if we're sitting at a red light for no reason other than that it's red.
In Portishead near Bristol where I showed my video, The Case for a Traffic Lights Trial to the council, a trial began on 14 September 2000.
The lights were switched off at a junction where there had been excessive queues and within minutes of the lights being bagged over the queues disappeared.
That trial has gone permanent and the monitoring has shown that journey times fell by over half with no loss of safety.
Various organisations have put the cost of lost productivity to the UK economy as a result of congestion at £20bn so in my opinion traffic system reform is a rich source of painless spending cuts.
This is an edited version of Martin Cassini's Four Thought talk for BBC Radio 4. Hear the full programme on Wednesday, 16 May at 20:45 BST or download the podcast.
How close are we to a crash-proof car?You Don’t Learn to Speak Spanish even if You Are Doing Full Immersion Courses in Spain
Is This The Solution?
frank sellingsloh Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 12, 2016
I have this idea. It’s related to the never-ending struggle of learning a new language other than English. It can be frustrating at times because no matter how much money, time and effort you put into lessons, it all comes down to how fluently you can speak the language.
No matter how many lists of verbs and groups of words you have memorized, this doesn’t count for anything if you can’t use them in a sentence. And no matter how many different tenses, forms and rules you know by heart, you won’t be able to apply them if you never actually talk.
Before I go on listing the main problem that may come in the way of learning a new language, I should probably mention that this isn’t written from the point of view of a frustrated individual that is stuck in his Japanese studies. I actually do speak multiple languages so I must have done something right to overcome these struggles.
What’s holding you back from improving your Spanish skills
My name is Frank Sellingsloh and I am the head of a language school in Tenerife. Before you click away, I am not here to promote my business and claim that the key to learning a language lies in taking my classes.
I would rather put some inside views out there that I have collected over the years. And when I say years, I mean since 2004. That’s when I became director of the Spanish language school here in the North of Tenerife, the biggest of the Canarian Islands.
After all, the most basic rule to learning a new language is actually using it. But of course, if you come to a new country and you’re surrounded by new people, you tend to forget about that rule as you are trying to make friends and present yourself in the best way possible, which won’t happen by you mumbling some Spanish words in the hope of getting your point across in a conversation. So what do you do? You switch back to English, the language everybody knows best.
Even though we make sure to only teach in small groups or even individually to get the best results out of the lessons, it seems as if most of our students can’t wait to switch back to speaking English or their mother tongue once the classes end. Which is sad, because that’s what’s holding them back from improving their Spanish skills.
Here’s what’s so sad about it: Once that level of speaking Spanish freely is reached, you won’t think twice about having a conversation in Spanish instead of English — you’ll even prefer it! You will go out of your way to prove your Spanish skills to yourself and those around you and by doing that, you will learn even more.
Once you reach that stage of being able to speak Spanish freely without struggling to find the right words, the whole project will automatically take care of itself and you will constantly improve your skills without even thinking about it.
So if only you could bear those difficult first few weeks of awkwardly conversing in a new language, then all your problems with that language would basically solve themselves as you would become increasingly fluent.
Like I’ve said, this is what happens to almost all of our students who are highly motivated in the classes and come here with the best of intentions to learn Spanish. If only we could make them understand that continuously speaking the language for a certain period of time will help them memorize it for good!
The Concept of a Workation gave me this strange idea
Last year, I opened up a coworking space for digital nomads here in Tenerife. Now we have digital nomads and remote workers from all over the world coming to our workspace all year round.
By meeting all those digital nomads and entrepreneurs in the last year, I was introduced to this new thing called Workation. A workation is a trip to one of the nicest spots you can find on this earth; a place where you’d normally only go to spend your vacation — but instead of going on vacation, you’re going on a WORKation which is basically a combination of working and vacationing.
It is hoped that because of the new inspiring environment and the like-minded people you’ll be around, you will get a ton of work done in that period of time because the atmosphere those circumstances create will call for much higher productivity.
In short, the idea of a workation is to have a group of like-minded people with similar goals come together in a beautiful and motivating place to reach those goals fast. What a brilliant idea, isn’t it?
It turns out that due to the location of our coworking space, we are an ideal host for such a workation, and we’ve helped organize plenty of them in the past. Seeing the impressive results that the participants were achieving right next to the halls of our language school gave me this idea…
The Spanish Bootcamp
What if I took the concept of a Workation and applied it to the need to learn a new language quickly and efficiently? I’ve given this plenty of thought and this is the idea that I’ve come up with:
Have 10 students and 2 teachers move into a villa together for a period of 8 weeks. Have them meet on the terrace or in the living room for Spanish lessons 10 hours per day, 6 days a week.
Sounds like a lot, I know, but hear me out. Make sure that the only language being spoken in that villa is Spanish at all times. Make it a rule. If someone is to break that rule repeatedly, they have to leave. Again, this may seem excessive, but trust me when I say that people will always switch to a language they know better when they have the slightest chance to do so.
I’ve seen it one too many times in my language school. It’s what keeps them from achieving the results that they aim for. Everyone who chooses to learn a new language wants to speak it fluently eventually, but only few people get to that point — and most certainly only if they are left with no other choice but to communicate with the people around them in that language.
This is the key reason behind this idea. I am pretty sure that anybody who was to move into that villa I mentioned above would walk out of it after 8 weeks speaking Spanish. Actually, I am so positive about it that I started a project around it. I want to see if something like this could work. I want to know what other language institutions think about this idea and if there are persons out there interested in such a thing.
The name of this project is “Spanish Bootcamp” and if it seems as if it can work, then I will make it happen in Tenerife.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your opinion about the whole thing. Whether you are working in the field of teaching languages or you’re interested in learning a language yourself, let me know if you think this could work.
Here’s the link: http://www.spanishbootcamp.net/
With sunny greetings from Tenerife,
Frank.This article gives some statistics about the atmosphere of hate in the Muslim world, and it illustrates the difficulty we face in disentangling the Islamic religion from Islamic culture.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church is graciously optimistic about the religion of Islam, but in the inter faith section it doesn’t speak of the culture of the Islamic world.
Because the Koran addresses every aspect of life with legalistic precision it becomes very difficult to extricate the “religion of peace” from the “culture of hate.”
Last Sunday at Mass I spoke about Islam and explained how the Koran is believed to be a literal, word for word dictation from the angel Gabriel to Mohammad and how this differs from the Catholic understanding of the Bible. The Bible is the witness to God’s primary revelation: Jesus Christ. It is not a rule book dictated to a prophet by an angel.
Afterwards a bright spark–a young convert girl said, “But what about the Ten Commandments?” She had her head in gear and understood that the Ten Commandments (and by extension the whole Mosaic law) is presented as a Divinely dictated law code for humanity. Wasn’t this like the Koran?
Yes and no. The Mosaic Law does come across as a divinely dictated law code, and if so, then Mohammad is like Moses. However, the New Testament rightly teaches that the old law has been fulfilled in Christ and is therefore no longer strictly in effect. What we conclude is that the basic principles expressed in the Ten Commandments provide the basis from which we develop a Christian code of conduct.
This is very, very different from a law code dictated to a prophet of an Arabian tribe in the seventh century which fundamentalist Muslims then apply to all people at all times.
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Image via BingI tend to avoid reading message boards, social media and Reddit as much as I can mostly because they are incredibly addicting and I end up wasting tons of time that is much better spent combing the parasites out of my hair. Over the last week or so I’ve fallen off the wagon and been noticing that there is a large number of ebike builders and buyers that are not using the right sized pack or BMS for their particular ebike builds. This article is dedicated to all of you people who are wondering why you just can’t seem to get the power & performance that you think you’re supposed to be getting out of your ebike and why that might be happening (spoiler alert: your pack is too small).
One of my pet peeves with the ebike industry is when they put a pack together with a BMS that allows more amps to be drawn from the pack than what the cells are really rated for. Let’s talk about 18650 ebike packs.
A standard 48v pack is a 13S pack which means there are 13 groups of cells in series that produce about 3.7v nominal. When the cells are fully charged that number is closer to 4.11v per cell grouping but I digress. A 52v pack is a 14S pack which has 14 groups of cells in series. These numbers have little or nothing to do with the amps that a pack can put out. I prefer the 14S packs because when they get run down they still produce a pretty high voltage so your motor doesn’t feel like it’s dying when the pack is nearly dead. This article will only talk about 14S 52v ebike packs because 90% of my packs are 14S.
What really matters for how many watts you can pull out of a pack is three things.
The type of cells How many cells are in each grouping What the BMS is rated at for continuous Amp draw
The amount of power you can get out of the pack is the lowest of these two things
(Cell Peak Amp Draw) x (pack P number) The P number is the Parallel number of cells in each cell grouping. The number of cells in a pack is the S (series) number times the P (Parallel) number.
BMS continuous draw rating (most frame packs / minicube packs are 25 Amps (em3ev) or 30 Amps (Lunacycle), larger soft triangle and frame packs can be 40Amps (em3ev) or 50Amps (Lunacycle)
This is where things get a little confusing. Let’s say you bought a Lunacycle 30Q mini cube that is 6Ah. The 6Ah is the total power capacity of the pack but has nothing to do with how much power you can draw at any one time. Instead, you have to look at the 30Q Peak Amp draw (15 Amps) x the pack P number (2P) which gives you a total of 30 Amps. Will the pack put out more than 30 Amps for short several second bursts? It can, but in doing so you are putting a huge stress on the cells and the BMS. Although the product description for this pack here says it can do 50 Amps burst that is not entirely true. You would be crazy to run a tiny 3lb 2P pack and expect it to put out that much power for more than a few seconds. I have run the 30Q 2P mini cube pretty successfully with both the BBS02 and the BBSHD drive unit, but I would never pair it with a 50 Amp BBSHD Ludicrous controller. If I did use a 30Q mini cube with a Ludicrous controller I’d never touch the throttle and instead would only use the middle to lower PAS levels which would assure that I would never pull more than about 1500 Watts of power (under 30 Amps).
Let’s talk shark packs for a minute, a 5P jumbo shark GA cell shark pack will be able to put out 40 Amps cont (8Amps x 5P) but the BMS is limited to 30 Amps continuous. Most frame packs are 4P so a PF frame pack will put out 40 Amps cont (10Amps x 4P) but again you’re going to be limited by the BMS. You can push the BMS on these packs up over 40 Amps for a few seconds (less than 10) but in my opinion, it’s a dangerous habit to get into. I don’t know of anyone who has successfully fit a BMS that is larger than 30 Amps continuous into any frame pack due to the size constraints of the cases.
One of my pet peeves is the PF 6ah and GA 7Ah Mighty Mini Cubes from Luna. These are tiny 3lb 2P packs with 30 Amp Continuous BMS’s. I would never release a battery like this because the continuous rating for the cells (16 for the GA 8Amps x 2P) (20 for the PF 10Amps x 2P) is much lower than the continuous rating of the BMS. This is one of the biggest Endless Sphere complaints about some Lunacycle packs, but to be fair these are currently the only two packs Lunacycle currently sells that the cell rating is far below the BMS rating. As long as you’re aware that the continuous rating for the cells on these packs is much lower than the BMS rating then you can use them accordingly and will probably not destroy them. If you throw either of the GA or PF cube and run them on an ebike at 30Amps continuous for 15 minutes straight then the packs are going to go into thermal shutdown mode. If you abuse these packs like that on a regular basis then there is no way you’re going to get a full 400 cycles out of them.
Power usage of the BBSxx series
Even on the highest PAS setting, the BBSxx drive units will only access about 50% of the peak power as long as you’re not on a steep hill. I find that the BBS02 will run consistently at around 750W with a 52T front ring on it which on my 26″ mountain bike will give me a steady speed of about 25mph without ever touching the throttle. Since the motor’s nominal rating is 750W that makes a lot of sense. The peak rating for this motor is about 1200-1300W depending on the battery voltage.
On the BBSHD when using the PAS level it rarely gets over 1000W if you’re riding on the level which is much lower than the 1500W that the BBSHD can run at all day long at full throttle. This means that the motor will pull about 20Amps continuous at the highest PAS level 9 as long as there is no hill. I find that with a big front chainring that will net me an average speed of about 30 mph using PAS alone, although with the throttle you can go a bit faster than that. While the BBS02 will overheat with full throttle for extended periods (several minutes at a time) the BBSHD can be run at full throttle at any temperature and any hill with relative impunity.
The Ludicrous controller is an animal of another color. If you’re running it at the 50 Amp setting from the Luna factory then the controller really peaks out at around 47Amps or so on full throttle. If you run the BBSHD at full throttle for extended time periods you will likely cause something in the drive unit to fail. If you use PAS only then you’re looking at about 30 Amps or so at the higher PAS levels if you’re going up a hill.
If you’re brave enough to run your Ludicrous controller at 60 Amps like I’ve been doing then all bets are off. With the highest PAS level you’re going to get closer to 35 Amps on the level and when you lean on the throttle it’s going to try to pull over 55 Amps out of the pack. Unless you’re using Lipos, with the Ludicrous you’re going to start stressing the BMS and cells of most ebike battery packs if you peg and hold the throttle down for extended periods of time.
What size pack should I get?
This is a hard question to answer. If you’re getting a Ludicrous BBSHD controller I would steer clear of the frame packs and opt for a large 7 or 8P triangle pack made out of high power cells (GA, PF, 25R or 30Q). I have to confess that I’m in love with the GA cells, but they only put out about 8 Amps continuous per cell without getting too hot for my comfort. If you’re running a 7P pack then that means you’re looking at 56 Amps peak continuous output which should be more than enough for most normal ebike builds.
If you’re running a very high power build or you want a very small pack then the only cell you should even consider is the 25R cells. These cells are rated for 22Amps continuous draw per cell, but Eric has tested them with a successful burst rate of 100Amps. I’m talking about the rates for a SINGLE cell, not a grouping of cells. If you want a 2P pack that will put out 44 Amps, the only 18650 cell out there that will do it reliably without getting stupid hot is the 25R.
What do I do if my pack is too small for my build
I often use my mini cube as a ‘spare tank’ sort of cell so I can get back to my car if my main battery runs out of juice. With the Ludicrous controllers when using the minicube you must be very careful to only use the lower PAS levels and not use the throttle at all. You will put the pack under extreme stress if you start trying to get 55 Amps out of it, and you’re going to kick yourself if you trash a $300 pack because you were a little too eager for more power when you should have been taking it easy.
The best time to pick the appropriate pack size for your build is to buy the right pack from the get-go for the build you have. If you have a pack that you want to share between several different builds then get the pack that will have the continuous power output for your most powerful ebike. I bought 4 shark pack mounting frames and throw then on a bunch of different ebikes I have. Although I only have one 30Amp Cont 52v GA shark pack, I use it on several different BBS02 and BBSHD builds. I never use the shark pack on the Ludicrous builds because I don’t want to destroy my $500 pack trying to pull twice the power out of it as what it is able to deliver. Most frame packs are 4P and the GA is an 8Amp cell meaning that it can put out 32Amps continuous pretty reliably. When you start pulling more than that out of the packs, even for a few seconds, the BMS and the cells are both going to heat up quick. It’s very hard to tell how hot your frame packs are because there is a big air space between the cells and the plastic case. I’ve taken apart my NCRb frame pack several times when the outside plastic was only about 10 degrees warmer than the outside air, but once the pack was apart the cells were literally too hot to hold for more than a few seconds (think hot potato). You really don’t want your cells to get this hot. I’m not a big fan of the NCRb cells and if you get a 4P shark pack with NCRb’s don’t expect to run it at more than 25 Amps continuous for several minutes without the pack getting hotter than I would feel comfortable with. In general, I’d avoid buying the NCRb or 26F packs and stick with the holy trinity of GA, PF and 30Q which are all really good cells with decent power density.
If you don’t know the continuous Amperage rating of a pack you own then contact the pack manufacturer to find out what it is.
You should not buy a battery pack and expect to use the Amperage range between the continuous and peak Amp range except in dire emergencies (like a bear is chasing you).
Get the right size pack for your build when you first buy the battery, when in doubt get the pack with the higher continuous Amperage rating, power is addicting and you might want to use that battery for a more powerful build in the future.
For pack power output multiply P rating of pack X cell continuous Amp rating (25R / 22Amps, 30Q / 15 Amps, PF / 10Amps, GA / 8Amps)
Know what your continuous output rating of the BMS is before you buy an ebike pack, make sure that the cells can put out what the BMS will allow to be pull for power.
Don’t get confused to think of peak power as something that you can easily pull from any pack for extended lengths of time. Peak power on a BMS is only what the cells can deliver and only for a few seconds.
Peak power on the controller, on the other hand, is what you want the continuous rating of your ebike pack to be able to provide.
Just think before you click the buy button, although frame packs look awful pretty, if you’re pulling more than 30 Amps continuous on your build then you should NOT be using a frame pack, get a large 50 Amp continuous 7P triangle or soft pack instead.
The smart consumer reads things like ‘peak power’ on his BMS and battery listings and pretty much ignores it. They do not build a setup that regularly pulls more than the continuous rating of the BMS on the ebike pack. I’m not kidding when I tell you that you will mess up your very expensive 18650 pack when you run your ebike over the continuous amp rating on a regular basis for extended periods. If you don’t abuse your packs they will last a very long time. Don’t be an ebike pack smacker.
Ride On.The popular view that Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are in a much better environmental shape than the rest of the world has been brought into question in a study publishing on March 28 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, by an international team lead by Steven L. Chown and Monash University scientists.
The study compared the position of Antarctic biodiversity and its management with that globally using the Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) Aichi targets. The Aichi targets are part of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, adopted under the CBD, to assess progress in halting global biodiversity loss. Yet they have never been applied to Antarctica and the Southern Ocean -- areas which together account for about 10% of the planet's surface.
The study found that the difference between the status of biodiversity in the Antarctic and the rest of the world was negligible.
"The results have been truly surprising," said lead author and Head of the School of Biological Sciences at Monash, Professor Steven Chown.
"While in some areas, such as invasive species management, the Antarctic region is doing relatively well, in others, such as protected area management and regulation of bioprospecting, it is lagging behind," he said. "Overall, the biodiversity and conservation management outlook for Antarctica and the Southern Ocean is no different to that for the rest of the planet."
"Despite our findings, there are great opportunities for positive action," said Monash co-author Professor Melodie McGeoch. "The agreements under the Antarctic Treaty System lend themselves to effective action, and nations have recently reinforced their desire to protect the region's biodiversity."
This latest analysis by scientists ensures that future assessments made under the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 will be truly global.
"It will also help inform global progress towards achieving the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals," Professor McGeoch said.Independent candidate TTV Dhinakaran won a crucial bypoll in Chennai's Dr. Radhakrishnan Nagar (RK Nagar), the constituency where J Jayalalithaa won her last two elections.
Dhinakaran crushed the AIADMK, which is led by Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami and his deputy, O Panneerselvam, and the DMK. His margin of victory - in tens of thousands of votes - will embarrass AIADMK presidium chairman Madhusudhanan and the DMK's Marudhu Ganesh
There was much at stake in the RK Nagar by-election: a legacy, prestige, political momentum, and of course, bragging rights. Dhinakaran will claim all of it.
The RK Nagar bypoll result, among the most-awaited of the year, should have been out as early as April. But the Election Commission cancelled it after uncovering evidence of corruption and bribery. Round Two seems to be been no different, as an India Today TV investigation found out.
Here are the highlights on TTV's famous win in RK Nagar.
RK NAGAR BY-ELECTION RESULT: THE LATEST | WATCH LIVE TV
7.08 PM: Floor test will reveal the strength of sleeper cells, says Dinakaran.
6: 56 PM: Defeat in RK Nagar is not a loss for the DMK, but a "Himalayan loss" for the Election Commission, tweets MK Stalin. Everyone should asks themselves whether giving out cash helps democracy, he adds.
6:46 PM: TTV Dhinakaran now has an official letter from the returning officer, which confirms his election as MLA. He told reporters he would fight to get the AIADMK's two leaves symbol. He warned police to behave properly (he believes they sided with the ruling party). And he told India Today he would speak to us tomorrow.
6:21 PM: You can read our full report on Dhinakaran's win here.
5:17 PM: We're calling it now. TTV Dhinakaran is the new MLA from RK Nagar, J Jayalalithaa's constituency. The AIADMK headquarters in Chennai's Royapettah is deserted. Dhinakaran has pulled off a famous upset.
5.04 PM: The AIADMK headquarters in Chennai's Royapettah is deserted. With over 86,000 votes after eighteen rounds of counting, TTV Dhinakaran is headed for a famous upset. But it has seemed that way all day long. Meanwhile, security was beefed up outside the counting station.
#RKNagarByPollresult: @TTVDhinakaran successor of Jayalalithaa in RK Nagar. #RKNagar gets new MLA. #TTVDhinakaran Wins with a lead of over 40k votes. - Akshaya Nath (@Akshayanath) December 24, 2017
4:23 PM: Traffic was temporarily blocked near one counting station after two factions began fighting. Police were clearing the space. 15 rounds over: TTV Dhinakaran with 72,413 votes, AIADMK 38,966, and DMK 20,388.
4.03 PM: TREND | Thirteen rounds of counting are over. TTV Dhinakaran has 68,392 votes, the AIADMK 36,217, and the DMK 18,924.
3:08 PM: TREND | After Round 11 of counting, it's 54,315 for TTV, 27,937 for AIADMK, and 14,481 for DMK. Dhinakaran has reached his Chennai after a pit-stop at...guess where? Yes, the Jayalalithaa memorial.
Official EC trends: TTV with 48,808, AIADMK's Madhusudhanan gets 25,567, DMK's Marudhu Ganesh with 13,015.
Photo: Akshaya Nath Photo: Akshaya Nath
14:10 PM: TREND | TTV Dhinakaran's lead has narrowed, but not by much. After 8 rounds of counting, he has 39,548 votes. The AIADMK's Madhusudhanan has 19,525, and the DMK has 10,292. The BJP's Karu Nagarajan has said the RK Nagar bypoll wasn't a democratic election. "All is money," he said. Read more here.
13:34 PM: The man of the moment has reached Chennai, and he clearly thinks this election is done and dusted (It isn't: tens of thousands of RK Nagar voters haven't yet been accounted for). He claims he has 'Amma's' Jayalalithaa's wishes, and that all AIADMK workers are with him. Trends show that TTV Dhinakaran now has 29,255 votes, and the AIADMK 15,184. The DMK is yet to hit the 10,000 mark.
12.36 PM: TREND | And the lead just grows and grows. TTV Dhinakaran has 24,132 votes, AIADMK 13,057, and DMK 6,606. "This (RK Nagar) is Amma's constituency. They have decided who should be Amma's successor. This a successor that the people have chosen," Dhinakaran said earlier in Madurai. Will he be proved right?
11.25 AM: TREND | TTV Dhinakaran now had 15,868 votes. AIADMK's Madhusudhanan has 7,033 and DMK has 3,750. Right now, it looks bad for Chief Minister E Palaniswami. The Election Commission's official trends also show Dhinakaran in the lead. The RK Nagar bypoll is beginning to look like a one-man show.
Official EC trends: TTV Dhinakaran leads with 5447 votes, AIADMKs E. Madhusudhanan 2512 votes and DMK's N. Marudhu Ganesh 1367 votes at the end of counting round 3 #RKNagarByPoll - ANI (@ANI) December 24, 2017
10.55 AM: TTV Dhinakaran looked amused as he spoke to reporters, while surrounded by happy supporters. Already, he appears to think he has won! The news channel Puthiya Thalaimurai quotes him: "I thank 1.5 workers and the people for victory in the RK Nagar election."
He says only the twin-leaves symbol is with the ruling AIADMK. The people and cadre, he claims, are with him. BJP MP Subramanian Swamy, who is from Tamil Nadu, seems to think Dhinakaran has won, too.
Dinakaran seems to have won the R K Nagar election caused by JJ death. I expect to see the two ADMK factions now to unite for 2019 LS poll - Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) December 24, 2017
10:15 AM: TREND | TTV Dhinakaran now has 10,421 votes. That's more than 5,000 votes more than the AIADMK, which is in second place with 4,521 votes. The DMK only has 2,383. All the talk of the effect of the 2G spectrum verdict, which went in the DMK's favour, seems rather premature now! TTV's men have brought out the fireworks, and we've learned that the AIADMK headquarters is empty!
Chennai: Supporters of TTV Dhinakaran celebrate, burst crackers outside his residence as official trends indicate his lead #RKNagarByPoll pic.twitter.com/qNGVnNj0Wd - ANI (@ANI) December 24, 2017
9:40 AM: TREND | There's now a gap of over 4,000 votes between Dhinakaran and the two major parties - the DMK and the AIADMK. Dhinakaran has 7276 votes, the AIADMK 2738, and the DMK, 1182. All others, including the BJP, have polled just 258 votes. Meanwhile, observers from the Dhinakaran camp and the AIADMK clashed at the Queen Mary's counting centre. Counting temporarily stopped (It has now begun again). TTV supporters allege they were beaten, and that an EVM was destroyed. Learn more here.
9:02 AM: TREND | TTV Dhinakaran now has a lead of over 2,000 votes. The AIADMK must be beginning to sweat. Dhinakaran has 5399 votes, the ruling party 2737, and the DMK 1181. But it's still early days: RK Nagar is a constituency with over 2 lakh voters, and the turnout on Thursday was 77.68 per cent (1.76 lakh voters), according to a Times of India report.
8:40 AM: TREND | Dhinakaran has pulled even further ahead. He has 1891 votes, while the AIADMK has 646, and the DMK, 360. Meanwhile, AIADMK leaders, inclduing Chief Minister Edappadi Palaniswami and his deputy, O Panneerselvam, are at the MGR memorial. They're paying tributes to their founder on his death anniversary.
#Chennai: Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edapadi K Palanisamy, Deputy CM O Panneerselvam pay tributes to late AIADMK founder MG Ramachandran at his Marina Beach memorial pic.twitter.com/Q75NeOsMV0 - ANI (@ANI) December 24, 2017
8:33 AM: TREND | Early lead for TTV Dhinarakan. The independent, who was once expelled from party by Jayalalithaa (and was later appointed the party's deputy general secretary, after Jayalalithaa's death), has 412 votes. The AIADMK has 257, and the DMK 92.
8:28 AM: There was just one postal vote, and that went to the DMK.
8:00 AM: Counting of votes has begun. If the AIADMK ends up winning this, they will have done so on the death anniversary of MG Ramachandran, the party's founder and Jayalalithaa's political mentor. The pressure is on the ruling party to defend Jayalalithaa's home turf. Meanwhile, the BJP's candidate, Karu Nagarajan, complained of his competitors' corruption.
Apart from BJP other parties that contested used corrupt practices and distributed money in a big way: Karu Nagarajan, BJP candidate from #RKNagar outside a vote counting center in #Chennai pic.twitter.com/4oWQyiKruz
WATCH | TTV Dhinakaran wins crucial RK Nagar bypoll by huge marginAttorney General Jeff Sessions repeatedly refused to answer questions from senators Tuesday about his private conversations with President Trump, including whether he spoke to Trump about former FBI director James B. Comey’s handling of the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential race.
In a number of testy exchanges with members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sessions said he would not answer many of their questions because of a long-standing Justice Department policy that he said protects private conversations between Cabinet secretaries and the president.
The attorney general confirmed elements of Comey’s dramatic testimony before the same panel last week while disputing others. Sessions said he was in an Oval Office meeting in February with Comey and Trump when the president said he wanted to speak to Comey privately — and he acknowledged that Comey came to talk to him the next day about the meeting.
At other times, though, Sessions frequently said he couldn’t recall specifics, particularly when asked about his meetings with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign.
Above all, Sessions, who served as a senator from Alabama before taking the attorney general post, tried to clear his name and win the sympathy of his former colleagues.
(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
He opened his testimony with a fiery assertion that he never had any conversations with Russians about “any type of interference” in the 2016 presidential election.
“I was your colleague in this body for 20 years,” Sessions said. “The suggestion that I participated in |
that it was for the best, some reach adulthood before they learn what was done to them. If this was so shocking for me to learn, imagine how shocked they must be at the ignorance of their own bodies!
Because Bill was a hardcore believer in the myths his parents taught him, he was so stunned at the information I found that he refused to believe any of it for some time. I brought him photocopies and printouts of journal articles and medical texts, but he rolled his eyes at them.
“The foreskin can’t have any real function,” he said, “otherwise they wouldn’t cut it off.” (“Appeal to Consequences“, anyone?)
Fraudulent Diagnoses, False Benefits, and Questionable Ethics
As we know, the reason it is cut off is because it has a very definite function, which was most threatening to many Americans of the Victorian era. Even more, a tight foreskin was thought to cause all manner of illness, from hydrocephalus to lunacy. In his presentation, Geisheker brings up the 1881 assassination of James A Garfield by the insane lawyer, Charles Guiteau. Famously, Guiteau danced to the gallows, recited a poem, and shook hands with his executioner before hanging. Upon autopsy, it was discovered that his foreskin was tight, and so his insanity was blamed on that. Such was the mentality of the people at the time.
This ‘diagnosis’ can largely be blamed on a medical doctor named Lewis Sayre, who claimed to have cured a boy of Polio by circumcising him. Like many others of his ilk, he had no proof of this, he just assumed so because the patient never returned.
I wouldn’t have, either.
In 1870, Sayre gave a speech about the harms of normal foreskins, which he called ‘congenital phimosis’ (cannot be retracted) and ‘Adhered Prepuce’ — in other words, the normal fusion found in boys until at least ten years of age.
Today, there are still some doctors who apparently think that a normal, healthy foreskin is ‘adhered’ in ‘congenital phimosis’, or even ‘redundant’ for its long, tapered look. In the billing book for medical procedures, a Code 605 refers to “redundant prepuce and phimosis, adherent prepuce, phimosis congenital.” Many healthy children are fraudulently diagnosed and subsequently circumcised under this billing code — because there is nothing wrong! Wait, what?
The process of circumcising infants has been brutal, especially since it was once assumed (also thanks to 1870’s pseudoscience) that infants do not feel pain. That’s right — even open-heart surgery has been performed on infants with zero pain control.
In reality, the younger a child is, the more pain he or she experiences, and it is especially acute in newborns. These facts, and their relation to infant surgery, did not begin to be explored until the 1980’s.
In 1934, the Gomco clamp was invented to minimize the likelihood that the infant would bleed to death if someone other than a surgeon did the operation, and without any type of pain control. The erogenous tissue is torn from the infant’s glans and crushed, excruciatingly, into goo. When the clamp is removed ten minutes later, the wound doesn’t bleed. The shallow bell is actually meant to maximize the amount of erogenous tissue that is lost. And yes, it is commonly used today in U.S. hospitals, with little pain relief, if any: this is because anesthetics are dangerous and not fully effective in infants, including nerve block techniques.
Another circumcision device is the Plastibell clamp, which strangles the erogenous tissue over an entire week. The pain and discomfort from this process commonly interferes with breastfeeding, sleep cycles, and parental bonding. Whatever the method used, the glans is afterward revealed as a raw, open sore, and the infant is almost never prescribed pain relievers. When he urinates, the ammonia burns the open sore. This wound takes weeks to heal, and complications (besides the intended damage) are not as uncommon as is widely believed. Meatal stenosis isn’t counted as a ‘complication’ because it doesn’t occur until three months after the procedure, and sexual problems of course do not count because they become evident much later on. And there are more problems which are not mentioned.
Ironically, the study of anesthetics on infants during circumcision has had to stop because it is considered to be grossly unethical. The intense pain (measured in infants’ stress responses) is far too high to justify further study.
Typical pain responses include an extremely fast heart rate, very high levels of cortisol (stress hormone), and high-pitched screaming, sometimes until the infant turns blue from lack of oxygen. The fragile newborn’s heart, lungs, and other organs can be damaged or ruptured from being overworked. Although some parents may believe that their own son “slept through” his circumcision, this is what they are told when their baby goes into shock and doesn’t respond to any stimulus. These are exactly the type of responses that we would expect in an adult whose genitals are being torn apart, yet this may be framed as ‘discomfort’. Wouldn’t ‘torture’ be more appropriate?
This extreme trauma is known to cause a sort of PTSD in infants, similar to the effects of other types of surgery or a traumatic birth, and can lead to a variety of psychological and emotional problems later on in life. It doesn’t matter whether the individual has any conscious (“explicit”) memory of this because most types of memory are stored outside of conscious awareness in the involuntary (“implicit”) systems of the brain and body. Similarly, circumcised infants, as with preemies given a heel stick or scalp IV, show neurological changes that cause a permanent increase in sensitivity to pain. In other words, intense pain in an infant re-wires the brain for life. I should also note that compared to intact boys, the circumcised ones tend to be more irritable, have trouble eating, sleeping and thriving, and demonstrate a significant increase in ‘colic’ (crying for no apparent reason) for up to a year after this ‘procedure’. A whole spectrum of emotional reactions to being put through this in one’s infancy become evident later on, and they (naturally) include a sense of loss and grief. Although foreskin reconstruction is becoming more popular today, with its own market, it was only in 1990 that desiring one’s lost foreskin was suggested to be a form of “body dysmorphia”.
For more information, and citations, you may want to start here.
As though that wasn’t bad enough, what about unintended injuries and trauma? Surgical mistakes and infections can result in more problems, from an inability to urinate, to even more tissue being excruciatingly cut away from the infant, sometimes his entire penis or more. Infections can also, more rarely, cause brain damage and death. Even if this procedure goes ‘right’, the penile skin often attempts to re-fuse itself together, resulting in abnormal adhesions, which require further tearing apart. In the long-term, the boy’s penis may grow too large to fit within the skin that is left, and may bend or even tear open when he gets an erection. This may require further surgery to add skin to his penis. Indeed, a seemingly long prepuce in infancy can turn out to be quite short in the adult. This cannot be predicted in infants, which is another good reason to wait on this question, and leave the decision to the person who is affected by it.
More popular myths that Bill told me was that the foreskin is prone to disease and is too hard to clean under to be worth the bother. In reality, the easily-retracted adult foreskin only needs to be briefly rinsed in the shower; therefore, it is easier to clean than behind one’s ears. As we shall see, this misunderstood and vilified body part has not been shown to be a vector for disease. If it was, our ancestors wouldn’t have evolved it in the first place, much less a particularly extensive one. Indeed, you don’t see other species scrubbing their penises — not even bonobos.
The cleanliness myths began in the late 1800s, with the idea of ‘moral cleanliness’ in the eye of God as he watches you masturbate. By the early twentieth century, the meme had changed to physical cleanliness and preventing STDs. However, when all the literature over the years is taken together, it shows that circumcision slightly increases one’s chances of getting certain STDs, while slightly decreasing the chances for others, and there are different statistics between cultures. All in all, it’s a wash.
Child circumcision was not common in the early 20th century, but because of the STD-prevention belief around World War I, the militaries of English-speaking countries were practically forcing sailors and soldiers to be circumcised — as most of them refused to go along with it. (In Geisheker’s audience, one guy said his uncle was an aircraft mechanic, but at 45 years old he wasn’t allowed on a Naval aircraft carrier to do work unless he was circumcised for some health and safety code. So, he was, and regretted it. Scary stuff.)
In the 1930’s, childbirth had become medicalized, and those doctors who were experts in female health (yet knew little about male health), were enthusiastic in promoting and performing circumcision on the newborn males. Their inexpertise was what the Gomco clamp was invented for.
By the start of World War II (during which we find the sand myth), newborn circumcision was beginning to become popular in the U.S., and almost as popular in Britain, although this changed when the U.K. was devastated by the war. With so few resources, U.K. doctors didn’t see any point in continuing unnecessary and dangerous surgery, so they put an end to it. At the same, the practice took off in the U.S., because it was funded by most health insurance packages, and fueled by advice from the popular press. This includes the influential child expert, Dr. Benjamin Spock, although to his credit he later recanted his position. By the end of the 1950’s, almost all newborn boys in the U.S. were subjected to this procedure, whereas almost none were in the U.K. Although child circumcision had spread to a number of English-speaking countries during the early 20th century, nowadays this practice is long-gone from most of them. And then there’s South Korea.
During the Korean War, MASH doctors imposed circumcision on the South Koreans, claiming that it improved cleanliness. Now South Korea has one of the highest penile abridgement rates in the world, and it is typically done as a rite of passage at age twelve. At the library way back when, I remember reading a very detailed report about the history and cultural beliefs about this South Korean phenomenon.
Most of the South Koreans who were surveyed believed that people from all developed countries practiced routine circumcision — which is a popular belief in the U.S. as well. These South Koreans also believed that if it wasn’t done, they had a very high chance of developing “phimosis” and needing to be circumcised anyway. So popular was this misconception that they called it “the phimosis operation”. I also recall that many adults in South Korea had this done to themselves, partly due to a combination of collectivist culture and public baths — everyone must do the same or else be looked down upon! Interestingly, those men who said that they experienced sexual problems after this operation were able to describe what was wrong, whereas those (fewer) men who said it helped their sex life did not explain how. Were they just saying what was expected of them?
And then there is the medicalized circumcision of the Philippines, which is partly influenced by Americans. Slitting the foreskin of eight-year olds (without removing tissue) has morphed into outright foreskin-severing as a rite of passage. The Filipinos have their own unique cultural myths about medicalized routine circumcision, such as that it stimulates growth in the boy, and that it will increase his virility as an adult. When you think about it, this is just as silly as the myth that a normal infant’s penis has a medical problem, that females don’t produce smegma, or that the foreskin gets in the way of sexual pleasure — and I am surrounded by people who believe these things!
Culture versus medicine
Both contained nearly the same information — basically, highlights of what I’m covering in this post — but the American version was written with a completely neutral tone whereas the British one had a distinct note of relief at the news that Americans are finally starting to learn not to chop at their infants.
As for today, infant circumcision rates in the U.S. are continuing to drop, and are now around 50% or lower.
Even so, the Americans who have not learned have instead been inventing and recycling ideas each decade in order to justify continuing it. This includes the continuation of the old idea that it prevents sexually transmitted diseases. It is worth pointing out that New Zealand, where Geisheker is from, they stopped routine infant circumcision 40 years ago and have lower rates of STDs than the U.S.. Clearly, there are scientifically valid ways of prevention, such as sex education and condom use, which is often lacking in the U.S..
More importantly, I feel that I should point out the obvious — that infants don’t have sex. Would it not be more appropriate to wait until the individual is old enough to make a judgment about his own sex life?
The same could be said in the case of sexually transmitted HIV prevention, which is re-gaining popularity in the U.S. as an argument for circumcising infants. This connection was first proposed in a 1986 letter, by Canadian urologist Aaron Fink, who had self-published a book advocating circumcision. He promoted the unsupported claim that the callus that forms over the glans of circumcised males creates a barrier to HIV. In February 1996, Scientific American printed an article about the Caldwell retrospective analysis of HIV and its prevalence in those African populations who circumcise versus those who do not. They concluded that HIV is more prevalent among those who are intact, although they did not examine any of the patients. Vincenzi and Mertens (1994) pointed out serious flaws in the design of this study. This was pointed out in two letters to Scientific American, but they were heavily edited for publication, and the criticisms went unaddressed by the Caldwells in their rebuttal.
Even since then, most similar studies have a small sample size and contain many flaws, including guessing whether or not a subject is circumcised, based on which culture he is from. Dozens of such studies did not take into account other confounding factors such as the practice of ‘dry sex’, which creates lots of friction and tears in the vagina, nor genital ulcer disease, viral load, or female circumcision, which is only done in cultures where male circumcision is practiced. This is compounded by the fact that studies which are purported to show a connection between HIV and circumcision are more exciting, and thus more likely to be published than studies which show no correlation at all — a phenomenon called publication bias.
A 2003 Cochrane review points out all these flaws, and “found insufficient evidence to support an interventional effect of male circumcision on HIV acquisition in heterosexual men.” Also, it is worth pointing out that researchers who are white males of nations that have had a history of circumcision are the main proponents of this correlation.
The resurgence of this meme is based on three recent and incomplete studies, which were done in Africa, partly because the ethics committees in other parts of the world would not approve. Only one of these studies (Auverts, 2006) was actually published in a peer-reviewed journal. The clock for the experiment started when half of the volunteers were circumcised at random. While the intact men went off to have sex, the circumcised group had to wait four to six weeks, as they were in too much pain for intercourse. Also, they had to come back to the clinic twice more to make sure they were healing properly, where they got additional safe sex counseling and condoms. Not only were the circumcised guys unable to have sex for most of the duration of the study, but blood exposure and homosexual intercourse were not controlled for. On top of this, the researchers used an HIV antibody test, which only gives results from three months since the last exposure. However, they did not wait to administer the test, so half the cases of HIV came from before the study even started.
Based on this dubious data, the conclusion was that heterosexual men are 60% less likely to catch HIV from infected females with each exposure. And how did Auverts et al determine this? As Geisheker explains it, this study showed a very low incidence of HIV in the intact subjects, and a slightly lower incidence in circumcised subjects. It’s like comparing 1.5% versus 1%, and declaring that there’s a huge difference between the two. So, the 60% rate is relative, not absolute. If this were a vaccine, it wouldn’t be considered very effective. And the Gates Foundation is funding this.
Contrast this with condom use, which is almost 100% effective at preventing the transmission of HIV. Also, condoms protect women as well, whereas pro-circumcision researchers themselves say that circumcision only protects the man. If circumcision did protect men as they claim, the condom would still be needed. However, condoms are so effective that any small positive effect from circumcision, if real, would be superfluous. Thanks to government campaigns for always using a condom in Lesotho, Tanzania and Thailand, there are dramatic reductions in HIV. This could not and has not happened with circumcision and HIV.
There has long been plenty of evidence against the foreskin/HIV connection, even for adult men who might want to protect themselves from HIV in Africa. Even worse, some of these circumcised men believe they are protected from HIV and don’t necessarily need a condom at all. On top of that, this newest wave is inspiring some journalists and even doctors to spin fanciful tales that these African studies justify doing circumcision to infants living in quite different conditions in the U.S.. There is also some evidence in industrialized cultures that circumcision does not decrease HIV transmission, simply because the U.S. has both the highest circumcision rate and highest HIV incidence of any industrialized nation.
Another popular justification for slicing infant dicks which is trumpeted to this day is the claim that it protects against penile cancer. This idea started in the early 20th century from the circumcision-promoting Dr. Wolbarst, who proposed that smegma is carcinogenic (which was disproven), and that circumcision stops “epileptic fits” (actually orgasms) in boys. Of course cutting off a body part will prevent it from getting cancer — you can’t get cancer on what isn’t there! However, penile cancer is extremely rare, even more rare than earlobe cancer. If we think that the risk of penile cancer is worth cutting the foreskin off, then why don’t we cut off our earlobes if that is even more likely to help? Also, why don’t the folks at the American Cancer Society agree that this is a reason to circumcise infants? According to them, “it would take over 900 circumcisions to prevent one case of penile cancer in this country.” That’s a pretty extreme health measure, don’t you think?
An oncology nurse in Geisheker’s audience said that there isn’t any association at all between penile cancer and foreskins. It’s just a meme, but if you’re a lazy journalist, you’ll pad your article with these types of dubious claims and statistics. She said that when debating this issue with a urologist, she brought up breast cancer, which 1 in 12 women will eventually develop. “Would you remove breast buds off a girl?” she asked. The urologist said, “You’re right, we shouldn’t do it.” Besides, statistically, infants are more likely to die of the circumcision itself than to die of penile cancer as adults.
Indeed, infants don’t get penile cancer at all, men do, especially older ones, so again, it would make more sense to wait and let the individual judge this matter for himself.
A similar argument has been made that circumcision prevents transmission of HPV, and thus cervical cancer, in women. This is also completely untrue and based on fatally-flawed studies, which you can read more about here. What is most outrageous with this claim is the idea of causing significant and irreversible harm to an unconsenting infant, in anticipation that it may have some effect on a hypothetical female sexual partner in the future. It’s not meant to help the infant who’s being operated on, but rather, someone he may never meet. He may, for all we know, turn out to be gay. Also, such a concern of HPV should be outmoded, since there is now an effective vaccine against it.
Then, of course, there is the the tired old argument that foreskinlessness prevents urinary tract infections. This began with the Wiswell study (yes, really), which compared the rate of UTIs between circumcised with intact babies. There were a few fatal flaws, including instructing the parents of the intact boys to repeatedly retract the foreskin and wash under it. Which, as we know, is a known cause of infection — this includes UTIs.
The larger picture here, of course, is that UTIs are generally no big deal — they are easily treated with antibiotics. In fact, young girls are four times more likely to get UTIs than intact boys, and no surgery is recommended for them. There is also no evidence that circumcision prevents UTIs in adults, even though it is sometimes recommended for chronic ones. It shouldn’t be, because chronic UTIs are caused by internal problems, not external ones. In any case, it is ludicrous to put weight on foreskin-chopping in infancy as a treatment for such a minor and treatable problem, even if the literature did show a benefit. The treatment is far worse than the sickness!
Interestingly, in the United States, the highest rate of circumcision centers around Michigan, home of Kellogg — coincidence? Of course, the Midwest also has more Medicaid subsidies that pay for it. Out here in Seattle, and other U.S. locales where circumcision is not nearly as common, the children are no sicker than the ones in the Midwest.
In New Zealand, Geisheker’s home country, they completely gave up routine circumcision 40 years ago, and NZ children are healthier than U.S. children today. Also, the rate of circumcision in Australia has plummeted in recent decades, while at the same time, health among children has improved, due to better healthcare. Geisheker also works with European and Australian doctors, who think that Americans are a bit backwards when it comes to chopping babies’ perfectly healthy genitals. According to most doctors of the world, it’s a bad idea:
After reviewing the currently available evidence, the RACP believes that the frequency of diseases modifiable by circumcision, the level of protection offered by circumcision and the complication rates of circumcision do not warrant routine infant circumcision in Australia and New Zealand.
Circumcision of newborns should not be routinely performed.
There is no convincing evidence that circumcision is useful or necessary in terms of prevention or hygiene… circumcision entails the risk of medical and psychological complications… Non-therapeutic circumcision of male minors conflicts with the child’s right to autonomy and physical integrity. – The Royal Dutch Medical Association, 2010.
While most doctors of the world discourage this practice, doctors in the U.S. frame the situation differently. Their arguments for child circumcision center around motivating parents to feel comfortable with choosing this for their unconsenting children. The parents don’t want to hear that they, or loved ones, have been harmed, and so are more willing to believe that it’s for the best.
Extraordinary claims sometimes require extraordinary justifications, and we can see some level of parallel with female genital mutilation. In one African culture that I have heard of, it is believed that when a woman gives birth and the baby’s head touches her clitoris, both will die. We know this is ridiculous, since we see that it doesn’t happen. In the same way, outsiders ridicule the “disadvantages of a foreskin” that I hear all around me, particularly if they never occur in real life.
In college, I wrote a paper on child genital mutilation (yes, really) and I remember reading an article about immigrants to the U.S. from someplace in Africa. They believed that the clitoris causes women to like sex “too much” and engage in excessive sexual behavior. When they saw a pregnant teenage girl, they would say, “See? Americans need to circumcise their daughters. I would not let my daughter keep her clitoris!” If this is shocking to you, then good: This is basically how most people of the world regard parents who say their son needs to have his most erogenous zone cut off.
Many of the immigrant women did not know what a clitoris is, nor what they were missing. This may seem dismaying to you, and it is equally so to me when I am asked by a full-grown man what a foreskin is. Even worse is the ones who don’t know, but they don’t realize they don’t know.
Only a few years ago I heard of a controversy in Egypt, where 90% of women are circumcised, over whether the female practice should be medicalized. As per Egyptian culture, some doctors recommended removing the prepuce of the clitoris, with the belief that there was medical evidence that this protects against HIV. They called this procedure ‘female circumcision’, but they called removing the entire clitoris ‘genital mutilation’. Other doctors said that was an unfair characterization and that all of this is female genital mutilation.
Since the bias against some genital parts over others is based on cultural beliefs, I wondered about other body parts that might be discriminated against. One example is to be found in a book by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The title should give you a clue — Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. It’s about how people solve their cognitive dissonance between their image of themselves as a generally good person, and facts which seem to contradict this. The book opens with the Nuer and Dinka tribes, and a much stranger coming-of-age ritual: Surgically extracting the front teeth with fishing hooks — two on the top, and up to six on the bottom.
This is extremely painful, somewhat risky, and in the long-term, causes a gradual atrophy of the jawbone, especially a caved-in chin. What could possibly possess anyone to do this to their own children? It is thought to have been their solution to an outbreak of tetanus, in order to keep children from starving to death through clenched jaws. Over the years, it became a coming-of-age rite, ‘normal’ for everyone in the tribe. Now the general opinion amongst tribe members is that people who have all their teeth look frightening like cannibals, or silly like donkeys. They also say they prefer the whistling sounds they make when they talk.
These post-hoc justifications are a way to resolve the cognitive dissonance between causing harm to children, and having had harm caused to them. Besides, it’s just normal to them! This very same point is repeatedly made by researchers concerning the U.S. bias against foreskins, and the billion-and-a-half dollar industry based on cutting them off. Indeed, there are a million routine infant circumcisions done in U.S. hospitals each year — it is among the most common surgeries in the United States.
Instead of allowing the individual to enjoy his own erogenous zone, it is tossed in the incinerator, or sold to companies such as Invitrogen for other people’s profit and benefit.
That’s right — genital parts ripped from uncomprehending infants are made into Apligraf Magic Skin Treatment, and even Oprah has been criticized for pushing a skin cream made from baby penile cells. It seems that in the U.S., the male prepuce is valued more as a commodity than as a rightful part of a person’s own body. (Yet, the reverse is true for the female prepuce.) There’s a difference between donating an organ and stealing an organ. Which is this? Whose body is it, anyway?
I once made this point to a former housemate of mine who was pregnant with a boy. Although I had previously talked with her about this subject, twice, it evidently had no effect. She personally didn’t like the look of a normal, intact penis, and wanted her boy to match his friends. I explained to her that only 30% of newborn boys are circumcised in the Seattle area, so he would actually be unlike most of his friends.
She replied, “So?”
Then I told her why most other societies in the world look down upon chopping off the most sensitive part of the penis.
She said, “Who cares what they do in other countries? I want to do what Americans do!”
I switched tactics and asked her, “Whose penis is it? Is it yours? What if your dad had part of your genitals cut off because he didn’t like the way they looked? How would that make you feel?”
Unable to answer in a rational manner, she started screaming about how it was her right as a parent to make this decision and how dare I tell her what to do, or even care about it at all, as it was none of my business.
“It’s my child, it’s my choice!” she shouted, and stormed out of the room, slamming the door. Although her emotional reaction was quite strong, it is not that different from more typical incidents I have heard of.
Indeed, instead of centering this surgery around the person who is affected by it, and letting him make this decision about his own body, I have noticed that pro-circumcision websites are all about having the parent choose. Displayed on their front pages are comments from parents along the lines of “I have never regretted my choice,” and “I agree, parents should be the ones to decide.” What about his choice? Can it wait until he is old enough to fill out a consent form? He will probably prefer to keep what he was born with, thanks. Most do.
In response to making this very point, I’ve heard, “Of course he will want to keep his foreskin, that’s why I shouldn’t leave the choice to him!” Sound familiar?
This is why most male circumcision rituals of various cultures are done on young boys — they are not large enough to fight back or leave the tribe. They also don’t usually have lawyers to protect them, although those are employed in North America. Geisheker mentions the 14 year old boy by name of Bolt, whose father had converted to Judaism and wanted his son’s penis to match his. Bolt’s case was turned down by the Supreme Court, but by then, he was old enough to testify in court. He escaped unharmed and went to live with his mom. Defending male children from circumcision is tough in the U.S. because no medical license is required — it can be done by mohels, midwives, nurses, or parents. That’s partly because it’s not medicine. In New Male Studies, Geisheker published an article about this, called The Completely Unregulated Practice of Circumcision.
Indeed, in the U.S., most doctors, midwives, and OBGYNs bring up the question, and frame it as though it is a decision to be made by the parents. Although I’ve heard of doctors in Seattle questioning parents who want to do this to their children, they could do better/ In the 1960’s, doctors in New Zealand ended the practice by not bringing it up to parents, and if anyone asked about it, they said that it was an obsolete procedure that came from England. That was usually enough to dissuade them.
American medical culture is still full of bias on this topic, as many European doctors pointed out in response to a 2012 American Academy of Pediatrics pro-circumcision technical report. Plus, out of eight people on the AAP committee, four of them had vested interests: one had circumcised his own son on his kitchen table; one was a doctor in Seattle at the children’s hospital who promoted female circumcision; one was an expert in medical financing; and one refused to reign in a mohel for giving babies herpes via sucking their penis wounds.
Near the end of his presentation, Geisheker demonstrates what Bioethics 101 means. There are a few points to consider when you focus on the patient’s immediate needs, from the point of view of the patient.
Beneficence — Is the procedure necessary/beneficial?
Nonmaleficense — Does it avoid harm/suffering
Justice — Would we choose this for ourselves?
Autonomy — Is the patient being treated as a separate person or as a member of a community? Can it wait for patient assent?
Proportionality — Is the risk and pain worth the gain?
As I hope to have demonstrated in this post, non-therapeutic child circumcision fails every one of those requirements. He comes to the same conclusion that I grasped many years ago: It is plastic surgery, a phrase that means ‘adult’.
This is so obvious to people outside of this sort of culture that they could easily assume that Americans don’t do this, just as Americans commonly assume that the rest of the industrialized world does. The first time I discussed this with a non-U.S. person, a man from Ireland, he said he had no clue of this practice until he saw a variety of American pornography. He reported feeling repulsed by the strange, vigorous way that “mutilated” genitals had to be stimulated. The people from Europe that I have talked to on this issue have all told me that in their countries, male and female circumcision are both regarded as pointless and culturally backwards.
Indeed, it is a bizarre double standard in North America and some other places that people can think that hacking at boys’ genitals is good, but that hacking at girls’ genitals is bad. I think that much of this is related to the deeply-embedded cultural attitude that the foreskin is not part of the penis. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve seen this phenomenon in person, as well as on TV and in movies. Another example is Robin Williams’ comedy routine about how wonderful the male member is, yet his only allusion to the hyper-developed erogenous zone was “an optional covering”. That is like saying that your lips are an optional covering, rather than a functional part of your mouth. I once even saw the episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit on this topic, and laughed hysterically when the doctor actually said they use a clamp so as not to “hurt the baby’s penis”, while he screams in agony (or “tolerates extremely well”). It would be quite a feat to be able to amputate a huge section of any appendage without harming it, yet that is essentially the claim here.
“Cutting off part of the penis is not injuring it in this reality, only cutting off more than what you intended to leave,” says physical oncologist Ryan McAllister in his presentation The Elephant In The Hospital, which I’ve linked to below.
` In 2011, someone I’ll call ‘L’ posted this video on Facebook in response to his brother and wife’s adopting what was about to become most-of-a boy.
` The wife claimed that this is a religious practice required in Catholicism, which is anything but true, yet is a common belief.
` The brother, who admitted to knowing nothing at all about foreskins, said that he was satisfied in the amount of research he had done that he was making the right choice.
` Instead of clicking on the video, they simply raised a fuss, calling it a ‘family crisis’, and forbid L from ever meeting the boy.
In the hopes that someone would learn from this video, I posted it on Facebook (where else?):
Child Circumcision: an Elephant in the Hospital
Ryan McAllister, PhD What is infant circumcision? Why is the practice common in U.S. hospitals and not in other countries? What does it remove…
He brings up most of the same things that I have brought up already, and takes a closer look at some of the phallic logical fallacies of this culture:
Poisoning the well: “It’s cleaner, looks better.”
Appeal to Majority: “Everyone does it.” Minimizing words: “Little snip”, “useless”, “flap of skin.” Special Pleading: “Babies don’t feel pain or remember.” Appeal to Ignorance: “I can’t imagine how it could be harmful.”
He examines the cyclic view of a social surgery, that is, one that removes a healthy unique organ part. Many doctors know it’s a social surgery, not a treatment, yet they take advantage of the parents’ trust.
They trivialize complications and don’t tell the parents that the foreskin is a sexual part. They don’t bring up ethical questions or conflicts of interest, such as profit and tissue uses.
He actually shows a video of the surgery: The infant is screaming in extreme pain, yet the physician is not bothered by this.
Losing one’s job is one possible punishment for doctors and nurses who don’t want to do it, or who tell parents not to.
Not only does it harm children and their parents, it hurts the health practitioners because they are learning to harm people.
The AAP ethics committee says that it is inappropriate to allow the individual to make his own decision, and obstetricians claim that it’s the mother’s choice because she is the patient, not her child. McAllister shows a clip of an obstetrician interviewed on Craig Ferguson’s talk show. She said it really is a social and cultural procedure, and that any health benefits from circumcision can be achieved through washing.
Then she says, “You have to choose as a parent.”
“That’s a tough choice,” Craig jokes.
Do you have to choose giving your baby a nose job, too?
Because of the circumcision craze, David Gibbins, Pediatric Urologist said that in a two year period he was referred over 275 newborns and toddlers with complications from it, and almost half needed corrective surgery.
There is also the unspoken assumption that foreskin-chopping is inevitable. I have long noticed this, as in “My parents waited until I was six before they finally had me circumcised.” Also, Americans tend to use the word ‘uncircumcised’, which implies that you’re in line to do it eventually. I would not say that I am ‘uncircumcised’, or ‘unmastectomized’ for that matter. Women aren’t viewed that way, so why are men?
To my surprise, I didn’t get any dissenting comments on the video — instead, it |
morbidity, including hypertension (systolic blood pressure (BP) >95th percentile for age and sex), hypertriglyceridemia (TG >95th percentile for age and sex), impaired fasting glucose (Hemoglobin A 1c >6.0 or fasting glucose >5.55 mmol/L), hyperinsulinemia (fasting insulin >90 pmol/L or HOMA‐IR >4.3), alanine aminotransferase (ALT) >40 U/L, or severe acanthosis nigricans. Exclusion criteria included: known diabetes, steroid medication use, any medication that affected insulin secretion or resistance, alcohol use, pregnancy, or neuroactive medications. Participants were recruited during initial clinic visits or from referrals from the community. Appropriate consent and assent were obtained in writing at the time of screening. Participants filled in food frequency questionnaires (FFQ) 16, 17 and were interviewed by a dietitian, from which their baseline macronutrient profiles (percent of calories as fat, protein, and carbohydrate; and fiber content as g/1000 kcal) were identified. We estimated energy requirements using formulas published by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) for weight maintenance in overweight boys and girls, ages 3 through 18 18. After the first 17 participants were studied, seven were noted to have lost >2% in weight, so caloric targets for each participant were increased by 10% thereafter. Participants and guardians were told to continue their usual home diets until they came fasting to the UCSF Pediatric Clinical Research Center on Day 0, where anthropometric measurements were recorded. Blood pressure was obtained by automated monitor after a 15 min rest period. Fasting blood samples were obtained through a saline lock. An oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) was performed by administering 75 g glucose, and blood was drawn for glucose and insulin levels at 0, 30, 60, 90, and 120 min. Whole‐body dual‐energy X‐ray absorptiometry (DXA) scanning was performed to assess bone, fat, and fat‐free mass. All participants were provided a floor scale with instructions on how to collect, record, and report their weight each day, as well as store and prepare the study diet, and record their daily food intake for the following 9 days. Participants were sent home with 9 days of food (in three separate installments) prepared by the UCSF Clinical Research Service (CRS) Bionutrition Core to provide adequate calories to maintain their body weight. The menu was planned to restrict added sugar, while substituting other carbohydates such as those in fruit, bagels, cereal, pasta, and bread so that the percentage of calories consumed from carbohydrate was consistent with their baseline diet, but total dietary sugar and fructose were reduced to 10% and 4% of total calories, respectively. Additional food items were provided when weight loss was observed during daily fasting weight checks which were reported to the study dietitian each morning. Additional individualized instructions for maintaining weight stability were provided by phone, email or text, and at food pickup or delivery. On Day 10, participants returned with their final record of dietary intake and fasting blood specimens, OGTT, and DXA were repeated. Any additional or missed foods that were recorded on the diet checklists were added or subtracted from the total study diet intake calculation. The caloric and nutrient content of the study diet assigned and after intervention was calculated using the nutrient analyses software ProNutra 3.4 (Viocare) with USDA standard reference database 23. Fasting clinical chemistries were measured in the UCSF clinical laboratory. All other specimens were processed and frozen for subsequent batch analysis. Plasma with sodium fluoride and potassium oxalate was used to measure for glucose and lactate concentrations (YSI 2300 Stat plus, Yellow Springs, OH). Serum insulin concentrations were measured by chemiluminescence on a Siemens Immulite 2000 XPI platform, fasting lipids on a Beckman DXC‐600 by blanked timed endpoint, and high‐density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL‐C) by homogeneous immunoinhibition (Trinity Biotech) at Pennington Biomedical Research Center (Baton Rouge, LA). Data are expressed as mean ± SD. Normal distributions were tested by histogram, box‐plot, q‐norm plot, and Shapiro Wilk tests. To compare weight and DXA variables between Day 0 and Day 10, paired t‐tests were used. Each analyte was evaluated for normality; when normal, repeated measures analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was performed on each biochemical parameter to control for weight change, and separate regression analysis was performed to obtain the β‐coefficient (mean difference adjusted for weight change, with 95% confidence intervals). When data were not normally distributed, log transformation was performed to achieve normal distribution, and then the data were subjected to repeated measures ANCOVA. Resultant β‐coefficients were converted back to the raw data scale for each parameter to reflect percent change in mean differences adjusted for weight change, with 95% confidence intervals. When data were not normally distributed and could not be log transformed, Kruskal–Wallis non‐parametric testing was instead used for analysis. We also performed univariate regression analysis to investigate the association between change in weight and change in metabolic analytes; r2 values are reported to assess the change in the variance of each analyte versus change in weight. To assess the impact of the demographic variables (sex, age, Tanner stage, race/ethnicity), we re‐ran the repeated measures ANCOVA models with each included as a single covariate, and with all included as multiple covariates in one model. For the glucose and insulin levels from the OGTT, we compared values at each time point using paired (Day 10 vs. Day 0) t‐tests. Post hoc sensitivity analysis was performed for the 10 participants who did not lose weight during the study. All statistical tests were considered significant at P < 0.05 based on two‐tailed tests. All analyses were conducted with STATA version 12.1 (StataCorp, College Station, TX).
Results Day 0 and Day 10 clinical and anthropometric parameters are listed in Table 1. Fifty‐two Latino and African‐American participants were recruited. Two participants were found to be ineligible, five did not arrive for their Day 0 visit, and two completed Day 0 but did not return on Day 10, and are excluded from this analysis. We analyzed 43 pairs (27 Latino, 16 African‐American, 16M, 27F) of baseline and 10‐day post‐intervention data (42 pairs for OGTT). The mean age of our cohort was 13.3 ± 2.7 years, with BMI z‐score 2.4 ± 0.3. Pubertal status was Tanner 1 in five, Tanner 2‐3 in 16, and Tanner 4‐5 in 22 participants. Table 1. Anthropometric and DXA measurements (mean ± SD) on Day 0 and 10 (n = 43) Day 0 Day 10 Mean change [95% CI] P value Weight (kg) 93.0 ± 22.1 92.1 ± 22.2 −0.9 [−1.3, −0.6] 0.001 Body mass index (kg/m2) 35.6 ± 6.4 35.2 ± 6.5 −0.4 [−0.6, −0.2] <0.001 Fat mass (kg) 43.9 ± 13.8 43.6 ± 14.2 −0.3 [−0.8, +0.1] 0.17 Fat‐free mass (kg) 48.3 ± 9.4 47.6 ± 8.9 −0.6 [−1.2, −0.1] 0.04 Bone massa (kg) 2.7 ± 0.5 2.7 ± 0.5 0 [−0.08, +0.05] 0.63 We attempted to match each participant's macronutrient intake profile during the 9‐day intervention to their baseline diet. After adjustments for both uneaten and supplementary foods, the mean self‐reported intake of the study diet was 29 ± 6 kcal/kg with a macronutrient profile of 51 ± 3% carbohydrate, 16 ± 1% protein, and 33 ± 3% fat (16% saturated, 9% polyunsaturated, 13% monounsaturated). Post hoc analysis showed that, compared with the baseline macronutrient distribution determined by FFQ, the total percentage of carbohydrate intake on the study diet decreased by 4%, protein increased by 2%, and there was no change in percentage calories from fat. Within the carbohydrate fraction, dietary sugar intake reduced from 27.7 ± 8.3% to 10.2 ± 1.7%, and fructose from 11.7 ± 4.0% to 3.8 ± 0.5%, of daily calories. The consumption of dietary fiber of necessity increased from a daily mean of 9.3 ± 2.2 g/1,000 kcal to 11.7 ± 1.3 g/1,000 kcal. This study diet profile is consistent with recommendations by the IOM for macronutrients 18 and the World Health Organization for dietary sugar intake 19. This “child‐friendly” study diet included various no‐ or low‐sugar added processed foods including turkey hot dogs, pizza, bean burrritos, baked potato chips, and popcorn that were purchased at local supermarkets. Despite intensive efforts to maintain each participant's body weight at baseline levels, weight decreased by 0.9 ± 0.2 kg (1%, P = 0.001) over the 10 days of intervention. Of the 43 participants, consumption of the study diet ranged from 75% to 115% of calories assigned; 33 reported that they were unable to consume all of the food provided for weight maintenance. Individual weight curves and the mean pattern of weight change (Figure 1) suggests that weight loss occurred within the first 4 days, with subsequent return toward baseline and stabilization thereafter, arguing for acute water loss and against persistent caloric deficit as the cause of the weight change. Comparison of DXA data (Table 1) demonstrated that fat and bone mass did not change significantly during the 10‐day study period, although fat‐free mass reduced by 0.6 kg (P = 0.04). Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Change in weight from baseline in the 43 participants over the 10 days of study. Individual weight change curves are in light gray, while means ± SEM for the entire cohort are in black. All subsequent physiologic and biochemical analyses that were normally distributed, either before or after log transformation, were adjusted for weight change by repeated measures ANCOVA. Our results did not differ when we controlled for sex, age, Tanner stage, and/or race/ethnicity. Weight change itself was not significant as a covariate in any of the repeated measures ANCOVAs. Aspartate aminotransferase (AST) was not normally distributed and was analyzed by Kruskal–Wallis testing. Systolic BP did not change (P = 0.42) over the 10 days. However, diastolic BP decreased signficantly by 4.9 mmHg (P = 0.002). Heart rate (HR) tended to decline non‐significantly by 2.8 bpm (P = 0.12). Interestingly, uric acid increased over the 10 days of intervention by 17.8 µmol/L (P = 0.001). Glucose and insulin responses to OGTT are shown in Figures 2a,b. Fasting glucose decreased by 0.3 mmol/L (P < 0.001), while glucose area under the curve (AUC) decreased by 7.3% or 67.2 mmol/L/120 min (P = 0.001). Fasting insulin decreased by 53% (P < 0.001), and HOMA‐IR decreased by 58% (P < 0.001). Peak insulin decreased by 56% (P < 0.001) and insulin AUC reduced by 57% (P < 0.001), implying reduction in hyperinsulinemia. Figure 2 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint (a) Glucose and (b) insulin responses (mean ± SEM) to OGTT on Day 0 and 10 for all 43 participants. (c) Glucose and (d) insulin responses to OGTT on Day 0 and 10 for the 10 participants in the post hoc sensitivity analysis who gained weight during the study interval. *P < 0.05, paired t‐test (Day 10 vs. Day 0) at each individual time point. **P < 0.01, paired t‐test (Day 10 vs. Day 0) at each individual time point. The results of other biochemical analyses are shown in Table 2. Fasting TG levels decreased by 46% (P = 0.002), low‐density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL‐C) decreased by 0.3 mmol/L (P < 0.001), and HDL‐C reduced by 0.1 mmol/L (P < 0.001). Serum free fatty acids increased by 0.12 mmol/L (P < 0.001), suggesting increases in peripheral lipolysis and increases in flow of fatty acid for oxidation. Alanine aminotransferase (ALT) tended to decline non‐significantly by 13% (P = 0.09), while AST declined significantly by 3.6 U/L (P = 0.02 by Kruskal–Wallis). Fasting lactate on Day 0 was 1.2 ± 0.4 mmol/L, and decreased by 0.3 mmol/L, (P < 0.001), and lactate AUC decreased by 19.5% or 31.2 mmol/L/120 min (P < 0.001). Table 2. Biochemical measurements (mean ± SD) on Day 0 and 10 (n = 43) Day 0 Day 10 β‐coefficient (adjusted change) [95% CI] P value r2 a Heart rate (beats/min) 83.1 ± 10.7 80.1 ± 11.3 −2.8 [−6.5, +0.9] 0.13 0.001 Systolic blood pressure (mmHg) 122.6 ± 10.5 121.1 ± 9.9 −1.4 [−4.9, +2.1] 0.43 0.002 Diastolic blood pressure (mmHg) 68.8 ± 8.9 63.7 ± 7.5 −4.9 [−8.1, −1.8] 0.003 0.03 Mean arterial blood pressure (mmHg) 86.7 ± 7.7 82.9 ± 7.3 −2.8 [−6.4, +0.8] <0.001 0.01 Fasting glucose (mmol/L) 5.4 ± 0.5 5.1 ± 0.4 −0.3 [‐0.4, −0.2] <0.001 0.04 Glucose AUC (mmol/L/120 min) 911.9 ± 130.9 845.3 ± 130.4 −67.2 [−105.5, −28.9] <0.001 0.09 Peak glucose during OGTT (mmol/L) 9.1 ± 1.4 8.3 ± 1.3 −0.8 [−1.2, −8.0] <0.001 0.03 Fasting lactate (mmol/L) 1.2 ± 0.4 0.9 ± 0.3 −0.3 [−0.5, −0.2] <0.001 0.001 Lactate AUC (mmol/L/120 min) 160.0 ± 34.5 129.0 ± 34.5 −31.2 [−41.9, −20.5] <0.001 0.01 Fasting insulin (pmol/L)b 195.6 ± 115.2 135.6 ± 63.0 −53% [−65, −36] <0.001 0.07 Insulin AUC (pmol/L/120 min)b 131760 ± 81240 89580 ± 53280 −57% [−71, −36] <0.001 0.07 HOMA‐IRb 7.9 ± 4.8 5.2 ± 2.6 −58% [−70, −43] <0.001 0.07 Peak insulin during OGTT (pmol/L)b 1645.2 ± 1020.0 1172.8 ± 786.8 −56% [−69, −36] <0.001 0.09 AST (U/L)c 27.4 ± 14.1 23.8 ± 8.9 0.02 0.04 ALT (U/L)b 28.9 ± 22.8 26.7 ± 19.6 −13% [−25, +0.2] 0.09 0.02 BUN (mmol/L) 3.5 ± 0.9 3.6 ± 1.1 0.1 [−0.2, +0.4] 0.56 0.06 Creatinine (µmol/L) 53.0 ± 8.8 53.0 ± 8.8 0 [−0.9, +2.7] 0.41 0.001 Fasting uric acid (µmol/L) 315.2 ± 53.5 333.1 ± 53.5 +17.8 [+8.3, +32.1] 0.001 0.08 Fasting triglycerides (mmol/L)b 1.4 ± 0.9 1.0 ± 0.5 −46% [−62, −25] 0.002 0.08 Fasting LDL‐cholesterol (mmol/L) 2.4 ± 0.6 2.1 ± 0.6 −0.3 [−0.4, −0.1] <0.001 0.003 Fasting HDL‐cholesterol (mmol/L) 1.2 ± 0.2 1.0 ± 0.2 −0.1 [−0.2, −0.1] <0.001 0.05 Fasting free fatty acids (mmol/L) 0.6 ± 0.2 0.7 ± 0.2 +0.1 [+0.1, +0.2] <0.001 0.07 To provide assurance that the effects of sugar restriction were not due exclusively to the modest weight loss evidenced during the study, we performed univariate regression between the change in weight versus the change in metabolic analytes. We saw no relationship other than a positive association between change in glucose AUC and change in weight (P = 0.045). Furthermore, we analyzed the 10 participants who did not lose weight over the 10 days in a separate post hoc sensitivity analysis, and the results were directionally consistent as compared with the entire cohort (Table 3). Notably, hyperinsulinemia significantly improved in this subcohort as well (Figure 2d). Table 3. Sensitivity analysis of the 10 children who did not lose weight; measurements (mean ± SD) on Day 0 and 10 Day 0 Day 10 β‐coefficient (adjusted change) [95% CI] P value r2 a Fasting glucose (mmol/L) 5.3 ± 0.3 5.1 ± 0.2 −0.2 [−0.4, −0.1] 0.01 0.31 Glucose AUC (mmol/L/120 min) 854.7 ± 74.4 836.4 ± 95.5 −18.3 [−79.6, +42.2] 0.51 0.11 Peak glucose during OGTT (mmol/L) 8.7 ± 0.9 8.0 ± 0.9 −0.7 [−1.3, −0.2] 0.01 0.19 Fasting lactate (mmol/L) 1.3 ± 0.5 0.9 ± 0.4 −0.5 [−0.8, −0.1] 0.01 0.56 Lactate AUC (mmol/L/120min) 161.9 ± 34.2 128.5 ± 28.1 −33.4 [−58.2, −8.6] 0.01 0.09 Fasting insulin (pmol/L)b 228.6 ± 141.0 159.6 ± 76.2 −54% [−76, −11] 0.04 0.30 Insulin AUC (pmol/L/120 min)b 151080 ± 112620 123180 ± 74400 −32% [−67, +43] 0.24 0.01 HOMA‐IRb 9.0 ± 5.7 5.9 ± 2.9 −58% [−78, −21] 0.03 0.25 Peak insulin during OGTT (pmol/L)b 2019.0 ± 1399.2 1614.0 ± 1129.8 −41% [−71, +21] 0.08 0.08 AST (U/L)c 25.9 ± 6.9 21.1 ± 3.9 0.08 0.001 ALT (U/L)b 25.2 ± 13.1 22.5 ± 11.5 −21% [−51, +24] 0.42 0.001 BUN (mmol/L) 3.3 ± 0.6 3.7 ± 0.9 +0.4 [−0.1, +0.8] 0.11 0.002 Creatinine (µmol/L) 53.0 ± 8.8 53.0 ± 8.8 + 8.8 [−3.5, +6.2] 0.61 0.25 Fasting uric acid (µmol/L) 315.2 ± 65.4 327.1 ± 47.6 +11.9 [−5.9, +29.7] 0.14 0.04 Fasting triglycerides (mmol/L)b 1.2 ± 0.4 0.9 ± 0.4 −33% [−69, +55] 0.30 0.17 Fasting LDL‐cholesterol (mmol/L) 2.1 ± 0.5 1.9 ± 0.4 −1.2 [−0.4, +0.1] 0.26 0.04 Fasting HDL‐cholesterol (mmol/L) 1.1 ± 0.2 1.1 ± 0.2 −0.05 [−0.14, +0.04] 0.26 0.01 Fasting free fatty acids (mmol/L) 0.5 ± 0.2 0.6 ± 0.1 +0.1 [−0.04, +0.17] 0.19 0.15
Discussion Epidemiological studies have linked dietary fructose consumption, either as sucrose or high‐fructose corn syrup, with the various co‐morbidities of metabolic syndrome, including CVD, T2DM, and NAFLD 4, 20, 21. However, proof of causation has been difficult to establish for four reasons. First, long‐term randomized controlled trials of dietary fructose consumption are difficult because in real world settings, there is no integrated biomarker for dietary fructose or measure of compliance 22. Second, short‐term experimental protocols feature an excessive dose of oral fructose 23. Third, recall bias underestimating sugar consumption is the norm in epidemiologic studies 24; therefore using recall data in order to conduct externally controlled studies becomes problematic. Fourth, investigators routinely conflate the metabolic detriment of the fructose molecule with its caloric equivalence or with its effects on adiposity, either of which are assumed to be the intermediate cause of the pathology 25. To circumvent these issues, we instead chose to evaluate whether short‐term isocaloric restriction of dietary fructose in children with obesity and metabolic syndrome would mitigate metabolic pathology. However, to demonstrate a primary effect, we had to substitute dietary added sugar (glucose‐fructose) calorie‐for‐calorie with dietary starch in order to maintain equivalence for both calories, carbohydrate content, and weight. We anticipated that a 9‐day fructose restriction interval would be sufficient, based on previous work by our group in healthy adults demonstrating changes in liver fat within 7 days of isocaloric fructose restriction 8. Fructose has been suggested to increase BP 26 by enhancing sympathetic activity 27, decreasing urinary sodium excretion 28, increasing gut sodium absorption 29, and increasing uric acid (the endogenous inhibitor of endothelial nitric oxide synthase) 30. Fructose has been associated with both systolic and diastolic BP increase in children 31, 32. Our participants' diastolic BP declined significantly. A reduction in diastolic BP suggests decreased volume status which would normally trigger a compensatory increase in HR to maintain cardiac output. Our participants' weight loss occurred during the first 4 days (suggesting water loss) and then returned toward baseline (Figure 1). However, the non‐significant decline in HR suggested that the diastolic BP reduction was not due to changes in volume status. In addition, blood urea nitrogen and creatinine did not change (Table 2). Interestingly, our participants' uric acid levels increased, despite the significant reduction in diastolic BP. We cannot attribute this increase to hemoconcentration, protein intake, or weight loss. Fasting glucose and glucose AUC improved, implying improved glucose tolerance. Fasting, peak, and insulin AUC reduced, implying enhanced insulin sensitivity. These improvements were unrelated to calories or weight change. We also documented improvement in fasting serum lipids. TG were reduced on the fructose‐restricted diet, consistent with previously reported declines in de novo lipogenesis and very‐low‐density lipoprotein (VLDL) production and release from the liver 8, 33. LDL‐C reduced consistent with VLDL reduction. Fasting free fatty acids increased, consistent with peripheral lipolysis. Fasting lactate and lactate AUC decreased after fructose restriction. Although clinical norms for lactate in children vary, high lactate is seen in patients with decreased mitochondrial number or throughput, e.g., those with ischemia or anoxia, cancer (due to the Warburg effect) 34, or in those with mitochondrial encephalomyopathy (Kearns‐Sayre, MELAS) 35. Fasting lactate and lactate AUC reduced significantly either through decreased lactate production or increased lactate clearance. ALT, a marker of liver fat, did not decline significantly. However, AST, a marker of liver mitochondrial integrity 36, 37, declined significantly by Day 10. While each of these indices are indirect, the simultaneous reduction of AST, lactate, and TG suggests that hepatic mitochondria may be capable of improved disposal of pyruvate. We proffer the testable hypothesis that excessive dietary fructose causes hepatic mitochondrial overload which results in metabolic syndrome, and that individual manifestations of metabolic syndrome may be due to organ‐specific mitochondrial overload. This study manifests several strengths. Rather than studying excessive acute oral fructose administration in normal participants, or the addition of fructose to a normal caloric allotment 12, 38, we instead evaluated restriction of added dietary sugar in children with metabolic syndrome to see whether their metabolic dysfunction would resolve—an endpoint with clinical relevance, and with little chance for charges of artifact. If our participants had been non‐compliant with the dietary regimen, it would only have diluted our findings. To reduce systematic bias, we maintained investigator blinding on all data until final statistical analysis. However, there are some limitations to our paradigm. Athough inclusion of a separate external control group would have been optimal, it would have presented novel challenges of its own, such as: 1) if subjects under‐ or over‐estimated their baseline fructose consumption, then providing them their reported daily fructose content would be problematic; 2) altering each subject's diet while trying to maintain the baseline fructose content would require changes in liquid versus solid, which may also result in caloric change, altered absorption, and altered satiety; and 3) our participants were all patients in an obesity program. We did not believe that maintaining fructose at the same level, even within a study, is commensurate with the message that the change in macronutrient composition is important for their health, and in order to use the study as an “educational moment.” Furthermore, others have looked longitudinally at children with obesity over time without any intervention, but still within the confines of a study, and had seen no changes in metabolic outcomes 39. Rather, each participant served as his or her own control. Our paradigm of dietary sugar and fructose restriction, which included mid‐study dietary adjustments to compensate for weight loss, resulted in a 4% decrease in percentage of calories from carbohydrate, a 2% increase in percentage of calories from protein, and a small increase in dietary fiber, which could have reduced macronutrient absorption 18, flux of fructose to the liver, and also increased satiety. Recognizing that consumption data by recall is routinely underestimated 24, we made every effort to maintain our participants' baseline weight throughout the 10‐day study interval, and even increased the caloric allotment partway through the cohort, yet a decline of 0.9 ± 0.2 kg was noted during the 10 days. Furthermore, this reduction was documented by a 0.6 kg change in fat‐free mass on DXA. One potential concern is that the weight loss over the 10‐day study interval was a manifestation of unintended caloric deficit, and that this weight loss alone resulted in metabolic improvement. Although we cannot determine whether this weight loss was muscle or water or combination thereof, the temporal pattern of weight change argues against persistent caloric deficit (Figure 1); and it is unlikely that a reduction of this magnitude in either compartment would improve metabolic health. To control for weight loss: 1) regression of change in metabolic analytes (except for glucose AUC) versus change in weight showed no significance (data not shown); 2) all analytes (except AST) were adjusted for changes in weight by repeated measures ANCOVA (Table 2); and 3) sensitivity analysis on the subcohort who gained weight (Table 3; Figures 2c,d) demonstrated directionally equivalent metabolic improvement, especially in hyperinsulinemia, suggesting that the effects were primarily due to fructose restriction rather than weight loss. Our econometric analysis ascertained that sugar meets the Bradford Hill criteria for causation for diabetes, including dose, duration, directionality, and precedence 4. This study bolsters this assertion, and supports change in public health policy regarding sugar intake and food labeling.
Conclusion Concerns surrounding the role of sugar consumption in chronic disease have previously focused on its caloric equivalence and its role in fomenting increases in weight. Furthermore, previous clinical studies have relied upon excessive sugar administration, which introduces experimental artifact. This study mitigates all three of these concerns by intervening in children who are already sick with metabolic syndrome and by adjusting for effects of calories, weight gain, and adiposity. This study argues that the health detriments of sugar, and fructose specifically, are independent of its caloric value or effects on weight. Further studies will be required to determine whether sugar restriction alone can impact metabolic syndrome in adults and whether such effects are short‐lived or long‐term.
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank all the participants and parents/caregivers who volunteered for this study. Thanks is also given to all the UCSF Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) Pediatric and Adult CRS Staff (Jean Addis, Sarah Fuerstenau, Erin Matsuda, Grace Mausisa, Abigail Sobejana, Grady Kimes, Erin Miller, Raquel Herrera, Tamara Williamson, John Duda, Caitlin Sheets) who participated in this study, as well as the Bionutrition staff, Jennifer Culp and Monique Schloetter, who planned and prepared the food for this study. A special thanks to Drs. Emily Perito and Patrika Tsai. Authors also thank Arianna Pham, Davis Tang, Ari Simon, Moises Velasco‐Alin, Luis Rodriguez, and Karen Pan. Special acknowledgment is given to Drs. Zea Malawa and Tami Hendriksz who helped recruit patients. Thanks to Laurie Herraiz, RD, who helped design and implement the protocol. The authors also thank WATCH clinic coordinators, who helped screen patients and implement this protocol, including Rachel Lipman, CPNP, Kelly Jordan (medical student at Tufts), Sally Elliott (medical student at UCLA), and Katrina Koslov, PhD (medical student at UCLA).Many Topekans have experienced the Great Topeka Duck Race. But on Thursday afternoon in downtown Topeka, several experienced the Great Topeka Duck Hunt.
A mother duck and her 11 ducklings were spotted walking along S.W. Van Buren about 3:15 p.m. when downtown employees saw from their office windows the ducks were headed straight for traffic at S.W. 6th and Van Buren. It wasn’t clear where they had come from.
Several people stopped what they were doing and came down to make sure the ducks weren’t going to be hurt.
"I noticed they couldn’t get up and push the button to turn on the stop sign so everybody would stop and let them cross," Jason Lamprecht, a downtown worker, said of the ducks. "So I kind of guarded so they kept from crossing 6th Street."
"We’re scared to death they’re going to get ran over," said Diane Nicholson, another downtown employee.
People from various businesses watched the ducks for a bit near the intersection in the parking lot of Valley Inc. Realtors, sort of taking shifts, before realizing they needed to take the ducks somewhere.
The ducklings were rounded up easily enough in two boxes about 4:45 p.m., but the mother proved elusive.
Every time the group of duck hunters tried to get her into a truck, box or blanket, she would fly away.
"I can’t say I’ve ever taken leave to chase a duck," Lamprecht said.
A two-hour hunt ensued, as more than six people kept tabs on the pesky feathered fowl.
"She’s a stubborn little gal," one person said.
It seems everything but duck calls and tranquilizers were used to try and catch her, but to no avail. Animal control, a wildlife refuge and the Helping Hands Humane Society were called, and all said they couldn’t help.
Topeka police Officer Matt Rose eventually came, and still there was no luck in catching the duck.
"(This is a) first time for ducks," Rose said of responding to the call. "Typically it’s not something like this."
The peeping ducklings were used several times as bait to try to get the upset mother to go into a location.
Finally, after trying to just grab her — as well as wrangle her into the bed of a truck, a police car, the window well of Valley Inc., and even the front door of the business — the group decided to wing it as the situation had turned into a wild-goose chase.
The do-gooders made the decision to get the ducks across S.W. 6th and let them go on their way. Traffic had calmed down, so the group took the babies and crossed S.W. 6th.
The mother followed along, and her babies were released from the box. Shortly afterward, at 6:45 p.m., the 12 were on their way along S.W. Van Buren toward the Kansas River.
Dan Wilson, another downtown worker, followed the ducks with his wife all the way to the river to make sure they made it safely.
"She outsmarted at least six of us," Wilson said of the mother. "She knew where she wanted to go. It’s a happy ending. At least we kept them from turning into road kill."An Irish man has been shot dead in Mexico after he stopped to ask for directions to the beach.
An Irish man has been shot dead in Mexico after he stopped to ask for directions to the beach.
Irish man (29) shot dead in Mexico after'stopping to ask for directions'
The man (29) was from Co Louth.
Local media are reporting that he was shot in Lazaro Cardenas in the State of Michoacán on Tuesday.
According to reports the man was travelling with his partner in a van when they stopped to ask for directions at a gas station at La Garzas de La Mira. It is understood that they were looking to travel to the beach.
At least two men approached the couple and attempted to rob a bag from the woman.
The Irish man moved to defend her but was shot repeatedly and dragged from the vehicle.
According to reports the thieves stole their white Ford pick-up van, leaving the couple behind.
Paramedics attended the scene and the woman was treated in hospital.
Excelsior reports that the woman is 28 and from Tucson Arizona in |
an oligarchy. These open attempts to buy governance (corruption or favor-for-influence) spread the unprofitable reality of debt-fiat even faster.
This process has happened before and it will happen again.
It is the nature of consolidation and corruption:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Data/Information
Throughout history humanity has depended on its ability to gather and process data. Season cycles, food location, time, these are examples of data humans have processed for as long as we know. As we explored the world we expanded our capacity to gather and process data and, for the most part, benefited greatly. Eventually we automated the process for gathering data -- we now gather data with sensors and regarding things we only dreamed even existed (gravitational waves?!). In the digital age, we even create data about ourselves and our habits which is processed to determine large human patterns (politics, disaster relief, etc). Our ability as a society to process this data has lagged behind our ability to collect and create it. The few massive processing centers we posses as a species are run by highly centralized institutions and when comparing supply and demand for processing, are clearly inaccessible to everyone except the highest payers and most well connected.
So What is Gridcoin?
Gridcoin is a store of value which prioritizes the decentralized processing of data gathered or created. If you believe in the value of accessible data processing, you believe in Gridcoin, and that is where it gets its value. If you believe in the value of data processing for those able to pay, you believe in Golem, SONM, or iEx. Both of these systems place value in the usefulness and cost (rarity) of processing data. I personally believe this is one of the better representations of value.
So the problem we face is, that people do not know what cryptocurrencies are and frankly don't even want to know.
---- @appliepiie
I run into the same problem a lot. A solution I have found is to literally read them the abstract and summary from the Bitcoin Whitepaper and talk about it. Focus on this line:
What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.
Once people get it, they love it. No Credit Card companies.
Once you've explained the blockchain, explaining using the power it requires for processing data which leads to real scientific progress is a breeze.
Regarding @applepiie's Idea
I think it's the perfect direction for Gridcoin. It will probably take some time to put together such an ambitious endeavor, so let's get going!
(If you are reading this but haven't read @applepiie's post please go do that. It's linked at the top of this post.)
Thanks to @joshoeah for the new header! Expect more in the coming days/weeks.Restaurant Siege In Somalia Ends With At Least 31 People Killed
Enlarge this image toggle caption Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP
Somali soldiers reclaimed the blasted and bloody remains of a popular pizza joint early Thursday, ending a nightlong siege that left at least 31 people dead in the country's capital, according to local police. News reports quoted Capt. Mohamed Hussein as saying all five of the gunmen were killed.
The militant group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack on Pizza House and the adjacent Posh Hotel in Mogadishu.
That attack began Wednesday evening with a car bombing at the hotel's front gates, The New York Times reports, then devolved into a hostage situation at the restaurant. Citing state news outlets, The Times says more than 50 hostages were ultimately rescued by special forces troops.
But before they were rescued, The Associated Press says, many of the survivors endured a nightmarish scenario as militants went from room to room, firing at civilians at point-blank range.
"I never thought I would have the chance to see the sun again," one survivor told the AP. "They were killing people on sight."
The wire service details how the fight unfolded:
"Soldiers in gun-mounted vehicles surrounded the building, and troops later entered the ground floor as al-Shabab snipers defended their positions upstairs. The battle to end the siege was hampered by darkness, (senior police Capt. Mohamed) Hussein said.... "The bodies of five girls believed to have been killed by the extremists were found in the restaurant, police said. The body of a Syrian man who worked as a chef lay near a blood-spattered and bullet-marked wall. "The car bomb that began the attack blew the roofs off the restaurant and other nearby buildings. Many of the first victims were young men who had been entering the Pizza House when the bomb went off, Hussein said. "The extremists, appearing to pose as security forces, then rushed inside the restaurant."
The U.S. carried out airstrikes against the al-Qaida-linked militant group elsewhere in the country on Sunday, killing eight militants, according to military officials.
And the restaurant siege overnight was by no means the first attack launched by al-Shabab on a civilian target this year. The group's assault on another hotel in January reportedly claimed as many as 28 lives.Reinsdorf's cheap? What a bunch of Bull
hello
Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, left, embraces Chicago White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf during the White Sox baseball fan festival on Friday, Jan. 27, 2012, in Chicago. Associated Press
There's a perception in some circles that Bulls and White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf is all about winning and throw away millions by eating contracts. Daily Herald columnist Barry Rozner says that perception is just dead wrong and totally unfair. Daily Herald file photo
Jerry Reinsdorf is cheap and less interested in winning than making money.
We know this because ESPN basketball expert Bill Simmons has told us this a few times now.
It happened again Thursday night during the NBA draft when Simmons told a national TV audience that Reinsdorf is a businessman who watches every last dollar and didn't believe Reinsdorf would be willing to pay Carlos Boozer $16 million to go away.
In other words, Reinsdorf is a cheapskate.
It's not the first time Simmons has made this claim. It's at least the third, and perhaps many more than that.
The stunning part isn't that it happened again. Reinsdorf has long been a target for a certain segment of the media that may have motivations escaping the naked eye.
It's stunning because someone with Simmons' platform would seemingly have more knowledge than has been displayed on national TV and in a nationally-read column.
Last month, Simmons wrote that the Bulls operate the franchise "like they're stuck playing in Indiana or Milwaukee. Keep getting dem checks, Jerry."
Yes, Jerry is all about the money. Except that he's not.
Reinsdorf has eaten plenty of contracts over the years and spent plenty of his own money helping out players and employees in trouble, both with the Bulls and White Sox, stories never made public by Reinsdorf or his kin.
On the baseball business side, just this year he let Rick Hahn dump Jeff Keppinger and ate $8.5 million of contract. Just this week he dined on more than $2 million of Scott Downs' salary.
Yeah, he'd never send a player away for nothing, right?
As for the Bulls, well, it's still his fault Scottie Pippen agreed to a bad contract -- even though Reinsdorf begged him not sign it, knowing the deal would soon be obsolete.
But Pippen blamed Reinsdorf and Jerry Krause for the better part of two decades, making certain everyone around the NBA knew they were terrible people and to blame for all the world's ills.
Lest you think that story dead, understand there are players around the league who still think Reinsdorf did wrong by Pippen and Michael Jordan, a legend yet furthered by players from the six title teams.
It doesn't matter, apparently, that Reinsdorf has not only forgiven Pippen for everything he ever said about Reinsdorf and his family, but when Pippen was unemployed, Reinsdorf hired Pippen to walk around the UC and shake hands.
Randy Brown was forced to sell his championship rings in a Chapter 7 auction five years ago. He's now an assistant GM for the Bulls.
Jay Williams broke his contract when he broke his leg in a motorcycle accident. The Bulls could have released him immediately, knowing his career was over, but they paid him in full the next season. When the Bulls bought out Williams' contract the following year to gain roster flexibility, Reinsdorf wrote Williams a check for $3 million.
Yeah, the man is heartless and cold, collecting "dem checks" and keeping track of every dollar.
As for Boozer, well, the Bulls did buy out Eddie Robinson for $10 million a decade ago, and since have bought out the contracts of players Tim Thomas and Rip Hamilton, costing millions more in the process.
If the Bulls end up accomplishing nothing this summer, perhaps they will keep Boozer and pay him to play if they find no better options, reserving the right to deal an expiring contract that might have value later.
Or maybe they'll figure out another reason to keep him and play him rather than pay him to go away -- though the chances of that are very slim -- but the conclusion won't be a result of the owner's stinginess.
The people who say that are the same who claim the Bulls have never paid the luxury tax. Actually, they did a year ago to the tune of $4 million just so they could sign Kirk Hinrich the previous summer.
The Bulls didn't have to bring in Hinrich. They could have bought someone for the minimum and saved $4 million in salary and $4 million in taxes, but in an attempt to stay afloat while Derrick Rose was rehabbing, they thought Hinrich was the answer.
So that's another $8 million spent trying to win.
They attempted to sign Luol Deng to an extension before he was dealt this season, and that would have put them back in the luxury tax, but Deng turned it down and somehow that makes the Bulls cheap for avoiding the tax this summer.
It goes on and on and on.
At best, it's a result of ignorance. At worst, perhaps something more sinister. But it's always wrong and intrinsically damaging to both Reinsdorf and the Bulls franchise.
Like Reinsdorf or not, think him a winner or not, that narrative is simply false.
It's also really unfair.
brozner@dailyherald.com
• Listen to Barry Rozner from 9 a.m. to noon Sundays on the Score's "Hit and Run" show at WSCR 670-AM.How to Attract Birds to Your Backyard
Guest Writer: Dave Green
Introduction
I’ve always been fascinated by wild birds, and I’ve spent many a pleasurable hour sitting and watching them feeding, bathing and preening in my backyard. It’s wonderful to observe them playing and flitting around.
If you want to attract birds to your yard, you don’t have to do much more than put out a feeder or two to get a few visitors. If you want to attract as many birds as possible though, and a wider range of different types of birds, there are a few simple extra steps you can take.
Following are a few guidelines for how to attract birds to your backyard:
Tips On How To Attract Birds to Your Backyard
Put out a number of different types of feeders with varying types of feed in them. This will help to attract a range of bird species. Target the feed and the feeder types at the specific types of birds you would like to attract. For example, put out hummingbird feeders filled with nectar to attract hummingbirds.
Keep your feeders clean and tidy to prevent the risk of disease from moldy or stale food.
Place your feeders where the birds can easily escape from predators such as cats.
Make sure you put out feed regularly. The birds will get used to your feeding routine and will become regular visitors.
Provide sources of water for the birds to drink and bathe in. Flowing water is best, both because birds seem to be attracted to it and also because it prevents the water from becoming stagnant. If you can only provide still water sources, make sure you refresh the water regularly. Some ideas for sources of water are ponds, streams, bird baths and water fountains. Again, think carefully about where your sources of water are placed; you want to make sure the birds are safe from predators and can relax and feel comfortable.
Give the birds areas to shelter and nest. Bird houses are good for cavity nesters. Trees and hedges are good for non-cavity nesters.
As well as putting out feeders, think about other ways you can provide food. For example, old pieces of wood are great for attracting insects and so work well as a food source for insect-eating birds. Lawns are good for birds that feed on worms. Shrubs that produce berries are another good food source.
If you have the space and time, design your yard for birds. For example, plant trees, hedges and shrubs that attract birds. Lay a lawn and put in some berry-producing plants. Leave some areas to grow wild. This provides cover for the birds and also attracts insects.
Summary
If you follow this advice, you will no doubt soon start getting a lot of regular visitors to your yard. This is good both for your personal enjoyment and also for the birds that have a safe and reliable source of food and water.
Happy birding!
Author Bio:
My name is Dave Green and I am a keen advocate of backyard birding. Not only is it a relaxing and enjoyable hobby but it has real benefits for the birds too. I run a website dedicated to all aspects of backyard birding. You can access it here: Backyard Birding
***
How To Attract Birds to Your Backyard #birds #birding #wildlife Click To Tweet
***
A QUESTION FOR YOU:
What do you do to attract birds to your yard?
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*** Leave a comment below and remember to share. ***
It’s just sexy!
As always, thank you for taking the time to visit my blog!
♥ PEACE ♥Luxury apartment communities may seem a dime a dozen these days in Denver, but SkyHouse Denver is betting one amenity will help it stand out.
The top floor of the 25-story tower at East 18th Avenue and Broadway isn’t carved up into penthouse units — it’s an indoor/outdoor rooftop lounge and deck open to all building residents, equipped with a resort-style outdoor pool, 24-hour fitness center, outdoor terrace with kitchen, grill and fireplace, a demonstration kitchen and multiple lounge areas to watch the big game or just hang out with friends.
“The entire building can enjoy this view,” community manager Carmen Miller said during a tour Wednesday. “It’s like everyone in the building gets to live in the penthouse.”
Developed on the site of the old Cosmopolitan Hotel by Atlanta-based Novare Group, Batson-Cook Development Company and Denver’s Simpson Housing, the apartment tower will welcome its first residents Nov. 1. Leasing has already begun on the 354 apartments, which range in size from studios to two-bedroom units.
Monthly rents start at $1,435 for a studio, $1,565 for one-bedroom and $2,355 for a two-bedroom. Standard amenities include floor-to-ceiling windows, hardwood floors, stainless steel appliances, in-unit washer and dryer, quartz countertops and a private balcony.
About 7,000 square feet of street-level retail space is also in lease-up, Miller said. Stapleton-based SuperFruit Republic, which serves acai and pitaya bowls and smoothies, will open its second location in one of the spaces along Broadway, across from the Brown Palace Hotel. The other two storefronts should be leased by Jan. 1.
Miller expects apartment tenants to run the gamut — downtown office workers looking for a walkable commute, Denver newcomers who want to be centrally located, young and old. Most other new downtown apartments in recent years have been built near Denver Union Station and in the Golden Triangle.
“We’re so central,” Miller said. “There’s so much that’s close to us.”Get the biggest daily stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Ministers have insisted the West Midlands will benefit from a controversial new trade deal with the United States.
Exports from the region could grow by £1.4 billion a year, mainly because the treaty will provide a boost to the automotive sector, said Business Minister Lord Livingston.
But he rejected calls for the NHS to be excluded from the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), saying the deal posed no threat to health services.
The Department for Business has launched a campaign to promote the benefits of the TTIP following a wave of criticism from MPs and unions.
Vocal opponents of the deal include Birmingham MP Roger Godsiff (Lab Hall Green), who argues that it poses a severe threat to the UK’s public services and could lead to a relaxation of regulations governing workplace safety, food hygiene, workers’ rights and environmental protection.
The EU and the US began detailed negotiations in 2013 and the aim is to increase transatlantic trade partly by getting rid of tariffs and agreeing common rules and regulations, so that products made in one continent can be exported to the other without requiring significant changes.
A practical example highlighted by the Government is the dashboard light used to show that a car handbrake is on. In a British car this would be an exclamation mark in a red circle but in the US the light shows the letter P, for ‘park’.
Eliminating these differences will make trade with the US much easier, in particular for small businesses, ministers say.
The TTIP would also ensure we have similar rules on how governments buy products or services from the private sector, and similar rules regarding employee rights and protecting the environment.
But trade unions fear that common employment laws will mean European workers have less protection than they do now and warn that the treaty could lead to privatisation of the NHS.
But Lord Livingston insisted the treaty would help the economy grow and create jobs.
The West Midlands would benefit because agreeing common standards with America will increase production of motor vehicles in the UK by an estimated seven per cent, according to the Department for Business.
Lord Livingston said: “This is a very big prize, removing most tariffs so that more companies will be able to trade with the United States. We are trying to bring standards together, not reduce them,” he said.
But he confirmed the Government had rejected calls for the NHS to be excluded specifically from the treaty.
MP Mr Godsiff said: “I don’t believe him. It’s as simple as that.
“I think it’s a very dangerous treaty, and of course once you sign the thing you are bound by it lock stock and barrel.
“It’s no good afterwards turning round and saying we made a mistake because the answer’s going to come back: ‘you signed it’.”Image caption Ministers argue law enforcement agencies need to keep pace with changing technology
Plans to monitor all Britons' online activity are needed to help society fight crime and "save lives", Home Secretary Theresa May has said.
Under draft plans, service providers will have to store details of all internet use in the UK for a year.
But Mrs May said the police would only see the details if they had a "clear case" and investigative justification.
It was a myth it would allow the government "to read everyone's e-mails", she added.
Mrs May is defending the proposals as she appears before a special committee of MPs and peers which is scrutinising the plans.
The proposals would require firms to retain the basic details of people's activity on websites, social networking sites, webmail, internet phone calls and online gaming for a year and release it if required.
She said "a number of myths" had arisen about the proposals "such as it was going to enable the government to read everyone's e-mails which it plainly, obviously, is not".
'Who, when where and how'
The authorities would not gain routine access to the content of people's conversations as the scope of the proposed powers would be limited to the "who, when, where and how" of communications.
Data Communications Bill The Bill extends the range of data telecoms firms will have to store for up to 12 months
It will include for the first time details of messages sent on social media, webmail, voice calls over the internet and gaming in addition to emails and phone calls
The data includes the time, duration, originator and recipient of a communication and the location of the device from which it is made
It does not include the content of messages - what is being said. Officers will need a warrant to see that
But they will not need the permission of a judge to see details of the time and place of messages provided they are investigating a crime or protecting national security
Four bodies will have access to data: police, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, the intelligence agencies and HM Revenue and Customs
Local authorities will face restrictions on the kinds of data they can access
"There is no intention of going beyond that into content," she added. "There is a limited scope for the data we want to have access to. We have been very clear about that at every stage."
The police would have to make a "clear case" for requesting access to data when there was an investigation that required it.
Pressed by MPs and peers about the range of data channels that would be covered, she said there had to be a "degree of flexibility" to ensure any new law was not outdated by the time it was passed.
She said the authorities' ability to keep track of suspects was being increasingly "degradated" by the use of new technology such as social media and encrypted messaging services.
And she added: "The aim of this is to ensure our law enforcement agencies can carry on having access to the data they find so necessary operationally in terms of investigation, catching criminals and saving lives."
Of the 30,000 estimated cases last year where the police made an urgent request for communications data, between 25% and 40% of them resulted in lives being saved, according to figures quoted by Mrs May.
"I think that matters to the public," she told the committee.
The police definition of cases that resulted in lives being saved includes missing persons, kidnappings and other crimes where people in potential danger had to be traced, the Home Office said.
'Genuine concerns'
There is a lot of genuine concern about this bill and the effect of intrusion into private lives Julian Hupper, Lib Dem MP
Lib Dem MP Julian Huppert said the government had failed to adequately persuade the public of the need for new powers or make clear for what purpose they would be used.
"There is a lot of genuine concern about this bill and the effect of intrusion into private lives, given the breadth of it."
Labour MP Nick Brown said that many of his constituents were concerned that they would be "spied on" and that information could be "illegally obtained" and find itself in the public domain.
And Lord Blencathra, the Conservative chair of the committee, urged ministers to restrict the number of organisations that could have designated access to the information to the intelligence services, the police and the Financial Services Authority and a handful of others.
"You seem to be edging closer to saying... let's have the big important national bodies dealing with crime, national security, terrorism and then make all the rest go through additional hoops that are much stricter than at the moment."
In response, Mrs May said the public was "justifiably" concerned about who had access to the data and they should be a second stage of "extra scrutiny" by Parliament for other public bodies.
"There is a necessity in order to show that people can have confidence that these are bodies that are appropriate to have access...that there is an extra rung in the ladder that they have to get up."
She said the government was fully committed to the draft bill - but it would be prepared to look at its wording in certain areas to ensure the way it was drafted did not lead to any misinterpretation.The Union Finance Minister Shri said that apart from on-going schemes and programmes for the marginalized and vulnerable section of the society, the Government has initiated various special social sector programmes. He said that these programmes among others include Swacch Mission (Gramin), which will set the base for improving sanitation and health standards; Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) and RuPay debit card which will extend financial inclusion and give financial empowerment to the account holders at large. The Finance Minister, Shri Jaitley was making his Opening Remarks during the Pre Budget Consultative Meeting with the representatives of Social Infrastructure, Human Capital and Development Groups here today. He said that more than 63% of the population is in the age group of 15-59 years, broadly termed as India's demographic dividend. He said while this young population provides a great opportunity, but it also poses a great challenge to the Government. He said that benefits will flow only if our population is healthy, educated and properly skilled. In this context, he said that investments, especially in social infrastructure that build-up human capital are crucial. Shri Jaitley said that needs to take advantage of this demographic window in the next couple of decades and garner its benefits. Therefore, the Finance Minister said that his Government has put thrust on skill development as well as on 'Make in India' as the Government's endeavour to improve employability and create large employment avenues for the youth among others. He said that skill development has been given focused attention for which a dedicated Department of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship has been created in the Central Government. He said that the challenge for the country now is in planning and acting towards converting its potential demographic force for enhancing opportunities of growth by dovetailing the quality of manpower to the requirements of employers, both domestic and international..
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The Union Finance Minister Shri said that emerging trends indicate the growth deceleration in has bottomed-out. The Finance Minister said that significant downward trend in inflation has also been recorded in the second and third quarter of 2014-15. He said that external environment has also largely turned in India's favour. In such a back drop, the Finance Minister said that domestic policies to achieve macro-economic balance and the on-going process of economic reforms would lend further strength to the recovery of the economy..
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The meeting was attended among others by Shri Rajiv Mehrishi, Finance Secretary, Shri Shaktikanta Dass, Revenue Secretary, Shri Ratan P. Watal, Secretary (Expenditure), Shri V.S. Oberoi, Secretary (WCD), Shri Lov Verma, Secretary, Health and Family Welfare, Ms Vrinda Sarup, Secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy, Smt. Gauri Kumar, Secretary, Ministry of Labour and Employment, Dr. Arvind Subramaniam, Chief Economic Adviser Ms. Anita Kapur, Chairperson, CBDT, Shri Kaushal Srivastava, Chairman, CBEC, and other senior officers of the Among the representatives of the various social sector groups included Shri Paul Divakar, National Campaign on Dalit Himan Rights, Ms. Barsha Poricha, National Foundation for India, Shri Sreedhar Ramomoorty, Mines Minerals and People, Ms Dipa Sinha, Right to Food Campaign, Shri Subrat Das, Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability, Shri Ashok Bharti, National Confederation of Dalit Organisation, Ms. Sonali Khan, Breakthrough, Shri Ashraf Patel, Pravah, Shri Ajay Jha, Public Advocacy Initiatives for Rights and Values in India (PAIRVI), Shri Thomas Chandy, Save the Children, Shri Sandeep Chachra, Actionaid, Shri Avinash Kumar, Wateraid, Shri Pradeep S. Mehta, CUTS, Shri Ambarish Rai, Right to Education Forum and Ms Yamini Aiyyar, Centre for Policy Research among others..
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Various suggestions were received from the representatives of the different social sector groups during the meeting. Major recommendations include that immediate steps be taken in the budget to prevent any scope of diversion and misallocation of funds meant for the benefit of dalits and adivasis. This will result in about Rs. 30,000 crore to be available for the development of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes. Other suggestions include to set apart in the coming budget the entire 16.2% for Scheduled Castes and 8.2% for Scheduled Tribes, establishment of well designed and dedicated institutional mechanism for Schedule Caste Sub Plans (SCSPs) Tribal Sub Plans (TSPs) separately at the Centre and State levels, creation of a separate unit within Niti Ayog with power to review, monitor and direct to ensure effective implementation of the SCSP and TSP as well as setting-up of a nodal unit headed by a Joint Secretary with the responsibility of preparation of Annual SCSP Plans and their subsequent implementation..
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Other suggestions include adequate allocation for ICDS budget, Mid Day Meal Scheme and for the programmes for the nutrition of mother and child under Food Security Act as well as clear demarcation of funds to remove malnutrition among children of dalits and adivasis etc. Besides this, there was suggestion for budget transparency at local level in order to have better utilization of funds and results of various social welfare schemes at the grass root level etc..
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Other suggestions made during the aforesaid meeting include that a mechanism needs to be built to develop entrepreneurship among dalits, schemes to be brought out for developing art and culture of dalit and adivasi communities. Suggestions were also made about proper implementation of Prevention of Domestic Violence against Women Act, appointment of women protection officers, increasing the scope of Nirbhaya Fund to cover the domestic violence against women etc. A suggestion was made that Finance Minister may include a statement in his Budget Speech condemning violence against women showing unequivocal commitment of the Government in this regard..
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Some suggestions were also made on investment on youth, especially from those of socially excluded communities, investment in skill and entrepreneurship building, more spending on education and social enterprises, inclusion of youth leadership in CSR activities, higher spending to change the social mindset of people against the use of toilets etc..
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Other suggestions include adoption and implementation of the National Competition Policy to push the growth on higher trajectory, adoption and implementation of Public Procurement Act. As public procurement accounts for almost 30% of the total GDP worth US $136 billion annually, therefore, Public Procurement Act would help in promoting the good governance by curbing corruption in public procurement; and adoption of a National Public Procurement Policy; adoption and implementation of Financial Consumer Protection Act, fixing of fiscal management practices by establishment of Parliamentary Budget Office, adoption of international best practices in budgetary planning and reduction of non-merit subsidies among others..
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In end, suggestions were also made for enhancement of allocation to education with an emphasis on making functional investment in early childhood and elementary education, enhanced allocation to education to 6% of GDP in line with Kothari Commission and National Education Policy recommendations and enhance allocation to elementary education by 1% to accommodate a cumulative gap in education, enhanced allocation to areas with strongest implications on quality-availability of teaching learning materials, improved libraries and strengthening of the capacity of the resource unit at the cluster level, enhance allocation for research, monitoring and evaluation, address gaps in financial and planning process to ensure full expenditure of allocated funds in education sector among others..
.Hot on the heels of Team RED,
it’s time to get BLU!
From one of our very favorite titles in the Valve catalog come these brand new TF2 Series 1 BLU Deluxe Action Figures! BLU stands for “Builders League United,” but it also just happens to be the colors you wear when you square off against Team RED (“Reliable Excavation Demolition”) in Team Fortress 2.
Our Series 1 RED Demoman and Pyro figures are shipping now and should be on shelves later this week, so let’s take this chance to get acquainted with Team BLU, shall we?
To the Limit
Like their sold-out crimson compatriots, Series 1 BLU Demo and Pyro are LIMITED EDITION. We’ve made a mere 10,000 of each deluxe figure, and both figures come with codes to unlock exclusive in-game bonuses. So not only do you get an awesome figure, but you get more of the game, too!
Feelin’ Kinda BLU
Limited Edition Demoman BLU
Limited Edition Pyro BLU
Pyro and Demoman are re-created here in their Builders Leagues United (BLU) uniforms. The 7″ scale figures feature over 25 points of articulation and include their signature in game weapons and accessories.
These figures are strictly limited to 10,000 pcs of each and the packaging will be labeled as such.
Spring Arrival
Look for Team Fortress 2 Series 1 BLU to hit shelves in April. Series 1 RED is sold out, but in the meantime, for more info, visit the Demoman and Pyro product pages:
And don’t forget to check out our Pyro and Scout plushes and the whole Team Fortress 2 collection!
“Boom Boom, Baby.” – Demo
Stay tuned for more to come on Team Fortress 2 and all your Valve favorites!
For exclusive updates and behind-the-scenes sneak peaks, keep up with NECA on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus!
Related ProductsQuest Brothers Classic Cars are offering AutoJumble readers the exclusive opportunity to vote on the colour and wheel choice of a 2002Tii they are currently restoring.
The 2002 is one of the most significant cars in BMW’s history, having laid the foundations for the brands’ identity as a producer of sporty but practical saloon cars. That said, they’re great cars in their own right themselves, with powerful and reliable engines and an extremely well balanced chassis.
Furthermore, their practical and utilitarian interiors makes them feasible daily drivers even in modern times.
QBCC, a classic car restoration specialist in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, are currently restoring a 1975 model 2002 Tii. They are exclusively offering AutoJumble readers the opportunity to vote upon the colour the car will be painted, and the wheels the car will wear – giving you the chance to spec a 2002 for the first time since 1977.
The car arrived in the shop after the previous owner had abandoned its restoration at a fairly early stage. The 2002Tii was missing many panels and although the engine turned over, it would not fire. A 1975 model, the car was actually registered in 1980 for unknown reasons. This, combined with the fact it has been off the road in 1990, makes the displayed mileage of 36k miles somewhat plausible, although more research is needed to be conclusive.
The car was originally ‘Turkis’ turquoise, but was resprayed white in the ’80s, which is the colour it still (partially) wears.
Since arriving at QBCC, the team have already had the engine running after a full fluid change and a new starter motor.
QBCC have a agreed to four colours and three sets of wheels that are available and they would be happy to go with, beyond that, it’s up to you!
>>> For BMW news, information, events and more, see the BMW Car Club GB.
>>> Fancy your own 2002? Check their current prices here.Digix Core Dev Weekly Update — Mar 1st 2017
Digix Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 28, 2017
KC Chng (CEO)
Ropsten Hiccup
On 24th Feb 2017, Ropsten, Ethereum’s public test net, was under a denial a service attack (“spam attack”). Average block propagation time slowed to a crawl as a large miner has decided to deploy several zero-value high-gas transactions to spam the test network continually. The attacker’s intentions are unknown, but the result is that Ethereum developers who rely on Ropsten to test their contracts no longer have a stable public testing environment to deploy and test their smart contract code prior to deploying to production.
The use of Proof-of-Work (PoW) for testnets presents a fundamental game theoretical problem: the only significant economic incentive to mine on testnets using dedicated GPU resources is to launch an attack and reduce stability and the viability of the testnet (and thus hamper development for the mainnet chain).
This means that testing on Ropsten may no longer be viable as these attacks will come continually / sporadically. We are working out alternatives as we speak, and will make a separate announcement soon.
Chris will be giving a presentation tomorrow at SG Innovate, together with Attores and Otonomos. Please tune into our channel for more information.
Digix Live Stream
Chris Hitchcott (Digix Core Dev)
This week I’ve been working on Spectrum. I completed the web3-redux refactor, and have implemented `redux-orm` as the main datastore for the core project. This gives us the ability to have dynamic keystore ‘plugins’ with custom creation, editing and signing components. In simple terms, this means that adding new signing types (like uPort or 2FA) can be done in a decoupled way, and the ‘dapplet store’ can not only list dapplets, but also custom keystore providers.
Weekly Git Commits
## core2-storage-library-contracts
### git@github.com:DigixGlobal/core2-storage-library-contracts.git
- b95c7a4 — [maint] refactor into single storage contract
- 586ecbf — [wip] Auditor and Custodian functions
- 729f490 — [wip] Vendor related functions
- 9b2e271 — [wip] participant interfaces and controllers
- 0aa8724 — [maint] rename User library to Token library
- 3f85527 — [wip] Asset contracts
## simple-faucet
### git@github.com:DigixGlobal/simple-faucet.git
- 6bc5add — [maint] add example start script for localhost server
- a44052c — [feature] resolve ip in new version of nginx, document
- a8ac441 — Merge branch ‘master’ of github.com:DigixGlobal/simple-faucet
- 0c5217c — [feature] simple faucet — initial commit
- 2c0cf57 — Initial commit
## spectrum
### git@github.com:DigixGlobal/Spectrum.git
- a9a0f25 — [wip] offline signing
- b19c9c7 — [wip] modular hooked signing providers 😆
- 9b44e38 — [wip] parse balances with bignumber
- 5e3e6d9 — [wip] more sensible v3 editor
- 6f83fd0 — [wip] web3 integration
- 156ddaa — [wip] tokens refactoring
- 34ad1e3 — [wip] working baseToken |
the EPA's refusal to enforce emission standards and petitioners' injuries. Finally, the dissent maintains that redressability of the injuries is even more problematic given that countries such as India and China are responsible for the majority of the greenhouse-gas emissions. The Chief Justice concludes by accusing the majority of lending the Court as a convenient forum for policy debate and of transgressing the limited role afforded to the Supreme Court by the U.S. Constitution.[12]
Scalia's dissent [ edit ]
First, Justice Scalia found that the Court has no jurisdiction to decide the case because petitioners lack standing, which would have ended the inquiry. However, since the majority saw fit to find standing, his dissent continued.
The main question is, "Does anything require the Administrator to make a 'judgment' whenever a petition for rulemaking is filed?" Justice Scalia sees the Court's answer to this unequivocally as yes, but with no authority to back it. He backs this assertion by explaining that the "statute says nothing at all about the reasons for which the Administrator may defer making a judgment"—the permissible reasons for deciding not to grapple with the issue at the present time. Scalia saw no basis in law for the Court's imposed limitation.
In response to the Court's statement that, "If the scientific uncertainty is so profound that it precludes EPA from making a reasoned judgment as to whether greenhouse gases contribute to global warming, EPA must say so," Scalia responded that EPA has done precisely that, in the form of the National Research Council panel that researched climate-change science. (But in fact, the panel stated that it "generally agrees with the assessment of human-caused climate change presented in the IPCC Working Group I (WGI) scientific report," which concluded that most of the increase in global temperatures since the middle of the 20th century is "very likely" caused by man-made greenhouse gases.)
Remand [ edit ]
On remand, EPA found that six greenhouse gases "in the atmosphere may reasonably be anticipated both to endanger public health and to endanger public welfare." On February 16, 2010, the states of Alabama, Texas, and Virginia and several other parties sought judicial review of EPA's determination in the U.S. Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit. On June 26, 2012, the court issued an opinion which dismissed the challenges to the EPA's endangerment finding and the related GHG regulations.[13] The three-judge panel unanimously upheld the EPA's central finding that GHG such as carbon dioxide endanger public health and were likely responsible for the global warming experienced over the past half century.
See also [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]early video game
Pong is one of the earliest arcade video games. It is a table tennis sports game featuring simple two-dimensional graphics. The game was originally manufactured by Atari, which released it in 1972. Allan Alcorn created Pong as a training exercise assigned to him by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Bushnell based the idea on an electronic ping-pong game included in the Magnavox Odyssey; Magnavox later sued Atari for patent infringement. Bushnell and Atari co-founder Ted Dabney were surprised by the quality of Alcorn's work and decided to manufacture the game.
Pong was the first commercially successful video game, which helped to establish the video game industry along with the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey. Soon after its release, several companies began producing games that copied its gameplay, and eventually released new types of games. As a result, Atari encouraged its staff to produce more innovative games. The company released several sequels which built upon the original's gameplay by adding new features. During the 1975 Christmas season, Atari released a home version of Pong exclusively through Sears retail stores. It also was a commercial success and led to numerous copies. The game has been remade on numerous home and portable platforms following its release. Pong is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. due to its cultural impact.
Gameplay [ edit ]
The two paddles return the ball back and forth. The score is kept by the numbers (0 and 1) at the top of the screen.
Pong is a two-dimensional sports game that simulates table tennis. The player controls an in-game paddle by moving it vertically across the left or right side of the screen. They can compete against another player controlling a second paddle on the opposing side. Players use the paddles to hit a ball back and forth. The goal is for each player to reach eleven points before the opponent; points are earned when one fails to return the ball to the other.[1][2][3]
Development and history [ edit ]
Pong as a training exercise. Atari engineer Allan Alcorn designed and builtas a training exercise.
Pong was the first game developed by Atari.[4][5] After producing Computer Space, Bushnell decided to form a company to produce more games by licensing ideas to other companies. The first contract was with Bally Manufacturing Corporation for a driving game.[3][6] Soon after the founding, Bushnell hired Allan Alcorn because of his experience with electrical engineering and computer science; Bushnell and Dabney also had previously worked with him at Ampex. Prior to working at Atari, Alcorn had no experience with video games.[7] To acclimate Alcorn to creating games, Bushnell gave him a project secretly meant to be a warm-up exercise.[7][8] Bushnell told Alcorn that he had a contract with General Electric for a product, and asked Alcorn to create a simple game with one moving spot, two paddles, and digits for score keeping.[7] In 2011, Bushnell stated that the game was inspired by previous versions of electronic tennis he had played before; Bushnell played a version on a PDP-1 computer in 1964 while attending college.[9] However, Alcorn has claimed it was in direct response to Bushnell's viewing of the Magnavox Odyssey's Tennis game.[7] In May 1972, Bushnell had visited the Magnavox Profit Caravan in Burlingame, California where he played the Magnavox Odyssey demonstration, specifically the table tennis game.[10][11] Though he thought the game lacked quality, seeing it prompted Bushnell to assign the project to Alcorn.[9]
Alcorn first examined Bushnell's schematics for Computer Space, but found them to be illegible. He went on to create his own designs based on his knowledge of transistor–transistor logic and Bushnell's game. Feeling the basic game was too boring, Alcorn added features to give the game more appeal. He divided the paddle into eight segments to change the ball's angle of return. For example, the center segments return the ball a 90° angle in relation to the paddle, while the outer segments return the ball at smaller angles. He also made the ball accelerate the longer it remained in play; missing the ball reset the speed.[3] Another feature was that the in-game paddles were unable to reach the top of the screen. This was caused by a simple circuit that had an inherent defect. Instead of dedicating time to fixing the defect, Alcorn decided it gave the game more difficulty and helped limit the time the game could be played; he imagined two skilled players being able to play forever otherwise.[7]
Three months into development, Bushnell told Alcorn he wanted the game to feature realistic sound effects and a roaring crowd.[7][12] Dabney wanted the game to "boo" and "hiss" when a player lost a round. Alcorn had limited space available for the necessary electronics and was unaware of how to create such sounds with digital circuits. After inspecting the sync generator, he discovered that it could generate different tones and used those for the game's sound effects.[3][7] To construct the prototype, Alcorn purchased a $75 Hitachi black-and-white television set from a local store, placed it into a 4-foot (1.2 m) wooden cabinet, and soldered the wires into boards to create the necessary circuitry. The prototype impressed Bushnell and Dabney so much that they felt it could be a profitable product and decided to test its marketability.[3]
Pong prototype that was used in the tavern. Theprototype that was used in the tavern.
In August 1972, Bushnell and Alcorn installed the Pong prototype at a local bar, Andy Capp's Tavern.[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] They selected the bar because of their good working relation with the bar's owner and manager, Bill Gaddis;[21] Atari supplied pinball machines to Gaddis.[5] Bushnell and Alcorn placed the prototype on one of the tables near the other entertainment machines: a jukebox, pinball machines, and Computer Space. The game was well received the first night and its popularity continued to grow over the next one and a half weeks. Bushnell then went on a business trip to Chicago to demonstrate Pong to executives at Bally and Midway Manufacturing;[21] he intended to use Pong to fulfill his contract with Bally, rather than the driving game.[3][4] A few days later, the prototype began exhibiting technical issues and Gaddis contacted Alcorn to fix it. Upon inspecting the machine, Alcorn discovered that the problem was the coin mechanism was overflowing with quarters.[21]
After hearing about the game's success, Bushnell decided there would be more profit for Atari to manufacture the game rather than license it, but the interest of Bally and Midway had already been piqued.[4][21] Bushnell decided to inform each of the two groups that the other was uninterested—Bushnell told the Bally executives that the Midway executives did not want it and vice versa—to preserve the relationships for future dealings. Upon hearing Bushnell's comment, the two groups declined his offer.[21] Bushnell had difficulty finding financial backing for Pong; banks viewed it as a variant of pinball, which at the time the general public associated with the Mafia. Atari eventually obtained a line of credit from Wells Fargo that it used to expand its facilities to house an assembly line.[22] The company announced Pong on 29 November 1972.[23][24] Management sought assembly workers at the local unemployment office, but was unable to keep up with demand. The first arcade cabinets produced were assembled very slowly, about ten machines a day, many of which failed quality testing. Atari eventually streamlined the process and began producing the game in greater quantities.[22] By 1973, they began shipping Pong to other countries with the aid of foreign partners.[25]
Home version [ edit ]
Home Pong console, released through Atari'sconsole, released through Sears in 1975
After the success of Pong, Bushnell pushed his employees to create new products.[4][26] In 1974, Atari engineer Harold Lee proposed a home version of Pong that would connect to a television: Home Pong. The system began development under the codename Darlene, named after an attractive female employee at Atari. Alcorn worked with Lee to develop the designs and prototype and based them on the same digital technology used in their arcade games. The two worked in shifts to save time and money; Lee worked on the design's logic during the day, while Alcorn debugged the designs in the evenings. After the designs were approved, fellow Atari engineer Bob Brown assisted Alcorn and Lee in building a prototype. The prototype consisted of a device attached to a wooden pedestal containing over a hundred wires, which would eventually be replaced with a single chip designed by Alcorn and Lee; the chip had yet to be tested and built before the prototype was constructed. The chip was finished in the latter half of 1974, and was, at the time, the highest-performing chip used in a consumer product.[26]
Bushnell and Gene Lipkin, Atari's vice-president of sales, approached toy and electronic retailers to sell Home Pong, but were rejected. Retailers felt the product was too expensive and would not interest consumers.[27] Atari contacted the Sears Sporting Goods department after noticing a Magnavox Odyssey advertisement in the sporting goods section of its catalog. Atari staff discussed the game with a representative, Tom Quinn, who expressed enthusiasm and offered the company an exclusive deal. Believing they could find more favorable terms elsewhere, Atari's executives declined and continued to pursue toy retailers. In January 1975, Atari staff set up a Home Pong booth at a toy trade fair in New York City, but was unsuccessful in soliciting orders due to the fact that they did not know that they needed a private showing.[26][27]
While at the show, they met Quinn again, and, a few days later, set up a meeting with him to obtain a sales order. In order to gain approval from the Sporting Goods department, Quinn suggested Atari demonstrate the game to executives in Chicago. Alcorn and Lipkin traveled to the Sears Tower and, despite a technical complication in connection with an antenna on top of the building which broadcast on the same channel as the game, obtained approval. Bushnell told Quinn he could produce 75,000 units in time for the Christmas season; however, Quinn requested double the amount. Though Bushnell knew Atari lacked the capacity to manufacture 150,000 units, he agreed.[26] Atari acquired a new factory through funding obtained by venture capitalist Don Valentine. Supervised by Jimm Tubb, the factory fulfilled the Sears order.[28] The first units manufactured were branded with Sears' "Tele-Games" name. Atari later released a version under its own brand in 1976.[29]
Lawsuit from Magnavox [ edit ]
The success of Pong attracted the attention of Ralph Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, and his employer, Sanders Associates. Sanders had an agreement with Magnavox to handle the Odyssey's sublicensing, which included dealing with infringement on its exclusive rights. However, Magnavox had not pursued legal action against Atari and numerous other companies that released Pong clones.[30] Sanders continued to apply pressure, and in April 1974 Magnavox filed suit against Atari, Allied Leisure, Bally Midway and Chicago Dynamics.[31] Magnavox argued that Atari had infringed on Baer's patents and his concept of electronic ping-pong based on detailed records Sanders kept of the Odyssey's design process dating back to 1966. Other documents included depositions from witnesses and a signed guest book that demonstrated Bushnell had played the Odyssey's table tennis game prior to releasing Pong.[30][32] In response to claims that he saw the Odyssey, Bushnell later stated that, "The fact is that I absolutely did see the Odyssey game and I didn't think it was very clever."[33]
After considering his options, Bushnell decided to settle with Magnavox out of court. Bushnell's lawyer felt they could win; however, he estimated legal costs of US$1.5 million, which would have exceeded Atari's funds. Magnavox offered Atari an agreement to become a licensee for US$700,000. Other companies producing "Pong clones"—Atari's competitors—would have to pay royalties. In addition, Magnavox would obtain the rights to Atari products developed over the next year.[30][32] Magnavox continued to pursue legal action against the other companies, and proceedings began shortly after Atari's settlement in June 1976. The first case took place at the district court in Chicago, with Judge John Grady presiding.[30][32][34] To avoid Magnavox obtaining rights to its products, Atari decided to delay the release of its products for a year, and withheld information from Magnavox's attorneys during visits to Atari facilities.[32]
Impact and legacy [ edit ]
Pong consoles made their way to various countries, like this Russian Турнир ("Turnir", meaning Dedicatedconsoles made their way to various countries, like this Russian Турнир ("Turnir", meaning tournament ).
The Pong arcade games manufactured by Atari were a great success. The prototype was well received by Andy Capp's Tavern patrons; people came to the bar solely to play the game.[4][21] Following its release, Pong consistently earned four times more revenue than other coin-operated machines.[35] Bushnell estimated that the game earned US$35–40 per day, which he described as nothing he'd ever seen before in the coin-operated entertainment industry at the time.[9] The game's earning power resulted in an increase in the number of orders Atari received. This provided Atari with a steady source of income; the company sold the machines at three times the cost of production. By 1973, the company had filled 2,500 orders, and, at the end of 1974, sold more than 8,000 units.[35] The arcade cabinets have since become collector's items with the cocktail-table version being the rarest.[36] Soon after the game's successful testing at Andy Capp's Tavern, other companies began visiting the bar to inspect it. Similar games appeared on the market three months later, produced by companies like Ramtek and Nutting Associates.[37] Atari could do little against the competitors as they had not initially filed for patents on the solid state technology used in the game. When the company did file for patents, complications delayed the process. As a result, the market consisted primarily of "Pong clones"; author Steven Kent estimated that Atari had produced less than a third of the machines.[38] Bushnell referred to the competitors as "Jackals" because he felt they had an unfair advantage. His solution to competing against them was to produce more innovative games and concepts.[37][38]
Home Pong was an instant success following its limited 1975 release through Sears; around 150,000 units were sold that holiday season.[39][40] The game became Sears' most successful product at the time, which earned Atari a Sears Quality Excellence Award.[40] Similar to the arcade version, several companies released clones to capitalize on the home console's success, many of which continued to produce new consoles and video games. Magnavox re-released their Odyssey system with simplified hardware and new features, and would later release updated versions. Coleco entered the video game market with their Telstar console; it features three Pong variants and was also succeeded by newer models.[39] Nintendo released the Color TV Game 6 in 1977, which plays six variations of electronic tennis. The next year, it was followed by an updated version, the Color TV Game 15, which features fifteen variations. The systems were Nintendo's entry into the home video game market and the first to produce themselves—they had previously licensed the Magnavox Odyssey.[41] The dedicated Pong consoles and the numerous clones have since become varying levels of rare; Atari's Pong consoles are common, while APF Electronics' TV Fun consoles are moderately rare.[42] Prices among collectors, however, vary with rarity; the Sears Tele-Games versions are often cheaper than those with the Atari brand.[39]
Pong IV, Sears' version of Pong sequel (Pong Doubles), was one of the many consoles that flooded the market by 1977. Tele-Games, Sears' version ofsequel (), was one of the many consoles that flooded the market by 1977.
Several publications consider Pong the game that launched the video game industry as a lucrative enterprise.[8][29][43] Video game author David Ellis sees the game as the cornerstone of the video game industry's success, and called the arcade game "one of the most historically significant" titles.[4][36] Kent attributes the "arcade phenomenon" to Pong and Atari's games that followed it, and considers the release of the home version the successful beginning of home video game consoles.[37][40] Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton of Gamasutra referred to the game's release as the start of a new entertainment medium, and commented that its simple, intuitive gameplay made it a success.[29] In 1996 Next Generation named it one of the "Top 100 Games of All Time", recounting that "Next Generation staff ignor[ed] hundreds of thousands of dollars of 32-bit software to play Pong for hours when the Genesis version was released."[44] Entertainment Weekly named Pong one of the top ten games for the Atari 2600 in 2013.[45] Many of the companies that produced their own versions of Pong eventually became well-known within the industry. Nintendo entered the video game market with clones of Home Pong. The revenue generated from them—each system sold over a million units—helped the company survive a difficult financial time, and spurred them to pursue video games further.[41] After seeing the success of Pong, Konami decided to break into the arcade game market and released its first title, Maze. Its moderate success drove the company to develop more titles. Pong has also been used in programming classrooms to teach the fundamentals of languages such as Java and C++.[46]
Bushnell felt that Pong was especially significant in its role as a social lubricant, since it was multiplayer-only and did not require each player to use more than one hand: "It was very common to have a girl with a quarter in hand pull a guy off a bar stool and say, 'I'd like to play Pong and there's nobody to play.' It was a way you could play games, you were sitting shoulder to shoulder, you could talk, you could laugh, you could challenge each other... As you became better friends, you could put down your beer and hug. You could put your arm around the person. You could play left-handed if you so desired. In fact, there are a lot of people who have come up to me over the years and said, 'I met my wife playing Pong,' and that's kind of a nice thing to have achieved."[47]
Sequels and remakes [ edit ]
Bushnell felt the best way to compete against imitators was to create better products, leading Atari to produce sequels in the years followings the original's release: Pong Doubles, Super Pong, Ultra Pong, Quadrapong, and Pin-Pong.[2] The sequels feature similar graphics, but include new gameplay elements; for example, Pong Doubles allows four players to compete in pairs, while Quadrapong—also released by Kee Games as Elimination—has them compete against each other in a four way field.[48][49] Bushnell also conceptualized a free-to-play version of Pong to entertain children in a Doctor's office. He initially titled it Snoopy Pong and fashioned the cabinet after Snoopy's doghouse with the character on top, but retitled it to Puppy Pong and altered Snoopy to a generic dog to avoid legal action. Bushnell later used the game in his chain of Chuck E. Cheese's restaurants.[2][50][51][52][53] In 1976, Atari released Breakout, a single-player variation of Pong where the object of the game is to remove bricks from a wall by hitting them with a ball.[54] Like Pong, Breakout was followed by numerous clones that copied the gameplay, such as Arkanoid, Alleyway, and Break 'Em All.[55]
Atari remade the game on numerous platforms. In 1977, Pong and several variants of the game were featured in Video Olympics, one of the original release titles for the Atari 2600. Pong has also been included in several Atari compilations on platforms including the Sega Genesis, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, and personal computer.[56][57][58][59][60] Through an agreement with Atari, Bally Gaming and Systems developed a slot machine version of the game.[61] The Atari published TD Overdrive includes Pong as an extra game which is played during the loading screen.[62][63] A 3D platform game with puzzle and shooter elements was reportedly in development by Atari Corporation for the Atari Jaguar in September 1995 under the title Pong 2000, as part of their series of arcade game updates for the system and was set to have an original storyline for it,[64] but it was never released. In 1999, the game was remade for home computers and the PlayStation with 3D graphics and power-ups.[65][66] In 2012, Atari celebrated the 40th anniversary of Pong by releasing Pong World.[67]
In popular culture [ edit ]
The game is featured in episodes of television series: That '70s Show,[68] King of the Hill,[69] and Saturday Night Live.[70] In 2006, an American Express commercial featured Andy Roddick in a tennis match against the white, in-game paddle.[71] Other video games have also referenced and parodied Pong; for example Neuromancer for the Commodore 64 and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts for the Xbox 360.[72][73] The concert event Video Games Live has performed audio from Pong as part of a special retro "Classic Arcade Medley".[74] Frank Black's song "Whatever Happened to Pong?" on the album Teenager of the Year references the game's elements.[75]
Dutch design studio Buro Vormkrijgers created a Pong-themed clock as a fun project within their offices. After the studio decided to manufacture it for retail, Atari took legal action in February 2006. The two companies eventually reached an agreement in which Buro Vormkrijgers could produce a limited number under license.[76] In 1999, French artist Pierre Huyghe created an installation entitled "Atari Light", in which two people use handheld gaming devices to play Pong on an illuminated ceiling. The work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in 2007.[77] The game was included in the London Barbican Art Gallery's 2002 Game On exhibition meant to showcase the various aspects of video game history, development, and culture.[78]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]The concussion debate
Hape: Players are treated like pieces of meat
ESPN Staff
Shontayne Hape in action for England. He has sounded a warning against the dangers of concussion © Getty Images Enlarge
Former England centre Shontayne Hape has accused coaches of treating players like "pieces of meat" after finally announcing his retirement from rugby.
Hape also sounded a warning against the dangers of concussion after being forced to call time on his playing career because of a series of head injuries.
Hape's last professional game was for Montpellier last year and, although he received medical advice to quit the sport in January, he has only just revealed his decision to retire and the shocking reasons for it.
Hape, 33, claims he was often put under pressure to return to action after head injuries before he was ready. He suffered more than 20 concussions and was frequently knocked out during his career, including several times in succession during the 2012-13 season at Montpellier. Subsequent scans revealed his brain function had been reduced to just above that of someone with special needs and he was advised to retire.
"Things got so bad I couldn't even remember my pin number - my card got swallowed up twice. My memory was shot," Hape told the New Zealand Herald. "The specialist explained that my brain was so traumatised, had swollen so big, that even just getting a tap to the body would knock me out. I had to retire immediately.
"I was thinking I'd rest for a year and then make a come back. That's why I never told anyone I was retired. I still couldn't accept it was over.
Hape, who won 13 caps for England, felt symptoms such as constant migraines, sensitivity to light and sound, irritability, depression and memory loss.
"There was constant pressure from the coaches [to play]," he said. "Most coaches don't care what happens later on in your life. It's about the here and now. Everyone wants success. They just think, 'If we pay you this you are going to do this'. Players are just pieces of meat. When the meat gets too old and past its use by date, the club just buys some more."
Hape also claimed that players regularly manipulate cognitive tests that are designed to monitor their brain functions throughout the season.
"In England it is a standard procedure for all players to perform a computerised pre-season head test. The test establishes a baseline score that you'll have to match later in the season if you cop a head knock.
"The problem with the test is that players can manipulate it by under-performing so that later if you have a head knock and you have to beat it you normally can.
"This is an issue people, particularly young players, need to know about. More people need to speak out about it, tell the truth if they are suffering. Most players won't, though, for fear of being thought of as soft or because of the financial pressures."
© ESPN Sports Media LtdHillary Clinton speaks at the Eighth Annual Women in the World Summit on Thursday in New York City. Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images
Since the election, thinking about Hillary Clinton has been painful. Every photograph of Donald Trump standing before a grinning phalanx of white men as he signs another attack on the social compact is a reminder of what could have been. Many people on the left are furious with her; they blame her sense of entitlement and poor political instincts for our current dystopia. But when I think about Clinton I just feel sick with grief—both for our country, and for her unredeemable, life-defining loss. On the scale of people whose existence will be blighted by the Trump presidency, Clinton is nowhere near the top. Still, I find myself wondering at odd times of the day and night: How is Hillary? Is she going to be all right?
That was the first question that Nick Kristof asked her onstage on Thursday evening in Manhattan. The live interview, part of Tina Brown’s Women in the World conference, was the first time since the election that Clinton has spoken publicly at any length about her defeat. Kristof said that he queried his social media followers about what he should ask her, and while there were many policy questions, lots of people just wanted to know how she’s doing. “You know what, I’m doing pretty well, all things considered,” Clinton said. She described the aftermath of the election as “devastating,” but said that with the help of friends and family, she’d picked herself up. “I would put it this way,” she said. “As a person, I’m OK. As an American, I’m pretty worried.”
It was appropriate that Clinton was speaking at a women’s conference. Twenty-two years ago, during a moment of political crisis and despair following the collapse of her attempt at health care reform, Clinton revived herself by traveling to Beijing for the United Nations Fourth World Congress on Women where she famously said, “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” She’s always seemed most comfortable when working on behalf of women and girls, which she described on Thursday as the “unfinished business of the 21st century.” With her future suddenly a blank, Clinton says her only plans are to write a book—which will, among other things, explore the role misogyny played in the presidential election—and work to recruit and train young women to run for office.
It’s hard to imagine, now, what it would have been like to have a president who finds her solace in feminism. Clinton, like many American women, has been aghast at the administration’s systematic attacks on women’s rights and health: the expanded global gag rule, the defunding of the United Nations Population Fund, the attempts in the American Health Care Act to jettison mandatory insurance coverage for maternity care and to eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood. “The targeting of women, which is what’s going on, is absolutely beyond any political agenda,” she said. “There’s something else happening here.” She didn’t say exactly what that “something” is, but the suggestion is that Trump represents a wave of misogynist rage.
The conservative media is already mocking Clinton for saying that sexism contributed to her defeat, but she’s clearly right. “It is fair to say that certainly misogyny played a role. That just has to be admitted,” she said. Clinton pointed to research on how ambition affects women’s likeability. “With men, success and ambition are correlated with likeability, so the more successful a man is, the more likeable he becomes,” she said. “With a woman, guess what. It’s the exact opposite.”
She reminded us that when she left her job as secretary of state, her approval rating was around 65 percent. Then she decided to seek the highest office in the land, and suddenly, public perception shifted. “Even people who had supported me in the media during my time as secretary of state or even as senator, all of the sudden it’s: Who is she? What does she want?” she said. “I always feel like I’m in Waiting for Godot.”
As bittersweet as it was to hear Clinton talk and imagine the sort of president she might have been, the interview offered a stark reminder of why many on the left distrusted her. Speaking hours before Trump launched airstrikes on Syria, she made it clear that she’d also have been a hawkish president. The United States, she said, should take out Bashar al-Assad’s airfields, “and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop Sarin gas on them.” During the campaign, she said, people asked her if she was afraid that her plan to impose a no-fly zone in Syria would lead to a Russian response. “It’s time the Russians were afraid of us!” she said heatedly. “Because we were going to stand up for human rights, the dignity and the future of the Syrian people.”
Clinton’s worldview is sincere, but this sounds like a recipe for another unwinnable war. Yet instead of her carefully considered plan for greater military intervention in Syria, we now have Trump’s impulsive bombing raid, disconnected from any greater strategy. Under Trump, there’s been an increase in civilian deaths in Muslim countries, possibly because he has loosened the military’s rules of engagement. During the campaign, it was common to hear people on the left describe Clinton’s foreign policy as “scarier” than Donald Trump’s, to use Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s word. Yet what we have now is aggression unchecked by competence, analytical rigor or compassion.
It could have been so different. And Clinton has to carry the burden of knowing that if she’d done things differently, it might have been. Last week, Timothy Stanley wrote a CNN column arguing that it’s too soon for her to return to the public eye, given her responsibility for allowing Trump to become president. “America needs to move on,” Stanley said. “She needs to pause and reflect.”
He can speak for himself. It’s hard to watch Clinton these days, but it’s also inspiring. Having suffered an epochal, humiliating rebuke that could well cleave American history into before and after, she still—still!—refuses to disappear. Speaking of the viciousness with which women in politics are treated, she said, “Part of the personal attacks, part of the bullying, part of the name calling that has certainly become much more pervasive because of the internet, is to crush your spirit, to make you feel inadequate, to make you doubt yourself. I just refuse to do that.” This toughness would have served her well as president. But she might need it even more now that she never will be.Vietnamese Defence Minister General Ngô Xuân Lịch meets with his Chinese counterpart Sen. Lieut. Gen Chang Wanquan in Beijing yesterday as part of Lịch’s official friendly visit to China. — VNA/VNS Photo Hải Yến
BEIJING – The Defence Ministers of China and Vietnam have agreed to deepen defence ties between the two countries, thus bringing pragmatic interests to their people and contributing to peace and stability in the region and the world at large.
Vietnamese Defence Minister General Ngô Xuân Lịch and his Chinese counterpart Sen. Lieut. Gen Chang Wanquan held talks in Beijing yesterday as part of Lịch’s official friendly visit to China.
The ministers cherished the fruitful developments of the relationship between the two armies, with strategic dialogues, delegation exchanges, border guard cooperation, joint maritime patrols, the sharing of experience in joining the UN peace-keeping operations, and especially the Việt Nam-China Border Defence Friendship Exchange Programme.
They emphasised their resolve to successfully organise the fourth programme slated for April 2017, expand the border guard cooperation model, maintain the exchange of high-level meetings, implement defence strategic dialogues at the deputy defence ministerial level, and increase exchanges between the two countries’ young officers.
They held that defence collaboration is an important factor of the bilateral comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership and a pillar promoting links between the two Parties and States.
The host said General Lịch’s visit to China was of significance as it helped elevate the bilateral defence ties to a new level and significantly contributed to the friendship between the two Parties and States.
Minister Lịch, who is Politburo member and Vice Secretary of the Central Military Commission, highlighted that "Việt Nam’s defence policy is self-defence, not allowing other countries to set up their military bases in its territory and not using or threatening to use force to address disputes, affecting the stability and security of the entire region."
In its foreign policy, "Việt Nam prioritises relations with countries sharing its border," he said, noting that "the Vietnamese Party, State and army aim to build solidarity, friendship, mutual trust and a stable, long-term and comprehensive relationship with China."
Regarding the East Sea issue, Lịch affirmed Việt Nam’s consistent stance that the two countries should observe common perceptions reached by their high-ranking leaders and solve disputes by peaceful measures in line with international law, especially the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982 UNCLOS).
They should seriously follow the Việt Nam-China agreement on basic principles guiding the settlement of sea-related matters and the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC), and work to reach a Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC) as soon as possible.
The two sides should take no actions that complicate and expand the disputes, particularly not use or threaten to use force to address the disputes, and maintain peace and stability in the East Sea.
According to the Vietnamese official, ASEAN always regards China as one of its important partners.
However, sovereignty disputes in the East Sea are posing challenges for the ASEAN-China Strategic Partnership.
Lịch, therefore, underscored the need to enhance cooperation between the ten-member group and China in an effort to seek solutions to the East Sea issue.
Sen. Lieut. Gen Chang Wanquan stressed that China always attached importance to the time-honoured relations with Vietnam and wished to solve disputes satisfactorily so as to protect peace and stability in the East Sea.
At the end of their talks, the two ministers witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding on cooperation between the Vietnamese Institute for Military Strategy and China’s Academy of Military Science.
During the visit, Việt Nam’s military delegation also paid a courtesy call to Politburo |
the art world, even “success” can be deceptive; artists who periodically sell well at auction don’t necessarily make a cozy living. “Nobody escapes falling on hard times,” artist Marilyn Minter told me. “I think all artists have a really hard time at the beginning, middle, or end of their careers; it’s up and down like a yo-yo, and some people have it twice.” For most, even the “yo-yo” career remains aspirational. “Personally, the A.R.T. Act would not translate into any kind of immediate windfall for me,” the artist William Powhida told me. “I’ve only had one small work come up at auction, which sold for under $3,000. I am hopeful, though, that in 10–15 years that might be a different story for my work, but that is almost besides the point.”
It might be safe to say that if Robert Rauschenberg has produced an heir in today’s New York art world, it’s Powhida. In blisteringly searing cartographic drawings like “How the New Museum Committed Suicide With Banality,” Powhida methodically plots out conflicts of interest, celebrity mania, and speculator motives. Other to-do list drawings, like “Things I Think About When I Think About Bushwick, ” give bitter voice to the crushingly unrealistic hopes of legions of disenfranchised artists. These days, you’ll meet him person at affordable housing meetings, panel discussions, and picket lines all over the city.
William Powhida sits on the steps of the defunct Roebling Hall gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in August 2012. Photo by Michael Mandiberg
I have my own selfish reasons to hope that the A.R.T. Act would someday benefit him. Powhida had been a personal hero of mine long before I moved to New York; his work was taught to me in art history 101, and his unfiltered professional voice inspired me, as a meandering painting graduate, to be bold and abrasive about art world injustices. He was somebody I feared and admired, and I was probably not the only art student eager to blaze behind his trail. I didn’t fully appreciate what that would mean, though, until last winter, when I worked as his studio assistant in Bushwick.
“As something of a midcareer artist approaching 40, I have never made enough money from art sales to quit my day job as an art educator,” Powhida, who for many years taught art at a Brooklyn high school and now co-directs a residency program, reflected recently over email.* “A painter I know incredulously questioned me about my commercial success: ‘Come on, you’re the most famous artist I know, and you can’t make $40,000 a year doing this?’ While my friend was half-joking, I think his comment revealed the gap between being a commercially successful artist and having a successful art career.”
As I realized slowly after moving to New York, nothing gets easier. All my heroes are poor, and very few of my peers are saving; people are working multiple jobs outside the field to pay for a studio in the city where the connections are—and making the connections by working unpaid jobs in their studio time.
Artists and allies have proposed a number of alternative approaches to royalties, which could touch the lives of many more artists. The group Level Rights has drafted a one-time, voluntary resale royalties contract, which was recently tested out at Bushwick’s NEWD Art Show. William Powhida would like to see a percent of auction profits be split between royalties and a general museum acquisitions fund.
So far, though, these propositions haven’t got legs. Instead, the grumbling froths up regularly around auction season, as it did recently at Christie’s $134.6 million bad-boy auction “If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday.” The sale featured an untitled print by Wade Guyton, made in 2005, when he was still a rising artist and was selling similar works, according to his gallery, for around $8,000. Possibly disgusted by the $2.5 million to $3.5 million estimate, Guyton printed dozens of identical images and posted photos to his Instagram account—instantly devaluing the uniqueness of the work on sale—with foreboding hashtags like #winteriscoming, #deflationarypolicy, and #ifiliveauction. But hours later, the work hammered out, as planned, for $3.5 million anyway. Christie’s even incorporated the protest into their advertising for the auction, remarking on his stunt: “Fun.”
Of course, Christie’s can afford to laugh it off. But their sense of humor is harder to appreciate, after years of watching your friends and mentors struggle to buy a sandwich or a roll of tape. It’s telling that in more than 70 countries that have now adopted some form of artist royalties, the only major debate has come from the U.K., which has the second largest art market after the U.S., and adopted artist royalties in 2006. When droit de suite was proposed for the U.K. in 2000, the British Art Market Federation forecasted implosion: Even a 4 percent royalty could send thousands of jobs overseas, they warned, and affect five times as many sales as covered by droit de suite. The alarms managed to stall the implementation of droit de suite in the U.K. until 2006. But years after implementation, studies have shown that the law barely affected sales.
If that’s any indication, artists’ royalties don’t harm the market. They can provide some measure of security to artists, especially later in life; they are common most everywhere in the world; and they are recommended by the U.S. Copyright Office. But all this is beside the point. America forgot about a basic rights law, and for many, the conversation comes a lifetime too late.
Correction, June 30, 2014: This article incorrectly stated the current day job of artist William Powhida. He worked for many years as a high school teacher but now co-directs a residency program. (Return.)For those that might not be too familiar with the standard, Thunderbolt is Intel’s high-bandwidth, do-everything connector, designed as a potential future path for all things external to a system—displays, USB devices, external storage, PCI Express, and even graphics cards. Thunderbolt supports up to 10Gb/s bandwidth (uni-directional) for each port, which is double what USB 3.0 offers, but the cost to implement Thunderbolt tends to be quite a bit higher than USB. For that reason, not to mention the ubiquity and backwards compatibility of USB 3.0 ports, we haven’t seen all that many Thunderbolt-equipped Windows laptops and motherboards; mostly the ports are found on higher-end motherboards.
For those that need high bandwidth access to external devices, however, even 10Gb/s may not be enough—specifically, 4K/60 video resolutions can require around 15Gb/s. As we’ve previously discussed, with Thunderbolt 2 Intel is doubling the bandwidth with Thunderbolt 2 up to 20Gb/s per port (bi-directional) by combining the four 10Gb/s channels into two 20Gb/s channels, thus enabling support for 4K/60 support. The ASUS Z87-Deluxe/Quad motherboard is the first motherboard to support the standard, and as expected you get two 20Gb/s ports courtesy of the single Falcon Ridge controller. Combined with the HDMI port, that gives the board the potential to drive three 4K displays at once. And if Thunderbolt 2 support isn’t enough for your enthusiast heart, ASUS is also including their NFC Express accessory for Near-Field Communication.
Here’s the short specifications summary for the Z87-Deluxe/Quad; we’re awaiting further details on expected availability and pricing, but given the Z87-Deluxe/Dual runs $350 we’d expect the new board to come in above that price point.AMD’s most powerful GPU yet code-named Vega 10 is set to debut at the end of the year with Vega 11 following early next year. The company also has a new board code-named “Magnum” that will be showcased at SC 2016 this upcoming November. It’s not clear yet whether Vega 10 will make its debut alongside “Magnum” next month but several of our sources have confirmed that we’ll definitely see Vega 10 before year’s end.
Magnum is a unique chip, it features a matrix of logic blocks that can be configured and programmed individually for any desired application or program. In other words, it’s the company’s first ever FPGA and its greatest attempt yet to expand its penetration into the high performance embedded market.
AMD’s Vega 10 Debuting Before Year’s End – Features New V9 GCN Architecture
Moving on to Vega 10, the GPU that most of you reading this are probably interested in. Vega 10 will be the very first GPU based on the company’s brand new GCN graphics architecture and 9th generation collection of visual IP. Vega 10 has been long in the making and we’ve heard so much about it over the past several months.
The specifications for AMD’s upcoming flagship Radeon graphics card, Fury X successor, based on Vega 10 have been leaked on one of the company’s leading engineers’ LinkedIn page. Packing an impressive 4096 next generation V9 cores and an unbelievable 12 teraflops of compute performance. Putting it ahead of Nvidia’s top dog the $1200 GTX TItan X.
Since then we have actually spotted the card on AMD’s & Sapphire’s official websites. The card was touted as a 4K gaming capable high-end offering with a 2016 release date. Not long after that Raja Koduri announced that the Radeon Technologies Group was celebrating a major milestone with regards to Vega 10’s development. Subsequently, the head of PR at the Radeon Technologies Group teased the launch venue for Vega 10 on his facebook page.
Completely Redesigned V9 GCN Architecture With Significant Advances
The V9 nomenclature refers to AMD’s 9th graphics architecture. Which represents a significant departure from the previous 8th generation GCN architecture of Polaris,RX 400 series, and AMD’s “Islands” family of R9 200 & HD 7000 graphics cards.
The structure and configuration of SIMD units is entirely new. Each Vega NCU is now capable of simultaneously processing variable length wavefronts. To understand why this is such a big deal we have to look at AMD’s current GCN implementation.
In AMD’s current GCN implementation, each compute unit has four 16-wide vector SIMD units, capable of executing four 16-wide wavefronts ( a group of threads ) over four cycles. In addition to one scalar unit, capable of executing one instruction per cycle. This unit is delegated time-critical tasks, where the four-cycle turnaround of the SIMD units isn’t sufficient.
Unfortunately, these 16-wide SIMD units work exactly the same no matter how small of a wavefront they’re fed. Executing a 16-wide wavefront would take just as long as executing a 4-wide wavefront, rendering the other 12 ALUs inside the SIMD completely useless. And as graphics workloads are inherently non uniform it’s effectively impossible to find any scenario where all 16-wide SIMD units are fully occupied at any given time.
Variable Width SIMDs, Getting More Performance Out Of Fewer Cycles
This is no longer the case in AMD’s new GCN implementation inside Vega. The V9 architecture includes new incredibly clever schedulers and coherency subsystems that allow several smaller wavefronts to be executed simultaneously inside any SIMD that’s able to accommodate the workload. This in effect allows each NCU to finish considerably more work in the same amount of time compared to its predecessor. In addition to freeing up valuable cache and memory resources for other compute units.
It’s very hard to predict how much of a difference this big of an improvement in resource utilization and CU occupancy will yield given how unpredictable and inherently fluctuant graphics workloads are. Which brings us neatly to Vega’s rumored specs.
Vega 10 will come in several configurations for gaming & professional computing applications. All configurations will feature second generation high bandwidth memory but in various capacities. Radeon Pro Vega 10 will feature the highest configuration of 4096 stream processors and 16GB of memory. The board has a TDP of ~230W and is powered by eight and six pin PCIe power connectors. Cooling wise the Radeon Pro will come in active and passively cooled configurations for servers.
AMD Vega Lineup
Graphics Card Radeon R9 Fury X Radeon RX 480 Radeon RX Vega Frontier Edition Radeon Vega Pro Radeon RX Vega (Gaming) Radeon RX Vega Pro Duo GPU Fiji XT Polaris 10 Vega 10 Vega 10 Vega 10 2x Vega 10 Process Node 28nm 14nm FinFET FinFET FinFET FinFET FinFET Stream Processors 4096 2304 4096 3584 4096 (?) Up to 8192 Performance 8.6 TFLOPS
8.6 (FP16) TFLOPS 5.8 TFLOPS
5.8 (FP16) TFLOPS ~13 TFLOLPS
~25 (FP16) TFLOPS 11 TFLOLPS
22 (FP16) TFLOPS >13 TFLOLPS
>25 (FP16) TFLOPS TBA
TBA Memory 4GB HBM 8GB GDDR5 16GB HBM2 TBA TBA TBA Memory Bus 4096-bit 256-bit 2048-bit 2048-bit 2048-bit 4096-bit Bandwidth 512GB/s 256GB/S 480GB/S 400GB/S TBA TBA TDP 275W 150W TBA TBA TBA TBA Launch 2015 2016 June 2017 June 2017 July 2017 TBA
AMD’s Vega 11 Coming Early 2017, Faster & More Power Efficient Than Polaris 10
Vega 11 will feature 8GB of HBM2 and is aimed at delivering the highest possible performance in notebook devices as well as replacing Polaris 10 in the midrange on the desktop. The GPU will be faster than Polaris 10 and use less power. Vega 11 will come in mini-ITX SFF and standard PCIe form factors. Most of the GPU’s extra oomph comes from the updated graphics architecture in addition to higher clock speeds compared to the RX 480 and RX 470. Vega 11 based cards will target the same ~$250 mid-range target that’s currently occupied by Polaris 10 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060.
Radeon Pro Vega 10 will be announced later this year with availability expected immediately after. Gaming Radeon graphics cards based on Vega 10 are expected to be available on shelves in the first quarter of next year. Vega 11 Radeon graphics cards are expected to be soon after that, but more towards the summer.
AMD Radeon Graphics Architectures
WCCFTech Year Consumer
Product GPU Process Transistors In Billions Performance Memory Bandwidth Southern Islands 2012 HD 7970 Ghz Tahiti 28nm 4.3 4.1 TFLOPS 3GB GDDR5 264GB/s Volcanic Islands 2013 R9 290X Hawaii 28nm 6.2 5.6 TFLOPS 4GB GDDR5 320GB/s Caribbean Islands 2015 R9 Fury X Fiji 28nm 8.9 8.6 TFLOPS 4GB HBM1 512GB/s POLARIS 2016 RX 480 Polaris 10 14nm 5.7 5.2 TFLOPS 8GB GDDR5 256 GB/s VEGA 2017 RX Vega 64 Vega 10 14nm 12.5 13 TFLOPS 8GB HBM2 480GB/s VEGA Refresh
VEGA 2 2018
2018 TBA
TBA TBA
Vega 20 12nm
7nm 12.5
TBA TBA
TBA TBA
32GB HBM2 TBA
1 TB/s NAVI 2019 TBA Navi 10 7nm TBA TBA Nextgen Memory TBAThese days, the pursuit of perfection is all around us, a pursuit that is based on the notion that we can alter the world to suit us. But, according to recent theories, this view is untenable and perfect order always ultimately degenerates into chaos. In Tongue Cat, Peter Verhelst uses the various stories to describe how a city falls apart and comes to grief in chaos and violence.
The destructive powers are summoned by Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. In the novel, he swaps the mythical, primeval world, ruled by violence, for an earthly city, in which modernisation is taking place ever more rapidly and renewal has been elevated to the status of an aspiration – a caricature of the city in which we live.
Once having descended, Prometheus is taken in tow by Ulrike. She leads him to the slums of the city. Prometheus finds himself in an underground counterculture of squatters, junkies and whores. The latter are called tongue cats. But it is not only on the underbelly of society that the fire of resistance is smouldering, it is also brewing in the higher echelons, which becomes clear when the king leaves his palace in search of human warmth. Although the court continues to function for a while, opposition to his absence gradually increases and finally degenerates into a frenzy of chaos and violence. Order is an illusion. That ultimately also applies to the book itself. Naturally, the writer cannot escape the conclusion that his story world, too, forms a closed structure in which the fire of self-destruction is smouldering.
In the masterly final chapter, Verhelst lets the story, together with the city, burst apart at the seams. Tongkat is far more than a visionary novel about our society, it is a literary tour de force.Get the biggest daily news stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
When it comes to polished masterpieces, this unusual artist has it nailed.
Talented Cristiam Ramos creates perfect portraits and stunning landscapes using only nail varnish.
Famous faces such as Marilyn Monroe and the Mona Lisa have been cleverly brushed to perfection with the cosmetic product.
Cristiam, from Mexico City, spends roughly four to five weeks on each painting and has created 15 altogether.
Cristiam said: "It's totally different to painting with normal paint because you cannot blend, it dries too fast and therefore you have to use very small amounts of paint on each application.
"I always look for new challenges and many artists have copied classical works but nobody has done it in a material as hard to work with.
"It dries in seconds which gives me a margin too short to blend colours.
"People are amazed. They've said I'm crazy and that they've never seen anything like it.
"When women find out it's nail polish, they tend to be more surprised because they know how hard it is to paint with."
(Image: Cristiam Ramos / Barcroft Media)
Cristiam says he goes through roughly 40-50 bottles for each painting which go up to 36 by 48 inches.
He says each one costs him up to $1000 taking into account the polish, brushes and solvents.
Cristiam said: "The only celebrity I've done is Marilyn Monroe and it was because she was particularly associated with feminine beauty and nail polish is part of the beauty in women.
"The others are masterpieces of great painters such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Monet, van Gogh, and Georges Seurat."
One of Cristiam's paintings will set you back between $4,000 to $9,000 depending on the size and complexity of the piece.
He said: "I have to rest on average thirty minutes each time I work as the smell is very strong and I need to use a mask to work. I think that every day I have a headache, but it's worth it.
"Sometimes I take the nail varnish from my wife if I need it."Crossposted from the Global Priorities Project
This post has two distinct parts. The first explores the meanings that have been attached to the term ‘cause’, and suggests my preferred usage. The second makes use of these distinctions to clarify the claims I made in a recent post on the long-term effects of animal welfare improvements.
On the meaning of ‘cause’
An intervention area, i.e. a cluster of interventions which are related and share some characteristics. It is often the case that improving our understanding of some intervention in this area will improve our understanding of the whole area. We can view different-sized clusters as broader or narrower causes in this sense. GiveWell has promoted this meaning. Examples might include: interventions to improve health in developing countries; interventions giving out leaflets to change behaviour. A goal, something we might devote resources towards optimising. Some causes in this sense might be useful instrumental sub-goals for other causes. For example, “minimise existential risk” may be a useful instrumental goal for the cause “make the long-term future flourish”. When 80,000 Hours discussed reasons to select a cause, they didn’t explicitly use this meaning, but many of their arguments relate to it. A cause of this type may be very close to one of the first type, but defined by its goal rather than its methods: for example, maximising the number of quality-adjusted life-years lived in developing countries. Similarly, one could think of a cause a problem one can work towards solving.
There are at least two distinct concepts which could reasonably be labelled a ‘cause’:These two characteristics often appear together, so we don’t always need to distinguish. But they can come apart: we can have a goal without a good idea of what intervention area will best support that goal. On the other hand, one intervention area could be worthwhile for multiple different goals, and it may not be apparent what goal an intervention is supposed to be targeting. Below I explain how these concepts can diverge substantially.
Which is the better usage? Or should we be using the word for both meanings? (Indeed there may be other possible meanings, such as defining a cause by its beneficiaries, but I think these are the two most natural.) I am not sure about this and would be interested in comments from others towards finding the most natural community norm. Key questions are whether we need to distinguish the concepts, and if we do then which is the more frequently the useful one to think of, and what other names fit them well.
My personal inclination is that when the meanings coincide of course we can use the one word, and that when they come apart it is better to use the second. This is because I think conversations about choosing a cause are generally concerned with the second, and because I think that “intervention area” is a good alternate term for the first meaning, while we lack such good alternatives for the second.
Conclusions about animals
In a recent post I discussed why the long-term effects of animal welfare improvements in themselves are probably small. A question we danced around in the comments is whether this meant that animal welfare was not the best cause. Some felt it did not, because of various plausible routes to impact from animal welfare interventions. I was unsure because the argument did appear to show this, but the rebuttals were also compelling.
My confusion at least was stemming, at least in part, from the term ‘cause’ being overloaded.
Now that I see that more clearly I can explain exactly what I am and am not claiming.
In that post, I contrasted human welfare improvements, which have many significant indirect and long-run effects, with animal welfare improvements, which appear not to. That is not to say that interventions which improve animal welfare do not have these large long-run effects, but that the long-run effects of such interventions are enacted via shifts in the views of humans rather than directly via the welfare improvement.
I believe that the appropriate conclusion is that “improve animal welfare” is extremely unlikely to be the best simple proxy for the goal “make the long-term future flourish”. In particular, it is likely dominated by the proxy “increase empathy”. So we can say with confidence that improving animal welfare is not the best cause in the second sense (whereas it may still be a good intervention area). In contrast, we do not have similarly strong reasons to think “improve human welfare” is definitely not the best approach.
Two things I am not claiming:
That improving human welfare is a better instrumental sub-goal for improving the long-term future than improving animal welfare.
That interventions which improve animal welfare are not among the best available, if they also have other effects.
If you are not persuaded that it’s worth optimising for the long-term rather than the short-term, the argument won’t be convincing. If you are, though, I think you should not adopt animal welfare as a cause in the second sense. I am not arguing against ‘increasing empathy’ as possibly the top goal we can target (although I plan to look more deeply into making comparisons between this and other goals), and it may be that ‘increase vegetarianism’ is a useful way to increase empathy. But we should keep an open mind, and if we adopt ‘increasing empathy’ as a goal we should look for the best ways to do this, whether or not they relate to animal welfare.GQ pushes Trump assassination porn in its Thanksgiving post.
What a classy bunch.
It’s late-November 2017, and you know what that means: Every man you’ve ever seen on TV for any reason has just been unmasked as a woman-hating sewer ghoul. Also, it’s time to ruin your Trump-supporting family’s Thanksgiving—for America!
Thanksgiving is a celebration of community and gratitude, where we reconvene in our nostalgia-drenched hometowns and perform time-honored traditions such as almost sleeping with your high school crush and going around the table to say what you’re most thankful for and where you were on 9/11. Last year’s Thanksgiving was a difficult time for most Americans—roughly 65.8 million of us. The election was still a fresh wound. Trump had begun assembling his Dr. Caligari cabinet of White House monsters, each one a direct fuck-you to some beloved ideal. There was the EPA chief who doesn’t believe in climate change, the labor secretary who opposed minimum wage increases, the flagrantly Islamophobic National Security Adviser who might just be a foreign agent, and at the helm of it all, a man who speaks almost exclusively in racist dog whistles and “locker room talk.” Thanksgiving was a cathartic vent sesh for liberals with like-minded families, and a painful twist of the knife for those without…
…This year, if you’re headed home to a household that still thinks a sex-offending game show host in rapid cognitive decline was the best choice for a president, it is your civic duty to filibuster Thanksgiving.
Trump has spent the entire year performing one long, clumsy touchdown dance atop the wreckage of America’s former norms and values. He turned the presidency into a haberdashery. He made nepotism a core hiring strategy. He attacked a civil rights leader during Martin Luther King Day. He politicized a Boy Scout jamboree. Any parents still riding the Trump Train at this point have thereby signaled that nothing is sacred. It is time to follow their example. They can’t stand idly by while President Deals tramples every other American tradition and yet somehow expect that Thanksgiving will be normal too. If every other moment of this year is going to be drastically out of whack, nobody should get to pretend that everything is normal for one meal just because that’s what the pilgrims would have done.Yes, I do believe manufacturing is becoming Cool again! Though American manufacturing was lost to cheap labor overseas, they are now losing their jobs, to even cheaper labor - the robots. With this, we are seeing a regrowth of manufacturing in American, though not a return of the middle pay jobs that once to dominate the industry.
Automation is eliminating the lower skilled and repetitive jobs, and replacing them with higher skilled engineering and entrepreneurial positions. But our population is not suited to fill those new jobs. People that struggle to understand fractions could still excel in a middle-pay factory job that required physical skills, but they have no hope filling the high tech engineering and entrepreneurial jobs that are being created by our economy today. The economy is creating jobs, but our human population can't fill them. This is creating an over abundance of low skilled workers, chasing too few low skill jobs, causing wages to drop to minimum wage levels, while a lack of high skill workers, chasing a growing demand of high skill opportunities, causing high end salaries to skyrocket.
As automation advances, this problem will only grow - more people will find their jobs being outsourced to machines, leaving them without the skills or time to re-educate (even if they have the mind for the work), stuck in minimum wage jobs - if they can even find them.
Though it will be nice to see manufacturing come back to America, the larger problem is that we are facing a major revolution in the economy. We are getting very near to the future where humans won't be able to work for a living at all, and where wealth will be created by, and controlled by, the top investors and entrepreneurs that end up owning everything in this winner take all economy that is emerging.The interior of a computer is a fine and private place, but none, I fear, do there embrace, except in "Tron," a dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous. Here's a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun.
The movie addresses itself without apology to the computer generation, embracing the imagery of those arcade video games that parents fear are rotting the minds of their children. If you've never played Pac-Man or Space Invaders or the Tron game itself, you probably are not quite ready to see this movie, which begins with an evil bureaucrat stealing computer programs to make himself look good, and then enters the very mind of a computer itself to engage the villain, the hero, and several highly programmable bystanders in a war of the wills that is governed by the rules of both video games and computer programs.
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The villain is a man named Dillinger (David Warner). The hero is a bright kid named Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who created the original programs for five great new video games, including the wonderfully named "Space Paranoid." Dillinger stole Flynn's plans and covered his tracks in the computer. Flynn believes that if he can track down the original program, he can prove Dillinger is a thief. To prevent that, Dillinger uses the very latest computer technology to break Flynn down into a matrix of logical points and insert him into the computer, and at that point "Tron" leaves any narrative or visual universe we have ever seen before in a movie and charts its own rather wonderful path.
In an age of amazing special effects, "Tron" is a state-of-the-art movie. It generates not just one imaginary computer universe, but a multitude of them. Using computers as their tools, the Disney filmmakers literally have been able to imagine any fictional landscape, and then have it, through an animated computer program. And they integrate their human actors and the wholly imaginary worlds of Tron so cleverly that I never, ever, got the sensation that I was watching some actor standing in front of, or in the middle of, special effects. The characters inhabit this world.
And what a world it is! Video gamesmen race each other at blinding speed, hurtling up and down computer grids while the movie shakes with the overkill of Dolby stereo (justified, for once). The characters sneak around the computer's logic guardian terminals, clamber up the sides of memory displays, talk their way past the guardians of forbidden programs, hitch a ride on a power beam, and succeed in entering the mind of the very Master Control Program itself, disabling it with an electronic Frisbee. This is all a whole lot of fun. "Tron" has been conceived and written with a knowledge of computers that it mercifully assumes the audience shares. That doesn't mean we do share it, but that we're bright enough to pick it up, and don't have to sit through long, boring explanations of it.
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There is one additional observation I have to make about "Tron," and I don't really want it to sound like a criticism: This is an almost wholly technological movie. Although it's populated by actors who are engaging (Bridges, Cindy Morgan) or sinister (Warner), it is not really a movie about human nature. Like "Star Wars" or "The Empire Strikes Back," but much more so, this movie is a machine to dazzle and delight us. It is not a human-interest adventure in any generally accepted way. That's all right, of course. It's brilliant at what it does, and in a technical way maybe it's breaking ground for a generation of movies in which computer-generated universes will be the background for mind-generated stories about emotion-generated personalities. All things are possible.The results of the election are in: California is practically another country.
Californians woke up the morning of Nov. 9 to find something extraordinary had happened the night before.
Voters here legalized the recreational use of marijuana. They sent a liberal African-American woman to the U.S. Senate. They extended the highest marginal income tax rate in the country to 2030 (or, as a practical matter, until the end of time).
Sure, voters kept the death penalty on the books, but they enacted even stricter gun controls. They approved yet another $2 per pack tax on cigarettes to pay for yet another harebrained social scheme. They backed wildly irresponsible bond measures and shot down an initiative to keep wildly irresponsible bond measures in check.
In short, it was a progressive free-for-all, a triumph of liberal enlightenment.
But, no!
Donald Trump won the presidency. How? Heaven knows, we didn’t vote for him.
In fact, Democrat Hillary Clinton’s national popular vote victory is due in large part to Golden State voters. Trump—and the U.S. Constitution—denied Clinton her foreordained coronation. Worse, he killed our buzz.
Well, your buzz maybe. Not mine.
Read the rest at the Sacramento Bee.At the foot of the retaining wall, in the town of Barrios de Luna, the owner of a bar wonders why there is so much attention about the reservoir; it’s not the first time it has practically dried out. “People are also coming, but some years in October it’s like this too.” That's the problem. This time a year ago, the reservoir had almost six times more water than now, alllowing farmers to irrigate some 35,000 hectares of crops. But not this year: the drought forced a cut in irrigation in August, and there are fears the harvest will be lost, if it hasn’t already been.
2017 is the third driest year of all time, behind 1981 and 2005
The situation in the northwest of Spain stands out, but the drought has attacked the entire country. Reservoirs have lost half their capacity over the long, hot summer, which preceded a dry winter. According to the latest data from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment, they now stand at 42.9% capacity, with some basins at 17.2% capacity. Water reserves are almost 26% below the average of the last 10 years.
“This year is unheard of. We have been watering crops for 50 years with water from these reservoirs, but nobody has ever known a drought like this,” says Matías Llorente, general secretary of a local farming association. He estimates that at least 30% of spring crops (corn, potatoes, beets, beans), which are irrigated until September 30, will be lost.
The Barrios de Luna reservoir is the worst in the region. The regoinal government has now declared a situation of prolonged drought. In other areas, there has been drought declared since 2015.
ampliar foto The Barrios de Luna reservoir at 7% capacity. Uly Martín
The lack of rain explains much of the situation. Cumulative rainfall so far in the hydrological year, which runs from October 1, 2016 to September 30, 2017, is down 12%, according to Ana Casals, a spokeswoman for the State Agency of Meteorology (Aemet). This makes 2017 the third driest year, behind 1981 and 2005.
Up to 37 of 150 districts in Spain were in an “emergency” situation due to water shortages at the end of June, according to the latest data. This is the most serious level of classification.
One of Congress’ first tasks this month will be the adoption of a draft law on urgent measures to mitigate the effects of the drought.
English version by Debora Almeida.Today’s header image was created by Isabell Winter, the original source for the image is available here
Last week I discussed using BundlierMinifier.Core and how it’s become the default option for bundling and minifying JavaScript and CSS in.NET Core MVC applications, and the week before I discussed using webpack for the same purpose.
This week, we’re going to talk about the elephant giant soda cup in the room: Gulp.js.
I’ll also go into why BundlerMinifier.Core was chosen as the default option for bundling.
So What Is Gulp.js?
Gulp.js (or just Gulp) is a JavaScript task runner, its goal is to help with automating all of the repetitive tasks in a build pipeline for client side stuff (JavaScript, CSS, images, that kind of thing). Tasks like linting, building changelogs, bundling, minfying, image compression, and everything in between are what Gulp has in it’s sights.
It does this by reading a JavaScript config file, which consists of tasks using predefined methods and plugins. It can be configured to run repetitive tasks as and when certain files are changed or as part of a build action.
Is Gulp Supported In.NET Core?
Before.NET Core RC2, Gulp was the task runner of choice in default.NET Core MVC applications. So the short answer is: yes, it’s supported.
However before RC2 was released, a discussion on an issue was started on the.NET Tooling GitHub repo with the objective of deciding which task runner to use: Gulp or Grunt.
You can read though that discussion here
In the ASP.NET Community Stand up for June 21st 2016, Jon Galloway, Damian Edwards and Scott Hanselman discussed why decision was made to drop Gulp for the.NET tooling. You can watch the whole video here:
Fair warning, it’s around 73 minutes long
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been severely limited by poor adherence. The ease with which naltrexone pills can be discontinued, the need for patients to be fully detoxified before starting naltrexone, and potential for precipitated withdrawal symptoms are likely contributing factors. Severity of opioid dependence and recent use of methadone have been associated with greater likelihood of dropout from naltrexone treatment. 16 Coupling of naltrexone with enhanced behavioral interventions has been shown to improve retention, but dropout rates are still high. 17 – 22
Factors associated with better retention in methadone maintenance include demographic characteristics of patients, such as older age, being employed, being married, having effective social supports and good health. 5, 6 Importantly, features of methadone treatment programs are also associated with better outcome, including adequate methadone dosage, adequate counseling, presence of ancillary psychosocial services, emphasis on abstinence, and patient satisfaction. 7 – 15
Opioid dependence is a serious public health problem, with endemic opioid dependence having been joined over the past decade by a growing epidemic of prescription opioid dependence. 1 Fortunately, effective treatments are available, but the majority of opioid dependent patients are not engaged in any treatment, while rates of dropout from treatment and relapse are high. Opioid substitution treatments, with methadone or buprenorphine, have consistent evidence of efficacy from multiple clinical trials, but even there rates of dropout and relapse are substantial. 2 Dropout is usually associated with relapse. Treatment failure and ongoing opioid use have serious consequences, including morbidity and mortality from overdose and infectious diseases. 3, 4 Thus, factors that may improve retention deserve close scrutiny.
To evaluate if patients changed their cannabis use during the trial, we compared baseline self-reports of the proportion of days during which cannabis was used to the proportion of cannabis positive urine toxicology collected during the trial, trichotomized into abstinent, intermittent, and consistent cannabis use categories as described above.
Treatment retention was the primary outcome measure. Retention was defined as the numbers of days to dropout. Patients who relapsed (reverted back to opiate dependence) or did not attend the clinic at least once within a 14-day period were rated as treatment dropouts. The day on which the patient relapsed and was removed from the trial, or the 14th day of treatment absence was designated as the time of dropout. For those completing the trial, the 182nd day was the point of censor. The effect of cannabis use on time to drop out was tested using a Cox proportional hazard model. Variables were entered into the model in three blocks. Block 1 consisted of treatment group assignment, baseline heroin use (average bags per day), and cocaine use (proportion of cocaine-positive urines during the treatment). Cocaine use (based on urine toxicology data) during the treatment differed across the three cannabis use groups thus it was entered as a control variable. Benzodiazepine and alcohol use was rare during the trial and did not significantly differ across the three cannabis use groups. In Block 2 the main effects of cannabis use were tested by the simultaneous entry of two comparisons: abstinent vs. intermittent cannabis use, and abstinent vs. consistent cannabis use. In Block 3, the moderating effect of treatment group on the relationship between cannabis use and treatment retention was tested by entering two interaction terms: a treatment by intermittent cannabis use term and treatment by consistent cannabis use term, respectively. Changes in −2 Log Likelihood statistics tested the significance of each block entry. An alpha of 0.10 was used to test the entry of the treatment by cannabis use group interaction terms in block 3.
Participants in the study were divided into three groups, based on how the proportion of cannabis positive urines collected during the trial was distributed. The abstinent cluster demonstrated no cannabis positive urines during their treatment (0% cannabis positive). For the intermittent use cluster between 1% and 79% of their urine samples were positive for cannabis. The consistent use cluster showed greater than 80% cannabis positive urines. Differences among the Cannabis Use groups on baseline demographics, baseline drug use, and continuous treatment outcomes were tested with chi-square or ANOVAs.
During the six months of the BNT trial urine samples were collected under supervision at each twice-weekly visit. All collected urine samples were tested for illicit opiates, cocaine, benzodiazepines, and cannabis using Abbott//MDTX and scored as positive or negative using standard NIDA cutoffs, and viewed under ultraviolet light for riboflavin fluorescence, a marker of compliance with naltrexone treatment.
Compliance Enhancement is also a manual-guided intervention intended to control for professional attention, and to simulate standard medical management. It consists of two appointments per week, one with a psychiatrist for counseling and another for clinical monitoring. The counseling consists of psychoeducation, emphasis on compliance with daily naltrexone intake, problem-solving, and 12-step principles. 32
Behavioral Naltrexone Therapy, described in detail elsewhere, 24, 31 is a manual-guided intervention that combines evidence-based approaches, including Motivational Interviewing, 34 Cognitive Behavioral Relapse Prevention, 35, 36 Voucher Incentives, 37 – 42 and Network Therapy with a significant other monitoring medication-taking, 43 in an effort to optimize outcome of naltrexone treatment for opioid dependence. Its goals are to encourage continuous naltrexone adherence and abstinence from opiates. Individual treatment sessions occur three times per week for the first two weeks post-detoxification, and two times per week thereafter.
The sample of patients presented in this report participated in a controlled trial of Behavioral Naltrexone Therapy (BNT) reported previously. 31 One hundred and five treatment-seeking, opiate dependent, potential participants were evaluated, of which 80 were eligible and 69 completed inpatient detoxification and were randomized. Of these, 63 patients attended at least one outpatient visit and constitute the sample under study in this report. As part of the screening procedure, potential participants were evaluated with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R Substance Abuse Comorbidity version (SCID-SAC 33 ), and by a psychiatric, medical and laboratory examination. Patients were eligible if they met DSM-IV criteria for current opiate dependence, were seeking treatment voluntarily, and had an abstinent significant other who could commit to participate in the treatment. Exclusion criteria included any unstable medical or psychiatric disorder that could make participation hazardous. After giving consent, patients were detoxified in hospital for up to 10 days, and then entered outpatient naltrexone maintenance lasting six months. Following the detoxification, patients were randomly assigned to one of two therapies: BNT or compliance enhancement (CE). All patients received oral naltrexone, titrated up to a dose of 50 mg a day, encapsulated with riboflavin to estimate compliance by urine fluorescence.
Treatment outcome for the three cannabis use groups is summarized in, and the survival curves describing treatment retention across the groups are displayed in. Intermittent cannabis users demonstrated longer treatment retention (median = 133 days) relative to those who were either abstinent (median = 35 days), or consistent (median = 35 days) users in either BNT or CE groups (log rank = 12.2, df = 2, p =.002). Cocaine use increased in proportion to the level of cannabis use, while the cannabis use groups did not differ on measures of opiate or benzodiazepine use during the treatment program. The Cox proportional hazards regression model, summarized in, yields a significant main effect of intermittent cannabis use on treatment retention, consistent with the descriptive data and the unadjusted log-rank test. Results modeling cannabis use (% THC positive urine toxicology) as a continuous variable yielded similar findings, supporting an inverted U shaped association between cannabis use and retention. There were no significant effects of baseline opioid use or during-treatment cocaine use. The model also yields a significant interaction of cannabis use level with randomized treatment condition. The interaction is driven by the heavy cannabis use group where treatment retention was better in the BNT treatment condition compared to the CE condition (see ), such that intensive behavioral therapy (BNT) appears to mitigate the adverse prognostic effect in the heavy cannabis use group, but not in the cannabis abstinent group. Compliance with naltrexone, assessed by the proportion of urine samples with riboflavin fluorescence differed by level of cannabis use (F (2,60) = 3.4; p < 0.03): intermittent users (mean = 0.86, SD = 0.22), abstinent users (mean = 0.56, SD = 0.41), consistent users (mean = 0.69, SD = 0.39).
The pattern of cannabis use before treatment entry was classified into abstinent, intermittent, or consistent use based on self-reported use frequency at baseline and was compared to the during-treatment pattern based on urine toxicology. Sixty percent of abstinent cannabis users at baseline remained abstinent, 31% became intermittent users, and 9% became consistent users during the trial. Thirty three percent of intermittent users at baseline remained intermittent, 11% became abstinent, and 56% became consistent cannabis users. All consistent users at baseline remained so during the trial. These data are imprecise since serial urine toxicology data were not available pre-treatment, necessitating reliance on self-report to classify pre-treatment levels. Bearing that caveat in mind, the overall pattern was for patients to either remain at the same use level, or advance to a higher level of use.
No significant differences among the cannabis use groups were found concerning demographic variables, although there was a trend toward more Caucasians among the intermittent users. However, differences in baseline drug use were noted ( ). In the 30 days preceding entry in the trial, baseline number of heroin bags per day used increased as consumption of MJ increased across cannabis use groups. Consistent cannabis users reported a greatest proportion of cannabis use days (0.24), while intermittent users differed only slightly from abstinent users (0.06 vs. 0.01) in the proportion of cannabis use days.
Among the 63 opiate-dependent patients who attended at least one post-detoxification clinic appointment, 52 (83%) were men, 11 (17%) were women, and most were Caucasian (Caucasian 54%; African-American 16%; Hispanic 30%). The average age was 35.5 years (SD = 9.2) and 81% were not in a relationship during the treatment period. The average level of heroin use was 6.5 bags per day (SD = 3.6). The majority of patients reported intranasal use of heroin. Thirty-one were randomized to CE and 32 to BNT.
DISCUSSION
The present study replicates a previous surprising finding23 that intermittent cannabis use is associated with improved retention in naltrexone treatment among opioid dependent patients, while both abstinence from cannabis and regular cannabis use during naltrexone treatment are associated with high dropout. Inspection of the retention curves ( ) shows that most of this effect occurs during the first 30 days after completion of inpatient detoxification and induction onto naltrexone, when dropout is steepest, and when patients may continue to experience protracted withdrawal that may be promoted by antagonist or inverse agonist effects of naltrexone.44–46 Intermittent cannabis use was also associated with improved adherence to naltrexone pill-taking. The data comparing cannabis use levels before versus after treatment entry suggest patients either stay at the same level, or advance to a higher level of cannabis use after starting naltrexone, consistent with a process of self-medication. These findings are of interest, because they suggest the hypothesis that moderate cannabis use may be exerting a beneficial pharmacological effect improving the tolerability of naltrexone in the early weeks after induction, and that cannabinoid agonists might have promise for improving the effectiveness of naltrexone treatment for opioid dependence.
A beneficial effect of cannabinoid agonism early in the course of naltrexone treatment is biologically plausible. Rapid naltrexone induction during a 7 to 10 day hospitalization involves substantial withdrawal discomfort, which can be partially relieved by attenuating adrenergic activity with the alpha-2 autoreceptor agonist clonidine.47,48 During the early weeks after naltrexone induction, protracted withdrawal symptoms may persist, again likely driven in part by sympathetic nervous system activation.47,48 Data from a variety of preclinical models suggest that exogenous cannabinoids can attenuate sympathetic nervous activation, especially with intermittent rather than sustained administration.49–63 Thus, intermittent cannabis use might improve tolerability of naltrexone in the early weeks after induction by attenuating sympathetically driven withdrawal symptoms such as insomnia and agitation.
Cannabis also stimulates appetite and has antiemetic, antispasmodic and analgesic effects that have been clinically useful during cancer chemotherapy and wasting syndromes.64,65 This might be useful in helping relieve the gastrointestinal distress and other physical discomfort associated with opioid withdrawal.
Finally, cannabis might improve the tolerability of naltrex-one maintenance by furnishing an indirect dopaminergic agonist effect at the brain reward system, countering the lethargy and anhedonia that are typical of opioid withdrawal and that might be worsened or prolonged by antagonist or inverse agonist effects of naltrexone. Naltrexone has not generally been associated with anhedonia among normal controls or alcohol dependent patients.66,67 However, preclinical evidence suggests naltrexone functions as an inverse agonist in the setting of prior exposure to mu agonists,44–46 as in opioid dependence. Cannabinoid (CB1) and mu opiate receptors are both G protein coupled receptors with overlapping neuroanatomical localization,68 and both CB1 and mu agonists stimulate dopamine release from the meso-limbic dopamine neurons and function as positive reinforcers. Thus, cannabis might compensate for a deficit in dopaminergic tone related to naltrexone.
The hypothesis of a beneficial pharmacological effect of cannabis for naltrexone maintenance would need to account for the inverted U-shaped function, namely that heavier cannabis use was associated with worse treatment retention than intermittent use. It may be that heavy cannabis use identifies a subgroup with greater overall addiction severity and worse prognosis that overwhelms any beneficial pharmacological effect of cannabis. This would be consistent with the significant association between cannabis use level and baseline level of opioid use (bags per day) (see ), which has been shown to be a predictor of poor outcome for naltrexone maintenance.69 In prior analyses, the intensive behavioral therapy (BNT) was shown to have its greatest beneficial effect among patients with the higher levels of opioid dependence (more bags per day) at baseline.24,70 Similarly here, the interaction of treatment assignment with level of cannabis use suggests that BNT partially counteracts the adverse prognosis in the heavy cannabis use group (, and ).
It is possible that regular or heavy cannabis use induces tolerance, perhaps through down regulation of CB1 receptors,71 diminishing any beneficial effects. The inverted U pattern might also reflect individual differences in sensitivity to the putative beneficial effect of cannabis. Since patients would be self-medicating, in effect adjusting their own dosages, those who are most responsive to the beneficial effects might select a modest dosage level sufficient to provide substantial relief, whereas those who are less responsive may advance to more regular or heavy use without sufficient response to impact retention.
The present findings are observational, and it is also possible that the association between intermittent cannabis use and improved retention on naltrexone is accounted for by unmeasured confounds or other mechanisms, rather than a causal pharmacological effect. Baseline level of heroin use (bags per day), the most consistent predictor of naltrexone treatment in our hands,24,69,70 was controlled for in the Cox model, suggesting severity of opioid dependence at baseline is not a confound. Another approach is to consider why patients without any concurrent cannabis use would have poor outcome. For example, it has been theorized that complete abstinence early in treatment may be stressful for patients who have long relied on substance use as a coping mechanism.72 It is also possible that the cannabis abstinent group differs in their response to cannabis, experiencing it as either not reinforcing or aversive, based on constitutional or neurobiological factors that also might be associated with poor response to naltrexone.
Experimental studies are needed to determine whether cannabinoid agonists may exert a beneficial effect on opioid withdrawal or naltrexone maintenance. Haney and colleagues examined the impact of naltrexone (versus placebo) on cannabis effects,73 finding that naltrexone at 50 mg, but not 12 mg, increased the intoxicating effects of cannabis in established smokers, while in participants without a history of cannabis use, 12 mg of naltrexone enhanced the effect of cannabis.74 Such a mechanism might explain the inverted-U pattern if naltrexone caused excessive and aversive cannabis effects among the heavy users. In any case, it suggests there may be meaningful pharmacological interactions between cannabinoid and opioid systems, and that these may be conditioned by the prior history of use.
Experimental, placebo-controlled studies are needed to directly examine whether cannabinoid agonists are effective as adjuncts to opioid detoxification or naltrexone maintenance treatment and to delineate the mechanism. Oral THC (Dronabinol) is FDA approved to counteract appetite suppression and wasting syndromes and would be available in the U.S. for study. Sativex, which includes both THC and cannabidiol, is available in Canada. Other cannabinoid agonists or partial agonists might be considered as they become available for study in the future. Small, within-subjects crossover studies in the human laboratory could examine effects of cannabinoid agonists on acute opioid withdrawal, or naloxone precipitated withdrawal. Larger placebo-controlled clinical trials should examine cannabinoid effects as adjuncts to opioid detoxification or naltrexone maintenance treatment. Success in these efforts could advance the field by improving the viability of naltrexone in the treatment armamentarium for opioid dependence. Issues regarding exposing patients to a medication with its own addictive potential would also need to be carefully addressed.''So, where does Twilight live?'' Starlight asked, ''I heard that she lives above a library.'' She added, David stopped in his track and sighed, Starlight tilted her head, ''Is something wrong?'' She asked again.
''She used to live in a library, she hasn't for years...'' He said, his eyes were closed, Starlight was confused by this point.
''What do you mean 'used to'?'' She replied, David opened his eyes and sighed.
''It's best that i show you.'' He responded, walking towards the town square, Starlight followed him.
The two continued walking until a wrecked structure blocked the path, Starlight looked in surprise, it was a tree, most of it was gone, leaving charred remains.
''What happened?'' She asked, she felt the faded presents of dark magic around what was left of the tree building.
''Lord Tirek.'' David said, recounting what Twilight had told him, ''Lord Tirek was hunting Twilight, he wanted her alicorn magic. In an attempt to hide, Twilight teleported to here, The Golden Oak Library. Unfortunately, Tirek fired his dark magic at the library. Twilight and her pet barely escaped with their lives. The destruction of the library kick started what would be called 'The Battle For Equestria'.'' David recounted, he placed his hand on the burned tree bark of the ruins.A third major police union has added its voice to calls for a boycott of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, after the Oscar-winning film-maker spoke at a rally against police brutality in New York.
Related: NYPD union boss urges Tarantino film boycott over director’s comments
John McNesby, president of the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, said the organisation had voted unanimously to join the protest. Patrick Lynch, president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association in New York, first mooted the boycott on Monday and has since also received backing from the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
“Tarantino has shown through his actions that he is anti-police,” McNesby said in a statement. “Mr Tarantino has made a good living through his films, projecting into society at large violence and respect for criminals; it turns out he also hates cops.”
Tarantino joined three days of protests in New York last week organised by Rise Up October, a group opposing police violence and what organisers call a “genocidal assault on black and Latino people in this country”. Police unions have criticised the film-maker for appearing at the rally and labelling killings by police as “murder” a week after NYPD officer Randolph Holder was fatally shot in the city.
Tarantino has also received criticism from conservative commentators such as Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, who said the film-maker had “ruined his career” following the remarks. The Pulp Fiction director, whose new film The Hateful Eight debuts in the US on Christmas Day, has not responded to talk of a boycott.
Related: Quentin Tarantino has ‘destroyed his career’ says rightwing host Bill O’Reilly
Historically, boycotts of popular movies generally do not work.
Earlier this month, racist trolls called for fans to stay away from cinemas showing Star Wars: The Force Awakens because director JJ Abrams had cast a black actor, John Boyega, as one of the leads – but the film is tipped to be among the highest-grossing films of all time when it hits cinemas in December. Likewise, in 2006 fans of Pierce Brosnan who asked Bond acolytes to boycott the spy saga due to the casting of Daniel Craig as the new 007 must have sat back aghast as the latest iteration of the suave secret agent reached new heights of critical acclaim and box-office success.
Some rightwing American commentators have, however spuriously, claimed victory after Apple biopic Steve Jobs floundered at the US box office this weekend after angry Republicans calling for a boycott of cast member Seth Rogen. The comic, who has a supporting role as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in Danny Boyle’s Oscar-bait drama, had earlier tweeted “Fuck you @RealBenCarson” to the Republican presidential candidate.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2015Best Answer: Contact, Mackace (Mackley Air Cushion Equipment), they produced a number of successful Hoverbarges, such as the 250 ton payload “Sea Pearl” which operated in Abu Dhabi and the twin 160 ton payload "Yukon Princesses" which ferried trucks across the Yukon river to aid the pipeline build. Hoverbarges are still in operation today. In 2006, Hovertrans (formed by the original managers of Mackace) launched a 330 ton payload drilling barge in the swamps of Suriname.
The Hoverbarge technology is somewhat different from high-speed hovercraft, which has traditionally been constructed using aircraft technology. The initial concept of the air cushion barge has always been to provide a low-tech amphibious solution for accessing construction sites using typical equipment found in this area, such as diesel engines, ventilating fans, winches and marine equipment. The load to move a 200 ton payload ACV barge at 5 knots (9.3 km/h) would only be 5 tons. The skirt and air distribution design on the high-speed craft again is more complex as they have to cope with the air cushion being washed out by a wave and wave impact. The slow speed and large mono chamber of the hover barge actually helps reduce the effect of wave action giving a very smooth ride.
Good Luck!
Source(s):
Caretaker · 9 years agoOn Oct. 9, the Giants lost a game to the Packers in Green Bay. In that game, Giants left tackle Ereck Flowers played poorly. After that game, Flowers reportedly shoved a reporter in the locker room. The NFL decided to investigate the incident.
The investigation appears to be over. According to ESPN's Adam Schefter, the NFL will not fine Flowers because he didn't violate the personal conduct policy.
NFL determined this week that Giants OT Ereck Flowers did not violate personal conduct policy when he shoved a reporter in GB, per official. — Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) November 11, 2016
Here's what reportedly happened that night, via our Jared Dubin:
Things got even worse for Flowers after the game, when he reportedly shoved a reporter in the locker room. Per a report from NJ.com, this is how it went down: Flowers was giving an interview to two reporters when a third -- ESPN's Jordan Raanan -- walked over to the area near his locker. Flowers then interrupted the question he was being asked to tell Raanan to leave the area. When Raanan wouldn't leave, Flowers shoved him out of the way.
I was not there to witness the event, so I don't know for sure what happened. But if Flowers did shove a reporter and escaped a fine, that could be a not-so-great precedent for reporters moving forward.Advertisement
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The US military regards colleges as a crucial component of their defence strategy, and has developed a well-resourced and sophisticated position of influence within the US higher education system. Campuses have become an extension of the US military complex and key sties for recruitment, training, and military research.
Student Militias - The Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC)
Founded in 1916, the ROTC exists in over 1,000 US colleges, and provides military training to students, with the aim of producing the next generation of armed forces officers. ROTC Students are provided with a scholarship to college, on the condition that they complete four years of active military service once they graduate.
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ROTC graduates also serve an additional four years in the reserves after their active service.
ROTC students choose between the Army, Air Force and Navy as their service branch, and participate in regular drills throughout the academic year, as well as extended training activities during the summer. In 2010, 38.5% of newly commissioned US Army Officers were ROTC graduates, meaning that the ROTC serves a crucial recruitment function for the US Military.
The military has protected this recruitment function through the Solomon Amendment (1994), which allows the Department of Defense (DoD) to deny federal funding to colleges if they prohibit the ROTC, or military recruitment from taking place on campus.
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As explored below, this funding is extremely lucrative, meaning academic staff are often encouraged not to dissent against military initiatives within their colleges.
With the most expensive tuition fees in the world, the ROTC is seen by many students, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, as an effective way to avoid considerable student debt and guarantee employment after their studies. However, this financial and job security comes with the significant risks attached to an armed forces career.
Army 101: College Education for Current and Former Service Personnel
The US military not only regards colleges as a source for potential officers, but also as an opportunity to further the knowledge and skills of their serving members.
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A number of schemes and initiatives exist to provide serving personnel with a college education, meaning that students in military uniform has become a common sight on many campuses.
US military personnel are eligible for bursaries worth up to $4,500 a year to undertake a college education. However, this opportunity often comes with a'return to service' obligation, meaning military personnel commit to serving for another number of years upon completing their degree. The contracts brokered in educating military personnel are substantial, and are sought after by universities. For example, in 2013, Maryland University College, was awarded a $245 million contract to provide distance learning to troops serving in Europe, until 2023.
The US military also view colleges as an opportunity to assist veterans in their transition to civilian life. Service-members Opportunity Colleges, "enrol hundreds of thousands of service-members, their family members, and veterans annually", and the G.I. Bill, introduced in 1944, also provides a range of funding options for veterans to attend university. Furthermore, in 2012, 71% of public universities had a Veteran's Resource Centre, which has generated an exponential growth in veterans attending university. This educational provision for veterans benefits the US military by deflecting criticism away from the fact that recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in 970,000 veterans claiming disability benefits for various psychological and physical injuries.
It is vital for colleges to be viewed as 'Military-Friendly' institutions, and many universities pride themselves on achieving and maintaining this status. Resisting military influence is likely to damage college's public reputation, and can result in the loss of significant government funding. Consequentially, universities often feel pressured to alter their policies, in order to be regarded as pro-military. Many Universities grant accreditation for military training, pledge to re-admit military personnel should they be deployed, and offer reduced or even waived tuition fees for serving personnel. This desire to be regarded as 'Military-Friendly' can even result in the complete militarisation of certain universities. For example, Trident University, who recently came first in Military Advanced Education's 2015 Guide to Colleges and Universities, has 66% of students in the regular or reserve armed forces.
Ivory Turrets - Military Research at Universities
Universities receive a significant amount of DoD funding for conducting research with military applications. The DoD is the largest federal funder of university research in the US, and in 2012, had an astonishing research budget of $80.4 billion, 55% of the total federal expenditure on research and development. Thus, there is a considerable incentive for universities and academics to conduct military research. Indeed, a report by the Association of American Universities notes in 2002, that almost 350 colleges and universities conduct military research. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is consistently the highest recipient of funding for military research, receiving $608 million in 2005. On occasion, the military has even attempted to determine what students are taught. For example, in 2008, a memorandum of understanding between the DoD and the Department of Education agreed to promote foreign language learning, amongst college students, particularly in strategic languages, such as Arabic and Farsi.
Military research varies considerably. For example, in 2013, Assistant Professor Yarsolav Urzhumov, used a proportion of Duke University's $33 million in DoD funding, to research cloaking technology that would render airplanes and boats invisible to radar. Whereas, North Carolina State University, has received funding to study which breeds of dog are best suited to detect roadside bombs, and to develop a surface that would make naval ships barnacle-proof! However, funding is not only granted to science and technology departments, but also to social-science and humanities departments. In 2008, the Minerva Consortium, was established by the DoD, to fund universities to "carry out social-sciences research relevant to national security". Yet, academics are not only useful to the military, in terms of the research they might carry out in their universities, but are increasingly being sought after for their skills and expertise, which might be useful for conducting military operations overseas.
The Human Terrain Programme
In 2007, at the height of American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military established the Human Terrain Programme. This $40 million dollar initiative, poached academics and PhD students - particularly within anthropology and social-science departments - with salaries of over $200,000 per year. Their purpose was to utilise their expertise to monitor local populations, in an attempt to win 'hearts and minds', and assist US military decision-making. For many, the initiative represented the terminus by which US higher education has become militarised, with militarily-trained academics outfitted in fatigues and weaponised, in order to enable the US military's kill-chain.
The Human Terrain Programme continues to this day, and there is little doubt that the US military is constantly monitoring academics and their research, in order to recruit the very best skill-sets and expertise, to assist US military strategy.
A Military-Academic Complex
In his farewell address to the nation, in 1961, President Eisenhower warned against the burgeoning influence of the Military-Industrial Complex over US society. Since then, the US military has extended its reach to other areas of American society, including higher education. Whilst both the military and colleges benefit from this Military-Academic Complex, they are not equal partners. Universities are beholden to DoD policy, and risk a loss of reputation and funding if they dissent. The philosophical underpinnings of the public university, whereby academic institutions are free from political influence are no more, and military influence within US universities, is likely to continue into the future.Image copyright AP Image caption Pilgrims were crushed to death in Mina when two large crowds met
A crush near Mecca last month killed nearly three times as many people as Saudi Arabia has admitted, according to a tally by the Associated Press (AP).
AP said on Monday that at least 2,110 people died in the tragedy at the annual Hajj pilgrimage - far more than the official Saudi death toll of 769.
The new figure comes from media reports and statements from 30 countries who lost citizens, AP said.
The crush was the deadliest incident to strike the Hajj in 25 years.
Saudi officials have not updated their death toll - or the number of injured, which stands at 934 - since 25 September.
Iran says it lost 465 of its citizens, making it the worst affected nation. Many of the dead also came from Africa: Nigeria said it lost 199 people, while Mali lost 198, and Egypt 192, according to the AP count.
The AP tally comes after Saudi officials said they held a meeting about the disaster late on Sunday night.
According to the country's state press agency, SPA, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Naif bin Abdul Aziz, who is also the kingdom's interior minister, oversaw the meeting.
An investigation into the incident ordered by King Salman in ongoing.
"The crown prince was reassured on the progress of the investigations," the SPA report said.
Previously, the deadliest incident at the Hajj was a 1990 stampede that killed 1,426 people.Canada's Prime Ministers during its first century
The Prime Minister of Canada is an official who serves as the primary minister of the Crown, chair of the Cabinet, and thus head of government of Canada. Officially, the prime minister is appointed by the Governor General of Canada, but by constitutional convention, the prime minister must have the confidence of the elected House of Commons. Normally, this is the leader of the party caucus with the greatest number of seats in the house. But, if that leader lacks the support of the majority, the governor general can appoint another leader who has that support or may dissolve parliament and call a new election. By constitutional convention, a prime minister holds a seat in parliament and, since the early 20th century, this has more specifically meant the House of Commons.[1]
The office is not outlined in any of the documents that constitute the written portion of the Constitution of Canada; executive authority is formally vested in the sovereign and exercised on his or her behalf by the governor general. The prime ministership is part of Canada's constitutional convention tradition. The office was modelled after that which existed in Britain at the time. Sir John A. Macdonald was commissioned by the Viscount Monck on 24 May 1867, to form the first government of the Canadian Confederation. On 1 July 1867, the first ministry assumed office.[2]
The date for which a prime minister begins his or her term has been determined by the date that he or she is sworn into his or her portfolio, as an oath of office as prime minister is not required.[3] However, since 1957, the incoming prime minister has sworn an oath as prime minister.[3] Before 1920, prime ministers' resignations were accepted immediately by the governor general and the last day of the ministries were the date he died or the date of resignation.[3] Since 1920, the outgoing prime minister has only formally resigned when the new government is ready to be formed.[3] The Interpretation Act of 1967 states that "where an appointment is made effective or terminates on a specified day, that appointment is considered to be effective or to terminate after the end of the previous day".[3] Thus, although the outgoing prime minister formally resigns only hours before the incoming ministry swears their oaths, both during the day, the ministries are effectively changed at midnight the night before. Some sources, including the Parliament of Canada, apply this convention as far back as 1917.[4] Two prime ministers have died in office: John A. Macdonald (1867–1873, 1878–1891), and John Thompson (1892–1894). All others have resigned, either after losing an election or upon retirement.
Prime ministers [ edit ]
Timeline [ edit ]
Living former prime ministers [ edit ]
As of February 2019, there are seven living former prime ministers of Canada, the oldest being John Turner (born 1929). The most recent former Prime Minister to die was Pierre Trudeau (1968–1979, 1980–1984), on 28 September 2000. The living former prime ministers, in order of service, are:
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Voting is over, a winner has risen to the top, the true cream separated from the whey!
Congratulation to Djeroek!!! Maybe better know by some as Jonas the Plugexpert.
TwoThreeZero Kmaxi Insanity Pheelit Ostrogoth DubKidFlash Dunks KURTZ Garfferen mxb The Bellows
12. Djeroek Kin F John E Bolacha
Tracking time is over, now you need to get your listening heads on. Some awesome entries this round to wrap your ears around!!
Vote packs:
MP3: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?eff4490j49zmffn
XRNS: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?0rbl0ragctmdi1j
Soundcloud Set:
http://soundcloud.com/dead-dog-disko/sets/dead-dog-disko-final-renoise
Deadline for voting is 12 noon UK time on Wednesday 26th September
Well as most of you know I’m taking a break from running these regular competitions, maybe I’ll come back to it at some point in the future. Who knows…
Anyway as a parting gift I’ve decided to include a prize for the final round!!
[center]*** 1st Place Winner will receive a Renoise ***
*** Licence/Upgrade for a person of their choice! ***[/center]
Rules are quite simple for this round (but I’ll use the usual format below as well.) I have provided a sample pack, out of which there is one obviously named sample that must be used somewhere, somehow in your track. You may also use any samples from your own library (meaning they could be created with external software or hardware etc.) The final track must |
Lawmakers have created countless new crimes and punishments, and allowed law enforcement to extend old laws in dangerous ways. Have you ever told anything short of the absolute truth when filling out an online form to use some service? We can charge you with a felony for that. And, by the way, we don't need to convict you at trial. If you are a target, we can ruin you financially if you try to defend yourself. This is what we expect in banana republics and police states, not here. And as the surveillance state expands, it will create more targets among people like you.
Our political leaders have made a calculation in recent years. They believe you are too frightened, too cowardly, to face the truth – and that you think liberty is much less important than temporary safety.
We are human. Terrorism unleashes our deepest fears, and our most lethal fury, even though the risk for any one of us is vanishingly low. We must challenge the fear mongers, and ourselves.
Dan Gillmor has an absolutely fantastic "wishful thinking" speech he'd love to see from a future Presidential candidate, one in which liberty takes a front seat, rather than is seen as something that needs to be chipped away. Go read the whole thing, but here's a snippet to suck you in:Part of the problem we have today is that very few elected officials care about liberty. They care about power, and they believe, incorrectly, that their job involves ditching liberty in an attempt to retain power (which they falsely argue is about "protecting Americans" despite little evidence that the power grab protects anyone but their own interests). It would be an amazing step forward if there were a President who remembered why liberty was such an important issue to our founding fathers.
Filed Under: civil liberties, liberty, politics, presidentHOUSTON - A man pretending to work for an alarm company was targeting homeowners in Oak Forest in Northwest Houston.
Leslie Chane and her family moved to the growing Oak Forest neighborhood two weeks ago.
"I love the place. We walk two to three times a day because I have a 2-year-old that is super hyper," said Chane.
But, Chane was concerned after hearing a suspicious man had been in the area recently.
"I would be afraid to walk my daughter around," said Chane.
The SEAL Security Team said the man was wearing badges and claiming to work for ADT. The man was last seen knocking on doors on Wakefield near Piney Woods. They said once someone asks for an ID, he says he left it at home and takes off in a gray Camry or Nissan.
"Typically, we won't answer the door but what if he gets frustrated and starts knocking out a window," said Chane.
Vilma Vanegas, who was walking her dogs on Wednesday night, has lived in the area for a year.
"Now that someone out there pretending to be a good person is kinda scary."
But, they're both optimistic, this won't be a problem.
"It's not that kind of neighborhood, hopefully it stays that way," said Vanegas.
"I don't want to lose that hope of my new home. I'm really excited to be here," said Chane.
The SEAL Security Team said if someone claiming to be with ADT comes to your door, ask for a license. If they can't show you one, call them or police.?
Copyright 2015 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.TUSCALOOSA, Ala. (AP) — Mike Flowers, 59, learned a lesson from his parents as a boy: Get up and get going every day, no matter what.
The message stuck in a serious way, and Flowers is now retiring after a 35-year career as a police officer without ever having taken a sick day.
Flowers, a captain who oversees the Tuscaloosa Police Department's east precinct and tactical team, will work his last shift Friday without ever giving in to a queasy stomach, a sniffle or an achy body. He's never awakened, hit the alarm and gone back to sleep just because he didn't want to go to work.
It all goes back to childhood, he said.
"My mother always made me get up and go to school. Other than having the measles in the first grade I didn't miss any school days, either," said Flowers.
As astounding as Flowers' record might seem in a country where a 2013 study by PwC found the average worker takes about five sick days a year, Flowers doesn't see it as a big deal. He's just gone to work, perhaps with the assistance of good fortune and heredity.
A native of Tuscaloosa, Flowers joined the Tuscaloosa Police Department on Oct. 4, 1980. His first serious brush with missing a day came when he was a motorcycle officer around 1984.
"I had a motorcycle wreck one time where I had to have my... my arm in a splint for about a week. But back in the '80s you were allowed to come to work with a splint on your arm. So I came to work and I rode my motorcycle with a splint on my arm," Flowers said.
Flowers, who began receiving promotions in 1992, said his closet call with a sick day came about five years ago when his gall bladder ruptured the day before one of his sons wed.
"I had to have emergency surgery. So I missed his wedding but I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any work," he said. "Fortunately our police department has a light duty policy and I was able to come back to work."
With retirement, Flowers plans to get a boat and spend more time on Alabama's Gulf Coast. He said he is getting out of law enforcement at a good time given the increasing danger that officers face on the street, but he's going to miss friends and co-workers at the office.
"One of the things I can say about this job is that I enjoy doing this or I wouldn't have done it for 35 years," he said.New Delhi: Amid media reports that AAP might not give party tickets to six of its former legislators for the Delhi Assembly polls, Delhi BJP on Sunday termed the move as an indicator that AAP has already accepted defeat.
"In political life, we see such a massive change as an indicator of conceding defeat," Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay said while addressing party workers from two Delhi's trans-Yamuna districts - North East and Naveen Shahdara.
He called upon the workers to give the party a 5/5 result from their districts.
While BJP Pradesh Organisation General Secretary Vijay Sharma directed party men to go door-to-door for membership campaign, MP Manoj Tiwari assured the party leadership that workers of North East district will play an important role in winning all 10 seats in his parliamentary constituency.
Sources said AAP has decided not to give tickets to six former legislators including former Speaker of the Assembly Maninder Singh Dhir, Raju Dhingan, Dharmendra Singh Kohli, Harish Khanna and Rajesh Garg.
The sources said the party has taken the decision not to give tickets to six former legislators following "ground reports" on their performance.
Meanwhile, in order to connect to city's youth ahead of the assembly elections, BJP is all set to launch its website in the national capital.
The party had shut down its website four or five months ago due to some reason and now owing to Assembly elections, the party wants to come up with a new website with which it aims to connect with Delhiites, especially the youth.
According to the party, it will be able to reach out to the youth and convey its ideology and poll promises to them through the website.
"Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay is expected to launch
party's website in next two or three days. There will also be a chat option on the website through which youth can directly talk to the state party president and other senior leaders about various issues," a senior BJP leader said.
Sources in Delhi BJP said AAP has been actively using its website to convey its messages to the people and it therefore, wants to use its own website as a strong communication tool.
"On party's new website, there will be photos of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and some senior leaders. Besides, party will also put a message of Modi's wave so that voters can be influenced," the senior leader said.
The BJP leader added that party will also provide an option to write blogs on the website so that youth can post their views.
"Through the blog, we will get to know what the youth thinks and party can prepare its strategy accordingly. Besides, party's Twitter account will be added to the website," he said.It's Still a Bugg's World but Now, his Dog World, is So Much Sweeter!
By Denise O, 11th Dec 2011 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/44pkf0fj/
Posted in WikinutGuidesPetsDogs
Bugg is now a 2 year old Dog, no longer a puppy. Bugg is not sad though, Bugg has a puppy to help me train and Bugg loves being the big brother. Bugg knows being strict but also fair with Sweet Tee, is key, in making Sweet Tee the best Dog he can be.
Bugg
Yes I am still living in Bugg's world. I don't mind, I just love his world. Bugg, Sweet Tee and I have been having fun just hanging out. I am having the pleasure of watching these two guys become the best of friends.
Having been the mommy of two other dogs (Boo & Max), where I also had the priviledge of watching them two become the best of friends, over many years. It just warms my heart knowing that these two guys, Bugg and Sweet Tee, will also be life long friends.
When you have more than one dog, you must make both dogs feel loved and secure. They will notice if you give more to the other.
I promise you, when giving treats, they will look and make sure what the other one has is the same size as theirs.
Bugg is much bigger than Sweet Tee and his food intake in much larger. To combat this issue, so Sweet Tee does not get jealous. I cup Bugg's treat in my hand, so Sweet Tee only sees half. In Sweet Tee's mind, they both have received the same amount.
Just as when you give them atta boys and show your love with affection, you must give it to them both, equally.
I know it seems like hard work but, all it takes is a bit of patience, a lot of love and a few treats along the way.
Sweet Tee
Having Bugg around has helped me in so many ways. One way Bugg has helped is by taking a higher role in our pack, over Sweet Tee.
At first Sweet Tee tried to fight it but, Bugg and I were very persistent that he stay in the back of the pack.
For one reason, Sweet Tee is just a puppy, he still needs guidance.
As the months have gone by, Sweet Tee has settled into this position willingly.
Our Two cents
I write about experiences with my dogs so maybe you can learn a thing or two, on how to make this experience a more pleasant one. For both you and your dog/dogs.
I am no expert, I have just been raising dogs for a few decades.
I have learned from my own mistakes and I find, I am a much better mommy to my dogs, by doing just that, learning from those mistakes. I also did some things 'right' from the start.
Just like with people, every dog is different but, they are also the same.
I mean: The basics of raising a dog is the same but, their temperament might be different than Bugg & Sweet Tee's, so you might have to adjust to suit your dog/dogs.
Ahhhh Bugg is 2
November 24, 2011, our Bugg turned 2 years old. The day was Thanksgiving day here in America. Bugg ate some turkey & fixings and of course, Sweet Tee also had his share of goodies.
We didn't get a photograph of Bugg on his birthday, as I was cooking and the others were eating. I know Bugg forgives us. We went into the archives and pulled out last years photograph of Bugg making a wish.
Please take a look at Bugg's first birthday day...
In Bugg's World...Dog birthdays Will be Celebrated!
I do have to admit, the picture where Bugg blows out his candle, on his first birthday, was even more adorable than this one.
No doubt!
Still Just a Pup
Yes, Bugg is now officially a adult male dog, no longer a puppy. You can not tell it by the way this guy plays and I hope he keeps playing like this for many years to come.
Bugg and Sweet Tee just love to play. Having more than one dog is just as good as having more than one child, they entertain each other.
Since we brought Sweet Tee home as a little puppy of 6-8 weeks old (He was a rescue dog), Bugg has been teaching Sweet Tee all he has learned in his two years here on earth.
One thing I love that Bugg showed Sweet Tee is, to have a soft mouth, this is not really a known trait that belongs to a pitbull but, Bugg is 'almost' completely successful at teaching Sweet Tee to use his mouth lightly.
Games begin
One of the toughest job you will have raising a puppy, is making them tired. It might seem easy but, you never know which games will interest your dog,so it will take some trial and error. Like with fetch.
I can play fetch with a stick, Bugg and Sweet Tee will play for a good 30 minutes but, grab a frisbie and all bets are off. Now, Sweet Tee has just about eaten up all of the Alabama frizzbies so, I found this frisbie in the dollar store discount bin, 25 cents. I could not pass it up.
So let the games begin! I throw Bugg and Sweet Tee their frisbie.
Lets go Sweet Tee
From what I could see, both Bugg and Sweet Tee caught the frisbie at the same time.
Oh well, they must work this one out.
I promise you one thing though, I will not get my hands on that frisbie again, that is, until it is time to go inside and both dogs are tired.
Mommy is tired so, I tell Bugg to take his brother for a walk.
Bugg is more than happy to do this and also, Bugg is not ready to hand the frisbie over to this little guy.
We're Off!
Bugg and Sweet Tee walk around the yard, neither one willing to give up on the frisbie.
There is nothing more for me to do, other than to...
Sit back, relax and...
Take photographs.
I vote Stubborn
Bugg will take Sweet Tee for a long walk, they will go all around their playground.
Mind you, that is just a little under two acres, so it is a good walk for them both.
I have yet to figure out if, Bugg and Sweet Tee actually like walking around the yard or, are they really that stubborn. That neither of them wants to give up the frisbie.
Either way, they get their exercise.
After a couple of minutes I notice Sweet Tee is trying to pull the frisbie away from Bugg.
Remember: Sweet Tee is just a puppy and his attention span is not very long.
I can tell, Sweet Tee is thinking, this walking business is starting to get a little boring.
Walk is Done
Bugg notices Sweet Tee is starting to tug at the frisbie even harder, so Bugg yanks the frisbie out of Sweet Tee's mouth. I remind Bugg to be easy on his brother. Bugg heeds my warning.
Bugg was having fun just walking around but, Sweet tee has other things in mind.
Usually Sweet Tee will do as Bugg does but, there are times he just wants to do it his own way.
Sweet Tee is a puppy and he wants to play!
This walking around is for the old guys.
Bugg reluctantly gives in and then Bugg decides that he and Sweet Tee will play another game.
Victory!
Bugg lays on the ground with the frisbie in his mouth, teasing Sweet Tee by place one side of the frisbie into Sweet Tee's mouth.
Sweet Tee is happy because, him and Bugg can play one of his favorite games, tug of war. Sweet Tee grabs the frisbie and starts to tug.
Sweet Tee is pulling with all his might.
Sweet Tee just knows he will beat his big brother today.
Sweet Tee did it!
Sweet Tee has gotten the frisbie away from Bugg.
Not for Long
Bugg was caught off guard but, he will not allow this little puppy the satisfaction of beating him.
Sweet Tee is so proud of himself.
Bugg and Sweet Tee wrestle around for the frisbie.
Sweet Tee gets a little aggressive and accidentally catches some of Bugg's fur and bites down a little too hard.
Bugg is mad, Bugg knows it was a accident but, when it comes to your teeth connecting to fur or skin, it will just not be tolerated!
Grrrrrr
Bugg growls at Sweet Tee, warning him to lay off of the fur, it hurts. Sweet Tee Backs off.
Sweet Tee is doing one of Bugg's maneuvers, laying on the frisbie, so no one can get it.
The only problem with that is, Sweet Tee doesn't have the weight behind him and if Bugg wanted to, Bugg could pick the whole puppy up and grab the frisbie with one paw.
Bugg reaches under Sweet Tee's chin and grabs for the frisbie. Sweet Tee didn't mean to but, Sweet Tee accidentally grabbed a hold of Bugg's side of his face (again) with his teeth.
Nope, this will not be tolerated!
Bugg had already shown Sweet Tee once, that he was not happy with him clamping down on his fur, by growling at him.
Yet Sweet Tee does it again!
Uh Oh!
Bugg did not like this.
Bugg does not mind playing rough with Sweet Tee but, when it comes to actual biting, then Sweet Tee needs to learn his lesson.
Bugg will not tolerate Sweet Tee getting his mouth close enough to a human or a animal,so that he might hurt one of them.
Bugg knows it was a accident but, there is no excuse.
Bugg knows that Sweet Tee has just gotten too excited and he needs to learn that this will not be tolerated.
Once your mouth touches fur or skin, you release and Sweet Tee did not release.
Bugg jumps up and brings Sweet Tee to the ground.
Sweet Tee submits
Now, Bugg did not hurt Sweet Tee, he never would. Bugg is just showing Sweet Tee, he does not like Sweet Tee biting him, nor any other animal. That includes the human animal.
Once Sweet Tee had bitten down on Bugg's fur, Bugg was on him. Bugg did this so Sweet Tee will know exactly what he did wrong. If Bugg waited too long to correct Sweet Tee. Sweet Tee would have forgotten about biting Bugg within minutes of doing so.
Remember: Your puppy has a short attention span.
Once Sweet Tee stops struggling under Bugg's hold and submits. Bugg will then let Sweet Tee go. Bugg might ignore Sweet Tee for a few minutes but, it will be easily forgotten by this big guy. I mean: We all make mistakes.
There are very few times I allow Bugg to do the correcting over Sweet Tee but, I know Bugg will be fair and not a bully by attacking Sweet Tee for no reason at all. I know my Bugg!
Bugg hurts Nothing
Bugg loves Sweet Tee.
Bugg hates when he has to get onto Sweet Tee like this.
Bugg is the big brother and he has to show Sweet Tee, all that he has learned from Mommy and the good things that just comes naturally to Bugg, through his blood line.
Bugg's daddy is a yellow lab and his mama is a white shepherd. Both these breeds have some wonderful traits and very few bad ones. Bugg seems to have gained 'just' the best of both breeds.
So yes, I do allow Bugg to take the lead at times with Sweet Tee. They speak the same language.
Now would I do this, if I had any thought in my mind that Bugg would hurt Sweet Tee?
Never!
I have raised Bugg for 20 months, I know what he is about and also, I am the leader of this pack, I make the limits. I would never have allowed Bugg to take Sweet Tee down in the first place, if I thought there were any danger of Sweet Tee being hurt.
Bugg and Sweet Tee are tired, they want to go inside.
Lessons Learned
Sweet Tee learned his lesson, he knew he did wrong by biting down. Once you touch fur or skin, you are suppose to release. To show Bugg he was sorry, Sweet Tee didn't even try to rush the ice bowl when they came inside.
Bugg laid down and then Sweet Tee laid down behind Bugg. Sweet Tee hugged Bugg as if to say "I'm sorry Bugg.". Bugg realized that Sweet Tee learned his lesson and they both had sweet dreams.
Will Bugg and Sweet Tee have just as much fun when they wake up, of course they will.
As we all know...
It's a Bugg's world!
It's still a Bugg's World! I'm just Glad the Dog lets Us In
It's not the end of Bugg's World. It's just the End of a Dog Day.
Please also take a look at another article featuring Sweet Tee...
Bugg & Sweet Tee... These two Dogs will be the Best of Friends.
Do you have a story about your family pet, join Wikinut, share your experience and make money while doing so.When you read the news, sometimes it can feel like the only things reported are terrible, depressing events. Why does the media concentrate on the bad things in life, rather than the good? And what might this depressing slant say about us, the audience?
It isn't that these are the only things that happen. Perhaps journalists are drawn to reporting bad news because sudden disaster is more compelling than slow improvements. Or it could be that newsgatherers believe that cynical reports of corrupt politicians or unfortunate events make for simpler stories. But another strong possibility is that we, the readers or viewers, have trained journalists to focus on these things. Many people often say that they would prefer good news: but is that actually true?
To explore this possibility, researchers Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, set up an experiment, run at McGill University in Canada. They were dissatisfied with previous research on how people relate to the news – either the studies were uncontrolled (letting people browse news at home, for example, where you can't even tell who is using the computer), or they were unrealistic (inviting them to select stories in the lab, where every participant knew their choices would be closely watched by the experimenter). So, the team decided to try a new strategy: deception.
Trick question
Trussler and Soroka invited participants from their university to come to the lab for "a study of eye tracking". The volunteers were first asked to select some stories about politics to read from a news website so that a camera could make some baseline eye-tracking measures. It was important, they were told, that they actually read the articles, so the right measurements could be prepared, but it didn't matter what they read.
After this ‘preparation’ phase, they watched a short video (the main purpose of the experiment as far as the subjects were concerned, but it was in fact just a filler task), and then they answered questions on the kind of political news they would like to read.
The results of the experiment, as well as the stories that were read most, were somewhat depressing. Participants often chose stories with a negative tone – corruption, set-backs, hypocrisy and so on – rather than neutral or positive stories. People who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news.
And yet when asked, these people said they preferred good news. On average, they said that the media was too focussed on negative stories.
Danger reaction
The researchers present their experiment as solid evidence of a so called "negativity bias", psychologists' term for our collective hunger to hear, and remember bad news.
It isn't just schadenfreude, the theory goes, but that we've evolved to react quickly to potential threats. Bad news could be a signal that we need to change what we're doing to avoid danger.
As you'd expect from this theory, there's some evidence that people respond quicker to negative words. In lab experiments, flash the word “cancer”, “bomb” or “war” up at someone and they can hit a button in response quicker than if that word is “baby”, “smile” or “fun” (despite these pleasant words being slightly more common). We are also able to recognise negative words faster than positive words, and even tell that a word is going to be unpleasant before we can tell exactly what the word is going to be.
So is our vigilance for threats the only way to explain our predilection for bad news? Perhaps not.
There's another interpretation that Trussler and Soroka put on their evidence: we pay attention to bad news, because on the whole, we think the world is rosier than it actually is. When it comes to our own lives, most of us believe we're better than average, and that, like the clichés, we expect things to be all right in the end. This pleasant view of the world makes bad news all the more surprising and salient. It is only against a light background that the dark spots are highlighted.
So our attraction to bad news may be more complex than just journalistic cynicism or a hunger springing from the darkness within.
And that, on another bad news day, gives me a little bit of hope for humanity.
Are you drawn to negative words in headlines? Which of the ‘related’ stories to the left of this article caught your eye? Let us know on our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.
If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in these columns please get in touch @tomstafford or ideas@idiolect.org.ukThis is a continuation of my series of first chapter dissections where I take apart the opening chapter of a successful novel to find out what makes it work, how the author hooked the reader, which rules were followed, and which were broken to good effect (previous entries can be found here: Ch.1 Analyses ).
Suzanne Collins was an established writer before she wrote The Hunger Games, having written extensively for children’s television and a series of MG books. She moved onto Young Adult with this novel in 2008, the first in a trilogy. Set in a dystopian society in the future, every year two teenagers from each district are sent to the Capitol to compete in the games.
The premise isn’t original, but I’d say the main difference from its forebears is the audience. Stories of this dark nature haven’t been aimed at teens before (even when they’ve starred teens as in Battle Royale). How the author manages to balance this mixture of children and violence is, I think, part of the book’s success.
Chapter One is pretty long, over 16 pages, so expect this post to be not short. If you haven't read it you can find the first chapter online: here
The book is first person POV, present tense. The prose is very well written, you don’t even notice the tense. The pace is well maintained, a constant sense of moving forward, even though the opening isn’t particularly thrilling.
The whole chapter is a deft example of how to introduce description within action. We are given a look at the world as our heroine encounters things through action. She doesn’t stop to give an overview or a long explanation. She wakes, she describes the bed, she dresses, she describes the clothes, she goes hunting, she describes the woods etc.
“When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress.”
We start with one of the classic no-no’s of modern literature. Agents are always putting the opening scene where the MC wakes up on the top of their list of pet hates. Here there are two reasons to start this way. First, because it’s a special day, and it adds to the build up to start from first light. And secondly to introduce the MC's sister, Prim (more on that later).
It should also be noted, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, ‘rules’ only apply to unpublished writers. Once you’re in print you can do whatever works, and agents aren’t your primary market.
We also get a description of the world’s ugliest cat, which then never gets mentioned again. Why? It’s hard in first person POV to get a clear idea of the narrator, since people don’t think about themselves in those terms. But by using the awkward relationship with the cat, how she feels about it and how she imagines the cat feels about her, what the author does is give us an idea of Katniss’ place. Her need to be coldly pragmatic. Her feelings about her sister. The soft spot she has that she suppresses.
The message here, imo, is that Katniss is a tough cookie, but only because she has no other choice. She has accepted her burden, but it has left her a cold person with defences fully raised. Only Prim can get through.
Slowly hints are dropped in about the kind of world we’re in. Fences, wild animals, restrictions, lack of food, and a special event later in the day. All this stuff is related in between her preparation for hunting, no info dump. It’s very well managed. The dead father, the neglectful mother, and the laws against poaching are slipped in as relevant bits of info to do with the task at hand, hunting.
There is quite a lot of backstory, but it is served in small chunks, and always within the bitter voice of a girl who views her misfortune with an ironic detachment. I think that attitude helps make it more than just a round-up of previous events.
The first few pages contain no big action, but there is constant movement and enough info to give us an idea of an oppressed way of life, and a constant danger. The tone and attitude of the narrator is well conveyed, her tough guy act underscored throughout, but also occasionally punctured with thoughts of Prim.
She hooks up with Gale in the woods. She slips in a story about killing a friendly cougar here, again emphasising Katniss’ pragmatic nature. Can’t afford to be sentimental in this world. It’s a bit heavy handed, the same point has been made repeatedly in this chapter. She drowns cats, she kills lions, she defies the law, she replaces her mother. She does what she has to.
This is a clear difference between this kind of book and an adult work of fiction. Within the first chapter Katniss is given one motivation in life and it is hammered home relentlessly. Even though there are some interesting narrative devices employed, emotionally it is very direct.
“We could do it you know,” Gale says quietly.
“What?” I ask.
“Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it,” says Gale.
A romance element introduced here. It’s done in the classic ‘I’m not interested in love’ manner, but it’s pretty blunt. Gale fancies her. Her life is too hard to consider such luxuries. These feelings are later transferred to Peeta (the guy she's paired with to go to the games).
Whenever you get that sort of ‘no time for love’ stance from a female character you can pretty much guarantee there’ll be little time for anything else. Of course, romantic feelings are used later in the games to great effect. But this basic confusion about her feelings (can she allow herself to feel anything?) is a major theme of the story, much in the way two people who have a marriage of convenience for ‘Green Card’ purposes aren’t sure of their true feelings. Or when a spy is ordered to romance an ‘asset’, but what started off as a mission...
I think that scene in the woods, although short and full of denial of feelings, very much establishes this as a book for girls. I don’t think the writer put that scene in there by accident.
Then there’s a fairly long section on what and how they hunt, at the same time giving us a pretty good idea of the way this world operates, laws, dangers, black markets etc. It also shows us how self-reliant Katniss is, Gale being very much a partner and an equal, even though he is older than her. There is also a slight push towards the upbeat.
I think this variation in tone works really well. The start was a bit glum, then the joy of freedom in the woods, then Bam! the lottery. Keeping variation in the narrative helps the momentum, I didn’t find myself getting bored with the details here, even though this is probably the most exposition-heavy, info-dumpy section of the chapter.
The whole reaping concept is mentioned every now and again, but without any real explanation so far. There is a definite sense of foreboding about it, some bitterness and lots of sarcasm. I got a strong sense of Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘The Lottery’, which I think is another big influence. It’s pretty clear the reaping isn’t a good thing.
From the end of the hunt and bartering of goods with the black market folk, to the getting ready and arrival in the town square, everything is underplayed. Emotion is suppressed. A kind of weary resignation settles over the story that very effectively makes things feel far worse than people panicking and losing their minds. An excellent demonstration of how to use understatement to emphasise impending horror.
The rules of the Hunger Games (a battle to the death between kids selected from each of the 12 districts) are given just before the draw is made. It’s very important they are made clear before the draw is made. There is a strong compulsion among aspiring writers to hold back information like this as long as possible. But without knowing the consequences of an act, the act loses its tension. And you can't add musical cues to manipulate a reader.
The rules of suspense requires you to make the stakes clear ahead of the event, not after. Even if the lottery draw took place in the next chapter, it would still be better to reveal the nature of the Hunger Games in this chapter.
So, the draw is made and it’s Prim. Good end of chapter hook. Again, it would have been tempting for a lot of aspiring authors to hold back the name until the next chapter as a way to get the reader to turn the page. Again, a much weaker way to do it. If you’ve set things up correctly knowing who it is makes it more interesting to know what happens next, not less. Consider, if I tell you a) someone’s been in an accident, or b) your mother’s been in an accident, which gets you in the stomach more?
Prim has been mentioned throughout the chapter so we know her, and we know how Katniss feels about her. Her selection carries weight with the reader. But it was done is fairly subtle manner. Even though it was made clear this was Prim’s first reaping, the focus was taken off her by placing it on how many entries Katniss and Gale had, and the desperate hoping by Katniss that she wouldn’t be chosen. Prim’s entry was almost used as an example of someone who was safe from being picked. This sort of hiding in plain sight is always the best way to misdirect the reader. Had it not been mentioned at all and then sprung on the reader it would have felt like a cheat.
The start of the chapter, reaching for Prim who isn’t there, also takes on added significance. It was foreshadowing the end of the chapter and very cleverly bookended the chapter with the loss of Prim, providing a satisfying arc.
It’s clear that the writer knows what she’s doing. The first scene and last scene of the chapter are strongly linked. The big questions (what are these Hunger Games? Who will be picked?) are both answered within the chapter.
Interesting answers always draw the reader in, making them want to know more.
Plus, having proved she can deliver the goods, if the author chooses to be a little more coy in future chapters, I, as the reader, would feel confident in allowing her the room to do that, knowing she’ll pay it off. That is only because she’s done it so effectively straight out of the gates. She’s not asking me to hang on until it gets good down the line, she pays out on all bets up front and then offers the chance to win even bigger if you gamble and keep reading.
Things to note:
No violence up front. Even though they were hunting, very bloodless. Even with this older age group, I think the approach is to ease into the rough stuff.
Lots of foreshadowing. Not just for later in the book (with the romance stuff) but between the opening and the ending of chapter one. Set up and pay-off within the first chapter.
Strong emotional voice, not just out of personality, but situation. She is a product of her environment. The examples of her attitude were many and varied, but all kept to the same message. Chapter one was about making sure you knew her approach to life, and that approach was kept simple – whatever it takes to survive.
An excellent first chapter, would certainly get you to keep reading and makes you confident you’re in capable hands. A lot of ideas lifted from other places, but expertly mixed and reimagined.Gary Patterson revealed Tuesday, during his weekly press conference, that receiver KaVontae Turpin and center Austin Schlottman would be game-time decisions for Saturday’s matchup against No. 12 West Virginia.
GP says Austin Schlottman and KaVontae Turpin will be gametime decisions. Either one returning would be big, big news. — Grant McGalliard (@GrantMcGTCU) October 18, 2016
Grant is right. Getting just one of the two back would be huge news, but getting both back would absolutely spark an offense that, while it has been putting up good numbers, has been ridiculously inconsistent since both went out with injuries.
This indicates that the rumors about the most severe potential injuries suffered by Turpin and Schlottman are likely untrue, as both would require much more time to recover than what they’ve had to this point.
On another big note, it appears that cornerback Julius Lewis could be back this weekend as well. Lewis |
the den mother of the modern American right.” She was a regular commentator on the “Capital Gang.”
As the New York Times noted, “She was the author of ‘Women Who Make the World Worse and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military and Sports’ (2005), which cited Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem and Eleanor Smeal, the former president of the National Organization for Women…” (The Bradley Foundation did not fund her to write that book.)
Other Revelations
This is how the Bradley Foundation described IWF’s role in the rightwing infrastructure, in the files:
“[IWF] has been working hard to creating for women a sensible, attractive alternative to the radical leftist feminist organizations focused on making women actively committed to exercising their rights to secure benefits and status owing to their gender, from the municipal, state, and federal government. IWF aspires to stand for a vision which is in stark contrast to leftist organizations such as the National Organization of Women, National Women’s Law Center, Emily’s List, and the [American] Association of University Women.”
IWF’s website routinely describes one of its goals as reclaiming “real feminism,” asserting, for example, that American women’s groups have narrowed their “focus to magnifying discrimination where there may be none and scaring young woman into thinking that we are constantly victims of some atrocity or another where government law is the only solution.”
That is typical of IWF’s approach to issues, deploying straw man–or straw woman–fallacies. Meanwhile, IWF has vociferously objected to the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in the U.S. and has even attacked reporting about the epidemic of rape on campuses.
As CMD recently noted in its investigation of Tucker Carlson:
“IWF has sponsored a forum where its panelists contended that ‘rape culture statistics have been blown out of proportion in the United States, and that this is largely a product of the media’s focus on rape and sexual assault.’ That’s the description from The Daily Caller’s coverage of the event. Another piece, titled ‘Restraining Orders Hurt Women‘ also credited IWF’s analysis.”
IWF has made a name for itself by making claims at odds with public policies that most women support–all the while claiming to represent mainstream women.
CMD has issued major reports on IWF and IWV that detail these contradictions and more.
As CMD noted, IWF was founded to defend Clarence Thomas in the midst of the uproar over the testimony of Professor Anita Hill that Thomas had sexually harassed her when he led the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In the words of Bradley, though, now IWF’s “primary goal is to change how women think about conservative political principles and their relationship to the formation of public policy.”
IWF’s legal policy agenda recites the mantra of almost all Koch-fueled groups, including the GOP: “personal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.” As CMD has documented, IWF has deep ties to the billionaire Koch brothers, including shacking up with David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity and its predecessor and being led for years by Koch Industries’ former top DC lobbyist.
CMD’s report illustrates how IWF is not independent, mainstream, and neutral, despite its claims.
As Joan Walsh noted in the Nation: “the IWF website looks like it still shares content with Americans for Prosperity, with posts devoted to lowering corporate tax rates and ending the ‘death tax,’ criticizing food stamps… alongside screeds against Hillary Clinton and on how Title IX hurts boys. On its website, IWV says its five core issues areas are ‘healthcare, responsible government, workplace regulation, energy and economic literacy,’ which are all core concerns of the Kochs and their allies.”
About the Bradley Foundation
IWF’s approach to women’s issues was richly rewarded by Bradley with Dan Schmidt as the foundation’s Vice President. During Schmidt’s tenure, Bradley steered more than $1 million to IWF.
Schmidt has been credited on the right with turning Bradley into “one of the most influential” foundations in the country, working for former RNC lawyer Michael Grebe and Michael Joyce. Bradley’s new leader is Rick Graber, who helmed the Wisconsin Republican party for years shortly before Reince Preibus, who later became the RNC chair and now is Trump’s Chief of Staff.
Schmidt’s recommendations for major funding for IWF and other groups went to Bradley’s Board of Directors, which includes two of the biggest GOP funders in the country: Koch allies Art Pope and Diane Hendricks.
They each have reputations for using millions of their own billions to push aggressively divisive legislative and their personal political wish lists, like right to work in Wisconsin for Hendricks and an array of disastrous legislation in Pope’s home state of North Carolina.
Through their role on Bradley’s board, they now have the ability to have influence beyond even their own vast personal fortunes. They are tasked with helping to direct the nearly one billion in assets of the Bradley Foundation, whose assets exceed the Koch brothers’ foundations, though not the personal wealth of the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, themselves.
CMD’s research team, including David Armiak and Evan James, assisted on this report, with the help of Nick Surgey.Brewer's Minute: Why Brewers Should Net Deck
by SaffronOlive // Aug 04, 2017 Tweet
video Brewer's Minute
Hey, everyone! It's time for another Brewer's Minute. For reasons I don't fully understand, there's this weird divide in parts of the Magic community. Some players identify themselves as brewers and seem to think it's wrong to play other people's decks. Other players are considered "net deckers" because rather than building their own decks, they play decks built by other people. This disagreement is not only silly but harmful—especially to brewers. The idea that you shouldn't play and learn from other people's decks to be a brewer is absurd. In fact, playing and learning from other people's decks is one of the single most important things you can do to make yourself a good brewer. As such, this week for our Brewer's Minute, we're going to talk about why brewers should net deck!
Don't forget: if you enjoy the series (and haven't already), make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish YouTube Channel!
Discussion
Let's start with my personal story into Magic and brewing. I started off as an extremely casual player jamming games at home with my friends, and while I technically built my own decks, it's a stretch to call the decks I built back then brewing or deck building; instead, I would mostly just throw cards that looked cool together. Eventually, I started playing Magic Online, which kindled my interest in competitive Magic, and at this point I became a "net decker"—not just someone who played other people's decks but someone who was too scared to even change a single card in those decks out of fear of messing something up and making the deck not work right. Eventually, I got over this fear as I grew in the game and started changing cards here or there in the decks I found online. Over the course of time, I changed more and more cards, until one day I realized that the deck I was playing didn't really look all that much like the net deck I started with, which made me realize I could probably just build my own decks from scratch.
This progression from casual to "net decker" to tuner to brewer seems natural and healthy. I wouldn't be brewing decks today if I had never spent time playing other people's decks. Think about other hobbies. Is it reasonable to expect someone to sit down and write a novel without ever reading a book? Or, what about writing a song without first playing and learning from others' music? Of course not! Thinking that you can write a great song or novel without first learning from others is not only insanity but amazingly arrogant. It's the same way in Magic—playing decks built by other people is a necessary and important part of building your own decks! Becoming a great brewer is an exercise in humility and admitting that you need to learn from playing decks built by other people.
The idea that "net decking" and "brewing" are two competing forces in the Magic world is silly. Actually, rather than fighting each other, net decking and brewing work hand-in-hand. Playing other people's decks allows you to recognize interactions and archetypes, which is essential to building your own decks. Take the Two-Tix Red deck we played on Budget Magic. While it's technically a deck I "brewed," the brewing takes place within the history and context of hundreds of Mono-Red decks built in past formats. My own build of Mono-Red wouldn't have been nearly as good without playing and studying those decks! Actually, I wouldn't even be brewing decks at all without playing and studying other people's decks, so Two-Tix Red wouldn't even exist.
Along the same lines, building your own decks gives you greater insight into how cards and interactions work, and makes you think about decks on a deeper level, which help you improve as a Magic player in general, whether you're playing your own deck or someone else's deck.
You're doing yourself a disservice if you box yourself into easy categories like "I'm a brewer" or "I'm a net decker." You can't be a good brewer without playing other people's decks, and you won't have a full understanding of the decks you play without having at least some experience in the deck-construction process. If the goal is to be the best Magic player you can be, instead of boxing yourself in, you should do everything! Strive to be a complete player. Play cool decks you find online, tune decks to make them your own, and eventually build your own decks!
The bottom line is this: much like life, Magic is a learning and growing experience, and being well-rounded is extremely important. Don't limit yourself to being part of a Magic player (a net decker or a brewer); do your best to experience everything—net decking and brewing. In the end, you'll be a better player.
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.Leaving Pebbles or Stones on a Grave Marker
As you explore Mt. Hope you may notice a pebble or small stone left on top of a tombstone. This Jewish tradition signifies that someone has honored the deceased person’s memory with a visit to the grave. While a Jewish tradition, you will find that this has spread into general use while retaining the meaning originally behind it.
Victorian Symbolism
In the late 1700s the perception of death was changing from evil and sin to hope and forgiveness. Instead of skulls and crossbones, the enlightened Victorians used willow trees and angels, anchors and ivy, more natural and positive symbols on grave markers. The elaborate and simple grave markers which represent this change in ideals, can be found throughout the cemetery,
There are many obelisks to be found reaching for heaven at Mt. Hope. Often topped with a pyramid, this was a symbol for the Egyptian god Ra, who had the power to recreate. There are tree trunks telling of a life cut off, urns relating to the mourning of a family, flames announcing eternity and inverted torches telling us of a life snuffed out. Many variations of the endless-knot can be found. The delicate, endless design often addressed the belief in reincarnation.
As you discover stars, broken columns, lambs, and drapery, rest assured that a message is there waiting for you. If you want to know more about the messages, there are many accessible publications about Victorian cemetery symbols.
The Civil War In Rochester
The 140th Vol. Infantry, led by Col. Patrick O’Rorke (namesake of the drawbridge in Charlotte), is likely the better known of Rochester’s regiments but many Rochester men served many regiments. Mt. Hope’s Civil War plot (Section BB) is a testament to those who gave their “last full measure,” but even more of this war’s casualties are buried throughout the cemetery.
The bronze sculpture at the Civil War plot was created by Sally James Farnham who studied under Frederick Remington (the American artist best known for his paintings, drawings and sculptures capturing the vitality and spirit of the American West).
Mausoleums
Mount Hope is home to 75 building-like tombs, a statement of opulence, class or just preference.
General Jacob Gould, a Revolutionary War hero, shoe merchant and Rochester mayor, who ironically opposed the land purchase that would become Mt. Hope Cemetery, had his mausoleum built into the hillside (Section C). Its style is purely Egyptian and is topped with an Egyptian obelisk, a symbol of Ra.
Nathan Stein, of the Stein-Bloch Clothes in Rochester, erected the largest mausoleum in Mt. Hope. Built in the Greek Doric style, this awe-inspiring mausoleum can “sleep” twenty and still have room to dance the night away.
Originally, the mausoleums provided not only shelter from the weather for family and friends visiting the departed, but also shelter from the distractions of the outside world. Many of the mausoleums had lovely stained glass windows and relatively comfortable sitting areas. Now, many of these incredible structures are locked or permanently sealed to protect the residents. Their outer glory remains an intrigue and statement of personal taste.
The Gatehouse and Gazebo
At the north entrance is the Neo-Romanesque style gatehouse built by A.J. Foster in 1874 (on the left) and the Moorish-style gazebo, erected in 1872 (on your right). Both look incredibly new, as they should, considering they have undergone major restoration.
The Original Chapel (1912 Chapel)
After coming in through the north gate and driving past the cast-iron Florentine fountain you come face to face with the original 1862 Gothic Revival chapel and its 1912 addition. The newer addition fits in particularly well with the original structure, except for its enormous chimney. Constructed this way to lift the smoke up and over the chapel and nearby ridge, designed by J. Foster Warner (son of the gatehouse designer, A.J. Warner), who was able to blend together the chapel and the main crematory styles quite well, without sacrificing the proficiency of the chimney. It was one of the earliest crematories built in the United States.
“there have been more than 375,000 burials at Mt Hope, marked or unmarked.”
The Monuments
Early tombstones were generally made of marble or slate, but Victorians used granite most often. Granite didn’t flake like slate, was incredibly hard and came in a wide variety of colors and textures. Marble was a second choice.
If you look closely you may come upon a few bluish gray markers. This is molded metal. Not stone. It’s almost pure zinc so as it ages, it protects the metal underneath and its color change often appears to be that of stone. While inexpensive and often ordered from catalogs, the century old, molded metal monuments in Mt. Hope have hardly lost their detail.
Burial Numbers
Surely, as you wander through Mt. Hope you must wonder how many people are buried here. You may have noticed small, flat markers, no larger than a football engraved only with the single word BABY or GRANDMOTHER or GRANDFATHER. Yes, there are unmarked graves as well. However, incredibly thorough records of the burials have been kept throughout the cemetery’s history. Because of this, we know there have been more than 375,000, marked or unmarked.Federal regulators say Lumosity deceived consumers about the science backing what its "brain workout" program can do.
Now its creator, Lumos Labs, has agreed to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission that includes paying a $2 million fine.
If the company breaks the terms of its settlement, it could be on the hook for as much as $50 million, regulators said Tuesday.
Lumosity offers subscription-based access to games and activities on its website and mobile app, and the company has touted the program's "proven" ability to enhance brain function, ward off degenerative brain diseases, and improve academic and athletic performance.
The FTC, however, says the company didn't have evidence to back those claims, which were widely promoted through email campaigns, social media posts and advertisements, including some that appeared on CNN.
"Lumosity preyed on consumers' fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer's disease," FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director Jessica Rich said. "But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads."
Lumos Labs did not admit or deny wrongdoing and says it no longer uses the advertising language criticized by the FTC.
The company must notify all its subscribers of the FTC settlement and offer them an easy way to cancel auto-pay subscriptions, which cost about $15 per month.
Lumos Labs said in a statement that the settlement does not "pertain to the rigor of our research or the quality of the products" and it remains "committed to moving the science of cognitive training forward."
A slew of platforms tools that claim to boost users' brain function have popped up over the past few years, and the neuroscience community hasn't reached a consensus on the effectiveness of "brain training" games.
According to its website, Lumosity has 70 million "brain trainers" across 182 countries.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Florida correctional officers say a proposal to privatize some prisons amounts to the government picking winners and losers. They claim the losers will be correctional officers who would be unemployed or displaced, along with their families and communities. Proponents, including private prison operator GEO Group, counter that privately-managed prisons are money-savers for the state.
Captain Mike Riley, a corrections officer in Ocala, says private operators may throw current officers out the main prison gate.
"One of the things that the senators have said they'll put in the bill is they're recommending that they hire current employees, but there is nothing that makes it mandatory that they hire them."
Captain Riley points out that private prison operators typically cut staff to save money. He predicts the higher unemployment that would result will devastate local communities and businesses. He also claims the private companies choose staff members who were fired by the State Department of Corrections.
"I do know that the current prisons here in Florida that are private, a lot of the employees that are working for them are employees that have been fired from the Department of Corrections for, usually, discipline reasons."
The state Senate Budget Committee voted 13 to five for a massive expansion of prison privatization in south Florida. The bill is set to go to the full Senate today.
The plans include closing correctional facilities in Gainesville, Jefferson, Monticello, Polk City, Raiford and Vero Beach, and women's prisons in Fort Lauderdale and near Tampa.
Information about GEO Group is online at www.geogroup.com
Les Coleman, Public News Service - FLMembers of the Future Femme Collective, plus some hairy dudes. Photos by Sarah Jacobs
If you've spent any time on the internet, you've likely seen a cock shot. Maybe you came across one of a celebrity like failing New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner on a gossip site. Maybe you had some sent to you by random dudes on Grindr or OKCupid or wherever you hang out. Or maybe you even sent one becuase you thought someone wanted to see your penis (they probably didn't). Most of the time, dick pics are thought of as “harmless,” if they're thought of at all, but they're hardly ever treated seriously.
Four artists interested in feminism, the internet, sex, porn, and power have decided that the dick pics they've gathered are important enough to share with the public. Over 300 men who have engaged in a little harmless online exhibitionism sending this summer may be surprised to learn that their members will mounted, framed, and put on display on August 23 at a Brooklyn gallery space by an artist collective known as Future Femme. The group is hoping to turn the tables on this mind-boggling male habit.
“If a man was ever caught doing this, he’d be publicly shamed and stoned," said Violet, one of the artists. (Because of the sensitive nature of their work—and the potential legal ramifications—the artists requested that their names be withheld. I'll refer to them by the names of flowers.) “And if certain groups were to get ahold of our exhibit, I think there’d be a backlash. Some of the photos definitely cross the line of vulgarity for me.”
Their project started as a conversation about receiving cellphone pictures of penises. Violet, 25, had gotten an unsolicited dick pic from a guy she used to hook up with in college. He’d sent her an occasional drunk text or photo since they ended things, but their back-and-forth had dropped off when she started dating her boyfriend. In any case, his penis on her iPhone screen was a first. But Violet and her friends—who have been putting together art installations at their makeshift Brooklyn gallery space since this spring—quickly moved beyond girl talk.
Each of the artists retreated into their own (often dark) cave of dick pics, keeping their methods of solicitation and photo tallies a secret from one another. Getting a barrage of strangers’ penises sent to your inbox is not for the faint of heart. There have been photos of dicks covered in cum and dicks sprinkled with marijuana and ready to be rolled up like joints. There have been dicks so big that the girls were sure they were fake and dicks placed next to items like shaving cream cans for scale. There have even been some flaccid dicks, which seems like the laziest thing anyone has ever done. Looking at all of these photos definitely takes a psychological toll. As Justin Garcia, a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, told me, viewing strange cock can be hard on the psyche
“Many people find [these photos] offensive,” he said. “For many women, it is a form of…” he paused. “Well, not quite an assault, but more of a…”
"An affront?" I offered.
“Yes, an affront. I think that part of what happens on technology is that you lose a sense of impact. You don’t know the age, sex, temperament, sensitivity of someone.”
The artists have different levels of sensitivity when it comes to images of male genitals. Nasturtium, who credits herself with the formal idea for the exhibition, has an admitted fascination with dicks—she showed an interest in Craigslist’s missed connections at an early age, and told me she has a propensity for watching gay porn. Tansy, who wrote her thesis on pornography, referred to the show’s opening night as “her baby.”
Queen Anne, on the other hand, called her approach to sex and dating “subtle,” and said she was reluctant to participate at the beginning. She even felt vaguely guilty.
“I’m not usually sexually aggressive as far as saying stuff like, ‘Let me see your cock,'” Queen Anne told me. “I didn’t think that I would be able to do it, even though it’s online.”
A fifth artist who was initially involved with the exhibit dropped out for personal reasons: the project was making her uncomfortable with its nonchalant approach to sex, something she’d struggled with in the past and was working on setting right.
“Taking the time to encourage the ridiculous nature of sending any girl a picture of your fucking penis—what girl finds that to be anything but ridiculous—even if it becomes a public tribute to the silliness, has done nothing for me but focus my energy and interactions specifically in a direction that not too long ago I realized I need to break away from,” she told me in an email.
Dick pics in general represents yet another tired way women get the societal shaft, literally and figuratively, according to Garcia of the Kinsey Institute.
“In a national context in which women are treated less favorably than men—in the workplace, in healthcare legislation, and when it comes to sex and dating, it’s troublesome to me that women are getting flashed in the digital era,” he said. “With these pictures, you’re removing a certain agency from women. I think there’s a larger method of disrespecting women with these photos than we even recognize.”
The artists are pushing past that disrespect, in part by controlling how these penises are viewed and displayed. Each woman is mounting their work alongside a photo of her own genitals, and producing the dick pics in a style of their choosing. Tansy is going for a grainy, 1970s porn look, while Violet has decided on a classic, glossy, high-end art gallery style. Her boyfriend wishes she’d stick to graphic design.
“In my opinion, there's an element of ‘shock value’ to this exhibit that I don't really connect to,” he told me. “I wish the attention this exhibit is getting would translate into people actually becoming interested in who Violet is and her art outside of this, yet sadly I know all too well that most people have no attention span and have no interest in what I consider more traditional, beautiful, ‘real’ art.”
However, the guy Anne recently started dating—as well as a group of her male friends who she told me have been “struggling a bit” with her feminist leanings—have actually rallied behind the project.
“They think it’s so cool,” Anne said. “This person I’m seeing, he loves it. He thinks men are so disgusting with the way they treat women... It’s been really nice to get male support.”
Male support is one thing. Legal support is another. I’d contacted more than ten lawyers in search of some insight into the legality of all this, but attorneys seem particularly squeamish about sexy photos, and even more so about the words “dick” and “pic.” Even when I softened my language, many outright refused to talk to me.
Luckily, Aaron Messing, a privacy attorney at OlenderFeldman in New Jersey, was happy to shed some light on the matter. New York, where the photos will be exhibited, has very limited invasion of privacy statutes, and Messing said the laws wouldn’t do much to protect a guy whose dick pic was used in a way he didn’t intend.
“In order to be able to sue, you will need to be able to prove that the defendant used your image without consent for commercial and business purposes where there is no legitimate public interest,” Messing told me.
Most of the women have gone the straightforward route in collecting dick pics, using versions of their real OKCupid profiles and brief conversations—sometimes just going right for the jugular and straight-up asking for a dick pic, avoiding flirtation and conversation at all costs. One of the artists, however, went a step further by posing as a gay man on Grindr and wound up with 150 photos, which didn’t surprise any of the sex scientists or researchers I spoke to.
Grindr told me that while they don't monitor their users' interactions, they do take privacy seriously.
"We encourage our users to act with honesty and authenticity online and be smart about sharing information and photos with strangers," the hookup site said in a statement. "If a user comes across a profile where someone is impersonating someone else, we urge that they take action by 'flagging' the profile in question or contacting customer support to lodge a complaint."
It’s true that if your dick appears in the show and you were misled about the solicitor’s true identity you have a chance at legal retribution. Because one of the artists posed as someone else, she’s liable to be sued for internet impersonation, a class A demeanor in New York that caries a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison.
But unless any of these users walk into the Bushwick exhibit and recognize themselves, they’ll never know more than one stranger saw their dicks. But if a dick pic gets shown in a public space and the dick’s owner doesn’t know, is it moral? Is it right?
Peter Gloor, a researcher at MIT who has spent the last 22 years studying internet communities and has devoted significant time to looking at OKCupid called the deceitful nature of the project “problematic.”
“I could never do such an experiment,” he said. “It’s against professional ethics.”
I thought I could detect a hint of envy in his voice; though maybe I was wrong.
“I’m not showing any faces, I’ve made a point in my head not to,” said Tansy when I asked her if she had grappled with the ethics of the project. “No one is going to know anything about any of these people. I would imagine if anyone who has sent me a dick shows up… that would be interesting.”
Show Me More: A Collection of DickPix will open on August 23, 2013 at 8 p.m. as part of the event Explicit at Morgan Avenue Underground Studios, 55 Morgan Ave, Brooklyn, NY, There will also be gallery hours on Saturday, August 24, from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
@taliabethralph
For more naughty sex talk:
Recognizing Your Ex-Girlfriend in Porn
Tips for Celebrating International Masturbation Month
Why Don't Dudes Like My Crotchless Panties?One Texas county is about to take an unprecedented step to get guns out of the hands of convicted domestic abusers.
Dallas County will soon start confiscating guns from people convicted on domestic violence charges, the only county in Texas to do so, according to WFAA 8. County officials say they expect to collect about 700 guns per year.
“This is new,” Paige Flink, executive director of The Family Place, a Dallas domestic violence shelter, told the local news station. “This is landmark. Getting guns out of the hands of abusers will save lives.”
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.
Even though state and federal law forbids those convicted of domestic violence from possessing weapons, in Dallas County it was up to the person convicted of domestic violence to give up their weapons. One judge in the county said that did not go far enough.
“Pretty much when I ordered guys that they couldn't have guns anymore, it was pretty much on your honour,” said County Criminal Court Judge Roberto Cañas, one of two judges who handle misdemeanour domestic violence cases. “It's been a gap in the system response to this type of crime.”
Now, domestic abusers will be ordered to relinquish their firearms and will be required to show proof that they have done so. The weapons will be stored at DFW Gun Range and a deputy has been assigned to work at the range.
The offenders also will be allowed to hand their guns over to a third party who is legally allowed to possess a gun. Authorities will check gun permits and other official documents to determine if offenders may own a gun.
Officials in Dallas County have been desperate to address firearms in domestic-violence situations, as data shows that guns can have a devastating impact in those situations.
According to WFAA, women are 500 times more likely to be killed in domestic violence in homes with a gun. Firearms are involved in about 60 per cent of domestic violence murders in Texas.
“There's no doubt that the intersection of firearms and domestic violence is a very lethal one,” Mr Cañas said. “If we can take a step that will even prevent one homicide, this project will be worth it.”
Follow @PaytonGuion on Twitter.
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 nowThe Los Angeles Rams have signed DL Cam Thomas per his agent:
A fifth-round pick in the 2010 NFL Draft, Thomas never quite broke through in his four seasons with the San Diego Chargers picking up just 15 starts. He spent his last two seasons as a reserve lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Thomas clearly slides in nicely at the reserve DT spot as the Rams have some competition building for the spot abdicated by Nick Fairley who was signed a year ago before heading to the New Orleans Saints in free agency this offseason. Behind Aaron Donald and Michael Brockers, you've got a glut of newly-signed Dominique Easley, position tweener Ethan Westbrooks and lowkey option Louis Trinca-Pasat.
Strangely, Thomas (2006-09) is the third among the former UNC defensive lineman teammates now on the Rams' DL along with DE Robert Quinn (2008-09) and 2016 FA addition DE Quinton Coples (2008-11).Ready to get up close and personal with UP10TION?
The K-pop boy group is ready to fulfill your wishes in UP10TION, Please!, a new original variety show produced by Soompi and ZANYTV on Created by Viki. UP10TION, Please! will allow fans to interact with the stars and influence the storyline of the show itself.
“UP10TION, Please! started as a passion project to bridge the gap between the Korean entertainment industry and international fandom,” said Jenny Zha, Strategic Engagement Manager at Viki and Soompi. “As seen from segments like ‘Twitter Decides My Day,’ each episode was crafted from requests and input from fans around the world. If you’re looking for a new K-pop group to connect with, here’s your chance!”
On both Twitter and Facebook, you can impact the fate of UP10TION by voting on various missions and challenges that they need to perform throughout the series. If influencing the daily routine of your K-pop bias isn’t enough, you can also enter to win cool prizes AND savor the moment of undiluted happiness as they try cooking the dish you voted for.
As the first K-variety production for Created by Viki, UP10TION, Please! will introduce fans to this boy group that made waves at KCON New York earlier this year. “The members are funny, witty, and have all-around great personalities,” said Zha. “When we first decided to do an original variety show, we needed to find a group that worked well with each other and are able to entertain both themselves and the audience. UP10TION was that group.”
Episode one premieres on July 12th. Tune in every Wednesday at 7PM PST on Created By Viki.Share. Fun's over, folks. Fun's over, folks.
Future episodes of Rick and Morty will not be livestreamed by Adult Swim.
The network caused a storm of excitement amongst fans of the show when the third season premiered earlier this month, by livestreaming the first two episodes for free, and following up with more of the same for the season’s third episode (although the stream was not without its problems).
This week, however, as Polygon reports, fans were disappointed to find that instead of episode four, Adult Swim instead streamed a fake live-action version of the show, with the episode only airing on traditional television or as a catch-up option for those with a cable subscription.
Although Adult Swim's official Twitter account did provide a warning beforehand, they're being called out by some fans on Reddit for "trolling," even as others defend the network's right to charge for content.
Adult Swim has confirmed with Polygon that Rick and Morty will no longer livestream for free; cable subscriptions will be required for the entirety of the show's third season, although Adult Swim's tweet made a knowing nod to the inevitability of piracy in today's online marketplace, saying "Pirates start your engines."
Rick and Morty continues to air Sundays on Adult Swim.
Exit Theatre Mode
Matt Davidson is a freelance writer for IGN. Give him a follow on Twitter.A first-time mother from Syria is happily cradling her newborn at the Ziv Medical Center in Safed (Tsfat), after giving birth to a healthy 2.6 kg girl at the Israeli medical facility on Tuesday (August 26, 2014). This is the seventh birth of a Syrian baby at the northern medical center.
“We have already treated a number of mothers and babies from Syria and we do so with devotion and love,” said Esther Ambar, the nurse in charge of the Neonatal Department at the Ziv Medical Center.
The latest new Syrian mother to give birth in Israel is a 25-year-old resident of Quneitra. She told the Israeli medical staff that fighting in the Quneitra area made her pregnancy very difficult. “Because of the war there is a shortage of food and there are no health and birthing facilities. I knew that I was already in my 40th week and that the birth was imminent and there was no one who could help me. I heard from relatives and friends that Syrian casualties are transferred to Israel where they receive good care,” she said.
When her water broke, the young woman asked family and friends to take her to the Israel-Syrian border. The IDF transferred her to hospital.
“I was anxious and afraid, but the Israeli nurses and doctors treated me with sensitivity and respect and the delivery went well. I am very happy that I came here, they are treating me nicely and taking care of me and my new baby,” she said.
Ambar, who lives on Kibbutz Ein-Zivan on the Golan Heights which only a few days ago was shelled by rockets from Syria, is helping the mother take care of her new daughter. “We live in a strange reality. On Sunday, we ran to our bomb-shelters when a number of rockets hit the ground close to the kibbutz, yesterday a number of mortar bombs were fired on this area and today we delivered a Syrian baby whose mother arrived from the region from which we were fired upon,” Ambar said. “We hear and see the fighting in Syria daily and we know that the population there is in great difficulty.
“Ordinary people are not interested in wars, the Syrian mothers who reach us relay stories of the difficulties they experience in their country and speak about their hope for peace and a better future for their children. Their gratitude is moving and we wish that this will be a bridge to a dialogue between us and them and a hope for peace and quiet in the region.”My dearest Annabelle, it is said we shall begin maneuvers tomorrow night at 9:30 pm (central). Many of our comrades in the East begin their skirmishes tonight. I feel that things must surely be coming to some kind of ending, though I know not what glory may await those who ride in victory. There are no trophies in war, only that sweet freedom that a cessation of arms shall bring. I cannot predict what outcome awaits the men tomorrow, though some may try. To those souls I say only, good luck.
Taylor: This might be the most exciting matchup of the first round, and I think they |
HUNGARY Tickets
October 21 @ Spazio Aereo, Hear the Change Festival, Margherita (Venice), ITALY Tickets
October 22 @ Batofar, Paris FRANCE Tickets
October 24 @ I-Boat, Bordeaux FRANCE Tickets
October 25 @ Moby Dick, Madrid SPAIN Tickets
October 26 @ AM Festival, Barcelona SPAIN Tickets
October 28 @ Bergmal Festival, Dynamo, Zurich SWITZERLAND Tickets
AUSTRALIAN ‘FAREWELL BEFORE EUROPE’ SHOWS
July 1 @ The Basement, Port Macquarie NSW
Aug 12 @ The Bald Faced Stag, Leichardt NSW
Sep 7 @ BigSound, Brisbane QLD Tickets
Sep 8 @ Sol Bar, Sunshine Coast QLD Tickets
Sep 9 @ Minimum Wage Club – Miami Tavern, Gold Coast QLD Tickets
AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND w/Devin Townsend Project
May 18 @ Powerstation, Auckland NZ
May 20 @ The Triffid, Brisbane QLD
May 22 @ Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW
May 23 @ 170 Russell, Melbourne VIC
May 24 @ 170 Russell, Melbourne VIC
May 26 @ Capitol, Perth WA
AUSTRALIAN HEADLINE TOUR – “Made of Breath Only” album launch shows 2017
w/Caligula’s Horse & special guests
March 24 @ Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW w/Solkyri & Stare At The Clouds
March 25 @ Max Watt’s, Melbourne VIC Tickets / OzTix w/Pagan
March 30 @ ANU Bar, Canberra ACT w/Glass Ocean
March 31 @ Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW w/Glass Ocean
April 6 @ The Gov, Adelaide SA w/The Unset
April 7 @ Badlands, Perth WA w/Closet Space
April 8 @ Max Watt’s, Brisbane QLD w/Aerials
CHINA ‘Made of Breath Only’ tour 2017
Tickets here
March 9 @ Mao Livehouse, Hangzhou
March 10 @ Mao Livehouse, Shanghai
March 11 @ Yugong Yishan, Beijing
March 12 @ Ola Space, Nanjing
March 14 @ Nuts, Chongqing
March 15 @ Little Bar Space, Chengdu
March 16 @ Vox, Wuhan
March 17 @ Fei Livehouse, Guangzhou
March 18 @ B10, Shenzhen
March 19 @ Hidden Agenda, Hong Kong
AUSTRALIAN TOUR 2017 w/Underoath
Tickets here
Feb 10 @ Eatons Hill, Brisbane QLD Tickets
Feb 11 @ Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW Tickets
Feb 12 @ 170 Russell, Melbourne VIC – SOLD OUT
Feb 13 @ 170 Russell, Melbourne VIC Tickets
Feb 15 @ The Gov, Adelaide SA Tickets
Feb 16 @ Metropolis, Fremantle WA Tickets
AUSTRALIA ‘traced in constellations tour 2016’ w/The Contortionist & Tangled Thoughts of Leaving
Aug 4 @ The Rosemount, Perth WA
Aug 5 @ The Gov, Adelaide SA
Aug 6 @ Max Watt’s, Melbourne VIC
Aug 7 @ Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Aug 8 @ UniBar, Wollongong NSW
Aug 10 @ Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW
Aug 11 @ ANU Bar, Canberra ACT
Aug 12 @ Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW
Aug 13 @ The Triffid, Brisbane QLD
AUSTRALIA 2016 w/cog
July 8 @ The Northern, Byron Bay NSW – SOLD OUT
July 9 @ The Triffid, Brisbane QLD – SOLD OUT
July 10 @ The Triffid, Brisbane QLD – SOLD OUT
July 14 @ Max Watt’s, Melbourne VIC – SOLD OUT
July 15 @ 170 Russell, Melbourne VIC – SOLD OUT
July 16 @ Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW – SOLD OUT
July 17 @ Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW – SOLD OUT
Sep 23 @ HQ, Adelaide SA – SOLD OUT
Sep 24 @ Metro City, Perth WA
Sep 30 @ Wests, Newcastle NSW – SOLD OUT
North America w/The Contortionist, Monuments & Entheos
March 21 @ Launchpad, Albuquerque NM
March 23 @ Joe’s Grotto, Phoenix AZ
March 25 @ Chain Reaction, Anaheim CA
March 26 @ SOMA, San Diego CA
March 27 @ The Boardwalk, Orangevale CA
March 29 @ Hawthorne Theatre, Portland OR
March 30 @ Studio Seven, Seattle WA
April 1 @ The Loading Dock, Salt Lake City UT*
April 2 @ Gothic Theatre, Englewood CO
April 3 @ Aftershock, Merriam KS
April 4 @ Vaudeville Mews, Des Moines IA*
April 5 @ The Cabooze, Minneapolis MN
April 6 @ Subterranean, Chicago IL
April 7 @ The Stache at Intersection, Grand Rapid MI
April 8 @ The Agora Ballroom, Cleveland OH*
April 9 @ The Mad Frog, Cincinnati OH*
April 11 @ Altar Bar, Pittsburgh PA
April 12 @ The Hard Luck, Toronto ONT
April 13 @ Les Foufounes Electriques, Montreal QBE
April 14 @ Brighton Music Hall, Allston MA
April 15 @ Gramercy Theatre, New York NY
April 16 @ Voltage Lounge, Philadelphia PA
April 18 @ Baltimore Sound Stage, Baltimore MD
April 19 @ The Canal Club, Richmond VA
April 20 @ Greene Street Club, Greensboro NC
April 21 @ The Masquerade, Atlanta GA
April 22 @ 1904 Music Hall, Jacksonville FL
April 23 @ The Orpheum, Tampa FL
April 24 @ Backbooth, Orlando FL
April 26 @ Scout Bar, Houston TX
April 27 @ Korova, San Antonio TX
April 29 @ Fubar, St. Louis MO
April 30 @ Emerson Theater, Indianapolis IN
May 1 @ Saint Andrew’s Hall, Detroit MI
*w/Monuments & Entheos only
February 19 @ Party in the Paddock Festival 2016, Tasmania AUSTRALIA
February 14 @ Frankie’s, Sydney NSW
December 5 @ Bird’s Robe Records 5th birthday, Manning Bar, Sydney AUSTRALIA
December 11 @ Festival of the Sun, Port Macquarie AUSTRALIA
‘GREAT NORTHERN TOUR 2015’
UK & Europe tour 2015
w/Skyharbor & Tides From Nebula
March 6 @ Conne Island, Leipzig GERMANY – Tickets
March 7 @ Progresja, Warsaw POLAND – Tickets here
March 8 @ Liverpool, Wroclaw POLAND – Tickets here
March 9 @ Magnet, Berlin GERMANY – Tickets here
March 10 @ Hafenklang, Hamburg GERMANY – Tickets here
March 11 @ SubScene, Oslo NORWAY – Tickets here
March 12 @ Fangelset, Gothenburg SWEDEN – Tickets here
March 13 @ Loppen, Copenhagen DENMARK – Tickets here
March 14 @ 11er, Frankfurt GERMANY – Tickets here
March 15 @ Kavka, Antwerp BELGIUM – Tickets here
March 16 @ Underworld, London UK – Tickets here
March 17 @ Roadhouse, Manchester UK – Tickets here
March 18 @ Cathouse, Glasgow UK – Tickets here
March 19 @ The Exchange, Bristol UK – Tickets here
March 20 @ Joiners, Southampton UK – Tickets here
March 21 @ Espace B, Paris FRANCE – Tickets here
March 22 @ Stereolux, Nantes FRANCE – Tickets here
March 24 @ Taboo, Madrid SPAIN – Tickets here
March 25 @ Rocksound, Barcelona SPAIN – Tickets here
March 26 @ Marche Gare, Lyon FRANCE – Tickets here
March 27 @ Kiff, Aarau SWITZERLAND – Tickets here
March 28 @ Lo Fi Club, Milan ITALY
March 29 @ Feierwerk, Munich GERMANY – Tickets here
March 30 @ A38, Budapest HUNGARY – Tickets here
March 31 @ Arena, Vienna AUSTRIA Tickets here
April 1 @ 007, Prague CZECH REPUBLIC
April 2 @ Keller Klub, Stuttgart GERMANY – Tickets here
April 3 @ Willemeen, Arnhem NETHERLANDS Tickets here
April 4 @ Matrix, Bochum GERMANY – Tickets here
Europe & Asia tour 2015
April 5 @ Mavri Trypa, Thessaloniki GREECE Tickets
April 6 @ AN Club, Athens GREECE Tickets
April 8 @ Mixtape 5, Sofia BULGARIA
April 9 @ Question Mark, Bucharest ROMANIA
April 18 @ BASM Festival, Bistrita ROMANIA
April 15 @ Little Bar, Chengdu CHINA
April 16 @ Nuts, Chongqing CHINA
April 17 @ Yugong Yishan, Beijing CHINA
April 18 @ Mao, Shanghai CHINA
April 19 @ Strawberry Festival, Wuhan CHINA
April 21 @ T-Union, Guangzhou CHINA
April 22 @ B10, Shenzen CHINA
April 23 @ Hidden Agenda, Hong Kong HONG KONG
April 25 @ Tab, Singapore SINGAPORE Tickets
‘Great Northern’ Australia & New Zealand tour 2015
Thu April 30 @ The Pier, Port Macquarie NSW – FREE entry
Fri May 1 @ The Northern, Byron Bay NSW – FREE entry
Sat May 2 @ The Zoo, Brisbane QLD – Tickets Tickets
Sat May 3 @ Enmore Theatre, Sydney NSW (w/Opeth)
Sat May 9 @ ANU Bar, Canberra ACT – Tickets / Tickets
Sat May 16 @ Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW – Tickets Tickets
Sat May 23 @ UniBar, Wollongong NSW – Tickets Tickets
Fri May 29 @ UniBar, Adelaide SA – all ages – Tickets / Tickets
Sat May 30 @ Rosemount Hotel, Perth WA – Tickets Tickets
Sat June 6 @ King’s Arms, Auckland NZ – Tickets
Sun June 7 @ San Fran, Wellington NZ – Tickets
Fri June 12 @ The Hi Fi, Melbourne VIC – Tickets Tickets
Sat June 13 @ Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW – all ages – Tickets / Tickets
Australian tour December 2014 w/Dead Letter Circus
with special guests Voyager
Dec 11 @ The Gov, Adelaide SA
Dec 12 @ Capitol, Perth WA
Dec 13 @ Prince of Wales, Bunbury WA
Dec 18 @ The Hi Fi, Brisbane QLD
Dec 19 @ Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW
Dec 20 @ The Hi Fi, Melbourne VIC
Dec 21 @ Waves, Wollongong NSW
Nov 9 @ Newtown Festival, Sydney NSW – FREE entry all day.
Love of Cartography Australian tour July/August 2014
with special guests Breaking Orbit + Teal
July 5 @ Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW
July 6 @ Rad Bar, Wollongong NSW
July 13 @ Rad Bar, Wollongong NSW
July 18 @ The Northern, Byron Bay NSW
July 19 @ The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Aug 1 @ Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Aug 2 @ ANU Bar, Canberra ACT
Aug 8 @ Amplifier, Perth WA (no Teal / with Foxes)
Aug 9 @ Jive, Adelaide SA (no Teal / with Luke Carlino)
Aug 16 @ Manning Bar, Sydney NSW
(hello) Europe tour April/May 2014
April 17 @ Muziekodroom, Hasselt, Belgium
April 18 @ Ebullition, Bulle, Switzerland
April 19 @ Dunk Festival, Zottegem, Belgium
April 20 @ Graviere, Geneva, Switzerland
April 21 @ Secret Place, Montpelier, France
April 22 @ Razzmatazz, Barcelona, Spain
April 23 @ Moby Dick, Madrid, Spain
April 24 @ La Coopérative de Mai, Clermont-Ferrand, France
April 26 @ 4Ecluses, Dunkerque, France
April 27 @ Jubez, Karlsruhe, Germany
April 30 @ Fangelset, Gothenburg, Sweden
May 1 @ Slojdgatan, Orebro, Sweden
May 4 @ Desdemona, Gdynia, Poland
May 5 @ Klub Hydrozagadka, Warsaw, Poland
May 6 @ Dürer Kert, Budapest, Hungary
May 7 @ NoD Theater, Prague, Czech Republic
May 8 @ Juha West, Stuttgart, Germany
May 9 @ Café Glocksee, Hannover, Germany
May 10 @ Beyond the Redshift Festival, London, UK
‘Polymorphism’ Australian tour w/Karnivool & Dead Letter Circus – January 2014
Jan 8 @ Palace Theatre, Melbourne VIC – sold out
Jan 9 @ Palace Theatre, Melbourne VIC
Jan 11 @ The Marquee, RNA Showgrounds, Brisbane QLD
Jan 12 @ Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast QLD
Jan 15 @ CEX, Coffs Harbour NSW
Jan 16 @ Panthers, Newcastle NSW
Jan 17 @ Roundhouse, Sydney NSW – sold out
Jan 18 @ Roundhouse, Sydney NSW
Jan 19 @ Waves, Wollongong NSW
Jan 23 @ Red Hill Auditorium, Perth WA
UK & Europe tour w/65daysofstatic – October/November 2013
Sun Sep 22 @ Liquid Room, EDINBURGH UK
Mon Sep 23 @ Sound Control, MANCHESTER UK
Tues Sep 24 @ Rescue Rooms, NOTTINGHAM UK
Wed Sep 25 @ Scala, LONDON UK – sold out
Thu Sep 26 @ Tekla, BRISTOL UK
Fri Sep 27 @ Handelsbeurs, GHENT BELGIUM
Sun Sep 29 @ Forum, BIELEFIELD GERMANY
Mon Sep 30 @ Luxor, COLOGNE GERMANY
Tues Oct 1 @ Batschkapp, FRANKFURT GERMANY
Wed Oct 2 @ Melkweg, AMSTERDAM THE NETHERLANDS
Thu Oct 3 @ Vera, GRONINGEN THE NETHERLANDS
Fri Oct 4 @ Lido, BERLIN GERMANY
Sat Oct 5 @ Firlej, WROCLAW POLAND
Sun Oct 6 @ Basen, WARSAW POLAND
Mon Oct 7 @ Club Fleda, BRNO CZECH REPUBLIC
Tues Oct 8 @ Roxy, PRAGUE CZECH REPUBLIC
Thu Oct 10 @ Burer Kert, BUDAPEST HUNGARY
Fri Oct 11 @ Mochvara, ZAGREB CROATIA
Sat Oct 12 @ Flex, VIENNA AUSTRIA
Sun Oct 13 @ Hansa 39, MUNICH GERMANY
Mon Oct 14 @ Schocken, STUTTGART GERMANY
Tues Oct 15 @ Bad Bonn, DUDINGEN SWITZERLAND
Wed Oct 16 @ Nouveau Casino, PARIS FRANCE
Thu Oct 17 @ Les Trinitaires, METZ FRANCE
Fri Oct 18 @ La Laiterie, STRASBOURG FRANCE
Sat Oct 19 @ Entrepot, ARLON BELGIUM
Sun Oct 20 @ La Poudriere, BELFORT FRANCE
Mon Oct 21 @ Komplex Klub, ZURICH SWITZERLAND
Tues Oct 22 @ Tunnel Club, MILAN ITALY
Wed Oct 23 @ Circolo degli Artisti, ROME ITALY
Thu Oct 24 @ Lokomotiv Club, BOLOGNA ITALY
Sat Oct 26 @ Caracol, MADRID SPAIN
Sun Oct 27 @ Sonora, ERANDIO SPAIN
Mon Oct 28 @ Apolo 2, BARCELONA SPAIN
Tues Oct 29 @ Le Rockstore, MONTPELIER FRANCE
Thu Oct 31 @ L’Abordage, EVREUX FRANCE
Fri Nov 1 @ Het Depot, LEUVEN BELGIUM
Sun Nov 3 @ Birthdays, LONDON UK – SMW headline show
‘…and so we played everything’ Australian tour – June/July 2013
Fri June 21 @ ANU Bar, Canberra ACT (set A)
w/Time & Weight + A Drone Coda + The Ians
Sat June 22 @ Yours & Owls, Wollongong NSW (set B)
w/The Koranic + Mowgli + Go Away Everyone
Fri June 28 @ Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW (set A)
w/Self Is A Seed + Cull
Sat June 29 @ Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW (set B)
w/Self Is A Seed + I Am The Agent
Sat July 6 @ Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne VIC (set A)
w/Sleep Parade + Bear the Mammoth
Sun July 7 @ Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne VIC (set B)
w/A Lonely Crowd + Toehider (acoustic)
Thu July 11 @ Port Macquarie Hotel, Port Macquarie NSW – free (set A)
Fri July 12 @ Tempo Hotel, Brisbane QLD (set B)
w/Greenthief + theseashallnothavethem
Sat July 13 @ The Northern, Byron Bay NSW – free (set A)
w/Greenthief + theseashallnothavethem
Thu July 18 @ Mojo’s, Fremantle WA (set B)
w/NAIK + Antelope
Fri July 19 @ Amplifier, Perth WA (set A)
w/Foxes + Antelope
Sat July 20 @ Crown and Anchor, Adelaide SA (set B) – SOLD OUT
w/Sincerely Grizzly + Canidae
Sun July 21 @ Crown and Anchor, Adelaide SA (set A) – SOLD OUT
w/Sincerely Grizzly + Auxilla
Fri July 26 @ Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW (set B)
w/Meniscus + Oslow
Sat Aug 24 @ Progfest, The Espy, Melbourne VIC w/Voyager + Toehider + more
Rock The Bay Festival, Melbourne VIC – February 2013
Australian tour w/65daysofstatic – January 2013
Jan 2 @ The Hi Fi, Sydney NSW
Jan 3 @ The Hi Fi, Brisbane QLD
Jan 4 @ Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Jan 5 @ The Bakery, Perth WA
Sat Dec 2 @ The Hi Fi, Sydney NSW w/Bosnian Rainbows
‘Now We Rise And We Are Everywhere’ Australian tour – August/September/October 2012
Aug 31 @ The Patch Hotel, Wollongong NSW
Sep 2 @ Black Wire Records, Sydney NSW – all ages
Sep 7 @ The Standard, Sydney NSW
Sep 8 @ Cambridge Hotel, Newcastle NSW
Sep 13 @ Macquarie Hotel, Port Macquarie NSW
Sep 14 @ Crow Bar, Brisbane QLD
Sep 15 @ Miami Tavern Shark Bar, Gold Coast QLD
Sep 21 @ Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC – sold out
Sep 22 @ Brisbane Hotel, Hobart TAS
Sep 28 @ The Bakery, Perth WA
Sep 29 @ Fowler’s Live, Adelaide SA – all ages w/Russian Circles (USA) + Eagle Twin (USA) + Hydromedusa
Sep 30 @ Crown and Anchor, Adelaide SA
Oct 11 @ The Hi Fi, Sydney NSW w/Tortoise (USA) + The Laurels
Oct 13 @ Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC w/Tortoise (USA) + Grails (USA) + New War
‘Melodias Frescas’ Australian tour w/Karnivool & Redcoats – July 2012
July 3 @ HQ, Adelaide SA
July 5 @ The Hi Fi, Melbourne VIC – sold out
July 6 @ The Hi Fi, Melbourne VIC – sold out
July 7 @ The Hi Fi, Melbourne VIC – sold out
July 8 @ Bended Elbow, Geelong VIC – sold out
July 11 @ The Entrance Leagues Club, Bateau Bay NSW
July 12 @ The Hi Fi, Sydney NSW – sold out
July 13 @ The Hi Fi, Sydney NSW
July 14 @ Panthers, Newcastle NSW
July 19 @ The Northern, Byron Bay NSW
July 20 @ The Tivoli, Brisbane QLD
July 21 @ Coolangatta Hotel, Gold Coast QLD
July 22 @ The Hi Fi, Brisbane QLD
July 27 @ Rosemount Hotel, Perth WA – sold out
July 28 @ Rosemount Hotel, Perth WA – sold out
July 29 @ Rosemount Hotel, Perth WA – sold out
+ extra SMW only side show: July 26 @ Fat Shan’s Records, Perth WA w/Rosetta (USA) + Nuclear Summer
‘…and so we destroyed everything’ Europe tour – April 2012
April 8 @ dunk!festival, Zottegem BELGIUM w/65daysofstatic
April 9 @ Steinbruch, Duisberg GERMANY w/Beware of Safety
April 10 @ I-Boat, Bordeaux FRANCE w/For A Minor Reflection
April 12 @ Les 4 Ecluses, Dunkerque FRANCE w/For A Minor Reflection
April 13 @ Hall de Schars, Strasbourg FRANCE w/100% Chevalier
April 14 @ JH Kloster, Weil de Stadt GERMANY w/Watered
April 15 @ Café Wagner, Jena GERMANY w/Flies Are Spies From Hell
April 16 @ DOM, Lodz POLAND w/The Samuel Jackson 5
April 17 @ Hydrozagadka, Warsaw POLAND w/The Samuel Jackson 5
April 19 @ Batelier, Bratislava SLOVAKIA
April 20 @ Pending Lips Festival, Milan ITALY
April 21 @ Channel Zero, Ljublana SLOVENIA
April 22 @ Silenus Pub, Budapest HUNGARY
April 24 @ Baracke, Munster GERMANY
‘(hello) USA’ tour – March 2012
March 9 @ Home Room, Los Angeles CA – all ages – sold out
March 10 @ The Acheron, Brooklyn NY w/Hadoken, Zvoov, So is the Tongue, Calls
March 11 @ St Vitus, Brooklyn NY w/Hannibal Montana, No Grave Like The Sea, Vasudeva
March 12 @ Milkboy, Philadelphia PA w/North End, Vasudeva, Armine (Rosetta)
March 13 @ Warehouse Live, Houston TX – 7pm
March 13 @ Headhunters Patio, Austin TX – 11pm
March 17 @ Maggie Mae’s, Austin TX – Aussie BBQ
‘(hello) Australia’ tour – February/March 2012
9 Feb @ Transit Bar, Canberra ACT
10 Feb @ The Espy Front Bar, Melbourne VIC
11 Feb @ Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne VIC
17 Feb @ Gaelic Theatre, Sydney NSW
18 Feb @ Great Northern Hotel, Newcastle NSW
23 Feb @ Crown and Anchor, Adelaide SA
24 Feb @ The Bakery, Perth WA w/Tangled Thoughts of Leaving
25 Feb @ Prince of Wales, Bunbury WA
1 March @ Macquarie Hotel, Port Macquarie NSW
2 March @ Miami Shark Bar, Gold Coast QLD
3 March @ Tyms Guitars, Brisbane QLD – all ages, 3pm
3 March @ Jubilee Hotel, Brisbane QLD
22 March @ Metro Theatre, Sydney NSW w/Boris (JPN) + Laura
23 March @ Yours and Owls, Wollongong NSW
24 March @ Corner Hotel, Melbourne VIC w/Boris (JPN) + Laura + These Hands Could Separate The Sky – sold out
28 March @ Beach Road Hotel, Bondi NSW
‘…and so we destroyed everything’ Australian tour – July-October 2011
July 21 @ Tone, Sydney NSW
July 22 @ East Brunswick Club, Melbourne VIC
Sep 1 @ The Zoo, Brisbane QLD
Sep 2 @ The Bald Faced Stag, Sydney NSW
Sep 11 @ Hermann’s Bar, Sydney NSW w/Russian Circles (USA) – matinee show
Sep 23 @ The Patch, Wollongong NSW
Sep 30 @ ANU Bar, Canberra ACT
Oct 1 @ Factory Theatre, Sydney NSW w/Unitopia + Anubis + Toehider
Oct 8 @ Manning Bar, Sydney NSW w/Mono (JPN) + No Anchor
Dec 22 @ Annandale Hotel, Sydney NSW
Dec 23 @ Curtin Hotel, Melbourne VIC
Dec 31 @ Peats Ridge Festival, Peats Ridge NSWMichigan coach Jim Harbaugh talks with baseball legend Hank Aaron before a game against Illinois on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2016 at Michigan Stadium. (Photo: Kirthmon F. Dozier, DFP)
Michigan keeps winning.
A day after its seventh victory of the season, Michigan succeeded on the recruiting trail when Beaver Falls (Pa.) defensive lineman Donovan Jeter announced his commitment to the Wolverines via Twitter.
"After my official visit to Michigan, it was a tough decision but I feel like it's best for ME and my family that I continue my education and football career at the University of Michigan."
Jeter, a 6-foot-5, 250-pound strongside defensive end, was a Notre Dame commitment until Tuesday. The four-star prospect insisted at the time that Notre Dame was still in his plans but quickly planned a visit to U-M for the next weekend.
Explaining his decision to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he raved about U-M coach Jim Harbaugh, calling him "the coolest dude I ever met in my life" and citing how impressed he was that Harbaugh came to pick up recruits in a van at midnight after U-M's game.
“He doesn’t act like he’s important," Jeter told the paper. "He’s real down-to-earth and humble. He’s easy to talk to. Talking to (Notre Dame coach) Brian Kelly wasn’t fun. It wasn’t cool. You have to make an appointment just to go to his office. Coach Harbaugh has an open-door policy. Every one of Michigan’s coaches has an open-door policy.”
He said Michigan's 7-0 record and Notre Dame's struggles at 2-5 also played a role.
Jeter becomes the sixth-highest-ranked prospect in Michigan's 17-player class and the second strongside defensive end, joining James Hudson out of Toledo.
Following the visit for U-M's 41-8 win over Illinois, Jeter gave a ringing endorsement of Harbaugh, writing: "If I was a soldier I wouldn't want anyone else leading me in to war but coach harbaugh"
If I was a soldier I wouldn't want anyone else leading me in to war but coach harbaugh ✊🏾〽️ https://t.co/8ZMx5UT0Rt — Donovan Jeter (@__5god__) October 23, 2016
Contact Mark Snyder: msnyder@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @mark__snyder.
Download our Wolverines Xtra app for free on Apple and Android devices!The procedure by which a woman’s clitoris is surgically removed is usually performed without anesthesia and in unsanitary conditions. Unnecessary, retrograde and associated with a host of physical ailments, the surgery also can saddle a woman with a lifetime of psychological issues.
The very purpose of the surgery — to deprive a woman of sexual pleasure — is religiosity at its worst. Only a monster would support such a thing.
A monster — or the Liberal government, according to the blinkered thinking of Conservative MP Michelle Rempel. She seems to believe that the 23rd prime minister of Canada, along with its 20th immigration minister, are in favour of the practice.
Why? Because the Liberal government (she suggests) plans to remove from the pending new citizenship guide a reference to female genital mutilation, which is listed among other “barbaric cultural practices,” including honour killings and forced marriage.
“Those guilty of these crimes are severely punished under Canada’s criminal laws,” the current guide helpfully points out.
In fact, ‘plans to remove’ is too strong a statement, as the Liberals have yet to release the new citizenship guide, which newcomers use to study for the citizenship test. Nor have the Liberals said that the reference would be excised from the guide, despite the leak of a draft copy this summer that didn’t include it. Whenever he is asked about it, Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen typically spouts the words “consultation” and “stakeholders” ad absurdum.
Rempel, who serves as the party’s shadow minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, sees something altogether nefarious in all this bureaucratese. And should the Liberals indeed remove the mention of female genital mutilation, it will be a “tacit message to people that perhaps the Canadian government is OK with it,” Rempel recently said during a radio interview.
Rempel’s line of questioning strongly suggested Hussen was a cypher, using his position to foist the practice of ritual mutilation on an unsuspecting Canadian public. Rempel’s line of questioning strongly suggested Hussen was a cypher, using his position to foist the practice of ritual mutilation on an unsuspecting Canadian public.
So, there you have it. Canada’s current government is in favour of the forced, ritual removal of a part of a woman’s anatomy, according to the Official Opposition. To be clear, Rempel says she doesn’t know why the Liberal government would be gung ho on such a thing. But that hasn’t stopped her from speculating — on the record.
During a recent parliamentary committee hearing, Rempel lobbed loaded questions at Hussen, the apparent goal of which was to suggest the Prime Minister’s Office had asked for the reference to be removed. After Hussen said the PMO hadn’t instructed him to do anything, Rempel aimed for the jugular — or rather, below the belt. “What is your personal view?” Rempel asked Hussen, before the committee chair mercifully cut her off.
Hussen hails from Somalia, where the rate of female genital mutilation is the highest in the world, according to UNICEF. He is a refugee who fled war and strife to become a Canadian citizen and eventually a federal cabinet minister. Rempel’s line of questioning strongly suggested he was a cypher, using his position to foist the practice of ritual mutilation on an unsuspecting Canadian public.
The reference to female genital mutilation in the citizenship guide is similarly loaded. Telling potential citizens that cutting off another person’s body parts is illegal and will be punished is … redundant. Worse still, the inference is clear, and is aimed squarely at a certain subset of would-be Canadian citizens: Muslims.
Not coincidentally, female genital mutilation is carried out in roughly 30 countries, nearly all of them in Africa and nearly all predominantly Muslim. The inclusion of the phrase in the 2011 citizenship guide, much like the Conservative’s “barbaric cultural practices hotline” gambit during the 2015 election, is the stuff of cynical wedge politics meant to leverage revulsion against an identifiable religious group.
It conveniently ignores the fact that immigrants and refugees often flee their countries of origin specifically because of such practices. And it vastly overstates the scope of the problem in Canada.
As in Europe, instances of genital mutilation in this country remain isolated tragedies, and often come to light as a result of arrests. Moreover, the rate of female genital mutilation among those 30 countries has decreased by 30 per cent since 1985, according to UNICEF.
Meanwhile, other types of crimes in Canada are far more common. There were 1,409 police reported hate crimes in 2016 — an increase of 20 per cent since 2013. The homicide rate has also increased by 20 per cent in that time period. There were over 220,000 assaults across the country in 2016, and roughly 159,000 instances of breaking and entering.
One wonders why Rempel isn’t pushing the federal government to remind potential citizens that murder, assault, thievery and race-based aggression are illegal in this country and will be punished. Because it’s obvious, perhaps?
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.MADRID (Reuters) - Investors will look to the Federal Reserve for reassurance in the coming week, with little economic data to assuage their concerns over the strength of the global recovery, amid signs Iraq may be sliding into civil war.
A general view of the U.S. Federal Reserve building in Washington, July 31, 2013. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The Fed, which wraps up a policy meeting on Wednesday, is expected to keep steadily reducing its massive bond-buying stimulus by $10 billion per month.
Financial markets will be listening out for any hints on when the U.S. central bank might begin raising interest rates.
“The Federal Reserve is preparing to move to the second step of the monetary policy exit. With the tapering of asset purchases virtually on auto pilot – QE3 is projected to end in late summer or early autumn – the focus is gradually shifting towards actual rate hikes,” Unicredit said in an investor note.
It said the notion that U.S. monetary policy has reached a turning point could be strengthened if the Fed policymakers’ median rate forecast for the end of 2016 stays at 2.25 percent, where it stood in March, up from 1.75 percent in December.
The matrix of dots for when each rate-setter expects policy to begin tightening - and how quickly - will be keenly scrutinised, as will any comments about rate hikes or slack in the economy from Fed Chair Janet Yellen, who speaks after the results of the meeting are released.
While the world’s largest economy got off to a weaker than expected start this year, many analysts believe the underlying trend for growth remains solid.
Global stocks are likely to stay on the back foot due to concerns over a growing radical Islamist insurgency in Iraq. U.S. President Barack Obama said he didn’t rule out air strikes to help Iraq counter the insurgency, but later said he needed several days to determine how the United States would react.
The escalating violence in Iraq drove oil prices to a nine-month high on Friday.
BOE MINUTES
The monetary policy outlook will also be in focus in Britain after Bank of England Governor Mark Carney stunned the markets by saying rates could rise sooner than financial markets expect.
His comments, which put the British central bank out ahead of the world’s other major policy guardians on the monetary tightening front, pushed sterling to near five-year highs against the dollar on Friday.
The Bank publishes the minutes of its June policy meeting on Wednesday, which will be closely watched for signs of any further division among its members on rates, and several of its policymakers will be speaking during the week.
The Bank’s new Financial Policy Committee, which has the power to rein in an overheating housing market, meets on Tuesday, although the meeting minutes will not be published for a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, the ECB’s fight against deflation via interest rate cuts and measures aimed at stimulating lending to crisis-hit companies, means few expect further action from it for now.
“The ECB has bought itself some quiet time, maybe for the remainder of this year. It doesn’t want to be pushed in to any additional movements before then,” economist at Deutsche Bank Gilles Moec said.
There will be few key economic indicators from the euro zone, with the German Zew index for June in focus after better-than-expected industrial output data and rising confidence in the bloc suggesting growth is accelerating in the second quarter.
Bond markets will look to absorb debt supply from Spain, Germany and France after a heavy issuance last week including 9 billion euros of a new 10-year bond from Spain and paper from France, Italy, Germany and Portugal.
Yield-hungry investors will be watching for news of a possible debt sale by Cyprus just a year after it bailed in bank depositors and imposed capital controls. That would make it the last euro zone member that took financial aid to make a market comeback.
The Bank of Japan publishes the minutes of its monthly policy meeting on Friday but is not expected to have moved from an optimistic viewpoint that the country is in the midst of a virtuous cycle of employment and output growth, analysts say.
“There is some support to this theory. The unemployment rate remains very low and job offers to applicants ratios are moving steadily higher. Add to this the slight improvement in cash wages, and the firmer backdrop to the Japanese economy than that prevailing back in 1997,” said ING in an investors note.
China will issue foreign direct investment data on Tuesday and house price figures on Wednesday. A slowdown in property inflation is likely to stoke fears about a deepening downturn in the sector. [ID:nL4N0OT14V]
(This story corrects Obama’s name in paragraph eight)Despite landing All-Star outfielder Matt Kemp at the Winter Meetings, it seems the Padres are still looking to add another star outfielder.
According to MLB.com's Mark Bowman, the Padres are seeking to trade for Atlanta left fielder Justin Upton. In 2014, San Diego left fielders batted.229 last season, fifth worst in the league for that position, so Upton would obviously represent a significant upgrade.
Upton batted.270/.342/.491 with 29 home runs and 102 RBI in 2014. Upton, who is a free-agent after 2015, been pursued this offseason by the Royals, Giants,Orioles and Rangers.
The Braves are almost certain to deal Upton, according to Joel Sherman of the New York Post, since Atlanta recently signed 31-year-old free agent outfielder Nick Markakis (10th in AL |
And you know what else Guillermo Del Toro loved? This plant monster:
Here it is, playing the villain in Hellboy 2:
But let’s get down to the really impressive stuff now. Check out this amazing shot of Lord Ram attacking Kumbhkaran with a sword. It’s straight out of anime isn’t it? Reminds you of Dragon Ball Z doesn’t it?
But you know what it reminds us of? Aside from Wonder Woman chopping off Doomsday’s limb in Batman v Superman, this shot is almost exactly the same as this one from Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch:
Especially when you see what comes right after:
Shot for shot:
In defence of Sucker Punch: It’s Inception by BvS director Zack Snyder
So we’re sure you won’t look at any of these movies the same way again. Especially since we’ve now discovered that this obscure 1992 Japanese Ramayana - whose English voice cast was led by Bryan Cranston (!) by the way - is the most influential movie of all time.
Follow @htshowbiz for more
The author tweets @NaaharRohan
First Published: Apr 05, 2016 08:11 ISTIt seems there’s no limit to what type of work the U.S. will outsource to India.
Of an estimated 400 U.S. citizens trapped in the war-torn country of Yemen, 140 were rescued by an Indian naval ship, while Saudi-led airstrikes pounded the southern port city of Aden.
The Department of State says it has been warning Americans about the security situation in Yemen since the mid-1990s, seeking to justify why the world’s most powerful Navy wouldn’t undertake any efforts to save citizens from the hostile situation.
Rather, the now-closed U.S. embassy in Sanaa is referring citizens to India’s rescue operations. A statement from April 11 encouraged Americans to board the Indian ship bound for Djibouti but then said, “Unfortunately we have no information on who to contact to board this ship.”
India’s INS Tarkash evacuated more than 500 people and arrived in Djibouti today. The U.S. ambassador to the East African country tweeted about the reception, saying “Officials from US_Emb_Djibouti welcome U.S. citizens from Yemen after a long trip. We’re here to help”
India’s operations have rescued 964 foreign nationals from 30 countries, according to The Hindu, an English-language daily. The article asks the all-important question: “why are Indian forces exposed to high risks to rescue nationals of so many countries”?
A lawsuit has been filed against the State and Defense Departments on behalf of 41 trapped Americans for failing to launch a rescue operation. Activists created the website, stuckinyemen.com to help U.S. citizens escape Yemen in the absence of an official, government-led operation.
Even the Russian navy has scooped up a few U.S. citizens since Saudi-led air campaign to oust Iran-backed, Shiite rebels began in late March.
Follow Erica on Twitter
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.
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.Susan Rice has denied a request to testify in front a Senate judiciary subcommittee next week on Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election.
According to CNN, Barack Obama’s national security adviser turned down a request from Sen. Lindsey Graham to participate in the hearing.
“Senator Whitehouse has informed us by letter that he did not agree to Chairman Graham’s invitation to Ambassador Rice, a significant departure from the bipartisan invitations extended to other witnesses,” Rice’s lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler wrote in a letter to Graham. “Under these circumstances, Ambassador Rice respectfully declines Senator Graham’s invitation to testify.” (RELATED: Does The White House Want Susan Rice To Testify? Sean Spicer Answers)
Rice was the administration official who made the dozens of requests seeking to unmask the identities of Trump associates, which she said were for national security reasons and not politically motivated. (RELATED: Susan Rice Has Given Two Different Answers In The Last 15 Days On Unmasking Trump Officials)At Artsy we've been building Node.js applications that share code and rendering between the server and browser. We've seen many benefits from this -- pages load faster, we can optimize SEO, developers are more productive, and JavaScript coding is just an overall better experience.
Today we're happy to announce Ezel, our open source boilerplate we use to bootstrap our Node projects and the various node modules that built up to it.
In his article, Isomorphic JavaScript: The Future of Web Apps, Spike Brehm from AirBnB describes this growing trend well and we're excited to be a part of it. In this article I'll tell Artsy's story of moving from a single monolithic application to modular Backbone apps that run in Node and the browser and consume our external API.
Growing Pains
Artsy started as a mostly standard Rails app almost three years ago. In these beginnings we were wildly productive and owe a lot of props to this great framework. However as time went on we started to deviate from the conventional Rails path until we were hardly leveraging much Rails at all. To support an early iOS app we used Grape to build an API. While building our API we wrote a lot of client-side JavaScript and soon integrated Backbone for organization. Eventually we cleanly separated our project into a single page Backbone app talking to our API all on inside of this original repository.
We knew we were outgrowing this monolithic project because we had some clear problems...
Slow initial page loads because of lacking server-side rendering. Twitter describes this problem well.
Slow following client-side renders because of downloading large asset packages without clear ways to break them up.
SEO issues like building escaped fragment pages in Ruby on the server while our users saw what JavaScript rendered on the client.
Maintaining duplicated Ruby/JavaScript code such as templates, date libraries, etc.
Very slow and brittle tests. We had a massive integration test suite consisting of over 3000 Capybara tests that took hours to run because we lacked good JavaScript testing tools.
Poor mobile experience from trying to responsively scale down a large single page app with bloated and unused assets.
Slow asset compilation, server boot, and general build times. Productivity suffered greatly as more code was added to the same monolithic project.
There's Got to Be a Better Way
A monolithic app that treats it's client-side code as a second class citizen was clearly not going to scale. Our poor mobile web experience was a good candidate to try something new. So we started building a separate mobile optimized website (m.artsy.net).
Some goals became clear:
Better client-side tools from JavaScript testing to package managers.
Share rendering code server/client to reduce duplication and optimize initial page load.
Flexibility. We needed a way to divide our app into smaller chunks with smaller asset packages.
Choosing Technology
Node was a clear choice because it made sharing rendering code server/client possible where other languages and frameworks struggle to do so. There were some existing Node projects that accomplish this such as Derby and Rendr. However, adopting these had challenges of their own including being difficult to integrate with our API, learning unnecessary conventions, or being early prototypes with lacking documentation.
We wanted an approach that breaks our app into smaller, more flexible, pieces. Not all of Artsy needs to be a thick-client app, or even use much client-side JavaScript at all. Adopting an existing solution and combining most of the server and client into a shared abstraction seemed like an unnecessary black box. After trying many other frameworks we found a combination of lower-level tools to be a clear winner.
We open sourced this combination of tools and patterns into Ezel. Ezel is a light-weight boilerplate project using Express and Backbone for structure, and Browserify to compose modules that can be shared server/client.
Sharing and Rendering Server/Client
To share rendering code server/client we had to make sure our templates and objects being passed in to them could work the same server/client.
Sharing Objects (Backbone Models)
Browserify lets you write modules that can run in Node or the browser. Since Backbone is able to be required on the server out of the box, it's easy to write models and collections that can be required on both sides with Browserify. However, there are two main speed bumps in doing this:
Backbone uses AJAX for persistence. We needed a Backbone.sync adapter that makes HTTP requests server-side, so we wrote one and it's open sourced. Data from the server needed to be shared in modules that are used server/client. For instance, our API is an external URL stored in an environment variable. We needed to use this variable in a module that will be required on the server and the client with Browserify. Bootstrapping data is a common technique to share data from the server by embedding JavaScript in the initial HTML and exposing that data globally to the client. To avoid exposing globals we open sourced a tiny module called sharify.
Sharing Templates
Browserify even lets you share non-JavaScript components server/client using transforms. To reuse our jade templates server/client it was a simple matter of using the jadeify transform.
All Together Now
With templates and models require-able server/client, sharing rendering code became much simpler. Below is an example using the same artwork model and detail template server/client.
Shared Backbone "Artwork" model to be required server/client:
models/artwork.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 var Backbone = require ( 'backbone' ), API_URL = require ('sharify' ). data. API_URL ; module. exports = Artwork = Backbone. Model. extend ({ url : API_URL + '/api/v1/artwork' });
Shared partial jade template used server/client:
templates/artwork-details.jade 1 2 h1 = artwork. get ( 'artist'). name h2 = artwork. get ( 'title')
Full server-side page template including the partial:
templates/artwork-page.jade 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 doctype 5 html head title Artsy | #{ artwork. get ( 'title') } body include artwork-details!= sharify.script ()
Route handler that uses the model server-side:
app.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 //... var Artwork = require ('models/artwork.js' ); app. get ( '/artwork/:id', function ( req, res ) { new Artwork ({ id : req. params. id }). fetch ({ success : function ( artwork ) { // Boostrap artwork data into sharify res. locals. sharify. data. ARTWORK_JSON = artwork. toJSON (); res. render ( 'artwork-page', { artwork : artwork }); } }); });
Client side code that requires the partial template and model:
client.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 var Artwork = require ('models/artwork.js' ), ARTWORK_JSON = require ('sharify' ). data. ARTWORK_JSON, detailsTemplate = require ( 'templates/artwork-details.jade' ); var artwork = new Artwork ( ARTWORK_JSON ); artwork. on ( 'change', function () { $ ( 'body' ). html ( detailsTemplate ({ artwork : artwork })); });
Developer Happiness
Not only does sharing code server/client let you easily optimize page rendering for fast page loads, but development becomes a lot nicer because we can reuse server-side JavaScript tools including...
Package Managers
With Browserify we were able to use npm as a package manager for server or client-side dependencies. There are other package managers for the client-side. However, because we were already using npm (and npm supports git urls), we could usually point to the project hosted on npm or Github without having to fork it.
For projects that don't support CommonJS modules (or npm), often one can still use npm and requires like so:
1 2 3 "devDependencies" : { "zepto" : "git://github.com/madrobby/zepto.git#c074a94f0f26dc946f1c501f5f45d603adada44d" }
client.js 1 2 3 4 5 6 // Require the base Zepto library (attaches `Zepto` to window) require ( 'zepto/src/zepto.js' ); // Attach Zepto's plugins require ( 'zepto/src/event.js' ); require ( 'zepto/src/detect.js' ); //....
Testing
Testing is light-years ahead because you can test all of your code in Node headless. I wrote an article on this a while back, and now with Browserify it's even better.
Models, templates, and other modules that are shared server/client can be required into mocha and tested server-side without extra effort. For more view-like client-side code that depends on DOM APIs, pre-rendered HTML, etc., we open sourced a library called benv to help build a fake browser environment in Node for testing.
Modularity
We wanted to avoid a monolithic organization that groups code by type such as "stylesheets", "javascripts", "controllers", etc.. Not only is this a maintenance problem as it makes boundaries of your app unclear, but it also affects your users because it encourages grouping assets into large monolithic packages that take a long time to download.
Instead, we borrowed a page from Django and broke up our project into smaller conceptual pieces called "apps" (small express sub-applications mounted into the main project) and "components" (portions of reusable UI such as a modal widget). This let us easily maintain decoupled segments of our project and build up smaller asset packages through Browserify's require s and Stylus' import s. For more details on how this is done please check out Ezel, its organization, and asset pipeline docs.
It's also worth noting, to avoid CSS spaghetti we followed a simple convention of name-spacing all of our classes/ids by the app or component name it was a part of. This was inspired by a blog post from Philip Walton.
Success!
With this new architecture and set of Node tools we've seen enormous benefits compared to the pains of developing Backbone in a monolithic project with lacking JavaScript tools. Our mobile web experience is much better, we can render more content on the server for SEO and faster page loads, our test/build/deploy cycles went from hours to minutes, our developer on-boarding time went from days to minutes, and overall developer happiness has significantly improved.
It's an exciting time to be developing JavaScript apps and we will continue to open source our efforts wherever possible. Thanks and follow us on Github!Donald Trump campaigns at the Iowa State Fair on August 15, 2015 in Des Moines. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
Donald Trump has produced one headache after another for the Republican Party since he joined the presidential race two months ago. From his xenophobic campaign kickoff in New York, to his anti-POW shtick in Iowa, to his misogynistic response to being grilled at the first presidential debate in Ohio, the unlikely White House hopeful has already prompted a series of national conversations his party would have preferred to avoid. What happens next, though, might prove even more uncomfortable for his GOP rivals, because Trump is finally getting specific.
On Sunday, The Donald released a policy paper detailing his strategy to combat illegal immigration, the first in a series of issue-specific papers he has promised are on the way. As my colleague Jordan Weissmann rightly noted, Trump’s immigration proposal comes with a few blank spots and might feel a “bit crackpot-ish” but, generally speaking, isn’t really out of line with what we’ve been hearing from a number of Republicans for a while now. Still, in a GOP presidential race long on candidates but so far remarkably short on any specific ideas, the fact that Team Trump is willing to put pen to paper and get specific at all isn’t just newsworthy, it’s potentially game changing.
To date, Trump’s GOP rivals have tried to avoid talking about Trump by dismissing him as a distraction, or declaring that they understand why voters love him (“they are angry with politics as usual”) without actually engaging him on ideas. They’ve had varying degrees of success in pulling off that trick, but their rationale was at least somewhat justifiable: Trump isn’t a serious candidate, the argument went, so we shouldn’t treat what he says seriously. But now that the real estate tycoon is getting specific in a way much of the rest of the field hasn’t, that argument begins to crumble.
It’s one thing to ignore Trump’s vague bluster, it’s quite another to dismiss a specific policy proposal put forth by a man who is leading you in the polls by double digits. Already, we’re seeing this play out on the campaign trail: Scott Walker spent weeks trying to ignore all things Trump, but at the Iowa State Fair on Monday he told reporters that he, too, wants to build a wall and end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants in the United States illegally.
For Americans, this and future Trump-created tests are a good thing: Since many GOP contenders have refused to stake out specific policy ground themselves, how they react to Trump’s proposals will allow voters to better place them on the policy spectrum. For the Republican Party, though, this presents a particular problem. Establishment favorites can tack right on an issue like immigration, going towards the current GOP frontrunner with an eye on the primary, or they can inch left with an eye on the general. Either way, with Trump out there talking policy, they will need to choose a lane. And as Mitt Romney can tell you, that choice can have serious consequences.
Trump’s decision to get specific would be a significant problem for the Republican establishment even if he had a consistent far-right worldview, but it’s that much more of one because he doesn’t. As I’ve noted before, the billionaire’s actually more moderate on several issues than his rivals, something that poses a unique problem to the party’s eventual nominee. If Trump represents the conservative fringe—and to many Americans he does—then what does that say about those establishment candidates who are even further from the center than he is? Hillary Clinton’s already trying to take advantage of the gap between the perception of Trump and the reality of him on issues like women’s health and abortion. His future policy papers will only provide her and her allies’ additional openings in the weeks to come.
Read more of Slate’s coverage of the GOP primary.TOWSON, MD — Social media posts by a student at Loch Raven High School prompted police action over the weekend and reportedly led to a call to parents on Monday.
After a 16-year-old student shared photos on the social media site Snapchat showing himself with a gun and saying: "You think I'm joking," an anonymous tipster identified the boy and notified police, according to Fox 45.
The boy's parents gave law enforcement permission to search their home, where officials found two handguns, one of which matched the gun in the photos, according to Fox 45, which reported Loch Raven High School issued a robo call to parents on Monday about the incident.
Police said the photos that were posted to Snapchat were intended to be threatening, telling WJZ that student reported to officials: "...he wanted to make some sort of threat to those that were bullying him..."
Authorities said the gun was not brought to school, and the investigation was ongoing.
Photo courtesy of Baltimore County Public Schools.This year nine films will vie for the Academy Award for Best Picture: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, 12 Years A Slave, and The Wolf Of Wall Street. Like every list of Oscar nominees, that group contains some standards (12 Years A Slave), some surprises (Philomena?), and some snubs (Inside Llewyn Davis!). If the sheer quantity of nominations matters at all (and sometimes it does), David O. Russell’s American Hustle and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity lead the way with ten nominations apiece; Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave is right behind them with nine nominations. The Dissolve’s pick for the best film of 2013, Spike Jonze’s Her, garnered five nominations, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture.
I’ll be breaking down the awards, the surprises, and the snubs with The Dissolve’s Oscar columnist Jen Chaney a little bit later in the day, but for now here’s the full list of nominees. The winners will be announced on March 2.
The 2014 Academy Awards nominees
Best Picture
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
Her
Nebraska
Philomena
12 Years A Slave
The Wolf Of Wall Street
Best Director
David O. Russell, American Hustle
Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity
Alexander Payne, Nebraska
Steve McQueen, 12 Years A Slave
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Best Actress
Amy Adams, American Hustle
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Sandra Bullock, Gravity
Judi Dench, Philomena
Meryl Streep, August: Osage County
Best Actor
Christian Bale, American Hustle
Bruce Dern, Nebraska
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years A Slave
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club
Best Supporting Actress
Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine
Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years A Slave
Julia Roberts, August: Osage County
June Squibb, Nebraska
Best Supporting Actor
Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips
Bradley Cooper, American Hustle
Michael Fassbender, 12 Years A Slave
Jonah Hill, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
Best Original Screenplay
Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell, American Hustle
Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine
Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack, Dallas Buyers Club
Spike Jonze, Her
Bob Nelson, Nebraska
Best Adapted Screenplay
Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight
Billy Ray, Captain Phillips
Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, Philomena
John Ridley, 12 Years A Slave
Terence Winter, The Wolf Of Wall Street
Best Cinematography
Phillippe Le Sourd, The Grandmaster
Emmanuel Lubezki, Gravity
Bruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn Davis
Phedon Papamichael, Nebraska
Roger A. Deakins, Prisoners
Best Editing
American Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
12 Years A Slave
Best Foreign Language Film
The Broken Circle Breakdown
The Great Beauty
The Hunt
The Missing Picture
Omar
Best Animated Feature
The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Celestine
Frozen
The Wind Rises
Best Documentary
The Act Of Killing
Cutie And The Boxer
Dirty Wars
The Square
20 Feet From Stardom
Best Original Score
John Williams, The Book Thief
Steven Price, Gravity
William Butler and Owen Pallett, Her
Alexandre Desplat, Philomena
Thomas Newman, Saving Mr. Banks
Best Original Song
“Alone Yet Not Alone,” Alone Yet Not Alone
“Happy,” Despicable Me 2
“Let It Go,” Frozen
“The Moon Song,” Her
“Ordinary Love,” Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom
Best Sound Editing
All Is Lost
Captain Phillips
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
Lone Survivor
Best Sound Mixing
Captain Phillips
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
Inside Llewyn Davis
Lone Survivor
Best Production Design
American Hustle
Gravity
The Great Gatsby
Her
12 Years A Slave
Best Costume Design
American Hustle
The Grandmaster
The Great Gatsby
The Invisible Woman
12 Years A Slave
Best Makeup And Hairstyling
Dallas Buyers Club
Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
The Lone Ranger
Best Visual Effects
Gravity
The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
Iron Man 3
The Lone Ranger
Star Trek Into Darkness
Best Live Action Short
“That Wasn’t Me”
“Just Before Losing Everything”
“Helium”
“Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?”
“The Voorman Problem”
Best Animated Short
“Feral”
“Get A Horse!”
“Mr. Hublot”
“Possessions”
“Room On The Broom”
Best Documentary Short
“CaveDigger”
“Facing Fear”
“Karama Has No Walls”
“The Lady In Number 6: Music Saved My Life”
“Prison Terminal: The Last Days Of Private Jack Hall”Focus Features has released a batch of new clips and images from Sam Mendes‘ upcoming comedy “Away We Go.”
This funny and heartfelt film, from an original screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, follows the journey of an expectant couple (John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph), as they travel the U.S. in search of the perfect place to put down roots and raise their family. Along the way, they have misadventures and find fresh connections with an assortment of relatives and old friends who just might help them discover “home” on their own terms for the first time.
Rounding out the cast are Jeff Daniels, Carmen Ejogo, Jim Gaffigan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Josh Hamilton, Allison Janney, Melanie Lynskey, Chris Messina, Catherine O’Hara, and Paul Schneider.
The movie features the music of Alexi Murdoch.
“Away We Go” is scheduled to appear in theaters on June 5th, in limited release.
Away We Go Clip: You Got Lucky, Sister
Away We Go Clip: You’re So Fat
Away We Go Clip: The Pain Is So Enlightening
Away We Go Clip: Only 6 Months PregnantThe Sufi festival at Nagaur has to be one of the most lovely festivals in the world; it’s small, it’s intimate- you get a chance to meet not only the people attending the festival, but also to sit down and chat with the artists, the food is amazing, the music is awesome and the Nagaur fort- lit up by over 5000 oil lamps, provides a magical setting. Plus of course you have Royalty! Mr. Gaj Singh II of Jodhpur is a charming person and he’s very accessible during the festival.
The performances at the 2018 edition were a treat, and we're already looking forward to next year. The World Sacred Spirit Festival in Rajasthan will take place at Nagaur from 18th - 20th Feb 2019 and Jodhpur on 22nd & 23rd Feb. The Nagaur event is very exclusive and tends to sell out quickly, so if you’d like to be there, we recommend that you book now. Use the form at the bottom of the page to get in touch.
Nagaur was founded in the 4th century BC and its historical significance is closely linked to its geography, as it lay along ancient trade and invasion routes at the edge of the Thar desert. Nagaur was also an ancient site of Sufism and the festival here carries forward that heritage in the gorgeous Ahhichatragarh Fort. Initially constructed in the early 1100s, it's a beautiful example of Rajput-Mughal architecture, besides being an unbeatable setting for the spiritual experience that the festival offers.
Click here to see the 2018 festival programme.
Day 1: Jodhpur - 17 Feb
Arrive into Jodhpur, where you will be met by our car and driver. Right in the heart of Rajasthan, Jodhpur was the capital of the former Marwar kingdom and is a city with a rich and colourful history. Check in to your hotel, freshen up and head out to explore the massive Mehrangarh Fort that looms over the town. This is one of India's largest and best-maintained forts and is full of curious artifacts, opulent royal costumes and antique weaponry. Adjacent to the fort is another monument, the Jaswant Thada, a royal cenotaph constructed entirely in white marble. There are a number of great options for dining- tell us what you're in the mood for and we'll make recommendations. Return to your hotel for the night.
Day 2: Jodhpur - Nagaur - 18 Feb
Have breakfast at your hotel and check out. Your driver will meet you at your hotel. You have the chance to see some more of the city this morning- Jodhpur also has some good shopping opportunities, particularly for handicrafts and durries (rugs). Have lunch at the Gypsy Restaurant if you want to try a really good Rajasthani thali, or check out On the Rocks or Darikhana which offer great Indian and International cuisine. After lunch, drive 2 & 1/2 hours southwest to Nagaur. You will be staying within the fort here, either at the Ranvas- beautifully restored havelis, built as a residence for the maharajah's queens or in the elegant Royal Tents (with bathrooms attached). Relax and take in the tranquility of your surroundings. The festival kicks off at 7:00 pm, with performances running late into the night.
Days 3 & 4: Nagaur - 19 & 20 Feb
Enjoy breakfast at the fort. The festival programme starts at 9:00 am with music, poetry, dance, art, lectures and historical walks. There will also be tours of the town, museum and bazaars. All meals are provided, with cocktails every night and the celebrations go on into the wee hours.
Day 5: Nagaur - Jodhpur & onward - 21 Feb
The festival ends. After breakfast, check out of Nagaur and continue to Jodhpur airport to catch your flight out. Or if you're not quite ready to end this journey just yet, well, Rajasthan is something of a specialty of ours and we have a number of fabulous places for you to explore across the state. Options nearby include the desert town of Jaisalmer and the picturesque Khimsar Fort, an oasis of luxury in the desert. Both are great places to savour the experiences of the last few days...
Note: The Nagaur leg of the Sufi festival is a pretty exclusive affair, open only to the guests staying within the fort. Tickets are limited and increasingly sought-after, so do be sure to book as early as you can.Pearland has plenty of time on its hands waiting to play their first game of the 75th Little League World Series, but it gives the boys a chance to size up the competition.There are 8 U.S. teams playing in the tournament including Pearland. All of them except Pearland and Rhode Island will play one game before Pearland hits the field, so the boys and coaches can spend some time watching players who they may have to face.For now Pearland has to be content with practicing. The team takes the field Friday night, a full week after they got to Willaimsport. When they aren't tuning up their hitting and catching skills Pearland's all stars are checking out the other teams."Just looking at teams seeing if they are big or small, but then you also realize that this isn't football, size don't matter all that matters is the luck of the draw and your skills," third baseman McKane Groover said.Pearland's first opponent is a team from Rhode Island, and the Texas kids are definitely keeping an eye on the boys representing New England."We have seen them hit and field and stuff like that and we are going to have some competition but nothing we are too worried about," right fielder Cole Smajstrla said.For most parents, the opening ceremony was the first chance to see the other teams. But Pearland coaches, players have been living alongside those other teams for days and can't help but to compare themselves to the rest of the world."There are a couple of teams you look at and see the size of the kids and athleticism; and it appears they have some athleticism and you kind of keep in the back of your mind, who you think you are looking at," coach Don Smith said.But the team also has its fair share of athleticism. Two of the Pearland boys and one coach were part of the 2010 team that made it to the US championship. All of these boys have been playing baseball since they were 5 years old.A special honor also was given to one Pearland player at Thursday's opening ceremony. Christian Terranova read the Little League Pledge.The boys' first game is Friday night at 7pm. They'll be wearing green and gold, representing the Southwest US, and dozens of Pearland parents and siblings will be there throughout the tournament.The subjective quality of the DC Extended Universe has been one of the more divisive subjects in fan circles since Zack Snyder first started his great deconstruction project with 2013's Man of Steel. Many were critical of the franchise's poorly implemented dark tones, and often confounding editing decisions as the filmmakers, studio, and actors all seemed to be out of sync with what critics and audiences want from a superhero movie. But there's a hardcore fanbase that appreciates what the team has done with such conventional characters and are absolutely enthralled with Snyder's visual panache.
The tales of rewrites, reshoots, personal tragedy and studio flailing has hounded the production of Justice League, leading many to believe that this film would be an even bigger misfire than the critically panned Batman V. Superman. But less than an hour ago, the social embargo lifted for critics/audiences who attended early screenings and the reactions were not what people were expecting...
1. Most people are willing to forgive a lot if the movie delivers on a good time
I saw #JusticeLeague! Here's what I thought. There are ton of things I'd change but it comes down to this: I had a blast! I got to see the team together and I had fun watching it. Ezra Miller steals the movie and #WonderWoman was perfect! pic.twitter.com/rgCI9fUuTs -- Jenna Busch (@JennaBusch) November 10, 2017
2. Some were unequivocally positive
Bottom line: JUSTICE LEAGUE is awesome!
ZACK SNYDER's film is filled with so many moments that had me geeking out and crying nerd tears. When an action scene/hero moment hits, the film is firing on all cylinders.
Still love Affleck's BATMAN. My fav Batman actor since Keaton. pic.twitter.com/YKZTbVJL7D -- Kevin McCarthy (@KevinMcCarthyTV) November 10, 2017
3. Perhaps the screenwriters learned from their critics?
People that have complained about DC movies being too dark are about to see the light #JusticeLeague pic.twitter.com/eB1JoNJTvi -- Steven Weintraub (@colliderfrosty) November 10, 2017
4. Or, perhaps they're still making some old mistakes
#JusticeLeague is a fun, bumpy ride that succeeds in character, but fails in narrative. It's a mixed bag of execution that's saved by the actors, who rise above the shortcomings to deliver an engaging, funny and hopeful, yet flawed, entry to the DCEU. @joblocom -- Paul Shirey (@arcticninjapaul) November 10, 2017
5. Many are drawing links to the DC Animated Universe
SO I saw #JusticeLeague -twice. Still under embargo, but: This is a fun superhero flick. Funny but still hero adventure. Reminds me of JL Unlimited ep. Likable interaction amongst recognizable heroes. There is a villain problem (no worse than Marvel's) - @aaronsagers -- Aaron Sagers (@aaronsagers) November 10, 2017
6. A hopeful change of pace from what came before
Here are some of my thoughts on #JusticeLeague pic.twitter.com/HZfiWC7Abt -- Jim Vejvoda (@JimVejvoda) November 10, 2017
7. Lots of talk of success despite its shortcomings
#JusticeLeague is a fun blockbuster that is entertaining enough to overcome its flaws. The team works well together to deliver more than a few spectacular superhero moments worth seeing on the big screen.
Maybe not quite what some hoped, but definitely not what many feared. -- Sean Gerber (@MrSeanGerber) November 10, 2017
8. Is the change of direction too little, too late?
#JusticeLeague is clunky & uneven as hell, but it also gets the characters right and has a lot of fun along the way. When it's over DC's vision for these heroes going forward will make sense.
It's a very small but very vital step forward. I dug it. pic.twitter.com/FrWkhBe69v -- Conner Schwerdtfeger (@ConnerWS) November 10, 2017
9. Between this and Thor Ragnarok we're feasting on "funny" heroes
I am genuinely happy to report #JusticeLeague is a lot of fun. It's not perfect and has its problems, but does the job of making you care about these characters as a team by its end. It's also VERY funny, in lots of unexpected ways. pic.twitter.com/1AAjYgv16i -- Terri Schwartz (@Terri_Schwartz) November 10, 2017
10. Not everyone was so kind to the movie...
Nothing could save JUSTICE LEAGUE from its loud, ugly, tacky self. Not Wonder Woman, not wide-eyed Ezra Miller, not Joss Whedon's quippy teardown & rebuild. And Henry Cavill's mustache is an actual issue; they gave him Uncanny Valley Face. Oof, guys. It's a rough ride -- Josh L. Dickey (@JLDlite) November 10, 2017
11. The truth (most likely) is somewhere in-between
The good: #JusticeLeague is my favorite DCEU movie. It will make you love its heroes and want to see them team-up again. pic.twitter.com/mU2khvwUPD -- Rob Keyes (@rob_keyes) November 10, 2017
The bad: #JusticeLeague rushes through a lot and its main story/lore and villain are rather stripped down and forgettable. -- Rob Keyes (@rob_keyes) November 10, 2017
12. Still, it could have always been worse!
Justice League reviews coming in. I'll certainly take "Good but flawed" over |
Chord, Washington, was sent there for a nine-month tour.
In February, the Army deployed 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment, to Korea. The combined-arms battalion from Fort Hood deployed with M1A2 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. They were replaced in October by about 800 soldiers from 3rd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, also from the 1st Cavalry Division.
Officials have said rotating whole units — instead of deploying soldiers on individual tours — will result in formations that are more ready and trained to higher levels.Exclusive: Firms claim to support responsible drinking, yet data shows those who consume at risky or harmful levels account for 60% of sales in England
The alcohol industry makes most of its money – an estimated £23.7bn in sales in England alone – from people whose drinking is destroying or risking their health, say experts who accuse the industry of irresponsible pricing and marketing.
While the industry points to the fact that most people in the country are moderate drinkers, 60% of alcohol sales are either to those who are risking their health, or those – labelled harmful drinkers – who are doing themselves potentially lethal damage, figures seen by the Guardian show.
Work by Prof Nick Sheron of Southampton University, co-founder of the Alcohol Health Alliance of more than 40 concerned organisations and colleagues, has established that people who drink dangerously are the industry’s best customers.
“We looked at data from the Health Survey for England and did some calculations on that and we found that in terms of the total alcohol consumed within that survey, 69% was consumed by hazardous and harmful drinkers together,” he said.
The secret A&E nurse's diary: 'He stands 1cm from my face, saying he will kill me' Read more
Of the 69%, he said, 38% was consumed by “hazardous” or “increasing risk” drinkers who exceed the old guidelines of 14 units a week for women and 21 for men (these have recently come down to 14 units each, with some alcohol-free days), either by bingeing or regular drinking. The rest was consumed by harmful drinkers on more than 50 units a week for men or 35 for women, whose addiction might lead to liver problems including cirrhosis. Public Health England estimates that 10.8 million people drink at risky levels and 1.6 million may have some level of dependence on alcohol.
Separate work in progress from Sheffield University helps to establish the value of this custom to the industry. In 2013, the data shows, 38.2% of the value of alcohol sales in England came from risky drinkers and 24.5% from harmful drinkers. Industry sales in the UK were £45.5bn in 2013. England accounts for 83% of alcohol tax receipts, putting sales at about £37.8bn. That would suggest £14.4bn in sales comes from risky drinkers and £9.3bn from harmful drinkers: £23.7bn in total from drinkers jeopardising their health.
More than 1m hospital admissions a year are related to alcohol, double the number 10 years ago. According to Public Health England, in 2013-14, alcohol cost the NHS £3.5bn.
Harmful drinkers drink so heavily that it is claimed that for many, their habit would be unaffordable if they could not obtain cheap alcohol. In a paper last year, Sheron and colleagues revealed male patients in a liver unit consumed a mean of 146 units a week and female drinkers 142 units. They bought cheap alcohol, at a median price of 33p per unit, whereas low-risk drinkers spent £1.10 per unit. Strong cider such as Frosty Jack’s, made by Aston Manor Cider in Birmingham, is sold in three-litre bottles in outlets such as Iceland at just 15p per unit.
The drinks industry claims it supports responsible drinking. Yet, say critics, it has strongly fought proposals to introduce a minimum price per unit of 50p, which would curb the drinking of those most addicted for whom cost is a real issue.
A recent report from Australia found similar drinking patterns. The Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education revealed the industry’s best customers were the 3.8 million Australians who consume more than four standard drinks a day, double the national guidelines. They are 20% of over-14s but drink 74.2% of all alcohol consumed. The industry calls them “super consumers”.
Katherine Brown, director of the Institute of Alcohol Studies, said: “It comes as no surprise to learn the drinks industry relies on excessive consumption of alcohol to boost its profits. Why else would alcohol producers spend millions of pounds on advertising each year encouraging people to drink more, and fund heavyweight lobbyists to fight against public policies designed to tackle harmful drinking?
“This evidence tells us two things. Firstly, the government must take action on cheap alcohol … and secondly, the alcohol industry simply cannot be relied upon to act as messengers on public health.”
Prof Sir Ian Gilmore, chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance, said: “There’s no doubt that the drinks industry depends on excessive drinking to drive its profits. Drinks like high-strength white ciders are preferentially consumed by heavy and dependent drinkers, with 50% of those drinking these ciders drinking more than three litres a day, and the damage these drinks do is widely known.
Minimum unit pricing would target the highest strength drinks which cause the most harm
“Importantly, minimum unit pricing would target the highest strength drinks which cause the most harm, leaving the price of lower strength drinks relatively untouched. With minimum unit pricing [MUP], moderate drinkers would barely notice the difference.”
Gerard Hastings, professor of social marketing at Stirling University, said the data “throws into relief the conflict of interest between industry and public health. Industry is driven by the need to sell as much as it possibly can. Ultimately the marketing department rules the waves.”
However, Miles Beale, chief executive of the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, said: “The WSTA opposes MUP because – even if it were legal – it would disproportionately impact responsible drinkers, as well as those on the lowest incomes. Statistics show that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to drink – and the more you are likely to drink: 15% of people have drunk more than six to eight units in the last week, but this is 23% of the highest earners and 10% of the lowest.”
The Scotch Whisky Association, which led opposition to minimum unit pricing in Scotland, also claims wealthier people drink the hardest. Evidence shows, said its chief executive, David Frost, “that most hazardous and harmful drinkers are among the wealthier parts of the population, are the least sensitive to price and do not tend to opt for the cheapest alcohol. Therefore they are largely unaffected by minimum unit pricing.”
The Institute of Alcohol Studies disputes this, referring to its own report on alcohol and health inequalities. Brown said evidence from Canada showed that a 10% increase in alcohol prices led to a 32% reduction in alcohol-related deaths.
“This is a clear indicator that raising the price of the cheapest alcohol can have significant public health benefits,” said Brown. “With alcohol costing UK society £21bn each year, we can’t afford to keep stacking our supermarket shelves with pocket-money priced drinks.”
Gordon Johncox, managing director of Aston Manor Cider, said it did not recognise the 15p a unit price for a £3.50 three-litre bottle of Frosty Jack’s. “We typically see the price between £4.50 and £5.00 and in recent years we have consistently increased our prices into wholesalers and retailers,” he said. Because companies did not set the retail price, they “cannot control instances of sales to people that are under-age or already intoxicated or recognised as a problem drinker”, he said.
The Portman Group said that as a regulator of alcohol marketing, it could not comment on price, but a spokesman added: “The official statistics show that during the last decade there have been significant declines in binge drinking (down 20%), alcohol-related crime (down 34%), underage drinking (down 36%) and drink driving (down 47%) and drinks companies have contributed to this through a programme of voluntary measures designed to tackle alcohol misuse.
“These actions have been welcomed by government and leading charities and the industry will continue to work alongside public and third sector partners to drive down alcohol-related harms further.”When the Baltimore Orioles host the first game of their American League Division Series against the Detroit Tigers later today, local fans will carry the rituals they held throughout the season into the playoffs. They will shout “O!,” for Orioles, when the national-anthem singer reaches the word; they will dance to “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” during the seventh-inning stretch; and throughout the game they will toast their team with countless cups of National Bohemian beer, or Natty Boh, as it is affectionately known. “Crabs, O’s, and Boh’s” goes the often-repeated list of summertime pleasures on the Chesapeake Bay.
Natty Boh is an inexpensive American adjunct lager, like Budweiser or Coors. Though not highly regarded among beer lovers (it has a rating of sixty-seven—“Poor”—on BeerAdvocate.com), Baltimoreans cherish the brew. Ninety per cent of Natty Boh’s sales are in Charm City. Drive through Baltimore on I-95, and you will see the black-and-white visage of Mr. Boh, the beer’s one-eyed, mustachioed mascot, peering down like Dr. T. J. Eckleburg on the neighborhoods of Brewers Hill and Canton. All across town, billboards and T-shirts celebrate the symbiosis between Natty Boh and Baltimore: Edgar Allan Boh, Old Bay seasoning and Boh, special purple-and-silver Ravens cans of Boh. Some even refer to the city as Bohtimore.
All of this civic affection might lead you to believe that Natty Boh is a local product. But although the beer can trace its origins to nineteenth-century Baltimore, every drop of Natty Boh consumed today at Camden Yards and in the rest of the city is brewed at plants in Georgia and North Carolina, by Miller Brewing, whose parent company, SABMiller, is South African. Last month, it was announced that the brand’s owner, Pabst, is being purchased by the Russian beverage company Oasis, in partnership with the private-equity firm TSG Consumer Partners.* According to the Wall Street Journal, the deal values Pabst—which also owns Schlitz and Old Milwaukee—at more than seven hundred million dollars. The acquisition is the latest in the consolidation of the global beverage industry. Nearly half of the world’s beer is sold by four corporations: Anheuser-Busch InBev, SABMiller, Heineken, and Carlsberg. More consolidation is expected: it was reported last month that Anheuser-Busch InBev is seeking financing to buy rival SABMiller.
In Maryland and elsewhere, this trend has been countered by the growth of microbrewing. The Brewers Association has reported that small and independent American brewers saw their share of the U.S. beer market rise from 6.5 per cent, in 2012, to 7.8 per cent, in 2013. Craft brewers have gained this traction in part by adopting many of the practices of the locavore food movement, offering seasonal beers and products made with regional ingredients, often linking their identities to the locales where they are made. Some of these microbrewers have been critical of the fact that Natty Boh has been so thoroughly embraced by the citizens of Baltimore, when it is, in fact, owned by a multinational conglomerate. Last year, Maryland craft brewer Heavy Seas released a T-shirt with the image of a pirate that bears a more-than-passing resemblance to Mr. Boh. On the back, the shirt reads, “Actually brewed in Baltimore.” Asked about Natty Boh by the Baltimore Sun last week, Hugh Sisson, the founder of Heavy Seas, replied, “I don’t think there’s a local brewer who doesn’t want to roll their eyes.”
National Bohemian hasn’t been locally owned since the nineteen-seventies, and it hasn’t been brewed in Maryland in more than a decade. Its origins do lie in Baltimore, however. It was first brewed, in 1885, by the newly founded National Brewing Company, as part of a thriving nineteenth-century brewing industry in the city. The brewery was forced to shut down during Prohibition, but returned, in 1933, under the ownership of the Hoffberger family and flourished for the next three decades, becoming one of the twenty largest brewers in the country. The Hoffbergers introduced a new recipe, modernized production, and, in 1943, became the first beer producer to sell its product in six-packs.
In 1953, National Brewing’s president, Jerold Hoffberger, helped to bring the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, where they changed their name to the Orioles. To assuage the Griffith family, who owned the nearby Washington Senators and opposed the sale of the Browns to a group of Baltimore investors, Hoffberger offered to have National Brewing sponsor Senators games on radio and television. A dozen years later, he purchased a controlling stake in the Orioles and assumed chairmanship of the team. Under Hoffberger’s ownership, the Orioles went on to win two World Series and four American League pennants. It was during this heyday that National Bohemian became the “official” beer of both the Orioles and the city of Baltimore.
Both National Brewing and the Orioles passed out of Hoffberger’s hands in the nineteen-seventies. For the next three decades, the National Bohemian brand languished, purchased first by Stroh, then G. Heileman Brewing, and then by Pabst, in 1999. Pabst, which capitalized on the affection of city-dwelling hipsters for its Blue Ribbon beer in the first decade of the century, used Natty Boh’s legacy in Baltimore to cultivate similarly passionate devotion among young Marylanders. On social media, they share pictures of their Mr. Boh tattoos, their Bohtinis (Natty Boh with Old Bay seasoning on the rim), and their encounters with the Mr. Boh mascot. During the 2012 playoffs, the @NattyBohs Twitter feed (an account that is not officially linked to the beer) was a hub of Orioles fandom. It is likely to be so again this October.
Late last week, I dropped by Nacho Mama’s, the unofficial Natty Boh headquarters in Baltimore, for a drink. In 2011, when Natty Boh was made available on draft after an absence of more than a decade, the first keg was tapped there, and, last year, Natty Boh issued a commemorative can to honor Patrick “Scunny” McCusker, the restaurant’s proprietor. When I arrived, the room was littered with bottles and pitchers of Boh.
I spoke with two employees, Sean Fisher and Kallie Amentas, who told me that sales of National Bohemian had been rising steadily in recent years. They doubted that the acquisition of Pabst by Oasis would change that trend. “It is still a Baltimore beer,” Fisher said. “It almost defines us.”
* Update: It was reported in November that the original announcement of the deal was incorrect. The group that purchased Pabst was formed, independently, by Oasis's chairman, a Russian-born U.S. citizen, but Oasis itself was not involved in the purchase.ACAPULCO, Mexico (Reuters) - Sixty bodies, including men, women and children, were found in an abandoned crematorium in Western Mexico, authorities said on Friday, in a discovery that the state attorney general said was likely linked to negligence rather than drug-related violence.
Authorities, who originally said 61 bodies were found, said the remains at the crematorium, near the decaying seaside resort of Acapulco, were clothed, wrapped in sheets and sprinkled with lime. Many of them were in a state of decomposition.
“We are talking about a clear violation of state sanitation laws,” Miguel Angel Godinez, attorney general for the state of Guerrero, told Reuters.
The crematorium had been abandoned for months, and local residents had called police because of the smell, Godinez said.
Still, some of the bodies were “perfectly embalmed” and prepared for cremation, according to a statement from the attorney general’s office.
The discovery was made 130 miles (211 km) from the town of Iguala, where 43 student teachers were abducted by corrupt police and apparently massacred by drug gang members.
Authorities are investigating how and when the people died, and whether those responsible were guilty of disrespecting humans remains, the statement said.
President Enrique Pena Nieto is facing his deepest crisis over his government’s handling of the students’ disappearance. The case laid bare Mexico’s deep problem of impunity and corruption and it has overshadowed his efforts to focus attention on economic reforms.If you're an Eagles fan and you're excited about the early success of rookie quarterback Carson Wentz, I'm sorry to inform you that Wentz should not be given any credit because he doesn't take shots down the field.
According to Scott Kacsmar of Football Outsiders, Wentz has the third-shortest average "air yards per throw" (average distance the ball travels past the line of scrimmage per throw) in the NFL, at 6.86 yards.
In other words, sorry Eagles fans, but your new quarterback is a Checkdown Charlie dink-and-dunker.
Now, I know what your rebuttals are going to be, Eagles fans.
The Eagles' heavy usage of screens serve as glorified running plays, therefore wildly skewing Wentz's numbers here. In other words, every time the Eagles run a screen, Wentz is chalked up with a big fat zero on yards traveled past the line of scrimmage. And maybe, just maybe, screens shouldn't be included in this metric as a measure of how often a quarterback will take shots down the field.
The Eagles have had huge second half leads, so why on Earth would they continue to take risky shots down the field?
The Eagles don't exactly have much in the way of vertical threats at the wide receiver position.
All of those rebuttals are wrong, and if you use them, you're dumb. Wentz is a dink-and-dunker, and should not be given undue credit for the Eagles' success so far:
To be sure, I went back to the tape to see if Kacsmar has a point. Indeed he does. The following is a clinic in garbage checkdown quarterbacking.
Dink...
Dunk...
Dink...
Dunk...
Dink...
Dunk...
Dink...
Dunk...
Dink...
Dunk...
Dink...
Dunk:
At some point, Carson Wentz is going to have to take a shot down the field, and when he does, I suspect the Eagles season will be over immediately.
Follow Jimmy on Twitter: @JimmyKempski
Like Jimmy on Facebook.Is there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great thinker.” Fuck him, he explained.
Here was a signal to the Darwinist dittoheads that a mob needed to be formed. In an earlier book Nagel had dared to complain of “Darwinist imperialism,” though in his scrupulous way he added that “there is really no reason to assume that the only alternative to an evolutionary explanation of everything is a religious one.” He is not, God forbid, a theist. But he went on to warn that “this may not be comforting enough” for the materialist establishment, which may find it impossible to tolerate also “any cosmic order of which mind is an irreducible and non-accidental part.” For the bargain-basement atheism of our day, it is not enough that there be no God: there must be only matter. Now Nagel’s new book fulfills his old warning. A mob is indeed forming, a mob of materialists, of free-thinking inquisitors. “In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism, heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against religion,” Nagel calmly writes, “... I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.” This cannot be allowed! And so the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Secular Faith sprang into action. “If there were a philosophical Vatican,” Simon Blackburn declared in the New Statesman, “the book would be a good candidate for going on to the Index.” I hope that one day he regrets that sentence. It is not what Bruno, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, Locke, Kant, and the other victims of the anti-philosophical Vatican had in mind.
I understand that nobody is going to burn Nagel’s book or ban it. These inquisitors are just more professors. But he is being denounced not merely for being wrong. He is being denounced also for being heretical. I thought heresy was heroic. I guess it is heroic only when it dissents from a doctrine with which I disagree. Actually, the defense of heresy has nothing to do with its content and everything to do with its right. Tolerance is not a refutation of heresy, but a retirement of the concept. I am not suggesting that there is anything outrageous about the criticism of Nagel’s theory of the explanatory limitations of Darwinism. He aimed to provoke and he provoked. His troublemaking book has sparked the most exciting disputation in many years, because no question is more primary than the question of whether materialism (which Nagel defines as “the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real”) is true or false.
And so scientists are busily animadverting on Nagel’s account of science. They like to note condescendingly that he calls himself a “layman.” Yet too many of Nagel’s interlocutors have been scientists, because Mind and Cosmos is not a work of science. It is a work of philosophy; and it is entirely typical of the scientistic tyranny in American intellectual life that scientists have been invited to do the work of philosophers. The problem of the limits of science is not a scientific problem. It is also pertinent to note that the history of science is a history of mistakes, and so the dogmatism of scientists is especially rich. A few of Nagel’s scientific critics have been respectful: in The New York Review of Books, H. Allen Orr has the decency to concede that it is not at all obvious how consciousness could have originated out of matter. But he then proceeds to an almost comic evasion. Finally, he says, we must suffice with “the mysteriousness of consciousness.” A Darwinii mysterium tremendum! He then cites Colin McGinn’s entirely unironic suggestion that our “cognitive limitations” may prevent us from grasping the evolution of mind from matter: “even if matter does give rise to mind, we might not be able to understand how.” Students of religion will recognize the dodge—it used to be called fideism, and atheists gleefully ridiculed it; and the expedient suspension of rational argument; and the double standard. What once vitiated godfulness now vindicates godlessness.The Texas Longhorns women's golf team advanced to the NCAA Championship on Saturday after a sixth place finish at the NCAA Bryan Regional. It's the 25th time in program history the Longhorns have advanced to the NCAA Championship, and it's the first time the program has done so since 2013.
Texas shot a 15-over-par, 302 in the third round, its worst one-day total of the event, but it held on for a Top 6 spot, clearing seventh place Tulane by a single stroke.
Junior Julia Beck led the Longhorns with a 1-under finish for the tournament, good for 12th. Fellow junior Haley Mills finished 18th overall with a 1-over performance for the tournament, while senior Natalie Karcher (7-over) finished in a tie for 35th. Additionally, sophomore Sophia Schubert (8-over) finished 42nd, while senior Tezira Abe (24-over) ended the tournament in a tie for 81st.
Karcher made a birdie on the final hole of the event for Texas to send the team to the NCAA Championships.
"I honestly had no clue where we were standing and was just trying to make the putt like any other one," Karcher said. "It was only when I heard the screams from the crowd that I realized how big it was! Ending my four years at Texas by going to nationals with my team is absolutely incredible! I'm so excited to be able to live this experience."
This is the first appearance in the NCAA Championships for second-year head coach Ryan Murphy at Texas.
"It was really a perfect storm for us today," Murphy said. "We just needed to hang in there, but the conditions were tough and the wind was strong. But we did hang in there and I'm very proud of the team. They have worked really hard and we are really excited to keep playing."
The NCAA Championships will start Friday, May 20 at Eugene Country Club in Oregon.Adelaide Strikers star batsman Mahela Jayawardena is expected to miss the final two matches of the KFC Big Bash League regular season with a quadriceps strain, the club announced today.
Jayawardena sustained the injury sprinting for a quick single in the Strikers' run chase against the Brisbane Heat on January 8 at the Gabba.
The 38-year-old carried on batting after receiving treatment from team physiotherapist John Porter, posting 53 from 36 balls, as the Strikers completed an eight-wicket win to secure their place in the BBL|05 finals.
"Clinically the signs are actually quite promising. He was able to commence some light rehab today and he’s keen to start batting as soon as possible," said Porter.
"We’re certainly building our timeframe for a return to play towards that semi-final and anything sooner than that is probably going to be a bonus."
WATCH: Mahela's fighting fifty, while injured!
Jayawardena's injury comes off the back of two half-centuries for the Strikers since moving up the order to open the innings alongside wicketkeeper-batsman Tim Ludeman.
Middle-order batsman Alex Ross says the loss of one of Adelaide's key batsmen is considerable, but is confident the Strikers have the cattle to replace the Sri Lanka legend.
"Yeah he’s a massive loss. Not only for the Strikers but the Strikers crowd as well," Ross said.
"Everyone is going to be upset he’s gone because he’s such a class player as we’ve seen so far.
"So he’s going to be a huge loss but I’m sure someone will step up and take the role that he’s been doing."
WATCH: Jayawardena's classy half-century against Scorchers
FREE OFFER: Get an Optus Live Pass to stream every ball of BBL matches (and Test matches) for FREE until midnight January 9. Click here or on the image below.During his weekly “New Rules” segment, Bill Maher addressed the disappointingly low turnout in the 2014 midterm elections. He also thumped British comic Russell Brand for exhorting people not to vote.
The November elections, Maher noted, had the lowest turnout in any election since 1942, “when many Americans didn’t make it to the polls because they’d been captured by the Japanese.”
Nothing will change in the U.S., he said, until Americans vote for it to change.
“Russell Brand is in the news, he’s a funny guy,” said Maher, “but he just wrote a book that’s more laughable — where he tells young people not to vote because the system is so awful and so dirty that the only solution is to bring it down. Not by violence, but not by voting either.”
“No, by some sort of spiritual awakening,” he scoffed. “Oh, for f*ck’s sake, fine, you know, don’t vote, but don’t dress it up as something noble or sophisticated. The fake excuses offend me.”
Watch the video, embedded below via Real Time:How did Jeremy Hunt keep his job? On reshuffle day the BBC reported he was gone, but after an exceptionally long session inside No 10 he saved his skin, emerging with that grin and a tweet saying he was “thrilled”. Junior doctors were less than thrilled, since Hunt’s survival signals no turning back on the dispute he has caused. Full speed ahead to impose a contract, threatening yet more strife.
Jeremy Hunt narrowly survived the cabinet reshuffle – so what now? | Denis Campbell Read more
But here’s the great question: did Hunt tell Theresa May the truth about the NHS? That was the time to warn the new prime minister of just how critical the financial crunch is, building into imminent crisis. He needed to report to her what all the leading health economists say, what Whitehall’s most senior civil servants say and what NHS managers are warning: nine out 10 trusts have deficits from which they can’t escape, with missed cancer waiting times up 56% and no chance of restoring the four-hour A&E waiting time limit. The Department of Health to all intents and purposes busted its budget last year, an extraordinary event only redeemed through one-off wheezes that can’t be repeated.
Simon Stevens, head of NHS England, warns that capital funds needed for “overcrowded and clapped-out buildings in need of a makeover if not a bulldozer” are being diverted to fire-fight day-to-day treatment. His £1.8bn transformation and sustainability money – supposed to be invested in joining up NHS and social care and creating larger conglomerations of care – is being burned up on basic services. That £10bn promised at the general election? Nigel Edwards of the Nuffield Trust says much was Treasury sleight of hand, stolen from other parts of the NHS, and less than half was new money.
Did Hunt tell her? He has never confronted NHS underfunding, preferring to apply his own screws by naming and shaming inadequate care. By talking up the scandal in Mid Staffs he encouraged the Care Quality Commission to set higher nursing and doctor numbers per ward, but that added to the financial pressure he never mentions. He never took up the cudgels over public health and social care cuts in local councils needlessly filling up hospital beds with the frail.
The word is he instead beamed from ear to ear and told May the NHS was safe in his hands, he could fix it, knock sense into the moaners and shroud wavers, just leave it to him. If he failed to warn her that the Treasury must find big sums very soon, she may not thank him for pretending there are magic solutions.
Nearing its 70th birthday, the NHS has the lowest funding increase ever, with worse to come in the next two years. And Brexit voters will be expecting that fantastical £350m a week NHS windfall.
To prove to the Treasury that NHS heads are “getting a grip”, all trusts have been sent a threatening “reset” letter where fines will be imposed on those in debt – a curious perversity. Of the many in deficit, a handful were chosen for “special measures” to frighten the rest. The letter warns that trusts will also lose 30% of promised funds if they fail A&E, cancer and operation waiting times, with a cap on hiring staff or temps. Cut debts and improve quality – or else.
NHS bosses launch'reset' plan to tackle £2.45bn deficit Read more
Or else what? All the trusts I’ve spoken to regard this threat as showboating for the Treasury, a bit of play-acting, because nobody – including the NHS England and NHS Improvement heads – can think the deficits will be wrung out, or the old waiting targets resumed. Savings are being made by sharing HR and back offices, buying equipment in bulk and shutting down Andrew Lansley’s wasteful plethora of CCGs, commissioners still wasting money on competitive tendering.
But the big cost is people – and more staff are urgently needed. Failing to train enough, still scouring the globe for nurses and doctors, after Brexit the fear is that many here already may depart. Stevens publicly begs for “early reassurance to international NHS employees about their continued welcome in this country”, but May still refuses.
Take one finance director of a major teaching hospital, anonymous because everyone feels intimidated by this “reset” letter. “NHS funding is back to the year 2000 as a share of GDP, so I say to my consultants, think back to how it was then. What do we do now we didn’t do then?” They say back then, before Labour’s investment, “we had 18-month waits, many fewer nurses and doctors, lower pay, winter crises, no Nice and CQC minimum standards”.
Consider what is expected now on the same funding share, such as state-of-the-art drugs costing up to £100,000 a year per patient. There used to be leeway for cutting corners, but in all hospitals the chief executive must report to the board every month that the correct number of nurses and doctors have staffed every shift. This finance director challenges the government, “Come clean, be honest. You tell us what we should ration.”
So how does the NHS burst at the seams? Chorley hospital in Lancashire abruptly shut its emergency department – downgrading it to urgent care for safety – because it could only fill five of its 14 middle-grade doctor posts. The only applicants were unregistered or struck-off doctors. This was not done to save money: ambulances cost as much to ferry serious cases to Preston hospital, which is already under pressure. What’s more, Chorley’s walk-in patients numbers are still rising fast due to 18 local GP vacancies.
NHS squeeze can be reversed by applying some radical thinking | Letters Read more
Dewsbury hospital in Yorkshire has just done likewise, with many others in similar staffing straits. But those near to downgrading unsafe emergency units fear suffering Chorley’s fate, where managers are under savage personal attack. The public and local MPs accuse them of a closure plot, when government failure to fund the NHS or train enough clinicians should take the flak.
“Reset” will be nothing of the kind and NHS England knows it, despite rattling sabres at trusts and intimidating managers. Most trusts have signed up to “control totals” pledging deficit reductions they know for certain they can never achieve. There is safety in numbers: they know they are a high-calibre cadre doing an impossible job: they can’t all be put into “special measures”, with no army of ultra super-managers to replace them. They will go on trying to do the impossible. What they all say is the public must be presented with the resoundingly obvious truth: pay more or get less from the NHS, that is the choice.Acclaimed filmmaker and Buffy mastermind Joss Whedon hosted a screening of his newest film, a black-and-white, contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, last night at the always excellent Brooklyn Academy of Music. The movie, shot in 12 days at Whedon’s house, is fantastic, its tiny budget and time frame giving the final result the energy of a live performance, with superb acting (particularly on the part of Whedonverse favorites Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof, not to mention a hilarious Nathan Fillion) and elegant, generous directorial choices. This is a filmmaker who loves his audience — and it comes through in everything he does. After the screening, Whedon hosted a Q&A where he discussed what still excites him about TV, how a love of dance has inspired him to consider making a ballet about a library, and how Shakespeare’s Claudio is basically Michael Scott.
Asked why he chose to adapt Much Ado About Nothing out of all of Shakespeare’s plays, Whedon had a whole list of reasons: “One, it all takes place in one place. Very important for a microbudget studio. Two, Amy and Alexis. We read it at the house, and when they read Beatrice and Benedick I was like, ‘I gotta do that, I can’t not.’ I was like, ‘I’m getting right on that!’ Ten years ago. And then finally because I’d talked about it, because we had the location, we had the cast, my wife had already put together a crew for another project she’s doing, so everything was really in place, it was just a question of, oh yeah, why Much Ado? And so I just went into the text and really looked at it with fresh eyes and saw a lot of darkness and pain and manipulation and cynicism and thought, this’ll be great! I found that the rest of the play, which is so often just a backdrop for a two-hander, is in fact very much integral and a part of the same text, and the jolly manipulations of Don Pedro are exactly the same as the tragic manipulations of Don John, and what everybody’s doing is corrupting the idea and deconstructing the idea of romantic behavior. So he’s basically pulling apart the idea of the rom-com, which he is inventing. That, to me is impressive.”
Whedon is much beloved for his powerful female characters, and while Much Ado About Nothing has Beatrice, who is arguably Shakespeare’s best leading lady, it also has Hero, her mostly silent, mostly victimized younger cousin. How did Whedon turn her into a Whedon heroine? “My direction with Jillian [Morgese] was just, you need to lean forward at all of this, you need to come at him. You don’t have to be wilting – you have to faint. It’s gonna happen. Huge plot point. Can’t get away from that. But it was very important to me that she have — and it was part of the reason I cast Jillian — real poise of presence and power… As much as possible I tried to give her character power – it’s in the lines if you choose to play them that way. She did. She’s one of the few people who watched the Branagh version before we shot and she said ‘apparently I’m supposed to twirl a lot.’ I’m like, ‘we’re actually going to take that out. It is in the text. Enters twirling.’ And by the same token, at the end when she says ‘as I live I am a maid,’ she’s not just saying don’t worry, I’m still |
failure is that he is tricked by Utgard’s Loki and does not understand that the mead he is drinking is the world’s sea and a cat he is lifting is in fact the Midgard’s serpent. It is at this stage the myth is telling us about what this study focuses on.
The myth will be presented in Old Norse and English due to the importance of the text. Using the sources available, I will use all the handwritten vellums we have at our disposal in the mythological text that follows, just as it was done 1848 in the first critically scientific and still the most informative presentation of Snorra Edda and its historical source material. I have put some passages in italics both in the Norse text and in the English translation in order to make the important terms clearer for the reader.
1.3. The text in Old Norse
[…] Þá mælti Útgarđa-Loki: ”Svá fór þessi leikr sem mik varđi. Köttrinn er heldr mikill, en Þórr er lágr ok lítill hjá stórmenni þvi, sem er hér er međ oss.”
Þá mælti Þórr: ”Svá lítinn sem þér kalliđ mik, þá gángi nú til einnhverr ok fáiz viđ mik! Nú em ek reiđr!”
Þá svarar Útgarđa-Loki ok litast um á bekkina ok mælti: ”Eigi sé ek þann mann hér inni, er eigi mun lítilræđi í þykkja at glíma viđ þik.” Ok en mælti hann: ”Sjám fyrst, kalli mér hingat kerlinguna fóstra mína, Elli, ok fáiz Þórr viđ hana ef hann vill. Fellt hefir hon þá menn er mér hafa sýnnz eigi ústerkligri en Þórr er.”
Því næst gekk í höllina kerling ein gömul. Þá mælti Útgarđa-Loki at hon skal taka fang viđ Ása- Þórr. Ekki er langt um at gera. Svá fór fang þat, at því harđara en Þórr knúđist at fánginu, því fastara stóđ hon. Þá tók kerling at leita til bragđa, ok varđ Þórr lauss á fótum, ok vóro þær sviptningar allharđar, ok eigi lengi áđr en Þórr féll á kné öđrum fæti.
Þá gekk til Útgarđa-Loki, bađ þau hætta fánginu ok sagđi svá at Þórr myndi eigi þurfa at bjóđa fleirum mönnum fang í hans höll. […]
1.4. The translated text
[…] Then Utgard’s Loki said: “So it went with this game as I thought. The cat is very big and Thor is low and little in comparison with the impressive men that are here with us.”
Then Thor said: “So little as you call me, let any one of you now come hither and wrestle with me! Now I am wrath!”
Then Utgard’s Loki answered, and looked about on the benches and said: “I do not see the man here within, who does not think it is a trifle to glíma with you.” And he also said: “Let me see first, call me hither the old woman, Elli, who was my wet-nurse and let Thor wrestle with her if he wants. She has felled men who have seemed to me no less stronger than Thor is.”
Then an old woman came into the hall. Then Utgard’s Loki said that she should take hold on Asa-Thor. The tale is not long; so fared the grapple, that the harder Thor tightened his hold the faster she stood. Then began the old woman to try to trip him, and then became Thor loose on his feet, and there were very hard tugging, and it was not long until Thor fell down on one knee.
Then Utgard’s Loki went up and told them to stop the fight, and said that it was no use for Thor to ask anyone else in the hall to wrestle him. […]
1.5. Important terms explanation
Before we go any further I want to give an explanation of certain terms that are used in the myth.
The Old Norse word fang is an ancient term for wrestling/grappling and its exact meaning is “the area which one claps and embraces with the arms and breast” and in Swedish we still use the term fång to describe anything that can be embraced with the arms and breast together. This means that a grip or a hold with the part of the body that is called fang in Old Norse and is still called fång in Swedish, and is most likely the major grip or hold in ancient Scandinavian wrestling. It is also interesting to note that famntag, favnetag and favnetak were Swedish, Danish and Norwegian expressions of wrestling and have the same meaning as fang.
The medieval text states that the actual wrestling starts when both fighters “take hold” or taka fang as it is called in Old Norse. These words clarify that the ancient Scandinavian wrestling, as it is described in Snorra Edda, has been practiced with a fixed hold. The text does not tell us where this hold is taken, but it is obvious that it is taken with the arms and that it has made a wrestling match possible. I do not think it is to daring to presume that it was some kind of back-spanning or back-hold, because it says “that the harder Thor tightened his hold” (at því harđara en Þórr knúđist at fánginu) and that seems to indicate that we are talking about a hold with both hands clasped together probably around the opponent’s back. This style of wrestling is known to have been a popular physical activity of the Scandinavian country people and was called Ryggtag or Ryggkast in Swedish, Ryggjetak, Ryggspenna or Ryggjekneppa in Norwegian and Hryggspenna in Icelandic.
The ancient Norse wrestling could obviously also be called glíma because it is used as a synonym for fang in the text. It should be mentioned that it is the oldest of the three surviving medieval manuscripts of the Snorra Edda that use the word glíma. The other two vellums use fáz instead. To be more exact, fáz and fáiz are verbs used in different tempus made out of the substantive fang. However, the important observation is that the writer of Codex Upsaliensis of the Snorra Edda thinks that glíma is the same thing as fang.
The main objective of a glíma fight is to throw the opponent to the ground and the text states that Elli is known for her skills in glíma because she has “felled” (fellt) men that seemed to be strong enough to put up a good fight. The action needed to fell someone is the use of bragđ (or brögđ in plural) which is a quick or sudden motion in Old Norse. The myth says that the old woman is leita til bragđa and that makes Thor lauss á fótum. This means that Elli is using some kind of tripping techniques that makes Thor lose his balance and start to stumble.
When Thor has lost his balance, Elli puts in the final attack and uses “very hard tugging” (sviptningar allharđar) which ends with that Thor “fell down on one knee” (féll á kné öđrum fæti). To be victorious in glíma/fang in ancient times it seems that the fighter only had to make the opponent touch the ground with anything other than his/her feet, because Utgard’s Loki immediately “told them to stop the fight” (bađ þau hætta fánginu) when Thor fell down on one knee. It is totally clear that the game is over at this point and that Thor has no right to ask anyone else in the hall for a rematch.
I hope that I have made a fairly good picture of the major points in glíma with this explanation before we continue with this study’s major subject.
1.6. The ritual ceremonies and their components
One of the things that strikes me mostly when I study the myth of Snorra Edda is that there are a lot of elements in it that indicate many of the ritual ceremonies surrounding the glíma fight in ancient times.
First of all we have the arena. In this case it is a hall of a chieftain. The beginning of chapter 46 in Gylfaginning says that it was a “great hall” (höll mikla) in a “burg/fortress” (borg). In this hall there were “many men sitting on two benches” (marga men á tvá bekki). Later in the text the men on the benches are specified as “the chieftain’s bodyguard/warriors” (hirđmenn). This means that we have a great hall where the action is supposed to happen and trained warriors are sitting on two benches which are the seats of honour.
Then we have the challenger, or more exactly the person who is trying to get recognition from the distinguished people sitting on the benches in the hall. In the myth, Thor is the challenger. The ruler of the burg and the warriors is called “the king” (konunginn) and he is the only person who communicates with the challenger. In the myth it is Utgard’s Loki who is the ruler. As we see in this study, the challenger is allowed to make challenges only, but the ruler explains the terms and judges the effort made by the challenger.
The challenger must perform three feats of impressive nature in which the last is the glíma fight in order to prove himself worthy. The contest of feats starts with the ruler asking the challenger: “what kind of arts/feats would he be willing to show before them” (hvat þeira íþrótta mun vera birta firir þeim). As we can see, the challenger is allowed to choose what the first feat will be.
In the myth, the first feat is made by drinking an alcoholic beverage from a great horn and the challenger is supposed to empty it in three attempts. The challenger starts by saying: “that he most of all wants to compete in a drinking bout with any man” (at helzt vill hann þat taka til at þreyta drykkio viđ einhvern mann). The ruler answers and sets terms for the challenger: “Of this horn it is thought well drunk, if it goes off in one draught, though some men drink it off in two, but no one is so little a man in his drink that it does not go off in three.” (Af horni þessu þikkir þá vel drukkit ef í einum drykk gengr af,en sumir menn drekka af í tveim drykkium, en engi er svá lítill drykkiumađr at eigi af í þrimr). In the myth, Utgard’s Loki mocks Thor after each draught because the challenger is not showing proof of impressive behaviour. The mocking is made in a courteous way, like “This is well drunk and yet it was not that much.” (Vel er drukkit, ok eigi til mikit.). It should be mentioned that the actual drinking horn is called “the horn of harm” (vítis-horn) in the text, which indicates that it is some kind of punishment to drink from this horn.
After the first feat has been performed the ruler accepts the outcome. He asks the challenger if he is willing to continue the challenge by asking: “Do you want to try more games?” (villtu freista um fleiri leika?). The challenger answers: ”I want to try some more games … But what game do you want to offer me?” (Freista má nú ek enn of nökkura leika …En hvat leik vilit þér nú bióđa mér?). As we see, the ruler and the challenger are communicating in a very courteous way. However, it is the ruler who decides if the challenge continues.
As we have seen, the second feat begins with the ruler asking the challenger if the latter is willing to continue. After getting a positive answer the ruler declares the second feat and in the myth, it is a contest of strength, in this case lifting a heavy object from the ground. Please, note that the object to be lifted is a living creature and not a dead weight. As it has been mentioned before the myth uses a cat which in fact is the enormous Midgard’s serpent being the object to be lifted. In the text Utgard’s Loki specifies that the object should be “lifted up from the earth” (hefia upp af iörđo). It is obvious that the heavy object is supposed to be lifted as high as possible by the challenger, because the myth says: “Thor raised his hands … Thor had got them as high as ever he could” (Þórr rétti upp höndina … Þórr seildiz svá langt upp sem hann mátti lengzt).
The outcome of the second feat is commented on in a mocking way by the ruler: “So it went with this game as I thought. The cat is very big and Thor is low and little in comparison with the impressive men that are here with us.” (Svá fór þessi leikr sem mik varđi. Köttrinn er heldr mikill, en Þórr er lágr ok lítill hjá stórmenni þvi, sem er hér er međ oss.). Which make the challenger answer: “So little as you call me, let any one of you now come hither and wrestle with me! Now I am wrath!” (Svá lítinn sem þér kalliđ mik, þá gángi nú til einnhverr ok fáiz viđ mik! Nú em ek reiđr!). It now looks like the challenger is deciding the third feat as he has done in the first case. The difference is that the challenger issues a stronger challenge by letting everyone know that he is going to use his wrath on the person who dares to wrestle him.
The ruler accepts the challenge and declares that the third feat should be a contest of glíma, which is the same as “wrestling/grappling” (fang). The ruler also decides who will be the challenger’s opponent in the fight and chooses an experienced wrestler who has proven her skills by having: “felled men who have seemed to me no less stronger than Thor is” (fellt hefir hon þá menn er mér hafa sýnnz eigi ústerkligri en Þórr er). This wrestler is “old” (gömul) but still very able in the art of glíma because she knows how to “try to trip” or more exactly “how to find out the right tripping-techniques” (leita til bragđa). These skills make her victorious in the bout.
The ruler orders the fighters to “stop the fight” (hætta fánginu) when the challenger has lost his balance and “fell down on one knee” (féll á kné öđrum fæti). After having made this order Utgard’s Loki specifies: “that it was no use for Thor to ask anyone else in the hall to wrestle him” (at Þórr myndi eigi þurfa at bjóđa fleirum mönnum fang í hans höll). These words make it clear for the challenger as well as for the audience that he has no right to continue the competition or make any more challenges to the distinguished people in the hall. The decision of the ruler can obviously not be overruled, and therefore we do not hear complaints from the challenger or the storyteller in the myth.
An interesting detail is that the ruler does not mock the challenger for his efforts when the third and last challenge is over. This may be a token of gratitude towards the challenger after earning the respect of the ruler by having had the courage in being put to the test in the hall of the warriors.
2. A structural presentation of the information given in Snorra Edda
2.1. The major players
The major players in the ritual are the ruler and the challenger, which communicate in a very polite and courteous way. It is also important to mention the distinguished warriors belonging to the ruler and sitting on the benches in the hall/arena, because they are the people which already have the recognition the challenger is striving for.
2.2. The ritual and its major points
It is the ruler who starts the ritual by asking the challenger if the latter knows any arts/feats/sports of impressive nature that he can perform. The challenger answers by naming a feat he thinks he is good at. Then the ruler gives his approval of the mentioned art and lets the challenger show his skills in this sport. However the ruler explains the terms to the challenger and what is expected in the feat he has chosen. The ruler comments on the challenger’s efforts and does it in a mocking but courteous way. The ruler’s comments always contain a polite question whether the challenger is willing or dares continue. The challenger decides the first and the third feat. The ruler decides the second feat. This means that the ritual contains three feats that the challenger is to perform. When the last feat has ended, the ruler announces that the contest is over and gives his conclusion of the challenger’s efforts. This is done with respect and does not include any mocking even if the outcome of the last feat is negative for the challenger.
2.3. The feats
As we have already stated the feats are three in number. They are quite different in their structure, but they are all performed in a competitive way. The first feat is a drinking contest where the challenger is supposed to empty a big drinking horn filled with an alcoholic beverage. The challenger is allowed three attempts to empty it, but the fewer draughts the better. The second feat is a contest of strength and is done by lifting a heavy object from the ground. The challenger is supposed to lift the object as high as possible with his hands, that indicates it should be lifted over the head. The heavy object is not a dead weight which makes it more difficult to control. The third feat is a wrestling match and is the final test of the challenger. In this feat both strength and skills are needed. The aim of the fight is to make the opponent lose his/her balance and the game is lost when one touches the ground with anything other than the feet.
3. Conclusion of the study
3.1. The aim of the ritual and its ceremonies
When studying a myth, it is of major importance to find out in what kind of cultural context the story seems to be told. In our case we are talking about a pagan myth of ancient Scandinavia that can be found in medieval manuscripts from the beginning of the 14th Century. We also know for sure that the original text of these manuscripts are at least one hundred years older because the collector of the myths wrote them in the first part of the 13th Century. It is not my purpose to discuss the age or the origin of the myths that can be found in the Snorra Edda, but I want to stress that these myths are the oldest mythological stories that have survived in the Old Norse language and they are told in a heathen context. As an important information regarding the age of the myth it should be mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were Christianised in the 10th and 11th Centuries. This indicates an origin which is much older than the era when the myths have been collected in Snorra Edda.
If we focus on the cultural context of the myth, it is clear that the stage, where the feats are performed, is a great hall of a chieftain or more exactly of a king. The warriors belonging to the king’s bodyguard are the audience. This indicates that the feats, which are performed in the myth, are connected to the cultural context of a Scandinavian king and his armed bodyguard.
Like in all religions, the myths in Norse mythology are usually related to real life in some way. The myths were an oral tradition constructed to explain real life phenomenon’s and teach morals and values. This makes it fairly probable that the three mentioned feats were of great importance to the warrior society of the North in heathen times. If we examine closely the contents of the myth, it seems to describe the ritual ceremonies which are performed in front of the king and his warriors by a person aiming to get acceptance of the group. In other words we are talking about some form of initiation.
The feats are very physical in their appearance. The ceremonial circumstances are enhanced by the fact that the challenger first of all is supposed to empty a drinking horn full of alcoholic beverage. As well as the ritualistic appearance of it, being a good drinker is obviously a thing that was held in high regard in the cultural context of the warrior society of the North. It is not difficult to understand that the second feat, where the challenger shows proof of his strength, was a respected quality of warriors. However it is the third and last feat that really puts the challenger to the test because in this test the challenger must prove his skills as a fighter and that is of course the most important quality of a warrior.
The third test is the only feat where the challenger must fight another person and therefore it demands more skills and efforts than the other feats. The art of combat chosen for the fight is called glíma/fang and is an Old Norse expression for describing wrestling. By choosing an unarmed fighting style, it indicates that the aim is not to kill the opponent. Knowing that the skilled warriors are the audience, it is interesting to note that an unarmed fighting style is used to ascertain the skills of the challenger.
If we analyse the major components of the ritual ceremonies that surround the third and final test, we get a clear picture of what kind of skills the warrior society of the North approved of and thought to recognize a true fighter. The challenge made by the challenger before the last feat starts, is directed towards all the warriors and states that he has the courage to fight any one of them. The courage to take on all comers must be the most important mark of a warrior because the latter must be able to handle any opposition encountered on the field of battle. The ruler decides who will fight the challenger and the choice is made by estimating the challenger’s powers and giving him an opponent who does not seem impressive in appearance but has proven to be victorious in many fights. This fighter is much older than the challenger and knows how to act in unarmed combat. The chosen opposition lets the challenger prove his skills at the beginning of the fight, but quickly repels the attacks with cunning and efficient moves that make the challenger lose his balance and the fight. The ruler interferes the moment he understands that the fight is over and announces the verdict which ends the ritual.
If the myth is related to the social context it describes, the analysis of the fight will most likely point out the virtues that the warrior society of the North held in high esteem in ancient times. A closer look at the fight tells us that a fighter must be able to stand strong when he/she is pressed hard and should take the opportunity to attack when a chance appears. These virtues are easy to understand and accept, but of course, is more difficult to perform in reality and in stressful situations.
The conclusion of the study is that the myth in Snorra Edda gives us a fairly good description of the ritual ceremonies that surrounded glíma fights in ancient times. The glíma fight and its preceding feats are used by the skilled warriors and their chieftain to find out if the aspiring warrior has what it takes to become a real warrior. By using an unarmed combat style to test the challenger’s fighting skills, the chieftain and his warriors could analyse the aspiring warrior’s talents without exposing him or the opponent to serious danger. This indicates that the warrior society of the North thought that the martial art called glíma contained all of the fighting aspects needed. It also means that the Scandinavian warriors held glíma in the highest regards and that it was a combat style known to all warriors.
I do not think that we are stretching the facts too far if we state that the three feats described in the myth, provide us with a clear picture of the deeds used in Scandinavia when a warrior is initiated as an accepted member of the warrior society by proving the virtues necessary to cope with in his new line of work. This means that a warrior was supposed to be a great drinker without getting drunk. He also was to be strong and to know how to fight. However, it is the ritualistic circumstance with courteous questions and answers surrounding the feats that give the appearance of a ceremonial initiation of a warrior. It is interesting to note that mocking was an important aspect in the course of initiation which unveils the good spirit of the ritual.
4. Excursus – The result of the study observed in a wider perspective
4.1. The warrior society of ancient Scandinavia
While discussing the subject it is important to give some more information about the ancient warrior society of the North which is closely related to the myth described in Snorra Edda. It so happens that the historical sources are very favourable with information concerning the Scandinavian warrior society and its laws.
The most important sources in this matter is the Danish Witherlogh or “the law of the king and his warriors” and the Norwegian Hirđskrá or “the scroll that tells about the king and his warriors”. The Witherlogh is preserved in a Latin version from the late 12th Century written down by a Danish historian and warrior Sven Aggeson (ca 1130/1140–1190/1200). His text states that it can be traced back to the early 11th Century. The Hirđskrá is preserved in the Norse language from the late 13th Century and the actual text tells about an old and a new version of this law, in which the oldest is from the early 11th Century or even older.
It is a well known fact that the best historical sources are found in law-books because it gives high quality information about the laws and customs which the society accepts or obeys. A study of the abovementioned law-books presents the interesting information that they were founded on the idea that the king and his warriors are equal before the law. This meant that any new person who desired to become the king’s warrior, had to get an official acceptance from both the king and his warrior. It is clearly stated in chapter 25 (or chapter 30 in some vellums) of Hirđskrá that the aspiring warrior must get recognition from both the king and all his warriors before he will be given an official status of a warrior.
When looking at the skills and virtues thought highly of, it does not come as a shock that both the Witherlogh and the Hirđskrá state that practical knowledge of martial arts is the most important virtue of the warrior. However, it is interesting to note that the Hirđskrá also mentions that the warrior should never get drunk while drinking. This means that two of the three feats performed in the myth of Snorra Edda have direct references to the ancient laws of the Scandinavian warrior society. I further would like to stress that unanimous decision given by the king and his warriors was necessary for the aspiring warrior to get recognition and acceptance by the warrior society. The ancient warrior laws of Scandinavia do not say how the king and his warriors substantiated their decision, but it may be very close to the ritual ceremony described in Snorra Edda.
I hope this little excursus gives the reader a better chance to understand the underlined customs and culture which haven given birth to the myth of Thor’s visit to Utgard’s Loki.
4.2. Closing words
This study has been focusing on a mythological text that is rich in information concerning the physical feats that were performed and respected by the warrior society of the North in ancient times. However, we should not forget to mention that the glíma fight is fought between a man and a woman in which the woman is victorious. The fact that the woman of age can beat a strong man in glíma by using experience and cunning moves is well known in the Scandinavian countries. The greatest evidence of this is that the expression of käringkrokar, which means “the old woman’s hooks”, was used in the Swedish language in older times for all the tripping-techniques of glíma. This expression was used up to the beginning of the 20th Century in Sweden and its meaning can be traced back to the pagan myth mentioned in Snorra Edda which was used in this study.
About the author
Lars Magnar Enoksen was born in 1960 in Sweden. He has Norwegian/Swedish ancestry and is a well known expert in ancient Scandinavian history. As an author he has written many critically acclaimed books about the Viking age culture of which mythology, runes and the martial arts are his favourite subjects. Besides being published in the major Nordic languages, his books can also be found in English and Japanese.
Lars Magnar Enoksen is internationally recognized to be an outstanding expert in Glíma both in the practical and theoretical sense of the art.PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced that it has completed its evaluation of strategic alternatives for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and has decided the unit will remain part of the company.
“HP objectively evaluated the strategic, financial and operational impact of spinning off PSG. It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees,” said Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer. “HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.”
The strategic review involved subject matter experts from across the businesses and functions. The data-driven evaluation revealed the depth of the integration that has occurred across key operations such as supply chain, IT and procurement. It also detailed the significant extent to which PSG contributes to HP’s solutions portfolio and overall brand value. Finally, it also showed that the cost to recreate these in a standalone company outweighed any benefits of separation.
The outcome of this exercise reaffirms HP’s model and the value for its customers and shareholders. PSG is a key component of HP’s strategy to deliver higher value, lasting relationships with consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and enterprise customers. The HP board of directors is confident that PSG can drive profitable growth as part of the larger entity and accelerate solutions from other parts of HP’s business.
PSG has a history of innovation and technological leadership as well as an established record of industry-leading profitability. It is the No. 1 manufacturer of personal computers in the world with revenues totaling $40.7 billion for fiscal year 2010.
“As part of HP, PSG will continue to give customers and partners the advantages of product innovation and global scale across the industry’s broadest portfolio of PCs, workstations and more,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP. “We intend to make the leading PC business in the world even better.”
More information is available at www.hp.com/investor/PSG-Decision.
About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. The world’s largest technology company, HP brings together a portfolio that spans printing, personal computing, software, services and IT infrastructure at the convergence of the cloud and connectivity, creating seamless, secure, context-aware experiences for a connected world. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.
This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of HP and its consolidated subsidiaries could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements of the plans, strategies and objectives of management for future operations, including execution of growth strategies, transformation initiatives and restructuring plans; any statements concerning expected development, performance or market share relating to products and services; any statements regarding anticipated operational and financial results; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include macroeconomic and geopolitical trends and events; the competitive pressures faced by HP’s businesses; the development and transition of new products and services (and the enhancement of existing products and services) to meet customer needs and respond to emerging technological trends; the execution and performance of contracts by HP and its customers, suppliers and partners; the protection of HP’s intellectual property assets, including intellectual property licensed from third parties; integration and other risks associated with business combination and investment transactions; the hiring and retention of key employees; expectations and assumptions relating to the execution and timing of growth strategies, transformation initiatives and restructuring plans; the resolution of pending investigations, claims and disputes; and other risks that are described in HP’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2011 and HP’s other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to HP’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2010. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
© 2011 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.Education Dept. torched for misspelling W.E.B. Du Bois in tweet
CLOSE Twitter users had a field day after the Department of Education misspelled W.E.B. Du Bois on Twitter. Many blamed the new education secretary Betsy Devos. USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Well, this isn't going to help Betsy DeVos, Trump's controversial new Education secretary, win any new fans.
The Department of Education on Sunday tweeted a quote about the importance of education from the late W.E.B. Du Bois, the revered historian and civil rights activist who helped found the NAACP.
But the effort to highlight Du Bois’ famous words backfired—because whoever sent the Tweet misspelled Du Bois’ name, as "DeBois."
The response was ruthless, with Twitter followers of the agency lampooning the misspelling.
@usedgov It's either a terrible mistake or a perverse foray into humor. His name is W.E.B. Du Bois. Screenshot saved. — Jeffrey Guterman (@JeffreyGuterman) February 12, 2017
The Senate narrowly confirmed DeVos last week despite a firestorm of complaints about her nomination. The billionaire philanthropist is best known as a vocal advocate for charter schools and vouchers, which critics see as a way to undermine public education.
She had a rocky confirmation hearing, during which she seemed to not be familiar with critical education issues, such as the federal Individuals with Disabilities Act.
Several hours after the first Tweet was posted, the Education Department re-posted the message with the correct spelling and apologized for the mistake. But the apology included another mistake, this time a grammatical error.
"Our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo," the department tweeted.
Post updated - our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo. — US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2kzwro0Concession to studio allowed him to keep sequel on film, and not digital
J.J. Abrams knows what he likes. And while many movies are now being shot digitally, he wants to stick to celluloid film.
Even if that means converting “Star Trek 2” into 3-D.
Abrams said he was against shooting the sequel in 3-D because he didn’t want to use digital cameras, which would be required for shooting a film in 3-D. He also was against a 3-D post-production conversion because, well, those films don’t look that great after the fact.
But some of the post-production crews at Paramount Pictures showed Abrams what a 3-D conversion could look like, using scenes from his 2009 “Star Trek” film, and the director said it changed his mind.
“That was the thing which made me think it would be OK,” Abrams told reporters at the recent Television Critics Association Press Tour. He was there promoting his new Fox series “Alcatraz.”
“I wanted it to match the look of the first and shoot it anamorphically,” he said. “Then I saw the first movie converted: It was actually really cool. So I was OK with [converting ‘Star Trek 2’ to 3-D] as long as I could shoot it the way I wanted to.”
Of course, that begs the question: Is Paramount planning a post-conversion 3-D edition of the 2009 film?
Filming in 3-D got real hot over the past few years, thanks to the huge box office take from films like “Avatar,” and the fact that movie theaters can charge a premium on tickets for 3-D films. However, 3-D has not done so well lately, suggesting that the movement may be more of a fad than a movement.
Morgan Stanley reported late last year that 3-D films are generating just 43 percent of revenue per title, compared to 54 percent in 2010. Yet, sales of 3-D tickets accounted for just 18 percent of the box office in 2011, but that’s expected to rebound to 20 percent this year according to some analysts.
Proponents of 3-D point out, however, that when you put 3-D on large release movies, the returns are extraordinary. So if “Star Trek 2” generates anywhere near the business as the first film in 2009, Paramount will certainly have nothing to lose by converting “Star Trek 2” into 3-D in post-production.A massive sea turtle caught in fishing gear off the coast of New Jersey was freed by a team of rescuers this weekend.
A good Samaritan on a recreational fishing boat spotted the entangled, leatherback turtle offshore on Saturday and reported it to the Coast Guard, which then led an effort to rescue the approximately 800-pound animal.
A crew from the Coast Guard's Atlantic City station took a member of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine to a 45-foot response boat located near Corson's Inlet. A crew from the Coast |
not bother them at all, while 36 percent said it bothered them a lot. Eleven percent said it bothered them “a little,” and one percent was not sure.
Surprisingly, Florida voters overwhelmingly supported President Obama’s recent actions to open up relations with Cuba. Sixty-seven percent approved of the actions, and only 22 percent disapproved. Eleven percent were not sure.
Sen. Marco Rubio appears to be handily leading his Democratic opponent Rep. Patrick Murphy for Senate, holding a ten-point lead. Rubio has 51 percent support to Murphy’s 41 percent.
The poll was conducted October 21-24 by Selzer & Co, based on interviews with 953 Florida residents, who say they will definitely vote or have already voted in the 2016 general election. (An oversample of 148 likely voters identified as Hispanic on the Florida registered voter list was conducted, leading to a total of 212 likely Hispanic voters.)Most of your favorite super heroes are actually side projects. Most super heroes don’t do that whole super hero thing as their full-time gig. In fact, most of them have got a day job.
I know you’re busting your ass, Mr. and/or Mrs. Startup type. I know you’re working hard on a side project or idea while continuing to slave away at the day job. All in the hopes that someday—someday—you might get to turn that side project into a full-time gig. But it can be taxing. I know it.
So every once in awhile, I like to try to give you a little motivation. A little help. A little something that makes staying up that extra four hours a little easier. And that little something today is this: Most of your favorite super heroes are actually side projects.
I hear you. “WTF is he talking about now?”
But bear with me. Let’s take a few minutes to think about what you’re doing in the context of being a super hero. First off, because you are pretty heroic following your dream. And second, because it might just give you that inspiration you need. Third, it just goes to show that you can do something incredible that has nothing to do with revenue.
I mean, just stop and think about it for a second.
Most super heroes don’t do that whole super hero thing as their full-time gig. In fact, most of them have got a day job. The super hero thing? It’s a side project, true believer. It’s something they do in their free-time.
That’s right. Super heroes? Just a bunch of working stiffs with 9-to-5 jobs. But with amazingly awesome side projects on which they work when they’re not in the office.
Peter Parker? Day job. Superman? Day job. Tony Stark? Day job. Bruce Wayne? Day job. Fantastic Four? Day job, day job, day job, day job. And they were astronauts. ASTRONAUTS. And they still felt like pursuing their side project. Or maybe Reed Richards pushed them into it.
Whatever. The point is they could have been doing something else. Profitable. You get the drift.
All of these folks had a much more lucrative and profitable careers than “being a super hero.” But guess what they decided to do? They decided to do what they knew they had to do. To follow their passion.
I mean, what if they had said “There’s no business model or revenue stream for this whole ‘saving people’ thing. So I’m not going to do it.”? That would have been a huge loss. Your not following your intuition—not pursuing your side project—could be an equally big loss.
What? You’re still not buying it?
Okay. How about this? Super heroes even start their side projects the same way entrepreneurs do. And much like Web startups, it doesn’t much matter what name you choose for the project. You just have to do it.
Let’s take Peter Parker. He’s minding his own business when suddenly he’s bitten by the startup bug. And he realizes that he has something special. Something he could call his own. Something with which he could change lives.
Or Bruce Wayne. After his own trauma, he recognizes the inefficiencies of the municipal justice system. Frustrated, he develops a way to shortcut the red tape and bring criminals to justice. And he bootstraps his own business and brings on a partner to make it happen. He even gets additional assistance from friends and family.
Or Tony Stark who, after tinkering with some technology, figures out a better way to do what his massive corporation does. But he continues to pursue it and use it for good even though—let’s be honest—the capital expenditures have his startup deep in the red.
Or take Bruce Banner. I mean, he used to just get angry about the way things were. But once he found a startup that needed him, he was much much happier. For a little while anyway. He’s kind of a serial entrepreneur that one.
Heck, Professor Xavier liked his side project so much, he started a startup incubator that helps other mutants learn how to turn their side projects into full-time gigs. He’s like the venture capitalist of the super hero world.
Same with Nick Fury. Making connections among super heroes so that they could form more viable startups.
I could go on and on—in the Marvel universe at least—about examples of how what you’re doing, what you’re pursuing, is much the same as many of the super heroes out there. Because they saw a problem. They encountered something they knew they could fix. They took a risk to make something better. Or they simply were born with the skills to make it happen.
However you look at it, super heroes start as side projects. And sometimes they become startups. But they have to follow their passion first. And it has nothing to do with revenue. Or business acumen. Or ROI. It has to do with solving a problem. And making something better than what exists today.
So what side project are you pursuing? You could be the next super hero.
(Image courtesy popculturegeek. Used under Creative Commons.)
Want to connect with more awesome dots in the Portland startup community? Consider joining us over on Patreon ❤️
Like this: Like Loading...Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Polish fisherman Rado Papiewski wants to have the sign removed
A fishery which has a sign banning Polish and "Eastern bloc" anglers is facing possible legal action.
The owner of Field Farm Fisheries in Oxfordshire said he had caught some anglers stealing fish.
Polish fisherman Rado Papiewski has crowdfunded £5,000 to pay for a private prosecution and have the sign removed.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said the sign was unlawful and it would take "enforcement action" if necessary.
Mr Papiewski, from Doncaster, South Yorkshire, runs a project called Building Bridges, for the Angling Trust, which aims to "educate and integrate" anglers from other countries.
The project website explains that anglers from countries such as Poland have traditionally caught fish "for the pot", whereas in Britain anglers generally return fish to the water.
Mr Papiewski said he was shocked when he saw the sign in Launton, near Bicester.
He believes it is in breach of the Equality Act 2010.
Image copyright Rado Papiewski Image caption Rado Papiewski has crowdfunded more than £5,000 to pay for legal fees
"It discriminates against a group of people. It could be any nationality on this sign.
"It's [before] my time but… people are commenting that this is like going back to the 1960s," he said.
He wants the sign removed quickly so other people are not encouraged to follow suit.
Mr Papiewski said he approached the police, but they said it was not a criminal matter. Thames Valley Police confirmed the investigation was passed to the EHRC.
An EHRC spokeswoman described the sign as discriminatory and unlawful, and said it would be writing to the fishery to advise it to take it down.
"It's right to challenge such out of date practices and any business that believes this is acceptable should think again before they find themselves facing legal action," she said.
Fishery owner Billy Evans defended the sign.
The former Conservative councillor, has had similar signs on his land since 2009.
He said: "I shall still stand up for what I believe in.
"If they want to call me a racist for stopping thieves from coming on my private property that's what they'll do.
"I know I'm right and I'm doing the right thing."Bill Whittle is back with another Firewall video commentary. This time Bill takes on the recent massacre in Orlando, which is not just another case of "homegrown extremism." Despite the shameful censoring of the transcript of the 911 call, the Orlando murders were just another step in the long, bloody march of [OMITTED]; another [OMITTED] responding to the call of [OMITTED] to commit mass murder In the name of [OMITTED].
Warning: the video contains visually graphic content. Transcript below:
49 people are dead in Orlando, in the worst mass shooting in the nation’s history.
Barack Obama initial public statement concerning this latest unspeakable horror can be summed up in a few sentences:
First: Islam? What’s that?
Second: Easy access to guns caused the massacre
Third: We Americans are to blame.
Fourth: This is just another case of homegrown extremism.
The word Islam never came up during the Presidents initial remarks to the nation, so let me see if I can fill in a bit of his educational deficiency.
Mr. Obama, t he word Islam means “submission” and the religion of Islam divides the world into two spheres: Dar al Islam, which means the house of Islam -- the House of Submission -- and Dar al Harb, or the House of War. Islam has been at war with every other religion on earth since Mohammed began his conquests.
At present, Islam is at war with non-Muslims in Orlando, Paris, Brussels, Munich, Rome, and in fact in every western country. They are at war with Orthodox Christians and Atheists in Russia; at war with Hindus in Kashmir in India; at war with Buddhists and Hindus in Asia; at war with Jews in the Middle East, at war with Animists in Africa, with Copts in Egypt, Christians in Syria and Iraq and now they’re at war here.
I’m rather surprised you haven’t heard of them.
A few months ago, a Muslim Imam came to Orlando and said that homosexuals should be killed “out of compassion.” The FBI wanted to warn gay bars about this threat, but you specifically forbade them from doing so.
Why have you consistently ordered the words Islam and Jihad and others from our intelligence briefings? Why did you tell the United Nations that “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam?”
You consistently order our military to abort airstrikes against ISIS and order our FBI to scrub intelligence files of any Islamic references, and to not investigate or even inform us of these threats.
You claim that stricter gun control laws could have prevented this Muslim mass murder. Actually, Mr. President, they have very strict laws against such so-called “assault rifles” in Beslan, Russia; in Paris, and in Brussels. They do not have gun shops in Paris, but they do have at least three Mosques in Paris where they discovered military armories packed with these kind of weapons, and more.
Muslims are throwing homosexuals to their deaths from the tops of buildings; they are using knives to stab Jews in Israel, and they are using stones to kill not the rapist but rather the victims of rape. You can write all the laws against guns, or knives, or stones or even gravity that you want to. They will find a way to keep killing what they hate, and as we have seen, they hate pretty much everything that is not them.
So Mr. Obama, when you do not condemn Islamic terror – when you refuse to even mention it – what do you think that does to the millions and millions of kind, decent, loving Muslims in America or around the world, who are more afraid of these murdering savages than anyone? If you will not even name these blood-soaked assassins, let alone defend all Americans – including Muslim Americans -- against their butchery, why would Muslim Americans risk their necks to help their neighbors when doing so could get them killed by the same domestic savages and murderous ideology that you pretend don’t exist?
And finally, to the gay Americans, and Jewish Americans, and American women who vote for you and your party in such large numbers; you who brag about deals with Iran as gay men are hung on construction cranes in Teheran; who sympathize with the ones that stab and blow up Jews in Israel; and who stone to death or pour acid upon or consign to a life in a movable prison half of their entire population, without so much as a peep from the caring, caring, sympathetic and caring Obamaphiles: what is the matter with you?Tears Run Rings in photo booth; Photo Credit: Tears Run Rings
Tears Run Rings’ new LP In Surges is set for release on December 2nd via Deep Space Recordings on limited Icy Blue & Blue in White vinyl.
Tears Run Rings is a West Coast shoegaze/dream-pop band with members living in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. This is their third full-length, and second for Deep Space Recordings, with Distance having been released in 2010. Other releases include A Question and an Answer EP (2007) and Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Never (2008).
In Surges has been six years in the making. Over that time span, the band met up on several occasions to write, record, and mix the album together, in between starting families and recording separately. Full of lush guitars, haunting melodies, and layered, shimmering vocals, the album picks up right where Distance left off.
Pre-order “In Surges” at Deep Space Recordings
Official Site
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The Big Takeover is delighted to premiere the visually dream-hazy performance video for Tears Run Rings’ shimmering and propulsive shoegaze/dream-rock number “Belly Up”.
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DisqusMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The Vinci engine can be reignited multiple times
Manufacturers say they are making rapid progress in the development of Europe's new rocket - the Ariane 6.
The vehicle is due to enter service in 2020, gradually replacing the existing workhorse, the Ariane 5.
The prime contractor, the recently rebranded ArianeGroup, gave an update on the status of the programme here at this week's Paris Air Show.
"We're on track with our roadmap and Ariane 6 is progressing very well," CEO Alain Charmeau told BBC News.
Image copyright ARIANEGROUP Image caption The Ariane 64 (four strap-on boosters) will be the most powerful version of the rocket
"Perhaps the most spectacular highlight at the moment is the testing of our Vinci engine. It's a brand new engine that will be on our new, versatile upper-stage. And on Monday we had another successful test. We're now well above 100 hundred tests."
The Vinci can be stopped and restarted multiple times. It will permit the Ariane 6 to conduct a broader range of missions than its predecessor.
It can also bring the upper-stage out of orbit after it has dropped off the satellite payload. This is a nod to the tightening "clean space" requirements that demand rocket operators leave as little debris in space as possible.
The recent Vinci firings are being conducted at a facility in Vernon, France. But even as these continue, production of the engine has started at a factory in Ottobrunn, Germany. This will be ramped up over the course of the next three years.
Ariane 6 is envisaged as something of a "jack of all trades" launcher. It will assume both the heavy-lifting duties of the Ariane 5 and the medium-lifting missions of the Russian Soyuz rocket that also operates out of Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
Ariane 6 will launch everything from constellations of small telecommunications satellites to giant, next-generation space telescopes. To achieve this, it will come in a couple of flavours - the A62 and the A64.
Each will have a liquid-fuelled (hydrogen and oxygen) Vinci upper-stage, and a liquid-fuelled core-stage that uses an improved version of the Ariane 5's current Vulcain engine.
But then two or four solid-fuelled boosters will be added, depending on how heavy the satellite payload is and where it needs to be placed in orbit, or even beyond Earth.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption ArianeGroup CEO Alain Charmeau: "We will be on time"
These boosters are being produced by the Italian Avio group and the first casing is due to head out to Kourou in the next few days to be filled with an inert fuel grain - to verify the overall design.
"It's an extremely light motor; very performing," said Avio's CEO Giulio Ranzo. "It's going to contribute significantly to the overall competitiveness of the launcher and the flexibility of turning it from a 62 to a 64."
Image copyright AVIO Image caption The boosters will also feature as the first stage of Europe's smaller Vega rocket
A new range of dispensers is also being developed for the Ariane 6. Dispensers are the devices that hold the satellite payload to the upper-stage during the ascent of the rocket, only letting it go when the right orbit is reached.
The expected menagerie of satellites will be mirrored by an equally diverse set of dispensers. Essential as well are new fairings - the clamshell-shaped covers that protect a satellite during the early flight phase up through the atmosphere.
Ariane 6 is getting two - one 14m high, the other 20m high.
These carbon fibre pieces are being made in one of the biggest curing ovens in the world by Swiss aerospace company RUAG Space.
"Our factory is up and running already," said chief executive Peter Guggenbach. "We've reduced the integration steps from five to one. The production is highly automated. Robots control every millimetre, ensuring we have zero defects."
Image copyright ARIANEGROUP Image caption New design and new approaches - but fewer people will also contribute to the reduction in costs
The manufacturing consortium is looking for a 40% cost reduction, at least, in the Ariane 6, compared with the Ariane 5. In part that is coming from exploiting new materials and new manufacturing techniques (3D printing, friction stir welding, augmented reality design, etc) and in part by maximising the common use of elements in both the 62 and 64 variants.
Avio's solid-fuelled booster is also the same as the first stage on the company's Vega rocket, which launches much smaller satellites.
But a big cost saving will come from simply employing fewer people.
"There is a transition from Ariane 5 to Ariane 6 (from 2020 to 2023), but from 2024, 2025 onwards - our workforce will be 30% less than today," explained Hans Steininger, the boss of MT Aerospace, which is making the rocket's huge metallic propellant tanks.
The Ariane 6 is on a tight schedule. The European Space Agency (Esa), whose member states are funding a large proportion of the development costs, has fixed 16 July 2020 as a deadline for the first flight.
"We are really at full speed," said Esa's director of launchers, Daniel Neuenschwander. "But we have to be to meet the target of July 2020. I signed an incentive scheme with industry, so they should be motivated," he told BBC News.TORONTO (Reuters) - Toronto taxi drivers are launching a class-action lawsuit against ride-sharing company Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL], seeking more than C$400 million ($307.27 million) in damages and an injunction to stop it operating in the Canadian province of Ontario.
The logo of car-sharing service app Uber on a smartphone over a reserved lane for taxis in a street is seen in this photo illustration taken in Madrid on December 10, 2014. REUTERS/Sergio Perez
Law firm Sutts, Strosberg LLP, which is representing the taxi drivers, said in a statement on Thursday that the named plaintiff, cab driver Dominik Konjevic, alleges that “Uber X and Uber XL have created an enormous marketplace for illegal transportation in Toronto”.
Jay Strosberg, a partner at the law firm, said the proposed case covers all drivers and taxi companies in Ontario. If a judge agrees to hear the case, drivers and cab companies can choose to be omitted.
“This protectionist suit is without merit,” Uber Canada spokeswoman Susie Heath said via email. “As we saw from a recent court ruling in Ontario, Uber is operating legally and is a business model distinct from traditional taxi services.”
Uber is fighting for legal status in cities around the world as authorities weigh the legality of its phone-based app.
The low-cost Uber X service is the San Francisco-based company’s most controversial, since it uses contract drivers who are not licensed as taxi operators.
An Ontario court earlier this month rejected the City of Toronto’s bid to halt Uber’s activities in Canada’s largest city, saying there was no evidence the company operates as a taxi broker.
Strosberg said the class action case is based on provincial law, distinguishing it from the municipal regulations in question in the earlier Toronto case.
Toronto Mayor John Tory has said he wants city council to update bylaws to incorporate Uber, which he says is operating outside the current, outdated rules.
On Wednesday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio postponed a vote on whether to cap Uber’s growth in the city.
News of the proposed class action by Toronto cab drivers comes on the same day that Uber Canada said it is expanding to more Ontario cities, including Hamilton and Guelph.
In Canada, the ride-sharing app is already operational in Ottawa, Edmonton and Montreal as well as Toronto. Uber withdrew from Vancouver after a moratorium was imposed.CHICAGO (Reuters) - Researchers have developed some of the tiniest solar cells ever made and said on Thursday the organic material could potentially be painted on to surfaces.
So far, they have managed to pull 11 volts of electricity from a small array of the cells, which are each just a quarter of the size of a grain of white rice, said Xiaomei Jiang of the University of South Florida, who led the research.
“They could be sprayed on any surface that is exposed to sunlight — a uniform, a car, a house,” Jiang said in a telephone interview.
“Because it is in a solution, you can design a special spray gun where you can control the size and thickness. You could produce a paste and brush it on,” she said.
Eventually, Jiang envisions the solar cells being used as a coating on a variety of surfaces, including clothing. They might generate energy to power small electronic devices or charge a cell phone, for example.
Solar cells, which convert energy from the sun into electricity, are in increasing demand amid unstable gas prices and worries over global warming.
Most conventional solar cells are made up of silicon wafers, a brittle substance that limits where they can be placed.
Many teams of scientists are working on different ways to make solar cells more flexible in the hopes of taking better advantage of energy from the sun.
The tiny cells from Jiang’s lab are made from an organic polymer that has the same electrical properties of silicon wafers but can be dissolved and applied to flexible materials.
“The main components are carbon and hydrogen — materials that are present in nature and are environmentally friendly,” Jiang said.
In research published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, Jiang and colleagues showed an array of 20 of these cells could generate 7.8 volts of electricity, about half the power needed to run a microscopic sensor for detecting dangerous chemicals and toxins.
Her team is now refining the manufacturing process with the hope of doubling that output to 15 volts. “It’s a matter of months,” Jiang said.Did you visit Santa this year, hmm? Or write him a fancy old-timey papery letter? Tell ‘im all your wishes ‘n desires? No, of course you didn’t. You’ve been a terrible person all year, and he ain’t bringing you shit. You know it. He knows it. And I know it. But how do I know? Well for one you’re here reading this, and probably instead of working too. That’s proof enough right there. Furthermore, Santa’s been mighty busy this year so he’s had to outsource some of the tasks he normally handles himself and I happened to get in on a bit of the action. Basically, what I’m getting at is I’ve been watching you sleep, which is nothing new, but now it’s for money so that makes it okay.“The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check.”
— President Obama, remarks on gun violence, Jan. 16, 2013
“Studies estimate that nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement.”
— “Now Is the Time: The president’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence,” released Jan. 16
Earlier this week, we gave this claim a “verdict pending.” We said we faced a bit of a conundrum because the 40 percent statistic was based on a single, relatively small survey of 251 people from nearly two decades ago — but that foes of gun control had made it difficult for further research to be conducted.
We also gave kudos to Vice President Biden for acknowledging that the statistic might not be accurate. So we said we would be watching carefully for how the statistic would be used by gun-control advocates in the future.
We also noted that the microdata used in the original survey could be accessed by researchers. A pair of readers, including John R. Lott Jr. (a noted skeptic of gun restrictions) downloaded the data and presented us with an Excel analysis to argue that the words used by the President and the White House—“gun purchases” and “gun sales” — were inaccurate. That’s because the original report on the survey, from which the statistic is derived, referred to “gun acquisitions” and “transactions” — much broader categories of data.
So we went back to Jens Ludwig, one of the original researchers. He patiently reran his data and explained how he and his colleague, Philip Cook, had reached their conclusions. We won’t get into the weeds of the discussion, but Lott and Ludwig looked at the data in different ways.
Part of the difference was that Ludwig and Cook looked across a variety of different answers in order to spot inconsistencies, rather than immediately assume the gun had been purchased from a licensed dealer, also known as the primary market. “Our approach with the rest of the cases (don’t know source of gun, refused to report source of gun) was to be conservative in estimating what fraction of sales are in the primary market,” Ludwig said.
Still, the data as presented in Ludwig and Cook’s 1996 report on the survey (see Table 3.14) did not give us enough information to test whether the president’s use of the words “gun purchases” was accurate. So Ludwig examined the data yet again at our request and came up with the following results:
Percent of Secondary (“off the books”) market purchases
Cash purchase from gun, hardware or department store, from pawnshop, or from seller at gun show, flea market or military, or through mail that respondent says “yes” was FFL [federally licensed dealer]: 22 percent
Add cash purchase from seller at gun show, flea market or military, or though the mail that respondent says “probably was/think so:” 20 percent
Add cash purchases, trades with family, friends/acquaintance that respondent says are or probably are FFL: 14 percent
In other words, rather than being 30 to 40 percent (the original estimate of the range) or “up to 40 percent” (Obama’s words), gun purchases without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent. And since the survey sample is so small, that means the results have a survey caveat: plus or minus six percentage points.
Moreover, as we noted before, the survey was taken in late 1994, eight months after the Brady law went into effect, and the questions were asked about gun purchases in the previous two years. So some of the answers concerned gun purchases that took place in a pre-Brady environment.
Ludwig noted that “if you look at where gun criminals obtained their guns (as indicated from surveys of people in prison or arrestees detained in jail), people have typically found that 80-90 percent of that population get their guns in the secondary market.” We referenced some of that data in our earlier column, and gun-control advocates might argue that it bolsters the need for universal background checks. But that is not the statistic used by Obama.
We can understand why the president might want to use a word like “purchases” rather than “transactions.” And certainly there is a pressing need for additional and up-to-date research on gun purchases in the secondary market. But that is no excuse for the president’s language, especially because the survey data is already nearly two decades old. (The White House declined to comment.)
So we are changing our ruling in this matter from “Verdict Pending” to Two Pinocchios.
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Follow The Fact Checker on Twitter and friend us on Facebook.By James Stafford for Oilprice.com
The coal industry is in uncharted territory.
After decades of strong financial numbers and dominance in the electric power sector, coal producers are starting to fall apart faster than anyone could have anticipated. SNL Financial has produced some jaw dropping data on the quickly deteriorating coal industry, with a horrific performance in the second quarter.
The U.S. coal mining sector has exhibited an unprecedented wave of turmoil in just the last few weeks.
Walter Energy, an Alabama coal miner, announced on July 15 that it is filing for bankruptcy. Senior lenders will see their debt turned into equity, and if the company cannot turn the ship around, it will more or less sell off all of its assets. “In the face of ongoing depressed conditions in the market for met coal, we must do what is necessary to adapt to the new reality in our industry,” Walter Energy’s CEO Walt Scheller said in a press release.
Alpha Natural Resources, a top producer of metallurgical coal (used for steelmaking), was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange because its share price was “abnormally low.” The company is eyeing the possibility of declaring bankruptcy protection.
Arch Coal has seen its share price crater to similar depths that Alpha Natural Resources saw before it was delisted. Arch Coal pulled off a one-for-ten reverse stock split in an effort to avoid the same delisting fate as its peer. Essentially, the move to reduce the number of shares is intended to boost the share price, and it will take effect on July 27. But moves on paper won’t change the underlying fundamentals.
Coal prices are down 70 percent from four years ago. The U.S. is shifting towards natural gas in the electric power sector, and weak demand for coal is leading to mine closures. The Obama administration is also trying to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, and a litany of regulations intended to meet that objective are cutting down coal at the knees. As the dirtiest source of electricity, coal is in the crosshairs. The EPA is working hard to ensure that its Clean Power Plan, which puts limits on carbon emissions at the nation’s power plants, is finished before the end of Obama’s term.
But there are other regulations that are piling on the coal industry, deepening the crisis. The Interior Department proposed a new rule this month that would require surface mines to maintain a buffer zone from their operations and streams nearby. They would also be required to monitor water quality before, during, and after mining. Reactions were predictable – environmentalists said the rules didn’t go far enough and coal companies said the rules were unnecessary and draconian.
The combination of weak demand and rising costs is becoming too much for the sector to bear. As such, the coal industry could be facing structural and permanent decline. But the damage is happening quickly. According to SNL Financial, the combined market capitalization of the entire publicly-listed coal industry in the United States was less than $9.30 billion. And around 40 percent of that total can be attributed to just one company, Consol Energy. The coal sector’s market cap is more than 80 percent down from April 2011.
The only way out – exporting coal abroad to energy hungry countries like China – is also quickly closing off. Oversupply on international markets is depressing prices, and even China is showing less of an appetite for coal than many anticipated. For example, for the fiscal year ending in June 2015, China posted a 31 percent decline in imported thermal coal. China’s economic growth is slowing, but it is also implementing air pollution measures that are reducing its demand for coal. Moreover, China is propping up domestic producers to the detriment of coal miners abroad, such as those in the U.S.
So far 2015 has been a horrendous year for coal, but the ugly forecast keeps getting worse.
This article was originally published on Oilprice.com.The Charismatic Gifts by Rev. William G. Most The ordinary charismatic gifts, the invisible gifts that help us fulfill our state in life, are widely given. The extraordinary are given when and to whom the Spirit wills, as St. Paul tells us in 1 Cor 12.11. They are not routine today, though they were in the first generation Church, as we see from 1 Cor 12-14. Some have claimed that these extraordinary graces are ordinary and were ordinary for the first centuries. But the Patristic texts cited for this view are few. Fairly clear are those of Tertullian (an early pentecostalist who eventually left the Church), St. Hilary, and St. Cyril of Jerusalem. Already by the fourth century, however, St. Augustine had to argue that the accounts of miracles in the early Church were not mere fables. In the East, St. John Chrysostom also noted that the age of the charismatic gifts as a regular occurence had long since ended. It is clear from the history of the early Church that as soon as Christians could point to the rapid spread of the Faith and the witness of martyrs in order to make converts, God began to give the charismatic gifts less frequentlythey were always by their nature extraordinary, and long before the time of Augustine and Chrysostom, they were no longer necessary on a large scale. Thus, it is not true that extraordinary charismatic gifts are simply actualizations--putting to work--of the gifts of the Holy Spirit that all Catholics have. Rember, the special charismatic things belong to one category, the seven Gifts to another. One cannot suppose graces from one side of this divide will actualize those from the other side. Still further, the possession of extraordinary charismatic favors does not even prove those who have them are in the state of grace. We think of the frightening words of Our Lord Himself in Mt 7. 22-23: "Many will say to me on that day: Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name, and in your name cast out devils, and have done many marvels in your name? And then I will admit to them: I never knew you: depart from me you workers of iniquity." Vatican II, Lumen gentium 12 said of the extraordinary gifts: "... they are not to be rashly sought, nor should one presumptuously expect of them the fruits of the apostolic works; but the judgment as to whether or not they are genuine, and as to their ordered use pertains to those who are in charge in the Church...." When these gifts are used with careful discernment of spirits and obedience, they are "fitting and useful for the needs of the Church" (Ibid.) Electronic text (c) Copyright 1997 EWTN. All rights reserved.A little over two years ago I wrote a couple of posts arguing that we cut our ancestral teeth on meat, and that contrary to all the vegetarian blather about colon length, tooth structure, etc., the archeological and anthropological data convincingly demonstrates we were descended from meat eaters, not vegetarians. (Click here and here for those posts.) A couple of recent developments have now inspired me to write a third.
First, I noticed in both talking with people at the Ancestral Health Symposium last August and attending a number of the talks that many followers of their own version of the ancestral diet are dismayingly including more and more carbohydrates. And recommending more to their followers.
When MD and I wrote Protein Power in the mid 1990s, we used the Paleolithic diet as an argument for the efficacy of the low-carb diet. If pre-agricultural man evolved in a milieu devoid of carbohydrate-dense foods, we posited, then natural selection should have culled those who didn’t thrive on such fare, leaving us, the descendants, powered by metabolic processes that performed better on protein and fat substrates. If the rampant obesity and diabetes (we just thought it was rampant then) was a consequence of a diet we weren’t designed for, then switching to one that better suited us metabolically should produce substantial changes to the good. Which it undeniably does.
I can’t help but recall the great quote by Dr. Blake Donaldson, who changed the complexion of his practice in New York after spending some time with Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Wrote Dr. Donaldson in Strong Medicine, his book about an almost all meat diet:
During the millions of years that our ancestors lived by hunting, every weakling who could not maintain perfect health on fresh meat and water was bred out.
Now, it seems, many who have taken to the Paleo diet have started to drift from the Paleo-is-basically-low-carb paradigm into the Paleo-is-anything-that-isn’t-Neolithic paradigm. And although Neolithic man grew all sorts of crops, most Paleo dieters consider only grains to be truly Neolithic foods. Some Paleo dieters take it a step further and argue that since pre-agricultural man couldn’t have domesticated animals (other than perhaps canids of some sort), then he couldn’t have eaten dairy products. So, those Paleo purists avoid grain and dairy products. Both the dairy and non-dairy Paleo dieters, however, are starting to include larger amounts of carbohydrates |
2009-10.
He joined AZ in 2011 from Villarreal, scoring 38 goals in 67 appearances and has also scored 17 goals in 60 appearances for the US national team.
Altidore will join up with head coach Paolo Di Canio and his new team-mates at their training camp in Italy.
He is the club's latest summer signing after the recruitment of Modibo Diakite, Valentin Roberge, Cabral, Duncan Watmore, David Moberg Karlsson and goalkeeper Vito Mannone.Additional reporting by Blake Nelson
Late one spring night in 1984, the doorbell rang at the home of Norman and Mary Jane Stout. The Stouts, married thirty years, with three grown kids, lived in Guernsey County, Ohio, about a hundred yards off Interstate 70. Norman was a heavy-equipment operator; Mary Jane, who once worked as an office manager, was a collector of Holly Hobbie plates and figurines. They were at the kitchen table, paying bills. Norman opened the door to find two men, who looked to be in their mid-twenties. They said that their car had broken down on the highway and asked to use the telephone.
This story was produced in partnership with The New Yorker. Photographs by Danna Singer.
Norman invited them in, then watched as one of the men, after finishing the call, took out a handkerchief and wiped off the receiver. The two men—their names were John David Stumpf and Clyde Daniel Wesley—pulled guns. “Oh, by the way, this is a stickup,” Wesley said. When Norman rushed at Stumpf, Stumpf shot him twice in the head; the first shot, Norman later recalled, hit “the bridge of my glasses, right between my eyes.” He lost consciousness and fell to the ground. Afterward, one of the robbers shot and killed Mary Jane. Norman came to in time to hear the men’s voices in another room, and then the shots that killed his wife. But he couldn’t see who fired the gun.
Stumpf and Wesley were both charged with aggravated murder, and were prosecuted separately at the Guernsey County Courthouse. Stumpf’s case went to court in September, 1984. A county prosecutor, urging the death penalty, argued that Stumpf had shot Mary Jane : “Believing that he had killed Mr. Stout, this defendant then turned the same chrome-colored Raven automatic pistol upon Mary Jane Stout as she sat on the bed and shot her four times. Three times in the left side of the head and neck and one time in the wrist, obviously in order not to leave anyone available to identify him.” Stumpf was convicted and sentenced to death.
Seven months later, the prosecutor returned to court for Wesley’s trial. Again seeking the death penalty, he argued this time that Wesley had fired the fatal shots : “Believing that he had killed Mr. Stout, John David Stumpf pitched the gun aside.” At that point, the prosecutor continued, “this defendant, whose own gun was jammed, picked that chrome-colored Raven up and, as Mrs. Stout sat helplessly on her bed, shot her four times in order to leave no witnesses to the crime.” Wesley was convicted and sentenced to life.
Several years ago, a lawyer contacted me about a case in which he said prosecutors had argued contradictory theories of a crime. Looking into the subject, I didn’t find much—a few law-review articles and the occasional news story. The author of an article from 2001, a professor emeritus at Villanova University’s law school named Anne Bowen Poulin, told me that when she began her research a colleague said to her, “This is stupid. It never happens.” The next day, Poulin got a call from a former student, now a defense attorney, who had just such a case, in Philadelphia. “It does happen,” Poulin said. “And probably more often than we’d like to think.”
There’s no saying exactly how often. But, in a recent canvass of court rulings, I turned up more than four dozen cases, from California to Massachusetts, in which the defense attorney argued in an appeal that the prosecution had told conflicting stories about the crime. Prosecutors have offered contradictory theories about which defendant stabbed someone with a knife, or chopped a woman’s skull with a hatchet, or held a man’s head underwater. The most common scenario involves a fatal shot: the prosecutor puts the gun in the hand of one defendant, then another. Under the legal principle of accomplice liability, a defendant can be convicted of murder without being the killer. But, if the prosecutor says that a defendant pulled the trigger, it’s easier to ask a judge or a jury for a death sentence. At least twenty-nine men have been condemned in cases in which defense attorneys accused prosecutors of presenting contradictory theories. To date, seven of those twenty-nine have been executed.
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More often than not, judges who are confronted with inconsistent prosecutions have affirmed convictions, while, at times, expressing distaste for the tactic. The descriptions applied by judges include “unseemly,” “unseemly at best,” “troubling,” “deeply troubling,” and “mighty troubling.” “The state cannot divide and conquer in this manner,” a federal appeals-court judge wrote in one Georgia case, in which the court threw out a defendant’s conviction on other grounds. “Such actions reduce criminal trials to mere gamesmanship and rob them of their supposed purpose of a search for truth.”
In 2004, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned John David Stumpf’s conviction in the murder of Mary Jane Stout, writing, “Inconsistent theories render convictions unreliable.” The state appealed, and on April 19, 2005, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Stumpf’s case. Justice David Souter said, of the prosecution’s contradictory theories, “It has to be the case that one of those arguments, if accepted, would lead to a false result.” Souter asked how the use of conflicting arguments could square with due process. Justice Antonin Scalia said that he saw no such problem: “Due process doesn’t mean perfection. It doesn’t mean that each jury has to always reach the right result.” Scalia’s language was so blunt that even Ohio’s State Solicitor saw a need to soften it. “I agree with that, Your Honor, and I hate to argue against my position, so I do this gently,” he said. “One of the old saws of American law is, it’s better one guilty person should go free than that one innocent person should be punished.”
Victim's Husband Norman Stout Stout, shot twice in 1984, won a varsity letter as a left-handed pitcher in high school. “Now I can’t even write out a check with my left hand,” he said.
Victim's Husband Norman Stout Stout, shot twice in 1984, won a varsity letter as a left-handed pitcher in high school. “Now I can’t even write out a check with my left hand,” he said.
Two months later, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous opinion, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, affirming Stumpf’s conviction while avoiding the due-process question. Under Ohio’s law on aiding and abetting, Stumpf could have been convicted of aggravated murder no matter who fired the gun. The question, the Court determined, was whether the prosecution’s inconsistency should invalidate Stumpf’s death sentence. The Sixth Circuit had not tackled that issue, so the Supreme Court sent the case back for an answer. To this day, the Supreme Court has not ruled squarely on the validity of conflicting prosecution theories.
Cases like Stumpf’s have long offered the courthouse equivalent of what the counsellor to the President Kellyanne Conway described, in January, as “alternative facts.” In 1935, the Supreme Court said that a federal prosecutor “is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty,” and that his “interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” A prosecutor who presents contradictory theories risks violating this vision of his role. In “Do No Wrong,” a 2009 book about legal ethics, Peter Joy and Kevin McMunigal wrote, “Public respect and trust in our criminal justice system will suffer if factually inconsistent charges are pursued that result in an innocent person being convicted.” “Imagine,” they continued, how jurors “would feel about the prosecutor and the criminal justice system” if they learned that the prosecutor had told them one story of the crime—and then told another jury the opposite.
In the summer of 2000, Demetrius Pascall was twenty-seven—a large man, six feet tall, three hundred and two pounds, who played the bass guitar at Faith and Hope Ministries in Wellston, Missouri. He had been married two years, and he and his wife were looking to buy their first house. At about 10 P.M. on July 30th, he pulled into the parking lot of a Schnucks grocery store in St. Louis. The store, open twenty-four hours, was busy.
Pascall was driving a white 1990 Lincoln Continental with a blue ragtop. He dropped off a cousin at the store’s entrance, then pulled alongside a couple of women walking to their car. According to police, as he chatted with one of the women, his Lincoln caught the attention of four men nearby, in a black Nissan Pathfinder. Antoine Bankhead, who was eighteen, and Martez Shadwick, who was nineteen, had been friends since middle school. Bankhead had two children and had flipped burgers at Wendy’s; Shadwick had a daughter and had worked there, too. Bankhead told me that he had met the other two men, Alvin Washington and I. V. Simms, who were both eighteen, more recently.
Two of the men approached Pascall, wearing black baseball caps and gold bandannas, which left only their eyes exposed. The caps had lettering affiliated with a local gang. One of the two pulled a pistol, a.380 semiautomatic. They told Pascall to get out of the car and demanded his jewelry. Pascall resisted and ran toward the grocery store. A bullet hit him in the left side of his chest, and, as he reached the entrance, he collapsed into the arms of a woman who was shopping with her son and three grandchildren. “Somebody help me,” she heard him say. The gunman and the second robber jumped into Pascall’s Lincoln and sped away. Pascall died at Saint Louis University Hospital, shortly after midnight.
Detectives interviewed at least eighteen eyewitnesses to the murder. Aside from race—both robbers were black—their descriptions were not consistent. One witness described both men as four feet eleven. Another said that both were maybe five feet six. A third said that both were between five feet nine and five feet ten. Yet another said that one was short, the other tall. Three witnesses said that one robber wore white or tan shorts, while three others said both wore bluejeans.
The day after the shooting, police spotted Washington driving the Pathfinder, which had been stolen the previous week. They cornered him in a garage, where they found the gun that had killed Pascall.
That same day, police found Pascall’s Lincoln, stripped and partially burned. The only prints recovered from the car were Washington’s. He told police that, on July 30th, the four men had driven to the Schnucks so that he could buy some dog food. Washington said that Shadwick and Bankhead had robbed Pascall, and that Shadwick had fired the gun.
Three days later, Shadwick turned himself in, accompanied by a lawyer, who advised him not to talk to the police. On August 14th, police arrested Bankhead and Simms. Asked who committed the robbery, Bankhead named Washington and Simms, and said that Washington fired the fatal shot. Simms, on the way to the police station, told two officers that Washington and Shadwick were the robbers, and Washington the shooter. Then, at the station, Simms claimed that Shadwick, Washington, and Bankhead had all got out of the Pathfinder, and that Shadwick shot Pascall.
Police created at least four different photo lineups and showed them to eyewitnesses, asking if they could pick out the robbers. Some selected Washington, some Shadwick, some Bankhead. The task was complicated by the fact that Shadwick and Washington were both five-eleven and a hundred and fifty pounds, while Bankhead and Simms were both short and slim. “If you see his picture and my picture, we kind of favor each other,” Bankhead told me. Police settled on Shadwick as the shooter, and Shadwick, Bankhead, and Washington were all charged with murder, robbery, and two counts of armed criminal action.
The task of trying the three went to Robert J. Craddick, an assistant prosecutor with the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s office. Craddick, who was in his mid-forties, had received his law degree from Washington University, in St. Louis, and had been with the office since 1984; at one point, he had been responsible for training new prosecutors. Police are often critical of prosecutors for being overly cautious, but in St. Louis the police praised Craddick. “He’s the best they’ve got. He’s been an aggressive prosecutor who knows the importance of getting murderers off the street,” one detective later told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Craddick told the paper that, during his twenty-one years in the office, he had won all but four of a hundred and sixty-seven cases.
On September 21, 2001, Washington appeared in circuit court with his attorney and pleaded guilty to the four charges.
Craddick, asked to summarize the state’s evidence, said that it would show beyond a reasonable doubt that Washington and Shadwick had “decided to take it upon themselves” to rob Pascall. Shadwick shot him, and the two fled in Pascall’s car.
“Did that happen, Mr. Washington?” the judge asked.
“Yes, sir,” Washington said.
At the hearing, and in others to come, Pascall’s family described their loss. In July, 2000, Pascall’s church had held a two-week revival, where he played the bass guitar. The day he was shot, he had persuaded his father to attend. “He was smiling all day,” his dad said. “We had dinner, he was playing with me. And at the end of that day I didn’t have a son anymore.” Pascall’s wife wrote of seeing his body at the morgue, a tube still in his mouth. She said that, at the funeral, “I just wanted to fall into the casket with him.”
In exchange for Washington’s plea, the state recommended a sentence that would make him eligible for parole in about twenty-two years. The judge accepted the recommendation, but told Washington, “I think I must be getting cranky in my old age. I think you probably deserve to die.”
Nine months later, Martez Shadwick went on trial, before another judge. Craddick, in his opening statement, again said that Shadwick and Washington were the two robbers, and that Shadwick was the gunman. Five prosecution witnesses identified Shadwick as one of the robbers. Craddick didn’t ask the first three witnesses—a nurse, a shoe saleswoman, and a gas-station cashier—about the identity of the second robber. But he did ask the last two: the woman in whose arms Pascall had collapsed, and the woman’s son. Both testified that in a photo array they had picked out Washington.
In closing arguments, Shadwick’s lawyer challenged the reliability of the prosecution’s witnesses. One witness’s description of the robbers didn’t fit Shadwick’s height. Another’s didn’t match his skin tone. The most damning evidence was against Washington: he had been found with the murder weapon, and his fingerprints were the only ones recovered from the Lincoln. “Alvin Washington killed Demetrius Pascall, Your Honor, and Martez Shadwick had nothing to do with it,” the defense lawyer said.
At the trial’s end, on June 20, 2002, the judge complimented both attorneys for “an excellent job of presenting evidence” and found Shadwick guilty of first-degree murder, robbery, and the two other charges.
At Antoine Bankhead’s trial, which began on July 1st, Craddick appeared before a third judge, Joan M. Burger. This time, he changed his lineup of witnesses. The woman and her son, who had identified Washington as Shadwick’s accomplice, weren’t called to testify, but the three witnesses whom Craddick had not asked about the second robber’s identity were called again.
At Shadwick’s trial, the defense attorney had asked two of those witnesses to identify the second robber: the gas-station cashier said it was Washington; the saleswoman said that while looking at police photos she “couldn’t pick that second person out.” Now both said that the second robber was Bankhead. The third witness, the nurse, named him as well.
Bankhead’s attorney later said that he had attended part of Shadwick’s trial, but he did not ask the cashier or the saleswoman about the inconsistencies in their testimony from one trial to the next. Bankhead recalled that, after Washington’s and Shadwick’s convictions, he found the case against him baffling. “I’m, like, hold on, this ain’t right,” he said. “I’m not the smartest man in the world, but this doesn’t make sense.”
In Craddick’s closing argument, he told the jury that there was “no doubt” that Shadwick was the shooter, and that the evidence that Bankhead was the second robber was “uncontradicted.” If Washington had been the second robber, he said, why had no eyewitnesses picked out his photo? Any suggestion that Washington was Shadwick’s accomplice was a “smoke screen.” The jury, after deliberating for less than two hours, convicted Bankhead of all four charges.
When I spoke to Bankhead recently, he gave me his account of Pascall’s murder. He’d been drinking and smoking marijuana that evening, he said, and was asleep in the back seat of the Pathfinder when the sound of the gunshot woke him. He saw that Shadwick was sitting in the front seat. (Shadwick’s lawyer told me that her client was not present. Washington and Simms could not be reached for comment.)
A couple of days after Bankhead’s conviction, while his sentencing was pending, he wrote to Burger, asking for a retrial. “I’m a innocent man,” he said. Only two people had committed the crime, but Bankhead was the third to be convicted. He wrote, “Now don’t you think somethings wrong with that picture your honor.”
Alvin Washington might have helped Shadwick’s and Bankhead’s defenses, and at one point he had promised to do so. In June, 2002, a few days before the start of Shadwick’s trial, Washington wrote to Bankhead’s mother, “i’m sorry for you having to lived these last 2 years without your son and no-dout i feel as if it was my fault because if i wouldn’t have said nothing he wouldnt be in this situation … i was thinking selfish at that time … getting them before they got me.” He said that he would help Bankhead and Shadwick when their trials came, “cause theirs no reason for everybody to go down for one dead body.” He even signed an affidavit, saying that Bankhead and Shadwick played “no active part” in the crime.
Shadwick’s lawyer arranged for Washington to testify at Shadwick’s trial, and had him transported from prison. But at the courthouse Washington balked. Bankhead’s lawyer wanted a jail officer to testify that she had overheard Washington tell other inmates that he was the shooter, and that Shadwick and Bankhead had stayed behind in the S.U.V. But the judge prohibited the account as hearsay.
On July 26, 2002, the sheriff’s department carried Shadwick into court for sentencing, restrained with a belly chain and leg irons. “You convicted me for something I didn’t do, man,” Shadwick said as the hearing started. “Why you doing this, man? God, I don’t know why you’re doing this—”
“Mr. Shadwick, please,” the judge said.
Shadwick kept saying that he was innocent: “I didn’t do it, man…. God know I didn’t do it…. I know you think in your head, oh yeah, I got gold, I got braids, I’m black, I’m a teen-ager, but that ain’t me, man…. I’m not no robber, I’m not no murderer.” Shadwick said, “Craddick know that I’m innocent. He know. He just wants a conviction, man.” He claimed that Bankhead was innocent, too, and all but named Washington and Simms: “The dude that done it may be sitting in the penitentiary right now, laughing at me, and the other dude did it, man, and he didn’t even get convicted, man.”
On Craddick’s recommendation, the judge sentenced Shadwick to life without parole.
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“Why? Why life without? Why?” Shadwick said.
“Mr. Shadwick, please,” the judge said.
The following month, Bankhead returned to court to be sentenced by Joan Burger. “I thought it was a just trial,” Burger said, in court. She knew that two other men had been convicted in the case, but she wasn’t aware of the particulars: a judge is supposed to see only the evidence presented in her court. Burger sentenced Bankhead to life with the possibility of parole.
In late 2003, Bankhead asked to have his conviction thrown out based on the prosecution’s conflicting theories and his trial attorney’s failure to capitalize on the inconsistencies. The motion went before Burger, and, for the first time, she was presented with transcripts from Washington’s plea hearing and Shadwick’s trial.
Burger told me that when she read the two court files she was shocked by the contradictions. Burger had been a circuit-court judge for thirteen years and, before that, an attorney in the same office as Craddick. As a prosecutor, she said, “you have a duty to justice, for both the victim and the defendant, and we took that to heart.” Craddick had often appeared in Burger’s court, and she considered him a good, experienced prosecutor. “He was very serious. There was no lightheartedness in him,” she said. “He didn’t think he did anything wrong. But, wow.”
Judge Joan M. Burger “[As a prosecutor] you have a duty to justice, for both the victim and the defendant, and we took that to heart.”
Judge Joan M. Burger “[As a prosecutor] you have a duty to justice, for both the victim and the defendant, and we took that to heart.”
Burger held a hearing on Bankhead’s motion in March, 2004. Arthur Allen, an assistant public defender, represented Bankhead, who had turned twenty-two the week before. “He just struck me as a kid,” Allen told me, adding that Bankhead was small and “extremely quiet.” Going into the hearing, Allen didn’t give much of a chance to his argument about conflicting theories. “It seemed to be something that prosecutors got away with,” he said. But that changed when Burger summoned the lawyers to the bench. “She was angry. You could tell that,” Allen said.
Craddick wrote that the state “did not use inherently factually contradictory theories.” It had accused the three defendants of “acting with each other.” Burger was unmoved. Two months after the hearing, she threw out Bankhead’s conviction, writing, “The state has convicted three people for the acts of two.”
There is no simple explanation for why a prosecutor might argue contradictory theories. In a 2012 law-review article on inconsistent prosecutions, Brandon Buskey, now a senior staff attorney with the A.C.L.U. Criminal Law Reform Project, identified “three basic types” of prosecutor in these cases: the “win at all costs” prosecutor, obsessed with conviction rates; the “agnostic” prosecutor, who feels no need to be convinced of a defendant’s guilt and defers “responsibility for protecting innocence to the trial judge, defense counsel, and the jury”; and the “genuinely uncertain” prosecutor, who doesn’t know which defendant did what, and is fine with leaving it to a judge or a jury to decide.
On rare occasions, attorneys for a defendant get a chance to ask prosecutors under oath about their thinking. That happened in one case with conflicting prosecutions in California. In 1982, Samuel Bonner and Watson Allison robbed an apartment in Long Beach. One resident, twenty-three-year-old Leonard Wesley Polk, was shot twice in the head and killed. Kurt Seifert, of the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, prosecuted both men.
At Bonner’s trial, in November, 1983, Seifert, pursuing the death penalty, argued that Bonner and Allison went into the apartment, and Bonner fired the two shots. The jury convicted Bonner of murder and robbery but concluded that he wasn’t the shooter, and Bonner received a life sentence. Two months later, at Allison’s trial, Seifert again pursued the death penalty. This time, he argued that Allison went into the apartment alone, and that he fired the shots. Bonner, Seifert now argued, was only a “wheelman,” who drove Allison to and from the crime. Allison was convicted and sentenced to death.
In 2008, Allison’s attorneys questioned Seifert as part of Allison’s federal habeas-corpus petition. Seifert, now retired, had been a prosecutor for thirty-two years, and said he believed that “the role of the prosecutor is not to win. The role of the prosecutor is to represent the parties that he represents with an eye to doing the right thing. And the right thing means, right or wrong, present the truth. And if the truth stacks up against your position do not prosecute.”
Seifert went on, “Truth is not a block of stone. It is a malleable gray area. There can be nuggets of truth, bits of lies. It’s all—it’s a fluid idea, even. What’s true one day may not be true another. Pluto is no longer a planet.”
Martin Sabelli, one of Allison’s lawyers, recalled that Seifert seemed indifferent to the importance of the case: “He had a smile that leaned more toward sarcasm than irony.”
“In the Bonner trial, you had argued that Mr. Bonner had been in Mr. Polk’s apartment?” Sabelli asked Seifert.
“Absolutely.”
“And in the Allison trial you argued that Mr. Bonner had never been in Mr. Polk’s apartment.”
“Well, huh. That was a booboo. You can quote me.”
When Seifert was asked about arguing in the first trial that Bonner was the triggerman, then in the second trial that Allison was the triggerman, he referred to that switch as “the big oops.”
Seifert didn’t say those words with any sense of embarrassment, Sabelli told me. “It was more, like, boastful, it was more a ‘What are you going to do about it?’ kind of tone.” Michael Clough, another of Allison’s lawyers, said he believed that Seifert wasn’t being flippant. His words were an “honest, direct reaction” to realizing what he’d done. (At another point, Seifert, reviewing the contradictions in his arguments, said, “Whoa.”)
A minute or two later, Seifert said, “There was only one issue ever in the case, and that is triggerman. And, frankly, I don’t know who pulled it. Today, if you asked me who pulled the trigger, I don’t know.”
“At the time, you didn’t know, either?” Sabelli asked.
“I would have to say that’s true based on the way things panned out,” Seifert said. (He could not be reached for comment.)
In 2010, a district-court judge ruled that Seifert’s first theory—that both Bonner and Allison entered the apartment—was more likely true than his second, and threw out Allison’s death sentence. Allison is now serving twenty-five years to life at the California State Prison in Solano. Bonner is at the California Men’s Colony, in San Luis Obispo.
In the Missouri case, Bankhead remained in prison while prosecutors appealed Burger’s ruling. The case came up for oral argument in August, 2005, before the Missouri Court of Appeals. The three judges—all former prosecutors—left little doubt that they believed the state’s theories to be irreconcilable. “This has a smell-test problem,” one of them said.
The following month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Craddick was leaving the Circuit Attorney’s office to practice civil law. Craddick said that he had four children and couldn’t afford “several college tuitions on a government salary.” “His leaving is a great loss,” one police detective told the newspaper. Another said, “He’s the only guy over there who would take a chance on a case. It didn’t have to be a slam-dunk winner for him to take it.”
In January, 2006, the Court of Appeals unanimously upheld Burger’s ruling. Bankhead was released from state custody later that year. Shadwick also appealed his conviction, but lost. Both Shadwick and Washington remain in prison. Bankhead, who later spent another five years in prison, for unrelated crimes, works at a packaging warehouse in southern Illinois.
Craddick now serves as in-house counsel for a health-care company. When I asked him about Bankhead’s trial, he recalled that the jury’s deliberations had been short—“one hour and thirty-three minutes”—but said he hadn’t heard that the conviction had been overturned. I explained that Burger and the Court of Appeals had found that he had violated Bankhead’s due-process rights. Craddick said, “Hmm. I don’t have any real comment about that, because it was so long ago.” He added, “I prided myself on being a prosecutor who played by the rules,” but otherwise declined to talk about his time in the Circuit Attorney’s office. “It doesn’t do any good to talk about something so long ago,” he said.
This past August, I called one of the jurors from Bankhead’s trial, Susan Conway-Wiesen, who described herself as “a little old lady with gray hair.” She had no idea that, two weeks before that trial, the prosecutor had argued that the second robber wasn’t Bankhead but Washington. When I told her, she gasped.
“That is terrible. That is just terrible. I think our justice system should actually be”—she paused—“justice. I think that is awful.” Later, she began to cry. “My goodness, I really need to think about this one.”
She said that the deliberations were short and straightforward. “Based on what we were told, it was hard to come up with a different conclusion.”
I asked if it would have made a difference to know that the prosecutor had earlier accused someone else. “Absolutely,” Conway-Wiesen said. “Oh my gosh, that’s outrageous.”
Juror Susan Conway-Weisen “Our justice system should actually be—justice... Based on what we were told, it was hard to come up with a different conclusion.”
Juror Susan Conway-Weisen “Our justice system should actually be—justice... Based on what we were told, it was hard to come up with a different conclusion.”
More than thirty-three years after John Stumpf and Clyde Wesley appeared at the Stouts’ door, the debate over Stumpf’s fate will soon be renewed. In 2011, six years after the Supreme Court declined to rule on whether the conflicting prosecutions should invalidate Stumpf’s death sentence, the Sixth Circuit Court finally ruled on the question. A three-judge panel vacated the sentence. Two years later, the court agreed to rehear the case with all judges sitting, and reinstated Stumpf’s death sentence. The vote was 9–8.
Last month, I spoke on the phone to Norman Stout, who is eighty-seven and still lives in Guernsey County. I asked him if he wanted to attend Stumpf’s execution. “Absolutely,” he said. “I offered to pull the lever.” For Stout, the use of contradictory stories was unimportant—the man who didn’t fire the gun did nothing to stop his wife’s murder. He recalled that Mary Jane sang Patsy Cline tunes on a weekly radio show, and wore her hair the way Cline did. After his wife’s death, Stout continued to add to her collection of Holly Hobbie memorabilia, eventually opening a gallery where he displays more than twelve hundred items. He thinks about her constantly, he said.
Stumpf is scheduled to be executed in the spring of 2020. In 2005, during oral arguments in Stumpf’s appeal, Justice Scalia suggested the clemency stage as the time to argue the right and wrong of alternative theories. Let the governor “figure out which one of the two wasn’t the shooter,” he said. That’s an invitation Stumpf’s attorney, David Stebbins, will likely accept, when it comes time to ask Ohio’s governor for mercy. In clemency, the issues can be esoteric. But that’s not true in this case. Stebbins said, “This is one issue that I think everyone can understand.”Hooray! My book is finally done! You can buy it on Amazon or Packt.
I started this book mid 2015. Since then it's gone through several revisions and several updates. I never realized how much work is required for a book until I started working on this. It took a lot of late nights.
For those who don't know I wrote this book so I could help more people learn Ember.js. Some recipes are from this blog, others I created for the book.
Here are some of the chapters.
Ember CLI Basics
The Ember.Object Model
Ember Templates
Testing
Ember Components
Ember Models and Ember Data
Real-Life Tasks with Ember.js
Real-Time Web Application
And more...
Some of the more intermediate topics include, authentication, validations, addons, and the run loop to name a few.
This book is for anyone that is looking to level up their skills on Ember.js. I go over all the basics including some intermediate and advanced topics. If your learning Ember.js or your looking to get into some more intermediate topics then this book is for you!
Future
Stay tuned, later this week I'll have an interview up with my technical editor. He'll go over how his experience was helping me write this book.
Want to keep up with me? Subscribe to my email list below! I give exclusive discounts and tips on Ember.js.A Brian Blade Fellowship concert feels a bit like a family reunion. Its core — drummer Blade, pianist Jon Cowherd and bassist Chris Thomas — has played together for more than 20 years, and its horn players have stayed loyal to the operation, too. Its repertoire feels rooted in a deep emotional well where sacred abuts secular and jazz meets its Southern folk cousins. Sparks always seem to fly when it gathers for an infrequent recording or string of tour dates. (It helps that it's led by one of the world's great drummers; Blade is prone to violent, furious punctuation and gentle time management alike.)
With a new album, Landmarks, in the works, the band reunites for a week in New York. WBGO and NPR Music will broadcast and video webcast the Brian Blade Fellowship live at the Village Vanguard on Tuesday, Dec. 10 at 8:30 p.m. ET.
Set List
"Landmarks" (Cowherd)
Mercy Suite: Part 1 (Cowherd)
Mercy Suite: Part 2 [Grace] (Cowherd)
Mercy Suite: Part 3 [Mercy Wind] (Cowherd)
"Shenandoah" (Traditional)
"Farewell Bluebird" (Blade)
PersonnelWren Day (Lá Dreoilín) is a traditional Irish custom where the bold and mysterious ‘Wren Boys’ perform a ceremonial ‘Hunt of the Wren’, which takes place on Christmas Day or Chrismas Eve, followed by a parade on the 26th of December, or Saint Stephen's Day, each year.
While its true origins are unknown, it is clearly quite ancient, but today it reflects a fusion of Ireland’s Christian beliefs with its ancient pagan customs. It is also known as the ‘Day of the Wren’, ‘Wren’s Day’, ‘Wrenning Day’, or the ‘Hunt of the Wren Day’.
As we pass the Winter Solstice, as Newgrange gets her annual fill of renewing sunlight, we are reminded how significant this dark and dead part of the year was to ancestors. Far from being a time of remorse and regret, this was a time of hope and celebration. The Sun had |
Réaction. J.K. Rowling prédit une Ecosse qui réclame l'indépendance : l'héritage de Cameron sera d'avoir brisé deux unions, dit-elle. Scotland will seek independence now. Cameron's legacy will be breaking up two unions. Neither needed to happen. twitter.com/AngharadC/stat… 24.06.16 J.K. Rowling. @jk_rowling Suivre
07:00 Finance. Les marchés financiers et l'économie seront fortement perturbés à court-terme par la décision des Britanniques de quitter l'Union européenne, a prévenu ce matin l'IIF, l'association bancaire internationale, en demandant aux politiciens de clarifier la situation rapidement.
07:00 Au Japon, «nous répondrons fermement quand la nécessité s'en fera sentir» Brexit. Le ministre japonais des Finances, Taro Aso, a assuré qu'il était disposé à agir fermement en temps voulu face aux mouvements «extrêmement brusques» sur les marchés des changes après la publication d'estimations donnant une sortie du Royaume Uni en tête. «Nous répondrons fermement quand la nécessité s'en fera sentir», a déclaré le gardien japonais des deniers publics, se disant en outre «préoccupé par les risques sur l'économie mondiale et sur les marchés financiers».
06:57 Analyse politique. On a envie de dire merci pour cette analyse. L Europe sans la GB pourra être soit le meilleur soit le pire mais elle sera différente 24.06.16 Corinne Lepage. @corinnelepage Suivre
06:44 Shitstorm. David Cameron commence à avoir les oreilles qui sifflent de toutes parts. Comme dans ce tweet : «Si le Royaume-Uni quitte l'Union européenne et que l'Ecosse quitte le Royaume-Uni, à quelle hauteur David Cameron est-il sur la liste des Pires Premiers Ministres de Tous les Temps?» If the UK leaves the EU *and* Scotland leaves the UK, how high is David Cameron on the Worst Prime Ministers of All Time list? 24.06.16 Matt O'Brien. @ObsoleteDogma Suivre Vu sur Twitter
06:36 Ecosse. La Première ministre de l'Ecosse, Nicola Sturgeon, a prévenu que l'Ecosse, qui a voté en majorité pour le remain selon des premiers chiffres, voyait «son avenir au sein de l'Union européenne», après le vote des Britanniques favorable au Brexit selon les projections des médias britanniques.
06:35 Irlande. Le parti politique irlandais Sinn Fein souhaite réunifier l'Irlande. Il avait appelé à voter remain. #BREXIT Le Sinn Fein appelle à un référendum sur une Irlande unifiée #AFP 24.06.16 Agence France-Presse. @afpfr Suivre
06:26 Cinq raisons pour que Londres parte Vu de Bruxelles. Dans son édition de jeudi, Libération donnait les cinq raisons pour lesquelles, vu de Bruxelles, les dirigeants européens ne seraient pas fâchés d'un Brexit et pourraient même en profiter pour relancer l'Union.Il est l'heure de le relire. A lire sur Libération.fr
06:06 Monnaie. Même si le résultat du référendum n'est pas encore officiel, la livre sterling chute à 1,33 dollar alors que le Brexit est donné en tête par les médias. «Nous récupéré avons notre pays», tweete le leader de l'Ukip. We've got our country back. Thanks to all of you. #IndependenceDay 24.06.16 Nigel Farage. @Nigel_Farage Suivre Vu sur Twitter
06:01 Le Brexit donné gagnant Out. Nous revoilà. Les Britanniques ont voté pour une sortie de l'Union européenne, selon les projections de la BBC et de Sky News, après dépouillement des bulletins dans 302 des 382 centres. Aux premières heures de la matinée, le Brexit, ou British Exit, réunissait 52% des voix. La participation au scrutin a été forte, avec 72,2% selon le chiffre officiel. BBC forecasts UK votes to #Leave the European Union bbc.in/28RVXAE #EURef #Brexit 24.06.16 BBC Breaking News. @BBCBreaking Suivre
03:14 Suspense. Avec seulement 41 secteurs dépouillés sur 382, difficile de donner une indication de l'issue de ce vote. Numériquement, le leave est en avance, mais ça ne veut pas dire grand-chose, vu le faible nombre de bulletins dépouillés. Ce qui est certain, c'est que le résultat s'annonce extrêmement serré, et clairement, les deux camps sont ultra-nerveux. Nous, on va se coucher une poignée d'heures, et on vous retrouve vite en ces lieux pour davantage de résultats. L'Irlande du Nord, l'Ecosse et Londres vont pouvoir déclarer leur indépendance et créer un nouveau pays #EUref 24.06.16 soniastolper. @soniastolper Suivre
03:07 Money, money. La livre sterling plonge, tandis que les bookmakers mettent les deux issues à égalité.
03:00 Leave. Les résultats restent très serrés à l'échelle nationale, avec seulement 31 secteurs dépouillés sur 382. Premier constat: le nord-est de l'Angleterre, ancien bastion du Labour, veut prendre le large avec Leave largement en tête #Labourmalaucrâne 24.06.16 soniastolper. @soniastolper Suivre Vu sur Twitter
02:59 Bookmakers. Les bookmakers donnent toujours un avantage au camp du Remain, mais très réduit par rapport à plus tôt dans la journée. Les marchés sont subitement immobiles ou presque, après un jeu de yoyo après les premiers résultats. Tétanisés peut-être?
02:57 Londres. Les premiers résultats à Londres donnent, comme on pouvait s'y attendre, 75% des votes en faveur du remain. Premier résultat londonien, City of London : 75% Remain, 25% Leave et un taux de participation élevé à 73% #Euref 24.06.16 soniastolper. @soniastolper Suivre Vu sur Twitter
02:54 Un résultat provisoire très serré mais des premiers chiffres encore très partiels Longue, longue nuit. Les premiers résultats, qui restent encore très partiels - aucune grande ville, à part Newcastle, n'a fourni de résultats - montrent que le Leave a fait mieux que prévu dans les circonscriptions où l'on s'attendait qu'il gagne, mais le constat est le même dans les circonscriptions où l'on s'attendait à une victoire du Remain. D'où, pour le moment, un résultat extrêmement serré, qui place les deux camps presqu'à égalité, à 50% chacun, avec un très léger avantage au Leave. Mais ce n'est que le début d'une longue, très longue nuit.Il faut qu'un des deux camps ait récolté 16,8 millions de vote. Pour le moment aucun des deux camps n'a encore atteint le million de votes.
02:52 Remain. Renfrewshire (Ecosse) a voté à 65% pour le remain, 35% pour le leave.
02:47 Leave. A Basildon (Essex), 63% des électeurs ont voté pour le Brexit, et seulement 31% pour le Bremain.
02:46 Ultra-serré. Pour le moment, les résultats de seulement 16 secteurs sont connus. Et c'est ultra-serré.
02:36 We're back. Le temps de sauter dans un black cab et de regagner nos pénates, et nous revoilà. Cela dit, nous ne sommes pas en mesure de vous dire grand-chose de plus, les résultats des grandes métropoles n'étant notamment pas tombés.
01:52 Des électeurs «pas racistes, mais...» Histoire. Entre deux résultats, permettez-nous de vous raconter une petite histoire. Cet après-midi, nous avons rencontré à la sortie d'un bureau de vote situé dans la circonscription de Jeremy Corbyn (Labour) Peter, 56 ans, propriétaire d'un cercle de poker et «parieur professionnel». Lui a voté pour la sortie du Royaume-Uni de l'Union européenne, parce qu'il «n'y a plus de place dans le pays. Il n'y a plus de Britanniques dans le quartier désormais, ce n'est pas du racisme mais ce pays est plein. L'Europe, ce n'était pas une erreur, mais il y a trop de monde dans ce pays. Ce n'est plus l'Angleterre. Il y a des musulmans qui nous ennuient à cause de l'odeur de notre nourriture ou de notre alcool. Je sais qu'ils ne sont pas tous ainsi, mais ça va créer des problèmes», nous a-t-il dit, insistant à plusieurs reprises pour qu'on ne le prenne «pas pour un raciste». Et de regarder Manuel, notre photographe, en lui disant que «ce n'est pas contre lui»... Cette phrase, nous l'avons entendue systématiquement lorsqu'un électeur nous a confié avoir voté pour la sortie du l'UE.
01:51 Remain. Dans les îles Sorlingues (Scilly, en V.O.), le camp du remain bénéficie d'une petite avance (56,4 %) contre 43,6% pour le leave.
01:32 «Guts». Nigel Farage (Ukip, pro-Brexit), qui a pourtant concédé la défaite de son camp plus tôt dans la soirée, a remercié les électeurs qui «ont eu les tripes» de défier l'establishment par leur vote.
01:24 Prudence et nervosité. La livre sterling baisse après les résultats de Sunderland, prudence et nervosité, rien n'est encore gagné.
01:19 Leave. Les résultats de Sunderland (nord-est de l'Angleterre), qui aura raté son coup pour être le premier, sont désormais connus : énorme victoire du leave, avec 51 930 voix (39%) pour rester dans l'UE contre 82 394 (61%) pour partir, et 65% de taux de participation. Le Ukip avait opéré une énorme poussée électorale récemment dans cet ancien bastion travailliste. Sunderland bastion Labour vote pour Leave. Pas une surprise mais l'ampleur surprend, les déçus du Labour n'ont pas suivi leur parti #Euref 23.06.16 soniastolper. @soniastolper Suivre Vu sur Twitter
01:12 Orkney. A Orkney Islands, un archipel au nord de l'Ecosse, 7 189 personnes ont voté pour rester dans l'Union européenne, 4 193 pour en partir. Soit 63,2% pour rester.
01:03 Serré. Les résultats de Newcastle-upon-Tyne sont ultra serrés. Quelque 49,3% des électeurs ont voté pour la sortie et 50,7% ont voté contre.
01:02 Carte. Qui, dans le monde, s'intéresse au scrutin britannique? Google propose une intéressante carte, à consulter ici.
00:56 Comme Sunderland prend la Grande-Bretagne de court... à chaque scrutin Jeu. La circonscription de Sunderland (nord-est de l'Angleterre) devrait être le premier centre sur l'île de Grande-Bretagne à déclarer ses résultats. Comme à chaque élection. C'est devenu une sorte de jeu, les autorités de Sunderland mettent un point d'honneur à dépouiller leurs bulletins le plus rapidement possible. Ce qui donne des images étonnantes à la télévision d'individus échevelés qui courent comme des dératés armés d'urnes pour les apporter au centre de dépouillement. La municipalité est allée jusqu'à modifier la durée des feux de signalisation pour permettre aux véhicules transportant les urnes d'avancer plus vite. Et la distance dans le hall de dépouillement entre les différentes tables a été également soigneusement mesurée pour optimiser au maximum la course des porteurs d'urnes. On s'amuse comme on peut.
00:43 Flash. Premiers résultats publiés à Gibraltar : sans surprise, le camp du Remain l'emporte à une énorme majorité, 19 322 voix en faveur contre seulement 823 votes pour une sortie de l'Union européenne. Ce résultat était prévisible et ne donne aucune réelle indication sur la tendance dans le reste du pays.
00:40 Brexit. Alors qu'aucun résultat n'a encore été déclaré - les premiers sont attendus vers minuit heure locale (entre 1 heure et 1h30 à Paris) - une autre voix du camp du Leave s'est exprimé. La secrétaire d'Etat à l'Irlande du Nord Theresa Villiers, en faveur du Brexit, a estimé que son «instinct lui dit que Remain a gagné». Pour le moment, aucun membre du camp du Remain ne s'est exprimé sur les résultats attendus. Et Nigel Farage, leader du parti europhobe du UKIP, qui avait, à peine les bureaux de vote fermés, annoncé qu'il pensait que le Remain pourrait l'avoir emporté «de justesse», a cette fois-ci affirmé plus catégoriquement que «Remain a gagné». Aucun résultat ni sondage sortie des urnes n'a encore été publié.
00:32 Pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas de sondage de sortie d'urnes? Merci de l'avoir posée. A la LSE, un expert explique pourquoi il n'y a pas de sondages de sortie d'urnes. Lors des scrutins traditionnels, les sondeurs se basent sur une sélection de circonscriptions identiques d'un mandat à l'autre. Elles sont donc comparables, et il est aisé de donner des appréciations de l'évolution du pays. Or, cette fois, on parle d'un référendum exceptionnel. Il n'y a donc pas de point de comparaison. Il faut alors augmenter l'échantillon, ce qui coûte très cher.
00:28 Boris un peu profil bas, une fois n'est pas coutume Sobriété. Boris Johnson (photo AFP), l'une des figures clé du camp du Leave, a fait preuve d'une sobriété peu habituelle pour lui dans un tweet peu de temps après la clôture des bureaux de vote. «Les bureaux de vote ont fermé, la démocratie a été exercée et nous attendons le verdict du peuple. Merci à tous ceux qui se sont impliqués et tous ceux qui ont voté», a-t-il sobrement déclaré. L'ancien maire de Londres a voté très tard, à 22h49, parce qu'il était dans l'après-midi en Ecosse, à l'université de St Andrews, pour assister à la remise de diplôme d'une de ses filles. Et que son avion de retour vers Londres a été retardé.
00:16 Entendu... en salle de presse, des journalistes français discutant de l'avenir politique de Boris Johnson en cas de défaite du Brexit. Une journaliste (d'un autre journal, mais on ne balancera pas), qui estime qu'il ne faudrait pas l'enterrer trop vite : «Boris Johnson, c'est comme Britney Spears, il revient toujours».
23:46 Selon un sondage réalisé dans la journée, le «remain» serait en tête Prudence. Un sondage YouGov réalisé dans la journée et publié juste au moment de la clôture des bureaux de vote donne une victoire du camp du Remain, en faveur du maintien au sein de l'Union européenne, avec 52% des votes, contre 48% au camp du Leave, en faveur d'une sortie de l'UE. Attention, ce sondage est à prendre avec prudence, il ne s'agit pas d'un sondage sortie des urnes mais un sondage réalisé dans la journée par internet. En général, pendant toute la campagne, les sondages sur internet ont eu tendance à donner des chiffres pour le camp du Remain inférieurs aux sondages par téléphone. Par ailleurs, la livre sterling a connu une journée faste, laissant supposer que les marchés étaient plutôt optimistes sur une victoire du Remain.
23:42 La parti conservateur s'agite Tension. Le parti conservateur, déchiré entre ses eurosceptiques et les partisans du Remain ralliés derrière le Premier ministre David Cameron, s'agite. Robert Syms, député conservateur de Poole (sud-ouest de l'Angleterre), a twitté la liste de 84 députés, dont les deux tiers ont soutenu le Brexit (une sortie de l'Union européenne), apportant leur soutien à David Cameron et lui demandant de rester à son poste, «quel que soit le résultat» du référendum. Un moyen de s'attirer les bonnes grâces du Premier ministre s'il a remporté son pari et que le Remain l'emporte? The letter was signed by 84 MPs, two-thirds of those who publicly supported the Vote Leave Campaign list attached 23.06.16 Robert Syms MP. @robertsymsmp Suivre Vu sur Twitter
23:33 Participation. Gibraltar a publié son taux de participation, très élevé, à 84%. Le rocher, enclavé au sud de l'Espagne, sera l'un des premiers à fournir ses résultats autour de minuit. Les 23 000 habitants devraient avoir voté massivement en faveur du maintien au sein de l'Union europénne, comme l'expliquait hier notre correspondant en Espagne François Musseau.
23:13 Nigel Farage (Ukip, pro-Brexit) affirme déjà que son camp a perdu Déclaration. Nigel Farage, leader du parti europhobe du UKIP, a déclaré que «le camp du Remain pourrait l'avoir emporté de justesse». Est-ce déjà un signe qu'effectivement, le Remain a gagné? A suivre avec les premiers résultats qui tomberont autour de minuit.
23:08 Brexit, demandez le programme! Au menu cette nuit. Voilà le programme de la soirée de jeudi et de la matinée de vendredi, concernant le référendum sur le maintien du Royaume-Uni dans l'Union européenne (toutes les heures sont indiquées à l'heure anglaise. Ajoutez une heure pour la France) : 22 heures. Fermeture des bureaux de vote. Dans l'immédiat, rien ne devrait filtrer : ni taux de participation, ni sondages de sortie d'urnes. Il faudra patienter. Minuit. Les premiers résultats (ceux de Gibraltar et des îles Scilly) devraient tomber, mais ils ne sont pas significatifs car ils concernent trop peu de citoyens britanniques. 1 heure. Les résultats des premiers arrondissements de Londres devraient être connus, même si eux non plus ne seront pas significatifs, la capitale semblant acquise au remain. Vers 2h30. Si l'écart est significatif, nous pourrons vous dire quel camp semble être en tête. Autour de 4 heures du matin. Des tendances plus nettes pourraient être connues. On ne vous promet pas que nos envoyées spéciales et notre correspondante seront encore debout. 6 heures du matin. Si le résultat est net, nous devrions être en mesure de vous dire si le Royaume-Uni a voté pour son maintien ou sa sortie de l'Union européenne. Entre 7 et 8 heures. Fin prévue du suspense.
23:04 Faites vos jeux, rien n'va plus. Les bureaux de vote sont désormais fermés. L'avenir du Royaume-Uni au sein de l'Union européenne est scellé.
22:29 Thursday night live. Nous rouvrons ce live en direct de la London School of Economics, où a lieu une soirée consacrée au référendum. Si les bureaux de vote ne ferment pas avant encore une bonne demi-heure (22 heures, heure locale), et que l'issue du vote ne devrait pas être connue avant tard dans la nuit (ou tôt vendredi matin), nous tenterons de vous tenir compagnie, et de vous fournir analyses et prévisions à mesure que la soirée avance.
20:04 Humour british. Le leader d'Ukip, Nigel Farage, était guilleret en allant voter, ce matin. Dans une vidéo du Guardian, le dirigeant du parti europhobe répondait aux journalistes qui l'interrogeaient sur son vote : «Je suis en train de réfléchir, je suis encore indécis». Hilarious!
19:56 Causerie. Julian Assange, plutôt «Brexit», discute référendum britannique avec Yannis Varoufakis, clairement «Bremain». Cloîtré depuis maintenant quatre ans dans l'ambassade d'Equateur à Londres (il est toujours sous le coup d'un mandat d'arrêt de la justice suédoise et d'une enquête américaine), le chef de file de WikiLeaks diffuse ce soir une émission en ligne, The Brexit Club, à partir de 21 heures (heure française). Outre l'ancien ministre grec des Finances, sont attendus, entre autres, les musiciens Brian Eno et M.I.A., le philosophe français Bernard Stiegler et un représentant du parti espagnol Podemos.
19:47 Bourse. Indicateur de la façon dont les marchés anticipent les résultats du référendum : la façon dont les actifs dépendant de chacune des deux issues se comportent. «Ce matin, tous les actifs financiers qui profiteraient du "remain" ont rebondi juste après 10 heures : la livre a gagné un demi pourcent, le yen s'est déprécié et les bourses européennes sont en hausse. La nuit dernière, un rebond similaire a eu lieu : il coïncidait avec la publication des derniers sondages, plus favorables au "remain"», nous expliquait plus tôt dans la journée un économiste qui a préféré garder l'anonymat.
19:36 Le Brexit sous l'eau Météo. Plus tôt dans la journée, une pluie torrentielle s'est abattue dans le sud-est de l'Angleterre, obligeant parfois les électeurs à patauger dans l'eau pour accéder aux bureaux de vote. Certains bureaux, inondés, ont même dû fermer. Ce mauvais temps n'a pour autant pas découragé les Britanniques, comme en ont témoigné les longues files d'attente sous la pluie. I just had to be carried into a flooded polling station. It's something biblical... #remain 23.06.16 Helen Joanna Youngs. @hjyoungs Suivre Vu sur The Guardian
19:29 Kajsa, 31 ans, a peur qu'un Brexit remette le multiculturalisme en cause Londres. [De notre envoyée spéciale Kim Hullot-Guiot] Kajsa, 31 ans, est rédactrice indépendante et écrivaine. Suédoise, elle n'a pas voté aujourd'hui mais, si elle ne craint pas pour son propre avenir en Grande-Bretagne (son mari est anglais), un Brexit l'inquiète tout de même. «Le multiculturalisme, le système public de santé... tout cela pourra être remis en cause (en cas de sortie de l'UE).» Dans cette campagne, la xénophobie exprimée ouvertement l'a frappée. «Je ne comprends pas que les gens ne veuillent pas que les réfugiés syriens viennent en Angleterre», nous a-t-elle confié.
18:52 Londres. [De notre envoyée spéciale Kim Hullot-Guiot] Dans le quartier de Highbury, dans le nord de Londres, des commerces affichent volontiers leur position par rapport au scrutin du jour. Ici, un restaurant italien incite ses clients à voter «remain», tout comme un opticien situé à deux pas.
18:44 «J'ai surtout voté "remain" pour protéger mon boulot» Pays de Galles. [De notre envoyée spéciale Isabelle Hanne] Dans sa blouse verte d'aide soignante, Caroline a voté «remain», au bureau de vote de l'école primaire Sandfields, à Port Talbot. «Honnêtement, j'ai surtout voté "remain" pour protéger mon boulot», avoue cette militante travailliste, qui a «suivi ce que disait Jeremy Corbyn. J'ai beaucoup hésité. Mais je n'ai pas du tout aimé le ton alarmiste employé par les deux camps.» Elle dit qu'autour d'elle, «les gens sont très partagés». Allan et Rihan aussi ont voté «in » pour «protéger le NHS». Allan est retraité, mais son épouse est une «infirmière spécialisée depuis 40 ans, et fière de l'être». «Ce n'est pas l'Europe qui a détruit l'hôpital public et les usines, ce sont les conservateurs. C'est Thatcher qui a lancé toutes ces privatisations dans les années 80, il ne faut pas l'oublier», lance Rihan. Né à Port Talbot, le couple de Gallois a vu la ville se détériorer : «De nombreuses usines ont fermé, il y a eu beaucoup de licenciements parmi les ouvriers de la sidérurgie, la pauvreté a augmenté… Mon père était ouvrier ici, à Port Talbot, j'ai clairement vu la dégradation de la ville et de l'état d'esprit des gens.»
18:37 «Voter "remain", c'est voter pour le moindre mal» Pays de Galles. [De notre envoyée spéciale Isabelle Hanne] Anita et Tony, deux retraités, sont venus voter pour le «remain» parce qu'ils ont «peur de l'inconnu». «Surtout, reprend Tony, parce que je n'aime pas du tout les leaders du camps du "leave", ces types d'extrême droite… Eux peuvent faire beaucoup de mal à la classe ouvrière. Après, voter "remain", c'est voter pour le moindre mal.» Son épouse affirme qu'autour d'eux, il y a «énormément d'indécis, encore à cette heure-ci!». Ils représenteraient un cinquième des 45 millions d'électeurs britanniques.
18:30 «J'ai peur que mes impôts augmentent si on sort de l'UE» Pays de Galles. [De notre envoyée spéciale Isabelle Hanne] Clare, robe marine et sac jaune poussin, sort en souriant du bureau de vote. «Je veux bien vous répondre mais je n'y connais pas grand-chose, dit cette institutrice de 58 ans. J'ai choisi le "in" parce que j'ai peur que mes impôts augmentent si on sort de l'UE. Mais surtout, j'ai peur qu'en faisant ça, on coupe tous les ponts avec l'Europe, du point de vue du business comme du point de vue culturel. Il faut qu'on donne des opportunités à nos enfants, un avenir.» Sur le grand porche du bâtiment, la devise du club résonne comme une consigne de vote : «Together we are stronger» («ensemble, nous sommes plus forts»).
18:16 «Mon vote, il ne vous regarde pas, je le garde pour moi!» Pays de Galles. [De notre envoyée spéciale Isabelle Hanne] A l'église St Mary, peu de gens veulent nous répondre. «Mon vote, il ne vous regarde pas, je le garde pour moi!», lance, sérieux, un quinquagénaire. Les bureaux de vote britanniques sont tous plus pittoresques les uns que les autres. Salles de sport, écoles, églises… Ou club de boxe, comme celui des «Bulldogs», à Baglan, un quartier au nord-ouest de Port Talbot. La famille Philipps y est venue en nombre pour voter «out» : «Nous avons besoin d'un changement, il a fallu faire un choix courageux, annonce Tracey, la mère, une infirmière de 42 ans, accompagnée de ses deux enfants. On a voté "out" surtout pour la sauvegarde de nos emplois, au NHS et dans la sidérurgie. Mais après, ce n'est pas un choix facile, on a beaucoup hésité.»
18:09 «Utilisez un stylo, le crayon de papier peut facilement être effacé» Parano. Au moment de voter pour ou contre le Brexit, il n'y avait qu'un crayon de papier dans l'isoloir. Alors certains électeurs britanniques ont emmené avec eux leurs propres stylos, par peur que les votes au crayon soient effacés, «et les résultats facilement changés». Une parano qui en a rendu certains «hilares». Make sure no matter the vote to use a pen, pencil is easily scribbled out and results are easily changed #usepens 23.06.16 Shannon Rouse. @Shannon__Rouse Suivre
18:07 Des fleurs pour Jo Cox Hommage. Environ 200 personnes se sont rassemblées devant la bibliothèque de Birstall, où a été tuée la députée travailliste Jo Cox, et qui sert de bureau de vote pour le référendum. La foule a observé une minute de silence, avant de scander «Nous sommes ensemble! ». Des fleurs ont également été déposées devant le bureau de vote. En parallèle, la justice a annoncé, ce jeudi, avoir fixé au 14 novembre la date d'ouverture du procès de Thomas Mair, le meurtrier présumé. Very moving image- it reminds me generally the price paid, always, for our democracy & a better society #JoCox 23.06.16 PaperMaven. @PaperMaven Suivre
18:03 «On a déjà assez de pauvreté ici, on n'a pas à s'occuper de celle des autres» Pays de Galles. [De notre envoyée spéciale Isabelle Hanne] Dans les rues du centre de Port Talbot, animées pendant l'heure du déjeuner, ce ne sont pas vraiment les panneaux «Leave» qui occupent les vitrines, mais des affichettes «Save our steel», la campagne en faveur de la protection des emplois dans les sidérurgies de la ville. Au Docks Cafe, le repaire des ouvriers de Tata Steel, dont on aperçoit les fumées et les tuyaux oxydés juste à côté, Paula Baker veut bien nous répondre mais «vite, parce qu'après je dois faire la vaisselle». Cheveux roux et chasuble vert, des tatouages dans le cou, cette femme franche et enjouée a décidé de voter «out », comme «toute [s]a famille». Pour elle, le problème de l'UE, c'est «l'immigration» : «Honnêtement, on a déjà assez de pauvreté ici, on n'a pas à s'occuper de celle des autres.»
17:58 Remain. Notre envoyée spéciale à Londres Kim Hullot-Guiot a rencontré Alexa, 32 ans, qui travaille dans l'industrie du cinéma. Elle a voté «remain» aujourd'hui, d'abord parce que son père est originaire de Malte et qu'elle se sent, du coup, très européenne. Ensuite parce qu'elle n'imagine pas la Grande-Bretagne autrement qu'au sein de l'Union européenne - sans doute une affaire générationnelle. La façon dont la campagne s'est déroulée, avec des paroles racistes assez ouvertement proférées, lui fait se sentir «embarrassée et honteuse».
17:20 Témoignage. Notre envoyée spéciale Kim Hullot-Guiot a rencontré Adrian, 40 ans, responsable événementiel à temps partiel. Il a voté «remain» ce jeudi, sans hésitation. Pour lui, croire que le Royaume-Uni puisse se la jouer solo, c'est ne pas comprendre comment le monde fonctionne. «Qu'on le veuille ou non, il faut regarder le tableau en entier», explique-t-il sans perdre son sourire. Autour de lui, ses amis ont majoritairement voté pour rester dans l'UE, et il espère que ceux qui prêchent la sortie n'iront pas voter. Si c'est pourtant le «leave» qui gagne, il craint qu'«on perde l'Ecosse», dit-il en riant.
16:26 On s'en grille une? Dans notre édition du jour, une grille de mots croisés spécial Brexit, concotée par Gaëtan Goron. En traIN? Un peu de rOUTe? Dans une manif statique? Grillez-vous en une sur le #Brexit @libe 23.06.16 Gaëtan Goron. @guegoethe Suivre
16:01 Un référendum qui a du chien! Ouaf. C'est presque devenu une habitude. A chaque élection, nombre de Britanniques prennent en photo leur chien, qui patiente devant les bureaux de vote. L'idée? Exprimer leur choix ou montrer qu'ils ont accompli leur devoir citoyen. Le hashtag #dogsatpollingstations (des chiens aux bureaux de vote), est rapidement devenu viral sur Twitter. #dogsatpollingstations make democracy worth the effort 23.06.16 Referlendum Cresci. @elenacresci Suivre
15:30 «Il faut restreindre l'accès à l'Angleterre, parce que le pays est trop petit» Témoignages. Au pied du centre commercial du quartier de Wandsworth (dans le sud-ouest de Londres), on se hâte pour aller déjeuner ou faire une course. De nombreuses personnes sont plutôt pressées, et, aussitôt le sujet de notre reportage connu, déclinent poliment nos questions. Quelques-uns acceptent tout de même de livrer leur vote. Hitess, 36 ans, livreur de journaux, a voté en avance il y a quelques jours. Son amie affirme, l'air gêné, n'avoir pas pu s'inscrire à temps. Lui a voté «remain» pour «le business» : selon lui, le pays ne pourra s'en sortir économiquement en-dehors de l'UE. «Il n'y a plus de manufactures ici», insiste-t-il. Au contraire, M. et Mme Taylor, retraités septuagénaires plutôt bien mis, ont voté pour le Brexit. Si lui affirme que ce serait trop long d'expliquer pourquoi, elle donne quelques raisons : |
. A name that is closely related to the political history of the country, Batlle began his political career in the 1950s and had served as member of the Uruguayan Congress for the Colorado Party, to which many members of his own family – which came to the River Plate from the Catalan coast at Sitges, Spain, 200 years ago – had belonged before him.
Early life [ edit ]
Batlle was born in 1927, son of Luis Batlle Berres and Matilde Ibáñez Tálice. He has two siblings, Luis and Matilde. His ancestors include the Uruguayan presidents Jose Batlle y Ordonez and Lorenzo Batlle.[2]
By 1958, when he was first elected Congressman for the Colorado Party, Dr. Batlle – who had obtained his Diploma in Law and Social Sciences from the University of the Republic in 1956 - had been active in journalism both in Radio "Ariel" and the newspaper "Acción". He was also by that time a member of the governing body of his Party. He unsuccessfully ran for president in 1966, and was part of a financial scandal in 1968, which was never proven. He ran for president again in 1971, without success.[2]
During the period of civilian-military administration in Uruguay (1973–1985), Dr. Batlle did not occupy any legislative or official position, having been banned from political activity by decree.[3] He was detained on several occasions.[2] He did preside over the Legislative General Assembly in February 1985, when the first democratically elected Congress was seated after the military interregnum. He has a very active legislative record. Dr. Batlle was also a leading promoter and drafter of two Constitutional Amendments, one in 1966 and the other more recently in 1996. He was defeated a third time in the 1994 presidential elections, and won the 1999 elections, taking office in 2000.[2]
Presidency [ edit ]
Batlle took office at a particularly difficult moment for Uruguay, as an economic depression led the country close to sovereign default, and a third of the population below the poverty line.[2] Batlle's determination to reduce public spending, aimed at preserving the macroeconomic balance, made it possible for Uruguay to be highly regarded as a country with a sound management of its economic affairs. US president George H.W. Bush helped him to prevent default with $1.5 billion in credit.[2]
His administration had to deal with a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak, which threatened access of Uruguayan beef to international markets.[2] Before the end of his term, Uruguay had re-gained disease-free status.
Batlle firmly backed MERCOSUR, which he saw as instrumental for an open regional integration into the world economy. He favoured strengthening MERCOSUR by forming associations such as the one envisaged in the so-called "4+1" agreement with the United States. He maintained close diplomatic ties with the US at a time when the Pink tide in Latin America was marked by several regional governments that distanced themselves from the US.[2] He had a diplomatic conflict with Cuba, as he criticised the human rights record of the Castro's regime.[3]
He proposed the legalization of cocaine, as a way to reduce the political clout of drug cartels.[4]
He was also in favour of the creation of the Free Trade Association of the Americas (FTAA). As president, Batlle was firmly set against protectionism and subsidies of any kind; he has been a consistent spokesman for unhampered free trade.
Later life [ edit ]
Jorge Batlle stayed active in politics after the end of his presidency. He criticised the Uruguayan presidents that succeeded him through newspapers columns and social media.[2]
Death [ edit ]
Jorge Batlle fainted and struck his head during an event at the Colorado party. He was hospitalized at the Sanatorio Americano hospital, and underwent surgery to stop a cerebral hemorrhage. The operation failed, and he died on 24 October 2016, one day shy of his 89th birthday.[2] Uruguay declared a day of national mourning upon his death.[3]
See also [ edit ]Russian protest leader and mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny, left, addresses his supporters. (Grigory Dukor/Reuters)
There is more and more research these days in political science on the subject of elections in what are termed “competitive authoritarian regimes.” These are regimes where elections are held — and held regularly — but in which the process is far from free and fair. In the following guest post, University of Wisconsin political scientist Scott Gehlbach takes up this question with an application to last month’s Moscow mayoral election, where in retrospect the surprising question may have been why the regime allowed the election to proceed in as free and fair a manner as it did.
*****
The recent Moscow mayoral election highlights an important choice for incumbents in countries with weak democratic institutions: whether to manipulate elections to guarantee an easy victory or take one’s chances with a free and fair contest. The decision to allow the anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny to run and collect votes with minimal interference was a gamble — a gamble that incumbent mayor Sergei Sobyanin appears to have lost, even though he was declared the winner and soon thereafter inaugurated for a second term. Expecting an easy victory, Sobyanin emerges from the election diminished in the eyes of the apparat. Sensing that his hold on power is insecure, bureaucrats will be less likely to carry out his orders promptly, and the selectorate in the Kremlin will be less likely to view him as a potential successor to Putin.
Alberto Simpser and I provide a model of this choice in “Electoral Manipulation as Bureaucratic Control.” Like Sobyanin, the incumbent in our model worries about his “legitimacy” among the bureaucracy, whose cooperation is important for the incumbent’s career success. But the bureaucracy worries about investing effort in an incumbent who is unlikely to be around in the long run. In such circumstances, electoral manipulation can help to assure the bureaucracy that the incumbent’s hold on power is secure — say, by confusing bureaucrats as to the incumbent’s actual popular support.
But electoral manipulation isn’t always the right strategy. In particular, it doesn’t make sense to manipulate when the incumbent believes that the public is firmly behind him, as was apparently the case in Moscow. Sobyanin now knows better, but given his initial belief it would have been foolish to side with those who wanted Navalny in prison rather than on the hustings. Doing so would have denied the apparat the opportunity to verify the popular support that Sobyanin thought he had. Having lost his gamble, Sobyanin should now be asking himself why he overestimated his standing with the public.C + Collagen Deep Cream is rated 4.8 out of 5 by 49.
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A homeless man with a criminal record is to blame for defrosting a morgue in Vladivostok, an incident described as a “pending biological disaster,” police said on Thursday.
The suspect, a 49-year-old Azerbaijani native, stole pipes transmitting refrigerants to the body storage area in order to sell them for scrap metal, local news agency PrimaMedia.ru reported, citing a spokesman for police in the far eastern Russian city.
The incident took place on Monday, but the theft was not discovered until the next day, when temperature in the morgue rose above zero degrees Celsius, causing bodies to spoil, LifeNews.ru online tabloid said earlier.
Several corpses had to be buried immediately, said Vladivostok region’s chief forensic expert Alexander Golubev, who described the incident as a “disaster.” Morgue employees had to don hazmat suits to clean up the mess caused by the thawing.
The suspect, who made a living collecting scrap metal, simply entered the unlocked room that housed refrigerator equipment and cut away the metal pipes, letting all the Freon leak from the system before calmly walking away with the loot, PrimaMedia.ru said. The man then sold the pipes to a scrap metal yard next door, from where they were eventually recovered by police.
The man, who previously served prison terms for hooliganism and sexually abusing a minor, now faces up to five years in prison if charged and convicted of theft.
Ironically, the suspect, whose name was withheld, is himself a refrigerator repair man by profession, police said.Tasmanian MP Adam Brooks accused of conflict of interest over mining links
Updated
The State Opposition has alleged new Mining Minister Adam Brooks had a conflict of interest in his previous government role, likening the successful businessman-turned-Parliamentarian to controversial Queensland MP Clive Palmer.
Key points: Opposition alleges Brooks had conflict of interest in past trade role
Mr Brooks describes attack as grubby
Opposition says it is concerning he is the sole shareholder of MSS
In response to questions in State Parliament, Mr Brooks confirmed he resumed an active role in the company he founded, Maintenance Systems Solutions (MSS), while he was parliamentary secretary for trade.
As a member of the Opposition, Mr Brooks stepped down as managing director of MSS Australia in 2012, after the Greens accused him of a conflict of interest.
Since being appointed Mining Minister in February, replacing the retired Paul Harriss, Mr Brooks has resigned his directorships and is in the process of divesting himself of his business interests.
Deputy Opposition Leader Michelle O'Byrne led the attack on Mr Brooks in Parliament today.
"Given the very serious conflict of interest that has quite clearly occurred, can you categorically rule out that at no stage while you were the parliamentary secretary for trade did you meet with, present to or have contact with any company that has a commercial relationship of any kind with Maintenance Systems Solutions or its international affiliates... or any other company in which you hold shares or directorships?" she asked.
Mr Brooks described the Opposition's tactics as grubby.
"They've been on the public record, been disclosed as required, there is no conflict of interest there, and yet the Opposition, because they've run out of anything else to ask about, they've now decided how dare someone recover from the disaster of the Labor-Green government train wreck," he said.
Ms O'Byrne was concerned Mr Brooks remained the sole shareholder of the company.
"Further given that you retain ultimate control of the company as it's sole shareholder, isn't it a fact you remain a shadow-director of this company in the same manner that federal MP Mr Clive Palmer was accused of being the shadow-director of the failed Queensland Nickel?" she said.
Mr Brooks strongly denied he was a shadow-director and returned fire by accusing the Opposition of embarking on a "personal smear campaign because of your pathological hatred of people who are successful".
Topics: states-and-territories, hobart-7000
First postedInside the Human Information Technology Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle, cognitive psychologist Hunter Hoffman is using video game technology to help patients forget their pain.
Hoffman is a pioneer of virtual reality therapy (VR): a distraction technique that requires patients to immerse themselves in a computer-generated environment as a way to control and overcome physical pain. The therapy is based on an influential 1965 theory by Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall referred to as "the gate control" theory: the idea that what a person is thinking, and where their attention is directed, can influence how much pain they experience. This is where SnowWorld comes in.
SnowWorld is a virtual reality world created specifically for use with burn patients. Developed by Hoffman and colleague David Patterson with funding from Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the game produces the illusion of floating through an icy canyon with a frozen river and waterfall as snowflakes drift down on the scene. As patients walk through the canyon, they use a PC mouse to shoot an unlimited number of snowballs at enemies, which take the form of snowmen, igloos, robots, penguins, flying fish, and wooly mammoths; as soon as the enemies are hit, they disintegrate and reappear later on (with Paul Simon songs from the album Graceland playing in the background.) To enter SnowWorld, patients look through a pair of virtual reality goggles with a wide field of view, commonly used by the military to train forces. Patients wear noise-cancelling earphones, while specialized hardware holds the VR goggles near the patient's eyes.
A soldier at Brooke Army Medical Center trying SnowWorld pain distraction while his wound care nurse cleans his combat-related burn wound. Picture credit: Hunter Hoffman.
The game is specifically designed to help burn patients during wound care, a painful process that involves cleaning and re-administering bandages and treatments several times a week. While conducting early clinical trials with healthy volunteers, Hoffman and Patterson found a significant correlation between the potency of the illusion--how strongly the subjects felt they were immersed in the virtual world--and the alleviation of pain, administered in small doses during the trial. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Hoffman and his team scanned the brains of healthy volunteers using SnowWorld to measure what effect the game had on their ability to register pain; the results showed on average 30 to 50 percent reductions in pain.
There is a limit to how much information people can process--with burn patients, playing SnowWorld leaves less attention available to process signals coming in from pain receptors, patients spend a lot less time thinking about their pain during wound care.
"Expecting pain is one way psychological factors can amplify or increase how much pain a patient can experience," Hoffman says. "The logic behind virtual reality pain distraction is based on a very old concept….as old as using a baby rattler to distract a baby from crying. I think most distractions are simply not compelling enough to compete with pain for attention at the level we are seeing VR work. There is a limit to how much information people can process. With burn patients, playing SnowWorld leaves less attention available to process signals coming in from pain receptors; patients spend a lot less time thinking about their pain during wound care."
Hoffman first became interested in blurring the distinction between reality and virtual reality during his time as a pre-graduate assistant of Marcia Johnson, a memory researcher at Princeton University. Johnson originated a theory called "source monitoring," centered on figuring out how people remember if something really happened, or if they only imagined it did. When he began work at the Human Information Technology Lab in Seattle, Hoffman began using virtual reality to test his theory that the stronger the illusion of going into a virtual world, the more attention would be devoted to that information. This idea parallels the argument that video games, as a form of interactive media, are more immersive than noninteractive media such as films, books, or music.
But Hoffman discovered that consumer video games just aren't immersive enough to do the trick. In an experiment using two teenagers suffering from severe burns, Hoffman and Patterson had both patients play Mario Kart 64 and Wave Race 64 on the Nintendo 64, as well as a virtual reality game called SpiderWorld, an earlier version on SnowWorld designed to help phobic patients overcome their fear of spiders by slowly introducing them to the arachnids in a virtual kitchen environment. (Both patients played while undergoing wound care.) What Hoffman and Patterson found was that both patients experienced a reduction in pain and time spent thinking about pain when playing SpiderWorld than when playing the Nintendo titles.
"Although Nintendo can hold a healthy player's attention for a long time, the illusion of going inside the two-dimensional video game was found to be much weaker than the illusion of going into virtual reality. The ability to give users the sense that they are'somewhere else' can be of great value in a medical setting.
"While the graphics are better in video games than in SnowWorld, the high immersion of the VR system is thought to be the key difference. The wide field of view VR goggles stimulate both central and peripheral visual fields and block patients from being able to watch their wound care or to even see the hospital room."
SnowWorld may be graphically crude, but it works.
After seeing the effects of VR, Hoffman and his team decided to kick it up a notch and create SnowWorld. Currently, Hoffman uses VR to treat three types of patients: burn victims, phobia sufferers, and those affected by post-traumatic stress disorder, afflicting a large number of US military personnel returning from Iraq or Afghanistan. For phobia sufferers and post-traumatic stress disorder, Hoffman uses VR exposure, which works oppositely to VR distraction by gradually exposing patients, via a virtual environment, to the object or situation they are avoiding, be it a spider, a plane, or, in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, the memory of a traumatic event.
"Hundreds of thousands of soldiers return with some major psychological problems that need to be treated," Hoffman says. "For example, if a soldier sees a terrorist blow up civilians in Iraq, those images can haunt the soldier later, causing nightmares and a wide number of other symptoms. Combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder is known to be unusually challenging to treat. If successful, VR could help hundreds if not thousands of lives of young US troops with psychological issues that need to be addressed to accelerate their reintegration into society."
Encouraged by their results with SnowWorld, Hoffman, Patterson, and UW anesthesiologist Sam Sharar MD are seeking funds to develop SnowWorld 2.0: SuperSnowWorld, which will add lifelike human avatars, a multiplayer option (so two patients or a patient and a caregiver can play together), as well more enemies (monstrous insects and animated sea creatures are at the top of the ideas list). Hoffman is confident that with more research and clinical trials, VR therapy can one day be used regularly to help treat a wide range of anxiety disorders, from phobias to more severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as alleviating pain in medical procedures, surgery rooms, physical and post-injury therapy, right down to everyday pains and fears, such as a trip to the dentist.
"The illusions produced by these programs are nowhere near as sophisticated as the world portrayed in films like The Matrix. Yet virtual reality has matured enough so that it can be used to help people control their pain and overcome their fears. As the technology continues to advance, we can expect even more remarkable applications for virtual reality in the years to come."In the years since the De Halve Maan brewery opened a bottling facility outside Bruges in 2010, the company's faced a tricky logistics problem. It still brews beer at its original site downtown, just as it has for nearly five centuries. To get all that delicious beer to the new factory for filtration, bottling, and shipping, it uses trucks. Trucks that burn fuel, spew carbon and clog the city’s cobblestone streets (which surely froths all that beer).
No more. The city council has approved the brewery's unusual but clever plan to save time and money while reducing emissions and congestion. It will build a pipeline to ferry the good stuff across town, underground. Yes, you read that right: A beer pipeline.
Instead of making the 3-mile drive in one of dozens of tankers that traverse town each day, the award-winning beer will flow through a 1.8-mile polyethylene pipeline, making the trip in 15 to 20 minutes. The pipeline will move 6,000 liters of beer every hour, De Halve Man CEO Xavier Vanneste told Het Nieuwsblad.
De Halve Maan brewing vats. De Halve Maan
As CityLab points out, Cleveland’s Great Lakes Brewing Company uses underground tubes to move beer between its brewery and its pub, across the street. But this is a longer journey, one with real environmental consequences, and the Belgian pipeline surely will have a bigger impact in terms of reducing traffic and carbon emissions. “In time, this innovative investment plan would reduce the amount of transport by heavy goods vehicles by 85 percent,” says Franky Dumon, the alderman for spatial planning who approved the project on behalf of the city council. “It is a win-win situation for everyone.”
De Halve Maan gets to move its beer swiftly and efficiently, without giving up the medieval site that draws more than 100,000 visitors every year. Bruges doesn’t have to spend a dime, since the brewery guarantees it will cover the installation and road repair costs. There are no public cost estimates for building the pipeline just yet, but De Halve Maan says it will minimize tearing up public streets with “computer-guided drilling techniques.”
The residents of Bruges will be happy to get all those trucks off the street, but we assume they're at least kind of hoping for a burst pipe and streets filled with free beer.Dotted with illegal and old structures that violate building norms, most areas of Delhi are vulnerable to disasters like the one that took place in Inderlok on Saturday.
In North Delhi, old, weak constructions in the Walled City area and unauthorised constructions in places such as Inderlok, Burari, Wazirabad and Badli are prone to the risk of collapse.
In East Delhi, the low ground level because of the proximity to the Yamuna makes the foundations of buildings in Laxmi Nagar, Geeta Colony, Shashtri Park and Sonia Vihar weak. Illegal constructions in Dilshad Garden, Patparganj and Seelampur are cause for concern.
In corners like Rajeev Nagar, Batla House extension, Jaitpur extension, Bhogal, Kalkaji, Okhla, parts of Dwarka, Bijwasan of the otherwise posh South Delhi area, there is a constant threat of a manmade catastrophe.
The building departments of the corporations are supposed to identify “dangerous buildings” and issue evacuation notices and then conduct demolition. But these on-paper exercises rarely yield results and the outcome is a building collapse.
According to a senior South civic body official, all junior engineers and superintendent engineers of the corporation get trained on rapid visual survey by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). “Our officials are well-equipped. We identify and give notices of vacation or demolition to dangerous buildings,” he said.
East Delhi has many unsafe buildings that can fall like a pack of cards if a major earthquake strikes the Capital and also boasts of the most number of unauthorised colonies, where houses have been constructed on weak foundations.
The civic body claims to have taken all possible precautions. “There is a standard procedure where firstly a survey is conducted and buildings found to be unsafe are tagged dangerous. After that a notice on action to be taken is issued,” a senior East body official said. “Our ground level is low and thereby we have to be more prompt,” he said.
The Walled City, too, is full of dilapidated buildings with the civic agency turning a blind eye rather than demolishing them. Officials say these buildings of Old Delhi are not very strong. “Most of them are over 200 years old. We do survey dangerous buildings and act on residents’ complaints,” an official said.
First Published: Jun 29, 2014 00:32 ISTThe Following post first appeared on FactCheck.org.
Rep. Michele Bachmann claims that “vulnerable women, vulnerable children, vulnerable senior citizens” will all “pay more” under the federal health care law and get “less” in return. The law actually provides free preventive services for women, increases prescription drug coverage for seniors and extends funding for the children’s health program for two more years.
But it was her plea to stop the law before it “literally kills” women, children and seniors that got the most headlines. That’s a particularly curious claim considering that the law will increase health care coverage for an estimated 27 million more Americans by 2017, and studies show that those lacking health insurance have a higher chance of dying prematurely.
Bachmann made her claims during a March 21 speech on the House floor — two days before the third anniversary of President Obama’s signing of the Affordable Care Act — where she urged for the law to be repealed.
Bachmann, March 21: You see, what he demanded and insisted upon was that the government have 100 percent control over health care. One hundred percent control? The American people lose control? What did they get? They get health care, health insurance, I should say, that’s more expensive than anything they’ve ever paid for before, and they get less for it. Well, what a deal, Mr. Speaker. What a deal. The American people, especially vulnerable women, vulnerable children, vulnerable senior citizens, now get to pay more and they get less. That’s why we’re here, because we’re saying let’s repeal this failure before it literally kills women, kills children, kills senior citizens. Let’s not do that. Let’s love people. Let’s care about people.
Bachmann claims vulnerable women, children and seniors will “pay more” and “get less,” but she overlooks services that they stand to benefit from.
In August 2012, the law began covering 22 preventive health services for women, such as mammograms and screenings for cervical cancer, without additional cost sharing. And in January 2011, the law began helping seniors by providing a 50 percent discount on brand-name drugs when they reach the gap in prescription drug coverage known as the “donut hole.” Plus the law extended funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program for two more years through 2015.
As for her plea to stop the law before “it literally kills” women, children and seniors, Bachmann has long been suspicious of the law’s creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board. It was about this time last year when she warned that the board would lead to less care for seniors and “the collapse of the greatest health care system in the world, killing quality care for all Americans.” But we’ve written on many occasions that the law prohibits the board, which is responsible for suggesting ways to slow Medicare spending, from rationing care or restricting benefits for seniors.
As we’ve also written before, scores of studies have found that thousands of deaths each year in the United States can be attributed to a lack of health insurance. Some of the studies adjusted for high-risk behaviors — such as smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity and income — to account for other factors that result in premature deaths. (For a more detailed discussion of the studies see our Sept. 24, 2009 item, “Dying from Lack of Insurance.”)
It’s also not true that the government will “have 100 percent control over health care,” as Bachmann claimed. We’ve said before that the new law expands existing federal programs, establishes new subsidies and imposes additional regulation of health insurance companies. But it doesn’t come close to establishing a government-run system, such as those in Britain and Canada. Instead, the federal law builds on the current system of private insurance, and creates more business for private companies by mandating that individuals buy coverage.
Bachmann’s impassioned House speech reminded us of remarks that Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida made in 2009, when he claimed that the Republican alternative to the health care overhaul was: “Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.” He later explained that he meant that the Republicans had “no plan.” But, as we said then, Grayson was “wrong that the Republicans have ‘no plan,’ whether he likes it or not, and it certainly doesn’t boil down to ‘die quickly.’”
For Grayson and now Bachmann, the facts simply don’t match their hyperbolic claims.Admit it: The last time you remember seeing a man cry you thought it was strange, but real men can cry. The truth is, society has always placed a stigma on the idea of men showing such a visceral emotion that tears are actually shed. The shared belief in society is that it’s not what men are supposed to do. It’s just not manly. Let’s look past the preconceived notions and stereotypes and find out why men aren’t being brought to tears that much and why they probably should cry every now and then for their own mental well-being. Ultimately let’s answer the question: ‘Why do we cry?’
It’s impossible to pinpoint when the act of crying was defined as something unbecoming of a man. In its simplest form, tears aren’t anything associated with gender—they merely lubricate the eyes. Humans are the only species who actually cry for emotional reasons aside from pain. According to Oren Hasson, MD, of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Zoology: “Crying is a highly evolved behavior—tears give clues and reliable information about submission, needs and social attachments between one another.” His research, published in Evolutionary Psychology, indicates that, “tears lower defences and reliably function as signals of submission [or] a cry for help.”
Is this act of submission or desire for help unmanly? Dale Curd, a therapist and men’s specialist, has found that while these signals aren’t necessarily unmanly, men and women alike have been conditioned to think so. “We’ve all heard ‘Men don’t cry’ and it has become a part of what society expects of men,” says Curd. “Even the term ‘crybaby’ clearly connects the act of crying with being infantile,” Curd states. He adds that, “men aren’t crying for the same reason women tend to shield their tears from others: It’s viewed as a weakness by themselves and everyone else around them.”
But maybe the stigma isn’t something that depends on the crier, more than the people witnessing the act of crying. According to Stephanie Shields, a professor of women’s studies at Penn State University, “When tears are shed, they have a powerful effect on others…crying is understood as not only a reflection of internal feelings but also as a form of social communication. The way tears are judged by others is affected by many factors, including the gender of both the crier and observer, whether the tears are perceived as angry or sad.”
Remember when University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow was labeled Tearbow for crying after losing the 2009 Southeastern Championships? While the media predictably swarmed on the young quarterback, the perceptions of his moment of sadness among his peers showed a change. According to research published in Psychology of Men & Masculinity that was conducted by psychologist Y Joel Wong, “The college football players in our study who believed…crying was appropriate had higher self-esteem.” The players who thought the crying was inappropriate generally had lower self esteem.
With that in mind, the perception of crying, especially that which stipulates male tears are unmanly, is actually changing. Shields’ research indicates that since September 11, 2001, a man crying has become acceptable in situations considered extreme like a death in the family or the end of a significant relationship though not as welcoming to tears over lesser instances like a computer crash. The research also indicates that men who cry get the benefit of the doubt more than women. “It stands to reason that if you see a man openly crying, he’s probably at a true moment of breakdown,” said Curd, “so it would make sense that people would believe the moment was genuine and illicit true feelings of empathy.”
Regardless of how people feel about the act of crying, Curd believes that each individual males thoughts about sadness should have no connection to an outsider’s perception. “Trying to keep emotions buried like this to seem manly is actually damaging to our psychological well-being,” says Curd. He added that, “instead of training generations of men to hide their feelings and then wonder why they are not emotionally available, as a society we should foster acceptance of all emotions from both genders and all age groups.”
What does that mean for the everyday guy? Go ahead and cry if you want to. By bucking the demands of others on how you should live your life, shedding a tear or two may yet be the manliest decision you’ll ever make.Get the biggest rugby stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
Pictures: The remarkable scenes as Wales down Belgium
Wales have booked their place among the best teams on the planet after their incredible win over Belgium that sent shockwaves through world football saw them move above European superpowers Spain, Italy and France.
And they can class themselves as the best in Britain if England fail to beat Slovenia on Sunday as the Welsh march up the Fifa rankings continues.
Gareth Bale's 25th minute strike to seal a momentous win over Marc Wilmots' star-studded side could – depending on other results over the next few days - see Chris Coleman's side enter the top ten in the world for the first time in their history.
That includes being above current European champions Spain and runners-up Italy as well as Euro hosts France.
They could even eclipse England in the rankings for the first time if Roy Hodgson's men slip up in Solvenia.
Watch: Cardiff City Stadium rocks out to Zombie Nation
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Wayne Rooney and his team have a 100 per cent qualifying record so far and will be expected to triumph again.
However, Slovenia are second in the table and will be desperate to avoid defeat as they seek to keep their place ahead of Switzerland in runners-up spot.
In the last set of Fifa rankings, England were 15th with Wales seven spots behind in 22nd.
Overcoming the second best team in the world means Wales have picked up significant ranking points in the complicated coefficient system Fifa use to formalise the ratings.
And if England don't win, the Bale-led triumph will ensure Coleman's side roar past the Three Lions too... and say they are Britain's finest.
(Image: Reuters / Rebecca Naden)
A football nation born again as Chris Coleman's men surge towards Euro 2016
Furthermore, the stunning victory has confirmed Wales' position as one of the top seeds for next month's World Cup qualifying draw.
Only world champions Germany, Belgium themselves and World Cup semi-finalists the Netherlands are so far guaranteed to be among the European teams guaranteed to be in pot one before the weekend fixtures.
Wales began the last World Cup campaign as bottom seeds alongside such minnows as San Marino, Andorra and Luxembourg and this will be the first time a team has moved from the last pot to top in the space of four years.
(Image: Action Images via Reuters / Carl Recine)
The draw for Russia 2018 takes place in St Petersburg on July 25 and their top seed standing will mean they can avoid many of the big guns when it comes to trying to reach their first World Cup since 1958.
Wales were 112th in the world just three years ago yet initial steady progress followed up by their unbeaten start to the Euro 2016 campaign has seen them rocket to their current lofty status.
Relive a remarkable evening as Wales put themselves in the box seat for Euro 2016Text size
Pure coincidence or inside information? One of those reasons explains how one investor knew to position bullishly in the options market one day before China's central bank lowered interest rates for the first time since 2008.
The People's Bank of China said Thursday that it was lowering its benchmark interest rate on loans and deposits by 0.25 percentage points. The bank lowered the one-year yuan lending rate to 6.31% from 6.56%, and the one-year yuan deposit rate to 3.25% from 3.5%.
The news surprised many investors, but one was supremely well positioned to benefit from the rate decision. This investor traded 40,000 options on the iShares China FTSE/Xinhua China 25 Index exchange-traded fund (ticker: FXI).
On Wednesday, the investor sold 20,000 July $25 puts on the China ETF when it was at $33.43 and bought 20,000 July $37 calls. The trade generated a credit of two cents per contract. The choice of strike prices implies this investor anticipated the exchange-traded fund would rise 11% by July 20. In recent trading, the July $37 call price was up 83% and the ETF was up |
askar’s concern with underlying causal mechanisms. See also the entry on scientific realism.
4.4 Economic methodology and social studies of science
Throughout its history, economics has been the subject of sociological as well as methodological scrutiny. Many sociological discussions of economics, like Marx’s critique of classical political economy, have been concerned to identify ideological distortions and thereby to criticize particular aspects of economic theory and economic policy. Since every political program finds economists who testify to its economic virtues, there is a never-ending source of material for such critiques. For example, in the wake of the near collapse of the international financial system in 2008, American economists who argued for austerity were mostly Republicans, while those who defended efforts to increase aggregate demand were mostly Democrats.
The influence of contemporary sociology of science and social studies of science, coupled with the difficulties methodologists have had making sense of and rationalizing the conduct of economics, have led to efforts at fusing economics and sociology (Granovetter 1985, Swedberg 1990, 2007) as well as to a sociological turn within methodological reflection itself. Rather than showing that there is good evidence supporting developments in economic theory or that those developments have other broadly epistemic virtues, methodologists and historians such as D. Wade Hands (2001); Hands and Mirowski 1998), Philip Mirowski (1990, 2002, 2004, 2013), and E. Roy Weintraub (1991) have argued that these changes reflect a wide variety of non-rational factors, from changes in funding for theoretical economics, political commitments, personal rivalries, attachments to metaphors, or mathematical interests.
Furthermore, many of the same methodologists and historians have argued that economics is not only an object of social inquiry, but that it can be a tool of social inquiry into science. By studying the incentive structure of scientific disciplines and the implicit or explicit market forces impinging on research (including of course research in economics), it should be possible to write the economics of science and the economics of economics itself (Hands 1995, Hull 1988, Leonard 2002, Mirowski and Sent 2002).
Exactly how, if at all, this work is supposed to bear on questions concerning how well supported are the claims economists make is not clear. Though eschewing traditional methodology, Mirowski’s monograph on the role of physical analogy in economics (1990) is often very critical of mainstream economics. In his Reflection without Rules (2001) D. W. Hands maintains that general methodological rules are of little use. He defends a naturalistic view of methodology and is skeptical of prescriptions that are not based on detailed knowledge. But he does not argue that no rules apply.
4.5 Case studies
The above survey of approaches to the fundamental problems of appraising economic theory is far from complete. For example, there have been substantial efforts to apply structuralist views of scientific theories (Sneed 1971, Stegmüller 1976, 1979) to economics (Stegmüller et al. 1981, Hamminga 1983, Hands 1985c, Balzer and Hamminga 1989). The above discussion documents the diversity and disagreements concerning how to interpret and appraise economic theories. It is not surprising that there is no consensus among those writing on economic methodology concerning the overall empirical appraisal of specific approaches in economics, including mainstream microeconomics, macroeconomics, and econometrics. When practitioners cannot agree, it is questionable whether those who know more philosophy but less economics will be able to settle the matter. Since the debates continue, those who reflect on economic methodology should have a continuing part to play.
Meanwhile, there are many other more specific methodological questions to address, and it is a sign of the maturity of the subdiscipline that a large and increasing percentage of work on economic methodology addresses more specific questions. There is plethora of work, as a perusal of any recent issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology or Economics and Philosophy will confirm. Some of the range of issues currently under discussion were mentioned above in Section 2. Here is a list of three of the many areas of current interest:
1. Although more concerned with the content of economics than with its methodology, the recent explosion of work on feminist economics is shot through with methodological and sociological self-reflection. The fact that a considerably larger percentage of economists are men than is true of any of the other social sciences and indeed than most of the natural sciences raises questions about whether there is something particularly masculine about the discipline. Important texts are Ferber and Nelson (1993, 2003), Nelson (1995, 1996, 2001), Barker and Kuiper (2003). Since 1995, there has been a journal, Feminist Economics, which pulls together much of this work.
2. During the past decades, laboratory experimentation in economics has expanded rapidly. Laboratory experimentation has many different objectives (see Roth 1988) and apparently holds out the prospect of bridging the gulf between fundamental economic theory and empirical evidence. Some of it casts light on the way in which methodological commitments influence the extent to which economists heed empirical evidence. A good deal of laboratory experimentation in contemporary economics is in the service of behavioral economics, which prides itself on heeding experimental evidence concerning the structure and determinants of individual choices. Although behavioral economics has secured a foothold within mainstream economics, it remains controversial substantively and methodologically, and its implications for normative economics, discussed below in section 6, are controversial.
For example, in the case of preference reversals, discussed briefly below in Section 5.1, economists devoted considerable attention to the experimental findings and conceded that they disconfirmed central principles of economics. But economists have been generally unwilling to pay serious attention to the theories proposed by psychologists that predicted the phenomena before they were observed. The reason seems to be that these psychological theories do not have the same wide scope as the basic principles of mainstream economics (Hausman 1992, chapter 13). Hesitation concerning neuroeconomics (Camerer et al. 2005, Camerer 2009, Marchionni and Vromen 2014, Rustichini 2005, 2009, Glimcher and Fehr 2013, Reuter and Montag 2016, Vromen and Marchionni 2018) is also common. In an extremely influential essay, “The Case for Mindless Economics.” Gul and Pesandorfer (2008) argue that the findings of behavioral economics (and neuroeconomics) are irrelevant to economics. They are at most of heuristic value. They maintain that the findings of behavioral economics are irrelevant to economics, because they do not concern market choices and their consequences, which are the only germane data. Sometimes Gul and Pesandorfer appear to identify economic theory with the empirical consequences economists are concerned with, while at other points they echo Milton Friedman (see section 3.2) and deny that the “realism” of the “assumptions” of economic models matters. They do not address sophisticated defenses of realism concerning mental states like Dietrich and List (2016). It seems to me that theoretical resistance to engaging with behavioral economists like that one finds in Gul and Pesandorfer’s essay is weakening. But it is clear that the methodological commitments governing theoretical economics are much more complex and more specific to economics than the general rules proposed by philosophers such as Popper and Lakatos.
The relevance of laboratory experimentation remains controversial. Behavioral economists are enthusiastic, while more traditional theorists question whether experimental findings can be generalized to non-experimental contexts and, more generally, concerning the possibilities of learning from experiments (Caplin and Schotter 2008). For discussions of experimental economics, see Guala (2000a, b, 2005), Hey (1991), Kagel and Roth (1995, 2016), Plott (1991), Smith (1991), Starmer (1999), Camerer (2003), Bardsley and Cubitt 2009, Durlauf and Blume (2009), Branas-Garza and Cabrales (2015), Fréchette and Schotter (2015), Jacquemet and L’Haridon (2018), and the June, 2005 special issue of the Journal of Economic Methodology. Al Roth’s Game Theory, Experimental Economics, and Market Design Page (http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/alroth.html) is a useful source. For recent work on behavioral economics see the Journal of Behavioral Economics, the Review of Behavioral Economics, and Behavioural Public Policy.
3. During the past generation, there has been a radical transformation in the attitudes of economists toward empirical causal inquiry, especially in the form of field experiments and natural experiments, often employing instrumental variables. For example, about two-thirds of the articles in the February, 2018 American Economic Review are based on empirical studies. The titles of the first four entries in the table of contents are: “The Effects of Pretrial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges,” “Implications of US Tax Policy for House Prices, Rents, and Homeownership,” “The Welfare Cost of Perceived Policy Uncertainty: Evidence from Social Security,” “The Economic Consequences of Hospital Admissions.” If one goes back twenty-five years, only about one-eighth of the first issue of the 1993 American Economic Review appear to rely on any empirical studies. The first four entries are: “Today’s Task for Economists,” “Trigger Points and Budget Cuts: Explaining the Effects of Fiscal Austerity,” “Economic Policy, Economic Performance, and Elections,” “The Macroeconomics of Dr. Strangelove.” A Rip Van Winkle who had gone to sleep in 1983 reading the principal economics journals would be staggered when he awoke in 2018.
Field experiments have been especially important in development economics where the results of various foreign aid projects have too often provided meagre benefits. One can find good introductions to this work in Carpenter et al. (2005), Duflo and Banerjee (2011, 2017), Gugerty and Karlan (2018), Karlan and Appel (2011, 2016), Kremer and Glennerster (2011), List and Samek (2018), and Mullainathan and Shafir (2013). See also the Poverty Action Lab. Although field experiments appear to be hard-nosed inquiries that establish what works and what does not work, matters are not so simple (Deaton 2010, Cartwright and Hardie 2013). Without knowledge of the mechanisms, it is all too easy for an intervention that works splendidly at a specific time and place to fail abysmally when tried elsewhere. Atheoretical inquiry, even when methodologically sophisticated, has severe limits as a tactic of knowledge acquisition.
The empirical turn in economics has also had the effect of increasing the importance of economic history. With some ingenuity, especially in identifying possible instrumental variables, history is full of “natural experiments.” For example (J. Hausman 2016), in 1936, the American Congress voted to pay pensions to veterans of World War I eight years before they were due to be paid. Because the percentages of veterans differed across states, Hausman can use the differing economic performances of states to estimate the effects of the economic stimulus the pensions provided. Although less decisive than randomized controlled trials (which are often impossible to carry out), examination of historical episodes such as this one provide significant evidence concerning economic hypotheses.
5. Rational choice theory
Insofar as economics explains and predicts phenomena as consequences of individual choices, which are themselves explained in terms of alleged reasons, it must depict agents as to some extent rational. Rationality, like reasons, involves evaluation, and just as one can assess the rationality of individual choices, so one can assess the rationality of social choices and examine how they are and ought to be related to the preferences and judgments of individuals. In addition, there are intricate questions concerning rationality in strategic situations in which outcomes depend on the choices of multiple individuals. Since rationality is a central concept in branches of philosophy such as action theory, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind, studies of rationality frequently cross the boundaries between economics and philosophy.
5.1 Individual rationality
The barebones theory of rationality discussed above in Section 1.1 takes an agent’s preferences (rankings of states of affairs) to be rational if they are complete and transitive, and it takes the agent’s choice to be rational if the agent does not prefer any feasible alternative to the one he or she chooses. Such a theory of rationality is clearly too weak, because it says nothing about belief or what rationality implies when agents do not know (with certainty) everything relevant to their choices. But it may also be too strong, since, as Isaac Levi in particular has argued (1986), there is nothing irrational about having incomplete preferences in situations involving uncertainty. Sometimes it is rational to suspend judgment and to refuse to rank alternatives that are not well understood. On the other hand, transitivity is a plausible condition, and the so-called “money pump” argument demonstrates that if one’s preferences are intransitive and one is willing to make exchanges, then one can be exploited. (Suppose an agent A prefers X to Y, Y to Z and Z to X, and that A will pay some small amount of money $P to exchange Y for X, Z for Y, and X for Z. That means that, starting with Z, A will pay $P for Y, then $P again for X, then $P again for Z and so on. Agents are not this stupid. They will instead refuse to trade or adjust their preferences to eliminate the intransitivity (but see Schick 1986).
On the other hand, there is considerable experimental evidence that people’s preferences are not in fact transitive. Such evidence does not establish that transitivity is not a requirement of rationality. It may show instead that people are sometimes irrational. In the case of so-called “preference reversals,” for example, it seems plausible that people in fact make irrational choices (Lichtenstein and Slovic 1971, Tversky and Thaler 1990). Evidence of persistent violations of transitivity is disquieting, since standards of rationality should not be impossibly high.
A further difficulty with the barebones theory of rationality concerns the individuation of the objects of preference or choice. Consider, for example, data from multistage ultimatum games. Suppose A can propose any division of $10 between A and B. B can accept or reject A’s proposal. If B rejects the proposal, then the amount of money drops to $5, and B gets to offer a division of the $5 which A can accept or reject. If A rejects B’s offer, then both players get nothing. Suppose that A proposes to divide the money with $7 for A and $3 for B. B declines and offers to split the $5 evenly, with $2.50 for each. Behavior such as this is, in fact, common (Ochs and Roth 1989, p. 362). Assuming that B prefers more money to less, these choices appear to be a violation of transitivity. B prefers $3 to $2.50, yet declines $3 for certain for $2.50 (with some slight chance of A declining and B getting nothing). But the objects of choice are not just quantities of money. B is turning down $3 as part of “a raw deal” in favor of $2.50 as part of a fair arrangement. If the objects of choice are defined in this way, there is no failure of transitivity.
This plausible observation gives rise to a serious problem. Unless there are constraints on how the objects of choice are individuated, conditions of rationality such as transitivity are empty. A’s choice of X over Y, Y over Z and Z over X does not violate transitivity if “X when the alternative is Y” is not the same object of choice as “X when the alternative is Z”. John Broome (1991) argues that further substantive principles of rationality are required to limit how alternatives are individuated or to require that agents be indifferent between alternatives such as “X when the alternative is Y” and “X when the alternative is Z.”
To extend the theory of rationality to circumstances involving risk (where the objects of choice are lotteries with known probabilities) and uncertainty (where agents do not know the probabilities or even all the possible outcomes of their choices) requires further principles of rationality, as well as controversial technical simplifications. Subjective Bayesians suppose that individuals in circumstances of uncertainty have well-defined subjective probabilities (degrees of belief) over all the payoffs and thus that the objects of choice can be modeled as lotteries, just as in circumstances involving risk, though with subjective probabilities in place of objective probabilities. See the entries on Bayes’ theorem and Bayesian epistemology. The most important of the axioms needed for the theory of rational choice under conditions of risk and uncertainty is the independence condition. It says roughly that the preferences of rational agent between two lotteries that differ in only one outcome should match their preferences between the differing outcomes. Although initially plausible, the independence condition is very controversial. See Allais and Hagen (1979) and McClennen (1983, 1990).
A considerable part of rational choice theory is concerned with formalizations of conditions of rationality and investigation of their implications. When an agent’s preferences are complete and transitive and satisfy a further continuity condition, then they can be represented by a so-called ordinal utility function. What this means is that it is possible to define a function that represents an agent’s preferences so that U(X) > U(Y) if and only if the agent prefers X to Y, and U(X) = U(Y) if and only if the agent is indifferent between X and Y. This function merely represents the preference ranking. It contains no information beyond the ranking. Any order-preserving transformation of “U” would represent the agent’s preferences just as well.
When an agent’s preferences in addition satisfy the independence condition and some other technical conditions, then they can be represented by an expected utility function (Harsanyi 1977b, ch. 4, Hernstein and Milnor 1953, Ramsey 1926, and Savage 1972). Such a function has two important properties. First, the expected utility of a lottery is equal to the sum of the (expected) utilities of its prizes weighted by their probabilities. Second, expected utility functions are unique up to a positive affine transformation. What this means is that if U and V are both expected utility functions representing the preferences of an agent, then for all objects of preference, X, V(X) must be equal to aU(X) + b, where a and b are real numbers and a is positive. In addition, the axioms of rationality imply that the agent’s degrees of belief will satisfy the axioms of the probability calculus.
A great deal of controversy surrounds the theory of rationality, and there have been many formal investigations into weakened or amended theories of rationality. For further discussion, see Allais and Hagen 1979, Barberà, Hammond and Seidl 1999, Kahneman and Tversky 1979, Loomes and Sugden 1982, Luce and Raiffa 1957, Machina 1987, and Gilboa and Schmeidler 2001.
5.2 Collective rationality and social choice
Although societies are very different from individuals, they have mechanisms to evaluate alternatives and make choices, and their evaluations and choices may be rational or irrational. It is not, however, obvious, what principles of rationality should govern the choices and evaluations of society. Transitivity is one plausible condition. It seems that a society that chooses X when faced with the alternatives X or Y, Y when faced with the alternatives Y or Z and Z when faced with the alternatives X or Z either has had a change of heart or is choosing irrationally. Yet, purported irrationalities such as these can easily arise from standard mechanisms that aim to link social choices and individual preferences. Suppose there are three individuals in the society. Individual One ranks the alternatives X, Y, Z. Individual Two ranks them Y, Z, X. Individual Three ranks them Z, X, Y. If decisions are made by pairwise majority voting, X will be chosen from the pair (X, Y), Y will be chosen from (Y, Z), and Z will be chosen from (X, Z). Clearly this is unsettling, but are possible cycles in social choices irrational?
Similar problems affect what one might call the logical coherence of social judgments (List and Pettit 2002). Suppose society consists of three individuals who make the following judgments concerning the truth or falsity of the propositions P and Q and that social judgment follows the majority.
P if P then Q Q Individual 1 true true true Individual 2 false true false Individual 3 true false false Society true true false
The judgments of each of the individuals are consistent with the principles of logic, while social judgments violate them. How important is it that social judgments be consistent with the principles of logic?
Although social choice theory in this way bears on questions of social rationality, most work in social choice theory explores the consequences of principles of rationality coupled with explicitly ethical constraints. The seminal contribution is Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem (1963, 1967). Arrow assumes that both individual preferences and social preferences are complete and transitive and that the method of forming social preferences (or making social choices) issues in some social preference ranking or social choice for any possible profile of individual preferences. In addition, Arrow imposes a weak unanimity condition: if everybody prefers X to Y, then Y must not be socially preferred. Third, he requires that there be no dictator whose preferences determine social preferences or choices irrespective of the preferences of anybody else. Lastly, he imposes the condition that the social preference between X and Y should depend on how individuals rank X and Y and on nothing else. Arrow then proved the surprising result that no method of relating social and individual preferences can satisfy all these conditions!
In the sixty years since Arrow wrote, there has been a plethora of work in social choice theory, a good deal of which is arguably of great importance to ethics. For example, John Harsanyi proved that if individual preferences and social evaluations both satisfy the axioms of expected utility theory (with shared or objective probabilities) and that social preferences conform to unanimous individual preferences, then social evaluations are determined by a weighted sum of individual utilities (1955, 1977a). Matthew Adler (2012) has extended an approach like Harsanyi’s to demonstrate that a form of weighted utilitarianism, which prioritizes the interests of those who are worse off, uniquely satisfies a longer list of rational and ethical constraints. When there are instead disagreements in probability assignments, there is an impossibility result: the unanimity condition implies that for some profiles of individual preferences, social evaluations will not satisfy the axioms of expected utility theory (Hammond 1983, Seidenfeld, et al. 1989, Mongin 1995). For further discussion of social choice theory and the relevance of utility theory to social evaluation, see the entry on social choice theory, Sen (1970) and for recent reappraisals Fleurbaey (2007) and Adler (2012).
5.3 Game theory
When outcomes depend on what several agents do, one agent’s best choice may depend on what other agents choose. Although the principles of rationality governing individual choice still apply, arguably there are further principles of rationality governing expectations of the actions of others (and of their expectations concerning your actions and expectations, and so forth). Game theory occupies an increasingly important role within economics, and it is also relevant both to inquiries concerning rationality and inquiries concerning ethics. For further discussion see the entries on game theory, game theory and ethics, and evolutionary game theory.
6. Economics and ethics
As discussed above in Section 2.1 most economists distinguish between positive and normative economics, and most would argue that economics is relevant to policy mainly because of the (positive) information it provides concerning the consequences of policy. Yet the same economists also offer their advice concerning how to fix the economy, and there is a whole field of normative economics.
Economic outcomes, institutions, and processes may be better or worse in several different ways. Some outcomes may make people better off. Other outcomes may be less unequal. Others may restrict individual freedom more severely. Economists typically evaluate outcomes exclusively in terms of welfare. This does not imply that they believe that only welfare is of moral importance. They focus on welfare, because they believe that economics provides an excellent set of tools to address questions of welfare and because they hope that questions about welfare can be separated from questions about equality, freedom, or justice. As sketched below, economists have had some things to say about other dimensions of moral appraisal, but welfare takes center stage. Indeed normative economics is standardly called “welfare economics.”
6.1 Welfare
One central question of moral philosophy has been to determine what things are intrinsically good for human beings. This is a central question, because all plausible moral views assign an important place to individual welfare or well-being. This is obviously true of utilitarianism (which holds that what is right maximizes total or average welfare), but even non-utilitarian views are concerned with welfare, if they recognize the virtue of benevolence, or if they are concerned with the interests of individuals or with avoiding harm to individuals.
There are many ways to think about well-being, and the prevailing view among economists has shifted from hedonism (which takes the good to be a mental state such as pleasure or happiness) to the view that welfare should be measured by the satisfaction of preferences. A number of prominent economists are currently arguing for a return to hedonism, but they remain a minority. (See Bavetta et al. 2014. Clark Flèche 2018, Dolan and Kahneman 2014, Frey 2010, 2018, Frey and Stutzer 2001, Kahneman 1999, 2000a, 2000b, Kahneman and Krueger 2006, Kahneman and Sugden 2005, Kahneman and Thaler 2006, Layard 2006, Ormerod 2008, Radcliff 2013, Weimann and Knabe 2015 and for criticism Davies 2015, Etzioni 2018, and Hausman 2010.) Unlike hedonism, taking welfare to be preference satisfaction specifies how to find out what is good for a person rather than committing itself to any substantive view of a person’s good. Note that equating welfare with the satisfaction of preferences is not equating welfare with any feeling of satisfaction. If welfare can be measured by the satisfaction of preferences, then a person is better off if what he or she prefers comes to pass, regardless of whether that occurrence makes the agent feel satisfied.
Since mainstream economics attributes a consistent preference ordering to all agents, and since more specific models typically take agents to be well-informed and self-interested, it is easy for economists to accept the view that an individual agent A will prefer X to Y if and only if X is in fact better for A than Y is. This is one place where positive theory bleeds into normative theory. In addition, the identification of welfare with the satisfaction of preferences is attractive to economists, because it prevents questions about the justification of paternalism (to which most economists are strongly opposed) from even arising.
Welfare and the satisfaction of preferences may coincide because the satisfaction of preferences constitutes welfare or because peDead bikie assaulted gunman before shooting
Updated
Sorry, this video has expired Video: Man shot dead in broad daylight (7pm TV News NSW)
Police say a Lone Wolf bikie gang member who was fatally shot in Sydney's south yesterday had assaulted his killer just before the man opened fire.
The killer remains on the run, with police expressing their frustration at a lack of cooperation from witnesses.
Neal Todorovski, 37, was shot in the head, hand and body outside an apartment block at Sans Souci around midday yesterday.
His attacker escaped in a black Land Rover four-wheel drive with New South Wales registration GB-84-AO.
Reports yesterday said there were three men in the car as it drove off.
Two men who were with Mr Todorovski escaped unharmed but were then charged by police.
John Leger, 32, and 23-year-old Matthew Lewis faced Parramatta Local Court today charged with concealing a serious indictable offence and affray.
Leger is also charged with possessing a prohibited weapon.
In police facts tendered the court heard the men were with Mr Todorovski before and during the incident.
Police say before the shooting the three Lone Wolf gang members armed themselves with a pistol, plastic knuckle dusters and a knife before assaulting an unknown man who was parked outside Mr Todorovski's apartment block.
The unknown man managed to free himself from the scuffle and retrieve a gun from the car.
Police say he shot Mr Todorovski and also fired four or five shots at Leger as he chased him down a laneway.
Leger and Lewis did not apply for bail in court today, and will remain in custody until they face court again next week.
Homicide detectives have formed Strike Force Lobbe to investigate the killing.
Detective Superintendent Michael Willing says the lack of cooperation has been frustrating.
"There are witnesses who can provide us information, there are certainly people out there who know who was involved in this shooting and we're asking people to come forward with information that could help us," he said.
"There is no honour in remaining silent when it puts the lives of the community, other members of your family and other people that you may know at risk.
"We would appeal for those people to seek what is the right thing to do, which is to come forward and give us that information so that we can ensure the safety of the whole of the community."
Earlier police said their investigation would include possible links to a series of recent violent incidents linked to the Lone Wolf gang.
A member's teenage son was stabbed to death in Sydney's west last month, while the Lone Wolf clubhouse was torched in September.
There have been suggestions of a turf war being fought between the Lone Wolf and Rebels bikie gangs.
Detectives were also examining possible links to the stabbing of a 25-year-old man in nearby Brighton-Le-Sands on Tuesday.
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, crime, murder-and-manslaughter, sydney-2000, nsw, australia
First postedMONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Alabama Senate has approved a bill that would do away with the requirement for probate judges to sign marriage licenses.
The bill comes as a few probate judges in the state continue to refuse to issue marriage licenses to anyone so they do not have to give them to gay couples.
Senators voted 22-6 for the bill Tuesday. The measure now moves to the Alabama House of Representatives.
Instead of a license signed by the probate judge, Republican Sen. Greg Albritton’s bill would require couples to file a form and affidavit with the probate judge to record their marriages.
Similar legislation failed to win final approval in the last two legislative sessions.
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This Story Filed UnderToday the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a press release about their creation of a dedicated “Cyber Unit.” Among other things, this unit will exercise some oversight over digital currencies.
Broad authority
The SEC stated:
The Cyber Unit will focus the Enforcement Division’s substantial cyber-related expertise on targeting cyber-related misconduct, such as:
Market manipulation schemes involving false information spread through electronic and social media
Hacking to obtain material nonpublic information
Violations involving distributed ledger technology and initial coin offerings
Misconduct perpetrated using the dark web
Intrusions into retail brokerage accounts
Cyber-related threats to trading platforms and other critical market infrastructure
The new Cyber Unit will clearly have significant authority if all these are to fall under its purview. The third bullet point is most relevant to the cryptocurrency markets. The SEC is officially taking on the role of policing both ICOs and the “distributed ledger technology” sector.
Simply giving oneself enforcement power over “distributed ledger technology” seems overly broad. Depending on how the SEC (and perhaps the courts) define this term, the SEC could have wide latitude to investigate users of digital currencies.
ICO regulation is no surprise
Following this summer’s ruling that Ethereum’s “TheDAO” project was in fact a security offering, it is no surprise the SEC is taking a rather proactive approach with respect to regulating ICOs.
The ICO boom has been unprecedented, raising over $1.5 bln in 2017 alone. Many of these ICOs are either outright scams or are the result of some vague ideas in the head of a few would-be entrepreneurs.
Some on the /r/BitcoinMarkets subreddit have expressed their pleasure at the SEC’s apparent plan to get tough on ICOs. User amygdala9 stated:
“I dislike any regulatory oversight. Period. Though I'm pleasantly surprised at the SEC's chosen course of action here. They might even manage to deter a blatant exit scammer/fraudster or two from preying on idiots.”
Other areas
Other points of interest in the SEC’s announcement include the first bullet point, which states that the SEC will be watching out for pump-and-dump schemes carried out via “electronic and social media.” Additionally, for digital currency users who carry out illegal activities on the Darkweb, bullet point four indicates that the SEC will be looking out for that conduct as well.
Balanced approach
On the whole, the SEC seems to be taking a balanced approach to digital currencies. Given that many ICOs promise “tokens” that sound a great deal like “shares,” it’s unsurprising that the SEC would be interested in potential securities’ violations from that area.
Careful enforcement could prevent retail investors from being fleeced while not destroying the fledgeling ICO market entirely. Likewise, oversight over “distributed ledger technology” violations could give the SEC more power to track down and prosecute alleged scammers like Josh Garza.The Roaring Twenties refers to the decade of the 1920s in Western society and Western culture. It was a period of economic prosperity with a distinctive cultural edge in the United States and Western Europe, particularly in major cities such as Berlin,[1] Chicago,[2] London,[3] Los Angeles,[4] New York City,[5] Paris,[6] and Sydney.[7] In France, the decade was known as the "années folles" ('crazy years'),[8] emphasizing the era's social, artistic and cultural dynamism. Jazz blossomed, the flapper redefined the modern look for British and American women,[9][10] and Art Deco peaked.[11] Not everything roared: in the wake of the hyper-emotional patriotism of World War I, Warren G. Harding "brought back normalcy" to the politics of the United States. This period saw the large-scale development and use of automobiles, telephones, motion pictures, radio, and electrical appliances. Aviation became a business. Nations saw rapid industrial and economic growth, accelerated consumer demand, and significant changes in lifestyle and culture. The media focused on celebrities, especially sports heroes and movie stars, as cities rooted for their home teams and filled the new palatial cinemas and gigantic sports stadiums. In most major democratic states, women won the right to vote.
The social and cultural features known as the Roaring Twenties began in leading metropolitan centers, then spread widely in the aftermath of World War I. The United States gained dominance in world finance. Thus, when Germany could no longer afford to pay World War I reparations to the United Kingdom, France and the other Allied powers, the United States came up with the Dawes Plan, named after banker, and later 30th Vice President, Charles G. Dawes. Wall Street invested heavily in Germany, which paid its reparations to countries that, in turn, used the dollars to pay off their war debts to Washington. By the middle of the decade, prosperity was widespread, with the second half of the decade known, especially in Germany, as the "Golden Twenties".[12]
The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of novelty associated with modernity and a break with tradition. Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. New technologies, especially automobiles, moving pictures, and radio, brought "modernity" to a large part of the population. Formal decorative frills were shed in favor of practicality in both daily life and architecture. At the same time, jazz and dancing rose in popularity, in opposition to the mood of World War I. As such, the period is also often referred to as the Jazz Age.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 ended the era, as the Great Depression brought years of hardship worldwide.[13]
Economy [ edit ]
[14] Chart 1: USA GDP annual pattern and long-term trend, 1920–1940, in billions of constant dollars
The Roaring Twenties was a decade of economic growth and widespread prosperity, driven by recovery from wartime devastation and deferred spending, a boom in construction, and the rapid growth of consumer goods such as automobiles and electricity in North America and Western Europe and a few other developed countries such as Australia.[15] The economy of the United States, which had successfully transitioned from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy, boomed and provided loans for a European boom as well. Some sectors stagnated, especially farming and coal mining. The US became the richest country in the world per capita and since the late-19th century had been the largest in total GDP. Its industry was based on mass production, and its society acculturated into consumerism. European economies, by contrast, had a more difficult postwar readjustment and did not begin to flourish until about 1924.[16]
At first, the end of wartime production caused a brief but deep recession, the post–World War I recession of 1919–20. Quickly, however, the US and Canadian economies rebounded as returning soldiers re-entered the labor force and munitions factories were retooled to produce consumer goods.
New products and technologies [ edit ]
Mass production made technology affordable to the middle class.[16]
Automobiles [ edit ]
The automotive industry, the film industry, the radio industry, and the chemical industry took off during the 1920s. Of chief importance was the automotive industry. Before the war, cars were a luxury good. In the 1920s, mass-produced vehicles became commonplace in the US and Canada. By 1927, the Ford Motor Company discontinued the Ford Model T after selling 15 million units of that model. It had been in continuous production from October 1908 to May 1927.[17][18] The company planned to replace the old model with a newer one, the Ford Model A.[19] The decision was a reaction to competition |
is just a very shy person – and some females may be understandably wary of signalling any interest in male strangers. The only way to find out is by close observation of your target's behaviour towards others. Does she consistently avoid direct eye-contact with men? Does he seem nervous, anxious or aloof in his interactions with other women? If so, your target's reluctance to meet your gaze may be nothing personal, and it might be worth approaching, but only with considerable caution.
Once you have approached your target, you will need to make eye contact again in order to strike up a conversation. As soon as your eyes meet, you may begin to speak. Once a conversation begins, it is normal for eye contact to be broken as the speaker looks away. In conversations, the person who is speaking looks away more than the person who is listening, and turn-taking is governed by a characteristic pattern of looking, eye contact and looking away.
So, to signal that you have finished speaking and invite a response, you then look back at your target again. To show interest while your target is speaking, you need to look at his/her face about three-quarters of the time, in glances lasting between one and seven seconds. The person speaking will normally look at you for less than half this time, and direct eye contact will be intermittent, rarely lasting more than one second. When your target has finished speaking, and expects a response, he or she will look at you and make brief eye contact again to indicate that it is your turn.
The basic rules for pleasant conversation are: glance at the other person's face more when you are listening, glance away more when you are speaking and make brief eye contact to initiate turn-taking. The key words here are 'glance' and 'brief': avoid prolonged staring either at the other person or away.
The most common mistake people make when flirting is to overdo the eye contact in a premature attempt to increase intimacy. This only makes the other person feel uncomfortable, and may send misleading signals. Some men also blow their chances by carrying on a conversation with a woman's breasts, rather than looking at her face.
Interpersonal distance
The distance you keep from the other person when flirting is important, because it will affect his or her impression of you, and the quality of your interaction. Perhaps even more importantly, paying attention to the other person's use of distance will tell you a great deal about his/her reactions and feelings towards you.
When you first approach an attractive stranger, having established at least an indication of mutual interest through eye contact, try to make eye contact again at about 4ft away, before moving any closer. At 4 ft (about two small steps away), you are on the borderline between what are known as the'social zone' (4 to 12 ft) and the 'personal zone' (18in to 4ft).
If you receive a positive response at 4ft, move in to 'arm's length' (about 2ft 6in). If you try to approach much closer than this, particularly if you try to cross the 18in 'personal zone/intimate zone' border, your target may feel uncomfortable. The 'intimate zone' (less than 18in) is reserved for lovers, family and very close friends. If you are close enough to whisper and be heard, you are probably too close for comfort.
These distance rules apply particularly in face-to-face encounters. We will tolerate reduced interpersonal distances when we are side by side with someone. This is because when you are alongside someone, it is easier to use other aspects of body language, such as turning away or avoiding eye contact, to 'limit' your level of involvement with the other person.
You can therefore approach a bit closer than 'arm's length' if you are alongside your target – at the bar counter of a pub, for example – rather than face-to-face. But be careful to avoid 'intrusive' body-language such as prolonged eye contact or touching.
If you have misjudged the appropriate distance, in either a face-to-face or side-by-side encounter, the other person's discomfort may show in his/her body language. Your target may attempt to turn away or avert his/her gaze to avoid eye contact. You may also see 'barrier signals' such as folded or tightly crossed legs, or rubbing the neck with the elbow pointed towards you. If you see any of these signs, back off!
Finally, remember that different people have different reactions to distance. If your target is from a Mediterranean or Latin American country (known as the 'contact cultures'), he or she may be comfortable with closer distances than a British or Northern European person. North Americans fall somewhere between these two extremes. Different personality-types may also react differently to your approach: extroverts and those who generally feel at ease in company will be comfortable with closer distances than introverts and shy or nervous types. Even the same person may vary in tolerance from day to day, according to mood: when we are feeling depressed or irritable, we find close distances more uncomfortable.
Posture
Most of us are quite good at controlling our faces – maintaining an expression of polite interest, for example, when we are really bored to tears, or even nodding when we really disagree! But we tend to be less conscious of what the rest of our body is doing. We may be smiling and nodding, but unconsciously revealing our disagreement by a tense posture with tightly folded arms. This is known as 'non-verbal leakage': while we're busy controlling our words and faces, our real feelings 'leak out' in our posture.
When flirting, you should therefore watch out for signs of this 'non-verbal leakage' in your partner's posture – and try to send the right signals with your own posture.
Your partner's 'non-verbal leakage' can give you advance warning that your chat-up isn't working. If only his/her head is turned towards you, with the rest of the body oriented in another direction, this is a sign that you do not have your partner's full attention. Even just the feet starting to turn and 'point' away from you can be a sign that his/her attention is directed elsewhere, or that he/she is thinking about moving away. Leaning backwards and supporting the head on one hand are signs of boredom. 'Closed' postures with arms folded and legs tightly crossed indicate disagreement or dislike.
More positive signs to watch out for would be a partner's body oriented towards you, particularly if he/she is also leaning forward, and an 'open' posture. These are signs of attentiveness and interest or liking. Experiments have also shown that females are more likely to tilt their heads to one side when they are interested in the person they are talking to. Men should beware, however, of automatically assuming that these signs indicate sexual interest. Women should be aware of men's tendency to make such assumptions, and avoid signalling interest too obviously.
Another positive sign is what psychologists call 'postural congruence' or 'postural echo': when your partner unconsciously adopts a posture similar to yours. Mirror-image postural echoes – where one person's left side'matches' the other person's right side – are the strongest indication of harmony and rapport between the pair. If the position of your partner's body and limbs appear to 'echo' or'mimic' your own, particularly if his/her posture is a mirror image of yours, the chances are that he/she feels an affinity with you.
When flirting, you can also use postural echo to create a feeling of togetherness and harmony. Experiments have shown that although people are not consciously aware of someone deliberately 'echoing' their postures, they will evaluate a person who does this more favourably. If you 'echo' your partner's postures, he/she will not only feel more at ease in your company, but will perceive you as more like-minded.
This technique obviously has its limits. We would not suggest, for example, that a woman in a mini-skirt should 'echo' the open-legged sitting posture of her male companion. But if he is leaning forward with his left forearm resting on the table, she could create a sense of common identity by'mirroring' this aspect of his posture – leaning forward with her right forearm on the table.
In addition to these 'generic' signals of interest, there are specifically male and female posture signals which are often seen in flirtatious encounters. These tend to be postures which enhance the masculine or dominant appearance of the male, and the femininity of the female. Males may adopt postures which make them appear taller, larger and more impressive, such as placing hands in pockets with elbows out to enlarge the chest, or leaning one hand at above shoulder height on a wall to appear taller and more imposing. Females either adopt postures which make them look smaller, such as drawing the knees towards the body when seated, or postures which draw attention to physical attributes attractive to males, such as arching the back to display the breasts, or crossing and re-crossing the legs to draw attention to them.
Gestures
As well as overall body posture, the gestures we use can signal interest, attraction and invitation – or discomfort, dislike and rejection.
When flirting, it is important to be aware of these non-verbal cues, both in'reading' your partner's body-language and in controlling the messages you are sending with your own gestures.
In conversation, gestures are mainly used to enliven, clarify and 'punctuate' our speech, or to show responsiveness to what the other person is saying. In a flirtatious encounter, the amount of gesticulation, the directions of the gestures and the co-ordination of gestures can indicate the degree of interest and involvement your partner feels towards you.
Different cultures vary widely in the amount of gesticulation that accompanies their speech (Italians say that you can silence an Italian by tying his hands behind his back), and even within a single culture, some people naturally express themselves more through gestures than others. Generally, however, someone who is interested in you will be more lively and animated in conversation, using more gestures when speaking in order to keep your attention, and more responsive gestures to show interest when you are speaking.
Similarly, you can signal interest in your partner, and keep his/her attention focused on you, by enhancing your speech with appropriate gestures: shifting your hands or head slightly at the end of sentences, using downward hand movements to emphasise a point, 'projecting' what you are saying towards your partner by open-palm hand movements and so on. When your partner is speaking, you can show responsiveness by nodding in agreement, throwing up your hands in surprise, bringing them together in a'silent clap' of appreciation, etc.
Researchers have found that nodding can be used to'regulate' conversations. If you make single, brief nods while your partner is speaking, these act as simple signs of attentiveness, which will maintain the flow of communication from the speaker. Double nods will change the rate at which the other person speaks, usually speeding up the flow, while triple nods or single, slow nods often interrupt the flow altogether, confusing speakers so much that they stop in their tracks. So, if you want to express interest and keep your partner chatting with you, stick to brief single nods.
You can also watch for gestures which indicate anxiety and nervousness, such as hand-clasping movements and palm-rubbing. As a general rule, anxious gestures are directed towards the anxious person's own body (known as 'proximal' movements), while 'distal' movements, directed away from the body, are a sign of confidence. As well as watching for these signals in your partner, you can control the impression you are making by using more confident, 'distal' gestures.
As with posture, the greatest involvement and harmony is achieved when gestures are synchronised – when the movements of one person are echoed or reflected by the other. You may have noticed that this tends to happen naturally between people who like each other and get on well together. Watch pairs of lovers in a bar or pub, and you will see that they often tend to lift their drinks and take a sip at the same time, and that many of their other body movements and gestures will be similarly synchronised. Psychologists call this 'interactional synchrony' or 'gestural dance', and some of their research findings indicate that the timing of matched gestures may be accurate down to fractions of a second.
Although this synchronisation normally happens without conscious effort, you can use it as a highly effective flirting technique. If you feel the conversation is not flowing easily, or you and partner seem awkward and uncomfortable with each other, try to be more sensitive to the patterns of his/her gestures and body movements, and to reflect these in your own body language.
If your partner spontaneously begins to synchronise his/her body language with yours, this is a sign that he/she feels comfortable with you. Men should not assume that it necessarily indicates sexual interest, however. Women can avoid creating this impression by reducing synchronisation, adopting a more 'closed' posture and avoiding the use of gestures which are specifically associated with flirtatious behaviour. In experiments, female hair-flipping and head-tossing were among the (non-contact) gestures most often regarded as sexually flirtatious, along with repeated leg-crossing and movements designed to draw attention to the breasts.
Facial expression
An ability to'read' and interpret the facial expressions of your partner will improve your chances of successful flirting, as will awareness of what you are signalling with your own expressions.
Some expressions can be effective even from a distance, as in the 'across a crowded room' encounter with a stranger. The 'eyebrow-flash', for example, which involves raising the eyebrows very briefly – for about one-sixth of a second – is used almost universally as a long-distance greeting signal. When you see someone you know, but are not near enough to speak, the eyebrow-flash shows that you have noticed and recognised them.
We all use this non-verbal "Hello!" in situations where we cannot use the verbal equivalent, either because of distance or social convention. Watch a video of Andrew and Fergie's wedding, for example, and you will see that Fergie performs frequent eyebrow-flashes as she walks down the aisle. Social etiquette does not allow a bride to call out cheery greetings to her friends and relations during the ceremony, but the highly sociable Fergie is clearly unable to refrain from signalling the same greetings with her eyebrows.
If you are desperate to attract the attention of an attractive stranger across a crowded party, you could try an eyebrow-flash. This should make your target think that you must be a friend or acquaintance, even though he or she does not recognise you. When you approach, your target may thus already be wondering who you are. You can, if you are skilful, use this confusion to initiate a lively discussion about where you might have met before. Such conversations inevitably centre on possible shared interests or friends or habits, and invariably involve mutual disclosure of at least some personal information. As you will learn from the 'Verbal flirting' sections of this Guide, these are essential ingredients of successful flirting. So, assuming your target finds you attractive, an eyebrow-flash with appropriate follow-up could leapfrog you into instant intimacy.
Two warnings are necessary here: 1) If your target does not find you attractive, the eyebrow-flash strategy may backfire, as the confusion over whether or not you already know each other will be experienced as unpleasant and annoying, rather than amusing. 2) Do not use the eyebrow-flash in Japan, where it has definite sexual connotations and is therefore never used as a greeting signal.
If your target is attracted to you, this may be more evident in facial expressions than in words. Studies have found that women are generally better than men at reading these expressions, but that both sexes have equal difficulty in seeing through people's expressions when they are controlling their faces to hide their real feelings.
The problem is that although faces do express genuine feelings, any facial expression that occurs naturally can also be produced artificially for a social purpose. Smiles and frowns, to take the most obvious examples, can be spontaneous expressions of happiness or anger, but they can also be manufactured as deliberate signals, such as frowning to indicate doubt or displeasure, smiling to signal approval or agreement, etc. Feelings can also be hidden under a'social' smile, a'stiff upper lip' or a blank, 'inscrutable' expression.
Despite this potential for 'deceit', we rely more on facial expressions than on any other aspect of body language. In conversation, we watch our companions' faces rather than their hands or feet, and rely on their facial signals to tell us what effect we are having, and how to interpret what they say. Although people are better at controlling their facial expressions than other aspects of body language, there is still some 'leakage', and the following clues will help you to detect insincerity.
Let's say your target smiles at you. How do you know whether this smile is spontaneous or manufactured? There are four ways of telling the difference. First, spontaneous smiles produce characteristic wrinkles around the eyes, which will not appear if your target is 'forcing' a smile out of politeness. Second, 'forced' or'social' smiles tend to be asymmetrical (stronger on the left side of the face in right-handed people and on the right side of the face in left-handed people).The third clue to insincerity is in the timing of the smile: unspontaneous smiles tend to occur at socially inappropriate moments in the conversation (e.g. a few seconds after you have made a funny remark, rather than immediately). Finally, there is a clue in the duration of the smile, as a manufactured smile tends to be held for longer (what is often called a 'fixed' smile) and then to fade in an irregular way.
When observing your target's facial expressions, it is important to remember that although an expressive face – showing amusement, surprise, agreement etc. at the appropriate moments – may indicate that your target returns your interest, people do naturally differ in their degree and style of emotional expression. Women naturally tend to smile more than men, for example, and to show emotions more clearly in their facial expressions.
You are also likely to interpret expressions differently depending on who is making them. Experiments have shown that people may read the same expression as 'fear' when they see it on a female face, but as 'anger' when it appears on male face. There are also cultural and even regional differences in the amount of emotion people express with their faces. Oriental people are more likely than Westerners to hide their emotions under a 'blank' expression or a smile, for example, and American researchers have found that in the US, Notherners smile less than people from the South.
If an attractive stranger smiles at you, it could be that he or she finds you attractive, but he or she could also be an outgoing, sociable person from a culture or region in which smiling is commonplace and not particularly meaningful.
These factors must also be taken into account when considering the effect of your own facial expressions. People tend to be put off by levels of expressiveness that are considerably higher or lower than what they are used to, so it could help to try to'match' the amount of emotion you express with your face to that of your target.
As a general rule, however, your face should be constantly informative during a flirtatious conversation. Unexpressiveness – a blank, unchanging face – will be interpreted as lack of interest when you are listening and an absence of facial emphasis when you are speaking will be disturbing and off-putting. You need to show interest and comprehension when listening, and to promote interest and comprehension when speaking, through facial signals such as eyebrows raised to display surprise, as a question mark or for emphasis; the corners of the mouth turning up in amusement; nodding to indicate agreement; frowning in puzzlement; smiling to show approval, or to indicate that what you are saying should not be taken too seriously, and so on.
Fortunately, most of these facial signals are habitual, and do not have to be consciously manufactured, but some awareness of your facial expressions can help you to monitor their effect and make minor adjustments to put your target more at ease, for example, or hold his or her attention, or increase the level of intimacy.
Finally, remember that your target is unlikely to be scrutinising you for tiny signs of insincerity, so a'social' smile will be infinitely more attractive than no smile at all.
Touch
Touching is a powerful, subtle and complex form of communication. In social situations, the language of touch can be used to convey a surprising variety of messages. Different touches can be used to express agreement, affection, affiliation or attraction; to offer support; to emphasise a point; to call for attention or participation; to guide and direct; to greet; to congratulate; to establish or reinforce power-relations and to negotiate levels of intimacy.
Even the most fleeting touch can have a dramatic influence on our perceptions and relationships. Experiments have shown that even a light, brief touch on the arm during a brief social encounter between strangers has both immediate and lasting positive effects. Polite requests for help or directions, for example, produced much more positive results when accompanied by a light touch on the arm.
When flirting, it is therefore important to remember that the language of touch, if used correctly, can help to advance the relationship, but that inappropriate use of this powerful tool could ruin your chances forever.
Although there are considerable differences between cultures in the levels of touching that are socially acceptable, and different personalities welcome different levels of touching, we can provide a few basic rules-of-thumb for first encounters with strangers of the opposite sex.
The first rule, for both sexes, is: touch, but be careful. Women are much less comfortable about being touched by an opposite-sex stranger than men, so men should take care to avoid any touches which may seem threatening or over-familiar. Men are inclined to interpret women's friendly gestures as sexual invitations, so women should be equally careful to avoid giving misleading signals with over-familiar touches.
This does not mean 'don't touch', as appropriate touching will have positive benefits, but touching should initially be restricted to universally acceptable areas and levels. As a general rule, the arm is the safest place to touch an opposite-sex stranger. (Back pats are equally non-sexual, but are often perceived as patronising or overbearing.) A brief, light touch on the arm, to draw attention, express support or emphasise a point, is likely to be acceptable and to enhance your companion's positive feelings towards you.
If even this most innocuous of touches produces a negative reaction – such as pulling the arm away, increasing distance, frowning, turning away or other expressions of displeasure or anxiety – you might as well give up now. Unless your companion is exceptionally shy and reserved, negative reactions to a simple arm-touch probably indicate dislike or distrust.
If your companion finds you likeable or attractive, a brief arm-touch should prompt some reciprocal increase in intimacy. This may not be as obvious as a return of your arm-touch, but watch for other positive body-language signals, such as increased eye-contact, moving closer to you, more open posture or postural echo, more smiling, etc. Your arm-touch may even prompt an increase in verbal intimacy, so listen for any disclosure of personal information, or more personal questions.
If you see or hear signs of a positive reaction to your arm-touch, you can, after a reasonable interval, try another arm-touch, this time slightly less fleeting. If this results in a further escalation of verbal or non-verbal intimacy from your companion, you might consider moving to the next stage: a hand-touch.
Remember that a hand-touch, unless it is the conventional handshake of greeting or parting, is much more personal than an arm-touch. By touching your companion's hand, you are opening negotiations towards a higher degree of intimacy, so keep it light and brief: a question, not an order.
A negative reaction to your hand-touch, such as the non-verbal signals of displeasure or anxiety mentioned above, does not necessarily mean that your companion dislikes you, but it is a clear indication that your attempt to advance to the next level of intimacy is either premature or unwelcome. A very positive reaction, involving a significant increase in verbal or non-verbal intimacy, can be taken as permission to try another hand-touch at an appropriate moment.
Highly positive reactions to a second hand-touch – such as a definite and unambiguous attempt to move closer to you, reciprocal arm- and hand-touching, along with significantly more personal questions, more disclosure of personal information and more expression of emotion – can be taken as permission to proceed, with caution, to a higher level of intimacy. The next stages might involve a hand-squeeze or hand-hold, repeated twice before moving on to an arm over the shoulders, or perhaps a brief knee-touch. (Males should note, however, that positive reactions to any of these touches can not be taken as permission to grope.)
You will have noticed that we advise performing each touch two times before progressing to the next level. This is because repeating the same touch, perhaps with a slightly longer duration, allows you to check that reactions are still positive, that you were not mistaken in your judgement that the touch was acceptable. The repetition also tells your companion that the first touch was not accidental or unconscious, that you are consciously negotiating for an increase in intimacy. Repeating the same touch before moving to the next level is a non-verbal way of saying "Are you sure?".
Vocal signals
You may be surprised to see this heading in the 'Non-verbal flirting' section, but'verbal' means 'words' and vocal signals such as tone of voice, pitch, volume, speed of speech, etc. are like body-language in that they are not about what you say, the words you use, but about how you say it.
We noted at the beginning of this 'non-verbal' section that people's first impressions of you are based 55% on your appearance and body language, 38% on your style of speaking and only 7% on what you actually say. In other words, body-language may be your most important 'flirting tool', but vocal signals come a very close second. The more you think about that 38%, the more concerned you will be to ensure that your vocal signals make the best possible impression. An ability to'read' the vocal signals of the person you are flirting with will also help you to find out how he or she really feels about you.
Attraction and interest, for example, are communicated much more by the tone of voice than by what is actually said. Depending on the tone, volume, speed and pitch, even a simple phrase such as "Good evening" can convey anything from "Wow, you're gorgeous" to "I find you totally uninteresting and I'm looking for an excuse to get away from you as quickly as possible".
If your target gives you a deep-toned, low pitched, slow, drawn-out "Good evening", with a slight rising intonation at the end, as though asking a question, this is probably an indication of attraction or at least interest. If you get a short, high-pitched, clipped "Good evening", or a monotone, expressionless version, your target is probably not interested in you.
Once you are in conversation, remember that the intonation of even a single word can communicate an immense variety of emotions and meanings. As an experiment, try practising variations in your intonation of the one-word response "Yeah", and you will find that you can communicate anything from enthusiastic agreement to grudging acceptance to varying degrees of scepticism to total disbelief.
If you speak in a monotone, with little variation in pitch, pace or tone of voice, you will be perceived as boring and dull, even if what you are saying is truly fascinating or exceptionally amusing. Loud volume, a booming tone and too much variation in pitch will make you seem overbearing. Speak too quietly or too slowly and you will seem submissive or even depressed. Aim for moderation in volume and tone, with enough variation in pitch and pace to hold your companion's interest.
Also remember that a rising or falling intonation, especially when accompanied by a drop in volume, is a 'turn-yielding cue', whereby speakers signal that they have finished what they are saying and are ready to listen to the other person. When you hear these vocal signals, your companion is probably indicating that it is your turn to speak. When your companion hears these signals, he or she may well assume that you are 'yielding' the floor. If you frequently end sentences on a rising or falling intonation, with a drop in volume, and then carry on without allowing your companion to speak, he or she will become frustrated. Taking your turn when your companion has not given any vocal 'turn-yielding cues', even if he or she has finished a sentence, will be perceived as interruption, and is equally irritating.
Verbal flirting
Although your target's initial impressions of you will depend more on your appearance, body language and voice than on what you actually say, successful flirting also requires good conversation skills.
The 'art' of verbal flirting is really just a matter of knowing the rules of conversation, the unwritten laws of etiquette governing talking and listening. The best and most enjoyable conversations may seem entirely spontaneous, but the people involved are still obeying rules. The difference is that they are following the rules automatically, without consciously trying, just as skilled, experienced drivers do not have think about changing gears. But understanding how the rules of conversation work – like learning how and when to change gears – will help you to converse more fluently, and flirt more successfully.
Studies have shown that women tend to be more skilled at informal social conversation than men, both because they are naturally more socially sensitive, and because they have better verbal/communication skills. (Men make up for this with superior visual-spatial abilities, but these are not much help in verbal flirting.) Men can, of course, easily learn to be as skilled in the art of conversation as women – it is only a matter of following a few simple rules – but some do not take the trouble to learn, or may be unaware of their deficiencies in this area. Those males who do take the trouble to improve their conversation skills (perhaps by reading this Guide) have a definite advantage in the flirting stakes.
Opening lines
When the subject of flirting comes up, most people seem to be obsessed with the issue of 'opening lines' or 'chat-up lines'. Men talk about lines that work and lines that have failed; women laugh about men's use of hackneyed or awkward opening lines, and all of us, whether we admit it or not, would like to find the perfect, original, creative way to strike up a conversation with someone we find attractive.
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that your opening line is really not very important, and all this striving for originality and wit is a wasted effort. The fact is that conversational 'openers' are rarely original, witty or elegant, and no-one expects them to be so. The best 'openers' are, quite simply, those which can easily be recognised as 'openers' – as attempts to start a conversation.
The traditional British comment on the weather ("Nice day, isn't it?" or "Doesn't feel much like summer, eh?", etc.) will do just fine, as everyone knows that it is a conversation-starter. The fact that these comments are phrased as questions, or with a rising 'interrogative' intonation, does not mean that the speaker is unsure about the quality of the weather and requires confirmation: it means that the speaker is inviting a response in order to start a conversation.
In Britain, it is universally understood that such weather-comments have nothing to do with the weather, and they are universally accepted as conversation-starters. Saying "Lovely day, isn't it?" (or a rainy-day equivalent) is the British way of saying "I'd like to talk to you; will you talk to me?"
A friendly response, including positive body language, means "Yes, I'll talk to you"; a monosyllabic response (accompanied by body-language signalling lack of interest) means "No, I don't want to talk to you", and no verbal response at all, with body language signalling annoyance or dislike, means "Shut up and go away".
If you are indoors – say at a party or in a bar – and nowhere near a window, some equally innocuous general comment on your surroundings ("Bit crowded, isn't it?", "Not very lively here tonight, eh?") or on the food, drink, music, etc., will serve much the same purpose as the conventional weather-comment. The words are really quite unimportant, and there is no point in striving to be witty or amusing: just make a vague, impersonal comment, either phrased as a question or with a rising intonation as though you were asking a question.
This formula – the impersonal interrogative comment – has evolved as the standard method of initiating conversation with strangers because it is extremely effective. The non-personal nature of the comment makes it unthreatening and non-intrusive; the interrogative (questioning) tone or 'isn't it?' ending invites a response, but is not as demanding as a direct or open question.
There is a big difference between an interrogative comment such as "Terrible weather, eh?" and a direct, open question such as "What do you think of this weather?". The direct question demands and requires a reply, the interrogative comment allows the other person to respond minimally, or not respond at all, if he or she does not wish to talk to you.
In some social contexts – such as those involving sports, hobbies, learning, business or other specific activities – the assumption of shared interests makes initiating conversation much easier, as your opening line can refer to some aspect of the activity in question. In some such contexts, there may even be a ritual procedure to follow for initiating conversation with a stranger. At the races, for example, anyone can ask anyone "What's your tip for the next?" or "What do you fancy in the 3.30?", a ritual opening which effectively eliminates all the usual awkwardness of approaching a stranger.
Unless the context you are in provides such a convenient ritual, use the IIC (Impersonal Interrogative Comment) formula. This formula can be adapted to almost any situation or occasion. Just make a general, impersonal comment on some aspect of the event, activity, circumstances or surroundings, with a rising intonation or 'isn't it?' type of ending. Your target will recognise this as a conversation-starter, and his or her response will tell you immediately whether or not it is welcomed.
There are of course degrees of positive and negative response to an IIC. The elements you need to listen for are length, personalising and questioning. As a general rule, the longer the response, the better. If your target responds to your comment with a reply of the same length or longer, this is a good sign. A personalised response, i.e. one including the word 'I' (as in, for example, "Yes, I love this weather") is even more positive. A personalised response ending in a question or interrogative (rising) intonation (as in "I thought it was supposed to clear up by this afternoon?") is even better, and a personalised response involving a personalised question, i.e. a response including the words 'I' and 'you', is the most positive of all.
So, if you say "Nice day, isn't it?" and your target replies "Yes, I was getting so tired of all that rain, weren't you?", you are definitely in with a chance. Note that there is nothing original, witty or clever about the above exchange. You may even be inclined to dismiss it as polite, boring and insignificant. In fact, a great deal of vital social information has been exchanged. The opener has been recognised as a friendly invitation to a conversation, the invitation has been accepted, the target has revealed something about him/herself, expressed interest in you, and even suggested that you might have something in common!
The biggest mistake most people make with opening lines is to try to start a flirtation, rather than simply trying to start a conversation. If you think about your opening line as initiating a conversation, rather than starting a flirtation, use the IIC formula and pay close attention to the verbal and non-verbal response, you cannot go wrong. Even if your target does not find you attractive and declines your invitation to talk, you will avoid causing offence and you will avoid the humiliation of a direct rejection.
Turn-taking
Once you have initiated a conversation with your chosen target, your success in making a favourable impression will depend as much on your social skills as on what you say.
We have probably all met at least one person who is highly articulate, witty and amusing, but who loses friends and alienates people by hogging the conversation, not allowing others to get a word in. You may also have come across the equally irritating strong, silent type who makes you do all the 'work' in the conversation – who never asks a question, never expresses interest and makes no effort to keep the conversation flowing.
What you have to say may be fascinating, and you may express it with great eloquence, but if you have not grasped the basic social skills involved in conversational turn-taking, you will be perceived as arrogant and unpleasant, and neither your target nor anyone else will enjoy your company.
The basic rule on how much to talk is very simple: try to make your contribution to the conversation roughly equal to that of your partner. The essence of a good conversation, and a successful flirtation, is reciprocity: give-and-take, sharing, exchange, with both parties contributing equally as talkers and as listeners.
Achieving this reciprocity requires an understanding of the etiquette of turn-taking, knowing when to take your turn, as well as when and how to 'yield the floor' to your partner. So, how do you know when it is your turn to speak? Pauses are not necessarily an infallible guide – one study found that the length of the average pause during speech was 0.807 seconds, while the average pause between speakers was shorter, only 0.764 seconds. In other words, people clearly used signals other than pauses to indicate that they had finished speaking.
In previous sections of the Guide, we have described in detail the various non-verbal signals people use to show that they have finished what they are saying, and that it is your turn to speak. These include eye-contact signals (remember that people look away more when they are speaking, so when they look back at you, this often indicates that it is your turn) and vocal signals such as rising or falling intonation, with a drop in volume. This may be accompanied by verbal 'turn-yielding' signals, such as the completion of a clause or 'tailing off' into meaningless expressions such as "you know".
As a general rule, the more of these turn-yielding cues occur simultaneously, the more likely it is that your partner has finished and expects you to speak. Watching and listening for these clues will help you to avoid interrupting, and also to avoid awkward gaps and lengthy pauses in the conversation.
Talking
This Guide clearly cannot tell you exactly what to say, what words to use, in a flirtatious conversation, but it is possible to provide some general guidelines on what |
soldiers (and hence contributions to the Democratic party) without having to put the expenditures on an annual budget.
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In sum: Giant welfare state, crippled private sector limiting the tax base, massive shift away from full-time employment, and public-sector union goons with their hands out repeating the only slogan that really matters to them: “F*** you, pay me.” Which is to say, Puerto Rico today is Illinois the day after tomorrow, along with California, New Jersey, Connecticut, etc.
Senate Republicans propose to make things better by making them worse.
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EDITORIAL: What to Do About Puerto Rico
The Senate is looking to help Puerto Rico avoid a default on its bonds, partly because it wants to protect the bondholders, which include the usual assortment of Wall Street jerks (one in five U.S. bond funds is invested in Puerto Rican debt) and institutions with a high appetite for risk. Puerto Rico has something like an island-wide commitment to screwing its creditors, for instance by commandeering funds earmarked for future debt payments for other purposes. Puerto Rico intends to steal money intended to pay bond-holders and use it to continue paying its bloated and underfunded pensions. Republicans, incredibly, intend to help ease Puerto Rico’s way toward doing that.
What the Republicans need here is a broad, long-range strategy, but one that begins with a single word: “No.”
#share#Many U.S. states and territories have statutory and constitutional guarantees that public-sector pensions must be paid. Puerto Rico is one of these. It also has a constitutional guarantee of its bonds. What we have in Puerto Rico is a version of the question that we almost certainly will face in several U.S. states: What happens when those legal guarantees run up against the cold, hard fact that the cupboard is bare? There isn’t really an established body of law to rely upon here. There is a bankruptcy law for U.S. cities and municipal agencies, but not for states or for a commonwealth such as Puerto Rico. Some in Washington wish to pretend that Puerto Rico is a municipality and to then extend to it the protections of Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code, which Detroit took advantage of recently. But Puerto Rico is not a municipality, and declaring that it is one does not make it so.
If we thought of the United States as something like the European Union, then Puerto Rico is Greece.
If we thought of the United States as something like the European Union, then Puerto Rico is Greece. Just as it makes little or no sense for the monetary policy of Greece to be identical to the monetary policy of Germany, it makes no sense for Puerto Rico to share a minimum wage and other provisions with the mainland United States. Puerto Rico’s economic productivity simply is not high enough — and probably is never going to be high enough — to carry that burden. Rather than try to paper over this with many billions of taxpayers’ dollars, Congress should act to put Puerto Rico on a path to stability. Puerto Rico should be allowed to default on its debt payments, leaving creditors — who knew the risks when they were chasing those high returns — to work out what they can. Puerto Rico should face up to fiscal reality and repudiate, at least in part, its unfunded pension liabilities. Rather than face that reality, the current governor, Alejandro Garcia Padilla, has ruled that out. He can rule that out all day, but the arithmetic is what it is. The sooner we all acknowledge that, the better.
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In the long run, Puerto Rico’s economic status cannot be rationalized until its political status is sorted out. That is a dilemma, inasmuch as Puerto Rico is suited neither for independence nor for U.S. statehood. With apologies to Karl Rove and his entertaining new book on the subject, we must consider this situation a blight upon the reputation of William McKinley, not that that provides much illumination about what to do today.
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RELATED: Puerto Rico’s Debt Crisis Could Be Bad News for the GOP in 2016
But what not to do is to bail out Puerto Rico — and that is what is being considered, despite all the official protestations that this isn’t a bailout per se. We should not bail out Puerto Rico because a bailout will not fix what is wrong with the commonwealth and will, in fact, delay necessary reform. It also establishes a precedent that is much more worrisome: When the time comes, we will not have the option of simply granting Illinois its independence and wishing it the very best of luck. If we bail out Puerto Rico, we are going to end up bailing out every Democrat-run fiscal hellhole across the fruited plain and every grasping public-sector union promised pension benefits that look more like a lottery prize.
And, note: Illinois can’t pay lottery winners, either. Nobody can say that they didn’t see coming what is coming.David Schinazi <dschinazi@apple.com>
Hi everyone, Today Apple released the first public seeds of iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan. These seeds (and the third developer seeds released yesterday) include an improved version of Happy Eyeballs. Based on our testing, this makes our Happy Eyeballs implementation go from roughly 50/50 IPv4/IPv6 in iOS 8 and Yosemite to ~99% IPv6 in iOS 9 and El Capitan betas. While our previous implementation from four years ago was designed to select the connection with lowest latency no matter what, we agree that the Internet has changed since then and reports indicate that biasing towards IPv6 is now beneficial for our customers: IPv6 is now mainstream instead of being an exception, there are less broken IPv6 tunnels, IPv4 carrier-grade NATs are increasing in numbers, and throughput may even be better on average over IPv6. The updated implementation performs the following: - Query the DNS resolver for A and AAAA. If the DNS records are not in the cache, the requests are sent back to back on the wire, AAAA first. - If the first reply we get is AAAA, we send out the v6 SYN immediately - If the first reply we get is A and we're expecting a AAAA, we start a 25ms timer - If the timer fires, we send out the v4 SYN - If we get the AAAA during that 25ms window, we move on to address selection - When we have a list of IP addresses (either from the DNS cache or by receiving them close together with v4 before v6), we perform our own address selection algorithm to sort them. This algorithm uses historical RTT data to prefer addresses that have lower latency - but has a 25ms leeway: if the historical RTT of two compared address are within 25ms of each other, we use RFC3484 to pick the best one. - Once the list is sorted, we send out the SYN for the first address and start timers based on average and variance of the historical TCP RTT. Roughly speaking, we start the second address around the same time we send out a SYN retransmission for the first address. - The first address to reply with a SYN-ACK wins the race, we then cancel the other TCP connection attempts. If this behavior proves successful during the beta period, you should expect more IPv6 traffic from Apple products in the future. Note however that this only describes the current beta and all these details are subject to change. Please test this out if you have the means to, we'd love to see test results and receive feedback! I would like to personally thank Jason Fesler and Paul Saab for their help investigating these issues and testing this. Thanks, David Schinazi CoreOS Networking EngineerUpdated 8:42 PM ET
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. Tourists returned to the Grand Canyon on Saturday after Arizona officials along with several counterparts agreed to a federal government plan to reopen national parks, which had been closed as a result of the partial government shutdown.
But the Obama administration's OK to reopen tourist areas across the nation came with a big caveat: States must foot the bill with money they likely won't see again.
So far, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Arizona and New York have agreed to open parks that had been closed since the beginning of the month. Meanwhile, governors in other states were trying to gauge what would be the bigger economic hit - paying to keep the areas operating or losing the tourist money that flows when the scenic attractions are open.
South Dakota and several corporate donors worked out a deal with the National Park Service to reopen Mount Rushmore beginning Monday. Republican Gov. Dennis Daugaard said it will cost $15,200 a day to pay the federal government to run the landmark in the Black Hills. He said he has wired four days' worth of donations.
The main entrance to Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona was closed during the shutdown until Oct. 12, 2013, when it reopened under a deal between the federal government and the state. AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin
In New York, Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state will pay $61,600 a day to fully fund Park Service personnel and the Statue of Liberty will open Sunday.
But it will be one day too late for Jason Demman and his eight-year-old daughter Kate, who came from Omaha intending to see Lady Liberty. Of how he told his daughter about the closure, Denman told CBS News: "I tried to explain how our government works...it was a little bit difficult to explain." He said he'll bring Kate back to New York to see the monument again.
In Arizona, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer balked at spending about $112,000 a day for a full reopening of the Grand Canyon. She said a partial reopening would be much cheaper while allowing tourists to visit and businesses to benefit.
"The daily cost difference is enormous, especially without assurances that Arizona will be reimbursed," said Andrew Wilder, a spokesman for Brewer.
In the end, Arizona agreed to pay the Park Service $651,000 to keep the Grand Canyon open for seven days. The $93,000 a day is less than the $112,000 the federal government had said was needed to fund park operations each day.
In additional to state money, cash provided by the town of Tusayan, just outside the South Rim entrance, and private business would also be included in the funding.
At this time of year, the Grand Canyon draws about 18,000 people a day who pump an estimated $1 million a day into the local economy.
The town of Tusayan, and area businesses have pledged $400,000 to help reopen the canyon, but Wilder said it was unclear if the Interior Department could accept private funds.
In Utah, federal workers rushed to reopen five national parks for 10 days after the state sent $1.67 million to the U.S. government with the hope of saving its lucrative tourist season.
Zion National Park superintendent Jock Whitworth said staff members began opening gates and removing barriers and expected to have the park fully operational Saturday.
"This is a practical and temporary solution that will lessen the pain for some businesses and communities in Utah during this shutdown," Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell said in a statement.
It was welcome news for beleaguered shop owners in the small town of Springdale adjacent to Zion. Hotels have been vacant and rental and retail shops have seen sales plummet during the shutdown.
"It's going to be awesome," said Jenna Milligan of Zion Outfitters, an outdoor gear rental shop. "A lot of businesses have suffered severely because of the government. I just hope it does stay open through autumn."For me, the epitome of stovetop alchemy is making caramel from table sugar. You start with refined sucrose, pure crystalline sweetness, put it in a pan by itself, and turn on the heat. When the sugar rises above 320°F/160°C, the solid crystals begin to melt together into a colorless syrup. Then another 10 or 20 degrees above that, the syrup begins to turn brown, emits a rich, mouth-watering aroma, and adds tart and savory and bitter to its original sweetness.
That's the magic of cooking front and center: from one odorless, colorless, simply sweet molecule, heat creates hundreds of different molecules, some aromatic and some tasty and some colored.
How does heat turn sugar into caramel? Heat is a kind of energy that makes atoms and molecules move faster. In room-temperature table sugar, the sucrose molecules are jittery but standing in place, held still by the forces of attraction to their neighbors. As the sugar heats up in the pan, its molecules get more and more jittery, to the point that their jitters overcome the attractive forces and they can jump from one set of neighbors to another. The solid crystals thus become a free-flowing liquid. Then, as the temperature of the sugar molecules continues to rise, the force of their jittering and jumping becomes stronger than the forces holding their own atoms together. The molecules break apart into fragments, and the fragments slam into each other hard enough to form new molecules.
That's what I've thought for many years, along with most cooks and confectioners and carbohydrate chemists: heat melts sugar, and then begins to break it apart and create the delicious mixture we call caramel.
And we've all been wrong.
It turns out that, strictly speaking, sugar doesn't actually melt. And it can caramelize while it's still solid. So proved chemist Shelly Schmidt and her colleagues at the University of Illinois in studies published last year.
It's dismaying to think that so many could be so wrong for so long about such a basic ingredient and process! But it's also a rare opportunity to rethink the possibilities of the basic. Here's a plateful of possibilities; scroll down for more.
Professor Schmidt's group made their discovery when they tried to nail down the precise melting point of sucrose. The figures reported in the technical literature vary widely, and it wasn't clear why.
The melting point of a substance is the temperature at which it turns from a solid into a liquid while maintaining its chemical identity. When solid ice turns into liquid water, for example, the molecules of H 2 O move fast enough to escape the attractive forces of their neighbors, but they're still H 2 O. And it doesn't matter how fast the substance heats up: the melting point is the same. Ice melts at 32°F/0°C. Always.
After careful analysis, Professor Schmidt found that whenever sugar gets hot enough to turn from a solid into a liquid, some of its molecules are also breaking apart. So sucrose doesn't have a true melting point. Instead it has a range of temperatures in which its molecules are energetic enough to shake loose from their neighbors, and a range in which the molecules jitter themselves apart and form new ones. And these two ranges overlap. Whenever sugar gets hot enough to liquefy, it's also breaking down and turning into caramel. But it starts to break down even before it starts to liquefy. And the more that sugar breaks down while it's still solid, the lower the temperature at which it will liquefy.
When we make caramel standing at the stove, we use high heat to liquefy and then brown the sugar in a few minutes, and the liquefying temperature can be upwards of 380°F/190°C. But Professor Schmidt's group found that when they ramped up the heat slowly, over the course of an hour, so that significant chemical breakdown takes place before the solid structure gives way, the sugar liquefied at 290°F/145°C.
I made the caramelized sugars in these photos by putting crystals and cubes in my gas oven at around 250°F/125°C, shielding them with foil above and below to avoid temperature extremes from the cycling heating element, and leaving them there overnight and longer. In the large sugar crystals, which I got in a Chinese market, it's clear that breakdown and caramelization is fastest in the center. That may be because the center is where impurities get concentrated as the crystals are made, and the impurities then kickstart the breakdown process.
Caramel makers have long known that, as is true in most kinds of cooking, the key to caramelization is the combination of cooking temperature and cooking time. But the the temperatures have typically been very high, the times measured in minutes. Now we know that you can caramelize low and very slow and get something different. Sugar breakdown even occurs at ambient storage temperatures, though it takes months for the discoloration and flavor change to become noticeable. For a manufacturer this is undesirable deterioration. But for a cook in search of interesting ingredients, it could be desirable aging.
In a follow-up to her initial scientific reports, Professor Schmidt wrote in Manufacturing Confectioner that
from a practical point of view, caramelization can be thought of as browning of sucrose by applying heat for a length of time. Thus it may be possible to better control the caramelization reaction by identifying the time-temperature conditions that optimize the production of desirable caramel flavors compounds, while minimizing undesirable ones. Confectionery manufacturers and sugar artisans, armed with this new scientific knowledge, may be able to push their craft in unforeseeable directions.
For example: aged sugar, roasted sugar, caramel-center crystals. Let the pushing begin!
Schmidt, S.J. Exploring the sucrose-water state diagram. Manufacturing Confectioner, January 2012, 79-89.
Lee, J. W. et al. Investigation of the heating rate dependency associated with the loss of crystalline structure in sucrose, glucose, and fructose using a thermal analysis approach (Part I). J Agric. Food Chemistry 2011, 59: 684-701.
Lee, J. W. et al. Investigation of thermal decomposition as the kinetic process that causes the loss of crystalline structure in sucrose using a chemical analysis approach (Part II). J. Agric. Food Chemistry 2011, 59: 702-12.November 5, 2013
A love letter to my fans....
When I drove to Nashville almost two years ago with my son in the backseat, against the backdrop of the many cardboard boxes filled with all of those things we just couldn't leave behind, I was fueled by your encouragement. For sometime now, you and all of your kind words have pushed me out onto countless stages across this country, held my hand until the line that just couldn't be written finally appears, and kept my ears ever-straining to hear that next song.
I started working on a new record almost a year ago. I knew immediately that it was going to be different from anything I'd done before. I decided that I was going to really take my time with it, the time to experiment and make a truly incredible sounding album. I have been working so hard and have put so much of myself into this thing. I can't wait for you to hear it.
All of the Kickstarter funds raised will go towards:
Recording costs (studio time, musicians)
Mixing
Mastering
Album Artwork
Duplication
Publicity
In total, this record is going to cost over $50,000 to make and release. But meeting the goal of $20,000 will be a HUGE help. If we exceed this goal, just know that all of the money raised will be put towards these costs.
I feel so lucky. Music is one of the things that I most love in this world. And the creation of each and every song is my favorite part. But thankfully I don't create in a vacuum. I do it for you. And because of you, I can keep doing it.
I truly appreciate all of the encouragement and support that you continue to give me. Thanks so much for helping me make this record.
Love, Jill“We are here legally. We pay taxes to the local government,” a North Korean worker said after being approached outside the dormitory. Asked about reports that workers have been mistreated, he snapped, “They are all lies!” Then he got in a van and drove away, down a muddy alley.
North Koreans working elsewhere in Poland also keep to themselves.
At the greenhouse complex that employs North Koreans, the workers’ dormitory was surrounded by a seven-foot-high concrete wall. But through a crack, a heavyset man in a thick parka could be seen directing six women to wash a blue Ford van in the winter chill.
In Koldowo, a speck of a village some 200 miles northwest of Warsaw, residents said a group of North Koreans arrived in early 2017 for jobs at Remprodex, a manufacturer of shipping containers in the nearby town of Czluchow.
During their first months, they slept inside empty containers despite the cold, residents said. Later, the workers rented half of a house tucked inside a walled compound.
Remprodex did not respond to questions, and Times reporters were turned away at the estate of the Kociszewscy family, which owns the greenhouses.
The countries hosting North Korean workers have defended the arrangements, arguing that they expose the laborers to the outside world and help them support their families. Conditions back home can be so desperate that some North Koreans pay bribes to get these jobs.
But human rights organizations, North Korean defectors and United Nations monitors have described the assignments as forced labor because the workers are physically confined, under constant surveillance and deprived of most of their wages.As of this morning 834 people have been shot dead by American police officers in 2015. We're 309 days into 2015 so that means we're averaging cops killing two people a day this year. At this rate we should be up against, if not exceeding, one thousand people killed by cops by the time 2015 ends. Yesterday the police in San Diego shot and killed a guy who was fleeing and wouldn't raise his hands. Two days ago they shot and killed a 6 year old autistic boy whose dad was trying to flee a warrant. I don't care what your political leaning is, these are disturbing things to read; the social contract we have with police is that they have guns to use when their lives and the lives of other are in clear and present danger and yet somehow American cops have killed 29 unarmed black people this year.
That's not supposed to be the country we live in. This is not what America is about, it never was. One of the key sparks that led to the American Revolution was the Boston Massacre, where British soldiers opened fire on American protesters (who were super asking for it, by the way, much more so than a dude running away from the cops) - this nation was founded on the concept that authority figures just shouldn't be gunning down citizens in the street. We reject that out of hand, and again - I don't care which party you're with - any American who understands what America stands for must also understand that police shooting and killing people should be rare, unusual, not occuring with the frequency of factory shift changes. It is insane that 834 people have been shot dead by police in this country this year, and it is clear that we need to put a stop to this, and that the only way to put a stop to this is to retrain our police force to use lethal options last. Very, very last. Let that guy get away without his warrant being served, because it's not worth ending the life of a 6 year old autistic boy. In no reality is that worth the life of a little boy.
Quentin Tarantino agrees with this, and he marched in an anti-police brutality protest in New York City. This has really upset the cops of our nation, who have decided that a filmmaker speaking out against the killing of unarmed black and brown people is a bigger problem than the fact that American police have killed 834 people so far this year. Tarantino's words - he said that unarmed black and brown people who were killed by the police were murdered - trouble the police more than the fact that their brothers keep ending the lives of American citizens without anything approaching due process. Instead of working to change a system that is clearly not working, the nation's police unions have opted instead to boycott Tarantino's Hateful 8, an impotent gesture that is frankly embarrassing.
I wasn't going to write about this - I've been busy with our magazine and believe it or not I don't live to write things that piss people off - but today the Fraternal Order of Police's executive director, Jim Pasco, said something so insane I couldn't ignore it. The man in charge of a organization that represents 325,000 cops across the country, basically threatened Tarantino.
"Tarantino has made a good living out of violence and surprise," Pasco says. "Our offices make a living trying to stop violence, but surprise is not out of the question."
"Something is in the works, but the element of surprise is the most important element," Pasco says. "Something could happen anytime between now and [the premiere]. And a lot of it is going to be driven by Tarantino, who is nothing if not predictable."
"The right time and place will come up and we'll try to hurt him in the only way that seems to matter to him, and that's economically," Pasco says.
Pasco denied that was a threat, but that's certainly a Mafioso-style veiled warning. The police could do any number of things, including cause trouble at the film's premiere or wreak havoc on theaters showing The Hateful Eight; this is exactly the mob tactic where a made guy would advise a business owner that paying a protection fee would guarantee nothing bad happened to his business. We call this extortion. It is illegal. Even when cops do it (as opposed to murder, which seems to be legal for police).
Police brutality
is real
and it's a major problem in America today.
People who speak out against police shootings are not enemies of the police, and one would think that the police themselves would rather exist in an environment where they work with the community rather than gun them down, twice a day. It seems crazy to me that the current state of affairs is acceptable to the American police, and it seems unreal to me that they would rather attack those who criticize them than fix the problem that has led to 834 deaths so far in 2015.
Let the police boycott The Hateful Eight. We will be supporting Quentin Tarantino's film in full, and I will be purchasing multiple tickets to see the film in its run, both in 70mm and digital presentations. Don't let the police chill free speech. Don't let the blue wall stand between us and justice. Don't let the few craven, twisted killer cops - and their unhinged spokesmen - soil the pride of America's peace officers. This sort of reaction from dirty, crooked cops isn't unusual - it's happened again and again, from the 1700s through Serpico and beyond - but each time strong, patriotic Americans have stood up to the bad cops and allowed the good cops to flourish. Let's do it again, and let's make America once again a nation where a figure of authority shooting someone is a shocking event, not a twice-a-day reality.Pakistani Taliban gunmen disguised in burqas stormed the campus of an agriculture college in Pakistan on Friday, killing at least nine people and wounding 35, police and hospital officials said.
Police and army troops summoned to the scene killed all of the attackers at the Agriculture Training Institute in the northwestern city of Peshawar about two hours into the attack, the military's press wing said.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility, saying in a message from spokesman Mohammad Khorasani that they had targeted a safe house of the military's Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
The gunmen arrived at the campus in an auto-rickshaw, disguised in the burqas worn by many women in the region, Peshawar police chief Tahir Khan said.
They shot and wounded a guard before entering the campus, he said.Image caption Ms Mayawati of BSP said it supported the government because the move was not binding on states
The decision by India's government to open the retail sector to foreign competition has received full parliamentary backing.
A total of 123 MPs voted in favour of the government's decision and 109 MPs opposed it in the upper house.
On Wednesday, the Congress-led government won a key vote on the decision in the lower house.
The win will help the government push ahead with further economic reforms to bolster India's slowing economy.
Friday's win in the upper house came after the regional Bahujan Samaj Party's 15 MPs voted with the government, which does not have a majority in the chamber.
The BSP said it supported the government because the move was not binding on states.
The party had walked out before the vote in the lower house on Wednesday, helping the government win.
Ahead of the vote in the upper house on Friday, MPs from another regional party, Samajwadi Party, walked out of parliament, bringing down the margin for victory.
The decision to allow foreign direct investment was hotly debated on Thursday and Friday in the 244-member upper house.
Opposition parties, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), oppose the government's decision to allow global firms - such as Walmart and Tesco - to buy up to a 51% stake in multi-brand retailers in India.
The move has been strongly opposed by tens of thousands of small businesses and corner shops who fear they would be put out of business.
But the government and business leaders argue that it will boost the economy and transform the way Indians shop.Can Romney Stay The Course As The CEO Candidate?
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jim Cole/AP Jim Cole/AP
Mitt Romney's front-runner status in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination took a hit this week, with national polls showing that he has been eclipsed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
Perry's quick ascent — he officially announced his candidacy only two weeks ago — has put pressure on the former Massachusetts governor and venture capitalist to tweak his consistent I'm-the-CEO-you've-been-waiting-for campaign theme.
But, for better or worse, race-watchers say, Romney's success in the private sector remains his most persuasive argument for why he, and not Perry or the rest of the lagging GOP field, should be the Republican who takes on President Obama next year.
"His accomplishment with Bain Capital and with helping turn around the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002 are the primary strengths of his candidacy," says Dale Buss, who has written extensively about business leaders and CEO politicians.
"Given the deteriorating state of the economy, a lot of Americans are looking for economic competence, for economic understanding," Buss says.
That includes former Obama supporter Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire real estate developer and publisher, who this week bemoaned what he characterized as an economic "competency crisis" in the White House.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Thursday, Zuckerman said he longs for a "triple-A president to run a triple-A country," though he did not mention Romney.
Given the deteriorating state of the economy, a lot of Americans are looking for economic competence, for economic understanding.
Strategists say that if Romney veers from his CEO message to try to move to the right of the conservative Perry, an evangelical Christian and Tea Party favorite, he risks muddying the argument that he is uniquely qualified to lead during a time of national economic crisis. Because Romney's moderate past on legal abortion, gay rights, gun control and expanding health care coverage already makes him a suspect commodity with the party's base, his best bet is to stay the business leader course.
Romney, however, is discovering that his CEO personality and corporate success, including personal wealth estimated at $250 million, can present on-the-trail pitfalls and fodder for his opposition, especially in a general election.
Democrats pounced on his Iowa State Fair comment that "corporations are people." He had to weather recent reports that he plans to tear down his $12 million California beach home to build a much larger one.
He dismissed with a "no harm, no foul" comment criticisms of a secretive and short-lived political action group, founded by a former Bain colleague, that gave his campaign $1 million.
And this week, while in New Hampshire, he shushed an aggressive questioner by saying, "You're not the boss of me."
Nature Of The Business
CEO politicians like Romney, says J.P. Donlon, all have the "instinct and drive to accomplish things."
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jim Cole/AP Jim Cole/AP
"But when you're running a corporation, everyone by definition is to be pulling in the same direction," says Donlon, editor-in-chief of Chief Executive magazine. "In politics, you have to have the patience to deal with all the conceits that politicians have to undergo and suffer through."
"Why do you think Jack Welch and Lee Iacocca didn't run?" he said, referring, respectively, to the former heads of General Electric and Chrysler who were both urged to seek political office.
"Mitt Romney, however, has already dealt with these issues for a number of campaign seasons," says Donlon.
Romney-watchers like to refer to the candidate this time around as Romney 2.0, a CEO who has learned from his political experiences — a successful run for governor in 2002 and his unsuccessful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination four years ago.
Romney founded Bain Capital with two associates in 1984. It now has nearly 400 employees, 10 offices including those in Hong Kong, Mumbai and London, and boasts that it is "one of the world's leading private, alternative asset management firms" managing about $65 billion.
Romney left Bain in 1999 to head the Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing committee.
Romney has been credited with rescuing the scandal-plagued Olympics, which, once mired in graft and disarray, ended up a success. In an interview with The New York Times during his last presidential run, Romney characterized the experience as preparing him for public life.
"Romney understands the basics of growth — private investment and capital formation," Donlon says. "That's what it's all about."
It's clear why Romney is running as a CEO, Donlon said: "What's most important to the country right now is to create an environment that creates jobs. As long as jobs remain the single greatest priority, he's obviously going to leverage his experience in getting the nomination."
While there have been successful CEO candidates, like three-term New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, there are plenty of examples of those who have come up short — even when money was no object.
Former eBay chief Meg Whitman lost her GOP bid for governor in California last year, and ex-Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina fell short in her effort to oust California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat. Former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine, a New Jersey Democrat, won a term in the U.S. Senate and another as governor but was ousted last year by Republican Chris Christie.
Perry Peril
Perry has benefited, Buss says, from leading a business-friendly state but "has not had really any experience in the private sector."
One-third of jobs created nationally since 2009 have been in Texas, driven, many analysts say, by the state's oil and gas boom. Another analysis this week by the San Antonio Express-News found that government has also played a significant role in job growth in Texas, noting that 1 of every 4 jobs created since Perry became governor has been in the government sector — a stat that Perry's opponents are hoping might not go over well with small-government GOP voters.
Romney's trick as the Republican primary season approaches, Buss says, will be to rely on his business credentials while "tapping into what people are feeling about government spending — that seems to be more on their minds than antipathy toward Wall Street."
And he has to do a better job of it.
"I just don't hear him packaging what he's done [in a way] that would speak to people about the experience he brings," Buss says. "The conversation between CEOs and the government is getting increasingly important and visible."
On Thursday in New Hampshire, Romney attempted to sharpen his message, saying he would give Obama a "triple D" rating on the economy.
Former Bush administration adviser David Frum this week suggested on his website that despite Perry's surge in the national horse race polls, the Texas governor's lead is fragile, and the candidate vulnerable.
National polls before the primary season often have limited long-term predictive value. In June 2007, Hillary Clinton held a "solid lead" over Obama and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards in the race for the Democratic nomination, and Rudolph Giuliani still led on the GOP side. Giuliani eventually dropped out of the race after failing to win any primary contests.
In Perry's case, Frum says, his opposition to Social Security and Medicare could pose problems.
In his book, Fed Up! published last fall, Perry posits that Social Security is unconstitutional, a "Ponzi scheme," and a failure. Last week Perry's communications director said he'd never heard Perry call Social Security unconstitutional and said that the book should not be viewed "in any way as a 2012 campaign blueprint or manifesto."
Perry's vulnerabilities, Frum asserts, "will come under intense scrutiny during his stint in the spotlight."
And that could play to Romney's advantage, if he continues to double down on his economic bona fides.
Says Buss: "It's still his to lose."He said that Britain would be better off outside the Single Market and that there were "question marks" about staying in the customs union.
He said: "I don't think it makes sense for us to pretend we should remain in the single market and I think there are real question marks about whether it makes sense to remain in the customs union.
"Clearly if we do that we cannot make our own trade deals with other countries."
He also said that the Government should go public with its immigration policies "sooner than later", adding that it would be a "mistake" to wait until Article 50 is triggered by the end of March next year.
He defended his successor Mark Carney, who has been criticised for warning about the risk of leaving the European Union.
He said that Mr Carney had been put in an "almost impossible position" because of the polarised nature of the debate and was entitled to issue warnings about the economic impact of the Brexit vote.How Good Is The World's Most Expensive Fighter Jet?
toggle caption U.S. Navy/Lockheed Martin/Getty Images
First of two parts
After years on the drawing boards and in testing labs, a new fighter plane is entering the U.S. arsenal. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to help the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines replace their fleet of aging aircraft.
But this plane has become the most expensive military procurement program in history. While critics continue to carp about the cost, the plane is now in the skies, and the military says it's the lynchpin for future defense strategies.
On a cold fall morning at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Fla., Air Force Lt. Col. Lee Kloos watches a fellow pilot prepare an F-35 for launch. Kloos loves the technology — from the advanced helmet that lets him see in the dark, to the stealth technology that lets him hide from radar.
Some of that stealth design is built right into the smooth shape of the plane.
"When he closes his |
can work hand in hand.Rather than viewing copyright policy as a zero sum game where one party "winning" means someone else losing, let's recognize that the only real stakeholder is the public, and any policy should be designed to be best for the public, and that's one where both artists and technologists are better off, because new technologies enable artists to better create, promote, distribute, connect and monetize their works, while providing the public with more content, more choices, more ways to support, more ways to share, more ways to express and to communicate. And the end result, as we've seen throughout history, tends to be better for just about everyone -- with the exception of those who stay wedded to obsolete models that are built around being the gatekeeper for areas of friction that no longer apply.Focus on what's best for the public and it will also be best for creators and technologists alike. That's how you "get copyright right."
Filed Under: benefits, copyright, copyright week, fair use, public domain, the publicThe Baltimore Orioles starting rotation has been a major talking point about the team. Here are two free agent pitchers the team should avoid at all costs.
As Spring Training gets nearer and nearer, one of the main talking points, and concerns, about the Orioles has been their starting rotation. They recently acquired Odrisamer Despaigne, but he’s not exactly expected to be an impact player in their rotation. At best, maybe an end-of-the-rotation kind of guy.
Because there has been a lot of talk about the starting rotation, there has also been a lot of speculation as to whether or not the Orioles will sign a free agent pitcher, and two names have been linked repeatedly to the team. They are Yovani Gallardo and Tim Lincecum, and the Orioles should stay as far away from the two of them as humanly possible.
Let’s start with Gallardo. First, to get it out of the way, probably the number one reason the Orioles shouldn’t (and likely won’t) sign Gallardo is because they’ll have to give up their draft pick to sign him, and Duquette isn’t too interested in that. But aside from that, Gallardo out-pitched his stats by a lot last year. So let’s geek it up and dive into the numbers (note: for what many of these sabermetric terms mean, click here and use that glossary).
Last year, Gallardo went 13-11 and had a 3.42 ERA. At first glance, that sounds pretty good, especially considering he was with the Rangers in the AL, a traditionally hitter-friendly league. But if you look a bit deeper into his stats, you’ll notice a lot of outliers.
First of all, the most obvious one, his FIP was 4.00 and his xFIP was 4.31, way off from his 3.42 ERA (a career best by the way), suggesting a fair share of good luck for Gallardo. Also, Gallardo’s K/9 was a paltry 5.91, which is pretty average (and below his career average of 8.23), and when you look at that compared to his left on base (LOB) percentage of 77.2%, that suggests a regression. Typically, the league average of LOB% is around 70%, and if you’re a high-strikeout pitcher, you’ll likely have an above-average LOB%, but Gallardo isn’t at all.
There’s also the issue of his control, specifically his 3.32 BB/9 and 1.42 WHIP. He walks people a lot. All of this suggests, strongly, that Gallardo is not what he was last year, and that he’s due for a pretty serious regression, something the Orioles cannot afford.
Then there’s Big Time Timmy Jim. Everyone remembers Lincecum when he was a perennial Cy Young contender, but he has suffered from the same thing that Ubaldo Jimenez has suffered from, which is a seriously diminished velocity on his fastball.
In 2011, Lincecum had a 2.74 ERA and a 9.12 K/9. In 2012, he maintained his K/9 for the most part, but his ERA shot up to 5.18, which begs the question, what happened? The answer is his fastball, specifically that it went from an average of 92 mph to 90 mph. And then by 2014, it was at 89 mph, and last year it was at 87 mph. On top of all that, Lincecum started walking people a lot more. His WHIP went up to 1.47 in 2012 from a 1.21 in 2011, and its hovered around the mid-ones since then.
Lincecum, like Jimenez, was a fastball pitcher with decent off-speed stuff and a crazy windup that fooled a lot of batters. But once his fastball lost velocity and became exceptionally average, he couldn’t adjust and completely lost his step. On top of that, his windup has caused a lot of control issues, so now he’s only easier to hit, but he’s wild. Plus, he just had hip surgery, so health is a concern on all of that.
Now, perhaps Duquette is able to sign Lincecum for virtually nothing and we give it a shot, if that’s the case, maybe that would be alright, but he should have an exceptionally short leash. Take his last name off of his jersey and who is he? A bottom-tier starting pitcher.
So who should the Orioles sign? The answer to that is Mat Latos. Latos had a rough year last year, pitching to a 4.95 ERA, but a look at his 3.72 FIP and 63.8% LOB rate (he’s an above average strikeout pitcher at 7.74 K/9 so it shouldn’t be that low) suggests that he had some bad luck. Not only that, but his HR/FB rate was 11.6%, which is exceptionally high for him being that his career average is around 8.8%.
All of his skill stats look the same, he’s still striking guys out at the same rate, his fastball hasn’t changed, he’s not walking batters that much more than normal (his BB/9 was 2.48 last year compared to a career 2.65), so everything should be roughly the same. Will he be an ace? No. But could he pitch to a mid-threes ERA with around seven K/9? Absolutely. And that’s something the Orioles rotation could definitely use.According to the French secret service, Leila Trabelsi, the wife of the ex-president, went to the Central Bank of Tunisia to fetch the gold bars, the paper reported.
The governor of the bank is reported to have refused to give them to her, so Trabelsi rang her husband who first also refused to help, before giving in, according to Le Monde.
"It seems that the wife of Ben Ali left with some gold, 1.5 tons or 45 million euros worth,” a French politician told the paper.
But a central bank official denied receiving verbal or written orders for gold withdrawals, adding that the country's gold reserves "have not moved," Le Monde said.
An official from the Elysée told Le Monde that "this information comes directly from Tunisia, in particular the Central Bank. It seems to be pretty much confirmed.”
Trabelsi took a flight to Dubai, before heading to Jeddah. It is still unclear how Ben Ali left Tunisia.
According to Italian sources, reports suggest the former president’s airplane was in Maltese airspace without the authority to land.
There is also speculation that Ben Ali may have left Tunisia by helicopter to Malta and then taken his plane from there.
The French government believes the Libyan secret service may have helped Ben Ali flee in order to avoid violence, Le Monde reported.Image caption After the murder of Luis Santiago of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico's El Diario, the paper curtailed crime coverage
More than 251 journalists in 13 countries were killed "with impunity" in the past decade, the Committee to Protect Journalists has reported.
Across the world, the unpunished murders lead to self-censorship and press silence, the group reported.
The group singles out Iraq, Somalia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka as the worst environments for journalists
The situation for journalists worsened in Mexico but improved in Russia in 2010, the group wrote in a new report.
"The targeted killing of journalists serves as a silencing message to others, ensuring that sensitive issues are not subjected to public scrutiny," Committee to Protect Journalists Executive Director Joel Simon said in a statement.
"Many journalists who were murdered had been threatened beforehand but were left unprotected. Governments can either address anti-press violence or see murders continue and self-censorship spread."
The New York-based group's report was released the day after the body of Pakistani investigative journalist Saleem Shahzad was found; Mr Shahzad had written about al-Qaeda's infiltration of Pakistan's navy.
In a report released on Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote that murders of local journalists constitute the majority of unsolved cases, and that corruption and dysfunction in law enforcement keep journalists' killers from being brought to justice.
The committee found the killings lead journalists to avoid sensitive topics, quit the profession or flee in order to avoid violence.
In 2010 Russia's standing on the "impunity index" improved, as no journalists were murdered that year and authorities won two murder convictions.
Mexico worsened for the third straight year when news photographer Luis Carlos Santiago, 21, of El Diario of Ciudad Juarez was shot dead in midday in a shopping centre parking lot.
The committee's report covered 13 countries in which the murders of more than five journalists remain unsolved in the past decade. Ranked by unsolved killings proportional to population, those include:Before fleeing Fort McMurray, many rushed around their homes grabbing essentials: important documents like passports and sentimental items like photo albums and family heirlooms.
For children who fled and could only take a couple of things, they knew exactly what to reach for.
Hockey medals
Eleven-year-old Evan Norman’s parents are from Bonavista. (Caroline Hillier/CBC)
Evan Norman, 11, couldn't leave without taking his impressive collection of hockey medals.
Teddies in tow
Leah Brown, 8, is originally from St. Lunaire-Griquet. (Caroline Hillier/CBC)
Leah Brown, 8, took this toy she calls 'Elle' because to her, it's irreplaceable.
"My friend gave it to me and it's really special and there's no more in the store," said Leah.
Leah’s sister Kimberly Brown, 5, poses with her stuffed dog. (Submitted photo)
Kimberly Brown, 5, couldn't leave behind her favourite stuffed toy that reminds her of a former pet.
"I took my [stuffed] dog so I can remember Rusty that died," said Kimberly.
Olivia Pilgrim, 9, is from Straitsview, on the Northern Peninsula. (Submitted photo)
Olivia Pilgrim has been sleeping with 'Panda' every night since she was a baby, so naturally it was the first thing she tossed in her suitcase.
Not ready to bid bye-bye to blankie
Six-year-old Ian Norman’s parents are originally from Bonavista. (Caroline Hillier/CBC)
Ian Norman's home in Fort McMurray has been completely destroyed by fire. When he left his house for the last time, he took his baby blanket.
"I really like it and it's really special to me and I can share it with my brother and my baby sister," said Ian.
Even though he took his blanket, he's missing some of the other things the family was forced to leave behind.
"I'm gonna miss my little [pet] lizard, some of my teddies I left, I'm going to miss my new couch... my little gun toys and my little figures."
A 5 pound gardening book
Quinn van Driesums’s mother, Andrea Reardon, is from St. John’s. (Submitted photo)
When Andrea Reardon told her three-year-old daughter Quinn to pack a small bag for herself, Quinn filled it with a few stuffed animals and books … including one that her mom was surprised to see.
"We wondered why [the bag] was so heavy, and when we finally got to Edmonton and opened it up, she had a gardening book — my hardcover Weekend Gardener book," said Reardon.
"I don't know why … That's what she wanted to take, so that's what she took."
See a short interview below with Ian Norman, 6, about his experience fleeing the Fort mac wildfire.
On mobile? View the video here.Tech executives are offering to match donations to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) following the enactment of an executive order banning entry to refugees and visa holders from seven countries.
As multiple executives and CEOs of technology companies have come out in opposition of what’s essentially being called an immigration ban, some have chosen to do so by offering to match individuals’ donations on Twitter. Early Twitter investor Chris Sacca, for example, was an early one to start the trend and offered to match donations to those who would direct message or respond with receipts.
You guys are the best. You give me hope. Thank you. 🙏🏼 Because of you, I'm matching my own match and giving $150,000 to the @ACLU.#resist pic.twitter.com/ITjz4bSU5P — Chris Sacca (@sacca) January 28, 2017
A number of executives also followed:
In addition, Google has created a $2 million “crisis fund” that can be matched by up to $2 million in donations from employees. The fund is for four organizations: the ACLU, Immigrant Resource Center, International Rescue Committee and Mercy Corps, according to that report. Google executives are separately giving money to the cause, though the report didn’t cite specifically who. A spokesperson for Google confirmed the existence of the fund.
The ACLU challenged the executive order and won an emergency stay that will allow those who landed in the U.S. with a valid visa (or are currently in transit) to enter the country and stay. The stay was issued by a federal court in New York.
Protests erupted Saturday following the executive order, putting pressure on prominent members of the tech industry and executives to come out against the immigration ban. And, for the most part, executives in the largest companies have made some kind of statement either internally or publicly. The order in particular placed challenges on companies like Google and Uber, which may have employees working abroad that may not have the ability to get back in the country following the order.
Uber, for example, said it would create a $3 million defense legal fund to cover legal, immigration and translation costs for drivers affected by the ban. Lyft CEO Logan Green said the company would donate $1 million to the ACLU over four years and came out strongly against the order.
For the millionaires and billionaires of Silicon Valley these increments in the tens of thousands of dollars may seem nominal (with Sacca’s being among the highest). But at the same time it’s given these executives and prominent members of the community a way to come out against the ban in a some measurable fashion, and it’s apparently been successful in getting people to donate to the ACLU.Contains 1 oz of.999 fine Silver.
Medal comes in Proof condition housed in the official assay card of issue.
Minted at KOMSCO, the mint of South Korea, with a very limited mintage of 2,016.
Obverse: Shield of Chiwoo Cheonwang above latent security feature and KOMSCO logo, surrounded by date, fineness, denomination and Republic of Korea.
Reverse: Depiction of Chiwoo Cheonwang in military dress with spear and shield.
New concept of measurement value as 1 CLAY.
This series features Chiwoo Cheonwang, a legendary figure in Korean history who is known as a symbol for victory and a guardian figure.
Don't miss the chance of owning the inaugural and strictly limited release of Korea's first-ever Proof version of the successful Silver medal bullion series. Add one of these Korean 1 oz Silver medals in Proof condition to your cart today!
Learn more about the Chiwoo Cheonwang series.
In 2017, after two successful issues of the Chiwoo Cheonwang series, APMEX was pleased to discover special 2016 versions that had been produced but never made available to the public. Among these was the 2016 1 oz Proof Silver medal, providing even more beauty and depth to the already popular inaugural design.A new email application launching today called SlideMail is designed to help those of us with bad email habits sort through our inbox, while also intelligently organizing our messages and alerting us to important meetings and other events. While other email apps focus on presenting power users with a “priority inbox” containing their most important emails, SlideMail’s take is a little different. To figure out what matters to you, it watches your email activity, learning what you read, trash and archive, and then adapts to that behavior over time.
SlideMail’s creator, Vu Tran, who previously founded the Y Combinator-backed company Framebase, has returned to the accelerator program for the second time to get this new email app off the ground.
He says that, initially, he began developing SlideMail to address his own personal pain points when it came to using email. For instance, he would often get overwhelmed with emails in his inbox and miss important meeting requests. With SlideMail, however, the app can parse the text of your emails to look for dates, times, and other phrasing that indicates an upcoming event, or even a pending flight.
If you use a Gmail add-in like Boomerang Calendar, for example, the technology isn’t all that different here – except with Boomerang’s implementation, you have to click on the underlined dates and times in Gmail’s web interface, then click to add that item to your Google Calendar. In SlideMail, though, the app just reminds you automatically about your upcoming events.
In addition, it can help to locate events it detects on a map, or bring up the latest schedules when it detects an email is referencing an upcoming flight.
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The app is also able to identify different types of emails – like receipts, newsletters, or personal emails from people you know, which helps it with categorization. One of its better tricks is its ability to immediately suggest to you, upon first launching the app, which emails it thinks you should archive to make inbox triage quicker. This is presented in a pop-up box that appears overtop your inbox when you open the app, and from here you can either tap “archive” next to its suggestions or just hit “Done” to go to your inbox without taking action.
What differentiates SlideMail from some other email applications on the market today is that SlideMail adapts to you the more you use it. Explains Tran, if there are newsletters that you actually read and keep, it learns to prioritize those better. Meanwhile, it also learns which emails you consistently archive or trash, and then begins to suggest that you archive those.
“Our play is to make the email experience more pleasant and more personal, because your inbox is personal, too.” Tran says.
While inbox management is the key focus for the app, SlideMail also has the advantage of offering a bit more privacy than some other mobile email clients. Many apps today store a copy of your inbox on their server, but SlideMail does not – all the processing takes place in the app itself. And if you delete the app from your phone, your data is gone. Tran says the plan is to add encryption to the system in the future, too.
Smarter Email For The Mainstream (Not Power Users)
SlideMail has been in private testing with around 8,000-plus testers prior to today’s launch, and has been adding new testers at a rate of 800 to 1,000 per day, the founder notes. During this beta period, Tran found that the app actually resonated more with the non-technical, non-power user crowd, even though he had originally built it for power users like himself.
Technical users and business users are already engrained in using their own email habits, Tran explains, and if SlideMail fails to offer them a feature they rely on, then it’s deal breaker.
“So we distributed [the beta build] to random people – like older folks and college students. And what really surprised me was that the retention numbers were a lot higher for them,” says Tran. “The features that they liked were a lot higher than the ones that the technical people liked.”
He realized then that maybe they had been targeting the wrong people with SlideMail. Now the team is working to make the app more accessible to this more mainstream audience, who prefer simplified experiences.
The app is currently a free download on iTunes. Versions for iPad, then Mac, and finally Android will be developed in the future.
SlideMail’s small team includes the designer from popular email app Mailbox (acquired by Dropbox). Tran also says that, eventually, the startup wants to build out a suite of productivity apps for its audience.A Conservative Read On Palin's 'Going Rogue'
Going Rogue: An American Life
By Sarah Palin
Hardcover, 432 pages
HarperCollins
List price: $28.99
Sarah Palin is back to tell us that she loves Alaska. And America. And Todd, the First Dude. She loves God, Ronald Reagan, cutting taxes and serving those she calls "ordinary hardworking people." Who's on Sarah's enemies list? The media. Good ol' boys who condescend to her. Elites like the Alaskan gadfly she describes as a "Birkenstock-and-granola Berkeley grad." Oh, and she really hates cynical McCain campaign staffers who, in her view, sabotaged her vice-presidential campaign.
That's pretty much everything you need to know about Going Rogue, the former Alaska governor's breezy new memoir. There's more about the intricacies of Alaskan politics than most readers could possibly care about. There are also familiar stories of life on the campaign trail. But Going Rogue is a book designed to re-introduce Palin as a national political force, and — though she's coy about this — to lay the groundwork for a 2012 presidential run.
The rap on Palin is that she's too shallow and inexperienced for the presidency — a conclusion that early Palin supporters like me came to during the 2008 campaign. Alas, for conservatives in search of a champion, there's nothing in Going Rogue to challenge that conclusion. It's like this: Palin spends seven pages dishing about her appearance on Saturday Night Live, but just over one page discussing her national security views.
Palin's economic program amounts to nothing more than tax-cutting, deregulating, and the endless repetition of shopworn GOP talking points. This is the Republican Party's great populist hope?
Palin positions herself as a populist, but her populism is entirely cultural. She never misses an opportunity to tell us how weepy she gets when she thinks about our country and its military. She fires the governor's mansion chef, who is bored because her kids won't eat his fancypants food. She swoons over a meal of homemade blueberry pie from "hardworking, unpretentious, patriotic" Alaskans — unlike, one presumes, those uppity Berkeley snobs who prefer tarte Tatin at Chez Panisse.
A little of that goes a long way, and I wouldn't begrudge Palin a bit of it if her populism had any economic substance. Early in Going Rogue she talks in detail about how Exxon exploited the people of Alaska in the Exxon Valdez disaster. And her experience tangling with oil companies taught Palin about how big business colludes with government to create a crony capitalism that harms the common good.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Courtesy of Rod Dreher Courtesy of Rod Dreher
And yet, she's incapable of understanding how the uncritically pro-business economic agenda she touts makes this possible.
"In national politics, some feel that big Business is always opposed to the Little Guy," she writes. "Some people seem to think a profit motive is inherently greedy and evil, and that what's good for business is bad for people. (That's what Karl Marx thought too.)"
Karl Marx! Well, say no more! Along those lines, Palin's economic program amounts to nothing more than tax-cutting, deregulating and the endless repetition of shopworn GOP talking points.
This is the Republican Party's great populist hope?
Sarah Palin is selling a personality, not a platform. That's not dumb. She's doing the best she can with what she has to work with. She quotes her father's line upon her resignation this summer as Alaska's governor: "Sarah's not retreating, she's reloading." On evidence of this book, Sarah Palin is charging toward 2012 shooting blanks.
Rod Dreher is a conservative columnist at The Dallas Morning News and writes the Crunchy Con blog on Beliefnet.com.Media interviews are not given under oath, but when the prime minister told CBC’s Peter Mansbridge that people should ignore speculation about the prospect of a spring election, I was inclined to believe him.
Now, I’m not so sure.
Certainly, the temptation to break the October fixed election date must be nearly irresistible. Stephen Harper’s pitch to Canadians is that he is best positioned to provide them with physical and economic security, at a time when threats to both are on the rise.
His forthright comments last week that international jihadists have declared war on Canada and its allies, and the country must be willing to confront the challenge, will resonate with many voters. The brutal killings in Paris seem to have exhausted any tolerance for euphemism or nuance on the security issue. Just as right-wing parties across Europe have received a bump in popularity because of the attacks, so can Canadian Conservatives expect to see some electoral momentum.
But it is the tumbling oil price, along with the economic uncertainty it heralds, that has persuaded me that the Great Opportunist will risk the charge of rank hypocrisy and break his own election law again.
The price of West Texas crude dipped below US$45 Tuesday — Canadian producers receive a US$13 discount on that price. As Bank of Canada deputy governor Timothy Lane said in a speech Tuesday low oil prices are likely, on the whole, to be “bad for Canada” — which in banker parlance means “stock up on the tinned goods and bottled water.”
His explanation of how things are likely to play out suggests that the Harper Conservatives may be wise to go to the polls while the going is relatively good.
The immediate impact of the lower oil price is positive — consumer disposable income will increase by as much as $1,500 per family, according to the Bank of Montreal. Lower prices will benefit many sectors like manufacturing, as production costs are reduced. In the short term, the positive effect of lower prices on net oil-importing countries like the United States, China, Japan and the European Union will be good for Canadian non-energy exports, particularly when the dollar is trading lower too.
But in the Bank’s opinion, these gains will be more than reversed over time, as lower incomes from the oil patch and the rest of the supply chain spill over into the broader Canadian economy. The effects will be felt most profoundly in the oil-producing provinces – Jim Prentice, the Alberta premier, said Tuesday that royalties will be $7-billion lower while oil producer Suncor said it was reducing its workforce by 1,000 — but the ripples will wash over every town in the country that sends its young people to the oil patch or has companies that have customers there.
TD Economics projected Tuesday that the Conservatives will be in deficit two years longer than originally planned, due to the falling resource price. The bank said rather than a $1.9-billion surplus in 2015-16, there would be a deficit of $2.3-billion, with more red ink the following year.
TD Economics projected Tuesday that the Conservatives will be in deficit two years longer than originally planned
Joe Oliver, the finance minister, refuted the report, saying the books will be balanced in the next fiscal year — a claim that will almost certainly be proven correct once the fiscal cuisiniers in the Finance department have worked their magic.
But no one knows where oil prices are going for sure. Mr. Lane said today’s price is unlikely to be high enough to balance supply and demand, so it will recover. But the timing is highly unlikely to be optimal for the Conservative party’s re-election prospects.
My sense is that the original plan was to wait until the Mike Duffy trial in the spring had begun to fade from memory, and families had the cheques from the family tax cuts in their hands, before going to the polls.
But that plan threatens to leave the prime minister bobbing like a cork in the torrent of geopolitical events.
The contingency may well be an early budget and then a plea from Mr. Harper for a renewed mandate to protect the country from rampaging jihadists and recurring recession.
National PostBERKELEY, Calif. — Growing up, Guneeta Singh Bhalla heard a terrifying story from her grandmother. In August 1947, as British India was being partitioned into independent India and Pakistan, her grandmother fled Lahore, in what was soon to become Pakistan, for Amritsar, in what was soon to become India. All around her was carnage. Clutching her three young children, she looked out the train window to see bodies strewed along the tracks. The memory haunted her until she died.
For years afterward, Ms. Bhalla regretted not recording her grandmother’s story, and it spurred her to begin recording other people’s memories of that time. The project, known as the 1947 Partition Archive, has grown far bigger, far quicker than she ever imagined. Since its inception here two years ago, its dozens of volunteers have video-recorded 647 oral histories from more than seven countries and stored them digitally. It describes itself as “a people’s history” of that wrenching time.
“It’s something that’s been brewing in my mind since high school,” recalled Ms. Bhalla, a research physicist who is now 34, about the same age as her grandmother in 1947. “As I was growing up, it was always in the back of my head, and bothersome, as family members were passing.”GIMX stands for Game Input MultipleXer or Game Input MatriX. GIMX allows us to control a video game console with a PC. It currently only works with the PS3, but the Xbox 360 is a also targeted. stands for Game Input MultipleXer or Game Input MatriX. GIMX allows us to control a video game console with a PC. It currently only works with the PS3, but the Xbox 360 is a also targeted.
In other words, GIMX emulates a sixaxis to control the PS3 with mice, keyboards, or joysticks. It operates:
Over bluetooth: works with Linux only. A compatible bluetooth dongle is required. Tutorial here.
. Over usb: works with Linux and Windows. A usb-usb adapter is required. Tutorial here.
The application gets data from the PC peripherals (mice, keyboards and joysticks) and sends controls to the PS3 over bluetooth or usb. Other controls such as gesture or voice are possible through the emulation of PC peripherals.
Current Features
Up to 7 controllers (linux+bluetooth only) - requires 1 bt dongle for each controller
Up to 8 profiles per controller
On-the-fly profile switch with switch back mode
Supported devices: mice, keyboards, joysticks (gamepads, wheels,...)
Multiple joysticks, mice and keyboards
Configuration GUIs with automatic event & device detection
Button-to-button, axis-to-axis, button-to-axis, and axis-to-button mappings
Customizable mouse mapping (dead zone, sensitivity, acceleration)
Graphical display of the controller state
Mouse calibration mode
Mouse smoothing
Keyboard macros
new version of GIMX was released just few days back improving joysticks and navigation stick support. of GIMX was released just few days back improving joysticks and navigation stick support.
here). Check out video of Modern Warfare 3 being played using GIMX and Ubuntu 11.10. Battlefield 3 can be easily played using GIMX+Windows+Keyboard+Mouse (Works with Linux too. You can download Config from). Check out video of Modern Warfare 3 being played using GIMX and Ubuntu 11.10.Bitcoin Core Protocol Issues Can Lead To A Bitcoin Exodus
The recent Bitcoin network issues are a significant threat to the viability and prospects of the Bitcoin ecosystem. In fact, various people are claiming they are leaving Bitcoin and invest their money elsewhere, in some of the more promising blockchain-based projects, such as Ethereum, Maidsafe, and others. But is there a real Bitcoin exodus happening, or is this just a phase community members have to go through before things can take off?
Also read: Accessibility Clickjacking Threatens Bitcoin Users On Android
The Bitcoin Exodus Is Slightly Overstated – For Now
One thing’s for sure, though: plenty of people are fed up with the current block size debate and the network issues that have been taking place as of late. While delayed transactions were sorted out eventually after slightly over a full day, the situation pointed out how the Bitcoin network is not ready to handle a significant increase in transactions as of yet.
At the same time, there is a bit of confusion going on in the Bitcoin community as to why the increase to 2MB network blocks is taking so long. Both Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic developer teams seem to agree on this growth, yet it will take at last a few more weeks until it is integrated into the main fork of Bitcoin development. This indecisiveness could lead to a Bitcoin exodus at some point, though.
Rumours are starting to surface as to how several of the main Bitcoin developers want to keep the network crippled to prove this digital currency will not be feasible in the long run. While it s hard to determine the validity of these claims, improving the Bitcoin protocol should be of the utmost importance to any developer right now.
At the same time, it is entirely understandable some Bitcoin community members are fed up with the entire ordeal and are planning to leave the Bitcoin scene behind them. While these announcements are less dramatic than the one made by Mike Hearn – not all of us have mainstream media connections – it could lead to a Bitcoin exodus of some sorts.
People who leave the Bitcoin ecosystem right now should not be blamed for their decision, as getting fed up is understandable. However, they should ask themselves whether or not it is a smart move, as there are plenty of passionate people who want to Bitcoin better at the protocol level. It is still a bit early to talk about the risk of a Bitcoin exodus, but it is not as far-fetched as some people might think.
A Promising Outlook For The Coming Years
There are several projects in existence which are building something new on top of the Bitcoin protocol. Ethereum is the project nearly everybody has a vested interest in these days, as the project is seeing a healthy price increase per Ether. Moreover, smart contracts are quite an appealing prospect, even though BitHalo makes it possible to use this technology with Bitcoin as well. Plus, Rootstock is planning to offer similar functionality for Bitcoin users. All of these exciting prospects should be able to prevent a bitcoin exodus from happening, although the community can be very fickle sometimes.
The big question is whether or not the Bitcoin community cares enough about the future of digital currency to see it succeed. More and more discussions are taking place regarding hidden agendas, back room deals, and allegations that are difficult to prove. If all of this energy were used to create a better Bitcoin protocol, the future might have looked vastly different right now.
What are your thoughts on an impending Bitcoin exodus? Is it something we should worry about? Let us know in the comments below!
Source: Reddit
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Stainless MediaThe federal environment minister and her top officials were unable to provide concrete numbers on Canada's new plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions to a parliamentary committee.
Leona Aglukkaq's appearance created some sparks at a normally low-key Commons environment committee meeting.
She was grilled on her recent announcement Canada will cut carbon emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
That target has been submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as Canada's intended, nationally-determined contribution. It's part of the international effort to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees.
Aglukkaq called the targets "fair and ambitious," but didn't say what the 30 per cent reduction actually means in tonnes of carbon pollution that would have to be cut annually.
Liberal MP John McKay went after Aglukkaq's deputy minister, Michael Martin, for the answer.
"What is it in terms of megatonnes?" he asked.
"Actually I can't do the math off the top off the top of my head but would happy to provide the number to the committee," said Martin.
It clearly took McKay by surprise.
"Really?" he asked."I find it quite remarkable that you should state the target for 2030 of 30 per cent and not know what that is in megatonnes."
Martin promised to provide numbers to the committee members at some point later.
When ministers appear at committee they are accompanied by their top bureaucrats and a herd of staff lugging heavy binders of information. But none of those binders appeared to contain the number Canada will strive to reach.
McKay found it all very odd.
"I would have thought if you had a percentage reduction you would know what the bottom line is," he said in an interview outside the committee hearings.
"They just want to have a press release — a talking point, but no real number."
Aglukkaq's staff denies avoiding question
Aglukkaq wouldn't talk about the target number with reporters either, but said her government is reducing the country's carbon footprint by bringing in rules for individual sectors.
"The sector-by-sector approach that we have taken reflects Canada's footprint and we are proud of those accomplishments and initiatives that we have taken," she said.
An hour later, Aglukkaq's director of communications, Ted Laking, called CBC to sort out the confusion.
Canada has committed to a 30 per cent reduction of 2005 levels by 2030, ahead of an international climate change conference later this year. (Frank Gunn/Canadian Press)
"I did the calculations on my way back to work," Laking said.
"The 2005 levels were 749 megatonnes. Multiply that by 0.3 and you get 224, so it would be 224 megatonnes [reduction] by 2030," he said.
When asked why a deputy minister couldn't have easily done that too, Laking said: "That was cheesy question. He didn't have the numbers off the top of |
missing is an Olympic representative. The careers of the Spartans' best players, including former All-Americans Val Sterk and Jenna Wrobel, often have been misaligned with when the Olympics roster selection competitions have been held.
Moster's, however, will conclude just in time for the 2016 Games in Rio De Janeiro.
"That's great for Kori, and we're excited for her and her future in volleyball," MSU coach Cathy George said. "We've had four players on the National Team so far at Michigan State. Obviously, that's a huge goal for the program. But really, mostly for our players, because we want to see our kids that we know get to achieve their dreams."
Last February, Moster tried out for and made the USA Volleyball Collegiate National Team, which in June toured China as part of the Beijing Super Women's Volleyball Challenge. It was her first international experience.
"It was above and beyond anything I'd experienced. It's the best players," Moster said. "It prepared me for all the different changes, because international play differs from U.S. play."
That's no small feat for a player at Moster's libero position — typically, there are few spots reserved for defensive-minded players in fast-paced, above-the-net international competition. She was the only libero on that collegiate squad. Her team went 5-2, winning three of four from the Chinese National Team and dropping its only other match to a professional squad.
More importantly for Moster, the tour was considered a second tryout phase for the Women's National Team. In January, she will travel to Anaheim, Calif., to participate in an important two-week training phase with the U.S. program under the direction of coach and men's Olympic legend Karch Kiraly. The best from there will be invited back to spend the summer with the U.S. National Program.
The Olympic roster for 2016 will consist of the best 12-15 players from that National Team player pool that Moster hopes to play her way into.
"That would be my entire summer out there. They train and send different rosters to different tournaments, preparing for the Olympics in 2016," she said. "(Kiraly) made it very obvious to me that, because how far along they are in the process, they might take no one. But then again, if it's someone he feels can impact the program from the beginning, then he'd be more than willing to take them. It really does just depend."
Focus on now
Like all seniors, it's a critical time for Moster. But she also has a few other things going on that most don't – including guiding the Spartans' quest in the NCAAs.
"Right now is a great thing for her. Right now prepares her for that," George said of Moster's next phase. "The further we go in the tournament, the more different teams and styles we play against, it helps prepare her. Keeping her mind right where it needs to be, which is here, is going to help her. It keeps our practices going, which gets her ready for January."
Entering this season, Moster already owned the MSU career record for digs. With 511 so far this fall, pushing her career total to 2,179, she has moved into fifth place in Big Ten history. Two strong tournament games could bump her as high as second on the conference list.
Moster is one of 10 finalists for the women's volleyball Senior CLASS Award. She and Florida State's Katie Mosher are the only two liberos on the list. The winner will be announced later this month during the Division I volleyball championship in Oklahoma City.
"You never obviously replace a player like Kori, who's been a mainstay in our lineup for four years," George said. "She's pretty much solidified our defense and our passing group, and she's become quite a server, too, in the last couple years. She can take over matches at times."
In May, she will graduate from MSU with a degree in advertising and hopes to go into public relations or marketing.
First, though, she might have more volleyball. Playing professionally on the international circuit – like former MSU teammates Lauren Wicinski (Puerto Rico) and Alexis Mathews (Romania) – will be difficult as a libero. Most of those spots on pro teams go to domestic players, with taller hitters and blockers who command higher salaries taking up their roster slots for Americans and foreign-born players.
That means chasing the Olympic dream could be her ticket to additional post-collegiate competition. She'll find out more in January. But first, there comes one final December march with the Spartans.
"When that's completed, hopefully in a few weeks, then I can switch my gears and help the transition into the international game a little bit," Moster said. "But right now, I really am just focused on the collegiate level."
KORI MOSTER FILE
•Who: MSU senior libero
•Height: 5-4
•Hometown/school: Cincinnati/Ursuline Academy
•Honors: Two-time All-American (honorable mention 2012, third team 2013), two-time Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year (2012, 2013), All-Big Ten honorable mention (2013, 2014), Senior CLASS Award finalist.
NCAA TOURNAMENT
MSU vs. Loyola Marymount
•When: 7:30 p.m. today
•Where: Maples Pavillion, Palo Alto, Calif.
•Online: Streaming at Pac-12.com
•Next: The MSU-Loyola Marymound winner will face the winner of the match between host and No. 1 Stanford and Cal-State Bakersfield at 10 p.m. Saturday.5 key attributes of effective data monetization strategy
In cognitive computing era, new revenue generation stream has emerged with data at center of the modern digital business model. One of the key capabilities cognitive computing enables for an organization is the ability to generate additional revenue streams by using data effectively.
In the big data world we call it data monetization. The internal data monetization has already done amazing job at transforming business in all verticals by improving customer experience, enabling more personalized marketing and sales, deterring fraud and so on.
The emergence of big data has shown to transform professions and industries. We are seeing big data doing wonders with cost optimization and enhancing customer experience. We are increasingly seeing a growing trend among our customers to create new revenue streams with big data. Customers ranging from banks, telecommunication providers, energy and utilities companies and retailers have potential to earn new revenues from the vast amount of data they hold. Each of these businesses are experimenting with different ways to monetize the value of the data they gather during their normal operations. Each are expecting to make considerable revenues based upon the difference between the cost of collecting and storing the data, and what the insights and outcomes can be sold for.
As per the McKinsey Global Institute report on “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity,” big data can create as much as $700 billion in value to consumer and business end users. Capturing this value will require the right enablers, including sufficient investment in technology, infrastructure and personnel as well as appropriate government action.
1. Identifying your target customers' needs, requirements and aspirations
Before you embark on journey to make money out of your data. It is important you profile your target customers, verticals and their parameters for success.
Case in point is telcos targeting retailers and mall operators with insights about anonymous movement of people throughout the property and surrounding. Delivering store or business catchment analysis based on real behavior, not just proximity to your location.
2. Identifying data assets—raw and refined, internal and external
Data monetization is much more than just storing and selling the data. Data monetization is about making revenue out of data enablers like insights, outcomes and partnerships. Companies can benefit from a centralized Data Science team that partners with the business and potential customers by identifying data that differentiates, exploring use cases to solve, and helping to jumpstart business teams.
One of the customer engaged with us is a retail company who is selling real time supply chain report to merchant wholesalers. The company is using the data from their Hadoop and Spark cluster to generate revenue-driving reports for wholesalers. The key parameter here is blending of purchase data from POS with transaction data from banks. With Apache Spark and Kafka, they run these reports in just hours, and with the scalability models in place they expect to grow this business to 25% of overall revenue. The analytics from these reports help merchants with customer segmentation, cross-sell analytics, and more.
How you share your data is about balancing needs to innovate against the risk of using your data. Strike that balance with clear responsibilities and pragmatic access, enforce compliance to data security, privacy and retention policies and processes to ensure continued trust by consumers and meet regulatory and legal requirements. Company privacy policies must be clear and well-understood by overall business and technical team. Access should be determined by the use case requirements and priorities.
4. Data as a service and business model
Operationalizing your data monetization strategy calls for having the right business model, the right strategic alliances and the right partner.
The companies are working on driving sophisticated big data as a service business models based on both volumes and values. The win-win business model will be highly influenced by the number of insights business can provide to customers and value those insights can generate for their customers.
5. Defining the technology strategy—Hadoop, Spark and IBM Watson Data Platform
The emergence of open source technologies gives tremendous power to organization in this new emerging data monetization space to break even more swiftly. Data provides maximum value when it is fresh. Technologies like Apache Spark and Kafka give real time analysis capabilities to business at lightning speed. This technology has a wholly different approach to data and data management than what we had before. It is the key enabler to the far reaching transformation that is really “big data.”
In short, these changes all lead back to the simplest of facts in the underlying technology—the agility of data.
A big data environment that supports collaboration powered by open standards is ideal. IBM Watson Data Platform provides the power of machine learning and cognitive computing based on open source “Apache Spark” to enterprises. Data platforms such as this will form solid foundation for a data monetization strategy and will enable organizations to quickly and easily monetize data.
Follow @IBMBigDataCLOSE Fort Collins resident Patricia Cudd has last-stage breast cancer and wants to find her beloved pit bull mix, Sherlock, a new home. Madeline Novey/The Coloradoan
Buy Photo Pat Cudd sits with her dog, Sherlock, a pit bull mix, Monday in their hotel room in east Fort Collins. Cudd has last-stage metastatic breast cancer and is looking for someone to adopt her dog. (Photo: V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan)Buy Photo
Patricia Cudd has lived longer than doctors predicted, but she says final-stage breast cancer will kill her.
Making sure her pit bull mix, Sherlock, finds a loving home tops the list of things the 62-year-old Fort Collins woman wants to do before she dies.
"I love him so much. I want him to have the best, you know?" she said, sitting on her bed Monday, one arm in a sling and the other draped across the 5-year-old dog's back.
Cudd adopted "Sherie," as she fondly calls him, from the Longmont Humane Society in September 2010. He was initially apprehensive of his new owner, but they grew to be best of friends, enjoying long walks along the Poudre River and playing when Cudd took breaks from her accounting studies at Colorado State University.
Roughly two years later, doctors diagnosed Cudd with metastatic breast cancer.
After particularly grueling chemotherapy treatments, Cudd will curl up next to Sherlock on the bed in her hotel room in east Fort Collins. The two once sat side-by-side, "watching Harry Potter movies for a full day until I felt better," she said with a smile.
The cancer is taking its toll, though, and Cudd said she may need to go into hospice care. That, coupled with her waning strength, makes it too difficult to walk or care for Sherlock in the way she thinks he deserves.
"I am passing away. I don't know when exactly. Of course, everyone is passing away. But the cancer, you know — stage 4 is the ultimate stage — and he needs a home," she said.
Throughout the roughly five years Cudd has lived in Fort Collins, she's struggled to find landlords who allow pit bull or pit bull-mix dogs. She worries finding Sherlock a home could prove a challenge, given negative perceptions of the breed.
Cudd is the first person to admit Sherlock is territorial and protective, but she says he's also attentive, loving and playful.
The best future home for her companion would be one without other pets. She knows he will create happy memories with another family, just as he has with her, if given the opportunity.
"I have to place him somewhere. It breaks my heart," she said. "But if he could go to a good home, you know, it would help me so much. It would give me peace."
Those who are interested in adopting Sherlock may call (970) 775-0797 or email rubyphoenix36@yahoo.com.
Interested in adopting Sherlock?
• Call (970) 775-0797 or email rubyphoenix36@yahoo.com.
• Sherlock needs to be welcomed into a home without other pets.
• Dustin Main, of Front Range Pet Scooping, said he is willing to offer a year of free pet waste removal to whomever adopts Sherlock, as long as they live in Loveland or Fort Collins.
Read or Share this story: http://noconow.co/1iOSzSuA FRAGMENT believed to have come from inside the cabin of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has been found on an island in Mauritius, east of Africa.
MH370 Independent Group expert Don Thompson saw photographs of the part and said it appeared to match the bulkhead of an MAS Boeing 777 business class cabin.
The decorative finish on the piece, however, was not limited to that section of a B777 and could also have come from economy class, Mr Thompson told news.com.au.
Fellow IG member Mike Exner agreed with the assessment and the group this morning passed on the information to the Australian Tranport Safety Bureau (ATSB) who is understood to be excited by the find.
The object, if proven to have come from the missing plane, is hugely significant because it is the first possible internal fragment to have been found. The piece is also likely to shed more light on the manner in which the aircraft entered the water.
The Vitry's #MH370 île Rodrigues find looks to b 1st ID of internal item, decorative foil match w B777-2H6 interior pic.twitter.com/TAs6f60knl — Don Thompson (@GuardedDon) April 1, 2016
#MH370 "Debris @ beach Var-Brûlé, between Mourouk & Gravel,Rodrigues ". Looks like a match w/ MAS bulkhead. TNX Don. pic.twitter.com/K1MhQkc5Xj — Mike Exner (@Airlandseaman) April 1, 2016
@Airlandseaman With interior items now washing up maybe we can finally admit the early pieces didn't flutter off of #mh370 *IT CRASHED* — RM (@fxnighttrader) April 2, 2016
@fxnighttrader Yes, it crashed for sure. But the flapperon and maybe other pieces probably did come off before the main impact. — Mike Exner (@Airlandseaman) April 2, 2016
A couple holidaying on Rodrigues Island (a small volcanic island in the Indian Ocean, east of Mauritius) found the wreckage as they were walking along the beach at Var-Brûlé between Mourouk and Gravel, on Thursday.
Jean Dominique and Suzy Vitry, who live on nearby La Reunion where a flaperon confirmed to have come from the plane was found last July, immediately suspected they had found another piece of MH370, reports Reunion website Clicanoo.
They took the piece back to their hotel, the Mourouk Ebony, and gave it to management for safekeeping while a report was made to the River Coco Police Station.
It is not clear how big the fragment is but Clicanoo quoted a senior hotel staff member as having described it as “tens of centimetres”. A small cluster of barnacles are visible on the piece.
Photographs of the fragment have been posted to the hotel’s Facebook page.
The ATSB recently confirmed that two pieces of debris found in Mozambique last month, including Blaine Gibson’s “NO STEP” part and the outboard wing flap found by South African teenager Liam Lotter, were “highly likely” to have come from MH370.
EIGHT VITAL MH370 QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERS
ARE YOU INADVERTENTLY HOARDING A PIECE OF MH370 DEBRIS?
Mozambique Debris ‘Almost Certainly’ From MH370 0:57 Two pieces of debris recently found in Mozambique are “almost certainly” from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Malaysia's transport minister said Thursday. Photo: Australian Transport Safety Bureau
The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 vanished on March 8 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board.
Another fragment, dubbed the “Rolls Royce piece”, found in South Africa’s Western Cape province, is thought to have come from the inlet cowling of the aircraft’s engine.Last Friday, when the market was down only 2%, we presented readers with a note which promptly became the most read piece across Wall Street trading desks, which was written by JPM's head quant Marko Kolanovic, who correctly calculated the option gamma hedging imbalance into the close, and just as correctly predicted the closing dump on Friday which according to many catalyzed Monday's "limit down" open.
Recall:
Given that the market is already down ~2%, we expect the market selloff to accelerate after 3:30PM into the close with peak hedging pressure ~3:45PM. The magnitude of the negative price impact could be ~30-60bps in the absence of any other fundamental buying or selling pressure into the close.
We bring it up because Kolanovic is out with another note, one which may be even more unpleasant for bulls who, looking at nothing but price action, were convinced that after the biggest two day market jump in history, the worst is behind us.
In the just released note, the head JPM quant warns that a large pool of assets controlled by price-insensitive managers including derivatives hedgers, Trend Following strategies (CTAs), Risk Parity portfolios and Volatility Managed strategies, which is programmatically trading equities regardless of underlying fundamentals, is about to start selling equities, "and will negatively affect market in coming days and weeks." For good measure, he casually tosses the word "crash" in the note as well.
By way of reference, JPM notes that a good example of how price-insensitive sellers can cause market a disruption/crash is the price action on the US Monday open. It says that technical selling related to various hedging programs, in an environment of low (pre-market) liquidity indeed caused a ‘flash crash’ on Monday’s open. S&P 500 futures hit a 5% limit down preopen, and then a 7% limit low at 9:31 and 9:33. The inability of hedgers to short futures spilled over into large cap stocks that were still trading and could be used as a proxy hedge. Had it not been for the futures limit down event, the selloff would likely have been worse as indicated by the price of the index implied by individual stocks. The figure below shows the S&P 500 futures, SPY ETF and S&P 500 replicated from
the largest stocks that were trading near the market open.
Kolanovic correctly takes credit for his prediction and notes that "in our Friday note we forecasted end-of-the-day selling pressure due to option gamma hedging. We saw similar price impacts on Thursday, Friday, and Monday (pushing the market lower into the close) and an upside squeeze on Wednesday. Our estimate is that up to 20% of market volume was driven by hedging of various derivative exposures such as options, dynamic delta hedging programs, levered ETF stop loss orders, and other related products and strategies (note that levered ETFs have gamma exposure of only ~$1bn per 1%, i.e., much smaller than that of S&P 500 options). We estimate the cumulative selling pressure from options hedging during the market selloff to be ~$100bn. Options gamma is expected to remain substantially (in excess of $20bn) tilted towards puts while the S&P 500 is between 1850 and 2000.
The figure below shows Put-Call Gamma assuming current open interest and different spot prices. JPM expects high volatility to persist (should we stay in this price range) and cause quick intraday moves up or down, particularly towards the end of the trading day.
According to the quant, it is not only derivative hedgers who are pushing the market around like a toy with barely any resistance: :in fact, there is a much larger pool of assets that is programmatically trading equities regardless of underlying fundamentals."
It is these investors who, "in the current environment" are selling equities and "will negatively impact the market over the coming days and weeks."
Trend Following strategies (CTAs), Risk Parity portfolios, and Volatility Managed strategies all invest in equities based on past price performance and volatility. For instance, in our June market commentary we showed that if the equity indices fall 10%, these trend followers may need to subsequently sell ~$100bn of equity exposure. These types of ‘price insensitive’ flows are starting to materialize, and our goal is to estimate their likely size and timing. These technical flows are determined by algorithms and risk limits, and can hence push the market away from fundamentals.
This is where it gets scary for the bulls who thought we may be out of the woods, and that the crash was behind us. If Marko is right, as of this moment we are merely in the eye of the hurricane:
The obvious risk is if these technical flows outsize fundamental buyers. In the current environment of low liquidity, they may cause a market crash such as the one we saw at the US market open on Monday. We attempt to estimate the amount of these flows from three groups of investors: Trend Following strategies (CTA), Risk Parity portfolios, and Volatility Managed strategies. These investors follow different signals and have different rebalancing time frames. The time frame is important as it may give us an estimate of how much longer we may see selling pressure.
So, how much longer may we see the selling pressure?
1. Volatility Target (or Volatility Control) strategies provide the most immediate selling as a reaction to the increase in volatility. These strategies adjust equity leverage based on short-term realized volatility. Typical signals are 1-, 2-, or 3-month realized volatility. Volatility target products are provided by many dealers, index providers and asset managers. Volatility targeting strategies also became very popular with the insurance industry. After the 2008 financial crisis, many Variable Annuity (VA) providers moved from hedging their equity exposure with options to investing directly in volatility target indices (e.g., 10% volatility target S&P 500). It is estimated that VA issuers have ~$360bn in strategies that are managing volatility; some of these use options to manage tail risk, some buy low volatility stocks, and some invest in volatility target strategies. We estimate that strategies that are targeting a particular level of volatility or managing to an equity floor could have $100-$200bn of assets.
Assuming that, on average, these strategies follow a 2-month realized volatility signal, we can estimate their selling pressure. 2M realized volatility increased over the past week from ~10% to ~20% (i.e., doubled), so these strategies need to reduce equity exposure by up to ~50% to keep volatility constant. This could lead to $50-$100bn of selling, and it likely started already this week. There is often a delay of 1-3 days between when a signal is triggered and trade implementation, and positions are often reduced over several days. We think this could have contributed to the ‘unexpected’ selloff that happened in the last hour of Tuesday’s trading session. While these flows may continue to have a negative impact over the next few days, they would be the first to reverse (start buying the market) when volatility declines.
2. Trend Following strategies/CTA funds have an estimated ~$350bn in AUM. We modelled CTA exposures in our May and June commentaries, and estimated flows under different scenarios for asset prices. In particular, under a 10% down scenario in equites we estimated CTAs need to sell ~$100bn of equities. In our model, the bulk of selling was in US markets, some in Japan and relatively little in Europe. S&P 500 futures did underperform Europe (by ~3%) and Japan (by ~2%) over the last two trading sessions (European hours), which may indicate that CTA flows have started to impact equity markets. The rebalance time frame for CTA strategies is typically longer than for volatility control strategies. CTA funds may act on their signal in a period that ranges from several days to a month. We believe that selling from CTAs may have just started and will continue over the next several days/weeks.
3. Risk Parity is one of the most popular and (historically) successful portfolio construction methodologies. Risk Parity allocates portfolio weights in proportion to assets’ total contribution to risk (a simplified version, called Equal Marginal Volatility allocates inversely proportional to the asset’s realized volatility). In a survey of quantitative investment managers (~800 clients in US and Europe), we found that ~50% prefer a Risk Parity approach (vs. 15% for traditional fixed weights (e.g., 60/40), 20% Markowitz MVO, and ~20% active asset timing). Estimated assets in Risk Parity strategies are ~$500bn and ~40% of these assets may be allocated to equities. Risk Parity portfolios may also incorporate leverage, often 1-2x. Risk parity funds often rebalance at a lower frequency (e.g., monthly, vs. daily for volatility target) and use slower moving signals (e.g. 6M or 1Y realized volatility). The increase in equity volatility and correlation would cause Risk Parity portfolios to reduce equity exposure. For instance, 6M realized volatility increased from 11% to 15% and a modest increase in correlations would result in approximately a ~20% reduction of equity exposure. Based on our estimate of Risk Parity equity exposure, this could translate into $50bn-$100bn of selling over the coming weeks.
In summary, JPM estimates that "the combined selling of Volatility Target strategies, CTAs and Risk Parity portfolios could be $150-$300bn over the next several weeks. Rebalancing of these funds may appear as a persistent and fundamentally unjustified selling pressure as these funds execute their programs. In addition, there may be a positive feedback loop between all of these sellers – Gamma hedging of derivatives causes higher market volatility, which in turn leads to selling in Risk Parity portfolios, and the resulting downward price action invites further CTA shorting. All of these flows pose risk for fundamental investors eager to buy the market dip. Fundamental investors may wish to time their market entry to coincide with the abatement of these technical selling pressures."
* * *
In other words, if JPM is right, yesterday and today are merely the eye of the hurricane - enjoy them; tomorrow is when the winds return full force.Terrence Malick used to be known for taking his time between projects; in 1973, his film Badlands was released, followed by Days of Heaven five years later and The Thin Red Line two decades after that. However, ever since The Tree of Life in 2011, Malick has been pumping out films much quicker.
From 2015 until now, three Malick-directed movies (including two versions of his Voyage of Time documentary) have been released, and within the next few years, two more are on the way. One of those upcoming projects is a World War II drama, his first since The Thin Red Line, entitled Radegund.
Producer Philip Lee, one of the backers of Radegund, gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter where the film got a brief mention. The outlet confirmed that the film is slated for a 2018 release, meaning that it will come out the year after 2017’s Weightless, which stars Ryan Gosling, Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, Christian Bale, Haley Bennett, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara and more.
Radegund, on the other hand, has a less star-studded, more unknown cast that includes August Diehl, Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Nyqvist, Jürgen Prochnow and Bruno Ganz. The film tells the story of Diehl’s Franz Jägerstätter, who is executed for refusing to fight for the Nazis in 1943.Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas 6.
Place the cubes of swede in a roasting tray. Drizzle over two tablespoons of the olive oil and season.
Roast in oven for 25-30 minutes until golden brown and tender, stirring occasionally.
Meanwhile, heat the remaining tablespoon of oil in a large heavy-based saucepan, stir in the onion, carrots, celery, garlic and thyme leaves and fry for 4-5 minutes until softened but not browned.
Add the roasted swede to the pan and pour over the stock.
Bring gently to the boil, cover and simmer for 25-30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Purée the soup in a food processor or liquidiser until completely smooth. Pass through a sieve for an extra fine texture if preferred.
Transfer the soup back to a clean saucepan. Stir in most of the cream, reserving some for garnishing. Gently heat through and adjust the seasoning if necessary.Baku, Azerbaijan, July 6
Trend:
Armenia’s deliberate targeting of Azerbaijani civilians is a despicable act, Bob Blackman, a British MP, chairman of the Azerbaijan All-Party Parliamentary Group, said.
He was commenting on the recent developments on the contact line between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops.
On July 4 at about 20:40 (GMT+4 hours), the Armenian armed forces, using 82-mm and 120-mm mortars and grenade launchers, shelled the Alkhanly village of Azerbaijan’s Fuzuli district.
As a result of this provocation, the residents of the village Sahiba Allahverdiyeva, 50, and Zahra Guliyeva, 2, were killed. Salminaz Guliyeva, 52, who got wounded, was taken to the hospital and was operated on.
Armenian armed forces should cease firing across the contact line and at least give [Nagorno-Karabakh] peace talks a chance of success, the British MP added.
The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.
The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.
Follow Trend on Telegram. Only most interesting and important newsNEW DELHI: These are exciting times for Indian football. While the India under-17 players took their first step towards becoming professionals by playing in the World Cup, eight former India stars have taken a step to become professional coaches.Former stars Jo Paul Ancheri Alex Ambrose and Dinesh Nair had all undergone an AFC 'A' license course held in Kolkata last month under course instructors Savio Medeira, who is also AIFF's acting technical director, and Scott O'Donell of Australia. This is probably a first - a record eight former players, most of whom were contemporaries in their playing days, all underwent the exam at the same time.While the result is expected by the end of this week, a source said that most of the former players are expected to clear the exam. Getting an AFC 'A' license certificate will enable the players to coach I-League teams from the forthcoming season.Former Mohun Bagan midfielder Renedy Singh, who played 56 times for India, said it was important to understand how to manage players as a coach. "It was a one month-long course divided into two modules of 15 days each. One of the major aspects of coaching is to understanding man-management techniques. Since everyone comes with their individual mindset, you have to apply specific techniques for each player while interacting with them," Renedy told TOI.Before taking the course, most of the players were working as assistants at various ISL clubs. While Renedy was with FC Pune City, Alex Ambrose was working with Mumbai City FC. "The transition is never easy from a player to a coach. So it's important to learn the ropes as an assistant coach. I got the training at FC Pune City and it has really helped me when I took the course," said Renedy.However, getting the license isn't a cakewalk, as Ancheri would tell you. The former midfielder had appeared for the exam last year but failed to clear it before applying for it again. Medeira said it is important for a coach to manage time as well. "You have to manage your time because you are strategizing, training and managing your players. But this is a good trend — many former stars are realising the importance of being trained coaches and joining the profession," Medeira said.A while back, we spent hours with a client on an EJB issue only to realize it was something simple.
Don’t you hate that?
Usually, if you configure Remote EJBs perfectly, they just work. But if not, the lack of logging makes it hard to find a solution.
I hope this guide saves you the trouble.
Here are ten steps we took to resolve Remote EJB issues in JBoss
1. Start with a standalone client
A standalone EJB client provides more useful logging information than JBoss.
Deploy this example EJB to your destination server
Run this ejb standalone client (the dest server must be reachable from your computer) java -jar ejb-standalone-client-{version}.jar {host} {port} {username} {password}
be reachable from your computer) Check the top of the logs
If you see, “Could not register a EJB receiver for connection” –> Goto Step 2
If you see, “Authentication failed:” –> Goto Step 4
If you see,, “Hello World!” –> Goto Step 6
2. Check your connection settings
Check the host and port attributes. And make sure your server is running 🙂
3. Check the binding IP address of your destination server
Your destination server must bind to the IP address you are trying to connect to. This is done at startup.
Ex../domain.sh -b 192.168.56.101
4. Check your authentication
The username and password in the standalone client should match the one on your destination server. If you’re using domain mode, check that this user is added to every host node in your domain. You must run the add user script (add-user.sh) on each node.
5. Make sure the example EJB was deployed successfully
You should see deployment messages like
java:jboss/exported/ejb-server-side/MyEJB!org.codelikethewind.ejbserver.RemoteEJB
6. Check your client settings
Open jboss-ejb.properties and the (domain/standalone.xml) of your client server. Verify the following are the same.
jboss-ejb-client.properties domain/standalone.xml Username Username in remote-outbound-connection Password Base64 decoded security-key* in your security-realm** Host & Port host/port in remote-outbound-socket
* You can decode your password here
** In domain mode, this realm should be in your host.xml of each server
Finally, check that your remote-outbound connection references the correct remote-outbound socket and security-realm
7. Check your Remote EJBs
Your EJB should be annotated as @Remote. And you should see java/jboss/exported JNDI messages for your EJB in the logs
8. Check the EJB JNDI string in your client code
Open the startup logs for your destination server and look for your EJB deployment. For example:
java:jboss/exported/ejb-server-side/MyEJB!org.codelikethewind.ejbserver.RemoteEJB
Replace “java:jboss/exported” with “ejb:”
ejb:/ejb-server-side//MyEJB!org.codelikethewind.ejbserver.RemoteEJB
This should be the string you use in your code.
Note: Unless you specified one, you will not have a distinct-name. But you still need to include the forward slash.
EJB JNDI Syntax Reference
9. Check your EJB client descriptor
If your top level deployment is a WAR, your descriptor (jboss-ejb-client.xml) should be in src/webapp/WEB-INF/
If your top level deployment is an EAR, your descriptor (jboss-ejb-client.properties) should be in src/main/resources/META-INF/
10. Check your server names
The client and “destination” server names must be distinct.
If you are running two standalone instances, make sure their node names are different
You can change the node names with a startup flag
-Djboss.node.name=node1
If you are running in two domains, make sure the servers in domain 1 have different names than the servers in domain 2.
You can change the server-name attribute in the host.xml file, under <servers>
Good luck & Happy Coding,
-T.O.Welcome back to another weekly Dev blog!
Hello! It’s a pleasure to meet you! I’m ArkZky, a developer in charge of video editing. Just to give you a brief idea of my work, I helped make the recent Sandbag trailer and the homepage for this website. Well, leaving that aside, today I’m going to present you a really special developer blog.
You’re going to take a quick look into the world of the SSF2 development team and witness a bunch of bugs we had to face during the development of SSF2 Beta.
As you may have been wondering, the SS |
The University of Manitoba Bisons were back in action Friday night, taking on a reinvigorated University of Regina Cougars. The physicality of the last game carried through to the second game of the weekend, with both sides clashing from puck drop to the final buzzer with the Bisons ending up on top 7-1.
The Bisons would get on the board first just three minutes in thanks to Nicole Carswell. Erin Kucheravy broke into the Cougars’ zone, feeding a pass to the slot where Carswell was able to tip it over the shoulder of Cougars goalie Jane Kish.
Near the end of the first period, Venla Hovi would put the Bisons up by two with her second of the year. A shot by Alanna Sharman went wide, but was scooped up by Jayden Skoleski who tucked a pass behind her to a waiting Hovi.
In the second, the Bisons extended their lead again, this time off the stick of Erica Rieder. Lauryn Keen took the puck low into the Cougars’ corner, passed it to the slot, and then a quick one timer by Rieder beat Kish low glove side to give the Bisons a 3-0 lead.
Goals from Cassandra Taylor, Alana Serhan, Sheridan Oswald and Kucheravy would provide security, as the Bisons would cruise to a 7-1 victory.
Regina’s lone goal came courtesy of Kylie Gavelin, who was able to tuck in a power play goal off a feed from Jaycee Magwood.
Rachel Dyck continued to shine in the Manitoba net, making a number of key stops. This included two brilliant saves in tight on the penalty kill late in the first, and a glove save off a Regina breakaway in the third.
“I’m going to go game to game.” Bisons head coach Jon Rempel said of his goaltending tandem, “It depends on the situation, who we’re playing and who’d be the best fit. Rachel is on top of her game right now, we could’ve won with [Schubert], but Rachel is on a mission.”
The Bisons head back out on the road next weekend to play the UBC Thunderbirds on Oct.28-29.First off, if you haven’t heard of Marcus Sheridan (aka The Sales Lion), then you’re missing out on one of the most entertaining and eye-opening speakers there is. I think the big thing that separates him from the rest of the social media / content marketing speakers out there, is that while most people talk theory, he talks practical application.
Marcus is one of the owners of River Pools and Spas, a fiberglass pool company located in Virginia. In 2008, his business was declining with the start of the recession and he knew that if he didn’t make a change, his business might fail. He was spending over $250,000 per year on traditional marketing (radio, adwords, television, etc.) and decided that he needed to switch things up. Marcus decided to give inbound marketing a shot and within a short amount of time was able to decrease his marketing costs from $250k to under $25k a year and increase his revenue year over year.
Marcus’s presentation at Blog World 2011 was my first introduction to inbound marketing and since then I’ve been able to prove my own success with inbound marketing by following his advice.
Here are 3 essential marketing lessons I learned from Marcus Sheridan over the past couple of years:
1. Become a Teacher, Sales will follow- “Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” This quote is truer now than ever as consumers can find out almost anything about your company in a matter of clicks. As many traditional companies are finding out, the old way of holding back information from your customers is only hurting business. The new way of business is all about helping others and becoming a teacher. Providing valuable content to your target audience while they’re in the research phase of the buying cycle builds trust. When that same person decides to make a purchase, it’s likely that they will come back to you. Why, you might ask? Because many of your competitors aren’t teachers- they’re only concerned about the hard sell. If you’re the thought leader in your industry educating your audience about everything there is to know about your product or service- most likely, you’ll be the one that they trust and ultimately buy from.
2. “Most businesses think they have a “secret sauce” but in reality it’s nothing more than thousand island dressing”- You’ll get the reference to this quote if you watch Marcus’s Ted talk- but what he’s referring to is talking about the things that most businesses are scared of talking about on their website. Price of your product or service, who the competition is, the drawbacks of your product or service, etc. The first blog post that Marcus wrote for River Pools and Spas was titled “How much does a fiberglass pool cost.” That post alone was attributed to more than $1.7M in sales for the company. Why? Because most companies are afraid to address cost online and it’s one of the first questions you’re asked from people on a sales call. So what happened when people went to research the cost of a fiberglass pool? Yep, you guessed it… River Pools and Spas came up number one in the search results and people began to build trust with the company because he was honest, transparent and none of the competition was addressing the number 1 question.
View Marcus’s Ted Talk (it’s worth your time):
3. Less isn’t always more- During his presentation Marcus asks the audience: “how many pages on a website do you think someone reads prior to making a purchase?” Many people guessed that visitors read between 5-10 pages but the magic number for his company was 30 pages. If someone read 30 pages on his website and then had a sales consultation, his close rate would be over 80%. As an online marketer, there is no way I would have ever thought someone would read 30 pages on a website. Most marketers and business owners think that no one reads anymore- therefore most business websites only have about 10 pages. Make sure you’re providing enough content on your website to satisfy your customer’s thirst for knowledge. The lesson here: Don’t make your website an online brochure, make your website the wikipedia of your industry.
Your Thoughts?
Do you agree with these lessons? Why or why not? Has your company tried practicing these principles, what has been the success?
Let us know in the comment section below.Russell Street Report Street Talk Jernigan Motivated by Poor 2015 Season
Making an impact is something every player wants to do for their respective teams.
For Ravens defensive tackle Timmy Jernigan, 2016, his third season in the NFL, is ready to make his mark along a stout defensive line.
Jernigan, a former second round draft pick needs no motivation to get things going this season after the Ravens disappointing 5-11 record in 2015.
“Every day we walk through those doors we’re thinking about, ‘Man, we went 5-11 last year,’” recalled Jernigan following the team’s first full session of OTAs. “When I want to take a break, that’s what I think about.
“It’s not acceptable. The players don’t accept it. The coaches don’t accept it. Nobody in this organization does, so it’s definitely on our mind every day.”
The former Florida State Seminole has a big chip on his shoulder as does the rest of the young defensive line group.
After appearing in 15 games last season (6 starts), the gritty Jernigan is ready to take his next step in improving his game.
“[I] just have to become that force that I was drafted here to be,” remarked a fiery Jernigan. “I feel like last year I came up a little bit short. I feel like I had a good year, but to my standards, I don’t think it was enough.
“I’ve definitely been busting my butt every day – day in and day out. I’m doing whatever I can just to take it to the next level and get everybody around me to do the same thing.”
While most players enjoy a little R & R during the offseason, Timmy, who now wears #99, spent his training hard for offseason activities and the upcoming season.
“I’ve been doing a lot of stuff that kind of got me here,” Jernigan stated about his training program. “This offseason I started doing a little bit more power cleans, the Olympic lifts, and getting back to running stadiums and stuff like that when I go home in that 100 degree Florida weather.
“I like to get out there when it’s hotter than hot so days like this don’t really bother me.”
While Jernigan feels his game has improved and could be a Pro Bowler in 2016.
“Definitely. I won’t stop until I get [to the Pro Bowl],” said Jernigan. “Sometimes you come up short in life, and it’s only going to do two things: It’s either going to make you or it’s going to break you. It definitely opened my eyes to how hard it is to get there.”
Jernigan’s main focus, however, isn’t on achieving personal accolades.
“I’m definitely working hard towards [having a Pro Bowl year], but that’s not my main focus. 5-11 is my main focus. That’s what I’m thinking about every day. I’m not worried about the Pro Bowl.”
It remains to be seen just how all of his offseason work will translate to the field this season, but Jernigan’s focus cannot be questioned. It was a welcomed sign as the team got back to the practice field for the first time.
Follow me on Twitter @sportguyRSR[296 Pages Report] The Aerospace Coatings Market is projected to grow from USD 1.42 billion in 2017 to USD 1.98 billion by 2022, at a CAGR of 6.90% during the forecast period. In this study, 2016 has been considered as the base year to estimate the size of the aerospace coatings market. The report provides the short-term forecast from 2017 to 2022.
Growing trend of lighter and efficient aircrafts has led to adoption of nanotechnology in aerospace manufacturing. Nanostructure metals are used in aircraft manufacturing, as nano structure metals have better properties than larger grain structures. Nano-Structure metals offers tensile strength, corrosion resistance, and low density along with lighter material. This light weight of aircraft construction leads to less fuel consumption and low carbon footprint.
Market Dynamics
Drivers
Use of nano coatings technology
Chrome-free coating technology
Emerging middle class population in developing countries
Environmentally friendly products and new technology complying with REACH regulations on VOC
Reduced ATF Price by oil companies increased number of passengers
Use of nano technology in the aerospace coatings industry
Increasing airforce defence budget of Asia-Pacific countries
Restraints
Volatility of raw material prices
Economic slowdown and uncertainly in European currency
Opportunities
Application of UV-cure coatings in military aviation industry
Shift of major European players to emerging countries such as India & Saudi Arabia
Growing aerospace industry in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East
Increase in number of aircraft deliveries globally
Challenges
Stringent and time-consuming regulatory policies from manufacturing and end user industry.
Complying with international safety and quality standards without increasing cost
Use of nano coatings technology
Nano coatings technology implies using various nano materials as filler materials to improve the properties of structural and non-structural polymers used in aircraft construction. Growing trend of lighter and efficient aircrafts or air vehicle has led to adoption of nanotechnology in aerospace manufacturing.
Nano-coatings and Chrome-free coating are also now being used on turbine blades and other mechanical components which have to withstand high temperatures and friction wear. Tribological coatings can drastically lower the friction coefficient and improve resistance to wear. This greatly improves the efficiency of the engines.
Nano-phase ceramics coatings are used in thermal barrier coatings which have wide application in aircraft engines, aero-structures, and turbine engines. This costing system has corrosion-resistant outer layer, deposited on an underlying strain-resistant layer that can deform without cracking. This system can lead to high fuel efficiencies.
The following are the major objectives of the study.
To analyse and forecast the size of the global aerospace coatings market, in terms of both value and volume
To provide detailed information regarding the major factors influencing the growth of the market (drivers, restraints, opportunities, industry-specific challenges, and opportunities)
To define, describe, and forecast the global aerospace coatings market on the basis of resin type, technology, user type, end user type, application, and region
To forecast the market size of the segments with respect to five main regions (along with their key countries), namely, Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, South America, and the Middle East & Africa
To strategically analyse the markets with respect to individual growth trends, future prospects, and contribution to the global market
To analyse the opportunities in the market for stake holders and provide competitive landscape for market leaders
To analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, mergers & acquisitions, new product developments, partnerships, contracts, and agreements in the aerospace coatings market
During this research study, major players operating in the aerospace coatings market in various regions have been identified, and their offerings, regional presence, and distribution channels have been analyzed through in-depth discussions. Both, top-down and bottom-up approaches have been used to estimate and validate the size of the aerospace coatings market and to estimate the sizes of various other dependent submarkets. This research study involved extensive use of secondary sources, directories, and databases, such as Hoovers, Bloomberg, Chemical Weekly, Factiva, and other government associations. Moreover, private websites and company websites have also been used to identify and collect information useful for this technical, market-oriented, and commercial study of the aerospace coatings market. After arriving at the total market size, the overall market has been split into several segments and subsegments. The figure given below provides a breakdown of the primaries conducted during the research study, on the basis of company type, designation, and region.
To know about the assumptions considered for the study, download the pdf brochure
The value chain for aerospace coatings begins with identifying the manufacturers of raw materials, such as resins and pigments, among others. These raw materials are procured by manufacturers of coatings, which are then supplied to the manufacturers of aerospace coatings. The maximum value to the aerospace coatings is added at the manufacturing stage, as basic chemicals are mixed and processed with other chemicals to achieve the desired strength and other properties for specific applications.
Major Market Developments
In 2016 PPG Industries, Inc. (U.S.) expanded development and technical-service capabilities for aerospace and military coatings at its Shildon (U.K.) facility with an investment of USD 2 million. This development supported the installation of advanced-technology equipment for evaluating paint characteristics.
In 2015 AkzoNobel N.V. (Netherlands) expanded its performance coatings research facility in Houston (U.S.) with an investment of USD 3.4 million. The upgraded facility will support the company�s aerospace coatings, marine coatings, and specialty coatings businesses. This expansion mainly focused on technology and product innovation and provides technical support for customers, globally.
In 2016 PPG Industries, Inc. (U.S.) launched Aerocon e-coat primer pilot system in France for the aerospace industry. This system will help address queries of customers regarding aerospace coatings in the region.
In 2015 Henkel AG & Co. KGaA announced their plan to acquire Magna-Tech Manufacturing (Indiana). Magna-Tech Manufacturing is the North American market leader in vacuum impregnation services with focus on process center capabilities. Magna-Tech will function as a subsidiary of Henkel Corporation. Through this acquisition, the company enhanced it�s the product portfolio in the aerospace coatings market.
In 2016 AkzoNobel N.V. (Netherlands) acquired BASF's industrial coatings business segment worth USD 506.39 million. The acquisition included technologies, patents, and trademarks as well as securing supply to customers worldwide. Two manufacturing plants, one in the U.K. and one in South Africa, was also transferred to AkzoNobel. This acquisition strengthened the company�s position in the aerospace market, globally
Leading players in the aerospace coatings market, which include PPG Industries, Inc. (U.S.), Akzo Nobel N.V. (Netherlands), Henkel AG & Co. KGaA (Germany), Mankiewicz Gebr. & Co. (Germany), Hentzen Coatings, Inc., (U.S.), BASF SE (Germany), IHI Ionbond AG (Switzerland), The Sherwin-Williams Company (U.S.), and Zircotec Ltd. (U.K.), among others, have been profiled in this report.
Key Target Audience:
Manufacturers of Aerospace Coatings
Manufacturers of Coatings
Manufacturers of Resins and Other Feedstock Chemicals
Manufacturers of Important Intermediate Chemicals
Government Agencies or Organizations
Research Institutions and Organizations
Various End Users (Commercial Aviation, Military Aviation, and General Aviation)
Traders, Distributors, and Suppliers of Technology, Chemicals, or Components
Regional Chemical Manufacturers� Associations
Scope of the Report:
This research report categorizes the aerospace coatings market on the basis of resin type, technology, user type, end user, application, and region.
Aerospace Coatings Market, by Resin Type:
Polyurethanes
Epoxy
Others
Aerospace Coatings Market, by Technology:
Liquid Coating-based
Powder Coating-based
Aerospace Coatings Market, by User Type:
MRO
OEM
Aerospace Coatings Market, by End User:
Commercial Aviation
Military Aviation
General Aviation
Aerospace Coatings Market, by Application:
Exterior
Interior
Aerospace Coatings Market, by Region:
North America
Europe
Asia-Pacific
Middle East & Africa
South America
The market is further analyzed for key countries in each of these regions.
Critical questions which the report answers
What are new application areas which the aerospace coatings companies are exploring?
Which are the key players in the market and how intense is the competition?
Available Customizations:
With the given market data, MarketsandMarkets offers customizations according to specific needs of the companies. The following customization options are available for the report:
Regional Analysis:
Country-level analysis of the aerospace coatings market, by application
Company Information:
Detailed analysis and profiles of additional market players
The aerospace coatings market is projected to reach USD 1.98 billion by 2022, at a CAGR 6.90% from 2017 to 2022. A coating is a covering that is applied to the surface of an object, usually referred to as a substrate. The purpose of applying the coating may be decorative, functional, or both.
The aerospace coatings market is largely driven by increased demand for aerospace coatings from various end users, such as commercial aviation, military aviation, and general aviation. The growth of the aerospace coatings market can also be attributed to increased investments by the key players to launch efficient and cost-effective products. Emerging middle class in the emerging economies is one of the important drivers for the growth of the aerospace coatings market, as increasing air traffic has caused airlines to increase their purchase of commercial aircraft. This, in turn, is driving the demand for associated facilities such as aerospace coatings, thereby fueling the growth of the aerospace coatings market. This aerospace coatings market has been segmented on the basis of resin type, technology, user type, end user, application, and region.
The demand for high-quality paints & coatings for use in aircraft has led to improvement in the technologies employed for manufacturing aerospace coatings. As such, nano coatings that offer resistance to dirt and drag and retain shiny colors for a long period time are being constantly developed and tested.
The demand for aerospace coatings has increased in the recent years due to their increased consumption in the Asia-Pacific region. There is a rising demand for aerospace coatings from emerging economies of the Asia-Pacific region, which include India, China, South Korea, Vietnam, and Singapore, among others for use in industrial applications. The aerospace coatings market is highly competitive as innovative products that comply with tough safety standards and improved efficiencies attract customers.
In terms of volume and value, the North American region is the largest market for aerospace coatings, as the key manufacturers of aerospace coatings are based in this region. In addition, the introduction of various new aircraft, such as A320neo and A350 by Airbus, and 737 MAX and 787 by Boeing have driven the demand for aerospace coatings, thereby leading to the growth of the North America aerospace coatings market. Companies such as Akzo Nobel N.V. (Netherlands), Mankiewicz Gebr. & Co., and BASF SE (Germany), among others, are the key manufacturers of aerospace coatings that have expanded their presence across the European region as well and enhanced their production capacities to cater to the increased demand for aerospace coatings from the European region.
Increased in the demand for lightweight coating systems, durability, environmentally friendly solutions, unique and various color types and faster product drying times from the commercial and military end-use industries are influencing the growth rate of the global aerospace coating market. Commercial aviation is the largest end-use industry, whereas military is also a growing end-use industry for aerospace coatings.
Commercial aviation end use industry is estimated to drive the aerospace coatings market in terms of value.
Commercial Aviation
The growing aerospace industry in Asia-Pacific will create opportunities for the commercial aerospace industry and nano coatings technology. As China and Japan are the largest aerospace coating markets followed by India in Asia-Pacific. India is emerging as the fastest industry for engineering and design services. Owing to this, India has an enormous potential for establishing MRO centres for civil and military aircrafts. This may help in creating demand for aerospace coatings and nano coatings technology. Some of the major factors influencing the growth of the aerospace coatings market in the Asia-Pacific region are increasing cargo traffic, international trade, and rising number of air passengers
Military Aviation
The demand for military aviation coatings and nano coatings for different military aircraft is high, especially in Russia, the US, China, and India. Competition among countries to become global superpowers, empowerment of their defense sectors, and the adoption of emerging technologies and innovations are expected to drive the demand for military aerospace coatings in these industries. APAC is projected to witness strong growth over the next 5 years followed by North America and Europe.
General Aviation
According to the industry experts in the aerospace industry, the business jets will be the fastest-growing sector with the growth of 20% per year, driven by the rising demand in the BRIC countries. This, in turn, will drive the demand for aerospace coatings. The helicopter market is expected to be driven by Asia-Pacific and Latin America for the next decade due to factors such as high buying capabilities of private companies and high economic growth in the regions.
Critical questions the report answers:
Where will all these developments take the industry in the mid to long term?
What are the upcoming industry applications for aerospace coatings?
To speak to our analyst for a discussion on the above findings, click Speak to Analyst
The high power-to-weight ratio is a major concern in the aerospace industry. Therefore, aero engines and other parts of an aircraft are designed according to specify standards and regulations to ensure the highest performance for a profitable long-term operation. The approval of an aircraft under these standards and regulations is a time-consuming process. For instance, if corrosive deterioration is detected in an aircraft, it has to be prevented timely as it can endanger human lives. This leads to an interruption in the process and hence creates backlogs in the aerospace industry.
The coating systems needed for corrosion protection of these exposed surfaces of an aircraft must be selected carefully to match the challenges of the hostile environment in which the aircraft operates. Aircraft maintenance engineers and designers need to minimize the metal losses by applying coatings. There are several regulatory bodies to monitor this corrosion and related issues, and hence coating manufacturers have to adhere to these regulations. Moreover, any change in regulations affects the timeline that coating manufacturers have to adhere and hence eventually creating backlogs in the aerospace industry. This restrains the overall growth of the aerospace coatings industry.
Key players operating in the aerospace coatings market include PPG Industries, Inc. (U.S.), Akzo Nobel N.V., (Netherlands), Mankiewicz Gebr. & Co. (Germany), The Sherwin-Williams Company (U.S.), Hentzen Coatings, Inc. (U.S.), IHI Ionbond AG (Switzerland), and Zircotec Ltd. (U.S.), among others.O‘ahu Hike of the Month: Judd Trail
This short Nu‘uanu jaunt will take you to an enchanting 10-foot waterfall and swimming hole.
By Lorin Eleni Gill
Editor’s Note: We love hiking! Fortunately, O‘ahu is full of great hikes. In this web series, we bring you our favorite O‘ahu trails once a month.
Photos: Lorin Eleni Gill
TRAIL NAME: Judd Trail to Jackass Ginger Pool
DIFFICULTY: Easy
LENGTH: 1 mile round trip
FEE: None
WHERE: 4022 Nu‘uanu Pali Drive
DISCLAIMER
Hiking can be dangerous, and not every trail is a good idea for every person. Keep your personal fitness and skill level in mind, and always take proper precautions when venturing off road. Heed “no trespassing” and other warning signs. Pig hunting is permitted on Wednesdays and Sundays, so hikers with dogs should avoid those days. Check hawaiitrails.org for updates. Also, swimmers risk contracting leptospirosis, so enter the water at your own discretion.
ALTHOUGH IT’S AN INVASIVE SPECIES, THIS GUAVA GROVE LOOKS PRETTY COOL.
THE EXPERIENCE
Judd Trail is easy to spot from Nu‘uanu Pali Drive. Heading mauka, you’ll see it on the right side of the road. Shortly after passing the Judd trailhead marker, you’ll cross a rambling stream. At the next trail marker, turn right and stay close to the water while walking downstream. In less than a half-mile, you’ll hear the waterfall and see a clearing on your right. Tread down the hill carefully and you’ll find the enchanting swimming hole—said to have once been popular among Hawaiian royals. Set in a serene woodland area, it’s a fun escape for all ages. If you continue along the Judd Trail loop, you’ll pass through groves of pine, eucalyptus, guava and bamboo trees.
The stream you must cross to continue along the trail.
THE PAYOFF
Jackass Ginger Pool is about 8 feet deep, but check before you jump as its depth can vary depending on rainfall. If you’re not a jumper, try the natural mossy rock slide to slip into the pool.
MAP & DIRECTIONS
Take the Pali Highway and turn right onto Nu‘uanu Pali Drive. The road will soon split; keep right and the trailhead will be on your right after another half-mile.
TIPS
Bring lots of mosquito repellent to avoid bug bites. Remember to reapply after you swim in the pool.
Parking along the road will be limited. Park in the residential area and walk to the trailhead to avoid car break-ins.
Wear water-friendly shoes that allow you to cross a stream and slippery rocks.
Nu‘uanu Stream will be stronger after heavy rain, so plan accordingly.
To avoid leptospirosis, be careful not to swallow the pond water, put your head underwater or swim with cuts.
Click here for more Oʻahu hikes.Alan Carr
I’m jealous of myself in this photo. For once in my life I look cute. I wish I still had blond hair. It’s like The Picture Of Dorian Gray. I’m about a year old, and my mum had the picture done in a department store in Weymouth. A friend of the family knitted the jumper. It says Alan on the front and AGC on the side. She also knitted my mum a red one with Christine on it... → Photograph: Courtesy of Alan Carr, from Look Who It Is!, published by HarperCollins, £7.99This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.The links are powered by Skimlinks. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that Skimlinks cookies will be set. More informationCairo announced in a statement on Sunday, that Egypt's military participation in a Saudi-led operation in Yemen has been extended by the presidency.
"The National Defense Council agreed during the meeting to extend the participation of the required elements from the Egyptian armed forces in a combat operation outside the nation's border to defend Egyptian and Arab national security in the Gulf, Red Sea, and Bab al-Mandab areas," the statement said.
The presidency failed to disclose, however, exactly how long the extension would be for.
Almost 70 deaths in 24 hours
The announcement on Sunday came as medics and security sources confirmed that 66 people had been killed in Yemen in 24 hours. The fatalities occurred as forces loyal to President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi pushed forward in their efforts to oust rebels from a key west coastline.
Air strikes carried out by a Saudi-led coalition, as well as fighting near the strategic Bab al-Mandab strait killed at least 52 fighters belonging to the Shiite Huthi rebels and allied troops loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
On the pro-government side, 14 soldiers were killed and 22 wounded, according to medics in the southern port city of Aden where Hadi's government is based.
Pro-Hadi forces launched the huge offensive to retake the region overlooking the Bab al-Mandab strait on January 7. The channel is a key maritime route connecting the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
By Sunday, loyalist forces reported that they were within 10 kilometers (6 miles) of the city of Mokha, but the offensive was slowed by mines laid by rebel forces.
Reports of first Trump drone
Two suspected members of al Qaeda's Yemen branch were also killed on Sunday by what local officials believe was a US drone strike.
If confirmed, it would be the first such attack since Donald Trump assumed office as US president on Friday.
According to officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the men were killed when a missile hit their vehicle in the southern al-Bayda province.
In a bid to combat al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula - regarded as one of the global militant group's most dangerous branches - the US controversially conducted dozens of drone strikes throughout Barack Obama's presidency. The attacks were repeatedly criticized by human rights groups, however, following the deaths of hundreds of civilians.
The newly-inaugurated Trump administration is yet to lay out a clear policy on drone strikes. However the Republican president has said he would support an escalation of the fight against Islamist militants.
ksb/jm (AFP, Reuters)The president will present his case on behalf of his forthcoming executive order on amnesty tomorrow at 8 p.m. I certainly hope President Obama addresses the arguments against his action that were repeatedly and passionately made by … President Obama. Our friends at National Review have put together a nice video here; I’d urge you to watch it. Mr. Obama is now acting like, in his words, an “emperor.” His hypocrisy is, even by his standards, staggering.
But hypocrisy is not unusual in politicians and presidents; firing a missile aimed at our constitutional form of government is. And that is what Mr. Obama is about to do.
As the liberal law professor Jonathan Turley put it last night, this is a “particularly dangerous moment” for the president to defy the will of Congress yet again, just 15 days after an election in which the American people registered their emphatic (anti-Obama) judgment. “What the president is suggesting is tearing at the very fabric of the Constitution,” according to Professor Turley. “We have a separation of powers that gives us balance. And that doesn’t protect the branches — it’s not there to protect the executive branch or legislative branch — it’s to protect liberty. It’s to prevent any branch from assuming so much control that they become a threat to liberty.”
What is about to happen may be the low point in a presidency filled with them. Mr. Obama is acting in a way that he himself knows–that he himself has said–is unconstitutional and indefensible. No matter. In an act of unmatched narcissism and selfishness, the president will create–he is thirsting to create–a constitutional crisis that is utterly unnecessary and will further polarize our political culture.
Mr. Obama is about to commit an act of constitutional infamy. This is a stain that will stay with him.Just a week before they were elected last year, Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party posted a petition.
"END THE GAY BLOOD DONATION BAN"
The website has Trudeau sitting onstage with Seamus O'Regan. Sitting directly across from them is Scott Brison. Standing offstage is Glen Murray. O'Regan is now a Member of Parliament, Brison is one of Trudeau's ministers, and Murray is a minister in the Ontario government of Kathleen Wynne, Canada's first openly-gay leader. And, unless things are bad at home, not one of the three are allowed to donate blood.
"Canadian Blood Services (CBS) & Héma-Québec (HM-QC) currently ban gay men who have been sexually active at any point in the previous 5 years from donating blood, even if it's been entirely safe and monogamous," read the Liberal petition.
"It's a ban that ignores scientific evidence, and it needs to end."
More than 5,000 people agreed and signed the petition—plenty more than the 2,500 that the Liberals were shooting for. Each of those 5,000-plus people gave over their email address and were redirected to a donation page, where they were encouraged to fork over $20.16, $100, $250, $1,525, or any other number they felt like.
And so that money went into a big pot of cash, and it funded ads of a sunny, happy Trudeau promising to make all of our dreams come true. And, I assume, a kiddie pool full of Sunny D.
Screenshot of the Liberal petition.
We asked the Liberal Party just how much cash they raised on this and, well, they wouldn't tell us.
"The link you've shared is for a petition, not a fundraiser—although some grassroots supporters may have chosen to make a contribution after signing," one spokesperson said in an email.
Queer money led to queer commitments.
Trudeau promises to march in a pride parade; Trudeau promises to apologize on behalf of Canada for the queers that the government of Canada rounded up and threw in jail; Trudeau promises to finally pass into law a bill protecting trans people from abuse and discrimination.
Read More: Trudeau's Promise to Fix Parliament Not Looking Good
All great things, but not a single one was a tough choice.
The first real test of the Liberal government's commitment to every friend of Dorothy came this week, when the Canadian Blood Service was readying to announce that it would be updating its eligibility policies for men-who-have-sex-with-men (but also trans women and partners of the aforementioned guys).
It would be dropping the five-year celibacy requirement to—wait for it—one year. The change will impact approximately one gay man (his name is Jim and he's been on an 18-month dry spell. Things will turn around, Jim.)
You're welcome, queers!
According to Dr. Graham Sher, chief executive officer of the Canadian Blood Services: "This is an exciting, incremental step forward—" OK, something can't be both be exciting and incremental, that is a contradiction in terms "—in updating our blood donation criteria based on the latest scientific evidence—" of which there is none that really suggests that this is necessary "—Canadian Blood Services is dedicated to being as minimally restrictive as possible, while also maintaining the safety of the blood supply."
Right, because nothing says "minimally restrictive" like telling ten percent of the population that they need to stop fucking for the next 365 days because their sex is gross and will kill scores of people.
If I sound angry about this, I am. Because, without telling you too much about my sex life: I am banned from donating blood.
We reached out to the office of Jane Philpott, our Minister of Health. Her office provided a response that amounted to: our hands are tied.
"When reviewing the submission, Health Canada cannot impose a less stringent requirement than what the blood operators propose — it may only impose a more stringent requirement, i.e., increasing a deferral period," a spokesperson said.
First off: that's not really true.
If you actually go and read the 200-odd pages of Health Canada's Blood Regulations (note to self: form a metal band called Blood Regulations) you'd see section 13, subsection 1:
"The Minister may add terms and conditions to an establishment's authorization or amend its terms and conditions... [if] the Minister has reasonable grounds to believe that it is necessary to do so to prevent a compromise to human safety or the safety of blood."
Oh jeez, then, done deal, eh?
Unless you read section 13, subsection 5:
"The Minister may, by notice in writing, remove a term or condition from an authorization if she or he determines that the term or condition is no longer necessary to prevent a compromise to human safety or the safety of blood."
Awwwwwkward.
Now, the spokesperson did note that Health Canada is providing $3 million in funding to push Canadian Blood Services to study dropping the ban altogether.
"We are confident that any remaining barriers to MSM blood donation will be removed – it is only a question of when. Our government will continue to work diligently toward that goal," they said.
So, in other words: we know it's wrong, we just need to pretend that we're not totally sure if it's wrong for another few years. In the interim, this policy propagates discrimination and homophobia.
Photo via Facebook
And remember, this isn't blood (something we've got a fair bit of), it's organs, too. The federal government has policies in place that strictly forbid gay men from donating organs. And if you think that our healthcare system is above asking the mothers of dead gay men about their son's sexual habits well, this next paragraph is going to upset you.
"I was asked if he was a gay male and I said, 'yes.' And I was asked if he was a sexually active gay male or if he had a partner and I said, 'yes,'" Nancy Campana told the CBC in 2013. Her son, Rocky, had committed suicide, and his organs were rejected.
I wrote an article about this new policy when it came out on Monday. It was met with such reasoned replies as: "Get over it. Some don't want your blood" and "if your sexual habits land you in a high risk group...It's not anti gay. It's simple science." The amount of thinly-veiled homophobia I've seen in the last |
Facebook and Twitter threatened with sanctions in UK 'fake news' inquiry Read more
One thing missing from that white paper was the identity of the malicious actor. It later emerged that the company had cut mentions of Russia from the document before publication owing to legal concerns. In a follow-up blogpost in September it had no such qualms: the company revealed the extent of Russian interference for the first time, noting that it had found almost 500 inauthentic accounts and pages that altogether had spent $100,000 on ads.
From there the story snowballed. In October the company shared further information about the ads and how many people had seen them (126 million at the latest count), and it testified alongside Google and Twitter at a hostile committee hearing at the US Congress.
Twitter, too, had to reveal some uncomfortable truths. It released a list of more than 2,700 accounts it believed were run by the Internet Research Agency, a St Petersburg-based “troll army”. It also had an embarrassing spat with the Russian news organisations Sputnik and RT over whether or not the millions of dollars it took in advertising from the state-owned broadcasters amounted to foreign interference. It eventually donated the cash to fund academic research into elections and civil engagement and banned the organisations from further advertising.
Google, for its part, has emerged remarkably clean. Despite the search engine’s well-documented fake news problem – it has regularly placed questionable reporting or outright falsehoods at the top of its search results for breaking news events – the company apparently avoided being specifically targeted for manipulation by the Internet Research Agency.
As 2017 winds to a close, Facebook could be forgiven for thinking its problems are behind it. But two big concerns still lie ahead, threatening to drag the issue back on to the front pages in the new year.
Firstly, the fear of Russian misinformation has gone international, and Facebook is making unforced errors in its response. Circumstantial evidence suggests Russian influence campaigns were far more widespread than just the US, with votes in France, Germany and the UK all affected to a greater or lesser extent.
But whereas the social network’s response in the US was a months-long investigation culminating in the handover to Congress of a significant amount of data, in the UK the company has been accused of fobbing off parliament with a lazy repetition of its previous findings.
“It would appear that no work has been done by Facebook to look for Russian activity around the EU referendum, other than from funded advertisements from those accounts that had already been identified as part of the US Senate’s investigation,” said the Tory MP Damian Collins, chair of the select committee that is pushing Facebook for answers on this matter.
“No work has been done by Facebook to look for other fake accounts and pages that could be linked to Russian-backed agencies and which were active during the EU referendum, as I requested.”
And then there is November. The US midterms will be the first serious test of Facebook’s commitment to fixing its platform. The company has promised changes to its political advertising products to increase transparency, as well as enforcement of rules limiting spending to Americans only. But it has not yet had to enforce those rules on a grand scale, over hundreds of separate races happening simultaneously.
If it fails to stick the landing then the whole cycle will begin again.By Michelle
“Do you want to upgrade your fries and drink?” “Would you want to try out our new burger?”
These are classic examples of how product upsell and cross-sell work. It creates a more personal engagement; a two-way dialogue between the seller and the buyer that increases your potential sales without pushing too hard.
Yet, in an e-commerce environment, there are no physical salespeople or cashiers who will assist and guide shoppers in their overall shopping sessions and who can suggestively ask relevant upgrades or add-ons to maximize the transactional value. This becomes an obstacle to many online retailers, with 74% struggles in personalizing real-time offers, to create a dynamic web shopping experience that could allow them to provide product upsell and product cross-sell for shoppers.
And so, how do you fully take advantage of product Upsell & Cross-sell techniques? How do you benefit if you enhance them? This article outlines the key characteristics and offers practical tips in product Upsell & Cross-sell techniques that will help e-commerce stores achieve a boost in revenue and lift in customer loyalty and satisfaction.
How to differentiate Upselling & Cross-selling?
There’s a subtle difference between product upsell and product cross-sell, which is why the two have always been combined as a single discipline. Both, theoretically, helps in increasing the transactional value of your shoppers which in return maximizes your sales.
Product Upselling
Product upselling happens when a merchant suggests an upgrade to a superior product, usually in price, features or version, based on the one selected by the shopper.
Cross-selling
On the other hand, cross-selling takes place when a merchant suggests add-on items that could complement the products selected by the buyer.
Why should Ecommerce entrepreneurs use product upsell and cross-sell tactics?
If you want to significantly improve your sales, product upsell and cross-selling are drivers to maximize your profits with each customer as you want your shoppers to buy more with every transaction.
By implementing cross-sell techniques, you can increase your revenue as high as 70%. On the other hand, product upsell efforts can also drive your sales by up to 35%. That’s why incorporating them both to your online store could significantly expand your bottom line results.
Ready to be more profitable? We have these guide of product upsell and cross-selling techniques to help you win your shoppers’ heart.
1 – Give them options, always offer an upgrade
The most common way of product upselling is through upgrading techniques. Upgrading is the process of changing or updating an item to a newer or higher version of the same product but for a higher price.
The main goal of upgrading is to actually help customers to buy the most up-to-date and more improved version of what they are buying now. But at the same time, you are also encouraging them to make a larger price purchase. In an e-commerce environment, you can fully leverage on this strategy by creating selection buttons of the upgraded version of the product.
Help Me Choose: Dell has a “Help Me Choose” corner which allows shoppers to select what version of the laptop they will get. Not pushing too hard, Dell showcases a “Dell Recommended” to upsell the higher version of the system.
The Deluxe Version: Proflower offers a “deluxe version” of their vases and even an option to upgrade to more affordable vases.
Get upgraded at special discount: When you offer customers an upgrade, you expect them to pay more. What can be a more convincing reason why they should change to a superior yet more expensive upgrade?
Source: Boost Sales app
2 – The Decoy Effect, make more expensive products look like a steal
Shoppers don’t buy products right away, they will compare different items first before arriving to a decision. In fact, 94% of online shoppers invest time to find the lowest price. And so, how can you make sure the profitability of your more expensive items? Use the decoy effect. It happens when consumers will tend to change their preference between two choices when a third item is presented.
The decoy effect is commonly used to product upsell your pricier items by increasing their perception dominance. The effect is based on presenting the more valuable features of expensive items versus the cheaper ones.
Here’s an illustrative example of how you can apply decoy effect in your product listing to put the preference perception on more expensive items.
Consideration Set 1: In this example, shoppers who are price conscious will go for flash drive B while those who go for bigger storage will prefer A.
Consideration Set 2: The addition of flash drive C changes the buying decision. It now acts as a basis comparison for A and B. Because A is better than C in storage for the same price, while B is just partly better than C in value, more shoppers now will be more inclined to the more expensive product than they did in the first set.
3 – Predict the Future, product upsell and cross-sell by personalized product recommendations
Previous shoppers’ buying behavior could help you predict the right items to product upsell or cross-sell. By investing in predictive analytics, you can create a personalized recommendation whenever a shopper visits your site. Thus, increasing your revenue potential as 31% E-commerce site’s revenue were generated from personalized product recommendation.
The general idea is you create an algorithm which upsells or cross-sells a certain product whenever this item is being viewed by new visitors. Your algorithm will be based on the behaviors of your previous shoppers. These behaviors can be divided either on purchasing trend or browsing pattern.
To further help you, let’s take for example how purchasing or browsing patterns were used in product upselling or cross-selling the right items:
Browsing pattern: Very.co uses the past browsing behavior of web visitors to cross-sell similar products.
Example from a real store using Personalized Recommendation app to run automatic personalized product recommendations based on customer’s browsing
Purchase history: Amazon uses purchase behavior to product upsell and cross-sell relevant items that shoppers will likely buy because of the previous buying trend.
4 – Better Together, sell more by offering supplementary products
Supplementary products are two or more items that are used together. For instance, if you buy a juicer you will need to buy the fruits or vegetables to juice, otherwise it is pointless that you have a juicer. The most commonly used term for supplementary products is ‘complementary’ products. It is the same principle of two or more items being used all together. The one cannot be used without the other, that’s why a supplementary item are best promoted via product upsell and cross-sell strategies.
Here’s an idea of how supplementary product cross-sell works:
Frequently Bought Together: Amazon focuses its cross-selling efforts by suggesting the supplementary items that go well with the item selected. Shoppers can conveniently add all of the three items all together in their cart.
Classic example from Amazon: how they cross-sell in combo
A modern example from a small online shop using Boost Sales app: how they cross-sell in a product bundle
5 – Don’t leave them empty-handed, show substitute products for sold out items
There are moments when your items are running out-of-stock so it won’t cover the needed quantity of your shopper or worse they have already been sold out. And so most of the shoppers leave your site because they don’t have the items that they need. But don’t despair, this is actually a perfect time for you to cross-sell your substitute or alternative products.
Substitute products are items that could be good alternatives to the product that they’re looking for. For example, if your shopper is looking for oregano herbs but you’ve no available supply, you can offer available substitute herbs like thyme or basil. Placing your substitute products is a cross-selling strategy that gives the opportunity to promote your available replacement items.
Metrodeal, for instance, promotes its live alternative products beside the sold-out item.
6 – Post-purchase is a golden moment, offer product upsell and cross-sell after payment
Instead of just offering your shoppers an product upsell or cross-sell items during their browsing session or shopping cart process, you can do it right after they’ve purchased an item. What you can do is to show a popup message containing products that might stir their interest.
The popup upsell or cross-sell products can be included behavior-based analytics or simply you want to promote your bestsellers or your newly arrived items. You can apply any of the above strategies here too because post-purchase popup product upsell and cross-sells can contain endless strategies to promote your products right after your shopper purchased an item.
Thank them for their purchase, plus this Quick Tip: You can easily plug-in Checkout Boost which has a Post-checkout-product upsell popup capability to encourage your shoppers to buy more items from you after finishing an order.
Above is an example of how Post-Purchase popup works to upsell or cross-sell other merchandises
7 – Bring customers back to your store with product upsell & cross-sell emails
Based on customer’s past purchases, you can really guess what they might like to buy if they come back to your store. Then you have their email from past purchase registration…what’re you gonna do to take the chance? Upsell & Cross-sell via newsletter.
5-7 days after your customer’s last order, you can schedule a follow-up series of email that offers product upsell & cross-sell tailored by their bought items. Make sure your emails are carefully crafted and contain highly relevant products to each customer. That way, you can connect, engage and drive return sales from your buying customers.
See how a cross-sell email generated automatically via Mailbot app:
8 – Incorporate product upsells and cross-sells in your cart abandonment recovery emails
The average cart abandonment is 68%. That’s a high number of shoppers leaving your site without completing the checkout process. With your efforts to recover your cart abandonment, you can also use this as an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell your other merchandises.
This strategy helps you suggesting new and more options to your cart abandoning shoppers because some of them may be comparing prices or features before deciding to buy. If you are sending a cart abandonment email reminding them that they’ve left an item in their cart, don’t forget to showcase other merchandises that they might like.
Monsoon includes product upsell and cross-sell efforts in its cart abandonment email.
Are you ready for more sales?
Product Upsell and cross-sell techniques do wonders in increasing your average transaction size and ultimately in expanding your sales. However, as any marketing strategy to work, you have to make sure that you’re focusing on what your shoppers need and want.
With our practical tips and proven strategies above, you are not only meeting or over-achieving your revenue goals but you are also putting your customers’ experience into the spotlight. And with happy and satisfied customers, you only have one question to prepare for: are you ready for more sales?Addison Park on Clark Renderings View Full Caption
LAKEVIEW — Developers of the stalled Addison Park on Clark project hope to break ground early next year, according to Ald. Tom Tunney's (44th) office.
The $140 million development will bring an 8-story mixed-used building with 148 rental units, nearly 170,000 square feet of retail space and 493 parking spots to the corner of Clark and Addison.
A number of local businesses — including Red Ivy, Salt & Pepper Diner and Mullen's on Clark — will be torn down to make way for the project, according to Bennett Lawson, Tunney's chief of staff.
Goose Island founder John Hall closed his Wrigleyville bar late last month, citing the Addison Park on Clark project. He said the business ran on a month-to-month lease, and his landlord couldn't guarantee the bar would remain open through the end of the 2015 Cubs season.
The developers "would like to break ground in the first quarter of next year," Lawson said. "Their plan is to get rolling in the first quarter, demolishing and clearing the site."
Lawson estimates the entire project will take 18 to 24 months.
Developer M&R Development did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Most of the businesses along Addison Street between Clark and Sheffield will be torn down, Lawson said. These include a Starbuck's, 7-Eleven and several small offices.
Two stores at the corner of Addison and Clark will remain standing: Luis Auto Repair, 1031 W. Addison St., and Sports World, 3555 N. Clark St. Lawson said these will remain separate from the Addison Park on Clark project.
Along Clark Street, everything from 3525-3545 N. Clark St. will close. This includes Red Ivy, Mullen's on Clark and Salt & Pepper Diner. Three impacted storefronts have already shut down: Bar Louie, iO Theater and Goose Island Wrigleyville.
If Addison Park on Clark construction does span two years, it'll overlap with two Cubs seasons and ongoing Wrigley Field construction.
Lawson said Tunney's office plans to coordinate each phase of construction with CDOT, the department of buildings, the Chicago Cubs and Addison Park on Clark developers.
"Pedestrian and vehicle access is key," he said. "This is something we've dealt with on smaller projects."
A spokesman for the Chicago Cubs said the team was aware of the Addison Park on Clark project, but is focusing its energy on completing its own Wrigley Field renovations on time.
Once complete, Addison Park on Clark will include a health club, rooftop pool and sun terrace area for the building's residents, M&R Development told DNAinfo last year.
Lawson said the 7-Eleven being torn down near Addison and Sheffield is expected to reopen inside Addison Park on Clark. There's no word on the future of other impacted businesses, and none of new development's retail space has been leased yet, Lawson said.
For more neighborhood news, listen to DNAinfo Radio here:In the 14th century, the Medici family used the power of its newly invented, double-entry accounting system to build a cross-border banking empire that banks still use today. Now more than 600 years later, cross-border payments total more than $22 trillion.
These transactions are essential to conducting international business, and increasingly important as global commerce continues to expand — a 14th century process is simply not good enough. Medici’s system uses “nostro” and “vostro” accounts — in English that translates to “ours” and “yours.”
The bitcoin ledger, a two-column spreadsheet with who owns what, is simply the 21st-century version: 12 million rows — one for each person who owns bitcoin. The second column shows how many they own and that column totals 14 million bitcoins today. It’s a very clear public record of who owns what — one that does not require paying a third party to keep those accounts.
Cross-Border Payments
The legacy cross-border payment process presents a web of challenges that are nearly impossible to untangle without having one accepted ubiquitous global payment system.
A typical international cross-border payment for a small-to-medium-sized business whose payments are typically on the order of $1,000 to $10,000 can take several days and cost up to 5 percent of the total transaction. Let’s pull back the curtain on the process.
Before a business can make a large purchase from a supplier, the buyer provides a letter of credit from a financial institution to the supplier, which acts as a guarantee of payment. There is a non-trivial fee for acquiring this and it may take several days for a bank to produce. Once the letter of credit has been provided by, for example, a U.S. business looking to buy from a Brazilian supplier, the supplier sends an invoice for an amount due. The U.S. business initiates a money transfer at its primary bank for an amount greater than what is due on the invoice. This is in order to cover the many fees required along the payment’s journey. Over the course of several business days, the buyer’s bank first charges a money transfer initiation fee and eventually moves the money along to its U.S. correspondent bank. Once the payment hits the first correspondent bank, it grants the buyer’s primary bank a rebate — a finder’s fee of a sort to incentivize the perpetuation of the 600-year old process. This correspondent bank deducts yet another fee for processing the buyer’s payment and moves the buyer’s payment along to a second correspondent bank in Brazil. This relay takes another couple of business days to complete. Upon receiving the payment, the second correspondent bank converts the buyer’s USD-denominated payment into Brazilian reals with a foreign-exchange spread. While able to exchange currencies at a wholesale rate, savings from doing so are not passed on to the customer but withheld as additional profit for the correspondent bank. Another processing fee for the payment is taken by the second correspondent bank before the payment moves on to the supplier’s primary business bank. The currency exchange and subsequent relay of the payment take an additional couple of days to complete.
The fees, transaction times, and opacity that is considered business as usual for the legacy cross-border payments system is stifling for business, especially for fast-paced, Internet-age commerce.
Bitcoin Fix?
The good news is the fix is under our noses. It’s not a new process for moving money; it’s a whole new approach: bitcoin. As a payment rail, bitcoin has the potential to revolutionize cross-border money flows.
With bitcoin, there is way to conduct global and secure commerce efficiently. By design, bitcoin is a global and secure payments network, having arguably greater reach and greater security than the legacy payments system or its myriad players. It is much more difficult to establish a bank branch in a remote foreign country than it is to access the Internet.
It is much less secure for payment forms to be filled out by several mistake-prone humans as the payment moves from bank to bank than the digital establishment of a worldwide consensus over what cryptographically secure ledger positions are to be swapped.
It is much easier to change data values within the bitcoin protocol (which is indicative of a transfer of bitcoins) than it is to lug a suitcase across borders, send checks over snail mail or wait several days for the correspondent banking industry to grind through.
There is no need for middlemen in a bitcoin-enabled cross-border payments world — no need for any additional fees or processing times to move a payment but those inherent to using the bitcoin network. Bitcoin transactions are virtually free and virtually instantaneous. Bitcoin does everything the legacy payments middlemen individually do — better, faster, cheaper. Real-time wires for half the price.
In the 1700s, the last of the Medici’s dynasty fell. But their once disruptive accounting system is still being used more than 600 years later. I’d say it’s time for a 21st-century update.A massive international drug and money-laundering bust resulted in the seizure of 273 pounds of heroin with a street value of $40 million, Colorado and federal agents and prosecutors announced Wednesday.
“Heroin use in Colorado has reached epidemic proportions,” said state Attorney General Cynthia Coffman. “This bust deals a knockout punch to a highly organized and invasive bunch of traffickers.”
Dubbed “Operation Chump Change,” the two-year investigation was described as “the most complex heroin bust in the history of the Rocky Mountain region,” resulting in dozens of federal and state indictments.
Agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration began tracking a money-laundering operation in 2013, and the investigation led agents to a drug cartel that grew opium poppies and operated heroin laboratories in Mexico, as well as smuggled drugs into the western U.S.
Brown heroin was smuggled into Colorado in large quantities and sold on the 16th Street Mall and in City Park in Denver, said Rob Saccone, a DEA strike-force agent. Brown heroin, which can be smoked or snorted, was sold relatively cheap, in $10 and $20 packets.
The alleged leaders of the cartel — a man and his son in Mexico — have been identified but not yet arrested, said U.S. Attorney John Walsh. He expects they’ll be tracked down, arrested and extradited to Colorado to face multiple charges.
The investigation led to 54 state-level indictments and three federal indictments charging 34 suspects “with complex money laundering and violations of the drug king-pin statute,” officials said.
On May 14, 15 search warrants were served on suspected heroin traffickers across Colorado and 24 suspects were arrested. Additional search warrants were served and arrests made in Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California.
The coordinated effort illustrates that law enforcement and judicial officials “will not sit back and let hard drugs overtake our state,” Coffman said.
“This case,” Walsh added, “represents the gold standard for federal-state law enforcement cooperation to attack and dismantle a dangerous international narco-trafficking organization.”
Officials called the investigation “Operation Chump Change” because some early seizures and arrests, involving amounts in the $100,000 range, seemingly failed to slow the operation.
The operation also netted:
• 31 pounds of methamphetamine, valued at $500,000.
• 25 pounds of cocaine, valued at $1 million.
• 25 vehicles, worth about $300,000.
• $2.3 million cash.
Kieran Nicholson: 303-954-1822, knicholson@ denverpost.com or twitter.com/kierannicholsonListen to the musical collaboration between Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy and his 18-year-old son, and let us know what you think of it
Compared to the iTunes hijacking or deep web delving boundary pushing tactics of late, Jeff Tweedy’s double album may not appear too radical. But it’s good old fashioned music making that really demonstrates the Wilco frontman’s wry experimentalism: Throughout his career, he’s found himself a cult following and the lofty tag as the frontman of “the American Radiohead”; straddling dusty acoustic, Americana rock and leftfield button pushing all imbued with the same bittersweet beauty. His new solo (ish) venture looks to do the same - released on 22 September via dBpm Records, the double album, Sukierae, started out as 90 songs and was shaved down to just 20 for two distinct records.
Unlike a double LP driven by bulbous band egotism or lack of savvy editing skills, the record is born out of a love for the traditional album form. “I understand in this day and age there might not be many people who will listen to it that way, but it doesn’t matter – because I want to,” Jeff writes for a piece in praise of the album, published in this Friday’s G2 Film & Music. “I’m not a curmudgeon, a luddite or anti-modern technology doomsayer. I just want to listen to the album and have a feeling that one part has ended, and now I can take a little breather before I listen to the second part.”
From the “childish daydream” of Nobody Dies Anymore, partly inspired by a comment Jeff’s son made after 9/11, to Low Key’s autobiographical tale of a quiet, internal joy, Sukierae, this delicately dishevelled musical collaboration with his 18-year-old son and drummer Spencer Tweedy, is available to listen to below in full. Let us know what you make of it.1 of 3 Full Screen Full Screen Autoplay Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Caption Buy This Photo Stills from surveillance footage of four suspects at Danish Gardens, a marijuana cultivator that was burglarized early Tuesday morning. (Danish Gardens) Wait 1 second to continue.
Four people broke into a cannabis cultivator's grow in South Anchorage earlier this week, stealing $150,000 worth of marijuana, the owner said Wednesday.
Dane Wyrick, owner of Danish Gardens on Cinnabar Loop Road, said the business was burglarized just after 1:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Surveillance video shows what appear to be three men and a woman breaking into the business, Wyrick said.
The group spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out how to get into the building. They used a sledgehammer to try to break locks off the gates, Wyrick said.
Eventually, they smashed through bulletproof glass on the side of the building. "They took five hits to get through," Wyrick said.
After that, "they went straight upstairs," Wyrick said. "This is a 20,000-square-foot building, so they definitely knew exactly where they were going and exactly what they were doing."
The group went into a room used to dry marijuana. They took around 36 pounds of marijuana and "ran out the door," Wyrick said.
The four suspects were not Danish Garden employees, but Wyrick believes that an employee coordinated the burglary, given the suspects' knowledge of the inside of the building.
The Anchorage Police Department confirmed it responded to the burglary at 1:40 a.m. Tuesday, spokeswoman Renee Oistad wrote in an email.
"Unknown suspect(s) forced entry into an exterior glass door and subsequently stole a significant amount of the business's product," Oistad wrote.
The burglary renewed calls by businesses to remove sensitive information from the Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office's website.
Detailed operating plans of all marijuana businesses that have gone before the Marijuana Control Board are public information, readily available online – "including where all of our alarms and every one of our cameras are," Wyrick said.
Businesses have previously asked the board to take the information off the state website. Wyrick said the company is "demanding, we are no longer casually asking," that the business plans be taken down.
"The board would need to consider the Public Records Act if they re-evaluate this issue," Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office director Erika McConnell wrote in an email.How to Write a Wizard in React
Lee Gillentine Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 28, 2017
Building a sign-up or onboarding wizard shouldn’t be difficult if you have the right composition.
A wireframe of a sign-up wizard
The wizard is a tried and true design interaction pattern. It’s great for on-boarding new users or inputting information tied to some type of decision tree.
Under the hood, a wizard nothing more than a state machine. A state machine is a simple object that keeps track of what state it’s in and the states it can transition to.
EXAMPLE: A Setup Wizard Flow from Kaspersky. Each page on a wizard is a different state. The Next and Previous buttons on the wizard are used to transition between change states.
Wanna see some code? Here’s a github repo with these concepts applied and a live demo.
Setting up a Wizard
In React, a basic wizard looks like this:
It keep track the current step in state and passes that down to the steps of the wizard. Our “state machine” is just a number. A set of Prev/Next buttons increment and decrement the currentStep. (Later on, I’ll explain why that’s not such a good idea)
Each of the children components receives the current step of the wizard as props and can determine whether or not to display based on the value in that prop.
If the currentStep is not correct, we bail early with a guard clause.
This is a basic pattern for a composition based wizard. It’s easy to modify — you can use CSS to show/hide steps instead of a guard clause, or use a renderStep function to do a lookup on a decision tree to return the correct wizard step. The only limit is your imagination!
Let’s build on this foundation to deal with user input in each step.
Handing User Input in Each Step
In many cases, it’s a good idea to make the steps responsible for their own data, since it keeps things simple. If you don’t, you could end up with a very big wizard step wrapper component that handles the sanitizing, validation, and transformation of user input from all the steps in one place, and that will be hard to maintain.
Since each step is responsible for it’s own data, it should have some type of validation and handle any transformation of user input into an appropriate data structure. This also means that each form will have it’s own button that will move the currentStep forward or backwards.
The basic wizard component outlined earlier will have to loose those Prev/Next buttons since the _next and _prev functions will be passed in as props.
And a step will look like this:
Note how this example is also missing a Prev button and _prev. I did this to save time writing the examples. Many wizards, such as a sign-up wizard, don’t need a button that takes the user to the previous step. If this example did have that button, the _prev function would mirror the _next function.
Linkable Steps with location.hash
In some cases, it’s good to have the wizard steps be linkable (i.e. www.example.com/sign_up#step2). It’s pretty easy to handle this hash based navigation using vanilla JS:
State Machines are Cool
Tying this all together is the state machine that manages the current step.
If you’re working on a wizard that only has one possible set of screens — meaning that the choices the user makes don’t affect what screens are shown — the state machine outlined in the examples should work fine.
The path that a user follows to complete a wizard is made up of a series of wizard steps. When the required wizard steps change based on information the user has input (for example, signing up for a business account vs. a personal account), that’s when it’s necessary to use a more robust state machine to manage the user’s path. Having a place where the available steps are checked also makes it easier to do validations on past data and re-surface required or skipped steps.
A contrived example of a complicated wizard that can be easily handled with a robust state machine
State machines are a huge topic for another post. All I can say for now is that it’s very easy to use one in concert with the components and guidelines I’ve outlined above. The wizard is really the display mechanism for the state machine.
Don’t forget to check out the live demo and source code to see these concepts in action.Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire investor who funded ex-wrestler Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, is seeking to pause the sales process of the now-defunct website, arguing that he was unfairly excluded from making a bid, according to a bankruptcy court filing obtained by BuzzFeed.
Why it matters: The buyer of Gawker.com (the rest of Gawker Media's properties were acquired by Univision last year) will be able to do with its contents as they please, including deleting specific articles. There are still ongoing legal actions over a few articles in the archive. Though Thiel never admitted as much, it was long rumored that his decision to help Hogan was fueled by unflattering coverage of him and his business activities over the years, including a 2007 story about the fact that he is gay.Ohio State linebacker Darron Lee has declared for the NFL draft.
Lee, a redshirt sophomore, announced his intentions on Twitter Saturday night.
“After thorough research and careful consideration, I have decided to forgo my last 2 years of eligibility and enter the NFL draft,” Lee wrote. “I would like to thank coach [Urban] Meyer and Coach [Luke] Fickell as well as the rest of our coaching staff for giving me the opportunity of a lifetime that has changed my life forever. I feel it is in my best interest to take this next step in achieving my dream.”
Lee was a critical part of Ohio State’s 2014 championship run, and recorded 146 combined tackles, three interceptions and 11 sacks over the past two seasons. He is considered a potential early-round selection in the draft.
Lee joins Ohio State running back Ezekiel Elliott and quarterback Cardale Jones in declaring for the draft. Head coach Urban Meyer said defensive end Joey Bosa, a likely top pick, will also enter the draft, though Bosa has yet to declare.
- Jeremy WooThe Democratic Party is trying to build a new House majority with a collection of political neophytes who hail from business, medicine, philanthropy and the military.
On Monday, Democratic officials shared with the Washington Examiner the party's emerging 2018 slate, a collection of recruits that it believes could challenge Republicans in traditionally conservative districts that are dissatisfied with President Trump.
They include Vietnamese physician Mai-Khanh Tran, poised to challenge House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., in an Orange County district that voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton over Trump; and attorney and Army combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq Jason Crow, who is running against Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo., a Marine combat veteran of both Iraq wars, in a suburban Denver district that Hillary Clinton won.
Democrats expect additional, similar candidates to declare in the coming days in seats deemed crucial to their midterm strategy. This week, a Democrat could announce for Congress in Kansas' suburban Kansas City 3rd Congressional District. The seat, held by Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder, went for Clinton by 1.2 percentage points.
At issue is whether a restless liberal base, animated by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will tolerate nominees who are good political fits for their districts but might seek to moderate to appeal to Republican voters who want to put a check on Trump but are queasy about installing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. as speaker.
"The progressive base will be fine with it," said a Democratic operative, who advised campaigns in 2006, when Democrats retook Congress during President George W. Bush's second term. "The question is, what the Bernie base will do. Most will be with their fellow progressives and liberals. But they vocal nihilists will get disproportionate attention from the media."
This operative and party officials are confident that liberal voters' opposition to Trump, just like their opposition to Bush and the Iraq war in 2006, will facilitate their support of centrists who don't perfectly toe the progressive line. They see that dynamic playing out in Georgia's 6th District, where Democrat Jon Ossoff, whose special election campaign is being fueled by millions of dollars in small donations from progressive activists across the country, is running as a pragmatist.
But Democratic politics has shifted. The party's base is more progressive and less tolerant of centrist positions on key issues. Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said recently that the party should shun candidates or lawmakers who oppose abortion rights; Pelosi disagreed and immediately rebuked him.
Democrats also are going through their own bout of impatient activism, similar to what Republicans experienced with the Tea Party during President Barack Obama's two terms. The Sanders wing of the party is accusing the Democratic establishment of being in league with campaign donors, consultants, and corporate interests.
Republicans say this demand for Leftist purity is a stark contrast to the ideological flexibility Democratic voters exhibited in the 2006 midterms. It's why they are less concerned about the possibility of Democrats nominating candidates that Republicans and independents unhappy with Trump might find acceptable.
"Their challenge is getting those people through the purifying funeral pyre of a primary against a true-believing Bernie Sanders socialist clone. The heartbeat of their party hates the military and thinks not all lives matter and you didn't build your small business if you have one," said Brad Todd, a Republican consultant who advised the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2010, the year the GOP won back the House.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee the House campaign arm, is cognizant of the anti-establishment sentiment on the Left. Though the DCCC is actively recruiting many of these candidates, it is being careful to operate with a light touch and allow primaries to play out without intervening from Washington — at least for now.
This is a relatively new concern for the Democrats. For years, while the Republican campaign committees in the House and Senate tiptoed through competitive primaries, while Democrats exerted a heavy hand to box out low-quality candidates.
Democrats need to win a net of 24 seats to make Pelosi speaker again. They are targeting 23 Republican-held districts won by Clinton, plus other swing districts where Trump was successful. On the party's radar are:
Bryan Caforio, an attorney and the 2016 nominee running |
snooped through the green side of each woman’s balance sheet, but we do sit close to the cogs of the surf biz and here’s how we see it.
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Tyler and the joys and freedom of summer on Australia's east coast. Photo: Craig Parry Tyler and the joys and freedom of summer on Australia's east coast. Photo: Craig Parry
8. Tyler Wright, 20.
Tyler Wright signed a five-year deal when she was 16. And for this reason, when Stab approached Miss Wright, the youngest of this group, she replied: “I ain’t on no rich list.” A lot can happen in five years and what seem like big dollars when you’re a virtual unknown doesn’t hold as much weight when you’re a world title contender. Tyler is the feminine touch in one of the world’s most successful surfing families and as much as she wants to deny it, is surfing’s richest little Tomboy. She is famous for acting herself, speaking her mind and is the furthest thing from contrived on social media. When this current contract expires, Tyler will move into the top five or top three earners and has at least five years ahead of her as a world title contender.
Total before contests and bonuses: Circa $300k
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Photo: Baccon Photo: Baccon
7. Laura Enever, 23.
Loz Enever is the most fun-loving member of the Rich List, and the lone Sydney-sider. At 23, Loz makes the Dream tour look like Blue Crush has gone mobile around the world. She’s the coffee addict, equally hooked on Instagram. But, don’t think for a second she ain’t savvy. Or a worker. She works for it. And on it. She does the time in the ocean and always works on her craft. The line-up at North Narrabeen where she’s from couldn’t be further from the peachy world it looks like she inhabits. She’s also got a philanthropic vibe and puts her face as an ambassador to a number of charities. She’s leading by example, of course. Loz is a single girl and that’s real good for biz. A Mister Enever would just kill the buzz, and her brother, Chris, does enough of that. We kid. But no one wants to see a good time girl all loved-up on social media! Loz is earning, too. She brings in $300k-plus from Billabong with healthy bonuses, has a Rockstar energy drink contract (even though Rockstar aren’t big payers like Red Bull) for around $40k and also has deals with Subway and Toyota.
Total before contests and bonuses. Circa $420k
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Maya Gabeira and Nazare. Photo: Ricardo Bravo/Red Bull Content Pool Maya Gabeira and Nazare. Photo: Ricardo Bravo/Red Bull Content Pool
6. Maya Gabeira, 27.
Maya Gabeira fits a diff bill to the rest of the girls in here. She’s the big wave surfer from Brazil who died in the water at Nazare last year and was brought back to life on the sand. You know the footage, you saw her face down and then dragged up the beach by tow partner Carlos Burle. She was also the one who copped the digital dressing down from Laird about even being out in the water. Whatevs, she’s the goofyfooter with the electric smile who was shot nude for the ESPN Body Issue a few years back and who also won the ESPY award for Best Female Action Sports Athlete. The 27-year-old makes the list without any surf co’s making telegraphic transfers to her bank account. Maya is on the books for Red Bull, Renault cars, Nextel and Vigor.
Annual earnings. Circa $450k
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Surfing’s most famous shark attack took this young lady’s arm, but it won’t take her pay cheque. Beth Hamilton fears nothing now but egos globally fear her. Photo: Josh Tabone Surfing’s most famous shark attack took this young lady’s arm, but it won’t take her pay cheque. Beth Hamilton fears nothing now but egos globally fear her. Photo: Josh Tabone
5. Bethany Hamilton, 24.
Beth is the most famous surfer in the world. If you asked Ellen, Oprah or even ol’ prez Obama about surfing’s highest paid athlete, Mr. John John Florence, you’d almost certainly get blanked. Ask them about the 11-time world champ and you might get a few hits. But. Ask about the surfer who survived a shark attack and now braves the ocean with one arm, you’d be almost certain they’d know Miss Beth Hamilton. She’s the only living surfer to have had her own feature film made about them, she’s starred on The Biggest Loser, The Today Show and the list goes on. But, beyond her story there’s something that most of us are just starting to work out: Beth charges and absolutely tears. She recently went to Tahiti where she hoped to bag herself a 12-footer at Teahupoo. She arrived at the same time as the crew from Pointbreak II and only managed “some 10 footers,” but has the goal of taming monsters in the future. She has Jaws in her sights, too. But for what? A new documentary with film-maker Aaron Lieber called, Bethany Hamilton Surfs like a Girl. The name is a play on the saying, “she surfs so good she’s like a dude.” Lieber’s take is simple: “Bethany wants to define herself as a girl. She wants to surf like a girl, rip like a girl and charge like a girl.” The film is set for release late 2015. This will certainly add to Beth’s income stream. While she makes okay cash from the surf industry she’s in her own space when it comes to raking leaves. She’s a regular on US talkshows and when she speaks at conferences, she is a beacon of inspiration to others around the world (which means she fills seats).
Annual earnings. Circa $600k
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Photo: Baccon Photo: Baccon
4. Sally Fitzgibbons, 24.
Sally Fitz has never consumed alcohol. Not a drop. And, at the time of print, she’s also in the running for her first world title. Again. She stands for a healthy lifestyle and has launched a book, Live Like Sally. Sal copped a little heat this year when she appeared in an ad for KFC, a $125k endorsement that many thought contradicted what she stood for. But there’s no doubting she is a girl with goals and a plan. She prefers to roll solo on tour, just with her Pops, Martin, and sticks to a fitness regime that’d shadow most of the gents. You won’t see Sal at the post-event parties, and it’s a battle between her and Courtney Conlogue to be first to the line-up before light. She works hard on her craft, wants to have airs on-lock and did that well-covered week in Dubai at the Wadi wavepool. Sal’s very Layne Beachley in her approach to cracking into the mainstream. She’s more NRL than ASP. She’s more sportswoman than surfer and stars heavily in mainstream press in Oz, boasted with a fresh news network contract. Red Bull in Australia have said that she gets a better ROI than just about any other athlete on their roster. And, for this she is well backed. Her boards are stacked. Her Red Bull deal is from Australia and is Rail Sticker, which means a reduced earn ($150k compared to a $350k plus deal on the nose). She rides for Garnier, is on a $500k-plus deal with Roxy, gets free wheels from Land Rover and is Samsung’s only female surf ambassador.
Total before contests and bonuses. Circa $1.1m
****
3. Carissa Moore, 22.
Riss pops a San Clemente lip. Ryan Miller/Red Bull Content Pool Riss pops a San Clemente lip. Ryan Miller/Red Bull Content Pool
When energy drinks burst onto the scene over a decade ago, the surf industry wasn’t quite ready for the aggressiveness of The Logo. Honed in the world of motor sports, The Logo placement was king. The Hat was to be owned. And, also, The Nose (of the surfboard). It didn’t matter that most noses of surfboards spent their time planted in the water as tails flew above the lip; this was the real estate known as The Desired. Carissa Moore is the lucky recipient of a marquee energy drink sponsor in Red Bull and they own The Nose of Miss Moore’s Mayhem-shaped knives. And, Red Bull are all about performance. Get results and get rewarded. Contest victories and world titles pay handsomely and Riss gets plenty there. With a world title, Riss can make a mill from Red Bull alone with her bonuses. Even though her Red Bull and Hurley contracts sit at around $500k apiece and Target is a great earn at around $250k, it’s the earnings from world titles that can reshuffle the rich list. But unfortunately for Riss, not this year.
Total before contests and bonuses. Circa $1.2m
****
Steph, a world title frenemy to all. Photo: Trevor Moran Steph, a world title frenemy to all. Photo: Trevor Moran
2. Steph Gilmore, 26*
The best brands know what they stand for. And when they don’t falter, it’s their consistency that connects. In the big-monied top-end of female pro surfing, Steph Gilmore is that brand (cue that awesome brand scene with Vinnie Chase in Entourage). Whatevs, Steph keeps it real. When bikinis on the world tour were shrinking, Steph stuck with boardshorts. When Insty feeds turned into bikini threads or busty selfies, Steph kept it loose and fun. But, when you’re a five-time world champ, when you’re a Laureus sportsperson of the year and when the male world tour surfers hang around to watch your heats, then why do you need change? You don’ts! In terms of financial success, the past few years have been great to Steph. She owns a five-bedroom penthouse that looks over Duranbah, another apartment round the corner and her earnings continue to bubble away consistently. Unlike the men’s tour, the women attract more mainstream cash in terms of sponsors. While Steph banks around a mill from Roxy, the land beyond surf is just as nice. Steph’s Weet-Bix and Nikon deals are rumoured to be well north of $250k apiece, and the three cars from Toyota also come with a $100k ambassador fee.
Total before contests and bonuses. Circa $1.7m
* Please note: with a world title bonus from a recent world title, Steph Gilmore is easily the highest paid female surfer in 2014. This list was without contest earnings and went to print before Steph was crowned the title.
****
AB and a crop (surprisingly not ours) that might easily torment the male soul. The perfect social media specimen… it all makes sense. Photo: David Mandelberg AB and a crop (surprisingly not ours) that might easily torment the male soul. The perfect social media specimen… it all makes sense. Photo: David Mandelberg
1. Alana Blanchard, 24.
When the most socially powerful surfer in the world took to the stage for the victory in the 2013 Surfer Poll awards in Hawaii, it was like even she knew something was up. She knew she wasn’t the best surfer in the world but she also knew that her fan base is surfing’s largest. And, with an award as prestigious as Surfer Magazine’s still decided via public vote, she wasn’t going to gloat about being placed ahead of her peers in a social media competition. “It’s so amazing to be up here and be a part of all these women.” It was perfectly avoided and perfectly handled. But, regardless of the win, Alana is still a world tour surfer and is a lot more than surfing’s most popular ass. Alana’s competitive year on the world tour hasn’t been hot and she will not requalify in 2015. According to insiders, a world tour without Alana is like a men’s world tour without Kelly, and her presence is missed in digital plays and fans on the beach. Many are talking that she deserves the injury wildcard for this fact alone. But, there’s just one problem: she ain’t injured. Falling from tour might hurt her pride but it won’t affect her income. She’s still the Golden Girl of earnings, with her Rip Curl contract (inclusive of her bikini royalties) as the premier earner just shy of $800k and the loading of smaller sponsors like Spy, GoPro, Modom, Rockstar and Reef bring in over a quarter of a brick. Alana’s lucrative wins come in the form of what the surf industry calls non-endemics: which in plain speak is anything that isn’t a surf company. We’re talking Don Draper mainstream and Alana cashes in with Proactiv, Sony and T-Mobile.
Total before contests and bonuses. Circa $1.8m
****Shutterstock
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ON MARCH 5th an index of the value of the American dollar against six other big currencies touched 89.11, its highest point this year. Since then, however, it has been a steady downward drift for the greenback. On Tuesday October 20th, for example, the dollar index had slipped to 75.24, its lowest point in more than a year.
This hardly constitutes an outright collapse, nor is it necessarily cause for concern. American exporters, whose goods have become more competitive abroad, are happy with their weaker currency. Similarly domestic producers may be cheered that rival, imported goods are more expensive. And European tourists, who can buy more for their euros during weekend shopping excursions to America, may cheer too. However, the continued decline of the dollar does come against a backdrop of ominous murmurs from the likes of China and Russia, who hold much of their reserves in dollars, about the need to shift their reserves out of the greenback. Brazil's imposition of a 2% levy on portfolio inflows is also a sign that other countries are getting nervous about seeing their currencies rise against the dollar.
Worries about the dollar are hardly new. Well before the credit crunch some fretted that a collapse in the currency and a jump in Treasury-bond yields, as foreigners balked at funding America's current-account deficit, would precipitate an economic crisis. Instead sub-prime mortgages and over-leveraged financial institutions plunged the world into its worst recession since the Great Depresssion.
The recession, which reduced America's imports as consumers tightened their belts, has improved its trade imbalance, shrinking its current-account deficit. But ironically this has been accompanied by renewed weakness for the dollar.
The simplest explanation for the currency's decline is based on risk aversion. On the days when risky assets fall, the dollar tends to go up. When risky assets rise, the dollar falls. The dollar has fallen fairly steadily since March, a period which has seen stockmarkets enjoy a phenomenal rally. Domestic American investors may be driving the relationship, repatriating funds in 2008 when they were nervous about the state of financial markets and sending the money abroad again this summer because of a perception that the global economy is reviving.
But although risk aversion may be a factor, describing the dollar as a “safe haven” seems dubious. Indeed, the weakness of American fundamentals has revived the longstanding bearish case against the currency. Some cite the American budget deficit, expected to be 13.5% of GDP this year. There is little sign that the Obama administration has a plan to reduce it, and health-care reform may add to it.
But if foreign investors are so concerned, why is the dollar's decline not accompanied by a sharp rise in bond yields? One reason may be that the Federal Reserve has been buying so much of the year's debt issuance, as part of its quantitative easing programme. That has helped to keep yields down.
A simple dynamic may be at work: supply and demand. Last year the market was short of dollars because investors needed the American currency to meet their liquidity needs. This year QE is creating a surplus of dollars (and pounds) and is thus driving both currencies down.
The use of QE also creates a problem for central banks as they contemplate their exit strategies. An early abandonment of the approach could cause bond yields to rise sharply, unless there is an unexpectedly dramatic improvement in the fiscal position. But continuing QE could cause further currency weakness.
It is hard to see what the American authorities could do to bolster their currency even if they wanted to. Low yields offer little support to the dollar. The Fed seems highly unlikely to raise interest rates from their near-zero levels over the next 12 months or so.
But it is hard, also, to think of a parallel in history. A country heavily in debt to foreigners, with a government deficit it is making little headway at controlling, is creating vast amounts of additional currency. Yet it is allowed to get away with very low interest rates. Eventually such an arrangement must surely break down, bringing a new currency system into being, just as Bretton Woods emerged in the 1940s.
The absence of a credible alternative to the dollar means that, despite its declining value, its status as the world's reserve currency is not seriously under threat. But the system could change in other ways. A world where currencies traded within bands, or where foreign creditors insist on America issuing some debt in other currencies, are all real possibilities as the world adjusts to a declining dollar.Image caption There's been a big international operation to evacuate people from South Sudan
Four US service personnel on an evacuation mission have been wounded after their aircraft were shot at in South Sudan, the US military says.
The three CV-22 Ospreys were attacked as they approached Bor, which is occupied by forces loyal to the former Vice-President Riek Machar, it added.
South Sudan has been in turmoil since President Salva Kiir accused Mr Machar a week ago of attempting a coup.
Mr Machar told the BBC the rebels were under his control.
He was in control of large parts of the country, he said, and troops loyal to him had also seized control of Unity, a state on the border with Sudan which produces much of the country's oil.
He added that he was prepared to negotiate with the government if politicians arrested earlier this week were released.
At least 500 people have been killed since the fighting began.
Ugandan involvement
The US military said the Ospreys, aircraft which can fly both like helicopters and like planes, were involved in the evacuation of US citizens from Bor.
A statement said all three aircraft were damaged by small arms fire by unknown forces as they approached the town.
The aircraft returned to Uganda's Entebbe airport, from where the wounded service personnel were transferred onto a US Air Force C-17 transport aircraft and taken on to Nairobi, Kenya, it added.
All four were treated and are in a stable condition, the statement said.
Image caption Government troops are patrolling the capital, Juba
The BBC's former Sudan correspondent James Copnall, who spoke to Mr Machar, says his forces were likely to have fired on the aircraft thinking they were Ugandan.
Uganda is one of a number of other countries trying to evacuate their citizens from South Sudan.
It has sent troops to take part in the operation. They will also try to secure the capital Juba, just 75km (50 miles) from the border, reports say.
However, Uganda has denied reports that it has been helping the South Sudanese army by bombing Mr Machar's forces in eastern Jonglei state, of which Bor is the capital.
Commander 'defects'
The army is trying to retake Bor. Jonglei is one of the most volatile regions in the country.
Troops backed by helicopter gunships were advancing on the town, army spokesman Philip Aguer told the French AFP news agency.
A spokesman for UN peacekeepers Unmiss in Bor said considerable numbers of people had arrived over the past 24 hours from surrounding areas seeking their protection.
In Unity state, a major oil-producing region, a senior commander, General James Koang, was reported to have defected to Mr Machar's forces.
Profile: Riek Machar Image caption Riek Machar was reportedly dismissed by President Kiir as part of a power struggle Central figure in Sudanese and South Sudanese politics for three decades
Member of South Sudan's second-largest ethnic group, the Nuer
Married UK aid worker Emma McCune in 1991 - she died two years later in a car accident in Kenya while pregnant
Was a Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) commander and led a breakaway faction for some years in the 1990s
After 2005 peace deal appointed vice-president of interim government, retaining the post after independence in 2011 until his dismissal in July 2013 Riek Machar in profile
Mr Machar said General Koang was now in control of the state, but the military, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), says he defected alone and did not take any forces with him.
A resident in Unity state told the BBC that Gen Koang announced on local radio he had joined Mr Machar's rebellion.
On Friday African mediators held talks with Mr Kiir in an attempt to avert civil war.
The talks are set to continue and US Secretary of State John Kerry said he was sending a special envoy, Ambassador Donald Booth, to help foster dialogue.
President Kiir, a member of the majority Dinka ethnic group, sacked Mr Machar, who is from the Nuer community, in July.
He said that last Sunday night uniformed personnel opened fire at a meeting of the governing party, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM).
Violence then broke out in Juba and has since spread across the country, pitting gangs of Nuer and Dinka against each other.
The whereabouts of Mr Machar, who has denied trying to stage a coup, remain unknown.
Worst violence
Thousands of civilians have flocked to UN compounds seeking shelter from the unrest.
The UN on Friday condemned an attack on its compound in Akobo, Jonglei state, a day earlier in which two Indian peacekeepers and at least 11 civilians were killed.
Jonglei state has seen some of the worst violence since South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011, with hundreds killed in periodic clashes between rival heavily-armed ethnic militias sparked by cattle-rustling.
Following decades of conflict, weapons are widely available across much of South Sudan.
South Sudan's government insists the clashes are over power and politics, not between ethnic groups.
President Kiir said the majority of those arrested after Sunday's alleged coup attempt were Dinka, not Nuer.
The oil-rich country has struggled to achieve a stable government since becoming independent.FUNimation Updates On ‘Evangelion 3.33’ Anime DVD/BD Release
Chris Beveridge Posted by
FUNimation had a limited theatrical engagement for Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo back in January of this year and had plans to release it on DVD and Blu-ray not long after that. But circumstances changed, the home video release was shifted to a TBA status and nothing much has been said since. Now they’ve been able to provide a bit of new information about what’s going on, which isn’t always easy with the way that things go when dealing with Japanese licensors since you can’t often say much without making an impact on any discussions that may be going on.
We are working directly with the Japanese studio and the original creator on the upcoming Evangelion 3.33 home video release. This is a unique opportunity that presented itself to us, and since the plot for Evangelion 3.33 is so different from previous story lines, we are thrilled that the creator has asked to be so heavily involved in this project. Studio Khara has even decided that they would like to create their own special subtitle tracks for the release! We thank you for your continued patience as we work to confirm a release date. Please keep an eye on our social channels and our website for more updates!
What it sounds like is that while they had their plans set and everything sent off for approval earlier in the year, something changed in Japan and the studio wanted more input and control over the North American release. And while they wanted that, it likely wasn’t high on their priority list and has been on the backburner until recently and progress is now being made and FUNimation can now start talking about it again. While that may not make things better for fans, it is important to remember that companies that license materials as opposed to creating their own are under significant restrictions and often are in a difficult position. And when dealing with the folks involved here, it’s easy to imagine creative control being very critical to them. Interestingly, you can’t even find any Evangelion trailers on FUNimation’s YouTube channel outside of packaging ones (at least I can’t, not that YouTube makes searching channels easy), which is surprising.
Plot concept: 14 years have passed since the near third impact. Most of the world has changed except Shinji Ikari who awakens, unaged in a new and strange environment. Misato has formed a group that has is separate from Nerv. The fight is far from over but the biggest struggle might be against humans and former allies.
Chris has been writing about anime, manga, movies and comics for well on twenty years now. He began AnimeOnDVD.com back in 1998 and has covered nearly every anime release that’s come out in the US ever since. He likes to write a lot, as you can see. Chris Beveridge – who has written 55658 posts on The Fandom Post. Facebook • Twitter • YouTube • PinterestMany times recently the Israel/Palestine issue has turned the New York Times into a small-town newspaper, whose function seems to be to chronicle the life of the Jewish community and Israel. That was the case when the newspaper made front-page news of a Manhattan synagogue’s decision to endorse Palestinian statehood. It is the case again today: Tom Friedman wants Chuck Hagel as Defense Secretary, because he is the Defense Secretary that Israel needs, to save Israel from itself. Friedman knows he is up against a powerful community:
because Hagel once described the Israel lobby as the “Jewish lobby” (it also contains some Christians) [a]nd because he has rather bluntly stated that his job as a U.S. senator was not to take orders from the Israel lobby but to advance U.S. interests, he is smeared as an Israel-hater at best and an anti-Semite at worst. If ever Israel needed a U.S. defense secretary who was committed to Israel’s survival, as Hagel has repeatedly stated — but who was convinced that ensuring that survival didn’t mean having America go along with Israel’s self-destructive drift into settling the West Bank and obviating a two-state solution — it is now. I am certain that the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes on Israel — that it is surrounded by more implacable enemies than ever and needs and deserves America’s backing. But, at the same time, this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account by slowing its self-isolating settlement adventure. And it’s going to get worse. Israel’s friends need to understand that the center-left in Israel is dying. The Israeli election in January will bring to power Israeli rightists who never spoke at your local Israel Bonds dinner. These are people who want to annex the West Bank. Bibi Netanyahu is a dove in this crowd. The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth. But most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews prefer to stick their heads in the sand, because confronting Israel is so unpleasant and politically dangerous. Hagel at least cares enough about Israel to be an exception.
Really, what should it matter to the United States that a tiny ally “makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account” through its “settlement adventure”? Friedman is saying that Israel is isolating the United States, because the U.S. lacks the political ability to make policy that is not guided by Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer said very much the same thing; and Friedman said it before a year ago when he wrote that Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”
This column is itself a symptom of the problem; Friedman must proffer that Hagel is “out of the mainstream.” How can that be? Because of Hagel’s
stated preferences for finding a negotiated solution to Iran’s nuclear program, his willingness to engage Hamas to see if it can be moved from its extremism, his belief that the Pentagon budget must be cut, and his aversion to going to war again in places like Iraq and Afghanistan
What a crazy world we live in. And this is the core power of the Israel lobby, its ability to dominate the discourse, to define conventional wisdom, to conflate American and Israeli interests, and to punish those who opposed the Iraq war and who seek non-militant answers in the Middle East. Look what happened to Barack Obama! (And yes I think this reflects the prominence inside the establishment of Jews: how many readers feel included by Friedman’s comment, “your local Israel Bonds dinner.”)
Of course Friedman as an Iraq war hawk has the ability to address this rightwing Zionist community. So his endorsement is worrying to the neocons. At 6:30 this morning, Bill Kristol posted an angry response at the Weekly Standard, leaping on the “out of the mainstream” statement. Kristol defines what the mainstream is, cossetting Israel forever:
So Hagel, “unlike most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews” will seek confrontation with Israel. Is that what we want in our next defense secretary? Is that what most U.S. senators—dismissed by Friedman as “stick[ing] their heads in the sand”—want? In any case, Friedman confirms that on Israel as well, Hagel’s views place him out of the policy-making mainstream. Tom Friedman came to praise Chuck Hagel. He may have ended up burying him.
Meantime, four former national security advisers, including Zbig Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci and the Obama public servant James Jones stand up for Hagel in stentorian tones in a letter to the Washington Post:German sprinter Marcel Kittel and Giant-Alpecin have both announced that the rider’s contract has been nullified and that he is free to sign for another team in 2016. Although no announcement about a new team has been made, it’s expected that the sprinter will ride for Etixx-QuickStep. However, the Belgian team quickly moved to deny that the rider has already signed with them when contacted by Cyclingnews today. Related Articles The Cyclingnews Podcast: Froome rides the Vuelta, Kittel comeback
News shorts: Kittel out of Belgian race due to illness
Report: Kittel to transfer to Etixx-QuickStep for 2016
Kittel looking forward to fresh start with Etixx-Quickstep
Dumoulin and Barguil sign three-year renewals with Giant-Alpecin
Giant-Alpecin: 2015 report card
Both Kittel and Giant-Alpecin released statements this evening, confirming at the very least that the sprinter, who won four stages at last year’s Tour de France, would be leaving the team. He had one year remaining on his existing deal but Kittel expressed his desire for the contract to be torn up, with the team willing to allow him to leave.
“The German sprinter recently indicated to the team’s management that he wished to make a fresh start," the team said in today's announcement. "Kittel wishes to get the difficult 2015 season behind him and achieve new goals in new surroundings, rather than doing so in the improvement-driven elite sports environment of Team Giant-Alpecin.”
Kittel has endured a hugely disappointing season this year, with just a handful of wins compared to his hauls in previous seasons. He has been plagued by injuries and illness, and despite several comebacks throughout the season was left out of this year’s Tour de France team. That, and a constant struggle for form left the sprinter believing that his career needed a fresh start.
“Marcel has meant a lot to the team and has been a great ambassador for us. Therefore, we immediately decided to respond positively to his request and release him from his contract. His request came very late in the season, but nevertheless he looks able to find and join a suitable team, which makes it realistic to actually release him. Marcel is a great athlete and it will be good for the sport of cycling, for the fans and, most importantly, for Marcel himself if he can produce great sprints again next season, which was an additional argument to respond favorably to his request,” said Giant-Alpecin CEO Iwan Spekenbrink.
On his own website, and minutes before the official announcement was made by Giant-Alpecin, Kittel posted a message confirming the news.
"In addition to my personal experiences I have also realized that Team Giant Alpecin has changed and wants to go in a new direction," he wrote. "The focus on the GC brings of course a new direction to how the team is composed. For me as a pure sprinter there comes the question, of whether my ambitions will be given enough room. In the end, we were not able to agree on the definition of our goals. I haver therefore decided to change teams.”
"I look back thankfully to a successful time, in which both the team and I grew together. We celebrated some great wins. I could give the team management the yellow jersey at the Tour de France twice and eight stage wins. I especially want to thank the riders with whom I have celebrated these successes and who selflessly worked for me. Thank you! That was something great and something special, the way we all got along. I enjoyed being underway with you all. True friendships have come out of it.
In the team's own statement, Spekenbrink concluded: “We want to thank Marcel for the great contribution he has made to the team since 2011. We really enjoyed his sprinting talent and the unforgettable moments we shared together, and we will continue to be proud of the sprints he will deliver in the future, as he will always be a ‘product of our school.’ We wish Marcel all the best in his future career.”Finding Nemo is one of our favorite Pixar movies. One of us saw it 5 times in the theater and then again when it was released in 3D (hint: it wasn’t Matthew). With Pixar’s Finding Dory coming out in theaters in less than two weeks, we thought it would be fun to do a recipe commemorating its release. After going back and forth, we decided it had to be tacos but given the nature of the movie, we wanted to do something vegan. We knew we wanted to do the new movie justice by creating a recipe that could be enjoyed by meat-eaters and vegans alike. After all, didn’t we all learn that “fish are friends, not food”? Thus, the Fish Are Friends Not Food Tacos were born!
Once tacos were decided on, we weren’t quite sure what route to take? Veggie? Tofu? Then it dawned on us! Gardein would be the “protein” of our taco. With the option of crabless cakes or fishless filets, we went the route of crabless cakes. Fish tacos in general are so common that we wanted to think outside the box. “Crab” also meant we could explore more of a tropical flavor than rely on a cream sauce. After some testing and debate (very little debate actually), we came up with our avocado, mango, and fire roasted corn relish. The addition of a habanero hot sauce is completely optional and the tacos don’t suffer without it (but they do taste amazing with it!).
Below is a quick video of our recipe:
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel as we have more videos coming! Do you have a recipe that you are making to celebrate the release of Finding Dory? Leave a comment below with a link to it or use the hashtag #GeekEats and until next time, just keep swimming!
Print Fish Are Friends Not Food Tacos- A Finding Dory Inspired Recipe Yield: 6-8 tacos Serving Size: 2-3 tacos These vegan tacos are inspired by Pixar's release of Finding Dory, the sequel to the hit Finding Nemo. Ingredients 1 package of Gardein Crabless Cakes
6-8 corn tortillas For the Avocado, Mango, and Fire Roasted Corn Relish: 1/2 medium mango cubed
1 avocado cubed
1/4 cup fired roasted corn (we used Del Monte)
Juice from 1/2 lime
2 tbsp rough chopped cilantro
Salt and Pepper to taste Optional: Habanero Hot Sauce (We used Bravado Spice Co. Pineapple Habanero) Instructions Combine all relish ingredients. (Lightly stir so as not to break down avocado too much)
Refrigerate while cooking Gardein.
Cook Gardein Crabless Cakes per package instructions.
Heat tortillas.
Cut Gardein Crabless Crabcakes into quarters.
Place approximately 5 crabcake quarters on each tortilla.
Top with relish and then hot sauce if desired. Notes This recipe is completely vegan. Recipe Management Powered by Zip Recipes Plugin 5.0 https://2geekswhoeat.com/fish-are-friends-not-food-tacos-recipe/
*The Geeks were not given any comped items to facilitate this write-up; Opinions and recipe are wholly our own. View our Disclosure Policy for more info.
SavePresidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders to speak at SIUE this Friday
Mar 2, 2016 3:28 PM | comments
Watch the event live:Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: A Future to Believe In Rally at SIU - Edwardsville
EDWARDSVILLE - The official Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Twitter account announced Wednesday morning that democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders will be speaking this Friday at 10 a.m. at the Sam M. Vadalabene Center on campus. The announcement tweet reads as follows:
Vadalabene Center to host U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Friday, March 4 at 10 a.m. More details to follow. — SIUE (@SIUE) March 2, 2016
Doors will open to the general public at 8 a.m. All attendees must pass through security. Senator Sanders is expected to speak at approximately 10:30 a.m. Free parking is available to the public in the outer lots.
The social media account, managed by the SI |
attempt to recover the precious cargo, which was apparently intended for delivery to Russian Tsar Nicholas II, is now being chronicled on television by The History Channel.
He first tried - and failed - to locate the gold nearly 30 years ago, going bankrupt in the process.
Now, with salvage rights to the ship secured and having raised millions from venture capitalists, the New Yorker is convinced he'll pull off the world's largest-ever treasure recovery.
"In 1987 my research was incomplete, and we spent 74 days excavating in the wrong place," admitted the 64-year-old father-of-two, whose previous expedition merely uncovered the ship's wine cellar.
"Now, after three decades of additional research, we have verified exactly where the treasure is. We have good tools, we have good people, and now we just have to go for the gold."
RMS Republic, loaded with wealthy passengers bound for the Mediterranean, was lost off the coast of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, on January 23, 1909, after being hit by an Italian steamship which had lost its way in dense fog.
Of the 1,742 people on board the 580ft, 16,000-ton White Star liner built by Harland and Wolff in 1903 - only six died, but all the baggage and cargo went down with the doomed vessel to its final resting place, 270ft below the surface. At the time, she was the largest ship ever lost in maritime history.
The gold was, apparently, a loan to Russia from the US government - something the White House was keen to keep secret.
"The coins were worth 20 dollars each at the time when people were earning six dollars a week," said Bayerle, who added that he wonders whether the sinking of the Titanic three years later might have had a different outcome if the Republic's construction flaws were given more attention. "Both ships were built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast with the same design," he said.
"They were sister ships, termed 'practically unsinkable.' But they both sank. I can see, though, why there was no panic aboard Titanic. The loss of Republic was big news. Everybody knew about it.
"But over 18 hours, all the passengers, except of course the three passengers and three crew who died at the point of collision, were safely off-loaded."
In his book, The Tsar's Treasure, Bayerle - who first discovered the wreck of the Republic in 1981 - says the ship's manifest included both the Russian gold shipment and a US Government in-coin currency shipment, valued at a collective $3,800,000 in 1909. The failure of the first expedition hit Bayerle hard, and in the early '90s he was sentenced to five years in prison for voluntary manslaughter after shooting dead his estranged wife's boyfriend.
He served half the sentence and then set about securing salvage rights to Republic.
Billion Dollar Wreck is being shown on Mondays on The History Channel.
Belfast TelegraphTom Guilmette is a professional camera man who has been working in the TV industry for many years. That hasn’t dulled his love of shooting with cool equipment every chance he gets, though, so when he got handed a Vision Research Phantom High Speed Digital Cinema camera he started experimenting.
The camera is the new Flex version. He was in Las Vegas to shoot the World Championships of Ping Pong (WCPP), but he needed to get used to the camera first, so he spent a whole night playing with it in his hotel room.
The result is this rather epic video that was shot at 2,564 frame per second. The detail on view here is astonishing, and it’s some of the best I’ve seen. The phone hitting a hard surface was especially interesting seeing how the whole case reacted to the impact, as was the way water comes out of the tap and almost forming a ball before dropping. I think the light bulb smashing is my favorite, though.
If only the cameras in our smartphones were capable of capturing such detail.
Read more at tomguilmette.comNow that the two conventions are in our rearview mirror… I recommend you gird your loins for the onslaught of lies and slanders—a choreographed character assassination like you have never seen. NEVER.
The Democrats and their establishment media apparatus is in FULL “Protect Hillary at all Cost” Mode, AKA “Destroy Trump” Mode. And to no one’s surprise… GOP snakes Mitch McConnell, John McCain and Paul Ryan have joined them.
Trump is accused of saying things that he never said— Trump did not attack the Kahn family…. nor did he equate his sacrifices to their sacrifices.
But as plane as the nose on your face—the Big Media does not give a damn about the truth.
Hillary, in the meantime, Appears on FOXNews Sunday (video below) and absolutely lies her ass off. According to Hillary, FBI director Comey did NOT say what we all heard him say— He said she was ‘truthful.’
Even the Washington Post gave Hillary 4 Pinocchios on this whopper.
We clearly need a new definition of liar—Hillary Clinton has taken the Art of Lying to a whole ‘nother level. This woman lies as easily as you and I breathe.
On another note… former #NeverTrumper Hugh Hewitt has finally seen the light…. in his new article “It’s the Supreme Court Stupid”South Dakotans Again Consider An Abortion Ban
Making Their Cases Enlarge this image Jane Greenhalgh/NPR Jane Greenhalgh/NPR When she was pregnant, Tiffany Campbell and her husband decided to abort one twin to help the other survive. Read more. YouTube Video: The Campbell Family, In An Ad, Explains Its Decision. Anti-Abortion Activist Allen Unruh Challenges A Procedure's Medical Necessity. Neonatal Surgeon Hanmin Lee Disagrees, Outlining Medical Issues.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jane Greenhalgh/NPR Jane Greenhalgh/NPR
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jane Greenhalgh/NPR Jane Greenhalgh/NPR
It's deja vu all over again in South Dakota, where voters are being asked for the second election in a row to approve or reject a ban on abortion.
Two years ago, voters just said no to a ban so sweeping it allowed almost no exceptions. This year, the proposed ban is a little less rigid.
But opponents say it's still too extreme. And partisans on both sides know it's not just abortions in South Dakota at stake: If the ban is passed, it could be used to mount a U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the right to abortion nationwide.
Strolling through a serene neighborhood in Sioux Falls on a pristine autumn day with volunteers canvassing door-to-door, it was hard not to flash back to nearly the exact same scene two years earlier.
"Are you William?" asks Megan Moss, one of dozens of 20-something volunteers opposing the ban. She and her colleagues have been crisscrossing the state a house at a time.
William Flanagan nods his head over the din of several barking dogs. "I'm with the South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families," Megan continues. "I'm going around your neighborhood passing out information on Initiated Measure 11. Have you heard of that yet?"
Limiting Exceptions
Initiated Measure 11 is the formal name of the abortion referendum on the Nov. 4 ballot. It would ban virtually all abortions in the state, with limited exceptions for rape, incest, and threats to the life or health of the woman.
At this house, Moss scores a hit, as Flanagan says he'll be voting against the ban. "I don't believe in government telling people what to do," he says.
But while a strong libertarian streak among South Dakota voters like Flanagan helped defeat the ban two years ago, South Dakota is still a very conservative state when it comes to abortion.
That's apparent around the corner, at the home of ZoAnn Trumbull. "I believe abortion is wrong, it's murder," she tells Moss' canvassing colleague, Hassan Ali. "And according to the Bible, thou shall not murder.... And there are a lot of people out there who need to adopt those babies that need to be adopted, and that's the way we stand," she says politely, but firmly.
Across town, at the headquarters of Vote Yes for Life, the people working to pass the ban hope there are a lot more voters like ZoAnn Trumbull.
The headquarters — once a Planned Parenthood clinic — is now decked out with orange and blue balloons, and little framed pictures of babies' feet decorate the walls. In what used to be the clinic waiting room, one whole wall is taken up by a massive map of South Dakota showing votes on the 2006 ban county by county, where they won and where they need to gain more support.
A Revised Initiative
Presiding over a row of volunteers combing through computerized voter lists on this particular day is Allen Unruh. He's one of the campaign's organizers and a longtime anti-abortion activist in the state. He says a big reason the 2006 effort didn't succeed was that the ban simply went too far.
"Countless people said, 'If you'd had an exception for rape and incest, then we'd have voted with you,' " he says.
So in version 2.0, he explains, "we're giving the people of South Dakota what they wanted. This bill, this initiative, basically has exceptions for rape, incest and health and life of the mother."
Unruh says he recognized that some compromise was necessary. "Ideally, I'd like to save every child possible, but we don't live in that type of world right now. So to me, it's kind of like if the Titanic is sinking, would you say, 'Let's not lower the lifeboats because you can't save them all?' Let's save every person we can."
Across town, at the current Planned Parenthood clinic, CEO Sarah Stoesz says all the talk of limits on the ban is nothing but a smoke screen.
"If this ban is passed, it means that there will be no abortions performed in South Dakota," she says.
Currently, no doctors in South Dakota are willing to do elective abortions; Planned Parenthood flies in doctors from Minnesota once or twice a week. They perform between 700 and 800 abortions per year — one of the lowest rates in the country. Stoesz says the proposed ban's exceptions are so narrow that not only would it force an end to elective abortions, it would mean abortions could not be performed for any other reason, either.
"In the case of the so-called life exception, doctors will have to be so absolutely certain that a woman could fit through this narrow, narrow exception so they would not under any circumstances make a mistake — because if they make a mistake, they are subjected to potentially felony charges," Stoesz says. "And I have not met a doctor in South Dakota yet who has said he or she is willing to perform an abortion under those circumstances."
Strings Attached
The rape and incest exceptions to the ban come with similar strings: They require the doctor to collect and preserve DNA samples from the fetus. Backers of the ban say that will help catch criminals. Opponents say it's just another way to deter women from seeking abortions and doctors from performing them.
But what worries Stoesz most is that if the ban were to pass, it could well trigger a lawsuit that could quickly have national implications.
"A state that has only 778,000 people living it in could potentially set in motion a course of events that could overturn Roe versus Wade," she says, referring to the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide in 1973.
And that's just what Unruh is hoping for. "You know, we might be a flyover state, but we want to be a beacon of light for anybody who flies over. That's what our goal is."
Both sides are predicting a close vote.Share. Rogue One was the first standalone film, but there are many other corners of that galaxy far, far away that just demand to be explored on the big screen. Rogue One was the first standalone film, but there are many other corners of that galaxy far, far away that just demand to be explored on the big screen.
The success of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story has proven what most of us knew all along: There’s a vast appetite for more live-action adventures in the Star Wars universe even with tales that fall outside of the main saga. Disney and Lucasfilm may have rendered the Expanded Universe stories non-canon, but the franchise still has an incredibly expansive mythology that’s only getting bigger.
Han Solo’s standalone film is already lined up for 2018, followed by Episode IX in 2019, but we currently have no idea about which Star Wars anthology movie will follow that in 2020. At one point, Fantastic Four director Josh Trank was slated to helm an untitled Star Wars film -- possibly about Boba Fett -- but we haven’t heard much about that project since he and Lucasfilm parted ways.
Disney isn’t likely to let a year pass between Star Wars movies, so it’s only a matter of time before a new director signs on for the third anthology and we learn what it’s going to be about. In the meantime, we’ve got a few ideas about what we’d love to see in future spinoffs, and we’re starting off by taking a look at the Star Wars underworld...
Star Wars: Underworld
Ever since Disney purchased Lucasfilm, the proposed Star Wars: Underworld TV series has been largely forgotten and abandoned. But at one point, George Lucas fully intended to make this project, and he recruited writers like Ronald D. Moore, Tony McNamara, Stephen Scaia, and Fiona Seres to develop the show and write scripts.
The series would have reportedly explored the Coruscant underworld with new characters set in the time period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. The underworld was briefly glimpsed in Attack of the Clones, and it offered an opportunity to explore the darker corners of the Star Wars universe. Producer Rick McCallum openly called it “Deadwood in Space” and noted that it would have fleshed out a few of the characters from the novels while dealing with some of the important moments from Han Solo and Princess Leia’s backstories (without making them the central characters).
This still seems like an area ripe for exploration in the Star Wars movies, and you have to figure all those story ideas from the TV show (and perhaps concept art as well) are still lying around at Lucasfilm, just waiting to get exploited in some way.
Star Wars: 1313
The Star Wars: 1313 video game was another casualty of the Disney deal, but it was further along than Underworld. It also would have taken place on Coruscant, specifically on “level 1313.” Lucasarts even showed off some of the gameplay footage in 2012. The game was rumored to follow a young Boba Fett before he became the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy, so perhaps it was something along the lines of Boba Fett Begins.
Exit Theatre Mode
Back in 2015, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy hinted that both Underworld and 1313 were potentially still on the table. She told Slash Film “that’s an area we’ve spent a lot of time [on], reading through the material that [Lucas] developed is something we very much would like to explore. And there was 1313, the game where there was [unbelievable concept art]. So our attitude is, we don’t want to throw any of that stuff away. It’s gold. And it’s something we’re spending a lot of time looking at, pouring through, discussing, and we may very well develop those things further. We definitely want to.”
Fallen Jedi
Rogue One didn’t need a Jedi main character to connect with audiences, but the Star Wars underworld is another opportunity to depict what happened to some of the Jedi who managed to stay under the Empire’s radar. As much as we’d love to see Darth Vader hunting down the last of the Jedi (as alluded to in the original film), it may be even more interesting to see morally conflicted Jedi like Quinlan Vos, or his lover Asajj Ventress, reinvent themselves as criminals. The movie Jedi have always been essentially depicted as saints, but the EU has shown us that there can definitely be shades of grey to some of these characters. A bounty hunter with a lightsaber? Think of the possibilities!
The Black Sun
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire is somewhat divisive among Star Wars fans, and it’s no longer in continuity. However, there are still some elements in that tale that are potentially worth exploring, like the criminal syndicate the Black Sun. That group’s Prince Xizor was originally presented as someone who posed a real threat to Darth Vader’s standing within the Empire, and there’s something very enticing about giving the Dark Lord of the Sith a rival who isn’t intimidated by him. We saw with Rogue One that Vader can still work, and work well, onscreen, so a Vader-Xizor dynamic could be amazing. Also, Xizor’s android bodyguard Guri had an intriguing arc of her own, as she seemed to gain a measure of sentience.
Even if Lucasfilm isn’t interested in revisiting either of those characters, the idea of the Black Sun itself is very intriguing. It was supposed to be the largest criminal organization in the galaxy, so that suggests the possibility of giving Star Wars a real crime epic as the Black Sun clashes with other criminal groups like the Hutts.
Bounty Hunters
“Bounty hunters. We don’t need their scum.” Except we totally do. Those brief moments of the bounty hunters in The Empire Strikes Back struck a chord with fans that still resonates today. Obviously Boba Fett is the most popular bounty hunter of that group, but we’d love to know more about the assassin droid known as IG-88, which was essentially its own boss. The other characters like Bossk and Dengar were also visually intriguing, and their backstories are wide open now that the previous continuity is gone.
However, there’s no reason that a new Star Wars film couldn’t introduce even more bounty hunters to the mix. It seems like a popular profession in that universe, and they could be the perfect characters to place as the leads of a more mature Star Wars story.
It may be sometime before Lucasfilm announces its plans for the third anthology, but the abundance of material in the Star Wars underworld has us hoping that it will come to the forefront. What do you want to see in the Star Wars spinoff films? Let us know in the comments!
Blair Marnell is a freelance writer whose work can be found all over the Internet. You can talk to Blair on Twitter at @BlairMarnell.A true barn find, this large, economy size Mopar is presented just as it was pulled from long-term storage. Thanks to Barn Finds reader Bob R for alerting us to this big-block monster located in Hudson Valley, New York and advertised here on craigslist for $3750 or best offer.
There’s no way around it, this is a huge car. With a wheelbase of over 124 inches, that’s a lot of metal to be moving down the road. Thankfully, with well over 350 horsepower and prodigious torque, the 440 is up to the task. Chrome and trim are said to be excellent and certainly look the part in the pictures. With “no dents” and minimal rust, you won’t have to do much to the body.
It’s not all perfect though. A different shade of white on the right rear quarter suggest that the car has at least been partially repainted. I’d suggest checking this area closely for evidence of previous bodywork. Maybe some judicious use of rubbing compound would bring the colors closer together to avoid a repaint, at least for the moment.
The linear dash is so period. And I’ll bet that 440 would peg that speedometer past 120 given the chance. Minimal wear on the pedal pads leads me to believe that the claimed 50,000 miles is true.
An extremely original appearance under the big hood means you aren’t going to have to do much here beyond cleaning. The seller claims the New Yorker runs and drives “absolutely amazing” and it needs nothing. I think I’d add a modern aftermarket AC system and drive it as-is after a detail.
My favorite memory of these Chryslers is probably a little different than most readers! I grew up near Bowman Gray Stadium, located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and we frequently went to the stock car races there. My favorite class to watch were the “Blunderbusts”, big cars running on skinny stock rubber. The hot ticket was these big New Yorkers, both the two and four door versions. They never failed to smoke a lot of rubber going around corners!
A Summit box, what I think is a heater core and some other miscellaneous parts in the trunk make it look like the car has been taken care of by an enthusiast at some point in its life. And what a trunk it is! Even the weatherstripping looks nice. I’m lucky enough to live in a state that doesn’t require front plates, so that dealer plate would look great on the front bumper. Any interest in bringing this find home to your barn?First of all, what is EMV and more importantly why should restaurateurs care about EMV? In this blog post, we have defined EMV and listed several reasons why every merchant needs to care about EMV!
What does EMV stand for – Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) is a global standard for all credit card brands including debit and credit cards issued by American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa.
What is an EMV card – these are the new credit cards with the small gold-colored rectangular electronic chip embedded on the front left side of the card. To the right is a sample Visa Debit Card issued by Bank of America, notice the arrow that is highlighting the embedded electronic chip on the left side of the card.
What does the EMV chip do – the embedded electronic chip stores the card member’s data electronically and generates a unique code each time the card is used to make a payment. Each generated code is unique to that specific transaction creating a more secure process.
Why is EMV better than a magnetic stripe – the information from a magnetic stripe can easily be duplicated onto a blank card, encoding an electronic chip with the customer’s data is much more difficult to duplicate and embed on a blank credit card.
What if I don’t have an EMV card reader – for merchants without an EMV reader, the magnetic stripe of the credit card will be used to process payment transactions.
How is an EMV card processed – the EMV card is inserted into the credit card terminal or the EMV reader of the POS system and the customer will validate the transaction with their signature or by inputting their PIN number. PIN numbers are most utilized worldwide with signature verification implemented in the U.S. For transactions under a specific floor limit amount, neither PIN nor signature may be required.
Will an EMV transaction take longer – yes it will, the EMV process requires that the credit card remain in the credit card terminal or the EMV reader of the POS system during the authorization process. This will require staff training and take longer than the familiar swipe and go magnetic card process.
Is there a way to speed up EMV transactions – contactless EMV allows the EMV reader to communicate with the EMV credit card via an integrated EMV contact reader currently being sold on many of the new EMV ready credit card terminals.
What about NFC payments instead of EMV payments – Near Field Communications (NFC) equipped credit card terminals and PIN pads allow your customers to pay electronically from their smartphone with such 3rd party services as Apple Pay, Softcard, Google Wallet and other mobile wallet payment programs. NFC transactions should be as fast as a credit card swipe for the experienced mobile wallet customer, but to date mobile wallet customer acceptance has been slow to gain acceptance.
Why should a restaurateur care about EMV – effective October 1, 2015, American Express, Discover, MasterCard and Visa (the card brands) have mandated a counterfeit fraudulent transaction liability shift making the merchant liable for all costs if the merchant is using the least secure technology of the parties involved in the fraudulent transaction.
What about lost and stolen fraud liability – for American Express, Discover and MasterCard the lost and stolen fraudulent transaction liability shifts to the merchant effective October 1, 2015, if the merchant is using the least secure technology of the parties involved in the lost or stolen fraudulent transaction. Visa, unlike the other brands, will continue to be liable for lost and stolen fraudulent payment transactions even if the merchant can’t process EMV transactions.
What does a restaurant need to do – to eliminate the counterfeit fraudulent transaction liability shift your credit card terminal and/or POS terminal must be able to accept and process an EMV credit card payment transaction by October 1, 2015.
Will my credit card terminal or POS system handle EMV cards – unless you have updated your credit card terminal, POS system or payment PIN pad in the last few months, the answer is probably no. Most POS developers have been slow to embrace EMV due to a lack of technical specifications regarding the EMV process requirements.
Do I have to update my merchant processing equipment – no you do not, this is a mandate and not a law. Remember, if you do not update you will be liable for all costs involved with a counterfeit fraudulent transaction if you are the least secure technology of the parties involved.
Will my customers care if I don’t update – millions of Americans have been the victim of card payment fraud and there is a growing customer awareness regarding the loss of personal information, you will want to make sure your restaurant is viewed as a secure location to process credit card payments by being EMV ready before the October 1st dead line.
About the author – Bob Frazier
This is a guest post from Bob Frazier, a Restaurant POS professional with over 20 years of coaching, advising and assisting restaurateurs with their Restaurant POS System selection and implementation. Bob Frazier and POS Advice assist restaurateurs considering a POS system by providing restaurant POS information, resources, white papers and educational videos. To learn more, visit www.pos-advice.com.Join the revolution? X-Men #1 Review
WARNING – CONTAINS SPOILERS
It’s been a long time since I’ve bought a paper comic. I was deeply in love with comics at one point in my life. I swore off them a while ago for reasons of both taste – I’d run out of titles with female characters that I was interested in – and budget: it was one too many expensive habits for a theatre professional, and in the end, red wine won the day.
I’ve kept a weather eye on the comics world, and the announcement of an all-female line-up for X-Men was enough to send me to Forbidden Planet. But what made me actually buy the thing despite the £3 price tag was writer Brian Wood (DMZ, Channel Zero and Northlanders) and colourist Laura Martin (Planetary, Authority and JLA Earth 2, which all sit beautiful and bold on my shelves thanks in part to her palette choices and ability to make heroes look truly heroic).
Marvel introduce the issue on their website as follows:
Because you demanded it! The X-Women finally get their own book!
So, a fan-based revolution in the world of comics? Perhaps. The title is part of Marvel NOW, the 2012 relaunch of the brand aiming to bring new readers into the market, or in my case, perhaps to bring readers back into the fold and into comic stores.
Could it be that the comic industry is tackling the gap in the market for mainstream titles that are interesting to women? I’m heartened by the weight put behind this comic; it doesn’t seem to be a gimmick or an afterthought. The issue was heavily trailed with an XX teaser campaign, which was hard not to notice. And what I’ve also been interested to note is the supportive voices around the line-up, with Bleeding Cool praising Marvel for “raising their game in this regard” and other commentators using the launch as an opportunity to dedicate space to interviews with women in the industry, and to the importance of more titles about women, for women.
There’s a good piece here in Clutch, an interview with editor Jeanine Schafer over at The Mary Sue, and another piece here at Bitch magazine.
To me, my reviewers!
The series features an all-female team including Storm, Jubilee, Rogue, Kitty Pryde, Rachel Grey (daughter of Scott and Jean) and Psylocke. They’re based at Jean Grey’s School for the Gifted and pitted against runaway trains, teenage tantrums in the hallway, and the arrival of John Sublime with a request for help.
I’m very pleased to see Storm’s mowhawk back in business, and Jubilee was always a favourite of mine from the TV series, even if she was often cast as a mutant girl version of Snarf. She spoke to me of teenage wish-fulfilment, her mutant power always waiting in the wings for the right moment to shine, exactly like mine. Except my mutant power hasn’t developed yet. I’m sure it will.
What’s good about it? Lots. Lots and lots. The storyline moves on nicely, with a strong introduction that sets up future intrigue. It’s issue one, so I’ve not got a lot to go on, but so far it feels well-paced and with good action scenes and themes of homecoming (positive and negative) alongside the usual “outsider” politics that have always been a solid foundation for mutant-related plot.
The main characters get set up nicely and all showcase their abilities, personalities and range of powers. Jubilee and Kitty are set at a similar age and look like they are set to play out the roles of younger, naive/vulnerable characters, although there are two pupils at the school who look like they might also fill that position, so we’ll see. In terms of more experienced or older figures, Storm takes centre stage on the cover and is the team leader and headmistress with Rachel Grey as her second-in-command. Rogue is the powerhouse, and is shown enjoying herself being gung-ho in saving the day during a classic runaway train sequence, whilst Psylocke is pleasingly intimidating in the role of bad cop when Rachel interviews John Sublime.
There’s the usual balance of action/adventure with high school drama, much as you might expect, so in the future I’m hoping for something along the lines of Grant Morrison’s New X Men. This is referenced clearly through the young people at the school, so in those panels you can play a fun game of Guess Who? Mutant High Edition. This does also tend to lead on to a less fun game of Where Are We In What Passes For Continuity Around Here, but generally I take the Doctor Who approach on that one, so try not to get cross-eyed, basically.
I can’t write this review without talking about how the characters look, partly because comics are a visual medium, but also because it’s so good to see a lot of the traditional problems of female representation overturned here. We have two non-white characters in the line-up, neither of whom are the xenophilia standard sexy blue lady. Almost all of the outfits in Olivier Coipel’s artwork are really nicely, thoughtfully designed and look very practical, including Rogue’s costume which comes complete with a hooded top. No spiked heels – or any of the break-your-legs Girl Power stacks of Frank Quitely – are in evidence. Everyone’s zippers go all the way up, with the sad exception of Storm who, in the words of a friend of mine, seems to have developed a secondary mutation allowing her outfit to stick to her breasts despite flying at speed. She’s clearly the Emma Frost replacement in the line-up.
I’m going to be charitable and say that the instances of female characters doing needlessly sexy poses is fairly low, but having passed the issue around a few friends (male and female) the mileage varies. That said, it’s certainly way below what I would have expected and certainly nowhere near the awful debacle that is DC’s recent treatment of Starfire. I could easily imagine a world in which an all-female X-Men line up could have been all bikinis, all the time…
If I’m being uncharitable, I could say that it’s sad all the women are quite so perfect in how they look. Mutation offers such a variety of bodies to the writer and artist that it would have been good to see a character who subverted traditional expectations of what heroic women in comics should look like. A woman with the glorious curves of Morrison’s Angel Salvadore before she got reworked into a “prettier” version. Similarly, it’s a shame not to have an older female character to give something of the sagacity of Professor Xavier (can we make Helen Mirren a mutant already?), not to mention the fact that without him and without Cyclops the line-up could perhaps be seen as somewhat ableist compared to other line-ups.
All said and done though, this is only the beginning, and only a few pages. And in case it wasn’t clear: I really enjoyed it. I’ll spend money on the next one. A slim volume cannot hope to achieve everything that I might have wanted from a comic, but even if it weren’t an engaging start that has me hooked, it has already done an awful lot to show what female superheroes can do when well-written and well-drawn: tell a fantastic story that makes you wish your mutant powers would hurry up and kick in…
Does this herald a much-needed change and a step in the right direction for the future of comics? I hope so. But I’m hedging my bets, just in case I’m once again entirely cut off from my source of illustrative imaginings. Instead, I’ve been out on the wild plains of internet comics, on the hunt for decent female protagonists and generally doing pretty well – more on that in another post. Watch this panel.
In the meantime, I leave you with this quote I found in the slew of Google searches that I pass off as “research”:
For a bulky segment of a century, I have been an avid follower of comic strips – all comic strips (…) I cannot remember how the habit started, and I am presently unable to explain why it persists. I only know that I’m hooked, by now, that’s all. – Dorothy Parker, 1943THE script hasn't quite gone to plan for Brisbane Roar attacking weapon Kofi Danning.
Since the release of this season's schedule, the Roar's away clash on Saturday night against Sydney FC has been circled in Danning's diary.
The former Sydney prodigy left the Sky Blues in the off-season bemoaning his lack of opportunities and was hopeful of playing more first-team football with Brisbane.
But Young Socceroos' and Olyroos' commitments caused Danning to miss chunks of the Roar's pre-season campaign, and as a result the 20-year-old forward has fallen down the Brisbane pecking order.
He had to be content with a 10-minute cameo off the bench in the Roar's first-up 1-0 win over Central Coast last weekend and, as impressive as it was, Danning's chances of even travelling south for Saturday's match at Sydney Football Stadium could depend on the fitness of Brazilian speedster Henrique (ankle).
But Danning insists he has no regrets about his move to Brisbane, confident that his time will come, provided he performs on the training paddock and whenever he gets a first-team chance.
"There's probably extra motivation for me this weekend because I did come from Sydney, but if I get an opportunity I just want to play as well as I did the other night and do as much as I can for the team," he said.
"As long as we're winning and we're playing good football, I think I'll improve as a player and get better as the season goes on.
"When I got back from those (national team) camps, I wanted to prove myself to (Roar coach) Ange Postecoglou and prove that I want to be there. He's seen that and now he knows what I can do."
If Danning's head does ever drop at not being in the starting XI, he quickly considers the current plight of foundation Roar midfielder Massimo Murdocca, who also has to be content with a spot on the bench.
Postecoglou said Danning was "more than likely" to be in Brisbane's 15-man squad on Saturday.
Originally published as Hot Kofi stays on the shelfAs every month im coming with my predictions. Last months i was right for 80-100% of my cryptocoin bets. And you get them free – but of course people on email list always get some more info than its posted on blog 😉
Peerplays – The World’s First Decentralized and Provably-Fair Online Gaming Tournament and Wagering Platform Built Entirely on the Blockchain. They even put out a proposal for TheDAO (the famous #1 crowdfunding on the planet) to join this party and it seems promising. They are in phase 2 of token presale and i have to say – this looks really promising! On top of this there are known Bitshares guys in the team, this cant go wrong.
SteemPower – this is new way of social network making. You post to the website, people vote for your stuff making you getting paid. You don`t want to create content? Just voting for new good ones are making money too. On we should mention July 4th there will be first payouts from the system so its still early to join. And whats the best? Everything is on blockchain and coin already trades on Bittrex and OpenLedger.
Wings – a multi-blockchain, Smart Contract based platform for creation, participation and management of DAOs that.. Bitmain (!) invested into. Currently you can only get Eggs which are bounties for following them and doing other things (read in the newsletter) and later on before DAO launches you will be able to convert them into Wings. In around a month.
Get good Karma. Send me Birthday Gift!
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* LTC LfU3NJNSfue9wiHJkHH28DXHkgtbofNXKVPLEASANTVILLE, N.Y. -- New York State Crime Stoppers and Westchester County police are offering a reward of up to $2,500 for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the murder of Pleasantville volunteer firefighter Tom Dorr 18 years ago, according to a press release.
On Jan. 8, 1996, Dorr’s bludgeoned body was discovered in the snow in Graham |
was discarded. The methods section in the paper19 describes how the subset of prescreened data was further filtered to obtain only the very best alignments. The resulting data was then subjected to a variety of comparative analyses that, for all practical purposes, are completely meaningless given the extremely high level of selection, data masking, and filtering applied. Not surprisingly, they report only a 1.24% difference in only highly similar aligned areas between human and chimp. A more realistic sequence similarity based on the researchers’ own numbers for discarded data in the alignments alone is not more than 65% (table 1).
Shortly after these initial human–chimp comparison papers, a disturbing trend quickly emerged. This trend involved only reporting final alignment results and omitting the specific details of how such data was filtered, masked and selected. Key data to allow critical readers of human–chimp similarity papers to calculate a more accurate overall similarity began to be consistently omitted. For example, Liu et al. reported on the alignment of human genomic sequence with chimp, baboon, and marmoset.20 Important information concerning the starting set of sequences and specific data for the alignments was omitted. They state only that they used a total amount of 10.6 Mb of sequence for all species combined. Their similarity estimate on the final alignment, omitting indels and non-aligned areas, was 98.9%. Including indels, we derived a value of 95.6% for the alignments, similar to Britten’s research. Important data outside the aligned areas was impossible to evaluate because of the omitted sequence data.
Another disturbing trend is that only highly conserved protein-coding sequence (exons) are often utilized to report genome-wide similarity. We now know that non protein-coding sequences, which comprise greater than 95% of the genome, are critical to all aspects of genetics and genome function.8 Typical of the trend to only align exonic sequences, Wildman, et al. reported on a study that compared only human and chimp protein coding regions of 97 exon fragments for a total of 90,000 bases.21 The preselected exons were based on the fact that they were present in both humans and chimps and already known to be highly alignable. Because of these bias issues and a lack of detail in the materials and methods, it is impossible to arrive at a valid estimate of omitted data and actual similarity in this case (table 1).
In 2004, Watanabe et al. used a variety of BAC libraries to select clones for DNA sequencing representing chimp chromosome 22.22 The sequence was then compared to its similar human homolog. The caveat is that the individual chimp BAC clones were only selected if they each contained 6 to 10 human DNA markers. Once again, we have an initial level of biased pre-selection occurring. In this case, it is happening before the DNA sequence data is even generated. Unfortunately, critical overall DNA alignment statistics are not given in the paper or in the supplemental information. The authors state a nucleotide substitution rate of 1.44% in aligned areas, but do not give similarity estimates to include indels. While indels are omitted from the alignment similarity, the authors indicate that there were 82,000 of them and provide a histogram that graphically shows the size distribution based on binned data groupings. Oddly, no data for average indel size or total indel length was provided. Likewise, the number of sequence gaps were given, but nothing about cummulative gap size. Despite the fact that supposedly well-sequenced orthologous chromosomal regions are being compared, specific data that would allow one to calculate overall DNA similarities are conspicuously absent. Based on an estimate using the limited graphical data provided regarding base substitutions and indels, a rough and fairly conservative estimate of about 80 to 85% overall similarity can be inferred (table 1).
One of the most ambiguous of all human–chimp studies was published by Nielson et al.23 In keeping with the established obfuscational trend, only highly conserved exons were used and no data were given to allow one to calculate any type of real overall similarity. Of the total starting number of gene sequences in the analysis (20,361) the researchers decided to throw out 33% (6,630) in an ambiguously stated “very conservative quality control”. In other words, one third of the initial chimp data did not align to human, so it got tossed out. In fact, no hard data was actually given to even assess the final two-thirds of chimp data that was compared. The authors only report on sequence substitution divergence beyond ‘silent sites’. These ‘silent sites’ are the areas where the data was thrown out; representing locations where genetic variation supposedly exhibits little to no effect on genome function. This is an errant presupposition that is coming under scrutiny due to the fact that the majority of the non-coding portions of the genome are now proven to be functionally active. Data for important indel differences was also completely omitted. Unfortunately, there was not enough data provided in this highly obfuscated report to obtain even a rough calculation of similarity.
Chimpanzee rough draft genome assembly data—81% similarity?
The major milestone publication regarding human–chimp genome comparisons was the 2005 Nature paper from the International Chimpanzee Genome Sequencing Consortium.4 Unfortunately, this paper followed the previously established trend where most of the comparative data was given in a highly selective and obfuscated format and detailed information about the alignments was absent. The majority of the paper was primarily concerned with a variety of hypothetical evolutionary analyses for various divergence rates and selective forces. Hence, the critical issue of overall similarity was carefully avoided.
However, based on the numbers given in the chimp genome paper, one can determine a rough overall genome similarity between humans and chimp by including published concurrent information from the human genome project. In regards to the overall alignment, the authors state, “Best reciprocal nucleotide-level alignments of the chimpanzee and human genomes cover ~2.4 gigabases (Gb) of high-quality sequence”.24 At this time, the human euchromatic assembly was estimated to be 99% complete at 2.85 Gb and had an error rate of 1 in 100,000 bases.25 The chimp genome authors state, “The indel differences between the genomes thus total ~90 Mb. This difference corresponds to ~3% of both genomes and dwarfs the 1.23% difference resulting from nucleotide substitutions.”26
In summary, only 2.3 Gb of chimp sequence aligned onto the highly accurate and complete human genome (2.85 Gb) an operation that included the masking of low complexity sequences. For the chimp sequence that aligned, the data for substitutions and indels indicates 95.8% similarity, a biased figure which excludes the masked regions. Using these numbers, an overall estimate of chimp compared to human DNA produces a conservative estimate of genome-wide similarity at 80.6%. In 2005, a five-fold redundant coverage of the chimp genome had been attained, which should have represented greater than 95% of the overall sequence.
Wood’s report features an analysis that attempts to validate the entire 2005 chimp genome assembly.27 Wood’s comparison between human and chimp used deduced amino-acid sequences from gene orthologs already known to be similar, thus alignable. Protein amino acid comparisons between electronically translated coding sequences of known orthologs is hardly an accurate indicator of genome-wide DNA sequence similarity. Orthologs are genes in different species that are assumed to have evolved from a common ancestral gene primarily because they have the same function and similar sequence in both species. Amino acid comparisons between electronically translated coding sequence of known orthologs is also not an accurate indicator of genome-wide sequence similarity because less than 5% of the human genome actually contains protein-coding sequence. Yet another problem with using electronically generated proteins for comparisons is highlighted by the fact that a majority of mammalian genes undergo alternative transcription and translational start/stop sites, multiple mechanisms of exon splicing, intragene regulatory RNA coding segments, enhancer elements and many other complex transcriptional splicing code features.28,29 In light of our current knowledge of how the genome actually functions, the antiquated approach of using electronically deduced nuclear protein sequences for intergenome comparisons needs to be seriously reconsidered by both evolutionists and creationists.
The human–chimp paradigm starts to crumble
Following Wood’s summary15 of some of the major papers involved in the human–chimp similarity myth, several key reports emerged that called into question the dogma of the human-primate evolutionary paradigm. The first was a study by Ebersberger et al., in which a large pool of human, chimp, orangutan, rhesus and gorilla genomic sequences was used in constructing phylogenies (multiple alignments analyzed in evolutionary tree format).30 The original pool of DNA sequences actually went through several levels of selection to preanalyze, trim and filter them for optimal alignment. First, a set of 30,112 sequences were selected that shared homology (overlapping similarity) between the five species. These sequences were aligned and only those which produced ≥ 300 base alignments were retained for another series of alignments and only the sequences that produced superior statistical probabilities > 95% were used in the final analysis. This filtering process removed over 22% of already-known, pre-selected homologous sequence. Despite all of this data filtering designed to produce the most favourable evolutionary alignment and trees, the results did not show any clear path of ancestry for humans with chimps or any of the great apes. What emerged was a true mosaic of unique human and primate DNA sequences; discounting any clear path of common ancestry. Perhaps the best summary of the research can be found in the author’s own words.
“For about 23% of our genome, we share no immediate genetic ancestry with our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. “Thus, in two-thirds of the cases a genealogy results in which humans and chimpanzees are not each other’s closest genetic relatives. The corresponding genealogies are incongruent with the species tree. In accordance with the experimental evidences, this implies that there is no such thing as a unique evolutionary history of the human genome. Rather, it resembles a patchwork of individual regions following their own genealogy.”31
The authors add that the lack of support for a consistent and clear evolutionary tree among humans and other primates is due to the “inclusion of alignments with no clear phylogenetic signal,”32 a significant statement given the fact that they used extremely high levels of data filtering and selection designed to provide enormous levels of “phylogenetic signals”.
The Y-chromosome bombshell
One of the most dogma-damaging reports to surface in recent years is the Y-chromosome comparison between humans and chimps.33 In this study, the male-specific region (MSY), a large region of the Y-chromosome, was compared between human and chimp. To accomplish this, a fair amount of resequencing had to be performed due to the fact that the chimp sequence in this area was fragmented and incomplete. The end result was 25,800,000 bases of highly accurate chimp Y-chromosome sequence distributed among eight contiguous segments. When compared to the human Y-chromosome, the differences were enormous. The authors state, “About half of the chimpanzee ampliconic sequence has no homologous, alignable counterpart in the human MSY, and vice versa.”34 The ampliconic sequence contains ornate repeat units (called palindromes) that read the same forwards as they do backwards. Dispersed within these palindromes are families of genes that are expressed primarily in the male testes. Not only did 50% of this type of sequence fail to align between human and chimp in the Y-chromosome, humans had over twice as many total genes (60 in humans vs 25 in chimp). There were also three complete categories of genes (gene families) found in humans that were not even present in chimps. Related to this large difference in gene content, the authors note, “Despite the elaborate structure of the chimpanzee MSY, its gene repertoire is considerably smaller and simpler than that of the human MSY,”35 and “the chimpanzee MSY contains only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human MSY, and only half as many protein-coding transcription units.”35
Besides these distinctively male-type genes, there were other areas characterized that contained genes labelled as ‘X-degenerate’, a somewhat misleading term based on the assumption that the X-degenerate genes have homologs on the female X chromosome from which they are postulated by evolutionists to have evolved. A comparison of X-degenerate gene regions between humans and chimps also showed distinct organizational and locational differences in addition to differences in gene content. In fact, humans have three types (classes) of X-degenerate genes that are not even present in chimps.
Besides the large differences in gene content between human and chimp MSY regions, the overall structural differences were enormous. Take note of some of the additional comments from the authors:
“Moreover, the MSY sequences retained in both lineages have been extraordinarily subject to rearrangement: whole chromosome dot-plot comparison of chimpanzee and human MSYs shows marked differences in gross structure. “The chimpanzee ampliconic regions are particularly massive (44% larger than in human) and architecturally ornate, with 19 palindromes (compared to eight in human) and elaborate mirroring of nucleotide sequences between the short and long arms of the chromosome, a feature not found in the human MSY. “Of the 19 chimpanzee palindromes, only 7 are also found in the human MSY; the other 12 are chimpanzee-specific. Unlike the human MSY, nearly all of the chimpanzee MSY palindromes exist in multiple copies.”34
The large differences in both structural arrangements of unique DNA features and gene content described in the Y-chromosome study, is particularly damaging to human-chimp DNA similarity mythos and the dogma of primate evolution. In fact, the authors shockingly note that given “ … 6 million years of separation, the difference in MSY gene content in chimpanzee and human is more comparable to the difference in autosomal gene content in chicken and human, at 310 million years of separation.”35
The main problem with these drastic differences between human and chimp Y-chromosomes is that the evolutionary dogma cannot account for it.
The main problem with these drastic differences between human and chimp Y-chromosomes is that the evolutionary dogma cannot account for it. A large study of genetic variation in the human genome showed that the Y-chromosome was exceptionally stable and had five times less genetic variation than the autosomes.36 This data makes perfect sense because the Y-chromosome has no similar homolog in the genome and undergoes very little recombination with the X-chromosome during meiosis. Given this lack of recombination and sequence diversity on the Y-chromosome, the primate evolution model encounters a serious problem, because the human and chimp Y-chromosomes should be considerably more similar to each other. Evolutionists consider high levels of DNA sequence variation as positive indicators of places in the genome that evolve rapidly. Therefore, the Y-chromosome should have signatures of such activity because it is so markedly different from chimp, but it has not. Instead, it appears to be very static and stable, with very few structural differences and little sequence diversity among human males worldwide. The proven stability of the Y-chromosome compared to the rest of the human genome, combined with the large differences between human and chimp, is an insurmountable enigma for the human–chimp common ancestry paradigm.
Some cases of high similarity may be due to contamination
Another factor to consider in the human-chimp similarity debate is that some cases of high sequence similarity may be due to contamination. Not only is the chimpanzee genome assembly still largely based on the human genomic framework, it also now appears that the wide-spread contamination of non-primate databases with human DNA is a serious problem and can run as high as 10% in some cases.37 Human contamination results from the process of cloning DNA fragments in the lab for sequencing where airborne human cells come from coughing, sneezing, and physical contact with contaminated fingers. The detection and characterization of human DNA contamination in primate databases could be a difficult and highly subjective endeavour because of the overriding dogma of primate evolution. It is also noteworthy that the chimpanzee genome was sequenced during the time period where wide-spread human DNA contamination was not well exposed. The contamination problem is also confounded by the use of the human framework for chimp sequence assembly and annotation.
In fact, contamination is not only possible via laboratory error, but is introduced on purpose during chimpanzee genome assembly and annotation based on Darwinian dogma. On a recent website at the Ensembl database (joint bioinformatics project between EMBL-EBI and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), a webpage titled ‘Chimp Genebuild’ provides the following information as to one of the ways in which the human genome is used as a guide to assemble and annotate the chimp genome:
“Owing to the small number of proteins (many of which aligned in the same location) an additional layer of gene structures was added by projection of human genes. The high-quality annotation of the human genome and the high degree of similarity between the human and chimpanzee genomes enables us to identify genes in chimpanzee by transfer of human genes to the corresponding location in chimp. “The protein-coding transcripts of the human gene structures are projected through the WGA [whole genome assembly] onto the chromosomes in the chimp genome. Small insertions/deletions that disrupt the reading-frame of the resultant transcripts are corrected for by inserting ‘frame-shift’ introns into the structure.”38
Not only is the chimpanzee genome assembled using the human genome as framework, human sequence contamination is admitted to exist because it was electronically added to fill in putative missing chimp sequences. Based on the myth and dogma that human DNA is supposedly nearly identical to chimp, bits and pieces of human DNA have been fitted into gaps and regions of the chimp genome, making it appear more human. As a result, when downloading the assembled and annotated chimp genome sequence for independent study, the researcher does not have 100% unbiased chimp sequence, as often assumed. Instead, there is a patchwork of human and chimp sequence pieced together, aligned, and oriented based on the human genome.
Conclusion—human and chimp DNA not so similar after all
The chimpanzee genome in its final annotated and assembled state is clearly a biased product. In addition, nearly all research reports on human–chimp DNA similarity omit significant amounts of data that do not align or represent gaps in the sequence. In fact, a significant number of papers do not even include enough data to allow an independent reader the ability to factor in how much original dissimilarity existed before the final, highly filtered numbers are given. In regards to an estimate of human–chimp genome similarity from data provided (but often buried) in published reports, it is safe to say that it is not more than 81 to 87% and quite possibly lower.
In support of this conclusion, a large-scale human–chimp genome comparison research project was just recently published in a separate journal.39 This study completely substantiates and confirms the data presented in this report. In this study, author Tomkins reports on the pair-wise alignment data of 40,000 random chimpanzee genomic sequences compared to four different versions of the human genome using the blastn algorithm run under 30 different parameter combinations. This effort produced a total of 1.2 million attempted alignments—4.8 million if you factor in the four different human genome assemblies. Excluding data for the large amount of chimp sequence that did not align, Tomkins reported a very conservative estimate of human–chimp DNA similarity in just the aligned regions at 86–89% (depending on algorithm parameters). Results from this extensive and very objective study unequivocally indicate that the human and chimpanzee genomes are at least 10–12% less identical than is commonly claimed. The human-chimp common ancestor paradigm, which claims a nearly identical DNA content, is clearly based more on myth and propaganda than real factual data.There is an incredible demand for human blood. In the United States alone, a transfusion is required every two seconds. Over 41,000 one-pint donations are needed every single day. While as much as 38% of the American population is able to donate blood, only around 10% actually do, which isn’t enough to keep up with demand. However, the use of synthetic blood may change all of that.
Synthetic blood may seem like a fantasy from HBO’s True Blood, but a research team in Romania has had surprisingly encouraging results from the first trials of using blood manufactured in a laboratory. The blood is composed of expected ingredients like water, salt, and albumin, but it also contains proteins from an unlikely source: marine worms. The iron protein, hemerythrin, is responsible for oxygen transport and storage.
Hemerythrin has the added benefit of making the blood stress resistant, which has been a considerable challenge in other attempts to manufacture a synthetic blood alternative. Previous blood formulas could not stand up to stress factors and ended up turning toxic. Hemerythrin is the only protein to succeed on this front so far.
The trials were completed using mice, and will continue to do so until it has been exhaustively shown that the synthetic blood does not pose a risk for toxicity. Head researcher, Radu Silaghi-Dumitrescu, from Babes-Bolyai University speculates that it will be around two more years before the formula is ready for human testing. Human trials “represent an enormous risk” and Silaghi-Dumitrescu wants to ensure all safety concerns have been addressed beforehand.
Success in trials over the next two years will lead the team to publish their results and Silaghi-Dumitrescu has confirmed that he will seek a patent on the formula.
Earlier this year, a Scottish laboratory was granted permission to begin human trials for synthetic blood derived from adult stem cells.Victoria scores two powerplay goals to top Tri-City 4-1.
For Immediate Release Saturday, November 1, 2014
Victoria, BC- The Victoria Royals earned a 4-1 victory over the Tri-City Americans on Saturday night at Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre.
The Royals’ Axel Blomqvist scored a pair of goals for the home side. Austin Carroll tallied his 11th marker and Logan Fisher also scored in an empty net to round out the scoring for Victoria. The Americans’ lone marker came from Maxwell James in the opening frame.
Blomqvist extended his point streak (6g-4a) to six games, while Brandon Magee recorded two assists to put his point streak (1g-7a) to five games.
Goaltender Coleman Vollrath stopped 20 of 21 shots he faced for the Royals, while Americans’ goalie Eric Comrie turned away 20 of 23 shots.
Victoria went 2/4= 50.0% on the powerplay, while Tri-City went 0/4= 0.0%.
The Royals conclude their five-game home stand Sunday afternoon at 1: 05 p.m. against Tri-City. Sunday’s game marks Marty’s ninth birthday followed by a skate with the players at Save-On-Foods Memorial Centre. Get your tickets today by calling 250-220-7777 or visiting at www.victoriaroyals.com.
Pro-rated Royals season ticket packages are still available and offer a host of fantastic benefits. Get more details by calling 250-220-7889 or visiting at www.victoriaroyals.com. Join the Royal family today.
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The Portuguese saying ‘Mais vale pão duro que nenhum’ roughly translates as ‘Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow’.
I discovered this shortly after typing “egg on your face in Portuguese” into Google, which responded with a picture of Pedro Caixinha.
The Rangers boss declared this week that Aberdeen are “coming to the end of their cycle” in second place.
It’s an interesting theory, but one that he was reluctant to discuss with Derek McInnes after Aberdeen recorded their first win against Rangers at Ibrox since 1991.
McInnes insisted Rangers should be “embarrassed” to have finished behind his side, as the two managers became embroiled in the most unsavoury war of words since James Forrest and Liam Henderson’s infamous alphabet spaghetti brawl of 2015.
As well as attracting the ire of noted wallflowers Chris Sutton and Neil Lennon, Caixinha’s comments inspired Charlie ‘Well maybe you should go also then Jeff because eh, you couldn’t see driving home the other night because you’ve, you don’t even wear your glasses in, in eh TV in case you get eh, you get slagged off so, you just eh you just stick to Specsavers and I’ll do the game’ Nicholas to form two coherent sentences in a row.
The renowned grammar-phobe told Sky Sports News viewers that “They’ve got a manager who’s just walked in and thinks he owns our country, telling everybody what to do”.
Aside from anything else, if the country does indeed now belong to Charlie Nicholas it would go some way to explaining our declining literacy rates.
The Dons were reduced to 10 men late on as Jayden Stockley saw red, presumably for having a name like a BBC Sound of 2014 runner-up who covers Rihanna songs with an acoustic guitar.
His team-mates held on, however, as an insipid performance from the home team brought their sensational run of two wins in a row to an end.
A rare highlight for the home side came as a Rangers fan caught the ball and promptly ran out of the stadium with it, showing a degree of innovation and determination sorely lacking in his team.
As those masochist fans who remained until full time trudged out of the stadium, Aberdeen supporters serenaded them with cries of “You’re f****** s***”.
Given the bitterness that matches between these two sides often descend into, it was refreshing to hear Aberdeen fans offer such a restrained review of a Rangers performance that experts have confirmed was in fact “Extremely f****** s***”.
Kelvin Wilson this week became the latest Parkhead alumni to be linked with Lennon’s Hibs revolution, with the defender potentially set to join fellow Lennon-era Celtic fixtures Efe Ambrose, Liam Henderson and petulant touchline antics.
“Look, I know what you’re all saying about the volume of former Celtic players we’ve signed, but we’re our own club with our own identity” insisted Lennon, before ending the press conference, draining his pint and walking out of the Brazen Head.
Wilson told reporters that beating Barcelona remains the pinnacle of his career, prompting some head-scratching among his potential Hibs team-mates, many of whom hadn’t heard about Celtic beating Barcelona for over 12 minutes.
Partick ‘Ubiquitous Chip’ Thistle were put to the sword on Thursday night by Leigh ‘Savoy Saturdays’ Griffiths.
The striker opened the scoring from the spot with Celtic’s 100th goal of the season, then set up Tom Rogic for the second after slicing through the Jags defence like a hot knife through Waitrose Duchy Organic English salted butter.
There was disappointment for Celtic fans as the comfortable 5-0 victory robbed them of an excuse for a dramatic late pitch invasion, but Thistle fans couldn’t contain themselves and spilled onto the turf with excitement after watching their heroes string three passes together.
Either that or they’d just remembered there’s a new season of Twin Peaks coming soon.Jolie is tired. She woke up at 6:30 this morning, put three kids on the bus, and took her youngest with her to the preschool where she clocks in at 8:30. At 3:30, she clocked out, and returned home to her husband (he is a technician for a telecommunications company) and her children. At 6:00 p.m. she will clock into the big-box store where she recently picked up a seasonal job, and she won’t finish her shift until 1:30 in the morning. But instead of sleeping while she has the chance, she’s explaining to me why she, like 46 percent of non-college-educated Republican voters, favors Donald Trump.
“Being a mom, there’s been times that I fall between the cracks,” she said. “I can’t get [government] assistance, because we make too much. But I don’t have enough to cover what I need to just to survive. And there’s times that I just question in reality, ‘How can I not be able to get help when I’ve worked my whole life since I was 14?’ I pay into it. I should be able to reap some of the benefits when I need it.”
Once, when Jolie lived with her parents in their one-story house, she applied for food stamps. She received them for a time, but then the county accused her of fraud: they said she was lying about living at her parents’ house, and stripped her of her food stamps.
Those food stamps, she said, were “the only way I had of feeding my children.” She got an associate’s degree to teach preschool, but in the six years that she has taught—almost all of that time with the same privately owned company—she has never made more than $10 an hour. And she was coming up short. Her checks weren’t enough to cover her family’s needs: basic stuff like rent, a car payment, and diapers.
“But yet there are people who live on government assistance, who collect it, and they turn around and sell it for drug money,” she noted. “And it bothers me. But Trump is talking about cutting down some of those benefits.”
In Jolie's view, we need a president who can ‘equal the playing field for everyone, not just for certain groups.’
Jolie likes that. As Alec MacGillis recently noted in the New York Times, working-class voters like Jolie are attracted to Republicans who promise to crack down on welfare recipients because they’re concerned that too many people are milking the system. In her view, we need a president who sees the problems, and who can “equal the playing field for everyone, not just for certain groups.” As she sees it, a married mother of four with an associate’s degree and with a husband who also works full-time shouldn’t have to work two jobs. And if she’s eligible to receive food stamps, she should receive them. But that hasn’t happened to her. She thinks she understands at least part of why that’s happening.
Just think of all the illegal immigrants who enter this country, she said. When they have babies, they are U.S. citizens, and thus eligible to receive government assistance. This doesn’t seem fair to her.
“So these people are coming over here, having these babies, collecting the welfare,” she said, “but yet not hav[ing] to pay any taxes towards it. Versus us, who have to work to pay for those taxes, can’t get it!”
This is another reason why she likes Trump. She heard that he was talking about closing down the borders and “shipping the illegals back over to their countries, which I kind of agree with.” We have too many homeless U.S. citizens who are struggling to survive as it is, she added.
Importantly, she noted, Trump is a successful businessman. “He has some experience in the financial world of how to make ends meet, and to get to the max potential of the company. The United States needs that because we’re in debt to a bunch of other countries.” She thinks that if we could get that debt under control, it would have positive, trickle-down effects for ordinary Americans like her. “And I think he could clear that [debt] up,” she said.
I told her about Trump’s comments that he thinks America shouldn’t raise the minimum wage to $15 because wages are already “too high,” and that Americans just had to work harder. Here she was, a woman lucky to get four hours of sleep because she had to work two jobs. Did his comment bother her?
“My thought is that I kind of agree with him, though,” she said. “Is it fair for someone who works at McDonald’s to make $15 an hour, versus I’m a teacher at a preschool with an associate’s degree making $10 an hour? Is that fair? Is it fair that I should go to school to better myself to have a career, yet any Joe that walks into McDonald’s is making more than me? Is that fair? I don’t think so.”
She points out that there’s no way her boss could afford to pay her $15 an hour for her job. She thinks that you have to look at things from the perspective of the small business owner, too.
‘He’s rich for a reason... He has a business, he knows how to run it.’
“What about the fact that he’s a billionaire,” I asked, “does that bother you?”
She shook her head. “I mean, he’s rich for a reason. I’m poor for a reason! We all have our reasons for our financial standing in life. He has a business, he knows how to run it. So clearly he did something right. I may not know the secrets yet—someday I might. Hopefully!”
“So you respect him as a businessman?” I asked.
“I do. I mean, you can’t always be all soft and buttery when it comes to your business. You gotta be hard and stern and know when to fold and when to push further. I think he knows how to do that.”
“And you think he could do that for America?”
“I think he could.”
Economic Interests Versus Values
Political analyst Bill Schneider has suggested that Trump is rallying the white working class not around their “economic interests” but around their “values.” But if Jolie’s answers represent how other less-educated white voters are thinking, that dichotomy is misguided.
Yes, the values Trump appeals to in many cases resonate with those of the white working class. As Lance, a gas station cashier and a married father of three, told me, Trump is speaking to “stereotypical Americans” like himself who revere “guns, Bible, soldiers, beer, football.” But as Lance also explained, he thinks people like him are quick to support Trump because they think “he’s going to be able to turn the economy around just lickety-split.” (It’s one of the reasons why Lance initially supported Trump.)
For Jolie, the fact that she’s falling “in between the cracks” and having to work two jobs drives her attraction to Trump. She thinks he can get the economy humming again, just like (she pointed out) it was during the Clinton years. In fact, if it came down to Trump against Hillary Clinton, she thinks it’d be a tough choice. She says things were better when “the Clintons” were in office.
Russ, a retired Army veteran whom I also interviewed, reiterated Jolie’s point. He likes what Trump has to say about barring Muslims from entering the country and deporting all illegal immigrants. But if it came down to a contest between Trump and Clinton, he’d vote for Clinton. Why?
“She was president before,” he explained with a mischievous smile. “She made all the decisions. The economy was good, the country was good. Since she got out of president, the country hasn’t been good. But when it was in the green, everybody had jobs. She’s a smarter person than [Bill Clinton] is.”
Russ’s daughter, Stacy, though, explained that she’d vote for Trump: “Because he’s going by the Bible: gay marriage shouldn’t be allowed,” before adding, “I believe that if you don’t believe in Jesus, then you don’t need to be in this country.” (For her, at least, values do appear to trump economic concerns.)
“Ronald Reagan was a good president, too,” Russ chimed in, “but he believed in the Bible, too.” For him, though, the economy was paramount. “I’d vote for Jesse Jackson if he made the economy good.”
‘I’d vote for Jesse Jackson if he made the economy good.’
What about the fact that Trump was a billionaire, I asked them? I had heard members of their family make disparaging comments before about the rich people who lived outside of the working-class part of town. Did they mind that he was wealthy?
“No,” they said in unison. And, no, they weren’t worried that he would cut food stamps. As Stacy began explaining why she is on food stamps and doesn’t have a job—she received custody of her nieces and nephews because of their parents’ battles with heroin—her father offered his opinion: “I believe in the Bible: if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” It also didn’t bother them that Trump said wages are “too high” for working Americans, though they personally believed that wages should be raised to at least $12 an hour.
“I used to watch him on TV,” Stacy said about Trump. She liked how on The Apprentice, he said it like it was: “You do what you need to do, or you’re fired. Plain and simple: you do your job.” Besides Clinton, the only other candidate they knew about was Jeb Bush, whose name rolled off Russ’s tongue as if he was uttering a disgusting slur. (“We don’t need another Bush in the White House,” Stacy agreed.) But they like a businessman who, as they see it, knows how to build a company and get rich.
Will It Last?
Many members of the white working class distrust everyone and everything from their own dads to the government. So how long can Trump keep their support? One working-class young man I corresponded with said, “I love the way Trump speaks,” but explained that he doesn’t vote. Why not? “I don’t believe any votes actually matter to me. Every election is rigged. Research where all the votes go.”
In light of such pervasive distrust, why do so many of them put their faith in the billionaire New Yorker who is the epitome of the so-called One Percent? The man who has implicitly questioned the work ethic of Americans in low-wage jobs (“People have to go out, they have to work really hard and they have to get into that upper stratum”) and said that he has never asked God to forgive his sins?
How long will the relationship last?
In search of insights, I talked with Lance, who until very recently was a Trump supporter. And if my conversations with him are any indication, a break-up could be in the offing—and it if happens, it will be ugly.
“He’s a rich guy with a hot wife that wants a lot of power” is how Lance describes Trump now. Or as he added later, “Trump’s being a complete jackass…there are two people that I don’t want in office, and that’s Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.”
Lance initially liked Trump “because he was all for getting illegal immigrants out of this country so that we can rebuild |
– Instant cast – 1000 range – Cannot be cast on self – Ally can move around but will unstealth when performing a combat action. The Vanish I realm ability is now obtainable at level 49 specialization A new ability, Blur, has been added at level 50 specialization Jumps to target’s position – Must be a player target (can be enemy or ally) – 1000 range – 90s RUT – Usable while rooted or snared but does not break the CC – Can be used while stealthed or unstealthed – Does no damage
Envenom specialization
Poisons are no longer items that are applied to equipped weapons but are now offensive proc abilities trained in the Evenom specialization. These offensive proc poisons will be instant-cast buffs that have a 100% chance to fire and cannot be resisted. These proc buffs can be put up and switched while stealthed and assassins will remain stealthed when casting them. When swinging 2 weapons with a poison proc up, players will only land 1 poison; however, when the poison is applied on the target, the poison proc buff will remain on the assassin – allowing them to switch targets and apply the same poison to the new target without having to put up another poison proc buff.
Poisons cannot be reapplied to a target until the previous application has ended or the target purges, unless stated otherwise. Poisons cannot be resisted and will always land for their full duration and value on the target.
There are 5 poison proc buff types: Effectiveness poison: melee dps + attack speed debuff Withering poison: disease + melee resistance debuff Stat debuff poison: weapon skill + all stats debuff Damaging poison: damage-over-times Shadowbind poison: snare Tranquilizing poison: mesmerization
All poisons have a RUT of 8s except for the Shadowbind and Tranquilizing poison. Shadowbind and Tranquilizing poison have unique RUTs of 8 seconds and 25 seconds, respectively.
for the Shadowbind and Tranquilizing poison. Effectiveness Poison: Debuffs the target’s effectiveness. Lowers the target’s damage dealt with all melee attacks and reduces their attack speed. This poison lasts 20 seconds. 3 Envenom – Minor Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 4% and attack speed by 5%. 13 Envenom – Weak Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 6% and attack speed by 10%. 23 Envenom – Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 10% and attack speed by 15%. 33 Envenom – Major Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 15% and attack speed by 20%. 43 Envenom – Swordbreaker. Lowers melee damage dealt by 20% and attack speed by 25%. Withering Poison: Applies a disease to the target that inhibits healing and lowers melee resistances. Diseased targets received heals are reduced by 50% and are snared. Disease prevents health regen. This poison lasts 15 seconds. 4 Envenom – Minor Widow Sting. Diseased, 15% slow and reduces strength by 5. 16 Envenom – Widow Sting. Diseased, 15% slow and reduces strength by 10. 26 Envenom – Widow Toxin. Diseased, 15% slow, reduces strength by 15, and lowers resistances to melee attacks by 5%. 36 Envenom – Widow Toxin. Diseased, 15% slow, reduces strength by 20, and lowers resistances to melee attacks by 10%. 46 Envenom – Widow Venom. Diseased, 15% slow, reduces strength by 25, and lowers resistances to melee attacks by 20%. Stat debuff Poison: Debuffs the target’s stats. The stats debuffed are Weaponskill, Dexterity, Strength, and Constitution. This poison will debuff all four stats with on application. This poisons lasts 30 seconds. 7 Envenom – Weakening Poison. Debuffs WS by 5% and stats by 13. 17 Envenom – Inhibiting Poison. Debuffs WS by 8% and stats by 24. 27 Envenom – Enervating Poison. Debuffs WS by 10% and stats by 30. 37 Envenom – Unnerving Poison. Debuffs WS by 14% and stats by 41. 47 Envenom – Touch of Death. Debuffs WS by 19% and stats by 60. Snare Poison: Snares the applied target for a set duration. This snare ignores root or snare immunities on the target and always applies for its full duration. This snare does not break upon damage. Unlike other poisons, snare poison can be reapplied to the target before its current duration has ended. 9 Envenom – Crippling Toxin. Snares the target by 15% for 4 seconds. 29 Envenom – Snaring Toxin. Snares the target by 35% for 6 seconds. 49 Envenom – Shadowbind. Snares the target by 60% for 9 seconds. Mez Poison Removed from Spymaster and added to Envenom. Mez poison has its own RUT of 25 seconds and does not share a RUT with any other poison. This poison will interrupt through bodyguard. Mez poison has a 500 radius and will always last its full duration on all targets, not counting dropoff duration reduction. 18 Envenom – Tranquilizing Gas - 5s duration PBAoE mez. 46 Envenom – Tranquilizing Miasma – 15s duration PBAoE mez. Damage-over-Time Poison: Applies a poison that does damage over time to the target. This poison lasts 20 seconds. 1 Envenom – Minor Lethal Poison. The target takes 9 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 5 Envenom – Lesser Lethal Poison. The target takes 15 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 10 Envenom – Lethal Poison. The target takes 22 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 15 Envenom – Major Lethal Poison. The target takes 29 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 20 Envenom – Greater Lethal Poison. The target takes 36 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 25 Envenom – Minor Lethal Venom. The target takes 36 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 22 matter damage every 3.9 seconds 30 Envenom – Lesser Lethal Venom. The target takes 38 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 30 matter damage every 3.9 seconds 35 Envenom – Major Lethal Venom. The target takes 42 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 39 matter damage every 3.9 seconds 40 Envenom – Greater Lethal Venom. The target takes 50 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 46 matter damage every 3.9 seconds. 45 Envenom – Insidious Lethal Venom. The target takes 72 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 55 matter damage every 3.9 seconds. 50 Envenom – Lifebane. The target takes 101 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 60 matter damage every 3.9 seconds.
Critical Strike specialization
Armor Wither effects can no longer be resisted and last their full duration.
Level 8 – Pincer – Side positional – 1% ABS debuff replaced with 4s melee stun
Level 12 – Hamstring – Evade reactionary – bleed effect replaced with a 20% attack speed debuff
Level 18 – Garrote – Anytime – snare effect replaced with 14 damage bleed
Level 21 – Perforate Artery – Frontal stealth opener – growth rate and damage increased signficantly, 10s duration armor wither effect added
Level 25 – Achilles Heel – Now a rear positional – Attack speed debuff effect replaced with 10s duration armor wither, damage reduced slightly
Level 29 – Leaper – Now follows Pincer style – Bleed effect changed to 1% ABS debuff, damage increased
Level 39 – Stunning Stab – Follows Creeping Death style – Bleed effect replaced with 3% ABS debuff
Level 44 – Rib Separation – Now follows Achilles Heel style – Armor wither effect replaced with 6s melee stun
Level 45 – Incapacitate style removed
Level 46 – Neck Shot – Now an anytime style – damage has been reduced slightly, targets helm armor slot
Level 47 – Rib Shot – Now an anytime style – damage has been reduced slightly, targets chest armor slot
Level 48 – Hip Shot – Now an anytime style – damage has been reduced slightly, targets leggings armor slot
Level 50 – Ripper – Now follow Garrote style – Applies a 20s duration armor wither
Dual Wield Specialization
Level 21 – Penumbra – Rear positional – rear snare removed, 26% attack speed debuff added, growth rate increased
Level 34 – Dark Tendrils – Anytime – growth rate decreased
Slash Specialization
Level 39 – Backslash – Rear positional – rear snare removed, growth rate increased
Thrust Specialization
Level 29 – Pierce – Rear positional – rear snare removed, growth rate increased
Mentalist
Mana Magic Specialization
Added group versions of all power regen spells that didn’t exist.
Moved the level 25 DoT Lesser Mind Melt to 27.
Mentalism Specialization
The spec single target mez has changed: The level 23 mez as been lowered to 40 sec. The level 31 mez has been lowered to 50 sec. The level 41 mez has been lowered to 60 sec. The level 50 mez, Unmake Mind, has been removed.
Mercenary
Mercenaries have been given a forced full skill respec
Mercenaries have been given a forced realm ability respec
Mercenaries now get the climb wall ability, Climbing Spikes, for free at level 50.
The Charge realm ability has been removed from Mercenary’s trainable realm abilities and they instead get it for free at the following class levels: Level 30 – Charge 1 Level 35 – Charge 2 Level 40 – Charge 3 Level 45 – Charge 4 Level 50 – Charge 5
Light Tank Stances
Three new intrinsic archetype abilities are being added to Light Tanks this update. These abilities are “stances” that are permanent buffs each with its own benefits and downsides.
All stances cost 60% of MAX endurance to switch in to. This can potentially leave you stuck in a stance if you aren’t careful. Way of the Mercenary Default Stance. Gained at level 5. Accuracy is increased by 10%. No penalties. Way of the Soldier Damage Stance. Gained at level 30. Movement speed is reduced by 50%. Stacks with snare and root effects, and is not removed upon being rooted or snared. Always active while in Way of the Soldier. All melee swings will always ignore bladeturn spells. Increases chance of a critical hit by 20%. Increases melee damage dealt by 15% (this does not stack with Savages damage buff. Savage damage buff is superior and will supercede this ability). All damage taken from enemy melee and magical attacks is increased by 25%. Way of the Rogue Mobile Stance. Gained at level 45. Movement speed is increased by 15% Works in and out of combat, but does not stack with speed spells. Works within speedwarps. Both weapons have a 15% chance to proc a level 44 pet. Pet is killable with confuse and lasts 25 seconds. Weapon-proccing weapons will not proc while in this stance; aside from the stance’s own proc-pets. All melee damage dealt is reduced by 35%. All damage taken from melee and magical attacks is increased by 10%.
Dual Wield Specialization
Level 21 – Penumbra – Rear positional – rear snare removed, 26% attack speed debuff added, growth rate increased
Level 34 – Dark Tendrils – Anytime – growth rate decreased
Level 50 – Dark Shadows – Penumbra rear positional followup – 30% attack speed debuff replaced with 7s stun, growth rate increased
Slash Specialization
Level 39 – Backslash – Rear positional – rear snare removed, growth rate increased
Thrust Specialization
Level 29 – Pierce – Rear positional – rear snare removed, growth rate increased
Crush Specialization
Level 25 – Divine Hammer – Rear positional – rear snare removed, growth rate increased
Minstrel
Minstrels have been given a forced full skill respec
Instruments specialization
Added Crescendo, a realm–targeted, instant–cast, 7s duration, 130% speed buff at 34 Music. Target can still be rooted, snared, mezzed, or slowed in a speedwarp while under the effect of Crescendo but combat will not break the speed buff.
Great Crescendo, a realm– targeted, instant–cast, 9s duration, 160% speed buff at 44 music. Target can still be rooted, snared, mezzed, or slowed in a speedwarp while under the effect of Crescendo but combat will not break the speed buff.
The Group Pulse melee ablative chant has been changed. Cannot be cast on self. A single target 100% melee ablative. 2.8 sec cast, 60 RUT, 30 sec duration. Barrier of Sound, Level 30, absorbs 150 melee damage. Shield of Melody, Level 40, absorbs 225 melee damage. Wall of Song, level 50, absorbs 300 melee damage. The single target flute mez has had its duration reduced by 33% at all levels Level 50: from 29 to 20 seconds. Level 36: from 26 to 18 seconds. Level 24: from 20 to 14 seconds. Level 18: from 17 to 12 seconds. Level 9 : from 12 to 8 seconds. Please note that the flute mez spells effectively double their listed delve when determining spell duration. For instance, the level 50 version listed at 20s will apply like a 40s duration mez.
Necromancer
Necromancers have been given a forced full skill respec
Death Servant specialization
A new shade–cast PBAoE spell has been added as follows to the Death Servant specialization: Level 47 – Necrotic Conduit – 225 damage, 350 radius PBAoE – 20% power cost – 3s shade–cast, instant–cast by pet – shade must be within 250 range of pet The traditional level 47 PBAoE spell, Channeled Frenzy, is now trained at level 46 Death Servant specialization.
Nightshade
Nightshades have been given a forced full skill respec
Nightshades have been given a forced realm ability respec
Nightshades have had their spec points increased from 2.2 to 2.8 spec points.
Vanish is no longer a Realm ability option but has instead been added to the Stealth specialization.
Mastery of Stealth is no longer a Realm ability option but has instead been added to the Stealth specialization in the form of the new Shadow Run ability.
Assassins may now spec for the Determination and Strike Prediction realm abilities.
Assassins have had the Heightened Awareness, Blood Rage, and Subtlety abilities removed.
Remedy has been changed to a 5 minute RUT and no longer takes any hit points when used.
The Viper realm ability has had its values reduced as follows: Level 1 – 10% to 5% Level 2 – 20% to 10% Level 3 – 35% to 20% Level 4 – 50% to 30% Level 5 – 75% to 40%
Stealth specialization
Several changes have been made to the Stealth specialization so that speccing to level 50 is encouraged. A new ability, Shadow Run I-Shadow Run IX has been added at the following levels and values: Level 10 – Shadow Run I – instant cast – Permanent duration – 5% detection bonus Level 15 – Shadow Run II – instant cast – Permanent duration – 10% detection bonus Level 20 – Shadow Run III – instant cast – Permanent duration – 15% detection bonus Level 25 – Shadow Run IV – instant cast – Permanent duration – 20% detection bonus Level 30 – Shadow Run V – instant cast – Permanent duration – 25% detection bonus Level 35 – Shadow Run VI – instant cast – Permanent duration – 30% detection bonus Level 40 – Shadow Run VII – instant cast – Permanent duration – 35% detection bonus Also casts Shadow Run I – Permanent duration – 70% normal run speed while stealthed Level 45 – Shadow Run VIII – instant cast – Permanent duration – 40% detection bonus Also casts Shadow Run II – 85% normal run speed while stealthed Level 50 – Shadow Run IX – instant cast – Permanent duration – 45% detection bonus Also casts Shadow Run III – 100% normal run speed while stealthed Detect Hidden and Assassinate abilities have been removed from the specialization Save Fall V has been moved from 50 to 48 specialization A new ability, Overshadow, has been added at level 49 specialization Stealth an ally – 10s duration – Ally must be out of combat – Instant cast – 1000 range – Cannot be cast on self – Ally can move around but will unstealth when performing a combat action. The Vanish I realm ability is now obtainable at level 49 specialization A new ability, Blur, has been added at level 50 specialization Jumps to target’s position – Must be a player target (can be enemy or ally) – 1000 range – 90s RUT – Usable while rooted or snared but does not break the CC – Can be used while stealthed or unstealthed – Does no damage
Envenom specialization
Poisons are no longer items that are applied to equipped weapons but are now offensive proc abilities trained in the Evenom specialization. These offensive proc poisons will be instant-cast buffs that have a 100% chance to fire and cannot be resisted. These proc buffs can be put up and switched while stealthed and assassins will remain stealthed when casting them. When swinging 2 weapons with a poison proc up, players will only land 1 poison; however, when the poison is applied on the target, the poison proc buff will remain on the assassin – allowing them to switch targets and apply the same poison to the new target without having to put up another poison proc buff.
Poisons cannot be reapplied to a target until the previous application has ended or the target purges, unless stated otherwise. Poisons cannot be resisted and will always land for their full duration and value on the target.
There are 5 poison proc buff types: Effectiveness poison: melee dps + attack speed debuff Withering poison: disease + melee resistance debuff Stat debuff poison: weapon skill + all stats debuff Damaging poison: damage-over-times Shadowbind poison: snare Tranquilizing poison: mesmerization
All poisons have a RUT of 8s except for the Shadowbind and Tranquilizing poison. Shadowbind and Tranquilizing poison have unique RUTs of 8 seconds and 25 seconds, respectively.
for the Shadowbind and Tranquilizing poison. Effectiveness Poison: Debuffs the target’s effectiveness. Lowers the target’s damage dealt with all melee attacks and reduces their attack speed. This poison lasts 20 seconds. 3 Envenom – Minor Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 4% and attack speed by 5%. 13 Envenom – Weak Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 6% and attack speed by 10%. 23 Envenom – Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 10% and attack speed by 15%. 33 Envenom – Major Essence of Lethargy. Lowers melee damage dealt by 15% and attack speed by 20%. 43 Envenom – Swordbreaker. Lowers melee damage dealt by 20% and attack speed by 25%. Withering Poison: Applies a disease to the target that inhibits healing and lowers melee resistances. Diseased targets received heals are reduced by 50% and are snared. Disease prevents health regen. This poison lasts 15 seconds. 4 Envenom – Minor Widow Sting. Diseased, 15% slow and reduces strength by 5. 16 Envenom – Widow Sting. Diseased, 15% slow and reduces strength by 10. 26 Envenom – Widow Toxin. Diseased, 15% slow, reduces strength by 15, and lowers resistances to melee attacks by 5%. 36 Envenom – Widow Toxin. Diseased, 15% slow, reduces strength by 20, and lowers resistances to melee attacks by 10%. 46 Envenom – Widow Venom. Diseased, 15% slow, reduces strength by 25, and lowers resistances to melee attacks by 20%. Stat debuff Poison: Debuffs the target’s stats. The stats debuffed are Weaponskill, Dexterity, Strength, and Constitution. This poison will debuff all four stats with on application. This poisons lasts 30 seconds. 7 Envenom – Weakening Poison. Debuffs WS by 5% and stats by 13. 17 Envenom – Inhibiting Poison. Debuffs WS by 8% and stats by 24. 27 Envenom – Enervating Poison. Debuffs WS by 10% and stats by 30. 37 Envenom – Unnerving Poison. Debuffs WS by 14% and stats by 41. 47 Envenom – Touch of Death. Debuffs WS by 19% and stats by 60. Snare Poison: Snares the applied target for a set duration. This snare ignores root or snare immunities on the target and always applies for its full duration. This snare does not break upon damage. Unlike other poisons, snare poison can be reapplied to the target before its current duration has ended. 9 Envenom – Crippling Toxin. Snares the target by 15% for 4 seconds. 29 Envenom – Snaring Toxin. Snares the target by 35% for 6 seconds. 49 Envenom – Shadowbind. Snares the target by 60% for 9 seconds. Mez Poison Removed from Spymaster and added to Envenom. Mez poison has its own RUT of 25 seconds and does not share a RUT with any other poison. This poison will interrupt through bodyguard. Mez poison has a 500 radius and will always last its full duration on all targets, not counting dropoff duration reduction. 18 Envenom – Tranquilizing Gas - 5s duration PBAoE mez. 46 Envenom – Tranquilizing Miasma – 15s duration PBAoE mez. Damage-over-Time Poison: Applies a poison that does damage over time to the target. This poison lasts 20 seconds. 1 Envenom – Minor Lethal Poison. The target takes 9 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 5 Envenom – Lesser Lethal Poison. The target takes 15 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 10 Envenom – Lethal Poison. The target takes 22 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 15 Envenom – Major Lethal Poison. The target takes 29 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 20 Envenom – Greater Lethal Poison. The target takes 36 body damage every 3.9 seconds. 25 Envenom – Minor Lethal Venom. The target takes 36 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 22 matter damage every 3.9 seconds 30 Envenom – Lesser Lethal Venom. The target takes 38 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 30 matter damage every 3.9 seconds 35 Envenom – Major Lethal Venom. The target takes 42 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 39 matter damage every 3.9 seconds 40 Envenom – Greater Lethal Venom. The target takes 50 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 46 matter damage every 3.9 seconds. 45 Envenom – Insidious Lethal Venom. The target takes 72 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 55 matter damage every 3.9 seconds. 50 Envenom – Lifebane. The target takes 101 body damage every 3.9 seconds. A second poison is applied that does 60 matter damage every 3.9 seconds.
Armor Wither effects can no longer be resisted and last their full duration.
Level 8 – Pincer – Side positional – 1% ABS debuff replaced with 4s melee stun
Level 12 – Hamstring – Evade reactionary – bleed effect replaced with a 20% attack speed debuff
Level 18 – Garrote – Anytime – snare effect replaced with 14 damage bleed
Level 21 – Perforate Artery – Frontal stealth opener – growth rate and damage increased signficantly, 10s duration armor wither effect added
Level 25 – Achilles Heel – Now a rear positional – Attack speed debuff effect replaced with 10s duration armor wither, damage reduced slightly
Level 29 – Leaper – Now follows Pincer style – Bleed effect changed to 1% ABS debuff, damage increased
Level 39 – Stunning Stab – Follows Creeping Death style – Bleed effect replaced with 3% ABS debuff
Level 44 – Rib Separation – Now follows Achilles Heel style – Armor wither effect replaced with 6s melee stun
Level 45 – Incapacitate style removed
Level 46 – Neck Shot – Now an anytime style – damage has been reduced slightly, targets helm armor slot
Level 47 – Rib Shot – Now an anytime style – damage has been reduced slightly, targets chest armor slot
Level 48 – Hip Shot – Now an anytime style – damage has been reduced slightly, targets leggings armor slot
Level 50 – Ripper – Now follow Garrote style – Applies a 20s duration armor wither
Critical Strike specialization
Celtic Dual specialization
Level 15 – Thunderstorm – Detaunt anytime – Defensive bonus and growth rate reduced to bring in line with other detaunt styles
Level 21 – Hurricane – Rear positional – Rear snare removed, damage increased
Level 34 - Meteor Shower – Anytime – Growth rate decreased slightly
Pierce specialization
Level 12 – Black Widow – Rear positional – Rear snare removed, growth rate increased
Blades specialization
Level 34 – Revenging Blade – Rear positional – Rear snare removed, growth rate increased
Paladin
Paladins have been given a forced full skill respec
The Mastery of Healing realm ability has been added to Paladin’s list of trainable realm abilities.
The Wild Healing realm ability has been added to Paladin’s list of trainable realm abilities.
Shield specialization
Level 44 – Immobilize – Requires target’s side – 21s snare – Low-damage – High endurance cost – No offensive bonus – Low defensive bonus.
Level 46 – Cripple – Requires target’s back – 23s snare – Low-damage – High endurance cost – No offensive bonus – Low defensive bonus.
Chants specialization
The group endurance buff has changed back to a pulse: Level 2 – Chant of Endurance – Instant cast – 8s RUT – 2000 range – Target regenerates 3 endurance. Level 12 – Chant of Stamina – Instant cast – 8s RUT – 2000 range – Target regenerates 4 endurance. Level 22 – Chant of Persistence – Instant cast – 8s RUT – 2000 range – Target regenerates 5 endurance. Level 32 – Chant of Resilience – Instant cast – 8s RUT – 2000 range – Target regenerates 6 endurance. Level 42 – Chant of Perseverance – Instant cast – 8s RUT – 2000 range – Target regenerates 7 endurance.
A new group instant-heal has been added at the following levels and values: Level 2 – Holy Recovery – Instant cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 5% power – The target regains 25 hit points. Level 5 – Holy Renewal – Instant cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 5% power – The target regains 50 hit points. Level 12 – Holy Refreshment – Instant cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 10% power – The target regains 100 hit points. Level 20 – Holy Restoration – Instant cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 20% power – The target regains 180 hit points. Level 35 – Holy Rejuvenation – Instant cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 25% power – The target regains 250 hit points. Level 45 – Holy Revitalization – Instant cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 35% power – The target regains 300 hit points.
The group-target magic ablative chant has been removed.
A new single-target magic absorb buff has been added at the following levels and values: Level 30 – Barrier of Faith – 2.8s cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 30s duration – 10% power – Absorbs the next 300 magic damage on the target. Cannot be cast on self. Level 40 – Barrier of Virtue – 2.8s cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 30s duration – 15% power – Absorbs the next 375 magic damage on the target. Cannot be cast on self. Level 50 – Barrier of Temperance – 2.8s cast – 60s RUT – 1500 range – 30s duration – 20% power – Absorbs the next 500 magic damage on the target. Cannot be cast on self.
A new self-target base dexterity buff has been added at the following levels and values: Level 4 – Righteous Dexterity – 3.0s cast – 20m duration – 3 power – Increases dexterity by 12. Level 13 – Righteous Deftness – 3.0s cast – 20m duration – 11 power – Increases dexterity by 22. Level 21 – Righteous Proficiency – 3.0s cast – 20m duration – 16 power – Increases dexterity by 32. Level 31 – Virtuous Agility – 3.0s cast – 20m duration – 25 power – Increases dexterity by 42. Level 47 – Virtuous Fluidity – 3.0s cast – 20m duration – 43 power – Increases dexterity by 52.
A new single-target major heal has been added at the following levels and values: Level 5 – Major Restoration – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 5 power – Target regains 55 hit points. Level 8 – Major Recuperation – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 7 power – Target regains 82 hit points. Level 11 – Major Renewal – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 9 power – Target regains 109 hit points. Level 14 – Major Revival – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 11 power – Target regains 136 hit points. Level 18 – Major Resuscitation – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 14 power – Target regains 172 hit points. Level 25 – Major Reviction – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 19 power – Target regains 235 hit points. Level 33 – Major Refection – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 24 power – Target regains 307 hit points. Level 43 – Major Refocillation – 3.2s cast – 2000 range – 30 power – Target regains 396 hit points.
All group-target resistance chants have been removed.
All group-target multi-resist chants have been removed.
A new single-target resistance buff has been added at the following levels and values: Level 27 – Elemental Ward – 4.0s cast – 1500 range – 20m duration – 5% power – Increases all of the target’s magic resistances by 8%. Level 46 – Elemental Shield – 4.0s cast – 1500 range – 20m duration – 5% power – Increases all of the target’s magic resistances by 12%.
Two-Handed specialization
Level 34 - Obfuscate – Anytime – Growth rate decreased slightly
Level 44 – Two Moons – Onslaught side positional followup – growth rate increased
Level 50 – Sun and Moon – Doubler rear positional followup – growth rate increased
Ranger
Ranges have been given a forced full skill respec
All archers now receive the Remedy Realm Ability free at level 50 Remedy is on a 5 minute RUT, no longer has a hit point cost, and makes the user immune to poisons for 60s
Archery specialization
Critical Shots have had their damage increased by about 10% across the board. Critical Shots’ archer immunity penalty has been increased from -50% damage to -75%.
Standard Shots have had their cast speed reduced from 5s to 4.7s.
Elemental Shots have had their cast times reduced from 7s to 5.5s and damage types changed across the realms as follows: Hunter: Now gets Benthic (cold) and Tempestuous (spirit) shots. Ranger: Now gets Pyroclasmic (heat) and Entropic (energy) shots. Scout: Now gets Lithic (matter) and Somatic (body) shots.
Power shot has had its cast time reduced from 6s to 4.5s and is now modifiable by dexterity. Power Shot has had its damage increased by about 13% across the board. Power Shot now ignores but doesn’t pop bladeturn and cannot be blocked or intercepted Power shot now has a 30s RUT Power shot now checks and sets archer damage immunity
Rapid Fire shots have been changed to a 90 degree frontal cone AoE (FAE) 700 radius, same damage, same cast speed
A new root shot has been added at the following levels: Level 18 - Bola Shot 1 – 12s duration root – 4s cast – 2100 range Level 28 - Bola Shot 2 – 20s duration root – 4s cast – 2100 range Level 38 - Bola Shot 3 – 28s duration root– 4s cast – 2100 range Level 48 - Bola Shot 4 – 36s duration root – 4s cast – 2100 range
A new snare shot has been added at the following level: Level 45 – Patella Shot – 15s duration melee hinder – 20s RUT – 4s cast – 2100 range
Point Blank Shots have been removed and replaced with three new versions of Point Blank shot: Level 16 – Point Blank Shot 1 – 74 damage – 2s cast – 90s RUT – 500 range – Fires a self bladeturn pulsing spell for 30s, 10s frequency. Level 26 – Point Blank Shot 2 – 134 damage – 2s cast – 90s RUT – 500 range – Fires a self bladeturn pulsing spell for 30s, 8s frequency. Level 36 – Point Blank Shot 3 – 195 damage – 2s cast – 90s RUT – 500 range – Fires a self bladeturn pulsing spell for 30s, 6s frequency.
Poison shots have been removed.
Acid shots have had their range reduced to 1500 and are now 350 radius AoE shots.
Siege Shots have had their damage increased: Siege Shot 1 – Damage increased from 2 to 7 Seige Shot 2 – Damage increased from 7 to 21 Siege Shot 3 – Damage increased from 15 to 42 Siege Shot 4 – Damage increased from 21 to 60 Siege Shot 5 – Damage increased from 26 to 75 Siege Shot 6 – Damage increased from 37 to 90 Siege Shot 7 – Damage increased from 42 to 105 Siege Shot 8 – Damage increased from 47 to 125
Long Shots now have a cast-speed debuff linked to them at the following values: Long Shot 1 – 3% cast speed debuff – 40s duration Long Shot 2 – 6% cast speed debuff – 40s duration Long Shot 3 – 9% cast speed debuff – 40s duration Long Shot 4 – 12% cast speed debuff – 40s duration Long Shot 5 – 15% cast speed debuff – 40s duration Long Shot 6 – 18% cast speed debuff – 40s duration Long Shot 7 – 21% cast speed debuff – 40s duration Long Shot 8 – 24 |
that all of the enemies are the same. If Bokoblin block all of the same ways that the more powerful Stalfos can block then what makes the enemies different? The best solution to this problem is finding new ways to update enemy design.
Skyward Sword has a good example, but this enemy only appears a few times in the game. There is a bird enemy (called a Furnix in the game) with a long tail. When the bird lowers its tail, you can use the whip to pull the bird to the ground and then attack it with your sword.
In a similar fashion, new enemies could be designed that are immune to all (or most) of your attacks unless certain requirements are met. Skyward Sword and other Legend of Zelda games already feature many enemies that use this design, but they are almost always saved for special situations. I think these more interesting enemies should become more common place in the Legend of Zelda series.
Yes, you can have Wii Motion Plus-style sword controls on your Nintendo 3DS.
In the end, updating the enemy designs is only half of what Skyward Sword accomplished. If a handheld game is really going to achieve the same kind of gameplay that Skyward Sword introduced then it really needs to feature the same advanced sword controls that are present in Skyward Sword. Unfortunately, it’s common knowledge that the advanced sword controls are impossible without Wii Motion Plus, right?
I’m not so convinced.
Everyone says the controls cannot be done without the Wii remote, but are they really so different that the same effect cannot be achieved with an analog stick? I’m not a game developer, but I do not see any reason why Link could not be made to swing his sword in the direction that a second analog stick is pointed.
For example, if you tilt the second (or right) analog stick to the left, Link performs a right-to-left horizontal swing. If you tilt the analog stick up, Link performs a bottom-to-top vertical swing. If you tilt the analog stick at an angle to the top-right edge, Link performs a bottom-left to top-right diagonal slice.
I believe this type of control scheme would work without alienating players who cannot (for physical reasons) or will not (because they prefer traditional controls) use the Wii remote to play the game. I’ve grown to like the motion controls in Skyward Sword, so I am not convinced this style of control would be more fun than the motion controls. I do, however, believe this style of control would be more precise than the motion controls. I also believe it would work wonderfully on a handheld platform.
Would Nintendo actually do it?
The bad news is that the Nintendo 3DS does not include a second analog stick in-the-box. There is an add-on that adds a second analog stick, but I’m not sure how much Nintendo really plans to support it. I’m also not convinced that Nintendo has any intention of trying to replicate the advanced sword controls on the Nintendo 3DS.
Even if they wanted to replicate the controls, I’m not sure they’d use an analog stick to achieve that goal. Nintendo has not often made use of dual-analog styles of control, and that’s exactly what this would be. It may be too complicated for their (or Miyamoto’s) taste.
Regardless, I think everyone needs to drop the misbelief that the Skyward Sword sword combat cannot work without Wii Motion Plus. It can work, and I think this is something the series needs. The new advanced sword controls in Skyward Sword are one of the most important changes to the Legend of Zelda series in its 25 year history. Such an important change needs to be introduced into the upcoming handheld Legend of Zelda games.With just 3 months after its official release, and weeks after its Competitive patch, Blizzard will officially kick-off Overwatch’s Esports potential in its Overwatch World Cup.
Blizzard Entertainment’s newest Arena FPS hit, and their first IP since StarCraft, Overwatch is now officially set for the Esports field as Blizzard themselves reveal their plans for the first ever Overwatch World Cup. Described by the Game Development titan as an “international exhibition pitting teams from multiple nations and regions against one another in a battle for global glory“, the Overwatch World Cup will be an exhibition tournament featuring teams from 3 international regions, Europe, the Americas and the Asia Pacific.
Being Blizzard’s first major event for Overwatch, the qualification format will follow a non-traditional, community sourced phase, dubbed as the Voting Phase, wherein select players from the chosen nations and regions will be nominated for the playerbase to choose as their country’s representative.
Each voted player will then form their country’s roster, and proceed to compete in the Regional Qualifiers, where the ultimate winners will fly to BlizzCon 2016, all expenses paid, for the main event.
In addition however, countries such as the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand will automatically earn their spots as the Overwatch World Cup 2016 finals on BlizzCon 2016, for the reason being Blizzard considering “a variety of factors, including server locations, regional infrastructure and connectivity, and other geographical considerations”.
A total of 16 teams from each region will be chosen, with 6 from the Asia-Pacific (including the 1 each for China, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand), 4 from the Americas (including the 1 each for USA, Canada and Brazil) and 6 from the European region.
The Overwatch World Cup 2016 will not feature a prize pool, but rather, all the qualified teams that will fly to BlizzCon 2016 will be receiving an appearance fee as well as a free trip to the annual Blizzard convention. The voting phase for the Overwatch World Cup 2016 will begin this August 11, 2016, with the online matches for voted players to start this coming September, BlizzCon 2016 will be on November 4-5, 2016 at the Anaheim Convention Center, Anaheim Ohio.Disallow multiple calls to an object’s constructor to ensure that the encapsulated data cannot be mutated even if an object is meant to be immutable. The goal is it to ensure that developers can trust their intuition about how things work instead of reading the documentation and to provide helpful errors from the compiler and runtime.
PHP currently supports multiple calls to the magic __construct method of classes, this is in line with all other methods of a PHP class. This means that the following PHP code is perfectly legal. It illustrates both multiple calls to a constructor and explicit invocation of a constructor on the existing object (which in effect are multiple calls too):
class A { public function __construct ( ) { echo self :: class, "
" ; } } class B extends A { public function __construct ( ) { parent :: __construct ( ) ; echo self :: class, "
" ; parent :: __construct ( ) ; } } $b = new B ; $b -> __construct ( ) ;
Output of the above code is as follows:
A B A A B A
However, support for multiple calls to the constructor is highly unintuitive for developers and can result in subtle bugs or misuse of objects. An example would be any class that is meant to be immutable.
final class User { private $id ; public function __construct ( int $id ) { assert ( $id > 0 ) ; $this -> id = $id ; } public function isRoot ( ) : bool { return $this -> id === 1 ; } } final class Area51 { private $user ; public function __construct ( User $user ) { // No need for deep cloning since our user class is immutable. $this -> user = $user ; } public function access ( ) { if ( $this -> user -> isRoot ( ) === false ) { echo 'Not Authorized!' ; } else { echo 'Welcome to Area51!' ; } } } $user = new User ( 42 ) ; $area51 = new Area51 ( $user ) ; $area51 -> access ( ) ; // Not Authorized! $user -> __construct ( 1 ) ; $area51 -> access ( ) ; // Welcome to Area51!
As illustrated, the functionality allows breaking of the encapsulation of objects at runtime. It is true that there are many ways to achieve the same thing and that the likelihood that a developer does anything like the above by accident is very low. But there is also no argument why this requires support other than misusing the constructor of a class for things it was never intended to be used for. This is most apparent with parent::__construct() calls from child classes where the PHP language specification states that:
— php language specification: constructors A constructor should not call its base-class constructor more than once.
Leaving the problem to the developers themselves. It is possible for developers to protect their objects against such unintended usage by asserting that all properties are null but this is unnecessary boilerplate code in a language that is already very verbose.
We propose that multiple calls to the constructor of an object should result in an error instead of breaking encapsulation. This means in effect that the only idiomatic way to create a new instance is via the new keyword. Child classes are only permitted to call their parent constructor once and further calls are going to result in an error too.
This means in effect that the code examples posted earlier would result in errors, however, another code example that was posted on internals as a legitimate use case for calling the constructor method directly would continue to work as is:
final class DbConnection { private $dsn ; private $initializer ; public function __construct ( string $dsn ) { $this -> dsn = $dsn ; // socket stuff happens here, much like with PDO } public function query ( string $queryString ) : array { ( $this -> initializer ) ( ) ; // irrelevant from here on return [ 'query' => $queryString, 'dsn' => $this -> dsn ] ; } public static function lazyInstance ( string $dsn ) : self { $instance = ( new ReflectionClass ( self :: class ) ) -> newInstanceWithoutConstructor ( ) ; $instance -> initializer = function ( ) use ( $dsn, $instance ) { $instance -> __construct ( $dsn ) ; $instance -> initializer = function ( ) { } ; } ; return $instance ; } } $instance = DbConnection :: lazyInstance ('mysql://something' ) ; var_dump ( $instance, $instance -> query ( 'SELECT * FROM foo' ), $instance -> query ( 'SELECT * FROM bar' ) ) ;
The constructor is called once only in this example, hence, the call is permitted and only subsequent calls are going to result in an error.Running back Kenyan Drake (17) and Alabama are the No. 1 team in the nation, but would the Crimson Tide win the College Football Playoff if it were to happen today? (Photo: John David Mercer, USA TODAY Sports)
PredictionMachine.com's Director of Research and Analytics, John Ewing, takes a look at what the College Football Playoff could look like through 50,000 simulations of Football Four's most recent four-team Playoff Projection, a bracket determined each week via a 16-person expert panel. Follow John on Twitter @JohnEwing for more notes from his analysis and to let him know what else you may like to see with these projections.
How this works:
The Predictalator uses current rosters and strength-of-schedule and efficiency-adjusted team and player stats (weighted slightly more toward recent games), to play every game 50,000 times before it's actually played. For this analysis, we are tracking how likely a team is to make it to any level of the College Football Playoff, if it were to go into effect this season.
Football Four Playoff Projection Simulation
In the first semifinal, Alabama, the No. 1 team in our Power Rankings, defeats Ohio State (assumes Braxton Miller plays). Ohio State's greatest strength on offense is its rushing game. The Buckeyes are sixth in the nation with 311 yards/game (third in rushing efficiency in our Power Rankings). The Tide is able to neutralize this strength with its run defense, which is first in defensive rush efficiency in the country. Alabama, led by A.J. McCarron, wins on average by more than a touchdown. (Note: This was also our original preseason projection for this season's BCS National Championship game.)
In the second semifinal, Oregon's run-happy offense squares off against Clemson's passing attack. Clemson does not have an answer defensively for Oregon, but the Ducks are able to slow down Tajh Boyd with their fifth-ranked pass defense. Oregon rushes to a win in a high-scoring affair. Also, though Clemson's résumé may look strong now, our Power Rankings only have the Tigers as the 12th-best team in the country.
After 50,000 simulations, the most likely National Champion is Oregon. Oregon wins 34.0% of all the simulated tournaments. In the most likely National Championship game, Oregon defeats Alabama 51.9% of the time by an average score of 34-33. Although Alabama has a slight edge in our Power Rankings, Oregon wins the matchup on a neutral field a little more often than not. As Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel has clearly shown, this Alabama team is susceptible to teams that run at a high tempo and have playmakers at every offensive and defensive level.
Based on the analysis, here is the projected College Football Playoff bracket:
Semifinals
1 seed Alabama vs. 4 seed Ohio State
Alabama wins 63.6% of the time by an average score of 32-23.
2 seed Oregon vs. 3 seed Clemson
Oregon wins 64.0% of the time by an average score of 42-31.
National Championship
Alabama vs. Oregon
Oregon wins 51.9% of the time by an average score of 34-33.
Odds for each team to advance to and win the championship.
Team Semifinals Championship Alabama 63.6% 28.3% Ohio State 36.4% 16.4% Oregon 64.0% 34.0% Clemson 36.0% 21.3%
***
According to a Prediction Machine analysis of the Football Four Playoff Projection, Oregona and quarterback Marcus Mariota would win the College Football Playoff were it to be held today. (Photo: Scott Olmos, USA TODAY Sports)
***
PredictionMachine.com's Playoffs
Now, what would the playoffs look like based on PredictionMachine.com's Power Rankings?
First, the bracket would look a little different, with Texas A&M and Georgia replacing Ohio State and Clemson. Although this is not likely to occur due to the fact that three of these teams are in the same conference, we actually rank six of the top seven teams in the country as hailing from the SEC. At least two, if not three or more, teams from the SEC would deserve to make a college football playoff like this.
Second, the semifinal matchups are closer. Alabama no longer wins by more than a touchdown and although Oregon's scoring increases, it does not win by as much, either. In the end, Oregon still faces Alabama in the most likely championship game, winning it all 51.9% of the time by an average score of 34-33.
Semifinals
1 seed Alabama vs. 4 seed Georgia
Alabama wins 56.6% of the time by an average score of 37-32.
2 seed Oregon vs. 3 seed Texas A&M
Oregon wins 60.1% of the time by an average score of 47-38.
National Championship
Alabama vs. Oregon
Oregon wins 51.9% of the time by an average score of 34-33.
Football Four is on Twitter @TheFootballFour. Prediction Machine is on Twitter @PredictMachine.
THIS WEEK'S 10 BEST GAMESThe evidence seemed overwhelming.
A Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy was caught on video stealing trim from an impounded vehicle. Another deputy was captured taking cash after a motorist was shaken down to avoid his car being towed. A third was caught on tape rummaging through an SUV at a tow yard and accused of pilfering designer sunglasses from it.
The case was built around an informant who had worked for the FBI — a tow truck driver given the code name “Captain America.”
The secret recordings he made were enough for local prosecutors to bring corruption charges against three deputies and a sheriff’s parking enforcement officer, alleging bribery and theft.
But, last year, when the first case went to court, the star witness dropped a bombshell.
“Captain America,” it turned out, wasn’t the man sheriff’s investigators thought he was.
Albino Mendoza has been held in an ICE detention facility after helping federal agents target L.A. County sheriff's deputies in a corruption investigation. Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
Albino Mendoza’s instincts were to steer clear when an FBI agent approached him in 2012.
The tow truck driver was living in the country illegally and had a criminal history that included convictions for burglary, credit card fraud, and other crimes, court and FBI records show.
He had been previously deported back to Mexico and then returned to California to live under a fake name, Damian Castillo. With his new identity, he had begun driving for tow companies in the constellation of small, industrial cities that ring Los Angeles to the south. He got married and had three children.
But his wife urged him to work with the FBI, which was investigating allegations of corruption in the county’s tow truck industry. Agents, she said, might be able to help him earn legal status in the country in exchange for his cooperation.
He agreed to become an FBI informant, but kept his real identity and past hidden.
A few months later, he came clean with his handler, Special Agent Jason Dalton, telling him his real name, his past crimes and his illegal status in the country.
Dalton alerted higher-ups in the bureau and the U.S. attorney’s office of the deception and asked if Mendoza’s credibility was too badly compromised to continue as an informant. He was told to keep using him.
For more than two years, Mendoza told Dalton stories of massive corruption. Tow companies, he said, were paying off local politicians and sheriff’s officials with five- and six-figure bribes. Dalton found the claims to be “completely unsubstantiated" and not credible, said FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller.
Secret recordings made by Albino Mendoza were enough for local prosecutors to bring corruption charges against three deputies and a sheriff’s parking enforcement officer, alleging bribery and theft. Secret recordings made by Albino Mendoza were enough for local prosecutors to bring corruption charges against three deputies and a sheriff’s parking enforcement officer, alleging bribery and theft. Secret recordings made by Albino Mendoza were enough for local prosecutors to bring corruption charges against three deputies and a sheriff’s parking enforcement officer, alleging bribery and theft. (L.A. County Sheriff's Dept.)
Then, in July 2014, the informant piqued the agent’s interest. He said a group of sheriff’s deputies and parking enforcement officers were preying on motorists.
One deputy, he said, had swiped a PlayStation game console from the impounded car of a homicide victim. Another pilfered car stereos. Others shook down motorists for cash to release impounded vehicles — and Mendoza admitted he had participated.
FBI technicians fitted one of Mendoza’s work shirts with a hidden camera. Over the next few months, Dalton instructed him to record multiple encounters with some of the sheriff’s employees, according to FBI memos, court records and videos.
One night, Deputy Manny Zavala called Mendoza to tell him a motorist was willing to pay cash to avoid being towed, according to FBI memos written by Dalton. The informant collected $380 from the driver and later recorded a meeting with Zavala at a Huntington Park gas station parking lot where he paid the deputy half of the money.
And Mendoza reported to Dalton that two parking enforcement officers arranged for him to collect $190 from a motorist who faced being towed, according to another memo. One of the officers, Marie Cruz, later sidled up to Mendoza.
“So can I get my half?” she said, according to the memo. On a different night, Mendoza recorded a rendezvous where he paid Cruz $160 — her share of bribes paid by two motorists earlier in the evening, FBI records show.
Excerpt of a recording from an FBI sting in August 2014 that targeted an L.A. County sheriff's deputy.
In another exchange, the hidden recorder ran as Deputy Tony Guerrero removed the trim from a vehicle before allowing Mendoza to tow it, FBI memos show.
Dalton set up a sting targeting Deputy Heriberto Fernandez, who Mendoza claimed liked to steal expensive sunglasses and other things from impounded cars, according to FBI reports. At the agent’s direction, Mendoza led the deputy to an SUV equipped with hidden cameras. Inside were a pair of Oakley sunglasses and an envelope with $1,310.
The deputy picked up the cash but worried aloud that nearby security cameras might be watching, according to a transcript of the FBI recording filed in court.
“Hey, give me five bills out of that, all right, dog? Keep the rest,” Fernandez told the informant at one point, suggesting they split the cash, according to the transcript. “Five, six, seven — you keep 800 bucks.”
When Dalton searched the car the following morning, the sunglasses were gone. But the cash was still there.
In the end, none of it amounted to the type of large-scale corruption that federal prosecutors typically handle. The FBI opted to shut down its investigation.
But when sheriff’s investigators caught wind of the FBI’s inquiry, Dalton handed over the evidence he and Mendoza had collected.
The recordings became the crux of the case sheriff’s detectives brought to local prosecutors. In 2015, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed criminal charges against the three deputies and parking enforcement officer.
A guard on security rounds at Adelanto Detention Facility. Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times
Prosecutors called “Damian Castillo” to the stand last year to testify about the wrongdoing he had witnessed.
But the focus of the preliminary hearing soon turned to the informant’s own murky past.
Richard Hirsch, a veteran defense attorney, asked if he had come to the United States illegally and been deported after getting convicted of a drug offense. Begrudgingly, the informant admitted it was true.
Hirsch accused him of helping the FBI in hopes agents would help him become a legal resident in the U.S. Growing flustered, the informant denied the claim.
The attorney had one more card to play.
“What is your true name?” he asked.
“Albino Manuel Mendoza,” the informant replied.
The revelation came as news to Sgt. Amy Hanson, one of the lead sheriff’s investigators on the case. Hanson later testified she had no idea until that moment that her key witness had a significant criminal record and was living in the country illegally under a fake name.
FBI agents gave their informant the code name “Captain America.” The informant – known in bureau parlance as a “confidential human source” or CHS – and a sheriff’s parking enforcement officer allegedly shared bribes paid by motorists hoping to avoid their cars from being towed. Left, FBI agents gave their informant the code name “Captain America.” Right, The informant – known in bureau parlance as a “confidential human source” or CHS – and a sheriff’s parking enforcement officer allegedly shared bribes paid by motorists hoping to avoid their cars from being towed.
Dalton, she said, had introduced the informant as Damian Castillo and she had no reason to doubt the agent. A transcript of the FBI recording from that initial meeting with Dalton confirms that the agent introduced the informant as Castillo.
For his part, Dalton testified he could not recall alerting sheriff’s investigators to the informant’s true name but believed he did so because it “would have been useful” to their case.
Even during his testimony, however, the agent continued to refer to Mendoza as Castillo.
“I’m used to calling him Castillo,” Dalton insisted. “I think I would be more comfortable calling him Castillo.”
By then, Mendoza’s credibility was destroyed.
Prosecutors didn’t even call him as a witness as the first case went to trial last year.
Superior Court Judge Chet L. Taylor acquitted Fernandez, the deputy accused of stealing the sunglasses. Calling the case “a rotten egg,” the judge sharply criticized both Dalton’s investigation and the informant.
The footage captured in the sting didn’t show who took the sunglasses, which were never recovered. The judge recited the informant’s lengthy rap sheet of past convictions and deceptions.
“This is a guy who is not credible, not credible at all,” Taylor concluded.
I’m used to calling him Castillo. I think I would be more comfortable calling him Castillo. FBI agent Jason Dalton
FBI agent Jason Dalton leaves the stage after attending a May 2015 press conference at the downtown Federal Building. Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
The rest of the corruption cases soon crumbled. Prosecutors announced they would drop misdemeanor petty theft charges against Guerrero, who was accused of stealing car parts.
Prosecutors dropped the bribery charges against the remaining deputy, Zavala, and the parking officer, Cruz. Zavala pleaded no contest to petty theft and Cruz to grand theft. Both avoided jail.
Fernandez and Guerrero remain in the Sheriff’s Department, Sheriff Jim McDonnell said in an interview. The accusations against the deputies are being dealt with “administratively,” said McDonnell, who declined to elaborate, citing state privacy laws. Zavala and Cruz no longer work for the Sheriff's Department.
A lawyer for Cruz declined to comment. Lawyers for the three deputies criticized how the FBI handled the informant and the confusion over his identity.
“At its most benign, it was sloppiness by an agent. At its most sinister, it was a distortion of the criminal justice process,” said attorney Vicki Podberesky.
Dalton declined requests for comment. Eimiller, the FBI spokeswoman, said Dalton dealt with the informant and sheriff’s investigators appropriately.
Brandon Fox, who recently left his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the public corruption unit that oversaw Dalton’s case, said sheriff’s investigators should have done more to learn the truth about the informant.
“The Sheriff’s Department had the obligation to perform its own investigation,” he said in an interview. “It needed to follow its own rules for determining the credibility of its sources.”
McDonnell defended his investigators.
“In general, if you get a case from another law enforcement agency, you give credence to the fact that it is coming from seasoned professionals,” the sheriff said.
Mendoza has been released from the Adelanto Detention Facility. Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times
Mendoza wasn’t around to see the cases fall apart.
While he worked as an informant for Dalton, immigration officials had agreed not to go after him. But a few weeks after his real identity was revealed in court, Mendoza was driving alone when immigration agents pulled him over.
He was sent to a detention facility a few hours outside of Los Angeles in the Mojave Desert, where he spent the next six months. While he was locked up, his wife gave birth to their fourth child.
An immigration judge released him in December and will ultimately decide whether he should be deported.
Wearing a location tracker strapped to his ankle, Mendoza spends most of his days at home, broke and bitter. A $5,000 payment the FBI had given him for his services was spent long ago. Mendoza claims Dalton promised to help him obtain legal residence; Dalton denies making such a promise.
Looking back on it now, Mendoza said, “I should have just minded my own business.”
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joel.rubin@latimes.com | Twitter: @joelrubin
matt.hamilton@latimes.com | Twitter: @MattHjourno
ALSO
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Ex-L.A. Sheriff Lee Baca to stay out of prison while he appeals his convictionPurolator Inc. is a Canadian courier that is 91% owned by Canada Post,[2] 7% owned by Barry Lapointe Holdings Ltd. and 2% by others.
The company was originally organized as Trans Canada Couriers, Ltd. In 1967, it was acquired by the US manufacturer of oil and air filters Purolator of Fayetteville, North Carolina (founded as Motor Improvements Incorporated in 1923)[3]—the name was originally an abbreviated form of "pure oil later".[4] In 1987, the company returned to Canadian ownership. Although it retained the Purolator name, it has since had no connection with the oil filter business.
Purolator has partnered with UPS for deliveries outside of Canada.
Cargojet Airways operates Boeing 727, Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 aircraft for Purolator.
Unicell Quicksider [ edit ]
A Purolator hybrid electric vehicle
On September 24, 2007, Purolator Inc. introduced the Unicell Quicksider, a prototype full-electric vehicle, lightweight urban delivery vehicle, developed by a consortium led by Toronto-based Unicell Limited[5] in partnership with ArvinMeritor, Battery Engineering and Test Services Inc.; Bodycote Material Testing; Electrovaya Inc.; PMG Technologies Inc.; Purolator Courier Ltd.; Southwestern Energy; and the Transportation Development Centre of Transport Canada.[6][7]We see it every election: a map of the United States, each state color coded red or blue according to whether voters swung Republican or Democrat.
But as we all know, infographics can lie: a 51/49 split between Republicans and Democrats is so neck-and-neck that it seems ridiculous to color the whole state red. It’s just not an accurate representation of how people are voting.
So designers try to split the difference, mixing the red voters and blue voters by state until they have a purple blob that they feel better represents the true political temperature of a region.
See the full series here. Lawrence Weru/Medium
But there’s a problem with purple in election maps. Our brains can’t actually tell how blue or red a shade of purple is by itself. And our perception is skewed by surrounding colors. A purple blob surrounded by red looks like a “redder” purple to us than that same color purple surrounded by blue. So our brains see a district that is going Republican, when it actually might be going Democrat, or vice versa.
According to Lawrence Weru, who studied election maps during the 2012 presidential elections while at Florida State University, this is why purple election maps are misleading. But there’s a solution. By adding an appropriate amount of green to each blob, we can neutralize the color purple from our election maps. Districts will appear redder or bluer according to how many Republicans or Democrats are voting in them, but neutral states will be white or gray.
There’s a big difference, and as Weru notes, this technique allows our eyes to easily identify a 51/49 voting split in a way that a purple blob never could. Read more about how Weru color-balances election maps on here.The House Judiciary seems to have pulled from a grab bag in scheduling the next hearing in its series reviewing various aspects of copyright law for reform. Tomorrow's session is titled "Moral Rights, Termination Rights, Resale Royalty, and Copyright Term," covering four very distinct areas of law and policy.
How is this going to work? It's hard to say. Probably not very well. The hearing structure allows a handful of witnesses to give very brief explanations of their views, but the question-and-answer format hasn't always been very productive. In the past, we've seen lawmakers in the committee raise pet issues instead of focusing on the topics on the agenda—take for example last month's hearing on the first sale doctrine, which included numerous questions about the unrelated issue of "piracy."
Moreover, in the absence of real public feedback during these hearings, the committee has sought to represent the public interest by inviting testimony from “both” sides of an imagined dichotomy. Hearings include witnesses from, say, a big company and a small company, a telecom and a publisher, or a copyright licensor and a licensee. This sometimes provides a good impression of balance, but on a panel addressing four separate issues, the odds seem long. It is also often the case that these “sides” don’t include anyone who represents the public interest.
But let's not pass judgment before the hearing even takes place. For those who are watching the hearing, here is a primer on the four issues up for discussion:
Copyright Term
The length of copyright terms is an important issue that is very distinct from the other three being discussed. Our current term—95 years for corporate works, 70 years after the life of the author for others—is far too long. Worse, earlier policy decisions, such as the retroactive extension of terms on works already created, have been made without the support of empirical data. Though copyright should be fact-based policy, too often debate happens in a reality-free zone.
A term that is too long diminishes the public domain, creates a massive problem of orphan works, and exacerbates problems with archiving materials. Thankfully, not since the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act have there been any serious proposals to extend the term further. But we should acknowledge that our effectively-perpetual terms create many more problems than they solve, do little if anything to promote innovation, and thus should be rolled back.
Resale Royalty
Because of the first-sale doctrine, the secondary markets for copyrighted works don't generally produce any income for the original authors of those works. Most notably, the sale of a painting can bring in millions of dollars, all of which goes to the shrewd collector who purchased it in the first place.
Lawmakers have at various times proposed to address this situation with a resale royalty that would be paid to the original artist on every sale of a given work. The Copyright Office has explored this question in two reports, one in 1992, and another last year. As of the most recent report, the Copyright Office acknowledged that there are some important missing data points to collect—information about art markets and industry norms—before considering any particular proposal.
Moral Rights
By and large, United States copyright law does not include the concept of "moral rights," or legal ability for an artist to control things like attribution or integrity of their work (or a copy of that work) after it is no longer in her possession. American copyright policy is primarily an economic one, and for the most part the owner of a work or copy of a work has free rein to do with it what she wants. For example, most artists cannot legally object to the presentation (or even destruction) of their works once they are sold.
There is one major but narrow exception for visual artists, codified in section 106A of the Copyright Act. That section, added in 1990, grants visual artists limited legal rights to claim authorship, to prevent misapplied claims of authorship, and to prevent the distortion or destruction of certain works.
The Constitution allows Congress to make copyright and patent laws specifically to promote the progress of science and the useful arts. Congress should be careful to ensure that any moral rights proposals work towards that goal, and certainly that they do not run afoul of the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees.
Termination Rights
Termination rights give an opportunity for authors who have transferred the copyright in their work to reclaim that copyright after a set period of time. These terminations can be confusing and necessarily require revisiting deals made decades in the past. The results have been inconsistent in the courts.
Termination rights are important because copyright terms are too long. Without termination rights, whomever receives a transferred copyright can control the fate and availability of a work for a century or more (even when they no longer care about it). Artists, however, often want to reclaim their works and continue to exploit them. This leads to a situation where some of the same industry groups that have sought to extend copyright term, such as the Recording Industry Association of America have also at times worked to limit termination rights.
***
As even this basic introduction shows, the Judiciary Committee has bitten off a lot of agenda for tomorrow's hearing. We'll report back how it did on covering these issues.Studies show that men like women who wear less makeup. pic.twitter.com/clk7MRa57i — Google Facts (@GoogleFacts) March 15, 2016
Google Facts is one of the most important accounts to follow on Twitter. How else would we know that a man named Ronald McDonald robbed a Wendy's in 2005, that British people are drunk in over 75% of their Facebook pictures, and that there are enough preservatives in Doritos to mummify a small dog? A few days ago, however, Google Facts copped backlash for tweeting that men prefer women who wear less makeup. This is not a funny thing to throw into a dinner conversation, and it's not useful for women who wear makeup because — shocker — they like it. It's also not even true. What most people mean when they say "I don't like makeup" is "I only like painstakingly applied makeup in natural hues." Shout-out to the guys who chimed in to actually admit this.
The fact-of-the-matter character of the tweet made it perfectly ripe for mockery, and women wasted no time in taking advantage of this. Fact: women don't exist for the male gaze. No studies needed.
@GoogleFacts studies show I don't give a shit — axelle (@magicfanny101) March 15, 2016
@GoogleFacts studies show women don't exist for men's boners — guacsnotglocks (@guacsnotglocks) March 15, 2016
@GoogleFacts So if I cake on my make up stupid ass men will leave me alone? — Brenda Bea (@MsBrendaBea) March 15, 2016
RT : @GoogleFacts Studies show that men like women who wear less makeup. pic.twitter.com/jzmB7N97dW — Jesus Christa (@cwistah) March 15, 2016
Credits
Text Hannah Ongley
Image via Twitter[Content Note: Discussion and imagery of fat hatred; racism; transphobia; dehumanization; appropriation; Othering.]Every year, I end up writing a post about offensive Halloween costumes, whether it's costumes that uphold the rape culture; treating stereotypical markers of an(other) ethnicity as a costume ; or some other gross manifestation of Othering for which Halloween is used an excuse.Yesterday, Shaker Mod aforalpha emailed me this article about the Sikh Coalition having successfully persuaded Walmart and RiteAid to stop selling "turban and beard" Halloween costumes. I am thrilled that they were successful, and annoyed they had to address this contemptible shit in the first place.Plus: For every win some marginalized group has in stopping major retailers |
report.
The evidence was found in June 2012 when a Syrian pilot flew a MiG-21 from Syria to King Hussein airport in Jordan. Analysts found the MiG-21 could be flown remotely and could "carry and dispense a 'deadly volume' of chemical warfare agents," according to Flight Global's report.
President Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons would force the U.S. to get involved with the Syrian civil war. A report of retrofitting a MiG-21 goes along with other reports of additional activity at the sites where the Syrian army stocked their chemical weapons like the deadly nerve agent, Sarin.
The details on the system built onto the MiG-21 to carry chemical weapons are not known. It was expected the Syrians could simply adapt bombs to carry and dispense chemical weapons and make sure the explosive distribute and not destroy the chemical agents.
It's also fascinating to read that they could build a remote system into a MiG-21 fighter. That is a not a simply feat for an air force like Syria's. They Syrian military is known for their air defense network, not their unmanned flight capabilities. Again, it will be interesting to monitor how effective that system might be and how it works.
Flight Global's Stephen Trimble reported how the evidence of the Syrians adapting their fighters to carry chemical weapons is making the Israelis nervous. Israeli Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel has said the Israelis are preparing themselves "with potential threats" to include chemical weapons "flowing" out of Israel.About
Welcome one and all to the Sanctum Polis – Rest Eternal Memory Kickstarter! Many of you have been waiting for this day. Some are just happening upon us. We are thankful to every single one of you.
We need your vote!
Follow this link: Help us get on Steam
We also accept PayPal!
Here's the link: Quadrangle Games - PayPal
Please note that, though we will grant backer rewards to PayPal backers, due to the limitations on our reward tiers, we cannot guarantee a reward slot until the funds have been successfully received by Quadrangle Games, Inc. If you want a limited reward tier, please email us at Feedback@sanctumpolis.com prior to sending your payment. Please use the corresponding email linked to the money being donated mentioning the reward tier you are interested in.
Current Funds Through PayPal: $3,222
I will post here any limited rewards that were obtained by PaPal Backers.
All Gone!
===========Medic!=========== Your Character as the Area Healer (Name, Original World Sprite, Personality & Portrait) + The Area Healer is a ghost that helps heal the protagonist Caxton and his allies in certain safe zones. + Based off the information you provide us for their personality, the team will develop dialogue options. + Reference material required (at minimum a written description) + What is designed is ultimately at the discretion of the game developers to incorporate into the game in any way they see fit. If the design is unable to be incorporated into the game, the developers will contact you in order for you to submit a new design. + Restrictions apply** + LEGENDARY HEROINE
======Spirited Child====== Any gender - Your Character as Drexel’s child (Name, World Sprite, Battle Sprite, Personality, & Portrait) + UPDATE: Bishop Drexel and her mother's species will ultimately be determined by the species you choose for this tier. You'll wield a rapier and shield, with an affinity for defensive combat, and accompanies Caxton through most of the game. + Elemental affinity can be chosen by you from Fire, Earth, Air, and Water dependent on how it can balance all the characters out. These are first come first serve. This elemental affinity may appear as primary or secondary depending on how it balances the characters + Based off the information you provide us for their personality, the team will develop dialogue options. + Reference material required (at minimum a written description) + What is designed is ultimately at the discretion of the game developers to incorporate into the game in any way they see fit. If the design is unable to be incorporated into the game, the developers will contact you in order for you to submit a new design. + Restrictions apply** + LEGENDARY HEROINE
========Spiritual Leader======= Your Character as the Shaman (Name, Original World Sprite, Personality & Portrait) + The Shaman is the person in charge of the Tribe Members and is a key figure in Bishop Konel’s past. The Spiritual Leader can be any gender. + Based off the information you provide us for their personality, the team will develop dialogue options. + Reference material required (at minimum a written description) + What is designed is ultimately at the discretion of the game developers to incorporate into the game in any way they see fit. If the design is unable to be incorporated into the game, the developers will contact you in order for you to submit a new design. + Restrictions apply** + LEGENDARY HEROINE
So you may be wondering: what are these guys doing on Kickstarter with their amazing game idea? Or at least some variation on that question. Well if there is one thing that Kickstarter is known for, it’s getting everyone involved. From those of us making the game to you who will play it, everyone has a chance to be a part of it. We put in the endless nights of staring at a screen and figuring things out into something that hopefully makes sense. You put in the money. See everything works out.
Of course, there is more to it than that. All of us are normal people like you. Not some big name company. Yet we wanted to make something really awesome. So we put a lot of our own time and effort into it. However, all of us need to fund this little thing called living, so we are hoping that you like what we’ve come up with enough to help us finish Sanctum Polis. You are just as important to the game as we are. Please help us keep the dream alive.
Visuals do not represent the final game. This is still a work in progress and we're asking for Kickstarter backing to code the game in Unity and improve the visuals.
Bullet points!
Funds go toward:
- Coding the game in unity
- Better visuals
- Improved animations and environments
- Less repeating tiles and more character expressions
- Longer, better, and more epic story!
- Releasing on multiple consoles and operating systems
- PS3, PS4, Vita, Mac, and Linux
- And integrating you into the game!
- Be it through a reward tier or just your ideas! We'd love your input
Sanctum Polis – Rest Eternal Memory is a 32-bit Role Playing Game where the main character Caxton finds himself thrown into Solaris Notre University. Founded as a religious reform school, SNU takes in wayward youths from across Diurne in order to reforge them into the service of Solaris the Sun Goddess as clergy.
The university exists in two refurbished castles, one housing the male students, the other the female. Here, Caxton joins a group of students trying to escape, Silent Uproar. It is here that Caxton finds he has the ability to invade dreams, which leads to the discovery of secrets hidden deep within the school.
Sanctum Polis takes influence from old school rpg’s such as: Persona, Suikoden, and Final Fantasy. We even took some psychological, survival horror elements from games such as Silent Hill. Many of these elements come into play as Caxton investigates with the world around him. As he interacts with other characters, dialogue options will require the player to choose how they want Caxton to be. Seemingly innocent at times, these discussion will ultimately have an impact on how the storyline plays out.
Long Story Short!
What you can expect from the story:
- You're forced to go to a school and interact with students
- Socialize, make friends, make enemies, gain allies
- People are disappearing!
- Investigate but beware of the Lunus Monks!
- Delve into dreams
- Each dream is uniquely crafted to represent each person's
subconscious
We're best described as a menu based RPG with a semi active battle system.
The game is split into day and nighttime activities. During the day, the player can choose from options such as: attending class, going to an extracurricular, and conversing with students. Yet at night, Caxton can choose to enter the dreamworld.
The dreamworld is where many of the fantasy style elements come into play. For instance, the game uses a turn based party battle system that includes the use of magic unique to the dreamworld or physical attacks. It is here that much of the truth comes out as you play.
The choices the player makes throughout the game will alter storyline, leading to increases in difficulty, optional quests being revealed, and finally one of the possible endings. All of this depends on what you choose Caxton to become.
Abridged!
What you can expect from gameplay:
- Level Up!
- Collect items, go on quests, fight monsters, power up your team
- Be stealthy
- The real world lacks the magic of the dream world so you'll need to
avoid confrontation to stay out of trouble or stay alive
- Be social
- Interact with people to find out what they're hiding
Other Stuff!
Visit our website and take our quiz to find out what House you'd belong to.
SanctumPolis.com
Here is our presentation earlier this year at SuperCon 2014 that showcases an early trailer of the game and answers some questions you may have.
Social Media and Comic Book
Learn more about our lore by following the Sanctum Polis - Eternal Days, Endless Nights Comic on our social media sites. The comic details the origin of Diurne leading up to the events of the game.
- Facebook - Tumblr - Twitter - DeviantArt - FurAffinity - Weasyl -
Music!
Visit SoundCloud for a few of the songs our fantastic composer Bryan Akers from Sleepmeld has created for the game - Sanctum Polis SoundCloud
Earlier on in our development, we gave some of our fans the opportunity to become integral parts to our story. And now we are ready for you to meet them.
Ephias Belvidea
by Elias "Ephias Blue"
A childhood friend of Kage, Ephias follows the hare to SNU. As children, Kage protected him, so here Ephias has taken it upon himself to try and help his one time friend come to terms with his horns. To do this, Ephias has worn horns on his head since their youth. It was only fitting that he found himself in House Terranel as well.
Jace Simmons
by Jared "Relar"
Jace finds himself at SNU after a series of unfortunate events. This however is nothing new for the black cat, who seems to have had a trail of bad luck following him ever since his birth. However, Jace does his best not to let it bother him, and it is this strength that has led him to House A’Risel.
Vartas Darkly
by Rylan Clarke
Vartas, preferably referred to by his last name Darkly, spends much of his time with research. Often times the albino crow is hard to find since he seems to have a knack for keeping himself hidden. Many refuse to get close to him, since he has a habit of finding out your secrets. The only person ever seen with him is Soul, who makes it a point to be friends with everyone. It’s no wonder that the researcher of a crow was sorted into House Ignusel.
Marylise Alding
by James Kimsey "Shibuya"
Although rare, some humans also find their way to Solaris Notre University. Marylise is one of these. Due to this, Marylise keeps to herself as to not be approached by those that may not view humans in the most positive of lights. That was until she met Kendra, who seemed to take a sign to the young girl. Now she grows in confidence and tries to find a place for herself in House Aquirelle.
These are some of the monsters you'll encounter in the dream world. These particular monsters were named by our fans in the early stages of our development.
Learn more about our stretch goals in our updates!
Stickers
Character Posters
T-Shirts
Your character may be human or anthropomorphic. If you choose to be a human keep in mind, due to game lore, they are rare, endangered, and generally not well received by the populace or met with confusion as to what they may be. If you choose to create an anthropomorphic character there are some regulations. Due to game lore only wings incapable of flight are allowed. Dragons and prehistoric animals will be allowed within the game so long as they are anthropomorphic and follow the rules about wings. All characters must be restrained to human proportions and have opposable thumbs.
Other “mythical creatures” may only be created through a mixed breed such as an Antelope and a Jack Rabbit to create a Jackalope like Kage Andrews. A creature with wings may have patagium much like a Flying Squirrel, small flightless wings, tattooed wings, or feathery hands. Mixed breeds may be allowed (i.e. half cat half dog.) but they both must fall under the same category; Reptile, Avian, Mammal, Aquatic, or Insect. Arachnids fall under the Insect category, aquatic mammals such as dolphins can be used in both Mammal and Aquatic categories, amphibians can be used in both Reptile and Aquatic Categories, and humans can also be mixed with the Mammal category.
Characters may have their own unique colorations but ultimate approval must be given by the Quadrangle Games development team. You are allowed to have tattoos so long as the imagery does not conflict with the game, it story, Quadrangle Games as a company, or is offensive in nature. Since this is a religious school, all piercings must be removed (you may leave the hole) unless you are appearing inside a dream world.
Characters outside of the dreamworld must identify themselves as either male or female to determine which of the two schools they will attend. Character's that have a non-binary gender may be submitted with the gender they wish to be regarded as and the proper pronouns they'd like to be used when referring to their character. However, if your character appears outside of the dream world, since there is no third school for characters of other genders, you must determine if they will attend the male or female school. All names cannot be offensive in nature and cannot be previously trademarked or copy written by another company. Also names should fit into the world in some way. If there is an issue of naming, the development team can work with you to come to a useable compromise.
For characters appearing in the real world, uniforms must be light brown for lower class students and dark brown for seniors and also have the color of their House. A different colored accessory is permissible. All students must bear the Eye of Solaris either as a necklace, on their clothing, as a tattoo, or other form of accessories. The Eye of Solaris is a compass with arrows pointing in each cardinal direction with an eye in the middle representing Solaris’ omnipresence and her relation to the sun. Eparch's wear their House symbol instead of the Eye. Any characters wearing shorts or skirts must not go above the knees. No cleavage, bare chest, or belly may be shown but sleeveless clothing is allowed. Characters may wear sandals or shoes but cannot be barefoot unless their feet are hooves.
We are an indie game company who started off with only four employees and have expanded greatly since. Our vision to create classic games with a modern twist has led us to the development of Sanctum Polis - Rest Eternal Memory. The reason we chose an all Anthropomorphic cast is two-fold; on one hand we wanted to reach out to fans of anthropomorphic artwork who are often forgotten in modern games and we wanted to create a diverse cast not limited by race or creed but rather a character that anyone can relate to because they are seen as the person they are beneath the fur. Sanctum Polis is our first gaming venture but we hope to expand not only on this series in the future but on other game ideas we have planned as well.
Now you may be wondering who is in charge of what, since all you know is that we are a group of people. Fear not, we have names and have dedicated people for each task. Here they are:
Gabriel Trujillo – President & CEO
Jaden Rivera "Zerberus" - Vice President, Marketing/ Advertising Director
Luis Velasco Jr “Lucian” – Script & Content Writer
Adrian Madriz – Script Writer
Daniel "Gade" – Programmer
Evan Baad – Programmer
Chad Killeen - Animation & Pixel Artist
Gregorius “Rumz" - Art Director
Jesse "Oniontrain" - Background Pixel Artist
Michael "Zephyrin" - Background Pixel Artist
Sara "Rikkoshaye" - Pixel Artist
Milo "Slugbones" – Animation & Pixel Artist
Bryan Akers "Sleepmeld" – Composer
Damián E. M. Schinder - Spanish Translation
Alexis "Zeke" - Comic Book Artist
Timothy Welty "Arrowbomb" - Web DesignerGQ’s full profile of Amber Rose, titled “Amber Rose: How to Be a Bad Bitch” after her forthcoming book, has been released online and in many ways, it raises more discussions than it settles. On Tuesday, Rose briefly expressed her disappointment in the piece, which she felt reduced her to her relationships with rappers Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa.
She posted a picture of the dek (which is a summary of the piece that appears below the headline). It may not officially be part of the story, but it’s the hook. It’s the first thing many readers will see, and is generally meant to frame what is to come.
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(Later, she posted a photo comparing herself to Channing Tatum, another former stripper who has appeared in GQ. Tatum had his stripping and relationships remarked upon, actually more than once, though not in the dek of those pieces.)
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This is what Amber was mad about. Amber Rose is a smart, self-aware woman. We see this in Carrie Battan’s GQ profile, as Rose describes her approach to a lecture she delivered to a group of college students:
I know before you guys got in here, you had conversations with your friends, like: “Why would I go listen to Amber talk? She’s only famous because she fucked Kanye…who the fuck wants to listen to her?” “It’s a fair point,” she admits. “I get it. But now that you’re here, we’re gonna really talk about slut shaming.
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Here we have the crux of this entire situation. Discussing a woman like Amber Rose is a bit of a catch-22. She is, of course, so much more than her past relationships, but they are also the reason many of us know who she is. How do we contextualize her while also respecting her individuality?
Overall, the story itself is fair—and even, at times, effusively complimentary:
Calling Amber Rose hot is like saying caviar is a good source of protein: It’s technically true, but insufficient to capture her unique, otherworldly perfection. Rose is one of the few women in history who was meant to walk the earth with her head shaved.
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Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa do appear frequently in the piece, but always in context and never without hearing Amber’s side of the story.
It is clear that Battan spent a considerable amount of time with Rose. We don’t, however, know how much real time Amber truly devoted to discussing her exes versus what Battan thought would fit best in the story.
It’s fascinating to watch a woman like Amber Rose navigate the world of fame and her journey to build a real career and name for herself outside of the men she was and is linked to. She, like many celebrities in her position, is sort of doing this backwards. She became famous first and is now establishing the framework to maintain that notoriety.
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What we’re also seeing at play is the larger issue of how women are and are not allowed to frame themselves. To some degree, we’re all at the mercy of public opinion, but Amber Rose is challenging how much she will allow those opinions to play into her future.
Kim Kardashian appears in the story, unsurprisingly, and she is perhaps the best lesson in all this. Although Kim had the privilege of family wealth and whiteness, she has been playing this exact game for years. (If the world had seen Kim as anything other than white, that sex tape would not have gone the way that it did. Further, while Amber has vaguely referred to herself as “mixed,” she certainly isn’t seen by the world as white.)
When Kim’s sex tape with Ray J leaked back in 2007, she took her newfound notoriety and, with her mother’s help, leveraged it to build an entirely new brand for herself. But that took many years—and even now, the sex tape will probably always be part of her narrative. Her husband, Kanye West, even references it on the song “Clique” (“My girl a superstar all from a home movie”).
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Much like her own days as a stripper, Amber doesn’t believe that Kim’s sex tape is a bad thing, just that it’s perceived as such.
Rose wonders whether Kim, deep down, might feel the same way about that sex tape. “She probably had a fucking blast. And guess what? At the time she was in love with that guy,” Rose says. “So don’t think you’re better than me, because we’ve all had trials and tribulations.”
Amber Rose certainly doesn’t regret her past, but she also doesn’t think that being a stripper and dating rappers precludes her from being known for other things. She seems to be wondering how much longer she’s going to be qualified by her relationships with men. It’s a problem that women—particularly those who are beautiful and enjoy sex—face much more often than men.
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The GQ story clearly wasn’t some sort of hit piece, nor does it attempt to frame her in a false or negative light. Still, Amber Rose is the only person who gets to decide if a portrayal of her is satisfactory. And if she doesn’t speak out and define herself for herself, no one else will.
Contact the author at kara.brown@jezebel.com.Continuing its push to strengthen regional ties on the back of its energy potential, Cyprus agreed to expand cooperation with Israel this week, including pipeline and grid sharing as a means of reaching the European market.
According to Israeli media reports, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades stated that they would increase collaborations to exploit the full potential of the offshore natural gas reserves claimed by each country.
"There is palpably renewed energy in our relationship, I mean that figuratively and literally," Netanyahu said, according to a Haaretz report. "... We think that by cooperating with each other we can take it out more easily, we can market it better, to the betterment of both our societies."
Over the last five years, Cyprus has made a concerted effort to strengthen ties in the Eastern Mediterranean region based on the country's new-found energy status. This has included downplaying historical tension, striking up technical and logistical sharing efforts and, in the case of Turkey, paved the way towards easing decades of separation.
While this effort has not always worked miracles, it has established Cyprus as a happy middle-man in a region with a viable, potential energy future, both as a producer and transport hub for reserves further afield.
This effort dates back to a 2011 discovery by Cyprus, but progress has been slow as the country’s weakened economic standing has made it difficult to nail down the financing needed to pursue exploration, production and export options.
However, according to recent reports, only one company has had any success in finding offshore reserves in the region. According to a Reuters report, Texas-based Noble, “discovered a field with an estimated 4.5 trillion cubic feet of gas south of Cyprus in 2011. It is close to Israel’s Leviathan with its estimated 22 trillion cubic feet of reserves.”
The country's progress and access to potential export markets could be helped by new collaborations with Israel.
While the two leaders offered few specifics about what this closer relationship might ultimately mean, they did allude to an Eastern Mediterranean pipeline and a Eurasia interconnector, "a private project to transport to Europe electricity powered by natural gas."Each year at I/O, Google gives all of the developers in the audience a gift. Some years it’s a tablet. Some years it’s a laptop.
This year? It was a piece of cardboard. Yeah, yeah, they gave attendees some other stuff, too — but that cardboard!
Once you tear the seal on Google’s lil’ slab of cardboard, it becomes clear that this is no mere corrugated fiberboard. This is something more!
If you can bust out the skills you picked up at the University of Ikea and work your way through the the not-so-intuitive folding process, you end up with something wonderful. Paired with your Android phone, that origami’d cardboard transforms into a cheap, on-the-fly virtual reality headset.
Google calls the project “Cardboard”; I’ve taken to calling it the Mockulus Thrift.
I’ve been playing with it since the Keynote ended and.. it’s actually kind of freaking wonderful.
Is it an Oculus Rift killer? Hah — of course not. It’s made of cardboard.
But it’s still awesome.
Once you finish contorting Cardboard into shape, a rubber band and a velcro’d flap hold your Android phone in place.
Like the actual Oculus Rift, two plastic lenses built into the face of Cardboard help to distort your phone’s screen in a way that helps wrap the image around your eye.
That would have been enough, really. But Google took it one step further.
Midway through bending Cardboard into shape, you’ll notice a stray, circular magnet stuck to one of the flaps. It’s the very last piece of the construction process; the last thing you put in in place. Once everything is all folded up, you plop the magnet into a small groove on Cardboard’s exterior.
If you’re like me, you assume it’s just to hold everything in place or something.
Then you launch the Cardboard app. Right off the bat, a tutorial begins
“Turn your head to look around the app”, it reads.
Okay, easy enough.
“To select an item, slide the magnet down then let go.”
Turns out, these Google guys are pretty freaking clever.
This funny little cardboard faux-Rift has something even the original Rift itself does not: a built-in button.
The magnet slides within its groove, then automatically slips back into a place because of another magnet on opposite side. Your phone is able to sense the magnet’s movement, allowing it to act as a ridiculously clever little button. Yeesh.
The cardboard app comes with 7 “experiences”, and each is pretty darned neat in its own right:
Youtube lets you watch a selection of Youtube videos on a simulated theater screen. Probably my favorite of all the apps
Street Vue lets you wander around in a VR version of, you guessed it, street view
“Exhibit” lets you look at a few 3D recreations of objects. Not the most exciting of the lot.
Earth Flyover lets you zoom around a city in Google Earth. Push the “button” to start flying forward, push it again to stop.
Photo Sphere Viewer lets you look around in pictures you’ve taken using Android’s built-in 360º panoramic feature
Windy Day is a cute, cartoony environment where you can watch animals sneak around as leaves fall
Tour Guide has you explore the Palace of Versailles
Want one? Unless you’re at I/O, you might be out of luck. Fortunately, I managed to end up with an extra one. Still sealed and everything! Like everyone at I/O, you’ll have to bring your own Android phone. If you want it, drop a comment down below — I’ll pick someone at random this weekend.Volume 1: Origins "There's more sorrow on your face than someone twice your age should have." A worried voice said to a now attentive Edward Elric. He looked up to see a waitress for the outdoor cafe he claimed a seat from watching him. She was about his age, with light brown hair that was put up in a ponytail that fell past her shoulders, and light colored eyes that he couldn't identify as any one color. "Are you okay? You look like you're lost, anything I can do to help?", she said cheerily, hoping her positive attitude could help cheer the young man up. "Not unless you've got an inter-dimensional portal hidden back behind your coffee pots." "An intra-what-a-ma-portal? Look, I don't know all that much about science, professor, but how about I bring you something to drink. Coffee, or maybe some ice cold milk or juice?" "Blech, even here I'm getting the 'drink your milk' lectures...", Edward mumbled, getting defensive and crossing his arms. "Well how about I bring you some soda and a few snacks, I'll be right back!", the waitress said as she went off to the cafe's kitchen. Soon after she returned with a glass of soda, cookies, and a sandwich. "I appreciate the gesture, but I don't think I have enough to pay for all of this...", Ed spoke while pushing his hands into his pockets. "Don't worry about it, I just wanted to help make your day a little better, I know it's not my business, but I have a sixth sense when it comes to reading people's emotions, and you just reek of sadness. No offense of course!" Ed stopped eating (he really did need the food after all), looking shocked and slightly embarrassed, "Well, looks like whatever sense you had was right, my name's Edward, by the way." "Oh, silly me, all this chatter and you don't even know my name, it's nice to meet you Edward, my name is Aura, and it's no problem at all, I just enjoy helping people." "Thanks, I kinda did need a little food for a pick-me-up after all. I hate to leave without paying anything though, is there anything I can do around here to help?" Edward said hopefully, thinking an odd job could help take his mind off of his current situation. "AURA! GET OVER HERE NOW!" a gruff, stocky man yelled from the entrance of the cafe. "Uh oh, I'll be right back, go ahead and finish your food." Aura walked back to where her boss now stood, obviously not amused that she had given away food again. "How many times do I have to tell you Aura, if you give my food away, I don't make money, and if I don't make money, I don't pay you." "I'm sorry sir, but he just looked like he could use some help." "This isn't a homeless shelter Aura, it's a business, and I am tired of seeing my money being wasted because you have a soft spot for the needy. You can't go around trying to save every lost cause that wanders your way." "Well if I don't help them, no one in this sorry town will! People are supposed to help those who need it, and then they can do the same for the people they meet." "That's wishful thinking sweetheart, you're young but you'll find out soon enough that the world doesn't operate on the same high ideals you hold yourself to. Now who's gonna pay for what that little urchin ate? Are you gonna pay for it again?" "HEY, WHO ARE YOU CALLING LITTLE?!" said Ed, who was really trying to respect the privacy of their conversation until he was mentioned. "Gee, he sure looks like he's going to pay back your kindness now, doesn't he Aura, smart mouthed brat!" "Can't blame him for being angry, it's rude what you just said about him! Paying customer or not!" "I've had about all I can take from both of you, get your stuff together Aura, you're fired!" "That's fine with me! I'd appreciate it if you'd pay me the wages I've earned, since I don't intend on ever coming back to this dump after I walk out of here." Aura's boss grumbled to himself as he got some money out of the register and counted out what Aura earned since her last payday. "There, that's what you've earned, minus the cost of the meal you provided for your new 'friend' over there.", he said while handing her the money. "Thanks, best of luck to you and your booming business!", she said cheerfully as she watched him grumble and walk back into the cafe. "Whoa, did I just get you fired, Aura?" Edward said, worried but not sure why. "Don't worry about it, that guy was a jerk from the day I started. Now let's spend this money the right way," she said with an evil smirk on her face.... Aura's former boss came back out to wait on the tables Aura had left behind, when he noticed his patio was empty. "I know I had at least 5 tables that ordered here?!", he looked around bewildered. Then he happened to look towards the rival coffee shop across the street and saw his customers, as well as Aura and that strange young man smiling and waving to him. "What's the meaning of this?!", he yelled across the street, eyes glaring at Aura and the kid in the red coat. "Well I figured I'd put the last bit of the money I earned from you to good use, I offered it to the people at your shop as an inconvenience fee of sorts for having to listen to all your grumpy and rude remarks. Then I brought them here for some good food and service!" The words coming from her former boss' mouth were rather unintelligible by the time they made it across the street, and after a long satisfying sigh, Aura decided to get going. Edward was rather impressed with the way she handled the situation, but was still left with a twinge of guilt for being the cause of all the ruckus. "So, where are you off to now? You heading home?" Aura asked Edward, who got that same worrisome look on his face once more. "No, to be honest I don't really know where home is right now. It's a long story, but as far as I know, home isn't anywhere near here for me." "Well, I know we just met and all, but if you want you can crash at my place, get some rest, and maybe check some maps or do some research on where you should go next. Give you a base of operations, so to speak." "That would be great! I don't want to burden you too much though, so I'd only ask to stay long enough to figure out where I am and where I should go." "It's no problem at all, it'll be nice to have good company for a while." said Aura as she opened up the door and let them into the house. It was a modest family home, with room for a full family, not just one person. Strangely, there were no pictures displayed showing Aura or any of her family around the house. She showed him into the spare room and then went into the kitchen to make something to eat. As they finished eating, she told him that they can look up the information on her computer, and found it odd that he'd never even seen a computer before. They went into her room to look up information, but it didn't take long for Ed to fall asleep right where he was sitting on Aura's bed. She shook her head, leaned him down and put a pillow down for him and covered him with a blanket, then went into the kitchen to clean up.DARWIN’S Jennifer Graetz made an unspoken pact with her unborn child in the weeks leading up to his birth.
media_camera Robbie Danger Russell was born with an extremely rare syndrome called Bardet-Biedl.
She was to stay strong and “give birth like a champion”. He was to live.
Against all medical opinion, little Robbie Russell kept his end of the bargain. Against her own demons, so did she.
The now not-so-little Robbie – at 20.5kg he is believed to be nudging a Guinness World Record for his age – is a giggling, hungry, happy baby miracle.
He’s been defiant from the first minutes he was not supposed to outlive; through the February deadline by which time he was supposed to be blind; to today – his first birthday. But for all his triumphs, the long-term outlook is unclear.
Experts are 97 per cent certain he has the ultra-rare Bardet-Biedl syndrome, a genetic disorder affecting about 1 in every 140,000 caucasian births.
LITTLE DORA’S FUNDRAISING CAMPAIGN
It can cause blindness, deafness, obesity, polydactylism (Robbie has 12 toes and an attempt at an 11th finger), bone deformity and organ problems, most notably with the kidneys.
Robbie’s kidney problems are more pronounced than other cases and doctors are careful in their predictions.
“They don’t want to get ahead of themselves or let me get ahead of myself,” Jennifer, 40, says.
“I thought ‘Kids have kidney transplants’, so I didn’t really understand it when they said there’s nothing we can do.
“I felt like shaking them and saying ‘Yes there is’. But they don’t want to give me false hope. They don’t talk much about his long-term future. They don’t talk about going to school. It’s hard to prepare and keep positive. You sort of have to be in denial to keep positive, but at the same time I want to know it and be ready for it.”
What appeared a normal pregnancy turned five weeks before Robbie’s birth, when ultrasounds showed something was very wrong.
Doctors incorrectly believed he had no shoulder blades, no collarbones and had fused wrists. They were right, for the most part, about serious organ problems.
It sent Jennifer, a single mum with no great means, into a dangerous spiral of depression and anxiety.
“It was a lot to brave up to, but you have no choice,” she says. “The feeling, I can’t describe it. When you see your baby it’s instantly love, but then you have this sinking feeling, too.”
media_camera Robbie Danger Russell with his mother Jennifer Graetz.
As Robbie grows, Jennifer is coming to terms with the fact she will not be able to look after him without specialist help. It is a blow to her pride and natural independence, but it is the truth.
Born just 5.5 pounds (2.49kg), Robbie has grown 1.5kg in some weeks |
Eric Trump at his posh Manhattan residence at 100 Central Park South, also known as Trump Parc East, was opened by his wife Thursday, CBS News reported.
A source close to the investigation said the letter had a Massachusetts postmark and warned that if Donald Trump doesn't withdraw from the race for the Republican presidential nomination -- paraphrasing -- harm will come to the kids.
A source familiar with the matter said the envelope contained suspicious white powder that's been sent to a lab for testing. The source said a preliminary field test indicated the substance didn't appear to be hazardous.
No injuries were reported.Johnny Jewel has been giving away tons of free singles on his SoundCloud lately, and now his band is back in the albums business. Chromatics will release Dear Tommy, the follow-up to 2012’s amazing narcotic Italo-disco excursion Kill For Love, early next year. Pitchfork reports that the album will be out “in time for Valentine’s Day.” The album includes a version of “Cherry” that is “similar” to the one from After Dark 2, while the recording of “Camera” is entirely different. Here’s the full tracklist:
01 “Fresh Blood”
02 “In Films”
03 “Time Rider”
04 “I Can Never Be Myself When You’re Around”
05 “Cherry”
06 “She Says”
07 “Just Like You”
08 “4 A.M.”
09 “Teacher”
10 “Camera”
11 “Dear Tommy”
12 “Touch Blue”
13 “After Hours”
14 “Shadows”
15 “In Silence”
16 “Colorblind”
17 “Endless Sleep”
Dear Tommy is due out in early 2015 on Italians Do It Better.Ratten, "Continuance use intention of cloud computing: Innovativeness and creativity perspectives," Journal of Business Research, 2015.
a:] Bahn Bann [a] raten Ratten Ahle alle Staat Stadt [[epsilon]:] Stahle Stelle [epsilon] baten Betten Vater Vetter
C Ratten, works to TPO(s) 04/88, 3 Crowlees |Gardens, Mirfield.
2006; Tsiotsou & Ratten, 2010) y la gestion de las aplicaciones tecnologicas como estrategias de desarrollo de negocio (Law & Jogaratnam, 2005).
Christopher Ratten and Lindsey Cooper of Baker Tilly were appointed Administrators on June 16.
126) See ibid at 243, citing Ratten v The Queen, [1972] AC 378 at 387, [1971] 3 WLR 930.
Die Ratten (1955) recalls Robert Siodmak's pre-War films and, beyond that, "the whole arsenal of 1930s German cinema" with its "banging doors, perverse teenage girls, hangars and perspectives, masks and New Year's balls" ("Les Rats de Robert Siodmak").
63) Regarding the Swedish outdoor movement's compensatory idea, see Klas Sandell and Sverker Sorlin, 'Naturen som fostrare: Friluftsliv och ideologi i svenskt 1900-tal', Historisk tidskrift, 114 (1994), 4-43; Lena Eskilsson, 'Fritid som ide, struktur och praktik: Ratten till lattja eller friluftsliv i folkhemmet', Historisk tidskrift, 120 (2000), 29-53.
Schliesslich in einer Laube unter dem Zwerchfell fand man ein Nest von jungen Ratten.
Our time in Abu Dhabi will be divided between our pre-season training commitments as well as promoting our team and our game within the region," Ratten said.
Deutlich wird das Schwanken zwischen der Faszination an den technischen Moglichkeiten der "Filmstadt" (259) und der menschlichen Isolation "unter diesen traurigen Palmen, in denen die Ratten wohnen.Take control of the heart of an alien girl and battle tough bosses in this Bullet-hell Shoot-em-up with rogue-like elements.
This is a free Demo Version of TVRUHH!
A more complete version of this game is available in early access here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/790060/The_Void_Rains_Upon_Her_Heart/
Features:
Take on boss after boss with streams of heart shaped love bullets.
This game supports customizable Keyboard and Gamepad controls.
Dodge through brilliant bullet patterns that ramp up in complexity as the boss level goes up.
Each boss battle is unique with different forms of attacks and weaknesses.
Aim for high scores by sustaining constant damage on the boss without getting hit yourself.
Experience a poetic story with lovely illustrations.
An original soundtrack that captures the personality of each boss.
Play through a campaign of randomly chosen bosses leading up to a final fight.
Receive random power ups from defeated bosses that stack together.
Don't get heartbroken, or you will have to start over.
Don't get heartbroken, or you will have to start over. Submit to the void! It will be fun, I promise.
This demo includes:
2 game modes (Story and Quickplay)
2 difficulty settings for Story Mode
9 monsters
42 gifts
1 playable character
*This game contains mild nudity*[TSL] Fight for a Seed Text by Xxio Graphics by Kennigit Saturday May 14th 18:00 GMT (+00:00) pokerstrategytsl3.com TSL3
By Xxio
The TSL final is this Sunday. Naniwa vs. Thorzain, in the most epic – yesyesyes. We know. Calm down, people. First thing's first: who comes third? Besides an extra $1,500, the third-place finisher will take home a seed into the TSL4.
Kas and HasuObs are as unexpected to be in a fight for a TSL4 seed as a Thorzain vs. Naniwa final. In European circles, Kas and HasuObs have long been known as top players. It is only recently in the TSL, however, that the entire, stretched StarCraft 2 scene started giving them the level of attention a gosu deserves.
The TSL final is this Sunday. Naniwa vs. Thorzain, in the most epic – yesyesyes. We know. Calm down, people. First thing's first: who comes third? Besides an extra $1,500, the third-place finisher will take home a seed into the TSL4.Kas and HasuObs are as unexpected to be in a fight for a TSL4 seed as a Thorzain vs. Naniwa final. In European circles, Kas and HasuObs have long been known as top players. It is only recently in the TSL, however, that the entire, stretched StarCraft 2 scene started giving them the level of attention a gosu deserves. On April 25 2011 05:55 Irave wrote:
Hasu played so well, feedbacking ghosts nailing storms. On April 25 2011 05:55 BoBiNoU wrote:
gosuhasu
that micro is just amazing
HasuOb's run in the TSL is a long time coming. After
HasuOb's run in the TSL is a long time coming. After IEM Cologne in August, he seemed to fall off the map. In reality, he had followed up his performance in the first major StarCraft 2 tournament with five tournament wins and eight second-place finishes. He was trading wins with players like Dimaga, WhiteRa, and BratOk in the weeks leading up to his round of 32 TSL appearance. Not every player gets the chance to play on the biggest stages, the ones that people post and make threads about. The TSL widened the spotlight for many once-smaller players and gave them the opportunity to turn into stars. HasuObs took the opportunity and went all-out, proving with wins over Huk, Morrow and Boxer that he is as skilled as any big-name player. On April 24 2011 04:36 Dakmaniac wrote:
EmpireKas = MacroMachine o.O On April 24 2011 04:36 HQuality wrote:
120vs60 supply
what?
Right now, Kas is the scariest player from the Ukraine. Which pretty much means that he's one of the scariest players in the world. Kas is a
Empire.Kas vs. mouz.HasuObs
PvT is HasuObs' best matchup. Since April 1st, he is 29-9. To see why and how he is so dominant in this matchup, just look back at the 2011 Ultimate Gaming Championship (which he won) or his games against Boxer in the TSL. Against Select in Gadget Show Live, HasuObs showed that, just like skittles, his PvT has all the flavors of the rainbow. In one game he almost won with a 12 minute, 2 base phoenix push. In another, after a 3 gate, pressure-expand, he hid a dark shrine and destroyed the Terran's economy with DTs. Against Sjow, in the same tournament, he set the pace of the game with phoenix, forced his enemy's tech path, then cleaned up with a perfect unit composition.
Kas was able to reaper-FE over and over against Adelscott and strong-arm wins through terrific macro. While definitely a macro-monster, he will not be able to beat HasuObs with macro alone. HasuObs knows exactly how to deal with macro Terrans and has some of the best drop-defence, which is sure to fluster Kas. If Kas settles into the macro game, HasuObs will have a stack of builds to pull from. In fact, HasuObs excels at the macro game. Rarely does he lose a fight at max food. Kas' macro is so good, though, that he can run over his opponent before a perfect death-ball can be crafted. His enormous bio pushes should never be underestimated. The problem with them, however, is that they most always come after a successful defence in the form of a counter-attack, and HasuObs is patient. He knows how to rein in a mobile Terran and never over-commits. Another problem is that HasuObs has been crushing this exact, stim-heavy style of play since April. I hope Kas mixed some mech into his builds because HasuObs is very comfortable against the norm.
Prediction: HasuObs 4-1.
Liquibet Stat: Kas: 4602 HasuObs: 4376
PvT is HasuObs' best matchup. Since April 1st, he is 29-9. To see why and how he is so dominant in this matchup, just look back at the 2011 Ultimate Gaming Championship (which he won) or his games against Boxer in the TSL. Against Select in Gadget Show Live, HasuObs showed that, just like skittles, his PvT has all the flavors of the rainbow. In one game he almost won with a 12 minute, 2 base phoenix push. In another, after a 3 gate, pressure-expand, he hid a dark shrine and destroyed the Terran's economy with DTs. Against Sjow, in the same tournament, he set the pace of the game with phoenix, forced his enemy's tech path, then cleaned up with a perfect unit composition.Kas was able to reaper-FE over and over against Adelscott and strong-arm wins through terrific macro. While definitely a macro-monster, he will not be able to beat HasuObs with macro alone. HasuObs knows exactly how to deal with macro Terrans and has some of the best drop-defence, which is sure to fluster Kas. If Kas settles into the macro game, HasuObs will have a stack of builds to pull from. In fact, HasuObs excels at the macro game. Rarely does he lose a fight at max food. Kas' macro is so good, though, that he can run over his opponent before a perfect death-ball can be crafted. His enormous bio pushes should never be underestimated. The problem with them, however, is that they most always come after a successful defence in the form of a counter-attack, and HasuObs is patient. He knows how to rein in a mobile Terran and never over-commits. Another problem is that HasuObs has been crushing this exact, stim-heavy style of play since April. I hope Kas mixed some mech into his builds because HasuObs is very comfortable against the norm.HasuObs 4-1.Kas:HasuObs:
Cheerfuls!
This TSL is sponsored by PokerStrategy.com, the world's largest poker school and community. With hundreds of Poker VODs and an assortment of learning material in 18 different languages, PokerStrategy.com offers the chance for aspiring Poker players to learn from a beginner to a professional level. Sign up using TL's referral link.
By signing up, you can also enter the TSL3 Raffle, where you can win a 5-night trip to South Korea for 2 people to watch StarCraft live in person and tour the oGs-Liquid house.
Discuss with other fans in the TSL3 Forum. Right now, Kas is the scariest player from the Ukraine. Which pretty much means that he's one of the scariest players in the world. Kas is a macro-monster, and been one for a long time. Like HasuObs, he was dominating long before the TSL highlighted his brute-force, nerd-shattering play. The Top Dog of March boasts ten first-place finishes and five silver medals over players like BratOk, Strelok, Mondragon and Grubby. He has undoubtedly been one of the most skilled and exciting players to watch. When he exits the TSL on Saturday, he will take a piece of the limelight with him. Moderator KTYClashes in the stands forced supporters onto the pitch and delayed kick-off.
Clashes in the stands forced supporters onto the pitch and delayed kick-off.
LYON AND BESIKTAS have been handed suspended two-year bans by Uefa after crowd trouble marred the first leg of their Europa League quarter-final.
Last Thursday’s match at Parc Olympique Lyonnais was delayed by 45 minutes due to fans from the lower tier entering the field after objects were thrown at them from within the group of travelling supporters in the tier above.
Besiktas fans also broke through segregation and fought with home fans.
Uefa charged Lyon in relation to crowd disturbances, setting off fireworks, stairways being blocked, insufficient organisation and field invasion by supporters after Jeremy Morel capitalised on an error from Besiktas goalkeeper Fabri to snatch a 2-1 win.
Besiktas were similarly punished for crowd disturbances and setting off fireworks, along with throwing objects.
Under punishments handed down by Uefa’s Control, Ethics and Disciplinary Body (CEDB), each club has been fined €100,000.
A statement released by Uefa read: “The CEDB has decided to exclude Olympique Lyonnais [and Besiktas] from participating in the next Uefa club competition for which it will qualify. This exclusion is deferred for a probationary period of two (2) years.”
The statement added: “Based on the official reports and the current available evidence at the disposal of the Uefa disciplinary bodies, the CEDB has considered that the supporters of both clubs were responsible for the crowd disturbances at the match.”
The second leg of the quarter-final tie takes place in Istanbul on Thursday and comes after Lyon were involved in another ugly flashpoint over the weekend.
In Ligue 1, their game at Bastia was initially delayed by home fans entering the field to confront Lyon players during the warms-ups, while a similar fracas at half-time resulted in the match being abandoned.
The42 is on Instagram! Tap the button below on your phone to follow us!Tongan criminals may be in Australia after records wiped
Updated
Tongan police have told Australian officials that convicted criminals may have travelled to Australia after having their records wiped clean.
Tongan police commissioner Grant O'Fee says 172 people convicted in Tonga have obtained police clearance letters, allowing them to apply for visas overseas.
The New Zealand immigration minister says an estimated 40 of those people may currently be in New Zealand and some may have gained residency.
Others are believed to have made their way to Australia.
Australia's Immigration Department is conducting an inquiry.
A spokesperson says anyone who is found to have entered the country after being sentenced to a year or more in jail is likely to be deported.
Commissioner O'Fee says police officers in Tonga are being investigated in relation to the practice, which is believed to have happened in the 10 years to 2011.
New Zealand has put an immediate hold on Tongan visa applications that require police clearance.
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, immigration, tonga, new-zealand, australia
First postedThe Midnighters are taking on the apocalypse in the Sept. 18 Midnight Texas finale. Manfred has taken his hero's journey all the way to the underworld, the town got hit a freaky storm, and now our gang has got to take back their home. This supernatural family has never been stronger. Will Midnight, Texas be renewed for Season 2? Mister Snuggly didn't offer to sacrifice his furry life only to have this show be canceled already.
UPDATE: It was announced via the show's official Twitter account that Midnight, Texas will return Oct. 26.
EARLIER UPDATE: On Feb. 14, 2018, Deadline announced that Midnight Texas will return for Season 2, without Sarah Ramos and Yul Vazquez as series regulars and with new showrunners Eric Charmelo and Nicole Snyder replacing Monica Owasu-Breen, who is pursuing other projects.
EARLIER: While the NBC series has covered most of Charlaine Harris' trilogy in one season, there is still more story to tell beyond Midnight, Texas, Day Shift, and Night Shift. If the first season is any indication, there will always be more threats coming to Midnight. Now that the supernatural members of the town have come together to fight this Big Bad, we're going to need to see what happens next. The veil opening is clearly just the beginning.
TVLine's Renewal Scorecard calls Midnight, Texas a safe bet in terms of another season pickup. Some episodes were recently rescheduled and aired in a different timeslot, with a two-night event moving from a Monday and Tuesday to a Monday and Wednesday. While a sudden change like that is sometimes a bad sign from the network — that is not the case this time. The penultimate episode moved to accommodate the recent hurricane telethon.
In an interview with NBC News, showrunner Monica Owasu-Breen was hopeful about the future of Midnight, Texas, but assured fans that they wouldn't totally be left hanging either way. “If you watch the 10 episodes [of Season 1]," she said, "you will have a satisfying ending; there’s a turn and you see where the show can go if we’re lucky enough to get another season.”
It's a summer series with a lot of fans and a great cast. There's no reason not to keep that party going for at least another year. When and if Season 1 hits a streaming service, that audience is bound to grow. Supernatural drama may make for good summer vacation viewing, but sometimes you need something new and with vampires to cozy up with and marathon on a winter weekend.
For now, the finale promises a lot of big moments for these characters. In an interview with TVLine, actor Parisa Fitz-Henley teased "Fiji's finale sacrifice." That may sound ominous, but she and this particular demon have a history. It's kind of her fight at this point.
“Fiji is in a place where she feels at a loss," she said, "having to be that vulnerable in front of her friends, really her family. She’s having to deal with her feeling of really being an outsider, even in this family that she’s created for herself." She wants to be normal, just like everyone in Midnight, but seemingly can't balance any kind of happy relationship with the dark side of her powers.
That's just one bit of drama going into the final episode. In an interview with SyFy Wire, François Arnaud talked about how his "unfinished business" in the real world isn't necessarily a vendetta. It's love. It's Creek. "I think there’s an understanding that she has lost so much," he said, "he doesn’t want his death to be another burden on Creek’s shoulders. It gives him a reason to not die. I think if he didn’t have Creek he’d be more willing to die." Sure, he's a chosen one and a fledgling leader — but there's a much more human element to his journey.
With all of the twists and turns that have been dealt already on Midnight, Texas, you just know that Season 1 is going to end with some kind of shocking cliffhanger. Owasu-Breen promised as much. Surely all of the'shipping woes won't be resolved by the end of the finale. Even if the first season is resolved with a satisfying ending, fans are going to be begging for more, and hopefully NBC will deliver.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
Lillian Weber is on a mission.
Every day she makes another dress for a small child she'll never meet.
"I could probably make two a day, but I only make one," she says.
The dresses are collected and sent overseas to little girls in Africa by a Christian outreach group called "Little Dresses for Africa".
"I have to be busy," says Lillian.
And she's been very busy.
In the past two years she's made more than 840 dresses and she plans to make 150 more by May 6th of next year.
You see, by next May, Lillian will turn 100 years old and it will be her one thousandth dress.
"It's just one of those things you learn how to do and enjoy," she says.
In Lillian's Scott County farm house are completed dresses for little girls, made from a pattern, but each with extra stitching and individual details, designed to give each child a little extra pride.
"She personalizes them all," says Lillian's daughter, Linda Purcell. "It's not like good enough that she makes the dresses, she has to put something on the front to make it look special, to give it her touch."
What started as a hobby has become a daily labor of love.
Lillian says she starts work on a dress in the morning, takes a break during the midday, and puts finishing touches in the afternoon.
"I just think she's somebody to look up to, somebody whose not just sitting around and frittering her life away," says Tonya Urbatsch, who nominated Lillian for the "Pay It Forward" award.
"I'm amazed at her every day," adds Linda. "I'm very, very proud of my mother."
Family and friends will continue to be proud of Lillian, well after her 1000th dress. After all, 1000 is just a number.
"When I get to that thousand, if I'm able to. I won't quit. I'll go at it again because there's no reason to not do nothing."
When Lillian is finished with her dresses, her daughters deliver them to a Davenport senior living apartment complex where a group of residents have a weekly sewing appointment to make dresses for the charitable organization.
"Little Dresses for Africa" is a Christian charitable organization founded in 2008 in Michigan.
Its founder, Rachel O'Neill, says 2.5 million dresses have been distributed.
The simple dresses are distributed to orphanages, churches, and schools in Africa.
Rachel says she's traveling to Africa again in September 2014 and February 2015 and hopes to be able to present to a child one of the dresses personally made by Lillian.
If you know someone doing good deeds for others, why not Pay It Forward? You can nominate someone by clicking on this link.Wrestling with criticism and what it means to be Malay-Muslim, some worry that the pressure could drive the young into the arms of extremists like ISIS. Kane Cunico reports.
Additional reporting by Nadia Samdin and Mysara Aljaru
KUALA LUMPUR: Shereen Ezaini wears a hijab when she goes out, observes the five pillars of Islam such as fasting and praying five times a day, and plans one day to go on the Haj. It is, in the 29-year-old’s own words, “living life the way a Muslim’s life should be”.
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But somehow, that just is not good enough in the eyes of some fellow Malaysian Muslims.
Remembering her days at university in 2009, the young mother of two said: “I was at a lecture wearing jeans, and I remember my lecturer, she told me that I am not being ‘Muslim enough’. The blouse that I was wearing fell to my knees.”
Looking incredulous, she continued: “I am not ‘Muslim enough’ because I am wearing jeans? Or I am not Muslim enough because I am drinking Starbucks?”
THE FUSS
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With a rising tide of moral policing and debate over what is halal (permissible in Islam) and haram (forbidden in Islam) in recent years, Ms Shereen is not the only Muslim in Malaysia who has heard such criticism, or felt somehow pressured by the voices of religious fundamentalism.
WATCH: What some have to say (2:58)
In 2015, concerns about growing conservatism made headlines when security guards at some government buildings went overboard in trying to enforce dress codes even on non-Muslim women. That same year, multi-medalled gymnast Farah Ann Abdul Hadi was criticised by religious authorities and conservative netizens because she wore a “revealing” leotard.
In 2016, Auntie Anne’s, a pretzel chain that has been operating in Malaysia for years, had issues with its halal food certification because of - among other technicalities - a menu item named a “pretzel dog”.
Gymnast Farah Ann Abdul Hadi was criticised for wearing a "revealing" leotard at the SEA Games in Singapore.
And during the Pokemon Go hype, the mufti of Federal Territories, Zulkifli Mohamad al-Bakri, declared that it was haram for Muslims to play the augmented-reality game. Just this past Valentine’s Day, the National Muslim Youth Association warned women to stay away from using emoticons and too much fragrance.
Ms Shereen sees such events as making a fuss over the “trivial”. “Malay Muslims tend to focus on unnecessary things, for example, the ‘I Want To Touch A Dog’ programme'; so many unimportant issues they are taking very seriously,” she said.
CAUSE FOR CONCERN?
But, couple this trend with the number of Malaysians arrested for suspected terror links, and political campaigning that has turned to Islam to woo and retain the Malay vote, and many worry that moderate-Muslim Malaysia - once a beacon of religious pluralism and tolerance - is shifting inexorably towards a stricter, more fundamentalist Islam.
According to Pew Research Centre’s Global Attitudes survey 2015, 11 per cent of people in Malaysia held favourable views of ISIS, and nearly a quarter were unsure of their views - this despite the Malaysian government declaring ISIS a terrorist organisation.
Is sympathy for a more extreme view of Islam creeping into the mainstream in Malaysia?
“No,” insists GrabCar driver Zeli Amat, during a drive through downtown Kuala Lumpur. The former businessman said he has moved house some “20 times” around Malaysia. “I have lived in so many neighbourhoods. The sentiment on the ground is still good. There is no strong focus on extremist ideologies.”
Mr Zeli, 45, believes Malaysian Muslims are merely becoming more observant of Islam. He himself reconnected with his faith after what he admits was a secular life filled with mistakes. “I can see the Islamic values getting stronger. A lot more people are wearing the hijab, a lot more people are going to the mosque,” he said.
But Mr Asyraf Ismayatim is less prosaic. A Masters student of political science at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), he has been monitoring chatrooms, student forums and blogs. He feels the university culture take on a more “conservative slant” over the years.
“There are hardline comments from foreign-exchange students who reject integration, comments that female students’ clothes are too tight. Even on the IIUM Facebook page, there are some ultra-conservative comments surfacing,” he said.
IIUM lecturer Ahmad El-Muhamady, whose field is political violence and terrorism, says, that more and more, Malaysian Muslims are using “signifiers of Islam” to pass judgement on one another.
“What are the criteria that we can use to say that you are ‘Muslim enough’? It could be your dress code, it could be the interaction between genders, or it could be (that) if you are educated in the UK or the US, you are less Islamic than me because I studied in the Middle East and am more educated in religious matters,” he said.
THE MALAY-MUSLIM IDENTITY STRUGGLE
It’s this struggle with the question of “what is a good Malay-Muslim”, or “what does it mean to be Muslim in Malaysia”, that lies at the heart of Malaysian society today, some observers believe.
Research interviews among young people aged between 18 and 35, conducted by not-for-profit research centre IMAN, reveal that many are grappling with their Malay-Muslim identity.
If you want to identify with being a proud Malay, said IMAN founding member Dina Zaman, “there will be those who say we are lazy and we are this and that”. “The only (other) identity we have is to be Muslim, but we also have issues being Muslim because ‘we are not good enough’,” she added.
Ms Dina, a former journalist and published author, cited the issue of whether Muslims should be wishing Christians a merry Christmas as an example of how edicts, guidelines and fatwas can sometimes be confusing for Muslims.
“The Federal Territories’ mufti said that it is okay to wish Christians, so I forwarded it to my mother, who then forwarded it to her friends,” said Ms Dina. “She said all the aunties were very confused, saying ‘our ustaz (Muslim scholar) says we cannot wish people Merry Christmas’.
“The mufti says this, another person says that, what is what, who do we follow? Everybody has their own opinion.”
This state of equivocation and identity confusion is exactly what extremists do best at exploiting, according to Mr Ahmad. As an advisor to Malaysian police’s special rehabilitation programme, he has spent years counselling militant detainees.
The more-than-200 suspects currently detained are proof of the illiberal portion of Malaysian society, “but at the same time, we have the so-called liberal side of society and the moderate side of society”, he said.
“So, as young people who are just coming out from the university, they look at this society and ask, ‘What is going on and which route do I take?’ They are coming to a crossroad.”
At this juncture is where the extremists come in ready with answers - a “specific world view” about how Islam should be practised in daily life, disseminated via digital media.
“(Democracy) has been hijacked by certain groups trying to impose their values upon others. This is the phenomena (where) groups of people might say, ‘I don’t think that you are Muslim enough’,” he said.
ONE YOUTH’S TUSSLE WITH ‘JIHAD’
Hamzah Nazari knows what it is like to grapple with “being a good enough Muslim” - so much so that he once hoped to die in jihad as a martyr.
The 31-year-old former political journalist’s half-Malay, half-English racial heritage meant he found it hard to fit in in his early years at an all-Malay high school.
“As a 13-year-old, it was very confusing. I stuck out like a sore thumb. And in high school, we learnt how Malaysia was colonised by the British,” he said. “I got called anjing penjanjah, which means colonial dog, and I got into a lot of fights.”
Growing up with a very religious father in a conservative Muslim family, Mr Hamzah was seven when his dad told him about the conflict in Palestine and explained jihad to him. “I responded that we should go there and help them and if we die, we go to heaven. I told my mum (about it) and she was not very happy.”
Mr Hamzah spent much of his teenage years apart from his father, and says he would have been a prime target for radicalisation. Not having been taught the meaning behind the teachings of Islam “left space for me to misunderstand a lot of things”.
“When I was a young man in my 20s, I was not a very good person and I was less of a good Muslim then. I was worried about whether or not I would go to heaven,” he said. “So my friends and I were hanging out and discussing how to go to heaven, like this was a real issue for us, looking for a way to die in jihad.”
Mr Hamzah carried that with him until about two years ago, when he was sent to Palestine as a reporter in Gaza. “I believed what I was doing (reporting the news) was a good thing … I had gone there hoping to die, when in actual fact, that is not what jihad means,” he said.
These days, he strives to be a good Muslim by “being a good son, a good brother, employee, a good member of society, being helpful and being peaceful, and being a good example to other people”, he says.
But there are challenges. Mr Hamzah says he can sometimes see why one might be “pulled to one side or the other”. “You have your extremist Muslims or your ‘very conservative Muslims’, so to speak. And you have your very liberal and secular people.
“What they have in common is that they only think that there are only two sides to the conversation. And they believe that there is no middle ground. So what I see is that there is a very large middle ground, but it is very silent.”
That wide grey area, he adds with a smile, is where he finds himself these days.
MOSQUES: A ‘DON’T QUESTION’ CULTURE?
Writer and human rights activist Marina Mahathir isn’t alone in believing that many Muslims, like Mr Hamzah, lack guidance.
Said Ms Marina: “You know it is really odd, because most Malay Muslims grow up with a lot of so-called religious education. All of us are taught to read the Quran.
“But what does not happen is an understanding of the ethics and principles of Islam. It is very rote. You know all the rituals, the basic lore and all that. But you do not fully understand the ethics of it, and that is the problem.”
Indeed, this reporter’s discussion with Grab driver Mr Zeli appeared to spark certain questions in his mind, because he decided to approach the second imam (worship leader) after performing his Friday prayers at a mosque in Damansara.
What, Mr Zeli asked - among other things - was his sense of the personal problems faced by Muslims in modern Malaysia?
Muhammad Syafiq Alhamdan, a young man in his 20s who has been an imam for two years after reading Islam at university, said his worry was that young Muslims were being corrupted by modernity and globalisation.
Pausing for a long while to reflect on the question, he said: “What is hindering them (from being good Muslims) is their clothes. Girls these days, when they wear the baju kurung, we can see their silhouette from the back. So that is not good. It is sad.”
It is views like this that make Mr Zeli feel a certain disconnect with how his mosque approaches real-world issues, he admitted afterwards.
“The mosque is not being the focal point for people to seek advice. They are not creating a friendly environment. It is still about, ‘Oh, you cannot do this or you cannot do that,’” he said.
Mr Hamzah calls this a culture of “don’t question” which is common in the Muslim community.
ISIS TURNS ON ‘YO, BRO’ APPEAL
And so, younger Muslims are turning instead to social media and messaging apps with questions about the issues that affect them.
Trawling through Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms, IMAN’s research team found that their questions involved everyday problems such as, “my husband was really lazy today, or, I do not know how to deal with my boss,” noted Ms Dina.
Everyone turns to social media, she said, because “there are no alternative spaces to ask”.
And this is where groups like ISIS turn on the appeal, reaching out with slick material and advice.
“It appeals to the young, because they feel ‘these guys are not talking down to me, they sit with me and they accept me’,” said Ms Dina.
“Our researchers who have dealt with ISIS members say that they can sit down over Skype or tea, and they can talk and talk, like a ‘yo, bro’ session.
“They will say things like, ‘You have problems with your girlfriend? Let’s talk.’”
Ms Dina said she knew of someone who was asked to join ISIS but declined. “They said, ‘Fine, we are not going to pressure you.’ And people appreciate that (approach), because they are not pressured to be ‘the good Muslim’.”
POLITICS, SOCIAL MEDIA AND ‘ARABISATION’
A part of that pressure has been driven by the accelerating politicisation of Islam in recent years, in Malaysia.
After the ruling Barisan National’s poor showings in the 2008 and 2013 elections, the coalition has been trying to reconnect with the Malay voter by appealing to religion. For example, last year, the United Malays National Organisation aided its long-time rival, the Islamic party PAS, to fast-track a Bill that would allow Kelantan’s Islamic courts to enforce stricter punishments.
Ms Marina said: “The politicisation of Islam has been going on for a long time. The thing is that nowadays, it is weaponised through laws.”
Observers agree that conservatism and the Islamisation of society has been a long and slow-building thing.
“It has always been here, but it is just coming to the surface,” said Mr Hamzah. “Social media and the Internet have allowed people to express themselves. Before, people were very limited in whom they could share their opinions with.”
This conservatism - the influence of a more “Arabised” form of Islam - is eroding Malay culture, says Ms Marina.
According to scholars like Dr Ahmad |
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The Raiders living up to their slogan of "Commitment to Excellence" was spurred by impact free-agent signings and a stellar 2014 draft class in which edge rusher Khalil Mack, quarterback Derek Carr and guard Gabe Jackson were selected in the first three rounds. Although playoff success eluded the Raiders with their Pro Bowl quarterback sidelined by a broken right fibula, the 12 regular-season wins in 2016 were the team's most since 2000. Oakland heads into the 2017 season as arguably the biggest threat in the AFC to dethrone the reigning Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.
But just as the Raiders' championship window opens, the equation is changing. Mack, Carr and Jackson are eligible for contract extensions. How big of a window the Raiders have will depend on McKenzie's ability to navigate potential pitfalls while building a roster when this talented trio is no longer on rookie contracts.
The high price of successful drafting
Getting Carr under contract long term is McKenzie's main offseason focus now that the NFL Draft has taken place. The 2014 second-round pick is a higher signing priority than Mack because he is entering his contract year. Mack's contract year is 2018 since first-round picks are subject to a fifth-year option, which the Raiders exercised for $13.846 million.
Carr recently shot down reports that he was frustrated with the pace of negotiations. He indicated he has complete faith that his new deal will be in place before training camp starts in late July. Nonetheless, Carr set a deadline for reaching an agreement. He will end his negotiations and play out his rookie contract, which pays him $1,152,519 in 2017, once training camp starts.
Derek Carr could break records with his next contract. USATSI
Carr could become the NFL's first $25 million player, eclipsing the five-year, $122.97 million extension Andrew Luck received last offseason from the Colts, after an MVP-caliber 2016 campaign. Luck reset the NFL pay scale with a deal that averages $24.594 million and contains $87 million in guarantees, of which $47 million was fully guaranteed at signing.
Carr putting a clock on negotiations was a smart move. The Raiders allowing Carr to play out his contract and the franchise tag game could be more costly, especially if he can duplicate or better his 2016 performance. It will be upwards of $24 million to place a franchise tag on Carr in 2018 whether using the exclusive or non-exclusive version. A Matthew Stafford extension making him the NFL's highest-paid player is a distinct possibility before the season starts.
The top of the quarterback market could have a dramatic shift in 2018. Aaron Rodgers is expected to sign a new deal with the Packers when there are two years left on his current contract. The Falcons will likely extend reigning NFL MVP Matt Ryan's contract next year as well since he will be in a contract year.
Mack has been everything the Raiders could have hoped for and more. He became the first player in NFL history to earn first-team All-Pro honors at two different positions during the same season (defensive end and outside linebacker) in 2015. Mack followed up this outstanding campaign by being named the NFL's Defensive Player of the Year last season.
A new deal will likely make Mack the NFL's first $20 million non-quarterback. That is, if Rams defensive lineman Aaron Donald, a fellow 2014 first-round pick, doesn't beat him to it. Negotiations between the Rams and Donald are ongoing. A Donald extension should serve as a salary floor for Mack.
The overall guarantees in Mack's deal could approach $75 million. The current benchmark for non-quarterbacks is the $70 million Von Miller received in the six-year deal averaging $19,083,333 he signed last summer as the Broncos' franchise player. The deal also made Miller the league's highest-paid non-quarterback.
There might be more urgency to extend Jackson before Mack. As a 2014 third-round pick, Jackson is also in a contract year. He made a successful transition from right guard to left guard in 2016 to accommodate free-agent signee Kelechi Osemele, who Oakland made the NFL's highest-paid guard with a five-year, $58.5 million deal (worth up to $60 million through incentives) containing $25.4 million fully guaranteed.
The Raiders will become one of the rare NFL teams with a heavy financial investment in guards thanks to an explosion of salaries in free agency this year. Kevin Zeitler established a new salary benchmark when he signed a five-year, $60 million contract containing $31.5 million of guarantees with the Browns. Ronald Leary received a four-year, $36 million deal from the Broncos with $24 million of guarantees after filling in for the Cowboys at left guard because La'el Collins was sidelined most of last season due to a foot injury. The Browns also extended 2014 second-round pick Joel Bitonio's contract five years at $10 million per year despite him missing 17 games over the past two seasons because of injury. His deal has $23,664,777 of guarantees.
A contract at $9 million to $10 million per year with over $20 million in guarantees, which is the going rate of the second salary tier for guards, might be necessary to keep Jackson. The Raiders would join the Browns as the only team with a pair of guards having contracts averaging at least $8 million per year.
Extending Gabe Jackson would give the Raiders two high-priced guards. USATSI
Using a franchise tag on Jackson, provided Carr is under contract long term, would be out of the question. It would be too cost prohibitive. The current offensive lineman number is $14.271 million, which is significantly higher than Jackson's value.
The Raiders are facing an unprecedented situation because of Carr and Mack's success. It is rare for teams to have a quarterback on a lucrative contract while also having one of the league's highest-paid non-quarterbacks. The Raiders are likely to become the first team in league history with a $20 million non-quarterback and a $25 million quarterback.
Among the highest-paid non-quarterbacks by average yearly salary, which in order are Miller (Broncos), Ndamukong Suh (Dolphins), Muhammad Wilkerson (Jets), Fletcher Cox (Eagles), Olivier Vernon (Giants) and Antonio Brown (Steelers), only the Giants (Eli Manning) and Steelers (Ben Roethlisberger) have quarterbacks making at least $20 million per year. Neither quarterback is among the five highest-paid at the position. The Rams will be on the other end of the spectrum as the Giants and Steelers once Donald joins the ranks of highly paid non-quarterbacks because their quarterback, Jared Goff, is entering the second year of his rookie contract.
It's a good problem when arguably the NFL's best young quarterback and a transcendent young defensive player are on a team's roster for the foreseeable future. Other NFL teams aren't going to have any sympathy for the impact Carr and Mack's massive deals will have on Oakland's salary cap.
McKenzie also struck gold in the 2015 draft with fourth overall pick Amari Cooper. The wide receiver has cracked the 1,000-yard mark in both of his NFL seasons. The Raiders will surely exercise Cooper's fifth-year option for 2019 next offseason, barring an unforeseen circumstance this season. His option year salary will likely be over $14 million.
Cooper could be in position to command top wide receiver money on his next contract if he continues to develop. By the time Cooper's contract is ready to be extended, Odell Beckham Jr. might have taken wide receiver salaries to another level on a deal averaging in excess of $17 million with more than $50 million in guarantees.
The 'pay as you go' contract structure
McKenzie has adopted an approach with practically all veteran signings that isn't embraced by most NFL teams. These contracts utilize a "pay as you go" structure. A player's cash and salary cap numbers are the same in each contract year because he is receiving salary guarantees instead of a signing bonus under the "pay as you go" model.
The first contract year usually consists of a fully guaranteed base salary and a roster bonus due a few days after signing. The most lucrative deals have salary guarantees in the second contract year as well. Since there isn't any signing bonus proration, the Raiders won't have any dead money, which is a salary cap charge for a player no longer on the roster, if a player is released during the latter part of a deal provided there hasn't been a restructure for cap purposes.
Contracts with this structure have higher cap numbers initially because of the absence of a signing bonus. Rodney Hudson's five-year, $44.5 million contract, which briefly made him the NFL's highest-paid center in 2015, is a perfect example of this concept. The cap number on the first year of his deal was $13 million. It dropped to $7.7 million in 2016 and $6.85 million in 2017 before rising again to $8.35 million and $8.6 million in the final two years. Hudson can be let go at any point after the 2016 season with impunity because the final three years don't contain any guaranteed money.
The Jaguars and Buccaneers are the most frequent proponents of the "pay as you go" structure outside of the Raiders. The Buccaneers adopted the structure first during Mark Dominik's tenure as general manager. Jacksonville's biggest contracts now contain relatively modest signing bonuses.
It will be difficult for the Raiders to sign the trio to new deals in 2017 without deviating from McKenzie's preferred structure at least to some degree considering the Raiders should have slightly over $31 million of cap space remaining once their entire draft class is under contract. Taking signing bonus deferrals with other high-priced quarterback contracts into account, Carr's 2017 compensation realistically should increase by between $20 million and $30 million on an extension. Luck made $30 million in 2016 under his blockbuster extension; $14 million of his $32 million signing bonus was deferred until this past March. When Russell Wilson signed a new deal in 2015, he made $20.7 million in the first year; $11 million of his $31 million signing bonus wasn't payable until the following April. Even at the lower end of this range, a choice will have to be made between locking up Jackson and Mack this year.
It will likely require the players sacrificing the size of the raises received this year for all three to sign with extensions before the season gets underway. A case can be made that Mack should be the most accommodating since his contract doesn't expire after the season. Parting ways with right tackle Austin Howard would give the Raiders $5 million more to devote to extensions. Giving the players, particularly Carr, a modest signing bonus would provide more salary cap flexibility to take care of all three this year.
Something has to give
Some of the same challenges the Seahawks have faced in making the transition from a championship-caliber team having a low-paid quarterback to a Super Bowl contender with a high-paid one are likely to occur with the Raiders. Seattle had has to make some difficult choices on which players to retain, compromising roster depth with a premium placed on the coaching staff's ability to develop draft talent. It's also going to be a different phenomenon for the Raiders consistently picking at the back end of each draft round instead of near the top of rounds.
The 49ers can also serve as a cautionary tale for the Raiders. Oakland's Bay Area neighbor was set to make the same transition until quarterback Colin Kaepernick regressed, a few key players unexpectedly retired and head coach Jim Harbaugh exited after losing a power struggle with general manager Trent Baalke, whose draft failures have handicapped the 49ers.
The Raiders are built primarily with homegrown talent, with 41 of the 62 players (66.1 percent) on the roster last season either drafted or originally signed as undrafted free agents. Only 10 of the 22 starters were homegrown. This number isn't expected to change this year despite some roster turnover but will need to increase in the future.
Can GM Reggie McKenzie keep finding gems in the draft? USATSI
It will become vital for McKenzie to continue having successful drafts where more starters are homegrown because of Carr and Mack's upcoming deals. For example, cornerback Gareon Conley (2017 first-round pick), who is facing sexual assault allegations, and safety Obi Melifonwu (2017 second-round pick) quickly developing would allow the Raiders to make a seamless transition in the secondary next season. Safety Reggie Nelson, 33, is a free agent after the season. The Raiders could pick up $8.5 million of salary cap room from cutting Sean Smith, who turns 30 in July, next year provided Conley is cleared.
On the surface, it appears the Raiders have an abundance of salary cap space in 2018. There should be approximately $127.5 million of cap commitments for 2018 once the entire draft class is signed. The 2018 salary cap will be in the $180 million neighborhood if the growth rate from recent years continues. Up to $50 million of this space could be devoted to Mack, Carr and Jackson with new deals in place. There would also be very little cap space to carry over with all three re-signing this year.
Being extremely aggressive during the first wave of free agency as in 2015 and '16, when Bruce Irvin, Hudson, Osemele and Smith were signed, could largely become a thing of the past. It might become increasingly harder to sign players like Cordarelle Patterson to short-term deals in the $4 million to $5 million range as the salary paradigm shifts with the inclusion of more high-end contracts. However, the Raiders should be a favored destination for talented free agents once it becomes a buyer's market in the secondary phases of free agency. The move to Las Vegas in 2020 will help in this regard. Nevada is one of the few places, along with Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, that doesn't have a state income tax.
Tough road ahead, but it can be done
Late last season McKenzie remarked, "We think we've built this thing to last." The Raiders could have an extended window of opportunity as Super Bowl contenders despite being on the verge of venturing into uncharted territory because of Carr and Mack's contracts.
The Raiders won't be in any danger of getting back into the massive cap problems that plagued them before McKenzie took over with new Carr and Mack deals because of their approach to structuring contracts. Once these deals are in place, the Raiders should have cap flexibility annually to retool the roster if necessary because of a lack of dead money.
As long as Carr stays healthy, and as long as talent is continually amassed through strong drafts so aging veterans and players that price themselves out of Oakland/Las Vegas or find better opportunities for playing time in free agency can be replaced cost effectively, the Raiders could become an NFL franchise to emulate.The rapid pace of technological and societal change has given government CIOs a new sense of urgency and a willingness to experiment with smart city and open data initiatives, according to Gartner. If managed effectively, this shift will position governments at the core of technological innovation in society.
“As citizens increasingly use personal technology and social networks to organize their lives, governments and businesses are growing their investments in technology infrastructure and governance,” said Anthony Mullen, research director at Gartner. “This creates open platforms that enable citizens, communities and businesses to innovate and collaborate, and ultimately provide useful solutions that address civic needs.”
As a result, Gartner predicts that by 2019, 50 percent of citizens in million-people cities will benefit from smart city programs by voluntarily sharing their personal data. The volume and diversity of the data generated by citizens will continue to grow in line with the proliferation of consumer devices and the IoT.
Citizens will experience some of the benefits of sharing data passively, through government and commercial collaboration. As this hyperconnectivity picks up pace, however, citizens will become more aware of the value of their “life data” and will be willing to proactively exchange it for “in the moment” value.
This process of data sharing is being accelerated by the demand for efficiency and convenience. For example, one of the major barriers for citizens interacting with government is the complexity of engaging via a variety of touch points. A simple question such as “Am I eligible to vote?” can lead citizens through complex processes and rules and onto a variety of websites.
Citizens, therefore, are turning to conversational platforms like virtual personal assistants and messaging bots over traditional apps and websites. Governments are also adapting to this change. For example, the Utah Department of Public Safety provides a practice exam for its driver’s license via Amazon Echo, and Singapore is collaborating with Microsoft on its “conversation as a platform” initiative to develop chatbots around a number of public services.
One consequence of this is that the volume of machine-readable data generated on how citizens interact with government and their city is rapidly growing, creating a huge opportunity to develop open data portals that can increase efficiency, improve citizen experience, drive innovation and generate revenue for government organizations.
“Open data portals in cities are not a new thing, but many portals today have limited machine readability and therefore limited business value,” said Bettina Tratz-Ryan, research vice president at Gartner. “The city becomes ‘smart’ when the data is collected and governed in a way that can produce valuable real-time streams, rather than just backward-looking statistics or reports.”
Some cities are already building data marketplaces, especially in light of the increasing streams of data from the IoT. One early mover is Copenhagen Data Exchange, which takes the very first steps of connecting citizens to data, providing online city records and a mix of lenses through which to view the information.
The next step in building a true marketplace is to present and orchestrate this data for more business-oriented benefits. Gartner predicts that 20 percent of all local government organizations will generate revenue from value-added open data through data marketplaces by 2020. The key to monetization will be automating and extending the user experience to allow citizens and businesses to discover and prepare data, and to find patterns and share them within their community or organization.
“Users will have a number of options to ‘pay’ for data access depending on the use case,” said Ms. Tratz-Ryan. “A normal citizen may simply participate via data democracy and have free access in return for providing their own data, whereas commercial use may require sharing revenue with the data owner, or buying a license to access an enriched data source.”After the stunning success of sport utility vehicles, the more functional pickups are now also gaining ground in the automobile market. Among those that are introducing their models are famous brands like Mercedes-Benz and Renault. This will indeed be breakthrough for the car company. On top of that, we have rumors and even renderings of Land Rover and the possible pickup in their lineup.
It has also been heard of that several other companies are also taking the interest of the idea of having their own entry into this market. Citroen and Peugeot are two of these car makers while Volkswagen had recently created the Amarok. This makes the future of pickups really interesting.
Mercedes was the first to introducing its premium model with the X-Class. It has been uncovered in Stockholm and was hailed as the world’s first “true” premium pickup. Hence, the question arises. Will the German brand’s competitors also move to enter the fray?
The probability for this to happen seems quite faint. BMW, as well as Audi, do not have much of the luxury in the range of commercial vehicles that could grease the wheels for its own pickup like Mercedes–Benz does. So, the X-Class can be confident to remain in its position in the market for some time.
However, BMW and Audi are not the only competitors for Mercedes – Benz. Some Japanese brands also come forward in the market and rumors are filled with Lexus and Infiniti related stories. Looking at the trend, we know that British carmakers would not agree to be left behind. They have already achieved so much success with the SUVs like Discovery Sport, Range Rover, and Range Rover Sport. And according to latest reports the Land Rover is also surfing the tide.
Discovery is the most recent SUV from Land Rover. Although it is still set to come out to the market, it is already gaining popularity with some of its astonishing features like the light aluminum frame, the quality of its architecture and some rough terrain capabilities.
Although two of these characteristics do not necessarily suggest that pickup model will be delivered, the Theophilus Chin, the engineer who crafted the digital image for Discovery truck, persisted in moving forward with his design. The entire form of this vehicle looks good, but the rear seems to have just been copied from the traditional pickup. The opportunities for this project to push through are bleak, but it is also helpful to stretch your imagination and squeeze your creative juices once in a while. Hence, people are questioning why BMW and Audi haven’t created its own pickup line.Proponents of “Add the Four Words” lined the hallway after the Idaho House State Affairs committee voted to keep HB2 in committee Thursday. The bill would have added the words sexual orientation and gender identity to the Idaho Human Rights act. (Katherine Jones/Idaho Statesman via AP)
Two days after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced it backed some nondiscrimination legislation, Idaho became the first heavily Mormon state to consider such a bill, and legislators there, including some who are Mormons, voted it down.
The House State Affairs Committee voted 13-4 to hold a bill in committee that would have added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Idaho Human Rights act, in effect killing the bill Thursday. The committee includes five Mormons, all of whom voted against it. The reason, they said, lies at the crux of the Mormon Church’s argument that with LGBT protections must come protections for people of faith.
“The concern was that it would conflict with religiously held views,” Rep. Ken Andrus (R), a Mormon, told The Washington Post. He pointed to cases involving florists, photographers and bakers in other states who, because of their religious beliefs, did not want to provide services to same-sex couples. Without religious protections, he said, the bill could “set this issue back.”
The vote came after three consecutive days and more than 20 hours of testimony about why the bill was needed from gay, bisexual and transgender Idahoans and their family members — “people getting up and telling that every day of their life they live in fear they’ll get kicked out of their apartment or be fired,” Andrus said.
“We have an obligation to do something for these people,” he said. “The public just doesn’t realize what these people are going through, the burden they’re carrying.”
Some lawmakers took issue with the lack of definition of the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in the bill and said it needed to be worded more specifically if it were to pass.
“I think there’s going to be something coming out of the legislature,” said Rep. Linden Bateman (R), another Mormon who voted against the bill. “There’s just a hesitancy. You want to be a champion of both issues, [but] they clash in some areas.”
Rep. John Rusche (D), the bill’s sponsor, said legislative rules don’t allow for a bill to be reintroduced in the same session, but he’s encouraged about what could happen next year.
“I think they had their eyes opened,” he said. “I talked to some of the people who I thought were curmudgeons and they were really moved by what they heard.”
Andrus, the Idaho Republican, said the LDS church’s statement and testimonies in support of the bill has made him more compassionate. “It softened my heart,” he said.
“Five years ago, I thought that these people were acting out of choice, but I have changed my mind totally,” said Andrus. “A lot of these people are born this way. They didn’t bring this on by their own choice.”
Idaho was the first test of how much influence the church’s endorsement will have on Mormon lawmakers, and there is more ahead. Nondiscrimination legislation has been introduced in the Book of Mormon Belt states of Arizona, Utah and Wyoming. Two of these bills are sponsored by Mormons — Arizona Rep. Ed Ableser (R) and Utah Rep. Steve Urquhart (R).Ashley Keast took a selfie at the scene of the crime… and send it to the homeowner’s colleagues (Picture: South Yorkshire Police)
Is this the worst burglar ever? Detectives might disagree, after he made it especially easy for them to track him down.
After Ashley Keast broke into a home in Rotherham last September, he took a selfie using a phone with a stolen SIM card and somehow managed to post it on WhatsApp, where his victim’s colleagues saw it and contacted police.
The 25-year-old, from Norfolk Court, stole £27,000 worth of goods but was arrested at home the next day.
This week he was jailed for two years and eight months after admitting burglary, at Sheffield Crown Court.
His accomplice Anthony Hunt, 27, of Garbroads Crescent, was jailed for 18 months for the same offence.A critical vulnerability (CVE-2015-0311) exists in Adobe Flash Player 16.0.0.287 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh. Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. We are aware of reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild via drive-by-download attacks against systems running Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows 8.1 and below.
UPDATE (January 24): Users who have enabled auto-update for the Flash Player desktop runtime will be receiving version 16.0.0.296 beginning on January 24. This version includes a fix for CVE-2015-0311. Adobe expects to have an update available for manual download during the week of January 26, and we are working with our distribution partners to make the update available in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 and 11. For more information on updating Flash Player please refer to this post.And that's all folks! At least for today.
Join us tomorrow for more amazing performances from the likes of Nas, Eagles of Death Metal and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
For the low-down on how to follow all the weekend's action check out our How to Watch and Listen page.
The mighty Foals smashed it to bring the party to a close on the Main Stage earlier this evening.
BBC Copyright: BBC Foals at Reading + Leeds 2016 Image caption: Foals at Reading + Leeds 2016
The fantastic Nothing but Thieves kicked things off for us on the Main Stage earlier today.
BBC Copyright: BBC Nothing but Thieves Image caption: Nothing but Thieves
Listen to some tunes by the acts you can catch this weekend on our Reading + Leeds 2016 playlist.
BBC Copyright: BBC Reading + Leeds 2016 Playlist Image caption: Reading + Leeds 2016 Playlist
For updates on the latest highlights follow the Radio 1 Facebook and Twitter accounts.Helle Panziere is a charismatic and charming global sales manager for OVO Lifestyle Toys, Baci Lingerie and ENVY Menswear. She is from Europe, born in Rome and grew-up in Denmark. Her mum is Danish and her father is Italian. She added,
“The weathers always grey and dreary in Denmark. I have been in the U.S. for 20 years.”
One of her favourite quotes that inspires her success is by Mandy Helen:
“You don’t always need a plan. Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go and see what happens.”
When asked what she believes in important to the success of the development of the companies she explained,
“It is very structured, regimented and you must follows plans. The truth is things will be okay. It is an important lesson to learn in business and life |
paper to explain the motivation behind some of the more arcane definitions needed to implement arithmetic in a fully relational style, and to prove their properties formally. The paper develops unary and binary arithmetic relations in pure Prolog (with no cuts, negation or introspection).
LtU readers will also be interested in yet another embedding of pure Prolog into Haskell, that the authors offer. It is not meant to be the most optimal or convenient Prolog implementation (it wasn't even intended to be an implementation of a logic system). It was explicitly designed to be easier to reason about and so help prove certain properties of SLD or similar evaluation strategies. The main difference of DefinitionTree from other embeddings of Prolog in Haskell has to do with the generation of fresh names for logic variables. In DefinitionTree, name generation is not an effect, and the naming is fully decoupled from the evaluation. The evaluation no longer needs to carry a state for the generation of fresh names, hence the evaluator is easier to reason about equationally.September comes to a close this weekend with two major studio releases, but will either be able to overtake Kingsman: The Golden Circle and IT from the top two spots?
Meanwhile, indie openers A Question of Faith and ‘Til Death Do Us Part are expected to debut well outside the top five as they open in less than 700 theaters each. Battle of the Sexes is slated to expand into an estimated 1,200 locations and has been included in our forecast below.
PROS:
American Made (Universal) reunites Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman after Edge of Tomorrow (or Live Die Repeat, depending on who you ask) became a well-received hit three years ago. This film’s $59.5 million overseas earnings have marked a solid start for the crime thriller, tying into the film’s encouraging Facebook presence with nearly 118,000 fans so far — notably ahead of where The Accountant stood at the same point before release. The film’s 84 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is another driving factor as the pic hopes to counter-program among adult males.
(Universal) reunites Tom Cruise and director Doug Liman after Edge of Tomorrow (or Live Die Repeat, depending on who you ask) became a well-received hit three years ago. This film’s $59.5 million overseas earnings have marked a solid start for the crime thriller, tying into the film’s encouraging Facebook presence with nearly 118,000 fans so far — notably ahead of where The Accountant stood at the same point before release. The film’s 84 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is another driving factor as the pic hopes to counter-program among adult males. Flatliners (Sony / Columbia) is generating slightly stronger Twitter activity than the Rings sequel/reboot did earlier this year as it hopes to benefit from the wave of success (not to mention that of the nostalgia-driven variety) enjoyed by many horror releases this year. The PG-13 rating could further help achieve that goal with so many R-rated films dominating the market right now, giving teens something to check out.
CONS:
American Made enters a competitive fall corridor that already hosts several male-driven films, most notably last week’s opener Kingsman: The Golden Circle and next week’s Blade Runner 2049, which is currently receiving early (though unofficial) praise from hush-hush critics’ screenings. Combined with Cruise’s modest drawing power outside the Mission: Impossible franchise in recent years, as well as lukewarm Twitter activity that currently trails War Dogs and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back by significant margins, this film may be looking at a slower start out of the gate than once expected, but that will hopefully build into long-term staying power through October.
enters a competitive fall corridor that already hosts several male-driven films, most notably last week’s opener Kingsman: The Golden Circle and next week’s Blade Runner 2049, which is currently receiving early (though unofficial) praise from hush-hush critics’ screenings. Combined with Cruise’s modest drawing power outside the Mission: Impossible franchise in recent years, as well as lukewarm Twitter activity that currently trails War Dogs and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back by significant margins, this film may be looking at a slower start out of the gate than once expected, but that will hopefully build into long-term staying power through October. Flatliners‘ biggest point of competition will obviously be the remaining holdover business of IT, which continues to set records for the horror genre going into its fourth weekend. In addition, the film’s review embargo remains in place at the time of this report’s Thursday morning publishing (rarely a positive sign) and Facebook growth trails that of comparable films like the 2015 and 2013 remakes of Poltergeist and Carrie, respectively.
The Weekend Forecast:
Title Distributor Weekend Domestic Total through Sunday, October 1 % Change IT Warner Bros. (New Line) $16,500,000 $290,600,000 -45% Kingsman: The Golden Circle Fox $16,400,000 $65,730,000 -58% American Made Universal $13,900,000 $13,900,000 NEW The LEGO Ninjago Movie Warner Bros. $13,800,000 $37,300,000 -33% Flatliners Sony / Columbia $7,600,000 $7,600,000 NEW Battle of the Sexes Fox Searchlight $5,750,000 $6,410,000 +1016%
For client and media requests relating to box office analyses, please contact Shawn RobbinsTell me if you've heard this one: "Aww, she's cute now, but just wait until she's a teenager." I have. At least a few times a week, someone, usually someone who has a teenager at home, decides to pee in my Corn Flakes.
Yes. I get it. I have read the books. My daughter will one day be an acne-ridden mess of hormones and angst just like yours. But while you're busy trying to ruin my day, I'm one of those "when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, heavy on the vodka" kind of moms. Lucky for you, I share.
So here's something to BRIGHTEN your day... a look at why parents of teenagers have it a lot better than they think they do (even with all that door slamming and OMG, I hate you, Mom stuff):
AdvertisementA woman was arrested for allegedly smearing uncooked bacon and sausage on the dispatch window and offering to “feed the pigs’’ at a Framingham police station on Friday.
Lindsey McNamara carried a Dunkin’ Donuts box full of meat into the police station at 11 a.m., according to police. Lieutenant Harry Wareham said McNamara approached an officer “with a great smile on her face’’ and said she was there to “feed the pigs.’’ She then allegedly took the bacon and sausage out of the box and smeared it on the window of the dispatch office.
McNamara was arrested and charged with malicious destruction of property, a misdemeanor.
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The pork meat and McNamara’s alleged “pigs’’ comment appear to be a reference to the criticism of policemen as pigs.
In recent weeks, people have protested across the country against what they say is violence and racism by law enforcement, particularly after policemen in New York and in Ferguson, Missouri were not indicted for killing unarmed black men. Tensions have been particularly high after a man shot and killed two New York policemen last weekend. On Monday, a man in Chicopee was cited for allegedly posting the message “Put Wings on Pigs’’ on his Facebook page.
“There’s a lot of unrest regarding law enforcement, and I don’t know if [this] is related or not,’’ Wareham said. “There’s probably a lot more productive ways to voice her displeasure with police.’’
Framingham has had its own police shooting controversy in 2011. Eurie Stamps Sr., a 68-year-old black man, was shot and killed in his home by a Framingham police officer during a SWAT team raid. Stamps was not the target of the raid, and was lying on the ground with his hands over his head when he was killed.
The Middlesex district attorney’s office determined the policeman lost balance and fell, accidentally firing his weapon. He was not charged with any crimes in the case. Stamps’s family sued the officer on civil rights grounds, and the case is making its way through federal courts.Here are 5 reasons Black America should give up on the Democratic party:
Via John Hawkins at Townhall:
1) Black Americans have been voting for the Democrats en masse for almost 40 years. What do they have to show for it economically? Here’s what they have to show for it: In 2009, the average net worth for white households was $113,149 and $5,700 for black households. Great job, Democratic Party!
It’s truly bizarre to hear Maxine Waters, Andre Carson, Jesse Jackson and other assorted Democratic “leaders” blaming Republicans or even more improbably, Tea Partiers, because black Americans are having a tough time. In every single place in the country where black Americans are a decisive factor in selecting the politicians in charge, Democrats are running the show. How do you look at decimated cities where Democrats have had control of every lever of power for 40 years and conclude, “Republicans are the problem?”
3) Black Americans are thriving in today’s Republican Party. Whatever you may think of the job that Barack Obama has done as President, it is still unquestionably a big deal for America to have its first black President. That being said, the GOP hasn’t been standing still in that department either. Michael Steele was the first black Republican National Committee chairman. Tim Scott and Allen West were both elected to Congress, in majority white districts, last year. West is so popular that he was the keynote speaker at CPAC, the biggest conservative conference of the year. Their election came on the heels of George W. Bush appointing the first AND second black Secretary of State, Colin Powell and Condi Rice. Walter Williams is a fill-in host for the most popular conservative talk radio host in America, Rush Limbaugh. Thomas Sowell was voted the single most liked conservative in America in 2010 AND 2011 by conservative bloggers. Incidentally, second place in 2011 was Allen West. If the question is, “Can black Americans get the respect they deserve in the Republican Party today?” the significant number of black conservatives making an impact seems to suggest the answer is, “Yes, they can!”
4) Black Americans are not as liberal as their voting records seem to show. Many black Americans actually see eye-to-eye with Republicans on many social issues including abortion, gay marriage, and being friendly to Christianity. Many black Americans also agree with the conservative stance on illegal immigration, school choice, being tough on crime, and supporting entrepreneurs — and no wonder. For a lot of black Americans, a vote for the Democratic Party is a vote to lose their job to an illegal alien, trap their kids in a lousy school, and get criminals released back into their neighborhood.
Even someone like Louis Farrakhan, who has campaigned for numerous Democrats over the years, is in favor of corporal punishment, building small businesses, and he believes that welfare is a trap that keeps black Americans mired in poverty. Incidentally — it is.
When black Americans stop buying the phony baloney “He’s a racist” line that Democrats peddle in every election and start genuinely considering Republican candidates on the issues, suddenly both parties will start giving black Americans the attention they deserve.
5) What has the Democratic Party’s “help” over the last 40 years achieved for black Americans? The Democratic Party’s line is that black Americans need their “help” to get by in a racist world. Here’s an alternate theory: Buying into the Democratic Party’s philosophy and accepting “help” has been one of the biggest reasons that black Americans lag behind white Americans. Black males are 6 times as likely to be in prison as white males and black Americans make up 49% of the homicide victims in America. 71.6% of all black Americans are born out of wedlock and black Americans are almost twice as likely to drop out of high school as white Americans, both of which help explain why the black poverty rate is almost 2 1/2 times the white poverty rate.Steven Universe Design Contest 2
About The Contest
About the Contest: They are the Crystals Gems. They’re here to judge our contest. And you think they can’t, they’re sure to find a way! Better than fry bits, the Big Donut, and Cookie Cat combined, WeLoveFine and Cartoon Network are excited to announce the second STEVEN UNIVERSE DESIGN CONTEST, judged by the voice talents of Garnet, Pearl, Amethyst AND STEVEN! It’s time to take your art supplies out of your Cheeseburger Backpack, warp to your creative space, and show us your out of this world Steven Universe Designs. The contest is open to all characters seen in the Cartoon Network show, including fusions, background characters, Homeworld Gems, and of course the main cast, but OCs and Gemsonas will not be accepted as contest submissions. SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED UNTIL 11:59PM PST ON 10/16/2015
RATINGS OPEN FROM 10/06/2015 UNTIL 11:59PM PST on 11/03/2015 About the Judges: Zach Callison: Zach Callison is an American voice, television, and film actor. He voices Steven Universe and Onion in "Steven Universe", voiced King Tut in the 2014 Dreamworks Animation film Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and also does other acting and voicing roles. He also provided several roles for Disney, including Prince James in Sofia the First.
Estelle: Estelle is a British singer-songwriter, rapper, producer and Grammy Award winner from West London, England. She is also the voice of Garnet on Steven Universe! DeeDee Magno-Hall: Deedee is an American actress, singer, and a former member of a pop group called The Party. She voices Pearl, Holo-Pearl, the daughter in Li'l Butler, and Hopper in Steven Universe. Michaela Dietz: Michaela Dietz is an American voice actor and comedian. She voices Amethyst on Steven Universe and has contributed to several other projects including Barney and Friends and Grand Theft Auto V. Hot Topic: It all started in 1988. A ton of teen retail accessory stores filled the malls, but there wasn't a cool music-inspiredaccessory store for both guys and girls. Then came Hot Topic. We brought the world of pop icons into our Hot Topic stores.
How To Enter
DOs & DON'Ts 1. Do: Make something original. Research to make sure your idea isn't already out there. 2. Do: Make stylized art! Get inspiration from Steven Universe! 3. Do: Use logos or icons that can be found in the show. Please, however, do note that if it's a fairly simple or generic logo, make sure that we do not already have it on the website. 4. Do: Have fun and be creative! 5. Don't: Use the Steven Universe Logo or Cartoon Network's Logo. When creating your design imagine its part of the Steven Universe world. 6. Don't: Submit similar versions of the same design. Sometimes people submit the same design, but with small changes. This will only divide your votes and hurt your chances of winning rather than help it. 7. Don't: Use any copyrighted, 3rd party or inappropriate materials. This contest is to submit art designs to be officially licensed. If it is too obscene or mixes 3rd party, or copyrighted materials, it will NOT be approved. 8. Don't: Submit images or pictures from the show. Please create your own art! 9: Don't: Create your own characters for the show. Only Characters from within the show are allowed.
FAQWith the NBA in Mexico again this season, the Brooklyn Nets have a chance to build off their recent success.
Unless one is a fan of the Brooklyn Nets, they may not notice the Nets have won three of their last five games. Next up for the Nets is a trip to Mexico City, Mexico where the Nets face the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Miami Heat. The Nets are taking “We Go Hard” to Mexico.
NBA in Mexico: Brooklyn Nets Hope to Go Hard Across the Border
Success on the Road
The Nets recently went on a road trip against Western Conference opponents. They were forced to play short-handed as sharpshooter Allen Crabbe missed all three games due to back issues. Starting power forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson left the Grizzlies game injured and missed the games versus the Houston Rockets and Dallas Mavericks.
Joe Harris and Trevor Booker filled in admirably for Crabbe and Hollis-Jefferson, respectively. Harris continued to repay the faith shown by the coaches as he contributed timely and consistent scoring throughout, while Booker brought his usual workman-like attitude, contributing double-doubles in victories over the Grizzlies and the Mavericks.
Veteran Leadership Evident
The Nets followed a successful road trip with a disappointing loss Atlanta Hawks upon their return to the Barclays. However, veteran leader DeMarre Carroll,a former Hawk, is unshaken in his belief of his young team. In a recent stint on NBA TV, Carroll spoke of his role with the Nets, playing defense and his relationship with coach Kenny Atkinson.
Vengeance in Atlanta
After that unexpected, heart-breaking home loss on Saturday to the Atlanta Hawks, the Nets exacted sweet revenge on Monday. Swing man Caris LeVert paced a balanced attack which saw six Nets scoring double figures versus Atlanta in a game that Brooklyn badly wanted.
LeVert, Hollis-Jefferson, Harris, Spencer Dinwiddie, Jarrett Allen and Carroll each scored at least 11 point; Trevor Booker also chipped in with 9 points.
On a night where the Nets led the Hawks in all five major categories, a couple of performances stood out. Rookie Jarrett Allen tallied 11 points and 3 blocks. Hollis-Jefferson had a double-double (16 points, 10 rebounds), and Carroll continued his consistent play contributing 13 points, 8 rebounds and 4 assists.
Next up, Mexico
The Nets will help create NBA history on Thursday, December 7 and Saturday, December 9. Because it shall be the first time Mexico City hosts four regular-season games in a calendar year. Reigning league MVP Russell Westbrook, alongside Paul George, Carmelo Anthony, and the Thunder face the Nets on Thursday. While on December 9, the Erik Spoelstra led Miami Heat challenges the Atkinson led Brooklyn outfit.
The NBA Mexico City Games 2017 mark the 25th and 26th games played in Mexico. These games most of all, help the NBA celebrate its 25th Anniversary of playing games in Mexico. Especially relevant, the Brooklyn Nets are excited to play at the Arena Ciudad de Mexico.
General Manager Sean Marks see this as more than another road trip for his Nets team. “The Brooklyn Nets are honored to be the host team for the 2017 NBA Mexico City Games and help the league celebrate the 25th anniversary of the first NBA game in Mexico,” said Sean Marks, Brooklyn Nets General Manager.
National Network Neglect
In closing, the Nets were allocated two games on NBA TV this season. One game was a loss to the Utah Jazz. The other is game on Saturday versus the Heat.
Television networks ABC, ESPN, and TNT shunned the Brooklyn outfit, opting for more fashionable teams like the Suns and Mavericks. Finally, this Mexico trip is the Nets chance to shine on the National and International stage.
Main image credit:
Embed from Getty ImagesCheck your radar and prepare yourself to be a part of the storm that's about to hit! Torrent Brewing Company is coming to Ames, Iowa and bringing great beer with it! Ames is a vibrant college town of over 60,000 people nestled in the heart of the Midwest. We’ll offer a great core lineup of beers and an exciting rotation of seasonal, barrel aged and sour beers! With a quickly emerging craft beer industry in Iowa, Ames is prime for a truly great craft beer experience!
Existing vacant building re-purposed for our use!
With hard work and elbow grease this will become.....
…..Torrent Brewing Company!
So you say how can I help Torrent Brewing Company get this thing going? You can help at the ground level by picking a donation level to the right and in return receive some awesome swag! But were not just offering merchandise here, we've got some really unique rewards available for the craft beer lover! From our lowest reward level all the way to our highest, all of you are vitally important to not only the success of the fundraiser but also to the overall success of Torrent Brewing Company!
Men's and Women's shirts
Pint glass and Coaster
This fundraiser is an all or nothing campaign. What does that mean? Basically we either meet or exceed our funding goal, if not we get nothing! If we reach our goal the transaction will go through on your card, if we don’t it’s like it never happened. So now you probably want to know what we'll use the funds for right? We've emptied the cars ash tray and checked super deep in the couch cushions and have secured enough funds to get us all the way to the tap room build out and that’s where you come in. We need to build the bar including sinks and plumbing and install the draft system so our fresh flavorful beers can flow. In addition we’ll need places for our patrons to relax and enjoy their pints so we need tables, chairs and bar stools. All of this adds up extremely fast and so that’s why we’re asking you to be a part of the brewery and help get us over the top!
Stretch Goals:
If we receive more than our goal we'd like to do the following.
1. Purchase more whiskey and wine barrels to jumpstart our barrel aging program.
2. Create an outdoor seating area, think beer garden.
3. Purchase a "High Lift" floor jack.
Here's where you can find out more about us and the brewery!
Website: http://torrentbrewingco.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Torrent-Brewing-Company/550597188348395?fref=ts
Twitter: @Torrentbrewingcompany
Ames Tribune article:
http://amestrib.com/news/ames-and-story-county/new-brewery-planned-downtown-ames
So ready to be a part of the brewery at the ground level, here's how.
1. On the right side of the page (next to the photos) choose the pledge level and rewards that interest you.
2. Now click on “Continue to Next Step” near the bottom of the page.
3. Select “Continue to Amazon”
4. If you already have an Amazon account log in. If not enter your email and click on “I am a new customer” and select “Sign in using our secure server”
5. Now follow the instructions that Amazon will give you.
6. If we meet or exceed our funding goal by the date we've set, your card will be charged the amount you pledged. If we fall short of our goal you won’t be charged and we don’t get a dime (sort of sad to think about really).
7. So if we meet our goal we’ll send you the rewards listed under your pledge level or contact you on how to collect your reward.Many immigrants who have time-limited permission to live and work in the United States under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) face an uncertain future as the White House and lawmakers from both parties wrangle over immigration policy and border security issues.
Roughly 318,000 people currently have this protected status after fleeing their countries because of war, hurricanes, earthquakes or other extraordinary conditions that could make it dangerous for them to live in that country. Nearly all are expected to lose their benefits either this year or next. Federal officials have said that TPS is meant to provide temporary rather than long-term relief.
The Trump administration proposed extending Temporary Protected Status for 300,000 immigrants as part of a border wall deal to end the longest government shutdown in history earlier this year. Democrats opposed the proposed plan for several reasons, including new standards and higher fees for TPS applications.
The Department of Homeland Security said last year that it would not extend Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from six of the 10 nations that are now eligible. Of those six nations, five (Sudan, Nicaragua, Nepal, Haiti and El Salvador) will face TPS expirations this year. TPS for Honduras expires in 2020. Only those from South Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia have received TPS extensions with the possibility of future extension.
However, the decisions to end TPS for those from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador have been temporarily blocked by a federal court. And immigrant advocates recently filed a separate lawsuit challenging the decision to end TPS for those from Nepal and Honduras.
The first groups expected to lose their benefits will be roughly 1,000 Sudanese and about 2,500 Nicaraguans whose benefits were extended through April 2 of this year. However, their benefits will continue while the court injunction remains in effect. Benefits for the largest group, about 195,000 people from El Salvador, are scheduled to expire this September.
In all, immigrants with Temporary Protected Status were about 3% of the 10.7 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2016, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of government data. Yet this share was higher for some countries: Immigrants with TPS accounted for about a quarter of unauthorized immigrants from El Salvador (27%) and around 13% of those from Honduras in 2016, for example. (This analysis assumes that immigrants with TPS are in the U.S. without authorization.)
Once the Department of Homeland Security designates a nation’s immigrants as eligible for Temporary Protected Status, immigrants may apply if they entered the U.S. without authorization or entered on a temporary visa that has expired. Applicants may also have a valid temporary visa or another non-immigrant status such as foreign student.
To be granted TPS, applicants must meet filing deadlines, pay a fee and prove they have lived in the U.S. continuously since the events that triggered relief from deportation. They also must meet criminal-record requirements – for example, that they have not been convicted of any felony or two or more misdemeanors while in the U.S., or been engaged in persecuting others or terrorism.
Temporary Protected Status does not make individuals automatically eligible for permanent residence or U.S. citizenship, but some may apply for permanent lawful status. Federal officials are required to announce 60 days before any TPS designation expires whether it will be extended; without a decision, it automatically extends six months.
Here is the status for the largest origin groups now protected under TPS, based on the most recent Federal Register notices for each country:
EL SALVADOR
In 2016, there were 725,000 unauthorized immigrants from El Salvador living in the U.S., and about a quarter of these (27%) had Temporary Protected Status, according to Pew Research Center estimates. As of 2018, U.S. government officials estimate that 195,000 individuals from El Salvador have TPS, which is scheduled to expire on Sept. 9. Though the Trump administration plans not to extend TPS for Salvadorans, this decision has been temporarily blocked by a federal court.
The current TPS for El Salvador applies to immigrants who have lived in the U.S. since Feb. 13, 2001, following a series of earthquakes that killed more than a thousand people and inflicted widespread damage. Recovery has been slowed by a series of problems, including “hurricanes and tropical storms, heavy rains and flooding, volcanic and seismic activity, an ongoing coffee rust [fungus disease] epidemic, and a prolonged regional drought that is impacting food security,” according to a Federal Register notice explaining why the designation has repeatedly been extended. The notice also cited increasing violence and high unemployment. El Salvador’s government has asked that TPS be extended.
HAITI
There were about 100,000 unauthorized immigrants from Haiti in the U.S. in 2016 overall, according to the Center’s estimates. U.S. government officials estimate about 46,000 Haitian immigrants have Temporary Protected Status as of 2018. TPS benefits for Haitians are set to expire July 22, with no plans for extension, though the Trump administration’s decision to terminate TPS is also temporarily blocked by a federal court challenge.
The TPS designation for Haiti was based on an earthquake that killed hundreds of thousands of people in January 2010. Immigrants also are eligible if they entered the U.S. up to a year later – so any Haitian immigrant with protected status has been in the U.S. since at least early 2011.
In 2017, the Haitian government asked for an 18-month extension leading up to the July 22 termination, citing recent catastrophes including other hurricanes.
HONDURAS and NICARAGUA
There are 57,000 Hondurans and roughly 2,550 Nicaraguans with Temporary Protected Status, as of 2018 estimates. In 2016, there were an estimated 425,000 unauthorized immigrants from Honduras and around 70,000 from Nicaragua overall. Benefits expire for Nicaraguans (as well as for Sudanese) on April 2, with no plans for extension, though this is being challenged in court along with terminations for El Salvador and Haiti. Benefits for Hondurans expire Jan. 5, 2020, with no plans for extension.
Immigrants from Honduras and Nicaragua who qualify for TPS must have been living in the U.S. as of Dec. 30, 1998. Immigrants from both countries were designated eligible for TPS based on damage from Hurricane Mitch in 1998. The storm killed more than 5,600 people in Honduras and more than 3,000 in Nicaragua. The government of Honduras had also requested an extension of TPS.
Damage in Honduras was at least $5 billion, and recovery has been hampered by tropical storms, drought and poverty, federal officials said when they last extended the TPS designation. In Nicaragua, damage was at least $1.3 billion, with a series of environmental disasters – including storms, earthquakes and a volcanic eruption – getting in the way of recovery efforts, federal officials said in extending that country’s TPS designation. Elaine Duke, then acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a 2017 announcement that conditions in Nicaragua had improved enough that the TPS designation would be terminated in January 2019, but that was later pushed back as a result of an injunction by a U.S. District Court.
Because of data limitations, Pew Research Center has not estimated the TPS share of unauthorized immigrants from the other six countries. They include Nepal (with 8,950 immigrants with TPS), Somalia (500), South Sudan (70), Sudan (1,040), Syria (5,800) and Yemen (1,250).
Congress and President George H.W. Bush authorized the TPS program in the 1990 immigration law, granting the White House executive power to designate and extend the status to immigrants in the U.S. based on certain criteria.
Note: This is an update of a post originally published Nov. 8, 2017.
For the most recent information on Temporary Protected Status by country, see the Department of Homeland Security TPS page.
Topics: Unauthorized Immigration, Global Migration and Demography, Foreign Affairs and Policy, Latin America, Donald Trump, ImmigrationMajor coup for AE9/11Truth -– American Institute of Architects green lights Building 7 vote
% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.
By Craig McKee (Truth and Shadows)
Sometimes it really pays to be persistent.
That’s what Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth found out this week when the organization achieved something truly remarkable. It succeeded in getting a commitment from the largest association of architects in the U.S. to debate and vote on a resolution supporting an investigation into the destruction of World Trade Center Building 7 on Sept. 11, 2001.
The vote will take place at the annual convention of the American Institute of Architects, May 14-16, in Atlanta, GA. (If you’re not sure how much of a big deal this convention is, the keynote speaker is former president Bill Clinton.)
After several failed attempts to get the AIA to even consider looking into Building 7, AE tried a different approach in early 2015. Instead of simply appealing to the AIA leadership, they used the organization’s own rules to create a resolution that, pending approval by the AIA resolution (Continue on Truth and Shadows)Image copyright AFP Image caption Rival militias have been battling for control in Benghazi
At least 35 bodies have been recovered from a Libyan military base that was overrun by Islamist-led militias, the Libyan Red Crescent says.
The special forces base in Benghazi was captured on Tuesday, after two days of intense fighting.
Libya has been gripped by a wave of violence involving the militias that spearheaded the 2011 uprising against Muammar Gaddafi.
The new parliament is reportedly going to hold an emergency meeting this week.
The parliament, elected late last month, was due to have met in Benghazi on 4 August.
However it will now meet on Saturday in the city of Tobruk, some 200 km (125 miles) east of Benghazi, the AFP new agency reports.
Abu Badr Biira, an MP quoted by the agency, said the venue for the meeting had been changed "in light of the dangerous situation".
Many Western governments - including the UK, France, Germany and the US - have already asked their citizens to leave the country. Several have also evacuated their embassies.
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Firefighters have been battling to contain the Tripoli fuel depot blaze
Tripoli blaze
An officer from the special forces unit in Benghazi told reporters on Tuesday that the base was abandoned after heavy shelling.
On Wednesday, Red Crescent spokesman Mohamed al-Misrati told the AFP news agency that 35 bodies had been recovered at the base.
"But there are more," he is quoted as saying.
Reuters news agency reports that 75 bodies have been found since the fall of the Benghazi base, most of them soldiers.
At least 97 people have also been killed in fighting between militias battling for control of Tripoli's main airport in the past week.
The government has blamed clashes between the armed groups for starting a fire at a Tripoli fuel depot, and for preventing firefighters from putting out the blaze.
The militias reportedly agreed a ceasefire on Wednesday to allow the blaze to be brought under control.
Separately on Wednesday, a Filipino nurse was kidnapped and raped in Tripoli, the AFP news agency reports, quoting medical and security officials.
A Libyan health ministry spokesman, quoted by the agency, said Filipino staff working at hospitals in Tripoli were preparing to leave following the incident.Image copyright Steffen Richter, Harvard University Image caption The measurements were taken using the BICEP2 instrument at the South Pole telescope facility
Scientists say they have extraordinary new evidence to support a Big Bang Theory for the origin of the Universe.
Researchers believe they have found the signal left in the sky by the super-rapid expansion of space that must have occurred just fractions of a second after everything came into being.
It takes the form of a distinctive twist in the oldest light detectable with telescopes.
The work will be scrutinised carefully, but already there is talk of a Nobel.
"This is spectacular," commented Prof Marc Kamionkowski, from Johns Hopkins University.
Nature did not have to be so kind and the theory didn't have to be right Prof Alan Guth, Inflation pioneer
"I've seen the research; the arguments are persuasive, and the scientists involved are among the most careful and conservative people I know," he told BBC News.
The breakthrough was announced by an American team working on a project known as BICEP2.
This has been using a telescope at the South Pole to make detailed observations of a small patch of sky.
The aim has been to try to find a residual marker for "inflation" - the idea that the cosmos experienced an exponential growth spurt in its first trillionth, of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.
Image copyright BICEP2 Image caption Gravitational waves from inflation put a distinctive twist pattern in the polarisation of the CMB
Theory holds that this would have taken the infant Universe from something unimaginably small to something about the size of a marble. Space has continued to expand for the nearly 14 billion years since.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Stephen Hawking debates inflation with Neil Turok
Inflation was first proposed in the early 1980s to explain some aspects of Big Bang Theory that appeared to not quite add up, such as why deep space looks broadly the same on all sides of the sky. The contention was that a very rapid expansion early on could have smoothed out any unevenness.
But inflation came with a very specific prediction - that it would be associated with waves of gravitational energy, and that these ripples in the fabric of space would leave an indelible mark on the oldest light in the sky - the famous Cosmic Microwave Background.
The BICEP2 team says it has now identified that signal. Scientists call it B-mode polarisation. It is a characteristic twist in the directional properties of the CMB. Only the gravitational waves moving through the Universe in its inflationary phase could have produced such a marker. It is a true "smoking gun".
Speaking at the press conference to announce the results, Prof John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and a leader of the BICEP2 collaboration, said: "This is opening a window on what we believe to be a new regime of physics - the physics of what happened in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the Universe."
'Completely astounded'
The signal is reported to be quite a bit stronger than many scientists had dared hope. This simplifies matters, say experts. It means the more exotic models for how inflation worked are no longer tenable.
The results also constrain the energies involved - at 10,000 trillion gigaelectronvolts. This is consistent with ideas for what is termed Grand Unified Theory, the realm where particle physicists believe three of the four fundamental forces in nature can be tied together.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Prof Alan Guth: "Experiment is Nobel Prize worthy"
But by associating gravitational waves with an epoch when quantum effects were so dominant, scientists are improving their prospects of one day pulling the fourth force - gravity itself - into a Theory of Everything.
The sensational nature of the discovery means the BICEP2 data will be subjected to intense peer review.
It is possible for the interaction of CMB light with dust in our galaxy to produce a similar effect, but the BICEP2 group says it has carefully checked its data over the past three years to rule out such a possibility.
Other experiments will now race to try to replicate the findings.
Prof Andrew Jaffe from Imperial College London, UK, works on a rival telescope called POLARBEAR. He commented: " |
, Moscow ordered feeding of water to the reactor. As Director of the Chernobyl site he was imprisoned for ten years.
Nikolai Fomin [ edit ]
Chief engineer Fomin arrived in the Block 4 control room at 4:30. Akimov reported an intact reactor and explosion of the emergency water feed tank. He ordered continuous feeding of water into the reactor, which was already in progress by emergency pump 2 from the deaerators. Fomin kept pressing the staff to feed water to the reactor and transferred more people to Unit 4 to replace those being disabled by radiation. After Dyatlov left, Fomin ordered Sitnikov, his replacement, to climb to the roof of Unit C and survey the reactor; Sitnikov obeyed and received a fatal radiation dose there; at 10:00 am he returned and reported to Fomin and Bryukhanov that the reactor was destroyed. The managers refused to believe him and ordered continued feeding of water into the reactor; the water, however, flowed through the severed pipes into the lower levels of the plant, carrying radioactive debris and causing short circuits in the cableways common to all four blocks. Later, before trial he had a mental breakdown and tried to kill himself. Fomin had broken his glasses and slit his wrists with the shards, but they saved his life.
Victims and other on-site persons [ edit ]
The following is a table of victims and other involved people of the Number Four reactor accident (still alive unless date of death is specified or died from explosions or related causes).[6][7][8][9]
Name Cyrillic name Date of birth Date of death Cause of death/injury Role Akimov, Aleksandr Fyodorovich Акимов, Александр (Саша) Фёдорович 1953-05-06 1986-05-10 Deep Radiation Burns on 100% of Body Unit #4 shift leader Akimov was In the control room at the reactor control panel at the moment of explosion, with Toptunov; received fatal dose during attempts to restart feedwater flow into the reactor; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree[10] Badaev, Yuri Yurievich Бадаев, Юрий Юрьевич SKALA computer operator, electromechanic (DES), block 4 at the moment of the explosion in the SKALA room[11] Baranov, Anatoly Ivanovich Баранов, Анатолий Иванович 1953-06-13 1986-05-20 electrical engineer, senior electrician posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree[10] Bondarenko, Nikolai Sergeevich Бондаренко, Николай Сергеевич oxygen-nitrogen station, operator at the moment of the explosion stationed in the nitrogen-oxygen station, 200 meters from the Block 4 [11] Borets, Vitaliy Ivanovich Борец, Виталий Иванович? former Leningrad power plant block shift leader; in charge of preparation of the test, would supervise it according to the original schedule, asked Dyatlov to cancel it due to the state of the reactor. Went home for the night, was called on-site to assist with post-accident situation.[12] Brazhnik, Vyacheslav (Slava) Stepanovich Бражник, Вячеслав Степанович 1957-05-03 1986-05-14 turbine operator, senior turbine machinist operator in the turbine hall at the moment of explosion; received fatal dose (over 1000 rad) during firefighting and stabilizing the turbine hall, died in Moscow hospital; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree;[10] irradiated by a piece of fuel lodged on a nearby transformer of turbogenerator 7 during manual opening of the turbine emergency oil drain valves Bryukhanov, Viktor Брюханов, Виктор 1935-12-01[13] plant director former director of the Balakovo Nuclear Power Plant; after the disaster stripped of Communist party membership, arrested in August 1986, spent a year in Kiev prison awaiting trial;[14] found guilty of gross violation of safety regulations, sentenced to 10 years of labor camp plus concurrent 5 years for abuse of power.[15] Of this he served five.[16] Chugunov, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Чугунов, Владимир Александрович reactor shop 1 deputy director radiation burn on right side, right hand, received sublethal radiation dose during post-accident site survey[12] Degtyarenko, Viktor Mikhaylovich Дегтяренко, Виктор Михайлович 1954-08-10 1986-05-19 reactor operator at the moment of explosion close to the pumps; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree,[10][17] face scalded by steam or hot water[18] Dik, G.A. Дик, Г.А. plant employee morning shift[18] Elshin, M.A. Ельшин, М.А. thermal plant automation and measurement, shift leader present in the control room when the reactor power dropped; returned to his office when power was stabilized, where he was in the moment of explosion[11] Fomin, Nikolai Maksimovich Фомин, Николай Максимович 1937? chief engineer arrived at 4:30; spent a month in the Moscow clinic; after the disaster stripped of Communist party membership, arrested in August 1986, spent a year in Kiev prison awaiting trial;[14] cleared of charges of abuse of power, found guilty of gross violation of safety regulations, sentenced to 10 years of labor camp,[15] released soon afterwards because of a nervous breakdown Gazin, Sergei Nikolaevich Газин, Сергей Николаевич turbogenerator chief engineer from shift 16:00–24:00, stayed to watch the test, in control room at desk T with Kirshenbaum at the moment of explosion Golovnenko, Mikhail Головненко, Миша firefighter, driver Ignatenko, Vasiliy Ivanovich Игнатенко, Василий Иванович 1961-03-13 1986-05-13 fireman senior sergeant, first crew on the reactor roof, received fatal dose during attempt to extinguish the roof and the reactor core, died two weeks later in Moscow Hospital 6[19] Ivanenko, Yakaterina Aleksandrovna Иваненко, Екатерина Александровна 1932-09-11 1986-05-26 Pripyat city police guard guarded a gate opposite to the Block 4, stayed on duty for the entire night until morning[20] Kavunets, Aleksander Adamovich Кавунец, Александр Адамович turbine repair department chief Khmel, Grigori Matveyevich Хмель, Григорий Матвеевич fireman firefighting car driver, Chernobyl region firefighting area Khodemchuk, Valeriy Il'ich Ходемчук, Валерий Ильич 1951-03-24 1986-04-26 initial explosion main circulating pumps, senior operator stationed in the northern main circulating pumps engine room, likely killed immediately; body never found, likely buried under the wreckage of the steam separator drums; has a memorial plaque on the west side of the Phase 2 ventilation building; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree[10] Kibenok, Viktor Mykolayovych Кибенок, Виктор Николаевич 1963-02-17 1986-05-11 fireman lieutenant, leader of the second unit, fighting fires in the reactor department, separator room, and the central hall; in 1987 posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union Kirshenbaum, Igor Киршенбаум, Игорь turbine control senior engineer (SIUT), deputy head of unit 4 turbine section present in the control room, desk T, at the moment of explosion; in charge of switching off the Turbogenerator 8 and starting its spindown Konoval, Yuriy Ivanovych Коновал, Юрий Иванович 1942-01-01 1986-05-28 electrician posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree[10] Kovalenko, A.P. Коваленко, А.П. 1950 reactor shop 2, chief // reactor 4 supervisor former Tomsk-7 worker; received radiation dose during the post-accident site survey the next day;[12] after the disaster demoted, allowed to continue working in the plant while awaiting trial;[14] found guilty of violating safety regulations, sentenced to 3 years of labor camp.[15] Kudryavtsev, Aleksandr Hennadiyovych Кудрявцев, Александр (Саша) Геннадиевич 1957-12-11 1986-05-14 SIUR trainee present in the control room at the moment of explosion; received fatal dose of radiation during attempt to manually lower the control rods as he looked directly to the open reactor core; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree[10] Kukhar, A.A. Кухар, А.А. electrical laboratory, chief at the central control room with Lelechenko; at the moment of explosion just arrived to the block 4 control room[11] Kurguz, Anatoly Kharlampiyovych Кургуз, Анатолий Харлампиевич 1957-06-12 1986-05-12 operator, central hall scalded by radioactive steam entering his control room; his colleague, Oleg Genrikh, was spared the worst and survived Kuryavchenko, Nikolai Gordeevich Курявченко, Николай Гордеевич SKALA computer operator, electromechanic (DES), block 3 in block 3[11] Lelechenko, Aleksandr Grigoryevich Лелеченко, Александр Григорьевич 1938-07-26 1986-05-07 fatal radiation exposure, 2500 rads plant worker, deputy chief of the electrical shop former Leningrad power plant electrical shop shift leader;[12] at the central control room with Kukhar; at the moment of explosion just arrived to the block 4 control room;[11] in order to spare his younger colleagues a radiation exposition he himself went through radioactive water and debris three times to switch off the electrolyzers and the feed of hydrogen to the generators, then tried to supply voltage to feedwater pumps; after receiving first aid, returned to the plant and worked for several more hours. Died in Kiev hospital. Lopatyuk, Viktor Ivanovich Лопатюк, Виктор Иванович 1960-08-22 1986-05-17 electrician received fatal dose during switching off the electrolyzer[21] Luzganova, Klavdia Ivanovna Лузганова, Клавдия Ивановна 1927-05-09 1986-07-31 radiation exposure, est. 600 rad Pripyat city police guard[22] guarded the construction site of the spent fuel storage building about 200 meters from Block 4[20] Lysyuk, G.V. Лысюк, Г.В. electrician, shop chief at the moment of the explosion in the control room; in charge of issuing the simulated Maximum Projected Accident signal on Metlenko's command[11] Metlenko, Gennady Petrovich Метленко, Геннадий Петрович Dontechenergo, senior brigade electroengineer at the moment of explosion present with two assistants in the N area of the control room, at the oscillographs; supposed to monitor the slowdown rate of the spinning down turbogenerator, and its electrical characteristics, worked together with Kirshenbaum; after the explosion sent to help in the turbine hall but sent back from there[11] Nekhaev, Aleksandr A. Нехаев, Александр А. morning shift, helped Akimov and Toptunov opening the valves to feed water to the reactor through steam separator drums and main circulation pumps[23] Novyk, Oleksandr Vasylyovych Новик, Александр Васильевич 1961-08-11 1986-07-26 turbine equipment machinist-inspector received fatal dose (over 1000 rad) during firefighting and stabilizing the turbine hall, died in Moscow hospital; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree;[10] irradiated by a piece of fuel lodged on a nearby transformer of the turbogenerator 7 during attempts to call the control room Orlov, Ivan Lukych Орлов, Иван Лукич 1945-01-10 1986-05-13 physicist received fatal dose during attempts to restart feedwater flow into the reactor Perchuk, Kostyantyn Hryhorovich Перчук, Константин Григорьевич 1952-11-23 1986-05-20 turbine operator, senior engineer in the turbine hall at the moment of explosion; received fatal dose (over 1000 rad) during firefighting and stabilizing the turbine hall, died in Moscow hospital; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree;[10] irradiated by a piece of fuel lodged on a nearby transformer of the turbogenerator 7 during manual opening of the turbine emergency oil drain valves Perevozchenko, Valery Ivanovich (Valera) Перевозченко, Валерий Иванович 1947-05-06 1986-06-13 foreman, reactor section received fatal dose of radiation during attempt to locate and rescue Khodemchuk and others, and manually lower the control rods; together with Kudryavtsev and Proskuryakov he looked directly to the open reactor core; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree;[10] radiation burns on side and back Petrovskiy, Aleksander Петровский, Александр fireman watched the fire spread from the roof of Unit C until 6 am as ordered by Teliatnikov Popov, Georgi Illiaronovich Попов, Георгий Илларионович 1940-02-21 1986-06-13 acute radiation sickness Kharkov turbine plant vibration specialist,[24] mobile laboratory in the car at Turbine 8; buried in Mitinskoe Cemetery Pravik, Vladimir Pavlovych Правик, Владимир (Володя) Павлович 1962-06-13 1986-05-11 radiation burns fireman lieutenant, first crew on the reactor roof, repeatedly visited the reactor and the roof of Unit C at Level 71 to supervise the firefighting; received fatal dose during attempt to extinguish the roof and the reactor core, died two weeks later in Moscow Hospital 6; his eyes are said to have been turned from brown to blue by the intensity of the radiation;[4] in 1987 posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union Prishchepa, V.A. Прищепа, В.А. fireman Pravik's unit, watched the fire spread from the roof of Unit C until 6 am as ordered by Teliatnikov Proskuryakov, Viktor Vasilyevich Проскуряков, Виктор (Витя) Васильович 1955-04-09 1986-05-17 SIUR trainee present in the control room at the moment of explosion; received fatal dose of radiation during attempt to manually lower the control rods as he looked directly to the open reactor core; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree;[10] 100% radiation burns Rogozhkin, Boris V. Рогожкин 1935? block shift leader supervisor of the 0:00–8:00 shift; after the disaster demoted, allowed to continue working in the plant while awaiting trial;[14] found guilty of gross violation of safety regulations, sentenced to 5 years of labor camp plus two years concurrently for negligence and unfaithful execution of duty[15] Rysin, Aleksei Vladimirovich Рысин, Алексей Владимирович turbine operation senior engineer Savenkov, Volodomyr Ivanovych Савенков, Владимир Иванович 1958-02-15 1986-05-21 acute radiation sickness Kharkov turbine plant vibration specialist,[24] mobile laboratory in the car at Turbine 8; first one to become sick; buried in Kharkov in a lead coffin[24] Shapovalov, Anatoliy Ivanovych Шаповалов, Анатолий Иванович 1941-04-06 1986-05-19 electrician posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree[10] Shashenok, Vladimir (Volodya) Nikolaevich Шашенок, Владимир Николаевич 1951-04-21 1986-04-26 thermal and radiation burns, trauma Atomenergonaladka, adjuster of automatic systems (Chernobyl startup and adjustment enterprise) stationed in Room 604, found pinned down under a fallen beam, with broken spine, broken ribs, deep thermal and radiation burns, and unconscious; died in hospital without regaining consciousness Shlelyayn, Anatoly Vladislavovich Шлеляйн, Анатолий Владиславович SKALA computer operator, senior officer (SDIVT), block 3 in block 3[11] Sitnikov, Anatoly Andreyevich (Tolya) Ситников, Анатолий Андреевич 1940-01-20 1986-05-30 deputy chief operational engineer, physicist received fatal dose (about 1500 roentgens or 390 mC/kg), mostly to head, after being sent by Fomin to survey the reactor hall and look at the reactor from the roof of Unit C Smagin, Viktor Grigoryevich Смагин, Виктор shift foreman, reactor 4 Stolyarchuk, Boris Столярчук senior unit 4 control engineer present in the control room, desk P, at the moment of the explosion, controlling the feedwater and deaerator mechanisms Telyatnikov, Leonid Petrovich Телятников, Леонид Петрович 1951-01-25 2004-12-02 survivor, received est. 4 Gy firefighter head of the plant fire department; in 1987 named a Hero of the Soviet Union; according to Shavrey, arrived on the scene drunk,[25] as he was called from a birthday celebration for his brother Tishchura, Volodymyr Ivanovych Тищура, Владимир Иванович 1959-12-15 1986-05-10 radiation burns fireman sergeant, Kibenok's unit, fighting fires in the reactor department, separator room, and the central hall Titenok, Nikolai Ivanovych Титенок, Николай Иванович 1962-12-05 1986-05-16 radiation burns external and internal, incl. blistered heart fireman senior sergeant, Kibenok's unit, fighting fires in the reactor department, separator room, and the central hall; received fatal dose during attempt to extinguish the roof and the reactor core, died two weeks later in Moscow Hospital 6 Tolstiakov, Petr was fishing at the shore of the cooling water channel, witnessed the explosion Toptunov, Leonid (Lenya) Fedorovych Топтунов, Леонид (Леня) Федорович 1960-08-16 1986-05-14 SIUR, senior engineer for management of the reactor (reactor operator) in the control room at the reactor control panel at the moment of explosion, with Akimov; received fatal dose during attempts to restart feedwater flow into the reactor; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree[10] Uskov, Arkadiy Gennadievich Усков, Аркадий Геннадиевич reactor operator, senior engineer, block 1 received non-fatal radiation dose when helping Orlov, Akimov and Toptunov to manually open cooling system valves[18][26] Vashchuk, Mykola Vasylyovych Ващук, Николай Васильевич 1959-06-05 1986-05-14 fireman sergeant, Kibenok's unit, fighting fires in the reactor department, separator room, and the central hall Verkhovod, V.F. Верховод, В.Ф. SKALA computer operator, senior officer (SDIVT), block 4 at the moment of the explosion in the SKALA room[11] Vershynin, Yuriy Anatoliyovych Вершинин, Юрий Анатольевич 1959-05-22 1986-07-21 turbine equipment machinist-inspector in the turbine hall at the moment of explosion; received fatal dose (over 1000 rad) during firefighting and stabilizing the turbine hall, died in Moscow hospital; posthumously awarded the Order "For Courage" of third degree;[10] irradiated by a piece of fuel lodged on a nearby transformer of the turbogenerator 7 during attempts to call the control room
See also [ edit ]Mindy and Simon go to the Gamma Beta party to find the person using their powers to feed on the energy of their classmates.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS
Scott Carelli & Nick Jimenez
CO-EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Cassandra Fredrickson
PATREON ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Leaper 182
STARRING
Morgan Spencer as Mindy Gibson
Matt Maassel as Elliot Markowitz
Andrew Ball as Simon Holt
Ray Ruzzo as Gwen Allen
Chris O’Connor as Jeff Gibson
Naomi Wong as Lorelei Swift
Jay Malone as Victor Conrad
GUEST STARRING
Natalie Van Sistine as Madison Powers
Suzie Yeung as Anita Chen
Julie Lac as Margaret
Rachel Gatlin as Mystery Woman
ADDITIONAL VOICE WORK
Jennifer Lenius
Jeremy Heaps
Jessica DiPaola
Bradley William Smith
Garrick Young
Warren Blackie
CASTING DIRECTOR
Chelsi Kern
WRITTEN BY
Jake Baker and Stephanie Merchant
DIRECTED BY
Ray Ruzzo
EDITED BY
Scott Carelli
THEME SONG
Zach Gibson
ORIGINAL SCORE & FINAL MIX
Scott Tofte
CREDIT NARRATION
Brian Brown
CREATED BY
Scott Carelli
All characters in this work are entirely fictitious, any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2017 Dueling Genre Productions.
Email: contact@geekbynight.net
For exclusive scripts, artwork, and podcasts featuring interviews with the cast and crew, support Geek By Night by becoming a patron on PATREON.
Geek By Night will return with “Friends and Enemies: Part One” on March 8th.The police apparently could go no further after the chairs of Makati City’s posh villages, home to many of the country’s rich, issued “certifications” that they have no drug suspects among their residents.
This was according to Mayor Abby Binay, who still called on the residents and officials of these gated communities to be “more cooperative” in the campaign against drugs.
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Binay on Wednesday issued the statement after learning from the Makati police chief, Senior Supt. Rommil Mitra, that officials of Forbes, Dasmariñas, Bel-Air, San Lorenzo and Urdaneta villages did not submit a list of drug suspects, as mandated by the Philippine National Police’s Oplan Tokhang.
The PNP campaign, fueled by President Duterte’s tough pronouncements against crime, has so far caused thousands of drug users and pushers to “surrender” and be documented, mostly from slum areas.
Binay said because of the certifications, the police were unable to conduct Tokhang in the high-class villages. They were, however, able to go around Magallanes village, but the search also yielded no drug suspects, the mayor said.
But a barangay hall employee of one of these villages, who asked not to be named for lack of authority to speak to the media, said it was the police who asked for a certification from them to confirm that they had no suspected drug pushers or addicts among their residents.
“Besides, we really don’t have any drug-related cases,” the employee stressed.
The staff member explained that the gated communities have stringent security measures when it comes to police searches: If the officers implementing Tokhang want to knock on every door inside the village, the barangay officials would have to notify every homeowner and ask for their permission before allowing the police in.
“It would be easier if the police already had a name of a suspect and his or her respective address. But even then, we would still have to ask for the residents’ permission to allow the search.”
Such measures are apparently not observed in other barangays, in Makati or other parts of Metro Manila, where police can just go to a suspected drug suspect’s house and force his or her surrender.
In the 26 barangays in Makati, a total of 625 drug users and 185 pushers have come out in the open as of July 18, according to an accomplishment report provided by Southern Police District chief information officer, Supt. Jenny Tecson.
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MOST READAMC’s Talking franchise is revving up for a new season of Better Call Saul, setting series creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould and cast members Jonathan Banks and Rhea Seehorn for a post-premiere sit-down with Chris Hardwick on April 10. Talking Saul also will air after the season finale on June 12, with guest TBA.
The Breaking Bad prequel is coming off a second consecutive Emmy noms for Outstanding Drama Series. Season 3 follows Jimmy McGill’s (Bob Odedkirk) devolution toward Saul Goodman, known from the predecessor series as Albuquerque’s most notorious criminal lawyer. Still six years from meeting Walter White as the season starts, semi-law-abiding, small-time attorney Jimmy and his law partner/girlfriend Kim (Seehorn) deal with repercussions of Chuck’s (Michael McKean) scheme. This imminent existential threat presses Jimmy’s faltering moral compass to the limit. Meanwhile, Mike (Banks) searches for a mysterious adversary who seems to know almost everything about his business. And we meet Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).
AMC said this month that its postshow interview format is expanding year-round via Talking with Chris Hardwick, an extension series that will air at 11 pm Sundays when The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead are buried in hiatus.
Talking Saul is produced by Embassy Row with executive producers Michael Davies, Hardwick, Jen Patton, Brandon Monk and Brillstein Entertainment Partners."What We Left Behind," a proposed new documentary, would look back at the creation and influence of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine."
A new documentary aims to celebrate what the filmmakers call an underappreciated series in an iconic franchise.
When "Deep Space Nine" debuted in January 1993, loyal "Star Trek" fans found a darker world than the hopeful earlier installations of the long-lasting franchise.
Instead of being set on a moving starship, "Deep Space Nine" took place on a space station. The show was darker than its predecessors, often discussing refugee camps and long-standing wars. And the Ferengi, a marginalized and stereotyped race for much of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," ended up as some of the series' main characters. It strayed far from the optimism that creator Gene Roddenberry first imagined for "Star Trek" in the 1960s. [What Makes a 'Star Trek' Fan? (Slideshow)]
Nearly a quarter century later, a new documentary on "Deep Space Nine" argues that the show was underappreciated. The film, called "What We Left Behind," is now in production, and has raised more than $448,000 on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo — more than triple its original goal of $148,978. And there are still eight days to go in the campaign. [What I Learned by Watching Every 'Star Trek' Show and Movie]
What We Left Behind Indiegogo Pitch from 455 Films on Vimeo.
"'Deep Space Nine' was written off as too 'dark,' 'edgy' and 'the black sheep' of the 'Star Trek' family, a show that did not fit Roddenberry's vision of the future," the documentary's creators wrote on the Indiegogo page. "But someone was still watching, as the show lasted seven seasons."
"Now, over 20 years later, fans all over the world are rediscovering 'Deep Space Nine' and embracing the show with an enthusiasm rivaling the affection they feel for any other 'Star Trek' series," they added. "Critics are even calling the show the jewel in the crown, and the best of the 'Star Trek' franchise. A devoted sci-fi fan might rightly ask themselves: 'What the hell happened?'"
Heavy cast involvement
The documentary is produced by 455 Films and is directed by Adam Nimoy, son of "Star Trek" actor Leonard Nimoy, who played the beloved alien Spock in the original series. Adam Nimoy and the production company were also behind "For the Love of Spock," a 2016 documentary that celebrated Leonard Nimoy's fan legacy and relationship with his family.
The "Deep Space Nine" documentary is spearheaded by Ira Steven Behr, producer and showrunner of the series, and features many of the original cast members. Some of the actors in the new documentary include Nana Visitor (Kira), Terry Farrell (Dax), Rene Auberjonois (Odo), Armin Shimerman (Quark) and Alexander Siddig (Dr. Bashir). Veterans of "The Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine" also are involved, including Colm Meaney (Miles O'Brien) and Michael Dorn (Worf).
The documentary has already blasted through several revised crowdfunding goals for the filmmakers to add content to the finished film. At $250,000, the film was extended from 60 to 90 minutes, and more 3D graphics and animation were promised. At $350,000, the film's creators committed to an original score with a live orchestra, and at $425,000, more round-table interviews with "Deep Space Nine" crewmembers were promised. There is an additional stretch goal of $500,000 that would upgrade some of the show's clips to high definition.
"The bulk of the money we raise will be going into the key elements of what it takes to make a film like this one," the creators said. "We have been actively filming interviews over the past few years with many of the people involved in the series, so a good part of production is already complete... but our work is far from done."
"As we hone the story with Ira and the team, there are still some important key interviews we will need to capture with creatives and talent situated in various places around the globe," they added. "Your contributions can help to make that, and the rest of the process, happen."
You can contribute to the project ;on the film's Indiegogo page.
Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.At least 14 people, including a 51-year-old bouncer, were wounded in shootings in Chicago between late Saturday morning and just before dawn Sunday, police said.
About 11:45 p.m., a 51-year-old man was critically hurt while he was inside a bar in the Old Irving Park neighborhood on the Northwest Side, police said.
The man was working as a bouncer inside Brudder’s Bar & Grill at 3600 N. Pulaski Road when an unknown attacker outside the bar fired shots, police said. The man was struck in the head by a bullet that went through the window of the bar.
He was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was in critical condition, police said.
At the scene of the shooting, police officers blocked off Addison Street west of Pulaski with red and yellow tape.
Officers and detectives walked in and out of the bar, shining flashlights in search of evidence.
A window just west of the bar’s entrance had a bullet hole near a neon Corona sign.
Inside the bar, police officers blocked off a section with red tape. Most of the chairs were put on top of the tables, and some red balloons were tied next to one of the windows.
Across from the bar, a shot-up gray van stood parked on Addison.
As officers continued to investigate the scene and interview witnesses inside the bar, two women came out of the bar onto the sidewalk. One woman leaned on the other woman, burying her face in grief. The other woman hugged her.
A bouncer was critically wounded inside Brudder's Bar & Grill in the Old Irving Park neighborhood when a bullet went through a window of the bar and struck him in the head on April 3, 2016. He died the following day. (CBS Chicago) A bouncer was critically wounded inside Brudder's Bar & Grill in the Old Irving Park neighborhood when a bullet went through a window of the bar and struck him in the head on April 3, 2016. He died the following day. (CBS Chicago) SEE MORE VIDEOS
Later Sunday morning, black tape covered a distinct bullet hole through the bar's front window. Across the street, a single ribbon of red police tape remained on a gray mini-van that had a two of its passenger side windows shattered.
Meanwhile, detectives canvassed nearby businesses, including a Thai restaurant equipped with surveillance cameras.
Tina Anaya, who lives near the bar, heard three or four shots while she was at home.
"It was a little scary because I was wondering where they came from, because it happened so close," she said.
“There have been fights before,” said Anaya, who has lived about a block from the bar since August. “I can hear people yelling outside. I have two other bars that are close to me, where I live but you can tell when people are leaving, with all the noise, the crowd is very young.”
The gunshots also woke up Adam Ali, who lives a few houses west of the bar.
“It’s usually fine, but at (midnight) or later it gets rowdy,” said Ali.
In other shootings:
Most recently, a 20-year-old man was seriously hurt in a gang-related shooting about 5:40 a.m. in the West Garfield Park neighborhood on the West Side, said Officer Jose Estrada, a Chicago police spokesman.
The man was sitting in a car in the 4400 block of West Monroe Street when an unknown gunman walked up to him and shot him in the face, Estrada said.
He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was in serious condition, Estrada said.
Police said the man is a documented gang member.
About 1:10 a.m., a 29-year-old man and a 32-year-old woman were wounded in a drive-by shooting in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, said Officer Hector Alfaro, a Chicago police spokesman.
The man and the woman were on the front porch of a home in the 800 block of North Central Park Avenue when someone fired shots from a passing dark-colored sedan, Alfaro said.
The man was shot in both of his legs, and the woman was shot in the left thigh. Both were taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where their conditions stabilized, Alfaro said.
A 17-year-old boy was wounded in a shooting about 1:05 a.m. Sunday in the Little Village neighborhood on the West Side, Alfaro said.
The teen was walking on the sidewalk in the 4000 block of West 26th Street when he heard gunshots and realized he was struck, Alfaro said.
He was shot in the left thigh and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where his condition stabilized, Alfaro said.
About 11:35 p.m. Saturday, a 24-year-old man was wounded in a shooting in the Marquette Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side, Alfaro said.
The man was walking on the street in the 3400 block of West 73rd Street when an unknown male attacker walked up to him and fired shots, Alfaro said.
The man was shot in the back and was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center, where his condition stabilized, Alfaro said.
About 8:50 p.m., a 22-year-old man accidentally shot himself in the South Chicago neighborhood, police said.
The man was in the 9000 block of South Burley Avenue when a firearm in his waistband accidentally went off and hit him in the leg. He was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center, where his condition stabilized, police said.
About 6:25 p.m., two men were shot on the 300 block of South Pulaski Road near the Blue Line CTA station in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, police said.
The victims, a 29-year-old and a 33-year-old, both suffered leg wounds. The 29-year-old was taken to Stroger Hospital in good condition. The older man refused medical attention, police said.
Earlier, two other men were shot on the 7800 block of South Cornell Avenue in the South Shore neighborhood, said Officer Michelle Tannehill, a police spokeswoman.
The shooting happened at 5:28 p.m. and left a 30-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his left leg and a 27-year-old man with a gunshot wound to his ankle. The older man was taken in good condition to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the younger man was in good condition at Jackson Park Hospital.
A 28-year-old man was shot at 2:21 p.m. on the 3100 block of North Central Avenue in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood, Tannehill said.
The man, who is a gang member, was shot in the right leg after an SUV drove up and began firing, police said. He was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital in good condition, police said.
Earlier, at 1:02 p.m., a 27-year-old man was shot on the 4900 block of West Adams Street in the South Austin neighborhood, Tannehill said. The man was shot five times in the buttocks and was taken to |
congregation energetically telling God how much they loved him, needed him, would set aside everything to serve him, etc. That might seem admirable but often when you come to church, you’re running on fumes—you’re dry, hurting…I belong to a message board for evangelical mothers and let me tell you—there is a rising trend among evangelical of finding church to be empty, tiring, and irrelevant. There is a rising interest among them of either going to a ‘house church’ (for community) or a traditional church (for depth and transcendence). Please don’t give them nothing to find when they come.”
I recently was part of some liturgies that were…unfortunate. Actually beyond unfortunate, they reminded me of the very things I fled to join the Episcopal Church. From vague “contemporary” songs written in the heady days of Vatican II that talked about us rather than God to a Fraction anthem that sounded like a raucous taproom jukebox number rather than a memorial of the Sacrifice of Christ there were elements of the liturgies that were deeply uncomfortable. Moreover, the planners seem to have forgotten an adage of our rector, that we are not the interesting thing about Church – God is.
We sang over and over “They’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love.” Over and over. We, us, our. We, us, our. We, us, our. Have I mentioned us lately?
A friend recently told me a story about another event. A diocese had a conference and the youngest clergy in the diocese were asked to plan the liturgies. They ended up with lots of chant, solemn masses, and the like. Middle-aged clergy were aghast and some even informed the planners that they were undermining everything they had spent their career working for.
My hope is that middle-aged leaders in the Church will not see the desire for the reconsideration of elements of lost tradition as a threat or as an undoing of their lifetime of work but as a natural process and movement to rediscover and re-appropriate parts of our heritage.
This past Saturday, I took part in a blessing of a civil union of two young women. It took place within the context of Rite I Solemn High Mass. The readings were from the King James Bible. The music was gorgeous and rooted in the Anglican tradition. The ceremonial was lush without being self-referential. The blessing itself was beautifully written and theologically rich. In other words, the fullness of our tradition created, for these women, a sacred space in which to have their commitment solemnized.
A changing world does not demand that tradition be undone. Changing realities reinforce the need for tradition – albeit a tradition that is considered, scrutinized, examined, and tried. We have spent much of the last half-century tearing down anything that looks like tradition because it looks like tradition. Our youngest laity and clergy are now taking the time to go through what has been cast aside and calling for a careful re-examination of the notion that progress means perpetual revolution.
Robert+
The full report may be found at https://www.cpg.org/linkservid/57003D75-DA12-05B2-F4FFD5819BE00E5A/showMeta/0/?label=Hymnal%20Revision%20Feasibility%20Study
AdvertisementsMany believe the Jacksonville Jaguars will be drafted Oregon defensive end/linebacker Dion Jordan in Thursday's NFL Draft. There's now a little more juice behind it, thanks to a report by Tony Pauline.
"Latest from the Jacksonville Jaguars? The team is looking at either Dion Jordan or one of the offensive tackles with the second pick," Pauline writes. "No surprise there. If they trade down I am told the player they like is Ezekiel Ansah."
This doesn't really sound like anything new, but Pauline is well connected with the Jaguars considering some of his reports from past drafts. We've talked plenty about how Jordan would be a fit in the Jaguars defense as a Julian Peterson-type linebacker that can also lineup with his hand on the ground to rush the passer.
The talk about the offensive lineman, in my opinion, is noise for a possible trade down if someone decides to draft Jordan with the first overall pick. The offensive tackles are expected to go quick at the top of the draft and there are a handful of teams who need a left tackle, and all three could be gone by the fifth overall pick. If Jordan's gone, it could entice a team to move up with the Jaguars for one of the lineman.
Ansah as the fallback option also makes a lot of sense, and I honestly wouldn't be shocked if he were the pick second overall. To me it's clear however, the Jaguars are drafting a pass rusher.The Purple Revolution Nigel Farage ★★★★★
Nigel Farage wants the reader to know just how much he’s given up to be the leader of Ukip
Of all the party leaders going into the General Election, Nigel Farage is probably the most talented.
He’s a more gifted debater than Nick Clegg, a better manager than David Cameron and he has a clearer sense of purpose than Ed Miliband.
Thanks to his relentless drive, he’s transformed a party of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists’ into a formidable fighting machine.
At first glance, The Purple Revolution: The Year That Changed Everything reads like a celebration of this success.
The year in question is 2014-2015 and you’re supposed to come away with the idea that Ukip is poised to make a major breakthrough this May.
But the book is surprisingly amateurish, full of repetitions, and Farage ends up revealing more than he probably intends about himself.
It’s as though he dictated it to some scribe in between speaking engagements and it has been published without having gone through any sort of editorial process.
He repeatedly draws our attention to just how hard you have to work in the front rank of politics.
He complains of how exhausted he always feels, rarely having more than four hours of sleep a night.
‘Of all the times that I have done Question Time, which was probably the nearest I had got to doing a live television debate, I don’t recall ever doing it when I felt well, or having any energy,’ he says.
There’s more of this scattered throughout the book. He’s always ‘flat out’, his life is ‘utterly frantic’.
This self-pitying tone suggests Farage feels misunderstood.
He wants the reader to know just how much he’s given up to be the leader of Ukip, a party he describes as ‘riven by arguments and in-fighting’.
He complains that, at times, the hostility reaches an intensity he finds difficult to bear
He talks at length about his three ‘near-death’ experiences – a serious car accident at 21, a bout of testicular cancer and the famous plane crash of 2010.
As a result of these injuries, he claims to have the body of a 70-year-old.
‘I am still in pain and I have some very bad days – not helped, of course, by sitting for hours in the back of a Land Rover, travelling up and down the country.’
Another constant theme is how much money he could have made if he had stayed in the City.
After a successful career as a commodities trader, he set up his own business called Farage Futures which was soon making a tidy profit.
He shut it down in 2002 in order to devote himself to Ukip full-time, and he stresses again and again what a colossal sacrifice this was.
‘I feel sure that, had I kept my business going in the City, I wouldn’t be living in a modest semi-detached house in Kent and driving an ageing Volvo estate,’ he writes.
Yet far from being appreciated for his sacrifice, he is constantly under attack.
Throughout the book, he complains about the ‘nastiness’ of the Conservatives, the ‘bias’ of the mainstream media and the ‘disdain’ of the political class.
All of this mud-slinging has left him a paranoid wreck.
In one passage, he accuses the Conservative Party of tapping his phone at the time Conservative MP Mark Reckless was defecting to Ukip.
He complains that, at times, the hostility reaches an intensity he finds difficult to bear.
The most vivid section in the book deals with the death threats he received from the mentally disturbed pilot who was at the controls for his plane accident.
Is this his reward for devoting his life to public service?
Farage seems almost baffled by the injustice.
Indeed, he is constantly surprised by people who fail to see things from his point of view, using phrases like ‘it is frankly outrageous’, ‘it beggars belief’ and ‘it is quite frankly astonishing’.
IT'S A FACT Farage once lost a seven-figure sum trading on the zinc market... in a single morning’s business, when he was a broker in the City during the Nineties.
Farage has said that he will step down as party leader if he doesn’t succeed in getting elected as Member of Parliament for South Thanet, where he’s standing in this year’s General Election.
And reading The Purple Revolution it’s not hard to see why. Farage has set out to write a tub-thumping political tract, but it reads more like a cry for help.
In the penultimate paragraph, in what is supposed to be a rousing call to arms, he breaks off to make yet another plea for sympathy.
‘I have learnt so much – chiefly that the higher up you go, the fewer people you can trust,’ he says.
‘This journey has increasingly become lonely.’
All of this makes The Purple Revolution one of the most revealing political memoirs in years.Image caption A copy of the Magna Carta was originally issued in 1215 to every county in England
Lincolnshire County Council has announced new plans to put the Magna Carta back on public display in Lincoln Castle.
The council originally wanted to house the exhibit in the building currently used by the crown court, which is situated inside the castle grounds.
But plans to move the court away from the castle were abandoned by HM Courts Service.
The new plans are for the Magna Carta to be housed in a purpose-built vault.
'Great atmosphere'
Mary Powell, tourism development manager for the council, said the plan is to rephase the works and do them in a different order.
"When we found out that the crown court were not able to leave to our timetable we decided to revamp the Victorian prison first," she said.
"It is a huge space with a great atmosphere and we have a great selection of diary archives from the prison and some great stories to tell.
"The Magna Carta will be housed in a vault in some rundown buildings to the side of the prison with its own entrance.
"We didn't want to house the Magna Carta inside a prison."by Patrick Appel
Here's Adam Serwer on what happens now that DC has voted for marriage equality:
Shortly after the D.C. City Council voted 11-2 to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples in the District, the room erupted into cheers and applause. Leaders from each side scrambled into the hallway to field questions from reporters. Bishop Jackson warned that his group would be "bringing their voices to the Hill" in the hopes of persuading a Democratic Congress to overturn the marriage equality bill; Congress has a month to overturn D.C. laws after they've been passed and signed by the mayor. Overturning the law this way would require majorities against the bill in both houses and the signature of the president, which Mike DeBonis points out is an unlikely scenario. But DeBonis also notes that there are other ways Congress could circumvent the law, either by restricting the city's funding or by adding riders to unrelated bills. Still, all that it will take for marriage equality to become law in the District is for Congress to simply do nothing -- something which Congress is generally pretty good at.
DCist argues that the marriage proceedings are also a victory for home rule.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.It’s the school holidays, so Andrew Cole brings his 15-year-old son Devante along to meet FourFourTwo. A striker with Manchester City, the youngster watches and listens as we put your questions to his dad, who retired from playing in November 2008.
That’s after the pair have walked through the centre of Manchester, turning heads as they go. “That’s Andy Cole,” one punter shouts. “He used to score goals for Man United.”
Cole is happy to sign autographs, though strictly speaking, he’s also the former Arsenal, Fulham, Bristol City, Newcastle United, Blackburn Rovers, Manchester City, Portsmouth, Fulham, Birmingham City, Sunderland, Burnley and Nottingham Forest striker – and he played for England at every level.
Over to you…
You grew up in Nottingham. Were you a Forest fan? Did you ever get down to the City Ground to watch the European champions?
Kevin Godfrey, London
My mates loved football, but we never watched Forest. Being black, not a chance I would go and watch a game in case someone called me a black this or black that. We played football in the park, but we never watched it. I remember Forest winning the European Cups. The players came past our house on a bus with the trophy. I followed the bus and ended up lost in an area I didn’t know. I never ever thought that I’d win that trophy which players like Trevor Francis, Tony Woodcock and Peter Shilton held up.
You were at Forest as a kid. Is it true Brian Clough once introduced you as “the one who got away”?
Michael Clarke, Huddersfield
He did. I’ve got a huge respect for what he achieved as a manager with Forest. When I was later an apprentice at Arsenal, I would clean the away dressing rooms. When Arsenal played Forest, Clough would see me, plant a big kiss on my cheek and say, “Ah, young man, this is the one from Nottingham who got away.”
Is it true that your childhood hero was Cyrille Regis? Should you meet your heroes?
Alan Stone, Coventry
Cyrille was a pioneer. He took so much abuse, so that people like me could play without problems. He was a tank, strong as an ox with a powerful strike. I loved watching him on television scoring great goals; loved the way the commentator said: “Regis!” He always had respect for himself, Cyrille. I’ve told him that too. It was an honour to meet him. I was glad I met Cyrille, but not another hero, George Weah. What a player, yet when he came to Man City he was a letdown as a person. People may say the same about me, but he was cold and dismissive.
Who was better – Bristol City’s Polish magician Jacki Dziekanowski or Eric Cantona?
David Painter, Bristol
I have to say Eric, but Jacki really surprised me. Skill-wise, he was miles better than anyone at that level. You’ve made me smile, mentioning Jacki’s name.
Why didn’t you make it at Arsenal?
Terry Shaw, Hornchurch
Gorgeous George. George Graham pulled me into his office one day and said: “You think you’re the bees’ knees don’t you?” I was 15, but I wasn’t having him taking the piss and came back with, “No. And I’m not having you tell me what I am.” He just shouted, “Out!” and pointed to the door. Their problem was that they knew I had something and could play. And I knew it too. A lot of my mates were playing first team and I wasn’t. I used to watch Perry Groves and Martin Hayes in the Arsenal first team and I thought I was as good and should be given a chance. I wasn’t, so I moved on.
When on loan from Arsenal at Fulham, how did you react when chairman Jimmy Hill told you that you’d never make it as a footballer?
Karen Hammond, Milton Keynes
He said: “You think you’re a bit of a player, don’t you, whereas I don’t think you’re ever going to be a player.” “That’s your opinion,” I replied. “You’re entitled to it.” Then I walked out. I never spoke to him for years until he came up to me when I was at Manchester United and said “Remember that chat we had? I was wrong, wasn’t I?” I didn’t tell Hill that I used people like him and George Graham to spur me on.
You were Newcastle United’s record signing. Did Kevin Keegan really call you Adrian when he tried to sign you?
Michael McHale, Windsor
He did. I was playing for Bristol City, in the days before mobile phones, when I came outside to see a note on the window of my car from my team-mate Russell Osman – it said: “Coley, give me a call.” “Kevin Keegan wants to phone you,” said Russell. I went home and awaited the call. “Hello, Adrian,” Keegan said. “I think you have got the wrong person, because I’m Andrew,” I replied.
“Ah, sorry. Anyway, we’d like you to come up as we’re interested in signing you. Is there any possibility that you can get up to Newcastle tomorrow?” I said: “I can’t come tomorrow because I have to finish my laundry. I can come the day after, though.” He was a bit taken aback, but I did my laundry and went the day after.
ARCHIVE ANDY COLE The Games That Changed My Life
A mad Newcastle fan got a tattoo of you on his leg just before you signed for Man United. Did he ever get in touch, asking for his money back? Seriously, though, what was it like to be in a football-mad city like Newcastle?
Matt Wilding, Crouch End
He never got in touch, but I’m sure he regretted it. It was so big that even laser treatment would have taken a long time. I enjoyed it at Newcastle, but it was difficult playing there. I was a young man and struggled to deal with the level of adoration. I just wanted to play football, go home and go out with my mates.
When I went out, some punters would say, “Well done”. That was fine. Others wanted to hold court with you. I could be having a meal with my missus and people would come up and want to get involved in the conversation. It did my fruit in. I loved my football at Newcastle, but I felt trapped. And the more goals I scored, the worse it got. From the milkman to the bloke in the paper shop, everyone wanted to talk about football, football, football.
How did you feel when Manchester United allegedly tried to sell you to Blackburn in a part-exchange deal with Alan Shearer?
Adam Jones, Hazel Grove
I’ve never heard that before. United went for Shearer, but he didn’t want to come to Old Trafford. And the gaffer went for Patrick Kluivert in 1998, and if he’d signed then I’m sure I would have been on my way. But he didn’t want to come either, so we got Dwight Yorke. Then we won the Treble.PORT Adelaide says it exists to win premierships. Therefore, it is more than appropriate that the bulk of its 2004 premiership heroes make up the Power’s highest AFL line-up.
From the 22-man team that ended Brisbane’s triple-premiership run in 2004, there are 16 who take to the pedestal celebrating the Power’s greatest line-up since the club rose from the SANFL to the AFL in 1997.
25 SEASONS: THE GREATEST CROWS TEAM OF ALL TIME
The six non-premiership players in the highest line-up all justify their selection by their outstanding records. They are:
MATTHEW PRIMUS. He missed the 2004 grand final with a knee injury. He remains the best captain to have led the Power in the AFL, repeatedly carrying his teammates on his shoulders.
JOSH FRANCOU. Another who missed the 2004 grand final by a knee injury. A hardworking midfielder, the Magarey Medallist twice ranked in the top-three of the Brownlow Medal count to be acknowledged as one of the AFL’s great players of his time.
DARREN MEAD. The key defender was one of the few Magpies who was in the right age group to be considered for the Power’s inaugural squad. He won the club’s first AFL best-and-fairest title.
ROBBIE GRAY. He was still a teenager unable to sign a draft form when the Power won the 2004 flag. The midfielder-forward is playing a critical role in finding Port Adelaide’s second AFL premiership.
TRAVIS BOAK. The current Power captain is defining a new era at Alberton with a playing style that draws comparison with Primus for the way it sets team standards and inspires his teammates.
JAY SCHULZ. In just five seasons at Port Adelaide, the former Richmond forward has risen to No. 4 on the Power’s highest goalkicking chart with 221 goals (behind Warren Tredrea, 549; Stuart Dew, 245 and Brett Ebert, 240).
Jay Shulz marks in front of Alex Rance. Pic Mark Brake Source: News Corp Australia
The 16 premiership players who make the Power’s highest line-up are: Brownlow Medallist Gavin Wanganeen, Darryl Wakelin, Michael Wilson, Adam Kingsley, Chad Cornes, Kane Cornes, Josh Carr, Norm Smith Medallist Byron Pickett, Stuart Dew, Hall of Famer Warren Tredrea, Shaun Burgoyne, Peter Burgoyne, Brendon Lade, Roger James, Dom Cassisi and Brett Montgomery.
Port Adelaide’s supporter base was asked to pick a “Team of the Decade” four years ago. There are five differences to the fans’ team and The Advertiser selection. The fans chose defender Matthew Bishop, midfielder Jarrad Schofield, ruckman Dean Brogan, Rising Star winner Danyle Pearce and Nick Stevens, who defected to Carlton (after failing to get to Collingwood) at the end of the 2003 season.
The Advertiser has preferred Mead, Pickett, Gray, Boak and former captain Cassisi.
Brogan was surprisingly named by the fans as the lead ruckman ahead of Primus, who this year earned SA Football Hall of Fame honour.
The highest Power team recognises every winner of the John Cahill Medal as club champion except 1998 winner Stephen Paxman and current players Jackson Trengove (2011) and Chad Wingard (2013).
Port Adelaide has had just four AFL coaches — John Cahill, Mark Williams, Matthew Primus and Ken Hinkley. As the man who led the Power to the 2004 flag, Williams is the unchallenged choice as coach for the highest line-up.
PORT ADELAIDE’S GREATEST AFL STARS
B: G. Wanganeen, D. Wakelin, M. Wilson
HB: A. Kingsley, C. Cornes, D. Mead
C: K. Cornes, J. Carr, B. Pickett
HF: S. Dew, W. Tredrea, S. Burgoyne
F: P. Burgoyne, J. Schulz, R. Gray
1R: M. Primus, J. Francou, R. James
Int: B. Lade, D. Cassisi, T. Boak, B. Montgomery
Coach: M. Williams
2004 premiership player Gavin Wanganeen. PIC SARAH REED. Source: News Limited
BACKS
Gavin Wanganeen
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2006: 173 games, 138 goals. Also Essendon, 1991-96: 127 games, 64 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; Port Adelaide club champion, 2003; All-Australian, 2001 and 2003. Also Essendon premiership player 1993; Brownlow Medallist, 1993; All-Australian, 1992, 1993, 1995. Australian Football Hall of Fame.
RUCCI SAYS: Arguably Port Adelaide’s greatest player in the club’s AFL era and among its greats for every chapter through its SANFL-AFL story. Versatile to the extreme as he was able to cope with the demands in all three zones on a field. He was the Power’s inaugural captain and the ultimate X-factor in the 2004 premiership campaign.
Darryl Wakelin
(Port Adelaide, 2001-2007: 146 games, 4 goals. Also St Kilda, 1995-2000: 115 games, 8 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004.
RUCCI SAYS: Premiership coach Mark Williams always underlines the importance of Darryl Wakelin by saying the Power would have reached the 2002 grand final had Port Adelaide started its finals campaign with the key defender on the field rather than nursing a broken jaw. His return from St Kilda in 2001 marked the building of a sound defence at Alberton with his leadership being vital.
Michael Wilson
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2008: 192 games, 51 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; AFL Rising Star, 1997.
RUCCI SAYS: An outstanding defender with a manic focus on the contest and his opponent, Michael Wilson won his place in the Port Adelaide fans’ hearts when he carried two battered shoulders to the 2004 premiership triumph without every complaining or appearing unable to fulfil his tasks.
Chad Cornes tangles with Graham Johncock during a Showdown. Source: News Limited
HALF-BACKS
Adam Kingsley
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2006: 170 games, 47 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; Port Adelaide club champion, 1998.
RUCCI SAYS: After finally getting his chance to be an AFL player at Port Adelaide — following a stint with the Essendon reserves — Adam Kingsley became an instant success at Alberton as the winner of the Power’s second John Cahill Medal as club champion. But it was his comeback after a testing 2003 season that proved hard work brings its rewards, such as premierships.
Chad Cornes
(Port Adelaide, 1999-2011: 239 games, 175 goals. Also Greater Western Sydney, 2011: 16 games, 4 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; All-Australian, 2004, 2007.
RUCCI SAYS: Here was the real soul and spirit of the Port Adelaide team for much its AFL story. Either at centre half-back or centre half-forward, Chad Cornes imposed himself on the game to be one of the AFL’s most forceful players of the 2001-2010 decade. His return to Alberton in a coaching role is eagerly anticipated.
Darren Mead
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2002: 122 games, 8 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide club champion, 1997.
RUCCI SAYS: One of the few Magpies who was given the chance to carry the Port Adelaide dream to the AFL, Darren Mead set high standards early — particularly with his willingness to train himself away from the football club. He was immediately rewarded with the first John Cahill Medal as club champion while taking on major roles as a key defender in the Power’s foundation seasons.
2004 Norm Smith medallist Byron Pickett. Source: News Limited
CENTRES
Kane Cornes
(Port Adelaide, 2001-today: 293 games, 92 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; Port Adelaide club champion, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012; All-Australian, 2005, 2007.
RUCCI SAYS: The “Iron Horse” of the Port Adelaide line-up with his extraordinary fitness capacity. Kane Cornes is destined to become the Power’s first 300-game player in the AFL. He has made his name as a hard-checking midfielder who also can collect the ball with a high count himself.
Josh Carr
(Port Adelaide, 2000-2004 and 2009-2010: 124 games, 65 goals. Also Fremantle, 2005-2008: 83 games, 44 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004.
RUCCI SAYS: He was “Mr Showdown” never losing a derby to the Crows during his two stints at Port Adelaide that were interrupted by answering the family call to play at Fremantle. Tough, uncompromising and capable of going head-to-head with star players such as Brownlow Medallist Michael Voss, Josh Carr has his name engraved in the Power’s spirit.
Byron Pickett
(Port Adelaide, 2003-2005: 55 games, 80 goals. Also North Melbourne, 1997-2002: 120 games, 81 goals and Melbourne, 2006-2007: 29 games, 16 goals).
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; Norm Smith Medal as best-afield, 2004 grand final. Also, North Melbourne premiership player, 1999; All-Australian, 1999.
RUCCI SAYS: It was a short return to Port Adelaide for AFL duty, but it was some ride with some of the biggest bumps in AFL history and some of the biggest runs down the wing, particularly in the 2004 grand final in which Byron Pickett was rated best-afield.
Stuart Dew powers the ball forward in 2006. Source: News Limited
HALF-FORWARDS
Stuart Dew
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2006: 180 games, 245 goals. Also Hawthorn, 2008-2009: 26 games, 20 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; Port Adelaide leading goalkicker, 2002. Also Hawthorn premiership player, 2008.
RUCCI SAYS: A member of the Power’s inaugural squad, Stuart Dew was virtually a cult figure as he used his booming kick to repeatedly score goals or clear the ball out of the Port Adelaide defensive half. He remains the Power’s second-highest goalscorer in AFL company.
Warren Tredrea
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2010: 255 games, 549 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership side, 2004; Port Adelaide club champion, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2009; All-Australian, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004; Port Adelaide leading goalkicker, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2009. Australian Football Hall of Fame.
RUCCI SAYS: The local boy who held up the AFL flag as the Power’s first premiership captain, Warren Tredrea emerged as one of the game’s power forwards — as highlighted by his induction to the Australian Football Hall of Fame this year. A strong mark with great presence in packs, Tredrea remains the Power’s highest leading goalkicker with 549 goals.
Shaun Burgoyne
(Port Adelaide, 2002-2009: 157 games, 171 goals. Also Hawthorn, 2010 to today: 112 games, 64 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; All-Australian, 2006. Also Hawthorn premiership player, 2013, 2014.
RUCCI SAYS: Shaun Burgoyne oozed class as soon as he stepped onto an AFL field in his debut season in 2002. As a midfielder or forward, he always attracted heavy attention from the opposition. He left Alberton at the end of 2009 — after being denied the captaincy — and defied the gloom around his battered knees to prove his greatness with Hawthorn.
Robbie Gray after the elimination final win over Richmond. Photo Sarah Reed. Source: News Corp Australia
FORWARDS
Peter Burgoyne
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2009: 240 games, 193 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004.
RUCCI SAYS: Outstanding midfielder who developed from a timid player to an assertive member of the Power line-up, particularly in the build up to the 2004 premiership. After making his name as an attacking midfielder, Peter Burgoyne moved to the half-back line in 2007 when he had his best numbers, 611 disposals.
Jay Schulz
(Port Adelaide, 2010-2014: 96 games, 221 goals. Also Richmond, 2003-2009: 71 games, 58 goals).
HONOURS: Port Adelaide leading goalkicker, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014.
RUCCI SAYS: Inspired recruiting by Power football chief Peter Rohde brought to Alberton from Richmond the SA-born Jay Schulz who has become the most-reliable go-to key forward in the Port Adelaide setup. His goalkicking accuracy has repeatedly saved the Power.
Robbie Gray
(Port Adelaide, 2007-today: 115 games, 161 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide club champion, 2014; Port Adelaide leading goalkicker, 2011.
RUCCI SAYS: Often described as the “blue-collar Gary Ablett”, Robbie Gray deserves to be known by his own name as one of the classiest midfielder-forwards in the AFL today. His comeback from a serious knee injury early in 2012 — with all his reading of the game still to perfection — is one of the AFL’s feel-good stories.
Former Port Adelaide captain Matthew Primus in 2000. Source: News Limited
RUCKS
Matthew Primus
Captain
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2005: 137 games, 76 goals. Also Fitzroy, 1996: 20 games, 5 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide club champion, 2002; All-Australian, 2001, 2002.
RUCCI SAYS: Matthew Primus’ power as a dominating ruckman with almost-unbeatable bodywork is underlined by the AFL changing the ruck rules to minimise his influence on the game. His career was unfulfilled at Alberton by a knee injury that denied him the chance to be captain in Port Adelaide’s 2004 grand final triumph. His leadership stood out as he carried the team on his shoulders.
Josh Francou
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2005: 156 games, 72 goals)
HONOURS: All-Australian, 2002.
RUCCI SAYS: The 1996 Magarey Medallist was among the AFL’s elite as he ranked second and third in the 2002 and 2001 Brownlow Medal counts respectively as the umpires recognised his class and hard work as a true playmaker. Another star midfielder denied a premiership medal in 2004 by a knee injury.
Roger James
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2005: 147 games, 87 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004.
RUCCI SAYS: Top-class midfielder who saved Port Adelaide in the 2004 preliminary final against St Kilda at Football Park, particularly at the start when he was the only Power player who could regularly find the ball. Roger James’ in-close work with his hands was exquisite.
Brett Montgomery in action for Port Adelaide in 2002. Source: News Limited
INTERCHANGE
Brendon Lade
(Port Adelaide, 1997-2009: 234 games, 182 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; Port Adelaide club champion, 2006; All-Australian, 2006, 2007.
RUCCI SAYS: Despite two broken legs and back injuries, Brendon Lade refused to be beaten in his dream to be an AFL premiership player. His deft ruck work was exemplary and his one-two combinations with Shaun Burgoyne often baffled opponents at stoppages. His ability to take strong marks and kick goals allowed him to play as a key forward.
Domenic Cassisi
(Port Adelaide, 2002-2014: 228 games, 74 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004.
RUCCI SAYS: Started as an outside player in the 2004 premiership line-up, Domenic Cassisi put his head and body on the line as the Power converted him to an inside midfielder and later a checking defender. His work as Power captain during the dark years from 2009 are not to be forgotten nor under-appreciated.
Travis Boak
(Port Adelaide, 2007-today: 155 games, 93 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide club champion 2011; All-Australian, 2013 and 2014.
RUCCI SAYS: Has stood up as a game-breaking midfielder — and has not been burdened by the Port Adelaide captaincy that was handed to him two years ago. His long-term commitment to the club and leadership has set an example at Alberton as much as his head-over-the-ball attitude to his game.
Brett Montgomery
(Port Adelaide, 2000-2005: 126 games, 51 goals. Also Western Bulldogs, 1997-1999 and 2006-2007: 78 games, 68 goals)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership player, 2004; Port Adelaide club champion, 2000.
RUCCI SAYS: Another strategic pick-up to build Port Adelaide’s 2004 premiership squad, Brett Montgomery moved to Alberton from Footscray to become an important part of the Power defence. He immediately made an impression by winning the John Cahill Medal as club champion in his first season, 2000.
COACH
Mark Williams
(Port Adelaide, 1999-2010: 274 games)
HONOURS: Port Adelaide premiership coach, 2004.
RUCCI SAYS: Mark Williams was brilliant in working all his VFL experiences at Collingwood, Brisbane and Essendon to make Port Adelaide a professional unit capable of adjusting from the SANFL to the AFL as soon as he returned to Alberton in 1997 as John Cahill’s assistant coach. His work between 2001-200 |
a rotate/translate function
x = (x*cos(b) + a*sin(b)) ; a = (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))
; a = Use adjustable sliders to navigate around a hyperobject
'a' = translate ; 'b,c' = rotate
Starting with a 4D ring-like object with 2 pre-existing holes, we shift it along an axis, then sweep around in a circle into a 5th spatial dimension. This will generate an even more complex ring-like object, that now has 3 holes. Only one type of 5D torus is made by shifting and rotating a tiger, along any single axis. The same object also comes from rotating a 3-torus, so, we'll only need to cover the objects made from a 3-torus. There are 3 distinct ways to'shift then sweep' a 3-torus into 5D, which generate 3 distinct shapes.
Creating and Exploring the 4-torus, [math]T^4[/math]
Start with the equation of a 3-torus :
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + w^2 = 1
Set x = (sqrt(x^2 + x^2) -8), rewrite with x,y,z,w,v
, rewrite with x,y,z,w,v (sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -8)^2 + z^2) -4)^2 + w^2) -2)^2 + v^2 = 1
[math]\left(\sqrt{\left(\sqrt{\left(\sqrt{x^2 + y^2} -8\right)^2 + z^2} -4\right)^2 + w^2} -2\right)^2 + v^2 = 1[/math]
A degree-16 function of 5 variables and 4 coefficients.
In order to turn this into a usable 3D equation, we need to cancel out two variables, and re-write as x,y,z. This is'slicing twice', which ends up making four intercepting objects in 3D. These objects are different configurations of tori. As we've seen from some above examples, slicing a ring-like object only once can lead to two objects, side by side, in a vertical column, or a concentric pair some diameter.
So, if we slice a 5D ring like object into 4D, we'll end up with 2 objects, that are 4D. Slicing once more, and we'll get 2x2=4 objects, that are 3D. We can even 3D-slice inside the gap, between the 4D objects, leading to a complex solution of 3 variables, when one of the coefficients becomes an imaginary number. A hole that's encircled by a ring that contains an infinite 3D plane!
3D Cross Sections of T^4, with translate in 4D and 5D
Set viewbox to X,Y,Z min = -16 / X,Y,Z max = 16, Apply Changes
Set ctrl+sft+t, 70 for clearer transparency
Set -16 < a < 16 and -16 < b < 16 parameter ranges
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -8)^2 + z^2) -4)^2 + a^2) -2)^2 + b^2 = 1
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -8)^2 + a^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + b^2 = 1
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + a^2) -8)^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + b^2 = 1
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -8)^2 + a^2) -4)^2 + b^2) -2)^2 + z^2 = 1
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + a^2) -8)^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + b^2) -2)^2 + z^2 = 1
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + a^2) -8)^2 + b^2) -4)^2 + y^2) -2)^2 + z^2 = 1
And, this cool one, a complex solution:
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(a^2 + b^2) -8)^2 + x^2) -4)^2 + y^2) -2)^2 + z^2 = 1
The ring of the 4-torus is circling completely around the 3-plane, without touching (intersecting) it. Adjusting 'a' or 'b' by ±8 will move away from the center of the hole towards the ring, where we'll see two tori appear, divide, and merge, when it gets sliced. Imagine shining a laser pointer through the hole of a lifesaver donut ring. You're seeing the same thing, but with a 3D laser beam, and a 5D donut ring.
Using the Sliders
Adjust 'a' to slide up/down along the 4th axis
Adjust 'b' to slide up/down along the 5th axis
But really, they're just two extra dimensions, with no actual labeling on whether it's the 4th or 5th. It's like exploring an underground cavern with a laser pointer. The darkness is what we can't see in 4D and 5D space. The laser pointer is our 3D plane, which has the same relative thinness of a line in 3D (being 2D less). We have to move the laser pointer up/down and left/right to properly scan and image everything there is. Same deal with using 3D to explore 5D, we have these two extra directions.
Slices you will see :
These are the exact solutions of 3 variables of the equation for T^4. We get a product of 4 roots, of a 3D torus, as 6 real, and one complex.
Rotate/Translate in 4D and 5D:
The single rotate/translate and the double-rotate/single-translate functions can be used for the 4-torus. But, since there are two extra variables to replace, we can also use a function with 4 rotate directions for a single translate.
Set 0 < b < pi/2 range back again, since we're using it for rotation
Using the x-section equation :
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + a^2) -8)^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + b^2) -2)^2 + z^2 = 1
set:
x = (x*cos(b) + a*sin(b))
y = (y*cos(c) + (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*sin(c))
z = (z*cos(d) + (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*sin(d))
a = ((z*sin(d) - (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*cos(d))*cos(t))
b = ((z*sin(d) - (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*cos(d))*sin(t))
Which becomes:
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt((x*cos(b) + a*sin(b))^2 + ((z*sin(d) - (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*cos(d))*sin(t))^2) -8)^2 + (y*cos(c) + (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*sin(c))^2) -4)^2 + ((z*sin(d) - (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*cos(d))*cos(t))^2) -2)^2 + (z*cos(d) + (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*sin(d))^2 = 1
Or, use the x-section:
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -8)^2 + a^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + b^2 = 1
which becomes:
(sqrt((sqrt((sqrt((x*cos(b) + a*sin(b))^2 + (y*cos(c) + (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*sin(c))^2) -8)^2 + ((z*sin(d) - (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*cos(d))*cos(t))^2) -4)^2 + (z*cos(d) + (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*sin(d))^2) -2)^2 + ((z*sin(d) - (y*sin(c) - (x*sin(b) - a*cos(b))*cos(c))*cos(d))*sin(t))^2 = 1
Using the Sliders:
Adjust 'a' to slide along one of the extra directions
Adjust 'b' to rotate on plane #1
Adjust 'c' to rotate on plane #2
Adjust 'd' to rotate on plane #3
Adjust 't' to rotate on plane #4
Or, use the simpler rotate functions first.
Creating the 5D Toratiger
Playing around with some nomenclature, we can come up with some silly names for these things. But, the important part, is how the object differs from the 4-torus and the other 5D one. This hypertorus is the made by the second way to rotate a 3-torus. This object can also be understood as a small circle embedded into the surface of a 4D tiger.
Using the [math]T^3[/math] equation:
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + w^2 = 1
set z = (sqrt(x^2 + x^2) -4), rewrite with x,y,z,w,v
, rewrite with x,y,z,w,v the coefficient of 4 is used, since the next lower nested diameter is 2 units
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + (sqrt(z^2 + w^2) -4)^2) -2)^2 + v^2 = 1
[math]\left(\sqrt{\left(\sqrt{x^2 + y^2} -4\right)^2 + \left(\sqrt{z^2 + w^2} -4\right)^2} -2\right)^2 + v^2 = 1[/math]
A degree-16 function of 5 variables and 4 coefficients.
Distinct 3D Slices:
You can set the viewbox back to XYZmin = -10, XYZmax = +10 for the next two objects
Real:
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + a^2) -4)^2 + (sqrt(y^2 + b^2) -4)^2) -2)^2 + z^2 = 1 (sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + (sqrt(z^2 + a^2) -4)^2) -2)^2 + b^2 = 1
Complex:
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + (sqrt(a^2 + b^2) -4)^2) -2)^2 + z^2 = 1
Adjusting 'a' and/or 'b' will slide out from the center of the hole, and slice the ring coming out as a pair of 2 tori, concentric in the major diameter
By now, you should be well-equipped to handle this function, by replacing variables with rotate equations, and using the sliders to explore hyperspace. The only animation I have of this thing is a double, simultaneous rotation, seen as the first animation in this gallery : Multirotations of Higher Dimensional Tori
Creating the 5D Tiger Torus
The final, third way to sweep a 3-torus into 5 dimensional space. This is the one that can also be made by sweeping a 4D tiger into R^5, hence the name. It can also be understood as a small 4D tiger embedded into the surface of a larger, hollow circle.
Using the [math]T^3[/math] equation:
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + w^2 = 1
set w = (sqrt(w^2 + v^2) -2)
the coefficient of 2 is used, since the next lower nested diameter is 1 unit
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + (sqrt(w^2 + v^2) -2)^2 = 1
[math]\left(\sqrt{\left(\sqrt{x^2 + y^2} -4\right)^2 + z^2} -2\right)^2 + \left(\sqrt{w^2 + v^2} -2\right)^2 = 1[/math]
A degree-16 function of 5 variables, 4 coefficients
Distinct 3D Slices :
Real Solutions:
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + a^2) -4)^2 + b^2) -2)^2 + (sqrt(y^2 + z^2) -2)^2 = 1
Plots a vertical column of 4 tori
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + a^2) -4)^2 + y^2) -2)^2 + (sqrt(z^2 + b^2) -2)^2 = 1
Plots a 2 x 1 x 2 vertical square array of 4 tori
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + b^2) -2)^2 + (sqrt(z^2 + b^2) -2)^2 = 1
Plots a vertical column of 2 pairs of concentric tori, in the major diameter
Complex Solutions:
(sqrt((sqrt(x^2 + y^2) -4)^2 + z^2) -2)^2 + (sqrt(a^2 + b^2) -2)^2 = 1
Adjusting 'a' or 'b' by ±2 units will slide out from the center of the hole, and slice the ring, which comes out as a concentric pair of 2 tori in the minor diameter
(sqrt((sqrt(a^2 + b^2) -4)^2 + x^2) -2)^2 + (sqrt(y^2 + z^2) -2)^2 = 1
Adjusting 'a' or 'b' by ±4 units will slide out from the center of the hole and slice the ring, which comes out as a disjoint pair of 2 tori in a column arrangement.
Exploring this object, you will see many of the things in this gallery :
Hyperdonut : 5D Tiger Torus (((II)I)(II))
And, that about covers it, up to 5D. There's still 8 more types of torus that can exist in 5D, that I didn't get into, some seen here :5D Hyperdonut Rings. And, as you can see, this process can easily be extended into constructing 6D, 7D, 8D, 9D hypertori as well. If you or anyone else is interested, I can elaborate more on 6D hypertori, and beyond. I also completely left out a whole other class of objects, such as the pentachoron, hypercube, cubinder, duocylinder, and many other elementary 4D objects that can be defined by equations, seen here: Implicit Equations of Elementary ShapesIn my previous article on how to do Bible study; I emphasized the importance of context a number of times. Recently, I saw this importance again when I was doing some Bible study with my own children.
We have recently finished our study of the books of the prophets and the post-exilic period. We planned to follow this up with a study of the life of Y’Shua and the book of Acts. My wife and I decided that it would be a good idea to give the children some historical and cultural context, by first spending some time on the inter-testamental period. We wanted to ensure that the children had a decent understanding of the changes that had happened in the world between the books of Malachi and Matthew.
The purpose of this study was not to be a history lesson, but purely to show them how the people of Jerusalem went from a small group of people led by a High-Priest and Governor, serving under the Persians, to a mighty nation led by the High-Priest, Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes under Roman rule.
While studying the Persian period after Nehemiah and Ezra, I stumbled across a part in the book of Josephus that described the building of the temple on Mount Gerizim. This small bit of information led me to a more complete study on the Samaritans. Once I had done this, I suddenly had a lot more insights into two incidents in the Apostolic Scriptures. I have decided to write up this study as an example of how the context could lead us to a more complete understanding of the text.
We will first look at the basic history that led to the formation of the Samaritans, then look at the relationship between the Judeans and Samaritans before we look at the insight this provides us.
The History of the Samaritans
The story of the Samaritans started with the exile of Israel, the ten northern tribes, by the Assyrians. It was the strategy of the Assyrians not to remove all the people from the land that they conquered. They rather followed a strategy of assimilation to mix the nations they had conquered into a “new” nation. We see that once Israel had been conquered, the Assyrians relocated some of the people of the ten tribes and replaced them with people from other nations they had conquered. We read about the people who were sent to Samaria in the second book of Kings. However, the lions came and killed the people now living in Samaria. The conclusion was made that the god of the land was unhappy about the way the people were worshiping him. Thus, the solution was to send some of the priests back to teach the people how to worship YHVH. Of course, they did not give up all their own gods, but simply mixed the religions.
2 Kings 17:22–29
22 The sons of Israel walked in all the sins of Jeroboam which he did; they did not depart from them 23 until YHVH removed Israel from His sight, as He spoke through all His servants the prophets. So Israel was carried away into exile from their own land to Assyria until this day. 24 The king of Assyria brought men from Babylon and from Cuthah and from Avva and from Hamath and Sephar-vaim, and settled them in the cities of Samaria in place of the sons of Israel. So they possessed Samaria and lived in its cities. 25 At the beginning of their living there, they did not fear YHVH; therefore YHVH sent lions among them which killed some of them. 26 So they spoke to the king of Assyria, saying, “The nations whom you have carried away into exile in the cities of Samaria do not know the custom of the god of the land; so he has sent lions among them, and behold, they kill them because they do not know the custom of the god of the land.” 27 Then the king of Assyria commanded, saying, “Take there one of the priests whom you carried away into exile and let him go and live there; and let him teach them the custom of the god of the land.” 28 So one of the priests whom they had carried away into exile from Samaria came and lived at Bethel, and taught them how they should fear YHVH. 29 But every nation still made gods of its own and put them in the houses of the high places which the people of Samaria had made, every nation in their cities in which they lived.
While the ten Northern tribes were in exile, we see that there still were attempts to re-unite the tribes, whenever Judah had a strong spiritual leader or the Assyrians had a dip in their power. We read of at least two attempts to bring the remainder of the Northern tribes back to the fold. When King Hezekiah did his spiritual reforms in Judah, he went and invited people from Beersheba (Be-er Sheva) to Dan. If you look on the map, you will see that this basically means from the bottom of the Southern Tribes to top of the Northern tribes. He did not have a huge success in convincing them to come and worship in Jerusalem, but we do read that some people went to Jerusalem.
2 Chronicles 30:1–12
1 Now Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah and wrote letters also to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they should come to the house of YHVH at Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover to YHVH the Elohim of Israel. 2 For the king and his princes and all the assembly in Jerusalem had decided to celebrate the Passover in the second month, 3 since they could not celebrate it at that time, because the priests had not consecrated themselves in sufficient numbers, nor had the people been gathered to Jerusalem. 4 Thus the thing was right in the sight of the king and all the assembly. 5 So they established a decree to circulate a proclamation throughout all Israel from Beersheba even to Dan, that they should come to celebrate the Passover to YHVH Elohim of Israel at Jerusalem. For they had not celebrated it in great numbers as it was prescribed. 6 The couriers went throughout all Israel and Judah with the letters from the hand of the king and his princes, even according to the command of the king, saying, “O sons of Israel, return to YHVH the Elohim of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, that He may return to those of you who escaped and are left from the hand of the kings of Assyria. 7 “Do not be like your fathers and your brothers, who were unfaithful to YHVH the Elohim of their fathers, so that He made them a horror, as you see. 8 “Now do not stiffen your neck like your fathers, but yield to YHVH and enter His sanctuary which He has consecrated forever, and serve YHVH your Elohim, that His burning anger may turn away from you. 9 “For if you return to YHVH, your brothers and your sons will find compassion before those who led them captive and will return to this land. For YHVH your Elohim is gracious and compassionate, and will not turn His face away from you if you return to Him.” 10 So the couriers passed from city to city through the country of Ephraim and Manasseh, and as far as Zebulun, but they laughed them to scorn and mocked them. 11 Nevertheless some men of Asher, Manasseh and Zebulun humbled themselves and came to Jerusalem. 12 The hand of YHVH was also on Judah to give them one heart to do what the king and the princes commanded by the word of YHVH.
During the reign of King Josiah, he also attempted to rid the northern tribes in Samaria of their foreign deities. It is recorded that he broke down their high places and killed all the priests of their high places. We also see that a prophet had come to the Samaritans to warn them of the things that were going to happen to them. Obviously, they did not pay any attention to him.
2 Chronicles 34:6–7
6 In the cities of Manasseh, Ephraim, Simeon, even as far as Naphtali, in their surrounding ruins, 7 he also tore down the altars and beat the Asherim and the carved images into powder, and chopped down all the incense altars throughout the land of Israel. Then he returned to Jerusalem. 2 Kings 23:15–20
15 Furthermore, the altar that was at Bethel and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel sin, had made, even that altar and the high place he broke down. Then he demolished its stones, ground them to dust, and burned the Asherah. 16 Now when Josiah turned, he saw the graves that were there on the mountain, and he sent and took the bones from the graves and burned them on the altar and defiled it according to the word of YHVH which the man of Elohim proclaimed, who proclaimed these things. 17 Then he said, “What is this monument that I see?” And the men of the city told him, “It is the grave of the man of Elohim who came from Judah and proclaimed these things which you have done against the altar of Bethel.” 18 He said, “Let him alone; let no one disturb his bones.” So they left his bones undisturbed with the bones of the prophet who came from Samaria. 19 Josiah also removed all the houses of the high places which were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made provoking YHVH; and he did to them just as he had done in Bethel. 20 All the priests of the high places who were there he slaughtered on the altars and burned human bones on them; then he returned to Jerusalem.
In the book of Jeremiah, we find some more scriptural proof that 80 men from Shechem, Shiloh and Samaria came to the temple in Jerusalem to bring their offerings.
Jeremiah 41:4–5
4 Now it happened on the next day after the killing of Gedaliah, when no one knew about it, 5 that eighty men came from Shechem, from Shiloh, and from Samaria with their beards shaved off and their clothes torn and their bodies gashed, having grain offerings and incense in their hands to bring to the house of YHVH.
Thus, we can see that before the tribes of Judah and Benjamin went into exile, there were still some people in places like Samaria, that worshiped YHVH and came to Jerusalem to bring their offers. These people must have remained in the land while the Southern tribes were sent into exile in Babylon.
Return of the Southern Tribes from Babylon
In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, we find a good description of the struggles that the returnees had when they returned to Jerusalem from Babylon. The original group, led by Zerubbabel and Joshua the high priest, started the process of rebuilding the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Shortly after they had laid the foundations of the temple, the problems started between the returnees and the locals. In the book of Ezra, we learn that the Samaritans were part of the group who wrote a letter to King Artaxerxes to request of him to halt the building of the temple in Jerusalem.
Ezra 4:8–11
8 Rehum the commander and Shimshai the scribe wrote a letter against Jerusalem to King Artaxerxes, as follows— 9 then wrote Rehum the commander and Shimshai the scribe and the rest of their colleagues, the judges and the lesser governors, the officials, the secretaries, the men of Erech, the Babylonians, the men of Susa, that is, the Elamites, 10 and the rest of the nations which the great and honorable Osnappar deported and settled in the city of Samaria, and in the rest of the region beyond the River. Now 11 this is the copy of the letter which they sent to him: “To King Artaxerxes: Your servants, the men in the region beyond the River, and now Ezra 4:17–21
17 Then the king sent an answer to Rehum the commander, to Shimshai the scribe, and to the rest of their colleagues who live in Samaria and in the rest of the provinces beyond the River: “Peace. And now 18 the document which you sent to us has been translated and read before me. 19 “A decree has been issued by me, and a search has been made and it has been discovered that that city has risen up against the kings in past days, that rebellion and revolt have been perpetrated in it, 20 that mighty kings have ruled over Jerusalem, governing all the provinces beyond the River, and that tribute, custom and toll were paid to them. 21 “So, now issue a decree to make these men stop work, that this city may not be rebuilt until a decree is issued by me.
They were successful in their request, and Artaxerxes stopped the work for the remainder of his reign. With the motivation and encouragement of the prophets Haggia and Zecharia, the people decided to resume the building of the temple. Once again, the locals wrote a letter to the king of Persia. King Darius did some research into the matter and found the decree that Cyrus had issued allowing the temple in Jerusalem to be rebuilt. King Darius then issued a decree to allow the work on the temple to continue and for the local governors to provide the people of Jerusalem with the money they required to complete the construction, as well as the animals they needed for the sacrifices. The temple was completed.
Opposition to the rebuilding of the city
When Nehemiah arrives in Judea, he faces opposition from some of the governors south of the Euphrates river. The opposition from Sanballat the governor of Samaria escalates over time.
Nehemiah 2:9–10
9 Then I came to the governors of the provinces beyond the River and gave them the king’s letters. Now the king had sent with me officers of the army and horsemen. 10 When Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official heard about it, it was very displeasing to them that someone had come to seek the welfare of the sons of Israel. Nehemiah 4:1–2
1 Now it came about that when Sanballat heard that we were rebuilding the wall, he became furious and very angry and mocked the Jews. 2 He spoke in the presence of his brothers and the wealthy men of Samaria and said, “What are these feeble Jews doing? Are they going to restore it for themselves? Can they offer sacrifices? Can they finish in a day? Can they revive the stones from the dusty rubble even the burned ones?” Nehemiah 4:7–8
7 Now when Sanballat, Tobiah, the Arabs, the Ammonites and the Ashdodites heard that the repair of the walls of Jerusalem went on, and that the breaches began to be closed, they were very angry. 8 All of them conspired together to come and fight against Jerusalem and to cause a disturbance in it.
After the wall of the city had been completed Nehemiah returns to Artaxerxes as agreed before the start of his assignment. However, upon his return, he found that the people had intermarried with other nations and also that there was a foreigner living in the temple.
Nehemiah 13:6–8
6 But during all this time I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had gone to the king. After some time, however, I asked leave from the king, 7 and I came to Jerusalem and learned about the evil that Eliashib had done for Tobiah, by preparing a room for him in the courts of the house of YHVH. 8 It was very displeasing to me, so I threw all of Tobiah’s household goods out of the room. Nehemiah 13:27–30
27 “Do we then hear about you that you have committed all this great evil by acting unfaithfully against our Elohim by marrying foreign women?” 28 Even one of the sons of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, was a son-in-law of Sanballat the Horonite, so I drove him away from me. 29 Remember them, O my Elohim, because they have defiled the priesthood and the covenant of the priesthood and the Levites. 30 Thus I purified them from everything foreign and appointed duties for the priests and the Levites, each in his task,
Nehemiah drove the priests out that had married foreign women. Nehemiah also considered the daughter of Sanballat a foreign woman, and therefor he drove out this grandson of Eliashib. As we are now at the end of the post-exilic chronology in the Tanach, we have to pick up this story in some extra-biblical history books.
Split of the priesthood and the temple on Mt. Gerizim
If we turn to the writings of Josephus Flavius to pick up the remainder of this story. In his book, Antiquities of the Jews, he gives us some information regarding the rest of this story. This story is what lead to the temple in Shechem being built. The marriage between Manasseh, the brother of the high priest and Nicaso, the daughter of Sanballat, pushed the contention between the inhabitants of Samaria and Judea to the next level.
2. (302) Now when John had departed this life, his son Jaddua succeeded in the high priesthood. He had a brother, whose name was Manasseh. Now there was one Sanballat who was sent by Darius, the last king [of Persia], into Samaria. He was a Cuthean by birth; of which stock were the Samaritans also. (303) This man knew that the city Jerusalem was a famous city, and that their kings had given a great deal of trouble to the Assyrians, and the people of Celesyria; so that he willingly gave his daughter, whose name was Nicaso, in marriage to Manasseh, as thinking this alliance by marriage would be a pledge and security that the nation of the Jews should continue their good will to him. 1 Antiquities 11.7.2
2. (306) But the elders of Jerusalem being very uneasy that the brother of Jaddua the high priest, though married to a foreigner, should be a partner with him in the high priesthood quarrelled with him; (307) for they esteemed this man’s marriage a step to such as should be desirous of transgressing about the marriage of [strange] wives, and that this would be the beginning of a mutual society with foreigners, (308) although the offense of some about marriages, and their having married wives that were not of their own country, had been an occasion of their former captivity, and of the miseries they then underwent; so they commanded Manasseh to divorce his wife, or not to approach the altar, (309) the high priest himself joining with the people in their indignation against his brother, and driving him away from the altar. Whereupon Manasseh came to his father-in-law, Sanballat, and told him, that although he loved his daughter Nicaso, yet was he not willing to be deprived of his sacerdotal dignity on her account, which was the principal dignity in their nation, and always continued in the same family. (310) And then Sanballat promised him not only to preserve to him the honor of his priesthood, but to procure for him the power and dignity of a high priest, and would make him governor of all the places he himself now ruled, if he would keep his daughter for his wife. He also told him further, that he would build him a temple like that at Jerusalem upon Mount Gerizzim, which is the highest of all the mountains that are in Samaria; (311) and he promised that he would do this with the approbation of Darius the king. Manasseh was elevated with these promises, and staid with Sanballat upon a supposal that he should gain a high priesthood, as bestowed on him by Darius, for it happened Sanballat was then in years. (312) But there was now a great disturbance among the people of Jerusalem, because many of those priests and Levites were entangled in such matches; for they all revolted to Manasseh, and Sanballat afforded them money, and divided among them land for tillage, and habitations also; and all this in order every way to gratify his son-in-law. 1 – Antiquities 11.8.2
In order to save his daughter’s marriage, Sanballat promised Manasseh his own high priesthood and temple in Shechem. When Manasseh accepted the offer and brought a number of Levites with him. All that was required was for the king of Persia to give permission to build the temple. The problem was that before Sanballat could ask for permission, Darius III had become involved in a war with the Macedonian, Alexander the Great. When Sanballat saw that Alexander was winning this war, and the people from Jerusalem had refused to revolt against Darius, as Alexander had asked them to, he saw a good opportunity to get one up. He quickly got his men together and went to battle to support Alexander.
4. (321) But Sanballat thought he had now gotten a proper opportunity to make his attempt, so he renounced Darius, and taking with him seven thousand of his own subjects, he came to Alexander; and finding him beginning the siege of Tyre, he said to him, that he delivered up to him these men who came out of places under his dominion, and did gladly accept of him for their lord instead of Darius. (322) So when Alexander had received him kindly, Sanballat thereupon took courage, and spake to him about his present affair. He told him, that he had a son-in-law, Manasseh, who was brother to the high priest Jaddua; and that there were many others of his own nation now with him, that were desirous to have a temple in the places subject to him; (323) that it would be for the king’s advantage to have the strength of the Jews divided into two parts, lest when the nation is of one mind and united |
just below a simmer is fine.
As soon as the salmon hits about 115°F in the center, it'll be medium-rare, which is done enough for me. Then I remove it from the poaching water and let it chill briefly in the fridge.
Once that's all done, you can toss the salad together. I throw in some diced celery and fennel, along with a basic vinaigrette made with shallot, lemon juice, and olive oil. A small amount of minced dill adds an herbal touch. It's best to combine all the ingredients except the salmon first, and then gently mix the salmon in at the end. Otherwise, all that stirring will break up the flakes into little shreds; not the end of the world, but a little less attractive.
It may not be the most popular method, but the more I cook salmon with it, the more versatile I realize poaching is.
Get the Recipe Salmon Bean Salad View Recipe »
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Snobbery
Books are the smart person versions of television shows, FYI.
No, I didn't name my shoegaze band Game of Drones after the television show; I named it after a book that a television show just happens to be based on. There's a difference. One is pop-culture-y and low-brow; the other one is literary, thus making it high-brow. And if you'd ever listened to our stuff, you'd know that we take on deep, complicated issues like the books, not just the soft stuff that you'd use to fill an hour of prime time television.
In fact, why don't I show you what I mean. We could have a few beers and listen to one of our records, and you'll hear all of what I'm talking about.
What did you say? We could have some "Ghost White Ale"? I'm sorry... why are you laughing? I don't get it?
Oh, is this some reference. See, that's the problem. I've never actually read the books or seen the show. I just liked the pun.
Wear this shirt: while playing that game with the phones.
Don't wear this shirt: if you're playing that game of clones.
This shirt tells the world: "You might not get it, but to me, this reference is a game of knowns."
We call this color: game of slate[ones]
Back to topJERUSALEM (Reuters) - U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday his wife Jill and their grandchildren were dining on a Tel Aviv beach when a Palestinian killed an American tourist with a knife and wounded 11 other people on the seafront “not very far” away.
Since October, Palestinian stabbings, shootings and car rammings have killed 28 Israelis and two U.S. citizens. Israeli forces have killed at least 179 Palestinians, 121 of whom Israel says were assailants. Most others were shot dead during violent protests.
“I don’t know exactly whether it was a hundred meters or a thousand meters,” Biden, on a visit to Israel, told reporters about Tuesday’s assault.
“It brings home that it can happen, it can happen anywhere, at any time,” he said, after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem.
Violence has surged since Biden’s arrival in Israel on Tuesday as part of a regional visit. Two Palestinians, who Israel said opened fire and wounded one man in Jerusalem on Wednesday, and a Palestinian who the military said tried to stab soldiers in the occupied West Bank, were killed by Israeli forces.
On Tuesday, Biden was meeting former Israeli President Shimon Peres several blocks from where the Palestinian was running along the Tel Aviv beachfront stabbing pedestrians and motorists stuck in traffic.
Taylor Force, a 28-year-old Vanderbilt University graduate student and a U.S. military veteran who Biden said served tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, was killed and 11 people were wounded before police shot the attacker dead.
“Let me say in no uncertain terms, the United States of America condemns these acts and condemns the failure to condemn these acts,” Biden said, with Netanyahu at his side, in remarks that appeared critical of Palestinian leaders.
Slideshow (5 Images)
Palestinian leaders say many Palestinian attackers have acted out of desperation in the absence of movement towards creation of an independent state. Israel says they are being incited to violence by their leaders and on social media.
Later in the day, Biden, who has visited the Gulf during his trip and plans to travel to Jordan next, met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank.
Abbas expressed his condolences over Force’s death, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, and said the establishment of a Palestinian state was key to ending the violence.As Nemanja Vidic reflected on his final season at Manchester United, the glory he had become accustomed to had been washed away by pain, frustration and memories of team-mates turning on each other as the club lurched into crisis under David Moyes.
“We argued amongst ourselves,” Vidic said. “This year more than any other, because when you have bad times, people show they care. We are still friends, but we were arguing to get better. We wanted to improve.
“We could say those things to each other because we have been together for so long, but it hurt. If you didn’t argue, it would not be right. We had some hard moments in the dressing room between ourselves.”
Vidic has just collected his boots from United’s Carrington training ground, while some of his team-mates have returned their club Chevrolets as they prepare for life away from Old Trafford.
For it to end as it has done, with United due to appoint a second new manager in 12 months after finishing seventh in the Premier League, there is obvious anguish felt by Vidic, the club captain for the past four years.
But with Moyes paying the ultimate price for failure by losing his job as manager last month, Vidic believes the Scot suffered for attempting to impose his personality on a club who already had a fierce identity.
“There was a transition,” Vidic said. “You get someone who sees football in a different way and he will want to put his stamp on the team and the way he wants to play. Ryan [Giggs] shares the same ideas as Sir Alex Ferguson and his was a more similar approach to the one we had with Sir Alex. The players are more used to it and felt more comfortable with it.
“I am not saying that the David Moyes way was bad, but these players feel more comfortable playing a certain way of football. You have to respect where you are and what you represent, though, and there is no point speaking about someone who was here, who everyone knows lost his job because he did not succeed in doing what he wanted to achieve.
“The best answer I can say is that he [Moyes] tried really hard, he was professional. He was really committed to the job and desperately wanted to do well. But unfortunately, it didn’t happen and we are all sad.
“Sometimes you have bad times and you question yourself, of course, but we never did anything to question the manager at all. We questioned ourselves more.”
Having declared Vidic to be the “best defender I have ever worked with” last September, suggesting that a new contract for the centre half would be a formality, Moyes was either unable or unwilling to sanction the new deal which would have secured the player’s services beyond the end of the season. The two men were not close, but Vidic insists that any 'issues’ between them were aired face-to-face.
“All problems I have had in my life, I have sorted out personally with the manager,” Vidic said. “Any issues, we have sorted it out face-to-face because everything from me I will say it to someone looking into their eyes.
“When you work with someone every day, sometimes you are not happy with someone for what they have done. Sometimes you have issues over certain things. It is normal. So you talk to the manager. You are a senior player, someone who has been there and done it and you are trying to help the manager. Sometimes you need to have honest conversations. We had them.
“Look, we are human beings. We do not agree with things all the time, but you have to respect the manager, you have to respect your boss. He is the one who is responsible. What kind of influence would I have on my manager if I said: 'You should play these tactics?’ He is the one who is responsible for those tactics and tomorrow he will lose his job if I say: 'You have to play in a different way.’”
When Moyes was dismissed last month, following the 2-0 defeat at Everton which confirmed United’s inability to secure Champions League qualification, it was little surprise to those close to the club.
During Moyes’s 51 games in charge, United had stumbled from one crisis to another, with humiliating defeats – many of which were endured by Vidic – becoming an almost fortnightly occurrence.
“It has been hard,” Vidic said. “We thought it might be difficult to win the title this year, but we still thought we would challenge for the trophies. We ended up losing the chance to win the title very early, though, and then we lost the chance to win the cups as well.
“We are used to fighting until the last day of the season for the title. That has happened for the last seven years and this year was the first year we have not done that, so it is hard to cope.
“Why did it happen? It is hard to say now. You cannot point the finger at something and say this is why, or at someone and say it was their fault.
“All of us have to take responsibility, but we have to accept that it did not work for us. We did not manage to keep the same standards of playing that we had under Sir Alex.
“I don’t want to point at any one thing and say he should have stayed or that person might have come, or what if it had been someone else. If, if, if. That has passed.
“Everyone has their own ideas and their own vision. It is hard to judge on why they didn’t do this or that. You should always judge on what they actually did do.”
There was, however, confusion generated by tactics and team selection, with players used out of position or not selected at all.
“Sometimes you have players playing on the wing and if it is a midfield player, he might not be able to perform,” Vidic said. “You need time to adapt to a certain style and we didn’t adapt quickly enough. After the results started to be a bit bad, everyone started to get more nervous, then we lost confidence. That is why it was going wrong, and it rolls up and you can’t stop it.
“After six games, we were already six or seven points behind the other teams. Maybe if we had easier games to play we would have got the confidence.
“If you start thinking about it now, it was not easy for us from the first day. We had Liverpool away, Manchester City away. We lost those matches, then people start questioning the manager, start questioning the players and the pressure builds up.
“It is not a question you can answer easily. Everything did not happen in one week. You can’t say this or that happened. In the cycle of one year, there are a lot of things. But when we lost the chance to win the title, we knew this season wasn’t working and this season was lost.
“When I thought we had lost our chance to win the title, we were also out of the cups. Then you say, 'Wow, this is not working well’.
“I believe if we had finished fourth and got a Champions League place, it would have been more acceptable for everyone. But it just went worse and worse.”
As Moyes began to resemble a man fighting fires all around him, stories emerged of senior players losing faith in his methods and others wanting to leave.
And there was another story, seemingly nonsensical, that Moyes had taken Vidic and Ferdinand aside in training to tell them how to defend like Phil Jagielka, the centre-half he turned into an England player at Everton.
When asked whether that episode had actually taken place, Vidic was diplomatically non-committal. “It doesn’t matter. Listen, what happens between the players and us stays between the players and us. I am not going to speak about what has happened in my house. You have to understand the person I am. I am the captain. The captain has to be the captain. He has to respect the club, the manager has to respect the club as well. All of us have to understand we are at a club with a big tradition and if you have a problem, this club always will try to keep them in-house.
“All problems are solvable. Either you sort them in a nice way or …”
Vidic’s departure will undoubtedly be a blow to United and incoming manager Louis van Gaal, with Ferdinand’s exit breaking up arguably the best defensive pairing during the Premier League era.
“I have played with some great players, but Rio deserves a special mention because he has been my partner and the best I have ever played with,” Vidic said.
The question among the supporters, however, is whether Vidic would have remained at the club had he known the Moyes era would be cut short before the summer.
“It is not an easy question to answer,” Vidic says.
So that is a 'yes,’ then?
“It is not a yes,” Vidic replied. “I am trying to answer it properly. Sometimes you don’t make a decision instantly, especially one like this. You have to think about it. Is it the right thing to do? Sometimes there are many reasons.
“If I am going to do something, I ask myself why. If there are more than two reasons to do it, I think it is time to change. Sometimes these decisions you make are because of certain circumstances. You don’t make a decision like that all of a sudden. I know you would like me to say the exact thing but I cannot. The best way for me to say it is that sometimes you make decisions because of circumstances.
“I have to say, it is not easy to say certain things. You have a responsibility for what you are and who you represent. I have been with this club for so many years and I have been the captain for the last few. Even in a family, if you have issues and conversations, sometimes they have to stay within the family.
“At the end of the day, if you have an issue with someone, especially when you care and you have had so many great times, you do it in a way that is suitable to the club. It has happened that way.”
As Vidic departs, however, he insists he is leaving behind a club with a future as bright as their past. “I think now it is a happier place because change is coming again and everything is going to be new. The club has to believe that. You feel that atmosphere. You start from there and try to be strong again. You want to see the lights for the next season. You are looking for new ideas and a new mentality because this has gone. It is like resetting a computer and starting again.”“I chop down trees, I wear high heels, suspenders and a bra.
I wish I’d been a girlie, just like my dear papa.”
My friends and I happily sang those Monty Python lyrics, at the drop of a hat, throughout our teen years, identifying with Michael Palin’s exuberant character, rather than the men who walked away from him in dismay. Yes, we’d seen men dress as women in comedy sketches, but those were burlesques, painted in broad, garish strokes. There had never been a declaration of donning women’s garb as a part of regular life, let alone by a macho character like a lumberjack.
In my little gang of friends, we didn’t necessarily know or talk much about homosexuality, which was decidedly less open in our suburban lives in the 70s (though one of our group later came out, to little surprise from any of us). We also hadn’t heard of terms like transvestitism or cross-dressing. Remarkable as it may seem, Monty Python may have played a key role in raising our consciousness, even more so when we learned, in the following decade, that Python’s Graham Chapman was gay, sadly lost too young to cancer.
So it’s particularly galling, more than three decades later, to find that South Williamsport Junior/Senior High School in Pennsylvania has just shut down an intended production of Monty Python’s Spamalot reportedly because of its gay content. WNEP News paraphrases the school’s drama director, Dawn Burch, as saying, “school officials dropped the musical because of its homosexual themes, according to an email she says she received.” WNEP quotes the superintendent as saying, “We want our performances to be appropriate for the student performers and audiences so that anyone participating or watching can enjoy all aspects of the show.” There’s no indication of what he finds inappropriate or unenjoyable.
I have already reached out to Burch, as well as to the school’s superintendent, for comment; I’ve received no replies as I write a few hours later. I would very much like to read exactly what the e-mail that nixed the production said. The language needs to be brought out into the open. But if Burch’s characterization is accurate, it marks the first time I’ve encountered a school explicitly saying that gay content caused cancellation of a show; the language is usually veiled, with references to mature themes, difficult material or, as even the WNEP report is headlined, “questionable content.”
The WNEP piece continues, “In that email, Burch says the principal wrote that homosexuality does not exist in a conservative community such as South Williamsport.”
If the principal believes that, then he is standing with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad who denied that homosexuality existed in his country during a 2007 speech at Columbia University. He is backing the rationale of Russia’s Vladimir Putin who has outlawed the “promotion” of homosexuality. That’s a very strange cast of characters for any high school principal to be aligned with, especially in such a conservative community.
While I’ll grant that there’s some language in Spamalot that a combined junior and senior high school might have some concerns about, they certainly could take those moments up with the licensing house, Theatrical Rights Worldwide. In fact, TRW already has an FAQ with suggested edits for schools right on its website (click here, then ‘Resources,’ then ‘FAQ for School Productions’).
But the marriage of the characters Herbert and Lancelot is non-negotiable. I asked Jim Hoare, director of licensing for TRW, whether they would ever entertain the excision of those nuptials, and his answer was blunt: “Absolutely not.” Hoare said that hundred of schools perform Spamalot annually.
This news is just breaking, and I’m writing with limited information at what I suspect and hope is the start of a story, not the end. One facet to be explored: Dawn Burch’s husband Samuel is on the district Board of Education, and both are active in community theatre as well, so there may well be support for the show above the level of superintendent.
Despite this coming to light just before a national holiday (gee, didn’t Trumbull High cancel their production of Rent right before Thanksgiving?), it must survive the weekend festivities, on a wave of deserved outrage. School may not be in session, but hopefully the students can organize, like students in Trumbull High School in Connecticut, like students at Timberlane High in New Hampshire, via social media, to increase pressure on the narrow-minded, retrograde administration.
That any educator or school administrator is still denying gay love and gay life in 2014, that a school would cancel a show in a move designed both implicitly and explicitly to shame and frighten any gay student, teacher or person, is simply ugly and wrong. It’s worth noting that in the very first news piece on this, reporter Kristina Papa quickly found people to counter the principal’ s alleged, now retracted, assertion about gay life in South Williamsport, which must have really startled the blinkered administration.
It’s worth noting that gay marriage is legal in Pennsylvania. So it is ironic that, as they marry in Spamalot, Lancelot says to his spouse, “Just think, Herbert, in a thousand years time this will still be controversial.”
I guess Tim the Soothsayer had warned Lancelot about South Williamsport, PA. But maybe we can change history, if we raise our voices together.
I urge you to write Superintendent Dr. Mark Stamm (mstamm@swasd.org) and Principal Jesse Smith (jsmith@swasd.org) to voice your concerns (and please share your correspondence with me, if you’re willing, at howard [at] hesherman [dot] com. But I ask that you do so respectfully, even if the district doesn’t afford the same respect in its attitudes and actions.
Addendum, July 3, 5 pm: WNEP now reports that the principal did not make the statement about “homosexuality not existing.” I have left the material in place with the text and my rhetoric about it struck through, because I cannot deny having shared that original report or that I made statements resulting from it, but to show that they are also no longer supported by facts in evidence. Disclosure of the e-mail at the root of this controversy seems more essential than ever, and it should be noted that the school administration certainly has the legal right to disclose it should it wish to do so.
For those who do read the original WNEP story, it should be noted that the local resident and parent, Manny Tskitas, who makes several statements in support of the school administration’s position and questions the play choice, is also a staff member of the South Williamsport school district, as the librarian for grades K through 6. It would have been beneficial if WNEP had noted his affiliation.
Correction, July 5, 7:30: The original version of this post stated that Graham Chapman died of AIDS. That was an error and the text has been updated with accurate information.
Like this: Like Loading...Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Chris Hogg says North Korea is warning of more attacks
South Korea's defence minister has resigned amid criticism of his handling of North Korea's shelling of an island near their disputed maritime border.
President Lee Myung-bak will name Kim Tae-young's successor on Friday.
Tuesday's barrage left two South Korean civilians and two marines dead, and sent regional tensions soaring.
South Korea has increased troop numbers on Yeonpyeong and other nearby islands, and announced more rigorous rules of engagement for future incidents.
Mr Kim had been urged to step down by legislators from both governing and opposition parties over his handling of the shelling.
In his resignation statement, the minister said he took full responsibility.
Analysis South Korean officials described Tuesday's attack as "surprising and shocking". "We couldn't have imagined they would carry out this kind of grave provocation," one senior government source told me. The South Korean rules of engagement called for a sufficient but proportionate response to an attack from their northern neighbour. But that was not enough of a deterrent. So now they have a simple message for Pyongyang - in the face of any kind of further provocation, however unimaginable, South Korea will now not hesitate to use "all kind of measures". "If we give this signal to North Korea they will have to think for more time before they make their judgement [to launch a further attack]," the official said. The new defensive posture should be more flexible and more unpredictable, but it could create extra risk that any future attack could more easily escalate into something far worse.
More powerful response
The government also said it was changing its rules of engagement to allow it to respond more forcefully to similar incidents. The old rules have been criticised as too passive.
The BBC's Chris Hogg in Seoul says the cabinet had decided that under the old rules of engagement there was too much emphasis on preventing a military incident escalating into something worse.
In future, the South would implement different levels of response, depending on whether the North attacked military or civilian targets, a presidential spokesman said.
A senior government official told the BBC that Seoul wanted to be more flexible in order to keep the North Koreans guessing as to their response.
The South Korean broadcaster, KBS, said the new rules called for the South to fire back "with shots two to three times more powerful than the enemy artillery".
North Korea meanwhile threatened further military action if the South continued on its "path of military provocation", the official KCNA news agency reported.
Pyongyang has blamed Seoul for this week's incident on Yeonpyeong, insisting it did not fire first. The South was holding military exercises in the area at the time, and returned fire when the North's shells began to land.
North Korea: Timeline 2010 26 March: South Korean warship, Cheonan, sinks, killing 46 sailors 20 May: Panel says a North Korean torpedo sank the ship; Pyongyang denies involvement July-September: South Korea and US hold military exercises; US places more sanctions on Pyongyang 29 September: North holds rare party congress seen as part of father-to-son succession move 29 October: Troops from North and South Korea exchange fire across the land border 12 November: North Korea shows US scientist new - undeclared - uranium enrichment facility In pictures: Korean shelling China's muted response Possible triggers for attack
The North also accused the United States of stoking tensions - saying it helped draw up the "illegal" western maritime border between the two Koreas.
About 28,000 US troops are stationed in South Korea.
Naval exercises
The clash was one of the worst incidents between the two Koreas, who remain technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended without a peace treaty.
The US and South Korean militaries are to hold joint naval exercises, which will include US aircraft carrier USS George Washington, south of Yeonpyeong in the coming days.
The Chinese foreign ministry has expressed "concern" over the exercises.
"We oppose any act that undermines peace and stability on the peninsula," it said.
Beijing, Pyongyang's main ally, has been under pressure to use its influence to ease tensions.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who is in Moscow, earlier described the situation on the peninsula as "grim and complicated".
Mr Wen repeated his view that the six-party talks on the North's nuclear programme should be resumed as soon as possible, a position shared by Pyongyang.
South Korea, the US and Japan have said the negotiations should not restart until the North stops uranium enrichment work and apologises for its alleged torpedoing of a South Korean warship in March, which killed 46 sailors.
A visit by Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi to South Korea, which had been due on Friday, has also been postponed. The delay was put down to "scheduling" issues.The Seal of the United States Congress tells an observer a number of salient facts about American politics: the olive branch stands for America’s commitment to peace; the arrows represent its readiness for war; and the Star of David, which The Economist has helpfully added to the original design, symbolises the control of Jews and/or Israel over America’s policies of war and peace.
Peter Schrank’s cartoon, which accompanies an article on negotiations with Iran in this week’s Economist, depicts President Obama with his ankle shackled to the Judaised seal of the US Congress, thereby prevented from shaking hands with Iran’s President Rouhani, who is being restrained by his nefarious-looking, US-flag-burning compatriots.
The message is that either American Jews or Israel (and it is unclear which, because the Star of David is both a Jewish and Israeli symbol) are holding the United States back from making peace with Iran – and moreover, that they are doing so through their control of the machinery of the American government, since the Star of David is incorporated into the official insignia of the US, alongside the stars and stripes. The Israel Lobby, as the cartoon rather nefariously hints, is not a separate influence on the US government – it is a constituent part of it.
Schrank’s previous cartoons have hardly been kind towards Israel, but one can only wonder what was going through the mind of his editors: there are questions about the impartiality of the magazine’s coverage of Israel, but as last week’s very fair and reasonable “Who is a Jew?” feature suggests, The Economist is hardly an anti-Semitic publication.
Intentionally or not, however, Schrank’s cartoon is now an addition to the disturbing trend of cartoons hinting at the sinister control of Western governments by Israel or Jews, following Steve Bell’s Guardian cartoon showing Netanyahu as a puppeteer with Tony Blair and William Hague as finger-puppets, and a cartoon in the Qatari Al-Watan newspaper depicting an Orthodox Jew driving with Obama’s head as a gearstick and the UN logo as his steering wheel.
I shan’t accuse The Economist directly of anti-Semitism, but it bears repeating that the EUMC Working Definition, adopted by the British government, covers “stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as… the myth … of Jews controlling the… government” and also covers “using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism… to characterise Israel or Israelis”. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions.
The notion that Jews control the world’s major institutions of power, including governments, media and banks, is one of the most established and pernicious myths peddled against Jews, and it is difficult not to see continuity between contemporary hints about “Zionist” control of world governments and nineteenth-century cartoons depicting a Jewish octopus with its tentacles over the globe.
In France, 29% believe Jews have too much control of international financial markets; in Italy, 39% believe Jews have too much power in the business world; and in Hungary, Poland and Spain, well over half of the population believes at least one of these propositions. In the United States, 14% believe that “Jews have too much power in the U.S. today”, and that’s from the most philo-Semitic of countries out there.
Anti-Semitic tropes enjoy even greater vibrancy in the Muslim world, where the Elders of Zion is taken as gospel, Jewish conspiracies are more common than Jews, and The Economist is available too – subtly, and quite probably unintentionally, reinforcing such prejudices.
The Economist’s readership might be more intelligent than the general public, but it should not flatter itself. Even if its readers believe the myth of Jewish power in proportions far lower than is average, their perceptions are hardly likely to be dispelled by such cartoons, which contribute towards a toxic drip-drip in public discourse, confirming the unarticulated suspicions about Jewish power of those who find that such beliefs are neither rare nor taboo.
It may well be that the cartoon was intended only as a nod to the influence of Israel or AIPAC in Washington’s policy-making on Iran; and perhaps the cartoonist had good reasons not to include a Tricolore and shahada, despite similar pressure from the French and Saudis. Nevertheless, it does not take a Professor in Anti-Semitism Studies to understand how such an image can reinforce the myth of the Jewish conspiracy in the minds of those already convinced of its veracity, and for whom the words “Jewish lobby” trip too easily off the tongue.
Cartoons work by using images and symbols familiar to readers in order to induce them to read between the lines and infer a particular unspoken message from the image. The best that can be said about Schrank’s cartoon is that it is ambiguous, but this ambiguity is precisely what makes it so noxious: the Economist can dissociate itself from the most toxic of interpretations, but still the process of “wink wink, nudge nudge” will continue to encourage readers, quite reasonably, to jump to conclusions about Jewish control over Capitol Hill from the incorporation of the Star of David into official US symbols.
Belief in a Jewish conspiracy is sufficiently prevalent worldwide that for the Economist to buttress them, even unintentionally, is negligent at best and utterly reckless at worst. If there is nuance, the Economist cannot protest innocence when it is lost in translation.
Update: The Economist has pulled the cartoon from its website, explaining: “The print edition of this story had a cartoon which inadvertently caused offence to some readers, so we have replaced it with a photograph.” Given that the article makes no mention of AIPAC, the Israel Lobby, or indeed Israel (bar a passing reference in brackets to Benjamin Netanyahu), this was probably a wise move.A follow-up to my earlier post on this topic:
Some are really upset, apparently, that by accepting an invitation for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to sing at the inauguration of Donald Trump and Mike Pence, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is making a political statement.
This is nonsense.
The Tabernacle Choir has already performed at the inaugural ceremonies for the Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson (1965), as well as for the Republicans Richard M. Nixon (1969), Ronald Reagan (1981), George H.W. Bush (1989) and George W. Bush (2001). So far as I’m aware the Choir has performed at every presidential inauguration to which it has been invited. Moreover, the Church has routinely welcomed presidents and presidential candidates of both major parties to its headquarters in Salt Lake City, notably including the Democrat John F. Kennedy Jr., who spoke in the Tabernacle on Temple Square. I myself was in the audience outside, many years ago, when the Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter paid a visit to the First Presidency in Salt Lake City.
Accepting the invitation to perform at the Trump inauguration isn’t a political statement. Fully anticipating that controversy would ensue, I almost wish that the invitation hadn’t been extended, great honor to the Choir though it is. Once the invitation had been extended, however, refusing it would have made a political statement. Accepting it doesn’t.
P.S. If Mr. Trump were to invite me to Washington DC for advice and counsel — as, if he were wise, he would certainly do — I would go. Despite the fact that I publicly and vocally affiliated myself with the “Never Trump” movement at a very early point and wrote against him as energetically as I could, and despite the fact that I didn’t vote for him, I respect the office of the presidency enough, and I love my country enough, that I would do so. It would scarcely be an “endorsement.”‘T his is an embarrassing confession,” novelist his is an embarrassing confession,” novelist Jonathan Franzen admits, “[but] I don’t have very many black friends.”
The line comes at the beginning of a lengthy interview on Slate (to promote the paperback release of Franzen’s latest novel, Purity ), when reporter Isaac Chotiner inquires if – in light of America’s “weird year” – Franzen would ever consider writing a book about race. Right off the bat, “weird” seems a jarringly detached descriptor for a year of unrelenting xenophobia, white nationalism and state-sanctioned summary execution; one wonders if a person with more than “not very many” black friends might have remarked upon it.
But Franzen charges on: “I have never been in love with a black woman. I feel like if I had, I might dare... I write about characters, and I have to love the character to write about the character. If you have not had direct first-hand experience of loving a category of person – a person of a different race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people – I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.”
There’s little fault in his underlying logic. In fact, he articulates quite beautifully a truth that more people of privilege need to internalise: “I feel it’s really dangerous, if you are a liberal white American, to presume that your good intentions are enough to embark on a work of imagination about black America.”
Yes, absolutely. White people should stay in our lane. Jonathan Franzen should not write books about the black experience in America. The boundary he senses there is a healthy one. Such an endeavour would not be good for black people, Jonathan Franzen, experiences, America or books. (The profoundly colonial notion that “loving” a black woman can magically imbue a white man with the insight to “write fully from the inside” of her – that having sex with a person gives you ownership over their story – is evidence enough of that.)
But, writerly principles aside, human to human, I hope that Franzen and millions of other white people in this deeply segregated nation of the US take some time to interrogate the phrase: “This is an embarrassing confession, [but] I don’t have very many black friends.”
It’s a strikingly honest inversion of the cliche that white people usually reach for when asked pointed questions about race – “Some of my best friends are black!” – yet somehow more unsettling in its complacency. I don’t know these people, Franzen is telling us. These are not my people. I know enough to be embarrassed but I do not care enough to change.
Following the confession, Chotiner shepherds the conversation away from race and toward the meaning of the word “love”. But, wait. Why wouldn’t you ask “why?”
Why don’t you have very many black friends? Why doesn’t it bother you that you don’t have very many black friends? Why don’t you take steps to cultivate some friendships with black people? Why do we pretend like it’s perfectly reasonable for men to reach 56 years of age – some of those years spent in New York City – primarily socialising within their own race?
I dislike singling Franzen out, because it obscures the breadth of the issue. As the above study shows, self-segregation is business as usual in white America. It’s normal, and Franzen is more thoughtful than many white male writers of his generation about the politics of privilege. But there’s something about the blithe way he tosses out that line, the performative and ultimately gutless embarrassment, the shrug with which, later in the interview, he accedes to the public perception that he’s a “white guy writing about white-guy things” (“some people like it”). It’s particularly demoralising when compared with the tenderness with which he talks about bird conservation, his evening tennis routine and watching the NFL on TV. In this interview, he speaks with more warmth and familiarity about birds than he does about black people.
To be clear, I highly doubt that “less important than birds” is Franzen’s genuine, intellectual take on systemic racism and Black Lives Matter, but the ability to slide so deep into one’s bubble, because one lives next to a magnificent conservation area above the Pacific, and one has observed 27 of the |
very small precipitates. UV–vis absorption spectra of the DNA solution, the solution of DNA and AgNO 3, and the solution after the reduction are shown in Figure 2. The maximum absorption at ∼260 nm is shifted after the addition of Ag(I), and the peak at 408 nm, the typical plasmon resonance band of Ag nanoparticles, appeared after the reduction. In the case of the volume ratio of 1:3, a large amount of precipitation was observed, and a very small amount of Ag nanoparticles was produced.
Figure 2 Ultraviolet-visible (UV–vis) absorption spectra of the DNA and the DNA–Ag mixed solutions (before and after adding NaBH 4 ). Full size image
Ag nanoparticles were also prepared using solutions of IMw-DNA (10−2 mol l−1) and AgNO 3 (10−1 mol l−1) and HMw-DNA (10−3 mol l−1) and AgNO 3 (10−2 mol l−1). The molar ratio of [nucleotide]:[Ag(I)]:[BH 4 ] was chosen to be 1:20:20. Ag concentrations in the mixed solutions were calculated to be 6.25 × 10−3 mol l−1 when using the 10−2 mol l−1 AgNO 3 solution and 6.25 × 10−2 mol l−1 when using the 10−1 mol l−1 AgNO 3 solution. As denoted in Table 1, homogenous dark brown solutions were obtained under all conditions. Moreover, a slight turbidity was observed without clear phase separation in the solutions with 10−2 mol l−1 IMw-DNA (Table 1, no. 4) and 10−3 mol l−1 HMw-DNA (Table 1, no. 5). Precipitation also occurred in the 10−2 mol l−1 IMw-DNA solution (Table 1, no. 4), and the Ag concentration in the supernatant was above 46% (confirmed by ICP-AES). There was little precipitation in the 10−2 mol l−1 LMw-DNA solution (Table 1, no. 2), and the Ag concentration was only ∼3%.
Table 1: DNA and AgNO 3 solutions employed for the preparation of Ag nanoparticles and states of the resultant solution after reduction Full size table
The dark brown supernatants were purified by membrane dialysis, a simple method amenable to mass production. After purification, all the obtained solutions were dark brown and homogeneous in appearance. The Ag concentrations as estimated by ICP-AES were 3.9 × 10−3, 4.0 × 10−3, 4.3 × 10−3, 5.3 × 10−2 and 3.6 × 10−2 mol l−1 for the 10−3 mol l−1 LMw-DNA, 10−3 mol l−1 IMw-DNA, 10−3 mol l−1 HMw-DNA, 10−2 mol l−1 LMw-DNA and 10−2 mol l−1 IMw-DNA solutions, respectively. The UV–vis absorption spectra of Ag colloids have been reported to be influenced by the particle size distribution; for example, the absorption peak shifts toward longer wavelengths as the particles become larger,26 and small aggregates cause a decrease in the peak along with the appearance of a long tail on the high wavelength side.27 At the same Ag concentration, the UV–vis absorption spectra showed a similar shape for 10−3 and 10−2 mol l−1 LMw-DNA solutions (Figure 3a, no. 1 and 2), and 10−3 mol l−1 IMw-DNA solution (Figure 3a, no. 3), suggesting that these Ag particles possessed a similar size distribution.
Figure 3 (a) Ultraviolet-visible (UV–vis) absorption spectra of the Ag nanoparticle dispersions, in terms of the same concentration of Ag. (b) transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) images of the samples. (c) Corresponding scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of Ag–DNA complexes after dialysis. The specified DNA solutions were: (1) low-molecular weight DNA (LMw-DNA) (10−3 mol l−1), (2) LMw-DNA (10−2 mol l−1), (3) intermediate-molecular weight DNA (IMw-DNA) (10−3 mol l−1), (4) IMw-DNA (10−2 mol l−1) and (5) high-molecular weight DNA (HMw-DNA) (10−3 mol l−1). Full size image
Figures 3b and c show typical microscopic images. The LMw-DNA at concentrations of 10−3 and 10−2 mol l−1 and the IMw-DNA at a concentration of 10−3 mol l−1 produced fine Ag nanoparticles (Figure 3a, no. 1, 2 and 3), while the IMw-DNA at a concentration of 10−2 mol l−1 and the HMw-DNA gave large Ag particles (Figure 3a, no. 4 and 5). The 10−2 mol l−1 LMw-DNA and the 10−1 mol l−1 aqueous AgNO 3 solutions were selected for producing Ag nanoparticles in a high concentration.
Characterization of the Ag nanoparticles
The concentrations of Ag, P and Na in the Ag nanoparticle dispersions were measured by ICP-AES, and the DNA concentration was calculated from the amount of P. The Ag content in the nanoparticles was 85.2 wt%; the DNA content was calculated as 14.3 wt%. The ratio of Ag to DNA was approximately the same before and after the reduction. That is, the Ag nanoparticles consisted largely of Ag, with a low content of impurities such as Na. The TEM images of the Ag nanoparticles showed them to be spherical in shape with an average diameter of <10 nm (Figure 4a). The particle size distribution was determined with AFM (Figure 4b) by using the height profile in the image (Figure 4c). The histogram of the size distribution is shown in Figure 4d; ∼90% of the particles were <10 nm, with a median particle size of 2.6 nm.
Figure 4 Particle images and size distribution of the Ag nanoparticles. (a) Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and (b) atomic force microscopy (AFM) images of the Ag nanoparticles. (c) Height profile along the indicated line of the AFM image. (d) Histogram of the Ag nanoparticle size distribution as evaluated by AFM. A full color version of this figure is available at Polymer Journal online. Full size image
The zeta-potential is a measure of the degree of repulsion between similarly charged particles in a dispersion. A higher zeta-potential indicates a higher stability of the dispersion, which would be more resistant to aggregation. The zeta-potential of the Ag nanoparticles in water was −73.82 mV, which was negatively charged, similar to DNA. The absolute value was higher than that of DNA, −42.17 mV. This result suggested that the surfaces of the Ag nanoparticles were thickly covered with DNA, which led to the high stabilization in aqueous media.
From the ratio of Ag to DNA, a schematic was drawn of the size of the Ag core and the thickness of the outer DNA layer wrapping the core. We applied the literature density value of 1.05 × 104 kg m−3 for Ag,28 and the measured density value of 1.14 × 103 kg m−3 for DNA. For a particle of median size, 2.6 nm in diameter, the Ag core was calculated to be 1.90 nm in diameter and the DNA layer 0.35 nm thick (Figure 5). Adamcik et al.29 reported that the height of single-stranded DNA, dried in air, was 0.35±0.05 nm, according to their AFM observations. Therefore, our results could be explained by supposing that the Ag nanoparticles were coated with a single layer of single-stranded DNA.
Figure 5 Proposed structure of the Ag nanoparticles estimated by calculation. Full size image
In addition, the thermal behavior of the Ag nanoparticles was analyzed by TG. The weight loss of the nanoparticles was low from 250–500 °C, followed by a remarkable change over 500 °C. In contrast, the weight of DNA was continuously decreasing from 250–900 °C (Figure 6a). In the stepwise heating from 200 to 600°C, the weight changed little under 400 °C, and a 15% decrease occurred at 500 °C (Figures 6b and c). This value was identical to the analysis by ICP-AES. In other words, the Ag nanoparticles demonstrated good thermostability up to 400 °C. Moreover, most DNA is expected to decompose by heating over 500 °C, at which point the Ag nanoparticles may show potential as a conductive material.
Figure 6 Thermogravimetry (TG) curves of (a) DNA and the Ag nanoparticles at a heating rate of 5 °C min−1 under ambient air, and TG curves with stepwise temperatures at (b) 200 and 300 °C, (c) 400, 500 and 600 °C, each for 4 h. Full size image
Long-term stability of the Ag nanoparticles in water
Long-term dispersion stability is necessary for Ag nanoparticle applications. Upon standing for over 6 months, the as-prepared dispersion did not change from a homogeneous dark brown based on visual inspection. The UV–vis absorption spectrum indicated that the particle size and shape were remarkably stable in water (Figure 7). The change in the spectrum was the same or even smaller than that of previously reported highly stable Ag nanoparticles stored at lower concentrations.10, 13, 30 These results demonstrate that the DNA had an important role as a protective agent in addition to serving as the template. This stabilization enabled the DNA-templated Ag nanoparticles to be stored on a large scale and used without re-dispersion.Note: By submitting this form, you agree to Third Door Media's terms. We respect your privacy.
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The folks at Android Police uncovered that the new version of Google Maps for Android now lets users set Google Maps to only work in WiFi mode. This way, you do not have to use your cellular data while using Google Maps, assuming you pre-downloaded the maps before you left your WiFi connection.
If your Maps app has received the WiFi only mode setting, you will be able to access it by opening the Settings screen and looking for a new toggle on the second line with the title, “Wi-Fi only.” Android Police explained:
If it’s there, you’re set to go offline. This line used to be titled “offline areas,” and it still provides a link to the same screen if you tap the description, but it has been augmented with the new title and the switch. Just be aware that tapping the title or switch will effectively cut maps off from cellular data, and tapping anywhere on the description will open the configuration screen for offline areas.
Here is a picture of the setting:
When you turn it on, you get this prompt:
This “Wi-Fi only” blue bar shows up at the top when active:
People also are noticing new mass transit delay notifications as another feature in the app.Read More
Urban Explorations
Amsterdam's canal-woven core is laced by atmospheric narrow lanes. You never know what you'll find: a tiny hidden garden; a boutique selling witty, stylised Dutch-designed homewares and fashion; a jewel-box-like jenever (Dutch gin) distillery; a flower stall filled with tulips in a rainbow of hues; an old monastery-turned-classical-music-venue; an ultra-niche restaurant such as an avocado or strawberry specialist or one reinventing age-old Dutch classics. Fringing the centre, post-industrial buildings in up-and-coming neighbourhoods now house creative enterprises, from art galleries to craft breweries and cutting-edge tech start-ups, as well as some of Europe's hottest clubs.
Admiring Art
You can't walk a kilometre without bumping into a masterpiece in the city. The Van Gogh Museum hangs the world's largest collection by tortured native son Vincent. A few blocks away, Vermeers, Rembrandts and other Golden Age treasures fill the glorious Rijksmuseum. The Museum het Rembrandthuis offers more of Rembrandt via his etching-packed studio, while the Stedelijk Museum counts Matisses and Mondrians among its modern stock. And for blockbuster displays, the Hermitage Amsterdam delivers: the outpost of Russia's State Hermitage Museum sifts through its three-million-piece home trove to mount mega exhibitions.
Bike & Boat Travel
Two-wheeling is a way of life here. It's how Amsterdammers commute to work, go to the shop, and meet a date for dinner. Abundant bike-rental shops make it easy to gear up and take a spin. If locals aren't on a bike, they may well be on the water. With its canals and massive harbour, this city reclaimed from the sea offers countless opportunities to drift. Hop aboard a canal boat (preferably an open-air one) or one of the free ferries behind Centraal Station, or rent your own for a wind-in-your-hair ride.
Feel Gezellig
Amsterdam is famously gezellig, a Dutch quality that translates roughly as 'convivial' or 'cosy'. It's more easily experienced than defined. There's a sense of time stopping, an intimacy of the here-and-now that leaves your troubles behind, at least until tomorrow. The easiest place to encounter this feeling is a bruin café (brown cafe; traditional drinking establishment). Named for their wood panelling and walls once stained by smoke, brown cafes have gezelligheid (cosiness) on tap, along with good beer. You can also feel gezellig lingering after dinner in snug restaurants while the candles burn low.
Read LessThey say most great artists aren’t really appreciated until after they’re dead. I say most great meals aren’t appreciated until after you go to the bathroom.
That’s where scrapple comes in (or out). It enters and leaves your body as scrapple, more or less. No fuss, no questions asked. Kale can move on over, because there’s a new miracle food in town.
In a way, scrapple is the only thing that keeps bringing me back to my home state of Pennsylvania. Scrapple is my heritage, much like the South’s Confederate Flag, except without any of the racism or pride for a defunct nation. Just tastiness from corner to greasy corner.
What exactly is in scrapple, you ask? According to most sources, its a gourmet blend of cornmeal, flour, and, you guessed it, meat scraps! As for what kind of meat, nobody can be sure. Probably whatever isn’t good enough to use in hot dogs. The exact recipe is likely an ancient Amish secret, talked about only during the most sacred of barn raisings. I’ve tried to ask them about it, but they never respond to any of my emails.
A few weeks ago, I tried to share the local delicacy with my three college roommates: a Minnesotan WASP, a Chinese international, and a Long Island Jew. To my dismay, not one of them recognized the beauty of the Mid-Atlantic meat brick. They provided weak excuses. It was too burnt. It had a weird consistency. It wasn’t “kosher.”
But I’ll be damned if that scrapple didn’t make them all feel as American as any man could on this crazy little marble we call Planet Earth. If there was ever any doubt, the man at the table next to us was wearing a shirt covered in bald eagles and snippets from the Constitution. His was the type of patriotism that could make Joe McCarthy look like Chairman Mao.
And when you think about it, scrapple is really the Constitution of breakfast meats. It’s rugged, rectangular, and nobody can agree on what’s in it. But like all good things in life, scrapple brings up more questions than answers. To quote the great John Mellencamp (neé Cougar), “Ain’t that America, Home of the Free?” I’d say so. So next time you’re out for breakfast, have yourself a side of scrapple, amended with a generous slather of Heinz ketchup. Because anything else is just Canadian bacon.
AdvertisementsExtreme weather over the last five years has been occurring with a regularity that’s about three times the norm, according to a newly created index from a group of number crunchers.
The Actuaries Climate Index, which was officially launched near the end of 2016, takes data from “neutral, scientific sources, generating objective, evidence-based results on extreme weather events,” according to the index’s creators.
The key metric is a five-year moving average, which enables users to see a clear climate signal.
The current five-year moving average value for the index is 1.02 – a small, but potentially eye-popping figure if you know what it means. The index value reached a value of 0.5 in 1998 and first reached 1.0 in 2013.
Those values indicate a sustained increase in the frequency of extreme weather occurrences and changes in sea levels, according to the keepers of the index, which highlights 12 regions in the U.S. and Canada.
The index is based on analysis of quarterly seasonal data for six components – each of which is a monthly or seasonal time series based on measurements from a network of meteorological stations and coastal tide stations – compared with a reference period of 1961 to 1990. These components measure extremes rather than averages, because extremes have the largest impact on people and property, according to the index creators.
In actuarial-ese, the index is the sum of component values divided by the number of components. The six index components are:
Frequency of temperatures above the 90th percentile; Frequency of temperatures below the 10th percentile; Maximum five-day rainfall in the month; Consecutive dry days; Winds above the 90th percentile; Sea level.
The index was designed to be an educational tool to help inform actuaries, policymakers and the public about climate trends and their potential impact, said Doug Collins, chair of the Climate Change Committee, which developed the index.
The committee is a joint effort of the American Academy of Actuaries, the Canadian Institute of Actuaries, the Casualty Actuarial Society and the Society of Actuaries.
The index was put together over a period of about eight years, according to Collins.
“The idea was to come up with the simplest, most objective way to measure changes in climate as well as sea level,” he said. “It will be useful to the insurance industry as well as public policy makers who are looking at information on climate.”
He said the website portal where the latest data in the index can be found has had more than 8,000 visits since launching on Nov. 30 and more than 400 visitors have downloaded data from the site.
The data is free.
There were some costs involved with creating the index, such as paying consulting firm Solterra Solutions of Victoria, B.C., and web developer Matrix Group International of Arlington, Va., but most of the work was done on volunteer basis by actuaries, many of whom are employed by companies in the U.S. and Canada.
A number of actuarial and communications staff members from the associations were also involved in the development of the site and its launch, and Collins volunteers his time. All costs are shared among the four sponsoring organizations.
Back to the current index.
The index is calculated so that its average value from 1961 to 1990 is exactly 0. In other words, the index value for each season is calculated as the anomaly relative to the average index during the reference period, therefore the average value of the index for those 30 years is 0.
While it varies from season to season and month to month, over the past five years the index has been above 1.
According to Collins, 1 and above is a fairly large change.
“One way you could describe the value of 1 means that an event that occurred about a sixth of the time during the reference period (1961 to 1990) is occurring on an average basis now, so it’s going from a probability of one-sixth to a probability of 50 percent,” Collins said.
That means extreme weather over the past five years has occurred more than three times normal – with normal being the reference period.
The index shows the current highest five-year average values by region are: Northwest Pacific (British Columbia and Yukon Territory); Northeast Atlantic (New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island); and Southern Plains (Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming).
“In the U.S we’re seeing high numbers on the East Coast and in the Southwest,” Collins said.
Despite climate change being a political hot potato in the U.S., Collins said the group hasn’t gotten much grief from people who don’t believe that the climate is changing or that climate change is manmade – it should be noted that Collins and his group aren’t taking sides on the latter.
“We have not had any experience with that so far,” Collins said of the lack of criticism.
As for whether that lack of criticism so far means the new Trump administration will embrace the index as a valuable tool for policymakers?
“We’re just waiting to see what happens,” Collins said. “I’m not sure that the incoming administration has paid attention to this. I’m sure they’ve got a lot of other more important things that they are thinking about right now.”
He added: “We’re hopeful that they will find some use in our data.”
Past columns:« John Boehner: You Know, If Obama Plays His Cards Right We Could Do Immigration Reform Next Year | Main | American Jihadi Killed Fighting For ISIS Formerly Worked for... Airport » Are Progressives the Real Authoritarians? A few months ago, Charles Murray wrote about the 1920s progressive movement's open admiration for authoritarian regimes. [P]hilosophically, the progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century had roots in German philosophy ( Hegel and Nietzsche were big favorites) and German public administration ( Woodrow Wilson's open reverence for Bismarck was typical among progressives). To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong unifying leader. They were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective. They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded. That's not a description that Woodrow Wilson or the other leading progressive intellectuals would have argued with. They openly said it themselves. It is that core philosophy extolling the urge to mold society that still animates progressives today--a mind-set that produces the shutdown of debate and growing intolerance that we are witnessing in today's America. Such thinking on the left also is behind the rationales for indulging President Obama in his anti-Constitutional use of executive power. If you want substantiation for what I'm saying, read Jonah Goldberg's 2008 book "Liberal Fascism," an erudite and closely argued exposition of American progressivism and its subsequent effects on liberalism. The title is all too accurate. Today, Megan McArdle writes about this as well. In the ultra-liberal enclave I grew up in, the liberals were at least as fiercely tribal as any small-town Republican, though to be sure, the targets were different. Many of them knew no more about the nuts and bolts of evolution and other hot-button issues than your average creationist; they believed it on authority. And when it threatened to conflict with some sacred value, such as their beliefs about gender differences, many found evolutionary principles as easy to ignore as those creationists did. It is clearly true that liberals profess a moral code that excludes concerns about loyalty, honor, purity and obedience -- but over the millennia, man has professed many ideals that are mostly honored in the breach. She is herself animated to write about this by Jeremy Frimer's study, which he writes about at the HuffPo. Frimer is a psychologist, and, it seems, a fairly dogmatic progressive, but not so dogmatic to avoid interesting questions, or to refuse to conduct research that might not reinforce his personal bigotries. Frimer was struck by progressives' resort to group-think bullying and a longing to live their lives by Received Dogma -- the same sort of thing he'd always thought about "Bible-thumping" conservatives, only with different shibboleths and holy books. He conducted a study to explore this. Together with my collaborators Dr. Danielle Gaucher and Nicola Schaefer, we asked both red and blue Americans to share their views about obeying liberal authorities (e.g., "obey an environmentalist"). In an article that we recent published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, we found that liberals were now the ones calling for obedience. And when the authorities were viewed as ideologically neutral (e.g., office manager), liberals and conservatives agreed. Only when people perceived the authority to be conservative (e.g., religious authority) did conservatives show a positive bias. If the two sides equally support obedience to their own authorities, how had I come to believe that conservatives are the ones that favor obedience to authority? We wondered if the asymmetry lay not in attitudes toward obedience, but in the nature of authority. Perhaps authorities tend to be conservative, and people know it. His idea that conservatives are perceived as more longing for authority because the "authority" people usually have in mind when they think about this are institutions thought to be "conservative" -- chiefly, the police, the military, the church. But Frimer finds that when you broaden the concept of "authority" to include all the various dogma-generating, loyalty-enforcing institutions of ideation and control, progressives are just as slavish to Received Wisdom as the stereotypical conservative is. Rather than thinking of liberals and conservatives as being fundamentally different psychological breeds, I now think of them as competing teams. Liberal versus conservative is like Yankee fans versus Red Socks fans. Each has its own flag to which it pledges allegiance. And each side has its own authorities to which it demands obedience. You should probably read his whole piece. I haven't included why he was prompted to conduct this study; it involves a bicycling tour of Cuba. I think most of this is explained well enough by the concept of "altruistic punishment," an evolved human behavior of rule and code enforcement within a tribe, as described in the very short (probably still free to borrow) book Trial by Fury by Douglas Preston. Thanks to @rdbrewer4.
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Recent Comments Recent Entries Search Polls! Polls! Polls! Frequently Asked Questions The (Almost) Complete Paul Anka Integrity Kick Top Top Tens Greatest Hitjobs“I’ve been in the department for 15 years, and I knew this was going on but didn’t pay too much attention,” says Serita Frey, a soil microbiologist and a professor at the university.“It didn’t have anything to do with climate change at first. Everyone just knew that the ginkgo tree dumps its leaves in one day.”
Why the single-day drop? In the autumn, deciduous trees form a scar between their leaves and stems to protect themselves from diseases and winter’s coming chill. Most flowering trees, like oaks and maples, form the scar at different rates, in different parts of the tree, over the course of weeks. Their leaves then fall off individually. But ginkgoes form the scar across all their stems at once. The first hard frost finishes severing every leaf, and they rain to the ground in unison.
A few years ago, Frey became curious about whether there was data documenting the ginkgo-dump day over the years. According to the National Climatic Data Center, fall temperatures in New Hampshire are now more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they were in the late 1970s. Did that affect the flagship ginkgo tree? Had someone even kept records about the contest that far back?
For the first few days of her search, she couldn’t locate the record. “And then I found a piece of paper with handwriting on it that some secretary back in 1977 started, and that someone from the department had been adding to every year,” she said. “I put all that information in a spreadsheet, and I’ve been updating that graph every year since.”
The graph revealed that the ginkgo-dump day had been sliding forward over the ensuing decades. Every decade, the ginkgo tree loses its leaves an average of three days later than it had 10 years prior. When the James Hall ginkgo dumped its leaves this Thursday, November 9, it was the second-latest that the tree had ever hit the autumn milestone.
When Did the James Hall Ginkgo Lose Its Leaves?
“It’s our poster tree—our local example of climate change,” she told me. Frey uses the slide in her classes about global warming.
The James Hall ginkgo is not, of course, the only organism subject to the creeping relocation of the seasons. In 2016, the U.S. National Park Service examined when the first leaf or first bloom of spring arrived in 276 of its parks. In three-quarters of parks, spring was arriving earlier than it had in the past; in half of the parks, spring now arrives earlier than it did in 95 percent of the years since 1901.
Nor is the story of the James Hall ginkgo data trove unique. About two decades ago, climate scientists realized that springtime bloom records were some of the longest-running observations of the climate system available. By examining and digitizing old records, they have found:The piriformis syndrome is a very limiting injury which can take months to recover if you don’t treat it right. Fortunately, there is a way to reduce your pain quickly.
Luckily for you, we’ve found a way to treat your piriformis syndrome the right way. And we’ll teach you exactly how to do it yourself.
Your piriformis syndrome will go away!
I’ll explain exactly what the piriformis syndrome is and how you can treat it the right way. I’ll also show you how you can do a piriformis test yourself to discover if you really have it.
After that, I’ll show you how you can treat your piriformis syndrome yourself.
Finally, I’ll try to answer the most frequently asked questions about piriformis syndrome.
If you find our information helpful and would like to support us you can donate here through PayPal or leave a review on Google or Facebook.
Also, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more video’s.
So keep on reading.
What is the piriformis syndrome?
The piriformis syndrome is a neurological injury. It’s caused by the compression of your sciatic nerve by your piriformis muscle.
To understand the mechanism behind the piriformis syndrome, you’ll need to know the anatomy of your gluteal region.
Your sciatic nerve runs from your back through the back of your leg all the way to your foot. It controls the muscles at the back of your leg and your foot. It also innervates the skin of your leg, so you can feel touch.
In your pelvic region, the sciatic nerve is covered by the piriformis muscle. The piriformis muscle originates from your sacrum and SI-joint. It attaches to the greater trochanter at the outer side of your thigh bone.
The function of your piriformis muscle is to rotate your leg to the outer side when you lift it behind you extended. It also abducts your leg when you lift it flexed in front of you. This means that your bodyweight shifts more to the middle. If this didn’t happen you would be out of balance and not able to walk.
Piriformis syndrome is also known as “wallet sciatica” or “fat wallet syndrome,” as the condition can be caused or aggravated by sitting with a large wallet in the affected side’s rear pocket.
Now I will discuss the most common symptoms of piriformis syndrome and why they arise.
What are piriformis syndrome symptoms?
There are two main symptoms that can point you towards a piriformis syndrome. I’ll discuss both of them and explain why they appear.
The first and most pronounced symptom is a pain in the buttocks. The pain is caused by excessive use of your piriformis muscle. This excessive effect damages the muscle, making it stiffer.
Since the piriformis muscle becomes stiffer, the sciatic nerve is pressurized. This nerve passes under the piriformis muscle. The pressure causes irritation of the sciatic nerve. This irritation causes a radiating pain at the back of your leg. This pain can go through your leg to your calf muscle. This is the second sign you can recognize a piriformis syndrome by.
This is why it sometimes looks like a herniated disc.
Sometimes it even radiates to your back causing lower back pain.
Also, piriformis syndrome reduces your ability to walk, sit for a long period of time and to bend forward to pick something up.
What causes piriformis syndrome?
The main cause of the piriformis syndrome is overuse of the piriformis muscle. Overuse can be caused by different activities.
Bending and getting up many times in a short period of time.
The muscles in your buttocks help you to get up after bending down, like when you work in the garden.
Imagine you’re in your garden weeding. You bend over and pick up one weed at the time. After an hour or two, you’ve bent and got up many times. Each time you get up, you use your piriformis muscle. So you can imagine that after two hours your piriformis muscle is used a lot and is tired.
If it’s trained regularly this is not a problem.
It’s like working out in the gym. When you do it for the first time or not very regularly, you are more likely to injure yourself during your training. But if you train four times a week, it’s very unlikely that you will get an injury. So if your piriformis is trained well because you work in the garden all the time, it won’t be a problem. If you do it only occasionally, you’re more likely to injure yourself.
When you expect a baby you can expect a piriformis syndrome as well
During pregnancy, a woman can experience the symptoms of a piriformis syndrome. This condition is called pregnancy sciatica. It’s the piriformis syndrome caused by pregnancy.
This is why it occurs:
During pregnancy woman obviously, gain weight. This is a natural process. Unfortunately, this also increases the pressure on your pelvic region.
Because of the weight, walking becomes harder. As mentioned before you use your piriformis muscle a lot when you walk. Because your weight has increased, the muscle has to work harder when you walk. This causes it to tighten up and puts pressure on your sciatic nerve.
The second contributing factor is an increase of laxity in your pelvic region. To prepare your body for the birth of your baby a special hormone is produced. It’s called the relaxin hormone and its purpose is to loosen your ligaments. These ligaments normally keep your pelvic girdle together. When you give birth the baby needs to pass the pelvic girdle.
The hormone loosens the ligaments that keep the different parts of your pelvic region together. This increases the space for the baby to pass through. One of the consequences is that your pelvic girdle muscles need to work harder to compensate for the pelvic instability. This includes the piriformis muscle. Therefore the chances are that you’ll overuse it, causing tension and compression of the sciatic nerve.
Fortunately, the symptoms usually disappear by itself after the baby is born.
Hip pain, a stiff hip, hip arthritis and the piriformis syndrome
A stiff hip can also be a cause for the piriformis syndrome.
As mentioned before your piriformis muscle serves many of your hip movements. When you have a stiff hip the muscle has to work harder to move your hip because of bigger resistance. This will lead to overuse of the muscle resulting in the piriformis syndrome.
One of the main reasons for developing a stiff hip is hip arthritis. This means that the cartilages in your hip joint disappear. The lack of cartilage results in less mobility of your hip joint.
This is how hip arthrosis can lead to a stiff hip resulting in the piriformis syndrome and hip pain.
How long does piriformis syndrome last?
Your piriformis syndrome can last for several months if you don’t treat it the right way. However, if you use the exercises I’ll describe later, it will only last for about four weeks.
In severe cases, even with the right exercises, it can take months to heal. This is usually because the piriformis syndrome is an outcome of another, bigger problem. In those cases, you’ll have to solve the main problem before you can cure your piriformis syndrome. This is rare.
How can I do a piriformis syndrome test myself?
What you’ve learned so far is what the symptoms of the piriformis syndrome are and what the main causes are.
This has already given you a good indication of whether or not you are suffering from piriformis syndrome.
If you’re not sure yet there are a few simple tests that you can do yourself to find out if you have the piriformis syndrome yourself.
These tests look very similar to the exercises that you have to do to cure your piriformis syndrome.
The first indication that you have the piriformis syndrome is a tight buttock. You can feel your piriformis muscle at the lower part of your buttocks, close to where your leg starts. You should feel a difference between your painful side and your healthy side. At the painful side, you should feel a tender point. This feels like a little ball and it hurts when you put pressure on it. On your healthy side, this ball is absent.
The second indication is when you stretch your piriformis muscle.
This is how you can stretch your piriformis muscle. In this example we’ll stretch our left piriformis muscle:
Grab your right knee with your right hand.
Grab your right ankle with your left hand.
Pull your right knee toward your left shoulder.
Pull your right ankle also towards your left shoulder.
Now you should feel the stretch and tightness in your buttocks area. Tightness is quite normal in this muscle. However, when you have the piriformis syndrome you should feel a big difference between your right and left side. When |
there were more than 750,000 cases. A decade later, in 1968, that number fell to about 22,000, according to an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Today, measles cases are extremely rare, but the CDC reported a spike in 2014, with more than 600 measles cases, the first such jump in more than a decade. The CDC attributed the increase to an outbreak among unvaccinated Ohio Amish communities and cases related to an outbreak in the Philippines.
Although some have linked the anti-vaccination movement to more-affluent, highly educated parents, Pew Research data show little difference in people’s views based on income or education.
About 30% of adults living in households earning $75,000 or more a year say parents should decide whether or not their child gets vaccinated. This holds true even among the highest of earners (those in households making $100,000 or more). These opinions are on par with people living in lower- and middle-income households.
Men and women share similar views on whether vaccines should be required or not and opinions on this issue vary little by race. At the same time, slightly more parents of minor children than those without children believe vaccinating children is a parental choice.
There are slight differences in views about vaccines along political lines. A majority of Democrats (76%), Republicans (65%) and independents (65%) say that vaccines should be required. But Republicans and independents are somewhat more inclined than are Democrats to say that parents should be able to decide. In 2009, there was no difference in views on vaccinations along party lines.
Topics: Health, Science and InnovationMonckton Misleads California Lawmakers - Now It's Personal (Part 2)
Posted on 5 April 2012 by dana1981
Rather than responding to Peter Hadfield's devastating documentation of Christopher Monckton's constant misrepresentation of his sources, Monckton spent March 21st, 2012 giving a presentation to 5 California state legislators (of 120 who were invited) and approximately 75 predominantly climate denialist members of the public, plus me.
In Part 1 we examined Monckton's utterly absurd and alarmist claims regarding the cost of California's soon to be implemented carbon cap and trade system. Monckton flew in from abroad to try and tell Californians how we should address the problem of climate change, misinforming our public and policymakers by relying exclusively on one heavily-debunked economic paper.
Here in Part 2 we will examine Monckton's climate science claims in this same presentation, which as usual, misrepresented his sources. For those who wish to follow along, Monckton's slides can be downloaded here.
Setting the Tone
The main theme running throughout Monckton's presentation truthfully was not one of science, but rather of conspiracy theories. For example, at one point he made a joke about President Obama not being born in the United States - the birther conspiracy. Apparently it wasn't just a joke, because the next day on the Dennis Miller show, Monckton expanded on his birther conspiracy theory in much more detail.
Throughout the presentation Monckton accused climate scientists of fraud, data tampering, "bastardizations of science", "scientific voodoo", "naughty technique(s)", "fiddling with data", called mainstream climate science "a sham, a scam, and a scandal", referred to "enviromarxists of the hard left", and so forth. The rhetoric was extreme; all the while Monckton was the one consistently and constantly presenting distorted graphics and misinforming his audience.
What Monckton Got Right
To his credit, very similar to Fred Singer's recent comments, Monckton started out his presentation by establishing that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and the human-caused atmospheric CO2 increase has caused some warming over the past century. While this shouldn't need to be said, unfortunately there are still quite a few climate denialists who dispute the greenhouse effect, and given the composition of the audience at this particular talk, I would not be surprised if a number of people in the audience denied this reality. Thus credit to Monckton for dispelling these myths up front.
Unfortunately the quality of the talk went downhill very quickly from there.
IPCC and Moncktonian Credibility
Monckton soon displayed a graphic of what he called "the IPCC credibility gap," which in fact completely undermined Monckton's own credibility (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Slide 3 from Monckton's California presentation, showing a purported "IPCC credibility gap"
In this slide, Monckton shows a graphic with the x-axis labeled "t" (time), and yet he shows the 1950-2011 trend beginning at the same point as the plotted IPCC 2000-2100 projected trend.
Being from the United Kingdom, perhaps Monckton borrowed Dr. Who's TARDIS, but for those of us who cannot travel through time, 1950 and 2000 are actually quite far apart, and thus plotting them at the same point on the x-axis as Monckton has done is erroneous and misleading. It is simply inappropriate to compare the observed warming thus far to the projected future warming, which is expected to accelerate in response to accelerating CO2 emissions, and claim that the difference between the two somehow reveals a "credibility gap." The only issue with credibility here is Monckton's for misleading his audience in this fashion.
Climate Sensitivity and Feedbacks Consensus
Monckton next claimed that the magnitude and direction of climate feedbacks is "unsettled" and that there is no consensus on the issue. On the contrary, the many different lines of evidence are all consistent with the IPCC range of climate sensitivity, and thus net feedback estimates (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Distributions and ranges for climate sensitivity from different lines of evidence. The circle indicates the most likely value. The thin colored bars indicate very likely value (more than 90% probability). The thicker colored bars indicate likely values (more than 66% probability). Dashed lines indicate no robust constraint on an upper bound. The IPCC likely range (2 to 4.5°C) and most likely value (3°C) are indicated by the vertical grey bar and black line, respectively. Adapted from Knutti and Hegerl (2008)
Monckton also repeated his incorrect claim that climate sensitivity must be low because a positive feedback means runaway warming. Chris Colose did a nice job debunking that particular myth with great clarity here.
Not-So-Fraudulent Statistical Technique
Monckton followed by repeating the same claim of a "fraudulent statistical technique" used by the IPCC which we previously debunked in detail here. However, in this presentation he made his argument much clearer, and thus even easier to debunk, comparing global temperature changes to a sine wave (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Slide 17 of Monckton's presentation showing the purported IPCC "fraudulent statistical technique"
Quite simply, while there are cyclical effects which influence the global temperature, the climate is not currently behaving as a sine wave. Rather the temperature is being forced upward by the global energy imbalance caused by human CO2 emissions. Monckton's accusation of fraud here assumes that like a sine wave, the global temperature has zero long-term trend and will start to cool any day now; thus the 25- to 150-year trends plotted by the IPCC are just short-term noise.
The faulty basis of this argument is quite self-evident. Based on this supposed "fraudulent statistical technique," Monckton asserted that we "should have no regard for the IPCC's findings." On the contrary, if Monckton makes such a basic error and then accuses the world's foremost climate scientists of fraud on the basis of his error, it is Monckton for whose findings we should have no regard.
Monckton also claimed that it warmed just as fast in 1860-1880 and 1910-1940 as it has in recent decades - a myth we have debunked here.
Monckton Rewrites History Again and Again and Again
Monckton then repeated the myth that Ben Santer singlehandedly changed the 1995 IPCC report, which we debunked in Monckton Misrepresents Specific Situations (Part 2) and Monckton Myth #17: Debate vs. Denniss, Part 1. We wonder how many times we must debunk this myth for Monckton before he stops repeating it. The IPCC report is a consensus document which no single author can alter on their own. Monckton should stop trying to re-write history and start learning from it.
The Magical IPCC
Speaking of rewriting history, Monckton also repeated the myth that the IPCC ‘disappeared’ the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), wrongfully asserting that the schematic diagram in the 1990 IPCC First Assessment Report (which was based on the Central England Temperature record, not global temperatures, and was published in 1966) was "the understanding" of global temperatures at the time. It was not - the figure was clearly labeled as a schematic, and was based on a single local temperature record. The horrendous Great Global Warming Swindle made a similar argument.
However, Monckton used this opportunity to launch into a diatribe against the Mann et al. 1998/1999 'hockey stick,' making all sorts of claims of fraud about that particular study. Rather than repeat them, I would simply recommend Michael Mann's The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, which explains the science involved far more accurately than Monckton, to say the least.
Regardless, Monckton is stuck 14 years in the past - all subsequent millennial temperature reconstructions (including by Mann and colleagues) show the MWP (and Little Ice Age), and also confirm the general 'hockey stick' shape of the temperature record, and the fact that the current rate of warming is unprecedented over the past 2,000 years.
Accurate IPCC Predictions
Monckton then claimed that the IPCC global warming projections have been inaccurate, showing a figure created by computer modeler David Evans, whose shoddy work we have previously examined (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Slide 36 of Monckton's presentation showing purportedly inaccurate global temperature projections by the IPCC First Assessment Report (1990)
We don't know how Evans created this graphic, but we do know that plotting the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) satellite atmosphere temperatures against the IPCC projected surface temperature means it is not an apples-to-apples comparison, and that when you do the apples-to-apples comparison, the graph actually looks like Figure 5.
Figure 5: IPCC FAR BAU "best" global warming projection reflecting the observed GHG changes (blue) vs. observed average global surface temperature change from GISTEMP (red) since 1990.
Details regarding how Figure 5 was created can be found here. In reality, the IPCC 'best' projection (2.5°C climate sensitivity for doubled atmospheric CO2) has been very close to observed surface temperature changes.
Global Sea Ice Decline
Monckton then proceeded to show a number of additional misleading graphs, mainly relying on short-term cherrypicked data to misinform his audience. The worst graph may have been his plot of global sea ice, whose extent Monckton claimed has remained "almost unchanged in 33 years" (Figure 6).
Figure 6: Slide 41 of Monckton's presentation showing purportedly "almost unchanged" global sea ice extent and trend
Reality, as usual, is quite different from Monckton's depiction (Figure 7).
Figure 7: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) Antarctic, Arctic, and global (sum of the two) sea ice extents with linear trends. The data is smoothed with a 12-month running average.
Also see tamino's latest post on Arctic sea ice - how fake skeptics fool themselves (that title being a perfect descriptor of Monckton's presentation).
The Hot Spot is Not Anthropogenic
Monckton then made a very common error amongst climate denialists, claiming repeatedly that the potentially missing tropical troposphere "hot spot" is "the fingerprint of human-made global warming." This in fact is an error we have documented Monckton making time and time again (see here and here and here for a few examples). In fact Monckton has been making this erroenous argument for at least 4 years to this point. It almost seems as though Monckton is not interested in getting the facts and science right.
Let's once again be clear - the 'hot spot' is an expected result of any global warming and is not at all specific to human-caused global warming or an increased greenhouse effect. The 'hot spot' happens because any warming means more evaporation, which cools the surface. The vapour then travels up the atmosphere and condenses higher up, releasing latent heat and boosting warming there (Soden & Held, 2006).
Fossil Fuel Energy is Not Cheap
After making his absurd and alarmist economic argument based on a single fundamentally-flawed and heavily-debunked paper (as we examined in Part 1), Monckton proceeded to attack renewable energy sources, claiming that they are "hundreds of times more expensive than fossil fuels." Likewise, this claim is utterly absurd and has no basis whatsoever in reality. In fact, if we take all costs into consideration, many renewable energy sources are already cheaper than fossil fuels.
Concern for the Poor
Monckton also claimed that by implementing the proposed carbon cap and trade system, California will be diverting money which could be spent alleviating poverty in the Africa, and that we are thus kicking the poorest people in the teeth.
Have we used the word "absurd" too many times already? Even if the climate legislation were to have a significant adverse impact on California's economy - which we showed in Part 1 it will not - this is a false dichotemy. It should be self-evident that California is not taking money it would otherwise send to Africa in order to implement its climate legislation.
Ironically, the poorest nations (including many in Africa) are amongst those expected to be hardest-hit by climate change (and the least able to adapt due to their limited resources). Thus it is Monckton who is kicking the poor in the teeth by working to undermine efforts to mitigate climate change (Figure 8).
Figure 8: Per capita emissions vs. vulnerability to climate change, from Samson et al. (2011)
Monckton the Serial Misinformer
Believe it or not, there were several other misrepresentations in Monckton's talk which we did not cover in this post. In fact, it's hard to find a slide in his presentation that doesn't contain some sort of misrepresentation and/or outright falsehood.
Toward the end of the event, Monckton was asked what the "skeptics" can do to prevent governments from taking action to mitigate climate change. After making a comment about the "enviromarxist hard left," Monckton responded "get me in to meet the officials." Monckton believes he can convince lawmakers not to take action to mitigate climate change, and he probably has succeeded to convince a few to take a do-nothing stance.
And that is a problem. Monckton frankly has no business whatsoever speaking to policymakers about climate science. He has no expertise on the issue, and virtually every argument he makes is based on a misrepresentation of his sources. Monckton does not educate the public and policymakers; he misinforms them. Frankly it's a travesty that Monckton is treated as a climate expert and given the opportunity to misinform policymakers in the manner that I observed him doing to those 5 California state assembly members.By the time "Tighten Up" was released in early 1969 (and only operating since July of 1968), Trojan Records of the UK had released a staggering 108 singles and 25 albums to a voracious cosmopolitan British public. But Trojan knew that they needed a way to expand the nation's knowledge of their excellent catalogue, so they hastily put-together this 12-track ragbag of 7" singles as a compilation, priced it cheap (14 schillings and 6 old pence to you pal!), put a lovely fetching cover on it and plopped it into the racks of every Woolworths store across the land.
Named after the opening song on Side 1 by The Untouchables, by their own admission, Trojan hadn't expected much of "Tighten Up". Happily for them and us, they were wrong! It sold in large quantities and was hugely influential in introducing reggae music not just to the youth of Britain, but to many other countries as well. It became a genuine phenomenon - spurning 7 more volumes up to Vol. 8 in 1973 where it simply ran out of steam and Volume 9 was shelved. This astonishing 48-track 2CD DELUXE EDITION released Monday 11 August 2008 is a massive overhaul of that legendary beginning - and what a peach it is too!
There's a lot on here, so let's get to it:
DISC 1 (66:04 minutes):
Tracks 1 to 12 are the original UK LP released January 1969 on Trojan Records TTL 1
Tracks 13 to 24 are the B-sides of Tracks 1 to 12 in exact order
(it should be noted that many of the B-sides were by different artists to those on the A, a common practice for reggae 7"s at the time)
DISC 2 (66:33 minutes):
Called "Tighten Up - The Alternatives", Disc 2 is the A-sides of 24 UK 7" singles released between July and November of 1968. ISLAND LABEL collectors should also note that 8 of the 24 are from the coveted "WI" series (3126 to 3159) appearing here on CD for the first time anywhere to my knowledge. The other tracks include songs from Trojan's affiliated labels, Blue Cat, Amalgamated and High Note. The sound quality on Disc 2 is far better than Disc 1 - and the track choices are simply sensational - beautifully done!
PACKAGING:
Each of the two foldout flaps has colour adverts on both sides, very cool and fantastically evocative of the period, while the 20-page fact-filled booklet is penned by LAURENCE CANE-HONEYSETT. This is worth noting because along with MICHAEL de KONINGH, both authored the fabulous book "Young, Gifted And Black - The Story Of Trojan Records" (see my review of it posted a few months ago). They did extraordinary work on the label's full discography, most of it published in the public domain for the first time anywhere, so this knowledge of the album and the label who put it out means that the booklet is properly in-depth - filled with pictures of tasty 7"s and promo-photos of the artists, discussions of each song, producers of the tracks, catalogue numbers, release dates... really great stuff.
SOUND:
Mastered by Nick Watson at Fluid Mastering, the liner notes don't mention what tapes (if any) the songs were mastered from. This is not surprising. Reggae music was invariably recorded on a shoestring budget - and that's what you get here - extreme lo-fi - most of the tracks sound like they were recorded in a bucket with someone holding a microphone over it! But that is of course what makes them so magical and charming. There is no pretension to audiophile here. This is party music - it's meant to be blasted out over a dancehall stack - pumped out of your stereo with a beer in your hand and your friends out back dancing in the sunshine! It's not all bad - it isn't - it's just that the sound does vary wildly, great one second, muddy and crackly the next. But I'm not sure that fidelity matters with this lovely album or indeed reggae music in general, because I'm sitting here grooving to "Soul Limbo" by BYRON LEE and THE DRAGONAIRES and it's hard to believe that any human being could resist this brilliantly joyful calypso/reggae groove - no matter what the sound quality is! Disc 2, as I said, is better sounding than Disc 1, but it's all about `feel' and once you accept that, there's so much goodness on offer here...
SONGS:
The album is heavy on cover versions - The Beatles, Ben E. King, Wilbert Harrison, PP Arnold and ""Watch This Song"" which is Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" under another name. "I'll Be Around" by The Kingstonians is a slow and fabulous song - one I suspect soul lovers will want to investigate. Island collectors should also note that tracks 7 and 19 on Disc 1 are the A & B of Island WIP 6051 and to my knowledge make their CD debut here. Disc 2 simply offers up more of the same - discovery after discovery...and for those who already own the excellent 2002 Sanctuary version with 25 tracks, thankfully there's little duplication on either disc.
To sum up, I've loved hearing this album again and its cleverly chosen additions. "Tighten Up DELUXE EDITION" is fun, evocative and a warm reminder of days when music seemed new and life-changing. It transported me back to a time when I played sampler albums like this to death - when my sister and me bopped around the dansette in the front room of our home and just couldn't get enough - going back to flip it over to Side One again once we'd finished! This is a great re-issue and about time that reggae music in general got the DELUXE EDITION treatment from a major label that it deserves. Mash it up indeed. Thoroughly recommended.
PS: To those at Universal - it would be nice to see "Club Ska '67" on Island given the same deluxe treatment as this - and what about "You Can All Join In", "Bumpers", "El Pea", "Nice Enough To Eat" and....
PPS: Along with "Strangers Almanac" by WHISKEYTOWN and the two ELTON JOHN sets "Elton John" and "Tumbleweed Connection" (see separate reviews), this is without doubt the best issue in the DELUXE EDITION series so far in 2008 - in my opinion this a REISSUE OF THE YEAR.Voters in Alberta made history Tuesday night — and they sealed it with an exclamation point. Rachel Notley and her New Democrats secured a majority victory in an election that was supposed to be a stroll in the park for a powerful Progressive Conservative dynasty that had all but swallowed up its opposition in the province.
NDP supporters celebrate as they watch the election results at NDP Leader Rachel Notley's headquarters in Edmonton on Tuesday. ( Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS ) Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley celebrates her victory Tuesday night after toppling the Progressive Conservative colossus that has dominated the province for more than four decades. ( Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
Instead, Jim Prentice rolled the dice on an early election and has found his own place in Canadian political lore. Albertans gave the middle finger to 44 years of unbroken rule and Prentice resigned, both as party leader and MLA, riding sadly into the prairie night. The former Stephen Harper cabinet minister who was once thought to be a potential Harper successor, is the man who squandered a dynasty with staying power never before seen in this country.
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Ultimately, it sputtered and died, succumbing to the twin diseases of entitlement and hubris. The party sat in third place behind Wildrose, its future very much a question mark. The scope and depth of this change — one that will be felt across the country and shake expectations in this autumn’s federal election — is difficult to digest. On a personal level, Notley’s stunning victory carries with it a special poignancy. She has completed the journey of her father, Grant, who spent years building this party before he was killed in a plane crash more than three decades ago when she was 20. Grant Notley brought the Alberta NDP to its high water mark of 16 seats — only to have it washed away in futility seven short years later when the party was wiped off the map.
Change?
Consider, Alberta had elected only two governments in 80 years.
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Consider, the majority of the province had never lived under anything but a PC government. Consider, Notley was speaking to crowds that could be counted on the fingers of both hands just a few years ago, in ridings that she won Tuesday. Consider, she almost didn’t enter the NDP leadership race. With two children still at home she was considering the time away from them to guide a party that was sitting in single digits in polling. Peter Lougheed began the long reign of 12 PC majorities in 1971 with a caucus of six. Notley led a caucus of four into battle with a goal of growing her party, then forming a robust opposition, then, in the campaign’s final week, trying to cobble together a cabinet in her head. Canada’s political landscape in recent years has featured so-called political “waves.” They can wash both ways, but they don’t always lead to government. It did for Bob Rae in Ontario in 1990 and the common denominator between that shocker and this Alberta campaign was the early, unwanted campaign called by Liberal David Peterson. The rise of Reform and the Bloc Québécois and the demise of the Progressive Conservatives federally were waves in 1993, but they played out against a common script — the return of a federal Liberal government. Similarly, Jack Layton’s 2011 Orange Wave crested in Quebec but ran out of steam, although it did provide the party with its first opposition status in its history. Ultimately, the question in Alberta came down to change during uncertain times, something Canadian voters have repeatedly rejected, from British Columbia to Prince Edward Island. But how to make Notley look scary? Like Layton, she was selling optimism, what she liked to call “hope-mongering.” She looked authentic, she looked real, she looked like a shot of energy, but most of all she looked like a fresh face, a warm Chinook on a winter day on the prairie. She vowed to raise Alberta’s corporate tax rate to 12 per cent from 10 per cent, but that would merely move Alberta into the middle of the Canadian pack of the country’s corporate tax regimes, moving it in line with Ontario and Quebec. She said she would not waste her time pushing the giant Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the B.C. coast and she said the Keystone XL pipeline had become a strictly U.S. domestic issue.
She promised a review of energy royalties, something that burned former PC premier Ed Stelmach, who all but reversed increases after it became apparent that a backlash had dried up PC donations and helped give rise to the Wildrose party on his right. In sum, Prentice said the three measures meant vanishing investment, an exodus of jobs and damage to the free enterprise system which fueled Canada’s economic engine. Notley, in essence, said Albertans knew better and she dismissed the self-serving shots across the bow from the province’s well-heeled and coddled business community.
Read more about:Include 1 oz Silver rounds in your investment portfolio and join the many investors and financial planners who believe that Precious Metals such as Silver can provide balance to your investments. Though Silver prices may fluctuate, they typically are not affected by the ups and downs of the stock market. With Silver bullion in your portfolio, many believe you have a hedge against economic downturns. Many times Silver prices have risen in times of high inflation when the dollar is at its weakest point. 1 oz Silver rounds provide as easy option for investors, as the premium over the spot price of Silver is often lower for this Silver bullion than for many Silver coins.
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The price of 1 oz Silver rounds is affected by the supply and demand for Silver. Silver used to manufacture Silver rounds and other products is considered a rare Precious Metal; however, it is one of the easier Precious Metals to mine and process, which helps to keep the production costs lower. When you buy Silver bullion, including 1 oz Silver rounds, you are investing in a Precious Metal that is also in demand for industrial and other uses, ranging from solar panels to jewelry. As the demand for Silver rises, the higher the Silver price is for investments like these unique Silver rounds. Keep an eye on the Silver spot price and buy 1 oz Silver rounds when the price is right for you based on your Silver investing needs.Image copyright Reuters Image caption Kim Jong-un has made no overseas visits since inheriting the North Korean leadership
Russia says North Korea's leader has accepted an invitation to travel to Moscow in May for World War Two anniversary celebrations.
Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said his presence had been confirmed, and Russia was preparing for his visit.
However, Mr Peskov did not mention Kim Jong-un by name, sparking speculation that another official may attend.
Kim Jong-un has not made any overseas visits since taking power in North Korea in late 2011.
South Korea's Unification Ministry told Yonhap that the reference to the leader could be ambiguous, as Kim Yong-nam is the nominal head of state.
'Not finalised'
Earlier this month, reports emerged suggesting Russia could be the site of Mr Kim's first official visit.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told journalists on 21 January that Russia had invited Mr Kim to the 9 May celebrations to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of WW2.
He said that the "first signal was positive" from the North Korean government.
Image copyright AP Image caption Late leader Kim Jong-il made few overseas visits and did not confirm them ahead of departure
Mr Peskov told Interfax news agency on Wednesday: "The participation of the North Korean leader has been confirmed, we are preparing for his arrival."
However, Yonhap reported earlier that the Kremlin had not finalised the list of guests, and there has been no statement from North Korea.
Kim Yong-nam, whose official title is president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, has more traditionally represented North Korea at overseas events.
Visits by Kim Jong-un's father Kim Jong-il, the former leader who died in December 2011, were never announced ahead of his departure.
Kim Jong-il visited Russia in August 2011, but he paid more regular visits to China. Under his leadership, China was seen as the North's closest ally.
If Kim Jong-un did choose to visit Moscow ahead of Beijing, the decision could be seen as a sign of growing distance between China and the North.
In recent years, China has come under pressure from Japan, South Korea and the US to exert more pressure on Pyongyang over its nuclear programme.
Beijing has, on some occasions, expressed exasperation with its northern neighbour via official media channels.
It also backed UN resolutions strengthening sanctions on Pyongyang after its recent missile and nuclear tests in 2013.Don’t think that 26/11 is just a number. It was Mumbai’s date with devastation, a grim reminder of the mindless killing of innocent people, including foreign tourists, by a group of terrorists on the night of November 26, 2008. The audacious attacks on India’s financial hub had left over 160 people dead and scores injured.
Three years have been passed ever since that fateful night. Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone 26/11 terrorist caught alive, had been handed over death penalty by a special anti-terror court on May 6, 2010. The Bombay High Court later upheld the decision saying, “There is no scope of reform or rehabilitation of the convicted accused. It is a rarest of rare case and the court cannot be more confident than it is today that death penalty must be given.” However, Kasab appealed against the death penalty, which is pending before the Supreme Court.
If earlier cases are any indication, the judicial process will certainly take years to send Kasab to the gallows. But for now, he is making merry in the jail.
According to reports, the state government has already spent a whopping Rs50 crore to keep the 24-year-old terrorist from Pakistan safe and secure in the prison. A special cell had been constructed inside the high-security Arthur Road jail for Kasab. The cell was designed in such a way that even if a truck laden with explosives were to ram into it, the cell would not be dented. Another special cell was also made in the prison ward of JJ Hospital.
But the big question is why the government is spending so much on a terrorist? And the safety is for whom, the man who jeopardised the safety of millions of Mumbaikars. The government wants to keep Kasab alive only to expose Pakistan as he is the last link to Islamabad’s role in the 26/11 carnage. It is widely known that Pakistan is a safe haven for terrorists. And you don’t need to spend so much on Kasab to tell the world just that.
Instead of paying so much attention to Kasab’s security, the government must have concentrated on enhancing security at crucial points across Mumbai, which are vulnerable to 26/11-like strikes. The case in point is Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST), where Kasab and his aide sprayed bullets on people killing more than 50 and injuring hundreds. Soon after the attack, CST and other important installations across Mumbai that were targeted by the terrorists virtually turned into fortresses. But as the time passed, things returned to usual. The security measures are still not up to the mark.
The promised multi-crore Integrated Security System (ISS) for major stations like CST is still on papers. The Central Railway had drawn up a Rs27.5 crore shopping list for buying hi-tech security equipment, including night-vision cameras, internet-based security surveillance and vapour detectors, to protect commuters on Mumbai’s suburban railway system.
To this, Anil Sharma, chief security commissioner of the CR, had said: “The ISS is in tendering process and soon it will be in place.”
But how long will it take? Are the authorities waiting for another 26/11 to happen?
Likewise, the Indian coast guard had distributed free Distress Alert Transmission System (DATS) to fishermen across the state with the aim of making them their eyes and ears at sea. The 26/11 terrorists had taken the sea route to reach Mumbai. But in the absence of a decisive provision for the DATS’ maintenance and accountability in the event of their loss or sale to other fishermen, the plan has virtually been thrown in choppy waters. In case if terrorists hijack a fisherman’s boat as they did in 2008, they may give a false alarm through the DATS and distract security agencies.
It is high time that the administration put their act together to prevent another 26-like mayhem. Otherwise, 26/11 will be reduced to just a date in the calendar with symbolic anniversary functions and wreath laying ceremonies.According to several internet reports, Emmy Award winning actor Bryan Cranston (" Breaking Bad ") has been cast as 'Lex Luthor' in director Zack Snyder's developing " Man Of Steel " sequel, with the working title "Batman Vs Superman ". Cranston was reportedly signed to appear in at least six DC superhero movies, as Superman's arch-nemesis, throughout a developing series of "DC Universe" films, including " Justice League ".The original 'Alexander Joseph "Lex" Luthor', created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, debuted in "Action Comics" #23 (April 1940), with a full head of red hair, described as "...a power-mad, evil scientist" of high intelligence and incredible technological prowess. Luthor's goal of killing'Superman'was to be a stepping stone to his evil domination of the universe.In subsequent comic books, Luthor became hairless as the result of an artist's mistake. A 1960 story by Jerry Siegel expanded upon Luthor's origin and motivations, revealing him toImage caption The memorial features six texts carved on to four stone benches, arranged in an open circle to represent unity and equality
A memorial recognising the wartime work done by Quakers has been unveiled at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.
Quaker beliefs, among them pacifism, meant that many were unable to serve in the armed forces during wartime.
Many volunteered to serve in warzones in the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU).
Leslie Steed, 94, from Birmingham, who served with the FAU during World War II, said: "I would rather have been killed than kill somebody."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Leslie Steed, 94, who served with the Friends Ambulance Service in World War II, said he "would rather have been killed than kill somebody"
Other Quakers served with the Friends Relief Service (FRS), the official relief body of the Religious Society of Friends, which worked at home and in mainland Europe to help civilians in distress.
The memorial features six texts carved on to four stone benches, arranged in an open circle to represent unity and equality.
The seats are arranged in an open circle, as they are at many Quaker meetings.The Mariners have announced that they’ve designated infielder/outfielder Richie Shaffer for assignment. The move clears roster space for incoming starting pitcher Chris Heston, who was acquired in a trade with the Giants that is now official.
The Mariners acquired Shaffer (along with Taylor Motter) in a small deal with the Rays last month. The 25-year-old Shaffer was the 25th overall pick in the draft in 2012. He’s spent parts of the past two seasons in the big leagues, batting.213/.310/.410 in 142 plate appearances. He was unimpressive in a larger sample this year at Triple-A Durham, batting.227/.329/.367 in 496 trips to the plate. He had a strong year on the farm in 2015, swatting 26 homers, and he’s capable of playing first base, third base or right field, so it’s not impossible a team could take a chance on him as a waiver claim.At a press conference held in front of Kenosha News, Wisconsin businessman Paul Nehlen demanded that House Speaker Paul Ryan take down his deceptive Wisconsin TV ads, in which Ryan claims he’s trying to keep Islamic terrorists from entering the country.
Nehlen blasted Paul Ryan for using “open borders blood money” from his globalist donors to fund the ad, which seemed designed to “dupe” Wisconsin voters into thinking that Ryan wants to curb Muslim migration.
“I’m here today to discuss Paul Ryan’s latest lie to the people of Wisconsin on behalf of furthering the interests of his donors,” Nehlen said to reporters from one of the biggest newspapers in Wisconsin’s first congressional district. “[ |
by giving very severe punishment,'' she said. ''We don't believe in an eye for an eye, we are a bit more civilized than that, I hope.''
Mr. Syvajarvi, a muscular 21-year-old with close-cropped hair who become a heroin addict at age 14, received a six-year sentence for drug selling and assaults. As a young offender, he will serve only a third of that time, and he is expected to be out in a year.
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He is now the appointed ''big brother'' peer counselor to other youths in the jail, must submit to random drug checks to make sure he remains off the habit and has undergone training with anger management specialists that he says has prepared him to rejoin society with a new outlook.
''Before, I wanted to be like those drug dealers in the States,'' he said, adding in English, ''I was a gangster wannabe.'' He went into a boxer's crouch and popped punches in the air. ''I used to think the most important thing was to stand up for yourself.
''Now I've learned that it takes more courage to run away.''Well, this was fast! It was just 2 hours ago when we presented you with the leaked images of the Oppo R7s. And surprsingly, the phone has just been launched in Dubai at the GITEX 2015. With the R7s, Oppo’s goal is to widen its brand influence in the MENA region. Now that the phablet has been launched, let’s dive straight into the details.
The Oppo R7s gets a 5.5-inch AMOLED display made out of 2.5D screen. As seen previously in the R7 series, the R7s gets a metal unibody design and looks beautifully premium. Powering the phablet is an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chipset coupled with a whopping 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, which is further expandable up to 128GB! These specifications will surely provide high-speed performance to the Oppo R7s.
The R7s runs Android 5.1 with Oppo’s own ColorOS 2.1 on top of it, and the phone gets its juice from a large 3070 mAh battery. Oppo claims that the R7s can be used continuously for 13 hours and 15 minutes. Set together with the VOOC Flash Charge technology, just 5 minutes of charging will give you 2 hours of talk time in the R7s, and it takes only 50 minutes to charge the phablet up to 90%!
The camera in the Oppo R7s uses Flash Shot technology, just like other R7 series phones. This tech translates to a triple-threat feature for assuring quick launch, speedy focus, and very stable photography. The PDAF (Phase Detection Auto Focus) feature of the Flash Shot technology mimics SLR cameras, providing auto focus time of as quick as 0.1 seconds! The rear 13MP shooter and the front 8MP snapper both get anti-shake optimization for capturing extremely beautiful pictures instantly, even if the subject is moving fast. And yes, the camera now opens up 30% faster!
The Oppo R7s will sell in 10 different regions and countries starting November, and the listed countries include Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia, and Indonesia along with the MENA regions. USA and Europe consumers can get their hands at the R7s in December from the OPPOstyle website.A day after it became known that he had been awarded a commendation certificate by the Army chief, Major Nitin Leetul Gogoi, who has been at the centre of a row ever since he instructed his troops to tie a Kashmiri to a jeep bonnet as a shield against stone-pelters on April 9, said his action “saved many peoples’ lives” because “had I fired, there would have been casualties… there were women and children in the crowd”.
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Speaking to reporters at Beerwah in Budgam district of J&K — it is rare for an officer engaged in counter-insurgency operations to appear before TV channels — Gogoi said about 1200 people had surrounded a small group of security personnel at a polling booth in Utligam village on April 9 and if he had ordered firing, there could have been casualties.
He said he had gone with a Quick Reaction Team to that polling booth after a “distress call” from an ITBP officer that ITBP personnel and some polling staff had been surrounded by a big crowd of about 1200. The crowd, which included women and children, was threatening to set ablaze the polling booth, he said.
He said a man who appeared to be “instigating” the stone-pelters and could have been “their ringleader” at Utligam. He said the idea of tying the man, who was identified as Farooq Ahmad Dar, to the jeep struck him suddenly as a means to evacuate the polling staff and the ITBP personnel.
He said after Dar was tied to the jeep, the stone-pelting stopped for some time, providing “a window” to them to leave that area safely. “This thing I have done only to save the local people. Had I fired, there would have been casualties… With this idea, I have saved many peoples’ lives,” he said.
On Dar, Gogoi said, “He tried to flee on a bike but somehow, despite intense stone pelting and getting hurt, we caught hold of him.” He said after catching Dar, the troops moved towards the polling station with the help of a mine-protected vehicle.
“Once we got inside, I rescued four civil polling staff, seven ITBP personnel and one J&K Police constable,” he said.
According to Gogoi, while they were leaving the polling station, their mine-protected vehicle got stuck in the mud. “On seeing us, the mob again resorted to stone-pelting. At that time, an announcement was made… The civilians had started gathering and they were more violent. They even threw a petrol bomb at us but somehow the petrol
bomb did not explode,” he said.
Gogoi said he ordered his men to somehow take out the vehicle from the mud, which they managed to do. “In the meantime, again I announced through my megaphone that give us a safe passage so that we can move out from the area but the crowd was not listening to us.”
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“At that moment, suddenly the idea of tying him (Dar) to the vehicle came to my mind. As soon as I ordered my boys to tie him up on the vehicle, the stone-pelting stopped for a while and that was a fraction of the moment where I got a window to come out safely from that place and immediately I informed all my boys to get inside the vehicle and we moved out from that area,” he said.In the wake of Republican nominee Donald Trump winning the US presidential elections, a number of Americans are gathering in the streets to express either shock or jubiliation.
Live from Manhattan, this is a compilation of some tweets that show the deep divisions that exist in America today:
Some folks on Twitter resorted to humour:
Is it too soon to tell my Mexican boyfriend I'm just not ready to be in a long distance relationship??? #ElectionNight — Bree Essrig (@BreeEssrig) November 9, 2016
While there is chaos at many places:
BREAKING: Chaos outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan saying "America united, we will never be divided" @WIONews #ElectionNight pic.twitter.com/yoTyXuptAC — Archith Seshadri (@ArchithNEWS) November 9, 2016
NYC Trump Protesters??
This Has Soros Written All Over It
Civil Unrest Is The Lefts Goal
Stay Vigilant#TrumpProtest #TrumpPresident pic.twitter.com/B7g7Tvtych — #MAGA?? Colleen (@col_nj) November 10, 2016
Student walkout at Central Academy in Des Moines -- with "Dump Trump" signs up. #TrumpPresident pic.twitter.com/tg3xfPFdYc — ANTONIO ARELLANO (@AntonioArellano) November 9, 2016
People also started suggesting that the elections are rigged:
People are protesting outside the Hilton hotel Midtown saying "one person one vote" @WIONews pic.twitter.com/3tt0bNoMok — Archith Seshadri (@ArchithNEWS) November 9, 2016
On the other hand, there's red everywhere:
A man is selling "Make America Great Again" caps outside of the Hilton hotel in Midtown @WIONews pic.twitter.com/ZO7a91Et3l — Archith Seshadri (@ArchithNEWS) November 9, 2016
Amidst the celebrations and protests on the streets, many are even contemplating leaving for greener pastures:
(Contributed By: Zeba Khan)Update, October 24: NeoGAF is back online following its shutdown over the weekend. Its owner, Tyler Malka, has issued a statement concerning the allegations made against him, and changes that will be being made to the site following its return.
Following its brief shutdown over the weekend, popular gaming news forum NeoGAF is back online. The site will be undergoing changes following its return.
The biggest changes will be to the types of posts allowed on the site, and to the visibility of moderators. For the immediate future, there will be no Off-Topic forums, and moderators will become anonymous, in order to help shield them from toxicity that reportedly contributed to some of the resignations from the site.
The site’s reappearance has been accompanied by a statement from its owner, Tyler ‘Evilore’ Malka, in which he denies the allegations made against him, and explains why the site was down. Evilore says the allegations against him are “not true, the individual making the accusation isn’t credible, the story doesn’t reconcile logically with the facts, and there’s plenty of evidence and witnesses to corroborate that.”
Waypoint has spoken to both Malka and his accuser, Ima Leupp, and they paint a fuller picture of events, with the two maintaining a friendship after the incident that broke down late that year. However, the witnesses and evidence Malka refers to don’t come up.
Evilore goes on to explain why the site went down, citing that the period of downtime was for “maintenance and repair and restructure.” He also claims that a rise in the amount of “heated news, political issues, and social issues” being discussed on the site had already put pressure on the mod team. You can read the full statement here.
Several users on the main forums are requesting permanent bans from moderators in a mark of protest.
Original story, October 22:Prolific and popular gaming forumNeoGAF(formerly the Gaming Age Forums, founded in 2006) is currently offline at the time of writing, and it might not be coming back this time.
In the wake of some very serious allegations of sexual harassment (captured here on Imgur, with names removed) levelled at site-owner Tyler ‘Evilore’ Malka, at least 11 site administration and moderation staff have stepped up and walked out in a show of solidarity with the accuser, taking many of the site’s regular users with them.
The allegations against Malka carry additional weight, due to claims from the man himself, posted on NeoGAFback in 2012 that he has treated women in a far less-than-gentlemanly fashion. Joining the admin/moderation stuff, NeoGAF’s community is scattering far and wide, with some other major games forums seeing mass sign-ups in the past few hours, with Waypoint in particular seeing a large number of arrivals welcomed with open arms.
NeoGAF held a special place among gaming forums for a very long time, with a combination of active moderation (on top of effectively being an invitation-only community, with applications to join often taking weeks or months to be processed) and a great many industry insiders posting there regularly. For those looking for cutting-edge gaming news and rumors, the original source for much of it was NeoGAF. Nowadays with the rise of social media, traditional caming forums carry a little less weight.
There has also been talk among some of the former NeoGAF staff of creating a successor site, although it’s questionable whether a major gaming new forum could flourish in the present climate. Discord servers have become a subtitute for many (including myself) to traditional games forums, with communities able to set up new hubs of activity quicker and easier than ever before, as well as moderate more effectively than previously possible. While NeoGAF had its own official Discord server, it was – like its parent site – an invitation-only affair.
While there is potential for NeoGAF to recover under new ownership (this would of course require Malka to stand down and hand the site off to someone else) this has an ‘end of an era’ feeling to it, and is very much a sign of the times. While great to see gaming communities (and the greater public) no longer willing to stay silent or sweep things under the rug in situations like this, it feels like it may be some time until communities reform under better leadership.Update: According to city and borough officials, water service has been restored to homes near the Turcot Interchange construction site as of 8 a.m. Monday.
A boil water advisory is in effect for at least 24 hours.
Original story:
When Giovanni Paquin uses the bathroom, he has to think ahead.
For the past three days, the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce resident has been digging snow in his alley to flush his toilet.
Giovanni Paquin is one resident dealing w/day 3 of no water. He's using snow to flush his toilet. @Global_Montreal pic.twitter.com/kg2lM3SYBc — Billy Shields (@billyshields) February 12, 2017
Friday morning, residents like Paquin, who live on Girouard Avenue near Saint-Jacques Street, received word that a landslide near the Turcot construction site damaged a water main.
In NDG, residents have been dealing with no water service after landslide broke a pipe near Turcot. @Global_Montreal pic.twitter.com/7qlSMwZR1I — Billy Shields (@billyshields) February 12, 2017
At a press conference Sunday afternoon, Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough Mayor Russell Copeman said it was unclear what caused the problem to begin with.
NDG-CDN borough: no evidence Turcot work caused water main break. Though construction is within the Turcot site. @Global_Montreal — Billy Shields (@billyshields) February 12, 2017
Paquin said the borough has been responsive to residents’ needs, dropping off drinking water by their doorsteps on a daily basis.
Some residents are also talking about borrowing water from a local gym in buckets. @Global_Montreal pic.twitter.com/z7ct4Gw2hA — Billy Shields (@billyshields) February 12, 2017
Others however are furious the situation has lingered, and angered at both the borough and Quebec’s Transport Ministry, who oversees the construction.
WATCH BELOW: Residents raise concerns over Turcot construction
Water service is expected to resume by Monday.
Water work interrupted due to safety concerns (it's near a gas main), officials hope to restore water service by tomorrow. @Global_Montreal — Billy Shields (@billyshields) February 12, 2017
Global News reached out to Transports Québec, but requests for comment went unanswered.
This is the second complaint about the construction site I've covered in a week's time. @Global_Montreal pic.twitter.com/WLXaXSWti5 — Billy Shields (@billyshields) February 12, 2017
This is the second time a complaint has surfaced in the span of a week.
A businessman filed an application for a class action earlier against the ministry.Today has been a very, very, very weird day.
Very weird.
Let’s see what tomorrow brings.
But in the meantime, let’s continue our look at Dark Matter Episode 304, “All The Time In The World”. First there was the loops. Then, there was phasing assassin. Finally, there were the Android flash-forwards…
Android flashes forward to her on the bridge of The Raza. THREE enters and stuns her. (Why is THREE shooting her? Is something wrong with THREE? Or is it the Android who’s the threat?)
Android flashes forward to her, in civvies, confused by the tears she is shedding. TWO consoles her, informs her she is experiencing grief. (Well, this is ominous. Who is she grieving over?)
Android flashes forward to her in a laboratory under the direction of Electus Corp. A scientist accuses her of being in league with the Android Liberation Front. It is revealed that she has been partially disassembled. (Is there an android rebellion brewing? And what role will our Android play in the suggested uprising?)
Android flashes forward to her in a strange black uniform, sporting a retinal upgrade. She is on The Raza, but it’s a darker version of the home she’s come to know and love. She encounters a future version of FIVE who informs her of an even darker future that awaits, then proceeds to list the following foreboding hints:
Dwarf Star’s Conspiracy (It appears we’ve received clues about this in preceding seasons)
The Doubled Deception (Clones? Alternate selves? Something else entirely?)
Kryden (Who is he?)
Carina (Who is she?)
The Accelerated (Oh, now this sounds all kinds of cool. But what does it mean?)
The fall of the House of Ishida (Well, no explanation required here. The question is not if but when?)
A meeting with you creator (Finally! The Android backstory!)
The Black ships (Oh, another ominous teaser)
What does it all mean? Well, like everything on Dark Matter, it’s all part of a greater plan. You’ll be getting answers to roughly half of these before season’s end. And answers to the rest before series’ end.
So, do you have any theories? The WorkPrint’s Jen Stayrook sure does. I’d love to read your takes on what it all means.
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Like this: Like Loading...Which one of these is not like the other: homicide, rape, kidnapping, arson, prostitution, and civil disorder? While all of these are included as stipulations that could make a teacher ineligible for licensure, it seems shocking that the last crime is even remotely considered to be in the same category. Civil disobedience, classified by North Carolina as “any public disturbance involving acts or violence by assemblages of three or more persons,” may be the Trojan horse in Senate Bill 867 used to further stifle the voices of teachers.
Photo courtesty of Digital Dealer Credit
The war for public education reform is still going strong in North Carolina. Last week, teachers were arrested for protesting in front of the Governor’s office. This week, they are trying to make amendments to Senate Bill 867.
The bill, also titled “Protect Students in Schools”, is a new piece of legislature that would call for stricter background checks on teachers and school personnel. On the surface, that sounds great. Who wouldn’t want a solid background check for the individuals that are with their students every day?
But, if you start to read the fine print on this bill, there are a few hidden points that seem to directly target the teachers in a negative way. For instance, in addition to newly required fingerprinting and the standard background check, licensure hopefuls are subjected to a morality clause that could set their application up for further scrutiny. Specifically, if they “otherwise fail to meet the standards and criteria adopted by the State Board of Education governing ethics and moral character required for professional educators.”
Meaning that the teachers from last week who were arrested for refusing to disperse from the streets and subsequently charged with resisting a public officer could come under fire and have their teaching licenses, as well as their jobs, threatened come renewal time. As North Carolina is a Right to Work State where collective bargaining for public school teachers is banned, peaceful demonstrations were one of the few methods left to protest for better resources and educational standards in support of their children.
Photo courtesy of Lisa McCool-Grime/Facebook North Carolina teachers protesting outside of Governor's office.
Senators Barefoot, Newton, and Wade- the primary co-sponsors of Bill 867- were not immediately available for comment at time of publication, but the article will be updated with any responses received.
Justin Parmenter, a Charlotte, NC seventh grade teacher, shares his worries. “My concern is that legislation intended to keep our children safe should not be used to stop teachers from advocating on behalf of their students," he states. "There is a big difference between keeping those who have been convicted of violent crimes out of the classroom and discouraging teachers from engaging in civil disobedience. Does anyone honestly think that a teacher who would sit down in the middle of the street to call attention to the lack of funding for education is a danger to their students?”
The bottom line is, background checks are something that we can all agree are a requirement in this day and age -- no one is disputing that. What teachers are asking for is that Bill 867 be amended to remove Article 36A. The North Carolina General Assembly Finance House Standing Committee will be meeting soon to finalize the bill. If you think the bill should be amended, contact committee members here.
Edited to add note on collective bargaining.Ali Mohammed Said was arrested in London after trying to smuggle false passport to man seeking to join Islamic State
A drug dealer has been jailed for attempting to smuggle a passport and £2,000 in cash to a suspected terrorist who is thought to have fled Britain in the back of a lorry and is seeking to join Islamic State.
Ali Mohammed Said, 23, from Camden, north London, was arrested as he tried to board a Eurostar train to Brussels with a false passport, money and a new mobile phone with one number in Belgium stored in the memory.
The passport had the photograph of a man who can only be referred to only as CF, because he was once under a terrorism prevention and investigation measure (TPIM) and police have not issued an appeal since his disappearance.
The passport had been reported missing by a man of the same surname as CF who said he had lost it on a bus. A new name had been inserted.
Said, who was on bail for drug dealing at the time of the offence, was jailed for five years at Blackfriars crown court.
Judge John Hillen told him: “You are not a man motivated by ideology, but by money – a common criminal – but it is extremely concerning that a common criminal, in your case a drug dealer, was assisting those who maybe seeking to harm the public on a wide and terrifying scale.
“A message has to be sent to you and your friends, however unwitting your involvement in this sort of crime, that it will be met with severe and immediate imprisonment.”
CF had been arrested on three previous occasions on suspicion of breaching the TPIM but never charged and was released from the order when it expired in January this year.
His passport was removed by Theresa May, the home secretary, using royal prerogative powers but he managed to travel to Brussels where he was awaiting a false passport to continue to Syria.
The case raised questions from Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, concerning the government’s terrorism measures after the Guardian first reported on it last month.
The 26-year-old man had lived in Dartmouth Park, north London.
He has a long history of involvement with al-Qaida-linked groups and is thought to have been seeking to join Isis, sources say.
CF is a close associate of Mohammed Mohamed, who fled from a mosque dressed in a burqa while under a TPIM last November.
He also knew Ibrahim Magag who escaped from a TPIM on Boxing Day 2012 apparently by jumping in a cab at Euston railway station in London.
CF has a history of involvement with terrorist groups dating back six years. In 2008 he allegedly attempted to travel to Afghanistan to fight “jihad” and engage in suicide operations alongside another man.
He was arrested and charged with seeking terrorism training overseas but while electronically tagged on bail he absconded using a false Portuguese passport.
He travelled to Somalia in June 2009 where he allegedly attended a terrorist training camp and was involved in fighting alongside al-Shabaab, a group linked to al-Qaida that was behind the Westgate mall attacks.
From there, he provided advice on travelling to Somalia to others and attempted to recruit fighters in Britain to join them, including offering to help another man to travel to Somalia in 2010.
He was also engaged in seeking funds for al-Shabaab and may have been involved in planning attacks.
Shortly before his arrest, he was allegedly involved with Mohammed Mohamed’s plans to attack western interests in Somaliland. Mohamed’s plans had included an attack on the Juba hotel in Mogadishu in August 2010.
CF was arrested by Somaliland authorities alongside Mohamed in Burao on 14 January 2011 and detained in Hargeisa prison for two months before being deported to Britain where he was put under a TPIM.
In a high court judgment, Lord Justice Lloyd Jones said CF had played a substantial role in the British network in Somalia and that his involvement was “undoubtedly real and substantial”.
“I am entirely satisfied that the secretary of state was and remains reasonably entitled to hold a reasonable suspicion and a reasonable belief that CF had engaged in terrorism-related activity,” he added.
Said, a Somali national born in Mogadishu, had arrived in Britain with his mother and three brothers after his father was killed in the civil war.
He had fallen in with a group of Somalian youths in the Camden area and was arrested for supplying cannabis in 2008 and given an antisocial behaviour order, which he breached on 11 occasions.
He continued living with his mother, but was arrested for offences of threatening and abusive behaviour and affray.
On 18 February an undercover police officer spotted him approaching another man, carrying out “what appeared to be a drug deal,” Mark Dawson, prosecuting, said.
When he fled, he threw a bag containing 15 wraps of heroin and two wraps of crack cocaine to the ground and was arrested.
On 23 July, while on bail for the drugs offences, he was arrested at St Pancras station and the false passport discovered in a rucksack.
Said was unemployed but was planning to start a degree in accounting and finance at Middlesex University after deciding to turn over a new leaf, James Skelsey, defending, told Blackfriars crown court.
He had met an individual at a Somali cafe who gave him the offer of “making some money” on a trip to Europe, but didn’t know who the passport was for.
Said was jailed for five years on Friday – 20 months for possession of a false passport, four months for refusing to divulge his iPhone pin, and three years for possessing Class A drugs with intent to supply.Did you know that what you say on Facebook can be used against you in a court of law? If you're sharing something with your friends, you may as well be sharing directly with the judge and jury: A recent ruling in a U.S. federal court says that if you post something on Facebook, your friend can share that information with the police — it's not a violation of your privacy.
Accused gang member Melvin Colon had argued in court that investigators violated his constitutional right to privacy when they viewed his Facebook profile via one of his friends' accounts. But US District Judge William Pauley III ruled that Colon's messaged threats and posts about violent acts he committed were not private, and indeed fair game for prosecutors. To some extent, the ruling makes logical sense: When you say something publicly on Facebook, you're often sharing a thought with hundreds, maybe even thousands of people. There's not much that's private about that.
Courts have settled a number of questions pertaining to Facebook and our legal system this year. Courts have ruled that it is improper to deliver a court summons via Facebook, even when it's the best method of reaching someone. A court has also ruled that a Like on Facebook isn't constitutionally protected free speech — something Facebook is vigorously appealing.
This article was written by Fox Van Allen and originally appeared on Tecca
More from Tecca:As December 7th passes on our calendars, I cannot help but compare the surprise attack of Pearl Harbor to 9/11 just a little bit. Both resulted in a declaration of war but the results could not be more catastrophically different. America extracted its blood and guts from Pearl Harbor in a matter of five years. The suffering was enormous but the lines of the good guys versus the bad guys and why we were fighting were clearly marked. Yes, mistakes were made on the home front with the American Japanese, as has been recognized. But as for the support of the nation -- that was never in question. If ever there was a war where the lines between good and evil and right and wrong were clearly defined, it was World War II.
But then the war was over and the soldiers came home and America thrived. In fact, America entered its Golden Years. Pearl Harbor was not forgotten -- hardly -- but it was not a trauma continually thrust into the forefront of the American people day after day. Americans got even and it was over. My father fought in the Pacific theater including the nightmare of Guadalcanal and several other island invasions. I grew up surrounded by Marines who simply wanted to get on with the business of life after the war.
As the war in Afghanistan moves into its ninth year, support on the home front wanes weekly. Never mind the confusion in the Congress -- it's the confusion in the nation that is just as problematic. Few people feel comfortable when their nation is at war. But most citizens will support their nation going to war when the cause and the enemy are clearly defined. This is a war, however, that has fallen down the Rabbit Hole. It has absurdity written all over it, from the war beginning in a cesspool of Bush/Cheney lies to this escalation of 30,000 soldiers being sent into a desert to fight who exactly? Ghosts in caves and human bombs -- is this the new face of war?
Listening to President Obama announce his decision to pour more billions if not a trillion dollars into this scheme to get the Afghan people and the Pakistanis to succumb to a Christian democracy in eighteen months, the image of Osama bin Laden leaped into my mind. Perhaps he, too, was listening to the president, maybe from a cave or the unthinkable -- a comfortable hidden mansion somewhere in Pakistan. Eighteen months is the time line we are giving these essentially tribal people to get their acts together to become high functioning, trustworthy soldiers, armed to the teeth with American weaponry, who promise to be more loyal to Christian invaders than to their brother Muslims, regardless of whether they are members of the Taliban or Jehovah's Witnesses or Druid converts. Let's face it -- blood, and especially tribal blood, is thicker than water, especially while having an invaders gun pointed at you.
As President Obama spoke the other day, memories of a taped message that bin Laden sent out in the early days of this war ran through my mind. He promised that he would break America financially just as he did to the Russians when they invaded Afghanistan. Sure their bombs and bullets killed and maimed thousands but in the end, the Russians left Afghanistan having spent billions of dollars and accomplishing nothing. I imagine bin Laden emailing instructions to his minions that go something like this, "Okay team, suit up for the next eighteen months in your best western wear. Look cooperative because the U.S. is about to pour even more money into our coffers. They just don't get how we work, who we are, and how we really think -- and that foolishness is our best defense. As soon as this next infusion of cash is done, get out your militant wardrobe, pull out those burkas for your women and get this country back just the way it always was -- ours."
Reports are that there are but 100 Al Qaeda militants left in the whole of Afghanistan, at least that was the statistic offered during the past days as the debate regarding the president's decision continues. Escalating a war while the home nation disintegrates has, historically, done in more than one world leader. Every leader needs the support of his or her nation when that nation is at war. Equally important is that the people of that nation need to understand who and where the enemy is and not be fed a continual line of spin as to why our soldiers and our resources are being evaporated in a vast wasteland while the home front is left to listen to Congressional has-beens like McCain spout off about what the president should be doing. That's just what we need -- more Republican "experts" who do nothing but babble. If McCain was a real patriot and not just an angry, raging, jealous bitter man that he is, he would be doing all he could to unite the Republican Party. He of all people knows how dangerous it is for a nation to endure a nearly decade long war.
So here we are, nine years later, still pouring our soldiers and resources into this war, still using 9/11 as our battle cry, and all the while our own nation is on an economic and psychic respirator. What are we thinking? Is this what winning a war looks like? Seems to me that our nation has paid and is continuing to pay a price for 9/11. Perhaps there are other reasons for the ongoing war that have nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11 -- oil, perhaps? And if that's so -- if it turns out that oil interests are even a small part of why this nightmare has been extended for almost a decade -- how shall we respond to that as Americans, especially if the previous administration as well as this one used 9/11 as their battle cry for support. Is it any wonder why the politics of our nation have that "Alice in Wonderland" quality to them?
If we really wanted to "get even" for 9/11, would it not be to our benefit to pour that money into us and not them? Would it not benefit us more if those endless financial resources went to rebuilding this nation and not that one? Seems to me that if all those billions were directed toward assisting new businesses, educational aid, repairing bridges, streets, and other disintegrating infrastructures, and all seriously launching green technology, we could rise out the ashes of 9/11 and get on with the business of life again. Granted nothing is that simple but even the simplest of us can see how foolish it is to escalate a war that will only continue to shatter an already broken nation.Ryanair plans to challenge a ruling by Denmark’s labour court allowing industrial action against the Irish airline at Copenhagen airport in a row over its refusal to enter into collective agreements with local trade unions.
The Danish court said that members of the country’s Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) could refuse to service Ryanair flights out of Copenhagen airport, where the airline has based one aircraft.
While there is no direct right of appeal from the Danish labour court, Ryanair has lodged its own claim against the unions. It is also likely to look at other challenges, such as lodging a complaint with the European Commission.
Ryanair argued that the ruling “appeared to allow competitor airline unions” to blockade the one craft it has based at Copenhagen. Any industrial action could involve staff working for companies that service rival carriers. It is likely to be at least two to three weeks before the unions take action, which would involve ground staff refusing to handle Ryanair passengers’ baggage, fuelling its craft or providing other services to the airline.
Industrial action can only apply to Ryanair planes based at Copenhagen and not to those flying into Denmark from other countries.
Ryanair is likely to put plans on hold to add four other craft to the one already based at Copenhagen. Spokesman Robin Kiely said that it intends to continue to operate 12 routes from there, but will use planes based outside Denmark.
Danish Confederation of Trade Unions spokesman Kenneth Nielsen confirmed that its members cannot take industrial action against Ryanair services if the airline moves its base out of Copenhagen.
The dispute is rooted in Ryanair’s refusal to enter into a collective agreement with Danish unions covering staff based in the country because the airline employs staff under Irish law. Mr Nielsen explained that under the Danish model, collective agreements between unions and employers, rather than extensive labour legislation, govern workers’ rights.
He pointed that rival airlines with bases in Denmark, including EasyJet and Scandinavian group, SAS, all have collective agreements with their staff, but Ryanair does not.
Academics and industry figures recently claimed at a European Parliament committee that Ryanair’s employment practices could have implications for safety. The airline responded warning that “should they make defamatory claims about Ryanair’s safety in any other forum we will initiate proceedings against you without further notice”.HoloLens, a newly announced augmented reality device from Microsoft, is definitely turning some heads to the possibility of interacting with floating apps and games. We can’t help but notice though that there seems to be an eerie convergence of technology, leaving us with a serious case of déjà vu. Here we take a closer look at two crowdfunded devices that are working on the same problems as HoloLens: Atheer Labs’s AiR Smart Glasses and the Meta 1 developer kit.
See Also: ‘Microsoft HoloLens’ Revealed, an Untethered See-through AR Headset
Although Microsoft’s HoloLens is promising to bring some very important firsts to the field of augmented reality— like the integration of voice commands, or their Windows 10 ‘Universal apps’ that will run on both PC and the new AR wearable itself, we’re still scratching our heads over the fact that Microsoft is calling HoloLens “the first fully untethered holographic computer.”
Brushing aside the buzzwords, what Microsoft has introduced is an advanced AR wearable (holograms need not apply), but not entirely unlike some crowdfunded devices, namely Atheer Lab’s AiR Smart Glasses and Meta 1 Development Kit (formerly known as ‘Spaceglasses’).
AiR Smartglasses
Atheer Lab’s AiR Smartglasses essentially connects their AR glasses to an android-based computer, or as they say “the wallet”, that’s supposed to fit in your pocket while doing the computational heavy lifting. Although not ‘fully untethered’ by virtue of the cable connecting the two halves of the device, AiR Smartglasses integrates hand-tracking and gesture control with their see-through display that looks awfully similar to their undelivered developer kit directed towards consumers, a move by the company |
across two segments and a news brief.
ABC’s World News Tonight anchor David Muir introduced correspondent Alex Perez’s report from Missouri by explaining that Serrano-Vitorino “appear[ed] in court today, prosecutors saying he was in the country illegally and should have been deported that authorities knew he was here.”
Perez followed with the details of Serrano-Vitorino’s alleged killings:
Investigators revealing the Mexican national suspected in a murder spree that left five dead wasn't supposed to be in the country. Authorities believe the suspect, an undocumented immigrant, gunned down his neighbor and three other men Monday night in Kansas City, Kansas. The suspect then fleeing, driving more than 170 miles to Montgomery County, Missouri. By Tuesday, his Dodge Ram found abandoned. 20 minutes later, another man shot dead at his home five miles away. Choppers, canine units scouring the area until the suspect is finally cornered in a muddy ditch.
With the motive unclear, the ABC correspondent was left to relay only a short rundown of the illegal alien’s criminal past:
Serrano-Vitorino was deported to his native Mexico in 2004, but reentered the country undetected. After a traffic violation and an arrest for domestic assault last year, ICE sought to have him detained, but local officials had already released him.
As mentioned above, both of the top Spanish-language networks outflanked their English counterparts in covering this story. The newscast Noticiero Telemundo featured a 30-second brief from co-anchor María Celeste Arrarás while Noticiero Univision devoted a surprising two-minute-and-43 second segment to the matter from correspondent Vilma Tarazona.
The coverage from World News Tonight came on the heels of ABC’s Good Morning America offering a 31-second news brief from news reader Amy Robach hours earlier. Robach mentioned that the reason being given for Serrano-Vitorino being released following his previous criminal charges was due to “a paperwork error.”
To broaden the scope even further as an example of how shameful CBS and NBC were to censor this tragic story, even ABC’s early morning newscast America This Morning scrapped together 32 seconds for Serrano-Vitorino’s apprehension.
Editor's Note: Many thanks to MRC Latino's Edgard Portela for contributing the Spanish-language network evening newscast totals to this blog.
The transcript of the segment from ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir on March 9 can be found below.New Delhi: Major fire that broke out in Parliament premises on Sunday afternoon has been brought under control. Several fire tenders were pressed into service to douse the flames at Parliament AC plant.
"Maintenance work was going on in AC plant in Parliament premises, fire broke due to welding spark," Delhi Fire Service Director AK Sharma said. When asked if fire broke out due to negligence, Sharma said, "It appears so, ordinarily it happens when adequate precautions are not taken."
The fire broke out around 2:20 pm and was contained at around 2:50 pm. The shopkeepers nearby first alerted when the thick smoke started billowing from Parliament.
However, there are no reports of injuries or damage to the main Parliament House building in the fire.
Expressing concern over the fire, President Pranab Mukherjee has asked for an urgent enquiry into the cause, meanwhile, Home Ministry has sought report on fire in Parliament complex.
In last four day, this the second time there is a fire incident in Parliament premises.While far from being a 'rant,' 'Tropical Loop' seemed a meditation on the Sisyphean nature of art as an expression of our identity.
It was this Sisyphean quality of the burdens that had descended on his shoulders once he was elected to Parliament which gave him sleepless nights.
They carry on in their Sisyphean struggle, or more correctly their Diogenesian search, not for an honest man this time, but for a brave one.
It's tilted to roll back into their favor while the rest of us are saddled with a Sisyphean task.
And, let's face it, as Sisyphean tasks go, leaf blowing takes the award every time.
Ongoing and perhaps unending monitoring is needed, a challenge the researchers describe as Sisyphean.
Yes, in an age when photo staffs are dwindling, this is a Sisyphean wish.
For all of the allusions to high tech here, this Sisyphean choreography was the show's only performance.
Much of the book's humor is effective in great part thanks to Christina MacSweeney's translation, a Sisyphean task, considering the demands of Rabasa's world building and intricacy of the text.
This Sisyphean strategy to control a force of nature makes as much sense as trying to fight an earthquake or manage a hurricane.
Whoever takes the prize, uniting the nation - in particular when racial tensions are heightened and terrorist attacks are on the increase - will have an uphill struggle, if not a Sisyphean task.#IfItAintWhiteItAintRight
I always find it interesting how the world will shit on African people while simultaneously stealing and mimicking African culture.
They called Africans who stretched their earlobes “primitive” then proceeded to copy it.
Remember that “dreads” were seen as derogatory?
Whites would call it dreadful, dirty, ugly ETC…
African women been carrying Babies on their back since for ever.
There was criticism for that now that got “baby carriers”
They used to make fun of African Women’s BIG LIPS and ASSES now EVERYBODY want a big lips and big asses.
White people have been obsessed with Africans ever since we came in contact don’t ever forget that. So obsessed they had to get their hands on your continent.
Now we running around here ashamed of our own people and our own heritage like fools.
Post made by @Solar_InnerG
#sancophaleague
#neverlovedus
Shoutout to @oba_tayo for the Gauge Earring Comparison! And the photo in the top right corner!JUMP TO: Mechanics and Schedule | Terms and Conditions
Following the success and warm reception garnered by the launch of their campaign Inspire Every Day! last July 19, 2014, Ayala Museum is holding another free admissions day coupled with a diverse set of pocket events to create a museum experience like no other.
There is just one important condition guests are requested to do in return: “Be kind.”
This event will zero in on the concept of kindness—particularly through inspiring artist activities and the generation of awareness for AFI’s volunteer opportunities.
On Saturday, July 25, 2015 from 9AM to 6PM, visitors are free to enter Ayala Museum to enjoy its permanent exhibitions on Philippine historical events, pre-Hispanic gold from the Philippines, indigenous Philippine textiles, Asian trade ceramics, and Fernando Zobel paintings, which have inspired visitors for generations. Also on view are the following changing exhibitions: Beautiful Handicrafts of Tohoku, Japan, a traveling exhibition brought by The Japan Foundation Manila to showcase the traditional crafts of areas struck by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami; From Citadel to City: Juan Luna paintings and 19th century prints from the BPI Collection, showing the parallels of the development of Juan Luna’s art to social realism and the rise of the city of Manila as seen in the works on display; and Felix Laureano: First Filipino Photographer which exhibits the work of the Panay-born pioneer.
Also in the roster of what is to be expected on the 25th are interactions with Filipino creatives: painter and illustrator Valerie Chua, contemporary visual artist Leeroy New, Up Dharma Down front woman Armi Millare; as well as daylong hands-on activities designed by popular local apparel brand TeamManila, artist collective Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan, and specialty arts and craft retailer Craft Carrot. Manila Symphony Orchestra’s woodwinds section and artists from the Tago Jazz Cafe are also slated to perform in various areas of the museum throughout the day.
The event will also premiere a short film by noted wedding and events videographer Jason Magbanua composed of crowd-sourced video clips solicited through his official Instagram account (@jasonmagbanua), showing various acts of kindness.
A special mini-bazaar area will also serve as a haven for special discounts on artistic and unique merchandise from the MuseumShop, TeamManila, and Craft Carrot.
Mechanics
To avail of the free admission, guests are requested to fill up a registration form upon arrival to join the Ayala Foundation mailing list and volunteer opportunities available for them in Ayala Foundation, Inc., namely the following:
Feeding the Mind
Volunteer as storytellers at CENTEX, an Ayala Foundation-run public school for bright children from impoverished communities.
Volunteer as storytellers at CENTEX, an Ayala Foundation-run public school for bright children from impoverished communities. Playing for Confidence
Volunteer coaches in futsal and ping pong are welcome to make sure our bright young minds in CENTEX are well rounded and active!
Volunteer coaches in futsal and ping pong are welcome to make sure our bright young minds in CENTEX are well rounded and active! Capturing Joy and Success
Shutterbug? Volunteer as a photographer to document the joy and inspiration from Ayala Foundation’s events and community activations
Shutterbug? Volunteer as a photographer to document the joy and inspiration from Ayala Foundation’s events and community activations Designing for Impact
Help Ayala Foundation effectively communicate its programs by serving some of its graphic design, photo editing, and video editing needs.
Guests can submit the accomplished form to the present Ayala Museum representative. In exchange, they will be given kindness currencies which they can use to enter the museum for free, participate in the special inspire stations, and avail of discounts from the Ayala MuseumShop.
Special Inspire Stations (at the ground floor lobby, limited, requires kindness currencies)
Postcards of creativity and kindness by Valerie Chua | 10 AM
| 10 AM Session with Armi Millare (details to be determined) | 1 PM
Wear Leeroy New‘s wearable sculptures from the Aliens of Manila series | 4PM
Whole day activities (until supplies last)
Hourly musical performances
Manila Symphony Orchestra (woodwinds) | 10AM (2nd Floor), 11AM (Ground Floor), 2PM (4th Floor)
Musicians from Tago Jazz Cafe | 11 AM (3rd Floor), 1 PM (Ground Floor), 3PM (Ground Floor), 5PM (Ground Floor)
Premiere of Jason Magbanua short film
Every hour
Terms and conditions
Admission is free from from 9AM to 6PM during July 25, 2015. By accomplishing the registration form, guests are agreeable to be included in the Ayala Foundation database to receive updates on future volunteer opportunities. They are free to unsubscribe any time. Guests shall receive a value of 500 kindness currencies to be able to enter the museum for free, participate in special inspire stations and avail of applicable discounts in the mini-bazaar. These are not convertible to cash and can only be used on July 25, 2015. Admission to the Filipinas Heritage Library is also free on this day. Please ask the security guards at the 4th Floor for assistance. Photography is allowed only at the 1st and 2nd Floors of the museum. Guests should avoid bringing luggage, big bags, backpacks, and umbrellas (that are not foldable) for these will have to be deposited at the baggage counter. The following items are strictly prohibited in the museum: Food and drinks Pets Professional photography and video cameras and accessories (DSLR, camcorders, tripods, lights, etc.) Flammable items Sharp Objects Tools Weapons and firearms
Please observe good conduct and show other guests courtesy at all times. Inspire by being polite, careful, and considerate!
Catch the latest announcements and update on this event through our official social media channels: Facebook | Twitter | Instagram. Ayala Museum also encourages everyone to use the hashtag #InspireEveryDay before, during, and after the event to spread the positivity! For inquiries, email marketing@ayalamuseum.org.
The comments are closed.On August 14, when a Japanese student
slipped off a guardrail above Horseshoe Falls, Niagara's postcard waterfall, she plunged 180 feet. Her body is still missing. While searching for her the next day, authorities found the body of another victim of the falls, an unidentified man.
Despite the multiple reports this summer (and the fact that accidentally going over a waterfall makes for good movie drama), the odds of accidentally going over are remote. Yet we couldn't help but wonder: Can you somehow improve your chances of surviving a plunge over a waterfall like Niagara?
The Threats
Six million cubic feet of water rush over the falls every minute during peak daytime hours (upriver dams change the volume). The rapids above the falls are clocked at 25 mph, and up to 68 mph over the brink. "I can't think of any way to survive that except luck," says Malcolm Cooper, chairman of the Hawaii Masters Swimming Association. He grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and knows Niagara well. "Basically, you're going to hit rocks."
But rocks aren't the only threat. If you miss them, the next is bubbles; the plunge pool under a waterfall is like big surf. "There's so much air mixed in with the water that you can't swim in it. Everything goes black in big surf because the sunlight is blocked out by the bubbles. In Niagara Falls, that would definitely be the case," Cooper says.
If you survived the bubbles, the turbulence and darkness underwater would probably disorient anyone who survived the plunge from Niagara Falls. "When you're washed in big waves, you can't tell which way is up," Cooper says. "You're getting pushed around by water. You just have to hope that you get pushed up." Debris could be another killer. "The risks are all the stuff that's around you. You get bashed underwater. That's why kayakers wear helmets," Cooper says.
Finally, if you manage to surface, you can float even in a bruising current. But then you have to worry about the cold. Niagara's waters are in the 30's (Fahrenheit), and Cooper says that gives you about 3 minutes before you black out. The United States Search and Rescue Task Force is a little more optimistic. The shock of sudden entry into cold water can trigger a heart attack, even in healthy people, but if you survive that, the task force gives you less than 15 minutes in water that is freezing or below, and 15 to 30 minutes in water up to 40° F.
The Tips
In the face of so many dangers, it's difficult to draw up a game plan. But Steven Labov, the task force's chief, made a short list of tips for surviving a fall.
First, he says, do not panic. Take a deep breath just before you go over the edge. Go feet first to avoid head injury. As you're falling, tighten your muscles, wrap your arms around your skull to shield it, and cover your nose with the crook of your elbow. Just before you enter the plunge pool, press your legs together, tighten your gluteals and close your eyes and mouth to make yourself water tight. When you surface, swim downstream as soon as possible to avoid the falling water. If you just fell in front of a crowd of tourists, help should be on the way. And finally, Labov says, "adrenaline will help you."
Even without Labov's advice, three people have slipped or jumped into the falls without protection and lived to tell about it. In 1960, Roger Woodward, a 7-year-old, fell over the falls wearing a life preserver and survived. In 2003, Kirk Jones, 40, took the plunge without even a flotation device. And most recently, in 2009, an unidentified man survived the fall and swam until rescuers saved him.
We'll never know how closely these Niagara survivors followed Labov's prescriptions. However, if anything saved them, it might have been entering the water at the best angle, feet-first. That's how most high-divers do it, and the world record for highest dive—177 feet, set by Oliver Favre in France in 1987—nearly matches Niagara's 180-foot height.
Overall fitness matters too. High diving, even at lesser heights, requires practice and a body that can take a beating. The World High Diving Federation explains that as divers enter the water, their underwater body parts are at the highest rate of deceleration while the part of the body that is still dry is at full acceleration. "The athlete must be at maximum strength and muscle-tightness upon entry, to avoid compression or contortion of the body or its parts," the association says on its website (which explains Labov's advice on tightening your gluteals).
If the body isn't at maximum strength to withstand those forces, or if the fall happens from so high that a human body simply can't withstand them, the results can be gruesome. In 1968, Richard Snyder published a study called Fatal Injuries Resulting from Extreme Water Impact, a medical report for the Federal Aviation Administration. (Given the prevalence of commercial air travel over water, the FAA wanted to know about "human survival tolerances in water impacts.") Snyder looked at the autopsy results from 169 people who jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge in a 29-year period. That's a leap of about 250 feet, or nearly 40 percent higher than the fall from Niagara.
The impact crushed the rib cages in more than half of the jumpers, Snyder reports. Hearts and blood vessels ruptured from within after a sudden pressure change, but most of the organ damage was probably caused by shards of shattering bone and cartilage. Fractured ribs penetrated the lungs in three quarters of the jumpers, livers ruptured in more than half, and 30 percent had brain injuries. Finally, 45 of the jumpers (26.6 percent) may have lived through the impact but drowned to death.
However, Snyder also found that body position at impact might be the more critical factor. He cited data showing that people have survived an impact with water at speeds of 100 to 115 feet per second if they entered feet first, 97 feet per second if they entered head first and only 87 feet per second if they hit the surface on their sides or bellies. Nevertheless, the key stat was still grim: At the time of his 1968 study, 99.3 percent of known Golden Gate fallers or jumpers died from their jumps.
So Cooper was probably right from the start: To survive any fall into the water from such great heights, you have to be lucky. It may help to be young, strong and trained in cliff diving, but the best survival tip is to stay off the guard rails.1 of 18 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Redskins’ rainy preseason finale View Photos Washington played its fourth preseason game at Tampa Bay, which moved the game up one day to avoid the remnants of a tropical storm. Rain still bombarded the stadium. Caption Washington played its fourth preseason game at Tampa Bay, which moved the game up one day to avoid the remnants of a tropical storm. Rain still bombarded the stadium. Redskins running back Mack Brown runs 60 yards for a score during the second quarter. Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Postgame — Here are links to our coverage of the game:
Tough decisions show how McCloughan has improved roster
Redskins close preseason with sloppy 20-13 victory
Bog: Best and worst moments from the game
Bog: Redskins and Bucs play pointless, poorly attended game
0:57 fourth quarter — Bernard Reedy catches a touchdown pass, the Buccaneers’ first of the game, and Tampa Bay makes it 20-13. It’s 10:54 p.m., so the game might end in less than three hours, especially given the unsuccessful onside kick attempt.
When Washington kneels this out, they’ll improve to 3-1 in the preseason. Mack Brown finishes with 149 yards rushing and Robert Kelley 99, each on a carry count in the high teens. Both averaged more than six yards per carry.
3:31 fourth quarter — I’m still here, there just hasn’t been much worthy of an update in a while. Tampa Bay just kicked a field goal at the end of a 17-play drive, also by Roberto Aguayo, and made it 20-6 at the 3:59 mark.
Washington is outgaining Tampa Bay, 298-151, and outrushing the Bucs 249-50.
5:44 third quarter — Rashad Ross catches a touchdown pass, and got his foot down in the back of the end zone, for a 20-3 advantage. Ross’s catch survived a replay review.
8:40 third quarter — T.J. Thorpe has a big gain, tiptoeing down the left sideline with a Nate Sudfeld pass for a 41-yard play.
10:23 third quarter — Maligned Bucs kicker Roberto Aguayo makes a 50-yard field goal to get the Bucs on the board. It’s 13-3.
Halftime — Washington leads, 13-0. Mack Brown is the star of the first half.
1:03 second quarter — CSN just showed a graphic that said total yards are 187-3 in the Redskins’ favor. Dang.
Which reminds me, here are the live stats.
6:02 second quarter — Mack Brown is going to mess around and make the roster. He just went for 23 yards; he’s up to 11-130-1 on the day. Brown wasn’t so far out of the roster mix that he couldn’t play well enough today to earn a spot, but of course coaches go by everything they’ve seen all offseason, training camp and preseason too.
10:45 second quarter — Ryan Griffin throws off his back foot on a play action rollout and Deshazor Everett pops it up into the air, and Duke Ihenacho comes down with the interception.
Mike wrote this 25 minutes ago:
Everett in at free safety instead of Blackmon now. Everett needs a big game. Will be hard to keep five safeties. — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) September 1, 2016
13:44 second quarter — The roster battle at running back might have just gotten more interesting. Mack Brown takes a handoff, cuts back, stiff-arms a Bucs defender on his helmet and gallops to the goal line, diving over for a 60-yard score. Brown now has eight carries for 101 yards. And that run would have been nice on a dry day, with the cutback and all.
It’s 10-0.
Mack Brown with the 60-yard touchdown run shows great vision and shiftiness. Really like how he runs. — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) September 1, 2016
Or maybe it didn’t get more interesting?
Mack Brown with a 60-yard TD run. Like him but #Redskins don't have room. Been more impressive than Keith Marshall. — Master Tesfatsion (@MasterTes) September 1, 2016
Or maybe it did?
Jay Gruden said back in the spring maybe they'd keep four backs. But hard to say if they can do that really. 4 backs, 3 TE, 8 OL? — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) September 1, 2016
14:53 second quarter — Anthony Lanier, a potential roster surprise on the D-line, makes a nice play, spinning back from an unsuccessful rush and leaping into the throwing lane, nearly intercepting a pass. A Bucs punt follows.
1:04 first quarter — Finally an interesting thing happened. Punt returner Bernard Reedy mishandles the punt, picks it up and tries to run before Lynden Trail strips it and Deshazor Everett recovers in the end zone. The touchdown was short-lived though, as officials ruled that Reedy’s forward momentum has stopped and whistles had blown.
The first quarter ended with Washington up, 3-0, instead.
Touchdown Redskins. Trail does much better on punt coverage this time, forcing fumble, Everett recovers. — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) September 1, 2016
https://twitter.com/MasterTes/status/771145202706812929
5:07 first quarter — Mack Brown breaks a 21-yard run, but a sack and a penalty push Washington back to a third and 21, and a Tress Way punt soon follows.
8:05 first quarter — Northern Virginia native Mike Glennon starts at quarterback for Tampa Bay. He actually got to throw a pass on third and five, and he hit Russell Shepard in the hands before Washington cornerback Kendall Fuller knocks it loose.
9:34, first quarter — Dustin Hopkins gets Washington on the board with a field goal.
Dustin Hopkins drilled a 47-yard field goal. Heavy rain, but no wind based on the goal post flags. #Redskins — Master Tesfatsion (@MasterTes) September 1, 2016
That drive was 46 yards in 10 plays, 5:36, capped by a 47-yard field goal. — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) September 1, 2016
Redskins quarterback Colt McCoy — who will likely only play if Nate Sudfeld is injured — warms up. (Jason Behnken/Associated Press)
8:11 p.m. — As an ex-football player, I’m willing to admit there are a few other sports that might be harder to master. But football in general is absurd sometimes. A baseball game in this weather would have been called hours ago. These guys are playing the least-meaningful game of the season while dripping wet, like it’s totally normal.
8:07 — We’re underway with a Robert Kelley carry. Between the rain and the fact that three of the running backs are back at home, Kelley and Mack Brown will get heavy work tonight.
Why is Robert Kelley out there? He could have to start Week 1. Never know! — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) September 1, 2016
Not that there are many other options, but Mike has a point. Matt Jones and Keith Marshall are currently injured. Chris Thompson isn’t often healthy, and is more of a third-down back. But, Kelley still has to lock down his roster spot.
7:57 — Three-hundred more than I’d have expected. Although there are always some people who will go just to say they did.
There appears to be MAYBE 300 fans here. It's been raining really hard for hours now. — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) August 31, 2016
7:35 — Here’s something to chew on, regarding the defensive line:
Big game to watch on the DL with roster spot up for grabs. #Redskins expecting to keep six, already have Baker/Golston/Reyes/Hood/ Francois — Master Tesfatsion (@MasterTes) August 31, 2016
Interesting that Ziggy Hood is among the players that didn't make the trip, while Kendall Reyes and Ricky Jean Francois are dressing tonight — Mike Jones (@MikeJonesWaPo) August 31, 2016
It's also the 1st time #Redskins will see Jerrell Powe in the preseason. Missed previous 3 games bc of a heart arrhythmia procedure — Master Tesfatsion (@MasterTes) August 31, 2016
Redskins place kicker Dustin Hopkins checks out the field conditions as rain associated with Tropical Storm Hermine passes over the area before the game against the Bucs on Wednesday night (Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press)
6:50 — The fourth preseason game is the territory of die-hards to begin with. You want to see players earn those eight or nine roster spots that are still up for grabs, or impress you enough that you’ll be excited when they’re cut and re-signed to the practice squad. Future starters and key contributors play in this game. Will Compton was once an undrafted free agent fighting for a job. Quinton Dunbar was not that long ago a converted wide receiver trying to show he could make it at cornerback.
Still, it’s not the most compelling football you’ll watch over the next few weeks. And add in the rainstorm, and … well, be glad we get to watch. Some people have to be there. Though not, of course, Washington’s starters, many of whom hung back with the game moved up a day. Here are the 26 players the team announced did not make the trip and won’t play:
No. 8 QB Kirk Cousins, 11 WR DeSean Jackson, 20 CB Greg Toler, 23 S DeAngelo Hall, 24 CB Josh Norman, 25 RB Chris Thompson, 26 CB Bashaud Breeland, 30 S David Bruton Jr., 31 RB Matt Jones, 51 LB Will Compton, 54 LB Mason Foster, 61 G Spencer Long, 64 NT Kedric Golston, 71 T Trent Williams, 73 DE Ziggy Hood, 75 G Brandon Scherff, 76 T Morgan Moses, 77 G Shawn Lauvao, 78 C Kory Lichtensteiger, 80 WR Jamison Crowder, 85 TE Vernon Davis, 86 TE Jordan Reed, 88 WR Pierre Garçon, 91 LB Ryan Kerrigan, 92 DE Chris Baker, 94 LB Preston Smith.
There are your first 26 locked-up roster spots.
The basics:
Washington Redskins at Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Kickoff: 8 p.m. ET at Raymond James Stadium
TV: CSN, NBC-4 and NFL Network (out of area).
Radio: 980 AM; 92.7 and 94.3 FM. SiriusXM: internet 831.
Line: Bucs by 3, o/u 37.
Box score: Updates every 60 seconds.
Redskins roster | Depth chart | Injury report
Bucs roster | Depth chart | Injury report
Preseason Week 4 schedule & scores
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Follow: @MikeJonesWaPo | @lizclarketweet | @MasterTesBrain neurons can transmit signals using a flow of Na+ and K+ ions, which produce an electrical spike called an action potential (AP) (Hodgkin and Huxley, 1952). After an AP, the Na+/K+ pump resets the arrangement of Na+ and K+ ions back to their original positions so that the neuron is then ready to relay another AP when it is called upon to do so (Glitsch, 2001). So, the Na+/K+ pump has a “housekeeping” role rather than a direct role in brain signaling. This is the long-held, entrenched viewpoint. However, novel research upon cerebellar Purkinje neurons suggests that the Na+/K+ pump may have a direct role in brain coding and computation (Forrest, 2008, 2014a,b; Forrest et al., 2009, 2012). This research was conducted in 2006–2007, and presented in a 2008 Ph.D. thesis (Forrest, 2008), but has only been published relatively recently. In the intervening period it was serially rejected by reviewers and journals that were uncomfortable with this re-appraisal of Na+/K+ pump function. Purkinje neurons are found in the cerebellum, responsible for motor control (Ito, 1984).
The Na+/K+ pump uses the energy of one ATP molecule to exchange three intracellular Na+ ions for two extracellular K+ ions (Glitsch, 2001). Thus, the pump is electrogenic, extruding one net charge per cycle to hyperpolarize the membrane potential. In vitro, the Na+/K+ pump has been shown to control and set the intrinsic activity mode of Purkinje neurons (Forrest, 2008, 2014a; Forrest et al., 2009, 2012). It dictates whether the Purkinje neuron is quiescent or spontaneously firing in a continuous tonic, continuous burst, bimodal (tonic and quiescent), trimodal (tonic, burst, quiescent), or bimodal (burst and quiescent) repeat pattern. In the bimodal and trimodal repeat patterns, the Na+/K+ pump sets the length of each constituent mode. So, at the foundation of the Purkinje cell's intrinsic multimodality, there is the working of just a single molecular species: the Na+/K+ pump.
Numerical modeling of experimental data suggests that, in vivo, the Na+/K+ pump produces long quiescent punctuations (>>1 s) to Purkinje neuron firing (Forrest, 2014a). The Na+/K+ pump is an enzyme and its activity is dependent on the concentration of its substrates: intracellular Na+ and extracellular K+ (Glitsch, 2001). Na+ flows into and accumulates in the Purkinje cell during firing; Forrest's numerical model proposes that intracellular Na+ concentration is a memory element, which records firing history (Forrest, 2014a). Furthermore, that the Na+/K+ pump “reads” this memory setting to dictate the timing and duration of long quiescent periods. To speculate, these long quiescent periods, on the scale of seconds and minutes, may be computationally advantageous. By conferring an access to longer time scales, they may permit storage and short-term processing of sensory information in the cerebellar cortex. To elaborate, they may permit different dynamical states to be sustained in the cerebellar cortex for extended periods. Each of these states is associated with a specific configuration of firing and quiescent states in different Purkinje cells. These network states could store information and perform computations. So, these network computations sit upon the proposed intracellular Na+ ion computation, mediated by the Na+/K+ pump, which dictates the activity state of individual Purkinje neurons (firing or quiescent). Forrest terms this hypothesis: “ion to network” computation (Forrest, 2014a). There could be further layers of control and regulation: the Na+/K+ pump is a receptor for the endo-ouabain signaling molecule (Xie and Cai, 2003) and Na+/K+ pump activity might be modulated by intracellular signaling cascades (Therien and Blostein, 2000; Bagrov and Shapiro, 2008). Relevantly, a mutation in the Na+/K+ pump causes rapid onset dystonia parkinsonism, which has symptoms to indicate that it is a pathology of cerebellar computation (Cannon, 2004; de Carvalho et al., 2004). Furthermore, an ouabain block of Na+/K+ pumps in the cerebellum of a live mouse results in it displaying movement disorders: ataxia and dystonia (Calderon et al., 2011).
In recent times, other groups have shown the Na+/K+ pump to be a computational element in other neuron types, in other systems. For example, the Na+/K+ pump produces an afterhyperpolarization (AHP) to each burst in the motor neurons of Drosophilia larvae; AHP amplitude is dependent on the number of spikes in the burst (Glanzman, 2010; Pulver and Griffith, 2010). So the Na+/K+ pump generated AHP acts as a spike counter and is a form of short-term memory.
Locomotion in Xenopus tadpoles, as in vertebrates generally, is produced by a central pattern generator (CPG) network within the animal's spinal cord and hindbrain. In these CPG neurons the Na+/K+ pump produces an AHP; the amplitude/hyperpolarization (and therefore duration) of which is proportional to the intensity and duration of previous spiking activity (Simmers, 2012; Zhang and Sillar, 2012). So, again, a Na+/K+ pump generated AHP acts as a spike counter and a form of short-term memory. This system ensures that if the tadpole has recently swum intensively (many spikes per unit time) the next swimming bout is shorter; whereas if prior swimming was weaker (less spikes) then the next swimming bout can be longer. This presumably ensures that the animal is not overexerted. So, the Na+/K+ pump generated AHP system remembers prior spiking/motor activity to dictate the nature of future spiking/motor activity.
Aplysia interneurons can exhibit a prolonged inhibitory synaptic potential, produced by synaptic activation of an electrogenic Na+ pump (Pinsker and Kandel, 1969). In sensory neurons of the lamprey, and tactile (T) sensory neurons of the leech, the Na+/K+ pump produces an AHP (Baylor and Nicholls, 1969; Jansen and Nicholls, 1973; Van Essen, 1973; Catarsi and Brunelli, 1991; Catarsi et al., 1993; Parker et al., 1996; Scuri et al., 2007). Activation of a leech's T neurons produces swimming behavior; serotonin quickens the swimming response to touch (reaction time) (Scuri et al., 2007). It negatively modulates Na+/K+ pumping, leading to less AHP, and more spikes being transmitted across a synaptic connection between two T neurons i.e., there results a functional, plastic change at a synapse (learning).
The leech T neuron responds to step-stimuli on the skin with a burst code (Arganda et al., 2007). The code doesn't seem to contain any amplitude information, only the velocity of the skin displacement. With Gaussian white-noise stimuli, stimulus velocity is encoded in burst duration. The greater the velocity, the longer the burst (and the greater the spike rate within the burst). However, a given velocity does not always produce the same length of burst; the length depends on the nature of other velocities coded for in the same period. The burst length codes the ratio of that velocity to the standard deviation of the velocity distribution. This means that a burst of given size is first produced in response to low velocities, but after 1 min of stimulation it is only produced in response to higher velocities i.e., there is adaptation to the stimulus. Numerical simulations and experiments indicate |
minding its own business, sculling across the river, not accused in a formal document of any NCAA violations, you can't just slap them with penalties because you feel like it.
North Carolina's women's basketball program can expect the harshest penalties from the NCAA. Sean Meyers/Icon SMI
Men's basketball coach Roy Williams, in an interview with ESPN before his team's appearance in the national title game, reiterated that sentiment.
"[It's] hard to penalize somebody when you have no allegations against them," Williams said.
And more, if a player hasn't been accused of -- let alone found guilty of -- receiving an impermissible benefit, he or she can't be considered ineligible, by extension, which means that 2005 national championship banner should continue to fly in the rafters. Reached by email on Monday, an NCAA spokesperson said the NCAA could not comment beyond "general process questions."
Men's basketball and football will be held accountable under the broader umbrellas of "lack of institutional control," but with the new notice, significant penalties become "less likely," another source said.
That won't be the case for the women's basketball team, the program that ranks as either North Carolina's renegade sport or convenient scapegoat, depending on which side of Tobacco Road you sit. Thanks to Jan Boxill, then the women's team's academic advisor, the team is specifically alleged to have received extra benefits. That team will be subject to the full force of the NCAA rulebook and the new penalty structure. Boxill's attorney released a statement on Monday stating the alleged activity is "incorrect and based on email conversations that were taken out of context."
If you'd like to raise a skeptical eyebrow at all of this, by all means, do. The problem with this case always has been a bit unclear. Essentially, the NCAA can only charge a sport with offering impermissible benefits if the benefit isn't made available to the general student population.
Conveniently, everyone -- athletes and nonathletes -- at North Carolina was allowed to commit egregious academic fraud via the African-American studies program for years and years.
So, using the letter of the law then, the NCAA has had a hard time turning this into an extra-benefits case. But why shouldn't this be an NCAA issue? This goes to academic integrity and ethics, which should be the very pillars of a collegiate governing body.
North Carolina's men's basketball team lost to Villanova at the buzzer in the 2016 national title game. Peyton Williams/UNC/Getty Images
North Carolina and the individuals named have 90 days to respond to the NCAA, and athletic director Bubba Cunningham expects it will take the full allotment of time. After that, the NCAA has 60 days to respond to the response.
All of which means UNC isn't likely to go before the Committee on Infractions until the fall, with a decision not likely to come much before 2017.
Once -- like, say, Friday -- that seemed like a dire timetable for the men's hoops team. Another season awaited the Tar Heels, like the one that just ended, played under the investigative cloud, with the Heels' accomplishments constantly held up like a stinky sock because of the potential NCAA sanctions.
Now, though, with the help of some bureaucratic hocus-pocus and a nice dollop of Wite-Out, things look decidedly less murky.
Except, that is, for the women's basketball team.
Jerry Tarkanian would be amused.PARIJS – De Organisatie voor Economisch Samenwerking en Ontwikkeling (OESO) heeft vandaag haar jaarlijkse rapport voorgesteld over wereldwijd alfabetisch gerangschikte landen. Volgens dat 2014 World Report of Countries in Alphabetically Ascending Order doet België het weer niet slecht: ons land staat, net zoals vorig jaar, op de vijftiende plaats.
Met die vijftiende plaats doen we het opvallend beter dan de buurlanden. Duitsland, vaak gezien als de economische motor van Noord-Europa, staat pas op de 42e plaats in de lijst. Frankrijk doet het met positie 53 nog slechter, en Nederland vinden we pas terug op de 118e plaats.
De eerste plaats wordt opvallend opgeëist door Afghanistan, nochtans een land dat in internationale rapporten en lijsten doorgaans onderaan vermeld wordt. De OESO wijdt het succes van Afghanistan aan het efficiënte geo-onomastieke beleid dat het land ondanks de locale politieke instabiliteit heeft weten te voeren. Ook opvallend is de slechte score van de Verenigde Staten (184), al slagen die erin om dat te maskeren door zichzelf kortweg “America!” te noemen en zich voor de rest niets van OESO-rapporten aan te trekken. Verder lukt het ook Myanmar, het vroegere Birma, niet om zijn gunstige positie van voor 1989 te heroveren. Het land doet het met de 115e positie niet bijzonder goed.
Regio’s
Het OESO-rapport neemt alleen officieel erkende landen op en dus worden onze regio’s niet vermeld. Deze redactie deed daarom de oefening over voor Vlaanderen en Wallonië. De resultaten zijn onthutsend: mochten Vlaanderen en Wallonië onafhankelijke natiestaten zijn, dan zouden zij volgens de OESO op respectievelijk de 186e en 188e plaats komen, ná Vietnam en Wit-Rusland. Redacteur Hans Van Elverschele, specialist op gebied van alfabetiek, licht toe: “Dit lijkt er zeer sterk op te wijzen dat, ondanks wat sommige politici ook mogen beweren, het Belgische systeem werkt. Met de naakte feiten valt niet te redetwisten. Cijfers zijn cijfers, ook als het letters zijn.”Muslim Press has conducted an interview with Mary DeCamp to discuss the Occupy movement, the upcoming U.S. presidential election and the role that the Green Party could play in it.
Below the full text of the interview has been provided:
Muslim Press: What role did you play in the Occupy movement?
Mary DeCamp: Occupy Tucson is a non-hierarchical group of people who continue to come together weekly to discuss ways to challenge the status quo in politics, economics, environmental policy, and social justice. The role(s) I “did play” and “still do play” are simultaneously similar and different.
I speak only for myself – Occupy Tucson has not authorized any single individual to serve as spokesperson for the movement.
In 2011, when we were living in tents in public spaces, I was also running for Mayor of Tucson on the Green Party ticket. I conducted my campaign from my campsite. Because I was a candidate, and Occupy was careful not to align with any political party, the roles I took with Occupy tended to be care-taking and maintenance jobs that could be accomplished in the background rather than in front of media cameras.
I thought of myself and my role as oil in the machine – making things happen more smoothly. I helped maintain hygienic conditions in camp and I tended to emotional care-giving with the help of my pet dog. I pitched in when & where I could to help lighten the load of others.
Currently, I staff our office and continue to attend meetings and share information with other members. I believe we are living at the end of empire; we must investigate ways to transition from a rapacious consumer capitalist caterpillar into a butterfly that lives lightly and engages reciprocally with our host planet.
My efforts with Occupy are freely given. I do not receive any monetary compensation.
MP: Could you tell us about the job you’re doing at Code Pink?
Mary DeCamp: There is no “job” with Code Pink. This is another organization where I can only speak for myself and not for anyone else. I am drawn to the non-violent approach this group adopts and to Code Pink’s commitment to demilitarize our planet.
It is important to me because I believe the planet is in peril. I believe that climate change and environmental degradation create intense weather patterns and biological hazards that threaten human existence. I believe we need love and peace and cooperation and compassion to confront the future we face. Empathy, not weapons, will yield peace.
MP: What are the major problems that you think need immediate attention?
Mary DeCamp: Demilitarization – we must stop using violence to achieve our goals.
Climate change – we must work together to ensure an inhabitable planet.
Unfair distribution of resources – we must alter economic systems that allow obscene opulence for a few and deprivation for so many.
Absence of empathy – we must know one another as parts of ourselves.
MP: What’s your analysis of the upcoming U.S. presidential election and the role that the Green Party could play in it?
Mary DeCamp: I believe that Hillary Clinton will be our next president, using all sorts of political levers to return her to the White House. I am frustrated that Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein receives so little acknowledgment in the presidential race, because I believe she has the best platform to offer. I believe that all the disaffected young voters whose hearts were broken when Bernie Sanders was muscled out of the Democratic primary race could flood the system and help elect Dr. Stein, but I don’t think it will happen. I believe that Mrs. Clinton’s forces will mobilize to ensure her victory.
Following the election, progressive voters will pat themselves on the back for electing a woman and they will be reluctant to force greater change, much the way they were when America elected the first African American president. The Green Party will still be there, pointing out better alternatives and pushing for changes.
MP: Do you endorse Green Party candidate? What’s your take on her impact on the election?
Mary DeCamp: Yes, I definitely endorse Dr. Jill Stein to be president. And I endorse our local Green Party candidates as well.
Dr. Stein’s impact on the election is unfortunately minor. Most people are too frightened by the prospect of Donald Trump as president to vote for anyone other than Hillary.
I am proud to be a Green Party member this election cycle. Our presidential candidate is intelligent, civil, ethical, healthy, and female. It is a shame that she is not included in the televised debates. It is inexplicable and indefensible why American media ignore the Green Party platform of putting planet, people, and peace over profit.
MP: What could be done about the discrimination that Muslims face in the United States? (Does the Green Party have plans for this?)
Mary DeCamp: I believe that discrimination is overcome when human ties are formed. Famous sociologist Muzafer Sherif’s “Robbers’ Cave study” found that artificially assigning “us” and “them” categorizations to children was sufficient to incite hostility and competition. If we take a step back and recognize one another as “just us” we will see change.
We can accomplish this by providing safe public spaces and activities that transform strangers into neighbors. We need human interaction, a sharing of basic common concerns, and avenues to cooperate with one another.
The Green Party has 10 Key Values that inform our public policy proposals. One of them is “respect for diversity” and another is “future focus.” My personal favorite is “nonviolence.
Mary DeCamp was born and raised in a small farming community in Nebraska. She has degrees from the University of Arizona (BA & MA), but dropped out of the PhD program in 2011, after losing her home in America's mortgage foreclosure crisis. She's been a Tucson Green Party candidate for City Council (2009) and for Mayor (2011). She walked across the country in 2014 with the Great March for Climate Action. Mary now devotes her time to advocating for peace and social justice.As the United Nations this week debated America's record on race, one name was on everyone's minds: Michael Brown. Not only Americans have been riveted this week by the tragic killing of the unarmed teenager, the subsequent protests, and the militarized response of law enforcement in Ferguson, Mo.
The events in the overwhelmingly black suburb of St. Louis came as the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reviewed U.S. compliance with the world's leading anti-discrimination legal instrument, which the United States ratified 20 years ago. The gap between the rights guaranteed by our Constitution on one hand, and the reality of the persistent racism that continues to plague our society on the other, could not have been made more relevant by current events.
That gap is just as stark when viewed from the lens of international human rights law. This week, in Geneva, Switzerland, the U.N. committee that oversees compliance with the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination placed the U.S. record under the spotlight. The committee, comprised of leading human rights and race discrimination experts from all over the world, heard from high-level representatives of the U.S. government in a large delegation as well as from advocates and victims of human rights abuses.
The committee expressed deep concern at the circumstances surrounding Mr. Brown's shooting as well as over other recent deaths of unarmed African-American men – like Eric Garner, John Crawford, Ezell Ford, and others – at the hands of law enforcement. They heard heartbreaking testimony from the mother of Trayvon Martin and the father of Jordan Davis, both of whom lost their sons in violent circumstances that underscored the overt and subconscious forms of racism that our country continues to face. Mark Kappelhoff, the deputy assistant attorney general of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice said in response to the committee's questions that the Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the Brown case.
The United States was represented by a high-level delegation led by Ambassador Keith Harper, a member of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma and the first Native American U.S. ambassador to represent the United States at the U.N. Human Rights Council. In Ambassador Harper's words :
The United States has made...visible progress that is reflected in the leadership of our society, [but] we recognize that we have much left to do. Issues covered by this Convention are of such fundamental and deep importance that we must continue to make progress. For this reason, we value the opportunity for dialogue with the Committee.
That dialogue was a rich one, with the committee questioning the United States on a variety of issues, including deaths on the Southern border, the unaccompanied minor crisis, family detention, lack of access to justice for individuals detained at Guantánamo Bay, education, and violence against women, amongst many other topics. The committee also asked specific questions about lack of implementation of the treaty at federal, state, and local levels and echoed many concerns raised in the ACLU shadow report submitted to the committee. Those include:
The committee's final report and recommendations will be issued on August 29. We hope that they serve as a guide for how our government can better comply with its obligations under the convention and – more importantly – take further steps to address persistent forms of discrimination and prevent any more unnecessary deaths.
The world is watching.When Subaru Natsuki is pulled into the fantasy world of Lugunica, he hardly knows up from down, much less the political machinations that await him and his selected paramour. He's first introduced to the kingdom as a deceptively simple-looking medieval world, but Subaru becomes more acquainted with the strife that permeates the region when he sees a fruit vendor being accosted by street urchins and gets a tour of the city slums. It's survival of the fittest in Lugunica, where family lineage, race, and origin can make or break you.
The kingdom could be due for a change-up, though. A series of events has left Lugunica without an heir apparent, so any lady with a thirst for the monarchy and an appropriate sponsor throws their hat into the ring of the Royal Election, hoping to whip the country into their ideal state. There are five viable candidates; Emilia, Felt, Priscilla Barielle, Anastasia Hoshin, and Crusch Karsten. Three offer some kind of measurable growth for Lugunica, while the other two would surely see its further corruption. The most viable candidates might seem obvious to anyone caught up with the show, but the flaws of leaders like Anastasia and Crusch only come to light when looking back at history.
Crusch Karsten & Meritocracy
Crusch immediately establishes herself as one of the most appealing candidates. She's honorable, capable, and hardworking, all exemplary qualities for a future leader. Her ties to the late royal family, paired with her philosophy that citizens earn their keep through their own efforts, garners the favor of Lugunica's conservative class. She'd be a shoe-in if she hadn't doubled down on rejecting the guidance of the dragon, a figure credited with the kingdom's success.
Crusch's political approach is known as a meritocracy: citizens are rewarded based on their own talents and contributions. It's an idea that sounds good on paper and may sound appealing to many Western viewers of the show. After all, it's the same philosophical principle behind "The American Dream", that anyone can make it in the U.S.A. so long as they try hard enough. Crusch would see Lugunica operate the same way. Unfortunately, a meritocracy starts to fall apart when the many variables inherent to humanity come into play. Not every citizen is going to be able-bodied, live in a stable environment, or have access to the same resources. Felt's life and the slums Subaru walks through in the first few episodes are a testament to that inequality.
Meritocracies also make the government and citizens feel less culpable for the state of the disenfranchised. Citizens living at the poverty level can be written off as "not trying hard enough." If only they'd pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they could have the success of families like the Crusches and van Astreas, right?
A meritocracy doesn't breed much empathy, but it masks its flaws by being sold as pure equality and fairness. Crusch would likely be seen as a fair yet hard-nosed ruler, but her reign could easily mean a worse life for the poor and minority classes of Lugunica. Subaru even calls her out on this, although his comment was coming from a pretty angry place.
Anastasia & Capitalist Oligarchy
The ends justify the means, so long as the ends produce a profit. Anastasia is a no-nonsense, crafty head of a trading company. She prides herself on being many steps ahead of her opponents, knowing what they need and how to package it for her greatest benefit. Having a leader this clever would be a boon to any country dealing in foreign policy. Anastasia would outmaneuver anyone when it came to trade agreements or threats of war.
For the citizens themselves, though? Anastasia's political approach quickly leads to cronyism and further gaps in the upper and lower classes. The economy would likely soar upward but that money's destination would be highly dependent on who had resources to offer her. Land owners like Roswaal could turn a tidy profit, while market owners on the main strip would suffer trying to keep up with more affluent competition.
Make no mistake, Anastasia will gladly build Lugunica's first Walmart. Maybe there's nothing outright evil about that, just unpleasant and insidious. All the store's greeters would be adorable mages with cat-speak inflections, but all the merchandise would be manufactured on the backs of less developed nations. Anastasia isn't completely heartless though; at least the cat mages would get comprehensive health care.
Felt & Anarchy
Felt is tied with Priscilla for the least likely choice, if only because her selection would mean the absolute end of any established order. Anastasia might usher in bureaucratic kickbacks and unprecedented tax evasion, but Felt will turn the entire government hierarchy on its head. This approach makes sense from her perspective, because the state has never put food in her belly or clothes on her back. Felt grew up learning she had to scrape and steal to make ends meet. Her anger feels justified, as does throwing the rich to the wolves.
One of the central values of anarchism is the evaporation of "property" in favor of "possession." In other words, nothing is really yours completely, and once it's not actively being used, it's up for grabs. This idea eliminates wasteful hoarding of resources. Other tenets of the philosophy are that wage labor is still slave labor and things like rent and profit are unethical.
Felt stands in complete opposition to Anastasia. If she could be trusted to approach anarchy from an (ironically) organized standpoint, it could mean plenty of benefits for Lugunica's working class. On the other hand, historical attempts to implement anarchist systems in the real world have all failed. Anarchists actually took over Paris for about two months in the late 1800s, but their rule was neutered when faced with armed forces. Felt wouldn't have that problem with an army of knights at her side, but the Sages would have to be crazy to select her, knowing she'd oust them the moment she took the throne.
Inevitably, there would be violence up front. There's no such thing as a peaceful political revolution. When the dust clears, it's hard to say what would be left. A kingdom without any kind of governance would invite criminality with no promise of punishment. Felt would effectively burn the kingdom down, unless we're to believe everyone in Lugunica could function as honest and trustworthy people.
Priscilla & Totalitarianism
Are you ready to kiss the feet of your overlord before she kicks your groveling face across the room? Priscilla is Lugunica's most terrifying prospect. She grew up in an environment where her desires were met unequivocally thanks to her unnatural level of luck. Things that don't work out the way she wants, like her multitude of previous marriages, don't last for long. In fact, her husbands have all died under mysterious circumstances, which should be enough to give potential supporters pause.
As a ruler, Priscilla would be unbothered by her constituents' quality of life. What's most important to her is that they obey her whims without talking back. She doesn't have an altruistic bone in her body and loathes people who rely on others, which means she'd never consider implementing any kind of policy that would benefit citizens she didn't think had "earned" her help, like the sick and the poor.
Priscilla's desire for absolute control would quickly turn Lugunica into a totalitarian state. Propaganda campaigns to persuade the populace into obeying her would come in short order, easily enforced with her access to the kingdom's knights. Priscilla's reign would be one of the worst Lugunica's people had ever seen. She could only maintain power by diverting attention to some other campaign, like maybe eradicating Mabeasts. Throw in a couple of persuasive arguments about how elves and their descendants are really just Mabeasts too, feed into the people's already obvious racism against elves, and she could continue to rule over the kingdom unchallenged.
Emilia & Democracy
Emilia's characterization, especially when it comes to politics, has suffered the most over the last arc because she's been almost entirely absent. What we do know from her past actions and her speech to the Sages during the ceremony is that Emilia gets satisfaction from helping others. She states that this is her own selfishness, meaning she likely feels better about herself when she makes others happy. She has also experienced discrimination based on her heritage and appearance for most of her life. This experience gives her empathy for Lugunica's less fortunate members and an intimate understanding of their struggles.
Emilia's number one goal, if chosen, is to champion equality for the country's people. This would mean a major upset in the established order. After all, Lugunica is a monarchy with an established hierarchy of knights, nobility, merchants, and plebeians. This also means that Emilia is the common person's best chance at better living and working conditions, because equality in this case means a more even distribution of power. Emilia's election could very well mean an end to the monarchy altogether (or at the very least an elected parliament).
Emilia is Lugunica's small light at the end of the tunnel for a better future. Crusch and Anastasia are viable options in that they won't send the country to hell in a handbasket, but they will more or less maintain the status quo. Areas of the government and civilian life would change, but parties with all the financial and social power would likely stay the same. Trade agreements would improve and military service members would get more perks, but the middle class and disenfranchised would stay that way.Image copyright AP
A Somali-American has become the first to compete in the Miss Minnesota USA pageant wearing a hijab and burkini.
Halima Aden, 19, donned the traditional Islamic dress and full-body "burkini" during the event's swimsuit segment.
Ms Aden, who was born in Kenya and moved as a child to St Cloud, Minnesota, was one of the top 15 contestants in the two-day pageant.
She said she hopes her participation inspires other Muslim women to be confident about their identity.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC spoke to Muslim voters in Minneapolis about how they are feeling ahead of the presidential election
"A lot of people will look at you and will fail to see your beauty because you're covered up and they're not used to it, so growing up I just had to work on my people skills and give people a chance to really know me besides the clothing," Ms Aden told local television station KARE.
The St Cloud resident said she was overwhelmed to be in the top 15 contestants and has received an outpouring of support from women around the world.
"This is a big win for us, you know. I'm the first to do this and I'm hoping to see more Muslim women wearing burkinis and being celebrated," she said.
Image copyright Halima Aden Image caption Halima Aden received an outpouring of support from women around the world
"I'm just challenging you to be outgoing and just do your best in everything that you do."
Minnesota is home to the largest concentration of Somali immigrants in the US.
Denise Wallace, executive co-director of the Miss Minnesota USA pageant, praised Ms Aden for her decision to wear the traditional dress.
"I think for Halima standing on the stage this weekend she is showing other women that they too can do that and that it's possible for them," she said.
The winner of the pageant was Minneapolis resident Meredith Gould, who will go on to compete in the Miss USA pageant next year.The future of city centres across England and Wales looks set to undergo a major shift as the number of 20 to 29-year-olds moving into them almost tripled over a ten-year period, says a new report.
However, the findings by Centre for Cities – a research institute, dedicated to improving the economic success of UK cities – have found the share of households in large city centres are overcrowded and have increased by 69 per cent between 2001 and 2011.
While London is known to be a major port-of-call for young professionals, the city has seen slower growth with high housing costs pricing-out many younger residents and students.
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Instead, population growth has taken place in London’s suburbs which have grown at twice the rate as in other large cities.
Now, though, the chief executive of Centre for Cities, Alexandra Jones, has issued a warning to policy-makers not to take the resurgence for granted but to support and sustain the need for housing and strong transport links if they don’t want potential residents being put-off.
However, Ms Jones acknowledged the positive side to the boom, saying it offers policy-makers big opportunities to spur on local economies by investing in city centres to attract more jobs and make them better places to live.
She added: “In an era of continued austerity, sustaining the growth in metropolitan living is not only vital for cities, it’s also important for the whole country because stronger city centre economies will generate more tax revenue for the national finances.
“This should be a priority for the Government which can help cities by creating a City Centre Growth fund to improve infrastructure for both residents and businesses in city centres.”
Manchester’s 20 to 29-year-old population grew by a staggering 198 per cent over the ten years, while Liverpool saw a rise of 160 per cent, as the number of jobs available to young professionals rose.
Sheffield, too, saw a 110 per cent growth because of a rise in students, as did Newcastle, according to the research based on 2011 Census data.
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Subscribe nowZombies SHOULD be harder to fight and deal with.
So loot progression in Unturned is terrible still, yes Russia has better and better loot as it goes on, but it doesn't exactly work that way. If I take Russia as an example, the bottom and middle of the maps spawn♥♥♥♥♥♥ while the top spawns ok loot. This means players will ALWAYS run straight to Volk and other locations. Because of this, there are no spawns there, and it's a cluster♥♥♥♥ of people at these military locations. Instead of loot progression, it's just plain old map progression. Here is how to fix this.
Probably the best cause on why this happens is the difficulty of the zombies. They are SO easy to deal with, literally just get a knife and you can loot any location EASILY. Simple enough, zombies should be made harder in general, not just what tier zombie they are. They should be changed in ways such as
- Move a bit faster
- A bit more damage
- Solid player models (you can't run through them, this should be with everything tbh)
- Not as dumb AI
- If in large groups, can pile on top of each other to prevent climbing on obstacles.
- If ONE zombie is alerted next to more zombies, they should all make noise, attracting more
- Zombies should only be stunned by heavy attacks (creates more skill than just click and click, you would have to stun it first to effectively melee it.
Simple enough, make the zombies a lot tougher to kill, especially police and military zombies. I think those zombies should be a LOT faster, be more alerted, and overall tougher to deal with. Military and other good end loot places should have zombies that are almost impossible to deal with using a melee. This forces players to be more cautious and loot other areas before looting these places, they must get an amount of bandages and suitable weapons (small fire arm, etc) before entering. If this was implemented with better loot progressions SPAWNS in the new maps, then it would be perfect. Zombies being more alert would also work perfectly for cities and towns, isn't it supposed to be crowded and dangerous? Because it's not right now, it should be death if a group of zombies was alerted. EVEN BETTER, I think depending on how♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥off or the size of the group of zombies is, they shouldn't stop chasing you - at least for a while. This was in Unturned 2.0 and it worked better. Please do this Nelson, I haven't seen many good additions to the game in a while, and it's due to the lack of paying attention to your community.Image caption A tiny fraction of users were affected by police data requests, said Microsoft
More than 75,000 requests were made by police forces around the world for data on Microsoft users in 2012.
The figures were revealed in Microsoft's first transparency report which detailed how often police forces sought data to aid investigations.
US police forces topped the list of agencies keen to know who created specific images or other content.
In most cases, Microsoft only handed over basic information such as login names and IP addresses.
The transparency report from Microsoft follows similar efforts by Google, Twitter and others to let users know who is seeking data about what people do online.
The requests covered more than 137,000 accounts on Microsoft's many services including Hotmail, Outlook.com, Xbox Live, Skype and others. It was hard to estimate how many individual users that involved, said Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, in a blogpost, because many people ran lots of separate accounts.
Content control
Only 2.1% of the requests involved Microsoft handing over the content people created. This includes documents or images stored on servers or sent via email as well as copies of messages sent through its services. More than 99% of requests for content data came from US law enforcement agencies.
Most of the other requests were for non-content data such as login names, IP addresses or other low-level identifiers. Police forces in five countries - the US, UK, Turkey, Germany and France - made the bulk of these requests.
Finally, about 18% of requests involved Microsoft handing over no data at all, said the report, either because there was no data to be found or the request was not submitted properly.
"While law enforcement requests for information unquestionably are important... only a tiny percentage of users are potentially affected by them," wrote Mr Smith. He estimated that only 0.02% of its users felt the effect of a police request for data.
Microsoft said it would update the report every six months.Trunks (Future)
Alignment: Lawful Good
Born: AGE 766 (~30 years old, physically 34)
Race: Saiyan-Earthling Hybrid
Home: Planet Earth
Battle Power:?????
Occupation: Survivor of Time
Goals: To prevent moar f#@*ing chaos...
Showcased Transformations:
Base, Super Saiyan, Super Saiyan 2, Super Saiyan 3, False Super Saiyan God
Bio:
First and only son of the Saiyan prince, Vegeta, and the heiress of the Capsule Corporation, Bluma. Unlike his present counterpart, he grew up in a world destroyed by Gero's Artificial Humans. He has a fairly different personality due to living his life in fear and without the influence of most his friends and family.
A mysterious character sharing Son Goku's name an appearance arrives on Earth in AGE 796, murdering Earthlings in the name of justice. After a year of harsh battles attempting to stand against Goku Black's fearsome power, Trunks once again flees to the past in AGE 797 to seek help from his friends.
Notes:
This sheet covers Future Trunks during the threat of Goku Black. Due to there being no explanation as to why his hair color was changed to blue in the anime, I've switched it back to purple to remain consistent with himself and the rest of his family in the project.
-*-*Disclaimer*-*-
The series of submissions labeled under the title of DB Redux are part of a fan rewrite of the official series. Anything that you see in the art or description that varies from the original manga or anime sources is most likely intentional. While I appreciate that you are taking the time to look at my gallery and notice these differences, I do not require a comment on what needs correcting because it wasn't "originally like that". Thank you, and please enjoy!
Do not repost, edit or claim this artwork as your own.
Dragon Ball (Z, GT, etc.), copyright to Toriyama Akira, Toei Animation, etc.But the story of 40TW194, and its companion, 37DK76, also seems to be a story of just how forgotten a war’s forgotten heroes can be.
The bird’s skeleton was discovered in 1982 at the 17th-century Surrey home of David Martin as he sought to renovate a chimney. Amid a cascade of pigeon bones, “down came the leg with the red capsule on,” he said in one of many interviews he has given in recent days.
Inside the capsule, he discovered a coded message with crucial clues as to the provenance of the bird. The message, for instance, was marked as a duplicate to a message carried by 37DK76. (The first two numerals indicated the pigeon’s year of birth.) It was addressed to “xo2,” now thought to be code for bomber command.
The fact that two birds had been dispatched with the same message, and that the message was in code, seemed to suggest that it might have been carrying word of some major development.
The location of Mr. Martin’s home in Bletchingley might also be a key to the long-secret message. It is between the site of the Allied landing at the Normandy beaches in 1944 and a famous code-breaking center north of London at Bletchley Park. It is also, Mr. Martin said, near the site of a headquarters established by the British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery at Reigate before the D-Day landings.
“The bird may well have been flying back to Monty’s HQ or Bletchley Park from Nazi-occupied Normandy during the invasion” of 1944, said Colin Hill, the curator of a pigeon exhibit at Bletchley Park, referring to Montgomery by his nickname. The pigeons, he said, routinely accompanied both ground forces and Royal Air Force bomber crews who were told to use the birds to report back their positions if they crash-landed in hostile terrain.
But at first, said Mr. Martin, now 74, and a retired probation officer, no one seemed interested in what might well be a gripping yarn of feathered valor. At the time, the Falklands War was under way. The code-breakers were too busy to worry about pigeon bones. “It wasn’t a story then,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
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Only the community of people who love pigeons — including some who race the birds and are schooled in their wartime history — took an interest and began a campaign over many years to get officials to pay attention.
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what we do, but how we do it: the spirit that animates our actions. A young person who gets involved in “Brave New World’s” government is likely to get sucked into its machinations, its bureaucracy, its ideology. To stand apart from the fray and demand something more requires being something more.
In this instance, ironically enough, both “1984” and “Brave New World” have a powerful, united message for their readers. They remind us of the power of the past, and of the power of words.
‘1984’ Displays the Power of Ancient Things
Not far into “1984,” we discover Winston’s secret rebellion: he has bought a book. And not just any book—an antique diary. Orwell describes Winston’s writing thus:
The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one, furtively and with some difficulty, simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink pencil. Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speakwrite, which was of course impossible for this present purpose.
Orwell’s bibliophilic description captures an idea that has animated many in American culture as of late: there’s a romance in the nature of physical things. There’s a romance in our interactions with them. In the midst of his sterile, cold, saddened world, it is the simple act of putting words onto paper that constitutes Winston’s most powerful rebellion.
Not much later, Winston has a powerful dream. It brings to mind a vision of beauty and belonging that is entirely antithetical to Winston’s current life: “Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.” As the dream fades, writes Orwell, he “woke up with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.”
‘Brave New World’ Depicts The Power Of Virtue
That’s not the only time Shakespeare is referenced in a dystopian work. Indeed, “Brave New World” is full of quotes and references to the British playwright. Its title is derived from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
Near the beginning of the novel, two Londoners venture from their hedonist paradise to a New Mexico “Savage Reservation.” There, they meet John: a young man who has spent every moment reading Shakespeare, the Bible, and other ancient works.
These works are banned among “civilized” worlds. But John’s mind and character have been inescapably shaped by them. He calls himself an “unhappy gentleman” because he cannot reach his full potential in a world that rejects him. All the nobility of love, service, deference, and bravery reside in his heart. But sadly, both at the reservation and back in London, his attempts at noble, gentlemanly living are thwarted at every turn. There is no room in this modern life for such old-fashioned virtues.
When John falls in love with Lenina, he seeks to woo her with all the passionate romance of a Romeo. Oblivious to such virtuous intentions, she thwarts his courtship with her own brazen, lustful advances.
The novel ends with the “Savage” hanging himself. It’s a tragedy—just as Winston’s story is—because there is no room in dystopia for nobility: for the virtues and relationships of the “ancient time,” as Orwell puts it.
Fear Disenchantment as Much as Totalitarianism
If we’re likely to fall prey to anything, it is this: lack of virtue, gentility, and enchantment. And if we lose these things, we lose all the rest—we lose the independence and integrity that constitute members of a strong, accountable republic.
For Winston and the Savage, the enchantment of ancient works and words drew them to a better, more noble life. It beckoned to them, beyond their own bleak reality. It gave them strength to act with passion and conviction.
In both cases, it was books—ancient volumes with tangible presences, with enchanting beauty and winsome words—that spoke to them from their place of emptiness. We too can find comfort and conviction in these objects.
Our Society Endlessly Seeks the New
Our society, like the Savage’s, endlessly pursues the new. We’re obsessed with obtaining the latest iPhone model, the newest sports car, the most exciting new Netflix series. In response, our attention spans shorten; our interest in the serious, the noble, the ancient begins to decline.
Our culture is missing something: something deep, something poignant. Something a bit romantic, even (in the old-fashioned sense of the word). Often, when I read new books, I’m struck by their dimness. The leanness of their meaning, their lack of magic, nuance, and enchantment. As Richard Beck has written in the past, we live in a disenchanted era. Nowhere does that show up more obviously, perhaps, than in our books.
So a return to the past—to Shakespeare and the Bible, to writing with ink on physical paper—is, in many ways, a chance to rekindle the fire of enchantment. The Savage had a moral imagination, a passion. But his society tries to quench this enchantment—and tragically, succeeded.
We Should All Seek to Be ‘Savage’
Perhaps for all of us, the challenge is to stay “savage” in a world that wants to tame our passions and poetry. The challenge is to keep alive the noble fierceness that should constitute citizens who are passionate and principled.
Archaic and ancient things are often scoffed at among the world’s authorities and tastemakers. “Privacy, love, and friendship,” gentlemanliness and virtue and nobility—these are things we need, now more than ever.
So read “1984.” Read “Brave New World.” And don’t just beware the machinations of the totalitarian state. Beware the disenchantment of our age. See what true rebellion ought to look like—and seek to be “savage.”Dubuque Fighting Saints defenseman Sasha Larocque has committed to play college hockey at Ohio State University beginning next season.
Larocque has recorded two points (1g, 1a) in six games for the Saints this season. He netted his first USHL career goal in the 5-4 overtime win against Youngstown on October 17th. The 20-year-old from Calgary, Alberta is also serving as one of the team’s alternate captains this season.
The defenseman came to Dubuque after being selected by the team in Phase Two of the 2014 USHL Draft. He previously played for Grand Prairie in the Alberta Junior Hockey League.
Larocque is joined by Saints teammate Michael Davies who is also committed to Ohio State University. Ten other current USHL players are also committed to the school; Tanner Laczynski (Chicago Steel), Miguel Fidler (Lincoln Stars), Sam McCormick (Madison Capitols), Mason Jobst (Muskegon Lumberjacks), Michael Latorella (Muskegon Lumberjacks), Bradley Johnson (Omaha Lancers), Dakota Joshua (Sioux Falls Stampede), Tyler Nanne (Sioux Falls Stampede), Gordi Myer (Tri-City Storm), and John Wiitala (Waterloo Black Hawks).
Ohio State University is a member of the Big Ten and has 17 USHL alumni on the roster this season; Darik Angeli (Tri-City/Chicago/Sioux City), Clark Cristofoli (Sioux Falls), Matt Johnson (Tri-City/Waterloo), Alex McLean (Omaha Lancers), Nick Oddo (Omaha/Cedar Rapids), Tyler Lundey (Dubuque Fighting Saints), Anthony Greco (Des Moines/Waterloo), Blake Doerring (Des Moines/Fargo), Nicholas Schilkey (Green Bay Gamblers), Drew Brevig (Sioux Falls Stampede), Dave Gust (Fargo Force), Christian Frey (Dubuque/Tri-City/Des Moines), Matthew Weis (Green Bay Gamblers), Christian Lampasso (Lincoln/Sioux City/Des Moines), Luke Stork (Youngstown Phantoms), Janik Moser (Muskegon Lumberjacks), and Victor Bjorkung (Chicago/Fargo).
USHL stats – Sasha Larocque
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, the USHL celebrates its 13th season as the nation's only Tier I junior hockey league in 2014-15. A record 35 players were chosen in the 2014 NHL Draft and more than 300 players on team rosters last season committed to NCAA Division I schools, further establishing the USHL as the world’s foremost producer of junior hockey talent. For more information, visit us on the web at www.USHL.com or visit the League’s social media platforms, including Facebook (/ushlhockey), twitter (@USHL), and YouTube (/ushlinteractive). Fans can also watch USHL action all season long, live or on-demand via FASTHockey (ushl.fasthockey.com).
It’s not just hockey. It’s the USHL.Please enable Javascript to watch this video
ZIONSVILLE, Ind. -- Federal authorities raided the home of Subway spokesman Jared Fogle on Tuesday morning in connection with a child pornography investigation.
FBI sources told WXIN state and federal investigators served warrants at Fogle’s home in connection with the investigation.
The raid started around 6:30 a.m. Tuesday. An evidence truck could be seen parked in the driveway. Investigators from the FBI and Indiana State Police are also at the scene.
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Earlier this year, Russell Taylor, the former director of the Jared Foundation started by Fogle, was arrested in a child pornography case. He was accused of possessing and producing child pornography.
Investigators said a search of Taylor’s home turned up more than 500 videos with images of child pornography.
In May, Taylor unsuccessfully tried to kill himself while in jail.
Fogle said the foundation severed all ties with Taylor following the arrest. Investigators wouldn’t say if Tuesday’s raid was connected to that case.
Fogle gained national fame after attributing massive weight loss to eating Subway sandwiches. He was a freshman at Indiana University at the time. He later became a visible presence in Subway ad campaigns, pitching the restaurant’s sandwiches and touting their health benefits.
Subway has released a statement in connection with the Jared Fogle investigation
"We are shocked about the news and believe it is related to a prior investigation of a former Jared Foundation employee. We are very concerned and will be monitoring the situation closely. We don't have any more details at this point."
And later in the day, Subway tweeted that they would be suspending their relationship with Fogle
Subway & Jared Fogle have agreed to suspend their relationship due to the current investigation. Jared is cooperating with authorities. — SUBWAY® (@SUBWAY) July 7, 2015
Please enable Javascript to watch this videoLycan
One of the most ancient and feared of all curses, lycanthropy can transform the most civilized humanoid into a ravening beast. In its natural humanoid form, a creature cursed by lycanthropy appears as its normal self. Over time, however, many lycanthropes acquire, features suggestive of their animal form. On close inspection, its eyes show a faint spark of unnatural intelligence and might glow red in the dark. Evil lycanthropes hide among normal folk, emerging in animal form at night to spread terror and bloodshed, especially under a full moon. Good lycanthropes are reclusive and uncomfortable around other civilized creatures, often living alone in wilderness areas far from villages and towns.
Some individuals see little point in fighting the curse and accept what they are. With time and experience, they learn to master their shapechanging ability and can assume beast form or hybrid form at will. Most lycanthropes that embrace their bestial natures succumb to bloodlust, becoming evil, opportunistic creatures that prey on the weak.
Curse of Lycanthropy. A humanoid creature can be afflicted with the curse of lycanthropy after being wounded by a lycanthrope, or if one or both of its parents are lycanthropes.
The Lycan Level Features Shapeshifting 1st Shapeshifting, Lycan Form 1 2nd Feral Senses 1 3rd Frenzy 2 4th Feral Mind, Ability Score Improvement 2 5th Fury 3
Prerequisites
In order to become a Lycan, you must meet the following prerequisites (in addition to the multiclassing prerequisites for your existing class):
1
• Constitution 13. Lycanthropy takes its tole on the cursed only those with great fortitude can live through its burden.
1
• Wisdom and Charisma 13. Willing yourself and maintaining your mind over the beast requires a strong mind in order to bury deep the bestial urges raging inside.
1
• Lycanthropy. You must be afflicted with the curse of lycanthropy.
1
• Character level 5th. Lycanthropy wears down those that are able to withstand its overwelming bloodlust, only the truly strong and take advantage of it's curse you must be a 5th-levelcharacter before you can gain levels in the Lycan prestige class.
1
Class Features
As a Lycan, you gain the following class features
Hit Points
Hit Dice: 1d12 per Lycan level
1d12 per Lycan level Hit Points at Higher Levels: 1d12 (or 7) + your Constituion modifier per Lycan level after 1st
Equipment
The Lycan prestige class does not grant any special equipment.
Shapeshifting
You can use your action to magically assume your lycan form. You can stay in a Lycan form for a number of hours equal to your Lycan level. You then revert to your normal form. You can use this feature a number of times indicated by the shapeshifting table. You can revert to your normal form earlier by using a bonus action on your turn, You automatically revert if you fall unconscious, drop to 0 hit points, or die. While you are transformed, the following rules apply:Your editorial on the French elections (11 April), with its encouraging mention of the rise of the higher tax and spend candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, failed to mention possibly his biggest electoral draw: the fact that he is a leftwing protectionist. Prior to the 2012 election, polls showed that over 80% of French across the political spectrum thought that free trade had a negative impact on employment. So it’s not just immigration that is fuelling ever-broadening support for Marine Le Pen, it is also the fact that she too is an overt protectionist.
These trends have obviously not been lost on the unholy trinity of free trade pushers the IMF, WTO, and the World Bank (Report, 11 April). Having forced nations across the world to accept their open-borders, export-led growth mantra they are now busy crying crocodile tears for the “left behind”, the inevitable result of their policies. They still rail against protectionism, despite the fact that if it has a progressive end goal, it could enhance the economic and social conditions of the globally disadvantaged.
In terms of the relevance of all this to the UK, and at the risk of intruding on public grief, what are the Labour party’s views on these under-publicised protectionist trends? The likes of Trump and Le Pen have been able to turn it into a politically potent and successful issue, so why are so many progressives over here absent from this pivotal debate?
Colin Hines
East Twickenham, Middlesex
• The attempt by the World Bank, IMF and WTO to defend the role of “free” trade merely serves to underline their role as advocates of a neoliberal order that impoverishes the many and benefits the few. The call for a “robust global trading system based on the WTO” is aimed at locking in countries to a system that removes decision-making from sovereign states and places it instead in the boardrooms of transnational corporations. When their report states that trade is good for growth, what they really mean is that it is good for corporate balance sheets. And when they refer to helping those “left behind”, they are inviting us to believe in discredited theories of trickle-down economics which holds that what is good for the rich is good for the poor.
As we move into the uncertainties of a new post-Brexit trading regime, it is incumbent upon us to develop alternative models to outdated concepts that automatically equate GDP growth with increased wellbeing. And it’s also time to not only challenge the WTO’s direction of travel but also to recognise it for what it is and campaign for its abolition, replacing it instead with a consensual model of economic integration based on the needs and aspirations of independent states and their regional priorities. As Donald Trump preaches protectionism, he would do well to heed his far wiser predecessor, Thomas Jefferson, when he said: “Peace commerce and honest friendship with all nations … entangling alliances with none.”
Bert Schouwenburg
International officer, GMB
• We must not lose sight of the downsides to globalisation and world trade. The rampant consumerism which is driving economic growth is certainly lifting incomes for some while also lining the pockets of global corporations. But only recently (Pollutionwatch, 10 April) you reported that our consumption of Chinese products causes about 55,000 early deaths from air pollution across China every year. While the three organisations say that they want to pay attention to disadvantaged individuals and communities, they will not be able to “lift up those who have been left behind” if they are dead.
Fiona Carnie
Bath
• “We worked together to ensure that the great recession did not become another great depression”, says Christine Lagarde of the IMF. The truth is quite the opposite – they and their supporters in the US, the World Bank and the WTO, brought about the crash in 2008 with their insistence on deregulation of the finance business. The aftermath of 2008 is still penalising the poor and what used to be the better-off, both in the rich and poor worlds.
Michael McLoughlin
Wallington, Surrey
• Doughnut economics is very compelling, but George Monbiot (Opinion, 12 April) and, presumably, Kate Raworth, seem not to have encountered A Blueprint for Survival. This remarkable document was published by the Club of Rome, with spadework by MIT, in 1969. It postulated that pollution would end matters if the world proceeded on its continual pursuit of economic growth. That hasn’t happened, but not for our want of trying. But the important message was how to create a no-growth, vibrant successful economy by pouring all the world’s efforts into recycling, making things that lasted as long as possible and general encouragement of invention centred on conservation of resources and environment.
I and my colleagues teaching general studies in FE spent some enlightening weeks with our students exploring the validity of the proposals. I also wrote to my MP asking what the government’s attitude was; I got a nondescript reply. And that’s where matters shuddered to a permanent halt. I do hope Kate Raworth has better luck for all our sakes.
Ted Clark
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/lettersEver since there have been men, those men have looked at other men and said to themselves, I want what that guy has. It has always been the case that some men, by dint of noble birth or symmetric features or an effortless sense of humor, have had the most access to sex, resources, and society’s esteem.
It’s only been fairly recently, though, that we’ve come up with a tidy, sciencey-sounding taxonomy that can explain why some men — and for the purposes of a conversation that is about attracting women, we’re talking about straight ones — get what they want while others toil endlessly with little to show for it. “Alpha males” are the winners, and “betas” are always a step, if not several laps, behind. (And don’t even ask about omega males.) And while the alpha male/beta male model sometimes feels intuitively correct, and has influenced many, many internet-age kids, make no mistake: It’s dying, even if its adherents are louder than ever.
There are many definitions of “alpha male,” but the term, as it has most commonly been interpreted recently, involves a level of dominance: Alphas get their way because they know how to, because they know to not back down. To butcher the old expression, women respond to alphas’ strength by wanting them, men respond to it by wanting to be them. But a liaison, relationship, or friendship is only going to occur on the alpha’s terms: He has neither the inclination to compromise, nor any need to, since he can always get — let’s be honest, take — what he wants. Alphas offer few wasted words — you won’t see them sputtering some nonsense about their feelings, or begging others to like them. To the outside observer, everything comes easily to them.
The concept of the alpha male comes from the animal kingdom, and interest in the sorts of animal hierarchies led by alphas picked up greatly in the second half of the 20th century. Google Scholar can only provide a rough estimate, of course, but it returns 11 research mentions of “alpha male” between 1900 and 1950, and about 2,220 for the period between 1950 and 2000. Google Books shows a similar trend: The term barely existed in books until 1960 — though in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, first published in 1932, human beings were assigned, from fetushood on, to a caste ranging from alpha to epsilon — and since then has been on a mostly consistent upswing.
A solid chunk of that upswing comes from primatology research — researchers have long been fascinated by the complicated social structures of chimps, gorillas, and our other evolutionary cousins. The alpha chimp and the silverback gorilla, physically imposing as they often are (alpha chimps have been known to rip tree stumps out of the ground in terrifying displays of dominance), have come to symbolize in the public imagination a natural order that favors a single dominant male “winner.”
Even after discussion of alpha males was well established in various fields of animal behavior, though, the concept was rarely applied to humans. What changed that, at least in part, was the release of the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal’s book Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes in 1982. “I don’t think the term alpha male was in use outside of primatology when I wrote Chimpanzee Politics,” de Waal told me in an email.
Part of the appeal of de Waal’s best seller, which told the story of the six years he spent observing a colony of captive chimps in the Netherlands, was the idea that it could offer insights into human life, too, and naturally one of the messages that echoed the loudest had to do with alpha-chimp behavior. One Chicago Tribune article, for example, flipped back and forth between scenes from de Waal’s research and human scenarios from a real-life office, with a natural focus on males near the top of the hierarchy grappling for power. “The startling thing about chimpanzee corporate life is how much it resembles our own,” remarked the article’s author, Duncan Maxwell Anderson, in a sentence that only makes sense if you don’t think too hard about it. He also pointed out that “a Dutch consulting firm … ordered 100 copies [of Chimpanzee Politics] and gave them to all the firm’s clients and employees.” Indeed, the book’s promotional materials note that it was “acclaimed not only by primatologists for its scientific achievement but also by politicians, business leaders, and social psychologists for its remarkable insights into the most basic human needs and behaviors.”
Still, the concept of the human alpha didn’t quite break through to the mainstream — it took a couple more decades for that to happen. As late as the mid-1990s popular outlets wrote about alpha males in an introductory manner. “Take a powder, sensitive guy,” went a USA Today article from 1996. “The new ideal man — at least, if you believe the latest issue of Esquire — is a superior fellow the mag dubs the ‘alpha male.’ And he’s putting the ‘man’ back in manhood.” Naturally, there were instances of backlash too, with one 1998 article on Silicon Valley alphas in the San Jose Mercury News offering a cautionary note: “[B]eware, say researchers who specialize in the study of these so-called ‘alpha males’ — the business world’s top dogs. The same traits prized by their colleagues could just as easily undercut their personal lives, contributing to family stress, higher odds of infidelity, divorce and overwork.”
It was Al Gore, though, who really helped the idea of male alphas and betas blow up in the 1990s. In late 1999, Time magazine, reporting on Gore’s hiring of Naomi Wolf as a consultant, reported that “Wolf has argued internally that Gore is a ‘Beta male’ who needs to take on the ‘Alpha male’ in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog.” This notion — that Gore was trying to step out of the hypermasculine shadow of Bill Clinton — proved irresistible to the media. “Can Gore Go Alpha?” wondered the Times in a 1999 article which then then offered some thoughts from experts on how Gore could achieve the alphaness he was seeking. One of those experts suggested that he was just too loyal a husband and father to be an alpha: “He stays with the same woman, he likes his kids. He’s photographed with the grandchild. He doesn’t hide his age, He’s perfectly decent, and real men aren’t perfectly decent.” Naturally, Wolf didn’t take well to the narrative that she was trying to turn Gore into an aggressive bulldog. “Naomi Wolf, the feminist writer turned feminist campaign consultant, disputes the notion that she has been giving Al Gore secret lessons in how to bare his teeth, growl and get elected leader of the pack,” led a Times story a few days days later — Wolf claimed she had only mentioned the term once.
So, by the dawn of the 21st century, a lot of people were aware, at least in passing, of the concept of a human alpha male. But it was still something of an abstraction; it still hadn’t quite taken hold as a goal that normal guys could reach for. In 2005, The Game, Neil Strauss’s mega-bestselling account of his time in the pickup-artist community, changed that — in the long run, it turned alphadom into a real-world, achievable goal for perhaps millions of men.
A big part of the reason it made such an epochal splash was that Strauss himself is very much a normal guy — a schlubby writer who never had much success with the ladies. But the adoption of some simple wisdom changes that. Early on in the book, Strauss recounts the lessons he learns from Mystery, a pickup artist famous for, among other things, encouraging his protégés to “peacock” by wearing garishly ridiculous clothing. Mystery explains to Strauss and the other would-be Casanovas what it means to be alpha: “Besides confidence and a smile, we learned [from Mystery], the other characteristics of an alpha male were being well-groomed, possessing a sense of humor, connecting with people, and being seen as the social center of a room,” Strauss writes. (Betas, on the other hand — and this definition seems consistent wherever you go — are frequently ignored or mocked by women, viewed by their peers as pushovers, and rarely get what they want, partly because they’re scared to truly go after it.)
Thanks in part to these lessons, Strauss is soon enjoying what what can only be described as a full-blown sexual extravaganza. This became the Ur-narrative of the alpha-male movement: Betas — even pathetic, helpless-seeming betas — can become alphas if they put enough time into it. Whether through neuro-linguistic programming or nutritional supplements or body-language training or whatever the other alpha-izing trick du jour is, there’s always something that can be done to improve the situation, and it always involves becoming more assertive and/or imposing and/or dominant.
This idea proved to be catnip for men hoping to achieve the level of success — sexual, career, etc., but mostly sexual — that seemed to come so agonizingly easily to other men. The notion of the alpha male took all sorts of different frustrations and dysfunctions and envies and swept them together into a simple binary. Either you’re alpha or you’re not, and if you aren’t, boy, is a lot of failure going to spring from that deficiency. The good news is that it can (usually) be fixed: “If you’ve read the traits and characteristics of a beta male and find that you fit the mold, understand that being a beta male is a choice,” notes one guide.
But how does one choose to break these patterns? What does it mean to become an alpha? Self-proclaimed experts have always disagreed about this, and that’s where the internet has stepped in. Over the last 20 years — but particularly since The Game’s release — a vast ecosystem of alpha-oriented online communities have popped up to teach men how to crawl out of the sad pit of their betadom. All draw on Strauss-style narratives of pathetic schlubs metamorphosing into sparkling alphas (sometimes, in the case of the attire Mystery favors, literally sparkling).
There’s endless appetite for this stuff: Young men desperately need to know whether they are alpha and, if not, what they can do to avert the slow-motion catastrophe of perpetual betadom. That’s why large segments of the internet have turned into a thick sludge of alpha-male content. A quick Google search for “How to be an alpha male” returns 16.5 million results where you can get you information on how to be an alpha male (from “The Attraction Institute”); read signs you’re not an alpha male (according to AskMen, non-alphas panic in a crisis, suck up to their superiors, and let women pick up the check); et cetera ad infinitum. Amazon’s book collection offers endless opportunities to improve your alpha game.
All this content has some breezy science affixed to it, of course — in 2016, what would a self-improvement plan be without some empirical-sounding buzzwords to throw around? In the case of alpha-dominance, the natural corresponding field is evolutionary psychology, or the study of how ancient evolutionary impulses forged millennia ago affect our behavior in the present day. It’s a real discipline with real insights to offer, but the version of it embraced by the alphateers is a bastardized, pseudoscientific strain wielded mostly by people seeking to reinforce traditional roles of masculinity and femininity, and the latter has fed into the former: Seek out a guide to alpha-maleness, and stories about how because something something something survival on the savannah millennia ago, women are drawn to physically and socially dominant men won’t be far behind.
These story lines, based as they are on misinterpretations and hysterical overextrapolations of our “natural” gender roles, feed rather fantastical visions of what it means to be a man, an adult, or both. Minutes after diving into the most alpha-obsessed pockets of the internet, you will come across stuff that reads as though the authors have rarely, if ever, interacted with other human adults in the real world: “Yes, you have to be dettached a bit [sic], put yourself first, cater to your own needs first, but an alpha is naturally a leader of a community, a leader of both men and women, and so he needs to have a certain level of empathy towards others,” goes a post entitled “Lessons from evolutionary psychology: traits of the alpha male” on TheRedPill, a rather infamous subreddit dedicated to “Discussion of sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.” The poster continues: “He has always been the protector of others. He is the one who was in charge of ensuring their survival.” (Wait, remind me whether we’re talking about humans or chimps again?)
The appeals to nature and the wild show up again and again — a big chunk of being alpha, readers are told, has to do with dominating others. And to dominate others, it’s important not to come across as a pussy, because in those chimp colonies the pussy-apes always get punked. In his second rule for “How to Become a More Dominant Man,” Mike Cernovich, a well-known and rather acerbic manosphere presence with 45,000 Twitter followers, tells his readers to “Stop smiling so much, you goofs.” “Girls always tell me I need to smile more,” he writes. “Well if girls think I am so ugly with my Mr. Frowny Face, why are they always talking to me and grabbing my arms and telling me how great my back feels when they hug me? I smile when around my god daughters and my dog. Otherwise I don’t see any need to smile like some goof.”
Did you notice the mixed signals? Just a few paragraphs ago, Mystery told us to smile. Which is it? This sort of contradiction is a common theme in alpha-land. Should you smile, or no? Should you confidently approach women, or ignore them, making yourself out to be the center of the room until they come to you? How much empathy should you exhibit? Different peddlers of alpha offer different answers. These inconsistencies raise the question of just how rigorous and scientific the idea of an alpha male really is.
For most straight males who grew up in the internet age, at least some aspect of the alpha-male idea has become deeply internalized. And kids caught in the wrong place at the wrong time — those who don’t have access to a leavening view of masculinity, women, and so on — can end up tumbling pretty far down the rabbit hole — again, just go to TheRedPill on Reddit.
Luckily, some researchers have started debunking and complicating the concept of the alpha male in important ways. The best such dissection was written by the cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman a couple years ago. In his essay, Kaufman takes the reader through a small pile of the social-science literature on masculinity, relationships, and dominance, and comes to the conclusion that when you actually review the literature carefully, a much more nuanced, less Neanderthalic portrait of successful masculinity emerges:
The dominant male who is demanding, violent, and self-centered is not considered attractive to most women, whereas the dominant male who is assertive and confident is considered attractive. As the researchers suggest, “Men who dominate others because of leadership qualities and other superior abilities and who therefore are able and willing to provide for their families quite possibly will be preferred to potential partners who lack these attributes.”
Their results also suggest that sensitivity and assertiveness are not opposites. In fact, further research suggests that the combination of kindness and assertiveness might just be the most attractive pairing. Across three studies, Lauri Jensen-Campbell and colleagues found that it wasn’t dominance alone, but rather the interaction of dominance and pro-social behaviors, that women reported were particularly sexually attractive. In other words, dominance only increased sexual attraction when the person was already high in agreeableness and altruism.
The key insight here is that prestige matters — it shouldn’t surprise anyone that women are most attracted to men who carve out an impressive niche for themselves — but there are many routes to it. And anyone claiming that kindness is a bad move doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
This idea that masculine worth can only be earned through the demonstration and projection of strength isn’t new — it’s been around since the first time one Neanderthal bashed another Neanderthal’s head in with a third Neanderthal’s skull. What is new is the pseudoscientific packaging drawn from barely relevant animal studies, from misunderstandings of how hormones work (alpha-peddlers are obsessed with hormones, specifically testosterone), from overblown evo-psych claims.
On the one hand, it makes sense that boys are drawn to this oversimplified model, particularly because it feeds into so much of the ambient culture surrounding masculinity and femininity. But on the other hand, it’s a bit strange, simply because these days they are awash in alternative models: Michael Cera and Jesse Eisenberg and Seth Rogen are legitimate movie stars. Kendrick Lamar’s breakthrough album involved gang-banging, yes, but in many of the verses he adopted the persona not of an alpha gangster, but of an exhausted and scared kid traumatized by the gunfire around him. Drake and Kanye are frequently, openly — quite ostentatiously, in the latter’s case — vulnerable.
If the goal of being alpha is to get access to women, prestige, and money, it can’t be the case that these men aren’t alpha in any sense that could possibly matter. And they’re reflecting trends one can observe at every level of society, not just in the superstar outliers. Looking at the scope of American masculinity from Friday-night football heroics in Texas to art galleries in hipster districts, there’s probably never been a time when there were more ways to “win” as a male.
And yet the hardline alpha-worshippers are not only hanging on — if anything, they’re inflamed and emboldened. Online, they seem to be as loud and angry as ever. As Jonathan Chait wrote this week, Republicans have rediscovered the cult of masculinity thanks to Donald Trump. On Twitter, grown-man Trump supporters are unironically calling other men whom they perceive to be weak-kneed or effete “cucks” (naturally, not supporting Donald Trump is one of the primary symptoms of being a cuck).
Any time there’s a reconfiguration of gender roles, religion, or anything else viewed as a bedrock for how society is supposed to be organized, that reconfiguration is going to bring a backlash. That seems to be what’s going on now. Given that some of the ideas that drive the alpha-male archetype have been around for millenia, it’s unrealistic to expect they’ll go away anytime soon — there will always be men, and particularly frustrated young men seeking out a simple narrative to explain their failures, who are drawn to this idea. So the most likely outcome isn’t some mass enlightenment in which the world |
do not consider the generalization of Lock to also contain a value.) At runtime, the lock is represented as two closure types, indicating locked and unlocked states. The locked closure contains a waiting queue, containing threads which are waiting for the lock.
When a thread takes out a free lock, it adds the lock to a (GC'd) held locks set associated with the thread. When it returns the lock, the lock is removed from this set.
When a thread attempts to take a busy lock, it blocks itself (waiting for a lock) and adds itself to the waiting queue of the locked closure.
Critically, references to the lock are treated as weak pointers when the closure is locked. (Only the pointer from the held lock set is strong.) Intuitively, just because a pointer to the lock doesn’t mean you can unlock; the only person who can unlock it is the thread who has the lock in their held locks set.
If a thread attempts to take out a lock on a dead weak pointer, it is deadlocked.
Theorem. Any set of threads in a waits-for cycle is unreachable, if there are no other pointers to thread besides the pointer from the waiting queue of the locks in the cycle.
Proof. Consider a single thread in the cycle: we show that the only (strong) pointer to it is from the previous thread in the cycle. When a thread is blocked, it is removed from the run queue (which counts as a GC root). Given the assumption, the only pointer to the thread is from the waiting queue of the lock it is blocked on. We now consider pointers to the lock it is blocked on. As this lock is busy, all pointers to it are weak, except for the pointer from the thread which is holding the lock. But this is exactly the previous thread in the cycle. ■
At the cost of a weak-pointer dereference when a lock is taken out, we can now achieve perfect deadlock detection. Deadlock will be detected as soon as a garbage collection runs that detects the dead cycle of threads. (At worst, this will be the next major GC.)
Why might this be of interest? After all, normally, it is difficult to recover from a deadlock, so while accurate deadlock reporting might be nice-to-have, it is by no means necessary. One clue comes from a sentence in Koskinen and Herlihy's paper Dreadlocks: Efficient Deadlock Detection: “an application that is inherently capable of dealing with abortable lock requests...is software transactional memory (STM).” If you are in an STM transaction, deadlock is no problem at all; just rollback one transaction, breaking the cycle. Normally, one does not take out locks in ordinary use of STM, but this can occur when you are using a technique like transactional boosting (from the same authors; the relationship between the two papers is no coincidence!)
Exercise for the reader, formulate a similar GC scheme for MVars restricted to be 1-place channels. (Hint: split the MVar into a write end and a read end.)The popular home-sharing website Airbnb is heading to federal court Thursday to wage a legal battle against its hometown of San Francisco. The preliminary injunction hearing is part of a lawsuit filed by Airbnb in June that aims to block a new San Francisco ordinance that would force home-sharing websites, like Airbnb, to remove illegal rentals that are not registered with the city. Under the new law, the city would be able to issue hefty fines to home-sharing companies if they do not remove unregistered listings. Investigative Reporter Bigad Shaban reports in a story that first aired on Oct. 5, 2016. (Published Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2016)
The popular home-sharing website Airbnb is heading to federal court Thursday to wage a legal battle against its hometown of San Francisco. The preliminary injunction hearing is part of a lawsuit filed by Airbnb in June that aims to block a new San Francisco ordinance that would force home-sharing websites, like Airbnb, to remove illegal rentals that are not registered with the city. Under the new law, the city would be able to issue hefty fines to home-sharing companies if they do not remove unregistered listings.
HOSTING REQUIREMENTS IN SAN FRANCISCO INCLUDE:
Register as a business with the city of San Francisco
Sign up for an in person appointment with the Office of Short Term Rentals (1-2 day wait)
You will need a Business Registration Certificate, valid ID, proof of liability insurance
Fill out a registration application ($50 fee)
Average 3-week wait to have your application approved
San Francisco Supervisor David Campos believes the city is facing a housing crisis with rent prices skyrocketing across the city. Campos says sites like Airbnb may contribute to the decline of affordable housing and wants home sharing websites to take responsibility for their thousands of unregistered users.
“It doesn't matter [if] you are a small business or a $25 billion company like Airbnb, you have to play by the rules,” Campos told NBC Bay Area. “That's really what this is ultimately about, and that's why San Francisco is not going to be intimidated by what is essentially a bully tactic on the part of this company.”
Since February 2015, anyone in San Francisco wanting to rent out their home for less than 30 days is required to apply for a $50 permit from the Office of Short Term Rentals every two years.
But an NBC Bay Area Investigation in May found that hosts largely ignored the registration process. According to figures from Airbnb and the Office of Short Term Rentals, at least 82 percent of hosts failed to register with the city.
“Folks have been robbing people of that housing, and Airbnb has been driving the getaway car, and enough is enough,” said Campos during a San Francisco supervisors meeting back in June.
After NBC Bay Area’s Investigation, Campos and other members of the Board of Supervisors approved a new law that would allow the city to charge home-sharing companies up to a thousand dollars per day if they allowed unregistered users to continue to post their rentals online.
Airbnb fought back, slapping the city with an 18-page lawsuit that accused San Francisco of violating the company’s First Amendment rights of commercial speech. Airbnb also argued it would be a “significant burden” to verify whether all of its users are registered with the city.
Click Here to View Full Lawsuit
The new penalties were set to take effect in July, but San Francisco put enforcement on hold pending Airbnb’s lawsuit.
David Owen heads policy strategy for Airbnb and says the city’s registration process for hosts is impractical and too complicated for all users to comply.
“This is a new activity, it's a new economy and the city can and should be able to develop a simpler much more innovative process to enable folks to rent out their home for a few nights out of the year without going through a process that takes six, eight weeks,” Owen said. “[The process] requires endless amounts of paperwork, endless amounts of interaction with a mounting list of new city agencies that seems to grow almost by the month.”
While Airbnb is asking for a preliminary injunction to stall the city’s new law, it is unclear whether the judge will take several days to rule on the issue or potentially announce a decision during Thursday’s hearing.
Meanwhile, the $50 registration fee for renters is expected to increase to $250 in November to cover the costs of operating the Office of Short Term Rentals. Last year, taxpayers had to shell out $413,004 to keep the program going, according to an analysis by the San Francisco Controller’s Office.
Owen said Airbnb would like to work with the city to revise its registration process; while Supervisor Campos wants the company to respect city law.
“At the crux of the housing crisis is this question of will San Francisco continue to have a middle class,” Campos said. “If the court rules against the city and basically says you city government have no way of protecting the housing stock, the answer could very well be … there will be no middle class in San Francisco.”NASCAR is planning on making significant engine package changes to extend the life of Sprint Cup powerplants and reduce horsepower. And along with engine changes, there likely will be aerodynamic and tire changes for the Cup cars in the future as well.
That’s the word from NASCAR Vice President of Competition and Racing Development Robin Pemberton, which was confirmed on Tuesday by NASCAR Chairman Brian France in an interview with Sirius XM NASCAR Radio.
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In an exclusive interview with FOXSports.com on March 22 at Auto Club Speedway, Pemberton said the sanctioning body has had four meetings so far with representatives from Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota and race teams about how to implement those changes. No consensus has been reached yet, according to Pemberton, but discussions are ongoing in advance of making the changes.
Although Pemberton declined to specify how many horsepower NASCAR is looking to cut, sources familiar with the discussions said the reduction would be in the neighborhood of 75 to 100 horsepower. Currently, NASCAR Sprint Cup Series engines make about 860-900 horsepower at most tracks.
Check out Tom Jensen’s full story on the proposed engine changes and listen to France’s comments in the following video clip:The UK Government’s decision to spend an estimated £10m on the ‘state funeral’ for former PM Margaret Thatcher faced fresh controversy today. We now know the government has been rejecting thousands of applications for Pauper Funerals made on behalf of ordinary UK pensioners who have died alone without money left to pay for their own burial. It seems Thatcher might be the only pensioner the UK government will support to die with dignity.
Rise in Pauper Funerals
Those of the Thatcherite persuasion will often be heard raising the issues of the Winter of Discontent as the ultimate failure of the socialist idea of government. The common cry goes ‘we couldn’t even bury our dead’. Whilst bodies were left unburied due to strike in 1978, they are being left unburied due to poverty in 2013.
There was a 6.9% rise in requests for the Government Funereal Fund to bury pensioners last year. The government rejected over half of all applications made. Even those who were successful won an average £1,217, whilst average funereal costs have risen to £3,091.
To put this in some perspective, the UK government could have buried almost one thousand pensioners who died in poverty this year, for what it is paying to bury a millionaire former PM who died in her bed at the Ritz hotel.
This is not the first year that the government has done these pensioners out of a decent send off either. The Department of Work and Pensions rejected 34,000 applications for funereal support in 2011, a rise of 7%.
The problem is only set to worsen, with the death rate likely to rise by 17% each year for the next 15 years and funereal costs skyrocketing 71% in the last 9 years.
It is bad enough that our elderly people are unable to die in dignity, but increasingly the final years of life are spent watching the pennies and waiting to die.
Pensioner Poverty
Today, one in every six (1.8m) UK pensioners lives in poverty, whilst a further 1.2m live on the edge of poverty.
Pensioner poverty did not suddenly become an issue as a result of ideological austerity. Pensioners have been having a tough time for a long time. The number of pensioners living in poverty fell in 1997/8 and again in 2004/5 but not improved significantly since. However, the Coalition government will spend £250m less on older people between 2010-15 than was spent between 2004-5 whilst the number of people over 85 has risen by two thirds, to 630,000.
At the same time, the cost of living for pensioners has risen 25% over the last five years.
The cost of living is going up, the number of elderly people is going up, and the support given to them is going down, rapidly. There is only one outcome to this policy: rising poverty in old age.
Crisis of Care
With the population of elderly people rising as more of us are lucky enough to make it to old age, managing down the costs of care home places and in home care, whilst ensuring the highest standards of care should be a central policy of any government. However, the coalition policies seem to be achieving quite the opposite aim.
In the UK today over 90% of all care home provision (up from 61% in 1990) to elderly people is in the independent/private sector, after the public sector was encouraged to outsource provision in an effort to cut costs. The same period has seen an astronomical rise is the cost of care home places. The average cost of a single room in a care home has risen to over £27,000 a year. This is higher than the average UK annual wage (£26,000) and more than double the average annual pension income of £13,208. In fact since 2011, care home costs have risen at twice the rate of inflation, whilst standards of care have slipped.
As a result, the homes this generation bought under Thatcher are not nest eggs for surviving relatives, but simply collateral. It is estimated that 40,000 elderly people a year are selling their homes for just this purpose, in aims to cover the average £100,000 care home costs to cover the final years of their lives.
Whilst the Coalition plan to implement a £75,000 cap in the contributions a person makes to their care home costs, a) they have stalled the policy until after the next election and b) it won’t include accommodation costs, which are the bulk of the issue. This is no help at all.
One might expect that for these breathtaking sums we might have the finest care homes in the world. Yet, last year the regulatory body for the UKs care homes (The Care Quality Commission) published a damning report that showed that more than half of all elderly and people with disabilities in care homes were being denied basic care.
The report showed that people suffering incontinence were waiting more than two weeks for a consultation on their condition in more than 40% of care homes surveyed. One might think perhaps this was some failing, but this was classed as success! Two in every five Homes surveyed set themselves a target of 90 days (that’s three months!), to make such a basic check up for a resident.
More worrying is that the data used for the study only covers 2010, so does not even take into account the sweeping cuts implemented since. This is the sorry state of care the elderly lived in prior to the ideological austerity we have seen sweeping the UKs public services.
Indications suggest things have become worse; over 40 care homes were closed down by the Care Quality Commission last year for providing sub standard care including: verbal & physical abuse of patients, medicines not being managed safely, poor sanitary conditions and a lack of medical and nursing care. Deaths like that of 81 year old Gloria Foster also provide a damning verdict on a privatised system of care, which simply doesn’t.
Turning Our Backs on the Elderly
During this period of imposed national mourning, there has been much ado about those who dare to criticise either Thatcher herself, the legacy of her ideology and policy, or the state funded pomp and military honour being applied to her send off.
The police yesterday ‘approved’ plans for those wishing to express their dissent to line the Funeral route with their backs turned to the coffin. One would struggle to conjure a more fitting tribute, not only to Thatcher but to this current iteration of neoliberal politicians, who have so clearly turned their backs on generations of elderly people up and down the land.
Take Action
If you have elderly neighbours, get to know them. We don’t have to wait for the government to care, before we do. Exchange numbers, be kind, take notice.
AGE UK – great charity and hive of information. You can donate, keep informed on key issues and make a difference.
Sign the petition against a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher and at least go on the record with your opposition.
Campaign to End Loneliness – an inspirational idea to create connections between the generations and put an end to loneliness in old age.
Compassion In Care – seeks to ensure that care is compassionate across the country, check out their website to see how you can support.India's vast but crumbling railway network has received special attention under Modi's government, with Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu pledging to spend around $137 billion to modernise it over the next five years (AFP Photo/Noah Seelam)
The Indian government has awarded a $2.6 billion contract to General Electric to develop and supply Indian Railways with 1,000 diesel locomotives over a period of 11 years, a company statement said on Monday.
In accordance with the contract, GE is set to invest $200 million to build a factory and maintenance sheds in the country, in what is being touted as the company's largest deal in their 100-year history in India.
"It is a major advancement and milestone for India and for GE, a symbol of our commitment and support of the 'Make in India' initiative," GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt said in a statement.
The "Make in India" initiative is one of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship policies, aimed at seeking larger amounts of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country to spur growth in domestic manufacturing.
Modi, who won a landslide election last year with the promise of creating jobs by fostering a business friendly environment, has touted India's policy reforms and faster project clearances to seek investment in the country.
India's vast but crumbling railway network has received special attention under Modi's government, with Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu pledging to spend around $137 billion to modernise it over the next five years.
As a part of this effort, the Indian government last year also allowed 100 percent foreign direct investment (FDI) in the railway sector.
"(The) diesel locomotive project marks one of the first major initiatives of FDI in enhancing India's rail locomotive capacity," GE said in the statement.If the Democratic National Convention showed us anything it’s that when Democrats truly, desperately need to connect with Americans they reach for strong progressive ideas.
When they know, in this post-Citizens-United landscape, that they will be hopelessly outgunned in the 30 second TV soundbite battlefield; when they understand that the media will dilute their strongest points in endless he-said, she-said “balanced” journalism; when they are faced with the only opportunity they will have to speak directly to the electorate in those 3 days from the convention floor – they opt for our ideas, progressive ideas.
This is good news.
Now before I get hammered for any perceived fluffing of the Democratic Party, let me say that I know that’s not how they govern. I also know that they can wrap those progressive ideas in conservative reassurances in areas where the right has been too successful warping the public debate – deficits and military adventuring come to mind.
I’m only taking about the core message here and who has the most powerful one.
That would be us.
Only we haven’t done very well at all articulating it. There are reasons for that, of course. We’re up against a messaging juggernaut on the right. We’re proud cats of the left and don’t herd easily. And, we don’t know our own strength.
It’s that last thing I want to talk about. And I want to talk about it in the context of Bill Clinton’s speech Wednesday evening. Love him or hate him, that was an incredible political speech.
A number of things made it so effective. Hell, you could spend several weeks in a university rhetoric course on that speech. But notice this: It made its case from a position of strength.
Clinton wasn’t cowed. On several occasions he quotes the republicans’ best lines directly and then calmly and wittily rips their premises to shreds. You can only do that if you are supremely confident in the rightness of your own ideas.
Clinton was colloquial. He made his case in everyday talk. If you are totally sure of yourself, and have a deep understanding of your subject, then you can make your case simply and it’ll stick.
Clinton was pointedly detailed. He wasn’t afraid to get into specifics because those specifics had a clear point, they were tied to strong, central premises. Conventional wisdom has it that getting into details is death for political rhetoric. But Clinton shows us that conventional wisdom is wrong when you can connect those details to a central message that is both clear and compelling.
What’s the takeaway for us from Clinton’s talk? It’s this: even if we aren’t the oratorical master that the Big Dog is, we can have confidence in our message and that confidence will serve us well as we talk to our friends and family and in public fora.
As progressives we are grounded. We are steeped in ideas that Americans cherish. We have a leg up on our well-funded opposition – even if that opposition might have convinced us otherwise.
What’s the lesson of the whole DNC for us? It’s this. The majority of Democratic elected officials might be corporatist tools once in office. They might dismiss us as hippies and “retards.” But when the going gets tough, it’s our message that they count on to resonate with the American people.
We cannot trust them to live out that message, to act on it. They will only borrow it when it suits them. We have to act on that message ourselves. Nobody’s going to do it for us. That probably means getting active at the local level – but that’s a topic for another blog post.
For now, know this. We have the winning message – and it’s time we started acting like it.Are you tired of searching for cruelty free shoes? Stop worrying, we’ve got you covered – from heel to toe, here’s some Vegan options:
The philosophy of Olsen Haus is anchored in universal truth and respect for all beings, with a dedication to the expression of truth in the material world. Olsen Haus is committed to being 100% animal- free/cruelty- free, producing functional goods with a high standard of ethical social responsibility in animal rights, human rights, and the environment. Their vegan shoes are made of non-animal materials, in sample rooms & factories that are personally checked for ethical practices & environmental impact.
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Oka-B is founded on the principle that fashion and comfort should never be mutually exclusive. Imagine a shoe that not only looks great with every outfit but feels great with every step. A sandal given the thumbs up by your doctor and your best friend. A slide that matches your wedding gown and massages your feet as you dance down the aisle. A flip-flop so stylish it’s featured in fashion magazines.
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NOAH is a cutting-edge company playing a pioneering role in the field of sustainable and ethical footwear. They combine ethical values with high quality design research. This socially responsible and eco-friendly business fits in with the elegant taste of the Italian “Dolce Vita”: this is the Italian Vegan Lifestyle of NOAH.
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Bourgeois Boheme is a London-based footwear brand for men and women. Ethically produced in Portugal using the finest vegan leather and natural materials.
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Vegan Chic is focused on bringing vegan fashion to the mainstream. Vegan Chic is 100% vegan 100% of the time. This does not mean you sacrifice quality or style. They have designer brands that are hand made and there are plenty to choose from. Each brand goes through a crucial examination of everything on the site to ensure all products are cruelty free and maintain fair and safe working conditions for their employees.
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‘Po-Zu’ stems from the Japanese ポーズ, meaning to pause. Their mission to provide your feet with unique respite from the frantic pace of busy lives and to halt the damage that modern footwear manufacturing often causes to people and planet. Po-Zu products are made from carefully selected natural materials that are healthy for your feet, safe for all of the workers throughout the supply chain, while remaining kind to the environment.
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Mohop is the first company to create mass customizable footwear via your smartphone. They do this by combining on-demand 3D digital fabrication with emerging body scanning technology. Mohop explores the space where cutting edge digital technologies meet traditional artisan techniques. They are passionate about comfortable shoes that both fit your style and fit your foot, women in STEM, and conscientious relationships with people, animals, and the environment.
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NOHARM offers cruelty-free, non-leather footwear and accessories. All NOHARM footwear is crafted in Italy by artisans in fair labour environments. NOHARM synergises high fashion and ethical concern. They recognise these two terms are no longer mutually exclusive and the synergy of fashion and ethics is driven by a growing social movement.
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Will Green of Wills London aims is to bridge the gap between everyday people and ethically produced vegan shoes. Wills is about getting the latest fashions out there at fair prices, while not hurting animals or people in the process. No matter who you are or where you’re going in life, Wills are there for when you want to make a positive choice.
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MooShoes is a vegan-owned business that sells an assortment of cruelty-free footwear, bags, t-shirts, wallets, books and other accessories. MooShoes offers its services through their online store as well as in its lovely retail stores in New York City and, as of 2014, Los Angeles. They’re open 7 days a week for your shopping pleasure.
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Alternative Outfitters is an vegan boutique — a resource for fashionable leather alternatives and cruelty-free products for a compassionate lifestyle.
They have put together an amazing collection of stylish vegan shoes, vegan handbags, and vegan accessories for your shopping pleasure. Alternative Outfitters have also added cruelty-free vegan cosmetics and personal care items to their product line, because fashion and beauty go hand-in-hand.
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Beyond Skin creates beautiful, luxury vegan footwear for the discerning style led woman. Wherever possible they use the most sustainable eco-friendly materials and all our components are sourced locally to their factory in Spain. Beyond Skin is constantly on the lookout for new innovative materials to introduce to their range.
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To help understand the importance of vegan shoes, check out our article on leather tanning in Bangladesh, Lives Lost to Leather.Ten years ago in Tokyo parks a young Japanese woman started to apply acrylic paints directly onto cardboard with her hands, without using a brush.
Today that woman, Rokkaku Ayako, is 29 years old.
She first came to widespread attention when she submitted her work to the Geisai contemporary art festival organized by Murakami Takashi—an event that has recently become something of a rite of passage for young Japanese artists. In the years since then, she has risen to international prominence and held solo exhibitions of her work in France, Italy, and Denmark.
This summer her biggest solo exhibition to date, “Colours in My Hand,” was held at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Over the two months of the exhibition, Rokkaku’s art and energetic live painting performances charmed large numbers of visitors.
Art with an International Appeal
“I always loved doodling as a kid,” Rokkaku says, “but I didn’t start to draw seriously until I was 20 or so. I was looking for a way to express myself, I guess, and kind of stumbled upon it one day. I was wondering what I was going to do with my life, and when I started painting everything clicked.”
Rokkaku says she can’t even remember today what the subject of that first painting was. “I just remember this squishy, squelchy mess of paint all over my hands.” Rokkaku says the figures of grownups and children so typical of her work began to emerge spontaneously when she started painting directly onto cardboard with her fingers. How did she come up with her unique method of painting?
“I don’t feel I’m really painting unless my hands are in direct contact with the paint. It’s more fun that way—using your hands, painting with your whole body. And the finished paintings are more powerful too. When I started out, I used cardboard because it was convenient. I could get hold of it anywhere, and it was light and easy to prop up against things. But after a while, I realized that actually it’s the perfect medium for my kind of painting. I love everything about it—the warm feel, the rough cross-section you get when you tear it, the way the paint sticks to the surface. That’s why I’m still using cardboard today.”
Rokkaku Ayako is a spontaneous artist who likes to create in the moment. The results are impressive. There is a wonderful sense of approachability about her paintings on cardboard that gives her work an almost universal appeal, speaking powerfully even to people who would never normally think of visiting an art gallery. People seem to enjoy holding her paintings in their hands and examining them up close.
Rokkaku says people who have bought examples of her work to hang in their homes tell her that touching the paintings seems to bring them energy and strength. Her pictures are attracting growing numbers of admirers from diverse backgrounds—young and old, men and women—all over the world.
“When I’m painting, I try to get in touch with the way I felt as a child—to get back to my starting point, if you like. Everyone goes through a stage of being totally into drawing and painting when they are small. Children can get completely absorbed in their pictures. I think maybe my pictures help to remind people of how they felt back then.”China’s Tencent Pictures, the film arm of online giant Tencent, has announced it will partner with Legendary Pictures and invest an equity stake in Warcraft, the vidgame adaptation of popular online World Of Warcraft. Wanda, China’s largest cinema chain, will also work with the two companies and use its network to promote and market the film.
Currently in post, Warcraft is directed by Duncan Jones (Moon) and stars Travis Fimmel and Paula Patton. Tencent’s deal on the film is similar to Alibaba Pictures’ recent investment in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation in that it is a combination of equity and marketing and promotion support. The film will be released next summer.
The announcement was part of a wider event for Tencent Pictures that saw the company unveiling a slate of new projects. One such project is a remake of classic 1970’s martial arts film The Magic Blade with partners Celestial Pictures. The original was produced by the legendary Shaw Pictures.
Other projects announced include a number of comic book adaptations, games and adaptations of books. Tencent is one of China’s largest vidgame distributors, an obvious influence on the type of fare that the group’s film unit is likely to focus on.
All three of China’s Internet giants- Baida, Alibaba and Tencent- are aggressively moving into long form content generation and distribution. In addition to today’s news, last week Tencent announced the launch of Shanghai-based Penguin Pictures, with a particular focus on web drama. Alibaba has been making its own moves, signing a deal with Chinese film company DMG and Hunan TV to bundle subscription-based Internet, cable and mobile entertainment, along with gaming, film and TV content, to Chinese consumers for the first time as well as acquiring an 8.8% stake in Enlight, one of China’s leading film and TV production companies as well as a minority stake the Huayi Bros.
The deal with Wanda will see the two companies make use of China’s largest private sector cinema chain to promote their content. Wanda Cinemas is a separately listed unit of Dalian Wanda, which owns the U.S.-based AMC Cinemas and Australia’s Hoyts chain.Vince Gill did something on Sunday that not many country singers are willing to do: he courted controversy. Prior to a concert in Kansas City, Missouri, Gill confronted protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, who were picketing outside his concert to protest his divorce and remarriage, which they hold to be nothing more than a form of adultery. The church, which is nonaffiliated, has also protested against gays and Jews and at the funerals of U.S. soldiers killed in combat, in the belief that God is punishing the nation for its immorality.
At Kansas City’s Kauffman Center for the Arts, Gill walked up to the picket line where people carried placards saying, “God Is America’s Terror.”
“Vince Gill, what in the world are you doing out here?” a woman on the line asked.
“I just came to see what hate looked like,” he said.
“Well, more importantly,” the woman said, “what are you doing with another man’s wife?”
“I came out to see what hatred really looked like in the face.”
“Don’t you know that divorce plus remarriage equals adultery?” the woman asked. “Jesus Christ said that.”
“Did he?” Gill responded. “You know what else he said? He said a lot of stuff about forgiveness, about grace. You guys don’t have any of that.”
But the only thing truly surprising about the encounter was that it happened at all.
Country musicians have been a pretty quiet bunch since 2003, when the Dixie Chicks started a ruckus by badmouthing George W. Bush 10 days before the invasion of Iraq (“We don't want this war, this violence,” lead vocalist Natalie Maines told a London audience, “and we're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas"). Conservative talk show hosts skewered the group, fans threw out their albums in public protest, album sales tanked, and the band played to half-empty halls for a few months.
Aside from the occasional and toothless “I’m a Patriot” tune from the occasional country star, it’s been pretty quiet since the Dixie Chicks debacle, unless you count Brad Paisley’s milquetoast bid for racial healing back in the spring when he performed a duet with LL Cool J on “Accidental Racist.” Defending his right to wear a Confederate flag T-shirt in a Starbucks (now there’s some real country imagery) because he was a Skynyrd fan, Paisley penned a song so sorry that its only redeeming aspect was that it inspired a withering parody by Stephen Colbert.
Oh, for the good old days when Roy Acuff taught Richard Nixon how to use a yo-yo on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. The fact is, though, country music has always been averse to controversy. True, a few country performers turn out for the Republican convention now and then (Ted Nugent needs some company). But in the main country artists are far more timid about taking public stands than their counterparts in rock, pop, or hip hop.
Intriguingly, the country stars who do have something to say are usually to the left of center (Johnny Cash) or unpredictably contrarian (Merle Haggard).
Cash invited African-American performers onto his television show and always said that gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharp was his favorite singer. He protested the Vietnam War in his music and sang “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” about a Native- American war hero.
Haggard is a more complicated case. “Okie From Muskogee” made fun of hippies and extolled small-town virtues, but it did it with some tongue in cheek. “The Fighting Side of Me,” on the other hand, is a downright mean and divisive song. But what are we to make of “Irma Jackson,” Haggard’s beautiful song about an interracial love affair that he put on an album in 1972? Or of the fact that Haggard was a Hillary supporter and wrote a song endorsing her candidacy? No one with a lick of sense would ever try to predict where Merle’s going to land next.
Then there’s Willie Nelson, whose leadership of the Farm-Aid years makes him the hands-down favorite as most effective activist in a cowboy hat. In 28 years, the NGO he helped found and for which he still performs has raised more than $43 million to help preserve family farms.
Right-wing country stars have come forth now and then, although rarely with the virulence of, say, the ’60s, when Dave Dudley recorded “The Vietnam Blues,” and Marty Robbins recorded ”Ain’t I Right,” which knocked the Freedom Riders (“You bring a lot of trouble to the town and then you leave/ That's part of your Communistic game”). His label, Columbia, considered the song so nasty that it refused to release it—it only appeared years later on a collection of his music.
These, though, are all exceptions. For most of its history, country music has been a profoundly insular music that avoided tangling with social issues. Country songwriters may have been ahead of the curve when it came to dealing straightforwardly with domestic matters, such as divorce, drinking, cheating, and single parenthood, but they showed almost zero interest in civil rights, Vietnam, or women’s issues. “Stand by Your Man” is a rarity, not the rule.
More than almost any other form of music, country—and I’m talking about country before it got “cool” and started sounding like the Eagles—was music made for a specific audience: the white working class. Its defenders will point out that there were black performers like the harmonica player Deford Bailey on the Grand Ole Opry, but in fact, there was just Deford Bailey. Black country singers like Charley Pride? Nope, just Charley Pride. You have to dig way back to discover that early country was not all that different from the African-American music that was finding a national audience at the same time that the first country performers did, and that sometimes it was the same audience. Most certainly, country’s stars didn’t talk much about the fact that their music owed as much to the blues as it did to Anglo-Irish fiddle tunes brought over from Europe.
But how about this song, “Blue Yodel #9,” recorded in 1930 by Jimmie Rodgers, the undisputed Father of Country Music, with the help of Louis Armstrong and his wife, Lil, on piano. The most interesting thing about this number, as Noah Berlatsky has pointed out, is that neither Rodgers nor the Armstrongs sound the least bit uncomfortable. Unlike that dissonant duet between Brad Paisley and LL Cool J, no one here is trying to play a style they aren’t comfortable with, because it’s the same style. Armstrong’s jazz and Rodgers’s country are two sides of the same thing, whether you call it blues, or jazz, or country. The sad truth is that American musicians, black or white, were more in tune with each other’s music 80 years ago than they are today.
Country’s great mistake was to turn its back on its own roots in the blues and early jazz. Those strains surface now and again, in the swing of Bob Wills, and in many songs by Haggard and Nelson, but for the most part country shut itself off from where it had come from and from what was going on in other styles of music, not to mention the social movements that remade society in the last half of the 20th century. As a result, when country stars do try to |
was written around 1000 BCE. Since the Los Lunas inscription uses the same script, it is safe to conclude that the Los Lunas inscription was written by a Hebrew people about 3,000 years ago. Other ancient Hebrew inscriptions have been found around the country including Tenessee and the Mississippi Valley. The " Archeological Outliers Homepage " includes other ancient Hebrew artifacts found in the United States. The article " Who Really Discovered America? " also includes some very interesting information on the Los Lunas inscriptions as well as other finds and includes a possible link between the Gold of Solomon and the Gold of Brazil. Vandalism
I have received a couple of emails from individuals who have recently visited the Los Lunas site and are reporting the vandalism that has been done to this famous inscription. One of these individuals reported the problem to the New Mexico Dept of Public Lands, and the Governor's office, but only got a, "we don't have the money, it truly is a shame," answer in reply." I would imagine that if someone began to erase the inscription on the Liberty Bell they would immediately be arrested and thrown into jail. But, it appears that the Los Lunas inscription is not that important. Pesonally, I believe this is one of the greatest discoveries in America which should be re-writing the history of this continent.
Before
After
See Also
Turning Right at the Burning Bush, Reflections on a National Treasure from Ancient America
Pictures by Matthew S. Demers
Pictures by Mike Hilson
Pictures by Klappauf
AHRC Book Recommendation
( see our other recommendations )In the face of all this, the fate of a handful of music blogs largely faded into the background. But for Mr. Hofman and others, the episode has had lasting consequences. After OnSmash was seized, Mr. Hofman started FreeOnSmash.com as a replacement, but its traffic and advertising revenue were a fraction of what he had once had. Even worse, Mr. Hofman said, was the “black cloud” of suspicion that surrounded him in the industry.
“When I went to album release parties,” he said, “people looked at me like they had seen a ghost.” Corporate sponsorship of live events, once an important part of the site’s business, also dried up, he added.
Suing for the return of OnSmash would have been expensive and risky, so Mr. Hofman pursued an “offer in compromise” with the government — submitting a petition for the site’s return, and paying what the government determined to be its appraised value: $7.
In March 2012, Craig Trainor, Mr. Hofman’s lawyer, submitted a 66-page memorandum of law outlining their case. Rather than a rogue site that hurt music labels, Mr. Trainor argued, OnSmash was “an indispensable forum for hip-hop fans, a marketing vehicle for record labels and artists, and a generator of protected speech.” He also noted that Dajaz1.com had been returned to its owner after about a year.
The OnSmash case dragged on for another three and a half years until October, when — with a five-year statute of limitations on the seizure looming — the government notified Mr. Trainor that OnSmash would be returned. Paperwork with his web host took another month or so, Mr. Hofman said, and he finally got the site back in November.
When asked about the return of OnSmash and another site, Torrent-Finder.com, which was seized in the 2010 raid and also returned to its operator this fall, Matthew Bourke, a spokesman for the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that after working with the Justice Department, “it was determined there was not enough evidence to seize the websites.”
Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the recording industry association, said he welcomed the return of the sites, as long as they played by the rules. “If the managers of some of these sites now seek to have the domain name returned because they wish to become legitimate operators, that’s a success,” he said. In recent months, the music industry has successfully shut down unlicensed sites like Aurous, Sharebeast and RockDizMusic.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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Des Moines, Iowa—I had a premonition of Donald Trump’s Iowa caucus loss Monday sitting in a half-empty Waterloo auditorium that morning. He was low-energy, his crowd was low-energy, and I didn’t understand the choice of Adele’s “Rollin’ in the Deep”—“We could have had it a-a-allllllll”—as his walk-up music, on Caucus Day. Ad Policy
But the truth is, I should have seen it, or at least suspected it, on Saturday morning when Senator Ted Cruz packed an Ames hotel ballroom with parents and kids and showed off his high-profile Iowa-based evangelical support. In Iowa endorsements matter, and organization matters, and in the end it seems Trump had little of either, and Cruz had it all.
The event was fascinating. Cruz was endorsed by four conservative heavyweights, who couldn’t decide quite how apocalyptic to be: Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell, Family Leader CEO Bob Vander Plaats, conservative anti-immigrant Congressman Steve King, and radio hysteric Glenn Beck, whose media empire “The Blaze” was in the process of going up in flames but who still showed up to praise his friend Cruz. Vander Plaats noted that he’d never before been on the same side as Steve King in a caucus, and suggested that was a good omen, and it turned out to be one. Glenn Beck told the crowd: “There’s gonna come a time of catastrophic consequences in the next four to eight years, if we make it,” and he assured them Cruz will be ready: “In his DNA, he knows the constitution.”
By contrast, two days later Donald Trump was in Waterloo, alone, no big-star introductions, just name-dropping B-list supporters like Jerry Falwell Jr. and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The tired-seeming Trump failed to fire up the crowd; at the next stop, in Cedar Rapids, he was upstaged by another B-lister, Sarah Palin, and suddenly his campaign seemed like the mediocre reality-TV hoax many expected when it began. Can he recover in New Hampshire, and beyond? It’s going to get interesting.
The other new development Monday night was the emergence of Marco Rubio as “the” establishment candidate. He made the night’s first victory speech, which seemed presumptuous unless you realized he’d won a big victory with donors. Rubio was the story in the caucus I attended, where his supporters, plus those of Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul, all told me the party had to stop Trump and Cruz. “Cruz is playing up to the evangelicals,” retired Drake University librarian James Leonardo told me. “You don’t want to be ruled by the Koran, why do you want to be ruled by the Bible?” A Rand Paul supporter behind us said, “I absolutely don’t trust Trump—he’s working for Hillary,” and said Rubio was her second choice.
This moderate Des Moines precinct of roughly 130 voters gave 40 votes to Rubio, 29 to Jeb Bush, 20 to Paul, and only 18 to Cruz and 11 to Trump, plus a handful to Chris Christie and John Kasich. That wasn’t the norm here in conservative Christian Iowa, but it’s likely a harbinger of the way the establishment side of the race shakes out. Christie and Kasich are doing better than that in New Hampshire, but Rubio’s strong showing here makes their road harder.
Cruz gave an overwrought, overlong victory speech in which he brazenly annexed Obama’s “Yes, we can” and shared the over-quoted mawkish Psalm 30:15—“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning”—which felt like an odd thing to say about an exciting nighttime victory, but what do I know? The networks cut away from Cruz’s long-winded self-tribute to Hillary Clinton’s non-victory speech, and then Bernie Sanders’s, and I think Cruz was still going when Sanders finished.
I found Cruz’s Saturday speech more instructive about the rest of the campaign, because it laid out the agenda that won over Iowa, and it’s more extreme than any other candidate’s. He shared the list of what he would do the proverbial Day One in the White House, and there were some surprises. Number one was predictable: “rescind every illegal and unconstitutional executive action” of President Obama. But number two—before tearing up the Iran nuclear deal or repealing Obamacare–was having the Department of Justice investigate and hopefully prosecute Planned Parenthood. Go figure. Moving Israel’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem also came before destroying Obamacare, or securing our Southern border. Bob Vander Plaats, by the way, mentioned Cruz’s importance to Israel at least three times in his speech. So this is going to be a real far-right evangelical Christian campaign, the likes of which we haven’t seen at a national level.
But that’s what Cruz insists is necessary to win back the White House after a run of “squishes”—Mitt Romney and John McCain—got the nomination and lost. I think Cruz heralds a Goldwater-level loss if he wins, and so do establishment Republicans. Expect an enormous amount of pressure on Christie, Kasich, and Bush to make way for Rubio in the week to come.
And what about Trump? Even more than by his low-energy speech, I was struck by the fact that there was nobody even trying to direct voters to caucuses at his Caucus Day event. Having been to so many other candidates’ events, it suddenly felt like a fake campaign. Organization is more important in Iowa than in any other state, but it will be interesting if New Hampshire, where he still leads, sees his lackluster effort here as a sign of insufficient seriousness, in these self-important first two contests, and if he starts to slide.
He gave a fairly unusual and humble concession speech, for Trump. “Iowa, we love you. We thank you. You’re special. We will be back many, many times. In fact, I think I might come here and buy a farm. I love it!” I’m not sure if the plainspoken Trump realizes “bought the farm” is an old expression for, well, died. He’d be unlikely to say that, and it’s too early for me to say it either. But this was the worst day of Trump’s campaign to date, and it may herald many more bad days.MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
When it comes to US energy policy, President Obama's actions toward changing our basic reliance on fossil fuels is so incremental, you can hardly notice it is moving forward.
Yes, one came blame the Republicans for continuing an earth-destroying dependency on fossil fuel, but you get the feeling Obama is not pushing much beyond lip service to create a systemic change in US energy policy.
That is why there is no reason to be surprised that President Obama is highly likely to approve the last segments of the Keystone XL Pipeline, as BuzzFlash at Truthout has predicted: "Obama Hints at Approval of Keystone XL Pipeline at SF Fundraiser, Blames Middle Class Priorities."
That is also why it should be no surprise that Ernest Moniz will likely be approved by a wide margin in the Senate, after expected committee approval on Tuesday to become secretary of the Department of Energy. Moniz's funding at MIT is so lubed up with the oil and gas industry, you might find a fracking site in his lab. As the website dcbureau.org reported:
Professor [and] nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz, is director of the MIT Energy Initiative, a research arm that has received more than $125 million in pledges from the oil and gas industry since 2006, according to the Public Accountability Initiative, a non-profit that blew the whistle on UBuffalo.
The four “founding members” of MITEI — BP, Shell, Italy’s ENI and Saudi Aramco — each agreed to pay $25 million over five years for the right to help manage research projects, maintain an office at MITEI headquarters and “place a researcher in a participating MIT faculty member’s lab,” according to the MITEI website. Ten “sustaining members” commit $5 million each for fewer rights, but still get seats on MITEI’s executive committee and governing board.
A host of others energy interests, including the Clean Skies Foundation, have participated as well, funding and shaping MIT research.
Clean Skies was founded and chaired by Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy Corp., the nation’s No. 2 gas producer. At the time Clean Skies officials called on MIT with a research idea, Chesapeake had placed a large bet on high-volume hydraulic fracturing of shale formations, or fracking, by aggressively leasing land in shale regions.
It turns out that Moniz's MITEI leans a bit toward fracking, considering all the oil and gas money helping to run his program at MIT:
The research produced by the MIT-Clean Skies collaboration was a May 2011 report called “The Future of Natural Gas.” In its acknowledgements, the Moniz team wrote: “Discussions with the (Clean Skies) Foundation led to the conclusion that an integrative study on the future of natural gas in a carbon-constrained world could contribute to the energy debate in an important way, and the Foundation stepped forward as the major sponsor.”
Other acknowledged major funders of the study included the Hess Corp., Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos of Colombia, the Gas Technology Institute and Exelon.
“The Future of Natural Gas” was a magnum opus that crowned natural gas as the “bridge to a low-carbon future.” It cited vast new supplies of cheap, clean-burning gas from shale drilling and recommended a switch from coal to natural gas in U.S. electric power generation, industry and transportation….
MIT’s report touted shale gas as a huge economic opportunity and argued that switching to it for electric power generation in particular would help slow global warming.
Furthermore, industry public relations efforts associated with the MIT report lacerated the reputations of two Cornell professors who dared to challenge it. If Moniz came to their defense to engage in academic debate, please e-mail any evidence that he did so.
The Huffington Post elaborated on Professor Frackenstein's affinity to the fossil fuel industry (although he is, like Obama, on record of being in favor of a balanced US energy approach, whatever that is, and his program looks at alternative energy approaches).:
An influential MIT study that suggested fracking could provide a "bridge to a low-carbon future" and would pose only "manageable" environmental issues lacked disclosure that it's lead author -- and now energy department nominee -- Ernest Moniz had ties to the natural gas industry, according to a watchdog group.
In their report released on Wednesday, the Public Accountability Initiative said that Moniz, director of the Energy Initiative at MIT, had joined the board of ICF, a consulting firm with oil and gas ties, just three days prior to the release of the report. They add that Moniz has since collected over $300,000 from ICF.
The nonprofit group, which has been critical of the gas industry and fracking, goes on to suggest other timely conflicts of interest among authors of the study. One co-author had joined the gas company, Talisman Energy, prior to release of the study; another was on the board of a liquid natural gas (LNG) company that would receive the U.S.'s only LNG export permit shortly after the study came out.
"The public should have been informed that MIT's natural gas study was written by representatives of the oil and gas industry," Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, said in a statement. "Is MIT an independent research university or an oil and gas industry mouthpiece?"
On Tuesday, Ron Wyden is expected to ask Moniz about his lack of concern about the perils of the nuclear power industry:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) plans to question Moniz on the polluted Hanford nuclear site in Washington State, where waste tanks may be leaking 1,000 gallons of waste per year, reported The Hill. Moniz wrote in November 2011 that "it would be a mistake" to let "Fukushima cause governments to abandon nuclear power and its benefits."
But the conventional wisdom in DC is that Moniz will easily pass out of committee and be confirmed by the Senate. The corporate mainstream media has roundly ignored or barely mentioned Moniz's connections with the fossil fuel industry.
After all, just looking at the companies who are his founding advisors for MITEI (see above) indicates that the fossil fuel lobbyists will give the green light to senators of both parties to confirm Moniz.
As with Obama's policy of no major action toward preventing irreversible Climate Change, Moniz will become Secretary of the Department of Energy at a time when the earth's environmental deterioration may outpace his and Obama's leisurely approach to implementing alternative energy and standing up to the fossil fuel industry.
(Photo: Steve Harbula)Vaklis, Latria, and Ongim drawn by
and characters created and designed by me.
-----------------------
Efrit drawn by dezilon.deviantart.comEvalyne drawn by cronoan.deviantart.com"Over the streams of eternity we preside, forever vigilant and ever watching. You have distracted us from our duties, harming not just your world but entire universes in the process. We are the deities, and we, are not amused." - VaklisThe Deities are the beings who preside over the Eternal streams, which themselve are too large for any singular God to maintain. However, due to the unique chemistry of these five individuals, they are able to act as the avatar and physical representative of their respective streams. This chemistry having been granted to them due to their nature as mortals and humanoid beings, which the Gods and Elder Gods lack.This group of individuals have been tasked by The Ancestoral Archetict (The creator of existence as it's known) to ensure that balance itself is maintained throughout the Omniverse, as to avoid the attention of The Abyss, from which was originally all that existed and what the archetict mutated off from. If it detects anything, it's own special form of defense will consume and wipe out the infringing material, like white bloods cells within a body.The deities ensure that this is avoided or that any damage is contained, having the ability to quarantine off planets or entire universes so that, if worst comes to worst, only the universe or planet in question will be consumed and not the entire multiverse.The Deities are as follow:Chaos: LatriaSoul: EfritTime: VaklisBalance: OngimOrder: EvalyneTheir authority supersedes that of any God in regards to the stream that they represent, with Gods maintaining only a local hold and acting as a representative of the stream in question (afterlife for soul, time, chaos, etc). In all respects, the deities are the streams, having been merged in concept and being with said streams.It’s actually my favourite illness period. I’m pretty sure it’s not that normal to have a favourite pathogen.
Rabies is a well known virus, deadly, and scary.
Rabies is transmitted through an open wound or mucus membrane coming into contact with the infection. The most common form of transmission is via bite by a non-human animal.
The animals that carry and transmit rabies most often (in North America, at least) are bats, racoons, skunks, dogs/canines, and foxes.
bats and skunks have quite a high chance of being a carrier, which is someithing I didn’t always know. I defintly am more careful around bats and skunks now.
On that note; if you ever find a bat on the ground, injured or stunned (like, in my case, cuaght by a cat, or run into a window), make sure you handle it in a way thatprevent the bat from being able to bite you. Bats have small teeth, people are often unaware of bites they may get. So be like me, use thick material to shield you from the animal.
symptoms
The symptoms of rabies are;
hyper-agression
drooling
disorentitnation
anxiety, stress, and tension,
convulsions,
unusually intense sensation at infection site (bite mark)
excitability
loss of feeling in parts of the body
muscle spasms and loss of muscle function,
low fever,
numbess adn tingling,
pain at wound site
problems swallowing
light sensitivity
hydrophobia
and many more.
Details
Tehre’s two types of rabies judgde by symptoms, dumb rabies, and furius rabies. Dumb rabies doesnt include the agression bits of the disease, and furious rabies is the scary attacking everyone one.
the drooling is caused by difficulty swallowing.
Did you know that after examining the remains of people said to have been werewolves in the dark ages, researchers found signs of rabies in many of them? It makes sense, if you think about it, hyper-agression = acting like an angry dangerous wolf, sensitivity to light = they came out at night, shied from light, drooling like an angry wolf.
SO, rabies, when untreated, has always resulted in death, except once, in an instance that i could write an entire essay on, so I won’t go into it. It’s on the rabies wiki page.
SO if you are EVER bitten by a strange animal, ALWAYS assume it’d given you rabies. No, I don’t mean you should freak out and say your goodbyes, I mean call 911, (or your local emergancy number) and wash the wound. Get to the ER FAST.
HOW IT WORKS
So, rabies kills you by attacking your Central Nervous System (CNS). And it destroys it. So that’s why even if you cure it, rabies Can still leave you with serious damage.
this nervous system destruction is why you get all the nerological sysptoms. Obviously.
COOL FAX
There’s only ONE other possible way to survive rabies without getting the rabies shots. see here http://biomedicalephemera.tumblr.com/post/11847807056/the-girl-who-survived-rabies
ALSO
I can’t find much on it, but i’ve also talked to vet/ vet students about how AWESOME wolves are in regards to rabies;
So, sometime in the mid 1900s rabies got into the US wolf population, and the scientists tracking the disease were like, ‘OH SHIT, THE WOLVES ARE GONNA SPREAD IT REAL FAST ALL OVER NORTH AMERICA, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE, GET IN THE BOMB/RABIES SHELTER! EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF!“ And so they waited. And waited. And found that the virus wasn’t spreading NEARLY as fast or or far as they had thought. They didn’t know why.
it turns out, the social structure of a wolf pack is SO strong, that an infected wolf DYING FROM RABIES will not attack a superior member of the pack. I’m not soo sure that’s true, but the other factor sounds more likely; that wolves are quick to shun and cast out any wolf that they think is sick. So, basically, wolf social structure saved North America. On behalf of the wolves, YOU’RE WELCOME EVERYONE.
Also, I thought I’d also seen that ^^ on at least wikipedia, but I canna find it, but I PROMISE I DID read it somewhere. I KNOW I didn’t make it up... TO THE TEXTBOOKS!About five years ago, Lin Xu learned that film from the Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft had been declassified and given to the National Archives. A digital imaging expert at Eastman Kodak in Boston for 12 years, Xu decided to drive the eight hours from his home in Massachusetts to College Park, Maryland, and search the declassified material. He was hoping to find photographs of his hometown, Jilin City, China.
But there was a catch. Although the film itself had been declassified, the film’s indexes were not. To make matters worse, the film was accompanied by 20,000 pages of declassified documents, but the Central Intelligence Agency had blocked all film index references in them, making the footage virtually unsearchable.
Between 1962 and 1974, pilots from Taiwan in the Republic of China made 213 flights over mainland China, about 100 of which were over land. (Several years earlier, the Taiwanese government and the United States had agreed to cooperate on flights to gather intelligence about communist China.) Each mission generated up to two miles of film, and when the CIA delivered the declassified film to the National Archives, each roll was cut into 60 pieces. One of these pieces could have images of Jilin City, thought Xu (pronounced “shoo”).
He first searched the declassified mission documents for clues to which areas were overflown on each mission. He found missions that flew over geographic features, like Beijing’s city wall, and, by checking the time coordinates on the documents, he could connect missions to events, such as a MiG-21 chasing a U-2. He could then connect the events to sites overflown; that led him to find footage of Jilin City.
Although Xu had seen images of Jilin City taken by Corona satellites, the U-2 images were a revelation. The mission was flown in 1962—the earliest images of the city Xu had seen. His elementary and high schools hadn’t yet been built; that land, with its pigpens, retained a rural feel. Xu could even see the three-story apartment building where he grew up.
That was the moment when his own mission broadened from finding pictures of his hometown to creating his own index of the miles of filmstrips.
U-2 pilots didn’t turn on their cameras until right before entering the target area, so in his searches, Xu has to estimate where, relative to the film’s length, an incident happened, in order to request the appropriate film canister number.
The U-2 footage is stored at the National Archives’ facility in Lenexa, Kansas, and researchers must place a shipping order—for no more than 10 canisters at a time—before arriving at Maryland. There are two cameras on a U-2, one on either side of the aircraft. Images from the two are joined to give photo interpreters a complete picture of the terrain (see photo, p. 38). “When you try and locate a target,” says Xu, “it could be on the left side of the film, or it could be on the right. So you have to order both sets. Out of the 10 cans, you actually have five chances to find your target.”
The film cannot be touched or scanned, and has to be viewed on cold war-era viewing tables, donated by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA. Each researcher must laboriously hand-wind the film. “If I look at 10 cans,” says Xu, “I’m winding 2,000 feet of film.” Xu became fascinated by the MiG pilots who chased the U-2 (see “I Was There: Bring Down the Spyplane,” p. 48), and started looking through the footage for the Soviet-designed fighters. But the MiGs were elusive quarries.
“I have to examine the film frame by frame, very carefully,” says Xu. “Most of it is ocean or clouds, and the plane could be hidden in a cloud. So you look from land to ocean, from ocean to cloud, and you try to find a black spot.” Finding the spot was especially difficult because the film is in negative. To make it more challenging, the MiG doesn’t leave a contrail. Xu’s search for another communist Chinese airplane, the Shenyang J-6, was far easier. “That plane is also very small,” says Xu, “but it has a contrail. So when you look for it, all of a sudden you see a straight line: of course [at the end of the line], that’s it.”Just upgraded to the latest Windows 10? Our to-do list
ed bott Here's how you can still get a free Windows 10 upgrade The GWX tool may be gone, but all the other upgrade tools still work, and the end result is an apparently valid digital license. But those offers could end soon. Read More
This article has been extensively updated to incorporate changes in Windows 10. The most recent update was January 17, 2018.
Microsoft delivered Windows Update for Business (a layer of configuration options that controls the free Windows Update service) as part of the very first feature update to Windows 10 four months after its initial 2015 release.
Since then, this much-needed feature has evolved steadily. It allows IT pros to set update policies for an organization. Using settings not available on consumer Windows editions, they can defer and delay updates and upgrades until they've been proven safe and reliable.
With the help of Windows Update for Business, you can delay receiving Patch Tuesday updates for up to 30 days. If you'd rather wait a week or two to ensure that an update won't cause problems on a mission-critical PC, you can set a deferral period of, say, 14 days, giving yourself two weeks to monitor feedback from other users before the update automatically installs.
In addition, you can defer so-called feature updates (the twice yearly major version upgrades) by about four months by opting to wait until Microsoft declares that update ready for widespread deployment; you can add up to 365 days of additional deferral time after Microsoft makes a feature update available to your servicing channel in Windows Update.
Originally, all of these deferral options required the use of Group Policy settings, which are designed for network administrators to manage large groups of machines using Active Directory on a Windows domain.
You can use those same Group Policy settings on your own unmanaged PC, with no domain required, by using the Local Group Policy Editor (Gpedit.msc).
As of Windows 10 version 1709 (the Fall Creators Update), the task gets even simpler, with most Windows Update for Business options now available in the Settings app.
Windows Update for Business requires a PC or device that supports Group Policy, which means you need Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, or Education. The device also needs to be configured for the Current Branch for Business. Neither option is available for PCs running Windows 10 Home, where all updates are automatic.
If you meet those requirements, follow these steps to get started.
Using the Windows 10 Settings app
On Windows 10 version 1709, you'll find all of the Windows Update for Business options by going to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update > Advanced Options. Under the Choose when updates are installed heading, you should see these three settings.
Here's what each of these settings does:
It's worth noting that these settings delay the automatic installation of updates. You can override them at any time by installing updates manually.
Using Group Policy
If you are running Windows 10 version 1703 or earlier, or if you are managing a large number of devices on a Windows domain, you can apply Windows Update for Business settings using Group Policy.
In an enterprise deployment, you'll do all of the following with the Group Policy Editor or with Mobile Device Management software.
If you're working with your personal PC or managing a small number of devices on a network that doesn't have Active Directory, get started by opening the Local Group Policy Editor, Gpedit.msc. (If that instruction is confusing, you should stop right now. Seriously.)
Navigate through the Local Computer Policy tree in the left pane: Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update.
These settings have changed significantly over time. In Windows 10 version 1703, there's an additional subfolder called Defer Windows Updates. In version 1709 and later, the subfolder is called Windows Update for Business.
In either version, you have separate options to defer feature updates and quality updates. Although the wording is slightly different depending on the version you're running, the specific policy settings are the same. Here's an example of what you'll see if you choose Select when Preview Builds and Feature Updates are received in version 1709.
Double-click a single setting from this list to open a dialog box where you can define policies for the current PC. The Group Policy options let you do everything I described in the previous section using the Settings app in version 1709. (It also includes options to configure devices for different Windows Insider Preview rings.)
If you're not experienced with Group Policy, note that for your update and upgrade schedules to be honored, you have to change this policy setting to Enabled. Set it to Disabled (or back to Not Configured) to restore default Windows 10 update settings.
Regardless of which method you choose, the end result is the same. If you set the delay for quality updates to one or two weeks, you can then watch carefully after each batch of Patch Tuesday updates arrives. If there are no problems, your updates install after the general public has tested them for you. Setting the "Delay updates" value to 30 days effectively puts you a month behind the general population.
If you discover that a pending update is potentially troublesome and you want to prevent it from installing after your deferred installation date, you can use the Pause button. In Windows 10 version 1709, this setting is below the Windows Update for Business settings, under the Pause Updates heading. Slide that switch to On and the updates will be blocked for another 35 days.
Using the Local Group Policy Editor, click the Pause Quality Updates starting check box and enter today's date. This action effectively blocks all updates or upgrades; the machine will remain paused until you specifically clear the Pause check box (or reverse the associated policy). You can't delay forever, though; after 35 days, updates resume automatically installing.
Note that definition updates for Microsoft's security programs cannot be deferred. (If you install a non-Microsoft security program, its update controls take over and Microsoft's definitions are not downloaded.)
Ironically, one Group Policy option available only in Enterprise and Education editions causes these settings to be completely ignored. If Allow Telemetry is set to 0 (that is, set to the lowest possible level), then Windows Update for Business settings have no effect.Royal Chant get around.
Play it loud. Tell a friend. Rinse. Repeat.
++++++++++
Influences: Guided By Voices, Bob Dylan, Boston Spaceships, The Pogues, The Velvet Underground, old R.E.M., new R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Idlewild, Nirvana, Elliot Smith, Neil Young, The Kinks, David Bowie, The Jam, The La's, Dramarama, The Pixies, The Drones, Crazy Horse, Radiohead, Iggy Pop, Beck, Ryan Adams, Folk Implosion, The Shins, Elvin Jones, John Coltrane, Monk, Ronnie Dobbs, Falstaff, Philip Larkin, Stevie Smith, Andy Kaufman, Oscar Wilde, Jack Fairy, Opinions, Fists, Bedwetting Music, Bad Poetry, Bad Dancing, People Who Talk Too Much, Being Someone's Second Best Friend, A Broken Harmonica You Found In A Public Toilet, A Good Beating, Throwing Up, Running Away, Hanging Around, Getting By +++++++++
This review might sum it up best….
"What do you get when you put a band of impassioned Aussies in a van, and send them trekking across the outback and through cities? In the case of Royal Chant, you get something feral and raucous. And, beneath all that, something unexpectedly poetic. Singer Mark Spence is an American expatriate, and his deadpan singing style belies the restlessness just beneath the surface. There’s an edge of discontent that runs through a lot of Royal Chant’s material. The modish “I Remember Crescent City,” with its bopping guitars and thumping rhythm guitars and doodling leads, could be a Strokes song in an instant. On “Shatters Alright,” Spence sings, “It’s not love without the abrasions” while guitars and drums send up torrents of grit. It’s garage rock perfection. Our favorite might have to be “Coughing Fits,” a dark and troubling rocker that unfolds with muffled dread. Sinewy guitars and twinkling keys quicken the pulse, and disturb all the way though the chorus. The abrasions might be psychological here, but either way, it’s love."
-Kate Bredimus editor, Ourstage.comiPhone Can Take Photos Of You Without Your Knowledge - BlackBerry, Gmail Users "You're All Screwed Too : Wikileaks Spy Files
In past we had reported Julian Assange said it is only a matter of time before damaging information that Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo Spying Tools for US intelligence becomes known. In past we had reported Julian Assange said it is only a matter of time before damaging information thatbecomes known.
Now in latest development on Mass Surveillance, companies can use your iPhone to take photos of you and your surroundings without your knowledge, said a representative from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism at a panel chaired by Julian Assange.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange also said governments the world over were curbing personal liberty and individual privacy by continuous monitoring of phone calls and emails under the guise of tracking Islamist terror.
He said the governments worldwide were keeping emails and phone calls under surveillance "not necessarily for terrorists but may be for economic intelligence".
This bulk of information, he said, "flows through largest US companies".
He named US' Lockheed Martin and Boeing as the companies which access the information and said: "It is handed out to those individuals and companies who are |
THE ESTATES, POWERS AND TRUSTS LAW, IF AN INDIVIDUAL WHO A. 6701 8 1 CONSENTED IN A RECORD TO BE A PARENT BY ASSISTED REPRODUCTION OR ARTIFI- 2 CIAL INSEMINATION DIES BEFORE THE TRANSFER OF EGGS, SPERM, OR EMBRYOS, 3 THE DECEASED INDIVIDUAL IS NOT A PARENT OF THE RESULTING CHILD UNLESS 4 THE DECEASED INDIVIDUAL CONSENTED IN A SIGNED RECORD THAT IF ASSISTED 5 REPRODUCTION OR ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION WERE TO OCCUR AFTER DEATH, THE 6 DECEASED INDIVIDUAL WOULD BE A PARENT OF THE CHILD. 7 PART 4 8 GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT 9 SECTION 581-401. GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT AUTHORIZED. 10 581-404. ELIGIBILITY. 11 581-405. REQUIREMENTS OF GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. 12 581-406. TERMINATION OF GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. 13 581-407. GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT: EFFECT OF SUBSEQUENT SPOUSAL 14 RELATIONSHIP. 15 581-408. FAILURE TO OBTAIN A JUDGMENT OF PARENTAGE. 16 581-409. DISPUTE AS TO GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. 17 581-410. INSPECTION OF RECORDS. 18 581-411. EXCLUSIVE, CONTINUING JURISDICTION. 19 S 581-401. GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT AUTHORIZED. (A) IF ELIGIBLE UNDER 20 THIS ARTICLE TO ENTER INTO A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT, A GESTATIONAL CARRI- 21 ER, HER SPOUSE IF APPLICABLE, AND THE INTENDED PARENTS MAY ENTER INTO A 22 GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT WHICH WILL BE ENFORCEABLE PROVIDED THE GESTATIONAL 23 AGREEMENT MEETS THE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS ARTICLE. 24 (B) A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT SHALL NOT APPLY TO THE BIRTH OF A CHILD 25 CONCEIVED BY MEANS OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE. 26 (C) A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT MAY PROVIDE FOR PAYMENT OF COMPENSATION 27 UNDER PART FIVE OF THIS ARTICLE. 28 (D) A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT MAY NOT LIMIT THE RIGHT OF THE GESTATIONAL 29 CARRIER TO MAKE DECISIONS TO SAFEGUARD HER HEALTH. 30 S 581-404. ELIGIBILITY. (A) A GESTATIONAL CARRIER SHALL BE ELIGIBLE 31 TO ENTER INTO AN ENFORCEABLE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT UNDER THIS ARTICLE IF 32 SHE HAS MET THE FOLLOWING REQUIREMENTS AT THE TIME THE GESTATIONAL 33 AGREEMENT IS EXECUTED: 34 (1) SHE IS AT LEAST TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF AGE; AND 35 (2) SHE HAS COMPLETED A MEDICAL EVALUATION WITH A HEALTH CARE PRACTI- 36 TIONER RELATING TO THE ANTICIPATED PREGNANCY; AND 37 (3) SHE HAS UNDERGONE LEGAL CONSULTATION WITH INDEPENDENT LEGAL COUN- 38 SEL REGARDING THE TERMS OF THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT AND THE POTENTIAL 39 LEGAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER ARRANGEMENT; AND 40 (4) SHE HAS, OR THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT STIPULATES THAT PRIOR TO THE 41 EMBRYO TRANSFER, SHE WILL OBTAIN, A HEALTH INSURANCE POLICY THAT COVERS 42 MAJOR MEDICAL TREATMENTS AND HOSPITALIZATION, AND THE HEALTH INSURANCE 43 POLICY HAS A TERM THAT EXTENDS THROUGHOUT THE DURATION OF THE EXPECTED 44 PREGNANCY AND FOR EIGHT WEEKS AFTER THE BIRTH OF THE CHILD; THE POLICY 45 MAY BE PROCURED AND PAID FOR BY THE INTENDED PARENTS ON BEHALF OF THE 46 GESTATIONAL CARRIER PURSUANT TO THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. 47 (B) THE INTENDED PARENTS SHALL BE ELIGIBLE TO ENTER INTO AN ENFORCEA- 48 BLE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT UNDER THIS ARTICLE IF HE, SHE, OR THEY HAVE 49 MET THE FOLLOWING REQUIREMENTS AT THE TIME THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT WAS 50 EXECUTED: 51 (1) HE, SHE, OR THEY HAVE UNDERGONE LEGAL CONSULTATION WITH INDEPEND- 52 ENT LEGAL COUNSEL REGARDING THE TERMS OF THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT AND 53 THE POTENTIAL LEGAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER ARRANGEMENT; 54 AND A. 6701 9 1 (2) HE OR SHE IS AN ADULT PERSON WHO IS NOT IN A SPOUSAL RELATIONSHIP, 2 OR ADULT SPOUSES TOGETHER, OR ANY TWO ADULTS WHO ARE INTIMATE PARTNERS 3 TOGETHER, EXCEPT WHERE THE INTENDED PARENT AND HIS OR HER SPOUSE: 4 (I) ARE LIVING SEPARATE AND APART PURSUANT TO A DECREE OR JUDGMENT OF 5 SEPARATION OR PURSUANT TO A WRITTEN AGREEMENT OF SEPARATION SUBSCRIBED 6 BY THE PARTIES THERETO AND ACKNOWLEDGED OR PROVED IN THE FORM REQUIRED 7 TO ENTITLE A DEED TO BE RECORDED; OR 8 (II) HAVE BEEN LIVING SEPARATE AND APART FOR AT LEAST THREE YEARS 9 PRIOR TO EXECUTION OF THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT, THEN THE SPOUSE OF THE 10 INTENDED PARENT IS NOT REQUIRED TO BE A PARTY TO THE GESTATIONAL AGREE- 11 MENT AND SHALL NOT HAVE PARENTAL RIGHTS OR OBLIGATIONS TO THE CHILD. 12 S 581-405. REQUIREMENTS OF GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. (A) A GESTATIONAL 13 AGREEMENT SHALL BE DEEMED TO HAVE SATISFIED THE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS 14 ARTICLE AND BE ENFORCEABLE IF IT MEETS THE FOLLOWING REQUIREMENTS: 15 (1) IT SHALL BE IN A SIGNED RECORD VERIFIED BY THE INTENDED PARENTS, 16 THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER, AND HER SPOUSE, IF ANY; AND 17 (2) IT SHALL BE EXECUTED PRIOR TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF ANY MEDICAL 18 PROCEDURES IN FURTHERANCE OF THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER ARRANGEMENT OTHER 19 THAN MEDICAL EVALUATIONS NECESSARY TO DETERMINE ELIGIBILITY OF THE 20 PARTIES PURSUANT TO SECTION 581-404 OF THIS PART; AND 21 (3) IT SHALL BE EXECUTED BY A GESTATIONAL CARRIER MEETING THE ELIGI- 22 BILITY REQUIREMENTS OF SUBDIVISION (A) OF SECTION 581-404 OF THIS PART 23 AND BY THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER'S SPOUSE, IF ANY; AND 24 (4) IT SHALL BE EXECUTED BY INTENDED PARENTS MEETING THE ELIGIBILITY 25 REQUIREMENTS OF SUBDIVISION (B) OF SECTION 581-404 OF THIS PART; AND 26 (5) THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER AND THE INTENDED PARENTS SHALL HAVE BEEN 27 REPRESENTED BY SEPARATE, INDEPENDENT COUNSEL IN ALL MATTERS CONCERNING 28 THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER ARRANGEMENT AND THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT; AND 29 (6) IF THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT PROVIDES FOR THE PAYMENT OF COMPEN- 30 SATION TO THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER, THE COMPENSATION SHALL HAVE BEEN 31 PLACED IN ESCROW WITH AN INDEPENDENT ESCROW AGENT PRIOR TO THE GESTA- 32 TIONAL CARRIER'S COMMENCEMENT OF ANY MEDICAL PROCEDURE OTHER THAN 33 MEDICAL EVALUATIONS NECESSARY TO DETERMINE THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER'S 34 ELIGIBILITY; AND 35 (7) THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT MUST INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING TERMS: 36 (I) AS TO THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER AND HER SPOUSE, IF ANY: 37 (A) THE AGREEMENT OF THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER TO UNDERGO EMBRYO TRANS- 38 FER AND ATTEMPT TO CARRY AND GIVE BIRTH TO THE CHILD; AND 39 (B) THE AGREEMENT OF THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER AND HER SPOUSE, IF ANY, 40 TO SURRENDER CUSTODY OF ALL RESULTING CHILDREN TO THE INTENDED PARENTS 41 IMMEDIATELY UPON THE BIRTH; AND 42 (C) THE RIGHT OF THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER TO UTILIZE THE SERVICES OF A 43 HEALTH CARE PRACTITIONER OF HER CHOOSING, AFTER CONSULTATION WITH THE 44 INTENDED PARENTS, TO PROVIDE HER CARE DURING THE PREGNANCY; AND 45 (II) AS TO THE INTENDED PARENT OR PARENTS: 46 (A) THE AGREEMENT TO ACCEPT CUSTODY OF ALL RESULTING CHILDREN IMME- 47 DIATELY UPON BIRTH REGARDLESS OF NUMBER, GENDER, OR MENTAL OR PHYSICAL 48 CONDITION; AND 49 (B) THE AGREEMENT TO ASSUME SOLE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE SUPPORT OF THE 50 CHILDREN IMMEDIATELY UPON THE CHILDREN'S BIRTH; AND 51 (C) THE AGREEMENT THAT THE RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS OF THE INTENDED 52 PARENT OR PARENTS UNDER THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT ARE NOT ASSIGNABLE. 53 S 581-406. TERMINATION OF GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. (A) AFTER ISSUANCE 54 OF A JUDGMENT OF PARENTAGE PURSUANT TO SECTION 581-203 OF THIS ARTICLE, 55 BUT BEFORE THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER BECOMES PREGNANT BY MEANS OF ASSISTED 56 REPRODUCTION, THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER, HER SPOUSE, IF ANY, OR EITHER OF A. 6701 10 1 THE INTENDED PARENTS MAY TERMINATE THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT BY GIVING 2 NOTICE OF TERMINATION IN A RECORD TO ALL OTHER PARTIES AND ANY LIABILITY 3 RESULTING THEREFROM WILL BE DETERMINED PURSUANT TO SECTION 581-408 OF 4 THIS PART. 5 (B) AN INDIVIDUAL WHO TERMINATES A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT UNDER THIS 6 SECTION SHALL FILE NOTICE OF THE TERMINATION WITH THE COURT. ON RECEIPT 7 OF THE NOTICE, THE COURT SHALL VACATE THE JUDGMENT OF PARENTAGE ISSUED 8 UNDER THIS ARTICLE. 9 S 581-407. GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT: EFFECT OF SUBSEQUENT SPOUSAL 10 RELATIONSHIP. AFTER THE EXECUTION OF A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT UNDER THIS 11 ARTICLE, THE SUBSEQUENT SPOUSAL RELATIONSHIP OF THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER 12 DOES NOT AFFECT THE VALIDITY OF A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT, HER SPOUSE'S 13 CONSENT TO THE AGREEMENT SHALL NOT BE REQUIRED, AND HER SPOUSE SHALL NOT 14 BE THE PRESUMED PARENT OF THE RESULTING CHILD. 15 S 581-408. FAILURE TO OBTAIN A JUDGMENT OF PARENTAGE. WHERE THE 16 INTENDED PARENTS OR THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER FAIL TO OBTAIN A JUDGMENT OF 17 PARENTAGE PURSUANT TO SECTION 581-203 OF THIS ARTICLE, THE PARENTAGE OF 18 A CHILD BORN AS THE RESULT OF A GESTATIONAL CARRIER ARRANGEMENT WILL BE 19 DETERMINED BASED ON THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD TAKING INTO ACCOUNT 20 GENETICS AND THE INTENT OF THE PARTIES. 21 S 581-409. DISPUTE AS TO GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. (A) ANY DISPUTE WHICH 22 IS RELATED TO A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT OTHER THAN DISPUTES AS TO PARENT- 23 AGE SHALL BE RESOLVED BY THE SUPREME COURT, WHICH SHALL DETERMINE THE 24 RESPECTIVE RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS OF THE PARTIES. IF A GESTATIONAL 25 AGREEMENT DOES NOT MEET THE REQUIREMENTS OF THIS ARTICLE, THE AGREEMENT 26 IS NOT ENFORCEABLE. 27 (B) EXCEPT AS EXPRESSLY PROVIDED IN THE GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT, THE 28 INTENDED PARENT OR PARENTS AND GESTATIONAL CARRIER SHALL BE ENTITLED TO 29 ALL REMEDIES AVAILABLE AT LAW OR EQUITY IN ANY DISPUTE RELATED TO THE 30 GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT. 31 (C) THERE SHALL BE NO SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE REMEDY AVAILABLE FOR A 32 BREACH BY THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER OF A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT TERM THAT 33 REQUIRES HER TO BE IMPREGNATED. 34 S 581-410. INSPECTION OF RECORDS. THE PROCEEDINGS, RECORDS, AND IDEN- 35 TITIES OF THE INDIVIDUAL PARTIES TO A GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT UNDER THIS 36 ARTICLE SHALL BE SEALED EXCEPT UPON THE PETITION OF THE PARTIES TO THE 37 GESTATIONAL AGREEMENT OR THE CHILD BORN AS A RESULT OF THE GESTATIONAL 38 CARRIER ARRANGEMENT. 39 S 581-411. EXCLUSIVE, CONTINUING JURISDICTION. SUBJECT TO THE JURIS- 40 DICTIONAL STANDARDS OF SECTION SEVENTY-SIX OF THE DOMESTIC RELATIONS 41 LAW, THE COURT CONDUCTING A PROCEEDING UNDER THIS ARTICLE HAS EXCLUSIVE, 42 CONTINUING JURISDICTION OF ALL MATTERS ARISING OUT OF THE GESTATIONAL 43 AGREEMENT UNTIL A CHILD BORN TO THE GESTATIONAL CARRIER DURING THE PERI- 44 OD GOVERNED BY THE AGREEMENT ATTAINS THE AGE OF ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY DAYS. 45 PART 5 46 PAYMENT TO DONORS AND GESTATIONAL CARRIERS 47 SECTION 581-501. REIMBURSEMENT. 48 581-502. COMPENSATION. 49 S 581-501. REIMBURSEMENT. (A) A DONOR WHO HAS ENTERED INTO A VALID 50 AGREEMENT TO BE A DONOR, MAY RECEIVE REIMBURSEMENT FROM AN INTENDED 51 PARENT OR PARENTS FOR ECONOMIC LOSSES INCURRED IN CONNECTION WITH THE 52 DONATION WHICH RESULT FROM THE RETRIEVAL OR STORAGE OF GAMETES OR EMBR- 53 YOS. A. 6701 11 1 (B) PREMIUMS PAID FOR INSURANCE AGAINST ECONOMIC LOSSES DIRECTLY 2 RESULTING FROM THE RETRIEVAL OR STORAGE OF GAMETES OR EMBRYOS FOR 3 DONATION MAY BE REIMBURSED. 4 S 581-502. COMPENSATION. (A) COMPENSATION MAY BE PAID TO A DONOR OR 5 GESTATIONAL CARRIER BASED ON SERVICES RENDERED, EXPENSES THAT HAVE BEEN 6 OR WILL BE INCURRED, TIME, AND INCONVENIENCE. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAY 7 COMPENSATION BE PAID TO PURCHASE GAMETES OR EMBRYOS OR TO PAY FOR THE 8 RELINQUISHMENT OF A PARENTAL INTEREST IN A CHILD. 9 (B) THE COMPENSATION, IF ANY, PAID TO A DONOR OR GESTATIONAL CARRIER 10 MUST BE REASONABLE AND NEGOTIATED IN GOOD FAITH BETWEEN THE PARTIES, AND 11 SAID PAYMENTS TO A GESTATIONAL CARRIER SHALL NOT EXCEED THE DURATION OF 12 THE PREGNANCY AND RECUPERATIVE PERIOD OF UP TO EIGHT WEEKS AFTER THE 13 BIRTH OF THE CHILD. 14 (C) COMPENSATION MAY NOT BE CONDITIONED UPON THE PURPORTED QUALITY OR 15 GENOME-RELATED TRAITS OF THE GAMETES OR EMBRYOS. 16 (D) COMPENSATION MAY NOT BE CONDITIONED ON ACTUAL GENOTYPIC OR PHENO- 17 TYPIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DONOR OR OF THE CHILD. 18 PART 6 19 FORMATION OF LEGAL PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP AFTER BIRTH OF CHILD 20 SECTION 581-601. DETERMINATION OF PARENTHOOD. 21 S 581-601. DETERMINATION OF PARENTHOOD. (A) A PERSON SEEKING TO QUAL- 22 IFY FOR A JUDGMENT OF PARENTAGE UNDER THIS PART IS REFERRED TO HEREIN AS 23 "PETITIONER". 24 (B) THE COURT SHALL ISSUE A JUDGMENT OF PARENTAGE TO A PETITIONER WHO 25 DEMONSTRATES THE FOLLOWING BY CLEAR AND CONVINCING EVIDENCE: 26 (1) THE PARENT OR PARENTS OF A CHILD CONSENTED TO THE PETITIONER'S 27 FORMATION OF A PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CHILD, SUCH CONSENT TO 28 BE EXPRESSED IN WRITTEN FORM, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ANY OF THE 29 FOLLOWING EXAMPLES: A SIGNED LETTER AGREEMENT, AN EXECUTED CONTRACT, A 30 BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENT, A RELIGIOUS CEREMONY DOCUMENT, OR A SCHOOL OR 31 MEDICAL RECORD; AND 32 (2) PETITIONER RESIDED IN THE SAME HOUSEHOLD WITH THE CHILD FOR A 33 LENGTH OF TIME SUFFICIENT, GIVEN THE AGE OF THE CHILD, TO HAVE ESTAB- 34 LISHED WITH THE CHILD A BONDED, DEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP PARENTAL IN 35 NATURE; AND 36 (3) PETITIONER PERFORMED PARENTAL FUNCTIONS FOR THE CHILD TO A SIGNIF- 37 ICANT DEGREE; AND 38 (4) PETITIONER FORMED A PARENT-CHILD BOND WITH THE CHILD. 39 (C) PETITIONER UNDER THIS PART SHALL NOT INCLUDE A GRANDPARENT OF SUCH 40 MINOR CHILD, A PERSON WHOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE CHILD IS BASED ON 41 PAYMENT BY THE PARENT, OR A PERSON WHO HAS NOT AT ANY TIME BEEN AN INTI- 42 MATE PARTNER WITH A PARENT OF THE CHILD. 43 (D) PETITIONER QUALIFYING AS A PARENT UNDER THIS SECTION SHALL BE 44 DEEMED TO BE THE LEGAL PARENT OF SUCH CHILD FOR ALL PURPOSES. 45 (E) A JUDGMENT OF PARENTAGE SHALL BE ISSUED PURSUANT TO SECTION 46 581-204 OF THIS ARTICLE CONFIRMING ESTABLISHMENT OF A PARENT-CHILD 47 RELATIONSHIP AS PROVIDED IN THIS PART. 48 PART 7 49 MISCELLANEOUS PROVISIONS 50 SECTION 581-701. REMEDIAL. 51 581-702. SEVERABILITY. 52 581-703. PARENT UNDER SECTION SEVENTY OF THE DOMESTIC RELATIONS 53 LAW. A. 6701 12 1 S 581-701. REMEDIAL. THIS LEGISLATION IS HEREBY DECLARED TO BE A 2 REMEDIAL STATUTE AND IS TO BE CONSTRUED LIBERALLY TO SECURE THE BENEFI- 3 CIAL INTERESTS AND PURPOSES THEREOF FOR THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE CHILD. 4 S 581-702. SEVERABILITY. THE INVALIDATION OF ANY PART OF THIS LEGIS- 5 LATION BY A COURT OF COMPETENT JURISDICTION SHALL NOT RESULT IN THE 6 INVALIDATION OF ANY OTHER PART. 7 S 581-703. PARENT UNDER SECTION SEVENTY OF THE DOMESTIC RELATIONS LAW. 8 THE TERM "PARENT" IN SECTION SEVENTY OF THE DOMESTIC RELATIONS LAW SHALL 9 INCLUDE A PERSON ESTABLISHED TO BE A PARENT UNDER THIS ARTICLE OR ANY 10 OTHER RELEVANT LAW. 11 S 2. Section 73 of the domestic relations law is REPEALED. 12 S 3. Article 8 of the domestic relations law is REPEALED. 13 S 4. This act shall take effect on the one hundred twentieth day after 14 it shall have become a law. Effective immediately, the addition, amend- 15 ment and/or repeal of any rule or regulation necessary for the implemen- 16 tation of this act on its effective date is authorized to be made on or 17 before such date.
I'm highly saddened to see another piece of legislation aimed at legalizing surrogacy, where I don't see anything that protects children in the most basic of levels. From my perspective, when I read this bill I see that the goals of the bill are to clear up any legal custodial issues that might arise from a surrogacy agreement. I see that we want to ensure that surrogates have a right to be paid for their services.Why am I not seeing that we should require home studies to be done prior to children being conceived through these technologies?One thing that is highly agreed upon within the donor conception community is that anonymity should not be allowed. In reading this bill I see that there are provisions for using anonymous donor gametes. But, I feel that there are some parents who fear that if their donors were known it would complicate the custodial issues for them, so they would prefer not to know the donor or allow the children to know their biological parent.The word "donor" from the get go is a misnomer. Very few actually "donate" their sperm or egg, they're usually financially compensated. That means it's not a donation! But this profit driven industry has captured all the feel good vocabulary and pushed it so much, that we as a society don't even question it. These feel good words take place of, bought & sold, abandoned, etc.If you are someone who is considering using 3rd party "donor" conception please read the bill below. The link below will take to the website where the bill is listed.While reading the bill try and put yourself in the shoes of someone who is donor conceived. Notice how the intended parents are protected (which ultimately helps clinics who participate in this have their finances increased) the surrogates, but not the children. Try and imagine the feelings you could have towards this industry, when we see that from the get go donor conceived children aren't treated as a blessing, but a right.Jeurys Familia #27 of the New York Mets in 2015.
Fellow Dominican Zacarías Ferreira composed and sings “Somos Familia,” the pitcher’s new custom theme song
“Somos Familia,” NY Mets closer Jeurys Familia’s new walkout song, will be released as a single this Friday, April 8, the same day that the Mets play their opening home game against the Phillies.
Fellow Dominican Zacarías Ferreira, a popular bachata artist known for his rootsy yet contemporary style, composed the song expressly for the pitcher.
Wth a title and lyrics that play on Familia’s name (“We Are Family”), the catchy song, performed by Ferreira, is a definite crowd pleaser, with appeal for both old school bachata fans and younger New Yorkers raised on Aventura and Romeo Santos: that means that it hits right to the multigenerational Latino members in the stands at Citi Field.
Familia’s new inspirational theme song also tells baseball fans what they want to hear on the field, assuring, in Spanish, that he is “ready to give every drop of my sweat and my blood here.”
“Somos Familia” will play at Friday’s home opener if Familia closes out the game.
Meanwhile, listen to “Somos Familia” now, exclusively on Billboard.Who said sabermetrics hasn't gone mainstream? We've now reached the point where even mainstream analysts are yelling "small sample size!" at one another. There's always been some understanding that a player who goes 4-for-5 in a game is not really an.800 hitter, but now, people are being more explicit in talking about sample size. I consider that a victory. Hooray for sabermetrics!
How big does a sample size need to be before it stops being… small? As I understand it, the most commonly cited study on the topic was written by a man code-named "Pizza Cutter" almost five years ago at a blog that no longer exists.
Mr. Cutter's idea was that he'd look at something called split-half reliability. BP's Derek Carty did something similar a while ago, while picking plate appearances at random. Mr. Cutter took two equal samples of the same number of PA for a bunch of players and checked to see how well they correlated with one another. The idea was that over time, a statistic becomes more and more "stable," meaning that it becomes a better indicator of his true talent level over that time frame.
After reading the original Pizza Cutter article, I am amazed that anyone pays attention to this study given its many methodological flaws. Among them:
It is written by a man who named himself after an auxiliary kitchen utensil
According to Mr. Cutter, who at the time was working with data from 2001-2006, he used consecutive pairs of years (2001-2002, 2003-2004, 2005-2006) for each player. This means that in his sample, Barry Bonds
He used an evens-and-odds method to split his sample. In this case, he lined up everyone's PAs in chronological order, numbered them from one to whatever, and then split them into even and odd numbered PAs and calculated a correlation between these two buckets. This is a man who needs more methodological sophistication. It may not be likely, but what if his findings were the result of his even-and-odd method?
When looking at batted ball type rates, he did them with the denominator of per PA
He used a case-wise deletion strategy. So, his sample for 100 PA PA
He used 50 PA
He left pitchers-as-batters in the sample. They should really be taken out. At higher levels of PA PA
Why would a man obscure his real name like that on such an important study? Was he afraid that people would find out who he is?
Let's see if we can make this better. I would propose to duplicate Mr. Cutter's study with much better methodology. As always, if the numbers scare you, you can close your eyes for the next part, and go to "the results."
Warning! Gory Mathematical Details Ahead!
I missed doing that.
The data were Retrosheet play-by-play logs from 2003-2011. Pitchers batting were eliminated, as were all intentional walks (I counted them as never happening). Only batters who had at least 2000 PA in that time frame were selected. There were 311 such batters. All batter PAs were lined up chronologically and numbered in order, and I took the first 2000 PAs for each batter. This means that I was able to get reliability coefficients on samples up to 1000 PA.
For stats that had other denominators, such as batting average (ABs) or grounders (balls in play), I note the inclusion criteria in the chart below.
This time, instead of splitting up the sample into evens-and-odds as Mr. Cutter did, I used a much better methodology, the Kuder-Richardson reliability formula. (For the initiated, I used KR-21, a derivative of Cronbach's alpha. There were a couple cases where the outcome was not binary—SLG, ISO—where I used Cronbach.) The baseball statistics in which we are most interested are binary outcomes (strikeout rate is a yes/no question of whether the batter struck out over a series of PA), and Kuder-Richardson specifically assesses measure reliability in binary outcomes.
The formula is available elsewhere online, but the basic idea is this. Imagine that you had a sample of six PAs for a bunch of hitters. Now imagine if, instead of splitting them 1-3-5 vs. 2-4-6 (i.e., evens and odds), you could split them into every single possible combination available and correlate those two halves. So, you could see what the correlation between 1-2-3 and 4-5-6 would be, or the correlation between 1-2-4 and 3-5-6. Then, let's say that you could take the average of all of those correlations. Mathematically, that's what Kuder-Richardson (and Cronbach) does.
So, if I have a sample of 500 PAs for a list of batters, this method will tell me what happens when you split that into a pair of 250 PA samples in every possible way. The result will be a much better estimate of how reliable an indicator of a player's true talent level a statistic is over 250 PA. Of course, we know some stats reach higher levels of reliability at lower levels of PA, but it's interesting to note which ones are which and what that says about player evaluation as the season goes along.
I looked for the place where reliability passed.70, which is about the only thing that Mr. Pizza Cutter got right. At.70, the rate of signal to noise crosses the halfway point (.707 *.707) = 50%. Of course, with any sort of bright line, there's always the objection that it's a black/white contrast where 50 shades of grey are called for. I don't know what else to say other than "Yeah, I know."
The Results
Statistic Definition Stabilized at Notes Strikeout rate K / PA 60 PA Walk rate BB / PA 120 PA IBB's not included HBP rate HBP / PA 240 PA Single rate 1B / PA 290 PA XBH rate (2B + 3B) / PA 1610 PA Estimate* HR rate HR / PA 170 PA AVG H / AB 910 AB Min 2000 ABs OBP (H + HBP + BB) / PA 460 PA SLG (1B + 2 * 2B + 3 * 3B + 4 * HR) / AB 320 AB Min 2000 ABs, Cronbach's alpha used, Estimate* ISO (2B + 2 * 3B + 3 * HR) / AB 160 AB Min 2000 ABs, Cronbach's alpha used GB rate GB / balls in play 80 BIP Min 1000 BIP, Retrosheet classifications used FB rate (FB + PU) / balls in play 80 BIP Min 1000 BIP including HR LD rate LD / balls in play 600 BIP Min 1000 BIP including HR, Estimate* HR per FB HR / FB 50 FBs Min 500 FB BABIP Hits / BIP 820 BIP Min 1000 BIP, HR not included
Hopefully, Colin Wyers won't kill me for using Retrosheet batted ball classifications.
* – In some cases, the magic.70 mark was not reached within the constraints of the data set, so I used the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula to estimate at what point.70 was most likely to occur.
What it means
Take a look at the basic outcomes of a PA. The idea of the "three true outcomes" (TTO) has been something of a staple of sabermetric thinking for a while. The idea of the holy triad of strikeout, walk, and home run being "true" was something that came from DIPS theory and applied mostly to pitchers. While they are the three that stabilize for hitters most quickly, it's actually a gentle progression upward to HBP rate and then singles rate.
Perhaps we need to talk about the five factual outcomes for hitters? I realize that TTO is meant to describe a hitter like Adam Dunn or Jack Cust who has a style of play that emphasizes those three outcomes. However, between 2007-2010, when the two of them were duking it our for the title of TTO king, Cust began to see his rate of singles rise (while his HR fell), while Dunn hit comparatively fewer singles and kept his HRs (freakishly) consistent.
Rates of doubles and triples were an odd duck. There's been a certain sabermetric (should I use the word fetish here?) over the past few years for guys who have high doubles numbers, but whom the market overlooks because they don't have sexy HR totals. Those doubles numbers may be illusions. The home run numbers are more likely to be real. Caveat emptor. Or amator.
Ground balls and fly balls stabilize at roughly the same time (and quickly!). Skill in producing line drives is given to much more noise. Again, Colin Wyers has written over and over that it's hard to trust a classification of a line drive because it's a subjective judgment. But even trusting that Retrosheet is 100 percent correct that a player's line drive rate will likely vary a lot, his GB/FB ratio will be quick to stabilize. Some players are GB hitters, some are FB hitters, but line drives occasionally happen and it's hard to know why.
Overall, these numbers aren't vastly different from the original article by Pizza Cutter, but the methodological improvements that I've made take away some of the concerns that could be raised about the originals. The techniques are a little more obscure, but after five years, it's time for an update. If I see some other older works that might benefit from some methodological sprucing up, especially from this Pizza Cutter guy, I might look into doing just that.
(If there's a stat that you wish I had done, leave it in the comments, and I will do my best to get around to it. Let's stick to hitters for now.)
Next time, we'll talk about how these numbers are often misused and what they can and can't be used to show.We’ve now seen several small-scale versions of Star Trek Beyond’s hero ship – the USS Franklin – over the last year since the film hit theaters: from the plastic versions that arrived with Beyond‘s Blu-ray releases to Hallmark’s light-up ornament to Eaglemoss’ special edition model.
Now, the largest version yet of the Beyond vessel is on the way from Moebius Models, a massive 15.5-inch, 1:350-scale edition under development as a kit for collectors to purchase and assemble at home.
Moebius had their fresh-off-the-3D-printer prototype on display at the Las Vegas Star Trek convention for fans to take in, a still-in-development version which is due to be finalized in the coming months.
News on ordering and availability is yet to be announced.
Stay tuned for more Star Trek news out of Las Vegas in the coming days!S.F. drug warrant helped accused killer stay in U.S.
San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, (left) leads Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, into the Hall of Justice in San Francisco, Calif. on Tues. July 7, 2015, for his arraignment on suspicion of murder in the shooting death of Kate Steinle on San FranciscoÕs Pier 14 last Wednesday. less San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi, (left) leads Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, into the Hall of Justice in San Francisco, Calif. on Tues. July 7, 2015, for his arraignment on suspicion of murder in the... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 54 Caption Close S.F. drug warrant helped accused killer stay in U.S. 1 / 54 Back to Gallery
A 20-year-old warrant over an alleged $20 marijuana deal in San Francisco turned into a ticket to freedom for Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the man charged Monday with murder in the shooting of a stranger who was walking on a waterfront pier.
Whether he should have gotten that ticket continued to fuel debate Monday in the aftermath of Wednesday’s slaying of Kathryn Steinle on Pier 14 along the Embarcadero.
Lopez-Sanchez, whose age is listed as 45 by police and 52 in jail records, is a convicted felon with a long history of drug crimes who has spent about half his adult life serving time for illegally entering the country and has been deported five times to Mexico, according to records reviewed by The Chronicle.
Lopez-Sanchez was on his way to a sixth deportation earlier this year, records show. But something changed: He got sent to San Francisco.
After serving 46 months at a lockup in Victorville (San Bernardino County) for felony re-entry into the country, Lopez-Sanchez was sent to San Francisco in March by the federal Bureau of Prisons rather than being transferred into U.S. immigration custody.
The old marijuana warrant, officials said, took precedence over the civil immigration case.
Upon his return to San Francisco, immigration officials asked that he be held for deportation after the city got through with him. But after his case was discharged by city prosecutors on March 27, the day of his arraignment, he was released by the Sheriff’s Department — which runs the jails — on April 15.
Sanctuary policy
The immigration hold was not honored. Less than three months later, Steinle was dead.
The legality and prudence of that release — made under San Francisco’s sanctuary policy for immigrants in the country illegally, which states that the city should not assist in federal immigration enforcement — continued to be a subject of fierce debate Monday.
Mayor Ed Lee distanced himself from the release, saying in a statement that “San Francisco’s Sanctuary City policy protects residents regardless of immigration status and is not intended to protect repeat, serious and violent felons. Our city’s policy helps immigrant and limited-English speaking communities where sometimes people fear and mistrust the criminal justice system.”
Lee called for an investigation into what happened by all of the local and federal agencies involved, saying, “I am concerned about the circumstances that led to the release of Mr. Sanchez.”
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monkey has almost entirely blackish fur with white fur only on ear tufts, chin beard and perineal area. It also has a relatively long tail, approximately 140% of its body size.
“After the discovery of the new species of Snub-nosed Monkey in Myanmar we conducted hunter interview surveys along the Chinese-Myanmar border which suggest at least one group in contiguous forest across the border in Yunnan. I contacted Long Yongchen my friend and colleague from the IUCN primate specialist group who followed and organized the first surveys that document the presence of the Myanmar ‘snubby’ in China,” said Frank Momberg of Fauna & Flora International, Myanmar Program Director.
“The discovery of Rhinepithecus strykeri in China gives a bit more hope for the species survival, however the population is still considered critically endangered, due to the high level of threats and very small population.”
“This monkey group was actually found in an area designated as a nature reserve 30 years ago and while local people have been hunting the species for ages, local managers knew nothing about it,” Dr Long concluded. “This highlights the need to improve wildlife management in China, as it is likely quite a few new species of plants and animals may be discovered in the border areas between China and Myanmar.”
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Bibliographic information: Long Y et al. 2012. Rhinopithecus strykeri Found in China! American Journal of Primatology, article first published online 26 jun 2012; doi: 10.1002/ajp.22041AMES, Iowa -- The Best Story In College Football hit the pause button on Monday.
Iowa State stood down from shocking the world because even karma needs a day off. Nine weeks into a college football season that was devolving into a study of the usual suspects, here come the Cyclones.
A program whose last and only conference title was 105 years ago is tied for the Big 12 lead with five weeks to go. A program that had beaten one top-five team in its history has beaten two in the last three weeks. A program with its former quarterback playing middle linebacker has seen its current quarterback (a walk-on) beat both Oklahoma and TCU. A program that might be the most polite in the country. A program that doesn't allow its players in bars during the season -- and whose players largely obey that edict.
"It's hard," said senior linebacker Joel Lanning, "but it's a team rule."
Far from a powerhouse, Iowa State is no longer a punchline having smacked both the Sooners and Horned Frogs in the mouth this month.
"You talk about coming out of nowhere," said Dan McCarney, the program's longest-tenured coach from 1995-2006. "It's incredible. This whole story is one of the best in college football."
The Best Story In College Football is guided by the current Hottest Coach. Matt Campbell came here two years ago after five seasons at Toledo. He's a Midwestern guy with Midwestern values who brought nearly his entire staff to a program that won its last conference title in 1912.
Twenty-one games into his stay here, the Clones are bowl eligible for the first time in five years.
More than that, Campbell's cell number has to be on the list of every athletic director contemplating a coaching change. If a 37-year-old former Division III player can turn things around at Iowa State in less than two seasons, what could he do at a place like Florida or Tennessee?
"I'm sure there are schools that contacted him," Lanning said. "I'm sure that Iowa State was not his dream school. He's from Ohio; I'm sure he's a big Buckeye fan."
Reminded that Ohio State has a fairly secure coach in place, Lanning added, "I don't think [Urban Meyer] is going to be leaving for a while, but I'm assuming schools are going to want [Campbell]."
Iowa State fans swarm the field after a home upset of TCU. USATSI
They're not to the point of being nervous here just yet; they're still reveling in their relevance.
The Clones have been, well, cuddly for most of their existence. Not threatening, certainly not winning. When the cold and wind whipped up in November, every once in a while Iowa State could be flat out annoying for teams south of here. In every conference Iowa State has ever played, that has been everyone.
These Clones are charter members of the old Missouri Valley, having survived conference expansion from the Big Six to the Big Seven to the Big Eight long before the Big 12 came along.
But coaches seldom stopped for long, usually passing through on their way to bigger and better things -- or they got fired in the process.
The list of former assistants is more than impressive -- Pete Carroll, Mack Brown, Jimmy Johnson, John Fox, Jackie Sherrill and Tom Herman. They just didn't make their bones here.
Campbell is where AD Jamie Pollard intends to make a stand -- or as much as a stand that can be made with the 53rd-highest paid coach in the country.
"Are we going to modify his contract going forward?" Pollard asked. "Yeah, we should because he earned it."
But that's as far as it goes for the moment. Pollard, in his 13th year, is in the process of drawing up a list of coaches that begs the question, "How did that guy get fired?"
Somewhere near the top of the list is Florida's Jim McElwain, who "mutually split" with the Gators on Sunday.
"Let's face it, the Florida coach is 22-12 and was in the last two SEC Championship Games, and he's in Year 3, and it's not good enough?" Pollard asked rhetorically.
At some point, he may even show the list to Campbell as sort of a grass-isn't-always-greener reminder.
For now, Campbell makes $2.6 million per year with a $9.3 million buyout. That is a significant poison pill, Pollard suggested.
"I'm not aware of any school in the country that has paid that much to buyout another school," he said. "I'm not naive enough to think it's never going to happen."
Campbell doesn't have an agent, which is almost unheard of at this level. Instead, he relies on a financial advisor and an attorney. That, Pollard said, is one reason he was hired.
"At the point in time you think there's a better opportunity somewhere else, I'll drive you the airport," Pollard said he tells his coaches.
"There's a growing number of football coaches who would tell you, 'I wished I didn't chase the almighty dollar.' I think that number is going to grow exponentially."
If that trend starts here, good for the Clones, Campbell and, well, good for college football. It would be nice to make more trips here where almost inexplicably there is a 44-game streak of at least 50,000 in the stands. The top 10 most attended games have all come since 2011 when Iowa State has been mostly terrible.
When asked if he expects to get calls from bigger schools, Campbell said, "I don't even think about that … I put zero thought into that."
Not even if super agent Jimmy Sexton calls you to be a new client?
"Probably right," Campbell said.
For now, on the field, these Cyclones look destined. Not necessarily for the playoff but for pertinency. With all the crap we the media have to cover each week, it's nice to find something good and pure.
Campbell takes Nick Saban's book-smart, polished, New York Times best-selling version of The Process and adds a Midwestern earnestness.
"If you fall in love with the process, then eventually the process will love you back," Campbell said on this postgame video from Saturday that went viral.
Fall In Love With The Process!
Do the Unremarkable With Remarkable Detail! #RaiseTheStandard
🌪🚨🌪 pic.twitter.com/BpyHHUm6eK — Cyclone Football (@CycloneFB) October 29, 2017
Love is not the first thing you think of with Iowa State football. The program hadn't had a 4-0 October in 80 years.
"I didn't even know that," Campbell said. "I had zero idea that existed. That's honest."
Campbell gets his advice from his dad, his former high school coach and his college coach, the retired Mount Union icon Larry Kehres.
"A guy I constantly talk to," Campbell said. "We're getting ready to play a rain game, I'll say, 'Coach what kind of advice do you have?'"
At Mount Union, he won three Division III national championships as a player under Kehres, losing just one of his 55 games. The Toledo turnaround included winning less than nine games once in five seasons. In his first season here, the Clones went 3-9.
"The humility piece," Campbell said Monday, repeating a familiar mantra, "is not something our society as a whole is good at."
To counter that, Campbell favors defense, team over self, precision and sacrifice. The Cyclones are one of two teams yet to lose a fumble this season. In the last 14 quarters, the defense has allowed only 27 points. Walk-on quarterback Kyle Kempt has the most Big 12 wins by a Cyclone quarterback (four) since 2010 -- all this month. Lanning was asked to switch to middle linebacker after starting 14 games at quarterback over two seasons.
"Growing up, I always wanted to be a quarterback," said Lanning from nearby Ankeny. "I was going to be an NFL quarterback someday. Wasn't having the greatest success doing it."
Playing both ways against Oklahoma, Lanning was on the field for 78 snaps. He recovered a fumble, posted a sack, passed for 25 yards and rushed for 35 yards. Kempt's backup under center that day was named the Walter Camp national defensive player of the week.
Every coach in some way teaches core values, but Campbell codifies it with signs regarding manners throughout the facility. He calls it the "Cyclone Code of Conduct."
"It's always 'yes sir, no sir' around coaches," Lanning said. "And Miss Erica out there."
That would be assistant to the head coach Erica Genise, literally the first face you see entering the facility. She was only the former director of football operations at Stanford and Notre Dame.
It concludes, "I AM THE RESPECTFUL CYCLONE!" Dennis Dodd / CBS Sports
Who knew there was a 44-game streak here of at least 50,000 fans? Or that one of the first texts the coaching staff received was from NFL rookie sensation Kareem Hunt. Yup, this Iowa State staff helped develop Hunt at Toledo.
And so we're left, for now, with an old-fashioned feel-good story. Campbell is 37, looks at least 10 years younger and spits values that suggest he's been around for 30 years.
The big TCU win was celebrated at home Saturday night with Campbell meeting the new family dog, a goldendoodle puppy named Rex.
"Only we would take on that in the month of this," the coach said.
This month has been life-changing. It took McCarney five years to get above.500. That 9-3 record in 2000 tied the 94-year old school record for wins. Needless to say, Iowa State hasn't been as good since.
Campbell invited McCarney back two springs ago. The beloved former coach spoke to the team in August and was back in town Saturday to witness a field storming following the TCU win.
"He sure as hell doesn't catch your eye much," McCarney said of Kempt, "because he wasn't getting many reps in August."
The first meaningful snaps of Kempt's career came when he started three weeks ago at Oklahoma. Starter Jacob Park had taken a leave for personal reasons.
A 343-yard, three-touchdown performance was capped by a nine-play, 75-yard game-winning drive. Kempt threw a 25-yard scoring pass to top receiver Allen Lazard with 2:19 left.
Where exactly did that come from?
"The entire game I felt we were going to win at some point," Kempt said. "I felt like that the night before. I've never felt like that. It wasn't confidence, it was calmness."
This from a kid who didn't know what Iowa State was until he arrived two years ago. Actually, Kempt thinks less of his accomplishments than those of his father. Mychal Kempt grew up in a trailer park in Aloha, Oregon. He was adopted. His father left the family. His adoptive mother died while Mychal was in high school. Mychal played football at Montana State, and he's now a high-ranking official at a banking technology firm.
Kyle bounced from Oregon State to Hutchinson Community College in Kansas to Cincinnati to here. Three years out of high school, he hadn't taken a college snap in a game.
"My dad is a phenomenal example of perseverance," Kyle said. "He prepared me so much for his moment. His thing was, 'You gotta be ready for your moment when it happens. Take it and run with it. Never look back.'"
There are few around here who remember Marv Seiler. In 1992, Seiler was a fifth-year, walk-on quarterback making his first start -- just like Kempt.
Seiler had been forced to play against mighty Nebraska. The slow-footed quarterback somehow broke free for a 78-yard run for the game's only touchdown. Iowa State won 19-10.
Seiler never did anything before that day or after. That pretty much is an embodiment of the program. The only other top-five win came over No. 2 Oklahoma State in 2011, knocking the Cowboys and Big 12 out of the BCS title game.
Since that day, Iowa State is 23-49.
"The fans have not been spoiled," McCarney said.
But once again, Iowa State may be responsible for sticking a pin the conference's national title hopes.
Ask the Cyclones if they care. They are resilient at their core. Running backs coach Lou Ayeni has been with Campbell for six years. As the field flooded with fans Saturday, Ayeni needed a police officer escort. Not because anyone recognized him but because he had been coaching in recent weeks with a debilitating disc problem in his neck. Ayeni couldn't afford to be jostled wearing a neck brace post-surgery, which kind of fit the scene around him. The Iowa State coaches nursing a fragile program.
"It was unbearable," Ayeni said of the pain. "I wasn't sleeping at night. It was on that nerve, 24 hours a day."
The coach was getting shot up with painkillers just to be on the field with his position group.
"I've got to be there for him, give it to me," Ayeni told doctors when he considered the likes of sophomore David Montgomery.
Montgomery is second in Big 12 rushing and leads the nation, according to Iowa State, having eluded 70 tackles.
"He's been the catalyst, basically for this whole thing," Ayeni said. "His desire to not be average and be the best has trickled down."
"Best month of my life," Montgomery told reporters Saturday.
There is a trickle-down effect all through the Cyclones. It's hard to be selfish when those around you are sacrificing.
"What went through my mind first was, 'Can I tackle?'" said Lanning, who hadn't played defense since eighth grade. "I know I can find the ball and do all that stuff. Am I physical enough to go tackle somebody every single play? I hadn't form tackled anyone in eight years."
Joel Lanning has picked up tackling just fine. USATSI
Pollard has already laid out his pitch for Campbell to stay. He likens this moment to a baton being passed.
McCarney built a foundation. Gene Chizik stayed for two short years (2007-08) but season tickets went from 27,000 to36,000. The likeable Paul Rhoads created everyman energy from 2009-15 but not enough wins. On his watch, though, there was a $100 million upgrade in facilities.
"If those three guys don't do their part, Matt's not even here," Pollard said. "He had other options that were easier and probably would pay more. I remember challenging him in the interview. 'Is your next job a transaction or a calling? If it's a transaction, go somewhere else … but if you're up for a calling that nobody has never done or has failed trying to do, then come do our job.
"'They'll build statues for you if you can do it.'"I'd like to share my experience with this keyboard. I have used a Logitech G15 for several years and decided to upgrade to the G19. The G15 is excellent and still in working condition, but I really wanted to use the color display on the G19 for video playback. I purchased the G19 in April 2012, and it worked wonderfully. Should you get this keyboard, definitely look into the freeware application LCDHost. It lets you make custom displays with tons of options. Currently, my G19 is displaying the time, outside temperature, weather, memory usage, cpu usage across all for cores, i/o on 4 hard drives, in and out speed of my internet connection, and the number of emails in my inbox, all updated in realtime, simultaneously, with a custom background picture to boot.
The keys have a much softer feel to them than the G15, and the fully customizable backlight color is a great feature. The built in apps are adequate. I don't really like the new resource monitor. The bar chart format for memory and cpu usage on the G15 was much easier and faster to read than the tachometer-style meters on the G19. As I said above, you can fix that by making a custom config with LCDHost. Also, the movie playback plugin often doesn't recognize a lot of formats. There is a plugin for an older version of VLC that lets you redirect video to the LCD. That's great, but it means having 2 versions of VLC installed, and some twiddling.
Now, for the bad. I heard that this keyboard had issues with Intel X58 and AMD 790 chipsets. I have an AMD 790 based board, but everything was fine...until I reinstalled my Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty PCIe sound card, which I had take out to make room for a graphics card. After installing this card, I started getting the same issues that have plagued a lot of users. The keyboard would work fine for 20 minutes to 4 hours, and then it would lock up. It often locked up when Netflix was playing, or in the middle of a game of Battlefield 3. No amount of driver re-installation would fix the issue. Logitech's forums had lists of suggestions, but many of them were ridiculous, like disabling Crossfire. I have a Crossfire system, and I don't think that disabling my second graphics card is a great tradeoff. It didn't work, anyway.
So, for a few months, I have been using the G15, occasionally hooking the G19 up and trying a different suggestion. Nothing seemed to stop the constant lockups. During this process, I noticed that the AC adapter was making a loud buzzing noise. I had high hopes that I might have a bad AC adapter, so I ordered a new one from Logitech. The new adapter does not buzz, but the keyboard had the same lockups. I tried tweaking USB settings in the BIOS, as directed by Logitech. They even claimed that cell phones sitting near the keyboard could cause lockups. Moving my iPhone across the room didn't fix it, and to be honest, I'm not surprised.
In a last ditch effort to get this expensive (but really nice to use) keyboard working, I bought an IOGear 5 port USB card (which can be found on Amazon). I hooked up the keyboard, and it finally works with no problems again. There is still a downside, though. The USB card isn't recognized until Windows boots. So, I still have the G15 hooked up, sitting in a corner, in case I need to get into the bios or tell Windows to start normally after a crash. Obviously, this isn't exactly ideal. But, the keyboard is so good that I'm willing to put up with it. If it had worked well without any issues, it would be a five star product.
So, in conclusion, if you buy this keyboard and it works for you, you will really enjoy it. Combined with LCDHost, it is an incredible piece of hardware. If it doesn't work, you might as well either return it or go straight to using a USB card instead of your onboard USB. I haven't really been satisfied with Logitech's explanations for these keyboard issues. I can see how there might be a problem with one particular USB chipset, but the USB logic on the Intel X58 and AMD 790 is completely different. I believe that there is either a hardware flaw with the keyboard, or a flaw in their drivers. I don't think it has anything to do with the Creative hardware or drivers, since plenty of people encountering this issue have used onboard sound.I was hesitant at first to sign up for the book exchange, fearing that I might get books I already have, or might not like. I shouldn't have worried though, as I got four awesome books from my UK book exchanger Salnajjar! They did an awesome job picking out four books I would have chosen myself, but fortunately have never heard of! I am especially excited to read a book by the author Terry Pratchett, as I have heard great things about him but until now never knew which novel to get. And I'm always on the lookout for a really interesting non-fiction book and Salnajjar really came through with Stiff by Mary Roach. This book about human cadavers is both humorous and incredibly engaging., Also, the book of short stories by Michael Marshall Smith and novel by Tom Holt have introduced me to two new authors with quite a few works to their names that will keep me busy reading for quite some time.
Thank you so much Salnajjar, you really did a great job picking out these books for me and made this such a fun experience!I was lucky to be paired with a great Santa. I've done a couple of the redditgift exchanges, but this was my first Secret Santa exchange. This also was the first time my match messaged me with questions and was interested in getting to know me a little better. They let me know when my gifts were on the way.
The first delivery was a big box which contained a really cool art print. I was so excited that rearranged my room that night so I could hang it up! Within the next week I received two more gifts, a Rolling Stones tank top (I'm a rock n roll type girl) and a magical unicorn figurine (to further my Cryptozoology studies).
But wait! There's more! I received a final box that I waited until Christmas to open. I had a rough couple of days with stressful family crap and this was something to look forward to; a surprise box from a stranger. And WOW! My Santa really outdid themselves. They sent me a thumb drive with music from their personal collection, since I'm really into music. A Groupon for Fusion Taco, because I'm really into tacos! I haven't been to this place either, so I'm looking forward to trying it. They also sent a Groupon for five belly dancing lessons! This is awesome; I just saw this group Wine & Alchemy a couple of weeks ago and the singer can belly dance something incredible, and afterward I had a conversation with her telling her how I wished I could dance like that. Now maybe I can learn some moves! Im so excited! On top of all of this, my Santa sent a ton of Bath & Bodyworks products in my favorite "stress relieving" scent, and two pairs of cozy socks, plus a custom colored picture of Rudolph from the 60's cartoon.
Truly amazing and thoughtful gifts that I will most definitely use and enjoy for a long time. Thank you SO MUCH!!
I also want to add that the experience with this particular exchange has inspired me to get more involved with / get to know my match better on future exchanges. Time to step up my game!If Scotland votes No next month, don't knock on Pat Kane's door.
Unlike Scottish Green leader Patrick Harvie, who said he would "sigh" if Yes lost, Kane would take defeat very badly.
"It will be a heart blow and a head blow," he says, sitting in Glasgow's CitizenM hotel.
"I would need to reconstruct a large part of myself."
He claims Scotland will not be a nice country if independence is rejected.
"It will be a depressed place for quite a while. I think there will be a leak of optimism, idealism, passion and energy. The balloon will go down considerably."
Kane is no fair-weather friend for independence, having supported the policy for 25 years.
The 50-year-old left-winger has an eclectic CV: he was one half of Coatbridge pop act Hue and Cry who now spends his time as a writer, independence campaigner and "futures consultant" for an "innovation" charity.
However, like some intellectual types, he can at times struggle to communicate in a way that appeals to the masses he wants to liberate.
In 2012, the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC) met to discuss socialism and other issues.
Here's how Kane described it: "It would seem to me that Brecht's tough self-admonition about the interpersonal anger and aggression of the radical had an answer today in the Radisson Hotel."
Can he see why some people regard him as pretentious?
"I think the tall poppy syndrome in Scotland has to be ruthlessly extirpated," he says. "Pretentious is a badge of honour for me."
Kane joined the Yes Scotland advisory board in 2012, but on condition Yes took no money from SNP-supporting tycoon Brian Souter, who had previously bankrolled a referendum to stop a government policy on gay rights.
He says of Souter: "The guy is a pernicious influence in Scottish public life."
He predicts a "narrow win or a thumping win" for Yes, but all the polls show Yes is behind and last week's debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling did not help his side.
Isn't Yes running out of time? "I think there's a deep process running that is not calculable from people talking to opinion pollsters," he replies.
"There's a lot of soul-searching going on. And there's a lot of deep cogitation going on."
Kane is closer to the Green vision of independence than what he describes as the SNP's "indy-lite" manifesto.
If Scotland votes Yes, he wants the disparate Left elements - spanning the SNP, Labour, Greens, SSP and groups such as RIC - to form a new party and contest the 2016 election.
"I think there is a glorious opportunity for a coherent, social democratic platform to be built," he says.
He also thinks the SNP will be wound up after independence: "It might get through the 2016 election, but I'd be surprised if it exists beyond that."
The SNP insists the Queen will be head of state in an independent Scotland, but Kane says this should be a short-term arrangement.
He would like to strip the Royal Family "down to bicycles" before moving to a republic.
How soon could the monarchy be replaced?
"Quite soon, I would say," he says. "I think it would probably be for the second term."
Kane believes the No campaign has created a "spectacle of scepticism", but he sounds a tad conspiracy-theorist when he suggests it is a co-ordinated effort between the state and media.
"I think it's been a masterful top-down job, led by friends of the British establishment, pliant media and a state broadcaster that should somewhat hang its head in shame in terms of its approach to the spinning and shading stories to unravel the plausibility of independence."
Isn't that paranoia?
"I don't think it's paranoia at all. I think it's empirical," he says.
Kane is a fan of the wider Yes movement - the hundreds of groups that have sprung up around the country - but he does not like everybody in the campaign.
In the 1990s, Kane, his then wife Joan McAlpine and Tommy Sheridan were friends, with the latter two co-authoring a book on the poll tax. Kane dislikes Sheridan intensely.
"Tommy is as damaged goods as it gets in Scottish politics. I've no time for the man," he says.
Back on policy, Kane says reducing "inequality" is one of the top issues for him in an independent Scotland.
However, there is an elephant in the room.
If he cares so much about inequality, why were his children educated privately?
"I have an answer to this which is quite clear.
"You should ask my ex-wife about that. The clue is in the 'ex'."
He did not agree with the decision: "I never have and I never will. It wasn't entirely under my control."
He describes the matter as "private grief", but says McAlpine, now an SNP MSP, is a "great asset" to Scottish public life.
Depending on your perspective, Kane is either a valued pro-Yes intellectual, or a chatterbox who has read too many books by French post-modern theorists.
On September 19, he will find out whether the theory of independence is to become a reality.Fort Collins Rep. Joan Ginal's bill to fine "rolling coal" stalled in state Senate. (Photo: (Photo: Photo: Toa55, Getty Images/iStockphoto))
State Rep. Joann Ginal's bill to fine soot-shooting diesel drivers stalled in the state Senate on Tuesday.
Ginal, D-Fort Collins, said she wrote the bill to target the activity, not the modifications. She had input from Fort Collins law enforcement and city officials on the bill. The bill would have created a $35 fine for those who rig light diesel trucks to blast thick, black exhaust and use it to obscure roadways or harass pedestrians, referred to as rolling coal. It would have also tacked two points on the offender's license. Too many points in a one- or two-year period will lead to license suspension.
The bill passed out of the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives on a bipartisan vote earlier this month. It failed on a party-line vote in the Senate transportation committee, with the three Republicans voting against it. A phone message to the chair of the committee, Sen. Randy Baumgardner, R-Cowdrey, was not immediately returned Wednesday.
LEGISLATION: Ginal bill to ban some edible marijuana heads to Senate
Ginal wrote in a text message that she plans to bring the bill back next year, possibly with revisions and additional input from law enforcement.
She said support for the bill has increased as more people have experienced being blasted with rolling coal.
Ginal said previously that Fort Collins law enforcement and city officials asked her to look into how to curb rolling coal. Councilman Bob Overbeck, an advocate for the bill, said he's heard of diners in Old Town getting doused with soot while enjoying patio weather, and stories of pedestrians or other motorists catching a plume are as common as a drive down College Avenue.
The behavior earned the ire of even pro-diesel advocacy group Diesel Technology Forum. In a letter to the editor, the Washington, D.C., based group wrote the practice "runs against everything" the industry has worked toward, including it efforts to reduce emissions and improve air quality.
Read or Share this story: http://noconow.co/1SBt9u1Rate Limiting: Throttling Consecutive Function Calls with Queues
Pat Migliaccio Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 20, 2017
An implementation for limiting the amount of time between function calls in JavaScript may be necessary when any sort of process requires regulation like generating network requests. Whether it’s an API call, data store, or even a DOM event, multiple consecutive firings of a function may not give enough time for the intended result before the next invocation occurs.
Rate Limiters
A common solution for controlling consecutive function calls would be to create a rate limiter or throttled wrapper function. A method that, when given a function and a time delay, will return a new function that when executed consecutively, will invoke the given function parameter with a wait time before it can be executed again.
Below is a working example of an initial design.
As you can see, the boolean value of isCalled determines whether or not the function has already been called. Now after the given wait in milliseconds, the setTimeout callback reverts the limiter back to a “non-called” state, making the method available for continued execution.
Dropped Calls
A rather significant limitation to this rate limiter is the other function calls are dropped. For example, if one were to loop over this method, they would lose certain iterations of the call if they occurred within the specified wait period. If the desired intention is for every call to be actualized, this method will not suffice.
A way to improve this would be to queue up each of the calls, so that every iteration will still occur but with the rate limiting timeout between each invocation.
Each execution of the returned function, will push the call to the array variable calls, which will act as the queue. While the queue contains values, a check will see if the function is already in a called state. If not, it will shift off the top or first method in the queue and call it. Then as with the earlier implementation, the isCalled boolean value will revert after the allotted timeout.
This does not work.
Why? Because the while loop blocks the event-driven nature of JavaScript and its event loop. Our callback in the setTimeout will never execute until after the while loop finishes its iterating, which won’t occur until the callback happens, causing an infinite loop.
Recursive Design
With this realization or understanding in mind, our real solution lies with good old recursion. By abstracting a caller method containing the fn parameter invocation which could be called recursively from within the setTimeout, it would allow the function execution to occur after the callback and would prevent the unintended continuous iteration.
Passing Arguments
Now how could the fn function be supplied with arguments of its own?
Looking into examples of other solutions, one implementation I have found, created by Matthew O’Riordan, contains some insight into ways in which this method could be optimized. His _.rateLimit() method, written as an extension of Underscore.js, adds additional functionality for parameters to be provided at the time of execution.
Continuing with the usage of idiomatic JavaScript and not requiring any dependencies or additional libraries is the most pragmatic approach for this implementation. Now making sure that arguments may be passed to the rate limited function requires their inclusion within the limiter method’s return function.
For simplicity the Spread operator is used on the Arguments object to bind the arguments to our fn parameter.
Alternatively, if ES6 compatibility is a concern, among the other changes necessary (i.e. ‘let’), an alteration must be made to provide the arguments to the rate limited function. As shown in the comments, the arguments object must first be converted into a true array which will enable it to be properly passed into the apply() method. This method is necessary to allow for the passing of an array of parameters to the bind() method as opposed to its de facto spread sequence.
Brief Implementation
Implementing the limiter function is now a rather straightforward task.
Each message will log in the console at an interval of 500ms. This may easily be replicated with setInterval(), but its usage gives a rather clear picture of a rate limited function declaration.
Rate limiters and throttling functions exist through a plethora of JavaScript libraries; I’m now looking forward to comparing their methodologies with the one above.
This article was originally posted on my own site, patmigliaccio.comANALYSIS/OPINION:
In the mid-morning of Sept. 11, 2001, 40 passengers and crew members aboard United Airlines Flight 93 found themselves on the front lines of a war they didn’t realize was taking place when they woke up that morning.
The pilot, co-pilot and most of the flight attendants had been killed by four Islamic terrorists who had gotten into the cockpit and commandeered the plane. At that moment, the passengers gathered in the back of the plane to decide what to do.
Some thought that, like in previous hijackings, the hijackers would want to negotiate and would eventually land the plane. Those passengers thought it best to go back to their seats and do nothing. But then one of the hostages called home and learned that other planes had been hijacked and hadn’t landed but had been used as weapons to strike at the heart of America.
So the passengers took a vote and decided that, instead of remaining passive, they would fight back as best they could. They had very little to defend themselves. One flight attendant who was still alive had a pot of boiling water as her weapon. Other people used utensils left over from breakfast.
They fought back, overwhelmed the terrorists and regained control of the cockpit and the plane. The passengers weren’t able to land the plane safely. Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pa., killing all 44 people on board. But no one on the ground was injured. Nor, obviously, was anyone hurt at what was thought to be the terrorists’ target: The U.S. Capitol or the White House.
The story of Flight 93 is an apt metaphor for the state of the country and the 2016 election. The idea did not originate with me, but with an author writing anonymously in the Claremont Review of Books.
The point is that this country is the equivalent of that hijacked plane right now. We’re heading toward a disaster, and, unless we can get control of the cockpit again, we won’t have a chance of survival.
Most Americans realize, like the passengers of Flight 93, that the trajectory we’re on has us headed for catastrophe. Polls show only a quarter of the public thinks the country is on the right track while two-thirds thinks we’re on the wrong track.
Polls also show that most Americans are unhappy with the immigration and refugee policies being pursued by the current administration. President Obama last year authorized the resettlement of more than 12,000 Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom are Muslims coming from countries defined by extremism and hatred of the West. A poll conducted in August by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that only 36 percent of the public supports the administration’s policy.
And, with domestic terrorism on the rise, the Obama administration has proposed to increase the number of refugees admitted to the United States by more than half — to 110,000 people.
That’s not all. Race relations are |
until May 26, it will be the deepest into the month on record.
We may salvage the month with a decent stretch of late spring weather around the Memorial Day weekend. But that’s so far out into the future, the confidence in the forecast is still low.This post may contain affiliate links; please read the disclosure for more information.
Walt Disney World has just announced a new dinner experience that will involve monorail hotel hopping and much more around the “Monorail Resorts” near the Magic Kingdom:
Join us for a progressive dinner unlike any other—with sumptuous offerings at 3 Disney Resort hotels.
Your Dine Around adventure begins at Disney’s Contemporary Resort, where you’ll check in at The Wave… of American Flavors restaurant. Relax and mingle with your fellow diners, enjoying a welcoming appetizer and specialty cocktail before setting off on your epicurean odyssey. Bon voyage and bon appétit!
First stop: Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort—where you’ll feel as if you’ve arrived in a far-flung tropical paradise. Celebrate the spirit of the South Pacific and luxuriate in the charm of this exotic retreat, with an enticing variety of island-inspired libations and appetizers.
Then it’s time for a change of scene and cuisine—as the monorail transports you a world away: to the opulent Victorian-style Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort & Spa. Step inside and step back into a bygone era of elegance and gracious hospitality. You’ll be escorted to the award-winning Cítricos restaurant where we invite you to settle in amid the refined ambience as you’re treated to a special Chef’s main course selection. Afterward, gather in the splendidly appointed lobby to sip champagne and savor a selection of artisanal cheeses.
Board the monorail once more to return to Disney’s Contemporary Resort for the culmination of your evening. Here, you and your Dine Around companions will retire to a private patio to enjoy an indulgent assortment of desserts, cordials and coffee. From this exclusive location, watch in wonder as the Wishes nighttime spectacular fireworks light up the night over Cinderella Castle—a musical, magical grand finale to your one-of-a-kind dining adventure.
-Price: $150 per person plus tax; gratuity included.
-The Highway in the Sky Dine Around is offered select Tuesday, Friday and Saturday evenings.
-Reservations must be canceled at least 24 hours in advance to avoid forfeiting the full price of the experience.
-Check-in takes place at The Wave… of American Flavors at Disney’s Contemporary Resort at the time of your reservation. Please arrive 15 minutes ahead of check-in time.
-Guests must be 21 years of age or older to consume alcoholic beverages. A valid form of government identification will be required to verify your age.
-Please alert the host at check-in regarding food allergies. Wherever possible, alternative dining selections will be offered.
-Disney dining plan entitlements may not be redeemed for this event.
-Discounts and promotions are not valid for this event.
Dining experience is subject to change; fireworks experience is subject to change or cancellation without notice.It feels like a while from my last Warhammer 40,000 illustration, but I think that's due to all the other projects I've been developing in-between.
I return to the Dark Millenium, though, with the latest Primarch in the Libris Primaris series: Alpharius Omegon, of the Alpha Legion.
This is one I was really looking forward to depicting. Mostly because I knew there was going to be a lot of symbolism to him, given the secretive and deceitful nature of the Legion.
As I had foreseen, I did incorporate many elements that make this one one of my favourites.
The most obvious is, of course, the presence of Omegon in the background. Or is he Alpharius? No one will know. That's key to the Alpha Legion, their unknown plans and schemes, which i tried to accentuate by making this Traitor Primarch face left as a loyalist, but looking right, as my Taritors. Omegon is promptly doing the inverse, so you never know...
They don't have an established homeworld, so I incorporated the many faces effect on the background, emphasising the Hydra quality of the Legion as well as Alpharius' likeness to that of a regular Marine from his ranks. Something also present in the relatively simple design of his armour, less pompous than his brothers'.
The Hydra is a repetitive motif all around, too...
So, overall, I'm very satisfied and happy with this one and I hope I've once again done justice to the character. You'll be the judges, as usual!
Have a great weekend and see you all soon!
Nic.-
© Games Workshop Ltd. 2010PORT ST. LUCIE, Fla. -- David Wright went 0-for-3 in his return to Grapefruit League action, but after logging five innings at third base, the New York Mets third baseman indicated he is recovered from the strained intercostal muscle on his left side and ready for Opening Day.
Wright plans to play again Saturday in Sarasota, as the Mets wrap up spring-training play against the Baltimore Orioles.
Wright grounded out and lined out to second base, both against right-hander Jake Westbrook. Then, facing lefty Marc Rzepczynski, he flied out to right field. Wright does go opposite-field often, but that also could signal his timing is not fully back yet.
He played in minor league games this week, but had not seen upper-tier pitching since the injury forced him out of the World Baseball Classic two weeks ago. He had received a cortisone injection in his left side March 15.
"The game action on the minor league fields, I think, helped me feel a little more comfortable today," Wright said. "Everything's good."
Playing Wright in a spring game eliminates the Mets being able to backdate any disabled-list stint and signals that team officials are fully confident he will be ready to face right-hander Edinson Volquez and the San Diego Padres on Monday at Citi Field. Wright remains confident he will be in the lineup Opening Day.
"I've said all along the same, and that hasn't changed to this point," Wright said.
Asked how he felt compared with how he typically does on the eve of a season, Wright added: "I feel about the same, I guess. Of course I would have liked a few more at-bats. But I don't have that luxury right now. I'll get the most out of what I can tomorrow and we'll be ready to go. Right now I feel pretty good considering the circumstances."
The Mets' infield, once depleted by injury, now appears intact for Opening Day.
Second baseman Daniel Murphy, who received a cortisone injection Feb. 19 for a strained intercostal muscle on his right side, played in his first Grapefruit League game Thursday. Murphy similarly expressed that confidence he will be ready to break camp with the club.Florida Virtual School — the state’s official provider of online-only learning — plans to accept 20,000 students from Puerto Rico who have been displaced by Hurricane Maria.
The resource is available to those students regardless of whether they’re still in Puerto Rico or have relocated to Florida, Gov. Rick Scott said in an announcement Thursday.
“Families in Puerto Rico have experienced extreme devastation of their homes and communities due to Hurricane Maria. As they work to rebuild their lives, these families should not have to worry about their children falling behind in school,” Scott said, touting that Florida’s public schools “offer a world-class education.”
Interested families should Liz Chico at Florida Virtual School at 863-606-8033.
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“I am glad that Florida Virtual School has stepped up to help these families as they rebuild their lives,” Scott said. “The state of Florida will continue to do all we can to help them during this challenging time.”
The governor’s office advised that Puerto Rican families interested in signing up for Florida Virtual School should contact Liz Chico at 863-606-8033.
Classes through Florida Virtual School are free to Florida residents, while nonresidents typically pay tuition. The internet-based public school was established by the state Legislature 20 years ago.
RELATED: “Give Florida schools leeway to take in displaced Puerto Ricans, lawmakers ask state”
Scott reiterated Thursday that all of Florida’s 67 county school districts are prepared to accept displaced students from Puerto Rico, some of whom have already started to enroll.
Officials at the Florida Department of Education said earlier this week they would issue “a summary of guidance to all districts and continue to work with school districts on additional issues as they arise.”
No announcements have yet been made by Scott’s administration in response to a formal request by lawmakers earlier this week, who asked that county school districts be assured additional funding and granted flexibility from certain state mandates in taking in Puerto Rican students.Maple season is finally upon us. Quebec is home to hundreds of the best cabanes à sucres (aka sugar shacks) in the world and supplies about 80% of its maple syrup. Selecting the ultimate best sugar shack can be a difficult task, thankfully we lined up the top 5 destinations you must try out. Whichever you choose, always remember to make reservations ahead of time and schedule your dentist appointment as soon as your sugar high has worn off.
Cabane à sucre Au Pied de Cochon
Martin Picard is the mastermind behind Au Pied de Cochon and since 2009, he is also the brains behind Cabane à sucre Au Pied De Cochon. This sugar shack is unlike any other. Not only does it elevate traditional sugar shack cuisine to an uber gourmet level,it also does so with an untamed imaginative flare. Pea soup with foie gras, mackerel omelet, pancakes fried in duck fat and smothered in the cabane’s maple syrup are just few of the dishes that have been featured at Picard’s sugar shack. The desserts are just as innovative! Maple cotton candy, maple whippet cookies, and a yogurt gelatin with jello cubes of maple inside are just the beginning. Au Pied du Cochon has kept the best for last with its 2014 menu. Many have speculated that Picard’s favourite ingredient, foie gras, will be highlighted in a soufflé with pork rinds. Suspected to be on this year’s menu are sturgeon quenelles, sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows, duck breast stuffed with innards, and squid ink pasta with blood sausage. Au Pied de Cochon sugar shack is already fully booked for this maple season, so if you would like to reserve your spot for the next maple season, submit a reservation request as of December and await confirmation.
Kids under 3 years: free
Kids under 12 years: $20
Adults: $62
11382, rang de la Fresnière, St Benoit de Mirabel, QC J7N 2R9
(450) 258-1732
Érablière Charbonneau
Érablière Charbonneau has been around since 2004 and within this short time frame they have received countless well deserved positive reviews as a top family destination sugar shack. Guests can enjoy maple taffy demonstrations, live music every Saturday night and a petting zoo. Looking to take in the quiet and serene nature that surrounds the shack? Charbonneau also offers sleigh rides, snowshoeing, as well as pony rides in the maple forest. As for the menu, it consists of your traditional sugar shack favourites: Homemade meat pies, cretons (pork spread), buckwheat pancakes, pea soup and of course, baked beans and of course plenty of the best maple syrup around. L’Érablière Charbonneau serves up more than just maple syrup, they also produce their own ciders using their own local brewery as well as apples from their orchard.
Kids under 3 years: free
Kids between 3-10 years: $8.50
Kids between 11-15 years: $11.75
Adults (on the weekend): $25.75
45 ch du Sous Bois, Mont-Saint-Grégoire, QC J0J 1K0
(450) 347-9090
Cabane à sucre Bouvrette
Bouvrette has been producing maple syrup since 1947. This family-owned business still offers its customers the authentic Quebecois maple experience, with some welcomed upgrades for both children and adults. Customers can explore the forest and catch a glimpse of the maple trees by horse-drawn sleigh or by train at $3 a person. Want to enjoy a free activity? Children (and children at heart) can visit Bouvrette’s petting zoo and spend some time with friendly animals. Bouvrette also has a dance room if you happen to find yourself there on a Friday or Saturday evening and want to dance off your snow maple taffy sugar rush. Speaking of eating, Bouvrette delivers its customers some of the best traditional Quebecois sugar shack meals: Baked beans, pea soup, homemade pickles, pork rinds, and more are on the menu.
Saturdays:
Kids 0-5years: $7
Kids 6-12 years: $12
Lunch for adults: $19
Dinner for adults: $21
1000 Rue Nobel, Saint-Antoine, QC J7Z 4N1
(450) 438-4659
Photo: Instagram user @mandzzzzz
Photo: Instagram user @mandzzzzz
Érablière au Sous-Bois
Érablière au Sous-Bois isn’t like most traditional cabanes à sucre. What makes it really stand out from the crowd is its menu, serving up an interesting tasty twist of your Quebecois sugar shack classics. After listening to the history of Canadian maple syrup and witnessing how maple syrup and maple butter are made, it’s time to eat. At the buffet, you will find staples like grand-père au sirop d’érable (a dumpling-like treat that is boiled in maple syrup) and pouding chômeur cake made with hot maple syrup or caramel poured on the batter before baking. The buffet also includes beet salad, rice salad, crepes soufflé, sausages and eggs in maple syrup. For dessert, guests can choose from over a dozen options, including carrot cake, bread pudding, and tapioca. Érablière au Sous-Bois also offers dancing until 1:00am on Fridays and Saturdays as well as caricaturists and face painters on the weekends.
Saturdays:
Kids 0-3 years: free
Kids 4-12 years: $8
Kids 13-15 years: $10
Lunch for adults: $19
Dinner for adults: $20
150 Chemin du Sous Bois, Mont-Saint-Grégoire, QC J0J 1K0
(450) 460-4069
Cabane à sucre La Branche
La Branche offers everything a traditional Quebecois sugar shack should offer along with some secret family recipes. Expect nothing less than great maple syrup, a hearty traditional meal, Quebecois music, and crisp country air. So why is it on our top 5 list? La Branche sugar shack also includes Domaine La Branche: their homemade alcohol product line. The Domaine includes many interesting homemade ciders and wines. Definitely check out their maple wine and maple liqueur and look out for their ice, sparkling, crackling, still and fire ciders. All of these are made using ingredients grown locally, most of which are grown on-site. Domaine La Branche also supplies their red and white wines. Cabane à sucre La Branche is perfect for amateur cooks and foodies proud of Quebec’s produce. Before leaving, ask for recipes using their alcoholic products along with their maple products.
Saturday Lunch:
Kids from 3-5 years: $8.50
Kids from 6-12 years: $12
Kids from 13-15 years: $19
Adults: $23
565 Rang Saint Simon, Saint-Isidore, QC J0L 2A0
(450) 454-2045
2015 is a new year, so we’ve updated our list with 4 more spots you should try out if you’ve exhausted the options above.
Sucrerie de la Montagne
Some sugar shacks work hard on looking and feeling ancient. They decorate their buildings with wooden slats and artifacts of colonial Quebec. Sucrerie de la Montagne is one of those few sugar shacks that does not pretend. It is very old and still employs some very old ‘technology’. The complex out near Mont-Rigaud is quaint and not overly commercial. It still runs a very old-style bakery with wood-fire ovens baking mouthwateringly delicious bread. It sports a typical cabane-à-sucre breakfast meal with ridiculously sweet desserts. What is so charming about the place, however, is the site. Spread out like a little village, each house and building offers a different part of history. And the bread. Don’t forget that bread. In the words of Pierre Faucher, Sucrerie de la Montagne is an excellent place to come experience a “sugaring off”.
Saturday Lunch:
Kids 3 to 6 years old: $13
Kids 7 to 12 years old: $19
Adults: $29
300 Chemin St Georges, Rigaud, QC J0P 1P0
(450) 451-5204
Haut Bois Normand
Sugar shacks are fun in and of themselves. Despite this, sometimes the long drive for a single meal can seem too much. To remedy this, you could go to Haut Bois Normand: a sugar shack, tubing, and tree-to-tree adventure complex. The tubing, literally in the back yard, is a great way to work off the sugar you will inevitably ingest. On the other hand, if you happen to go late in the season when the snow has melted, the tree-to-tree adventure climbing is a great attraction too. Climb and circumvent the mountain overlooking Lake Stuckley. The whole complex sits in the shadow of the eastern township’s Mont-Orford which is one of the most beautiful mountains in the winter. Haut Bois Normand can easily be a whole day affair with tubing in the afternoon and an early dinner inside the sugar shack.
Saturday:
Kids under 5 years old: free
Kids under 13 years old: $16
Adults: $27.50
426 Chemin George Bonnallie, Eastman, QC J0E 1P0
(450) 297-2659
Famille Constantin
Another activity filled sugar shack is Famille Constantin up in Saint-Eustache. This sugar shack is an especially nice treat for smaller children. With bouncy castles, jungle gyms, a petting zoo, and a puppet show, any little one will be entertained until they fall asleep on the car ride back. For the bigger kids, there is an ATV course outside and a mini-disco party after dinner. The premises are full of interesting things to see for the little ones while you enjoy the classic sugar shack meal and snow-toffee. There is even a fully stocked bar available if maple syrup shots aren’t enough. Finally, for those interested in supporting local producers, Famille Constantin only uses local products from the region.
Saturday lunch:
Kids 0 to 2 years old: Free
Kids 3 to 5 years old: $7.75
Kids 6 to 12 years old: $10.75
Adults: $17
1054 Boulevard Arthur-Sauvé, Saint-Eustache, Quebec J7R 4K3
+1 800-363-2464
La Goudrelle
Aside from a chosen few, the food at sugar shacks rarely changes: pea soup, beans, eggs, ham, and sausage with tons and tons of maple syrup. Sometimes though, some food stands out, staple though it may be. At La Goudrelle, there are the kind of beans that seem to be baked in molasses. There are Criss d’Oreils which counter the sweetness with salty, crispiness. And there are fried doughnuts which are just so good you order 3 baskets. Aside from the food, La Goudrelle has a dance floor, hiking trail tours, and a flurry of activities for the kids. It is a nice alternative to Charboneau down the street which sometimes gets overly packed. Both are excellent examples of Mont Saint-Gregoire’s mastery of sugar shacks.
Saturday lunch:
Kids 0 to 3 years old: Free
Kids 4 to 12 years old: $8
Teens 13 to 15 years old: $10
Adults: $20
136 Chemin du Sous Bois, Mont-Saint-Grégoire, QC J0J 1K0
(450) 460-213Greenpeace activists have scaled the heights of Barcelona’s famous Sagradia Familia cathedral to demand the release of 30 colleagues detained in Russia. Several members, suspended on ropes, unfurled pictures of their fellow-campaigners on the 50th day since their arrest.
In a similarly eye-catching move the group has released video of what appears to be Russian naval forces seizing its ship the Arctic Sunrise in international waters.
The vessel, which had been used in a protest against Russia’s first offshore Arctic oil rig, was towed to the port of Murmansk.
Russian investigators initially charged all 30 with piracy but said last month they were changing the charge to hooliganism. Greenpeace says its actions were entirely peaceful.
If convicted the activists face up to seven years in prison. Russia’s detention of the Greenpeace group has been heavily criticised in the West.New Year’s Eve partygoers are being urged to avoid cheap fake booze containing potentially lethal ingredients found in antifreeze.
The warning in the run-up to the UK’s biggest drinking night of the year comes from the Local Government Association (LGA), which represents more than 370 councils in England and Wales. It follows recent council seizures of counterfeit vodka laced with highly dangerous chemicals found in cleaning products and paint solvent.
After a series of raids on suspect premises leading up to New Year’s Eve, council trading standards teams are also warning sellers of illegal alcohol that they face confiscation of their stock, prosecution and being stripped of any relevant licences.
As people stock up on alcohol at home and attend major celebrations in towns and city centres, councils are issuing safety advice to help people avoid harm from dangerous alcohol containing lethal chemicals such as chloroform – which can induce comas – and high levels of methanol which is a key ingredient in antifreeze. Drinking the bogus booze can lead to vomiting, permanent blindness, and kidney or liver problems, and can be fatal in extreme cases.
The LGA is urging shoppers to look out for telltale signs of fake booze. These include unfamiliar names or names mimicking recognised brands, crooked labels, spelling mistakes, and very low prices that seem “too good to be true”. Drinkers being served vodka in pubs and clubs should also smell the drinks as fake vodka will often smell of nail varnish.
“New Year’s Eve is the biggest drinking night of the year but people need to avoid suspiciously cheap, fake alcohol at all costs because it could seriously harm your health, and even kill you,” said Simon Blackburn, a councillor and chair of the LGA’s Safer and Stronger Communities Board.
“Counterfeit alcohol also harms legitimate traders and threatens livelihoods, with the black market trade helping to fund organised criminal gangs. Council trading standards teams have been cracking down on businesses selling fake alcohol and rogue sellers should think twice about stocking these dangerous drinks as we will always seek to prosecute irresponsible traders.”
In a prosecution brought by Halton borough council, a taxi driver had his vehicle seized and was given a suspended sentence after counterfeit vodka was found in his taxi. Twenty-six litres of fake vodka – found to be unfit for human consumption – and 108 bottles of illicit wine were seized following a search of a storage unit.
Separately, Lincolnshire county council’s trading standards officers helped seize 3,570 litres of beers, wines and spirits – most believed to be counterfeit – from 20 premises as part of an operation with police and HMRC.
Drinking industrial-strength isopropanol – which is more commonly found in antifreeze, lotions and cosmetics – can lead to dizziness, vomiting, anaesthesia and even blindness, and can leave someone in a coma. Other substances found in fake bottles of spirits include ethyl acetate, which is normally found in glues, nail polish removers and cigarettes, and can lead to organ damage.This article is available for download as a free PDF ebook. Click the button below to download my free ebook. DOWNLOAD FREE EBOOK HERE
Hi Celes, I’m have social phobia/anxiety. [When I’m around people,] I can be relaxed sometimes, but most of the time I get nervous and I can’t think of anything. I want to be sociable and talkative like other people. What can I do? How can I overcome this? Please help me. Thanks a lot – Enes Hi Celes, besides professional help, do you have any tips for someone who suffers from social anxiety? – Tina
Do you have social anxiety? Do you feel anxious when you are around other people, especially people you are meeting for the first time? Are you worried about how people may perceive you? Do you fear interacting with other people, because you are afraid you would slip up, make a fool of yourself, and create a bad impression in others’ minds? Do you sometimes go to great lengths just to avoid facing or interacting with other people?
Social anxiety is a common problem many face, perhaps more than one may realize. For every run of Live a Better Life in 30 Days Program and Be a Better Me in 30 Days Program, I often read about participants who have social anxiety problems, beginning as early as when they were young. Some of them face mild anxiety problems in the form of sweaty palms and mind blocks when they meet new people. Some face more severe problems, where they experience intense fear of being around people, even going to great lengths just to avoid such situations.
In today’s article, I’ll be sharing the one fundamental reason why people have social anxiety. (And no, contrary to what many of you may think, it really has nothing to do with lack of confidence or fear of interaction.) I’ll share the fundamental mindset shift that, when you apply it, will eliminate social anxiety from your life.
Even for those of you who do not experience social anxiety, this “tip” that I’ll be sharing will help you increase the quality of your relationships by 300 to 400%. You will realize that whatever disputes, anxiousness, unhappiness, and fear you may experience in your relationships are totally redundant. This is the mindset which I’ve been using for the past 3-4 years and has helped me gain tremendously in the area of relationships.
Enter Tom, a Shy, Socially Anxious Person
To illustrate the essence of what I’m going to share, I will use an example.
Imagine Tom, a shy, secluded, and socially withdrawn person. Like most people who are socially withdrawn, Tom has social anxiety problems. Whenever he meets someone new, he tends to clam up and not know what to say. He also feels nervous as he wonders whether he’s doing anything stupid which may give the person a bad impression of him. Sometimes he blabbers off and says something silly, makes the situation worse. Awkward silences are all too familiar to him. The situation worsens by two to three fold when it’s a girl, because he has a high tendency to turn red which gives his anxiety away.
Here, you see multiple signs of anxiety at work. Lack of confidence, mental block, nervousness, second-guessing himself during the interaction, stuttering, flushing, and so on. For those of you with social anxiety (be it mild or severe), you can probably relate to this.
Now, let’s examine Tom when he interacts with people he knows, such as his good friend Chandler from high school, whom he has known for more than 20 years. Chandler is like his brother. Tom has no problem talking to him, asking questions, making small talk, answering questions, and having a conversation in general. He feels at ease and behaves totally like himself. Tom also does not feel any need to please or instill a good impression of himself in Chandler – because that’s Chandler, his best bud, right there. Chandler knows him, he knows Chandler, and there’s no distance between them, so to speak.
What just happened here? As you can see, Tom is able to behave totally normal when he’s with his best friend. But why is it different when he’s around other people?
The Reason Behind Society Anxiety (and the Key To Meaningful, Fulfilling Relationships)
This difference in behavior is because Tom perceives other people in a different manner than he perceives Chandler.
You see, in Tom’s mind, he perceives Chandler as his very good friend whom he trusts, relies on, and enjoys spending time with. There’s no reason to be nervous around Chandler since they are so close to each other, like brothers. It’s like Tom being nervous when he’s by himself. It’s silly.
On the other hand, Tom sees people he doesn’t know as people who are separate from him – distant, ambiguous, and alien. Not knowing who these people are, how they are like, and what their intentions are, he views them with great caution and keeps them at a distance so as to protect himself. He also feels a need to project a certain image around them, since he wants to give others a good impression of himself.
He does this to everyone he meets, until time passes, trust is built, the walls come down, a relationship is formed, and it is proven that the people he is with are good-hearted, trustworthy, reliable, and genuine people.
Tom’s perception of people is pretty much the same way most people out there view others. Most people in our society perceive other people as foreign, unknown beings who have no place in their lives (that is, until their paths cross). They view people as separate from them, until they get to know the other people well enough to consider as a part of them. This separation mindset is the source of all your social anxiety and relationship problems.
Separation Mindset: Viewing People as Separate From You
Characteristics of Separation Mindset
Here are the typical characteristics of someone with a separation mindset:
You see people as separate from you. They have no connection or relation to who you are.
from you. They have no connection or relation to who you are. You are often worried about the opinions others have of you.
. When meeting someone new, you are obsessed with giving the right (first) impressions, rather than fostering a connection.
, rather than fostering a connection. By default, you do not open yourself up, nor do you fully give your trust to someone, until he/she has proved deserving of it. This is a safeguard to prevent yourself from ever getting hurt.
, nor do you fully give your trust to someone, he/she has. This is a safeguard to prevent yourself from ever getting hurt. Because of that, you take time to warm up to people, before you become at ease around them, and reveal who you really are. Before that happens, you usually project a front that is totally different from how you normally are.
, before you become at ease around them, and reveal who you really are. Before that happens, you usually project a front that is totally different from how you normally are. You see the world as a cold, dark, and dangerous place with malicious people out there to hurt you (or others). E.g., If someone approaches you in a foreign land, your first instinct would be to wonder if the person is trying to pick your pocket or rip you off, rather than anything else.
with malicious people out there to hurt you (or others). E.g., If someone approaches you in a foreign land, your first instinct would be to wonder if the person is trying to pick your pocket or rip you off, rather than anything else. By default, you question people’s intentions (especially if it’s someone you don’t know), because as your parents always say, “You never know if others have ulterior motives.” and you prefer to err on the safe side.
Problems with Separation Mindset
The separation mindset is one that is marked by fear. It is pretty much the source of all issues when it comes to social situations and relationships. (Note: by relationships, I’m referring to all kinds of relationships, including friendships, business relationships, romantic relationships, familial relationships, etc).
Here are common problems that someone with a separation mindset would face:
It takes time for relationships to build. As opposed to getting right into the heart of connecting with people right away, there is often a lot of time spent dancing around the edges before you get to know the people better. For people with deep separation mindsets, it takes even longer. You create a lot of unnecessary tension for yourself, between yourself and the other person, and for the other person in a relationship. In social situations, you are often concerned with whether you’re giving the right impression, rather than focusing on the interaction between you and the other person. You drive away great people and great relationships (be it potential friends or potential romantic partners), without even knowing it yourself. That’s because you erect so many crazy barriers for someone to know you and to get close to you, such that it becomes a pointless endeavor for the other party at the end of the day. You are often second guessing other people’s intentions, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt. You often have problems meeting nice people, be it friends or romantic partners. For some reason, you often attract fear-based people into your life. (That’s because a fear-based mindset attracts fear-based people, as I wrote before in 10 Steps to Attract Authentic Love)
Does any of the above apply to you?
Oneness Mindset: Viewing People as Like Souls To Be Reconnected
The opposite of the separation mindset is the oneness mindset, where rather than seeing people as separate from you, you recognize other people are a part of you, and you are all one and the same. It is a mindset marked by love.
Characteristics of Oneness Mindset
You see people as connected with you. Even if you may not know everyone yet, a connection already exists, and you just have to tap into that latent connection when you meet each person.
with you. Even if you may not know everyone yet, a connection already exists, and you just have to tap into that latent connection when you meet each person. You do not worry yourself with what people think of you. You know your intentions are pure and that’s what matters.
. You know your intentions are pure and that’s what matters. Impressions do not concern you. You know the relationship is beyond the initial impressions, and it’s about building a real connection.
. You know the relationship is beyond the initial impressions, and it’s about building a real connection. You open up your authentic, real self when you’re around people you know as well as people you don’t know yet. Your heart is worn completely on your sleeve. You do not hide behind a mask or try to be someone you are not.
when you’re around people you know as well as people you don’t know yet. Your heart is worn completely on your sleeve. You do not hide behind a mask or try to be someone you are not. The concept of “warming up” to others does not exist. You get right to connecting with people when you (first) meet them.
when you (first) meet them. You see the world as one, where everyone is interconnected with each other, separated only by the space between them. Each person serves a role in the grand design, and each role the person serves supports everyone else in the universe.
, where everyone is interconnected with each other, separated only by the space between them. Each person serves a role in the grand design, and each role the person serves supports everyone else in the universe. By default, everyone gets the benefit of the doubt from you, until proven otherwise. You see everyone as having genuine, good intentions in his/her heart, and there is no one out trying to hurt anybody. (An exception to the rule would be people in extremely fear-based consciousness, who have lost their way and resort to hurting others to let themselves be hurt.)
Benefits of Oneness Mindset
When you embrace the oneness mindset, you will experience quite a paradigm shift in your social relationships.
There is no fear when you are around people, because you recognize they are all a part of you. Rather than spend time “building” the relationship (acquainting, getting to know the person better, knowing the person’s interests, forming trust, etc), you get right to fostering the connection right away. The notion of time has no significance in the growth of your relationship with others. You can be meeting people off the bat and becoming great buddies with them. People love to be around you because of the energy you exude. At the same time, you thrive in the presence of other wonderful people too. There are no barriers, separators, or distance between you and them, so to speak. You have little problem attracting good, high consciousness people into your life. Generous souls, kind angels, supportive spirits; these people keep entering your life one after another. You are much happier and at ease with yourself, compared to someone with the separation mindset. You stop worrying about making good first impressions and projecting a certain image of yourself, instead working on strengthening the connection between you and the other party instead.
Shifting from Separation to Oneness Mindset: How to Get Started
If you want to attract authentic people into your life, and if you want to achieve meaningful, fulfilling social relationships, the oneness mindset is the way to go.
Under the oneness mindset, the notion of social anxiety doesn’t exist, simply because there is no place for it. When you recognize that people are not separate from you but really are a part of you, suddenly it becomes obvious that all your anxiety in social situations, as well as your anxiety in relationships, is totally redundant. There’s no reason to be fearful at all, because others are not separate from you. They never were. It’s just like feeling nervous while you’re around your best friend; there’s no reason to be that way at all.
This guide will help you transit to this new mindset with ease.
1. Understand What’s Contributing to Your Separation Mindset
If there’s a part of you that refuses to let go of the separation mindset, try to understand what’s binding you to it. Why are you holding on to a separation mindset? Is it because you have been hurt before by others? Is it because people have said unkind things when you opened up, causing you to go right back into your shell? Is it |
ant Historia: Perfect Chronology – 33,525 (31,524 physical, 2,001 digital)
12. [PS4] Minecraft: PlayStation 4 Edition – 28,768 (14,600 physical, 14,168 digital)
13. [NSW] Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 25,261 (23,420 physical, 1,841 digital)
14. [3DS] Ever Oasis – 24,986 (23,030 physical, 1,956 digital)
15. [3DS] Sumikko Gurashi: Koko, Dokonan Desu? – 23,905 (23,597 physical, 308 digital)
16. [3DS] Pokemon Sun/Moon – 20,651 (20,030 physical, 621 digital)
17. [3DS] Monster Hunter XX – 18,874 (17,743 physical, 1,131 digital)
18. [PS4] NieR: Automata – 17,397 (15,729 physical, 1,668 digital)
19. [PSV] Omega Labyrinth Z – 16,847 (14,845 physical, 2,002 digital)
20. [3DS] Kirby’s Blowout Blast – 16,760 (1,738 physical, 15,022 digital)
21. [3DS] The Alliance Alive – 16,032 (15,341 physical, 691 digital)
22. [PS4] Final Fantasy XIV: Complete Package – 15,882 (4,291 physical, 11,591 digital)
23. [PS4] Omega Labyrinth Z – 15,819 (12,953 physical, 2,866 digital)
24. [PS4] Under Night In-Birth Exe:Late[st] – 15,232 (9,400 physical, 5,832 digital)
25. [PS4] Farpoint – 15,017 (14,202 physical, 815 digital)
26. [PS4] Grand Theft Auto V – 14,453 (11,668 physical, 2,785 digital)
27. [3DS] Animal Crossing: New Leaf – Welcome amiibo – 13,701 (10,833 physical, 2,868 digital)
28. [PS4] Call of Duty: Black Ops III – Game of the Year Edition – 13,544 (12,572 physical, 972 digital)
29. [PSV] Osomatsu-san: The Game – 13,474 (13,077 physical, 397 digital)
30. [NSW] Fate/Extella – 13,128 (12,019 physical, 1,109 digital)
Note that these sales are based on data between June 26 and July 30.
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PocketKyle Schwarber's screamer of a home run almost dotted the "i" on Wrigley's Budweiser sign.
Many Cubs fans are still talking about rookie sensation Kyle Schwarber's home run. The ball went so far, some joked it would have landed in Lake Michigan if it wasn't for the Budweiser sign on top of the right field video board."And Schwarber sends one high and deep, way back, and this ball is long gone!" said the announcer.Schwarber's long ball was gone, until Chopper 7 spotted it just after the game atop the Budweiser beer sign.Bartman, the Billy Goat, and now, the Kyle Schwarber ball. The rookie's moon shot is now part of Cubs lore."It was really something. It hit his bat, and people were kind of giggling, laughing, they couldn't believe what they just saw," said Ed Hartig, a Cubs historian.The experts say it traveled 418.9 feet. Not the longest drive in Wrigley history, but it was the most accurate.When Chopper7HD was back over Wrigley Wednesday morning, the ball was gone and superstitious Cubs fans began to worry."We don't believe in curses," said Julian Green, Cubs spokesperson.Fear not Cub faithful, the team removed the ball to make sure it was Schwarber's shot then crews returned it to the same spot - now protected by plexiglass."It did have the post-season watermark on the ball. We retrieved the ball, verified that it was Schwarber's home run and decided as an organization: Why not leave it up there?" said Julian Green, Cubs spokesperson.So on Wednesday afternoon, with a few fans looking on and Chopper7HD circling overhead, the team put the ball back in its rightful spot."That's a very positive symbol, it's a good luck charm," said Grant DePorter, Harry Caray's Chicago Sports Museum.Collector, baseball buff and restaurateur Grant DePorter says that ball has value. Perhaps in the ballpark of the $50,000 paid for Paul Konerko's World Series Grand Slam."If they go all the way to the World Series, the value is going to go up and it could easily be that number," DePorter said.At Sheffield Baseball Club, rooftop fans will have something new to see."We've been looking at it all day. It's something to add to the feel of Wrigley. It's great. It's going to get everyone fired up," said Ryan Manson, Sheffield Baseball Club."It's the legend and the truth, it's right there for everyone to see," Hartig said.The Cubs said the ball will stay on top of the video board - under a plexiglass case - for the remainder of the season. Some fans say the team should auction it off for charity.“There’s a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours.”
It’s tough to not like The Princess Bride. It’s got something for everyone: Cary Elwwwweeeessss for the ladies, Robin Wright for the fellas, Andre the Giant for the everyone. Not to mentions swamps and giant rats and Wallace Shawn and sword fights and Kevin Arnold and Christopher Guest and hello my name is Inigo Montoya you killed my father prepare to die. It’s one of the few cult movies that deserves all the adoration it receives.
On Thursday night, director Rob Reiner joined Jason Reitman at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in front of a rapturous crowd to talk over The Princess Bride. Rather than MST3K it, though, they instead provided interesting facts about the movie — a real-life directors commentary. Here’s what we learned.
1.
Reiner: Originally, Peter Falk [who was around 60] said, “I don’t know if I’m old enough to be a grandfather.” He said maybe we should put prosthetics on me, to make me older. So we did. We did a test on it. He looked at it and said, “Rob…I look like a burn victim!” I said, “Peter, maybe we do it without the prosthetics?” He says, “I think you’re on to something.”
2.
Reitman: There’s a piece of trivia I heard about this scene. There’s a hat in the scene that [composer] Mark Knopfler wanted you to use? Reiner: There it is! You see it hanging? You see that little cap there? That’s the cap I wore in Spinal Tap. And Mark Knopfler, who wrote the score for The Princess Bride, said to me, “I’ll only do it if you put something from This is Spinal Tap in the movie.” So I threw the hat in there for Marty DiBergi, and then I was lucky enough to get the guy who was the lead guitarist for Dire Straits. Here, you can hear his guitar. It’s a classical score, but his guitar work is very distinctive.
3.
Reitman: I read somewhere Cary Elwes said everywhere he goes to this day, women ask him to say that to them. Reiner: Yes, and people have Princess Bride weddings. They have ‘As you wish’ written inside their rings. They do all kinds of things like that.
4.
Reitman: I read that you were in a restaurant in New York once, and one of John Gotti’s men said… Reiner: Yeah, I walked outside the restaurant, and John Gotti was there with six wiseguys. There was a guy beside the limo who looked like Luca Brasi. He looked at me, and said: “You killed my father…Prepare to die!” I almost went right then! He said, “I love dat movie, da Princess Bride!”
5.I have been writing in Haskell almost exclusively since the early summer. Before that I was writing in Scala. I have a significant amount of experience in both C# and F#. One of the most frustrating things about learning Haskell is there is not a good map that takes the way things are done in the OO world of Java and.Net to the way things should be done in Haskell. Even for a good developer it can be difficult to make the transition especially for writing high performance, highly concurrent applications.
I am starting this series to document things that I find have worked in Haskell. I don’t claim to be a Haskell expert, but I do build code that ships and works. I tend to use less of the fancy language features than other people and I prefer to write very readable code even if it is slightly more verbose than it might otherwise be. I hope that others can learn from my experience and move along the learning curve faster.
For our inaugural topic I will cover our development environment. We operate in a mixed language environment using Haskell, C++ and a smattering of both Python and R. We develop primarily on vim (I use mvim) on OSX. We deploy code onto custom Gentoo linux running on both our own boxes as well as EC2 machines.
As our codebase grew we quickly started to become frustrated with cabal as there is no notion of recompile all dependencies, so when a change is made in a common package everyone had to manually recompile their packages in the correct order. We evaluated cabal-dev but ultimately decided that it did not meet our needs, primarily due to the fact that we needed good C++ support and wanted more flexibility to add custom steps which did not seem like it was going to be particularly easy using cabal-dev. Ultimately we built our own build system, cabal-waf, using waf. You can find Nathan’s blog post with more details here.
For debugging we have increasingly moved to using a custom build of the RTS which has our own debugging extensions specifically around heap analysis. Most debugging is done through GDB which in and of itself is a terrible experience compared to using Windbg. In the future we will be adding more functionality for debugging as we will need it to debug production issues. I have not found GHCI to be useful for anything other than trivial issues as it runs far to slow. All core applications and libraries are compiled with -Wall and -Werror to catch any potential bugs that they can pickup.
We use our own forked version of the LLVM bindings for Haskell extensively to do code generation. There was functionality we required the depended on type unsafe code that the maintainers did not feel that they wanted, so we maintain our own fork.
It turns out that we have developed our own set of core libraries as many companies do. We will probably release a couple of these in the future. We have our own time library that takes most of its design from Joda Time. I was actually very shocked by how undeveloped this functionality was on Haskell, and we had to do a far amount of work to get complex time manipulation working initially. Apparently we are not the only ones with problems as I have found another implementation that takes its inspiration from.Net’s DateTime.Our survey is about which hand left-handers use for various activities, how left-handedness runs in families and how left-handers are affected by their hand preference. Thank you very much to all of you who completed the survey and we have now analysed the results so far, which make some interesting reading.
If you have not completed the survey yet, click here to add your experiences and views
(sorry, we are not taking new submissions for this survey at the moment)
These links take you to the sections of our results analysis below or you can just scroll down the page to see it all.
Who took part in the survey?
How does left-handedness run in families?
Which hand do left-handers use for various activities?
What are the effects of being left-handed?
How does being left-handed help or hinder?
Complete the survey (not taking new submissions for now)
Who took part in the survey?
39% of our survey respondents were male and 61% female. It is generally thought that there are slightly more male left-handers than female so does this just reflect the fact that males are less likely to fill in surveys?
The ages of the survey respondents were: Under 18
19-29
30-39
40-49
50-59
60 and over 9%
13%
31%
21%
14%
11%
How does left-handedness
run in families?
We asked about the handedness of family members to see whether being left-handed runs in families. No-one has yet discovered a gene that causes handedness but anecdotal evidence indicates that it does run in families.
The results below show the percentage of left-handers for each family member, based only on the surveys completed by left-handers as “you” and ignoring all blank boxes. For example, 14% of left-handers had a left-handed mother but only 5% had a left-handed grandmother on their mother’s side (grandmother2).
Grand
parents % Parents % YOU and siblings % Your children % Grand-
father 1 13 YOU 100 Child 1 15 Grand-
mother 1 6 Father 13 Brother / sister 1 13 Child 2 16 Grand-
father 2 6 Mother 14 Brother / sister 2 13 Child 3 14 Grand-
mother 2 5 Brother / sister 3 7 Child 4 8
In total, 11% of all left-handers’ direct relatives were also left-handed
The handedness of their parents was slightly higher then the generally accepted level of 10% of population being left-handed (although this figure itself has not been established by any proper large scale survey)
Left-handedness seems to reduce with additional children, both with the person’s own brothers and sisters and their own children. Could it be that the more children you have, the less left-handed they become?
Left-handedness among grandparents is below average current levels. This may be due to the fact that at the time they were young, left-handedness was much less accepted and many people were forcibly changed to the right
Only 1.4% of left-handers in the survey had both parents left-handed, 24% had one left-handed parent and 75% had two right-handed parents
Which hand do left-handers
use for various activities?
We asked which hand people used for the following tasks and the results below show the percentage who used the left.
Activity Left Writing and drawing 98% Cutting with scissors 68% Brushing / combing your hair 98% Holding a toothbrush 92% Using a knife to cut, without a fork 88% Using a knife with a fork (knife hand) 26% Using a spoon (on its own) 95% Throwing a ball 68% Holding a racquet (e.g. tennis, squash) 83% Unscrewing the lid from a jar (lid hand) 84% Kicking a ball (kicking foot) 82% Holding a golf club, cricket or baseball bat
(left hand on top, facing to left side = right-handed!) 59% Looking with one eye (e.g. telescope) 75% Listening with one ear (cupping to hear more clearly) 70%
Writing is the most common indicator of handedness so we can expect a very high percentage of people who consider themselves left-handed to use that hand for writing
Where left-handers have a free choice, they usually use their left-hand, giving high percentages for all the tasks where the “tools” are ambidextrous, such as brushing hair
The low percentage for using scissors probably reflects the lack of availability of left-handed scissors causing many people to change their hand rather than struggling with backwards scissors that don’t cut properly
There is a very low percentage of people who eat left-handed with knife and fork (i.e. with the knife in their left hand and fork in the right). We don’t find this surprising as it is consistent to always feed yourself with your dominant hand – 95% of left-handers use a spoon on its own in their left hand and 74% also use a fork in their left hand. We think there has been some historic mistake here – using the fork in your left hand should be called “eating left-handed” and it is the right-handers who have got it all wrong and change their feeding hand depending on whether they are using a spoon or a fork.
What are the effects of
being left-handed?
We asked about what effect being left-handed had on our respondents’ lives and this is what they told us.
Do you consider yourself to be more or less intelligent than average? More 58% Ave 41% Less 1% Do you consider yourself to be more or less creative than average? (art and music, generating ideas) More 48% Ave 43% Less 9% Do you consider yourself to be more or less awkward or clumsy than average? More 85% Ave 0% Less 15% Did you experience any difficulties at school related to being left-handed? Yes 71% No 29% If you had difficulties, did you receive any help from teachers or others? Yes 24% No 76% Have you ever been discouraged from using your left hand for anything? Yes 39% No 61% Have you ever used any specialist left-handed implements? Yes 61% No 39%
Some research has shown that left-handers are more intelligent and we certainly seem to think so ourselves, with 58% of left-handers considering themselves more intelligent than average!
The same goes for creativity, with 48% considering themselves more creative than average
Having 85% considering themselves more awkward or clumsy than average was a surprise – we thought that it was right-handers who thought that about us. However, it does show the extent to which living in a right-handed world has a negative effect on us.
71% had difficulties at school, mainly with writing, but only 24% got any help – which is a bit sad when a bit of basic help can make a great difference. Some of the comments we got were:
“At school smudged work, but received no help to overcome problem” “Not much awareness or understanding in 70’s and 80’s (still!), was tested by “specialist” to determine the extent of my “disability” “Was given pen with left handed nib as matter of course” (hooray!)
We were a bit surprised that, even in these days, 39% had been discouraged in some way from using their left hand
We were very surprised that 39% of left-handers had never used a specialist left-handed implement! With all the great left-handed products available, we thought all left-handers had at least tried them to see if they made a difference. The most popular item was left-handed scissors
The most popular subjects at school were maths and art, with over 40% of all left-handers giving one of these two
How does being left-handed
help or hinder?
We asked whether there any ways in which being left-handed particularly helps or hinders you, and we got some great comments – here are some samples:
I think that I problem solve in my own kind of way – often people don’t understand my thinking as it appears non logical – but to me it seems considered.. OK its a right handed world but I LIKE BEING DIFFERENT. Difficult at meetings and conferences – seating/table space assumes right handedness. Very few items of business equipment allow for left-handedness Signing credit card slips in on shop machines, using cheque books, smudging writing when using anything but a biro pen Hinders when I’m sitting next to a righty when eating. If being left handed is what makes me so creative then that is a particular help. I think through growing up using right handed things you get used to it. When using right handed scissors it leaves me with sore thumb and fingers sometime resulting in blisters. All life is hard if you are left handed I believe that all left-handers see and experience the world from a slightly altered perspective than a right-hander and this I take to be an advantage. Believe being left-handed enables you to see the world in a different way to right handers for some reason. Seem to be less conformist and able to see things from a different perspective. Amazed growing up – things that may have seemed so obvious to me – while rest of family (with exception of other left-handed members – father & brother) – could not see them at all. Makes one feel bit of an outsider with friends (majority right-handed). Found it difficult – growing up – to find people to relate to on same level / similar wavelengths. Dance, ice skating, tin-openers, anyone else’s computer, writing desks attached to conference chairs, table settings – I often drink someone else’s wine, many other things It’s always a conversation piece huh guys!! They know we’re better Helps: using a mouse and writing simultaneously (righties can’t do that!) Helps – Playing racket sports (opponents seem to get confused) As I am only 4 years old I am unable to answer these questions For my work I am able to visualise pipe layouts underground which helps me solve problems.
Thank you to all the left-handers
who completed the survey
We hope you have found the results interesting and amusing – at least we all know there are millions of other left-handers out there facing the same challenges and getting the same benefits.
We will be following up the survey with a series of in-depth reports on particular aspects of being left-handed and we will publish these on the Anything Left-Handed website at as well as sending them to all registered Left-Handers Club members.Things to do in Saskatoon During March 2014 Posted on by Susan Zwarych Posted in: Events in Saskatoon As we head into March, hopefully winter begins to draw to a close. It looks like it's going to be another busy month around Saskatoon with a variety of events taking place in the city. Shows, Exhibitions & Other Events
Contemporary Drawing from The National Gallery of Canada
Date: January 24 - March 30, 2014
Location: Mendel Art Gallery and Civic Conservatory Trace Nelson: Walls of Intrigue and Cabinets of Curiosity Date: January 24 - March 30, 2014
Location: Mendel Art Gallery and Civic Conservatory Exhibition: Bronze Sculpture and Modren Contemporary Art
Date: February 3 - April 30, 2014
Location: Delta Bessborough A Queen and Her Country
Date: February 21 - June 8, 2014
Location: Diefenbaker Canada Centre Wearable Art Date: February 28 - April 12, 2014 Location: Affinity Gallery, 813 Broadway Avenue The Nature of Rhyme: a photo-poetry exhibit
Date: March 1 - April 30, 2014
Location: Meewasin Valley Centre Gallery “Birth” New Works by Angelina C Hussman
Date: March 3 - 24, 2014
Location: Saskatoon Community Youth Arts Program, 253 3rd Avenue “Heart Break: New Works by Silvana Shamo
Date: March 3 - 24, 2014
Location: Saskatoon Community Youth Arts Program, 253 3rd Avenue Screening of Lunafest and Panel Discussion
Date: March 5, 2014
Location: Broadway Theatre Maximizing the Profit Potential of Any Business
Date: March 6, 2014
Location: German Cultural Centre Saskatoon Wildlife Federation Sports and Leisure Show
Date: March 6 - 9, 2014
Location: Prairieland Park Facade: BFA Show by Samantha Braun
Date: March 10 - 14, 2014
Location: Snelgrove Gallery, University of Saskatchewan Digital Marketing Workshop
Date: March 12, 2014
Location: Women Entrepreneurs of Saskatchewan, 108-502 Cope Way Taboo Naughtu but Nice Show
Date: March 14 - 16, 2014
Location: Prairieland Park Collector’s Show
Date: March 14 - 16, 2014
Location: Prairieland Park Adult Drawing Studio - Figure Drawing Boot Camp
Date: March 15, 2014
Location: Mendel Art Gallery Canadian Light Source Open House
Date: March 20, 2014
Location: Canadian Light Source, 44 Innovation Blvd HomeStyles 2014
Date: March 20 -23, 2014
Location: Prairieland Park Gardenscape
Date: March 28 - 30, 2014
Location: Prairieland Park Rock 102 presents Spring Invasion
Date: March 28, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Live Music Saskatoon Blues Festival
Date: February 24 - March 2, 2014
Location: Various venues in Saskatoon Piano Series: David Braid’s Octagon Chamber
Date: March 1, 2014
Location: The Bassment Riff Raff
Date: March 1, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway The Bridge City Brass Presents “EPIC THEMES”
Date: March 1, 2014
Location: Broadway Theatre The Pack A.D. with Pandas in Japan
Date: March 2, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Tebey with MacKenzie Porter
Date: March 3, 2014
Location: Louis, University of Saskatchewan Roots Series: Old Man Luedecke with Jordie Lane Date: March 4, 2014
Location: The Bassment The Rockies
Date: March 4 - 5, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Wake Owl with Lyon
Date: March 6, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Feeding Friction
Date: March 6, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Lady Antebellum with Kip Moore
Date: March 6, 2014
Location: Credit Union Centre An evening for Townes Van Zandt with Zachary Lucky, Shakey Wilson and more
Date: March 6, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern Basement Paintings with Black Tremor, Mehta
Date: March 7, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Big Band Series: The U of S Jazz Ensemble
Date: March 7, 2014
Location: The Bassment The Nightrain
Date: March 7, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Muy Caliente Carnival Fiesta Date: March 8, 2014
Location: O’Brians Event Centre Royal Canoe with special guests
Date: March 8, 2014
Location: Louis, University of Saskatchewan Music is Great Britain - Gyro Masters Series Date: March 8, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Men Without Shame
Date: March 8, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Gunner and Smith with Coldest Night of the Year, Megan Nast
Date: March 8, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Roots Series: The Once
Date: March 8, 2014
Location: The Bassment The April Verch Band
Date: March 9, 2014
Location: Broadway Theatre Buffy Sainte-Marie Date: March 10, 2014
Location: Broadway Theatre Irene Elliott Trio
Date: March 10, 2014
Location: Bon Temps Cedar Sky Date: March 11, 2014 Location: Buds on Broadway Johnny Broadway’s Record Club Date: March 11, 2014 Location: Vangelis Tavern Free Willy Date: March 12, 2014 Location: Buds on Broadway Mavericks with guests Date: March 13, 2014 Location: O’Brians Event Centre The Residuals Date: March 13, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Jazz Jam: The Kim Salkeld Trio Date: March 13, 2014 Location: The Bassment Curved Worth Date: March 13, 2014 Location: Buds on Broadway Come On I Wanta Lei You Cabaret Date: March 14, 2014 Location: Prairieland Park The Faps with Bad Decisions and Myles & the Blanks Date: March 14, 2014 Location: Vangelis Tavern Young Benjamins with Scenic Route to Alaska, John Antoniuk Date: March 14, 2014 Location: Amigos Cantina Fiddle Series: The Fretless Date: March 14, 2014
Location: The Bassment Rippertrain
Date: March 14 - 15, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway At The Movies, An Oscars Wrap Party - Conexus Pops Series
Date: March 15, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Bass Kleph, Mat the Alien & Elite Force
Date: March 15, 2014
Location: O’Brians Event Centre Concert for Change featuring: Wolfen Rabbits, The Northern Lights, Wizards
Date: March 15, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Sleepy Sun
Date: March 15, 2014
Location: Vanelis Tavern The Diana Panton Quartet
Date: March 15, 2014
Location: The Bassment Martin Sexton
Date: March 16, 2014
Location: Broadway Theatre Electric Six with The Mohrs
Date: March 16, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Wenches and Rogues with Across the Pond
Date: March 17, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Matt Webb of Marianas Trench
Date: March 18, 2014
Location: O’Brians Event Centre 17 Seconds of Fuel
Date: March 18, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Celtic Woman - The Emerald Tour
Date: March 19, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Kyprios with Cquel, Animal Nation and Stage
Date: March 19, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern Undercover Pirates
Date: March 19 - 20, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Cover the Nights featuring: The Pxrtals
Date: March 20, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Guitar Series: Steve Dawson
Date: March 20, 2014
Location: The Bassment Spring with Comments and Concerns
Date: March 20, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern Roots Series: Rosie and The Riveters
Date: March 21, 2014
Location: The Bassment Head Hits Concrete with Cetascean, Denogginizer, Narcissistic
Date: March 21, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Whiskey Songs with guests
Date: March 21, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern DJ Charly Hustle with guests
Date: March 21, 2014
Location: O’Brians Event Centre Screamlyne
Date: March 21 -22, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Tim Hicks with guests
Date: March 22, 2014
Location: O’Brians Event Centre Absofunkinlutely
Date; March 22, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern Untimely Demise with Vulture Kult, Singularity
Date: March 22, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina An Orchestral Toy Story - Family Concert Series
Date: March 22, 2014
Location: Elim Church, 419 Slimmon Road University of Saskatchewan Amati Quartet - The Beethoven Cycle - Concert No. 2
Date: March 22, 2014
Location: Third Avenue United Church Vocal Jazz Series: Solstice
Date: March 22, 2014
Location: The Bassment Phillip Phillips
Date: March 23, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Islands with Escondido
Date: March 23, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Carsick Cars & White & Powder Blue & DJ Loud Panda Date: March 25, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern Travis Tritt
Date: March 25, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Flathead
Date: March 25 - 26, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway John McDermott
Date: March 27, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Jay Malinowski & The Deadcoast with Astral Swans
Date: March 27, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern Brewsters & Roosters
Date: March 27, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Roots Series: Caladh Nua (Ireland)
Date: March 28, 2014
Location: The Bassment Mounties (Hawksley Workman), Steve Bays (Hot Hot Heat), Ryan Dahle (Limblifter, Age of Electric) with Rich Aucoins, JpnsGrls
Date: March 28, 2014 Location: Amigos Cantina Young the Giant
Date: March 28, 2014
Location: O’Brians Event Centre The Glorious Sons with Teenage Kicks and Lab Coast
Date: March 28, 2014
Location: Vangelis Tavern The Hung Jury
Date: March 28 - 29, 2014
Location: Buds on Broadway Jazz Diva Series: Melissa Lauren
Date: March 29, 2014
Location: The Bassment The Extrovery, Delta Throats, Herb and the Humans
Date: March 29, 2014
Location: Amigos Cantina Newman Sounds Glee Club presents Mixed Tape
Date: March 29 - 30, 2014
Location: Broadway Theatre Against Me! with Laura Stevenson and the Cans and Cheap Girls
Date: March 31, 2014
Location: Louis, University of Saskatchewan Sporting Events Saskatoon Blades VS Brandon Wheat KIngs
Date: March 1, 2014
Location: Credit Union Centre Winter Senior National Diving Championship
Date: March 6 - 9, 2014
Location: Shaw Centre Saskatoon Blades VS Moose Jaw Warriors
Date: March 7, 2014
Location: Credit Union Centre U14 - U18 Youth Premier Division Soccer Championship
Date: March 7 - 9, 2014
Location: SaskTel Sports Centre Rock 102’s Cardboard Cup
Date: March 8, 2014
Location: Diefenbaker Park Saskatoon Blades VS Calgary Hitmen
Date: March 8, 2014
Location: Credit Union Centre SSRA Western Canadian Snow Drag Championship
Date: March 8 - 9, 2014
Location: Prairieland Park Saskatoon Blades VS Prince Albert Raiders Date: March 15, 2014
Location: Credit Union Centre CIS PotashCorp University Cup
Date: March 20 -23, 2014
Location: Credit Union Centre Extreme Midget Wrestling
Date: March 29, 2014
Location: O’Brians Event Centre Family Fun The Saskatoon Parent and Tot Expo
Date: March 1, 2014
Location: Prairieland Park Nature Craft at Beaver Creek
Date: March 1 - 2, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Clever Canines - Outdoor Hike at Beaver Creek
Date: March 2, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Disney Live! Mickey’s Rockin’ Road Show!
Date: March 2, 2014
Location: Credit Union Centre A Dr. Seuss Birthday Party!
Date: March 2, 2014
Location: Stonegate Walmart, 3035 Clarence Avenue South Something on Sundays - Cultural Diversity Month
Date: March 2, 2014
Location: Mendel Art Gallery Nature Craft at Beaver Creek
Date: March 8 - 9, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Clever Canines - Outdoor Hike at Beaver Creek
Date: March 9, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Zoo Crew
Date: March 14, 2014
Location: Saskatoon Zoo Society Nature Craft at Beaver Creek
Date: March 15 - 16, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Clever Canines - Outdoor Hike at Beaver Creek
Date: March 16, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Something on Sundays - Make Green Art for St. Patrick’s Day
Date: March 16, 2014
Location: Mendel Art Gallery Nature Craft at Beaver Creek Date: March 22 - 23, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Clever Canines - Outdoor Hike at Beaver Creek
Date: March 23, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Kinsmen Free Day
Date: March 23, 2014
Location: Children’s Discovery Museum Kids on the Block - Puppet Show
Date: March 27, 2014
Location: Children’s Discovery Museum Nature Craft at Beaver Creek
Date: March 29 - 30, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Clever Canines - Outdoor Hike at Beaver Creek
Date: March 30, 2014
Location: Beaver Creek Conservation Area Performance, Dance and Theatre Brent Butt
Date: March 3, 2014
Location: TCU Place - Saskatoon’s Arts and Convention Centre Circle of Voices Production by PJ Prudat
Date: March 5 - 12, 2014
Location: Saskatchewan Native Theatre Company, 914 20th Street West Hypnotic Night Out with Corrie J
Date: March 8, 2014
Location: The Ivy, 301 Ontario Avenue Uptown Stomp Swing |
North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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43. University of Richmond
44. Brandeis University
44. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
46. Bethel University
47. Villanova University
47. The University of Texas at Austin
49. Oberlin College
49. Lehigh UniversityReady 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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“Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield,” President Lyndon Johnson said on August 6, 1965, when he signed the Voting Rights Act into law.
The VRA quickly became known as the most important piece of modern civil rights legislation and one of the most consequential laws ever passed by Congress. It led to the abolition of literacy tests and poll taxes; made possible the registration of millions of minority voters; forced states with a history of voting discrimination to clear electoral changes with the federal government to prevent future discrimination; and laid the foundation for generations of minority elected officials.
Inside the US Capitol Rotunda, LBJ announced the signing of the bill flanked by a bust of President Lincoln, who exactly 104 years earlier had signed the Confiscation Act freeing Confederate slaves. Among the many civil rights leaders present on that historic day forty-eight years ago was John Lewis, the 25-year-old chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who had nearly died four months earlier marching for the right to vote in Selma, Alabama. He was the only veteran of the “Bloody Sunday” march to attend the signing ceremony, as historian Gary May notes in his new history of the VRA, “Bending Toward Justice.” Lewis remembered that day in August 1965 as “a high point in modern American, probably the nation’s finest hour in terms of civil rights.”
Twenty-one years later, Lewis won election to Congress from Georgia’s 5th House district, representing the hometown of his idol Martin Luther King Jr. He has the pen LBJ gave him after signing the VRA framed in his Atlanta home and a bust of the thirty-sixth president in his Washington office. Without the VRA, there would be no Congressman Lewis or Senator Rubio or President Obama. “When Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act,” Lewis said on a trip to Alabama in March, “he helped free and liberate all of us.”
Consider how the VRA transformed American democracy:
• In 1965, only 31 percent of eligible black voters were registered to vote the in the seven Southern states originally covered by the VRA, compared to 72 percent of white voters. The number of black registered voters was as low as 6.7 percent in Mississippi. In Selma, only 393 of 15,000 eligible black voters were registered when LBJ introduced the VRA in March 1965.
Today, 73 percent of black voters are registered to vote, according to the US Census and black voter turnout exceeded white turnout in 2012 for the first time in recorded history.
• In 1965, there were fewer than 500 black elected officials nationwide.
Today, there are more than 10,500.
• In 1965, there were only five black members of Congress.
Today, there are forty-four. The 113th Congress is the most diverse in history, with ninety-seven minority elected representatives.
• Since 1965, the Justice Department blocked at least 1,150 discriminatory voting changes from going into effect under Section 5 of the VRA.
Yet the Supreme Court’s decision in late June invalidating Section 4 of the VRA threatens to roll back much of the progress made over the past forty-eight years. Since the ruling, six Southern states previously covered under Section 4 have passed or implemented new voting restrictions, with North Carolina recently passing the country’s worst voter suppression law. The latest assault on the franchise comes on the heels of a presidential election in which voter suppression attempts played a starring role, with 180 bills introduced in forty-one states to restrict access to the ballot in 2011–12, which NAACP President Ben Jealous called “the greatest attacks on voting rights since segregation.” The broad scope of contemporary voting discrimination is why John Lewis testified before Congress last month that “the Voting Rights Act is needed now like never before.”
The spread of voter suppression efforts to states like Pennsylvania, where over 500,000 registered voters could be disenfranchised by a voter ID law before the courts, is a strong argument for expanding, not eliminating, the key provisions of the VRA. Sections 2 and 3 of the VRA, as currently written, are no substitute for Sections 4 and 5. Under Section 2, discriminatory voting changes can only be challenged after lengthy and expensive litigation, with the burden of proof on those facing discrimination. Under Section 3, a court has to find that a state (like Texas) was guilty of intentional discrimination, a very high bar to clear, in order to force it to approve its voting changes with the federal government for a period of time. Under Section 5, however, the states with the worst history of discrimination had to prove that their voting changes were not discriminatory before they became law. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1966, the genius of the law was to “shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.”
The evil of voting discrimination remains all-too-common today, which is why Congress urgently needs to strengthen the VRA. Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the former chair of the House Judiciary Committee who presided over the overwhelming congressional reauthorization of the VRA in 2006, recently told CQ Roll Call, “There are a lot of Republicans who are [on board], but they don’t want to be publicly named.” If there is indeed a silent majority of Republicans who still support the VRA, let’s hope they speak up soon. Otherwise, on the fiftieth anniversary of the VRA in 2015, we may be mourning its demise instead of celebrating its transformational impact.In our last article, we learned how to control a Raspberry Pi from a mobile device and, as a bonus, we created a menu to make it even easier to issue commands and control our Pi. We’re back today to put that remote menu to good use because we’re building an amazing Pandora music player we can connect to a stereo in our living room, for example, without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. Our system will include a web interface served through Node.js so we can control our Pandora player remotely from a mobile phone—all from the comfort of our couch. 🙂 Follow along with me and let’s make this happen!
Note: I originally released this article two years ago and have updated it based on the latest version of Raspbian.
Article Contents
Complete Prerequisites
Prepare your Raspberry Pi
If you have not already followed my Beginner’s Guide to Installing Node.js on a Raspberry Pi, I recommend that you take a look at that now. In this guide, I equip you with the knowledge needed to build an awesome Raspberry Pi system that can also run in a headless mode. We’re able to avoid a dedicated monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and this is exactly what we need to maximize the awesomeness of our Pandora player.
At the very least, make sure you follow the steps to install Node.js because Node.js will be powering the built-in Pandora web server we’ll be accessing from our mobile devices.
Create Pandora account
If you do not already have a Pandora account, go ahead and visit Pandora.com and create one now. Pandora is “free personalized radio that plays the music you love”. What’s not to love about that? 🙂
While you are logged into Pandora, go ahead and create a couple of stations. Our remote web interface will ultimately need stations in order to to play music for us.
Install additional packages
We’ll need a couple of additional packages to utilize our Pandora player. First, let’s install pianobar, an amazing console-based pandora.com player underpinning our entire project:
$ sudo apt install pianobar
Next, we’ll install screen, a terminal-based window manager that our software will use behind the scenes in conjunction with pianobar:
$ sudo apt install screen
Install Patiobar
As a next step, we’ll install and configure Patiobar, a web frontend for pianobar created by Kyle Johnson. I was gearing up to create a web interface to pianobar and came across Kyle’s project. He has done an excellent job, and we’ll be leveraging his work to create this fantastic music system.
Go ahead and ensure your terminal session is in your home directory:
$ cd ~
Also, these very next steps require Node.js so make sure you have that installed.
Ok, let’s install Patiobar. Execute this next set of commands one by one from the terminal:
$ git clone https://github.com/kylejohnson/Patiobar.git $ cd Patiobar $ bash install.sh
Excellent! We just made some serious progress and installed the foundational elements needed for our Patiobar web server.
Configure pianobar so it’s ready to be used by Patiobar
Our Patiobar web frontend ultimately uses pianobar behind the scenes to serve up music from Pandora so we need to make sure pianobar is configured and in working order first.
Launch the pianobar configuration file for editing using the Leafpad text editor:
$ leafpad ~/.config/pianobar/config &
The contents will look something like this:
user = you@user.com user = user@example.com password = password #autostart_station = 123456 audio_quality = high event_command = /home/pi/Patiobar/eventcmd.sh fifo = /home/pi/Patiobar/ctl tls_fingerprint = FC2E6AF49FC63AEDAD1078DC22D1185B809E7534
Substitute the user parameter with your Pandora user account email, and substitute the password with your Pandora password, and save your changes.
Great work! We’re making excellent progress and we’re ready to launch pianobar by itself to confirm it works. Connect a set of earbuds or speakers to the audio output jack of your Raspberry Pi. Get ready to hear some music!
Issue the following command to launch pianobar:
$ pianobar
At this point, pianobar should log into Pandora and prompt you to select a station for listening. Now, select the default station that you would like to start each time the Raspberry Pi music player starts. You will be able to change this station from the web interface that is provided, but we need a starting station to bootstrap our player each time it starts. The pianobar station selection dialog will look something like this:
[?] Select station: 2 |> Station "David Nevue (Holiday) Radio" (3749270268933429865)
After selecting a station, hit Ctrl+C to quit. If Ctrl+C does not work, try Ctrl+\ instead.
You will need the long station number listed in parentheses, 3749270268933429865, as shown in our example above, for the next step.
Edit the pianobar configuration file one more time:
$ leafpad ~/.config/pianobar/config &
Replace the existing autostart_station line with the long station number you obtained above. Be sure to remove the “#” from the beginning of the line so pianobar can read the autostart_station configuration information.
autostart_station = 3749270268933429865
Save your changes and launch pianobar again.
$ pianobar
This time, pianobar should jump right in and begin playing your default station without intervention required by you. Assuming this is the case, you are ready to finish the installation so we can use pianobar with the awesome Patiobar web frontend powered by Node.js.
Create Patiobar start and stop scripts
Okay, let’s create a couple of scripts to make it easy to start and stop Patiobar.
Create bin directory to make our menu command accessible from any directory
First, we will create a directory so our scripts will be accessible from any directory on our system without the need to provide a full path name to our script.
From the terminal, return to your home directory if you are not already there.
$ cd ~
Next, create a directory called bin :
$ mkdir bin
We will need to edit our.bashrc file to include this bin directory in our PATH variable. This will ensure that any scripts located in our newly created bin directory can be invoked from any directory on our system without needing to include the full path to the script. Let’s first launch a text editor so we can edit the.bashrc file:
$ leafpad.bashrc &
Add the following line to the bottom of this file:
export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
Save your changes and close the leafpad editor.
To ensure our changes to the.bashrc file are processed right away, invoke this command:
$ source.bashrc
Perfect! We are now positioned to create our Patiobar start and stop scripts.
Create pbstart (Patiobar start) command
We’ll use leafpad once again to create our new command. We’ll call our command pbstart (Patiobar start):
$ leafpad ~/bin/pbstart &
Add the following contents and save the file.
#!/bin/bash cd /home/pi/Patiobar # Kill any old Patiobar processes running pbstop 1> /dev/null screen -S pianobar -d -m bash -c 'pianobar' # The "patiobar" in the end is not needed and is used as an identifier so we can kill it when stopping. # Otherwise, we might kill other "node index.js" processes. node index.js patiobar > /dev/null 2>&1 & echo "Go to http://$(hostname):3000/ to launch the Web interface."
Create pbstop (Patiobar stop) command
Using leafpad once again, create a second command called pbstop (Patiobar stop):
$ leafpad ~/bin/pbstop &
Add the following contents and save the file.
#!/bin/bash echo Closing out Pandora processes... pkill -xf "SCREEN -S pianobar -d -m bash -c pianobar" pkill -xf "node index.js patiobar" echo done
Set user execute bit on the pbstart/stop scripts
Finally, set the user execute bit on both files so the pi user has permission to run the scripts:
$ chmod u+x ~/bin/pbstart $ chmod u+x ~/bin/pbstop
Launch Patiobar and start listening to music!
Okay, here’s the moment of truth. Let’s try out our pbstart command and see if we can start up Patiobar. Remember that we can invoke this command from any directory on our system since it is part of our PATH. Here we go!
$ pbstart
Patiobar should start up pianobar, and you should both hear music and be able to navigate to the Patiobar web interface running on port 3000. For example, my Raspberry Pi host name is called “pandora” so I would navigate to http://pandora:3000. It’s December and I’m listening to Christmas music so this is what I see when launching the web interface from my mobile phone:
The interface is excellent and we can change stations using the “hamburger” menu in the top right, and pause, skip songs, etc. There’s even album art as you can see!
When you are done listening, stop the Patiobar player so you do not consume all your Pandora minutes:
$ pbstop
Install SSH client on mobile phone to control Pianobar start/stop remotely (optional)
We learned how to control a Raspberry Pi from a mobile device] in our last article and I encourage you to read that article to learn how to install an SSH client on your mobile device so you can invoke terminal commands from your phone. It’s pretty amazing and useful to not be tethered to a laptop or desktop and still log in and interact with your Pi!
After the mobile SSH client is installed you will be able to invoke pbstart from your mobile device to start Patiobar, stop Pianobar with pbstop, and safety shut down your Pi using the following command:
$ sudo poweroff
Utilizing a mobile SSH client is a much better option for shutting down your headless Pi gracefully rather than yanking the power cord out and risking potential corruption of your microSD card.
Add menu for remote control from mobile phone (optional)
To make it even easier to invoke commands, our last article on controlling a Raspberry Pi from a mobile device also included a bonus section on creating a menu system. You can follow the steps in that article to create a menu system that looks something like this for our current Pandora player project:
After following the steps in the controlling a Raspberry Pi from a mobile device article, you can create a file called menu2.sh in the same directory as the rmenu command like this:
$ leafpad ~/bin/menu2.sh &
…and add the following contents:
show_menu () { # We show the host name right in the menu title so we know which Pi we are connected to OPTION=$(whiptail --title "Menu (Host:$(hostname))" --menu "Choose your option:" 12 36 5 \ "1" "Uptime" \ "2" "Start Pandora" \ "3" "Stop Pandora" \ "4" "Reboot Pi" \ "5" "Shut down Pi" 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3) BUTTON=$? # Check if user pressed cancel or escape if [[ ($BUTTON -eq 1) || ($BUTTON -eq 255) ]]; then exit 1 fi if [ $BUTTON -eq 0 ]; then case $OPTION in 1) MSG="$(uptime)" whiptail --title "Uptime info" --msgbox "$MSG" 8 36 show_menu ;; 2) pbstart msg="Go to http://$(hostname):3000/ to launch the Web interface." whiptail --title "Note" --msgbox "$msg" 8 36 show_menu ;; 3) pbstop sleep 2 show_menu ;; 4) confirmAnswer "Are you sure you want to reboot the Pi?" if [ $? = 0 ]; then echo Rebooting... sudo reboot else show_menu fi ;; 5) confirmAnswer "Are you sure you want to shut down the Pi?" if [ $? = 0 ]; then echo Shutting down... sudo poweroff else show_menu fi ;; esac fi }
This new menu ( menu2.sh ) can then be invoked from rmenu as follows:
$ rmenu -m 2
As a final step (as outlined in the previous article), you can add this rmenu -m 2 command to ~/.profile so the menu starts automatically when you SSH into the Pi from your mobile device.
Launch Patiobar automatically on startup (optional)
If you have a dedicated microSD card for your Pandora player, you might want to start Patiobar automatically each time you power on your Raspberry Pi. This makes it easier to, for example, power on a Pi connected to speakers in your living room without the need to SSH into the Pi upon boot to issue a pbstart command. The downside is that you might be playing music and burning Pandora time when you don’t even realize music is playing. 🙂
To start Patiobar automatically every time you boot, use sudo to edit the following file since this file requires root privileges:
$ sudo leafpad /etc/rc.local &
Add the following line just above the last line in the file with the contents of exit 0 :
sleep 15 && sudo -iu pi /home/pi/bin/pbstart
The /etc/rc.local script runs every time the Pi boots up. We sleep for 15 seconds before invoking the pbstart command under the aegis of the pi user. The 15 second “nap” 🙂 gives time for the network to stabilize before the pbstart script connects to Pandora.com and begins to stream music.
Save the file and close leafpad. Finally, reboot your Pi.
$ sudo reboot
After the Pi finishes its boot cycle (and another 15 seconds after that), you should start hearing music streaming from Pandora automatically!
Troubleshooting in the future (if music does not play)
Sometime down the road, you may be faced with a situation where music does not play. This could very well be caused by the fact that the “TLS fingerprint” associated with the Pandora website has expired. When Pandora updates their SSL certificates, a new TLS fingerprint is needed. Keep this in mind in the future when Patiobar stops working and you can’t figure out why. Revisit this section and update the TLS fingerprint as we will describe now.
First, run pianobar as a standalone program separate from Patiobar to verify this is the issue:
$ pianobar
If you do not hear music, but instead see an error message indicating a “TLS fingerprint mismatch”, proceed with the next steps to resolve this issue.
We first need to copy over a handy script included with the pianobar distribution to our current directory so we can retrieve the latest TLS fingerprint:
$ cp /usr/share/doc/pianobar/contrib/tls_fingerprint.sh.
Next, set the user execute bit to make sure we can run the script:
$ chmod u+x tls_fingerprint.sh
Go ahead and invoke this script to retrieve the TLS fingerprint:
$ bash tls_fingerprint.sh
You should see something like this: FC2E6AF49FC63AEDAD1078DC22D1185B809E7534
Next, edit the pianobar configuration file:
$ leafpad ~/.config/pianobar/config &
Replace the existing tls_fingerprint configuration parameter with the new TLS fingerprint obtained:
tls_fingerprint = FC2E6AF49FC63AEDAD1078DC22D1185B809E7534
Run pianobar to verify that it now works before issuing a pbstart to restart Patiobar:
$ pianobar
You should hear music playing and be back in business!
Conclusion
There you have it! We created an amazing Pandora player that can be controlled remotely from a mobile device. We can control our Pandora listening experience through a web interface. As a bonus, we can also start and stop our Pandora player through an SSH interface on a mobile device with a handy menu as well. We are ready to enjoy music with family and friends—and we learned some cool technology tricks in the process!
Follow @thisDaveJ (Dave Johnson) on Twitter to stay up to date with the latest tutorials and tech articles.
Additional articles
Controlling a Raspberry Pi from a Mobile Device with Bonus Menu Too
Beginner’s Guide to Installing Node.js on a Raspberry Pi
Connecting a Raspberry Pi Using an Ethernet Crossover Cable and Internet Connection Sharing
Upgrading to more recent versions of Node.js on the Raspberry PiThousands of Egyptian Copts flocked to Jerusalem this year in celebration of Palm Sunday.
According to Egyptian media, at least 5,700 Coptic Orthodox Christians have travelled to Jerusalem so far this year, an increase of more than a thousand compared to the Coptic pilgrims who undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Jerusalem in 2015.
The growing presence of the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox in the Holy City marks an end to a ban on travel by Copts to Israel after the late Coptic Pope Shenouda III had instructed the faithful not to travel to Israel because of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
That ban remained in effect even after Egypt and Israel established diplomatic relations in 1979.
The prohibition was never formally revoked, but after his death in 2012 pilgrimages slowly resumed and last November, the new Coptic Pope Tawadros II traveled to Jerusalem for the funeral of the Coptic Archbishop Abraham.
The visit, although presented as "an exception," was taken as a sign that the ban was rescinded.
This year, nearly 6,000 Egyptian Copts have already traveled to Jerusalem, with the numbers increasing steadily as the Copts, who follow the Julian calendar, approach the celebration of Easter.Last week, Donald Trump told the hosts of “The Palin Update,” a webcast dedicated to all things Palin, that he would consider tapping the former-half-term governor for a post in his presidential administration. This week, Palin returned the favor, stopping by the program to praise the “awesome” Trump.
Palin, who once hailed Trump as a “hero,” didn’t hold back on praising the GOP presidential frontrunner: “He’s awesome. I thank God that he’s running. He’s stirring it up, he’s coaching, he’s educating the other candidates saying, ‘This is how you tap into the good part of a populist movement.’”
She urged other Republican candidates to “emulate” Trump rather than being “so stubborn and not humble enough to admit, ‘Oh, he’s right about that.’”
Palin also lauded Trump for his “boldness” in describing her as a “special person,” calling him a courageous truth-teller.
“Donald Trump is the art of the deal in so many respects, he wrote that book called ‘The Art of the Deal,’ but he literally knows the art of the deal and here in America we are losing deals left and right,” Palin said. “We’ve lost our industrial base, we’re losing our friends and allies, we’re losing obviously respect around the globe, we’re losing morale in the United States military with the troops whom we so respect and love and we want them to be able to respect and love their commander in chief and organization and all of these things that we’re losing deals on. Donald Trump is one who is saying, here’s how you fix the problem, here’s how you seal the deal to win.”
She added: “I do know Donald Trump well and personally even I can vouch for his character, his love of country and his intelligence when it comes to these solutions that he proposes.”Photo: MINUSCA
Peacekeepers in Bria
More than 280,000 people in the two countries will benefit from China's contribution, which will allow WFP to provide rice, pulses and oil, as well as distribute specialized nutritious food to prevent malnutrition among pregnant and nursing women and children under five.
"WFP is very grateful for this new contribution from China, which comes at a crucial moment with increased violence and mounting hunger in both countries," said Sixi Qu, WFP China Representative. "WFP is scaling up its emergency food assistance to the most vulnerable people affected by disaster and conflict. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that we have sufficient funds to continue to provide uninterrupted life-saving assistance."
Of the US$5 million contribution, US$3 million will help assist 150,000 people - mostly women and children - in the conflict-affected Congolese departments of Pool and Bouenza. The remaining US$2 million will be allocated to the provinces of Haute-Kotto, Basse-Kotto, Mboumou and Haut-Mbomou in southeast C.A.R., supporting ongoing relief operations for some newly displaced 132,000 people.History
Hardware
Software
Services
Game development
PartnerNet, the developers-only alternative Xbox Live network used by developers to beta test game content downloads and games developed for Xbox Live Arcade,[173] runs on Xbox 360 debug kits, which are used both by developers and by the gaming press. In a podcast released on February 12, 2007, a developer breached the PartnerNet non-disclosure agreement (NDA) by commenting that he had found a playable version of Alien Hominid and an unplayable version of Ikaruga on PartnerNet. A few video game journalists, misconstruing the breach of the NDA as an invalidation of the NDA, immediately began reporting on other games being tested via PartnerNet, including a remake of Jetpac.[174] (Alien Hominid for the Xbox 360 was released on February 28 of that year, and Ikaruga was released over a year later on April 9, 2008. Jetpac was released for the Xbox 360 on March 28, 2007 as Jetpac Refuelled.) There have also been numerous video and screenshot leaks of game footage on PartnerNet, as well as a complete version of Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I, which caused for the whole PartnerNet service to be shut down overnight on April 3, 2010.[175] In the following days, Microsoft reminded developers and journalists that they were in breach of NDA by sharing information about PartnerNet content and asked websites to remove lists of games in development that were discovered on the service.[176] Sega used feedback from fans about the leaked version of Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode I to refine it before they eventually released it.[177] Additionally, a pair of hackers played their modded Halo 3 games on PartnerNet in addition to using PartnerNet to scoop up unreleased and untested software. The duo passed their hacked Halo pics to their friends before they were eventually caught by Bungie engineers who left a message for the hackers on PartnerNet which read "Winners Don't Break Into PartnerNet.".[178] Other games that were leaked in the PartnerNet fiasco include Shenmue and Shenmue 2.[179]
See alsoEvery week we bring you an article from our archive, either for you to read again or discover for the first time. This week, with news circling of Microsoft buying Mojang, we bring you a reminder of the power of Minecraft via Keith Stuart's excellent article, first published in November 2012.
Here is a valuable lesson I have learned about parenting: never tell your children not to touch your Minecraft save file.
Of course, this should always have been obvious - children are irrevocably drawn to anything placed enticingly out of reach, especially if it involves video games. My two sons, aged four and six, are obsessed with Minecraft - it's pretty much all they talk or think about. While they used to enjoy playing all the Lego titles, now they just want to load up Mojang's creative masterpiece and batter zombies with pickaxes. They were always going to take a peek at my saved world, eventually. I sort of knew that - I just didn't realise what they'd do when they got there.
There's a reason I was being protective. Being a complete nerd and a fan of modern architecture I had spent around 12 hours of game time building a scale replica of Villa Savoye, Le Corbusier's seminal modernist show home, built in the town of Poissy, France in 1929. It turns out the game's large, uncompromising blocks and its insistence on angular design, make it a perfect palette for the sort of severe construction the Swiss pioneer was famed for. I'd looked jealously at the architectural marvels that others had produced in the PC version of the game, but without a creative mode on my Xbox edition I decided to try something reasonably modest, yet still recognisable. So I got out my Le Corbusier book (as you do), picked a building and got to work. For two days.
Corbusier's five points are no match for one of earth's four elements, it turns out.
And then I had to go off for a week on a press trip. My wife said, "is it okay if the boys play Minecraft on your Xbox while you're away?" I don't often let them play alone, because they're small - and also because they are irresponsible idiots. But I figured it would give my wife a bit of respite while I was away, and I was feeling generous. "Just don't let them go on my world," I said. "Riiiight," replied my wife. I turned to my sons: "please don't go into my save file." "We won't daddy," was their angelic response.
The day I got back, I loaded up Minecraft with my sons because they wanted to show me something they had built on one of their own maps, which was, of course, called Poo. All their maps are scatalogically themed. Because they are irresponsible idiots. We were browsing the list of saved games and they were telling me what they had done in each. When we passed my world, they went quiet and glanced at each other. "What?" I asked. "Have you been in my world?"
A moment's silence passed. "Zac had a look," said my younger son, Albie.
I loaded up the map. The map I didn't want them to go in. The one with my Le Corbusier villa.
The game world appeared on screen. I looked around - I knew I was in the right place, because I recognised the jagged mountains in the distance to the far left of my building. But something was wrong. Ah yes, that was it - there was no building. As the initial fog of confusion parted, I noticed that my character was standing on a small tower of cobblestone, about six blocks high. That was it; that was all that remained of my imposing brutalist construction.
"I looked around - I knew I was in the right place, because I recognised the jagged mountains in the distance to the far left of my building. But something was wrong."
Here's an attempt at Villa Savoye from Kallooka Black that hasn't been razed just yet.
And the devastation didn't end there. Everything around me, all the land in the immediate vicinity and all the blocks left littered about the place, was on fire. On actual fire. My sons clearly didn't think it was enough to simply dismantle my home; they had decided, in perhaps the same spirit of defiance that led Saddam Hussein to ignite the oil wells while pulling out of Kuwait, to pursue a scorched earth policy. Nobody was salvaging anything from this.
What really annoyed me, what really stuck, was that I didn't even know how to make fire. It was something they'd discovered themselves, ahead of me. They had found flint. And they had used this arcane knowledge to incinerate my house.
"Wha… why?" I managed to ask. My sons shrugged, already bored of being expected to feel guilty and keen to get on with their next assault on Persson's creative universe. I decided to get down off the pedestal and have one last sullen look around before deleting the file. But I couldn't; and this really was the pièce de résistance. I couldn't get down, because I was surrounded by angry wolves.
"Zac was throwing things at them," said Albie. "They are cross now."You might already be aware of this, but the 2015-16 Canucks are not very good. They are a mess in a lot of positions (goaltending notwithstanding), but their defence is easily the weakest link of all.
For much of this season, fans have questioned whether goals for or goals against have been the bigger issue (they’re been near the league’s worst in both). The two may be more connected than they appear to be on the surface, and the numbers are demonstrating that both problems begin on the Canucks’ back end.
Canucks defencemen have scored an abysmal 21 goals this season, which is the second lowest total in the NHL this year. Six of those have come from Alex Edler, and five from Matt Bartkowski (and each has been surprising). Chris Tanev has four goals, Dan Hamhuis has three, Luca Sbisa has two, and Ben Hutton, as impressive as he’s been this season, has but one solitary goal. Nikita Tryamkin, Andrey Pedan, and power play specialist Yannick Weber (who led Canucks defencemen last season in goals with 11) have combined for zero goals.
It’s often said that good defence leads to good offence, and although it’s easy to throw that line away as an old school cliche, the reality is that it holds plenty of merit. The vast majority of offensive opportunities, especially at even strength, at some point run through a team’s defencemen.
On rush goals, that involves defencemen retrieving the puck from their own zone and make good, crisp passes to available forwards, kick starting a breakout that leads to forays into the offensive zone. The inability perform this properly leads to a myriad of problems, ranging from blatant defensive zone turnovers to the less flagrant (but still problematic) glass-and-out clears that relinquish possession and allow the opponent to regroup and enter the defensive zone as a unit. The 2015-16 Canucks are chock full of defencemen that commit both of these acts on a regular basis.
On goals that follow offensive zone possession, defencemen at the blue line are used to stretch out the opponent’s defensive structure as well as change angles and get pucks through crowds for screened shots. They require blueliners who are fleet of foot and sharp of mind that can make intelligent plays, rather than swat pucks into crowded areas or shin pads, leading to loss of possession. Too few Vancouver defencemen are good at this either. Not to mention that retrievals and breakouts are necessary to achieve offensive zone possession more often than not anyways.
As a result of being largely inefficient in most offensive areas of the game, the Canucks defencemen do not score very more goals, nor do they gain very many points. The 2015-16 Canucks defencemen are astoundingly bad in terms of generating offence, whether compared against the rest of the NHL, or previous iterations of themselves.
To illustrate this, I looked back 20 years and tallied the number of points that each NHL team has gotten from their defence group:
The Canucks defencemen are among the lowest scoring in the NHL this season, with only Edmonton, New Jersey, and Winnipeg’s blueliners piling up less points. These are not teams that you generally want to be close to in offensive categories if you’re intending to have any sort of success.
Looking horizontally across the chart, you can also see that this season is about as bad as it gets |
situation where we know the mass of an object and the forces acting on it. We added up the forces (assigning negative signs to "left" and "down", causing those forces to subtract instead), and rearranged to solve for acceleration -- and we did this for both the X and the Y directions separately. In this example, the ball is accelerating down and to the left, but it's accelerating more to the left than it is downwards.
(More advanced: sometimes you don't know the X and Y components of a force. It's possible that you only know about one force that's angled at, say, 30 degrees up from right. In that case, you can use cosine and sine to figure out the X and Y pieces of that force respectively. We'll do that in a future article.)
Gravity
Gravity is one of the universal fundamental interactions, along with the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces. Gravity causes a force to act on every single object from every other single object, but fortunately everything works out to simplify nicely if you're on the surface of a planet. On Earth, for instance, we don't even need to worry about the force that gravity causes, we can just look at the end result: every single object on Earth experiences an additional downward acceleration of 9.8 m / s. That simple.
If our ball from above (that we already solved for) is on Earth and experiencing gravity, then we just need to modify the a y equation slightly. We'll take the downward acceleration that the force is causing and combine it with the downward acceleration that gravity causes:
a y = -0.5 m / s2 - 9.8 m / s2
That leaves us with an acceleration of
a y = -10.3 m / s2
As you can see, the downward force combined with the acceleration from gravity shoots the ball downward even faster than either gravity or the force alone could.
So, gravity is simple (if you're on a planet). All you do is modify the a y acceleration to factor in the downward pull of gravity.
In a future article we'll look at how to model gravity if you're not on a planet (perhaps you are a planet), but that doesn't come until later...
Aerodynamic Drag
Our ball experiences gravity, but as I mentioned, we don't need to model that as a force; we just plug it directly into the acceleration result. Drag, however, is a force, and we'll have to model it.
The equation (one of the equations) for aerodynamic drag looks like this:
F D = -0.5 * C D * A * ρ * v2
It looks complicated, but when we break it down, it's pretty simple. First off, notice the bold characters. Like F = ma above, a bold variable means it's actually a vector -- so right off the bat we can split this into two equations:
F D, x = -0.5 * C D * A * ρ * v x 2
= -0.5 * C * A * ρ * v F D, y = -0.5 * C D * A * ρ * v y 2
And then we look at each one of those terms above:
C D is the "coefficient of drag", which is influenced by the shape of the object (and a little bit by its material). For a ball, this is 0.47, and is a dimensionless quantity.
is the "coefficient of drag", which is influenced by the shape of the object (and a little bit by its material). For a ball, this is 0.47, and is a dimensionless quantity. A is the frontal area or frontal projection of the object. If you look at a silhouette of the object from the front, this is the area of that shape. For a ball, the frontal area is just the area of a circle, or π r 2.
. ρ (Greek letter rho) is the density of the fluid the ball is in. If our ball's in air, this value is 1.22 (kg / m 3 )
) Velocity squared -- since we're looking at this in two directions separately, we use the X velocity and the Y velocity respectively.
Note the -0.5 at the beginning. The negative sign, with the fact that the equation uses velocity, indicates that this force pushes in the opposite direction the ball is moving at all times. Because the velocity is squared it'll always be positive, which means the whole equation will always be negative, ie, opposite the velocity.
A Touch of Calculus
Calculus, like physics, is amazing and has a wonderful depth that I can't do justice in a blog post.
The "derivative" in calculus describes how something changes as something else is changing; often this will be called the "rate of change". When you drive a car at 30 MPH, your position is changing by 30 miles every hour. Your position changes as time changes. It can then be said that velocity is the "derivative of position with respect to time" or simply the "time derivative of position".
Then we can think about what happens when you speed up or slow down (accelerate). You might change your velocity by 5 MPH per hour (MPHPH?). In that sense, your velocity is changing with time, and you can say that acceleration is the time derivative of velocity.
So it starts with position. The derivative of position is velocity. And the derivative of velocity is acceleration. (The derivative of acceleration is called "jerk", and the derivative of jerk is called "jounce".)
Why is this relevant? Because if you know the acceleration of something (5 meters per second per second), and if you know how fast it's going when you start looking at it (let's say it's not moving at all), you can figure out where it will be at every moment in the future.
An example: your ball is accelerating at 2 m / s2 (meters per second per second). Let's say it's not moving at all when you start looking at it, and that the starting point is called x = 0;
Time Accel Velocity Position 0 s 2 m / s2 0 m / s 0 m 1 s 2 m / s2 2 m / s 0 m 2 s 2 m / s2 4 m / s 2 m 3 s 2 m / s2 6 m / s 6 m 4 s 2 m / s2 8 m / s 12 m 5 s 2 m / s2 10 m / s 20 m 6 s 2 m / s2 12 m / s 30 m
And so on. This is the approach we'll use when solving for the motion of our ball, except we'll do it not once per second but 40 times per second. All we're doing is using our knowledge of the forces to figure out the acceleration at every frame. Then we use the acceleration and current velocity to figure out the new velocity. And then we use the velocity and last position to find the current position.
Writing the Code
Time to dive in. I won't reproduce all the code in snippets, because there's some stuff that has nothing to do with physics. You'll be able to see the full script at the bottom of the page in the JSFiddle.
var frameRate = 1/40; // Seconds var frameDelay = frameRate * 1000; // ms var loopTimer = false; var ball = { position: {x: width/2, y: 0}, velocity: {x: 10, y: 0}, mass: 0.1, //kg radius: 15, // 1px = 1cm restitution: -0.7 }; var Cd = 0.47; // Dimensionless var rho = 1.22; // kg / m^3 var A = Math.PI * ball.radius * ball.radius / (10000); var ag = 9.81;
We set up the frame rate and plug in some physics values. We also create a ball object that stores the ball's position, velocity, mass, radius, and a number called "restitution". You'll see later that this value determines how bouncy the ball is.
Notice here that we've set the ball to be moving at the start of the simulation.
The best part of programming real physics is the fact that you can look up the density of water and replace the value for rho, and the ball will actually behave as if it's in water! If you program the physics correctly, then all you have to do is change the constants and the rest follows. Want the ball to be on the moon? Just change the acceleration due to gravity. Want the ball to swim through water? Just change the density rho. Want a light, floaty beach ball? Lower the mass and increase the radius.
Please play with these values in the JSFiddle below. Change rho and the radius and the mass, and see how physics affects the simulation!
var setup = function() { canvas = document.getElementById("canvas"); ctx = canvas.getContext("2d"); canvas.onmousemove = getMousePosition; canvas.onmousedown = mouseDown; canvas.onmouseup = mouseUp; ctx.fillStyle ='red'; ctx.strokeStyle = '#000000'; loopTimer = setInterval(loop, frameDelay); }
The setup function initializes the canvas and sets up a loop that executes every frameDelay milliseconds. We'll do all the physics and animation in the loop function.
In the loop:
// Do physics // Drag force: Fd = -1/2 * Cd * A * rho * v * v var Fx = -0.5 * Cd * A * rho * ball.velocity.x * ball.velocity.x * ball.velocity.x / Math.abs(ball.velocity.x); var Fy = -0.5 * Cd * A * rho * ball.velocity.y * ball.velocity.y * ball.velocity.y / Math.abs(ball.velocity.y); Fx = (isNaN(Fx)? 0 : Fx); Fy = (isNaN(Fy)? 0 : Fy); // Calculate acceleration ( F = ma ) var ax = Fx / ball.mass; var ay = ag + (Fy / ball.mass); // Integrate to get velocity ball.velocity.x += ax*frameRate; ball.velocity.y += ay*frameRate; // Integrate to get position ball.position.x += ball.velocity.x*frameRate*100; ball.position.y += ball.velocity.y*frameRate*100;
First off, we calculate the drag forces on the ball. There's a little trick I used to get the direction of the velocity. Instead of using "if" statements to see if the velocity is positive or negative, I just do:
ball.velocity.y / Math.abs(ball.velocity.y)
at the end of the drag force statements. Dividing a number by its absolute value just leaves the sign. Other than that, the drag force lines are pretty straightforward. We're just calculating the forces.
After that, we calculate acceleration. Notice that the statement for "ay" is different from "ax". Gravity only works in the Y direction, so we add that in here. Also notice that in this problem, "downwards" is positive, unlike the example at the top of the page.
After that, we update the ball velocities with the acceleration times the frame rate. The reason we multiply by the frame rate is so: the acceleration is given in "meters per second-squared". But we're calling this loop 40 times a second (not once a second), so we need to divide by 40 (or multiply by 1/40 in this case) to adjust for the frame rate.
Finally, update the ball positions in a similar fashion. In this case we're also multiplying by 100. If you look at the ball object definition way above you'll see I commented that "1px = 1cm", so this *100 is just an adjustment to make everything work out in meters.
Then we handle collisions with the walls:
// Handle collisions if (ball.position.y > height - ball.radius) { ball.velocity.y *= ball.restitution; ball.position.y = height - ball.radius; } if (ball.position.x > width - ball.radius) { ball.velocity.x *= ball.restitution; ball.position.x = width - ball.radius; } if (ball.position.x < ball.radius) { ball.velocity.x *= ball.restitution; ball.position.x = ball.radius; }
We're just checking to see if the ball has ended up past the wall in this frame. If it has, then we multiply the velocity in that direction by the restitution coefficient from above. Since that number is always negative, it'll make the ball reverse direction. If you set the restitution to -1, it'll be perfectly bouncy, meaning it'll bounce up as high as it started falling from. If you set the restitution to 0, it'll flop dead on the ground with no bounce whatsoever. And if you set it to something like -2, it'll bounce even higher than it started. Play with it!
We also modify the position of the ball to just kiss the wall -- this way the ball won't get stuck "in" the wall. Keep in mind that the ball is moving in discrete motions, and so when it collides with the wall it's actually overlapping slightly.
Finally, since we want to be able to control the ball with the mouse, we'll add some handlers (not all code shown here):
var mouseDown = function(e) { if (e.which == 1) { getMousePosition(e); mouse.isDown = true; ball.position.x = mouse.x; ball.position.y = mouse.y; } } var mouseUp = function(e) { if (e.which == 1) { mouse.isDown = false; ball.velocity.y = (ball.position.y - mouse.y) / 10; ball.velocity.x = (ball.position.x - mouse.x) / 10; } }
If you click and drag the mouse, and let go, you'll create a kind of slingshot effect. This is achieved not by applying a force to the ball (which you could do), but rather by overriding the velocity of the ball based on how far you pulled the mouse. I like this approach better because it's easier to apply than a force. If you were to use a force to move the ball with the mouse, you'd have to apply the force over a period of time. The "initial velocity" technique above just lets you un-naturally override the velocity in an instant and let physics figure everything out again.
I hope you learned something! Please fork and play with the code in the fiddle below. Click and drag the mouse to slingshot the ball.
Note that certain configurations of variables will cause the simulation to become unstable. Try setting rho = 1000 but leaving the mass at 0.1. The ball should spaz out and blink around the screen. This isn't a problem with the physics, it's just that we're not running at a high enough frame rate for the very large drag forces. To solve that problem we would have to increase the frame rate to make the simulation stable again. Or we could use a different solver (we're using Euler's method here, a first-degree ODE solver) -- but we won't talk about solvers for a few weeks.A man walks past the sign for the Uber headquarters in downtown San Francisco. (Photo11: Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY)
Uber and Lyft drivers in Chicago are awaiting a vote next week that could force them to comply with many of the same kinds of regulations city-licensed taxis must meet. The companies have threatened to leave the city if they consider the final rules too onerous.
A subcommittee of the Chicago City Council approved the “Rideshare Reform” proposal unanimously Friday, and the measure faces a full vote from the council as soon as Wednesday.
The proposal — opposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel — requires that drivers get background checks and chauffeur licenses, and ensure that some vehicles are accessible to the disabled.
Uber and Lyft oppose the measure, arguing their drivers already undergo background checks, and that forcing them to meet the same kinds of rules as taxis makes their business model impractical.
The ride-hailing services work via smartphone app by pairing drivers with passengers, and the cheapest level of service is usually significantly less expensive than a similar taxi ride. It’s usually cheaper because the drivers use their personal vehicles.
The face-off in Chicago comes weeks after Uber and Lyft ended operations in Austin after voters rejected a proposal by the companies to self-regulate their drivers and mandated that drivers undergo fingerprint background checks and have emblems on their cars.
The debate in Chicago is the latest battleground over stiffening regulation for ride-hailing app drivers that's also brewing in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami and Seattle.
Uber and Lyft launched a public relations blitz on social media and with ads on local television and in newspapers ahead of Friday’s vote, calling on Chicagoans to side with them in the debate.
Emanuel argues the city shouldn’t license the approximately 90,000 Uber and Lyft drivers because they might leave at a time when the city is trying to attract more young, well-educated people who tend to be the companies' best customers. The two companies often launch their services without getting advance permission, and then use their popularity to push back against additional licensing efforts backed by their competitors, taxi companies.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/24YhyLFWARNING: This story contains graphic content. Discretion is advised.
A Canada-wide warrant has been issued for a Calgary man convicted of killing and dismembering his best friend 10 years ago.
Dean Commanda began serving a nine-year-and-six-month sentence in February 2007 for the manslaughter death of 22-year-old Chad Largy. He was also convicted of indignity to a dead body and assault with a weapon.
READ MORE: Wanted man Dean Commanda ‘deserves to be locked away’ after killing, dismembering friend: victim’s sister
Commanda was granted statutory release on Nov. 10, 2015.
Correctional Services Canada (CSC) confirms a warrant was issued July 28, 2016 for the apprehension of Commanda and the suspension of his release.
According to an agreed statement of facts heard in court when Commanda was convicted, he stabbed Largy to death. That night, the pair had been drinking at a downtown bar, before meeting up at Commanda’s southwest condo.
Court heard Largy was upset Commanda had taken off from the bar with two women, leaving him behind. Commanda dismembered Largy’s body and threw the remains into various dumpsters around the city.
Largy’s arms were discovered Jan. 20, 2006, just blocks from Commanda’s condo. He had tried to get rid of knives and other evidence by burning them west of the city–setting a U-Haul and his own car on fire.
He also ripped out the carpet and flooring from his condo, but police were still able to find traces of Largy’s blood inside.Australian winger Robbie Kruse has hinted at a January exit from Bayer Leverkusen.
Robbie Kruse will be out to find a new club unless he can translate his Socceroos form into more game-time win the German Bundesliga.
Kruse, 28, has been left on the bench so far this season in the league at Bayer Leverkusen.
While it's allowed him to come into Socceroos camp feeling fresh, Kruse knows it's not a sustainable position.
"I'll reassess my options in January given I'm in the last year of my contract," he said.
"Hopefully I'm in a good situation to keep getting some minutes and we'll see what happens in January."
Kruse, who has spent the last six years in Germany since leaving A-League club Melbourne Victory, suggested flickering interest in his services during the offseason.
"It was difficult last window because I was with the national team four or five days before the window closed, and one of our wingers got injured, so I was always staying until January," he said.
"I know my situation at the club. I want to go play.
"If I can, I should be able to leave."
While gazing to the future, Kruse isn't moaning or complaining about his lot.
He knows there are far worse places to be than his ambitious home at Leverkusen, which is playing in the European Champions League and hopes to challenge perennial title-winner Bayern Munich.
"The squad we have is one of the best in Germany... a lot of people have tipped us to push for the title," he said.
"You want to play every game but I'm competing with some top talent in Europe. Three of our front line are playing in the German national team -- in the squad at least.
"I've done really well to get in the squad, now I'm on the team sheet, on the bench at least every week.
"It's about pushing harder and getting some minutes.
"To be able to mix with them gives me a lot of confidence."Introduction
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably already aware of the Valve/HTC partnership where HTC will manufacture the Vive, a virtual reality head mounted display, powered by Valve’s SteamVR platform.
As part of the reveal, one new piece of technology was introduced to the public: the Lighthouse. This is a brand-new-to-VR technology which will be used as part of a system to track the position and orientation of a user’s head mounted display and controllers throughout an entire room.
With Lighthouse, instead of using VR in a chair or standing in place, its room-scale VR feature allows you to use the space of an entire room as a stage to physically walk around in a virtual environment.
Disclaimer
This article is based on publicly available information. Be aware that we are trying to explain a system that is unreleased, subject to change, and has very little publicly available information. Some elements of this article may prove inaccurate at a later date.
With any complex system, there are many rules, details, and exceptions to explore. This first article is just going to cover the tech basics (but will still be plenty meaty for many). We’ll consider more detailed issues in later articles.
A Basic Operational Review
The purpose of this first article is to clear up some of the common misconceptions concerning the Lighthouse technology. It will also serve as a starting place for additional articles on Lighthouse and on the various aspects of the HTC/Valve partnership.
By understanding how this one component works, we can understand much more about what HTC and Vive are trying to deliver to consumers. They’re not just cranking out randomly incremental or independent technological solutions here; Valve is running a very deep and highly integrated game plan.
So… we’ve all seen the kind of hand scanner used to read the UPC codes off of the sides of boxes. They send a glowing red line out into space which strikes the surface of the box. If we were able to see infrared light, what Lighthouse does to a room would be similar in appearance. It sends a line of laser light out into space, and lands on the objects and walls inside.
The Lighthouse units have been referred to as a “dumb” device, which is partially true. They are not able to see or interpret what they are scanning. By themselves, they are unable to “read” a room. They serve only as a high-tech flashlight, providing a pattern of predictable illumination.
The Lighthouse units are not conventionally networked. They stand alone and they do not plug into your computer. Each unit only has a single wire for a power connection. Still, in a later article, we’ll learn that they’re far more intelligent than you might first believe.
Twenty-five times a second, each lighthouse unit sweeps the room with two infrared laser beams which are invisible to the naked eye. See the illustration below.
Different from the animation above, the Lighthouse does not currently sweep the room with both beams at the same time. It also isn’t this slow. Even if our eyes were capable of seeing the infrared laser beam, it sweeps the room so quickly that the eye cannot track it.
The system has been stated to sweep the room 100 times a second. In 10 milliseconds, a single Lighthouse unit will sweep a first beam horizontally across the room. In the next 10 milliseconds, it will sweep a second beam vertically across the room. Finally, it will rest for another 20 milliseconds. That’s a total of 50 sweeps per second.
EDIT 3/23/2015: Timings corrected thanks to MadExecutioner.
Because the Lighthouse system consists of two Lighthouse units, a second unit (across the room) is believed to be sweeping while the other unit is resting, and combined, they reach a total of 100 sweeps per second. Some surfaces in the room are swept once, others are swept twice, depending on which Lighthouse can see them.
The video, below, shows the operation of the Lighthouse in slow-motion. If you observe carefully, you may notice the pause after every pair of sweeps.
Lighthouse lasers slowed down to 1/8 speed. pic.twitter.com/cy58cpkxfC — Ian Hamilton (@hmltn) March 21, 2015
Aside from potentially being able to achieve higher steady refresh rate, why use two Lighthouses instead of one? With a conventional tracking approach that uses a single camera, if you put a controller behind your back, the computer loses sight of it and is unable to determine exactly where it is. The object you are holding in the virtual world goes dead or disappears from the game.
If you look at the cartoon image at the beginning of this article, you will see the two Lighthouse units are placed high and in the corners of the room. By placing them in opposite corners, it gives them an opportunity to completely surround a person or an object in laser light, making it far more difficult (but certainly not impossible) to foul up the tracking.
Modes
The Lighthouse is expected to be capable of several different modes of operation. What we have described in this article is only one way the Lighthouse might behave, and is based on the behavior of the pre-release units. It is possible that a Lighthouse will ship to you with only a single mode enabled, but the Lighthouse units are user reprogrammable. We can expect other modes to be available for more specific applications, and this topic will be part of another upcoming article.
Coverage
When asked about how much space the Lighthouse covers, the initial answer was 15 feet x 15 feet. This very specific answer caused a lot of unnecessary alarm and confusion. What if I have a smaller room? What if I have a bigger room? What if I can’t dedicate a whole room and I want to sit in a swivel chair at my desk*, or to stand in the middle of my living room?
In response, Valve’s Chet Faliszek clarified this issue at a presentation at EGX Rezzed. “We say 15 feet, which is what a lot of people have heard. That isn’t required; that’s just one version of it. You can be seated, you can be standing, you can have a small room or big room. We like having those options.” He wasn’t walking it back; Valve is offering all those possibilities.
* – It is worth noting that if you intend to use the Vive at a desk, you should place your Lighthouse units where they will have an unobstructed view of your head and arms.
The minimum space for a Lighthouse appears to be enough so that you can sit or stand in place, and freely move your arms about you. Perhaps 6 feet by 4 feet. The maximum space for two Lighthouse units have not yet been defined, but is expected to be greater than the 15’x15′ figure given.
Down the road, they expect to provide the ability to concatenate multiple spaces together with additional Lighthouse units. That is another feature that might work out really well for a specific application.
For in-game tracking, an inspection of the current SteamVR Beta API reveals support for two different methods of positional tracking. The traditional system provides a relative position while seated in a chair. The new system provides absolute position while standing in a room. Developers can use one or both tracking systems as needed.
Other Hardware Manufacturers
As mentioned in the previous article, Competitors with Different Goals: Valve vs Oculus, Valve plans to make the Lighthouse technology freely available for any hardware manufacturers to integrate.
You may not think that this offer is very significant, and based on anything that I’ve read so far, I don’t blame you. Perhaps you only thought of a company which wants to sell you a new controller or a competing head-mounted display?
The more we understand about Lighthouse, the better that we can answer the question of why any other kind of company would want to integrate this technology. We’ll work our way back towards answering that specific question.
Upcoming
For you hardcore geeks and pharophiliacs (also known as lighthouse lovers), yes, we’ll get to the good stuff. We have to lay down some more foundation first. The next article will discuss the other half of the tracking system, which includes the sensors that use the predictable patterns from the Lighthouse to compute your absolute position inside of a room.
This series continues with the next article, “Examining the Valve/HTC Vive Ecosystem: Basic Sensors and Processing“.Kurdish security forces rescued a 16-year-old Swedish girl, Marlin Stivani Nivarlain, from Islamic State-controlled territory near Mosul in northern Iraq on February 17, according to a statement from the Kurdistan Regional Security Council. Nivarlain was interviewed by Kurdistan24 after her rescue, and told them she was misled by her boyfriend, an Islamic State supporter, into traveling to Mosul in May 2015, without a proper understanding of what IS was. She described her journey across Europe and through Syria, and poor conditions in Mosul. She thanked the Kurdistan Regional Security Council for rescuing her. NOTE: To use this video, you must provide credit to Kurdistan24, and link to their story. Credit: Kurdistan24
THE long-anticipated battle to wrest the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State is imminent. The liberation of the second biggest city in Iraq would prove the most defining and morale-boosting moment in the entire war to date, and give new courage that the days of ISIL are numbered.
Recent imagery from the outskirts of Mosul, a city that once held two and a half million people but has dwindled to one million after ISIL seized it in June 2014, suggests things have gone very quiet, with barely a car seen moving.
It is thought that Mosul’s estimated 10,000-strong ISIL force has drawn into the centre of the city, along with the remaining civilian population, as it prepares for a showdown. The population is a mix of ISIL supporters and those who are trapped and will be used as human shields.
Last week, Iraqi aircraft flew over the city and dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets, advising people that help was finally coming. They told the population that Iraqi forces had been victorious late last year in the battle for Ramadi, east of Baghdad, and advised them to be ready for “the biggest battle”.
FORCES GATHER
This week, the US-led fighters attacked chemical sites near Mosul supposedly used to produce mustard gas. It comes a week after the Pentagon announced it was using cyber interference to block telecommunications within Mosul as it prepares to assist Iraq in retaking Mosul at an undisclosed date, in the immediate future.
Iraqi news outlets have been reporting that ISIL is currently sieving through the local population, arresting hundreds who refuse to join them in the defence of the city.
When News Corp recently visited the Australian forces In Taji, just north of Baghdad, they were training a battalion of Iraqi soldiers who were from Mosul and were being readied for the liberation.
Since then, the Iraqi army has been gathering in the Makhmour province, just south of Mosul, in anticipation of the fight.
JOCKEYING FOR POSITION
Kurdish forces have Mosul surrounded and are holding the insurgents in place, and have reportedly in recent weeks had “dozens” of ISIL fighters surrender to them, fearing they will die in Mosul.
Several weeks ago, Kurdish-led forces overran and recaptured the ISIL-held city of Shaddadi, in eastern Syria, the main town along the supply route that had linked Mosul to ISIL’s headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
APOCALYPSE NOW: Understanding the prophecy behind Islamic State’s death cult
Mosul is now isolated and everything appears in place for an invasion, though there is politics on who will lead the assault. While the Kurdish forces that operate out of their autonomous province in northern Iraq have done most of the fighting so far, the Iraqi government is anxious that its own soldiers will be first into Mosul.
That is partly because the oil-rich city, which is outside of formally agreed Kurdish lands, is nonetheless seen by some Kurds as part of their realm. The Iraqis don’t want the Kurds to take Mosul and then claim it as their own.
CALIPH OF TERROR: Inside the mind of Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iranian-backed Shia militia are also demanding to join the fight, after they were denied a place in the battle for Ramadi. Mosul is majority Sunni and there are concerns involving Shia militia will cause infighting, as well as increasing Iranian influence in the region.
PRESSURE MOUNTS
There is added urgency to move on Mosul.
The enormous Mosul Dam sits some 50km north of the city. Its walls are said to be fractured and could breach at any time. On Thursday, the US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, posted on Twitter: “Just left chilling briefing on Mosul dam in Iraq; failure could leave Mosul city under 15m of water in only hours.”
Mosul Dam sits on the Tigris River, which runs through Mosul. It feeds all the way down to Baghdad. Ms Power tweeted that if the dam collapsed, the “entire pop of Baghdad wld face choice to flee or risk being stranded by flood”.
Just left chilling briefing on Mosul dam in Iraq; failure could leave Mosul City under 15m of water in only hours. pic.twitter.com/FqJuC4SiVy — Samantha Power (@AmbassadorPower) March 9, 2016
Mosul dam failure wld be catastrophic—entire pop of Baghdad wld face choice to flee or risk being stranded by flood pic.twitter.com/O5u2ZBUojz — Samantha Power (@AmbassadorPower) March 9, 2016
An Italian firm is now desperately trying to strengthen the dam, but Coalition forces must be worried that ISIL could in a last act of spite attempt to blow the dam.
Victory in Mosul will not the mean the end for ISIL, who are now spread out across northern Syria and eastern Iraq. But it will be a hugely damaging loss that no amount of their propaganda can correct. And it will send the surest signal yet that the Islamic State has a use-by date.Story highlights Deadly airstrike forced complete review of Pakistan's relations with U.S., foreign minister says
Parliamentary debate this week could mend relations, restore trust, says Hina Rabbani Khar
She says Pakistan is prepared to play crucial role in Afghan peace talks
She rejects claims that Pakistan has ties to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar
Pakistan's foreign minister says an apology by the U.S. government for the NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers would not satisfy the Pakistani government, and the attack demanded a reassessment of Islamabad's partnership with the United States.
"The incident was grave enough for an apology not to be good enough," said Foreign Minster Hina Rabbani Khar in a wide-ranging interview with CNN at her home in Islamabad.
"This did require a complete relook at the terms of engagement with the United States of America."
In November, U.S.-Pakistan relations plunged to an all-time low when NATO fighter jets attacked a Pakistani checkpoint near the Afghan border, killing 24 Pakistani soldiers. The U.S. government expressed regret over the incident but has yet to issue a direct apology.
The NATO airstrike was the latest in a string of incidents that increased tensions between Islamabad and Washington, including the killing of two Pakistani men by a CIA contractor and the U.S. decision to raid Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan without notifying Pakistani authorities.
But it was the NATO airstrike that put some of the most crucial aspects of U.S.-Pakistan relations on hold.
Soon after the incident, Islamabad boycotted a conference on the Afghan peace process in Germany and shut down supply routes used to transport NATO supplies from Pakistan's port city of Karachi to Afghanistan.
JUST WATCHED Pakistan FM on peace with Afghanistan Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Pakistan FM on peace with Afghanistan 02:58
This week Pakistani lawmakers are set to debate and vote on terms of re-engagement with Washington. The conditions include charging fees for NATO goods transported through Pakistan, an end to U.S. drone strikes on Pakistani soil, and an "unconditional apology" for the deadly NATO airstrike.
Khar said the new terms could help mend U.S.-Pakistan relations and restore the trust and respect that have eroded between the two countries.
"We were partners for the past 10 years. Did we get the respect that a partner deserves? A partner which has lost many lives, a partner which has had huge economic costs? I think we must look at this relationship in a more realistic, in a more pragmatic manner, rather than a philosophical manner."
Pakistan's first woman foreign minister, and the nation's youngest ever, added that Pakistan is prepared to play a "crucial supportive role" in the Afghan peace talks. Khar rejected claims that Islamabad has links to Mullah Omar and can persuade the Afghan Taliban leader to take part in the negotiations.
"If what you're trying to get out of me is if we have links to Mullah Omar or not, the answer to that is no," said Khar.
Washington and Kabul view Pakistan as a crucial player in the Afghan peace talks because of the perception that Islamabad maintains ties to the leadership of the Afghan Taliban.
"I think that the perception of what Pakistan is able to do is blown out of proportion most of the time," said Khar.Right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson attacked NBA star LeBron James last week for saying that “being black in America is tough” after racist graffiti was sprayed on his home. Peterson declared that James is nothing but a pathetic “girly man” who could learn a lesson from President Trump about how to be a real man.
“What a lying, weak, pathetic, poor excuse of a male,” Peterson said of James. “He is not a man. There is nothing about him that says man. Everything about this guy says girly. No wonder he supported Hillary Clinton.”
Peterson asserted that he didn’t even believe the vandalism actually happened, stating that if it did, it was probably all a “set-up to make it look like the white folks did it, the Republicans did it.”
“I really pity his wife and his children,” Peterson continued. “His children will grow up messed up because they have a weak, pathetic, girly, lying father … The way that LeBron James handled this is a disgrace to mankind and especially to men. LeBron needs to take |
a decent showcase of novels. Of course, they don’t have as much novels as Joara and Munpia, but what they don’t have, they make up in quality. Kind of. If you’re thinking of asking for permission to translate in this platform, just… Give up. Kakaopage isn’t really into translations.
Ridibooks
If anything, Ridibooks is Korea’s version of Kindle Bookstore.
Ok, this is more a bookstore than a novel platform, but I had to include it here. Not only do they have popular novels that appeared on platforms like Munpia, but they also have a fantastic amount of published novels. This makes it a perfect website to look for good webnovels and published novels alike. If you’re looking to translate actual published novels, be sure to visit Ridibooks at least once. Who knows? They might have what you want. Don’t count on being able to contact the authors, though, since they aren’t really the ones handling everything that goes on in this site.
WARNING: Everything below here is pretty much unfamiliar territory for me as well. Proceed with caution, as I didn’t research too much on each of the websites listed below.
CUG
CUG, at this point, is pretty much a dead site. Well, compared to Munpia, anyway.
This is the oldest fantasy webnovel website in Korea. If you’re planning on digging through really old stuff, this is the place to go. Other than that, I really don’t have much to say about this place. Don’t really frequent it either.
Foxtoon
Yo! If you want BL, Foxtoon is the place to go!
This place is… quite popular for the BL novels it has. Sure, it has fantasy. Sure, it has game novels. But… BL is really what takes the cake here in this website. This is a site that really tries to sell its novels towards women. If Lezhin caters towards men with their power fantasy bullshit, Foxtoon caters towards women with fantasy novels with female protagonists and etc.
So that’s about it. These are the bigger novel websites that are in existence right now. There’s more, of course, and a more comprehensive list can be found on Namu Wiki. It’s kind of a pain to navigate, but I suppose sacrifices have to be made in the search for knowledge.
AdvertisementsHeavy monsoon rains have been drenching Southeast Asia since mid-July, causing mudslides and widespread flooding along the Mekong River. Parts of Thailand are now experiencing the worst floods in half a century, as water inundates villages, historic temples, farms, and factories. At least 281 people have been killed in Thailand, and another 200 in neighboring Cambodia. Rescue workers are scrambling to prevent a humanitarian disaster, and Thailand's prime minister is warning businesses not to use the flooding as an excuse to raise prices. About 8.2 million people in 60 of Thailand's 77 provinces have been affected by the flooding, and economic losses are so far estimated to top $2 billion. Collected here are recent images of the crisis in Thailand as some 10 million residents in Bangkok keep a wary eye on the approaching surge of floodwater, due to reach the capital in a few days.A letter from Environment Minister Peter Kent to editors at Postmedia in January called one of the news chain’s reporters an environmental activist.
On January 4, Kent wrote to Postmedia, saying he wanted to “clarify a few points” in a story the news chain ran on Christmas Eve. That story, by Postmedia reporter Mike De Souza, examined the government’s new fuel economy standards. De Souza reported that a government analysis had shown those regulations could put more cars on the road “and cost consumers and the economy up to $11.2 billion between 2017 and 2025.”
The De Souza piece also stated the following:
“The analysis said that manufacturers could earn credits to meet the new standards by performing above the standards in any given year and that they could also use an existing market-based trading system, in place for fuel economy standards for current model years up to 2017, to buy credits from other companies to meet their targets. Although their government adopted this formula, also known as a cap and trade regime, federal Conservatives have spent the past few months slamming the opposition New Democrats for proposing this type of system to make all large industrial facilities pay for heat-trapping pollution linked to global warming. The Tories have described it as a ‘job-killing carbon tax’ on everything.”
After stating that the government “is committed to protecting the environment and reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” and working with the United States “to develop GHG regulations that reflect the highly integrated North American auto sector,” Kent hit out at De Souza personally, tying him in with a partisan statement about the New Democrats.
“Mr. De Souza, like most environmental activists, believes that a carbon tax is the only answer to combat climate change,” Kent wrote. “Our government is fundamentally opposed to broad-based carbon tax schemes like the NDP’s $21-billion plan to tax everything without links to environmental benefits.”
The only newspaper in the Postmedia chain that published the letter, the Windsor Star, then issued a clarification a few days later, on Jan 8. The Star clarified that though the letter from Kent “implied that Postmedia News reporter Mike De Souza was an environmental activist who supports a carbon tax,” he is, in fact, a reporter and in his job “does not take positions on government policies, nor is he aligned with, or a member of, any environmental activist group.”
On Monday, iPolitics asked Kent’s office why the minister chose to mention De Souza in his letter, and what evidence Kent has – or had – to support his suggestion that De Souza was an environmental activist.
Adam Sweet, Kent’s press secretary, told iPolitics that Kent “directed that the letter be sent, and his name is on the letter.”
That letter, Sweet said via an email, “addressed the broader issue at hand — our solid record on the environment — as clearly shown in the full letter.” Sweet said Kent “felt the story was not objective and required a response.”
De Souza told iPolitics Monday he did not wish to comment on this story.
Last week, a statement from Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro that originated in the PMO called Postmedia reporter Stephen Maher “controversial.” Maher and Ottawa Citizen reporter Glen McGregor wrote a story about the RCMP helping Elections Canada investigate 2008 campaign spending in Del Mastro’s riding. The statement from Del Mastro noted a story Maher produced late last year about Conservative Party donations in a riding near Montreal, which subsequently had to be clarified.
“It is worth keeping in mind that Postmedia recently retracted a story written by controversial reporter Stephen Maher because it made false claims against a Conservative riding association,” it said.Following shortly after the release of KDE SC 4.3.4 for Linux and similar platforms, the KDE Windows team is pleased to announce the release of the latest KDE software for the Windows platform.
Highlights of the release include a Qt 4.6 package and KOffice 2.1.0 (however, in line with upstream, KOffice 2.1.0 is primarily intended for testing rather than production use). Konversation 1.2.1 and KTorrent 3.3.1 are also included. Older packages from the SC 4.3 series should be binary compatible, allowing you to choose which packages you would like to upgrade to the latest versions.
You can install KDE applications on your Windows platform using the latest installer (Windows executable). Please remember that KDE software on Windows is still a work in progress, so applications can be unsuitable for day to day use at the moment.Advertisement Iowa car salesman facing 5th drunken driving charge Share Shares Copy Link Copy
A familiar face in central Iowa was arrested for drunken driving for the fifth time, this time in St. Louis.Car salesman Steven Luebke's last offenses were in 2014 when he received two OWI's after taking a car from his dealership.Following the 2014 incident, Luebke was charged with OWI twice in one night.A few days ago, Luebke was arrested in St. Louis for driving drunk.“I think some people on their own are just not capable or won’t change that pattern,” Pat Hoye, of the Department of Public Safety, said.Hoye said a coalition is working to make changes how people are charged and to prevent repeat offenders“(We) take a strong look at what is the process in place for rehabilitation for those subjects,” Hoye said.The Iowa Board of Parole looks at previous criminal records and any history of drug or alcohol abuse when considering how much time an OWI offender will get. Luebke has both.Iowa DOT Director Mark Lowe told KCCI in a phone interview that when someone gets an OWI, on the administrative side they lose their license, even if on the criminal side they are going through trial“You might have an OWI on their driving record that may not get the conviction,” Lowe said. “It's both a delay issue and a burden of proof issue.”Although what happens within the conviction may need some work, Lowe said the current system used to try to keep offenders off the road matches with national strategies.Luebke served 18 months on his two 2014 OWI convictions. He was paroled in March of this year.Corrections officials said Luebke did have permission to travel to Missouri, but they will begin proceedings to determine whether to revoke Luebke's parole once they receive the arrest report from Missouri.I interrupted my husband’s usual daily routine of laundry and cooking and vacuuming and watching The Baby Channel with our daughter and bringing me a MOTHERFUCKING COCKTAIL NOW, and had him design I interrupted my husband’s usual daily routine of laundry and cooking and vacuuming and watching The Baby Channel with our daughter and bringing me a MOTHERFUCKING COCKTAIL NOW, and had him design this shirt for you, his fellow cuck.
But what is a cuck, you are asking, because you forgot to spend any time on the website of the man who is our nation’s newest “senior adviser” or what the fuck ever, Stephen Bannon, the white supremacist head of Breitbart.com, now tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to Make America White Again.
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Well, simply put, a “cuck” is a man who lets other men — usually Negro men — do sex on his wife’s sullied, white-skinned body. Shortened from the original “cuckold” and imbued with extra-special racisms, it is a thing Nazis and Trumpers love to say about all liberal pussy men. Liberal pussy men JUST LIKE YOU!
You do not have to actually have a wife who cheats on you to be a cuck; all you need is to let your country do congress with non-European peoples as if they are people too!
So pull out your wallet and put on So pull out your wallet and put on your Total Cuck shirt, and then GET YOUR WOMAN HER FUCKING DRINK.A man is seen reading the newspaper by the road side along Penang Road in George Town. ― Picture by KE Ooi
KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 12 ― A recent survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) showed over half of Malaysians do not trust the news that they read and are of the view that media organisations in the country are not free from “undue political influence”.
The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2016 released earlier this week gave a detailed analysis of digital news and media use across Hong-Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan with patterns and comparisons across other Asia-Pacific regions including Japan, Australia and South Korea, and selected European and North American markets (the UK and the US).
The report said that 61 per cent out of Malaysians polled in an online questionnaire disagreed that news media in Malaysia are independent of undue political or government interference.
Only 13 per cent perceived news media to be free from any influence while 28 per cent neither agreed or disagreed on the matter.
“Across all markets covered in the main report and the pilot study, significant numbers disagree with the statement that ‘the news media in my country is independent from undue political or government influence most of the time’ ― that is, they see news media as subject to undue political influence. But there is substantial variation, from figures around 30 per cent in many markets to figures over 50 or even 60 per cent in cases like Malaysia, South Korea, and the US,” the report said.
Comparatively, respondents from countries like Hong Kong and Singapore feel that their news media was free from political influence, with 28 and 33 per cent respectively disagreeing with the the statement in question.
Similarly, a significant 51 per cent of Malaysians polled believe that local news media are not free from commercial influence compared to just 13 per cent who feel otherwise and the 36 per cent who were on the fence.
Trust in news
The study also showed how respondents from different countries viewed the news they read in terms of trust. In this respect, countries like In Hong Kong, and especially Singapore scored higher compared to Taiwan and Malaysia.
For Malaysia, 29 per cent of respondents said they do not trust the news they read, as opposed to 18 per cent of respondents from Singapore and Taiwan. The number who openly expressed distrust in the news they read was higher in more developed nations like South Korea (30 per cent) and the US (38 per cent).
The report also pointed out the close link between news published and the journalists as well as the media outlets that present them, with higher levels of trust again recorded in Hong Kong and Singapore, and lower levels of trust in Taiwan and Malaysia.
Only 22 per cent of Malaysians and 23 per cent of Taiwanese nationals polled agreed that journalists can be trusted “most of the time”. In comparison, 39 per cent of respondents from Hong Kong and 35 per cent from Singapore had trust in journalists in their reporting of the news.
These figures are also reflective of the trust countries had in their local news organisations. In Malaysia, 29 per cent of respondents did not trust the editorial independence of media organisations, similar to South Korea (44 per cent) and the US (40 per cent).
“This is an indication of how strong brands associated with editorial values can enhance the credibility of the work of individual journalists.
“Again, there are higher levels of distrust in Malaysia than in any other market covered in the pilot study, more akin to what is seen, for example, in South Korea,” the report added.
Social media as the main source of news
In Malaysia, the report said that social media is considered the main source of news, overtaking television, radio or print news in terms of reach among internet users.
“Here, Malaysia in particular stands out as a country in which social media are not only widely used for news, but also the most frequently named main source of news. In Singapore, social media are tied with television and newspapers in the number of people who name them their main source of news.
“In both these markets, television is mentioned far less frequently as a main source of news than in most other markets, and newspapers significantly more frequently, a testament to the strength of titles like the Straits Times and Today in Singapore, Sin Chew and The Sun in Malaysia,” the report said.
The study was conducted online, and was commissioned by the RISJ to understand how news is being consumed in a range of markets in the Asia-Pacific region.
The report combines data from RISJ's main Digital News Report with a full survey fielded by YouGov using an online questionnaire at the end of January/beginning of February 2016 across 26 countries and an additional pilot study with a selection of the same questions and a smaller sample size conducted across an additional four markets in AsiaPacific in April 2016 ― Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia.Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth.
The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009.
Some of these new, lower-paying jobs are being taken by people just entering the labor force, like recent high school and college graduates. Many, though, are being filled by older workers who lost more lucrative jobs in the recession and were forced to take something to scrape by.
“I think I’ve been very resilient and resistant and optimistic, up until very recently,” said Ellen Pinney, 56, who was dismissed from a $75,000-a-year job in which she managed procurement and supply for an electronics company in March 2008.
Photo
Since then, she has cobbled together a series of temporary jobs in retail and home health care and worked as a part-time receptionist for a beauty salon. She is now working as an unpaid intern for a construction company, putting together bids and business plans for green energy projects, and has moved in with her 86-year-old father in Forked River, N.J.
“I really can’t bear it anymore,” she said, noting that her applications to places like PetSmart and Target had gone unanswered. “From every standpoint — my independence, my sense of purposefulness, my self-esteem, my life planning — this is just not what I was planning.”
As Ms. Pinney’s experience shows, low-wage jobs have not been growing especially quickly in this recovery; they account for such a big share of job growth mostly because midwage job growth has been so slow.
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Over the last few decades, the number of midwage, midskill jobs has stagnated or declined as employers chose to automate routine tasks or to move them offshore.
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Job growth has been concentrated in positions that tend to fall into two categories: manual work that must be done in person, like styling hair or serving food, which usually pays relatively little; and more creative, design-oriented work like engineering or surgery, which often pays quite well.
Since 2001, employment has grown 8.7 percent in lower-wage occupations and 6.6 percent in high-wage ones. Over that period, midwage occupation employment has fallen by 7.3 percent.
This “polarization” of skills and wages has been documented meticulously by David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A recent study found that this polarization accelerated in the last three recessions, particularly the last one, as financial pressures forced companies to reorganize more quickly.
“This is not just a nice, smooth process,” said Henry E. Siu, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia, who helped write the recent study about polarization and the business cycle. “A lot of these jobs were suddenly wiped out during recession and are not coming back.”
On top of private sector revamps, state and local governments have been shedding workers in recent years. Those jobs lost in the public sector have been primarily in mid and higher-wage positions, according to Ms. Bernhardt’s analysis.
“Whenever you look at data like these, there is this tendency to get overwhelmed, that there are these inevitable, big macro forces causing this polarization and we can’t do anything about them. In fact, we can,” Ms. Bernhardt said. She called for more funds for states to stem losses in the public sector and federal infrastructure projects to employ idled construction workers. Both proposals have faced resistance from Republicans in Congress.A WTF moment in Silicon Valley
Like everyone else who 1) has performed user research, and 2) is over age 40, I spent the requisite decade or two wandering a wilderness inhabited by misguided folks who assumed that, at best, users’ behaviors and opinions were but minor considerations in the design process.
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So imagine my shock when, about five years ago, I found myself trolling (AKA “consulting”) down the corridors of a large Silicon Valley tech company. You most definitely know this company—in fact, you’ve likely complained bitterly about your experience with their products. Naturally, I expected to find precious little sensitivity there to users’ needs, much less any actual user research.
Instead I encountered a series of robust, expensive, well-staffed teams of researchers—many with doctorates—employing just about every imaginable method to study the user experience, including (but not limited to):
Brand architecture research
Call center log analysis
Card sorting research
Clickstream analysis
Field studies
Focus groups
Market research
Mental model mapping
Net Promoter Score surveys
Search analytics
Usability testing
Voice of the customer research
The company had all this research into what their users were thinking
and doing. And yet their products were still universally despised.
Why?
The fable of the blind men and the elephant
You’ve heard this one before. Some blind men walk into a bar… Later, they happen upon an elephant. One feels the trunk and pronounces it a snake. Another feels a leg and claims it’s a tree. And so on. None can see the Big Picture.
Each of those teams is like one of those blind men. Each does an amazing job at studying and analyzing its trunk or leg, but none can see the elephant. The result is a disjointed, expensive collection of partial answers, and a glaring lack of insight.
Forget Big Data—right now, our bigger problem is fragmented data that comes from siloed user research teams. Here’s a simple example: one team may rely upon behavioral data—like a shopping cart’s conversion rate—to diagnose a major problem with their site. But they can’t come up with a solution. Meanwhile, just down the hall, another team has the tools to generate, design, and evaluate the required solution. Unfortunately, they don’t know about the problem. How come?
Because these two teams may not know that the other exists. Or they aren’t encouraged by their organization to communicate. Or they don’t share enough common cultural references and vocabulary to have a reasonable dialogue, even if they wanted to. So synthesis doesn’t happen, the opportunity for game-changing insight is missed, and products and services continue to suck.
I’ve since encountered the same problem in all sorts of industries and places outside the Valley. Even relatively small companies like Aarron Walter’s MailChimp struggle with fragmented user research.
Organizations that now invest in user research must resist the urge to congratulate themselves; they’ve only achieved Level 1 status. How can we help them reach a higher stage in their evolution—one where the goal isn’t simply to generate research, but achieve insight that actually solves real design problems?
I wish there were a pat answer. There simply isn’t.
But we can create conditions that get those blind men talking together. Consciously exploring and addressing the following four themes—balance, cadence, conversation, and perspective—may help researchers and designers solve the problems all that precious (and expensive) user research uncovers—even when their organizations aren’t on board.
Balance: Avoiding a research monoculture
Just as we favor the research tools that we find familiar and comfortable, large organizations often use research methods that reflect their own internal selection biases. For example, an engineering-driven organization may invest far more in its toolsy analytics platform than what may appear to them as “nebulous” ethnographic studies.
If you’re only listening to one blind man, you’ll be stuck with an incomplete and unbalanced view of your customers and the world they inhabit. That’s risky organizational behavior: you’ll miss out on detecting (and confirming) interesting patterns that emerge concurrently from different research silos. And you likely won’t learn something new and important.
A healthy balance of research methods and tools will give you a chance to really see the elephant. Sounds simple, but it’s sadly uncommon in large organizations for two reasons:
We don’t know what we don’t know. For example, you might have done dozens of field studies, but know nothing about A/B testing. We don’t know what to use when. There are so many potential approaches that it’s hard to know which to use and how to optimally combine research methods.
Plenty of good books can introduce you to user research methods outside your comfort zone. For example, Observing the User Experience and Universal Methods of Design will help you inventory research methods from the human-computer interaction world, while Web Analytics: An Hour a Day will do the same for web analytics methods.
But a laundry list of different research methods won’t, by itself, tell you which methods you should use to achieve balance. To make sense of the big picture, many smart researchers have also begun to map out the canon.
One of the most extensive and useful maps is Christian Rohrer’s “Landscape of User Research Methods.” It depicts research methods within four quadrants delineated by two axes: qualitative versus quantitative, and attitudinal (what people say) versus behavioral (what they do):
Use Christian’s “landscape” as an auditing tool for your user research program. Start with what you already have, using this diagram first to inventory your organization’s existing user research toolkit. Then identify gaps in your research methodology. If, for example, all of your user research methods are clustered in one of these quadrants, you need to find yourself some more—and some different—blind men.
Cadence: The rhythm of questions and answers
User research—like any other kind of effort to better understand reality—doesn’t work well if it happens only once in a while. Your users’ reality is constantly in flux, and your research process needs to keep up. So what research should happen when?
Just as a map like Christian’s can help you make sense of user research methods spatially, a research cadence can help you understand them in the context of time. A cadence describes the frequency and duration of a set of user experience methods. Here’s a simple example from user researcher and author Whitney Quesenbery:
Whitney’s cadence incorporates a mix of research methods, gives us a sense of their duration, and, most importantly, maps out how frequently we should perform them. It helps us know what to expect from an organization’s upcoming research activities, and figure out how other types of research might fit timewise.
To establish a cadence, first prioritize your organization’s research methods by effort and cost. Simple, inexpensive methods can be performed more frequently. You might also take a shortcut: look for (and consolidate) the de facto cadences already employed within your organization’s various user research silos.
Then consider how frequently each method could be employed in a useful way, given budget, staffing, and other resource constraints. Also look for gaps in timing: if your research is coming in on only a daily or annual basis, look for opportunities to gather new data monthly or quarterly.
Here’s a sample cadence. Given that your organization will employ a different mix of research methods, your mileage will vary:
Weekly Call center data trend analysis 2 – 4 hours (behavioral/quantitative) Task analysis 4 – 6 hours (behavioral/quantitative) Quarterly Exploratory analysis of site analytics data 8 – 10 hours (behavioral/qualitative) User survey 16 – 24 hours (attitudinal/quantitative) Annually Net Promoter Score study 3 – 4 days (attitudinal/quantitative) Field study 4 – 5 days (behavioral/qualitative)
I’ve added in the categories from Christian’s two axes to ensure that our cadence maintains balance.
Balance and cadence can help organizations get the right mix of blind men talking, and make sure they’re talking regularly. But how do we enable dialogue between different researchers and get them to actually share and synthesize their work?
Conversation: Getting researchers talking
Getting people to talk is easier said than done. If your user researchers have HCI backgrounds and your analytics team is mostly engineers, their languages and frames of reference may be so different that they crush any hope of productive conversation.
Create a pidgin
To make that conversation more likely to succeed, it’s helpful to identify at least a few shared references and vocabulary. In effect, look to develop something of a “user research pidgin” that enables researchers from different backgrounds to understand each other and, eventually, collaborate.
A concept from sociology, boundary objects, can be useful here. Boundary objects are two items from different fields that, while not exactly the same thing, are similar enough that they can enable a productive conversation between groups. For example, personas and market segments, or goals and KPIs, could be considered boundary objects.
Dave Gray, co-author of Gamestorming and The Connected Company, has taken the idea further, developing a simple process for identifying a fuller boundary matrix of common concepts.
While Dave’s process will help you determine common concepts and vocabulary, it’s still a Big Win to get broad acknowledgment that, while you and your colleagues may be speaking (for example) English, you’re really not speaking the same language when it comes to user research. That realization will make it much easier to meet each other halfway.
Tell each other stories
Common language makes it easier to have an effective interdisciplinary dialogue. So do stories that demonstrate the value of that dialogue. Can you tell a story that shows the power of getting the blind men to talk? Here’s one Jared Spool—a master storyteller, for sure—told me a decade or so ago:
The analytics team at a large U.S. clothing retailer found, when analyzing its site search logs, that there were many queries for the company’s product SKUs—and that they were all retrieving zero results. Horrified, they quickly added SKUs to their catalog’s product pages—an easy fix for a big problem—but they still couldn’t understand how customers were finding the SKUs in the first place. After all, they weren’t displayed anywhere on the site.
The analytics team could tell what was going on, but not why. So they enlisted the team responsible for performing field studies to explore this issue further. The field study revealed that customers were actually relying on paper catalogs—an old, familiar standby—to browse products and obtain SKUs, and then entering their orders via the newfangled website, which was deemed safer and easier than ordering via a toll-free number.
The story may be an interesting example of cross-channel user experience. But for our purposes, it’s a great way to show how two very different user research methods—search analytics and field studies, wielded by completely separate teams—deliver compounded value when used together.
Buy candy for strangers
Of course, sometimes it’s not that hard to get interdisciplinary dialogue going; you just might need to resort to some innocent bribery.
Samantha Starmer, who led design, information architecture, and user experience groups for years at REI, relates her experience in creating dialogue with her counterparts in the marketing department. Samantha made a point of regularly trekking across the REI campus over to their building to peek at the research they had posted in their war rooms and cubicle walls. She would even buy candy for the marketing people she wanted to get to know. She did whatever she could to get them talking—and sharing—in an informal, human way.
Samantha’s guerrilla efforts soon bore fruit—her team developed relationships not just with marketing, but everyone touching the customer experience. Informal lunches led to regular cross-departmental meetings and, more importantly, sharing research data, new projects, and customer-facing design work across multiple teams. Ultimately, Samantha’s prospecting helped lead to the creation of a centralized customer insights team that unified web analytics, market research, and voice of the customer work across print, digital, call center, and in-store channels.
Perspective: Making sense and making function
So far, we’ve covered the need for a balanced set of user research tools and teams, coordinating their work through orchestration, and getting them to have better, more productive conversations. But that’s quite a few moving parts—how do we make sense of the whole?
Maps like Christian Rohrer’s landscape can help by making sense of an environment that we might find large and disorienting. You’ll also find that the process of mapping is, in effect, an exercise in putting things together that hadn’t been combined before.
But maps are also limiting—they are hard to maintain, and more importantly, you can’t manipulate them. To overcome this, the MailChimp team took a very different route to sense-making, employing Evernote as a shared container for user research data and findings (see Aarron Walter’s article, also in this issue of A List Apart, “Connected UX”). It’s actually an incredibly functional set of tools, all pointed at MailChimp’s collective user research—but, unlike a map, it struggles to make visual sense of MailChimp’s user research “geography.”
Would it make sense to combine your map and your container? Dashboards are both orientational, like maps, and functional, like containers. They’re also attractive to many leaders who, when confronted with their organizations’ complexity, seek better ways to make sense and manage. But before you get your hopes up, remember that there’s a reason you don’t steer your car from its dashboard. Like any other design metaphor, dashboards tend to collapse as we overload them with features.
Perhaps some smart team of designers, developers, and researchers will be able to pull off some combination of user research maps and containers, whether presented as a dashboard or something else. In the meantime, you should be working on developing both.
Blue skies
These themes—balance, cadence, conversation, and perspective—provide a framework for positioning your organization’s user research teams to talk, synthesize, and, ultimately, come up with more powerful insights. So, go make friends, have conversations, and get outside of your comfort zone. Take a step back and look at what you and your counterparts are doing—and when. Then sketch maps and other pictures of which kinds of user research are happening in your organization—and which are not.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll be armed to bring senior leadership into the conversation. Ask them what evidence would ideally help them in their decision-making process. Then show them your map of the imperfect, siloed user research environment that’s currently in place. Balance, cadence, conversation, and perspective can help make up the difference.
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Florida woman taken to hospital with shark attached to her arm
News reports on Sunday said a 23-year-old woman was bitten by a small nurse shark in Boca Raton.
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that the woman was taken to the hospital by ambulance with the 2ft shark still attached to her arm.
“I have never seen anything like it,” Boca Raton Ocean Rescue captain Clint Tracy told the newspaper. “Never even heard of anything like this.”
Tracy saw the woman and the shark as they were put into an ambulance at Red Reef Park about 1.30pm.
FOX 11 Los Angeles (@FOXLA) Florida woman taken to hospital with shark still attached to her arm https://t.co/gVVgmC9oWH pic.twitter.com/GAZOkUptgs
Tracy told the newspaper the woman remained calm and there was a little blood. A splint board was used to support the woman’s arm and the shark as she lay on a stretcher.
The Boca Raton Regional Hospital operator said the woman had been treated and was in the process of being released.
It was not immediately known if the shark survived its ordeal.The world's "intellectual yet idiot" class just took another blow to the chin, but who really got buried? Nassim 'black swan' Taleb explains...
Simply put, as Taleb recently explained via Medium.com, The "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class...
What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligenzia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence and fall into circularities?—?but their main skills is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism?—?in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types?—?those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior?—?much of what they call “rational” or “irrational” comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in many countries, the government’s role is ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and rarely seen outside specialized outlets, social media, and universities?—?most people have |
-subsidized retirement accounts have long roused fans and critics. Budget cutters point to the trillions of dollars they cost the Treasury Department. Groups concerned about growing inequality complain that the tax break primarily benefits higher-income Americans who would save for retirement anyway. Those with more modest salaries generally have less access to work-based plans or can’t afford to save. Consumer advocates worry they are too vulnerable to the vagaries of the stock market.
Still, these retirement plans are extremely popular among middle and upper-income voters and many of the politicians who represent them — which is why previous attempts to eliminate them have failed.
Whether a tax-deferred 401(k) or a Roth is a better deal is not clear. Younger workers starting out can reasonably assume they are in a lower tax bracket now and benefit from a Roth, while middle-age workers may assume they will be in a lower bracket after they retire. But mostly there are question marks. Who knows if Congress will raise or lower tax rates 30 years from now, or if someone will shift from a higher tax bracket to a lower one? (It wouldn’t be the first time taxes on retirement income changed — Social Security benefits were shielded from federal income taxes for decades before the law changed in 1983.)
Mr. Gale says he thinks the immediacy of the 401(k) tax break encourages people to save more than they otherwise might. So does Mr. Benna, the 401(k)’s inventor. Although he says the tax deferral alone — without employers matching some of their employees’ contributions — was probably insufficient to persuade lower-wage workers to participate, it has nudged up middle-class savings. “It’s harder to save the same amount after taxes,” he said. “There will be a drop-off in contributions.”
But other experts aren’t so sure.
Andrew Biggs, formerly a principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration, said that for most people, it makes little difference whether they pay taxes on retirement savings now or in the future. Automatic enrollment and the employer matches are much more important than the delayed taxes, said Mr. Biggs, now a retirement specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.The mysterious artist who has brightened up inner city streets with cartoon faces but raised the hackles of the council has been outed.
And it turns out he is none other than a New Plymouth District Council employee. Ironically, the council has been hiring contractors to clean up after him.
The artist known on the street as Eno is 24-year-old, Puke Ariki worker, Mikaere Gardiner who says his work is an attempt to bring colour to the dull and drab spaces of the city.
ANDY JACKSON MIKAERE GARDINER: The artist Eno.
"I like to do it in places that don't look that good," he said. "It's about enhancing the city."
Gardiner is a nationally-recognised artist and last year won the Mayor's Choice Award as one of the New Plymouth District Council's 2010 Young Achievers. In 2009 he won a section in the National Youth Art Awards.
But without permission, his art is considered vandalism under council bylaws and is something it has no tolerance for.
"The community wants a graffiti-free district," parks manager Mark Bruhn said.
Last week council contractors were busy removing work by Eno and a host of other street artists from public structures – a cleanup that costs the taxpayer $170,000 each year.
Yesterday Mr Bruhn said he was not interested in the Daily News telling him who the artist was. "It doesn't matter who it is, the policy is the same for everybody," he said.
"We have got a range of options if we catch these people. It's still vandalism and there is a possibility of involving police," he said.
Eno's modus operandi is to paint the faces on paper before pasting them to his targets.
According to the bylaw such works must not be "offensive or indecent".
Gardiner's work is not politically motivated and he does not consider it to be graffiti, nor would he say it's aggressive.
Director of the Govett-Brewster gallery Rhana Devenport said the term graffiti was very broad and had a negative expression that didn't fit in with Eno's work. "I don't see anything at all aggressive about it," she said. "There's a sense of playfulness and cheekiness that goes with it."
Ms Devenport said the animated works that have been appearing over the past three months have been enjoyed by people.
While there is no debating the work wasn't sanctioned by the council, online poll results show the majority, 58 per cent, want the works to stay, with 42 per cent saying they should be removed.
Although the results are unscientific, Mr Gardiner believed they were indicative of the rise in popularity of street art.
"For me it's about getting public permission. If the public likes it then that's what it's about."
What should the council do about street art? Comment belowA sizable minority of women report lifetime sexual behavior with both men and women. In the present study, a multinational sample of women who reported genital contact with at least one man and one woman in their lifetime (N = 2,751) were asked to provide their behavioral definitions of “having sex with a woman” and “having sex with a man.” Replicating previous research, participants were asked “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with a woman/man if the most intimate behavior you engaged in with her/him was …” followed by a list of behaviors that differed based on the hypothetical partner gender. While most participants indicated that they would consider “having had sex” if they engaged in a variety of behaviors, behaviors involving genital contact were most often included within the participants’ definitions of having sex, regardless of partner gender. The percentage of behaviors included in the participants’ definitions of having sex with a woman (M = 59.40%, SD = 20.77%) was higher than the percentage of behaviors included in their definition of having sex with a man (M = 37.26%, SD = 28.97%). Broadening our understanding of “having sex” for individuals with diverse sexual experiences may have important implications for clinicians and researchers.Craigslist is not a website that can be effective for a market as dynamic and unique as the legal cannabis industry. However, in Washington D.C., that is exactly where people are forced go to obtain their technically legal marijuana. In November 2014, the District of Columbia voted to legalize recreational marijuana, and yet Congress has done everything in its power to block implementation, forbidding any kind of organized system to be put in place for now-legal users to buy and sell marijuana.
In the absence of regulations, dispensaries, etc., the public initially turned to Craigslist. Yet due to the heavy illicit activity that occurs on Craigslist — understandable with any online network that large — there is now a never-ending police presence on the site. Most of this has nothing to even do with pot; they are on the prowl for more severe crimes and cannabis is the collateral damage. Even in D.C., some people have a hard time following democratically elected laws such as the D.C. legalization act.
Recently, there is a new company becoming increasingly adopted by the marijuana community in D.C. as a revolutionary solution to the problem of legal marijuana within such a unique and complex landscape as the District of Columbia. Users love it for its innovative and easy approach to dealing with the issues and hardships marijuana users face in simply expressing their legal right to possess and consume marijuana.
LeafedIn.org has led the charge by creating the first-ever cannabis network that focuses on all individuals in the MJ industry. LeafedIn does not discriminate and accepts any participant, no matter their size or variety, as long as they are within the marijuana community. This service helps people meet their individual marijuana product or labor needs. Of course, though the focus is on individuals, any business or larger entity can join and benefit from it as well.
This is all done through the anonymous, map-based, weed-networking app that LeafedIn currently offers for free. It just takes one look at the D.C. area of the map on LeafedIn.org to see how many people have already benefited from this tool. It works with any internet-connected device simply by accessing the www.LeafedIn.org site from your device’s browser, such as Safari for iPhone, Chrome for desktop, etc. There is a dedicated iOS app currently in development that is in a private beta. However, the company has stated it will be released to the public very soon.
To be clear, Leafedin.org does not handle any transactions, but rather gives users a real-time map view of who is around them, including the weed vendors down the street, the buyers looking to get some high-quality buds, all types of marijuana employers and skilled labor looking for marijuana employment. Users can filter and search through either a map or list view to find other users nearby who meet their needs. Each user has an individual profile, which is summarized when viewing the user on the map for convenience. Additionally, there is a review system in place so you can easily get a sense of that user’s feedback and reputation.
Getting signed up takes only a few minutes and requires no personal details other than an email. Other than that, all that is asked for is a username and which group best describes the user. Each group has its own specifications, whether it’s what marijuana product or marijuana employment needs you are able to satisfy (vendor, employer) or what needs you have (buyer, worker).
We talked to a few users in the D.C. area, mostly mobile with one desktop, to see if it was truly that straightforward, and all of them agreed that the signup was easy, free, and took less than 5 minutes to finish registering. They felt it was structured to allow users, themselves included, to be anonymous unless they specifically chose not to be. One thing they all stressed was, just like on Craigslist, use caution and common sense and you’ll have no problems (a viewpoint LeafedIn openly promotes as well).
All said they were able to meet their marijuana needs, which for them was finding a viable weed connection nearby with high-quality cannabis, and they were able to do so within a day of signing up as there are so many users to choose from. They mentioned they knew a few people who had some luck with finding employment, especially temp jobs through LeafedIn as well, but in D.C the focus seems to be on the pot product side, both supply and demand. One user mentioned he signed up, messaged a vendor down the street who replied instantly, and after a donation the user had some high quality bud from two blocks away within less than an hour of signing up.
Clearly the possibilities here for both the buyers and vendors are endless, showing why hundreds of fellow DC’ers use LeafedIn daily and why it’s proving to be the most effective tool in the Washington D.C. area for the legal marijuana industry.'Steampunk' fashion heading for the mainstream, researcher says
"What if the Victorians had access to digital technology? What would it look like? It certainly wouldn't look like anything we see today. All of our digital devices wrapped in generic plastic. If the Victorians had access to all of our new technology, it would be done in beautiful woods, brass rivets and there'd be an exposed mechanical element to all of the devices," Art Donovan, steampunk curator at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University.
That pretty much sums up the style and historical milieu of the increasingly popular steampunk designs and fashion, which a number cruncher for IBM says is going to go mainstream in the next two years.
"The trajectory for steampunk as a popular social and cultural trend is on the rise," Trevor Davis, a consumer products expert at IBM, wrote in the IBM sponsored A Smarter Planet blog.
Davis says pop culture and social media references to steampunk have risen dramatically since 2009.
"For steampunk, the tipping point came in October 2010, when NYC ComicCon and a NYC Haunted House Halloween event both featured steampunk themes. Two months after that exposure, the level of social chatter more than doubled," he wrote.
In the next couple of years, he said, expect to see the steampunk aesthetic to migrate from subculture "craft" manufacturing to mass production and mainstream fashion labels.
Steampunk has grown dramatically in the Northwest scene as well. Two main groups have been organizing events around the aesthetic: Steamcon and The Steampunk Exhibition Ball.
We asked the heads of these two groups to send us their thoughts on the steampunk revolution. Here's what they wrote us:
Diana Vick, Vice Chair of Steamcon:
Steampunk got its start as a lowly subset of science fiction, coined in the 1980's, taking the Victorian era and using 20/20 hindsight to re-imagine it with mad scientists, airships and automatons. Fast forward to now where this retro-futuristic dream is igniting the imagination of not just writers but artist, musicians, clothing designers and well... everyone. There are now gallery show, concerts and entire conventions based on steampunk. Steampunk has gone from a mere literary genre to an entire subculture. For some, it is a way of life. I feel that the appeal may come from the wish to return to a simpler technological time but also a return to ornamentation and craftsmanship. Our slick mass produced lives aren't feeding our souls, so we are exploring and reinventing the past.
To experience more of steampunk from Vick's corner of the aesthetic, head on over to Steamcon.
Now this from DodiRose Zooropa, event coordinator, Steampunk Exhibition Ball:
Steampunk is an alternate history of the Victorian era. It's a fantasy world where steam power remains king. Steampunk's origins are in science fiction literature but it has now grown to a subculture focused on arts of all types. There is a heavy costume or fashion component to steampunk but that is really the last art form to be touched by the style. Steampunk attracted me because it allows one to take what you love from the Victorian era without feeling constrained to recreate. It's freeing to let your creativity wander and create a world of your own. As a costume designer, I have always loved the Victorian era and steampunk allows me to blend my love of history and sewing with my own artistic style. Although there are general guidelines to the style it is open to a wider interpretation that historical reenacting or even modern fashion for that matter We created the Steampunk Exhibition Ball to bring an extravagant and sexy event to the Seattle steampunk scene and as a benefit for the Center for Sex Positive Culture. The CSPC and steampunk are not an obvious pairing but the diversity within the steampunk movement has made the event an amazing success. We get steampunks, kinksters, burners, costumers, ballroom dancers, artists, musicians, gamers and all other sorts of other nerdy persuasions. Every year it becomes more extravagant and people continue to have a great time. We are now in our fourth year and have made the move with MOHAI to South Lake Union. Our audience seems to love the opportunity to take in Seattle's history while dressed to the nines and listening to some of Seattle's finest steampunk music, not to mention dancing to it.
Check out their website for more of what Steampunk Exhibition Ball is up to.Fans are still calling for Elsa to have a girlfriend.
The campaign to have a gay character in Frozen 2 continues to gain momentum.
The most successful animated film in history has become a pop-cultural phenomenon, largely owing to its progressive female characters: sisters Elsa and Ana.
Fans are wanting Elsa to have a girlfriend, given it would be an opportunity for Disney to debut its first gay character.
SUPPLIED Fans continue to campaign to get a gay character into Frozen 2.
The hashtag #GiveElsaAGirlfriend started on social media after user Alexis Isabel tweeted: "I hope Disney makes Elsa a lesbian princess imagine how iconic that would be."
READ MORE:
* Disney slammed for 'homosexual' agenda in Frozen
* Frozen fans are asking Disney to give Elsa a girlfriend
* New fairytale Promised Land follows a gay couple
Frozen is seen as a prime opportunity for Disney to improve LGBT representation in its movies with its first gay princess reports the Independent.
Fans continue to use social media to try and persuade movie bosses to make it happen.You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
— Gov. Pat McCrory fiercely defended a new law that sets North Carolina's discrimination policy during a Sunday morning interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," saying government shouldn't interfere with how businesses treat their employees and customers.
"I don't think government should be the HR director for every business," McCrory told "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd, who questioned the governor about his decision to sign the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act last month and the resulting backlash.
The law, commonly referred to as House Bill 2, requires people to use the public bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificates, excludes gay and transgender people from protections against employment and public accommodations protections and bars cities and counties from extending such protections to them. The law also blocks cities from setting their own minimum wage and eliminates the right for workers to sue for job discrimination in state court.
Scores of corporations have balked at the law, several performers have canceled shows in the state because of it and the NBA is weighing whether to pull the 2017 All-Star Game out of Charlotte over it. NBC estimates that the law has cost North Carolina $39.7 million directly and led to $186 million in lost revenue, Todd said.
McCrory blamed the Charlotte City Council for creating the firestorm, saying the council never should have passed an ordinance that would have allowed transgender people to use the public bathroom in which they feel most comfortable. He said leaders of the General Assembly felt they had to call a special session to address the issue before the ordinance went into effect April 1.
"I will always call out government overreach," he said. "It's not the government's business to tell the private sector what their bathroom, locker room or shower practices should be."
Businesses can set their own LGBT policies under the law, he said.
Todd pressed him on parts of the law beyond the bathroom provision and asked how he would have liked state government telling him how to handle minimum wage and LGBT protections when he was mayor of Charlotte. He responded by saying his priorities as mayor were on police and fire protection and transportation.
"I'm not the private sector's HR director," he said. "I am the HR director and governor for all state employees."
That's why, he explained, he used an executive order last week to extend protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity to state workers.
McCrory acknowledged that he didn't discuss the legislation with anyone in the LGBT community before the 12-hour period in which General Assembly passed it and he signed it into law. Since then, he said, he's has "very positive conversations" with some transgender people.
"We've got to have more dialogue and not threats," he said, adding that there is a "disconnect" between support for the law in many North Carolina towns and the outrage expressed by corporate executives.
Dealing with the "extremely new social norm" of being transgender creates a difficult balancing act of recognizing equality while respecting everyone's privacy, McCrory said.
"This is not just a North Carolina debate. This is a national debate that's come on in literally the last three months," he said. "There is passion on each side."BARRINTON, N.S. – The Municipality of Barrington’s lobster pot tree has been lit for the season.
A tree lighting ceremony was held the evening of Nov. 23, followed by fireworks.
The tree is constructed with just over 200 recycled lobster traps. Memorial and commemorative buoys decorate the tree, in memory of fishermen who have passed on and in honour of those who continue to make their living on the sea.
The goals of the tree are to provide a sense of beauty, a sense of pride and to serve as a symbol of remembrance and respect for the rich lobster fishing culture and heritage of the area.
A choir gets ready to sing in front of the Lobster Pot Christmas Tree during the lighting festivities on Nov. 23. KATHY JOHNSON
The RCSSC 327 Unicorn music band plays Christmas carols during the Lobster Pot Christmas Tree lighting festivities on Nov. 23. KATHY JOHNSONThe $150 million Peter Pan origins movie opens Oct. 9 in North American theaters.
Joe Wright's family tentpole Pan is in serious need of some magical pixie dust, according to pre-release tracking.
The Peter Pan origins story may have trouble clearing $30 million in its North American debut over the Oct. 9-11 weekend, a worrisome start for Warner Bros. considering the movie's hefty production budget and marketing spend. Two of the major tracking services have Pan debuting at $21 million to $22 million, while a third has it opening between $26 million and $31 million, according to those with access to the surveys.
Pan — which has secured a China release date of Oct. 22 — could make up ground overseas, where it launched last weekend in Australia to a solid, but not spectacular, $2.1 million. It opens in half of the international marketplace over the Oct. 9-11 weekend, timed to school holidays, including in Germany, Russia, Korea, Brazil, Mexico and Spain. Among other major markets, Pan opens in the U.K. Oct. 16, followed by France on Oct. 21 and Japan on Oct. 31.
Warners has a week to go in the U.S. in terms of its final marketing blitz, so it could move the needle. Also, the film should benefit from the Columbus Day holiday Oct. 12, when half of schools are out.
Hoping to rival industry leader Disney in the live-action fairy tale space, Warner Bros. spent at least $150 million to make Wright's movie, starring Hugh Jackman as Blackbeard and Garrett Hedlund as a young James Hook. Newcomer Levi Miller stars in the titular role, while Amanda Seyfried plays Mary and Rooney Mara, Tiger Lily. Pan is the first studio tentpole directed by Wright, known for Atonement, Hanna and Pride & Prejudice (2005).
So far, Pan has received mostly poor reviews, despite additional special effects work done after the movie was pushed at the 11th hour from June 26 to Oct. 9, where it goes up against Robert Zemeckis' The Walk. Both films are rated PG, although Pan is far more of a natural family play.
In terms of other big-budget live action fairy tales, Disney's Cinderella opened to $67.9 million domestically in March of this year, while the studio's Maleficent debuted to $69.4 million domestically in 2014. Universal's Snow White and the Hunstman nabbed a $56.2 million start in 2012.
Live-action family titles can certainly make business in the fall, but it's all about the economics. Dolphin Tale, released in late September 2011 and costing a modest $37 million to produce, debuted to $19.2 million on its way to earning $72.3 million domestically and $95.4 million worldwide. Last year, Disney's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, with a budget of $28 million, debuted to $18.4 million on its way to grossing $67 million domestically and $100.7 million globally.
Pan would need to do far more business on a global basis.
Hollywood has long been obsessed with the eternal boy created by Scottish novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie to mixed results, at least in live-action form. In 2003, P.J. Hogan's Peter Pan flopped. Steven Spielberg's Hook fared notably better in 1991, grossing north of $300 million worldwide.Share this
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A new study shows that news articles that characterize overweight individuals as lazy, weak-willed, self-indulgent, and contributing to rising health care costs may tip the scales in the wrong direction.
When women who perceive themselves as overweight are exposed to weight-stigmatizing news articles, they are less able to control their eating afterward than are women who don’t perceive themselves that way.
[related]
Using young women as their test subjects (because, as a group, young women are particularly vulnerable to issues related to weight stigma), researchers asked half of the participants to read a mock article from The New York Times titled “Lose Weight or Lose Your Job.” The other half read a similar article, “Quit Smoking or Lose Your Job.”
“The first article described all real things we found in the media about different kinds of stigma that overweight people are facing in the workplace,” says Brenda Major, a faculty member in department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
After reading the articles, participants were asked to describe them via video camera to someone who was unfamiliar with the content. A 10-minute break followed, during which the women were ushered into another room and asked to wait for the next phase of the experiment to begin.
A variety of snacks, including M&Ms and Goldfish crackers were available in the room. The snacks were pre-weighed, and every participant was offered the same type and amount, and remained in the room for the same amount of time.
Lack of control
In the final phase of the experiment, each participant was asked a number of questions, including how capable she felt of exercising control over her food intake.
“People might think the overweight women who read the weight-stigmatizing article would eat less than the others,” Major says, “but they didn’t. As we predicted, they actually ate significantly more than the other women in the study. And afterward, they acknowledged feeling significantly less able to control their eating.
Major says many people who are overweight feel helpless to control their weight. “Our study illustrates that articles and ads about the obesity epidemic that imply it’s just a matter of self-control can make overweight people feel even more helpless and out of control of their eating.”
The current study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, builds on earlier research demonstrating the negative effects overweight women experience when they are put into situations in which they fear being stigmatized because of their weight. In that study, each participant was asked to give a talk—which she believed was either audiotaped or videotaped—on the qualities that make her a good date.
Stress and overeating
The overweight women who thought they were being videotaped had greater increases in blood pressure and performed more poorly than the others on a subsequent cognitive measure of self-control than did others in the study.
“Our first study showed that being worried about being stigmatized because of your weight can decrease your self-control and increase stress,” Major says.
“And two big contributors to overeating are stress and feeling out of control. Thus, we predicted that exposing people who think they are overweight to messages emphasizing the stigma overweight people experience could actually cause them to eat more rather than less. And this is just what we found.”
One finding in the current study that surprised her, however, was that women who didn’t perceive themselves as overweight and who read the “Lose Weight or Lose Your Job” article subsequently reported feeling significantly more in control of their food intake afterward.
“This may partly explain why some people who’ve never had an issue with weight and feel in control of their eating think that weight stigmatizing messages ought to cause people to eat less,” Major says. “For them, these messages have that effect. But for people who don’t feel in control of their eating, these messages have the opposite effect.”
Good health, not BMI
Messages related to weight loss would be more effective if they focused on good health and exercise rather than on weight and body mass index (BMI), she says.
“There is good evidence that BMI at very high levels is unhealthy. But people who are in the slightly overweight category actually live longer,” Major says.
“A recent paper published by the Centers for Disease Control that summarized the results of many studies reaffirmed the idea that people who are slightly overweight tend to live longer than those who are thin or in the ‘normal’ weight category. That information doesn’t get much publicity, though.”
Focusing on weight and BMI can do a tremendous disservice to people who are in a constant battle with their scales, Major says.
“More than 90 percent of individuals who lose weight gain it back in two years. There’s so much biology involved and so many metabolic factors that it’s difficult for almost everyone to lose weight and keep it off. Once people become heavy, their metabolism changes and the reward centers in the brain function differently.”
The stigma attached to being overweight is devastatingly unhealthy at a psychological level, she says.
“People are literally dying to be thin. When you have such a focus on weight and people saying they’d take 10 years off their lives in exchange for being thin, or young women saying they’d rather lose an arm than gain weight, it shows an incredible amount of fear.”
The research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.
Source: UC Santa BarbaraA new poll shows former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore with a commanding lead over Luther Strange, the Washington establishment backed candidate, heading into the GOP primary runoff for the Alabama U.S. Senate seat left open this year.
The poll from JMC Analytics provided to Breitbart News ahead of its public release shows Moore with 51 percent, a majority, supporting him, while Strange trails nearly 20 points behind with just 32 percent—and 17 percent are undecided. Moore’s commanding lead comes after he outperformed polls to finish around 39 percent in a multi-way primary this past Tuesday. Strange finished the first round of voting with just under 33 percent, and this poll seems to indicate that Moore is the only candidate gaining more votes while Strange is stuck with a ceiling of what he got on primary day before the runoff.
See the polling in full by following the link here: Alabama Senate Republican Executive Summary Runoff Poll 1 (1)
Strange was appointed into the seat vacated by now Attorney General Jeff Sessions under questionable circumstances earlier this year by now former Gov. Robert Bentley. Strange was, at the time, the attorney general of Alabama and conducting an investigation into Bentley. Bentley was later forced to resign as a result of what Strange was investigating. His appointment-created incumbency, however, did little to help him in the first round of voting–and his powerful allies in Washington were unable to push him into first place in the first round of voting. Now that he is trailing significantly with just over a month to go before the runoff, with his opponent Moore securing for now a majority of the electorate, the future looks grim for Strange.
This latest JMC Analytics poll was conducted from August 17 to 19, with a 95 percent confidence interval and a 4.3 percent margin of error. That means Moore’s commanding lead with a majority of support in Alabama is far outside the margin of error in this poll, making him the clear GOP frontrunner walking into election day on September 26. The survey had 515 respondents.
In the primary’s first round, a group run by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s allies called Senate Leadership Fund spent nearly $10 million to back Strange with vicious attack ads against Moore and against fellow conservative Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL). The attack ads, filled with mostly false information, largely backfired since they—and a questionable endorsement from President Donald Trump—were not enough to get Strange across the finish line into first place. Normally, with that kind of money and an endorsement from the president himself, someone would finish in first place in a multi-way race.
This survey neither Trump’s endorsement nor McConnell’s backing is helping Strange much at all. When asked if Trump’s endorsement of Strange made respondents more or less likely to vote for him, 23 percent said less likely while 25 percent said more likely and 51 percent said no difference at all.
When asked if McConnell’s help with millions backing Strange made respondents more or less likely to vote for Strange, 45 percent said less likely while only 10 percent said more likely. Forty-six percent said no difference.
“There are three main takeaways from this poll: (1) former Chief Justice Roy Moore surges into an early runoff lead due to support from a substantial number of those who did not support either runoff contender in the August 15 primary, (2) evangelical support is fueling Moore’s initial runoff lead, and (3) both President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s endorsements are not helping Senator Strange,” JMC Analytics pollster John Couvillon wrote in his analysis of the data.
Couvillon’s last poll of the primary right before the first round of voting caught the trend of the race exactly right, as it showed Moore trending upwards into the 30s and Brooks right at 19 percent—where he finished—and it showed Strange struggling in deep second place. Brooks had tried to break out and the second place spot was trending his way until Trump’s endorsement of Strange stunted his growth and gave Strange a last-second boost to hold him in a far-distant embarrassing second-place finish.
Moore is winning almost everywhere statewide now, too, Couvillon writes, adding that he is also consolidating support from the other candidates in the first round of the race. In total, in addition to Brooks, the August 15 first round had a number of other candidates. Outside of Moore and Strange—the two who made the runoff—there is a whopping nearly 30 percent up for grabs. Interestingly, that also means that Strange—with an endorsement from Trump and more than $10 million spent on his behalf—was rejected by more than 67 percent of the Alabama GOP electorate.
“In the ballot test, Roy Moore has substantial leads across all of the state’s media markets except Mobile,” Couvillon writes now. “It also looks like the support of the defeated primary candidates has initially moved to Moore: not only did those supporting the ‘also rans’ say they support Moore 51-26%, but (to use a readily apparent example), ‘Mo’ Brooks’ Huntsville base has largely realigned itself with Moore, where he has a 52-29% lead. What also appears to be fueling Moore’s surge in post primary support is the substantial difference in support depending on whether the respondent self-identified as an evangelical Christian. Among that group, Moore has a 58-28% lead over Senator Strange, while among non-evangelicals, Strange has a narrow 42-39% lead.”
Despite this poll, this race is by no means over at this stage. McConnell’s allies are likely to, since they already dumped millions into backing Strange, go all in with tens of millions more.
“We congratulate Big Luther Strange for closing the gap in the final week and positioning himself well for the runoff,” Senate Leadership Fund’s Steven Law, an acolyte of the very anti-Trump Karl Rove, said in a statement on election night. “We are proud to have strongly supported President Trump’s number-one ally in this race, and we believe the President’s support will be decisive as we head into the next phase of this campaign, which Senator Strange will win in September.”
The next morning, Trump seemed to hedge his backing of Strange by congratulating both Moore and Strange via Twitter.
Congratulation to Roy Moore and Luther Strange for being the final two and heading into a September runoff in Alabama. Exciting race! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2017
It remains to be seen what the president may or may not do for Strange–or for Moore–moving forward ahead of the Sept. 26 runoff.Our most recent nationally representative survey finds that More than half of Americans (58%) believe climate change is mostly human caused. That’s the highest level measured since our surveys began in 2008. By contrast, only 30% say it is due mostly to natural changes in the environment, matching the lowest level measured in our November 2016 survey.
Four in ten Americans (39%) think the odds that global warming will cause humans to become extinct are 50% or higher. Most Americans (58%) think the odds of human extinction from global warming are less than 50%.
One in four Americans (24%) say providing a better life for our children and grandchildren is the most important reason, for them, to reduce global warming. More than one in ten Americans said preventing the destruction of most life on the planet (16%) or protecting God’s creation (13%) was the most important reason.One in two favour Muslim immigration ban? Beware the survey panel given an all-or-nothing choice
Posted
An Essential Report poll finding that 49 per cent of Australians want to ban Muslim immigration received extensive media coverage last week. In addition to general reporting, Essential's executive director, Peter Lewis, wrote in The Guardian:
The result floored me.
Less surprised was commentator Ray Hadley in The Daily Telegraph:
The left-leaning cafe latte sippers were left scratching their heads this week when an Essential poll revealed...
Senior journalists, including from Fairfax Media, and politicians took the findings at face value. Labor's deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, saw the survey as proof that:
We're not doing a good enough job as national leaders to bring harmony and cohesion to our community.
Among the few to question the result was new Labor MP Anne Aly. She asked whether public opinion was really so adverse.
A second questioner was One Nation senator Pauline Hanson, who said the poll understated the degree of opposition:
I believe it's a lot higher than that. Because people... have been in fear to answer the question... because they don't know who's taking the call.
Surveying methodology
Some aspects of the Essential findings are worthy of critical scrutiny. One relates to methodology.
There are two main approaches to surveying. One is a sampling of the population based on randomly generated telephone numbers. The other utilises an online panel of respondents who complete surveys out of interest and for reward.
Contrary to Hanson's claims, no-one was "taking the call" in the Essential survey: it utilised an online panel.
Surveys employing online panels are much cheaper and quicker to run. They have a proven record on a number of issues, notably predicting election outcomes, as over a period of years they develop weighting formulas for their panel calibrated against election results. But there are no formulas of the same level of precision when surveys deal with social issues.
An extensive review of online survey methodologies found that:
Computer administration yields more reports of socially undesirable attitudes and behaviours than oral interviewing, but no evidence that directly demonstrates that the computer reports are more accurate.
Major organisations seeking the highest level of reliability continue to employ random population sampling, despite the cost involved.
To test the impact of different methodologies, in 2014 the Scanlon Foundation administered the same questionnaire to both a random sample of the population and an online panel. It found 44 per cent of Australia-born online panel respondents whose parents were born in Australia indicated they held "very negative" or "negative |
Google says the device will begin shipping again next week. The company wouldn't get into specifics about why sales stopped, or whether new devices will include a patch that works around the court's preliminary ban, but they will indeed have the new Android 4.1 update.
Thanks, Justin K!Milan look for new investors?
By Football Italia staff
Milan owner Li Yonghong is reportedly on the lookout for new investors to share his financial burden.
According to Reuters, Li is effectively Milan’s only benefactor as “his partners backed out following Beijing’s crackdown on foreign acquisitions, especially in football”.
Consequently, the Chinese businessman would prefer to have another investor on board, given the Rossoneri are expected to turn another loss this year ‘at least’.
A spokeswoman for Milan told the news agency that “there was no indication of any potential changes in the club’s ownership.”
Nonetheless, Reuters believes the Diavolo could attract new investors by listing themselves on the Chinese stock exchange within two years, while backers from the country could be tempted “if the authorities soften their stance on foreign investment”.
Li paid €740m to buy Milan from Silvio Berlusconi earlier in the year and approved of a €230m spending spree on new players over the summer, with only Paris Saint-Germain and Manchester City paying out more.
Reuters adds Li’s advisers are also working on refinancing the debt his consortium took on from American private equity fund Elliott Management.
Elliott rescued Li’s takeover of Milan, but at the cost of a €308m loan, with an average interest rate of just below 10 percent, which will have to be paid back by October next year.A Congolese military spokesman had earlier confirmed that the bodies had been discovered near the road, but did not know how many there were.
GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo – The bodies of 26 people believed killed after an ambush last week in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have been discovered, most of them with their hands tied and their necks broken, a local chief said on Sunday.
The victims disappeared a week ago after they were ambushed by militants on the main road in North Kivu’s restive Beni territory, where more than 800 people were killed in dozens of massacres between 2014 and 2016.
The attack, which followed a lull this year, has revived questions about the state’s ability to impose order over eastern borderlands wracked by ethnic tensions and competition for mineral resources.
Congolese authorities and UN officials initially believed that about 20 civilians had disappeared after being attacked by armed assailants and were likely to have been killed. They were unable to locate the bodies for days, however, due to intense fighting.
A group including officials from Congo’s UN mission MONUSCO, the army, the Congolese Red Cross, and Congolese authorities travelled to the scene of the killings on Sunday.
“In total, 26 people -- three women, 22 civilian men and one Congolese soldier -- were tied up and killed by breaking their necks,” Saambili Bamukoka, chief of Beni’s Watalinga chiefdom, told Reuters.
A Congolese military spokesman had earlier confirmed that the bodies had been discovered near the road, but did not know how many there were.
“Bodies were found in a state of decomposition,” said local army spokesman Mak Hazukay, adding that the road remained closed to civilian traffic. “We must first have the time to secure the surrounding area.”
The day after the attack on the travellers, militants assaulted two nearby military bases, killing two UN peacekeepers and injuring 18 others.
The army and UN peacekeeping mission blamed the raids on the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan Islamist group active near the border. Authorities have also accused the ADF of carrying out nearly all the massacres of the past three years.
But independent and separate UN experts say several armed groups, as well as national army commanders, have been involved in the killings as they vie for influence in Congo’s lawless eastern borderlands.
Millions died in regional wars that ravaged eastern Congo between 1996-2003 and spawned dozens of armed groups that continue to prey on local populations.TCU or Baylor? Baylor or TCU? I’ve gone back and forth on it all summer. Especially since the Big 12 really will have one true champion this year.
On the one hand, Baylor’s 2015 squad should be Art Briles’ most complete to date, which is saying something coming off back-to-back 11-2 seasons. QB Seth Russell should step in seamlessly on offense, where he’ll have the luxury of playing behind an all-upperclassman offensive line; throwing to Corey Coleman, KD Cannon and, on occasion, 392-pound tight end LaQuan McGowan; or handing off to Shock Linwood and Devin Chafin. It should be another near 50-points-per game attack.
But all the more intriguing is the Bears’ extremely experienced defense, led by NFL-caliber D-linemen Shawn Oakman and Andrew Billings. Briles’ style of play makes it prohibitive that Baylor will ever field a truly dominant defense, but this unit should at least hold its own.
Article continues below...
TCU, for its part, is replacing more starters on defense, but I don’t worry much about Gary Patterson reloading on that side of the ball. The secondary is a bit concerning, especially against the Big 12’s high-powered offenses. But like Baylor, few have a chance of outscoring the Horned Frogs. TCU, after all, scored 58 points in its only loss last season. What heights will that offense reach this year what with not only QB Trevone Boykin, but nearly every key starter returning?
Ultimately, I believe the schedule sets up a little more favorably for TCU than it does for Baylor. Over four straight weeks in November, the Bears visit K-State for a tricky Thursday night date, host Oklahoma then visit Oklahoma State before their Black Friday showdown with TCU. Briles’ offense executes with impeccable speed and precision at home, but it often bogs down outside of Waco.
With that in mind, this year’s TCU-Baylor game is in Fort Worth. The Frogs will win both that and the conference.
ALSO: Feldman’s Big 12 picks: Baylor’s time for undefeated title run is now
A few other thoughts:
–Expect Texas Tech transfer Baker Mayfield to win Oklahoma’s quarterback job and lead new coordinator Lincoln Riley’s offense to considerable improvement. Bob Stoops’ team remains a notch behind TCU and Baylor, but should get back to the nine-to-10 win range.
–It will be another rocky,.500-type season for Charlie Strong’s Longhorns, but not without showing off promise for the near future. Strong is going all-in on his class of highly acclaimed freshmen like LB Malik Jefferson, which could lead to wild volatility from one week to the next.
–Texas Tech, coming off a rough 4-8 season in which it was fortunate to win that many, could be the most improved team in the conference. New coordinator David Gibbs and Ohio State transfer LB Mike Mitchell give a previously sorry defense some hope.
–Kansas will be the worst Power 5 team in the country due to the roster mess Charlie Weis left behind. The Jayhawks need to beat FCS foe South Dakota State (no given) because they’ll be underdogs the rest of the way.
PREDICTED STANDINGS TEAM RECORD (LEAGUE) TCU 11-1 (8-1) Baylor 10-2 (7-2) Oklahoma 9-3 (6-3) Oklahoma State 8-4 (5-4) Kansas State 7-5 (5-4) Texas Tech 7-5 (5-4) Texas 6-6 (4-5) West Virginia 6-6 (3-6) Iowa State 4-8 (2-7) Kansas 1-11 (0-9)
Stewart Mandel is a senior college sports columnist for FOXSports.com. He covered college football and basketball for 15 years at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on Twitter @slmandel and Facebook. Send emails and Mailbag questions to Stewart.Mandel@fox.com.Read a presentation by the state seismologist that includes a list of "best practices" for oil and gas operations to avoid triggering earthqua…
Read a bill filed by Rep. Casey Murdock that would prohibit cities from passing bans on fracking and other oil and gas operations.
Read a statement by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission on what the agency is doing to repsond to the state's huge increase in earthquakes, th…
Read a draft of an EPA report on earthquakes believed to be triggered by wastewater injection wells and related activites.
Read a scientific study by a former OU researcher, now at Cornell, finding that Oklahoma's increase in earthquakes is likely due to huge incre…
The Geological Survey is chartered in the Oklahoma Constitution. It is charged with "investigating the state's land, water, mineral, and energy resources and disseminating the results of those investigations to promote the wise use of Oklahoma's natural resources consistent with sound environmental practices."
The Oklahoma Geological Survey is a state agency located on the University of Oklahoma's Norman campus and affiliated with OU's Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy.
What are injection wells?
The federal Safe Drinking Water Act permits oil and gas injection wells to dispose of salty water unearthed during the drilling process.
There are about 3,200 active injection wells in Oklahoma. In 2013, the latest year figures are available, operators disposed of 1.1 billion barrels of wastewater.
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission permits, oversees and inspects wastewater injection wells. Because the federal law was passed before scientists widely understood such wells could trigger earthquakes, the law's requirements relate only to protecting water sources and not earthquakes.
According to the EPA, most oil and gas injection wells are in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and California. Nationwide, about 144,000 wells inject more than 2 billion gallons of wastewater every day.
For more information about injection wells, visit the EPA's website."Hi, my name is James and I'm a volunteer for Barack Obama's Campaign for Change, how are you doing?" A pause, and hopefully an answer such as "fine, thank you." I ask "Have you made a decision as to whom you're supporting on November 4?"
At this point the script diverges wildly; often, the answer will be a mumbled, "I'm sorry" and a click on the other end of the line, or perhaps "I don't want to say" and I note "refused" in the vote template, or perhaps the answer is "Obama" or "Don't worry, this is an Obama house." Or perhaps, and this is surprisingly infrequent, I get a definitive "McCain" and so I say "Thanks for your time - have a nice day." Always polite, and never ever argumentative or pushy.
That's the short version, but it doesn't usually go that way. First we ask any Obama supporters if they're aware of early voting (beginning October 20 in Florida) and if they need a ride to the polls. After providing the pertinent information, we duly note the answers for follow-up action. Then we ask if they want to volunteer. These are the calls that gladden our hearts, and we get quite a good number of them.
So far, so good, but it's the "undecided" response that gets challenging. I've heard some strange things at this point. There was the lady in Plantation, Florida, who assured me that "Obama plans to tax every person $10,000 and to give them three years to pay it or else!" When I tell her confidently that this is not the case, and in fact Obama proposes the opposite, the voice on the other end says she's still "not sure" since she had heard it from a "good source." During the primary, I had a conversation with a lady in Indiana who declared that "Obama is a Muslim" and she had received several e-mails to prove it. At that point, a reference to his membership in a Christian Church should have sufficed, but as with my Florida discussion, the lady said "I know what I know..." I often have to field questions about Obama's policies; one of the most unusual was the man who asked me about Obama's position on treating autistic children, something he cared deeply about since he had an autistic granddaughter. Thankfully, I was able to give him an answer since it turns out that Barack Obama has a detailed position on autism posted on his fabulous website.
But the most effective response to an undecided voter, the one that always gets an "I think I'm leaning to Obama," is to mention Governor Sarah Palin. She's the magic bullet. I have not talked to a single person who has a favorable opinion of her, not even among McCain supporters. In going door-to-door in Pennsylvania (my weekend activity), bringing up Palin is always met with a furrowed brow and a troubled look. The typical comment I hear is, "How could he have picked her? She really worries me!"
Nor have I ever come across either a caller or a voter door to door who is happy with how things are going in our country. No one is happy, whether Democrat, Republican or Independent. But while McCain supporters I've spoken to express equal unhappiness with the status-quo, sometimes they can be fiercely partisan and downright nasty. For instance, one McCain supporter in Pembroke Pines named Diana told me with a sneer, "He [Obama] doesn't salute the flag." Even though Diana told me she was unhappy with Bush, I realized there wasn't any point in arguing, so I rang off with the standard "have a nice day," and clicked "McCain supporter." Probably the most unpleasant conversation I've had to date was with Jessie, also of Pembroke Pines: "I think he's a socialist and I don't like his friends. Show me someone's friends and I'll tell you how they think," she said with sour satisfaction. Now, there are some phone bankers who would try to convince her otherwise, especially on the absurd "socialist" charge, but I knew Jessie was a "no sale" and answered, "thank you for talking to me and have a nice day." But Jessie had the last word, with "I hope YOU don't!"
It's rare to get abuse on the phone beyond a quick hang up, so after Jessie's call I had to stand up and tell the story to our phone bank chief, the very smart Roy Winnick, who is a paragon of energy and organization. Roy, who in real life is a well-respected biographer and historian, is the brains behind the daytime phone banking at Princeton Democratic Headquarters. As I mentioned in my last post, Princeton's dynamic campaign operation is always jammed with people making buttons, calling local volunteers, doing data entry and phone banking. They include people from all walks of life and positions, including high school students (we get lots of those), Princeton University students, and even a few of the many famous authors residing in the area. Everyone wants to help it seems.
But Jessie's bad wishes didn't compare to my adventures in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, where a group of us from Princeton joined others canvassing door to door this Sunday. As I approached one door, a large black dog bounded out and jumped up on me, proceeding to literally "bump" me off the property while barking wildly. Thankfully the dog turned away when I hit the street. But that's an unusual occurrence, as most people are friendly out on the trail. There are just a few curt "no, thank you's", and enough polite challenges to keep us on our toes. Our lists are targeted, so we don't generally knock on Republican doors, but we've encountered several voters who say something to the effect that "I've been a Republican all my life, but I'm voting for Obama." My friend Philip, a Princeton Professor, had an interesting conversation with a man whose son is on his third tour in Iraq. The entire family, including his soldier son, is emphatically supporting Obama.
Today, we wearily finished our route of 50+ houses by trudging up the weedy driveway to a shabby porch of a house along a busy highway. I was prepared for a suspicious door-slam, but not for the clean-cut young man who welcomed me heartily and enthusiastically signed up as an Obama volunteer. It was a great finale to a satisfying day of hard campaigning.
There is no better way to directly help influence a campaign than canvassing door to door or phone banking. These activities allow even the lowest ranking member of a campaign to have a profound effect on the outcome - to make a difference. It's even possible to make calls directly from home as a member of Obama's National Phone Team. It's not easy work; it takes persistence and an ability to never take things personally. The truth is, despite Jessie's wish to the contrary, I find that every day I'm able to campaign is a very nice day indeed.Megadeth were previously banned from performing in Malaysia in 2001. — Handout via TheHive.Asia
KUALA LUMPUR, May 3 — US thrash metal band Megadeth is the latest target of PAS Youth that questioned why its concerts here this week were approved when it had been prevented from performing here in 2001.
The movement did not list out what issues it has with the band or its performances, beyond calling it a “negative influence”.
“PAS Youth is questioning the authorities’ resolve in addressing this event, when they so clearly tout the Islamic entertainment guidelines,” the movement’s information chief, Hishamudin Abdul Karim, said in a statement.
He further asked how the nation and Malaysians would benefit from the event, suggesting it was little more than an opportunity to witness unhealthy cultures.
Hishamudin then insisted that Islam was not against entertainment.
“PAS Youth is confident that PAS, if given the mandate to rule, will not block the organisation of concerts that meet the guidelines set by religious authorities to preserve the prosperity of the public,” he added.
PAS Youth has a history of protesting against foreign performers.
Last year, it did so against US pop singer Selena Gomez due to her “sexiness”.
Megadeth will perform at the National Stadium in Kuala Lumpur tomorrow and Friday.Tarot: the High Priestess and her Avatars – Viviane from „The Mists of Avalon“
The High Priestess, the second Major Arcana of the Tarot, reflects the values of spirituality and inner self. In the Tarot of Marseilles, she is crowned with a papal tiara and her name is „La Papesse“ (the Popess – probably a reference to the catholic legend of Pope Joan, a woman who had reigned as pope during the Middle Ages).
In the Rider-Waite tarot deck, her name is „The High Priestess“ and she wears no more the papal tiara, but a horned diadem at her head and a large solar cross on her breast. Behind her, there is the veil of the Temple and the scroll in her hands bears the letters TORA. She was also associated by different occultist with Virgin Mary or with the Egyptian goddess Isis but the main interpretation remains that of inner spiritual power of feminine nature.
When speaking about the divinatory meaning of the High Priestess, A. E. Waite offers, in his book „The Pictorial Key to the Tarot “, several possible meanings: „ secrets, mystery, the future as yet unrevealed; the woman who interests the Querent, if male; the Querent herself, if female; silence, tenacity; mystery, wisdom, science“. Waite also affirms that „ there are some respects in which this card is the highest and holiest of the Greater Arcana“.
In literature, painting and cinema, there are many scenes and characters that more or less accurately illustrate the meaning of this Major Arcana. We chose Viviane, the Lady of the Lake from „Mists of Avalon“ – 2001 miniseries based on the 1983 novel of the same name by Marion Zimmer Bradley, a retelling of the Arthurian legend with an emphasis on the perspectives of Morgan le Fay and other women of the tale.
In the movie, the Lady of the Lake is the title of the ruling priestess of Avalon, and various characters assume it, including Viviane and Morgan le Fay, named Morgaine. Viviane is interpreted by Anjelica Huston. At her first appearance, she comes at her sisters Igraine with the prophecy that she will bear a king destined to beat the Saxons, but who will not be Gorlois’ (Igraine’s husband) child. After few years, Vivian announces her younger sister Igraine that is time to take Arthur (son of Uther) and Morgain to Avalon. There, she initiates Morgain in the power of the elements and in the servitude of the Three-fold Goddess (Maiden, Mother and Crone). The final test is to part the mists that protect Avalon.
The High Priestess meaning according to Tarot Masters
The High Priestess interpretation and meaningCosts of Conservation In 2010, world governments agreed to a strategic plan for biodiversity conservation, including 20 targets to be met by 2020, through the Convention on Biological Diversity. Discussions on financing the plan have still not been resolved, partly because there is little information on the likely costs of meeting the targets. McCarthy et al. (p. 946, published online 11 October) estimate the financial costs for two of the targets relating to protected areas and preventing extinctions. Using data from birds, they develop models that can be extrapolated to the costs for biodiversity more broadly. Reducing extinction risk for all species is estimated to require in the region of U.S. $4 billion annually, while the projected costs of establishing and maintaining protected areas may be as much as U.S. $58 billion—although both sums are small, relative to the economic costs of ecosystem losses.
Abstract World governments have committed to halting human-induced extinctions and safeguarding important sites for biodiversity by 2020, but the financial costs of meeting these targets are largely unknown. We estimate the cost of reducing the extinction risk of all globally threatened bird species (by ≥1 International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List category) to be U.S. $0.875 to $1.23 billion annually over the next decade, of which 12% is currently funded. Incorporating threatened nonavian species increases this total to U.S. $3.41 to $4.76 billion annually. We estimate that protecting and effectively managing all terrestrial sites of global avian conservation significance (11,731 Important Bird Areas) would cost U.S. $65.1 billion annually. Adding sites for other taxa increases this to U.S. $76.1 billion annually. Meeting these targets will require conservation funding to increase by at least an order of magnitude.
After the failure of previous global commitments to reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity (1), parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) recently adopted a new strategic plan, including 20 targets to be met by 2020 (2). Negotiations on financing the plan are not yet resolved, partly for lack of information on financial costs. We used data on birds, the best known class of organisms, to assess the financial costs of meeting two of the targets relating to conserving species and sites: (i) preventing the extinction of known threatened species and improving and sustaining their conservation status (Target 12) and (ii) effectively managing and expanding protected areas to cover 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas (and 10% of coastal and marine areas), “especially areas of particular importance for biodiversity” (Target 11) (2). These two targets align closely with the existing focus of much of the conservation sector; they are also among the most immediately urgent, involving discrete actions amenable to costing.
To assess the costs of species conservation, we sampled 211 globally threatened bird species [19% of all threatened bird species on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List (3)]. We asked experts on each species to estimate (i) recent expenditure on conservation actions, and (ii) a range of costs for conservation actions needed to achieve the minimum improvement in status necessary to reclassify (“downlist”) each species to the next lowest category of extinction risk on the Red List (e.g., from Critically Endangered to Endangered). We modeled midrange cost estimates as a function of breeding distribution extent, degree of forest dependence, mean Gross Domestic Product per km2 of breeding range states, and mean Purchasing Power Parity of breeding range states, and we used this model to estimate costs for all other globally threatened bird species (4) (fig. S1).
The median modeled annual cost per species for conservation actions required to achieve downlisting within 10 years was U.S. $0.848 million (range: U.S. $0.0387 to $8.96 million; all values adjusted to 2012 U.S. $) (Fig. 1A and table S1). This compares with a median of U.S. $0.219 million annually [range: U.S. $0.001 to $4.82 million, standardized to the same 10-year period and adjusted for inflation (4)] for 25 threatened species that were successfully downlisted during 1988–2008 because of genuine improvements in their status (i.e., directly resulting from conservation interventions) (5) (table S2). Costs for all but one of these species fell within the range of our sample of estimated costs (Fig. 1A), although the median was significantly lower [analysis of variance (ANOVA) of natural log–transformed values: F 1, 259 = 7.4, P < 0.01]. This may simply be because conservationists often prioritize species with more tractable conservation needs (6) or because, relative to all globally threatened birds, a disproportionate number of those 25 species are found on oceanic islands (76 versus 35%; χ2 = 16.2323, df = 1, P < 0.001), thus tending to have smaller ranges and hence lower costs.
Fig. 1 (A) Estimated annual financial costs of conservation actions needed to downlist 211 globally threatened bird species to lower categories of extinction risk on the IUCN Red List within 10 years (solid bars), compared with actual costs of actions that led to successful downlisting of 25 species during 1988–2008 [outlined bars; corrected to the same 10-year period and adjusted for inflation (4)]. (B) Modeled annual costs per species of conservation actions needed to downlist 174 Critically Endangered species (red), 380 Endangered species (orange) and 561 Vulnerable species (yellow bars); horizontal colored lines indicate the height of obscured bars; arrows show medians (black indicates median across all 1115 bird species).
Assuming that the actions required for each species are independent, we estimate the total costs of downlisting 1115 globally threatened bird species to be U.S. $1.23 billion (U.S. $0.975 to $1.56 billion) annually over the next decade, excluding the costs of at-sea actions (4) (table S3). The estimated cost per species is <U.S. $3 million annually for 95% of species (<U.S. $1 million annually for 50%), and is lower for species in higher categories of extinction risk (Fig. 1B, ANOVA, F 2, 1112 = 74.4, P < 0.0001) because they generally have smaller distributions. However, most costs are for actions (e.g., site protection) that will probably benefit other species whose distributions overlap; only 20% are for species-specific actions such as captive breeding. We therefore attempted to estimate the effects of such cost-sharing through a spatial analysis (4), which produced a revised minimum total of U.S. $0.875 billion annually, of which U.S. $0.379 to $0.614 billion (43 to 49%) is needed in lower-income countries [low- and lower-middle–income countries as classified by The World Bank (4)]: those with greatest need for funding assistance (Table 1 and Figs. 2 and 3).
Table 1 Global costs of bird species conservation and site protection and management (billion U.S. $ per year over the next 10 years; figures in parentheses give the % of the global total in each income group). Low-income and lower-middle–income countries are referred to in the text as “lower-income” countries; high-income and upper-middle–income countries are referred to as “higher-income countries.” Threatened bird species excludes taxa listed as Possibly Extinct or Vulnerable under criterion D2 (4). Minimum values for column 5 are the costs of effectively managing additional sites; maximum values include costs of expanding protected areas. View this table:
Fig. 2 Current expenditure and total required for conserving 1115 threatened bird species and safeguarding 11,731 important sites for birds in lower- and higher-income countries (black and gray bars, respectively). Bars for species show costs accounting for sharing between species, with vertical lines indicating costs excluding sharing. Bars for sites indicate management costs, with the vertical line for unprotected sites showing acquisition costs.
Fig. 3 Geographic patterns in the annual cost for conservation actions (U.S. $ km−2) for 1097 globally threatened bird species (A) assuming that actions for each species are independent and (B) assuming cost sharing; (C) number of species km−2, and (D) distribution of IBAs (points; red indicating those for which management-cost data were included in the model) and lower-income countries (blue shading). Costs and number of species are divided into quantiles; areas with no globally threatened bird species present shown in gray in (A to C); Behrmann equal-area projection. Distribution maps for 18 globally threatened species are not available.
Investment of such sums does not guarantee success, as multiple factors (both deterministic and stochastic) may influence conservation outcomes (7, 8). Furthermore, many of these species will almost certainly require continued (and possibly even increased) funding to maintain any improvement in their status beyond 2020, particularly given the likely intensification of existing threats, the increasing impacts associated with climate change, and the emergence of potential new threats (9).
The median annual expenditure within the last decade for the 211 species in our sample was U.S. $0.065 million (range: $0 to $15.2 million), with the majority of resources spent on just a few species, which reflects a common pattern documented at national levels (10–12). This covered a median of 12% of the estimated required annual expenditure per species. Recent funding was adequate (>90% of estimated need) for only 3% of species (n = 7), and <50% of required expenditures were covered for 86% of species. Extrapolation suggests that, to cover the U.S. $0.875 to $1.23 billion annually required to meet the CBD target for birds, an additional U.S. $0.769 to $1.08 billion per year is needed (but only U.S. $0.314 to $0.509 billion, 41 to 47% in lower-income countries) (Table 1 and Fig. 2). Given that the species for which we could obtain data may be biased toward those that are already receiving funding, the true shortfall may be even greater.
Conservation costs per species appear to be lower for other taxa (except possibly mammals), presumably because they have smaller distributions on average than birds (tables S4 and S5). Data for 664 declining threatened species in New Zealand (63 birds, 601 mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish, invertebrates, vascular plants, bryophytes, and fungi) show that annual costs for birds are 4.20 times larger than the median for other taxa (4). Threatened birds make up 7.65% of all threatened species on the global IUCN Red List (4, 13), which suggests that the total annual costs of conserving all “known threatened species” as called for in the CBD target (2) by downlisting them by ≥1 Red List category may range from $3.41 billion (if the proportion of costs that are shared among birds is the same for all other taxa) to $4.76 billion (if one assumes no cost-sharing).
To estimate the costs of meeting the CBD target for site conservation, we carried out a separate analysis to quantify the costs of effectively conserving all terrestrial Important Bird Areas (IBAs). IBAs represent the largest systematically identified global network of important sites for biodiversity (14), as they make up 11,731 sites supporting populations of one or more of 4445 threatened, restricted-range, biome-restricted or congregatory species (15). Only 28% of IBAs are completely covered by existing protected areas, 23% are partially protected, and 49% are entirely unprotected (14). Protection [encompassing all types of protected area management and governance (16)] of all unprotected and partially protected IBAs (32% of which are in lower-income countries) would increase terrestrial protected area coverage to 17.5% and meet the CBD site target (14).
We estimated the costs of effectively managing IBAs by modeling required expenditure per hectare as a function of socioeconomic and site-specific variables (4), on the basis of data for 396 sites across 50 countries (table S6). Extrapolation suggests that the total cost worldwide would be U.S. $7.18 billion annually for currently protected IBAs, of which U.S. $1.58 billion (22%) is required in lower-income countries.
We assessed the costs of expanding protected area networks to cover all unprotected and partially protected IBAs using spatially explicit agricultural land values (gross economic rents) from Naidoo and Iwamura (17) as a proxy for purchase or compensation costs (4). This produced a total cost of U.S. $50.7 billion annually (U.S. $15.9 billion, 31%, in lower-income countries), which is comparable to previous estimates of protected area expansion costs in developing countries (18). Applying our management cost model (see above) to these sites yields an estimate of U.S. $7.11 billion annually, resulting in a total figure of U.S. $57.8 billion required annually for protecting and effectively managing all IBAs.
Globally important sites have also been systematically identified for mammals; amphibians; and certain reptile, fish, plant and invertebrate groups in 12 countries (19, 20). Of these sites, 71% already qualify as IBAs and cover 80% of the total area (14). Assuming the areal relation holds worldwide and that such sites have a level of protection similar to that of IBAs, we estimate that protecting and effectively managing a more taxonomically comprehensive global network of terrestrial sites would cost U.S. $76.1 billion annually (U.S. $22.4 billion annually, 29% in lower-income countries) (Fig. 2).
We estimate that current annual expenditure on managing IBAs that are already under some form of protection falls short of requirements by U.S. $1.09 billion annually in lower-income countries (31% of needs covered) and by $2.82 billion annually in higher-income countries [50% of needs covered, although this figure is based on more limited data (4)]. Management of an expanded protected area network covering all currently unprotected or partially protected IBAs increases the estimated shortfall to $2.78 billion for lower-income countries and $8.24 billion for higher-income countries.
A proportion of the costs would be shared between the species and site targets considered here. Establishing protection and managing sites made up 50 to 55% of the total costs for sampled bird species. Discounting this proportion from the total cost of species conservation across all taxa, a combined cost needed to meet both species and site CBD targets may be in the order of U.S. $78.1 billion annually (Fig. 2). It is also highly likely that actions to meet these two targets will contribute to other targets in the CBD strategic plan, which are critical to delivering sustainable development and the safeguarding of global biodiversity in the long term (4).
Even with increased investment, careful prioritization will continue to be necessary to inform decisions about which areas to protect and which actions to undertake for species, e.g., using approaches that optimize returns on investment, given fixed budgets and defined objectives, for sites (21), species (7, 8), and management actions (22). Our finding that species facing higher categories of extinction risk require less investment for downlisting than do those in lower categories suggests that in many cases such analyses will prioritize actions for the most-threatened species first. We also note that there is considerable global spatial variation in costs and the number of threatened species per unit area (Fig. 3). Although the shortfalls in higher-income countries are substantial, the greatest gains per dollar will be in lower-income countries (23).
Despite the limitations of the available data, the shortfalls we have identified clearly highlight the need to increase investment in biodiversity conservation by at least an order of magnitude, especially given the small, but growing, body of evidence linking spending and effectiveness (24, 25). Nevertheless, the total costs are small relative to the value of the potential goods and services that biodiversity provides (26), e.g., equivalent to 1 to 4% of the estimated net value of ecosystem services that are lost per year [estimated at $2 to $6.6 trillion (27–29)]. More prosaically, the total required is less than 20% of annual global consumer spending on soft drinks (30).
These results should inform discussions among governments on the magnitude of the financing needs for implementing the CBD Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020. A particular challenge will be how to address the current mismatch between the greater resources available in richer countries and the higher potential conservation gains in financially poor, biodiversity-rich countries (31, 32). Resolving the ongoing conservation funding crisis is urgent; it is likely that, the longer that investments in conservation are delayed, the more the costs will grow (23, 33), and the greater will be the difficulty of successfully meeting the targets (6, 34).Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation–although these make fine ingredients–but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings. - Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
Yes. And, I would expand Jacob’s thoughts to say that we need buildings of all sizes.
I would like to personally thank everyone who attended Strong Towns on |
power to homes on Sunday to encourage evacuations. The area was closed off on Sunday and military vehicles were stationed on the periphery to take people out.
Karen Waltmon, 58, who was returning to her home in one of the neighborhoods, said she wondered if parts of the city would have to be razed.
“I feel a lot of Houston is drying out, and I don’t want them to forget about us,” she said.
About 37,000 refugees stayed overnight in 270 shelters in Texas plus another 2,000 in seven Louisiana shelters, the highest number reported by the American Red Cross.
Some 84,700 homes and businesses were without power on Sunday, down from a peak of around 300,000, according to the region’s major electric companies.
In Crosby, Texas, an Arkema (AKE.PA) chemical plant that ran out of electricity needed to keep volatile organic peroxide refrigerated will burn the remaining containers as a “proactive measure,” company and Harris County fire officials said in a statement.
Officials last week evacuated residents and set up a 1.5-mile (2.4-km) perimeter around the area.
Slideshow (10 Images)
Energy disruptions pushed up gasoline futures to a two-year high ahead of the holiday weekend, but major refineries started to come back online on Friday.
Colonial Pipeline, the biggest U.S. fuel system, expects to reopen a Texas segment of its network on Monday, when it will resume transporting distillates from Houston to Hebert, Texas, the company said on Sunday, adding that it would be ready to start moving gasoline on Tuesday.
Those repairs would restore to normal Colonial’s entire pipeline from Houston to Linden, New Jersey, relieving shortages between Texas and the U.S. Northeast.To say that Lawyerist has feelings about legal technology would be a dramatic understatement. We have all of the feelings about solo and small law firm technology. This isn’t the time nor the place to inundate you with all of those musings. But suffice it to say that we believe successful law firms use future-oriented legal tech and are near the front edge of technology adoption and innovation.
When we talk about legal technology at Lawyerist, we always talk about it in the context of how it can make your life—and your clients’ lives—better. We think you should have some goals for your law firm’s technology infrastructure. We think you should:
Take advantage of technology when it can help you fulfill operational needs, streamline systems, meet goals, and improve client service. Be technologically competent in general. Be (well and frequently) trained in your technology systems. Run a paperless law firm. (You scan and digitally file all paperwork, shred what you don’t need, and keep anything you do need.) Run a mobile firm. Use mobile technology to work productively and securely from outside the “office,” whatever you conceive that to be. Conduct data security threat assessments. Have an up-to-date threat model and a written security policy. Have technology systems that reflect your firm’s security needs and those of your clients.
Reaching those legal technology goals may seem daunting at first. But fear not: you don’t need to accomplish all of them today. They are aspirational, and as you go about designing and improving your law firm technology systems and tools, keep them in mind.
In this “Legal Technology” hub, we’ll talk in detail about our technology buying guide for small and solo lawyers, including our thoughts on hardware, accessories, software, and backup, security, and encryption technologies.
We’ll explore online legal research tools, PDF manipulation, and technology training tips.
And we’ll go deep into technology innovation, change management, and law practice management software.
Along the way, we hope you’ll develop a curiosity for technology and tools and an understanding that the pace of change in technology has unlocked an entire world to small and solo firms that can make you super-hero like in your clients’ eyes.
How is this for incendiary? You should download our “Basic Tech Competence Checklist.” If you can’t check the box on fully 90% of it, you have lots of work to do in the legal tech department. You’re not irredeemable, of course, but you’re behind the curve. We can help you with that. Just read on.On October 22, Bangladeshi and Indian officials were supposed to hold a ceremony laying the foundation stone for the Rampal power plant, a massive new coal-fired project that will sit on the edge of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest. Instead, the governments canceled the ceremony and announced that the project had already been inaugurated in early October by the two countries’ heads of state via a Skype call. While the governments say the change was made because of busy schedules, activists contend the sudden scuttling of the ceremony was more likely due to rising pressure against the coal plant, including a five-day march in September that attracted an estimated 20,000 people.
The Sundarbans lies 80 percent in Bangladesh and 20 percent in India. MOHAMMED RAKIBUL HASAN
Opponents say that the 1,320 megawatt project could devastate the Sundarbans, Bangladesh’s largest forest and the nation’s last stronghold of the Bengal tiger. They contend that water diversion to the plant, coupled with air and water pollution and heavy coal barge traffic, could leave the Sundarbans — a UNESCO World Heritage site — an increasingly degraded ecosystem, potentially threatening the livelihoods of some of the half-million people who depend on the great mangrove forest.
“Most of the impacts of [the plant] are negative and irreversible which can’t be mitigated in any way,” concludes an independent Environmental Impact Assessment of the proposed plant by environmental scientist Abdullah Harun Chowdhury of Khulna University in Bangladesh.
The government says that the plant will produce badly needed power for Bangladesh’s 150 million people, about half of whom lack electricity. Officials also contend that Rampal will cause minimal environmental harm. “[The] Sundarbans is our safeguard [against natural disasters], and no power plant will be set up jeopardizing the Sundarbans,” declared Monowar Islam, the head of Bangladesh’s Power Division.
The construction of the Rampal plant is part of an ambitious government strategy to increase electricity generation to 20,000 megawatts by 2021 — a goal that relies heavily on coal. The current administration of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is proposing a dozen new coal plants, with more likely to come. Until recently, less than five percent of Bangladesh’s electricity production came from coal. Instead the country produced most of its energy from natural gas and biomass.
Critics say embracing coal is a reckless strategy for a nation highly vulnerable to sea level rise.
Critics of the Rampal plant and the country’s growing embrace of coal argue that it is a reckless strategy for a nation that is consistently rated as one of most vulnerable countries to global warming. Few nations are as low-lying as Bangladesh, and the Sundarbans is one of the country’s most important bulwarks against rising seas and intensifying typhoons and other extreme weather events.
Based on sea level increase projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 17 percent of Bangladesh could be engulfed by the sea as waters rise, creating millions of climate refugees. In 2010, Bangladesh’s Minister of the Environment and Forests, Hasan Mahmud, said that “in Bangladesh climate change is not a threat; climate change is the reality.”
The Rampal power plant will be built near
the edge of the Sundarbans.
“Bangladesh is already a global hotspot for tropical cyclones and other climatic events and is highly vulnerable to increased intensity of storms,” Mahmud said last year. “Two thirds of the country is less than five meters above sea level and vulnerable to coastal inundation and salinity intrusion, which we are already experiencing.”
In 2009, Prime Minister Hasina told the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen that “the refugees caused by climate change increase day by day.” Still, Hasina is a staunch defender of the Rampal coal plant, and her administration is the driving force behind Bangladesh’s sudden investment in coal.
First conceived in 2010, the Rampal power plant is a partnership between the Bangladesh Power Development Board and India’s state-owned National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), which will share fifty-fifty ownership of the plant, as well as the electricity it produces. Critics contend that despite being a joint project between India and Bangladesh, Bangladesh will face the environmental and human impacts.
“Coal is big business in India, and no doubt there are powerful interests at play,” says Ashish Fernandes, an expert on coal with Greenpeace India. “If Bangladesh is locked into a coal-dependent energy paradigm, companies like NTPC will make significant profits, at the cost of [Bangladesh’s] people and environment.”
Like the Rampal coal plant, the Sundarbans mangrove forest — an expanse of wooded tracts that rise out of sediment in the tidal zone — is shared between Bangladesh and India. Around 80 percent of the forest lies within Bangladesh, while the rest is in the Indian state of Bengal. The Sundarbans, a UNESCO World Heritage site, covers 10,000 square kilometers and is vital to locals who have depended on its fisheries and other bounty for centuries.
“[The Sundarbans] plays a significant role in the national economy and it is the largest source of forest products in the country,” explains Abu Diyan a local environmentalist and guide.
Roughly the size of Lebanon, the Sundarbans is home to at least 330 plant species, 315 bird species, 210 fish species, 49 mammal species, and 59 species of reptiles. Many of the species are endangered, including the Ganges river dolphin; the masked finfoot, a water bird; and the Bengal tiger. Globally, mangrove forests are among the world’s most important ecosystems — serving as fish nurseries, havens of biodiversity, and carbon storehouses — but they are increasingly disappearing in the face of coastal development and aquaculture.
‘Situating a coal plant near a unique and already stressed ecosystem is inexcusable,’ says an Indian activist.
The human toll of the coal plant — built just 14 kilometers (8.5 miles) from the edge of the Sundarbans — has already been felt: several hundred families have been forcibly removed to make way for the project and hundreds more are expected to be relocated in the near future. The land they inhabited, mostly shrimp farms and rice paddies, will soon be the scene of the power plant construction.
The government says the Rampal coal plant will suck up 9,150 cubic meters of water from the Passur River every hour and run it through a desalination plant. Since mangroves depend on a brackish mix of fresh and salt water, scientists not only fear that water levels in the Passur river will run low, but also that the blend of fresh-and-salt water could be disrupted, dooming swaths of the Sunderban’s mangroves. Furthermore, water dumped back into Passur River will be up 20 to 25 degrees F warmer than the river water, threatening aquatic species.
“The water of the Sundarbans and surrounding areas will be affected by discharging cooling water, effluents from the ships, and leaching water of the coal from ships,” Chowdhury explained in an interview. Experts say that the Rampal coal plant will require around 4.72 million tons of coal every year, which the government says will require a ship a day carrying coal through wildlife-rich waters.
Fewer than 2,500 Bengal tigers remain in the wild; about 270 live in the Sundarbans. STEVE WINTER/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/PANTHERA.ORG
Another major concern is the air pollution and toxics generated by the plant, including arsenic, mercury, lead, nickel, and radium. The government says the plant could discharge up to 52,000 tons of sulfur a year, which, depending on the type of coal burned, could lead to acid rain in the Sundarbans and surrounding regions.
“While there is no ‘good’ location for a coal plant, situating one in or near a unique and already stressed ecosystem like the Sundarbans is inexcusable,” says Fernandes.
The government of Bangladesh, which did not respond to numerous requests from Yale Environment 360 for comment, has repeatedly argued that the coal plant will have little or no environmental impact. “[The Rampal coal plant] would be built using the latest ultra super critical technology, so it would not affect the environment of Sundarban,” Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, an adviser to the Prime Minister, said in September.
He added that “the matter has to be understood with a scientific outlook, not emotion. [Opponents’] criticism is not based on information and technological knowledge. Our decision is based on real terms, and not emotions.”
According to a recent press note from the government, the plant will only burn “high-quality imported coal,” and “emissions of carbon, sulfur, fly ash and several other sorts of air pollution will be kept at a minimum level to avoid having any adverse impact on the environment.”
However, conservationists and some scientists have harshly criticized the government’s EIA for downplaying threats and spreading misinformation. For one thing, the government EIA treats the Sundarbans as a “residential and rural area” and not an “ecologically critical area.” That designation allows the government to impose lower thresholds for pollutants, including sulfur and nitrogen.
Conservationists argue that coal is not the best answer to Bangladesh’s shortage of electricity.
“It defies logic to treat the Sundarbans, the largest mangrove forest in the world … as a residential area,” economist Anu Muhammad with Jahangirnagar University told The Independent newspaper of Bangladesh.
Furthermore, critics say the government had already tacitly approved the coal plant before the EIA was even written or submitted to the Environment Ministry for approval. In 2010 the government had already obtained 1,834 hectares (4,532 acres) of land for the project, an acquisition that pushed locals off their ancestral land.
Mowdud Rahman, an engineer with the Southeast Asia Renewable Energy People’s Assembly, says that the EIA process was “used as an instrument to rationalize a predetermined project.”
He and others say that coal is not the best answer to Bangladesh’s shortage of electricity. Increasing efficiency at existing gas plants could add 2,500 megawatts in one year — nearly double the electricity production of the Rampal coal plant, Rahman says. In addition, he says, Bangladesh should look to biogas, mini-hydroelectric, wind, and solar for its energy needs. Currently, the Bangladesh government has set a goal of producing 5 percent of its electricity with renewable energy by 2015 and 10 percent by 2020.
“Unfortunately this only seems to be a juicy target with no substantial attempt to make it happen,” says Rahman.
In September, concerned Bangladeshis took their opposition to the streets. At the end of the 400-kilometer march, activist leaders released the “Long March Declaration,” which demanded that the government cancel the project by October 11. Nevertheless, the project is moving ahead.
“We have frequently said there are alternatives for producing electricity, but there are no alternatives to the Sundarbans,” the declaration read.Jeremy Corbyn has been branded 'chaotic' and'sloppy' after it emerged he failed to include thousands of pounds of income on his tax return.
Aides to the Labour leader have confirmed he was receiving a pension from his time in local government worth thousands of pounds in 2014-15.
Mr Corbyn, who turned 65 in May 2014, was also getting the state pension of around £6,000 a year.
However, neither streams of income appeared on the return he published yesterday.
Asked whether the veteran left-winger had filled out the form wrongly, his spokesman told MailOnline: 'That is between him and HM Revenue & Customs,'
The issue is particularly embarrassing for Mr Corbyn as after demanding transparency from the Prime Minister, he seemingly struggled to locate a copy of his return yesterday and was then forced to admit he had been fined £100 for filing the document late.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn left the pensions section on his tax return for 2014-15 blank
Mr Corbyn was able to build up entitlements during a nine-year spell as a councillor in Haringey, London.
The spokesman initially suggested that the pension was 'not taxable'.
Nearly 10 hours later the position shifted to saying that all taxes due on the income had been collected through the PAYE system.
Mr Corbyn's office also claimed that he had sent the taxman documents about his pensions.
Jeremy Corbyn's tax return was sent in a week late and incurred a £100 fine, which MPs are warned about on the tax return (pictured above)
The tax return for 2014/15 was dated February 6 2016 - a week after the January 31 deadline
'All his earnings were declared including his pension earnings,' the spokesman said.
However, an HMRC spokeswoman confirmed that such figures needed to be included on a tax return.
The spokeswoman said: 'Generally, for all UK taxpayers in Self Assessment, all income received needs to be noted on a Self Assessment tax return, including income from employment and pensions and any tax already taken.'
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell did declare his £14,000 a year local government pension as income on his 2014-15 tax return.
Danny Cox of financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown said although Mr Corbyn was likely to have paid the right level of tax, he did appear to have committed an offence.
LABOUR ARE PLANNING TO BAN TAX-FREE GIFTS FOR CHILDREN An inheritance tax crackdown that would ban people from giving tax-free gifts to their children is being examined by Labour. Senior party figures seized on revelations that David Cameron's mother Mary gave him a £200,000 gift following the death of his father in 2010 as evidence that the inheritance tax system is flawed. The rules on gifts mean that if Mrs Cameron lives for another two years then her son will not be liable for any inheritance tax on the sum. In theory the move could save him up to £80,000. Financial experts yesterday pointed out that the rules on gifts in the inheritance tax system are legitimately used by thousands of families, with people often trying to help their children buy a home or fund their education. But shadow chancellor John McDonnell said the rules would now be included in a wide-ranging Labour Party review of the tax system. Mr McDonnell said people were 'angry' about the tax system because it was not seen to be 'fair'. He said he would reverse Tory plans to raise the inheritance tax threshold from £325,000 to £500,000. Mark Serwotka, of the PCS union, said cash gifts to children should be taxed by a future Labour government.
'You are duty bound to declare all of your tax affairs on your tax return,' Mr Cox said.
'It is certainly pretty sloppy not to have declared money on your tax return.'
Tory MP Alec Shelbrooke told MailOnline: 'What we have seen in the last 24 hours is an absolutely chaotic personal life.
'How on Earth could he run the country?
'It is a typical socialist doctrine - "do as I say and not as I do".'
The confusion emerged as the row over politicians’ financial affairs raged on.
David Cameron mounted a passionate defence of ‘aspiration’ and wealth creation in the Commons yesterday, condemning critics who had wrongly ‘traduced’ his stockbroker father Ian over his offshore funds.
Downing Street released a summary of the Prime Minister's tax returns covering the past six years over the weekend in a bid to restore trust after damaging revelations about his links to the Blairmore investment vehicle.
They showed that Mr Cameron had an income of around £1.1 million over the period and paid some £400,000 in tax. Renting out his London home while he lives in a grace-and-favour apartment has been bringing in more than £90,000 a year.
Labour has lashed out at the revelation that Mr Cameron received gifts totalling £200,000 from his mother Mary after the death of her husband Ian in 2010.
If he had received the money as an inheritance it could have attracted duties of up to £80,000.
Meanwhile, George Osborne is still under scrutiny after disclosing his return for 2014-15 – showing he had an income of nearly £200,000 including £44,000 in dividends from his family’s luxury wallpaper firm.
But the Chancellor’s aides insisted he will not be following the PM’s example by revealing information for previous years – arguing that those details are not of ‘particular interest’.
David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne during the Commons debate yesterday, in which the Prime Minister made a passionate defence of 'aspiration' and his father Ian
Labour MP Yvette Cooper has demanded to know whether Mr Osborne was right in 2012, when he suggested during an interview that he would not benefit from the cut in the top rate of tax from 50p to 45p for earnings over £150,000.
‘So how does Osborne explain difference between 2012 claim that he wasn't top rate tax payer/didn't benefit from tax cut & the 2014 facts?’ for former frontbencher posted on Twitter.
According to the Treasury, Mr Osborne was referring to the 2010-11 tax year when he received less income from renting out his London and no dividends.
London Mayor Boris Johnson pitched in by disclosing that his tax and income details for the past four years – revealing he has earned more than £2 million and paid nearly £1 million in tax. The money came from his official salary, columns for the Daily Telegraph, and royalties from books.
Mr Corbyn's tax return for 2014-15 - which he filled in himself rather than using an accountant - included MP pay of around £70,000, and a total of £1,350 for nine lectures he gave about the Foreign Office to Capita.
The Opposition Leader’s office said he had declared £150 too much income from the lectures.
Former foreign secretary Lord Hague
Former foreign secretary Lord Hague called for'maturity' in the debate over politicians' finances.
'The consequence of greater transparency in tax, in medical records, whatever else it may be among leaders, is that there has to be a maturity in the public debate about those things and a recognition that the circumstances and habits of people who are effective leaders will vary greatly, and that those personal circumstances are not necessarily a good guide to how good they will be as a prime minister, a chancellor or anything else,'Mr Hague told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
'We’ve had leaders in the history of our country who’ve had chaotic personal finances, like William Pitt the Younger, but who were brilliant at handling the nation’s finances.
'We’ve had leaders who’ve had tax returns, like Churchill, that would have been more difficult to defend in public than Prime Minister David Cameron’s tax returns.
'But Churchill was the greatest leader of modern times.Is this why he’s working on a tunnel based hyperloop?
Elon Musk flew 18 hours this week to see on-again off-again girlfriend Amber Heard in Australia, where she is currently filming Aquaman, to sort out their current relationship status.
Phoning up the Gold Coast Bulletin while there, he defended the actress and revealed the two are working on their relationship, bu that distance has been a huge issue.
“The distance has been really tough on our relationship, because we haven’t been able to see each other much. All relationships have their ups and downs, of course,” the Tesla owner said. “All relationships have their ups and downs…Sometimes other agendas are at work.”
Rumors had been swirling that Amber had been dating someone locally and her secret Gold Coast address was revealed to the paper. Amber has been filming late into the night with Jason Momoa.
“Having read recent articles about our relationship, we would like to speak for ourselves,” Elon added, “People occasionally send out speculation, which has no basis in fact, without our knowledge, believing that they have our best interests in mind. Sometimes, other agendas are at work. It can get a little weird.”
He said the two are on friendly terms, even though the inventor has been chasing the actress for a good 5 years now. They dated briefly after her split from Johnny Depp last year.
“However, we would like to state directly that we have the utmost respect for one another, and it would be troubling if anyone had the impression that we thought otherwise,” he said. “As a closing note, it is worth bearing in mind that events are always amplified and dramatized in a high-profile relationship, whether the people involved like it or not (and we definitely don’t). The reality is that this is just a normal relationship with a giant magnifying glass applied.”
The couple announced their split last weekend. While Amber films, Elon is in the United States unveiling of the latest Tesla car and playing with rockets.This past April, Rev. James R. Schook of the Archdiocese of Louisville was convicted of sexually abusing a teenage boy several decades ago. Specifically, he was charged with “three counts of sodomy and one count of indecent and immoral behavior with an individual.” It led to a 15-year prison sentence.
Now, only six months into that sentence, Schook says he’ll totally never do it again, so can the judge pretty please let him out of jail?
An attorney for the Rev. James Schook has given notice that he will ask a judge Monday to release Schook on shock probation, saying he “now realizes the importance of obeying and conforming to the community’s rules.” … Schook suffers from terminal cancer. Shock probation allows inmates to be released after serving one to six months of their sentence, under the belief they have been so “shocked” by their experience that they would be deterred from future crimes. … Jeff Koenig, with SNAP — the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests – said releasing Schook so soon “will not do justice to the crimes he was convicted of.”
I’m sure damn near every criminal feels some measure of repentance after being in jail for a little while, but that doesn’t mean they should be set free. They did the crime; they can do the time. If Schook has a problem with prison, he should’ve thought about that when he was abusing a child all those years ago.
For 40 years, in fact, Schook was “spared the consequences” of his actions, according to the judge who sentenced him. There’s simply no reason to let him off the hook just because prison isn’t a fun place to be.
(Thanks to Brian for the link)Assassins aren’t born, they’re made.
CBS Films and Lionsgate will release AMERICAN ASSASSIN in theaters September 15, 2017
Check out Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, Shiva Negar and Taylor Kitsch in this adrenaline-filled Official Poster. Official Trailer links are below!
Watch the Official Trailer:
Watch the Restricted Trailer:
Directed by Michael Cuesta
Screenplay by Stephen Schiff and Michael Finch and Edward Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz
Based on the American Assassin novel in the Mitch Rapp series by Vince Flynn
Produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Nick Wechsler
Starring Dylan O’Brien, Michael Keaton, Sanaa Lathan, Shiva Negar, Scott Adkins and Taylor Kitsch
AMERICAN ASSASSIN follows the rise of Mitch Rapp (Dylan O’Brien) a CIA black ops recruit under the instruction of Cold War veteran Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). The pair is then enlisted by CIA Deputy Director Irene Kennedy (Sanaa Lathan) to investigate a wave of apparently random attacks on both military and civilian targets. Together the three discover a pattern in the violence leading them to a joint mission with a lethal Turkish agent (Shiva Negar) to stop a mysterious operative (Taylor Kitsch) intent on starting a World War in the Middle East."Louis XIII" redirects here. For the cognac, see Louis XIII (cognac). This article is about the 17th-century French king.
Louis XIII ( French pronunciation: [lwi tʁɛz]; 27 September 1601 – 14 May 1643) was a monarch of the House of Bourbon who was King of France from 1610 to 1643 and King of Navarre (as Louis II) from 1610 to 1620, when the crown of Navarre was merged with the French crown.
Shortly before his ninth birthday, Louis became king of France and Navarre after his father Henry IV was assassinated. His mother, Marie de' Medici, acted as regent during his minority. Mismanagement of the kingdom and ceaseless political intrigues by Marie and her Italian favourites led the young king to take power in 1617 by exiling his mother and executing her followers, including Concino Concini, the most influential Italian at the French court.
Louis XIII, taciturn and suspicious, relied heavily on his chief ministers, first Charles d'Albert, duc de Luynes and then Cardinal Richelieu, to govern the Kingdom of France. King and cardinal are remembered for establishing the Académie française, and ending the revolt of the French nobility. They systematically destroyed castles of defiant lords and denounced the use of private violence (dueling, carrying weapons, and maintaining private armies). By the end of 1620s, Richelieu established "the royal monopoly of force" as the ruling doctrine.[1] The reign of Louis "the Just" was also marked by the struggles against the Huguenots and Habsburg Spain.[2]
Early life, 1601–10 [ edit ]
Born at the Palace of Fontainebleau, Louis XIII was the oldest child of King Henry IV of France and his second wife Marie de' Medici. As son of the king, he was a Fils de France ("son of France"), and as the eldest son, Dauphin of France. His father Henry IV was the first French king of the House of Bourbon, having succeeded his ninth cousin, Henry III of France (1574–1589), in application of Salic law. Louis XIII's paternal grandparents were Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, and Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre. His maternal grandparents were Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Joanna of Austria, Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Eleonora de' Medici, his maternal aunt, was his godmother.[3] As a child, he was raised under the supervision of the royal governess Françoise de Montglat.
The ambassador of King James I of England to the court of France, Sir Edward Herbert, who presented his credentials to Louis XIII in 1619, remarked on Louis’s extreme congenital speech impediment and his double teeth:
...I presented to the King [Louis] a letter of credence from the King [James] my master: the King [Louis] assured me of a reciprocal affection to the King [James] my master, and of my particular welcome to his Court: his words were never many, as being so extream [sic] a stutterer that he would sometimes hold his tongue out of his mouth a good while before he could speak so much as one word; he had besides a double row of teeth, and was observed seldom or never to spit or blow his nose, or to sweat much, 'tho he were very laborious, and almost indefatigable in his exercises of hunting and hawking, to which he was much addicted...[4]
Rule of Marie de' Medici, 1610–17 [ edit ]
Louis XIII ascended the throne in 1610 upon the assassination of his father, and his mother Marie de' Medici acted as his Regent. Although Louis XIII became of age at thirteen (1614), his mother did not give up her position as Regent until 1617, when he was 16. Marie maintained most of her husband's ministers, with the exception of Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, who was unpopular in the country. She mainly relied on Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de Villeroy, Noël Brûlart de Sillery, and Pierre Jeannin for political advice. Marie pursued a moderate policy, confirming the Edict of Nantes. She was not, however, able to prevent rebellion by nobles such as Henri, Prince of Condé (1588–1646), second in line to the throne after Marie's second surviving son Gaston, Duke of Orléans. Condé squabbled with Marie in 1614, and briefly raised an army, but he found little support in the country, and Marie was able to raise her own army. Nevertheless, Marie agreed to call an Estates General assembly to address Condé's grievances.
The assembly of this Estates General was delayed until Louis XIII formally came of age on his thirteenth birthday. Although his coming-of-age formally ended Marie's Regency, she remained the de facto ruler of France. The Estates General accomplished little, spending its time discussing the relationship of France to the Papacy and the venality of offices, but reaching no resolutions.
Half Louis d'Or (1643) depicting Louis XIII
Beginning in 1615, Marie came to rely increasingly on the Italian Concino Concini, who assumed the role of her favourite. Concini was widely unpopular because he was a foreigner. This further antagonised Condé, who launched another rebellion in 1616. Huguenot leaders supported Condé's rebellion, which led the young Louis XIII to conclude that they would never be loyal subjects. Eventually, Condé and Queen Marie made peace via the Treaty of Loudun, which allowed Condé great power in government but did not remove Concini. With growing dissatisfaction from nobles due to Concini's position, Queen Marie, with Louis's help, imprisoned Condé to protect Concini, leading to renewed revolts against the Queen and Concini.
In the meantime, Charles d'Albert, the Grand Falconer of France, convinced Louis XIII that he should break with his mother and support the rebels. Louis staged a palace coup d'état. As a result, Concino Concini was assassinated on 24 April 1617. His widow, Leonora Dori Galigaï, was tried for witchcraft, condemned, beheaded, and burned on 8 July 1617, and Marie was sent into exile in Blois. Later, Louis conferred the title of Duke of Luynes on d'Albert.
Ascendancy of Charles de Luynes, 1617–21 [ edit ]
Luynes soon became as unpopular as Concini had been. Other nobles resented his monopolisation of the King. Luynes was seen as less competent than Henry IV's ministers, many now elderly or deceased, who had surrounded Marie de' Medici.
The Thirty Years' War broke out in 1618. The French court was initially unsure which side to support. On the one hand, France's traditional rivalry with the House of Habsburg argued in favour of intervening on behalf of the Protestant powers (and Louis's father Henry IV of France was once a Huguenot leader). On the other hand, Louis XIII had a strict Catholic upbringing, and his natural inclination was to support the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Ferdinand II.
The French nobles were further antagonised against Luynes by the 1618 revocation of the paulette tax and by the sale of offices in 1620. From her exile in Blois, Marie de' Medici became the obvious rallying point for this discontent, and the Bishop of Luçon (who became Cardinal Richelieu in 1622) was allowed to act as her chief adviser, serving as a go-between Marie and the King.
French nobles launched a rebellion in 1620, but their forces were easily routed by royal forces at Les Ponts-de-Cé in August 1620. Louis then launched an expedition against the Huguenots of Béarn who had defied a number of royal decisions. This expedition managed to re-establish Catholicism as the official religion of Béarn. However, the Béarn expedition drove Huguenots in other provinces into a rebellion led by Henri, Duke of Rohan.
In 1621 Louis XIII was formally reconciled with his mother. Luynes was appointed Constable of France, after which he and Louis set out to quell the Huguenot rebellion. The siege at the Huguenot stronghold of Montauban had to be abandoned after three months owing to the large number of royal troops who had succumbed to camp fever. One of the victims of camp fever was Luynes, who died in December 1621.
Rule by Council, 1622–24 [ edit ]
Following the death of Luynes, Louis determined that he would rule by council. His mother returned from exile and, in 1622, entered this council, where Condé recommended violent suppression of the Huguenots. The 1622 campaign, however, followed the pattern of the previous year: royal forces won some early victories, but were unable to complete a siege, this time at the fortress of Montpellier.
The rebellion was ended by the Treaty of Montpellier, signed by Louis XIII and the Duke of Rohan in October 1622. The treaty confirmed the tenets of the Edict of Nantes: several Huguenot fortresses were to be razed, but the Huguenots retained control of Montauban and La Rochelle.
Louis ultimately dismissed Noël Brûlart de Sillery and Pierre Brûlart in 1624 because of his displeasure with how they handled the diplomatic situation over the Valtellina with Spain. Valtellina was an area with Catholic inhabitants under the suzerainty of the Protestant Three Leagues. It served as an important route to Italy for France and it provided an easy connection between the Spanish and the Holy Roman empires, especially in helping each other with armies if necessary. Spain was constantly interfering in the Valtellina, which angered Louis, as he wanted to hold possession of this strategically important passageway. (In these years, the French kingdom was literally surrounded by the Habsburg realms as the Habsburgs were the Kings of Spain as well as Holy Roman Emperors. In addition, the Spanish and Holy Roman empires included the territories of today's Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and Northern Italy.) He therefore found a better servitor in his Superintendent of Finances Charles de La Vieuville, who held similar views of Spain as the king, and who advised Louis to side with the Dutch via the Treaty of Compiègne.[5] However, La Vieuville was dismissed by the middle of 1624, partly due to his bad behaviour (during his tenure as superintendent he was arrogant and incompetent) and because of a well-organized pamphlet campaign by Cardinal Richelieu against |
’s hockey in general. We continue to work closely with Bauer to ensure our players continue to receive the equipment they need to play at the highest level possible.”
What the disgruntled "employee" fails to realize is that the statement Rylan made was on behalf of both the NWHL and Bauer.
Both worked together a second time to respond to the anonymous emails leaked with surprising, and welcomed, candor from the NWHL commissioner:
"Bauer Hockey has been a great partner and supporter of the NWHL in our inaugural season. From the beginning, the NWHL was founded on the principle of paying women to play hockey. In our dedication to pay our players first, we missed a payment with Bauer. We have since paid them and are looking forward to working with Bauer Hockey again this season."
Yes, the commissioner admits to missing payments in order to fulfill obligations to players. This opens up a Pandora's Box of questions the start-up league is prepared to answer,
As for the illegal immigration and under the table payments of New York Riveters head coach Chad Wiseman, the anonymous truther did not include any emails to back that statement up.
This whole situation is just weird.
This isn't the first time the media is being played to make the NWHL look bad. We've received emails on the Puck Daddy account that are trying to point us in a certain direction in the hopes we'll go to press without checking our sources. Some websites did that today with the emails.
We don't know and aren't going to speculate on who is attacking the NWHL. But as we've said multiple times, the kid gloves are off, and both women's leagues have to be prepared for the fall out.
(And no, this isn't to imply the CWHL had anything to do with it. Take your tinfoil hats off.)
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Jen Neale is an editor for Puck Daddy on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or follow her on Twitter! Follow @MsJenNeale_PD.
MORE FROM YAHOO HOCKEY:British savers might soon be able to invest in the controversial Bitcoin currency through a stocks and shares Isa.
The American regulator, the SEC, is about to decide whether to permit an "exchange traded fund", which would track the digital currency, to issue shares which would be traded on a US exchange.
If the fund gets the green light, British investors would be able to buy shares through their trading accounts and in theory even their Isa.
The investment fund has been proposed by the Winklevoss twins, the entrepreneurial pair famous for suing Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook.
Exchange-traded funds work by pooling investors' cash and using it to buy the underlying assets - which in most cases are shares or commodities. Thousands of such funds exist, and investors can buy or sell through a broker just as if they were buying any other share.
Bitcoin traders are awaiting the SEC's decision with interest, predicting that if the fund is permitted, it will lead to a surge in demand from investors and thus a rapid rise in the currency's value - which has already risen substantially.
Bitcoin is generally regarded with suspicion by central banks and some governments. It is an unregulated currency in Britain, and its use banned completely in some countries, on the grounds that it is linked to money laundering and other criminal activities.President Obama's budget released Tuesday claims to reduce deficits by trillions of dollars, but a closer look at the details reveals that the deficit reduction is dependent on a number of gimmicks.
Overall, Obama's budget for fiscal year 2015 still projects deficits of $4.9 trillion between 2015 and 2024 if all of his policies are adopted. But that is about $3 trillion less than what the Congressional Budget Office is projecting for the period and $2.2 trillion less than what the White House's own Office of Management and Budget is estimating for the period if there are no changes to current laws.
However, this budgetary feat is less impressive when one considers the following gimmicks on which Obama relies. This is by no means a comprehensive list.
Rosier economic assumptions
Budget projections are highly dependent on changes in economic growth. A robust economy means more people are employed, individuals and businesses are earning more, and fewer people are reliant on social safety net programs. This translates into higher tax revenue and lower government spending. Even seemingly small fluctuations in economic growth can have significant implications on deficits. In February, the CBO estimated that if economic growth were just one-tenth of one percent lower each year over the next decade, it would increase deficits by $311 billion over the period.
Obama’s budget assumes that economic growth will average 2.7 percent annually over the next decade, which compares with a 2.4 percent estimate from the CBO. This helps explain why even before considering the effects of a single Obama proposal, the White House’s 10-year deficit forecast goes down to $7.1 trillion – an instant reduction of $800 billion compared with the CBO estimate.
To be sure, economic forecasts are consistently unreliable, so it may turn out that the White House economic assumptions prove closer to reality than the more pessimistic CBO estimates. But it's worth noting that in the past, the Obama administration has tended to overestimate growth. For instance, in Obama's fiscal year 2011 budget, even after the depth of the nation's economic crisis was apparent, the White House estimated that real growth in gross domestic product would average 4.1 percent annually for calendar years 2011 through 2013. The actual average turned out to be 2.2 percent, according to the latest revisions.
Phony war savings
As is his wont, Obama also claims $695 billion in deficit reduction from lower spending on “overseas contingency operations.” Translated, this means that spending is lower than a baseline that assumes that without Obama's policies, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would continue at elevated levels in perpetuity - even though they were already scheduled to wind down.
Corporate tax reform slight of hand
Obama's budget isn't the most transparent document. Those wanting to get a breakdown of the tax increases (without the benefit of my awesome recent post on the subject), would have to go line-by-line through a 24-page table, in which tax and fee increases are mixed in with changes to Medicare and other mandatory spending. Starting on page 195, and continuing for several pages, there's a long list of tax increases on businesses totaling $250 billion, described as a “reserve for long-run revenue-neutral business tax reform.”
Then, on the bottom of page 200, there’s a footnote, which reads: “Because the Administration believes that these proposals should be enacted in the context of comprehensive business tax reform, the amounts are not reflected in the budget estimates of receipts and are not counted toward meeting the Administration’s deficit reduction goals. The budget estimates do include $150 billion in temporary revenues that would be generated by the transition to a reformed business tax system, shown as part of the proposal to reauthorize surface transportation above.”
Wait, what?
It turns out that the $250 billion in corporate tax proposals aren’t actually counted in the budget, they’re merely suggested ways to finance a tax reform that would close loopholes and lower corporate rates. But that doesn’t mean the budget isn’t claiming any revenue from corporate tax reform.
Another section of the budget describes “a four-year, $302 billion surface transportation reauthorization proposal.” The section goes on to explain that, “the transition to a reformed business tax system will generate one-time, temporary revenue, for example from addressing the $1-2 trillion of untaxed foreign earnings that U.S. companies have accumulated overseas. The Budget proposes to use the one-time savings generated from transitioning to the new business tax system to fill the Highway Trust Fund shortfall and pay for the four-year transportation reauthorization proposal included in the Budget.”
In other words, Obama’s budget lists a bunch of loophole closures toward the theoretical adoption of corporate tax reform that wouldn’t have a net impact on revenue. But then the budget still uses a one-time revenue windfall resulting from this theoretical reform to help finance Obama’s other domestic priorities.
Tobacco tax trick
Obama’s budget claims to pay for a universal preschool program by hiking cigarette taxes. The move has obvious political appeal, by allowing Obama to portray opponents as putting smokers over innocent kids. But it’s fiscally suspect. The reason is that if tobacco taxes are effective in reducing the number of people who smoke, they will decline over time as a source of revenue. On the other hand, the cost of financing early education will grow over time. This is apparent in the White House’s own numbers.
Though Obama’s budget projects that tobacco taxes would raise $78 billion over the next decade, more than paying for the $76 billion increase in early childhood education, the trend is problematic. Whereas in 2016, the White House projects tobacco taxes will raise $10 billion compared with $1 billion in spending for early childhood education, by 2024, tobacco tax revenues are projected to decline to $6 billion while early childhood education spending is expected to increase to $11 billion. Thus, over time, Obama’s financing mechanism will prove insufficient to pay for his education proposals.
Gaming immigration reform
The Obama budget also assumes the adoption of comprehensive immigration reform, which it estimates would boost revenue by $456 billion as newly legalized immigrants pay taxes. Overall, the budget estimates reform would reduce deficits by a net $158 billion after the immigration reform-related spending is accounted for. However, a big chunk of increased revenue from immigration reform comes from payroll taxes, which provide a short-term revenue injection for the government, but also impose long-term obligations to the Social Security system that would come due outside of the 10-year budget window. Though the Obama budget doesn't provide a detailed breakdown of how much of the revenue would come from payroll taxes, a similar June 2013 CBO estimate of the Senate immigration bill found that $214 billion of the $459 billion in increased revenue would come from payroll taxes.CLOSE Police fatally shot a masked gunman who opened fire at the Kinopolis movie theater in Viernheim, south of Frankfurt, Germany. USA TODAY
Heavily-armed police outside a movie theatre complex where an armed man has reportedly opened fire on June 23, 2016 in Viernheim, Germany. According to initial media reports, the man entered the cinema today at approximately 3pm, fired a shot in the air and barricaded himself inside. (Photo11: Alexander Scheuber, Getty Images)
Police shot and killed a masked gunman Thursday who had opened fire in a cinema and taken hostages in a small town in western Germany, according to German authorities.
Initial reports in the German media indicated that at least 25 people had been injured in the melee, possibly by tear gas, but police said later that no one was hurt.
The incident erupted in the Kinopolis movie theater in the town of Viernheim, about 45 miles south of Frankfurt, according to the Associated Press.
Hesse state’s interior minister, Peter Beuth, said special forces had "fought and killed" the man, who had been visibly confused and had fired at least four shots inside the cinema with a rifle, the German news agency DPA reports.
Beuth said the elite police stormed the cinema from the rear.
According to witnesses, just after 2 p.m., the masked man entered the theater. A theater employee thought it was just a filmgoer: "It's often that filmgoers dress up to match the film," Guri Blakaj, 21, told German broadcaster, N-TV. But after he took a gun out and forced employees to lie on the ground, Blakaj realized, "this is serious."
"If you have a gun to your head, you're scared," the employee added, noting that the man held a long gun and wore a balaclava. He did not want money.
The suspect then barricaded himself and up to 40 movie-goers in the theater before police stormed the building.
Blakaj said the suspect was "small, black-haired and between 18 and 22 years old" and looked confused.
Authorities did not immediately identify the gunman or suggest a possible motive. Darmstadt police spokesman Bernd Hochstädter: "There is no indication that it could be someone with a Islamist background."
Another witness, Oguzhan Turk, a salesman in a store next to the movie theater, told N-TV that a cinema employee came running out in a panic, said she was threatened with a gun and asked him to call police.
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Mass shootings are rare in Germany. Gun laws were tightened in 2009 after a rampage by a teen gunman.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/28SDXJSAfter nabbing an Oscar for a supporting role, actress is reportedly in talks with J.J. Abrams for the female lead.
Not long after taking home an Oscar for her supporting role in "12 Years A Slave," it looks like Lupita Nyong'o may already have her eyes on a lead role.
Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the actress is in talks for the female lead in "Star Wars: Episode VII." She reportedly met with director J.J. Abrams a few weeks ago, but the details of the role are unclear.
While no casting is set in stone for the highly anticipated "Star Wars" return — which is expected to hit theater in summer 2015 —
there have been a bevy of names thrown into the hat for the coveted lead roles. "Girls" star Adam Driver is reportedly in final talks for the villain. Reportedly in talks for the male lead role are: "Friday Night Lights" star Jesse Plemons, "Attack the Block" star John Boyega, "Downton Abbey" actor Ed Speleers, and stage actors Matthew James Thomas and Ray Fisher.
While Nyong'o has yet to step into the sci-fi world, the Hollywood darling seems up to the challenge. Despite it being her first role in a feature-length film, her turn as Patsey in "12 Years A Slave" was enough to beat out seasoned actresses Sally Hawkins and Julia Roberts and previous winner Jennifer Lawrence for the Best Supporting Actress trophy, in what was undoubtedly the tightest race at last week's Academy Awards.When we first started working on Xbox One a few years ago, we set out to build upon all of the things that made Xbox 360 great, and also address some of the things our fans found frustrating.
Two areas we sought to improve were how Xbox One updated the system, apps and game content and also how the console consumed power. In both areas, we were able to innovate and make improvements thanks to feedback from fans and partners in the power industry.
With the “Instant-on” power setting we solved an age-old problem of system updates that interrupted gaming and entertainment experiences and frustrated our users. This was easily a top concern shared by Xbox 360 owners.
With this power setting, the Xbox One is always up-to-date delivering updates and downloading content while the console is not actively being used. Only with this setting can you make game or content purchases from SmartGlass or Xbox.com and have the content download automatically to your home console. When factoring the monthly system updates, new features in apps and games and automatic mobile purchase downloads, the Instant-on setting easily saves users countless hours of needlessly waiting.
Instant-on also revolutionized the way you can control your entertainment with voice commands that allow you to power on the console with a simple request: “Xbox on.”
While we believe Instant-on provides the best experience for our fans, we also believe in providing consumer choice which is why we offered the “Energy-saving” mode. This lower power state consumes less energy and can save customers an average of $6 to $15 in energy costs* per year in the U.S. This mode does not provide the added value of background updating.
By providing multiple power states in Xbox One and empowering our fans with choice, we sought to balance energy efficiency and functionality. At the same time, we know many Xbox One fans are vigilant about their household’s energy consumption; after all, environmental leadership often begins at home.
It was that same personal leadership that drove our teams in the product design phase to maximize computational power per watt and drive significant improvements in how power is used in Xbox One. Even though the Xbox One is significantly more powerful with more feature functionality than Xbox 360, at launch it used about the same amount of power. This is possible because of the scalable architecture in Xbox One where it uses only the power it needs at the moment for the task at hand.
But we didn’t stop there: Our commitment to innovation continued. As we demonstrated with Xbox 360, we improved power consumption over time and we are doing the same with Xbox One. Since Xbox One launched, we’ve reduced the power consumed while in Instant-on by a third. At Microsoft, sustainability is core to our business practices—we continue to work to reduce the environmental impact of our products and services, and we are committed to carbon neutrality as a company.
As we continue to evolve the Xbox One experience, we are bringing this power choice front and center. In the coming months, new Xbox One owners around the world will be prompted with this choice in the initial console set-up process. Current Xbox One owners can easily make changes to their power consumption choices now in Settings under Power & start up.
We hope current and new Xbox fans will take the time to learn about the differences between Instant-on and Energy-saving settings so that they are empowered to make the choice that best fits their gaming and entertainment lifestyle.
*While individual energy costs vary, on average U.S. customers can expect to spend about $6.50 to $15.50 per year for “Instant-on” and about $0.26 to $0.62 per year for “Energy-saving” mode; EU customers can expect to spend about €7.25 to €27.50 per year for “Instant-on” and about €0.29 to €1.10 per year for “Energy-saving” mode.US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton demanded that more must be done to ensure the United States does not “lose our military edge,” by giving the Pentagon the “stable, predictable funding it needs.”
© AFP 2018 / CHRIS KLEPONIS Clinton Pledges New Nuclear Posture Review if She Wins US Presidency
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for an end to sequestration, the US budget spending caps, in a Wednesday campaign speech to the American Legion veterans convention in Ohio.
“The sequester makes our country less secure. Let’s end it and get a budget deal that supports America’s military, our families and our country,” Clinton said.
Clinton demanded that more must be done to ensure the United States does not “lose our military edge,” by giving the Pentagon the “stable, predictable funding it needs.”
In an effort to reduce the US deficit, Congress passed a law in 2012 imposing annual budget caps on all defense and non-defense spending in order to cut $2.4 trillion from the budget over the next decade.
US defense officials have regularly testified before Congress requesting relief from the mandated budget sequester.
Clinton’s speech on Wednesday focused heavily on US military strength and “American exceptionalism,” something she said was defined by US leadership in foreign engagements.Editors' pick: Originally published Dec. 30.
President John F. Kennedy's predecessor President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the world about the dangers of a growing "military-industrial complex."
Since Ike coined that term during his farewell address in 1960, the military industrial complex has ballooned to mind-boggling proportions that would have made the president and five-star general blanch.
Sane human beings hate war, but expanding expenditures on aerospace and defense mark an unstoppable trend and huge, multi-year growth opportunity that investors shouldn't pass up.
Let's look at the top five defense contractors based in the U.S., according to revenue and size of pending contracts.
Global defense spending rose this year to $1.57 trillion, ushering in what is expected to be a decade of booming military expenditures around the world, according to the annual Jane's Defense Budgets Report from research firm IHS Markit.
Every December, the IHS Jane's Defense Budgets team produces the report, which examines and forecasts defense spending for 105 countries.
Highlights from this month's report include:
America's defense budget represents about 40% of the total global defense budget. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, more than $9.35 trillion has been allocated to the U.S. defense budget. During the presidential campaign, President-elect Donald Trump bemoaned what he characterized as a neglected and hollowed out U.S. military, which is clearly an absurd notion in light of these numbers. Nonetheless, he has promised to massively boost the Pentagon's budget. What's more, Trump's extremely hawkish and provocative foreign policy views almost guarantee an expanded military.
China's defense budget will nearly double within 10 years, to $223 billion in 2020 from $123 billion in 2010.
India's defense budget this year overtook Saudi Arabia's and Russia's to become one of the top five defense spenders globally for the first time.
Western Europe's aggregate defense budget should grow about $10 billion across the region over the next five years, as fears rise over an expansionist Russia that is allied with Trump.
The upshot: Investing in aerospace and defense is one of the surest ways to profit in what promises to be a turbulent year.
As many analysts call for a correction next year, America's top five defense contractors should weather the storm better than most other sectors.
Let's start with Lockheed Martin (LMT), Boeing (BA) and Northrop Grumman (NOC).
As major manufacturers of combat jets and military planes, these three U.S.-based behemoths monopolize the global military aircraft business. They are mega-cap blue chips that are positioned to reap the lion's share of the spoils.
Lockheed Martin is number one in the U.S. and the largest in the world. In the U.S., Boeing is second and Northrop Grumman is fifth.
Both Lockheed Martin and Boeing also make military helicopters, with Lockheed Martin making the Sikorsky Blackhawk and Boeing the Apache.
Lockheed Martin's projected earnings growth this year is 7.70%.
It is pegged at 4.80% next year and 7.81% over the next five years on an annualized basis, compared with 9.36% over the past five years, according to the analyst consensus estimate.
Boeing's projected earnings growth this year is -8.20%, largely due to the vagaries of Pentagon budgeting, but it soars next year to 31.70%, according to the analyst consensus estimate.
Growth for the next five years is forecast at 10.19% on an annualized basis, compared with 14.24% over the past five years.
Northrop Grumman's projected earnings growth this year is 12.50%.
It is pegged next year at 3.20% and 9% over the next five years on an annualized basis, compared with 8.86% over the past five years, according to the analyst consensus estimate.
Raytheon (RTN) is the third-largest defense contractor in the U.S. and the largest missile maker in the world. The company's engineering expertise continues to be coveted by America's top brass and allies around the world.
The company also is a major play on the burgeoning use of drones.
Raytheon's projected earnings growth this year is 10.40%.
It is pegged at -0.30% and 8.31% over the next five year on an annualized basis, compared with 3.88% over the past five years, according to the analyst consensus estimate.
General Dynamics (GD) is number four in the U.S. The company provides combat vehicles; information technology solutions for the military; maintenance overhaul and repair for military aircraft; submarines; and surface ships.
The company's projected earnings growth this year is 7.60%.
It is pegged at 3.30% next year and 7.24% over the next five years on an annualized basis, compared with 8.71% over the past five years, according to the analyst consensus estimates.
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We will also edit our config file to add specific sizes and name them. This tutorial continues where Manipulating and serving images on the fly with Laravel – Part 1 left off.
First, let’s make sure our controller and router accepts an additional size parameter.
Modifying the route and controller
in app/routes.php change the following code:
Route::get( '/images/{file}', 'ImageController@getImage' );
We will add the size parameter before the file parameter. Our route will now look like this:
Route::get( '/image/{size}/{file}', 'ImageController@getImage' );
Now modify your ImageController‘s getImage action declaration to have the size parameter like this:
class ImageController extends BaseController { public function getImage($size, $filename) {... } }
Creating the Image library
Now we know how to open an image, read it and re-output it. The question is: how do you resize an image with Laravel 4? For this I recommend using Imagine. Follow the instructions for installing Imagine here.
After installing Imagine we have to set up an Image class and a facade.
First, however, let’s re-think our configuration file a bit.
Let’s make it more structured and define sizes inside of it. For example we could set a size called “big” and make it 600×400 pixels.
Our final config file in app/config/assets.php
<?php return array( 'images' => array( 'paths' => array( 'input' => 'app/assets/images', 'output' => 'app/storage/cache/images' ),'sizes' => array('small' => array( 'width' => 150, 'height' => 100 ), 'big' => array( 'width' => 600, 'height' => 400 ) ) ) );
Since we are saving our resized images, this is actually cached. So I chose to output images to app/storage/cache/images.
Now we are ready to create our Image class and facade. Our structure will look like this:
app libraries facades Image.php Image.php
Let’s start with our Image class (not the facade). I have commented the source code since it so it should all be clear. Basicly what our class will do is resize the image, save it, and get the mimetype. Save this file as app/libraries/Image.php
<?php namespace App\Libraries\Image; // We need to add these namespaces // in order to have access to these classes. use Illuminate\Support\Facades\File; use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Config; class Image { protected $imagine; // We instantiate the Imagine library with Imagick or GD public function __construct($library = null) { if (!$this->imagine) { if (!$this->library and class_exists('Imagick')) { $this->imagine = new \Imagine\Imagick\Imagine(); } else { $this->imagine = new \Imagine\Gd\Imagine(); } } } /* * Resize function. * @param string filename * @param string sizeString * * @return blob image contents. */ public function resize($filename, $sizeString) { // We can read the output path from our configuration file. $outputDir = Config::get('assets.images.paths.output'); // Create an output file path from the size and the filename. $outputFile = $outputDir. '/'. $sizeString. '_'. $filename; // If the resized file already exists we will just return it. if (File::isFile($outputFile)) { return File::get($outputFile); } // File doesn't exist yet, so we will resize the original. $inputDir = Config::get('assets.images.paths.input'); $inputFile = $inputDir. '/'. $filename; // Get the width and the height of the chosen size from the Config file. $sizeArr = Config::get('assets.images.sizes.'. $sizeString); $width = $sizeArr['width']; $height = $sizeArr['height']; // We want to crop the image so we set the resize mode and size. $size = new \Imagine\Image\Box($width, $height); $mode = \Imagine\Image\ImageInterface::THUMBNAIL_OUTBOUND; // Create the output directory if it doesn't exist yet. if (!File::isDirectory($outputDir)) { File::makeDirectory($outputDir); } // Open the file, resize it and save it. $this->imagine->open($inputFile) ->thumbnail($size, $mode) ->save($outputFile, array('quality' => 90)); // Return the resized file. return File::get($outputFile); } /** * @param string $filename * @return string mimetype */ public function getMimeType($filename) { // Make the input file path. $inputDir = Config::get('assets.images.paths.input'); $inputFile = $inputDir. '/'. $filename; // Get the file mimetype using the Symfony File class. $file = new \Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\File\File($inputFile); return $file->getMimeType(); } }
Now we can simply create our facade like this in app/libraries/facades/Image.php
<?php namespace App\Libraries\Facades; use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Facade; class Image extends Facade { protected static function getFacadeAccessor() { return new \App\Libraries\Image\Image; } }
We need to make sure composer will autoload our class. So in your composer.json add the app/libraries folder to the autoload paths.
Make sure to run the command composer dump-auto as well as php artisan dump-autoload afterwards! Not doing so will make it so that your class does not get found.
"autoload": { "classmap": [ "app/commands", "app/controllers", "app/models", "app/database/migrations", "app/database/seeds", "app/tests/TestCase.php", "app/libraries" ] },
Now add the alias in the app/config/app.php
'Image' => 'App\Libraries\Facades\Image'
Refactoring the Image Controller
Last thing we need to do is refactor our image controller. Our goal is to make our controllers have as few lines as possible. We can now make our controller very light by modifying the code like this:
<?php class ImageController extends BaseController { public function getImage($size, $filename) { // Make a new response out of the contents of the file // We refactor this to use the image resize function. // Set the response status code to 200 OK $response = Response::make( Image::resize($filename, $size), 200 ); // Set the mime type for the response. // We now use the Image class for this also. $response->header( 'content-type', Image::getMimeType($filename) ); // We return our image here. return $response; } }
Let’s test it out!
Create a sample view if you want, and put <img> tags in it like this:
<!doctype html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <title>Laravel PHP Framework</title> </head> <body> <h1>This image is resized</h1> <img src="/image/small/YOURIMAGE.jpg"> <img src="/image/big/YOURIMAGE.jpg"> </body> </html>
That’s all there is to it! It only resizes the images once. If they are already resized it will increase your pageload by loading the cached image.
I hope you like this 2-part tutorial. Like us on facebook, follow us on twitter, and share our tutorials on your favorite media to show your appreciation. Thanks!Before the recession, Joana Husain drove a BMW, hosted lavish parties, and frequently vacationed with her family at pricey theme parks. Fifteen months later, she's cut back drastically.
After losing her job as a human resources coordinator at EMC Corp. in Hopkinton, Mass., Ms. Husain traded in her BMW for a Toyota, began holding smaller potluck parties, and swapped Disney World vacations for family road trips.
Ironically, losing a well-paying job has helped Husain and her husband get their finances in order. They've scrutinized their budget, pared expenses, and started saving more – even on half their previous household income.
"We're cutting down a lot.... [The recession] taught us we need to save more for times like this," says Husain, who lives in Westborough, Mass., with her husband and two sons. "Even saving $20 or $30 a month can add up to a lot." And with a third boy on the way she says, "I'm sure we'll have to tighten our budget long-term."
The recession has brought about a seismic shift in Americans' financial habits, coaxing scores of former spendthrifts to save.
Roughly 6 in 10 Americans now say they prefer saving to spending, according to a recent Gallup poll. And although Americans still have one of the lowest savings rates in the world, they are saving more: Americans saved 5.4 percent of disposable income in the second quarter of 2009, when the recession was near its peak.
By contrast, the savings rate was less than 2 percent in all of 2005 when access to easy credit, sophisticated marketing campaigns, and a culture of consumption lured many Americans to the malls.
Based on conventional wisdom, Americans' newfound penchant for thrift is good for them but bad for the economy. But some economists assert saving more can actually improve the economy in the long run.
Whenever the economy goes sour, consumers are often bombarded with messages to spend, spend, spend, to stimulate the economy.
"If you can afford it, then this is exactly the moment to redo your kitchen or buy a car," wrote Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser in a 2009 New York Times article titled "If you got money, it's time to spend some." "Not only will you be able to get a good deal, but your spending will help revive the economy."
And on more than one occasion, former President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to shop to spur the economy. It's a familiar refrain throughout history, says Lauren Weber, author of "In Cheap We Trust."
"Everyone's telling us we're doomed unless consumers start spending," says Ms. Weber. "American history is filled with these times when [saving] is demonized and those who do are told they are endangering the American way of life."
Consumption-mongers may be right, to a point.
In a consumer-driven economy like the US, consumption typically makes up 70 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). But as consumers slashed spending and boosted savings during the recession, consumption as a percentage of GDP began dropping. It will be 65 percent of GDP by 2015, according to some reports – and that has some people worried.
It's a problem known as the paradox of thrift, the theory that individual thrift leads to collective misfortune, an idea first proposed by English economist John Maynard Keynes.
One person's spending is another person's income, the theory goes, so if everyone decides to save money by, say, eating out less, someone else loses that income (like restaurants).
Multiplied across the economy, less spending and more saving will slow economic growth. In other words, according to Mr. Keynes, Husain is contributing to a downturn by saving for her sons' college educations.
But some economists say responsible financial behavior may actually help the economy in other ways.
Here are four reasons saving money can save the economy:
1. Savings feeds investments, which feeds growth
"We would have a healthier economy by far if we saved more and invested more," says Robert Frank, professor of economics at Cornell University's Johnson School of Management.
The traditional argument, he explains, is that the savings of individuals provides a pool of money people can borrow from to start new businesses, innovate new technologies, and create jobs. "We would grow more rapidly the more we save and invest," says Dr. Frank. "The more we save, the more we invest, the more [we can fund] new inventions and boost productivity, which are the engines of growth."
History supports his case. During World War II, millions of Americans were put to work on wartime production, but most consumer items were rationed.
Making money with nothing to spend it on, Americans' savings rates soared to more than 25 percent during World War II, in part propelling a huge 25-year economic boom with growth rates around 3 percent. In the 1970s, when savings rates declined to less than 10 percent, economic growth also dipped, to about 2 percent.
"History shows us that more spending is not necessarily equated with growth, in the long run," says Frank.
2. Savings can moderate recessions
If more people saved, says Weber, the recession wouldn't have been as severe as it was. One of the benefits of saving, she says, is that it creates a cushion for "rainy day" emergencies – a car repair or expensive hospital visit – so they won't break the bank.
"When you have a situation where households have no cushion, it makes the economic shock greater," she says. "If more people had a safety net, you wouldn't have necessarily hit the crisis point that we've hit in the last couple of years."
Spending more, she says, is exactly the opposite of what the US needs to climb out of recession.
"What got us into this mess in the first place was excessive spending and borrowing," says Weber. "You can't cure this problem with the same poison that caused it. It's like telling an alcoholic going through withdrawal that they should have a glass of whiskey to calm their nerves."
3. Savings make Americans less beholden to foreign creditors
Each step in the direction of financial responsibility is a step away from potentially dangerous dependence on foreign money. American savings provide a larger domestic pool of money for companies (and the government) to borrow from, making the US less dependent on foreign creditors who currently loan the US hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
"China and Japan are financing the spending spree of American consumers," says Weber. "We are selling our global influence by being profligate spenders; we're mortgaging our global influence."
4. Savings alleviate volatile boom-bust cycles
The most convincing argument for responsible financial behavior will be seen in coming generations, says Greg Daugherty, executive editor at Consumer Reports.
Like the generation that came of age during the Great Depression, young people experiencing hard times in their formative years will be profoundly affected. The upshot? They may be more financially responsible than their parents, |
is little doubt that a big storm will explode on the region, says Tom Kines, senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.
"A lot would really have to go wrong, so to speak, for this system to not deliver a ferocious punch," Kines told USA TODAY. "The reality is we are just hemming and hawing over snow amounts. Who gets 6, 12 or even 18."
The wet, heavy snow combined with the high winds could mean damaged trees and powerlines and blocked roads. Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston all could face a direct hit, meaning airport disruptions could prompt flight delays and cancellations across much of the nation.
Confidence rising for major coastal winter storm Mon nt - Wed. Still much uncertainty on details, but winter storm & blizzard watches issued pic.twitter.com/t05F5GQpxZ — NWS Eastern Region (@NWSEastern) March 12, 2017
Philadelphia International Airport tweeted that some airlines would be issuing travel waivers and urged travelers to contact their carriers. With snow already roling across parts of the Midwest, airlines canceled more than 100 flights Sunday and and more than 500 on Monday, according to FlightAware. American, Delta and United were among carriers offering no-cost waivers for flights Tuesday and Wednesday at dozens of airports from Virginia to Canada, if flights are rescheduled by Friday.
"Anybody looking to travel on Tuesday, whether by land or air, will find it difficult or impossible in many places," Kines warned.
Kines said two "pieces of energy" were involved. A storm system was dumping heavy snow across the Northern Plains on Sunday and was heading east. Another storm system will try to form Monday off the South Carolina coast, he said.
"That storm is going to take control," he said. "The big cities will probably fall into the 6- to 12-inch category. But there will be places that get 12 to 18. And it's not out of the question that New York or Boston will be among those places."
The National Weather Service issued a blizzard watch from New York City and Long Island to southern Connecticut, southern Rhode Island and parts of southeastern Massachusetts, including Boston. Parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, including Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were under winter storm watches.
The menacing forecast comes less than two weeks after February wrapped up as the nation's second warmest since climate tracking became a thing in 1895. But days of bitter cold, with more to come, doesn't bode well for the confused flowers that had prematurely emerged on trees and plants across much of the region.
During the brunt of the storm, northeasterly winds will pull ocean water toward the coast and create rough surf from Virginia to Maine, Accuweather predicted, leading to tides 1-2 feet above normal. Coastal flooding and beach erosion are also a concern.
The storm was billed as a potential nor'easter — brutal storms that form along the East Coast as warm air from over the Atlantic Ocean clashes with arctic cold to the north and west. The storms get their name from the northeasterly winds that blow in from the ocean ahead of the storm.
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“We are closely monitoring this storm as it develops and I am directing all state agencies to be on alert and ready to respond as the weather develops," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. He promised that more than 2,000 trucks and 443,000 tons of road salt were at the ready.
Most of the region will be dealing with extremely cold temperatures until the weekend, so don't look for a quick melt, Kines said. Even though the big storm, if it materializes, would hit just a week before spring officially arrives.
"The fact that it is snowing, that happens this late," Kines said. "When you start talking a foot of snow or more, that doesn't happen very often."
Includes reporting by John Bacon and Bart Jansen of USA Today.
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2mdPqFFPolice: Mom, daughter overdose at same time in Ashland City store Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved Stacy Felix and her daughter, Jessica Chauvin (Courtesy: Ashland City Police Department) [ + - ] Video
ASHLAND CITY, Tenn. (WKRN) - A mother and daughter both reportedly overdosed at the same time in an Ashland City Dollar General store this past Saturday.
Investigators say the women overdosed on cocaine laced with fentanyl. Ashland City police told News 2 the lethal substance tested positive at the scene.
Stacy Felix and her daughter, Jessica Chauvin, were resuscitated at the scene by emergency responders.
Officer Joseph Hunter was one of the first to arrive.
"It was pretty apparent what is going on-- eyes roll back in their head, lips turn blue, both at the same time too much of a coincidence not to be an overdose," he told News 2.
According to investigators, 49-year-old Felix had no pulse when responders arrived.
"She is not breathing. To my knowledge, she has already coded at least once to that point," Officer Hunter said.
A criminal history showed daughter Chauvin has a long arrest history for burglary, assault, and drugs.
"The daughter was in the doorway and noticed her eyes roll back in her head and become unresponsive," Hunter said.
The officer says the 33-year-old allegedly swallowed the drugs in her possession when she saw police officers arriving.
"There are conflicting reports, still under investigation, but it very well could have happened that way," Officer Hunter said.
Investigators say the women may have overdosed on cocaine laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate 100 times more powerful than opium. Field tests showed evidence of fentanyl.
"It is, and most of our ODs we work, are because of something laced with fentanyl. Not sure why it is so readily accessible, it is a controlled substance that hospitals and EMS would have, but not something you can go to your drugstore and purchase," explained Dan Schaeffer, the chief of Cheatham County EMS.
Schaeffer says both women were resuscitated with Narcan, an anti-overdose drug that can literally bring people back to life.
"When you bring them back, one of the first things they tell you is you wasted it because I am going to do it again," he told News 2.
The mother was taken to a Nashville hospital while her daughter was taken to one in Ashland City where she was treated and released.
News 2 was told charges are pending, and Ashland City police are investigating who may have sold them the drugs to charge them as well.
Schaeffer says Narcan has been administered 125 times this year, saving 87 overdose victims. There have been six overdose deaths so far.Muay Thai Kick – Drill to Perfection
To get the most out of any technique in terms of power, balance, and efficiency, we must execute it properly. Some rush the process by repeating incorrect mechanics over and over that eventually become ingrained within their style – messy.
Coach Joe from the well respected North Jersey Muay Thai gym brings you a drill to help you or your students slow down the Muay Thai body kick – helping you to correctly feel the exact positioning of your body. Follow along and watch Joe’s body posture to get the most out of this drill:
Paul Banasiak is a Muay Thai fighter/addict, 9x champion, trainer, and fitness professional. After leaving medical school without looking back, he decided to fully follow his passion of helping others become the best version of themselves, creating MuayThaiAthlete.com. A website for those who are already passionate individuals that want to take their life&training to the next level.
Today we begin forging our bodies and
strengthening our limitless minds.
Interested in even more? Follow us on:
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Facebook Fighter Fan Page.Coinbase is still one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges in the world today. How long that situation will last is anybody’s guess at this time. The company is dealing with multiple issues and negative press on social media. The latest incident involves Bitcoin withdrawal delays. Apparently, a lot of people are moving their funds off Coinbase in anticipation of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork. This causes a massive backlog for the company, resulting in delays of 12 hours or more.
The past year has been both good and bad for Coinbase. On the positive side, they keep growing their customer base by leaps and bounds. No other exchange is so transparent regarding its growing user base. Then again, most exchanges don’t share this data in general, rendering any comparison pretty moot. The downside to a growing customer base comes in the form of more issues and delays. More specifically, support tickets going unanswered for long periods.
Yet Another Major Issue for Coinbase Users
Additionally, the company also suffers regular small outages Either the exchange goes offline during times of heavy trading, or one of their cryptocurrency gateways isn’t working properly. This often results in delays for either deposits or withdrawals, which annoys customers even more. In this particular case, withdrawals of Bitcoin are delayed by 12 hours or more. That is simply not acceptable under any circumstance, even though the company has a solid excuse. M
More specifically, a lot of people are moving their bitcoins from Coinbase right now. This is due to the upcoming Bitcoin Cash hard fork on August 1st. Even though the company will credit users with their BHC balances, most traders want to control their own funds. More people withdrawing money results in more transactions to process. Coinbase does this manually for most withdrawals, as their hot wallet can only handle so many transactions. Sadly, the queue is growing exponentially it seems.
Waiting 12 hours or more to receive your bitcoins isn’t pleasant. We can only hope the company addresses this problem sooner rather than later. Moving funds off an exchange is the first thing anyone should do whenever they have bitcoins there. A lot of users only realized that fact now, by the look of things. A massive queue was to be expected, and it is possible other platforms may deal with similar issues moving forward. It is also – once again – bad PR for Coinbase. The company really needs to step up its game in that department. A growing list of issues and frustrating experiences will send customers away in the end.
Header image courtesy of ShutterstockAs it turns out, humans possess the ability to tell who's a and who's not simply by looking at them because criminals look different from noncriminals.
In this blog, I have repeatedly emphasized the fact that virtually all "stereotypes" are empirically true. If they weren't true, they would not be stereotypes in the first place. To my knowledge, all of the very, very few stereotypes that are not empirically true, for some reason, have to do with people's appearance. Hence, it is not true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it is not true that beauty is only skin-deep.
Another " " about physical appearance that is not empirically true is "you can't judge a book by its cover." In previous posts, I have explained that women can tell which men would make good fathers and which men would make bad fathers simply by looking at them. And people can tell who is altruistic and who is egoistic simply by looking at a 30-second video clip without sound.
So, contrary to popular, you can assess people's character and by simply looking at them. Nice people look nice, and nasty people look nasty, and it appears that humans have innate psychological mechanisms to tell them apart. Now, in a truly groundbreaking study, recently published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, Jeffrey M. Valla, Stephen J. Ceci, and Wendy M. Williams of Cornell University show that people can tell criminals and noncriminals apart simply by looking at their still photos. Criminals, it appears, look different from noncriminals.
In their experiments, Valla et al. show pictures of the faces of 32 young Caucasian men in their 20s, without scars, tattoos or excessive facial hair, all in neutral expressions. Sixteen of them are convicted criminals, and the other sixteen are not. Valla et al. simply ask their experimental participants to indicate how likely they think it is that each man is a certain type of criminal (murderer, rapist, thief, forgerer, assailant, arsonist, and drug dealer) on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 = extremely unlikely to 7 = extremely likely. Their results from two experiments consistently show that individuals can tell who is a criminal and who is not, by indicating that they believe the actual criminals have higher probability of being a criminal than actual noncriminals.
However, their results also show that individuals cannot tell what type of criminals they are. While Valla et al. are initially puzzled by this finding, it is actually consistent with what we know from. As I explain in an earlier post, criminals do not specialize. Men who commit one type of crimes are more likely to commit other types of crimes. (Remember O. J. Simpson?) Even though, for their experiments, Valla et al. carefully select pictures of criminals who are convicted of only one type of crimes, in empirical reality, there are no men who are only murderers (and do not and will not commit other types of crimes) or men who are only thieves (and do not and will not commit other types of crimes). Given time, some men would commit other types of crimes. In empirical reality, there are men who commit (all types of) crimes, and there are men who do not. And Valla et al.'s experiments show that individuals can tell them apart because the two types of men look different.
There is one seemingly anomalous finding in their paper. In both experiments, women are unable to spot rapists. Women consistently rate convicted rapists to be less likely to be criminal than not only other types of criminals but noncriminals as well! While this may be initially puzzling, upon further reflection, it makes perfect sense, as Valla et al. explain in their paper. In order to be a successful rapist, the man has to be able to fool the woman and earn her trust initially. Men who "fit the bill" by looking like a rapist or otherwise criminal and dangerous would not be able to do that. They would not be able to get close enough to the women to rape them. This may be why women, but not men, are unable to spot rapists, even though women are equally good as men at spotting other types of criminals.
For your amusement, I include the visual material that Valla et al. use in one of their experiments. It contains pictures of 32 men, 16 of whom are convicted criminals (arsonists, assailants, drug dealers, and rapists), and 16 of whom are noncriminals (normal college students). Can you spot the difference? Can you tell which of them are criminals and which of them are not? If you are a woman, can you spot the convicted rapists among them?
If you want to know the answers, you will have to access Valla et al.'s article here. The answers are in the Appendix at the end of their paper.Continue Reading Below Advertisement
Unfortunately, Konami Code Easter eggs are usually pretty short-lived, presumably because they are surreptitiously sneaked in by nerdy programmers without consulting with their bosses and then removed as soon as they're found out. We've mentioned before that, for a while, entering the code on Marvel Comics' website brought up an image of a squirrel dressed as Deadpool, while doing it on ESPN.com caused the entire page to be invaded by unicorns.
ESPN
At first we thought it was just our screensaver.
Facebook did something similar in 2009 when a temporary Easter egg caused the Konami Code to trigger a lens flare effect all over the website.
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J.J. Abrams never turned it back off.
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But the best use of the Konami Code so far goes to the old site for the now defunct Newsweek magazine: Pressing the familiar keys caused all the headlines on the front page to be replaced with fake news stories about zombies.
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Who will prepare us for the zombie invasion now? Cheezburger.com?
Erik Germ does all sorts of things over at Hugefrigginarms.com and thinks it would be awesome if you followed him on Twitter.
For more easter eggs that'll blow your pants to the moon, check out 9 Video Game Easter Eggs That Took Years to Find and 7 Insane Easter Eggs Hidden in Movies and TV Shows.
If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 4 Reasons Pokemon Is the Scariest Alien Invasion Story Ever.
And stop by LinkSTORM to learn why these are just the precursor for Skynet.
Do you have an idea in mind that would make a great article? Then sign up RIGHT NOW and pitch your first article today! Do you possess expert skills in image creation and manipulation? Mediocre? Even rudimentary? Are you frightened by MS Paint and simply have a funny idea? You can create an infographic and you could be on the front page of Cracked.com tomorrow!
And don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr to get sexy, sexy jokes sent straight to your news feed. Are you on Google+? So are we!An Alabama fisherman pulls a kitten out of the Warrior River. Screenshot: AL.com/YouTube
HOOVER, Ala., Aug. 31 (UPI) -- Two men out fishing on an Alabama river captured video of their unexpected catch -- a pair of kittens that swam up to their boat.
Jason Frost, who posted the video to Facebook, was fishing Saturday on the Warrior River with friend Brandon Key when they heard a splash and saw something swimming toward them from shore.
Frost said he and Key were unsure of the mystery animal's identity until it let out a "meow" and got close enough for them to tell it was a small kitten.
The men pulled the kitten up into their boat, where it shook off the water.
"Never in my life have I seen anything like that," Frost says in the video.
The men then noticed a second, identical kitten jump into the water from the shore and swim toward them. The men steered their boat toward the second feline and picked it up.
"Well there's a first time for everything, isn't there?" Frost says.
Frost said the kittens were friendly and seemed comfortable with riding in the boat.
"People were looking at us out on the water like, 'Oh my God, these people got cats with them,'" Frost told AL.com.
Frost said he and Key gave the kittens to a family on the shore with two young girls.
"Everybody always has a crazy fishing story, and that's all it is, is a story," he said. "If I wouldn't have had this on video, everybody would have thought I was crazy."Alright, class, time for the little daily lesson on racial differences and Negroid uselessness.
You see, every new parent knows that babies can be more than a handful – they can cry constantly for no apparent reason, they deprive adults of sleep for months at a time, they start out being hungry every two hours or so, and even the slightest food mistake (or no mistake at all) can lead to fun times involving colic and gas.
It’s tough, but we as Whites are usually able to move past the grueling moments to enjoy the period of a child’s life that will only occur once.
But when it comes to Blacks, things get a little complicated.
To them, there is always a chance that ordinary newborn issues like colic or gas will be interpreted as demonic possession – having a primitive brain can do that to you.
And when there’s a perceived demon, you already know what’s going to happen…
CBS Pittsburgh:
A mother is facing charges after police say she stabbed her one-week-old baby in Swissvale on Friday. Tanishia Fielder, 32, is in jail Saturday, charged with stabbing her 8-day-old baby boy in the face. The baby is being treated at Children’s Hospital. The child’s condition is unknown. It happened in a second-floor apartment in the 7500 block of Melrose Street. Fielder admitted to the crime, according to police. She said she used a kitchen knife. Police later recovered a knife under a dumpster behind the Melrose Street apartment building. “’It was the Devil’s child.’ That just kept coming out of her mouth,” neighbor Darius Warren said. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy.’” Warren said he knew the mother and he couldn’t believe what happened. “It was devastated. I never seen anything like that before, especially from her,” he said. “I never would have expected that.” A criminal complaint said the baby sustained knife wounds near the right eye. Fielder was quoted by police saying, “I stabbed the baby. That’s the Devil’s baby.” She explained the crime to police, saying God told her she needed to kill the baby, dismember him and throw him in the garbage because he was by the Devil.
My God, what would we ever do without such brilliant diversity in our midst?
Could we even survive without the awesome vibrancy that accompanies Blacks like typhus-carrying lice on a rabbi’s beard?Hide Transcript Show Transcript
WEBVTT ATTACKERS COWARDS FOR WHAT THEYDID.>> I FEEL LUCKY TO BE ALIVE.IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE.KAREN: THIS WOMAN, WHO DID NOTWANT TO GIVE HER NAME, SAYS SHEWAS ATTACKED HALLOWEEN NIGHT INFEDERAL HILL.SHE WAS WALKING TO BARFLY'SRESTAURANT TO MEET FRIENDS WHENABOUT 10 TEENAGERS CAME OUT OFAN ALLEY.>> I HAD A RED DOWN-LIKE VEST ONSO THEY GRABBED THE BACK OF MYVEST AND THEN HELD ME AND THENOUT IN FRONT OF THEM CAME SIXYOUNG WOMEN WITH WOOD PIECESTHAT WERE LIKE MAYBE AN INCHTHICK BY THREE INCHES AND ABOUTTHREE FEET LONG.THEY STARTED HITTING ME WITH THEWOOD, IN THE KNEES, A LOT IN MYFACE.KAREN: SHE SUFFERED A BROKEN EYESOCKET, BROKEN NOSE ANDLACERATIONS ON BOTH OF HERKNEES.HER BOYFRIEND JEFF SAYSSOMETHING NEEDS TO BE DONE ABOUTWHAT HE DESCRIBES AS A GROWINGTREND.>> I WISH MORE PEOPLE WOULD TAKERESPONSIBILITY FOR KNOWING WHERETHEIR CHILDREN ARE AND WHATTHEY'RE DOING BECAUSE IT'SPRETTY UNFORTUNATE TO SEE KIDSOF THIS AGE COMMITTING THESEKIND OF CRIMES.KAREN: CRIMES THAT SENT THISWOMAN TO THE HOSPITAL.>> A COUPLE OF BLOWS TOO HARD I, REALIZED I COULDN'T STAND UPANYMORE SO I WENT TO THE GROUNDON MY KNEES.BY THE TIME I WAS ON THE GROUNDI WAS SCREAMING AND BEGGING FORTHEM TO STOP.KAREN: A STRANGER DID COME TOHER RESCUE AND SCARED THE TEENSAWAY.>> HE KEPT APOLOGIZING THAT HEWAS LATE BUT HE CAME RIGHT ONTIME AND I'M COMPLETELY THANKFULFOR THAT.KAREN: AND THANKFUL TO BE ALIVE.THE VICTIM SAYS THE TEENS TOOKHER CELLPHONE.SHE STILL QUESTIONS WHY THEYWANTED TO ATTACK HER FOR NOAPPARENT REASON.
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A woman said she was beaten with wooden boards and sticks while walking down the street in a Federal Hill neighborhood. Baltimore police said eight people were assaulted and/or robbed in several incidents Halloween night in South Baltimore.The woman called her teenage attackers cowards for what they did, badly injuring her face and her knees."I feel lucky to be alive. It could have been a lot worse," the victim said.The woman, who did not want to give her name, said she was attacked Halloween night in Federal Hill. She was walking to Barfly's restaurant to meet friends when about 10 teenagers came out of an alley."I had a red down-like vest on, so they grabbed the back of my vest and then held me, and then out in front of them came six young women with wood pieces that were like maybe an inch thick and about three feet long," she said.She was surrounded."They started hitting me with the wood, in the knees, a lot in my face," she said.She suffered a broken eye socket, broken nose and lacerations on both of her knees.Her boyfriend, Jeff Brown, said something needs to be done about what he describes as a growing trend."I wish more people would take responsibility for knowing where their children are and what they're doing because it's pretty unfortunate to see kids at this age committing these types of crimes," Brown said.They are crimes that sent the victim to the hospital."A couple of blows too hard I realized I couldn't stand up anymore, so I went to the ground on my knees," she said. "By the time I was on the ground, I was screaming and begging for them to stop."A stranger did come to her rescue and scared the teens away."He kept apologizing that he was late, but he came right on time and I'm completely thankful for that," she said.She said she's thankful to be alive.The victim said the teens took her cellphone. She also said she is glad she fought back, but doesn't understand why they would want to harm her.Anyone with information should call police.We our currently seeking sponosrs for our 2019 Fair!
For more info please email info@olmstedcountyfair.com
Current requests for proposals for sound production
and onsite liquor sales are available now.
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Olmsted County Fair July 22nd-28th 2019
Sound Production Specifications
Now accepting estimates for Sound Production:
Requirements - Estimates must be submitted by Feb 15th, 2019
Provide sound system, lighting, all needed accessories and staff for 6 days on beer garden stage.
Should include PA for outdoor use and monitor system for up to a 6-piece band.
Provide sound systems and staff for setup and tear down of sound systems across grounds- up to 6 arenas/buildings, minimum of four house systems.
Saturday the 20th, Monday – Sunday (6 hours Sat, Mon and Sun.) (Tues-Sat 13 hours.)
Must have 3 sound systems and 4 Wireless Mics available to use with existing systems.
Provide sound system and staff for use in Grandstands
Should be minimum of 4 - 1000-watt speakers.
(Friday thru Sunday - 4 to 5 hours per day.)
Interested parties should email their estimates to: tom@olmstedcountyfair.com
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Olmsted County Fair July 22nd-28th, 2019
Beer Garden and Grandstand Alcohol Specifications
Now accepting estimates for Beer Garden and Alcohol Specifications:
Estimates must be submitted by February 15th, 2019
Requirements:
Provide valid liquor license
Provide valid insurance certificate naming the Ag Association as additionally insured
Obtain and provide valid health license
Provide beer and alcohol in the beer garden
Book entertainment on free stage next to beer garden with approval of the Fair Board
Abide by any deals the Fair Board makes with outside promoters (example: % of liquor sales in Grandstands to be paid to Promoter of music events)
Provide beer and pop in the Grandstands
Provide all of your own equipment (Beer trailers, hook ups, trailers, soda bars, ice chest, product, cups, etc…
Check ID and wristband on all before selling alcohol
Use distinctive cup for alcohol that can be carried on the Fair Grounds
Set up tables and chairs in beer garden and grandstand and decorate as needed
Maintain/clean beer garden, tables, chairs, floor during the week of the fair and a final clean at the last day closing
Olmsted County Fair provides tables and chairs for the beer garden building and space under the grandstands, concession stand for pop sales under the grandstands, garbage containers and removal, and standard power to the beer garden.
Interested Parties should email their estimates to: tom@olmstedcountyfair.com
Look for our new website in 2019!The billboards were part of a new campaign, whose design is shown above.
The advertising giant Clear Channel Outdoor on Thursday took down the billboards it donated to a campaign against gun violence, arguing that its support had been “misconstrued as a political position” by gun-rights advocates who mounted an online protest against the advertisements.
The billboards, which went up across the state this week, said, “We’re not anti-gun. We’re pro-life. Massachusetts Gun Laws Save Lives,” and featured a Bushmaster XM-15 assault rifle with a white surrender flag in the barrel.
Initially a full-throated supporter, Clear Channel said that it did not intend to take sides on gun control. It owns 25 of the 36 billboards planned for the campaign, which was organized by the group Stop Handgun Violence. It was unclear whether the three other companies that offered to donate space would also pull the ads.
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“This campaign has become politicized and misconstrued as a political position by our company, so we have taken it down,” Clear Channel spokesman David Grabert said in a statement.
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Grabert said the company had received “a number of messages expressing concern” about the signs.
Many of the messages came as part of an effort by the Gun Owners’ Action League, the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association, which demanded that the billboards come down — or that the companies displaying them give equal time to gun-rights advocates.
“I’m certainly glad they have decided to pull the ads. I hope they’re doing it for the right reasons,” said Jim Wallace, executive director of the Gun Owners’ Action League. He called the ads “inaccurate and misleading.”
John Rosenthal, cofounder of Stop Handgun Violence, said he felt that his message in opposition to violence was one that everybody could agree on. He described the gun group’s tactics as “bullying.”
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“It’s the same intimidation tactics that have worked for GOAL so effectively before,” he said.
Stop Handgun Violence organized the statewide billboard campaign as it prepared to remove its iconic, 252-foot billboard from the side of the Massachusetts Turnpike near Fenway Park, where it had been for 20 years.
The other companies that donated space for the billboards were Logan Communications, Total Outdoor, and Outfront Media, according to Stop Handgun Violence.
Carly Zipp, a spokeswoman for Outfront Media, said the company offered to sell the group space it had initially donated in Peabody. Stop Handgun Violence said it would not pay.
“As a general rule, Outfront Media allows issue-oriented messaging to be displayed on its advertising platforms on a space-available basis,” Zipp said.
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Multiple requests seeking comment from the other companies were not immediately returned.
Rosenthal said he reached out to Clear Channel Outdoor about purchasing the ad space to keep the messages up, but did not have a deal Thursday afternoon.
Rosenthal had sought out the new space as he faced a deadline to remove the massive billboard from the side of the turnpike.
He once owned the garage that supports the sign, but he has since sold it to Fenway Sports Group, the parent company of the Red Sox.
John Henry, principal owner of Fenway Sports Group, also owns The Boston Globe.
In a Globe interview this week, a Clear Channel official cited the removal of the longstanding advertisement on the Mass Pike as the impetus for the donation.
“When we realized he would no longer have his... billboard to get out the message about gun control, we offered to utilize some of our space,” Stephen Ross, president of the company’s Boston division, said Monday.
On Thursday, Ross referred a request for comment to Grabert, who said the company initially considered the billboards within the scope of its “social responsibility” program.
That campaign typically offers billboard space to nonprofit and governmental organizations for public service announcements focusing on environment, arts and education, and health and safety, according to details about the program on the company’s website.
“We also respond swiftly to crises with weather notifications, AMBER alerts, and support for law enforcement in cases like the Boston Marathon bombing,” Grabert said.
Clear Channel, based in San Antonio, is majority owned by two large Boston private equity firms — Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners.
Peter Ubertaccio, director of The Joseph Martin Institute for Law and Society at Stonehill College, said it’s “hard to imagine” that Clear Channel didn’t see this controversy on the horizon when it agreed to run the ads.
“I don’t know how you could arrive at any other conclusion, or fail to see that it’s fairly controversial,” he said.
Ubertaccio said gun rights are such a contested issue that even trying to get into the conversation from a public health perspective invites a lot of political sentiments.
“There is a way to thread that needle to talk about firearm safety,” he said. “But very few conversations about guns don’t have political overtones, and they become heightened because of the Second Amendment and public policy making.”
Wallace, of the Gun Owners’ Action League, said there are other ways to advocate for gun safety.
“In the future, if they want to put ads out about firearm safety — how to properly store a gun or get the right training — we would work with them on that.”
Beth Healy of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannearWhen X-Men Villain Mister Sinister Will First Appear By Eric Eisenberg Random Article Blend For X-Men fans, the post-credits scene featured in the recent X-Men: Apocalypse is incredibly exciting, as it teases that the movie franchise will soon introduce one of Marvel Comics' best villains: the genetics-obsessed Mister Sinister. That being said, thanks to producer Simon Kinberg's vague comments, it hasn't been exactly clear where the character would show up next. Now we have confirmation: Mister Sinister will be the villain in The Wolverine 3. We now know this thanks to the audio commentary featuring Simon Kinberg and director Bryan Singer that is attached to the digital release of X-Men: Apocalypse - which just came out this past Friday. As the post-credits scene begins to roll, Kinberg and Singer discuss the Deadpool 2 teaser idea that they ultimately had to scrap, but wrap up that little bit of trivia by confirming that the Mister Sinister tease is indeed a method of preparing audiences for 2017's untitled Wolverine 3. For those that don't remember the sequence, it begins by taking audiences back to the famed Weapon X facility at Alkali Lake -- which remains a bloody crime scene following the events of X-Men: Apocalypse. A group of men walk into the area, led by a guy in a business suit and thick black glasses, and while some of them are clearly assigned to clean the place up, the others have more specific jobs. The man in the glasses (who Bryan Singer jokingly calls "Elvis Costello" on the commentary) goes into a cabinet and grabs the blood/DNA of Weapon X -- a.k.a. James Howlett a.k.a. Logan a.k.a. Wolverine. He puts this sample in a briefcase with a lid hiding its contents, and it's then that we see that the men are representatives from Essex Corp., the company owned by Nathaniel Essex a.k.a. Mister Sinister. Now that we know that Mister Sinister will play a significant role in The Wolverine 3, it makes us look at the project differently -- specifically certain members of the cast. Up until now, all we've known about the James Mangold-directed film is that it will be set in the future and basically be a road movie feature Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and Professor X (Patrick Stewart). Knowing that Sinister is involved makes us turn a questioning eye towards one new actor joining the X-Men franchise with the feature: Richard E. Grant. In the casting report back in April when Richard E. Grant signed on to The Wolverine, the character name was kept a secret, but the role is described as being a mad scientist. "Mad scientist" happens to be a remarkably apt description of Mister Sinister, whose existence in Marvel Comics has found him regularly conducting insane experiments involving gene splicing and cloning. Admittedly I'm personally rooting for his to be the case, because Grant would be a perfect choice for Sinister. It's worth mentioning that just because Mister Sinister will be the villain in the future-set Wolverine 3 doesn't mean that he will exclusively be the antagonist of that film. Thanks to those aforementioned insane experiments, he has what can best be described as complete control over every cell in his body - which on a certain level makes him immortal. As a result, it's possible that we could wind up seeing him, played by the same actor, in X-Men movies from a variety of different decades -- including the 90s set X-Men sequel, the stalled Gambit solo movie, or even Deadpool 2. In fact, his presence could ultimately help to define and the upcoming slate of titles from the franchise, now that the series has completed the trilogy that started with First Class and ended with Apocalypse. How do you feel about Mister Sinister being in Wolverine 3? Do you agree that Richard E. Grant is the most likely actor for the role, or do you think someone else is playing him in the movie? Hit the comments section below with your thoughts! UPDATE: Wolverine 3 director James Mangold has posted a Tweet suggesting that Mister Sinister may not be featured in the 2017 blockbuster. We have reached out to 20th Century Fox for clarification on this development, and will provide new information when available. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topAlulim was both the first king of Eridu and the first king of Sumer, according to the mythological anted |
the Cultural Revolution China tried to commit cultural genocide by destroying almost all the holy places of Tibetan Buddhism, though it has since pursued a less aggressive policy. As a result the number of active monasteries has been cut from 2,500 before "liberation" to 1,800, and the number of monks is down from 120,000 to 46,000. Now the Chinese government is betting that as Tibetans continue to join the money race, they’ll become more pliant and less committed to the Dalai Lama and to what Beijing alleges is his scheme to split China by inciting rebellion in Tibet.
While Norbu is a devout Buddhist, rebellion is the furthest thing from his mind. He believes that he and others like him have the ability to improve their own lives and the welfare of Tibet. "We are taking our fate into our own hands," he said. "By growing rich we’re able to support our religion and our language so that our children will be able to remain Tibetans."
In fact, everywhere I went in Tibet, the faithful were still in evidence: pilgrims in dust-coated chubas and Mao-style padded blue jackets packed into open-bed trucks, heading for temples; worshipers carrying out the repetitive drills of Tibetan Buddhism—circumambulating shrines and temples, always clockwise; passing loops of prayer beads through their fingers, keeping careful tally as they strive for millions of repetitions; twirling little prayer wheels around, around, around.
Once, driving at 14,000 feet in the eastern TAR, I nearly ran over two monks sprawled in the middle of a narrow dirt road. They were prostrating their way across the country to Lhasa, a thousand miles and two years distant. This is perhaps the most extreme expression of religious fervor in a society that honors extremes—but it isn’t unusual. The monks, protected only by rawhide knee pads and wooden blocks strapped to their hands, lowered and extended themselves from toe to nose, scrambled to their feet, took two steps forward, then repeated the whole routine. After swerving hard and screeching to a halt, I got out and asked the men the obvious question. "For His Holiness the Dalai Lama," one replied after a moment's thought.
Everywhere, too, were the silent but dynamic signs of Buddhism and its affiliated animist culture. Hardly an hour would go by that I didn't pass outcroppings of rock with the Buddhist mantra chiseled in bas-relief: Om Mani Padme Hum... Om Mani Padme Hum..."Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus," again and again. Prayer flags—red, green, white, blue, yellow—strung from posts and trees like pennants on a sailing ship fluttered their appeals heavenward. At high passes and across table-flat pastures, rocks the size of bread loaves were stacked meticulously into squared-off cairns—more modest versions of stupas. Chinese authorities, despite their paranoia about religion, evidently don't consider these symbols dangerous.
While religion is crucial to Tibetan culture, the language— incomprehensible to Chinese, almost none of whom bother to learn it—is the second pillar of Tibetan identity. In this as well the new entrepreneurs are helping, financing schools and colleges to teach Tibetan to young Tibetans, who are in danger of losing their language as they become proficient in Chinese, the language they must use if theyâre to get ahead.
One of these young people—Sonam—traveled with me as guide and interpreter; he was fluent in Tibetan,Mandarin, and English.We met in Chengdu in Sichuan Province, but before starting out, Sonam wanted to receive a blessing from a friend, a lama, who was in town. This senior monk, in his early 60s, told me he'd sat out 30 years of "liberation," Cultural Revolution, and other Chinese-inflicted horrors as a hermit, meditating in a cave. Five years ago, having reached the level of spiritual growth he was seeking, he rejoined the world and found that Chinese were fascinated by his story. He was now on the lecture circuit, spreading Tibetan Buddhism to born-again former communists.
The lama received us in his room in a bare-bones hotel where he and a large party of aides—monks, nuns, and laypeople—occupied two entirefloors. As he sat cross-legged on his bed, wrapped in a maroon robe, his young assistants flowed silently in and out with an endless stream of plastic trays bearing foam cups of instant noodles, hard candies, apples, bananas, cheese, buttered tea, and Coca-Cola. All had been paid for by the lama’s followers—including some wealthy Chinese women.
Tibetan Buddhism, said the holy man, was becoming fashionable among sophisticated Chinese. "Some of it is due to their awareness that Buddhism is popular with famous American movie stars," he said, "and part is because their lives are empty and they feel a need to fill that emptiness with spirituality. In addition, he said with a vague smile, some are attracted by a misunderstanding of tantric practice, an esoteric element of Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism, which they associate with a more erotic sex life.
After taking our leave, Sonam and I headed west toward Tibet. An hour or so out of town, the four-lane superhighway gave way to lesser roads, some newly paved, some barely there, some holed deep enough to swallow our car, others terrifyingly narrow enough to drop it, and us, into bottomless ravines. Accommodations, too, deteriorated: Within a couple of days in Tibet, we slipped from hot water to cold to none; from indoor toilet to outdoor privy to a squat in the bushes; from clean linen to questionable to probably-never-washed to bare mattress.
Along the way I encountered my most enduring image from anywhere in Tibet: thousands of men and women—Chinese and Mongols as well as Tibetans—digging, hammering, blasting, pouring concrete, cooking tar, and meticulously assembling rough stone into towering retaining walls as they pushed an expanding web of roads mile after mile westward through the mountains and across the great Tibetan Plateau.
Like the long knives Tibetan nomads hang from their belts, new roads into Tibet can cut deeply, slicing away millennial layers of isolation and ignorance, clearing access to the world and to almost anything money can buy. But the roads can also cut into a rich—and fragile—culture. Still, although I found no shortage of Tibetans who damned the Chinese, few criticized the roads. "We have to admit that only China could accomplish this," a farmer with a brown walnut of a face, astride a wheezing one-lung motor tricycle, told me as we waited more than four hours for a pick-and-shovel gang to clear a rock slide. "Our own government never did and never could."
This mammoth construction project is key to Beijing's "Develop the West" program, intended to modernize the lagging economy of western China, which includes the Tibetan Plateau. The eventual objective is to fill this open territory—as vast as Western Europe—with millions of Chinese now living in economically deprived parts of China. Just as Horace Greeley advised an earlier generation of ambitious young Americans to go West, the authorities are urging Chinese to move in the same direction. So far results have been mixed, because lowland Chinese find the altitude, the dry, cold climate—and the Tibetans themselves—unwelcoming. Beijing's statistics, widely considered extremely low on this point, show that 122,000 Chinese are now living in Tibet. Those who do migrate generally stay no more than a couple of years, just long enough to save some money, before returning home.
Mutual animosity runs high: Chinese despise Tibetans as ignorant, lazy, superstitious, and dirty. Tibetans hate and fear the Chinese as cruel and money grubbing. The resident Chinese seem genuinely puzzled by the antagonism. "We're bringing them the benefits of a superior culture," a couple running a tiny Chinese restaurant in the Wild West town of Dari, near Sichuan Province's boundary with the TAR, told me, with what sounded like utter sincerity. "We don't understand why they don't welcome us with open arms." They didn't understand either how numbing it must be for people with an ancient culture to realize that their country is permanently occupied by what they consider to be a foreign government, or how disquieting it is when a convoy of olive-drab trucks loaded with grim-faced armed Chinese troops rumbles past a village. I passed these convoys on several occasions, and each time I noticed that the Tibetans on the roadside would glance up, then quickly look away, fearful of making eye contact with a Chinese soldier.
A sign of why Tibetans resent the Chinese can be seen, at a distance, in the form of brick-and-stone-walled compounds sprinkled across the Tibetan Plateau—the laogai, "reform through labor" camps. Statistics on the prisoners in these camps are almost meaningless: Beijing claims that in 1995 there were 685 camps holding 1.2 million prisoners throughout China. Harry Wu, a former inmate now living in the U.S. and known around the world for his indefatigable struggle against the Chinese authorities, insists there are nearly twice as many camps and up to eight million prisoners across the country. Perhaps 10 percent of them are held for their political activities. According to Wu, camps in the TAR hold some 4,000 Tibetans, and countless thousands more are imprisoned in neighboring provinces. He says the Tibetans, along with other prisoners, are tortured and forced to work at hard labor and produce cheap goods for international trade; officially they are spared another indignity: the government's harvesting of bodily organs for sale.
Tibetans I met acknowledged that along with oppression China has brought a standard of living far higher than that of their parents under the Dalai Lama's rule. The Chinese have built hundreds of schools, where until the 1950s there had been just a handful of nonreligious schools. They've built hospitals. Everywhere I traveled, they'd halted deforestation and are replanting trees, having learned through bitter experience in the summer of 1998 that the denuding of Tibet caused the Yangtze to flood, drowning 4,000 people. They've built airports and are beginning the first Tibetan railroad. They've also installed a telecommunications network, one that enabled me to dial directly to the U.S. Despite having a phone line to India, the best the Dalai Lama could do to send word across Lhasa from the dim recesses of the Potala Palace was to dispatch a runner.
Yet Tibetans almost invariably also said that China was implementing development solely to help exploit Tibet's natural resources. "Their goal is to extract all our treasures—timber, wildlife, gold, uranium—"and to make China rich and powerful," said a man in his late 20s in Chamdo, a town on the banks of the Mekong River.
It is in rough-hewn towns like Chamdo that China's colonization is most noticeable. Along streets either ankle deep in putrid mud or swirling with choking red dust, the air foul with sour, eyeburning smoke from yak-dung cooking fires, new Chinese arrivals throw together featureless concrete shops, restaurants, and brothels to serve the needs of the road crews and other transient laborers. The new one—and two—story buildings bear signs in two languages—Tibetan script on top and larger Chinese characters below.
As thankless as I found these towns, dirt-poor Tibetan nomads are as dazzled as the proverbial rubes who see Times Square for the first time. Herdsmen in filthy chubas roam the dirt streets in clusters, gawking into storefronts at Chinese women in short dresses cutting customers' hair or chatting over cans of Coca-Cola. A single tube of pink or purple neon in the window of a brothel can be as exciting as all the lights of Broadway. "I would like to go in," said a man in his 20s with lank, shoulder-length hair, in the little town of Jamdun, a few miles east of the Mekong River. "But I have no money." Few Tibetans do, but that doesn't stop them from aspiring to the pleasures of the towns. And Beijing seems to be counting on that hope to eventually win Tibetan hearts and minds. One soft evening in the northeastern corner of the TAR, I shared dinner with Huadon and his wife, who—despite having suffered, as he put it, "the full misery of liberation and the Cultural Revolution"—seem to be bearing out that hope.
Both 54, they'd lost family members among the more than a million Tibetans killed since 1950; they'd never been to school; Huadon had been frustrated in his boyhood dream of becoming a monk. After the agricultural commune where they lived during the Maoist era of the 1950s and '60s was disbanded, they began growing barley, the staple of the Tibetan diet. They scrimped and searched for business opportunities. Now Huadon owned a small cement plant and a general store, which his wife ran, and a blue pickup truck. Despite his lasting anger over the past,Huadon didn't hesitate to tell me that "there's no comparison between the way we live and the way our parents did."
Huadon and his family certainly seemed comfortably off. As is the custom each summer throughout rural Tibet, they and about 20 other families were spending three weeks relaxing, camped in a grassy field riotously spread with yellow and lavender wildflowers against a stunning backdrop of snow-streaked mountains. A hacking gas-powered generator, a sure indicator of rural prosperity, provided electric light and pumped Tibetan and Chinese pop tunes over the fancifully embroidered large white tents.
At the open front of their tent, Huadon's wife was cooking on a portable gas stove. She'd loaded a long table with dried yak meat, huge mutton ribs—which we ate with a hunting knife passed from hand to hand—bowls of steaming rice and curry, salted nuts and seeds, cookies, candies, watermelons, bottles of tepid Chinese beer, soda, juice, and water. "This is our time for forgetting everything and to eat and drink and have fun," said Huadon, as we raised unending toasts.
I asked about their three children. The couple had sent their elder son through college, and he was now working as a teacher. Their daughter was a Buddhist nun. And, to Huadon's great joy and satisfaction, their younger son, at 16, was becoming the monk Huadon hadn't been allowed to be. The Chinese government bans monastic education before the age of 18, but devout parents like Huadon quietly ignore the law. "I believe that my son and his generation will save Buddhism and Tibetan culture," he said.
People like Huadon and Norbu, who use their participation in the new economy to help preserve the old ways, represent the leading edge of change in Tibet. I spent my most comfortable night of the trip in a shiny new hotel in the burgeoning town of Jyekundo, a few hours drive from Huadon's camp. Proud of his success, Gama Sera, the owner, was pleased to let me use his real name. "I was working for a state-owned bank and came to realize that because of this town's location at the juncture of six counties, a decent hotel could do well here. So I proposed that the local government lease me the state guesthouse for 20 years. Very quickly, they agreed."
The result was a multistoried, tile-faced structure replete with gilt dragons on red-lacquered pillars, a glass-domed lobby with marble floor and electric-eye doors. Clean rooms, clean beds, clean bathrooms, fresh towels, soap, toilet paper, TV spouting Chinese dramas and advertisements for luxury condominium communities in Beijing, and, most delicious after days of red dust and no showers, the prominently advertised "24-hour hot water."
Gama Sera, too, is contributing to the rejuvenation of Buddhism. With his earnings, he said, "I'm helping support a lama whose teachings I follow."
With religious practice woven so inextricably through the fabric of their lives, and with China having systematically undermined it, the Tibetans' fear of cultural genocide is well-founded. Although individuals are permitted to worship, owners of photos of the Dalai Lama, which are seized from temples and even personal shrines, have been jailed for as long as six years. Monks feel the lash of Chinese control most severely. In the Dalai Lama's day the power of the religious establishment was complete. Nearly a fourth of all Tibetan males took the tonsure and maroon robes of monkhood. The great monasteries counted members in the thousands and owned huge tracts of farming and grazing land. They enjoyed the right to use peasants as laborers and to recruit little boys, some of whom they may have used for sex. Claiming moral outrage, although in reality far more concerned with loosening Buddhism's hold on Tibetans, the Chinese have jailed thousands of monks during their occupation.
In Lhasa, I spoke with 73-year-old Tashi Tsering,who also allowed me to use his real name. He said that at the age of ten he'd been recruited into the Dalai Lama's dance troupe and chose to become a drombo, or passive sex partner, for a senior monk. Tsering, who has written a book about his life, said the drombo practice was widespread, but I was unable to find any other Tibetan willing to acknowledge awareness of this sexual activity in the monasteries.
Lhasa is the spiritual focus of Tibetan Buddhism, and in the heart of the city is the Potala, the deep-red, 13-story hilltop palace that has been the residence of all Dalai Lamas since the 17th century. The Potala is now a museum, and fewer than a dozen of its thousand rooms are open to visitors. Bored Chinese tour guides deliver rote recitations on paintings and statuary in a smattering of languages. I found a few men hanging around languidly in the dim halls, mainly for atmosphere, I thought. But like Tibetans I encountered elsewhere, they were willing to risk being caught to let a foreigner know their true allegiance. One, prayer beads in hand, sidled up to me and whispered, "I love the Dalai Lama. I think of him every day."
The monastic establishment today is a faint shadow of what it had been before the Dalai Lama fled Lhasa just steps ahead of the People's Liberation Army. I visited six monasteries, and at each one the nervous whispers were the same: By reducing the number of monks, the Chinese are attempting to destroy our religion.
At Derge, an 18th-century town carved into the side of a ravine rising steeply off the east bank of the Zi Qu tributary of the Yangtze, I met two men in their 20s. For protection, I will not identify their homes, but they'd been traveling by truck for nearly a month, and now they, as I, were gawking at the Derge Parkhang. This exquisite carmine, gilt-roofed, three-story printing house, which looks like a temple rather than a factory, was built in 1744 to produce traditional unbound books of religious and medical texts. During the 1960s troops of the People's Liberation Army occupied the building, gravely damaging it. The Chinese government, always in search of tourism income, restored it and opened it to visitors in the late 1990s.
Led by a Chinese government guide, after paying the 20-cent admission fee (no charge for Tibetans), we walked past walls newly painted with religious murals of fantastic demons and through unlit rooms lined with floor-to-ceiling racks holding 270,000 ancient wooden printing plates that had survived the Chinese army and subsequent neglect. Tibetan men, many physically disabled, sat by threes on the floor, each team slathering the plates with thick black ink, pressing them onto sheets of rough paper, and peeling off some 2,500 pages an hour of the classical texts. This impressive output, sold inexpensively in bookshops throughout Tibet, appeared to contradict allegations among Tibetans living abroad that the Chinese ban Tibetan-language publishing.
After the tour, as I chatted with the two men, it became evident that they knew a great deal about the tribulations Tibetan monks face today. "Fifteen times a year Chinese officials visit the monasteries and conduct 'patriotic education' classes," said the younger man. "Each class lasts two or three hours. Basically they tell the monks that the Dalai Lama is evil and that he wants to split the motherland. The monks must pretend to listen, but most manage to block it out by chanting silently to themselves." Afterward the monks try to erase anything that might have seeped in by listening to Voice of America Tibetan-language broadcasts on shortwave radios.
In an attempt to counter the impact of the age ban on monastic life, they said that the monks smuggle in boys as young as eight and begin training them in secret. "No one wants to become a monk when they've already danced with girls," the older one said with a little chuckle as he glanced at two gum-chewing young women in diaphanous chubas, tottering past our table on platform shoes.
One afternoon on a roadside in eastern Tibet, I spoke with a monk I'd waved down to ask directions. He told me about his monastery, which once held 500 monks and 300 students and had seen those numbers more than halved by government edict. Like other monks I spoke with, he measured the strength of Buddhism by the length of monastic rolls. "Only when we're many," he said, "can we properly teach the people that it is much better to be poor, as long as you have your faith and know that peace is coming, than it is to live in a concrete house, wear Chinese clothes, and have a lot to eat, if you're not at peace."
Not all Tibetans agree. "One of the main reasons Tibet was so backward is that too many men were in the monasteries and not contributing toward development," said Arzong, a 39-year-old instructor at the Tibetan Language School in eastern Tibet, about 300 miles southeast of Derge. "I continually advise parents to send their children to schools, not to monasteries. Otherwise, our population will remain stagnant, and we'll never be able to compete economically."
In his large, sparsely furnished office, Arzong demonstrated that he was able to communicate on the Internet in Tibetan. "The truth," he said, "is that there are plenty of Tibetan books and literature available, both electronically and in print." Over the summer he was writing a volume on Tibetan grammar for use by teachers and was editing a collection of folktales. He conceded, though, that the only reason for young people to learn their ancestral language was "to preserve Tibetan nationalism."Annual interest rates, fees and features are current as of June 19, 2017 unless otherwise indicated and subject to change.
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1 Must apply online by June 2, 2019. Welcome Bonus of 15,000 Aeroplan Miles will be awarded to the Aeroplan Member account associated with the TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite* Card Account (“Account”) only after the first Purchase is made on the Account. To receive the additional 15,000 Aeroplan Miles, you must make $1,000 in Purchases on your Account, including your first Purchase, within 90 days of Account opening. If you have opened an Account in the last 6 months, you will not be eligible for these offers. We reserve the right to limit the number of Accounts opened by and the number of miles awarded to any one person. Rebate of the Annual Fee for the first year for the Primary Cardholder will occur when you have applied for an Account by June 2, 2019. Rebate will be applied within 2 monthly statements from the date of Account opening. The Annual Fee for any Authorized User Cards added to the Account continues to apply. Your Account must be in good standing at the time bonus miles are awarded. Please allow 8 weeks after the conditions for each offer are fulfilled for the miles to be credited to your Aeroplan Member account. Offers may be changed, withdrawn or extended at any time and cannot be combined with any other offer unless otherwise specified. These miles are not eligible for Aeroplan status.
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3 All Air Canada benefits are fulfilled in whole or in part by Air Canada, or its designated affiliates or other third parties, and are subject to change at any time. The Toronto-Dominion Bank and its affiliates are not responsible for fulfilling these benefits. For more details about these benefits, please contact Air Canada directly. Air Canada Benefit Eligibility – Priority Travel Services: With the TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite Card, Air Canada benefits (the complimentary first checked bag, priority check-in and priority boarding) apply whenever the Primary Cardholder travels using an Aeroplan flight reward, only, on a flight operated by Air Canada, Air Canada rouge or under the Air Canada express banner. Flights operated by other airlines are not eligible. To access these benefits, the Primary Cardholder must redeem their Aeroplan flight reward (defined as Fixed Mileage Flight RewardsTM or Market Fare Flight RewardsTM) with miles from their Aeroplan account. To access these benefits, the Primary Cardholder must also ensure that the name on the Air Canada flight booking is identical to the name on the Aeroplan account profile of the traveler. Where zonal boarding is available, the priority boarding status will be recognized by a Zone 2 descriptor for the Primary Cardholder and companions travelling on the same reservation checking-in at the same time, which will be displayed on the Air Canada issued boarding pass. Priority check-in may also be extended to companions travelling on the same reservation checking-in at the same time as the Primary Cardholder. To access priority check-in and priority boarding, the Primary Cardholder may be required to show their TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite Card to the Air Canada agent. Please allow two weeks from receiving your Card for these Air Canada benefits to be activated. The complimentary first checked bag, up to 23kg (50 lb), applies whenever the Primary Cardholder travels using an Aeroplan flight reward, only, on a flight operated by Air Canada, Air Canada Rouge or under the Air Canada express banner. Flights operated by other airlines are not eligible. To access this benefit, the Primary Cardholder must redeem their Aeroplan flight reward (defined as Fixed Mileage Flight Rewards or Market Fare Flight Rewards) with miles from their Aeroplan account. To access this benefit, the Primary Cardholder must also ensure that the name on the Air Canada flight booking is identical to the name on the Aeroplan account profile of the traveler. The complimentary first checked bag applies solely to the Primary Cardholder, and service charges for additional/oversized/overweight baggage may apply. Applicable on flights that do not already offer a complimentary first checked bag. To access this benefit, the Primary Cardholder may be required to show their TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite * Card to the Air Canada agent. Please allow two (2) weeks from receiving your Card for these Air Canada benefits to be activated.
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4 1.5 Bonus Aeroplan Miles (“Bonus Rate") are earned on each $1.00 in Purchases of eligible gas, groceries, drugstore, and aircanada.com products and services (excluding Air Canada Vacations packages, car rentals, hotel bookings, and other third party partner products and services that can be purchased through aircanada.com) charged to your TD Aeroplan Visa Infinite Card Account (“Account”). Any returned items, refunds, rebates or other similar credits will reduce or cancel the Aeroplan Miles earned on the original Purchase. To earn this Bonus Rate, Purchases of gas, groceries, drugstore and aircanada.com products and services must be made at merchants classified through the Visa network with a Merchant Category Code (“MCC”) that identifies them in the "gas", "grocery" or "drugstore" category and on aircanada.com. Some merchants may sell gas, groceries or drugstore products/services, or have separate merchants located on their premises that also sell gas, groceries or drugstore products/services, but may not be classified with a gas, grocery or drugstore MCC and such Purchases will not earn this Bonus Rate. If you have questions about the MCC that applies to a Purchase, contact TD at 1-800-983-8472. Bonus Rate is only available on the first $80,000 in net annual Purchases of gas, groceries, drugstore products/services and on aircanada.com made from January 1 to December 31 each year on your Account. Once the maximum net annual amount has been reached, Purchases of gas, groceries or drugstore products/services on the Account will not earn the Bonus Rate but will only earn Aeroplan Miles at the standard rate that applies to all other Purchases on the Account. This Bonus Rate offer is in place of and not in addition to the standard rate earned on all other Purchases made on your Account. Offer may be changed, withdrawn or extended at any time and cannot be combined with any other offer.
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10 Underwritten by TD Life Insurance Company. Medical and claims assistance, claims payment and administrative services are provided by our Administrator. Benefits, features and coverages are subject to conditions, limitations and exclusions, including a pre-existing condition exclusion, that are fully described in the Certificate of Insurance included with your TD Credit Cardholder Agreement. Note that this insurance offers different benefits, with different terms and conditions, than the optional Travel Medical Insurance that is available to all TD customers. The day of departure from and the day of return to your province of residence each count as one full day. 21-day coverage if you're under 65 and 4-day coverage if you're 65 or older.
11 Underwritten by TD Life Insurance Company (for medical covered causes) and TD Home and Auto Insurance Company (for non-medical covered causes). To be eligible for this insurance, your trip must be paid for in full using your TD Credit Card and/or Aeroplan Miles. Benefits, features and coverages are subject to conditions, limitations and exclusions, including a pre-existing condition exclusion, that are fully described in the Certificate of Insurance included with your TD Credit Cardholder Agreement. Note that this insurance offers different benefits, with different terms and conditions, than the optional Trip Cancellation and Trip Interruption Insurance that is available to all TD customers.
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21 Life, |
26 8 9 43 8 27 9.5 10.5 44 9.5 28 10.5 11.5 45 10.5 29 11 12 46 11 30 12 13 47 12 31 13 14 48 13 32
Children's Shoes
UK US UK EU JAPAN 5 6.5 5 2 - 6 7 6 23.5 14 6.5 7.5 6.5 24 - 7 8 7 24.5 15 7.5 8.5 7.5 25 - 8 9 8 25.5 16 8.5 9.5 8.5 26 - 9 10 9 26.5 16.5 9.5 10.5 9.5 27 - 10 11 10 27.5 17.5 10.5 11.5 10.5 28 - 11 12 11 28.5 18.5 11.5 12.5 11.5 29 - 12 13 12 30 19 13 1 13 31 20 13 1.5 13 31.5 20.5 1 2 1 32.5 21 1.5 2.5 1.5 33 21.5 2 3 2 33.5 22
Footwear Returns
In the rare event that a customer is unhappy with the fit of their shoe, Love Hype & Glory will process an exchange with free re-shipping of the item ONLY ONCE PER SHOE ORDER.
In respect of footwear returns due to size, the customer is responsible for covering the cost of return, and must use a trackable / signed-for service; we cannot be held responsible for lost items shipped via an un-tracked mailing service.
Only exchanges are allowed - refunds will not be issued for footwear returned to us for a sizing change.
Any and all costs related to exchanges past the first exchange must be covered by the customer.
Exchange requests that differ by more than 2 sizes from the original size ordered will be considered a customer-input error and will not be eligible for exchange by Love Hype and Glory.
In order for a free exchange to be processed, customers must provide the following information:
1. Reason the shoe didn’t fit (i.e. too small, too big, too narrow)
2. The new size requested by the customer
3. Customer name, order numberBy Michael Bradshaw
Russians did not actually celebrate Christmas until the 7th of January, but no doubt most are wishing for a rapid rebound in the oil price and a significant recovery in the value of the ruble. Unfortunately, neither seems likely anytime soon. Similarly, Western governments—led by the US and EU—are unlikely to lift their sanctions against Russia without significant movement from the Kremlin (which also seems unlikely). The EU’s sanctions will be subject to review later in the year, starting in March, and no doubt some member states will be concerned about the negative impact that the current measures are having on their own economies. But the US sanctions are likely to stay in place for some time to come.
Much has already been written about the nature of the sanctions, their content and their intent (see a recent article by Peter Rutland). The sanctions are aimed at individuals, organizations and companies close to the ruling elite in Moscow. The EU’s sanctions fall into three main areas: financial sanctions against designated Russian banks, energy companies and defence companies; arms embargoes and restrictions on certain duel purpose technologies; and restrictions on exports of high tech goods and services in the energy sector. In early December the EU clarified the aspects of the energy sector subject to sanctions:
oil exploration and production in waters deeper than 150 metres;
oil exploration and production in the offshore area north of the Arctic circle; or
projects that have the potential to produce oil from resources located in shale formations by way of hydraulic fracturing (it does not apply to exploration and production through shale formations to locate or extract oil from non-shale reservoirs).
The purpose of this short comment is to consider the impact of the sanctions, together with wider trends in the global economy, on the challenges facing the Russian oil and gas industries. In doing so, it addresses three issues: first, the immediate and short-term consequences for Russian oil and gas exports; second, the impact on the planned development of LNG exports; and finally the implications for Russian oil and gas production and exports in the 2020s.
A Multitude of Challenges
Even before the imposition of sanctions and the recent dramatic fall in the oil price, it was widely recognised that the Russian oil and gas industries faced significant, but different, challenges. Since the mid-1990s, the dramatic recovery of Russian oil production has been based mainly on enhanced production from fields inherited from the Soviet industry. Western service companies and the TNK-BP joint venture played a key role in this resurgence. In recent years production has stabilised around the 10 million barrels a day level and some new fields—such as Vankor in East Siberia and the Sakhalin offshore projects—have provided new production to enable this (in fact Russian oil production reached a post-Soviet high of 526.75 million tons in 2014). However, due to the high tax burden and short-termism, the industry has not invested sufficiently in exploration and development activity, and it seems inevitable that production will start to fall towards the end of the decade. To counter this, it is hoped that the development of tight oil deposits in West Siberia will provide new production in the short-term in close proximity to existing infrastructure; while in the longer-term new fields in East Siberia and offshore—both in the Black Sea and Arctic—would provide a boost in the 2020s.
In the case of Russian gas, it is not a shortage of reserves but the inability to find customers willing to pay a premium price that presents the challenge. The domestic market is already liberalised, and Gazprom has been losing market share to Novatek and the oil companies with gas to sell. At the same time, it is well understood that Europe does not represent a growing market for Gazprom. Existing long-term contracts will ensure that sales remain above the 100 bcm level well into the 2020s, but the cancellation of the South Stream project highlights just how difficult things are in Europe. In response, diversification was to be achieved in two ways: first, by expanding LNG production and export; and, second, by accessing new markets for pipeline gas in Asia. The latter has been achieved through the 38 bcm agreement reached with China in May 2014, and Russia hopes that a second 30 bcm agreement will be made in the next year or so. However, the agreement struck in May commits Gazprom to a $55 billion investment programme with questionable financial returns for both the company and the Russian state, particularly since the gas price is oil-indexed. There is no doubt that China has used events in Ukraine to strike a good deal for itself in terms of accessing Russian energy reserves (Rosneft has sold 10 per cent of the Vankor field to the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC)).
Targets and Unforeseen Consequences
Western sanctions against the Russian oil and gas industry were designed—at a time when the oil price was around $ 100 a barrel—so as not to interrupt the flow of oil and gas onto global markets. Instead, the focus on the Arctic offshore and tight oil was deliberately aimed at stopping a series of agreements between the international oil companies and Rosneft and Gazpromneft to develop medium (by the end of the decade) and longer-term prospects (mid-2020s). This has denied Rosneft billions of dollars in production carries promised by ExxonMobil, Statoil, Total and ENI (BP still owns 19.75% of Rosneft). While it has been relatively straightforward to target high-profile projects such as the ExxonMobil-Rosneft venture in the Kara Sea, where the partners struck oil last summer, much of the equipment needed for tight oil exploration and development is also used to produce ‘hard-to-get’ conventional oil. The net result is that the Western service companies and their suppliers are in an ambiguous situation on the ground in Russia and are siding with caution and withdrawing. This leaves a gap that the domestic service industry cannot fill.
Whether intentional or not, it is the financial sanctions that are having the most significant immediate impact on the oil and gas sector. Rosneft in particular is heavily indebted, is having to rationalise its investment plans, and is calling on the state to help it meet its financial obligations. Gazprom is also having to pay greater attention to the bottom line, and is probably relieved that the $40 billion South Stream project has been cancelled, which allows it to focus on East Siberia and the Power of Siberia pipelines. While it had banked on receiving $25 billion from China towards the field development and pipeline construction costs, that now seems unlikely. Again, the Kremlin may end up being the bank of last resort. The private gas company Novatek is also betting on funding for its Yamal LNG project from China as CNPC is a shareholder in the project, but it too has secured a $2.6 billion loan from the National Welfare Fund. Rosneft, meanwhile, is seeking a $4 billion loan to finance four of its projects. Thus, the oil and gas sector is proving an unforeseen victim of Western financial sanctions. Indeed, sanctions may well have an immediate impact on the activities of Rosneft—which now produces more than half of Russia’s oil—and could accelerate the predicted decline in Russia oil production.
Russia’s LNG Plans in Tatters
A year ago the prospects for the development of Russian LNG were looking bright. The Russian Government had just allowed the limited liberalisation of LNG exports that enabled both Novatek and Rosneft to progress with their projects on the Yamal Peninsula and Sakhalin Island respectively. Gazprom was planning the Vladivostok LNG plant, was resurrecting its Baltic LNG project, and was close to committing to the construction of a third train at Russia’s only operating LNG facility on Sakhalin. Now, 12 months on, Novatek is struggling to finance the first train of its three-train project, and progress will inevitably be delayed. Gazprom has all but cancelled the Vladivostok project due to concerns that LNG liquefaction technology might be added to the sanctions list, but also because it recognizes that project finance and customers will be very hard to find. On Sakhalin Island, Rosneft and ExxonMobil continue to talk about the Far Eastern LNG plant, but they have not resolved their conflict with Gazprom over access to the Trans-Sakhalin pipeline and no investment decision on the LNG project has been announced. Likewise, no investment decision has been forthcoming in relation to expanding Sakhalin Energy’s LNG plant that Gazprom owns together with Shell, Mitsubishi and Mitsui. Again, problems securing financing and buyers will likely delay both Sakhalin projects. In general, Asian buyers are unlikely to commit to Russian LNG in the current geopolitical climate, and the LNG market is shifting as new production comes onstream in Australia and demand softens. The falling oil price is also leading the International Oil Companies (IOCs) to rationalise their investment expenditure. In such a climate, placing Russian projects on hold may be an easy decision to make. To make matters worse, the falling oil price impacts the price of LNG, which, when combined with the impact of financial sanctions and buyer concerns, has left Russia’s LNG plans in tatters.
A Market Solution for the West
In his first two terms as President, Vladimir Putin rode a wave a rising oil prices and sustained production increases. Russian oil exports played a key role in matching surging global oil demand, compensating for problems in places like Iraq and Iran. Then the 2008 financial crisis struck, but prices quickly rebounded and Russia was able to use its financial reserves to avoid economic collapse. Once again Russia reaped the dividend of high oil prices without promoting diversification or investing sufficiently in future oil production.
But those high prices were also promoting the tight and unconventional oil revolution in North America and the likes of Iraq and Iran were returning to the international oil market. As supply surged, demand failed to keep pace, Saudi Arabia and OPEC refused to constrain production (a policy encouraged by the US), and the resulting adjustment has seen the oil price fall from $110 in the middle of 2014 to less than $60 at year-end.
Much of the current fall in demand is cyclical, but some of it is structural. As oil demand continues to fall in the OECD, efficiency improves and oil faces competition in the transportation sector. This suggests that those, such as Russia’s energy executives, who think that demand will quickly rebound, at which point prices will recover, could be in for a long wait. This means that the market could easily absorb a prolonged period of sanctions against Russia and a subsequent fall in Russian oil exports. The current Russian budget assumed an average oil price of $100 in 2015. Now, the Russian Finance Ministry projects that an average price of $60 this year would see the economy shrink by 4 per cent and the country would run a budget deficit of 3 per cent. Indeed, this may be optimistic, and difficult times are clearly ahead. Whether that will change Russia’s position on Ukraine remains to be seen. What is clear is that current conditions make it easier for the West to keep its sanctions in place, while the markets do the rest.Sen. Lindsey Graham began the presidential race as a long shot and remained as such until Monday, when he finally suspended his campaign.
But Graham’s campaign was never really about winning. It was about making the case for his particular brand of conservatism to Republican voters who seem more resistant than ever to listening. In many ways, the party seems closer than ever to nominating a candidate whose worldview is diametrically opposed to Graham’s.
Graham’s platform consisted of two key planks. Sen. John McCain, his most prominent backer, described them on Monday as one, a “message of serious statesmanship and problem-solving in public affairs” and two, “forthright opposition to policies and attitudes that would endanger our country and reflect poorly on our party.”
That meant a hawkish take on foreign policy, which included the most robust and specific call for ground troops to fight ISIS in the GOP field, and a call to moderation, especially on immigration, in order to appeal to a broader base of voters.
RELATED: Lindsey Graham’s best one-liners
In both cases, he warned the consequences would be dire if the party failed to heed his prophecy. No American troops in Syria meant another 9/11. No immigration reform meant a “demographic death spiral” that would lock the GOP out of the White House.
On the national security front, Graham’s campaign began at a sensitive time for the party. When Graham first made noise about entering the race, GOP hawks were concerned that Sen. Rand Paul – who Graham frequently clashed with in Washington – could become a force in the primaries and potentially drag Republicans toward a more non-interventionist approach. Graham hoped that by participating in the race, he could help challenge Paul’s philosophy in the public arena point by point.
Close video Graham: 'This is not my time' Matt Moore, South Carolina Republican Party chair, joins Thomas Roberts with his reactions to U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina dropping out of the 2016 race. share tweet email save Embed
“I got into this race to put forward a plan to win a war we cannot afford to lose, and to turn back the tide of isolationism that was rising in our party,” Graham said in a video announcing his decision on Monday. “I believe we made enormous progress in this effort.”
To Graham’s relief, Paul’s campaign never got off the ground. The rise of ISIS and especially the Paris attacks last month also refocused the party more and more on the national security issues Graham emphasized.
But he doesn’t sound happy with what’s filled the breach. Sen. Ted Cruz’s foreign policy includes some elements of Paul’s libertarianism, especially his opposition to regime change in places like Syria, where Graham has long called on the United States to oust dictator Bashar al-Assad. Then there’s Donald Trump, who shifts wildly between condemning American overreach in invading Iraq one moment and then complaining the military didn’t seize the country’s oil fields the next, while drumming up outrage against Muslims at home with misinformation and shadowy warnings. Graham, who assailed Trump throughout the race, took a moment in the last debate to personally thank Muslim Americans serving in the military.
Graham’s second argument on centrism was about policy too, but it touched at least as much on politics. Graham argued that the GOP could not win another presidential election without improving the party’s performance with, among other groups, Latino voters. In his mind, the biggest obstacle was immigration, which he sought to address by co-authoring a bipartisan reform bill with Sen. Marco Rubio that passed the Senate and died in the House.
To his horror, Trump, the national front-runner in the race, has taken the party in the opposite direction. And he’s dragged another front-runner, Cruz, significantly further right with him.
“Now it’s not self-deportation, it’s forced-deportation!” Graham said during a tirade against Cruz and Trump at the Republican Jewish Coalition this month. “We’re literally going to round them up. That sound familiar to you? Deport them, and their American children. You think you’re going to win an election with that garbage? If you think it’s about turning out more people and keeping us on this path, you’re setting us up for oblivion.”
He also warned that on issues like abortion, the party was moving dangerously out of the mainstream in ways that could cost them the election. In the same RJC speech, Graham called out Cruz for opposing exceptions on abortion restrictions for rape, a position shared by Rubio.
“‘[I]f you are going to tell a woman who has been raped she has to carry the child of a rapist, you’re losing most Americans,” Graham said. “Good luck with that.”
Graham’s sense of humor delighted many observers, but he never had a chance at the nomination. Large swaths of the party had already written him off as a squish on core conservative issues and, more than anyone in the race, he embodied the Washington establishment that the other candidates use as a punching bag in their speeches. It didn’t help that he was relegated to the undercard debates, and thus never have had a chance to counter Trump, Cruz, and Paul head on.
He may not have the charisma, policies or organization to take the party’s fate into his own hands, but Graham wanted to make sure that no one in America (or future historians) had any doubt where he stood on the core choices facing the GOP in 2016. And because he had nothing to lose, he was able to lay out his case with a purity and earnestness that no one in the field could match. On that front, at least, his campaign was an unqualified success.NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Jurrell Casey finished sixth in Pro Bowl fan voting at defensive tackle. But he didn't fare well enough in the voting of coaches or players to get into the game.
He lost out to Gerald McCoy of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Haloti Ngata of the Baltimore Ravens, Dontari Poe of the Kansas City Chiefs, Justin Smith of the San Francisco 49ers, Ndamukong Suh of the Detroit Lions and Kyle Williams of the Buffalo Bills.
He said he didn't earn sufficient respect from the player and coach factions and he views it as something to work for next season.
Poe or Smith could wind up in the Super Bowl. Another guy or two could skip the game because of injury.
If the NFL gets to the second alternate at his position, it will have to get to the third as well, Casey told us on The Midday 180 in Nashville Tuesday.
"I don't go for second place," he said. "I go first place or no place."
Or in this instance one of the top six places or no place.Biomimetic self-curled nanoplates assembled coral-like nanoporous γ-Al 2 O 3 has been prepared by a solvothermal method using ethylene glycol (EG) H 2 O as the mixed solvent, followed by the annealing process. The resulting samples are composed of micro/nanostructured units (∼1.5 μm) with self-curled porous nanoplates on the surface. The volume ratio of EG to water in precursor solution is crucial for the formation of coral-like structure. The formation process is investigated to be an assembly process with self-curled nanoplates driven by adsorption of EG. Importantly, the coral-like porous γ-Al 2 O 3 has high surface area of 64.18 m2/g and exhibits enhanced adsorption performance for efficient removal of heavy metal Hg(II) (49.15 mg/g). The removal capacity is higher than (∼2.5 times) those of commercial Al 2 O 3 nanoparticles and hollow structured γ-Al 2 O 3 prepared without EG (∼2.7 times). Further investigation shows adsorption behaviors of the coral-like γ-Al 2 O 3 and the alumina hollow structure can be well described by Langmuir isotherm model, whereas that of commercial Al 2 O 3 nanoparticles fits Freundlich isotherm model. This work not only provides an inspiration for high efficient biomimetic adsorbent but also presents a facile route for coral-like γ-Al 2 O 3 preparation.After authorities found GMO wheat growing on the field of an Oregon farmer, they were hoping to quickly trace the origin of the crop. Three months later, though, investigators are even more puzzled than before.
A farmer in Oregon discovered in May that a GMO wheat crop manufactured by biotech company Monsanto and discontinued years earlier had mysteriously sprouted in his field. But after an array of testing was waged from the United State Department of Agriculture and others, it’s still uncertain months later where the crop came from.
A Monsanto-made GMO wheat strain was tested on the field between 1998 and 2005 before the St. Louis, Missouri-based agro-giant withdrew its application from the USDA’s regulatory approval process. By that point, though, it had spent seven years planting a particular strain of wheat that could withstand exposure to Monsanto’s own “Roundup” pesticide. When an Oregon farmer realized two months ago that some plants in his wheat field were surviving despite dousing them with Roundup, he became suspicious. Soon after the USDA did too, even launching a federal investigation.
The zombie crop raised concern around the world when foreign buyers of US goods objected over possibly buying a harvest infected with hybrid seeds unapproved of overseas. Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robb Fraley went on to call the entire incident “suspicious” and generated calls of potential sabotage, but even still the mystery remains unsolved.
The result, NPR reported this week, could mean hundreds of millions of dollars if Asian buyers exit from contracts with American farmers.
Weighing in weeks after he touted the possibility of the incident being the result of sabotage, Fraley still seemed unsure. "The fact pattern indicates the strong possibility that someone intentionally introduced wheat seed containing the CP4 event into his field, sometime after that farmer initially planted it," Fraley told NPR, referring to Monsanto's patented Roundup resistance gene
Fraley also said that anti-GMO activists upset with his company could have orchestrated it to discredit the company. Monsanto was in fact the focus of a day of international protests earlier this year held by GMO activists on six continents, and like-minded advocates continue to petition against Washington’s ties to the biotech industry.
“There are folks who don’t like biotechnology and who would use this as an opportunity to create problems,” Fraley previously told reporters.
But as the investigation remains unresolved, the entire incident may unfold to be nothing more than an honest mistake. Oregon State wheat breeder Bob Zemetra told NPR that Fraley’s claim seemed a bit of “a stretch” and suggested it was something much simpler.
"Or you have a bag that gets mislabeled and gets put on the shelf and just sits there," he said.
Others, like Oregon State University weed scientist Carol Mallory-Smith, say it really could be anything.
“There are so many places in the system where errors can be made,” she told Nature. “Once we release these genes into the field, we should just assume that they are going to stay in the environment.”
“We may never know who actually released it,” added Washington State University Director of Agricultural Research James Moyer.With just six days left in the regular season, it’s getting tough to not look ahead to the playoffs. So today, let’s do exactly that, with a ranking of the 10 best realistic first-round matchups that we could be on the verge of seeing.
Of course, your definition of “realistic” might vary, but let’s draw a line in the sand at 10 per cent (based on the odds as calculated by Sports Club Stats). That means that some matchups won’t make the cut, even if they’re still technically possible and would be completely amazing. And yes, I’m talking about the Islanders and Rangers. Look, I’m still not over the way that all fell apart on us over the last few weeks.
Just give me a minute.
For the rest of the candidates, we’ll be considering a variety of factors. We’ll of course be looking for great hockey between two elite teams. A compelling storyline or two always helps. And any sort of rivalry or bad blood, recent or long-term, is a major bonus.
Granted, if you’re a fan of a team headed to the post-season (hello, Americans!), you’d probably just prefer the easiest matchup possible and be done with it. But for the rest of us, here are the 10 best matchups to root for over the season’s final week.
10. Detroit Red Wings vs. Tampa Bay Lightning – 38.2%
Contender status: Up until a few days ago, the Lightning looked like an Eastern favourite, but injuries to Steven Stamkos and Anton Stralman have devastated those expectations. Meanwhile, the Red Wings have their hands full just making it to the post-season.
Potential storylines: Can a team that went all the way to the final last year be considered a scrappy underdog this time around? Given the Lightning’s injuries, they might have to be. Meanwhile, the Wings would have the sentimental story of trying to make a run in what could be Pavel Datsyuk‘s last season.
Rivalry factor: The two teams faced each other for the first time last year, in what turned out to be an excellent series in which the Wings nearly pulled off the upset. As an added bonus, there’s always the Steve Yzerman factor.
Bottom line: It would be a matchup between two teams that a lot of us are writing off this week, one of which would be moving on to the division final.
Random clip to get you fired up: Niklas Kronwall launches himself at Nikita Kucherov, earning the suspension that kept him out of last year’s Game 7.
9. Boston Bruins vs. Florida Panthers – 11.8%
Contender status: Um… well… anything can happen in the playoffs, right?
Potential storylines: Both teams have more likely matchups – the Panthers are at 43.9 per cent to face the Islanders, while the Bruins would be 38.9 per cent to get the Lightning. But we’ll pair them together here because we want to get them both out of the way of some intriguing storylines. There’s the Shawn Thornton factor, as the veteran enforcer faces the team he won a Cup with five years ago. Jaromir Jagr is a former Bruin, although that’s not all that exciting because at this point he’s a former almost-everyone. And maybe most intriguing, you get Roberto Luongo‘s rematch with the Bruins from the 2011 final.
Rivalry factor: Minimal, although there was some minor bad blood in a game a few weeks ago. They also met back in the 1996 playoffs, making the Bruins the only team the Panthers have ever beaten in the opening round.
Bottom line: Whoever they play, the Panthers are looking like a fun bandwagon team. Matching them up against a team that embraces the villain role as effortlessly as the Bruins would be a perfect fit.
Random clip to get you fired up: Can you feel that, Bruins? Can you feel it coming in the air tonight?
8. New York Islanders vs. Pittsburgh Penguins – 26.1%
Contender status: The Penguins have gone from early-season disappointment to one of the league’s best second-half teams, and should get even better once Evgeni Malkin returns. The Islanders are sputtering, and don’t even technically have their spot locked up quite yet.
Potential storylines: Take your pick. Both teams are racked with injuries. It would be the first playoff action in the Barclays Center, so we’d hear plenty about crowd noise and bad ice. And after six years behind the Islanders’ bench, Jack Capuano could be coaching to save his job.
Rivalry factor: Plenty. As long-time division rivals, they have a playoff history dating back over four decades, including a surprisingly tight series in 2013. And of course, we also had all that nonsense from a few years ago.
Bottom line: The Islanders draw a tough matchup while trying to win their first playoff series in 23 years. Speaking of which…
Random clip to get you fired up: What else could it be? David Freaking Volek.
7. Minnesota Wild vs. Dallas Stars – 80.9%
Contender status: The Wild have struggled through a disappointing season, although they’ve been better since their February coaching change. The Stars are the most exciting team in the league, but questions linger over whether they have the goaltending to be considered true contenders.
Potential storylines: Wow, the high-powered Stars were dominating but Devan Dubnyk stood on his head and stole the series, who could have seen that coming? (Every Dallas Stars fan is nodding grimly right now.)
Rivalry factor: The two teams have never met in the post-season, but there’s certainly some history here: The Stars used to be the North Stars, before abandoning Minnesota for Dallas in 1993.
Bottom line: This feels like a bit of karmic payback brewing, even if the two teams did declare that weird truce at the outdoor alumni game.
Random clip to get you fired up: Relive the magic of the underdog (North) Stars’ stunning 1991 run in the delightfully tacky “Shining Stars”.
6. New York Rangers vs. Pittsburgh Penguins – 72.5%
Contender status: Strong. We’ve covered the Pens already. And while the Rangers have often looked like a flawed team, this is essentially the same core that’s been to the conference final three times in four years, and they’ve still got Henrik Lundqvist.
Potential storylines: We don’t yet know how long Marc-Andre Fleury‘s latest concussion will sideline him for. But if he’s not ready to go for Game 1, we’d get a goaltending matchup pitting a five-time Vezina finalist against a rookie with barely a dozen NHL games under his belt in Matt Murray.
Rivalry factor: Excellent. This would be the third straight season that the two teams have met with the Rangers ending the Penguins’ season in each of the previous years.
Bottom line: The Rangers’ window has felt like it was closing for a while now, and Penguins seem like the sort of team that could finally slam it shut. But that goaltending matchup…
Random clip to get you fired up: Lundqvist and Sidney Crosby go nose-to-nose in 2010.
5. Chicago Blackhawks vs. Dallas Stars – 17.1%
Contender status: We’ve covered the Stars already and we’ll get to the Blackhawks a little further down the list, but suffice it to say, it’s high.
Potential storylines: Hey, remember when the salary cap forced the Blackhawks to trade one key veteran off of last year’s Cup roster and watch another depart via free agency? Where’d those guys wind up again?
Rivalry factor: Partly due to the Stars’ long stopover in the Pacific, the two teams have never met in the playoffs before. The regular-season meetings are usually feisty, though.
Bottom line: The series would feature two excellent teams that play very different styles. Can those styles win in the playoffs? We know one team’s answer.
Random clip to get you fired up: An emotional Patrick Sharp watches as Hawks fans welcome him back to Chicago. (Don’t expect the same treatment in April, Patty.)
4. Philadelphia Flyers vs. Washington Capitals – 60.2%
Contender status: The Caps have run away with the Presidents’ Trophy, and will go into the playoffs as the prohibitive favourite to come out of the Eastern Conference. The Flyers have been a nice late-season story, but the standings say they won’t have much of a chance here.
Potential storylines: Hey, we all love a good David versus Goliath story, right? And that’s especially true if Goliath has a decades-long history of crushing playoff disappointments. As an added bonus, the Capitals’ reputation for squandering big series leads means this one would bear watching right up until the final horn.
Rivalry factor: The two teams have been division rivals forever, including plenty of nasty moments in the 80s and 90s. They’ve met in the playoffs four times, most recently in a classic in 2008 that ended with Game 7 overtime. There’s been plenty of bad blood over the past few years, including the Ray Emery/Braden Holtby incident. More recently, last week’s matchup in Philadelphia was big kid hockey at its finest.
Bottom line: On paper, this would be a dominant favourite taking the first step on a long playoff journey against a team that should just be happy to be there. Don’t count on it playing out that way.
Random clip to get you fired up: Future Flyers coach Craig Berube runs Don Beaupre in 1991, and eats a blocker for his trouble.
3. San Jose Sharks vs. Anaheim Ducks – 54.2%
Contender status: Higher than you might think. The Ducks’ credentials have been well-established ever since they shook off a brutal start to emerge as one of the league’s best teams. But the Sharks are a sneaky pick in their own right.
Potential storylines: We can’t talk about the Sharks in the post-season without bringing up all those years of playoff disappointment for Joe Thornton and Co. Here, they’d be facing a team that already has one cap-era Cup to its credit and is built for another.
Rivalry factor: They’ve only met once in the playoffs, back in 2009 when the eighth-seeded Ducks shocked the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Sharks in the opening round. But the regular season has featured plenty of nastiness as part of the three-team California rivalry that ranks as one of the league’s best.
Bottom line: There’s no doubt the Sharks would be underdogs. Then again, maybe that’s what they’ve needed to be all along.
Random clip to get you fired up: Thornton and Ryan Getzlaf go right off the draw to open Game 6 of that 2009 series.
2. San Jose Sharks vs. Los Angeles Kings – 45.8%
Contender status: The Kings have been pretty good over the years. Pretty sure I read that somewhere.
Potential storylines: You’d get all the Sharks’ baggage from the Ducks entry up above, with the extra weight of their devastating 2014 collapse against the Kings introduced. But don’t overlook the goaltending battle, as Martin Jones faces the team that traded him away last summer. Or does he? With James Reimer in town, the Sharks look like a team that hasn’t completely settled on one guy.
(As a side note, apologies to the Predators, who’ll almost certainly get whichever of the Ducks and Kings don’t face the Sharks and who are the only playoff team who didn’t make this list anywhere. It’s no knock on Nashville, a fun team in their own right that could absolutely make some noise. They just have the bad luck of being in the way of the Battle of California.)
Rivalry factor: They’ve faced each other three times since 2011, including a pair of seven-game battles that were both won by the Kings. Their meetings are usually heated, and this year’s Logan Couture/Milan Lucic dust-up only added to that.
Bottom line: The Kings are two-time champs. But both times, they’ve done it after entering the playoffs with underdog status, which won’t be the case here. How do they like being the hunted instead of the hunter?
Random clip to get you fired up: We’ve harped on the Sharks’ playoff failures enough for now. Here’s Thornton’s all-but-forgotten OT winner from the 2011 series.
1. Chicago Blackhawks vs. St. Louis Blues – 82.1%
Contender status: The Blackhawks are the defending champs. The Blues are tied for the second-best record in the league. Yep, I’d say this one checks out.
Potential storylines: In one corner, you’ve got the closest thing the NHL has to a dynasty. The Hawks look vulnerable, battered by injuries and suspensions as they wobble towards a less-than-impressive finish. But they’ve been counted out before only to find a way. (And when that happens, sources tell me, their fans never let you forget it).
In the other corner, you’ve got a Blues team that’s been a regular season powerhouse for five years but just can’t seem to get over that playoff hump. This feels like a do-or-die season in St. Louis, one that could see everyone from Ken Hitchcock to the roster’s core to the Zamboni driver on the hot seat with a loss.
Rivalry factor: A total of 11 lifetime playoff matchups, most recently in 2014. Toews versus Backes. The Sutter Brothers. The Norris Division. The St. Patrick’s Day Massacre. Other than that, no, not much.
Bottom line: The road to the Stanley Cup goes through Chicago, and the champs are on the ropes. But do the Blues really have what it takes to finish them off?
Random clip to get you fired up: Jonathan Toews‘ gut-wrenching road winner in Game 5 of the 2014 meeting, one of four sudden death games in that series.Pirate101 Monthly Newsletter Tweet Select a Different Month... January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 201 |
damage to people, we have to shut down schools and markets... and I think it has come to that point now," said Ashish Khetan, Vice-chairman of Delhi Dialogue Commission, an advisory body of the AAP government.But the Delhi pollution board disagrees. "Can somebody say that pollution levels at home are better than pollution levels in school? Such knee-jerk reactions are of no use," said Ashwini Kumar, chairman of Delhi Pollution Control Committee. The need of the hour is to tackle the problem, but "not through hypocrisy and fear", he said.The presence of particulate matter in air, which is high enough due to consumption of fossil fuel like coal, increases here in winter due to copious burning of leaves, rubber and garbage in every neighbourhood by the poor.The issue comes in the backdrop of the global climate in Paris, where India has contended that the developed countries take the lead to counter climate change.With 200 million people with no access to electricity, India has said it will not accept any restrictions on its use of coal. But Prime Minister Modi had outlined an ambitious programme under which the nation will increasingly generate and consume clean energy. The AAP government, meanwhile, is looking to citizens for fresh ideas. The Delhi Dialogue Commission and the University of Chicago have started a joint venture and a first-of-its-kind competition focussed on improving air quality by soliciting ideas from citizens. The prize money is Rs 2crore.Ex-CIA director Porter Goss, former House majority leader Tom DeLay and three other former Republican congressmen are among those who still support disgraced former U.S. House speaker J. Dennis Hastert — at least enough to write a federal judge on his behalf.
The men were among 41 people to write U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin as he prepares to sentence Hastert next week in a sordid criminal case that brought to light allegations that Hastert sexually abused teenagers while working as a high school teacher and wrestling coach decades ago. None of the writers delved into those accusations, instead focusing on the good that Hastert had accomplished in his life.
“Perhaps, the Speakers greatest gift to the House was trust,” Goss wrote in his letter. “My belief is that Members found him very approachable and took him at his word.”
[The details on Dennis Hastert’s alleged sexual abuse of teenagers]
Goss is a former Republican congressman from Florida who served as CIA director under George W. Bush. DeLay is a Texas Republican who worked alongside Hastert in the House leadership and who himself was accused in a criminal case of influencing state elections with corporate money — although his conviction was ultimately tossed. The three other former congressman writing letters on Hastert’s behalf were John T. Doolittle (R-Calif.), David Dreier (R-Calif.) and Thomas W. Ewing (R-Ill.).
Hastert, 74, pleaded guilty last year to withdrawing money in amounts meant to dodge federal reporting requirements — itself a crime that prosecutors have since said belied something more sinister. By their telling, Hastert was withdrawing the money to pay off a man he had abused as a teenager. And after FBI agents began investigating the case, they found four other men — all affiliated with the wrestling team that Hastert once coached as a high school teacher in Yorkville, Ill. — who had leveled similar allegations of abuse.
Hastert is scheduled to be sentenced in the case on Wednesday. His attorneys submitted the letters to the U.S. Probation Office in hopes of influencing its recommendation on the penalty he should face, but Durkin said he would not consider them unless they were filed publicly. The attorneys made 41 of them public late Friday and wrote in a filing that those represented the people who were okay with making their sentiments public.
[Dennis Hastert pleads guilty to lying to the FBI in hush-money case]
Based on the letters, it would seem that Hastert enjoys broad support from his family and many of those he taught and coached or those who worked with him. Jean Hastert, his wife of 43 years, wrote she had “never known a more honorable and devoted man.”
“If one of his students or wrestlers ever needed anything of him, he would be there for them, and he was never happier than when he could watch someone he helped succeed,” she wrote.
Three retired Capitol Police officers who worked on Hastert’s security detail and a retired sheriff of Kendall County, Ill., wrote about their respect for him.
“Wherever he traveled in this country, he would never leave an event without personally thanking each law enforcement person who helped support the Capitol Police, wrote John DeWolfe, who worked as the agent-in-charge of the speaker of the House. “This is why I was so surprised to learn that he had been charged with lying to the FBI, it’s not the Denny I knew. I cannot comment on the specific charges, all I ask is when sentencing Speaker Hastert you take into account all the good he has done for his community and for his country.”
Prosecutors have painted a different portrait of Hastert, arguing that he rose to the highest levels of American politics, confident his dark secrets would never emerge, while his victims struggled. As part of an agreement with defense attorneys, they recommended a sentence between zero and six months in prison. Hastert is seeking only probation. Durkin could go as high as five years.
Read more:Project Lucy: IBM technology at the service of Africa
VueTel Italia Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 23, 2015
Africa’s horizon. One hundred million dollars of investment in 10 years to support Africa in its path of growth and development. These are the main numbers of Project Lucy, created and promoted by computer giant IBM that has decided to put ‘Watson’, its first cognitive computer, at the service of the African continent, in addition to the experience and expertise of its researchers.
For the past decade Africa has been experiencing a phase of profound social and economic change. The strong GDP growth and the wide availability of natural resources predict it to be a future protagonist in the world’s economy. The development is accompanied however by huge social challenges. The increase in population, the water shortages, a mortality rate that is still very high, the climate change and its consequences on agriculture, these are all factors that jeopardize the materialisation of a truly equitable and inclusive growth. IBM believes that its technology can help Africa to live this “news deal” in the best possible way, making the most of the available potential.
Lucy: the revolution designed by IBM. Project Lucy symbolically takes its name from the primate discovered in Africa in 1974 and considered the first hominid in history. At the heart of the initiative there is Watson, the first cognitive computing system designed by IBM, able to learn from human language, store, process and correlate large amounts of data and highlight innovative connections between them.
According to Kamal Bhattacharya, vice president of IBM Research Africa,
“with the ability to learn from emerging models and discover new correlations, the cognitive abilities of Watson have the enormous potential to help Africa achieve in the next two decades what current developed markets achieved in two centuries.“
In Africa, the American company, along with their business and academics partners, will use Watson and the related cognitive technologies to analyze the big data available to develop commercially viable solutions to the big challenges of the continent. They will range through all policy and problematic areas: from health to education, from water management to sanitation, from agriculture to human mobility. A complex analysis that will be put in the system, according to the plans of IBM, with the creation of a new pan-African Center of Excellence, for the Data-Driven Development (CEED), and three Innovation Centers, in Lagos (Nigeria), Casablanca (Morocco) and Johannesburg (South Africa).JPMorgan calls for authoritarian regimes in Europe
By Stefan Steinberg
17 June 2013
In a document released at the end of May, the American banking and investment giant JP Morgan Chase calls for the overturning of the bourgeois democratic constitutions established in a series of European countries after the Second World War and the installation of authoritarian regimes.
The 16-page document was produced by the Europe Economic Research group of JP Morgan and titled “The Euro Area Adjustment—About Half-Way There.” The document begins by noting that the crisis in the euro zone has two dimensions.
First, the paper argues, financial measures are necessary to ensure that major investment houses such as JP Morgan can continue to reap huge profits from their speculative activities in Europe. Second, the authors maintain, it is necessary to impose “political reforms” aimed at suppressing opposition to the massively unpopular austerity measures being carried out at the behest of the banks.
The report expresses satisfaction with the implementation of a number of financial mechanisms by the European Union to secure banking interests. In this respect, the study maintains, reform of the euro area is about halfway there. The report does, however, call for more action by the European Central Bank (ECB).
Since the eruption of the global financial crisis in 2008, the ECB has made trillions of euros available to the banks to enable them to wipe out their bad debts and commence a new round of speculation. In the face of mounting pressure from the financial markets, ECB chief Mario Draghi declared last summer that he would do whatever was necessary to shore up the banks.
This, however, is not sufficient as far as the analysts at JPMorgan are concerned. They demand a “more dramatic response” to the crisis from the ECB.
The harshest criticisms in the document, however, are reserved for national governments that have been much too tardy in implementing the type of authoritarian measures necessary to impose austerity. The process of such “political reform,” the study notes, has “hardly even begun.”
Towards the end of the document, the authors explain what they mean by “political reform.” They write: “In the early days of the crisis it was thought that these national legacy problems were largely economic,” but “it has become apparent that there are deep-seated political problems in the periphery, which, in our view, need to change if EMU (the European Monetary Union) is to function in the long run.”
The paper then details problems in the political systems of the peripheral countries of the European Union—Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy—that have been at the center of the European debt crisis.
The authors write: “The political systems in the periphery were established in the aftermath of dictatorship, and were defined by that experience. Constitutions tend to show a strong socialist influence, reflecting the political strength that left-wing parties gained after the defeat of fascism.
“Political systems around the periphery typically display several of the following features: weak executives; weak central states relative to regions; constitutional protection of labour rights; consensus-building systems which foster political clientalism; and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo. The shortcomings of this political legacy have been revealed by the crisis. “ Whatever the historical inaccuracies in their analysis, there can not be the slightest doubt that the authors of the JPMorgan report are arguing for governments to adopt dictatorial-type powers to complete the process of social counterrevolution that is already well underway across Europe.
In reality, there was nothing genuinely socialist about the constitutions established across Europe in the postwar period. Such constitutions were aimed at securing bourgeois rule under conditions where the capitalist system and its political agents had been thoroughly compromised by the crimes of Fascist and dictatorial regimes.
The constitutions of European states, including those of Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal, were elaborated and implemented in collaboration with the country’s respective Socialist and Communist parties, which played the key role in demobilising the working class and permitting the bourgeoisie to maintain its rule.
At the same time, however, Europe’s discredited ruling classes were well aware that the Russian Revolution remained a political beacon for many workers. They felt compelled to make a series of concessions to the working class to prevent revolution—in the form of precisely the social and constitutional protections, including the right to protest, that JPMorgan would now like to see abolished.
To some extent, the bank’s criticism of European governments for their lack of authoritarianism rings hollow. Across Europe, governments have repeatedly resorted in recent years to police state measures to suppress opposition to their policies.
In France, Spain and Greece, emergency decrees and the military have been used to break strikes. The constitution adopted in Greece in 1975, following the fall of the colonels’ dictatorship, has not prevented the Greek government from sacking public workers en masse. And in a number of European countries, ruling parties are encouraging the growth of neofascist parties such as the Golden Dawn movement in Greece.
For JPMorgan, however, this is not enough. In order to avoid social revolution in the coming period, its analysts warn, it is necessary for capitalist governments across Europe to move as quickly as possible to set up dictatorial forms of rule.
At the end of the document, the authors put forward a series of scenarios that they claim could result from the failure of European governments to erect authoritarian systems. These variants include: “1) the collapse of several reform-minded governments in the European south, 2) a collapse in support for the euro or the EU, 3) an outright electoral victory for radical anti-European parties somewhere in the region, or 4) the effective ungovernability of some Member States once social costs (particularly unemployment) pass a particular level.”
This is the unadulterated voice of finance capital speaking. It should be recalled that JPMorgan is deeply implicated in the speculative operations that have devastated the lives of hundreds of millions of workers around the world. In March of this year, a US Senate committee released a 300-page report documenting the criminal practices and fraud carried out by JPMorgan, the largest bank in the US and the world’s biggest dealer in derivatives. Despite the detailed revelations in the report, no action will be taken against the bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, who enjoys the personal confidence of the US president.
The same bank now presumes to lecture governments. Seventy years after the assumption of power by Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, with catastrophic consequences for Europe and the world, JPMorgan is leading the call for authoritarian measures to suppress the working class and wipe out its social gains.Mike Pence wrote in an op-ed 17 years ago that Disney's "Mulan" was liberal propaganda.
He wrote the op-ed, which was discovered by Buzzfeed News, when he was a radio talk show host in Indiana before he ran for Congress and right after he saw the film with his children.
"I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulan's story will cause a quiet change in the next generation's attitude about women in combat and they just might be right," Pence wrote. In fact, this past March, the U.S. military began to recruit women for combat jobs, including as Navy SEALs, the Associated Press reported.
"Despite her delicate features and voice, Disney expects us to believe that Mulan's ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis with her cloddish cohorts," he said. "Obviously, this is Walt Disney's attempt to add childhood expectation to the cultural debate over the role of women in the military."
Pence wrote that Mulan's story showed women can't serve in the military. Citing the "Tailhook" and Aberdeen Proving Ground sex scandals, Pence asserted in the op-ed that "the hard truth of our experiment with gender integration is that is has been an almost complete disaster for the military and for many of the individual women involved."
"Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan. Moral of story: women in military, bad idea," he said.
The report from Buzzfeed came out a few days after Donald Trump announced that he had selected Pence, governor of Indiana, as his vice presidential running mate. It also came out just before the Republican National Convention kicked off in Cleveland on Monday.
As the report points out, the movie is based on the 6th century Ballad of Mulan.
After leaving his job as president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, Pence launched his career in talk radio. First, he hosted "The Mike Pence Show," which aired on 18 stations throughout the state for a few hours each morning. Before his stint in Congress, he hosted a weekend political talk show in Indianapolis.THIS is the Persian Hercules or Iranian Hulk, a huge weightlifter who is astounding social media with his sheer physical size.
Sajad Gharibi, 24, from Iran, is said to weigh almost 160kg, almost all of it muscle.
Gharibi has over 59,000 followers on Instagram where he posts photos of his day to day life, as well as doing what he does best — weightlifting.
The enormous man can lift up to 175kg, which is more than he weighs.
He takes part in the powerlifting category of competitions. He has also participated in bodybuilding competitions representing Iran.
Gharibi is pictured in various images showing his huge frame and bulging muscles, which have earned him the name of Hulk or Hercules.
Since gaining a following on his social media accounts, the Persian Hercules has quickly become an internet sensation as social media users express their amazement at his impressive build.
In his free time, he also likes to take pictures with objects that look smaller when held next to him, including other humans.
However those who know him assure that despite his grizzly appearance, Gharibi has a big heart and is a gentle giant.NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democrat Hillary Clinton has a 5 percentage point lead over Republican Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential race, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Friday, roughly the same advantage she has held all month.
Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump speaks as Democratic U.S. presidential nominee Hillary Clinton listens during their first presidential debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, U.S., September 26, 2016. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
The survey result showed little movement following Monday night’s presidential debate, the first of three debates before the Nov. 8 election.
The Sept. 23-29 national tracking poll showed that likely voters support Clinton over Trump by 43 percent to 38 percent, while another 19 percent said they would not pick either candidate.
Clinton has mostly led Trump in the poll this year, and her level of support has been 4-5 percentage points higher than Trump’s in each of the last four weeks.
In a separate poll that included alternative party candidates, Clinton led the field by 4 percentage points. Among likely voters, 42 percent supported Clinton, 38 percent supported Trump, 7 percent supported Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and 3 percent supported Jill Stein of the Green Party.
Monday’s debate was the most watched presidential debate in U.S. history, with an estimated 84 million people tuning in for the 90-minute exchange. Some 56 percent of Americans adults who watched the debate said Clinton won, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday.
Voters appeared to be warming up to both candidates in Friday’s poll. Some 48 percent of likely voters said they had an overall favorable view of Clinton, compared with 45 percent in the previous week, while 46 percent said they had a favorable view of Trump, up from 44 percent the week before.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll is conducted online in English in all 50 states. The poll included 2,501 people who were considered likely voters due to their registration status, voting history and stated intention to vote in the election. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 2 percentage points.
National opinion polls have differed this year in how they measure support for Clinton and Trump. Some polls, like Reuters/Ipsos, try to include only likely voters, while others include all registered voters. The Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll also gathers responses every day and reports results twice a week, so it often detects trends in sentiment before most other polls.
An average of major opinion polls aggregated by RealClearPolitics showed Clinton ahead of Trump by 2.9 percentage points on Friday, or 47.3 points to 44.4, slightly lower than the previous margin of 3 points on Wednesday, but well up from 0.9 point on Sept. 19.× Student Faces 1-Year Expulsion After Bringing Airsoft Gun To School
A Bentonville student faces the possibility of a one-year expulsion after bringing an airsoft gun to school earlier this week, according to the Bentonville School District.
The third-grade student brought an airsoft pellet gun to Thomas Jefferson Elementary on Monday. A teacher discovered the gun and notified administrators, said Mary Ley, a spokeswoman for the school district.
The student was automatically expelled from school for 10 days, after which an appeals hearing will be held to determine whether a student should face the state standard of a one-year expulsion for bringing a gun to school, Ley said.
The incident marks the third time in the last month a Bentonville student has brought a gun to school, Ley said. No one was injured in any of the incidents.
An eighth-grade student at Bentonville’s Washington Junior High School brought an air soft gun to the school with the purpose of selling it to another student in February, according to the school district. A few weeks earlier, a student brought a BB gun to Mary Jones Elementary School, Ley said.
The students involved in those two incidents had their recommended expulsions overturned by Superintendent Michael Poore following an appeals hearing, Ley said.Terrorism has no face it is a dark shadow which arrives without notice at any moment and any place.
It’s difficult to understand why this does happen, what are the reasons for those terrible acts in the name of religions, political motivations and others… It’s a very in-depth question involving many variables however, it is possible to mention some important ones for a better comprehension of terrorism.
We live in a society and every day we are influenced by others and we influence others with our behaviour in this regard terrorism is a way of influence, using violence as main weapon to achieve specific goals. Attached to this violence there are political perspectives or religious beliefs that are used to influence others and it is from here that we can analyse how terrorist organisations are established.
Social and Political Influences
There are many terrorist organisations and inopportunely most of them are well organised. They have a good structure, leaders and power which is the base to attract people to join them. They are a minority although they can conquer territories, important sources to get money and become a serious threat to any Nation.
Communication is also very important, they use propaganda campaigns defending politics or religious perspectives which are not accepted by majorities, their ideas are pass using terror and violence they will not hesitate to kill anyone who deny their ‘true’.
Ideology – Arguments and Beliefs
Terrorism is also defined by their extreme ideology which explain everything they plan, execute and support. Extreme ideology allows them to justify their acts and blame their enemies for using this path of violence.
Social Movements
These organisations can present themselves as a defenders of beliefs and values of religious or political movements on their own cultural community using violence to achieve their goals – let’s say it’s their technique of social influence.
Final Reflection
Terrorism is a sad and scary reality in our life that we can’t ignore it but at the same time we cannot hide otherwise these people will take over from us and rule the world. We are now involved in a war fighting an enemy that we know who is it but at the same time we can’t recognise it.
Racism is increasing I mean people don’t accept so easily cultural differences, we can see that in the Syrian refugees situation were many people disagree in accept them in our Countries (multiple reasons) but an ‘obvious’ one is that ‘some of them are not refugees they are terrorists’ – common! We and our governments should be worried we those ones who are already here some of them were born here (Europe, America…), they are leaving to those places as Syria to be trained and then sent them back to fight us and destroy our society, those are the dangerous ones!
Also we can see that many of these terrorists are young and they are persuaded to leave everything and fight against their own Country, some measures should be taken to understand why this happens and not just send fighter jets to bomb terrorist targets were many innocent people are also killed.
References:
http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/8/html
AdvertisementsA controversial plan to charge Los Angeles developers a fee to help pay for low-income housing is headed for a City Council vote after winning an endorsement from a key committee.
The council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee voted Tuesday to give final approval to the measure and forwarded it to the full council for a vote in the coming weeks.
A council vote would come two years after Mayor Eric Garcetti introduced the so-called linkage fee as a way to help tackle the city’s housing crunch.
The fee is expected to generate more than $100 million a year and produce or preserve hundreds of subsidized units. Should Los Angeles adopt a linkage fee, it will join other cities such as San Francisco, San Diego and Boston.
Developers have fought the measure every step of the way. Jeffrey Lee Costell, a lawyer representing the Building Industry Legal Defense Foundation, told the council’s planning committee that the fee will stifle housing production.
"The supply will be reduced. The cost of building will increase. There’ll be upward pressure on rents," Costell said.
Supporters, who outnumbered opponents on Tuesday, included Fanny Ortiz of Boyle Heights, who said she is a formerly homeless, single mother of five.
"Having access to affordable housing made an impact on my quality of life allowing me the opportunity to work, go back to school and become an organizer within my community," Ortiz said.
Supporters of the measure had advocated for higher fees than those approved by the planning panel. For example, they wanted an $18 per square feet fee imposed in hot real estate markets such as West L.A. rather than the $15 the committee approved.
They also wanted the fees applied immediately rather than phased in over 18 months under an adopted amendment. But they still applauded after the 4 to 1 vote.
https://twitter.com/JustLACoalition/status/917934548146462721
Councilmember Mitchell Englander cast the single "no" vote. His spokesman, Colin Sweeney, said that the councilmember had wanted language exempting certain nonprofits from the fee because of the costs they would face.
Sweeney said the issue around nonprofits is the main "sticking point" for Englander, who may ultimately vote for the linkage fee the next time around.
The council's housing committee is also expected to vote on whether to endorse the measure.Summary: Trump made big promises during the campaign. Now they come due. Some solutions will be difficult, some unconstitutional, some impossible. Stratfor explains how his promises about manufacturing and trade are the latter. America’s businesses are enmeshed in the world economy, a world regulated by a web of treaties. Stepping out of those without ripping the world probably can’t be done.
Manufacturing: A Campaign Promise That Trump Cannot Keep
Stratfor, 11 November 2016.
Throughout the race for the White House, President-elect Donald Trump vowed to renegotiate trade deals to restore the manufacturing jobs that have all but vanished from the U.S. economy. In making this promise, he was not breaking new ground; President Barack Obama made similar assurances in his 2008 run for office. And much like his predecessor, Trump will face considerable challenges in fulfilling his pledge, constrained by the geopolitical, structural and institutional forces surrounding him. Without a doubt, the next president will usher in changes to U.S. economic and trade policies. But he will likely find a wide gap between theory and practice as he tries to deliver on many of his campaign promises.
Despite Trump’s threats to unilaterally pull out of NAFTA, any attempt to do so would meet with legal and constitutional objections and resistance from the U.S. business community. The NAFTA trade bloc is one of the largest in the world, and the trade partnership it affords Mexico and the United States is vital to both countries. Mexico is not only the United States’ third-largest source of imports but also its second-largest export destination, accounting for almost $250 billion in 2015. Furthermore, much of the United States’ trade relationship with Mexico, unlike its trade ties with most other countries, is heavily integrated into American supply chains, providing auto parts, raw materials and energy for use in manufacturing.
In addition to the problems it would cause with the Mexican and Canadian governments, a sudden withdrawal from NAFTA would hurt U.S. companies with significant operations in Mexico, such as Ford and Wal-Mart. At the same time, pulling out of the free trade agreement and slapping hefty tariffs on imports would likely prompt Mexico to take similar action against the United States, diminishing export revenue. Consequently, the next administration will probably take a slow, methodological approach to its trade relations with Mexico, focusing on the country’s compliance with environmental standards regulations and rules of origin.
Trump may highlight a few industries for scrutiny to goad Mexico City to the negotiating table. But the new president will have more important things to worry about than severing trade ties with Mexico — like appointing a Cabinet and filling the vacancy on the Supreme Court with a weak Republican majority in Congress.
Trump will have an easier time cracking down on trade with China. Even so, he is unlikely to target all Chinese exports with cumbersome tariffs. The United States imports primarily finished products from China, such as smartphones, televisions, toys, textiles, footwear and light bulbs — items no longer manufactured domestically. Building the factory capacity necessary to enable the United States to phase out Chinese imports cannot happen overnight. In the meantime, jacking up tariffs on Chinese goods will only increase the price of those products, forcing Americans to pay more, consume less or purchase items imported from elsewhere.
Instead of introducing comprehensive restrictions on Chinese goods, the Trump administration is more likely to focus on specific areas, pushing for anti-dumping regulations on industrial goods that the United States still produces, such as steel. Trump could also explore other ways to challenge China, for instance, through existing World Trade Organization regulations on Beijing’s manufacturing subsidies. But if Trump took such measures to try to compel China into more comprehensive talks on trade, he would be disappointed. Beijing has spent the past decade trying to diversify its economy, and though the United States is its largest trade partner, domestic consumption is driving much of its economic growth today. (Exports rose just 1.6% on average each year from 2013-15.)
At home, the new president will face an even greater challenge. Although Trump may be able to protect existing manufacturing jobs in the United States, revitalizing the country’s manufacturing sector and creating jobs in new industries will be a struggle. Already, many companies are moving their manufacturing operations from China to cheaper destinations such as Indonesia. Moreover, many of the products that the United States imports from China include components produced elsewhere in Asia. Most computer chips in exported Chinese electronics products, for instance, come not from China’s tiny superconductor industry but from other producers in the region, such as Taiwan. Companies will be loath to move away from their established supply chains in Asia, or, for that matter, their consumer base. Asia boasts the largest growing consumer economy in the world today. Only 40% of Apple Inc.’s revenue comes from North America, while China alone accounts for roughly 25%.
Whether manufacturing returns to the United States depends on long-term trends in technology and manufacturing, many of which will still be playing out well after Trump leaves office. Over time, more and more industries will adopt new manufacturing techniques, including automation, that are gradually revolutionizing how products are made. So far, most industrial robots are concentrated in the electronics and auto industries, but they will become more prevalent in the coming years. Even with the advent of new production techniques, manufacturing could well remain in countries with cheaper labor and a more technologically proficient workforce than the United States has to offer.
Throughout Asia, workers with technology skills are readily available at a lower cost, and they may be able to adjust to new technologies just as easily as American workers. And even if changes in technology spark a renaissance in U.S. manufacturing, it will probably not create a glut of new jobs, since machines will be doing the heavy lifting.
Though Trump’s trade and manufacturing policies appealed to many voters in the hollowed-out heart of the U.S. manufacturing industry, they will be difficult to bring to fruition. As president, Trump may take a more active approach to challenging the geopolitical factors that stand in his way. But no amount of renegotiating, or even abolishing, trade deals will be able to restore the country’s manufacturing sector to its former glory.
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If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about manufacturing, about trade, and especially these…Russia has secretly deployed a new cruise missile in the country, a move a U.S. official labels an apparent violation of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987.The move is one of several incidents involving the Russian military and the United States that came to light on Tuesday. The Pentagon said that Russian planes flew low and fast above an American destroyer in the Black Sea last week in an "unsafe and unprofessional" manner and that a Russian intelligence vessel was detected heading north along the East Coast of the United States.Known by American officials as the SSC-8, the cruise missile has been in development for years and was most recently tested in 2014.The Obama administration hoped that Russia would not place the missile in operational status - a violation the INF Treaty, which bans American and Russian intermediate-range missiles based on land.But according to a U.S. official, Russia now has two battalions of the cruise missile. One is at a test location at Kapustin Yar, a Russian rocket launch and development site near Volgograd. The other was moved in December to another military location in Russia."The Russian Federation remains in violation of its INF Treaty obligations," said Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. Michelle Baldanza in a statement.State Department spokesman Mark Toner said in a statement, "As detailed most recently in the 2016 compliance report, the Russian Federation remains in violation of its INF Treaty obligations not to possess, produce or flight-test a ground-launched cruise missile with a range capability of 500 to 5,500 kilometers or to possess or produce launchers of such missiles.""We have made very clear our concerns about Russia's violation, the risks it poses to European and Asian security and our strong interest in Russia returning to compliance with the treaty," said Toner. "The administration is undertaking an extensive review of Russia's ongoing INF Treaty violation in order to assess the potential security implications for the United States and its allies and partners."The missile's deployment and operational status was first reported by The New York Times.Meanwhile, it appears Russia has resumed unusually close interactions with American military vessels in international waters.On Feb. 10 the Navy destroyer USS Porter noted three "unsafe and unprofessional" encounters with Russian military aircraft while in the Black Sea. In each of the incidents Russian aircraft approached the destroyer at an unspecified "low altitude," and some were at "high speed," according to the Pentagon.The Russian aircraft did not have their transponders on and did not respond when the destroyer's crew hailed the planes on radio."Such incidents are concerning because they can result in accident or miscalculation," said Baldanza.Russia's Defense Ministry denied any incidents occurred on Feb. 10 between Russian aircraft and the Porter. "All flights of our aircraft are done and have been done in neutral waters of the Black Sea in accordance with the international rights and security demands," said Igor Konashenkov, a Defense Ministry spokesman.Last April, Russian fighter jets repeatedly buzzed an American destroyer in the Baltic Sea, with one coming as close as 30 feet to the USS Donald Cook. That incident was one of several close encounters between the U.S. and Russian militaries in 2016, but officials said recently that such encounters had become infrequent.At the time of the Porter incident, Baldanza said, the destroyer was "conducting routine maritime operations in international waters in the Black Sea following the conclusion of Exercise Sea Shield."According to her, the first encounter involved a Russian Ilyushin 38, a maritime patrol and anti-submarine aircraft. The plane "flew in an unsafe and unprofessional manner due to the unusually low altitude" above the Porter.The second incident involved two SU-24 fighters and the third a different Su-24. A U.S. official said one of the fighters flew 300 feet above the Porter.Meanwhile, American officials are not expressing concern about the presence of a Russian intelligence-gathering ship headed north along the East Coast. The White House referred questions on this issue to the Defense Department According to a U.S. official, the Russian intelligence vessel Viktor Leonov was 70 miles off the coast of Delaware yesterday in international waters, heading in a northerly direction. American territorial waters extend 12 miles from shore.The official said the speculation is that the Russian ship is headed near the U.S. Navy's submarine base at New London, Connecticut.Soviet military monitoring of U.S. sub bases took place frequently during the Cold War but became infrequent after the fall of the USSR.In 2015 a Russian spy ship made its way south along the East Coast past the sub base at Kings Bay, Georgia, apparently mapping underwater communications cables off the Florida coast.If the Leonov follows previous deployment patterns, it will eventually head to south to Cuba.The U.S. official said there is not much concern about the Leonov's movements or its intelligence-gathering capabilities.The Russian ship was in the mid-Atlantic a month ago and made a stop in Kingston, Jamaica, in early February.1. ESPN’s Adam Schefter went on the media circuit this week and the New England Patriots were an important part of his discussions. Let’s take a look a what he had to say and what it means.
First, Schefter joined the Murph & Mac show and explained the Patriots decision to trade QB Jimmy Garoppolo to the San Francisco 49ers. Schefter says that “the Cleveland Browns had been calling the Patriots last spring over and over,” and that “they tried apparently this fall and never got to first base with them,” as the Patriots rejected their offers.
Then “the day before the trade deadline,” the Patriots spent five minutes constructing a trade with the 49ers because, as Schefter hypothesizes, Bill Belichick thought the 49ers would “treat [Garoppolo] the way that they thought he should be treated.”
This whole story requires us to believe that Belichick’s heart grew three sizes this winter, but more importantly it totally adds context to the Jamie Collins trade, right? If he didn’t want to send Garoppolo to the Browns |
from the southern marshes and proud graduate classes.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Montanabe Street, known for its book market and seen as the city’s intellectual heart. Photograph: Sam Tarling for the Guardian
Next to the entrance are five more contemporary photographs, of Haj Mohammed’s sons who were killed by a huge car bomb that targeted the book market eight years ago.
“This is all we have left. All around us is history,” he said, pointing at the framed memories as customers queue to pay for their tea. “It’s not just about our [family] history. This is about society.
“All that we knew has been overwhelmed since we were occupied by the Americans. We have felt like we were undressed. We don’t see people buying books or even textiles anymore. We no longer know what is coming for us, or when. Back in the 50s, we weren’t just living, we were competing with the rest of the world.”
The book fair on Montanabe Street is not as popular as it was. Once a place where all manner of fiction classics could be picked up for small change, religious texts and comic books now seem more prolific, especially mid-week in summer on the eve of Ramadan. “But you still won’t find anything else like it,” Haj Mohammed said. “It needs to be protected.”
In a palace on the edge of the Green Zone, General Abdul Amir al-Sammari, the man in charge of protecting Baghdad, was upbeat. There had been no major explosions in the capital for 10 days and the battle over the horizon had been going better lately. State security forces had played a role in the improvement, the general said, but the main contributors had been militia that work alongside the military and often take primacy over it.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Officers talk in the Baghdad operations command control room near the Green Zone. Photograph: Sam Tarling for the Guardian
Iraq’s security tsars largely endorse the role of the militias, known as the Popular Mobilisation Forces or locally as Hashd al-Shaabi. They are thought to number as many as 200,000 fighters, and nominally come under the authority of the prime minister’s office. Most of the groups are Shia. They are directly supported by Iran, and their authority is rooted in a call to arms from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shia cleric, last June.
“From January to June last year, we were isolated and alone,” Sammari said of army units in Baghdad, which at the time were besieged by increasingly muscular Isis forces on Baghdad’s western outskirts. “Then came the fatwa of the marja [Iraq’s highest Shia religious authority]. As soon as that happened, the street was with us.”
Last month, when Iraq’s military withdrew from Ramadi and allowed Isis to take full control of the city, the militias were sent to surround it. The pattern had already been set in smaller battles elsewhere in the country earlier this year. When the state fails, a parallel force steps into the fray.
Sammari acknowledged that Iraq’s military has rarely had the upper hand against Isis, but claim ed cooperation was improving. “It is true that lots of splits have happened that have weakened the morale of the military. We are trying to avoid the forces working as separate units and to unify. It is starting to happen.”
The tussle for power between the ailing state forces and the ascendant irregulars clearly rankles security chiefs, as it does many of Iraq’s politicians.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Security officers from a Shia militia frisk people entering a memorial for a military leader. Photograph: Sam Tarling for the Guardian
“Any nationalist must believe that the military is the strongest part of the state’s security,” said Sammari. “Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.”
Asked about regular complaints from Iraq’s Sunnis, who lost power when Saddam was ousted, that the militias have consolidated the hold of their rival sect on the country, Sammari responded: “When will they accept that they lost?”
On the other side of Baghdad in the district of Ghazaliya, the leader of the country’s largest Sunni institution has regularly warned of the dangers of the state being subjugated. Kutaiba al-Falahi, a spokesman for the Sunni waqf, said a failing political process was keeping Iraq’s disenfranchised Sunnis on the sidelines, allowing Isis to claim a role as their de facto representatives.
It would be better if the Americans came back. We can’t run the country ourselves Kutaiba al-Falahi
“Anbar is outside state control and the Kurds aren’t interested in Iraq as it was drawn a century ago,” he said. “Almost everyone we speak to wants a form of federalism. They want their basic needs met. The solution lies in real autonomy and authority for the provinces.”
In Falluja, 20 miles west of Baghdad and the closest city to the capital held by the jihadis, a local doctor who uses the name Abu Saleh said hope of the state resuming control had evaporated.
“I have no faith in the government, Sunni or Shia,” he said. “They are the ones who put us in the situation we are in now. The majority of people in Falluja aren’t with Isis, but some are tired and scared of the army. At least they have their homes now and their kids can go to school.
“They don’t want to be begging in the streets or begging the government to let them into Baghdad. If we had Sunni tribes who will come inside the city and fight Isis, we would feel safer.”
Al-Falahi said the plight of refugees from Anbar showed the standing of the broader Sunni community in the eyes of the state.
“We are all being labelled [as Isis supporters ]. We need the government to look at us like humans. There are refugees [from Ramadi ] sitting at the gates of Baghdad and they are not allowed in - the old the young and the sick living in tents in this heat because they don’t trust us. It would be better if the Americans came back. We can’t run the country ourselves.”Ostfriesland
Handschuhfächer fehlen - VW sucht 20.000 Parkplätze
Wer kann in Ostfriesland vorübergehend einen fabrikneuen Passat aufnehmen? Der VW-Konzern braucht dringend 20.000 Parkplätze. So viele Autos müssen wegen Lieferantenproblemen zwischengeparkt werden.
DPA Autoterminal neben dem VW-Werk in Emden
Neue Baustelle für den Volkswagen-Konzern: Die Wolfsburger suchen in Ostfriesland rund 20.000 Parkplätze für fabrikneue Passat-Fahrzeuge aus dem Emder Werk. Der Grund dafür sind Lieferprobleme bei Klappen für Handschuhfächer. Deshalb könnten bis zu 20.000 Neuwagen in der nächsten Zeit nicht komplett ausgestattet werden und müssten vorübergehend zwischengeparkt werden, bestätigte ein VW-Sprecher entsprechende Medienberichte.
Ursache des Materialengpasses war der Brand einer Produktionshalle bei einem Lieferanten in Tschechien vor drei Wochen. "Die nötigen Werkzeuge des Lieferanten können nicht so schnell nachgefertigt werden", sagte ein VW-Sprecher. Vorübergehend habe es Ersatzlieferungen mit Handschuhfach-Klappen aus einer anderen VW-Produktion in China gegeben. Diese Übergangslösung werde jedoch nur noch wenige Tage greifen.
Von Donnerstag an sind in Emden planmäßig vier Tage Kurzarbeit angesetzt. Bis zur Lieferung neuer Klappen kann es noch mehrere Wochen dauern. Parkräume sollen zunächst aus Kostengründen auf dem Werksgelände in Emden und bei Speditionen in der Nähe eingerichtet werden.
"Wir suchen weitere Flächen im Umkreis bis zu 100 Kilometern", sagte der Sprecher. Denkbar seien auch ungenutzte Gelände in Häfen, etwa beim JadeWeserPort in Wilhelmshaven. Dort waren bereits in der Vergangenheit für den Export bestimmte Porsche-Sportwagen geparkt worden, nachdem es in Bremerhaven zu Platzproblemen gekommen war.
msc/dpa(CNN) "Narcos" wrapped up its Pablo Escobar storyline in two terrific seasons, raising the question of what the show could possibly do for an encore without Wagner Moura in that role. The answer, it turns out, was to splendidly hit the reset button, with Pedro Pascal moving to the center and a quartet of Cali Cartel kingpins filling the void.
Boyd Holbrook's character has moved on, leaving Pascal, as DEA agent Javier Pena, to take over the narration chores. Yet with the horde of characters to track, even he plays a relatively modest role, as the show traces a criminal enterprise that Pena labels "the pinnacle of trafficking evolution; apex drug dealers."
Pena is actually somewhat uncomfortable due to his sort-of celebrity in helping to stop Escobar, but the Cali threat in the 1990s raises a new set of issues. For starters, the cartel's leader Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela (Damian Alcazar) is determined to go legit, in a move that raises the specter of "The Godfather" sequels.
As in those movies, transferring Cali's clout into respectable businesses isn't as simple as it sounds. And while the show starts somewhat slowly, the violence comes later in explosive and grisly fashion, as the Cali heavyweights prove every bit as ruthless and sadistic, albeit in somewhat different fashion.
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The array of characters is particularly strong, with Alberto Ammann as an openly gay leader of the cartel, who -- despite the time and place -- is completely accepted for who he is; Matias Varela as a family man trying to navigate the fine line between the DEA and his bosses; and Andrea Londo as the wife of a drug lord forced to seek the patronage to Gilberto's brother Miguel (Francisco Denis) to survive.
Read MoreHip-hop's most famous hype man, Flavor Flav, knows the value of time.
The reality star, author, and member of 2013 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Public Enemy has been wearing a dinner-plate-sized clock around his neck since 1987.
The comical artist, whose birth name is William Drayton Jr., made the timepiece one of music's funniest fashion statements. But there's actually a deeper meaning behind it.
Flavor Flav, who gave clocks to the top candidates during the three seasons of his dating show, "Flavor of Love," explained the origins of his unusual necklace during a 1994 MTV interview: "Before I started out wearing these clocks, we started off with little stopwatches, and one day I just wanted to do something out of the ordinary," he said during an interview with the cable channel.
A friend, rapper Son of Bazerk, dared him to replace the stopwatch with an actual clock, and he tried it. "It was looking crazy, but I liked it," he said. Public Enemy frontman Chuck D wore a clock for a brief stint, too, but it became a staple for Flavor. He told Vanity Fair that he owns more than 100 timekeepers.
Flavor said the clock joke eventually served a more serious purpose.
"The reason why I wear this clock is because it represents time being the most important element in our life," he said. "Time can't afford to be wasted, but not only that, but God only gave us one life. Each minute we live, we got to live each second to our best value. Time brought us up in here, and time can also take us out."
View photos
Even though Flavor often seems aloof, his accessory is a reminder that he is actually quite aware. "I always say, 'I'm clockin', I'm clockin'.' That means I'm paying attention, so you can't get fast on me because I know what time it is."
On Thursday, Public Enemy will become the fourth rap group to be inducted into the Rock and Hall of Fame, following Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run-D.M.C., and the Beastie Boys. The oft-arrested Flavor originally had conflicting court date in Las Vegas for allegedly threatening his fiancé's son with a butcher knife, but the judge agreed to change the date.
Follow me on Facebook, Twitter.It took President Bush 5 days to visit Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina hit and the media would never let him off the hook for it, even calling it a “stain” he could “never recover from.” It’s been a week since devastating flooding hit many parts of the same state, destroying thousands of homes and killing 13 people but President Obama still has not stopped golfing in Martha’s Vineyard to visit. While none of the networks acknowledged the backlash Obama was facing last night, both ABC and CBS brought up the criticism this morning but took every chance to downplay the President’s role and defend his choice to golf instead of coming to Louisiana’s aid.
While the last two nights the networks refused to even acknowledge Obama’s absence on the matter, Friday’s morning shows on CBS and ABC brought up the fallout from Obama’s absence. On CBS This Morning, correspondent Manuel Bojorquez touted the “support” Obama was getting from the governor of Louisiana and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. CBS made sure to include comments from Johnson and the governor defending Obama’s choice not to visit.
Similarly on ABC’s Good Morning America, White House correspondent Jonathan Karl tried to defend Obama against his critics saying, “Now Robin, as you know, no president really goes on vacation. The White House points out he's been getting regular briefings on this. He's dispatched his Homeland Security Secretary and the FEMA director to the state and offered any assistance the administration can offer.”
NBC’s Today did not even cover the backlash at all.
The contrast with how the media blasted Bush for not immediately visiting Louisiana compared to how they’ve carefully defended Obama for not visiting the state a week later, is too obvious not to point out. President Bush also delegated, touting his FEMA director, Michael Brown as doing “a heck of a job” for reason as to not being in the state the day the hurricane hit. While the media hit Bush for that, they’ve taken every opportunity to say President Obama was “on top of” the situation for doing the exact same thing--- sending FEMA and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to Louisiana. And while Bush actually stopped vacationing and addressed Katrina several times in that five-day period, The Washington Post called his response the “second worst” moment of his presidency. Meanwhile, the media has been reticent to call out Obama for continuing his vacation and largely remaining detached from the situation, aside from a local Louisiana newspaper which called him out for it. It’s doubtful the Post will write a similar article about Obama after he leaves office or add this to his list of “stains” on his legacy.
And here’s the kicker: President Obama himself had scathing criticism for President Bush’s response to Katrina, saying in a speech at Tulane University in 2008, to screaming applause,On the last morning of the last day Dontrell Stephens could still walk, the 20-year-old was bicycling across Haverhill Road, talking to a friend on a cellphone.
A truck slowed as he rode against traffic.
Palm Beach County Sheriff's deputy Adams Lin was watching schoolchildren waiting for a bus.
Later, he would say he followed Stephens to give him a traffic ticket for not bicycling properly. But he also would acknowledge he was suspicious of Stephens, whom he had not seen in the neighborhood before that morning, according to court records.
He intended to stop him, ask for identification and find out where he had come from and where he was going. He considered frisking him. But Lin, who is of Asian descent, denied racially profiling Stephens, who is black, and wore his hair in long dreadlocks.
When Stephens turned down a side road, Lin followed, stepping on the gas, turning on the siren and then the lights. He thought the way Stephens rode his bike was suspicious. He thought the way Stephens got off his bike was suspicious.
And four seconds after Lin got out of his patrol car, he shot Stephens four times, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
Lin said he opened fire because Stephens was reaching in his back waistband, possibly for a gun.
There was no gun.
An internal investigation and the State Attorney's Office have both cleared Lin of the September 2013 use of force. It was a good shoot, they ruled.
But the Stephens shooting illustrates key findings identified in a joint year-long Palm Beach Post/WPTV NewsChannel 5 investigation analyzing every officer-involved shooting in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast since 2000: In roughly one of every four shootings, Palm Beach County deputies fired at unarmed suspects. The Department of Justice has criticized jurisdictions where the percentage of shootings at unarmed suspects was sharply lower. Deputies disproportionately shot at young black men, a third of whom were unarmed. Non-deadly force options, such as Tasers or batons, were seldom used prior to shooting. PBSO rarely found fault with a deputy's decision to shoot, sometimes basing its decisions on cursory or incomplete investigations.
All of those issues figured prominently in the Stephens shooting.
Because Stephens is suing, Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw can't discuss the case.
In a recent interview with The Post, though, Bradshaw acknowledged policies and procedures regarding shootings can always be improved as new "best practices" are adopted.
But Bradshaw said he believes PBSO has a firm grasp on its use of lethal force. And he emphasized another belief that he also voiced in the wake of the Stephens shooting: Do what the deputy says and no will be injured.
Just what Lin told Stephens to do, though, remains up in the air. The crucial seconds before the shooting when Lin and Stephens speak to one another can't be heard on the recording from the patrol car's dashboard-mounted camera.
The gunshots can.
Trip to store for energy drink
In September 2013, Stephens had no job. He had recently served a few months in jail on a drug charge. But he also had no shortage of friends and a cousin who had offered to let him stay on her couch. He had a little brother whom he played ball with, and whose shoes he was wearing when he hopped on a borrowed bike to get an energy drink at a corner store.
Nearby, Lin was sitting in his patrol car at Haverhill, watching schoolchildren waiting for a bus.
He had worked hard to get there. PBSO's Community Policing Deputy of the Year in 2010-11, Lin had applied at several law enforcement departments in South Florida before PBSO hired him in 2004 and, after a 2007 tour in Afghanistan, welcomed him back.
Stephens said later he had probably seen the deputy before he started biking across Haverhill, holding up a cracked black flip phone while talking to a friend.
Lin saw a truck slow to avoid hitting him.
That alone warranted a citation, Lin said later. But the deputy also said he was suspicious because he caught a glimpse of Stephens' face — enough to convince him Stephens was a stranger to the neighborhood.
Stephens turned down a side street toward his friend's house.
Lin turned in after him. Believing Stephens was running away from him, he "chirped" his siren, turned on his lights and hit the gas.
When Stephens then biked between a mailbox and a fence toward his friend's house, a shortcut Lin could not easily follow in his patrol car, the deputy considered that further evidence of Stephens' intent to flee.
The dashcam video shows that Stephens looks back, then continues about 20 more feet to his friend's house, where he gets off the bike. Lin is now even more convinced that Stephens is about to take off on foot, not because he got off the bike, but because he put both feet over the same side to do so.
"The manner he stopped and got off his bicycle was consistent with someone who had run from me in the past," Lin said in a deposition: a "rolling run" where someone jumped off with both feet on one side and just kept going.
What happened next happened fast, and mostly out of sight: Lin runs from his car. The deputy is out of range of the dashcam and can't be seen. Stephens walks toward the deputy, then also disappears from the dashcam video. There is no audible recording of either.
Three seconds pass.
The audio suddenly snaps with the sound of pops. Stephens abruptly moves back into view, almost as though he is turning to run.
He isn't running. He's falling.
In his right hand, he is clutching the cellphone.
Lin walks over to him and orders him to roll over on his stomach. He maintains a shooting stance a few feet from the wounded man, until backup arrives.
"He was hiding behind the car," a clearly shaken Lin said at the scene. "I'm just giving him commands, I'm taking cover behind this car as I'm giving him commands, all of a sudden his left hand goes like this.
"He starts backing away from me and as soon as he backs away I'm like, 'Get on the ground. Get on the ground.'
"And I'm like 'Oh, s—t.' And I just threw three rounds."
Video shocks deputy
It is the description of events Lin will tell and retell. He said Stephens had nothing in either hand, reached toward his back waistband and, Lin thought, raised what looked like a gun, "a dark black object," in his left hand.Engadget Japan has shown a purported schematic of the iPhone 6S which it attributes to a reliable source in the Chinese supply chain. While the diagram does not appear to have originated from Apple, the design and marked dimensions are consistent with casing photos we obtained from a proven source.
We noted that any change in thickness was imperceptible, and the thickness marked on the schematic is 7.1mm – just 0.2mm thicker than the iPhone 6, and the exact same thickness as the iPhone 6 Plus. This also matches (within 0.03mm) that shown in a drawing we reported earlier …
NordVPN
With the design unchanged, and a minimal change in the depth of the phone, it’s likely that almost all existing cases will fit the new model. Our earlier report noted that the antenna lines are still present, though Apple does appear to be exploring the possibility of removing them for later models.
Check out our earlier piece for a full gallery of the casing photos.
Via Business InsiderCo-authored by Henry I. Miller
"Many of the 'healthiest foods' we eat may not be as healthy as we think" was the lede of a recent Channel 11 news story out of Pittsburgh. It was based on the Environmental Working Group's just released 2013 "Dirty Dozen" report on pesticide residues on produce, which is trotted out every year by the NGO. These misleading pseudo-analyses frighten consumers and actually discourage them from buying healthy fruits and vegetables.
The news story continues, "Pesticides are meant to kill pests, but the residue isn't meant to be eaten, and it could be harmful to your health." Actually, the only truth in that statement is that "pesticides are meant to kill pests." The rest of it is false, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, which unambiguously states that "U.S. food does not pose a safety concern based upon pesticide residues."
The Channel 11 news story is typical of the insidious reporting that results from the EWG list. (We refuse to call it a study.) In fact, such news stories are the very reason EWG releases the report each year -- to generate coverage that inhibits people from eating produce that isn't organic. Unless of course, the produce is on the relatively new list, "The Clean Fifteen," which contain the lowest level of pesticides, according to EWG.
EWG tries to make their "Shopper's Guide" appear legitimate by relying on samples taken and tested by the USDA and FDA. According to an article in The Huffington Post, "The EWG looked at six measures of pesticide contamination, gave each measurement a score from one to 100 and compiled the results.
But what was their methodology, if you could call it that? "In government tests analyzed by the Environmental Working Group, detectable pesticide residues were found on 67 percent of food samples after they had been washed or peeled. We found striking differences between the number of pesticides and amount of residues detected on Dirty Dozen Plus™ and Clean Fifteen™ foods." (Yes, they've trademarked the names.)
In essence their approach is (in our words), "Some produce had more residue and some had less. We put the ones with most on a list and called them 'dirty' and the ones with least and made a different list and called them 'clean.'"
This type of gimmick should result in an "F" in a 4th grade science fair, not adoring coverage in major media.
Federal agencies agree that pesticide residues, even from those topping the dirty dozen list, are not in the least harmful at the levels they occur. If you think the government agencies are in cahoots with "big agriculture" and you shouldn't believe them, consider that even the first lady in her "Let's Move" campaign advocates consumption of more fruits and vegetables, and hasn't insisted they be organic.
Yet the Dirty Dozen is resurrected each year, and each time -- like Charlie Brown fooled by Lucy pulling away the football at the last second -- the media buy into it.
The EWG's crying "Wolf!" about this non-issue began in 1995, when, backed by such eminent scientific entities as the Barbra Streisand Foundation (we are not making this up), the organization published its first "Dirty Dozen" -- a list of produce that supposedly contained the highest levels of chemical pesticides. The annual list, which this year includes some of the most nutritious and delicious components of our diet - such as apples, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, peaches, strawberries and grapes - is accompanied by an admonition to limit consumption of those kinds of fresh produce and to avoid conventionally grown varieties in favor of the more costly organic options.
However, a study published in 2011 in the Journal of Toxicology by Dr. Carl Winter and Josh Katz of UC-Davis showed that 90% of the cases "exposed" in EWG's 2010 list involved levels of pesticides 1,000 times lower than the chronic reference dose (the level of daily exposure likely to be without an appreciable risk of deleterious effects during a lifetime of chronic exposure). They concluded, "The potential consumer risks from exposure to the most frequently detected pesticides on the 'Dirty Dozen' list of foods are negligible and cast doubts as to how consumers avoiding conventional forms of such produce items are improving their health status."
Moreover, as Dr. Winter wrote in a separate commentary for the International Food Information Council, "Three-quarters of the pesticide/commodity combinations [identified by the EWG] showed consumer exposure estimates more than one million times lower than doses given to laboratory animals continuously over their entire lifetimes that do not show adverse effects."
These are critical observations because, as has been known from antiquity, "the dose makes the poison"; in other words, a substance is toxic only if the dose and length of exposure are sufficient to cause damage - a fundamental principle of toxicology seemingly alien to the EWG (which relies heavily on the percentage of samples with pesticide, rather than on potentially toxic levels). Moreover, the EWG's main recommendation - to "buy organic" - is belied by the fact that many organically grown versions of the "dirty" products are also "contaminated." As Winter and Katz pointed out, the same data from the Department of Agriculture Pesticide Data Program used by the EWG indicate that there are pesticide residues in nearly a quarter of organic food samples.
But there's an even more persuasive point to be made about our consumption of pesticides. The vast majority of pesticidal substances that we consume occur in our diets "naturally," and they are present in organic foods as well as conventional ones. In a landmark research article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues found that "99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves. Only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests, and about half (27) are rodent carcinogens; these 27 are shown to be present in many common foods."
The bottom line of Ames' experiments: "Natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests. We also conclude that at the low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant." In other words, consumers who buy overpriced organic foods in order to avoid pesticide exposure are focusing their attention on 0.01 percent of the pesticides that they consume.
The "Dirty Dozen" list is always a headline grabber for EWG, so it is no wonder that the media-hungry activist group keeps updating the same worthless analysis each year. The report informs -- or more aptly, misinforms -- the public conversation about the alleged dangers of pesticides on food. EWG cleverly publishes the report in the spring, just as Americans are getting excited about the prospect of summer produce.
The media have failed dismally to do their homework. Reporters consistently fail to ask pertinent questions about dose, exposure, likelihood of actual harm or compliance with federal regulations. Had they done so, they would have discovered that the pesticide tolerances in food established by the EPA are extraordinarily conservative -- that is, highly risk averse -- and that even these stringent limits are exceeded less than one percent of the time. But reporters and editors regurgitate the same old story, touting the Dirty Dozen's supposed dangers while ignoring the science that belies the warnings
Although the minuscule amounts of synthetic pesticides in our foods pose negligible health risks, some activists actually advise consumers not to eat fruits and vegetables at all if they can't afford organic varieties -- in spite of decades of evidence that those who eat the most conventionally grown fruits and vegetables have half the cancer rates for practically every type of cancer and live longer than those who eat less.
We will never convince the intransigent ideologues of the error of their ways, but the media can -- and must -- do better at presenting accurate and complete information.Photo: Courtesy The Vintage Technology Association Nick Holonyak was sure the LED would replace the incandescent light bulb when he presented it to GE executives 50 years ago. While the incandescent is still king in homes across the nation, the LED has transformed lighting in more ways than Holonyak could have imagined. From those first dim red diodes to powerful streetlights in major cities, the LED has made its mark on the world. The Ubiquitous Red LED The first LEDs were red. This wasn’t an aesthetic choice. LEDs are made by building layers of semiconductor crystals on a wafer. As the layers are added, dopants are added to determine the color of the LED. The tiny wafer is placed into molten liquid and metal contacts and leads are then added. The mixture used in the first LEDs -- gallium arsenide phosphide -- produces a natural red color. That’s why red became the default color choice for so many indicator lights. New processes have delivered a rainbow of available LED colors, making them suitable for far more than battery indicators and warning lights. But for the first 10 years of their existence, LEDs were red.
Image: A Japanese Busicom ad for the LE-120A. The First Pocket Calculator As relatively inexpensive, low-power LEDs began replacing incandescent bulbs in electronics, prices for those electronics fell into a much more consumer-friendly range. The Busicom LE-120A "HANDY-LE" was the first calculator to use the relatively new segment LEDs in a display. A seven-segment LED display contains seven individual LEDs with one display package. The $400 calculator appeared on the market in January 1971 and was in the pockets of nerds everywhere by Valentine’s Day.
Image: A Pulsar ad for the Time Computer. The First LED Watch The centuries-old art of watchmaking also felt the presence of the LED when, in 1972, Pulsar introduced the first LED watch. Dubbed the Time Computer, the watch was reportedly accurate to within 60 seconds per year. It cost $2,100 because it was the first to utilize LED technology in a small package and it relied on electronics to tell the time. Unfortunately, all this new technology devoured batteries, which is why the watch required the wearer to press a button to see the time. Pulsar introduced a calculator watch in 1975, which, not coincidentally, is right about the time teachers started requiring students to show their work on math tests.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired From Indicator to Light Source In 1993, Shuji Nakamura had a breakthrough in doping (the name for the process by which manufacturers introduce impurities into an LED to change its color properties) that led to bright blue LEDs. Blue LEDs with yellow phosphor coatings gave us the white LED and a whole host of new applications. Suddenly, the LED could be more than just a red dot telling you that you’d left your Walkman on; now it could illuminate the world. As LEDs grew brighter, the flashlight industry switched over from incandescent lights. The flashlights used less power, and the bulbs never had to be replaced. Now it’s difficult to find a flashlight without LED bulbs.
Image: From an early commercial for LA Gear's original L.A. Lights. Light-Up Shoes LA Gear introduced a light-up shoe in 1992. Initially marketed to children, the shoes had a red LED that would light up when pressure was applied to the heel. It was a goofy idea that was the bright spot on a rather glum year for the shoe company. The company had so much faith in the future of light-up footwear, it introduced an adult version called Light Gear. Yes, they were for Robert Downey Jr. and the Batman movies; the '90s were a weird time for shoes.
Optical Mice The optical mouse was invented in the early '80s. But it wasn’t until 1999, when Microsoft introduced the IntelliMouse Optical, that the technology became widely available. The mouse replaced the filth-attracting roller ball with a bright LED. The mouse used image sensors in conjunction with an LED to track the movements of the mouse on any surface. It also signaled the end of the perpetually disgusting mouse pad.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired From LED Backlighting to OLED The world of HDTVs has moved at an incredible pace in the past 15 years. The CRT is out and HDTV is in. One important component of all this has been, yes, the LED. LED backlighting replaced CCFL-backlighting, delivering higher contrast ratios and an improved color gamut. Plus, the resulting TVs used less electricity. The first TV with LED-backlighting was the $10,000 Sony Qualiia 005. Introduced in 2004, the 46-inch TV transformed the entire industry. Currently a 60-inch HDTV with LED backlighting will set you back about $1,500 to $2,000. But the LED invasion of HDTVs didn’t stop with backlighting. LG showed off a 55-inch ultra-thin OLED HDTVs at 2012’s CES. The organic carbon-based compounds in the OLED can be illuminated with an electrical current, with no need for an additional backlighting. The result: The TV is only 4 millimeters thick and weighs just 16 pounds. OLEDs also use less power, offer better viewing angles, produce richer colors, and have higher contrast ratios than LCD TVs. One catch: As with the first backlit-LED TVs, LG’s 55-inch showpiece has an early adopter price: $8,000.
Image: Audi Light Up the Road Changing out the lights on a car can be a pain, with proprietary fasteners, awkward panels, and random engine components blocking access. For the 2010 A8 L, Audi replaced all the incandescent lights with LEDs. The lights will probably last longer than the car. Other German carmakers followed suit. The long lifespans and low power needs of LEDs make them ideal for vehicles. But beyond practical considerations, there’s an undeniable cool factor, too.
Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired Light Bulb CFL light bulbs give your home the pleasant ambiance of a morgue. While the move away from incandescent lights is inevitable, the shift a new home lighting technology is at a crossroads. CFLs have been on the market for years but lack the warmth of the traditional light bulb. LEDs can recreate that warmth with less electricity, but they are prone to overheating. Plus, like CFLs, they can be pricey. That hasn’t stopped companies like huge corporations like Philips and GE from introducing new LED lights. But these companies are not alone. Lighting upstart Switch is working on bringing its own LED light bulb to the market. It’s a beautiful piece of technology that makes you want to throw your lamp shades away.As we approach round twelve of the Premier League this weekend we thought that it would be good to analyse the Premier League’s top creators and really find out which players are the most dangerous creative threats to Premier League defences. In this article we will be looking at a few different angles of creativity: Total, Frequency, Open-play frequency, Set-play frequency, Clear-cut frequency, Total Passes per Chance created and Accurate Passes per chance created. Will we find out which players are the most creative threats in the Premier League after analysing all of the angles stated above? Let’s find out.
Total Chances Created
As many will know, and has been beaten to death by Liverpool fans, Steven Gerrard is the most creative player in the league at the moment in terms of total chances. An astonishing 48% of his chances are created via set-play however using totals doesn’t really give you an accurate indicator in terms of which player is the most creative. The totals do not take into account the total amount of minutes played this season and therefore are not a fair comparison which leads us to look at the stats for Minutes Per Chance Created.
Most Frequent Chance Creator
This Top 5 is a who’s who of creativity in the Premier League and the five players listed are those that you’d expect to see in the list. David Silva takes the top spot as most frequent creator so far in this Premier League season creating a chance every 21.4 minutes. Christian Eriksen is impressing in terms of his numbers coming in second place with 23.78 mins per chance creation (Note: All of the players shown below have |
City. Saturday’s game will be the Lions’ third in six days, having lost in Portland on Sunday before returning home for Wednesday night’s victory.
Midfielder Cristian Higuita will sit out again, recovering from a calf injury. Kreis said Friday afternoon that he “is not quite there yet.”
Dallas is highly motivated and broke a 10-game winless streak with a 2-0 victory over the Colorado Rapids. That game also was played on Wednesday, however, so it has been a short turnaround with travel for the Texas side fighting for a playoff spot.
“Right now, 100 percent of the focus is just on rest, recovery and regeneration,” Kreis said after a light training session Friday. “The majority of the work comes from watching video and preparing as best we can tactically for Dallas.
“It’s a very, very dangerous team. I think they’ve gone through a really difficult patch, but in my mind it’s as really high quality team with a lot of high, high quality players. So, we need to be prepared for their best. We know — I think we feel the same way — that we just caught a little bit of confidence in this last game. I think you’re going to see two teams going after it tomorrow and two teams that have a new, fresh sense of energy and belief.”
Dallas enters the match at sixth in the West, the final playoff position, and is tied in points with No. 5 Real Salt Lake. But, the clubs also are just one point above No. 7 Houston, meaning this game could have severe repercussions if Dallas walks away with nothing.
Despite the recent freefall, Dallas was the 2016 U.S. Open Cup champion and Supporters Shield winner. The squad has a strong midfield that features U.S. men’s national team standout Kellyn Acosta; Mauro Diaz, who has worked his way back from an Achilles injury over the last few months; Michael Barrios, who leads the team with 14 assists; and Roland Lamah, who has nine goals this season.
“We know they're a good attacking team,” Lions midfielder Richie Laryea said. “They have a lot of good players in midfield and attacking third. We just have to be aware of some of the special players they have.”
Orlando City is ninth in the East, five points behind the sixth-place New York Red Bulls, who have a game in hand. Though the Lions mathematically have not been eliminated from playoff contention, there is little chance they can advance to the postseason.
After finding success against New England with a lineup that looked a bit different and featured Kaká as a striker alongside Dom Dwyer and leading scorer Cyle Larin (12 goals) on the bench, Kreis said he is seriously considering putting out the same starting XI. Kaká leads the team in assists (5) and is now second in goals (6).
“We haven’t been able to see video of Dallas, but we did practice what we did and what we were effective with in the New England game: to be clinical in front of goal, to keep the ball,” Orlando City midfielder Yoshimar Yotún said. “And mostly we’ve been focusing on ourselves. We showed we can get good results Wednesday. … If we do the same, we’ll be able to get results not only Saturday but the rest of the season.”
ardelgallo@orlandosentinel.comThere are about 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States of America. According to the NAACP, African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. If you asked me why I went to jail, the easiest explanation would be to say, because 'I'm Black.' Unfortunately there isn't a simple answer to this question; Being that I never actually grew up in an impoverished community and the fact that I am the first person in my family to ever go to jail, the stereotypical urge to categorize my situation doesn't apply. No... Not the same way it would for the rest of my friends who have been incarcerated. The roots are much deeper and the answer is far more extensive. It's an answer I will be sharing for the first time today.
I grew up in a middle class home, 15 minutes away from Washington D.C. in Glenn Dale, Maryland. My mother, Julia, a paralegal just shy of earning a master's degree, purchased our home with some financial help from my stepfather, Martin. The neighborhood bordered The Bowie (middle-class, African American city) and Glenarden (lower-class African American city) areas. My first year of high school, I attended Duval High, home of the Duval Tigers. It's located in one of most notorious neighborhoods in the Prince George's County, Maryland area. It's safe to say Duval was one of the worst schools in the county at the time. My days at Duval consisted of talking to girls, cutting class and looking for more girls to talk to. I always went for the girls that liked the bad guys. At Duval, the best way to fit in with the cool crowd was to act up. This mentality would throw me in a whirlwind of trouble for the next six years.
Three years and three different high schools later, I found myself behind a shatterproof window. Directly across from me was a Black male about the age of 20, eating a cold bologna and cheese sandwich exactly identical to the one I had in my hand. Next to him was what looked like a middle age, Hispanic man whose face was so battered I had trouble believing he could even see his sandwich and just assumed he was eating it based off his sense of feeling and judgement. As he began to taste the cheese, bread and processed meat made by inmates, I was getting my first taste of incarceration. The fact that I was only 17 in an adult prison proves the extent of what my charges could have been. In the state of Maryland, a minor only gets charged as an adult for the following: murder, rape and anything that involves being armed with a weapon. My charges in total carried over 80 plus years in prison. My bond/bail was $300,000. The only thing I could do was sit down and realize that all those years of trying hard to be cool had finally caught up to me. I was charged with armed robbery with no hopes of getting out.
My days as a juvenile inmate consisted of breakfast at 4 a.m., educational program from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with lunch in between, dinner at 4 p.m., and the rest of the time in-between to mingle with other inmates, watch TV or stay in my cell and reflect. Weekends were less educational and were use for more TV or reflecting time, and Sundays were left for us to hone in on our spiritual sides. This was no place for a 17 year old developing mind, if you asked me. But if you asked the justice system, it was perfect. They would tell you I was right where I belonged, regardless of the fact that I was not yet convicted and could be completely innocent. Regardless of the fact that this was my first offense ever. Ignoring the fact that the weapon used, which was the only reason I was in an adult jail, was never found. There were 35 other juvenile inmates like me. We made up a small percentage of the nearly 2,000 inmates at the Prince George's County correctional facility. All of us had serious charges, orange jumpsuits and, at one point, a future.
My first visit in in 'the system' came to an end 6 months after going in when my lawyer convinced the judge to release me on private home detention. Months of prayers had been answered. During my stay, I had been practicing Christianity much more than when I was in the outside world. My plans and interest in education were at an all-time high for the first time, and I was eager to finish high school and move on to college. In 2010, I attended Prince George's Community College in hopes of transferring to The University of Maryland. My major was computer science, and the goal was to one day work as an I.T. I figured it was a good source of income and I had a slight interest in it due to a summer job prior at Tech U.S.A. A job that only God could tell you how I got it since I had been registered in the system as a felon.
In October 2011, I was a full time student with a job working as barber, but all of a sudden, I was back behind bars. Without my knowledge, the woman running the private home detention company decided to violate me due to late payments. $350 dollars a month isn't the easiest to keep up with when you have $3,000 worth of restitution, $1000 of court fees and college tuition to pay. Nonetheless, that orange jumpsuit that I thought I'd never see again, became my uniform for another three months until my violation hearing transformed the orange into denim jeans and a blue shirt that read "D.O.C." D.O.C stands for Department of Correction. Translation: I had graduated from county jail to state prison and it became my home for the rest of my three year sentence (1 year).'Anxious' market slides further
Updated
Falls on the main Chinese share markets have driven the local bourse lower, completely erasing a tentative late morning recovery.
The Australian share market fell steeply in early trade this morning as investors factored in the impact of Europe's debt turmoil and the US credit downgrade.
The major Australian share indices both posted losses of more than 2 per cent on opening, before pulling back some of those losses.
However, falls of 3.7 per cent in Shanghai and 4 per cent in Hong Kong by 2:15pm (AEST) have seen the Australian market fall back into losses of around 2.5 per cent.
The ASX 200 had lost 109 points to 3,997 by 2:30pm, which is its first trip below 4,000 in more than two years.
The broader All Ordinaries Index was down 99 points to 4,071.
Tokyo's Nikkei had also seen steeper falls by early afternoon, and was down 2.5 per cent, after being around 1 per cent lower most of the morning.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were down 258 points to 11,144 by 2:00pm in the first US trading since Standard and Poor's downgraded the US credit rating to AA+.
Royal Bank of Scotland's head of trading in Australia, Justin Gallagher, says the nearest thing to a certainty on the market is continued volatility, with investors unsure about the economic and financial implications of the US downgrade.
"We're certainly in uncharted territory in regards to the US being downgraded," he said.
"No doubt the markets will be very anxious tonight, and a continuation of that nervousness is likely to continue in the short-term."
The falls in Australia have been broad-based, with 184 of the top 200 listed companies trading lower by mid-afternoon.
The major banks were all lower: the Commonwealth was down just 0.6 per cent, but NAB was down 3 per cent.
Retailers were also down, with Myer and Harvey Norman off 3.6 per cent, David Jones down 2.5 per cent, and JB Hi-Fi down 1.3 per cent after bouncing back from steeper early losses on its profit report.
In an indication of the volatility and conflicting forces on the market, so-called defensive stocks, considered not as vulnerable to fluctuations in the economic cycle, were among those companies falling, with Telstra and Woolworths both trading substantially lower.
The Australian dollar followed the afternoon market rout, losing about a cent to 103.3 US cents by 2:36pm.
Topics: business-economics-and-finance, markets, currency, stockmarket, money-and-monetary-policy, international-financial-crisis, australia
First postedRedditor TophatMcMonocle has a humorous but useful suggestion for ensuring that you learn your new tech products inside and out: keep those manuals in the bathroom, where you're desperate for something to read.
If you've been known to ignore the cardinal rule of technology ("Read the F****ing Manual"), you can use this trick to form better habits:
Put new product manuals in the [bathroom]. Then read them little by little. Within a day, or several days, you'll understand the new item's functions without having to have dedicated an afternoon for study.
Advertisement
Sure, it's a bit silly, but as many of us at Lifehacker can tell you, 90% of tech problems can be solved by reading the manual to begin with—and as we enter the holiday season, where you're sure to accumulate lots of new gadgets, this bit of strategic placement could come in handy.
Photo by Sean Winters.
LPT For Bathroom Readers: Put new product manuals in the s***er. | RedditA far-right party in Germany has been widely criticised after one of its leading members made racist comments about footballer Jerome Boateng, a member of the national team.
Alexander Gauland, deputy chief of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, told the Sunday newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) that Germans would not like to live next door to Boateng.
The 27-year-old Bayern Munich defender and member of the German national team has a Ghanaian father and was born and brought up in Berlin.
"People find him good as a footballer, but they don't want to have a Boateng as a neighbour," Gauland said.
On Sunday, Gauland attempted to backtrack.
"I have never, as the FAS insinuates, insulted Mr Boateng," he told German daily Bild. "I do not know him nor would I therefore have the idea to devalue him as a personality."
READ MORE: The rise of Germany's anti-refugee right
Yet, FAS put out a statement saying both of its reporters who interviewed 75-year-old Gauland in Potsdam on Wednesday had a record of his comments.
AfD party chief Frauke Petry tried to calm the storm, telling Bild that Gauland "cannot recall whether he made that statement".
"Independent of that, I apologise to Mr Boateng for the impression that arose," she said, before tweeting: "Jerome Boateng is a super footballer who is rightly a member of the German national team. I'm looking forward to the European championships."
'Boateng is my neighbour'
Nevertheless, Gauland's comments drew widespread condemnation by several top figures in German football and politics, as well as social media users.
The manager of the German national team, Oliver Bierhoff, said: "It isn't the first time that we've been confronted with such statements. They need no comment. The people who made them are simply discrediting themselves."
Footballer Benedikt Howedes, who won the 2014 World Cup alongside Boateng in the German team, wrote, "if you want to win the title for Germany, you need neighbours like him" alongside a picture of Boateng on Twitter.
Wenn du für Deutschland Titel gewinnen willst, brauchst du Nachbarn wie ihn. #Abwehr #???????? pic.twitter.com/hXzsI5aCq2 — Benedikt Höwedes (@BeneHoewedes) May 29, 2016
Meanwhile, Bayern Munich chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said racism should be eradicated.
"Discrimination of any kind has no place in sports and in our society. It deserves the red card," Rummenigge said.
German Justice Minister Heiko Maas criticised Gauland's comments as "unacceptable and shabby".
"People who say things like that unmask themselves, and not just as a bad neighbour," he wrote on Twitter.
Einfach nur niveaulos und inakzeptabel.Wer so redet, entlarvt sich selbst - und das nicht nur als schlechter Nachbar https://t.co/pRkMo3nRPg — Heiko Maas (@HeikoMaas) May 29, 2016
Several social media users also took to Twitter to express their support for the footballer.
i'd rather live next to 1000 boatengs than to one AfD politician. #Boateng — annie (@notarunwaygurl) May 29, 2016Buy Photo Doug Marrone (Photo: Mike Groll, AP File photo)Buy Photo
Back from a long holiday vacation and I see where Buffalo Bills coach Doug Marrone opted out of his contract.
Opted out? Hmmmm. Why don't we just say what Marrone did? He quit on his team, his players and western New York all together. He took the money and ran, just like his favored quarterback, Kyle Orton, whose timid play foreshadowed a player planning to retire.
Only in the NFL circa 2015 can an overrated college coach skip town after two years and a 15-17 record as an overrated professional coach. Marrone is reportedly coveted by more than a few teams, more proof that the world is flat.
From this bar stool, the Marrone Mess will prove a blessing, opening the door for a true leader with character that runs deeper than taking care of No. 1. Someone like Frank Reich perhaps?
The legendary Bills backup quarterback of the Super Bowl Era has built an impressive coaching resume, and with his oratory and tactical skills could be well suited to take over a roster that isn't far from the Promised Land of 10 wins.
Marrone came billed as a tough-minded coach and skilled teacher, endorsed by some of the biggest names in football. But that reputation wobbled like many of Orton's passes.
Marrone was hired by the Bills to develop a franchise QB and stellar offensive line. Instead, he gave up on EJ Manuel after just 14 games, his line was among the worst in the NFL, his offense the reason Buffalo "opted out'' of the playoffs for a 15th consecutive season.
His claim to fame as Bills boss? Being smart enough to hire two excellent defensive coordinators (Mike Pettine and Jim Schwartz) and an agent shrewd enough to negotiate a $4-million golden parachute in his contract in the event of an ownership change and a future not to his liking.
“He proved a poor game manager, hungry for more power and security as he clashed with others in the Bills front office, and he was thin skinned. That's a personality trait worse than hating traffic if he lands with the Jets.”.
He proved a poor game manager, hungry for more power and security as he clashed with others in the Bills front office, and he was thin skinned. That's a personality trait worse than hating traffic if he lands with the Jets. Syracuse's loss surely was not Buffalo's gain.
And somewhere Kyle Orton is poolside with an umbrella drink. Yes, he gave the Bills the best chance of winning in 2014. But it came at the expense of a long-term plan and now we know why.
With a foot out the door, Doug Marrone wasn't trying to win games for the franchise, he was trying to win for Doug Marrone so much so he wouldn't even give Manuel the start in a meaningless season finale at New England.
How shameful is that? The Bills' 9-7 record was the first winning mark in a decade. But it was more hollow than a hustler's promise. The manifestation of a blue-collar coach with white-collar loopholes in his contract.
Players talk. And Marrone's $4 million opt-out is the price he paid for his credibility.Mostly Peaceful Protests Marred By Occasional Looting, Arson, and Murder
�Just know that all white people are f****** devils, all white cops are f******* devils and white people," said a man identified as Scott's brother.
Who, by the way, cannot be a racist, definitionally, because he's black, and you can only be racist if you have power.
Do observe in the first video that a gang of black thugs chases down a random white guy to beat him; I wonder, who has the power here?
I'm sorry -- please explain to me why it'swho needs to learn that people of a different skin color aren't Free-Range Scapegoats to be beaten or murdered at will Because Angry About Things.
Also enjoy the second video, which begins very heartwarming; but then watch on, to see this guy get harrangued for actually selling peace.
Oh by the way: The DoJ is sending its Riot Promotion division to Charlotte.
No really-- after Ferguson and Baltimore, they sent an Alinsky-like team to teach rioters how to organize.
So that's good.
Jazz Shaw: Rioting and looting and assaulting and murdering are not "protesting."
Oh, this one is truly heartwarming: "Protester" bodychecks CNN "reporter."
I'll admit to getting a little turgid when the rioter decked the CNN reporter. Given the lawlessness shown, I felt appropriately ashamed afterwards.Also available, Cercube 3 (iOS 8 & 9)
Cercube is a fully featured YouTube extension, which adds tons of useful features to the official YouTube app available on the AppStore.
Cercube was crafted with love to beautifully integrate to the YouTube app and extend its abilities while keeping its beautiful look and feel.
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Downloads
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One of Cercube's remarkable features is the ability to download videos while viewing any video, with just a tap of the button you'll be able save that video on your device.
Later on, you can save the video to Camera Roll or import it as a song to your Music library.
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Cercube enables Background Playback for YouTube app.
That gives you the ability to quit the application while playing your favorite Music and still have the audio playing throughout your device.
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Cercube enables HD playback on Cellular Data, giving you the ability to choose a custom resolution for playing videos.
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Video ads can be incredibly annoying sometimes. Cercube does a great job of getting rid of them.
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Bypass Age Restrictions
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Cercube gives you the ability to view any age restricted video on YouTube.
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Block Promoted Video Ads
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Block promoted video cells from appearing on "What to watch" page and few other places.
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With Cercube, you can set the default playback quality to 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p
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Cercube gives you the ability to auto replay the current video when playback is finished.
Cercube is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 7.0 or later
See larger Screenshots below..Handy Motorsport are set to remain as a one-car entry in the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship for 2017 after enjoying a breakthrough season with Rob Austin this past year.
Following on from two character-building campaign’s in the BTCC, Simon Belcher elected to move into a team manager role for 2016 with the Independent outfit bringing in double race winner Austin.
Despite a tough first half of the season the Toyota Avensis hit form at Snetterton right through to the finale and Austin subsequently notched a trio of podium finishes, underlining the potential the Swindon-based team have to challenge at the front on a regular basis.
Originally securing a second TOCA BTCC Licence (TBL) prior to the start of the 2016 season, Belcher and Handy Motorsport never proceeded in their plans to expand into a two-car team. Handing the TBL back to series organisers, Belcher has admitted that he has no interest in expanding and instead want to build on the foundations of becoming a solid front running single car team.
Speaking to BTCC Crazy, he explained: “We will be definetly running just one car again in 2017, running a second car doesn’t make sense. If we secured a second licence then of course we could run a second car but that may not be productive in the long run.
“We as a team have made massive strides over the last year or so and having Rob on-board has been brilliant. If we were to expand then there is always the possibility that we go backwards again because we are having to split our focus, etc. With one car we can do everything to near perfection and with faultlessly funded budget.
“I made the decision at the end of 2015 to step away from the driving side to ensure the team could move on to the next level. Although I miss racing in the BTCC I have really embraced and enjoyed the new managerial role, we’ve had podiums and now the next aim is wins as well as a real push for the Independents title.”
Although Austin is yet to confirm where he will be for 2017 campaign, both parties are expected to remain with each other. Despite the Toyota Avensis proving to still be a force to be reckoned with in the hands of Austin and Speedworks’ Tom Ingram, Belcher hinted towards the team assessing their options and what possibilities could arise.
Belcher added: “It is only right that we assess our options for next year, this championship constantly evolves and moves forward so you can’t stand still for too long. Although there are several months to go until the first round there is a lot to be done in terms of making sure you arrive as ready as you can be.
“I think if we were to go down the avenue of running a new car then it would be one that we have built in-house – we certainly have all of the resources and people to do so. That being said, the Toyota is a fantastic car and there is still, we believe, a bit more that we can get out of it.”
As the road to a new year and season continues to gather momentum, Belcher hinted that the team may well make an announcement at the Autosport Show International, held at the NEC Arena in Birmingham in mid-January.
“It would make sense for us to confirm our plans at the Autosport Show,” revealed the former Clio Cup racer. “It is an event where we have made announcements before and they have always gone down really well. We shall see how the next few weeks pan out and go from there though.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jakob Ebrey PhotographyEditor’s Note: Tyler Perry is partner and general manager at Bateman Group, a PR and social media communications firm with offices in New York and San Francisco.
When WeWork scored a $355 million funding round with a stunning $5 billion valuation at the end of 2014, the shared workspace startup became the poster child for New York City’s exploding tech scene.
For New Yorkers, however, the sight of increasing numbers of tech offices has become ever more common.
While Silicon Valley grabs attention as the center of the tech universe and birthplace for some of the biggest startups, the most recent growth data shows that the NYC tech boom is living up to its own Silicon Alley hype.
A confluence of forces is behind the rising tide of the city’s tech. A voyage inside the workings of New York City’s startup scene reveals tech players and funding drawn to the region’s bedrock industries of finance and fashion, and media, marketing and commerce.
New York has also been the beneficiary of city and state policies favoring business incentives to attract tech in the wake of the financial crisis and jobs exodus. Mayor Bill de Blasio has continued in the footsteps of former mayor Michael Bloomberg, making tech central to the scene.
“Technology is driving innovation across New York City’s industries – from fashion to finance to manufacturing, making it more necessary than ever for the City’s digital community to have a central platform,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the October launch of Digital.NYC, the city’s hub of tech services intended to make the digital economy accessible to all New Yorkers.
Like San Francisco’s tax credits to Twitter and others, New York City has also extended tax breaks to attract tech. Buzzfeed in December was granted a $4 million tax credit for its new 194,000 square foot headquarters to encourage it to stay amid concerns it may go elsewhere. That came after Etsy scored a new 200,000 square foot Brooklyn digs and a $5 million tax break. It’s a trend that’s playing out repeatedly across New York City.
Another factor weighing in New York’s favor: tech job growth is exceeding Silicon Valley’s. Since 2008, technology employment in New York has grown roughly 40 percent, with financial and legal services coming in below pre-recession numbers. While the growth in New York has been slightly faster than Silicon Valley — 8.4 percent versus 5.2 percent as of June, according to commercial real estate giant Jones Lang LaSalle — the size of Silicon Valley’s workforce still remains significantly larger than New York’s, at 213,000 compared with 90,000.
The biggest single indicator that NYC tech is rocketing, however, is its venture capital deal flow. Venture capital has taken a huge leap in NYC, signaling a wave of new opportunities particular to the Empire State.
Venture capital investments jumped 138 percent to $1.7 billion in the New York Metro region in the third quarter compared with a year ago, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. For the same period, Silicon Valley venture capital grew 20 percent to $4.4 billion.
Investments in the metropolitan area companies are coming for good reason. Media and entertainment, retail and consumer products are all regional strengths, attracting new businesses centered on tech.
Digital Media Boom
New York has long owned the title of media capital of the world. That is now extending deeper into the digital arena. Investments in media and entertainment shot up more than threefold to $1.8 billion across all regions, and much of that came to the big city.
Brooklyn-based Vice Media scored a $500 million investment during the period, highlighting the edgy publisher’s expansion and New York’s growing digital media presence. New York City-based Buzzfeed attracted $50 million in the period as well. In the current quarter, the city’s Vox Media has nabbed $46.5 million. Meanwhile, content distribution platform Outbrain is expected to go public early this year at a $1 billion valuation.
Online Retail Ride
New York, of course, is a worldwide center for commerce, especially for fashion, art and investments. It’s therefore no surprise that the city’s become a hotbed for online retail upstarts. Investments in retail shot up sixfold to $233 million last quarter for all regions, including New York City, as startups emerge to shake up businesses in previously insular industries void of innovation.
Flash sales sites became all the rage in the recession but have since struggled to gain footing as continued product availability remains a growing concern in up markets. NYC-based Fab took in $336 million in venture capital over several years and flamed out, selling in November for a reported $15 million.
It remains to be seen whether rival Gilt Groupe, which has taken in $236 million in funding, will prosper amid IPO speculation. The company’s trailblazer status and deep roots in the fashion industry have enabled it to maintain a following and continue to get good merchandise. Another beacon is Artsy, which received $18.5 million this year for its efforts to connect more people to the cutting edge art flowing in and out of New York’s galleries.
Product to the People
NYC is also a hub for startups that are evolving in core commerce areas. Consumer products and services shot up nearly fivefold to $453 million in the quarter for all regions, with investments going to New York startups.
The new generation of retail startups is mixing content marketing and product curation. Think companies like Thrillist Media Group, which blends content with commerce aimed at men. The startup category includes New York-based Birchbox, which offers subscription boxes of beauty samples as well as relevant content and tips. It attracted $60 million in 2014.
Consumer financial services are an area of slow and steady growth, with startups like Betterment, which closed $32 million in 2014 to open up the wealth management industry to the 99 percent. Then there’s OnDeck, whose late-2014 IPO is riding the online lending wave started by Lending Club and Prosper.
Does all this mean New York City is on its way to having its own stable of so-called tech unicorns? This trajectory is likely to continue. That’s because retail, media, finance and fashion are all industries native to New York.
So with the economic factors and the existing talent pool, tech companies that are innovating in those industries will continue to gravitate here. Additionally, the lowered barriers of entry mean that we might see more tech companies migrating to the Big Apple with the goal of being closer to the media, fashion and financial giants that they are selling to or disrupting.Ever wished Samus Aran was real? It’s alright, you can tell us the truth. You’re in the company of friends. Also, you’re not alone.
Enter Jenni Källberg, AKA Pixelninja, from Stockholm, Sweden — who brings us that much closer to a life with some Samus-filled substantiality. These Samus costumes (The curve hugging blue Zero suit and Varia suit, respectively, from Metroid Prime) she fashioned with a little elbow grease and her own ingenuity were so good that she was invited by Nintendo of Europe to follow them on a Metroid Prime trilogy press tour in Germany:
For more of Pixelninja and her cosplay adroitness, visit her website.
And if you think this costume was good, you ain’t seen nothing yet; Morph Ball over to her Varia Suit 2.0 from Metroid Prime cosplay gallery.The investigative series Indonesia for Sale, launching this week, shines new light on the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land rights crisis.
In-depth stories, to be released over the coming months, will expose the role of collusion between palm oil firms and politicians in subverting Indonesia’s democracy. They will be published in English and Indonesian.
The series is the product of nine months’ reporting across the country, interviewing fixers, middlemen, lawyers and companies involved in land deals, and those most affected by them.
Indonesia for Sale is a collaboration between Mongabay and The Gecko Project, an investigative reporting initiative established by UK-based nonprofit Earthsight.
(Read the first article in the series, “The palm oil fiefdom.”)
Indonesia, a nation of thousands of islands draped across the equator, is in the grips of a social and environmental crisis.
Its rainforests are being destroyed at a catastrophic rate. Nearly every year it is cloaked in a choking haze from burning peatlands. Thousands of conflicts over land persist across the archipelago. It is one of the most unequal societies on earth, with half of its wealth controlled by 1 percent of the population. Local elections, where power over millions of people is decided, descend into a brazen display of vote-buying and bribery.
Many of the causes of these problems can be traced back to one source: the corrupt actions of a small number of politicians who have taken control of Indonesia’s districts.
In the turbulent years after the fall of the dictator Suharto in 1998, huge powers were transferred from the central government to Indonesia’s districts. Specifically, to the bupatis, the elected officials who presided over these jurisdictions, and who assumed new control over how land and forests within them could be used.
Within a few short years, the bupatis had built fiefdoms across Indonesia. They used their newfound powers to cash in on natural resources, bankroll elections and build dynasties by installing relatives as their successors and in other influential positions.
Under their watch, oil palm plantation companies were granted millions of hectares of land and forests. Much of it was used and owned by indigenous and other rural communities, whose rights were cast aside in favor of the private sector.
Plantation companies have played a central role in the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests. They have drained its peat swamps, rendering vast landscapes prone to outbreaks of fire. They have taken community lands and offered little in return, sparking intractable conflicts.
The land deals overseen by the bupatis concentrated immense territories in the hands of conglomerates owned by super-rich oligarchs from around Southeast Asia. At the same time, they deprived many of the poorest rural families from access to the fields and forests on which they depend for their livelihoods and food security. While successive national governments paid lip service to the need for land reform, precisely as a means of reducing inequality, the bupatis were busy giving more land to the rich.
Over the past nine months, Mongabay and The Gecko Project have investigated the corrupt ways in which government officials handed out vast tracts of Indonesia to private firms. We traveled to the heart of Borneo, to the swamplands of southern Kalimantan, to a paradise island of mangrove forests, and to a remote corner of eastern Indonesia. We met with indigenous activists who carried out their own investigations into the officials pillaging their land, and with fixers who facilitated deals between politicians and companies in Jakarta hotels.
Over the coming weeks we will release our findings in a series of articles and short films collectively titled Indonesia for Sale. The series is centered around three case studies, each shedding light on a central component of the way in which large swaths of the country have been transferred by corrupt politicians into private hands.
The first installment, “The palm oil fiefdom,” shines a spotlight on a bupati in Borneo who tried to turn almost the entire southern half of his district into one giant oil palm plantation, for the benefit of his relatives and cronies. It delves into one of the most egregious examples of a system in which district chiefs collude with private companies to exploit their office, with devastating consequences for people and the environment.
The next installment follows the money trail that ended in the bribery of Akil Mochtar, chief justice of the nation’s highest court, to secure an election win in Borneo. It lays bare the connection between natural resources, land deals and money politics, and the middlemen who serve as the connective tissue in that relationship.
The final installment exposes a shadowy cabal that constitutes the largest single threat to Indonesia’s forests today, with links from Papua to Malaysia to Yemen. It reveals the methods these individuals are using to hide their identities and the illegality of their projects as they forge east into the archipelago’s last frontier.
These will be supported by articles that explore broader issues raised by our investigations. For example, the role of brokers in facilitating oil palm deals, the tricks employed by companies to acquire land from indigenous groups, and the widespread failure of plantation firms in Indonesia to provide smallholdings for nearby communities, as required by law.
For more than a decade, the fate of Indonesia’s forests has been recognized as a global problem. The expansion of agriculture into |
of the use of a toxic industrial chemical, probably chlorine, in Syria this month, in the opposition-dominated village of Kafr Zita,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said on April 21.
There have been conflicting accounts of the alleged chlorine attack on Kafr Zita, with the government and the opposition trading blame.
Activists have also reported other chlorine gas attacks, most recently in Idlib province, in the northwest, two weeks ago.
Syria has surrendered all but eight percent of its chemical weapons under the terms of the US- and Russia-brokered deal, which headed off the threat of US military action last year.
AFP contributed to this report.In California's Protected Waters, Counting Fish Without Getting Wet
Enlarge this image toggle caption National Park Service National Park Service
Diver Dan Abbott unloads his scuba gear on a beach in Monterey, Calif. — his tank, flippers and a waterproof clipboard covered in tally marks. He spent the morning counting fish: pile perch, black perch, blue rockfish and kelp rockfish are among the 150 fish he spotted.
Abbott is diving with a team from Reef Check California, a group of volunteers doing underwater surveys by counting everything in the kelp forest in Monterey Bay.
He's part of an effort to determine whether there are more fish in the waters now than there were eight years ago. That's when this kelp forest was set aside as a marine protected area, where there's little or no fishing allowed, part of a huge experiment to restore marine life.
There are more than a hundred protected areas off California, covering 16 percent of state waters, and the only way to know if they're working is for Abbott and others to keep checking the marine population year after year.
These monitoring efforts are expensive. For a while, the state funded the work — to the tune of some $16 million. That money has already run out in some regions of the coast.
But thanks to advances in genetic testing, scientists now have another way to count marine life, without the costly and time-consuming field work.
A Soup Of Genetic Information
Jesse Port, an environmental genomicist at the Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University, studies the environment through DNA testing — the same kind developed for human health.
Port says all he needs is a liter of seawater to know exactly what has been swimming through it. That's because all organisms — whales, fish, seals — shed their DNA and leave cells behind.
"Their skin, their scales, their waste — all of this gets into the water," Port explains.
It's like a soup of genetic information. Port collects the cells and sequences all of the DNA.
"We get 150 million sequence reads and that's a lot of information," he says.
Port ends up with a spreadsheet that tells him what DNA is there. Humpback whale? Check. Rockfish? Check. Port can do this because DNA sequencing has gotten so much cheaper. One sample costs $1,500.
"This was just not possible five, 10 years ago," Port says. "And sequencing technology is just going to get better, so this will probably get even cheaper."
A Potentially Revolutionary Breakthrough
He first ran DNA tests in a large tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium — a good test case because he knew exactly what was swimming in there. But he got back results he didn't quite believe.
"Things like turkey. We picked up chicken DNA in these tanks," he says.
Turns out, the poultry was in the feed some of the fish were getting. But it raised some big questions. How do you know the DNA comes from a fish or from something it ate miles away? Or how do you know the DNA didn't float in on a current?
Port is still figuring these things out, but if DNA testing proves out in the ocean, it could be revolutionary.
"You can cover such a larger area by taking water samples rather than having divers do that all themselves," he says.
That could help California's conservation funding go a lot further — and help ensure its marine protected areas really are working.In 1992, Skybox teamed with Marvel and painter Joe Jusko to release what would become one of the most revered and sought-after trading card sets of the era. While Marvel had been in the trading card game already, the Marvel Universe series was steeped heavily in comic art and wore its sports-style influences on its sleeve. With Marvel Masterworks, the game was changed completely. Instead of cards for Spider-Man that offered stats and quips, we were treated to museum quality paintings that captured the power and majesty of heroes and villains alike. The Marvel Masterpieces series would see a number of releases over the years, including sets done by the Hildebrandt brothers and Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, but it was the original set, painted entirely by Joe Jusko that ignited it all.
This year, Joe Jusko and the Marvel Masterpieces card series return after a long layoff with 135 all-new paintings turned into premium quality cards for this momentous release. It's been a long time, but with the limited preview art that's out there, the wait looks to have been worth it.
While the project was announced back in 2014, there'd been little updates from Upper Deck on when the new Marvel Masterpieces might see the light of day. Turns out creating 135 original paintings takes a little bit of time. However, this week Upper Deck finally released the details on the revisited set, which means it won't be much longer until the high-end card series is available. This one is going to be expensive.
The 2016 Marvel Masterpieces set will come with just three cards to pack, and just 12 packs to a box. That means on an optimal pull, you'll only be getting 36 of the 90 base cards in a box, not to mention the 45 other parallels that will be included like sketches ( 100 by Jusko, an unspecified number by other artists), base variants, signature cards, mirage, lenticular and whatever else Upper Deck throws out there. All the cards will have serial numbers, and the rarest cards beyond the sketches will be limited to just 10 each.
Though the exact look and style of all the specific parallels is still under wraps, a forum post showed one of the signature variants takes Jusko's art and uses it as cover art for a particular comic. The thick card stock is also clearly visible on these, which only serves to show that Upper Deck is taking a premium approach to the set. The earliest cards in the history of the Masterpieces series were treated like normal trading cards, but with better card stock, the printing and durability of this series should fare much better than the loose cards hidden somewhere in the closet of my old bedroom in my parent's house.
While early art below has shown off characters like Captain America and Lady Sif, there are some Marvel characters that will not make the cut. Notably those under Fox's cinematic jurisdiction. That means no Fantastic Four or Galactus cards will appear, even though they were painted for the set. Deadpool however will be included, along with the Silver Surfer.
No firm release date or pricing has been announced as of yet, but given the way the cards and boxes are being packed, you can expect a box to fetch at least $120 based on similar formats from Upper Deck and its competitors. A pricey investment to be sure, particularly if you want to get your hands on a complete set, which will take about four boxes with no doubles. Haha, good luck with all of that. At least you should also get a healthy number of valuable variants with all those packs you'll be burning through.
Though it's a bit of a pricey endeavor, there's just something about the nostalgia of this set that's calling to me. I can still remember walking into Dreamscape Comics (RIP) with my limited saved earnings to buy a box of the 1992 set and pouring over them for hours. Hopefully I'll be able to get at least one pack when this revamped set arrives to remember what it was like to be that kid.
You can check out some of the art featured in the set below.
[An earlier version of this post listed noted Jusko painted 100 images for the set, but that has been updated to the correct number of 135 paintings. - Ed.]
Upper Deck
Upper Deck
Upper DeckFor years, groups of plain clothes regime agents have been easy to spot at opposition process, if you know where to look. Their role? To infiltrate opposition demonstrations, try to turn them violent, and pass intelligence off to the Interior Minister.
La Red is more like a system of informants structured and organized by Consejos Comunales at the local level: they’re about infiltration, first and foremost.
That’s what an explosive new story by El Nacional’s Hernán Lugo Galicia says. The Network (“La Red”), as the system is dubbed, plays a central role in dissolving concentrations and in occasionally attacking protesters with rocks, bottles and even fire guns. All of it under the police and military’s noses.
According to Lugo Galicia, The Network acts independently from Colectivos, the paramilitaries-on-motorbikes whose main job is intimidation. La Red is more like a system of informants structured and organized by Consejos Comunales at the local level: they’re about infiltration, first and foremost.
After identifying a promising protest focus and sending their agents, PNB and GNB officials contact “Network”, presumably under the authority of the Interior Minister, Nestor Reverol. Once deployed, Lugo Galicia reports, the plain clothes agents do what they can to push protesters towards violence.
Lugo Galicia may be overstating how wide The Network really is, and how organized. Our sense is that these are more a series of ad hoc arrangements by the police in each area than a single, cohesive national “network.”
Still, those groups are out there, and it makes sense that they should be.
I’ve seen these kinds of group at work, and so has anyone who has participated in any protest these last three or four years.
The government knows that instigating small acts of violence is the quickest way to break up a march: all but the most hot-headed opposition activists get freaked out and go home when violence picks up, draining the protest of effectiveness and giving the authorities the justification they need for violent repression. In the fevered atmosphere of an opposition demo these days, it doesn’t take much to kick things off.
I’ve seen these kinds of group at work, and so has anyone who has participated in any protest these last three or four years. In Merida, they usually appear a few minutes after police forces show up, often throwing rocks and bottles at the protesters. One time however, they chased a group of students inside ULA’s med school and eventually ended up firing one of the campus buildings, all this under the State Police’s obliging sight.
At the same time, Network agents collect information about the movement of most opposition leaders around the country and send it back it to the Respuesta de Movilización Inmediata (REMI) a Social Intelligence system with direct communication to Miraflores and the PSUV situation room.
A different organization with overlapping goals, the Popular System for Protection and Peace (SP3 for its Spanish acronym) was also created by the Defense Minister to keep an eye on any situation that could potentially threaten the revolution. SP3 is more about monitoring than instigation, though.
The government sees clearly that a non-violent protest movement could badly destabilize it, while a violent protest movement will be easy to deal with.
It’s the groups that report to Reverol that are the real threat. In Caracas, some of these “pro-government para-police groups,” as lawmaker Dinorah Figuera calls them, are allegedly paid out of Caracas’ Libertador Municipality’s payroll, under the leadership of Mayor Jorge Rodríguez. Reports suggest they may have been involved in the assault on congress of October 23rd, 2016, and also in the attack on several lawmakers that marched to the General Attorney’s Office on Friday, March 31st this year to ask for the TSJ judges involved in last week’s controversial decisions to be fired.
The government sees clearly (more clearly than some in the opposition, sadly) that a non-violent protest movement could badly destabilize it, while a violent protest movement will be easy to deal with. Violent protests scare off the kinds of moderate, middle-of-the-road pro-democracy voices that the opposition absolutely needs to mobilize. Violence solidifies the state security forces’ cohesion, stabilizes the chain of command, and motivates agents in defense of the revolution.
The regime needs protests to be violent.
And so it has a plan to make protests violent. Obviously.
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DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - Cardinal Raymond Burke is officially endorsing the Novena for Our Nation. Sponsored by the Holy League, the prayer consists of a 54-day Rosary novena to begin August 15, the Feast of the Assumption, and to end on October 7, the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.
According to the former prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, spiritual advisor to the Holy League,
There is no doubt that our beloved nation is in one of the worst crises which it has ever experienced, a profound moral crisis which generates division on all levels and results in an ever-greater more pervasive violence and killing. For Roman Catholics, who have always been known for their faith-filled patriotism, the first response to this crisis is fervent prayer and, in particular, prayer through the intercession of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, Mary Immaculate who is also the patroness of our nation.
He cites the Rosary as one of the "most powerful prayers" of the Church, calling to mind the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, where, through the intercession of Our Lady in the Holy Rosary, the Catholic fleet conquered the Saracens in spite of overwhelming odds. His Excellency is asking the faithful to ask the Blessed Virgin Mary "to inspire in her citizens the holiness of life which alone can transform our nation."
According to the website explaining this initiative, "Extraordinary times call for extraordinary action."
We are living in extraordinary times. Presidential executive actions, U.S. congressional and state legislation as well as court rulings at all levels up to the Supreme Court are in conflict with God's laws — especially the disregard for the rights of the unborn, elderly and weak in our society and the attacks on marriage and family values. At the same time society and government are becoming more intolerant towards biblically based religious belief and practice. In conflict with First Amendment constitutional rights, persecution of traditional religious expression has reached unprecedented levels. We are in a Spiritual Battle.
The Holy League takes as its inspiration the original Holy League established by Pope St. Pius V in 1571, which was a call to the Catholic world to unite in prayer through the Rosary to defeat the Turkish army. Today's campaign is a response not to a physical enemy, but rather to the threats of "relativism, secularism, impurity, and confusion regarding Church teaching."
The Holy League reaches out specifically to men, "to call men back to the state of grace and to transforming the culture through prayer (primarily Adoration and Confession) and training in holiness." Learn more about this movement here.
Have a news tip? Submit news to our tip line.If you’ve read a book in the Young Adult section recently, you might have noticed that moral ambiguity is a common theme. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss knows beyond a shadow of the doubt that the Capitol is evil, until faced with the reality of her “saviors.” In Across the Universe by Beth Revis, Amy knows instinctually that the Elder/Eldest system is oppressive, until she unravels the Godspeed’s secrets and finds the rationale behind the system. In YA lit, teens are constantly searching for their destiny and the right path, but discovering that right and wrong aren’t so easily defined. The same generally isn’t true for Middle Grade fiction—the stories aimed at middle school and younger reader. These stories tend to have firmly delineated lines of good and evil.
Sure it’s easy to point to Snape and Draco in Harry Potter and cry, “But look! Morally ambiguous characters in Middle Grade fiction!” I’m not disagreeing. Middle Grade is the first time when stories tend to hint at the shades of gray in the moral spectrum. But in the end, there is no doubt that Voldemort is completely, 100% evil. There is nothing Voldemort stands for that a reader can remotely support in good conscience. And Harry Potter is far from the only example. Does anyone ever doubt who is good or evil in the Redwall books? In Garth Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom, you might question motivations and rationale, but in the end it’s clear that the Morrow Days have broken the Architect’s Will, which is going to result in the destruction of both the House and the Universe. In MG fiction, good and evil are clear-cut and easy to determine.
And then there is Percy Jackson and the Olympians, where Rick Riordan doesn’t shy away from the questionable morals of the Greek gods. Nearly every (human) kid we meet in the series is an illegitimate child from an illicit affair. In the first book, this fact is just sort of there, mentioned but not focused on. But when Percy meets Poseidon’s wife in a later book, there is no getting around it. The goddess hates him, because Percy—as a demigod—represents infidelity on the part of her husband. How many MG books deal with that?
Not to mention, the gods make terrible parents. Poseidon is a typical deadbeat dad, and he’s not even the worst offender! At least he bothered to claim Percy, unlike the dozens of other kids crammed into the overcrowded Hermes cabin, who don’t even know which god sired them and doomed them to a life of being hunted by monsters. That overcrowded cabin, where there aren’t even enough beds to go around for all the demigod campers shoved in there, is where we meet Luke Castellan.
Cabin Leader. A son of Hermes. A college-aged, obviously cool kid that the eleven-year-old Percy can’t help but admire. Luke doesn’t distance himself from the younger kids. He immediately takes Percy under his wing, giving him advice and even gifts for his quest!
Apparently, Percy never heard the saying about Greeks bearing gifts.
By the end of the first book, we learn all of Luke’s gifts were traps—thank goodness those shoes just slip off of Grover’s hooves!—and that Luke actually set Percy up to take the fall as the lightning thief in order to start a war between the gods. Because, as Luke reveals in his James Bond villain monologue to Percy, he wants to overthrow the gods and reinstate Kronos as ruler.
Why would a demigod, a hero, want to overthrow his own father and put a crazy Titan in charge? This is it, the point where the Percy Jackson series departs from nearly every other Middle Grade series on the shelf: although Luke Castellan is our villain, he is not exactly evil. All of his grievances with the gods are legitimate.
Luke grew up not just with a deadbeat dad but also an unhinged mother—a woman driven insane by her attempt to take on the powers of the Oracle. Luke blames Hermes for his mother’s mental state, for not healing her, and for putting her in a situation where she felt this was something she had to do. Though Hermes didn’t force her to do it, it’s clear that without something special like Oracle powers, Hermes would lose interest in Ms. Castellan and go about his way, forgetting about her and Luke.
When his mother’s mental state becomes too much for him to bear, Luke runs away to Camp Halfblood, where his best friend is turned into a tree and he gets stuck in the overcrowded cabin of a lesser god. The only way a camper can distinguish himself and earn favor with his godly parent is by going on quests. Hermes does give Luke a quest. He fails it.
Luke is far from the only demigod with such a tale of woe. Kronos, on the other hand, promises Luke a new future where demigods will be treated better, treated like gods. It’s no wonder that Luke leads halfbloods against their parents. Dozens of campers defect to Luke’s side. Very quickly, Luke has started an all-out war. What starts out as a frame job moves into trying to destroy the camp and then escalates into a battle in the streets of New York City. Let’s be clear. Luke is definitely a villain. He believes the ends justify the means, and he will use whatever means are necessary, including killing middle schoolers.
But this isn’t a story of children and teens fighting against an obviously evil—and usually adult—force like in so many other MG stories. This is a tale of children fighting children over the lesser of two evils, the rule of the gods as opposed to the rule of the Titans. The system the gods created is broken. It doesn’t work. Their self-absorption and lack of regard for their children results in girls getting turned into trees, kids being locked in casinos for decades, and one particular demigod choosing to awaken the head honcho Titan. It’s no wonder in such a morally ambiguous epic that in the end we discover Percy is not the hero of this story, the hero destined by prophecy to either save or destroy Olympus.
Luke is.
And Luke saves everybody by committing suicide.
That’s right. In a book aimed at readers fourteen and younger, the world is saved by the main antagonist committing suicide and thereby destroying Kronos, who by this point has taken over Luke’s body.
Even better? Luke still hasn’t given up his grievances. He kills himself—and Kronos—because he realizes now that things would be even worse under Kronos. But he’s not at peace with the gods and the system they created. His dying wish is that all the gods have a cabin at the camp—minor gods and Hades included. That no kid should ever again be crammed in Hermes cabin. That every kid should have a home.
Such villainy! Wishing kids would have homes. What kind of monster is he?
Percy knows Luke is right. When the gods offer him godhood for saving the world, he declines it and instead requires that the gods swear they will claim all of their children by the time they’re thirteen. Then back at the camp, he helps build more cabins.
That’s the strangest and best part of the Percy Jackson series. In the end, the world is made the sort of place the main villain wished it would be.
It’s not often a Middle Grade novel has the guts to posit that the main villain had a mostly correct viewpoint, he just went about it in the wrong way. Or did he? Because this reader questions whether the gods would ever have changed without such a horrific war to show them the errors of their ways.
Though Luke is a traitor, a killer, and a villain, he is also the hero. And despite his terrible actions, he managed to change the world for the better.
Mandy Pietruszewski spent her childhood idolizing Geordi LaForge, so it’s no surprise she grew up to be an aerospace engineer. When not working on satellites, Mandy can be found buried in books, comics, and movies—with a particular interest in Middle Grade and Young Adult fiction. She tweets incessantly, blogs intermittently, and is even known to podcast.Join us for the August installment of Nerd Nite for talks on topics that range from our human cells to trees to teeny satellites…
Intrigued by the human body? Katie Parzych will clue us in on the process of autophagy – a recycling process that our cells use to stay healthy. Curious about the natural world beyond the human body? Kirsti Ashworth gives us the lowdown on chemicals produced by trees, and how they might relate to air pollution, and the related “nefarious” world of plant communication. And, if you’re more interested in something above and beyond the earth – Michael Kirkhart, amateur satellite developer/operator tells us all about a tiny satellite called $50SAT!
When: August 21st, 2014, doors at 630pm, talks at 7pm!
Where: LIVE, 102 S First St, Ann Arbor
Moola: FREE! Thanks, Ann Arbor District Library!
Katie Parzych – Autophagy: How Cells Recycle to Survive
Autophagy is a recycling process that our cells use to stay clean and healthy. Defects in autophagy can contribute to several diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. In this talk, I’ll be discussing how autophagy works, why maintaining the right balance of autophagy is important in preventing disease, and how expanding our understanding of how cells control autophagy is important for developing new treatments for diseases.
About Katie Parzych:
Katie is a PhD student at the University of Michigan, where she studies how yeast cells regulate autophagy in response to nutrient starvation. She is a recent participant of the RELATE workshop aimed at teaching scientists how to communicate their research to a wide range of audiences. When not geeking out about microbiology and yeast, Katie can usually be found acting on stage with a number of Ann Arbor’s local theatre groups.
Michael Kirkhart – $50SAT: 3 hams and a university in Kentucky on their quest to build the world’s smallest functioning satellite
On November 21, 2013, a Dnepr rocket was launched from Russia carrying 32 satellites, including 4 of a new class of very small satellites known as PocketQubes. One of these PocketQubes was built as a collaborative effort between Professor Robert Twiggs of Morehead State University and 3 amateur radio operators: Howie DeFelice (AB2S), Stuart Robinson (GW7HPW), and Michael Kirkhart (KD8QBA). This satellite, known by its official name of Eagle-2, it unofficial name of $50SAT, and its OSCAR (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio) designation of Morehead OSCAR 76, has surprised its developers by:
1. Working
2. After almost 9 months, continuing to work (August 21 will mark the 9 month anniversary of the launch)
This talk will provide an overview of the project, including some of the challenges involved as well as a discussion on in-orbit performance.
About Michael Kirkhart:
Michael Kirkhart is an electronics engineer, hardware hacker, amateur radio operator. He recently added the title of amateur satellite developer/operator to the list.
Kirsti Ashworth – Trees – Heroes or Villains in the Battle Against Air Pollution?
I’ll be looking at the role that certain chemicals produced and released by forests play in air pollution, and asking whether these chemicals alleviate or exacerbate the problems we encounter in such diverse places as LA and Beijing. I’ll be taking you into the nefarious world of plant communication, and letting you in on the secret of what stresses out a plant. We’ll also be considering how widespread these chemicals are and what their fate is once they leave the tree and hit the atmosphere. And of course, trying to decide which side trees are on…
About Kirsti Ashworth:
Kirsti is a Brit, who has only recently made it across the pond and into Michigan. She gained a PhD in Atmospheric Science from Lancaster University in 2012, where she pondered whether the cultivation of biofuels could affect human health and crop production. In between, she worked as a research scientist in deepest, darkest Bavaria – at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany’s premier alpine ski-resort (though sadly she did have to spend some time most days working). While loving the life in Ann Arbor, she does occasionally miss seeing the mountains!Artist's impression of the proposed Crown Sydney casino at Barangaroo Credit:Crown Resorts But the PAC said "the NSW Parliament effectively settled the issue about the location of Crown Sydney" when it legislated for the location of a gaming floor on the site in 2013. As such, the PAC said it could not recommend moving the building. The changes to the project that have been imposed by the PAC's determination include a wider foreshore walk, a larger "Hickson Park" area to the east of the casino, and a small increase in the number of affordable apartments to be provided as part of the project. An extra 25 units will be provided by Crown within five kilometres of the site. Nevertheless the PAC stopped short of saying the public good would be enhanced to the same degree as private profit by the casino and apartment complex. The PAC said that after its proposed changes "the public good has been given a more equal status with the private good." The three members of the PAC who made the decision were experienced public servant Lynelle Briggs, Canberra-based architect and consultant Annabelle Pegrum, and planning consultant John Hann.
The hotel and casino is on the far left, next to three apartment buildings being built for Crown Resorts by Lendlease named One Sydney Harbour. Credit:Wilkinson Eyre Architects The chairman of Crown Resorts, Robert Rankin, said on Tuesday the company would soon move to start excavation work and expected to open in early 2021. "While it has been a long and detailed process, we are pleased with the overall outcome and we're deeply committed to building a six-star hotel resort that Sydneysiders and all Australians can be proud of," Mr Rankin said. James Packer's privately held investment vehicle, Consolidated Press Holdings, agreed to sell about 4.8 per cent of Crown. Credit:Pat Scala Industry groups also welcomed the decision. The Sydney Business Chamber's executive director Patricia Forsythe said Barangaroo has already transformed from "a wasteland to a precinct that bustles with activity."
"A spectacular building housing a second casino and 350 or so luxury hotel rooms and suites is the final piece of the puzzle," Ms Forsythe said. The PAC's report offers a window into the high-level negotiations over the site. The PAC first provided its advice to the Planning Minister, Rob Stokes, on June 1. Mr Stokes then provided the advice to the government agency, the Barangaroo Development Authority. The BDA said it had a number of concerns with the PAC's recommendations, and said they would have "a material prejudicial impact on the still open public tender and financial implications for the state." But the PAC rejected the BDA's criticisms, and Mr Stokes accepted the PAC's advice. The decision by the PAC was needed after previous plans for a hotel jutting out into the harbour were scuppered.
As a result, Lend Lease proposed construction of a hotel on land previously slated for a park, Crown struck a deal with Lend Lease for the right to build a casino on the site, and Parliament legislated for a gaming floor. But construction of that casino - as well as about 30 floors of luxury units - required changes to the approved consent for the site. The PAC was therefore examining changes both to the land use in the area, as well as the design of the hotel and casino complex. The design of the building was fiercely resisted by the City of Sydney, which argued the private tower and its bulky base would "dominate and overwhelm" what had been reserved for public land. "There is clear failure in the assessment to consider site suitability and the broader public interest," Graham Jahn, the council's director of planning, development and transport, told the PAC at a public hearing in April. Other critical submissions came from former government architect Peter Mould, who said no reason had been given for adding so many floors of apartments, and from the NSW President of the Australian Institute of Architects.
"The only possible explanation for this change is increased profits without any accrued public benefit," Mr Mould said. "In fact, there is considerable public disbenefit." Mr Carter said: "What would history think of us all here today, if we chose a casino over a public park for this significant place on the harbour," said Mr Carter, who characterised the public preference for a park as a "no brainer". However the design of the casino received strong support from industry groups such as the Sydney Business Chamber, the Tourism and Transport Forum, and the Urban Taskforce.Illumination's The Secret Life of Pets continued to be a force of nature, earning $8.6 million on its third Friday (-43%) for a new $240m domestic total. We can expect a $28m third weekend (-44%) for a new $259m 17-day cume. Oh, and it has earned an additional $57m overseas meaning it will cross $300m worldwide sometime today. We can expect a global cume of around $320m (with lots more still to come) by tomorrow. All of this cost Universal/Comcast Corp. just $75m to produce.
Sony's Ghostbusters took a tumble on its second Friday. The $144 million comedy earned $6.2m (-63.8%) to give it a new $71.4m eight-day cume. That's a sharp fall for a comedy, but it's a lower drop than Pixels and The Boss. So now it's a question of which of those two precedents matches up. Expect a $21m second weekend (-54%) for a new $86m ten-day total. It's still looking like a cume of $135m-$150m by the time it's done. Overseas will tell the tale, but I think everyone was hoping for a better second-weekend hold. At least the toys are selling pretty well.
Walt Disney's Finding Dory earned another $2.087 million (-38%) on its sixth Friday for a new cume of $455m. Expect a $7m weekend (-38%) for a $459m total by Sunday as it starts losing screens. By the way, there was a ton of screen bleeding this weekend (even Secret Life lost 333 locations), so this weekend is as good an example as any as to why movies aren't quite as leggy as they used to be. The Legend of Tarzan earned $1.8m (-46%) on Friday for a new $111m cume. Expect a $6.1m weekend (-46%) and a new $114m cume.
Fox's Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates earned $1.325 million on its third Friday for a new $37m cume. It should have $4.26m (-44%) for the third weekend (after losing 871 locations) for a $40m cume. Bryan Cranston's The Infiltrator earned $883,360 (41%) on its second Friday for a likely $3.18m (-40%) second weekend and a $12.1m cume. Central Intelligence should make $2.8m (-48%) this weekend for a $123m cume while The Purge: Election Year lost 970 venues and will drop 64% in weekend three for a $2.242m weekend and $76.48m cume.
The BFG will pass $50 million this weekend after a 76% weekend plunge. The Steven Spielberg film will crawl to $55m, and that's it. Woody Allen's Cafe Society expanded to fifty theaters this weekend and earned $234,868 for the occasion, giving the Lionsgate/Amazon release a likely $854k weekend (17k p.s.a.) and a new $1.356m cume. The Shallows lost 1,182 screens, giving it just $609k (-80%) for the weekend on 513 screens for a $53.5m cume. Oh, and Independence Day: Resurgence crossed the $100m mark on Thursday and should earn $827k (-77%) at 730 locations for a $101m cume.LISBON, May 25 (Reuters) - Cristiano Ronaldo became the first player in the 59-year history of the European Cup to score for two different winning teams when he netted Real Madrid’s fourth goal in their 4-1 win over Atletico Madrid on Saturday.
The 29-year-old Portugal captain also scored for Manchester United when they won the Champions League in 2008 in Moscow and capped an astonishing season with his 17th Champions League goal of this campaign at the Stadium of Light.
His penalty conversion contrasted with his miss in the final shootout against Chelsea six years ago.
Ronaldo had already broken the European Cup record of 14 goals in a season established by Jose Altafini of AC Milan 51 years ago and by his rival Lionel Messi of Barcelona in 2011-12 and has now set a new benchmark in the competition.
Ronaldo, the FIFA World Player of the Year, has scored 52 goals in 51 Champions League games for Real and, together with his goals at United, has 67 in the European Cup in total.
That ties him in second place with Messi, while both players are four goals behind Raul who tops the all-time list with 71.
Ronaldo, making a rare club appearance in Lisbon, the city where he came to fame as a teenager with Sporting, had nine goal attempts on Saturday, one less than the entire Atletico team.
BETTER PLAYER
“Ever since I arrived at the club I always felt ready for this moment. The pressure is making me a better player every day,” he told reporters. “The Decima (10th European Cup) is here now and with records broken along the way it’s just awesome.”
Ronaldo had not played since limping off with muscle fatigue eight minutes into the La Liga game against Valladolid on May 7 and came out wearing strapping on his thigh.
Although he was not as devastating as he can be, he still had a fine match, creating chances for himself and his team mates, and said: “It was worth taking the risk to play (after injury) - and we are the winners.”
Ronaldo was enjoying very different emotions at the stadium than he did there a decade ago when Portugal surprisingly lost 1-0 to Greece in the final of Euro 2004.
This time he was celebrating wildly with his team mates as they came back from the dead to beat Atletico with three goals in extra time after Sergio Ramos’s equaliser in stoppage time.
Ronald Koeman can also lay claim to scoring in two European Cup finals for two different winning teams, but his goal for PSV Eindhoven in 1988 came in a penalty shootout after a 0-0 draw with Benfica and does not count in official records.
The Dutchman also scored for Barcelona in a 1-0 win over Sampdoria in the 1992 European Cup. (Reporting by Mike Collett)By scheduling an interdivisional matchup on this final weekend of the regular season, the Pac-12 has fallen into a terribly awkward situation. UCLA has already clinched the Pac-12 South and a spot in the conference championship game. Stanford needs a win to win the North and take a seat on the |
a similar model, the Redbird Redhawk.[49][50]
Premier Aircraft Sales also announced in February 2014 that it would offer refurbished 172 airframes equipped with the Continental/Thielert Centurion 2.0 diesel engine.[51]
Military operators [ edit ]
A variant of the 172, the T-41 Mescalero was used as a trainer with the United States Air Force and Army. In addition, the United States Border Patrol uses a fleet of 172s for aerial surveillance along the Mexico-US border.
The Irish Air Corps uses the Reims version for aerial surveillance and monitoring of cash, prisoner and explosive escorts, in addition to army cooperation and pilot training roles.[52]
Irish Air Corps Reims FR.172H Rocket
For T-41 operators, see T-41 Mescalero
Austrian Air Force 1× 172
Iraqi Air Force Cessna 172 lands at Kirkuk Air Base
Irish Air Corps 8× FR172H, 1× FR172K[59] Five FR172H remain in service as of 2014.[60]
Accidents and incidents [ edit ]
Specifications (172R) [ edit ]
Data from Cessna[85][86]
General characteristics
Crew: one
one Capacity: three passengers
three passengers Length: 27 ft 2 in (8.28 m)
27 ft 2 in (8.28 m) Wingspan: 36 ft 1 in (11.00 m)
36 ft 1 in (11.00 m) Height: 8 ft 11 in (2.72 m)
8 ft 11 in (2.72 m) Wing area: 174 sq ft (16.2 m 2 )
174 sq ft (16.2 m ) Aspect ratio: 7.32
7.32 Airfoil: modified NACA 2412
modified NACA 2412 Empty weight: 1,691 lb (767 kg)
1,691 lb (767 kg) Gross weight: 2,450 lb (1,111 kg)
2,450 lb (1,111 kg) Fuel capacity: 56 US gallons (212 litres)
56 US gallons (212 litres) Powerplant: 1 × Lycoming IO-360-L2A four cylinder, horizontally opposed aircraft engine, 160 hp (120 kW)
1 × Lycoming IO-360-L2A four cylinder, horizontally opposed aircraft engine, 160 hp (120 kW) Propellers: 2-bladed metal, fixed pitch
Performance
Cruise speed: 122 kn (140 mph; 226 km/h)
122 kn (140 mph; 226 km/h) Stall speed: 47 kn (54 mph; 87 km/h) (power off, flaps down) [87]
47 kn (54 mph; 87 km/h) (power off, flaps down) Never exceed speed: 163 kn (188 mph; 302 km/h) (IAS) [11]
163 kn (188 mph; 302 km/h) (IAS) Range: 696 nmi (801 mi; 1,289 km) with 45 minute reserve, 55% power, at 12,000 ft
696 nmi (801 mi; 1,289 km) with 45 minute reserve, 55% power, at 12,000 ft Service ceiling: 13,500 ft (4,100 m)
13,500 ft (4,100 m) Rate of climb: 721 ft/min (3.66 m/s)
721 ft/min (3.66 m/s) Wing loading: 14.1 lb/sq ft (68.6 kg/m2)
Avionics
See also [ edit ]
Related development
Aircraft of comparable role, configuration and era
Related listsOperation Pastorius Part of the American Theater of World War II The third day of the trial of the captured Germans, July 1942. Objective Sabotage American economic infrastructure Date June 1942 Executed by Nazi Germany Outcome Failed
Operation Pastorius was a failed German intelligence plan for sabotage inside the United States during World War II. The operation was staged in June 1942 and was to be directed against strategic American economic targets. The operation was named by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr, for Francis Daniel Pastorius, the leader of the first organized settlement of Germans in America.
Background [ edit ]
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, followed by Nazi Germany's declaration of war on the United States four days later[1] (and the United States' declaration of war on Germany in response), Hitler authorized a mission to sabotage the American war effort and attack civilian targets to demoralize the American civilian population inside the United States.[2] The mission was headed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the German Abwehr. Canaris recalled that during World War I, he organized the sabotage of French installations in Morocco, and entered the United States with other German agents to plant bombs in New York arms factories, including the destruction of munitions supplies at Black Tom Island, in 1916. He hoped that Operation Pastorius would have the same kind of success they had in 1916.[3]
Agents [ edit ]
Recruited for Operation Pastorius were eight German residents who had lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel, had worked at various jobs in the United States. All eight were recruited into the Abwehr military intelligence organization and were given three weeks of intensive sabotage training in the German High Command school on an estate at Quenz Lake, near Berlin, Germany. The agents were instructed in the manufacture and use of explosives, incendiaries, primers, and various forms of mechanical, chemical, and electrical delayed timing devices. Considerable time was spent developing complete background "histories" they were to use in the United States. They were encouraged to converse in English and to read American newspapers and magazines so no suspicion would be aroused if they were interrogated while in the United States.[4]
Mission [ edit ]
Amagansett Coast Guard station at Atlantic Avenue Beach in Amagansett, New York. The station was moved in 1966 to a private residence to protect it from demolition. In May 2007, the structure was moved back to near its original location.
Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets: hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America's plants in Illinois, Tennessee, and New York; locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad's repair shops at Altoona;[5] a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hell Gate Bridge in New York; and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey. The agents were also instructed to spread a wave of terror by planting explosives on bridges, railroad stations, water facilities, and public places. They were given counterfeit birth certificates, Social Security Cards, draft deferment cards, nearly $175,000 in American money, and driver's licenses, and put aboard two U-boats to land on the east coast of the U.S.[4]
Before the mission began, it was in danger of being compromised, as George Dasch, head of the team, left sensitive documents behind on a train, and one of the agents when drunk announced to patrons at a bar in Paris that he was a secret agent.[6]
On the night of June 12, 1942, the first submarine to arrive in the U.S., U-202,[7] landed at Amagansett, New York, which is about 100 miles east of New York City, on Long Island, at what today is Atlantic Avenue beach. It was carrying Dasch and three other saboteurs (Burger, Quirin, and Henck). The team came ashore wearing German Navy uniforms so that if they were captured, they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies.[8][9] They also brought their explosives, primers and incendiaries, and buried them along with their uniforms, and put on civilian clothes to begin an expected two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production.[10]
When Dasch was discovered amidst the dunes by unarmed Coast Guardsman John C. Cullen, Dasch seized Cullen by the collar, threatened him, and stuffed $260 into Cullen's hand.[11] Cullen reported the encounter to his superiors after returning to his station. By the time an armed Coast Guard patrol returned to the site, the Germans, weary from their trans-Atlantic trip, were gone and had taken the Long Island Rail Road train from the Amagansett station into Manhattan, New York City, where they checked in and stayed at a hotel. The Coast Guard then discovered German equipment buried in the beach and reported it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the FBI. A massive manhunt for the German agents was conducted; however, they did not know where exactly the Germans were going.
The other four-member German team headed by Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16, 1942. They came on U-584, another submarine.[12] This group came ashore wearing bathing suits but wore German Navy hats. After landing ashore, they threw away their hats, put on civilian clothes, and started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio.[9][13]
The two teams were to meet on July 4th in a hotel in Cincinnati to coordinate their sabotage operations.[14]
Mission betrayed [ edit ]
Dasch called Burger into their upper-story hotel room and opened a window, saying they would talk, and if they disagreed, "only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window." Dasch told him he had no intention of going through with the mission, hated Nazism, and planned to report the plot to the FBI. Burger agreed to defect to the United States immediately.[15][16]
On June 15th, Dasch phoned the New York office of the FBI from a pay-telephone on Manhattan's Upper West Side explaining who he was and asked to convey the information to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. When the FBI agent was trying to figure out if he was talking to a crackpot, Dasch hung up. Four days later, he took a train to Washington, D.C. and checked in at the Mayflower Hotel. Dasch walked into FBI headquarters, asked to speak with Director Hoover. He eventually spoke to Assistant Director D.M. Ladd.[16] He finally convinced the FBI by dumping his mission's entire budget of $84,000 on the desk of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd.[17] At this point, he was taken seriously and interrogated for hours.[18] Besides Burger, none of the other German agents knew they were betrayed. Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover made no mention that Dasch had turned himself in, and claimed credit for the FBI for cracking the spy ring.[19]
Mugshots [ edit ]
Trial and execution [ edit ]
Fearful that a civilian court would be too lenient, President Roosevelt issued Executive Proclamation 2561 on 2 July 1942 creating a military tribunal[20] to prosecute the Germans.[21] Placed before a seven-member military commission, the Germans were charged with the following offenses:
1) Violating the law of war;
2) Violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy;
3) Violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of spying; and
4) Conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first three charges.
The trial was held in Assembly Hall #1 on the fifth floor of the Department of Justice building in Washington D.C. on 8 July 1942.[22] Lawyers for the accused, who included Lauson Stone and Kenneth Royall, attempted to have the case tried in a civilian court but were rebuffed by the United States Supreme Court in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1 (1942), a case that was later cited as a precedent for the trial by military commission of any unlawful combatant against the United States.
The trial for the eight defendants ended on 1 August 1942. Two days later, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Roosevelt commuted Burger's sentence to life in prison and Dasch's to 30 years because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others. The others were executed on 8 August 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia jail and buried in a potter's field in the Blue Plains neighborhood in the Anacostia area of Washington.
Aftermath [ edit ]
The failure of Operation Pastorius led Hitler to rebuke Admiral Canaris and no sabotage attempt was ever made again in the United States. During the remaining years of the war, the Germans only once more dispatched agents to the United States by submarine. In November 1944, as part of Operation Elster a German submarine, U-1230, dropped two RSHA spies off the coast of Maine to gather intelligence on American manufacturing and technical progress. The FBI captured both men shortly after.[23] These agents benefited from the calmer state of public nerves in the later years of the war and received prison sentences rather than execution.[24]
In 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they be deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany. They were not welcomed back in Germany, as they were regarded as traitors who had caused the death of their comrades.[25] Although they had been promised pardons by Hoover in exchange for their cooperation, both men died without ever receiving them. Dasch died in 1992 at the age of 89 in Ludwigshafen, Germany. Burger died in 1975.
Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, the National Socialist White People's Party placed an unauthorized monument to the executed spies in a thicket in southwest Washington, D.C. on National Park Service land. It went largely unknown and ignored for several decades; the Park Service removed the monument in 2010.[19]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes
Bibliography
Further informationDemonstrators march through Oakland to protest white nationalist violence
A crowd rallies in downtown Oakland in solidarity with victims of an attack on protesters of a white nationalism march in Charlottesville, Va. A crowd rallies in downtown Oakland in solidarity with victims of an attack on protesters of a white nationalism march in Charlottesville, Va. Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Demonstrators march through Oakland to protest white nationalist violence 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
Hundreds of protesters marched through Oakland on Saturday night, with some briefly blocking traffic on the Interstate 580 freeway in what organizers called an “emergency solidarity” demonstration in response to the violence at a white supremacist rally in Virginia that left one woman dead and many injured.
The woman was killed when a car plunged into a crowd of people peacefully protesting the rally.
The rally was largely peaceful, although police gave the order to disperse shortly after 9:30 p.m. when about three dozen protesters moved up the I-580 off-ramp at Grand Avenue and then linked hands on the freeway to stop traffic. Others then launched illegal fireworks into the air.
Traffic was completely blocked for a time on the freeway as police stopped traffic to avoid hitting the protesters. After several minutes, the protesters left the freeway and continued marching on city streets as motorists honked support.
Police later blocked Broadway as a few hundred protesters moved back into the downtown area, which kept the march from heading toward North Oakland or Berkeley.
Protesters began gathering near Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland at 7 p.m. for speeches as a handful of police officers watched nearby.
Just over an hour later, several hundred protesters, including families with young children, began marching through city streets and around Lake Merritt.
Many of those present expressed words of respect for their “comrade” who died, and many called for marchers to protest peacefully. At times tempers flared during the march, with protesters decrying President Trump and the white nationalist rally in Virginia, but there were also somber moments to mourn the victims of white supremacy, past and present.
“My grandparents marched back in the day,” said Jerrod Anthony, a 25-year-old rapper and artist from Concord, adding that he was disgusted by the events in Virginia. “I like to think of all who came before us who gave us the right to be here. It wasn’t too long ago we couldn’t sit at the front of the bus.”
Dozens of law enforcement officers from the Oakland and BART police departments, as well as the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, stayed nearby but gave the protesters a wide berth in the first hours of the march.
Cat Brooks, co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, whose members were among those in the crowd, said the same issues of racism and bigotry on display in Charlottesville afflict Oakland, too, pointing to high-profile cases of officer misconduct and police shootings in the city.
“I don’t have an answer for the images from 1952 translating to 2017,” she said. “Nothing has changed. This is America unmasked.”
A banner leading the march called on protesters to “Mourn the Dead (and) Fight Like Hell for the Living.”
Earlier in the day, Bay Area politicians were among the flood of officials condemning the bloody clashes in Charlottesville and President Trump’s equivocal response, in which he did not single out neo-Nazis, members of the Ku Klux Klan or white nationalists, insisting that “hatred, bigotry and violence” were coming from “many sides.”
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, called the violence an “act of terror.”
“The vile beliefs of the perpetrators of this violence insult our fundamental American values and must be condemned in the strongest terms,” she said. “The president’s talk of violence on ‘many sides’ ignores the shameful reality of white supremacism in our country today and continues a disturbing pattern of complacency around such acts of hate.”
Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf tweeted: “We reject hate & bigotry in our communities.”
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, also took to Twitter to condemn the violence.
“Make no mistake: The white supremacists in #Charlottesville feel emboldened by the Trump Admin,” she said. “All Americans must condemn this bigotry.”
In Berkeley, Mayor Jesse Arreguin called the violence “horrifying.”
“We cannot stand by and watch while neo-Nazis, the Klan and other extremist groups, who have been emboldened by our president, take over U.S. cities,” he said. “Berkeley stands in solidarity against bigotry, hate and white supremacy and supports those who embrace peaceful assembly and debate.”
In San Francisco, word of the violence in Virginia spread through the crowds at the Outside Lands music festival. Early afternoon performers Joseph — a Oregon folk trio made up of sisters Allison, Meegan and Natalie Closner — acknowledged the victims.
“We are thinking about Charlottesville today,” Natalie Closner said from the Sutro Stage in Lindley Meadow. “It’s a scary time we are in. We need to come together.”
Later in the day, Dawes frontman Taylor Goldsmith condemned the act and expressed his gratitude for the ability to play for such a peaceful crowd.
“I’m able to celebrate love and connection and music,” he said. “Thank you for reminding me, and for reminding all of us, what it’s really all about and how easy it actually is to love each other.”
Chronicle staff writer Mariecar Mendoza contributed to this report.
Kimberly Veklerov, Michael Bodley and Jill Tucker are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: kveklerov@sfchronicle.com, mbodley@sfchronicle.com, jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kveklerov, @jilltucker, @michael_bodleyAfter publishing its second quarter 2016 financial results last month, Tesla said that it plans to deliver about 50,000 vehicles during the second half the year to bring the total to 80,000 vehicles. The volume will generate a lot of cash flow for the company and now CEO Elon Musk says that it could be enough to be profitable during the third quarter, which will end by the end of the month.
Musk made the comment in a colorful company-wide memo dated August 29. Bloomberg got the email and shared a few quotes:
The simple reality of it is that we will be in a far better position to convince potential investors to bet on us if the headline is not ‘Tesla Loses Money Again,’ but rather ‘Tesla Defies All Expectations and Achieves Profitability. That would be amazing! […] I thought it was important to write you a note directly to let you know how critical this quarter is. The third quarter will be our last chance to show investors that Tesla can be at least slightly positive cash flow and profitable before the Model 3 reaches full production. […] We will need to raise additional cash in Q4 to complete the Model 3 vehicle and the Gigafactory. […] It would be awesome to throw a pie in the face of all naysayers on Wall Street who keep insisting that Tesla will always be a money loser!
In the email, Musk urges employees to deliver as many vehicles as possible by the end of the quarter – September 30.
Tesla exited the second quarter at ~2,000 vehicles per week. If it manages to maintain that throughout the third quarter and that the number of vehicles in transit at the end of the second quarter is similar to that at end of the third quarter, the automaker could deliver as many as 26,000 vehicles.
It would beat its previous delivery record of 17,400 vehicles in Q4 2015.
Featured Image: Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, reacts to a reporter’s question following the electric automaker’s initial public offering on Nasdaq, Tuesday, June, 29, 2010 in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)Snapchat has quickly risen to become the favorite social media platform for people over the age of 12. Let's be honest; when the platform first launched in 2012, teenyboppers flooded the app, and we grown folks rolled our eyes at the fleeting social engagement.
But something happened last year. Snapchat became popular with millennials, older folks (not your grandma) and celebrities. The social media app morphed into a slice-of-life platform where many people shared intimate details of their lives.
Snapchat is now boasting over 10 billion video views a day and counting. This social storm is a trend worth latching on to, but who should you follow? There are a few black superstars (some celebrity and some regular folks) on the app whose stories you should be tuning in to. Check out our favorite black Snapchatters!
Kevin Hart (lilswag79)
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Yes, the $87 million (and counting) man is on Snapchat. Hart's presence on Snapchat is everything you'd imagine it to be. He hilariously uses the Snapchat face filters on his friends, gets dragged to luau-themed dinners with his wife, shows us the behind-the-scenes of his latest movie, and takes us along on each and every one of his (daily) intense workouts.
Leslie Jones (lesdogggg)
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Another hilarious comedian to follow on Snapchat is Saturday Night Live’s own Leslie Jones. At this point, you missed her epic Road to Rio—yes, Jones was invited to be an Olympics commentator after the powers that be saw her commentary on Twitter. She shared every Brazilian moment with her Snap family. Follow her for all the hilarity you'll need.
Brandy (thenextbrandy)
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Who knew Brandy had such a big funny bone?! The singer-actress is completely unhinged on Snapchat. From impromptu singing sessions with Jenifer Lewis to playing literally all day with the Snapchat face filters to depleting herself in workouts or rehearsal, there's something so real and raw about Brandy. There's also always a fair amount of shade, and it's glorious.
Danielle Young (rhapsodani)
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Honorable mention (read: shameless plug): Danielle Young (rhapsodani) deserves a follow, too. OK, so that's me. But honestly, I am your favorite Snapchatter's favorite Snapchatter. You'll see me struggle to get up in the morning to either make it to a workout or to work. You'll see my healthy and not-so-healthy meal choices and meal prep, and there's a lot of celebrity cameos because I work here at The Root, and I get to interview celebrities. It's a good time, so come through and Snap with me—oh, and with these awesome people in the list above. Happy Snappin’!
Chrissy Teigen (chrissyteigen)
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She’s more than a pretty face, John Legend’s wife and the mother of hi,s child. All the celebrities on Snapchat have a unique emoji next to their names and Teigen’s is a pizza. What’s more relatable and spot-on than a slice of piping-hot, cheesy goodness? On Teigen’s Snapchat, not only do you get to see her beautiful face, but you'll also see her and Legend's chubby baby, Luna, a shirtless Legend and all the glorious food that the Legend family eats.
Franchesca Ramsey (chescaleigh)
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While Fran—or, as the Internet knows her, Chescaleigh—may not be the household (read: celebrity) name that many folks recognize upon first glance, she's definitely someone we should celebrate. Ramsey reached viral status after her YouTube video, "[S—t] White Girls Say to Black Girls." She's a comedian, writer, social-justice advocate and internet sensation. She's also filled with substance, which is why you should follow her. When she's not taking days off from the gym, she's taking us with her to voiceover jobs, showing us the behind-the-scenes of her MTV web series, Decoded, and sharing a few priceless gems about succeeding in life (when her eyebrows are off—you gotta watch!).
Trey Songz (treysongz)
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Sure, Trey's an R&B crooner, but he's also a social media savant. He takes full advantage of the Snapchat face filters by creating characters around them, like Tyrone (for whom he uses the sad face). You'll see random snippets from Trey's life with his family, a few celeb cameos (like Kevin Hart) and that infectious smile of his … constantly.
Serena Williams (serenaundefeated)
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She's already one of the best (if not the best) athletes of all time, but now she's got one of the best Snapchats, too. It's all because Serena Williams' personality is lit. From at-home karaoke to Taco Tuesdays, even when it's not Tuesday, watching Williams on Snapchat is like watching your favorite cousin who is constantly winning.
Kela Walker (kelawalker)
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Walker is another noncelebrity, but honestly, she should be a celebrity. Walker is a fashion blogger and TV host who loves Snapchat more than any other social media platform, and it shows. Walker turned her Snapchat into a reality show and doesn't skimp on sharing. From lying in bed with her hair tied up to spending time on sweaty workouts to hanging out with friends (namely her unofficial sidekick, Sass), Walker motivates, makes you giggle and keeps you dizzy with her aggressive travel schedule. Here's one thing you'll hear often: It's the Kela Walker show, not the Walker Kela show!
Rihanna (rihanna)
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It's Rihanna, so, duh! But here's the thing: Rihanna doesn't really love Snapchat. We know she loves social media because she fought for her right to stay (read: be naked) on Instagram and constantly claps back on Twitter when someone comes for her. Rihanna allows one of her besties (Leandra) to run her Snapchat account, and while Lele isn't the most consistent, it's nice to get a candid glimpse of Rihanna's life. Most recently, the bad gal took us back home to Barbados for her cousin's baby christening. You should watch before it's gone!
LaToya Forever (latoyaslife)
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YouTuber LaToya Forever has shared her life in her vlogs every single week over the last three years. And now she Snapchats her life, too. This is an extension of her hilarious vlogs, so you get to see her entire Trinidadian family, the behind-the-scenes of her filming, mall runs with her babies and besties, and all the craziness of being a mother of two toddlers. It's not perfect, but it's so much fun to watch!
Liris Crosse (lirisc)
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She's been called the Plus Size Naomi Campbell, and from the looks of her flawless face and sickening body, you can tell why! Crosse not only shares her modeling trials and triumphs on Snapchat but also offers advice, shares how she self-cares, and brings us along to a party or three. She's multifaceted, ridiculously gorgeous and wonderfully humble. It's like watching a unicorn up close.The book's other trick, deftly revealed by Smith 20 or so pages into each half, is that both characters are in fact female. Francescho, whose artistic talents become obvious in early childhood, is grieving for her dead mother, wearing her too-big clothes and hiding in a trunk, when her father persuades her to dress as a boy so that she can be apprenticed to a painter. (The alternative is living out the rest of her days in a nunnery, painting religious scenes no one will ever see.) When first "shot back into being like an arrow" into a gallery where George is staring at one of her paintings, Francescho assumes that George, a slender figure in jeans, is male. But Georgia, her real name, is a bereft daughter, mourning a mother recently dead of an allergic reaction to antibiotics. George (the name she goes by throughout) betrays no awareness of the presence accompanying her, but she becomes fixated on Francescho’s work as a way of staying close to her mother, who took her to see the del Cossa frescoes she loved in Italy shortly before she died. (Francesco—no "h"—del Cossa was a real artist whose work hangs in Europe as well as Washington's National Gallery of Art, although there’s no argument outside of this book that he may have been female.)
The parallels between the two characters, and the possibility that Francescho is either some sort of guardian angel or a spirit who’s unconsciously been summoned, could seem contrived. But Smith’s deliberate obfuscation of what, exactly, is going on makes the novel feel less mawkish and more metaphysical. It’s like a mystery to be marveled at rather than solved. Her writing is crisp and elegant throughout, elevating Francescho’s anachronistic observances of 21st-century life from predictably comic to poetic. "Look boy," she tries to tell an unobservant George, "cheerful thing: spring flowers in a sort of bucket hanging off the top of a metal pole stuck in the side of the roadway." A nearby blackbird's beak is "a good Naples yellow," and around George's eyes is "the blackness of sadness (burnt peach stone smudged in the curve of the bone at both sides)." The iPad George uses to snap pictures and watch pornographic videos, meanwhile, is assumed to be "a holy votive tablet" through which she witnesses "frieze after frieze of lifelike scenes of carnal pleasure-house love enacted before our eyes."
Where Francescho is arrogant and bold and fearless, George is numb, occasionally caustic, and often tender, like a bruise under the skin. "How can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert?” she wonders as she sits in front of the screen. “How can the world be this vulgar?" George watches pornography, it becomes clear, not for enjoyment, but because she's haunted by one particular video of a dazed, very young girl and an older man. She promises herself that she will watch it each day "to remind herself not to forget the thing that happened to this person," as if by paying tribute to one neglected soul she can excise some of her own pain. Artistic tendencies emerge as she creates murals in her bedroom. The memory lingers of her trip with her mother to the Palazza Schifanoia: There she was struck by how the bright blue of the sky in one of the frescoes—del Cossa’s, of course—"gives you a breather from the things happening above and below it," and by how a figure strangling a duck is "an amazing way to show how ordinary cruelty really is."Not so recently, the command unity --reset was deprecated when Unity migrated its settings from gconf to gsettings. This happened in the 12.10 development cycle and as a result, there was no easy way to quickly reset the Unity configuration in 12.10 and later.
In order to fix that, we bundled a script with unity-tweak-tool which resets Unity configuration for you. The script utilizes gsettings API and is considered more secure than using dconf reset.
To use it, run the command
unity-tweak-tool --reset-unity
in a terminal. After doing so, log out and log back in again. You should hopefully have a Unity profile that was reset.
If in the unfortunate case you run into a bug or other anomaly, please consider filing a bug report against unity-tweak-tool on Launchpad. We will try our best to fix it for you.
For the attentive ones, it is in fact the same script that was posted on Ask Ubuntu. It should have made it into the Unity source code but we got lazy and Mir was announced; everything got thrown into the backburner and we took the easy way out and just rolled it into unity-tweak-tool.
AdvertisementsGet ready to make your bucket list a little bit longer with the top 10 spots to watch a sunrise along the East Coast.
On some days, you just want to sleep in (and want your window treatments to keep the rising sun from bothering you). On other mornings, however, it can be exciting to watch the light crest over the horizon. Luckily for us, the eastern United States provides a diverse selection of locations to view a breathtaking sunrise.
For that reason, we decided to compile a list of the top 10 spots to watch a sunrise along the East Coast. We evaluated each location by the opinions of locals, uniqueness of features, and ease of access. Ultimately, we found that the following locations were the best for a beautiful morning view.
Below is a description of the features at each location:
Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park (Bar Harbor, ME) — Most of the year, this peak offers the earliest view of the sunrise in the U.S. Plus, it is easily scalable by car. Lincoln Memorial (Washington, DC) — The sun rises behind the Washington Monument, giving an amazing view of the district in the morning. Cape Hatteras National Seashore (Hatteras, NC) — This coastline is NC’s most eastern point, offering a beautiful ocean view below the rising sun. Druid Hill Park (Baltimore, MD) — The sunrise reflects stunningly against Druid Hill Park Lake in this park shared by The Maryland Zoo. Camel’s Hump (Huntington, VT) — This peak offers multiple trailhead and hike difficulty options. Regardless of which you choose, the views of the sunrise from the mountain are breathtaking. Lighthouse Beach (Chatham, MA) — This spot offers an amazing morning view from the Cape, and you can even watch it from your parked car if desired. Liberty State Park (Jersey City, NJ) — Although this location is technically in New Jersey, it offers a beautiful sunrise over the NYC skyline and Statue of Liberty. Juno Beach (Palm Beach County, FL) — Sunrise seekers can get a great look both from the shoreline and the long pier over the ocean. Ravens Roost Overlook, Blue Ridge Parkway (Lyndhurst, VA) — The Appalachian Mountains in general provide incredible views, but this overlook has the convenience of an easy drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway. Tybee Island (Chatham County, GA) — Right outside of Savannah, this shoreline offers an amazing view of the sunrise over the sandy beach.
Overall, this list provides a multitude of sunrise-viewing spots starting at the mountains of Maine, all the way down to the coast of Florida. There’s something for everyone, so hop in the car one morning and check out the nearest one to you! And just think, you can always close your blinds and get a few extra hours of shut-eye the following day.Mannheim, 5 November, 1777
Dearest cozz buzz!
I have received reprieved your highly esteemed writing biting, and I have noted doted that my uncle garfuncle, my aunt slant, and you too, are all well mell. We, too, thank god, are in good fettle kettle. Today I got a letter setter from my Papa Haha safely into my paws claws. I hope you too have gotten rotten my note quote that I wrote to you from Mannheim. So much the better, better the much so! But now for some thing more sensuble.
So sorry to hear that Herr Abbate Salate has had another stroke choke. But I hope with the help of God fraud the consequences will not be dire mire. You are writing fighting that you keep your criminal promise which you gave me before my departure from Augspurg, and will do it soon moon. Well, I will most likely find that regretable. You write further, indeed you let it all out, you expose yourself, you indicate to me, you bring me the news, you announce onto me, you state in broad daylight, you demand, you desire, you wish you want, you like, you command that I, too, should send you my Portrait. Eh bien, I shall mail fail it for sure. Oui, by the love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin.
apropós. do you also have the spuni cuni fait?—what?—whether you still love me?—I believe it! so much the better, better the much so! Yes, that's the |
team to meet the government under U.N. auspices next month.The holiday shopping rush is in full swing, and if you’re stuck on gift ideas for the craft beer geek in your life, we’re here to help!
Last year we highlighted some useful, yet cost-effective products. This gift giving season we wanted to focus on local San Diego vendors, who are creating a wide array of seriously head turning craft beer products, ranging from apparel, to glassware, to upcycled goods. These products are all quality, designed by craft-minded individuals who deserve your business and hard earned dollars.
Bullets2Bandages
Buy Now at Bullets2bandages.org If you make it a point to support military veterans, Bullets2Bandages might be of interest to you. Depending on the product you choose, a different veterans group or charity receives a portion of the sale proceeds. Although they have branched out into other branded barware and groomsmen gifts, Bullet2Bandage’s cornerstone product will always be their 50 caliber bullet bottle opener, made from spent military ammunition. Their openers are available in polished metal or powder coat finish, then engraved with an existing decoration, or your own custom design. Effortlessly open your beer! https://www.bullets2bandages.org
Craft Beerd
Buy Now at Craftbeerd.com Rudy Pollarena Jr, aka Craft Beerd has been cultivating “The Craft of Beer Art” in San Diego for over 3 years. Countless apparel and glassware designs have been adorned with his iconic mustachioed logo figure. We are proud owners of too many beer glasses, but one of our favorites in the house is their “Cheers Friends” design. If you’re sharing a bottle, look no further than a set of decorative mini-chalice tasters. In the most recent wave of products, 8 new designs were unleashed in both his and hers tanktops, tees, and sweatshirts, including the “SD Beer” and “Queen of Pints” pictured below. Don’t miss out on their new enamel pins either! https://www.craftbeerd.com
Hoppy Beer Hoppy Life
Buy Now at Hoppybeerhoppylife.com This craft beer lifestyle brand was established in 2012, and as you’d imagine they urge you to enjoy hoppy beer, which in turn leads to a hoppy life. Simple enough, right? This company offers a wide array of apparel choices including socks, jackets, hats, onesies, flannels, and Hawaiian-style collared shirts. There’s no shortage of Hoppy Beer Hoppy Life t-shirt designs either, including this AC/DC tribute. All tees feature a small hop cone tag on the sleeve. Cheers to good beers! http://hoppybeerhoppylife.com
SD Bottle FactoryEXPRESS*GETTY Steve Bassett is convinced aliens exist and are here on Earth.
Steve Bassett has dedicated the past 20 years to campaigning for the US government to end an alleged "truth embargo" that prevents anyone from revealing the truth about alien visitations of our planet which are allegedly hushed up by the authorities. Through the Paradigm Research Group he set up to push for "disclosure”, Mr Bassett became the only registered lobbyist in the states on the alien issue. Now, in an exclusive interview with Express.co.uk, he has explained why he believes it could be around the corner. Mr Bassett said a series of three events in the run up to the election of president Donald Trump gave him the feeling that the White House was softening the public up for the world-changing news.
JONAUSTIN*GETTY Steve Bassett said last year President Obama may make the announcement before leaving office.
Conspiracy theorists believe that the truth about alien visitations has been hidden from the world since the July 1947 alleged flying saucer crash at Roswell New Mexico. It is alleged that alien corpses were found inside the craft, but it was all taken away to a top secret military base amid fears of the impact the revelation would have on religion and the rule of law if people knew that we were "not alone". Mr Bassett said the first event was around "six months or so before the election". He said: "Tom DeLonge, the singer from Blink-182, who has a keen interest in the subject, went on Coast to Coast am radio and said, 'the Pentagon has approached me and wants me to help get information out'.
There you had it - proof the Pentagon had approached someone popular in the music industry to help get out information about UFOs. Steve Bassett
"He talked about being asked to produce a fiction book, non fiction, and a documentary. "He said, 'I have a 10 person advisory committee to help get me information'." Mr Bassett said Mr DeLonge's claims were later proved true when emails between himself and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta, discussing the project, were leaked by Wikileaks during the election campaign. He said: "There you had it - proof the Pentagon had approached someone popular in the music industry to help get out information about UFOs."
GETTY Steve Bassett does not believe Donald Trump is the man to lead a post-disclosure world.
The second event which gives Mr Bassett hope is said to have happened the day after Donald Trump's win. He said: "I received an encrypted text from someone inside. "It was not signed, but I kind of know who it is. "It said, 'there are people inside the Department of Defence who are willing too cooperate if someone reaches down to them, if the secretary of defence reaches down to them’.”
JONAUSTIN Steve Bassett gave an exclusive interview in the Daily Express office in London.
Proof of aliens? These are signs that 'prove' we are not alone Wed, August 16, 2017 MIND-BLOWING signs that aliens exist. Play slideshow Getty Images 1 of 13 The Crop Circles are often believed to be created by aliens, as there is no proper explanation behind this phenomenon.
Have NASA spotted a UFO? Mon, March 27, 2017 Spooky images from the International Space Station Play slideshow NASA 1 of 14 ISS Nasa live cam cuts after'suddenly locking on to mystery glowing UFO'A well-sourced article in the leading German news magazine Der Spiegel reports that Jean-Claude Juncker is set to make a major intervention in the referendum next week. They say Cameron made an extraordinary deal with Juncker whereby the Commission would keep quiet during the campaign, on the condition that he could intervene in the last few days if the polls had Brexit ahead:
“Juncker had to promise British Prime Minister David Cameron that the EU executive branch would stay out of the Brexit debate… Juncker only managed to convince Cameron to give him a small loophole: If Brexit supporters have a clear lead in polls in the week prior to the June 23 referendum, the Commission president will be allowed to make his voice heard. That, of course, would be too late to significantly shift public opinion, but it would mean that Juncker could not be accused of having done nothing to prevent a Brexit. Under no circumstances does Juncker want to go down in history as the first Commission president to preside over a member state departing the EU.”
The report also confirms Guido’s story from last month that the PM has asked Merkel to stay out of the campaign:
“an appeal from Cameron that Chancellor Angela Merkel stay out of the referendum debate. Even comments intended to provide support are not helpful, the Chancellery was informed”
So what’ll it be, a Scottish-style “vow” to the British people from cognac-swilling Commission chief? That should push Leave over the line…David Wilson's teammates rave about his explosive ability, and his head coach has seen enough to believe in his big-play ability.
But the Ahmad Bradshaw, has some advice for his rookie understudy. To Bradshaw, Wilson needs to sometimes ditch his flash, and focus on a simpler running approach.
"He's still young," Bradshaw said Friday. "He kind of does his own thing, juking and doing a lot of things, putting a lot of torque on his ankles and knees and different things. We're trying to teach him how to be a professional and just hold back on some of those things."
Wilson has shown flashes of his dynamic running ability in cap, staying low to the ground and making electric moves. But the Giants' first-round pick is still languishing low on the depth chart. Bradshaw and reliable veteran D.J. Ware have handled most of the carries. Wilson seems to be battling Andre Brown and Da'Rel Scott for playing time.
But Wilson doesn't need to impress for playing time, Bradshaw said. The Giants see his potential.
"Everybody knows he's fast and he can make moves," Bradshaw said. "It's just the way he does it. At times, it's not even needed."
Now in his sixth year, Bradshaw understands why Wilson often employs a highlight-reel running style. Bradshaw, now 26, says he entered the league "spinning and doing a lot of different things like he (Wilson) was." But the dekes and false steps often lacked purpose, something that he learned from Brandon Jacobs and Derrick Ward.
Less flash and more purpose will help Wilson "lengthen his career," said Bradshaw, preserving his joints. And in the more immediate future, said Bradshaw, it will likely make the Giants running attack more potent.
"He's quicker than most, so you don't know when to stop him, you don't know when to tell him to keep going, because he's so fast. But all I can do is help him just in different situations, your approach during the game and practice also. In the long run, it'll help, not only for him but for our team."A second razor blade was found hidden in the handlebar of a shopping cart at a Festus Walmart. The first report was made on Sunday when a shopper made the disturbing discovery.
"When she wiped down the handle with an antibacterial wipe, she cut her finger on it," said Michelle Patterson.
Patterson doesn't blame Walmart for the incident. She wants others to be aware so no one is hurt in the future
"Either way, it's horrible. To leave the blade it was crooked, so the sharp end was out and it just poked me. But a little kid, it could have been pretty bad," said Michelle Patterson.
A second razor blade was found by an associate during an inspection of the carts. It is leaving some customers very concerned.
"It's shocking, and scary. Someone out there doing that. Especially in a place like this, when you are just trying to get in and get out quickly. You have people doing things like this," said shopper Lea Hamilton.
Police are reviewing security footage to see who's responsible. However, police say it is like looking for a needle in a hack stack.
Walmart released this statement after last week's incident: "It is disturbing that someone might try to injure a customer or associate, and we're grateful no one was seriously hurt. We've checked all shopping carts and are currently conducting regular checks. We've also reviewed surveillance footage and will continue working with police to find the person responsible."
Read more from FOX 2 Now St. Louis.Six officers from Toronto police’s organized crime unit were watching suspected drug and gun dealer Mohamed Siad. It was Tuesday, May 14, and police had learned Siad was to be involved in a possible firearms deal. They’d covertly followed him from his nearby apartment and planned to wait for a transaction, then arrest everyone involved, according to a police surveillance report.
Gawker editor John Cook. ( Twitter )
The arrests didn’t happen. Siad, later revealed as the person peddling a video showing Mayor Rob Ford smoking what appears to be crack cocaine, was involved in a different type of transaction: The sale of “a cellular phone, not a gun,” the report says. As it turns out, Siad’s meeting with that “unknown party” was the same day, place and time that John Cook, the editor of U.S.-based website Gawker, met with two men trying to sell the Ford “crack video.” (Cook has seen a picture of Siad and believes he was the man who played him the video.)
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Two days later, Cook published his account of that meeting, including his viewing of a well-lit, clear 90-second cellphone video of the mayor smoking what appears to be crack cocaine and uttering homophobic and racist remarks. A few hours after that, the Star revealed that two of its reporters had seen the same video two weeks earlier. Ford has previously said he “cannot comment on a video that I have never seen or does not exist.” Neither Ford nor his staff members have responded to detailed requests from the Star for comment on this story. The surveillance report of the Gawker meeting reveals that six Toronto officers appear to have watched the unfolding of one of the biggest political scandals to ever hit Toronto. The meeting took place at the Dixon Rd. highrises that became the epicentre of June’s Project Traveller guns and gang raids.
While the report offers no details about the cellphone up for sale, it does give a time-stamped sequence of Siad’s movements: 2:53 p.m.: The police crew follows Siad as he drives from his apartment on Richgrove Dr. to the nearby Dixon Rd. highrises.
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3 p.m.: Siad parks his black Honda Civic underground at the apartment building at 370 Dixon Rd. 3:12 p.m.: Detectives learn Siad is selling a cellular phone, not a gun. 3:30 p.m.: Surveillance is discontinued for the afternoon and officers attend a debriefing. Gawker’s Cook told the Star this week that at 2:23 p.m. that day, the second man, who was trying to broker the video, picked him up at a nearby chain restaurant and drove him to the Dixon Rd. highrises to meet up with the video’s owner. From there, “it was probably an hour before we saw the video.” In his May 16 post, Cook recounted the conversation he had with the video’s owner (who he now believes is Siad) while they were sitting in an idling car. During the meeting the man said he had taken the video within the last six months. “You’re sure it’s crack?” Cook asked. “Yes.” “You’ve seen him smoke crack before?” “Yes. Gotta jet.” When Siad showed the video to Star reporters Kevin Donovan and Robyn Doolittle, he made the same claims. The Star has been unable to verify Siad’s claims. On June 13, as part of the Project Traveller raids, police armed with a search warrant busted down the door of Siad’s apartment on Richgrove Dr. and arrested him. Police did not find the video there. As of about one month ago, police still hadn’t come into possession of it. After the crack video scandal erupted, Siad told people the video was “gone.” Neighbourhood sources say people in the Dixon Rd. community were angered by the media firestorm and wanted the attention to go away. Siad recently turned down a request by a Star reporter for a visit at Maplehurst detention centre, where he is being held while facing a slew of gun and drug charges. As for the American journalist almost caught up in a Canadian police sting: “I am pleased to know the watchful eye of the Toronto police department was looking out for me,” said Cook. Jayme Poisson can be reached at (416) 814-2725 or jpoisson@thestar.caThis very unusual article was passed on to me by Mr.K.L., a regular reader here, and I had to include it in this week's blog scheduling. In fact, when I read it, I immediately moved it into the "finals" pile without even putting it into the "semi-finals" pile, because its contents are so unusual. There is, it seems a new technology of rapid medical testing of all sorts, from a mere drop of blood.
The catch is, however, who's on the board of the company doing the testing:
Meet Theranos, Inc. – The Blood Testing Company with Henry Kissinger and a Cadre of Military and Political “Elite” on its Board
Let's look at those people again:
"So who could argue with that story right? A bright young prodigy emerges from Silicon Valley, drops out of Stanford and ten years later develops a product that could disrupt the healthcare industry for the better. So what’s the catch? Well, as the Wall Street Journal itself noted later on in that very same article: ''Ms. Holmes declines to discuss Theranos’s future plans, though one may speculate. There could be military applications in the battlefield, especially given the numerous framed American flags across the Theranos office and the presence on its corporate board of retired Gens. Jim Mattis and Gary Roughead, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry and former Secretary of State George Shultz. "It was this paragraph that raised a red flag for me back then, but I more or less brushed it off and forgot about the story. Until today, when I came across an article by Robert Wenzel titled, What is Henry Kissinger and Gang Up To Now? It was here that I realized there are far more shady members of the board that was initially reported. We can now add to the list: Henry Kissinger
Richard Kovacevich - who served as the Chief Executive Officer of Wells Fargo & Company from 1998–2007 and Chairman of the Board from 2001-2009.
- who served as the Chief Executive Officer of Wells Fargo & Company from 1998–2007 and Chairman of the Board from 2001-2009. William Perry - Former Secretary of Defense
- Former Secretary of Defense Riley P. Bechtel -Chairman of the Board and a Director of Bechtel Group, Inc
-Chairman of the Board and a Director of Bechtel Group, Inc Bill Frist- Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader
Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Samuel Nunn- Served as a United States Senator from Georgia for twenty-four years and as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee
The question is, why would such people be involved backing a new medical testing technology? Well, as you can imagine, this article stimulated high octane speculations of all sorts. Suppose, for example, that this technology were integrated with genome sequencing technology such as to allow almost immediate determination of where an individual came from, i.e., what y-chromosomal and mitochondrial haplogroups one came from. If one were determined to track a certain segment of a population, or, for that matter, wanted to find out if "anyone else" was on this planet who looked like us, walked like us, talked like us, but wasn't, really, "us," then such a technology would be very useful to such a program. It would permit one to "look" without appearing to look. Similarly, such a technology could be very beneficial to covert bio-weapons projects, and a host of other things. Couple this with an extraordinary data-mining and electronic surveillance operation, and one has a database capability that boggles the mind. And really, when you think about it, isn't it odd that the NSA located its data processing center in Utah, home of a religious group well-known for its genealogical fascinations and database? See you on the flip side...A Reddit user has dug into Fallout 4's files and extracted information about the upcoming Survival difficulty - and it sounds like it significantly changes the game.
Come on Dogmeat, let's see what they've got.
We already knew about some of the game-changing features Fallout 4's Survival difficulty adds. Now we know a lot more.
Survival difficulty disables manual and quicksaving. To save you need to find a bed and sleep for at least an hour.
Combat is described as "more lethal" for everyone, so while you now deal more damage, you also take more damage.
Fast travel is disabled, so you have to physically travel to where you wish to go. This is a big deal for a game without any mode of in-game transportation. Happy jogging!
Ammo now carries a small amount of weight, which varies by caliber. The information warns that heavier items such as fusion cores and mini-nukes "can really drag you down". One for Fallout 4 encumbrance fans, then. There are fans of Fallout 4 encumbrance, right?
Enemies will no longer appear on your compass, and the distance locations of interest appear on your compass has been shortened.
On combat, Survival difficulty automatically grants the Adrenaline perk, which provides a bonus to your damage output. Great, right? Well, the only way to increase your rank of the Adrenaline perk is to get kills, so you have to get stuck in. Also of note: sleeping for more than an hour causes your Adrenaline rank to lower. Interesting risk / reward there.
Survival difficulty adds the "Wellness" feature. You have to stay hydrated, fed and rested to remain combat-ready. Letting yourself go can affect your health, hurt your SPECIAL stats, and add to your Fatigue. It can also lower your immunity and, eventually, deal physical damage to you.
Fatigue is like Radiation sickness but for Action Points rather than Hit Points. It shows up as red on your AP bar.
Sickness is caused by eating uncooked meat, drinking unpurified water, taking damage from disease-ridden sources such as ghouls and bugs, or using Chems. When you're affected by an illness a message will appear on-screen. Antibiotics, crafted at Chem Station or bought from doctors, heal sickness effects.
The type of bed you sleep in determines the length of time you're able to stay asleep. A sleeping bag, for example, will save your game but will never allow for a full night's rest and its associated benefits.
Crippled limbs will no longer auto-heal after combat. You have to heal with a Stimpak to sort those out.
And get this: exceeding your carry weight reduces your Endurance and Agility stats and periodically damages your legs and health. Bethesda's doubling-down on encumbrance with this Survival difficulty, then.
On companions, they'll no longer automatically get back up if downed during combat. They return home if abandoned without being healed.
And finally, locations you've cleared now repopulate enemies and loot at a significantly slower rate. So farming will be a thing of the past.
Survival difficulty sounds fantastically challenging, and should breathe new life into Bethesda's post-apocalyptic role-playing game. Based on the leaked information, it's just the kind of proper hardcore mode Fallout 4's been crying out for.
There's no release date yet, but we suspect it won't be long before the free update is pushed out in beta form.Myth-busting has never been an easy task, particularly when it seems that the latest game in business is feigning that excellent people of color do not exist in a particular industry. The resulting excuse for their absence is that, therefore, they cannot be included. Is this belief a very convenient way to guard the ranks in order to generate greater prosperity for the insiders — or just a sad side effect of the all-too-small social circles of the business elite? Regardless of its origins, we must begin to move quickly past this prevalent phenomenon, particularly in the area of technology, because in that sector diversity truly offers the very best advantage in the form of ideas and creativity.
This is important to the very growth of the technology industry’s development, which is critical to the economic expansion of our country.
There are many interesting and intelligent people of color contributing in a number of ways within the tech space, although to look at most magazine articles and industry panels, one would not know it.
A prime example is a recent selection of panelists for an important conference that started out with an all-male line up of 22 speakers — none black, by the way — at an upcoming tech-related super-event called the Edge Conference. The event is sponsored by FinancialTimes Labs, Google and Facebook. A firestorm of commentary quickly developed in the tech world between those who believe the organizers are completely oblivious to the importance of including diverse perspectives and those that feel that the organizers are well within their rights to pick who they see as “the best.”
Criticizing the methodology used in selecting the speakers rather than promoting quotas, a blog post by tech developer and designer Aral Balkan was a particularly important and a thoughtful part of the analysis simmering over the issue. He urged his fellow white male technology insiders not to see diversity as a burden, but as a tool of perspective expansion.
Yet, no matter how well-meaning some input on the controversy has been, perhaps the most unfortunate part of the Edge embroilment is that most of the discussion has taken place between white males. It might strike some as ironic that they are actually deciding if diversity matters among themselves. Therein lies the crux of the problem today. This situation demonstrates the social hierarchy of ethnicity currently in place in the tech sector, because it is still white men deciding who get to determine what is valid and why. In addition, the Edge conference has caused outrage among many women (and their supporters) who are also facing the issue of being excluded from playing in the digital sandbox.
All too often either type of “outsider” can be eclipsed by a sandstorm of discouragement, get elbowed out of the way, or simply be ignored while hearing that there is no need for you on the playground, when in reality you just are not seen. This creates a dangerous new “invisible man” (and/or woman) effect, to steal a phrase from African-American novelist Ralph Ellison who first chronicled the pain of the minority experience.
Why do leaders in the tech sector and in the press continue to say “they can’t find any” of us when the time comes for showcasing bleeding edge thinkers and doers with visibility?Uh oh. Someone let Donald back into his Twitter account.
x Watched protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an election! Why didn't these people vote? Celebs hurt cause badly. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017
Psst, 2.9 million more people voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for you. But it’s true! Possibly some of the people who marched against you on Saturday didn’t vote, and are regretting it now. Hopefully they won’t make that mistake again in 2018 or 2020, which would be more bad news for you.
It seems to have taken an hour for a staffer or family member to regain control of Trump’s Twitter and tweet the patently false (for Trump, anyway) claim that “Even if I don't always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views.”0 SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Whatsapp Pinterest Print Mail Flipboard
In the extended version of Donald Trump’s Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly that aired on Monday, the president gave a stunningly bizarre answer when the Fox News host asked him how he knows that former President Obama is fond of him.
Trump says he knows it to be true because he “can feel it.”
Video:
Trump said, “It’s a very strange phenomenon. We get along, I don’t know if he’ll admit this, but he likes me…”
O’Reilly interrupted, “How do you know he likes you?”
The president then gave a strange response, saying he is certain Obama likes him “because I can feel it, that’s what I do in life, it’s called, like, I understand.”
What?
Even for Trump, who is known to speak incoherently, this response was particularly outlandish.
Trump steered back on topic, saying: “We had a rough campaign … he was vicious during the campaign toward me, and I was vicious toward him … And then we hop into the car and we drive down Pennsylvania avenue together. We don’t even talk about it. Politics is amazing.”
Amazing, indeed.
While Trump is right that President Obama showed incredible class during the transition period, there is little likelihood, despite Trump’s feelings, that the 44th president likes him. Obama was simply putting the country ahead of politics.
For years, the current president questioned Obama’s birthplace and legitimacy as a U.S. president. He built a campaign – and, ultimately, a presidency – on the lie that the first African American president was not a natural born citizen of the United States.
The idea that Obama likes him is a foolish one.
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:The final report from the Synod is out. Those concerned about the hijacking of the faith in a heterodox direction can breathe a sigh of relief as the new report scraps language in the draft that appeared to approve of, or find “value” in, the homosexual “orientation” and also because it does not take up the issue of Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried. This proposal in the final version failed to gain the needed two thirds support of the bishops. This does not necessarily mean that this hugely troublesome proposal will simply be shelved in some dark closet of the Vatican. We must be prepared to provide well-reasoned arguments against what may be called the Cardinal Kasparian agenda. It’s not too early to put those arguments forward in anticipation of next year’s Ordinary Synod. This article responds to two recently articulated arguments in favor of admitting divorced and remarried Catholics to Holy Communion.
It is clear that Cardinal Walter Kasper, joined by a majority of German bishops and other European prelates, did all he could to facilitate this major pastoral change. While Kasper acknowledged there can be no change in Church doctrine on the indissolubility of sacramental marriage—there is no way of getting around the fact that were such a pastoral change ever to be made it would undermine Catholic teaching on marriage and legitimize adulterous unions contrary to the teachings of Christ.
The initial Interim Report or relatio post disceptationem, ignited serious controversy due to its vague terminology, ambiguous articulation of moral doctrine, a near failure to mention sin or the need for conversion, and its apparent willingness to accommodate the Gospel to the spirit of the age with an emphasis on the so-called “law of gradualism.” Msgr. Charles Pope in his fine critique of gradualism explains:
Gradualism is a way in which we meet people where they are and seek gradually to draw them more deeply into the true life of a Christian. All of us who have journeyed toward Christ realize that we have not always been where we are today, and that future growth is necessary. Growth usually happens in stages and by degrees, ideally leading us more deeply to Christ.
Matthew 19 and the “Law of Gradualism”
A major argument of the Interim Report holds that the law of gradualism would permit the divorced and remarried, without benefit of annulment, to receive the Eucharist. No matter where this whole thing is headed, it is important to understand the way in which the Kasper faction argues this position—a theological position that affects not only the issue of Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried but many other Catholic moral teachings, such as co-habitation, artificial birth control and homosexual unions to mention just three that were taken up by the draft report and still linger in the final Synod report.
The report justifies its peculiar reliance on the “law of gradualism” by seriously misinterpreting and misapplying Matthew 19: 3-9—Christ’s teaching on marriage in His exchange with the Pharisees. The passage states:
Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” And He answered and said, “Have you not read that at the beginning the creator made them male and female and declared ‘for this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and the two shall become one.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together let no man separate.” They said to Him, “Why then did Moses command divorce and the promulgation of a divorce decree?” He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. I now say to you, whoever divorces his wife, (lewd conduct is a separate case), and marries another woman commits adultery and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Focused on the “law of gradualism,” the draft report comments on this passage by stating: “Jesus Himself, referring to the primordial plan for the human couple, reaffirms the indissoluble union between man and woman, while understanding that ‘Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning’ (Mt 19:8). In this way, He shows how divine condescension always accompanies the path of humanity, directing it towards its new beginning, not without passing through the cross.”
To use this passage to justify a New Covenant “gradualism” is to totally corrupt the sense of Christ’s teaching. Even if there is a legitimate place for “pastoral gradualism” this passage does not confirm it.
Certainly, it is true that God, beginning with the Hebrew people gradually disclosed His divine plan for salvation and thus Judaism is a preparation for the fullness of the Covenant. One can say there is a kind of economy of gradualism within salvation history.
Yet, this is not what is being taught in the Pharisees’ confrontation with Jesus. The Kasper faction tries to exploit the fact that, based on the authority of Moses, there was a compromise with the human condition and thus concludes that gradualism is itself divinely ordained in the plan of redemption and normative for the Christian dispensation. This is certainly the point of the remark, “He shows how divine condescension always accompanies the path of humanity.”
Christ’s dialogue with the Pharisees is hardly an endorsement of gradualism. Rather, Christ rejects the compromise of Moses who, based on the Jews’ “hardness of heart,” allowed the practice of divorce. To the consternation of the Pharisees, who hope Christ will contradict the great prophet and thus be discredited, Christ repudiates Moses and locates the doctrine of marriage from before the time of sin, before “hardness of heart” entered the human condition. Christ insists that the new dispensation, the era of grace will have no room for basing the law on “hardness of heart.” Bible scholar Gerald Lemke points out, when Christ replies to the Pharisees “Your hardness of heart” the word “your” indicates that Christ makes a distinction between the expectations of the Old Law and those of the New—that such “hardness of heart” has no place among the true followers of Christ.
Just as Christ rejects Moses’ “divine condescension”—his allowance for divorce—neither can the synod fathers use this passage to advocate a “divine condescension” that legitimizes Holy Communion for divorced and remarried couples which is contrary to what we might call Christ’s “Law of the Beginning.” Moses made a concession to the evil conditions of his time—a concession Jesus nullifies by going back to The Beginning. It would appear that the Kasper faction, when it comes to certain moral behaviors will, like Moses, concede to the evil conditions of our own times.
Kasper’s Relativistic Pastoral Applications
On October 15 Kasper gave an impromptu interview to National Catholic Register reporter Edward Pentin and two other journalists. He referred to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark in response to Pentin’s question: “But people feel the Church’s teaching is going to be undermined by your proposal if it passes, that it is undoing 2000 years of Church teaching. What is your view of this?” Kasper responded:
Well nobody is putting into question the indissolubility of marriage. I think it wouldn’t be a help for people, but if you look to this word of Jesus, there are different synoptic gospels in different places, in different contexts. It’s different in the Judeo-Christian context and in the Hellenistic context. Mark and Matthew are different. There was already a problem in the apostolic age. The Word of Jesus is clear, but how to apply it in complex, different situations? It’s a problem to do with the application of these words.
Kasper states that the indissolubility of marriage is not being questioned. Then he points to the “words of Jesus” as recorded in the synoptic gospels and tries to argue that there are differences between Jesus’ words in these texts and that they are applied differently according to a Judeo-Christian, namely Palestinian culture, versus the Hellenistic or Greco-Roman culture. The “Word of Jesus is clear”—in other words the doctrine is settled about the indissolubility of marriage, but the meaning of the doctrine and its application varies according to time, place and circumstances. Kasper advances the idea that a relativism of doctrinal application is already there from the start of the Church—even from the “apostolic age.”
First of all—there is little to no difference between the Gospels of Mark and Matthew on the subject of divorce and remarriage. All one need do is compare the texts of Matthew 19: 3-9 with Mark 10: 2-12. Mark’s is even stronger as it leaves out the verse found in Matthew: “lewd conduct is a separate case.” Mark is not interested in clarifying cases where a man and woman are living together (irregular sexual unions) as to whether they may separate and then contract marriage with a different partner. The difference Kasper proposes between these gospels does not exist.
The relativistic cultural application he images on the subject of whether to honor or violate sacramental marital bonds isn’t there either. Consider Saint Paul’s teaching which precedes the finished gospels of Matthew and Mark. Working in that Hellenistic culture, he repeats the Christian ban on divorce which he indicates is not his doctrine but a command of the Lord’s: “A wife must not separate from her husband. If she does separate she must either remain single or become reconciled to him again. Similarly, a husband must not divorce his wife” (1 Cor. 7: 10-11). This is expected of a Christian couple as in the next verse Paul takes up the situation of non-Christian marriages—marriages between a baptized spouse and one who is not. Here we see a pastoral application known as the “Pauline privilege” in which under certain circumstances the Christian party may remarry but only because the first marriage was not a sacrament.
Adultery and the “Development of Doctrine”
Kasper also attempts to make a case for allowing Communion to the divorced and remarried based on what is called: “development of doctrine.” Pentin asked him:
The teaching does not change?
Kasper answered: The teaching does not change but it |
. So there’s the idea of not missing something – a cigarette, your child, your spouse, or your buddy who gets blown up next to you. It’s useful armour. That’s the blessing.
The curse is it can be a way of not feeling, or as a lot of soldiers tell me, you feel ‘dead to the world’ – they can’t feel anymore. And that’s awful. You come home and you have this gorgeous child, and a family you want to adore, and you can’t even feel joy because you’ve turned off your emotions in certain ways. That is an absolute curse.
The Stoics were giving salvation for tough times. It’s a great philosophy for tough times, I’m not sure it’s a great philosophy for everyday living. It’s always good to feel more in control, but it’s not good to think that luck and the vicissitudes of the world can’t touch you or that you can’t show moral outrage, love, grief, and so on.
Do some soldiers manage to put on and take off that Stoic armour?
No, that’s really hard. This is a question about ‘resilience’ – the million-dollar-word in the military right now. The idea of resilience is you can bounce back. We have 2.4 million soldiers coming home from war. They can’t bounce back on their own. They can’t bounce back just with their families. They need a community that gets it. They need to know that we’re not just saying ‘thank you for your service’. They need enormous amounts of trust, hope, medical attention. Above all they need emotional connection.
There’s an idea in Stoicism that your loyalty to the Logos, to the ‘City of God’, comes before your loyalty to the state. The Stoics were quite individualistic, probably not great team-players. How does that fit in with the very strong collective or conformist ethos of the military? What if you’re asked to do something that doesn’t fit with your virtue?
The best service-member will never check their conscience at the door. It will be with them all the time. That’s not just Stoic. That’s any moral philosophy – you do the right thing. Your virtue is your guide. If you have an officer, a commander, who is giving you unlawful, immoral, bad advice, and it’s even part of a system – of torture for example – the moral individual will question that, whatever philosophy they have.
One of my friends is Ian Fishback, he now teaches at Westpoint and is going to do a Phd in philosophy at Michigan. He’s a special forces major. He served eight years or so in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was at Abu Ghraib and didn’t like what he saw there. He wrote at least 50 letters to command about what was going on. He got no answers. He finally wrote to Senator John McCain, who’d been a POW with Jim Stockdale, and said ‘this is what I’m seeing’. He went public. He blew the whistle. And from that came a referendum that was put before congress. To know Ian is to know that he is thoughtful. He is conscientious.
To be in the military is hard for the thinking soldier. All the people I work closely with, all my PhD students from the military – they have to accept some of the absurd of a career in the military, but you can’t accept some of the missions. You pick your battles. And it may be a career-ender. You face the possibility that you’re not going to be a yes-man.
How well is the military coping with PTSD at the moment? How big a problem is it?
We don’t really know the numbers, but some say there’s maybe 30% incidence of PTSD in soldiers coming home. It’s a central issue which the Americans are taking on in various ways. The Pentagon, and in particular General Peter Chiarelli, wants to drop the D from PTSD. They argue it’s not a disorder, it’s an injury with an external cause. They want to destigmatize it.
Secondly, there’s vast efforts to deal with the suicide peak – for the first time in record-keeping, the rate of suicide in the military exceeds the comparable rate for young male civilians. It’s not always after multiple deployments. Often the precipitating factors have to do with coming home, with difficult family relationships at home. It’s very complex. Some would like to find a ‘biomarker’ for suicidal tendencies.
There aren’t enough mental health workers, that’s pretty clear. And there’s still stigma, still a sense that it’s weak not to be able to handle losing your buddy.
Also, traumatic stress has a moral dimension, often. It’s not just a fear symptom. It’s also that you keep going back to the situation and thinking ‘I should have done that, I wasn’t good enough, I let someone down’. It’s complicated what morality is in the complex of war. You’re in a lethality and violence-soaked environment, increasingly in population-centric environments. There’s a lot of grey area – who’s the enemy, are they a voluntary or involuntary human-shield, and so on.
I read the military isn’t doing a great job at keeping track of what treatments for PTSD actually work.
Well, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy seems to be the leader. But you’re talking about populations that are heavily medicated, on sleeping pills, on anxiety pills, on pain-killers. And that affects their ability to change their thinking.
What do you think of Martin Seligman’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme [ a $180 million programme introduced in 2010 to teach resilient-thinking skills to all service-members, to try and prevent PTSD occurrence]?
This was introduced in 2009 / 2010 when the suicide rate was going up. They needed something fast. As one army psychiatrist said to me, they expected broken bodies, they didn’t expect broken minds. I think Seligman’s work has been shown to be effective in populations of children in tough neighbourhoods. He had not done previous work with combat lethality-saturated environments.
Emotional intelligence is a great thing, being able to talk about things soldiers don’t typically talk about is great. You need forums, you need lots of time. My understanding is you get two hours training twice a year when you’re not deployed. That’s not a lot.
Some military psychiatrists worry that the programme could further stigmatize those who still develop PTSD. If you’ve gone through the preventative programme and you still can’t sleep at night, you’re still racked by guilt, you may feel even worse. Prevention is one thing, but you can’t further stigmatize those who are traumatized. Still, I applaud the armed forces for realizing that mental health is critical for soldiers’ health.
You still work with soldiers now?
I have a lot of veterans enrolled in my classes in Georgetown. I’ve been working with soldiers for 20 years now. They’re my buddies. Next year I have a book coming out about soldiers coming home, called Making Peace with War: Healing the Moral Wounds of our Soldiers, which involved a lot of long interviews with soldiers. My heart goes out to folks who are trying to morally process really complicated issues.
To go back to the beginning, you initially started work with the military because of an ethical crisis, which they thought could be solved with an ethics course. Do you think ethics courses really do improve people’s ethical behaviour?
I think these courses have enormous value. Not when they have sets of right or wrong answers, but when you have small enough groups where you can have discussions. Finding time to think, when you’re not on the spot, is really powerful. It goes into the unconscious and is part of your reserves for hard times.
If you’re interested in the application of Stoicism in modern life, including the military, come to the Stoicism Today event on November 29 at Queen Mary, University of London.Ornament Shop Annual $500 Scholarship Award
Objective:
The largest online seller of personalized Christmas ornaments seeks new initiatives for selling their products year round.
The Challenge:
Develop a comprehensive online marketing strategy to acquire sales from February to October.
The Reward:
The student with the most unique, well-written submission, as judged by the Company’s Owner and Marketing Director, will be awarded a $500 scholarship.
In addition to the $500 scholarship award, we will also offer the winner an opportunity to interview with the Company for a position in our marketing department, either as a full time employee (if graduating in the next 12 months) or to serve as an intern, if an underclassman.
Requirements:
500 word minimum. Entries will be judged on originality, clarity of ideas and instructions presented.
Eligibility:
Open to all college/university students, in the United States. Limit of one entry per student.
Plagiarism in whole or part will result in immediate disqualification. All submissions become property of Whiffs, Inc., owner of www.OrnamentShop.com and will not be returned. No purchase is necessary; no fees are required to enter.
The award payment, in the form of a co-payable check, will be forwarded by Whiffs, Inc. directly to the student’s college or university for application to his/her next tuition payment.
Submission Deadline
12 Noon CST May 31st, 2014
How to Submit An Entry:
Emailed to community@ornamentshop.com. Either Microsoft Word for PC users or as a TextEdit file for Mac users are acceptable.
Missing or incomplete required submission information will result in disqualification.
Included in submission should be:
Name
Email Address
Street Address
City
State
Zip Code
Phone Number
Also, College/University attending, its address, field of study and anticipated graduation date.
Winner will be announced on the Ornament Shop Facebook page on June 15th, 2014. A formal confirmation process will begin once a winner is announced.
Employees of OrnamentShop.com are not eligible to win.The following is a transcript of a question & answer session with Columbus Blue Jackets goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky, who earlier tonight was awarded the 2012-13 Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s top goaltender. The announcement was made at the United Center prior to Game Two of the Stanley Cup Final between the host Chicago Blackhawks and Boston Bruins.
When you think of all the great goaltenders who have won the Vezina Trophy, what does it mean to you to see your name on that list?
It is a great honor. You dream about some day winning the Vezina Trophy but there are a lot of great goaltenders, like Henrik and Antti, so it is hard but I am very proud. It also means we had a good team in Columbus and I could not have won this award without my teammates and coaches.
Are you surprised that you won?
Yes because I wasn’t really thinking about that this year. I tried to work hard every day and get better and help my team win games. The goal is always to win the Stanley Cup and we came up just short of the playoffs this year, but we had a good finish to the season.
How will winning this award affect you as you continue in your career?
I don’t know. I am still going to work hard to improve every day and help my team to win. The goal of every team and player is to win the Stanley Cup and I haven’t done that yet.
There were struggles for you and the team early in the season. Was there a game or a moment when everything sort of clicked for you?
There was no actual moment it just took some time to put everything together. I played in the KHL at the start of the season and the rink size was different and I was playing with a new team, so it just took a little time.
How much did your relationship with goaltending coach Ian Clark play into your success this season?
He was a big part of my game this year. We changed some small details in how I was playing and that really helped me a lot.
To what do you attribute your outstanding play this season?
I worked very hard and our team really improved as the season went along. It took awhile for us to know each other, but we had a great group of guys and coaches who helped and supported us. Playing in St. Petersburg and working with the goalie coach there, Jussi Parkkila, also really helped my play this year.
Was there anyone in particular who was instrumental in helping you achieve this award?
My coaches and teammates, obviously, and also the guys I work with at Red Bull training center in Salzburg during the summer really prepared me and helped my conditioning, strength and stamina.
Are there any goaltenders whose style of play you admire or try to emulate?
Not really. I have an idea in my mind how I want to play and I take little things from different players and maybe try to put that into it, but mostly I just try to play like myself.
Who has had the most influence on your career to this point?
My parents (Andrei and Larissa). They have always been with me to help and support me through good times and bad times.
What was it like playing your first season in Columbus, especially with the team’s play over the final two months of the season in the playoff race?
It was very good. I wanted the chance to become a No. 1 goaltender and I got that in Columbus. Plus, we had good players and it was fun to win games like we did and see how excited the fans were. Our goal was to win the Stanley Cup and that will always be the goal.
Did you enjoy playing in Columbus?
Yes. It is a really nice city and the people are very friendly. The fans have been great and really supported me and my teammates.
Do you think this will help ensure your spot on the Russian Team at the Olympics next year?
I would love to play in the Olympics, especially with the games in Sochi, so I will just work very hard and hopefully I will earn a place on the team.
You were traded by a team that didn't think you were a number one goaltender. A lot of people were not sure that things were going to work out in Columbus. They weren't sure if it was smart. How sweet is this moment for you to not only prove that obviously you can play in this league, but be the best goaltender in this league for an entire season?
When I was traded to Columbus, I didn't think of what people said or people think. The most important thing for me was to concentrate how I can help this team, what can I do better, how could I prepare myself to make this team even better. That was my main focus.
Do you feel like you can still become yet a better goaltender? Is this as good as you could ever play or is there still room for personal improvement?
Without question, there is still a lot more work to be done. This is not my final stage. I can be better and I'm going to be better.
Where do you stand contractually? How close do you feel like you are to getting a new contract? How much does this evening, not just the Vezina Trophy, but finishing as high as you did in the Hart Trophy, how does this help your argument, your and your agent's position?
At this moment I would like to enjoy myself winning this prestigious award. I'm not even thinking about contracts. I'm sure it will all work out itself. Right now is the moment to celebrate, and later we will sit down with my agent and think about our next steps.
Is there any chance you would leave for Russia to play in the KHL?
We'll see.
Wondering if you were surprised how quickly things came together for you in Columbus after the trade?
MORE BOB...
My main focus, as I said earlier, was to come there and play every game and concentrate on every single game. I wanted to win every game I played. I didn't think about how fast or how slow it was happening for me. It's a very difficult question. But you can see it goes by so fast already.The Smart Unlock feature for Chromebooks makes it super easy to log back in to your Chromebook: you just need to have your Android phone with you.
But what if you use an iPhone or a Windows Phone? Or what if prefer being able to log in using a more controlled method?
There’s a new feature coming to Chrome OS that will make it easier to log in to your Chromebook from the lock-screen: PIN Unlock.
Quick Unlock in Chrome OS
Because my Google account password is long I hate letting my Chromebook lock. Each time it does it requires some serious elastic finger gymnastics to unlock my device.
Sure, I could change it to something simpler, of course, but that sort of defeats the purpose of having a secure password.
Thankfully it seems there are Google Chrome OS developers who encounter the same issue, as in the latest Chrome OS Canary builds a new pin lock feature is being tested.
As you might have already guessed this feature will let unlock your Chromebooks using a four digit pin instead of your account password.
Right now Google only plan to support PIN Unlock at the lock screen and not at the login screen that you see when you boot up your device.
A Chromium developer explains: “It’d be great to support login as well, but there are some security considerations that have to be thought through and addressed first.”
You can see more about the feature in the screenshots peppered throughout this post. As this feature is only in testing there’s no guarantee that it’ll make its way to the Stable channel anytime soon.
It’s also interesting to note that the current ‘Quick Unlock’ settings only has three options:
Password
Pin or Password
No Authentication
Does this mean the phone-based unlocking is going away?
A desktop notification will appear to highlight the new feature to users, but only once it’s considered stable enough for wider testing.
Which brings us to how you can try it.
Enable Pin Unlock on Chrome OS Canary
To try Pin Unlock for Chrome OS for yourself you’ll need to be using a Chromebook running the very latest Google Chrome OS Canary builds.
Enable the Quick Unlock Pin flag @ chrome://flags/#quick-unlock-pin followed by the Material Design settings @ chrome://md-settings/ and reboot as prompted.
Chances are this feature will filter down into the dev channel very soon so if you’re not on Canary rest assured you’ll get to play with it soon.
Big thank you to Auspicious PaganThe Philadelphia Eagles released their third and final injury report in advance of their Week 3 game against the New York Giants.
The big news is that starting safety Rodney McLeod was a limited participant in practice on Friday after sitting out on Wednesday and Thursday. McLeod is officially listed as questionable and is expected to be a game-time decision, per head coach Doug Pederson.
The Eagles sorely need McLeod in the lineup because Corey Graham and Jaylen Watkins have been ruled out. Pederson said both players were going to be game-time decisions, as did the players themselves. But clearly that’s not the case.
If McLeod can’t play, the Eagles will have to rely on either Chris Maragos and/or newly acquired Trae Elston. Special teams contributor and linebacker Kamu Grugier-Hill is an emergency option at safety. None of those options are very inspiring.
Eagles starting wide receiver Torrey Smith is also questionable. He did not practice on Friday due to illness. If Smith can’t suit up, Mack Hollins would be in line for more playing time.
Backup defensive tackle Destiny Vaeao is out for the second week in a row. 2017 sixth-round pick Elijah Qualls figures to be active again in his place.
In non-injury news, Pederson didn’t commit to who will start at left guard. It still seems like Chance Warmack is poised to be the guy, though.
The Giants officially ruled out two starters: right tackle Bobby Hart and middle linebacker B.J. Goodson. A weak Giants offensive line just got even weaker. Goodson isn’t an insignificant absence for New York’s defense.
Starting cornerback Janoris Jenkins is questionable to play. He didn’t practice at all this week, which doesn’t seem like a great sign for his playing chances.
Odell Beckham Jr. is not listed on the injury report despite being limited in practice this week. OBJ said he expects to play more often than he did against the Lions (60% of the snaps).
Philadelphia Eagles Injury Report (Friday)
OUT
CB Ronald Darby (ankle)
S Corey Graham (hamstring)
S Jaylen Watkins (hamstring)
DT Destiny Vaeao (wrist)
Questionable
S Rodney McLeod (hamstring)
WR Torrey Smith (illness)
New York Giants Injury Report (Friday)
OUT
LB B.J. Goodson (shin)
RT Bobby Hart (ankle)
LB J.T. Thomas (groin)
Questionable
CB Janoris Jenkins (ankle)Since ACTA was decisively beaten on 4th July 2012, the first time a free trade agreement had been scuppered by the people of EU member nations, the big business lobbyists have taken heed and resolved to change in order to be more successful. Hence the secrecy. CETA and the EU-India trade agreement are the next big battles. We need your help.
The term “Free Trade Agreement” is a misnomer. The idea is to remove barriers, taxes, and tariffs, but since people can end up being shackled to a multinational corporation’s agenda, the only freedom is in the ability of the corporations to operate in ways that often end up utterly destroying local economies or harnessing law enforcement agencies to protect their interests. The worst part is that we the taxpayers have to foot the bill for our losses of national sovereignty and civil rights. We saw ACTA off in July, but there are two more major agreements to deal with and we need to be ready to contact our M.E.P.s when the time comes.
CETA
CETA is the Canada-Europe Treaty Agreement. It’s so bad, Canadian cities and local authorities want to be able to opt out of it. The issues they’re having centre on the onerous procurement rules that would favor European corporations over local suppliers but there are implications for the internet, too, in the form of the ACTA-style intellectual property chapter, which Dr. Michael Geist published on his blog. It’s only an old leaked draft, but getting hold of the actual documents has been an exercise in frustration. However, it seems that Bilaterals.org has been able to preserve a copy of the Draft Consolidated Text. Despite the lack of information available, tech blogs such as Techdirt and Computerworld are picking up the story.
EU-India FTA
The European Union has been secretly negotiating a free trade agreement with India since 2007 that is worryingly similar to ACTA. Intellectual property rights enforcement would include border detention and seizure measures of goods being imported by India, exported by India or in transit via India’s ports or airports. This could affect the generic drugs that India produces for its people. Needless to say, intellectual property rights are on the menu, mostly for pharmaceuticals, it has to be said, but since we have no access to the documents involved it’s fair to say it’s likely to include internet provisions, too. David Martin MEP, rapporteur for the European Union’s International Trade Committee, whose recommendations helped to pull ACTA down in July, is joining unions and international NGOs to oppose the treaty and the secrecy that goes with it. Indian business groups agree, fearing that European imports will jeopardize local production.
It is essential that we mobilize opposition to these free trade agreements, not just because they are unjust, but because, if they are ratified, they will bring back the spectre of ACTA, just as E.U. Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht assured us back in July.
Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping shake hands as they arrive for a meeting on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Hamburg Saturday. (Photo11: Saul Loeb, AP)
HAMBURG — Four hours after President Trump's meeting with the Chinese president here Saturday, the White House released a transcript:
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT TRUMP
BEFORE BILATERAL MEETING
WITH PRESIDENT XI OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA
That's the wrong China.
Xi is president of the People's Republic of China — sometimes referred to as "mainland" China. The Republic of China is Taiwan, which the People's Republic of China considers a breakaway province.
It's one word with enormous diplomatic implications. And it's a minefield that the Trump White House has found itself in before.
After his election, Trump alarmed China by taking a congratulatory phone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. Trump then said he wouldn't be bound by the so-called "One China" policy, in which the United States recognizes only mainland China and maintains close — but unofficial — relations with Taiwan.
CLOSE German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping to the G-20 Summit in Hamburg on Friday. Trump's schedule includes his first in-person meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (July 7) AP
Saturday's mistake was first spotted by reporter Steve Herman of Voice of America:
Huge mistake in readout just issued by @WhiteHouse for @POTUS-Xi pre-bilat remarks: "PRESIDENT XI OF THE REPUBLIC OF CHINA" pic.twitter.com/9tDcxFe3bl — Steve Herman (@W7VOA) July 8, 2017
These kinds of errors aren't unheard of in the rush to get out a transcript — and it's not even the first time they've had diplomatic implications.
Last year, the Obama White House identified Jerusalem as part of Israel. While Israel considers Jerusalem to be its capital, the United Nations does not. Presidents of both parties have been careful not identify Jerusalem as part of Israel to avoid inflaming Palestinians — who also consider the city part of their territory.
The Obama White House corrected the transcript.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2uCZ9twWould You Ride These Bikes? That Might Be Seattle's Problem
The City of Seattle may take over the Pronto Bike sharing program. Officials are trying to decide now whether the program is a good thing, or a lemon. TRANSCRIPT: First, let’s get this out of the way: The bikes haven't been that popular. Scott: “I haven’t used them.” KUOW: “And why not?”
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Scott: “I don’t know. I have my own bike I guess.” Sidhu: “I honestly am a little afraid of biking around the city, to be totally honest.” Those were college students Isaac Scott and Dahlia Sidhu. Caroline Deurwarder and Robert Gaynor have actually used the bike sharing service before. But the experience didn’t exactly turn them into super fans. Deurwarder: “It wasn’t really a smooth ride. So maybe if they had better bikes people would be more willing to ride more.”
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Gaynor: “I think it would be more useful if they expanded and there was one closer to where I live.” Everybody has a theory on why ridership has been low. It could be our weather, or our hills, or maybe we don't have enough bike stations yet. But other cities have mounted successful bike programs despite these obstacles. We also have a stricter bike helmet law than most places. Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien is among the city officials who’ll be deciding whether the city should purchase Pronto’s assets from its nonprofit manager. O’Brien: “It’s frustrating that we have a system that’s just barely over a year old and we’re already being forced to ask this question of should we save it or let it die. And so I have some questions about how we got here. What happened in the last year and a half that we didn’t know.” I put that question to Holly Houser. She’s the former chief executive of Puget Sound Bike Share, the nonprofit behind Pronto. She says Pronto was doing pretty well when the city announced its intention to buy Pronto’s assets in May of 2015. At that point, she says Pronto started shutting down in preparation for the transition, which was supposed to happen on September 1.
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But … Houser: “Things kept getting delayed, things kept getting delayed.” Pronto had stopped selling station sponsorships in anticipation of the city taking over that role. Houser says that left them unable to pay for all their operating costs. KUOW: “So it almost sounds like you’re saying the city killed Pronto, and now they're complaining that Pronto is dead.” Houser: “Yeah. Those are your words, not mine, but I agree with them.”
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As Microsoft’s Build conference (June 26 to 28) nears, it’s only natural that we’d be hearing more and more Windows 8.1 rumors, and actually confirming a few of them. Today, we can semi-validate one previously unverified report that the updated operating system will bring back the Start button.
According to Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows, Microsoft will indeed be bringing back the Start button. You’ll no longer have a need for Start menu apps since Windows 8.1, informally called Windows Blue, is returning the long lost button to its users. In fact, it’ll look very similar to that of Start8, one of our favorite Start menu apps.
Thurrott, who has access to the Milestone Preview build of Windows 8.1, reports that hovering over the Start button will cause it to change colors “with a black background and the accent color used on the flag logo.” It’ll look just like the Start Charm and it cannot be turned off (not that you’d want to after finally getting it back!).
Even more good news is coming with 8.1: you’ll be able to boot straight to the desktop, completely avoiding the Metro-style Windows 8 home screen that so many users detest.
Thurrott also confirmed that in addition to the preloaded backgrounds and colors provided by Microsoft, users will also have the option of having their desktop wallpaper sit behind the Start background, though we wonder why this is a new addition and not something Microsoft made available to begin with. After all, Windows 8 is supposed to be all about customization and making an OS that works for everyone.
As we reported earlier this month, Windows 8.1 will be a free upgrade available as a public preview on the first day of Build, and we can’t wait to get our hands on it.
[Update 7:10 p.m. EST 5/30/13: Microsoft commented on the Start button as well as other new Windows 8.1 features. Read more about it here.]By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” asked Frederick Douglass of the crowd gathered at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852. “I answer,” he continued, “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which lie is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham.”
Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and became one of the most powerful and eloquent orators of the abolitionist movement. His Independence Day talk was organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. Douglass extolled the virtues of the Founding Fathers, those who signed the Declaration of Independence. Then he brought the focus to the present, to 1852. He said:
“I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today?”
Of course, the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Sewing Society had no intention of mocking him. Proceeds from their events were devoted primarily to supporting Douglass’ newspaper. They championed Douglass, and saw the need to take action, whatever action they could muster. The United States was, at the time of the speech, less than a decade away from a brutal civil war. The war would formally start with the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, just off the coast of Charleston, S.C.
Independence Day is a fitting time to reflect on the role that grass-roots organizing for social change has played in building this nation. The horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, S.C., also compels us to question just how far we have progressed toward the ideals enshrined in that document signed on July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence.
It was in Charleston that a man named Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had won his freedom, had planned an expansive slave rebellion, slated to take place in 1822. The plot was exposed, and Vesey, along with 34 alleged co-conspirators, was hanged. Vesey was one of the founders of Charleston’s AME church in 1818, which became Emanuel AME Church, where Dylann Roof is alleged to have murdered nine people this past June 17, among them the church’s pastor, who was also a state senator, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney. The storied church, called “Mother Emanuel,” has been central to the lives of African-Americans in Charleston and beyond for close to two centuries.
So, when evidence pointing to Roof’s racist motivation surfaced, including an Internet-posted manifesto along with numerous photos of him with the Confederate flag, pressure mounted to remove that flag from the grounds of the South Carolina state Capitol in Columbia, S.C. The movement was swift, with companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon pulling Confederate memorabilia from their shelves. Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley immediately ordered all Confederate flags be removed from Alabama Statehouse grounds. But as the U.S. and South Carolina flags on the Capitol Dome flew at half-mast after the massacre, the Battle Flag of the Confederacy, at a Confederate war memorial on the Statehouse grounds, continued to fly at full mast.
On Friday, June 26, more than 5,000 mourners crowded into an arena in Charleston for the funeral of the Rev. Pinckney. President Barack Obama gave a moving eulogy, ending by singing “Amazing Grace” as the congregation joined in. The next day, at dawn, Bree Newsome, a 30-year-old African-American woman, scaled that 30-foot flagpole in Columbia with helmet and climbing gear, and took down the Confederate flag. James Tyson, a fellow activist who is white, spotted for her from the base of the pole.
Read the rest of this column at Truthdig.orgOn Monday, The Globe and Mail issued this note to all editorial staff:
The term alt-right refers to a collection of groups or individuals espousing racist, fascist or white-supremacist ideologies.
We should avoid this term as much as possible.
Story continues below advertisement
If we must use it, in a quote, for example, we should provide a definition of the term.
On Friday, I urged this very thing with this column/blog.
A number of readers wrote to urge The Globe to codify this notion and I've heard from lots of you. You urged The Globe to call a lie a lie, not a claim, and to not be afraid to be blunt in the face of spin and propaganda.
A few of you quite rightly pointed out that this phrase is Orwellian Newspeak.
On Monday as well, the Associated Press, a major U.S. news service, published this note. The AP also said the term should be avoided. "In the past, we have called such beliefs racist, neo-Nazi or white supremacist."
Now not all readers agreed. One complained to me that my column/blog was based on a "fake" news report about the white supremacist Richard Spencer. I sent him the link from the New York Times story, written by a reporter who has there and heard the statements first-hand.
Now more than ever there is nothing that can replace reporting on the scene and direct witnesses to events.Dolo Town (Liberia) (AFP) - Trapped since officials placed them in quarantine two weeks ago, the residents of Dolo Town are becoming increasingly resentful over their incarceration in Liberia's open "Ebola jail".
Around 17,000 increasingly hungry residents in the settlement, close to the international airport, are forced to queue for rations of rice while soldiers blockade them in at gunpoint.
The usually-packed streets are almost empty, as residents observe quarantine measures in a bid to halt a particularly severe outbreak of a virus which has killed 2,000 west Africans, half of them in Liberia.
Dolo Town, 75 kilometres (47 miles) east of Monrovia, was placed in lockdown on August 20 at the same time as West Point, a slum in the capital.
While the West Point lockdown caused riots, people have largely accepted the measures to contain them in Dolo Town. But their patience is wearing thin.
"I am used to going out every day to hustle for my family to eat. Now look at me, sitting here like a kid, looking at my wife and children all day," carpenter Jallah Freeman, 56, tells AFP as he sits in front of his house.
"I am tired. I am fed up with this quarantine. We beg the government to lift this thing."
Most of the working age inhabitants of Dolo Town are employed at a nearby plantation owned by US tyre maker Firestone, the largest natural rubber operation in the world, covering almost 500 square kilometres (200 square miles).
- 'We are in jail' -
"We have not been going to work. We will not be able to go until the quarantine is lifted. It is regrettable but what can we do? We want to be free. We are in jail," Firestone employee Mohamed Fofana told AFP.
Firestone contained a possible outbreak when an employee's wife became infected in April, and has its own hospital with an isolated Ebola treatment ward. The company has scaled back production since the quarantine.
At Dolo Town's market, relocated from the city's outskirts, women sit at roadside stalls selling pepper, oil, some fish, salt and fruit.
Desperate and hungry people wander from stall to stall, searching for food among the increasingly dwindling stocks.
"They don’t allow us to go anywhere. We are only allowed to go and stand at the (checkpoint) and family members from elsewhere can come there to bring us food and other things we need," says stallholder Kebeh Morris.
"We can see the trucks bringing the food but not everyone is getting it for now. Like us: we don’t even |
at Bryan's Knights of Columbus Hall.
Those who died were Lt. Eric Wallace and Lt. Gregory Pickard. Injured in the blaze were Firefighter Ricky Mantey Jr.and probationary firefighter Mitchel Moran, who are receiving treatment at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
A van full of firefighters and friends makes the three-hour trip every day from Bryan to Galveston to visit Mantey and Moran, Filkin said.
The group is planning to take 2,000 shirts to sell Wednesday night at Shipwreck Grill in Bryan.
"My best hope is that I'll run out of shirts," said Filkin, who sold seven shirts while doing a telephone interview with a reporter.
He acknowledged the efforts of his wife, Shanna, and the Friends and Family Group from Protection Company No. One.
"They have been the workhorses behind the scenes," he said.
Monograms and More, the College Station company that is printing the shirts, has also been a big help, he said.
"I can't praise them enough at how great they've been on the fast turnaround," Filkin said.
Brian Pendergraff, an owner at Monograms and More, said sales have exceeded initial expectations but the company's 23 employees are keeping up with the orders.
"People aren't ordering one (shirt)," Pendergraff said. "They're ordering three, five, 10. You're getting a lot of group orders at one time."
Filkin said the response reflects the tight-knit community among firefighters worldwide as well as the fact that College Station has the world-renowned Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service's Brayton Fire Training Field.
"We end up building relationships and friendships that span the world," he said. "On top of that, every firefighter in the world faces the same risks. If you walk into a fire station and say, 'I'm a firefighter,' you're definitely one of the brothers."
To order T-shirts, visit protectbfd.org and click on the link on the home page.- The White House announced Thursday that President Donald Trump pledged to donate $1 million in personal funds to Harvey relief efforts.
Trump visited Corpus Christi, Texas, and Austin on Tuesday for briefings on Harvey's devastation. He praised first responders, telling everyone who has been affected by the storm that "we are here with you today, we are with you tomorrow and we will be with you every single day after to restore, recover and rebuild."
First responders have been doing heroic work. Their courage & devotion has saved countless lives – they represent the very best of America! pic.twitter.com/I0gvCQLTKO — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 31, 2017
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted that on his Tuesday trip to Texas he had witnessed "first hand the horror & devastation" wrought by Harvey. He wrote that after seeing the widespread damage, "my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!"
Aides say Trump plans to return to Texas on Saturday to survey damage and meet with people displaced by the storm.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.November 2016 Citra Sale Kern River Brewing Comapny
Kernville, CA
Sales have ended for this event.
Due to our new brewing facility, we are doing away with the lottery! (waits for applause)
Our new system is as follows - a first-come, first-serve sale where you buy a case (12 bottles) of 22 oz Citra Double IPA bottles to pick up at the brewery. The cost is $8 per bottle plus brown paper ticket fees.
Please pay close attention to the following rules:
1. There is a one case limit per person for the entire event
-If you want less than 12 bottles, go in with a friend.
-If you want more than 12 bottles, talk a friend into buying a ticket and bring them along
-If you try to buy more than one ticket, we will figure it out and cancel your additional tickets, so please don't try.
2. You must come to the brewery to pick-up your bottles
-You must have your drivers license with you, it must be yours, you must be at least 21 and your license must match the ticket you bought (you will be asked for it during your purchase).
3. You must buy a ticket corresponding to a pick-up time window (see dates below).
-Please make sure you can come to the brewery during the assigned dates BEFORE you buy your ticket. If you don't come during your pick-up window, your order will be cancelled without refund.
4. You may not resell these bottles. That would be illegal. If you are a retail store, you would additionally be jeopardizing any future relationships with KRBC
The Pick Up Time Windows ARE
A. Friday, November 11 to Sunday, November 13
B. Monday, November 14 to Thursday, November 17
C. Friday, November 18 to Sunday, November 20
Now that you have read and understand all the rules, get your tickets, come to the brewery and enjoy!
Location Kern River Brewing Comapny
13415 Sierra Way
Kernville, CA 93238
United States
Dates Start: Friday Nov 11, 2016 5:00 AM End: Sunday Nov 20, 2016 12:00 AM
Prices $96.00
Contact Who: Eric Giddens Email: eric@kernriverbrewing.com Web: http://www.kernriverbrewing.com
More Info Minimum Age: 21
[English] Español Français © Brown Paper Tickets, LLC - 1-800-838-3006
Standard Website Terms of Usage | Privacy Policy | Cookie PolicySix charged with criminal trespass in Lakewood incident
Richard Trudeau, 32, was one of six people arrested Sunday, June 28, 2015 at Lakewood Church in southwest Houston after allegedly trespassing and disrupting a church service, according to police. Richard Trudeau, 32, was one of six people arrested Sunday, June 28, 2015 at Lakewood Church in southwest Houston after allegedly trespassing and disrupting a church service, according to police. Photo: Houston Police Photo: Houston Police Image 1 of / 34 Caption Close Six charged with criminal trespass in Lakewood incident 1 / 34 Back to Gallery
Six members of an East Texas "revivalist" Christian group have been charged with criminal trespass after allegedly disrupting Sunday morning services at Lakewood Church.
Lakewood spokesman Donald Iloff said the men, identified as members of Church of Wells, began shouting as Pastor Joel Osteen began preaching his 11 a.m. sermon. The men were escorted from the sanctuary by church ushers and arrested. Police said criminal trespass is a Class B misdemeanor offense.
"They came out screaming scriptures," Iloff said, who said the group "goes after churches they don't agree with."
Iloff said members of the group entered the church about a month ago, raised a disturbance and were asked to leave."
In its manifesto, the group, which consists of about 70 members and based in the town of Wells, near Nacogdoches, accuse the "brethren of our lord" with "committing themselves in unholy unions with infidels." The manifesto also says that "the table of the Lord is turned into the table of devils and the temple of God into a house of idols... there is more leaven in the church that there is sincerity." The faithful, the church asserts, "are scattered upon the desolate hills of hopelessness as sheep without a shepherd."
Iloff noted that Lakewood Church, which claims the nation's largest Protestant congregation, occasionally is targeted by protesters. "It's because we have a high profile," he said.
Named in the complaints were Jacob Gardner, 26; Kevin Fessler, 27; Mark DeRouville, 25; Matthew Martinez, 27; Randall Valdez, 28; and Richard Trudeau, 32.
Inquiries emailed to the Church of Wells did not receive an immediate response.
Gardner is identified on the group's website as one of the church elders.
William Martin, a senior fellow in religion and public policy at Rice University's Baker Institute, said he does not know much about the Church of Wells, but they appear to be a small, insular and extreme religious group.
"They appear to believe they are the only people acceptable to God," he said.
Martin said it's difficult to pinpoint exactly why Church of Wells members felt compelled to make their presence known at Lakewood on Sunday. He noted that Osteen's preaching is largely accepting, with a more optimistic interpretation of biblical doctrine, concerned with how individuals can live well.
"It is possible that this group is saying, 'Well, that's the exact opposite of what we preach, so let's go into the lion's den and voice our criticism,' " he said.
City officials with Wells, with a population of close to 800, declined to comment about the church.
The incident at Lakewood marks the latest instance in which of Church of Wells members have made headlines.
Controversy surrounded the church when the parents of 28-year-old Catherine Grove claimed the organization was brainwashing her. According to published reports, she left the University of Arkansas in 2013 to join the church. She was later reunited with her family after calling 911 for help, but 12 days later, she returned, announcing she was engaged to another member. She later released a video statement claiming she did not want to permanently be back with her family, but only wanted to speak with them about the engagement.
The church also made headlines in 2012 when a member couple allegedly prayed over their dying newborn daughter instead of calling 911, according to news reports.Rahul, 36, (not his real name) works in the hospitality sector and strikes you as the quintessential family man of Bengaluru -a husband and the father of a five-year-old. But he has another life that only a few know about. It involves elaborate role plays, bondage, domination and other forms of kinky, erotic games -all of this oblivious to his wife.Rahul is, in fact, a popular man in the kink community across the country and goes by the username Mr_Rahul. He is also the founding member of the Official Kinky Bangalore, a community of people who are into bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism commonly called BDSM “Bengaluru has a vibrant BDSM community and there are a large number of people who regularly contact us over the internet,“ Rahul tells Mirror.Kink is often defined as a playful expression of sexuality and BDSM is an extension of “kinkiness“ as it also involves erotic power play. A kinkster is the official term for a man or a woman open to `play' or indulge in satisfying their fetishes, mainly through BDSM.“Our community in the city is very diverse and we have doctors, techies, businessmen, students and even teachers who attend our sessions. A major problem we face is that most people still believe that BDSM is unnatural and a deviant behaviour.Of course it has to be practised with consent and safety precautions,“ says Rahul.It is estimated that there are over 500 people in the city who have been attending monthly meetings of the community, which began unofficially in 2007 as a gathering of three at a pub on Bannerghatta Road.Known as “munches“ within the community, it is a meeting usually organised at a pub or a restaurant as announced on their online forum where members meet and discuss their kink, and regular, lives. The latest one was held near Jayanagar on December 26 had about 25 people in attendance.Apart from “munches“, annual workshops on BDSM to understand its limits and limitations along with safe practices are also conducted in the city. These are daylong events where some of the common BDSM techniques are demonstrated to the participants.On January 26, a group of 30, 26 of them men, converged at a resort, off Mysore Road, where the conference hall was booked for a seminar from 9 am to 5 pm. For strangers, and the resort employees, it was yet another corporate daylong `bonding meet' with name tag (pseudonyms)-sporting delegates, Power Point presentations, and a few interactive sessions and games. Of course, it was all about role play, bonding and even bondage as it was the third annual workshop on BDSM organised by the Official Kinky Bangalore.“There were people from 20s up to their 40s. There was a presentation on BDSM and then some demo during the post-lunch session, mainly on how to role-play safely, such as precautions to be taken during asphyxiation and whipping. The registration fee was Rs 750, inclusive of breakfast, lunch and snacks,“ said a 30-year-old participant.The participants at the workshops are also shown various bondage techniques and how to tie knots safely.There were demonstrations and practice sessions. The first-ever workshop in Bengaluru was conducted in 2014 and had around 12 people in attendance.Usually, “munches“ are held on the last Saturday of the month or on a public holiday that falls on the last week of the month.It was sometime in 2007 that kinksters in the city slowly started coming out of online chat rooms and meeting each other. Initially, there were a few members but by 2010 various groups emerged in cities such as the Kinky Collective in New Delhi, Kolkata and the Naughty India group in Mumbai. The social media boom across the country post-2010 proved to be a blessing for these groups as they no longer had to confine themselves to anonymous cyber chat rooms.“The Kinky Collective has an active presence on Twitter and Facebook and there are thousands of people following us. It is true that all of them might not be genuine kinksters. But the idea to have such groups is to minimise the risk of exploitation.Because once a person is known to have violated the code of consent and agreement then the word is posted on all kink forums and he she gets blacklisted,“ says Joy, a 46-year-old lawyer and a founding member of the Kinky Collective.Kinky Bangalore was formed in 2013 with three members -Rahul, Melik (kink identity) and Monty (kink identity).Melik is a 23-year-old student from the city, pursuing a course in Big Data analytics. Monty is a businessman. All of them had initially met on online chat rooms, they claimed. “But then our online forum got hacked and there was a lull before we decided to rename the group as Official Kinky Bangalore, about a year ago. We also included Bella (kink identity) as another founding member,“ says Rahul.A majority of the activities are organised through a web portal that lists down various fetishes for people to follow and indulge in after creating their own profiles.Fetlife also offers them a platform to get in touch with suppliers and distributors of BDSM props such as safe ropes, flogger, whips, handcuffs, etc, which are imported and sold to those interested in these activities. As of now, the most popular BDSM gear in the city is a common kit consisting of handcuffs, cotton ropes and floggers that cost around Rs 2,000. These are directly imported from China and Malaysia with the help of local kinksters on Fetlife.“There are very few stores in cities like Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai where these materials are available. There are also some online portals where we can place order for this gear,“ informs Joy.Despite the common perception that looks at BDSM as sexual deviancy and perversion, indulging in BDSM is not criminal as long as it is between consenting adults and done without inflicting any injury or harassment, points out Joy.“There is a constant fear of being judged and considered abnormal when we have such fetishes. Sometimes we even end up judging ourselves,“ says Joy to underscore the need for such groups of likeminded individuals.“Consent is one of the most important aspects in BDSM. It should be seen on the lines of combat sports like karate or boxing where two consenting adults are indulging in an act where they could get injured but with implied consent as mentioned under Section 87 of the Indian Penal Code,“ he says.Kinksters that Mirror spoke with were bothered by “misinterpretation and wrongful portrayal of BDSM“ in movies and media. These could cause serious injury among partners, they say. Of course, we couldn't resist asking them about the most talked-about BDSM novel, and it's film adaptation, `50 Shades of Grey'. The kinksters didn't approve of it, and found it “exploitative“ and the BDSM relationship portrayed in it, “abusive“.According to Joy, though BDSM covers an array of activities, the main focus is to ensure Safe, Sane and Consensual (SSC). Several tips are also given to participants to ensure that they meet and talk with each other before agreeing to play. Also, it is advised to formally mail each other their preferences and limits beforehand. And there is also the `safe word' (or gesture) like an `Off' button. “There are also instances when people hook up online and without taking proper safety measures decide to play with each other and could often end up exploited. There are instances when women who end up exploited in such manner are not even able to seek proper legal help because of the stigma,“ Joy adds.According to Jaya Sharma, a New Delhi-based women's rights activist who is also a founding member of the Kinky Collective, such discussions in society is integral to busting the myths about BDSM.“We live in a society where the idea of consent, especially that of a woman, is violated often even within the marriage. Even then, BDSM is projected as an act where consent does not exist which is very wrong. Consent is one of the main foundation stones of all BDSM relationships,“ she added.The Kinky Collective has already conducted a photo exhibition on BDSM, mainly bondage and domination, in New Delhi. It was called `Bound to be Free', which was an attempt to educate people and bust myths. There are numerous open and closed discussions and seminars also being conducted on the topic on a regular basis. There are also plans to open a kink group in Chennai in the coming weeks and also unite all separate groups under one national outfit.There's something called a `three circle approach' when it comes to talking about a fetish, say psychologists and behaviour experts.They also pointed out that since kinky fetishes and BDSM are often considered a taboo topic, often some people initially tend to hide it from their partners and often try to either convince or force them into certain activities that might end up scarring them for their life. There's the inner circle (usually of two partners) who have no issues with trying out fantasies and role play. There's a middle circle where one partner might have some reservations. And then there's the outer circle in which one partner might be totally averse to the requests and demands of the other.“Each of these scenarios has to be dealt with in a specific manner. It is a must that the act should always be between consenting adults with adequate safety precautions and mutual respect to each other. There are chances of serious nerve damage and brain injury if techniques such as bondage and asphyxiation are carelessly performed. It could even result in loss of life,“ says Dr Sandip Deshpande, consultant psychiatrist and sexologist, and co-founder of Happy Relationships, a sexual health and relationship wellness organisation.According to Melik, the only woman who was initially part of the Official Kinky Bangalore group, it is always a bit more difficult for women to come out and attend these meetings. She also added that they also should be careful about their personal safety and should make it a point never to go out with strangers without meeting and interacting with them to ensure that they are `genuine' kinksters.Melik and Rahul claim the BDSM community and their relationships are also based on certain principles and vows like in the case of `normal' couples. Once a partnership is established -especially in the domination and submission backdrop -they start with a personal oath, similar to wedding vows.“It is basically lying down a set of guidelines that will be followed by the couple during the role play session. We also assign alternative names and vow to respect each other's dignity and safety while performing these acts. The dominant one will also be called a `master' and the submissive one a `bottom' or `slave' during the session,“ Rahul added.Hundreds of tankers wait to cross into Iran in one of several lots near the Parwezkhan border crossing in Diyala province, Nov 6, 2013. (PATRICK OSGOOD/Iraq Oil Report)
Hundreds of tankers wait to cross into Iran in one of several lots near the Parwezkhan border crossing in Diyala province, Nov 6, 2013. (PATRICK OSGOOD/Iraq Oil Report)
TUZ KHURMATU - Since invading huge swaths of northern and central Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has been smuggling increasing amounts of crude scavenged from Iraq's stricken oil infrastructure to buyers in the Kurdistan region, earning the extremist group an estimated $1 million per day.
The first truckloads of ISIS-controlled crude arrived in Tuz Khurmatu, a mixed population town with a large Turkomen contingent that has long been at the epicenter of ethic and administrative tension, just two days after much of Salahaddin province fell to ISIS in mid-June.
Oil is being looted from pipelines, storage tanks, and oil fields in ISIS-controlled territory, according to two people directly involved in the smuggling, an official at Iraq's state-run North Oil Company (NOC) who is monitoring the trade, and other government and security officials.
In the early stages of the smuggling operation, trucks laden with crude were sold to middlemen. But as the trade has grown and Kurdish authorities have made truck movements more difficult, ISIS has been selling directly to smugglers who drive their own trucks.
The crude is smuggled into the Kurdistan region, where it is refined locally in unlicensed topping plants in Erbil and Sulaimaniya, according to a provincial government official and two oil traders in Sulaimaniya.
The Iraqi and Kurdish governments do not appear to have sanctioned the trade, but they also have been unable to prevent it.
A provincial government official and two smugglers directly involved in the trade said ISIS started out by selling fully laden tankers for around 5 million Iraqi dinars ($4,167), about $26 per barrel, to a handful of middlemen on the outskirts of Tuz Khurmatu. The smugglers then took the crude into Kurdistan at a large markup, selling it to buyers inside Kurdistan for around 12 million Iraq Dinars ($10,000), or $63 a barrel, said the NOC source, smugglers, the provincial official and Shallal Abdul Baban, the mayor of Tuz Khurmatu.
Over the last 10 days, the ISIS oil trade has grown, and the militants are now taking a larger hand in operations. They stopped using middlemen, kicked out other militant groups that had been involved, and are now filling more than 100 trucks of oil a day, selling each tanker cargo for between 8 million and 14 million dinars ($6,600 to $11,666).
"The price of the crude depends on the number of tanker drivers who demand it. If there are too many, the price will be driven up, and vice versa," said one driver, who was buying crude from ISIS on his own account.
Smuggling has long been a fixture of Iraq's oil trade. Saddam Hussein used smuggling routes to earn money during the imposition of international sanctions on Iraq after 1991, and insurgents and criminal gangs have sold stolen oil since 2003, though in recent years the U.S. and Iraqi governments had been able to curtail much of it.
Anti-government militants now control territory containing producing oil fields, refineries, and pipelines filled with both crude oil and refined fuel. ISIS, which has rebranded itself the "Islamic State" after its leader declared territory under its control to be a new Islamic Caliphate, is tapping into these established smuggling networks to generate significant revenue needed to fund its operations.
According to Malla Hassan Garmiani, a member of the Salahaddin provincial council and a Kurd from Tuz Khurmatu, the smuggling began just two days after Salahaddin province fell to ISIS-led militants and local insurgents.
Tapping and trucking Iraq's oil
The speed with which ISIS began to tap Iraq's oil infrastructure suggests they were targeting oil assets as a source of revenue. They have also shown determination to take control of oil assets capable of sustained production.
"ISIS's first oil source was seven oil wells in the Hamrin Mountains, south of Kirkuk, on the right side of the road of from Kirkuk to Tikrit," said Garmiani, referring to producing wells at the Ajeel field, and possibly to the Hamrin oil field as well.
A senior officer in the Asayesh, Kurdistan's intelligence service, verified on condition of anonymity that the main source of the smuggled oil are oil fields in the Hamrin mountains of Salahaddin province, where the Hamrin and Ajeel oil fields are located.
In the immediate wake of the Iraqi Army's retreat, said Garmiani, the militant group Ansar al-Sunna, which has been supporting the ISIS invasion in Salahaddin province, took control of the Ajeel oilfield southwest of Kirkuk. But on June 25, ISIS ran the group out of the oil field so they could run it directly. Since then, ISIS oil trucking has increased significantly.
"They are loading daily about 20,000 bpd" from Ajeel, said a senior NOC official who tracks the status of property belonging to the NOC. The field is limited by infrastructure constraints – it can produce up to 40,000 bpd but requires completion of a second production pipeline, the official said. It was producing 20,000 bpd prior to the recent violence that has stalled the northern oil sector.
"They sell around 100 tankers every day," said the Asayesh officer, adding that "militants who sell the crude tried to drive up the price of the crude to $11,000 for each tanker, but smugglers refused and they still buy it for $9,000."
The 20,000 bpd produced by Ajeel is enough to fill 125 standard sized oil tankers. If ISIS is indeed selling that many tankers every day for $9,000, then its daily revenue is $1,125,000.
Hamrin began producing 4,500 bpd in February and the first phase of a development plan to get to 60,000 bpd was underway, according to multiple senior NOC officials. It is not clear whether ISIS is also selling oil from Hamrin, or whether the group is making any attempt to raise production.
"The oil is taken to refineries along the Kirkuk-Erbil road, a section known as Qush Tappa, to the small, private refineries located there," said an oil trader in Sulaimaniya.
He has been getting calls from truckers who used to work for him who tell him they purchased crude from Ajeel at between 7 million and 8 million dinars per tanker, and are looking to sell it.
"The truckers have become businessmen," he said. "Knowing there is a market for crude, they go to the ISIS-controlled areas, fill up their trucks, then bring it back to the KRG to be refined."
The Asayesh officer also said that militants have been boring holes in oil pipelines as far south as Samarra and pumping out crude into trucks.
The drivers are "local people from Kifri, Tuz Khurmatu and Sulayman Bek, and the crude goes to Sulaimaniya," the officer said.
That version of events is corroborated by people directly involved in the smuggling.
"Daash poked holes in a pipeline and are selling the oil to buyers," said one tanker driver, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS. According to the driver, ISIS militants created a large pit for oil and then ruptured a crude pipeline between Baiji and Kirkuk. Smugglers then pumped crude from the pit into the tankers.
The driver said that he picked up the cargo from militants clearly identifying themselves as ISIS in a quiet agricultural area southwest of the oil refinery town of Baiji, in Salahaddin province. ISIS has been selling crude by the tanker from this collection point.
The driver and several security officials said that ISIS provides convoy protection to tankers and ensures they clear militant-run checkpoints along the route.
"The militants gathered us into a group of eight tanker trucks and they provided about 10 gunmen to protect us. The gunmen stayed with us until we reached Yengegeh," the driver said.
Yengegeh, a small, majority-Turkomen town three kilometers east of Tuz Khurmatu on the highway to Tikrit, is where the crude was initially re-sold to several buyers from Sunni tribes in the area.
Smuggling through Tuz
Since around June 13, 25 tanker trucks or so per day laden with crude started to cross from ISIS-controlled territory into Tuz Khurmatu, according to two Peshmerga officers in Tuz, which appears to have been the first point of entry used by oil smugglers into Kurdish-controlled territory.
One of the Peshmerga officers, who has a senior role in border operations in Tuz, said that a command came from higher up the ranks to let these tankers in and out of Tuz.
Before the ISIS surge in June, responsibility for securing Tuz Khurmatu was contested between federal Iraqi forces, a local ethnic Turkomen militia group and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). After the ISIS invasion, Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers moved into and around the town. Much of the population has fled, and the Peshmerga face off with ISIS only a few kilometers away to the southwest in the Sunni Arab town of Sulayman Bek.
The crude, according to two people participating in the trade, comes up into Kurdistan through Peshmerga-operated checkpoints. Initially, the crude tankers went southeast out of Tuz town center to Sulayman Bek, a majority Sunni Arab town in ISIS control, and from there into Kurdistan.
"ISIS signed a contract with a guy called Baqi Yaseen, originally from Sulayman Bek, to sell the crude. They sold each tanker of crude for 5 million dinars, then Baqi Yaseen re-sold each tanker to smugglers for 11 million dinars," said Garmiani.
IOR confirmed this account with one of the tanker drivers and another smuggler involved in Yaseen's business. The smuggler working for Yaseen said there were five or six main buyers of ISIS crude from the area southwest of Tuz Khurmatu, and Yaseen was the main one.
Yaseen, said both smugglers, was buying crude at Yengageh and ensured it got through the Peshmerga checkpoint on the western side of Tuz Khurmatu, then back out of town to the south on the road to Sulayman Bek. The smuggler close to Yaseen claims to sell the crude on to smugglers in southern Tuz Khurmatu district, who then truck it to Sulaimaniya, for processing in unofficial refineries or for export by truck into Iran.
Yaseen was making a tidy profit for this short trip. According to the smuggler who worked with him, each tanker initially cost 5 million dinars [about $4,167] to buy from ISIS, and then Yaseen sold them on for over twice that amount. He also said that, since June 24, the Peshmerga have started to prevent tankers from passing the checkpoint west of Tuz.
"We are fighting Daash at one checkpoint and buying oil from them at the other," said a Tuz Khurmatu resident, one of many who claim to have complained to the Peshmerga in late June about the tankers rolling through the town.
Those complaints eventually paid off and the Peshmerga closed the Yengageh route into the west of Tuz. On June 27, 14 drivers of tankers carrying ISIS crude were arrested, according to one of the drivers. Some were released, on the condition that they stopped taking part in the trade. The smuggler close to Yaseen said he had also been arrested.
Hard to stop smuggling
The arrests and the ban on tankers failed to stem the flow of illicit crude from ISIS, however.
An eyewitness in Tuz Khurmatu and the two smugglers said tankers have been rerouted to avoid Tuz town center and the westernmost Peshmerga checkpoint of the town, where the drivers were arrested.
The smugglers say the tankers now skirt around Tuz to the north, through an area called Shasti Wan, and on July 1, the trade had recovered and around 50 tankers were travelling into Kurdistan, according to a Peshmerga official in Tuz Khurmatu.
"They found out a new road to smuggling the crude, instead of the Yengeneh road. They bring their tankers to the main road from Kirkuk to Baghdad, and I have not found where they come from," Garmiani said, adding that along with the change of route, ISIS cut Yaseen out of the loop, and "started to sell its crude directly to smugglers."
The senior Asayesh officer from the area was adamant that for the trade to happen, it had to be supported at some level by local Kurdish authorities.
"It is not something that should be acceptable by KRG's formal policy, but there are big partisan officials behind the business. They are too powerful to be stopped by a poor policeman at Tuz checkpoint," he said. "This is very profitable business for all sides, ISIS, drivers, smugglers and KRG officials who indirectly have been involved."
Officials in the local regional administration in Garmian deny that smuggling is happening.
"We haven't let any smuggled oil come from ISIS-controlled areas through Garmian. If we see it, of course, we will stop it and ban it," said Haval Ibrahim, the spokesman of Garmian administration. "Last year, the director of Garmian administration decided to ban any oil company that has no contracts with KRG's Ministry of Natural Resources."
Other officials acknowledge the smuggling is happening.
"No Peshmerga, no Tuz Khurmatu local government and administration, no PUK and no other political parties accept oil smuggling from ISIS's controlling areas. We are against this, but we can't stop it," said Hassan Baram, the deputy manager of the PUK's office in Tuz Khurmatu.
"The KRG tried hard to stop this business and ban it, but it seems smugglers use their money and ability to bribe people to overcome the KRG's will. And there are a lot of people who are just professional smugglers and sometimes they can pass every difficulty. Even Saddam Hussein regime could not end the smuggling," said Garmiani.
Mohammed Hussein and Christine van den Toorn reported from Tuz Khurmatu and Sulaimaniya. Iraqi staff contributing from Tuz Khurmatu is anonymous for their security. Patrick Osgood and Andy Watkins reported from Erbil. Ben Lando reported from Erbil and the United States.The Dance Appreciation and Dance Appreciation Online courses, commonly referred to as "GPA boosters" among students, will no longer fill core learning requirements starting in the fall.
The Core Requirements Committee, a group of Rutgers faculty representatives from all New Brunswick-affiliated schools, voted in December to retire Dance Appreciation and Dance Appreciation Online from the School of Arts and Sciences Core Curriculum after the spring 2016 term, according to a statement sent by the School of Arts and Sciences to The Daily Targum.
According to the statement, the committee decided that the two courses did not meet the Arts and Humanities learning goals. Under the curriculum, students are required to take six credits in two of the three Arts and Humanities learning areas: Philosophical and Theoretical Issues (AHo), Arts and Literatures (AHp) and Nature of Languages (AHq).
The statement reads:
"... Evidence did not demonstrate that Dance Appreciation and Dance Appreciation Online significantly increased students ability to meet Core learning goals; specifically, to (1) "examine critically philosophical and other theoretical issues concerning the nature of reality, human experience, knowledge, value, and/or cultural production" [AHo] or "analyze arts and/or literatures in themselves and in relation to specific histories, values, languages, cultures, and technologies" [AHp]."
Dance Appreciation was at the heart of former Football Coach Kyle Flood's firing last year. Former Rutgers cornerback Nadir Barnwell failed the course in the spring 2015 term and became ineligible to play football the following fall semester. Flood stepped in to change the grade.
The three-credit course, prominently featured on lists of easy Rutgers courses, involves watching live in-class dance performances and writing reaction papers. David Hughes, president of the Rutgers American Association of University Professors-American Federation of Teachers, spoke to NJ Advance Media last year questioning the University's offering of a course with a pass rate of nearly 100 percent.
"Why would any school put on a class where almost everyone gets an A?" he told NJ Advance Media.
The two classes were among 12 courses retired from the list of courses meeting Core Curriculum learning goals after review in December. Theater Appreciation remains on the list of classes that fill core requirements, though Theater Appreciation Online has never been certified as meeting core curriculum goals.
The curriculum is required of undergraduate students in the School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers Business School and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
Avalon Zoppo is the managing editor of The Daily Targum. She is a School of Arts and Sciences sophomore majoring in political science. Follow her on Twitter @AvalonZoppo for more stories.In his first season in MLS, Honduran international Victor Bernardez helped lead the San Jose Earthquakes to the Supporters Shield, and, on a personal level, he was named to the MLS Best XI.
Now, it looks like he might be doing things off the field to help the club. In this Q&A with Honduran side Diez.hn, Bernardez revealed that, at the request of the Quakes' technical staff, he has networked to try to bring two more Honduran internationals to San Jose.
"I played in the national team with them," Bernardez said. "The important thing is that they are good people. That's what the president of San Jose wants: harmony in the dressing room."
Bernardez cited sensitivities around the contract negotiations and declined to reveal the names of his two potential new teammates.
More and more Hondurans have joined MLS in recent years, including Houston's Boniek Garcia, New England's Jerry Bengtson, Colorado's Henry Thomas, and Seattle's Mario Martinez, among others.
This offseason has seen several of Martinez's 2012 Olympic teammates linked to MLS. Seattle have reportedly been chasing CD Victoria defender Wilmer Cr |
, wherein previously-existing materials are transformed using capital into an intended, final, usable good.
Another objection of Block, that one triangle cannot represent the whole structure, is merely ignoring the fact that the model is implicitly and explicitly aggregative and is merely meant to represent the combinations of all capital structures, aka “the” capital structure, in a form where all of them are put together. No Austrians are aggregating consumption like Keynes did (as a single output of an economy, as if demand for one thing were demand for any other thing), people just like the model. It should be trillions of dimensions, now two, but Austrians do try to further explicate (again, Garrison’s “Austrian Macroeconomics”) so nobody is saying that all economic knowledge = Hayek’s triangle; nor the concentric-ring model.
Lachmann’s deserved legacy is that of a genius. He was perhaps one of the best capital theorists that has ever existed, along with Mises, Böhm-Bawerk, Kirzner, and Garrison himself.
Before I go on, let me simply explain how the instability of the velocity of money screws up the Keynesian multiplier, ironic in a way, when thinking of Friedman’s occasional moneyprinter holdouts and his objections to the feasibility of Keynesian policy (of which he invoked both the consequential argument and the Public-Choice school’s argument): that inflation targeting is just as destabilizing, if not more, when compared to Keynesian countercyclical tactics. Similarly, there is little political incentive to take the medicine as exactly prescribed by the popular economists of the day, be they Keynesians of any variety (except perhaps Krugman, the exact kind of political hack Friedman wanted extinct) or Monetarists of any variety (such as Bernanke, the new-school monetarist that actually liked deficits AND printing).
The point? If money is endogenous to the market, why cannot the market successfully create and sustain money itself? It already did. In addition, if total output (“Q”) or total transactions (“T” in the MV=PT formulaton) are so important to the changes in the price level (and as Friedman admits, the capital structure itself) then why aren’t these variables worth disaggregating, whatever your take on epistemology and the philosophy of science?
To be continued. My love to all that find this stuff interesting and worth finishing; you are seated at the shining pinnacle of civilization that may someday lead us out of this hellhole that we impose upon ourselves.
AdvertisementsThe House Intelligence Committee is among the many congressional panels to investigate the deadly attack on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi in 2012, and its findings are reportedly complete. The committee’s report is not yet available, but Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) talked to the San Francisco Chronicle about the results of the inquiry
The House Intelligence Committee, led by Republicans, has concluded that there was no deliberate wrongdoing by the Obama administration in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, said Rep. Mike Thompson of St. Helena, the second-ranking Democrat on the committee. […] Thompson said the report “confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given.”
The committee agreed Thursday to declassify its report, nearly two years in the making, and the findings will reportedly be available to the public once it’s cleared by intelligence agencies.
Just so we’re clear, this is a Republican-led committee, with GOP members outnumbering Democrats, 12 to 9.
And according to the Chronicle’s report, the committee’s findings are consistent with everything reality has told us all along: “There was no ‘stand-down order’ given to American personnel attempting to offer assistance that evening, no illegal activity or illegal arms transfers occurring by U.S. personnel in Benghazi, and no American was left behind.”
What’s more, the Obama administration’s process for developing “talking points” was “flawed, but the talking points reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments in the days immediately following the crisis.”
It would appear some Republican lawmakers who’ve spent 23 months screaming the exact opposite owe the public an explanation for why they were wrong.
Taken together, the deadly violence in Benghazi two years ago has now been investigated by the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the independent State Department Accountability Review Board, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.A Guide to the Basics of Responsive Web – The Trick Relies on Containers
Well, it is actually all about viewports, media queries, and containers. But yeah the trick is with organizing your design into sections then use containers.
What is a Viewport?
In technical theory, it is the viewing region in computer graphics. While in layman’s terms, it is the actual display area of the device that you are using.
What is a Media Query?
It is a CSS3 module allowing content rendering to adapt to conditions such as screen resolution (e.g. smartphone screen vs. computer screen).
What containers are you pertaining to?
The containers declared here are the HTML tags that would “wrap” sections of your web page or even the whole site itself.
Now that we have that all cleared up, let me begin this guide by saying that, basing from my experience as a developer, there are two approaches when it comes to responsive websites. One is to use a fluid measurement system using percentages or fixed measurements then override these and create conditions in the media queries. It is actually easier to use percentage measurements for your containers then partner them with some more settings in the media queries. Just to answer some doubts arising from you, my dear reader, there are some instances that fixed width is much more preferred especially when we want to achieve pixel-perfect precision.
The Demonstration
First off, let’s create a very basic semantic HTML layout to demonstrate a fixed measurement system.
<div class="container"> <header> <h1>Basic Responsive Web Demo</h1> <h2>Header</h2> </header> </div> <div class="container"> <section>Section</section> <aside>Aside</aside> </div> <div class="container"> <h2>Footer</h2> </div>
Without the styles.css, the HTML output would look like this:
Now let us create the styles.css using the code below:
body { font-family: "Open Sans", Arial, Sans-serif; color: #fff; margin: 0px; }.container:before,.container:after { content: ""; display: table; }.container:after { clear: both; }.container { background-color: #777; width: 960px; /* fixed width */ margin: 10px auto; /* auto center */ /*zoom: 1; /*non-standard and originally implemented only in Internet Explorer */ }.container, section, aside { border-radius: 6px; text-align: center; } section, aside { background-color: #555; margin: 10px; /* fixed */ padding: 20px 0px; text-align: center; } section { float: left; width: 540px; /* fixed */ } aside { float: right; width: 380px; /* fixed width */ }
Now the output would be styled now and appear like this:
As you can notice, all units of measurements are in pixels and have a fixed value. This layout is fixed and scroll bars would appear in case the screen size is smaller than the specified height or width of the layout. Now, we take this fixed layout and convert the measurements into something relative like em or % units. We can modify the existing css code or use it in our media queries which I will show you later on in this demonstration.
Media queries are a powerful tool in which it will allow your website to adapt to whatever device it would be viewed in. For you to better understand that, let us add a bit of media query code in to the existing css that we have already done. Just a note: there are three ways to initialize media queries. To initialize a media query we can use the @media rule inside the existing style sheet (which is what we are going to do). Another way is by importing a new style sheet using the @import rule. And lastly, we can link to a separate style sheet from within the HTML document. It is generally recommended though to use the @media rule inside of an existing style sheet to avoid any additional HTTP requests.
So let us continue and add this bit of code. The background color of the <body> will change every time a specified max-width is reached.
When the max-width of 1023px is reached, the <body> background-color changes to red, when 960px is reached it changes to blue, and so on shown in the following images below. Notice that a horizontal scrollbar appeared at the bottom, this is due to the fact that we are using a fixed layout. Now we would want to make this layout follow whenever the browser or screen resizes. This leads us to making our layout flexible using the em measurement unit or by percentages. So we modify our code like so:
We substituted all measurements from pixels to percentages and declared that the.container has a maximum width of 960 pixels and minimum width of 200 pixels. The containers width, as declared, will adjust to 100% of the screen.
There will be circumstances where the content is not effectively displayed by a container. We will then have to make additional adjustments in our media query. Take for example when the screen reaches the 480px mark for max-width, the <section> and the <aside> will be squeezed together. A solution would be for both to take full width and the <aside> be displayed after the <section>.
Adding this code will have the section and aside adjust when the screen reaches 480px.
And with 200px:
So there we have it! This concludes our guide to the basics of responsive websites. Media queries are powerful and this is not the only use for it. Responsive design targets to have websites become suitable for every device and ever screen size, no matter what becomes available in the modern market. Responsive design focuses on providing users an intuitive and gratifying experience whether they are faithful desktop users or on-the-go people that rely on portable devices. For an advanced tutorial for responsive web, we have a video tutorial for responsive websites using the 960 fluid grid.
Watch “How to Create Responsive Website – Responsive Web – Online Training” by the HTML Guys.
в записьПавелко федерация футбола украиныSolar Power Booming In Japan
May 17th, 2014 by Guest Contributor
Originally published on Energy Post.
By Rudolf ten Hoedt
A first gold rush driven by generous subsidies led to an uncontrolled boom in solar power projects in Japan, of which, however, only a very small percentage actually got built. Now, however, the government has taken charge and serious developers are entering the market. The liberalisation of the Japanese retail market in 2016 is expected to give another boost to solar power, as consumers will likely drive demand for renewable energy. The Japanese government and the big utilities, however, are hedging their bets: they are not prepared to let go off nuclear power anytime soon. Rudolf ten Hoedt reports from Kagoshima, Japan, home to the largest new solar project in Japan.
In April, Japan published the first update of its Basic Energy Plan since the 2011 nuclear Fukushima collapse. The plan sets policy for the Japanese power sector for two decades. It is updated every three years. The latest revision runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe upholds nuclear power as “an important base-load electricity source” while at the same time calling for expanded use of renewable energy.
The new energy policy tries to please those that are concerned with Japan’s energy security and fossil import dependence and the nuclear lobby which exploits this vulnerability, but is also acknowledges the anti-nuclear sentiment in the country by giving a boost to green energy. Most of the plan is rather vague. It does not contain clear targets for nuclear energy, although it does express the aim to push renewables over the 20% threshold by 2030 (of total electricity production). Japanese newspapers quoted the influential Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga AS saying: “For the next three years, we will make (the development) of renewable energy a top priority.” This will certainly apply to solar power, which is already booming in Japan.
According to recent research from Bloomberg New Energy Finance carried out for Pew Charitable Trust, last year Japan invested more than any other country in solar energy. See the chart below.
For Japan, solar obviously has priority over wind power. 6.7 GW of solar capacity was approved in Japan for the feed-in-tariff (FIT) scheme in 2013. Almost half of this was utility-scale solar.
This year, Japan is even expected to install over 10 GW of solar power, with more than half of this being utility-scale solar. The boom in utility scale solar got started by an FIT- program introduced in 2012 by the Japanese government. Under this program, regional utilities have to buy power from solar and other renewable energy producers for non-household use at pre-set prices for a period of 20 years.
When the program was first introduced, it started a gold rush. “In the beginning, there were many developers with a low level of sophistication”, says Patricia Bader-Johnston of Thurlestone Capital, a renewable energy developer that has funded over 500 MW of solar and off-shore wind projects around the globe. “Everybody who had a claim on land applied for FIT pre-purchase agreements.”
Squeezed out
But bringing all these gigawatts from large-scale projects on stream is another story. Of the large volume of FIT-approvals, only a fraction has so far been actually developed. “Only 400 MW of (utility-scale) solar energy had actually been installed after the first year (2012-2013) of development activity”, Bader-Johnston notes.
Ichiro Ikeda, General Manager of the Solar Marketing Division of electronics multinational Kyocera, confirms this picture.“There have been cases in which construction is delayed for projects which were approved with feed-in-tariffs rates”, he says. According to Ikeda, delays are typically due to three reasons. “First, costs turn out to be higher than expected because projects are planned at sites with difficult land conditions, such as in mountainous or forested areas. Secondly, government approvals to utilize land zoned for agriculture or forest for solar power projects have fallen behind. Thirdly, the project cannot be financed or does not pass screening by financial institutions.”
Another reason for delays is that Japanese utilities are often not very keen to connect utility-scale solar plants to the grid, says Whitney Rich, executive advisor of Hergo Sun Japan, the Japanese affiliate of an Italian oil servicing company that has been active in maintenance of renewables sites for 20 years. The Italians came to in Japan 2012, where they now have 10.4 MW of solar capacity under construction and another 90 MW in the pipeline. “Costs to get connected to the grid are very high and it can take 3 to 4 years (to get connected).” As a result, says Rich, “small developers are being squeezed out.”
But things are getting better. The number of projects that actually get connected is rising fast, industry sources tell Energy Post. The government is making efforts now to clean up the debris of inactive pre-purchase agreements that have clogged up the system. This clean-up plus a recent decrease of the FIT rate – which was lowered from 42 JPY in 2012 and 38 JPY per kWh in 2013 to 32 JPY (about €0.22) per KWh now (which is still one of the highest rates worldwide), has started a shakeout among developers, says Rich. “Government has cut several hundreds of projects this month and will do so again in August. With an FIT of 32 JPY, you really have to know what you are doing. Now more professional developers are coming in.”
Kyocera is undoubtedly a professional developer, with deep pockets and enough patience to get connected to the grid. The multinational has been supplying solar power generating systems outside Japan for many years, at more than 30 locations in Asia, the United States and Europe, during times when large scale solar development at home did not stand a chance against the powerful domestic nuclear lobby.
Volcanic sand
On the Island of Kyushu, Kyocera has just built Japan’s biggest solar plant on a flat landfill site without a tree in sight, skipping problems with mountainous or agricultural terrain. The selected spot has other challenges, though. It stretches right into the salt waters of the East China Sea and is staring the 1400 m high Sakurajima volcano in the face. The new 70 MW plant, called Kagoshima Nanatsujima, is as large as 1.27 million m2 (equal to 175 UEFA football fields) and is situated less than 10 kilometers south of the coastal town of Kagoshima.
The city is overlooked by Sakurajima-san across a very narrow passage of Kagoshima Bay. Fine black volcanic sand can be found in every flower bed and crack in the pavement. The permanent white plume rising from the volcano’s cone regularly transforms into a light brown smog that is usually blown away to the North. In the event nature changes plans and the wind blows south during a more serious outburst, the 290,000 Kyocera panels on the nearby solar plant are supposed to withstand the ashes. A 200 ton pool of water and mobile pressurized water cannons are on standby to conduct emergency cleaning operations. The owners, who invested 27 billion Japanese yen (about €192 million) in the facility, installed 140 invertersand 1,260 monitors, manufactured by German market leader SMA, which are designed to weather hostile conditions.
Kagoshima Nanatsujima has been in operation since October 2013 and will produce 78 MWh/y. The owners say they sell all generated electricity to Kyushu Electric, the utility that controls 90% of the market on the island and which used to be heavily reliant on nuclear power generation. Kyushu is home to important steel makers (Nissin/Sumitomo) and a growing chunk of Japan’s automobile and high-tech industry. Kyushu Electric is pushing hard to restart two nuclear reactors by this summer and has planned the construction of a coal fired power plant. The company is said to be reluctant to buy solar power, but it will have to swallow a lot more in the future.
Thanks to its sunny climate and the availability of land, Kyushu island is the main hotspot in Japan’s booming solar energy sector. Kagoshima Nanatsujima will soon be overtaken as the biggest facility in the country by an 81 MW plant built by Japanese trading house Marubeni. In addition, Solar Frontier, a 100% subsidiary of the Tokyo-listed company Showa Shell Sekiyu, in which Shell holds a 35% share, announced on March 31st the construction of a 29 MW solar power plant on land adjoining Nagasaki Airport in the western part of Kyushu.
Solar Frontier has large production facilities in Miyazaki on Kyushu where it manufactures CIS (denoting copper, indium, selenium) thin-film solar modules for customers around the world. The company is facing increasing competition from domestic and foreign module manufactures, such as Chinese panel makers RenaSola and Yingli Solar, seeking to benefit from Japan’s growing market. Sales of solar cell modules in Japan doubled last year.
In a hurry
Elsewhere in Japan, big name investors are also crowding in, seeking to profit from the still-generous support being offered.“We see continued strong demand for utility-scale mega solar installations”, says Kyocera’s Ichiro Ikeda. After signing a strategic partnership with Hitachi for the construction of two solar projects in Japan totalling 34 MW, Marco Northland of Toronto and Stockholm-listed Etrion declared to the Japanese press: “We continue to target a solar project pipeline in Japan of at least 100MW under construction or shovel-ready by 2015”.
The president of Chinese company Sky Solar, which is currently constructing a 4 MW solar plant in Mibu, was recently quoted by one of the biggest Japanese newspapers (Yumiuri) as saying: “Japan is one of the world’s most promising markets. We’ll invest ¥30 billion (€ 215 million) annually and develop solar power plants with 400 MW total output in three years.”
Investors are in a hurry. They want to have their projects up and running by 2016 when the liberalization of the Japanese retail energy market will step into the next phase, and the market is expected to become more competitive and dynamic, with new suppliers entering the market. One of these is Masayoshi Son, the outspoken president of the successful Japanese telecommunications company of SoftBank, a major shareholder of the famous Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. Masayoshi Son, who has been called the Buzz Lightyear of corporate Japan by news wire Nikkei, has declared war on nuclear power and is aggressively putting his money where his mouth is. Last February, the company’s subsidiary SB Energy opened its largest solar farm (43MW) yet, in western Japan. Plans for two more solar farms, both in Kyushu, are underway. With its new solar power capacity, SoftBank is planning to force open the power retail market, the company has said.NEW YORK—The mounting opposition to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to prohibit the sale of large-size soft drinks served as sad and sobering proof that Americans are still willing to fight for the causes they believe in, sources confirmed Wednesday. “While many argue that people in this country lack the passion and general informedness to meaningfully participate in matters of public policy, the fierce outcry against the soda ban provides depressing evidence that this is not entirely true,” said New York University sociologist Dr. Marvin Schafer, pointing to the recent flux of pathetic petitions, public demonstrations, and fervent calls to the mayor’s office, all of which have been aimed at maintaining unimpeded access to soda and other sweetened beverages larger than 16 ounces. “This embarrassingly powerful demonstration of democracy shows that, when their backs are against the wall, Americans are unfortunately still very willing to band together and stand up for what they believe in most. Specifically, soda.” At press time, an online petition demanding the White House make clear its position on the use of combat drone strikes against American citizens had garnered 14 signatures.
AdvertisementCLOSE Justin Rohner talks about Agriscaping Technologies.
Justin Rohner, owner of Agriscaping Technologies, helps customer Nicole Miller pick from excess fruits and vegetables on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, at the Farmers Market at Power Ranch Barn in Gilbert. Agriscaping Technologies is a business aiming to improve local food access and quality by transforming landscapes into edible food gardens. (Photo: David Kadlubowski/The Republic) Story Highlights Startups will share socially-responsible business plans with more than 700 people
Seed Spot businesses emphasize health, education, energy, environment, human rights, civic engagement and community impact
One business wants to teach kids how to skate after school.
One plans to connect donated goods to socially conscious shoppers.
And another wants to help people find water-bottle refill stations to reduce reliance on plastic bottles.
The three will compete against several other startups Thursday, June 5, for a chance to win $5,000 to further their efforts. It's all part of Seed Spot, a Phoenix-based non-profit incubator for social entrepreneurs, aspiring business leaders committed to solving societal problems.
"We really believe that entrepreneurs can solve major societal problems," said Courtney Klein, co-founder and CEO of Seed Spot. "We believe if we read about it in the headlines, we can solve it through the innovation of entrepreneurs."
The local entrepreneurs will pitch their solutions to some of Phoenix's societal problems at Seed Spot's Demo Day from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Orpheum Theatre, 203 W. Adams St.
The fledgling business owners will share their business plans with more than 700 people. The audience will vote via text for their favorite venture.
Demo Day is the culmination of Seed Spot's four-month, full-time program, which has secured more than $1 million in capital and created more than 60 jobs in the Valley since launching. Klein said Seed Spot social entrepreneurs will be leaders in Phoenix's future economic development.
"We have everything from entrepreneurs that developed an app to better diagnose epilepsy to a landscaping company that's developing pretty specific garden-planning tools using their app," she said.
Seed Spot launched in 2012 and provides startups with office space, a curriculum, mentors, financial modeling, media exposure and other capital opportunities to those wanting to launch businesses that benefit humanity. More than 100 people apply each cycle for anywhere from 10 to 15 slots.
Seed Spot was founded in part because finding success in social entrepreneurship can be difficult in Phoenix, Klein said.
"Sometimes it takes a while to sell a product or raise initial investment capital," she said. "It can take anywhere from several months to a few years depending on the sophistication of the business, the capital that's required or how hard it is to enter that market."
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Seed Spot businesses emphasize health, education, energy, environment, human rights, civic engagement and community impact.
"We support both for-profit and non-profit startups but we exclusively focus on social entrepreneurs. It has to be a product that's improving peoples lives," Klein said.
Phoenix leaders and entrepreneurs have worked hard to develop a startup culture for several years. Organizations like Seed Spot, CoHoots and JumpStart Phoenix have popped up in the last several years in central and downtown Phoenix to encourage entrepreneurship.
While not the Bay Area, the mecca of startups, Klein said Phoenix's startup culture is not going unnoticed.
"We've actually won some prestigious awards and honors and rank quite high for entrepreneurial capacity, so people are paying attention," she said.
Demo Day details
Reserve your free ticket for the June 5 Demo Day at ssdemoday.splashthat.com.
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/1h4G0b7For decades now, we hear of taking aspirin daily as a way to prevent heart disease. Some of my patients even take it upon themselves to start taking a daily baby aspirin because they think it is a healthy thing to do.
I would like to start first by saying that everyone should always clear this with their doctor first before doing it, and if you have already started, make sure that you let your doctor know that you are taking it on a regular basis as soon as you can.
The reason I am saying this is not because of the recent studies about aspirin... although we'll get to that in a minute. The reason I am saying this is because I want everyone to get into a habit of always keeping your doctors updated on all of your medications or supplements, because you never know when it might become an important thing that your doctors need to know about, when your health is in a less than optimal situation.
Having said that, let's get back to the topic of taking a daily aspirin...
In recent months, there has been some conflicting information in the news about aspirin -- whether it prevents cancer or whether it doesn't, and whether it actually puts people at higher risk of bleeding unnecessarily or not. Let's take a moment and try to get some important take-away points from these review studies so that we can safely use the information to our health benefit.
Let's start with the discussions that started in January of 2012, when studies suggested that using aspirin for heart disease or cancer prevention in otherwise healthy individuals unnecessarily puts these people at higher risk for bleeding. The concern was -- and is -- that aspirin, when used for disease prevention, may unnecessarily be putting people at risk for bleeding. However, aspirin is seen to be beneficial for those with strong history concerning for heart or vascular disease or cancers. So, should aspirin be used for prevention or not, and does it actually put people at higher risk for bleeding unnecessarily?
Then, in more recent months, some review studies looked at prior studies and concluded that daily aspirin therapy has a significant benefit for prevention of cancers, including colorectal cancer and esophageal cancer -- not to mention the cardio-protective effects of aspirin on top of that. These studies suggest that the bleeding risk is mitigated with long-term low-dosage daily use and becomes less of an issue with regular long-term use in the appropriate individuals and that bleeding from daily low-dose aspirin therapy is not a major consistent concern for most people.
So, what are we, as the general public, supposed to think? Do we or do we not use aspirin on a daily basis for heart disease and cancer prevention? Should we or should we not worry about the increased risk of bleeding?
As you may have noticed, the phrase that keeps repeating in these news reports is the concept of "in the appropriate individuals." This is the key concept I want you to take away with you from these reports... that baby aspirin is still medicine and that daily use should be something that you decide on whether it is appropriate or not for you with your physician.
The reason is because depending on your risk factors and your other medications, daily baby aspirin may in fact be beneficial for some; while for others, it would be inappropriate. You should also keep in mind that just because baby aspirin was at one point in your life appropriate for you, it may not always be appropriate if you have new diseases or conditions, or are on new medications. So you should always double check about your medications with your physician at your yearly physical to make sure that the medications you are on are still appropriate for your medical status.
While more studies may be needed to further decide whether daily aspirin therapy is indeed appropriate for all healthy individuals for heart disease prevention and cancer prevention, there is a distinct possibility that these studies will never be done at a large enough scale to definitively quiet the naysayers, because aspirin is a relatively inexpensive generic drug and may not be able to generate the glitz and glamour of a larger-scale study in the future to give us skeptics the definitive answer.
However, there is enough data thus far to give us a clear idea of what to do in the following examples:
If you have a strong family history of cancers, especially gastrointestinal cancers, and you are not on any medications that put you at higher risk for bleeding and you have no history of bleeding disorders, you may be a good candidate for daily baby aspirin therapy; therefore you should have that discussion with your doctor.
If you have a bleeding history or you are on medications that already impede your platelet or clotting ability and you are at higher risk for bleeding, you need to speak with your doctor first before placing yourself on another medication that might make you bleed more. In this case, you may not be a good candidate for daily aspirin therapy, especially if you do not have a strong family history of heart disease or cancers.
If you have a strong family history of heart disease, you are also potentially a good candidate for daily aspirin therapy... However, if you are already on a medication that helps with preventing clot formation, you need to speak with your doctor about taking additional aspirin therapy.
As you can see, the potential multitude of clinical scenario permutations are vast and these are only three examples of potential clinical scenarios in which individuals would be making that decision as to whether to take a daily aspirin; so you should always check with your physician first before making the decision to take or not take a daily aspirin.
In real life, the clinical scenarios are usually much more complicated and warrant a more in-depth discussion with your doctors. That's why you should always clear the usage of daily aspirin therapy with your treating physicians to ensure maximum safety for yourself.
After all, you have the doctors you have enlisted to be a part of your health care team for a reason... Why not utilize their expertise in this all-too-important decision? Even if it is just a baby aspirin in your mind, just remember that it is still a medication and thus should still be treated with caution.
For more by Julie Chen, M.D., click here.
For more on personal health, click here.
Reference:
[1] Rothwell PR, et al "Short-term effects of daily aspirin on cancer incidence, mortalilty, and nonvascular death: Analysis of the time course of risks and benefits in 51 randomized controlled trials" Lancet 2012; DOI: 10.1016/S01450-6736(11)61720-0. Rothwell PM, et al. Lancet 2012; DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60209-8.
[2] Rothwell PM, et al "Effect of daily aspirin on risk of cancer metastasis: A study of incident cancers during randomized controlled trials" Lancet 2012; DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(12)60209-8.
[3] Rothwell PM, et al "Effects of regular aspirin on long-term cancer incidence and metastasis: A systematic comparison of evidence from observational studies versus randomized trials" Lancet Oncol 2012; DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(12)70112-2.This November marks the 10-year anniversary of World of Warcraft, and we’re cooking up a few in-game plans to commemorate the occasion. Here’s a quick preview of what’s in store:
Tarren Mill vs. Southshore: The Rematch
If you engaged in PvP early on in WoW, you might have fond memories of—and perhaps a few scars from—the endless tug-of-war between Horde and Alliance players at Tarren Mill and Southshore. To recapture that feeling, we’ll be opening a Team Deathmatch–style Battleground based on that timeless struggle. However, unlike the old days of Tarren Mill vs. Southshore, there will be a clearly defined victor, so you’ll need to work as a team or face crushing defeat.
Molten Core Gets Boosted
Molten Core provided many WoW players with their first taste of WoW raiding. For the anniversary celebration, max-level players will be able to participate in a special 40-player Raid Finder version to relive the experience of hunting down Ragnaros and his minions within his fiery lair. Downing the Firelord will earn you an Achievement and a special Core Hound mount reward (fireproof leg armor not included).
Corgi-licious
Anyone who logs in during the 10-year anniversary event will also be able to claim a feisty, fiery new pet: the Molten Corgi! Just think of the corgi-parade potential when you and your friends summon these wee waddling balls of fire for a walk.
These events and rewards will only be available for a limited time, so make sure to check back with us later for more information on when you can expect to see all of these events and goodies in-game. ‘Til then, we’re looking forward to celebrating 10 epic years with you!When the people of Maharashtra jettisoned the largely discredited Congress-NCP government in 2014, it was a vote for change. 'Change' may have become an overused and overworn expression in the current political discourse, but yes, change it was in all connotations of the word. They not only wanted a respite from the 15-year rule of the earlier coalition, but also sought new energy and ideas in governance. This day last year, the Devendra Fadnavis-led government took charge, promising to live up to the expectation of people.
One year is too short judge any government. But the quality of its functioning and measures initiated offers us enough hint on the drift. Going by that it has been a mixed success story for the NDA government. Here's a listing of the big hits and misses of the government.
Hits:
Jalyukt Shivar to make state drought-free
The Maharashtra government has undertaken a Jalyukt Shivar initiative (an integrated water conservation and management initiative) that aims to make 25,000 villages drought-free in the next five years. In the first phase in the year 2015-16, it has implemented the project in 5,000 villages across the water scarcity-hit state. The ambitious programme involves works such as construction of a series of check dams, rejuvenation of old check dams and repair of Kolhapur Type (KT) weirs and storage tanks, repair of percolation tanks, desilting village percolation tanks and connecting stream or nullahs with water storage bodies and others. Following its success, the Rajasthan government has decided to implement the programme. It is turning out to be a game changer in a state known for water shortage.
Industry-friendly approach
The state government has cut down the number of approvals required for setting up industrial units. This is aimed at making
the state investor-friendly. It has received assurances of approximately Rs 70,000 crore, which is likely to generate around 75,000 jobs in Maharashtra. This increase is attributed to the state government's Make in Maharashtra initiative to boost the state's image among investors. Apart from this, it has also introduced a slew of other reforms, including pruning permissions required to set up businesses from 75 to 25, time-bound single window approvals, incentives to manufacturers, reimbursement of cost of water and energy audit and exemption in stamp and electricity duties.
Right to Services Act
The government has begun the implementation of the Maharashtra Guarantee of Public Services (MGPS) Act, known as Right to Services, from earlier of this month to empower citizens to avail services in a time-bound manner. Citizens can apply for birth, death, domicile and marriage certificates under the Act. The government has notified 224 services across various departments under the RTS act. While around 42 services have been posted online, all the other services would also get covered gradually. It is mandatory for the departments concerned to furnish the information and certificates within the stipulated time. It is a step forward to bring in greater transparency and accountability in the functioning of the government and to combat the corruption in the system.
Abolition of Toll and Local Body Tax (LBT)
While contesting the assembly elections, the BJP had promised to abolish toll tax and LBT. The government has so far shut 12 toll plazas and given exemption for cars and state transport buses from paying toll on 53 other toll plazas. It has scrapped LBT in 25 municipal corporation areas from 1 August.
Action against NCP leaders involved in corruption |
critic whose most mutated form of watching TV simply involves seeing the season premiere of Lost three weeks before you do.
Envy the book reviewer who might read a galley of a novel and therefore not see the finished cover and might see a few typos that will be corrected before the book reaches your amateur eyes. That’s the only difference. The gulf between the two experiences is narrow.
And then back we are to game reviewing where there are a few sessions available from EA to try the online mode of Skate 2 before it comes out and you need to appraise the game’s online modes… where LittleBigPlanet and Spore are already very different games from when they were released a few months ago when you probably reviewed them…where you binged through Assassin’s Creed even though your readers who bought it didn’t have to and where you did the same for Grand Theft Auto IV — and where none of these facts could have gone very differently…and where the difference between “good” reviewing and “bad” might simply have been whether you acknowledged any of this.
Nothing changes the fact that the game reviewers’ experience of games is so alien to that of the gamers’ that I believe the relationship between the two parties will always contain a distance. It will always contain an undercurrent of distrust not prevalent among reviewers and audience of any other medium. No reviews policy can do better than bridge that; it can’t hide the broad gap or narrow it. (And it’s true for game-playing beat reporters like me too.)
You can be as familiar with fandom as you want, reviewers, but you are not one of them. You don’t play games the same way.
That’s my thesis. Who’s with me?
Tom Chick, freelancer: Great comments, Stephen, and I suspect you’re largely correct for a lot of games writers. You can spot these folks a mile off at a press junket. Most of them are (were?) full timers on a staff somewhere. They have a powerful sense of entitlement. “Spoiled” and “distracted” are great words for them. “Mutant gaming experience” indeed. However, I think good professional reviewers can avoid what you’re talking about. They can separate the incidentals of being a games writer from the fundamentals of being a gamer.
For example, the incidentals of the experience of Skate 2 are different for me. I got a preview build a week early. It arrived at my doorstep. The PR person from EA was very conscientious about checking whether I had any questions. I didn’t get a chance to see a manual. I can’t go online until the retail copy is available. There was an online session with the developers set up if I wanted to join it.
But I don’t write about the incidentals. That’s not my job, and furthermore, I can’t imagine that anyone would care, any more than anyone would care where Roger Ebert parked when he went to a screening, which he didn’t because the studio probably sent a car.
But just as Ebert’s job doesn’t begin until the movie actually starts playing, mine doesn’t begin until I’ve got the controller in my hand. Here is the fundamental part of the experience, and here’s what I write about. Here is where my experience is no different from that of a kid who saved up his allowance for two months, and here is where I hope to communicate with him. Just as Ebert saw the same movie I saw, I’m playing the same skateboarding game that kid will play.
To use your examples, just as a book reviewer doesn’t write about typos in the galleys and just as a TV reviewer doesn’t get to enjoy the week-long water cooler talk between episodes of Lost, there’s no reason a game reviewer can’t understand and address the experience of an average gamer.
It’s more of a problem when reviewers are pressured to get an official review — the Definitive Word — posted by a certain time, usually before the game has been released into the wild. And, yes, that can lead to a very different kind of experience, but it doesn’t have to mean the writer can’t work around those differences (whether they do is another question entirely, but I don’t buy that they can’t).
Leigh Alexander, Gamasutra/Sexy Videogameland/Variety: First off, I do agree with Stephen that your average reviewer’s lost touch with the average audience member in a big, big way. In fact, I’d argue that there are working, prolific reviewers out there who only think about the Internet echo chamber and don’t even realize who their audience is anymore.
But I also agree with Tom. This jadedness, this hyper-exposure and this devaluation of a medium we’re overexposed to is not necessarily restricted to games — and it is not an inevitability or applicable to everyone.
Stephen’s right — the wider experience of the reviewer is never going to be the same as the experience of the player. We may see things they don’t see. Constantly exposed to games and information about the industry, we enter the experience with a different perspective. Going into a title, we might know things about the background, the development, or even the staff on the project that the audience doesn’t know about.
However, I think the idea that this is automatically a problem assumes that all audience members pick up a game with some kind of baseline perspective in common, or that they’re all expecting the same thing; they’re not. The only commonality among members of any medium’s audience is that they’re interested in a new experience — which requires them to be ready to find things they like and dislike, to think about what they’re playing and see what it means to them, just as we do.
I believe audiences go into a game ready to think about and feel for what they’re about to see and do — just as a critic does (or should). The role of the critic is to bring in that background knowledge, that experience, and the practice in articulating it, to help the audience member do that in a meaningful way.
Every individual’s experience of consuming entertainment is going to be colored in complex ways by their larger life experiences and the things they’ve liked or disliked in the past. In my opinion, rather than divide reviewers from audiences, this in fact unites them.
So I don’t think it’s quite as simple as the reviewer simply being able to set aside the fact that they’ve played eight other games that same week and pretend they’re just like a normal player. Nor should they. The challenge is to use the ways they’re different from players to the benefit of the players, rather than to their detriment. If the reviewer’s experiences lead him or her to provide less useful information to the player rather than more, to obfuscate a title’s value or lack thereof rather than highlight it, that’s not an inevitability or a necessary weakness — that’s just an amateur.
Is there an epidemic of amateurism out there? Sure. Are there heaps of game reviews out there that provide a nose-squinched-to-glass point of view that’s lost its ability to see or communicate the big picture? Hell yeah. Should we all work on that? Definitely, and it won’t be as easy as just trying to wipe the slate clean every time we sit down with a title.
I think this is something we’re all collectively developing as time goes on and as games become more complex. If we had all the solutions, we wouldn’t be doing this. But that we must fail simply by virtue of being reviewers? I don’t agree.
Our background and our perspectives are why we can succeed, as long as we’re capable of articulating and contextualizing them in a balanced, constructive way.
And as one last note, even if we did somehow collectively stumble on the formula for the perfect, universal review (as if such a thing definitively could exist!), it still wouldn’t eliminate the other important way audiences evaluate games — through conversation and recommendations from their friends and peers.
No matter what reviews do, audiences will always also consult people who definitively relate to them kind-to-kind in terms of perspectives. If we were ever to try to be just like players in order to be more useful to them, we’d already be beat in that arena — so why not explore what else we have to offer?
Shawn Elliott, 2K Boston: Stephen wonders whether or not reviewers really know what it’s like to be a gamer. Tom answers that “there’s no reason a game reviewer can’t understand and address the experience of an average gamer.” Leigh, however, argues that the reviewer’s “unpopulist” perspective is really the point — another signpost to a forthcoming section in which we’ll consider where reviews and criticism part ways. Leigh also suggests that members of an audience aren’t in agreement with one another (e.g. the expectations of Game Informer readers might be as different from one another as they are from the reviewer). What are your takes on that? Do you always assume to know who you’re writing for? Do the review policies of your employers define intended audiences?
Kieron Gillen, Rock Paper Shotgun: My answer on this one’s relatively simple. I’m a freelancer. I’ll write for whatever abstract audience I’ve been hired to write for. Working for kids/teenage games magazine Games Master is different for writing for Edge. Less jokes, mainly (Oddly, I found I wrote best for GM drunk. I’m in touch with my inner 14 year old whilst boozed. Er… I edited sober). Are the magazines’ comprehension of what their readers think and believe correct? Probably not, but I’ve been hired to write for that hypothetical audience. It’s not my job to decide what the audience is. As a freelancer, I have no power to decide that. And if I do decide that, I’ll be rightly sacked and edited to the magazine line.
(And perhaps obviously, if I disagree with the magazine line — and there are magazines I find pretty reprehensible — I don’t write for them. Or at least, I don’t write for them twice)
When I’m the boss — as in, as 1/4 of the RPS hive mind — we’ve constructed the audience from the ground up. We basically made the site we’d want to read. And, generally speaking, specialist magazines only ever really work when your writers are also your audience. I disagree with most people here who’ve argued in the split. I think we are gamers. I don’t think it’s a huge thing to remember what it was like to throw down thirty quid for a videogame for it to turn out to be shit. If you’re genuinely interested in the form, what interests you in it is what interests your readers. It may be easier to say that on something relatively niche like RPS — but RPS is little other than old-school PCGUK/Amiga Power/You Sinclair with the leash of decency removed, all of which were brilliant and highly popular (i.e. Best selling in their market) magazines. Specialist games writing in the UK has always thrived on the sense that the writers were the readers, just capable of articulating better than you were what these wonderful things called videogames are like. I always recall Tim Edwards — Deputy Editor of PCGUK, and recovering mag fanboy — overjoyed when we first did the yearly Top 100 Games feature by disappearing to the pub all day and arguing it out. “You really do it! You actually go to the pub and argue games”. That was the fantasy for the brit mags, y’know?
If I’m writing for a more mainstream place, of course, the rules all change. But that’s a different question — and there I return to being a freelancer. I’m a writer. I’m perfectly capable of writing for any audience I’m told to. At which point all my commissioning editors are laughing, as well they should.
Dan Hsu, Sore Thumbs Blog: I think the most successful media outlets are the ones that understand who their audience is, and like Kieron says, is a part of that same audience. On this first point, if the editors don’t give their writers some captain’s guidance as far as their readership goes, that boat can sail all over the place. Game Informer…are their readers the typical 18-34 gaming males? A more hardcore gamer? Or a more general consumer (including parents, aunts, uncles, etc.) who might be shopping at GameStop for someone other than themselves? If GI’s editors don’t provide that feedback, then a new writer may not know if using the term “RPG” or referencing some guy named “Miyamoto” without proper context is appropriate or not. I remember GI’s Editor-in-Chief Andy McNamara talking about this very thing at a panel once, so I know they think about this kind of stuff. We did at EGM as well. We figuratively painted a picture of our audience to our writers and editors regularly, so they understood whom they were writing for. It helps maintain a certain level of consistency in the writing. It also gives our respective magazines a consistent identity and brand. This is very important for so many obvious reasons.
And Kieron’s right as well as far as it helping when the writers are in the demographic they’re writing for. This lets the prose come out more naturally, more authentically because the writer and reader are in the same state of mind.
Take a look at John Davison. When he had his first son, his brain started changing. He started looking at videogames differently. I know he can still write for a more traditional, hardcore audience (because he’s still a hardcore gamer), but now he has a parent’s perspective as well. He was more and more interested in writing for a crowd that has to split time between Madden and diaper changing, and since Ziff Davis Media wasn’t the right outlet for that, he gave birth to What They Play. That’s a great story…a perfect example of someone reaching out to the audience he wants to write for rather than forcing it upon the wrong crowd and diluting the established hardcore brands (1UP, EGM, etc.).
Francesca Reyes, Official Xbox Magazine: I hate to chime in only to ride on Kieron’s coattails on this, but to me, he’s absolutely right. I know as writers, we’re supposed to be able to take on the guise of the Everyman, reviewing games for some fictional demographic out there and assuming the voice that speaks to them. But how successful is anyone if they’re not in some way writing for themselves? Especially for stuff like reviews, which are essentially well-supported (or crappily-supported, depending) opinions based on experience, knowledge, and taste?
But before I get carried away with that tangent, I wanted to make sure to address Shawn’s question about review policies. I’ve only really ever worked for one company for the past 12 years and since then, I’ve never had any sort of really strict guidelines for how to write or approach reviews. Maybe that had nothing to do with freedom of editorial and everything to do with disorganization, but a few things have always remained consistent, but never quite stated, across all the pubs I’ve written for: review the product, not the company that created it or released it (how very Formalist of us!); don’t become a jaded fuck; don’t get too insider-y with technical language (because it’s just wankery at that point); and always support your hypothesis. Those were for the actual writing part of reviews and I’d think they’re pretty straightforward.
For the process of reviewing a game or product — it was always strongly encouraged to finish the game you were reviewing and be as thorough as possible in researching them. Those were ideals, and like every ideal — not always realized in practical application, of course. Back in the day, it was a lot easier to do because of a number of factors — not the least of which, we all had some form of a freelance/contributor budget. These days, things run much leaner and as such — unless someone comes along and adds 5-10 more hours to each day, finishing every single game on time just isn’t always a possibility. But you always push people to do it, even if they physically can’t — even if it’s only to get across the importance and accountability of reviewing a product.
I know it’s an old-fashioned (possibly annoyingly earnest) ideal, but I always kind of thought you owed it to your audience and to the people who spent months to years creating a game to at least put in the 10-20 (and in the case of JRPGs, even more) hours of diligence to critique it. It’s completely impractical, I know, but I’ve always aspired to be consistent about it with the games I’ve reviewed. I’m always disappointed if I don’t accomplish it by the time I have to write the review.
But maybe I’m not being completely honest about my reasons, because I’ve also learned over the course of the past years that I have to cover my ass. If I don’t play through a game and know it thoroughly, I can’t expect to be able to accurately debate with someone who disagrees with my review — whether that’s a reader or a developer or a co-worker. I realize there are loopholes in my logic (I think Kieron pointed out early on that two players can see the same game completely differently), that I don’t always have the hours in the day to follow through on my goals, and that maybe I’m increasingly paranoid – but I’m also trying to be completely honest.
And as for the original topic for debate in this thread — being a fan reviewer versus not being a fan — that really depends on the publication. I know this is going against my original paragraph about how we all basically write for ourselves — but I don’t think you necessarily have to become someone completely different in order to connect or write for a different audience. I mean, if we’re all writing and reading about games — there’s a fundamental understanding that we are interested in the same medium and it’s only the degree of familiarity with said medium that separates any of us as writers or readers. So, it’s an adjustment of language — but it’s not an adjustment of passion or enthusiasm or knowledge.
There was some earlier chat in the thread about broadening game reviews/games media appeal to a wider audience by freeing certain reviews from genre experts — that doing this would somehow democratize the appeal of game reviews for readers. I’m a bit on the fence about this one since I think it all comes down to the skill of the reviewer. I mean, what do you want out of a review? Who are you hoping it’ll appeal to? If someone who’s never played a Madden game before gets an assignment to review one, you would hope they did their homework. But is that point? I mean, are you assigning it to them in order for them to write some experiential editorial about how they learned to play Madden? Or are you hoping that they write a review that weighs the pros and cons of the game versus what’s come before for people who’ve had some experience with the series? I think that’s really what you need to ask. Because I’m guessing that everyone in this forum, if they’re handed a game to review that they have no experience with, will do an inordinate amount of research (including maybe playing previous games in the series) in order to be able to evaluate it before or while reviewing it. And ultimately, you may not become an expert on the genre or the game’s series/background, but you will know more than the reader you’re hoping to attract by giving the review a “fresh, unfettered” take. Or I could be full of shit at this point.
I think the “non-expert review” idea is a great one for feature-type coverage or on a blog. I’d love to hear someone’s take on, say, Monster Rancher or Harvest Moon if all they’ve played up to this point was Counter-Strike games. But I’m not entirely sure I’d base any actual buying advice on that reviewer’s opinion. Because ultimately — games are weird in that they’re part entertainment (like movies), and part consumer product (like televisions). Evaluating how a game works (or doesn’t work) can be just as important as evaluating what it’s trying to say. And figuring both of those out takes some familiarity that I would think the reader trusts that you have.
Harry Allen, Hip-Hop Activist & Media Assassin: I definitely find this change in how reviewers review — the effect that the birth of offspring has — the most interesting one: The idea that, now, having children, I, as a gamer, see games differently.
It happens, and it happens pretty instantly. I’ll bet if you ask them, they couldn’t even tell you how, nor would they tell you that it “creeped” up on them.
My brother has two small children, aged five and eight.
A few years ago, it may have been before the first of his five-year-old, or shortly afterwards, I was reading up on this devastating new roller-coaster somewhere in the U.S.
I love roller-coasters, and e-mailed the link to him, with the idea that this was something we might go ride together.
He sent me an e-mail back — I’ll never forget this — with one word:
“Horrifying.”
In other words, having had children, he was having, essentially, a chemical counter-response to the idea of putting himself in even simulated danger.
Another, related-unrelated: I once did Tavis Smiley’s show, when it was on BET. Rapper Mack 10 was also a guest, and he was married to T-Boz, of TLC, at the time.
They had a bunch of food in the green room, including stewed chicken. At one point, T-Boz, who was pregnant then, came into the area. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, her nose offended. “What’s that smell? Ugh, chicken!” she said, and walked out.
I couldn’t understand it. The chicken wasn’t prepared in any unusual way, nor was its scent that dominating.
It was only later I learned that pregnant women will often have a very powerful, chemically-programmed counter-response to meat, because animal flesh can often be the carrier of parasites, to which a fetus would be especially vulnerable.
As a person aspiring to Christianity, I thought of this as a remarkable piece of design.
As a gamer, a person who adores the art of gaming, and who respects the craft of writing, what I appreciate is game writers being honest and saying, “I’ve changed.”
As Chris Rock says, you don’t wanna be the old guy in the club. Whether the issue is a lack of passion, burnout, family duties, or too many first person shooters in one lifetime, I think saying that, “I see this differently,” for whatever reason, has a high moral quality.Pakistan school attack: At least 141 people killed, including 132 children, in Taliban siege in Peshawar
Updated
At least 141 people have been killed and 122 injured in an attack by Taliban militants on a Pakistani high school.
At least 132 of the dead were schoolchildren, chief army spokesman General Asim Bajwa said.
Hundreds of students and teachers were taken hostage in the bloodiest insurgent attack in the country in several years.
The raid on the school lasted for more than eight hours before the gunmen were killed.
An unnamed source told Reuters that nine insurgents were killed while other sources reported six attackers, but noted they were all dead.
The Pakistani military said special forces had rescued more than a dozen staff and students during the assault.
"The combat operation is over, the security personnel are carrying out a clearance operation and hopefully they will clear the building in a while," police official Abdullah Khan said.
"Dead bodies of six terrorists have been found in the building."
General Bajwa said on Twitter that the operation was "closing up" but explosive devices planted in school buildings by the militants were slowing clearance efforts.
Key points At least 141 people killed, including 132 children
At least six Taliban militants who stormed the school are now dead
More than 500 children of military personnel and civilians attend the school, mostly aged between 10 and 18
The Taliban said the attack was in response to military operations
Peshawar is close to the North Waziristan tribal area where Pakistan's army is involved in operations against militants
The Pakistani Taliban is fighting for a strict Islamic state
The Taliban said they sent in six gunmen with suicide vests to attack the military run school.
Outside the school, helicopters had been hovering overhead and ambulances ferried wounded children to hospital.
The school on Peshawar's Warsak Road is part of the Army Public Schools and Colleges System, which runs 146 schools nationwide for the children of military personnel and civilians. Its students range in age from 10 to 18.
The schools educate the children of both officers and non-commissioned soldiers and army wives often teach there.
Disturbing reports have emerged of how the attack unfolded, according to Pakistani journalist Wajahat Khan, who is based in Islamabad.
"It started around home time, when most of the parents were about to receive the kids and school was about to get done," he told ABC News24.
"From what we know from military sources on the ground... [the] assailants, all equipped with suicide jackets and all wearing local paramilitary and police uniforms, essentially walked into the school and started picking off kids, classroom by classroom."
Prime minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the attack and said he was on his way to Peshawar.
"I can't stay back in Islamabad. This is a national tragedy unleashed by savages. These were my kids," he said in a statement.
"This is my loss. This is the nation's loss. I am leaving for Peshawar now and I will supervise this operation myself."
School targeted as'response' to army killing Taliban fighters
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility for the attack, saying the gunmen had been ordered to shoot older students but not children.
A spokesman for the group said the attack was retaliation for the Pakistan army's continuing operation against militants in the North Waziristan tribal area close to Peshawar.
"They include target killers and suicide attackers," TTP spokesman Muhammad Khorasani told AFP.
"This attack is a response to Zarb-e-Azb and the killing of Taliban fighters and harassing their families."
Zarb-e-Azb is the official name for the army's offensive against strongholds of the Taliban and other militants in North Waziristan.
The offensive has killed more than 1,600 militants, according to an AFP tally.
The military has hailed the operation as a major success in disrupting Taliban militancy.
Retribution by the Taliban "was long expected because for the last several months there's been a sustained campaign against militancy," Mr Khan told the ABC.
"Pakistan was criticised for years for not doing enough [to fight the Taliban]... This is payback."
The semi-autonomous tribal areas that border Afghanistan have for years been a hideout for Islamist militants of all stripes - including Al Qaeda and the homegrown TTP as well as foreign fighters such as Uzbeks and Uighurs.
The United States pressed Islamabad for years to wipe out the sanctuaries in North Waziristan, which militants have used to launch attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan
International condemnation of 'vile', 'dastardly' and 'cruel' attack
Pakistani Nobel peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for insisting that girls had a right to an education, said she was "heartbroken" by the killings.
"I am heartbroken by this senseless and cold-blooded act of terror in Peshawar that is unfolding before us," Malala, who now lives in England, said in a statement.
"Innocent children in their school have no place in horror such as this.
"I condemn these atrocious and cowardly acts and stand united with the government and armed forces of Pakistan whose efforts so far to address this horrific event are commendable.
"I, along with millions of others around the world, mourn these children, my brothers and sisters - but we will never be defeated."
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said it was "impossible to put into words the mixture of grief and fury that must be felt by people in Pakistan and around the world at this latest terrorist atrocity."
US president Barack Obama condemned the raid and promised his country would stand by Pakistan in its struggle against violent extremism.
"By targeting students and teachers in this heinous attack, terrorists have once again shown their depravity," he said.
"We stand with the people of Pakistan, and reiterate the commitment of the United States to support the government of Pakistan in its efforts to combat terrorism and extremism and to promote peace and stability in the region."
UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon also expressed his shock at the attack.
"It is an act of horror and rank cowardice to attack defenceless children while they learn," Mr Ban said at the start of a UN Security Council meeting.
India's prime minister Narendra Modi and home minister Rajnath Singh both disparaged the attack on Twitter.
"I strongly condemn the terrorist attack on a school at Peshawar," Mr Singh said.
"This dastardly and inhuman attack exposes the real face of terrorism. My heart goes out to the families of those children who got killed by the terrorists in Peshawar."
India has repeatedly urged Pakistan to rein in militant groups operating on its soil.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence in 1947, and deadly attacks on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants dealt a blow to tentative peace talks in 2008.
French president Francois Hollande condemned the attack on the school as "vile".
"No words can express the ignominy of such an attack against children in their school," Mr Hollande said in a statement.
German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a statement he condemned the "criminal attack in the strongest terms".
"The hostage-taking and murder of children exceeds in its cruel cowardice all that Pakistan, stricken by years of terror and violence, has known before," he said.
"We mourn with the people of Pakistan the victims of this bloody terrorist attack. Our hearts go out to the families of the victims. For the many injured we wish speedy recoveries."
ABC/wires
Topics: terrorism, unrest-conflict-and-war, pakistan, asia
First postedSen. Jeff Sessions (Photo: Provided)
This election may be the last chance you have to retake control of your country.
Record legal and illegal immigration levels are jeopardizing our national security, flooding our labor market and bringing criminal gangs, drugs and other large costs to our communities.
Years of failed trade policies have eroded our manufacturing base and eliminated millions of jobs.
The American people know perfectly well what is wrong. But Washington politicians are not listening. Instead, they listen too often to powerful international financial interests that have long since elevated themselves above the concerns of working Americans.
But, as we have seen in Iowa and New Hampshire, the long-silenced American people are rightly beginning to push back and to insist their government defend them.
On top of catastrophic illegal immigration – which must end – the government further crowds schools and job markets by issuing over 1 million green cards and 700,000 guest worker visas annually — far more than any other nation. These individuals directly compete with Americans for steadily declining jobs.
To illustrate, the U.S. annually admits over 20 immigrants on green cards for every one new public high school graduate in South Carolina. This will continue until Congress passes a law reducing them.
Reuters’ polling shows Americans want to reduce – not increase – immigration by a margin of nearly 3-to-1. The Polling Co. shows that by nearly 10-to-1, people want U.S. companies to raise wages for those already here rather than import cheaper foreign labor.
Yet the President’s "Gang of Eight" bill the Senate passed in 2013 would have gone much further, tripling green cards over the next 10 years and doubling annual guest workers. Had the American people not risen up in opposition, it would have become law.
It is time candidates and elected officials reflect the people’s wishes and call for lower immigration levels that protect American workers.
It is also time candidates and elected officials reflect the people’s wishes by opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and by advancing pro-America trade policies.
NEWSLETTERS Get the Top 5 newsletter delivered to your inbox We're sorry, but something went wrong The five biggest headlines in your inbox each morning Please try again soon, or contact Customer Service at 1-800-736-7136. Delivery: Daily Invalid email address Thank you! You're almost signed up for Top 5 Keep an eye out for an email to confirm your newsletter registration. More newsletters
Last year, Congress voted to ‘fast-track’ the colossal, 5,544-page TPP. Negotiated in secret by President Barack Obama and global elites, this deal utterly fails to prevent damaging foreign currency manipulation, which Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, said could wipe out years of negotiated trade protections in just ‘minutes.’
A 2015 IPSOS poll, for example, found that 88 percent of the public believes it’s important trade deals prevent currency manipulation.
Yet again, with "fast-track" and TPP, the international agenda won out over the people who know America as their home — not just another spot on a global map.
Ominously, the TPP also creates a new Trans-Pacific Union with a governing commission composed of the 12 Pacific nations that would be free at any time to change the deal, and even the rules of the commission — with the U.S. having only the same one vote as the Sultan of Brunei.
A Tufts University study finds TPP would cost nearly 450,000 American jobs by 2025. With opposition surging, its advocates have become silent. But know they are biding their time and will seek to ram it through after the election.
Fortunately, the American people can change our country’s course. The nation’s eyes now move to South Carolina and the SEC primaries. This is the people’s opportunity to exert their will on these defining issues — immigration and trade. This means demanding the politicians make clear commitments on these issues.
This election will decide, perhaps once and for all, whether we continue the slide into open borders globalism, or begin to emerge again as a nation-state that defends its people’s interests.
Jeff Sessions, a Republican, represents Alabama in the United States Senate. For more information sessions.senate.gov/
Read or Share this story: http://grnol.co/1XuyyH2Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype (Multi-Language) PLAY EXCLUSIVES
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Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype (Multi-Language)
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featured review xin_jbr (55) on 24, Jan. 2017 15:11 (HKT) Awesome Game!
Rare physical game
Fun gameplay and crispy graphic!
A must have for collector,get it while it last!
features Includes Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype - The Last Chapter add-on
Platinum trophy support
PlayStation Vita / Vita TV support
Full Color Manual (English)
10 unique action-loaded levels with fierce boss battles
High definition graphics with 3D backgrounds
Dynamic score-linked difficulty system
Three playerships with distinct characteristics and weapon systems
Complex bullet pattern system
Powerful limit attacks and fourfold chaser system
Console perfect, running at 60fps with next to no load times
Unlockables and rewards offer nearly unlimited replay value
Online high score ranking tables and replay file sharing
description Due to its astounding feedback earlier this year, Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype will get a physical version exclusively at Play-Asia.com! So, if you're into some serious shooting, don't miss out in adding this to your collection. That's your mission...
You will return to Gota IV as part of the Söldner-X defense force. The rest of the mankind will again rely on your battle against new mysterious foes. Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype delivers a shoot 'em up experience, mixing classic gameplay with stunning audio-visuals that will surely add hype to the gaming experience. The dynamic gameplay features include 10 action-packed stages, a powerful score-linked difficulty system, a challenge mode that allows players to unlock bonus features and rewards, and an online high ranking tables and replay file sharing.
This exclusive release includes Söldner-X 2: Final Prototype - The Last Chapter DLC! Widen your shooting experience with this action-packed expansion that includes 3 exhilarating stages, 13 daunting challenges, 11 trophies and more to the original game. Note: The Last Chapter DLC is on the cart and part of the game. No download voucher, so all players from all regions can experience The Last Chapter DLC!
LIMITED RELEASE: Only 3,000 copies of Soldner-X 2 Final Prototype remain!
further info Official Release Date Jan 12, 2017 Language Voice: English Subtitles English, Japanese, French, German Genre Shoot 'em up Version Asia PAX-Code PAX0008421222 Catalog No. VLAS-36106 Item Code 0797776432523 Players 1
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which includes data compiled in Tempest and Hunter (1965), Tempest et al. (1965),Simon and Azam (1989), Dethlefsen and Schmidt (2007), Milo (2013) and Valgepea et al. (2013), shows that the scaling for the volume of protein compared with that of overall cell volume is also less than linear, with P 0 =3.42 × 10−7 (m3Protein ), and β p =0.70±0.06 (Figure 2b). Considering the observed scaling for protein volume and DNA volume in the context of Equation (11), we calculate that scales like. It is likely that and are roughly constant across cells (e.g., the average gene length has been found to be approximately invariant across all bacteria (Xu et al., 2006)) and, therefore, this result implies that the average copy number of proteins is likely increasing as cells become larger. Thus, not only are the number of unique proteins increasing for larger cells and genomes but the number of times that each protein is copied is also increasing.
The departure of protein scaling from genome scaling gives an example of a cellular feature that is not simply predicted by a proportionality with overall genome size (e.g., the surprising scaling of V p ∝L3.33 given β p /β D ≈3.33). Given that total protein content is expected to play a strong role in determining the number of ribosomes (Equation (13)) and the overall RNA content of the cell, we should also expect these features to have a complicated connection with the genomic complexity of a bacterium.
We predict the relationship between the total volume of ribosomes and overall cell volume from Equations (13), (14),(15) using the asymptotic form of μ (see Supplementary Information for explicit forms) and measured values for the degradation rates φ and η. This prediction should represent a true lower bound, and in Figure 2c this curve (dashed line) tracks, but is consistently smaller than the observed volume of ribosomes from our cross-species compilation of published data, which includes Bremer et al. (1996), Fegatella et al. (1998), Seybert et al. (2006) and Luef et al. (2015). We also find a relationship for the number of ribosomes using a best fit of the degradation rates with the power-law approximation of μ (see Supplementary Information), which accurately captures the cross-species trends in ribosome volume in Figure 2c. We find that this fitted prediction, which relies on only a single free parameter, has a very similar goodness of fit to a simple power law, where we find that the best fit to Equation (16) is given by R 0 =1.54 × 10−7 (m3Ribosomes ) and β R =0.73±0.15. It should be noted that the best fit of our full model for ribosome composition makes predictions for ranges of cell size where we do not have data to test the model. Some of our later conclusions and inferences rely on these predictions, and thus provide a set of testable and open hypotheses, such as the number of ribosomes found at larger bacterial sizes or the exact size at which the ‘ribosome catastrophe’ occurs.
Shifts in cellular composition and the smallest bacteria
Our analysis now provides the size dependence for the major cellular components across the domain of bacteria. This includes the prediction for the volume of the envelope considering three cases: only a single membrane (organisms without a cell wall) and the effective thickness for Gram-negative or -positive bacteria (Figure 2d), and predictions for tRNA and mRNA given the volume of ribosomes.
Of critical interest is how the relative cellular composition changes across species of diverse size and what tradeoffs and limitations we might be able to infer from these shifts. Figure 3a shows all of the cross-species trends for various cellular components compared with the overall cell volume. The compiled trends show that the composition of the cell greatly shifts across the range of bacterial body sizes. The smallest cell volumes are dominated by DNA and, to a lesser extent, cell membrane and protein, while the largest bacteria are composed of mostly ribosomes, tRNA and mRNA. These changes in composition are accompanied by shifts in the dry fraction of cells, as discussed later, and the overall cell density (see Supplementary Figure S5 and related discussion).
Figure 3 (a) The volume-dependent scaling of each of the major cellular components for bacteria. (b) The total cell volume compared with the volume of all cellular components as a function of cell size. (c) The fraction of total cell volume that is occupied by the essential components. It should be noted that in each of these plots we have extrapolated curves to regions that are not physically possible (such as the dry fraction exceeding 1) in order to illustrate crossings that represent limiting sizes, and to show the increasing challenges faced by bacteria beyond these critical values. Full size image
These trends also predict at what scale certain components would become limiting. For example, the relationship for genome volume gives the mass of a cell that is entirely filled by DNA as
which is expectedly smaller than the smallest observed organism by a factor of approximately three (Table 1). This result shows that for the smallest cells there is not much room beyond the basic requirements for the genome. Similarly, the volume at which proteins are predicted to entirely fill the cell would be given by
Table 1: Comparisons of estimates and measurements for the smallest bacterium Full size table
which is about an order of magnitude smaller than the smallest cell. The cellular envelope volume that completely fills the cell can be found using Equation (19) given values for the envelope thickness. For a Gram-negative bacterium, the envelope would fully occupy the cell at a size of 7.44 × 10−22 m3, for a Gram-positive, at a size of 2.91 × 10−23 m3, and for a single membrane (organisms lacking a cell wall), at a size of 1.01 × 10−25 m3. These results show that for the smallest cells the envelope represents a significant portion of the overall volume. In order to reduce the required envelope volume, the smallest cells are expected to minimize surface area by becoming increasingly spherical, which agrees well with the mostly spherical cell shapes reported by Luef et al. (2015), and are expected to reduce envelope thickness or layers, consistent with Mycoplasma that lack a cell wall.
The above analysis is useful for understanding which individual components become limiting at the smallest cell sizes. More generally, we can understand the overall space constraints of the cell at the small end of life by considering the total volume from Equation (2). This summed component volume will equal the total cellular volume for a size of 1.02 × 10−20 m3 for a Gram-positive bacterium, which is comparable to the previous energetic prediction (Kempes et al., 2012; Figure 3b) and larger than the smallest observed and hypothesized cells by roughly a factor of two (Knoll et al., 1999; Seybert et al., 2006; Luef et al., 2015). Considering only a single membrane would give a minimal size of 4.10 × 10−21 m3, which closely matches measurements for the smallest bacteria (Table 1). Considerations of the space for the smallest cells is a topic that has been deeply considered in the past and previous estimates agree with our prediction for a lower bound, where it was estimated that the minimum size required for a cell of modern biochemical complexity should fall in the range of 4.19 × 10−21–1.41 × 10−20 m3 (Knoll et al., 1999). Furthermore, this result, and our space constraint estimate from V comp =V tot, also compare well with the limit anticipated from energetic considerations (Kempes et al., 2012), thus highlighting that multiple constraints are likely limiting the possibility of becoming smaller at the smallest scale of life.
Our result shows that the average cross-species trends converge to predict the smallest cell at the appropriate size range while still being an accurate predictor of cellular composition as cells move orders of magnitude away from this lower bound (Figures 2 and 3). This is remarkable because our analysis shows that average trends in cellular composition across the diversity of bacteria are consistent with the scale of the lower limits of life. However, these predictions also highlight necessary tradeoffs for the smallest cells, where the total volume requirements accurately predict the observed minimum size only for a reduced cellular envelope of a single membrane. This may not be biologically feasible and thus other compositional tradeoffs may be required for the smallest cells. For example, the genome size for Mycoplasma genitalium is 5.8 × 105 bp (Moya et al., 2009), which is about half the size of the prediction from the average trend for a bacterium of this volume. Similarly, at the smallest sizes, it is possible that cells could evolve to have lower copy number of proteins per gene, or have smaller average protein sizes—all to accommodate cell volume constraints.
Our own previous cross-species considerations (Kempes et al., 2012) predict a smallest bacterium that compares well with the mean cell size of Luef et al. (2015) and Seybert et al. (2006) but is about four to five times larger than the smallest cells from these studies (Table 1). This difference highlights that the smallest organisms may deviate from average energetic properties, such as unit maintenance costs, in addition to compositional shifts, though some of these deviations would require a cellular biochemistry that differs from modern examples. For example, previous estimates for possible primitive cells would lead to a size of 3.59 × 10−24 m3 (Knoll et al., 1999), which is not much bigger than the size at which the cell volume is entirely filled by a single membrane (1.01 × 10−25 m3).
Although the data presented here are for the domain of bacteria, we may find similar constraints in archaea. For example, the smallest observed archaea are roughly comparable to the smallest bacteria in volume (≈3.41 × 10−20 m3; Huber et al., 2002; Comolli et al., 2009) and have similar genome sizes (0.5 megabases (Huber et al., 2002)) and ribosome counts (≈92; Comolli et al., 2009) at this size.
RNA limitations and the largest bacteria
For the largest bacteria, the dominant cell components are determined by the increasing need for processes related to transcription and translation to match increasing growth rates. As discussed earlier, this eventually leads to a ‘ribosome catastrophe’, where a finite size would require an infinite number of ribosomes, tRNA and mRNA. The limits anticipated in our model for the volume of ribosomes can be seen in the prediction curve of Figure 2c, where the entire cell volume would be filled by ribosomes, the ‘ribosome catastrophe’, at a size of 1.39±0.03 × 10−15m3. This is in contrast to the smallest bacteria, where the need for ribosomes, tRNA and mRNA are predicted to diminish based on the decreasing growth rates. Previous predictions predict that growth rate goes to zero at a size of 1.45 × 10−20 m3 (Kempes et al., 2012).
Expanding from the number of ribosomes to the total RNA content, the prediction from Equation (18) compares well with measurements for mRNA in Escherichia coli and Mycoplasma pneumoniae (see Supplementary Information for the value of the constants in Equations (17) and (18)). For E. coli, previous measurements give a range of 1380 (Neidhardt et al., 1996) to ≈10 000 mRNA per cell (see compilation in the Supplementary Information of Lu et al., 2007), compared with our estimate of 2540 to 12 257 using a cell volume between roughly 0.7 and 6 μm3 (Dethlefsen and Schmidt, 2007; Milo, 2013), and dividing Equation (18) by. For M. pneumoniae, the mRNA quantities are two orders of magnitude lower than E. coli at around 10 per cell (Maier et al., 2011), which is similar to the lower bound of our estimate of 68-1159 given the considerable range in observed cell size of 0.005–0.24 μm3 (Seybert et al., 2006).
Similarly, the number of tRNA per cell in E. coli has been observed to range between 52 000 and 375 000 (Jakubowski and Goldman, 1984; Neidhardt et al., 1996; Mackie, 2013), where we would predict a range of 23 561 to 113 707 based on the range of cell volumes used above. For M. pneumoniae, observations give 190 tRNA per cell (Maier et al., 2011), which is similar to our prediction of 631 to 10 755. It should be noted that in both cases we overestimate the number of tRNA and mRNA in Mycoplasma which is likely due to the considerable space constraints faced by these minimal organisms, as discussed earlier.
Parallel to our analysis of the smallest cells, the total component volume also sets an upper bound on size, where V comp =V tot at a size of 1.19 × 10−15 m3. This limit is dominated by the ‘ribosome catastrophe’, where the cell will require more ribosomes than can fit in its volume in order for biosynthesis to keep up with increasing growth rate. It should be noted that this predicted upper bound is four orders of magnitude smaller than the largest observed bacterium of ≈4.19 × 10−12 m3 (Schulz et al., 1999). However, this giant sulfur bacterium (Thiomargarita namibiensis) is dominated by vacuoles used for nutrient storage, which does not represent the metabolic active or relevant volume considered in our model of the required components (Schulz et al., 1999). If we remove the vacuole volume (approximately 98% of the total cell volume; Schulz et al., 1999) then we are left with a size of 1.05 × 10−14 m3, which is only an order of magnitude larger than our predicted upper bound. It is interesting to consider what tradeoffs these cells have made to avoid the ‘ribosome catastrophe’, and one possibility is that the environment regulates growth at a slower rate than cell size would dictate.
Similar to our biosynthetic limit, previous work has shown that there is a linear increase in the fraction of promoter activity devoted to ribosomes with increasing growth rate (Zaslaver et al., 2009). If the observed trend is extrapolated, then at a growth rate of 2.9 divisions per hour all promoter activity would be devoted to ribosomes, which is not feasible, and this would correspond to a cell volume of 2.1 × 10−17 m3. This predicted upper bound is smaller than our space limitation and highlights the multiple constraints that could be faced for the largest bacteria. Both of these upper bounds on cell volume correspond to the rough size at which there is an observed transition to eukaryotic life, along with corresponding and dramatic shifts in growth and metabolic rates (DeLong et al., 2010; Kempes et al., 2012). Thus, this major transition may in part be motivated by the challenges related to biosynthesis and ribosome requirements.
Free volume
In between this lower and upper limit, changes in composition can be most easily understood by considering the total physical space required for essential components compared with the remaining volume. Considering the average composition trends that we have discussed thus far, the fraction of the cell that is dry weight (Equation (3)) is 1 for the smallest bacteria and decreases quickly for larger cells until reaching a minimum around 0.13 at a size of 2.83 × 10−17 m3, before increasing again towards the largest cell (Figure 3c). From this relationship we can see that bacteria of intermediate size have the most free volume, and the maximum of this volume occurs around the size of many well-studied species such as E. coli.
This free volume, which is an inferred and testable prediction from our model, has important evolutionary and ecological consequences because it implies that there is a range of cell sizes that may have the most flexibility due to the lack of physical space constraints. This flexibility could manifest as an increase in the copies of specific proteins in stressful conditions, greater ability to buffer waste products or plasticity in increasing the number of ribosomes for faster growth, among many other possible benefits. This is in sharp contrast to the smallest cells that barely have enough space for basic biochemical requirements. An important avenue of future research is to examine whether and how individual taxa allocate ‘free volume’ differently to various components or functions, and whether such allocation can be understood as an adaptation to specific niches or conditions.
However, it is also important to consider, as part of this ‘free volume’, the volume of water necessary for cellular reactions and internal transport. For example, if all of the free volume were dedicated to water, and given the size of E. coli, we would predict that 67–76% of the cell is filled with water, in good agreement with previous estimates of 70% (Neidhardt et al., 1996). This comparison implies that all of the free volume could reasonably be occupied by water, and that evolutionary flexibility at these cell sizes could depend on the degree to which the water content is constrained. Our predictions suggest that the smallest and largest cells have lower water content, which is consistent with previous efforts that describe a cytoplasm with high molecular packing densities (e.g., von Hippel and Berg, 1989; Cayley and Record, 2003; Golding and Cox, 2006; Burnap, 2015). Similarly, these changes in water content may alter processes related to the solvent capacity or diffusive, sub-diffusive or active transport in the cell (e.g., von Hippel and Berg, 1989; Cayley and Record, 2003; Errington, 2003; Golding and Cox, 2006; Burnap, 2015), and it is of potential future interest to understand whether there are specific and calculable requirements for water content in cells of different size in connection with cellular composition. Furthermore, these results imply that the application of a constant dry weight ratio to diverse species may often be inaccurate.
Energetic limitations and complexities
Previous studies have highlighted that prokaryotes have a superlinear scaling between metabolic rate and body size. This observation has been successfully used to derive cross-species trends in growth rates and a limit where growth rate should go to zero in bacteria (Kempes et al., 2012). However, the superlinear scaling of metabolism is still not fundamentally understood and here we are surprised to find that every cellular feature scales sublinearly with overall cell volume. This implies that metabolism is not a simple proportionality of any one cellular feature. Figure 4b gives the scaling of the total metabolic rate as a function of the volume of each cellular component where it can be seen that all of the scalings are superlinear. Taken together these observations suggest that metabolic rate is a complicated emergent property of some measure of increasing cellular complexity. In particular, the scaling of metabolic rate with genome size stands out with an exponent close to 8, and it may be the case that metabolism is a complicated function of the growing complexity of the metabolic network which adds capacity quickly with the addition of novel proteins (DeLong et al., 2010). Metabolism also goes up steeply (exponents close to 2.4) with the total envelope volume and total number of proteins which also makes sense given that the membrane surface area controls ATP synthesis (Lane and Martin, 2010) and the number of proteins are the actual components of the metabolic network. The scaling of proteins scales closely to a power-law approximation of the growth rate equation (6) (an exponent of 0.65 compared with 0.70). Since growth rate is set by the overall scaling of metabolic rate (Kempes et al., 2012), it is possible that the protein concentration could be the dominant factor controlling both metabolic rate and growth rate, albeit not via any direct proportionality. Yet the explicit connection between any of these components to the scaling of metabolic rate remains unclear.
Figure 4 (a) The estimated scaling of metabolic rate per gene as a function of overall cell volume calculated from the scaling of genome size here and the data from DeLong et al. (2010). Previous average values from Lane and Martin (2010) for prokaryotes and eukaryotes are both shown. It can be seen that the previous prokaryote average value agrees with the scaling for the middle range of bacteria, and that bacterial values are close to the eukaryotic average value for the largest bacteria. Surprisingly, bacteria are increasing the metabolic rate per gene with a scaling exponent of 1.49. (b) Scaling of the total cellular metabolism as a function of the total volume of each cellular component. It can be seen that all of these relationships scale with an exponent greater than 1 (linear scaling is indicated by the gray dashed line), implying that metabolism is not a simple proportionality of any single cellular component. This suggests that the way in which cellular components are combining to produce superlinear scaling in cells is a complicated and emergent phenomena. Most notably, metabolic rate scales with total genome volume with an astonishing power of ≈ 8. Full size image
Furthermore, these scalings also highlight the unexpected result that cellular efficiency, defined as the metabolic power per unit of component (Lane and Martin, 2010), is increasing for every cellular component. It has previously been pointed out that the plasma membrane serves as the only region for ATP synthesis in bacteria, and since this surface area scales sublinearly with volume it will be outpaced by anything that is proportional to volume (Lane and Martin, 2010). Previous analyses have thus suggested that bacteria are becoming less efficient on a per-protein or per-gene level (Lane and Martin, 2010). However, the surprising superlinear scaling of metabolic rate and the sublinear scaling of both genome size and protein content lead to an increasing efficiency for both components. Figure 4a gives the power per gene as a function of cell size showing that it is increasing superlinearly across bacteria. This scaling agrees with the average values from Lane and Martin (2010) for mid-range bacteria and as bacteria grow larger the values approach the reported eukaryotic average (Lane and Martin, 2010) at the upper range of bacteria. If bacteria were able to grow larger they would be expected to continue to increase the power per gene and overtake the eukaryotes. Thus, it would seem that bacteria are not limited by an energetic efficiency challenge but rather by an energetic surplus that demands ever faster rates of biosynthesis and eventually leads to a space limitation via the packing of ribosomes as discussed earlier. It may be that the evolutionary transition to eukaryotes was motivated by biosynthetic and space constraints resulting from a fast metabolism rather than to increased metabolic capacity. In fact, eukaryotes have a metabolism that scales with cell size following a smaller exponent than bacteria (DeLong et al., 2010). These results are counterintuitive and bring up deep questions about the explicit connection between membrane areas and metabolic rate: if mitochondria evolved to increase the ATP synthesis area and provide an advantage over bacteria (Lane and Martin, 2010), then how and why can metabolic rate scale superlinearly in bacteria when the surface area is growing sublinearly with body size?The news that Sweet Briar College would close after 114 years of educating women caught many by surprise. But to one veteran educator, it's the culmination of a financial disaster wrought by rising costs, changing tastes, and more affordable alternatives.
Hawes Spencer reports.
An $8.8 million addition to Sweet Briar’s library in November, less than three months before the nationally ranked college stunned students and faculty by announcing it would close at the end of the summer. The school was counting on increased enrollment to save it from financial ruin, but the student population kept dropping.
"They are dealing with a generation of young women for whom so many other options are available."
Josiah Bunting has led several colleges including Virginia Military Institute and the all-male Hampden-Sydney. He wonders if Sweet Briar’s recent decision to target prospective students from Virginia may have backfired.
"In the state of Virginia, women's colleges and Sweet Briar in particular face an array of choices, excellent colleges and universities of different sorts, all of which are $15,-20,000 a year less than the comprehensive fee of Sweet Briar College."
And Bunting recalls heading a prep school in New Jersey where the girls told him they would not attend a women’s college.
"What do you say to a 17-year-old high school senior girl who's also applying to three or four other colleges-- probably coed-- that makes her want to come to your place that does not have boys? Thirty or 40 years ago, that was easy, easily done because those coeducational places did not exist, or they were all male."
And Sweet Briar faced one more major challenge. Despite offering early retirement to faculty members, deferring maintenance, and draining its endowment, the school owed $27 million and was losing $3 million a year.
"For all of those reasons, the board of trustees said we are in debt, we simply can't continue to function, pay our faculty decently and our staff, and devote the resources necessary to recruit a sufficiency of women to enable us to balance our budget. It's a very sad thing when this happens."
Bunting doubts there is any way the college could recover, but a Save Sweet Briar campaign has sprung up with a goal of raising $20 million.Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres, Marlins & Nationals
Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6
Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada
The Marlins are at an interesting place in their development cycle. We’ve seen them be at every stage of the spectrum, from rebuilding to contender, over the last couple decades and now they’re flipping young players for ready-made big leaguers to put around Giancarlo Stanton while he’s in his prime. It remains to be seen how much of a contender they will be in 2015, but it’s clear a switch has been flipped and that’s evident in what the system looks like.
It isn’t that top heavy and it isn’t particularly deep in tradable assets, but I liked what the Marlins did in the later rounds in the most recent draft. The club told me they had leaned to pitching in recent drafts and needed hitters. They identified a number of lower six figure prep hitting prospects to help stock the lower rungs of the system. Going under-slot in the sandwich round for prep catcher Blake Anderson helped them do that; it’ll be a few years before we know if this draft strategy will pay off.
Here’s the primer for the series and a disclaimer about how we don’t really know anything. See the links above for the ongoing series about how I evaluate, including the series on the ever-complicated hit tool.
Most of what you need to know for this list is in the above links, but I should add that the risk ratings are relative to their position, so average (3) risk for a pitcher is riskier than average risk (3) for a hitter, due to injury/attrition being more common. I’d also take a 60 Future Value hitter over a 60 FV pitcher for the same reasons. Also, risk encompasses a dozen different things and I mention the important components of it for each player in the report. The upside line for hitters is the realistic best-case scenario (a notch better than the projected tools, or a 75% projection while the projected tools are a 50% projection) and the Future Value encompasses this upside along with the risk rating for one overall rating number.
Below, I’ve included a quick ranking of the growth assets that the Marlins have in the majors that aren’t eligible for the list and Dave Cameron shares some general thoughts on the organization. Scroll further down to see Carson Cistulli’s fringe prospect favorite. I’m working on a bunch of lists at the same time, so up next in the series will be the Braves, Orioles, Nationals, Yankees and A’s, in some order as I finish them.
Big League Growth Assets
1. Jose Fernandez, RHP, Age 22, FV: 70 (Video)
2. Christian Yelich, LF, Age 23, FV: 65 (Video)
3. Marcell Ozuna, RF, Age 24, FV: 60
4. Jarred Cosart, RHP, Age 24, FV: 55
5. Adeiny Hechavarria, SS, Age 25, FV: 50 (Video)
6. Derek Dietrich, 2B, Age 25, FV: 45 (Video)
7. Brad Hand, LHP, Age 24, FV: 45
8. Carter Capps, RHP, Age 24, FV: 45
Organizational Overview by Dave Cameron
The Marlins have spent the last few years doing what the Marlins do best; making a ton of money for their owners while stockpiling interesting young talent in the process. Now, the ownership is again promising that this time things will be different, with the biggest contract in baseball history as the dangled carrot to win fans back over. But whether you believe Jeffrey Loria or not — I don’t — this team has a chance to be interesting in 2015, and the Marlins are poised to be the team most likely to take advantage of the weak NL East if the Nationals run into problems. However, their short-term success will require bad fortune in Washington, and the franchise’s history doesn’t allow one to be too optimistic about a long run of excellence.
50+ FV Prospect
1. Tyler Kolek, RHP
Current Level/Age: RK/19.1, 6’5/270, R/R
Drafted: 2nd overall (1st round) in 2014 out of Texas HS by MIA for $6 million bonus, Agency: Excel Sports Mgmt
Fastball: 60/70, Curveball: 50/60, Changeup: 40/50, Command: 40/50
Scouting Report: Kolek jumped on the national scene in the summer of 2013 after hitting 100 mph at the Area Code Games regional tryout in Texas, just after the 2013 MLB draft. He then showed up at most of the major events over the summer, where his velocity ranged from 93-98, hitting 100 mph in early innings, but sometimes would dip to the low 90’s in longer outings. His sharp low-80’s curveball would flash plus but was often just average to above, while he only very sparingly threw a nascent changeup.
Last spring, Kolek’s competition was very poor in a small town outside of Houston, and he struck out over half of the players he faced. He never had to use his changeup in games and his breaking ball got even less consistent, only occasionally flashing plus, while he fiddled with throwing both a curveball and slider, a recipe for disaster for many previous draft prospects. He regularly hit 100 mph and got even bigger, hitting 270 pounds (but not getting fat, just big), which allowed him to hold his velocity regularly in the 93-97 mph range deep into games.
After going second overall, Kolek was just okay in the Rookie-level GCL, sitting 91-94 mph and having the command/secondary/consistency issues you would expect given what he faced during the spring. It’s normal for prep arms to have their velo back up a bit after the draft, as it’s the longest season of their young careers, so no one is concerned. The Marlins prefer Kolek’s curveball, given the action, consistency to the break and his slot and they actually tweaked his grip a bit, giving it a more downward break. He’ll shelve the slider for now (though it may come back later, particularly if the curveball doesn’t improve) and focus on integrating the changeup more often in games.
I ranked Kolek 6th in my last pre-draft rankings, which was lower than almost every scout and publication I could find. I’m concerned that given the relative rawness and the absurd arm speed that Kolek will take longer to develop than many are expecting and that, if Kolek keeps throwing in the upper-90’s, the odds of a Tommy John surgery coming are pretty high. There’s obvious allure to a Texas-bred offensive tackle that lives on a farm, bales hay and throws 100 mph, but there’s some real concerns he needs to address in the next couple years.
The Marlins are aware of this and one club official said the plan is to have Kolek to throw whatever is comfortable, whether that’s low, mid or upper 90’s and more of a sinker or four-seamer. If he starts throwing for the radar gun and losing his mechanics, this could turn into a problem, but the athleticism and broad indicators in the delivery are there to stay healthy and throw strikes if the mental approach is correct.
Summation: Kolek’s 2015 assignment will be a wait-and-see situation based on how he looks in Spring Training, but the expectation is that he’ll head to Low-A. There’s enough raw talent that he could shoot through the minors if he makes quick adjustments and needs to be challenged by better hitters. I’d caution patience and expect multiple years at the A-Ball levels.
FV/Role/Risk: 55, #3/4 starter, Very High (5 on 1-5 scale)
Projected Path: 2015: Low-A, 2016: High-A, 2017: AA/AAA, 2018: AAA/MLB
45 FV Prospects
2. J.T. Realmuto, C Video: Realmuto is a classic example of both multi-sport athlete and catching conversions taking longer to develop, but he took a huge step forward in 2014 from okay prospect to Miami’s catcher of the future. He was a successful dual-threat quarterback in high school that also played shortstop and converted to catcher after he turned pro as a 3rd rounder in 2011. Realmuto was once a plus runner but is now has more average speed, but his receiving has really improved and he projects to be a solid average receiver with a plus arm. He has a very quick release and quick feet to produce pop times as low as 1.78. Realmuto is a bat over power guy that’s more focused on contact and is likely a little below average offensively, but that’s still an easy everyday guy behind the plate if everything holds up.
3. Justin Nicolino, LHP Video: Nicolino came over from Toronto in the big Jose Reyes deal and while his K rate hasn’t been quite the same, his advanced feel for pitching has remained. He works 89-91, hitting 94 mph with a plus changeup, a curveball that’s average at times and at least average command. He pitches more for weak contact and low pitch counts than strikeouts, which should help his performance translate ot the big leagues. His curveball is often below average but is slightly above average at its best; that’s Nicolino’s biggest weakness right now. He may break camp in the big league rotation, but likely heads to Triple-A for more seasoning.
4. Avery Romero, 2B Video: In high school, Romero was a stout right-handed power bat without a position; many scouts projected him for left field. He’s slimmed up and gotten a little more athletic since then and plays second base. Some clubs tried him at catcher as an amateur and most think he’ll end up at third base (especially with Colin Moran gone), but Miami isn’t in a rush to move him. Romero has the above average power and hitting ability to profile, but he has more of a line drive, gap-to-gap approach, so they’d like to keep his bat at second as long as possible since it profiles better there.
5. Trevor Williams, RHP Video: Williams showed some power at Arizona State, hitting 96 mph often, but he’s been sitting 89-92, hitting 94 mph in pro ball. His sinker is an above average pitch most night and his slider will flash above average as well. Williams also has an average curveball and changeup to go with about average command, making the former power arm more of a solid-not-spectacular back-end starter that may be ready to contribute soon.
6. Jose Urena, RHP Video: Urena has progressed steadily through the minors as a starter, one level at a time (Triple-A coming in 2015) with low walk numbers and a modest strikeout rate. He has a loose arm and a plus fastball that sits 92-94 and hits 97 mph at times, but still has some polish to add to his game before he can be a big league rotation piece. Urena’s changeup is his best off-speed pitch and is consistently solid average while his slider will flash above average at times, but is more often below, while his curveball is a 4th pitch. The feel to command enough to start is there, but his arm action is a little funky and there’s still some work to be done; his stuff likely plays up in relief, as a backup option to starting.
7. Brian Anderson, 2B Video: I was the high guy on Anderson all spring, grading him as a sandwich to 2nd round pick; the Arkansas second baseman ended up slipping all the way to the 3rd round at 76th overall, and the Marlins were surprised he fell to them. He’s played all over the field and will continue at second base, but likely ends up at third base or center field. Anderson is a 6’3/175 athlete that’s probably too tall for the middle infield but is a plus runner with a plus arm (hit 95 mph on the mound in high school) and present average raw power that projects for a tick more.
His only struggles at the plate came on the Cape last summer when he tinkered with his high leg kick, but once he went back to the high kick |
Team Year W L OTL PTS PTS% GF GA DIFF CF% Playoffs Pittsburgh Penguins 2005/06 22 46 14 58 0.354 244 316 -72 47.26 Missed Chicago Blackhawks 2006/07 31 42 9 71 0.433 201 258 -57 49.25 Missed Los Angeles Kings 2008/09 32 37 11 79 0.482 207 234 -27 50.45 Missed Toronto Maple Leafs 2015/16 29 42 11 69 0.421 198 246 -48 50.35 Missed
You’re still just a middling threat. Right? Well, only if you want to be.
One thing that most of these teams had in common? They were getting their production for pennies on the dollar. This is especially true of the Penguins and Blackhawks (The Kings are the square peg of this comparison, but eventually find their way. Just run with it). Shockingly, adding multiple young, elite forwards that you previously drafted to the other depth guys that you’ve drafted and have managed to survive the draft years will lead to some very fun results. Those Penguins added Malkin and Staal. Those Hawks added Kane and Toews. Los Angeles got their help on the back end; this wasn’t Doughty’s first season, but it was his big boom. Of course, that leaves us with the Leafs, who had five rookies in their top ten scorers.
Future core pieces were hiding in the bottom of the scoring tables of the other three teams as well. In Pittsburgh, Max Talbot barely missed the cutoff for the above table, and Kris Letang got a seven-game taste of the pros after finishing his last QMJHL season. That Blackhawks team included Andrew Ladd, Cam Barker, Dave Bolland, Kris Versteeg, Troy Brouwer, Nicklas Hjalmarsson, and Corey Crawford for stints. The Kings gave brief looks to a handful of others, but still had a few veterans to skim off. The key point here, though, is that the teams now had a chunk of salary wiggle room; moreso if they were willing to play the bonus overage chasing game. Moreover, they had a lot of incentive to improve; their best players would only be cheap for so long.
So they took leaps.
Date “Year 3” Transaction Jul 2 2007 Penguins sign Petr Sykora Jul 2 2007 Penguins sign Darryl Sydor Feb 26 2008 Penguins trade 2nd+5th for Hal Gill Feb 26 2008 Penguins trade Armstrong, Christensen, Esposito, 1st for Hossa, Dupuis Jul 1 2008 Blackhawks sign Brian Campbell Jul 1 2008 Blackhawks sign Cristobal Huet Mar 4 2009 Blackhawks trade Wisniewski, Kontiola for Pahlsson, Stephenson, 4th Jul 27 2010 Kings sign Alexei Ponikarovsky Aug 25 2010 Kings sign Willie Mitchell Feb 28 2011 Kings trade Teubert, 1st, 3rd for Dustin Penner
The most glaringly apparent of these pushes comes from the Blackhawks, and that makes sense. The Penguins were still getting out of the bankruptcy woods at this point, and were already also an abundant threat; one that was just unfortunate to face a Cup Favourite (and eventual Eastern Conference Champion) in Ottawa in the first round. Even they still added some middle-lineup support, though, and eventually swung for the fences at the deadline. Los Angeles made their higher-profile moves in a way that minimized how many players would come off their roster, but also focused more on depth.
Chicago’s brazenness was key, though. Fewer top defencemen were hitting the open market once the cap era kicked in; the odds of a Zdeno Chara-level move from one team to another were minuscule. Campbell was clearly the best defenceman on the market and seemed poised to be for a long time. Knowing they were getting a top-end player that would flesh out their core, the Hawks signed him to his massive eight-year, $57 million contract, and decided that any issues that may arise would be addressed later.
Team Year W L OTL PTS PTS% GF GA DIFF CF% Playoffs Pittsburgh Penguins 2007/08 47 27 8 102 0.622 247 216 31 45.93 Lost SCF (6) Chicago Blackhawks 2008/09 46 24 12 104 0.634 264 216 48 56.02 Lost WCF (5) Los Angeles Kings 2010/11 46 30 6 98 0.598 219 198 21 51.98 Lost R1 (6)
Chicago and Pittsburgh took huge leaps, which is impressive given what they had accomplished the year before. Extra depth and improved goaltending from Fleury made all the difference for the Penguins, and while the Hossa move didn’t get them their cup, it got them the closest they had been in nearly two decades. Chicago looked ready to take the league by storm right out of the gate, but were tasked with facing the last truly great gasp of the Detroit Red Wings and, in their first playoff appearance as a group, just weren’t able to keep up. Los Angeles kinda spun their tires, losing to San Jose, but got an idea of where they needed to go while they still could.
Alright, second kick at the can.
Date “Year 4” Transaction Jul 3 2008 Penguins sign Miroslav Satan Jul 3 2008 Penguins sign Ruslan Fedotenko Jul 3 2008 Penguins sign Matt Cooke Nov 16 2008 Penguins trade Darryl Sydor for Phillipe Boucher Feb 26 2009 Penguins trade Whitney for Chris Kunitz, Eric Tangradi March 4 2009 Penguins trade conditional pick for Bill Guerin Jul 1 2009 Blackhawks sign Marian Hossa Jul 1 2009 Blackhawks sign John Madden Jul 1 2009 Blackhawks sign Tomas Kopecky Feb 12 2010 Blackhawks trade Cam Barker for Kim Johnsson, Nick Leddy Jun 23 2011 Kings trade B. Schenn, W. Simmonds, 2nd for M. Richards, R. Bordson Jul 2nd 2011 Kings sign Simon Gagner Feb 23 2012 Kings trade Jack Johnson, pick for Jeff Carter
The Penguins knew they couldn’t afford Hossa long-term with Crosby coming up for renewal, so they walked when the talks got too rich. But they also knew that this was the last year that Malkin and Staal would be this cheap and that Letang was on the clock too. So they surrounded them with (mostly) short-term support. The Hawks went for it for a second consecutive year and signed Hossa until approximately the apocalypse, and the Kings, knowing that it was now or never, threw down some young core players and cash to basically acquire the mid-late 2000’s Philadelphia Flyers.
Team Year W L OTL PTS PTS% GF GA DIFF CF% Playoffs Pittsburgh Penguins 2008/09 45 28 9 99 0.604 264 239 25 48.35 Won Cup Chicago Blackhawks 2009/10 52 22 8 112 0.683 271 209 62 58.25 Won Cup Los Angeles Kings 2011/12 40 27 15 95 0.579 133 118 15 54.86 Won Cup
Just in time. The Penguins solved their last big issue (coaching) midway through the season and went on a tear under Dan Bylsma, the Hawks achieved all-around dominance and cruised through the year, and the Kings shook off bad luck at just the right time to have one of the craziest playoff runs of our time. They did it while their best young players were still relatively cheap, and could be surrounded by top depth and veteran players to push them over the top while they approached their personal athletic primes.
The people preaching caution will be quick to point out that from here, managing the cap got a lot harder for all three teams. They all had to make tough decisions with to keep themselves within the constraints of the league, and that often involved very good players being moved out.
Signing elite free agents to push you over the top while your young core is signed to cheap enough deals to facilitate that is a bad idea. pic.twitter.com/d0il5kW5yN — Jeff Veillette (@JeffVeillette) May 15, 2017
I know that sounds bad, but it’s an inevitability of all rags to riches teams. No matter what happens with the Leafs, if they take the patient approach or not, they’re going to have players who will ask for more money or opportunity at the end of their deals. They’re going to have to move players, and what this team looks like now is not what it’ll look like even two years from now.
But none of those other three teams had to move away from their young stars. Crosby, Malkin, Letang (from the press box) and Fleury (from the bench) are chasing yet another cup in Pittsburgh. Nearly every other Hawk has been replaceable along the way, but Toews, Kane, and Keith are all still there. Kopitar and Doughty still run Los Angeles.
These teams, in a sense, got to use the winning to their advantage. Support players had the pedigree of a ring to raise their trade value to teams looking to make their own jump, and they were willing to give up picks and prospects to get a piece of the “culture” in their own rooms, beginning a conveyor belt of support development. Veteran UFAs wanted to join the ride and signed discounted short term deals to join these teams. Prospects looking to win from the start while being aware they could get legitimate minutes for a team that needed their lower initial cap hits (looking at you, Artemi Panarin) were more willing to hop on their bandwagons.
In short, getting to victory faster gave all of these teams leverage in manipulating the group outside their top players with efficiency. It created binds at times, but they were manageable because the hockey world wanted to be just like them. Thanks to this, these teams were all able to repeat and stay competitive for quite a few years after their first win. All three teams found their way back to hosting cup parades with the same top players. Chicago’s done so twice, and Pittsburgh may join them in a week.
Which brings us back to the Leafs. The Leafs team that we don’t want to get too carried away with yet. After all, even looking at the other “model franchise”, it still seems weird to think that they could be destined to go down that same, no-speed-limit road.
But it shouldn’t. The Leafs had their share of slumps and misfortune (the shootout, one goal games, and third period leads were all nearly the death of them), but they were one of the best possession teams in the league, the team that spent the most time in the lead in the league besides Washington, and one of the best at moving the puck in and out of dangerous areas at blistering pace. They did it on the backs of three rookies who couldn’t legally drink in 24 road arenas and a supporting cast that was nearly as young. They did it without any significant statistical alarms to set off, and they backed it all up by playing an extremely close series with the regular season’s best team in the league. There is little to no reason to believe that this team isn’t for real.
There’s less reason to believe that this offseason isn’t one to pounce, either.
Contract wise, this is the best position that the Leafs have ever been in the salary cap era. A long list of expiring buried salaries mean that Toronto has $12 million in space remaining with Connor Brown and Zach Hyman being the only two significant contracts left to sign. They’ve got another $10.5 million in theoretical (but not totally clean) money to spend through Long-Term Injured Reserve, should they feel the need to push their bonus luck. The likelihood of a “flat” salary cap means that other teams won’t have the room to upgrade their maxed out rosters, perhaps giving Toronto an advantage in attempted acquisition.
It’s the only time they’ll have it quite this nice, too. Next year comes with some benefit; the full removal of Lupul’s contract, the expiration of Eric Fehr, and the end of Tim Gleason and Jared Cowen’s buyouts, but they’ll also have the extension or replacement of William Nylander, James van Riemsdyk, Tyler Bozak, Leo Komarov, Connor Carrick, and a handful of others to worry about. Add a year, and you have Auston Matthews, Mitch Marner, and Jake Gardiner to worry about.
If there’s a time do to this, it’s right now. The team is on the cusp of being one of the league’s best using solely what they have now, but management has a once-in-an-era amount of flexibility to add to the group and audition what they have to offer to the rest of the league. Rather than worrying about what your top players will make in two years, consider what you’ll get for your third liners when they’re the ones who get priced out. Rather than worrying about losing a fringe prospect in a move, consider the incentive you give to future top ones who might show up from around the world. Rather than worrying about sticking to an arbitrary “X year plan”, recognize the opportunity you have in front of you to win now, while still looking towards a viable future.
Ultimately, developing a model franchise is a marathon, not a sprint. By no means am I saying that the Leafs should short all their future assets to go all-in on next year; that would be insane. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll spend some time on this site brainstorming about what the best plan of action and execution to make the next step is.
But they have to make it. Even a marathoner has to occasionally decide whether it makes sense to take a chance to pass the crowd ahead of them, and if you’re in it to win rather than to merely finish, you’re going to have to make that call at some point. You may as well do it while you have the energy.Bellator lightweight champ Eddie Alvarez just defended his title against Pat Curran at Bellator 39. At #6 on the USAT/SBN Consensus MMA Rankings, he's one of the most highly ranked fighters not currently under contract to Zuffa, the parent company of the UFC.
He recently spoke to ESPN's Josh Gross (audio file) about his decision-making in staying with Bellator and not jumping to the UFC (transcription via Fight Opinion):
"It means I'm still somewhat in-disposable. If I was among that group, I'd be disposable immediately the day that my contract was taken over by Zuffa, so... I feel like I still can have some sort of say with where my career goes and what sponsors I want to get and whether I want to be in a video game or not. There's a lot of things. The whole signing with Zuffa thing is a big control issue with me and I don't know, I just... I'm happy that they're doing what they're doing but right now I don't know if it's the right move for me."
Mr. Alvarez tried to walk a fine line but remain honest about his feelings regarding the UFC.
"I don't think they're doing anything wrong. I think they're running their business the way they are supposed to. But my issue with it is the way fighters lose one or two fights and they're fired and, not only that, there is no like, it's not like a union like the NFL, the NBA, and these other sports where the finances are regulated and you have to receive a minimum in order to be a part of that league. Like NFL, I don't know, maybe you have to receive half a million dollars per year just to play in the NFL or maybe a quarter of a million. The UFC's not like that. They can offer someone, you know, $5,000 and $5,000, the guy can fight at first and get his face broken to pieces and then he can totally put on a poor performance and then get fired. That scares me. I would like to be paid like an athlete and, I don't know. I guess I have a lot of issues with it and when I was, I believe when I was ranked #2 in the world, I was offered something from the UFC but it was significantly lower than what I was getting paid at that time, almost like insultingly low and I just, it wasn't the right move for me at that time. I have no qualms, I like the UFC, Dana White does a great job with them and they're definitely the biggest stage on Earth. And if I fight there some day, then great, but right now I think I'm where I'm supposed to be at."
"No, I think Dana realizes, you know, the type of person I am and he's seen me fight and I think he knows, you know, I don't take anything he says or doesn't say about me to heart. He's been in a number of interviews where he discredits my abilities and I understand why. I'm not mad at him. I'm not mad at him about it, I understand why he would discredit anything that I do. I don't work for him. But, you know, this is a business, man, so I mean I don't expect him to get emotional and say, ‘Let's never hire this kid because whatever.' I don't badmouth the UFC, it's just not the right move for me right now."
...
"It would be great to fight them guys but at what cost, you know what I mean? At what cost to me? Do I have to, what measures do I have to take in order to fight them guys? Do I have to take an $80,000 pay cut? Do I have give up all my, every single ancillary right I can dream of? Do I have to, you know, now I can't get certain sponsors that I want to get certain sponsors that I want to get because I have to pay the UFC before they pay me? There's a lot of issues involved and I don't know if people understand that. And if I was 20 years old and I was single and I had no kids, I would jump to the UFC tomorrow. But the reality is (that) I have three kids and I have a family to take care of and everything has to line up. Yeah, I want to be #1 in the world but I also want to be able to maintain a home for my family so I can't tell my wife and kids, ‘hey, Daddy's going to take a huge risk and this may not work and hopefully we do well.' Like, I can't tell my kids that. I got to tell them that I'm going to work hard and I'm going to get compensated correctly for my hard work and that's all I really ask for."Striking differences in the way men talk and play with their children depending on whether they are male or female revealed by US researchers
Fathers of toddler daughters are more attentive to their children than those of sons, according to a study that suggests unconscious gender biases can dictate the way parents treat their children.
In the study, which monitored 48 hours of interactions between fathers and toddlers, striking differences emerged between the way fathers spoke to and played with boys compared to girls.
Fathers of daughters spent about 60% more time attentively responding to their child, compared to those with sons. They also spent about five times as much time singing and whistling with girls and spoke more openly about emotions, including sadness.
Fathers of sons spent about three times as long each day engaged in rough and tumble play and used more “achievement-related” language, including words such as “proud”, “win” or “best”.
Girls believe brilliance is a male trait, research into gender stereotypes shows Read more
The research could not establish the extent to which innate preferences of girls and boys might be prompting different treatment from their parent. However, the authors concluded that it was likely that social biases were playing at least some role.
Jennifer Mascaro, an assistant professor of family and preventive medicine at Emory University, Atlanta, who led the work, said: “We should be aware of how unconscious notions of gender can play into the way we treat even very young children.”
There is plenty of evidence that differences exist in the behaviour, aptitudes and toy preferences of boys and girls from an early age.
“The question is always how meaningful are those differences,” said Mascaro. “It’s a really thorny thing to understand. As soon as they come into the world they are part of a society that has huge biases in how we interact with males and females.”
Studying the question scientifically has also proved problematic, since parents are often reluctant to admit to treating children differently, may be unaware of doing so, and are likely to behave differently when being monitored in a laboratory setting.
The latest work aimed to tackle the question in a natural environment. Fathers of toddlers (30 girls and 22 boys) were recruited and agreed to clip a small digital recorder onto their belts and wear it for one weekday and one weekend day. The device randomly turned on for 50 seconds every nine minutes to record any ambient sound during the 48-hour period. Every interaction with the toddler was then manually transcribed and analysed for various kinds of content.
“People act shockingly normal when they are wearing the device,” Mascaro said. “They kind of forget they are wearing it or they say to themselves, what are the odds it’s on right now.”
The differences were striking, raising questions about how different parental treatment of boys and girls might shape the most basic aspects of personality.
Fathers of daughters were more likely to use words associated with sad emotions, such as “cry,” “tears” and “lonely”, which the scientists suggest may help girls develop more empathy than boys.
“The fact that fathers may actually be less attentive to the emotional needs of boys, perhaps despite their best intentions, is important to recognise,” Mascaro said, noting that restricted emotions in adult men is linked to depression and lack of social intimacy. “Validating emotions is good for everyone – not just daughters.”
Those with daughters also used more words associated with the body, such as “belly,” “cheek,” “face,” “fat” and “feet”, and the scientists raised the possibility of a link between these innocent interactions and body image problems that are far more common in adolescent girls than boys.
“We found that fathers are using more language about the body with girls than with boys, and the differences appear with children who are just one to three years old,” Mascaro said.
Are gendered toys harming childhood development? Read more
Lisa Dinella, associate professor at Monmouth University and principal investigator of the Gender Development Laboratory, said many people start from the assumption that sons and daughters have different needs. “But boys and girls are more similar than they are different, so assuming that all parents should rough and tumble play with boys and not girls, or that parents should pay attention to girls’ feelings more than boys’ feelings, may end up creating or deepening gender differences in kids,” she said.
Prof Susan Gelman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the work, said: “This is a very interesting set of findings, with potentially important implications regarding the implicit messages that boys versus girls receive from an early age. Gender stereotypes and biases place limits on boys as well as girls, so it’s important for parents to be aware of how they may be passing along their own gender biases.”
Gelman added that parents often introduce biases, even when trying to achieve the opposite, highlighting the practical minefield this is for parents trying to be even-handed. “Even a statement that seems to contradict a stereotype, such as ‘Girls can be firefighters, not just boys,’ reminds the child of the stereotype that girls aren’t firefighters,” she said. “Children are highly sensitive to the subtle implications in parental talk about boys and girls.”
The findings are published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience.It’s a strange world where the Arizona State Sun Devils are ranked higher than the Arizona Wildcats in men’s basketball and picking up big road wins.
But it’s our reality in December 2017 after ASU went to Phog Allen Fieldhouse and beat the Kansas Jayhawks on Sunday.
The Washington Post isn’t ready to fully accept this reality though.
At least they got the team right in the score. Oh and those Gonzaga/UW and Purdue/IUPUI scores are right too.
Anyways, ASU fans are mad online, and I’m here for it.
Embarrassing for that rag of a paper. — Brad (@BradOIFTWICE) December 11, 2017
I thought higher education was valued in DC! Clearly the Post is slipping! Shame — I approve these msgs (@ksbaggs) December 11, 2017
UNACCEPTABLE!!! — Bill McKusick (@bmckusick) December 11, 2017Sex toy injuries have doubled since 2007, with a large increase in 2012 and 2013, after the release of the Fifty Shades of Grey books.
The figures are estimates from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which has tracked casualty admissions since 1991, the Washington Post reported.
The injuries relating to "massage devices and vibrators" were initially low but began to rise steeply from 2005, when around 1500 people across the US received treatment for sex injuries.
Middle aged men were most likely to get such injuries. Male patients accounted for 58 per cent, with the median age in that group being 44 years old. The median aged for women was younger, at 30 years old.
The oldest man recorded as receiving treatment for sex injuries was 85.
There was a large increase in the number of sex injuries in 2012, when 2,500 people received treatment for sex injuries. The first Fifty Shades of Grey book was released in 2011. There is no evidence the two are linked, but the bondage-themed novels have been read by tens of millions of people.
Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) and Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) in the new film
It was reported last week that sex shop owners on both sides of the Atlantic were stocking up on whips, pleasure balls and spanking paddles before the hotly anticipated Fifty Shades of Grey film hits the big screen this weekend.
US retailer Babeland, which has 20 Fifty Shades-branded items, has been stockpiling blindfolds and vibrators. "We're ready to respond," co-founder Claire Cavanah told AFP. The novels fuelled a 40-per cent sales increase at Babeland's New York branch.
Neal Slateford, owner of British company Lovehoney, which worked with EL James to produce the official Fifty Shades range in 2012, is also expecting a run on demand: "We have experienced spikes in sales after each movie trailer has been released which gives us a good indication of just how influential this movie will be."
For more stories, like the Telegraph's Facebook page by clicking on the link belowMIAMI (Reuters) - On June 5, 2006, not long after Florida enacted the first “Stand Your Ground” law in the United States, unarmed Jason Rosenbloom was shot in the stomach and chest by his next-door neighbor after a shouting match over trash.
Exactly what happened that day in Clearwater, Florida, is still open to dispute. Kenneth Allen, a retired police officer, said he shot Rosenbloom because he was trying to storm into his house.
Rosenbloom told Reuters in a telephone interview this week he never tried to enter the house and was in Allen’s yard, about 10 feet (3 meters) from his front door, when he was shot moments after he put his hands up.
Now living in Hawaii, Rosenbloom said he had been unaware of the growing outrage over last month’s shooting in Sanford, Florida, of an unarmed black teenager by a neighborhood watch captain.
Trayvon Martin, 17, was shot by George Zimmerman on February 26 while walking back to the house where he was staying with his father in a gated community. Sanford police have not arrested Zimmerman, largely because Stand Your Ground requires them, without clear evidence of malice and in the absence of eyewitness testimony to the contrary, to accept Zimmerman’s argument he was acting in self-defense.
Allen was not arrested in the shooting of Rosenbloom. Sergeant Tom Nestor of the Pinella’s County Sheriff’s Office said Allen was found to have acted in self-defense when he pumped two rounds into Rosenbloom with his 9mm semi-automatic pistol.
“He meant for me to be dead and he never called 911,” said Rosenbloom, 36, adding that Allen, now 65, bent over him and using an expletive, warned him not to tangle “with an ex-cop” as he lay bleeding on the ground.
“The police closed it on his words alone,” said Rosenbloom, explaining how the case that began with a complaint about him leaving eight trash bags on the curb instead of the regulation six, was closed after what he described as only a summary investigation.
“They made me the bad guy,” he added.
Allen, contacted by phone in rural Georgia, said on Thursday he had “no regrets” about shooting Rosenbloom, describing him as a “little punk” who was “lucky to be alive.”
He denied using profanity after shooting his neighbor, who he claimed had forced his way into the house and threatened to “beat my ass.”
WIDE LATITUDE IN CASE OF SELF-DEFENSE
Police say Florida’s Stand Your Ground law, which loosened formerly restrictive rules for using deadly force and gives people wide latitude to employ it in self-defense, was never officially cited in the Rosenbloom case.
But Rosenbloom considers himself one of the first victims of the new law in Florida and one of the few who has lived to give a first-hand account of how he said it can be used to shoot to kill with impunity.
The law, which extended the “castle doctrine” allowing residents to shoot would-be burglars or intruders entering their homes, gives legal protection to anyone, anywhere, to use deadly force in a case where a person is attacked and believes his life or safety is in danger.
One of the law’s legislative sponsors said it was partly motivated by a rash of looting and theft after a series of hurricanes hit Florida in 2005.
Dubbed the “Shoot First, Ask Questions Later” law by critics, the statute extends even beyond self-defense and is seen by some as encouraging vigilante justice.
“A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity... has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony,” the law says.
“I think it’s a very foolish law meant to turn a blind eye,” Rosenbloom said, referring to how Stand Your Ground has been criticized in the past for protecting people who might formerly have been prosecuted for assault or murder.
‘CONSISTENTLY AWFUL’
The law, approved under former Governor Jeb Bush after a big push by pro-gun advocates led by the National Rifle Association, was passed over numerous objections from the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association and state law enforcement officials. Florida’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, announced the formation of a task force on Thursday to “thoroughly review” the law in the wake of the Martin shooting.
“Basically it’s a law that fixed something that wasn’t broken, and then it created a lot of problems,” said William “Willie” Meggs, veteran state attorney for the 2nd Judicial Circuit in Tallahassee, the Florida capital.
“I have been an outspoken critic of the law since it came into existence and I would suspect we may be doing something about it after all the interest we’re seeing in it now,” he said.
According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, at least 23 states have passed laws similar to Florida’s since 2005.
Florida does not keep comprehensive records to gauge the impact of Stand Your Ground. But the St. Petersburg Times found that in the first five years after the law was enacted, “justifiable homicides” in Florida more than tripled, to more than 100 in 2010 from just over 30. The Stand Your Ground law was invoked in at least 93 cases over that time period, involving 65 deaths.
Despite assertions from supporters of the law that it has worked as a deterrent of violent crime, Dennis Henigan, a lawyer and veteran vice president of the Brady Campaign, said the state was still saddled with a “tragic record” on violent crime.
“It’s quite remarkable how consistently awful Florida’s record has been,” Henigan said. “It takes some work to finish in the top five in violent crime among all the states every single year for the last 30 years.”
‘NOT A ‘LICENSE TO KILL’
Supporters of Stand Your Ground say it has worked well, while arguing it should not be applied in the Zimmerman case.
“It’s not a 007 license to kill,” said Sean Caranna, who heads a gun rights group called Florida Carry.
Republican State Representative Dennis Baxley, one of the authors of the Stand Your Ground law, said it did not protect people who pursued and confronted their victims, as occurred in Sanford, according to lawyers for the parents of the dead teenager.
“That’s where he (Zimmerman) stepped out on thin ice away from protection of this statute,” he said.
Defending Stand Your Ground, Baxley said that while errors may occur, such as the death of Martin, it was important that the law err on the side of those who fear they are facing “a perceived” threat.
“That’s good public policy. I think we have a good statute and I would hate to lose anything in it that protects people from harm. It saves lives,” Baxley added.
Rosenbloom still has health problems stemming from his injuries and a bullet remains lodged in his right hip.
“Now I live as far away from Florida in America as you can freaking get,” he said, explaining his recent move to Hawaii was aimed at leaving a lot of bad memories behind in what he now calls the “Gunshine State,” a play on Florida’s nickname, “the Sunshine State.”
His family was struck by a second tragedy only three days after he was shot by Allen. Rosenbloom said his younger brother Joshua was shot and killed by police after threatening to commit suicide by disemboweling himself with a sword.
Twenty-year-old Joshua Rosenbloom, a manic depressive, was acting out after hearing his brother was in intensive care in a Tampa hospital, recovering from his gunshot wounds, Rosenbloom said. He was shot three times in his bedroom when police approached while he was still holding the sword in his hands, his older brother said.× Scientists on the verge of developing birth control for men
Scientists say they’re on the verge of having a safe birth-control shot for men.
According to a study by the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers gave men a shot of testosterone and other hormones, so their bodies stopped producing testosterone on their own.
Men in the study received shots every eight weeks. The injections consisted of 1,000 milligrams of a synthetic form of testosterone and 200 milligrams of norethisterone enanthate, which is essentially a derivative of the female hormones progesterone and estrogen referred to as “progestin” in the synthetic form.
Dr. Seth Cohen, a urologist at NYU Medical Center, told CNN that when a man is given a shot of testosterone, the brain assumes the body is getting enough of the hormone and shuts down its production. Specifically, it shuts down the production of the testicle’s production of sperm.
Researchers say the study was 96 percent effective.
However, side effects from the shot, like depression, caused the study to be cut short.
Researchers say they’re on the right track – they just have to work on calculating the right dose of hormones.Judge Jules chats about his tenure at BBC Radio 1, the magic of Ibiza, and more ahead of his debut set at Dreamstate SoCal!
It is hard to call oneself a fan of classic trance and house without ever hearing of Judge Jules. Alongside the famous BBC Radio 1 personalities of Pete Tong and Paul Oakenfold, Jules completes the almighty trio of UK superstar DJs from the 90s. Numerous DJ awards, a 14-year BBC Radio 1 residency, Ibiza club residency: these are only a handful of the accomplishments in an illustrious career.
Judge Jules is largely responsible for the growth of the harder sounds in the house and trance genres in the middle and late 90s, firstly as a radio and club DJ, but also as a producer. UK Hard House arose as a counter movement to the German-driven Hard Trance scene. The genre aligned well with the endless raves and warehouse parties that took place all over the country. Jules was one of its champions and grew the scene from nothing to massive appeal in a short time frame.
Jules is currently preparing for a classic special set at North America’s biggest trance event, Dreamstate SoCal. In anticipation of his performance, we thought it was a great opportunity to explore the classics era period with one of the biggest names in the history of the scene!
Listen to Judge Jules’ Set at Luminosity Beach Festival 2017:
Hi Jules, EDM Identity is honoured to have you stop by for a chat. How are you today?
I’m fine thank you, it’s Monday morning which, of course, isn’t everyone’s favourite time of the week.
It’s hard to believe for anyone that doesn’t know you but this year marks the 30th anniversary of your DJing career. What was your earliest exposure to dance music and how did that evolve into a passion for being a DJ?
It was through pirate radio, which has always had a very strong presence in the UK, especially in my hometown of London. At the time, dance music and club culture weren’t represented at all on the mainstream UK FM stations, so pirate radio would fill in the gaps.
Pirate radio has always been a big stepping stone for DJs and artists in the UK across various underground genres. Being involved in this scene, where everyone has a shared passion, launched me on the career path that I’ve trodden ever since.
During your long career, you’ve had numerous accolades, from DJ awards to residencies in Ibiza and BBC Radio 1. What represents your proudest moment?
They’re all important, but I would say that maintaining a career throughout all that time, and up to the present |
in constant contact with members of the DOJ and COPS program since October, and have worked in good faith on this collaborative process. We can only attribute this to a miscommunication, and we are ready to move forward with the COPS program," Madden said in an emailed statement.
Madden said that the city's Chief Legal Officer, Bruce McMullen, confirmed Wednesday with acting U.S. Attorney Larry Laurenzi that the city would sign a memorandum of agreement. "The two confirmed a promise that Jim Strickland would sign the memorandum of agreement today(Friday)," Madden wrote. "As promised, Mayor Strickland signed that MOA this morning."
In October, the DOJ announced that it would review the department's community policing and use of force as part of a federal review that was requested by Strickland and Police Director Michael Rallings.
.
The assessment of the Memphis Police Department is expected to take two years and will be conducted by Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, which promotes strengthening police ties with communities.
The COPS office has conducted assessments of police departments across the country, including in San Francisco, Philadelphia, Las Vegas and North Charleston, South Carolina.
Following the assessments, the COPS office issues a public report detailing the findings. They also evaluate progress made in implementing recommendations over an 18-month period following the initial assessment.
Read or Share this story: http://memne.ws/2lmDV25I still remember our first dishwasher back in the late 70’s – it was an electricity and water sucking noisy monstrosity taking up a good chunk of the kitchen – and it didn’t even really do a very good job.
Much has changed in dishwashers in recent years – they use less water, less juice; are lighter, whisper quiet and far less obtrusive.. and they actually clean the dishes.
We recently purchased a new dishwasher after a lengthy interlude between machines. Needless to say, the family were keen on getting another dishwasher after 2 years without one. I managed to avoid the chore by washing dishes by hand badly. Did I do it on purpose? I’ll never tell :).
I’ve been really impressed with the model that was chosen by the family. It has a 3.5 Star energy rating (266 kWh per year) and a 4 Star water rating (13.6 Litres per wash – about 3.6 gallons). It takes care of the dishes for a day for a family of four in a single cycle.
We’d likely use more water than that when hand washing. It was a little difficult to figure out if there’s any electricity or gas saving when it comes to heating the water and general operation, but to heat water and then store it takes quite a bit of energy if you have a standard hot water system. Even a tankless water system is the same sort of principle as what a dishwasher uses anyway – our model doesn’t use hot water from our system; it does the heating itself, so I suspect it would be highly efficient.
The topic has intrigued me, so I went hunting around for studies.
According to a 2004 study from the University of Bonn in Germany (Household Technology department):
“If you can afford an automatic dishwasher, use one – preferably a new one. A full, energy efficient dishwasher cleans best and has the lowest environmental impact of any method”.
The Bonn research determined that an automatic dishwasher only uses 50% of the energy and a small fraction of the water, along with less soap.
However, on pondering all this a few “gotchas” came to mind that also need to be considered:
– A minor gotcha – dishwashing machine detergent tends to be more harsh on the environment and earth friendly options are fewer in some places – we’re still looking around for a suitable product readily available – they seem to be more easily obtained in the USA from companies such as Ecover, Seventh Generation, Earth Friendly and Trader Joe’s.
– It would take a lot of energy and resources to make a dishwasher – steel, plastic, packaging, freight etc; whereas the tools for hand washing are simple and ready made – your hands :).
– The Bonn study project partners were dishwasher manufacturers. That doesn’t mean to say it was overly biased, but it’s always something to consider when reading studies – the level of partner involvement and what their vested interest was.
So, I’m still in two minds about the long term environmental impact of our purchase. If the dishwasher lasts for many years, perhaps it was a “greener” choice for the task when the water and energy savings are taken into consideration. Here’s hoping it does because it was certainly a lot more expensive than my family washing by hand :).
I guess another way to look at it was if the time you save in washing dishes you put towards environment oriented activities, or it meant that it gave you the extra time so that you could minimize the environmental footprint in other areas of your life; that might provide some (shakey) justification :).
One thing I do certainly advise – don’t cut corners when selecting a dishwasher; spend the cash on a good one – shop around and read reviews from consumer organizations and take special note of energy star and water ratings – you’ll certainly notice the difference in quality, energy and water consumption in most cases by spending a bit extra. A cheap dishwasher may also wind up in landfill a lot quicker – and that’s certainly not good for your wallet; or the environment.It sneaked in past the holidays and headlines about more important matters, and it satisfied neither side of the battle over how much, or little, musicians get paid for the broadcasting of their work, but it may spell the end for thousands of small, independent, online radio stations.
“It” is the ruling by the Copyright Royalty Board, issued in mid-December and effective Jan. 1, mandating new royalty rates to be paid to copyright holders for the next five years. It was bad news for small commercial webcasters who’d been paying a percentage of their revenue, which often was minuscule, or a flat license fee of $2,000. The royalty board (made up of three judges appointed by the Librarian of Congress), scratched that revenue model and threw the small operations into the pool occupied by such music-streaming giants as Spotify and Pandora. All stations and sites will be required to pay per performance, with rates varying depending on the kind of streaming, and adjusted according to the Consumer Price Index.
For small broadcasters, said Dennis Constantine, who’s worked on commercial and online radio, payments could go from $2,000 a year to more than that amount per month.
The impact was immediate. Live365, the Foster City company that, since 1999, has been home to 5,000 online stations, ranging from single DJs to commercial operations, and which covered licensing and royalty fees for its broadcasters, was rumored to be heading for bankruptcy. I had heard that 50 of 55 employees had been dismissed, that the offices were shut down, and that Live365’s stations would fall silent on New Year’s Day.
That didn’t happen. (As I noted in a recent column, I created and program a station, Moonalice Radio, that is a client.) But on Dec. 29, Live365 didn’t mince words, saying the new rates are “prohibitively expensive for many small to mid-sized Internet broadcasters,” and that the company had “hard decisions to make” regarding those under the Live365 umbrella. Beyond — or perhaps because of — the CRB ruling, Live365 said it lost major investors and had to reduce its staff. The company says that CEO N. Mark Lam is looking for new venture capital. If he fails, Live365 will suspend operations at month’s end. Dean Kattari, director of broadcasting, said Live365 has been “the home for musical discovery because many of these stations play emerging artists that terrestrial stations are reluctant to take a chance on. It would be a great loss for this to all go away.”
Among those stations — 30,000 around the country — are Chilltrax and PreDanz, operated by former KKSF DJ and satellite radio programmer Blake Lawrence. When he got the news about the royalty rates and policies, he wrote: “To quote John Kerry after Paris: ‘I’m shocked, but not surprised.’ … The story of the small webcaster is not over yet. It really depends on how much listeners value the wide variety offered by us little guys... and whether they'll make a stink or be content to switch to iHeart or Pandora.” Lawrence said he is hopeful “that some sort of coalition will emerge to turn SoundExchange’s heads around.”
SoundExchange is the organization that collects royalties for musical and other works on digital media and distributes payments to copyright holders, ranging from musicians to record labels. While broadcasters, small and large, have argued that playing artists’ music gives them valuable exposure, SoundExchange did not sound as if its head would be turned around any time soon. It had sought an increase in royalty rates to a quarter of a penny per 100 plays (0.25 cent) and got between 0.17 and 0.22. Upon receiving the royalty board’s ruling, it expressed its displeasure, saying that “the rates... do not reflect a market price for music and will erode the value of music in our economy.”
Rich Varrasso, a musician, producer and operator of an online station (Famous Hits Live), worked, until recently, at Live365, and sees both sides. “From an artist’s point of view,” he said, the ruling “puts a crimp into getting airplay for artists who can’t really get airplay, or any Bay Area band that isn’t Journey. It adds another level of complication for discovering new music.” Smaller broadcasters, he feared, might “become pirates and not comply, because it’s so hard to comply.”
Varrasso’s former colleague at Live365, Constantine, agreed, noting that the largest streaming companies saw their rates remain the same — or even lowered. “The big guys got the breaks,” he said. “The little guys got screwed.” Constantine said he hopes that Congress will step in “and say, ‘We’ve got to keep the little voices on.’”
And what of my free-form station for the rock band Moonalice? We remain on Live365, but I am, as they say, exploring all options. Check in at www.moonalice.com or the band’s Facebook page for the latest.
Ratings: KOIT (96.5) got its annual present from Santa, as its all-holiday music format, starting around Thanksgiving, gave it a ratings boost, to second place for the Nielsen Audio numbers through mid-December. KCBS continues to top the market, with a 6.0 percent share of listeners, followed by KOIT (5.7), KQED (way up, from 4.4 in November to 5.6), KIOI (Star 101.3) at 4.1, KLLC (Alice), 4.0, KNBR (3.9), KMEL (3.8), KMVQ (Now) and KYLD (Wild) knotted at 3.4, and KBRG (3.1).
Outside the top 10, it’s KBLX at 3.0 (way up from 2.4 in October), KSAN, 2.9 (also up from a 2.4 before Halloween), KSOL (2.7, up from 2.3), KRBQ (Q102) at 2.6, down from a surprising 3.7 in October, KISQ (Kiss), 2.4, KOSF (Big 103.7), 2.2, from a much bigger 3.0 two months ago. Also at 2.2: KSFO, followed by KFOG, 2.1, KGO, 2.0 (up from 1.7 in November) and KITS (Live 105), 2.0.
KGMZ (The Game) is at 1.9, KDFC, 1.8, and KKSF, 0.6, good (or bad) for 30th place.
But, as Lee Hammer, program director at KNBR, noted, not one advertiser buys based on these overall ratings, which cover all listeners ages 6 and older, at all times. It’s all about demographics, and the ratings hinge on a ridiculously low sample size, of about 2,500 participants in Nielsen’s meter program, representing 7.5 million listeners in the Bay Area. If a handful of loyal listeners in KNBR’s target demographic (adult men) were to, say, go out of town, the station’s numbers could take a beating. So, as I’ve advised since I began writing this column in the mid-’80s, take these numbers with a grain of... whatever.
Ben Fong-Torres is a freelance writer.$ 35.00
2xLP Set
Music by Takeshi Furukawa
Art by Nimit Malavia
Epic Tri-fold Design
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It’s with the utmost fan-thusiasm - and a joyous, child-like *giggle* - that we proudly unveil the vinyl soundtrack to the PlayStation®-exclusive opus, The Last Guardian.
While the game itself won’t be released on PS4 until December 6th, 2016, its legacy is already fully sewn - The Last Guardian humbly follows in the footsteps of Japan Studio’s previous efforts - the emotionally wrought, epically honed masterpieces of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus.
Composer Takeshi Furukawa delicately blends the scope of high adventure with the touching subtlety of an unlikely friendship. That unusual bond of boy & beast resonates deeply in the rich, orchestral score, accented further by wistfully beautiful album art by famed Nimit Malavia (noted for his elegant Fables covers).
This soundtrack is as timeless as it is touching. Period.
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FAQs
I ordered multiple things at once, but only received one of them… why???
Sometimes we have to ship items separately to minimize the damage that can happen during shipping. When we do, you’ll receive multiple e-mails with the specific tracking information for each shipment!
But...! But...! But...!
If you have any additional questions, we're all ears. Just toss an email over to store@iam8bit.com.I own all three streamer. In roku, I have the 2xs and the stick, chromecast stick and now the Fire stick. All are easy to install and use. Here is the difference: 1. Chromecast (a Google Product): Allows you to stream content using your Android or iPhone to your TV's HDMI port. There is no remote, your device is your remote (Tablets included). The main services, are Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Pandora, IHeart Radio, Vevo TV, and others. Basically, you can use your phone, tablet, or Chrome browser from your computer to throw the program at your TV. It then plays from the stick and does not drain your battery from your device during playback. There are a bunch of developers who make apps for the chromecast, some are useless and some are practical, but if you are looking for a ton of choices beyond Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and music, at this time although, Chromecast is a great product, it falls short in the programming department. And yet you can toss images from your google connected drive or device to the TV as well (Slide show). 2. Roku (2xs older model puck, or Stick): Roku comes with a remote control and also an app can be downloaded that you can run from your phone or tablet. Roku, simply has the most channels to add to the device, some are pay channels, some are private channels, not published to the public. Roku has been around the longest and has all the basic channels, such as Netflix, Hulu and all the others (Pandora, Vevo). Actually there's over 1000 channels, trust me you'll never watch them all, but its fun to see whats out there. Everything from How to, to religion, sports, games, holistic teaching, news, (this list keeps going). Roku also uses your WiFi to tap into the streaming service. The roku software is simple, open a channel and pick the program within the channel to watch. There are some apps to stream content directly from your device to the Roku, I found them to be a little jerky at best. Roku requires a credit card enabled account for initial setup. I have never in 4 years been charged for anything, however, if I choose to download pay content, they would use the credit card for that. You can enable password before purchase for this feature. I find the batteries for the Roku to be the fastest draining. However, the remote has a good feel, except for the 3 branded service buttons they added to the newer models. 3. FIRE TV: Very similar to Roku, but featuring better gaming and speed than either of the other streamers. Requires you to pair your Amazon (or set up an) account. Get a free month of prime to test out the service. This was my latest purchase and I made some striking discoveries. You can use the streamer without paying Amazon for anything. They offer all the same services, as well as HBO programming (not all HBO programming), but I did not like the menu, I found it to be confusing, when you look at a show, instead of cleanly showing a season and it's episodes, it strings them all in a line and you have to scroll all the way to the side to get to the next season, where on Roku, the device shows a season and just the episodes for that season, it is just a bit better organized. So you are asking, what did I find. I found that Amazon doesn't really offer much more than Hulu, or Netflix if you already have those subscriptions like me. Amazon will actually open Hulu for some of the episodes, which really annoyed me since Amazon actually charges extra if you are not a Hulu subscriber. Amazon will also charge for more recent episodes of programs that Hulu offers as part of the regular package. I like all 3 streamers, go for best price, they are all basically the same. If you own a SMART TV, don't waste your money, that's what the streamers already to. But the streamers are completely portable. Pull it out of the HDMI port, bring it to a friend or family's house and as long as you have the WiFi password; log in and it will work. Alot of people ask this question, what is the difference between HULU, Netflix, and Amazon? 1: HuluPlus ($90 annual): Next day TV. Watch your favorite network show the day after it airs. Saturday Night Live? Watch it Sunday, Monday etc. The Voice? Catch the singers after the season ended. There's History, Smithsonian, A&E, and some others (with limited recent programming, but plenty to watch). Litterally zillions of shows. Kids and family adult programming. Commercials are shown during most network programs (NBC, CBS, ABC, etc.). Hulu offers original programming as well, most of it is decent quality. 2. Netflix: ($108 annual) Movies, TV shows, original programming (House of Cards, Orange is new Black, Arrested Development, and others), most of the movies did not come out yesterday, they are about 2 years old. TV shows are obviously not recent episodes. Basic service allows you to watch on two screens simultaneously (one on streaming stick, one on laptop or tablet). 3. Amazon: ($99 annual, but comes with PRIME 2 day shipping with all orders): Some original programming, older but recent movies, TV programs from various networks, both cable and regular networks, but less recent episodes, unless you want to pay for a recent rental. All 3 services just mentioned can also be streamed to your laptop, phone, tablet, WiFi TV, Xbox, if you are already a member. I don't have cable by choice. I run a 10mb HDSL line from my provider to my home (which is just fast enough - but not if multiple people are streaming simultaneously in your home). I buy myself a gift certificate for HULU and Netflix every year and give it to myself. This way I have a year of programming with no billing (of course credit card on file is required for all the pay services). I watch OTA (Over the Air) TV for day to day programming. There is more than enough to keep me busy, not to mention Xbox for Video game entertainment. All 3 streamers offer Amazon Prime TV and video services, however, this is a $99 annual paid fee to watch. The main issue I found with all the streamers is that you need a bunch of logins to service. Such as one for netflix, one for Hulu, etc.. etc. Sometimes, they ask you to log into your main account to link the device to your account, this can be tedious if you have a bunch of streaming devices like me (Roku, Fire, Chromecast, XBOX, Cellphone, WiFi TV's, etc). Each one needs to be registered with the service (once). All services require a decent Wifi signal. If you are too far away from the source your service may be non existent or buffer a lot. Hope all this info helps you make a decision and understand the crazy tech we are faced with these days. N-Joy
Read moreThe prospect of a fairer society is a major motivating factor in the independence referendum, a poll suggests.
The survey of 1,002 people in Scotland shows that around three-fifths (58%) agree that consideration of a fairer and more equal society is more important than whether they will be slightly richer or poorer.
Commissioned by the Scottish Green party, the Panelbase poll asked people to rank how strongly they agree or disagree with the statement.
Only 10% say that economics will be more important in reaching a decision before the referendum in September next year. About one-third neither agree nor disagree.
Green MSP Patrick Harvie said: "To date, the economic arguments for and against independence have mainly focused on the prosperity of the nation as a whole, the performance of business and the extraction of oil. What our poll shows is that people are more attracted by a fairer society where wealth is shared instead of hoarded by the few.
"Scottish Greens want to engage with those Scots who haven't yet decided how to vote next September, as we believe our approach offers a positive vision that rises above the arguments they've heard so far.
"Our vision has at its core the need to put the common good back at the heart of our politics. We see independence as a means to that end, not an end in itself. As long as we remain tied to Westminster we risk those efforts being stymied.
"Margaret Thatcher famously declared society does not exist. It's quite clear Scots value society highly and next year's referendum is an unprecedented opportunity to start shaping the fairer society we want to live in."
A spokesman for Yes Scotland, the pro-independence campaign group, said: "The desire for a fairer, more just and more equal society goes to the very heart of what it means to be Scottish and the recent Westminster welfare cuts, with the hated bedroom tax, have brought this even more into the public spotlight.
"More and more people are starting to realise that the only way to ensure that we can have a caring and sharing future is to win independence for Scotland and to have the Government we want instead of having one we didn't vote for, such as this Tory-Lib Dem administration and its programme of austerity."A Dallas-area community group plans to host a block party Saturday to help raise money for senior citizens in need of air conditioning.
The Lowest Greenville Collective partnered with the City of Dallas Office of Senior Affairs and Dallas County Adult Protective Services to raise donations for fans, window units and portable A/C units for low income and disabled seniors around Dallas.
Equipment and funds collected will be taken to the Silver Star Room, Dallas fire and police departments and other agencies that help seniors, the group said.
People can donate at the check-in area at Blind Butcher anytime during the day. Wristbands will be given to anyone who donates a fan, A/C unit or more than $20. The wristband serves as a pass for special deals at 24 businesses in the Lowest Greenville Collective, as well as an after party at Truck Yard between 8-9 p.m.
Participating businesses include boutique stores, restaurants, bars, and other services on Greenville Avenue from Belmont Avenue to Ross Avenue. Some of members include Dude, Sweet Chocolate, Singlewide Bar, Crisp Salad Co., Bonafide Barber Shop, Bullzerk, Blind Butcher, Greenville Avenue Pizza Co., Steel City Pops, HG Sply Co, Good Records, Ragin' Crab and more.
ONLINE: Lowest G Cools Down Big DSteve Lonegan’s attack on our national educational standards is nothing more than the usual crazy-talk about leftist indoctrination — the federal conspiracy “to take over the control of our children’s minds.”
This is exactly why we need to teach critical thinking. It is Lonegan, and not the Common Core standards, who is dumbing down education. Moments like this are why it’s hard to take him seriously as a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate.
Let’s start with this idea of a federal plot. While President Obama encouraged states to adopt the Common Core standards, he didn’t create them. They were written by a nonpartisan group of educators, led by the nation’s governors and state schools chiefs, starting well before he took office. Not to brainwash children. To have a rigorous national standard that will make American students competitive with their international peers, who have passed the United States in several world rankings.
Common Core is voluntary, and has since been endorsed by 45 states, the major teachers’ unions and right-of-center think tanks such as the Fordham and Manhattan institutes. So Gov. Chris Christie is far from alone when he defends it against “knee-jerk” extremists in his own party.
It isn’t even a curriculum. It requires no specific textbooks, facts or reading material to be taught — with the exception of a little Shakespeare and America’s founding documents. Common Core simply gives a general outline of what students should be learning in each grade to stay on course for college. Because for too long, states had completely different standards, which made it hard for a kid who moved to another state to pick up where he or she left off.
It describes a sequence of skills to develop, such as reading and understanding a complicated text, or recognizing and solving a problem, and leaves it up to states how to teach them. Certainly, we should pay close attention to how Common Core is implemented, which is why New Jersey has new field testing planned for this spring. We don’t want to encourage mindless teaching to the test.
But neither do we want New Jersey added to the handful of states in which paranoid politicians and fringe groups are pushing to quash this reform outright, rather than finding ways to improve it.
Our nation needs a core set of educational standards. And we cannot let that be derailed by tea partiers with wide-eyed conspiracy theories, or left-wingers who don’t want standards or tests of any kind.Update (March 14, 2016) — Randy Wigle-Stevens plead guilty to all three charges, and he was sentenced to 908 days probation.
BATESVILLE, Ind. (August 12, 2015) – New details were released describing the encounter between Batesville Mayor Richard C. Fledderman and Randy Wigle-Stevens that ultimately led to both of their arrests.
According to court documents, on July 19 Wigle-Stevens reported to state police at Methodist Hospital that he was sexually assaulted by Fledderman in June. He told police he had Fledderman’s DNA to prove it, and police collected the DNA sample.
On July 20, a detective with Indiana State Police met Wigle-Stevens at the Columbus Police Department.
Wigle-Stevens told the detective that on June 7 he received four phone calls from Fledderman requesting a massage at his Batesville residence.
Wigle-Stevens responded to the request, and he went to Fledderman’s residence.
Wigle-Stevens told detective he began to massage Flederman, and during the massage Fledderman attempted to kiss him. Wigle-Stevens declined the kiss, and according to the probable cause that made Fledderman angry.
At that time, Wigle-Stevens said Fledderman got off the couch and forced Wigle-Stevens to perform a sexual act on him.
When the sexual act was finished Wigle-Stevens used a paper towel to clean up, and he saved the paper towel with Fledderman’s DNA.
Fledderman paid Wigle-Stevens $170 for the massage.
Several days later, Wigle-Stevens called Fledderman and told him he needed an additional $250.
Fledderman met Wigle-Stevens in the Greensburg Staples parking lot and gave him the money.
According to the probable cause, the Indiana State Police detective then spoke with Fledderman.
Fledderman told the detective he found Wigle-Stevens’ website while looking for a massage therapist. Fledderman later admitted that he was also seeking someone to engage in sexual conduct with.
Fledderman said Wigle-Stevens gave him a massage and performed a sexual act on him, and then he performed a sexual act on Wigle-Stevens. Fledderman said both acts were consensual. Fledderman told police he paid Wigle-Stevens $170 for the massage.
Fledderman told the detective that several days later Wigle-Stevens contacted him, demanding an additional $500. Fledderman told police Wigle-Stevens threatened to “tell on him” if he didn’t pay up.
Fledderman met Wigle-Stevens and gave him $270. In exchange, Wigle Stevens gave Fledderman a brown prescription bottle that contained a paper towel supposedly with his DNA on it. Fledderman said he discarded the bottle.
As part of the investigation, detectives discovered Wigle-Stevens is HIV positive and he was diagnosed 20 years ago.
Wigle-Stevens never disclosed this information to Fledderman.
As a result of the investigation, both Fledderman and Wigle-Stevens face charges.
Fledderman faces one count of patronizing a prostitute, a class “A” Misdemeanor.
Wigle-Stevens faces one count each of:
Failure to disclose dangerous communicable disease status (level 6 Felony)
Prostitution (class “A” Misdemeanor)
Intimidation (class “A” Misdemeanor)Wall Street hates the Volcker Rule and expectations have been building that the Trump administration would kill it.
But Steven Mnuchin, President-elect Trump's pick for treasury secretary, signaled on Thursday that the Volcker Rule isn't on the chopping block, at least not completely.
"I do support the Volcker Rule," Mnuchin said during his confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate.
The post-crisis rule bans big banks like JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Citigroup (C) and Goldman Sachs (GS) from making risky bets with their own money -- actions that some say exacerbated the financial crisis. Mnuchin said he didn't believe risky trading belongs in banks that require FDIC insurance.
However, Mnuchin sounded concerned about unintended consequences of the rule, which is named after former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.
Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs banker, flagged a recent Fed paper that found the 2015 implementation of the Volcker Rule had a harmful effect on the ability to easily buy and sell bonds during times of stress. Without that liquidity, markets can get jammed up.
"That is something I absolutely would look at," Mnuchin said.
Trump's pick for treasury blamed an overly-complex interpretation of the Volcker Rule that has left Wall Street confused and handcuffed about their abilities to provide liquidity. Making bets or trading with their own money is known in Wall Street as proprietary trading.
"We need to be able to explain to banks what's proprietary trading -- and what's not proprietary trading," Mnuchin said.
Related: Wall Street hates the Volcker Rule. Will Trump kill it?
Powerful Republican leaders had been pushing to kill the Volcker Rule. The Financial Choice Act, a bill championed by House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, calls for repealing the rule entirely.
Mnuchin's testimony to Congress suggests the Trump administration will relax -- but not completely eliminate -- some regulation.
For instance, Mnuchin said he thinks the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the watchdog championed by Elizabeth Warren, is worth keeping.
By comparison, Hensarling's bill would get rid of the CFPB, much to the disappointment of supporters who credit the regulator with cracking down on shady payday lenders and big banks like Wells Fargo. (WFC)
However, Mnuchin said he believes the CFPB should be funded by Congress, not the Federal Reserve as it currently is.
CFPB supporters would push back against such a shift. Their argument is that it would hurt the agency's independence and could allow Republicans to starve it of funding.
Related: Mnuchin: Raise the debt ceiling sooner rather than later
Yet Mnuchin didn't give big banks much love, especially not compared with Main Street banks.
"My biggest concern is this regulation is killing community banks," Mnuchin said, adding that tiny lenders provide much-needed loans to small businesses.
Mnuchin also said he wants to make sure "we don't end up in a world where we only have four big banks."
Trump's treasury pick was asked about bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act. Last summer the official Republican platform called for a return of this Great Depression-era law that restricted banks from serving both Wall Street and Main Street. The law was repealed in 1999 under President Clinton.
"I don't support going back to Glass-Steagall as is," Mnuchin said.
He explained that Glass-Steagall is a "very old law" and implementing it now "would have very big implications to liquidity and capital markets."
Still, Mnuchin said there's a need for a "21st Century Glass-Steagall."
He didn't elaborate exactly what that would look like.Tuttosport, having been so absolutely sure that Gonzalo Higuain was going to their local club Juventus, have given up nearly all their hope now and think that he'll be an Arsenal player soon. It all comes down to cold hard cash and Tuttosport say Juventus just simply don't have enough of it.
The Turin based newspaper love a good pun and their website headline right now is 'HIGUANNER' which we think is some awful mash-up of Higuain and Gunner. We feel a little sorry for them, they've dedicated so many front pages to the Argentine forward that he almost had a duty to make their dream come true and partner Llorente upfront. It's not certain the players would complement each other very well and it always did seem strange that Juventus appeared to be so obsessed with signing him. Perhaps it was more the 'name' and idea of a huge transfer than need within the team.
Conte no doubt feels he has a strong enough squad to win Serie A and a player like Tevez would probably work better with Llorente than Higuain would. Tuittosport have been slowly giving up hope for days and are now at their lowest ebb.
On June 16th, we said:
'It's gone a little quieter in Italy over the last few days and all the Spanish sport newspapers today mark out Arsenal as the favourites to sign the player. Most of the Spanish claims simply piggy back from English news yesterday but Marca set out the reasons why they think Higuain will be going to Arsenal and not Juventus.
The first is money, Arsenal are willing to pay more. Real Madrid, who threw a public strop after Higuain said he wanted to leave, are demanding a minimum of €30m. Marca say Arsenal will pay that, but we're not so sure. If it's the asking price then the London club will at least try and get him for a little below it, even if just for the sake of it. It is Arsenal after all.
Juventus won't go higher than around €23m, they can't really afford to. They've been linked with almost every striker on the European market but it's unclear where all the funds will come from, there are other areas they want to strengthen too and they won't want to blow their wage ceiling, especially when it's certain that would see a queue of current players wanting more themselves. Juventus want to structure an offer for Higuain over five years, which is much more common in Italian football than in England.
The scenario would see the player get a five year contract and each year Juventus would pay Real Madrid a fifth of what the agreed transfer fee was. The Spanish side aren't too interested in this proposal and Arsenal, according to Marca, would pay upfront, another reason they'll want a discount from the full €30m.'
If Tuttosport are right, Arsenal will get a discount for paying cash and could get Higuain for as little as €25m as long as they pay it all upfront. The outlet says that Florentino Perez, Real Madrid president, had wanted more than €30m but that became unrealistic when the player himself declared that he'd be leaving the club this summer.
Perez was angered by the tactic but given the general stance of Real Madrid, and most clubs, in the transfer market it wasn't a shock when Higuain stated he'd be off, there'd been reports about his exit for months. Juventus were mentioned repeatedly and most confidently by the local sport newspaper Tuttosport, all that appears to be slipping away and picturing the forward in an Arsenal shirt, along with a dodgy pun, may show that they think it's all over.
However, if they get any little sign of hope then no doubt he'll be on their front page as a dead cert for Juventus again tomorrow. It's all getting quite emotional.
Follow us on Twitter. @Sport_WitnessThis data – included in the International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Systems Program annual report – is taken to the end of 2013, although recent figures show that the accumulated total is now 3.4GW on around 1.4 million homes.
A couple of key points emerge. The first is that the size of residential rooftop solar PV systems increased from 1kW in 2009 to 4kW in 2013. In just the last three years, the size of the system has more than doubled, and the total capacity has risen three-fold.
The report says that around 850MW of solar PV was installed in 2013, mainly small- scale residential systems. Despite increased restrictions on PV power exports to the grid |
the 124 billion dollars of increased exports projected in the Peterson study.”
We note his statement did not address the fact that the study itself did not offer these calculations — or that effects of one action, such as more exports, are canceled out by another action, such as imports.
The Pinocchio Test
Clearly, with the Peterson Institute refusing to play the game this time and cough up a jobs number, the administration decided to concoct its own. But, as we have shown, one cannot at the same time claim both a gain of $77 billion in income and a gain of 650,000 jobs; the same effects simply cannot happen at once.
Moreover, these are big numbers with virtually no context. It is pretty lame to use such huge numbers to tout what, in the context of the U.S. economy, amounts to minuscule changes in income —10 years from now.
Our advice remains: be wary whenever a politician claims a policy will yield bountiful jobs. In this case, the correct number is zero (in the long run), not 650,000, according to the very study used to calculate this number. Administration officials earn Four Pinocchios for their fishy math.
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Follow The Fact Checker on Twitter and friend us on FacebookNew Delhi: Amid China's aggressive posturing in the Asiatic region, India and Vietnam discussed "concrete and feasible" steps to protect their interests while seeking to bolster their strategic bilateral ties.
Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Vietnam Pham Binh Minh, who concluded his four-day visit to India on Thursday, told PTI in an interview that the two sides also discussed the progress of implementation of the high-level agreements between them for creating a stable and facilitating framework to help their relations grow more "substantively".
The Vietnamese leader's visit comes in the midst of growing maritime aggression of China in the South China Sea as also its military stand off with India in the Sikkim sector.
Vietnam and several other countries, including Brunei and the Philippines, are involved in territorial dispute with China in the South China Sea, seen as a potentially explosive diplomatic issue in east Asia.
China has also been objecting to India's oil exploration projects in maritime areas offered by Vietnam in the South China Sea, claiming that it enjoys indisputable sovereignty there. However, India has been dismissive of Chinese objections, insisting its cooperation with Vietnam was as per international laws and that it would like the cooperation to grow.
Talking about the economic ties between the two countries, the Vietnamese leader said many of India's major corporations are investing in various projects in Vietnam such as the Tatas in Long Phu II thermal power plant in Soc Trang and ONGC Videsh in oil and gas exploration on Vietnam's continental shelf."
During his visit, apart from participating in the India-ASEAN ministerial meet on 4 July, he held bilateral meetings with Indian leadership, including President Pranab Mukherjee and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.
After the meeting with Swaraj, the MEA issued a statement saying both sides reiterated their support for peace, stability, security, safety, freedom of navigation and over flight, and unimpeded commerce based on the principles of international law, as reflected notably in the UNCLOS.
The reiteration of their stand came as the two sides noted the order issued by the Arbitral Tribunal, constituted under the UN Convention on the Law of Sea (UNCLOS), on the dispute between China and the Philippines which said Beijing did not have sovereign ownership over several disputed islands in the South China Sea. China had rejected the order.
Noting that many issues pertinent to bilateral relations were discussed during his talks here, the Vietnamese leader said they exchanged views on "concrete and feasible measures appropriate to the situation of each country as well as the international and regional state of affairs in order to substantively and effectively implement the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership established in 2016".
In the interview, the Vietnamese deputy prime minister also talked about cooperation in the areas of trade, defence and security.
"The establishment of the Strategic Partnership in 2007, which was upgraded to Comprehensive Strategic Partnership in September 2016, has created an important framework for our bilateral cooperation to expand and deepen in all areas: politics and diplomacy, defense and security, economy and trade, science and technology, and education and training,
among many others," he said.
Economically, India is among Vietnam's top ten trade partners, with a bilateral trade turnover of $7 billion, he said, adding by the end of May 2017, India's total registered FDI in Vietnam stood at $772 million, with 145 investment projects.
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.. -- Creighton forward Doug McDermott has been named the National Player of the Year by Sporting News, the publication announced on Tuesday. McDermott is the first player to win the award while playing for a BIG EAST school since St. John's forward Walter Berry in 1985-86.McDermott leads the nation in scoring (26.5 ppg.), ranks second in field goals and third in points scored. He's scored 20 points or more in 26-of-30 games this season, including a career-high 45 points in Saturday's Senior Night win over Providence. In the process, he's moved up to seventh in NCAA history with 3,011 career points. He is the nation's first player in 25 years with three straight years of 750 points or more and one of three men all-time with at least 3,000 points and 1,000 rebounds.The recognition comes one day after Sporting News named McDermott a First Team All-American, and also one day after BleacherReport.com named McDermott its National Player of the Year.Ranked 14nationally, Creighton (24-6) returns to action on Thursday at 6:02 pm Central when it plays a quarterfinal round game vs. DePaul or Georgetown at the BIG EAST Tournament, presented by New York Life in New York City.Here's a list of the Sporting News Player of the Year winners in the last 10 years. A complete list can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporting_News_Men%27s_College_Basketball_Player_of_the_Year 2004-05: Dee Brown, Illinois2005-06: J.J. Redick, Duke2006-07: Kevin Durant, Texas2007-08: Tyler Hansbrough, North Carolina2008-09: Blake Griffin, Oklahoma2009-10: Evan Turner, Ohio State2010-11: Jimmer Fredette, BYU2011-12: Anthony Davis, Kentucky2012-13: Victor Oladipo, Indiana2013-14: Doug McDermott, CreightonI know...I know...it's a miracle that I'm participating this weekend. I blame the holidays. Life has been so crazy busy that I feel like I haven't had time to breathe lately. Let alone find the time to actually write posts. I'm usually up way too late to write the ones I've done so today I'm stealing a few moments to get stuff done!!
Today I started with a base of Polish M Autumn's Palette which is seriously the most amazing polish ever. It's a mix of copper, gold, and fuschia flakies as well as gold glitter and some copper holo glitter. If you don't have this one...I think you should track it down and get ASAP!
I then in with Mundo de Unas Chocolate and Uber Chic 2-02 to add in some patterns. The base polish kind of overwhelmed my stamping polish so this look is alot more subtle that I had originally intended.
*self purchased
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Be sure to check out all the other stamped looks below. Don't forget...you can join us at ANY TIME!Enjoy & until next time, Amy LeeFaithful Moto Z Play Droid Edition users — say that in one breath! — your loyalty has been rewarded. Verizon has revealed that it's seeded the update for Android 7.0 Nougat to your modular devices.
The Moto Z Play Droid can now take advantage of features like multi-window multitasking in both portrait and landscape modes, direct reply in the notifications shade, customizable quick settings, and all of the emojis your heart desires. There's also a helpful Data Saver feature that comes built into the operating system, which you'll definitely want to use if you're not subscribed to Verizon's unlimited data plan.
Ready for the update? If your phone is waiting on an update, you should have a notification waiting for your approval. If not, check to see if there's an update available in the Settings panel. You can read more on the update at Verizon's page.Russian President Vladimir Putin believes FIFA chief Sepp Blatter is innocent of corruption, and even deserves a Nobel Prize.
Putin, whose country will host the 2018 World Cup, met Blatter before the event's preliminary draw on Saturday and said the leader of the football's under-fire world governing body had his respect.
"We all know the situation developing around Mr Blatter right now," Putin said in an interview with Swiss broadcaster RTS. "I don't want to go into details but I don't believe a word about him being involved in corruption personally.
"I think people like Mr Blatter or the heads of big international sporting federations, or the Olympic Games, deserve special recognition. If there is anyone who deserves the Nobel Prize, it's those people."
Sepp Blatter and Vladimir Putin met before the World Cup qualifying draw on Saturday.
The Nobel Peace Center announced last month that it would stop working with FIFA on the joint fair-play "Handshake for Peace" initiative after the corruption allegations that rocked world football.
Blatter will step down as FIFA president in February, a decision he made in June following the bribery scandal that has led to the indictments of top FIFA officials. Blatter himself has not been indicted and denies any wrongdoing.
FIFA's awarding of the World Cup to Russia, a country with a history of civil rights violations and which is currently involved in armed conflict with Ukraine, was one of many reasons that the U.S. justice department turned it's gaze toward football.
The scandal put some doubt over whether the World Cup will stay in Russia, and Putin has previously criticised the U.S. for overstepping its bounds.
He hit back at the U.S. again on Monday, implying that the Americans were trying to reopen the voting so they could host an upcoming World Cup instead.
"The way there is this fight against corrpution makes me wonder if it isn't a continuation of the bids for 2018 and 2022," Putin said.When I first heard about Albert Meroño-Peñuela and Rinke Hoekstra's midi2rdf project, which converts back and forth between the venerable Musical Instrument Digital Interface binary format and RDF, at first I thought it seemed like an interesting academic exercise. Thinking about it more, I realized that it makes a great contribution to both the MIDI world and to musical RDF geeks.
MIDI has been the standard protocol for integrating synthesizers and related musical equipment together since the 1980s. I've only recently thrown out a book with the MIDI specs that I've owned for nearly that long because, as with so many other technical specifications, they're now available online.
Meroño-Peñuela and Hoekstra's midi2rdf lets you convert between MIDI files and Turtle RDF. I love the title of their ESWC 2016 paper on it, "The Song Remains the Same" (pdf)--I was pretty young when Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy album came out, but I remember it vividly. The song remains the same because the project's midi2rdf and rdf2midi scripts provide lossless round trip compression between the two formats, which makes it a very valuable tool: it gives us a text file serialization of MIDI based on a published standard, which makes MIDI downright readable. Looking at these RDF files and spending no serious time with the MIDI spec, I worked out which resources and properties were doing what and used this to create my own MIDI files.
As a somewhat musical RDF geek, this was a lot of fun. I wrote Python scripts to generate different Turtle files of different kinds of random music, then converted them to MIDI so that I could listen to them. (You can find it all in github.) The use of random functions means that running the same script several times creates different variations on the music. Below you will find links to MP3 versions of what I called fakeBebop and two versions of some whole-tone piano music that I generated, along with the MIDI and RDF files that go with them.
Each MIDI file (and its RDF equivalent) starts with some setup data to identify information such as the sounds that it will play and the tempo. Instead of learning all those setup details for my program to generate, I used the excellent Linux/Mac/Windows open source MuseScore music scoring program to generate a MIDI file with just a few notes of whatever instruments I wanted and then converted that to RDF. (This ability to convert in both directions is is an important part of the value of the midi2rdf package.) Then, keeping the setup part of that RDF, I deleted the actual notes and had my script copy the setup part and then generate new notes that it appended to the setup part.
In RDF terms, the note generation meant two things: adding a pair of mid:NoteOnEvent resources (one to start playing a note and one to stop) and then adding references to those events onto a musical track listing the events to execute. So, for example, the first mid:NoteOnEvent in the following pair defines the start of of a note at pitch 69, which is A above middle C on a piano. The mid:channel of 0 had been defined in the setup part, and the mid:tick value specifies how long the note will play until the next mid:NoteOnEvent. (I was too lazy to look up how the mid:tick values relate to elapsed time and picked some through trial and error.) The mid:velocity values essentially turn the note on and off.
p2:event0104 a mid:NoteOnEvent ; mid:channel 0 ; mid:pitch 69 ; mid:tick 400 ; mid:velocity 80. p2:event0105 a mid:NoteOnEvent ; mid:channel 0 ; mid:pitch 69 ; mid:tick 500 ; mid:velocity 0.
As my script outputs noteOn events after the setup part, it appends references to them onto a string in memory that begins like this:
mid:pianoHeadertrack01 a mid:Track ; mid:hasEvent p2:event0000, p2:event0001, p2:event0002, p2:event0003, # etc. until you finish with a period
After outputting all the mid:NoteOnEvent events, the script outputs this string. (While the triples in this resource are technically unordered, rdf2midi seemed to assume that the event names are "event" followed by a zero-padded number. When an early version of my first script didn't do this, the notes got played in an odd order. Maybe it's just playing them in alphabetic sort order.)
That's all for just one track. My fakeBebop script does this for three tracks: a bass track playing fairly random quarter notes in the range of an upright bass, a muted trumpet track playing fairly random triplet-feel eighth notes (sometimes with a rest substituted), and a percussion track repeating a standard bebop ride cymbal pattern. You can see some generated Turtle RDF at fakeBebop.ttl, the MIDI file generated from the Turtle file by midi2rdf at fakeBebop.mid, and listen to what it sounds like at fakeBebop.mp3.
By "fairly random" I mean a random note within 5 half steps (a major third) of the previous note. Without any melodies beyond this random selection of notes, I think it still sounds a bit beboppy because, as the early bebop pioneers added more complex scales to the simple major and minor scales played by earlier jazz musicians, it all got more chromatic.
I have joked with my brother about how if you quietly play random notes on a piano with both hands using the same whole tone scale, it can sound a bit like Debussy, who was one of the early users of this scale. My wholeTonePianoQuarterNotes.py script follows logic similar to the fakeBebop script but outputs two piano tracks that correspond to a piano player's left and right hands and use the same whole tone scale. You can see some generated Turtle RDF at wholeTonePianoQuarterNotes.ttl, the MIDI file generated from that by rdf2midi at wholeTonePianoQuarterNotes.mid, and hear what it sounds like at wholeTonePianoQuarterNotes.mp3.
Before doing the whole tone piano quarter notes script I did one with random note durations, so it sounds like something from a bit later in the twentieth century. Generated Turtle RDF: wholeTonePiano.ttl; MIDI file generated by rdf2midi: wholeTonePiano.mid; MP3: wholeTonePiano.mp3.
I can think of all kinds of ideas for additional experiments, such as redoing the two piano experiments with the four voices of a string quartet or having the fakeBebop one generate common jazz chord progressions and typical licks over them. (Speaking of string quartets and Debussy, I love that Apple iPad Pro ad that NBC showed so often during the recent Olympics.) It would also be interesting to try some experiments with Black MIDI (or perhaps "Black RDF"!). If I had pursued these ideas, I wouldn't be writing this blog entry right now, because I had to cut myself off at some point.
I recently learned about Supercollider, an open source Windows/Mac/Linux IDE with its own programming language that several serious electronic music composers use for generating music, and I could easily picture spending all of my free time playing with that. At least midi2rdf's RDF basis gave me the excuse of having a work-related angle as I wrote scripts to generate odd music. Although I was just slapping together some demo code for fun, I do think that midi2rdf's ability to provide lossless round-trip conversion between a popular old binary music format and a readable standardized format has a lot of potential to help people doing music with computers.
Please add any comments to this Google+ post.Breitbart News on Monday was denied permanent congressional press passes over concerns about the news outlet's links to a Republican mega-donor and a conservative nonprofit, according to a new report.
The U.S. Senate Daily Press Gallery, comprised of a group of five reporters all from traditional media outlets, denied Breitbart the permanent passes over its ties to Rebekah Mercer and the Government Accountability Institute, BuzzFeed reported.
The panel has granted the outlet temporary passes while it waits for additional information.
The committee wants the right-wing news organization to clarify its links to Mercer, a Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE supporter whose family has invested in the site, and the conservative nonprofit, the news outlet added.
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It reportedly asked Breitbart CEO Larry Solov last month to clarify White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s involvement in the news site. Bannon served as Breitbart's executive chairman.
But Solov's response raised more concerns, according to BuzzFeed.
BuzzFeed reports that Solov told the committee members that Breitbart is owned by founder Andrew Breitbart’s widow Susie Breitbart, unspecified members of the Mercer family and himself. New organizations are required to reveal whether they are financially tied to special interest organizations, regardless of their political views.
His response also reportedly showed that Peter Schweizer, Breitbart's senior editor at large, and Wynton Hall, its managing editor, are both linked to the Government Accountability Institute, which Bannon co-founded with Schweizer in 2012.
The committee asked Breitbart to provide further information about the two Breitbart employees’ connections to the institute and to address whether Mercer has editorial power at Breitbart.
The committee asked Breitbart officials to provide the requested information by April 18.
A Breitbart spokesperson did not immediately respond to BuzzFeed’s request for comment.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misidentified the Breitbart employees linked to the Government Accountability Institute. They are Peter Schweizer and Wynton Hall.
- Updated at on March 28 3:05 p.m.In a new forecast Tuesday, the World Bank projected another year of slow global growth as the U.S. budget showdown joins Europe’s recession to restrain the world economy. The year ahead will be “risky,” World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. But the relative calm in financial markets could provide an opportunity for emerging economies to boost growth without being dragged down by advanced economies, said Basu, who joined the bank last fall. Here are excerpts of the conversation:
This still looks like a fairly glum outlook for the global economy. What’s wrong?
We have come already into a very interesting year – though interesting for analysts does not mean it will bode well for people who live through the year. Downside risks have gone down. Financial markets are calmer. The indicators show that the concerns we had a year ago have diminished. But on the real side, it doesn’t translate into growth. In high-income countries, growth in 2012 was 1.3% and this year will be 1.3%. For developing countries, our forecast is better. It’s a bit of a good sign that emerging economies – the big ones – are expecting some revival. This could well turn out to be a year in which, in the long sweep of retrospective viewing, the baton gets passed from the industrial countries being growth leaders to emerging countries – China, India, Brazil – being the growth leaders.
We seem to have a protracted divide between recoveries in financial markets and the real economy. Does that worry you?
It’s certainly something we need to keep a very close watch on. Financial markets have calmed. But financial markets usually calm down when someone stands there and says, ‘We won’t allow a sudden crisis.’ In the end, financial markets feed on the real economy if they want returns. You can keep markets calm for one or two years, but if this is not backed up with real growth you could get another round of financial risks coming in.A new poll indicating that American Jews may have distrust and suspicion for evangelicals is raising eyebrows. The study, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, has some startling findings, especially considering the fact that many Jews and Christians have been working together for some time now in support of the Israeli state.
The Jewish Forward has more about the poll’s results:
Only one in five Jewish Americans holds favorable views of those aligned with the Christian right, a category that includes most of Israel’s evangelical supporters. [...] The survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and published April 3, asked Jewish respondents to rate the favorability of several religious groups. Mormons received a 47% favorability rating, Muslims 41.4%; the group described as “Christian Right” was viewed in favorable terms by only 20.9% of Jewish Americans. In contrast, the general American population, as shown by other polling data, views evangelicals more favorably than Muslims and Mormons.
Public Religion Research Institut Poll: American Jews Suspicious of Evangelical Christians More
These results are sending shock-waves through some faith communities. International Fellowship of Christians and Jews founder and president Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, for one, is stunned, saying that he finds the results both “shocking and concerning.” Eckstein, who has worked diligently to foster Jewish-evangelical relations, isn’t taking the results lightly.
As many people ask why these results are emerging even after years of collaborative work between the two faith communities, some contend that it may be a result of conflicting political inclinations and long-held stereotypes. Some experts also maintain that social conservatism – though it appeals to many Christians — is not palatable to the majority of American Jews.
“Most liberal Jews view the Christian right as wanting to impose a Christian America on them,” explained Marshall Breger, professor at the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law. “To the extent to which the bulk of Jews are liberal, both politically and culturally, they’ll have negative views of the Christian right.”
Public Religion Research Institut Poll: American Jews Suspicious of Evangelical Christians More
Eckstein, though, says that he has seen evangelicals become more accepted by Jews over the years.
“In the early years, the Christian right was very, very suspect in the eyes of the Jewish community,” he explained. “When we started giving to the Jewish Agency [for Israel] and the [American Jewish] Joint [Distribution Committee], the Jewish community’s attitude began to change. Evangelicals went from being a pariah to becoming accepted.”
The Forward continues:
This acceptance, however, has not penetrated the liberal Jewish circles or the broader Jewish community, all of which still view friendship to Israel as second in importance to shared social values. “There is a small segment of the Jewish population that loves evangelicals because evangelicals love Israel,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington religious affairs think tank. These Jews focus on the issue of Israel while not “buying into” other values promoted by Christian evangelicals, Cromartie said. All research points to the sharp contrast between Jews and Christian conservative views on abortions, women rights, gay and lesbian rights, and the separation of religion and state as the key factor distancing the two communities.
Regardless of the reasons behind it, the report states that “Jews hold considerably unfavorable feelings toward members of the Christian Right, significantly more so than toward Mormons or Muslims.” You can read the full report, which included 1,004 self-identified Jews (with a margin of error of +/- 5 percentage points) here.
(H/T: Jewish Forward)
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Here's a fun fact: Matt Carpenter is 0-for-16 in 21 plate appearances against one of the groomsmen from his wedding, and in Game 3 of the NLDS against the Cubs on Monday, the Cardinals third baseman will have his 22nd attempt to record a hit. But considering that groomsman is Jake Arrieta … let's just say good luck, Matt.
Indeed, Carpenter and Arrieta have been friends for years, since their days at Texas Christian University together. You'd think Arrieta, who Carpenter calls "the most flexible human being ever," would let his friend get at least one hit against him, as a belated wedding present or something, but nope.
The pair are competitive in everything, wedding party or not, and that's only magnified in the postseason. "We're going to have to toe it up against each other," Carpenter said.
But we all know who won the sunflower seed eating contests.Group aims to put independent redistricting commission on 2018 ballot
A Utah good government group is set to launch a ballot initiative to create a bipartisan/independent redistricting commission with the goal of putting the issue before voters in 2018.
UtahPolicy.com has learned that Utahns for Responsive Government are planning to unveil the proposal, which they call "Better Boundaries." The initiative would create a seven-person advisory commission to advise Utah lawmakers when they undertake the once-a-decade task of redrawing political boundary lines in the state.
The commission would essentially have no power in drawing political boundaries as that power belongs to the legislature under the Utah Constitution. The council would act more like an ombudsman for the public in the process. However, it would be very hard for lawmakers to reject the recommendation of an independent commission because it would not be a good look for them in the court of public opinion.
The Better Boundaries proposal creates a seven-person commission, with the membership selected as follows:
- Two members would be appointed by the Majority Party leaders in the State House and Senate.
-Two members would be appointed by Minority Party Leaders of the State House and State Senate
- Two commissioners would be unaffiliated, with one selected by Majority Leadership in the Legislature and the other appointed by the Minority Leadership.
- The Commission Chair would be appointed by the Governor.
If approved by voters, the commission would be in effect for the 2021 redistricting cycle, which would come after the 2020 census.
The group behind the proposal is a bi-partisan group of politicians and political operatives, including former Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker, a Democrat, and Jeff Wright, who served as the national finance director for Jon Huntsman Jr.'s presidential campaign in 2012.
A source involved with the process tells UtahPolicy.com that they're not quite ready to launch the initiative as they're still building support, but they are confident the funding to get the required 100,000 signatures to put the issue on the ballot will be available.
"We don't want to rip control of this process out of the legislature's hands," said the source. "We simply want to create good policy and restore public trust in this process."
To that end, members of the group have been meeting with lawmakers and other stakeholders trying to build support for the commission.
If URG successfully gets the initiative on the 2018 ballot, it would likely pass. A UtahPolicy.com survey from July of 2015 found 65% of Utahns want an independent commission to redraw Utah's political boundaries every 10 years, while just 25% think the Legislature should draw those boundaries. Clearly, public opinion favors the formation of an independent commission.
That same poll found Democrats and independent voters overwhelmingly favor the creation of an independent commission to handle redistricting, while 49% of Republicans agree.
The URG proposal would require the boundaries that the commission comes up with to meet five criteria:
The maps must be contiguous, meaning no breaks in the boundaries.
The Districts must be as compact as possible.
The maps must minimize the number of cities and counties divided among more than one district.
The maps must use natural boundaries like roads and geographic barriers.
They must also try to keep communities of interest and neighborhoods together.
Along with those requirements the maps that the commission comes up, there are certain things they must avoid. They can't favor or disadvantage a person, political party or candidate. They also cannot use partisan political data like election results or where officeholders live. That means incumbent lawmakers may find themselves drawn out of their districts.
A copy of a prospectus about the proposed initiative provided to UtahPolicy.com says "Everyday Utahns are losing their voice as extreme factions from each major party exercise an outsized influence in the electoral process. Politicians no longer fear losing elections and are driven to satisfy the demands of special interest groups, rather than the needs of their district."
The prospectus also points to the 2011 Congressional redistricting as a prime example of the necessity of an independent commission, highlighting the "pizza slice" map lawmakers came up with that divided Salt Lake County into four pieces, but none of the members of Congress live in the county.
No matter what maps the commission comes up with, lawmakers could choose to ignore them because the power to draw political lines belongs to the legislature. It would take a constitutional amendment to do that. But, just having another voice with the weight of state law behind them would put pressure on lawmakers to listen.
The 2018 ballot could get crowded with many petition initiatives vying for approval from voters. On Tuesday the "Our Schools Now" group launched their proposal to use sales and income tax hikes to provide more funding for Utah's schools, while another group plans to start a signature drive to put a medical marijuana initiative on the ballot, too.Radio hosts author/social activists Tavis Smiley and Cornel West are on anti-poverty tour, trying to draw attention to issues that are neglected in most political discussions–and all but absent in corporate media.
The good news, in theory, is that they’re getting some national TV attention. But this is one of those cases where you start off wishing there was more media coverage–until you see what kind of coverage you get. Then you’re wishing for something else.
Appearing on CNN‘s American Morning (8/8/11), host Carol Costello got off on the wrong foot, quoting from a letter from a CNN viewer:
This is from Stacy, she says welfare in theory was a good thing, but it’s become a way of life for generations. The poor actually have it better than the middle class.
Perhaps the intent was to ridicule that absurd point of view–that’s certainly how Smiley responded. But Costello seemed to be indicating that this viewer maybe had a point:
But, Cornel, put it this way, Cornel, the Heritage Foundation, this is conservative organization. They did this study. They say the poor in America today, are unlike the poor in America years ago. In fact, most of the poor in America live in a decent house. They have TVs. They have microwave ovens and they even have a refrigerator. What are they complaining about?
Those Heritage talking points, courtesy of analyst Robert Rector, have been a staple of media coverage of poverty–see Extra!, 1-2/99. Though I think Costello is going a little further than even Rector would–unless he, like her, really thinks there’s something weird about how the pampered poor “even have a refrigerator.”
When West begins talking about the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of us, Costello interrupts to say: “Those people pay the taxes in America and the poor don’t pay any.” That’s not true, though it’s the kind of thing you’re likely to hear on right-wing talk radio.
But perhaps the most revealing moment came after the interview had ended, when the CNN hosts were chatting among themselves. That’s when Costello said this:
And, frankly, I think to an extent the poor have been demonized because many people in America think they’re leeches on society. They’re just, you know, sucking everything out of us.
Like the question that started off the interview, a charitable interpretation is that Costello doesn’t agree with what she’s saying.
But given her attitude during the interview, it’s more likely that when she talks about how “many people” think the poor are “leeches…sucking everything out of us”–a sentiment that I doubt is all that widely shared–she’s talking about herself.
Update: Carol Costello responded on Twitter to our criticism:A 'parallel revolution' is emerging in Yemen, against corruption [EPA]
London, UK - As the year of revolution draws to a close, a new "parallel revolution" against corruption is emerging in Yemen. Over the past two weeks strikes have spread across the country and are proving effective, leading to the hope that this Yemeni uprising of 2011 can truly bring change to the Arab world’s poorest country. The chant of "Irhal, Irhal" - "Leave, Leave" - is now being directed at corrupt figures of authority throughout the country.
Unlike some of the other Arab revolutions, especially the Libyan and Syrian ones, the Yemeni revolution was mainly not one of the politically oppressed, but the economically oppressed. The extent of the atmospheric levels of corruption can be seen in the places where protests and strikes have been called. One of the first strikes was by Yemenia Airways workers; the airline, practically bankrupt, has been destroyed by corruption. Flights were stopped at Yemen's main airports and after two days the new Yemeni government removed the director, President Saleh's son-in-law.
After this, the floodgates opened. Military soldiers, traffic officers, government workers and police officers have all protested. They have not allowed corrupt bosses to enter their offices, and many of these figures, not used to such insubordination, fled.
Perhaps the most important demonstration, and the one that indicates that Saleh's powerbase is being seriously eroded, has been at the Yemeni Armed Forces Military Guidance Office, the publishers of the influential army newspaper. The soldiers called for their notoriously corrupt head, General Ali Hassan al-Shater, a key Saleh ally and adviser, to be removed from his position. There have been reports that al-Shater even kept a personal prison to punish officers and soldiers. The protesters managed to gain control of the 26 September newspaper, and published a damning editorial criticising al-Shater. The Defence Minister has now announced that General al-Shater will be replaced. This is a very important development that has inspired others around the country, implying that no one is untouchable anymore.
The Saleh clique are fearful, with the strikes possibly threatening their military powerbase more than 10 months of protest have. Ahmed Saleh, the President’s son and commander of the elite Republican Guard, has reportedly warned his troops that internal protests would not be tolerated. A Yemeni official told the Associated Press that Ahmed Saleh threatened his soldiers, "We will not permit copying here. Force will be the way to deal with any protest," he told them. In reality, Ahmed Saleh is not in a good position, and it seems increasingly likely that his authority is slipping away.
The protests and strikes have come in a period where revolutionary forces, especially the independent youth, are trying to re-assert their power over the revolution. The 250-km "Life March" from Taiz to Sana'a was an example of this new assertiveness. The "Life March" was an organic protest, under the direction of the youth, and not a ploy by the JMP opposition coalition, as Saleh's GPC party claimed.
The independent youth themselves, a great number of whom are students, have been taking part in the recent demonstrations themselves. Having recently returned to study after almost a year off, many students have used the opportunity to protest against "corrupt" lecturers. The most famous of these protests was at Sana'a University, where students demanded that Dr Muhammad al-Iryani, a Professor of Business, leave. He is well-known for his especially harsh grading of students, resulting in many of them failing his courses. Gathering in the lecture hall, the students chanted at a bewildered looking Iryani, vowing "No Iryani after today".
The overall strike and protest movement has surprised many, with analysts expecting that the next phase in Yemen would be civil war. That may still happen, but it does seemingly look further off. The strikes have unified Yemenis, with corruption cited as the main problem in the country by people who were for and against the revolution alike.
It was also unlikely that people who have protested for so long against dictatorship would suddenly go back to work and accept their own "mini-dictators" in the workplace. These mini-dict |
was questioned.
In 2006, Sun said her family had submitted an application to the police on her behalf requesting the authorities re-open the investigation to "find the truth." In April, after the Shanghai poisoning reignited public interest in Zhu's case, Sun resurfaced on Tianya and wrote: "I, more than anyone else, would like to bring the real perpetrator to justice."
Online campaign for 'justice'
Last Friday, with discussion on the Zhu case reaching fever pitch, Weibo started censoring the topic by blocking keywords like "Zhu Ling" and "thallium." The site's action only added fuel to the fire over the continued official silence, especially about whether Sun had any role in the crime.
On the same day, a "Y.Z." from Miami created a petition on the White House's official website, naming Sun -- whose English name is Jasmine -- as the prime suspect in the poisoning case and accusing her of committing marriage fraud to enter the United States. The petition calls for the U.S. government to investigate and deport her "to protect the safety of our citizens."
In less than four days, more than 130,000 people had signed the petition.
Anyone can petition the U.S. federal government online to take action on an issue. According to terms posted on the White House website, a petition must reach 100,000 signatures within 30 days to require a response.
"It's extraordinary to seek another country's help to address a domestic judicial issue," Yao Bo, a Beijing-based political commentator, told CNN. "But if your own government ignores you, I think it's reasonable to see people feel compelled to seek outside pressure to ensure judicial fairness and transparency in their own country."
Other observers oppose what they view as a cyber witch-hunt for Sun.
"The law is about evidence -- you can't convict someone without evidence and not everything is a conspiracy," a U.S.-based user wrote on his Weibo page. "Petitioning the White House without evidence is the ultimate fail -- those people really don't understand the law or American politics."
Zhu's mother speaks out
Weibo has lifted its short-lived ban on the discussion of the Zhu case, as her 72-year-old mother was interviewed by a talk show host on China National Radio on Monday
Recounting her experience of being stonewalled by the police over the years, Zhu Mingxin said the government has rejected the family's request to make the investigation results public.
"I will continue to apply," she said. "I hope to have an answer. I hope to give Zhu Ling an answer."
"Zhu Ling is my child and she is a good child," she added. "In the prime of her youth, she almost lost her life and she's been miserable since. I hate the perpetrator."
Such heart-wrenching words have resonated with the public, prompting many of the so-called "Weibo stars" with millions of followers to retweet Zhu's story and appeal for help. Websites set up by Zhu's supporters home and abroad are attracting new donations for her parents, whose entire lives now focus on caring for their ailing daughter.
Will public attention bring action?
Even the official Xinhua news agency has jumped into the fray, mentioning Sun's "unusual family background" and challenging the police to speak up about the case with concrete evidence in a widely circulated article published Monday.
"Whether or not to re-open the investigation depends on new evidence, but the Beijing police should take a meaningful step forward by breaking their silence," opined the Southern Metropolitan Daily newspaper on its official Weibo page. "Doing so would help not only the victim but also the alleged suspect as well as the police's own credibility."
"In the past few years, people have seen too much injustice in stories posted online -- and the political power's wanton interference in the judicial system," said Yao, the commentator. "Things just erupted when Zhu's case resurfaced."
For Zhu's parents, however, the latest wave of public attention changes little for their daughter.
"I used to hope for a miracle," Zhu's mother said on the radio show. "Now that it's been so long, I just hope to see her conditions improve."A Pennsylvania State Police corporal clung to life Tuesday after he was shot three times during a gunfight with a motorist he'd tried to arrest for driving under the influence, authorities said.
The trooper underwent surgery and was in "extremely critical" but stable condition after a routine traffic stop escalated into a violent altercation on a highway in Plainfield Township, Northampton County, about 65 miles (104 kilometers) north of Philadelphia, said state police Capt. Richard D'Ambrosio.
He said he is "very hopeful" the trooper will survive.
"He's a warrior. He went through a heck of a fight out here along the side of the road. He has a will to live, and, God willing, he is going to pull through this," D'Ambrosio told reporters outside a hospital in Fountain Hill, where the trooper was flown for treatment.
The trooper works at the Belfast barracks. His name was not immediately released.
He had ticketed the motorist for speeding Tuesday morning and was about to pull away when the motorist flagged him down, wanting to discuss the citation and how he would pay it, authorities said.
The corporal began to suspect the motorist was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, called for backup and performed a sobriety test. The troopers then tried to arrest the motorist, who began resisting, D'Ambrosio said.
"The troopers were in a knock-down, drag-out fight along the side of the road with vehicles speeding by them, and it got very, very violent," said D'Ambrosio, who viewed video of the altercation.
At some point, the suspect broke free, ran to his car, retrieved a gun and began shooting, striking one of the troopers, he said. Both troopers returned fire, hitting the suspect several times.
The motorist fled in a blue Pontiac sedan and drove himself to Easton Hospital. He was later transferred to another hospital, where he underwent surgery.
The suspect's name was not released. Authorities planned to release more information on Wednesday.
State police gathered evidence from suspect's car, which was parked near the emergency room entrance of Easton Hospital and appeared to have its rear window shot out. It was later put on a flatbed and driven away.
Gov. Tom Wolf said in a statement that he and his wife were "praying for this trooper, the family and every member of the Pennsylvania State Police."Applications for gun purchases in Maryland are soaring ahead of the start of a tough new firearms law that sets new magazine capacity limits and bans the sale of certain types of assault weapons.
The Washington Times reported that state police received 85,141 gun-purchase applications this year through Aug. 31. That’s compared with 70,099 applications in all of 2012 and 46,339 applications in 2011. Maryland State Police have increased staffing to cope.
In August 2012, 38 employees were assigned to conduct background checks, but this year 73 employees are doing that work, according to Sgt. Marc Black. Black said 60 temporary staffers are also rotating hours.
“We’re looking at unprecedented numbers,” Maryland State Police Sgt. Marc Black told the newspaper. “We saw this coming.”
So far, officials have processed 46,942 of this year’s applications.
Meanwhile gun dealers say they have been overwhelmed ahead of the law’s Oct. 1 effective date.
“Because of the gun ban, business has been booming,” said Al Koch, store manager at Bart’s Sports World, a Glen Burnie-based gun shop. “It’s been busy like crazy with people making last-minute decisions.”
Tammy Sager, an employee at Angus MacGregor’s Trading Post in Waldorf, told The Washington Times that her firearms shop recently received an approved application from police that was submitted in May.
"This person passed all the requirements — gun safety training, no criminal background — but that’s five months to get a background check," Sager said. "I don’t mind doing a background check, but what’s the holdup? I understand they’re getting a lot of applications, but why is it taking so long?"
The new gun law Maryland lawmakers passed earlier this year bans 45 types of assault weapons, but people who own them now will be able to keep them. The law also limits handgun magazines to 10 rounds and requires people to submit fingerprints to the state police to get a license to buy a handgun.
In addition, Maryland State Police will be able to suspend the licenses of gun dealers who fail to comply with new record-keeping obligations. The provision will allow the state police to supplement enforcement efforts of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The measure also requires mandatory reporting to law enforcement of lost or stolen firearms.
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a Democrat, proposed the bill in January in response to the December shooting in Newtown, Conn., where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Click here for more from The Washington Times.Return to Transcripts main page
THE SITUATION ROOM
Al Qaeda's Number 2 Releases New Videotape; Watching Chavez: Fighting Words, Power Play; Oil Addiction: Kicking the Habit; Possible Smear Campaign Against Senator Obama
Aired January 22, 2007 - 17:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
WOLF BLITZER, HOST: And to our viewers, you're in THE SITUATION ROOM, where new pictures and information are arriving all the time. Standing by, CNN reporters across the United States and around the world to bring you today's top stories.
Happening now, it's 1:00 a.m. in Iraq, where hundreds are killed or wounded and bombs ripped through crowded markets again. And the shock waves are still reverberating from a daring Trojan horse attack by insurgents who -- get this -- they dressed like American troops to go in and kill American troops. We're going to stand by for details.
Is America ready for a woman president?
Hillary Rodham Clinton is ready to find out. It's 5:00 p.m. here in Washington, where we have brand new poll numbers on the White House wannabes.
And as allegations swirl about Senator Barack Obama's education abroad, it's 5:00 a.m. in Indonesia, where we actually went to check out the facts, as a serious news organization should do, to debunk the rumors. We have a CNN exclusive that you will want to see this hour.
I'm Wolf Blitzer.
You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.
At least 100 dead and 200 more wounded. That's the toll from massacres today in two Iraqi markets. Most of the casualties coming in a twin bombing in Baghdad. Another bomber struck in Baquba.
The targets of the slaughter?
Civilians. And after an extraordinarily deadly weekend for U.S. troops, there are new details on the daring raid in which insurgents used disguise and deception to penetrate what was supposed to be a secure compound and kill Americans.
CNN's Arwa Damon is in Baghdad. Tom Foreman is standing by.
But let's begin our coverage this hour with our senior medical correspondent, Jamie McIntyre -- Jamie.
JAMIE MCINTYRE, CNN SENIOR PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, it's the oldest trick in the book -- get by security by looking like you're important and in a hurry. And that's apparently what Iraqi insurgents did.
(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)
MCINTYRE (voice-over): In Karbala, a destroyed American Humvee is hauled away a part of an intense investigation into a Saturday attack that set a new high for audacity.
Apparently, all it took to fool Iraqi troops manning a key checkpoint was some American-looking SUVs, some American-style uniforms and some American-sounding English.
Flashing fake I.D.s, the convoy, carrying about 30 gunmen, was able to pass through a series of Iraqi checkpoints and get right to a building where about a dozen U.S. troops were reviewing security plans for an upcoming religious pilgrimage to the city.
According to the U.S. military, what's called a provisional joint coordination center, a place where the U.S. routinely meets with local Iraqi forces, was hit with grenades and small arms fire. Five U.S. soldiers were killed, three more wounded.
The U.S. said the attack was aimed at both coalition and Iraqi forces, but Iraqi officials said it appeared only Americans were targeted and the gunmen seemed to know where the Americans would be.
In fact, a local police spokesman told CNN the Iraqi police didn't interfere because "they assumed it was American on American violence and wanted to stay out of it."
The U.S. troops did return fire and when five of the suspect vehicles were later located, to the north, in Babil Province, two wounded gunmen were captured, according to Iraq police.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What I see is a continuation of the enemy's ability to adapt and find weakness and exploit those weaknesses without a moral floor.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
MCINTYRE: The U.S. military says its investigation is still underway. It's looking both at checkpoint procedures and the performance of Iraqi security forces.
But one conclusion that doesn't require a formal investigation is that insurgents are getting very adept at exploiting Iraqi security to -- weaknesses in Iraqi security -- to deadly effect -- Wolf.
BLITZER: Because I've been told, Jamie, by U.S. military personnel now for several weeks that even as the U.S. and its Iraqi allies improve on some of their techniques, the other side is improving, as well.
MCINTYRE: They've said all along that they're dealing with a thinking enemy. And this enemy has shown a continuing capacity to be able to come up with new techniques to try to inflict casualties on the U.S. and Iraqi forces. BLITZER: Jamie at the Pentagon.
A tightly guarded compound, as Jamie just pointed out, surrounded by several checkpoints.
Let's get a closer look now at just what the attackers had to go through to pull this raid off.
Tom Foreman is here in THE SITUATION ROOM -- Tom.
TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Let's get a sense of where this actually happened.
Here's Iraq over here. If we move into the region, similar sized cities over here and here. Baghdad is up there. That's the big one.
Down here, Karbala is about a half million people, a little more than that, 600,000, something like that. This is a city, as we look on the map over here -- that is up on the wall -- is full of many Shiite followers. This was a stronghold of the Shia in Iraq during Saddam Hussein's time.
It was greatly distrusted by the Sunnis. They, in fact, attacked Shia here several times because this is such a holy city, an important city to the Shia.
These, in fact, are two of the shrines that are the middle of this big pilgrimage coming up, which is what these military people were planning for when this attack came.
We don't know exactly where the checkpoints were here, but we do know that they cleared three of them in this area. We don't know if the attackers were Sunni or Shia. But three of them to get in and make this attack.
Afterward, we also know this. Of these seven vehicles they brought in, some of them were found in this province, as you see. If you head up north there -- and it was north of town that they found them, right in that edge of green over there. They found some of them there and two of the attackers.
What does that tell us?
Well, maybe nothing. But take a look at this. I will look at the region right here, in the general area that we're talking about, this is where those provinces are and the dividing line roughly between where the Shia and the Sunni are operating in this area can be found right along in this area.
So roughly to this side is Shia and to this side is Sunni.
So we have no idea which side was attacking this very holy city for the Shia before this big festival comes up or how they coordinated this. But we do know this is where it happened and this is where some of the attackers were found afterward, up in that region. BLITZER: What a mess. What a mess, indeed. But they are getting better and better, these insurgents, with their capabilities, as we have clearly seen over this weekend.
Thanks very much for that, Tom.
Scores of civilians were also slaughtered today, slaughtered when bombers hit Baghdad and Baquba. The targets were crowded open air markets.
CNN's Arwa Damon is in the Iraqi capital -- Arwa.
ARWA DAMON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, violence across Iraq claimed over 100 innocent civilian lives and wounded over double that number. The deadliest bombing happening in the capital, Baghdad.
(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)
DAMON (voice-over): Familiar sights and sounds in the Iraqi capital -- explosions, sirens, mayhem. Insurgents striking once again, in the heart of Baghdad. This time, hitting one of the city's main marketplaces for the third time in as many months, an area mainly frequented by Baghdad's impoverished Shia population, leaving scores dead and wounded.
Two mid-day car bombs exploding seconds apart, tearing into the secondhand clothing section of the market. The dead and wounded rushed to hospitals already stretched to the limit.
Here at Al-Kindi Hospital, frantic efforts to save lives. It's the same hospital where just days ago, medics battled to treat the casualties from twin bombings at a university that killed at least 70 students and employees, and wounded over 160.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
DAMON: Just hours later, in the northern province of Diyala, another bombing in another marketplace. That attack killing at least two dozen Iraqis and wounding scores more -- Wolf.
BLITZER: Arwa Damon in Baghdad.
And this comes over the weekend. A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter apparently shot down by a shoulder-fired missile. That's the preliminary result of an investigation. Twelve American soldiers on board. The sophisticated capability of these insurgents clearly underscored once again. These Black Hawk helicopters flying over Iraq, a large number of them.
If the insurgents have this kind of capability right now, a very, very worrisome development for U.S. military personnel. I flew around in one of those when I was in Iraq a year-and-a-half or so ago and I can testify that it's a dangerous situation to begin with, but it's certainly, certainly something that is worrisome right now. Jack Cafferty joining us from New York -- it looks, Jack, like every time the U.S. and the Iraqi soldiers who are working with the U.S. improve on their capabilities, the other side, you know what?
They adjust, as well.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, it's a -- it's kind of scary. We had these -- the insurgents getting past military checkpoints. Now they're able to shoot Black Hawk helicopters out of the sky. One wonders where it's all going to end.
Senator Clinton, launching her presidential exploratory committee, has people wondering what impact her husband -- that would be the former president, Bill Clinton -- will have on the race. Now, a lot of people don't think Senator Clinton can relate to voters in the same way that her husband did.
One former White House staffer says the former president will be a big help to the senator. Chris Lehane says: "He'll double the amount of attention the campaign can get and take the spotlight away from the other candidates."
A recent "USA Today"/Gallup poll shows some major reasons why Democrats -- Democrats say they will not support Hillary Clinton in the primaries. Ten percent say it's because they don't want to see another Clinton in the White House. Twenty-nine percent say they don't think she can win the presidential race. Twenty-six percent don't agree with her on the issues. Sixteen percent don't think she can win the nomination. And 11 percent say they just don't like her.
So the question is this -- will Senator Hillary Clinton's husband be an asset or a liability in a run for the White House?
E-mail your thoughts to caffertyfile@cnn.com or go to cnn.com/caffertyfile -- Wolf.
BLITZER: Jack, see you in a few minutes.
Thank you.
Still ahead, they've turned Iraq into a living hell.
Are insurgents there now planning attacks here inside the United States?
We're going to have details of a disturbing new report.
Also, potentially damaging rumors swirling about Senator Barack Obama's early education as he eyes the White House. We've debunked them. We're going to show you the truth behind these allegations. This is an exclusive report. We've done serious journalism, gone to Jakarta in Indonesia to check out these rumors.
And is the country ready for a woman president?
Find out what people are saying and why gender may not be Hillary Clinton's only challenge to overcoming her presidential bid.
Stay with us. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BLITZER: Welcome back.
The roster of White House hopefuls growing significantly over the weekend. And we have some brand new poll numbers just out showing who voters say they're likely to support.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey finds that among registered Democrats, registered Democrats, Senator Hillary Clinton leads with 34 percent. She just announced Saturday she's forming an exploratory committee.
Senator Barack Obama is second with 18 percent, followed by former senator and vice presidential nominee, John Edwards.
On the Republican side, former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani leads the pack among registered Republicans with 32 percent, followed by Senator John McCain, with 26 percent. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has 9 percent. He has not announced that he's running. He has not thrown his hat into the ring yet. He says he'll make a decision later in the year.
The likely Clinton candidacy has many people, though, wondering if the country is actually ready for a woman president.
CNN's Mary Snow has been looking into that question.
She's joining us now live from New York -- Mary.
MARY SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, with Senator Clinton leading in the polls, some say it's a sign America is ready. But they also say women candidates still face more scrutiny than their male counterparts.
(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)
SNOW (voice-over): Senator Hillary Clinton hopes to make history.
But is America ready for a female commander-in-chief?
The White House answered that question today.
TONY SNOW, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I was asked a question, do we think a woman could be elected president?
The answer is yes.
SNOW: Sixty percent of people surveyed in the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll said America is ready for a woman president. This New York Democratic leader supporting Hillary Clinton isn't sure. HERMAN "DENNY" FARRELL, JR. FORMER NEW YORK STATE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CHAIR: Her biggest challenge, of course, is to get past the issue of being a woman. I mean no one is going to say it, and maybe I shouldn't even be saying it now.
SNOW: Political analysts say Senator Clinton also faces an image challenge.
DEBBIE WALSH, CENTER FOR AMERICAN WOMEN & POLITICS: She doesn't connect to me. She's not warm. She's, you know, she's not -- she's not like me. And I think she's trying to, you know, sit down, reach out and talk directly to the American public.
SNOW: Past attempts to do that have hurt her. Flash back to the 1992 campaign and these famous words uttered on "60 Minutes" when her husband faced questions of infidelity.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP FROM "60 MINUTES," COURTESY CBS)
CLINTON: You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette. I'm sitting here because I love him.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SNOW: Years later, as first lady, after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, she did stay with President Clinton.
How much will that factor in?
Experts say that depends on how well she connects with voters, both on her stand on current issues, as well as her image.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
SNOW: And in that effort to connect with voters, tonight, Senator Clinton will face the first in a series of video Web chats -- Wolf.
BLITZER: All right, we'll watch that, together with you.
We'll have much more coming up in our 7:00 p.m. Eastern hour.
We want to thank Mary Snow for that.
Mary is part of the best political team on television.
Also want our viewers to know that tomorrow night we're going to have special coverage of the president's State of the Union Address. Our coverage begins 7:00 p.m. Eastern, right here in THE SITUATION ROOM.
Paula Zahn and I will be co-anchoring our coverage from 7:00 to 9:00 and the speech begins at 9:00 p.m. Eastern. And this important programming note, as well, for our viewers. The next day, Wednesday, I'll have an exclusive sit-down interview with the vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. That interview will air Wednesday right here in THE SITUATION ROOM.
She's in and she's in it to win -- Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton first told the world using the World Wide Web.
But can she manage finally to engage the public online?
Our Internet reporter, Abbi Tatton, has a closer look at Senator Clinton's freshly launched Web site -- Abbi, what do you see?
ABBI TATTON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, in addition to the announcement over the weekend, there are -- the site is notable for the opportunities to interact at the newly revamped hillaryclinton.com, an opportunity to submit a first guest blog post on a new -- blog site for Hillary Clinton. And staffers are now going through thousands of entries.
And just in the last few minutes, the site has been opened up, inviting people to submit their questions online, questions that will be, that the senator will be fielding in the 7:00 hour online in a series of Web casts. There will be three going on this week.
In addition to all of that, there has been blogger outreach from the Clinton camp. Clinton Internet director, Peter Dow, he was brought on board last summer to be a liaison with the blogosphere. Dow tells us that over the weekend, he reached out to hundreds of blogs.
Now, when it comes to the anti-war Net roots, Hillary Clinton is no front runner, in part due to her position on Iraq. This continued blogger outreach, along with the multiple opportunities to participate, the message is clear, online from Hillary Clinton, let the conversation begin -- Wolf.
BLITZER: All right, good report.
Thank you, Abbi, for that.
Coming up, we'll have more on Hillary Clinton. Jack Cafferty wants to know will her husband be an asset or a liability in a run for the White House?
Jack will be back later this hour with The Cafferty File.
Plus, a CNN exclusive -- we sent one of our correspondents to Indonesia, to Jakarta, to debunk a possible smear campaign against Senator Barack Obama. We're going to show you what we found on the scene.
Stay with us. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BLITZER: Let's check back with Carol Costello.
She's monitoring developments, feeds coming in, checking in with all of our reporters to see what's going on.
She's got some other important stories making news right now j hi, Carol.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Wolf.
Hello to all of you.
We have an update for you on the case of Maher Arar. He's a Canadian citizen on the U.S. terror watch list. In 2002, he was taken into custody at Kennedy Airport in New York by U.S. officials and sent to Syria for interrogation, where he says he was tortured. Now the Justice and Homeland Security Departments say they've re-examined Arar's case and intend to keep him on the terror watch list.
The Justice Department is criticizing the FBI for its handling of the Mark Foley case. An internal report says the Bureau should have moved to protect White House pages when it first learned of the former congressman's explicit Internet messages last July. The report doesn't find any misconduct by the FBI, but it does fault the Bureau for making inaccurate statements about why it didn't launch an investigation. There is no comment from the FBI, at least not yet.
Jury selection in the trial of Louis "Scooter" Libby now in its final stages. The former top aide to Vice President Cheney is charged with perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of the Valeria Plame scandal, in which the name of the former undercover CIA officer was leaked to the news media. Opening statements in Libby's trial are expected to start tomorrow.
And long lines ahead of new passport requirements. Starting tomorrow, people traveling by air between the United States and Mexico and Canada will be required to have a passport. And that had Mexican citizens lining up at their country's consulate in San Francisco before dawn today, with similar scenes at the Mexican and Canadian consulates around the country.
That's a look at the headlines right now -- Wolf.
BLITZER: A very busy time at passport offices across the country, in Canada and Mexico, and elsewhere, as well.
Carol will be back shortly.
Coming up, al Qaeda allies in Iraq possibly eyeing America as their next together. Our justice correspondent, Kelli Arena, is investigating some disturbing reports. She'll share with us what she's learning.
And the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, taunting the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. We'll have details of the latest verbal volleys he's firing at the U.S.
Stay with us. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BLITZER: To our viewers, you're in THE SITUATION ROOM, where new pictures and information are arriving all the time. Happening now, a deadly new wave of violence in Iraq. Insurgent attacks killing at least 100 people in Baghdad and Baquba and leaving 200 people injured. Among the targets, a secondhand clothing market in the capital hit by near simultaneous car bombs. Witnesses describing a horrible scene of "body parts everywhere."
U.S. forces suffering, too, in the spiraling violence. Insurgents dressed as American troops launching a brazen Trojan horse attack in Karbala, killing five U.S. soldiers. Twelve American troops killed in the crash of a Black Hawk helicopter over the weekend, as well. An Islamist group now claiming on the Internet it brought the chopper down. No confirmation of that, although U.S. officials do suspect that Black Hawk helicopter was shot down by a shoulder-fired missile.
And we have a CNN exclusive coming up. We went to Indonesia, to Jakarta, to report on potentially damaging rumors about Senator Barack Obama and his early education. We're going to show you what we found. We have details of what could be a smear campaign against the popular Democrat who's eyeing the White House. You're going to want to see this. This is here only on CNN.
I'm Wolf Blitzer and you're in THE SITUATION ROOM.
There are some fresh reports that al Qaeda's allies in Iraq, who have taken a very heavy toll among U.S. troops, have also looked at ways to try to strike right here inside the United States and have considered the use of student visas to try to gain entry into this country.
Let's turn to our justice correspondent, Kelli Arena.
she's been investigating these reports -- Kelli, what are you picking up?
KELLI ARENA, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, here's the deal.
About six months ago U.S. forces found documents in Iraq indicating that Al Qaeda In Iraq was planning to attack on U.S. soil. Now, the threat was laid out by Lieutenant General Michael Maples, who heads up the Defense Intelligence Agency. He gave testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Officials say that both documents suggested using student visas, as you said, as a way to get terrorists inside the United States.
Now, intelligence officials describe this plot as more aspirational and operational, one in its very early stages. They say there was no target mentioned, no specifics on what kind of attack would be staged. And the FBI even says, for the record, that it has no indication of a specific threat at this time.
So, Wolf, what's the bottom line here? The bottom line is that this shows that as busy as al Qaeda and insurgents are in Iraq, they are still thinking about attacking on U.S. soil. Some officials say eventually talk turns into action, we have to be on guard, especially when it comes to a terror group like al Qaeda.
BLITZER: Kelli Arena reporting for us.
Kelli, thanks.
And we have this story just coming into THE SITUATION ROOM, as well.
President Bush's plan for a troop increase in Iraq has now drawn a taunting response from al Qaeda's second in command. Ayman al- Zawahiri daring the president of the United States to send the entire American Army into Iraq.
Listen to this clip.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, AL QAEDA (through translator): Security is a shared destiny. If we are secure, you might be secure. And if we are safe, you might be safe. And if we are struck and killed, you'll definitely, with God's permission, be struck and killed. This is the correct equation.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BLITZER: Ayman al-Zawahiri on the Web just a few minutes ago.
Let's get some more on this story from our senior international correspondent, Nic Robertson. He's joining us in London.
Give us some background. What's going on, Nic?
NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, in may ways this is vintage Ayman al-Zawahiri. We've heard this argument before, that if "we're attacked, then we're going to attack you."
He also again goes back to one of his pet themes. And that is criticizing President Bush in Iraq, saying, why send 20,000 troops? Why not send another 50,000 or 100,000? He said they'll be defeated anyway.
He also calls for the release of Sheik Abdul Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who's been in prison since 1995 for inspiring the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center.
These are all old themes. Again, Ayman al-Zawahiri trying to make himself relevant, perhaps, releasing this message just two weeks after President Bush did lay out this new plan for Iraq.
BLITZER: Is there a sense that, if you read closely what he's saying, the way he appears right now, that he now sees what's happening in Iraq as a prelude to what could happen elsewhere? Because I'm referring specifically to this report that Kelli Arena just noted, that perhaps there's some preliminary concern, and maybe more aspirational than intentional right now, that they could be attempting to look for targets right here in the United States?
ROBERTSON: There's no doubt that the best analysts will tell you that al Qaeda's prized goal would be to attack inside the United States in any way they can, and using visas would be -- student visas -- would be one way to get in and achieve that. The message here, again, it is what we've heard from Ayman al-Zawahiri.
And he calls it, the correct equation, he is talking about an equation of violence, an equation of force. "If we're struck, then we're going to strike you." So the implicit threat there is, if we're struck in our lands, we'll strike you in your lands.
BLITZER: Nic Robertson in London for us.
We'll continue to monitor this development, together with you, Nic. Thank you.
And amidst all of this, amidst all of this, there's a new skirmish unfolding in the war of words between Venezuela and the United States and a powerplay by the president, Hugo Chavez.
Let's turn to our State Department correspondent, Zain Verjee -- Zain.
ZAIN VERJEE, CNN STATE DEPARTMENT CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, Venezuela's president is at it again. This time he's going off to Condoleezza Rice.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
VERJEE (voice over): Hurling insults. The target this time, the U.S. secretary of state. In his weekly radio address, Hugo Chavez belittles Condoleezza Rice...
HUGO CHAVEZ, VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT: Condoleezza, how are you?
VERJEE:... saying, "Hi, Condoleezza. How are you? You've forgotten me, missy."
Last year, Chavez called President Bush "the devil" in his speech at the United Nations. Now he's just been re-elected and wants special authority that will let him rule by decree.
The State Department said decrees are a bit odd to have in a democratic system. Chavez is blasting back.
"Go to hell, gringos! Go home! Go home. We're free here." Adding that Venezuela has a right to do what it wants.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
VERJEE: Regional experts say Chavez' consolidation of power is basically disturbing. They say he seems bolder after his election victory and poses a real challenge for anyone who cares about democracy -- Wolf.
BLITZER: What's the State Department reaction, Zain?
VERJEE: They're saying today that Chavez isn't really doing himself or Venezuela any favors. They say he's basically hurting himself and they're just not going to go ahead and directly respond to some of the comments that he's made.
BLITZER: Zain reporting for us. Zain's our State Department correspondent.
And still to come, our exclusive report on Senator Barack Obama's early education. We actually sent a correspondent to Jakarta, Indonesia, to take a look at these rumors that may be part of a smear campaign against the popular Democrat as he eyes -- as he eyes the White House. You're going to want to see our special report.
Plus, President Bush, poised to announce a major new energy policy. That, at least according to some of his aides. What will it take to end America's addiction to oil?
Stay with us. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BLITZER: Welcome back.
President Bush is expected to talk about energy and energy |
tried to chop through something that was harder than the blade could handle. The second reason is because the ax was made with either poor materials or craftsmanship.
It is relatively easy to tell if chipping is the fault of the user or the manufacturer. If the chip has straight edges, this means that the metal failed and “chipped.” As such, it’s more likely a poor quality ax. However, if the chip is rounded (less of a chip and more of a dent) this means it’s more likely the fault of the user.
Ax Handle: When it comes to ax handles there are a few things to look for. First and foremost you want an ax handle to be made of hickory. Many axes are made with metal handles. Although metal handles will last a long time, they are much more difficult to fix or replace than traditional wood handles.
When inspecting a wood handle it’s important to not only make sure that it’s made from hickory, but also that the wood grain is straight and clear of knots. Many ax handles are m covered in a lacer that makes it smooth and gives a polished look. On inexpensive axes these lacers have a habit of flaking off with extended use. It’s best to find something that has been treated with linseed oil or is untreated so you can do it yourself.
Over time and extended use you ax handle may become rough. This can be remedied by soaking it in hot water until the wood grain starts to stand out. Dry the handle and carefully sand it down until smooth. Once the ax hand has become smooth, treat it with linseed oil. You can also remove cheap lacer with the same method and treat with linseed oil.
Types of axes: Pole Ax, Double Bitted Ax, Splitting maul, Hatchet
There are many different kinds of axes. Many have been either lost to time, or are very specialized and intended for one specific purpose. There are four general types of axes that are most commonly used and available at your local hardware store. These are: Pole Ax, Double Bitted Ax, Splitting maul, and the hatchet.
Pole Ax: The Pole Ax is the most common type of ax. It has one cutting edge and a flat blunt side opposite. The blunt end is commonly referred to either as the butt, or the Pole. Hence the name “Pole Ax.” The sharp end it used for chopping and cutting, whereas the blunt side is used for hammering things such as stakes or wedges.
Double Bitted Ax: The Double Bitted Ax is used for serious, heavy duty chopping. It was favored by loggers due to the fact that when one side became dulled they could simply switch to using the other side and keep on chopping. They would also use different grinds for each blade. One blade would be made razor sharp in order to expedite the cutting process. Whereas the other side would have a narrower grind and would be used for limbing trees and cutting through knots.
Splitting Maul: As the name suggests, the Splitting Maul is commonly used for splitting firewood. Though it’s excellent for splitting firewood, the Splitting Maul the good for little else. As with the Pole Ax, the Splitting Maul has one cutting edge and a blunt side that can be used as a sludge hammer or for pounding stakes.
Hatchet: The Hatchet is a shortened version of the pole ax. A hatchet usually has an overall length of around 16 inches. It’s commonly used for smaller tasks such and chopping kindling, limbing, chopping smaller trees, whittling, or dispatching animals such as chickens or geese. The hatchet is common on farms/ranches and is popular with outdoorsman such as Bushcrafters, hunters, and backpackers due to its small size, weight, and versatility.
How to Chop Wood: Chopping wood or cutting logs is only as difficult as you want to make it. Cutting through is much more about accuracy then it is about strength. Beginners tend to get frustrated and start swinging wildly and furiously. This is not just unproductive, but also dangerous. With each swing one should focus on accuracy. Practicing proper ax maintenance and keeping a sharp bald will go much farther then brut strength.
When chopping a fallen log it’s advisable to chop the log from the sides rather than then chopping from the top down. The reason being is that if you chop down from the top, when you cut through the log the blade may bury itself into the ground where it may become chipped or dented.
It’s also advisable that you chop at a 45 degree angle. Chopping at a more of an angle or straight on is much less effective. Chopping at an angle less than 45 degrees can be dangerous since it may skip off the log.
The “cows’ mouth” refers to a notch that is chopped into a tree to fall it, or a log to cut it in two. The width of the cows mouth should be equal to the width of the log or tree. You can get away with a little less, especially if you are using a chainsaw or cross cut saw.
Chopping firewood: Chopping firewood is a relatively simple process. When it comes to firewood there should be more emphasis on choosing good quality wood over using brut force. The reason for wood not easily splitting usually has more to do with the wood than the person swinging the ax. For example, I have witnessed beginners trying to chop green and wet maple with great difficulty. The reason isn’t that their swing isn’t true or their ax is dull. Rather the issue is that green maple not only makes for poor firewood, but also is generally difficult to split.
“Green wood” is wood that comes from a recently fallen tree. Green wood is not just more difficult to chop, but also makes for poor firewood. One should look for fallen trees that have been down for some time, but are not rotten. The wood should be dry and cut with relative ease. Pine should be avoided for firewood since it burns hot had produces a lot of soot and sap that will build up in the chimney. This can lead to a “chimney fire.”
Terminology:
Bevel: The foremost cutting surface. Part of the ax head that tappers down to make the cutting edge.
Belly: Curve in the ax handle.
Bit: The cutting portion of the ax head; also known as the blade or the edge.
Beard: Part of the bit that descends below the rest of the axe head.
Eye: Hole where the handle is mounted.
Boys’ Ax: A Three quarter ax weighing 2 ½ pounds and a 28 inch handle.
Poll: The blunt part of the ax head, also known as the back or butt.
Slash: Branches that have been trimmed from logs.
Helve: An ax handle.
Cows Mouth: A notch chopped into a tree to fall it, or a log to cut in two.
Cord: A measurement of wood. Often times used when selling firewood. A “cord of wood” is wood staked to make a pile measuring 8 feet long, 4 feet high, 4 feet wide.
Cruiser: A smaller double bitted ax with a 28-inch handle. As opposed to larger Double Bitted ax with a 36 inch handle.
Crown: The top of trees.
Stem: The trunk of a tree.
Sapling: A small tree.
Wolf Tree: A large tree that blocks the sun from reaching smaller trees.
Back stabber: Term used for the Double Bitted Ax due to its tendency to dig into ones back.“We asked ourselves, ‘What could we do that would move our customers forward with the latest and greatest technology every day?’ said Marcelo Claure, Sprint CEO. “We decided: How awesome would it be if anytime customers don’t have the latest iPhone, they are eligible to upgrade, and have it be as simple as handing us your existing iPhone and picking up a new one – all included in your monthly rate.”
Sprint today introduced a new plan called "iPhone Forever," which grants upgrade eligibility for the newest iPhone to any customer who doesn't have the most current version of Apple's flagship smartphone on their contract. The plan goes into effect today, and the company is opening the data plan to both new and old Sprint users, although the latter must have an upgrade eligible device to start using iPhone Forever.iPhone Forever lets customers get an iPhone for $22 a month, with the simple rule that anytime they don't have the latest iPhone on their plan, they are automatically eligible for an upgrade. Sprint is also discounting the service to $15 per month for any customer who trades in an existing smartphone, the catch being that the new phone purchased has to be a 16GB iPhone 6, and the monthly rate will increase back to the normal amount after their next upgrade.The $15 promotion will last until December 31, 2015, and the company notes that iPhone Forever is available on "any eligible Sprint rate plan." Sprint's announcement today follows a few week's worth of other carriers'detailing the introduction of their own brand new service plans for customers, no doubt all preparing for the next-generation iPhone launch sometime next month.Earth Day takes place each year on the 22nd of April. It is a global environmental movement with more than 192 nations taking part across the world, united with one goal in mind: to celebrate our earth and the environment.
The first Earth Day affected some major environmental polices in the United States, which led to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency and paved the way for the Clean Air, Clean Water and Endangered Species acts to be introduced.
The History Of Earth Day
Earth Day was started by Gaylord Nelson, then a US Senator from Wisconsin in 1970. After witnessing many environmental disasters, including a massive oil spill in Santa Barbara in 1969, he became deeply concerned about the environmental problems facing the nation – and the world.
Inspired by the anti-war movement of the 60s, and the teach-ins that were held across college campuses by Vietnam protesters, Nelson decided to create Earth Day as a way to raise awareness and gain public support for environmental issues.
The goal was to raise awareness among other US politicians and to have these issues added to the national agenda, forcing them into the ‘limelight’. The movement gained support and soon twenty million Americans could be seen demonstrating across the USA. This led to the US government creating a new federal agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in December 1970 to tackle these issues.
In 1990, Earth Day went global, mobilising 200 million people across 141 countries and taking environmental issues to the world stage.
That year, Earth Day focused on recycling efforts around the world and paved the way for President Clinton to award Gaylord Nelson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour that can be given to a US civilian for his role as Earth Day founder.
Earth Day Facts
On the 22nd of April each year Earth Day is celebrated around the world with more than 192 countries taking part in the celebrations and showing support. Here are some basic facts about Earth Day that will help you appreciate our planet, and the environment:
Earth Day was first organised in 1970 and celebrated on April 22 nd
It was founded by US Senator Gaylord Nelson
Earth Day Networks estimates that 500 million people from 4,500 organisations in 192 countries will participate in Earth Day events during the month of April
It originated in the US and became globally recognised in 1990
20 million people gathered in the street across America on the first Earth Day
Earth Day was renamed Mother Earth Day in 2009 by the UN
In 2011, 28 million trees were planted in Afghanistan by the Earth Day Network
In 2009 Disney Nature Films released a documentary for Earth Day called Earth; in 2014 they will release a new film called Bears
What You Can Do To Promote Earth Day
There are many ways that you can show support and celebrate Earth Day, so we have decided to share with you just a few of the ways that you can participate in the celebrations; we have also created a fantastic infographic that highlights some of the ways you can support Earth Day, every day!
Reduce waste by setting up a compost bin in your garden
Plant a tree
Volunteer your time to support the environment
Go paperless
Leave your car at home
Learn more about the environment
Buy eco friendly cleaning products
Wear green
Save energy, turn off lights etc when not in use
Got any more ideas? Let us know in the comments!Been waiting all week for this to arrive. I got the shipping last week, and have been patiently waiting for it to arrive at my door.
The box said think geek, so I knew it was going to be good. I pretty much want to buy the whole site, so I was got doubly excited before I even opened the box.
When I opened it, the Whovian inside me jumped for joy, and I immediately got it opened and laid out on my bed. Its super soft, and seems like it can warm pretty well. Its a great Tardis Throw Blanket.
Seems my Secret Santa knows how to buy gifts for a nerd. And as the weather here in the SF Bay Area has been considerably colder recently, not only does it look great, but it will definitely can keep me warmer at night (though probably not, since even in this subzero weather I am still pretty warm with a simple thin blanket)
So in 9th Doctor style: Fantastic!In the Keyboard and Mouse section of System Preferences there is a Keyboard shortcuts tab that allows you to assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item. This is great, but unfortunately it doesn’t work everywhere.
The main loss I notice is being unable to assign keyboard shortcuts to scripts in the scripts menu, which would actually solve the entire problem because you could just create scripts to replicate the functionality of any menu item that doesn't want to have a keyboard shortcut. Luckily you can use Quicksilver to assign keyboard shortcuts to AppleScripts. (or anything else). Listed below are 10 AppleScripts to perform lots of tasks that are much more convenient to do quickly with a keyboard shortcut.
Quicksilver is probably one of the most versatile applications for Mac OS X so I won't try and explain everything it does. For our purposes, we only need to use the "Triggers" part, which is accessible from the Quicksilver preferences. If you want to know more about Quicksilver check out the official "What is Quicksilver", or read through Dan Dickinson's "QuickSilver - A Better OS X In Just 10 Minutes".
For each of the AppleScripts below, this is the process you need to go through to assign a keyboard shortcut.
Open up AppleScript Editor (located in Applications/Utilities) and paste in the script. You can test it works by clicking Run. Save the script in the Scripts folder, located in the Library in your user folder. Open up the Triggers panel in Quicksilver (Command-' when quicksilver is visible). If you don't already have Quicksilver, you can download it for free from here. Click the plus (+) at the bottom, and choose HotKey from the menu to create a new trigger. Start typing the name of the script and it should appear in the box. Alternatively you can just drag it into the box from the Scripts folder. Click Save. Assign a keyboard shortcut by double-clicking on the trigger column, and typing the shortcut.
These are just the scripts that I could think of off the top of my head. If you have any others that work well with a keyboard shortcut please share them in the comments.
1. Turn AirPort on and off
The two separate scripts that you need to use are below. It's pretty obvious which is which. As explained above, paste each one into a script editor and save as "Airport Off" and "AirPort On" in the Scripts folder.
do shell script "networksetup -setairportpower off"
do shell script "networksetup -setairportpower on"
2. Run Time Machine backup now
do shell script "/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper & “
3. Eject All Disks
To eject all disk images, flash drives, external hard drives, CDs and DVDs (i.e. everything):
tell application "Finder" to eject ( every disk whose ejectable is true )
To ignore CDs and DVDs:
tell application "Finder" to eject ( disks where free space is not 0)
To ignore large drives (like a Time Machine backup). This is good to get rid of all the mounted disk images:
tell application "Finder" to eject ( every disk whose ejectable is true and local volume is true and physical size & lt; 1.0E+9)
4. Set colour labels in the Finder
You will need to create one script for each colour, and assign a different keyboard shortcut to each (or just the colours you use regularly). Command-Option-1, Command-Option-2 etc. might work well. The script works with multiple files selected too.
tell application "Finder" activate set selected to selection set colour to 2 repeat with n_file in every item in selected set label index of n_file to colour end repeat end tell
Replace the number in the fourth line with one of the following: 0 = No colour 1 = Orange 2 = Red 3 = Yellow 4 = Blue 5 = Purple 6 = Green 7 = Grey
5. Enable/Disable Growl Notifications
This page over at Mac OS X Hints has a great script for toggling Growl notifications on and off. Really useful for turning them off just before a presentation.
6. Go to Login Window
Quickly switch over to the login window without actually logging out. Works similarly to a "lock screen" shortcut.
do shell script "'/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession' -suspend"
7. Sync with MobileMe
do shell script "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DotMacSyncManager.framework/Versions/A/Resources/dotmacsyncclient sync"
8. Paste as plain text
This script just strips the formatting out of text in the clipboard. So you use Command-C to copy a load of formatted text, then Control-C (or whatever) to strip formatting, then Command-V to finally paste it.
do shell script "pbpaste | pbcopy"
9. Create a short URL
This script creates a short URL of the current page in Safari and copies it to the clipboard. Then all you need to do is paste into where you want it.
tell application "Safari" set bigURL to the URL in document 1 end tell set tinyURL to ( do shell script "curl --url \"http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?long_url=" & bigURL & "\" ") set the clipboard to tinyURL
10. The built in scripts
Most of the scripts that come with Mac OS X are pretty useless, but some are quite fun. They are all located in Macintosh HD/Library/Scripts. Here are the ones to look out for:Chemicals – not gasoline – is future, says Phillips 66
Phillips 66 Chairman and CEO Greg Garland speaks during the ground breaking ceremony for the new Phillips 66 corporate headquarters campus in Westchase area, the campus will feature twin 9 story buildings Houston Friday, Nov. 22, 2013, in Houston. ( James Nielsen / Houston Chronicle ) less Phillips 66 Chairman and CEO Greg Garland speaks during the ground breaking ceremony for the new Phillips 66 corporate headquarters campus in Westchase area, the campus will feature twin 9 story buildings... more Photo: James Nielsen, Staff Buy photo Photo: James Nielsen, Staff Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Chemicals – not gasoline – is future, says Phillips 66 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
The top two executives at Phillips 66 backed away from the gasoline business on Wednesday and said that pipelines and chemicals held more promise for the company.
"Today, if we look at the opportunities out there, we would tell you we see better value creation in the midstream and chemicals business," Phillips Chief Executive Greg Garland said after the company's annual shareholder meeting. "The Middle East and U.S. Gulf Coast are going to be the two best places in the world to make petrochemicals, long-term."
Gasoline demand is on a long slide downhill, Garland said, speaking alongside Phillips President Tim Taylor. The uptick in 2015, driven by cheap U.S. fuel and lots of driving, surprised the industry. But that won't last. Millenials are driving less. They're using ride-sharing companies like Uber more. Even the quintessential American truck, the Ford F-150, is getting better gas mileage. New F-150s, Garland said, are 20 percent more fuel efficient than those on the road today.
"In 10 years, if we're driving the same, we're going to see less need for transportation fuel," Garland said. "Given that as a backdrop, you don't want to invest in adding capacity in a declining market."
Growing gasoline demand in South America, Latin America and Mexico will more than offset the decline in the U.S. market, Garland said. But the U.S. shale revolution has unleashed a vast supply of natural gas, a building block for petrochemicals. And the U.S. can produce natural gas at some of the cheapest costs in the world.
"If you think about petrochemicals — take polyethylene for example," Garland said. "Something between 80 and 90 percent of your cost structure is around feedstock and energy. If you get that part of the equation right, you can compete with anybody, any place in the world."
In addition, the Gulf ports allow companies like Phillips to ship petrochemical products, like plastic pellets, all over the world.
"The trade we have makes the U.S. a very viable world export platform," Taylor said. "And that's where the competitive advantage comes from."Over the past decade, however, growing evidence suggests that certain biological systems might employ quantum mechanics. In photosynthesis, for example, quantum effects help plants turn sunlight into fuel. Scientists have also proposed that migratory birds have a “quantum compass” enabling them to exploit Earth’s magnetic fields for navigation, or that the human sense of smell could be rooted in quantum mechanics.
Fisher’s notion of quantum processing in the brain broadly fits into this emerging field of quantum biology. Call it quantum neuroscience. He has developed a complicated hypothesis, incorporating nuclear and quantum physics, organic chemistry, neuroscience and biology. While his ideas have met with plenty of justifiable skepticism, some researchers are starting to pay attention. “Those who read his paper (as I hope many will) are bound to conclude: This old guy’s not so crazy,” wrote John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, after Fisher gave a talk there. “He may be on to something. At least he’s raising some very interesting questions.”
Senthil Todadri, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Fisher’s longtime friend and colleague, is skeptical, but he thinks that Fisher has rephrased the central question—is quantum processing happening in the brain?—in such a way that it lays out a road map to test the hypothesis rigorously. “The general assumption has been that of course there is no quantum information processing that’s possible in the brain,” Todadri said. “He makes the case that there’s precisely one loophole. So the next step is to see if that loophole can be closed.” Indeed, Fisher has begun to bring together a team to do laboratory tests to answer this question once and for all.
* * *
Fisher belongs to something of a physics dynasty: His father, Michael E. Fisher, is a prominent physicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, whose work in statistical physics has garnered numerous honors and awards over the course of his career. His brother, Daniel Fisher, is an applied physicist at Stanford University who specializes in evolutionary dynamics. Matthew Fisher has followed in their footsteps, carving out a highly successful physics career. He shared the prestigious Oliver E. Buckley Prize in 2015 for his research on quantum phase transitions.
So what drove him to move away from mainstream physics and toward the controversial and notoriously messy interface of biology, chemistry, neuroscience and quantum physics? His own struggles with clinical depression.
Fisher vividly remembers that February 1986 day when he woke up feeling numb and jet-lagged, as if he hadn’t slept in a week. “I felt like I had been drugged,” he said. Extra sleep didn’t help. Adjusting his diet and exercise regime proved futile, and blood tests showed nothing amiss. But his condition persisted for two full years. “It felt like a migraine headache over my entire body every waking minute,” he said. It got so bad he contemplated suicide, although the birth of his first daughter gave him a reason to keep fighting through the fog of depression.MythBusters is the best. It’s the most talked about show here at PressureWashr.
The past 3 Friday afternoons we spent drinking beer doing nothing but MythBusters research for the infographic you see below.
We looked at info on 1,000+ myths and found 44 that were water related. Here are the 21 best in infographic form.
Want to share this infographic on your site? Feel free by using this code or just share this page (https://pressurewashr.com/mythbusters-infographic/) on your Twitter…
<p><strong>Please include attribution to PressureWashr.com with this graphic.</strong></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
<p><a href=’https://pressurewashr.com/mythbusters-infographic/’><img src=’http://cdn.pressurewashr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/MythBusters-Infographic-21-Best-Water-Myths.jpg’ alt=’21 Best Water Myths Mythbusters Infographic’ width=’595px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br />
Falling Into Water
1. A person who falls into water from high enough will sustain the same injuries as if he/she had landed on pavement.
Result: Busted
What Happened? No matter what height Buster was dropped from, or if it was feet first or belly flop, the accelerometers indicated much higher g’s landing on pavement.
2. A high fall over water can be survived by throwing a hammer ahead of oneself to break the surface tension.
Result: Busted
What Happened? The hammer reduced the impact force only slightly, Buster’s measurements still indicated death.
Using Water
Around The Home
3. Dipping a sleeping person’s hand in a bowl of warm water will cause him or her to wet the bed.
Result: Busted
What Happened? Crew member Matt Cordova had his hand in the water for 5 minutes while in deep sleep and did not wet the bed.
4. Water boiled in a microwave oven will kill plants if used to water them.
Result: Busted
What Happened? Romaine lettuce plants were set up and given tap water, oven boiled water and microwaved water for 1 week. The microwaved water plant had grown larger than the others.
Explosions
5. A water heater can explode like a rocket and shoot through the roof of a house.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? A 52-gallon (200 L) water heater had its safety features disabled so they could increase the PSI inside the tank until it blew. They then built a shack with a roof that adhered to California building codes. When the water heater exploded at 315 PSI it shot through the roof and 500 ft (150 m) high.
6. Alkali metals dropped into a bathtub filled with water will create a huge explosion comparable to a hand grenade.
Result: Busted
What Happened? Various amounts of rubidium, cesium, sodium and potassium were dropped into a toilet and bathtub. Using 5.5 pounds (2.5 kg) of each was enough to see violent reactions but it only caused the bathtub to crack. Not comparable to a hand grenade.
Water Stun Gun
7. It is possible to create a water-powered stun gun.
Result: Busted
What Happened? After testing different commercial water guns they found none could create a reliable steady stream to conduct the electricity. They also found even if there was a steady stream the voltage dropped significantly over a few feet.
On the Water Surface
What Can Machines Do
8. A motorcycle moving at freeway speed can ride across the surface of a lake.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? Supercross veteran Eric McCrummen rode across 50 ft (15 m) and 100 ft (30 m) stretches of 3 ft (0.9 m) deep water. In deeper water the motorcycle sank after 300 ft (91m).
9. A speedboat jumping off a ramp and flying through the air can survive the landing and continue driving (Based on scene from James Bond Live and Let Die).
Result: Plausible
What Happened? Boat was fitted out to be controlled remotely and driven at the ramp at 45 mph (72 km/h). Despite hitting the ramp at an angle and flipping, the boat still cleared the car underneath the ramp and had minimal damage.
10. A sailboat stranded in calm water can move forward by using an onboard fan to blow air into the sail.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? The full-scale test was on a lake using a swamp boat and 40 hp fan. With the fan facing the sail the boat travelled forward at 3 mph (5 km/h).
What Can People Do
11. A person can waterski behind a full-sized cruise ship.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? Tory opted to wakeboard instead of waterski. They attached a tow rope to the MS Regal Empress and Tory successfully transferred from a tow rope behind a boat to the tow rope behind the cruise ship on his second try and wakeboarded behind it.
12. A rowing eight can pull a water skier at sufficient speed for the skier to stay upright.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? Jamie was able to stay upright for over 40 seconds.
13. It is possible to run across the surface of a body of water through a combination of footwear and running technique.
Result: Busted
What Happened? No combination of footwear or speed allowed them to stay afloat. Olympic sprinter Wallace Spearmon and trained acrobat and gymnast Jessica Fortunato were even brought in to try.
Underwater
Survival
14. If a car falls into the water and becomes fully submerged, the door cannot be opened until the interior is flooded.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? Adam was easily able to open the door immediately after hitting the water. He could just barely open the door when the water was up to his waist. Once the water got up to the car window he had to wait until the interior was flooded to open it.
15. It is more difficult to escape from a sinking car that flips upside down than from one that remains right-side up.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? Adam was again in the drivers seat. Once the car hit the water it flipped and did a few more half turns. Adam had to wait till the car filled with water to escape. He had to use the emergency air supply. Because of the disorientation the myth was confirmed.
16. A person can stay underwater for an extended period of time by breathing the air from a car tire.
Result: Busted
What Happened? Adam sat inside a car until it sank then exited and cut a hole in the tire to try and breathe the exiting air. He could not get enough air and had to use the emergency air tank.
17. A person can increase his chances of surviving an underwater explosion by floating on his back at the surface.
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? A 10 lb (5 kg) charge of TNT was detonated at a depth of 15 ft (5 m). Pressure sensors were fitted on a pole at different heights including one at the surface. The TNT was detonated at 30, 70 and 150 ft (9, 21, 46m) from the sensors. They found that a person on the surface would survive at all distances the TNT was detonated.
18. Diving underwater can protect you from an explosion.
Result: Plausible
What Happened? Rupture discs were set up at varying distances and heights / depths. 50 pounds (23 kg) of gasoline, ammonium nitrate and dynamite were detonated. The ammonium nitrate ruptured every single disc. The gasoline ruptured the closest disc above water only. The dynamite ruptured all the discs except the ones farthest and under water. Myth plausible depending on explosive.
Guns
19. Hiding underwater can stop a person from being hit by bullets.
Result: Plausible
What Happened? This myth was deemed plausible because it depends how deep you hide underwater. Firing straight down into water supersonic bullets up to.50 caliber disintegrated within 3 ft (0.9 m). Pistol rounds which are slower required 8 ft (2.4 m) to slow to non-lethal. Shotgun slugs required more than 8 ft to slow to non-lethal. In real-life situation gun would be fired at angle to water and distance to reach non-lethal would be much less than tested.
Fun Stuff
20. It is impossible to ride a bike underwater.
Result: Busted
What Happened? Adam was easily able to ride a bike in the shallow end with his upper body out of the water. In the deep end with weights fitted to bike and bike rider they could ride the bikes on flat and downhill but not uphill underwater as they lost traction.
21. A scuba diver can wear a tuxedo underneath his drysuit, go underwater, resurface, strip off his scuba gear, and be able to present the tuxedo perfectly (From James Bond Goldfinger).
Result: Confirmed
What Happened? Jamie put on a drysuit over his tuxedo and did a 40 minute scuba dive while Adam boarded a boat in his tux. After boarding and removing the drysuit, Jamie and Adam were compared and both were found to be presentable condition for a party.
SourcesQuick, who’s the pitcher with the best fWAR in all of MLB this season? If you said Cleveland’s Corey Kluber, you’ve probably been doing your homework. Some of you may have also said, “Who the hell is Corey Kluber?” If you’re part of the second group, welcome to the homework. And while we’re here, I’ll throw another name at both groups; Jose Quintana.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the new pitching conversation in the AL Central. When you think about starting pitching in the Central, you think about names like Verlander, Scherzer, Sanchez, Shields and Sale. Yet who’s been more valuable in terms of fWAR than pitchers such as Madison Bummgarner, Sonny Gray and Zack Grienke? Why Jose Quintana of the Chicago White Sox, of course. Quintana also has a better WHIP than the mighty Verlander, who has been absolutely shelled over his past few starts.
What exactly makes these two so good? Well for Kluber it’s strikeouts. Kluber sits in fifth place in all of baseball in terms of K/9, with a mark of 10.28. He sits behind, in ascending order, Yu Darvish, Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg and the injured Jose Fernandez. That’s pretty good company. He’s also walking 2.11 batters per nine innings, and has a total WHIP of 1.27. That seems a bit high, no? Well part of that is he pitches in front of one of the worst defenses in all of baseball, as evidenced by the huge.350 BABIP that opposing hitters can lay claim to. So according to FIP (fielding independent pitching) and xFIP (modified FIP with tweaked home run expectancy), Kluber’s 3.10 ERA should look a bit more like 2.22 (FIP) or 2.70 (xFIP). That’s more what you would expect from someone who has Kluber’s strikeout numbers.
Quintana isn’t on the level that Kluber has been pitching at, but he’s been a model of consistency ever since he came up in 2012. Here are Quintana’s ERAs by season from then to now: 3.76, 3.51 and 3.61. He’s actually underperforming his FIP and xFIP this year, with respective marks of 3.02 and 3.37. So why haven’t we heard of this guy, who’s a very strong #2 to Chris Sale?
Well, mostly because he doesn’t win a whole lot of games. Despite pitching a full season’s worth of games last year (33 starts), Quintana only went 9-7. That’s a TON of no-decisions; pitchers with ERAs that good almost always find themselves with double digit wins. In fact, Quintana lead baseball with 17 no-decisions last year, mostly due to a lack of run support from last year’s anemic White Sox offense. And while the Sox currently rank third in the sport in runs scored, Quintana still finds himself on the ugly end of.500 with a 3-4 record.
It’s things like this that make the way we look at baseball so outdated. Quintana is clearly a fine pitcher, yet because his win-loss total isn’t anything to write home about, Quintana doesn’t get a ton of recognition by the fans or larger sports outlets. I don’t like to use fantasy as a method of talking about players from an analytical standpoint, but for Quintana it’s an excellent barometer of fan appreciation.
I play in an ESPN league, one of the more popular formats. I’m one of just the 9.2% to own Quintana. He was one of my final selections in my 14-team draft, and when I discovered he was still available I was shocked. How could someone so good fall so far in the draft? Quintana was actually one of the players I had in mind as a sleeper pick coming into the draft (one of the others, Brian Dozier, seems to have panned out well enough) but even the pre-draft rankings seemed to just not care about him.
Corey Kluber was another one of those guys I thought about grabbing. The Indians have been horrible this year, no question. Yet Kluber’s 5-3 record, while over.500, is still rather unfair to him. He took a loss in his first start, arguably one he really deserved. In his third start, he went 7.1 innings while only allowing two earned runs. On May 4th, he went eight innings and gave up only one earned run, and settled for another no-decision.
It’s truly shameful how much weight is thrown into wins and losses. Jeff Samrardzija owns an ERA under 2, and |
many builders was a young entrepreneur named Louis Davenport, who opened a new waffle restaurant from which a world-renowned hotel would someday grow.
Another, known as Dutch Jake, opened a beer garden and gambling emporium in a 150-by-50-foot tent capable, according to some accounts, of holding 1,000 people.
The Spokane Daily Chronicle cranked out newspapers from a tent, not missing an edition.
City leaders laid plans for a more effective fire department.
A brand-new company known as Washington Water Power began work on a downtown hydroelectric plant, stringing wires through the recovering city and launching an electric-powered streetcar system.
In the 900 block of West Riverside the newly built Crescent dry goods store had scheduled a grand opening for Aug. 5, 1889 – and escaped the flames. When its doors opened the morning after the fire, the store sold everything on the shelves – and remained a popular Spokane institution for a century.
The fire that triggered the transformation was itself quite a drama.
According to newspaper archives, it began in a rooming house near the current location of the Davenport Hotel’s parking garage. Flames shot from a window. Volunteers ran to the scene with hand-drawn firefighting carts. At first, bystanders declared that a few buckets of water should do the job.
But the onlookers soon noticed firefighters racing around in panic, their hoses spouting an inadequate dribble. Water mains held no pressure. The superintendent of the city water works was on vacation, and his frantic replacement could not restore the flow. The water mains, investigators found later, had sprung a large and untimely leak.
Flames spread from building to building. Kegs of gunpowder exploded, flinging one roof high into the air. Soon, firefighters blew up buildings deliberately, hoping to stop the conflagration’s spread.
The Spokane Falls Review described the disaster in its Aug. 6, 1889, edition:
“The terrifying shrieks of a dozen locomotives commingled with the roar of the flames, the bursting of cartridges, the booming of (gun) powder, the hoarse shouts of men, and the piteous shrieks of women and children. Looking upward a broad and mighty river of flame seemed lined against the jet-black sky. Occasionally the two opposing currents of wind would meet, creating a roaring whirlwind of fire that seemed to penetrate the clouds as a ponderous screw, while lesser whirlwinds danced around its base, performing all sorts of fantastic gyrations. … In this manner the appalling monster held high carnival until about 10 o’clock, when with a mighty crash the Howard Street bridge over the Spokane River went down.”
“All the banks, all the hotels, the post office, the land office, all the large business houses” were destroyed, the Review reported.
Thirty-two blocks lay in ruins. Only one man died – leaping in his nightshirt from the window of his burning hotel.
Over the city’s two remaining bridges, at Washington Street and Post Street, “a terrified and motley stream of homeless people passed, seeking shelter under the pine trees and relief from the smoke and din of the ruins,” the newspaper reported.
“They were not heavily burdened, for there were few downtown dwellers who had time to save anything of value. Some had blankets, others pillows and few carried bundles on their backs, but most of them were scantily attired and bankrupt of all personal effects. Among these latter were many theatrical and ‘sporting’ people (a euphemism for gamblers, drinkers and prostitutes), who were in great distress, for they lost not only all they possessed, but their means of earning a livelihood was gone.”
It was Tom McArthur, public affairs director at the Spokane Association of Realtors, who hatched the idea for Friday’s Twitter re-enactment. He said he called some of his historian pals last week and asked, “Wouldn’t it be neat to use a modern communications tool to tell this old story?” They jumped at the chance.
At the planning session Thursday afternoon, the historians chuckled over a thought that Friday’s tweets could make people think Spokane was on fire again. “We don’t want another ‘War of the Worlds,’” joked Cebula, recalling the 1938 radio broadcast about an invasion from Mars. And so it was that the committee drafted a warning: “This museum will be live tweeting the great fire of 1889. Do not be alarmed. Have a nice day. #GreatFire1889”In April, an appeals court in California upheld the state’s laws regarding teacher tenure, dismissal and layoffs by overturning a lower court’s earlier decision to scrap job-protection statutes in the highly publicized Vergara v. California case. The plaintiffs in Vergara were public school students backed by a school reform advocacy group called Students Matter, and they claimed that job protection laws for teachers are the reason that poor and minority children wind up with more ineffective teachers who are hard to fire. The court found that “the evidence did not show that the challenged statutes inevitably cause” the impact the plaintiffs claimed. Reform and anti-union activists have promised to continue the legal fight against teacher job protection laws that they say work against students.
[California appeals court upholds teacher tenure, a major victory for unions]
Such legal challenges are just part of what many teachers consider to be a war on their profession by school reformers and policymakers who have attempted to “disrupt” public education with systems and programs that educators think rob them of their professionalism and hurt the learning process.
Teachers unions again made national news this week when the Supreme Court denied a petition from plaintiffs in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association to rehear the case. A group of California teachers had challenged a law that they said violates their First Amendment rights by requiring them to pay dues to the state’s teachers union. California is one of about 20 states in which public employees are required to either join the union or pay a fee to support the union’s collective-bargaining activities — which support all workers, whether or not they are union members.
With this decision, it seems to be a good time to look again at how teachers are faring. Here’s a post about how and why teachers have become scapegoats for problems in public education and what should be done to change the dynamic. It was written by Alexander W. Wiseman, associate professor and director of the Comparative and International Education (CIE) program at Lehigh University’s College of Education. He has more than 20 years of professional experience working with government education departments, university-based teacher education programs, community-based professional development for teachers and as a classroom teacher in both the United States and East Asia.
By Alexander W. Wiseman
Recent U.S. education reform efforts — such as the Vergara vs. California lawsuit filed on behalf of nine students and similar suits in Minnesota and New York — point to teacher job protections negotiated by unions as a root cause of a troubling reality: unequal access to high-quality education. But this is at the least a distraction and at the most a purposeful misdirection of attention from the real problem.
Critics argue that the rules governing the hiring and firing of teachers, such as tenure, have the unintended consequence of burdening the most economically disadvantaged schools with the least effective or prepared teachers, thereby providing a sub-par education to the very students who need public education the most.
It does not take an expert to spot the absurdity of blaming the unequal distribution of highly effective teachers for the fundamental inequalities that pervade American society. Unequal access — to education, to jobs, to bathrooms, for goodness sake — because of one’s race, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, geography or nationality pervades our society. The damage inflicted on our young people as a result of these inequities vastly outweighs the ill effects of a handful of bad teachers.
Teachers are such easy scapegoats. Having worked in and with education systems in the United States, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Germany, I can confidently declare teacher shaming to be a worldwide phenomenon. In this country, myths depicting teachers as either lazy clock-punchers or rousing saviors — chronicled recently in a New York Times article, “Why teachers on TV have to be either incompetent or inspiring” — only serve to perpetuate the idea that if a kid fails to learn, his teacher is wholly to blame.
The high-profile lawsuits in California, Minnesota and New York have raised two important questions:
One, how much responsibility for unequal education can be reasonably laid at the feet of public schools and teachers — and how much belongs to the broader community for failing to dismantle persistent and durable barriers to equal opportunity such as poverty, systemic racism and income inequality?
Two, is the way we currently measure teacher quality helpful, or even accurate?
Given pursuits such as the Vergara trial, it seems clear that the balance between a school’s responsibility and the community’s is currently too heavily weighted in the school’s direction. When it comes to addressing the challenges we face as a nation, access to high quality education must be a part of the solution — but it cannot be the whole package.
For example, access to a good education is not going to make up for the fact that mom and dad lack jobs or that their full-time jobs do not pay enough to keep the family clothed, housed, healthy, and fed. The highest-quality teachers in the world do not have the power to lift an individual student out of poverty if the country’s system of wealth distribution is rigged against her. Teachers and public schools are not equipped to end the systemic racism that underlies the fact that five times more young black men are shot dead by U.S. police than young white men and that one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. There are some problems in the community that cannot be surmounted by education alone, yet education and teachers are persistently portrayed as a panacea for all of society’s ills.
Collectively, we are failing to accurately measure teacher quality and, thus, failing to help teachers succeed. The current discourse on teacher quality focuses disproportionately on teachers’ influence on students’ test scores. Test scores are only one piece of the larger picture of teacher and student success. Positive changes in a student’s attitude toward a subject, as well as increased confidence, is linked with improved academic success and must be included in any assessment of teaching quality.
Context also plays an important role in a teacher’s craft and is rarely considered. What are teachers doing in the classroom? How are they teaching? Are they simply babysitting or are they helping their students to engage the curriculum? And, are they modifying it for the students depending on their needs?
In addition, a teacher’s background — socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, race, level of education, whether they are teaching in the field in which they are trained — as well as the backgrounds of his or her students come into play. Incorporating some of these factors into teacher evaluations would not only allow for a more complete assessment of a teacher’s quality than test scores alone, it would also provide a professional development road map by which to help teachers training and improvement.
If we want highly effective teachers in every classroom, we must re-balance the scales, admit that teachers and schools can bear only so much of the responsibility for unequal access to education, and accept that some of the fault is in our collective failure to provide equal opportunity.
For U.S. education to live up to its promise as “the greater equalizer,” we must abolish outdated ideas that teachers are either incompetent or Jaime Escalante. Developing an evaluation system focused on helping teachers succeed is one way to start.
SaveCanonical and Mark Shuttleworth proudly announced a few minutes ago that the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system will have support for gestures, with multi-touch. This is possible via Ubuntu's uTouch 1.0 gesture and multi-touch stack.
Now that the new Ubuntu installer has been released, it is time for another breathtaking feature to take the spotlight. Both developers and end-users will benefit from an end-to-end touch-screen framework in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system.
With Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) various GTK applications will receive gesture-based scrolling support. Moreover, Evince, Ubuntu's document viewer, will be enhanced by Canonical to support richer interactions.
Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition will also feature a gesture-enabled Unity interface. Therefore, users with multi-touch pads or touch screens will get superior window management at their fingertips!
"You’ll need 4-finger touch or better to get the most out of it, and we’re currently targeting the Dell XT2 as a development environment so the lucky folks with that machine will get the best results today."
"By release, we expect you’ll be able to use it with a range of devices from major manufacturers, and with addons like Apple’s Magic Trackpad." - said Mark Shuttleworth on his personal blog.
For the new multi-touch technology, Canonical worked closely with the X.Org and Linux kernel communities, in order to add support for missing features or improve exiting drivers.
"It would be awesome to have touch-aware versions of all the major apps – browser, email, file management, chat, photo management and media playback – for 11.04, but that depends on you!" - said Mark Shuttleworth.
If you want to get involved, then you should know that Canonical's Multitouch code is published on Launchpad and it's released under the LGPLv3 and GPLv3 licenses.
Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) will be released in October 10th, 2010. It will be the 13th release of Ubuntu.
Don't forget to check our website regularly for more news about the upcoming features of Ubuntu 10.10.Share:
ISLAMABAD: Following intelligence reports, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on Sunday issued a security alert, warning of terrorist plan to attack Dir and Chitral.
The letter alleges that two terrorist groups comprising four to six snipers, trained by Indian intelligence agency Research Analysis Wing (RAW), have been launched by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan to carry out attacks in Dir and Chitral.
Aviation Security Senior Joint Director Anjum Raza issued the security alert which was sent to all relevant departments.
The letter says terrorists were trained at a RAW camp in Mazar-e-Sharif Afghanistan and they have already reached the bordering areas of Dir and Chitral.
Pakistan Army launched Zarb-e-Azb military offensive in June 2014 in a bid to wipe out militant bases in northwestern tribal areas and to bring an end to a bloody insurgency that has cost thousands of civilian lives since 2004.
Violence has declined in recent years following a series of military operations in volatile areas as well as concerted efforts to block the militants’ sources of funding.
But the remnants of militant groups are still able to carry out periodic attacks, particularly in the northwest.
According to data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal, 457 civilians and 182 members of the security forces were killed in Pakistan from January 1 to September 11, putting 2016 on course to fewer casualties than 2015.The Miami Hurricanes had a total of nine players drafted in the NFL Draft this weekend, which is the third most of any school behind Michigan and Alabama. The last time Miami had nine players drafted was in 2006. Below are the players drafted and who they went to.
David Njoku – TE – first round Cleveland Browns 29th overall
Rayshwan Jenkins – S – fourth round Los Angeles Chargers 113th overall
Corn Elder – CB – fifth round Carolina Panthers 152nd overall
Danny Isidora – OG – fifth round Minnesota Vikings 180th overall
Al-Quadin Muhammad DE- sixth round New Orleans Saints 196th overall
Brad Kaaya QB –sixth round Detroit Lions 215th overall
Stacey Coley WR – seventh round Minnesota Vikings 219th overall
Adrian Colbert CB – seventh round San Francisco 49ers 229th overall
Marquez Williams FB – seventh round Jacksonville Jaguars 240th overall
Obviously the biggest surprise was the fall of Brad Kaaya to the sixth round. That said he still got drafted and how it will be up to him to prove all the teams that needed a QB wrong. He’s also the first Miami QB to be drafted since Ken Dorsey in 2003 who was drafted in the seventh round. He the highest Miami QB drafted since Craig Erickson went in the fourth round in 1992. You did read that correctly.
Several former Miami players who didn’t get drafted got picked up as free agents.
Jamal Carter S – Denver Broncos
Jermain Grace LB – Atlanta Falcons
Justin Vogel P – Green Bay Packers
Malcolm Lewis WR – Miami Dolphins
Stan Dobard TE – Seattle Seahawks
Joseph Yearby who skipped his senior season wasn’t drafted and has yet be signed by a team as a free agentMyles Certified non-Kosher
Join Date: Aug 2006 Posts: 2,323 Blog Entries: 2
Jews Behind Obscene & Degenerate Rap and Hip-Hop A lengthy but exceedingly informative article revealing the true orchestrators of the abomination known as rap music. Note the surprisingly candid admissions of Jewish power as well as the unmistakable disdain for Whites. Most importantly, it's all straight from the horse's mouth. An absolute must-read.
**************
Jews Control Hip-Hop
All About the Benjamins (from the March 2004 edition of the Jewish magazine Heeb)
About two years ago, Jonathan Wolfson, a self-described neurotic Jew from Rockland County, New York entered Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, Calif., forty-five minutes outside Sacramento. It was Wolfsons first time in any penitentiary, let alone a Level 4 maximum-security penitentiary. The 30-year-old publicist was there to pitch a client. Wolfson sat in a visiting room as the imposing figure of Suge Knight, the controversial CEO of Tha Row Records (formerly Death Row), came out to sit in front of him. Basically, Wolfson recalls, I said that Tha Row hadnt had anyone handling their PR in a long time, and that there was going to be a media frenzy upon Suges release. I threw some numbers at him, and we talked about working together. Within the first few minutes of their meeting, Knight asked Wolfson about his background. I told him Im Jewish, Wolfson says. He chuckled and said, Yeah, me too. I joked, Yeah, you look it. He said, Seriously, I have a lot of respect for Jews. They came to this country with nothing, they lived in their own communities and had their businesses and supported each other and built themselves up. He wanted me to know he had respect. Since then, whatever one thinks of Knight's motives, he and Wolfsons work together at Tha Row has been what Wolfson describes as a roller coaster, but they get along well, and have a productive, personable relationship.
Considering Jews in hip-hop is kind of like finding a stoop sale with a couple of interesting eye-catchers on the sidewalk, and a trove of far more significant treasures further up the stairs. The eye-catchers are the usual suspects-- the Beastie Boys, Remedy of the Wu-Tang Clan, Blood of Abraham, Paul Barman-- MCs whose skills vary and whose Jewishness defies the hip-hop norm. But, their presence on wax is nothing compared to what goes on behind the scenes. Indeed, some of the biggest names in the business are Jewish-- Lyor Cohen of Def Jam, Steve Rifkind of Loud Records, David Mays of The Source-- to say nothing of those who course throughout the industry as label executives, entertainment lawyers, agents, publicists, producers, clothiers, and jewelers. An inquiry to one inevitably references five more: Oh, have you talked to Gottleib at FUBU? Or Sonenberg who handles Wyclef? The Jewish presence in hip-hop is huge, and, for the most part, offstage.
From block parties to the height of pop culture, hip-hops 20-year ascension has been remarkable for its speed, adaptability, and broad appeal. It has exploded into a global phenomenon with enormous social implications and an economic tsunami with infinite marketing possibilities. Likewise, the cultural input into hip-hop has become dizzying. Japanese kids with perfectly coiffed dreadlocks breakdance to lyrics they dont understand. Jay-Z raps for peace over a Punjabi beat. Jamie Kennedy gets such shine from portraying a corny rapper named Gluckman that he finds himself at nightclubs with real rappers named Lil Kim and Fabolous. Kids from all backgrounds feel the film Ï8 Mile-- the money shot of which has a white kid defeating a black kid in a battle by outing him for his bourgie-ness. In this climate, it makes sense that Jews are up in the mix, with a role that can perhaps only be discussed, not decoded.
Paul Rosenberg is a giant in the industry. Both figuratively-- hes Eminems manager, president of Goliath Records, and vice president of Shady Records, to which both Eminem and 50 Cent are signed-- and literally: hes 6 feet 5 inches tall, and 300 pounds. Like Eminem, Rosenberg is from the Detroit area, although from the suburbs rather than the city. People werent checking for hip-hop back then in the suburbs like they are now, he says. During his senior year of high school and freshman year of college, Rosenberg began rapping, going by the name MC Paul Bunyan in a group called Rhythm Cartel that played Detroits few hip-hop venues. After a couple years of moving back and forth between the classroom and the stage, he chose to go to law school rather than pursue a career as a rapper. When asked why, he jokes that being Jewish, he had to. He quickly rescinds the joke, and speaks in earnest about his educational goals. Im struck by his change in career path and the implications that came from it. Rosenberg was-- and is-- extremely passionate about hip-hop, and he certainly had the desire to be a rapper. But he somehow ended up a contributor to the musics framework more than the music itself.
The very idea of the machinations of Jews behind the scenes is a topic of historical controversy and itinerant conspiracy theories. There is a well-documented legacy-- painful on both sides-- of Jewish involvement in black music. From the early days of jazz and blues through rock and roll until now, there have been accusations of Jewish executives like Morris Levy and Herman Lubinsky exploiting black talent. In an upcoming documentary produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Marc Levin, Alfred Chess passionately defends his father and uncle from such charges. The history of black performers being denied musical credit and proper financial remuneration is an injustice in itself, as well as a reminder of so many other facets of racism. Hip-hop is a different game though. To posit that its contractual dynamics are the same as its musical predecessors is to deny the savvy of black artists and executives; to underestimate the real musical passion of Jews in the industry; and to ignore some of the most egregious examples of abuse (no one, for example, has ever accused a Jew of hanging a rapper out the window by his ankles until he signed over his publishing rights). It is to neglect the changing social climate, the real melting pot that has led more young whites, Jewish and not, to know black people not as an unfamiliar other, but just as the peers with whom they grew up. And most importantly, it denies that the music industry is intrinsically set up to exploit artists, regardless of who they are.
Amid the paraphernalia in entertainment lawyer Michael Selverne s impressive corner office, are two huge photos taken by his wife of an old Jewish couple, opposite a blown-up Rolling Stone cover autographed by the Fugees, (Mike, keep making us that money). Selverne argues that animosity between artists and labels is structural rather than ethnic. The basic model used by all record companies creates a misalignment of interests, he explains. In our industry, the label invests money, and once that money is repaid, the label continues to own the product, the business, the rights, the right to control the trade name and brand, etc. This is true in artists agreements, joint ventures, and label deals. Its part of why they dont work. The brand is serving two masters, whose economic agendas are not the same. This misalignment of interests promotes the dysfunctional, often adversarial nature of artist-label relations. Or, as Q-Tip put it succinctly in the song, Check The Rhime: Industry rule 4,080/Record company people are shady.
Selverne argues for smaller labels that take more time to cultivate artists and move away from the hit single-driven paradigm that makes todays rap stars so disposable. Tru Criminal Records is such a label. It was started in the early 90s by Lee Resnick, a 29-year-old Jewish kid from Long Island. Like Paul Rosenberg, Resnick-- known in the industry as Skill-- started out as a rapper. At 17, he got a deal with Geffen from which he was quickly dropped. I wasnt good enough, he says. But I knew that I could tell what was. After college, he ran through a couple of internships and had a very Jewish revelation: that he didnt want to work for anyone else. He took $5,000 of his bar mitzvah savings, his partner did the same, and they started Tru Criminal. The label matched up new artists in whom Resnick saw potential with established producers, and a few of their early records made some noise, including Heavy Metal Things featuring Pharoah Monche. Resnick rolled all the profits back into the company and lived at home to save money. All my friends moved to the city, were getting laid, and I couldnt even take a girl home because I was living with my parents, he says. Now the tables have turned. I own my place in Manhattan. Im more financially stable than most of them. And best of all, I dont have to wear a suit.
When I met Skill, he most definitely wasnt wearing a suit. He told me Id recognize him because he looks like MC Serch without glasses. His is the paradigmatic aesthetic of the young Jew in hip-hop-- the oversized sports wear, the close-cropped hair shaved to a suede-like terrain, a modified pimp roll, and an easy way with slang. The term suedehead to describe this aesthetic was introduced to me by Larry Zimmer, president of the Johnny Blaze clothing line, when I ran into Skill in Zimmers office a couple days after wed met. Zimmer is a Jewish hip-hop icon of another type. In his fifties with longish hair and an open collar, he chain smokes Bel-Airs and is more likely to dip into Yiddish than street slang. Like other Jews who produce hip-hop fashion at companies like FUBU, Phat Farm, and Lugz, Zimmer and his ilk are basically old-time schmatte salesmen who now deal in baggy jeans and retro-sports jerseys. He sees his work as part of a cultural tradition. Jews have always been in the garment business, he declares. I think if you go back to our European origins, we all had to have a trade, and Jews had a flair for clothes. When Zimmer started Johnny Blaze in 1997, he was more into Bob Seger and Chicago than Wu-Tang and Lauryn Hill, but like all good businessmen, he had his ear to the ground (or, in this case, BET). I was in young menswear, and whether I liked the music or not, I saw that this is where the business was going. Since then, Zimmer says he has come to enjoy and embrace the music. He especially likes DMX and P-Diddy, and can talk about what styles the kids are going to feel with surprising authority.
Indeed, it is the business of the fashion world to know how trends unfold, and it is acknowledged that embracing urban youth is the best way to market to kids worldwide. Larry Schwartz is the CEO of Lugz, a company that has cooled off since its heyday in the 90s, but was then near-ubiquitous in the hip-hop world, having been endorsed by such rap icons as Funkmaster Flex, Rakim, Snoop and EPMD. Schwartz grandfather had a shoe business on Duane Street in lower Manhattan. On the wall of Schwartz SoHo office hangs the old sign that adorned his grandfathers store, and on his desk sits a signed picture of KRS-ONE (To Larry, you are hip-hop). Schwartz marries a concern for the issues facing urban youth with a near-scientific understanding of fashions paths. A new trend starts with a group of kids in New York, goes down to Philly, Baltimore and DC, he says confidently. Once it gets to Atlanta, itll go throughout the South, and at the same time jump across to Chicago and to Oakland and then San Francisco. While the trend moves down the coast, it will also go down the I-80 corridor. And then of course, to Tokyo, Paris, Dusseldorf, and so forth.
There is an obvious difference between guys like Zimmer and Schwartz, who are businessmen embracing a market, and guys like Rosenberg and Skill, who have been personally immersed in hip-hop culture for most of their lives. But they all have an optimistic view of intercultural relations as it pertains to their work. Zimmer gushes about what he sees uniting them. "Jews, Italians and blacks were the only ones to step up [to the hip-hop market]," he says. The WASPs were sailing with Biffy on Sundays-- they dont give a shit about us. Were passionate people. Well grab a brother, grab a good friend, hug him and kiss him. If youre a passionate person, you work best around other passionate people.
Schwartz is more circumspect about his relationship with the hip-hop community. For him, its more about respect than commonality. Sensitivity towards the culture to which he markets is both a moral choice and a marketing decision. Weve been fair and honest in our dealings and respectful of the culture, he says. Thats how wed do it anyway, but since its a culture thats not our own, we go the extra mile to understand it. When you make mistakes, you show youre not down.
Rosenberg and Skill, with their rapping backgrounds and easy socialization with hip-hop heads of all colors, are more reflexive with their race- and religion-blindness. I think one of the great things about rap music right now is that theres just not much stigma attached to race and religion, Rosenberg says. He had just gotten back from a tour in Japan with Eminem and Xhibit. Asked if issues of culture and ethnicity ever came up in the course of their travels, his laugh and prompt dismissal of the question indicated just how far off that idea was from the reality of what happens backstage. Skill, likewise, senses no conflict between his Jewishness and his career. He speaks with great pride and concern about his artists, and with passion about the connection between them. Were all from different backgrounds, we all grew up completely differently, he says. But we all have the same belief in each other. Thats whats important.
I believe Zimmer and Schwartz when they say they respect the people who comprise their market, and I believe Skill and Rosenberg when they talk about the egalitarianism they experience in hip-hop. But I also know that the philosophy espoused during an interview can differ from how things go down in actuality. With Skills permission, I attended a recording session at which a Tru Criminal artist named Fuc That recorded a new track over a lush Just Blaze beat. For all the glamour and dynamism of the music industry, actually watching a song come together can be excruciatingly boring. For five hours, FT (as hes called) lay down the first of three verses over the track. Just off the Anger Management Tour with Eminem and Ludacris, FT is poised to blow up. He came to Tru Criminal through a friend of Skills, and his lyrical talent and endearing personality have brought him quickly into the fold. By the time I interviewed him, he had been rhyming and chain-smoking blunts for hours. It was apparent that he thought our conversation would be standard hip-hop journalist fare-- How do you get inspiration for your lyrics? Do you have beef with anyone else in the industry?-- and seemed taken aback by questions about the Jewish head of his label. At one point, he looked at his friend like, the fuck is this? I asked about Skills contention that everyone at Tru Criminal was in the game together. He acknowledged that they are in it together, that theyre close, and that their financial fortunes co-mingle. But he was guarded as well. I dont know about us all having each others back, he said. When the big business decisions come down, I turn to my family, my mom and my pops.
Innocent stuff. In this media-saturated era, celebrities and aspiring celebrities wont say much thats controversial, and few straight up dis their current management on the record. But my take on FTs hesitance didnt fully support the utopian ideal that Skill espouses. Again, exploitation is a tempting word to use when the product of a small group of kids (mostly black) make so many ancillary people (mostly white, many Jewish) so much money. But in this instance, its important to complexify the term. Most hip-hop tells the stories of people in the shadows of American life, told by the people who live there. If we think its important that the stories of people facing poverty and discrimination are told; and if we think its best that these stories come from the people actually experiencing that life, rather than the Kozols and Kotlowitzes of the world; and if we take hip-hop seriously; then Skill, by creating a channel for the words of kids he scouts in the projects and the friends of friends out there, would seem to be doing profoundly progressive work. The verse FT kicked over and over in the studio that day engraved itself in my brain: I aint in this biz for nothing/Niggas pushing Cadillacs while my ribs is touching/How I got time for a big discussion when Im hungry and my kids are fussing/But you dont hear me though. For better or worse, this is a radical statement, and a Jewish kid from Long Island is paving the way for people to hear it.
Hip-hop is a game so much about money that its tempting to boil the whole topic down to one sentence: Everybody wants to get paid. But I like to think its about more than that. In many ways, it crystallizes two of American cultures most interesting strains. The first is that of the outlaw-- the tradition of plowing a renegade path to power when the conventional paths are prohibited. My thoughts about hip-hop as an outlaw form were echoed by Marc Levin. Levin, the director of Slam, Whiteboyz and Brooklyn Babylon, is a middle-aged, middle-class Jewish guy who has made some of the most honest and searching films about hip-hop. Gangster culture is about being an outsider, Levin says. His cluttered office is filled with placards bearing the names of actors who will be appearing in upcoming episodes of the show he produces, Street Time, a cop drama on Showtime. One scrawled pair of index cards announces the unlikely pairing of Judd Hirsch with Fat Joe. You have a white Protestant culture, and you have the immigrants, he continues. The entertainment world was seen as somehow below what respectable people would do, so it opened up to the outsiders. Being gangsters was outside. Gangster capitalism was how many Jewish businesses started, Italian businesses started, black businesses started. These guys ran the whorehouses and the dives, the jazz clubs, and the speakeasies. There has always been an intersection between the creative and entertaining, and the muscle, the mob and crime, because they were both outside what was considered legitimate. Jews were part of it, a big part. Look at Arnold Rothstein, he says, referring to the iconic gambler and gangster who allegedly fixed the 1919 World Series. Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky were students of Rothsteins. This gangster aesthetic is all over rap music-- a whole subsection of the music is called gangsta, of course, and artists name themselves after Capone, Gotti, Murder Inc. and Meyer Lansky. The drive to succeed in spite of the mainstreams barriers is no longer as relevant to Jews now that, generations into our American experience, we enjoy unfettered access to virtually all the hallways of power. But it is still in our system, and it still connects us to a world that celebrates the triumph of the outlaw-- a world where determination, ruthlessness, and boundless energy have a fighting chance against the barriers put up to keep outsiders out.
The other metaphorical space in which hip-hop resides is the utopian. Although the kind of activism espoused by the civil rights movement has been mostly marginalized, there are certain parts of hip-hop culture that address the same combination of black empowerment, cultural harmony, and progressive politics that informed that movement. Multi-faceted urban mogul Russell Simmons and Rabbi Mark Schneier are the cornerstones of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, a group that aims to bring blacks and Jews together to lobby for mutually beneficial political goals. In the Upper East Side brownstone from which the foundation runs, the smooth-talking, immaculately dressed Schneier emphasizes the utopian goals of the organization, which has honored Jay-Z, Lyor Cohen, P-Diddy, Steve Resnick, and Damon Dash among others. Were a voice of conscience, he says. Blacks and Jews need to take a step back and acknowledge that we have this genuine relationship, and remind ourselves that it was the alliance of blacks and Jews that brought about the greatest social change in the history of this country |
other cool jobs I've landed, but that's not the point of this article. I wanted to share my story, of how I went from basically some kid who was into aviation into a developer.
I've had many motivations to keep me going over the years, money, fun, the fact I love programming, I love architecting systems, solving problems.
I look up to a lot of developers, and use them for my inspiration, people like:
And non "celebrity devs" too whom I've had the pleasure of working with
... The list could go on...
Edit: It occured to me that I had no female developers on my list I look up to, and that just isn't right to only credit male developers - There are just as many female devs I look up to whom in many cases work much harder than any male devs I know, fighting pre-conceptions in our society and fighting for equality, and my list has been updated to reflect that.
But one of the main things for me at least is to try and make my dad proud, he'd always boast to his friends, whilst he was at his alotment about me. He was very proud of me. And I want to make sure I earn that distinction.
And I want to achieve as much as I can, in honour of him.
I love you dad, I miss you every day.“He was only stopped finally because he did not have a silencer on his weapon. And the sound drew people to the place where he was ultimately stopped. Can you imagine what this would have been if he had silencers on these weapons?”
— Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), interview with The Washington Post, Oct. 2, 2017
In the wake of the mass shooting that left 58 dead and hundreds wounded in Las Vegas, Democrats have drawn attention to a GOP-backed bill that would streamline the purchase of suppressors — more popularly known as silencers — for firearms.
A House committee in September approved a bill that would no longer require a special license to own a suppressor; instead, purchasers would only need to undergo a federal background check. Advocates say the legislation is intended to help protect gun enthusiasts from hearing loss. A vote in the full House had been expected before the shooting, but House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Oct. 3 that there were no plans for a vote.
When we first saw Kaine’s interview, we thought he was making a point similar to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton — the suggestion that suppressors make guns quiet.
The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots.
Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get. — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 2, 2017
As we have explained before, that’s a movie myth. But Kaine’s staff says he knows this.
The Facts
First of all, there are relatively few reports of suppressors being used in crimes. In 2015, 125 suppressors were recovered from crime scenes where a trace was requested by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) — when nearly 265,000 pistols, revolvers, rifles and shotguns were recovered. The Violence Policy Center, which opposes the proposed law, argues that this shows the success of current restrictions. “The limited information available suggests that the current regulation of silencers under the NFA is working to keep criminal use of the devices rare,” the group says.
Second, firearms — even with suppressors — generally are very loud.
A suppressor generally will reduce the sound of a weapon by an average 3o decibels, about the level of ear protection.
Hearing damage begins to occur at about 85 decibels, which is the sound of a hairdryer. Various reports have indicated that the Las Vegas shooter had AR-15-type rifles. A 30-decibel reduction means an AR-15 rifle would have a noise equivalent of 132 decibels. That is considered equivalent to a gunshot or a jackhammer. A.22-caliber pistol would be 116 decibels, which is louder than a 100-watt car stereo. In all likelihood, the noise level is actually higher.
It’s certainly not like the “whoosh” in the movies.
Suppressors, by diffusing the noise of a weapon, may make it more difficult to locate the source of a sound, which is why they often are used by military snipers. Kaine’s staff insists that, despite our initial impression of his statement, he is talking about this aspect of silencers.
Suppressors also can reduce most of “the flash” of a weapon, which preserves a shooter’s night vision and also helps hide location.
In Las Vegas, the gunman, Stephen Paddock, shot from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino at a crowd of 22,000 people gathered for the music festival hundreds of yards away. Already, given the distance and the echoes of the gunfire, it was difficult to locate the point of origin. But when Paddock started firing, scores of confused guests dialed the hotel operator, some wondering if there were fireworks outside.
Officials credited hotel security and the police for quickly locating the source of the noise, based on officer observations about the trajectory of the shots and information from the guest calls inside the hotel. That led officials to conclude the shots were coming from a room between the 29th and 32nd floors. Paddock then gave himself away when he fired at a security guard checking rooms on the 32nd floor, apparently because Paddock had set up remote video cameras to monitor the hallway.
Kaine’s staff, citing the raw audio of police communications that night, compiled an extensive timeline to demonstrate that the gunshots led the police to Paddock’s room. For instance, one police officer said: “I’m inside the Mandalay Bay on the 31st floor, I can hear the automatic fire coming from one floor ahead, one floor above us.”
Kaine staff also noted the story of a guest two floors below who reported the sounds of weapons fire. “I could just hear the gunshots. Continuously. Just full automatic,” said Chris Bethel, an Iraq War veteran. “There’s explosions going off. It was like, a bomb just went off, man. And then there were more gunshots.”
But given that AR-15 rifles, even with suppressors, are as loud as jackhammers, this does not demonstrate that the gunman was “only stopped” because he did not have a suppressor, as Kaine asserted.
“Senator Kaine was making the case that the gunman was stopped when he was because the police were able to locate him on the 32nd floor of the hotel based on the sound of the gunshots,” said spokeswoman Sarah Peck.
The Pinocchio Test
Kaine should be more careful when talking about weapons, especially during a national tragedy. We will accept his staff’s explanation that he meant that silencers muffle a gunshot’s source, even though his phrasing certainly sounded like he meant that silencers actually made firearms quiet. Regular readers know we don’t try to play gotcha here at The Fact Checker.
But in any case, the evidence does not support Kaine’s claim that the shooter was “only stopped” because he did not have suppressors on his weapons. That’s exaggerated and could leave a misleading impression on people only familiar with silencers in the movies. The crowd under attack might have had trouble establishing the location of the shooter if he had silencers, but he fired from a hotel filled with guests who almost certainly would have heard 132 decibels from the floors above and below the attack.
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Show moreWhat a fun fight this was (finally available on UFC Fightpass). And not just because Waterson won.
The fight started off generally even-footed, but there was a hint of what was to come as Magana tried to take down Waterson and Waterson was the one to throw her down on the octagon floor.
There was a really tense minute where Waterson got her arm really caught by Magana in an armbar, and it really looked like it was caught bad, but Waterson was able to shift and pull out. It’s not the first time we’ve seen Waterson’s flexibility and technique help her out of armbar danger.
After that exciting moment, the rest of the fight was just a showcase of Waterson’s abilities, including her newly upgraded wrestling strength and skills. After throwing Magana down a few times, a few armbar submission attempts, and basically very dominantly kicking, punching, and kneeing her opponent around the cage, Waterson finished the fight by choking Magana, causing the latter to tap out about midway through the third round.
For the full fight, check it out on the July 12, 2015 The Ultimate Fighter Finale on UFC Fight Pass.The Kancamagus Highway, also known as "The Kanc," is often misspelled and mis-pronounced Kangamangus Highway, Kangumangus Hiway or Kancamangus Highway. The correct way pronounce Kancamagus is "Kank-ah-mah-gus." Also see: How to Pronounce Kancamagus
The Kancamagus Highway is a 34.5 mile scenic drive along NH's Rt. 112 in Northern New Hampshire that is well known as one of the best Fall Foliage viewing areas in the country. The Kancamagus Highway is now designated an American Scenic Byway for its rich history, aesthetic beauty and culture.
The Kancamagus Scenic Byway takes you through a path cut through the White Mountain National Forest with breathtaking views of the White Mountains, the Swift River, Sabbaday Falls Lower Falls and Rocky Gorge. The Kanc takes you to an elevation of just under 3,000 feet at its highest point at Kancamagus Pass on the flank of Mt. Kancamagus near Lincoln, NH.
Every year, rain or shine leaf peepers show up in full force to drive the Kancamagus Highway just to get a glimpse of the brilliant colored NH Fall Foliage. Visitors are also greeted with the deep forest smells of the pines and changing leaves, especially on a warm Fall day. Even the rain can offer a unique experience on the Kancamagus Scenic Byway.
The drive along the Kancamagus Highway takes you back in time as you drive through a forest that offers no comforts of the modern day world; no gas stations, no restaurants, hotels or other businesses have pierced their way into the heart of the Kancamagus Highway. Those luxuries are left behind at both ends of the scenic byway but well within reach when needed.
The Kancamagus Highway also offers 6
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If you are planning to visit the Kancamagus Highway, be sure to take in the richDon’t expect the Tigers to try to sign left-hander David Price long term before deciding whether to trade him — or even after he reaches free agency.
The contract that Price will command is beyond the Tigers’ comfort level, and the two sides have not engaged in serious talks, major-league sources say.
The Tigers evidently fear that they will fare no better with Price than they did with right-hander Max Scherzer, who rejected the team’s $144 million offer in the spring of 2014, then signed a seven-year, $210 million free-agent contract with the Nationals.
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Price, who turns 30 on Aug. 26, has little incentive to sign an extension when he is just over three months away from free agency. He struggled with being traded from the Rays to the Tigers last July, but is now comfortable with the team and city and open to a longer relationship, sources say. His initial difficulties stemmed more from the shock of getting traded than any uneasiness with his destination.
The Tigers have yet to decide whether to trade Price, outfielder Yoenis Cespedes and their other potential free agents, sources say. They trail by three games in the race for the second wild card, and could move over.500 with Price facing the Mariners on Thursday afternoon.
If the Tigers trade Price, the Dodgers, Cubs, Blue Jays and Astros would be among the teams interested, sources say.
Price’s former GM, Andrew Friedman, is now the Dodgers’ president of baseball operations. The Cubs employ Price’s former manager, Joe Maddon, as manager, and his former pitching coach at Vanderbilt, Derek Johnson, as minor-league pitching coordinator.
Any team that acquired Price would gain exclusive negotiating rights with him before he became a free agent. Price could get to know the players and team executives, and they in turn could get to know him.
The best guess is that the Tigers will keep their club together and perhaps even add to it; they are not accustomed to selling, and still in contention for a postseason berth.
Either way, Price does not figure to be wearing the old English “D” in 2016.
PUIG: SHOULD HE STAY OR SHOULD HE GO?
I’ve previously outlined why it would be difficult for the Dodgers to trade right fielder Yasiel Puig and improve their club.
Puig is just 24. He is under club control through 2019, a bargain at $4.5 million this season and $5.5 million the next. The Dodgers will need his right-handed power long term — Joc Pederson, Adrian Gonzalez and top prospect Corey Seager are all left-handed hitters.
The only way for the Dodgers to justify such a move would be if they received equivalent value — say, a pitcher similar in age, ability and service time. I’ve yet to unearth any discussions to that end, but I’m guessing that Friedman and his creative front office are exploring every possible way to improve their pitching, including combinations involving Puig.
The question remains: How good can Puig be?
He has made an effort to be a better teammate since the All-Star break, sources say. But the far more relevant concern is his performance.
Puig’s OPS in July is only.623, and he remains vulnerable to high velocity. Scherzer struck him out three times Sunday, with fastballs registering 95 and 97 mph and a slider registering 87.
Consider:
Puig, in 62 at-bats this season ending on fastballs between 89 and 94 mph, has batted.403 with a.613 slugging percentage — well above the league averages of.277 and.435, according to MLB Network research.
However, in 20 at-bats ending on fastballs between 95 and 99 mph, Puig has batted.200 with a.250 slugging mark — well below the league averages of.246 and.370.
Too small a sample? Perhaps. But last season, Puig fared even worse in a larger sample. In 50 at-bats that ended between 95 and 99 mph, he batted.120 with a.220 slugging mark, while the league averaged.239 and.344.
Puig has had individual success against certain hard throwers, but one measure of a good hitter is his ability to hit tough pitching, particularly in the postseason.
The overall numbers suggest that Puig is not quite there yet.
BRAVES’ TEHERAN: AVAILABLE OR NOT?
Two rival executives said Wednesday that the Braves are open to trading right-hander Julio Teheran — “quite open,” was how one put it.
However, a source with knowledge of the Braves’ thinking said that the team is not even considering such a move, explaining that Teheran is only 24, in the second year of a club-friendly six-year, $32.4 million contract and part of a deep crop of young pitchers the club worked hard to assemble.
All of that makes sense, but it’s not unusual for clubs to deny that a player is available until the moment he is traded. The Braves did just that during the offseason with Evan Gattis and Craig Kimbrel. Teheran’s age and contract make him attractive to other clubs as well as the Braves, despite his 4.53 ERA.
Team plans are subject to change – and sometimes vary according to a player’s performance. Teheran, in fact, is reversing his regression from earlier this season — he matched his career-high with 11 strikeouts against the Dodgers on Wednesday, and has pitched to a 2.81 ERA in his last four starts.
What if the Braves could trade Teheran for multiple pitching prospects and/or a young catcher?
Surely they would consider such a deal. Surely Teheran is not untouchable.
FREE CARLOS GONZALEZ
Check out Carlos Gonzalez’s month-by-month OPS.
April:.594.
May:.654.
June:.865.
July: 1.016.
Gonzalez, who turns 30 on Oct. 17, is batting only.169 with a.404 OPS against left-handers. Like most Rockies, he is better at home than on the road. But why wouldn’t a team such as the Angels or Mets make a run at this guy?
CarGo isn’t exactly cheap — he is owed the balance of his $16 million salary this season, plus $37 million in 2016-17. The Rockies’ position on him is the same as it is on all of their players — they’ll listen. But as with Troy Tulowitzki, it doesn’t seem that they’re terribly motivated to act, believing that Gonzalez has value to them, too.
Fair enough, but for the zillionth time, the Rockies haven’t won with Tulo and CarGo, so why not try another approach?
AROUND THE HORN
● The Astros, like the Blue Jays, are considering every available starter; hence, their interest in Cole Hamels. If the prices on the rentals do not drop, team officials might prefer to trade their better prospects for the longer control that Hamels offers — assuming, of course, that the pitcher would approve a trade to Houston.
More likely, the Astros will end up with one of the rentals, be it Johnny Cueto or Jeff Samardzija, Scott Kazmir or (gasp!) Price. They also could seek an additional year of control with the Padres’ Andrew Cashner, or an additional two years with the Pads’ Tyson Ross.
It will be fascinating to see how Astros GM Jeff Luhnow handles his first deadline as a buyer. He worked hard to build the team’s farm system, and he probably did not expect the major-league club to be this competitive this quickly.
To what extent is he willing to part with young assets?
● Tigers left fielder Cespedes is telling friends that he wants to re-sign with the club – and that he would maintain that desire even if the Tigers traded him and he became a free agent.
Either way, Cespedes would not be tied to a draft pick. His original contract with the A’s stipulated that his team must release him rather than offer him salary arbitration. A team cannot extend a qualifying offer to such a player.
● Rockies left-hander Jorge De La Rosa would appear a reasonable trade candidate — he has proven tough enough to succeed at Coors Field, and already is signed for 2016 at his current salary of $12.5 million.
De La Rosa, however, gained the right to veto any trade last September as a player with 10 years of major-league service, five continuous with the same club. Tulowitzki will become a 10-and-5 player on Aug. 30, 2016.
● The Mets could promote outfielder Michael Conforto using the same rationale that the Cubs did when they first summoned Kyle Schwarber, saying the move only would be temporary.
Schwarber went fourth in the 2014 draft, Conforto 10th. The Mets need not treat Conforto as a savior; they could simply return him to the minors once they make a trade.May 30, 2014 at 12:13 AM
A game’s referee assignment isn’t often news. It was this week, though, as Ricardo Salazar was assigned Saturday’s big game between Sounders FC and Real Salt Lake, the two teams with the most points in MLS.
Salazar.
Seattle fans know the name all too well, it seems. Some have even turned it into a verb. Indeed, even the most impartial observer would have to admit there has been seemingly a disproportionate amount of controversy in such meetings.
It’s probably no surprise Salazar hasn’t worked a Sounders’ game since June 1, 2013, when he issued a red card to Obafemi Martins that was later rescinded by an independent review panel.
Coach Sigi Schmid was asked about this referee assignment after Thursday’s practice.
“We’re looking forward to having Ricardo Salazar as our referee,” Schmid said, diplomatically.
You know things are bad when the Sounders officially have a 8-2-7 record in Salazar games and the feelings still are the way they are. (The record improves to 9-2-7 if you include a 2007 U.S. Open Cup game, a 5-0 win against the Colorado Rapids in the USL days.)
For those who have forgotten how things have gotten to where they are, here is a look back at the games in this — what’s the word? — relationship:
* * *
Oct. 13, 2013 — Portland Timbers 1, Sounders FC 0
Salazar was actually the fourth official in this game down in Portland. I only bring this one up because Osvaldo Alonso was issued a red card — admittedly one that was seemingly hard to argue. Still, it continued a crazy streak of the Sounders earning a red card in three straight games, and five of six, worked by Salazar.
June 1, 2013 — Chivas USA 0, Sounders FC 2
As noted above, this was the last time Salazar had worked in the middle of a Sounders game, and none of the Seattle players or coaches were happy with the red card issued to Martins. Their concerns were validated when the call was overturned.
Here was Schmid after the game: “I’ve seen the replay. I have my opinion on the replay, and I’ll keep my opinion to (myself). … I don’t know. I’ve got no comment. … Sometimes you agree with calls. Sometimes you don’t agree with calls. And nobody cares what my opinion is.”
Added Martins: “I didn’t do anything. I was trying to get up and get the ball back, and (Gabriel Farfan), he screamed, and the referee just looked at him, and they gave me a red card.”
Wow! Obas red rescinded? Shocking… — zk scott (@zkscott) June 5, 2013
Zach Scott had tweeted (and then deleted) after the game that Salazar hates the Sounders.
There was another notable instance after the game as Salazar refused to answer questions on the call due to a technicality involving the pool reporter process.
Oct. 17, 2012 — Sounders FC 0, Real Salt Lake 0
This big game leading into the playoffs featured a red card to Zach Scott for his second cautionable offense. Those bookings weren’t very egregious, but emotions were still fresh from the U.S. Open Cup final a few months prior. There were some other calls, like a non-PK, that also set Schmid off (highlights of the game here). You might remember the coach blasted Salazar during a halftime interview with the NBC Sports Network.
“We have our 12th man, which are our fans; they have their 12th man, which is Ricardo Salazar,” Schmid said. “Every time we have him, it’s a difficult game for us. It’s tough for us to play. It always seems to be that we’re very unlucky, things go wrong, (there are) handballs in the box that he doesn’t call. It’s just a nightmare for us to play when he referees.”
Schmid continued postgame, noting how well the Sounders fans know Salazar’s name, later adding: “Lord help us if we get Salazar in the playoffs.”
MLS suspended Schmid the following game for the comments, and Schmid later admitted things had gotten personal on his side while he didn’t think it was personal on Salazar’s side.
“I certainly have to admit at times when I see his name as the referee, it’s sort of like a red flag goes up in front of me, and I have to get over that,” Schmid said.
Sept. 15, 2012 — Portland Timbers 1, Sounders FC 1
An odd assignment about five weeks after the aforementioned U.S. Open Cup final, which is next in chronological order. Here is what Schmid said the day before the game: “It’s interesting that he also refereed our last game in Portland. The assignment situation is interesting. I don’t know why you would end up with the same referee in the same venue twice in a row. But it is what it is, and we hope we has a better game than he did in Kansas City.”
Best I can tell there wasn’t too much controversy, maybe since it was the first game against the Timbers since Roger Levesque retired. Seattle’s tie prevented Portland from clinching the Cascadia Cup on the night, something that would happen later in the year.
Aug. 8, 2012 — Sporting Kansas City 1, Sounders FC 1 (KC wins Open Cup final on PKs, 3-2)
This is probably the game that stings worst with Seattle fans, and there were a number of issues. Kansas City committed more fouls (18 to 15), yet were issues no yellow cards while the Sounders got six, including two to Patrick Ianni that had him sent off.
“How does a team commit an equal amount of fouls as the opponent and one team gets (six) yellow cards and the other team gets zero?” said Schmid. “That’s unbelievable to me.”
There was a controversial penalty kick on a supposed hand-ball by Zach Scott in the penalty box.
“I’ll be the first guy to put my hand up if I make a mistake, and I hope that the refs would do the same,” said Scott.
There was the PK shootout being taken on the wrong end of the stadium, and then, of course, there was calling Michael Gspurning for coming off his line on a save but not Kansas City’s Jimmy Nielsen. Here is a visual comparison.
“Nielsen moved ahead of every shot, as well, but he didn’t call any back there,” Schmid said. “All of a sudden he calls one back, and he does it indiscriminately?”
Lot of questions, not a lot of answers after this one.
“It’s difficult when you’re playing against a team at home, so the crowd helps them, and then when you’re playing against the referee as well, and he makes some absolutely, I thought, ridiculous calls,” Schmid said. “It’s very tough to win.”
June 24, 2012 — Portland Timbers 2, Sounders FC 1
This was where the run on red cards started, as Fredy Montero got his marching orders for a shove on a much larger David Horst that sent the big man tumbling. Montero said Horst sold it and Salazar bought it.
“This guy was head-to-head with Eddie and I just tried to push him away, you know?” Montero said. “He fell to the ground. … This is what this game was about and unfortunately today wasn’t a good day for him.”
Lovel Palmer was also sent off for Portland.
May 5, 2012 — Sounders FC 1, Philadelphia 0
Seattle can have no complaints about this one. Salazar would have been well within his right to sent off Andy Rose for two bookable offense, instead letting the rookie off with a stern warning on the second one — a foul from behind on Freddy Adu (remember him?).
“We were probably a little fortunate,” Schmid said.
“Some referees might have pulled a second yellow. I think that it could have been a second yellow, but I think Salazar was aware of where it was in the game, how early it was in the game.”
Added Rose: “Definitely my heart skipped a couple of beats there.”
Highlights here.
Union coach John Hackworth — an assistant then with Peter Nowak suspended — called the decision hard to swallow. Adu said it was a by-the-book card, and that would’ve been hard to argue.
Maybe some early karma for what was to come.
March 17, 2012 — Sounders FC 3, Toronto FC 1
Seattle’s dominance and David Estrada’s hat trick didn’t leave room for much controversy.
Oct. 22, 2011 — Chivas USA 1, Sounders FC 3
Similar to the game above. Mauro Rosales getting injured just before the playoff on a hard tackle by Ben Zemanski was the notable play, and there was a yellow card issued.
July 4, 2011 — LA Galaxy 0, Sounders FC 0
The Sounders were unhappy with the consistency of the foul calls in this one, particularly with David Beckham out there.
“Maybe there’s a rule where (Beckham’s) got to get seven free kicks a game,” Schmid joked.
April 30, 2011 — Sounders FC 3, Toronto 0
Another pretty anonymous game for Salazar, and another convincing Seattle win played into it. You might remember this game as a tribute to Steve Zakuani (broken leg) and O’Brian White (blood clot) after we learned about their long-term, career-affecting injuries.
Oct. 31, 2010 — Sounders FC 0, LA Galaxy 1
This was the most recent playoff game with Salazar in charge, and it was highlighted by Edson Buddle’s goal (at the 3:32 mark).
That isn’t to say there wasn’t some talk about the refs. Asked about Salazar’s performance, Schmid said: “No comment. The referees are the referees.”
To be quite honest, I couldn’t find a couple key calls or non-calls in question.
Aug. 14, 2010 — Chivas USA 0, Sounders FC 0
Salazar was the fourth official in this game, but he still had an impact, and referee Alex Prus told everybody about it. The controversial play was when Leo Gonzalez got sent off in the final minutes due to a tussle with Mariano Trujillo.
Prus issued the red card but afterward said on Twitter that it was at the advice of a crew member (pretty clearly Salazar).
After emotions are down a little bit let analyze Gonzales/ Trujillo incident in my last game. After review my tape red to Gonzales harsh. — Alex Prus (@alexprus) August 18, 2010
Even though Gonzales was instigator he did not make a contact above shoulders like I was told by my crew member on the field. — Alex Prus (@alexprus) August 18, 2010
Not having the best view of the incident acted on opinion of my crew members. Saying that I am taking full responsibility for this call. — Alex Prus (@alexprus) August 18, 2010
In officiating we survive as a team and sink as a team. As a head referee I take the blame even though it wasn't really my decision. — Alex Prus (@alexprus) August 18, 2010
The Sounders were left flabbergasted.
Schmid said: “It was a scrum. Trujillo swung back at Leo. I’m not quite sure why Leo got the red card. I think he fouled Trujillo, for sure he fouled him. But it was a foul, and then he swings back, and then somebody came into the fray really late, took a swing at somebody and that wasn’t seen at all. And it wasn’t one of our guys.”
Here was Kasey Keller: “I always think it’s weird when a guy gets punched in the face and somehow he gets red carded, as well. You take a red card for getting punched, that seems a little strange. … I was a long ways away but it looked a little harsh on our side.”
And Jeff Parke: “It looked like two girls smacking each other. I don’t think Leo really got too bad into it. I think it was definitely a red on that guy’s part and maybe a yellow on Leo, but it was pretty funny looking from my vantage point.”
May 1, 2010 — Sounders FC 1, Columbus 1
There was a red card in this one, but it was issued to the well-traveled Danny O’Rourke due to two yellows.
March 25, 2010 — Sounders FC 2, Philadelphia 0
Someone was upset after this one: Freddie Ljungberg, who had to leave this one early, limping with a back issue after a physical game. It led to a little back-and-forth between him and Peter Nowak, if you remember. The Philly coach said maybe his back probably hurts because “you’re an old man and playing on turf.”
Ljungberg actually went on to say Salazar did his best to keep things in check and that the league needed to look at preventing physical play from getting out of control. We’ve heard that message since.
Oct. 29, 2009 — Sounders FC 0, Houston 0
This was probably about the time a strong dislike — “hate” is too strong a word — really started to develop for Salazar.
You might remember an incident between Fredy Montero and Pat Onstad, where the Houston goalkeeper pushed the forward to the ground. Both got yellows.
“It was a bowling ball and a bowling pin,” Schmid said.
The main talking point was just the physical nature of the game. The Dynamo committed 18 fouls to Seattle’s six. Nate Jaqua was bloodied.
Ljungberg said: “It’s not rugby. It’s still soccer. … I don’t know what the referee was doing. … I can’t say too much. I need to play the last few games.”
Schmid added: “There were a lot of calls I was confused about. The game was very physical, it was allowed to be played that way. … We’ll see how the game gets interpreted differently down there. Maybe things will be different a little bit. I’m puzzled.”
The AP recap of the game led with Drew Carey voicing his anger in the elevator after the game.
Oct. 3, 2009 — Columbus 0, Sounders FC 1
Hey, look! A good memory. This was actually the game Seattle ended the Crew’s long home unbeaten streak. It’s probably one of the best road results in team history, considering Columbus won the Supporters’ Shield and the Sounders were right in the mix.
Aug. 15, 2009 — LA Galaxy 0, Sounders FC 2
Three red cards in this one, and you have to credit Salazar for sending off David Beckham when many other referees might not have. Also ejected later were Seattle’s Tyrone Marshall and LA’s Eddie Lewis.
The Sounders’ haven’t had a road win against the Galaxy since.
June 17, 2009 — Sounders FC 3, D.C. United 3
The Sounders couldn’t blame this one on anybody but themselves, blowing a 3-1 second-half lead. Kasey Keller memorably ripped into the team after the game, making sure his comments in the locker room were audible to everyone in the room.
Aug. 7, 2007 — Seattle Sounders 5, Colorado 0
Back to the USL days, when Brian Schmetzer’s side smashed the MLS side in the U.S. Open Cup quarterfinals. Guys like Sebastien Le Toux, Zach Scott, Josh Gardner and Taylor Graham scored goals in that one.
I don’t really have anything about Salazar in this one, but quite the result.What You'll Be Creating
Are you hunting for that dream role at a creative company? You'll need to dust off your old resume and give it a modern refresh.
But how can you make sure that—out of all the applicants—it’s your resume that catches your future employer’s eye?
Today we take a look at eleven resume design tips for overhauling the format, layout, and structure of your resume. We also share creative resume examples and templates throughout the post, visually demonstrating these resume design tips in action so you can readily put them to work for you.
When you're ready to create your own resume, check out this tutorial on designing a creative resume in Adobe InDesign. You can also browse the full selection of creative CV examples at Envato Elements and creative resume templates at GraphicRiver to get even more inspiration.
Tip 1. Use Columns to Maximize on Space
One thing that is an absolute nightmare for employers tasked with trawling through resumes by the bucketload is encountering resumes that are more than one page long.
Sure, you |
an outright ban may not happen. Still, investors should appreciate the regulatory risks that are associated, especially given the lack of clarity from Indian regulators.
Another feature they need to appreciate is that cryptocurrencies are difficult to value. “While I am bullish on the possibilities that decentralization opens up, it is hard to think about valuation of these new crypto assets. For bitcoin, depending on whether it is thought of as ‘digital gold’ (a store of value) or a currency to pay for purchases (a medium of exchange), you can arrive at vastly different estimates of what it can be worth in the future. Right now, it’s just guesswork," says Sharma.
Kunal Nandwani, CEO at uTrade Solutions, a fintech firm, worries about the mainstreaming of bitcoin, with the impending launch of futures trading on large platforms such as CBoE and CME in the US. “Bitcoin was meant to be used as a peer-to-peer decentralized currency. The whole idea was decentralization away from regulated and centralized financial systems. While there may be reason to cheer the bitcoin futures launch as validation of its credibility, are we losing the whole point of why Bitcoin was invented?" he asks.
In fact, other commentators have argued that the rapid rise in the virtual currency potentially defeats its use as a currency; people may just prefer to hold it for appreciation, rather than use it for buying goods and services. Of course, this begs the question—if it isn’t being viewed as a currency by the majority of buyers, then what is the logic behind the price rise?
But while there are multiple risks, bitcoin has also given some traders the thrill of earning returns of 1600% in the past year. This appears to be the fastest appreciation per unit of time for any major investment opportunity; with that sort of return, it’s little wonder people are ignoring the warnings all around them.Unless the guy running the NFL announces otherwise, the league is going to conduct its supplemental draft someday soon with Terrelle Pryor on the outside looking in, his nose pressed against the candy store window.
You probably don’t consider Pryor a sympathetic figure, and that is understandable. The former Ohio State quarterback wasn’t exactly a scholar, he drove a much nicer car than the one you drive (eight of them in three years, actually), and he exchanged autographed jerseys and other memorabilia for cash and tattoos and all those other life-affirming things that teenagers crave.
And his coach, Jim Tressel, as we all learned in late May, allowed him (and many others) to get away with all of it for three years because Pryor delivered a 31-4 record and three BCS appearances.
But now the kid is trying to enter the work force, having left Columbus, Ohio, in June after a laundry list of violations (his subsequent hiring of an agent made him ineligible anyway). The rules pertaining to supplemental draft eligibility are too convoluted to reiterate here, but Pryor’s problem is that the NFL is wary of his circumstances: His petition is still under consideration because he left school after the regular April draft, technically on his own volition, and wasn’t officially kicked out for some academic issue or misconduct like some of the other guys who are eligible for the supplemental draft.
So as of late today, when the league postponed the draft to consider Pryor’s case, its response to an e-mail inquiry became a more hopeful broken record: “No decision has been made yet on his eligibility,” spokesman Greg Aiello said.
Even if commissioner Roger Goodell changes his stance, we thought you should know that we are revisiting the nexus of college corruption and professional hypocrisy, which is a crossroads you always must approach with a clothespin affixed to your nose.
Usually, the NFL moves heaven and earth to employ the special talents, but Pryor is no better than a fifth-rounder whose future is at wide receiver. That’s the first point that needs to be raised: The NFL had no problem ignoring the overwhelming stench from Cam Newton’s house, and never stood in his way of being the top pick in the regular draft, but now it may conclude that Pryor needs to go away for a year to sanitize himself.
The reason, of course, is that talent trumps everything, and Newton’s sin was instantly cleansed by a Heisman Trophy and a national championship.
It’s easy to tolerate cheating in NCAA athletics — we’ve become very good at it. But if the NFL commissioner becomes the arbiter of what constitutes an NCAA felony, we’re in new and complicated territory, because it’s hard to conceive of Goodell keeping Pryor out by spouting rules. This is, after all, the same commish who was wise enough to change them on helmet hits in midseason.
So we’re interested in seeing how this turns out, especially whether Pryor becomes a pariah because he was part of an obscenely corrupt system in which everyone is allowed to get filthy rich other than the student-athletes who generate the revenue.
As you know, Tressel is no different from most of his peers, but no one seems very willing to do something about it. The only issues the NCAA cares about nowadays is conference alignments and competitive equity, which is all about laying the foundation for a football playoff system, something that will make March Madness look like Saturday night bingo.
There’s a great old quote from Walter Byers, the guy who ruled the NCAA for more than 35 years like a feudal lord: “The coaches own the athletes’ feet, the colleges own the athletes’ bodies, and the supervisors retain the large rewards,” he told Time magazine in 1997. “That reflects a neoplantation mentality on the campuses that is not appropriate at this time of high dollars.”
Byers said this 14 years ago, toward the end of a 37-year career as executive director of the NCAA.
Yet nothing has changed since then, other than some lip service reigning CEO Mark Emmert offered in USA Today last April that salaries for student athletes was a subject he was “willing to explore.”
Speaking of exploration: Tressel, that pillar of probity, was trolling around Browns camp Monday. Just visiting, everyone said; he’s from Barea, even went to college nearby, which was the first step toward becoming the highest-paid public employee ($3.5M) in state history. But if Mike Holmgren and Pat Shurmur decided that Tressel would make a good defensive coordinator or linebacker coach or locker room attendant, the NFL wouldn’t give it another thought.
Pryor? The kid will probably take a shot at the CFL. He’s made his mistakes, and now he could be sentenced to a year in football limbo.
Meanwhile, the red jersey that still bears his name and number (2) was selling for $19.99 at the Buckeye Store inside Schottenstein Center on Tuesday. That is sharply discounted 66 percent from its usual $59 price tag (while supplies last, so get moving), but call it the perfect ending to this parable.
At any price, they still own the only part of him that is currently on the market.
Dave D’Alessandro: ddalessandro@starledger.com
More from Dave D'Alessandro
• D'Alessandro: Giants' Osi Umenyiora could still rain on the team's parade
• D'Alessandro: New Jersey's Bill Lovett, a former NFL official, remembered as person others aspired to be
• D'Alessandro: In NBA lockout, players' side needs to speak upFrank Lampard is set to embark on his first full season in MLS when New York City FC's 2016 campaign gets underway, and his manager is a familiar one.
Lampard played against first-year NYCFC manager Patrick Vieira when both were in the Premier League (and while they played for England and France, respectively), and he recalled some of those memories on this week's Planet Fútbol Podcast in an interview with SI's Grant Wahl.
The 37-year-old Lampard, who is two years younger than Vieira nearly to the day, spoke of how overmatched he was when the two first went head-to-head in the Premier League and how their relationship has changed now that Vieira is running the NYCFC show, in place of ousted manager Jason Kreis.
"We didn't get on too much on the pitch. He was very competitive," Lampard said. "I was slightly younger than Patrick... so I came through a bit fresh, a bit naive, and many a time at Highbury (Arsenal's former home stadium), I remember Patrick off of his long legs flicking the ball over my head and getting it on the other side and I was chasing him and his shadow.
"It was great, I learned from him, I learned from playing against him. He got nasty, he'd be in your face, he'd let you know and I respected that. I think he has done very well since he's finished and decided to go into management. He's done the grassroots side, he's been working with the young players in Manchester and not gone straight into the big job. He's done his schooling there, and I think we'll get the benefits of that next year with him."
Listen to the whole interview below (Lampard's segment begins at the 14:37 mark):
Lampard and Vieira overlapped a little at Manchester City, when Lampard was playing and Vieira was coaching the club's youth team, and the two kick off their new season together on March 6 at the Chicago Fire.
Of course, Vieira can still bring it on the field, as Jason Hernandez found out the hard way in training.While the vaccine industry is exploiting the Disneyland measles outbreak to call for widespread MMR vaccination, nobody in the mainstream media is telling you how the MMR vaccine clinical trial results were faked by Big Pharma in yet another example of runaway scientific fraud by the vaccine industry.
According to two Merck scientists who filed a False Claims Act complaint in 2010 — a complaint which was unsealed three years ago — vaccine manufacturer Merck knowingly falsified its mumps vaccine test data, spiked blood samples with animal antibodies, sold a vaccine that actually promoted mumps and measles outbreaks, and ripped off governments and consumers who bought the vaccine thinking it was “95% effective.”
Natural News acquired that document years ago and maintains one of the very few copies in existence, as all “official” sources have tried to remove this document from human memory and bury the case.
Click here to read the full document now. (PDF)
Knowing falsified mumps vaccine tests to fabricate a 95% efficacy rate
According to Stephen Krahling and Joan Wlochowski, both former Merck virologists, the Merck company engaged in all the following behavior:
• Merck knowingly falsified its mumps vaccine test results to fabricate a “95% efficacy rate.”
• In order to do this, Merck spiked the blood test with animal antibodies to artificially inflate the appearance of immune system antibodies. As reported in CourthouseNews.com:
Merck also added animal antibodies to blood samples to achieve more favorable test results, though it knew that the human immune system would never produce such antibodies, and that the antibodies created a laboratory testing scenario that “did not in any way correspond to, correlate with, or represent real life … virus neutralization in vaccinated people,” according to the complaint. (http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/27/478…)
• Merck then used the falsified trial results to swindle the U.S. government out of “hundreds of millions of dollars for a vaccine that does not provide adequate immunization.”
• Merck’s vaccine fraud has actually contributed to the continuation of mumps across America, causing more children to become infected with mumps. Yes, the vaccine spreads disease, they say.
• Merck used its false claims of “95 percent effectiveness” to monopolize the vaccine market and eliminate possible competitors.
• The Merck vaccine fraud has been going on since the late 1990’s, say the Merck virologists.
• Testing of Merck’s vaccine was never done against “real-world” mumps viruses in the wild. Instead, test results were simply falsified to achieve the desired outcome.
• This entire fraud took place “with the knowledge, authority and approval of Merck’s senior management.”
• Merck scientists “witnessed firsthand the improper testing and data falsification in which Merck engaged to artificially inflate the vaccine’s efficacy findings,” according to court documents (see below).
US government chose to ignore the 2010 False Claims Act!
Rather than taking action on this false claims act, the U.S. government simply ignored it, thereby protecting Merck’s market monopoly instead of properly serving justice. This demonstrates the conspiracy of fraud between the U.S. government, FDA regulators and the vaccine industry.
Chatom Primary Care sues Merck for Sherman Act monopolization, breach of warranty, violation of consumer protection laws
Following the unsealing of this 2010 False Claims Act, Chatom Primary Care, based in Alabama, smelled something rotten. In 2012, Chatom filed a lawsuit against Merck. That lawsuit record is also available on Natural News, where real medical history is archived in the public interest.
Click here to read the Chatom lawsuit document.
It alleges, among other shocking things:
[Merck engaged in] …a decade-long scheme to falsify and misrepresent the true efficacy of its vaccine.
Merck fraudulently represented and continues to falsely represent in its labeling and elsewhere that its Mumps Vaccine has an efficacy rate of 95 percent of higher.
In reality, Merck knows and has taken affirmative steps to conceal — by using improper testing techniques and falsifying test data — that its Mumps Vaccine is, and has been since at least 1999, far less than 95 percent effective.
Merck designed a testing methodology that evaluated its vaccine against a less virulent strain of the mumps virus. After the results failed to yield Merck’s desired efficacy, Merck abandoned the methodology and concealed the study’s findings.
…incorporating the use of animal antibodies to artificially inflate the results…
…destroying evidence of the falsified data and then lying to an FDA investigator…
…threatened a virologist in Merck’s vaccine division with jail if he reported the fraud to the FDA…
…the ultimate victims here are the millions of children who every year are being injected with a mumps vaccine that is not providing them with an adequate level of protection. And while this is a disease that, according to the Centers for Disease Control (‘CDC’), was supposed to be eradicated by now, the failure in Merck’s vaccine has allowed this disease to linger, with significant outbreaks continuing to occur.
Chatom Primary Care also alleges that the fraudulent Merck vaccine contributed to the 2006 mumps outbreak in the Midwest, and a 2009 outbreak elsewhere. It says, “there has remained a significant risk of a resurgence of mumps outbreaks…”
Sources for this article:
NaturalNews wishes to thank CourthouseNews.com for its coverage of this story. Original article at: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/06/27/478…
Chatom Lawsuit against Merck
www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Chatom...
2010 False Claims Act against Merck, by two Merck virologists
www.naturalnews.com/gallery/documents/Merck-…
Announcement of the lawsuit in the media:
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/lawsuit-claims…
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/048402_measles_vaccine_scientific_fraud_court_documents.html#ixzz42VyoxdPGBhutan followed up their first leg win in Colombo with victory in front of their own fans
Bhutan, the lowest ranked side in the world, have defied the odds and progressed to the next round of World Cup qualifying by beating Sri Lanka.
Fifa's 209th-ranked nation secured a 3-1 aggregate victory by winning the second leg of their Asian preliminary first-round tie 2-1 in Thimphu.
It comes four days after their shock 1-0 win in the first leg in Colombo.
Chencho Gyeltshen scored both goals for the home side, who completed only their fifth-ever competitive win.
Gyeltshen, nicknamed "The Ronaldo of Bhutan", ensured his side move a step closer to the finals in Russia in 2018.
The 19-year-old opened the scoring on five minutes and was mobbed by his team-mates when he coolly struck the winner in the 90th-minute, sealing Bhutan's progression against a team 36 places higher in the rankings.
Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan kingdom, will now take their place in the group stage, involving 40 Asian teams.
They will be joined by East Timor, ranked 185th, who beat Mongolia (195th) 5-1 on aggregate.
India (173rd), managed by Englishman Stephen Constantine, progressed after a 0-0 draw with Nepal (180th) in Kathmandu, which followed a 2-0 first leg victory in Guwahati.
Pakistan's (170th) home leg against Yemen (175th) in Lahore was postponed and shifted to an unconfirmed neutral venue after a Taliban attack on churches in the city.
Cambodia (181st) progressed 4-1 on aggregate against Macau (187th) while Chinese Taipei (188th) overturned a 1-0 first leg deficit with a 2-0 win against Brunei (198th).The man who negotiated Canada's signature on the world's first climate agreement nearly 20 years ago says the new Trudeau government needs to quickly prove to the world it takes the climate issue seriously and will do things differently than the former government.
"Our government has been seen as kind of eccentric," said Paul Heinbecker, who led the Canadian delegation to the Kyoto climate change negotiations in 1997. "But the world realizes it was a bit of aberration for Canada."
Heinbecker was a career diplomat working for the governments of both Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney before becoming the permanent representative of Canada to the UN.
But Heinbecker says there aren't huge expectations that prime minister-designate Trudeau will show up at the UN climate change conference in Paris Nov. 30 with new targets and a new plan all ready to go. More than 190 countries will gather to finalize a new global climate treaty to control rising greenhouse gas emissions.
Heinbecker thinks if Trudeau just shows up with a different team and a different tone, it may be enough for now.
"People realize he was just elected, therefore they're going to cut him some slack — but not eternal slack," he said in an interview with CBC News.
Environment advisers
Heinbecker said among Trudeau's transition team and close advisers there are people who know a lot about the environment that could help to quickly set the new government's agenda for the crucial climate talks and beyond.
One example is Peter Harder, who has been helping to oversee the transition from Conservative to Liberal government. Harder is an experienced public servant and the former deputy minister of Foreign Affairs who was part of the team that negotiated Kyoto.
"His value is that he knows what needs to be done and what signals need to be sent," said Heinbecker.
"The people who are working with Trudeau have more experience with this than most people understand," said Louise Comeau, executive director of the environmental climate coalition Climate Action Network Canada.
"These folks care about the issue, understand the complexity of trying to respond to it and the international negotiating," she said in an interview with CBC News. "I haven't felt this hopeful in a long time."
Other close advisers with environmental experience include Mike McNair, who worked with former Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, helping to write his "Green Shift" policy, and Gerald Butts, who is Trudeau's close friend and principal adviser.
Butts is the former CEO of the World Wildlife Fund-Canada and former principal secretary to Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty. Under McGuinty, he helped craft the province's green energy plan and move away from coal-fired electricity. He's expected to lead the Trudeau approach to climate change and environment generally.
'Do a few big things well'
A long-time environmental observer who used to work with Butts and who spoke on background, says his approach is to "do a few big things well." He predicted that will be the way the Trudeau government tackles the complex issue of climate change both internationally and at home.
He says Butts's entire lens is "national unity" and avoiding conflict with the provinces, which is why Trudeau did not talk about national targets for Canada's greenhouse gas emissions during the election.
Justin Trudeau's principal adviser, Gerald Butts, left, has worked on environmental issues in the past. Butts's approach is to 'do a few big things well,' says one observer. (Chris Young/Canadian Press)
Instead, he has promised to bring the premiers to the climate talks and to get together with them within 90 days of the Paris conference to discuss a new national approach.
The observer says Butts is trying to avoid the mistakes of previous Liberal governments.
"There are no targets yet because Jean Chrétien agreed to targets and a commitment in Kyoto, but there was no agreement with the provinces," he said.
That led to discord and lack of action on climate change.
"We fell into endless discussions before. It was top down and no buy-in from the provinces," Comeau said.
It appears for now that discord is on the backburner. On Thursday, Canada's premiers held a conference call and agreed that everyone not facing an election campaign will attend the climate change summit in Paris with Trudeau.
"I'm cautiously optimistic," Comeau said.
But she points out the Canadian delegation will have to offer substance and show a real effort on Canada's part to reassure its international partners.
Under the Harper government, it was the only country to withdraw from the Kyoto Accord, and the sting is felt among the international community.
"We have made promise after promise and failed to meet them and so the question for the PM when he goes to Paris is: how is that going to change and why should we believe you now?" she said.
"The level of feeling around the world of abandonment, of betrayal — this is going to take some real work to fix."Appeals Court Smacks Down Unpaid HuffPo Bloggers Who Demanded A Cut Of HuffPo Sale
from the easily-dismissed dept
The problem with plaintiffs' argument is that it has no basis in their Amended Complaint. Nowhere in the Amended Complaint do plaintiffs allege that The Huffington Post represented that their work was purely for public service or that The Huffington Post would not subsequently be sold to another company. To the contrary, plaintiffs were perfectly aware that The Huffington Post was a forprofit enterprise, which derived revenues from their submissions through advertising. Perhaps most importantly, at all times prior to the merger when they submitted their work to The Huffington Post, plaintiffs understood that they would receive compensation only in the form of exposure and promotion. Indeed, these arrangements have never changed.
Though it is no doubt a great disappointment to find that The Huffington Post did not live up to the ideals plaintiffs ascribed to it, plaintiffs have made no factual allegations that, if taken as true, would permit the inference that The Huffington Post deceived the plaintiffs or otherwise received a benefit at the expense of the plaintiffs such that equity and good conscience require restitution.
After Huffington Post was sold to AOL for $315 million, there was a really, really silly discussion among a small group of the volunteers who blogged on the site for free (again, voluntarily), who whined about how this was somehow unfair. They ignored the fact that they took none of the risk, spent none of the money, had no obligations to provide content and clearly agreed to receive no money for their actions -- but still, they whined. Some then went even further and filed a very silly lawsuit, led by Jonathan Tasini. Tasini, previously, had successfully sued the NY Times concerning that company's handling of freelance works. Of course, given that he's now sued two major publications which he freelanced for, what publication wouldallow him to write freelance pieces again? It seemed that his success in the NYT suit led him to be over confident with this lawsuit. There was simply no basis for it: he blogged on the site voluntarily, knowing that he'd receive no compensation for it. To then whine that the investors, who took all the risk, made some money selling the site when he had no equity stake in the site, isn't just sour grapes, it's legally ridiculous.Thankfully, the district court smacked the case down pretty hard, and did so with prejudice, denying him the ability to refile an amended complaint. However, Tasini wasn't ready to give up, and appealed the original ruling. The appeals court has now taken its turn in smacking down the lawsuit, noting that Tasini's argument is simply ridiculous, as you can see in the full filing (also embedded below):In other words, Tasini's inability to accept the deal he made, and the fact that he apparently got jealous of Huffington's ability to sell the site, is not a legal issue at all. The court also re-affirms that the dismissal with prejudice was entirely proper. Maybe, instead of spending all this time on lawsuits, Tasini would be better served trying to build his own site. Of course, as was ironically noted after he filed his lawsuit, Tasini actually did that once and didn't pay the bloggers who blogged for him...
Filed Under: contract, entitlement, equity, greed, jonathan tasini
Companies: aol, huffington postJuan Lagares' latest injury isn't sitting well with manager Terry Collins.
The New York Mets outfielder, who's struggled with multiple injuries in recent seasons, left Saturday's contest against the Atlanta Braves with a left oblique strain, which his skipper is hopping doesn't linger for the oft-injured center fielder.
"I'm concerned. Those things can be one of those injuries that don't go away for awhile," Collins said Saturday, according to Marc Carig of Newsday. "I'm very concerned."
Lagares appeared to suffer the injury in the third inning while trying to run out a groundball to third base.
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(Courtesy: MLB.com)
In 2016, he missed 47 games with the club as he underwent surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb. He was also hampered by a nagging elbow injury, as well as a strain to his right shoulder in 2015.
The 28-year-old, who was expected to begin the season as the Mets' fourth outfielder, now may not be healthy in time for Opening Day, and with Brandon Nimmo still battling a hamstring issue suffered at the World Baseball Classic, the Mets could be without crucial outfield depth to begin the season.
"I'm frustrated but it's nothing you can control," Lagares told Carig. "I tried to (do) my job, run the bases hard."If it had followed the treatment written by Spielberg and Mathison, E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears would have shown a group of aliens descending to Earth in response to the distress call from "Zrek," which turns out to be E.T.'s real name. Oh, cool, more little E.T.s, right? Not really. These "albino mutations," who have red eyes, yellow heart-lights, and razor sharp teeth, are like E.T.'s evil siblings. They spend some time in the woods, mutilating cattle and capturing plants and "animal-like beings" in their weird "light cages" before Elliot, Gertie, and their friends show up mistakenly thinking E.T. is back. Then the kids are interrogated and Elliot is tortured until he passes out while crying for E.T. to save him. Sounds like the perfect follow-up to a family-friendly classic, huh?
Eventually, E.T. shows up, saves the kids, hugs everyone, then immediately flies away again, so he's back on Earth for approximately 15 minutes of screen time in an otherwise terrifying movie in which kids are abducted and assaulted. (A scan of the whole treatment is available here.) And yes, it's obviously a rough thumbnail of what would, of course, be a longer, more detailed story, but building another beloved classic on that dark framework seems like a stretch. Not to mention we don't think the Hershey Company would be too thrilled to see Reese's Pieces being gleefully shredded by the razor-sharp teeth of sadistic intergalactic torturers.Your brain starts to eat itself if it hasn't had enough sleep, according to a new study.
Researchers studied lab mice, and found that 'clean-up' cells were more active in their brains when they were sleep-deprived.
The cells, known as astrocytes, act like mini Hoovers in the brain, sweeping up cells as the brain's connections become weak and break apart.
'We show for the first time that portions of synapses are literally eaten by astrocytes because of sleep loss,' lead author Michele Bellesi told New Scientist.
According to the research team at Italy's Marche Polytechnic University, the seemingly alarming process is actually a positive thing.
The cells, known as astrocytes, act like mini Hoovers in the brain, sweeping up cells as the brain's connections become weak and break apart, according to Italian researchers
'They [our synpases] are like old pieces of furniture,' Bellesi said. 'And so [they] probably need more attention and cleaning.'
But he added that sleep-deprived brains showed ominous signs of activity that leads to Alzheimer's.
In sleep-deprived mice, brain cells called microglials were more active.
'We already know that sustained microglial activation has been observed in Alzheimer's and other forms of neurodegeneration,' Michele said.
The news comes on the heels of research that showed having too little sleep could put people at risk from heart disease.
The study found that having less than six hours sleep a night was associated with a higher risk of death in people with metabolic syndrome – a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity
Researchers said the effect was particularly strong in those with elevated blood pressure or poor glucose metabolism.
People with a common cluster of risk factors for heart disease and diabetes were around twice as likely to die of heart disease or stroke as people without the same set of risk factors if they failed to get more than six hours of sleep, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
For those who got more sleep, the risk of death was more modest.
The study is the first to measure sleep duration in a laboratory rather than relying on patient reports, and the first to examine the impact of sleep duration on the risk of death in those with a common cluster of heart disease risk factors.
The researchers randomly selected 1,344 adults with an average age of 49 who agreed to spend one night in a sleep laboratory.
Based on their test results, 39.2 per cent of the participants were found to have at least three of the risk factors, that when clustered together are known as the metabolic syndrome.
For the study, the cluster included body mass index (BMI) higher than 30 - the standard definition of being obese, as well as elevated total cholesterol, blood pressure, fasting blood sugar and triglyceride levels.
During an average follow-up of 16.6 years, 22 per cent of the participants died.
Compared to people without the same cluster of risk factors, those with metabolic syndrome who clocked more than six hours of sleep time in the lab were about 1.49 times more likely to die of stroke during the follow-up period.
But those who slept less than six hours in the lab were about 2.1 times more likely to die of heart disease or stroke.Are you tired of winning yet?
Well, too bad, we're going to keep winning, and even when you can't take any more winning, we're going to keep winning again and again!
Via Reuters:
Austria's highest court has overturned the results of the country's presidential election and ordered a re-do, citing vote-counting irregularities.
In the May runoff election, left-leaning, Green Party-backed candidate Alexander Van der Bellen defeated his far-right, anti-immigration rival Norbert Hofer by fewer than 31,000 votes. As we reported, his margin of victory was just 0.6 percent.
This is the "first time anything like this has happened in Austria's postwar history," as NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson tells our Newscast unit. She adds that Van der Bellen was supposed to be sworn in next Friday.
Now, Hofer has another chance at victory. If elected, he would be "the first far-right head of state in the European Union," as Reuters reports. The Constitutional Court ruled Friday on an appeal by Hofer's Freedom Party against the election's outcome.
"The court says postal votes were opened prematurely and in some cases their counting was unsupervised," Kerry Skyring reported for NPR from Vienna. "It says there is no evidence of vote manipulation, but because the potential for it existed, the result should be annulled."
As the BBC reports, the Freedom Party "also claimed to have evidence that some under-16s and foreigners had been allowed to vote."
Hofer's strong showing in the May runoff was seen as an indication of the rising power of far-right, ultra-nationalist parties in Europe. This is massive, the election was definitely stolen from Hofer with voter fraud, if he can get an honest do-over he stands a huge chance of victory and Europe will finally have it's first far-right head of state since 1945!
Think back one year ago, who could have possibly anticipated these huge victories in just one year's time?
I don't know about you, but I thought things were really bleak.
Now we have the rise of Trump, the rise of nationalism all over Europe, the impending collapse of the EU, and an awakening among Europeans and Americans to the perils of open borders and mass migration.
It's happening friends, it's really happening.
Follow InformationLiberation on Twitter and Facebook.Update — After reading this article, if you want to know, what has happened so far in past 4 days and how to protect your computers from WannaCry, read our latest article "WannaCry Ransomware: Everything You Need To Know Immediately." After reading this article, if you want to know, what has happened so far in past 4 days and how to protect your computers from WannaCry, read our latest article "
"If NSA had privately disclosed the flaw used to attack hospitals when they *found* it, not when they lost it, this may not have happened," NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says.
Kill-Switch for WannaCry? No, It's not over yet!
hxxp://www[.]iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea[.]com
hxxp://ifferfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea[.]com/
Since the kill-switch feature was in the SMB worm, not in the ransomware module itself., "WannaCrypt ransomware was spread normally long before this and will be long after, what we stopped was the SMB worm variant," MalwareTech told The Hacker News.
If you receive WannaCry via an email, a malicious torrent, or other vectors (instead of SMB protocol).
If by chance your ISP or antivirus or firewall blocks access to the sinkhole domain.
If the targeted system requires a proxy to access the Internet, which is a common practice in the majority of corporate networks.
If someone makes the sinkhole domain inaccessible for all, such as by using a large-scale DDoS attack.
WannaCry 2.0, Ransomware With *NO* Kill-Switch Is On Hunt!
CIRCL c/o securitymadein.lu
"I can confirm we've had versions without the kill switch domain connect since yesterday," told The Hacker News.
Updated: WannaCry 2.0 is Someone Else's Work
"The patched version matt described does attempt to spread. It's a full set which was modified by someone with a hex editor to disable the kill switch," Raiu told me.
"Given the high profile of the original attack, it's going to be no surprise at all to see copycat attacks from others, and perhaps other attempts to infect even more computers from the original WannaCry gang. The message is simple: Patch your computers, harden your defences, run a decent anti-virus, and - for goodness sake - ensure that you have secure backups." Cyber security expert Graham Cluley told The Hacker News.
"The next attacks are inevitable, you can simply patch the existing samples with a hex editor and it'll continue to spread," Matthew Hickey, a security expert and co-founder of Hacker House told me.
"We will see a number of variants of this attack over the coming weeks and months so it's important to patch hosts. The worm can be modified to spread other payloads not just WCry and we may see other malware campaigns piggybacking off this samples success."
"The worm functionality attempts to infect unpatched Windows machines in the local network. At the same time, it also executes massive scanning on Internet IP addresses to find and infect other vulnerable computers. This activity results in large SMB traffic from the infected host," Microsoft says.
Video Demo of WannaCry Ransomware Infection
And Second one…
Get Prepared: Upgrade, Patch OS & Disable SMBv1
WannaCry has Hit Over 200,000 Systems in 150 Countries, Warned Europol
"We are running around 200 global operations against cyber crime each year, but we've never seen anything like this," Wainwright said, as quoted by BBC.
"The latest count is over 200,000 victims in at least 150 countries. Many of those victims will be businesses, including large corporations. The global reach is unprecedented."
If you are following the news, by now you might be aware that a security researcher has activated a "Kill Switch" which apparently stopped the WannaCry ransomware from spreading further.But it's not true, neither the threat is over yet.However, the kill switch has just slowed down the infection rate.Multiple security researchers have claimed that there are more samples of WannaCry out there, with different 'kill-switch' domains and without any kill-switch function, continuing to infect unpatched computers worldwide (find more details below).So far, over 237,000 computers across 99 countries around the world have been infected, and the infection is still rising even hours after the kill switch was triggered by the 22-years-old British security researcher behind the twitter handle'MalwareTech.'For those unaware, WannaCry is an insanely fast-spreading ransomware malware that leverages a Windows SMB exploit to remotely target a computer running on unpatched or unsupported versions of Windows.Once infected, WannaCry also scans for other vulnerable computers connected to the same network, as well scans random hosts on the wider Internet, to spread quickly.The SMB exploit, currently being used by WannaCry, has been identified as EternalBlue |
difficult time finding detailed specifications for it. Supposedly the H316/Kitchen Computer is based on the DDP-516 (Also made by Honeywell), so perhaps some of the specifications are similar. However I couldn't find any way to verify that.
The Kitchen Computer was obviously geared towards housewives who loved to cook. However any housewives who wanted one of these had to shell out A LOT of green, considering the Kitchen Computer sold for $10,600 when it was first introduced (You could buy about four new cars for that much money in 1965!). This price tag included the built-in recipes mentioned earlier, and also included a cookbook and an apron (Oh boy do I hear the laughter now).
Not much more I can say about the Kitchen Computer. But one things for sure: regardless of how much of a computer geek I consider myself, I'd rather use a good old-fashioned cookbook."
The display itself was actually a binary display, not a text based one. You needed to learn how to just read it!
The language used on the Kitchen Computer was called "BACK"
There is no record of any Kitchen Computers ever being sold.
A small reference has been found about the actual computer part of the machine being used in the initial creation of ARPNET, but it yet has to be confirmed...
In addition to being sold as a "kitchen appliance" it powered the Mergenthaler Linotype Paul Ltd., Linotron 505.
________
Contributors: Jake Wasdin, Torin DarkflightELECTION-YEAR PANDERING to ethnic minorities is part of America’s political tradition, but sometimes restraint is the wiser course. In Northern Virginia this year, candidates have been outdoing themselves to cozy up to the region’s fast-growing Korean community. That’s fine — except when politicians seek to substitute their judgment for that of historians.
In the open-seat race in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, the Republican candidate, state Del. Barbara Comstock, is promising that, if elected, she will attempt to insert Congress into a dispute between South Korea and Japan. The dispute involves prodding states to buy school textbooks that challenge the name of the Sea of Japan, which many Koreans insist should be called the East Sea. Ms. Comstock’s Democratic opponent, Fairfax County Supervisor John Foust, chimed in that he would do the same.
Given Virginia’s demographics, politicians may see it as a no-brainer to take the Korean side. The state’s 82,000 ethnic Koreans, many of whom live in Northern Virginia, outnumber ethnic Japanese by more than 4 to 1.
But it’s fair to ask whether Ms. Comstock and Mr. Foust, neither of whom has any particular expertise in international affairs, should be poking their noses in a bitter dispute between two U.S. allies — one of which, Japan, is among Virginia’s top sources of foreign investment. Terry McAuliffe (D), while campaigning for governor last year, said he would support legislation in Richmond requiring the state to buy textbooks reflecting the Korean position. Once elected to office, and faced with the reality of Japanese opposition, his enthusiasm waned (though, in the end, he quietly signed the bill).
Similarly, we wonder about the precedent set by Fairfax County in dedicating a memorial garden, just behind the County Government Center, to women forced into sex slavery by Japan during World War II.
There’s no dispute about the anguish and abuse suffered by so-called comfort women, many of them Korean, who were forced into brothels to service Japanese soldiers. But what other ethnic, national or historical grievances will Fairfax agree to memorialize at its government center? Irish repression at the hands of the British? The Armenian genocide perpetuated by the Turks? The 14th-century Battle of Kosovo, in which the Serbs were wiped out by the Ottomans?
We’re pressing the point, but the question stands: Is the seat of a county government — even a county with a richly diverse population — the right place to memorialize historical tragedies? And if so, which ones?
We doubt it, much as we doubt that Congress should be attempting to arbitrate the nomenclature of the sea that separates Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Let politicians pander. But let them also refrain from dictating cartographic advisory opinions to the states.George Osborne yesterday warned us about a “cocktail of threats” brewing in the world economy. All the ingredients are there for a noxious brew. The emerging markets debt bubble. The ongoing stock market turmoil in China. Recession in Brazil and Russia, and the slowdown in India. The collapse in global commodity prices.
I’ve warned about the danger signs elsewhere before. But curiously, Osborne didn’t talk up these “threats” in last year’s autumn statement. He didn’t raise them at the summer budget. They were hardly a centrepiece of his election campaign.
Quite the opposite. He’s spent a fair few years now talking up how clever he has been, and how good everything is going to be. This was a result of his “long-term economic plan”. But there’s never been a “long-term economic plan”. Just the short-term politics of austerity. The result is Osborne serving up a rather unpleasant domestic cocktail of his own making.
George Osborne warns UK economy faces 'cocktail of threats' Read more
The chancellor claims Britain is “living within its means”, but our borrowing from the rest of the world rose to record levels. We have to borrow because we buy far more from the rest of the world than the rest of the world buys from us. And because we’ve borrowed so much money, and sold off so many assets, the payments due to the rest of the world are astronomical. We are borrowing more from abroad than any other developed economy.
If Osborne’s “march of the makers” had ever got out of the parade ground, this deficit with the rest of the world – our “current account” deficit – might have been shrunk. Instead, manufacturing exports have slumped and manufacturing output is decreasing, with manufacturing output still below its level of seven years ago, before the crash.
Far from “rebalancing” the economy, Britain has become more dependent on services, and we’ve shrunk manufacturing, which is the bedrock of any modern economy. And while employment in London is up nearly 12% since 2010, it’s up just 0.3% across the rest of the country. Even then, far too many new jobs are poorly paid and insecure, with pay still down on 2008.
I doubt even Osborne believes his own stories any more. That’s why he’s getting his excuses in first
The increase in poorly paid, insecure jobs means British households can’t “live within their means” either. After years of paying back their debts, households are being forced to borrow once more. Unsecured borrowing, covering credit cards, store cards and (alarmingly) payday lending is now rising at the fastest rate since before the crash.
The centrepiece of Osborne’s much-hyped “plan” is his effort to bring down the government’s own borrowing, while hoping he can increase household debts. And with tremors in China, it’s Britain that, thanks to its overstretched banks, has the largest single exposure to Chinese debt of any major western economy.
When Osborne first arrived in office, he promised us that 2015 was the year that government borrowing would hit zero. The figures, out just before Christmas, speak for themselves. Not only is government borrowing running at £67bn for the financial year to date, borrowing in November alone was the largest since 2013. Osborne has spectacularly failed to meet his own targets.
I’m backing George Osborne’s Project Fear – if it helps keep us in Europe | Martin Kettle Read more
In addition, he’s letting the financiers off the hook with a return to a soft-touch approach to bank regulations. Last summer, he kicked out the head of the watchdog he set up, the Financial Conduct Authority, which is charged with keeping bankers in line, for being a little too good at his job; meanwhile he stayed silent as the FCA watered down its vital inquiry into banking culture. And on top of all this he’s also slashed taxes for mega-banks, despite recent revelations showing some banks are not paying any tax.
As a result, it’ll hardly be surprising if the bankers are getting back to their old tricks.
I doubt even Osborne believes his own stories any more. That’s why he’s getting his excuses in first. His austerity programme is leaving our economy more unbalanced, with rising debts, and overexposed to risks elsewhere in the world. But, incredibly, he wants more of the same failure – more austerity. Instead, we need real investment in science, skills, and infrastructure, made for the long term across the whole country, not excuses and spin. Without this, George Osborne offers warnings but no solutions to a domestic cocktail that he made that will leave the rest of us with the hangover.CONWAY, N.H. — Abigail Hernandez clasped her hands and fixed her eyes on the lanky man in the orange jumpsuit accused of kidnapping her while she walked home from school last fall, just days before her 15th birthday.
Little more than a week after she was reunited with her family, Hernandez watched Tuesday as Nathaniel E. Kibby, the man who allegedly held her captive for nine months, was arraigned in Conway District Court.
Kibby, 34, of Gorham, N.H., was held on $1 million cash bail. His lawyer asked Judge Pamela Albee to enter no plea, saying he did not have enough information about the kidnapping charge to advise his client on a plea.
RELATED | Video: Abigail Hernandez walks into court
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At a news conference after the arraignment, Jane E. Young, associate attorney general for New Hampshire, said, “This arrest is the first step of this case.”
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She released few details about the alleged kidnapping, or about how Hernandez was returned to her family, saying the investigation is ongoing into where the Conway teen was held, whether she and Kibby knew each other, and whether others were involved.
Police have interviewed hundreds of people, analyzed social media, and used cellphone tower records in their investigation, said Kieran Ramsey, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division.
“We didn’t let any lead go unpursued, any tip go unchecked,” Ramsey said, remaining tight-lipped on details but saying some agents’ “worst fears were proven true.”
PHOTOS: Scenes from the arraignment
Young said investigators had enough evidence to obtain search and arrest warrants Sunday night but waited until Monday so SWAT teams could form a plan for taking Kibby into custody.
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Inside the courtroom, Hernandez sat next to her mother, Zenya, who leaned forward intently with her chin in her hands. Hernandez sat back straight, blond streaks coloring her dark hair, and barely moved or made a sound.
She wore flip-flops and jeans, mostly stared down or at the judge, and appeared thinner than in old photos released around the time she went missing.
Jesse Friedman, a public defender appointed to represent Kibby, outside of court would say only that Kibby is “mindful” of the charge, and “he’s not too happy to be in this circumstance, and I think you guys will find out a lot more on another day.”
Charles Krupa/Associated press Abigail Hernandez (seated third from left) was in the courtroom for Kibby’s arraignment.
Hernandez’s family rushed from court after the proceeding, shielding the teen’s face with a jacket and declining to comment. Kibby is charged with kidnapping her from North-South Road in Conway.
About 40 miles north in Gorham, state and federal investigators combed through Kibby’s property, which includes a small shed and a red shipping container in the backyard. Neighbors recalled Kibby as a loner who sometimes criticized the government and owned guns.
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Wallace and Janet Corrigan, who own Gateway Trailer Park and live there, said Kibby moved onto the property in 2009. He owned his trailer and always paid his rent, $300 a month, on time, they said.
RELATED: Many questions remain in Abigail Hernandez case
“It was a surprise to us,” Janet Corrigan said. “You see the SWAT team show up and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is happening right in our backyard.’ ”
Gil Talbot for The Boston Globe Shakira Bilodeau lives near Kibby in Goreham, N.H.
Don St. Germain, 76, and his wife, Jeannette, 71, said authorities descended on their quiet neighborhood Monday in full uniform with rifles ready.
“Just like you watch ‘CSI,’ when they come in fast like a drug bust,” Jeannette St. Germain said.
Don St. Germain said it was hard to believe Hernandez might have been kept in his neighborhood, but if she was confined, “you would have never known.”
Crystal Lutz, 31, said her cousin, Angel Whitehouse, dated Kibby for several years and even lived with him on Brookside Drive, but they broke up a couple years ago. A knock at the door of a Gorham home listed for Whitehouse went unanswered Monday.
Kibby attended some of Lutz’s family events, she said, and “used to complain” about the government “all the time” while sometimes acting aggressively toward her cousin.
Court records show Kibby has had numerous brushes with law enforcement, including many in 1998, when he was a student at Kennett High School in Conway, the same school Hernandez attended last fall.
He was found guilty then of assaulting a female student by grabbing her while she tried to board a school bus. That same year, he faced charges for using false information to buy an “AK-47 type weapon,” according to a police report.
Kibby additionally racked up several trespass violations and faced charges for theft and unlawful manufacture of a controlled drug after police allegedly found a small marijuana growing operation in his room.
More recently, he faced a $350 fine for being found in possession of marijuana on Oct. 22, 2013, in North Conway, according to court records. That was less than two weeks after Hernandez disappeared.
Kibby also faced assault and trespassing charges in connection with an altercation in March. The incident came after a February car accident in Redstone, N.H.
Eric Ray, the other man involved in the accident, said Kibby had gone to his house after he served Kibby with small claims papers at Kibby’s job in Conway. He said Kibby either threatened or hit Tammy Shackford, Ray’s girlfriend, causing her to slip and bruise her elbow.
Ray said he saw Kibby at a court proceeding last week, and “he was just very, very arrogant, smirking and smiling.”
After that incident, Kibby was ordered not to possess any firearms as part of his bail conditions. Court records show he called Gorham police to his home March 4 to seize several guns, so as not to violate his bail conditions.
Police referred all questions to the attorney general, whose office declined to comment on the visit.
Kibby later protested the bail conditions in a court filing, saying his firearms were “of immense equitable value” and that he was not a threat because he lived by an “objectivist libertarian moral code.”
More on the Abigail Hernandez case:
John R. Ellement and Martin Finucane of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Zachary T. Sampson can be reached at zachary.sampson@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @ZackSampsonHundreds of demonstrators gathered in Olympia, Washington, on Thursday night to protest a white police officer’s shooting of two unarmed black men suspected of shoplifting beer.
{snip}
About 400 people, waving signs reading “Black Lives Matter,” met at Woodruff Park, about a mile from the shooting scene, to listen to speakers and prepare for a march on City Hall, The Olympian newspaper and The Associated Press reported. Speakers urged the marchers to remain peaceful.
Olympia Police Chief Ronnie Roberts said at a news conference Thursday afternoon that he understood the sensitivity of the case in light of police shootings of unarmed African-Americans in several cities across the country. But he said there was no indication that race played a factor in the confrontation early Thursday near a grocery store where the men had allegedly tried to steal beer.
The men were identified as stepbrothers Andre Thompson, 24, and Bryson Chaplin, 21, both of Olympia. Thompson was listed stable in serious critical condition Thursday night, while Chaplin was described as critical. Both are expected to survive, police said.
Roberts said one of the men assaulted the officer, Ryan Donald, 35, who responded to a shoplifting call about 1:15 a.m. (4:15 a.m. ET). Donald wasn’t injured.
In audio of Donald’s communications with a dispatcher during the incident, he is asked whether the men are armed. He replies: “No. He just assaulted me with a skateboard. I tried to, uh, grab his friend. They’re very aggressive, just so you know.”
Donald shot the man, who fled into the woods with his stepbrother, Roberts said. They then came back out of the woods, and “the officer felt threatened and discharged his firearm” again, hitting the other man multiple times in the torso, he said.
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Original Article
Share ThisJosh Harris: "Pseudo was a fake company."
Josh Harris, founder of Jupiter Communications and, later, Pseudo.com, forwarded a letter to Boing Boing today in which he proclaims to the New York Times that "Pseudo was a fake company," and that the entire enterprise was "an elaborate piece of performance art."
Why did he address this to the NYT? Mr. Harris claims many of the news articles which established a perception of legitimacy for the once high-flying internet video startup -- the sort of legitimacy that helped encourage investors to part with tens of millions of dollars -- were written by now-disgraced NYT writer Jayson Blair, who was forced to resign in 2003 after having been caught plagiarizing and faking content in his stories for the paper.
"I suggest you do a NYT archive search and find the four articles written by Jayson; search terms: josh harris jayson blair," says Harris.
If you're not familiar with Pseudo (and Harris') significance during the late '90s internet bubble, here are a few profile links: NY Mag, Wired, Radar, Wikipedia, BusinessWeek. His online experiment "We Live in Public" predated the era of now ubiquitous always-on lifecasting video sites.
Journalists used words like "wild, Warholian," "oddball," "dot-com playboy extraordinaire" and "golden boy" to describe Harris during the Pseudo era; also "crazy."
The man who replaced Harris as CEO at Pseudo was David Bohrman, now an executive at CNN overseeing the network's election coverage in Washington.
Harris sends this to Boing Boing from Sidamo, Ethiopia (see snapshot above, with his almost-ripe coffee plants), where he moved shortly after selling his most recent creation, Operator 11. If he looks a little under the weather, that's because, as he explains, he's been fighting a fever there for the past few weeks; he says he's there "working on a documentary about the 'Great Ethiopian Nation.'"
Here is Harris' letter, which continues after the jump:
I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company. I believe that the then New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was actively following my work and onto my game (taking one to know one). The last article Mr. Blair wrote about me was entitled Dot-Com Executive, Once a Conjurer of Silicon Alley Razzmatazz, Logs Off (Jayson Blair, March 4, 2001). For that interview Mr. Blair requested that we meet in the empty back room of Sardi’s (the first time I recall meeting him face-to-face) and then basically winked at Andy Morris (my publicity agent) and I for over an hour. Previously Mr. Blair mentioned or quoted me in three other articles. Does the New York Times have an ethical responsibility to its readers to contact ad infinitum, ad nauseam every single source that touched Mr. Blair’s writing when the integrity of its reporting is at stake? Did someone at the New York Times Corporation contact each and every person that Mr. Blair wrote about?Paul Bradley Meagher, 42, formerly a UND police officer, was charged with one count of receiving child pornography and two counts of being in possession of child pornography last week in U.S. District Court in Grand Forks, though the court only unsealed his case Monday.
He pleaded not guilty to the charges at a hearing Monday in Grand Forks' federal courthouse downtown, according to minutes filed with the court.
Meagher previously was charged with 10 counts of possession of child pornography in Grand Forks County District Court, though those charges likely will be dropped in light of the federal charges now levelled against him.
With the federal charges, Meagher now faces more prison time, if convicted. Federal sentencing guidelines for child porn offenders are harsher than state ones, with the guidelines setting a mandatory minimum prison term and a longer maximum.
If Meagher is convicted of the federal charges, he would face a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison and a possible maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison, according to U.S. Code.
Court documents allege Meagher was caught downloading a large amount of child porn by the North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which in 2011, infiltrated a file-sharing network often used by child pornography offenders.
The BCI planted its own computers inside Freenet, a file-sharing network designed to protect users' anonymity, and were able to discern which users were downloading child porn off the network, according to a court document written by BCI Special Agent Jesse Smith.
Law enforcement carried out a search warrant of Meagher's Grand Forks apartment and allegedly found Meagher's computers downloading images off Freenet at the time of the search, court records say.
Ultimately, officers found more than 100,000 images and videos of child porn on Meagher's computers, with several images showing girls between the ages of 4 and 9 years old being sexually assaulted by adults, said Grand Forks County Assistant State's Attorney Brittney Blake.
Some of the images allegedly found on Meagher's computers dated back to February 2006, according to the federal indictment.
Meagher, who was hired by the UND Police Department in 2004, was fired after criminal charges were filed earlier this month.
He worked at the Grand Forks Juvenile Detention Center from June 1995 to April 1999 before he was transferred to adult corrections, according to an application he submitted in 2004 to the UND Police Department.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Alice Senechal allowed Meagher to be released under conditions he abstain from using the Internet, stay away from children while unsupervised, find a job and live with his parents in Grand Forks, among other terms, according to minutes from Monday's hearing.
Meagher will be held in custody until electronic home monitoring is in place at his parents' home, the minutes say.India’s recent rejection of bids from two American jet manufacturers for the biggest defense contract in Indian history made minor news in the U.S. The rest of the world paid closer attention because that decision shot down a dozen years of diplomacy intended to make India another of Washington’s “strategic partners.” It also signaled that one more chapter of the “Pax Americana” story has drawn to a close.
The deal to sell the Indian Air Force 126 fighter jets was a top-tier priority for the Obama administration, and the president lobbied hard for it when he visited New Delhi last November. Timothy J. Roemer, Obama’s ambassador to India, resigned as soon as U.S. defense contractors fell out of the running in late April.
The U.S. loss of $11 billion worth of business (and a commensurate number of American jobs) is troubling, especially since Boeing and Lockheed Martin lost out to Dassault, the French aerospace company, and Eurofighter, a consortium that operates in a cross-border fashion similar to Airbus Industrie.
Some defense and security mavens think New Delhi has blundered, and the conversation in the blogosphere has been heated. “Is the United States more likely to be sympathetic to India’s interests after an $11 billion contract — which means much-needed jobs for the U.S. economy — is awarded to someone else?” asks Nitin Pai, an Indian defense analyst, in a blog post. “Long used to complaining that the United States doesn’t care for India’s interests, will awarding the contract to some European firms help change the situation?”
Good questions. The interesting thing about them is that the Indian government doesn’t appear to be much concerned about the answers.
The Indian Air Force and the Defense Ministry insist that the Europeans simply beat the Americans on technological grounds. And analysts in Washington acknowledge that Boeing (F/A-18) and Lockheed (F-16) were not putting their most advanced technologies on offer.
There is also the Pakistan factor, which Indians are hyper-touchy about: American jet manufacturers already supply the Pakistani air force.
There’s a lot of history behind this deal, too. India’s foreign and defense policies have been marked since independence in 1947 by what used to be called “non-alignment” between East and West. The Cold War is over and the term has fallen out of fashion, but India, now as then, still prefers good friendships and autonomy to undue dependence on other powers. “In the contemporary geopolitical environment, India’s interests are best served by being a swing power,” Nitin Pai says in his blog; Pai is an Indian but pronouncedly a pro-American Indian.
Washington has been assiduously courting New Delhi since the Clinton administration. In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton flew to New Delhi to make sweeping statements about the bright future of the natural alliance between “the world’s two largest democracies.” Three years ago, President George W. Bush signed a civilian nuclear pact that, in essence, welcomed India into the club of nuclear powers.
U.S. intentions have been two. India was supposed to become a strategic counterweight in Asia to China’s supposedly worrisome rise as a global power. As the jet-fighter deal suggests, the Indians were also supposed to buy a lot of American defense hardware.
I see three miscalculations in this superficially neat formulation:
• India is not interested in becoming anybody’s counterweight to anybody else anywhere. Specifically, its efforts in Asia now are gradually to repair what have often been troubled relations with China. • Happy talk in front of the Indian parliament and offers of a strategic partnership do not translate into top-dollar defense deals. As Ashley Tellis, a security analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said after the Boeing and Lockheed bids were dropped, the intent was “to invest in a plane, not a relationship.” • Everyone is watching as China continues to gather steam economically and amass more influence as an Asian power. But few share the view, widely held by many Americans, that there is danger inherent in this. China’s rise is inevitable, and Beijing has done nothing to suggest that its intentions extend beyond keeping its economy going at warp speed and winning the world’s recognition as a regional and global player. India, incidentally, shares the same ambitions.
Despite the disappointment over the jet fighter deal, no one is suggesting any new frost gathering in U.S., although the Obama administration has not been shy in expressing its disappointment. But Washington has plainly discovered that there is a limit to its attraction to rising powers such as India: It has some, but history has taken us beyond the only-game-in-town, sole-superpower phase.
One ancillary dimension to this affair: It did not go unnoticed around the world that Roemer, the American ambassador, stepped down — officially for personal reasons — as soon as Boeing and Lockheed fell out of the race. It’s unseemly that diplomats may be reduced to something akin to account executives at ad agencies in the 21st century. But in this era of cutthroat competition to create jobs for your citizens, losing a big account that even the boss has gone to bat for doesn’t go down well in the oval-shaped corner office. “We made a big push,” says a security adviser in Washington who cannot be named because of his institution’s rules, “and we came out looking pretty pathetic.”
Related links
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (The Acorn)
Alliances of the Air (Project Syndicate)
Obama Dismayed as India Rejects Arms Deal (Al Jazerra)
India to Strengthen Bonds with Neighbors for Regional Stability (Asia Society)NJIT Names Travis Johnson to Lead New Division I Men’s Lacrosse Program
Nineteenth varsity sport is slated to begin play in 2015 with Johnson at the helm
has been named the first head coach of men's lacrosse at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Director of Athleticsannounced.Johnson, who will officially start his new post at NJIT shortly after New Year's Day 2014, has been hired to coach a start-up program that is slated to begin play in 2015 as an NCAA Division I team.He is a former player who has been coaching at the college level since the 1999-2000 academic year and most recently served as the first assistant, defensive coordinator, and recruiting coordinator atin Emmitsburg, MD.Prior to Mount St. Mary's, where he has worked since 2010-11, Johnson was an assistant coach in two stints at(2004-06 and 2008-2010) and also at(2006 to 2008). He began his coaching career as an undergraduate ofand continuedin Hoboken, NJ (2001-04).He is a 2000 graduate of RIT, where he played lacrosse and was selected by the professional Rochester Knighthawks in the 2000 National Lacrosse League draft.Johnson has been defensive coordinator at his stops since 2001. He is an experienced recruiter, having held the title of recruiting coordinator with Stony Brook, in his second stint at Penn State, and then with Mount St. Mary's.Johnson will be in charge of the Highlanders' 11th varsity men's team and the 19th varsity team overall for NJIT. The launch of the program was approved and Kaplan conducted a national search that resulted in the appoinment of Johnson as the first coach of the Division I Highlanders.According to reports in the lacrosse news media, NJIT is the 69th institution nationwide that either fields a team or is in the process of starting a Division I men's lacrosse team. In New Jersey, the Highlanders be the fourth Division I lacrosse program, joining Princeton, Rutgers, and Monmouth (which begins play this spring)."We are excited to be starting lacrosse and we are excited that Travis has accepted the challenge of being our first men's lacrosse coach," said Kaplan in announcing the appointment. "He's garnered great experience, first as a student-athlete at RIT and then as a coach working in excellent academic schools with great lacrosse programs. He will help us put NJIT lacrosse on the map."The new head coach of the Highlanders did his first coaching with the Division III programs at his alma mater and then at Stevens. From there, he entered the Division I ranks with Penn State, which made the NCAA Tournament in his first season on the staff.After another year with the Nittany Lions, Johnson headed to Stony Brook, working as the top assistant to, now the head coach at the United States Naval Academy. As recruiting coordinator, Johnson helped Sowell assemble the core of a Stony Brook squad that, in 2010, reached the NCAA Tournament and was ranked as high as sixth in the nation during the season.Johnson went back to Penn State for the 2009 and 2010 seasons and then moved to The Mount, which won the Northeast Conference championship in 2011, his first season on the coaching staff."I'm very excited about this opportunity," said the first coach of NJIT men's lacrosse as he looks ahead to building a new team. "We're going to offer student-athletes a chance to get a quality education, especially in the areas of science and technology, and play Division I lacrosse at the same time."We're going to have to hustle from the first day. It's going to be a wild ride for the next three months for me, personally (student-athletes who will begin college in the fall of 2014 are signing National Letters of Intent this fall). We have three months to identify and attract the players who are going to form our first Division I team. We're going to look in all the areas, but we're going to hit Jersey hard and go after the talent that's in this state."NJIT men's lacrosse team will play its home games on campus on Lubetkin Field at Mal Simon Stadium, the longtime home of NJIT's men's and women's soccer teams. The on-campus field is lighted and has an artificial turf surface.NJIT has a club lacrosse team which played six contests against other club teams in 2013 and will play again in the spring of 2014.Darrelle Revis shares the nicknames given to him by his teammates, why he deserves to get paid a large salary and his desire to cover Jerry Rice. (2:33)
This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's August 31 NFL Preview Issue. Subscribe today!
THERE ARE CERTAIN athletes who exude celebrity; it trails them like a cloud of perfume, intoxicating everyone in their path. Darrelle Revis is not one of those athletes. As we walk through New York's SoHo neighborhood, passing an outdoor basketball court, none of the kids shooting hoops notices the All-Pro cornerback, who recently re-signed with the Jets. He's anonymous in gray sweats. (It should be noted that they're unusually soft and luxurious sweats, the kind of sweats that probably cost more than most people's dress pants.) Out of uniform, Revis, 30, looks surprisingly average, like a genial uncle who happens to work out a lot.
We duck into his favorite Japanese restaurant and sit in the front. A young couple walk by on the sidewalk and pause by the window. They lean in, and I brace for something -- a wave or a photograph -- but nothing happens. Turns out they were just looking for a menu.
Revis doesn't notice. He orders a bottle of sake, which he insists we split. "Do you like eel?" he asks. "Ugh." He pokes his finger in his mouth and pretends to gag, then grins, teeth gleaming behind his fuzzy beard. He was an hour late, and he has apologized several times for this. He can explain. He was shopping in midtown Manhattan, and he couldn't catch a cab. He stood on the street for maybe 20 minutes and found himself chatting with a stranger who was also trying to hail a ride. ("Nice dude!") Eventually, he gave up and tried to use Uber -- but his phone had died, so he walked around looking for an outlet and ended up going into an empty Indian restaurant. Once it started charging, he felt like he should thank the owners, so he decided to order an entree, and --
"I'm really sorry," he says.
Revis' gentleness can be jarring if you've heard the stories of his ferocity: how he punishes anyone who beats him to the ball, practicing with an intensity that's borderline inappropriate; how he once brawled with Jets teammate Patrick Turner because the receiver wasn't replicating then-Dolphins wideout Brandon Marshall's pass routes, jeopardizing his ability to prepare for a game. He's called his competitive fervor a sickness. But here, sitting across from me on a breezy weekday afternoon, he's so soft-spoken and serene, he's almost Zen-like- -- a monk in a warrior's body.
More impressive than Revis' $70 million deal? The $39 million guaranteed. Peter Hapak for ESPN
Our waiter returns, an anxious smile crossing his face. After pouring our water, he backs away, then stops: "I hope it tastes better than Boston tap water," he sputters. Revis rewards him with a long, generous chuckle.
He's happy to be back in New York. Not because he has a LeBron-like complex about coming home -- though there's a little of that -- but mostly because he just likes it here. Of course, the money didn't hurt. In March, the Jets signed Revis to a five-year contract with $39 million guaranteed, making him the highest-paid cornerback in the NFL. Revis' peers, many of whom revere the presumptive Hall of Famer the way aspiring day traders worship Warren Buffett, rushed to praise him for landing the deal. Colts pass rusher Robert Mathis tweeted that he wanted to shake Revis' hand; longtime Steelers cornerback Ike Taylor wrote: "BRUH I NEED DAT REVIS DEAL."
"You have to admire what he's done," says Arizona's Larry Fitzgerald of Revis' contracts. "He's never flinched."
In the past eight years, Revis has negotiated five deals, held out of training camp twice, switched teams three times and won one Super Bowl ring. By 2017, he will have earned at least $134 million over the course of his career, cementing his legacy as one of the most successful -- and, some would argue, most cynical -- negotiators in NFL history. As he spears a piece of shrimp, I awkwardly broach the subject of his cutthroat reputation. "When you Google 'Darrelle Revis,' it says... "
He pauses, sets down his chopsticks. "Greedy."
"Mercenary."
He rolls up one of his sleeves, laying his forearm across the table like he's waiting to have blood drawn. He jabs at his skin. "Should I get that tatted on me -- all of those names?"
When I look up, he bursts into laughter.
"I'm a walking billboard for fairness," Revis says about his legacy. Peter Hapak for ESPN The Magazine
THE AIRING OF financial grievances is an essential part of the NFL offseason, as predictable as OTAs and minicamp. But this year's gripefest felt different somehow -- broader, more philosophical. It started in May, when Giants wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., |
2004 and named after the Jean-Luc Godard film Bande à part. Los Angeles-based Sternberg’s designs — and uncanny marketing acumen — attracted editors, buyers and celebrities alike, who bought into his vision of shrunken men’s shirting, primary-colour bandage skirts, clever copywriting and punch-label graphics. “I saw this enormous PR exposure and huge following in terms of fan base,” Verbaeys says. “There was huge potential for this brand. Imagine if we could lift sales to the level of the PR exposure and to the level of consumer following and likes on Instagram and Facebook. That’s why I was really interested in [it], the narrative and the aesthetic, Southern California… Everything about it.”
By the time the label opened its first New York store in 2014, complete with a Momofuku Milk Bar outpost that nodded to Sternberg’s short-lived-but-well-loved cookie blog, Band of Outsiders had grown into a full-fledged brand.
But by the spring of 2015, its fortunes had changed and the company had laid off its staff and cancelled Autumn/Winter orders because of failure to make payments on a $2.5 million line of credit. In July 2015, a public auction was held in New York City for Band of Outsiders’ intellectual property and inventory. But despite multiple proposals from outside bidders, none were large enough to pay off the debt and CLCC went back to Belgium in full control of the entity. “We always wanted to continue,” Verbaeys says. “We had to organise a public auction. But it was always our intention. Obtaining [Band of Outsiders] was a good thing for us.”
Many questioned how quickly CLCC would get the label up and running again, and in what capacity. While its brand equity was uncommonly strong for a company of its age and size, it was difficult for insiders to imagine the narrative continuing without Sternberg, who ended his involvement with the brand in 2015 and declined to comment for this story.
Verbaeys’ challenge, then, was to capitalise on Band of Outsiders’ remaining assets — mostly its name and provenance — without borrowing much else from Sternberg’s vision. “We didn’t want to make a copycat of Band of Outsiders 1.0,” the executive says. “We gave a lot of creative freedom and said, ‘This is the equity we would like to maintain: work with that and do your own thing.’”
That meant bringing on Hodel, Weber and Feder — three Europeans — and their network of creative collaborators across the continent, including graphic designers and art directors, to re-interpret Southern California style. “Los Angeles will always be the main source of inspiration,” Hodel says. It was a welcome challenge for the trio, who were absorbed in skate culture as teenagers growing up in the middle of the 1990s. “Everything that was brought from America was gold to us,” Feder says.
I am sure we will have some pushback, but I’m convinced that when they see the new narrative we have created, the pushback will subside soon.
Since joining CLCC to work on Band of Outsiders full time, the team has taken multiple trips to Los Angeles, and there are plans to open a studio in the city in the near future. “In the beginning, we had to sit together and talk about where we actually want to take this brand, and what we wanted to keep,” Hodel says. “It will be a re-launch. It won’t be a copy of something someone else created with his blood, sweat and tears. It’s like if WHF was done by someone else. What we do has to be different than what was done in the past.”
Photographs were not permitted at a preview of the forthcoming collections. Aesthetically, there is very little linking the reboot with the original Band of Outsiders. While both lines nod to collegiate style, Sternberg’s look was often rooted in prep-school attire, while Hodel, Weber and Feder are clearly inspired by streetwear. (For instance, their version of a suit features flyaway track pants rendered in a high-twist wool.) The concept behind the new lookbook, shot on the streets of Los Angeles in neighbourhoods from Venice to Compton, is a complete departure from Sternberg’s popular Polaroids.
Despite these aesthetic differences, both collections will be positioned similarly on the sales floor. The new Band of Outsiders will be sold at a contemporary price point slightly lower than that of its predecessor, and is targeting similar retailers.
This is perhaps the most complicated piece of the puzzle, as there are loyalties to Sternberg — and more importantly, his vision — that run deep. Band of Outsiders was previously sold at stores like Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue, Net-a-Porter and Opening Ceremony. But many retailers are also familiar with WHF, which is currently sold at Isetan in Tokyo, Colette and has been stocked by Opening Ceremony and Dover Street Market in the past. “I am sure we will have some pushback,” Verbaeys admits. “But I’m convinced that when they see the new narrative we have created, the pushback will subside soon. In the press the mood is already changing. Of course, some people are loyalists, but there will be sufficient room in the market.”
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What Happened to Saint Laurent’s LA-based Team After Hedi Slimane Left?It's time the Ontario government got out of the gambling business, Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak said Monday, hinting that he also wants to privatize liquor sales.
The cash-strapped government, facing a $14.4-billion deficit, needs to re-evaluate everything it does to get out of businesses that are better run by the private sector and instead concentrate on services like health care and education, added Mr. Hudak.
"We're in 2012, not back in 1972, and what should government be focusing on, what are the core services," he asked.
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"I'm going to argue to my last breath that it's hiring new nurses, putting new drugs on the formulary, not investing in new roulette wheels and slot machines."
The government, which gets about $2-billion a year from the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., should not be both a promoter of gambling by owning the OLG and the regulator, through the Alcohol and Gaming Commission, said Mr. Hudak.
"I think government should get out of the day-to-day operations of gambling in the province of Ontario and instead be a tough, respected regulator, making sure it's an honest game with honest players," he said.
"But we don't need government running roulette tables and picking what kind of scratch-and-win tickets to sell at variety stores."
Mr. Hudak wouldn't say how much the province would save by having private operators run casinos and lotteries, something that would require an amendment to the Criminal Code, but said he was convinced it would mean a bigger return for taxpayers.
"I think a much better approach would be to have a bid, let's see what private sector operators can do with those sites," he said.
"I bet you they can run them at a lower cost to taxpayers, and returns will probably improve to the province."
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OLG said it's already looking for private operators as part of a modernization plan that is designed to increase revenues and the annual dividend to taxpayers from casinos, slots and lotteries.
"OLG is expanding the engagement of the private sector to build and run day-to-day operations of existing and new sites, as well as develop new technology and games for lottery terminals," said OLG spokesman Tony Bitonti.
"Strictly regulated private sector providers would be responsible for funding and building any new sites, upon the recommendations made by OLG and approval from the minister and the host municipality."
Finance Minister Dwight Duncan said the Liberal government is "already privatizing the OLG" and seemed puzzled by Mr. Hudak's pledge.
"I didn't actually see a plan today, I just heard a lot of ideology," said Mr. Duncan.
"We are in fact bringing in the private sector to run the machines and bring in new technology."
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Mr. Hudak was asked if he also intends to get the government out of the liquor and broadcasting businesses — something the Tories have proposed in the past — and said people should "stay tuned," promising more announcements later this week.
Mr. Duncan said the Liberals considered selling the Liquor Control Board, but decided it was not a good idea to give up ongoing revenue for a one-time pay out.In September 2015, the Ukrainian startup community and technology-focused media went into a frenzy after Snapchat announced it was acquiring Looksery, an Odessa-based image-processing startup.
The deal, reportedly valued at around $150 million, represented one of the most spectacular startup success stories to emerge from Ukraine to date.
Looksery’s app could change anyone’s face in real time — using fun animations while having a video chat with someone, for example, or doing things like removing blemishes and altering eye color. The company was founded by Victor Shaburov, a serial entrepreneur and active supporter of programming contests for talented youth.
In 2013, Shaburov met Yuri Monastyrshyn, a fourth-year student in Odessa who would become the COO of Looksery. The product team was hired in Sochi, Russia, when the two nations enjoyed more peaceful relations. After the acquisition, the Looksery team relocated to Silicon Valley to work together with their new Snapchat colleagues.
Eastern European tech for Silicon Valley giants
Looksery was the first in a series of success stories involving computer vision and facial recognition startups from Eastern Europe.
Six months later, in early 2016, Facebook bought Masquerade, the Minsk-based developer behind another video filter app, MSQRD, which was at one point one of the most popular apps in Apple’s App Store. Facebook described MSQRD as “a fantastic app with world-class imaging technology for video.”
A little more than a year later, another Belarusian company, AIMatter, was snapped up by Google, just months after raising $2 million from local investors. Its SDK (software development kit) for real-time photo- and video-editing on mobile, dubbed Fabby, was touted as being faster than other available solutions. One of Fabby’s neat features — built upon a neural network-based AI platform — allows users to separate an object from its original background.
Russian startups are hot, too. Last year, an app made by Alexey Moiseenkov, an employee of the Mail.Ru Group, became a regional hit before surging up the global app store rankings. Called Prisma, the app — also built on neural networks — invites users to add stunning artistic effects to their photos to make them look like works of art.
The approach was not new (see DeepArt.io, based in Germany, and Ostagram, a Russian project created by Sergey Morugin), but Prisma’s distinctive advantage was in its speed and mobile-focused format.
In 2017, Prisma launched Sticky, a new app that turns selfies into stickers for sharing in your social feeds. The company is still independent, but recent rumors have suggested that Facebook and Snapchat were eyeing it for a potential acquisition.
The roots of excellence
Developing computer vision technologies for mobile isn’t just a simple case of mathematics. Optimizing performance is important, given the limited processing power of many modern mobile devices.
“Nobody needs an AR app which will work only on iPhone X,” noted Viktor Prokopenya, a serial entrepreneur with Belarusian roots who recently launched a $100 million investment program for AI startups. “There are billions of devices in the world, and a very small percentage of them are expensive devices. If you want to make a mass market mobile application, it should work on an iPhone 5s and give 30 frames per second, which is a challenge in its own right.”
The talents of East European engineers working to solve such an array of technological challenges can be traced in part to an education tradition dating back to the Soviet era. For all its moral and economic failures, communism demonstrated a rare capacity to raise generations of brilliant scientists and engineers that span several domains.
“In the field of machine intelligence, the Markov chains, Markov random field, and Markov models are the very basis of deep learning, while the Hidden Markov Model (by Ruslan Stratonovich) is the main model for speech recognition,” said Alexander (Sasha) Galitsky, a prominent Russo-Ukrainian investor who invests globally through the Almaz Capital fund. “Alexey Ivakhnenko, who was a prominent Soviet and Ukrainian mathematician, is still referred to as the father of deep learning.”
While the Soviet regime collapsed, the local mathematics education system was preserved to a large extent.
“The transformation went gradually, in an evolutionary way,” added Alexander Kurbatsky, professor of the computer programming department of the Belarusian State University in Minsk. “Thus, good math education created a nurturing environment for today’s digital transformation, which goes beyond the territory of the former Soviet Union,” he continued, referring to the many thousands of IT engineers and entrepreneurs who have moved to Silicon Valley, Berlin, Israel, and even Asia over the past 20 years.
Next-gen startups with “empathic cameras”
A considerable number of these IT talents still live and work in the Eastern Europe region, however, with new players springing up in facial recognition and related AR technologies.
After the Facebook acquisition, two former MSQRD team members, Andrey Yanchurevich and Dmitriy Dorin, launched AR Squad, a startup dedicated to “next-gen AR content.”
“Funny masks were a part of MSQRD’s viral strategy,” the company proclaims. “Today, we are developing a new level of interaction between users and augmented reality.” The young company has hired MSQRD’s whole art team, as well as additional experts from this field, and serves clients from the U.S., Russia, and Belarus.
Banuba, a startup born in Belarus but operating worldwide from its Hong Kong and Cyprus offices, recently developed an AR mobile software development kit for app developers and publishers worldwide. To a large extent, this technology relies on AI algorithms to recognize people’s faces and bodies; understand their emotions, facial expressions, postures, and gestures; and estimate race, age, and gender.
The solution can be used in a variety of apps — from content suggestions that improve your mood to very practical recommendations — for example, which hairstyle suits you best, or how you will look in the future. According to the company’s CEO, Vadim Nekhai, Banuba’s advantages lie in its “capability of mixing technologies on the same device and optimizing them for ground-breaking performance results.”
In early 2017, Banuba secured $5 million from Prokopenya and his investment partners. Following this, the startup launched a “technology-for-equity” program to enroll app developers and publishers across the world.
The first such agreement was signed with Inventain, another startup from Belarus, to develop AR-based mobile games. A special purpose vehicle (SPV), dubbed Camera First, was created with a $1.2 million capital injection from Banuba to develop the games.
The implications of mobile AI and AR technologies extend far beyond making gimmicky pictures and video features. “Such technologies can be leveraged by virtually every kind of app,” said Prokopenya.
Prokopenya envisions a world where “any app can characterize its users through the camera: male or female, age, ethnicity, level of stress, etc,” he added. “Content can then be optimized for maximum performance, based on such parameters.”
Thus, fitness apps can see how much weight you’ve gained or lost by analyzing your face, while games can adapt their pricing models to suit the type of user. Rather than viewing such applications as an intrusion on users’ privacy, Prokopenya sees something “empathic” in them. “They will understand the kind of emotions your face is showing and adjust their content correspondingly,” he said.
In the commercial realm, facial recognition software has been developed by Russian startup VisionLabs. The solution, dubbed Face_IS, allows retailers to make personalized offers to customers whose faces have been recognized. The technology may also be applied to ad personalization, user identification in internet of things (IoT) projects, medicine, transportation, and virtual / augmented reality.
Another VisionLabs solution, Luna, allows businesses to “verify and identify customers instantly” based on images, thanks to a “unique quality and performance pattern recognition technology.”
This technology has attracted the attention of Google and Facebook, which have supported VisionLabs’ efforts to develop professional communities in computer vision and neural networks.
The good, the bad, the ugly
Another promising but controversial technology from the region is FindFace. It was launched in 2015 by Moscow startup NTechLab, which presented it as “the world’s most accurate facial recognition technology for face detection, verification, and identification.”
FindFace is built on a deep learning and a neural network-based architecture. In November 2015, NTechLab won the MegaFace Benchmark, a world face recognition championship held in the U.S. The challenge was to recognize as many people as possible from a database of more than a million photos. The Russian startup bypassed more than 100 competitors, including Google, with its FaceNet program.
The app made headlines in Russia, where social media users use it to put names to faces using only a picture. Indeed, FindFace can match pictures with people’s profile images on Vkontakte, the country’s leading social network. The app is mainly being used for dating purposes, though it has also allowed police to identify criminals, and some have used it to harass young women. Nevertheless, the startup recently raised $1.5 million in a round led by Impulse VC, a venture fund that is reportedly affiliated with Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.
Grigory Bakunov, director of technology distribution at Yandex, came up with a sort of antidote to such intrusive technologies. Taking time out of his day job, he developed an “anti-facial recognition algorithm” to conceal people’s identities with the help of makeup.
“The service was able to offer futuristic makeup that could trick smart cameras with just a few facial lines,” Bakunov said in an interview. The project proved short-lived, however, because Bakunov realized that it would now be possible to deceive banks and the police.
“That’s why we decided we shouldn’t launch it on the market,” he added. “The chance that someone might use it for nefarious purposes was too high.”
This story originally appeared on Www.ewdn.com. Copyright 2017Warning: This project is experimental. Its files will not synchronize across the CurseForge network.
Reorganises item tooltips. In particular, condenses some labels into fewer lines and makes secondary stats show as +Whatever instead of Equip: line.
The whole thing is probably buggy in a lot of corner cases that I have not experienced myself, and I know that recipes are screwed up and that it interferes with other addons like arkinventory appending messages to the end of the tooltip. Oh, well.
Some examples (new/old):
Shorten secondary stats into +Stat, but keep them green. Collapse a bunch of labels into shared lines.
ilvl, armor and stamina are mostly scaling along with each other and on everything anyway, so who even looks at that, they can share a line. Throw required level on the other side for good measure. I am just leaving everything I do not want to handle at the end, so gems and procs and other stuff is still there.
Actually, stamina gets to stay for trinkets, because you would not expect it there. Or because it takes up item budget there. Armor should go there too.
Spirit is green along with the other secondary stats now, too. I am leaving spellpower alone for now because the ilvl/dps line is getting kind of crowded already.Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved A transgender woman living in Charlotte says she recently became a victim of violence (Source: Ralayzia Taylor)
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved A transgender woman living in Charlotte says she recently became a victim of violence (Source: Ralayzia Taylor)
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) - A transgender woman hurt in a hatchet attack last week is now facing sex crimes charges in the case, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said Friday.
Derrick Horton, who goes by Ralayzia Taylor, said she was walking near the Arbor Glen Park on Clanton Road last Monday when two people, one armed with a hatchet, began chasing her. She said one of the people cut her, leading to serious injuries.
Destiny Dagraca, 18, Daijion Tanner, 28, and a 15-year-old were all charged in the case.
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved Derrick Horton (Source: Hamilton County Sheriff's Office)
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved Derrick Horton (Source: Hamilton County Sheriff's Office)
CMPD says Horton later admitted during an interview that the crime was not random.
"Detectives also determined that Horton and the 15-year-old engaged in a sex act prior to the assault," police said.
Horton was arrested in Ohio, where she was staying with family, and served warrants for statutory sex offense and indecent liberties with a child.
Tanner and Dagraca were charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, attempted murder, kidnapping and felony conspiracy. The 15-year-old was charged with attempted murder.
Horton previously told WBTV the suspects used gay slurs during the attack, and that she considered the incident a "hate crime."
Eventually the attack stopped, and Horton said she was able to run away and ask people for help. Police say they were called to the area just before 1 p.m.
Horton required dozens of stitches and still has marks on her body from the attack.
She is now awaiting extradition to Charlotte.
Anyone with additional information is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 704-334-1600.A video of paramilitary troops being badly beaten in a hazing ritual has gone viral on Chinese websites this week, exposing a rarely seen side of the country’s security forces.
The 15-minute video shows five new firefighters in Inner Mongolia being slapped, kicked and hit with sticks and belts by eight more senior members of their brigade. After each round of assault the new recruits are made to stand at attention before they are attacked again.
Photo
In China firefighting duties are largely handled by brigades attached to the People’s Armed Police, a paramilitary group also responsible for internal security and border patrol. The Armed Police are organized like the military but fall under both the Ministry of Public Security and the Central Military Commission and are separate from the People’s Liberation Army.
Like the P.L.A., the Armed Police maintain a secretive culture, even by the tight-lipped standards of most security forces. While revelations of violent hazing in military units are not uncommon in the United States and elsewhere, they are seldom seen in China, and the posting of the video offered Chinese citizens new insights into the inner workings of an organization tasked with protecting them.
Online comments overwhelmingly expressed disgust at the hazing.
“This group of beasts is worse than pigs and dogs, hitting faces with leather belts, punching and kicking. This is the first-rate style of the People’s Armed Police firefighters?” wrote one commenter on Sina Weibo, the Chinese microblog service. “This is so-called strict and impartial discipline. If you treat your own comrades like that, how do you treat others? It makes one shiver all over!”
The video appeared to have been shot by the assailants, who could be seen adjusting the camera to ensure the beatings were recorded. It was not clear who posted it online.
In an online posting the Wuhai city fire brigade confirmed that the video was genuine, and said it was made in June 2012.
“The nature of this matter is completely vile, its effect is completely vile, and it has exposed serious questions about the management of our unit,” the posting said. “We are deeply shocked, hurt and blame ourselves. We deeply apologize to all walks of society and the troops who were beaten.”
The fire brigade said that the personnel responsible would be suspended pending an internal investigation and “seriously dealt with.” Those who had already left the force would be referred to the police, it said.Why is Stephen Colbert’s former Super PAC attacking Stephen Colbert?
Yes, we know that sounds contradictory, but that’s what appears to be going on. The “Definitely Not Coordinating with Stephen Colbert Super PAC,” now headed by Mr. Colbert’s friend and business partner Jon Stewart, has just released an ad that appears to bite the hand of the person who formally fed it.
You know, before Colbert decided to explore the possibility of running for president of South Carolina, and had to hand the group over to someone else.
The ad, narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, starts out by saying, “America is in crisis, and Stephen Colbert is turning our election into a circus”. Then it goes all reverse negative, like it’s a political attack ad from the ‘90s.
“And come on, why is the ‘T’ in his name silent? What else is he silent about? Letting murderers out of jail?” continues Jackson, in his best danger-to-the-republic voice.
What’s going on here? We say the super PAC remains on message – it’s not attacking Colbert, it’s continuing to satirize the tissue-thin separation between candidates and the super PACs that support them.
See, it’s a reverse flip – the group is attacking Colbert in order to pretend to distract viewers from the fact that its staff used to work for him, still works for his exploratory committee, and generally is trying to help him.
Got it?
Maybe a quote will make this clearer. As Jackson says sneeringly of Colbert in the ad in question, “Now a super PAC that he founded is running attack ads against him just so they’ll think they’re not coordinating!”
The ad ends by urging South Carolina voters to send Colbert a message by voting for Herman Cain. See, that’s what Colbert really wants – he’s hijacked Cain’s name, which remains on the South Carolina ballot despite the fact that the former pizza executive has dropped out of the race. It’s too late for Colbert himself to get on the ballot, so he’s said that a vote for Mr. Cain is really a vote for him.
“A vote for Herman Cain would be a strong message to me that voters want me to run,” said Colbert on his Wednesday show.
The coordination thing is the legal loophole that Colbert is really targeting in his faux possible residential run. That’s why he showed up on Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” on Tuesday when Stewart said he was nervous about what to do, and gave nods and winks as Stewart outlined where was thinking of buying air time for super PAC ads.
On a related note, Colbert’s fake candidacy appears to be sweeping through the Palmetto State with the force of a light drizzle. He appeared before a meeting of South Carolina moms via video conference, and they clearly were less than enthusiastic, with few applauding when asked if they wanted him to run.
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A new Public Policy Polling survey gives him the highest national favorability ratings of anybody left in the GOP race, with 36 percent of voters having a positive view of the latish-night comedian. [Editor's note: The original version misstated the findings of the PPP poll.]
“Thirty-six percent, that’s more than half!” said Colbert on his Wednesday show.A federal judge in Los Angeles has ordered the U.S. government to allow people holding immigrant visas from seven majority-Muslim nations into the United States despite President Trump's executive order banning them.
In a temporary restraining order issued late Tuesday, Judge Andre Birotte Jr. ordered the government not to cancel any validly obtained immigrant visas or bar anyone from the seven nations holding them from entering the U.S.
But it was unclear whether the order will have any effect. The State Department ordered all visas from the seven countries revoked on Friday, and the government has maintained that orders similar to Birotte's do not apply because the visas are no longer valid.
The State Department declined comment Wednesday on Birotte's order, saying it does not comment on pending litigation.
Stacey Gartland, a San Francisco attorney who represents a 12-year-old Yemeni girl whose parents and siblings are U.S. citizens living in California, acknowledged Wednesday that her client and hundreds of others with immigrant visas still may not be allowed in the U.S. under Birotte's order, but said she's optimistic.
"This court order is a major victory and definitely gives us a path forward," Gartland said. "It's just a matter of getting it into the right hands of someone who'll obey the court order."
Julie Goldberg, the Los Angeles-based immigration lawyer who filed the lawsuit that prompted Birotte's order, is trying to arrange flights for dozens of Yemeni citizens who have immigrant visas and are stranded in the tiny African nation of Djibouti, including the 12-year-old girl Gartland represents.
Gartland said two major airlines have turned them down but they are trying to work with smaller airlines that will follow Birotte's order.
"These are all children, parents and the spouses of U.S. citizens," Goldberg told The Associated Press from the Horn of Africa nation, emphasizing that those stranded are not refugees, though Yemen is engulfed in civil war. They received visas last week, she said.
Mohamed Mosleh Jeran is one of the many waiting. After his family's home was blown up in Yemen's conflict, he and his wife and two young children spent two years in Djibouti. Last month, their younger son died during what should have been routine surgery.
Last Thursday, the family received their U.S. visas and looked forward to joining Jeran's father, a U.S. citizen, in New York City.
But Trump the next day announced his executive order suspending immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. On Saturday, Jeran's family was turned away at the Turkish Airlines check-in counter, Goldberg said. A spokesman for the airline did not respond to a call for comment.
"Finally I am leaving Djibouti, but in my heart I was upset, I lost one of my kids," Jeran recalled to the AP. "But what can you do? This is life. I was happy my wife and son were leaving Djibouti, finally." But when they were turned away, "my wife, she was like a child, crying, my son, too.'"
Jeran has been accepted to the University of Toledo to begin a masters' program in March, Goldberg said.
"It's super frustrating," she said. "They're running out of money. Djibouti is very expensive. They can't go back to Yemen, they would be killed."
Yemen has been gripped by conflict since 2014. A Saudi-led coalition, backed by the United States, has been carrying out an air campaign against Iranian-backed Houthi rebels for nearly two years. Many Yemenis have fled on boats across the Bab al-Mandab strait to Djibouti or other Horn of Africa countries.
In the United States, relatives of the stranded Yemenis are anguished.
Esam Molhi and his wife, both green card holders from Yemen, now fear leaving for Djibouti to reunite with their 3-year-old daughter because Trump's order might keep them from returning home.
The girl was born in Yemen, and the U.S. Embassy there refused to let her fly with her mother to join Molhi in the U.S., Goldberg said. The family has been pursuing a U.S. visa for the girl since then.
The child is staying in a rented room in Djibouti with her Yemeni grandfather, Molhi told the AP from his home in San Francisco, where he works as an Uber driver. He has not yet seen her in person, and his wife has not seen her since she was a month and a half old.
"This is unfair," Molhi said of Trump's order. "I want him to feel as I feel, you know?"
The U.S. Embassy in Djibouti has posted an urgent notice online telling people, including those with dual nationalities, from the countries affected - Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen - not to schedule visa appointments or even attend existing visa appointments.Copyright and privacy cannot coexist. Society is at a crossroads where only one of these will exist in the future, and the copyright industry has been working hard to erode privacy to protect its obsolete business. It’s time to acknowledge the conflict and accept that copyright enforcement need to be actively prevented in order to safeguard fundamental rights.
The copyright monopoly was once created as a censorship instrument against the printing press, and later devolved to a commercial monopoly on duplicating creative works (and more). But with the advent of first the cassette tape, and later the Internet, this industrial duplication monopoly has become fundamentally incompatible with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, privacy, and the postal secret. We’re now at a crossroads where we must choose one or the other.
To understand why, we need to step back to a time before the Internet. We don’t need to step as far back as when Queen Mary I of England created copyright on May 4, 1557 in order to root out political and religious dissidents – it’s enough to go back to the early 1900s. In doing so, we need to disregard private copying altogether, on the simple basis that it did not exist in the early 1900s.
Copied books and movies used to be visible to the naked eye in public
The umbrella of monopolies we know as copyright – for it is a set of rather diverse monopolies that are quite unrelated to each other – was long intended to be a protection against industrial-scale plagiarization of a book or movie. After all, copying equipment for books and records used to be prohibitively expensive, and moreover, you had to expose your copied product on some sort of market or in some sort of store in order to sell it.
Hence, copyright infringements were always visible to the naked eye in public. This is key. They could be a copied book for sale in a bookstore, they could be an unauthorized public concert, and so on.
Therefore, enforcing the sales monopoly in the pre-Internet era did not require intruding into somebody’s diary or private correspondence: all infringements were visible to the public, naked eye.
But times have changed, and the copyright monopoly laws did not.
Copying moved into private correspondence, and enforcement followed
Enter the Internet.
All of a sudden, everybody has access to the world’s best copying machine for anything that can be converted to ones and zeroes. Making the first copy of something now costs on the order of microcents instead of thousands of dollars, so even the world’s poorest have access to it. Moreover, such copies are transmitted as private correspondence between private individuals.
Let’s take that again, because it is the key point: copyright infringements are now taking place within private correspondence. Bits leaving one computer in a stream, arriving at another computer. Some of the stream may be mail. Some of it may be chat messages. Other pieces of the stream leaving your computer may be a fully-legal torrent. Some pieces may be whistleblowing about a governmental abuse of power to a reporter, under heavy source protection. And yet other pieces may be an illegal torrent.
Private correspondence is supposed to be secret – as in not read by a third party in transit. That’s a key to privacy and is enshrined in most countries’ constitutions; it’s called the postal secret. Nobody is allowed to see who is corresponding with whom, about what, for how long, et cetera. To our parents, this was something they took for granted if they lived in the Western world – the ability to send a private letter, or even an anonymous letter where they didn’t identify themselves as sender. It was their prerogative whether they chose to identify themselves or not in corresponding with someone and what they were sending.
We’ve arrived at a point where it is no longer possible to have private correspondence, at all, and enforce the copyright monopoly at the same time. It is not possible to say that some pieces of private correspondence are legal and therefore remain fully constitutionally secret, whereas others are illegal and can be freely invaded. You cannot tell one from the other without looking at all of it, and at that point, there is no longer any postal secret at all.
The act of sorting into legal and illegal requires observation.
We’ve arrived at a crossroads in the development of our society where we must make a choice between privacy, as such, and the copyright monopoly. (To be precise, it’s about the enforcement of the monopoly – but it does not exist in practice without any enforcement.) If we allow private communications to exist at all, then I can use any digital communications channel to blow the whistle on governmental abuse as well as use it to send a protected movie or song to a friend. On the other hand, if the copyright monopoly is allowed to take precedence, then private correspondence ceases to exist, for both of these cases, and for every other case where something is communicated privately. There is either a seal of postal secrecy on everything, or on nothing.
(It’s noteworthy in these examples that it’s not just privacy at stake, but also freedom of the press, in the sense of an ability to protect its sources, and basic freedom of speech, in the sense of expressing yourself as you wish.)
Some have observed this fundamental underlying conflict, but the vast majority pretends it doesn’t exist and mumbles on about value on both sides of the scale – the commercial copyright monopoly on one side, and the postal secrecy, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech on the other – somehow being worthy of protecting, and about “striking a balance”. A “balance” here is technically and conceptually impossible, and a side must be chosen. Freenet is one of few projects that has a liberatingly unapologetic policy on this:
“The core problem with copyright is that enforcement of it requires monitoring of communications, and you cannot be guaranteed free speech if someone is monitoring everything you say. This is important, most people fail to see or address this point when debating the issue of copyright, so let me make it clear: You cannot guarantee free speech and enforce the copyright monopoly. Therefore, any technology designed to guarantee freedom of speech must also prevent enforcement of the copyright monopoly.”
This is the stance that is necessary, even if it seems brutal on the surface. When choosing one side of this scale, it is necessary to declare upfront and without apology that the other side will be completely prevented.
The copyright industry is methodically attacking privacy
It’s easy to think that the copyright industry is so old, stale, and obsolete that it doesn’t understand these two sides of the scale, doesn’t understand that its efforts are invading one of the most fundamental of constitutional liberties, and |
the barrels were transferred at night to different trucks to evade spy-satellite detection. The road led into the Central Japan Alps, where a secret chemical plant, funded by the Japanese government and run by a major corporation, was producing nerve gas under the guise of a pesticide plant or possibly a distillery.
At that point of the tracking effort, the Japanese government ordered the closure of Takarajima30 magazine, the end to my editorship and transfer of the Japan Times Weekly to staffers associated with Soka Gakkai, one of the groups involved in the start-up of Aum Shinrikyo. Needless to say, the US news media and the CIA and South Korean intelligence were involved in the cover-up of the Tokyo subway affair, just as they are now doing in Kuala Lumpur.
Now, just prior to the 26th anniversary of the Tokyo subway gassing, organophosphate nerve gas has resurfaced in Kuala Lumpur. By coincidence, the Embassy of Japan has taken an active role in intelligence operations in the Malaysian capital, including suppression of information related to the health effects of Fukushima radioactivity releases. Kuala Lumpur is one of those hubs of trilateral cooperation between the neo-fascist spies of Japan, the USA and Korea, who are anything but defenders of truth, justice and democracy. Recall what happened to MH370, a disappearing act from the same cast of magicians.
Roots in Unit 731
The black ops staged by these three powers has dark roots in the Japanese occupation of Korea and takeover of Northeast China. Prime Minister Shinzo Abes grandfather was the financial secretary of the quasi-military South Manchuria Railway, which is the pioneer in false-flag attacks including railroad bombings falsely blamed on the Chinese side. The Kishi-Abe clan, rooted in Yamaguchi Prefecture, is closely associated with the wartime Black Dragon secret society (named after the Heilongjiang river border between China and Russia), comprised of the military police called the Kempeitai and gangster militias, which would later in the postwar era gain notoriety as the yakuza. This fascist movement used Korean soldiers to carry out the more brutal attacks against the national resistance forces and to commit armed robberies, as in chopping off fingers to obtain rings embedded with precious stones. One of those Korean collaborators recruited into the Japanese Army was Park Chung-hee, later became a postwar president of South Korea and father of current leader Park Geun-hye. Reputedly, he spoke Japanese with greater fluency than Korean.
As a leading bureaucrat in the puppet state of Manchukuo, Kishi supported the chemical and biological warfare group designated as Unit 731, which conducted live tests not only on prisoners but through unleashing bubonic plague and other toxic agents on Chinese urban populations. Following Japans defeat, Unit 731 evaded punishment for war crimes by being transferred to the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, under the auspices of Japanese-friendly American military officers, most of them Mormons trained in the Japanese language. (Fast forward to the Mormon security men at Adelsons casinos, involved entrapment of Malaysian officials and how Doan Thi Hoang resided in Macau.)
This hidden legacy of trilateral cooperation has continued as a driving force for political intimidation, news censorship and war-mongering in South Korea and Japan. With such devious, aggressive and downright vile foes, is it any wonder the North Korea has to arm itself to the teeth, even if its military counterforce is minuscule compared with the hoard of weapons of mass destruction secretly accumulated by a neofascist Japan. Therefore President Donald Trumps advocacy of nonaggression, sensible dialogue and quiet confidence in American power deserves a chance to halt the arms race and to stop with the senseless confrontational mentality. The Deep State structure defying Trumps is even more of a menace to American democracy, and therefore must be plucked out root and branch.
Why Malaysia?
This our final question is a no-brainer after the disappearance of MH370. Since the tragic fates for MH370 and MH17, the Malaysian government of Prime Minister Najib Razak has been beholden to the CIA ever since this deputy Zahir Hamidi fell into an entrapment scam laid by the CIA in Las Vegas. The CIA takeover of the Malaysian government started with the arrest of gambling boss Paul Phua, a dual citizen of Macau and Malaysia, who ran a sports-gambling match-fixing operation out of both territories. After escaping a gambling fraud probe in Macau, he found shelter at the Sands Casino in Vegas, where the CIA installed wiretaps on his phone, intercepted his emails and inspected his posted letters. Following his arrest by the FBI under CIA orders, the spooks had Phuas lawyer request the Malaysian police chief to vouch for him as a character witness. When Zahir Hamidi unwisely took the bait and wrote effusive praise for Phua, the mouse trap snapped.
Najib Razak sullenly consented to a CIA demand to establish a joint anti-terrorism base in Malaysia, a cover for a planned air base in northeast Sabah with nearby naval facilities on the Sulu Sea, strategically enclosed by Malaysia and the Philippines, in easy airstrike reach of the Chinese island bases in the Spratley archipelago. The secret Malaysian base provides a substitute for former US military stations in Mindanao, Philipppines, where the CIA and military advisers were expelled after getting entangled in arms trading, dealing with Islamic militants, murders for hire, staged fake terrorist strikes, you name it, the war dogs do it.
Meanwhile Najib Razak got caught up in the embezzlement of several billion dollars from the Malaysian Development fund known as 1MDB. The vast sum was laundered through Goldman Sachs in Singapore through several other banks to accounts in the Cayman Islands and one of Zahir Hamidis playboy allies in the US. These scandals required the Najib team to dispatch a lawyer to the USA during the presidential campaign to pay off, allegedly, former Attorney General Eric Holder (who suddenly became much richer) and a tidy sum stuffed into Hillary Clintons handbag.
As for Trumps aborted attempt at statesmanship, nobody has ever believed that politics is fair or played by the rules. So there you have it: high-level intrigue and black operations at the same Kuala Lumpur International Airport where MH370 was hijacked and flown to the U.S. military base on Diego Garcia. If Donald Trump is serious about making America Great Again, hes going to have to flush out lying murderous criminals who have caused untold numbers of blowbacks and demolished the overseas credibility of the United States. Its now time to set up a hotline to Pyongyang to call in condolences to Kim Jong Un for the senseless murder of his older brother. Can foreign policy get any more ridiculous? Yes, Hillary Clinton is still not in jail.
Forensic journalist Yoichi Shimatsu led the only credible investigations into the political patronage behind Aum Shinrikyo, its smuggling of weapons of mass destruction aided by the Yeltsin regime, and the cults ongoing involvement in Japans nuclear weapons program in Ibaraki and Fukushima prefectures. In spite of several assassination attempts, he is still writing exposes.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Andrew Harding: People displaced by militant rebels are trickling back towards Timbuktu
French forces have killed several hundred Islamist militants in Mali in a month-long conflict, French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has said.
The militants were killed in air strikes and direct combat with French troops, he said.
France says it intends to start pulling out of Mali in March, and has stressed the importance of African Union forces in ensuring security.
Air attacks and sporadic clashes are continuing in several parts of Mali.
France has deployed about 4,000 troops, and thousands more from the African Union are also there.
'Significant number'
Mr Le Drian said the militants died in air strikes on vehicles carrying fighters and materials, or in ground fighting in the town of Konna at the start of the campaign and later in the town of Gao.
He said French troops had inflicted "great damage on the jihadist terrorist groups", saying "several hundred, a significant number" of Islamist fighters had been killed.
Image caption This sign left behind the northern city of Gao by Islamist rebels says Sharia is the "road to paradise"
The BBC's Thomas Fessy in Mali says it is unclear how the French made their assessment of the numbers of dead.
France has suffered only one fatality, a helicopter pilot killed at the beginning of the operation.
French experts had earlier suggested the Islamist alliance could probably muster about 3,000 fighters overall.
Mr Le Drian said Malian forces had also taken prisoners including high-ranking militants who would "have to answer to Malian courts and international justice".
French forces are continuing to carry out air strikes in mountains north of Kidal where Islamists have taken refuge.
Earlier, the French military said some 1,800 soldiers from Chad had entered Kidal.
Mr Le Drian said the town was now under the control of French forces with "the support of African and in particular Chadian forces".
Meanwhile, pro-autonomy Tuareg rebels said they had occupied the north-eastern town of Menaka, but their claim could not be verified.
Analysts say the Tuareg fighters, who initially joined forces with the Islamist rebels, are seeking to maximise their territorial claim on the region.
Mali's future
The French intervened in Mali in January, fearing that al-Qaeda-linked militants who had controlled Mali's vast north since April 2012 were about to advance on the capital, Bamako.
In an interview published on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said French soldiers could start leaving Mali in March.
"We will continue to act in the north where some terrorist havens remain," he told Metro newspaper.
"I think that starting in March, if all goes as planned, the number of French troops could be reduced."
Meanwhile, officials from the UN, EU, African Union, the World Bank and dozens of nations met in Brussels to discuss Mali's future.
They are considering how elections can be held in July, as well as the financing of an international military force and humanitarian assistance.Two years ago, a militant encampment next to Interstate 5 called Camp Defiance became the focal point of a tense standoff in Josephine County, Oregon, to protect the Sugar Pine Mine, the oldest continually operated gold quartz mining operation in the state.
The camp, a mixed bag of heavily armed antigovernment extremists, hard-right constitutionalists and Oath Keepers, was formed to protect the mine from being destroyed after its owners failed to file an operations plan with the Bureau of Land Management.
The antigovernment “Patriots” defending the mine, led by the Josephine County Oath Keepers, lined the hills, hid in the trees, camouflaged and heavily armed, waiting for federal government to start a war they feared was imminent. It was a tense environment. After weeks of concern, a federal judge issued a stay prohibiting the BLM from enforcing the order to stop mining, the Oath Keepers posted a banner on its website with the message, “Mission Accomplished."
It was a climactic moment for the Oath Keepers, which had formed five years earlier and had been looking for an opportunity since to push back against perceived constitutional violations under President Obama. Celebrations came swiftly on the heels of the ruling.
“The miners will have their day in court, which was the whole purpose of the Oath Keeper Security Operation. Mission accomplished!” the Oath Keepers proclaimed in a message posted to their website on May 22, 2015. “Well done, Josephine County Oath Keepers, and everyone who stood for the miners Rights. You stand tall in our eyes. Congratulations!”
The court order was one in a string of antigovernment actions across the West in response to the federal government’s management of public lands. Almost immediately, Rhodes and others in the Oath Keepers held up the Josephine County Oath Keepers as a model for what the organization of former military personnel and law enforcement officers could be –– a hard line in the sand between American citizens and the federal government.
Joseph Rice, speaking at the protest over the Sugar Pine Mine in Medford in April 2015.
As Joseph Rice, a former Army helicopter pilot who founded the Oath Keepers chapter in Josephine County, told supporters at the height of the Sugar Pine standoff, “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. … And a domestic enemy is anyone who will abuse someone’s rights within the Constitution.”
But on the eve of the two-year anniversary of what many journalists called “the other standoff,” the lush green hills around the Sugar Pine mine are free from the reported trip wires and sentries that defined the Oath Keepers’ “security operation.” And as the case labors through administrative appeals, Rice has joined a long list of former Oath Keepers to cut ties with the group citing concerns with its leader and founder, Stewart Rhodes.
During an interview earlier this month in Medford, Oregon, Rice told Hatewatch that he had lost trust in the direction the Oath Keepers, citing a record of poor leadership on a national level, a slow creep away from the group’s core mission, and fears the group’s direction was dangerously far from its origins.
“We have flag rank officers and senior officers, military retired, that made the statement that they would not join the group as long as Stewart Rhodes was in charge,” Rice told Hatewatch, adding, “Stewart is not a leader. He has no leadership ability. He self promotes.”
Notably, this is not the first time Rhodes’ leadership has been questioned, and hardly the first time he has been criticized for what appears to be an uncanny ability to be present when the radical right edges nearer to conflict with the federal government, and nowhere to be found when it all falls apart.
In May 2014, the Oath Keepers were a fixture at Cliven Bundy’s cattle ranch in Nevada — until Rhodes claimed to have received “intelligence” of an imminent drone strike. In response, he pulled Oath Keepers out of what he called “the kill zone,” which led other militiamen at the camp to openly talk about shooting Rhodes for desertion. In the end, they voted unanimously to oust the Oath Keepers, and the drone strike never came.
Rhodes stayed out of public view for weeks afterward, barring a video he released from a hotel conference room in Mesquite, Nevada, telling the Oath Keepers’ side of the story and criticizing the other militias defending the ranch for operational sloppiness.
A year later, antigovernment conspiracy theorist and radio host Pete Santilli published an article on his Guerrilla Media Network after Rhodes reentered the public light when Micah Xavier Johnson ambushed police and killed five officers in Dallas.
The article — titled “Stewart Rhodes Comes Out Of Hiding And Has The Nerve To Ask – Will You Take Up Arms To Fight Marxist Terrorism?” — quoted Susan Delemus, whose husband had answered the Oath Keepers’ call to defend the Bundy family and was among nearly two dozen people charged with criminal offenses during the Bunkerville standoff.
“Jerry first saw the call to action on the Oathkeepers [sic] website and after discussing it with me the decision was made to go across Country and join other Oathkeepers [sic] who were staged there under the command of Stewart Rhodes,” Delemus said. “We never dreamed that in the end Rhodes would abandon the men he called to join him.”
The article ended with a warning. “Here is some good advice for those of you listening to Stewart Rhodes and are actually considering his call to action and the taking up of arms in the name of keeping your ‘oath’— Don’t do it.”
In many ways, the election of President Trump was a notable turn for the group, which since its founding in 2009 has been looking for ways to confront the federal government. Instead of a bipartisan organization calling on police officers and former military personnel to “honor their oath” and refuse orders perceived to violate the Constitution, Rhodes seems to have moved closer to a promoting a hard-right libertarian political perspective.
The changing direction in the Oath Keepers that led Rice to break away and form his own group, Liberty Watch of Josephine County, became even more transparent in the final days of the Obama administration as the Trump administration readied to take power.
Before President Trump’s inauguration, Rhodes issued a “Call to Action” announcing “Operation DefendJ20” — J20 is short for Jan. 20 — and stating that the Oath Keepers would be coordinating with the antigovernment Three Percenters and the far-right Bikers for Trump to provide “security” during the inauguration.
The Oath Keepers said they had received warnings that antifascist protesters were planning to disrupt the ceremony.
“We call on those of you who are able-bodied and know how to handle yourselves well, and especially military and police veterans with applicable training and experience, who can remain calm under pressure, to come to Washington DC [sic],” the announcement read. That night, Rhodes posted a picture of himself, wearing a sun-faded Oath Keepers baseball cap in line to attend the Deploraball, organized by alt-right mouthpiece Mike Cernovich.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes addresses a protest at Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park in Berkeley, California, on April 27, 2017. (Credit: Ryan Lenz)
With an audience of protesters wearing the Pepe the Frog insignia during a “free speech” rally last month in Berkeley, Rhodes took the stage — dressed for a riot — to address a gathering of free speech advocates and alt-right protesters and proudly displaying Kekistani flags.
Before the rally, Rhodes told Hatewatch that he was bothered by the “false conflation” equating the Oath Keepers to racist organizations and that he had told white nationalist groups like Nathan Damigo’s Identity Europa that they were not welcome.
“We’re not white nationalists. We’re not racists of any kind,” Rhodes said. “And if they show up today, I am going to personally, physically remove them. Because they are trying to co-opt what we’re trying to do.”
Increasingly, though, what the Oath Keepers actually are has been a difficult question to answer. Recent years have seen the Oath Keepers align with Kim Davis, a Rowan County, Kentucky, court clerk who was jailed after refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses. In 2015, following the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, after which the Oath Keepers were criticized for providing armed security to businesses owned by primarily white people, the leader of the St. Louis Oath Keepers chapter left the group after Rhodes refused to allow the organization to sponsor a group of black protesters.
“The [Oath Keepers] leadership didn’t want black people to be armed in a protest,” Sam Andrews, the former Oath Keeper, said. “They didn’t want to see black people opposing the police. They were perfectly OK seeing white people and people of different colors pointing their rifles at federal agents at the Bundy Ranch. But you can’t have black people marching for their rights with their rifles pointed at the ground.”
Rhodes has repeatedly denied Andrews’ claims.
In Oregon the Josephine County Oath Keepers still exist, but without Rice, who says his new organization, the Liberty Watch of Josephine County, is dedicated to community service and emergency preparedness. The group is part of the Coalition of American Patriots, which includes various antigovernment groups and outlets such as Outpost of Freedom, a blog run by Gary Hunt, who was arrested earlier after publishing names of purported FBI informants inside the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in neighboring Malheur County.
One thing is for certain, it is not the Oath Keepers.
“Oath Keepers in concept is a good organization. When you’re talking about those people who took their oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, it’s important,” Rice said. “But what we’ve watched, there was a philosophy in leadership that was vastly different.”
That philosophy seems to increasingly be the personal politics of Stewart Rhodes.<<< NEWS FROM THE LAB - Thursday, June 2, 2011 >>> ARCHIVES | SEARCH Quick Snapshot of Trojan:AndroidOS/AdSMS.B Posted by ThreatSolutions @ 09:24 GMT Ever since we got wind of a variant of an AdSMS trojan with more aggressive functionalities making the rounds in various online forums, we've been on the lookout for more samples to analyze.
It hasn't been easy — there was a report of "more than 20 Android apps" being identified, but most of them seem to have been pulled out of circulation already. A lot of heavy forum trawling was required, which is a good thing for most users — it's not easy to get this trojan.
Analysis is still ongoing, but here are a few snippets based on the samples we have:
As before, the malware is a trojanized version of a legitimate app. For this sample, it was a paper toss game. For a simple game though, the permissions it requests are suspicious:
An alert user should be suspicious when a game says it needs to send SMS messages and read your personal information.
Once installed, the trojan is designed to prompt the user to "update" the program to a new version, with a "lightning update in 1 second" (?):
Once updated, the device is restarted and the malware is successfully installed under "com.android.battery", though it lists itself as appsms.apk in the application folder.
The trojan contains a known exploit, rageagainstthecage, for gaining root access and will run four malicious classes as services in the background: Adsms.Service, SystemPlus, MainRun and ForAlarm.
Other functionalities appear to be as reported, though we'll be continuing analysis — and hunting for more samples. We will be detecting this as Trojan:AndroidOS/AdSMS.B.
Threat Solutions post by — IreneThe world’s first “true wireless” in-ear headphones have been unveiled at the IFA technology show in Berlin, by Japanese consumer electronics manufacturer Onkyo.
Most in-ear headphones that are advertised as “wireless” actually have a cable connecting the two earpieces. They are known as wireless because they do not require a cable to connect to a media player or a smartphone.
The W800BT headphones, developed in partnership with audio group Gibson Innovations, consist of two earbuds that work independently from each other and deliver a balanced sound across a frequency range of 20Hz-20kHz. They connect to each other and to a smartphone wirelessly, using Bluetooth.
Onkyo claims that the headphones offer a clear and accurate audio experience with passive noise isolation. The right earpiece also includes a microphone to enable hands-free calls and can be used with any Bluetooth-enabled device.
They come with a charging case for storing the headphones with its own internal battery, providing up to 15 hours of talk time and 12 hours of music reproduction.
“The W800BT allows you to immerse yourself in audio in a free and natural way,” said Sebastiaan Gruijters, Onkyo Business Leaders at Gibson Innovations. “We’re proud to showcase this genuine breakthrough innovation here at the IFA in Berlin.”
The W800BT in-ear headphones are priced at €299.99 (about £220) and will be available in Europe from November 2015.
Onkyo also unveiled a pair of high-resolution on-ear headphones at IFA, in partnership with Gibson, as well as a new range of portable high-resolution audio speakers.
Gibson has been an investor in Onkyo since January 2012, when it acquired a majority share of Onkyo USA.
“We strive to achieve an optimum balance between the ideal acoustic design and a deep understanding of how we, as humans, interact with technology,” said Matthew Dore, sound and acoustics engineering lead for Onkyo products at Gibson Innovations.In case of a common home computer, there is always the possibility of important Files or Folders being accidentally modified or deleted by kids or someone else in the family. An easy way to prevent this from happening is to Hide Files and Folders in Windows 10 using methods as listed below.
Hide Files and Folders in Windows 10
The simplest way to Hide Files and Folders in Windows 10 is to access File Properties and designate the selected File as being “Hidden” in the Attributes section of the File Properties.
This easy method of Hiding Files and Folders in Windows 10 should be good enough for Family Computers where the intention is to prevent kids or anyone else in the family from accidentally deleting or modifying important files and folders.
Another method of Hiding Files and Folders in Windows 10 is to make your computer treat your important Files/Folders as System Files, which it automatically hides.
The second method requires the use of command prompt to hide/unhide files, which makes it difficult for anyone with average computer skills to snoop on your files.
Hide Single File or Folder in Windows 10
Follow the steps below to hide individual Files and Folders in Windows 10
1. Right-click on the File/Folder that you want to hide and then click on Properties option in the menu that appears.
2. In the File Properties window, scroll down to the “Attributes” section and then check the little box next to Hidden and click on Apply (See image below).
3. On the “Confirm Attribute Changes” pop-up, choose whether you want to “Apply Changes to this Folder only” or “Apply Changes to this Folder, Subfolders and Files” and click on OK (See image below).
Depending on your selection, the selected Folder or the Folder along with all its Subfolders and Files will become hidden, once you click on OK.
Hide Multiple Files and Folders in Windows 10
Follow the steps below to Hide Multiple Files and Folders in Windows 10.
1. Right-click on the Windows Start button and then click on File Explorer option in the menu that appears.
2. In the File Explorer Window, select the Files/Folders that you want to hide, click on the View Tab in the File Explorer top menu bar and then click on Hide selected items option (see image below)
3. On the “Confirm Attribute Changes” pop-up that appears, choose whether you want to “Apply Changes to the selected Folder only” or “Apply Changes to selected Folder, Subfolders and Files” and then click on OK (See image below).
Unhide Files and Folders in Windows 10
When Files and Folders are hidden, they no longer appear in File Explorer. However, you can easily Unhide Files and Folders that you had previously hidden on your computer by following the steps below.
1. Click on the Windows Start button and then click on File Explorer option in the menu that appears.
2. In the File Explorer Window, click on the View tab and then check the ‘Hidden items’ option in Show/hide toolbox (See image below).
Checking the Hidden Items option will reveal the Hidden Files/Folders in that location. The hidden Files/Folders will appear with partially transparent icons, so that you can clearly distinguish Hidden Files from regular ones (See above image).
Truly Hide Files and Folders in Windows 10 Using Command Prompt
The methods to Hide Files and Folders in Windows 10 as described above are only good for Home or Family Computers, where no one is really trying to snoop on your files.
In order to truly Hide Files and Folders in Windows 10, you can either make use of various Third Party Tools as available in the market or make use of a workaround in Windows 10.
The workaround involves making Windows 10 computer to treat the Files/Folders that you want to Hide as System Files. Once this is done, Windows Operating System will Automatically hide these files, just as it hides other System Files.
1. Right-click on Windows Start button and then click on Command Prompt Admin option in the menu that appears.
2. In the command prompt window, type attrib +h +s followed by The File Path and hit the enter key on the keyboard of your computer.
In the above image, a File named as “Family” is located on the desktop and its File Path can be written as C:\users\funaccount\desktop\family.
Hence, in the command prompt window, we are typing the attribute command as attrib +h +s c:\users\funaccount\desktop\family. The letters “h” and “s” in the attribute command instruct your computer to treat the selected File/Folder as Hidden and as a System File.
3. Type the Attribute command as required in your case (depending on the location of your File) and hit the Enter Key on the keyboard of your computer
Once the command is executed, the File/Folder named in the “Attrib” Command will be treated as a System File by your computer and it will become hidden.
Important: Make sure that you note down the file path for the hidden files, you will need this to unhide the file.
Unhide Files and Folders in Windows 10 Using Command Prompt
You can make the Hidden Files visible again by replacing “+” sign with “-” in the “attrib” command and running it again on your computer.
1. Right-click on Windows Start button and then click on Command Prompt Admin option in the menu that appears.
2. In the command prompt window, type attrib -s -h C:\Users\funaccount\Desktop\Family and hit the Enter Key on the keyboard of your computer.
Once the command is executed, you will see the hidden Files/Folders appearing back on your computer.Earlier this month, I wrote a story outlining the extremely narrow but not impossible path that Evan McMullin could take to the White House, and since then, McMullin has become a genuinely hot topic. Nate Silver followed up with a post about how our forecast model is handling Utah. And we’ve talked about how McMullin’s chances of being the first third-party or independent candidate to win a state since 1968 may turn out to be one of the last cliffhanger results in this race.
Despite all the drama, there hasn’t been much polling in Utah, and polls that include McMullin remain fairly scarce. Polls that ask voters about him the same way they ask about the better-known candidates are scarcer still. In particular, three of the polls currently used by the FiveThirtyEight model have issues that could be affecting the results:
The YouGov poll that gives Donald Trump a huge lead (and is the heaviest-weighted poll in our model) included McMullin only as an option after a respondent selected “someone else” when presented with a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The Monmouth University poll that also gave Trump a significant lead had essentially the opposite issue. It asked about McMullin on its initial list of candidates, but then when following up with undecideds, it asked only about Trump and Clinton. This follow-up question is not itself unusual — pollsters will sometimes “push” undecided respondents by asking “if you had to vote for … who do you lean toward.” Respondents can still say they’re undecided, but many choose a candidate at this stage. (I asked Monmouth’s polling director, Patrick Murray, why the poll didn’t ask about McMullin when following up with undecided voters, and he explained that Monmouth pollsters believe that, most of the time, undecided voters break for the major-party candidates. But he also said Utah this year may be a special case.) The Rasmussen poll that had McMullin within 1 percentage point of Trump listed McMullin as an “Independent Conservative.” This phrasing will not be on the ballot, where he will be listed as “Unaffiliated,” but in a state as conservative as Utah, the way Rasmussen labeled McMullin could give him an advantage in that poll.
Generally, we don’t get too far into the weeds about methodological questions. Different pollsters have different methods, which may be reflected in their “house effect” (which we adjust for) and ultimately in their pollster ratings (which affects how heavily we weight them). The best protection against potential method bias is simply averaging a lot of different polls and methods, which has a strong historical track record of accuracy.
But Utah is an unusual case. Polls are scarce there, the dynamic has changed quite quickly, and these factors can significantly affect polling results. Our model already excludes Utah polling that doesn’t poll McMullin at all, and that will remain our official approach. But unofficially, we thought we’d take a look at how things might be different if we excluded all polls that didn’t treat McMullin the same way they do the major-party candidates.
Unsurprisingly, this paints a better picture of his chances. As of 3:30 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 24, our polls-only model gave McMullin a 13.9 percent chance of winning Utah, and the now-cast gave him a 22.5 percent chance. Remove the three polls discussed above, and those numbers rise to 23.5 percent and 38.4 percent, respectively. In other words, excluding a small number of suspect polls improves McMullin’s chances in Utah by about 70 percent, which inches him ever closer to even money. Note that though the now-cast should normally be used cautiously, it might be better equipped than other versions of our model to respond to McMullin’s late surge. First, because it reacts to change much more quickly than other versions, and second because the lack of historical precedents for a candidacy like McMullin’s makes it harder to forecast what might happen between now and election day, and the now-cast bypasses that uncertainty by predicting what would happen if the election were held today.
As McMullin’s chances in Utah improve, so do the the chances of an Electoral College deadlock, though that rise is not as dramatic. In our polls-only model, the chances that no one will win a majority of the Electoral College improve from 0.5 percent to 0.7 percent. In the now-cast, they improve from 0.9 percent to an even 1 percent.
That brings us to the ultimate question: How much does this affect McMullin’s chances of winning the presidency? If the Electoral College deadlocks, the next president would be selected from the top three electoral-vote-getters (presumably Clinton, Trump and McMullin, barring any shenanigans) by state delegations in the incoming House of Representatives — in January. What would happen in that scenario is still entirely speculative.
But regardless: Pollsters, please include McMullin in your polls of Utah (at least) and treat him like a candidate who has a chance to win. Because he does.Related to: Disguised Queries, Words as Hidden Inferences, Dissolving the Question, Eight Short Studies on Excuses
Today's therapeutic ethos, which celebrates curing and disparages judging, expresses the liberal disposition to assume that crime and other problematic behaviors reflect social or biological causation. While this absolves the individual of responsibility, it also strips the individual of personhood, and moral dignity
-- George Will, townhall.com
Sandy is a morbidly obese woman looking for advice.
Her husband has no sympathy for her, and tells her she obviously needs to stop eating like a pig, and would it kill her to go to the gym once in a while?
Her doctor tells her that obesity is primarily genetic, and recommends the diet pill orlistat and a consultation with a surgeon about gastric bypass.
Her sister tells her that obesity is a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, and that fat-ism, equivalent to racism, is society's way of keeping her down.
When she tells each of her friends about the opinions of the others, things really start to heat up.
Her husband accuses her doctor and sister of absolving her of personal responsibility with feel-good platitudes that in the end will only prevent her from getting the willpower she needs to start a real diet.
Her doctor accuses her husband of ignorance of the real causes of obesity and of the most effective treatments, and accuses her sister of legitimizing a dangerous health risk that could end with Sandy in hospital or even dead.
Her sister accuses her husband of being a jerk, and her doctor of trying to medicalize her behavior in order to turn it into a "condition" that will keep her on pills for life and make lots of money for Big Pharma.
Sandy is fictional, but similar conversations happen every day, not only about obesity but about a host of other marginal conditions that some consider character flaws, others diseases, and still others normal variation in the human condition. Attention deficit disorder, internet addiction, social anxiety disorder (as one skeptic said, didn't we used to call this "shyness"?), alcoholism, chronic fatigue, oppositional defiant disorder ("didn't we used to call this being a teenager?"), compulsive gambling, homosexuality, Aspergers' syndrome, antisocial personality, even depression have all been placed in two or more of these categories by different people.
Sandy's sister may have a point, but this post will concentrate on the debate between her husband and her doctor, with the understanding that the same techniques will apply to evaluating her sister's opinion. The disagreement between Sandy's husband and doctor centers around the idea of "disease". If obesity, depression, alcoholism, and the like are diseases, most people default to the doctor's point of view; if they are not diseases, they tend to agree with the husband.
The debate over such marginal conditions is in many ways a debate over whether or not they are "real" diseases. The usual surface level arguments trotted out in favor of or against the proposition are generally inconclusive, but this post will apply a host of techniques previously discussed on Less Wrong to illuminate the issue.
What is Disease?
In Disguised Queries, Eliezer demonstrates how a word refers to a cluster of objects related upon multiple axes. For example, in a company that sorts red smooth translucent cubes full of vanadium from blue furry opaque eggs full of palladium, you might invent the word "rube" to designate the red cubes, and another "blegg", to designate the blue eggs. Both words are useful because they "carve reality at the joints" - they refer to two completely separate classes of things which it's practically useful to keep in separate categories. Calling something a "blegg" is a quick and easy way to describe its color, shape, opacity, texture, and chemical composition. It may be that the odd blegg might be purple rather than blue, but in general the characteristics of a blegg remain sufficiently correlated that "blegg" is a useful word. If they weren't so correlated - if blue objects were equally likely to be palladium-containing-cubes as vanadium-containing-eggs, then the word "blegg" would be a waste of breath; the characteristics of the object would remain just as mysterious to your partner after you said "blegg" as they were before.
"Disease", like "blegg", suggests that certain characteristics always come together. A rough sketch of some of the characteristics we expect in a disease might include:
1. Something caused by the sorts of thing you study in biology: proteins, bacteria, ions, |
want to see if you can pre-qualify for a mortgage. Then use a short term, higher interest loan to get the house built, or even a credit card. When the house is built, obtain a mortgage. You want to be completely transparent with the bank through this process, and there will be other costs associated with getting that loan, such as inspections and appraisals. In addition there will be costs to bring electricity, water and sewer to the building whether you are providing these things yourself or getting them from a local utility. So, understand these costs upfront! Other options for obtaining funds or saving money:
borrow from friends or family (then they have a vested interest in helping you build it), ask for tools and building materials for birthdays and holidays and check freecycle or other building material reuse centers in your area, and most importantly - measure twice and cut once! Minimize waste during construction.
4. Where to build my RabbleHouse?
We are assuming that you have some property you want to build on if you are considering building, or are considering purchasing property. However, what you may not know is if there are restrictions on the property, local building requirements, or other complications. That is why we have created this list (link here) of information you should take to the building department and questions you need to ask them before making this investment. Or if you don't have property at all, check out our blog post on creative places to build your small house (link here).
5. Lack of motivation.
We can't help there. You have to really want this!
Finally what are the challenges from the RabbleHouse end?
We have a great, experienced, cohesive team that have worked together on hundreds of projects. We have a great house design that has been vetted through individuals, building departments, contractors and other professionals. We have some "first generation" Rabblehousers that are ready to build now. We have a group of building professionals that are ready to help you do this right. What we don't have are the videos of building instructions and the online collaborative community. You make the commitment, we will provide the instructions. We expect the first video to be available for download within three months of successful Kickstarter campaign, with additional videos available every 1-2 weeks until the house is complete.
A note about liability: We are providing design and engineering - but any building is only as good as the time & effort you put into it. We are not liable for defects in construction, defects in products, poor workmanship, or worker safety on the job. We make no guarantees that your permit office will allow this to be built on your property. We provide a set of questions to take to the building department and guide you through the permitting process but we can't control zoning, set backs, local interpretation of codes, etc.Email, not Facebook, is the largest social network.
That’s the view held by the team behind Inside, a company focused entirely on growing and monetizing its motley collection of newsletters. Closing in on a year, the company founded by serial entrepreneur and investor Jason Calcanis — known for Weblogs Inc. and his early investments in Uber, among other things — has around 300,000 subscribers across 30 newsletters, and average open rates just above 40 percent and click rate of 10 percent across all the newsletters. The collection includes the Jason Calacanis newsletter, a general interest daily news briefing, and quirkier offerings like Inside Space (on outer space and travel), Inside Trump (on the president of the United States), Inside Streaming (for “cord cutters”), and Inside Beer (for sellers or brewers).
“We looked at the way news is consumed today on social media, with Facebook being the number place where all of that happens. A lot of publishers are talking to Facebook right now, but none of them know what Facebook is going to look like — it’s a platform controlled by a public company that has a lot of shareholders and other forces they need to answer to,” Austin Smith, Inside’s general manager, said. “Email will never be controlled in that way, and people are just as engaged with their inboxes as they have always been.”
It’s recently launched its paid subscription options for the newsletters at $10 a month for premium access to one newsletter, or $25 for premium access to an unlimited number of Inside verticals — a paid subscription removes ads and gets you…well, more emails. The more popular newsletters in the network average a “couple of hundred” paying subscribers; the smaller newsletters have around 50.
The newsletters also take ads: Either a company pays for a monthly sponsorship and gets a logo and callout in the newsletter, in addition to access to an Inside premium subscriptions bundle for their company, or advertisers can pay for more one-off native ads inside a newsletter (Inside doesn’t have an ad sales team so isn’t “super aggressive” about running them). Between ads and premium subscriptions, the company is not yet profitable (that’s “within eyesight,” it’s said) and may or may not be looking to raise funding in the meantime (“no comment”). Early on it had focused on metrics like opens-per-week, but with the rollout of subscription offerings, “enough readers are paying us so we don’t necessarily need to focus on volume as much as if we were only ad-supported,” Smith said.
Inside staffers float ideas for new topical newsletters to join the family, and readers “vote” by signing up to the potential newsletter with their emails; Inside will assign a writer and start a newsletter for ideas that collect at least 2,000 addresses (or attract a major advertiser to sponsor it). Some of the newer Inside newsletters such as Inside Trump, Inside Space, Inside Internet of Things, and Inside Beer all launched after hitting that minimum. Inside Bitcoin, for instance, went from the 2,000 pre-subscribers it had before anything launched to 7,000 subscribers a few days later.
“We found before we had the pre-subscribe feature, the most challenging thing for us was to get the first thousand, two thousand subscribers,” Smith said. It’s hard to get that word-of-mouth going when there’s nothing to build off of, and word of mouth is best way these things grow.”
Most of the company’s five full-time staffers and around 10 freelancers currently putting together all of Inside’s newsletters are tech-oriented generalists who have to cross multiple disparate beats. The team is still trying to figure out how much — and what — to offer premium subscribers, the right mix of original versus curation/aggregation, and the volume of new newsletters the team can handle. Several of the newsletters, such as the ones on Amazon and VR/AR industries, come out daily. News out of the Trump administration is so frequent that the twice-weekly Inside Trump digest has issued breaking alerts. Right now, Inside newsletters average about 60 to 70 curated content from other sources and up to around 40 percent original content, according to Kim Lyons, managing editor at Inside.
“Our current mix is working, though I’d like to get us to even more original reporting. But I’m interested more in doing the deeper dives rather than the breaking stuff, since there are a lot of news outlets that do that really well already, and trying to duplicate that with the size of the staff we have is not practical,” Lyons said. “Our sense is that we’re not writing for a completely beginner audience. What’s interesting to subscribers is, which drone companies are doing new things, what are the new regulations everything in this space is struggling with right now, how is that administration policy change going to affect my business?” At the moment, Inside’s audience is about 80 percent U.S.-based and mostly concentrated in the Bay Area, which makes sense given the industries it covers.
Premium offerings vary across newsletters. For some, a premium subscription comes with a occasional special research reports (e.g., Inside AI, written by angel investor in the space Rob May, compiles a monthly one). For others, it might mean one original article blurred out in a newsletter. (Inside’s newsletter CMS is built to handle toggling between paid-for and free content.)
“We try to make sure we don’t just have news of the day but news that you may have missed and is not getting attention elsewhere, and will take time to get our hands on an important issue that people are still only peripherally aware of,” Lyons said. “The most pushback we’ve had is from non-premium readers when they see an article they can’t read inside their newsletter, which we always knew was going to annoy some people who just don’t want to pay.”
“It’s still a process, building all this. But it’s super cool though to see readers actually do want to pay for it,” Smith said.The information that clinicians provide to patients when prescribing treatments has long been thought to play a role in the way that patients respond to drug therapies. Now an innovative study of migraine headache confirms that a patient's expectations -- positive, negative or neutral -- influence the effects of both a medication and a placebo.
Led by a research team at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and published on-line today in the journal Science Translational Medicine the study, for the first time, quantifies how much pain relief is attributed to a drug's pharmacological effect and how much to placebo effect, and demonstrates that a positive message and a powerful medication are both important for effective clinical care.
Senior authors Rami Burstein, PhD, Director of Pain Research in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at BIDMC and Ted Kaptchuk, Director of the Program in Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at BIDMC and Harvard Medical School, took advantage of the recurring nature of migraine headaches to compare the effects of drug treatments and placebos in seven separate migraine attacks in each of 66 individuals. Their findings uncovered several key points: 1) The benefits of the migraine drug Maxalt (rizatriptan) increased when patients were told they were receiving an effective drug for the treatment of acute migraine; 2) When the identities of Maxalt tablets and placebo pills were switched, patients reported similar reductions in pain from placebo pills labeled as Maxalt as from Maxalt tablets labeled as placebo; and 3) Study subjects reported pain relief even when they knew the pill they were receiving was a placebo, compared with no treatment at all.
"One of the many implications of our findings is that when doctors set patients' expectations high, Maxalt [or, potentially, other migraine drugs] becomes more effective," says Burstein, the John Hedley-Whyte Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School (HMS). "Increased effectiveness means shorter migraine attacks and shorter migraine attacks mean that less medication is needed," he adds.
"This study untangled and reassembled the clinical effects of placebo and medication in a unique manner," adds Kaptchuk, a Professor of Medicine at HMS. "Very few, if any, experiments have compared the effectiveness of medication under different degrees of information in a naturally recurring disease. Our discovery showing that subjects' reports of pain were nearly identical when they were told that an active drug was a placebo as when they were told that a placebo was an active drug demonstrates that the placebo effect is an unacknowledged partner for powerful medications."
The investigators studied over 450 attacks in 66 patients with migraines, throbbing headaches commonly accompanied by nausea, vomiting and sensitivity to light and sound. After an initial "no treatment" episode in which patients documented their headache pain and accompanying symptoms 30 minutes after headache onset and again two hours later (2.5 hours after onset), the participants were provided with six envelopes containing pills to be taken for each of their next six migraine attacks.
Of the six treatments, two were made with positive expectations (envelopes labeled "Maxalt"), two were made with negative expectations (envelopes labeled "placebo"), and two were made with neutral expectations (envelopes labeled "Maxalt or placebo"). In each of the three situations -- positive, negative or neutral -- one of the two envelopes contained a Maxalt tablet while the other contained a placebo, no matter what the label actually indicated. The patients then documented their pain experiences in the same manner as they had initially in the no-treatment session.
The results consistently showed that giving the pills accompanied by positive information incrementally boosted the efficacy of both the active migraine medication and the inert placebo.
"When patients received Maxalt labeled as placebo, they were being treated by the medication -- but without any positive expectation," notes Burstein. "This was an attempt to isolate the pharmaceutical effect of Maxalt from any placebo effect." Conversely, the inert placebo labeled as Maxalt was an attempt to isolate the impact of the placebo effect from pharmaceutical effect.
Adds Kaptchuk, "Even though Maxalt was superior to the placebo in terms of alleviating pain, we found that under each of the three messages, the placebo effect accounted for at least 50 percent of the subjects' overall pain relief. When, for example, Maxalt was labeled 'Maxalt,' the subjects' reports of pain relief more than doubled compared to when Maxalt was labeled 'placebo.' This tells us that the effectiveness of a good pharmaceutical may be doubled by enhancing the placebo effect."
Furthermore, the authors were surprised to find that even when subjects were given a placebo that was labeled as "placebo," they reported pain relief, compared with no treatment.
"Contrary to conventional wisdom that patients respond to a placebo because they think they're getting an active drug, our findings reinforce the idea that open label placebo treatment may have a therapeutic benefit," say the authors, adding that while further research will be needed to explore how these findings could be applied to clinical care, the findings suggest that in the future placebos may provide a therapeutic boost to drug treatments.On the Your City My City blog, transportation expert Lorenzo Mele writes:
“It seems almost too easy these days to find fault with the TTC. It wasn’t always this way. I remember as a child in the 1960s how exciting it was to travel downtown from Scarborough on the subway. The cars and stations were shiny and clean, and the drivers were polished and professional. It was a different era, of course, but something more than the passing of time and age have led us to our current situation.
Today, at the helm of the TTC are accountants, planners and engineers, and the board of directors and its leadership are politicians.
Comment from thestar.com on how to ensure city hall reflects the population:
“Party politics would do little to solve the problem — just look at provincial and federal politicians. Why don’t we try to:TOKYO -- Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal has developed an automotive steel sheet that is 20-30% lighter and 25% stronger than the toughest high-tensile steel now on the market, hoping to help carmakers build more fuel-efficient, safer vehicles.
The company is conducting verification tests and will start marketing the product around 2020 for use in vehicle frames, chassis and other components.
Currently, the highest grade of cold-rolled steel offered by major steelmakers has a strength of 1,180 megapascals. Nippon Steel's new, lighter material has a strength of 1,470 megapascals.
By improving the heat treatment process and adding alloy elements, Nippon Steel improved both strength and ease of rolling. The material is resistant to cracks from the stamping process.
The company hopes to keep the price flat with current top-of-the-line offerings.
The material is not as light as aluminum alloy or plastic reinforced with carbon fiber. But its price is only a third to half that of aluminum -- with processing costs factored in -- and about 1/20 that of carbon-fiber plastic.
Automakers are scrambling to meet increasingly tight fuel-economy regulations worldwide by employing lighter materials in vehicles. Nippon Steel thinks its new product fits the bill -- at a reasonable price.
(Nikkei)With Pep Guardiola reportedly set to introduce a number of fresh faces to the Manchester City starting XI, the former Premier League champions’ midfield is likely to become a key area for improvement.
Yaya Toure, Fernandinho and fellow Brazilian international Fernando had occupied the centre of the park for the Blues in recent seasons – with 30-year-old David Silva interchanging with Ivorian teammate Toure in the number ten position.
However, the Manchester City supporters began to question their ageing squad under Manuel Pellegrini following a poor run of form in the closing weeks of the 2015/16 Premier League regime – which resulted in the club edging a tight battle for a fourth place Champions League spot over their city rivals Manchester United.
Fans will be hoping that Guardiola can use his renowned managerial prowess in luring world class talents to the Etihad, to follow the transfer of Borussia Dortmund midfielder Ilkay Gundogan – after he put pen-to-paper on a four-year contract worth a reported £20million earlier this month.
The latest rumours have suggested that 20-year-old Schalke starlet Leroy Sane, who had flourished in an attacking midfield role throughout the last Bundesliga season, is being targeted by the Blues to replace the likes of David Silva, Yaya Toure or even Jesus Navas in Pep Guardiola’s new system at the club.
Schalke’s new man-in-charge Markus Weinzierl is reportedly desperate to hold onto the young prospect, yet it is evident that the club are preparing themselves for offers from major European clubs following their successful pursuit of FC Basel’s Swiss forward Breel Embolo.
With an estimated value of £40million, Sane had made impactful appearances both from starting and substitute roles for his German club, despite being unable to lead them past a disappointing fifth place league position and inevitable Europa League qualification.
However, the young German national’s goal and assist contributions will make for promising statistics in the eyes of Manchester City fans. Registering nine goals and seven assists across all competitions during the 15/16 season, his attacking prowess has not shied in the slightest.
The 78% passing accuracy he boasted throughout the last Bundesliga campaign is thought to have impressed Guardiola and can be likened to the 25-year-old Bayern Munich midfielder Thiago Alacantara.
Accompanying his prosperous passing statistics, the fact that Leroy Sane had created a clear-cut chance in nearly all of his 33 appearances for Schalke last year makes him a suitable candidate to replace the evident deadwood in Manchester City’s attacking midfield options and introduce a new-look youthful Blues side under their reputable manager.
Aside from a central role, Guardiola may look to deploy the Schalke no.19 as an inside winger on the right side of his preferred 3-4-3 formation – a position that we witnessed Douglas Costa thrive in for Pep’s successive Bundesliga champions.
Although the left-footer often steers away from crossing, an aspect of Jesus Navas’ game that holds particular strength, the potential for intricate link-up play with Manchester City talisman Sergio Aguero and newcomer Kevin De Bruyne could make for a deadline forward partnership.
Sane is currently participating in the European Championships with tournament favourites Germany following selection after making only three senior appearances – but training amongst a handful of Premier League players such as Bastian Schweinsteiger, Mesut Ozil and Emre Can may persuade him to contemplate the move.
Whether Manchester City continue their rumoured interest in the young attacker, it is certain that he will remain in the back page headlines, with his £40million price tag likely to be triggered by a top European club in the near future.
Featured image: All rights reserved by brainbernathNow Playing:
Hundreds of people across California were arrested for DUI during the holiday weekend, the California Highway Patrol said Monday.
Between 6 p.m. Friday and 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve, CHP officers arrested 790 people. With maximum enforcement set to expire at 11:59 p.m. Christmas Day, those numbers are expected to rise.
In the wake of the deadly DUI crash in the Bay Area that killed CHP Officer Andrew Camilleri, a 33-year-old father of three, the CHP is urging people to have a safe ride home if they plan to drink.
Maximum enforcement will not only be in effect Christmas weekend, but New Year's weekend as well, beginning Friday, Dec. 29.
Calling for a safe ride home could get even easier thanks to a new law that goes into effect Jan. 1. AB 711, authored by Evan Low, D-Cupertino, will allow alcohol companies and businesses to team up with ride shares, like Uber and Lyft, as well as taxi services, to give out vouchers or promo codes for rides.
A man died Thursday night after stepping into the path of a car on Interstate 80 in Vallejo, triggering a chain reaction crash. A man died Thursday night after stepping into the path of a car on Interstate 80 in Vallejo, triggering a chain reaction crash. Photo: California Highway Patrol Photo: California Highway Patrol Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close CHP makes 790 DUI arrests in less than 72 hours 1 / 3 Back to Gallery
In a statement to KCRA, Low said:
"My heart goes out to Officer Camilleri and his loved ones. This was a terrible and preventable tragedy.
"Driving under the influence is far too common in our state, especially around the holidays. Bills such as AB 711 will help address this issue by offering Californians affordable, safe rides home.
"I implore everyone to think twice before stepping behind the wheel. It's simply not worth it."
The law won't be in effect yet on New Year's Eve, but you can call Tipsy Tow with AAA at 1-800-AAA-HELP for a free ride home.Lord Edward Fitzgerald is one of the most romantic figures in Irish history, a rebel aristocrat associated with the failed revolution of 1798, known as the ‘Citizen Lord’. He is today buried in Saint Werburgh’s Church near to Dublin Castle, an institution he hoped to overthrow by force. A small plaque on the front of the church marks this fact, and it’s one of the great ironies of the city that Major Henry C. Sirr who captured him is buried in the graveyard at the back of the church.
One figure associated with Edward Fitzgerald I’ve been fascinated by for a while now is Tony Small, an escaped slave Fitzgerald encountered in the United States who he later employed as a personal assistant. Small became a frequent sight around Dublin in the 1780s and 1790s, in a city where coloured men were few and far between. Fitzgerald commissioned a portrait of Small in 1786 by the artist Thomas Roberts:
In her brilliant biography of Fitzgerald, Stella Tillyard noted that “If Lord Edward’s mother was his great love, his constant companion was Tony Small, the runaway slave who saved his life in North America in 1781”, and she went on to note that “Tony embodied and brought to life his master’s commitment to freedom and equality for all men.”
Small had witnessed the British and Americans at war firsthand in 1781, as when his owners had fled South Carolina with their possessions and slaves, Tony had escaped and stayed on. On the 8th September 1781, Tony wandered onto a battlefield, and as Tillyard has noted he stumbled across “the blood-soaked uniform of a British officer of the 19th Regiment of Foot. The man was alive but unconscious, overlooked by the search parties of both sides.” The man was Edward Fitzgerald, and when he next awoke he was in the small hut Tony Small knew as his home. Fitzgerald offered Small liberty, and a new life working as his servant, in return for wages. An incredible and unlikely friendship had been born.
Kevin Whelan discusses the friendship between the two in his entry on Lord Edward Fitzgerald for the Dictionary of Irish Biography, noting that “The best-documented Irish example of imaginative sympathy between a white and a black man is the subsequent relationship between Fitzgerald and Small. Until his death in 1798, in a sprawling career that took him across much of Europe, America, and Canada, Fitzgerald never subsequently parted from his ‘faithful Tony’.”
In time, this one-time British soldier and darling of the Ascendancy class was converted towards the ideas of republicanism, the influence of writers such as Thomas Paine and personal observation on the streets of France inspiring this total shift in identity and politics. It was not until 1796 that Fitzgerald joined the United Irishmen, but the seeds had long been planted.
Small followed Fitzgerald wherever he went, and on moving to Dublin with Fitzgerald, Small lived within the family home of Leinster House for a period. By this point Fitzgerald was married to a young French woman by the name of Pamela, and as Tillyard has noted “to Ascendancy society Pamela seemed to be every bit as much a symbol of the revolution as she was to Lord Edward himself.” Her poor English, and her Catholic faith, instantly distanced her from the Dublin ruling class of the day. Yet imagine how ‘different’ Tony Small must have appeared in the Dublin of the late eighteenth century.
One story relating to Small and Leinster House was told by John Brennan in a feature on Fitzgerald for The Irish Times in 1963, in which he noted that on one occasion when Fitzgerald was returning to his family home, Small alerted him to the presence of soldiers inside the house, thus saving Fitzgerald from arrest.
When Fitzgerald moved to Kildare in 1795, Tony moved with him, returning to Leinster House before the birth of the son of Fitzgerald and Pamela. The time in Kildare is remembered in Tillyard’s biography as a very happy one, with Tony said to come up from the servants’ rooms to dance jigs and enjoy Irish music and culture. He would travel also to Germany in May 1796 when Fitzgerald departed for there, to engage in discussions with the French Directory.
Tony Small had not alone an employer within the small travelling party in which he frequently accompanied the Fitzgerald’s, but also a partner. From the time he had lived in Kildare he had been very much in love with Julie, another servant who was the nursemaid of Pamela. Together they would have children.
Fitzgerald played a leading role in the planning of the insurrection for 1798, and his arrest and capture in May of that year on Thomas Street was a major blow to the republican movement. A reward for £1,000 was on the head of Fitzgerald, and he was considered among the most influential and indeed dangerous United Irish leaders still at large. He was taken to Newgate Prison, where he died having been denied proper medical treatment. This prison holds an infamous place in Dublin’s history, and it was there that the Sheares Brothers were hung, drawn and quartered for their role in the republican movement.
At the time of the passing of Edward, Tony was staying with Pamela in England. Both were naturally devastated, and the passing of the aristocrat-turned-revolutionary brought an unexpected twist in Tony’s life, as Pamela would in-time remarry and Tony and Julie felt it time to move on. Setting themselves up in London off the back of their savings, Tony died there following a period of illness. Not much was known of this period in Tony’s life, but recently released letters from the Fitzgerald family have shined a light on the period. Kevin Whelan has noted in a feature for History Ireland magazine that:
After 1798, Tony drops out of view but these new letters pick him up again. He had moved to London, and set up in trade in Piccadilly. Falling ill in 1803, he appealed to the Fitzgerald family for assistance which was quickly forthcoming (according to Lucy). The letter demonstrates Tony Small’s accomplished literacy. He talks of having spent money on doctors and asks ‘the family to make up a sum of money for me so that I might be able to keep on business for my wife and children which is my greatest trouble’. Small was obviously in contact with Arthur O’Connor’s peripatetic servant, Jerry O’Leary, because O’Connor wrote from Fort George that he had heard that Tony had fallen on hard times and was not being helped. Lucy Fitzgerald adds an indignant annotation that the family were indeed assisting him.
Beyond Tillyard’s excellent biography of Fitzgerald, little has been written on Tony Small. Did he appear in any of the Dublin newspapers of the day I wonder, as he would have been an unusual sight on the streets of the capital with his close relationship to Fitzgerald. The escaped slave who made it to Leinster House is as good a Dublin story as any, and Tony should not be forgotten.Photo credit: oleg zabielin | dreamstime.com
He is supposed to be serving, protecting and defending the interests of the country, flag and the American people but undercover FBI agents unearthed his betrayal. An American soldier has been charged for trying to give material support and share military secrets to ISIS.
Sergeant military air traffic controller Ikaika Erik Kang is accused of trying to pass military documents classified as “secret”, giving away a drone and providing training to people who he believed were ISIS supporters. In truth, they were undercover FBI agents.
Kang is also said to have sworn allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and self-declared leader of the extremist militant group ISIS.
The U.S. Department of Justice says Kang’s crimes allegedly happened in Hawaii where he was stationed from June 21 to July 8 2017. Kang will face a full trial, and a preliminary hearing is set to take place in Honolulu on Monday. Kang will face four charges of providing material support to a “foreign terrorist organization”, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on each count, plus a maximum fine of $250,000 for each crime deemed to have been committed.
The FBI and the US Army Criminal Investigation Division investigated Kang and his activities for a year, with undercover agents posing as members of ISIS. He was finally arrested on July 8.
Kang’s lawyer, Birney Bervar, said Kang was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder that the U.S. army had failed to address. The air traffic controller had served on tours of Iraq in 2011 and Afghanistan in 2014.
Kang assisted the terror group in buying a drone. He is also accused of giving military clothing and equipment to the undercover agents. He also allowed himself to be filmed giving training on weapons and combat techniques, which the terrorists would use as training videos for their people.
President Donald Trump promised during the campaign that he will be tougher in dealing with the terror group, air strikes carried out against ISIS and its affiliates have indeed increased since he took over the White House. The U.S. is leading an international coalition against the terror group.
The coalition-backed Iraqi army gained a major breakthrough earlier this month by recapturing the city of Mosul, ISIS’ last remaining city stronghold in Iraq.
Coalition efforts including bombing have also focused on ISIS strongholds in Syria and Somalia but have also targeted militants in Yemen and Somalia.
Source:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/isis-us-solider-ikaika-erik-kang-charged-military-secrets-classified-documents-hawaii-fbi-a7855236.htmlA Swarm is a new kind of organization, made possible by available and affordable mass communication. Where it used to take hundreds of full-time employees to organize 100,000 people, today that can be done — and is done — by somebody in their spare time from their kitchen.
There are many misconceptions about what a Swarm is. Let’s begin by dispelling what it is not.
It is not an amorphous cloud of equals, where nobody gets any decision power. While this would be an ideal society to some, it is not a Swarm.
Neither is it a traditional hierarchical organization where commands are issued top-down and people are expected to follow them. A Swarm may look like this from the outside, but that’s not what it is.
Rather, it is a scaffolding set up by a few individuals that enable tens of thousands of people to cooperate on a common goal in their life. These tens of thousands are usually vastly diverse and come from all walks of life, but share one common goal. The scaffolding set up by one or a few individuals allow these thousands of people to form a Swarm around it and start changing the world together.
This scaffolding doesn’t appear very complex. At its simplest, it is just a means to communicate and discuss the issues the Swarm wants to make a change on, like a forum on a server. The complexity comes with the meritocracy that makes up how the Swarm operates and decides on courses of action as an organism.
As all the people in the Swarm are volunteers — they are there because they think the Swarm can be a vehicle for change in an area they care about — the only way to lead is by inspiring others through action. The founder of the Swarm has a great deal of initial influence in this manner, but he or she is far from the only one. In a typical Swarm, you will find that people inspire one another across all levels and all geographies, with the only common factor being the overall goals of the Swarm that every particular individual chooses to follow.
Significantly, focus in the Swarm is always on what everybody can do, and never what people cannot or must do.
This sets it sharply apart from a traditional corporation or democratic institution, which focuses sharply on what people must do and what bounds and limits they are confined to. This difference is part of why a Swarm can be so effective: everybody can find something they like to do all the time off a suggested palette that furthers the Swarm’s goals, and there is nobody there to tell them how things may not be done.
In a Swarm, nobody gets to tell anybody else what to do. (People can take on roles and deliverables voluntarily, though.)
Rather, people inspire one another. There are no report lines among activists. As everybody communicates with everybody else all the time, successful projects quickly create ripples. Less successful ones causes the Swarm to learn and move on, with no fingers pointed.
If you want leadership in a Swarm, you stand up and say “I’m going to do X, because I think it will accomplish Y. Anybody who wants to join me in doing X is more than welcome.” Anybody in the Swarm can stand up and say this, and everybody is encouraged to. This quickly creates an informal but tremendously strong leadership structure where people seek out roles that maximize their impact in furthering the Swarm’s goals — all happening organically without central planning and organization charts.
The only people who deviate from this and take on formal deliverables are the ones upholding the scaffolding of the Swarm — being points of contact from media and other external organizations that work in a traditional way. Because of this, a Swarm may sometimes look like a traditional organization. But there is a key difference: it looks like a traditional organization from the outside because it chooses to; because the Swarm is more efficient in interfacing with legacy-type organizations that way. Not because it actually operates that way.
At the bottom line, what sets a Swarm apart from traditional organizations is its blinding speed of operation, its next-to-nothing operating costs, and its large number of very devoted volunteers. Traditional corporations and democratic institutions appear to work at glacial speeds from the inside of a Swarm. That’s also why a Swarm can change the world: it runs in circles around traditional organizations, in terms of quality and quantity of work, as well as in resource efficiency.
This book will teach you every step of constructing the necessary scaffolding and building a successful Swarm around it.Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple has been working doggedly to correct one of Sean Hannity's favorite false claims about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi: that State Department officials watched "real-time" video of the assault from an office in Washington, DC. Wemple's efforts got an assist from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on January 23: "There was no monitor, there was no real time." As Wemple's debunking of the falsehood makes clear, Hannity has been the primary driver of this claim by repeating on a near-daily basis. But the "real-time" video falsehood did not start with the Fox News host. In fact, one of the first mentions -- perhaps the first -- of the spurious Benghazi video was on Jennifer Rubin's Washington Post blog.
The whole story starts with an October 10, 2012, hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. At that hearing, Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary of state for international programs, had this exchange with Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), describing how she followed via telephone the developments in the Benghazi attack as they were happening:
LANKFORD: Mrs. Lamb, can you clarify for me, where -- where were you working September 11? Were you in the Washington area -- were -- in the main facility there? LAMB: Yes sir. I was in the D.S. Command center on the evening of the event. LANKFORD: You -- you -- you note that in your testimony that you were in the Diplomatic Security Command Center and then you make this statement, "I could follow what was happening almost in real time." LAMB: That's correct. LANKFORD: So once they hit the button in Benghazi, you're alerted, it says you could have. Did you follow what was happening in real time at that point? LAMB: Sir, what was happening is they were making multiple phone calls and it was very important that they communicate with the annex in Tripoli because this is where additional resources were coming from. So they would hang up on us and then call back. LANKFORD: But you're -- but you're tracking it back and forth what's going on. LAMB: Yes absolutely. [Transcript via Nexis, emphasis added]
That night on Fox News' Hannity, Liz Cheney seized on Lamb's testimony, but characterized it correctly:
CHENEY: Today, we learned from Charlene Lamb under oath that she followed, you know, the diplomatic security official, that she followed what was going on, minute by minute. She was following it in real time. So the administration knew in real time, there wasn't a mob, they knew in real time that this was a well-coordinated attack. They knew in real time that it involved heavy weaponry, this was clearly a terrorist attack and the American people have clearly, as you've said, been lied to.
The following morning, October 11, Jennifer Rubin posted a video of Cheney's Hannity appearance in a post headlined "Real-time Libya: Who knew what, when?" In that post, Rubin claimed (citing no other sources) that Lamb had watched a "real-time video" of the attack -- something neither Lamb nor Cheney had said:
Seriously, something doesn't make sense. Do we think no one else ever got the benefit of that information that mid-level bureaucrat Charlene Lamb had? This was the most urgent issue of the moment in which everyone (the White House, the public, the media) wanted to know what happened in Benghazi. So why not look at the real-time video? Why not ask Lamb what she saw and heard?
That next day, October 12, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow wrote in his syndicated column that "State Department officials saw the Benghazi attack in real time." [emphasis |
ing: the Holy Ghost is the Father’s Love. The Father empties Love into the Son, who in turn empties that Love onto the earth. The Love (the Holy Ghost) encircles and fills the earth, to return to the Father and again repeat the process. The interaction between God and man can be seen in terms of that self-emptying.
The one major controversy over the Holy Ghost is between the Eastern and Western Churches: the Eastern Churches say the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone, while the Western Churches say he proceeds from the Father and the Son.
It’s a complicated controversy that doesn’t concern our current project, and we needn’t take a position. My own thought runs as follows: the word we say as “proceeds” in the Nicene Creed is the Latin procedit, which in turn is a mistranslation of the Greek ekporevomenon which actually means “to originate, to be as from a source.” For our purposes it suffices to say no mainstream church teaches the Holy Ghost originates from the Son as well as the Father.
Human Free Will
The mainstream churches are rather unified when it comes to God as Trinity, yet they begin to fracture when it comes to the question of human free will. The question can be framed as: If God is truly sovereign over the universe, then are human beings really free or are their choices already made for them?
The answer runs a spectrum. At one end are Catholics and Arminians (the camp of most modern-day Evangelicals) who believe human will is completely free because God chose to allow it, while at the other end are five-point Calvinists who teach double predestination: i.e. that God chose from the beginning of time who would be allowed into heaven and who he would throw into hell.
To the Catholic and Arminian, man is free because God’s love wants a response made from love; to the Calvinist man is not free because if he were, then God would not be sovereign. In the middle of this spectrum are the Lutherans, who deny human will is perfectly free but teach single predestination: that God wills (i.e. predestines) everybody to get into heaven, yet the person’s choices can get him kicked out of that destination.
There’s a tendency to portray Calvinist teaching as a thoroughly pre-scripted universe (hence epithets like “the frozen chosen”), and I should point out that this is a misrepresentation. Rather, Calvin recognized two types of will: the will to make purely human decisions and the will to choose your salvation. His teaching, accurately represented, is that you’re free to choose your favorite TV show or your favorite flavor of ice cream, but you’re not free to choose a relationship with God or what’s ultimately happening to your soul.
While the mainstream churches are divided on this question, the historical teaching of Christianity is that human will is basically free, and the majority of churches tend to act as though the human will is at least partially free. In fact, the greatest common ground favors freedom of will, as true five-point Calvinists are in the minority. Thus our method squarely settles in favor of free will with the reservation that our choices can influence our salvation but we can’t decide it as though we had the final say.
Our First Major Conclusion
This brings us to our first theological conclusion: that the Triune God is all-powerful and the human person is free to enter into a loving relationship with this sovereign and all-powerful God. This is absolutely essential for our project because if any of these conditions is missing – God’s sovereignty, human free will, or the God-human relationship – then the concept of Christian magical practice becomes fiction.
Consider that it’s through God’s sovereignty that the universe is moved, and in free will that humans become participants in that movement. Through mutual love, God finds himself inclined to hear and care for the petitions of his human subjects, consequently moving the universe in the petitioners’ favor.
That relationship between human and God is of special concern to Christian theology, which sees that relationship perfected in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity: Jesus Christ. Christian orthodoxy teaches that Jesus is truly God and truly man, and became human so that humanity might be healed. While different denominations have different interpretations of how that healing actually happens (ransom? example? universal?), all mainstream Christians are agreed on who Jesus was and what Jesus came to do.
Grace
The word “grace” means favor, and almost all Christian denominations agree on three things: that grace flows to humanity by Jesus’ life, teaching, and death on the cross; that humans receive this grace by the working of the Holy Ghost (remember when we discussed perichoresis?); that the entire God-human relationship is based on God’s grace toward man.
Most denominations likewise agree that grace is “God’s underserved help,” and the distinctions arise when theologians try to analyze grace. While western theologians describe grace as a “gift,” eastern theologians describe grace as “God’s uncreated energy.” These two descriptions are not mutually exclusive, as “energy” comes from the Greek ενέργεια, meaning “working, operation, power in action.” Grace is indeed both: God’s gift of underserved help, and an example of God’s power in action.
Further debate occurs in the distinction between sanctifying grace and actual grace. The former is the grace that brings us to a state of salvation (sanctification), while the latter manifests as helps – such as prayers answered or fortuitous events occurring – the keep us in the faith and either obtain or maintain sanctification. The simplest description of the debate is that to a Calvinist, actual grace is an unnecessary distinction because the soul’s fate is predetermined.
I answer that there is only one grace, one power of God, and that the division into categories of “sanctifying” and “actual” is a human attempt to understand the different purposes to which God’s grace is directed.
Channels of Grace
“We thank thee for the Holy Ghost, the Comforter; for thy holy Church, for the Means of Grace, for the lives of all faithful and godly men, and for the hope of the life to come”
– prayer from the Lutheran Service Book and Hymnal
We’ve established that grace is divine gift, divine power, and divine energy. Likewise we’ve suggested in passing that grace, as a product of God’s love, is distributed to humankind by the workings of God’s Love (God the Holy Ghost) enfolding, encircling, and penetrating the universe by way of perichoresis or circumincession. We can also safely say that actual grace is analogous to what magicians commonly call “energy.”
As we’re not merely building a systematic theology but instead discussing a theology of magic, it becomes imperative to determine how that grace is channeled from the Triune God’s circumincession through all creation and into our day-to-day lives.
1. Prayer
All denominations are agreed on the effectiveness of prayer. Prayer is effectively the conscious and deliberate appeal to the God-human relationship with the purpose of manifesting further grace in the petitioner’s direction.
Unanimous agreement also holds that prayer can be vocal or mental, that is with one’s words or with one’s thoughts alone. The basis of this teaching is that God knows our thoughts as well as our words, and thus is able to respond accordingly.
2. The Scriptures
Another universally-agreed channel of grace is the Scriptures. While the Bible itself has no inherent energy or miraculous properties, it’s considered to be a channel of grace because it contains all the information required for salvation (i.e. sanctifying grace). Therefore it can be said to channel a grace of spiritual knowledge.
3. The Sacraments
Distinctions start to show when we move to the next channel of grace, the sacraments. The consistent teaching of Christian history and the numerical majority of modern Christians (Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Lutherans, and Anglicans) are agreed that a sacrament is “a visible sign of an invisible grace,” a channel through which God’s grace is manifest to the faithful. While there is disagreement on the number of sacraments and what they actually do, the general agreement is that the sacraments “work” somehow.
The opposite opinion (Reformed and Anabaptist) is founded in Ulrich Zwingli’s assertion that the sacraments weren’t given as God’s way to help us, but are merely symbolic ordinances by which we show our faith to God and to the Christian community. This is a bitter debate that rages in some quarters even today, yet fortunately this isn’t a book on sacramental theology. While a Catholic or a Protestant theology of magic will come to different conclusions on their own, all agree that God also gives grace outside the sacraments. Therefore an Ecumenical theology of magic can afford to be content with encouraging people to gather around their own conclusions.
4. The Sacramentals
Sacramentals are a second-cousin to the sacraments, and are spiritual helps for receiving actual grace in one’s life. Examples of sacramentals include blessings, exorcisms, medals, scapulars, holy water, the sign of the cross, and prayer. The term itself is almost exclusive to Catholic theology, but the concept – any action that helps manifest actual grace – is more ecumenical in its scope and appreciation. A theology of magic would categorize magic as a sacramental.
5. Morally Upright Living
In modern western religious language, the word “morality” has become synonymous with “sexual repression.” That’s not how I mean it here.
The word “morals” comes from the Latin mores, which at it root means “custom” or “prescribed behavior.” In its best form, behavior that’s “prescribed” – such as don’t lie, don’t kill, don’t steal, and so on – is prescribed on the basis of being in the best interests of the individual as well as for society.
Anthropologically, we can see the energy and the charismatic appeal of a person who deals fairly and honestly with others, not because it’s expected of him but because that’s who he is. When we do “the right thing” out of some hope of heaven or fear of hell, when we do it without our heart really being in it and for the benefit it brings others as well as ourselves, that’s when being “moral” can become soul-crushing; we ourselves become weak and crushed.
Theologically there’s unanimous agreement that some connection between moral conduct and grace exists, yet bitter debate over how that relationship should be understood. Generally Catholics believe that grace comes from faith and works (moral actions), while Protestants believe that works are merely the fruits of a lively faith and that grace results from faith alone (sola fide); many intermediate positions exist with that spectrum.
Our theology can be content with the conclusion that a relationship between actual grace and moral living exists, without quibbling over the details of how. We can let the theology professors argue that to their heart’s content while we happily move forward.
Our Second Major Conclusion
Our theology has just gained a grasp for what grace is, where it comes from, and how we can receive it. In short, grace is the gift of God’s uncreated energy. It is a product of God’s love and this energy permeates the universe through the workings of the Holy Ghost proceeding through creation.
Not only does this grace exist, this grace is available to us through several channels: prayer, the Scriptures, the Sacraments, the sacramentals, and upright moral conduct. It is through one of these channels, prayer, where we are able to call upon and direct this energy in the form of actual grace manifesting our desires.
Prayer can be mental (thought, meditation, visualization) or vocal (speech in one’s own words or according to prescribed formulae), and the energy of actual grace can be used and – as the existence of “dark” magicians demonstrates – abused. In fact baneful magic can be considered sinful because it’s the abuse of a God-given gift.
We have already defined magic as applied theology, and as such our theology considers magic the process of working with and manifesting this divine energy in our lives.
The Spiritual Hierarchies
Theological investigation also finds another point of agreement among Christians: that God is attended by a host of spirits who assist man from time to time; the Bible calls these spirits “Sons of God” or “Angels,” and hints that these Angels exist in hierarchies; extra-biblical texts show that this was indeed the belief of Old Testament-era Judaism. Thus in addition to God’s power and love for humanity, he has created legions of spirits who assist us.
So far there’s no disagreement. The disagreement comes, as in all issues, regarding the manner of that assistance. For example, can we call upon an angel to help us, or is it something God commands with no consideration or input from his human subjects?
The denominations are hotly contested over this question, with Catholics and Eastern Orthodox firmly on the side that we can call the Angels (and the Saints) as spiritual helpers, with the Reformed claiming such a thing is idolatry and superstition. In the middle we have the Lutheran position which concedes the Angels and Saints intercede for us constantly but that “invocation, though harmless, is unnecessary.”
The consistent teaching throughout Christianity’s history is that we can call upon the Angels for help and numerically this is the majority position; hence it will be the position taken by our theology. As to the matter of prayer to the Saints, we may advocate for it but are content to leave it an open question.
The Final Product
“I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw.”
– St. Thomas Aquinas
This is the theological foundation on which we can build an ecumenical Christian magical paradigm: God’s power, human free will, the possibility for a loving relationship between God and us, the ability to channel God’s power, and the spiritual helpers God has assigned to us.
This theology is incomplete in areas that don’t directly affect magical practice: soteriology, eschatology, sacramentology, and moral theology, to name a few. Yet it does not need to be complete; we seek only to establish a theological system of magic that can cut across and be viewed kindly by the largest number of people from the largest number of denominations, and in this I pray we’ve succeeded.
Let’s move in from this section, then, as we continue the next steps on our magical journey!
Notes for Chapter One
This teaching is taken from Joseph Smith’s King Follett Discourse, 1844.
This blog post was an excerpt from Ritual Magic for Conservative Christians. To read more, click this link.
AdvertisementsJohannesburg - Get a divorce, or remove your child from our school. That is what a married same-sex couple say they were told by a private Christian school. This occurred during a meeting after their five-year-old son told his Grade R teacher that he had “two mothers”.
The teacher took the matter to the principal.
Kally, 26, and Samantha Mabe, 27, who have been living openly as a lesbian couple, enrolled their son (who they asked not to be named) at Secunda Highveld Christian School in Mpumalanga earlier this year.
“We told the principal and our son’s class teacher that we are a lesbian couple, as I felt they needed to know because our wedding was in the media last year and we are activists as well.
“We never hid the fact that he has two mothers, and I filled in my details under the section in the form that asks for the mother’s details and Sam filled in the area that said ‘Father/Guardian’, but also filled in her title as ‘Mrs’.
“After we told them we were a lesbian couple, the principal said they were Christian and not in a position to judge us,” Kally, who is the boy’s biological mother, said on Tuesday.
However, Kally was called into a meeting at the principal’s office in April after her son had told his teacher he had two mothers and was accused by the school’s administrators of falsifying the information stating their sexual orientation on their application letter.
“The principal said she could not remember us telling her we were married, and that because they couldn’t differentiate between black names, they were under the impression that I was married to a man.
“I was told that this (being a lesbian couple) would be a problem and they would need to call in a pastor and involve the school board,” she continued.
Another meeting was subsequently called. This time, the school pastor and the principal were in attendance.
“The pastor said that if they had known we were a lesbian couple, they would never have allowed our son in the school…
“He said the school was a Christian private school that offered alternative education of Christian values for children of normal husbands and wives, and that we were trying to rewrite the school rules and compromising their values.
“He said I could either walk away from my lifestyle and have him stay at the school, or I should take the child out of the school, because he was worried that other children would make fun of him or isolate him,” Kally said.
After not reaching a resolution, the pastor allegedly threatened to take legal action if the couple did not remove their son from the school.
“We enrolled our son in a Christian school because they are supposed to teach love, acceptance and forgiveness as God taught us too.
“Yet the school stands and teaches hypocrisy and teaches that only some people deserve to be treated in a Christian way and others don’t,” Sam said.
Kally said she left the meeting in tears, asking herself “Why am I going through this?”.
“The principal said nothing to protect me during the meeting, as a fee-paying parent. They made me feel like I’m nothing…
“What really hurts me is that this happened on the days leading to Human Rights Day, and I feel like if I don’t fight for myself and other people going through this, then I’d be the fool.”
The Mabes refused to take their son out of the school and have since sought legal assistance from lawyers to sue the school.
The Star contacted the school on Tuesday and was told: “We are not going to speak to the press. If there is any information, you’ll have to wait for a press release.”
While the school is independent, it does receive funding from the Mpumalanga Department of Education.
Department spokesman Jasper Zwane said: “We have requested the district office to send a report, and we will investigate the matter.
“We view such matters in a very serious light, and even though the school is independent, we will still find out what happened and make sure that whoever worked outside the legal framework is brought to book.”
SA Human Rights Commission spokesman Isaac Mangena said the commission had been involved in various complaints involving discrimination in schools.
“The SAHRC recently made a finding against the Creare Training Centre, which had discriminated against pupils based on their sexual orientation.
“The commission has consistently been saying that pupils cannot be discriminated against based on their sexual or religious orientation, or that of their parents,” Mangena said. - The StarZANO is still available to purchase through Pre-Order at www.flyzano.com
It's autonomous. It's intelligent. It swarms. It takes selfies??
ZANO is an ultra-portable, personal aerial photography and HD video capture platform, Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and intelligent enough to fly all by itself! ZANO connects directly to your smart device (iOS or Android) via onboard WiFi and enables you to instantly begin capturing and sharing moments like never before.
"When we began work on ZANO, our goal was to make aerial photography and video capture truly accessible to everyone. This meant making ZANO small and lightweight, yet durable enough to take with you anywhere. Intelligent enough so no piloting skills were required, and most of all, pricing ZANO at a point that makes it affordable." Reece Crowther, Head of Marketing
ZANO next to an iPhone 5
"Right out of the box you can begin capturing and sharing stunning aerial photographs and videos, with absolutely no complex flight training required." - Ivan Reedman, Head of Research and Development.
A plethora of sensors work seamlessly together to allow ZANO to avoid obstacles, hold its position and know exactly where it is in conjunction with your smart device, at all times.
This means ZANO operates on a virtual tether connected to your smart device. Allowing for simple gesture control of ZANO. Tilt your phone or tablet left or right, forward or backward and ZANO will follow. (ZANO can also be utilised in "Free Flight" mode, using on-screen Joy Sticks). On screen slide bars control rotation and altitude. ZANO will hold its position unless instructed otherwise (In both "Capture" mode as well as "Free Flight" mode), which allows for maximum control and creative freedom without the burden of piloting ZANO.
If ZANO senses it's strayed too far from your smart device or is running low on battery, it will automatically return to your smart device.
Operating on a virtual tether also enables "Follow me" capability in ZANO. Which means once you set ZANO's hold position, it will register the distance it is from your smart device. You can choose for ZANO to hold this position or enable a "Follow me" feature, which will instruct ZANO to constantly maintain that distance from your smart device and follow you whilst avoiding any obstacles that may get it in the way during flight.
ZANO's GUI in "Capture" Mode
Example of ZANO's GUI in "Free Flight" Mode
An extended view of ZANO in action!
Revolutionary Intelligent Flight and Autonomous Operation, complete with Obstacle Avoidance - Don't fly it. Task it!
Lightweight and Durable. Conveniently take ZANO with you wherever you may go.
Instant image and video sharing capability to social networks.
Digital Image Stabilisation - For clear and precise image and video capture.
Safe - Failsafe software features ensures ZANO will always return to your mobile device if it feels its strayed too far, is losing signal or is running low on battery. ZANO will never leave your line of sight!
Free Flight Mode - Have complete control of ZANO with on screen Joy-Sticks, while still capturing and sharing photos and videos.
ZANO comes complete with a removable battery feature! This means a user can carry multiple charged batteries, and when ZANO is starting to run low on juice, simply bring ZANO home, pull the battery out, put a charged battery in and you’re back flying in no time!
ZANO’s battery can be charged whilst it is docked inside ZANO via a standard MicroUSB connection, and with a simple adapter ZANO’s batteries can be charged whilst outside of ZANO.
Every ZANO pledge reward above and including £139 will come complete with 1 x spare battery for our Kickstarter backers.
6.5cm x 6.5 cm (2.5" x 2.5")
on board MicroSD cradle
1 x Spare battery
55 grams in weight (1.94 oz)
5 megapixel HD video camera
IR obstacle avoidance
Echo sounding sonar and high resolution air pressure sensor for altitude control
32bit 330DMIPS processor
802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz WIFI connectivity
2w Class D Audio Amplifier
High sensitivity onboard digital microphone
Unlimited colour RGB 8*8 pixel front display supporting animations, icons etc - Which doubles as a camera flash!
Unlimited colour RGB landing lights
Bidirectional motor control (Zano can drive motors in either direction)
iOS and Android compatible
10 - 15 minute continuous intelligent flight time. (Weather dependent)
15 - 30 meter optimal operating range. (Smart device and regional legislation dependent.)
25 mph top speed
Durable and Lightweight design.
Digital Image/Video Stabilisation for clear and precise images and video capture.
Easy-Access Charging Port complete with removable battery. Charge multiple batteries and carry with you so your ZANO never runs out of juice!
We've designed ZANO with all the hardware already built in, to allow for a multitude of additional capability to be added in the future (See stretch goals, some of these may be available upon Kickstarter launch!). So not only will you receive the world's most sophisticated nano aerial photography and video platform, you will also receive a product that will continuously evolve without the need to upgrade your hardware!
Additional features we will be developing include:
Tracking of a set target through image processing. ("Follow me" capability is available right away through ZANO's Virtual Tether operation.)
Facial recognition capability
360 and 180 degree Panoramics
Instant imaging editing suite (Image filters, adding text, audio, etc.)
Custom LED Pixel Art creation
Swarming capability! A user will be able to control multiple ZANO’s from one device, this will enable photographs and video of the same event from Multiple Vantage Points.
The ZANO App will allow for "In-App" purchase of new and exciting functionality and capability for ZANO hardware, as we develop it. Eg. When we release an acrobatic capability for ZANO, this will be offered to you through the ZANO app as an "In-App" purchase.
Note: All of our Kickstarter backers will receive 12 months free capability updates.
Glow in the dark ZANO
Red ZANO in Limited Edition Red Carry Case
Limited Edition Red Carry Case
ZANO's Limited Edition Zipper Clam Shell carry case, will be made using the Thermoforming technique of premium quality foam and material. Offering a light weight yet durable protective carrying solution for your ZANO.
"We want to create a "Limited Edition" carry case to commemorate ZANO's launch on Kickstarter. This carry case is to be limited to 1000 pieces only, and will never be reproduced. This case will be made from premium quality materials and will include a docking station for your ZANOfuel charging stick as well as for a spare battery." - Reece Crowther
A "Standard" carry case is also available at a price of £25, which you can add to your early-bird pledge! Its in a similar "clam shell" style of the limited edition case. The materials are a little less fancy, however, this will still provide an ultra lightweight yet durable protective carrying solution for your ZANO.
ZANOfuel
See below an image of ZANOfuel connected to ZANO via MicroUSB charging port featured on ZANO. (The image of ZANO in this shot was intended to not only depict ZANOfuel and how it connects to charge ZANO via MicroUSB, but also our give an insight to how ZANO looks without any shell or motors! Pretty neat huh? Double sided, stacked PCB's.)
ZANOfuel: Will charge ZANO's battery in less than 30 minutes, 4 to 5 times per charge of the stick. 2200mAh.
Want to charge other devices from your ZANOfuel? No problems. ZANOfuel comes complete with a detachable charging cable! To give you mobile device charging freedom!
ZANOfuel comes complete with the £189 pledge reward for the Limited Edition Carry Case. ZANOfuel is not available at any other pledge levels. Again ZANOfuel is intended to be limited to 1,000 pieces to commemorate ZANO's launch on Kickstarter!
All pledge levels above and including £139 will receive 1 x spare battery with their pledge reward, including the £189 pledge level reward.
£125,000 - We make ZANO! The Autonomous and Intelligent Aerial Photography and Video Platform. Complete with Obstacle avoidance, Hold position, Follow-Me and Gesture based operation capabilities. Digital image stabilisation for clear and precise photos and video capture. Instant social networking uploads. £250,000 - All of the above. Plus 360 degree and 180 degree aerial panoramic shots. £750,000 - All of the above. Plus Track and Video Capture a target through image processing. £1,000,000 - All of the above. Plus ZANO Image Editing suite. Add image filters, music, text, voice recordings to your ZANO images and videos! Also we create the Custom LED Pixel Art creation suite. We will also make the ZANO SDK available upon launch! We will also have MicroSD ready firmware! (The hardware will already be on board!) £2,000,000 - We enable all of the above and Swarming capability! Control multiple ZANO's from the one device. Perfect for capturing moments from multiple vantage points! We see limitless development potential for ZANO and we want you to be a part of it. That’s why we have decided to create a ZANO SDK. The ZANO SDK will be available upon launch if we reach our £1,000,000 stretch goal. The ZANO SDK will be an incredibly well documented API, that will allow developers to task ZANO in the same way the ZANO app operates. A forum will be available to assist developers.
Ivan Reedman began breaking ground on autonomous, intelligent, swarming Nano UAV's in 2010. Starting with a 240mm x 240mm UAV, Ivan and his team of highly skilled engineers and developers at Torquing Group worked tirelessly to continue to reduce the size of this UAV technology, without impacting on its capabilities. Initially targeting the defence, industrial and law enforcement markets, the idea for a consumer version of this Nano UAV technology was first raised in October 2013 at the weekly Torquing Group team meeting. The team felt they were finally ready for the challenge to get this technology out to the consumer and make aerial photography and video capture truly accessible to anyone with a smart device. ZANO was born and the race was on to get this sophisticated technology to market affordably.
Since then we have been working relentlessly to bring this technology to the consumer market. We first designed the development environments (DEV Boards) in October 2013 (which is essentially all the vital components on one big PCB), so we could test that each of the electronic components would work as expected and meet the strict requirements we knew we had to meet in order to make ZANO possible. We selected components we knew we could not only eventually fit on a board 65mm x 65mm PCB board (with some skilful PCB layout) but also were readily available and at a low enough cost to meet the tight budget we had for each unit. Once we had selected all the vital components and our DEV boards were ready, we got to writing the firmware, an assortment of digital filters, complex mathematics routines, data fusing algorithms, video handling, obstacle avoidance and signal processing to allow for these components to work seamlessly together to achieve autonomous, intelligent flight. Many a sleepless night went by developing, until we were happy that we had selected all the correct components to bring ZANO to market affordably with all the functionality we wanted it to have.
Enter March 2014 and we have our first 65mm x 65mm ZANO prototype PCB ready to rumble. Naturally, there were a few minor issues. However, we were encouraged enough with the progress we had made, we decided to commit our resources to going full speed ahead with ZANO. Revisions were made to the PCB and sent back for prototyping and we began conceptualising the user experience and designing the graphics for the GUI.
June 2014, and we're finally happy with the PCB layout and that all components are working together in cohesion. We can begin to design the ZANO aesthetic. As a consumer device, Head of Design, Thomas Dietrich (12 years experience in the Royal Air Force) knew ZANO's aesthetic had to ooze sophistication. Yet on a device so small, size and weight are of the absolute essence. How do you make a device look great with such narrow design parameters? Thomas and his team set about for the next 3 months designing ZANO's aesthetic. A sleek, sophisticated shell that fuses functionality with durability.
With all the vital components selected and our PCB layout complete. It was now time to find an EMS (electronic manufacturing service) with premium quality manufacturing capability, yet with prices low enough to maintain affordability. As a British company it was important for us to explore all options on our home turf prior to sending the production overseas. October 2014, the search was finally over and we were able to find the EMS partner we were looking for in the UK, to handle the initial production orders.
So, November 2014, where are we?
ZANO's aesthetic is complete and we have selected our plastics manufacturing company.
Our supply chain is 100% ready to go, from vital components that make ZANO fly, to the very boxes that ZANO is packaged in are all priced and sourced!
Our in house team has begun work on the GUI and the App integration. Over the coming months the team will begin development for Android and iOS, this will continue until March 2015, at which point the App's will be tested rigorously then submitted to Android and iOS App stores for download in May 2015.
ZANO is up and flying, holding position, avoiding obstacles, streaming live video back to a smart device, capturing video and photos. However, with as much capability as we've packed into ZANO, we are continuing to refine the flight, avoidance, video and photo capturing and user interface, plus we have relentless testing and refining procedures prior to us releasing ZANO to the market. We will begin our BETA testing in March 2015. With a view to enter production in May 2015!
It's been a long journey, but ZANO is almost here! From everyone here at Team Torquing, we hope you are as excited as us!
-Reece CrowtherThe Chicago Bears 20-12 loss at the New Orleans Saints had a series of strange plays and bad calls that made the difference in the end.
In the fourth quarter, the Bears not only got a touchdown taken away after tight end Zach Miller appeared to catch the ball in the end zone, but they also lost Miller to a gruesome leg injury that certainly looks to be career ending.
Chris Mortensen of ESPN reported this morning that Miller “was having urgent vascular surgery in New Orleans last night to repair artery damage on dislocated knee.” Miller’s knee was so badly out of place that he tore the artery.
According to the San Diego Union Tribune, the surgery was performed in order to save Miller from amputation:
“The popliteal artery is behind the knee, and is the one damaged. The problem is that is the only main blood supply to the leg below the knee. It is like having the only bridge to an island go out.
This was a true emergency.
Blood flow needs to be restored within hours, and the surgery sometimes takes several hours.
Thus, the Bears medical staff with the cooperation of the Saints doctors should be applauded.
If blood flow is not restored within six hours, permanent muscle damage can occur. By the time Chris Mortensen’s tweet went out and we learned of Miller’s surgery, if blood flow had not been restored, Miller would likely have lost his leg.
Thankfully, when detected early and immediate care, amputation would be very unlikely.”
This will be far from the last surgery Miller must undergo over the next few months as doctors will now need to reconstruct his ligaments once the broken leg is healed. Then there is also the possibility of nerve damage.
Per ProFootballDoc, a knee dislocation this bad is not only rare, but “is virtually impossible to return from.”
We wish Zach Miller the best in a long and hard road to recovery and will keep you updated on this story as more details become available.A Catholic priest who stole $149,000 from the church to feed a poker machine addiction has been jailed for two years and three months.
Father John William Fitzmaurice, who worked as a priest in the Christchurch diocese for 34 years, had admitted eight charges of dishonestly using documents and obtaining money by deception.
He was sentenced by Judge John Macdonald in the Christchurch District Court after hundreds of dishonest transactions involving writing out cash cheques which were paid into his account, or withdrawals from automatic teller machines.
Defence counsel Jonathan Eaton told the judge: "He stands before you for sentencing truly ashamed and deeply remorseful for the harm he has caused."
Fitzmaurice was aware of the breach of trust towards the bishop, the church, parishioners, family, and friends.
Crown prosecutor Marcus Zintl said it had cost the church $31,000 in investigation fees to uncover Fitzmaurice's offending. Reparation of $149,000 was sought but the church was realistic in acknowledging Fitzmaurice's inability to pay.
Zintl said the offending involved 735 separate acts of dishonesty. It was highly calculated and premeditated offending.
"The offender was a man of faith, but the very faith that was placed in him by the Catholic church and the community, he has betrayed."
Eaton said a report described the offending as "a spiralling vocational and emotional meltdown over several years".
Fitzmaurice had become increasingly isolated and lonely. His visits to the poker machines had escalated into a pathological addiction. His relationship with another problem gambler led to small scale dishonest acts to fuel his behaviours.
He had faced public humiliation because of announcements in the church and in the media, said Eaton.
He had no assets at all and had only earned a modest income from the church.
"What his future holds in terms of his relationship with the church remains to be seen."
He could not continue to work in Christchurch, but an "olive branch" had been extended by the Bishop of Auckland, and he might be able to continue his work there.
Judge Macdonald said he would make no reparation order because of Fitzmaurice's inability to pay, but if he became able to pay later, the judge said he expected he would do so.
The betrayal of trust had caused a scandal for his fellow priests and members of the Catholic community. He noted there was continuing support and compassion for Fitzmaurice, voiced in references and letters or support.
"I understand how ashamed you must be," said the judge. It was surprising that he had not sought help earlier.
Eaton said after the sentencing that he would be applying for Fitzmaurice's release on bail pending the hearing of an appeal.
Later in the afternoon, Judge Macdonald refused to grant bail for the appeal which is likely to be heard in April.Look for this advertisement on TV, your local newspaper and online in the not too distant future: "For sale at auction: 535 Seats in the U.S. Congress - 100 in Upper House and 435 in Lower Chamber. Seats to be occupied by person of buyer's choice after bipartisan elective process with no restrictions on qualifications of candidates other than those set out by the major bidders.
"Reserve: $1 million per seat.
"Bidder must certify personal net worth of $200 million or more. Average citizens need not apply.
"Seat carries desk on main floor of domed building now referred to frequently as the 'Cave of the Winds' and individual offices in nearby structures. Also included with each seat is pro-rated share of sprawling government complex with extensive grounds and adjacent structures, restaurants, cafeterias, snack bars, meeting rooms, fleet of vehicles, separate library, priceless art and statues, parking facilities and fountains. Extremely valuable hideaways in main building where nefarious schemes are |
TAMO.NS) may need to recruit workers from outside Britain due to a lack of engineers in the country.
No one at JLR was immediately available to comment.A WAREHOUSE worker who etched a swastika and "WELCOME TO HELL" into the ice on a freezer room door will receive a $4800 pay-out after Fair Work Australia upheld a decision that he was unfairly dismissed.
Stephen O'Loughlin had been sacked by labour hire company APS Group (Placements) after the etchings were seen by other employees and captured by CCTV in February 2010. Mr O'Loughlin was placed, through APS, at a Sydney warehouse of VersaCold and at first denied making the etchings. Later he defended them as a jovial way to criticise the very harsh working conditions in the warehouse.
"Our fingers froze up. Our toes used to froze up. I thought it was quite a dangerous environment to work in. It was just an indication to me and another workmate that this was working in hell."
But APS, who had senior staff members who were Jewish, dismissed him for serious misconduct for "discrimination on the grounds of racial vilification". Last September the tribunal ruled the sacking was "harsh and unreasonable" and that while the worker, either through ignorance or stupidity, had "failed to appreciate" the offence the swastika creates it ruled he had not engaged in racial vilification.
The tribunal, however, did not give Mr O'Loughlin his job back saying his "abrasive and insensitive" conduct had "created impediment to the re-establishment of any employment relationship".
During the initial Fair Work case Mr O'Loughlin's views were summarised by the tribunal as "get over it, the war finished 70 years ago."
The employer appealed that decision but the full bench of Fair Work Australia, earlier this month, refused to grant an appeal. The majority decision noted the inconsistent approach taken by the employer on offensive images and etchings.
Another employee had drawn lewd sexual images and according to unchallenged evidence by Mr O'Loughlin this was "just laughed about" by management. "In circumstances where etchings of that sort had not attracted a disciplinary response, the etching made by the employee involved misconduct that ought be viewed as relatively minor," the majority decision said.Richmond's city council has decided the current approach to dealing with English on commercial signs will be formalized into a written policy.
After months of debate, councillors unanimously voted to adopt a policy that encourages signs to be at least 50 per cent English.
It means the city will continue to have no bylaws regulating language on signs.
The city says a bylaw is not necessary, because "the educational approach to encouraging the use of 50 percent English on signs regulated by the City of Richmond has been 100 percent effective for all business signs," according to a staff report.
"I truly think we're on the right track as far as this policy goes," said Coun. Derek Dang, voicing his support for the motion before it passed.
"It's probably been talked about more than we want to."
Encouragement vs. requirement
A bylaw regulating language on signs was rejected in 2013 and 2015, but in June, council voted 5-4 on drafting a new bylaw, which would have enforced a 50-per-cent English rule.
It would have also included the city hiring a full-time sign inspector.
Richmond legal council expressed concern it could violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by infringing on freedom of expression, and council eventually decided not to vote on it, opting instead for more study.
Two of the councillors who voted in favour of a bylaw supported the new encouragement motion, because it strikes the right balance.
"Fifty-fifty is straightforward, and we can go from there, and, hopefully, it's a compromise, and I think it continues to help us have a harmonious community," said Bill McNulty, who introduced the bylaw amendment.
"We really do try and use the education and communication tool. We've been so successful with the carrot, we don't need the stick," said Carol Day.
She said while she would have preferred a bylaw, she trusts staff to effectively work with the policy as outlined.
"If we don't get this right, we're going to really do our citizens a disservice... we have to take this seriously, and we have to create an inclusive society, and this is one way we could do that."
Mayor hopes it settles the issue
Specifically at issue in Richmond have been signs in Chinese, which have increased in numbers over the years in the city. According to the 2016 census, 44.8 per cent of residents indicated a Chinese language as their mother tongue, compared to 33.1 per cent who listed English.
But Richmond Mayor Malcolm Brodie said the issue has been percolating in the city for around 25 years.
"We have a very large non-English speaking population. That can easily get translated into signage. If you see your clientele is mostly Chinese, maybe you just need a Chinese sign. I think that's a mistake from a marketing and business point of view, but I think it's a mistake from a cultural point of view as well," he said.
Brodie said Richmond can have only so much effect on signs — mentioning that people's complaints stem from real estate postings, which aren't regulated by the city — but he's hopeful the city has come up with a lasting policy that's effective.
"I think we've dealt with the issue. I think we've had a very fulsome debate. I would hope this will enable us to go to the next step, which is we're comfortable with our diversity, but it's not a them and us, it's an us situation, and we can work through that."Cable Industry Finally Admits That Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Congestion
from the of-course-not dept
Michael Powell told a Minority Media and Telecommunications Association audience that cable's interest in usage-based pricing was not principally about network congestion, but instead about pricing fairness...Asked by MMTC president David Honig to weigh in on data caps, Powell said that while a lot of people had tried to label the cable industry's interest in the issue as about congestion management. "That's wrong," he said. "Our principal purpose is how to fairly monetize a high fixed cost."
Except the argument that usaged pricing is about fairness has been just as repeatedly debunked. If usage caps were about "fairness," carriers would offer the nation's grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like "fairness" to you?
For years, the key rationale given by broadband providers for implementing data caps was that it was the only way they could deal with "congestion." Of course, for years, independent researchers showed that this was bogus, and there was no data crunch coming. If you actually caught afrom a broadband provider, rather than a business person or lobbyist, they'd quietly admit that there was no congestion problem, and that basic upgrades and network maintenance could easily deal with the growth in usage. But, of course, that took away the broadband providers' chief reason for crying about how they "need" data caps. The reality, of course, is that data caps are all about increasing revenue for broadband providers -- in a market that is already quite profitable. But if they can hide behind the claims that they need to do this to deal with congestion, they can justify it to regulators and (they hope) the public.Of course, enough people have been calling this explanation out as completely bogus that it appears that even the broadband companies' own lobbyists may finally be dropping this line of reasoning. Former FCC boss Michael Powell, who is now the cable industry's chief lobbyist (president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association -- NCTA), has finally admitted caps aren't about congestion Of course, as Broadband Reports notes, Powell is jumping from one myth (congestion) to another (fairness) that is just as ridiculous. If it was true, we'd see at least some prices going down. But we don't.Data caps are about one thing only: increasing profits for the broadband providers, who already have massive control over the market with limited competition. It's nice to see them give up on one myth (even if we still see pundits repeating it without criticism), but it would be nice if we could get past the others as well.
Filed Under: congestion, data caps, michael powell
Companies: nctaAs good beer continues to grow, it’s only natural that bars want to find an edge over their competitors. One of the most common ways is to simply have more choice, with 50+ tap lists and 100+ bottle menus being increasingly common. Personally I can’t think of anything worse for a bar owner or the staff; mostly due to stock management, staff training, and refrigeration costs (and on-costs). Additionally I’ve never really felt at ease when confronted with a long list of beers to choose from. It makes me uncomfortable and I’ve never been able to explain why. Until I learned the concept of “choice overload”. Not a new concept but one that I found very interesting.
There is a fascinating TEDtalk by Sheena Iyenga where she uses a famous study she conducted, known as the “jam study” to illustrate the concept that more choice is a bad thing for both business and customers.
Here is the full talk, but if you don’t want to watch it (which I recommend you do because it is very good), I’ve pulled out the core concepts and how I believe they relate to beer menus below.
Basically by using free jam tasters at a supermarket, Sheena – along with fellow researcher Mark Lepper – looked at the difference in sales when they offered six tasters vs offering 24 tasters. They found that people were six times more likely to purchase a product when there were only six choices on offer.
The next study she discusses is about retirement plans. From over a decade of research they found when too many choices were offered there was a reduction in engagement, decision quality, and satisfaction.
Take a moment to consider that.
Potential customers, with less choice, were six times more likely to purchase a product and when they did they were more engaged and more satisfied with their decision.
Recently further analysis has been done which assess 99 different studies on this topic and puts parameters around when choice overload is likely to occur.
Choice overload is more likely to happen when (to paraphrase):
There is a difficult task in relation to: Accountability, the attributes of each option, and time constraints
There are value based relationships among the alternatives including the presence of a dominant option.
There is uncertainty in regards to how the customer can evaluate benefits and articulate their end goal.
How easy the customer wants the decision to be.
The conclusion was that the combination of these four factors have a direct correlation to increased choice overload.
Now consider these from the hypothetical perspective of a beer drinker standing at a bar, faced with a sea of taps and bottles. There is:
A long list of potential choices with an incredible range of attributes in a place where there is a high likelihood of time pressure (staff workload, other waiting drinkers).
A choice that has a range of value, often far wider than what they would normally see in a bar. Chances are it will have a dominant option in the form of a familiar “mainstream” or well-known smaller brand (think Carlton Draught, James Squire or Stone and Wood).
A customer who may not really know what their end goal is other than to find a beer they enjoy. Their personal vocabulary around beer (hoppy/bitter/sour/funky etc) may not be present to fully articulate or understand how to achieve their end goal.
The presence of the above three factors – and their varying degrees – will amplify how easy their final decision is.
Even without all of the psychological factors from a customer’s perspective; there are the additional, and obvious issues of staff knowledge, stock rotation, increased overheads for both purchasing and refrigeration, and cleanliness of your beer lines.
Should you own or be looking to open a bar, and all of this concerns you, here is some (contextualised) advice from the talk above:
Cut:
A long beer list also doesn’t give your staff the best chance of being able to assist with the complicated choice. Can everyone behind a bar explain the differences between the eight lagers, six golden ales, and 10 IPAs? How about between two lagers, or two IPAs? What’s easier on your staff, and how can they make it easier for your customers?
Concretise:
This has two sides for a bar. The first is to offer easier bar tab options (think online tab services such as Clipp, Dash and Aston Club). Removing physical money from the equation means people are more likely to spend more.
The second is to offer them an easy way to put the options into context. While a customer may not know what an American Brown Ale really is, a taste will give them a far greater understanding of what it is to them. Tasters and tasting paddles are an excellent way to concretise potential decisions.
Categorise:
Think about the way you are categorising your beers. Does “sour” mean anything to a drinker who has never tried one before? Does everyone know what an IPA is? The smaller your list is, the easier it is to put it into more refined categories but also you need to think about the categories.
Rather than approaching them from a beer style perspective, maybe consider a different way. One example I’ve seen that I really like is the Garage Project “temperature” system where their easier drinking beers are served cooler and the more flavourful beers warmer. Their menu presents that as the choice which makes absolute sense because more people understand temperature than beer styles.
Condition for Complexity:
Again, tasting paddles give people a quick glimpse at what is ahead of them for a low outlay. Additionally don’t turn your customers away from beers but rather get them excited for the task ahead of them.
The example in the TEDtalk shows that giving smaller choices and expanding as you go is the best approach to engaging consumers in their decision.
Although don’t read that as “just ask them what they like and give them the next best thing when they say lager” but think about how to really get them excited and how to get them salivating over your list rather than cowering to the safety of the familiar. Again, this comes back to staff knowledge of the product.
While I can see the giddy appeal in a new bar launching with a longer beer list than the one down the road, no part of it actually makes sense. Not from a consumer angle, a staff angle, nor a financial angle.
Not thinking seriously about your beer list may mean you are giving your customers anxiety, they are disengaged, and they are going to spend less. They are also less likely to explore the whole list while retreating to safety; or if they do they are likelier to get a stale beer, be less satisfied with their decision and disengage from not just from your bar but potentially from “craft” beer as a whole.
Not only are long lists bad for your business, they are also bad for the entire industry.Not for the West, obviously
Phantasy Star Online 2 is coming to PlayStation 4 in Japan next year, Sega announced today.
The free-to-play online role-playing game initially launched on PC in 2012 and came to PlayStation Vita the following year. Last spring, PSO2 spread to Southeast Asia (Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines), courtesy of Bangkok-based MMO publisher Asiasoft.
While the prospect of a western localization is still up in the air, the SEA release features English-language support. However, Asiasoft has implemented an IP block to prevent prospective players living outside the region from accessing the game's servers. These restrictions were briefly lifted recently over connectivity issues, but were put back in place after the matter was resolved.
Make sure to let Sega know if you want to see Phantasy Star release outside of Asia. The company seems to be a tad more receptive to fans these days, and wants to rebuild trust in its brand.
PlayStation 4版「ファンタシースターオンライン2」が2016年内にサービスイン。 [4Gamer]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upLadies and Gentlemen:—Presumably the honor which you have done me in inviting me to address you to-day upon The Relation of the State to the Individual is due principally to the fact that circumstances have combined to make me somewhat conspicuous as an exponent of the theory of Modern Anarchism,—a theory which is coming to be more and more regarded as one of the few that are tenable as a basis of political and social life. In its name, then, I shall speak to you in discussing this question, which either underlies or closely touches almost every practical problem that confronts this generation. The future of the tariff, of taxation, of finance, of property, of woman, of marriage, of the family, of the suffrage, of education, of invention, of literature, of science, of the arts, of personal habits, of private character, of ethics, of religion, will be determined by the conclusion at which mankind shall arrive as to whether and how far the individual owes allegiance to the State.(2 ¶ 1)
Anarchism, in dealing with this subject, has found it necessary, first of all, to define its terms. Popular conceptions of the terminology of politics are incompatible with the rigorous exactness required in scientific investigation. To be sure, a departure from the popular use of language is accompanied by the risk of misconception by the multitude, who persistently ignore the new definitions; but, on the other hand, conformity thereto is attended by the still more deplorable alternative of confusion in the eyes of the competent, who would be justified in attributing ineactness of thought where there is inexactness of expression. Take the term State, for instance, with which we are especially concerned to-day. It is a word that is on every lip. But how many of those who use it have any idea of what they mean by it? And of the few who have, how various are their conceptions! We designate by the term State institutions that embody absolutism in its extreme form and institutions that temper it with more or less liberality. We apply the word alike to institutions that do nothing but aggress and to institutions that, besides aggressing, to some extent protect and defend. But which is the State’s essential function, aggression or defence, few seem to know or care. Some champions of the State evidently consider aggression its principle, although they disguise it alike from themselves and from the people under the term administration, which they wish to extend in every possible direction. Others, on the contrary, consider defence its principle, and wish to limit it accordingly to the performance of police duties. Still others seem to think that it exists for both aggression and defence, combined in varying proportions according to the momentary interests, or maybe only whims, of those happening to control it. Brought face to face with these diverse views, the Anarchists, whose mission in the world is the abolition of aggression and all the evils that result therefrom, perceived, that to be understood, they must attach some definite and avowed significance to the terms which they are obliged to employ, and especially to the words State and government. Seeking, then, the elements common to all the institutions to which the name State has been applied, they have found them two in number: first, aggression; second, the assumption of sole authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries. That this second element is common to all States, I think, will not be denied,—at least, I am not aware that any State has ever tolerated a rival State within its borders; and it seems plain that any State which should do so would thereby cease to be a State and to be considered as such by any. The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction. That the first element, aggression, has been and is common to all States will probably be less generally admitted. Nevertheless, I shall not attempt to re-enforce here the conclusion of Spencer, which is gaining wider acceptance daily,—that the State had its origin in aggression, and has continued as an aggressive institution from its birth. Defence was an afterthought, prompted by necessity; and its introduction as a State function, though effected doubtless with a view to the strengthening of the State, was really and in principle the initiation of the State’s destruction. Its growth in importance is but an evidence of the tendency of progress toward the abolition of the State. Taking this view of the matter, the Anarchists contend that defence is not an essential of the State, but that aggression is. Now what is aggression? Aggression is simply another name for government. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy. On the other hand, he who resists another’s attempt to control is not an aggressor, an invader, a governor, but simply a defender, a protector; and the nature of such resistance is not changed whether it be offered by one man to another man, as when one repels a criminal’s onslaught, or by one man to all other men, as when one declines to obey an oppressive law, or by all other men to one man, as when a subject people rises against a despot, or as when the members of a community voluntarily unite to restrain a criminal. This distinction between invasion and resistance, between government and defence, is vital. Without it there can be no valid philosophy of politics. Upon this distinction and the other considerations just outlined, the Anarchists frame the desired definitions. This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will. And this is definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area. As to the meaning of the remaining term in the subject under discussion, the word individual, I think there is little difficulty. Putting aside the subtleties in which certain metaphysicians have indulged, one may use this word without danger of being misunderstood. Whether the definitions thus arrived at prove generally acceptable or not is a matter of minor consequence. I submit that they are reached scientifically, and serve the purpose of clear conveyance of thought. The Anarchists, having by their adoption taken due care to be explicit, are entitled to have their ideas judged in the light of these definitions.(2 ¶ 2)
Now comes the question proper: What relations should exist between the State and the individual? The general method of determining these is to apply some theory of ethics involving a basis of moral obligation. In this method the Anarchists have no confidence. The idea of moral obligation, of inherent rights and duties, they totally discard. They look upon all obligations, not as moral, but as social, and even then not really as obligations except as these have been consciously and voluntarily assumed. If a man makes an agreement with men, the latter may combine to hold him to his agreement; but, in the absence of such agreements, no man, so far as the Anarchists are aware, has made any agreement with God or with any other power of any order whatsoever. The Anarchists are not only utilitarians, but egoists in the farthest and fullest sense. So far as inherent right is concerned, might is its only measure. Any man, be his name Bill Sykes or Alexander Romanoff, and any set of men, whether the Chinese highbinders or the Congress of the United States, have the right, if they have the power, to kill or coerce other men and to make the entire world subservient to their ends. Society’s right to enslave the individual and the individual’s right to enslave society are unequal only because their powers are unequal. This position being subversive of all systems of religion and morality, of course I cannot expect to win immediate assent thereto from the audience which I am addressing to-day; nor does the time at my disposal allow me to sustain it by an elaborate, or even a summary, examination of the foundation of ethics. Those who desire a greater familiarity with this particular phase of the subject should read a profound German work, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, written years ago by a comparatively unknown author, Dr. Caspar Schmidt, whose nom de plume was Max Stirner. Read only by a few scholars, this book is buried in obscurity, but is destined to a resurrection that perhaps will mark an epoch.(2 ¶ 3)
If this, then, were a question of right, it would be, according to the Anarchists, purely a question of strength. But, fortunately, it is not a question of right: it is a question of expediency, of knowledge, of science,—the science of living together, the science of society. The history of humanity has been largely one long and gradual discovery of the fact that the individual is the gainer by society exactly in proportion as society is free, and of the law that the condition of a permanent and harmonious society is the greatest amount of individual liberty compatible with equality of liberty. The average man of each new generation has said to himself more clearly and consciously than his predecessor: My neighbor is not my enemy, but my friend, and I am his, if we would but mutually recognize the fact. We help each other to a better, fuller, happier living; and this service might be greatly increased if we would cease to restrict, hamper, and oppress each other. Why can we not agree to let each live his own life, neither of us transgressing the limit that separates our individualities? It is by this reasoning that mankind is approaching the real social contract, which is not, as Rousseau thought, the origin of society, but rather the outcome of a long social experience, the fruit of its follies and disasters. It is obvious that this contract, this social law, developed to its perfection, excludes all aggression, all violation of equality of liberty, all invasion of every kind. Considering this contract in connection with the Anarchistic definition of the State as the embodiment of the principle of invasion, we see that the State is antagonistic to society; and, society being essential to individual life and development, the conclusion leaps to the eyes that the relation of the State to the individual and of the individual to the State must be one of hostility, enduring till the State shall perish.(2 ¶ 4)
But, it will be asked of the Anarchists at this point in the argument, what shall be done with those individuals who undoubtedly will persist in violating the social law by invading their neighbors? The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary. But that is what we have now, is the rejoinder. You really want, then, only a change of name? Not so fast, please. Can it be soberly pretended for a moment that the State, even as it exists here in America, is purely a defensive institution? Surely not, save by those who see of the State only its most palpable manifestation,—the policeman on the street-corner. And one would not have to watch him very closely to see the error of this claim. Why, the very first act of the State, the compulsory assessment and collection of taxes, is itself an aggression, a violation of equal liberty, and, as such, vitiates every subsequent act, even those acts which would be purely defensive if paid for out of a treasury filled by voluntary contributions. How is it possible to sanction, under the law of equal liberty, the confiscation of a man’s earnings to pay for protection which he has not sought and does not desire? And, if this is an outrage, what name shall we give to such confiscation when the victim is given, instead of bread, a stone, instead of protection, oppression? To force a man to pay for the violation of his own liberty is indeed an addition of insult to injury. But that is exactly what the State is doing. Read the Congressional Record ; follow the proceedings of the State legislatures; examine our statute-books; test each act separately by the law of equal liberty,—you will find that a good nine-tenths of existing legislation serves, not to enforce that fundamental social law, but either to prescribe the individual’s personal habits, or, worse still, to create and sustain commercial, industrial, financial, and proprietary monopolies which deprive labor of a large part of the reward that it would receive in a perfectly free market. To be governed, says Proudhon, is to be watched, inspected, spied, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title nor knowledge nor virtue. To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, indorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected. To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed, robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, mitrailleused, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. And I am sure I do not need to point out to you the existing laws that correspond to and justify nearly every count in Proudhon’s long indictment. How thoughtless, then, to assert that the existing political order is of a purely defensive character instead of the aggressive State which the Anarchists aim to abolish!(2 ¶ 5)
This leads to another consideration that bears powerfully upon the problem of the invasive individual, who is such a bugbear to the opponents of Anarchism. Is it not such treatment as has just been described that is largely responsible for his existence? I have heard or read somewhere of an inscription written for a certain charitable institution:(2 ¶ 6)
This hospital a pious person built,
But first he made the poor wherewith to fill’t.
(2 ¶ 7)
And so, it seems to me, it is with our prisons. They are filled with criminals which our virtuous State has made what they are by its iniquitous laws, its grinding monopolies, and the horrible social conditions that result from them. We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them. Is it too much to expect that the new social conditions which must follow the abolition of all interference with the production and distribution of wealth will in the end so change the habits and propensities of men that our jails and prisons, our policemen and our soldiers,—in a word, our whole machinery and outfit of defence,—will be superfluous? That, at least, is the Anarchists’ belief. It sounds Utopian, but it really rests on severely economic grounds. to-day, however, time is lacking to explain the Anarchistic view of the dependence of usury, and therefore of poverty, upon monopolistic privilege, especially the banking privilege, and to show how an intelligent minority, educated in the principle of Anarchism and determined to exercise that right to ignore the State upon which Spencer, in his Social Statics, so ably and admirably insists, might, by setting at defiance the National and State banking prohibitions, and establishing a Mutual Bank in competition with the existing monopolies, take the first and most important step in the abolition of usury and of the State. Simple as such a step would seem, from it all the rest would follow.(2 ¶ 8)With the year ending soon, a lot of eyes in the EU Smash scene were locked on DAT Team and their next event, DAT BlastZone 24. Places for this tournament sold out fast with quite a variety of players, from local players in London to players from North England, France, Netherlands and beyond. They all came to show their skill and to make sure that they end the year with a tournament to remember.
Announcement of DBZ 25: Silver Anniversary
To celebrate DAT BlastZone 25th event, they increased the cap from 96 to 128 in singles. Not only that, the winner of the tournament will be taken to an American tournament in March, with full housing and transport covered, on top of all the regular tournament winnings. This is the tournament to win and signups are open so I advise anyone to sign-up as soon as possible before all the spaces get taken.
https://smash.gg/tournament/dat-blastzone-25-the-silver-anniversary/
Singles
In Singles pools, no one was safe, no matter what skill level you were. This was shown as we had players LTBrad, DX17 and BWC not making it through. Smash Bros. veteran J.Miller also suffered a loss from Streakz, 2-1. There were more surprises in pools with SmashBound coming 1st in his pool over Le Goat and C4rrot coming 2nd in his pool over DX17.
Amateur ladder
Whoever didn’t get into the main bracket had a chance in the amateur ladder. As a change from the normal bracket that we had prior, you instead get paired up with a player on the ladder, then face them, then report the scores and wait for another player if you wish to, you could do that as many times as you would like and winner was the person that had the least amount of losses and in this occasion, there was a prize.
Crispy was the winner of this ladder and he got a Sonic poster, representing the pride of the UK which he can happily hang on his wall.
Singles Bracket
In Singles bracket, there were some more upsets. Streakz beat Jmiller again, 3-2, to get into Top 8 of singles. Ogey’s Captain Falcon beat the UK’s #2 AfroSmash to do the same, and the Northern prodigy, Scr7, eliminating Matsu and Plastic Poptart back to back to get into Top 8.
Top 8
Top 8 had quite the talent, with DKHO, Ixis, Glutonny and Griffith in winners and Kibzu, Ogey, Streakz and Scr7 in Losers. Notably, out of the UK players, the majority was formed by the country’s younger talent, with three out of five being under 18.
Streakz had one of his best results in this tournament finishing in 5th place, beating Ogey and then losing to DKHO. This has been a great year for Streakz, with multiple top placings in DBZ and has beaten many high ranking players. 2018 is looking very bright for him.
DKHO keeps showing why he could be a contender for the top player in the UK this year, with a 3rd place finish, losing only to Glutonny. With this year’s results, there’s no doubt that he’s going to be in the Top 3 of best players in the UK.
The current #1 player in the UK, Ixis, had a smashing end to the year by winning DAT BlastZone 24.
Not only did he beat the arguably second best player in Europe, Glutonny, he made the best comeback of the month, hitting Griffith with a rage up throw>spring>u-air.
https://clips.twitch.tv/embed?clip=FunWittyPeppermintDxAbomb&autoplay=false&tt_medium=clips_embed
Also, by winning DAT BlastZone 24, he has got free entry into Schism 2 so look out for him there.
https://smash.gg/tournament/schism-2
Doubles
Doubles was another exciting event in DBZ with people working with friends and rivals to win using teamwork and craftiness to help each other win. DBZ 24 got a modest 24 entrants but it didn’t stop it from being full of surprises.
Finishing in the Bronze position were J.Miller and AfroSmash, both players have come from a long hiatus and both of them use abstract characters: AfroSmash using the bounty hunter, Samus and J.Miller using the eternal understudy, Luigi. With this team, they managed to get to top 3.
2nd went to Kibzu and DKHO. These players have been going strong and it has been a strong year for them both. With them using Sheik and Cloud, they came 2nd, making them the best performing UK doubles team.
Ogey and Glutonny took victory in Doubles. Both from France, they use characters that are quite unique. Ogey uses the glass cannon, Captain Falcon, while Glutonny uses the character with the game-changing waft, Wario. With their unique team, they managed to win the event, without dropping a set.
And that’s it from DBZ 24, and with DBZ 25 coming next month and with a bigger cap and with a bigger prize in store for the winner, who knows what will happen next time but it will most likely will be exciting, extraordinary and will help to start with the beginning of Smash 4 in the UK next year.
AdvertisementsSorry, Not Sorry: Penny Arcade and the Deeper Roots of Apology
When you issue a public apology, ideally, it’s because you’ve found yourself waist-deep in moral quicksand and wisely decided that stubbornly thrashing about in the name of abstract concepts like machismo - read, the worst reason for doing anything, ever - is less productive than admitting fault. More than that, though, an apology should be intended as a reassurance to others that you’re not going to keep bungling things in the same spectacular fashion. Without that critical element of self-analysis, you’re not apologizing; you’re just groveling for its own sake. You’re not really acknowledging or addressing the causative |
attractions will be added, although no details have leaked yet on those. The Jedi Training Academy will be relocating indoors to an existing building. An updated version of the Indiana Jones Adventure from Disneyland will supposedly be added.
from Disneyland will supposedly be added. Pixar Place will expand further, moving into the place where the Studio Backlot Tour used to exist, supposedly with three new attractions. (No word yet on what those will be.) Donnelly theorizes that construction could already be underway behind closed gates to allow a quicker opening, a practice Universal Studios has employed to great effect.
Also: No word on the time frame to complete this massive overhaul, but it will likely be done in phases or waves to keep rides open during the transition.
Based on Billy’s description, using my very meager photoshop skills, I have illustrated where the new Star Wars (red) and Pixar (yellow) lands would likely be situated on the Disney Hollywood Studios map.
I don’t know that Donnelly’s information is true, but bits and pieces seem to line up with so many rumors from trusted Disney theme park insiders that it seems likely. I’m excited to see a larger Star Wars presence and can’t wait until I can finally walk around a huge Star Wars land in a Disney theme park. I’ll be excited to hear what Disney has planned when they make announcements at D23. And hopefully those announcements also include details on more Star Wars at Disneyland park as well.
On the other side of the coin, I’m disappointed that the Indiana Jones stunt show will be going away as it is one of the best stunt shows ever created. Also, Muppetvision 3D holds a big place in my heart, and I was hoping for an update with more animatronic Muppets. I guess Muppets Most Wanted wasn’t a big enough hit to make that happen?
And while the idea of Disney Hollywood Studios (or MGM Studios as it was called in my childhood) never fully worked, I’m disappointed they are going to be abandoning the magic of moviemaking theme of the park and instead focus on the magic of movies.
And with that I leave you with a video of the Indiana Jones Stunt Spectacular:Photo
SOMETIMES you just want to get away from it all. And that doesn’t mean simply turning the phone off. For some second-home owners it means escaping everyday stress by going off-grid — living life more or less unplugged.
“The term ‘off-grid’ means away from the utilities — not being connected to an electricity company and such,” said Alan Bridgewater, author of “The Self-Sufficiency Specialist: The Essential Guide to Designing and Planning for Off-Grid Self-Reliance” (New Holland). “But it has also to do with a state of mind. While the term was originally used to describe a house in the developed world that by necessity or choice sourced its own energy, the term is also now more and more being used more to describe an independent way of life.”
Nick Rosen, editor of Off-grid.net, bought his retirement home this way. “I wish I could claim great ideological purity or trend-spotting brilliance, but I stumbled across the off-grid life because it was all I could afford,” he said in an e-mail message. “I bought a mountaintop shepherd’s hut in Majorca, home to Michael Douglas and Claudia Schiffer. I did not see why I should wait until I was 50 to afford my retirement home.” Mr. Rosen bought his getaway — a hut and five acres — for $10,000.
So how to do it yourself? “Location is everything,” Mr. Bridgewater said. Mr. Rosen agreed; he suggested a south- or southwest-facing structure away from a main road.
Advertisement Continue reading the main storyA powerful earthquake struck northeastern Japan on Tuesday morning, briefly disrupting nuclear fuel cooling functions at the Fukushima No. 2 power plant and generating tsunami of over 1 meter in the region that was devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster five years ago.
The 5:59 a.m. quake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.4 is believed to be an aftershock of the March 2011 mega-quake, the Meteorological Agency said.
It was the first quake with a magnitude of 7 or bigger to hit Japan since July 2014. The agency warned that there may be similar-scale quakes for around a week.
A tsunami measuring 1.4 meters high was observed at Sendai port in Miyagi Prefecture and a wave of about 1 meter reached the coast near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant that was crippled by the 2011 quake-tsunami disaster.
Authorities instructed residents in coastal areas to evacuate to higher ground and hundreds of schools canceled classes. Over 3,000 people fled to evacuation centers in Fukushima Prefecture.
“The sound of sirens brought back memories of the huge earthquake (in 2011),” said Tomomi Nagakubo, 48, who drove her car to an evacuation center in Ibaraki Prefecture with her 13-year-old son.
According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, a total of 17 people in Fukushima, Chiba, Tokyo and Miyagi prefectures were injured as a result of the quake. They included an 82-year-old woman in Chiba who fell down some stairs in her home and fractured her hip. In Fukushima, three people were injured, two of whom were elderly women who tripped and suffered broken bones.
The cooling system for the spent fuel pool in the No. 3 reactor building at the Fukushima No. 2 power plant stopped working but was restarted about 100 minutes later, according to operator Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc.
“I have been informed that it will not immediately lead to a radiation leak or an increase in the temperature of the fuel,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said in a news conference in Tokyo.
Equipment to measure dust for radioactive materials at the Fukushima No. 2 complex also stopped working, but Tepco said the glitch did not cause any serious problems.
No abnormalities were observed at other nuclear plants in northeastern Japan, according to Tepco and other power companies. Reactors at these nuclear plants have been offline.
Sixteen small boats were overturned off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, the Japan Coast Guard said, adding no one was believed to be onboard.
All tsunami warnings and advisories were lifted as of 12:50 p.m., the Meteorological Agency said.
The quake, which also shook the Tokyo area, measured lower 5 on the Japanese seismic intensity scale of 7 in Fukushima, Ibaraki and Tochigi prefectures, the agency said.
It was the first time since December 2012 that the agency issued a tsunami alert due to an aftershock from the 2011 quake.
Television footage showed ships moving out to sea from harbors as tsunami warnings wailed after alerts of waves of up to 3 meters were issued.
“We saw high waves but nothing that went over the tidal waves,” a man in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, told NTV.
Aerial footage showed tsunami flowing up rivers in some areas, as well as the overturned fishing boats in the port of Higashimatsuyashima, Miyagi Prefecture.
The focus of the quake was about 25 km under the seabed in the Pacific Ocean off Fukushima, the agency said.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a news conference in Buenos Aires that the government will assess the damage and keep the public informed.IslamiCity > Mosque > The Prophet Muhammad's Last Sermon Welcome to Mosque & Religious Center In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
The Prophet Muhammad's Last Sermon
This sermon was delivered on the Ninth Day of Dhul Hijjah 10 A.H.
in the 'Uranah valley of Mount Arafat' (in Mecca). After praising, and thanking Allah he said:
"O People, lend me an attentive ear, for I know not whether after this year, I shall ever be amongst you again. Therefore listen to what I am saying to you very carefully and TAKE THESE WORDS TO THOSE WHO COULD NOT BE PRESENT HERE TODAY.
O People, just as you regard this month, this day, this city as Sacred, so regard the life and property of every Muslim as a sacred trust. Return the goods entrusted to you to their rightful owners. Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you. Remember that you will indeed meet your LORD, and that HE will indeed reckon your deeds. ALLAH has forbidden you to take usury (interest), therefore all interest obligation shall henceforth be waived. Your capital, however, is yours to keep. You will neither inflict nor suffer any inequity. Allah has Judged that there shall be no interest and that all the interest due to Abbas ibn 'Abd'al Muttalib (Prophet's uncle) shall henceforth be waived...
Beware of Satan, for the safety of your religion. He has lost all hope that he will ever be able to lead you astray in big things, so beware of following him in small things.
O People, it is true that you have certain rights with regard to your women, but they also have rights over you. Remember that you have taken them as your wives only under Allah's trust and with His permission. If they abide by your right then to them belongs the right to be fed and clothed in kindness. Do treat your women well and be kind to them for they are your partners and committed helpers. And it is your right that they do not make friends with any one of whom you do not approve, as well as never to be unchaste.
O People, listen to me in earnest, worship ALLAH, say your five daily prayers (Salah), fast during the month of Ramadan, and give your wealth in Zakat. Perform Hajj if you can afford to.
All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action. Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood. Nothing shall be legitimate to a Muslim which belongs to a fellow Muslim unless it was given freely and willingly. Do not, therefore, do injustice to yourselves.
Remember, one day you will appear before ALLAH and answer your deeds. So beware, do not stray from the path of righteousness after I am gone.
O People, NO PROPHET OR APOSTLE WILL COME AFTER ME AND NO NEW FAITH WILL BE BORN. Reason well, therefore, O People, and understand words which I convey to you. I leave behind me two things, the QURAN and my example, the SUNNAH and if you follow these you will never go astray.
All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and may the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly. Be my witness, O ALLAH, that I have conveyed your message to your people". Credits: Iqra Islamic Publications IslamiCity.com - Mosque iRecommend Inside Mosque Scripture
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HTML TEXT Manage SubscriptionsThis article is about the consumer operating system released in 1992. For the version of Windows NT released in 1993, see Windows NT 3.1
Windows 3.1x is a series of 16-bit operating environments produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers. The series began with Windows 3.1, which was first sold during April 1992 as a successor to Windows 3.0. Subsequent versions were released between 1992 and 1994 until the series was superseded by Windows 95. During its lifespan, Windows 3.1 introduced several enhancements to the still MS-DOS-based platform, including improved system stability, expanded support for multimedia, TrueType fonts, and workgroup networking.
Windows 3.1 was originally released on April 6, 1992; official support for Windows 3.1 ended on December 31, 2001, and OEM licensing for Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on embedded systems continued to be available until November 1, 2008.[2]
Editions [ edit ]
Windows 3.1 [ edit ]
Default folders with some extra programs.
Windows 3.1, released on April 6, 1992, introduced a TrueType font system (and a set of highly legible fonts), which effectively made Windows a viable desktop publishing platform for the first time. Similar functionality was available for Windows 3.0 through Adobe Type Manager (ATM) font system from Adobe.
Windows 3.1 was designed to have backward compatibility with older Windows platforms. As with Windows 3.0, version 3.1 had File Manager and Program Manager, but unlike all previous versions, Windows 3.1 cannot run in real mode. It included Minesweeper as a replacement for Reversi (though Reversi was still included in some copies).
Improvements over Windows 3.0 [ edit ]
Windows 3.1, showing some of the personalization options available
Windows 3.1 dropped real mode support and required a minimum of a 286 PC with 1 MB of RAM to run. The effect of this was to increase system stability over the crash-prone Windows 3.0. Some older features were removed, like CGA graphics support (although Windows 3.0's CGA driver still worked on 3.1) and compatibility with real-mode Windows 2.x applications.
Truetype font support was added, providing scalable fonts to Windows applications, without having to resort to using a third-party font technology such as Adobe Type Manager. Windows 3.1 included the following fonts: Arial, Courier New, and Times New Roman, in regular, bold, italic, and bold-italic versions, as well as Symbol (a collection of scalable symbols). Truetype fonts could be scaled to any size and rotated, depending on the calling application.[3]
In 386 Enhanced Mode, windowed DOS applications gained the ability for users to manipulate menus and other objects in the program using the Windows mouse pointer, provided that a DOS application supported mice. A few DOS applications, such as late releases of Microsoft Word, could access Windows Clipboard. Windows' own drivers couldn't work directly with DOS applications; hardware such as mice required a DOS driver to be loaded before starting Windows.
Icons could be dragged and dropped for the first time, in addition to having a more detailed appearance. A file could be dragged onto the Print Manager icon and the file would be printed by the current printer, assuming it was associated with an application capable of printing, such as a word processor. Alternatively, the file could be dragged out of File Manager and dropped onto an application icon or window for processing.[4]
While Windows 3.0 was limited to 16 MB maximum memory, Windows 3.1 can access a theoretical 4 GB in 386 Enhanced Mode. (The actual practical ceiling is 256 MB.[5]) However, no single process can use more than 16 MB. File Manager was significantly improved over Windows 3.0. Multimedia support was enhanced over what was available in Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions and available to all Windows 3.1 users.
Windows 3.1 was available via 720 KB, 1.2 MB, and 1.44 MB floppy distributions. It was also the first version of Windows to be distributed on CD-ROM — although this was more common for Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which typically came with MS-DOS 6.22 on one CD. Installed size on the hard disk was between 10 MB and 15 MB.
32-bit disk access (386 Enhanced Mode only) brought improved performance by using a 32-bit protected mode driver instead of the 16-bit BIOS functions (which necessitate Windows temporarily dropping out of protected mode).
Windows 3.1's calendar uses the.cal filename extension.[6]
Windows 3.1 also introduced the Windows Registry, a centralized database that can store configuration information and settings for various operating systems components and applications.
Windows 3.1 was the first version that could also launch Windows programs via Command.com.
Windows 3.1 for Central and Eastern Europe [ edit ]
A special version named Windows 3.1 for Central and Eastern Europe was released that allowed use of Cyrillic and had fonts with diacritical marks characteristic of Central and Eastern European languages. Microsoft introduced its own code page (Windows-1250) and supported its use in violation of many countries' ISO standards (e.g., the official Polish codepage is ISO-8859-2, which was ignored by Microsoft but is supported by contemporary Internet Explorer versions). Similarly, Microsoft also released Windows 3.1J with support for Japanese, which shipped 1.46 million copies in its first year on the market (1993) in Japan.[7]
Modular Windows [ edit ]
Modular Windows is a special version of Windows 3.1, designed to run on Tandy Video Information System.
Windows 3.11 [ edit ]
Windows 3.11 was released on November 8, 1993. It did not add many feature improvements over Windows 3.1; it primarily contained bug fixes, but was considered a significant improvement because of those fixes, contributing to the operating system's popularity. Microsoft replaced all retail versions of Windows 3.1 with Windows 3.11 and provided a free upgrade to anyone who currently owned Windows 3.1.[8]
Windows 3.2 [ edit ]
On November 22, 1993, Microsoft released a Simplified Chinese version of Windows for the Chinese market. A year later, an update was released, which identified itself as Windows 3.2. Thus, Windows 3.2 is an updated version of the Chinese version of Windows 3.1.[9] The update was limited to this language version, as it only fixed issues related to the complex input system for the Chinese language.[9]
Windows 3.2 was generally sold by computer manufacturers with a ten-disk version of MS-DOS that also had Simplified Chinese characters in basic output and some translated utilities.
Windows for Workgroups [ edit ]
Network capabilities of Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Windows for Workgroups is an extension that allowed users to share their resources and to request those of others without a centralized authentication server. It used SMB protocol over NetBIOS.
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 [ edit ]
Windows for Workgroups 3.1 (originally codenamed Winball and later Sparta), released in October 1992,[10] is an extended version of Windows 3.1 that features native networking support. It comes with SMB file sharing support via NetBIOS-based NBF and/or IPX network transport protocols and introduces the Hearts card game and VSHARE.386, a VxD version of SHARE.EXE (a terminate-and-stay-resident program).
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 [ edit ]
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (originally codenamed Snowball) was released on August 11, 1993,[11] and shipped in November 1993.[12] It supported 32-bit file access, full 32-bit network redirectors, and VCACHE.386 file cache, shared between them. WFW 3.11 dropped standard mode support and requires a 386 machine to run.
A Winsock package was required to support TCP/IP networking in Windows 3.x. Usually third-party packages were used, but in August 1994, Microsoft released an add-on package (codenamed Wolverine) that provided TCP/IP support in Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Wolverine was a 32-bit stack (accessible from 16-bit Windows applications via WinSock Thunk), which gave it superior performance to most of the third-party TCP/IP Windows stacks available. However, it was only compatible with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and lacked support for dial-up. Wolverine stack was an early version of the TCP/IP stack that would later ship with Windows 95, and provided an early testbed for the 16-to-32-bit compatibility layer that was crucial to Windows 95's success.
Following the release of MS-DOS 6.22 in 1994, WFW 3.11 largely replaced Windows 3.1 for OEM installations on new PCs due to its improved capabilities and greater stability.
Video for Windows [ edit ]
Video for Windows was first introduced in November 1992 as a reaction to Apple Computer's QuickTime technology which added digital video to Macintosh. Costing around $200,[13] the software included editing and encoding programs for use with video input boards. A runtime version for viewing videos only was also made available. Originally released as a free add-on to Windows 3.1 and Windows 3.11, it then became an integral component of Windows 95 and later. Like QuickTime there were three components in Video for Windows. The technology introduced a file format designed to store digital video, Audio Video Interleave (AVI). The technology provided an application programming interface that allowed Windows software developers to add the ability to play or manipulate digital video to their own applications. Lastly, it included a suite of software for playing and manipulating digital video.
Windows for Pen Computing [ edit ]
Windows for Pen Computing was a series of Microsoft-produced add-ons for Microsoft Windows versions in the mid-1990s with additional tools for tablet PCs. Windows for Pen Computing (also known as Pen Windows and W4PC) was developed as Microsoft's pen computing response to PenPoint OS by GO Corporation.[14] Windows for Pen Computing was rendered obsolete by Tablet PC support for Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2002.
Win32s [ edit ]
Windows 3.1x was given limited compatibility with the then-new 32-bit Windows API used by Windows NT by another add-on package, Win32s. There was a rumor that Microsoft did not want to increase any mainstream Windows 3.1x version to something like "Windows 3.2" because it could be confused with the Win32 API or otherwise distract consumers from upgrading to a "real 32-bit OS", though Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5 were both 32-bit operating systems that looked similar in appearance. A game called FreeCell was included for testing the new Win32s functions.
WinG [ edit ]
To entice game manufacturers to move from DOS to Windows, Microsoft provided a first attempt at high-speed graphics and animation capabilities for Windows 3.1x, introduced in September 1994. Windows' GDI capabilities were originally designed with static images in mind, allowing only for write-only graphics calls. WinG provided a device-independent interface to graphics and printer hardware, and allowed programs to have both read and write capabilities to the WinGDC (WinG device context).[15]
Applications [ edit ]
Windows 3.1x introduced new possibilities for applications, especially multimedia applications. During this era, Microsoft developed a new range of software that was implemented on this operating environment, called Microsoft Home, Microsoft Bob being one of the programs.
As the first versions of Windows to enjoy major commercial success and software support, Windows 3.1 and WFW 3.11 quickly replaced DOS as the platform for application software on PC compatibles. Multimedia software (especially games) proliferated, although many games continued to run on DOS until Windows 95.
Program Manager [ edit ]
Program Manager was included in all versions of Windows from version 3.0 until Windows XP Service Pack 1. A non-operable icon library named progman.exe is included in Windows XP Service Pack 2, and the file was removed entirely from Windows Vista.
Internet Explorer [ edit ]
Internet Explorer 2 through Internet Explorer 5 were released for Windows 3.1.[16]
Promotion and reception [ edit ]
Microsoft began a television advertising campaign for the first time on March 1, 1992. The advertisements, developed by Ogilvy & Mather, were designed to introduce a broader audience to Windows.[17] Windows 3.1 was shipped worldwide on April 6, 1992, and reached three million sales two months later.[18] The year of Windows 3.1's release was successful for Microsoft, which was named the "Most Innovative Company Operating in the U.S." by Fortune magazine, while Windows became the most widely used GUI-based operating environment.[19]
Controversy [ edit ]
DR-DOS compatibility [ edit ]
The installer to the beta release used code that checked whether it was running on Microsoft-licensed DOS or another DOS operating system (such as DR-DOS). The code ran several functional tests that succeeded on MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS, but resulted in a technical support message on competing operating systems. If the system was not MS-DOS, the installer would fail. Digital Research, who owned DR-DOS, released a patch within weeks to allow the installer to continue. Microsoft disabled, but did not remove, this warning message for the final release of Windows 3.1. When Caldera bought DR-DOS from Novell, they brought a lawsuit against Microsoft over the AARD code, which was later settled.[20][21]
Legacy [ edit ]
Windows 3.x was superseded by the release of Windows 95 in August 1995. Microsoft officially dropped support for all 16-bit versions of Windows on November 1, 2008.
Windows 3.1 found a niche market as an embedded operating system after becoming obsolete in the PC world. As of November 2008, both Virgin Atlantic and Qantas employed it for some of the onboard entertainment systems on long-distance jets. It also sees continued use as an embedded OS in retail cash tills.[22] It is also used as a secondary application in DOSBox to enable emulation of Win16 games on 64-bit Windows.
On July 9, 2008, it was announced that Windows for Workgroups 3.11 for the embedded devices channel would no longer be made available for OEM distribution as of November 1, 2008.[23]
On July 14, 2013, Linux kernel version 3.11 was officially named "Linux For Workgroups" as a tongue-in-cheek reference to "Windows for Workgroups 3.11".[24]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]This is the eighth article in the Truthout on the Mexican Border series looking at US immigration and Mexican border policies through a social justice lens. Mark Karlin, editor of BuzzFlash at Truthout, visited the border region recently to file these reports. You can find links to the previous coverage at the end of this article.
US Banks Love Real Dollars, and Illegal Drug Money Comes in Cash
A recent article in The Guardian UK offers evidence that "while cocaine production ravages countries in Central America, consumers in the US and Europe are helping developed economies grow rich from the profits."
According to The Guardian UK story, the study by two Colombian professors found that "2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country [Columbia], while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries."
One of the researchers, Alejandro Gaviria said: "We know that authorities in the US and UK know far more than they act upon. The authorities realize things about certain people they think are moving money for the drug trade - but the DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] only acts on a fraction of what it knows."
"It's taboo to go after the big banks," added Gaviria's co-researcher Daniel Mejía. "It's political suicide in this economic climate, because the amounts of money recycled are so high."
Since Wachovia Bank (now owned by Wells Fargo) was levied a fine in 2010 (but no criminal charges) for money laundering hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of illegal drug cartel dollars, there does not appear to be any large crackdown on the practice in the United States, although lip service is often given to coming down hard on money laundering.
Indeed, more than one analyst has speculated that the billions of dollars in drug cash are vitally important to US banks because so many of their financial assets are tied up in non-fluid assets.
According to a 2011 article in AlterNet:
Antonio Maria Costa, former executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in 2008, "there's evidence to suggest that proceeds from drugs and crimes were the only liquid investment capital for banks in trouble of collapsing [during the financial crisis]." If billions of dollars in drug money rescued banks and other financial institutions from closing down then it's reasonable to argue that the economy itself is addicted to drugs. As professor Dale Scott noted in his book, American War Machine: Deep Politics; the CIA Global Drug Connection: "A US Senate... banking committee reportedly estimated that between $500 billion and $1 trillion dollars are laundered each year through banks worldwide, with approximately half of that amount funneled through US Banks."
In the '70s and '80s, Miami became known as a city that was experiencing an economic renaissance based on the flow of illegal drug money (mostly from Colombia at the time) into the city. But the cash didn't just get laundered through banks; it was used to buy legitimate businesses; condos; houses; investments; and more than likely a lot of corrupt law enforcement, custom and government officials.
Estimated $50 Billion in Illegal Drug Sales From Mexico Can Only Occur With US Corruption
In interviews, Truthout has been told again and again that the chain of distribution for illegal drugs is changing. Whereas before it was divided primarily among Mafia families in big cities, the Latin American cartels have now set up networks within the US.
But one thing hasn't changed; it still takes a lot of corruption to buy off virtual domestic impunity for the kingpins overseeing the domestic sale of prohibited drugs. Searching Google, you can find everything from Transportation Security Administration agents paid off to let drugs pass through airport checks, to cops who look the other way or actually steal the drug money, to border patrol agents letting drugs pass through, to local government officials overlooking illegal activity.
However, rarely does one come across the arrest and prosecution of a kingpin in the United States, or of a high-level law enforcement official in a major city or a politician being indicted. Does this mean that powerful individuals in the government and law enforcement are all squeaky clean as $50 billion in illegal drugs go whizzing through America, day in and day out? Not likely.
The emphasis of the DEA, FBI and the Department of Homeland Security is on catching the "guppies" without appearing to be working their way up to the people running the wholesale-to-retail illicit drug business in the US or their protectors. (In Latin America, however, the US is all about catching kingpins, although that doesn't often happen.)
For instance, the El Paso Times reported last year that "two former law enforcement officers allege that they cannot get anyone to investigate allegations that the Mexican drug cartels have corrupted US law officers and politicians in the El Paso border region.... Gonzales and Dutton allege that the FBI dropped them after 'big names' on the US side of the border began to surface in the drug investigations."
David Ramirez rose up the ranks of the Border Patrol to become a special agent at the Department of Homeland Security. He just wrote a book, "Beneath the Same Sky," a candid analysis of the borderland drug war. Interviewed by the Texas Tribune, he described US customs corruption matter-of-factly:
I can only tell you my experiences and what I saw. It was the lure of the money and as I write in the book, they offer this inspector $50,000 for what I call a "wave" - a loaded vehicle to come through the port. And they guaranteed them five vehicles a week so you are talking that kind of money, which is tempting. You have to be a man or a woman who knows their moral ground to say, "No. I am not doing it...." "It's capitalism, I would think - supply and demand," Ramirez said further. "The demand for the drug is here and then we say, 'Okay Mexico or Latin America, fix your problem over there, but we still want our drugs.'"
Different Interests in the US Financially Gain From the War on Drugs
It's not just that some law enforcement officials are corrupt. They don't need to be for police departments to make money from arresting minor drug offenders.
Police departments around the nation gain from laws that allow the seizing of assets that the law enforcement officers allege may be related to drug crime, without even a court case involved. The libertarian CATO institute wrote about this practice that allows the agencies to use the proceeds from the confiscated money or property to enlarge departmental budgets. The report is called "Forfeit for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture."
Law enforcement agencies can also get extra money from federal grants if they show a high number of arrests related to drug use and selling, so it is of financial value to the department to arrest as many people for drug related offenses as possible.
Neill Franklin is executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He calls this change to an emphasis on arrests of the drug user as a "shift to the numbers game" for police departments to receive more funding. Franklin, a 34-year law enforcement veteran of the Maryland State Police and Baltimore Police Department, said, "we worked in predominantly white areas, yet most of our cases and lock ups were minorities. There were very few cases in the outlying areas that involved whites."
Franklin told Truthout:
"Over my career I saw a shift to a war on the users of drugs. In the '70s when I worked narcotics it was about working your way up the chain of the sellers to the kingpins. That's how it was. As we got further into the '80s and '90s, we attacked the demand side. We concentrated on locking up the usual street corner suspects and before we knew it we had quadrupled the incarceration rate and most of that increase was from us arresting users. A lot of the small time dealers sell drugs because they need to support their habit of selling drugs. The day of the law enforcement concentrating on kingpins has gone. It's all about increasing the numbers of arrests."
To Franklin this brings up the question of why privatized prison companies are simultaneously benefiting financially from the increased incarceration, a subject that has been analyzed many times on Truthout. If the Correction Corporation of America needs a 90 percent capacity rate to make a profit on a prison, then you need to put the bodies in the beds. Franklin pointed out that the profiteering doesn't end with the prison business. There is the drug testing industry, parole officers, prosecutors, police, lawyers, rehabilitation counselors, psychologists etc. Arresting minor drug offenders, in short, is big business.
Race, Drugs, Incarceration and the New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander, author of the paradigm-shifting book on racism through the criminalization of being a black male, "The New Jim Crow," recently wrote a commentary in The Guardian UK in which she persuasively argues that "the US war on drugs created a whole new generation of the dispossessed, with millions of black people denied their rights."
Alexander wrote of the racist impact of the war on drugs in the black community, particularly among young black males:
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decades - they are currently at historical lows - but imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the "war on drugs" and the "get tough movement." Drug offenses alone accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population, between 1985 to 2000, and more than half of the increase in the state prison population. The drug war has been brutal, but those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youths are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youths. They also have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts. That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison.... Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working-class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing and affirmative action.
If you follow Alexander's analysis to its logical conclusion, the war on drugs in the United States fulfills a racist stereotype by disproportionately sending black males (and black women) to jails, where they are branded and marginalized as felons, while white users of illegal drugs - proportionately - are treated much more leniently by law enforcement and the judicial system.
This policy misleadingly confirms stereotypes of blacks that racists love, even though they are put in prison for offenses that are nonviolent in nature and that are driven by poverty, social neglect and incentivized police department arrest numbers.
But it also serves another important purpose. When poor, stereotyped members of society can only find an entrepreneurial future in the illegal drug business, or use drugs as self-medication to allow them to escape the squalidness of vast swathes of urban America that hold little opportunity of employment, the government does not have to attend to building neighborhoods and creating jobs. Drugs become the opiate of the masses, as meth also has in many poor, rural white communities.
As with the 50,000-plus mostly poor Mexicans who have died in the failed war on drugs, certain lives are deemed of less value in the US - and if there is big money to be made out of the drug trade, it's going to end up in banks and business ventures, not in the hood (with few exceptions). The undesirable resourceless drug users are both profitable and expendable.
US Hegemony and Military Control Over Latin America and the CIA
An established journalist, Gary Webb, wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996 with a shocking account of how the CIA, during the Reagan administration, allowed cocaine to freely be flown into the US (particularly crack cocaine) in return for drug cartel cooperation with funding and arming the Contras against the Sandinistas |
, 10 Feb 2016 16:32:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22613 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:47:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:47:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22662 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 18:01:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 18:01:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22654 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 18:01:03 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 18:01:03 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22668 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 22:46:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 22:46:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22669 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 22:59:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 14 Feb 2016 22:59:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22672 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 15 Feb 2016 18:08:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 15 Feb 2016 18:08:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22722 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 17 Feb 2016 18:29:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 17 Feb 2016 18:29:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22716 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 17 Feb 2016 19:17:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 17 Feb 2016 19:17:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22795 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 24 Feb 2016 22:03:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 24 Feb 2016 22:03:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22825 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 27 Feb 2016 18:28:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 27 Feb 2016 18:28:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 22884 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 02 Mar 2016 18:35:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 02 Mar 2016 18:35:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 21998 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 09 Mar 2016 16:51:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 09 Mar 2016 16:51:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23039 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:47:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:47:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23038 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:47:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Thu, 17 Mar 2016 15:47:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23042 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Thu, 17 Mar 2016 16:50:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Thu, 17 Mar 2016 16:50:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23050 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 19 Mar 2016 17:28:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 19 Mar 2016 17:28:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22490 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 19 Mar 2016 19:47:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 19 Mar 2016 19:47:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 20401 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 19 Mar 2016 22:12:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 19 Mar 2016 22:12:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 20931 Request was from Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 21 Mar 2016 20:07:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 21 Mar 2016 20:07:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23039 Request was from Xue Fuqiao <xfq.free <at> gmail.com> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 22 Mar 2016 22:25:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 22 Mar 2016 22:25:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 1 and 21943 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 02 Apr 2016 13:30:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 02 Apr 2016 13:30:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23254 Request was from Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 10 Apr 2016 23:34:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 10 Apr 2016 23:34:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22321 and 1 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 11 Apr 2016 23:08:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 11 Apr 2016 23:08:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23284 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 13 Apr 2016 21:56:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 13 Apr 2016 21:56:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23360 and 1 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:58:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:58:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23362 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:58:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:58:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23371 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 25 Apr 2016 15:53:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 25 Apr 2016 15:53:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23418 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 02 May 2016 20:45:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 02 May 2016 20:45:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23144 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 03 May 2016 20:03:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 03 May 2016 20:03:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23443 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 04 May 2016 15:54:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 04 May 2016 15:54:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23513 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 11 May 2016 18:44:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 11 May 2016 18:44:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22884 Request was from Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Fri, 13 May 2016 19:31:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Fri, 13 May 2016 19:31:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 21422 Request was from Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 14 May 2016 22:58:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 14 May 2016 22:58:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 20420 Request was from Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 14 May 2016 22:58:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 14 May 2016 22:58:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22527 Request was from Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 14 May 2016 22:59:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 14 May 2016 22:59:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 19479 Request was from Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 14 May 2016 23:06:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 14 May 2016 23:06:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23519 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 16 May 2016 17:25:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 16 May 2016 17:25:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 21874 Request was from Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 02:08:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 02:08:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 2 and 23360 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:29:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:29:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 17976 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 19548 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 21182 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 21650 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 21871 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 21874 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22107 and 1 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22147 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22338 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sun, 22 May 2016 16:36:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23519 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 23 May 2016 02:30:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 23 May 2016 02:30:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 19717 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 23 May 2016 02:35:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 23 May 2016 02:35:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23050 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 23 May 2016 02:35:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 23 May 2016 02:35:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23604 Request was from Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 23 May 2016 16:48:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 23 May 2016 16:48:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 20247 Request was from Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 23 May 2016 16:48:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 23 May 2016 16:48:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23611 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 24 May 2016 17:40:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 24 May 2016 17:40:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23612 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 24 May 2016 17:50:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 24 May 2016 17:50:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23616 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Fri, 27 May 2016 00:49:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Fri, 27 May 2016 00:49:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23609 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Fri, 27 May 2016 00:51:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Fri, 27 May 2016 00:51:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23609 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Fri, 27 May 2016 14:40:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Fri, 27 May 2016 14:40:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23672 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 01 Jun 2016 17:49:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 01 Jun 2016 17:49:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23672 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 06 Jun 2016 23:18:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 06 Jun 2016 23:18:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23705 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 07 Jun 2016 21:53:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 07 Jun 2016 21:53:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23616 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 07 Jun 2016 22:27:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 07 Jun 2016 22:27:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23725 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:31:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:31:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23726 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:32:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 08 Jun 2016 15:32:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23760 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 13 Jun 2016 15:35:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 13 Jun 2016 15:35:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23764 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Mon, 13 Jun 2016 20:42:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Mon, 13 Jun 2016 20:42:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 22795 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 14 Jun 2016 18:13:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 14 Jun 2016 18:13:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23760 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Sat, 18 Jun 2016 18:25:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Sat, 18 Jun 2016 18:25:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23947 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:16:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:16:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23705 Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:16:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Thu, 14 Jul 2016 17:16:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Added blocking bug(s) 23999 Request was from Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi <at> gmail.com> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:18:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 20 Jul 2016 17:18:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
Removed blocking bug(s) 23999 Request was from Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Fri, 22 Jul 2016 07:15:02 GMT) Request was fromto. (Fri, 22 Jul 2016 07:15:02 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
bug marked as fixed in version 25.1, send any further explanations to 19759 <at> debbugs.gnu.org and Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> Request was from Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org> to control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Tue, 20 Sep 2016 17:19:01 GMT) Request was fromto. (Tue, 20 Sep 2016 17:19:01 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
bug archived. Request was from Debbugs Internal Request <help-debbugs <at> gnu.org> to internal_control <at> debbugs.gnu.org. (Wed, 19 Oct 2016 11:24:04 GMT) Request was fromto. (Wed, 19 Oct 2016 11:24:04 GMT) Full text and rfc822 format available.
This bug report was last modified 2 years and 131 days ago.
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Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.I'm proud to announce the first distribution for ProtoShares owners.
ProtoShares owners collectively will receive a 1% stake in the relaunched MemoryCoin - MemoryCoin 2.0.
Balances will be calculated at block 32,000 and the distribution will take place in the genesis block of MemoryCoin 2.0. Coins will be awarded on a 1:10 basis - so if you have 10 ProtoShares, you'll receive 1 MemoryCoin. Fractional amounts will be awarded, but some lower limit may be enforced due to size constraints.
You'll need the private keys for your ProtoShares balance to claim your MemoryCoin distribution. If your balance is held at an exchange, the exchange will hold the private keys and be able to make the claim. However it is uncertain how different exchanges will handle this. To be certain of receiving your full distribution, I recommend holding your full balance off-exchange, and in a single address for simplicy.
MemoryCoin 2.0 will have a similar parameters to ProtoShares, but will have improved difficulty re-targetting, a memory-hard PoW, and voting and payments in the blockchain for 5 office-holders, CEO, CTO, CNO, CMO, CSO and 1 charitable donation, CHA.The Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa (Isasa) believes Cosatu’s proposal to do away with private schools is based on misconceptions about the private-school sector.
The trade union federation’s policy document, released this week, says that there is an urgent need to “eliminate the three-tiered education system which features private institutions, model-C schools and ordinary public schools and to redistribute resources toward ordinary public schools in working-class and poor communities”.
However, Isasa spokesperson Simon Lee told the Mail & Guardian on Thursday that it is a common misconception that the private-school sector services a predominantly wealthy, elite and mainly white demographic.
“We understand there might be frustration about the inequalities in education, but there seems to be some confusion. The most recent government figures show that 73% of learners in the private-school sector are black children, attending low-fee schools,” he said.
“The elite high-fee schools only make up 14% of the sector, so if you do away with independent schools it is mostly poor schools that will be affected.”
Recent statistics from the Department of Education show that there are nearly 26 000 schools in South Africa, while Isasa estimates there are between 1 400 and 2 000 independent schools, although it is hard to get an accurate figure due to the difficulty in keeping track of private institutions.
‘More harm than good’
Cosatu’s proposal calls for an equitable, levelled playing field for all pupils by closing private schools and redirecting resources to public schools. But Lee suggests that closing private schools will do more harm than good.
“First, the Constitution guarantees that every individual has the right to establish private educational institutions at their own expense.
So shutting down private schools would require a change to the Constitution,” he said.
“Private schools service roughly 450 000 children. Where is the money going to come from to fit them in to the public-school system?
“Removing private schools would not solve the problems in education. It would most likely put more strain on the state as it would have to fund these learners in public schools,” he said.
“High-fee private schools—which make up just 14% of the sector—get no subsidies from the state. And the low- and medium-fees schools that do get state funding are only given a maximum of 60% of what the state spends on a pupil in public schooling. In reality, most get less than that, so if anything, the sector saves the country money.”
According to Lee, private schools have an important role to play in the South African education landscape as they can be a “test bed for new ideas and to trial changes to the curriculum”.
“We make up only 5% of the total number of schools in South Africa, but if you look at the number of graduates from our schools who enrol in universities in the maths and science disciplines, it’s clear to see that we are punching well above our weight.”
‘No threat to private schools’
Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga has also come out in support of independent private schools.
On Wednesday her spokesperson, Hope Mokgatlhe, told Business Day that the minister believes independent schools have a right to exist, protected in the South African Schools Act.
“The minister believes public- and independent-sector schools can work together harmoniously, and has assured Isasa at its AGM over the weekend that its right to existence is not under threat,” she said.
Isasa suggested that it would be more helpful to education if there was a way for independent schools and public schools to work together.
“No doubt there are some dysfunctional schools in the public sector and we feel that we could make a contribution to improving the overall level of education if we work together. We are blessed with great teachers at private schools, so I think a more useful proposal would include a way to use these resources to help out state schools,” said Lee.I recently evaluated the Bakery Single Sign-On System aka Bakery SSO aka Bakery on behalf of clients. This article describes how I moved from finding a small weakness in version 2.x-alpha-3 to an exploit.
If you haven't updated all your sites to Bakery 2.0-alpha4 (6.x, 7.x), go and do so now.
About Bakery
Bakery provides a "single sign on" feature for Drupal based sites that are on the same second-level domain (i.e. example.com, subsite.example.com, subsite2.example.com). The Drupal.org family of sites uses Bakery so you can login on Drupal.org then visit and browse groups.drupal.org, association.drupal.org or drupalconlatest.drupal.org as an authenticated user without having to login again.
Very handy indeed.
How Bakery works
Bakery knows two types of sites, the master and slaves. The Bakery master is the only site that actually handles user authentication via username and password. Slaves forward login data to the master, but do not authenticate the user themselves via username and password.
Bakery works by passing around data in what it calls "cookies", confusingly both in actual (shared) cookies and in POST requests. These cookies contain the passed data together with a signature (a HMAC) in a base64-encoded encrypted string. The signature should ensure message authenticity (ie actually originates from master or slave). The encryption and signing key is shared between master and slaves. While Bakery makes a number of cookies, the two most important for this entry in the bug2exploit series are Oatmeal and Chocolatechip.
If you login on slave S, it will forward the username and password to the Bakery master M in Oatmeal via a browser redirect. The Bakery master does some checks, logs in the user and creates a Chocolatechip cookie only to redirect the user back to the slave. The slave checks the Chocolatechip cookie, updates relevant information and logs the user in.
While Chocolatechip serves to authenticate a user to the slaves, it also works to authenticate to the master. The cookie carries the username, mail and init together with some housekeeping fields.
Encryption & signatures
Before we continue to the weakness in Bakery, we need to take a look at the structure of cookies. Whenever Bakery bakes a cookie it starts by building an array with the data to send and a HMAC-based signature.
The next step in baking a cookie is to serialize the array structure, encrypt it via AES in ECB mode using the shared private key and finally base64-encode the result.
When the Bakery master receives such a cookie, it runs the process in reverse. First, it base64-decodes the contents, decrypts the result, then unserializes this into a $cookie array. Bakery then calculates a signature and checks if it matches the signature delivered in the cookie array.
Weakness: Unserialize on cookie value
Any security researcher will perk up when she sees an unserialize on user-supplied data. Such a call can be used to invoke object destructors with values chosen by an attacker. On Drupal 7, this can be used to delete files from the filesystem. As signature verification happens after unserializing the data, it cannot interfere with our nefarious purposes.
Alas, as Bakery decrypts the cookie before it calls unserialize on it, we need to find a way to get our payload encrypted with the private key or the decryption step will result in random garbage. This is where the next weakness comes in.
Weakness: ECB mode
AES is a block cipher that can be used in a variety of modes. In Electronic cookbook mode (ECB) used by Bakery, the plaintext is split in 128-bit blocks and each block is separately encrypted with the key. The content of one block doesn't influence the ciphertext of the next block.
Here's a short example, with a reduced blocksize of 64-bits to illustrate the consequences. A string that fits into 2 64-bit blocks has been encrypted in ECB mode. We then take the ciphertext, split it in 64-bit blocks and swap their positions. When we decrypt, the corresponding plaintext blocks have also switched position.
h e i n e j a n d e e l s t r a
4e2387db4b9713f0 5e9275df5301bf8b
5e9275df5301bf8b 4e2387db4b9713f0
d e e l s t |
to music
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[Note: The first sentence of this story was updated after publication, to reflect the age of the second person who was assaulted, as soon as the information was provided by BPD.]by
“… a social system which year by year witnesses the increase of the pauper class, and the increase of their miseries, stands condemned before the tribunal of … justice, how long will it take before that is understood and taken to heart?” ~Felix Adler, Creed and Deed, 1880
In early 2010, religion historian and longtime university professor R. Joseph Hoffmann wrote a blog post offering his thoughts on “the incoherence of contemporary humanism.” Hoffman, who in addition to his other roles is on the faculty of The Humanist Institute in New York City, observes that, being unsure of its real convictions, secular Humanism has become “a mess … the garbled message of freedom, science, democratic values, and church-state separation spread out over a playing field with no ball and no rules.” Thus, it ends up taking “a free-base approach to whatever grabs its attention on a given day.”
Hoffman is right, but he misses a huge and critical part of the picture. What’s wrong with today’s mainstream Humanism goes far beyond philosophical confusion and strategic anarchy. Strangely, the difficulty is one that, almost universally, Humanists seem wholly oblivious to, even though, as it happens, it is right out in the open. What’s more, because the problem concerns Humanism’s often admirably vanguard ethical fundamentals, it amounts to no less than a moral crisis.
Put simply, the Humanist movement, in the United States anyway, is badly broken. As jolting as that assertion may be to some, it is nevertheless necessary, because in major respects Humanism is blatantly betraying the core principles it was created to champion. We can explore just one of those principles here, namely Humanism’s foundational commitment to economic justice. The ugly truth is that nowadays the movement serves the narrow interests of the elite and the comfortable at the expense of everybody else, especially of poor and working class people.
It does so by the rather straightforward means of deliberate neglect. For the most part, it looks upon problems of poverty and economic inequality, when it looks upon them at all, as low priorities for secular activism and remedial public policy. More on that theme presently, but first, to see how incredibly far the Humanist movement has wandered astray, we need to look at some essential, mostly forgotten history.
Organized Humanism: The First Century
In his posthumously published book The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995), Edwin H. Wilson (1898–1993), an early executive director of The American Humanist Association (AHA), reflects on the development of Humanist Manifesto I (HMI). The buildup to HMI, which was promulgated in 1933, occurred during the miserable early years of the Great Depression, prior to the advent of the New Deal. The “principal political hope to many persons of humanist and humanitarian outlook,” Wilson writes “was found in the leadership of Norman Thomas, who advocated a democratic, non-Marxist form of socialism, or in refrains from [socialist] labor leader Eugene Debs” or in the writings of workers’ rights theorist and land reformer Henry George. “The time seemed ripe to ‘break the dead branches from the past.’” The Manifesto “was a principal expression of the movement.”
Wilson could have formulated a better metaphor. In calling for radical changes in the socioeconomic order, many thinkers, a good many Humanists among them, sought to get past the surface down to the roots of what ailed American society. So, when HMI was published in The New Humanist magazine, forerunner of today’s The Humanist, it explicitly called for the adoption of a democratic socialism. The document contains fifteen provisions, one of which (point fourteen) reads:
The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.
Humanist Manifesto I explicitly calls its perspective a religious humanism, but that fact in no way compromises its relevance for our purposes here. As reflected, for example, in the various secular “religions of humanity” that arose in Europe and the U.S. during the nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, for a significant minority of people religion did not necessarily entail theism. Thus, Humanists could be secular without being irreligious, a position of some practical benefit given the ironclad link in the public mind between religiosity and goodness. In any event, as the document clearly conveys, the author and signers of HMI were non-theistic metaphysical naturalists.
Thirty-four people, most of them philosophers and Unitarian ministers, signed the socialistic Manifesto. One of them was Wilson himself, who, decades later, would co-author Humanist Manifesto II. Other signers included philosopher Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973), author of a book of socialist political philosophy (The Next Step in Democracy, 1916) and writer of the first draft of HMI; John H. Dietrich (1878-1957), one of the founders of modern Humanism, anti-capitalist, and advocate of a “co-operative system” of economics largely inspired by the utopian socialism of Robert Owen; and William Floyd (1871–1943), editor of the Humanist magazine The Arbitrator, pacifistic socialist, and author of People vs. Wall Street: A Mock Trial (1930).
The most famous signatory was the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). Philosophically, as the historian Alan Ryan puts it, Dewey was a “non-Marxist naturalized-Left Hegelian” (John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, 1995). Often referred to by historians and political scientists as a social democrat or a democratic socialist, Dewey was in fact a market socialist who opposed the profit motive. He was also an ardent union advocate, enthusiast (like his philosophical rival and fellow Humanist Bertrand Russell) for guild socialism, president of the socialistic League for Industrial Democracy, supporter of the socialist Eugene Debs in the Presidential election of 1912, and, as Matthew Festenstein notes “a leading critic from the left of Roosevelt’s New Deal.” Dewey’s “detestation of the capitalist order” Ryan remarks “had a semi-religious quality.”
One of the various social movements Dewey influenced was Ethical Culture. According to Professor Joe Chuman, a longtime Ethical Culture leader, although Dewey was never a member of the movement, “his influence on it was transformative.” He continues: “Under the pressures of Deweyan instrumentalism” during the first third of the twentieth century, “and in response to the influx into Ethical Culture of newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe, who brought with them commitments to socialism and Marxism, Ethical Culture increasingly moved into the humanist camp” (“Toward a Humanist Politic,” in Toward a New Political Humanism, 2004). As Steven Rockefeller relates, in the years after its founder’s death Ethical Culture “came to function as a kind of religious humanist fellowship founded upon Dewey’s philosophy” (John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism, 1991). Hence the term “Ethical Humanism,” which eventually came into regular use as a synonym for Ethical Culture.
The factors Chuman points to did influence Ethical Culture, but he seems to miss the fact that the movement was both philosophically Humanist and broadly socialist from the very beginning. The New York Society for Ethical Culture (NYSEC), whose school Dewey’s children attended for several years, was founded in 1876 by Felix Adler (1851–1933), a philosopher, humanitarian social reformer, and secular Jew. Chuman himself notes that in its early decades the “animating spirit” of Ethical Culture was “a felt need to redress the evils wrought by the industrial revolution.” In her perceptive study of Adler’s social justice advocacy, Esther Lifshitz shows that, as a graduate student in Germany, Adler came under the influence of, among other strains of thought, the political philosophy of Friedrich Albert Lange. Author of Die Arbeiterfrage (The Labor Question, 1865), Lange was a social democrat (or reformist socialist) who, as Lifshitz writes, compelled Adler, whose mother had inculcated in him a deep concern for the poor when he was a boy, “to admit the legitimacy of socialist grievances and to ‘square [him]self with the issues that socialism raises.’” Lifshitz goes on:
Lange determined the course of his [i.e. Adler’s] future social activity. He convinced Adler that the progress of civilization depended on the advancement of social justice and assistance to the working class. … As he read The Labor Question with “burning cheeks,” Adler incorporated his new appreciation for practical social reform into his developing ethical thought. Thus, he became one of the earliest proponents of social justice and labor cooperation, proving his commitment to Lange’s mission a few years later with the founding of Ethical Culture.
Prior to leaving Germany, in charting the course he intended to take upon his return to the U.S., Adler expressed his intention to “arouse the conscience of the wealthy, the advantaged, the educated, to a sense of their guilt in violating the human personality of the laborer.”
For the rest of his life Adler was a staunch advocate for economic justice. In 1904, he became the founding chairman of the National Child Labor Committee, a position he held for 15 years. Lifshitz notes that Adler had been actively concerned about child labor issues since 1872, “when in Germany he read ‘with horror’ Karl Marx’s description of England’s orphanages, mills, and child maltreatment in Das Kapital.” He was a tenement reform activist and served on the New York State Tenement House Commission. He pioneered the idea of a maximum wage (or income cap) by way of a steep graduated income tax with a top rate of 100 percent. In its early years, Adler’s Society established a District Nursing Service to provide health care services in poor neighborhoods, opened a free kindergarten (the first school of its type in the United States) for the children of the working poor, and contributed to the founding of the Settlement House movement.
Adler’s outlook is reflected in his writings and speeches. In his first book (Creed and Deed, 1880), he lamented what he saw as the terribly tragic plight of exploited workers and of the poor in general, and insisted that changing the conditions that spawned oppressive inequalities was an urgent need. In an address honoring the twentieth anniversary of Ethical Culture in 1896, he called for scientific research “to ascertain whether the positions of individualism and socialism are not susceptible of being united in a deeper philosophy of life.” In 1903 (Life and Destiny) he wrote of his guiding vision for a new kind of society “in which no men or class of men shall be mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for others; in which no man or woman, or class of men or class of women shall be used as tools for the lusts” … “or for the ambition” … “or for the greed of others.” “The root disease” from which the world suffers, Adler wrote in 1918 (An Ethical Philosophy of Life) is the dominance of “the commercial point of view.”
Fittingly, then, as Chuman notes, one “enthusiastic member” of NYSEC was Samuel Gompers (1850–1924), founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. “Of all the religious and affiliated associations in New York,” Chuman writes, Gompers saw NYSEC as “the most supportive of the interests of labor.” And among the leaders of such associations, in Gompers’ estimation Adler was certainly the “most outspoken in the cause of the working class.”
The New York Society provided the model for the Chicago Society for Ethical Culture (CSEC, now The Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago), founded in 1882. Its first and longtime leader was William M. Salter (1853–1931), an author, scholar, and anarchist who “was deeply involved with social welfare work.” His book Anarchy or Government? (1895) is in large part an argument for active government regulation of big business in the interests of preventing the exploitation of workers. He proclaimed the mission of the new Society to “promote a nobler private and juster social life.” Society members believed themselves bound by “a sacred duty … to do all within our power to raise our less fortunate fellow-men out of the sorrowful condition into which they have fallen.” During its early years CSEC’s activities generally mirrored those of NYSEC. One difference was the former’s establishment of a Bureau of Justice, an early forerunner of the Legal Aid Society, for the purpose of providing legal assistance to the poor.
One notable member of CSEC was Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), a defense attorney who himself performed a good deal of pro bono work for poor clients. Darrow first drew national attention as a labor lawyer in a series of high-profile cases, defending among others, radical union leader Eugene Debs, the United Mineworkers, and “Big Bill” Haywood—like Debs a socialist founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World. As S.T. Joshi writes in his book The Unbelievers (2011), such cases solidified Darrow’s reputation as “a radical firebrand and ardent friend of labor.”
The Chicago Society was especially close to the local Settlement House movement, to which it gave organizational and material support. The leading figure in that movement, Jane Addams (1860–1935), was cofounder of the Illinois Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a close friend of Dewey’s, a lecturer at Adler’s summer School of Applied Ethics in Massachusetts in 1892, a frequent speaker at CSEC, and a social democrat. (It’s indicative of Addams’ own radicalism that, when she cofounded Hull House, her partner, Ellen Gates Starr—an Anglican who ultimately turned Catholic—was an anti-child labor activist, member of the WTUL, opponent of industrialization, and member of the Socialist Labor Party.)
One of Hull House’s resident staff members during the 1890s was Florence Kelley (1859–1932), whom Chuman calls one of Ethical Culture’s “moral heroes.” One of the most impressive figures of her time, Kelley (in addition to being a civil rights activist and cofounder of the NAACP) was a Marxist, a friend of Friedrich Engels, translator of Engels’ book The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (the version is still in print), an activist against sweatshops and child labor and for the eight hour day and a minimum wage, and cofounder (along with Upton Sinclair and Jack London) and president of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. A protégé of Kelley’s who spent time working at Hull House was the labor rights advocate Frances Perkins (1880–1965). During her twelve-year tenure as Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt, among many other reforms a minimum wage bill was enacted, child labor was ended, and the National Labor Relations and Social Security Acts were signed into law.
Kelley’s biography, posthumously published in 1953, was written by Adler’s sister-in-law, Josephine Goldmark (1877-1950). Goldmark was a progressive labor law reformer and a longtime publications secretary and researcher for Kelley at the National Consumers League. In the latter role Goldmark oversaw the production of publications such as the Child Labor Legislation Handbook (1907) and the Handbook of Laws Regulating Women’s Hours of Labor (1912), both of which, according to The Selected Letters of Florence Kelley, “became blueprints for reform legislation during and after the Progressive Era.”
Another activist who worked for Kelley was Alzina P. Stevens (1849-1900), a CSEC member and, during the 1890s, a resident of Hull House. Stevens was an experienced union organizer of women, coeditor of a weekly labor newspaper, and a regionally prominent member of the Knights of Labor. When Kelley was named chief factory inspector for Illinois, she appointed Stevens to be her top assistant. Among her other projects, Stevens collaborated with Darrow and with H. D. Lloyd on the promotion of anti-sweatshop legislation. Upon Stevens’ death, the NYSEC journal The Ethical Record memorialized her as “an indefatigable and heroic worker in behalf of social progress.”
Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847–1903) was Kelley’s close friend, CSEC member, and a radical labor advocate. A social democrat and staunch anti-monopolist, Lloyd envisioned a better society in the form of a “cooperative commonwealth.” In 1888 he ran for Congress under the banner of the Union Labor Party, during the 1890s he was a leader of the left wing of the Populist movement, and in 1894 he ran for Congress on a Labor-People’s Party fusion ticket. His published works include A Strike of Millionaires against Miners, Labour Copartnership, Country without Strikes, Lords of Industry, and the highly influential Wealth against Commonwealth. His speech “The New Conscience, or the Religion of Labor,” delivered at CSEC in 1888, was widely read after it subsequently appeared in a national magazine.
In the same way, then, that Wilson had explained that HM1 emerged, as much as anything else, out of concerns about the class problem, Lifshitz observes that a desire to fight class oppression was at the heart of the rise of Ethical Culture:
Reflecting on the initial motivation for the movement, Adler insisted that Ethical Culture did not begin as a series of rationalistic societies comprised of an intelligentsia embittered by religion, but as a movement for progressive reform. It originated as a positive action for humankind, not a negative reaction against Judaism. From its inception, Ethical Culture was bound with labor struggles—“the chief moral question of the day”—and the tangible and philosophical problems of the modern industrial world. (emphases mine)
Many humanists are aware that the most famous person ever to identify himself with Ethical Culture was Albert Einstein (1879–1955). However, few of them know that the greatest scientist in history was also a left-wing radical. In his essay “Why Socialism?,” written in 1949 for the inaugural issue of the socialist magazine Monthly Review and published in his book Essays in Humanism (1950), Einstein argued for the adoption of democratic socialism. Contemporary man was highly driven in anti-social directions, he observed, and in his view the culprit was no great mystery. The “real source of the evil,” he wrote, is the “economic anarchy of capitalist society.” In practice, capitalism creates inequities that lead to “an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.” He went on: “I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.” As biographer Walter Isaacson notes, Einstein “was a fierce defender of the underdog” whose socialism was a product of his commitments to equality and social justice. Isaacson quotes Einstein’s stepson-in-law: “Socialism to him [i.e. Einstein] reflects the ethical desire to remove the appalling chasm between the classes and to produce a more just economic system.”
Like Adler, Einstein was a secular Jew. According to Sherwin T. Wine, writing in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief (2007), Ethical Culture was one of five distinct varieties of Jewish secular Humanism. One of the others, Secular Zionism, included a Socialist Zionist (or Labor Zionist) element whose members (one of whom, although Wine does not say so, included Einstein, whose case illustrates that individuals were sometimes part of multiple Jewish Humanist traditions) “dreamed of a model egalitarian state where clerical, bourgeois, and military domination would cease to exist.” A notable aspect of Socialist Zionism was the kibbutz commune, “a dramatic example of secular socialism.” Interestingly, unlike the Bourgeois and Nationalist types of Secular Zionism, Wine explains, Socialist Zionism is the only variant that has “remained fiercely secular.” A third type of Jewish secular Humanism was Jewish Socialism. “For many Jews,” Wine writes “secularism was an aspect of their socialist commitment.” Jewish socialists, he goes on “could not separate secularism from egalitarian politics. Dismissing God went hand in hand with elevating the proletariat.” A significant number of Socialist Zionists, and a large number of Jewish Socialists, were part of the Jewish Diaspora in the United States.
Einstein’s Humanist ties went beyond his affiliations with Jewish secular Humanisms. During the 1930s, he served on the advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York. His colleagues on the board included, among others, John Dewey, historian and socialist-turned-progressive labor advocate Will Durant (1885–1981), and author and activist Helen Keller (1880–1968).
Keller’s political views, which would come as an utter shock to most people, are fascinating. She was a lifelong radical socialist and a member of the revolutionary labor union Industrial Workers of the World. Convinced that “the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness” within the human population, Keller applied a class analysis to that subject in her book Social Causes of Blindness (1911). Her other published books include The Unemployed (1911), and The Underprivileged (1931). The FBI, always on the lookout for subversives audacious enough to attempt to humanize American life, was concerned enough about Keller’s support for international socialism and her friendships with communists that it maintained a file on her throughout the last two decades of her life.
In 1973, the AHA released Humanist Manifesto II (HMII), coauthored by Wilson and Paul Kurtz (1925-2012). These days, the taken-for-granted view is that the new Manifesto represented a retreat from the socialist economics of HM1. It’s a plausible outlook, so long as you don’t examine it too closely. The inveterate, often truculent tradition of state repression of leftist political activity had not, to their great credit, dissuaded the drafters of HMI, but forty years later that tradition was steeped in a changed political and cultural atmosphere. The middle decades of the twentieth century had prominently included the long post-war economic boom, McCarthyism, and ubiquitous conflation of any sort of radical left democratic philosophy with authoritarian communism. As was the case with intellectuals in general, a good many Humanists, Kurtz’s mentor Sidney Hook being the most famous (or infamous), responded to sociopolitical currents by discarding their Marxist and or socialist commitments. With HMII’s preamble stating that the history of that period made HMI “seem far too optimistic” and with the explicit call for a “socialized and cooperative economic order” now absent, Humanism had seemingly de-radicalized toward a more realistic, responsible, and—undoubtedly for liberals the most important consideration—respectable, political orientation.
But that interpretation is wrong. For one thing, if they intended to extirpate socialism from the canon of mainstream Humanism, Kurtz and Wilson were like a remodeling crew that changed the appearance of the building but left the foundation and basic structure fully intact. In HMII they averred that “Humane societies” will emphasize improvement in the quality of life and enhanced “economic well-being for all individuals and groups,” an ethic which, in light of its then-obvious non-fulfillment, necessitated the consideration of “alternative economic systems.” They also called for a worldwide lowering of military spending and transfer of resulting savings to “peaceful and people-oriented uses,” an end to poverty everywhere, reduction of “extreme disproportions in wealth, income, and economic growth,” a robust social safety net, and economic democracy.
Given its insistence on both popular control (“We must extend participatory democracy in its true sense to the economy … [and] the workplace … Decision-making must be decentralized to include widespread involvement of people at all levels – social, political, and economic.”), and on relative economic equity, and in light of the profound social reconstruction the realization of those ideals would entail, it could be argued that, by implication, HMII demands democratic socialism. However that may be, its stated vision is, at minimum, social democratic, which, in fact, is what the journalist and Humanist activist Steve Ahlquist calls it. And that designation makes sense, given that, on government economic policy, Kurtz explicitly identified himself as a “Marxist social democrat.”
Here it is worth noting a subtle and hitherto overlooked, but intriguing historical connection. Kurtz’s favorite normative ethical theory was utilitarianism. As many readers will know, utilitarianism is a form of ethical consequentialism. According to the website of the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH), secular Humanists are consequentialists. Arguably, the greatest of all consequentialist thinkers was the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill. As it happens, Mill’s idea for a “Religion of Humanity” was an early version of secular Humanism, and, although the fact is seldom remembered today, he was, as reflected in the later editions of his Principles of Political Economy, a socialist.
For another thing, in the section titled “Democratic Society,” HMII endorses the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the principles of which it expresses a commitment to “safeguard, extend, and implement.” The UDHR, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, was coauthored by Eleanor Roosevelt, who, as it happens, was a longtime board member of NYSEC. The principles articulated in the UDHR include the following:
22: Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality. 23.1: Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. 23.3: Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. 25.1: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well- being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. 28: Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
From the perspective of mainstream economics these are truly radical notions. Capitalism is unequipped to deliver on such principles and in fact doesn’t even believe in them. This was true even before the rise to dominance of neoliberalism, the values of which are so sociopathic that, as Nina Power poignantly puts it “permanent accumulation” is “the only post-religious ‘infinite’ permitted to matter.” These factors (i.e., HMII’s stated economic principles and endorsement of the UDHR) should go a long way toward accounting for the curious fact that, as will become clear below, the left-wing signers of HMII were even more radical than most of the people who signed HMI.
An emphasis on economic rights appears again, coupled with a call for broadly socialist economics, in the Declaration of Interdependence: A New Global Ethics, issued in 1988 by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Therein, the IHEU’s board of directors asserts that adequate health care, freedom from want, and “moral equality,” meaning “equal opportunity and equal access,” are basic human rights. In place of the existing economic system, in which ethical egoism reigned at all levels, the declaration calls for “A new global system based on economic co-operation and international solidarity.”
As I have shown elsewhere, genuine concern about economic inequality was a recurring theme in the writings of HMII’s coauthor, Paul Kurtz. To cite a further example from his later years (Free Inquiry, Dec. 2004/Jan. 2005), the pioneering Humanist philosopher identified what he took to be the greatest threats to democracy in the United States. After noting that economic democracy is “a precondition for a just democratic society,” Kurtz elaborated at length on what he took to be four “especially dangerous” threats to democracy in America. Three of them are structural aspects of the broad system of economic oppression: plutocracy, “mega-corporations,” and “media-ocracy,” i.e. effective control of public debate by mega-media corporations (the fourth threat was theocracy). For Kurtz economic injustice matters a great deal, for “The erosion of democracy is especially disheartening to the humanist outlook, which has been intimately tied to the democratic philosophy.” So if economic democracy is a sine qua non for popular sovereignty, Humanists ought to be focusing on it.
Signers of HMII included A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), towering civil rights activist, longtime union leader, and democratic socialist; Paul Blanshard (1892–1980), author, union advocate, and socialist-turned-New Dealer; Mark Starr (1894-1985), enthusiastic student of Marx’s political economy at the Central Labour College in London, democratic socialist, and longtime labor union educator in the U.S.; Corliss Lamont (1902-1995), President of the AHA, Marxist, and two-time U.S. Senate candidate in New York (American Labor Party, 1952; Independent-Socialist Party, 1958); James Farmer (1920–1999), cofounder of the Congress of Racial Equality, national secretary of the socialist Student League for Industrial Democracy, and honorary vice chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America; Maxine Greene (1917–2014), educational philosopher, social democrat, leading figure in the left wing critical pedagogy movement, and scholarly collaborator with former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers; and Kai Nielsen (born 1926), political philosopher and “Marxian” democratic socialist.
There were many other prominent Humanists for whom economic justice was a central concern. The following is a partial list. It consists of individuals who were active in the Humanist movement, or were celebrated by it (eight of them received the AHA’s Humanist of the Year Award), or who in some fashion explicitly identified themselves as Humanist, but who never signed one of the manifestos. Like the figures previously mentioned, they all saw Humanism as entailing some form of radical or semi-radical left-wing political economy. Most of them were social democrats or democratic socialists: Hubert Harrison (1883–1927), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), Lillian Wald (1867–1940), Lewis Hine (1874–1940), John Lovejoy Eliot (1868-1942), Stanton Coit (1857–1944), James Peter Warbasse (1866-1957), Michael Schwerner (1939–1964), Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), Herman Joseph Muller (1890–1967), Erich Fromm (1900–1980), Roger Nash Baldwin (1884–1981), Gene Roddenberry (1921–1991), Algernon Black (1900-1993), Maggie Kuhn (1905–1995), Benjamin Spock (1903–1998), Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), James Forman (1928-2005), Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), Howard Zinn (1922–2010), Barry Commoner (1917–2012), Gore Vidal (1925–2012), and Beth Lamont (born 1929).
Clearly, then, from its beginnings in the 1870s into the late decades of the twentieth century, the amelioration of poverty and economic inequality was a central concern of the Humanist movement. In fact, for many prominent Humanists, the only problem as important as economic injustice was the threat of nuclear war. Among African-American Humanists, economic oppression was, of necessity, thoroughly mixed together with racism as the paramount body of concern.
Humanist Principles I
This history of class consciousness makes perfect sense. Humanist writings and speeches go on endlessly about how the main point of the philosophy is the promotion, primarily through the exercise of reason and the cultivation of goodness, of human flourishing. In this regard, among the psychosocial insights reason inevitably leads to, surely one of the most important is that human flourishing requires personal freedom—to be understood, I would suggest, in the Deweyan sense of being a cultural and social rather than an individual condition. But as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who proposed an Economic Bill of Rights (a.k.a. the Second Bill of Rights, the main inspiration for the UDHR) was fond of saying “necessitous men are not free men.” Surely it follows then, that human flourishing requires what I will call economic wellness. Such considerations prompt Ahlquist to take the view that “If Humanism is not about the working class, it’s about nothing at all.”
One of the rare contemporary Humanists who gets the importance of all this is Barry Seidman, producer of the radio show Equal Time for Freethought and editor of the book Toward a New Political Humanism (2004). “To be a humanist,” he writes “is to be anti-capitalism.” Humanists “have all these ethical codes and affirmations and principles, which if applied, would have to take into consideration capitalism and class or they would be neutered.” As he brilliantly puts it “Understanding Humanism without class/economics is like understanding biology without evolutionary theory.” (Email correspondence with the author, 21 Aug. 2014.)
A Movement Transformed
Unfortunately, nowadays, as radical leftists Ahlquist and Seidman belong to a tiny and mostly ignored minority within Humanist circles. Signs of a moderating tendency on economics began to appear within Humanism in the early 1980s. Although more research needs to be done on this, it’s likely that that tendency steadily strengthened during the administrations of corporate Democrat Bill Clinton. By the time Humanist Manifesto III (HMIII) appeared in 2003, the shift away from economic radicalism had become pronounced (more on HMIII below). Beginning in the mid 2000s, the movement’s change of direction was reinforced by, and in turn helped to strengthen, the state-and-corporate-power-serving New Atheist movement. Since then, the Humanist movement has followed along with determined docility while the mainstream of American political culture has moved further and further to the right. Today, ideologically, the realm of self-described Humanist bloggers, writers, conference speakers and panelists, magazine editors, podcasters, and organizational directors, is pretty thoroughly dominated by neoliberal values and thus mostly indifferent to the problems of poverty and inequality.
That indifference is evident all across the mainstream Humanist landscape. Anti-poverty advocates seldom appear as speakers or panelists at Humanist conferences, where economic oppression is rarely a main topic of discussion. Writings about poverty and inequality appear infrequently on Humanist blog sites and in the major Humanist magazines. Unless I have missed somebody, only two well-known Humanist figures, authors Sikivu Hutchinson and Barbara Ehrenreich, exhibit a serious and sustained concern about economic injustice (although, born in 1941, Ehrenreich belongs to the earlier, class conscious period of Humanist history as much as to the current one). It is a strange spectacle indeed: a movement that, at its inception, and which, for at least a century, took the alleviation of economics-based suffering to be a core part of its raison d’être, existing now in a context where “A typical American household cannot raise $400 without borrowing money or selling possessions,” but for which the class problem is usually an afterthought.
On that score, the websites of the two major Humanist organizations in the U.S., the AHA and the CSH, are quite revealing. On the “Issues” page of the AHA website, where eight focus areas are listed (as of 24 May), economic justice is not among them. The topic is alluded to under “Women’s Rights” only in terms of a few selected issues. The UDHR is mentioned under “Human Rights,” but for a decade now at least, most references to the UDHR within Humanist circles have had to do with the Declaration’s statements on freedom of thought, conscience, and expression.
It’s worth pausing here for a moment to let that information sink in. As we have seen, as a matter of both history and principle, a heavy emphasis on economic justice is supposed to be a defining element of the Humanist movement. Yet today, with more than 46 million Americans on food stamps, with millions more people “food insecure” but not receiving assistance due to unrealistic eligibility requirements, the folks who run the AHA consider the poverty/inequality problem unworthy of a place on their list of priorities.
The situation is no better on the CSH website. Its “Activities” page makes it clear that the organization’s focus is on promoting a secular-based worldview and on defending the rights of nonbelievers. In his long definitional essay on Secular Humanism, CSH executive director Tom Flynn does state that the broad goals of secular Humanist ethics are “Human happiness and social justice” and that the conditions necessary for human flourishing include “freedom from want.” Beyond that, however, amongst the 4000 words he devotes to explaining Humanism the problems of poverty and economic injustice are never mentioned.
So what does organized Humanism focus on these days? Four issues are paramount and get most of the attention: feminism (mostly in terms of |
ologists have done excavations in the Nemegt Basin in the northwestern part of the Gobi Desert (in Mongolia), which is noted for its fossil treasures, including early mammals, dinosaur eggs, and prehistoric stone implements, some 100,000 years old.[4]
Climate [ edit ]
A summer monsoon produces a flash flood, 2004
The Gobi is overall a cold desert, with frost and occasionally snow occurring on its dunes. Besides being quite far north, it is also located on a plateau roughly 910–1,520 metres (2,990–4,990 ft) above sea level, which contributes to its low temperatures. An average of approximately 194 millimetres (7.6 in) of rain falls annually in the Gobi. Additional moisture reaches parts of the Gobi in winter as snow is blown by the wind from the Siberian Steppes. These winds may cause the Gobi to reach −40 °C (−40 °F) in winter to 45 °C (113 °F) in summer.[5]
However, the climate of the Gobi is one of great extremes, combined with rapid changes of temperature of as much as 35 °C (63 °F). These can occur not only seasonally but within 24 hours.
Temperature Sivantse (1190 m) [6] Ulaanbaatar (1150 m) Annual mean −2.5 °C (27.5 °F) −0.4 °C (31.3 °F) January mean −26.5 °C (−15.7 °F) −21.6 °C (−6.9 °F) July mean 17.5 °C (63.5 °F) 18.2 °C (64.8 °F) Extremes −47 to 34 °C (−53 to 93 °F) −42.2 to 39.0 °C (−44.0 to 102.2 °F)
In southern Mongolia, the temperature has been recorded as low as −32.8 °C (−27.0 °F). In contrast, in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, it rises as high as 37 °C (99 °F) in July.
Average winter minimums are a frigid −21 °C (−6 °F), while summertime maximums are a warm 27 °C (81 °F). Most of the precipitation falls during the summer.[7]
Although the southeast monsoons reach the southeast parts of the Gobi, the area throughout this region is generally characterized by extreme dryness, especially during the winter, when the Siberian anticyclone is at its strongest. The southern and central parts of the Gobi Desert have variable plant growth due to this monsoon activity. The more northern areas of the Gobi are very cold and dry, making it unable to support much plant growth; this cold and dry weather is attributed to Siberian-Mongolian high pressure cells.[1] Hence, the icy sandstorms and snowstorms of spring and early summer plus early January (winter).
Conservation, ecology, and economy [ edit ]
The Gobi Desert is the source of many important fossil finds, including the first dinosaur eggs.
Despite the harsh conditions, these deserts and the surrounding regions sustain many animals, including black-tailed gazelles, marbled polecats, wild Bactrian camels, Mongolian wild ass and sandplovers. They are occasionally visited by snow leopards, brown bears, and wolves. Lizards are especially well-adapted to the climate of the Gobi Desert, with approximately 30 species distributed across its southern Mongolian border.[8] The most common vegetation in the Gobi desert are shrubs adapted to drought.[9] These shrubs included gray sparrow's saltwort (Salsola passerina), gray sagebrush, and low grasses such as needle grass and bridlegrass. Due to livestock grazing, the amount of shrubs in the desert has decreased.[9] Several large nature reserves have been established in the Gobi, including Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park, Great Gobi A and Great Gobi B Strictly Protected Area.
The area is vulnerable to trampling by livestock and off-road vehicles (effects from human intervention are greater in the eastern Gobi Desert, where rainfall is heavier and may sustain livestock). In Mongolia, grasslands have been degraded by goats, which are raised by nomadic herders as source of cashmere wool.[10]
Large copper deposits are being mined by Rio Tinto Group.[11] The mine was and remains controversial. There was significant opposition in Mongolia's parliament to the terms under which the mine will proceed, and some are calling for the terms to be renegotiated. Specifically, the contention revolves primarily around the question of whether negotiations were fair (Rio Tinto is far better resourced) and whether Rio Tinto will pay adequate taxes on the revenues it derives from the mine (an agreement was reached whereby the operation will be exempt from windfall tax.[12]
Desertification [ edit ]
The Gobi Desert is expanding at an alarming rate, in a process known as desertification. The expansion is particularly rapid on the southern edge into China, which has seen 3,600 km2 (1,390 sq mi) of grassland overtaken every year by the Gobi Desert. Dust storms, which used to occur regularly in China, have increased in frequency in the past 20 years, mainly due to desertification. They have caused further damage to China's agriculture economy.
The northern and eastern boundaries between desert and grassland are constantly changing. This is mostly due to the climate conditions before the growing season, which influence the rate of evapotranspiration and subsequent plant growth.[13]
The expansion of the Gobi is attributed mostly to human activities, notably deforestation, overgrazing, and depletion of water resources. China has tried various plans to slow the expansion of the desert, which have met with some small degree of success, but no major effects. The most recent project is called the Three-North Shelter Forest Program which features huge strips of newly planted forests; the government hopes the forests will help stabilize the soil, retain moisture, and act as a buffer against further desertification.[14]
Ecoregions [ edit ]
The Gobi, broadly defined, can be divided into five distinct dry ecoregions, based on variations in climate and topography:
Eastern Gobi desert steppe [ edit ]
The surface is extremely diversified, although there are no great differences in vertical elevation. Between Ulaanbaatar ( ) and the small lake of Iren-dubasu-nor ( ), the surface is greatly eroded. Broad flat depressions and basins are separated by groups of flat-topped mountains of relatively low elevation 150 to 180 m (490 to 590 ft)), through which archaic rocks crop out as crags and isolated rugged masses. The floors of the depressions lie mostly between 900 to 1,000 m (3,000 to 3,300 ft) above sea-level. Farther south, between Iren-dutiasu-nor and the Yellow River, comes a region of broad tablelands alternating with flat plains, the latter ranging at altitudes of 1000–1100 m and the former at 1,070 to 1,200 m (3,510 to 3,940 ft). The slopes of the plateaus are more or less steep, and are sometimes penetrated by "bays" of the lowlands.
As the border-range of the Hyangan is approached, the country steadily rises up to 1,370 m (4,490 ft) and then to 1,630 m (5,350 ft). Here small lakes frequently fill the depressions, though the water in them is generally salt or brackish. Both here and for 320 km (199 mi) south of Ulaanbaatar, streams are frequent and grass grows more or less abundantly. Through all the central parts, until the bordering mountains are reached, trees and shrubs are utterly absent. Clay and sand are the predominant formations; the watercourses, especially in the north, being frequently excavated 2 to 3 m (6 ft 7 in to 9 ft 10 in) deep. In many places in the flat, dry valleys or depressions farther south, beds of loess, 5 to 6 m (16 to 20 ft) thick, are exposed. West of the route from Ulaanbaatar to Kalgan, the country presents approximately the same general features, except that the mountains are not so irregularly scattered in groups but have more strongly defined strikes, mostly east to west, west-north-west to east-south-east, and west-south-west to east-north-east.
The altitudes are higher, those of the lowlands ranging from 1,000 to 1,700 m (3,300 to 5,600 ft), and those of the ranges from 200 to 500 m (660 to 1,640 ft) higher, though in a few cases they reach altitudes of 2,400 m (7,900 ft). The elevations do not form continuous chains, but make up a congeries of short ridges and groups rising from a common base and intersected by a labyrinth of ravines, gullies, glens and basins. But the tablelands, built up of the horizontal red deposits of the Han-gai (Obruchev's Gobi formation) which are characteristic of the southern parts of eastern Mongolia, are absent here or occur only in one locality, near the Shara-muren river. They are greatly intersected by gullies or dry watercourses. Water is scarce, with no streams, no lakes, no wells, and precipitation falls seldom. The prevailing winds blow from the west and northwest, and the pall of dust overhangs the country as in the Takla Makan and the desert of Lop. Characteristic of the flora are wild garlic, Kalidium gracile, wormwood, saxaul, Nitraria schoberi, Caragana, Ephedra, saltwort and the grass Lasiagrostis splendens. The taana wild onion Allium polyrrhizum is the main browse eaten by many herd animals, and Mongolians claim that this is essential to produce the correct, slightly hazelnut-like flavour of camel airag (fermented milk).
This great desert country of Gobi is crossed by several trade routes, some of which have been in use for thousands of years. Among the most important are those from Kalgan (at the Great Wall) to Ulaanbaatar (960 km (597 mi)); from Jiuquan (in Gansu) to Hami 670 km (416 mi); from Hami to Beijing (2,000 km (1,243 mi)); from Hohhot to Hami and Barkul; and from Lanzhou (in Gansu) to Hami.
Alashan Plateau semi-desert [ edit ]
The southwestern portion of the Gobi, known also as the Hsi-tau and the Little Gobi, fills the space between the great north loop of the Yellow River on the east, the Ejin River on the west, and the Qilian Mountains and narrow rocky chain of Longshou, 3,200 to 3,500 m (10,500 to 11,500 ft) in altitude, on the southwest. The Ordos Desert, which covers the northeastern portion of the Ordos Plateau, in the great north loop of the Yellow River, is part of this ecoregion. It belongs to the middle basin of the three great depressions into which Potanin divides the Gobi as a whole.
"Topographically," says Nikolai Przhevalsky, "it is a perfectly level plain, which in all probability once formed the bed of a huge lake or inland sea." He concludes this based on the level area of the region as a whole, the hard saldgine clay and the sand-strewn surface and, lastly, the salt lakes which occupy its lowest parts. For hundreds of kilometers, nothing can be seen but bare sands; in some places they continue so far without a break that the Mongols call them Tengger (i.e. sky). These vast expanses are absolutely waterless, nor do any oases relieve the unbroken stretches of yellow sand, which alternate with equally vast areas of saline clay or, nearer the foot of the mountains, with barren shingle. Although on the whole a level country with a general altitude of 1,000 to 1,500 m (3,300 to 4,900 ft), this section, like most other parts of the Gobi, is crowned by a chequered network of hills and broken ranges going up 300 m higher. The vegetation is confined to a few varieties of bushes and a dozen kinds of grasses and herbs, the most conspicuous being saxaul (Haloxylon ammondendron) and Agriophyllum gobicum. The others include prickly convolvulus, field wormwood (Artemisia campestris), acacia, Inula ammophila, Sophora flavescens, Convolvulus ammanii, Peganum and Astragalus species, but all dwarfed, deformed and starved. The fauna consists of little but antelope, wolf, fox, hare, hedgehog, marten, numerous lizards and a few birds, e.g. the sandgrouse, lark, stonechat, sparrow, crane, Henderson's ground jay (Podoces hendersoni), horned lark (Eremophila alpestris), and crested lark (Galerida cristata).
Dzungarian Basin semi-desert [ edit ]
The structure here is that of the mighty T'ien Shan, or Heavenly Mountains, running from west to east. It divides the northern one-third of Sinkiang from the southern two-thirds. On the northern side, rivers formed from the snow and glaciers of the high mountains break through barren foothill ranges and flow out into an immense, hollow plain. Here the rivers begin to straggle and fan out, and form great marshes with dense reed-beds. Westerners call this terrain the Dzungarian desert. The Chinese also call it a desert, but the Mongols call it a 'gobi'—that is, a land of thin herbage, more suitable for camels than for cows, but capable also, if herds are kept small and moved frequently, of sustaining horses, sheep, and goats. The herbage comprises a high proportion of woody, fragrant plants. Gobi mutton is the most aromatic in the world.[15]
The Yulduz valley or valley of the Haidag-gol ( – ) is a mini desert enclosed by two prominent members of the Shanashen Trahen Osh mountain range, namely the chucis and the kracenard pine rallies, running perpendicular and far from one another. As they proceed south, they transcend and transpose, sweeping back on east and west respectively, with Lake Bosten in between. These two ranges mark the northern and the southern edges respectively of a great swelling, which extends eastward for nearly twenty degrees of longitude. On its northern side, the Chol-tagh descends steeply, and its foot is fringed by a string of deep depressions, ranging from Lukchun (130 m (427 ft) below sea level) to Hami (850 m (2,789 ft) above sea-level). To the south of the Kuruk-tagh lie the desert of Lop Nur, the Kum-tagh desert, and the valley of the Bulunzir-gol. To this great swelling, which arches up between the two border-ranges of the Chol-tagh and Kuruk-tagh, the Mongols give the name of Ghashuun-Gobi or "Salt Desert". It is some 130 to 160 km (81 to 99 mi) across from north to south, and is traversed by a number of minor parallel ranges, ridges and chains of hills. Down its middle runs a broad stony valley, 40 to 80 km (25 to 50 mi) wide, at an elevation of 900 to 1,370 m (2,950 to 4,490 ft). The Chol-tagh, which reaches an average altitude of 1,800 m (5,900 ft), is absolutely sterile, and its northern foot rests upon a narrow belt of barren sand, which leads down to the depressions mentioned above.
The Kuruk-tagh is the greatly disintegrated, denuded and wasted relic of a mountain range which used to be of incomparably greater magnitude. In the west, between Lake Bosten and the Tarim, it consists of two, possibly of three, principal ranges, which, although broken in continuity, run generally parallel to one another, and embrace between them numerous minor chains of heights. These minor ranges, together with the principal ranges, divide the region into a series of long; narrow valleys, mostly parallel to one another and to the enclosing mountain chains, which descend like terraced steps, on the one side towards the depression of Lukchun and on the other towards the desert of Lop.
In many cases these latitudinal valleys are barred transversely by ridges or spurs, generally elevations en masse of the bottom of the valley. Where such elevations exist, there is generally found, on the east side of the transverse ridge, a cauldron-shaped depression, which some time or other has been the bottom of a former lake, but is now nearly a dry salt-basin. The surface configuration is in fact markedly similar to that which occurs in the inter-mount latitudinal valleys of the Kunlun Mountains. The hydrography of the Ghashiun-Gobi and the Kuruk-tagh is determined by these chequered arrangements of the latitudinal valleys. Most of the principal streams, instead of flowing straight down these valleys, cross them diagonally and only turn west after they have cut their way through one or more of the transverse barrier ranges.
To the highest range on the great swelling Grumm-Grzhimailo gives the name of Tuge-tau, its altitude being 2,700 m (8,858 ft) above the level of the sea and some 1,200 m (3,937 ft) above the crown of the swelling itself. This range he considers to belong to the Choltagh system, whereas Sven Hedin would assign it to the Kuruk-tagh. This last, which is pretty certainly identical with the range of Kharateken-ula (also known as the Kyzyl-sanghir, Sinir, and Singher Mountains), that overlooks the southern shore of the Lake Bosten, though parted from it by the drift-sand desert of Ak-bel-kum (White Pass Sands), has at first a west-northwest to east-southeast strike, but it gradually curves round like a scimitar towards the east-northeast and at the same time gradually decreases in elevation.
In 91° east, while the principal range of the Kuruk-tagh system wheels to the east-northeast, four of its subsidiary ranges terminate, or rather die away somewhat suddenly, on the brink of a long narrow depression (in which Sven Hedin sees a northeast bay of the former great Central Asian lake of Lop-nor), having over against them the écheloned terminals of similar subordinate ranges of the Pe-shan (Boy-san) system (see below). The Kuruk-tagh is throughout a relatively low, but almost completely barren range, being entirely destitute of animal life, save for hares, antelopes and wild camels, which frequent its few small, widely scattered oases. The vegetation, which is confined to these same relatively favoured spots, is of the scantiest and is mainly confined to bushes of saxaul (Haloxylon), anabasis, reeds (kamish), tamarisks, poplars, and Ephedra.
European exploration [ edit ]
The Gobi had a long history of human habitation, mostly by nomadic peoples. By the early 20th century, the region was under the nominal control of Manchu-China, and inhabited mostly by Mongols, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs. The Gobi Desert as a whole was known only very imperfectly to outsiders, and information was confined to observations by individual travellers from their respective itineraries across the desert. Among the European explorers who contributed to the understanding of the Gobi, the most important were the following:
See also [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Gobi" Encyclopædia Britannica. 12 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 165.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Owen Lattimore. (1973) "Return to China's Northern Frontier". The Geographical Journal, Vol. 139, No. 2 (June 1973), pp. 233–242.
Further reading [ edit ]
Cable, Mildred and French, Francesca (1943) The Gobi Desert Landsborough Publications, London, OCLC 411792.
Landsborough Publications, London, OCLC 411792. Man, John (1997) Gobi: Tracking the Desert Yale University Press, New Haven, ISBN 0-300-07609-6.
Yale University Press, New Haven, ISBN 0-300-07609-6. Stewart, Stanley (2001) In the Empire of Genghis Khan: A Journey among Nomads HarperCollins Publishers, London, ISBN 0-00-653027-3.
HarperCollins Publishers, London, ISBN 0-00-653027-3. Thayer, Helen (2007) Walking the Gobi: 1,600 Mile-trek Across a Desert of Hope and Despair Mountaineer Books, Seattle, WA, ISBN 978-1-59485-064-6.
Mountaineer Books, Seattle, WA, ISBN 978-1-59485-064-6. Younghusband, Francis (1904) The Heart of a Continent, John Murray.
Coordinates:5 Languages and Still Learning
Nadine Rashid Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 8, 2017
Last time I was monolingual, was at the age of 3. Moving abroad, I had no options but to learn the new language. Leaving our home behind, my parents opened up a new world for me. I was born in Lebanon and grew up between two different cultures, Lebanese and Swedish. Speaking a second language at a young age and being able to adapt quickly made me confident.
Eager to learn as a kid
My parents had two options when we migrated to Sweden from Lebanon, either to put me in a school for foreigners or in a local school with Swedish students only. They knew that the best for me was to integrate into our new society as quick as possible, therefore their choice was obvious. I ended up in the local school and never reflected about whether I was happy about it, instead I was eager to learn and to start speaking to my new friends. A few months later, I was already able to communicate and integrate with the local community.
Choosing French
The summer I was 10, we spent two months in France with my half-french cousins. At the time I had not in mind to learn French, however, I almost had to if I wanted to be able to understand and to communicate with my relatives. So I started repeating words after them. My mother, who had worked as a French teacher earlier, was more than happy to teach me as well. Back in Sweden, we have the chance to take on a third language to the schedule in school, besides Swedish and English. The opportunity came very timely and I chose French. Twice a week, two hours each lesson, covered most of the French grammar and basic vocabulary.
My Arabic speaking background with borrowed words from the French and spending 6 months in school in Lebanon at the age of 4 gave me an advantage at learning French. During the 7 years of my French studies, we went visiting my cousins in France every year. I kept hearing French natives, so I did become familiar with the culture as well as the pronunciation. The listening comprehension during tests in school became my biggest strength.
Mandatory Chinese
During my years at the university in Sweden, I got the chance to study one year abroad as an exchange student in China. Alongside with the mandatory courses, we had to learn Chinese. Living in a small city as Jinan, the provincial capital of Shandong province, meant no English speaking population besides our teachers at school. That made us strain ourselves to learn faster to be able to communicate with taxi drivers, at restaurants, and in stores. Having a desire to learn faster, I felt that my Chinese evolved rapidly even though we had only one hour Chinese class per week.
Develop language hacks
Every time I learn a new language, the learning process feels easier than the previous one. That is also why I still want to continue learning more languages. The reason why I find the process of learning easier, is that I manage to develop new language hacks that work for me. As a kid, my father pushed me to be independent when it comes to interacting with locals. Nowadays, I do feel less unsure unlike when I was 4 years old and learned my first foreign language.
I decided to learn these 5 languages because I know I sooner or later will have, or need, to use them somehow. Successively, I have got an advantage in today’s globalized world. Relocating and traveling brought me help understanding the diversity within societies.
Be multilingual,
NadineIslamic State fighters are shown in an image captured from an Islamic State video posted on the Internet.
ARA News
ERBIL – The Islamic State (ISIS) extremist group has lost large territories in Syria and Iraq over the past few weeks, especially after the U.S.-led coalition forces stepped up airstrikes on the group’s key positions.
Local sources confirmed that ISIS manpower has clearly decreased, particularly in the Syrian eastern province of Deir ez-Zor. The group has been pushing its security forces, which usually operate inside the city, into the battlefields to back their fellow militants in the forefronts.
Speaking to ARA News in Deir ez-Zor, media activist Saray ed-Din said that the security situation has obviously worsened in the province of Deir ez-Zor, especially with the battles getting closer to the northern border of the province.
Due to the heavy losses in the group’s ranks following painful blows by the U.S.-led coalition forces, ISIS started to launch arbitrary arrest campaigns against civilians in Deir ez-Zor, “forcing hundreds of people to join the fighting, in a bid to compensate the unprecedented shortage in its manpower”, according to ed-Din.
Also, local activists stressed that the terror group has arrested last week dozens of civilians in the province under the pretext of “spying” for the coalition and the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG)ــwhich declared on Thursday, along with several Arab and Christian groups, a federal system northern Syria.
Ed-Din pointed out that ISIS militants stormed Wednesday midnight civilian houses in the town of Baqras, claiming they use the internet service illegally and many of them spy for the western-backed forces.
“Amid the mounting loss of fighters, Daesh [ISIS] has been depending on the Islamic police forces and the Hisba members inside Deir ez-Zor to participate in the battles,” a local sources told ARA News, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“This is to back their fellows fighting the Kurds on the borders between Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor in an attempt to prevent further advance of the Kurds and their SDF allies,” he said.
Reporting by: Sarbaz Yousef
Source: ARA NewsVasily Vasiliyevich (Russian: Василий Васильевич; 10 March 1415 – 27 March 1462), known as Vasily II the Blind (Василий II Темный), was the Grand Prince of Moscow whose long reign (1425–1462) was plagued by the greatest civil war of Old Russian history.
First ten years of internecine struggle [ edit ]
Vasily II was the youngest son of Vasily I of Moscow by Sophia of Lithuania, the only daughter of Vytautas the Great, and the only son to survive his father (his elder brother Ivan died in 1417 at the age of 22). On his father's death Vasily was proclaimed Grand Duke at the age of 10. His mother acted as a regent. His uncle, Yuri of Zvenigorod (Prince of Galich-Mersky), and his two sons, Vasily the Cross-Eyed and Dmitry Shemyaka, seized on the opportunity to advance their own claims to the throne. These claims were based on the Testament of Dmitri Donskoi, Yuri's father and Vasily's grandfather, who had stated that if Vasily I died Yuri would succeed his appanage. However, Dmitri had written the testament when Vasily I had no children of his own, and it might be argued that this provision had been made only for the case of Vasily's childless death. Vasily's claim was supported by Vytautas, his maternal grandfather.
Upon Vytautas' death in 1430, Yuri went to the Golden Horde, returning with a license to take the Moscow throne. But the Khan did not support him any further, largely due to the devices of the Smolensk princeling and Moscow boyarin Ivan Vsevolzhsky. When Yuri assembled an army and attacked Moscow, Vasily, betrayed by Vsevolzhsky, was defeated and captured by his enemies (1433). Upon being proclaimed Grand Duke of Moscow, Yuri pardoned his nephew and sent him to reign in the town of Kolomna. That proved to be a mistake, as Vasily immediately started to plot against his uncle and gather all sort of malcontents. Feeling how insecure his throne was, Yuri resigned and then left Moscow for his northern hometown. When Vasily returned to Moscow, he had Vsevolzhsky blinded as a traitor.
Meanwhile, Yuri's claim was inherited by his sons who decided to continue the fight. They managed to defeat Vasily, who had to seek refuge in the Golden Horde. After Yuri died in 1434, Vasili the Cross-Eyed entered the Kremlin and was proclaimed new Grand Duke. Dmitry Shemyaka, who had his own plans for the throne, quarreled with his brother and concluded an alliance with Vasily II. Together they managed to banish Vasily the Cross-Eyed from the Kremlin in 1435. The latter was captured and blinded, which effectively removed him from the contest for the throne.
Kazan and Shemyaka [ edit ]
During Vasily's reign the Golden Horde collapsed and broke up into smaller Khanates. Now that his throne was relatively secure, he had to deal with the Tatar threat. In 1439, Vasily had to flee the capital, when it was besieged by Ulugh Muhammad, ruler of the nascent Kazan Khanate. Six years later, he personally led his troops against Ulugh Muhammad, but was defeated and taken prisoner. The Russians were forced to gather an enormous ransom for their prince, so that Vasily could be released some five months later.
During that time, the control of Moscow passed to Dmitry Shemyaka. Keeping in mind the fate of his own brother, Dmitry had Vasily blinded and exiled him to Uglich, in 1446; hence, Vasily's nickname, 'the blind' (Tyomniy, literally 'dark'). As Vasily still had a number of supporters in Moscow, Dmitry recalled him from exile and gave him Vologda as an appanage. That proved to be a mistake, as Vasily quickly assembled his supporters and regained the throne.
Vasily's final victory against his cousin came in the 1450s, when he captured Galich-Mersky and poisoned Dmitry. The latter's children managed to escape to Lithuania. These events finally put to rest the principle of collateral succession, which was a major cause of medieval internecine struggles.
Later reign and policies [ edit ]
Now that the war was over, Vasily eliminated almost all of the small appanages in Moscow principality, so as to strengthen his sovereign authority. His military campaigns of 1441–60 increased Moscow's hold over Suzdal, the Vyatka lands, and the republican governments of Novgorod and Pskov.
In the meantime, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the Patriarch agreed to acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope in the Council of Florence. Vasily promptly rejected this arrangement. By his order in 1448, bishop Jonah was appointed metropolitan of Russia, which was tantamount to declaration of independence of the Russian Orthodox Church from the Patriarch of Constantinople. This move further strengthened Russia's reputation among Orthodox states.
In his later years the blind prince was greatly helped by Metropolitan Jonah, boyars, and then by his older son Ivan III who was styled co-ruler since the late 1450s. On Vasily's death in 1462 Ivan III succeeded him as Grand Prince of Moscow. Vasily's daughter Anna was married to a prince of Ryazan.
Ancestry [ edit ]I spent quite some time this morning going over some coursework problems with my second-year Physics class. It’s quite a big course – about 100 students take it – but I mark all the coursework myself so as to get a picture of what the students are finding easy and what difficult. After returning the marked scripts I then go through general matters arising with them, as well as making the solutions available on our on-line system called Learning Central.
Anyway, this morning I decided to devote quite a bit of time to some tips about how to tackle physics problems, not only in terms of how to solve them but also how to present the answer in an appropriate way.
I began with the Feynman algorithm for solving physics problems:
Write down the problem. Think very hard. Write down the answer.
That may seem either arrogant or facetious, or just a bit of a joke, but that’s really just the middle bit. Feynman’s advice on points 1 and 3 is absolutely spot on and worth repeating many times to an audience of physics students.
I’m a throwback to an older style of school education when the approach to solving unseen mathematical or scientific problems was emphasized much more than it is now. Nowadays much more detailed instructions are given in School examinations than in my day, often to the extent that students are only required to fill in blanks in a solution that has already been mapped out.
I find that many, particularly first-year, students struggle when confronted with a problem with nothing but a blank sheet of paper to write the solution on. The biggest problem we face in physics education, in my view, is not the lack of mathematical skill or background scientific knowledge needed to perform calculations, but a lack of experience of how to set the problem up in the first place and a consequent uncertainty about, or even fear of, how to start. I call this “blank paper syndrome”.
In this context, Feynman’s advice is the key to the first step of solving a problem. When I give tips to students I usually make the first step a bit more general, however. It’s important to read the question too.
The middle step is more difficult and often relies on flair or the ability to engage in lateral thinking, which some people do more easily than others, but that does not mean it can’t be nurtured. The key part is to look at what you wrote down in the first step, and then apply your little grey cells to teasing out – with the aid of your physics knowledge – things that can lead you to the answer, perhaps via some intermediate quantities not given directly in the question. This is the part where some students get stuck and what one often finds is an impenetrable jumble of mathematical symbols swirling around randomly on the page.
Everyone gets stuck sometimes, but you can do yourself a big favour by at least putting some words in amongst the algebra to explain what it is you were attempting to do. That way, even if you get it wrong, you can be given some credit for having an idea of what direction you were thinking of travelling.
The last of Feynman’s steps is also important. I lost count of the coursework attempts I marked this week in which the student got almost to the end, but didn’t finish with a clear statement of the answer to the question posed and just left a formula dangling. Perhaps it’s because the students might have forgotten what they started out trying to do, but it seems very curious to me to get so far into a solution without making absolutely sure you score the points. IHaving done all the hard work, you should learn to savour the finale in which you write “Therefore the answer is…” or “This proves the required result”. Scripts that don’t do this are like detective stories missing the last few pages in which the name of the murderer is finally revealed.
So, putting all these together, here are the three tips I gave to my undergraduate students this morning.
Read the question! Some solutions were to problems other than that which was posed. Make sure you read the question carefully. A good habit to get into is first to translate everything given in the question into mathematical form and define any variables you need right at the outset. Also drawing a diagram helps a lot in visualizing the situation, especially helping to elucidate any relevant symmetries. Remember to explain your reasoning when doing a mathematical solution. Sometimes it is very difficult to understand what you’re trying to do from the maths alone, which makes it difficult to give partial credit if you are trying to the right thing but just make, e.g., a sign error. Finish your solution appropriately by stating the answer clearly (and, where relevant, in correct units). Do not let your solution fizzle out – make sure the marker knows you have reached the end and that you have done what was requested.
There are other tips I might add – such as checking answers by doing the numerical parts at least twice on your calculator and thinking about whether the order-of-magnitude of the answer is physically reasonable – but these are minor compared to the overall strategy.
And another thing is not to be discouraged if you find physics problems difficult. Never give up without a fight. It’s only by trying difficult things that you can improve your ability by learning from your mistakes. It’s not the job of a physics lecturer to make physics seem easy but to encourage you to believe that you can do things that are difficult.
So anyway that’s my bit of “reflective practice” for the day. I’m sure there’ll be other folk reading this who have other tips for solving mathematical and scientific problems, in which case feel free to add them through the comments box.
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Focus Group, the Improvement Delivery Group, is composed of both Provincial Grand Masters and Grand Superintendents, with our Third Grand Principal, Gareth Jones, as its Deputy Chairman. It will be designing and delivering the future direction of both the Craft and Royal Arch.
Companions, you may have seen that, after my address at Quarterly Communications in June, I have been accused in the national media of suggesting that masons are all grumpy and boring – a misrepresentation, companions. At least I consider it to be a misrepresentation, but, if any of you think otherwise, I apologise. I said that if an amusing incident occurs at one of our meetings, it should not be frowned upon as had sometimes been the case in the past. It is not a capital offence to smile during meetings. Whilst I was not suggesting we should turn our meetings into a pantomime, there is no harm in us being seen to enjoy ourselves.
I believe this to be particularly so in the Royal Arch, as our Exaltation Ceremony is one of the finest and, in my experience, candidates derive great enjoyment from it. I think this is particularly so when the new format of the ritual is used which involves more of the companions and has the benefit of changing the voice that the candidate hears which I always feel refreshes his interest.
Finally, since Supreme Grand Chapter arranged the refurbishment of our magnificent organ, we have been treated to a number of superb concerts in this temple and I congratulate the Organ Committee on its achievements to date. I am very keen to draw your attention to the next concert at 5.00 pm, on 14th December, after the Quarterly Communication, to be given by the international concert artist, Jane Parker-Smith. The concerts are free, companions, and, so far, they have been wonderfully entertaining, and I am quite certain that this will be no exception.
Companions, I have no doubt that after our closing, you will enjoy listening to a team from the Royal College of Surgeons led by Professor Neil Mortensen, RCS Research Board Chairman at Oxford University, who will enlighten us on what has been achieved through your most generous support.
Thank you, companions.Relatives of victims mourn outside the remains of the collapsed factory building. Credit:Reuters Mr Rana was there again too. He reportedly told his workers of his factory: “It will stand for another 100 years”. They went inside and began work, sitting at rows of sewing machines making jeans and shirts and jackets for the US and Europe. Just after 9am, the eight-storey building collapsed without warning, all of it, save for the first floor, crashing in on itself. In some parts of the wreckage, slabs of concrete that formed different floors can be seen crushed up against each other, with no space in between.
The death toll stood at 160 on Thursday, but it will rise. Most of the dead are women. Some of the bodies recovered appear to be those of children. Up to 1600 people, alive or dead, are believed still trapped inside. Up to 6000 people worked in the building; it's estimated 2500 were inside when it fell. Worker Nurul Islam was injured in the collapse. “None of us wanted to go in. The bosses came after us with beating sticks. In the end we were forced to go in.” None of us wanted to go in. The bosses came after us with beating sticks. In the end we were forced to go in.
Mr Rana has not been seen since the collapse, though police have filed charges against him and his father, as owners of the building. Director of the industrial police Mostafizur Rahman said they disobeyed express orders to close. “The industrial police had asked the owners of the factories to suspend operations after cracks were noticed in Rana Plaza. We had asked them to operate the factories only after a structural inspection by... engineers,” he said. “But the factories' owners ignored our directives and decided to reopen their units on Wednesday.” Thursday was declared a national day of mourning by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. She has launched a formal investigation. Tens of thousands of garment workers took to the streets of Dhaka to protest their poor working conditions. They marched on the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association building, demanding the death penalty be handed to the owners of the Rana Plaza.
There may be political fallout for her from this collapse. Mr Rana is a well-known and influential convenor for her party, the Awami League. Bangladesh's poor face some of the most miserable working conditions in the world. The country's garment industry is a $20 billion industry, second in volume only to China's. Five thousand factories in the country employ an estimated 3.2 million people. But whereas the minimum wage in some Chinese provinces has grown to $200 a month, Bangladesh's remains stuck at 3000 taka, less than $37. Most garment factory employees work a 12-hour shift, 30 days a month. They have no sick pay, holidays, parental entitlements or superannuation. If they do not, or cannot, come to work, they do not get paid. The work is often lethally dangerous. Factories are shoddily-constructed and overcrowded, dimly-lit and with poor ventilation. Minor industrial accidents are common. So are major disasters.
In November a fire in the Tazreen Fashion factory in Dhaka killed 117 people, many of whom burned to death because the building had no emergency exits. Over the past decade, 700 workers have died in factory fires in Bangladesh. Attempts to improve working conditions are met with hostility from factory owners, many of whom foster close links with government or who are active politicians themselves. In April last year, Aminul Islam, a Bangladeshi labour leader, turned up dead on a roadside outside Dhaka, his body bearing the marks of torture. He had previously been abducted and tortured by domestic intelligence officials, who told him his advocacy for workers' rights and wages was hurting his country. Within the rubble of Rana Plaza, labour activists have found labels linking European retailers and American brands to the factory. Those brands have denied having manufacturing agreements with the garment producers at Rana or have not responded to inquiries from Fairfax. One British retailer of mostly cheap fashions, Primark, reportedly confirmed it was supplied by one of the businesses operating the factory, New Wave. Determining the ultimate destination of the clothes made at these factories is often difficult. Supply agreements are opaque, often even workers don't know for whom they are making clothes, because labels are stitched on later, elsewhere.
Tessel Pauli from the Clean Clothes Campaign said efforts at self-regulation by the companies involved in garment manufacturing in Bangladesh had failed utterly. “It's unbelievable that brands still refuse to sign a binding agreement with unions and labour groups to stop these unsafe working conditions from existing. Tragedy after tragedy shows that corporate-controlled monitoring is completely inadequate.” She said the families of those killed had been left even more vulnerable by this collapse. “They, and the hundreds injured in the collapse, are without income and without support. Immediate relief and long-term compensation must be provided by the brands who were sourcing from these factories, and responsibility taken for their lack of action to prevent this happening.” With agenciesIn January this year, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi launched an initiative to change the way India is lit up at night.
The initiative—called the National Programme for LED-based Home and Street Lighting—sought to increase India’s usage of LED (light emitting diode) lamps across homes and cities. The goal was to replace conventional lamps, which typically use more power.
LED lamps consume about 80% less energy than incandescent bulbs, and conserving power is imperative for the Indian government given the country’s annual power shortfall of 3.6%.
Under the new scheme, the government also wants to switch all the street lamps across 100 cities to LED lamps by May 2016. “It is far more economical to save power than to produce it,” Modi said during the launch. His government has allocated a budget of Rs 2,500 crore ($378 million) for this initiative.
Now, 10 months after the launch, the programme is finally showing results.
According to the Economic Times newspaper, the production of LED lamps in India has increased 30 times to 30 million units per month compared to last year. These lamps, the government believes, can save 100 billion KwH of electricity annually if they replace some 770 million conventional bulbs that India purchases annually.
LED bulbs have a better shelf life and last almost 50 times more than ordinary bulbs and eight to ten times longer than compact fluorescent lamps. But they are also more expensive.
The programme is led by Energy Efficiency Services Ltd (EESL), a joint venture between state-run firms: NTPC, Power Finance Corporation, Rural Electrification Corporation and Power Grid Corporation. Through EESL, the government procures LED bulbs through competitive bidding and then distributes them to consumers at cheaper rates. That has led to a massive drop in the market price of LED lamps.
With increased production of LED lamps over the past year, the per unit cost has also been brought down significantly, with a 7 Watt LED lamp costing just around Rs100 ($1.5) compared to Rs650 ($9.8) a year ago. An ordinary bulb, in comparison, costs only about Rs20.
“The consumer can obtain the bulb in two formats—upfront payment and on-bill finance scheme. The total cost of the LED bulb under the DELP (Domestic Efficient Lighting Programme) is between Rs100 and Rs105. If a consumer wishes to purchase the bulb through the on-bill financing option, they are required to pay only Rs10 for each bulb and the remaining Rs95 will be added to his/her electricity bill, spread over a duration of 10 months,” a spokesperson for EESL told the Business Line newspaper.
EESL did not respond to an emailed questionnaire from Quartz.
India’s power shortfall
These energy saving schemes will likely have an impact, albeit a small one initially, on India’s power crisis.
With an annual power shortfall of 3.6%, Asia’s third largest economy is in dire need of additional power to fuel its growth ambitions. And nobody knows that better than Modi. After all, his government had stormed to power in 2014, promising faster economic recovery and better infrastructure, especially in the power sector.
“The dream of my government is to provide electricity all seven days a week, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day to every village,” Modi said in August last year. To do that, the Indian prime minister has also banked heavily on renewable energy, especially solar power and has even set an ambitious target of generating 100 gigawatt of solar power by 2022.You really just have to love banana- they are kind of amazing; you can get them year round, you don’t have to cook them, they are sweet, delicious and come in their own biodegradable packaging!
Bananas are one of the best sources of potassium {ever get those dreaded leg cramps at night- yikes}. Since bananas contain a whopping 400-plus mg of potassium and only 1 mg of sodium, they may help prevent high blood pressure and build better bones. Throw them in the blender with some old-grain oats, yogurt, fat-free milk, and a touch a honey and cinnamon for a delicious and healthy way to start your day.
Banana Oatmeal Smoothie
Ingredients
1/4 cup old fashioned rolled oats
1/2 cup plain low-fat yogurt
1 banana, halved
1/2 cup fat-free milk
2 teaspoons honey
1/8 teaspoon cinnamon
Directions
In a blender, combine oats, yogurt, banana, fat-free milk, honey, and cinnamon; puree until smooth. Serve immediately.
Recipe adapted from Everyday Food, November 2008Story highlights Donald Trump leads the GOP field with 23% to 13% for both Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, a new poll shows
Marco Rubio is in fourth place at 9%, followed by Jeb Bush's 8% and Ted Cruz's 6%
Washington (CNN) Donald Trump's lead over the two other political newcomers in the Republican presidential pack is now at 10 percentage points, a new Suffolk University/USA Today poll shows.
The real estate mogul is the GOP's front-runner with 23% support nationally. That's ahead of Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, who tie for second with 13% backing.
Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Many people on the Internet decided that GOP candidate Donald Trump is the most expressive person running for president. Here's a look at his many facial expressions: Hide Caption 1 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump speaks about illegal immigration July 10 at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Hide Caption 2 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump speaks to guests gathered for a campaign event at the Grand River Center in Dubuque, Iowa, on August 25. Hide Caption 3 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump visits his Scottish golf course Turnberry on July 30. Hide Caption 4 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump speaks during a rally August 21 at Ladd-Peebles Stadium in Mobile, Alabama. Hide Caption 5 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump eats a pork chop on a stick while attending the Iowa State Fair on August 15. Hide Caption 6 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump flashes a thumbs-up as he arrives for the start of the first presidential debate August 6 in Cleveland. Hide Caption 7 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump participates in the Republican debate in Cleveland. Hide Caption 8 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump arrives for jury duty in New York on August 17. Hide Caption 9 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump walks his Turnberry golf course on July 30. Hide Caption 10 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump at Turnberry on July 30. Hide Caption 11 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump talks to the media in Laredo, Texas, during a trip to the Mexico border on July 23. Hide Caption 12 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump greets onlookers after taping an interview with Anderson Cooper at a Trump-owned building in New York on July 22. Hide Caption 13 of 14 Photos: The many facial expressions of Donald Trump Trump exits New York Supreme Court after jury duty on August 17. Hide Caption 14 of 14
Trump still holds a commanding lead over the GOP pack, far surpassing candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio. But the poll on Wednesday reflects that the businessman's level of support has retreated from earlier in the summer, when Trump hovered above 30% in several surveys.
Rubio is in fourth place at 9% with Bush just behind at 8%. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is in sixth place with 6% support.
They're the only candidates who appear to have picked up much traction at this point. Behind them, locked in a tie at 2%, are former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
Read MorePower Slave is a first-person, 3-D action game featuring the standard grunts, explosions, and gunshots players expect from any Doom clone. Taking on the role of the lone soldier, players are sent into an Egyptian city crawling with enemy forces. The mission: Exterminate said enemy infestation at all costs. Yawn.
Unfortunately (at least in the early missions), most of these "forces" consist of decidedly unscary spiders that strongly resemble those of the ancient arcade machine, Centipede. To break up the monotony, the player occasionally runs into an angry bird (which pecks away at his brain), and battles horned bad guys who live to sling blue fireballs at unauthorized personnel. Near the game's conclusion, however, the enemies become a little more interesting - but it's a long way getting there. Ultimately, think of this game as Doom with a plot (sort of), a few camels, and the proverbial mother lode of jumping spiders.
Graphically, Power Slave doesn't really break any new ground. While the surface textures are varied, they are mostly of the "Wow, another rock wall" variety. To be fair, the lighting effects are good, especially when enemy fireballs light up dark halls en route to blasting the player (you) upside the head. The only real additions to the Saturn-based Doom experience are the abilities to jump, look up, and look down. The many different weapons appear at about the right time (starting with a default sword and pistol, and culminating with machine guns and magical staffs), and if only for that reason the game is acceptably challenging. Not unlike Hexen on the PC, players must return to completed levels to find otherwise hidden doorways and passages, and it's not uncommon for a level to have four different exits leading to four different levels.
For those who've scorched through the bowels of Doom and Final Doom and burn for more, Power Slave might just quench that fire. Uninitiated Saturn owners, however, will want to let Power Slave pass on by - other first-person, 3-D action games provide a better bang for the buck.The entire 4th Circuit Court of Appeals said this morning that Christian invocations offered by the Rowan County Board of Commissioners in North Carolina are indeed unconstitutional. Their decision reversed a disastrous 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel on the Court last September.
It’s a tremendous victory for church/state separation.
The controversy began in 2012, when the ACLU of North Carolina warned the Commissioners about the problem with their prayers. The ACLU’s letter was ignored, so the group filed a lawsuit to stop the Christian prayers in March of 2013:
From November 5, 2007, through the present, nearly every Board meeting has featured a sectarian invocation. Specifically, 139 of 143 Board meetings opened with sectarian prayer during that time period. Put another way, 97% of Board meetings in the past five-and-a-half years have featured sectarian prayer.
Those sectarian prayers, like the Commissioners themselves, promoted Christianity.
So it wasn’t surprising when, in 2015, U.S. District Judge James Beaty Jr. ruled that the Commissioners violated the law and continued to do so every time they uttered a prayer to Jesus:
In the present matter, the Commissioners themselves — and only the Commissioners — delivered the prayers at the Board’s meetings. In contrast, the Town of Greece invited volunteers from a variety of religious faiths to provide the prayers. … Additionally, because of the prayer practice’s exclusive nature, that is, being delivered solely by the Commissioners, the prayer practice cannot be said to be nondiscriminatory. The need for the prayer policy to be nondiscriminatory was one of the characteristics key to the constitutionality of the Town of Greece’s practice… … That some day a believer in a minority faith could be elected does not remedy that until then, minority faiths have no means of being recognized.
That last bit was huge. The Commissioners argued that they weren’t breaking the law because anyone in their position could deliver an invocation… it just so happened that they all happened to be Christian. If Satanists or atheists wanted to deliver the invocation, all they had to do was get elected to the Board first. It would be different, by the Commissioners’ logic, if pastors were invited to give the prayers. That wasn’t the case, they argued, so everything was okay.
It wasn’t okay. Beaty’s ruling said their argument made no sense. This was essentially default Christian prayer by the government in a community where non-Christians couldn’t have their voices heard in the same way.
In July of 2016, the Commissioners voted unanimously to appeal the ruling — putting a lot of taxpayer money at stake — and it looked like it worked. Two of the three judges voted to overturn the lower court’s decision, reversing the ruling and effectively saying the legislative prayers were okay.
A divided panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision by a Greensboro federal judge and ruled that the mostly Christian invocation county leaders used to open their sessions did not violate the separation of church and state. … [Judges Steven] Agee and [Dennis] Shedd ruled, however, that the commissioners’ role was immaterial. In his majority opinion, Agee cited “a clear line of precedent not only upholding the practice of legislative prayer but acknowledging the ways in which it can bring together citizens of all backgrounds and encourage them to participate in the workings of their government.”
The dissent, written by an otherwise conservative justice, Harvie Wilkinson, was brutal — and exactly right:
The prayers, bordering at times on exhortation or proselytization, were uniformly sectarian, referencing one and only one faith though law by definition binds us all. I have seen nothing like it. This combination of legislators as the sole prayer-givers, official invitation for audience participation, consistently sectarian prayers referencing but a single faith, and the intimacy of a local governmental setting exceeds even a broad reading of Town of Greece. … No one disputes that localities enjoy considerable latitude in opening their meetings with invocations and prayers. But the legislative prayer practice here pushes every envelope.
And what about the argument that voters could just elect non-Christians if they wanted to hear non-Christian prayers? Wilkinson shot that down as well:
While a small group of legislators can diversify their appointment of prayer-givers at will, it may be more difficult to expect voters to elect representatives of minority religious faiths… Failure to pray in the name of the prevailing faith risks becoming a campaign issue or a tacit political debit, which in turn deters those of minority faiths from seeking office. It should not be so.
In short, if this ruling were adopted everywhere, it would result in local leaders ending inclusive invocation practices — bye bye, atheists — and adopting a policy that lets the almost-entirely-Christian group of legislators deliver their own Christian prayers at every meeting. It would be a wrecking ball against the wall of separation between church and state.
The ACLU responded by saying it would ask the entire 4th Circuit to do an en banc review, reconsidering the decision as a full court, and the Court agreed to hear it.
That decision finally came down this morning, and the full Court said that of course these pretty-much-only Christian prayers were an unconstitutional establishment of religion by the government.
The prayer practice served to identify the government with Christianity and risked conveying to citizens of minority faiths a message of exclusion. And because the commissioners were the exclusive prayer-givers, Rowan County’s invocation practice falls well outside the more inclusive, minister-oriented practice of legislative prayer described in Town of Greece. Indeed, if elected representatives invite their constituents to participate in prayers invoking a single faith for meeting upon meeting, year after year, it is difficult to imagine constitutional limits to sectarian prayer practice. … The principle at stake here may be a profound one, but it is also simple. The
Establishment Clause does not permit a seat of government to wrap itself in a single faith. But here elected officials took up a ministerial function and led the political community in prayers that communicated exclusivity, leaving members of minority faiths unwilling participants or discomforted observers to the sectarian exercises of a religion to which they did not subscribe. The solemn invocation of a single faith in so many meetings over so many years distanced adherents of other faiths from that representative government which affects the lives of all citizens and which Americans of every spiritual persuasion have every right to call their own.
Hard to drop a mic any harder than that.
The judges also rejected the bizarre idea that elections themselves could decide which prayers were said at meetings, especially when that decision was made by an exclusively Christian group of officials.
The commissioners effectively insulated themselves from requests to diversify prayer content. And we cannot overlook the fact that the decision to restrict the prayer opportunity to the commissioners was not made by the citizens of Rowan County or some disinterested group but perpetuated by the commissioners themselves — all of whom identify as Protestant Christian. … Further, allowing the county to restrict to one the number of faiths represented at Board meetings would warp our inclusive tradition of legislative prayer into a zero-sum game of competing religious factions. Our Constitution safeguards religious pluralism; it does not sanction activity which would take us “one step closer to a de facto religious litmus test for public office.”
The Court said it was up to Rowan County officials to decide a legal alternative, but what they’re doing right now can’t stand.
The reason this case even had to be heard at all is because Greece v. Galloway, they said, only dealt with invocations offered by citizens. It didn’t concern prayers by the elected officials themselves.
Remember: All Americans can already pray without being censored. But a government meeting isn’t the place to deliver sermons. The fact of the matter is that atheists, Satanists, and several other non-Christian groups would never have their beliefs promoted or mentioned during the invocation by the all-Christian Rowan County government. Unless those non-Christian faiths have the ability to deliver the invocations, this should always be considered a violation of the law.
It’s good to see the full Fourth Circuit saying just that. (It was a 10-5 ruling, in case you’re wondering.)
This wasn’t an anti-Christian decision, by the way. It was a ruling against a religious monopoly by elected officials when it came to invocations. Rowan County officials are still allowed to institute a policy that welcomes people of all faiths or no faith to deliver a prayer if they want to.
No word yet on whether this will be appealed to the Supreme Court, but I wouldn’t expect Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal group defending the County, to just accept the results when there’s plenty of good money to be made from donors by fighting back against this decision.
Stay tuned for reactions from all sides. We’ll update this post as they come in.
***Update***: The ACLU is thrilled with the victory:
“This ruling is a great victory for the rights of all residents to participate in their local government without fearing discrimination or being forced to join in prayers that go against their beliefs,” said ACLU of North Carolina Legal Director Chris Brook, who argued the case. “We are very pleased that the full Fourth Circuit has upheld a bedrock principle of the First Amendment: that government should not be in the business of promoting one set of religious beliefs over others.”
***Update 2***: Conservative group First Liberty Institute issued this statement suggesting an appeal to the Supreme Court is inevitable:
“While we are disappointed in the Fourth Circuit’s decision to ban invocations before legislative meetings contrary to Supreme Court precedent, we are encouraged that the split in the vote on the Fourth Circuit demonstrates the need for Supreme Court review on this issue,” said Mike Berry, Deputy General Counsel for First Liberty Institute.
***Update 3***: Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Brett Harvey says they will consider appealing to the Supreme Court:
“All Americans, including public servants, should have the freedom to pray without being censored, just as the Supreme Court found only three years ago. The First Amendment affirms the liberty of Americans to pray according to their consciences before public meetings. For that reason, a 4th Circuit panel last year rightly upheld Rowan County’s prayer policy, which is clearly constitutional. The county will consult with its legal counsel to consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review this case.”
***Update 4***: The Freedom From Religion Foundation is glad the Court reversed the earlier decision:
“We are overjoyed that the 4th Circuit gave a constitutionally correct ruling,” says FFRF Co-President Dan Barker. “With the Rowan County commissioners being so blatant in their violations, it could have been no other way.”
(via @HeatherWeaverDC. Large portions of this article were published earlier)Getty Images Copyright: Getty Images
Southampton manager Claude Puel is aware of the importance of a good result in their semi-final first leg.
“We have to try and make a strong game and get a good result to prepare well for the second game and still have a good possibility to qualify,” said Puel.“This first game at home is very important. I don’t know exactly what a good result will be, but we have to keep an opportunity for the second game."The Frenchman added: “We are ready for a strong game. I think the game against Liverpool in the Premier League was about a strong game in a defensive organisation.“I think we have to have good control of the game a little more with the ball and possibilities to create chances to score against this team.“It’s another game and it’s important to see this as a very good opportunity.”For a list of all the latest deals, check out the transfers page.
Chelsea are interested in Manchester United target Thomas Muller and see the Bayern Munich and Germany forward, 26, as a possible replacement for Spain striker Diego Costa, 27. (Daily Mirror)
Costa is expected to return to the Chelsea starting XI for the Premier League game against Bournemouth on Saturday despite making his frustrations clear at being dropped to the bench for the draw at Tottenham. (Guardian)
Chelsea are worried they will not be able to return on-loan striker Radamel Falcao, 29, to Monaco in January as the French side are reluctant to recall the Colombia international. (Daily Mail)
Daily Mirror back page
Manchester United midfielder Ander Herrera, 26, wants talks with manager Louis van Gaal after becoming disillusioned at Old Trafford. (Daily Star)
United's hopes of luring Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo back to Old Trafford have been boosted by his mother Dolores, who would prefer the 30-year-old to return to the club he left in 2009. (Daily Mirror)
Manager Arsene Wenger has revealed that in 2014 Arsenal just missed out on a deal to sign 19-year-old French winger Kingsley Coman, who is currently impressing on loan at Bayern Munich from Juventus. (Evening Standard)
Arsenal are lining up a £22m January bid for Porto's 18-year-old defensive midfielder Ruben Neves, as cover for the injured Francis Coquelin. (Sun)
Stoke's England goalkeeper Jack Butland is not for sale at any price, says Potters boss Mark Hughes. (Daily Star)
Manchester United, Juventus and Barcelona will compete to sign Basel's 18-year-old Switzerland forward Breel Embolo in January. (Tuttosport - in Italian)
Brazilian striker Neymar's Ballon d'Or nomination has earned former club Santos £1.4m as part of the deal that took the 23-year-old to Barcelona in 2013. (Daily Mail)
Southampton want to sign England Under-21 winger Solly March for about £7.5m from Championship side Brighton. (Daily Mirror)
Daily Star back page
Tottenham and Arsenal both want to sign Paris St-Germain's France Under-21 midfielder Adrien Rabiot, 20, in the January transfer window. (Buzzsport - in French)
Newcastle boss Steve McClaren will have to sell before he can buy any new players in January, despite the club's position in the relegation zone. (Daily Telegraph)
Manchester City's Argentine defender Martin Demichelis, 34, whose contract expires in the summer, is planning to discuss his future towards the end of the season, but is likely to return to his homeland to finish his career. (Manchester Evening News)
Chelsea defender Branislav Ivanovic has backed team-mate Diego Costa to come back stronger after the Spain striker was dropped for the first time this season for the Blues' goalless draw at Tottenham on Saturday. (Times - subscription required)
Santi Cazorla and Alexis Sanchez have yet to be ruled out of Arsenal's must-win Champions League tie against Olympiakos next week because the club have not received medical assessments on the pair. (London Evening Standard)
Porto's Spanish goalkeeper Iker Casillas, 34, has not ruled out finishing his career in Major League Soccer in the United States.(Marca)
Best of 5 live
Former Leicester midfielder Robbie Savage says Manchester United should sign striker Jamie Vardy, who broke the record for scoring in consecutive Premier League matches at the weekend. Speaking on the Monday Night Club, the former Wales international said: "If I was Manchester United I would buy Vardy. He would offer pace." Listen here
Former Aston Villa midfielder Lee Hendrie is worried about the club's future if they are relegated from the Premier League. Speaking on the Monday Night Club, he said: "That's my fear - if they go down this year I think they'll find it very hard to come back up." Listen here
Best of social media
The wife of Manchester United reserve goalkeeper Victor Valdes has claimed on Instagram that he was not invited to the club's Unicef Gala Dinner at Old Trafford on Sunday night.
Does Pablo Zabaleta know the Quo once recorded Manchester United's FA Cup final song?
Manchester City defender Pablo Zabaleta has met Status Quo at the Manchester Palace Theatre leg of their European Tour. City posted on Instagram: "Zab meets his musical heroes!"
Sergio Aguero had some reassurance for Manchester City fans by tweeting: "For everyone asking, I'm fine. It's just a harmless bump on the heel. Thanks, all of you, for the support!"
Former Liverpool skipper Steven Gerrard has been back at the club's Melwood training ground and the Reds were delighted to tell their Twitter followers, even including a video of the moment.
Liverpool midfielder Lucas Leiva posted an Instagram picture of himself training with the Gerrard, with the caption: "Good to have you back my friend."
Former Liverpool midfielder Dietmar Hamann answered a Twitter appeal from 10-year-old Archie Palmer, who wanted a Reds player to visit his friend Myles Hemsley, who has been diagnosed with Leukaemia, in hospital.
Dietmar Hamann visited Myles and Archie in hospital
And finally
France legend Zinedine Zidane was famously sent off for headbutting in the 2006 World Cup final against Italy and now his son, 17-year-old goalkeeper Luca, has suffered the same fate in Real Madrid's youth game against Atletico Madrid. (Sun)
Arsenal were unable to beat Norwich on Sunday but during the match their midfielder Santi Cazorla became the first person to complete 1,000 successful league passes this season. (London Evening Standard)BPA could be making kids fat. Or not.
That's the unsatisfying takeaway from the latest study on bisphenol A — the plastic additive that environmental groups have blamed for everything from ADHD to prostate disease.
Unfortunately, the science behind those allegations isn't so clear. And the new study on obesity in children and teens is no exception.
Researchers from New York University looked at BPA levels in the urine of more than 2,800 people aged 6 through 19. The team wanted to know whether those with relatively high levels of BPA were more likely to be obese.
But the results, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, didn't offer a simple answer to that question.
Among white kids and teens, higher BPA levels were associated with more than twice the risk of obesity. With black and Hispanic youth, though, BPA levels didn't make a difference.
"When we find an association like this, it can often raise more questions than it answers," says the study's lead author, Leonardo Trasande, an associate professor of pediatrics at New York University. There's no obvious reason why one group of kids would be affected by BPA while another group wouldn't, he says.
Also, there's no way in this study to know whether BPA is actually causing kids to put on weight, says Frederica Perera, who directs the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health. "Obese children may be simply eating and drinking foods that have higher BPA levels," she says.
And even if BPA is playing a role in weight gain, it may be just one of many chemicals involved, Perera says.
"Our center has recently published a study showing that exposure to another group of endocrine disruptors, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons or PAH, was associated with obesity in the children," Perera says. Those hydrocarbons are typically a part of air pollution in cities.
Some of the uncertainty about BPA may come because the researchers had no way of knowing how much exposure kids in the study may have had in the womb — the time many scientists believe chemical exposure is most likely to have a lifelong effect.
"Clearly we need a longer term study that examines exposure in the earliest parts of life," Trasande says. Even so, he says, it may be time to rethink childhood obesity.
"Diet and physical activity are still the leading factors driving the obesity epidemic in the United States," Trasande says. "Yet this study suggests that we need to also consider a third key component to the epidemic: environmental factors that may also contribute."
The study clearly does not answer the question many parents have, says Mike Dedekian, who runs the pediatric obesity clinic at the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital in Portland, Maine.
"Does BPA cause obesity? We don't know yet," he says. "Does this study raise our level of concern? Yes it does, and it means we need to go further in science to establish whether there is more to this than just an association."
Dedekian says in the meantime, he hopes parents will stay focused on how much exercise their kids are getting, and what they're eating.
Regulatory agencies seem to agree that the science on BPA is far from definitive.
The FDA banned BPA from sippy cups and baby bottles this summer, but only after the plastics industry requested the action as part of an effort to reassure consumers.
A few weeks earlier, the agency rejected a call by environmental groups to remove BPA from all products that come in contact with food, saying the evidence of harm just wasn't there.
Copyright NPR 2019.Court in Diyarbakir province orders to block access to Web pages showing French satirical magazine's latest cover with caricature of Prophet Muhammad
DIYARBAKIR - A court in Turkey's southeastern Diyarbakir province ordered Wednesday to block the access to Web pages showing Charlie Hebdo's latest cover of a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad.
"Pictures, cartoons, statements, writings, and publications aimed at humiliating the Prophet and religious values are accepted as an insult to those who believe in that religion," the court ruled.
The French satirical magazine reportedly increased its print run to five million copies on Wednesday after it rapidly sold out in France.
The cover depicts Prophet Muhammad in a white dress and shedding a tear, holding up a sign reading, “Je suis Charlie,” below the headline "All is forgiven."
Last Wednesday, 12 people were massacred in a gun attack in the Paris headquarters of the weekly.
Copyright © 2015 Anadolu AgencyRochester’s long winter is over and it is Food Truck Rodeo season |
Rights, Personal Safety, and Tolerance and Inclusion have eroded worldwide
The world’s most powerful countries have failed to make significant progress, putting the Sustainable Development Goals at stake
GDP is far from being the sole determinant of social progress
Michael Green, SPI's CEO, suggested that even as many of the world's least-developed nations continued to make strides, it was the backward slide and flat-lining of wealthy countries like the United States that should worry leaders in those countries.
"The US, the richest member of the G7 in terms of GDP per capita, is seriously underperforming to come in 18th in the world on social progress," Green said in a statement. "Lack of safety, school dropouts, and low life expectancy are part of the story but so too is a slump in performance on tolerance and inclusion since 2014."
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As Bloomberg notes in its reporting, "The results of the group's annual survey, which ranks nations based on 50 metrics, call to mind other reviews of national well-being, such as the World Happiness Report released in March, which was led by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland, or September’s Lancet study on sustainable development. In that one, Iceland, Singapore, Sweden, and the U.S. took spots 1, 2, 3, and 28—respectively."
The U.S. was put in the "second tier" of the report's overall ranking, Green explained to Bloomberg, for its failure "to address basic human needs, equip citizens to improve their quality of life, protect the environment, and provide opportunity for everyone to make personal choices and reach their full potential."
ANd Ben Schiller, writing for Fast Company, offers plenty of other reasons why the report might serve to humble those Americans who continue to claim the U.S. is unequivocally the greatest nation in the world.
"The U.S. consistently falls down on health and wellness indicators, and our relatively high levels of violence, including gun crime," he writes. "We rank 82nd for suicides, suggesting poor mental health, and 27th for life expectancy. Our overall health and wellness ranking puts us on par with Turkey, hardly a lofty honor."
Better luck next year.It’s early enough in my career that I still get a thrill whenever I see my work shared online. As a scholar who works in both film studies and digital humanities, I use public domain scientific image analysis software to create “sums” of films, adding together the frames of a film to make one single abstract image. Since 2013, I have shared hundreds of these on Tumblr, Twitter, and Flickr, and written about my process in both popular and scholarly venues. Last year, the circulation of my work on social media brought me some attention, and I was interviewed by the Huffington Post and invited to contribute to The Best American Infographics 2016. I did some custom work, gave some talks, and wrote some book chapters, and when the venerable British Film Institute posted a link to my work on Facebook, I pretty much thought I had arrived.
So, last month, when I happened to see a British gallery tweeting about my work, I was curious and excited to see the context. I wondered how they found me? What other artists would they mention as a frame of reference? I wondered if they would want to display any of my work?
But no. What I was seeing was an announcement for a show by Jason Shulman at Cob Gallery called Photographs of Films. The press and interviews collected on the gallery’s website lauded a conceptual beauty and rigor in his work, but the only thing I could see was a rip-off. “Email for price list.” These images were unmistakably similar to the distinctive work I had been producing for years, and it was not long before friends started writing to let me know.
I am embarrassed now to recall how unseemly it felt to write the gallery before the opening to let them know about the situation. I was imagining the great expense of running a posh gallery in London, the effort of publicity, the time spent producing and mounting work, and here I was asking them to reconsider running the show in its current state. But I thought there was no way that the gallery would have been aware of my work beforehand, and so I naively expected them to be properly horrified at the obvious similarities and to respond appropriately.
Instead, two days later, I received 575 words about copyright in 10 contradictory bullet points. I started to see more press and more publicity. Photographs from the gallery’s opening, with well-known actors in attendance, appeared. Filmmakers praised the work. “My” work appeared all over social media and, maddeningly, on a growing number of websites that I admired.
In the message she sent, the gallerist was arguing that regardless of appearance, if Shulman and I used a supposedly different process to create the same image, then by definition his work had to be substantially different from mine. The rhetorical move here was helpfully explained to me by a lawyer, who also explained that it would be a very expensive case without any real financial reward, and that the gallery likely knew that and would just do whatever they wanted to anyway. Although I never mentioned copyright in my email, I could easily see the line that was being drawn: if Shulman’s work was created in “a different way” than mine, then it would not violate copyright, and if it did not violate copyright, then the gallerist could see no reason not to continue the exhibition.
It was hard to respond to this. In interviews, Shulman is very coy about his process, which was the first thing that bothered me about the similarities between our work. In a write-up in Wired, we learn that “Shulman won’t share many details about his process, but says he photographs the films ‘off a very, very high resolution monitor with a very big camera.’” Unlike Shulman’s strange secrecy (his process actually sounds pretty simple), for me it is important to share both the intellectual context as well as the specific nuts-and-bolts of my process, so that others can make use of my work. In this way, sharing my method not only satisfies the most basic requirement of ethical participation in humanistic culture — citation and the acknowledgment of other artists — but also reflects an awareness of a scientific tradition of reproducibility and an intellectual commitment to sharing knowledge freely.
So, in discussing my work, I acknowledge visual artists whose work I have used as a conceptual base to expand my thinking about film, the digital, and duration, including Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Theaters from the mid 1970s onward, Jim Campbell’s Illuminated Averages series (2000), and Jason Salavon’s Portrait (2009/10). Independently, other bloggers confirmed my sense of this mini-canon, remarking on similarities between these figures and Shulman. For instance, responding to the press around Shulman’s show, Michael J. Wilson criticizes the particular erasure of Sugimoto, a well-known Japanese photographer often exhibited in London. Ron Kretsch more directly questioned Shulman’s Wizard of Oz by placing it side-by-side with a much earlier version by Campbell. Austin Kleon compared Shulman’s work to mine in the context of captions. Because this work is so conceptually specific, its forebears are all the more easily recognized, and there is more consequence in failing to acknowledge these predecessors.
Beyond the imperative to acknowledge previous work, I share my work and process in a scientific tradition of reproducibility. If these are ever going to be anything more than just pretty pictures — whether that means a scholarly use for media studies research or as transformative artistic work in a particular aesthetic tradition — then understanding what these images do and how they work is critical. This tradition of reproducibility does not mean that art must be like science: reductionist, experimental, or empirical. Rather, it means that processes underlying the work should be made available to others, so that others may likewise experiment, expand, and engage with my practice. This is a core value of the digital humanities, particularly the tradition of deformance (Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels), screwmeneutics (Stephen Ramsay), and weird DH (Mark Sample), all of which are centered on play and the use and reuse of other digital materials. While the art world has its own tradition of theft and attribution, as part of the broader humanities, the art world today confronts a crisis of intellectual property, commerce, and new forms of dissemination. In this new internet ecology, a gallerist staking a body of work on technicalities of copyright alone will no doubt find her endeavor doomed.
While I find these abstract images beautiful and engaging on their own, I also use them as a form of media historical research that I call “digital surrealism,” treating the abstract images in their own right in order to study media history. For example, by comparing larger groups of summed films we can ask new research questions about film genres, historical periods, or national cinemas. Have animated films gotten darker over time? How distinct is the color palette of western films? Does Asian cinema frame its characters differently than Hollywood cinema?
But because Shulman is ignorant of this tradition that examines cinema and duration, his work fails to contextualize motion pictures in a meaningful way or to engage with cinema itself beyond clichés, such as his claim that these images show how “lots of Bergman films are kind of moody and psychological, much more so than other films,” or his misguided metaphor that “each of these photographs is the genetic code of a film — its visual DNA,” a lazy description that makes me uncomfortable as both a film scholar and a movie lover. Having thought about these kinds of images very hard for years, I see in Shulman a distinct lack of that quality of reproducibility that allows for deeper engagement, a failure to recognize prior work or to place his work in any tradition other than the superficial.
All of which made the gallery’s copyright-centric response even more frustrating. The gallerist’s email to me prioritized copyright details over common sense, placing my work in a frame of legal niceties that diminished my contributions in order to argue for the singular nature of Shulman’s work: well, he doesn’t use the credits but you do; his colors are somehow truer to the original than yours; in fact, his process is quite different and clearly produces a different, superior result. Unable to even acknowledge any of the obvious similarities between our work, the gallerist closed with a curiously sincere request: “I would be grateful if you would confirm that, in view of the above, you have no complaint with regard to the exhibition and exploitation of Jason’s work.”
“The exhibition and exploitation of Jason’s work.” What strange words to describe the function and value of art.
As far as “exhibition” is concerned, social media, search engines, and online databases have transformed the way knowledge is shared, and numerous disciplines have worked to respond to this change. For example, the New York Public Library has focused recently on expanding its digital collections, encouraging unprecedented access to, engagement with, and remixing of its holdings. The Modern Language Association just released a new version of its style handbook that departs from its predecessor’s fetishism of citation minutiae in order to show how documenting sources is a crucial way to publicly record meaningful conversations in a changing digital world. The Brooklyn Museum’s new ASK app creates a “dynamic and responsive museum” where visitors can pose geolocated questions in real time to a team of art historians and educators. Institutions like these, curators of humanistic values and culture, are shifting to embrace open exhibition practices as a way to facilitate productive connections between individuals past and present. Isn’t it reasonable to expect an art gallery to do so as well?
As for “exploitation,” this runs counter to my intellectual commitment to sharing knowledge freely. I do not mean, in this case, that art should be given away, but rather that artists and their representation should be more conscious about exactly what they are exploiting and should question the durability of a model of art centered on exploiting artists (and, as a consequence, artists exploiting other artists). “Exploitation” here requires the Cob Gallery to see me and Shulman as mutually exclusive. Exploitation requires a definition of his work as singular, sui generis, allowing no comparisons. Exploitation demands silencing any suspicion that his work is derivative in any way.
I sent one more email to the gallerist, asking to be acknowledged and credited in their literature, appealing to their sense of artistic community. This, after all, is a space that describes itself as being “founded on the principle of creative collaboration, adhering to a culture of collaboration between artist and gallery.” My email read, in part:
Last, and beyond what our lawyers might say, I appeal to your sensibilities as gallerists. Jason’s work is clearly similar to mine, and I’ve been doing it much longer than him. I can appreciate your lawyer’s advice to focus on the legal distinctions, but you must recognize that this is dubiously similar work, without much distinguishing conceptual consideration. So, I’m asking to be fairly recognized as being associated with similar work. I would appreciate being mentioned in your literature in an appropriate way that gives me my due. My main interest is in getting credit and I’d like to work with both of you on the best way to provide attribution.
I received no response to my request. How naïve was I to expect one?
In my unsuccessful efforts to negotiate my concerns of plagiarism with the Cob Gallery before the opening, I discovered that the aims and principles behind my scholarly aesthetic practice are at odds with the reality of the commercial art world. Whereas citation, context, and conversation are important to my work and teaching, the gallerist responded to my complaint with narrow, technical details of copyright law in order to protect her interest in running the show. In doing so, the gallery sacrificed an opportunity to engage with my work or to contextualize its artist’s work in a larger field, missing precisely the values and practices an art gallery should perform in the face of digitally-produced and disseminated work like my own. Rather than “exhibition and exploitation,” I had hoped for conversation and collaboration. But for the gallery, that kind of conversation is incompatible with a privileging of exploitation as a mode for producing and disseminating art.
As a countermove that encourages others to better engage with the kind of work I make, I conclude with a description of how readers can easily create their own summed images.
Download the free, public domain software ImageJ.
Use Quicktime Player 7 or similar to create a folder of frames from a digital copy of a film (File / Export … and select “Movie to Image Sequence”). You can get good results using even only a frame every 2–3 seconds (try.15 fps to start). You may also want to size your window to 600 pixels to save processor speed.
In ImageJ: Select Import / Image Sequence and navigate to the proper folder. For this purpose, you can select “Use virtual stack” to speed up the process.
Once the folder of images is imported, select Image / Stacks / Z-Project. For “Projection type” select “sum slices” and hit “OK.”This blog post describes how for-await-of handles synchronous iterables. for-await-of is a core construct of asynchronous iteration. You can read up on it in the blog post “ES proposal: asynchronous iteration”.
Note: you can run the examples in Node.js 9.2+ via:
node --harmony-async-iteration
Refresher: asynchronous iterables #
Asynchronous iterables return asynchronous iterators, whose method next() returns Promises for {value, done} objects:
async function * asyncGen ( ) { yield 'a' ; yield 'b' ; } const iter = asyncGen()[ Symbol.asyncIterator](); iter.next().then( x => console.log(x)); iter.next().then( x => console.log(x)); iter.next().then( x => console.log(x));
Synchronous iterables and for-await-of #
Synchronous iterables return synchronous iterators, whose method next() returns {value, done} objects. for-await-of handles synchronous iterables by converting them to asynchronous iterables. Each iterated value is converted to a Promise (or left unchanged if it already is a Promise) via Promise.resolve(). That is, for-await-of works for iterables over Promises and over normal values. The conversion looks like this:
const nextResult = Promise.resolve(valueOrPromise).then( x => ({ value : x, done : false }));
Two more ways of looking at the conversion are:
Iterable<Promise<T>> becomes AsyncIterable<T>
The following object { value : Promise.resolve( 123 ), done : false } is converted to Promise.resolve({ value : 123, done : false })
Therefore, the following two statements are roughly similar.
for ( const x of await Promise.all(syncIterableOverPromises)); for await ( const x of syncIterableOverPromises);
The second statement is faster, because Promise.all() only creates the Promise for the Array after all Promises in syncIterableOverPromises are fulfilled. And for-of has to await that Promise. In contrast, for-await-of starts processing as soon as the first Promise is fulfilled.
for-await-of in action #
Iterating over a sync iterable over Promises:
async function main ( ) { const syncIterable = [ Promise.resolve( 'a' ), Promise.resolve( 'b' ), ]; for await ( const x of syncIterable) { console.log(x); } } main();
Iterating over a sync iterable over normal values:
async function main ( ) { for await ( const x of [ 'c', 'd' ]) { console.log(x); } } main();
Further reading #Story Highlights More than six in 10 say corporations, upper-income Americans pay too little
Views that middle-income earners pay too much have increased
14% say lower-income pay too little; down from high of 24% five years ago
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- As President Donald Trump and Republican leaders strategize about tax reform, the majority of U.S. adults believe that upper-income people and corporations are paying too little in taxes. In contrast, about half of Americans say middle- and lower-income people pay too much, while the other half says these groups are currently paying their fair share or are not paying enough.
Americans Say Upper-Income and Corporations Pay Too Little in Taxes Please tell me if you think these groups are paying their fair share in federal taxes, paying too much or paying too little? Fair share Too much Too little % % % Middle-income people 40 51 6 Lower-income people 35 48 14 Upper-income people 24 10 63 Corporations 19 9 67 Sorted by "fair share" Gallup, April 5-9, 2017
These results are based on Gallup's 2017 Economy and Finance survey, conducted April 5-9.
The view that middle-income people pay too much in taxes has been higher each of the past two years -- at just over 50% -- than at any point since the George W. Bush tax cuts went into effect in the early 2000s.
Because few Americans say middle-income individuals pay too little in taxes, the major changes over the years have been shifts between the "too much" and "fair share" categories.
When Gallup began asking this question in the 1990s, the "too much" viewpoint dominated. By 2003, after the first round of Bush tax cuts and the nation's increased focus on the war on terrorism, the percentage saying middle-income people paid too much fell significantly. At the same time, the perception that middle-income people's taxes were fair increased.
In 2014, the public once again showed more concern that middle-income taxpayers paid too much. Since then, Americans have continued to be more likely to say this group pays too much, rather than their fair share in taxes.
Half Say Lower-Income Pay Too Much
Americans' views of lower-income people's taxes are broadly similar to their views of taxes on those who are middle income. About half say both groups pay too much.
At the same time, Americans are more likely to believe lower-income people pay too little than say this about middle-income people. The belief that lower-income people pay too little in taxes rose from 10% in 2005, during the Bush administration, to as high as 24% during the Barack Obama administration in 2012 -- before dropping to 14% this year.
These shifts mainly reflect Republicans' shifting views. In 2005, 15% of Republicans said lower-income people pay too little in taxes. This rose to 40% by 2012, but fell back to 24% this year. Few Democrats have held the belief that lower-income people pay too little in taxes in any of these years.
More Than Six in 10 Say Upper-Income and Corporations Pay Too Little in Taxes
Slightly more than six in 10 Americans in recent years have consistently said that upper-income people pay too little in taxes. The view was even more widely held at points in the past, including in the early 1990s when three-quarters expressed this. This suggests that Trump faces a challenge in positioning or justifying tax reform efforts if they effectively end up lowering taxes for upper-income Americans.
Trump has also talked about lowering the tax rate on corporations. But two-thirds of Americans today say corporations pay too little in taxes, with less than one in 10 saying corporations pay too much. The public's attitudes about corporations' tax burden have been stable in recent years.
Implications
These findings provide insight into Americans' basic beliefs about the tax system at a time when tax reform is a major item on the legislative agenda. Other questions included in Gallup's April survey show that only about a third of Americans say their own personal tax burden is unfair, and roughly half say their taxes are too high.
This ends up as a quintessential "half empty or half full" situation. Clearly some Americans are dissatisfied with the tax system, both in terms of their perception of what others pay, and in terms of their assessments of their own tax situation. But no more than half of Americans are dissatisfied, leading to the conclusion that the need for relief from burdensome tax rates is, by no means, a universally held attitude.
Also, it is not clear how these basic beliefs about taxes may affect the public's acceptance of specific components of any tax plan that Trump will put forth in the future. For example, it appears that some of those who hold the view that middle-income people are paying their fair share could still support tax cuts for that group. Separate research shows that 61% of Americans agree with a proposal to significantly cut federal income taxes for the middle class.
A significant majority of Americans believe that upper-income people and corporations pay too little in taxes, supporting other research showing that well less than half of Americans -- 38% -- agree with a proposal to cut corporate income taxes, and that the majority favor heavier taxes on the rich.
These data are available in Gallup Analytics.TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan’s trade minister on Monday ruled out any economic cooperation with Russia that would undermine Group of Seven (G7) unity on sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014.
Japan's Minister of Trade and Industry Hiroshige Seko speaks at a news conference at Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's official residence in Tokyo, Japan August 3, 2016. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo
The minister, Hiroshige Seko, who holds the portfolio for economic cooperation with Russia, spelt out Japan’s position ahead of summit meetings on Thursday and Friday between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The two leaders will meet in Japan to discuss economic cooperation and a decades-old territorial dispute.
“We will never hurt G7 solidarity over the Ukraine issue. That’s a prerequisite,” Seko told a news conference.
“We are making sure each item in the current cooperation plan is not infringing on sanctions.”
The two sides have been working on about 30 projects, from medical technology to energy, but some Japanese companies have expressed concern about running afoul of the sanctions as well as Russia’s uncertain investment environment.
The United States, the European Union and Japan imposed the sanctions to punish Russia it after its 2014 annexation of Crimea, and some Western countries have been worried about Japan breaking ranks.
With the Russian economy hit hard by low oil prices and the sanctions, Abe is betting the lure of Japanese investment and his close ties with Putin could help advance talks on a territorial row that has soured relations between Japan and Russia since the end of World War Two.
The dispute over a string of windswept western Pacific islands, seized by Soviet troops at the end of the war, has precluded a formal peace treaty between the two countries.
Officials on both sides, however, have recently played down expectations of a breakthrough on the dispute this week.
Abe told a representative of elderly Japanese former residents of the islands on Monday that he was determined to resolve the issue.
“I will make an all-out effort to make progress on the territorial issue, even if it is just a step closer toward a solution,” he added, according to Kyodo news agency.
An opinion poll conducted by NHK public television on the weekend found that 74 percent of respondents said they did not expect progress on the issue at the meeting, while 11 percent said they did.My parental leave at my day job started last week. Waffle’s two weeks time off officially started this past weekend. Now we’re just waiting for Baby T. Rex and finishing up some household projects and doing chores and running errands and relaxing. The relaxing is the hard part.
My due date is this Saturday, August 20th. We’d love for Remi to come any time now. They’re pretty much fully cooked and we’re ready (or as close to ready as you can be). First time babies are more likely to come late than early, so we may have quite a while to wait, but then again, one-to-two weeks is…not that far in the future.
I’m feeling a bit wistful and nostalgic as I realize this is our last childfree time together as a couple. In the future, we may take grown-up only dates and vacations, but we’ll always be parents from here on out. Our family of two will be a family of three.
Every time we do something, it feels meaningful. Our last childfree grocery shopping trip. Our last childfree walk down by Ontario beach. Our last childfree 1:00 AM Taco Bell run. Our last childfree fill-up at the gas station. Our last childfree movie night. Our last childfree change of our bedsheets. The cat’s last nail trim. I’m snacking on hummus right now and it could be my last childfree hummus snack.
Every time I’ve spent time with my friends and family over the past month, it’s probably been the last time I’ll see them before we have Remi. I feel like I have to hug everyone and tell them I’ll see them on the other side.
It feels like that, like we’re standing behind a maroon velvet curtain on opening night and everything is about to begin as soon as the rope is pulled. Everything is building to this moment. The lights will go up and this new scene that we’ve practiced for but never performed live will begin.
We’ll walk on-stage, step into the light, and become different people. Just like that.
However, it doesn’t feel like our life before Remi was lacking or less-than or “backstage.” There’s also a feeling of sadness, of saying goodbye to our lovely life before parenthood. I’d always imagined myself being childfree forever. Waffle hadn’t thought about kids for quite a while, since he committed to being with me.
We’ve had a really rich 11 years, some excruciatingly awful times and some extraordinarily beautiful times. We’re only in our thirties, but it feels like we’ve grown through several life stages with each other already. We have. From messy (emotionally and physically) college undergraduates to gainfully employed grown-ups, from protesting George W. Bush’s second inauguration to rooting for Hillary Clinton, from my college dorm room to owning a four-bedroom house. We’ve had two cats, five rats, three guinea pigs, and two bunnies as housemates and companions.
We had the years of reckless and insatiable lust, the years of emotionally abusive fighting and breaking up and immaturity, the years of regrounding and redefining ourselves as individuals, the long stretch between then and now of deep friendship and affection and healthy communication and loving support. A decade isn’t that long, but between your 20’s and 30’s, it can feel like forever.
We’ve worked hard and we’ve been lucky and we’ve benefited from middle-class privilege that allowed us to get to where we are today. These last few years, especially, we’ve finally been able to rise slightly above living paycheck-to-paycheck. We’ve been able to have grown-up experiences together, like our shared obsession with immersive theater and the money and time spent on travel and tickets to see as much of it as we can afford. We aren’t rich and we’re still frugal, but we’re definitely not struggling.
We’ve been able to do a lot as a couple, had a lot of time to figure out who we are as individuals and as a two-person family, and the privilege of relative economic security to nurture all of that. I think because of that, we’re ready to nurture this new (and also expensive) thing called Baby T. Rex.
The biggest difference between being in a relationship and being a parent is that your first priority becomes someone else. In a relationship, ideally, you’re still prioritizing yourself. You may choose to care for and put the needs of your partner(s) or relationship over your own needs sometimes, but in a healthy relationship, you’re still your own #1, your own ride-or-die. When it comes down to it, you have to love yourself first so you can love your partner(s). And you can always leave. You can always walk out the door if your needs aren’t being met in your relationship anymore.
As a parent, you are committing to care for another person in a way that is, honestly, much more intense than a romantic partner. If things get tough (and they probably will), you’re still a part of your child’s life and family. You don’t get to leave. To me, that’s an unbreakable bond. I know that’s not always how it is. I know parents don’t always support their children or put their children’s needs first. I know a lot of children have to walk away from toxic parents. But I don’t want to be like that. I see this as a lifelong commitment, no matter what. I’ve never made a commitment like this to anyone before. As a commitment-phobe, it’s a little terrifying to think about.
Still, I think there’s a difference between putting your child’s needs first and putting yourself last. I don’t plan to put my whole life outside of parenthood on hold. I want to include and prioritize Remi in my life, not make them my whole life. I think that is part of being a parent, too, modeling a healthy sense of self-worth and making time for myself and for Waffle and me as a couple so that we’re the best parents we can be to Baby T.
Of course, the first few weeks and months are going to be fiercely overwhelming and Remi will be, to a large extent, the alpha and omega of my life. Between caring for them and trying to adjust to a post-baby life and squeezing in sleep, it’s going to be Baby T. Rex time all the time.
As they get older, I’m sure we’ll want to do more things that are family friendly and allocate our time and funds towards things that benefit Baby T. Squeezing in a date night or couple-only time will be less frequent. However, Waffle and I both want to still do things and have things in common as a couple so that our whole relationship doesn’t become solely about Remi. That would be a big burden to put on a kid and a great way to lose touch with each other as friends and partners.
For now, right now, everything kind of is about Baby T. Rex. Every day when we wake up, we think, “This could be our last childfree day.” We’re trying to enjoy it, but we can’t help but be anxious for Remi to get born already. We’re here. We’re waiting. We’re ready to welcome Remi into our arms and get this show started.
8 Random Baby-Making Things I’m Currently Over-Processing
1. Consensual Poking
One of my midwives suggested acupuncture as a way to get my body prepped and open for labor. I’d never received acupuncture before. I’m not particularly opposed to it, I just hadn’t had the need or made the time.
There’s a lovely little community acupuncture place near me that’s part of a national movement of acupuncture groups dedicated to providing affordable care in a group setting. There’s a sliding scale that allows almost anyone to enjoy care regardless of financial means.
It’s not as weird as it may sound. You receive treatment in a large, open, comfortable room where other people are also receiving treatment. Cell phones and talking is banned. Dim lights and peaceful music and soundscapes and large, comfy chairs make it a very peaceful and intimate environment, even though a stranger with needles in their arms and forehead is snoozing right next to you. The practitioner was very gentle and thoughtful about explaining everything she was doing since it was my first time.
Did it help open my oxytocin receptors? I don’t know. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being a total skeptic and 10 being a total believer, I’m about a 6 on natural medicine and health care. I can say it was enjoyable and I might go back again this week. It put me into a nice, deep sleep and I woke gently after about an hour, feeling refreshed. I don’t know that it helped augment my transition into labor, but it was a spectacular nap.
2. Hatching a Birth Plan
Our birth plan is finally on paper! It’s pretty straightforward stuff and only one page.
The largest section is dedicated to ensuring our birth team knows Waffle isn’t going to be called “mom” and trying to let them know that she/her and he/him pronouns are both appropriate without making a big deal out of it. Or inviting awkward questions we don’t want to deal with while I’m in labor.
Our doula read it over and assured us it wasn’t written in a rude way. The first draft was admittedly kind of bitchy. We just really don’t want people bugging Waffle with inappropriate questions while we’re focusing on delivering a human baby through my cervix and into the world!
We kept in the part that was like, “Please ask questions about how to refer to Waffle if you have them, but don’t ask questions about Waffle’s gender identity, transition status, health history, or anything not pertinent to our birth process.” KTHX.
3. Waffle’s Latest Obsessions: Board Books and Football Jerseys
Waffle has moved on to amassing cool board books and New York Giants baby gear. I’m totally on board with the board books. I’m a word nerd and all about a huge library for Remi and reading to them every damn day.
I honestly could care less about the American football stuff, in general. Technically, I grew up in a Buffalo Bills family, but I transitioned to the Giants for Waffle because…because I just don’t care all that much.
The Giants preseason just started and Waffle can’t wait to watch fall games with Remi. He’s hoping to indoctrinate them to be a Giants fan from Day One.
4. Searching for a Friendly Pediatrician
On the list of things to do since the last column was finding a pediatrician. We couldn’t find anyone who specifically advertised LGBTQ-inclusive pediatrics in our city, nor did any of our friends have recommendations specific to LGBTQ-inclusivity, so we just picked a place near us that was accepting new patients and crossed our fingers.
Waffle actually got called in to work the evening of our prenatal appointment, so I went by myself. After we went over the basics like hours, staffing, afterhours care, etc., I took a deep breath and asked the question. “Do you have experience with LGBTQ families?”
The doctor quickly replied that they do and that they have many LGBT patients and parents, as well as staff. I was relieved, but still unsure if “LGBT” really meant “lesbian and gay” or if they really did understand bi and trans health and families, too. Before I could ask, she brought up that their staff had all recently attended a training on transgender identity and healthcare issues. OK, good sign!
I brought up that Remi will call Waffle “dad” and Remi will know him by a different name than his legal name (though he’s also fine with using his legal name). I was trying to get through it as quickly as possible, as this part of the conversation is often confusing for people and I just want to get to the part where it’s like, “Here are the names and pronouns Waffle uses. Everything is cool.” It’s also awkward to have this convo when Waffle isn’t around to speak for himself, but this was something he wanted me to cover at the prenatal appointment and he couldn’t be there.
About two minutes into my cautious ramble, the doctor chimed in, “So he’s genderfluid?” and I was like, “Yes! Similar to that!” and it was a huge relief that she even knew the word genderfluid and was comfortable with the concept of non-binary people. She wrote in both of Waffle’s first names and pronouns at the top of our intake form. Then I asked if they treat trans youth and she said they do and are supportive of things like puberty blockers. It was set!
Hopefully, we like the practice once we start going there regularly, but I’m feeling optimistic. I left feeling like 2016 is a pretty great time to be a queer parent.
5. A Baby Book for Your Lil’ Queer Family
This baby book from BabyStepsBook that Waffle bought for Remi is pretty great at being inclusive. The cool thing about the designer who created and makes these books is that you can customize them for your family. You can get two mom pages or two dad pages or one page for a single parent. You can get pages for additional parents if you have more than two parents in your family. You can have the parent page customized to say “baba” or something gender neutral or whatever your kid will call you.
You can add pages for a donor or for adoption or IVF or a surrogate. You can order extra pages for pets and for human siblings. You can custom order pages for pretty much anything.
It’s not cheap because each book is |
The seeding of ice-shelf channels A–C at the grounding line means that their morphology can record grounding-line history as well as changes in sub-shelf melt plume dynamics as ice flow advects them towards the shelf front. At sites A and C, the surface ridges decay seawards to grade into the depressed surface of the ice-shelf channels downstream (Fig. 6) although we also find some isolated hills a few km downstream of the grounding line at both sites (e.g., Fig. 1b at location A2′). Ice-shelf channel A follows a streamline and extends to the ice-shelf front (Fig. 7a). About 45 km downstream of the grounding line, this channel is split by a surface ridge ∼10 km long and several hundred metres wide (Fig. 7b,c), which advects today and presumably has been advected to its present position from the grounding line. The advection time for its downstream end is 240 years and for its upstream end 175 years using present-day velocities28. We surveyed this ridge with ground-based radar. Cross-section R1–R1′ shows a basal channel directly under the ridge and a secondary basal channel laterally offset from it by ∼800 m. In contrast, cross-section R2–R2′ (farther upstream) shows a typical ice-shelf channel with a surface depression and a corresponding basal incision (Fig. 7d,e). We interpret these features as follows: More than 375 a ago, the ice-shelf channel was formed by a subglacial conduit exiting at the grounding line, which progressively developed a ramp-shaped esker and a local surface ridge there. About 240 ago, the surface ridge reached a critical height-to-width ratio, so that it was maintained in the ice shelf because bridging stresses prevent full relaxation to hydrostatic equilibrium18. Between 240 and 175 years ago, subglacial water had rerouted around the ramp-shaped esker and this is documented by the secondary basal channel in Fig. 7d. About 175 years ago, the surface ridge could no longer be supported mechanically on its landward end, perhaps due to a glacial outburst flood that eroded the esker. Other possibilities are that (1) subglacial drainage conditions changed in other ways to erode the esker more gradually or (2) changes in plume dynamics deepened and widened the ice-shelf channel sufficiently to eliminate the surface ridges. All scenarios considered here point to some past hydrological variability that is straightforwardly explained if the system involves an esker instead of other bedforms not closely related to subglacial conduit discharge.
In this interpretation, the surface ridges at sites A and C are currently below their critical threshold so they do not intrude far into the ice-shelf channels. But the isolated hills suggest that these ridges may soon be advected into the ice shelf. An end-member scenario is that the ramp-shaped esker at site A was completely removed by flooding 175 a ago and has since re-grown to its present size. This requires a sedimentation rate of ∼1.4 m a−1 as an upper limit, which is an order of magnitude higher than model estimates of sedimentation rates at melt-stream portals36. However, these estimates are geared towards ice-proximal fans and do not account for an upward-sloping bed interface, and critically depend on (unknown) subglacial sediment properties at the sites.
At site B, the basal disruption imaged by reflector B is offset from the surface ridge, and we lack ground-based radar data for examining its geometry along flow. In plan view, the corresponding ice-shelf channel is less developed compared to ice-shelf channels A and C and deviates from the ice-flow direction towards ice-shelf channel C. These observations suggest that the esker/conduit B began developing more recently and has been migrating eastward to reach its current position.
Numerous subglacial processes in scenario 3 require further investigation. Our mechanism for the formation of ramp-shaped eskers involves a reduction of water flow speed towards the grounding line, which has not been directly measured. Also, without access to the bed, we lack precise information about the current subglacial conduit arrangement and sediment transport regime on/near the eskers, which determine how their form continues to evolve. Since all three sites lack sediment sources on the surface, a negligible sediment delivery to the bed is expected from supraglacial melt-water streams17 even though melting is known to occur at the surface43.
It is noteworthy that our eskers are an order of magnitude larger than most eskers in deglaciated areas, which usually do not exceed 50 m in height44, although examples higher than 200 m exist45. Such difference may be explained by stability and preservation reasons, which consequently mean that the sizes of our eskers and deglaciated eskers are not directly comparable. As mentioned before, the ice flow and grounding line in the study area are thought to have been stable for millennia—such stability would promote the growth of large eskers. In contrast, eskers from the last-glacial record are often associated with retreating ice-sheet margins, which can limit their size. Moreover, our eskers are observed in situ in their formation environment, and confined by ice, which prevents sediment-flank slumping. If the grounding line retreats, rapid degradation by slumping and erosion would occur, especially as their sediments are probably weakly consolidated in the subaqueous environment; given enough time, a drastic height reduction is hence not inconceivable. These ideas seem to us consistent with the fragmented nature of esker networks from the Wisconsinan glaciation (e.g., Laurentide Ice Sheet), which typically consist of ridge segments with major gaps in between. Indeed, many of them may be the meagre remnant or core of originally much higher eskers.
Finally, the inferred ramp shape of our eskers has counterparts in the deglaciated landform record, notably eskers of type I–III described by Brennand15, which are thought to have formed by subaqueously terminating conduits. The Katahdin Esker in Maine, USA is a key example. It shows numerous ‘tadpole-shaped’ segments, each several km long, that increase in size in the drainage direction. Hooke17 explained their origin by the same mechanism as proposed here and interpreted the corresponding ice margins had been stable for centuries. Our prediction (from Fig. 8) that each ramp decays rapidly over kilometres also suggests that their high topography should be rarely observed as a fraction of total esker length.Early childhood development policies: The evidence and the research agenda
Orazio Attanasio, Sarah Cattan, Sonya Krutikova
The importance of investment in children’s pre-school years for their later life outcomes is increasingly recognised by policymakers. This column surveys the evidence on early childhood development policies in both developed and developing countries. Research suggests that effective education programmes can be implemented at scale even in low-income settings, but the quality of the service and adapting it to the local context are crucial. Sustaining the gains from intervention in the ‘early years’ is also likely to require continuing investment at later stages of childhood.
The importance of investment in children’s pre-school years for their later life outcomes is increasingly being recognised by policymakers around the world. A growing number of lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are planning or implementing early childhood policies. This flurry of activity has immense potential, but also brings with it substantial risks: if the returns to these new programmes do not quite meet the high expectations set by the returns that are often advertised, the hard-won political will and public support in this area may be lost again.
The recent rapid expansion of primary education across the developing world has shown that a focus on increasing access can bring many more children to school, but it will have disappointing effects on their attainment if it is not accompanied by sufficient investment to sustain quality. According to Young Lives, an international study following the lives of 12,000 children in poverty, despite having access to primary education, in 2006, over a quarter of the 12 year-olds in the study’s Peruvian and Indian samples and about a half of the 12 year-olds in the Ethiopian sample did not reach the ‘low international benchmark’ of having basic mathematical knowledge. This compares with 7% of 10 year-olds in the UK in 20031 (Singh 2014).
As low-income countries begin to invest more in early childhood development (ECD) policy, similar issues will undoubtedly arise. The government of Ethiopia, for example, has announced highly ambitious plans for the roll-out of pre-school from a gross enrolment rate of about 4.2% in 2008/09 to 80% by 2020 (Ethiopia Ministry of Education 2016). Ghana has already introduced two years of kindergarten into the state primary education system; and Rwanda recently launched a new strategic plan to improve access to pre-primary education over the next five years (Rwanda Ministry of Education 2013).
Why may we not see returns to these investments? Because implementing effective ECD policies is hard. The evidence shows that there have been some great successes, but equally there have been some failures and the jury is still out in many cases, especially on the issues of scaling up ECD interventions and sustaining early impacts.
Now is a crucial time to take stock of what we already know and to be clear about what we do not know. At the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), we have studied early childhood development and policies from the perspective of developed and developing countries. To consolidate the current state of knowledge and identify future directions for research, the Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies (EDePo) at the IFS and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) are organising a conference, “The early years: child well-being and the role of public policy”, which will bring together researchers working on ECD across disciplines and geographical regions (see http://www.ifs.org.uk/events/1289).
So what do our findings tell us so far and what questions remain?
Implementing ECD programmes at scale in low-income settings
The first lesson from the research evidence is that early childhood programmes shown to be effective at pilot stage, in carefully controlled environments and often using highly skilled professionals, can be effectively adapted for implementation at scale using locally available resources and infrastructure in low-income settings.
The best known and most widely studied ECD interventions – such as the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program (Heckman et al. 2010), the Abecedarian project (Barnett and Masse 2007) and the Jamaica project (Grantham-McGregor et al. 1991, Gertler et al. 2014) – achieved impressive improvements across key developmental domains in the short term, which translated into improvements in adult outcomes. But these programmes were implemented on very small scales and, with the exception of the Jamaica project, used highly skilled professionals.
In partnership with others, IFS researchers are generating some of the first evidence on the feasibility of implementing such programmes in LMIC settings at scale. In Colombia, for example, we adapted the Jamaican home-visitation model to the local context by training local female leaders involved in the administration of a national welfare programme to deliver the home visits. These visits are aimed at promoting children’s stimulation by encouraging mothers to teach skills and concepts in daily routine activities.
After 18 months of home visitation, children in the treatment group had significantly higher cognition and receptive language than the control group (Attanasio et al. 2015). To assess how large these gains are, we compare the average cognition of children in the control group and in the treated group at the end of the intervention with the cognition of children in the poorest and richest quartiles of Bogota (using the Bayley scale for cognition). As Figure 1 reveals, the magnitude of the improvements is striking and equivalent to closing over a third of the gap between children in the top and bottom wealth quartiles in Bogota.
Figure 1 Size of the impact of the Colombia home-visitation programme on child development relative to the developmental gap between children in the top and bottom wealth quartiles in Bogota (using Bailey scale to measure child development)
These results suggest that, at least in the short term, the implementation model for delivering stimulation works and may serve as a promising blueprint for future ECD policies; whether these will persist in the medium and long term remains to be seen. In the Colombian case, using socially prominent local women whom the community know and trust to deliver the intervention was crucial: on the one hand, it kept costs down; and on the other hand, it helped the communities take ownership of the intervention. This latter aspect is key for interventions that aim to change individual behaviour that is often based on entrenched beliefs and attitudes. The intervention piggy-backed on existing services to identify the ‘right’ individuals.
Going forward, it will be crucial to understand precisely how to adjust interventions in each context so that they can be delivered at scale in the most cost-effective manner. Important questions will include identifying what aspects of local institutions and personnel should be leveraged and whether there are cheaper models of delivery that can yield the same returns.
At IFS, we are starting to tackle these questions. In work in progress, we have adapted the home-visitation intervention we studied in Colombia to the Indian state of Orissa. We are using the infrastructure of a large well-established education NGO to implement the intervention, while at the same time testing the relative effectiveness of delivery in groups compared with individually at home. The group delivery model is clearly cheaper; whether it will yield bigger or smaller impacts is an open question.
These questions will be central to the EDePo/IDB conference. Sally Grantham-McGregor will take stock of learning on these questions from over 40 years of experience designing, implementing and evaluating parenting programmes in LMIC settings. Caridad Araujo will present the first results of a large-scale intervention in Peru, where the government has been scaling up the Colombian model of delivery.
Ensuring quality service provision for ECD policy effectiveness
The second lesson from the research evidence is that the quality of the service delivered in early childhood programmes is crucial for their effectiveness.
Despite the widely cited high returns to programmes such as Perry Preschool and the high impacts reported in descriptive studies of pre-school effects in developing countries (e.g. Woldehanna and Gebremedhin 2012), the evidence on universal pre-school programmes is in fact very mixed. For example, recent work on the large-scale expansion of free (or highly subsidised) pre-school education in the UK and Quebec shows few effects on child development (Blanden et al. 2016, Baker et al. 2008); the few studies of LMICs also show mixed results with examples of both positive and null (at times negative) effects on child development and health (Berlinski et al. 2009, Bernal and Fernandez 2013, Rosero and Oosterbeek 2011).
The reasons behind the small, if at all existent, effects of these large-scale programmes are not fully understood, but one of the most plausible hypotheses is that the quality of these programmes was diluted with their wide expansion. Indeed, a persistent finding across contexts is that quality of the children’s pedagogical experience really matters. Just as in the schooling literature, there is little evidence of significant impacts of structural quality (physical infrastructure, quality of furnishings and space) on learning, so for pre-school education, well equipped buildings and lower child-teacher ratios alone do not seem to be enough (Hanushek and Rivkin 2012).
Our work in progress in Colombia supports these findings: an evaluation of a government programme to transform parental family day-care units into large childcare centres of higher structural quality shows no impacts on child developmental outcomes (Bernal et al. 2016).
At the EDePo/IDB conference, we will hear further about the substantial impacts that a high quality childcare programme can achieve in LMIC settings from Raquel Bernal and about the relative merits of investing in material and human resources available to pre-schools versus pedagogical training from Sonya Krutikova. While evidence suggesting that quality is essential is mounting, we still have a limited understanding of what exactly are the key ingredients for childcare quality, especially in application to centre-based care. A promising avenue is the use of innovative measures of teaching style and interactions between parents/teachers and children that capture multiple dimensions of quality. Steps in this direction have recently been made in a number of studies represented at the conference in presentations by Yyannú Cruz-Aguayo and Flavio Cunha.
Adapting programmes to the local context
The third lesson from the research evidence is that scalable early childhood programmes need a well-defined fully specified curriculum and implementation methodology adapted to the local context.
At the pilot stage, interventions delivered by highly trained professionals can and should allow for flexibility to enable them to exercise their expertise in tailoring the curriculum to the needs of the child. But when scaling up programmes by drawing on local material and human resources, implementers are often no longer professionals with expertise in child development and it is necessary to adjust the intervention in a way that maximises fidelity to the original model.
Our experience suggests that a detailed, structured and easy-to-follow curriculum and implementation guidelines are crucial. In the Colombian home-visitation intervention, for example, the curriculum prescribed specific activities for each week and included specific instructions in simple language to match activities to the child’s age and level of development (Attanasio et al. 2015).
The challenge is to develop this curriculum in a way that allows for sufficient flexibility to suit children of different development levels, but at the time ensures that every child benefits from its key elements and a well-structured learning programme. If adapting interventions from other contexts, an essential ingredient is that the agencies and personnel tasked with adapting the programme not only have knowledge of local culture and parenting practices, but also understand and respect the underlying philosophy of the interventions. In addition, it is essential that any teaching material is adapted to the level of those who will be implementing it and that in contexts where these individuals have low levels of education and expertise in child development, robust systems of supervision and monitoring are in place.
At the EDePo/IDB conference, Sally Grantham-McGregor will share her wealth of experience in adapting home-visiting curricula for implementation in various LMIC contexts. Hiro Yoshikawa will present a detailed study of implementation of an ambitious programme to improve the quality of pre-school provision in Chile: this is a good example of the challenges associated with maintaining fidelity in centre-based ECD programmes at scale.
Sustaining the gains from early intervention
The final lesson from the research evidence is that sustaining gains from early interventions is likely to require continuing investment at later childhood stages.
Our work on the dynamics of disadvantage suggests not only that developmental delays among disadvantaged children can be detected as early as 12 months (Rubio-Codina et al. 2015), but also that what happens at each stage of childhood matters.
Figure 2 shows evidence from work in progress by Krutikova and Singh. We use the Young Lives data with repeated observations on the same children to relate achievement in mathematics at age 12 to that at age 5 using non-parametric plots (Figure 2), separately for children in the lowest and highest quartiles (blue and red lines in Figure 2 respectively). The results show that even when disadvantaged children have the same mathematics skills as better off children at age 5, new gaps as large as 1.5 standard deviations open up by age 12. The picture looks very similar between the ages of 12 and 15, as well as when using measures of receptive vocabulary.
Figure 2 Evolution of gaps in quantitative skills of children in the top and bottom wealth quartiles between the ages of 5 and 12 across four LMICs. Lines are local polynomial smoothed lines plotted separately for children in the top and bottom wealth quartiles with 95% confidence bands
This may in part explain the commonly found fade-out of early childhood intervention effects (at least in the domains for which they are initially observed) and suggests that optimal childhood intervention may be a multi-stage process. Indeed, as emphasised in the literature, sustaining any gains achieved from early interventions, even in the case of the pilot studies, can be tricky. We observe many cases in which early impacts fade out, sometimes to reappear later on, possibly in different domains (see overview by Bailey et al. 2015).
To understand the fade-out of early childhood intervention effects, it is crucial to build a better understanding of:
How different skills develop over the course of childhood, how development in one domain affects that in the others and how interventions can be designed to reinforce this process; and
How the main actors – parents and pre-school teachers/headmasters – make decisions about how they invest in children.
This knowledge will help us understand how interventions can be designed to change these behaviours sustainably and how interventions over different phases of the life cycle of children (home visits, centre-based care) interact and should be integrated.
Future work at IFS will explore the complementarities between early childhood home stimulation programmes and subsequent pre-school interventions and how early to intervene so that all children start school on a level playing field. Some of these questions will be addressed at the EDePo/IDB conference: Karen Macours and Costas Meghir will speak about the specific mechanisms underlying the effects of parenting programmes in different contexts; while Pedro Carneiro will discuss a study of a group administered parenting programme in Chile that explores specific mechanisms for sustaining impacts over the medium run.
References
Attanasio, O, C Fernandez, E Fitzsimons, S Grantham-McGregor, C Meghir, and M. Rubio-Codina (2014), ‘Using the Infrastructure of a Conditional Cash Transfer Programme to Deliver a Scalable Integrated Early Child Development Programme in Colombia: A Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial’, British Medical Journal 349:g5785
Bailey, D, GJ Duncan, C Odgers, and W Yu (2015), ‘Persistence and Fadeout in the Impacts of Child and Adolescent Interventions’, Life Course Centre Working Paper Series No. 2015-27.
Baker, M, J Gruber, and K Milligan (2008), ‘Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply and Family Well-being’, Journal of Political Economy 116(4): 709-45.
Berlinski, S, S Galiani, and P Gertler (2009), ‘The Effect of Pre-primary Education on Primary School Performance’, Journal of Public Economics 93(1-2): 219-34.
Barnett, W, and N Masse (2007), ‘Comparative Benefit-cost Analysis of the Abecedarian Program and its Policy Implications’, Economics of Education Review 26(1): 113-25.
Bernal, R, and C Fernández (2013), ‘Subsidized Childcare and Child Development in Colombia: Effects of Hogares Comunitarios de Bienestar as a Function of Timing and Length of Exposure’, Social Science and Medicine 97: 241-49.
Bernal, R, O Attanasio, X Pena, and M Vera-Hernandez (2016), ‘The Effects of the Transition from Home-based Community Nurseries to Childcare Centers on Children in Colombia’, mimeo.
Blanden, J, E Del Bono, S McNally, and B Rabe (2016), ‘Universal Pre-school Education: The Case of Public Funding with Private Provision’, Economic Journal 126: 682-723.
Ethiopia Ministry of Education (2016), ‘Education Sector Development Programme V: 2015/16-2019/20’, Addis Ababa.
Gertler, P, J Heckman, R Pinto, A Zanolini, C Vermeerch, S Walker, S Chang, and S Grantham-McGregor (2014), ‘Labor Market Returns to an Early Childhood Stimulation Intervention in Jamaica’, Science 344(6187): 998-1001.
Grantham-McGregor, S, C Powell, S Walker, and J Himes (1991), ‘Nutritional Supplementation, Psychosocial Stimulation, and Mental Development of Stunted Children: The Jamaican Study’ The Lancet 338(8758): 1-5.
Hanushek, E, and S Rivkin, (2012), ‘The Distribution of Teacher Quality and Implications for Policy’, Annual Review of Economics 4: 131-57.
Heckman, J, S Moon, R Pinto, P Savelyev, and A Yavitz (2010), ‘The Rate of Return to the High Scope Perry Preschool Program’, Journal of Public Economics 94: 114-28.
Rwanda Ministry of Education (2013), ‘Education Sector Strategic Plan 2013/14-2017/18’, Kigali.
Rosero, J and H Oosterbeek (2011), ‘Trade-offs between Different Early Childhood Interventions: Evidence from Ecuador’, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper No. 102/3.
Rubio-Codina, M, O Attanasio, C Meghir, N Varela, and S Grantham-McGregor (2015), ‘The Socio-economic Gradient of Child Development: Cross sectional Evidence from Children 6-42 months in Bogota’, Journal of Human Resources 50(2): 464-83.
Singh, A (2014), ‘Emergence and Evolution of Learning Gaps across Countries: Panel Evidence from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam’, Young Lives Working Paper No. 124.
Woldehanna, T, and L Gebremedhin (2012), ‘The Effects of Pre-school Attendance on the Cognitive Development of Urban Children aged 5 and 8 Years: Evidence from Ethiopia’, Young Lives Working Paper No. 89.
Endnotes
[1] It should be noted though that the Young Lives samples are pro-poor while the UK one is not.As coal-fired plants have vanished from its landscape, renewable energy has taken off in a big way in Ontario, Canada's most populous province.
A wind turbine in Toronto contributes to Ontario's record renewable energy generation.
CleanTechnica reports that, with 2,312 megawatts (MW) of wind power, 4,091 MW of hydro and 159 MW from other sources, renewables hit 35 percent of all the energy going into the grid one day this week. That amount will vary, of course, depending on how windy it is on a given day.
CleanTechnica also pointed to a number of projects in development, with wind leading the the way which, when completed, would produce a total of almost 5,000 MW of new renewable energy. Together with existing sources, they could meet almost half the province's demand.
The surge was undoubtedly pushed by Ontario's aggressive drive to eliminate coal-fired power plants. Its Nanticoke Generating Station, the largest in North America and Canada's largest source of greenhouse emissions, closed last year. The Thunder Bay Power Station, its last coal-burning plant, closed in April, making the province entirely coal-free. It was ahead of its target by nearly eight months. And it was ahead of a goal of 2015 announced in 2002 by over a year.
"Ontario is now the first jurisdiction in North America to fully eliminate coal as a source of electricity generation," a press release from its Ministry of Energy said when Thunder Bay closed.
"The plant is scheduled to be converted to burn advanced biomass, a renewable fuel source. The province has replaced coal generation with a mix of emission-free electricity sources like nuclear, waterpower, wind and solar, along with lower-emission electricity sources like natural gas and biomass. A coal-free electricity supply mix has led to a significant reduction in harmful emissions, as well as cleaner air and a healthier environment."
Since 2003, according to the ministry, its coal closure plan has eliminated 30 megatonnes of emissions from Ontario's environment.
“Getting off coal is the single largest climate change initiative undertaken in North America and is equivalent to taking up to seven million cars off the road," said Ontario Minister of Energy Bob Chiarelli in announcing the closure.
"Today we celebrate a cleaner future for our children and grandchildren while embracing the environmental benefits that our cleaner energy sources will bring.”
When legislation was announced last November to permanently ban coal, the province's Minister of the Environment Jim Bradley said, “Coal-fired electricity generation is a major source of health-threatening smog, and of climate-destabilizing carbon dioxide. Our proposed legislation will ensure that dirty coal-fired electricity remains a practice of the past.”
Nuclear energy remains the biggest source of power generation in the province.
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Did Canada Just Have the Largest Coal Slurry Spill in Its History?When The Economist declared ten years ago that Canada was “cool”, with its mix of social liberalism and fiscal rectitude, it was a startling idea. A country whose constitution soberly calls for “peace, order and good government” was portrayed as a moose wearing sunglasses. Then came the fiscal crisis and there were the Canadians again, with a rock-star central banker strutting the world stage because Canada’s banks stood firm while those elsewhere tumbled down.
Sadly, in 2014 Canada will revert to type, and not just because Mark Carney has left to head the Bank of England. The United States and others are emerging from the financial crisis and will outpace Canada economically. And the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper will focus on entrenching (before the 2015 general election) policies that are decidedly uncool, such as promoting exports from Alberta’s tar sands while doing the minimum on climate change, and backtracking on the social liberalism that The Economist found so refreshing a decade ago.
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If Canada is exciting at all in 2014 it will be for the wrong reasons. With household debt and house prices at record levels and mortgage rates creeping up, a housing crash is the biggest domestic risk facing the economy.
Among the policies deemed praiseworthy in 2003 was a bill to decriminalise cannabis (which was never passed). It was a radical idea at the time, but since then two American states have gone much further, legalising the production, sale and recreational use of the drug. Uruguay is poised to do the same. Mr Harper’s reaction to a call by Justin Trudeau to legalise it—he accused the Liberal leader of “promoting marijuana use for our children”—made it clear that Canada would not be loosening the rules soon. His government has introduced mandatory, six-month jail sentences for possession of as few as six pot plants and in April will make growing medical marijuana at home illegal.
Canada’s approach to indigenous peoples, granting them home rule and control over mineral rights, also won praise ten years ago for boldness in social matters. The relationship between the government and aboriginal Canadians (First Nations, Métis and Inuit) has soured since, with many disputes about resource development on traditional aboriginal lands and a growing anger over deplorable living conditions on some reserves. Most take place before the courts, but the mounting pressure could easily find a more violent outlet in the coming year.
If Canada is exciting at all in 2014 it will be for the wrong reasons
Canada’s reputation for welcoming immigrants and celebrating cultural diversity, another part of the cool factor, got a knock in 2013 when the separatist government of Quebec, the second-most-populous province, proposed banning public workers from wearing “conspicuous” religious symbols such as headscarves, turbans or large crucifixes (small ones are fine). At the national level, long-overdue reforms to the immigration system got rid of some kinks. But there were casualties. Parents and grandparents wanting to join their relatives in Canada were told in late 2011 they could not apply for visas because of a backlog. Applications reopen on January 2nd 2014, but it will cost sponsoring families more than before and they will be on the hook for longer. In a bid to save C$100m ($97m) over five years, the government drastically cut refugees’ health-care entitlements in 2012. If protesting doctors are right, this is a short-sighted move that will give Canada a reputation for picking on the most vulnerable.
2014 IN BRIEF: Canada marks the 150th anniversary of the Charlottetown Conference, which paved the way for the founding of the country
Federal-budget deficits and a separatist Parti Québécois government in Quebec have reappeared since 2003. And the claim made then of better environmental protection than in the United States is now debatable. To protect the oil industry the government has dragged its feet on reducing carbon emissions. That has made it harder to win American approval of the Keystone XL pipeline planned to carry tar-sands bitumen across the border.
Some of the problems noted in 2003 have been tackled. The federal corporate-tax rate has plummeted to 15% from 22.1% in 2007; business investment has increased; and defence spending soared for a while. Canada also has a cool new trade deal with the European Union. It is still a peaceful, multicultural place—even in Quebec—and its economy is solid if not spectacular. Mr Carney had a lot of nice things to say in his last speech as governor of the Bank of Canada, entitled “Canada Works”. But now he intends to apply for British citizenship.
Madelaine Drohan: Canada correspondent, The EconomistDemocratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign event in Eau Claire in April. (Photo: Mary Altaffer/AP)
EAU CLAIRE - Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton said she is "disheartened" to see conservative policies advance in Wisconsin under Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
"But there was something else I learned as I got older, how Wisconsin was such a pioneer, a pioneer in making progress on behalf of working people, a pioneer in an idea... Wisconsin understood before most of rest of country did that economy and higher education were linked," Clinton told a crowd of more than 800 at the Lismore Hotel in Eau Claire.
"I admire that," she added. "(I’m) disheartened to see the dismantling of so many pieces of what made Wisconsin not just a great state to live in and a great state to work in, but an example for so many others.”
Clinton's Democratic opponent, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was also in Eau Claire Saturday for a rally on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire campus.
Clinton would campaign for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate to take the governor's office in 2018, when Walker's second term is up, she added.
Walker has told reporters he has not decided whether to run for a third term as governor.
Clinton has crossed the state for events in Green Bay, La Crosse, Madison and Milwaukee this week. Her husband, former president Bill Clinton, campaigned for her in Appleton Friday morning and will campaign for her again in Milwaukee on Monday.
She spent Wednesday and Thursday campaigning in New York, ahead of that state's April 19 primary. Both she and Sanders have a connection to New York, Clinton as a senator and Sanders as a Brooklyn native.
During her Eau Claire stop, Clinton hit Sanders for his free college tuition plan, saying she's not willing to let taxpayers pay for the college of wealthy Americans.
Sanders' plan would have the federal government match state government funding for university tuition for in-state students 2-1. Clinton said getting state governors like Walker to buy into that plan wouldn't work, as Walker made cuts to the University of Wisconsin System in the last budget.
"That would be like a death bed conversion," she joked to the crowd. "I'm not convinced that's going to happen."
She also argued she's the best-positioned candidate to take on a Republican in the general election.
“(Republicans) have been after me a really long time, and it drives them crazy, but I'm still standing” Hillary Clinton
"(Republicans) have been after me a really long time, and it drives them crazy, but I'm still standing," she said to cheers from the crowd.
Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and state Rep. Dana Wachs, D-Eau Claire, came to support Clinton. Baldwin introduced Clinton to the crowd and stood behind her as she spoke to the group.
"We work hard, we play hard, we expect that work will be rewarded, not just wealth," Baldwin said about Wisconsin voters. "Yet, we have seen some enormous battles in our state and some incredible threats to the things we value, the things we love here.
"And I say to you in Wisconsin, who care so deeply about this state, we would have no better ally in the White House as we build and reverse some of the damage that's been done than Hillary Clinton."
People started lining up about 9:30 a.m. Saturday outside the hotel. The event required an overflow room, and some had to be turned away.
Many Clinton supporters who spoke to USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin said they favored Clinton over Sanders because Sanders ideas are too pie-in-the-sky to be achieved.
"I just don't think he's realistic," said Christina Hupy, an Eau Claire resident, who went to the Clinton rally at the request of her 8-year-old daughter, Katya.
"She might be the first girl president," added Katya.
Sanders's rhetoric "is a little old at this point," said Reed White, a UW-Eau Claire political science major. "And she's the best choice against Trump. Once they're on a debate stage together, we'll see how weak his ideas are."
White went to the rally alongside friends Denise Bustamante and Anna Schwanebeck from the College Democrats club at UW-Eau Claire.
His support of Clinton is not because he doesn't like Sanders ideas, White said. Sanders is just too ambitious and not practical enough.
Schwanebeck told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin that she was most concerned with Sanders not being a lifelong Democrat. Sanders has been an independent in the Senate, but has often caucused with Democrats.
"Sen. Sanders doesn't have a history of working with the Democratic party," she said. "(Clinton) has been doing it her whole life. She cares about all Democrats down-ballot."
Sanders is qualified for the job, Jeremy Hundt of Eau Claire said, but his proposals like free college tuition are not realistic.
"Sanders is not practical," Hundt, 40, said. "If we're looking at reality, we need more moderate plans. And you (pass moderate plans) by getting bipartisan support, which (Hillary) can do."
"I've always been supportive of her and have admiration for her," he said. "She's very knowledgeable, intelligent, and she's done her homework. It's a lot more than I can say for the other candidates."
Following her afternoon appearance in Eau Claire, Clinton was to attend a state Democratic Party event with Sanders on Saturday night in Milwaukee. Other attendees include Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore, Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, Wisconsin Senate candidate Russ Feingold and Baldwin.
Madeleine Behr: 920- |
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