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We'll be dropping musical classic throughout the night for you to sing your hearts out too and back by popular demand.... We will be opening the BASEMENT for 2 rooms of dancing delights!
That's right kids... It's a new year and I'm getting older so why not throw the biggest, dirtiest, most outragous a house party to celebrate!
Same-sex marriage is an idea whose time has come. It is the growing trend all over the world, from Canada to South Africa and Argentina.
Why can't we have marriage equality in Britain too?
Political support for ending the ban on gay marriage is growing rapidly. London Mayor, Boris Johnson, and Conservative Party Vice-Chair, Margot James MP, have both come out in favour of allowing lesbian and gay couples to marry in a registry office, on the same terms as heterosexual partners.
This view is also endorsed by the leader and the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg and Simon Hughes. Indeed, Hughes has predicted that the ban on same-sex marriage will go within five years.
All five Labour leadership contenders - Ed Balls, Diane Abbott, Andy Burnham, Ed Miliband and David Miliband - now back marriage equality, regardless of sexual orientation.
Public attitudes have also shifted strongly in favour of allowing gay couples to marry. A Populus poll for the Times newspaper in June 2009 found that 61% of the public believe that: "Gay couples should have an equal right to get married, not just to have civil partnerships." Only 33% disagreed.
Some people say that civil partnerships are sufficient for gay couples. This is hypocritical. They would not accept a similar ban on black people getting married.
They would never agree with a law that required black couples to register their relationships through a separate system called civil partnerships.
It would be racist to have separate laws for black and white couples. We'd call it apartheid, like what used to exist in South Africa. Well, black people are not banned from marriage but lesbian and gay couples are.
We are fobbed off with second class civil partnerships.
Personally, I don't like marriage. I share the feminist critique of its history of sexism and patriarchy. I would not want to get married. But as a democrat and human rights defender, I support the right of others to marry, if they wish.
That's why I believe that civil marriage in a registry office should be open to everyone without discrimination.
Don't get me wrong, civil partnerships are an important advance. They remedy many - though not all - of the injustices that used to be experienced by lesbian and gay couples. But they are not equality.
They are discrimination. Separate is not equal.
In terms of the law, civil partnerships are a form of sexual apartheid. They create a two-tier system of partnership recognition: one law for heterosexuals (civil marriage) and another law for same-sex couples (civil partnerships).
This perpetuates and extends discrimination. The homophobia of the ban on same-sex civil marriage is now compounded by the heterophobia of the ban on opposite-sex civil partnerships.
Just as a gay couple cannot have a civil marriage, a straight couple cannot have a civil partnership. Two wrongs don't make a right.
Sadly, the official policies of the Conservative and Labour parties do not support same-sex civil marriage. They oppose it. They support discrimination.
The Green Party and the Liberal Democrats are, so far, the only parties officially committed to giving same-sex partners the right to civil marriage - and heterosexual couples the right to civil partnerships.
In a democracy, we are all supposed to be equal under the law. The Con-Lib coalition's professed commitment to gay equality cannot be taken seriously while it upholds the ban on same-sex marriage. Over to you, Dave and Nick.
Source: OutRage - PT
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JuneNZ on Family Tree Circles
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Journals and Posts
Looking for Percy Sheppard of New Zealand
Percy Sheppard was born c1853 in Sussex, England. He emigrated to New Zealand c1874. Married Emily Kate Lucas in Nelson in 1876. Resided in Nelson, Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill.Had seven children and left the family in the mid to late 1880's. Is said to have left to go to the goldfields, some family comment on being in Australia however nothing proven. The last census record that I can find of Percy in NZ is 1880-1881. Any assistance in finding records of Percy would be appreciated. Children were: Ida Lee 1877, Ethel Leonie 1878, Ella Maude 1879, Alfred 1881, Ernest 1882, Edgar Vincent 1883, Edith Florence 1884. Regards, Jun e
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subset: commoncrawl


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mtc poorhouse edition 8 dream 8 50 6.5 courageous 6 number {nm} on Sep 26, 11:34
Tagging [DRMHS], [5050], [COURG], [WYNUM] {nm} on Sep 26, 11:37
Thanks for the numbers, btw. {nm} on Sep 26, 11:38
I find it hard to believe that Number in 3,000 theaters will make less than Courageous in 1100... been seeing non-stop commercials for #. {nm} on Sep 26, 11:45
i find your hard-to-believ-idness hard to believe. number as well as house look terrible. 50 looks like wait for cable. {nm} on Sep 26, 11:56
If 50 looks like wait for cable, what would it take for a dramedy to be worth seeing in theaters? {nm} on Sep 26, 12:16
i was thinking more along the lines of people not really wanting to pay to see films about cancer. i would think one could look on Sep 26, 12:54
94% on RT, for what it's worth {nm} on Sep 26, 12:57
I have seen countless ads, too. But I saw the same number of ads for I Don't Know How She Does It. {nm} on Sep 26, 11:57
Yeah, same here; the trailer has been received well from what I saw, especially the last joke {nm} on Sep 26, 12:51
Ah, September, the least exciting month of the year box office wise. {nm} on Sep 26, 12:25
Really? I think I'd go with February. Either way, they're both pretty bad. {nm} on Sep 26, 14:30
February has VD and President's Day weekend, which gets bigger releases. {nm} on Sep 26, 18:33
After a record-setting weekend for September, this weekend bounds to come back down some especially with great WOM for current top holdovers {nm} on Sep 26, 12:50
So then will Lion King be #1 again? {nm} on Sep 26, 14:33
Dolphin Tale will be more likely {nm} on Sep 26, 14:53
I was going with Dolphin Tale until I saw that Lion King wasn't losing that many theaters but I haven't looked at actuals yet {nm} on Sep 26, 19:55
I still think it will drop 50% or more; TS re-release only lost 15% of its theaters when extending on its 3rd weekend but still lost 60% on Sep 26, 20:23
I really don't think that many people paid attention to the "limited engagement" thing... I never noticed it mentioned in commercials on Sep 27, 03:46
was referring Toy Story 1+2 re-release {nm} on Sep 27, 09:22


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For years, in the village of Juz Ghoray, at the remote fringes of the Musa Qala District in northern Helmand Province, the Taliban enjoyed free rein, collecting taxes from local poppy farmers and staging attacks on any foreign patrol that moved within shooting range of an abrupt desert prominence called Ugly Hill. After a Marine unit found nine I.E.D.'s hidden beneath Ugly Hill's scarred and caverned faces last year, coalition forces seldom ventured near it. Until one night this October, when members of Echo Company, from the Second Battalion, Fourth Marines — known since Vietnam as the Magnificent Bastards — quietly sneaked into Juz Ghoray and posted signs on people's doors and windows. Their idea was to co-opt the infamous Taliban practice of intimidating government sympathizers with night letters threatening execution. The Marines' signs were bordered with the nation's colors, and in Pashto and Dari they announced: "The Afghan National Security Forces are coming." Two weeks later, about 60 members of Echo Company, along with 30 Afghan National Army soldiers, traveled on foot through the night and took Ugly Hill without a shot. At dawn, as villagers emerged from their homes, they found laborers stacking bastions to fortify a new Afghan police post. And something else, which many residents of Juz Ghoray had never seen before: an Afghan flag raised on a wooden pole.
For the government, the new post represents a palpable extension of its reach, a triumph however modest. But not one without some cost. Before the Afghans could claim Ugly Hill, two marines had to sweep it for mines. Joshua Lee, a 26-year-old sergeant from Arkansas, located the first I.E.D. using a metal detector. As he set to work on the device, Lee identified a second bomb, and while readjusting he stepped on a third. The blast shattered his right leg, cocking it sideways below the knee and leaving mangled pieces of foot hanging loosely from flesh and bone.
In the morning, while searching a compound at the base of Ugly Hill, the marines discovered three more fully assembled I.E.D.'s, containing 100 pounds of explosives. When technicians set charges around the bombs, detonating them in place, a six-foot crater was left where one of the compound's buildings had stood. The following evening Echo Company continued south, making camp on a plateau of hard-packed gravel; as the desert night grew frigid, a small convoy arrived to resupply the men with food and water. Turning to climb the steep escarpment, the lead vehicle hit yet another bomb. Its mine-roller — an extended axle of weighted wheels that tests the ground ahead — absorbed the brunt of the blast. Walking nearby, a young platoon sergeant, Jacob Maxwell, was knocked off his feet as rocks and wreckage from the obliterated roller struck his legs and back.
This was Maxwell's fifth deployment. During a single tour in Iraq in 2006, he survived four I.E.D. explosions. When the dust settled, he was sitting beside the road, cut and bruised, but otherwise unscathed. The corpsman who treated him judged his luck to border on the freakish. Nonetheless, after the attack, Maxwell assured me he'd be leading his platoon on its coming operations. Those will take the company even deeper into Taliban country, to farther-flung villages than Juz Ghoray, among Afghans who, more than 10 years after the government's creation, still lack any meaningful contact with it. "The Marines are going out into the hinterlands," Maj. Frank Diorio, the battalion's executive officer, told me. "They're not tied to any posts. It'll be ongoing until we leave. It's just going to be continuous operations."
The Marines didn't arrive in force in Helmand until 2009. Previously, the British controlled the region. Undermanned, ill equipped and far too thinly spread, they were unable to contain the Taliban revival already proliferating through Helmand by 2006. Only as recently as 2010 did coalition forces, bolstered by Obama's troop surge, try to cauterize what Gen. Stanley McChrystal called the "bleeding ulcer" of Marja — a town just outside the provincial capital where the Taliban presided unmolested over a lucrative opium industry. Today the Taliban in Marja have been killed or vanquished to sparsely populated desert regions, and Afghan security forces have assumed most policing responsibilities in the town. Successful as it is, the taking of Marja was accomplished with an immense commitment of men and resources that could not realistically be brought to bear elsewhere in the province. An analogy often invoked across Afghanistan is that of the water-filled bag: squeeze the bottom, the top distends. Accordingly, subdued in Marja and other towns nearer the capital, the fight in Helmand has shifted upriver. There, in places like Kajaki and Sangin and Musa Qala, after 10 years and 821 coalition deaths and thousands of wounded, the insurgency perseveres.Continue reading the main story
Year after year, month after month, Helmand has ranked as the deadliest, most violent province in Afghanistan. Nowhere else comes close. Growing anxiety over the Pakistani border regions, however, means that America's withdrawal from the country will most likely happen more rapidly in Helmand than in the eastern provinces. During the coming year, the number of marines there will shrink by the thousands; as early as this summer, many Marine positions will be shuttered or handed over to the Afghan Army and the police. No one expects the insurgency to be defeated by then. The issue has long ceased to be how we can decisively expunge the Taliban — we can't. Instead, the question is: How can we forestall its full-fledged resurgence upon our departure? Toward the end of this year's fighting season, just before the winter rains, I spent seven weeks with marines across much of Helmand, and everywhere the answer was basically the same. First, leave behind a proficient national security force. And second, win them as much breathing room as time allows.
The Marines' push into Juz Ghoray was part of this plan. Adhering to a provincewide blueprint for withdrawal, Echo Company had recently closed two of its patrol bases, which in turn permitted longer-range operations, previously impossible, like the taking of Ugly Hill. "Essentially, we're trying to consolidate American forces and turn over positions to the Afghans in order to facilitate deeper operations," Lt. Nikolaos de Maria, the platoon's commander, told me shortly after the I.E.D. attacks that injured Lee and Maxwell. "So the center will be the Afghan Police. The next wave, around that center, will be the Afghan Army. And then for us, we're trying to operate a lot deeper. So that would be a third concentric ring. We would be on the outside, ready for a harder fight."
Later that afternoon, a local man claimed that insurgents had buried three I.E.D.'s in the dry riverbed crossed by the marines on their way to Juz Ghoray. After they found and detonated one of the bombs, several marines stayed to watch the area during the night. In the morning they were attacked by machine guns and artillery clattering from unseen positions to the east. Hearing the exchange back at Ugly Hill, de Maria rallied the rest of his platoon and the Afghan Army soldiers. As they donned their flak jackets and shouldered their radios and loaded their carbines, the men were charged by the usual electricity — but there was something else too: relief at the promise of actually confronting whoever had been trying so hard to blow them up. "We're bringing the hammer," de Maria said over the radio.
Cpl. Brandon Sisson led the platoon down the hill and through the deserted village. Thin and scrappy, with a penchant for brawling, Sisson should have been a sergeant, but in Iraq his promotion stalled after he broke another marine's jaw so badly he needed to be evacuated to a hospital in Germany. Now, at 23, with a wife and a child and another on the way, Sisson claimed to have mellowed with age. When we emerged into farmland, more shots rang out and the marines found cover where they could. As we lay flat on our stomachs in the wet mire of a tilled poppy field, Sisson shook his head. "I liked Iraq a lot better," he said. "You could actually see them."
Just then two Afghan soldiers strutted by holding their weapons like folded umbrellas. They seemed entirely unconcerned by the fact that people were shooting at us. I recognized one of them. In lieu of a rifle, he humped a rucksack full of rocket-propelled grenades. The marines loved him for this and had nicknamed him R.P.G. Others were less popular: because they were lazy, because they complained, because they smelled, because they stole, because way too often they were way too stoned — the list of grievances ran long. In the end, though, what mattered most was that one item never made the list: cowardice. They delighted in fighting.
If you had to name the principal difference between Afghan soldiers and United States marines, it might best be summarized as "discipline." Marines are existentially defined by it; Afghans have little concept of it. The previous day, I accompanied a patrol through Juz Ghoray with an Afghan Army squad that insisted on searching the first compound we came to. Sgt. Adam Sweet, the marine overseeing the patrol, was surprised. It was early, we had a long way to go and nothing about the place appeared especially suspicious. "This one?" he asked the Afghan squad leader.
"Yes, this one," the Afghan said. "We must search this one now."
Sweet had become a marine by accident. After being arrested for driving while stoned, he dropped out of college during his first semester, was evicted from his apartment and soon found himself back in Nebraska, living with his mom. There he met a girl who invited him to go with her back to Fort Collins, Colo., where she attended school. Sweet went. Six months later the girl pledged a sorority and announced she was moving in with her new sisters. "I didn't know what to do," Sweet told me. "So I ended up getting drunk one night and told myself that I should join the Air Force. I showed up in the morning to join the Air Force, and they were closed. So I walked next door to the Marine recruiting office and signed the paperwork." A year and a half later, Sweet was carrying a machine gun through the streets of Fallujah.
In Juz Ghoray, he shrugged and followed the Afghan soldiers into the compound. No one was home. As Sweet scrupulously searched room after room — opening ornate chests, shaking out heavy blankets, rifling through piles of hay, sniffing plastic fuel jugs — I noticed one of the Afghans hurry across the courtyard with a large propane tank. Then another ran by carrying a metal cooking pot. Finally came a third, making a basket of his shirt that bulged with fresh eggs. A few minutes later, Sweet and I found the whole squad huddled in the livestock pen. A shaggy-haired soldier sporting a Che-style beret grinned at us a little sheepishly. "Breakfast?" he said.
Now, as bullets clapped toward us in the muddy poppy field, R.P.G. gave a thumbs up. "Taliban good!" he said.
Corporal Sisson returned the gesture. "Hopefully, Taliban dead."
We pushed past a cornfield toward another village farther east. Whole families were running away. Sisson noticed, on a distant ridge, the silhouette of a lone figure and the glint of something metal catch the sun.
"We got a spotter," he told de Maria.
Bullets kicked the dirt near several of the marines, and the platoon pressed through the village to a wide, white-rocked creek on its other side. This was as far as they were authorized to go. From the edge of an eroding embankment that dropped precipitously, the marines watched a train of people fleeing toward the eastern hills. The figure on the ridge vanished, and soon two men on motorcycles appeared among the villagers.
"They're screening themselves with the women and kids," Sisson said. As the marines struggled to find a clear line of sight on the men with motorcycles, someone peeled away from the exodus and began walking toward us. It was a young boy, maybe 9 or 10, and he trailed a voluminous black scarf held high above his head. The cloth flapped in the hot wind.
Sisson spat. "They're doing this on purpose."
The boy walked all the way to the creek, where he seemed to waver, regarding the marines and the Afghan soldiers shouting at him to stop, turn around, get out of the way. Then he kept coming. He crossed the stream; he scaled the embankment; he passed right through the ranks of frantically yelling soldiers. All the while he held up his scarf as if it were a flag. The men on motorcycles came and went: now picking people up, now dropping others off — tauntingly, or so it felt. Soon the sun began to dim. It made of the men vague shapes receding deeper into a country where they knew the marines could not follow. When I looked around for the boy, he was gone, too.
The men on motorcycles and the train of villagers fled in the direction of Kajaki, a small district on the Helmand River connected to Musa Qala via a Taliban-controlled road riddled with karez (ancient underground aqueducts, which insurgents sometimes use to transport people and equipment). Over the years, Kajaki has been reduced to a ghost town. From the tops of the mountains that form its spacious valley, the village looks like a kind of postapocalyptic tableau: uncultivated fields and the ruins of razed homes; abandoned roads pocked by blasts from I.E.D.'s; the uprooted stumps of bulldozed trees; the ransacked, shuttered stalls of what used to be a large bazaar; and roving packs of jackals that fill the empty nights with a mournful howling. But even as the people have absconded, the fight in Kajaki has raged on. It has raged on because the fight has never really been about the people. It has been about the dam.
The Kajaki Dam, made of terraced earth rising more than 300 feet, blocks a narrow ravine in the upper Helmand River to form a massive lake whose bays and fingers reach deep into sheer-walled coulees. Controlled outflow from the lake provides electricity for much of southern Afghanistan and irrigates more than half a million acres of farmland. It has the potential to do much more. "It's only operating at really 30 percent," Cpt. Matt Ritchie, commanding officer of the last Marine battery in charge of the area, told me. Hundreds of tons of concrete are needed to install an additional turbine that will bring the power output nearer to capacity. Although a major road links Kajaki to Camp Leatherneck, the provincial headquarters for the Marines, until recently it was far too dangerous to transport the material. "Because of the dam," Ritchie explained, "Kajaki is significant. But this is the one district that's cut off. We didn't have any connection to any other districts within 20 kilometers." Last October, the Marines commenced what might prove to have been their last major offensive in Afghanistan, with the aim of ending Kajaki's isolation.
While an infantry battalion breached the district from the south, two platoons from Ritchie's battery were inserted by helicopters into its northern woodland, long held by the Taliban. "We put a fence in the dirt, literally," one platoon commander told me. "Put concertina wire down and said, 'You're not going to get north of this area.'" Between the two fronts of marines, the officer said, "during the three to four days that we were there, I think we killed about 30 of them. They quit picking up their casualties." The sole escape for the insurgents was to ford the Helmand River and disappear into Zamindawar, an ungoverned desert extending from the dam to the foothills of a towering mountain range several miles north. "And they did exactly that," the platoon commander said. "That's the Wild West up there. We won't ever go up there."
When I arrived in Kajaki in early November, a few families had begun trickling back to the villages below the dam, returning for the first time after six years to find out whether their homes might still be standing. By then, Captain Ritchie was finishing up his seven-month deployment and a new unit had just arrived to begin theirs. Now that the road from Camp Leatherneck was secure, the incoming marines were focused on "developing the Afghan National Security Forces and getting them to own the battle space, to protect the dam," the new commander said. In fact, there is a good chance the marines in Kajaki will be gone altogether by this summer. If that happens, the Afghan police officers and soldiers who are left behind will quite likely face a tough fight as the insurgents living in Zamindawar move to exploit their increased vulnerability. Of the several posts the Afghans will inherit, the least tenable will be one called the Shrine, the only Marine position north of the Helmand River, perched atop a small hill, on the frontier of the Wild West.
About a half-dozen Afghan policemen shared the Shrine with a squad of marines, who rotated in and out. Perhaps because of the forced intimacy of the tiny outpost and the shared experience of coming under constant attack, the marines and Afghans stationed there enjoyed an uncommonly functional, even fraternal, relationship. They knew one another's names, shared responsibilities, laughed and joked and sometimes ate together. All of the police officers on the Shrine were Tajiks or Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan who said they enlisted and came to the Pashtun south because they believed in their country and its government; they were nationalists. Their commander was a gaunt middle-aged Uzbek named Ghulam Jalani. Over several meals of rice and lamb in the cramped hut where his men quarter, Jalani expressed deep admiration for the Marines. He also fears for the day they go home. "I am not an educated man," Jalani told me one night. "In fact, I am illiterate. But I tell you: if the Marines leave here, the Taliban will come back."
The following morning, a squad from the new unit showed up for its first week at the Shrine. The squad leader, 25-year-old Erick Granados, is a first-generation American whose parents immigrated to the United States from El Salvador. Built like a wrestler and covered in tattoos, he is also the shortest man in the platoon. Even by Marine standards, Granados is deeply, almost fanatically, patriotic. One of the things he brought with him to Afghanistan was a large American flag. Upon arriving at the Shrine, while his squad was still unpacking, Granados climbed onto a bunker roof and planted the flag between two sandbags. It was a surprisingly potent image — something you rarely see in Afghanistan, where the U.S. deliberately fights the stigma of an occupying force by framing its activities as strictly ancillary to the national government.
I would learn that marines from the previous battery also had a flag. Invariably, they said, whenever it went up, the Shrine came under attack.
This time, the insurgents waited until dark, firing on the outpost with automatic weapons a little before midnight. Jalani and the other Afghan police officers sprinted to their machine guns in sandals and T-shirts, spraying bullets haphazardly into the dark. Using thermal optics, Granados was able to locate two men as they descended into a narrow canyon that snakes through an area called Chinah in the Taliban-occupied country north of the Shrine. After calling in illumination rounds that burned slow trails through the night, radiating pools of incandescence across the black expanse, the marines concentrated several volleys on the canyon. Staff Sgt. Vincent Bell seized the opportunity to observe a policeman firing a PK machine gun. Bell had deployed four times to Iraq, but this was his first tour in Afghanistan. As the policeman, pausing now and then to ash the cigarette that hung loosely from his mouth, showered a fusillade of bullets in the general vicinity of the canyon, Bell cried out: "You boys are raw! I mean raw, raw, raw!" The Afghan gave him a quizzical look, as if uncertain whether he was being chastised. "Don't get me wrong," Bell told him. "I like it!"
Eventually, the gunshots petered out. But a couple of hours later, a marine noticed two men digging with shovels near the road that connects the Shrine to the main base at the dam. He alerted Sergeant Granados, who magnified their images using a remote-controlled camera mounted atop a tower that relays infrared video to a monitor at its base. After watching the men excavate a hole, place an object inside and bury it, Granados radioed his superiors and requested permission to shoot them. The permission was denied. "They want to see components," Granados complained. "They want to see wires, jugs. We saw something getting put into the ground. To them, that isn't good enough." The marines watched the men toss a handful of branches over their project, then flee quickly back to Chinah.
Intermittent gun battles continued until dawn, when the sun bloomed from behind a series of serrated ridgelines, and the whole wasted valley — the cattails that crowd the river's banks, the yellow pastures where ragged camels graze, the wind-bent corn against the western desert — emerged in bright relief. I was drinking tea with Jalani when two trucks, loaded with farmworkers heading out to harvest the last of the year's crop, came bumping down the road leading to the outpost. As they reached the place where the two men were seen digging in the night, a tremendous explosion echoed off the hills and the trucks vanished in a geyser of erupted earth. Thirteen passengers, including women and children, had been crammed into the trucks, but somehow none were killed or badly hurt. A few minutes later, carrying satchels and tools, the Afghans continued toward their fields on foot.
"Where are they going?" I asked Jalani.
"To work," he said.
That afternoon, another squad from Granados's platoon, led by Sgt. Samuel Windisch, conducted its first foot patrol in Kajaki, north and west from the Shrine, into an area called the brown zone, where lawless Zamindawar abuts the territory controlled by the Marines. The purpose of the patrol, Windisch told me, was "to test the enemy's forward line of engagement. We're looking for a fight, basically." In 2005, Windisch was shot by a sniper in Fallujah. The bullet caught the upper right corner of his chest plate, knocking him down with a force that he said felt like someone hitting him with a sledgehammer. He re-enlisted nonetheless, and two years later he did another tour in the same city. When I asked whether the outgoing marines offered him any advice about the route he planned to take today, Windisch replied, "Yeah: 'You're gonna get shot at.' "
Following behind Joshua Gray, a young lance corporal who swept the path for I.E.D.'s, Windisch and his squad headed for Devon Hill, a steep knoll jutting from the western desert. Passing through the coalition-friendly village of Kanzi, we came to a dirt road where Gray noticed something that made him stop. Extending across the road — almost like a border — several neatly stacked stones had been arranged in a perfect line. The bomb-sniffing dog was sent forward to investigate; when it detected no explosives, the marines pressed on. Later, Windisch would wonder whether the stones marked what he called "the flip, literally the line in the sand," delineating the place where insurgents still prevailed.
After rounding the northern slope of Devon Hill, the marines glimpsed for the first time what lay on the other side: mud-mortar homes crowding the edge of a meandering gulch, women hanging laundry out to dry, children chasing one another over rooftops, men reaping fields of wheat with scythes — entire communities, not a quarter-mile from the Shrine, cut off from the Afghan government, untouched by its laws, its army and police.
Soon Gray halted the patrol once more. This time he spotted the barely visible edge of what appeared to be a piece of hand-carved wood poking out among some rocks. A corporal with a long-handled sickle joined Gray at the front and lightly scored the earth around it. The ground there was rough and the sickle blade accidentally bumped the object loose. What came up was a carefully constructed apparatus consisting of a cylinder and a sharpened dowel: a nonmetallic pressure switch. If depressed, the wooden spike would have struck a highly combustible powder that would have activated a detonation cord, triggering a main charge — a plastic fuel jug packed with homemade explosive — buried deeper underground. After recovering the first one, Gray spotted a second, identical wooden switch barely protruding a few feet away.
While Windisch and his executive officer, First Lt. Terence Sawick, reported Gray's find to headquarters and plotted their next move, the squad's Afghan interpreter, a soft-spoken and frail-framed young man, whom I'll call Mukhtar (he doesn't want it known among Afghans that he works with Americans), nervously surveyed the village. Mukhtar had been working with the Marines in Kajaki ever since they succeeded the British. His English was impeccable, the best of any linguist I've encountered in Afghanistan. (He told me he perfected the language by listening to the speeches of Barack Obama.) For more than two years, Mukhtar had been away from his family in Kabul. He earned $865 a month, but what kept him in Kajaki was the hope of someday earning a visa to enter the United States. Now, with unsettling emphasis, he turned to me and whispered, "This is a bad place to stop." Before I could ask why, Windisch called out to his squad, "We're going home." And as Gray turned east, cutting across the broad face of Devon Hill, a barrage of gunfire converged on us. It came from several directions, multiple compounds, some close and others far. Bullets zipped past, making the high-pitched cartoon sound of buttons popping off a fat man's coat, the singing of taut wire. Some smacked the ground around our feet, raising small puffs of dust and cracking into rocks.
"Get down! Get down!"
"Where's it coming from?"
A sharp declivity separated the rear of the patrol from those farther up the hill. Cpl. Michael Subu, the assistant squad leader (recently promoted to sergeant), yelled at the marines pinned below to bound for higher ground. "Get up here now!" The bullets continued in bursts, snapping overhead; each enemy position had at least one machine gun. Spotting muzzle flashes, the marines sited their rifles on "murder holes," narrow gaps in compound walls designed to accommodate barrels aimed from the inside out. Someone spotted four men with AK-47's rushing through a house less than 50 yards away. Subu delivered a rapid series of rounds through its windows as his team moved uphill behind him. Unable to lay his heavy weapon on the downward grade, Joshua Donald, the squad's 22-year-old machine-gunner, brought it to his hip and directed a steady stream of automatic fire toward another compound farther north. Windisch and Sawick radioed headquarters, asking for artillery support. But the squad was situated in between the targets and the mountains from which the howitzers and mortars would be fired. If ordnance fell short, it could land on the marines.
"We gotta move!" Subu called.
Gray stood up and began quickly sweeping a path with the metal-detector down the east side of the hill. The marines followed as closely as they could while kneeling, reloading and returning fire to the north. As the slope leveled off into short, tilled terraces, a new sound joined the melee: heavy weaponry clattering from somewhere high above us.
"What is that?"
"It's the Shrine!"
From up on the outpost, about a quarter-mile away, Granados radioed Windisch and asked him to mark a target. Windisch aimed his rifle-mounted grenade-launcher at one of the compounds where he'd seen consistent muzzle flashes. The grenade slammed into the compound wall, blowing open its metal door. A moment later, the marines on the Shrine unleashed a rain of ammunition.
Not far from the bottom of the terraces stood a low, mud-mortared wall. But to get there, we had to cross an open field in full view of the gunmen. Over the field, bullets audibly split the air. Gray popped two canisters of smoke and tossed them in the dirt. As the yellow clouds poured out, meeting in a thick, obscuring pall, the squad sprinted for the wall. Crouching behind it, Subu recognized more insurgents shooting from a tree line a couple hundred meters off. Windisch shouldered a rocket launcher, and we ducked and plugged our ears as its blast threw debris against us. The rocket soared long, exploding just beyond the trees.
"We're moving!" Sawick yelled. "Keep moving!"
One last stretch of exposed terrain remained, a shallow wadi we had crossed to get to Devon Hill. When Sawick, Windisch and Subu stepped into the streambed, a burst from a machine gun nearly took them out. Bullets skipped off the stones around them, ricocheting past their heads. By now, the marines on the Shrine had intercepted enemy radio communications: two insurgents were moving heavy guns to flank us from behind.
"Keep going!" Sawick urged. The enemy fire followed us all the way to Kanzi, despite incessant pounding from the Shrine. When we finally reached the village, a group of farmers were standing outside, surrounded by children. The men cheered and gave thumbs-up to the marines, while the children ran to them, pleading for chocolate. Sawick had Mukhtar tell the eldest of the men to lead us the rest of the way. The farmer was understandably reluctant. Sawick insisted, and the marines fell in behind him as he guided us through the fields, turning unexpectedly, zigzagging this way and that, following some unmarked route he knew by heart.
At the base of the Shrine, the marines lighted cigarettes and congratulated one another. Except for Staff Sergeant Bell, Sergeant Windisch and Corporal Subu, it was the squad's first taste of combat. As a 22-year-old in Kunar Province, Subu was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for heroism during the winter of 2008, after he jumped into a freezing river, while suffering from hypothermia, to rescue his drowning squad leader. While the younger marines now laughed and joked, giddy with adrenaline, Subu turned to Windisch and shook his head. "That was close," he said. With a little bit of wonder, as though unsure what to make of it, Windisch told him, "It's been six years since I fired my rifle at somebody." I looked around for Mukhtar and found him standing by himself, apart from the others. He removed his helmet and spread his bandanna on the ground, then got to his knees. As more gunshots came from the north, and the marines on the Shrine answered in kind, Mukhtar bowed and muttered, praying toward an orange sun setting over Devon Hill.
That night was unusually quiet in Kajaki. According to village scuttlebutt, five Taliban had been killed. "I think we gave them enough hell for a while," Windisch predicted. But the next evening several Afghan policemen found a fight on the riverbank, and in the morning Granados raised his flag again. In fact, he climbed onto the bunker roof and waved it at the northern desert before planting it in place. I was eating breakfast with one of the younger marines, who laughed and said, "It's about to get crackin'!" Fifteen minutes later, an 82-millimeter mortar round whistled over our heads and slammed into the hillside, unearthing a small crater not far from the half-sunken pipe that the squad urinated into.
After the ambush on Devon Hill, the marines suspended further patrols into the north. "There's no tactical advantage to going up there other than getting in a firefight," one officer told me. "We can spend another 10 years in Afghanistan and still be fighting like that. We have to look at the bigger picture, which is turning all of this over to the Afghans."
My last night on the outpost, I had dinner with Ghulam Jalani. "We need the Marines to stay here," he told me again. "We might not be able to defend this area." Indeed, it's hard to imagine a half-dozen Afghans holding onto the Shrine without the camera tower, the thermal optics, the high-powered binoculars, the heavy machine guns, the illumination rounds, the sniper rifles and the nearby mortars and howitzers that the Marines need to defend it now. It's also hard to imagine that, deprived of these assets, Jalani and his men would not choose to return north, where their wives and children wait for them, instead of risking their lives for a Pashtun population that doesn't speak their language.
After dinner, one of the policemen loitered near my cot, watching me pack my bag. He seemed to be working up the nerve to speak. Finally, I asked him what he wanted. He explained that the days were getting cold now, and he had no socks.
A week and a half later, Staff Sgt. Vincent Bell stepped on an I.E.D. and was killed.
When I heard about Bell, I was shocked to learn that he was 28 — my age. I assumed he was much older. He enlisted after high school, a few months before 9/11, and participated in the invasion of Iraq. He did four tours in the worst of that place. With Bell, as with so many marines, war had accelerated his maturation in ways both physical and psychic. On patrol he was exceedingly apprehensive about I.E.D.'s. You had the sense he had seen too much not to be — that is, he knew that apprehensive was the only prudent state of mind. I walked behind him twice, and he was by far the most cautious of any marine I followed. He took no chances. He did everything he was supposed to do.
In a combat zone, each of a variety of threats instills its own corresponding fear. Unique to the fear of I.E.D.'s is a sense of powerlessness. For marines, this fear, above every other, rates the most acute. Forgoing tactical formations, they often walk in single file behind engineers with metal-detectors. They overturn suspicious rocks with hooks affixed to bamboo stalks. They mark every turn with lines of shaving cream or baby powder in the dirt. They travel over rooftops, laying ladders across alleys to cross from house to house. After dark they leave a trail of chemically treated Q-tips that glow under night-vision goggles. And they study every step they take for signs of tampered ground. But despite these precautions, there remains a limit to the degree of safety that vigilance affords, and ultimately it is chance that kills or spares you. This fear — the fear of chance and your helplessness to affect it — is a constant companion to the grunts conducting daily foot patrols across the bomb-littered country of northern Helmand.
Nowhere has the I.E.D. been put to deadlier and more ubiquitous use than in Sangin, a central transit hub on the Helmand River just south of Kajaki. Home to the province's second-largest bazaar, an entrenched drug economy and a connecting route to Kandahar and Pakistan, Sangin has inspired the Taliban's fiercest resistance throughout the war. Between 2006 and 2010, the British lost 106 soldiers there. When the Marines took over, with larger numbers, they aggressively took the fight to the enemy, pushing hard into areas the Brits had shunned. "It was Vietnam," a former platoon commander told me. "Every day we were fighting for our lives." The next Marine unit deployed to Sangin lost 25 men, with more than 200 wounded: the heaviest toll by far of any American battalion since the beginning of the war.
Today the fight in Sangin has changed; knowing they will always lose, the insurgents who remain seldom ambush the marines, or engage them with small arms. Rather, they rely almost entirely on I.E.D.'s — and at this they have grown terribly adept. Most of the bombs in Sangin are fashioned from materials with a low-enough metallic signature to go unnoticed by hand-held detectors. Plastic jugs filled with potassium chlorate, a few nine-volt batteries offset from the charge, old speaker wire connecting to a pressure plate of wood and copper, anti-tamper devices made with clothespins, brake lights or hypodermic needles and improvised blasting caps — this is all you need. In October, the same unit that replaced the British in 2010, the Third Battalion, Seventh Marines, returned to Sangin for another tour. I visited them toward the end of November, and already four marines had been killed by I.E.D.'s, with another 17 severely injured, 10 of them amputees.
The prevalence of hidden explosives, the daily fact of them, has engendered in the war-weary residents of Sangin a kind of defiant apathy. My first day in the district, I arrived at a small base shortly after a squad of marines had left on a routine patrol. About 600 meters outside the wire a young boy stopped them to point out the location of a nearby I.E.D. I was in a tent with the platoon commander, who found the squad on the remote-controlled camera and zoomed in on the boy. He looked about 12. "He wants to bring it to us," the squad leader radioed back to the lieutenant.
"No," the lieutenant told him. "Do not do that."
But the boy had already bounded off, retrieved something from the tall grass and was carrying it back to the marines. "It's just the pressure plate," the squad leader said over the radio. And then: "Correction. He has the whole I.E.D."
The marines yelled: "Put it down! Put it down!" Eventually the boy tossed the device — a jug, plate, wires — roughly to the ground. He seemed to do it with a shrug. The lieutenant shook his head and told me this had happened several times before.
A few days later, I accompanied a patrol with another squad, led by First Lt. Matt Perry, during which we were invited into a compound by a young man caked from head to toe with splattered mud. The man, Kareem Dada, was building additional walls for his home, which he'd recently inherited from his father. Nearby, as he and Perry spoke, Kareem's 9-year-old brother leaned on a pair of old crutches, shifting his weight from armpit to armpit, adjusting the burden on his single leg. Three months ago, the boy and two other brothers had triggered an I.E.D. while playing in an alley near their house. The blast killed one boy and badly maimed the two survivors, who were taken to Camp Leatherneck for surgery. On their way to see them, racing along the Helmand River, Kareem's parents crashed their car and died.
"Who do you blame?" Perry wanted to know.
"The Taliban," Kareem answered automatically. "I hate them. Look at what they did to us."
As the marines left the compound, they found the third brother, who was maybe 13, waiting outside in a wheelchair. Both of his legs were amputated above the knees. He glared at us with naked loathing. He cursed us in English as we passed.
Back at the base, I asked Perry why he thought the third brother's attitude toward the marines had been so different from Kareem's. The lieutenant held up his hands. Maybe they weren't who they said they were. Maybe Kareem's whole story was a fabrication and they'd been involved in placing an I.E.D. that accidentally detonated. This felt plausible, if disturbing. But then Perry offered another explanation, which seemed to suggest a paradox inherent to any counterinsurgency: "They feel like if we weren't here, bombs wouldn't be in the ground."
When the Americans replaced the British, there were only a few patrol bases outside of the battalion headquarters, and each was perilously embattled. Since then the Marines have established dozens of positions throughout Sangin and driven the Taliban from the district center. This, however, has not completely prevented insurgents from carrying out attacks. "The bottom line with the enemy we're facing is that he's in civilian clothes, he's riding a motorcycle and he's unarmed," Lt. Col. Seth Folsom, the Marines' battalion commander, told me. "The way he operates is through the use of caches. He'll move from one cache to another, get the materials he needs and emplace I.E.D.'s that way. . . . They know we're not going to just start mowing down guys on motorcycles. So even though we cast a wide net, a lot of fish still get through."
Most of the caches are believed to be scattered through desert regions beyond the district center, particularly to the east, near the border of Kandahar. From there, components are smuggled piecemeal — a jug one day, a pressure switch the next — and only later assembled in Sangin proper. "If you know how to put one together," Folsom explained, "it literally takes minutes, if not seconds. If we catch them in the act, we can drop ordnance on them. But if they get away, we'll track them out to the east until we eventually lose sight of them." Until recently, the Marines, distributed among their many fixed positions, lacked the manpower to go after these caches and disrupt insurgents infiltrating from the east. But as in Musa Qala and elsewhere, they have now begun handing over posts to the Afghans, freeing up personnel for operations "in the hinterlands." While I was in Sangin, the first Marine patrol base was formally transitioned to the Afghan National Army. Later that week, also for the first time, an entire company moved east — and kept on going all the way to Kandahar.
For four days they hiked the desert, sweltering in the afternoon and bitter cold at night, sleeping in villages, searching each house and hole they crossed. They had anticipated opposition, but they found instead a conspicuous, almost eerie, absence of military-age men. "It's like when you turn on the lights, the cockroaches all disappear," Folsom said one afternoon. "When you turn off the lights, they all come right back out."
No insurgents, only traces of them everywhere. One day, searching a compound far from any village, the marines discovered four jugs of explosives, rolls of white speaker wire, casings from U.S. illumination rounds (scavenged for employment as projectiles) and several radio transmitters used as remote detonators. The last were especially worrisome. The battalion had yet to encounter remotely detonated I.E.D.'s in Sangin. "What this indicates to me is that if they're not using remote-control devices in our sector, they will be soon," Folsom said — and they have in fact encountered them since I left.
Two days later, on a sandy ledge, one of the technicians registered something with his metal detector. A sergeant probed around the ground with his knife and exhumed a bulky object wrapped in tire rubber. Cutting through the rubber and the patterned cloth beneath it, the sergeant unveiled a Russian-made machine gun; as he assembled its parts, another marine, farther up the bank, called out, "I got something else here." It was an AK-47 buried just below the surface. A couple of minutes later, several loaded magazines were found. Then a burlap sack containing 130 pounds of ammonium nitrate. Then a plastic bag with 17 pounds of a mixture of aluminum nitrate and ammonium powder. Then some pressure plates. Then two-way radios used as triggering devices. Then carbon rods, detonation cord, blasting caps and speaker wire.
Very close to the caches stood a compound. The day before, the marines asked the owner if they could spend the night inside his walls. The owner, who struck some as suspiciously hostile, refused. By the time the caches were discovered, he was gone.
Another local, anothernight, welcomed the entire company into his compound. As 70-odd marines unrolled their sleeping bags in the compound's dirt courtyards among goats, cows and chickens, the Afghan security forces drank tea and shared peanut butter and crackers with the host and several of his sons in a small mud room. Haji Abdul Rahim, the ruddy, bright-eyed owner of the compound, turned out to be a Koranic healer: in exchange for livestock, he treated illnesses and injuries by reciting over them appropriate passages from the Muslim holy book.
That night we stayed up late, listening to Rahim speak of miracles. His grandfather had been a revered spiritual leader in Sangin. After he died and was buried in a cemetery not far from Rahim's home, wild deer would regularly visit the slab of white stone that marked his grave. Faithful from all across Afghanistan traveled to Sangin to pay tribute. This was in the 1980s, during the jihad, and when the Soviets learned of the burial site's magic and the pilgrims it attracted, they dispatched a helicopter to destroy it. A bullet struck the grave marker, piercing the white stone, and from that place issued a slow line of blood. The stone still bleeds today, Rahim insisted, continually replenishing a deep pool at its base.
"In this country, you will see many strange things," Rahim said, holding up a finger. "Lots of miracles happen here."
At dawn, as the marines rolled up their bags and shouldered their rucksacks, Rahim approached the company commander. One of his daughters was in pain. She'd twisted her ankle and it was badly swollen. Did the marines have any medicine?
A corpsman dug out a few Ibuprofen, for which Rahim was very grateful.
On a recent afternoon at Camp Leatherneck, I met with Maj. Gen. John Toolan, the commander of coalition forces in southwest Afghanistan. We sat on a porch outside his office, and at one point during our conversation, General Toolan gestured at the steel I-beams of a half-erected building up the way. "Look at this place," he said. "It's just being built. We're not going anywhere. Yes, we're not going to be conducting the kind of operations that we're conducting today. But we're not leaving. I bring all kinds of people over here for meetings. I say: 'See that new construction over there? How long do you think that's gonna last? Twenty-five, 30 years?' "
To be sure, the United States will try to keep some kind of presence in Afghanistan long after 2014. Big bases might remain; trainers and advisers might come and go; special operations forces might continue to carry out targeted "kill-capture" raids. But conventional forces are coming home. And when that happens, the weird end will almost certainly pass unheralded by any declaration of victory or admission of defeat. Because the war in Afghanistan, almost certainly, will not be over. It will go on without us. Nobody knows how it will evolve. It's easy to be pessimistic — but pessimism, too, assumes some insight into a future that has seemed recently to become more, not less, opaque.
"People ask me all the time, 'Can the Afghan National Security Forces hold what we've got and maintain security?' " General Toolan told me. "I say, absolutely: they're better-trained, better-equipped and better-liked than the insurgency. They can do it. However, what is important is their will. Their will is a function of their leadership. And their leadership is oftentimes susceptible to corruption." This perhaps would be the greatest tragedy of all: if the gains earned in Helmand by the coalition since 2006 were lost because of a lack of will. For what would the British and Americans have sacrificed so much? To what end would we be able to say 821 of them gave their lives?
Before I left Sangin, I attended a memorial service for two marines who were killed a week earlier by an I.E.D. The centerpiece of any memorial for a marine is the formal construction of his battle cross. The rifle stuck bayonet down, the helmet set atop the butt stock, the dog tags draped on the pistol grip, the boots placed on the ground. The end result is a movingly personlike assemblage of the dead man's essential gear. What holds it all together is the rifle. Clearly, the rifle is meant to symbolize a kind of linchpin — the singularly vital thing. Yet somehow, it is the boots, their laces neatly looped and tied, that are most affecting. It is the boots, not the rifle, that most evoke an absence. It is the boots that young marines reach out to touch when they kneel before it all.
An article on Page 24 this weekend about Marines fighting in Afghanistan, using information from a public relations official for the Marines, misstates the given name of one them. He is Maj. Gen. John Toolan, not Michael.


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FRC Staff
Kenyn Cureton
Vice President for Church Ministries
Dr. Kenyn Cureton has served as Vice President for Church Ministries for Family Research Council since 2006. Under his leadership, FRC's "Watchmen on the Wall" pastors network has grown from 1,800 to nearly 41,000.
Prior to joining FRC, Dr. Cureton was unanimously elected as Vice President for Convention Relations for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In this position, Dr. Cureton directed media and public relations for the SBC executive committee, performed liaison work with national church and political officials, and was executive editor of SBC Life.
Previously, Dr. Cureton served as a pastor for twenty years, most recently at First Baptist Church in Lebanon, Tenn. While there, he authored Lost Episodes, a pilot video curriculum intended to teach children and adults about America's Christian heritage. In 2004, Dr. Cureton co-authored the iVoteValues voter resource guide with Dr. Richard Land of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC. He also provided the content for the iVoteValues.com website and Voter Impact Toolkit, which provides churches with all that is needed to conduct a Christian Citizenship Sunday and a non-partisan voter registration drive.
Since joining FRC, Dr. Cureton has further enhanced the iVoteValues initiative with a feature-rich website (iVoteValues.org) and expanded Voter Impact Toolkit. He also initiated the WatchmenPastors.org and CultureImpact.org websites for culturally engaged pastors and church members. He also created the "Stand for Marriage" Toolkit DVD which has been sent to over 20,000 churches, notably in California, Arizona, Florida, Maine, and North Carolina in support of their successful efforts to uphold traditional marriage. He is the author of a booklet: Ten Commandments: Foundation for American Society and contributes to Lost Episode from American History on the WatchmenPastors.org blog.
Dr. Cureton holds a Bachelor's degree in Religion from Carson Newman College and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) and Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has done additional study at the University of Texas at Arlington and completed his doctoral dissertation while at the University of Lund, Sweden. Dr. Cureton and his wife, Pat, have two children.


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India's gross domestic product (GDP) report is due out Friday and economists are not expecting any dramatic turnaround in Asia's third largest economy. The consensus is that growth in the April to June quarter was likely a repeat of the previous quarter's lackluster 5.3 percent - but investors are shrugging it off.
The country's equity market has seen a surge in inflows this year making the benchmark Bombay Sensex, which has risen over 13 percent year-to-date, one of the best performing indices in Asia.
Bad news out of India this year ranges from a threat of a credit ratings downgrade - driven by mounting fiscal deficit and a lack of any policy response to slowing growth - to the most recent power crisis which impacted half the country's 1.2 billion population. Despite this, investors have continued betting on India.
Since the start of 2012, foreign institutional investors (FIIs) have pumped almost $12 billion into the stock market – the highest inflows among Asian, ex-Japan, markets so far this year, according to HSBC. This compares to a net outflow of $358 million last year.
"The talk or rhetoric on India is much more negative than investor positioning - this has been somewhat surprising given the multiple problems India is facing," Rajeev Malik, Senior Economist at brokerage CLSA told CNBC.
"(But) there is a perception among some FIIs that compared with many other economies, the Indian situation is relatively less bad. Plus there is a long term story here even though the shine has come off and the current policy paralysis remains a stumbling block," he added.
Liquidity Driven Rally?
While the turnaround in the Indian market – which slumped 25 percent in 2011 – is partly linked to the rise in global liquidity, Mumbai-based Jitendra Sriram, Director and Head of Research at HSBC, says investors have been lured to the country because of its strong domestic focus, which shields it somewhat from the slump in Europe and the United States unlike many other Asian countries.
"India has limited external linkages. With fears on U.S. & EU, money has preferred to flow into more domestic economy oriented themes," Sriram said.
Within the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) space, he adds investors are viewing the Indian economy as "counter-cyclical."
"Investors who have been concerned about the China slowdown and the impact it could have on resource heavy economies like Brazil and Russia, believe that a weaker China growth could alleviate price pressure on commodities which in turn could be positive for India - a big importer of energy," Sriram said.
Lower commodity prices, which help ease inflationary pressures in India, could provide an opportunity for the central bank to ease monetary conditions.
Stability in corporate earnings alongside attractive valuations has also played a key role in attracting funds into the market. The Sensex is currently trading at a price-to-earnings ratio of 13.3 times, compared to a historical average of 15-16 times.
Nicholas Ferres, Investment Director at Eastspring Investments, who became overweight on the country's stocks in June for the first time in five years, says his decision was based on the market's low valuation relative to its own history.
In addition to institutional investors increasing their exposure to the Indian market, there has also been a pick-up in interest from sovereign wealth funds, particularly from the Middle East, according to Sriram.
Sriram, who has a year-end target of 18,700 for the benchmark index – which marks a 7 percent upside from current levels, says positive momentum for equities will hinge on government action to improve the investment climate, efforts to improve the fiscal deficit and the outlook for agricultural growth in the light of a deficient monsoon.
Investors will be watching the month-long parliament session ending on September 7 for signs of progress on economic reforms.
CNBC's Gauri Bhatia also contributed to the report


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Love comes in many forms. The love for your spouse is much different than the love for your child, which is different from the love for a pet, which is different from the love of a friend.
However, if you put all of them in a burning building and could only save one, most parents would choose their child, hands down. This is the most powerful kind of love.
This kind of love is most evident the day your teenager gets a learner's permit. As the parent, it is now your responsibility to allow your kid, the one who insists on repeating internet memes and splitting infinitives, to sit behind the wheel of a moving 3-ton vehicle while you sit in the passenger seat willingly channeling your inner crash dummy.
We do this out of love for our children.
The question is: Why on earth do some people become driver education teachers? They deserve a medal. They do this for other people's children! They must be missing some vital nerve to be able to do that! They are superhuman, maybe even part robot! Or perhaps they simply want to die, but they like surprises.
Fortunately for them, there is one advantage that driver education teachers have that parents do not. That is the all-important brake pedal on the passenger's side of their car. I keep slamming my foot down as if there was one in my car, but so far, it has been ineffective.
I could use an extra steering wheel as well. My son has a terrifying habit of drifting from one side of the road to the other. When I tell him to stay straight, he says, "Define 'straight'."
His driver education teacher stressed adjusting the mirrors before the student starts the car. This is difficult to do when the mirrors on the car are operated electronically. This presented a frustrating Catch 22 for my son, who couldn't be persuaded to start the car first. So... do I have to buy another car? Should we hack the electronics on the car? Or should we simply sit in the driveway until the car decides to cooperate?
As the parent of a new driver, you are not only required to put your very life into the hands of your squirrelly, know-it-all teenager, you are also required to be calm and rational at all times while he is attempting to kill you both.
Someone has to be calm and rational, though. If he is gripping the steering wheel and yelling "AAAHHHH!!!!" every time a semi approaches from the other direction, your scream of terror will not only be redundant, but it will not be helpful... at all. Plus, it won't stop the car from hitting the semi, which is even more terrifying.
One of the rules for a learner's permit states that a licensed adult driver has to be in the passenger's seat. But it doesn't say that person has to be conscious. So... that's an option, I guess.
After much thought, I decided that a better option to stay calm, rational, and conscious would be to simply pretend the car was impervious to accidents and that it could practically drive itself. Is that rational? I don't know for sure, but it's best not to examine that question while my son still needs a co-pilot.
Teaching a teenager how to drive is a lot like the burning building scenario. You are indeed risking your own life to improve his chances of survival. Good thing my car is impervious to accidents.
Laura Snyder is a nationally syndicated columnist, author & speaker. You can reach Laura at firstname.lastname@example.com Or visit her website www.lauraonlife.com for more info.
© Copyright 2002-2014 by Magic City Morning Star
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The Brewers Association (BA) developed position statements on the following issues:
Transparency in Labeling
Transparency in Brewer-Distributor Relationships
Independent Three-Tier Beer Distribution System
Brewery Direct to Customer Sales
The BA believes the American consumer should have access to the widest range of domestically produced beers made available by licensed breweries.
The BA recognizes that not all beers have adequate sales levels to find distribution on retailers' shelves or wholesalers' warehouses. In such situations, consumers may be willing to go to the brewery premises to find beers not readily available through normal distribution channels.
The success or failure of a beer should depend on consumer demand, rather than on artificial barriers to distribution. BA supports state laws that respect and enhance consumer choice in the marketplace. BA believes that to provide the greatest ongoing choice for consumers, small brewers should have the right to sell beer directly to qualified consumers.
For Small Packaging Breweries
The ability to sell beer directly to qualified consumers from a packaging/bottling brewery's premise would enhance customer loyalty and help increase sales within the three tier distribution system. Such right is not intended to bypass the three tier distribution.
For Small Brewery-Restaurants/Brewpubs
Granting brewery-restaurants/brewpubs the right to offer closed and sealed containers of their company's on premise brewed beer for off premise consumption is an effective means of engendering brand loyalty and improving customer relations and service. Such capability is not intended to bypass the distribution of bottled, canned or prepackaged beer within the three tier distribution system.
Alcohol Content in Beer
The BA believes the American beer drinker should have access to the widest range of domestically brewed beers made available by licensed breweries. The BA advocates for and supports state laws and regulatory protocols which expand beer drinker choice in the American marketplace. The accessibility of diverse American beer styles should reflect demand for these beers from responsible beer drinkers, and should not be restricted through artificial barriers to market entry.
BA believes that to provide the greatest ongoing choice for American beer drinkers, consistent with historical brewing tradition and beer's valued role in American food and beverage culture, brewers should have the right to offer beers of varying alcohol content and not be restricted by limits of alcohol by volume (ABV) or alcohol by weight (ABW). Similarly, American beer drinkers should have the right to the responsible enjoyment of different beer styles with the appropriate alcohol strength without having to pay a different tax based on the alcohol content of the beer.
Franchise Laws/Access to Market
BA believes that small brewers and wholesalers should be free to establish enforceable contracts between the parties that both parties agree are fair and equitable. Franchise laws were enacted to protect wholesalers from the undue bargaining power of their largest suppliers. Applying those laws to the relationship between a small brewer and the wholesaler is unfair and against free market principles.Where franchise laws exist, the BA believes that any brewer contributing a small percentage of a wholesaler's volume should be exempted from those laws and free to establish a mutually beneficial contract with that wholesaler. Without the leverage inherent in being a large part of a wholesaler's business, a small brewer and wholesaler can negotiate a fair contract at arm's length.
Talking points regarding revised BA position statement on franchise laws August 2012
Regarding the BA update of its position statement on franchise laws: The BA believes that the definition of "small percentage" is a state-by-state matter to be determined by the brewers guild of each state. In that definition of "small percentage," the BA fully supports the efforts of state brewers guilds to protect the interests of their members.
This acknowledges that a one-size-fits-all approach is not the most sensible. For example, an exemption for a brewer representing 20 percent of a wholesaler's volume might be an appropriate, or even desirable, goal for one state, while another solution might work perfectly well in another. Therefore, the position statement language referring to "a small percentage" was determined to be preferable to citing an exact number. In one state, "small" could be 20 percent or even more, while in another state, perhaps five percent would be appropriate. Thus, the BA recommends that brewers who represent a small percentage of a wholesaler's volume be exempted from franchise laws, and that "small percentage" be defined within each state.


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(Reuters) - Baxter International Inc said on Tuesday it would buy privately held Swedish kidney dialysis product company Gambro AB for about $4 billion, a tie-up that would make it No. 2 in the dialysis market.
Baxter, whose shares fell nearly 1 percent, will finance the acquisition with cash and debt. The deal marks Baxter's biggest acquisition since Chief Executive Robert Parkinson took the helm in 2004.
Baxter manufactures kidney dialysis equipment, drug infusion pumps and blood therapy products. The Gambro acquisition will round out Baxter's renal business, which accounted for almost one-fifth of the company's 2011 revenue of $13.89 billion.
Gambro, based in Lund, Sweden, is one of the largest makers of equipment for hemodialysis, which is generally performed in a hospital or clinic. Baxter's machines are used for peritoneal dialysis which can be done at home.
The need for dialysis is linked to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes and is attracting more investors. Billionaire Warren Buffett has more than a 10 percent stake in competitor DaVita HealthCare Partners Inc.
Gambro's sales have been flat to weaker in recent years, undermined partly by capacity constraints, but Baxter executives voiced confidence during a conference call with analysts that the business can be turned around.
"It is a big market and it is going to continue to grow for a long time. There are only so many kidney transplants available in the world," Parkinson told analysts.
Hemodialysis removes waste products from the blood when the kidneys fail. Another method is peritoneal dialysis, a treatment for severe chronic kidney disease that uses the patient's own membrane inside the body as a filter to clear waste. The third treatment option is a kidney transplant.
"At the end of the day, this is an acquisition that is not dependent on any one pathway for value creation. It is not dependent on a major new product launch or technological advancement, and is not dependent on commercial assumptions that are overly optimistic. This is an acquisition that is dependent on execution," he said. "This is something we know we can do and do well."
He said the planned acquisition did not represent a change in the direction for the company, which has invested in stem cell research and a treatment for Alzheimer's disease.
Shares of Baxter fell 0.9 percent to $65.22 on Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.
Some analysts said they were concerned by the price tag and that the company said on its conference call it will issue $3 billion in new debt and scale back its share buyback program in order to acquire Gambro.
"I think the deal makes sense. I think it does fit well with their existing renal business and I think there probably are synergies, but at the same time it is a lot of cash they are paying for this thing. They are taking on a significant amount of debt," said Michael Matson, an analyst at Mizuho Securities USA.
Credit rating agency Moody's said it put Baxter's A3 rating on review for downgrade following the announcement.
Derrick Sung, an analyst with Bernstein Research, noted that Baxter will be paying 2.5 times sales, which is not "unreasonable" but appears to be on the high end of comparable deals.
The Gambro deal marks further consolidation in the kidney dialysis market, where Gambro and Baxter compete against companies including U.S.-based DaVita and Germany's Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co KGaA, the biggest player in the hemodialysis market.
"I think in the longer term, the ambition is to try to challenge Fresenius," currently the market leader, analyst Kristofer Liljeberg of Sweden's Carnegie investment bank said.
However, he said that Gambro, owned by Swedish investment holding company Investor AB and its partly owned private equity company EQT, had been struggling in recent years with slow growth and price competition.
Liljeberg said the deal was a good one for Investor, the investment vehicle of the Wallenberg family which controls several of Sweden's top companies. Since the purchase of Gambro, Investor and EQT have sold off its clinics and a blood component business.
"This is a good long-term home for Gambro," Borje Ekholm, CEO of Investor, said. "These two companies have a lot of things in common. They share similar values to improve the lives of patients. They have a very complementary geographic fit."
More than 2 million patients globally are on some form of dialysis, and that has been increasing more than 5 percent annually, in part because of the rising rates of diabetes and hypertension.
Excluding special items, Baxter expects the Gambro transaction to reduce earnings per diluted share by 10 to 15 cents in 2013 and be neutral or add modestly to them in 2014. The deal is expected to close in the first half of next year.
Excluding the impact of special items and estimated amortization of intangible assets, the company said the deal should not affect earnings in 2013 and should add 20 to 25 cents per diluted share in 2014.
Baxter said it expected the deal to add to earnings per diluted share, excluding special items, after 2014.
The suburban Chicago company said it expected over five years to increase sales by 7 to 8 percent, excluding the impact of currency fluctuations, on a compound annual basis, with earnings per diluted share, excluding special items, rising by 8 to 10 percent.
"Companies like Baxter can unlock a fair amount of value when they find strategic use for their overseas cash," said Piper Jaffray analyst Matt Miksic.
Indeed, Baxter said it planned to finance the deal with cash generated from overseas operations and debt.
J.P. Morgan was Baxter's financial adviser for the deal while Goldman Sachs advised Gambro.
Reporting by Esha Dey in Bangalore, Debra Sherman in Chicago, Caroline Humer in New York, and Patrick Lannin and Mia Shanley in Stockholm; editing by Joyjeet Das, Lisa Von Ahn, Matthew Lewis, Marguerita Choy and Phil Berlowitz


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Author Notes: A borani is a cold yoghurt-based dish from Iran. But that is a bit of a boring piece of info, right? Well, apparently, it has been said that Poorandokht, the daughter of the Sassanian Persian King Khosrow Paravaiz, loved cold yoghurt-based dishes. When she was proclaimed Queen, the name Poorani was given to yoghurt-based dishes. Later on Poorani turned into Borani. I so do like to believe this story :) I love spinach and how it melds so well with yoghurt. This creamy appetiser is lovely with some lavash (flatbread from Iran) or some crisped-up-in-the-oven whole wheat pita bread. The combination of spinach, garlic, thick & creamy yoghurt, walnuts and mint, begs for a Pinot Gris from Alsace. Promise. —shayma
Food52 Review: Don't let a little blanching stop you from making this wonderful dip. While it's true that blanching spinach is a pain in the neck, once the water comes to a boil, the whole process is over in a minute, and then you're well on your way to bliss. Shayma smartly heats the blanched and chopped spinach in a little garlic-scented oil and then adds more fresh garlic to the creamy, tangy dip. Our tips: Don't worry about squeezing the spinach in step 4, unless it looks particularly soppy. Do use whole milk Greek yogurt -– the low-fat stuff will be watery and joyless. Use a wide shallow dish so you have room to spread out the dip, making a broad landing pad for the oil, mint and walnuts. And reach for your best olive oil for sprinkling over top. – A&M —The Editors
Serves: 2-4
packets baby (or regular) spinach, (6 oz packets)
clove garlic, minced and divided into two separate batches.
tbsp olive oil (not your best, but the type you use for sautéing)
small tubs very thick, drained yoghurt- I use Greek Yoghurt, 'Total Tage', (they come in a 5.3 oz tub).
dried mint for garnish (please do use dried vs. fresh mint, therein lies the beauty of this dish- the use of a woodsy, earthy dried herb)
handful crushed walnuts
your best olive oil
- Blanch your baby spinach.
- Drain well, make sure to get all the liquid out. Chop fine.
- Sauté 1/2 clove of garlic in 2 tbsp olive oil and add the baby spinach. Add a pinch of salt. Stir for a few minutes.
- Remove from stove, allow to cool, then squeeze out any excess liquid.
- In a bowl, add yoghurt, 1/2 clove of minced garlic, baby spinach and stir gently. Add salt to taste.
- Transfer to the bowl you are serving it in (I use a shallow, round bowl) and sprinkle with dried mint, crushed walnuts and a lazy trail of olive oil.
- Serve with lavash or whole wheat pita. And don't forget the Pinot Gris :)
- Your Best Spinach Recipe Contest Winner!
- This recipe is a Community Pick!
More Great Recipes:
Condiment/Spread|Clove|Mint|Vegetable|Walnut|Make Ahead|Vegetarian|Gluten-Free|Appetizer


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3 Minute Presentations
3 Minute Presentations
The 3 Minute Speech Competition, based on an international competition that
originated in Australia, challenges students to present their research or design work
in a very short timeframe in a manner that engages a non-specialist audience.
Participants have three minutes (and one static PowerPoint slide) to deliver a clear,
concise, and engaging presentation of their research to an educated audience of
non-specialists. In these presentations participants are expected to clearly communicate
their research topic or design project, explain what work is being done and how, and
identify the impact this work will have.
- A single static PowerPoint slide is permitted (no slide transitions,
animations or 'movement' of any description, the slide is to be presented
from the beginning of the oration).
- No additional electronic media (e.g. sound and video files) are
- No additional props (e.g. costumes, musical instruments, laboratory
equipment) are permitted.
- Presentations are limited to 3 minutes maximum and competitors
exceeding 3 minutes are disqualified.
- Presentations are to be spoken word (eg. no poems, raps, or songs).
SpeechSpeech is the vocal form of human communication. →


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Vous n'êtes pas identifié.
I'm here! I do not want to leave the ghost.
ช่อง ทาง เข้า sboMathias De Boi Fullback, the perfume of the present to play.
Saint-Etienne Admittedly, the extreme frustration that Arsene Wenger did
not release himself to join ManchesterUnited two years ago.
The 32-year-old said: "I want to move out of Arsenal to play
for another club. At that time, I was angry at the manager. "
"I had the opportunity to move to Manchester United and he did
not want me to move out of the team."ช่อง ทาง เข้า sbo
Last night, De Boi stopped the nightmare in the Emirates Stadium
after moving back to France to play. Saint-Etienne Last month
The seven-time All-Wolves have been downplayed for the Gunners,ช่อง ทาง เข้า sbo
which has been the third choice for Bayern and Maltese-Niles in the team.
Hors ligne


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* I think I need to give up my Indians fandom, limited as it may be. It's incredibly frustrating to go through the same thing year after year. Every year on July 31, you know exactly what to expect. Unless the team is in the thick of the race, a group of veteran players eligible for free agency or close to it will be traded away for prospects. And all you can do is shake your head and wonder, "Don't these people get it?"
I speak of course not of Mark Shapiro and the Indians front office, but about the mainstream "fan view" that you see on message boards and on talk radio.
Please recognize that I am not saying that I am enamored with the return the Tribe got in their trades, nor am I criticizing those who analyze the moves on a player-by-player basis and find them lacking. The return for Lee seems underwhelming, the return for Martinez seems a little bit underwhelming, but reasonable, the returns for Betancourt and DeRosa seem eminently fair, and the return for Garko seems more than generous. I don't suspect that the Cliff Lee trade will go down in history as a coup, but I'm also not foolish enough to write it off as a failure a week after it was made.
My real frustration with fan-think is that it doesn't matter who the Indians got in the trades. They could have got the Phillies and Red Sox top prospects, and the vox populi would still be howling. There was a similar outcry in Cleveland over the Colon trade, which of course turned out to be a massive coup. But there is nary little recognition that Lee himself was acquired in the very same type of trade he was dispatched in. Again, I'm not saying that this specific trade will work out as well as the Colon trade did. The Colon trade came under special circumstances and cannot be used alone as a precedent, and looked a lot better on paper at the time.
The outcry over the Pirates' moves is even more puzzling. The way some commentators have talked about Freddy Sanchez, Jack Wilson, and Nyjer Morgan, you would think they are stars. Again, I have no issue with questions about whether the return will do any good, but the idea that Freddy Sanchez was an integral future piece for the Pirates is absurd.
* More broadly, why is it that the baseball fan public at large has such a hard time grasping some very simply truths about baseball economics? I can't tell you how many people I've encountered with business sense and a solid understanding of economics (I'm not exactly Milton Friedman myself, mind you) that just can't apply it to baseball at all.
Here are just a few simple principles about trades that seem to be missed by a large portion of casual fans. There is some overlap between them, and I'm certainly not claiming that you didn't already think this way:
1. You are not trading for a player; you are trading for his contract too.
This is of course the key tenant of the type of trade analysis that is popular at sabermetic sites. People act as if you are trading Cliff Lee's entire future, but in fact what you are trading is 1 1/2 years of Cliff Lee's services. Of course, in Lee's case he is paid less than his free agent value, but in many other cases players are paid about what they would get on the free agent market, and in others they are paid more.
2. When a player is eligible for free agency, you are probably going to have to pay him is market value. In some cases there might be a hometown discount, or a security discount if you sign an extension in advance, but for the most part you pay market value.
Just because Cliff Lee is an Indian doesn't mean that he's going to stay an Indian. Would you expect the Indians to reach a free agent agreement with a pitcher of similar quality? No? Then you probably shouldn't expect them to reach a contract extension with him either.
Circling back to #1, trading Lee just means you give up 1 1/2 years of his service, not his whole future career. You can't trade what you never owned to begin with.
3. Even if a player's contract is a decent value, that doesn't mean he's the best possible fit for your organization.
Nyjer Morgan is not a bad player, but if he can handle center field well and your top prospect plays that position as well, then maybe you're better off trading him to a team with a gaping whole in center field in exchange for some other pieces. Simple, right? But how many hand-wringing comments about the Morgan trade ignored the presence of McCutchen and the possibility that Morgan's value is not maximized by playing left for the Pittsburgh?
4. Teams have to think about long-term implications
This is self-evident and shouldn't have to be stated at all, but the knee-jerk reaction often overlooks it regardless. The Indians recently traded Carl Pavano to Minnesota, and some fans balked because he was just about the most reliable starter left on the team (sad but true). But he was only going to be an Indian for two more months, and it doesn't make any difference how the Indians perform over the next two months.
Of course, the Indians got essentially nothing in return and just saved whatever was left on his contract, so it's not as if they would have lost out on some great opportunity had they held onto him. But still there were fans who reacted with an eye only on how it would affect the end of the Indians' lost season, and not the fact that it opened up a rotation spot for Justin Masterson (and maybe Carlos Carrasco or Hector Rondon or someone in September) or the dollar savings, etc.
* I am glad to see that strikeouts per PA (as an alternative to K/IP for pitchers) is gaining more widespread use in the sabermetric community. K/PA is something I've agitated for in the past--I don't know that I've ever done it here, but I could dig up some embarrassingly intemperate FanHome threads to prove it.
I don't mean to suggest that K/IP is worthless, but it doesn't measure what the casual fan seems to think it does. Innings Pitched has widely been accepted as our standard for how much someone pitched, but in fact it is the number of outs they recorded divided by three. So K/IP can actually be thought of as the percentage of outs that are recorded by strikeouts.
K/PA is the percentage of batter struck out, so it takes a binary approach--a strikeout is a "success" and any non-strikeout is a "failure". Of course, there are other ways you could break it down as well--some people exclude walks, for instance. It all depends on what you are seeking to measure.
But to me, K/PA answers the most relevant question. A pitcher with truly "unhittable" stuff would be able to strike batters out at will (ridiculous extreme, granted). Excluding walks ignores the tradeoff that often has to take place between attempting to avoid contact and throwing strikes. K/IP is still useful, IMO, as you could look at is measuring how often a pitcher takes care of a batter himself and how often his fielders are involved. And of course there is a strong correlation between K/PA and K/IP--you're not going to go too wrong either way and conclude that Nolan Ryan was a master of pitching to contact and that Nate Cornejo was a flamethrower.
Before you send me any angry emails about referring to PA rather than Batters Faced, one of my pet peeves is the use of different names for the same statistic based on whether it is for a hitter or a pitcher. It just causes unnecessary confusion.
* Out of the four major North American pro team sports, my order of preference is baseball (big gap), football (big gap), basketball, hockey. I was recently thinking about this and it occurred to me that my preferences correspond very well to the continuum of possession fluidity. The more fluid possessions are, the less I like the sport.
I am not saying that is the one and only explanation for my preferences--it is a kind of after the fact analysis. But I do like the increased order of each sport.
In baseball, there really isn't possession in the same sense as other sports, as of course the ball is not advanced towards a goal. But there is a very rigid process of changing sides, which occurs if and only if three outs are made or the game ends. Unlike in other sports, the offense and defense are kept completely separate, and there is never any incentive formed out of a goal of winning the game to do anything other than attempt to score or prevent the opponent from scoring. (Of course, there are times in which it makes sense to try to score one or two runs rather than attempting to maximize your runs. But there is never any win-based reason to eschew scoring at all, or severely curtail it, as there are in the other sports).
Football's possessions are fairly well-defined. Possession changes on a score, on the orderly concept of downs, or when one team voluntarily decides to surrender position, usually by punting. The only disorderly change of possession occurs on turnovers, and on about half of plays (running plays), the ball is physically in the possession of an offensive player at all times.
Basketball has much less rigidity. Possession changes on certain fouls and infractions, on certain scores, and on the shot clock. That list does not include turnovers, which are much more frequent than in football and understandably so, as the ball can only be cradled for a brief period of times. The rules of the game dictate that the ball almost always be accessible to thievery by the defense, and passing is a necessity done in close quarters rather than downfield as in football.
I would argue that hockey has the most possession fluidity of any of the sports, as possessions are not formally defined (there is no shot clock, no downs, and certainly no innings change). The puck must always be on the ice where it is up for grabs, and while hockey players have amazing control over the puck with their sticks (I tried to write this five different ways and none of them sounded good), it's hard to say that it is a safer way to secure the ball/puck than holding it with your hands.
If you thought this was going somewhere, sorry, it's not.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
* I think I need to give up my Indians fandom, limited as it may be. It's incredibly frustrating to go through the same thing year after year. Every year on July 31, you know exactly what to expect. Unless the team is in the thick of the race, a group of veteran players eligible for free agency or close to it will be traded away for prospects. And all you can do is shake your head and wonder, "Don't these people get it?"
2 comments:
Before you send me any angry emails about referring to PA rather than Batters Faced, one of my pet peeves is the use of different names for the same statistic based on whether it is for a hitter or a pitcher. It just causes unnecessary confusion.ReplyDelete
But if I give you the follwing;
Team PA PA
Cle 4,764 4,869
how would you know which number is the number of offensive plate appearances, and which number is the number of the opponent's offensive plate appearances? You wouldn't know of course, so I do think there is SOME utility in having different names for the same statistic.
I agree that is confusing. My preferred solution is to just add a qualifier before after the name of the stat--Opponent PA, Hits Allowed, etc. I don't think that having an entirely different name is particularly helpful.ReplyDelete
Plus the official categories handle this issue with no consistency whatsoever. On one hand you have different names--PA/BFP, HB/HBP. On the other you have stats where the full names may be different, but the abbreviations are the same (hits/hits allowed are both H official, runs scored/runs allowed are both R, etc.)
Comments are moderated, so there will be a lag between your post and it actually appearing. I reserve the right to reject any comment for any reason.


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NEW YORK - Despite losing for the second time in three weeks, the Seattle Seahawks remained atop The Associated Press NFL power rankings Tuesday.
Seattle was upset by Arizona last Sunday, its first loss at home all season. Yet the Seahawks (12-3) stayed in first place with 379 points, nine in front of Denver, which also is 12-3. Seattle grabbed eight first-place votes from a nationwide panel of media members who regularly cover the league, and Denver got the other four.
Both teams have clinched playoff berths.
"The Rams game is now huge," NBC's Tony Dungy said of the Seahawks' season closer. "They need a win to keep the No. 1 seed in the NFC.
ESPN's Herm Edwards went with Denver on top, citing Peyton Manning's record-setting exploits.
"When you set the NFL record throwing 51 touchdowns and you have one game left, you are No. 1," Edwards said of the Broncos, who own the AFC West title.
San Francisco, Carolina and New England, all with 11-4 records, were next in the AP Pro32. They also are in the playoffs.
"Still trying to figure out how Brady and Belichick won their 11th AFC East championship," Fox Sports' John Czarnecki said of the Patriots.
Of the 49ers, Jeff Legwold of ESPN.com said: "Flexing their muscle a bit roaring down the stretch with five consecutive wins."
And Ira Kaufman of the Tampa Tribune noted about Carolina: "Luke Kuechly won't let the NFC South title elude the Panthers, who have won 10 of 11."
A win at Atlanta on Sunday gives Carolina the division and a first-round playoff bye.
At the bottom were Houston with a mere 12 points, and Washington, with 29. Both division winners last season, the Texans are 2-13, the Redskins 3-12.
"Might as well close out this debacle of a season in style," Kaufman said of the Texans, who have lost 13 in a row.
"Counting down the days until we find out what happens to Mike Shanahan," Bob Glauber of Newsday said of the Redskins.
The same top 10 teams, albeit in a different order, remained this week: Cincinnati, Kansas City, Indianapolis, New Orleans and Arizona.
Either the Saints or Cardinals won't make the playoffs despite gaudy 10-5 records heading into their finales.
"The Cardinals have double-digit wins for only the seventh time in their 93-year history," noted Charean Williams of the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
"Their road record, now 3-5 after the loss to Carolina, becomes a little bigger problem each week," Legwold added of the Saints.
San Diego, which still has a shot at an AFC wild-card at 8-7, improved four spots to 12th, a big move for so late in the schedule. The Chargers impressed Glauber:
"The Chargers take care of business against the Raiders at home and still have a chance at a playoff run with a win over the Chiefs and losses by Baltimore and Miami."


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The Valley
Anderson Valley is located in Mendocino County, roughly 115 miles north of San Francisco, and is approximately 16 miles long. It's a relatively narrow valley ranging from one half mile to one and a half miles wide with steep, evergreen studded hillsides and mountains on either side. Those mountains and ridges provide a stunning back drop for the rolling foothills and the bucolic valley floor. Cattle and sheep ranches, horse properties, apple orchards, vineyards and several other agricultural industries line the valley from Yorkville in the South to Navarro in the North.
The valley's main water source, the Navarro River, is fed by several large creeks and winds its way through the valley and out into the Pacific Ocean. Lining its banks and covering the hillsides are thousands of beautiful Redwood trees, many of which are hundreds of years old.
The social and economic heart of the Anderson Valley is the town of Boonville. There you will find excellent choices for dining, lodging, shopping and wine tasting. The other major towns are Yorkville, Navarro and Philo, where our vineyard is located. There are no traffic lights in the entire valley and even the most developed town of Boonville can be driven through in less than 60 seconds. For the residents and the tourists this only adds to the locale's considerable charm. In addition, a number of well planned and rigorous agricultural zoning laws are in place to ensure that the country feel is here to stay.
Click here for a map of the area:
Local Wine Industry
While vines have been cultivated in the area for well over a century, the focused grape growing and wine production industry is relatively new. In the 1960's the Edmeades family were the first, planting 24 acres of grapes in the valley. Other intrepid wine growers soon followed and the area was rewarded with its own AVA (American Viticultural Area) in 1983.
The Anderson Valley is one of California's mildest wine growing regions and many cool weather varietals like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris and Riesling thrive in our unique microclimates. There are a number of wineries producing world class sparkling and still wines and several top notch growers that sell their sought after grapes to winemakers in Napa, Sonoma and elsewhere in the U.S.
For more information on planted acreage, varietals, wineries and tasting rooms click on this link:


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By Emma Koch
FORT WAYNE, Ind. — There's a lot of sequester (federal budget cuts) talk coming from Washington and Hoosiers are still learning how these cuts will impact their lives.
Nationwide the budget cuts amount to $85 billion. $13.8 million will be cut from Indiana primary and secondary education. Reports say Head Start and Early Head Start programs will be eliminated and up to 600 disadvantaged children could lose access to childcare.
The Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood announced Monday morning what the sequester will mean for nation-wide air travel. Approximately $600 million Federal Aviation Administration expenditures will be cut. That means that the tower at Fort Wayne International airport is one of 60+ towers across the country that would have to eliminate overnight tower shifts. 6 Indiana airports would be part of the over 100 air traffic control facilities that could be closed.
Thousands of civilian Department of Defense employees in Indiana could face furlough.
U.S. Senator Dan Coats issued the following statement:
"I opposed the budget control act that established sequestration cuts because the policy falsely assumes that all federal programs are equal and therefore all programs should be cut equally. A more responsible way to govern is to separate the essential functions of government from the programs that are duplicative, unnecessary or unaffordable to find ways to reduce spending and save taxpayer dollars."