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The Eastern Police District under PBGen CHRISTOPHER E TAMBUNGAN, District Director, ordered the immediate creation of Special Investigation Task Group (SITG) "Cugay" in order to fast track the investigation and solution of the shooting incident victimizing a policeman happened along EDSA corner Connecticut Street, Greenhills, San Juan City at about 3:30 PM on March 26, 2019.
According to the initial investigation, the victim, PSMSgt Solomon Cugay y Gacisano, an instructor under the Regional Training and Education Division of the National Capital Region Police Office, was travelling along EDSA-Connecticut Southbound onboard his black Yamaha Mio Soul motorcycle, when the suspects fired at him several times and sped off.
The SITG "Cugay" is now studying the trajectory of the bullets, CCTV footages at the crime scene and the route of the suspects for their immediate identification as well as the plate number of the vehicle they used.
PSMSgt Cugay sustained multiple gunshot wounds on his body which resulted to his instantaneous death.
The responding Scene of the Crime Operatives recovered seven (7) empty shells and three (3) deformed slugs of Caliber 45. The cadaver of the victim was subjected to autopsy examination. ### -RbB


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Information technology (IT) management solutions provider Kaseya, which targets managed service providers (MSPs) with its offerings, is linking up with small and medium-sized business (SMB) accounting firm Xero to help businesses gain greater control over their financial data.
The companies said Thursday (Feb. 1) that Xero and Kaseya's BMS will integrate to synchronize financial data between both applications. The business management solution (BMS) provides back-office services for MSPs to enhance automation. Integrating with Xero means the professional services automation (PSA) offering does not have to use a third party to sync up with data stored in Xero.
The firms also said the integration provides a "single source of truth" for financial information, including invoices, payment status, products procured and more.
The flow of integrated data goes both ways, meaning accounting teams using Xero can also access all the operational information they need from data sources like tickets, services and time tracking, among other common elements.
"Kaseya continues to innovate and thereby overcome the problems inherent in first-generation PSA solutions," said Jim Lippie, Kaseya general manager of cloud computing, in a statement. "As the industry's only next-generation PSA, BMS empowers our customers to be more profitable and operationally efficient through easy-to-access data capture and analysis. Our latest partnership with Xero provides an added layer of financial intelligence that can be leveraged within BMS's single pane of glass. This powerful integration saves our MSPs countless hours of admin and back office time."
Last November, Xero announced it would be delisting from the New Zealand Stock Exchange, a move which officially takes effect today (Feb. 2). The company described the move as an "extensive strategic process" to consolidate its shares on the Australia Stock Exchange (ASX) and "provide longer-term access to a broader marketplace for Xero shareholders."
Its CEO, Rod Drury, also pointed to plans to focus on continued expansion across the U.K., North America and Southeast Asia.
"As Xero continues to grow, gaining enhanced access to deeper capital markets, increased liquidity and a broader base of potential investors is critical to fulfilling our ambition to be the leading global small business platform serving millions of customers," Drury said in a disclosure to the ASX in November 2017.
The September 2020 Leveraging The Digital Banking Shift Study, PYMNTS examines consumers' growing use of online and mobile tools to open and manage accounts as well as the factors that are paramount in building and maintaining trust in the current economic environment. The report is based on a survey of nearly 2,200 account-holding U.S. consumers.

subset: commoncrawl


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Aloha Jersey
Island style meets our classic, custom long sleeve jersey. This tropical version of one of our customer favorites features "ALOHA" with Palms, Hibiscus and Plumeria across the back shoulders. The Pacific Whale Foundation logo on the front upper left chest.
- Jersey styling with long sleeves and cuffed at the wrist
- Over-sized fit (If in doubt, we recommend that you size down 1 size.)
- 100% Cotton
- Machine wash, Cold, Gentle cycle/Tumble dry Low
- Made in USA.
Models: Heather - Retail and Aurora - Retail
Photographer: Rob Owen


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Hello guys,
I was in Sardegna with my wife during two weeks in April, looking for Speleomantes, turtles, but also endemic flowers and insects (Pamphagus sardeus !).
With the profusion of bibliography in english and italian about herpetofauna in Sardegna it was quite easy to see most species (apart Speleomantes sarrabusensis).
Here the species we saw :
Testudo marginata :
The biggest (near 40 cm !) :
Testudo graeca (very common, in "sandy" places around Oristano) :
Speleomantes supramontis :
Speleomantes flavus :
Speleomantes imperialis :
Speleomantes genei (or Atylodes genei ?) :
ssp A :
ssp B :
genei is my favourite, looking very different from the others and the continental species (and with a distinct evolutive history).
Euproctus platycephalus :
Brooks are very rare in Sardegna, so is the brook newt ...
On our "wish list" we have missed only sarrabusensis (hard to find outside winter), and Hemorrhois seems very hard to find.
And the Pamphagus sardeus, biggest grasshopper in Europe :
us :
with the Pamphagus (big !)
For the snake lovers :
For the naturalists, here the full report on flickr :


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Bradley Merrill Thompson Quoted in "Health Privacy Official's Departure Unlikely to Rock the Boat"Bloomberg BNA November 8, 2017
Bradley Merrill Thompson, a Member of the Firm in the Health Care and Life Sciences practice, in the firm's Washington, DC, office, was quoted in Bloomberg BNA, in "Health Privacy Official's Departure Unlikely to Rock the Boat," by James Swann.
Following is an excerpt:
There's a growing consensus that cybersecurity is an issue that regulators need to focus on more, and it's not surprising that lawmakers feel the HHS needs a more coordinated strategy across the entire department, Bradley Merrill Thompson, a Washington-based health-care attorney with Epstein Becker & Green PC, told Bloomberg Law.
The new position shouldn't replace ongoing cybersecurity initiatives within HHS agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration, but overall it's a good thing, Thompson said.
One wrinkle in the bill is the absence of any additional appropriations for the position.
"That means HHS has to do this work instead of something else," Thompson said.


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You see that cute little baby seal? Chuck Wendig wants to punch that seal in the mouth because Crysis locked up on him. Again.
Cold Dark Heart
When a fanboy enters any conversation about videogames, all relevance and meaningful discourse stops. Matt Meyers posits that we should all stop acting like fanboys when we are trolled by Jack Thompson or Roger Ebert.
Spend any time on the internet speaking to gamers, and you're going to be called a noob at some point. Bryan Lufkin examines the phenomenon of many gamers' unsympathetic attitude towards those with less experience, or anyone, really.
A job in the videogame industry is highly prized, but it's not all fun all of the time. Mur Lafferty shows us why playing a bugged game or reviewing bad games makes it just like any other job.


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MANCHESTER UNITED fans are fed up with Paul Scholes after his latest attack on Jose Mourinho.
The Old Trafford legend has been viciously branded a "b*****d", "disgraceful" and "absolute turnip of a pundit" after criticising Mourinho's "classless" celebrations in Turin.
Juan Mata's free-kick and Leonardo Bonucci's own-goal secured a dramatic 2-1 Champions League fightback for United.
Mourinho, 55, taunted the Juve crowd so much that a furious Bonucci confronted him on the pitch and the Special One had to be escorted off.
BT Sport pundit Scholes, 43, blasted: "This is everywhere he goes. You need to win with a bit of class.
"Shake the managers hand, go over and clap your fans. I don't think there's any need for it but that's the way he is."
But many United fans have taken the manager's side and slammed Scholes for his "negativity".
Jordan Clarke tweeted: "P*** off Scholes. Not sure it it's just me but if Mourinho's going to stick around, that's the Mourinho I want to see.
"The b******. Scholes constantly has to pick a negative whenever there's a positive."
Paul Thorpe wrote: "Paul Scholes Absolute world class player Absolute turnip of a pundit"
Twitter user Babanla said: "Must be a tough past few weeks for Scholes.
"After he gave that his disgraceful & shameful interview denigrating Mourinho & insulting our players to give the media content during the international break, the team hasn't lost a game & have firmly fought for the badge. Shame on him."
Enyi Nnanta said: "Man Utd Lose: Scholes criticizes Man Utd Win: scholes criticizes What does this guy really want?!"
Mourinho brought on Mata and Marouane Fellaini in the 79th minute and both were instrumental in winning the game.
Mata scored a sublime 86th-minute free-kick while Fellaini flicked on a cross for Bonucci's last-minute own-goal.
Twitter user Kaizer said: "Scholes needs to pipe down for real man. Horrible pundit. Why tf does he have to speak to negatively al the time?
"He called Mou classless for what did after the whistle. Why not actually speak about Mou's tactical substitutions which completely changed the game?"
But others claimed Jose was out of order and backed Scholes.
They included TalkSport pundit Jim White, who said: "Scholes is right about class - at times like this, Jose doesn't have it."
Mourinho, who won Serie A with Inter Milan in 2009 and 2010, was goaded by Juventus fans throughout the match.
But he conceded he should not have let them get to him.
Mourinho said: "I didn't offend anyone at the end.
"I just made a gesture that I wanted to hear them louder.
"I probably shouldn't have done it, and with a cool head I wouldn't have done it, but with my family insulted, including my Inter family, I reacted like this."
Scholes and Mourinho have been at loggerheads during the Portuguese's spell in charge of United.
In January, Scholes claimed Mourinho and his players were "under-performing" after their 0-0 draw with Southampton.
The Red Devils boss hit back, saying "all he does is criticise" and he hopes he would be "25 per cent" as successful as him if he ever turns to management.
Scholes accused Mourinho of "embarrassing" United and claimed to be "surprised" he was not sacked after a 3-1 defeat to West Ham in September.


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Uplifting Dec. 08, 2015 04:51AM EST
Top 6 Healthiest Foods You Need To Give Your Dog
1. Lean meat.
Lean meat, like chicken and fish, is great for dogs. It's approved by many vets. It's a great source of amino acids and B vitamins, which are needed to maintain healthy energy for your pooch.
2. Eggs.
My dog is a picky eater big time. He likes his kibbles one day and then not the next. I can't blame him. Variety is important. So I feed him eggs if he starts looking thin or if he's having skin issues. It's an added protein boost and helps him pack on or keep on weight.


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Cinta Vidal – WeTransfer This Works. In a world where we are supposed to work and play hard, oftentimes it is tough to take a step back and put things in perspective.
But when you do, you'll learn how to see things differently. With her gravity-defying paintings, Spanish illustrator Cinta Vidal does just that; she forces you to approach the everyday from a new angle. Next to your personal work, you work in scenography too — how, if so, has that influenced your personal work? My work in the scenography workshop has influenced me a lot. Scenography is a job that focuses more on spaces than on people. Why did you start to make these 'un-gravity constructions'? I always carry a notebook with me and I am constantly drawing. It seems you paint domestic scenes. I like giving value to everything that is related to everyday life. I haven't found any other animal in your work than cats. Partager vos photos n'a jamais été aussi simple! - 42pix. StumbleUpon. 7 Of The Most Beautiful Fox Species In The World. We know how much you guys love foxes, so we thought we'd introduce you some of the most beautiful and striking types of foxes out there so you'd know which type is your favorite!
The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is what usually comes to mind when you hear the word "fox," which makes sense since it can be found throughout the Northern hemisphere. But this diverse and adaptive genus has species all over the world, all of which are especially adapted to thrive in their environments. If you love foxes and think they look better in the wild than they do around someone's neck, then you'll definitely love seeing all of these foxes in their natural element! Fennec Fox Image credits: Francisco Mingorance Fennec foxes, native to North Africa and the Sahara desert, are distinguished by their large ears, which serve to dissipate their body heat. Red Fox Image credits: Roeselien Raimond Image credits: Kai Fagerström Image credits: Wenda Atkin.
Clever Photoshop Master Stars In All of His Own Crazy Manipulations. While some people use Photoshop to make themselves look better, this Argentinian digital artist uses it to make himself look hilarious.
Starring in the scenes of his wildest dreams or worst nightmares, Martin De Pasquale is a digital magician, creating surreal, situations for himself to be a part of. From trimming his facial hair with a lawnmower, to turning his tongue into a diving board for mini Martins to jump off, his ideas will certainly make you smile. And he shares some of his secrets in the PS Speed Art video below!
Check out more of his original photo manipulations on Pinterest, Behance, and Facebook. Via: boredpanda.com. These 40 Brilliant Ads Are Shocking, But They'll Make You Think About Important Issues. Artist- Jody Steel. Living in a Surreal World. In every location Thomas Barbey has traveled to, he has taken photographs.
He uses the pictures to create artistic montages of a imaginary concepts, which are technically made with a combination of negatives, pre-planned double exposures, and/or other methods. His work is heavily inspired by his travels, everyday life, and art by Rene Magritte, M.C. Escher, and Roger Dean. Artwork © Thomas Barbey Via Not Shaking the Grass. Enchanted Sky. Digital artist Rhads has updated his portfolio with dreamy images of a gondola and whales swimming over clouds.
His work is magical and surreal, and it makes you want to sit down on the beach to watch the sky spectacle. See also: "A Home at the End of the World." Artwork © Rhads. Grimm and Other Folk Tales (2009) :Cory Godbey.
Free vector for free download. Фото и рисунки, арт и креативная реклама. Dream Worlds Revealed On Canvas. Along with some magnificent dreams, Jacek Yerka finds inspiration for his masterful paintings from his childhood memories: the places, remembered feelings and smells of 1950′s Poland.
He studied fine art and graphic design before becoming a full time artist in 1980… and we're glad he did. His paintings will take you through incredible worlds of imagination, bending reality in captivating and clever ways fit to inspire a novel or film. See many more examples of his find paintings at yerkaland.com. See Also ENDEARING MONSTER DRAWINGS POP FROM THE SCREEN Via: hypeness.com.br.


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Michael Douma and Phil Magness join us to discuss their new book What is Classical Liberal History?
In this episode of Liberty Chronicles, we are joined by Mike Douma and Phil Magness to discuss their new book "What is Classical Liberal History?" Mike Douma is an Assistant Research Professor at Georgetown University and the Director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. Phil Magness is a professor at Berry College's Campbell School of Business and author of Colonization after Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement.
Further Reading:
Douma & Magness, eds. What Is Classical Liberal History? Lexington Books. 2017.
"Creative Historical Thinking," Mike Douma's blog
Phil Magness' personal website
Benedetto Croce, Selections from History as the Story of Liberty. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. 2000.
Comegna, ed. Liberty and Power: A Reader. Washington, D.C.: The Cato Institute. 2017.
Music by Kai Engel
Anthony Comegna: Mike Douma is an assistant research professor at Georgetown University and the director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics. His research background is in American and Dutch history, slavery, capitalism, and historical methods. Ostensibly, most of his time is either spent chopping wood or publishing new books, among which is [00:00:30] the subject of discussion today, What Is Classical Liberal History? Douma's co‐editor on this project is Phil Magness, a professor at Berry College's Campbell School of Business and author of Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement.
Welcome to Liberty Chronicles, a project of Libertarianism.org. I'm Anthony Comegna. [00:01:00] Okay. Let's start with Mike Douma. Can you give us your 30‐second elevator pitch for this book? Go ahead and answer the title question. What is classical liberal history?
Mike Douma: In my mind, the main line of history is this historicist, empiricist type history that developed in the early 19th century. I think it's no coincidence that liberalism [00:01:30] developed in the 19th century at the same time that professional history developed. We began questioning basic assumptions, began looking at the sources, etc., etc. For me, classical liberal history, really we've coined this term, I want to define it as the main line, the forgotten main line, the idea that we can go to the sources, rigorously debate them, and come up with some sort of truth. In addition to that, it's the idea that what matters [00:02:00] and what we should be talking about is liberty. Liberty was a motivating, animating concern of 19th‐century historians.
Anthony Comegna: Okay. Phil, could you do the same thing? Give us your 30‐second version of what is classical liberal history.
Phil Magness: Yeah, absolutely. Basically, the purpose behind this book and why we brought these authors together is to carve out the niche in the field that Michael described. We basically noticed the trajectory of the history of the discipline. Although it's always had [00:02:30] some noticeable classical liberal scholars on the periphery, it is very much moving in other different directions from what our tradition tends to contribute. We were hoping to fill that niche and bring material from a classical liberal perspective directly to bear, and say, "Hey, we can look at issues slightly differently than some other scholars have done, and there are new insights to draw out of that."
Anthony Comegna: What are some of these issues that you think classical liberal history brings to the table, or [00:03:00] some of the new methods perhaps that we have to offer, some of the insights that we can contribute to the historical discipline more broadly?
Phil Magness: The one that I keep stressing, and it draws pretty closely out of my own work, so I do have a bias toward it, but the insights of the economic way of thinking. This is something that historically, in the mid‐20th century, there was a bit of a split between economic historians and regular historians that studied social events. They really [00:03:30] haven't talked to each other too much in the time since then.
What it's created is a rift in methodology to where you have economists that are very good at numbers, very good at empirical insights, but also the theory behind it, but they aren't talking to the historians. I see classical liberals do tend to come out of a firmer economic footing, so that's something that does carry forward more in our work than some of the other areas and traditions of the history discipline.
Mike Douma: [00:04:00] I would say, to me, the key of classical liberal history is the tradition of openness, and debate, and source criticism. I feel like a lot of times in the late 20th century, with the rise of social history, Marxist history, postmodernism, we place theory before evidence, and so we lose that original historicist claim that we go to the sources to discover our history. We've learned important things from other schools of history, but sometimes I [00:04:30] think the pendulum has been swung too far, that we're beginning with our theories and ideologies, then going back to try to serve those.
Anthony Comegna: Can you explain that term historicist to us, and perhaps give us a background on the origins of classical liberal history as a method or approach?
Mike Douma: Sure, I can do my best. Historicism, it's one of these words that I would say most graduate students don't learn or don't learn properly. It's a very confusing word. In fact, the best book on this [00:05:00] is Friedrich Beiser. He's a historian of philosophy, and he writes about the German idealist tradition. He's got five or six books on these topics, and he's got a book about the German historicist tradition, which is really good.
Essentially, historicism is the idea that the past was different from the present, that things change over time, and that to understand a period, we have to go to that period. The term historicism develops in the 19th [00:05:30] century in Germany. It's [foreign language 00:05:32]. Sometimes, it gets translated into English as historism, and there's some complications, but it essentially means that we're going against this old natural law tendency that things are universal, that morals, ideas, even economics are somehow always the same. The historicists, on the extreme end, might even challenge things like logic. They might say, "Logic is different in different times and places."
Anthony Comegna: [00:06:00] Germans have a different logic than Frenchmen, right?
Mike Douma: Yeah. Just to be aware of the situation in which you're interpreting the history. Why this term gets complicated, I blame Karl Popper, with his Poverty of Historicism in … Was it 1957, or '59, or something? Where he uses the term in a totally different way. He means deriving ultimate theories of teleological history that explain everything from those sources, where the original historicists in Germany [00:06:30] were the tradition that I'm talking about here. They were individualists and liberals who fought against these totalizing tendencies of history. They didn't say there was one history. Karl Popper flips this term around, and that's how it's often known in the English language, as historicists are people that create universalist theories of history.
Anthony Comegna: Again, part of what you want to argue is that classical liberal history really [00:07:00] used to be just history, period. It was generally the way people practiced it, was with a classical liberal set of methods that they were working with. Could you tell us a bit about that? What are the particular tools that a classical liberal historian brings to the table?
Mike Douma: One of them, another complicated term I think if we're going to introduce historicism, is hermeneutics, which is just different ways of textual analysis and interpretation. This term, once again, has [00:07:30] many different definitions and can be quite complicated, but essentially by hermeneutic what I mean is comparing sources to understand terms and words as they were used in the period. If you spend 10 years reading, as I have for example, Dutch diplomatic papers from the 1860s, you start to see that a word that they used then isn't the same as the word used today. It's the contextual understanding of words and figuring out what the meanings [00:08:00] are so that you avoid these mistakes.
I think through that is the recognition of things like these concepts that we have, that they're invented. A term can change meaning at different times. We look at something like, say, Marxism and class. Is what they're talking about class in the 19th century the same as today? Classes are constantly changing. The concept of what we mean is different. [00:08:30] The classical liberal historian wants to go to the basics, wants to start with individuals and their own actions, and understand how were they thinking about the world, what were their motivating factors, not look at the larger concepts of things like class, and state, and nationhood, because these concepts change over time, and don't act, as we say.
Anthony Comegna: Now, I want to jump back to Phil, because in our last episode, I interviewed David M. Hart at the Online Library for Liberty and Liberty Fund. [00:09:00] As I'm sure you know, David Hart has made his career, basically, in trying to revive the concept of class and put it back in focus, perhaps in the center of libertarian thinking about the past. I notice it's conspicuously absent from your book, so I want to ask you, why did you not put any chapters in there on libertarians and class? Is there something that you'd like to avoid in talking about class?
Phil Magness: I wouldn't say it's so much avoiding [00:09:30] it. I think it's more space limitations, obviously, a concern with publishing any type of book of this nature. We did cast our net broadly in trying to hit a number of different themes. I would say that there are elements of class theory that are implicit in some of our discussions that we get into, especially on the economic end, although it is a type of class theory that diverges from what we consider the mainstream history profession, which for [00:10:00] better or for worse, I'd argue for worse, has moved in the Marxist definition that treats classes as collective entities, collective actors.
My own take on it is that there is some value to talk about social status as a historical term, particularly as people see themselves and their own social status, but I also tend to approach it from an angle that uses economic theories. One of those theories that I draw on very heavily in my own work is Mancur Olson's The Logic [00:10:30] of Collective Action. He presents a very robust critique of the notion that class identity is a massive motivating factor for human action. Rather, he's arguing that there are other tendencies that rise to the top. Some of them are self‐interested, but basically, it's a critique of this Marxian approach that treats class as a dominant actor in history unto itself. It's basically individuals respond to individual incentives, and those incentives don't always [00:11:00] align with class action that we'd see as a historical event, as well as in the modern sense.
I wouldn't say that I have any aversion to it. In fact, quite a bit of David's work has been very useful and informative for my own, for many of the scholars that contributed to the volume. It's something that fell into the background of other themes that we didn't explore in the book.
Anthony Comegna: Yeah. Reading it, it seemed to me [00:11:30] that your problem would not be so much with the idea of social classes, or especially political classes, developing, but more with the lazy historians who would just say, "Oh, class is the explanatory factor here. Clearly, class is what's motivating people's decisions all the time." That way, we don't have to do much deeper work doing exactly what Mike was talking about, getting into the details of years, and years, and years of your life reading these things, and really getting [00:12:00] down to it, and understanding these people.
Mike Douma: I think we have to thank the Marxists for bringing class into the discussion. It's an important factor. It's an important concept, but to call it the one and only explanation for historical change, as Marx seems to do, is pushing it a little bit too far. This is why I sometimes think of Marxist history as the young Earth creationist version of history. At some point, material determinism, does this work? [00:12:30] Can we jettison that? Okay, what about stage theories? Let's jettison that. Labor theory doesn't seem to work. After a while, I wonder what is left of Marxist history.
What's left of it is usually underperforming, cranky historians in marginalized positions, but the influence of Marxist history is quite strong on progressives and on the main line. To push them in that direction on lots of normal topics of [00:13:00] class, and race, and labor, because the literature is heavily influenced by that stuff, but Marxists, like classical liberals I think in academia, are actually on the outside, so I have sympathy. I have some Marxist friends who can't jobs in academia. It's difficult. They're not doing what the … What the classical liberal approach is also to say is that these other positions should have a hearing. We should have multiple perspectives.
Anthony Comegna: Yeah. I was shocked in graduate school to hear [00:13:30] my fellow grad students saying, "Can you believe that he's a Marxist? Isn't that ridiculous?" I thought, "Wait, whoa. What academia am I into here? This is strange, where the students are criticizing the professors for being Marxists." Weird.
Mike Douma: Where'd you … Pittsburgh?
Anthony Comegna: Yeah.
Mike Douma: I thought they were Marxists there.
Anthony Comegna: There are a couple, but they were soon as the weird old cranks, sort of, who had a lot of books out, important books, but …
Mike Douma: This is an important message in the book. We try to reach out in the introduction to progressives, and conservatives, and others, [00:14:00] to say that, "The classical liberal tradition is your tradition. You relate to these types of ideas. There's something to be gained."
Anthony Comegna: Phil, I know you dig into a lot of statistics about contemporary academia. Do we have any idea whatsoever how many classical liberal historians there are out there, or how many libertarians [00:14:30] with PhDs in history?
Phil Magness: Yeah, there are no surveys that have any absolute number. I would put the total number of liberty‐friendly‐ish PhDs that are operating in some sort of an academic, quasi‐academic role, probably in a couple hundred. Of that, core participants that are on a day to day basis contributing to the tradition, we're talking a couple dozen. It's a very small segment.
Mike Douma: It depends here, too, Phil, if we're limiting [00:15:00] this to the United States only or to the world. Both of them are quite small numbers. I'm only aware of, in the countries that I know things about, only a handful in the Netherlands, only a handful in Germany. Nobody keeps track of this stuff.
I do want to make the distinction, as well, that I think classical liberal history, as I say again, we're defining for the first time as a specific thing, as a specific concept. Define or be defined. It's something bigger than [00:15:30] libertarian history. Libertarians can see themselves in that tradition, but I really want to draw on that 19th‐century legacy and see what we need to continue doing today. We can draw these parallels between what they were doing then, people in the 20th century, and people today, and say that really it's a lot of the main line that's merely been forgotten.
In fact, classical liberal history is really almost successful that it didn't get labeled because it was so mainstream. I think it would [00:16:00] say it's been pushed aside by progressive history in the last 50 years, 80 years, something like that.
Anthony Comegna: What do you think there is to gain, then, by marketing the idea of classical liberal history to departments or professional groups who are distinctly hostile to it?
Mike Douma: First of all, you guys have probably had this experience. You go to grad school, and you take a course in methods or approaches. Week after week, you're introduced to a new approach or a new method. [00:16:30] It's Marxist history, Annales School history, postmodernist history, etc., etc. Never once are you told that there's such a thing as conservative history or Christian history. Nobody writes that anymore. That's not even a legitimate field or idea, or even classical liberal or libertarian history.
On the side, I'm reading these other arguments, and I'm wondering, when are these ever going to come into the classroom. Nobody's even heard of them before, that there's alternative explanations. My goal is, if you're going to be listing 10 approaches [00:17:00] or 10 schools of thought on approaching the past, maybe one of them in that mix should be the classical liberals, who have some different ideas and interpretations.
Anthony Comegna: Phil, do you think that there are … I'm assuming you agree with Michael's earlier point that at one point, all history was basically classical liberal history. Then today, do you see any bits of classical liberal history still existing [00:17:30] and informing other schools within the profession?
Phil Magness: I'd say anywhere that methodological empiricism is at the core of a contribution. Again, it's not something that we have survey data on, but I'd say there's a sizeable minority of the field that still clings methodologically to rigorous close reading of historical evidence. These are the people that hit the archives and hit them hard to just aggressively try and tease out, discern [00:18:00] what was happening from the records that the past has left us. I think that is an approach that is very much synchronous with this 18th, 19th‐century broader grouping that we would now maybe refer to as classical liberal history.
The flip side of that is you have other traditions that have moved very far away from empiricism in the way that they approach historical topics. This is the same thing Michael was talking about, people that put the theory cart before the horse of [00:18:30] the actual evidence. Some of the fruits of that we see are historical claims that are often built upon a secondary or tertiary literature around a topic that have never really bothered to go back and look and see if the actual historical documents underlying that topic say what subsequent interpretations of them have said. I think this is one of the dangers of Marx, is you start getting history that settles in around a consensus myth, and then builds upon [00:19:00] that myth in even further and further directions when it's unchained from any kind of evidentiary base.
Anthony Comegna: Postmodernists are not Marxists, because they're not structuralists. They don't think that history has to progress in a particular way. They do clearly identify, as one of my professors liked to say, who did what to whom. That's the point of studying history, to find out who did what to whom. Postmodernists have a real keen eye on [00:19:30] that, I think. How does their approach … Could one of you define postmodernism, and then perhaps the other one tell us‐
Mike Douma: I think it defies definition.
Anthony Comegna: Go ahead. Start there.
Mike Douma: You asked me before if it's a research process or a paradigm. I'm not sure it is. I think it's almost an anti‐research paradigm. They're seeking out forms of power. They're challenging the knowledge that we have, challenging the sources, and our way [00:20:00] of interpreting things. I'm actually quite influenced by postmodern history, and I think probably a lot of people are today. Just like Marxism, it comes into the history of main line and it gives us something.
To me, the first great change in the professionalization of history was these guys like Niebuhr and von Ranke in the beginning of the 19th century, who say, "We have to change interpretations by going to the sources." Source criticism is the first big change, but the second real big change in history, in my eyes, [00:20:30] happens in the 1970s, first with Louis Mink, who is the bridge into postmodern history, and then Hayden White. What they're doing is challenging our personal relationship with the sources, to say, "What are our priors that we're bringing to this? What are the sources of power that are influencing what gets collected in archives and the interpretations that are made over time?" They make us skeptics.
They challenge the whole historical narrative and the idea that we can even work from those [00:21:00] sources to derive interpretations, because our interpretations are always going to be biased and influenced by race, class, gender, and other types of things. This is a fantastic challenge to the field that they have to take up. Now, the thing is, most historians ignore this. They say, "Well yeah, of course. We have to listen to it." It's just like psychologists. "Yeah, we've got to listen to Thomas Szasz, but we don't believe him."
Then they come back into the fold and do their own thing, which is interpret the sources and write narrative history, because we [00:21:30] can't sit around and just constantly be skeptical, and question our own assumptions. Sometimes we want to just put things down and tell the story one way or another. They'll tell stories that go against the grain. These are an important part of it. Of course, postmodern history is really powerful in the philosophy of history, a very small subfield of history which is maybe dominated by the postmodernists, actually.
Anthony Comegna: Phil, could you tell us what critical [00:22:00] theory is?
Phil Magness: Right. [crosstalk 00:22:02].
Anthony Comegna: Maybe could you find it within yourself to say something nice about critical theory?
Phil Magness: Yeah. I'll say something nice, I guess in the most general sense, probably similar to what Michael's noting with the postmodernists. Critical theorists do tend to at least bring an outside perspective and offer a different perspective to bear there. Critical theory is really hard to define in itself, and it often eschews definition. [00:22:30] If you go to some of the main scholars that work in this tradition, they're almost schismatic in between themselves over how they'd even classify themselves. There's a narrow subset of critical theory that comes out of the philosophy departments of mainly continental Europe, the Frankfurt School. Habermas is the most prominent, living, active figure out of that tradition. Then there's a broader diffusion of what we'd call critical theory [00:23:00] methodologies to other fields, to other areas of the academy. I tend to use the term more so in the broader sense.
It is something that came into vogue in the philosophy discipline first, emerging mainly in the 1960s and 1970s. Philosophy by and large has moved beyond it, discarded elements of it, or cornered it to niche subsets of the academy, but from that point it moved very heavily over [00:23:30] into the humanities as the dominant tradition of how to approach the evidence or the lack of evidence. Again, you get elements of trying to reduce everything to power relationships or group identities, so race, class, gender are the three main or the triumvirate of analytical tools for studying past events.
I could offer my own critique of it. I am fairly harsh on critical theory approaches to history, [00:24:00] in the sense that I think they import a heavy amount of ideological baggage. What Michael was saying, we can question our epistemic root of understanding what exists in the archives. We can step back and say, "Okay, certain things are preserved and other things are not preserved for a very specific reason." This does have epistemic things on what we can interpret out of it. My question, and this is where I diverge the sharpest from the critical theory ground, is what [00:24:30] do they offer in return? It's blowing up the evidentiary base of what we can find in archival material, and then importing a strong, political ideology that's just taken as almost assertions by declamation of historical truth, that class is the means of analyzing this, or that gender is the means of analyzing this, and then you start working backwards from that declamation through the evidence.
I think the problem that emerges here is when you declaim [00:25:00] a grand truth about something, you also alter the way you look at evidence around that supposed subject and the truth. You start seeking things that affirm that grand narrative, the ideology that emerges there, while also discarding, or overlooking, or neglecting other types of evidence that don't really quite fit to the narrative.
Anthony Comegna: We've talked about class. You brought up race, gender, religion. [00:25:30] One of the strong claims made in this book, and one of the most interesting things that I read in it, is Jonathan Bean's claim that his book Race and Liberty in America is the first presentation of a liberal theory of race in its history. Now, given that you're saying classical liberal history is all about historicism, putting things in context, and empiricism, [00:26:00] why has it taken so long for liberal historians to write a history of race in America?
Phil Magness: I think it is an oversight of the discipline, and it's an oversight of our own subset of the discipline. One thing I would note as a caveat there, a lot of racial history is very recent history. Simply the time that it takes to start studying sources, the civil rights era occurred [00:26:30] in the lifetime of many people that are still living there, so you do have a little bit of that time lag. You have a very small subset of historians that are even working in this tradition. It's just a matter of numbers, basically.
One thing I would differentiate, I think Jonathan is writing very specifically about how do we analyze race as a historical topic, as a historical event, and certain events that took place in American history, in particular, that had profound racial impacts. [00:27:00] We can separate that somewhat from classical liberal contributions to racial history as they played out.
There, if we go back 100 years, we see some of the major actors in the formation of the NAACP, for example, that I like to give as a historical event. You have what would have been considered the libertarians or classical liberals of the day are some of the major actors there. There's Moorfield Storey, who's [00:27:30] one of the attorneys that co‐founds the NAACP in the 1910s. He's a former clerk of the abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, grew up in an abolitionist and free market, free trade, almost laissez‐faire, classical liberal intellectual tradition. He's one of the main contributors that jumps in and tries to carry some of those ideas over on a civil rights front with the founding of the NAACP.
He's joined by a journalist [00:28:00] by the name of Oswald Garrison Villard, who's William Lloyd Garrison's grandson, very much out of the same tradition, a classical liberal intellectually, economically, as well as a tradition of rights. If you go back far enough, you start looking at some of the early histories of the civil rights movement. It's not so much a libertarian history of race or a theory of race. It's rather classical liberals applying principles of rights to [00:28:30] the institutions they see around them, and using that individual methodology to rectify injustices that they saw.
In that sense, I see a history of race as it relates to classical liberal thought just ripe and waiting to be written. This includes carrying some of those traditions all the way forward from the civil rights era to today. It also includes connecting the old school abolitionist and post‐abolitionist classical liberals [00:29:00] to the mid‐20th century.
Just a project I'm taking up myself very recently, I'm looking into a journalist by the name of R.C. Hoiles, who was the editor of the Orange County Register for most of the mid‐20th century. He's a very interesting guy. He's a radical anti‐statist in some respects, very much a free market type of a character, but his most prominent journalistic contributions, he's one of the only newspapers in the United States [00:29:30] that openly opposes Japanese internment during World War Two. He editorializes very aggressively against not only FDR but the governor of California who was complicit in carrying this out, Earl Warren, and comes to distinction as one of the only major papers that's actually taking an editorial stance during the war.
Then, right after the war, he turns to desegregation. There's actually a test case that comes out of Santa Ana, California in 1947. It's a half‐decade [00:30:00] before Brown vs. Board, but they were testing a de facto segregationist policy that separated Mexican American students from white students in the local school district. Hoiles jumps in on the editorial side of this, lambasting the local school board for enacting segregation. You have people that are drawing upon the classical tradition, these are just a few examples of them, to make arguments that have direct pertinence to civil rights, direct pertinence to [00:30:30] racial history as it's unfolding.
The question now is to jump into the sources. We need historians to actually dig around in these issues in ways that treat them very similarly as we would treat something like the history of American capitalism or the history of free markets, which has received much more attention.
Mike Douma: I'm no expert on this topic. When Jonathan Bean says [00:31:00] that he's the first to present a liberal theory of race, I have to take him at his word, because he's done the work on this, but it seems to me that the history of race in the 20th century has always been written in the service of something. Whether this is for the KKK, or for some other conservative cause, or for civil rights, or something else, it wasn't something that classical liberals or libertarians took up as one of their main causes, to talk about race on the whole, right?
There's [00:31:30] specific examples. During the civil rights movement, there's definitely civil libertarians who are making arguments and working on the ground, but it's not a topic that … First of all, you have a lot of these intellectual historians, historians of ideas. That started to fade in the 1960s. That was on the way out, and so we lost that older generation when history was ideas and politics. We moved into [00:32:00] social, class‐based explanations, so there weren't classical liberals around or interested enough in those topics to write general theories of race and history, as far as I know.
Anthony Comegna: I really liked David Beito's chapter in here, too. He makes the case that at least part of the serious value of doing classical liberal history is that it illustrates very clearly the roads not taken [00:32:30] over time. That the world is the way it is because particular people make very specific choices during their lifetimes, and so the world developed according to the choices they made. They could very well have made different choices, and produced different results. For our last question here, let me start with you, Mike, and then we'll go to Phil. What are some of the most fruitful and interesting roads not taken out there to be studied [00:33:00] in history, and that can teach us about where we should go in the future?
Mike Douma: That's a great question, Anthony. What I've been thinking the last couple years is that historians need to investigate their own discipline more. We don't study historiography as a concept. We read history, and then say that we know historiography, but we don't really think about what historiography is. We don't read theory. We don't have courses in the philosophy of history. We don't have courses in writing history, as [00:33:30] far as I know, most places. All these kinds of things that are practical, everyday things that historians in the real world do, we don't have those. We just have lots of content‐based courses in grad schools. So, I'd like to see a transition towards the practicing historians that learn to argue like philosophers, that are open, and will get a room, and challenge and argue things out.
I was going to say this earlier. Historians of every stripe don't like to hear it when you listen to a different interpretation than your own, [00:34:00] but I think more than anybody else, the libertarians get really upset when they hear other interpretations. It's usually because their interpretation is not even listened to in that discussion. You go to a major conference, or you listen to C-SPAN, or you listen to the news, and they talk about history of tariffs or something, and they get it all wrong. Most people would be like, "Okay, they got it wrong," but libertarians actually get really mad about this, because it's like they're not being listened to. We have written these works on this, but because it's not [00:34:30] in the textbook, and it's not the obvious answer, the Ockham's razor explanation of history that everybody accepts, it's not listened to. I think thinking about our own discipline is an important thing that historians need to do, and that's one of the contributions we've tried to make here.
I would say also, in general, just starting to understand more about agency of individual people, of small groups. I think we need more cultural [00:35:00] anthropology and folklore in history, not just the social class, race, gender explanations, but some more of the deep, embedded cultural explanations that we can get from the cultural anthropologists and the folklorists.
Phil Magness: Yeah. I guess I'll pick up on a little bit of that theme. I certainly will admit to being one of those historians that does get mad when I hear other interpretations, not so much disagreement [00:35:30] with the interpretation, but just the presentation of the actual material that's in error. It's wrong.
This comes up to the forefront oftentimes when historians who are not trained in economics attempt to talk about economic issues. This was a part that I got into in my contribution to the book. My chapter addressed some of what's called the new history of capitalism school. This is a movement that's emerged [00:36:00] in the history profession, mostly in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. This is a relatively new birth of material that purports to be studying economic history and economic events, which I think is actually a positive development to some extent, the fact that historians are paying attention to something outside of the race, class, gender triumvirate.
They're starting to notice that economic matters do intrude into historical [00:36:30] discussions, but at the same time, it's something that's been picked up without the toolboxes that are often necessary to talk about complex developments. Something like a tariff, if you read an average tariff history of the 19th century, it's almost like stumbling into the president's Twitter feed. That's the level of economic knowledge that's brought to bear to these discussions.
Another example that I cite in the chapter, there was a famous contributor [00:37:00] to this new history of capitalism approach. He was trying to measure the impact of slavery on the national economy of the United States, and therefore attempted or purported to do a calculation of how much slavery contributed to the U.S. GDP in, say, 1840. He goes through what's essentially just a made‐up formula that's not even rooted in any of the standards and practices of the field, and comes up with some ridiculous number where basically half the United States [00:37:30] economy is derived from slavery. The way he obtains this is through double counting, triple counting, separate and apart from the conventions that economics would bring to bear in measuring national accounts.
I do see this separation in the discussion of economic ideas and the actual tools that are often necessary as a foundation to take up those ideas. [00:38:00] I see that as a missed opportunity that goes back the better part of a century. The fact that economists were not talking to historians, and vice versa, historians were not consulting economists, has really left us in this mire where you have two separate trajectories that are discussing the same history, the same events.
A classic example I give is if you look at a standard U.S. history textbook, or even more scholarly works on U.S. history, and ask the question, what [00:38:30] caused the Great Depression? A historian will often offer something that economists have referred to as underconsumption theory plus inequality come together in the late 1920s, and then boom, stock market crash, FDR steps in and fixes it. If you ask any economic historian who actually studies things like business cycles, studies the complex mechanisms of what initiates or triggers a recession or a depression, [00:39:00] studies the major camps and theories about economic recovery, I don't care if you're an Austrian, a Keynesian, a monetarist, neoclassical type, these are rigorous theories, but they're all but absent from conventional historical accounts.
An average historian will probably tell the victory of FDR in ending the Great Depression. An economist would look at this and say, "We have substantial economic evidence, substantial [00:39:30] empirical evidence, that FDR's policies in some extent prolonged and exacerbated the Great Depression." So, completely opposite conclusions reached by historical experts using different methodologies on the exact same topic, and neither of them are talking to each other. I see that as a missed opportunity. It's something that I hope we can move closer toward rectifying.
Anthony Comegna: A huge thanks to Professors Douma [00:40:00] and Magness for joining us this week. Since I made them do it, let me give it a shot. What is classical liberal history? It is a centuries‐long tradition in academic and popular history stressing that individuals are the sole units of human agency, and any stories about the human experience over time must necessarily be built, as it were, from the bottom up, with reference to individual experience, motivations, and decisions. Classical liberal history is the only [00:40:30] truly humane method of writing about the past, though as always, there is much we can learn from our academic opponents.
Liberty Chronicles is a project of Libertarianism.org. It is produced by Tess Terrible. If you've enjoyed this episode of Liberty Chronicles, please rate, review, and subscribe [00:41:00] to us on iTunes. For more information on Liberty Chronicles, visit Libertarianism.org.


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We can't stay away from what we love. And neither can J.K. Rowling, who just dropped the script of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the new play about our favorite witches and wizards, only this time as adults, that premiered at London's West End last night. This addition to the Potter canon is the first in nine years, and I can't help but recall the last time there was a Harry Potter release...
I came across this photo of myself on Facebook today, sitting in my home town's Barnes & Noble after receiving my fresh copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on July 21st, 2007. My old friend captured the moment of me opening the book, heart fluttering, with the bittersweetness of recognizing a series emblematic of my childhood drawing to a close. I was wearing the yellow plastic bracelet that got me in before other nerds; I wore a buttoned-up flannel shirt similar to the one I wore to work at the studio on Friday; my bangs were too long and constantly got in my face; I had burned the part in my hair from that summer's beach trip; I hadn't yet finished high school, or gone to college, or moved to New York, or moved in with the love of my life, or even close to figured out who I was and what I was supposed to be doing with my energy and time.
Pictures of ourselves can do that, can't they? With a glance, a wormhole opened to a memory, one branded into my mind by the iron of knowledge that life would continue, it would always continue, and if I was lucky I'd be able to look back years from that memory and recognize it as a good one.
Pictures of ourselves are powerful. Headshots project an image of our best selves to others. Snapshots snuck between turns of a page can later return us to truths-- Harry Potter is great, our adolescence is as fleeting as his, and we need to preserve the sweetness, the joy we found in our youth in whatever ways we can.
Remember the potency that a single picture of yourself can possess. Capture the moments in your life that you will want to look back on. Goodness isn't found only in the past; it's there, right before your friend's Nikon.
x Lee Ann
Each person who works at City Headshots has a different perspective on photography and life. The Spotlight Blog is where it all comes together and we post fun and unique stuff!
May 2020


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An "interactional kitchen environment" that promotes a fast, efficient service to cater for the 70 million passengers that transit through Euston Station each year is at the heart of Paul Hollywood's newly-launched bakery concept. FEJ nipped along to check it out and meet the man himself.
As the judge of the Great British Bake Off, Paul Hollywood is a familiar face on the TV screens of the British public. But what the viewing masses won't necessarily know is that in between filming, Hollywood has spent the last couple of years perfecting the recipes and design of a new retail concept that bears his name.
'KNEAD by Paul Hollywood' opened to the public last month and the whole operation is built around the kitchen, with staff tasked with ensuring customers are served in less than one minute.
The offering is based entirely on recipes developed by Hollywood and produced on-site in a kitchen that he helped design. The kitchen, which makes up about a third of a site that was previously occupied by three individual street food units, consists of an Electrolux air-o-steam combi oven and refrigeration cabinets, food preparation areas, coffee machines and bespoke grab-and-go counters.
KNEAD is operated by SSP, which has spent the past two years working with the Great British Bake Off judge to get the format market-ready.
Hollywood admits he had previously rebuffed offers from other operators to create a foodservice concept for the high street. "I had said no to a lot of them because I wasn't really ready or interested in that to happen until SPP came along. When we chatted initially I was interested in what they'd done before and their track record. I have got a team of people that work with me, we develop recipes for Bake Off, we develop recipes for books, we work from ideas, push the boundaries from where baking and sandwich food is moving to, so when we met initially it was about getting an idea and a feel for what we were going to do and the plan was to open up this."
Hollywood said the brief he gave SPP was heavily based around his bakery preferences, what he had grown up with and quality of ingredients. "I'm the toughest critic there probably is on the planet at the moment so it is key that we get the right products, the right quality and the right flavour. All the recipes that you have got here are all my recipes," he says.
The KNEAD brand is designed to strike a balance between mainstream and aspirational by offering a variety of products that offer something a little different from typical high street bakeries. Sausage rolls, for instance, are sold by the inch. The unit will be open from 7am to 10pm weekdays, and 8am on weekends, to cater to the high footfall.
"I'm the toughest critic there probably is on the planet at the moment so it is key that we get the right products, the right quality and the right flavour"
Travel hub foodservice specialist SSP, which manages 42 separate brands, has expressed its desire to roll out the brand to additional sites if it takes off.
Simon Smith, CEO of SSP UK & Ireland, says: "We have put a lot of time and effort into getting this one right, so as with all things we want to make sure that we really learn from this one, do a great job for our client and our customers, and then we will look at other opportunities as and when they arise. With the amount of effort we put into this, you would want to do more. But let's get this one really going first."
Asked when SSP would likely take a decision on rolling out the next KNEAD store, Smith insisted it was not working to a specific deadline but would instead see how things pan out. "We don't really set anything like that. You want to learn how to do the concept right with the customers first. Some things take longer, some things take shorter, so we don't try and pigeon-hole ourselves into three months, six months or a year. The amount of effort and energy that the team put in to this, we want to do more but you don't want to rush something, you want to get it right and then do more with it. I've seen a lot of companies that rush and then they come back and go, 'oh, we have kind of lost our way', so we always believe in getting it right, doing a great job and then rolling it out."
Knead for speed
– The design of the first KNEAD outlet is centred around a live interactional kitchen environment and the need for fast, efficient service that is personal (served in under a minute).
– In-house methods of production are inspired by Hollywood's own techniques, with an emphasis on fresh, British food.
– All ingredients have been specifically selected by Hollywood following extensive testing.
– The core food equipment used within the kitchen area is provided by Eletcrolux, including the combi oven and refrigeration.


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If you are looking for a divorce attorney in Fort Lauderdale who will support and defend you through every step of the way, then look no further than the team at Friedland & Associates. Divorces can be complicated and stressful, but when you are working with an attorney who is experienced, dedicated, and ready to fight for your best interests during this time in your life, you can rest assured that your rights are protected.
Read more below about some of the overview issues of divorce in Florida, and contact us as soon as possible for a free consultation. During your initial call, you will be able to speak with an experienced legal professional about the basics of your divorce, discuss some of the main questions you have, and most importantly, understand how we will work with you throughout the entire process.
Preparing For a Divorce
Once you have decided that you will file for a divorce, there are some important steps to take in order to ensure that you can begin the process smoothly. In many cases, this may mean that you will need to secure a place to live after you tell your partner that you are filing for a divorce, and having a plan for how you will move forward after this first step.
Staying Safe
Even though it may not be surprising to your partner that you would like to separate, it will likely come as an initial shock. It is important that you remain civil with your partner throughout this entire process if possible because it is repeatedly shown that collaborative divorces are much smoother than contentious and combative divorces, and the first step you take towards this process may be a good place to begin with this attitude. Regardless, make sure that you have a plan for when you tell your partner that you are separating from them, and will be working towards a divorce.
If you are in a dangerous situation for you or your children, though, then the most immediate thing that you need to focus on is getting to safety. Florida, like all states, has a domestic violence hotline and many resources for victims of violent or dangerous situations. If you believe that telling your partner that you want a divorce will create a dangerous environment, then it is important that you utilize these resources and speak with an attorney before making any declarations, so that you can ensure that you and any children that may be involved in the marriage are safe and secure from possible violence.
Grounds For Divorce
Florida is what is known as a "no-fault" state, meaning that you do not need to prove that your partner has done something to make the marriage irreparable. In order to be allowed to proceed with a divorce, you must simply show that the relationship is beyond repair. Keep in mind that this does not mean that you will need to present the courts with proof that you have undergone extensive marriage counseling or something like this, but that your relationship is simply no longer tenable.
Filing For Divorce in Florida
To file for divorce in Florida, you will submit a Petition for Dissolution of Marriage to the Florida family courts, at which point your spouse must be notified that this petition has been filed. Once you have filed, your spouse has 20 days to respond to the petition, and either agree or disagree with your request to proceed with a divorce. In some cases, you may be able to request that this waiting period is waived because of possible danger or another injustice that may arise.
If your spouse does not respond within the allotted 20 days, then you will be able to file for a Motion for Default, at which point you will be able to set your own date for a hearing, at which point your spouse will need to be issued a Notice of Hearing.
If you and your spouse agree on all points of the divorce, then you may be able to file for a simplified dissolution. This means that you and your spouse both agree that your marriage is beyond repair, there are no dependent children involved in the marriage or divorce, you agree completely on the division of all property and assets, there is no issue of alimony, no other financial issues, and that you each agree to forgo a trial. If this is the case, then you may each be able to go to the Broward Clerks Office and sign your petition and then attend your final hearing. This is the best possible case for a divorce, but it is uncommon.
Options For Divorce
If you are unable to reach complete consensus on all of the aspects of your divorce, then you will not be able to opt for a simplified dissolution — at least not immediately. There are a few different ways that we will work with you, your spouse, and their legal counsel in order to find the path of least resistance while getting you what you deserve through this process. A trial will be our last resort, and if at all possible, we will be able to avoid a trial altogether by choosing one of the following methods that we will be happy to represent you through.
Mediation is a highly favorable option for working through the different aspects of a divorce for a variety of reasons. Mediation involves you, your spouse, and a third party mediator who helps you navigate the complicated, sometimes contentious, issues such as debt and asset division, child custody, and more.
Mediation is a very favorable option for agreeing with the various terms of your divorce because it forces collaboration and civility, which is supported by the mediator who is simply there to help you each arrive at an agreement. It is much less contentious than direct negotiations with each partner having a lawyer present, because it focuses on what is fair and reasonable, as opposed to each partner trying to maximize what they get out of the divorce.
Direct Negotiation
If mediation does not seem like a viable option for you, then the next possibility would be a negotiation between you and your attorney, and your spouse and their attorney. While this process may not be as collaborative as mediation, it is still a more cost-effective and expedited process than a full trial. In addition, you and your spouse still retain full control over the decisions about your assets, debts, properties, and children, as opposed to leaving these decisions up to the Florida court system.
Although direct negotiation can be difficult, we will always prefer this option over a full trial. Through mediation or direct negotiation, both you and your partner will need to understand that this will take some compromise, but know that by choosing this method you will be able to determine the outcomes on your own.
Florida Divorce Trial
If mediation or direct negotiations either fail or are not an option, then we will need to take your divorce to the Florida family courts for a full trial. During this process, we will present our arguments and facts to the judge, who will then decide upon each of the issues that must be resolved in order to finalize your divorce. This process can be costly and time-consuming since the scheduled times are determined by the courts and because you will need to pay court fees.
If this is the option we must choose, then you will need to adjust your work schedule around your court dates, since each postponement will only draw your divorce proceedings out longer and longer.
Issues To Settle For a Divorce
In order to finalize your divorce, there are a variety of issues that you and your spouse will need to settle, either directly or by a court ruling.
Marital and Non-Marital Assets
The first step is to determine which assets are marital and non-marital. Non-marital assets are those that a spouse brought into the marriage, did not mix, and is entirely separate from anything in the marriage. This can include things like inheritances, gifts, and even financial assets that one spouse had before the marriage, and never added their spouse to the deeds.
Marital assets are things like property purchased during the marriage, including real estate, vehicles, boats, and anything else of the sort. Additionally, it refers to income earned during the marriage, debts accrued, and any other asset or debt that was incurred during the marriage.
Nonmarital assets will be excluded from the divorce process, given that the owner of these assets can prove that they never mixed this asset with their marital property. This would include using the interest from a nonmarital fund to pay for property taxes on marital assets, and others of the sort. This can be a complicated process, so it is important that you share all of your available documents with your attorney as soon as possible so that they can begin to formulate a strategy.
Property Division
If there is marital property involved in the divorce, then you and your spouse will need to determine a fair way to divide this asset. Florida is what is known as an "equitable division" state, meaning that all debts and assets are divided among spouses in a way that is equitable. However, equitable does not mean 50/50, only that each spouse is awarded an amount that is equitable given all of the different factors such as income, non-marital assets, and more.
Asset and Debt Division
Assets and debts that are determined to be marital property also must be divided equitably. Like property, this does not mean that all assets and debts are divided 50/50, but that they are each awarded to the spouses in a way that is equitable given their independent financial situations.
If there are minor children involved in the divorce, then another very important issue that will need to be settled is the question of custody. There are a variety of different options available, all of which depend on the main concern of childhood welfare. Regardless of what a parent wants for their involvement with the child or children, the courts will need to determine that it is in the child's best interest before agreeing to it.
Custody is granted as either sole or joint. Sole custody means that only one parent has absolute custody over the child or children, and joint means that the responsibilities are shared. In addition to the possibilities of joint or sole custody, there are two different forms of custody.
Physical Custody
Physical custody refers to where the child actually lives. In the case of joint physical custody, the child will split their time between living with each parent. If one parent is awarded sole physical custody, this means that the child or children will live with that parent full-time. There may or may not be visitation allowances for the non-custodial parent depending on what the court has determined is in the best interest of the children.
Legal Custody
Legal custody refers to the decisions that are made regarding the child's welfare, such as medical, educational, religious, or disciplinary options. If the parents have joint legal custody, then they will need to collaborate to come to the decisions about the child's legal issues. However, if a parent has sole legal custody, then they will not need to consult with the other parent.
It is possible for a parent to have sole legal custody, but joint physical custody of their children.
Child Support
In addition to custody, the issue of child support will need to be determined as well. Oftentimes, one parent will have more earning capacity than the other. In a divorce, it is important that the children of the divorce do not suffer financially because of this separation. Child support ensures that each parent is contributing a fair amount to the children, which may mean a disproportionate amount of money depending on the type of custody that is awarded, as well as each parent's independent financial situation.
Alimony is intended to provide a spouse with financial support for a set period of time after the marriage. Alimony is a great option in that it helps a spouse get accustomed to their new, single life without fear of complete financial ruin. Alimony is awarded for a certain length of time after the divorce, and there are many different forms that this agreement can take depending on the finances of each spouse.
Contact Us Today
One of the most important things that you can do while preparing for a divorce is to partner with an experienced divorce attorney in Fort Lauderdale. We understand that this is a stressful time in your life, and will work our hardest to make sure that we are handling the legal details in a way that will give you space to begin working on establishing your new life and your independence after your marriage has been dissolved.


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Love Island winner Jack Fincham took to Instagram to flaunt the new Rolex he's bought with his £25,000 prize from the ITV2 reality show.
Dani Dyer's boyfriend posed with his new bit of bling in his hand, but it was his outfit which got his 2.3 million followers talking.
Wearing a matching checked polo shirt and shorts two-piece, the 26 year old left his fans divided.
"Oh God, the co-ords Jack sweetie no," advised one, while another said: "The f**k is Jack wearing?"
"I think that outfit boggles my vision," joked a third, as a fourth quizzed: "What's with the outfit, are you off to play golf?"
While some were baffled over his fashion choice, many were inspired by the garish two-piece.
"Look at that combo," added one person, before a second said: "That outfit is banging. I want one."
"Bringing tartan back," praised a third.
But Jack isn't the only islander to wear such an outfit, with co-star Wes Nelson being spotted in matching two pieces on more than one occasion since he left the villa.
Not only does Wes own a pale pink matching set of a t-shirt and shorts, but he also has a striped version of the ensemble in his wardrobe.
Those wanting to recreate the boys' looks should head to BoohooMan.com, where the online fashion retailer has a similar range of pieces from £10.
Their Pique Tee and Short Set is currently in the sale for £21, reduced from £30, and it comes in an array of colours including beige, pink and blue.


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UNC volleyball team beats Metro
October 28, 2003
Every so often, Erin Deffenbaugh walks with a slight limp, but it hardly equals the pain in her heart as she sits on the University of Northern Colorado volleyball team's bench.
The pain she feels as a spectator may never subside like the one she felt when she tore her anterior cruciate ligament in the off-season, putting her season on hold.
"This is tough, really tough," Deffenbaugh said before watching
the Bears sweep Division II No. 2-ranked Metropolitan State College of Denver 3-0 Tuesday night at Butler-Hancock Hall.
The victory runs the Bears' record to 25-2 while Metropolitan State slips to 20-5.
"I find myself cheering for my teammates, and at the same time feeling like I'm out on the court."
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Deffenbaugh, the NCAA Division II Player of the Year last season, hasn't been on the court since her injury, which she suffered while working a summertime volleyball camp.
"I'm three months in with about six-to-nine months left with my rehab," said Deffenbaugh, a 5-foot-11 outside hitter who was granted an injury redshirt season. "The most I can get involved is to be really observant and offer advice when I feel the timing is right."
Deffenbaugh's advice is welcome from her teammates and head coach Ron Alexander, but she explained there's a balance between offering advice and taking on a coaching role.
"It's a real fine line, and so what I try to do is keep most of my advice positive," she said. "I think about that a lot."
Much like she did as a player, Deffenbaugh's rehab effort is off the chart.
"It has to be," she said. "My knee has to be better than 100 percent if that makes sense. I want to play at such a high level, that I can't afford to be less than the best I can."
Her anxiety level hasn't changed a bit.
"It's the same sitting in the bench, it really is," she said. "My nerves jump up and down on every point. Even when we have pregame and we watch film, I find myself looking for tendencies of the opponent just like I'm going to be out there playing."
If there's been any consolation to Deffenbaugh's role, it's been to observe the Bears' run of success.
"They've done so well, it's made the situation a little easier," Deffenbaugh said. "I think some players have gotten a lot better with the extra playing time, which is great."
Freshman Terin Ledall has been the biggest beneficiary of playing time, and leads the Bears' offense.
"She has helped me so much," said Ledall, who had 13 kills, one ace, nine digs and two blocks Tuesday night. "She's been in just about every situation, and I know I can go to her with a question in a match or even in practice."
Amanda Wiggins has also seen additional playing time and took full advantage of it against the Roadrunners with 15 kills and 16 digs.
"What Erin Deffenbaugh brings to the bench is irreplaceable," UNC head coach Ron Alexander said. "She's been there and done that."
Alexander was a bit concerned in the preseason if Ledall would be able to fill the gap left by Deffenbaugh.
"She's done more than we could have ever expected," Alexander said. "Especially in the last three weeks, she's really exploded, and I know it helps her knowing that Erin is on the bench for advice if she needs it. Erin brings a fresh perspective to things."
"When we can come out here and beat a team like this in three straight, it can only help our confidence, which is pretty high right now," said Ledall, who recorded a .389 hitting percentage in the sweep.
– BEARS NOTES … In the first game, the Bears fought back from a 13-6 deficit to take an 23-16 lead before winning 30-27 on a kill shot by Maggie Ledall. … A kill by freshman Terin Ledall ignited a two-point rally to give the Bears the 31-29 victory in the second game. … In the second game, the Bears' attack percentage was an impressive .327. … UNC's sweep over Metropolitan State is its second this season. … The Bears have won 19 straight matches, including 18 at home. They've also won 57 of their last 60 games.
Northern Colorado def. Metropolitan State College
MSC: Kills: Jessy Roy 19, Shawna Gilbert 12k, Stefanie Allison 11, Devon Herron 7. Aces: Sheena McLaughlin 2, Gilbert. Assists: Herron 38, Allison 3, Renee Hazlewood, Roy. Blocks: Hazlewood 5, Gilbert 5, Allison 4, Herron.
UNC: Kills: Amanda Wiggins 15, Terin Ledall 13, Danelle Angus 12, Maggie Ledall 10, Cara Miller 4, Linnea Kiilsgaard 2. Aces: M. Ledall, T. Ledall, Kiilsgaard, Angus. Assists: Kiilsgaard 47, T. Ledall, M. Ledall. Miller. Blocks: Miller 6, Kiilsgaard 3, T. Ledall 2, Angus 2, Wiggins 2.


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XM Offers Free Three Months to Ex-Subscribers
As XM Satellite Radio waits to hear about the final approval for its merger with rival Sirius, it made a pricing move Tuesday. According to RadioInk.com, XM is now offering three free months- albeit spread out over the first six months of the subscription- for those who reactivate lapsed memberships.
The promotion goes into effect Nov. 23- Black Friday- and continues through the end of December. Those interested can do so at www.xmradio.com
After XM and Sirius shareholders approved their proposed merger last week, it is now under consideration by the FCC.
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Type 1 diabetes is a chronic condition characterized by a deficiency of insulin, a hormone needed to bring glucose from the bloodstream into the cells. As we eat our body breaks down glucose, however, those with type 1 diabetes do not have enough insulin to be able to keep that blood sugar at a normal level.
To be able to help control this, children with T1D need insulin. A healthy meal plan and exercise are key components. Meal planning when you have diabetes does not need to be a chore. You just need to make smart choices and eat balanced meals and enjoy healthy snacks. The more you know about the food you eat, the easier the choices will be.
The "Create your Plate" method was developed by the American Diabetes Association (ADA) which outlines diabetes-friendly combinations to every meal. Many individuals follow a more advanced form of meal planning called carbohydrate counting. This method requires that you count the carbohydrate grams in a meal to calculate the correct dose of insulin.
Along with diet, exercise plays an essential part of well-balanced diabetes control. Get moving! Exercise not only helps your body use insulin better, it also strengthens your heart and bones, improves blood circulation, lowers blood glucose and blood pressure, improves cholesterol levels and relieves stress.
The ADA recommends 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity at least 5 days per week for a total of 150 minutes of exercise. Remember to avoid a sedentary lifestyle and be sure to get up and moving every 30 minutes of sitting. Strength training is also recommended at least 2 times per week..
Examples of both types of exercise include: walking, running, swimming, dancing, weight machines, resistance bands and calisthenics (using own body weight).
Daily Tips
• Exercise builds stronger bones and muscles, helps you sleep well at night, decreases depression and anxiety, and helps to improve blood sugar control
• It is important for people with Type 1 diabetes to check their blood sugar before, during and after any physical activity! Having a small snack available is important as well!
• Insulin doses may need to be adjusted with increased activity – talk to your diabetes team!
• Exercise can lower your blood glucose levels up to many hours after you exercise by making your body more sensitive to insulin
• Avoid sugary beverages, stick to water. Only have juice to treat hypoglycemia.
• Eat a well- balanced meal, fruits and vegetable as well as plenty of protein.


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Vital GM safeguards could be quietly dropped after Brexit
GM Freeze, the UK's umbrella campaign on GM in food and farming, today launched twin campaigns aiming to protect key safeguards as the UK prepares to leave the European Union (EU).
Focused on issues around growing and importing GM crops, Safeguard our Farms calls for rigorous regulation to protect people, animals and the environment as well as effective measures to prevent contamination. Meanwhile, Don't Hide What's Inside aims to protect our right to decide whether or not to buy and eat GM through compulsory GM food labelling.
Almost all the UK's food and farming legislation currently comes from Europe, including rules that require case by case environmental risk assessments and labelling of GMOs in our food. It was an EU Directive that allowed Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to restrict the cultivation of GMOs in 2015, despite the Westminster Government's long-standing support for the use of GM in agriculture.
GM Freeze director Liz O'Neill said, "The UK's departure from the EU could result in enormous changes to the way we govern food and farming. Brexit brings opportunities for positive change but with so many issues competing for attention it would be easy for vital GM safeguards to be quietly dropped. The Safeguard our Farms and Don't Hide What's Inside campaigns are designed to ensure that doesn't happen."
Find out more at www.gmfreeze.org/safeguard and www.gmfreeze.org/donthide.


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The Sonatrach complex in Algiers' Hydra neighbourhood is a model of how many Algerians would like their country to be run. Security at the gate is tight but efficient; the buildings are clean and compact. Officials are knowledgeable and committed to their job. The company generates hard currency revenues, which finance a significant portion of the national budget, and is recognised in global energy markets as a major player with considerable capacity for growth.
At home in Algeria, Sonatrach staff are more concerned by plans for another major reorganisation of the state energy company. However, the corporate culture still seems relaxed, which is all the more surprising as Algeria's civil conflict rages all around it.
Sonatrach is abiding by its declared aim of becoming a major international company, whichever way Algeria's tortured politics takes the country. It is pursuing the strategy by building links with other international companies, encouraging more domestic exploration and production, and increasing its operations abroad.
It is now ranked eleventh in the New York-based Petroleum Intelligence Weekly ranking of the world's top 50 oil companies. Among Middle East entities it lies third behind Saudi Aramco and the National Iranian Oil Company. Algeria has huge untapped gas reserves and much of the country is only lightly explored so there is every prospect Sonatrach can enhance its standing in the years ahead.
'We are satisfied to have signed 30 exploration contracts with important companies,' Energy & Industry Minister Amar Makhloufi says. 'But at the same time we're not satisfied because half the domain is not covered at all. It needs more companies to come in, especially in the south and west to bring us towards a figure of 100 wells to be drilled every year.'
Sonatrach cannot do all this work alone, and hydrocarbons legislation has been amended to attract foreign investment. This started with a trickle of companies after the passing of a revised hydrocarbons law in 1986. It has accelerated since amendments were made in 1991 and dozens of international companies have since signed new exploration and production-sharing deals.
In 1993, foreign operators drilled more metres of exploration wells than Sonatrach, for the first time since nationalisation in 1971, reporting 35,369 metres drilled, against 32,839 for Sonatrach. In 1992, Sonatrach had drilled 34,347 metres and foreign firms 17,072 metres.
This increase in international activity is essential if oil reserves are to be maintained and the best use made of existing capacity. Sonatrach cannot bear the cost of greater exploration activity alone, nor does it have the technology to maintain production from mature wells.
It also needs financial help to develop the huge gas fields which are the key to Algeria's long-term prosperity. Sonatrach has been negotiating with several international companies to create ventures to exploit the gas finds. The most advanced talks are with The British Petroleum Company (BP), which is negotiating to develop the Southwest District 3 field at a projected cost of more than $2,000 million.
'The scale of investment needed is huge,' Makhloufi says. 'Gas is the most dynamic sector and structurally this can only be developed on an integrated basis with a big investment both upstream and downstream.'
The signing in mid-1994 of an agreement in principle with the US' Atlantic Richfield Company (Arco) was the highlight in Sonatrach's year. The $1,300 million contract is for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) work to raise output in the Rhourde El-Baguel field. This marks the first time a foreign operator has come into an existing oil field, providing a large-scale investment and a $300 million cash bonus.
Negotiations were delayed for months by legal wrangling. 'We had never seen anything quite like their American lawyers,' says a Sonatrach official. A final contract has still to be agreed before work can start.
It is unclear whether Arco will go ahead while Algeria's political crisis is unresolved. Several of Sonatrach's partners are continuing exploration and development work despite the obvious dangers. These include Italy's Agip and the US' Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, in which Sonatrach has a minority stake. Many others have reduced activity sharply, even though the conflict between radical Islamists and the state has until now left the hydrocarbons industry relatively untouched.
In its determination to maintain business as usual, Sonatrach has put pressure on foreign firms not to pull out or declare force majeure. Gaz de France withdrew its staff from the country in November, but refused to comment on the grounds that this might affect its relations with Sonatrach. Other firms have also quietly withdrawn staff.
Despite the crisis, Sonatrach says that further exploration and development work will go ahead in the coming months.
Indeed, new deals are being struck:
A consortium of South Korean firms signed a contract to explore in the Illizi basin on 15 November.
France's Total is reportedly negotiating for an exploration licence for blocks 443b and 444 in the Dahar depression on the Tunisian border north of the Ain Romana, Hassi Keskessa and El-Borma fields.
Anadarko is negotiating to develop the Hassi Berkine field, discovered in February 1994.
Spain's Compania Espanola de Petroleos (Cepsa) has announced an investment of Pta 23,000 million ($166 million) to develop the Rhourde Yacoub field.
Agip is developing block 403 in the southeast, to produce 40,000-50,000 barrels a day (b/d) from July 1995.
These projects are necessary to maintain oil production, which fell to 747,300 b/d in 1993 and even slightly lower in 1994.
Strategic alliances are another strand of the Sonatrach strategy. To improve access to markets and technology it has signed agreements with Royal/Dutch Shell, BP, Japan's Itochu Corporation, France's Total and Italy's Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (ENI) group, among others.
Others moves to raise the corporate profile include plans to increase trading operations through the Sonatrach offices in London and Singapore.
Another round of restructuring within Algeria is imminent, to complete unfinished business and iron out problems that have arisen from previous structural changes. This includes privatising non-core activities and reintegrating refining and some upstream operations into the main holding company.
Refining and marketing companies Naftal and Naftec were made autonomous in a previous restructuring, but experience has shown their operations are strategically important and should remain part of the main Sonatrach company, according to Sonatrach chairman Abdelhak Bouhafs.
Operations outside Sonatrach's core business of exploration, production, transport, refining and marketing will be hived off into independent companies, in line with the government's privatisation programme. Bouhafs says that service companies Enageo, ENTP, Enafor and GCB are doing more work as contractors to foreign companies which has shown they can thrive in a commercial environment, and earn hard currency.
The planned changes are not going unopposed. The National Federation of Oil, Gas & Chemical Workers threatened a three-day strike in late-November in protest at the reorganisation. The federation wants all hydrocarbons sector companies to be reintegrated into Sonatrach, which is the complete reverse of plans to privatise non-strategic companies. The company will not hear of any changes. In reply, Bouhafs said that 'assembling different activities within a group around Sonatrach would only lead to an accumulation of constraints. That would weaken all areas of activity in the sector and, more seriously, weaken the national oil company during a critical phase of consolidation and in an environment of increasingly intense competition.'
Sonatrach hopes the reorganisation will make it more profitable and more like an integrated hydrocarbons company. It is a big ambition but it remains to be seen whether it can remain sufficiently insulated from the surrounding political turmoil and make it happen. That same worry is concentrating the minds of all those concerned with Algeria's future.
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Like most years in the 50-year history of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), 2008 saw events that could have significant consequences for international relations and global balances of power. These included the election of Barack Obama as US president; the brief war in Georgia, which caused the West to look at Russia with more watchful eyes; and a cataclysmic crisis in the world's financial markets that seemed to threaten globalisation and even capitalism, and to herald a period of greater economic austerity.
Even as these events occurred, the security issues and risks that have been the core focus of the work of the IISS during the past half-century continued to loom large, among them nuclear proliferation and the relations between the major powers. In addition to these perennial themes was another set of issues that has in recent times risen higher on the international security agenda, including the security ramifications of natural disasters and environmental dangers such as climate change.
In its anniversary year, the IISS held several high-level conferences around the world. Speeches given at these events addressed all of these issues, and this Adelphi Paper offers a selection of them. The speakers were statesmen, senior military officers, high officials and international security experts. All were concerned first and foremost with the pressing issues of the moment, as their duties required them to be. But the fact that they also addressed recurrent themes testifies to the enduring nature of the strategic challenges faced by policymakers.
Foreword John Chipman Introduction Alexander Nicoll and Tim Huxley I. Global Security Dynamics 1. Address to the IISS 50th Anniversary Dinner Carl Bildt 2. Preventing a New Age of Nuclear Insecurity William Hague 3. Current Conflicts: Afghanistan Francesc Vendrell 4. European Armies: The Challenge David Richards 5. Europe and Conflict Resolution: Isolated or Engaged? Karl Eikenberry 6. Strategic Survey 2008 Launch Address John Chipman 7. The War in the Caucasus: Causes and Strategic Implications Oksana Antonenko II. Perspectives on Asian Security 8. Keynote Address to the 7th IISS Asia Security Summit, the Shangri-La Dialogue Lee Hsien Loong 9. Challenges to Stability in the Asia-Pacific Robert Gates 10. Charting a New Frontier: 'Global Korea' in the Twenty-First Century Han Seung-soo 11. The Future of East Asian Security Ma Xiaotian 12. Keynote Address to the 1st IISS-Citi India Global Forum Shiv Shankar Menon 13. Asian Military Modernisation: Key Areas of Concern Michael McDevitt 14. Asian Environmental Concerns Jeffrey Mazo III. The Widening Security Agenda 15. Restoring Peace in Complex Emergencies Jakob Kellenberger 16. Economics in Conflict Resolution Ronald Cohen 17. Assessing Political Risk Nigel Inkster