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DTZ Announces a Leadership Restructure of Global Occupier Services (GOS)
Quentin Knights Named EVP of Global Operations; Todd Richardson Appointed Head of Americas Business Development
CHICAGO, May 20, 2014 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- DTZ, a leading global property services firm, has announced a restructuring of its Global Occupier Services (GOS) leadership team in order to support and strengthen existing client relationships while enhancing the value of the service lines to new occupier clients. GOS was specifically created to meet the needs of the world's largest occupiers seeking regional or global solutions to manage their real estate portfolios. As a strategic partner to our clients, GOS provides global, integrated, comprehensive strategy, management and coordinated local execution to optimize the real estate portfolios of many of the world's leading enterprises.
Photos accompanying this release are available at
To further this mission, Quentin Knights, who formerly led GOS Americas operations has been named to the newly created position of Executive Vice President of Global Operations, GOS. Currently based in Palo Alto, CA, Mr. Knights will be relocating to DTZ Global Headquarters in Chicago. Concurrent with the appointment of Mr. Knights, DTZ announced that Todd Richardson, Senior Vice President of New Business Development in Facilities Management (a nearly $1 billion business for DTZ in the Americas) will move into a new position as Head of Business Development for GOS Americas. Mr. Richardson will maintain his office in Boston.
Quentin Knights joined DTZ in 2006 to oversee global account management functions for U.S. corporate clients. With over 25 years of commercial real estate experience, including management and executive-level positions with CBRE in Paris, New York and San Francisco, Mr. Knights is tasked with enhancing, streamlining and ensuring consistencies in GOS performance and reporting, including implementation of a global customer insight program. "To support DTZ's growth, we need to provide an enhanced level of service to our clients by managing our GOS business on a truly global basis," commented Mr. Knights. "Optimizing the efficiency and alignment of our talent and systems worldwide will further differentiate DTZ as a market leader in Global Occupier Services."
Since joining DTZ in March 2013, Todd Richardson has been leading the Facilities Management sales and business development team in North America. Prior to DTZ, Todd served as Senior Vice President at ABM Facility Services, where he led national business development and marketing efforts, focusing on large multi-regional, multi-service corporate real estate clients. In his new role, Mr. Richardson will integrate and lead all occupier sales and new business development teams in North America.
(C) Copyright 2014 GlobeNewswire, Inc. All rights reserved.


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Images: Night Raid in Sadr City [Image 4 of 5]
Photo by Staff Sgt. Michael Pryor
Bonnie Lake, Wash., native, Sgt. Mark Brasel (l.) a team leader with the Vilseck, Germany-based 1st Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, attached to the 82nd Airborne Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team, rushes into a courtyard after his team breached the gate during a late night raid on the homes of several suspected improvised explosive device-makers in Baghdad's Sadr City neighborhood, Oct. 28.
This work, Night Raid in Sadr City [Image 1 of 5], by SSG Michael Pryor, identified by DVIDS, is free of known copyright restrictions under U.S. copyright law.
Date Taken:10.31.2007
Date Posted:10.31.2007 09:13
Photo ID:63272
Size:697.96 KB
Location:BAGHDAD, IQ

subset: commoncrawl


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...not sure which comments you think are a load off rubbish, everything he's said makes sense and personally I agree with, we all want a good Ducati, we all hope CRT will be competetive but are unsure it will be. Interesting to see last years WC feels the same.


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RM News
Shoes in the City
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
We asked five industry insiders in NYC to test-drive our latest shoes, from punchy sandals to show-stopping heels. Watch the video and take our Shoes in the City quiz below!
Answer #1 to our Shoes in the City quiz is Ying Chu, Executive Beauty Director of Glamour Magazine! Ying dishes on her new post at the fashion glossy and her top shoe tips. Learn more about the makeup maven below.
Tell us a little about what you do at Glamour.
I oversee editorial beauty content for the brand — all things makeup, perfume, skin, hair. My typical day can range from interviewing a skin science researcher to being on a photo shoot with Pat McGrath.
What are some of your favorite NYC spots?
I have a matcha tea latte habit from Takahachi bakery in Tribeca. I am obsessed with Jen G's classes at Kula Yoga. My hair spot is Serge Normant for John Frieda in Meatpacking (to see Serge or DJ). And I love to wander the photography halls at MOMA.
What is your favorite type of shoe and why?
Ninety percent of the time, it's a heel that's at least four inches tall. Don't know if anyone I work with is onto my real height yet. They only know me by my fashion height!
Tell us about the shoe you're wearing and how you styled it.
I have on the nude Mabel sandals. They're actually incredibly comfy! So I paired them with equally comfy pleated pants, a printed peplum top, and some of my favorite delicate jewelry. I feel like I could run a marathon in this getup!
What is your top shoe advice?
I don't think you can ever have enough pairs—but I like to get my staples resoled once a year at Leather Spa. And as a beauty girl who rarely matches mani to toes, I love the novel idea of matching fingertips to shoes! I'm still searching for a fit with my Rebecca Minkoff Mabels, but Essie's Topless & Barefoot and Jin Soon's Nostalgia are in the running.
What three types of shoes should every girl have in her closet?
Classic stiletto — Pointy (at least for now).
A strappy, colorful (or metallic) number.
Platform wedge — to navigate sand and grass at summer parties without getting stuck!
What is your fondest shoe memory?
My first pair of pointe shoes (for ballet) as a kid. I wore a brand called Freeds and I remember loving the perfect nude-peachy tone; they weren't too candy pink. And I recall laboring over the ever-so-crucial elastic and ribbon pairing for them!
Follow Ying on Twitter @yingchunyc.
Come back every day this week to find out the rest of the answers to our Shoes in the City quiz! We're revealing the next It Girl on Tuesday, 2/26 at 3PM EST.


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On Christmas Eve of 2004, Sachi and I made a decision. We decided that, in one year, we would depart on a year long trip. We reserved a web site address that night: www.theworldisnotflat.com (TwinF). In January of 2006 we departed, dedicated to blogging the whole trip. After a glowing recommendation from another traveler along the way, we added Sri Lanka to our itinerary, with some apprehension. Sri Lanka experiences some domestic terrorism, but it mostly stays in the northern part of the... Continue Reading
To finish up China week, I'd like to share some of our favorite photos from China. Enjoy the Olympics! Shanghai from the Pearl City Tower A squished pig from a Nanjing market. Summer Palace Locks on Yellow Mountain. You might remember these from The Amazing Race. Li River, near Yangshou, China Li River Karsts, via Guilin, China. It was a sunny day in Shanghai. The umbrellas (parasoles?) were to block the sun. Yangtze River - Three... Continue Reading
Below is a short story that was posted to our travel blog from Shanghai. Almost any visitor to China is likely to experience a higher-than-expected level of competiion while standing in line for something like a subway ticket. In the case below, I had made up my mind to be a competitor. Unfortunately things didn't work out as planned. From the post: Lessons in Line Breaking I had made a decision and I was going to act on it. Gone were the days of standing passively in line while... Continue Reading
If making signs in Chinese characters was my job, I would be very, very bad at it. However, I might hire someone who knows the language well before erecting a permanent sign at a major tourist destination. For a long time, this didn't happen in China and we snapped the photos below before they invested in changing the signs for the Olympics. The guy in this photo is one of the most interesting people I've ever met. He's the blind adventurer Miles Hilton-Barber.(notice the broken cane,... Continue Reading
First, we want to wish you and yours good cheer and positive vibes for the Holidays. It's been an exciting year for us at Common Craft and it couldn't have happened without you. Your links, your blog entries, your emails to friends all put a spotlight on our work that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Maybe there is something to this social media thing after all. J Between now and the New Year, we'll be with families on separate coasts and generally unavailable. If you're looking for an... Continue Reading
Exactly one year ago, we published the video below - one of our first. We had just finished a six day river trip from Chong Qing to Shanghai, China on the Yangtze River, which goes through the Three Gorges. China is damming the Yangtze River with the Three Gorges Dam Project, the worlds largest dam. It has displaced over a million people and caused a huge and well-deserved global controversy. At this time last year, we had just purchased the camera we use today. I decided I'd try to do a... Continue Reading
How long has it been since you really thought about all the things you subscribe to in email? The newsletters, the notifications, the email lists. It's so easy to delete the old stuff when it comes in that you might be used to doing just that - deleting instead of unsubscribing. I've spent the last couple of weeks unsubscribing from everything and I was amazed at the sheer number of things that came in, but always went unread. My guess is there were 25-30 different newsletters and updates. I... Continue Reading
I've been geeking out a lot on all the things we can do with gadgetry on the trip. You might remember that I first posted about a device (the i-Mate PDA2K) back in June that I thought would be good for mobile blogging. I've been using a PalmOne Treo 650 for the last couple of months and I think it's going to be the close-to-perfect gadget for our needs on the trip. Over at TwinF I posted a bit about all the capabilties I've been testing. Tags: twinf, gadgetry, geek, mobile, moblogging
As I've been hinting, I'm getting really close to revealing something new that I'm very excited about. Quite honestly, I'm hoping to build some buzz, as I'll be looking for people to participate (it's free). In planning for buzz, I like to look at it in terms of something I call "Buzz Capital�?. Like most types of capital, buzz capital is something you build up and then spend. The goal is to spend it at the most opportune moment, thus increasing the returns on the buzz. I'd say... Continue Reading
I've been planning something since January of this year and I'm really excited that it's about to come to fruition. In fact, I can barely contain myself. I'm going to be evasive for now, but it's something that represents the biggest adventure of my life so far, personally and professionally. In a week or two, I'll start talking specifics and my goal in writing this is to fire off a warning shot to say that things are changing here at Common Craft headquarters. In fact, I think it's safe to... Continue Reading


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Lot 162 View Catalog
William F. Cody with Sister Julia, Very Rare Pose by Prince, New York
Silver gelatin photograph, 7.25 x 9.25 in., on 12.5 x 15 in. mount with recto imprint of Prince Studio, 31 Union Square New York/ Gessford & Van Brunt, Proprietors. A lovely, never-before-seen studio portrait of Buffalo Bill Cody glancing over notes with his older sister Julia Melvina Cody Goodman (1843-1928).
Born in LeClair, Iowa in 1843, Julia Cody Goodman lost her father Isaac at the young age of 14 and had to help in caring for her younger siblings. Within another 6 years, her mother Mary Ann passed away, and Julia and her brother, William, were made guardians of the younger children in the Cody family. In 1862, Julia married James Alvin Goodman at Leavenworth, Kansas, and she went on to raise a large family of her own. She spent 16 years at Scouts Rest in North Platte, and after the death of her husband, Julia took charge of the Hotel Irma which Buffalo Bill had opened in the new town of Cody, Wyoming. She had a keen interest in the Cody family and spent time visiting various family members throughout the country. Julia died in Honolulu, Hawaii in October of 1928, but is buried in North Platte, Nebraska.
Provenance: Descended directly in the family of William F. Buffalo Bill Cody
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Why Did Kate Middleton's Very Plain Royal Wedding Dress Feature Milksacks?
Breasetes. Milksacks. The future queen is letting her royal jellies flop all around for all to lap up in the eyes and get their jollies. There is no need for a dress to have such a cup section for the dandies.
This is the problem with the British. They are hypocrites. They try to act all ceremonial and moral and then, you see them snickering. Did you see Prince Harry taking a lick of his chops and staring at her chest gifts when she sashayed by during the procedure? It shows that royal lust and incest still runs strong in the House of Windsor.
I regret that America lacked a strong navy in 1776, because I would have loved to see King Redcoat's face when George Washington stepped off and lead the American Army in a burning spree through England, where we burned everything in site and demanded the king bow before the nation of the True King, Our God.
The Brits are low lifes. Look at how even the most 'regal' of them all is already dressing like a Vegas hooker with three bottles of dirty tequila on a raunchy Tijuana springbreak night. We're lucky she didn't just do another upskirt pose while she was walking down the aisle for attention. What we have hear is just another Lindsay Lohan.
I'm willing to be the toilet seat of Lindsay Lohan's home after a cocaine party is cleaner than the royal Middleton pantry drawers if she is even wearing any under that dress. We can just ask Prince Harry because he likely knows first hand with the way they were eying each other and doing simulated mouth sex act gestures when the William boy was not looking.
I'm happy this nonsense is over and am calling my local cable to tell them to stop broadcasting coverage. I don't care! James Monroe said if the British royalty ever tried to step foot into our country, we have the right to nuke them until their rivers boil in waste!
I say this qualifies and if they don't stop beaming their signals here, they can just get a nice beam of nuclear radiation melting their snag toothed faces right from their skeletons. Get out of here you no good taxiing tories hillbilly incest freaks. This is America, no kings!
- Excited
- Fascinated
- Amused
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- Sad
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One of the most horrible things about me is that I leave a trail of blogs behind me as bad as villains leave a trail of dead. It's not that I intentionally do this, most of the time it's cause I lose interest, I grow tired, or I just don't have the time.
But sometimes, it's a positive thing, it's a change. Like this time, I'm not leaving the blogosphere of gaming forever. Nay, I'm moving over to a new place, a new site, somewhere I will continue doing what I did here.
The only difference now being - I have a partner in crime, a friend who's just as interested to speak her mind as I am, about my first love - video games.
So it is with bittersweetness I announce the closure of Junch for Gaming, and the opening of The Big Gap. Do visit, it's exactly the same as here, only now with two writers for twice the content.
Au revoir and good luck y'all.
Friday, September 16, 2011
News: It was fun but now bon voyage, and onwards to a new site
One of the most horrible things about me is that I leave a trail of blogs behind me as bad as villains leave a trail of dead. It's not that I intentionally do this, most of the time it's cause I lose interest, I grow tired, or I just don't have the time.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Review: Realm of the Mad God
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'Ello there!
It's been awhile. Yes it has indeed. But I've come out from hiding (yes, that's exactly what I have been doing) to talk about Realm of the Mad God, which is maddeningly good. Maddening because you'll hate it. And good because you'll love it.
Yes that makes a lot of sense. Read on for more of this maddening writing (and game)!
Realm of the Mad God is at its simplest an MMORPG. You traverse an 8-bit world as one of a whole slew of classes pounding the hurt on various monsters, collecting lots of loot, upgrading your character and then taking on the big overlord boss of the entire realm in an epic fashion: that is, the entire cohort of gamers on the server at one time gets transported to this big boss Oryx and everyone works together to take him down.
Here's where it gets interesting:
1. Realm of the Mad God is free to play in your browser (with non-compulsory micro-transactions). So maybe you were doing research for a thesis paper, or at work sending some emails, and feel like a little break. So jump straight into the game. Very convenient. Until you realize you've been playing for 5 hours straight OMFGWHEREHASMYTIMEGONESHITMUSTPLAYSOMEMORE
2. It's persistent, it's an RPG so you get to save your character. Your very own little being in this great big dangerous world that levels up the more you play, and the more loot you bestow on it.
3. Heck there's a lot of lewt. Every other monster is dropping this or that thing and shit, your inventory space is only 8 boxes big, so you can only carry 8 things. And the crazy thing is, in just a short 20 minutes, you'd have come across some of the game's best items and your inventory will be crammed with all sorts of goodies. And more keep pouring out! Aaargh not enough inventory space what do I do!??! Do I drop behind this top-tier staff for this other top-tier shield even though I don't play this class? But I don't want the asshole tagging along behind me to pick it up! I want it all!!!!
4. And that's not even the end of your worries. The game is crazy fast-paced, more akin to a twin stick bullet hell game than your classic dungeon-crawling RPG. Bullets are flying left right centre, and you're actually dodging it at a neck-breaking speed while dealing your own pew pews of death. Maybe you're level 19, about to hit 20 and carrying all this good gear, looking forward to taking on the big boss of doom when suddenly, a stray bullet hits you and your screen fades to black.
5. Oh no! WTF you died! And guess what, your entire character wipes. Yessiree, it's hardcore mode from Diablo 2. All that lewt, all that great treasures of the realm you hoard all gone. Your hard work getting to level 20 all gone! RAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHH mega-rage, and then you play again.
Then a realization hits you, that Realm of the Mad God is a truly maddening and sadistic game. There's a reason why there is only so much inventory and stash box space. You just won't have enough space to collect all the l33t gear (unless you pay for more space and I'm trying very hard to fight the temptation because heck, the convenience would really help). And on top of that, death is always just around the corner. Get your guard down just so you can lewt that poor sod who died before you and some monster's going to breathe down your neck and kill you. Think you're invincible with high level gear? Some monster better than you is going to kill you all the same. Want to play this top-tier class? You're going to have to get several lower level classes to 20 before you can. So you keep playing.
It's the classic RPG at its most distilled. There are no NPCs in this world, no shops to buy anything from. Everything you'll need, everything you'll want can either be gained from killing monsters or found when other players with too little inventory space drop stuff. Half the game is spent running around Nexus (the safe zone in the game), jammed to the rafters with other players, picking up dropped lewt bags left by other people who couldn't carry anymore. And the other half of the game is spent killing monsters for no real narrative reason at all.
Then combat is the simplest thing. You can press T and have your character continually fire a stream of bullets at the enemy, all you have to do is point your cursor at the enemy till its dead. And press space bar on occasion to use your class' special ability. The problem of course is that there'll be plenty more monsters pointing their bullets right back at you.
And in typical MMO fashion, XP is equally shared across all people fighting the same monsters. You don't even need to be in the same party; so long as you teleport to a group of players fighting high level monsters, you don't have to lift a finger to level up continually. It's brilliant, and sometimes you'll see these massive trains of players just wiping a realm clean. All these green numbers denoting the amount of XP you're gaining just continually climbing. Also means you don't have to play the game 24/7 in order to get to the highest level. In just 30 minutes or so, you should reach level 20 - if you haven't died yet.
Death is the worst though. It's the absolute worst. All your hard work leveling your character to 20, all your careful lewt collecting, all that wiped completely clean in an instant because you were careless with a stray bullet or failed to defend yourself from a huge swarm of high level monsters. It's sickening because there is nothing else to do in the game other than keep fighting (or grinding, for the cynical) so when you die, you start straight from level 1 and get right back out there. Only to die again.
In fact, the only way you can survive the meta-game of Realm of the Mad God is to not let it get to you. Not let it make you feel the most utter hatred for the game developers, not let it get to you that they sucked your life and soul for a measly little browser MMO that is somehow also seemingly one of the most compulsively brilliant games of the year. Damn... because after awhile, you'll know that all you're doing is the same thing over and over with little reprieve or enlightenment. There is no enlightenment, this is the role-playing gamer's personal hell and heck, they love it. I love it.
It certainly trains you to realize the transient nature of every RPG game, of loot-hoarding compulsions, of the pointlessness of fighting. It really all doesn't matter. But you keep coming back for more anyway.
Nice one Oryx. Well played. Sure, we can kill you over and over and keep farming your nice lewt. As long as you're keeping us in the realm forever, you win.
Monday, May 30, 2011
News: Awesome blog update of awesomeness
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Hello y'all. Been awhile since my last post. And I figured this would be an apt time to revive this wondrous blog to talk about several awesome things related to my adventures in this crazy thing we call gaming. This includes getting a new gaming rig, playing several awesome games, and most importantly, going to e3.
THAT'S RIGHT. GOING TO e3.
I probably should talk about that last bit first, seeing as it is most likely the thing that has grabbed your attention. But nay, I'll get to that in a bit.
FIRST. I got myself a new computer. (I'll put up photos in soon)
Intel i7-2600 3.4Ghz
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD6950 2GB
Seasonic 660W Power
23" LCD monitor
This purchase was most definitely motivated by the upcoming slew of releases planned. Getting ready for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Rage, and definitely Battlefield 3. Hopefully it'll last a good few years before upgrade. By then I'll get dual cards, and three monitors for ATI Eyefinity awesomeness.
My former gaming wonder The Beast, a notebook from Asus, is still more than capable currently but it has had trouble running Crysis 2 and Witcher 2. It is time to put it to greener pastures i.e. running my word processing (har har).
SECOND. Games I've been playing.
I'm not far enough to give an absolute final verdict, but of the fair bit I've played of this seriously epic long RPG - this may be for me, the RPG of the year. Bioware botched that up with Dragon Age 2 which left me very disappointed at the lacklustre scope and poor writing compared to the first. Taking David Gaider off the script was a stupid idea, and rushing the whole damn development to cash in was not right either. Dragon Age 2 could've been the magnus opus to build on the awesomeness that was DA, but whatever.
Whereas Dragon Age 2 was not taking enough risks and not giving its dialogue enough punch for us to care, Witcher 2 has cocks, cunts, and all manners of grit in their speech. Which is not to say that that's what it takes to impress me, but there is certainly a deeper level of maturity and naturalness to the dialogue. And that extends to the entire design of the world of Witcher 2. It friggin' lives and breathes. People walk about, you can talk to all of 'em, and they appropriately respond to you. Day and night cycle, houses can be entered, and there is just a rich variety of things to do and see. On top of the badassery that is Geralt.
Combat is no walk in the park even on Normal difficulty. There's a bit of Assassin's Creed in there in the need to time your attacks and be positioned correctly. No enemy is too easy, you always have to be on your toes and to me, that's what real combat should feel like. It reduces the grindy element too.
Needless to say, this is really great and everyone should be playing it. The graphics are really sparkly too.
Crysis 2
I finally got around to playing this properly. It didn't run so well on my notebook so I put it aside until I could get my PC. And boy, is this game actually pretty fun. Shooting games has been getting rather tired of late, but Crytek injected an element of brains into the proceedings by opening up multiple paths to an objective, vertical as well as horizontal gameplay, and firepower that packs decent punches. Yeah, all the suit powers are there, but it never feels like you're too imba, which is always important. Challenge in a game.
And shit, New York City burned to ashes is so morbidly beautiful. The graphics are really stellar in this as well. And all super shiny on my new computer! LOVE IT.
Dirt 3
I've always said that I'm not a big fan of racing games, and I'm just not that good at it. But in recent times, racing games have been reaching out to non-racing people like me more and more, and I'm increasingly coming to like the genre. Need for Speed started it with Most Wanted and then waned with Carbon and Underground, but brought it back with Hot Pursuit which is just a full-on awesome Michael Bay experience of racing. But now that I've got my new PC, I need a new kind of driving experience.
An immersive one. And Codemasters' new game is absolutely perfect for this. Switch to in-car view and tackle the rough terrain, intense weather, and aggressive opponents as if you were right there in the thick of the action. The graphics are mind-blowingly hyper-realistic and the driving hits the line perfectly between exciting simulation and heart-pumping arcade entertainment. Driving is challenging and not for the faint of the heart. And the Flashback feature that started in Race Driver: Grid and carried over to their newer titles is just the most genius thing a racing game can ever have. It stops you from restarting races over and over just to get it perfect. Instead you rewind time and keep going thereby minimizing disruption of flow. Like Prince of Persia. And boy, what a creative game title menu presentation.
THIRD. Going to e3
Yes siree. I think it's time I let on that I'm going to e3 in LA for Razer with a couple of my colleagues. For those who know me, or have been following my blog for sometime, you'll know that games are pretty much the greatest thing to me. And when I got to join Razer, I was over the moon that I was closer to games that I ever thought I'd be for a career. And now, I'm going to e3.
It's so unbelievably crazy that I have to control myself writing this and careful not to gush too much. Making the trip to e3 is an honor, a mecca to the holy place of games that I know I will savor every second of. I'm such a fanboy, but I don't care.
It's from the 7th to the 9th of June but I'll be leaving for LA from Singapore on the 4th. Haven't been to the States either since I was 7, and what I remember are recollections from my parents. This time I'll be going back armed with a hunger to do proper coverage on games, with photos to boot. I promise to try and bring back a chock full of info so it'll almost be like you guys were right there with me. Also going to represent Razer and make some exciting announcements and show off a line-up of sexy new products.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Review: Portal 2
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This was a triumph... for gamers and gaming alike. That is all.
Valve has gone off the grid for the longest time. Of course, not literally. They've released Left 4 Dead 2 most recently, and have been providing steady stream of content to TF2. But their last emotionally-riveting, high-octane other-world adventure in the Half-Life universe was in 2007. That's four long years we've been waiting.
In that time, Call of Duty had been released several times over, Minecraft stole the hearts and minds of many gamers, and Blizzard initiated world domination with Starcraft II. Then there was Bioshock, Dead Space, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age for people to turn to for their absorbing single-playering fix.
But everyone who appreciates games knows the sheer importance of the Half-Life franchise. Each release can be likened to a season of Lost that is fanatically anticipated and continually succeeds to tops its predecessor. And when it was revealed that the Portalverse, and everything Aperture Science had major tie-ins to Black Mesa and the world of our favorite mute hero Gordon Freeman, our minds melted at such holy revelations.
I hope I've managed to introduce you to the sheer significance that Portal 2 represents, for me personally at least. It's not only an exciting game in itself, but surely Valve's teaser for our most awaited title, the one that will change the world of gaming - the game they'll either call Half-Life 2: Episode 3 or Half-Life 3.
But let's look at Portal 2 as a standalone title.
Portal was a highly refreshing title back in '07, in a market of oversaturated hyper-testosterone shooters and short attention-spanned gameplay. I was afraid Portal 2 would suffer from sequel-litis, bog down what made the original title such a breath of fresh air - but instead of trying to broaden the world of Aperture Science which is a nigh impossible task given its narrow focus on the concept of science, test chambers and laboratories - Valve both metaphorically and literally deepened the world.
What do I mean by this?
Given the minimalistic approach of Portal with its small cast of two characters, GLaDOS and you, Portal 2 adds just two more to the mix, Wheatley and Cave Johnson - enough to be a catalyst to drive the plot forward whilst maintaining the Zen and solitary sensibilities of the Portalverse. Wheatley, voiced by Stephen Merchant is a powerhouse of comedy. His bumbling, moronic ways is such a stark contrast to the cold, intelligence of GLaDOS (voiced by the ever wondrous Ellen Mclain) that it works perfectly and brings a new dimension to the world of Aperture Science.
You will joyfully relish the chance to learn more about GLaDOS, her inception and of her even larger role in the world. Cave Johnson, voiced by a kickass J.K. Simmons reminiscent of his Jonah Jameson character in the Spiderman movie, is introduced as the CEO and founder to this mega-mysterious corporation. His left-behind audio recordings to motivate test subjects are profound relics to a bygone era of uninhibited pursuits for scientific progress, and how one man's dreams for humanity's greatness can have such widespread repercussions into the future. Valve's favored style of storytelling shines through here, minimizing exposition and emphasizing plot-reveals through gameplay. It's a bit like Bioshock also in that you're dropped in a world after it has gone to the dogs, is deserted, and all that is left, is for you to explore it and get a sense of what had gone on before through tapes and pictures.
All I can say is that the story, the writing is so much deeper, more riveting, and darkly funnier than Portal, and I have no doubt on that front alone, Portal 2 will garner many awards.
But more importantly, let's look at gameplay.
Portal 2 is all about shooting portals. Simple enough? Apparently so. And yet so deliciously challenging. In the same way that conducting and solving tests creates euphoria in the artificial intelligence in Aperture Science, you'll be pushed just enough so that it frustrates, but not so much that you want to turn off the game. And that's important - if a puzzle game makes you want to turn it off, that defeats the purpose entirely and as a game it would fail. But with Portal 2, you just want to keep trying until you succeed, lest you are beholden to the dripping poison that is GLaDOS' voice. Even more so, you just want to keep going to see how the fantastic story unfolds.
The puzzles are not overtly difficult. They pose enough of a challenge in the ways you need to think about solving them; the first answer that comes to mind is never always the right one but I can guarantee most people will get it. But it's amazing that Valve has managed to create a butter smooth difficulty curve that never feels too easy or too hard at any time. It's a testament to their endless gameplay testing over and over till they hit pitch perfect note for a puzzle; I'm sure they have it down to a science as it were - very scary, I just realized that Aperture Science's obsession for testing is just a reflection of Valve's. They must have their own test lab rats tucked away somewhere in Seattle.
As a whole, the game is definitely more challenging than the original Portal, which is a plus for content-hungry gamers. There are a few new obstacles, or ways to solve puzzles, in the multi-colored gels, faith plates, light bridges and tunnels. Now, instead of just shooting portals, you'll have to manipulate surfaces to do more, whether it's to jump further, run faster, or be able to shoot portals through surfaces that you were previously unable to. The faith plates, light bridges and tunnels offer new forms of transportation of self or objects. Safe to say, none of it are bloatware, definitely worthy additions that maintain the tight and fun nature of gameplay for Portal 2 so by the time you get to the final boss fight, everything you've experienced and learned up till then becomes a necessary tool in your arsenal.
Here are a couple of criticisms I have for the game. One, Valve favors a hunt-for-a-portal-shootable-surface instead of always laying out an entirely solvable puzzle in front of us. Of course, when we're in the test chambers, everything is self-contained. But when we traverse the parts of Aperture Science outside the labs, it's as if Valve's idea of a "puzzle" then is to look for an obscure, hidden wall that we can shoot a portal through otherwise we cannot progress.
Two, whilst the game clocks in at between 8 - 10 hours of gameplay, which is a decent length, 2/3rds of the way through, it feels slightly draggy and that's probably Valve's well-intentioned attempt to plump out the content by way of more puzzles; but perhaps there were one or two too many. This is because the story drops off for a bit, we hear nothing for an entire section before being brought back into the fold of narrative awesomeness. It's not a huge dealbreaker, just something that Valve could tighten up and the game would be perfect.
Graphically, it is clear the Source Engine cannot compete with the likes of CryEngine or the hotly anticipated upcoming Frostbite 2 engine. Then again, the Source Engine has never been the most shiny or glistening, but Valve manages time and time again to build immersive worlds dripping with charm and lore. The animations of Wheatley, GLaDOS, and the test labs that shift and transform according to the needs of the A.I. are so amazing, so life-like and natural it's almost like Valve hired some Pixar people to work on Portal 2. That's probably not true, but is my comparison for how great it all looks.
The other big thing with Portal 2 is the inclusion of cooperative gameplay. Two people can team up to take on new puzzles plumping out the amount of content you get in an awesome way. But for those used to solving puzzles on their own, cooperative puzzle-solving will be a challenge in itself. Sure, two brains should help to solve puzzles faster, but having another person along could be a hindrance to your efficiency, and it'll take patience and supporting one another to succeed. All to beloved GLaDOS' sneering judgment. The cooperative bots also have their own narrative which should be exciting - I've yet to play it fully myself. Will cover that in a separate post in due time.
In glorious conclusion, Portal 2 is that game. That game that isn't so high-brow that only puzzle snobs or gaming purists will get, and isn't so low-brow that it feels like yet another money-making scheme churned out by a huge game developer year after year. It's a game game. It's a gamer's game. It's a game built to be enjoyed, tickling you at the right times and poking you at others. It's a self-contained addiction with huge implications on a larger narrative that Valve appears to be perpetuating. It's a game that's so well-crafted that it can be viewed as a near-perfect model for game development. Take all of that and what you get is a masterpiece. This is a masterpiece. And when the extremely climactic ending rolls around, the music and the audio escalating, the euphoria you experience is not only because what you're playing is awesome, but that you are privileged to be playing such a game at all. And it'll convince you that your pursuit for utter gaming enjoyment is the right one.
Well done Valve, well done.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Thinky stuff: If She Dies, You Die
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I just came across this blog post this morning and I thought you should read it too. It's really quite good. The writer Jason Killingsworth, features editor for Edge, laments about the temporary separation from his wife. This leads to a discussion of how games like Enslaved and Ico are very good at emphasizing overtly or subtly the idea of bonding with that special someone in your life, about what it means to be married, and what it means to lose the person you love.
Read it. Good advice on marriage too.
Friday, February 25, 2011
News: Draguns! Manshooting! And more Manshooting!
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You know why I love games? It's not just the actual act of playing them, but it's the trailers and the various screenshots to get you hyped up before the actual game launch. It's like ohmygod-I'm-going-to-get-to-do-that? or ohmygod-that's-the-world-I'm-going-to-be-in?
No doubt there's a lot of value in the film business in affecting people emotionally, and engaging educationally, but no one can doubt the awesome hype that video games are now capable of. Just look at the Dead Island trailer I posted a little while ago.
Now MORE AWESOME TRAILERS below.
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I can't even find it in myself to make fun of this video. How can you make fun of shouting at dragons? How can you make fun of wide roaming vistas and beautiful graphics? How can you make fun of sneaking about catacombs and fighting large spiders?
You can't, you just can't. And boy, that music.
Crysis 2
I'm starting to think now that there's a serious glut of trailers being released about this game, a bit overwhelming if you ask me. But now I can say with certainty what the game is about. Some aliens attack New York and some dude in a suit has to kick ass. Old man talks. Black guy talks. More ass kicking.
But one thing I don't get... who the fuck is Alcatraz?!?
Battlefield 3
So EA wants to take on the big bad boy Activision with their own epic man-war-shootery. Yeah, their last game Bad Company 2 was really horrible, at least story-wise. Multiplayer was not too bad, but it couldn't really take on the Call of Duties.
But this BF3 trailer looks ... alright. I'm not particularly super excited because teasing us with some footage intended to say, "Hey check out how hyper realistic this game looks, with the falling soldier, the proning on top of a building with another building opposite exploding" has really all be done before. And they had to have a flash of some insurgent smacking us in the face.
I'm not complaining though. I like man-war-shootery games. Bring 'em all on.
Monday, February 21, 2011
News: Dead Island screenshots
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Hot on the heels of the popular Dead Island trailer, Techland has released some screenies of the game itself. Which is good. So people know what the game is really like.
See shiny shots fired off below.
Apparently the game will have role-playing leanings, four player coop, so kinda' Left 4 Dead, kinda' Far Cry. All about scrounging around the island for supplies, whilst finding away to escape. And keeping true to some semblance of realism, there will be minimal firearms because that's not how real-world islands are like (apparently). So lots of melee combat, zombie head bashing. Sounds like fun.
Oh, and Techland are tag-teaming with Deep Silver. For those who don't know, Deep Silver did Sacred 2 which was a truly awesome RPG. So yeah, the role-playing bit could be pretty good. The graphics look positively shiny and keeping true to the mood they had in mind for the trailer.


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Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of US Imperial Policy in Africa May 14, 2014Posted by rogerhollander in Africa, Central African Republic, Congo, Genocide, Human Rights, Women.
Tags: Africa, africom, black caucus, boko haram, central african republic, glen ford, kidnapped girls, michelle obama, nigeria, nigerian army, roger hollander, susan rice
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Roger's note: the average North American's lack of knowledge and understanding of Africa the the United States' continued role there is astounding, present company included. Here is a bit of eye opening reporting for the always reliable Black Action Agenda's Glen Ford.
A chorus of outraged public opinion demands that the "international community" and the Nigerian military "Do something!" about the abduction by Boko Haram of 280 teenage girls. It is difficult to fault the average U.S. consumer of packaged "news" products for knowing next to nothing about what the Nigerian army has actually been "doing" to suppress the Muslim fundamentalist rebels since, as senior columnist Margaret Kimberley pointed out in these pages, last week, the three U.S. broadcast networks carried "not a single television news story about Boko Haram" in all of 2013. (Nor did the misinformation corporations provide a nanosecond of coverage of the bloodshed in the Central African Republic, where thousands died and a million were made homeless by communal fighting over the past year.) But, that doesn't mean the Nigerian army hasn't been bombing, strafing, and indiscriminately slaughtering thousands of, mainly, young men in the country's mostly Muslim north.
The newly aware U.S. public may or may not be screaming for blood, but rivers of blood have already flowed in the region. Those Americans who read – which, presumably, includes First Lady Michelle Obama, who took her husband's place on radio last weekend to pledge U.S. help in the hunt for the girls – would have learned in the New York Times of the army's savage offensive near the Niger border, last May and June. In the town of Bosso, the Nigerian army killed hundreds of young men in traditional Muslim garb "Without Asking Who They Are," according to the NYT headline. "They don't ask any questions," said a witness who later fled for his life, like thousands of others. "When they see young men in traditional robes, they shoot them on the spot," said a student. "They catch many of the others and take them away, and we don't hear from them again."
The Times' Adam Nossiter interviewed many refugees from the army's "all-out land and air campaign to crush the Boko Haram insurgency." He reported:
"All spoke of a climate of terror that had pushed them, in the thousands, to flee for miles through the harsh and baking semidesert, sometimes on foot, to Niger. A few blamed Boko Haram — a shadowy, rarely glimpsed presence for most residents — for the violence. But the overwhelming majority blamed the military, saying they had fled their country because of it."
In just one village, 200 people were killed by the military.
In March of this year, fighters who were assumed to be from Boko Haram attacked a barracks and jail in the northern city of Maiduguri. Hundreds of prisoners fled, but 200 youths were rounded up and made to lie on the ground. A witness told the Times: "The soldiers made some calls and a few minutes later they started shooting the people on the ground. I counted 198 people killed at that checkpoint."
All told, according to Amnesty International, more than 600 people were extrajudicially murdered, "most of them unarmed, escaped detainees, around Maiduguri." An additional 950 prisoners were killed in the first half of 2013 in detention facilities run by Nigeria's military Joint Task Force, many at the same barracks in Maiduguri. Amnesty International quotes a senior officer in the Nigerian Army, speaking anonymously: "Hundreds have been killed in detention either by shooting them or by suffocation," he said. "There are times when people are brought out on a daily basis and killed. About five people, on average, are killed nearly on a daily basis."
Chibok, where the teenage girls were abducted, is 80 miles from Maiduguri, capital of Borno State.
In 2009, when the Boko Haram had not yet been transformed into a fully armed opposition, the military summarily executed their handcuffed leader and killed at least 1,000 accused members in the states of Borno, Yobe, Kano and Bauchi, many of them apparently simply youths from suspect neighborhoods. A gruesome video shows the military at work. "In the video, a number of unarmed men are seen being made to lie down in the road outside a building before they are shot," Al Jazeera reports in text accompanying the video. "As one man is brought out to face death, one of the officers can be heard urging his colleague to 'shoot him in the chest not the head – I want his hat.'"
These are only snapshots of the army's response to Boko Haram – atrocities that are part of the context of Boko Haram's ghastly behavior. The military has refused the group's offer to exchange the kidnapped girls for imprisoned Boko Haram members. (We should not assume that everyone detained as Boko Haram is actually a member – only that all detainees face imminent and arbitrary execution.)
None of the above is meant to tell Boko Haram's "side" in this grisly story (fundamentalist religious jihadists find no favor at BAR), but to emphasize the Nigerian military's culpability in the group's mad trajectory – the same military that many newly-minted "Save Our Girls" activists demand take more decisive action in Borno.
The bush to which the Boko Haram retreated with their captives was already a free-fire zone, where anything that moves is subject to obliteration by government aircraft. Nigerian air forces have now been joined by U.S. surveillance planes operating out of the new U.S. drone base in neighboring Niger, further entrenching AFRICOM/CIA in the continental landscape. Last week it was announced that, for the first time,AFRICOM troops will train a Nigerian ranger battalion in counterinsurgency warfare.
The Chibok abductions have served the same U.S. foreign policy purposes as Joseph Kony sightings in central Africa, which were conjured-up to justify the permanent stationing of U.S Special Forcesin the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, the Central African Republic and South Sudan, in 2011, on humanitarian interventionist grounds. (This past March, the U.S. sent 150 more Special Ops troops to the region, claiming to have again spotted Kony, who is said to be deathly ill, holed up with a small band of followers somewhere in the Central African Republic.) The United States (and France and Britain, plus the rest of NATO, if need be) must maintain a deepening and permanent presence in Africa to defend the continent from…Africans.
When the crowd yells that America "Do something!" somewhere in Africa, the U.S. military is likely to already be there.
Barack Obama certainly needs no encouragement to intervention; his presidency is roughly coterminous with AFRICOM's founding and explosive expansion. Obama broadened the war against Somalia that was launched by George Bush in partnership with the genocidal Ethiopian regime, in 2006 (an invasion that led directly to what the United Nations called "the worst humanitarian crisis is Africa"). He built on Bill Clinton and George Bush's legacies in the Congo, where U.S. client states Uganda and Rwanda caused the slaughter of 6 million people since 1996 – the greatest genocide of the post War World II era. He welcomed South Sudan as the world's newest nation – the culmination of a decades-long project of the U.S., Britain and Israel to dismember Africa's largest country, but which has now fallen into a bloody chaos, as does everything the U.S. touches, these days.
Most relevant to the plight of Chibok's young women, Obama led "from behind" NATO's regime change in Libya, removing the anti-jihadist bulwark Muamar Gaddafi ("We came, we saw, he died," said Hillary Clinton) and destabilizing the whole Sahelian tier of the continent, all the way down to northern Nigeria. As BAR editor and columnist Ajamu Baraka writes in the current issue, "Boko Haram benefited from the destabilization of various countries across the Sahel following the Libya conflict." The once-"shadowy" group now sported new weapons and vehicles and was clearly better trained and disciplined. In short, the Boko Haram, like other jihadists, had become more dangerous in a post-Gaddafi Africa – thus justifying a larger military presence for the same Americansand (mainly French) Europeans who had brought these convulsions to the region.
If Obama has his way, it will be a very long war – the better to grow AFRICOM – with some very unsavory allies (from both the Nigerian and American perspectives).
Whatever Obama does to deepen the U.S. presence in Nigeria and the rest of the continent, he can count on the Congressional Black Caucus, including its most "progressive" member, Barbara Lee (D-CA), the only member of the U.S. Congress to vote against the invasion of Afghanistan, in 2001. Lee, along with Reps. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) and fellow Californian Karen Bass, who is the ranking member on the House Subcommittee on African, gave cart blanch to Obama to "Do something!" in Nigeria. "And so our first command and demand is to use all resources to bring the terrorist thugs to justice," they said.
A year and a half ago, when then UN Ambassador Susan Rice's prospects for promotion to top U.S. diplomat were being torpedoed by the Benghazi controversy, a dozen Black congresspersons scurried to her defense. "We will not allow a brilliant public servant's record to be mugged to cut off her consideration to be secretary of state," said Washington, DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.
As persons who are presumed to read, Black Caucus members were certainly aware of the messy diplomatic scandal around Rice's role in suppressing United Nation's reports on U.S. allies' Rwanda and Uganda's genocidal acts against the Congolese people. Of all the high profile politicians from both the corporate parties, Rice – the rabid interventionist – is most intimately implicated in the Congo holocaust, dating back to the policy's formulation under Clinton. Apparently, that's not the part of Rice's record that counts to Delegate Norton and the rest of the Black Caucus. Genocide against Africans does not move them one bit.
So, why are we to believe that they are really so concerned about the girls of Chibok?
American MilitarismThreatening To Set Off World War III December 12, 2012Posted by rogerhollander in Genocide, History, Imperialism, War.
Tags: africom, civil disobedience, civil resistance, francis a. boyle, geneva conventions, hans morgenthau, history, International law, mckinley, nuremberg, philippine genocide, roger hollander, spanish american war, u.s. army field manual, U.S. imperialism, war, world war iii
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by Professor Francis A. Boyle
Wed, 12/12/2012, www.blackagendareport.org
The following is the text of a speech delivered by Professor Francis A. Boyle at the Puerto Rican Summit Conference on Human Rights, University of the Sacred Heart, San Juan, Puerto Rico, December 9, 2012.
"The serial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the neoconservative Republican Bush Junior administration and the neoliberal Democratic Obama administration are now threatening to set off World War III."
Historically this latest eruption of American militarism at the start of the 21st Century is akin to that of America opening the 20th Century by means of the U.S.-instigated Spanish-American War in 1898. Then the Republican administration of President William McKinley stole their colonial empire from Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines; inflicted a near genocidal war against the Filipino people; while at the same time illegally annexing the Kingdom of Hawaii and subjecting the Native Hawaiian people (who call themselves the Kanaka Maoli) to near genocidal conditions. Additionally, McKinley's military and colonial expansion into the Pacific was also designed to secure America's economic exploitation of China pursuant to the euphemistic rubric of the "open door" policy. But over the next four decades America's aggressive presence, policies, and practices in the so-called "Pacific" Ocean would ineluctably pave the way for Japan's attack at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 194l, and thus America's precipitation into the ongoing Second World War. Today a century later the serial imperial aggressions launched and menaced by the neoconservative Republican Bush Junior administration and the neoliberal Democratic Obama administration are now threatening to set off World War III.
By shamelessly exploiting the terrible tragedy of 11 September 2001, the Bush Junior administration set forth to steal a hydrocarbon empire from the Muslim states and peoples living in Central Asia and the Middle East and Africa under the bogus pretexts of (1) fighting a war against "international terrorism" or "Islamic fundamentalism"; and/or (2) eliminating weapons of mass destruction; and/or (3) the promotion of democracy; and/or (4) self-styled humanitarian intervention/responsibility to protect (R2P). Only this time the geopolitical stakes are infinitely greater than they were a century ago: control and domination of the world's hydrocarbon resources and thus the very fundaments and energizers of the global economic system – oil and gas. The Bush Junior/ Obama administrations have already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America (e.g., the Pentagon's reactivization of the U.S. Fourth Fleet in 2008), and Southeast Asia for further conquest or domination, together with the strategic choke-points at sea and on land required for their transportation. Today the U.S. Fourth Fleet threatens Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador for sure.
Toward accomplishing that first objective, in 2007 the neoconservative Bush Junior administration announced the establishment of the U.S. Pentagon's Africa Command (AFRICOM) in order to better control, dominate, steal, and exploit both the natural resources and the variegated peoples of the continent of Africa, the very cradle of our human species. In 2011 Libya then proved to be the first victim of AFRICOM under the neoliberal Obama administration, thus demonstrating the truly bi-partisan and non-partisan nature of U.S. imperial foreign policy decision-making. Let us put aside as beyond the scope of this paper the American conquest, extermination, and ethnic cleansing of the Indians from off the face of the continent of North America. Since America's instigation of the Spanish-American War in 1898, U.S. foreign policy decision-making has been alternatively conducted by reactionary imperialists, conservative imperialists, and liberal imperialists for the past 115 years and counting.
"The Bush Junior/ Obama administrations have already targeted the remaining hydrocarbon reserves of Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia."
This world-girdling burst of U.S. imperialism at the start of humankind's new millennium is what my teacher, mentor, and friend the late, great Professor Hans Morgenthau denominated "unlimited imperialism" in his seminal book Politics Among Nations 52-53 (4th ed. 1968): The outstanding historic examples of unlimited imperialism are the expansionist policies of Alexander the Great, Rome, the Arabs in the seventh and eighth centuries, Napoleon I, and Hitler. They all have in common an urge toward expansion which knows no rational limits, feeds on its own successes and, if not stopped by a superior force, will go on to the confines of the political world. This urge will not be satisfied so long as there remains anywhere a possible object of domination–a politically organized group of men which by its very independence challenges the conqueror's lust for power. It is, as we shall see, exactly the lack of moderation, the aspiration to conquer all that lends itself to conquest, characteristic of unlimited imperialism, which in the past has been the undoing of the imperialistic policies of this kind….
The factual circumstances surrounding the outbreaks of both the First World War and the Second World War currently hover like the Sword of Damocles over the heads of all humanity.
Since September 11, 2001, it is the Unlimited Imperialists à la Alexander, Napoleon, and Hitler who have been in charge of conducting American foreign policy decision-making. After September 11, 2001 the people of the world have witnessed successive governments in the United States that have demonstrated little respect for fundamental considerations of international law, human rights, or the United States Constitution. Instead, the world has watched a comprehensive and malicious assault upon the integrity of the international and domestic legal orders by groups of men and women who are thoroughly Hobbist and Machiavellian in their perception of international relations and in their conduct of both foreign affairs and American domestic policy. Even more seriously, in many instances specific components of the U.S. government's foreign policies constitute ongoing criminal activity under well recognized principles of both international law and United States domestic law, and in particular the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, as well as the Pentagon's own U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 on The Law of Land Warfare, which applies to the President himself as Commander-in-Chief of United States Armed Forces under Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution.
"Specific components of the U.S. government's foreign policies constitute ongoing criminal activity under well recognized principles of both international law and United States domestic law."
Depending on the substantive issues involved, these international and domestic crimes typically include but are not limited to the Nuremberg offences of "crimes against peace"—e.g., Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, and perhaps their longstanding threatened war of aggression against Iran. Their criminal responsibility also concerns "crimes against humanity" and war crimes as well as grave breaches of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1907 Hague Regulations on land warfare: torture, enforced disappearances, assassinations, murders, kidnappings, extraordinary renditions, "shock and awe," depleted uranium, white phosphorous, cluster bombs, drone strikes, etc. Furthermore, various officials of the United States government have committed numerous inchoate crimes incidental to these substantive offences that under the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956) are international crimes in their own right: planning, and preparation, solicitation, incitement, conspiracy, complicity, attempt, aiding and abetting. Of course the terrible irony of today's situation is that over six decades ago at Nuremberg the U.S. government participated in the prosecution, punishment, and execution of Nazi government officials for committing some of the same types of heinous international crimes that these officials of the United States government currently inflict upon people all over the world. To be sure, I personally oppose the imposition of capital punishment upon any human being for any reason no matter how monstrous their crimes, whether they be Saddam Hussein, Bush Junior, Tony Blair, or Barack Obama.
According to basic principles of international criminal law set forth in paragraph 501 of U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10, all high level civilian officials and military officers in the U.S. government who either knew or should have known that soldiers or civilians under their control (such as the C.I.A. or mercenary contractors), committed or were about to commit international crimes and failed to take the measures necessary to stop them, or to punish them, or both, are likewise personally responsible for the commission of international crimes. This category of officialdom who actually knew or should have known of the commission of these international crimes under their jurisdiction and failed to do anything about them include at the very top of America's criminal chain-of-command the President, the Vice-President, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A. Director, National Security Advisor and the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff along with the appropriate Regional Commanders-in-Chiefs, especially for U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).
These U.S. government officials and their immediate subordinates are responsible for the commission of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes as specified by the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles as well as by U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 of 1956. Today in international legal terms, the United States government itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles, because of its formulation and undertaking of serial wars of aggression, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes that are legally akin to those perpetrated by the former Nazi regime in Germany. As a consequence, American citizens possess the basic right under international law and the United States domestic law, including the U.S. Constitution, to engage in acts of civil resistance designed to prevent, impede, thwart, or terminate ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by U.S. government officials in their conduct of foreign affairs policies and military operations purported to relate to defense and counter-terrorism.
"The United States government itself should now be viewed as constituting an ongoing criminal conspiracy under international criminal law in violation of the Nuremberg Charter, the Nuremberg Judgment, and the Nuremberg Principles."
For that very reason, large numbers of American citizens have decided to act on their own cognizance by means of civil resistance in order to demand that the U.S. government adhere to basic principles of international law, of U.S. domestic law, and of the U.S. Constitution in its conduct of foreign affairs and military operations. Mistakenly, however, such actions have been defined to constitute classic instances of "civil disobedience" as historically practiced in the United States. And the conventional status quo admonition by the U.S. power elite and its sycophantic news media for those who knowingly engage in "civil disobedience" has always been that they must meekly accept their punishment for having performed a prima facie breach of the positive laws as a demonstration of their good faith and moral commitment. Nothing could be further from the truth! Today's civil resisters are the sheriffs! The U.S. government officials are the outlaws!
Here I would like to suggest a different way of thinking about civil resistance activities that are specifically designed to thwart, prevent, or impede ongoing criminal activity by officials of the U.S. government under well recognized principles of international and U.S. domestic law. Such civil resistance activities represent the last constitutional avenue open to the American people to preserve their democratic form of government with its historical commitment to the rule of law and human rights. Civil resistance is the last hope America has to prevent the U.S. government from moving even farther down the path of lawless violence in Africa, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, military interventionism into Latin America, and nuclear confrontation with Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, and China.
Such measures of "civil resistance" must not be confused with, and indeed must be carefully distinguished from, acts of "civil disobedience" as traditionally defined. In today's civil resistance cases, what we witness are American citizens attempting to prevent the ongoing commission of international and domestic crimes under well-recognized principles of international law and U.S. domestic law. This is a phenomenon essentially different from the classic civil disobedience cases of the 1950s and 1960s where incredibly courageous African Americans and their supporters were conscientiously violating domestic laws for the express purpose of changing them. By contrast, today's civil resisters are acting for the express purpose of upholding the rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, human rights, and international law. Applying the term "civil disobedience" to such civil resistors mistakenly presumes their guilt and thus perversely exonerates the U.S. government criminals.
"Civil resistance is the last hope America has to prevent the U.S. government from moving even farther down the path of lawless violence."
Civil resistors disobeyed nothing, but to the contrary obeyed international law and the United States Constitution. By contrast, U.S. government officials disobeyed fundamental principles of international law as well as U.S. criminal law and thus committed international crimes and U.S. domestic crimes as well as impeachable violations of the United States Constitution. The civil resistors are the sheriffs enforcing international law, U.S. criminal law and the U.S. Constitution against the criminals working for the U.S. government!
Today the American people must reaffirm their commitment to the Nuremberg Charter, Judgment, and Principles by holding their government officials fully accountable under international law and U.S. domestic law for the commission of such grievous international and domestic crimes. They must not permit any aspect of their foreign affairs and defense policies to be conducted by acknowledged "war criminals" according to the U.S. government's own official definition of that term as set forth in U.S. Army Field Manual 27-10 (1956), the U.S. War Crimes Act, and the Geneva Conventions. The American people must insist upon the impeachment, dismissal, resignation, indictment, conviction, and long-term incarceration of all U.S. government officials guilty of such heinous international and domestic crimes. That is precisely what American civil resisters are doing today!
This same right of civil resistance extends pari passu to all citizens of the world community of states. Everyone around the world has both the right and the duty under international law to resist ongoing criminal activities perpetrated by the U.S. government and its nefarious foreign accomplices in allied governments such as Britain, the other NATO states, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Georgia, Puerto Rico, etc. If not so restrained, the U.S. government could very well precipitate a Third World War. Here in Puerto Rico we saw the stunning example of the most courageous civil resistors against Yankee Imperialism on Vieques.
The future of American foreign policy and the peace of the world lie in the hands of American citizens and the peoples of the world—not the bureaucrats, legislators, judges, lobbyist, think-tanks, professors, and self-styled experts who inhibit Washington, D.C., New York City, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Civil resistance is the way to go! This is our Nuremberg Moment now!
Thank you.
Francis A. Boyle teaches law at the University of Illinois. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard Law School. He has advised numerous international bodies in the areas of human rights, war crimes, genocide, nuclear policy, and bio warfare. He received a PHD in political science from Harvard
Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo Genocide June 25, 2012Posted by rogerhollander in Africa, Congo, Foreign Policy, Genocide, Rwanda, Uganda.
Tags: Africa, africom, antoine roger lokongo, Congo, genocide, kagame, museveni, roger hollander, rwanda, tutsi, uganda
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by Antoine Roger Lokongo
Six million Congolese have died since 1996 so that western corporations could retain unfettered access to the region's mineral wealth. Rwanda and Uganda turned the eastern Congo into a cauldron of death – with impunity, protected by their patrons, the U.S. and Britain. Although the evidence of Rwanda's role in the Congo genocide is irrefutable, Tutsi strongman Paul Kagame's regime "will simply get away with it and recommence again tomorrow – as long as minerals need to be supplied to the West."
Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo Genocide
by Antoine Roger Lokongo
This article appeared in Pambazuka News.
"Britain, America and the European Union are now caught red-handed and cannot claim not to be aware of the plot of annexing eastern Congo to Rwanda and Uganda."
The carnage that is lived daily by the Congolese people in eastern DRC is what the Congolese daily Le Potentiel calls a "forgotten genocide"[1] by the will of the international community. In fact, the international community has witnessed the atrocities being committed in eastern Congo by both Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi armed groups, with the complicity of some Congolese, since the UN peacekeeping mission was deployed in the DRC over a decade ago.
Britain, America and the European Union can no longer turn a blind eye to the complicity of Rwanda and Uganda in both supplying arms and soldiers to Tutsi rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda (both him and his predecessors are already indicted by the ICC) in the troubled North Kivu of the DRC. Britain, America and the European Union are now caught red-handed and cannot claim not to be aware of the plot (of annexing eastern Congo to Rwanda and Uganda, encouraged by the Sudanese experience) that is being weaved by Rwanda and Uganda in the eastern DRC.
Three official reports issued by the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo as reported by the BBC[2], by Human Rights Watch[3] and by the Congolese government (after conducting its own thorough investigation, including interviewing Rwandan fighters caught in the frontline[4]) have all confirmed that Rwanda, for the umpteenth time, is yet again on the front line in eastern Congo. According to Congolese Minister of Information, Lambert Mende Omalanga:
"200 to 300 rebels were recruited in Rwanda in order to be infiltrated in the DRC. They underwent a brief military training before being deployed against the armed forces of the DRC."[5]
Anyway, for the Congolese people there was nothing new. A year before Rwanda joined the Commonwealth (November 2009), The Telegraph, a British daily close to the Conservative Party in Britain and therefore close to the British Crown, revealed that Congolese Tutsi rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda was recruited from the Rwandan army. Rwanda was therefore allowing its territory to be used as a recruiting ground for the rebel movement behind the DRC's bloodshed, according to first-hand accounts and evidence gathered by The Telegraph.
"Rwanda, for the umpteenth time, is yet again on the front line in eastern Congo."
A 27-year-old fighter in Nkunda's movement said that he served as a platoon commander in Rwanda's army:
"There are many former Rwandan soldiers with the CNDP [Gen Nkunda's rebels]. When I was still in the Rwandan army, I was in touch with them. They wanted me to join the CNDP," he said. "I decided to join them because fighting for the CNDP is like fighting for Rwanda."[6]
The US Department of State is said to have issued "a firm statement"[7] warning governments against supporting rebel groups and mutineers operating in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo – without naming Rwanda. In a statement published on 6 June 2012 titled "Situation in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo," US State Department spokesperson Marck C. Toner, said:
"The United States is concerned by the continued mutiny of officers and soldiers formerly integrated into the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and now operating in North Kivu province as an armed group under the name M23, and by recent reports of outside support to M23."[8]
The European Union for its part, is said to be "strongly concerned" about an army mutiny in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the bloc's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
"The EU is strongly concerned by recent developments in the Kivus and the deterioration of the security situation. The current developments require the attention of all countries in the region. Recent cooperation between Rwanda and the DRC on this matter is necessary and positive. The EU is worried by information that this dynamic might be endangered," Ashton said in a statement.[9]
"Rwanda was therefore allowing its territory to be used as a recruiting ground for the rebel movement behind the DRC's bloodshed."
"The Tutsi continued to use the war against Hutu 'genocidists' as a pretext for occupying mining concessions and systematically exploiting them."
Kagame, Museveni and their Western backers have been uncovered. The whole world can now see that they are the main force driving this conflict. As Jacqueline Umurungi writes, some of Kagame's greatest admirers are Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Starbucks magnate Howard Schultz. American evangelist Rick Warren considers him something of an inspiration and even Bill Gates has invested in what has been called Africa's success story. Yes, Western liberals, reactionary evangelicals, and capitalist carpetbaggers alike tout Paul Kagame as the herald of a new, self-reliant African prosperity. Britain annually subsidizes 50 per cent of Rwanda's national budget.[10] Now you understand why the war in mineral-rich eastern Congo never ends and why, mockingly according to the BCC, "there is no end to the tears in the DRC."[11]
What Kinshasa did was to integrate all the Tutsi Congolese into the national army, even those wanted by the ICC for crimes against humanity like General Bosco Ntaganda, "who was born in Rwanda where he fought with the ethnic Tutsi rebels who brought current President Paul Kagame to power and ended the genocide in 1994," according to the BBC.[12] The CNDP (The National Congress for the Defence of the People or Congrès national pour la défense du people), a former rebel movement, was transformed into a political party and integrated into President Kabila's coalition in power.
President Kabila put them in charge of military operations against Hutu militia accused of having committed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Kinshasa even made a deal with Kigali to allow the Rwandan army to enter Congo and hunt Hutu militia. By the way, The ICC recently confirmed the dismissal of charges against Callixte Mbarushimana, a Hutu, of responsibility for atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2009.[13] Then the people of Congo realized that the Tutsi continued to use the war against Hutu "genocidists" as a pretext for occupying mining concessions and systematically exploiting them. That is why the Congolese Tutsi soldiers refuse categorically to be transferred to other parts of Congo to serve there. They just want to be posted in eastern Congo near the Rwandan border. But the Congolese army is supposed to be a national army, not an ethnic army. When President Kabila ordered the transfer of all soldiers from eastern Congo to serve in other parts of Congo, rumor went around that Ntaganda was going to be arrested and transferred to the ICC (Kabila has said he would be tried in Congo). He launched a mutiny known as the 23 March movement (a new name for the CNDP) because they joined the Congolese army under a March 2009 peace deal but have defected "complaining of poor treatment."
Enough is enough. The well-armed and Western-backed Tutsi regimes of Rwanda and Uganda must understand that there is a saying which goes like this: "Lie! Lie! There will always be something left to lie about: the truth." The "international community" will yet again confirm its complicity in the plot against the DRC if Rwanda and Uganda yet again get away with it this time. Is the ICC there just for Charles Taylor and Laurent Gbagbo, but not Tony Blair, George W. Bush, Museveni and Kagame?
[1] Le Potentiel. 2012. Face à l'indéniable implication du Rwanda dans la guerre au Kivu, les Etats-Unis, la Grande-Bretagne, l'UE… mis devant leurs responsabilités !, Kinshasa, 11/06/2012.
[2] BBC. 2012. Rwanda 'supporting DR Congo mutineers. BBC News Africa. 28 May 2012.
[3] Smith, David. 2012. Rwandan military 'aiding war crimes suspect' in Congo – Human Rights Watch. The Guardian, World News, Rwanda. 4 June 20. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/04/rwandan-military-war-crimes-suspect
[4] Groupe L'Avenir. 2012. Est de la Rd Congo : Enfin le Rwanda démasqué. lundi 11 juin 2012. http://www.groupelavenir.cd/spip.php?article45903
[5] Le Potentiel. 2012. Face à l'indéniable implication du Rwanda dans la guerre au Kivu, les Etats-Unis, la Grande-Bretagne, l'UE… mis devant leurs responsabilités !, Kinshasa, 11/06/2012.
[6] Blair, David. 2008. DR Congo rebels recruited from Rwanda army. The Telegraph. 20 Nov 2008.
[7] AfroAmerica Network. 2012. US Government Warns Governments Supporting Rebellions in DRC. 8 June 2012. http://bit.ly/Kvzquo
[8] Toner, Mark C. 2012. Situation in Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Press Statement. US Department of State, 6 June 2012. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/06/191902.htm
[9] AFP. 2012. EU 'concerned' over army mutiny in DRC. News24. 8 August 2012. http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/EU-concerned-over-army-mutiny-in-DRC-20120607
[10] Umurungi, Jacqueline. 2012. The Untold Stories: Again Rwanda is on the front line in the Congo Conflict.Who is fooling who? Inyenyeri News. NYENYERI NEWS, 28 May 2012.
[11] Hubert, Thomas . 2012. Havoc as Congolese flee the 'Terminator'. BBC News Africa. 11 May 2012.
[12] BBC. 2012. Congo warlord Bosco 'Terminator' Ntaganda 'replaced'. BBC News Africa, 8 May 2012.
[13] Reuters. 2012. ICC confirms release of Congo war crimes suspect.
Is the Detroit Nigerian "Terrorist" A Patsy? January 4, 2010Posted by rogerhollander in Political Commentary, War.
Tags: africom, al-Qaeda, bruce dixon, fort dix 6, liberty city, nigeria, nigeria oil, nigerian terrorist, obama government, Osama bin laden, patrick cockburn, roger hollander, terrorism, war on terror, yemen
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Posted Wed, 12/30/2009 – 12:18 by Bruce A. Dixon
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
What does the hapless Nigerian mope yanked off a plane in Detroit Christmas Day for setting his lap on fire have in common with color-coded terror alerts, with the shoeless, homeless Miami Haitians convicted of trying to bring down the Sears Tower, or with the 2004 pre-election videos allegedly dropped by Osama Bin Laden? Easy. All have been useful in whipping up public fear of Muslim-inspired "terrorism" and each and every one plugs neatly and sweetly into the meta-narratives that justify increasing the power of US police and intelligence establishments and the further militarization of foreign policy.
The guy is said to be an engineering student from Nigeria who received terrorist training in Yemen. Engineers are the practical souls whose profession is making things that actually work. Fortunately for the people on the plane, he seems to have been a very bad student who would have made a wretched engineer. He didn't know the difference between an explosive device, which might have done great harm to the plane and its passengers, and a small incendiary one which could do no more than set his own lap on fire, and maybe singe the hair of the passenger immediately next to him.
His Nigerian nationality is extremely useful, as it lets "terror experts" and talking heads on TV and radio to draw simplistic and misleading pictures for American audiences of Nigeria as a place besieged by Muslim fundamentalists linked with Al Qaeda and in need of more US military assistance. In the real world Nigeria is a major US oil supplier, and West Africa furnishes about a fifth of US oil imports, a portion expected to grow over the next decade. Nigeria has pumped trillions of dollars worth of oil for the West over the last fifty years without managing to give people in the oil-rich areas schools or electricity or hospitals. It has allowed foreign oil companies to make the region one of the most polluted in the world, where the rain eats metal roofs, health problems are endemic, and fishing and farming are nearly impossible.
After decades of violent suppression by successive military and civilian governments, Nigerians in the oil-rich regions have organized resistance movements which have sometimes posed direct threats to the operations of Western oil companies. For US military planners, inserting themselves into Nigeria to bolster the regime is a major priority. That's what AFRICOM is for.
The Nigerian reportedly received his "terror training" in Yemen. Yemen is located at the southern end of the Arabian Penninsula directly opposite AFRICOM's Djibouti base and close to Somalia, where the US has waged a 14 year series of interventions and proxy wars to secure Somalia's oil and gas resources for the West, an project that has killed a million Somalis, and currently has made another million homeless.
Yemen, as veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn assures us in an indispensable December 29 Counterpunch article, is next in the US crosshairs.
"It is the poorest Arab country, its government is weak, its people are armed, it already faces a serious rebellion, it is strongly tribal and its mountain ranges are a natural refuge for groups like al-Qa'ida…
"Yemen has been becoming increasingly unstable over the past two decades, ever since Saudi Arabia expelled a million Yemeni workers because Yemen refused to support the US-led war to expel Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait in 1990."
There is, Cockburn explains in the article which is well worth reading in its entirety, a civil war going on in Yemen, and the US needs excuses to beef up its intervention. Conveniently then, most terror suspects apprehended in the US will be found to have ties to the Yemeni insurgents.
Although the bumbling Nigerian had a multiple-entry US visa, he reportedly managed to board the Detroit-bound plane without showing it or his passport. Someone better dressed and better spoken intervened and got him on, according to published reports. Who? How? Why? He paid for his one-way ticket in Ghana in cash, and packed no more than a knapsack. People are profiled and searched for doing this all the time, all over the world, but he was not. And of course there's the matter of the incendiary device itself, which should have been easily detectable. It's not like they don't screen passengers at European airports boarding international flights. Why was he exempt from the normal search that passengers undergo, and if he was searched why did the normal procedures fail?
One possible answer to all these questions is that the guy is a patsy, a fool manipulated by people smarter and more resourceful than him for the purpose of creating the useful "terrorist" incident. That's what happened to the Haitians in Miami. They were disaffected and homeless, living in a Liberty City warehouse. They were contacted by a federal agent who said he could get weapons and explosives, shoes for the shoeless, rental cars (none of them had a bank account, let alone a credit card) and put them in touch with Al Qaeda. The federal agent helped them send fan mail to Osama Bin Laden and led them in taking a made-up jihadi oath, and delivered them fake weapons so they could be arrested. Journalist Webster Tarpley, in an early December Guns and Butter Radio interview (audio below – click the flash player or go to http://aud1.kpfa.org//data/20091216-Wed1300.mp3 )
with Bonnie Faulkner lays out a series of similar incidents in which apparent patsies have been used to create incidents like this. Although the interview was three weeks before the Christmas day incident, the similarities between the Liberty City case, the so-called Fort Dix 6, and other cases are numerous and startling.
Journalist I.F. Stone told us half a century ago that "Governments lie. All governments lie." It would not be the first time our government lied to get us into or to keep us involved in an unjust war, or to create an atmosphere of crisis to support some otherwise unsupportable policy. It wouldn't even be the fifty-first time. If Stone were alive today he'd assure us that the Obama government will readily lie to us too, in the service of its policy objectives, and probably in better English than Bush ever could. Is the incompetent Nigerian "terrorist" a patsy, intended to generate hysterical headlines and reinforce the administration's policies at home and abroad? Time will tell. Maybe.
Bruce Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, based in Atlanta. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
Justice for Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni People March 27, 2009Posted by rogerhollander in Africa.
Tags: Africa, africa command, africom, alien tort stature, crimes against humanity, delta force, glen ellis, ken saro wiwa, nigeria, nigeria justice, nigerian military, ogoni, roger hollander, royal dutch shell, torture
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Justice for Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni People
On April 27, 2009 the Ogoni people of Nigeria will finally have their chance at justice when the families of famed activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues, who were sentenced to death in a sham trial in Nigeria and hanged in 1995, will show that Royal Dutch Shell was at the very least complicit in their deaths and likely colluded with the Nigerian military to quell peaceful protests through murder, torture and destruction of villages. The plaintiffs' attorneys will use a U.S. law on the books since 1789 called the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) that allows violations of international law to be tried in U.S. courts. Violations include extrajudicial execution; torture; crimes against humanity; cruel inhuman and degrading treatment; arbitrary arrest and detention; and violations of the rights to life, liberty, security of person, and freedom of expression and association.
Learn more about the events and background of Ogoni Struggle
Visit WiwavShell.org for more information about the legal charges and proceedings and tell a friend about the case!
JINN is looking for volunteers for various tasks including:
- Help with web 2.0 tools
- Write and edit documents
- Update JINN website (expereince with wordpress a plus!)
- Edit audio and video clips
- Flyer at events
- Event publicity
- Administrative tasks
Contact Sarah at the JINN office for more information . JINN is located in San Francisco. We can use your help in our office and remotely.
Featured Event:
Justice In Nigeria Now presents:
Delta Force, a Documentary by Glen Ellis about Ken Saro- Wiwa and the Struggle for the Ogoni People
Followed by a Panel Discussion about the upcoming case against Shell
April 15, 2009
6pm – Wine and Beer Reception
7pm – Film Screening
8pm – Panel Discussion
Artist Television Access
992 Valencia Street (at 21st)
San Francisco, CA 94110
This is a benefit screening for Justice In Nigeria Now: www.justiceinnigerianow.org
$10-$30 suggested donation (no one turned away for lack of funds)
On November 10, 1995, Nigerian environmental activist and internationally acclaimed non-violent resistance leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and 8 of his Ogoni colleagues were executed by Nigeria's brutal military dictatorship. This one hour documentary, tells the story of the rise of Saro-Wiwa and the Movement for Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) and its violent suppression by the Nigerian military with the complicity of Shell Oil.
On April 27, 2009 relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other MOSOP members will bring Shell to trial in New York for the company's complicity in the death of the Ogoni 9. Join us at this benefit for Justice in Nigeria Now (JINN) to support JINN while socializing and learning about the Ogoni and the upcoming trial.


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Mass Cytometry to Delineate the Human Muscle Stem Cell Hierarchy and Dysfunction in Aging
Aging is characterized by a decline in skeletal muscle mass and strength (sarcopenia), coupled with an accumulation of fat tissue, impairing mobility and quality of life in 45% of individuals over 65 years of age. In aged mice, the regeneration defect arises in part from a diminished regenerative capacity of resident muscle stem cells (MuSCs). The goal of this proposal is to characterize muscle stem cell subsets residing in human skeletal muscle tissue and investigate the mechanisms responsible for their regenerative defects in aging. We will capitalize on two cutting edge technologies, single-cell bioengineered stem cell niches, which will allow tracking individual muscle cell fates, and multi-dimensional single-cell mass cytometry, which will allow resolution of the molecular characteristics of skeletal muscle cells from aged humans with detail previously unattainable. We expect that this combined approach will elucidate the functional defects observed in aged MuSC populations and therefore facilitate the development of a therapeutic agent to target muscle stem cells for the treatment muscle weakness in aged humans.
The state of California is the front-runner in stem cell research, having gathered not only private investments, as demonstrated by the numerous biotechnology companies that are developing innovative tools, but also extensive public funds via Prop 71, that allows the state, through CIRM, to sponsor stem cell research in public and private institutions. In order to preserve its leadership position and encourage research on stem cells, the CIRM is calling for research proposals that could lead to significant breakthroughs or the development of technologies useful for studying stem cells in order to improve human health. Aging is characterized by a decline in tissue function and regenerative capacity that leads to degeneration and loss of muscle mass and strength (sarcopenia). Muscle stem cells (MuSCs), also known as satellite cells, are responsible for the maintenance and regeneration of skeletal muscle mass. Several studies have shown a decrease in MuSC function in aged mice. However, the mechanisms responsible for their reduced function are not yet defined. The work we propose here focuses on human muscle and discerning differences among subsets of muscle stem cells. The results will facilitate the development of targets to augment a muscle stem cell based therapy to treat muscle weakness in aged humans.
Aging is characterized by a decline in skeletal muscle mass and strength, coupled with accumulation of fat tissue, impairing mobility and quality of life in 45% of individuals over 65 years of age. While muscle stem cells (MuSCs) have a remarkable capacity to maintain and repair skeletal muscle throughout adulthood, they decline in regenerative capacity during aging. The goal of this proposal is to elucidate dysregulated functions of MuSCs in human aged tissues and identify pharmacological targets to enhance the function of dysfunctional subsets or amplify the residual functional subsets. During the first 12 months of this grant period we have made significant advances toward the aims that will allow us to address the remaining aspects of the goals of the grant.
We have, for the first time, achieved:
Identification of novel subsets within the human muscle stem/progenitor cell population using multidimensional single-cell mass cytometry (CyTOF);
Prospective isolation of a fully functional human muscle stem cell population;
Demonstration that human muscle stem cells regenerate injured muscle fibers following transplantation into NSG mice;
Verification that engrafted human muscle stem cells home to the stem cell niche and respond to muscle injury, thereby constituting a stem cell reservoir to meet future needs for regeneration;
Observed that the number of human muscle stem cells decrease in aged muscle tissue.


text:
in Sahara case, that the power to administer proceedings in cases of public issue of shares or debentures lies with Sebi.
Sebis investigations found that SGI had invited investors to subscribe to its convertible preference shares through its office in Delhi, its agents and representatives, associate concern stockguru.india and its website.
Sebi said that these securities were of face value R10 each and were offered and subscribed at an exorbitant premium of R1,500 per share. However, the promised dividend of 18% was found to be on face value of R10 and not on exact per share price of R1,510.
In other words, subscribers were promised dividend of R1.80 on investment of R1,510 (which translates into 0.119% real dividend). Further, there was no reference of redemption premium to be paid to the subscribers, Sebi said. There was no economic justification of payment of so high premium with minuscule dividend...it added.


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Duty and Sacrifice the New Hampshire National Guard in Iraq
por Bob LaPree
A 144 page compilation of photos and stories that chronicle the New Hampshire National Guard contribution to the Operation Iraqi Freedom. The coverage includes photos and stories of the Guard while in Iraq in 2005 as well as their departures, returns and casualities. Additional coverage of troop support rallies and the funerals of several members of the armed services from New Hampshire from 2003 through 2007. The work was origianelly presented over the course of 4 years in the pages of the New Hampshire Union Leader and Sunday News by senior photographer Bob LaPree.
I have worked as a photojournalist in New Hampshire for 38 years. Am now the senior photographer at the New Hampshire Union Leader/Sunday News the statewide newspaper published out of Manchester, NH.
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