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We, the People of Europe?
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Chapter 1
I am speaking of the "borders of Europe" in Greece, one of the "peripheral" countries of Europe in its traditional configuration--a configuration that reflects powerful myths and a long-lived series of historical events. Thessaloníki is itself at the edge of this border country, one of those places where the dialectic between confrontation with the foreigner (transformed into a hereditary enemy) and communication between civilizations (without which humanity cannot progress) is periodically played out. I thus find myself, it seems, right in the middle of my object of study, with all the resultant difficulties.
The term border is extremely rich in significations. One of my hypotheses is that it is undergoing a profound change in meaning. The borders of new sociopolitical entities, in which an attempt is being made to preserve all the functions of the sovereignty of the state, are no longer entirely situated at the outer limit of territories; they are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people, and things is happening and is controlled--for example, in cosmopolitan cities. But it is also one of my hypotheses that the zones called peripheral, where secular and religious cultures confront one another, where differences in economic prosperity become more pronounced and strained, constitute the melting pot for the formation of a people (demos), without which there is no citizenship (politeia) in the sense that this term has acquired since antiquity in the democratic tradition.
In this sense, border areas--zones, countries, and cities--are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center. If Europe is for us first of all the name of an unresolved political problem, Greece is one of its centers, not because of the mythical origins of our civilization, symbolized by the Acropolis of Athens, but because of the current problems concentrated there.
Or, more exactly, the notion of a center confronts us with a choice. In connection with states, it means the concentration of power, the localization of virtual or real governing authorities. In this sense, the center of Europe is in Brussels, Strasbourg, or in the City of London and the Frankfurt stock exchange, or will soon be in Berlin, the capital of the most powerful of the states that dominate the construction of Europe, and secondarily in Paris, London, and so on. But this notion has another, more essential and elusive meaning, which points to the sites where a people is constituted through the creation of civic consciousness and the collective resolution of the contradictions that run through it. Is there then a "European people," even an emergent one? Nothing is less certain. And if there is not a European people, a new type of people yet to be defined, then there is no public sphere or European state beyond technocratic appearances. This is what I meant when I imitated one of Hegel's famous phrases: Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa.1 But the question must remain open, and in a particularly "central" way at the border points.
There are more difficult issues. We are meeting in the aftermath of the war in Kosovo, the Balkans, or Yugoslavia, at a moment when the protectorate established at Pri
I do not presume to resolve these dilemmas. But I want to state here my conviction that these events mercilessly reveal the fundamental contradictions plaguing European unification. It was not by chance that they occurred when Europe was set to cross an irreversible threshold, by instituting a unitary currency and thus communal control of economic and social policy and by implementing formal elements of "European citizenship," whose military and police counterparts are quickly perceived.
In reality, what is at stake here is the definition of the modes of inclusion and exclusion in the European sphere, as a "public sphere" of bureaucracy and of relations of force but also of communication and cooperation between peoples. Consequently, in the strongest sense of the term, it is the possibility or the impossibility of European unification. In the establishment of a protectorate in Kosovo and, indirectly, other regions of the Balkans, as in the blockade of Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, the elements of impossibility prevailed obviously and lastingly--even if one thinks, as is my case, that an intervention one way or another to block the ongoing "ethnic cleansing" could no longer be avoided and even if one is skeptical, as is my case, of self-righteous positions concerning a people's right to self-determination in the history of political institutions. The unacceptable impasse that we had reached on the eve of the war in the whole of ex-Yugoslavia was fundamentally the result of the powerlessness, inability, and refusal of the "European community" to propose political solutions of association, to open possibilities of development for the peoples of the Balkans (and more generally of the East), and to assume everywhere its responsibilities in an effective struggle against human rights violations. It is thus Europe, particularly the primary European powers, that is responsible for the catastrophic developments that subsequently took place and for the consequences they now may have.
But, on the other hand, if it is true that the Balkan War manifests the impasse and the impossibility of European unification, it is necessary to have the courage (or the madness) to ask in today's conditions: under what conditions might it become possible again? Where are the potentialities for a different future? How can they be released by assigning responsibility for the past but avoiding the fruitless exercise of repeating it? An effort of this kind alone can give meaning to a project of active European citizenship, disengaged from all myths of identity, from all illusions about the necessary course of history, and a fortiori from all belief in the infallibility of governments. It is this effort that I would like to call on and contribute to. We must privilege the issue of the border when discussing the questions of the European people and of the state in Europe because it crystallizes the stakes of politico-economic power and the symbolic stakes at work in the collective imagination: relations of force and material interest on one side, representations of identity on the other.
I see a striking indicator of this in the fact that during the new Balkan War that has just taken place the name of Europe functioned in two contradictory ways, which cruelly highlighted the ambiguity of the notions of interior and exterior. On one hand, Yugoslavia (as well as to varying degrees the whole Balkan area, including Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria . . .) was considered an exterior space, in which, in the name of a "principle of intervention" that I will not discuss here but that clearly marked a reciprocal exteriority, an entity called Europe felt compelled to intervene to block a crime against humanity, with the aid of its powerful American allies if necessary. On the other had, to take up themes proposed by the Albanian national writer Ismail Kadaré,2 for example, it was explained that this intervention was occurring on Europe's soil, within its historical limits, and in defense of the principles of Western civilization. Thus, this time the Balkans found themselves fully inscribed within the borders of Europe. The idea was that Europe could not accept genocidal population deportation on its own soil, not only for moral reasons but above all to preserve its political future.
However, this theme, which I do not by any means consider pure propaganda, did not correspond to any attempt to anticipate or accelerate the integration of the Balkan regions referred to in this way into the European public sphere. The failure of the stillborn "Balkan conference" testifies eloquently to this. There was no economic plan of reparations and development involving all the countries concerned and the European community as such. Nor was the notion of "European citizenship" adapted--for example, by the issuing of "European identity cards" to the Kosovo refugees whose identification papers had been destroyed by the Serbian army and militias, along the lines of the excellent suggestion by the French writer Jean Chesneaux.3 Nor were the steps and criteria for entrance into the "union" redefined.
Thus, on the one hand, the Balkans are a part of Europe and, on the other, they are not. Apparently, we are not ready to leave this contradiction behind, for it has equivalents in the eastern part of the continent, beginning with Turkey, Russia, and the Caucasus regions, and everywhere takes on a more and more dramatic significance. This fact results in profoundly paradoxical situations. First of all, the colonization of Kosovo (if one wants to designate the current regime this way, as Régis Debray, with whom I otherwise totally disagree, suggested by his comparisons with the Algerian War) is an "interior colonization" of Europe (with the help of a sort of American foreign legion). But I am also thinking of other situations, such as the fact that Greece could wonder if it was interior or exterior to the domain of European sovereignty, because its soil served as a point of entry for land-occupation forces in which it did not want to take part. I can even imagine that when Turkish participation in the operation was discussed, certain Greek "patriots" asked themselves which of the two "hereditary enemies" was more interior to political Europe, on its way to becoming a military Europe.
All this proves that the notions of interiority and exteriority, which form the basis of the representation of the border, are undergoing a veritable earthquake. The representations of the border, territory, and sovereignty, and the very possibility of representing the border and territory, have become the object of an irreversible historical "forcing." At present these representations constitute a certain conception of the political sphere as a sphere of sovereignty, both the imposition of law and the distribution of land, dating from the beginning of the European modern age and later exported to the whole world--what Carl Schmitt in his great book from 1950, The Nomos of the Earth, called the Jus Publicum Europaeum.4
But, as we also know, this representation of the border, essential as it is for state institutions, is nevertheless profoundly inadequate for an account of the complexity of real situations, of the topology underlying the sometimes peaceful and sometimes violent mutual relations between the identities constitutive of European history. I suggested in the past that (particularly in Mitteleuropa but more generally in all Europe), without even considering the question of "minorities," we are dealing with "triple points" or mobile "overlapping zones" of contradictory civilizations rather than with juxtapositions of monolithic entities. In all its points, Europe is multiple; it is always home to tensions between numerous religious, cultural, linguistic, and political affiliations, numerous readings of history, numerous modes of relations with the rest of the world, whether it is Americanism or Orientalism, the possessive individualism of "Nordic" legal systems or the "tribalism" of Mediterranean familial traditions. This is why I have suggested that in reality the Yugoslavian situation is not atypical but rather constitutes a local projection of forms of confrontation and conflict characteristic of all of Europe, which I did not hesitate to call European race relations, with the implicit understanding that the notion of race has no other content than that of the historical accumulation of religious, linguistic, and genealogical identity references.5
The fate of European identity as a whole is being played out in Yugoslavia and more generally in the Balkans (even if this is not the only site of its trial). Either Europe will recognize in the Balkan situation not a monstrosity grafted to its breast, a pathological "aftereffect" of under-development or of communism, but rather an image and effect of its own history and will undertake to confront it and resolve it and thus to put itself into question and transform itself. Only then will Europe probably begin to become possible again. Or else it will refuse to come to face-to-face with itself and will continue to treat the problem as an exterior obstacle to be overcome through exterior means, including colonization. That is, it will impose in advance on its own citizenship an insurmountable border for its own populations, whom it will place indefinitely in the situation of metics, and it will reproduce its own impossibility.
I would now like to broaden this question of European citizenship as a "citizenship of borders" or confines, a condensation of impossibility and potentials that we must try to activate--without fearing to take things up again at a distance, from the point of view of plurisecular history.
Let us remember how the question of sovereignty is historically bound up with the questions of borders, as much political as cultural and "spiritual," from the classical age to the crisis of imperialism in the mid-twentieth century, and which we have inherited after the dissolution of the "blocs." We know that one of the origins of the political significance of the name of Europe, possibily the most decisive, was the constitution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a "balance of powers" among nation-states, for the most part organized in monarchies.6 Contrary to what one often reads in history books, this did not occur exactly with the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), signed to put an end to the Thirty Years' War, which had ravaged the continent by opposing Protestant and Catholic forces against the background of the "Turkish menace." Rather, it happened a little later, when two conceptions of this European order confronted each other: the hegemonic conception, represented by the French monarchy, and the republican conception, in the sense of a regime of formal equality among the states, which coincided with the recognition of certain civil rights in the interior order, embodied by the coalition put in place by the English and the Dutch.7
It was then, in the propagandistic writings commissioned by William of Orange, that the term Europe replaced Christendom in diplomatic language as a designation of the whole of the relations of force and trade among nations or sovereign states, whose balance of power was materialized in the negotiated establishment of borders. We also know that this notion never ceased fluctuating, sometimes toward a democratic and cosmopolitan ideal (theorized by Kant), sometimes toward surveillance of the movement of peoples and cultural minorities by the most powerful states (which would triumph at the Congress of Vienna, after the defeat of Napoleon). But I would like rather to direct attention to two evolving trends, which affect this system more and more deeply as we approach the present moment.
The first of these comes from the fact that the European balance of power and the corresponding national sovereignty are closely tied to the hegemonic position of Europe in the world between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries--the imperialist division of the world by colonialist European powers, including of course "small nations" like Holland and Belgium and peripheral nations like Russia, later the USSR. This point has been insisted on in various ways by Marxist and non-Marxist theoreticians such as Carl Schmitt, who saw in it the origins of the crisis of "European public law," but before him Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, later Hannah Arendt, and closer to us, the historians Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein.
Drawing "political" borders in the European sphere, which considered itself and attempted to appoint itself the center of the world, was also originally and principally a way to divide up the earth; thus, it was a way at once to organize the world's exploitation and to export the "border form" to the periphery, in an attempt to transform the whole universe into an extension of Europe, later into "another Europe," built on the same political model. This process continued until decolonization and thus also until the construction of the current international order. But one could say that in a certain sense it was never completely achieved--that is, the formation of independent, sovereign, unified, or homogeneous nation-states at the same time failed in a very large part of the world, or it was thrown into question, not only outside Europe but in certain parts of Europe itself.
This probably occurred for very profound reasons that we need to consider. It is possible that that form of "absolute" sovereignty of nation-states is not universalizable and that in some sense a "world of nations," or even "united nations," is a contradiction in terms. Above all, this connection among the construction of European nations, their stable or unstable "balance of power," their internal and external conflicts, and the global history of imperialism resulted not only in the perpetuation of border conflicts but also in the demographic and cultural structure typical of European populations today, which are all postcolonial communities or, if you will, projections of global diversity within the European sphere--as a result of immigration but for other causes as well, like the repatriation of displaced peoples.
The second development that I would like to discuss concerns the evolution of the notion of a people, and it goes in the opposite direction from that of the preceding one, creating a strong tension that may become very violent on occasion. The historical insertion of populations and peoples in the system of nation-states and of their permanent rivalry affects from the inside the representation of these peoples, their consciousness of their "identity."
In the work that I published in 1988 with Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class,8 I used the expression "constitution of a fictive ethnicity" to designate this characteristic nationalization of societies and peoples and thus of cultures, languages, genealogies. This process is the very site of the confrontation, as well as of the reciprocal interaction, between the two notions of the people: that which the Greek language and following it all political philosophy calls ethnos, the "people" as an imagined community of membership and filiation, and d emos, the "people" as the collective subject of representation, decision making, and rights. It is absolutely crucial to understand the power of this double-faced construction--its historical necessity, to some degree--and to understand its contingency, its existence relative to certain conditions.9
This construction resulted in the subjective interiorization of the idea of the border--the way individuals represent their place in the world to themselves (let us call it, with Hannah Arendt, their right to be in the world ) by tracing in their imaginations impenetrable borders between groups to which they belong or by subjectively appropriating borders assigned to them from on high, peacefully or otherwise. That is, they develop cultural or spiritual nationalism (what is sometimes called "patriotism," the "civic religion").
But this construction also closely associates the democratic universality of human rights--including the right to education, the right to political expression and assembly, the right to security and at least relative social protections--with particular national belonging. This is why the democratic composition of people in the form of the nation led inevitably to systems of exclusion: the divide between "majorities" and "minorities" and, more profoundly still, between populations considered native and those considered foreign, heterogeneous, who are racially or culturally stigmatized.
It is obvious that these divisions were reinforced by the history of colonization and decolonization and that in this time of globalization they become the seed of violent tensions. Already dramatic within each nationality, they are reproduced and multiplied at the level of the postnational or supranational community that the European Union aspires to be. During the interminable discussion over the situation of immigrants and "undocumented aliens" in France and in Europe, I evoked the specter of an apartheid being formed at the same time as European citizenship itself. This barely hidden apartheid concerns the populations of the "South" as well as the "East."
Does Europe as a future political, economic, and cultural entity, possible and impossible, need a fictive identity? Through this kind of construction, can Europe give meaning and reality to its own citizenship--that is, to the new system of rights that it must confer on the individuals and social groups that it includes? Probably yes, in the sense that it must construct a representation of its "identity" capable of becoming part of both objective institutions and individuals' imaginations. Not, however (this is my conviction, at least) in the sense that the closure characteristic of national identity or of the fictive ethnicity whose origin I have just described is as profoundly incompatible with the social, economic, technological, and communicational realities of globalization as it is with the idea of a "European right to citizenship" understood as a "right to citizenship in Europe"--that is, an expansion of democracy by means of European unification.
The heart of the aporia seems to me to lie precisely in the necessity we face, and the impossibility we struggle against, of collectively inventing a new image of a people, a new image of the relation between membership in historical communities (ethnos) and the continued creation of citizenship (d emos) through collective action and the acquisition of fundamental rights to existence, work, and expression, as well as civic equality and the equal dignity of languages, classes, and sexes. Today every possibility of giving a concrete meaning to the idea of a European people and thus of giving content to the project of a democratic European state runs up against two major obstacles: the emptiness of every European social movement and of all social politics and the authoritarian establishment of a border of exclusion for membership in Europe. Unless these two obstacles are confronted together and resolved one by the other, this project will never happen.
The persistence of names is the condition of every "identity." We fight for certain names and against others, to appropriate names (Europe, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Macedonia but also France, Great Britain, Germany). All these battles leave traces, in the form of nostalgic longings and borders or utopias and transformational programs. Thus, the name of Europe--derived from distant antiquity and first designating a little region of Asia or Asia Minor--has been connected to cosmopolitan projects, to claims of imperial hegemony or to the resistance that they provoked, to programs dividing up the world and expanding "civilization" that the colonial powers believed themselves the guardians of, to the rivalry of "blocs" that disputed legitimate possession of it, to the creation of a "zone of prosperity" north of the Mediterranean, of a "great power in the twentyfirst century."
The difficulty for democratic politics is to avoid becoming enclosed in representations that have historically been associated with emancipatory projects and struggles for citizenship and have now become obstacles to their revival, to their permanent reinvention. Every identification is subject to the double constraint of the structures of the capitalist world economy and of ideology (feelings of belonging to cultural and political units). What is currently at stake does not consist in a struggle for or against European identity in itself. After the end of "real communism" and the taking of sides, the stakes revolve instead around the invention of a citizenship that allows us to democratize the borders of Europe, to overcome its interior divisions, and to reconsider completely the role of European nations in the world. The issue is not principally to know whether the European Union, too, will become a great military power, charged with guaranteeing a "regional order" or with "projecting" itself outward in humanitarian or neocolonial interventions; rather, it is whether a project of democratization and economic construction common to the East and West, the North and South, of the Euro-Mediterranean sphere will be elaborated and will gain the support of its peoples--a project that depends first on them. Europe impossible: Europe possible.
Lecture delivered October 4, 1999, on the invitation of the Institut français de Thessalonique and the Department of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloníki. French text first published in Transeuropéennes 17 (1999-2000): 9-17. The translation of this essay, by Erin M. Williams, originally appeared under the title World Borders, Political Borders, PMLA 117 (2002): 71-78.
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text:
Not clearing the bar
FAMU law school grads continue to bomb the Florida Bar exam. Eleven of 21 students who took the test in February passed, an anemic success rate of 52.4 percent, according to results released Monday. That's down from 57.1 percent for FAMU grads in February 2006 and 52.9 percent in July 2006.
As the law school seeks accreditation, that's not good news. FAMU Provost Debra Austin told trustees at last week's emergency meeting that recruitment, retention and bar passage were three major areas of concern identified by the American Bar Association's accreditation team. "As you know, we can do better in all of those areas," she said.
On the February test, Florida International University topped all 10 law schools in Florida with a 94.4 percent pass rate.
UF - with the state's biggest law school - came in at 83.8 percent. FSU, at 88.2 percent. The only school that did worse than FAMU: Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale. Only 48 percent of its grads passed.
- Ron Matus, state education reporter

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Soldiers and rescue workers on Thursday recovered 26 bodies from a bus buried in a landslide but held out little hope of finding survivors.
Frantically digging through tonnes of earth and rock, hundreds of soldiers and rescue workers braved threats of additional slides to pull victims from the bus, which officials said was carrying between 40 and 60 passengers.
The bus was travelling along a remote winding road on Wednesday morning when a rain-soaked mountainside gave way near the town of Eloxochitlan in the central state of Puebla.
The state's chief of ambulance services, Salvador Bianchini, told the Televisa television network that "all are dead", but did not explain how he knew that. He said workers had only gained access to a small section of the bus.
Other state officials have declined to speculate on the possibility of survivors.
"The search is very difficult," Bianchini said, noting that officials were concerned a nearby cliff could come tumbling down at any moment. He said the search would probably continue through Thursday and Friday.
Ismael Rios, a spokesman for the Puebla government, said the landslide brought down at least 100 tonnes of earth and rock piled 40 metres high.
"A large part of the mountain crumbled," he said.
Rios said 15 of the 26 victims have been identified and that their ages range from 6 to 44. Among those yet to be identified were two children and a woman found clutching a child in her arms.
Puebla Governor Mario Marin said officials were bringing coffins to the site. He said the government would pay for victims' funerals and set up scholarships for their children.
Local news media reported that most of the bus passengers were from Eloxochitlan, an extremely poor town in central Mexico.
Weeping relatives of the passengers and local residents crowded around barriers guarded by soldiers near the site of the landslide, which happened as the bus was headed to the nearby town of Tehuacan. Officials said it was impossible to know the exact number of passengers on board because the bus made stops along the way.
Eloxochitlan resident Donato Trujillo, who witnessed the landslide from his home and was on the scene helping rescue workers, said it was sudden and swift.
"We heard the movement of the earth, a tremendous roar and people screaming," he told Televisa. "It was a direct, fatal blow."
President Felipe Calderon ordered the interior and defence departments to help in the rescue efforts.
Marin, who arrived at the site by helicopter, said no one was to blame for the tragedy.
"All the mountains are risky. ... It's nature," Marin said.
He said authorities are considering dynamiting the rest of the mountain once rescue efforts end to avoid future landslides, saying its "current condition is a great risk".
Heavy rainfall across Mexico this week has triggered flooding and landslides that killed several people.
Fifty-seven people died last year when their overloaded bus careened off a highway into a 200-metre ravine in state of Veracruz, which borders Puebla.


text:
The Stoneyford beacon blazed brightly on the village, as residents welcomed in the glorious Twelfth.
This year Stoneyford Jubilee Committee rose to the challenge yet again when they successfully organised another Eleventh Night in the village.
The annual Twelfth celebrations kicked off in style at the War Memorial with a rousing performance by the Pride of the Village Stoneyford Flute Band.
Throughout the evening, the ladies of the committee organised a barbecue.
There was an added attraction this year with the appearance of the Lambeg drums and everyone was encouraged to have a go.
There was a truly spectacular fireworks display accompanied by a lone Lambeg drummer, which proved to be an extremely popular addition to the programme.
The crowd were totally enthralled at what they were witnessing and particularly enjoyed the opportunity to participate in the finale of the display.
The evening's festivities culminated in the lighting of the traditional Stoneyford beacon by former Lisburn City Mayor Cecil Calvert.


text:
Partner Jurisdictions and Agencies
Washington County Participating Local Governments
Creating a sustainable community requires many different groups working together to develop a network of collaboration and support. Here is a partial list of our Partners in Sustainability.
- City of Banks
- City of Cornelius
- City of Durham
- City of Forest Grove
- City of Hillsboro
- City of King City
- City of North Plains
- City of Sherwood
- City of Tigard
- City of Tualatin
Other Regional Partners
- Association of Oregon Recyclers
- City of Beaverton
- Clackamas County
- Clean Water Services
- Environmental Protection Agency
- City of Gresham
- Master Recycler Program
- Metro Regional Government
- Multnomah County
- Oregon Department of Environmental Quality
- OSU Extension Office - Citizen Participation Organization
- Oregon Refuse and Recycling Association
- Partners for a Sustainable Washington County Community (PSWCC)
- City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability
- City of Portland - Green Building Hotline
- Tualatin Valley Water District


text:
NewswireToday - /newswire/ -
Rueil-Malmaison, Hauts-de-Seine, France, 2014/06/23 - The new contract was signed in Paris on 23 June at a ceremony attended by His Highness Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, who is on an official visit to France. CAC 40; Euronext 100
A design-build contract with a value of about 2 billion in a consortium with Alstom;
Turnkey handover of the light rail system in 2018 (yellow line) and 2020 (green, red and purple lines).
After winning the first works phases for the light rail transit system (LRT) in Lusail, Qatar, in 2007 and 2011, QDVC, a 51% Qatari Diar, 49% VINCI Construction Grands Projets subsidiary, has won the contract covering the last phase of the project.
The new contract was signed in Paris on 23 June 2014 at a ceremony attended by His Highness Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, who is on an official visit to France.
This design-build contract with a value of about 2 billion will be built by QDVC in a consortium with Alstom. It comprises construction of 25 stations and a depot, architectural and electro-mechanical works packages, integrated project management, delivery by Alstom, for 750 million, of 35 trains equipped with catenary-free technology, track-laying, energy supply and telecommunications as well as control systems. The light rail system is scheduled to begin operating in 2018 (yellow line) and 2020 (green, red and purple lines).
The city of Lusail, a new urban development with a population of 200,000 north of Doha, the capital of Qatar, will welcome up to 450,000 users per day. Sustainable development was a primary criterion in planning the new city. From the start, the design included the creation of a public transport system to limit greenhouse gas emissions. QDVC completed the civil engineering works on the first phases of the infrastructure (7 km of tunnels, 7 underground and 4 above-ground stations, as well as an access viaduct to the depot) and is currently building the Pearl station, which will connect the Lusail light rail with the Doha metro system, also under construction.
In seven years, VINCI Construction Grands Projets (vinci.com) has become, through QDVC, a major construction player in Qatar. After handing over the country's largest wastewater pumping station, the company is currently working on several projects: a new motorway on the outskirts of Doha (the New Orbital Highway), the Doha metro (southern works package of the red line) and the underground car park and landscaped gardens at the Sheraton hotel in the West Bay business district.
Written by / Agency / Source: VINCI
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text:
CFI Opposes Funding for Non-Evidence Based Funding
October 5, 2009
CFI has always been a strong advocate for increasing funding for scientific institutions. So why did we come out with a report calling for Congress to end funding to a Center that is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? Because the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is spending taxpayers' dollars on "healing" techniques that have no scientific basis. In fact, according to a report by the National Center for Health Statistics and the US Department of Health and Human Services, " By definition, [Complementary and Alternative Medicine] practices are not part of conventional medicine because there is insufficient proof that they are safe and effective". The fact that there is insufficient proof is not because of a lack of funding. An article by the Associated Press dated June 10, 2009 states " The new center was given $50 million in 1999 (its budget was $122 million last year) and ordered to research unconventional therapies and nostrums that Americans were using to see which ones had merit." The article goes on to explain that in every other Institute that is part of the NIH, scientific evidence is required to justify a study. The opposite approach taken at the NCCAM has yielded almost no evidence that alternative treatments work. For example, a recently published study on the effects of Reiki on fibromyalgia patients resulted in the conclusion that "Neither Reiki nor touch improved the symptoms of fibromyalgia." The conclusion for this study goes on to state that "modalities such as Reiki should be rigorously studied before being recommended to patients with chronic pain symptoms." So, this "factorial designed, randomized, sham-controlled trial in which participants, data collection staff, and data analysts were blinded to treatment group" found no evidence that Reiki and healing touch provide treatment for fibromyalgia, but the conclusion is that we should spend more money on studies before we recommend it to patients? The logic doesn't follow. It is important to keep in mind that the field of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) is vast and includes everything from nutritional and herbal supplements, to yoga and meditation, to acupuncture and energy healing. Our point is not that all of these treatments are shams; it is simply our belief that funds for CAM research should be granted based on scientific evidence, as funds are allocated in other institutes at the NIH.


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|Sport, 1 pitch, 50'
|YDS: 5.10c/d French: 6b+ Ewbanks: 21 UIAA: VII+ ZA: 21 British: E3 5b [details]
|T. Perkins, C. Perkinson
|Page Views:
|Submitted By:
|scott e. tarrant on Jul 15, 2008
|Comments on Storm Jumper
|Add Comment
|Show which comments —
By Curt Dvonch
Jun 7, 2012
|The 5.7 unprotected runout to the first bolt felt more like committing 5.9. A stick clip is highly recommended. Otherwise this is a well bolted and fun climb worth doing.
By Martin Harris
Jun 7, 2013
|If you can climb 5.10, get on this thing. It's awesome.
By Pink Thunder
From: Lakewood
Jul 8, 2013
By Lynn S
Jul 16, 2013
|2 new anchor bolts and 5 new protection bolts, hardware courtesy of ASCA.
By Parker Wrozek
From: Denver, CO
Jul 14, 2015
rating: 5.10c 6b 20 VII 20 E2 5b
Great route. Agree that the bottom is not 5.7, more like 5.9/10a.
If you climb at the grade, get all over this thing!
By Jeff Welch
From: Denver, CO
Aug 3, 2015
rating: 5.10c 6b 20 VII 20 E2 5b
This is a really, really good route. One of the best I've done at The Pass.
I do think the moves getting up to and clipped to the first bolt are in fact 5.7, albeit devious, slippery, insecure 5.7. A stick clip is certainly not a bad idea. Immediately after clipping the first bolt, I agree that the final moves up the slab below the overhang are indeed 5.9+.
By Colter
Aug 22, 2016
|The CRUX HOLD BROKE!!!! I have climbed this route dozens of times and fortunately was cleaning the route on top rope when this hold broke. It is a clipping hold for the 4th bolt. There is another hold you can clip off; however, it will be a bit more strenuous and will leave you with a larger move afterwards to reach then next set of holds. I think it is fortunate for all of us that it broke on toprope rather than with slack in your teeth on lead! I did lower and climb through the section again to see how much harder it seemed, and I think it gives it another letter for sure, solidifying the grade at 10d or possibly up to an 11a! I feel like history was made yesterday as this route was changed forever. I do not think it affects the safety or quality of the route, only the grade. Ciao.


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Keith Urban's 2013 Year in Review – Exclusive Pictures
Keith Urban had a phenomenal year in 2013. With the release of an innovative new album, 'Fuse,' the Australian-born superstar not only maintained his position as one of country music's hottest acts, he actually broke new musical ground while doing so.
Urban began the year in the studio, working with a number of different producers on the music that would become 'Fuse.'
"I've always loved the creative discovery of being in the studio, and I can spend waay too long in there very easily," Urban admits.
Urban staged his annual We're All for the Hall benefit concert on April 16 at Nashville's Bridgestone Arena. This year's event featured Vince Gill, Tim McGraw, Montgomery Gentry, Willie Nelson, Trace Adkins and many more.
"If ever there was a labor of love, it's putting on our AFTH shows each year with Vince," said Urban. "It takes the community spirit that's at the heart of country music to make these events not only successful, but so easy to put together."
On May 3, Urban joined the Rolling Stones onstage to open their tour at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, where he jammed with them on 'Respectable.'
"Nothing in life can compare you for the atomic ferocity of performing inches away from Mick f—in' Jagger, trading solos with Keith [Richards] and Ron [Wood] and getting lost in the legendary groove of Charlie Watts," he said.
On Sept. 5, just days before 'Fuse' was set for release, Urban played a set on a barge in Baltimore's Inner Harbor to help kick off the NFL season.
"While the game was actually happening in Denver, we were kickin' it with some of the rowdiest Baltimorians ever assembled to hear someone play on a barge," he said.
The following day, Sept. 6, Urban took to the streets of Nashville for a quick series of promotional appearances, kicking off at Nashville's Riverfront Park. He then visited three Nashville honky tonks in rapid succession, playing a short set at each stop.
During his performance at the world-famous Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, Urban was joined by Aerosmith front man Steven Tyler, who jammed with him on ZZ Top's 'La Grange' before they launched into Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way.'
"I always wanted to know what it was like to be Joe Perry," Urban noted.
That's not all 2013 held in store for Urban. 'Fuse' was not only a critical hit, it was a commercial smash, debuting at No. 1 in both the country and mainstream charts. The album has spawned to No. 1 singles with 'Little Bit of Everything' and 'We Were Us,' a duet with Miranda Lambert.


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Can't read this newsletter? Click here to see it online.
16th March 2009
Stitchin', Bitchin' and Springing into Action
Springy Springtime greetings to you
The knitting world has gone Race for Life crazy and we thought it would be much fun to join in with the likes of Wickedwoollywitch, Socktopus and IKnit with our own S&B London team. Click here to read more.
The sun shone, the homemade biscuits were particularly good, the Kurdish Newroz New Year celebrations had a funky beat, the stitching was really rather fabulous with Knit Me in Trafalgar Square on Saturday. Those of you who came along we salute you. Thanks for Kat at Knit Me for arranging it all. You can read more here on our blog.
The last few meetings have seen us dominate Ev with our stitching power, filling practically every last seat in the house and almost eating them out of mezze.
At the RFH our Sock Surgery saw so many of you who have caught the bug for sock projects that we are sure it will soon reach pandemic proportions. Magic loop queries were cured, DPNs were surgically extracted and all were sent away with a clean bill of health. We promise to hold more sock surgeries throughout 2009, so watch this space.
Stitch and Mine's a Pint
Details of the next meeting:
Come join us in the cosy upstairs room at The Clarence for some traditional pub ale and grub whilst you knit. Just don't spill your pint of your WIP.
WEDNESDAY 18TH MARCH Time: From 6pm Venue: The Clarence (upstairs) 53 Whitehall London SW1A 2HP
Stitch and Keep Bustin'
Details of the meeting after that:
We have been invited to take part in the first Nanna's at the Disco at the Albert and Pearl cocktail bar for a night of music to knit by. The night promises anything from "Ska, Soul, Funk, Motown, Rare Groove, Disco, Classic Album Tracks and unearthed gems" to listen to whilst you get your stitch on. So get your dancing shoes on knitters, and try not to drop a stitch whilst you're rocking out!
THURSDAY 26TH MARCH Time: From 6pm Venue: Albert and Pearl 181 Upper Street Islington London N1 1RQ
Stitch and Sew It Up!
TUESDAY 31ST MARCH Time: From 6pm Venue: The Royal Festival Hall (Ground floor. Look for the knitters. You'll find us) Address: South Bank Centre Belvedere Road London SE1 8XX
Stitch and Fighting the Big C
S&B Londoners have always thought that cancer was really rubbish. We've been helping battle it since day one with our knits. There was our London Lion Scarf and our Blanket for Breast Cancer. And now we're Racing for Life because cancer just can't seem to take the hint.
Tina 'Wickedwoollywitch' Bragaglia is doing the Race for Life (bright red stick and all) in memory of her brother. You can see her sponsor page here. We thought that was rather fabulous and couldn't let her race alone.
So inspired by Tina, and other teams such as Socktopus and IKnit , we at S&B London are joining in Race for Life too. We're joining the event on the 6th of May at 7pm in Battersea Park (so no time off work or weekends taken up required).
Join Team S&B London:
The race is on the 6th of May at 7pm in Battersea Park. We'd love you to join us whether you help us raise a little or a lot.
To sign up just drop us an email at email@example.com. We'll sign you up (there's a £2 each admin fee from the site).
We'll be racing in a group at a walking pace to make sure some of us less gazelle-like members don't walk on their own.
Sponsor Team S&B London:
You can sponsor us at http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/stitchandbitchlondon
if you can't join in the Race.
Almost FREE woolly hat patterns:
Because Cancer Research is about those who are fighting, as well as those we have sadly lost, we're going to be knitting chemo caps as we go (knitting as you walk is optional). The caps will be donated to various cancer wards across London.
S&B London are offering two fabulous chemo cap patterns for a minimum £2 donation (give more if you like). To donate and download the patterns click here.
Just hop along to our blog page here, use the link to donate as much as you like, then download the patterns.
Sponsor or join Tina:
Stitch and Pay as You Go
We all love a free knitting pattern, it's true, and with everyone wanting to save a bit of cash these days delving into your stash seems like a much better idea than going out on a yarn splurge. But as you start your low-cost project take a moment to think about how many hours of stitching happiness it will give you. Did you pick up any new techniques for free? How much did you save by using stashed yarn? What would all that be worth?
P/hop have posed this rather interesting question to raise money in aid of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) an independent international medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid in more than 60 countries to people affected by armed conflict, epidemics, natural or man-made disasters or exclusion from healthcare.
P/hop stands for Pennies per Hour Of Pleasure and they are asking you 'What is the p/hop rating for what you just knitted?'
Super-generous designers (you could be one of them) will be donating free knitting patterns which will be available for download here as well as on ravelry.com where there is a p/hop group. With no 'set price' for a pattern you can give 50p to £50 - it's up to you. To donate to the p/hop project visit the justgiving page.
If you are a designer (budding or established) and would like to donate a knitting pattern for the MSF cause please email email@example.com.
Stitch and WIP it up Winners
In our last newsletter, we gave you folks the chance to win a copy of STC Craft's Weekend Knitting (not Knitting Weekend, as we wrote in error), by answering the question: What do our American knitting cousins call moss stitch?
You knowledgeable knitters correctly answered 'seed stitch' (not 'I-laughed-so-much-I-peed Stitch'). And our Winner-picking alpaca chose five lucky winners:
Sharon Spiteri
Clare McCaughren
Emma-Lee Yarwood
Rebecca Milloy
That's about it for this week. All that is left is to quickly mention that the new Knitty which is up now with loads of lovely free patterns – don't for get to think about donating with P/hop when you add them to your queue! Hope to see a fair few of you join us in the Race for Life too. Also remember to keep the 13th of June free; the S&B London Knit Crawl is recharging for another epic WWKIP day.
The S&B London Stitchettes x firstname.lastname@example.com www.stitchandbitchlondon.co.uk
S&B London promise not to share your email address with anyone, not even if they ask us nicely and offer us sweet, sweet cake or cashmere. S&B London is a non- profit group and we do all this for no payment in our spare time, so please be patient if we make mistakes.


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The Price of Freedom
Leonard Pitts Jr
They are, perhaps, the most dangerous words ever written:
That, for those who don't know, is the First Amendment to the Constitution of
What makes those words dangerous is that they guarantee a freedom that, in the wrong hands (or even the right hands) can cause upset and outrage, even topple regimes. America confers that kind of power -- freedom of expression, unfettered by government -- equally to the conscientious and the flighty, the modest and the mighty, the noble and the most vile.
We've been arguing about it ever since, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which restricted criticism of the government, to Snyder v. Phelps in 2011, a
As Islamic extremists continue a campaign of anti-American violence over "Innocence of Muslims," a risibly wretched piece of Islamophobic propaganda, it is apparently an article of faith for many in that world that the film represents a U.S. government attack upon Islam.
That's putting it mildly. And that ignorance has become a potentially deadly flashpoint in recent years. It used to be that only a few high-profile, theoretically responsible, individuals had access to the world stage and the ability to affect world events. But with the advent of YouTube,
Small wonder, then, that radio host
He's right. Even if it were possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube as Joyner demands, one has to ask: what next? If extremists on the far side of the world learn the lesson that we will abandon a core principle because they throw tantrums or even commit murder, what does that tell them about us? What might we next be bullied into doing?
There is nothing congenitally "Muslim" about the way some in the
They are not, because Muslim-Americans, like other Americans, know there is a reason you embrace those dangerous words. Namely, that though they give license to outrage, offense and obscenity, they also give license to that which enlightens, ennobles and uplifts. They liberate the worst in us, but also the best, a tradeoff Americans have always found worthwhile. We are now tasked with explaining that to parts of the world where the outrageous can't be said aloud and conformity is required by law.
That will not be easy, especially when Americans have been killed, and standing up for this principle requires you to stand behind a greasy little morsel like "Innocence of Muslims." Worse, we must make that case to those who have no framework to even understand what free expression is. But we have no choice. That is what this moment demands.
It is the price we pay for believing in dangerous words.
Read the latest political news.
- A Memo to Mitt and Ann Romney
- Mitt Romney's Biggest Problem is His Own Party
- Mitt Romney Can Win By Doing One Thing
- Mitt Romney on the Spot
- Presidential Debates Present Opportunity and Peril for Mitt Romney
- The Presidential Debate: Look for the Plans, Not the Puns
- His Campaign Sliding, Mitt Romney Must Deliver in Debate
- The 'Self-Made' Hallucination of America's Rich
- Why Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are Going Down
- Four Reasons Why Mitt Romney Might Still Win
- America Needs Good Refs -- On the Gridiron and in Politics
- How the GOP Protects Its Falsehoods
- 2012 Election Could Mirror 1980 Race
- A GOP Civil War Simmers
- Mitt Romney Missed Big Chance with Latino Voters
- Mitt Romney's Losing Bid to Win the Latino Vote
- Does Political Discourse Need Geneva Conventions?
- Another Episode in Mitt Romney's Foreign Policy Follies
- Team Romney Doubles Down
- In Defense of the 47 Percent
- The High Cost of Mitt Romney's Candor
- It was a privilege, Mitt Romney
- The Obama Hare and Romney the Tortoise
- An American Shame that Both Candidates Ignore
- Revisiting Wilson's 'Truly Disadvantaged'
- The Poor: America's Forgotten Swing Voters
- Pragmatic Racism
- Mitt Romney's Taxes: Who Cares?
- Waffling on Obamacare will Not Help Mitt Romney
- Why They Call Bill Clinton 'Big Dog'
- Bill Clinton's Secret: Make Little Words Matter
- Bill Clinton Delivers
- Forward to What, Democrats?
- The New Obama Shows Muscle
- Words of Wisdom from a Nun
- Likable Mitt Romney
- Mitt Romney Misjudges Voters
- Mitt Romney's Troubling Pattern
- Mitt Romney's Party -- Checks OK, iPhones Not
- Distractions and Diversions
- The Self-Immolation of Mitt Romney
- The Latest Battle in the War on Voting
- Better Off Today? Don't Ask
- What has Obama Learned?
- Obama Sells Old Ideas as New
- Let George W Bush Be
- Do We Want This Foolish Man?
- Poor Visibility
- Paul Ryan Runs Into the Truth
- Team Romney's War Against Facts
- Both Parties Go to Extremes
- Candidates Have De-Emphasized Foreign Affairs
- Campaign 2012 in a Nutshell: Wrong Ideas vs No Ideas
- Memo to GOP: Demography is Destiny
- Tribe of Liberty
- The Price of Freedom
- Paul Ryan Calling the Kettle Black with Medicare Scare Tactics
- House of Representatives Armed with Irony
- Obama Leads Romney in Post-Conventions Poll
- Character, Policy and the Selection of Leaders
- The Politicization of Violence
- The Selling of American Democracy: The Perfect Storm
- Losing Latino Votes
- The Party is Over: Longtime GOPer Dissects Modern Political Landscape
- Paul Ryan's Faux Populism
- Rise Up, Middle Class, Rise Up!
- A Modest Proposal: Three Weeks of Paid Vacation
- The Paul Ryan Choice
The Price of Freedom | Politics
(c) 2012 Tribune Media Services, Inc


text: I moved into a home last fall, to busy to mess with lawn with the move and all, this lawn is bluegrass and dandelion, crabgrass, I think creeping charlie? Lots of weeds, I am leasing and may not buy the home so I want to limit how much I spend to renovate lawn! Here is what I have done so far, I sprayed with weed b gone, I spread 12-12-12 to rejuvenate the dormant looking blugrass, the problem now is a lot of the weed/dandelions are dead but just laying dormant, I do not want to have to mow at 2" or less to cut them, will they rot away, been 10 days since weed spray?


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Things To Do
Veteran flight attendant describes life in the sky
"Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet," by Heather Poole (William Morrow) Want to impress the flight attendant on your next trip? Make eye contact. Say "please" and "thank you." Remove your earphones when asked a question. Be nice to your fellow passengers. Want to alienate him or her instead? Borrow a pen and don't give it back. Complain that the passenger ahead of you has reclined his seat. Snatch newspapers off the top of her crew bag. Yes, they notice that stuff. Those are some of the lessons a reader learns from "Cruising Attitude," a tell-all by Heather Poole, a veteran flight attendant. She has seen the good and the bad in a lot of passengers, from the elderly man who made origami birds for all the kids on the plane to the guy who grabbed Poole's Egg McMuffin off the jump seat and ate it without apology.Poole loves her job, and her account of it is fascinating. She writes about her training, in which the topics included not only balancing six wineglasses on a silver tray, but also recognizing dozens of weapons and throwing hot coffee at lunging terrorists. We read about the perils of dating in that line of work, including guys who turn out to be a bit too interested in a flight attendant's uniform or in sharing her flight perks. A conscientious reader can pick up some tips for flying, like why you shouldn't recline your seat too quickly (it smashes laptops), why you should wait until after takeoff to take a sleeping pill, and why nervous fliers should sit toward the front of the plane. The rear tends to fishtail during turbulence. "Cruising Attitude" is a fun and breezy read. I'll remember it the next time I fly. Especially when I order a Diet Coke, which Poole calls "the most annoying beverage a flight attendant can pour for a passenger in flight." Why? It takes so long. It's unusually fizzy in the glass, and she has to keep pausing for the foam to subside so she can pour in some more. Thanks to her book, from now on I'll just ask for the can.
Trending Now


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Entering the Silence with Sarah and Ty Powers
Expanding the Heart with the '4 Immeasurables': living with love, compassion, joy and equanimity. Buddha activity in our everyday lives.
Join Sarah and Ty Powers for six days of silent inwardly drawn Yin/Insight yoga practice at Kalani Retreat Center, on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Prerequisite: You must have at least two years of a committed yoga practice and a strong interest in Mindfulness meditation before attending this retreat.
In this retreat we will practice yoga, pranayama, mind training, and methods for awakening the heart. Our meditations will not only focus on concentration and investigation (Shamatha and Vipashyana), but will explore the compassionate practices often called the dwelling places of the gods, (Brahma Viharas or Immeasurables). These are the aspiration methods that allow us to envision living from our essence nature in interpersonal dynamics both toward ourselves, and others. We will develop a mood of Maitri or loving friendship toward experience and cultivate a caring attitude towards the human predicament as well as our intrinsic potential.
For the body we will engage in two long yoga sessions per day. We will enjoy both receptive and active (Yin/Yang) asana practices that are designed to develop and maintain pliancy in the muscles as well as the joints, to increase strength and vitality in all the systems of the body, and to cultivate a sensitivity and cultivation of the pranic body – the gateway to an ease of being. For the heart and mind we will practice several mediation sessions a day, mingling both concentration and Insight practices with a mood of Maitri or loving kindness.
To enhance the contemplative atmosphere, social silence will be sustained throughout the retreat.
Please read Sarah's book Insight Yoga, The Four Immeasurables: Practices To Open The Heart by Alan Wallace, and practice with one of Sarah's DVDs before attending.
Location: Kalani Retreat Center on Big Island, Hawaii
Dates: January 4-10, 2015
Check-in: Between 2pm and 5pm
Check-out: After breakfast
Silence will begin after dinner on January 4th and be held until the afternoon of the day before departure. Short individual meetings (optional) can be scheduled with Sarah and Ty.
Retreat full, for wait list contact Greg at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Single with Private Bath $1900
Double with Private Bath $1600
Triple with Private Bath $1300
Single with Shared Bath $1700
Double with Shared Bath $1400
Triple with Shared Bath $1100
Deposit $500. Triple Rooms are reserved for female students.


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With potential tax hikes looming, companies may elect to substitute share buybacks for dividends in the future.
While there's been a lot of talk about the looming "fiscal cliff," rarely does even a highly partisan political divide prevent politicians from cooperating at the last minute to find some sort of temporary solution. Sure, the resolution may neither be prudent nor long-term in scope, but most can logically predict that something will be done. With that said, regardless of how the cliff is resolved, we believe investors should care more about how we'll be paying for the spending that will be incurred. There is a good chance that tax hikes are right around the corner, and those will directly hit most investors' pocketbooks if enacted.
Tick, Tick, Tick ...
If Congress does not take any action, starting on Jan. 1, the government will tax all dividends at ordinary income rates instead of the preferential 15% treatment for qualified payouts. On top of that, as part of the Health Care and Recognition Act of 2010, investors whose income exceeds $200,000 or $250,000 for single and joint filers, respectively, will be subject to an additional 3.8% Medicare surtax on all dividends, interest income, and capital gains. This new tax will remain in effect even if Congress extends the Bush tax cuts.
As a result, the top dividend tax rate could increase to 43.4% from 15%. Taxes on long-term capital gains are also scheduled to rise for most investors to 20% from 15%. (This rate will decrease to 10% for investors in the 15% income tax bracket.) However, with the Medicare surtax, the top rate will increase to 23.8%.
While we can't predict the outcome of the election, there is a good chance that these tax hikes will remain in place for investors in the upper income tax brackets. The Medicare surtax almost certainly isn't going away. Rather than trying to determine whether the tax changes will take effect, a more relevant question may be how to be prepared if they do.
Choose Your Poison
The scheduled tax changes would create an imbalance between dividend and capital gains tax rates, potentially creating an opportunity for tax arbitrage. Because dividend tax rates would exceed capital gains tax rates for most investors, share-buyback programs become a more tax-efficient method for companies to distribute cash to their shareholders. Although it is unlikely that companies will cut their dividends to improve tax efficiency, this creates an incentive for them to increase their share-buyback programs in lieu of raising their dividends to distribute excess cash in the future.
Consequently, investors relying on dividend growth may be disappointed. Funds that target companies with a history of increasing their dividends, such as Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF
It is true that in the 1960s, when tax rates were much higher than they are today, companies paid out a higher percentage of their earnings in dividends. However, share repurchases were uncommon during that time. A firm that continues to increase its dividends will be worth less on an aftertax basis than it would be if it had retained the cash or used it to repurchase shares. Even if some companies do not alter their payout behavior to maximize aftertax value, investors looking for cash distributions may be better served by firms with healthy share-repurchase programs.
In a share repurchase, the issuer buys back its own shares in the open market, either with cash from its balance sheet or by raising debt, reducing the number of shares outstanding. Classic finance theory suggests that the act of repurchasing shares does not increase the value of a company's stock. Although there are fewer shares outstanding, the company also has less cash or more debt, which reduces the total value of the company's equity by an offsetting amount.
©2017 Morningstar Advisor. All right reserved.


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Key IndicatorsPopulation clock 24,664,075 1 new person every 1 minute and 23 seconds Consumer price index 1.9% June quarter 2017 All groups, original Gross domestic product 0.8% Quarterly change Jun 2017 Chain volume measure, seasonally adjusted Average weekly earnings $1,543.80 May 2017 Full time adults ordinary time, trend estimate Unemployment rate 5.6% August 2017 Monthly, trend estimate
Latest releases
- Thursday 21 September 2017New regional information in updated ABS dataData by Region
- Thursday 21 September 2017Detailed monthly Labour Force data released todayLabour Force, Australia, Detailed - Electronic Delivery
- Thursday 21 September 2017Detailed quarterly labour force data released todayLabour Force, Australia, Detailed, Quarterly
- Thursday 21 September 2017New appendix for future trend data scenariosOverseas Arrivals and Departures, Australia (Additional Information)
- Thursday 21 September 2017Latest Research from the Methodology DivisionMethodological News
Household Income and Wealth, Australia Inequality stable since 2013-14 Results from the 2015-16 Survey of Income and Housing reveal that income inequality has been stable since 2013-14, peaking in the lead up to the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and varying within a narrow range since then.
The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey The ABS has released further details on the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey process including advice on how people in remote communities, silent electors, elderly people in residential aged care, people with low vision and Australians overseas can participate.
Interesting Fact
In 2016, 26 per cent of all Australian residents were born overseas


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Schumann Symphony No. 2 – Violin I Part
Edited by Norman Carol
Title: Symphony No. 2
Composer: Robert Schumann
Instrument: Violin
Edited By: Norman Carol
Instrumentation: Orchestral
Pages: 18
The first violin part for Schumann's Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 61 has been edited by Norman Carol, the legendary former concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who held the position from 1966 to 1994. Carol's bowings, fingerings and other editorial markings have been added throughout the score.
Robert Schumann's Symphony No. 2 was published in 1847, although technically it is the third completed as the original version of his D minor symphony of 1841 was later revised and published as No. 4. Written during a time of severe health problems, the uplifting tone of Symphony No. 2 is a remarkable testament to hope and the strength of will. Some draw a parallel to his predecessor Beethoven as a symbol of triumph over fate/pessimism. The symphony follows the traditional four-movement form, though it breaks from the Classical tradition with the scherzo before the slow movement, as was often done in the nineteenth century.
Download and print the score today to gain access to expertly edited Schumann Symphony No. 2 violin fingerings and bowings from Norman Carol!
Click below to preview or purchase a recording of the Philadelphia Orchestra performing this piece.


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BP Comment Quick Links
|Strength of Schedule Report
December 16, 2010
Ahead in the Count
Home Runs, Fly Balls, and Popups
I have always loved pitchers' duels. One of my favorite childhood baseball memories is watching Curt Schilling throw a complete game shutout for the Phillies in a 2-0 win against the Blue Jays in Game Five of the 1993 World Series, with the Phillies facing elimination. I was only 12 years old at the time, and I did not know anything about sabermetrics, but Schilling appeared majestic as he pitched yet another brilliant start in what would become a magnificent playoff career. He only surrendered five singles that night and extended the series one more day.
When I finally did learn about Defense Independent Pitching Statistics (DIPS) and Voros McCracken's discovery that pitchers have little control over batting average on balls in play, I found it mildly disappointing to look back at that box score and discover Schilling actually had rather mediocre DIPS numbers that night—just six strikeouts and three walks. However, I still felt confident in my memory that I had seen a great game as a youngster, and I convinced myself that the lack of home runs that Schilling allowed were evidence that he was unhittable that night. Unfortunately, I later discovered that pitchers have little control over the rate of home runs allowed per fly ball, and that Schilling actually generated just 10 ground balls that night on 24 balls in play. Though DIPS Theory finds Schilling's entire career amazing, his numbers from that alleged gem appeared pedestrian even on that front.
Some fans probably dislike DIPS Theory because it takes the glamour away from memories like these, but I find myself appreciating individual pitching performances more now that I have a better understanding of the game. Seeing a pitcher like Tim Lincecum strike out 14 hitters in his playoff debut adds to the majesty of the 2010 postseason, rather than takes away from Roy Halladay's playoff no-hitter the day before. The knowledge of what good pitchers do and do not control has given me an ability to watch a brilliant pitching performance critically and appreciate the masterful performances more.
Elementary DIPS theory is well established. Pitchers have a lot of control over strikeout, walk, and ground-ball rates, as evidenced by the year-to-year correlation of this statistic, but they have poor control over batting average on balls in play (BABIP). While we have known for some time that pitchers also have little control over HR/FB, statistics like FIP remove all of the variance from BABIP and reproduce an ERA with a league-average BABIP for all pitchers, but leave in all of the variance in HR/FB. This treats HR/FB as a skill and hides the fact that home it is a statistic that pitchers show even less ability to maintain than their BABIP. Looking at home runs per outfield fly ball is important, because some pitchers do have some tendency to allow more popups than others, even controlling for team.
Below I list the year-to-year correlation of different statistics for 549 pitchers with at least 300 balls in play in consecutive seasons from 2003-10. For BABIP and HR/FB, I give numbers net of team performance (because defense and parks affect these numbers similarly for pitchers on the same team).
Pitchers actually appear to have more control over the rate of hits allowed on balls in play than they have control over the rate that outfield fly balls go for home runs. Yet statistics like FIP remove the luck from BABIP, but not HR/FB, because it is known that the rate of HR/FB is a little persistent. However, since BABIP is even more persistent, this does not make much sense. Statistics like SIERA and xFIP that neutralize the number of HR/FB do a better job of explaining reality when you have only a limited amount of information about a pitcher. Tom Tango has often argued that several seasons of data will show patterns in HR/FB, and that FIP will outlast xFIP when predicting ERA for pitchers with several years of data available. The problem is that excluding BABIP for several years of data by using FIP will ignore the control that pitchers have over BABIP as it reveals HR/FB skill, and ERA itself may be better at showing a pitcher's skill level with several years of data than FIP will.
Somewhat interesting was that pop-up rate has a high year-to-year correlation itself (.582). But what was surprising was that even after adjusting for team (and therefore park and foul ground area), the rate of popups per fly ball also had a pretty high year-to-year correlation (.328). This suggests that inducing popups is a skill beyond being a product of being a fly-ball pitcher. Therefore, SIERA's inclusion of outfield fly balls and infield popups together may be something worth revisiting as we learn more about pitching.
All numbers in the below table are computed relative to total team numbers, and are for all pitchers with at least 100 balls in play in consecutive seasons between 2003 and 2010 (a sample size of 1459).
However, the rate of popups per ball in play does not have a significant correlation with the rate of home runs per outfield fly ball (-.043). The importance of making an adjustment to SIERA seems minimally important, as the correlation between next-year's ERA and this year's pop-up rate is low as well (-.028). On the other hand, regressing next year's ERA on this year's pop-up rate and this year's outfield fly-ball rate shows an interesting effect.
Next Year's ERA = 4.96 – 9.77*(net PU%) + 7.71*(net FB%)
The net pop-up rate coefficient is significant, with p=.022. This suggests that differentiating popups and fly balls may be more useful and could be used to enhance SIERA.
Although the rate of popups per ball in play does not correlate with the rate of HR/FB, this does not mean that we cannot learn something important about this statistic. In fact, part of the strength of SIERA comes from the fact that it implicitly models the rate of HR/FB similarly to how it implicitly models BABIP.
I checked the correlation of HR/OFB with DIPS statistics:
The reason that the strikeout coefficient in SIERA is so large is that not only do strikeouts lead to lower ERAs in and of themselves, but they also correlate with lower BABIPs and lower HR/OFB rates, which likewise correlate with lower ERAs.
Running a regression (on all pitchers with 100 balls in play or more) of HR/OFB rate on all three statistics does not show a statistically significant coefficient for anything but strikeout rate:
The equation of the regression with only strikeout rate is:
Net home runs per outfield fly ball = .016 - .100*(SO/PA)
In the above regression, the p-statistic on strikeout rate is also less than .001.
Overall, this article and yesterday's article both show the benefit of using regression analysis to study ERA. Pitchers clearly exhibit far more control over defense-independent pitching statistics, but they still do have some control over BABIP and HR/FB. While looking at statistics like FIP removes the noise inherent in these two metrics, they also remove the skill. Since pitchers' BABIP and HR/FB skills are significantly correlated with their DIPS skills, running a regression actually controls for these effects and gives an accurate reading of pitchers' true skill levels with a unique methodology that picks up on factors that other measures do not.
Matt Swartz is an author of Baseball Prospectus.
15 comments have been left for this article.
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I love this stuff, Matt; thanks.
Dec 16, 2010 06:57 AM
Travis Leleu
I'm not as sharp as these guys, but I think this type of analysis isn't particularly appropriate when you're looking at things on a single-game level. Just what my gut tells me.
Dec 16, 2010 09:26 AM
That's what I was thinking, but Matt's anecdote about his take on Schilling's WS shut-out is what made me bring it up... thanks.
Dec 16, 2010 10:07 AM
I think that any detailed statistical analysis of one particular game needs to have a big asterix on it. That said, I think that pitchers (particularly ones like Moyer) are great at having plans for games. They are really good at mixing pitches and finding hitters weaknesses. As a result, they can often have good BABIP in a fleeting moment, but those strategies don't tend to be persistent. It's tough to keep getting the same hitters out if you are not striking them out or getting them to hit ground balls. Moyer will surprise a lot of hitters with a fastball down the middle on an 0-2 count, and then they'll hit a pop-up when they suddenly realize that it is actually a fastball. I don't think that Moyer will get the same guy to do that again, so I wouldn't say his BABIP is repeatable (as evidenced by his ever so slightly good but not amazing career BABIP), but he's definitely able to make a good pitch to get an out in an individual game. One thing I have also noticed with Moyer is that when his location is off, his BABIP is terrible, and no pitcher can always have their location on. It's a fleeting thing-- even Cliff Lee and Greg Maddux have games where the ball isn't going where they want it to be within the strike zone. So I would say it's possible to have a good game with mediocre K/BB, but probably it's rare, and the times it does happen, it's probably when the pitcher gets ahead in the count a lot.
Dec 16, 2010 11:16 AM
I've mentioned this to Matt on my blog, but I'll repeat it here.
Dec 16, 2010 07:31 AM
can't the answer be that FIP does both, depending on how it is used? As an ERA predictor, it acts like Matt describes--ignores noise and skill. As a representation of specific skills, it acts like Tango describes-- just observed results.
Dec 16, 2010 08:19 AM
I don't want my discussion of FIP to be mischaracterized. When I say "FIP assumes no BABIP control," I do not mean "Tom Tango assumes no BABIP control." I'm ONLY saying that his model is designed to neutralize BABIP, and one of the advantages SIERA has is that it neutralizes BABIP luck with neutralizing the whole thing. One of the model assumptions of SIERA is that all we know about BABIP can be explained by K, BB, and GB%. That's not a 100% true assumption either. But it's a feature of the model.
Dec 16, 2010 11:18 AM
What about asymmetric ballparks? I seem to recall one of the Yankee pitchers (I think it was Sparky Lyle) claim that he pitched so that the ball would go to left-center if it were drilled. Would that affect HR/FB?
Dec 16, 2010 08:59 AM
Travis Leleu
I believe that is accounted for when they compare a given pitcher's data to the team data. Matt explicitly mentions popups WRT infield foul territory, I would have to imagine it acts similarly for OF asymmetry.
Dec 16, 2010 09:33 AM
Yeah, it's probably very unlikely that many pitchers can really control where hard hit contact is made. If you're going to have that much control, you should probably aim to get the guy to make weak contact or miss. But a few pitchers probably do have the skill and intelligence to get that job done, which is why we do see somewhat positive correlations for a lot of the numbers above, even the ones close to zero.
Dec 16, 2010 11:20 AM
This is very interesting, but I am confused on one point. Matt wrote near the end of the article:
Dec 16, 2010 10:47 AM
Well, the proof mostly comes at the beginning. The correlations of BABIP and HR/FB are positive and small. They are also significantly negatively correlated with K%, and BABIP is significantly correlated with GB%. So we do say evidence of that small amount of control in that respect. Pitchers who miss bats also tend to induce weaker contact.
Dec 16, 2010 11:21 AM
I think what Kaiser's point is one that permeates everywhere: if you see a correlation of r=.10, then, that's it. It's r=.10. But, it's only r=.10 when BIP=400 (or whatever Matt used). Indeed, the r numbers are useless unless you also know the number of opps.
Dec 16, 2010 12:59 PM
Joey Matschulat
Tango, are you saying that in calculating r for any pair of variables, as sample sizes increases, r will inevitably approach 1.0? Because I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
Dec 17, 2010 09:52 AM
I think what he is saying is that any variable that has any slight persistence at all will do that. That's true, I think. But we're talking about saying suppose that all pitchers gives up infinity fly balls in 2010 and infinity fly balls in 2011, all against the same competition, the correlation of his HR/FB in those two years would be 1.0. That's technically true.
Dec 17, 2010 14:58 PM
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RIVERVIEW — Less than 24 hours after David Douglas Briell III was shot in his home, deputies said they arrested his killer.
Adonius P. Bailey, 32, of Tampa was arrested at his home Thursday afternoon.
The Hillsborough County Sheriff's Office said he had gone to Briell's home, 12230 Dawn Vista Drive in Riverview, with a woman who went in to see Briell.
When the woman didn't come back out soon enough, Bailey went inside, found her in a bedroom with Briell and shot him several times, deputies said.
He then kicked in the bedroom door of Briell's roommate and ordered him to not move. The roommate called 911 after Bailey left, deputies said.
The connection between the woman, Bailey and Briell remains unclear, deputies said.
Neighbors said they didn't know Briell by name, but knew what he was like.
He was big, tall and ripped. He spent time at the beach. He often left his garage door open as he lifted weights inside. He was friendly, said hello to kids on the block. He mostly kept to himself.
Albert Moore was home a few houses away when the shooting happened. Moore said he didn't hear or see anything unusual. He said Briell was friendly and used to jog around the neighborhood.
Neighbor Arema Brosnatch said she has lived there for eight years and often saw Briell working out. His death shocked her.
"I've never seen anything like that, ever," Brosnatch said. "It's just scary."
State criminal records show Briell was a 6-1, 220-pound mechanic in 2008 when he was arrested in Hillsborough for withholding information to obtain prescription drugs from a doctor. He was accepted into a pretrial diversion program.
Bailey has a history of multiple arrests in the county. He was convicted of trafficking in cocaine, drug possession and lewd and lascivious conduct. He was released from prison in 2005 and is a registered sex offender, according to state records.
Bailey was charged with first-degree murder with a firearm and armed burglary with a battery or assault.
Times staff writer Danny Valentine and researcher John Martin contributed to this report.


text:
BRIDGEPORT, Ala. -- Dennis Lambert crouches in the mud and looks over an unkempt football field, hallowed ground for fellow residents.
It's the home of the Bridgeport Middle School Fighting Tigers, and serves as a town square of sorts for the 3,000 factory workers and retirees who live in this remote town near the Tennessee state line.
But for Lambert, the field is important for a different reason. The amateur historian has committed eight years to proving the site is a burial ground for Union soldiers, both black and white.
''My best guess is close to 300 graves,'' said the 34-year-old Lambert, an unemployed college dropout.
His suspicions have made him unpopular. Some residents are campaigning for the removal of two war memorials that the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs placed at the site in May on the basis of Lambert's report.
Thousands of Union troops passed through Bridgeport during the Civil War, using the town as a supply depot, hospital and cemetery. After the war, the federal government removed the bodies of a number of Union soldiers for reburial 35 miles northeast in Chattanooga.
As a student at what was then Bridgeport High School, Lambert says he was fascinated by town legend that bodies were buried beneath the school.
He says he later found records at the Chickamauga battlefield national military park in northern Georgia showing that although more than 600 soldiers were buried in Bridgeport, only 300 were removed for reburial.
Two years ago, he won permission from the school board to dig and unearthed skeletal remains.
''You dig up one skeleton, that should send up a red flag that you might be in someone's burial,'' Lambert said.
A forensics expert at the University of Tennessee determined that the bones belonged to at least two black males and ''possibly'' one black female, ages 13 to 15.
That didn't impress one person who wants the monuments removed, football coach Jere McCraw, who also is a history teacher and Civil War re-enactor.
''It's just ridiculous that this has gone this far,'' McCraw said. ''They're dead and buried, just leave it alone.''
Although the community doesn't support Lambert's efforts, the Veterans Affairs monuments likely won't be removed unless evidence is collected to refute the 540-page report he submitted to the agency, said spokeswoman Jo Shuda.
Lambert hopes to find names to go along with the graves. Proof, he believes, that could lead to the relocation of the school.
''There is no compromise as far as I'm concerned,'' said Lambert. ''About the best thing you can do now is to tear this school down and get rid of it.''
McCraw says the ages and race of the remains Lambert unearthed raise questions of whether they were soldiers.
''We all love the movie 'Glory,' but the idea of them being black troops at that young of an age in this area stretches believability,'' he said, referring to the 1989 movie about an all-black volunteer company in the Union army.
Lambert, who is white, believes most people who oppose him are motivated by loyalty to the Confederacy.
''It hasn't been that long for some of these people,'' he said of the Civil War. ''I think this has turned into bigotry and hatred of the North.''
Patty Silvers, vice president of the Bridgeport Middle School, says her opposition has nothing to do with Southern or Confederacy loyalty.
''I totally deny that. I was against this before I got the forensics report in my hand,'' she said.
Even if the site of the school once was a graveyard, Silvers and others say it is one of the only places in town where children can play and that it shouldn't be cluttered with Civil War memorials.
Prep football has a rabid following in the South, especially in a town like Bridgeport that has little else is going for it. As many 500 people show up on game nights, McCraw said.
On the Net:
Chickamauga National Military Park: http://www.nps.gov/chch/index.htm
VA Civil War Cemeteries: http://www.va.gov/facmgt/historic/civilwar.asp
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