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Lucent Lesions of Bone
<-Axial Arthritis | Sclerotic Lesions of Bone->
Where, oh where does one start in the workup of this type of lesion? In my opinion, the first order of business is to learn the names of all of the tumors and tumor-like processes that involve bone. Richard Moser, former registrar of the AFIP, has said that among the thousands of radiology residents he taught there, there was one major cause for residents blowing unknown tumor cases: they didn't know the names of all of the tumors. This makes sense. If you have never heard of a non-ossifying fibroma, it is unlikely that you will ever put it in your differential diagnosis. If you would cast out the demon, you must first know its name. If you don't know Rumplestiltskin's name…. So get busy and first learn at least the names of all of these tumors. I know what a glutealgia it is to learn all of these names. When I was a first-year resident, I thought it was ludicrous to have to do this. To me, it was as if someone had taken a bunch of histological prefixes, shaken them up in a bag, and then drawn out a few at random, stuck them together, and then added "-oma" to it to get most of the types of bone tumors. How else do you explain entities like hemangiopericytoma, angiomyolipoma, chondromyxoid fibroma, or ossifying non-ossifying fibroma? Sooooooo…. go ahead and learn the names of all of these entities. Yes, Right Now! I'll be waiting right here when you get back.
Back already? OK! Now that you know all of the names of the tumors, let's focus on the ones you're likely to see in a solitary lucent expansile lesion of bone. A widely used mnemonic for this is: FEGNOMASHIC. However, I find it a lot easier to remember a mnemonic if it actually forms a real word. As it turns out, one can rearrange the letters of FEGNOMASHIC to form: FOGMACHINES. Take your choice — either works just the same. The entities considered in this mnemonic are:
Mnemonic = FOGMACHINES
Differential Diagnosis of Solitary Lucent Bone Lesions
- Fibrous Dysplasia
- Osteoblastoma
- Giant Cell Tumor
- Metastasis / Myeloma
- Aneurysmal Bone Cyst
- Chondroblastoma / Chondromyxoid Fibroma
- Hyperparathyroidism (brown tumors) / Hemangioma
- Infection
- Non-ossifying Fibroma
- Eosinophilic Granuloma / Enchondroma
- Solitary Bone Cyst
This is a fairly long differential diagnosis. However, it is one that you must learn. I still run through it every time I see one of these lesions, just to make sure that I consider all of the important possibilities.
The discussion that follows will dwell almost totally on the plain radiographic findings of these lesions. CT and MRI are wonderful tools for tumor workups, but they are fairly non-specific. Their place in the workup is to tell us where the lesion is: what its extent is; whether there are any metastases (either in the same bone or elsewhere); and whether an adjacent joint, nerve or blood vessel is involved. However, to tell us what a lesion is, the plain radiograph is still supreme. We've been looking at the darned things for almost a century now, and the plain film findings of most bone tumors are fairly well known. Plain films are not terribly sensitive, but they do have a decent specificity. Therefore, any workup of a bone tumor should start with a good set of plain films.
Patient age is a very important bit of knowledge to have in the workup of a tumor. According to Edeiken, about 80% of malignant tumors can be correctly diagnosed on the basis of age alone. From a study of the age prevalence of 4,000 malignant bone tumors, he gives the following table:
Age vs. Malignant Tumor Type
AGE (years) | TUMOR |
1 | neuroblastoma |
1 – 10 | Ewing's of tubular bones |
10 – 30 | osteosarcoma, Ewing's of flat bones |
30 – 40 | reticulum cell sarcoma (Primary histiocytic lymphoma), fibrosarcoma, parosteal osteosarcoma, malignant giant cell tumor, lymphoma |
40 + | metastatic carcinoma, multiple myeloma, chondrosarcoma |
What does the size of a lesion tell us? Unfortunately, not a whole lot about the histological type of lesion that we are dealing with. However, describing the size of a lesion is part of another important aspect of tumor management: pretreatment staging of the extent of the lesion.
Surgery is the preferred treatment for many lesions in this category. The surgeon wants to know where to cut so as to remove all of the lesion, along with an area of normal tissue on all margins of the tumor. Lesion size as measured on plain films will not tell us this accurately — if anything, it tends to greatly underestimate the extent of the lesion. However, it provides a convenient first-order approximation of the extent (a lower bound on its size) while the early workup is being arranged. Definitive assessment of the pretreatment extent of a lesion will require MR or CT.
This is one of the most important things that you can determine about a solitary, lucent, expansile lesion of bone. Why is this? Because, this is the finding that will give you your best shot at determining the biological activity of the lesion (how fast is it growing?). This is important, because in general, the faster a process grows, the more likely it is to be malignant.
So, how can we determine biological activity from the margin of the lesion? The answer is bone response. Bone is sensitive to a variety of stimuli, and generally responds to one of the processes in FOGMACHINES by either removing bone or creating bone. That's right! The bone itself does the removing or creating of bone – not the disorder involving the bone. At the AFIP, they are fond of saying that the only things that can remove bone are osteoclasts and orthopedic surgeons. I agree with this rule, but would also add talented amateurs to the list (lawnmower and saw accidents, auto crashes, blast injuries, and animal bites are favored mechanisms of bone removal by amateurs — professionals prefer saws, drills, and osteotomes and confine their efforts to operating rooms). For this reason, the term "expansile lesion" is a bit of a misnomer, since the lesion itself is not expanding the bone. The bone is remodeling itself in response to the stimulus of the lesion.
The other thing to know about bone response is that while it is certain, it is rather slow. If a lesion is growing slowly, then the bone will have plenty of time to retreat from the lesion, removing some bone around the lesion, but also laying down new bone around the margins of the lesion. This generally has the effect of producing a sclerotic and usually distinct margin around the lesion. If process grows more rapidly, the bone may only have time to retreat before the lesion, and not have time to lay down this sclerotic rim. Solitary lucent lesions in bone with a distinct margin are generally called "geographic" lesions, whether or not they have a sclerotic rim.
geographic lesion with ill-defined rim | geographic lesion with well-defined rim |
If the lesion grows more rapidly still, there may not be time for the bone to retreat in an orderly manner, and the margin may become ill-defined. Rather than a single discrete lesion, we may see several ill-defined foci of lucency. This has been termed a "moth-eaten" pattern.
a "moth-eaten" lesion
If, alas, the process grows more rapidly still, then the bone's retreat may become disorderly indeed. Continuing this battlefield analogy, the boundary between normal and abnormal bone may be lost altogether, with only a very ill-defined pattern of lucency seen, caused by many small, irregular holes in the bone, left behind by osteoclasts. This is an extremely aggressive pattern, sometimes called a "permeative" pattern.
permeative pattern | normal bone |
The presence of a permeative pattern usually means that the patient either has an aggressive infection or a malignant tumor. The most common malignancies that give this pattern are metastases, myeloma, primary histiocytic lymphoma, and Ewing's sarcoma. These lesions are sometimes referred to as "round cell lesions" due to the small, dark, round cells that they display to the pathologist.
What is matrix, anyway? It is stuff produced by osteoblasts and chondroblasts that eventually becomes, respectively, normal bone and cartilage. Bone tumors form matrix just as a normal bone does, but sometimes in greater quantity. Also, matrix produced by tumors is usually quite abnormal, and does not ossify properly. Why do we look for tumor matrix? Because, it helps us to give a bone tumor a rough histological classification into one of three categories: cartilage-producing, bone-producing or other. Cartilaginous tumors (enchondroma, chondrosarcoma, chondromyxoid fibroma, etc.) will tend to produce cartilaginous matrix, while tumors from the osteoid series (osteoma, osteoblastoma, osteosarcoma, etc.) will tend to produce osseous matrix. In order to see matrix on plain radiographs, it has to calcify. Chondroid matrix, for example tends to produce small punctate or swirled areas of calcification. Adjectives applied to this cartilaginous matrix include "popcorn-like", "curvilinear", or "speckled". Osseous matrix tends to be dense and confluent, and invokes descriptive terms like "cloud-like" or "mashed potatoes". Other lesions tend to produce little or no calcification in their matrix (fibrous dysplasia, fibrosarcoma, malignant fibrous histiocytoma, solitary bone cyst, etc.). Although the term "ground-glass" has been applied to this appearance of matrix, I think that it is a bit confusing, since a fogged film with no diagnostic information on it has a ground-glass appearance also. If I don't see any definite calcified matrix in a lesion, I prefer to just say that instead.
Most expansile, lucent lesions are located in the medullary space of the bone. However, we can further define the location of the lesion by noting its relationship to the physis. Many lesions tend to occur in a "favorite" part of the bone. The favored locations are listed in the figure below.
figure after Madewell, et al 1981
Very few lesions tend to arise in the epiphysis. Chondroblastoma is one of the very few tumors that arise here before the physis closes. Osteomyelitis can also arise in the epiphysis.
Several entities can spread across the physis. Osteomyelitis is a classic example of this. Although the dogma for years has been that malignancies such as osteosarcoma and Ewing's tumor rarely cross the physis, more recent experience with MRI has shown this to be untrue. With very sensitive pulse sequences such as STIR (short-tau inversion recovery), subtle extension across the physeal plate may be seen not uncommonly.
After the plate closes, the physis ceases to be an anatomic barrier to disease, and a variety of lesions can be seen involving the epiphyseal area, such as giant cell tumor, enchondroma or aneurysmal bone cyst. Helpful tips in steering the differential diagnosis among these entities include the facts that most enchondromas will exhibit chondroid matrix, most giant cell tumors will abut an articular margin, and most aneurysmal bone cysts appear, well, "aneurysmal" or expansile. It was once thought that aggressive tumors, such as Ewing's tumor and osteosarcoma tended to "respect" the physeal plate and only rarely cross it. However, more recent studies (Panuel,Norton) of the behavior of such tumors with sensitive MR pulse sequences show that osteosarcomas may cross the plate into the epiphysis in 70 – 80 % of cases and Ewing's tumor in about 20 %.
This is the fastest growing area of a bone, and also the most likely area for a primary neoplasm to arise. This is especially true in the distal femur and proximal tibia, which are the fastest growing metaphyseal areas in the skeleton. The metaphysis also has the best blood supply of the bone, so entities such as infection or metastasis will commonly be seen in this area as well. In general, most of the entities in FOGMACHINES (with the exception of chondroblastoma) will be most commonly seen in the metaphyseal area of a given bone.
Most of the entities in FOGMACHINES can also appear in the diaphysis, although with less frequency. Notable exceptions are: chondroblastoma, which almost always occurs in an epiphysis or epiphyseal equivalent (most apophyses, the patella and the calcaneus); giant cell tumor, which almost always occurs in an apophysis or in the bone adjacent to a join space; osteoblastoma, which usually occurs in the posterior elements of the spine; and aneurysmal bone cyst, which is usually metaphyseal in location.
Periosteal Reaction
Periosteal reaction is an important finding to note in the workup of bone tumors. However, it also occurs due to several other processes besides tumors. Therefore, I have given periosteal reaction a chapter all to itself. Please refer to this chapter on periosteal reaction for a discussion of how it relates to bone tumors.
So, what do you do if the patient has multiple lucent lesions? Well, you go through pretty much the same thought processes that you went through for a solitary lesion. The main thing that is different is the differential diagnosis that you use. A lot of the entities in FOGMACHINES don't really make sense as a cause of multiple lucent lesions. However, some of them do. It turns out that one can simply trim out the entities that don't make sense and what's left works just fine for multiple lesions. Thus, our differential reduces like this:
Differential Diagnosis of Multiple Lucent Bone Lesions
Mnemonic = FOGMACHINES –> FEMHI
- Fibrous Dysplasia
- Metastasis / Myeloma
- Hyperparathyroidism (brown tumors) / Hemangioma
- Infection
- Eosinophilic Granuloma / Enchondroma
This leaves the letters FMHIE as our differential for multiple lucent lesions. Try as I might, I still haven't been able to come up with any kind of decent word out of these letters. Clyde Helms orders them as FEMHI, and you can make up your own order if you like. If you do come up with a real word in English or some other language out of these five letters, tell me what it is and I will buy you a taco.
Wise Sayings About Solitary Lucent Lesions
Sometimes, all the logical principles that you have at your disposal don't seem to help very much, and one must fall back on some of the empirical maxims that musculoskeletal radiologists have accumulated over the years. Here are a few of the ones I have used over the years.
- With a long lesion in a long bone, think of fibrous dysplasia.
- Simple cyst, enchondroma, and fibrous dysplasia can mimic each other and can be hard to distinguish. Thus, when you think of one of these three entities, also think of the other two.
- Giant cell tumors nearly always occur near a joint surface.
- Certain bones in the body can be considered "epiphyseal equivalents" for purposes of differential diagnosis. These include the patella, the calcaneus, and most apophyses. Therefore, for lucent lesions in these areas, one should include the classic epiphyseal entities such as chondroblastoma, giant cell tumors and aneurysmal bone cysts.
- Lucent lesions of the sternum should be considered malignant until proven otherwise (Helms CA, personal communication, 1983).
- Keep in mind that the classic descriptions of bone tumors that you spend so much time studying are for untreated lesions. What kind of lesions do radiologists spend most of their time looking at? Treated lesions — treated with surgery, chemotherapy, cryotherapy and radiation therapy. In surgically treated lesions, besides simple resection of the lesion, one may also see replacement by a metal prosthesis, an allograft, or other forms of bone grafting. In short, you won't see the "classic" appearance of a lesion for very long in a given patient. When the patient first presents to you, you may not even have any history of these prior interventions, so you will just have to remember this phenomenon. Also, any given film that you see of a patient is just one frame out of a long documentary movie about that patient — movies change. Remember this.
- Edeiken J. Roentgen diagnosis of diseases of bone. (4th ed.) Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1989 (Harris JJ, ed. Golden's diagnostic radiology).
- Madewell JE, Ragsdale BD, Sweet DE. Radiologic and pathologic analysis of solitary bone lesions. Part I: Internal margins.Radiol Clin N Am 1981;19:715-748.
- Panuel M, Gentet JC, Scheiner C, Jouve JL, Bollini G, Petit P, Bourliere-Najean B, Devred P. Physeal and epiphyseal extent of primary malignant bone tumors in childhood. Correlation of preoperative MRI and the pathologic examination. Pediatr Radiol 1993;23:421-424.
- Norton KI, Hermann G, Abdelwahab IF, Klein MJ, Granowetter LF, Rabinowitz JG. Epiphyseal involvement in osteosarcoma.Radiology 1991;180:813-816.


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subset: commoncrawl


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The former cellmates apparently broke a cell window, pulled out the bars then descended almost 20 stories to escape the downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center early Tuesday.
Joseph "Jose" Banks, 37, and Kenneth Conley, 38, were unaccounted for during a 5 a.m. headcount, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. An FBI affidavit says the men were in their assigned areas for a head count around 10 p.m. Monday and that jail employees noticed the makeshift rope around 7 a.m. Nearby business owners said helicopters and canine units did not swarm the area until almost 8:30 a.m.
Inside the cell Tuesday morning, investigators found a broken window and bars inside a mattress, according to an FBI affidavit. Stuffed under blankets on two beds were clothing and sheets, shaped to resemble a body, the affidavit said.
Hours after the escape, the rope of bed sheets could be seen dangling down the side of the building, at least 200 feet long and knotted about every 6 feet.
The FBI has declined to provide details of the escape, but a close-up photograph clearly shows damage to the concrete along the lower edge of the window, which is 6 feet tall but only 6 inches wide. Damage broadened the hole through which the men must have had to climb.
Banks and Conley were the first inmates to escape from the federal facility in nearly two decades. It was still unclear how they were able to accumulate enough bed sheets and other items to pull off the escape or how jail guards failed to detect the scheme or notice that the men were gone until several hours later.
The FBI reissued a plea to the public to be on the lookout for the men, whom they believe are traveling together, and warned that they should be considered armed and dangerous. On Wednesday, Thomas Trautmann, the acting special agent-in-charge of the FBI's Chicago office, announced a $50,000 reward leading to their arrests.
The apparently meticulously planned escape from the 27-story facility came just a week after Banks made a courtroom vow of retribution. The men, who have yet to be sentenced, are facing hefty prison terms.
The facility, which can house up to 700 inmates, is one of the only skyscraper lockups in the world, and experts say its triangular shape was meant to make it easier to guard, theoretically reducing blind spots for guards. The only other escape from the nearly 40-year-old facility occurred in the mid-1980s, U.S. Marshal's Service spokeswoman Belkis Cantor said.
Banks and Conley both were wearing orange jumpsuits, but police believe they quickly changed into white T-shirts, gray sweatpants and white gym shoes. The FBI believes both men were in Tinley Park, a heavily wooded area about 25 miles south of Chicago. Authorities were scouring a local forest preserve in the afternoon.
SWAT teams stormed at least one home in Tinley Park on Tuesday. Although neither man was found, evidence suggested that both had been at the home just hours earlier, according to the FBI. On Wednesday, police in neighboring Orland Park said a search had been conducted Tuesday of a home where an associate of Conley lived or once lived, but that search came up empty as well.
Some schools went on lockdown after being inundated with calls from nervous parents. Mike Byrne, a superintendent in Tinley Park, said "our parents are so emotionally charged right now" because of the school shootings in Connecticut.
Banks, known as the Second-Hand Bandit because he wore used clothes during his heists, was convicted last week of robbing two banks and attempting to rob two others. Authorities say he stole almost $600,000, and most of that still is missing.
During trial, he had to be restrained because he threatened to walk out of the courtroom. He acted as his own attorney and verbally sparred with the prosecutor, at times arguing that U.S. law didn't apply to him because he was a sovereign citizen of a group that was above state and federal law.
After he was convicted by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, he said he would "be seeking retribution as well as damages," the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune reported.
When the judge asked how long he needed to submit a filing, Banks replied: "No motion will be filed, but you'll hear from me."
Pallmeyer, a prominent federal judge who oversaw the corruption trial of now imprisoned former Illinois Gov. George Ryan, appeared to stick to her regular schedule Tuesday and there were no signs of extra security. Her office declined comment.
Conley pleaded guilty last October to robbing a Homewood Bank last year of nearly $4,000. Conley, who worked at the time at a suburban strip club, wore a coat and tie when he robbed the bank and had a gun stuffed in his waistband.
The brother of Hollywood director Christopher Nolan also tried to escape in 2010. Matthew Nolan, who was being held pending an extradition request, was sentenced to 14 months in jail for plotting to escape the high-rise jail by hiding a rope made out of bed sheets in his cell.
Associated Press writer Sara Burnett contributed to this report.


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Icelandic Sheepskin Rug Grey Runner (Double) XL
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(Sheepskin rugs are measured from the fur side of the rug. The dimensions are approximate and can vary from rug to rug).
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Double Icelandic Sheepskin Rug in a Grey colour. This rug is two single rugs carefully matched a sewn together (end to end) to create this great rug
Each rug is produced in an eco-friendly way. All Icelandic Sheepskin rugs from Rughouse are also non allergenic.
The characteristics are long fluffy wool, naturally shaped; the wool also tends to be curlier than your standard Sheepskin Rug and very soft to the touch.
Do not expose dyed skin to strong light and direct sunlight to avoid fading and colour change. Colour transfer may occur if put on wet or light place like sofas.
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While honest toil is honorable, a day to honor labor does make it easy to overlook certain realities, such as: Why do both left and right clamor for more jobs? Would those who get to opine for a living be willing to perform the jobs they'd impose upon others? And why jobs? If work is the only way one can be worthy of an income, why not also clamor for self-employment and start-ups? Must the jobless look forward to having a boss their entire lives? And are more jobs needed, or even possible?
Instead of clamor for jobs, why not clamor for a shorter workweek and divide the necessary work among more people? How'd 40 hours a week get to be some sort of magic number? Why aren't automation and globalization whittling that down to 30, 20, 10, going, going, gone? Juliet Schor in her "Overworked American" (1991) calculated that if increases in productivity (more output from less labor input) over the course of a baby boomer's career were applied not to things like fatter CEO salaries, but to shrinking the workweek, it'd now be 6.5 hours. Why isn't it?
It has been drastically shorter in the past. In his "Stone Age Economics" (1974), Marshall Sahlins calculated some aborigines worked 15 hours per week. In his "Six Centuries of Work and Wages" (1884), James E. Thorold Rogers, member of Parliament, calculated that after a plague, peasants worked 14 hours per week. (Those were the Dark Ages, and now at 40 hours we're the enlightened ones?) What happened was plagues left fewer people to work prime land so, for a while, surviving aristocrats could not exploit farmers. The key in both instances was access to bountiful land which let humans choose to work as much or as little as they liked.
Now, days with billions of humans on the globe, land is not quite as accessible, but it could be made more affordable. When that happens, jobs sprout and wages climb, as has happened several times: In the 1960s and 1970s, New Zealand's employment rate averaged 99 percent for ten years. In the late 1950s, Danish workers received the biggest one-time raise in wages in Dansk history. And in the 1920s, New York City spurred the construction of numerous apartment buildings that provided jobs and slashed unemployment to negligible.
What was the one thing those places did in common? Their governments levied land. Whenever landowners must pay a heavier land tax, they eschew speculation and put their parcels to good use. The new construction puts people to work as do the resultant shops, offices and factories, as does the spending of wages by the gratefully employed workers.
Why is such a powerful tool for useful employment at decent wages left on the shelf by jobists? Perhaps because today there's a huge disconnect between labor, which has a voice, and its Day and land, which lacks a voice and needs a Day. At college, economics students still learn Ricardo's Law and how wasting prime sites, where wages are high and falling back on marginal sites, where wages are low, forces down overall wages, but they're required to forget that by the time they become the practicing economists whose opinions you see in the media.
Ironically, what economists have forgotten labor organizers used to know. About a century and a quarter ago, the most popular American in any union was a self-taught reformer, Henry George, advocate of the single tax on land and the Labor Party's 1886 candidate for mayor of New York, a race which he won, defeating Teddy Roosevelt in the process, but was denied office by the machinations of Tammany Hall. Samuel Gompers of the AFL-CIO proclaimed himself proud to be a friend of ol' Henry, who even had a cigar named after him. George's campaign manager, Louis Post, who went on to become assistant secretary of labor under Woodrow Wilson, pushed to make Labor Day, which some unions were already celebrating, an official holiday on the first Monday in September, which would some years coincide with the birthday of Henry George, September 2, and honor him, too.
It hasn't quite worked out that way. But forgetting the laws of economics does not make them go away. Idle land still makes idle hands, as the old reformers used to say. Drive around your city's slums; vacant lots – invisible to contemporary urbanites – are still the best indicator of joblessness, poverty and crime. And shifting the property tax off buildings and improvements, onto land and locations, is still the most effective way to harness both prime land and willing labor. A close second must be detaxing wages. If you want jobs so badly, why make them so costly?
This shift of taxes, this powerful reform, awaits implementation even as the left begs for jobs – anything to get money into the pockets of the poor – and the right pays jobs lip service – what better way to keep the poor busily subservient? But given the resultant rush hours, shriveled family time and sterile communities, it's a Faustian bargain at best. J.W. Smith in his "World's Wasted Wealth" (1994) suggested that if all the people now producing illth – everything from war toys to planned obsolescence – were to instead help produce wealth, we could cut the workweek in half.
This Labor Day, do remember our venerable organizers. But don't forget what generates truly useful jobs organically, the levy on land. It's always worked wherever tried, to the degree tried. Then take the rest of the day off.


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Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Tandems Overcome Bicycle Solpisism Which Overcomes Nihilism
2 comments:
Thanks fer teh spellchek Rantwick. I think I have a mental block against the spelling of solipsism due to solecism, not that that makes much sense. It's not a word I see used commonly in my day to day work or reading. I think I remember a professor delivering a scathing critique of one of my essays which went "Your writing is so littered with solipsisms, solecisms, shibboleths, jargon and acronyms that only a superliterate specialist could make sense of it." Sweet, best compliment I ever received. Or is that a complement?
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Photos - Burying Ireland's Great Hunger's dead on Staten Island
Irish famine victims buried in hastily dug ditches on Staten Island will finally be buried in graves that will honor their memories today, Sunday April 27.
Sunday's ceremony will see the remains of 83 men, women and children receive a proper burial after they were removed from mass graves in trenches behind a quarantine hospital.
"We know from the enamel analysis of the teeth that there were periods of extreme hunger and stress," archaeologist Cece Saunders said. "And we know from the analysis of the bone that these were heavy laborers."
Participating at the graveside reinterment will be Monsignor James Dorney, Assemblyman Michael Cusick who is also president of the American Irish Legislators Society of New York State, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Staten Island Pipes and Drums and tenor Andy Cooney.
The service will act as a tribute not just to their struggles, but to the many other Irish immigrants who crossed the Atlantic and died soon after their voyages.
Lynn Rogers, the Executive Director of the Friends of the Abandoned Cemeteries, who is heading up this reinterment, explained that between 1799 and 1858, Staten Island was home to the Marine Hospital Quarantine Station, where tens of thousands of immigrants, largely from Ireland, were sent to recover if New York medical inspectors found them suffering from infectious diseases. Between 1845 and 1852, as the Great Hunger ravaged the Irish nation, many of those arriving in New York were Irish.
Rogers said, "It was a ghastly end for so many of these people who had left Ireland in hopes of a new life in America.
"Their fate was tragic, but now, more than a century and half later, they will receive the recognition and benediction they never received in life."
One New York newspaper reported in April, 1851, "The number of poor people from Ireland who are wandering through the streets of Staten Island in a starving condition is dreadful."
PHOTOS - Remains of victims of Ireland's Great Hunger at Moravian Cemetery, Staten Island
They died in the streets or at the Marine Hospital. Rogers explained, "There were no records, no death certificates. In many cases people were dying before they could get them up the hill to bury them. They were being buried in mass graves as they died."
During construction of the St. George Court facilities, a team of professional archaeologists exhumed the remains from these mass graves. DNA testing revealed that all exhumed bodies were of Celtic origin.
There are thousands of remains beneath modern day Staten Island, buried in haste to avoid the spread of disease at the time.
The reinterment of these remains has touched many Irish and Irish Americans searching for their ancestors, who they believe traveled to New York. Often, their research comes to a dead end when they find no record of arrival or a death certificate. Thousands simply disappeared.
Richard L Simpson, a promoter of Staten Island history who visited the coffins said, "It struck me when we were looking at these coffins, 'These could be members of my family and I'd never know.'"
Photos - Burying Ireland's Great Hunger's dead on Staten Island
Rogers said the interest in the reinterment of the bones has been astounding. Many people are making the journey from as far as Chicago to pay their respects on April 27.
She added, "Many Irish immigrants, whose only reason for being on Staten Island was because of the quarantine decided to stay and make their new life here. Today, they are 6th and 7th generation Staten Islanders. It would be so fitting if some of the heirs of those first immigrants were to join us on the 27th."
The Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries will oversee reburial of those remains in a recreated cemetery on the grounds of the new St. George court house. The Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries is also producing a commemorative booklet and is seeking memorial ads. For more information contact email@example.com or call 917-545-3309.
Read more: Burying the Irish Famine dead in Staten Island - PHOTOS
Irish American Jack King, 71, will take part in Sunday's service in honor of two of his ancestors whom he believes were quarantined after arriving from Ireland.
He told the New York Times : "I'm probably one of the proudest Irishmen that you could find, to know that relatives had gone through this and I have an opportunity to put them to rest. This puts a final end to their sorrows."The New York Times report outlines how ships sailing into New York Harbor docked at Staten Island for a health inspection before facilities opened on Ellis Island in 1892.
All passengers and crew members had to be examined at the quarantine hospital on Staten Island and many of those deemed unfit for entry to the United States died there.
Mark Russo, the president of Friends of Abandoned Cemeteries, a community group that cleans and maintains forgotten grave sites on Staten Island and helped organized Sunday's service, outlined what happened next to the paper.He said: "If they were determined to be sick, they were quarantined. And that quarantine turned into a pretty nasty place and a lot of people didn't make it out.
"These people came over hoping to see their new land and all they saw was the inside of a hospital and in their death, they were thrown into a mass grave.
"Here I am, an Italian-English kid doing this for Irish and German immigrants. I'm doing it because we are all immigrants."
The remains have sat in two elaborate coffins stored in a 19th-century crypt at nearby Moravian Cemetery since their excavation. A large gray coffin contains all the adult bones, and a smaller white one is used for the children's remains.
Prayers will be said over the coffins on Sunday before they are lowered into a subterranean vault, which will then be sealed. Atop the nearly one-acre footprint of the burial ground, there is a memorial with green grass, pale pathways and rows of trees.
Photos - Burying Ireland's Great Hunger's dead on Staten Island
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Alaskan Tlingit Indian Traditional Knowledge: Trees Are People
Russell Stigall
Juneau Empire
Tlingit Elder Elaine Abraham shared stories of her ancestors' relationship with their environment at the Alaska Rainforest Center's symposium at Centennial Hall, Thursday.
The three-day event encouraged collaboration between organizations with a stake in the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.
Abraham spoke particularly of her people's connection to trees.
She offered stories of Tlingit warriors who dressed for battle with trees, shamans who negotiated with trees, trees that offer their own lives for tools and homes and fire. These same trees would dictate wise caveats for their sacrifice.
The Tlingit and Haida have lived in Southeast Alaska for thousands of years. Abraham offered a look at how they did it.
Abraham said her ancestors left messages on stones as they migrated between Ketchikan and Yakutat. These messages are still found along low tide beaches, she said.
Abraham said the information she would deliver to the audience came from her father, Olaf David Abraham.
"He'll be giving messages for you," Abraham said.
Tlingit warriors would fast and pray for day to lead them in to the right trees they will use to make wooden collars. The trees were selected by a shaman. The area became protected and the trees gave permission to be killed, Abraham said.
"They have to ask the tree people … we don't call them trees, we call them 'the people of the trees,'" Abraham said. "From the rock to the streams and we lived in close communication with them. They were people to us."
She told about a man from the Owl House killed by a fallen tree. The tree trapped the body.
"The tree people refused to give up the body," Abraham said.
So Abraham's ancestors fought back.
"They put on their royal battle armor and went to the edge of the trees and challenged the tree people to war."
Instead of war, as a symbol of peace they carved an image of the man from the Owl house from the tree that had crushed him.
That's how close the relationships are, Abraham said. "You read about it in your books and it says they were really close to the animals and plants. We lived with them as if they were human beings. We didn't see it any different."
Abraham lives in Yakutat. She was the first Tlingit registered nurse and worked in Juneau, Mt. Edgecumbe and Bethel.
She's held leadership positions at Sheldon Jackson College and the University of Alaska.
"Abraham is a revered Tlingit elder and serves as Chairperson of the Board of Commissioner's of the Alaska Native Science Commission," according to the Alaska Native Science Commission website. (http://www.nativescience.org/html/abraham.html)


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Rob Houck
Head of Technology Innovation
UL Compliance to Performance
Rob Houck is the head of technology innovation at UL Compliance to Performance. He has provided strategic direction for learning and talent management software, managed software development and support of technology products and services, and overseen software implementations for more than 3.2 million users in 73 organizations. Rob has worked in technology for more than 25 years and has consulting experience ranging from small business to Fortune 100 clients.


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1 Chronicles 4
The Message
An Appendix to the Family of Judah
4 1-2 Sons of Judah: Perez, Hezron, Carmi, Hur, and Shobal. Reaiah, Shobal's son, had Jahath; and Jahath had Ahumai and Lahad. These made up the families of the Zorathites.
3-4 Sons of Etam: Jezreel, Ishma, and Idbash. Their sister was named Hazzelelponi. Penuel had Gedor and Ezer had Hushah. These were the sons of Hur, firstborn son of Ephrathah, who was the father of Bethlehem.
5-8 Ashhur the father of Tekoa had two wives, Helah and Naarah. Naarah gave birth to Ahuzzam, Hepher, Temeni, and Haahashtari—Naarah's children. Helah's sons were Zereth, Zohar, Ethnan, and Koz, who had Anub, Hazzobebah, and the families of Aharhel son of Harum.
* * *
9-10 Jabez was a better man than his brothers, a man of honor. His mother had named him Jabez (Oh, the pain!), saying, "A painful birth! I bore him in great pain!" Jabez prayed to the God of Israel: "Bless me, O bless me! Give me land, large tracts of land. And provide your personal protection—don't let evil hurt me." God gave him what he asked.
* * *
11-12 Kelub, Shuhah's brother, had Mehir; Mehir had Eshton; Eshton had Beth Rapha, Paseah, and Tehinnah, who founded Ir Nahash (City of Smiths). These were known as the men of Recah.
13 The sons of Kenaz: Othniel and Seraiah.
The sons of Othniel: Hathath and Meonothai.
14 Meonothai had Ophrah; Seraiah had Joab, the founder of Ge Harashim (Colony of Artisans).
15 The sons of Caleb son of Jephunneh: Iru, Elah, and Naam.
The son of Elah: Kenaz.
16 The sons of Jehallelel: Ziph, Ziphah, Tiria, and Asarel.
17-18 The sons of Ezrah: Jether, Mered, Epher, and Jalon. One of Mered's wives, Pharaoh's daughter Bithiah, gave birth to Miriam, Shammai, and Ishbah the father of Eshtemoa. His Judean wife gave birth to Jered father of Gedor, Heber father of Soco, and Jekuthiel father of Zanoah.
19 The sons of Hodiah's wife, Naham's sister: the father of Keilah the Garmite, and Eshtemoa the Maacathite.
20 The sons of Shimon: Amnon, Rinnah, Ben-Hanan, and Tilon.
The sons of Ishi: Zoheth and Ben-Zoheth.
21-23 The sons of Shelah son of Judah: Er the father of Lecah, Laadah the father of Mareshah and the family of linen workers at Beth Ashbea, Jokim, the men of Cozeba, and Joash and Saraph, who ruled in Moab and Jashubi Lehem. (These records are from very old traditions.) They were the potters who lived at Netaim and Gederah, resident potters who worked for the king.
The Family of Simeon
24-25 The Simeon family tree: Nemuel, Jamin, Jarib, Zerah, and Shaul; Shaul had Shallum, Shallum had Mibsam, and Mibsam had Mishma.
26 The sons of Mishma: Hammuel had Zaccur and Zaccur had Shimei.
27-33 Shimei had sixteen sons and six daughters, but his brothers were not nearly as prolific and never became a large family like Judah. They lived in Beersheba, Moladah, Hazar Shual, Bilhah, Ezem, Tolad, Bethuel, Hormah, Ziklag, Beth Marcaboth, Hazar Susim, Beth Biri, and Shaaraim. They lived in these towns until David became king. Other settlements in the vicinity were the five towns of Etam, Ain, Rimmon, Token, and Ashan, and all the villages around these towns as far as Baalath. These were their settlements. And they kept good family records.
34-40 Meshobab; Jamlech; Joshah the son of Amaziah; Joel; Jehu the son of Joshibiah, the son of Seraiah, the son of Asiel; Elioenai; Jaakobah; Jeshohaiah; Asaiah; Adiel; Jesimiel; Benaiah; and Ziza the son of Shiphi, the son of Allon, the son of Jedaiah, the son of Shimri, the son of Shemaiah—all these were the leaders in their families. They prospered and increased in numbers so that they had to go as far as Gedor (Gerar) to the east of the valley looking for pasture for their flocks. And they found it—lush pasture, lots of elbow room, peaceful and quiet.
40-43 Some Hamites had lived there in former times. But the men in these family trees came when Hezekiah was king of Judah and attacked the Hamites, tearing down their tents and houses. There was nothing left of them, as you can see today. Then they moved in and took over because of the great pastureland. Five hundred of these Simeonites went on and invaded the hill country of Seir, led by Pelatiah, Neariah, Rephaiah, and Uzziel, the sons of Ishi. They killed all the escaped Amalekites who were still around. And they still live there.
Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson


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"Gender constructions themselves are racialized. Our overarching notion of what is a good man and what is a good woman, are based on white people being good people and people of color being bad people."
Rinku Sen is the president and executive director of the Applied Research Center (ARC) and publisher of ColorLines magazine. A leading figure in the racial justice movement, Rinku has positioned ARC as the home for media and activism on racial justice. She has extensive practical experience on the ground, with expertise in race, feminism, immigration, and economic justice. Over the course of her career, Rinku has woven together journalism and organizing to further social change. She also has significant experience in philanthropy, as vice chair of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and Advisory Committee member of the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. Previously, she was the co-director of the Center for Third World Organizing.
Jesse Clarke: What kind of organizing for racial justice were you doing in the late '80s and early '90s? How was it different from today?
Rinku Sen: I think the big difference between now and the late '80s is that race and racial justice were not considered core factors in community organizing then. It wasn't something you were supposed to build into your organizing ambitions and your campaign demands. Community organizing took a very race-silent approach then. What we and many colleagues around the country did was change the theory of community organizing to challenge the racial dynamic of the country.
Clarke: How much connection did you experience with the civil rights struggles of the '60s and '70s, which by then were historical legacies? Or for that matter, with the activists from the Alinsky stream of the community organizing movement, which wasn't looking at segregation and economic exclusion as fundamental parts of organizing?
Sen: In my perception, there was distance between us and civil rights players, organizations, and leaders who, partly as a result of the success of that movement, had become establishment people. They were school board members, city council members, members of Congress, and essentially, public sector targets for community organizing. The success of the civil rights movement created a more complicated political landscape. You had people of color as well as white people in decision-making power positions that had to be dealt with by community organizations and labor unions.
Another factor was that the civil rights movement was big, and involved many different kinds of people across the country, many of whom moved into community organizing. The major organizing networks were almost all populated—and many were led in the late '80s—by white, black, Latino, and Asian people who had cut their teeth on the civil rights movement. At that point, the key intervention to make was a diversity intervention. It was important to move people of color into organizing and for community organizing networks to recognize that they needed communities of color in their mix to be successful and relevant.
It wasn't until the latter part of the '90s that we, as organizers, got a sense that there was more to the race question than who was in the room. There was an analysis that you couldn't replace simply by putting a particular set of bodies together because simple diversity doesn't stand in for the analysis that really defines your organizing theory, your practice, and ultimately, what you can win for whom. Over the last 20 years, the work that I am proudest of is having created, not just a diversity paradigm, but an equity paradigm on race.
Clarke: What were the campaigns of the '90s, which brought the kind of analysis into the mix that went beyond just diversity?
Sen: One was a multi-year police accountability campaign that involved about seven organizations in different parts of the country. That effort created a participatory research process and a platform of demands that ran counter to the safety campaigns that mainstream community organizations were running. Community organizations, often with good numbers of people of color, were participating in and supporting the war on drugs. They were making deals with the police to increase police presence and helping to carry out the war on drugs in poor communities of color.
Starting in 1992, we worked with community members to look into the effects of that kind of criminalization. Was it actually keeping drugs out of our communities? It didn't look that way. Was it driving huge numbers of blacks and Latinos and increasing numbers of women into the criminal justice system? So it appeared. Did it result in policies that gave the police greater power in communities of color? That's how it looked.
By working on the analysis as well as having the people in the room we came up with a set of accountability demands on police departments, which included citizen review. One of the more creative arguments we made and actually won in a couple of cities was to get police departments to pay out civil rights lawsuits from their own budgets rather than the general city budget. That's a defensive victory but a pretty important one because it makes the police think about the cost of their civil rights violations.
Clarke: Can you talk about the impact of the shifting demographics in the U.S. and the evolution of what racism means within different communities—as a way of controlling people, distributing the workforce, and organizing the social and economic life to the benefit of the elite. What are some of your experiences of working with coalitions—the strengths and challenges?
Sen: At the Center for Third World Organizing we developed the notion that most communities live in a racial hierarchy. Because of the many different kinds of people in the country now, simple demographics take us beyond black and white, so you can't make blanket statements about all communities of color occupying the bottom of society. In fact, you might have certain Asian groups at the top of the income chain and others at the bottom of that chain. You might have black communities that have some political power but no economic power and Asians that have economic power but not much political power.
We have tried to develop a more complicated idea about how racism plays out and how we get played off against each other. We could create an ethic that says we don't all have to occupy the same rung on the racial ladder in order to feel committed to taking that ladder apart. The only reason for participating in racial justice work cannot be: "My people are at the bottom!" because your people are not always at the bottom. That's not a very sustainable motivation for acting and contributes to some real conflict in multiracial organizing situations. Everybody competes to be at the bottom in order to get their people's attention and get them involved. But we need a higher level of motivation and a baseline understanding of why we're all in the work. We need to deal with the realities of the time that we're living in.
When I was in college, there was the notion that all white people are racist because they're all racially privileged. I still hear this in a number of anti-racist trainings. Or that people of color can't be racist because they never had enough power to act on their racism. In a world where you have Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama, it's insulting to say that every person of color in a position of power is some white man's tool. It just absolves those people of all responsibility for dealing with racial equity, and I don't think we can let them off the hook. I think addressing racism is more complicated than just being anti-racist, which is a defensive posture. We need a proactive, affirmative, forward-looking vision of what racial equity means and what the country can gain from establishing it.
Clarke: So, even if you're a person of color, you can act on behalf of a racist and unjust economic system. But some earlier theories of economic analysis posit the somewhat simplistic idea that "The differences between the African American working class and the white working class are negligible, so we need to work primarily on the class relationship." In some circles there is a reductionist tradition in racial analysis. Can you share with us your view of the relationship between class and race and how organizing multiracial coalitions and dealing with economic justice are influenced by your class analysis of the situation?
Sen: Call me Pollyanna, but I just don't understand why class, race, and gender analysis can't exist together. Why do we have to decide that one thing is really the thing and everything else is tangential? That just isn't the way things work. I really object to a race-silent class analysis. As a young organizer, the theory of racial solidarity that I used was "We're all in it together—we're in the same boat." As I've grown older and had more exposure, I've come to understand that actually our boats aren't designed the same way, so we're not exactly in the same boat. Understanding those differences is key to solving the problem and to doing good multiracial organizing.
Just to give you an example, we work closely with the Idaho Community Action Network, a statewide organization of poor- and moderate-income white, Latino and American Indian, working people. The organization decided recently to test the signing up system for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Initially they thought, "Everybody has the same set of problems with that system, so we don't need to have a racial analysis." But then they decided to try to figure out if there are, in fact, racial differences in how people get screwed by the system. So, they sent in 27 people—nine sets of white, American Indian and Latino families. What they found was that 26 out of the 27 applicants got denied. So clearly, everybody gets screwed by the SCHIP system.
But, Latinos were the only people to be asked inappropriate questions about the immigration status of their kids. "Where did you have your child?" "How did you get across the border?" All the questions that government workers are not supposed to ask. If they hadn't done that study with a racial lens, they would have simply shortened the application form and changed the hours—problems that everybody faced—but not dealt with the questioning process that targeted only Latinos. Consequently, they would not have solved the problem for everyone and thus strengthened their multiracial relationships by clearly understanding how each party was affected differently.
Clarke: Can talk a little bit about how gender has figured into your analysis of racism, power, and class?
Sen: I did a training in the '90s for lead organizers that had a bunch of campaign planning activities to do. Just as a lark, we split the group into men and women. What we found was that the men focused in on the higher level strategy questions and were finished in half the time that I had alloted them. But they didn't do all of the exercise: they skipped over all of the questions about how to build relationships between people and how to manage the details of the campaign—the scheduling, the tracking of assignment, etc. They just skipped all those things that mostly women end up doing in organizations.
The women, on the other hand, spent so much time on the relational questions and on logistical details that they didn't have a whole lot to say about the overarching strategy. I think that's a division of labor that closely mirrors the division of labor among men and women in society. I don't think that the answer is to let everybody do what they've already learned how to do, but rather to train organizers to be good at all of the things they have to be good at. And to be aware of how their societal training and family training or their gendered training affects their ability to take on new skills in that mix.
Gender constructions themselves are racialized. Our overarching notion of what is a good man and what is a good woman, are based on white people being good people and people of color being bad people. So, if you look at the welfare debate, for example, that debate is full of gender judgments: The men aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, the women aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing. They are highly racialized definitions of what a man is and what a woman is. What a good man is, what a good woman is.
I do think it's important not to mush everything together as if race and gender and class all work in the same way. They don't. There are important differences in the way that the systems get set up and perpetuated. But there are so many more connections between them; so many more fundamental ways in which they influence each other that we tend not to pay attention to. When we don't pay attention, it really limits our ability to frame the issues that we're working on.
Clarke: What kinds of issues can and should be organized so that the questions are framed in a way that is also liberationist with respect to gender and which can advance a campaign that would expose gender and sexism as fundamental aspects of our cultural matrix and part of the equity problem?
Sen: I think that most issues have a gender element, a gender dimension, just as I think most issues have a racial dimension. I think a good example is "Don't ask, don't tell," the military policy around sexuality and being out, which in its actual application disproportionately affects black women. When you hear about the policy, you imagine white Army guys kind of forced to be in the closet and then forced out of the military. That's not who's actually getting a four star in the military under "Don't ask, don't tell." It's black women. That means that there's a racial and a gender, as well as a sexuality factor. It also means that black communities, particularly black women, might have a real stake in undoing that policy. But hardly anybody even knows that fact and very few people talk about it in relation to that debate. So, whatever stake black communities might have in changing that policy, goes totally under the radar.
Clarke: Can you talk a little bit about the fact that women of color are taking on leadership positions in different places now and have established some solid time under their belts.
Sen: There are lots and lots of really impressive women of color working in the field and taking on critical leadership roles, running big networks. Sarita Gupta is the head of Jobs with Justice, National Network of Labor Community Alliances. Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins is the head of Green for All. I could go on. I think it's really important to recognize the accomplishments of those women and the skills of those women. But, at the same time, I also hear many stories of women of color who stepped up into leadership positions in multiracial organizations and are just abandoned by all of the white people.
I have heard lots of stories about organizer training programs that train white graduates and graduates of color—mostly women, because it's women who do this work. The white graduates of the training program are hired immediately while the women of color either end up starting their own thing because they don't have another option or, are hired as the outreach person at a white organization, or end up not getting hired at all in organizing.
I think that there are still characteristics that make some of us more palatable leaders in the progressive world than others. You can't be too confrontational. You can't be too focused on race, for example. You can't be too insistent that gender always be in the mix of analysis. Perhaps I shouldn't say "you can't be" because I think I'm all of those things, but you have to make every decision extremely strategically. There's not much room for mistakes to be made, certainly not the kind of room that white men have in progressive politics. You can lose and lose and lose and still be the top strategist of major democratic campaigns, for example. That just would not be true for women leaders of color.
Clarke: Moving forward, what's the central racial justice challenge for building power for communities of color?
Sen: The environmental justice frame and the intellectual work that that movement did revealed how racism can work as a system even if the individuals within it are not consciously racist. Even if Union Carbide doesn't have consciously racist executives deciding, "We're going to make sure every community we target is a community of color because we just hate them." Even if that's not happening, the activities of Union Carbide have that impact, have the result of not just disproportionately creating health problems and poverty for people of color but actively exploiting those communities so that money can be made by someone else.
I think the biggest problem is that Americans don't understand how racism actually works today. They define it as interpersonal and explicit and blatant. So, if there's not a noose hanging somewhere, there's no racism involved. Communities of color also have that same definition. We're more sensitive to horrible interpersonal interactions. If we have the experience of discrimination it changes our outlook some, but our essential definition of racism is not systemic, it's individual. Until you get to a systemic definition, very little is going to change. We need everybody to embrace that systemic definition, regardless of their political position or their color.
I think it has been an enormous mistake to pursue short term gains—to win this election or that ballot measure. We have made lots of decisions about what we will not say because the "public" can't tolerate it, or is too stupid to understand the complexities of racism. We've based all kinds of political strategy—from school board races to budget fights to presidential campaigns—on the idea that Americans are too stupid to understand how a system works.
What we've done is let the muscle that can grapple with racism atrophy for 30 years. You know, when you exercise, you have to push yourself, not just maintain your resting heart rate. We have stopped engaging in the exercise and we have lost that muscle. I don't single out politicians of color as being better or worse than anyone else in this regard. But I do think that we have to pose that challenge wherever we can—to politicians, to government administrators, to teachers, to doctors, and to ourselves as activists.
B. Jesse Clarke is the editor of Race, Poverty & the Environment.Thanks to the National Radio Project for assistance in recording this interview.
The 20th Anniversary Issue | Vol. 17, No. 1 | Spring 2010 | Credits
Attachment | Size |
Rinku-Sen-Organizing.mp3 | 23.56 MB |


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Dir: Dror Moreh. Israel-France-Germany-Belgium. 2012. 95mins
The blood-soaked history of the Israeli-Palestine conflict is revisited from the unique perspective of the former leaders of the Shin Bet, Israel's secret service agency, in The Gatekeepers. Director Dror Moreh's fascinating documentary is reminiscent of The Fog Of War in the confessional intimacy of its testimony and the valuable insights that only arrive with the benefit of hindsight.
These are remarkable conclusions from men who have spent their lives fighting Israel's war on terror.
The combination of candid interviews and unfamiliar archive footage creates an intelligent and compelling film that sheds fresh light on an intractable situation. Further Festival exposure and specialist theatrical distribution should be guaranteed alongside keen interest from documentary channels and ancillary markets.
Moreh takes the Six Day War of 1967 as the starting point for an extensive overview of the subsequent Israeli occupation of Palestine and the question of why a significant military victory has never been transformed into a lasting political settlement. His focus is wide-ranging from the blossoming of hope at the time of the Oslo Accords to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, an act described by one Shin Bet leader " that shattered all hope". Moreh displays an ability to make complex issues accessible to the viewer and the use of computer animations based on photographs sometimes lends the film the air of a detective story.
Moreh's real coup is in persuading six former Shin Bet leaders to speak on camera for the first time, revealing the practicalities of what they were prepared to do to protect their country and their thoughts on the moral and ethical dilemmas that confronted them. There is a chilling quality to the matter-of-fact discussion of targeted assassinations, torture and betrayal as if they were all simply part of another day at the office.
There are justifications and evasions, sly smiles and disingenuous comments. You begin to suspect that Moreh will not be able to break their professional calm and belief that they did want was necessary to protect the lives of Israeli citizens regardless of the legality or morality of their actions.
Any suspicion that the film risks being one-sided is undermined when the Shin Bet leaders discuss the bigger questions. Here, they acknowledge the mistakes of their political leaders. Avraham Shalom comes clean about the notorious murder of terrorists captured alive after the hijacking of the 300 bus from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon in 1984. Ami Ayalon is scathing about the failure of the Camp David talks. Yuval Diskin, who retired in 2011, talks of his government creating a Palestinian nation steeped in the violence of a people who felt they had nothing to lose. All of the Shin Bet leaders in some way reflect on a sense of history repeating, nothing changing and no lessons having been learned.
The heart of the film lies in the tension between the actions these men were prepared to sanction and the insight that has bequeathed them. For all the talk of collateral damage, retaliation and revenge, they all seem to reach similar positions that the only way forward is through dialogue and the only hope lies in a two-state solution. These are remarkable conclusions from men who have spent their lives fighting Israel's war on terror.
Production Companies: Dror Moreh Productions, Les Films Du Poisson, Cinephil
International sales: Cinephil, www.cinephil.co.il
Producers: Dror Moreh, Estelle Fialon, Philippa Kowarsky
Cinematography: Avner Shahaf
Editor: Oron Adar
Production designer: Doron Koren
Main cast: Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gillon, Ami Ayalon, Avi Dichter, Yuval Diskin


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Im getting a lot of advertising in my e-mail, and I want to stop this.
this is a part of an e-mail I got:
>> Hi!
>> You have signed up to get the latest news
>> for Ricky Martin.
I never did sign up, never went to a website even related to ricky martin.
What is this??????
I also got an e-mail from microsoft about a developers convention.
I did go to the ms website, but never subscribed to anyhing.
did I activated somthig as "autosubscribe" or something.
How do websites get my e-mail address and how do I change this?
I want to give them another address they can use, not this one.
Im curious what else do they know about me (how do I prevent that) and how do they do it. A friend of mine told me it was a file that they accessed but I cant find it.
Any info on this topic is welcome.


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Jake Owen Celebrates Success of 'Alone With You' With Party in Nashville
On Tuesday afternoon (June 19), Jake Owen celebrated his recent chart-topping hit, 'Alone With You,' in Nashville. Owen was surrounded by his friends, family and industry peers, who all showed up to support the singer as he continues his steady climb to superstar status.
The party took place at Nashville hotspot, Cabana, where partygoers munched on pizza and enjoyed an assortment of cocktails while waiting for the ceremony to get under way. This was the second No. 1 party for Owen in recent months — back in November the newly-married was on hand to light candles in the name of his smash 'Barefoot Blue Jean Night.'
Owen and the song's three writers, Catt Gravitt, JT Harding and Shane McAnally, met with press prior to the party's start, and talked about the reason they were all gathered in the room and in a celebratory mood.
"I just knew the minute I heard the song that there was something that needed to be heard," Owen told Taste of Country prior to the start of the party. "It was one of those very vulnerable tunes, coming from a guy's perspective, especially. It was something that really hadn't been done that much or that often. It was something that just struck a chord with not only females, but a lot of guys."
"I felt like it was a good transition, after a fun summertime song ('Barefoot Blue Jean Night')," he continued. "It was a good song to kind of lead into the winter months where everybody kind of holds up in their house and gets cold and lonely."
But Owen was far from lonely at the party Tuesday, as Cabana was packed wall-to-wall with people who love and support the singer, including his lovely new bride and many A-list songwriters, like Jon Randall, Lance Miller, Dave Berg and Phil Barton, to name a few.
Owen is hoping to keep the No. 1 streak going with his latest summertime hit, 'The One That Got Away,' which he co-wrote along with 2011 BMI Songwriter of the Year and Peach Picker Dallas Davidson, as well as Jimmy Ritchey.


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Are We Headed for an Acquisition Brain Drain?
Procurement chief warns of an exodus, tells vendors he'd 'widen the aperture' to recruit contracting officers.
The top federal procurement officer on Thursday called for "not a tweak but a full rethink" of the government's planning for its acquisition workforce, warning that as many as 40 percent of the 36,000 federal contracting officers could retire in the next five years.
Joe Jordan, administrator of the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy, compared the coming brain drain to water flowing out of a "giant bathtub," saying he plans to push agencies to "widen the aperture of who they recruit."
Hiring managers should sell their agencies "as a good place to work for anyone who is smart and wants to serve" and then train them at facilities such as the Federal Acquisition Institute, Jordan told an audience of vendors and agency staff at the "Acquisition Excellence" conference hosted jointly by the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council and the General Services Administration. "Retaining these people in an era of continuing resolutions and pay freezes is a real challenge."
Joining with acting GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini, Jordan stressed the value of dialog with industry on ways to improve the acquisition process while highlighting the Obama administration's efforts to encourage efficiency, buy smarter, build agency relationships with government suppliers and develop a savvier acquisition workforce.
"Buying smarter means buying less, but doing it in a more thoughtful and focused way," said Jordan. He noted the administration was successful at reducing contracts by $20 billion in fiscal 2012 and moving interagency contracting off the Government Accountability Office's list of high-risk programs.
Agencies should shift the conversation about economical purchasing from a culture of "I think, I feel" to a culture of "data-driven analytics," Jordan said, calling for incentives for contracting officers to take managed risks. Though the Federal Acquisition Regulation states that actions not expressly prohibited can be pursued, he said, too many contracting officers work with an overly cautious mind-set for fear of congressional criticism. The administration "is standing up and saying, 'Look we're giving you air cover, so if you've done solid analytics and it didn't work out, that's okay. You made the right call, now what can we learn.' "
Jordan stressed his office's governmentwide push for greater use of strategic sourcing, and said he would like to move beyond the "boutique cuts" in contracts for office supplies and printing to more "transformational" approaches that "leverage the buying power of biggest purchaser in the world." He said agencies have far too little information on prices other agencies paid for tables and chairs and pens and pencils. The Procurement Office is partnering with GSA and the Defense Department on new software to "bootstrap an initial solution," he said.
As a symbol of his office's new push for dialog with industry and among agencies, Jordan touted his new Twitter account.
Tangherlini underlined the importance of streamlining the acquisition process for all agencies in the context of doing more with less in a period of "unprecedented budget cuts, which the sequester intensified, and which will be the environment for the foreseeable future."
GSA's schedules and its other shared services offerings enjoy only a 10 percent share of the federal acquisition market," he said. He wants to increase that share by partnering with agencies to "aggregate our purchasing power and reduce costs to the government." Purchasing officers who go out on "the open market incur their own costs in unnecessary and wasteful duplication," Tangherlini said. "The government has 4,000 wireless plans at different prices. The average family does a far better job of cellphone pricing."
Describing GSA's restructuring to consolidate functions such as information technology, human resources and financial services, the acting GSA head praised his newly assembled management team that includes Michael Casella as chief financial officer, Thomas Sharpe as commissioner for the Federal Acquisition Service (who spoke at the same conference) and Dorothy Robyn as commissioner for the Public Buildings Service.
"We want you to work with us and challenge us to make our offerings better," Tangherlini told the vendors and employees of other agencies. "If GSA doesn't meet the acquisition needs, tell us why so we can meet them."
Lesley Field, the deputy administrator for federal procurement policy, told a subsequent panel discussion that free dialog with industry "is one way to leapfrog toward innovation," adding that her office's quarterly front-line forum meetings with contractors has provided "great ideas for innovation and feedback" on OFPP memos. She encouraged all agencies to take advantage of such dialog.


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The Spectator's cover story this week is another re-examination of the changing face of the gender pay gap – somewhat provocatively titled "the Richer Sex".
Needless to say, women are not actually the richer sex. Their median wage remains 11 per cent below men's in the latest comprehensive study by the ONS, from 2007. Instead, the piece's author, Liza Mundy, touches on two trends which she sees in the UK.
The first is that, as the pay gap narrows (and it is narrowing – it is down from 16.5 per cent in 1997), the number of women earning more than their male partners will inevitably increase. Mundy highlights the apparently devastating effects that has on these "pursewhipped" men (a word apparently "slowly entering the English language", though not slowly enough):
I interviewed a woman I'll call Felicity, who married a gregarious salesman earning a third of what she did, But while he enjoyed the lifestyle her money could buy, he came to resent it. He started working less, playing golf more and watching TV instead of coming to bed with her. She wasn't surprised when she found his stash of online porn, but was still shocked. She ended up going into therapy.
Much the same argument was made, reduced to its barest essentials, by Tony Parsons on Woman's Hour in May, when he told Jane Garvey "my penis would literally fall off [if my wife earned more than me]. Literally, Jane, it would literally fall off."
Thankfully, this epidemic of shrivelled members is still a long time coming, because the gender pay gap has more structural reinforcement than Mundy makes out.
She correctly points to the fact that, in the first third of their lives, women – particularly educated, middle-class women – have largely closed the gap. Take the continued better performance of girls at GCSE, or her example of university education:
Women receive 58 per cent of all undergraduate degrees. Half of trainee barristers and 56 per cent of medical students are women, compared with 25 per cent in the 1960s.
And the increased success of younger women has paid off: between the ages of 24 and 32, the pay gap is negative. Younger women earn more than younger men.
But therein lies the rub. Munz optimistically assumes that this will continue; as that cohort ages, the gender gap will disappear, and women will actually become the richer sex. But the evidence points to a different outcome. The gender pay gap hasn't disappeared, it's just become a baby pay gap:
The pay gap between women and men with no children is 8.0 per cent. The pay gap between women and men with four children is 35.5 per cent. (For one child, it's 12.3, two is 14.9, and three is 19.0).
The pay gap between men and women who are married, cohabiting or in a civil partnership is 14.5 per cent; the pay gap between single men and women is -1.1 per cent. For the purposes of the point I am making, of course, one can read "single" as "unlikely to have a child any time soon".
It's not even enough to not have children, either. Once a woman reaches an age where potential employers think she might have children, the pay gap starts to widen.
The problem is that we have a legal system which emphatically reinforces the idea of women as carers, and from that we get the society we deserve. With the discrepancy between paternity and maternity leave, it's made unfairly difficult for a family to fight traditional gender roles. And so while I hope that Munz is right, and that we will start "calling into question the old notion that women are 'hard-wired' to seek providers", we can't just hope that a generation of smart girls will do it for us.


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Embed and use Typekit fonts in your WordPress website without having to edit your theme!
Typekit offer a service that allows you to select from a range of hundreds of high quality fonts for your WordPress website. The fonts are applied using the font-face standard, so they are standards compliant, fully licensed and accessible.
To use this plugin you need to sign up with Typekit, install this plugin and then either configure some Typekit selectors or define your own CSS rules. Typekit selectors provide a quick and easy way to get fonts enabled on your site. Using your own CSS rules (as explained in Typekit's Advanced tips) gives you more control and lets you access additional attributes such as font-weight. This plugin allows you to create your own CSS rules that use Typekit fonts without the need to edit/upload CSS style sheets.
Detailed instructions are available on the plugin's settings page.
This plugin by default uses Typekit's CSS embed code. However if you prefer, you can use the asynchronous Javascript embed.
Compatible with WordPress Multisite.
Available Languages
- Japanese – 日本語 ( ja )
Other Languages
If you would like to translate this plugin into another language, please visit the translate.wordpress.org site. Thank you!
Installation of this plugin is simple:
- Download the plugin files and copy to your Plugins directory.
- Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
- Go to the WordPress Dashboard, and use "Settings", "Typekit Fonts" to enter your kit ID and embed method.
- If you want to setup some CSS selectors like the examples shown in the Advanced link, enter your CSS rules in the plugin settings as well.
- Installation Instructions
Installation of this plugin is simple:
- Download the plugin files and copy to your Plugins directory.
- Activate the plugin through the 'Plugins' menu in WordPress.
- Go to the WordPress Dashboard, and use "Settings", "Typekit Fonts" to enter your kit ID and embed method.
- If you want to setup some CSS selectors like the examples shown in the Advanced link, enter your CSS rules in the plugin settings as well.
- Where can I get help?
There are detailed instructions on the plugin's settings page. See screenshot #2 for more information.
- Is this plugin secure?
Yes, see the plugin's description for more information.
- Which web browser(s) does Typekit support?
Please see this page for information on Typekit web browser support.
Contributors & Developers
"Typekit Fonts for WordPress" is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors"Typekit Fonts for WordPress" has been translated into 4 locales. Thank you to the translators for their contributions.
Translate "Typekit Fonts for WordPress" into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
- Add support for Typekit's new CSS embed method.
- Add support for Typekit's improved Advanced Javascript embed code.
- Simplified settings screen (just enter your Kit ID rather than your full embed code).
- WordPress 4.9 compatibility.
- Add support for Typekit's synchronous tracking code by setting async to false. Useful for avoiding FOUT.
- WordPress 4.8 compatibility.
- WordPress 4.7 compatibility.
- Add "Settings" link on plugins screen.
- WordPress 4.6 compatibility.
- Improved handling of the HTTP response when verifying a Typekit Kit URL.
- PHP7 compatibility (no more deprecated constructor warning).
- Use WordPress.org language packs for plugin translations.
- Improved compatibility with older PHP versions (no more pass by reference).
- Screenshot updates.
- Readme updates.
- Use Typekit's latest recommended embed code (which uses a https:// Typekit embed code URL for all sites).
- WordPress 4.3 compatibility.
- Change plugin's textdomain to match the plugin's folder name in preparation for translate.wordpress.org translations.
- WordPress 4.1 compatibility.
- Readme updates.
- Japanese language – thanks to ThemeBoy.
- Improved translation support.
- WordPress 3.8 compatibility.
- WordPress 3.5 compatibility.
- Use the new scheme-less typekit.net embed code format ( //use.typekit.net/xyz.js ).
- WordPress 3.4 compatibility.
- Clarify license as GPLv2 or later.
- WordPress 3.3 compatibility.
- Fix invalid HTML on settings page.
- Properly save/display settings.
- WordPress 3.2 compatibility.
- Translation/localization improvements.
- Fix localization deprecated notice (thanks to aradams for reporting).
- Store translation files in a /languages sub directory.
- WordPress 3.1 compatibility.
- Add support for HTTPS/SSL websites.
- WordPress 3.0.1 compatibility.
- Add instructions on how to use Typekit Kit Editor selectors.
- Add instructions on how to use font weights / styles.
- WordPress 2.9 compatibility.
- Improve FAQ.
- Initial release.


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"If the defiant fire of his words doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, then you have been on the Internet too long" — MTV Iggy
SUBATOMIC SOUND is back with a ground shaking, political scorcher from Jamaica's massive dancehall reggae star Anthony B on Subatomic Sound System & Nomadic Wax' re-upped "NYC-2-Africa" riddim, recorded in Africa, NYC, and Jamaica. In response to the universal anti-corruption message, it was remixed by producers from around the globe, essentially musically translating into the dialect of what's happening on their streets, resulting in twelve amazing versions we couldn't have imagined, from cumbia to tropical to all sorts of dubstep twist ups as well as vintage rude boy roots, hip hop, and dancehall reggae.
#1 on Juno for 3 weeks, top 20 7″s on Ernie B, 12 of the 15 tracks in Beatport's reggae top 50, top 100 in reggae on iTunes.
Cop it as digital release on Beatport, Juno, iTunes or on vinyl from Ernie B (US) or Juno (UK)


text: Stephen Johnson with Derrick Story. March 2008 In this video interview recorded in Orlando, FL at Photoshop World, Stephen Johnson talks about his seminal work, On Digital Photography, the evolution of digital cameras including how megapixels fit into that picture, and provides some great advice on how to best display your work. It's a terrific chat that I think you will enjoy. You can find out more about Stephen's ongoing projects and workshops by visiting his web site. |


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David Corn, writing in The Nation, sneak previews the coverage in "Hubris" of Valerie Plame's job at the CIA:
Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled.
Another issue was whether Valerie Wilson had sent her husband to Niger to check out an intelligence report that Iraq had sought uranium there. Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.
In 1997 [Ms. Plame] returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. But that summer--before 9/11--word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group.
There was great pressure on the JTFI to deliver. Its primary target was Iraqi scientists. JTFI officers, under Wilson's supervision, tracked down relatives, students and associates of Iraqi scientists--in America and abroad--looking for potential sources. They encouraged Iraqi émigrés to visit Iraq and put questions to relatives of interest to the CIA. The JTFI was also handling walk-ins around the world. Increasingly, Iraqi defectors were showing up at Western embassies claiming they had information on Saddam's WMDs. JTFI officers traveled throughout the world to debrief them. Often it would take a JTFI officer only a few minutes to conclude someone was pulling a con. Yet every lead had to be checked.
"We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming--wrongly--were for a nuclear weapons program. (The analysts rolled over the government's top nuclear experts, who had concluded the tubes were not destined for a nuclear program.)
Well. Unlike the Armitage "revalation", this story is not exactly testimony against interest - since it fits beautifully into Corn's preferred story line, we are left to wonder hwo hard he pushed his sources and how heavily he weighted (or discounted) less helpful information.
More later...
MORE: I'm still reeling - Ms. Plame was a senior officer in the specific CIA group that had spent the spring and summer of 2003 in a peeing contest with Dick Cheney. Well, I suppose his motive to out her might be greater than we expected. But guess what - Fitzgerald has investigated that for two years and has no case against Cheney.
And of course, her motive to be part of a politically motivated "Gotcha" game played by the CIA at the expense of the Vice-President is also greater than we expected.
This article does not really help with some outstanding issues, but here we go;
(1) Was Ms. Plame involved with orchestrating Joe Wilson's trip to Niger in 2002?
David Corn must be kidding when he tells us that
Hubris contains new information undermining the charge that she arranged this trip. In an interview with the authors, Douglas Rohn, a State Department officer who wrote a crucial memo related to the trip, acknowledges he may have inadvertently created a misimpression that her involvement was more significant than it had been.
Please - Ms. Plame was head of the JTFI Ops group, had proposed her husband for his 1999 trip to Niger, but was not involved here? Well, then, why does Libby's indictment include this:
7. On or about June 11, 2003, LIBBY spoke with a senior officer of the CIA to ask about the origin and circumstances of Wilson's trip, and was advised by the CIA officer that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and was believed to be responsible for sending Wilson on the trip.
Court filings eventually established that 'senior officer' to be Robert Grenier. So why was he wrong about this - more bad intel from the CIA? My guess - Grenier accidentally told the truth; later, the CIA scrubbed their story a bit. (Gosh, does that mean the CIA might, like, lie? That is almost like running a covert op...).
(2) Was Ms. Plame covert? We still don't know - the statutory definition of "covert" requires that her employment is classified (check!) and
who is serving outside the United States or has within the last five years served outside the United States;
And does "served" mean "formally posted" or is a flight to Europe (or Jordan) on Agency business sufficient?
No one has ever been tried under this statute, so we don't know. However, I bet some inspired legla researcher could find some relevant case law regarding State Department definitions of "service" that might be relevant. FWIW Victoria Toensing, who helped draft the law, insists that "served" means "posted", but who knows?
THE NON-BARKING DOG: Per the story, Cheney met with folks from the CIA team. Well, if he met Valerie Plame professionally, that evidence would have been presented by Fitzgerald, who has strained to come up with anything at all suggesting that Libby knew her status was classified. So far, he has a warning Libby received *after* Novak's column had been published.
THE "ENFORCED" LEAVE: Why did Ms. Plame take what the Daily Telegraph described as a unpaid "enforced leave of absence" in June od 2004, which was long after the initial leak drama, long after the birth of her twins, but just before the embarrassing Senate Intelligence Committee report? Does "Hubris" probe this? I'll bet!
GET ME ROBERT GRENIER! If Grenier actually told Libby that Ms. Plame was on the JTFI as head of operations, wouldn't that be quite unforgettable, whether he also mentioned her classified status was disclosed or not? What did Grenier tell Libby, and how does it impact his "I Forgot" defense? That asked, Special Counsel Fitzgerald has surely poked at this.
NOT A MONOLITH: It's worth keeping in mind that the CIA was hardly monolithic on the question of Iraqi WMDs - just offhand, the CIA had "Joe" at WINPAC promoting aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment centrifuges, supported the notion that captured trailers were for mobile bio-weapons labs, and vetted Powell's not-so-good speech to the UN. Was the CIA sure Saddam had no WMDs? Not a slam dunk!
Actually, Libby's complaint to Judy Miller in the summer of 2003, when the WMDs went missing, was quite different - his view was that the CIA sent over hedged reports before the war, then back-pedaled when the WMDs weren't found.
ALL CONSPIRACIES GET A WHIFF OF OXYGEN: As noted above, if Ms. Plame was so central to the Iraq effort (as opposed, for example, to manning the CIA's Estonia desk), then all conspiracies get a boost, including this one from an unlikely source - Kevin Drum. His speculation - the timing of Wilson's leaks and public statements were driven by information held only inside the CIA and passed to him by his wife.
If they were exploiting her classified status and their spousal immunity to embarrass the White House, that's naughty. Of course, there is no evidence that Fitzgerald ever investigated this, and no likelihood that he will (but that's what the civil suit is for!).