text:
The Shostakovich Variations
[NOTE: "The Shostakovich Variations" has been revised, updated, and re-published in A Shostakovich Casebook (Indiana University Press), just out in paperback. Get it here on Amazon.ca, or here on Amazon.com.]
Lingua Franca, MAY/JUNE 2000
See also: Wishful Thinking
The idea that Shostakovich was a 'secret dissident' remains powerful — but the actual evidence suggests otherwise.
The Nation, May 3, 2004
- Why Testimony is a Fraud
- Testimony: The Defense Never Rests
- Fake But Accurate: Shostakovich and "Truthiness"
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
–Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
If the epic tragedy of Soviet history were ever made into a film, the music of Dmitri Shostakovich would surely provide its soundtrack. At the piercing blast of a factory whistle (courtesy of Shostakovich's Second Symphony), peasants and workers would crowd the squares of 1917 Petrograd. The madcap 1920s, when Soviet Russia's last capitalists flaunted their wealth and Western tastes, might be accompanied by the inspired silliness of "Tea for Two" from the ballet The Golden Age. And as the bitter night of Stalinism spread its gloom over Soviet Russia in the 1930s, an oboe would sing out in quiet anguish from the Fifth Symphony's Largo. Finally, the Seventh Symphony's "invasion theme"–an insipid scrap of a tune plucked out on hushed strings–would build gradually and inexorably into an earsplitting military march, as Hitler's armies approached and then encircled Leningrad. In fact, with music this powerful, making a film might be superfluous.
Shostakovich speaks a musical language that is familiar as well as evocative. He is heir to Gustav Mahler rather than Arnold Schoenberg. His melodies may not be hummable, and his harmonies may be sharp and astringent, but his music remains rooted in the grand symphonic tradition of the nineteenth century. Though he experimented with twelve-tone composition in his later years, he embraced tonality. He was the last great composer to work almost exclusively in the traditional genres of classical music: the symphony, the concerto, the string quartet, the keyboard prelude and fugue. The result is a body of work of both emotional power and technical achievement. Shostakovich is that rarest of breeds: a genuinely popular twentieth-century composer.
Perhaps because the music is so accessible, audiences have wondered about the man–and the troubled age in which he lived. Born in 1906, Shostakovich spent his entire creative life as a citizen of the Soviet Union. When he died in August 1975, his Pravda obituary hailed him as a "loyal son of the Communist Party." The London Times agreed. Shostakovich was the "greatest figure in Soviet music over the last two decades," the Times wrote, who "saw himself equally as a Soviet citizen and a composer." Perhaps it was inevitable that his music came to be understood as a faithful reflection of pro-Soviet politics. He composed a song for the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin to sing in outer space and signed a letter denouncing Andrei Sakharov. His best-known musical offerings–the fifteen symphonies–were in many cases burdened with dedications that invited such a political reading: "October," "The First of May," "The Year 1905," "The Year 1917."
But in October 1979, four years after the composer's death, Harper & Row published a book that cast doubt on his Soviet credentials. A manuscript purporting to be the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich had been smuggled out of Russia by a young Soviet music journalist who claimed to have interviewed the aging composer at length. It would become one of the most explosive documents of the Cold War and one of the most controversial books on music published in the twentieth century. The Shostakovich who emerged from its pages was not the legendary "loyal son of the Communist Party" but a bitter man who despised Soviet power. Audiences, it seemed, had got the political message in his music exactly wrong.
"The majority of my symphonies are tombstones," this Shostakovich told his interlocutor. "Hitler is a criminal, that's clear, but so is Stalin…. I haven't forgotten the terrible prewar years. That is what all my symphonies, beginning with the Fourth, are about, including the Seventh and Eighth."
Testimony, the book's dust jacket read, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov. But are the memoirs genuine? And if so, what do they tell us about the music? After twenty years of debate, scholars of Shostakovich seem more bitterly divided than ever.
Solomon Volkov was a sixteen-year-old student at the high school affiliated with the Leningrad Conservatory when he met his idol. In 1960, after writing an enthusiastic review of Shostakovich's Eighth String Quartet, Volkov was introduced to the fifty-four-year-old composer. It was the start of a relationship that would be marked by respect and trust, if not close friendship.
Several years later, in the late 1960s, Shostakovich agreed to contribute a preface to Volkov's first book, a study of Leningrad's young composers. Volkov reports that he interviewed Shostakovich at length about his former composition students, prodding the reluctant and notoriously private composer to reminisce about his youth. Volkov claims he "had to resort to trickery: at every convenient point I drew parallels, awakening associations" in order to overcome Shostakovich's reserve. Unfortunately, Volkov says, the Soviet censor expunged these biographical details when the book was published in 1971.
According to Volkov, this act of censorship provided the "final powerful impetus" for the creation of Testimony. The self-effacing and hesitant Shostakovich was transformed into an eager memoirist. "'I must do this, I must,' [Shostakovich] would say. He wrote me, in one letter: 'You must continue what has been begun.'"
At first, Volkov says, he and Shostakovich met at a retreat belonging to the Union of Composers in Repino, near Leningrad. Later, when Volkov became a senior editor at Sovetskaya muzyka, the official journal of the Union of Composers, Shostakovich invited Volkov to his Moscow apartment, which happened to be in the same building as Volkov's office. They used no tape recorder, since Shostakovich would "stiffen before a microphone like a rabbit caught in a snake's gaze." Volkov scribbled down the composer's words in shorthand.
As the "mound of shorthand notes" grew higher, Volkov says, he "divided up the collected material into sustained sections, combined as seemed appropriate…. Shostakovich read and signed each part." In this way, Volkov says, the manuscript of Testimony took shape. This piecemeal method is reflected in the book's digressive, rambling style. But the composer apparently liked it, for he affixed his signature, along with the Russian word chital (read), on the first page of each of the manuscript's eight chapters. According to Volkov, the composer's only demand was that the book be published after his death.
Shortly after Shostakovich died, Volkov immigrated to the West. His precious manuscript had already been smuggled abroad. The original shorthand notes were left behind and have never been located.
Speaking from his New York home almost thirty years later, Solomon Volkov still considers the book a miracle. Testimony was "a product of this crazy era, with all the anxieties and all the imbalances that were typical of it," he reflects. "I was nervous because I was a young neophyte music journalist. Before me was a genius who was also under a lot of pressure, and this colored the whole situation irrevocably."
Western critics greeted Testimony with enthusiasm, praising its depiction not just of Shostakovich and his music but of cultural life in the Soviet Union generally. Harold C. Schoenberg raved about it in The New York Times Book Review, calling it a "serious indictment of past and present Russia, as well as the recollections of a life apparently spent in fear and despair." The London Times called it the "book of the year."
In the Soviet Union, however, the book was denounced as a fraud. Just two weeks after Testimony was published, the Moscow weekly Literaturnaya gazeta printed a letter signed by six Soviet composers–students and friends of Shostakovich's–declaring it a "pitiful forgery." When a New York Times reporter visited the composer's widow, Irina Antonovna, in her Moscow apartment, she claimed that Volkov had only met with her husband "three or maybe four times," clearly not frequently enough to create a book-length manuscript. But Westerners suspected that these public denunciations were coerced–an example of the double life Soviet citizens were compelled to live, and to which Testimony's Shostakovich bore witness.
One of Volkov's earliest supporters was Berkeley's Richard Taruskin, then a young assistant professor of music at Columbia University. In 1976, after meeting Volkov and discussing the memoirs, Taruskin wrote a glowing letter of reference to support Volkov's application for a research fellowship at Columbia's Russian Institute. It was a letter Taruskin would come to regret.
Laurel Fay was a graduate student in musicology at Cornell University when she heard rumors of Testimony's impending publication. In April 1978, while finishing a dissertation on Shostakovich's late string quartets, Fay eagerly wrote to ask if she could be of any assistance to Volkov. "I understand that you have unique material concerning Shostakovich," she wrote. "Is it possible that you have an autobiography?"
The letter was "very naive," she now admits. Shortly after she began reading Testimony, her attitude changed. "Something just didn't feel right," she says. "It was all just a little too convenient, both in terms of the explanation of the genesis and the background and then in the actual text itself." The tone also puzzled her. Testimony is filled with biting sarcasm, bitter recrimination, and gossipy asides. Apart from a warm tribute to his mentor, Alexander Glazunov, Shostakovich says nothing about his life's happy moments and expresses little gratitude. And why would Shostakovich, a devoted father and husband, recklessly endanger his family by agreeing to publish such a frontal attack on the Soviet system?
But there was something even more troubling. "I began to realize that I'd read some of this material before," Fay says, though at first she couldn't identify where. The breakthrough came in November 1979, when the critic Simon Karlinsky published a review of Testimony in The Nation. Karlinsky noted that two substantial passages in Testimony–a book said to derive entirely from interviews with the composer–had already appeared in print under Shostakovich's name in Soviet publications. "Then it all began to click for me," Fay says, "and it didn't take me very long then to find another five passages." She presented her findings in April 1980 at a meeting of the Midwest chapter of the American Musicological Society. Indiana University musicologist Malcolm Hamrick Brown invited her to publish her research in Russian Review, an academic journal put out by Stanford University's conservative Hoover Institute.
The article, titled "Shostakovich Versus Volkov: Whose Testimony?" appeared to deliver a shattering blow to Volkov's credibility. For example, one passage in Testimony, the composer's reflections on Stravinsky, reproduced an earlier text verbatim. Paragraph breaks, parentheses, dashes, and quotation marks remained in their original positions. Other passages paraphrased the material they reproduced, but the borrowing was no less egregious: Shostakovich's reflections in Testimony on the Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold apparently derived from an article he published in Sovetskaya muzyka while Volkov had worked there as a senior editor. As Fay has recently pointed out, the introduction to the original Sovetskaya muzyka article was attributed to none other than "S. Volkov."
Incredibly, Volkov claims never to have heard of the original sources of any of the material reproduced in Testimony. "No, no," he insists over the phone, "if I did I wouldn't have included it of course." Asked about Shostakovich Sovetskaya muzyka article about Meyerhold, for which Volkov apparently wrote an introduction, Volkov responds: "I can assure you that there wasn't a single staffer who would read the current issue of the magazine in its entirety. Material dealing with Shostakovich was appearing in almost every issue."
Adding to the mystery, almost every borrowed passage in Testimony appear on the first manuscript page of a chapter–on the only pages that Shostakovich actually signed. (The manuscript pages in question were reproduced in the German and Finnish editions of Testimony.) In other words, Shostakovich's authentications appear where no authentication was necessary. After the page is turned, the text begins to diverge, sometimes dramatically, from its original source. A striking example occurs in chapter 5, during Shostakovich's discussion of his Seventh Symphony. "I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the 'Leningrad,' very quickly," Testimony's Shostakovich says at the chapter's start, quoting a previously published article. "I couldn't not write it. War was all around. I had to be with the people, I wanted to create the image of our country at war, capture it in music…. I wanted to write about our time, about my contemporaries who spared neither strength nor life in the name of Victory Over the Enemy."
On the next page, however, the composer says something radically different: "The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack. The 'invasion theme' has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme." As Fay asked in her article, "Is it possible that Volkov misrepresented the nature and contents of the book to Shostakovich just as he may be misrepresenting them to the reader?"
Volkov did not reply to an invitation by the editors of Russian Review to respond to Fay's allegations, and he has tightly controlled access to the manuscript. According to Volkov, it is now in the hands of a private collector.
Although many academics considered Testimony discredited, it continued to be a much-cited source throughout the 1980s. Despite its disputed origins, it provided an alternative to the Soviet-sanctioned image of Shostakovich as a "loyal son of the Communist Party." Some of the book's revelations had been whispered about in the Soviet Union for years: The Fifth Symphony's radiant finale was "forced rejoicing"; the marching and gunshots in the Eleventh Symphony ("The Year 1905″) alluded to the Soviet suppression of Hungary in 1956.
Whether or not Testimony was the authentic voice of Shostakovich, it seemed true to a widely shared understanding of him. After Maxim Shostakovich, the composer's son and a world-renowned conductor, defected in 1981, he was reluctant to disavow Testimony, because of his hatred for the greater distortions imposed on his father's memory by official Soviet biographers such as Sophia Khentova. "I hate, I khhhate her book," he told David Fanning in a May 1991 Gramophone interview. "She makes him look like a genuine son of the Communist Party."
It became common for writers to acknowledge the inauthenticity of Testimony, while vouching for its basic message. For instance, in The New Shostakovich, Ian MacDonald, a British journalist, stated outright that Volkov's book was a "dishonest presentation." But MacDonald then offered evidence of political dissidence in Shostakovich's music. An example of MacDonald's style is his description of the Fourth Symphony, which the Party pressured Shostakovich into withdrawing: "A little strutting promenade for bassoons and giggling piccolo leads us into the hall where thrumming harps call the [Party] conference to order. A wan waltz (the composer?) enters and sits dejectedly while flute and piccolo trill the opening remarks in a mood of schoolboy hilarity…."
There is little doubt that Shostakovich could express political sentiments in musical language. Perhaps the most poignant example is his Eighth String Quartet (1960). Dedicated to the "victims of fascism and war," it opens with and obsessively quotes the composer's musical signature, the four-note sequence D, E-flat, C, and B. (In German musical notation, the names of these notes are D, S, C, and H, which spell out "D. Sch.," the Germanized form of Shostakovich's initials.) Snatches of earlier works by Shostakovich are heard, including his banned opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and the revolutionary song "Tormented by Grievous Bondage" (one of Lenin's favorites). Shostakovich was telling his listeners, as clearly as he could, that he was fascism's victim, too.
But none of the composer's other published works expressed political ideas so literally, and Shostakovich seems to have resented such easy paraphrase. In the Slavic Review in 1993, Taruskin upbraided MacDonald with a 1933 quote from Shostakovich himself: "When a critic…writes that in such-and-such a symphony Soviet civil servants are represented by the oboe and the clarinet, and Red Army men by the brass section, you want to scream!"
Since the fall of Communism, new information about Shostakovich has come to light. In 1994, the British writer and cellist Elizabeth Wilson published Shostakovich: A Life Remembered, a collection of oral and written reminiscences by the composer's friends and colleagues. It is a largely sympathetic portrait of a man tormented by his struggle to conform to political demands. Venyamin Basner, a close friend, argues that we should "discount the articles and statements that Dmitri Dmitriyevich 'signed'; we knew that they were meaningless acts to him, but served him as a public shield. His many courageous actions were taken in private." Galina Vishnevskaya, the great Russian soprano and the wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, echoes this justification, and adds that Shostakovich "didn't worry about what people would say of him, because he knew the time would come when the verbiage would fade away, when only his music would remain."
But not everyone Wilson interviewed was so forgiving. Some felt Shostakovich crossed the line when he added his name to a letter denouncing Andrei Sakharov in 1973. "I felt that he had every right to refuse to write or sign such a letter," the composer Edison Denisov told Wilson; "in fact he was duty bound not to do so." After learning that Shostakovich had signed the denunciation of Sakharov, the theater director Yuri Lyubimov refused to shake the elderly composer's outstretched hand after a concert at the Union of Composers.
Two years ago, Volkov's Testimony appeared to be destined for oblivion. Shostakovich, it seemed to many, had not dictated his memoirs, nor had he been much of a dissident. But in 1998, Allan Ho, a professor of musicology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and Dmitry Feofanov, a concert pianist and practicing lawyer, published a book whose dedication was a call to arms: "To Solomon Moiseyevich Volkov," it read. Ho and Feofanov's Shostakovich Reconsidered (Toccata Press) brought the controversy over Shostakovich's memoirs back to life.
Ho and Feofanov met at the University of Kentucky in the 1980s. Ho was completing a dissertation on the piano concerto as a genre, and Feofanov was teaching. Their first collaboration was a reference work, Biographical Dictionary of Russian/Soviet Composers (Greenwood, 1989). They asked Volkov, then at work on a book of conversations with the choreographer George Balanchine, to write the entry on Shostakovich.
In the early 1990s, when they first began work on Shostakovich Reconsidered, Feofanov and Ho again approached Volkov, inviting him to contribute a thirty-page defense of Testimony. Volkov declined. "He was not the right person to do it," Ho says now, "because people wouldn't believe what he said." Instead, Ho and Feofanov took on the task themselves.
Of Shostakovich Reconsidered's 787 pages, 300 refute Laurel Fay's twenty-year-old ten-page article. The book's structure parallels that of a trial, and its conclusions are harsh: It convicts Fay and her supporters of "subjective and selective editing of the facts," "inept scholarship," and "historical ignorance." It alleges that Fay has "difficulty reading plain English." Some of the evidence Ho and Feofanov have uncovered corroborates the picture of Shostakovich presented in Testimony. Like most Soviet citizens, Shostakovich hid a complex private life behind a mask of Communist loyalty. The composer loved, for instance, to mock the stilted and formalistic language of Soviet bureaucratese in his letters to friends. Other evidence buttresses Testimony's claim to authenticity. Ho, Feofanov, and a research assistant in Moscow have collected written and oral statements by several of Volkov's former colleagues who say they knew of Volkov's Shostakovich project at the time.
Then there is the piece of evidence that Ho calls a "smoking gun." In 1996 Shostakovich's close friend Flora Litvinova reported that the composer had once told her he had been meeting "constantly" with an unnamed young Leningrad musicologist who had "dug everything up, even my youthful compositions…. I tell him everything I remember about my works and myself. He writes it down, and at a subsequent meeting I look it over." Shostakovich may, however, have been telling Litvinova about the interviews he granted for the preface of Volkov's first book.
Responding to Fay's observation that Testimony reproduced passages previously published elsewhere, Ho argues that Shostakovich's prodigious memory allowed him to quote himself at length. He points out that Shostakovich often repeated certain stock phrases verbatim. (For instance: "That Sonata of yours is an interesting, good music. I liked it, I would say, a lot.") He also notes that the composer often retold the same stories, though not verbatim. But could an aural memory reproduce texts so exactly and at such length? And if it could, would a note taker punctuate it the same way twice? Even Ho recognizes the difficulty: "I think I'll always have some doubt," he reflects, "because these recyclings are hard to explain with 100 percent certainty."
In the case of Dmitri Shostakovich, musicologists have not always debated in a cool, scholarly tone. In fact, both sides have been insulting. Malcolm Hamrick Brown, the Indiana musicologist who encouraged Fay's research back in 1980, has written openly that he believes "Solomon Volkov lied about how he put Testimony together." Though she now regrets it, Fay once referred to MacDonald's book as a "moronic tract" at an American Musicological Society meeting. Taruskin, as any reader of The New York Times or The New Republic knows, is a polemical writer and has compared his opponents to both Stalinists and McCarthyites–sometimes on the same page.
But Ho, Feofanov, and their supporters may be winning this race to the bottom. Insults and invective crop up on virtually every page of the opening essay of Shostakovich Reconsidered. Ho and Feofanov regularly call into question Fay's scholarly integrity. In a fifty-thousand-word review posted on his Web site , MacDonald has dismissed Fay's recent biography of Shostakovich as a "dismal, devious, and at times dishonest book," since he believes she methodically erases evidence of the composer's political dissidence. MacDonald even claims to discern in the book "telltale signs of a pro-communist attitude." In January 2000, an impressive new low was reached by the British journalist Norman Lebrecht, who compared Laurel Fay to a Holocaust revisionist in the Daily Telegraph. When I mention Lebrecht's charge to Ho, he chuckles, then suggests that it was tit for tat: "This name-calling has been going on for some twenty years, coming from them against us."
In Fay's case, that may be unfair. She rarely mentions her opponents in print. (When she spoke last month at Princeton and New York University, it was her first public response to Ho and Feofanov.) In Shostakovich: A Life (Oxford, 2000), Fay coolly presents verifiable details about her subject in a manner that downplays his engagement with politics. Her Shostakovich is a man nearly broken by the political demands imposed on him, but he does not assume the heroic proportions of a Solzhenitsyn. Fay refuses to portray his compromises with authority as secret attempts at political subversion.
In The New York Times last February, Joseph Horowitz called Fay's approach as "inordinately dry-eyed." For example, Fay's opponents have characterized Shostakovich's 1948 song cycle, From Jewish Folk Poetry, as a valiant attempt to denounce the Soviet government's increasingly murderous sponsorship of anti-Semitism. Fay, however, sees it as the composer's good-faith attempt to abide by his pledge to the Composers' Congress to write melodies "infused with the essence of folklore." As Fay wrote in The New York Times in April 1996, "It was his rotten luck that of all the available nationalities, great and small, he just happened to pick the wrong 'folk' as his inspiration."
Like Fay, many Russians who knew the composer have been doubtful of Testimony's authenticity. Of Shostakovich's close friends and family, his daughter Galina has offered the most convincing endorsement. "I am an admirer of Volkov," she told Ho and Feofanov. "There is nothing false in [Testimony]…. It represents, fairly and accurately, Shostakovich's political views, although there is too much 'kitchen talk' and anecdotes."
Her brother Maxim has been far more cautious. Shortly after his 1981 defection, he told the London Sunday Times that Testimony was "not my father's memoirs. It is a book by Solomon Wolkow [sic]."5 Less than two years ago, he told the Los Angeles Times that although he liked Testimony, "There are a lot of rumors in it, and like all rumors, some are true and some aren't." He singled out Testimony's claim about the scherzo in the Tenth Symphony as an example: "Father never said it was a portrait of Stalin."
Many others have also refused to vouch for Testimony, among them Mstislav Rostropovich, Galina Vishnevskaia, Manashir Yakubov (the curator of the Shostakovich Family Archive), and the composer Boris Tishchenko. Tishchenko, who was Shostakovich's most prized pupil, helped arrange Volkov's interviews with the composer, and attended at least one of them. Volkov thanked him in Testimony as "my distant friend who must remain nameless." Yet in his recently published correspondence with Shostakovich, Tishchenko condemns Testimony as "not the memoirs of Shostakovich, not even a book by Volkov about Shostakovich, but a book by Volkov about Volkov."
Tishchenko was one of the six Soviet composers who denounced Testimony in Literaturnaya gazeta in 1979, in the letter that most Western observers then believed to have been coerced. Apparently it wasn't. In June 1999, the daughter of another signatory wrote to Izvestiya that her father had been familiar with Testimony and had firmly believed it was a fake. Ho and Feofanov claim that yet another signatory, the Azerbaijani composer Kara Karayev, had been "undergoing treatment for a heart condition, [and] had been ordered to sign or be kicked out of the hospital." Yet Karayev's son, Faradzh, has emphatically denied this account to Laurel Fay.
Shostakovich's sixty-five-year-old widow, Irina Antonovna, also remains a skeptic about Testimony. Reached at her Moscow apartment, Irina stands by the story she told more than twenty years ago. "Dmitrich wanted to write his memoirs himself," she says, "but this had nothing to do with Solomon Volkov." Volkov met with her husband three times, she said, and the meetings lasted between ninety minutes and two hours. Since Shostakovich was ill and Irina was acting as his personal secretary and often his nurse, she rarely left him alone. The interviews were supposed to be published in Sovetskaia muzyka. "The rest," she insists, "came from Volkov himself."
Asked about the Russians whose memories contradict Volkov, Feofanov responds by discrediting the individuals in question. He says that Irina Antonovna and Boris Tishchenko "in essence don't know what they're talking about." Irina's published interviews, Feofanov says, suggest that she is "primarily concerned about money, so maybe not getting money has something to do with it." About Maxim's guarded comments, Feofanov asks, "Does Maxim read English enough to read the book? I don't think so. I've heard him speak…. And with all due respect to Slava [Mstislav] Rostropovich, I happen to know that his English is not so hot either." Competence in English is an issue, because Testimony has never been published in Russian.
Shostakovich's widow raises an entirely different concern about Volkov's method. "So many of his books have been published after the deaths of those about whom he is writing," she says. "After the death of Brodsky, after the death of Balanchine, after the death of Mitya–it's a very strange thing…. And the dead are unable to respond."
Indeed, Volkov has made a career for himself as amanuensis to Russia's dying cultural elite. He has published books of conversations with Balanchine (Balanchine's Tchaikovsky, 1985), the violinist Nathan Milstein (From Russia to the West, 1990), and the poet Joseph Brodsky (Conversations With Joseph Brodsky, 1998). His study St. Petersburg: A Cultural History (1995) relies heavily on these collaborations. Volkov's current project is a book of interviews with the great Russian pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who died just over ten years ago. Volkov is likable and well read, and he seems to have an extraordinary ability to win the confidence of interviewees. He attributes this to a "device" he has perfected over the years. If you want "to do a book with a star," Volkov said in 1992, then "tell him to start remembering about his friends. Then inevitably he will tell something about himself as well."
Volkov has admitted that collaboration is not without its tensions. As he wrote in the Russian weekly Ogonyok in 1991, "Sometimes, of course, bitter failures and resentments occur. The 'stars' make a fuss… and torment you." But Volkov believes he has learned a great deal since his book on Shostakovich. "If I'd known that [Testimony] would be such a controversial book for which accounting of day-to-day activities and material would be needed, maybe I would at least have tried to preserve all this material," he said at a press conference in New York City last year. "[I]t was my first big project in this genre. If I'd been wiser by twenty-five-plus years, then probably I would have handled it better. My book of conversations with Joseph Brodsky–my personal belief is that it's structured better than Testimony."
But structure was never the issue with Testimony. Authenticity was. And as Irina Antonovna points out, there are unsettling parallels between Testimony and Conversations With Joseph Brodsky. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Volkov interviewed the Russian poet on several occasions, and Volkov's accounts of the interviews appeared in the émigré Russian press in Paris and New York. As Volkov himself admitted, the texts he published were the result of "long and careful 'montage' and editing." When Volkov approached a Russian-language publisher in New Jersey in 1987 about printing his interviews as a book, Brodsky wrote to the publisher about what he called "Volkov's little interviews [interv'iushek]." Brodsky insisted on "look[ing] them through before they're printed. THERE IS A MASS of purely stylistic RUBBISH." The deal fell through.
Volkov never showed Brodsky a manuscript of his book. The poet died in January 1996. Just a year later, a Free Press catalog for autumn 1997 announced the impending publication of Conversations With Joseph Brodsky, almost half of which consisted of previously unpublished material. In an advance version of the book sent to magazine and newspaper editors in July 1997, Volkov's preface referred to Brodsky as one of his "collaborators." Brodsky's literary executor, Ann Kjellberg, protested to the Free Press that the word was inaccurate, and the published preface does not call Brodsky a collaborator. "[A] completed book project," Volkov wrote, "is sustained by the belief of both parties involved that this particular arrangement is vital." Vital to Volkov, certainly, not to mention lucrative: He is the sole owner of copyright for both Testimony and Conversations With Joseph Brodsky, and he has never consulted with or offered any compensation to either the composer's or the poet's heirs.
Like the Shostakovich shorthand notes, the tapes of Volkov's conversations with Brodsky remain unavailable. (He plans to donate them to St. Petersburg's Anna Akhmatova Museum sometime in the future.) Meanwhile, Dmitry Feofanov, acting as Volkov's lawyer, has issued Kjellberg a cease-and-desist order and has threatened to sue her for defamation if she persists in objecting to the book as unauthorized by Brodsky.
What is Testimony? It is a book based in part on at least some face-to-face interviews with Shostakovich. It is a vivid portrait of a brilliant composer living in difficult times. And it is a collection of rumors and anecdotes, many of which were such common currency in the Soviet Union of the 1970s that Fay and Taruskin heard them when they visited as exchange students. But can it be considered the authentic "memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich"?
Testimony's defenders commonly portray the dispute as a final skirmish in the Cold War, a last desperate stand by Soviet apologists. "It's a matter of common knowledge," observes Feofanov, "that the last refuge of true Marxists is American academia." Somewhat dramatically, he also declares that the dispute is a "struggle for Shostakovich's soul."
In fact, the dispute is about a way of listening to Shostakovich's music, and to music in general–a way that Testimony encouraged. Testimony's defenders become most enthusiastic when they discuss music in which they discern a dissident "message in a bottle": the Eighth Quartet, the Tenth and Eleventh Symphonies, and the Antiformalist Rayok, Shostakovich's vicious (and unpublished) caricature of his Stalinist persecutors, apparently written in the 1950s and 1960s. Feofanov has recently become intrigued by the possibility that the Twelfth Symphony "encoded" Stalin's initials.
But can anything be more impoverishing of music than a search for literal paraphrase? Once, after an evening spent performing his Seventh Symphony on the piano for friends, all of whom understood it to be "about" fascism and the war with Germany, Shostakovich confided to Flora Litvinova: "Fascism, of course. But music, real music, is never attached literally to a theme. Fascism isn't simply National Socialism. This music is about terror, slavery, the bondage of the spirit." Ironically, Ho and Feofanov have seized on Litvinova's recollection as evidence that the "invasion theme" of the Seventh Symphony "depicts Stalin and his henchmen."
Although deeply skeptical of Testimony, Margarita Mazo, a Russian emigree now teaching at Ohio State University's School of Music, finds the dispute over its authenticity unseemly. "For many of us [in the Soviet Union] listening to a new piece of Shostakovich was a sacred experience," she says, her voice breaking. "Was he a dissident or was he not? Was he a Communist or was he not?… He was so much more complex than that." She pauses, then adds, "Besides, can you tell music with words? Can you say with words what this music is about? If so then why do you need music?"


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Hinduja Tech Recruitment 2017 Jobs For Freshers Apply
Company- Hinduja Tech
Website- www.hindujatech.com
Eligibility- BE / B.Tech / MCA / BSc / MSc
Experience- 2 - 4 yrs
Location- Chennai
Job Role- JAVA Developer
Company Profile-
Hinduja Tech is a premier global provider of integrated Product Engineering & Digital Technology Solutions. It is a part of multi-billion dollar, and highly diversified UK headquartered Hinduja Group.
Job Description-
- Should take part in software & architectural development activities.
- Transform requirements into stipulations.
- Develop & design soft-ware based proto-types.
- Should take part in testing of prototypes.
- Should be updated with the software & be proactive.
- Should be flexible to learn new programs and script languages.
- Should show good levels of enthusiasm and interest in all computer related things.
Candidate Profile-
Qualification- BE / B.Tech / MCA / BSc / MSc
- Implementation of Soft-ware development using Java, JSP, Servlet, struts frame work with WAS (Websphere application server) & jboss Application servers.
- Good idea about Web programming skills & Knowledge of RDBMS like Oracle and SQL Server.
- Experienced in using Integrated Development Environments like web-sphere and JBOSS Application servers.
- Required Experience in developing web-applications based on MVC2 (MVC) architecture using the Struts framework
- Knowledge on soft-ware development life cycle (SDLC).
- Capacity for work with team to solves complex and cross-functional issues by well interacting with Team members
- Automobile industry experience is preferred.
- Good knowledge on SQL

subset: commoncrawl


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Used truck tyres
The used truck tyres are selected, high-quality tyres that will give you years of driving pleasure. The tyres are often available for less than half of the original price. All second-hand truck tyres are assessed by our expert team and restored if necessary. All our used tyres undergo a triple inspection.
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You are buying 4 Colors of 14 mm x 10 mm Rose Pendant Settings. You will receive one each Antique Gold, Gold, Antique Silver & Silver, these are all Plated. The outside dimensions are 32 x 24 mm including the loop at the top. The top has a nice size loop (2.3 mm) for your Chain or Cord or Jump Ring (which I have 3 Colors & 2 Sizes of). These are just a gorgeous design with 3 beautiful roses at the top, really a special setting for cameos, cabs, or charms settings. You will have to glue in any cameos or cabs you want to put into the setting, no prongs and they are very sturdy. These have never been used. I have lots of Great Bails, Bracelets, Cameos, Chains, Connectors, Jump Rings, Lockets, Pendants, Pins, Rings & Settings so, just look at all my listings. These are all offered in groups of 6 of each Color. The Antique Gold is item #360478422139, Shiny Gold is item #360478422141, Antique Silver is item #110930807409, and the Shiny Silver is item #110911255142. All 4 colors of these are offered in a group of 29 different 14x10 settings in 4 Colors item #110911244707 as show in the last picture, sold separately.
There are no products in your shopping cart.
|0 Items


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SYDNEY -- U.S. markets fell again on Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 0.3%, the S&P 500 Index closing 0.2% lower, and the Nasdaq Composite Index also falling 0.2%. Investors appear increasingly skeptical of a turnaround in Europe and concerned over U.S. growth. At one stage the Dow Jones was down 0.7%, but it recovered in late trading.
European markets fell for a fourth straight day, with the U.K.'s FTSE 100 down 0.6%, Germany's DAX down 0.4%, and Paris' CAC 40 also down 0.4%.
The Australian dollar was up slightly against the greenback, buying $1.02.
Commodities rose a bit overnight, with gold up 0.5% to $1,590.50 an ounce, while Brent crude oil jumped 2% to $100.23 a barrel. Copper was up around 0.4%.
In lighter news, Royal Dutch Shell has been crowned the No. 1 company globally in the annual Fortune 500 list, which ranks companies by revenue. Australia has nine companies in the list, including the big four banks -- BHP Billiton, Woolworths, Wesfarmers, and Telstra -- and, perhaps surprisingly, Caltex Australia Limited (ASX: CTX.AX), which comes in at No. 486 with AU$22.8 billion in revenue.
SPI says "Up" -- but not by much
The ASX SPI futures were up just five points, suggesting that the S&P/ASX 200
Today the Australian Bureau of Statistics announces May building-approval data, while National Australia Bank (ASX: NAB.AX) will release its business confidence and conditions surveys.
Insurance Australia Group (ASX: IAG.AX) is today holding a conference on Asian markets where the company has a presence. The company has recently expanded into several Asian countries as it continues its goal of achieving 10% of revenue from Asia.
Foolish takeaway
A flat start or early gains -- take your pick. Investors are likely sitting on the sidelines awaiting further developments from Europe and hoping for some positive news. Here at The Motley Fool, we continue to look for great businesses trading at cheap prices and tune out the market noise.
If you're in the market for some high-yielding ASX shares, look no further than our free report, "Secure Your Future with 3 Rock-Solid Dividend Stocks," where we've put together our best ideas for investors who are looking for solid companies with high dividends and good growth potential. Click here now to find out the names of our three favorite income ideas. But hurry -- the report is free for only a limited time.
More reading
Motley Fool writer/analyst Mike King owns shares in BHP and Woolworths. The Motley Fool's purpose is to help the world invest, better. Take Stock is The Motley Fool's free investing newsletter. Packed with stock ideas and investing advice, it is essential reading for anyone looking to build and grow their wealth in the years ahead. Click here now to request your free subscription, while it's still available. This article contains general investment advice only (under AFSL 400691). Authorized by Bruce Jackson.
The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days.


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Valveless, Ceramic Pumps Ideal for
Critical Industrial Low Pressure Robot Gearbox Lubrication
Valveless, Ceramic Pumps from Fluid Metering, Inc. (FMI) provide the solution for metering high viscosity grease at low pressure for precision lubrication of industrial robot gearboxes.
To maximize productivity and eliminate downtime, industrial robots require continual lubrication. The PDS100 Programmable Dispensing System utilizes FMI's unique valveless pumping design to accurately deliver gearbox lubricating grease, independent of viscosity. But more importantly, the PDS100 accomplishes this at pressures low enough to prevent any seal damage to the gearbox.
The PDS100 is available in both single and dual channel configurations and is easily integrated with industrial process controllers. Dispense and metering rates range from a few microliters per dispense up to 768 ml per minute continuous metering. Fluid Metering's valveless, ceramic pumps have only one moving part in contact with the fluid.
The sapphire-hard internal components and valveless design of FMI pumps eliminate accuracy drift typical of pumping systems that rely on valves, diaphragms, peristaltic tubing, and pressurized feed lines for fluid delivery.
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1-800-223-3388 or 1-516-922-6050 Fax: 1-516-624-8261 E-mail: email@example.com
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there are so many little things in life that bring me comfort. very little things. and this week they were disrupted a bit. thursday morning i ran. and then thursday i left work at the end of the day to run again. a very rare pleasure for me. much needed and much appreciated. just a decent run around the lake with a friend. but once we returned to the cars everything shifted. my passenger window was smashed. shattered. my jacket. my backpack. my bag with my work clothes, shoes, my watch – gone. my i.pod and headphones and armband – gone. my beloved n.orthface jacket that made its way through italy with me – no more. my license, my credit cards, gift cards, insurance cards, pictures of hook that i had carried around with me for the past 5 years. all taken. and my backpack. filled with all the things that i take with me everyday. suddenly just not there anymore. and most of the things in it don't mean anything to anyone. sure there were a number of items of considerable financial value. but there were so many more that no one can ever replace. and that no one will be able to understand what they meant to me. cards. words. pictures. papers. my water bottles. my glasses. prescriptions. old training schedules. pictures from the kid. rocks from all over. things that meant something to me. and only me. words that i wrote down because i needed to. and because i wanted to. and because i had to. just to get by. and now they have been taken. and tainted. and i think that is the hardest part. i cancelled the credit cards. i have already replaced the window. i will be reimbursed for some of the items that were taken. but the things that can't be replaced are the things that leave the gaping hole. it really is the little things to me. the details. it always has been. and now the details are disrupted. and tainted.
for months i have carried around all of the paperwork related to ivf and the RE. all of my test results. my prescription protocols. my receipts. the questions i had. the notations from the RE on the handouts. copies of the consents and disclosures. it was all calming. and centering. and it made me feel like i had a handle on something. that it was within my grasp. or at least i could look over it and pretend that i knew what was going on when everything seemed so unstable and so unsure. needless to say it was in my backpack. and now it is gone. this has been difficult to accept. not only are the physical papers gone but the sense of security that they provided is also gone. (not to mention my personal medical information is floating around who knows where). yesterday i called the RE's office to request a copy of the medication protocol because while i am pretty familiar with what i am supposed to start when I would like to be absolutely certain. i left a message at the nurses desk detailing the situation and asking for the booklet and copies, etc. while at the bank closing my checking account i received a message from a nurse. it was curt. to the point. and completely inaccurate. some of the dates were a day off. and the medications were well wrong. i was pissed not happy. so i called back and left another message expressing my concerns. then i went to replace my drivers license. and pick up my race packet. and search trash cans around the scene of the crime in hope that my criminal non-essentials (basically the things i really cared about) had been dumped close by – (no luck). this time i was available when the same nurse called back. she was perhaps more curt. and told me that yes i was correct that the thousands of dollars worth of medication i have sitting at my house is what i am supposed to take (ah yes i know) so i should just cross off the f.ollistim 300 she wrote in the packet she sent and write in the b.ravalle 400 and just do that. then i asked about the dates. she insisted she was correct and that i just needed to follow what she said. and that i could look at it when it arrived in the mail. the entire conversation was infuriating. basically she sounded annoyed that i had called and asked for me own information. then more annoyed when i wanted it to be correct. i know this is something the nurses do everyday. and questions that they answer all the time. however i'm also pretty sure this is part of the job. and it might be what they do all day, but it is not what i do all day. in fact i don't ever do it. and i have paid a whole heck of a lot of money. so really i want it all to be right. and i understand that does not buy me a guarantee. but i can at least hope that if everything goes properly, i never have to be concerned about such a protocol again. having the stuff taken in the first place made me feel like a bit of my security was gone but i deserve to have at least a little of it back – even if that is only through a kind voice and an accurate piece of paper. they should expect to hear from me again on monday.
complete aside – ran a 10 mile race this morning. i think i have a little bit of an affair with running. it is my sanity. and i managed to get a PR.


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So maybe you have or you haven't heard of the company Digital Juice. Now i had previously heard of them and that they were mostly used for digital backgrounds. But looks like they are also starting to get into some camera hardware. And they have this cool device called the "Baby Pin" suction mount series. And right now they are on sale for $59.95. Seems like a pretty sweet deal for a suction mount.
If you are at all interested visit


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Well where do I start, I think I have heard that before somewhere on this trip already. I will try and summarise what we have been doing for the last few days in Canada. I arrived on my own having flown Air Canada instead of BA and eventually met up with the rest of the UK scholars at Toronto airport. We loaded up and headed for the Delta hotel in Guelph where we were met by the Nuffield Canada team! We were all kitted out in the hockey shirts, checked into the hotel, met our room mates and headed for the local hockey rink. I am sharing a room with Jason Size who is a stone fruit farmer from Bookpurnong in South Australia. Jason is studying the flavours and customer preferences for stone fruit.
Whilst at the hockey match a few of us took part in a burger making competition, the only thing was, we were the buns. I teamed up with Andrew Janaway from the UK, and our Southern hemisphere competitors were Trent De Paoli (Australia) and Natasha King (New Zealand). The object was to build the full burger with foam cheese, salad, burger and pickles out on the ice, trying to run backward and forwards delivering the ingredients. The finale was the dive onto the burger by the top of the bun (me). It was resounding win for the Northern Hemisphere, positive vibes for the Lions later this year?
We had a great night out and continued to make new friends late into the night. The following morning it was presentation time. We all had 2 minutes to introduce ourselves, our family and our study topic. In the afternoon we took part in a scavenger hunt around the University of Guelph, taking photographs and solving puzzles. We boarded the school bus that evening and headed to the Guelph Curling Club.
The curling was great fun. We had some assistance from the members of the club who came to teach us the very skillful art of the gliding stones! A big thanks to Clayton Robins and Blake Vince for their help and enthusiasm for the 60 or so curling novices setting foot onto the ice! I was amazed at how effective the frantic brushing can make to the speed of the granite stones and ow little power was needed to send the stone on its way.
We were also treated to a lovely meal at the Curling Club before heading back to the hotel and getting ready for the start of the main event on Monday. I took the role of Daily Lead for the Monday session so I had to organise people to introduce and thank our speakers.


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Last week, in a phone conversation with The New York Times, White House strategist Stephen Bannon derided the news media as stupid, lazy and corrupt. He described it as out of touch with the American public and biased to the point of being the equivalent of an opposition party.
Representatives of the media responded that they are not the enemy; they are an essential part of our democracy, whose job is to tell the truth.
At the same time that open warfare was breaking out between the press and the president over whose news is fake and whose facts are alternative, I was lucky enough to see the limited-engagement, all-star cast, Broadway production of "The Front Page" at the Broadhurst Theater in New York City.
The play was written by two former newspaper reporters. It is set in Chicago in the 1920s. All the action takes place in the big, open press room of Chicago's criminal courts building, which is next to the jail and overlooks the gallows below. Eight different newspapers have reporters assigned to cover the beat.
The big story of the day is the impending hanging of Earl Williams, a white man who has been convicted of killing a black policeman. In the current production, Williams is rumored to be an anarchist (in other productions, a Communist).
Williams escapes and makes it into the nearly empty press room, where he confides in the Examiner's star reporter Hildy Johnson (John Slattery) that he shot the policeman by accident, contrary to the narrative being promoted by the corrupt mayor and sheriff (John Goodman) in an effort to win enough black votes to get the mayor re-elected.
Johnson tries to keep Williams a secret from his rivals so he can get the scoop. Together, he and his editor Walter Burns (Nathan Lane) conspire to sneak Williams out of the building, which leads to several slapstick moments. Three hours fly by as the cast celebrates a golden age of newspapers.
It was an age when newspapers were a major component of civic life. When big cities had several papers and big daily newspapers put out more than one edition a day. Newspapers had distinctive characters who appealed to, and inspired, different loyal readerships.
It was characterized by fierce competition between good-natured adversaries who enjoyed each other's company when they weren't pounding the pavement or a typewriter. Being a reporter was an exhilarating job, chasing down stories and meeting deadlines.
Maybe that's all a bunch of romantic nostalgia, but I think that old system served the public pretty well.
The current status quo does not. Too many reporters no longer approach a story with an open mind as something to be investigated, discovered, understood and then described to readers. They come at it with an agenda and only report what fits and promotes that agenda.
One major newspaper in a city that presents one perspective on events is not enough. The fact that four times as many reporters identify themselves as Democrats than as Republicans is a problem. It takes more than one point of view to get at the truth.
The Internet is a poor substitute for newspapers with standards and editors and fact checkers. Many of today's surviving newspapers have lowered their standards by running stories without checking them, and by eliminating the barrier between the opinion and news pages. The current effort to marry legacy newspapers off to social media providers is troubling.
Maybe the golden age depicted in "The Front Page" is gone forever. Maybe it never existed in the first place. In any event, it is a worthwhile goal. Newspeople should welcome and nurture a competitive, multi-viewpoint press, not scorn outlets with different perspectives – if for no other reason than it means jobs for many more reporters.
Halsey Frank is a Portland resident, attorney and former chairman of the Republican City Committee.


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Council of Europe European Commission for the efficiency of justice (CEPEJ)
Study visit on the new Israeli case-weighting and risk assessment system and Workshop on the development of the CEPEJ case-weighting toolJerusalem (Israel) 19-20 February 2019
The members and experts of the CEPEJ's SATURN working group visited Jerusalem (Israel) on 19 and...
The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) organised, in cooperation with the Venice Commission, a training course in Morocco on strategic working methods and tools within a Justice CouncilStrasbourg 19 December 2018
At the request of the Training Directorate of the High Council of the Judiciary (HCCJ), on 12...
Awareness-raising and implementation of the European Ethical Charter on the use of artificial intelligence in judicial systems and their environmentStrasbourg 18 February 2019
Following the adoption of the first reference framework setting out the principles for the use of...
Launching of consultations in view of promoting cyberjustice in Spain through change management and improvement of data collectionSpain 13-15 February 2019
In the course of two missions of the CEPEJ experts team to Spain, carried out on 12-13 December...
New "Cyberjustice University Diploma - Numerical challenges in Justice and the Law"Strasbourg 05 February 2019
The CEPEJ is a partner of the Cyberjustice Cluster of the Law Faculty of Strasbourg and invites...
New :
Applications for the Crystal Scales of Justice Prize : participate now !
Council of Europe adopts first European Ethical Charter on the use of artificial intelligence in judicial systems
Publication of the 2018 edition of the CEPEJ report "European judicial systems - efficiency and quality of justice"
At a glance
In setting up the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) at the end of 2002, at the initiative of the European ministers of Justice who met in London (2000), the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe wanted to establish an innovative body for improving the quality and efficiency of the European judicial systems and strengthening the court users' confidence in such systems.
A short movie presenting the CEPEJ has been realised by the Directorate of Communication of the Council of Europe.
Interview with Stéphane Leyenberger, Executive Secretary of the CEPEJ:
How will artificial intelligence be implemented in the functioning of justice systems ?
How will this Charter cross the work of all 47 members States ?
What are the checks and balances in this Charter to make sure that the core principles are really implemented ?
How will the Charter be disseminated among the 47 members States ?
The CEPEJ develops concrete measures and tools aimed at policy makers and judicial practitioners in order to:
- Analyse the functioning of judicial systems and orientate public policies of justice
- Have a better knowledge of judicial timeframes and optimize judicial time management
- Promote the quality of the public service of justice
- Facilitate the implementation of European standrards in the field of justice
- Support member states in their reforms on court organisations
The CEPEJ also contributes with specific expertise to debates about the functioning of the justice system in order to provide a forum for discussion and proposals and bring the users closer to their justice system.
NEW: Documents adopted at the 31st plenary meeting of the CEPEJ on 4 December 2018:
European Ethical Charter on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Judicial Systems and their environment
Revised SATURN Guidelines for judicial time management
Length of court proceedings in the member states of the Council of Europe based on the case law of the European Court of Human Right, by Ms Françoise Calvez and Nicolas Regis, Judges (France) 3rd edition by Nicolas Regis - Cepej Studies No. 27
Guide on communication with the media and the public for courts and prosecuting authorities
Code of Conduct for Mediation Providers
Baseline Grid with performance indicators to establish baseline mediation statistics


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There are certain places in the world that make you want to fall in love here are the top 5 romantic cities. Places where the air smells of passion and you immediately find yourself sucked into it all. For those of you looking for love and a romantic trip to the following cities.
Unlike a romantic beach setting, where you're likely to be with someone you love, Paris makes you fall in love all on your own. There is something about the city streets, the buildings, the intoxicating food, and the gorgeous people, that makes you want to live longer, better, and more passionately. Its magic makes you feel that you really could fall in love on the metro, or standing in front of the Tour Eiffel, or walking along the Champs Elysee.
A short train ride away, visit the luxurious Chateau de Versaille, the elaborate palace of the notorious Sun King. Be sure to take a bottle of wine and a snack of baguettes and cheese to nibble on the grounds. Just a few more minutes further on the same train, you can visit Chartres Cathedral, one of the most stunning gothic churches in Europe.
You've seen the scene in almost every romance set in Paris: a couple embraces for a deep kiss on a bridge overlooking the Seine River. There's a reason filmmakers use this image. It's wonderfully romantic. Take your honey to the nearest bridge, walk to the center and get smooching.
2. Mykonos, Greece
There is something very warm about falling in love under the sunset by crashing waves. Mykonos is Greece's party island, and probably its most visited. There is everything from delicious restaurants to fabulous hotels, to amazing nightlife. But amidst all of the chaos it is possible to escape for a drink somewhere hidden, and in that moment, maybe fall in love.
Venice has got everything that you could want out of a city. It is in Italy, which speaks volumes for its food, drink, fashion, and architecture. Moreover, it is a floating city, and therefore surrounded by canals, and filled with sweet, narrow streets. Some of the most romantic attractions include Piazza San Marco, Canale Grande, and Ponte di Rialto, but in Venice, you can fall in love anywhere.
There is something enveloping about Buenos Aires. They say it is the Paris of South America. Architecturally it is astounding, the food is sensational, the people gorgeous, and the fashion, very a la mode. The best part though, is that amongst it all, it is South American, which means it has a spirit and joie de vie that is impossible to match. The clubs are off the charts, usually not opening until 2 a.m. and closing around 7 a.m.


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Italian speaking PA to CEO
- Recruiter
- Angela Mortimer
- Location
- London (Central)
- Salary
- £40,000 per annum
- Posted
- 07 Jul 2018
- Closes
- 20 Aug 2018
- Job Function
- Chief Executive Officer
- Industry
- Other
- Position Type
- Permanent
Italian Speaking PA to CEO
Angela Mortimer International is urgently recruiting for an Italian speaking PA to the CEO of a Financial Services company based in London. This role includes some office management and private PA responsibilities so it is a really varied position that will keep you interested! The company can guarantee a stable and friendly working environment; this is the perfect chance to build your career working with a truly charismatic and visionary leader.
Daily Responsibilities of the Italian speaking PA to CEO:
-Complex diary management, coordinating meetings and travel for the CEO and other members of the team
-Ordering stationary, dealing with suppliers, meeting & greeting guests and screening calls
-Dealing with the CEO's email inbox
-Management of expenses
-Dealing with suppliers and management of properties abroad
-Ad hoc project management
Requirements of the Italian speaking PA to CEO:
-Excellent verbal and written Italian language skills as well as English
-Five years or more experience as a PA preferred
-Excellent MS Office skills together with confidentiality tact and diplomacy
-Working hours are 8.30 - 5.30pm
For an initial discussion and to find out more about vacancies requiring additional languages in the international team please contact Natasha Hayiannis 0207_287_7788


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Allan Kory
Beaverton High Beaverton, MI
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Simon Thould
Simon Thould was born in Somerset, where he went to public school and played rugby and cricket with more enthusiasm than he studied. He later managed to qualify as a chartered surveyor and practised for twenty years in both public and private sectors in London and the south of England. He also worked as a restaurant and bar manager before moving with two black cats to a farmhouse in the mountains Andalucia for a year and a half. There he wrote his first novel.
He moved back to the UK and worked as a resident housekeeper and groom in Kent and wrote his second novel.
Then he relocated to the USA for several years and worked in warehouse stock control, sold insurance and then art work from a gallery in Downtown Charleston, South Carolina. Returning to the UK again, he worked as a postman and in several retail sales positions and wrote a third novel.
His passions, other than writing, are reading 'hard-
He currently lives on the island of Gozo in the Mediterranean where he wrote Dark Water.


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Alix Kit, named after her son :)
Over 100 elements and beautiful papers available HERE!
My layout featuring Boudinette's little boy, Alix.
Look at that face...MUWAH!
Harmony Complete Kit may be found HERE.
Dream Kit Collab by Digi Boudinette and Jade Designs
Available HERE
My Layouts
Harmonie Kit Part 1 Available HERE
My Layout


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Winter Edition
(Click the image to download PDF)
Archive :
Autumn Edition 2009
User login
Half way
Dorte — Mon, 22/02/2010 – 2:30pm
We are now half way through our year of trying to become green, so has anything changed over the last 6 months? I think it is time for a stock take.
Recycling: We have always been pretty good on the recycling front, but I think we are even better now – hardly anything goes in the bin that could go somewhere else, we recycle, compost, reuse, donate, freecycle etc.
Waste: We are trying to minimise waste, but it is difficult. Everything seems to come wrapped in at least one layer of plastic. On the plus side our paper waste is definitely down, we get almost all bills online and are signed up to Mail Preference Service etc.(In fact a lot of the paper in the recycling bin is probably my children's drawings – oops bad mum, should be keeping them, but there are sooo many)
Energy: We are definitely a lot more conscious of our energy use – we don't leave stuff switched on (In fact my husband said the other day 'what happened – we always seem to be stumbling around in the dark…)Last prognosis suggested that we might not have increased our energy use since moving, despite this house being double the size of the old one.
Water: We don't get readings for water usage, so we don't know for sure, but I am pretty certain we use less water now than a year ago. We are still to install a water butt for the garden, but the cold winter hasn't really been a great incentive to do water installations outside.
Car: We use the car less, although there is still room for improvement here. In fact doing this stock take has made me realise that the mileage readings I wanted to take have kind of been forgotten, and I don't know with certainty how many miles we drive on average in a month – so action required. At least when I do drive I try to follow the advice for greener driving.
Other transport: we do a lot of walking now which is good, on the other hand my bike hasn't made it out of the garage many times, I struggle with public transport (thankfully my husband is doing better on that front) and we are booked on a flight next month – quickly next subject!
Food: We are still managing to have 2 vegetarian days a week, and red meat has also been decreased to just once a week. Likewise we seem to have limited the amount of food that ends up wasted.
Shopping:I now try to get our meat from the local butcher rather than the supermarket and I generally pay more attention to the stuff that goes in my shopping basket. Unfortunately we are not strictly buying organic, because it is just too expensive, but I try my best to avoid excessive amounts of food that has been flown half way across the planet or is packaged in ridiculous amounts of plastic. I still haven't signed up for a veg box delivery and I rarely make it to any of the local farm shops, which is slightly pathetic – so another action to note.
Cleaning: the main products in the cleaning cupboard are now bicarbonate of soda, vinegar and microfibre cloths.
Gardening: I am learning the basics of growing our own vegetables. This is definitely not a skill I will have fully mastered within the year, but considering what I knew this time last year, there has been huge progress.
All the little things: I pay a lot more attention now in general. I try to think about what I do and what impact it might have, although that is a gigantic task – and sometimes too difficult to figure out. Changing your mindset is a very difficult thing to do (just think about how many failed diets, exercise programmes or other resolutions there are every year), but I believe we are getting somewhere.
And the big things: well we haven't made any huge groundbreaking changes to our lives, that was never the plan from the outset. We have however probably changed some priorities, e.g. I am not sure we would have spent our limited money on insulation last year, but that was the choice we made this time round. Somehow the little things also push you towards the bigger ones. A year ago putting solar panels on the roof was the stuff of daydreams, now it is something I actually want to see happen. OK, it will still be a long time, they are expensive and our bank account is empty, but it has entered the priority list.
So what is the situation? Have we achieved anything? yes! Are we truly green? No, probably not. There are still lots of things we can do, some of them we will hopefully manage within the next 6 months, others will take longer – but at least we are doing something. In fact the other day I was reading more about the Transition Town movement (www.transitionnetwork.org). It is a very exciting set up based on the idea that many of the issues we are likely to face due to peak oil, climate change etc can be overcome by building sustainable and resilient communities that has a completely local basis. Transition here means the transition away from a completely oil dependent society and basically Transition Towns are trying to prepare themselves for what might come. We don't live in a Transition Town (yet…), but it made me think that maybe we are trying to be a transition family. A time might come when we all need to change our priorities, and if so hopefully this project is good preparation. I sincerely hope that the future doesn't look half as bleak as some of the predictions are suggesting, but if changes do come then hopefully they will be slightly less of a shock for us; and if life somehow by a miracle continues like this for the next 1000 years, well then we haven't lost anything by learning new stuff and cutting down on waste and consumption.I think we are on track!
New forum topics
- LCC Meeting : 15th February 2010
- DECC: Wam Homes, Greener Homes Strategy
- Scot Gov: Review of building stds – Sec 6 energy
- Committee on CC : Updated report o Scottish Exec..
- WWF: New Report: Climate impact of food much higher than previously thought
- Peak Oil – Businesses wake up – shortages by 2015 possible
- Community Woodlands Assoc
- Uk Gov: FITs announced
- Linlithgow Development Trust
- NEF: Growth Isnt Possible
- Scot Gov: Consulation on the Energy Efficiency Action Plan 4 Scotland
- LCC Meeting : 11th January 2010
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Jamie Turner
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The Pure Bridal 2013 collection boasts a great range of gowns that are ideal for brides on a budget. Which one will you choose?
With over 30 gorgeous styles to choose from, the 2013 bridal collection from Pure Bridal prides itself on being modern, bold and exciting.
With prices starting from just £399, this collection is just perfect for brides on a budget. Designs are simple yet stunning with figure-flattering silhouettes at every turn.
You'll also find a selection of lightweight gowns in this collection, ideal for weddings abroad.
Gallery – See the Pure Bridal 2013 collection
Contact Details
Website: www.romanticaofdevon.co.uk/collections/pure-bridal
Stockists: www.romanticaofdevon.co.uk/stockists


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Home > ALJ > Vol. 6 (2008) > Iss. 3
Academic Leadership: The Online Journal
Article Title
Gifted students continue to struggle in class because they are restricted to learning the standard curriculum (Clark, 2002). Gifted learners cannot be confined to a proficient level of education and therefore the need to advocate on their behalf continues. Not only can the need be recognized by those in the classroom, but also by those outside of the classroom with an interest in gifted and talented education.(Douglas, 2004) (Kaplan, Summer 2004) Each year the students that are enrolled in gifted and talented programs are asked to do an advocacy for gifted and talented education. They take on different approaches with the majority of them building on a personal teaching experience (Grant, 2002). While writing from three different approaches, three teacher-students captured the totality of the needs of gifted students as you will see in the following examples.
Recommended Citation
Monaco, Theresa
"Giving Our Gifted Students a Voice,"
Academic Leadership: The Online Journal: Vol. 6
, Article 10.
Available at: https://scholars.fhsu.edu/alj/vol6/iss3/10


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To mark the fated voyage of the Titanic exactly 100 years ago, a cruise ship is sailing from Southampton to New York on a twelve-night cruise to commemorate the anniversary of the sinking of the White Star liner.
Passengers on the Titanic Memorial Cruise ship, which left Southampton on Sunday April 8 include relatives of some of the 1,500 people who died when the Titanic sank and the ship will retrace the original voyage, including a visit to the site of the wreck.
The MS Balmoral is operated by Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines and was chartered for the special cruise by Miles Morgan Travel. The original Titanic was built in Belfast by Fred Olsen Cruise Lines' parent company, Harland and Wolff.
The cruise will recreate the atmosphere of the era with special menus and live music "of the day". The Titanic sank on April 15 1912 when she collided with an iceberg in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic.
Passengers from as many as twenty eight countries are on board, including the relatives of some of those who died. Seven hundred people survived the disaster.
Tickets cost from just over £2,000 up to £5,995 and a number of special onboard events are planned, including lectures by Titanic experts such as Philip Littlejohn who is the grandson of one of the survivors.
"It will be an emotional moment when we are over the wreck site, where I dived in 2001 and where my grandfather left Titanic rowing Lifeboat 13," said Mr Littlejohn.
The dinner menu on April 13 will feature dishes served onboard the original voyage and a special memorial service on April 15 will take place onboard at the exact time the Titanic got into trouble.
The Southampton cruise will pass by Cherbourg on the French coast before calling into the Irish port of Cobh then sailing across the Atlantic to Halifax in Canada, before arriving in New York.
In the US, a similar memorial cruise on the Azamara will leave from Manhattan Cruise Terminal (Pier 88) on April 10th, setting sail for Halifax before returning to New York eight nights later.
For more information visit http://titanicmemorialcruise.co.uk


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The information contained on this page is provided as general health information and is not intended to substitute as medical advice and direction from your physician or health care provider. Please direct any questions related to your health care provider. In an emergency, call 9-1-1 or go to the nearest emergency center.
The carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) test measures the level of CEA in the blood. CEA is a protein normally found in the tissue of a developing baby in the womb. The blood level of this protein disappears or becomes very low after birth. In adults, an abnormal level of CEA may be a sign of cancer.
Carcinoembryonic antigen blood test
A blood sample is needed.
Smoking may increase the CEA level. If you smoke, your doctor may tell you to avoid doing so for a short time before the test.
When the needle is inserted to draw blood, some people feel moderate pain. Others feel only a prick or stinging. Afterward, there may be some throbbing or a slight bruise. This soon goes away.
This test is done to monitor the response to treatment and then to check for the return of colon and other cancers such as medullary thyroid cancer and cancers of the rectum, lung, breast, liver, pancreas, stomach, and ovaries.
It is not used as a screening test for cancer and should not be done unless a diagnosis of cancer has been made.
The normal range is 0 to 2.5 ng/mL (0 to 2.5 µg/L).
In smokers, slightly higher values may be considered normal (0 to 5 ng/mL, or 0 to 5 µg/L).
A high CEA level in a person recently treated for certain cancers may mean the cancer has returned. A higher than normal level may be due to the following cancers:
Higher than normal CEA level alone cannot diagnose a new cancer. Further testing is needed.
An increased CEA level may also be due to:
Veins and arteries vary in size from one person to another and from one side of the body to the other. Obtaining a blood sample from some people may be more difficult than from others.
Other risks associated with having blood drawn are slight but may include:
Chernecky CC, Berger BJ. Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) - serum. In: Chernecky CC, Berger BJ, eds. Laboratory Tests and Diagnostic Procedures. 6th ed. St Louis, MO: Elsevier Saunders; 2013:292-293.
Franklin WA, Aisner DL, Post MD, Bunn PA, Garcia MV. Pathology, biomarkers, and molecular diagnoistics. In: Niederhuber JE, Armitage JO, Doroshow JH, Kastan MB, Tepper JE, eds. Abeloff's Clinical Oncology. 5th ed. Philadelphia, PA: Elsevier Saunders; 2014:chap 17.


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The incredible shrinking woman! Khloe Kardashian showed off her insane body and super small waist on Instagram on Monday. And there's no denying it: The Keeping Up With the Kardashians star looks tinier than ever. But the crazy part? Khloe is drinking a Coke in the photo. Is that the secret to your weight-loss success, KoKo? What the heck is going on?!
The photo was taken from the side, so you can see just how minuscule Khloe's waist is. Check it out:
Unbelievable, right? Khloe literally has completely overhauled her entire body. And being that she's so strict with her diet and exercise routine, it's pretty surprising to see her with a can of sugary, corn syrupy soda in her hand. Who knew that was allowed in her regimen?
More from CafeMom: 21 Throwback Pics of Khloe Kardashian That Are Almost Impossible to Believe (PHOTOS)
Khloe of course could have one of the Kardashians' beloved waist-trainers on, but still. The Strong Looks Better Naked author's entire figure looks good lately. Whatever she's doing, she should keep it up. Hey, if soda makes her look that good, keep on keeping on, girl.
Image via Aficionado Group/Khrome/Splash News


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|Young Offender's Dahlias
Generally September is the best month of the year to go hiking as it is dry underfoot and the weather is pretty reliable without the heat of August. I managed a second day out on the Way at the end of the month, completing another pretty easy section through the orchards of Kent. Even though only three weeks had passed since my last trip, the change in season was well underway with most of the apples now cropped and fields ploughed. The trees were mostly still green although there was a definite change of colour.
|East Sutton Village Sign
Sutton Valence had proved to be an easy place to park so I headed there first, leaving the public transport bit to the end. The village itself is quite interesting, with a ruined castle in the centre of the village and some attractive old buildings and would be worth some time exploring. The Greensand Way largely by-passes the centre of the village and heads out through the orchards at the top of the ridge.
|Ulcombe Church
After a mile or so, I passed the attractive church of St Peter and St Paul at East Sutton. There was a buzz of activity as several of the congregation were getting ready for the harvest festival and I was invited in to have a look around. I took one look at my muddy boots and politely declined since I didn't want to make a mess when they were working so hard!
|Foxton Sheep
Next door to the church was a young offender's institute. All was quiet although I did admire their magnificent dahlia display at the entrance. This was obviously someone's pet project to keep the miscreants out of trouble! The path then headed out across fields and there was a fine view of the now diminished ridge stretching away into the distance.
|Egerton House
The path passed by yet another church at Ulcombe, which was hiding behind a large yew hedge. The church was some distance from the village which nestled in a hollow in the clay vale below.
|Egerton Pub
From here it was back to orchards for some considerable distance. As most of the apple harvest was now complete the overriding memory of the day was the smell of rotting apples! Thankfully there weren't too many wasps about although it must have been ideal territory. Maybe they were drunk on the cider-like fumes!
|Egerton Village Sign
The path continued to skip from village to village along this part of the ridge and the next was Liverton Street, presumably built to serve the impressive looking Boughton Place, a further half mile along the way. This apparently is only a small part of the original house, with the rest being left to ruin over the years.
|Elmstone Hole
Here there was a break from orchards, but initially not a welcome one as I reached a freshly ploughed field, with the path being taken away. This created a rather unwanted obstacle, although luckily it wasn't wet enough to cause too many problems. A passed through some woodland and up a flight of steps to reach another impressive house at Egerton. The village of Egerton, a little further beyond had a very impressive church although this was sadly bathed in scaffolding.
|Shipland Ridge
Egerton had a village shop and a nice looking clapperboard pub, which would make for a good lunch stop. The path left the ridge for a short while and headed out across the clay vale once again to the village of Pluckley, famous for the location of 'The Darling Buds of May' and reputedly the most haunted village in England. I didn't hang around in Pluckley as the weather had turned by now and I was anxious to get to Pluckley station to get the next train. The station is almost two miles from the village and can be reached by a 'link' route that is waymarked. However, the path is clearly not used anything like as often as the main route as I came across some overgrown sections and the waymarking was patchy. Transport back to the car was easy. I took the train to Headcorn and from there the bus back to Sutton Valence, which left from the front of the station. This section of the route is easy, with few hills, some attractive villages and a lot of orchards!


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Many great dishes and recipes call for one of my favorite things, dairy, specifically milk. Hot chocolate, béchamel sauce, country gravy, are just the first few things that come to my mind that have a milk or cream base. If you have not learned by now, anything that can be medicated will get medicated around here, and this time we will tackle marijuana milk. This is another simple recipe to medicate and add to your…
How to Make Marijuana Milk
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Is 21st century stress causing you to live a lie?
McGraw-Hill Concise Dictionary of Modern Medicine defines denial as this: a primitive ego defense mechanism by which a person unconsciously negates the existence of a disease or other stress-producing reality in his environment by disavowing thoughts, feelings, wishes, needs, or external reality factors that are consciously intolerable. In other words, a person pretends that a situation that is happening in their lives isn't really happening at all. Oddly enough, however, the very mechanism people in denial use to protect themselves is the very thing that prevents them from actually helping themselves.
Considered one of the most primitive of the defense mechanisms and one of the most frequently used by individuals with an undeveloped, or immature, ability to cope with reality, denial is also usually accompanied by regression ("If I don't think about it, it's not real.") and people existing in a constant state of denial and regression can pay a high price mentally, emotionally, and socially. With such harmful repercussions as a result, why do people choose to exist within these mechanisms? Sigmund Freud, the armchair psychologists psychologist, claimed that in order to reduce feelings of anxiety, human beings are driven towards rationalization. Saul McCloud, a teaching assistant at the University of Manchester, concurred stating that rationalization is the cognitive distortion of "the facts" to make an event or an impulse less threatening, or to protect the person's self-esteem. It's the conversation that plays out like this:
"My husband (or wife) does this (or that) behavior (or thing) repeatedly and makes me (or our family, himself, herself) look bad not because he (or she) doesn't love me (or our family, himself, herself) but because (insert lame, overused excuse here)."
If you, or someone you know, lives in denial, you've heard statements similar to that one that may be about the person's job, their family, their friends, their kid's friend's parents; however, most people, when making excuses like that for themselves, rationalize on a fairly conscious level. McCloud had this to say about those individuals, "For many people, with sensitive egos, making excuses comes so easy that they never are truly aware of it. In other words, many of us [they] are quite prepared to believe our [their] lies." Sounds like a recipe for disaster for the friends and family who aren't prepared to believe the lies. So, what are they to do when confronted with the denial and rationalization of a loved one or colleague? It's an area where, according to another mental health professional, they had better tread lightly.
Michelle Aycock, a licensed psychotherapist and contributor for the Savannah Morning News, wrote about the impact of denial on relationships in a recent online article. Highlighting the difficulties of having a relationship with a person in denial because of the inability to confront the individual (due to the fear of repercussions), she had this to say, "Some people enjoy floating down the river of denial." In other words, you can confront a person living in denial until you're blue in the face but the only reaction you will most likely get is continued denial ("Your face isn't blue at all, it's red."). She offers the following advice for dealing with a person using denial as a chronic coping mechanism:
Don't try to take on or fix their problems. As difficult as it may be, let them deal with the consequences of choosing to live in denial however bad.
And for the person living in denial, she offers this:
If people are telling you you have a problem, then you probably have a problem.
Is there any hope for people in relationships with others living in denial? According to veteran psychologist, Dr. Bev Smallwood, there is. Smallwood wrote in an online post that if the person acknowledges and examines the areas in their life where they haven't been completely honest and then, with that same honesty, reflects on her suggested activities below, there is hope.
- Have you been defensive about statements people have made because they hit too close to home?
- Focus on the things you've been trying to ignore; maybe there is some truth in what people have been telling you.
- Allow yourself to experience your truth but don't be surprised if you feel sadness, embarrassment, or depression.
- Stop procrastinating! Face your issues and make a plan to improve your circumstances.
Life is not easy and with all of the demands we are faced with in the 21st century, so it's easy to understand why so many people choose to live in denial. Oftentimes, it's easier than facing the ugly truth! But if are constantly living in denial because of situations and circumstances in your life that are repeated over and over again, and it's causing the people around you to a.) not have candid conversations with you about your situations and circumstances because they know you'll have a melt down, or b.) concur with you and your bullshit because they know you'll have a meltdown, it might be time to step out of the river of denial and onto dry land.
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Improved services in rural communities and continued work between the Department of Agriculture and stakeholders are just two of the highlights of Farm Minister Michelle O'Neill's New Year message.
In setting out her priorities for the year ahead, Mrs O'Neill has said that 2015 will be challenging – not least with budget cuts of close to £30 million coming into play.
Minister O'Neill reflected on a successful end to 2014 which saw a record number of farmers receive their Single Farm Payments in December.
The minister said: "It was fitting to note that we ended 2014 with a record performance of 95% of approx 30,000 farmers receiving their Single Farm Payment (SFP) in December. These are the best results the department has delivered since the introduction of SFP in 2005. However, my officials will continue to process remaining claims as quickly as possible and I would appeal to the farming community to work with us to ensure any outstanding claims are settled quickly.
"2015 will herald significant changes in payments to farmers. The eligibility rules will change so my department currently has a major focus on communicating these new rules to farmers. The new payments for 2015 are the Basic Payment, the Greening Payment and the Young Farmer Payment.
"One of the biggest changes here is that the payments are not designed for landowners who let their land in conacre. The eligible claimant is the active farmer using the land. It is not sufficient simply to be the owner of the land. The department will put new controls in place to identify claimants who are not themselves the active farmer.
"The Greening Payment will have particular implications for farmers who have larger areas of arable land and the Young Farmer Payment is intended for younger farmers with a qualification who are taking control of the farm.
"The detailed rules and requirements are largely in place now and a considerable amount of information is available on the department's website (www.dardni.gov.uk). I have also committed to invest in the information and communications technology to comply with Europe's requirements and help farmers avoid penalties. My message to claimants in 2015 is simple: make sure you claim online rather than on paper, make sure your maps are accurate and make sure you meet the eligibility rules to ensure faster payment."
Turning to her department's budget spending plans for 2015 the minister identified frontline services, tackling rural isolation and harnessing the 'Going for Growth Strategy' as key priorities.
She said: "The Executive's draft budget for 2015/16 has been a focus of debate over the last number of months, particularly given the scale of Tory cuts. My share of the cuts equates to £29.9m. This will be very difficult for my department to deliver within one year, particularly as over half of my costs relate to staff.
"We have set a target to reduce staffing by about 10%. I know staff are concerned, not just about their own futures, but also to continue to deliver front line services. We have already put a hold on recruitment and promotion, so we are filling priority vacancies by moving existing staff. Shortly we will be offering a voluntary exit scheme. I believe these measures will allow us to meet our target.
"I do, however, recognise the need to balance my budget. I launched my Draft Budget 2015-16 proposals in late November and over 250 consultation responses have been received so far. My department is currently working through the responses and will be providing me with a summary of the key themes later this month for consideration. I will also use this summary to inform the Executive's consultation on the Draft Budget.
"Despite the obvious challenges the reduction in budget presents, I will not be deterred from delivering my policy priorities and my department's commitments in the Programme for Government. These include continuing progress on animal health and Tackling Rural Poverty and Social Isolation (TRPSI) which remains a key priority for me. I will ensure funding is provided for the TRPSI Programme in 2015-16. I am currently working with my Executive colleagues to identify new and challenging actions for inclusion in a refreshed Rural White Paper Action Plan which I hope to publish during 2015.
"I also intend to bolster rural economies through the department's programme of relocation which I have already announced and I have allocated the necessary capital funding (£4.2m) in my budget proposals. I also look forward to opening a new DARD Direct office in Strabane.
"I will also allocate £3m of funding to initiate some of the actions identified in the 'Going for Growth' strategy. A key feature of this investment will be the delivery of the Farm Business Improvement Scheme (FBIS). This represents an initial step towards delivering longer term investment.
"In addition to the FBIS I am also committed to delivering a range of other measures within the new Rural Development Programme. This includes establishing the new Local Action Groups under the LEADER programme, and delivering payments to farmers through the new Areas of National Constraints scheme.
"Cuts are being imposed across the Executive and my department is not exempt. I will have to take difficult decisions. In doing so, I intend to remain true to commitments I have made and priorities I have set.
"I will welcome views from stakeholders on the measures to take in balancing the budget and how to mitigate their impact," she added.