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She tries (and is rather successful) to get Pucho to show interest in Pituka.
Luna can also transform herself, so while she is usually seen in her original form, when around her new friends she will take on the form of a pink cat.
Astrid: Astrid is a dream solider, meaning she has an oath at birth to serve the queen of paws den.
After she was saved by Pituka, she changed her allegiance to Pituka.
Astrid is extremely loyal to whoever she serves, and will follow any order given to her.
Astrid very closely resembles an anubis.
Secondary characters [ edit ] Tammy: Tammy is a crazy witch therapist who constantly tries to seduce Dr. Ulrick.
She provides therapy to Pituka and Nelly.
Dr.Ulrick: Ulrick is a doctor that works in Paws Den at a clinic.
Because of his shy and cute personality, many of the females find him very attractive.
Notes [ edit ] "Fillers" are used whenever a comic isn't avaible Updates are sometimes streamed
Four reasons the updated Uber Dubai app makes us sad By Mike Priest Double charges, secret surges… Uber, your app is bad.
Late last year, ride-hailing company Uber updated its app in an effort to make it even easier for customers to book one of its cars.
The update added a number of new features, including the ability to schedule rides in advance, as well as providing up-front fare estimates.
However, just like the sickly sweet smell of a newly opened car air freshener, not everything was as rosy as it seemed.
While the app also received a much needed facelift, some of the core functionality that users enjoyed was either buried behind a mess of design-driven decisions, or had been removed entirely.
So, after months of botched bookings and frustration, we can stand it no more!
Here are our top four gripes with the Uber app: 1) You can’t book an open-ended trip One of the perks of the original Uber app was the ability jump in any of its cars and venture off into the Dubai streets to wherever took your fancy.
A super handy feature in a city where roads and landmarks are constantly changing, giving Google Maps a tough time at playing catch up.
The app now requires that you enter a definite end-point to your journey, making it incredibly difficult in those instances when you’re trying to get to your mate’s place and all you have for directions are a vague take the third left after the second Mosque once you hit Al Wasl Rd.
Similarly, if you want to hail an Uber to help you collect something and then return home in the same car it is tricky to do as you can’t specify a round-trip as a destination.
2) The surge pricing indicator is tucked away Surge prices are the scourge of the avid Uber user, always at their peak during daily prayer times, commuting rush hours or Friday brunches.
Either they run the risk of doubling your fare during peak hours, or making you late as you impatiently wait for them to drop below 1.1x so you can avoid paying even a single fil over the going rate.
Uber must clearly have caught on that its users aren’t fans of elevated surge pricing as it now hides away any notice of it in the tiniest font possible, only notifying you when asking you to confirm your booking.
We miss the big, bold pop up that told us we were about to be ‘surged’ before we booked.
A little unscrupulous if you ask us, especially for those looking to book in a hurry, or at the end of a night out.
3) Location errors can end up costing big One Uber user recounted to us a story in which they were looking to travel from their apartment building in Dubai Marina to the Al Qasr hotel in Jumeirah but had, unbeknownst to them, mistakenly set their destination as a restaurant in JBR with the same name (that was 500 metres from their house).
Uber told them the fare would be Dhs30-40 when they booked (seems fair for Marina to Madinat) so they hopped in the cab and then had a confusing conversation about location, during which the driver said he knew it would be Al Qasr the hotel and not the restaurant, so the user asked the driver to take them there.
In the end a 10 minute ride cost them Dhs80 (and they didn’t realise it would cost that much when they booked).
While this is not entirely Uber’s fault (the app relies on Google Maps for its location information), we’ve heard multiple similar accounts to warrant it being noted as an issue.
A series of checks certainly wouldn’t go amiss to ensure customers don’t wind up with a fare for the wrong location or, worse yet, end up somewhere else entirely.
4) Being charged double for a ride is no fun One of the biggest changes that Uber implemented with its app overhaul is how they handle payment.
It used to be that you would book your ride and only be charged the fare (calculated based on the minimum fee and an amount per minute/kilometer) once you reached your destination.
Just like a regular cab – nice and simple.
Instead, the new system calculates the fare in advance (using the same maths as before) and gives you an estimated rate for how much the journey should cost.
This is clearly stated in the app along with the caveat that “Uber places a temporary authorization hold on your card, which is converted to a charge for the final fare.
You may receive 1 or more SMS messages from your bank notifying you of both the hold and the charge.” Frustratingly, if your journey deviates from the specified amount charged at the beginning of the trip (due to a detour to pick up a friend or, you know, traffic) you are then charged a second, final amount for what the fare actually is.
Sure, the original amount is released back to your credit card, but some banks take upwards of 10 working days to process a card chargeback, meaning if you’re a regular Uber user who gets stuck in traffic often – hello, practically everyone in Dubai – then you could be potentially ponying up around double each time you ride.
We reached out to Uber regarding our grievances with their app and they came back with the most diplomatic of responses: “At Uber, we are passionate about using technology to help move people around cities, and to recapture the clean and simple aesthetic of the original Uber experience, we rebuilt a faster, smarter rider app completely from the ground up.
The new Uber experience is reimagined around a simple question—“Where to?”.
And by starting with your destination, we can tailor the journey to you.” We will say this, Uber does continue to offer a responsive and competent level of customer support whereby, should you raise any of the above issues with your ride (and believe us, we did!
), they go above and beyond in helping to resolve things.
It’s just upsetting that the core app is in such a state that we experienced everything we’ve mentioned here on multiple occasions, without so much of a hint as to whether these issues are going to be addressed in the future.
Let’s hope Uber gets its act together.
In the meantime, it’s enough to make you want to try that other ride-hailing company’s app from across the street… – Have you experienced any issues with the Uber app that drive you nuts?
Tell us about them on Facebook.
Photos: Uber app
Israel Accused of Suppressing Terror Evidence to Help Out New Pal China Israel is a country desperate for friends.
Isolated in the Middle East and hated in large parts of the Arab world, it struggles to make alliances.
The few it has, it guards fiercely.
So it should perhaps come as no surprise that for years Israel has been courting China, inking trade deals and fêting one another over champagne.
But that process now finds Israel in an awkward bind, one that may lead the country to compromise on its core anti-terror policies.
According to a report in Haaretz, the Israeli government is currently under enormous pressure from Beijing to suppress evidence that the Bank of China laundered money for Islamic Jihad.
In 2006, a Jewish-American teenager, Daniel Wultz, was killed in a suicide bombing carried out by Islamic Jihad at a Tel Aviv shawarma restaurant.
His parents have now sued for damages — at the initial encouragement of Israel — and allege that the Bank of China laundered funds for the terror group, effectively bankrolling the operation that killed their son.
Prior to filing the case, according to Haaretz, Israeli officials told the parents, Yekutiel and Sheryl Wultz, that they would support their case and provide evidence implicating the Bank of China.
Now, at Beijing’s urging, they’re having second thoughts.
So far, Israel has declined to provide the expert testimony they promised and are currently deliberating over whether to make Uzi Shaya, a former intelligence official, available to a New York City court.
That’s right, under Chinese pressure, Israel may prevent the victims of a Tel Aviv terrorist attack from extracting damages from the people who bankrolled an operation that killed their son.
Chalk it up to the cost of a new friendship.
If the burgeoning alliance between Israel and China sounds unlikely, bear in mind that it’s a relationship forged in political and economic calculation.
Israel was one of the first countries to recognize China following its Communist revolution, and while it took over 40 years for to China establish diplomatic relations with Israel, the two countries have something off an oddball history of military cooperation.
Awash in seized Soviet weapons following the Six Day War in 1967, Israel quietly worked to upgrade China’s military arsenal.
That relationship continued into the 1990s when President Bill Clinton furiously vetoed the proposed sale from Israel to China of an advanced radar system.
Now, the relationship between the two countries has become primarily economic, though geopolitical concerns still hover in the background.
Trade between the two countries stood at $8 billion in 2012, and when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Beijing in May he was accompanied by a retinue of Israeli businessmen who hope to push that figure above $10 billion over the next five years.
While there, Netanyahu signed a series of bilateral agreements and shared a champagne toast with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.
And in January of last year, the two countries inked a $300 million line of credit designed to bring Israeli investments to China.
Now, a free trade pact is under consideration.
But even as Israel and China draw closer to one another economically, awkward geopolitical concerns threaten to poison their relationship.
China habitually obstructs efforts to crack down on Iran’s nuclear program and is all too happy to undermine Western and Israeli interests in the region at times.
But for this reason, Israel has little to lose — and a lot to gain — by moving closer to China.
"We do hope that if we are able to improve economic ties and connections between Israel and China, it will help us also to explain our positions with regard to the Iranian nuclear threat, with regard to the events in Syria," then-Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinetz said in an interview with Bloomberg prior to signing the $300 million line of credit.
Steinetz currently serves as the intelligence minister, and the calculation at play is an obvious one: Through its trade ties Israel hopes to win influence with China and alter its positions on issues critical for Israel.
But that calculation runs both ways, as Israel is currently learning in a New York courtroom.
In arguments last Friday, lawyers for the Bank of China tried to convince the judge that Israel’s reluctance to make its intelligence expert available signaled that the Israeli government no longer backed his conclusions about the bank’s involvement with Islamic Jihad.
But the judge, Shira Sheindlin, did not buy it.
"It’s hard for me to accept that assumption," she said.
A drawing shows a woman having her arm prepared for minor surgery.
(Print by Abraham Bosse via National Library of Medicine) What’s the best way to treat prostate cancer?
What are the benefits and risks of different rehabilitation options for survivors of stroke?
Unfortunately, the answer to these and similar questions often is: Nobody knows.
The United States spends $3 trillion annually on health care — much of it funded by taxpayers through programs such as Medicare — yet only a limited amount of information exists about what treatments work best for which patients.
Although estimates vary, some experts think that less than half of all medical care is based on clear scientific evidence.
The good news is that the federal government is now making a significant investment in health services and patient-centered outcomes research to identify waste and improve the safety, effectiveness and quality of care.
The bad news is that House Republicans are trying to abolish one of the main agencies carrying out this research, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and cut the funding of another, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
The puzzle is why.
One possible reason is that Republicans oppose taxpayer funding of all scientific research as a matter of principle.
Yet the same House Appropriations Committee draft bill that targets health services research also provides a $1.1 billion increase in the budget of the National Institutes of Health.
A second possible reason is that Republicans are uninterested in evidence-based policymaking.
But both Democrats and Republicans argue that better information is needed to make government more effective.
For example, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) recently introduced the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission Act of 2015 to evaluate the effectiveness of federal programs.
What makes the situation even more perplexing is that evidence-based medicine has a solid Republican pedigree.
Perhaps the most important advocate of an increased federal role in paying for research on the clinical effectiveness of treatments has been Gail R. Wilensky, a Republican economist who served as George H.W.
Bush’s Medicare director.
In 2008, former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) published an op-ed with Billy Beane, the “Moneyball“ general manager of the Oakland A’s, and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.)
in which they lamented that “a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures.
Studies have shown that most health care is not based on clinical studies of what works best and what does not — be it a test, treatment, drug or technology.” Republicans have turned against government funding of evidence-based medicine research for five reasons.
Federal investment in this research (although it predated the 2008 election) became closely tied to the Obama administration’s health-care reform agenda, because big funding increases were tucked into the 2009 stimulus legislation and the Affordable Care Act — two measures the GOP strongly opposed.
An increased federal role in comparative effectiveness research, together with payments to physicians for voluntary counseling to Medicare patients about end-of-life options and the creation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (another agency the GOP wishes to kill) contributed to the “death panels” myth, which Republicans have used to frame health-care reform as “rationing.” As University of Maryland political scientist Frances E. Lee argues, partisan conflict over technocratic issues such as medical research is often “opportunistic and focused on electoral advantage.” As she writes, “The politics of good government, ironically, is hardball.” Although evidence-based medicine might seem likely to have bipartisan support, it has become a partisan issue among voters.