text
stringlengths 245
34.4k
| id
int64 0
1.27M
|
|---|---|
Commercials can be banned for numerous reasons. Sometimes they’re too sexy, too inappropriate, too violent, or sometimes even too honest for TV.
The following advertisements were all yanked off the air after their short life-span on regular television.
Lucky for you, you can thank always thank WebTvHub and the internet for never holding back.
7) Go Daddy’s Un-aired Super Bowl Ad
GoDaddy is known for their creative, yet risqué advertisements. Personally, I don’t think this one was that controversial, but the network did. Maybe if it had been a Budweiser commercial it would have been deemed more ‘appropriate’ for the Super Bowl.
6) Every Car Needs a Trunk Monkey
Screw plasma TVs and 24 inch rims! This car’s powerful device wards off angry drivers. After seeing this ad, I’m seriously considering buying a Suburban. This one was pulled for being too violent.
5) Perverted Dodge Commercial
Here’s another car commercial with a twist- wait…that didn’t sound right. Well, what these guys are talking about doesn’t exactly sound right either. What’s 7 inches longer, handles great, and is loved by girls? A Dodge Durango of course!
4) Hilarious Xbox 360 Ad: Crazy Lady
It’s a proven fact: when old people play video games, they go crazy. Usually, though, it comes from their frustrating inability to learn the controls. This lady, on the other hand, is way too into it. I wish my mom was this enthusiastic about video games!
3) Sumo Beepers
Pagers are considered obsolete these days, but this commercial remains a classic. Make sure to stick around for the ending. Talk about a big finish!
2) Banned Condom Commercial
We’ve shared this one on WebTVhub in the past, still, I dare you to find a commercial that is more brutally honest than this. We’ve all seen a similar seen at the grocery store at least one time. Here’s one video that needs to get played on MTV.
1) The Funniest Banned Commercial
Here you have it, the funniest banned commercial of all time (and, yes, this one’s NSFW). After I saw this, it made me think about international music. What are we really listening to when we hear music in other languages?
That concludes my list of the funniest banned commercials. Sure, there are others that show more gore and skin, but none of those are quite as hilarious. The next time you see an advertisement in the same league as these, enjoy it before it gets pulled of the air. | 1,266,000 |
A REFERENDUM on the European fiscal treaty, to be held on May 31st, is there for the Government to win. It would be a mistake, however, to discount the negative impact ministerial laziness and arrogance could have on public opinion. Being forced to ask the same question twice, in order to get the desired outcome, became something of a sick joke at the time of the Nice and Lisbon treaties. This time out, clear explanations and robust political campaigns are required from the outset. A lack of information must not be allowed to figure again as the public’s reason for rejection.
There are signs the electorate appreciates the importance of this treaty in the context of Ireland’s current economic and fiscal situation. Unlike the two previous occasions, when public support for the treaties started high and unravelled as the campaign progressed, this time opinion polls have plotted a gradual increase in support over a three month period. The Government parties should attempt to build on that momentum in the coming weeks.
One of the stark differences involving this treaty is the absence of a capacity for rejectionists to demand a better deal on the basis that unanimity is required for its adoption. A majority of countries within the Eurozone will implement the provisions of the document with or without Irish participation. If voters stand aloof, they will automatically forego the capacity to access emergency funding by way of a new Eurozone “firewall”. Such funding may not be required. But its availability could make a substantial difference to the cost of Government borrowing on international markets. That, in turn, will influence the range of public services it can afford to provide.
Opponents of the treaty have criticised it on the basis that it will perpetuate hardship. They do not say where money can be raised if it is rejected. Austerity became inevitable in this State because of banking guarantees and profligate spending and vote-buying of recent governments. It was not a new phenomenon. Since the foundation of the State, the economy has been brought to the brink of ruin on three separate occasions by governments that embarked on mad-cap, unsustainable spending. Given that track record, citizens could be forgiven for thinking an increase in budgetary discipline would be a positive development.
With eight weeks to go, the text of the Referendum Bill has not been published. The legislation will be rushed through the Dáil next week, opening the way for the appointment of a Referendum Commission. The Commission is unlikely to be in a position to issue an impartial explanation of what the treaty means until mid-May. By then, the Government will have grabbed the initiative and circulated a copy of the treaty, along with its own explanatory leaflet, to every household. Given such alacrity, it has clearly learned a lesson from the bloody nose it received in its campaign to introduce a property charge. Issuing a leaflet is, however, no substitute for knocking on doors. | 1,266,001 |
Image copyright Yuan Zhang/Nature Ecology & Evolution Image caption What pterosaurs might have looked like
Two exceptionally well preserved fossils give a new picture of the pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs.
Scientists believe the creatures may have had feathers, and looked something like brown bats with fuzzy wings.
The surprise discovery suggests feathers evolved not in birds, nor dinosaurs, but in more distant times.
Pterosaurs were the closest relatives of dinosaurs, sharing a common ancestor about 250 million years ago.
"We would suggest - tentatively - that it would be worth considering that feathers originated much earlier than we thought," Prof Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol, told BBC News.
Hailing from China, the 160-million-year-old fossils are of two different pterosaurs, one of which is newly discovered.
Strange feathery creatures
In depth analysis shows that as well as fur - which has been suggested before - the flying reptiles had feathers like some dinosaurs, including the theropods.
"If I just saw these fluffy bits on their own, I would swear they were from a theropod dinosaur," said Dr Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, who was not part of the study.
"This means feathers were not a bird innovation, not even a dinosaur innovation, but evolved first in a much more distant ancestor.
"The age of dinosaurs was full of all sorts of strange feathery creatures!"
Image copyright Baoyu Jiang, Michael Benton et al./Nature Ecology Image caption Are these feathers?
The researchers found that the pterosaurs had four different kinds of covering, including fuzzy, fur over most of their body; and, on parts of the head and wings, three types of fibres similar to modern feathers.
The fluff and feathers are likely to have been important in heat regulation and aerodynamics.
"These structures on the pterosaur make it look a bit like a fruit bat, or something like that, a fuzzy hairy creature," said Prof Benton, who worked on the discovery with colleagues in China.
"They fly with great out-stretched bony wings that carry a substantial membrane, a bit like a bat."
Flight in the Jurassic skies
Questions still remain over whether these are true feathers. If they are, it would suggest that feathers appeared millions of years earlier than previously thought.
Alternatively, feathers could have evolved twice during the course of evolution.
Insects were the first group to achieve the ability to fly: they developed wings at least 320 million years ago.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates - animals with a backbone - to evolve powered flight, about 230 million years ago.
The research is published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Follow Helen on Twitter. | 1,266,002 |
United States Secretary of State John Kerry will return to Israel and the Palestinian territories for the second time in less than two weeks, as part of the Americans’ efforts to kick-start the long-stalled peace process.
According to a senior Israeli official who asked to remain anonymous, Kerry is expected to arrive in Israel on Saturday night. Kerry is also expected to visit Turkey this week as part of his trip to Western Europe and Asia, to consult allies on issues including Syria's civil war.
Kerry spoke on Tuesday with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and informed them of his plan to return to the region.
Among the issues discussed were further confidence-building measures between the sides, which the administration of President Barack Obama hopes will pave the way for direct negotiations.
On March 23, one day after Obama ended his 3-day trip to Israel and the West Bank, Kerry started his campaign of shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Ramallah. As a result of his talks with Netanyahu, the prime minister announced last week, just hours before the start of the Passover holiday, that he was ordering the Finance Ministry to resume transfer of tax revenues collected on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, which had been halted after Ramallah gained recognition of its statehood by the United Nations in November last year.
Kerry plans to continue traveling between Jerusalem and Ramallah in an effort to find a formula that would allow both sides to agree to direct talks. The issue of Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails is likely to top the agenda when Kerry sits down with both sides, especially given the death of a long-term prisoner Tuesday and the disturbances that erupted across the West Bank as a result.
During their previous round of talks, Abbas told Kerry that he sees the issue of prisoners as paramount in any Israeli-Palestinian dialogue. The Palestinian leader made it clear he would be willing to meet Netanyahu if he agreed to free the 120 Palestinians who have been incarcerated in Israel since before the signing of the Oslo Accords. Similarly, the Palestinians are demanding the implementation of understandings they claim were reached with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whereby Israel supposedly agreed to free an additional 1,200 prisoners as a personal gesture of good will to Abbas.
Kerry’s plan would see a three-month preparatory period of talks between the sides, after which he would present his proposal for the resumption of direct talks. Until then, he is keen for Israel and the PA to commit to further confidence-building measures: on the Israeli side, restricting settlement construction and freeing prisoners, and on the Palestinian side, undertaking not to carry out any more unilateral approaches to the UN or associated bodies. Kerry also wants Arab states to contribute toward the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian talks: Later this month, a delegation of foreign ministers from Qatar, Jordan and Egypt are due to discuss the administration’s policy on the peace process. | 1,266,003 |
did one better: the winner of a cointoss between the teams would decide sides and order of picks. The winner could choose if he wanted to decide the side (choosing either Dire or Radiant) or the order of picks (choosing either first or second pick). The loser gets whatever the winner didn't want. This changes everything. Teams now have to decide in the beginning what fits their plans better instead of following the old Radiant & First Pick vs Dire & Second Pick procedure.Anyway, here is what happened -The groupstage saw a crazy 8-16 in favor of the Dire, mostly because of the bo1 format. However, once the tournament got into the quarter finals, the numbers show a near perfect equilibrium between Radiant and Dire: 4-4 in the quarterfinals, 2-2 in the semi-finals and 1-2 on the finals. In many matches teams went straight to the Radiant mid lane neutral camps to place wards and deny the pull.In terms of picks, the groupstage saw a close 11-13 in favor of the second-pick. Dark Seer was the hero most often first-picked in the tournament, but his winrate was only a measely 28% (5-13). Other popular first-pick heroes like Templar Assassin (6-10) and Batrider (4-6) stayed below the 50% winrate mark as well. Magnus (11-2) and Bounty Hunter (13-5) had the best numbers among the heroes with the most first-picks in the tournament. Heroes like Undying (10-2) and Chaos Knight (7-3) also had strong winrates, while Sven (9-14) and Rubick (9-13) accompanied Batrider and Templar Assassin to the below-50%-winrate mark.- Magnus and Undying had a perfect 100% winrate when played on the Dire side (6 games each).- Bounty Hunter was picked twice as much for the Radiant (12 times, with 67% winrate) as for the Dire (6 times, with 83% winrate)- Dark Seer had a 10% winrate when played for the Radiant (1-9), while Dire winrate was 44% (4-5). Sven had a 26% winrate while playing for the Radiant (4-15), and his winrate for the Dire was 56% (5-4).In terms of the Fantasy League, there were no surprises. Team Mathismight won the global league for the third time in a row. At first he wasn't in first place, but, scoring 664 points, he skyrocketed from 7th to 1st with Na'Vi's elimination in the quarter finals. Basically, he didn't have any Na'Vi players in his roster. In the TL Dota Fantasy League, Affinity won first place with 554 points.
Administrator SKT T1 | Masters of the Universe | 1,266,004 |
market, in the company of the two German shepherds by their side, is simply spectacular! This almost felt like a gaming level in Call of Duty on Xbox or PlayStation. Although slightly less breathtaking than the big chaos scenes of the second movie, the stunts and the fights are yet still unprecedented, compared to everything we see in common action movies. Hard to believe that Reeves and Berry are in their fifties, knowing full well that they are doing almost all of their stunts. Props to these guys!
Keanu Reeves in ‘John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum’ [Credit: Lionsgate]
Let’s discuss a few minor flaws here. There are some story elements that don’t work as well as in the two previous films. I have to admit, the script is not destined to be the central element of this franchise, fans do not like to watch John Wick at work for his conversation abilities. In this case, I think Keanu Reeves has about 30 to 35 lines for the entire runtime … no more than that! He is a man of few words, we knew that, but this is a record for a lead character! This is also the case for the other characters, whose lines are weaker and lack variation. Everyone says a little bit of the same thing constantly, using the same terms and arriving at the same conclusions. Let’s say that the story decreases in complexity, which might not please everyone. There’s more, we definitely feel a constant pretension, as if the creators wanted to boast that John Wick is so cool by adding more and more crazy stunts. On many occasions, characters will meet John before confronting him and will always take the time to flatter him. It is clear that Stahelski adores his creation, we have that reason for all this orgasmic action and these killer one-liners. Oh yeah…and the last line of the film is even a little too laughable for my taste.
All in all, John Wick 3 is a good and fun ride, no questions asked. On the other hand, I think it is now time to ask the question: how many films can they still make before the formula gets dated or overused? In my opinion, not a whole bunch. Keanu Reeves can iron his shirt and put on his jacket again, but it must be done by adding some more creative touches before it’s too late.
On that note, please feast on John f **** cking Wick!
Click here and get tickets to John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. Use the promo code SQUAD to get $5 of your first ticket purchase!
Like this review? Check out these other similar reviews by some of our top contributors!
‘Game of Thrones: The Last of the Starks’ Spoiler Review!
‘Long Shot’ Review | 1,266,005 |
?
One wonders how funny that film will turn out to be. The scenes set in 2015, for sure, will be tinged with irresistible comedy. We will see the faces of the actors playing Burnham, Cooper, and Kendall as word begins to filter through, from the campaign trail, that they are no longer in a three-horse race; that the hobbling outsider, far from being an also-ran, is right on their hooves. Even more aghast will be the expressions of the Corbyn nominators. It is now clear that some of them—sane, experienced politicians—encouraged him to enter the fray not because they shared his beliefs, or even because they were backing him in the leadership contest, but because they felt, in their wisdom, that the race would benefit from a broader range of candidates. The other three were on the bland side; why not, you know, toss a maverick into the mix? Who on Earth could object to a more vigorous debate? To which the only response is: be very, very careful what you wish for.
Jeremy Corbyn is sixty-six. He has been married three times. “He’s a genuinely nice guy,” according to his first wife. “The problem is that his politics are to the exclusion of other kinds of human activities.” There is a cruel caricature, hard to erase from the popular imagination, that depicts the archetypal resident of the British far left: a bearded, bicycle-riding, teetotal vegetarian from Islington, in north London. The image is lazy and unjust; in Corbyn’s case, unfortunately, it also happens to be true. Since 1983, he has been the Member of Parliament for Islington North. He owns no car. He was a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Stop the War coalition against the invasion of Iraq. His natural weapons are the banner, the bullhorn, and the protest march. He has never been a minister, or a shadow minister. What he has been, persistently, is a pain in the neck, or, at any rate, a thorn in the side. More than five hundred times in his parliamentary career he has defied the whip; in other words, he has ignored the advice of the party whips—a thrillingly British term for the enforcers who, in a House of Commons debate, cajole and command M.P.s to vote in line with the leadership. Corbyn’s reputation as a rebel has been honestly earned, over the long haul, but it now presents him with a problem; how exactly, in his new capacity, can he expect those who serve beneath him to obey the touch of the whip? How do you square the example of your own conscience with the need for party order, without which, in opposition, you cannot hope to hold the government to account? | 1,266,006 |
A legal immigrant is going viral for defending President Donald Trump's immigration policies in a recent op-ed.
Guyanese-born Neil Gouveia came to the United States when he was seven-years-old, and six years later he became an American citizen.
Gouveia joined Steve Doocy on "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday to share his story and to explain why he believes Trump is right on immigration.
'Facts Work, Why Don't You Get Some': Tucker Battles NM Candidate Who Said 'F*** the NRA'
"America's a land of opportunities, and this is a place where we could create our own destiny, so it was definitely worth it," Gouveia said of his family's years-long journey toward citizenship.
Gouveia revealed that his mother had to make an incredibly difficult "Sophie's Choice" as she tried to legally bring her family to America.
After a three-year wait, Gouveia's mother arrived at the U.S. embassy in Georgetown to pick up visas for her family of nine, but she was informed by an immigration officer that the visas could not be issued because one of her children had cerebral palsy, and that would be a huge expense for the U.S. government.
Gouveia's mother decided to leave her daughter behind to be cared for by a friend, in order to save the American Dream for the rest of her family.
The girl was eventually brought to America and reunited with her family, although she passed away of pneumonia a short time later.
Despite that, Gouveia said, one of his mother's greatest satisfactions was that she never gave up on her daughter.
As for his "conservative" views on immigration, Gouveia said the U.S. is a country of rules and laws, and those rules and laws must be followed.
"People like me and my family, we took the long way, we had to be really patient about it," Gouveia said. "But this is the way to do it. There's no other way. And if you want to be productive members of society in this country, you have to follow the guidelines."
He added that Trump's proposed merit-based immigration system is something that is already practiced in countries like Canada and Australia.
"Invite people over who... embrace our ways of life or values -- which are very important -- in addition to having skills that fit the society."
Watch more above.
LOOK: Anti-NRA and Anti-GOP Signs Displayed at Philadelphia Elementary School
Tomi Lahren: 'Knee-Jerk Reactions' on Gun Control 'Never the Solution'
Student Organizes Pro-Gun Walkout: 'You Can Only Violate a Right, You Can't Take It Away' | 1,266,007 |
grow.
While pharmaceutical giants like Roche Holding have also developed reliable coronavirus testing kits, Seegene can churn out tests more quickly using a production system automated with artificial intelligence, said Shin Jae-hoon, an analyst at Hanwha Investment & Securities Co.
The country's inroads in test kit production also reflect South Korea's position as a powerhouse for complex manufacturing, with electronic parts like memory chips and OLED displays that go into smartphones and laptops made there. The country spends more of its economic output on scientific and technological research than its most advanced rivals like Japan and Germany.
Related Story Test for Covid-19 antibodies a world first for Singapore
Related Story Singapore sends coronavirus test kits to Myanmar
In Hubei province, the region of China which has been devastated by the virus and is still under mass quarantine, the shortage of tests and their tendency to throw up false negatives meant that thousands of infected patients were not hospitalised before they spread the virus widely to other people.
"China used massive social distancing to respond to the outbreak, but that would be difficult to replicate in most countries and might have adverse economic consequences," said Associate Professor Ben Cowling at the School of Public Health of University of Hong Kong.
Similar issues are now cropping up elsewhere. Japan is facing criticism for a failure to test widely and well: two passengers let off a cruise ship the country locked down for weeks in Yokohama harbour to contain the virus tested positive after they returned home. Local officials from Tokyo to further-flung prefectures like Wakayama say they don't have enough test kits.
The US case tally - at 126 infections and 11 deaths - has some speculating the country just isn't testing enough. New York and Florida have complained of faulty tests and a shortage of supply, and fewer than 2,000 people have been been checked for the virus nationally as of last week.
Similar scenarios are playing out in other virus hot spots like Iran and Italy. Expanded testing will likely show that transmission within communities has been taking place for longer than realised, said Prof Raina MacIntyre, professor of infectious diseases at the University of New South Wales. "In the US, the emergence of cases with no risk factors suggests that community transmission is a serious concern," she said.
For South Korea, widespread testing has helped it get a handle on the scale of the epidemic, but once diagnosed with the virus patients need to be isolated and treated. In Daegu, hospital beds are running out and public anger is rising over a shortage of masks and other supplies.
"We are testing people on the biggest scale, at the fastest pace in the world, and disclosing the results transparently and instantly to public," Mr Moon said in a speech on Tuesday. "We believe this is the best thing we can do for now in order to prevent further spread in local communities." | 1,266,008 |
Burma EU Set To Lift Burma Sanctions, Except On Arms
The EU is expected to lift all sanctions on Burma next week, except for an arms embargo, in recognition of the “remarkable process of reform.”
BRUSSELS—The European Union is expected to lift all sanctions on Burma next week, except for an arms embargo, in recognition of the “remarkable process of reform” in the country, a document seen by Reuters showed on Wednesday.
The European Union agreed a year ago to suspend most of its sanctions against Burma for a year, but it is now expected to go further by agreeing “to lift all sanctions with the exception of the embargo on arms,” the document said.
The step, which was agreed by EU ambassadors on Wednesday, paving the way for ministerial approval on Monday, will allow European companies to invest in Burma, which has significant natural resources and borders economic giants China and India.
“The EU is willing to open a new chapter in its relations with Myanmar, building a lasting partnership,” said the document, which contains the draft conclusions for Monday’s EU foreign ministers’ meeting.
The European Union had frozen the assets of nearly 1,000 companies and institutions in Burma and banned almost 500 people from entering the European Union. It also prohibited military-related technical help and banned investment in the mining, timber and precious metals sectors.
The United States and other Western countries have been easing sanctions on Burma to reward a wave of political and economic reforms put in place since Burma’s military stepped aside and a quasi-civilian government was installed in 2011.
Under President Thein Sein’s reforms, opposition leader and Nobel peace prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who spent 17 years under house arrest, has been allowed back into politics and has made a number of visits abroad.
A succession of foreign leaders, including US President Barack Obama, have traveled to Burma, and the country is attracting a surge of interest from overseas businesses keen to enter one of the last untapped markets in Asia.
In February, Danish brewer Carlsberg said it was returning to Burma following the easing of international sanctions which forced it out of the country in the mid-1990s.
While praising moves toward democracy and government efforts against corruption, the EU document called on Burma to release unconditionally remaining political prisoners.
It also called on the government to deal with inter-communal violence and take urgent action to deal with humanitarian risks facing displaced people in Arakan State, which was swept by sectarian violence last year that killed at least 110 people and left 120,000 homeless.
Sectarian violence erupted again last month and 43 people were killed in Buddhist-majority Burma. Thousands, mostly Muslims, were driven from their homes and businesses as bloodshed spread across the central region of the country. | 1,266,009 |
— Ad money from outside groups is pouring into North Carolina this fall to back or oppose candidates for Congress, the General Assembly and the state Supreme Court, including millions of dollars from anonymous sources who want to influence voters.
By law, those groups aren't allowed to coordinate with candidates, but that's exactly what both major parties say the other side is doing.
The North Carolina Democratic Party filed a complaint this week against Carolina Leadership Coalition after, Democrats say, the group did a lot of expensive research to help state House Republicans and posted it all online so GOP candidates could download it and use it for free.
"[It was] everything from polling to messaging to attacks to even what constitutional amendments to put on the ballot," Democratic Party spokesman Robert Howard said. "I think that shows this Republican Party will do anything to hold on to power."
Carolina Leadership Coalition treasurer Victor Edwards declined to comment. Collin McMichael, the treasurer of the North Carolina House Republican Caucus Campaign Committee, didn't respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, the North Carolina Republican Party filed a complaint against Democratic Supreme Court candidate Anita Earls and outside group NC Families First. Party executive director Dallas Woodhouse said Earls' campaign made a video and posted it online so the group could download it and pay to run it as a commercial.
"We follow the law, and we wish they would too," Woodhouse said.
"We are running a campaign that blends strong grassroots organizing with modern communications, including promoting ads online," Caroline Spencer, a spokeswoman for Earls' campaign, said in an email. "We have no control over what third parties choose to do independently with our ads, which tell the story of a candidate who will work to ensure an independent judiciary that is fair to all."
"The NCGOP needs to have its attorneys review their complaints before they file and before they run to every news outlet across the state," Michael Weisel, the treasurer of NC Families First, said in an email. "Even if every factual statement in their complaint were accurate, which they are not, there are no election law violations."
Campaigns and outside groups are not allowed to coordinate, but it's not unusual for them to do work and then post it online for others to use. Unless they discussed it first, that's not technically coordination.
"Folks are continuing to push the envelope. Our campaign finance laws are a little bit confusing," said Jonathan Kappler, executive director of the North Carolina Free Enterprise Foundation. "State and federal laws on this can leave some gray areas that groups will sometimes work to exploit."
Third-party money is easier to raise and harder to track. Both of these cases involve political action committees that got huge sums of money from other groups who don't have to report their donors upfront. That means voters won't know before Election Day, if ever, who paid to influence them. | 1,266,010 |
hey he is not just a very alive writer, he is the most alive person that I spent time with, and that's who he was. He's not just someone who, when he was 46, ended his own life.
BROOKE: Thank you very much.
LIPSKY: It's been great to be on, Brooke. I wanted to hear more clips. (laughs)
BROOKE: Well, we have --
LIPSKY: No, I didn't, no
BROOKE: Well, we have one more.
LIPSKY: Okay, please, yeah.
BROOKE: Let's play it.
TAPE:
SEGEL as WALLACE: I'm not so sure you want to be me.
EISENBERG as LIPSKY: I don't?
SEGEL as WALLACE: Give my best to Jann.
LIPSKY: (laughs) That's great.
BROOKE: Did he say that?
LIPSKY: No, he didn't say that.
BROOKE: Mhm.
LIPSKY: What he said before we left was that ambitions for ourselves can be great, they can be motivating, they can be a flamethrower held to our ass, but past a certain point they can be toxic. You know, what he was saying was, that that actually is what happens when you get what you want.
BROOKE: Did any of that stuff stick with you?
LIPSKY: We never saw each other again. And part of it was that he was a much more successful writer than I was, and I was always afraid that if I went and emailed him or tried to call him or talk to him that that would always be there. And one of the things he had said was that it'd be interesting to talk to me again in a few years when I'd had some of the experiences he'd had. And so I'd always waited. And then when that time came, um, you know, I would write emails saying, I would like to have that conversation now. And there's a thing that I do when I'm unsure about an email, is I take the actual address off and I email it to myself to see how it looks, and I would get these emails and I would think, that looks like a crazy person wrote it. So I never sent them.
BROOKE: David, thank you very much.
LIPSKY: It's been great being here, Brooke. Thanks for having me.
BROOKE: David Lipsky is a contributing editor to Rolling Stone and the author of "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," among many other books, including "The Art Fair." | 1,266,011 |
“I told you, no one can guard you.” That’s what Coach Vic Schaefer told Freshman guard Morgan William after today’s win over #14 Texas A&M 63-61. She certainly was unguardable today as she put up 16 points and 6 rebounds against a very good Aggies squad. She wasn’t the leader on the team, though, as that distinction fell with Martha Alwal as she got another double-double today. If you want to talk about an amazing game, today’s game was certainly one of those.
Let’s talk about regulation first, shall we? The Bulldogs and Aggies came out swinging tonight, as this was one of the most physical games I’ve seen in a long time for Mississippi State Basketball. This win was an emotional one for Vic Schaefer as this wasn’t only a game against his former employer, but the Bulldogs were looking for their first ever win against the Aggies. In front of an announced crowd 4,651, this Bulldogs squad put on one of the best performances of the year.
The Bulldogs were in situations that it seemed the game were lost. At one point, the Aggies had all of the momentum and led by 8. Many Bulldog fans saw flashbacks to the recent Tennessee game that saw the Bulldogs lose. But Vic Schaefer and this Bulldog team fought back and even had the lead towards the end of the game. This game was only tied for around 2 minutes, but fans were on the edge of their seats for most of this game. Excitement was everywhere throughout the whole experience.
Even though Victoria Vivians didn’t score many points, only adding 5 to her total, she hit one of the most crucial shots of the night. With less than a minute to go, Vivians ran down the baseline, got in the corner, received a pass from Morgan William, then drained a 3 to put the Bulldogs ahead by 1. The crowd became louder than it had been all night following that three, and Schaefer looked as happy as a clam. How happy was he? Let’s just say he did a full fist pump, and had one of the biggest smiles he has had on.
This team is something else, and they are accomplishing things that some thought impossible. It started with their amazing start to the season, and now they are defeating teams that they never have before. Texas A&M drops to 18-6 (6-4 SEC) while the Bulldogs rise up to 23-3 (8-3 SEC). The Bulldogs will travel to Lexington, KY to face off against #11 Kentucky. This will be important in the seeding of the Bulldogs, as they look to give the best possible resume for the NCAA Committee to look at. Top-4 seeds in the regions host the first two rounds of games of the NCAA Tournament. | 1,266,012 |
I’m faster,” Rector said. “Ty’s really fast also. We’re pretty close…This last spring we ran 40s and I was the fastest, but Ty wasn’t there because he was injured with his shoulder.”
That injury, which still could sideline Montgomery for the season opener against UC-Davis on Aug. 30, puts some pressure on Rector to prove that he can do more than just run deep routes, which has been a focus of his this offseason.
“It’s a misconception about him, that he’s just a deep shot guy,” Pritchard said. “And he’s not that. He runs every route extremely well, coming off the ball, attacking a DB. Those guys feel his speed, which is what allows him to run all the different routes as well.”
At least once last year, a Stanford opponent had to pay the price for respecting Rector’s speed. On a second-and-20 in the Pac-12 Title Game, Arizona State gave Rector eight yards of cushion, setting up an easy 34-yard screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGpVZbdugIM&t=84m45s
That 38-14 Stanford win also served as a coming-out party of sorts for Pratt, who had three catches for 56 yards in what could be a sign of great things to come. The AAA pitcher turned environmental engineer turned 29-year-old depth receiver “does everything right,” Shaw said.
“Just being out there, consistent, bringing a lot of intensity, knowing what to do, being ready to fill in where they need me,” Pratt described himself. “Just a guy who does the job.”
Rounding out the group are sophomore Francis Owusu and fifth-year senior Jeff Trojan, who combined for eight catches last year.
Though the Cardinal’s wide receivers accounted for 65 percent of the team’s catches in 2013 — up from 33 percent in 2012 — the highly anticipated emergence of three sophomore tight ends likely means that the Stanford passing game will regain some balance this season. But with an embarrassment of riches that should keep opponents guessing play in, play out, the Cardinal’s wideouts are primed to capitalize on their opportunities even more effectively in 2014.
“We have a wide variety of receivers,” Rector said. “I think this could be one of the best receiving corps we’ve ever had at this school.”
Someone’s been listening to David Shaw.
Contact Joseph Beyda at jbeyda ‘at’ stanford.edu.
2014 Stanford Football Preview Series | 1,266,013 |
TORONTO, June 27, 2017 /CNW/ -
Strainprint Technologies Ltd. ("Strainprint") -- the leader in cannabis patient and strain efficacy data -- is excited to announce the launch of the first ever co-branded version of its revolutionary mobile outcomes-tracking App with Emblem Cannabis Corp. ("Emblem"). This customized edition of the App features all the same great functionality but is enhanced with unique benefits for Emblem patients such as redeemable discounts on Emblem products.
Emblem will use data gathered by the App to better understand customer needs and to adapt production and service offerings accordingly. "Being the first Licensed Producer in Canada to work directly with Strainprint will give us a competitive understanding of real patient efficacy and allow us to meet the evolving needs of our patients, improving their quality of life," said Maxim Zavet, President of Emblem Cannabis.
"It has been an absolute pleasure to work with the Emblem team, as they share our dedication of using research to improve patient care and increase quality of service," said Evan Karasick, Chief Product Officer of Strainprint.
Strainprint now offers a turn-key, custom-branded version of its mobile App for licensed cannabis producers, clinics, researchers and government. This enables rapid community building through loyalty engagement and triggered messaging. Sandboxed patient data can be segregated by research requirements to run up to five unique clinical studies at once, which can be reported on independently. All Strainprint versions comply with HIPAA, PIPEDA and PHIPA privacy laws and all patient data remains completely confidential. Moreover, Strainprint can be seamlessly embedded or integrated with most electronic medical records (EMR) or seed2sale software providers.
The Strainprint mobile App is free for patients and is available for both iOS & Android from the Apple iTunes and Google Play Stores respectively. Emblem patients will receive a unique code to activate the additional premium features.
About StrainprintTM:
Founded in 2016, StrainprintTM Technologies Ltd. is a Toronto-based software company providing enterprise grade analytics and consumer solutions for the medical cannabis industry. Strainprint manages the gathering and analysis of real-time cannabis consumption data and ranks specific strain efficacy against conditions and related symptoms. Strainprint also works with commercial producers and clinics to provide advanced intelligence to optimize grow operations and advance treatment recommendations. For more information visit www.strainprint.ca. facebook, twitter, LinkedIn
About Emblem Corp.:
Emblem Cannabis Corp. is a fully integrated Canadian medical marijuana, healthcare and cannabinoid-based pharmaceutical company licensed to carry on business as a producer of medical cannabis by the Government of Canada.
SOURCE Strainprint™ Technologies Ltd.
For further information: Media Contacts: Jessica Moran, Strainprint Technologies Ltd. [email protected]; Ali Mahdavi - Director, Investor Relations, Emblem Corp., [email protected] | 1,266,014 |
Ohio Gov. John Kasich says the budget proposed by the Trump administration would have a "significant" impact on his home state but that the package "isn't going to pass."
"Presidents send up budgets and the Congress fiddles around," Kasich, a Republican, said Wednesday on "CBS This Morning," seemingly undeterred by the massive cuts proposed by the Trump White House.
The plan, titled "The New Foundation for American Greatness," includes a total of $3.6 trillion in spending cuts to reach a balanced budget within 10 years, reducing the debt from its current 77 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to 60 percent of GDP and wiping out deficit spending entirely in a decade. The budget book devotes two pages outlining the White House's assertion that the Obama administration caused massive inflation of the national debt and created economic stagnation.
President Trump's first major budget proposal, which assumes the Medicaid savings in the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) will be passed, would make $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade.
Programs like food stamps (SNAP), Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and Temporary Assistance for Needy families (TANF) will face sharp cuts.
"You can't just take stuff away when people need to be healthy they need to be fed," Kasich added. "It's not just a one way street. It has to be both ways."
The welfare portion of Mr. Trump's proposal would give states increased authority to impose work requirements and eligibility restrictions for welfare programs, and his budget would slash an estimated $274 billion from anti-poverty programs over 10 years.
"When you do budgets, it's a matter of creating priorities," Kasich said. "Reform is fine, privatization is fine, but you can't just move quickly," adding that "we have to get to the root of the problem."
"The changes, the reforms that can come from many of these programs are fine, but you just can't pull the rug out from under people," he said. "If they're not healthy, they're not going to work, and if they're hungry, they're not going to go to work."
While Kasich questioned Mr. Trump's budget proposals, he applauded the president's comments on the terrorist attack in Manchester, England.
"What I think is so important is, who helped this guy build this vest? We have to track this down, and it means good intelligence and it means cooperation worldwide and it also means -- and I give President Trump credit for this -- everyone in this world is civilized, whether you're Christian, Jew, Muslim, it doesn't matter," Kasich said. "We all have to stand up and make the argument that this culture of death, of destroying young people is not acceptable and we must stomp it out." | 1,266,015 |
“Who tipped them off, and how?” Tattletale asked.
“I assumed it came from within, from internal background checks,” Big Picture said. “It didn’t?”
“No. I don’t think so. You might have enemies,” Tattletale said.
“Oh, I definitely do. It’s a very dramatic world, art,” he said. He smiled, eyes crinkling a bit.
“If we go back to Foresight and ask, are you okay with them sharing?” I asked.
“I’m not bothered. I’m upfront about my art and where I come from. We parted amicably, as I saw it.”
“Great,” I said. My eyes scanned the pictures. Even the innocent ones with warm smiles -mostly civilians or capes out of costume- left me feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. I turned to Tattletale. “We should go.”
“Is there a rush?” she asked, with a tenor or vibe that made me feel like she was jabbing at my jugular because I’d exposed too much throat. Putting me on the spot.
I turned to Chicken Little, “Want to go wait outside?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Dirty move,” Tattletale said. But she didn’t stop Chicken.
Chicken Little paused before leaving. “Thank you for inviting us in. They’re really good pictures.”
“Thank you,” Big Picture said.
“They’re dark, though.”
“They can be,” Big Picture said, turning to look at Gully’s picture, her head, face, and dreads seeming to emerge from the picture, out of darkness and into light.
“Do you want that darkness, along with wanting to be them?” Tattletale asked.
I was spared the continuation of the conversation by the ringing of my phone. I put a hand on Chicken Little’s shoulder to guide him to the door of the studio as I put the phone to my ear.
Rain.
“What happened to the communication blackout?” I asked.
“Emergency,” he said. “Weld came by to check in, I don’t even know what’s going on, but Tristan’s trying to handle it and he’s not having any luck, and now all hell is breaking loose.”
Previous Chapter Next Chapter | 1,266,016 |
As with last year's CES, Nvidia devoted its keynote this year to machine learning and self-driving cars, unveiling a new version of its Drive PX system. But while Drive PX 2—which Nvidia describes as a "self driving supercomputer that fits nicely in your trunk," with the "processing power of 150 MacBook Pros"—will no doubt help partner Volvo with its first public trial of autonomous driving, it's what's under the bonnet that's exciting.
Drive PX 2, which consists of two SoCs paired to two graphics cards, is the first device from Nvidia to feature its new Pascal GPU and the first to be fabricated on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process. Not only that, but the new SoC is also quite exciting, mashing together two of the company's custom Denver CPU cores (as used in the Nexus 9 tablet) with four ARM Cortex A57 cores. The two GPUs are connected to the SoCs via a pair of discrete MXM (Mobile PCI Express Module) cards.
This configuration is a marked departure from the original Drive PX, which sported dual Tegra X1 SoCs with four Cortex A57s cores and four Cortex A53s cores along with an integrated Maxwell GPU.
On paper Drive PX 2 is an extremely powerful (and power-hungry) system. Unfortunately, Nvidia is keeping quiet on the full specifications of the Pascal GPUs, but it claims that the whole Drive PX 2 system will be capable of 8 teraflops of FP32 processing power, with a combined TDP of 250W. The latter is high for an ARM-based system, but presumably the twin GPUs account for most of the power draw. Nvidia, somewhat intriguingly for a computer that sits in the boot of your car, is cooling the Drive PX 2 with a custom liquid cooling system.
The claim that the PX 2 is "150 times faster than a MacBook Pro" is probably spurious. We've e-mailed Nvidia to ask how it arrived at such a figure, but it's probably something like a single MacBook Pro CPU against two Pascal GPUs.
As for why you'd need so much processing power in a car, Drive PX 2's first home will be in 100 autonomous Volvo cars, which the company plans to deploy on Sweden's public roads in 2017. Instead of hard-coding driving rules for the cars to follow, they'll use deep learning and computer vision to identify objects fed to them by a 360-degree camera array. The Drive PX 2 will be available to early access partners in Q2, with general availability in Q4.
For now, Pascal is only part of Drive PX 2, but with AMD having recently revealed its new GPU architecture Polaris, it's only a matter of time until Nvidia brings its new architecture to desktop GPUs. Current rumours point to the full Pascal unveil occurring in mid-2016. | 1,266,017 |
This is about to get worse. It appears Jenn Sterger wasn't the only woman who received unwanted and inappropriate text messages from Brett Favre while he played for the Jets. Favre also pursued two team massage therapists, according to one of the women. [UPDATE: The women have sued.]
The woman (who wishes to remain anonymous for now — we'll call her "Mandy") worked as a massage therapist for the team for a couple years, but she says never had an incident with a player until No. 4 showed up at training camp at Hofstra University, where the Jets still worked out in 2008. "He was on the table next to mine," she tells me. "He was looking at my ass the whole time while I worked on another player. He was... ogling me."
The woman who was massaging Brett that day (massage therapist No. 2, or "Lindsay") exchanged numbers with him. (Mandy claims it's common for players to take the numbers of team-contracted massage therapists should they need additional rubdowns off campus. Yeah, I know. Please don't.)
Lindsay received a text message from Favre, according to Mandy. Lindsay assumed it was for a massage but quickly realized Brett was asking for more. He invited both Lindsay and Mandy back to his hotel room. Mandy claims that the texts became increasingly inappropriate ("just nasty stuff"), but she adds that Brett did apologize when he found out she was married.
This apology over text, however, wasn't enough for Mandy's husband. We'll call him "John".
"I called him on his phone and told him I wanted an apology. He acted all arrogant. He refused to apologize," John tells me in a phone conversation.
Mandy and John say they approached attorneys about the situation but were told that because Mandy was a private contractor, there were no grounds for a harassment case. They didn't pursue anything.
But, after reading the story in the New York Post this morning, they decided to come forward with their story. Mandy's husband John reached out both to Deadspin and the Post. They don't want to reveal their names just yet, John says, and they "don't want photographers on their front lawn." But they said they're still considering going public with it. First, they want to talk to the NFL and the Jets. They gave me permission to pass along their info to the team, which I did. If someone from the NFL wants to reach out to them, they'll talk to someone there, too.
Also? Mandy says she and Lindsay still have some of the text messages. Hooray.
EARLIER:
• Brett Favre's Cellphone Seduction Of Jenn Sterger
• Did A Jets PR Person Act As Liaison Between Brett Favre And Jenn Sterger? | 1,266,018 |
Over 1,000 people from Antofagasta in far north to Los Rios in south affected, with some housed in shelters
By Rosalba O'Brien
SANTIAGO, Aug 9 (Reuters) - Heavy rain and winds hit the southern cone of South America over the weekend, battering the Chilean coastline and leading to the precautionary suspension of work at some mines in the top copper exporter.
Over 1,000 people from Antofagasta in the far north to Los Rios in the south of Chile were affected, with some being housed in shelters after being evacuated or losing their homes to floods, and over 120,000 were left without electricity, the emergency service Onemi said on Sunday.
Mud landslides wiped out roads in and around the city of Tocopilla in the Antofagasta region, leading to three deaths, while another three were killed in accidents along the coast, local media reported.
Over 15 millimeters (0.6 inch) of rain had fallen in six hours in normally bone-dry Antofagasta, the interior ministry said.
After months of drought, the rains that began early last week in central Chile and have since spread north have brought some relief to farmers and ski resort owners, but spelled more potential bad news for Chile's key copper mining industry, mostly based in the north of the country and already hit by floods once this year.
State-owned Codelco, the world's top copper exporter, said it had suspended operations at Chuquicamata, its second largest mine, from around 2 p.m. local time (1700 GMT) on Sunday as a safety measure. Chuquicamata produced around 340,000 tonnes last year out of Chile's total 5.7 million.
Codelco said it had also temporarily stopped operations at its Radomiro Tomic mine during the morning but had resumed work. An ongoing strike has already halted work at its Salvador mine and led to a partial suspension at Ministro Hales.
The company did not report problems at El Teniente, its biggest mine.
London-listed Chilean miner Antofagasta said all its mines were operating normally. Companies running other mines could not immediately be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, Chile's central coast faced some of its heaviest sea swell in over three decades, with waves up to 10 metres (33 feet) high. The seafront along tourist resort Vina del Mar was seriously damaged, with cars and fishing boats smashed.
The heavy rains extended into neighboring Argentina, complicating voting in presidential primaries there.
The meterological office forecast dry weather in northern Chile for Monday, although more rain is expected for the central part of the country. (Reporting by Rosalba O'Brien; Editing by Eric Walsh)
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. | 1,266,019 |
Amid coronavirus scare in India with confirmed cases of infections rising to 29, Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said there was no need to panic while adding that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is personally monitoring the situation.
Briefing the Rajya Sabha on coronavirus outbreak and how it has impacted India, Union minister Harsh Vardhan on Thursday said the situation is being monitored by the ministry and the PM on a daily basis. "I am daily reviewing the situation. A Group of Ministers is also monitoring the situation," Union Health Minister said.
Union Health Minister: I am daily reviewing the situation. A Group of Ministers is also monitoring the situation. #Coronovirus https://t.co/x6egmunuQe ANI (@ANI) March 5, 2020
"Total 29 cases reported... of them, three are from Kerala who have been released. One more has tested positive in Delhi, who has a travel history to Italy," the minister added.
The Health Minister said India initiated required preparedness and action since January 17, much before advice of the World Health Organisation.
Union minister Harsh Vardhan informed the Rajya Sabha that till March 4, around 6,11,176 passengers have been screened at different points.
ALSO READ | Coronavirus outbreak is also a mental health issue. Here's what can be done
The health minister Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday had announced that all international flights and passengers will now have to undergo screening, and not just the 12 countries listed earlier.
Addressing the media on Wednesday, Vardhan had said that he met the Delhi health minister and civic body officials, and urged them to augment facilities of isolation wards in city hospitals.
Health Ministry issues advisory to schools to avoid gathering of students
As India reported 29 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus, the Union Health Ministry on Wednesday issued an advisory to all schools asking them to avoid any large gathering of students in premises.
The ministry advised that any student or staff with travel history to any COVID-19 affected country or in contact with such persons in the last 28 days should be monitored and quarantined at home for 14 days.
Class teachers have been asked to remain alert of any possible signs and symptoms among students like coughing, fever or difficulty in breathing and immediately inform the parents to get them tested. "Ask parents not to send child back to school till advised so by the treating doctor," the advisory said.
It has also asked schools to place alcohol-based hand sanitiser at various spots and advised monitoring students staying in hostels.
ALSO READ | Flu or coronavirus, can you tell from the symptoms? Doctors answer
FROM THE MAGAZINE | Coronavirus: Are we ready?
VIDEO | World fights against coronavirus: Here's how it started | 1,266,020 |
specialty area, claiming that she had a specialized degree that made her uniquely qualified for that kind of job. She would also go on about how that credential justified clients paying higher rates. Okay. Fair enough. But the thing is, she was lying. She later admitted publicly (without realizing it until someone else called her out on it) that she never had received this degree. If someone had hired her believing her to be uniquely competent to handle a certain type of project and they later found out that was a lie, she could have opened herself up to a lawsuit, even if she was running her business as an LLC.
In addition to torts, you have to worry about breach of contracts. In the case of an LLC, a lot depends on how you sign your contracts. If you do so under your own name (instead of your name, title with the company, and full LLC name), you might be held personally liable if accused of a breach.
Another area freelance writers should be concerned about is intellectual property law. What if you're accused of copyright infringement in your blog post, e-book, or something you wrote for a client? Because you're personally committing the infringement and using your LLC to carry out that infringement, you can be sued and held personally liable.
Think of it this way: if you're the one personally responsible for the action someone is suing over, you most likely won't have any liability protection on a personal level. And if you're the only member and employee of your freelance business' LLC, you're probably going to be responsible for all decisions and actions taken.
So, Are LLCs a Bad Idea for Freelancers?
Not necessarily.
In a single-member LLC, you might not have the liability protection you were hoping for, but that doesn't mean this business structure offers no benefits. Consult with an attorney and accountant to discuss possible legal and tax benefits depending on the needs of your business.
How Freelance Writers Can Protect Themselves
While an LLC (and other business structures) have their benefits, don't rely on them exclusively if you're looking to limit your professional liability. Your best option is to get a professional liability insurance policy, and possibly combine it with an errors and omissions (E&O) policy.
Did you set your freelance writing business up as an LLC thinking it would protect you if your business was ever sued? Did you know that you could still be held personally liable for actions taken through your business? Share your experiences with LLCs, their benefits, and their limitations in the comments below.
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney. Nothing in this article is meant to serve as legal advice. Please consult with a licensed attorney in your state to discuss business structures, liability concerns, or other issues related to your business. Please consult with a licensed insurance professional if you would like to discuss liability protection and insurance options. | 1,266,021 |
Neptune was struck by a giant comet about two centuries ago, according to new research. The find adds to a growing body of evidence that cometary collisions with gas giant planets may be more common than astronomers thought.
On rocky planets with thin atmospheres, such as Mercury (pictures) and Mars, it's easy to count the craters made by impacts dating back millions of years, giving scientists a rough estimate of how frequently space rocks collide with other worlds.
But the gas giants—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—are planets that are almost all roiling atmosphere with just tiny cores of rock, making it much harder to find evidence of past impacts.
In 1994 the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke apart and smashed into Jupiter, and several space probes, including Voyager 2, Galileo, and the Hubble Space Telescope, were able to document the rare event.
Using what they'd learned about chemicals left in Jupiter's atmosphere after the comet crash, scientists from the French observatory LESIA and the Max Planck Institutes in Germany analyzed the composition of Neptune's atmosphere with the European research satellite Herschel.
The data show that the amount of carbon monoxide in Neptune's upper atmosphere is higher than in the planet's lower atmosphere. Since gas would normally thin out as it reaches higher atmospheric layers, the extra gas had to come from some outside source, the scientists say.
A comet, which carries carbon monoxide in its icy tail, is the "main explanation," said study co-author Paul Hartogh of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research.
Comet Also Smashed Saturn?
The researchers estimate the comet that struck Neptune was 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) wide, which would have made its impact very powerful.
The first fragment of Shoemaker-Levy 9 was just half the size of the unnamed Neptune comet. When the fragment struck Jupiter, it released energy equal to 225,000 megatons of TNT and created a plume 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) high.
In addition, a similar technique used earlier this year found evidence for a comet crash on Saturn 300 years ago.
Adding the Neptune find to the relatively recent Saturn and Jupiter smashups implies that comet collisions might be more frequent than astronomers had thought.
A 1997 study estimated that comets about a mile (1.6 kilometers) wide hit Jupiter once every 6,000 years. And mathematical models for Neptune have suggested that a major comet hits the gas giant planet every 8,000 years, Hartogh said.
Based on the old calculations, he said, "statistically, it's not so probable" that Neptune, Jupiter, and Staurn would each suffer a major impact event within a 300-year period—suggesting a new estimate may be in order.
"Maybe there are more impacts than we think." | 1,266,022 |
The crypto revolution is gaining momentum every day, but it still faces a huge problem. What is it? It is the distance between the traditional financial world and the crypto world. Digital coins are quickly developing and becoming more popular, however, these days most people would consider them as an investment. The options where you could use crypto as a means of payment are still quite insufficient, this creates a barrier between consumers and new opportunities. How to fix this problem?
What is Beverage.Cash? The vision of the project
Beverage.Cash is an innovative project that combines two markets: crypto and alcoholic beverages.
On one hand – real economy -: RFID based network will be implemented on the vineyards, in wineries, wine storage cellars to collect information from every stage of production.
On the other hand – crypto world – all information collected will be stored on blockchain and will be available for consumer on the iOS/Android platform using QR/NFC tags attached to the bottles.
It will unite a bunch of participants within its ecosystem, namely:
consumers of alcohol
producers of alcohol
investors
specialists
crypto traders
other developers
What will happen inside the platform?
This is a unique structure involving 2 tokens and 2 platforms in the project
The participants purchase product which is represented on the platform by Beverage Cash Utility Tokens (1 token storing all information about one lot (bottle, case, barrel of beverage) using Beverage Cash Coin Tokens cryptocurrency (it can also be used to pay for platform fees, RFID network installation, QR/NFC labels, service fee etc.). The producers/sellers of alcoholic beverages can place their products on the platform in a form of an auction lot and/or sell it in the shop anywhere in the world with QR/NFC labels on their product and deliver information stored in Beverage Cash Utility Tokens to the consumer.
Cool features of Beverage.Cash
the platform is simple and user-friendly
active participants are guaranteed to receive pleasant rewards
the payments are super quick due to the implementation of smart contracts
the blockchain technology provides for total security and transparency of all the processes on the platform
the platform is structured in such a way that the all the participants/lots/products can be found easily
ICO details
Beverage.Cash will start its ICO on the 30th of September, and the token sale will run up to the end of 2018. Users will be able to purchase Beverage Coins for the price of 0.002 ETH. Keep in mind that the minimum amount of investment is 0.01 ETH. The project has a soft cap of 1500 ETH and a hard cap of 30,000 ETH. The platform offers bounty campaigns and different bonuses.
More details on the project and its ICO can be found here. | 1,266,023 |
Bitcoin cash has rallied more than 96 percent from recent lows, but still remains trapped in a bearish pattern, the technical charts indicate.
As of writing, bitcoin cash (BCH) is trading at $1,500, as per data source Coinmarketcap. The world’s fourth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has appreciated by 11 percent in the last 24 hours, making it the biggest gainer among the top 10 cryptocurrencies.
The sharp recovery from the Feb. 6 low of $764 is pretty much in line with the uptick seen in the broader markets in the last 10 days. That said, BCH has outperformed other crypto market leaders over that period, except for litecoin, which is up close to 110 percent from Feb. 6 lows.
The rally is backed by good news on the fundamentals front. For instance, decentralized marketplace OpenBazaar and crypto payments firm BitPay have both added support for BCH in recent weeks.
That said, BCH bulls need to overcome a couple of critical resistance levels before claiming victory over the bears.
4-hour chart
The high volume inverse head-and-shoulders breakout signals a bearish-to-bullish trend change and has opened the doors for a rally to $2,100 (target as per the measured height method).
However, the gains are capped by the neckline resistance (former support) of the head-and-shoulders bearish reversal seen on the daily chart below.
Daily chart
Neckline resistance is seen at $1,533 and is capping gains in BCH.
BCH is still trapped inside the falling channel (marked by lower highs and lower lows), meaning the overall outlook still remains bearish.
The 50-day moving average (MA) and 100-day MA will likely see a bearish crossover (50-day MA cuts 100-day MA from above, indicating a bearish bias).
On the other hand, the relative strength index (RSI), 5-day MA and 10-day MA are trending higher in favor of the bulls.
View
A daily close (as per UTC) above $1,756 would signal an upside break of the falling channel, adding credence to inverse head-and-shoulders breakout (seen in the 4-hour chart), and could yield a sustained rally to $2,000.
The bullish daily RSI and 5-day MA, 10-day MA indicate BCH will likely rise above resistance at $1,533 (head-and-shoulders neckline) and move towards $1,756 over the next few days.
However, if BCH fails to take out $1,533 and closes (as per UTC) below $1,100, then the outlook would turn bearish.
Green aarow image via Shutterstock | 1,266,024 |
You haven’t been using your Keurig to brew up boozy beverages? What’s wrong with you, man?! If you want in on the action, here are some K-Cup Cocktails to get you started. (Adjust level of booze to your taste/tolerance.)
Loosely based on an Apple Rye Punch, this drink ditches any hard cider and gets supercharged with some applejack.
Apple Cider K-Cup
Laird’s Apple Jack Brandy
Maker’s Mark
Orange Bitters
Cinnamon tastes great in hot chocolate, and this cinnamon happens to be booze-flavored!
Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate Hot Cocoa K-Cup
Goldschlager Cinnamon Schnapps
This is a play on some delicious hot buttered rum that you can make thanks to your trusty one cup brewer.
Butter Toffee Coffee K-Cup
Bacardi Gold Rum
Cinnamon Sticks
Classic Irish coffee in k-cup form.
Donut Shop K-Cup
Jameson Irish Whiskey
Whipped Cream
This is a hot version of Bourbon Mint Tea. Go easy on the bourbon cause it will have a strong bourbon flavor (unless you like that kinda thing).
Pure Peppermint Tea K-Cup
Knob Creek Whisky
Dark Brown Sugar
These ingredient-friends always show up in drinks both warm and cold together. Now mix them in with a Kahlua coffee K-cup and drink up.
Kahlua K-Cup
Frangelico Liquer
Bushmills Irish Whiskey
Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur
You don’t need to be walking the Champs-Elysee in winter to appreciate the perfect combination of chocolate, coffee and cognac.
Belgian Chocolate Coffee K-Cup
Courvoisier VS Cognac
Chai tea goes surprisingly well with spiced rum. This cocktail gets an added hint of flavor from some peppermint schnapps.
Chai Latté K-Cup
Captain Morgan Original Spiced Rum
Peppermint Schnapps
This play off Moscow Hot Chocolate is flat out delicious. Ideal for an after dinner drink on a cold night.
Swiss Chocolate Almond Coffee K-Cup
Absolut Vodka
Disaronno Originale Liqueur
Careful, this is gonna taste like candy. Drink too many of these rich butterscotch, chocolate coffee concoctions and you’ll be warmed up real good. | 1,266,025 |
ETH price is gaining momentum above the $310 resistance area against the US Dollar.
The price must break the $315 resistance area to climb above the $320 resistance zone.
There is a breakout pattern forming with resistance near $314 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD (data feed via Kraken).
On the downside, there are a few important supports near the $306 and $302 levels.
Ethereum price is likely to break the $320 resistance area versus the US Dollar, but struggled vs bitcoin. ETH price remains well supported on the downside as long as above $302.
Ethereum Price Analysis
After yesterday’s rise, there were further gains in bitcoin price above $12,500 against the US Dollar. BTC/USD even broke the $13,000 resistance area (as discussed in yesterday’s analysis). On the other hand, there was no new weekly high in Ethereum, but it remained stable above the $300 and $302 support levels. Earlier, it started a downside correction from the $318 swing high and traded below the $310 support area.
However, the $302 support zone acted as a strong support along with the 100 hourly simple moving average. A swing low was formed at $302.80 and the price recently climbed back above the $306 and $308 levels. Moreover, it recovered above the 50% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $318 high to $302 swing low. It is now trading nicely above the $310 level.
Moreover, there is a breakout pattern forming with resistance near $314 on the hourly chart of ETH/USD. The pair is currently trading near the 61.8% Fib retracement level of the recent decline from the $318 high to $302 swing low. If there is an upside break above the $314 and $315 resistance levels, Ethereum price could continue to rise. In the mentioned case, the price is likely to break the last swing high near $318 and trade to a new weekly high above $320.
The next major resistance is near the $325 level. On the downside, an initial support is near the $310 level. The next major support is near the $306 level, which is near the triangle lower trend line.
Looking at the chart, Ethereum price is clearly trading with a positive bias above the $310 level and it looks set for more gains above the $315 and $320 levels. The bulls may even push the price above the $325 resistance level in the near term.
ETH Technical Indicators
Hourly MACD – The MACD for ETH/USD is moving back in the bullish zone, with a positive bias.
Hourly RSI – The RSI for ETH/USD is currently well above the 55 level, with a positive angle.
Major Support Level – $306
Major Resistance Level – $320 | 1,266,026 |
, and I did this several times over, and you watch for how many times he actually gets hit, there are players that have the unique ability to avoid what I would call devastating contact, and he’s one of ’em, whether he’s outside of the pocket or inside the pocket,” Klatt said. “So because of that, I don’t think that his frame is as big of a concern, at least certainly not for me.”
Murray is not as brash and boisterous as Mayfield — who is? — but oozes a quiet and infectious confidence.
“What I thought went unnoticed throughout the season it’s that he is hyper-competitive,” Klatt said.
Asked what kind of leader he is, Klatt said: “His teammates loved him.”
His Bills teammates grew to love Flutie for a short time in 1999 … after the Miracle Man was forced to toil for eight years in the CFL.
“The biggest problem with a lot of short quarterbacks is they don’t have the arm strength. [Murray] does. He can make all the throws,” Flutie told TMZ last month. “He can throw from all kinds of angles. We see that with [Patrick] Mahomes and you’ll have the same thing with Kyler Murray.”
Klatt was in the booth for Oklahoma’s game against Texas.
The team that drafts Murray will have to adapt its system to him and for him much more dramatically than it would for Haskins.
“I think [Haskins has] a higher upside than maybe Kyler, but I think Kyler’s probably more suited to have success early in his career at the next level,” Klatt said. “I think Dwayne will probably be really well-served to go in and potentially sit for a year.”
Klatt, like Murray, played baseball (in the minors) before leaving Colorado as an all-Big 12 quarterback and trying out as a free agent with the Lions and Saints in 2006.
“There was never a moment that was ever too big for Kyler,” Klatt said. “The lights were never too bright for him. I think he always remained calm. I think that he can have success in any market in the National Football League.
“If I’m looking at it from just the dynamic ability of offensive players on the field, can you imagine having Kyler Murray and Saquon Barkley on the field at the same time? Are you kidding me? Who are you defending?”
Until further review, The Improbable Dream. If not The Impossible Dream. But it sure is a fun one. | 1,266,027 |
refers to the moves as school restructurings. In total, the DOE spent $1.4 million on restructurings — for public and charter schools — at 153 locations during the 2012-13 school year, according to records obtained by DNAinfo. That means clearing space for Success Academy at the eight sites accounted for 9 percent of the total costs.
At the end of the 2011-12 school year, Success Academy received space in six DOE school buildings. That year the DOE shelled out $125,000 to make room for the chain under the same deadline. The total cost of school restructurings for that year was $1.6 million.
Education Department sources said that in each school year, clearing space for Success Academy could have been done for half the amount if the work were spread out over a few days, eliminating the need for extra manpower and overtime. The DOE could have then spent the saved money on fixing up schools, the sources said.
“All of this takes away from repair work, our core mission,” a source said.
Success Academy wants the speedy space clearings so its construction team can quickly begin construction.
“The earlier move date and meeting the move deadline allows us to do all the building work so we can start our school year on the right foot,” Moskowitz wrote in an email to Grimm after a successful move one year.
However, Success Academy construction crews don’t enter the school until after July 4, meaning the DOE really has a few days to pull off the moves, sources said. Also no other charter school gets to move into a new space so early, according to sources.
When Bill De Blasio becomes mayor on Jan. 1, Success Academy may lose its favored status in Tweed Hall. De Blasio has criticized the Bloomberg administration’s special treatment of the charter chain and has said he wants Moskowitz to start paying rent for DOE space.
But with just weeks to go in Mayor Bloomberg’s term, DOE officials are working to arrange speedy move-ins for Success Academy in at least four schools in June 2014, according to sources.
Normally, DOE officials hold meetings on making space for Success Academy in the spring. This year, they started meetings in November, sources said.
Shea also recently approved the promotion of a Moskowitz-friendly DOE deputy facilities manager to director of schools facilities for northern Brooklyn, sources said.
Joseph Lazarus was chosen for the position, even though other in-house candidates had more experience and qualifications, sources said. Before his promotion, Lazarus was a deputy facilities manager for schools on the northwest side of Manhattan, where he was known for helping Success Academy schools get extra resources for repair work.
Lazarus did not respond to a request for comment.
The Education Department and Success Academy also did not respond to requests for comment. | 1,266,028 |
Exclusive: farm gets the green light to be built by Chinese companies after $9.9m grant from renewable energy agency
This article is more than 4 years old
This article is more than 4 years old
Australia’s first large-scale hybrid wind and solar farm is set to be built near Canberra, with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (Arena) providing a $9.9m grant.
The money would go towards the $26m cost of building a 10MW solar photovoltaic plant alongside the existing Gullen Range windfarm.
Goldwind, one of the Chinese companies that will build and operate the project, said the solar farm was expected to generate about 22,000 MWh of electricity in the first year of operation, enough to supply about 3,000 homes.
Building the solar farm on the same location as the windfarm meant 20% could be saved from the construction costs of the solar farm, said Ivor Frischknecht, the chief executive of Arena.
Vattenfall starts work on UK hybrid wind and solar farm Read more
Arena recently commissioned an investigation into the costs and benefits of hybrid solar and windfarms.
It found that besides huge cost savings – achieved mostly because the grid connection was able to be shared by the two generators – the two energy sources were often complementary, producing peak outputs at different times of both the day and year. That meant they combined to create a more reliable energy source.
“Co-location provides more continuous energy generation as windfarms tend to generate more energy overnight whilst solar only generates during the day,” Frischknecht said. “Gullen windfarm generates more power in winter and the new solar farm will generate more in summer.”
Frischknecht said he hoped that, by building the first example of a combined solar and windfarm, others would follow.
“This is the first project of its type in Australia, so the lessons learned will be invaluable,” he said. “It has the potential to provide a blueprint for future projects and cement industry confidence in the approach.”
Since the costs of connecting the solar farm to the grid were almost eliminated, there was less need for the farms to be very large just to recoup those costs. He said that meant the co-location strategy could unlock medium-scale PV projects.
The project is expected to be completed in July 2017. It will be built and owned by two Chinese companies – Goldwind and Beijing and Jingneng Clean Energy – which own and operate the existing wind farm.
After the Arena grant of $10m, another $10m is being lent to the project by National Australia Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, leaving the existing windfarm to fund the remaining $6m. | 1,266,029 |
’’ Langill told LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke, during a recent interview. “She is like Dick Nen, Steve Finley, Charlie Culberson. If you blink, you missed it.’’
Parker was the shortest tenured Dodgers organist, having played for only four months during the summer of 1972. She did, however, manage to draw enormous praise from a man who was a then spry 45 years old.
“Young lady, I’m going to tell you something. Nobody has ever made me stop when I’m announcing,” said Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully to young Miss Parker. “That is the most fantastic music I ever heard.”
After Parker’s brief time as the Dodgers organist, she was replaced by perhaps the most famous Dodger Stadium organist – “Helen Dell on the Dodger Stadium Conn organ,” as longtime Dodgers PA announcer John Ramsey would often say. Dell was at the ivories during the magical 1981 season when the Dodgers beat the highly-favored New York Yankees in the World Series in six games. Ironically, Helen Dell also has something that no other Dodgers organist has – a plaque at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
They say timing is everything and such was the case for Nancy Bea Hefley, who replaced Helen Dell in 1988 after Dell’s marvelous 16-year career. As such, Nancy Bea was at the keyboard when Kirk Gibson hit what was arguably the greatest home run in Dodgers history to win game-1 of the 1988 World Series against the (yet again) highly-favored Oakland A’s. Hefley would remain at the Dodger Stadium organ for the next 28 years to become the longest-tenured Dodgers organist in franchise history and quite possibly MLB history.
What many Dodger fans may not know is that Nancy Bea and Bill Hefley, who have been together for a remarkable 60 years, live in Silver Springs, Nevada, a small town located 35 miles northeast of Carson City and 450 miles away from Dodger Stadium. The couple would routinely commuted to Dodger Stadium for the Dodgers homestands during the latter part of Nancy Bea’s historic career as the Dodgers organist.
Which brings us back to Dieter Ruehle, who came up one win shy joining Gladys Goodding, Bob Mitchell, Helen Dell and Nancy Bea to become what would have been the fifth Dodgers organist to be at the keys during a World Series championship.
“Playoffs trump the regular season,” Ruehle said, when asked how he would shuffle his busy schedule around to avoid conflicts with his other gigs during the postseason.
But hey … “Wait till next year!” | 1,266,030 |
Leather Belts
Buckle My Belt is the online leader in Handmade to Measure Leather Belts. We specialise in delivering Men's and Ladies designer leather belts at a fraction of the price for the same quality of a branded leather belt. There is a space in the marketplace for high quality Leather Jean and Trouser Belts and we deliver this every-time. When you purchase a leather belt through Buckle My Belt we enable you to choose the buckle that best suits your needs and the colour of leather you require. We currently stock 10 different colour leathers and offer 42 size variations for each leather belt. This amounts to 420 variations for each buckle and we have hundreds of buckles in stock. As all items are made to measure the leather belt you purchase will always be exactly what you ordered.
Leather Belts for Sale
Buying a leather belt on-line isn't as difficult as you may imagine! As long as you follow a few simple steps you will always get the perfect handmade to measure leather belt every-time. We have an extensive range of Leather Belts for Sale and we offer Full Grain Leather Belts for both Jeans and Trousers. Each leather belt is custom Made in the UK to the specific external waist size entered at the time of ordering. This allows us to provide any size needed, Small, Medium, Large and Extra whether that be 20" or 80" (50cm or 200cm) we can provide a leather belt to accommodate.
Ordering a Leather Belt On-line
leather belt on-line. If you follow our process you will buy the perfect fitting leather belt and you will never go shopping anywhere else again for this fashion accessory. Below are our simple "How to buy a leather belt online"! We encourage you to read our simple steps to ordering the perfect. If you follow our process you will buy the perfect fitting leather belt and you will never go shopping anywhere else again for this fashion accessory. Below are our simple ""!
How to Measure a Belt Also please take note of our measuring criteria at
How to Order a Leather Belt On-line
Browse through our extensive range of buckles remembering that any buckle can have any leather strap.
Choose the Buckle that best suits your needs.
Enter the size!! Remember this is the external waist size. The measurement over clothing worn with your new leather belt. See link How to Measure a Belt
What colour leather do you need? Choose the full grain leather colour which best suits your requirements.
Add to Basket / Cart! This will add your leather belt to the basket ready for checkout. Repeat the process above until you have finished shopping.
Once you have finished your on-line shopping click the basket icon to progress to the checkout procedure.
Complete the checkout process in full and you will get a confirmation email.
Leather Belt Customer Service | 1,266,031 |
morning. Our prayers are with the family and friends of Samantha Josephson following the devastating news of her death. Times like these leave me searching for words of wisdom and comfort. However, I take solace that the Carolina Family is here to embrace those who are hurting.
As you make plans for the weekend, remember the tenets of Stand Up Carolina: look out for one another, be active bystanders. Travel in groups and stay together. If you have not already done so, download the RAVE Guardian safety app, set up your profile and learn how to use it.
It has been a difficult week for our extended Carolina family. The loss of a student is never easy but this has been a particularly painful few days as we have experienced loss on several of our campuses. As a family, let’s continue to pray for all the families experiencing heartache and grief this week."
South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster said he and his wife were "devastated" and "crushed" by the death of the college student:
"Peggy and I are devastated and crushed over the Josephson family losing their beautiful daughter Samantha. She was one of the brightest stars at the University of South Carolina. I ask every South Carolinian to join us in praying for the Josephson family. Let us also pray for the men and women of law enforcement as they fight to bring evil to justice."
Josephson was a native of Robbinsville Township, New Jersey, a community "devastated" by her death:
"Mayor Dave Fried, B.A. Joy Tozzi and everyone in Robbinsville Township are devastated by the news that the Josephson family of Robbinsville have lost their precious Samantha.
Our thoughts, prayers, boundless grief and endless support are with Seymour, Marci and Sydney at this unimaginable time.
Personal note: Seymour was like a big brother to me throughout our young baseball careers, and as the father of a daughter of similar age out trying to make a real difference in the world, this is just beyond my comprehension capabilities.
I love you, buddy...JN"
Robbinsviile School District, where Josephson attended high school, called the student a "vibrant young woman with an infectious smile and a contagious laugh" in a statement to News19:
"Our hearts are heavy with grief and shock as we process the news of the sudden death of Samantha Josephson. On behalf of our board and entire school district, we want to extend our deepest sympathy and love to the Josephson family. Sami, a 2015 Robbinsville High School graduate, was a vibrant young woman with an infectious smile and a contagious laugh. Robbinsville is a strong and close-knit community and we will continue to find ways to care for and support our students, families, friends, staff, and community members as we hold the Josephson family in our hearts." | 1,266,032 |
Stormy Daniels lawyer and former employee of Rahm Emanuel, Michael Avenatti, is facing questions about his past business dealings.
A complaint was recently filed against him with the California State Bar Association for his role in a transaction that occurred several years ago and involved Tully’s Coffee purchasing an entity called Global Baristas.
The complaint, filed by attorney David Nold, states Avenetti and Global Baristas encountered a lien for roughly $5 million in unpaid federal income taxes. They claimed the taxes were withdrawn from employee paychecks but were never turned over to the federal government, The Seattle Times reports.
Since Global Baristas acquired Tully’s Coffee, the chain has struggled immensely as it has faced with a litany of lawsuits.
Avenatti argued to Fox News that he was not a “member” of Global Baristas US LLC, and claimed he was part of the entity that owned it, Global Baristas LLC.
“The federal tax lien is related to an entity that was owned by another company that I used to have an interest in,” Avenatti said to Fox News Thursday. “At no point in time was I ever responsible for any taxes for Global Baristas US LLC, nor was I ever a member of that entity, nor did I own any direct interest in that entity.”
Contrary to his statement, a 2017 court document acquired by the Seattle Times demonstrates Avenatti recognized the fact that he was the “principal” of Global Baristas US LLC.
The complaint is “complete and utter nonsense” Avenatti argued to Fox News, claiming it was filed by an “unethical lawyer who was recently held in contempt of court.”
“The court ruled that I should not have given the full Avenatti deposition transcript to the news media,” Nold said to Fox. “The court found nothing wrong with sending the bar complaint.”
Another lawsuit was filed against Daniels’ lawyer in 2013 by none other than actor Patrick Dempsey. Dempsey contended Avenatti had not fulfilled his financial commitment to the coffee chain. The lawsuit was resolved shortly after it was filed.
In Seattle, big day tomorrow! Hope we pull it off! pic.twitter.com/U1nR5CWL — Patrick Dempsey (@PatrickDempsey) January 3, 2013
Avenatti is no longer involved with either Global Baristas entity.
Before he stepped into the spotlight as Stormy Daniels’ lawyer, Avenatti was notorious for his “unconventional” tactics and had a reputation as being an effective and aggressive attorney.
Avenatti has a history if intertwining with prominent figures. In the early days of his career, he worked for a political opposition research and media firm operated by now-Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. | 1,266,033 |
Send this page to someone via email
Back in the day, the menu behind the counter at McDonald’s used to say smiles were free.
A young employee at a Langley McDonald’s has earned praise for an even kinder gesture, comforting an upset customer who had just attended the funeral of a loved one.
Tammy Stauffer-Jacobsen says she stopped by the Brookswood McDonald’s last Wednesday to get a cup of coffee for her and her husband.
It was a particularly difficult time as she was mourning the loss of her father-in-law Norman Jacobsen, who served as mayor of Maple Ridge and MLA for the riding of Dewdney.
Tired and emotionally drained, Stauffer-Jacobsen had trouble finding the words to order the coffees. She told the McDonald’s employee that it had been a long day as she had just come back from a funeral.
Story continues below advertisement
Employee Scott Farynuk stepped in with his staff card and took care of the drinks.
It was this small gesture that sent Stauffer-Jacobsen over the edge.
“I started to cry and he came around the corner and gave me a really big hug,” she said.
“It took him a couple of minutes for him to make the coffee but I just kept telling him, ‘Thank you.’ It was just so sweet of him to do and so kind.
“I’ll never forget it.”
Stauffer-Jacobsen was so touched by the small act of kindness that she wrote about it on Facebook.
READ MORE: Richmond senior lets neighbours park on his front lawn
The post circulated around the community and people have been coming into the Brookswood McDonald’s and calling head office to commend the young man.
Farynuk says he’s flattered by all the attention but isn’t sure what all the fuss is about.
Story continues below advertisement
“In a way, it’s kind of sad that a kind gesture has to be newsworthy because it’s something everyone should be doing every day,” he said.
“Who wouldn’t do that in a situation where someone is emotionally suffering and they just need someone to be there and tell them it’s OK? I think a lot of people would do the same.”
Stauffer-Jacobsen says the two have kept in touch as she still comes in regularly to buy coffee.
“He’s got a lot of compassion, a lot of empathy,” she said of Farynuk. “He’s being raised well.”
— With files from Aaron McArthur | 1,266,034 |
In the dark: Wests Tigers coach Jason Taylor insists he was unaware of the issues in Simona's life. Credit:Getty Images "That season is done, but obviously it held us back," Taylor told Fairfax Media. "And, looking forward, we won't have that hinderance to our performance, which is a good thing." The NRL said it had no evidence that Simona had altered his performance to throw matches or achieve other betting outcomes. But Taylor says he did have serious concerns over the 25-year-old's consistency and that he had had several conversations with him on the matter over the past 12 months. "I always believed Tim was out there playing his best and the inconsistencies were due to the fact he's an inconsistent player," Taylor said.
Bad bets: Disgraced Wests Tigers centre Tim Simona. Credit:Jonathan Ng "I spent a lot of time with Tim in a one-on-one situation, talking to him about his game and his life off the field. Through most of the course of the time I've been here I've been working on improving Tim's consistency. But he didn't improve and that was something I wasn't comfortable with. "He wasn't improving at the rate the other guys were. Did I know what was going on? No, I didn't. But I knew something wasn't right with Tim." Taylor says he also asked Simona about his life away from the game, again on an almost-weekly basis, but the Samoan international gave no indication of the off-field demons that led to his demise. "I knew that he was working hard to support his family," Taylor said. "That's what I knew about him. That's why we spoke a lot about his family and how things were. I would ask about his family and personal life. He always looked me in the eye and said everything was good.
"As a coach, I sat down with him weekly and spoke about on field stuff but almost always asked him about life off the field because they are linked. He continually told me things were fine. Continually. As a club it was hard for anyone to predict that when someone is not only not willing to share that, but is going out of his way to hide it." Taylor admits the revelations surrounding Simona came as a complete shock, but is adamant he won't allow the saga to change the way he approaches coaching. "Never, no never," Taylor said when asked if he had had any suspicions regarding his former player. "As a coach, I've never thought about that. Even when players play really poor. I believe every player turns up wanting to play their best game of footy each week. They don't always get that right but I believe they did their best. "But I can't change. I won't be able to build the relationships with players that I want if I'm doubting their attitude or level of commitment." | 1,266,035 |
US destroyer collides with Philippine-flagged vessel south of Tokyo Bay in Japan in rare incident on busy waterway.
The US navy says seven crew members are missing and at least three injured after a destroyer, the USS Fitzgerald, collided with ACX Crystal, a Philippine-flagged merchant vessel off the coast of Japan.
The Japanese coastguard said the Fitzgerald was experiencing some flooding, but was not in danger of sinking, while the merchant vessel was able to sail under its own power.
The coastguard said none of the 20 crew members on board the merchant vessel were injured.
Three aboard the destroyer had been medically evacuated, including the ship’s commanding officer, Commander Bryce Benson, who was reportedly in stable condition after being airlifted to the US Naval Hospital in Yokosuka.
The other two injured were transferred to the hospital for lacerations and bruises, while other injuries were being assessed, the US navy statement said.
The Fitzgerald was operating under its own power, “although her propulsion is limited”.
It was unclear how the collision south of Tokyo Bay happened.
“Once an investigation is complete then any legal issues can be addressed,” the US navy’s Seventh Fleet spokesman said.
‘Grounds for fear’
The Fitzgerald and the Japanese coastguard were searching for seven missing sailors.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Tokyo, Michael Penn, a journalist with the Shingetsu news agency, said: “As hours and hours have gone by [and] it was in the middle of the night that they went overboard, there are strong grounds to fear for them.”
The Fitzgerald suffered damage on its starboard side, above and below the waterline, but the full extent of the damage was still being determined.
“The US navy ship is an Aegis destroyer, which has one of the most sophisticated radars in existence. So how such a ship was taken unaware and rammed by a merchant ship is very bizarre,” Penn said.
The ACX Crystal is about three times the size of the warship USS Fitzgerald [Kyodo via Reuters]
The waterways approaching Tokyo Bay are busy with commercial vessels sailing to and from Japan’s two biggest container ports in Tokyo and Yokohama.
The USS Dewey and two navy tugboats had been dispatched to provide assistance, the US navy said.
Japan’s public broadcaster NHK showed aerial footage of the destroyer, which had a large dent in its right, or starboard, side. Images broadcast by NHK showed it had been struck next to its Aegis radar arrays behind its vertical missile launch tubes.
In May, the US navy’s USS Lake Champlain collided with a South Korean fishing vessel, but both ships were able to operate under their own power. | 1,266,036 |
Background: Chosen One
You are destined for something greater—at least, that is what everyone says. You were raised under the assumption that you are fated to fulfill some ancient prophecy. The pressure to meet the impossible expectations set upon you is immense. Many think that you are set on an inevitable path, but deep down you wonder if it is possible to fight fate. Whether or not you try is your choice.
Skill Proficiencies: History, Religion
Languages: Two exotic languages of your choice
Equipment: A set of common clothes, a copy of the prophecy you are named in, a talisman of the god or other being that chose you, a journal, and a pouch of 15 gp.
Predestined Quest
For some reason or another, people have decided that you are a perfect fit for a prophecy. Discuss with your DM how the prophecy will play into your campaign, or if it will at all, and consider what your character thinks about their mission. Choose from the tables below or roll on the table to determine what the prophecy foretells that you will do. The first table shows what you are destined to accomplish, and the second table shows how you will supposedly do it.
d6 I will... 1 Save the world from a dark, evil force 2 End a major war or other ongoing conflict 3 Free an oppressed people and raise them to up their former glory 4 Bring spiritual salvation 5 Cause the end of the world 6 The prophecy doesn't mention what I'll do d6 Using... 1 An untapped ultimate power deep inside of me 2 An unstoppable weapon only I can wield 3 My cunning, skill, and/or determination 4 The power of some abstract virtue (love, honor, trust, etc.) 5 My own death 6 The prophecy doesn't mention how I'll do it
Feature: Mark of the Chosen
You have an unusual physical feature that marks you as being the chosen one, such as a strange birthmark, an oddly shaped scar, or an unnatural hair or eye color. It is in a highly visible place and will be noticed by most people who get a good look at you, unless you intentionally cover it up.
People who are familiar with the prophecy will recognize you immediately. If they believe in it and support your quest, they will be more willing to help you, as long as it doesn’t put them in danger. They can also be convinced to support you at whatever lifestyle they can reasonably afford. They may ask you to help them with their own problems using your supposed power. If they are against your quest, they will treat you with hostility, and may even attack you.
Suggested Characteristics
Chosen ones grow up with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Believing that they are destined for great things could either bolster their ego or plague them with doubts, depending on how they choose to cope. | 1,266,037 |
For the past several months, Apple-leased Dodge Caravans with equipment-laden roofs have been spotted driving around the United States. While early speculation suggested the vans could be Apple's first attempt at developing a self-driving vehicle, it quickly became clear that the vans were being used for mapping purposes.
The Dodge Caravans are all outfitted with an array of LIDAR cameras, much like the vehicles that Google uses to capture images for its Street View mapping feature, so it is no surprise that a report shared today by 9to5Mac suggests the images and data from the vans will be used for future improvements to Apple's Maps feature. Here at MacRumors, we have been aggregating Apple van sightings to give a clear picture of the areas where Apple is currently focusing its attention.
Click on the map to go to a full interactive view complete with pictures from each sighting
Apple has worked tirelessly to improve the Maps app since its 2012 launch, fulfilling Tim Cook's promise that Apple would work "non-stop" until Maps met its "incredibly high standard." The next step in Maps' evolution is the gathering of in-house data to reduce reliance on third-party companies like TomTom, which has provided data for Apple Maps since it launched. Just this month, TomTom and Apple renewed their mapping contract, so Apple's shift towards its own data system may still be several years off.
Using in-house data has the potential to significantly improve the Maps experience. Apple will not have to rely on third-party information that's potentially riddled with errors and inaccuracies, and the company will also be able to implement changes and fixes more quickly.
In the future, the imagery captured by the vans may be used by Apple to create its own 3D street level viewing experience to complement its existing Flyover feature. Flyover is designed to let Maps users explore landmarks and major cities around the world through an aerial view. A street level addition to Flyover could perhaps be useful in day-to-day life to get a look at nearby locations, but it's possible Apple has its eye on something grander, perhaps giving Maps users a way to explore exotic locations on a more granular level.
Apple is also reportedly using its fleet of Dodge Caravans to capture images of storefronts and businesses, and this data may be of more immediate use to the company. Imagery of stores, businesses, and restaurants may be incorporated into an upcoming iOS 9 revamp to Apple's Points of Interest system, replacing photographs pulled in from third-party sources like Yelp.
We may see the first fruits of Apple's new mapping project as soon as June 8, when Apple unveils iOS 9 at WWDC and provides it to developers for testing purposes. iOS 9 is rumored to have a few other upgrades in addition to a new Points of Interest system, including transit routing information in a limited number of cities. | 1,266,038 |
Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a controversial appearance at Georgetown Law School Tuesday to deliver remarks on free speech on college campuses. Besides Sessions’ atrocious record on civil rights, the speech prompted protests from students and faculty after many students were ironically uninvited from the event. After arguing in his speech that there were too many restrictions on speech on college campuses, Sessions proceeded to defend President Trump’s condemnation of NFL players protesting racism by kneeling for the national anthem.
When asked if it concerns him that Trump criticized their protests, Sessions responded, “Well the president has free speech rights too. He sends soldiers out every day to defend this country under the flag of the United States, under the national anthem, and the unity that those symbols call on us to adhere to.”
In fact, Sessions proceeded to condemn the players himself for “denigrating” the nation’s symbols:
So I agree it is a big mistake to protest in that fashion, because it weakens a commitment we have to this nation that has provided us this freedom. I would note, of course, that the players aren’t subject to any prosecution, but if they take a provocative act, they can expect to be condemned, and the President has the right to condemn them, and I would condemn their actions, not them as a human being. There are many ways, these players, with all the assets that they have, can express their political views other than — in effect, denigrating the symbols of our nation, the nation that has provided our freedom to speak and act.
In response to a follow-up question, Sessions seemed to suggest that he would actually be okay with NFL owners controlling the speech of players:
People have a right to register their opinions, to protest, to criticize in any number of ways. I guess it’s up to the owners and the people who create these games and pay for the ball fields to decide what you can do on the ball field. But the freedom of every individual player is paramount under the Constitution. It’s protected, and we have to protect it. I think that’s — it’s not a contradiction there.
Just moments earlier, in his speech, Sessions said, “In this great land, the government does not tell you what to think or what to say” and proceeded to criticize universities’ “free speech zones.” He also announced that the Department of Justice had issued a statement of interest in a campus free speech case, promising that they will “defend free speech.”
As his final thought, he urged the audience to also defend the freedom of speech “steadfastly against anyone that would dominate somebody in their thought and speech.”
In other words, Sessions supports the freedom of speech except when a football player wants to protest on the field. | 1,266,039 |
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – California’s top oil regulator announced his resignation on Monday after 17 months as head of the embattled agency, including a criticized episode in which he directed state workers to investigate the oil and gas potential of Gov. Jerry Brown’s family ranch.
Steve Bohlen, the state’s oil and gas chief, is quitting to return to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory research center, according to a statement from Brown’s office.
The statement did not give a reason for Bohlen’s resignation, but it said Bohlen had been on loan from his work at the research center. Officials of his Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources did not immediately return The Associated Press’s calls seeking comment.
The AP reported earlier this month that Brown directed Bohlen in June 2014, days after appointing Bohlen to the job, to investigate and map out the oil, gas and mineral potential and history of the Brown family ranch in Northern California.
Bohlen and Brown aides defended the public work for Brown family private property, saying it was legal and normal. The governor’s spokesmen said the governor was not interested in possibly drilling on the family property.
The oil regulator who prepared the map for Brown filed a whistleblower complaint over being made to do the work, her lawyer confirmed. Former oil regulators and oil-industry veterans told the AP the state oil work for Brown was unique because of the custom map with drilling information and color-coded geological records and legends, and because of the report’s conclusion by state regulators that the area of Brown’s family ranch was unlikely to warrant any drilling or mining in the future.
Bohlen said this month that Brown also directed him in June 2014 to keep the personal work done for Brown out of email, citing open-records laws.
State officials were unable to produce any other examples of state regulators mapping out the petroleum, mineral and geology status of land for personal purposes, and records showed the state oil agency specifically rejecting requests for maps from a state lawmaker’s office and from a private individual.
The state’s oilfield regulation agency has had a series of top-level turnovers at least since 2011, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepped up criticism that the agency was failing to enforce federal laws meant to protect public health and the environment from oilfield pollution. Brown, who has sought to boost the state’s oil production while encouraging some of the most ambitious conservation programs in the country, boasted in 2012 of speeding up the agency’s oil permitting by firing one of Bohlen’s predecessors, after oil companies accused her of demanding rigorous environmental reviews.
Brown’s office did not immediately respond to the AP’s request for comment about turnover at the agency.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. | 1,266,040 |
Five people have been charged in connection with a migrant-smuggling scheme that resulted in a high-speed chase that killed five unauthorized migrants in Texas, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas on Tuesday said those charged include Jorge Luis Monsivais Jr., 20, of Eagle Pass, Texas, the driver of the 2007 Suburban that crashed near the town of Big Wells on Sunday, killing five people.
Customs and Border Patrol has said an agent saw what appeared to be three vehicles involved in a smuggling operation on a rural highway Sunday morning.
One vehicle stopped and two others led authorities on chases, authorities said. The speed of the Suburban topped 100 mph before it careened off the road near the town of Big Wells, southwest of San Antonio and about 60 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, and rolled over, Dimmit County Sheriff Marion Boyd has said.
Twelve of the 13 migrants inside that vehicle were ejected. Four were pronounced dead at the scene and a fifth died on the way to a hospital. Seven remain hospitalized.
Four others in another vehicle, a 2013 Tahoe, were charged as conspirators in a smuggling scheme, prosecutors said: the driver, identified as Mexican citizen Marcial Gomez Santana, 55; his son, Rudy Gomez, 21, of Hockle, Texas; his daughter, Johana Gomez, 19, of Houston; and Mariela Reyna, 45, also of Mexico. Marcial Gomez stopped when pulled over by authorities.
All five were charged with transporting illegal aliens and conspiracy to transport and harbor illegal aliens resulting in serious bodily injury and death, federal prosecutors said. If convicted they could face the death penalty.
Monsivais and the other four charged were in federal custody, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. It was not immediately clear if they had attorneys. No one answered a phone call to someone believed to be associated with Monsivais Tuesday afternoon.
The driver of another Tahoe, a 2008, was an unidentified 17-year-old who is in the custody of Dimmit County authorities, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The driver tried to evade law enforcement officers but eventually pulled over. Some people fled after the Tahoe stopped, and 10 suspected of being in the United States illegally were later taken into custody, prosecutors said.
Twenty-three undocumented migrants were involved in the scheme, all but two of whom are Mexican citizens, prosecutors said. The other two are citizens of Honduras. Six of those 23 people are being held on federal complaints as witnesses in the case, prosecutors said.
The deadly crash and federal smuggling charges come amid controversy over the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, which results in children being separated from their parents when the parents enter the United States illegally. | 1,266,041 |
Health Savings Accounts: While increasing contribution limits will increase HSA take-up, one other change should take precedence: Allowing HSA funds to be used to pay for insurance premiums, which is currently prohibited in most cases (except for COBRA continuation coverage, during periods of unemployment, and other limited circumstances). Allowing account funds to pay for premiums would represent a quantum leap forward in consumer-driven health care, by creating a defined-contribution model: Small businesses that cannot afford to purchase coverage for their workers can make predictable HSA contributions, which employees can then use to pay for health expenses, or to fund their own health insurance.
It is possible that the budgetary cost of ending the restrictions on premium payments prompted leadership staff to work instead on increasing the contribution limits. But the former should come before the latter, for multiple reasons: Allowing people to use account funds to pay premiums will create greater political movement to increase the contribution limits, while increasing the contribution limits now will make ending the premium restrictions more costly later. Both are positive reforms, but for multiple strategic reasons, ending the premium payment restrictions should take precedence over increasing the contribution limits.
The Ugly
New Entitlement (Funded by New Taxes?): The linchpin of the House plan lies in its system of advanceable, refundable tax credits—a new program of spending that would see the federal government writing “refund” checks to individuals with no income tax liability. However, the proposal likely will not receive a favorable score from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) about the number of individuals covered by health insurance, at least compared to Obamacare.
That said, the new government spending will impose a fiscal cost. While Republicans did not mention a “pay-for” in their policy brief, press reports suggest the party may raise taxes to fund the new spending. Specifically, House Republicans are looking at capping the current exclusion for employer-provided health coverage, a policy included in their Better Way plan last year.
Most economists agree that the tax treatment of employer-provided health insurance encourages over-consumption of health insurance and health care. However, there are better ways to reform the tax treatment of health coverage—and provide parity between employer-sponsored and individually purchased insurance—without raising taxes overall. The American people do not support repealing Obamacare’s revenue increases only to replace them with other tax hikes.
Therein lies the great disappointment of the House proposal. While in 2008 Barack Obama campaigned for his plan by saying it would reduce health-care costs, he governed with a singular focus on increasing the number of individuals with health insurance, and in so doing raised costs and premiums for millions of Americans. Going down the same failed Obamacare approach of more taxes and more spending will not lower health costs. That, and not repealing and replacing Obamacare’s taxes and spending, should be House Republicans’ ultimate objective. | 1,266,042 |
The many accusations of women’s oppression will look meek compared to what happened in New Atheism. Being a new movement (or as what others point out, a new religion), sexism in atheism is not widely mentioned. But when it happened, it happened.
In my past hub, I mentioned certain cases of sexism in the New Atheism movement. This article you are reading will dig even further on such cases. And let’s begin to the well-known leader of atheism known as Richard Dawkins.
Thanks to his infamous Muslima letter, he lost the love of the left and the respect of his fellow atheists. It all started one evening, in an incident known as the Elevatorgate.
Rebecca Watson, the founder of the website Skepchick shared in her vlog an experience she got at a conference. At 4 in a morning, she got an invitation from a man that followed her in the elevator, asking her for a coffee in his hotel room. The experience made her uncomfortable and she suggested in her vlog that people should not do the same.
Initially it went peacefully, until Watson received a number of alarming comments and emails. As what PZ Myers (a fellow atheist) said in his blog post, these are evidence of sexism in atheism. Then Richard Dawkins butted in with the comment of his own. He composed this Dear Muslima letter, which accused Watson of overreacting and comparing her experience to the women forced to don the Burqa. And below is the copy of his rants:
Dear Muslima,
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and... yawn... don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so... And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
The backlash it caused divided the atheist community, with people taking sides. Dawkins did make an apology over the incident, three years after the incident. But that’s just one of the many sexism problems the movement is facing. | 1,266,043 |
Tomorrow we have an excellent set of posters based on Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy by Johnny Dombrowski! We're continually blown away by Johnny's illustrative prowess and his note-perfect interpretations of modern films as classic comic book covers. As iconic genre staples, SHAUN OF THE DEAD (horror), HOT FUZZ (crime), and THE WORLD'S END (fantasy) lend themselves beautifully to EC-inspired comic cover treatment.
Additionally, we'll also have a new poster for HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH by the brilliant Alan Hynes. Featuring glow in the dark inks, Alan's poster for arguably the second best film in the franchise is based on his mind-bendingly awesome artwork for our vinyl release of the soundtrack last year.
These posters will be available on Thursday (3/14) at a random time via mondotees.com.
SHAUN OF THE DEAD by Johnny Dombrowski
24"x36" Screenprinted Poster, Edition of 300
Printed by DL Screenprinting
Expected to Ship in April 2019
Ships to Addresses in US & Canada Only
$45
HOT FUZZ by Johnny Dombrowski
24"x36" Screenprinted Poster, Edition of 225
Printed by DL Screenprinting
Expected to Ship in April 2019
Ships to Addresses in US & Canada Only
$45
THE WORLD'S END by Johnny Dombrowski
24"x36" Screenprinted Poster, Edition of 200
Printed by DL Screenprinting
Expected to Ship in April 2019
Ships to Addresses in US & Canada Only
$45
"Edgar Wright’s visual storytelling is some of the best in the business - showing more in seconds than others can do in hours. Blink and you can miss a shot, a joke, a reference, a swan, anything. The Cornetto Trilogy is a perfect love letter to all of those zombie-cop-alien movies so I wanted to create a series that would match it. After talking it over with the folks at Mondo, a simultaneous love letter to EC comics seemed like a good fit. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few issues on set." - Johnny Dombrowski
HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH by Alan Hynes
18"x24" Screenprinted Poster, Edition of 225
Printed by Seizure Palace Press
Expected to Ship in April 2019
Ships to Addresses in US & Canada Only
$45
Please follow us on Twitter for the on sale announcement. These posters will be available online at a random time on Thursday, March 14th. | 1,266,044 |
management to control water. In a not so distant future, we will be able to control the climate, control the weather, relocate land to create more coasts where we want and how we want. Ocean level or disappearing species will not threaten us in any way.
One might wonder if the exhaustion argument is even intended to make sense. It is hard to know where to even start with that. We do want to exhaust resources. Logically, we pick the cheapest form of any resource, like mineral oil for energy, or a certain ore for lithium. We are not going to spare it just to not exhaust it, are we? We want to use up all of it, and then look for some other source, or recycling existing stocks in some way. The argument that when there is no more of it, prices will sharply rise, is an argument for or against what? If a resource runs out, and the next best alternative is five times as expensive, what is the proposed strategy? Not using it helps how? The only concern is to be prepared for a sudden increase in price when one source runs out. But this is hardly a challenging problem in a modern economy. In fact, we can expect our capabilities grow faster than the cost of accessing alternative sources, thus making resources cheaper and cheaper as we go. Even in a relatively close future, we foresee asteroid or core mining, as well as ocean filtration.
Before you let yourself be consumed by outrage, allow me clarify that we don’t advertise completely ignoring other living beings, and destroying them in the process. My point is that it is our choice, and there is neither necessity nor moral obligation to preserve a species or save any particular animal from suffering. However, there is a moral obligation to save people from suffering. Perhaps not an obligation, but certainly a more compelling goal on both emotional and rational level. We will get to the point when we can easily be the saviour and protector of life on this planet, as opposed to an extinction causing factor. Not sure anyone will care at that point, but the possibility is there. Until that time, however, we need to choose between us and other species, and the choice should be pretty clear.
Civilization, including the technological one, happens for a reason: we are building a better future. It is not greed or derangement that drives us, but the possibility to eliminate suffering and unnecessary death. Today, billions of people live in medieval or even tribal conditions. If we create the proper circumstances, these people can be brought up to western level, but it takes time. People living today will probably not see skyscrapers, air conditioning and computers becoming ubiquitous. But their grandchildren might, and this should be our focus and our goal. Hindering this process is a crime against humanity. It is baffling how can pandas or coral reefs be more important than hundreds of millions of people doomed to lifelong suffering and poverty. | 1,266,045 |
Student covers uni fees by selling videos of herself sneezing to fetishists for up to £100
Reported on the daily mirror online
Going to university is an expensive venture, with the average student in England now believed to graduate with debts of over £50,000.
Abi Haywood, however, has a novel way of countering the mounting costs which further education incurs.
The fine arts student, from Wales, has identified a niche money-spinner – filming herself sneezing and charging sneeze fetishists for the footage.
Abi can make £20 to £30 per clip, and will even charge up to £100 for more specific video requests. This might be, for example, when someone wants her to include footage of her feet or to carry out a request somewhere public.
She told MailOnline that she began this enterprise to help pay for her studies as she needed a “safety net”.
As for the sort of requests she gets, she revealed: “I had a request where this guy wanted me to sneeze and go to the toilet in a public bathroom because of the privacy, echo and the clinicalness where people would be unaware.”
After carrying out the instruction at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, she got a £100 Urban Outfitters voucher for her efforts.
“Ideally [the buyer] would send me money over PayPal but because he was a first time buyer and didn’t want his bank information showing or maybe he has a wife and he doesn’t want her seeing or buying material from fetish models,” she explained.
Abi’s motivation behind choosing the Institute for her filming came about as she “knew they would hate the concept.”
She added that she often found the art world to be elitist and inaccessible to people from low income backgrounds.
Among her fans is one man who told her he watches [her] on [his] 72-inch TV in surround sound.
With some help from a clothing tag and her allergy to bright lights, Abi can rack up 11 sneezes in one go, ad points out she’s only ever had two nosebleeds.
Abi got started on creating videos for fetishists after creating a piece called “drawing of the form, endurance and repetition”. For this, she had sneezed 37 times in three hours and had drawn an outline in pen.
Having filmed her work and uploaded it to YouTube, the number of views quickly mounted to the thousands and the requests started to come in. She realised there was money to be made from these sort of clips.
She admitted she would have dropped out of Leeds art school without the cash because her waitressing job at the Hepworth Gallery pays minimum wage. | 1,266,046 |
Former President Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaObama calls on Senate not to fill Ginsburg's vacancy until after election Senate Republicans face tough decision on replacing Ginsburg Cruz: Trump should nominate a Supreme Court justice next week MORE on Monday urged Americans to “make a positive impact on the world” in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
“I’ve always drawn inspiration from what Dr. King called life’s most persistent and urgent question: ‘What are you doing for others?’” Obama tweeted. “Let’s honor his legacy by standing up for what is right in our communities and taking steps to make a positive impact on the world.”
I’ve always drawn inspiration from what Dr. King called life’s most persistent and urgent question: "What are you doing for others?" Let’s honor his legacy by standing up for what is right in our communities and taking steps to make a positive impact on the world. — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 21, 2019
The former president spent a number of his Martin Luther King Jr. Days in office volunteering at local organizations in Washington, D.C.
ADVERTISEMENT
His call for service comes as President Trump Donald John TrumpObama calls on Senate not to fill Ginsburg's vacancy until after election Planned Parenthood: 'The fate of our rights' depends on Ginsburg replacement Progressive group to spend M in ad campaign on Supreme Court vacancy MORE and Vice President Mike Pence Michael (Mike) Richard PenceEx-Pence aide: Trump spent 45 minutes of task force meeting 'going off on Tucker Carlson' instead of talking coronavirus Trump asked Chamber of Commerce to reconsider Democratic endorsements: report Controversial CDC guidelines were written by HHS officials, not scientists: report MORE visited the MLK Memorial in D.C.
The approximately two-minute visit was previously unannounced. In a tweet earlier Monday, Trump wrote that the U.S. celebrates King "for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear, that no matter what the color of our skin or the place of our birth, we are all created equal by God."
Today we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for standing up for the self-evident truth Americans hold so dear, that no matter what the color of our skin or the place of our birth, we are all created equal by God. #MLKDay https://t.co/pEaVpCB8M4 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 21, 2019
Pence faced criticism from King’s son, Martin Luther King III, after he compared Trump to the civil rights icon in a pitch for the president’s immigration proposal.
“Martin Luther King Jr. was a bridge builder, not a wall builder,” Martin Luther King III said on Monday. | 1,266,047 |
This article is also available in: Shqip Macedonian Bos/Hrv/Srp
Shyhrete Tahiri-Sylejmani. Photo: Kallxo.com.
Shyhrete Tahiri-Sylejmani filed a criminal complaint to Kosovo’s Special Prosecution for War Crimes on Monday in an attempt to ensure that her attacker during the 1998-99 war is prosecuted.
“I am here today to share the pain I hold in my soul and to represent all the mothers, women, sisters and brothers who share the same pain as me and give them courage,” Tahiri-Sylejmani told a press conference in front of the Special Prosecution building.
“It is not easy to share this pain, which breaks the heart and soul, but I am here to seek justice,” she added.
Tahiri-Sylejmani is one of the few Kosovo Albanian survivors of wartime sexual violence to speak publicly, following the example of Vasfije Krasniqi-Goodman, who spoke out last year about how she was raped by Serbian police in her village in 1999, when she was 16 years old.
Tahiri-Sylejmani was accompanied at her press conference by Feride Rushiti, the head of the Kosovo Rehabilitation Centre for Torture Victims.
Rushiti emphasised that it was important for victims of wartime sexual violence to come forward and not just talk behind closed doors about the crimes they suffered.
“During these 20 years we have shared many silent stories with these people who survived such horrid crimes, which most of the time have not even been discussed within families. We have unfortunately kept them hidden even from society and the relevant institutions,” Rushiti said.
Rushiti accused Kosovo’s institutions of not having convicted anyone who committed crimes of sexual violence during wartime.
“Without justice there is no peace for the survivors of sexual violence during the war,” she said.
Krasniqi-Goodman’s televised interview last year about her case was credited as opening up discussion about the issue of wartime sexual violence by Serbian forces in Kosovo.
Krasniqi-Goodman also testified at a US House of Representatives’ foreign affairs committee hearing in Washington DC earlier this year, calling on the US to “address impunity for war crimes and abuses” by helping to push for justice for the victims.
No verified statistics exist on the number of victims of sexual violence inflicted by Serbian forces during the Kosovo war.
A total of 400 women and 12 men have the official status of victim of wartime sexual violence in Kosovo.
A report by Amnesty International published in 2017 said only a few of those accused of wartime rape have been prosecuted. | 1,266,048 |
scott morrison australia Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images
An Australian spy agency on Sunday said Australia was „actively investigating“ allegations of Chinese political interference laid out during Nine News‘ „60 Minutes“ program.
The program on Sunday claimed that Nick Zhao, a 32-year-old Liberal Party member and Melbourne luxury car dealer, was offered $1 million by Chinese agents to run in the federal elections and infiltrate the country’s parliament.
He refused the offer and instead told Australia’s spy agency. He was later found dead in a Melbourne hotel room.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the allegations as „deeply disturbing and troubling,“ but said that the government was taking harder steps to address foreign interference.
Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
An Australian spy agency on Sunday said Australia was „actively investigating“ allegations of Chinese political interference laid out during Nine News‘ „60 Minutes“ program.
The program on Sunday claimed that Nick Zhao, a 32-year-old Liberal Party member and Melbourne luxury car dealer, was offered $1 million by Chinese agents to run in the federal elections and infiltrate the country’s parliament.
Instead of taking the offer, Zhao told the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) about the deal, the program said, citing sources with knowledge of the plot.
Zhao was found dead in a Melbourne hotel room in March, according to „60 Minutes.“ Police have not yet figured out how he died, according to The Age.
The program also aired an interview with Wang „William“ Leqiang, a 27-year-old man claiming to be a Chinese spy who is now seeking political refuge in Australia. Wang told „60 Minutes“ that Beijing spies operate in Australia and have tried to influence politics.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the allegations as „deeply disturbing and troubling,“ but said that the government was taking harder steps to address foreign interference.
„I can assure Australians that under our government, the resources have never been stronger, the laws have never been tougher, and the government has never been more determined to keep Australians free and safe from foreign interference.“
Director-General of Security of ASIO, Mike Burgess, said in a statement on Sunday that it was taking the allegations laid out in „60 Minutes“ seriously.
„Australians can be reassured that ASIO was previously aware of matters that have been reported today, and has been actively investigating them,“ he wrote. „Hostile foreign intelligence activity continues to pose a real threat to our nation and its security.“
China has since dismissed Wang’s allegations and have accused him of being a convicted fraud, according to Nine News. | 1,266,049 |
Shiv Sena defended its MP Ravindra Gaikwad, banned by most major airlines. (File)
Highlights In Parliament, Shiv Sena defends its MP who assaulted Air India employee
"Kapil Sharma misbehaved on a flight but no ban on him," a Sena MP says
"Rules same" for all, including an MP, says Aviation Minister
"Never...had I expected an MP to get caught in this," said Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju
Comedian Kapil Sharma's drunken episode on a flight was raised in parliament today as the Shiv Sena defended its MP Ravindra Gaikwad, banned from flying most major airlines after he assaulted an Air India official with his slipper on Thursday. Kapil Sharma misbehaved on a flight after getting drunk but no ban was imposed on him. Corrupt people are allowed to fly. How can an MP be banned," Sena's Anandrao Adsul questioned in the Lok Sabha.The government asserted that "rules are the same" for all, including an MP. "Violence on a flight can be disastrous...we cannot compromise safety in airlines," Civil Aviation Minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju said to the Sena, the BJP's estranged ally.Reports suggest Air India will issue a warning to comedy host Kapil Sharma, who is accused of misbehaving with co-stars, like Sunil Grover, on a flight to Mumbai from Melbourne two weeks ago. Though the brawl has been in the news over the cataclysmic impact on Mr Sharma's TV show, talk of possible action has emerged after Mr Gaikwad was banned by six airlines.The minister said airlines are empowered to deny boarding to any passenger whose demeanour is incorrect. But "never in the wildest of dreams had I expected an MP to get caught in this," Mr Raju said.Mr Gaikwad, the Sena's parliamentarian from Osmanabad in Maharashtra, thrashed a 60-year-old Air India Duty Manager, abused him and allegedly tried to push him down a step-ladder during an argument over a business class seat. A day later, barred by every airline, the politician was forced to take a train to Maharashtra but he got off somewhere in Gujarat to avoid the media.Amid protests by Sena MPs in parliament, the minister said, "An MP is also a passenger. We cannot have unequal treatment of people of different classes...we cannot compromise safety in airlines."
Mr Gaikwad was not just unapologetic about his conduct, but he also bragged later about " hitting the official 25 times ".The Samajwadi Party has backed him. The party's Naresh Agrawal said in the Rajya Sabha that airlines banning Mr Gaikwad "just goes to show their dadagiri (bullying)". | 1,266,050 |
disenfranchised members of society would have their day in court. The person who was being sterilized was Carrie Buck. The doctor who was to perform the sterilization was John Bell.
The associate justice who wrote the opinion for the majority was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. A proud defender of the Constitution and individual liberties, Holmes had authored nearly a thousand valued opinions.
On May 2, 1927, justices ruled 8-1 in favor of Carrie Buck’s sterilization. Holmes wrote, “Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crimes, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Then Holmes authored the words that placed Buck v. Bell in the pantheon of America’s most embarrassing Supreme Court decisions: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote, effectively solidifying laws that even the most ardent eugenicists thought were unenforceable. One critic later wrote that Holmes’s opinion represented “the highest ratio of injustice per word ever signed on by eight Supreme Court justices.”
On Oct. 19, 1927, her legal options exhausted, Carrie Buck was sterilized; she thought she was having an appendectomy.
In 1933, the year that he came to power, Adolf Hitler passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. The list of those to be sterilized was virtually identical to that first generated by the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor. Clinics were established and doctors were fined if they didn’t comply with the law.
Within a year, 56,000 Germans had been sterilized; by 1935, 73,000; by 1939, 400,000, logarithmically dwarfing the number of sterilizations performed in the U.S. The procedure was so common that it had a nickname: Hitlerschnitte, “Hitler’s cut.” Americans took note. Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, lamented, “Hitler is beating us at our own game!”
Twenty years later, Buck v. Bell would be presented in support of SS officer Otto Hofmann during the Nuremberg military tribunal investigating Nazi war crimes.
The U.S. Supreme Court has never officially overturned its verdict.
Paul A. Offit is a professor of pediatrics and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is the author of Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (National Geographic Press). | 1,266,051 |
Computer scientists create novel digital assistant to help people communicate more effectively with computers than ever before
A new digital assistant which can be used to help people in scenarios from emergencies to festivals has been unveiled by scientists from the School of Computer Science & Informatics.
The team has created a digital assistant called SHERLOCK (Simple Human Experiment Regarding Locally Observed Collective Knowledge) for smartphones and tablets, like Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana, which allows users to ask questions and quickly receive a response.
But SHERLOCK takes this one step further by using a novel “controlled natural language”, which ensures that the software and its users understand one another, enabling SHERLOCK to act on the information it’s given in a robust way.
Unlike most digital assistants, users can tell SHERLOCK things and it can use the information it’s told - combined with things that other users tell it - to build a “local knowledge base” allowing it to work out new information and take actions.
Researchers say SHERLOCK can therefore be used to help people communicate more effectively with computerised systems than ever before. For example, in a ‘smart’ home you could tell it, "I'm feeling cold", and it could adjust the heating or suggest closing open windows.
Similarly, it can also be used to collect and process ‘crowdsourced’ information. At a festival it could help people work out where the busiest and quietest food areas are, or in an emergency it could help medical teams – or even aerial ‘drones’ – to find people needing aid, based on eyewitness reports.
Professor Alun Preece, School of Computer Science & Informatics, explained: “People like to communicate with computers using natural languages like English, which are hard for computers to understand and process".
“SHERLOCK can therefore be used to help people communicate more effectively with computerised systems.”
“We believe we’re unique in putting Controlled Natural Language technology literally in people’s hands - and, with the Watch app, on their wrists - with the aim of enabling better human-machine understanding and collaboration.”
Families got the opportunity to experience SHERLOCK in action recently when Professor Preece demonstrated the new technology at the BBC Make It Digital event in Cardiff. He explained the research ideas behind SHERLOCK and invited the audience to participate in a crowdsourcing game, using their own smartphones.
The SHERLOCK Apple Watch app has also been unveiled for the first time at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA recently. Prof Preece demonstrated it using a simulated emergency
response scenario where people on patrol can use “smart” watches to provide information to SHERLOCK, allowing it to help protect the public during a crisis. | 1,266,052 |
Adrian Mattheis has a new opponent at ONE: ‘Masters of Destiny’. The experienced Indonesian strawweight will now be matched with Li Zhe at the Axiata Arena on Friday night.
The original opponent, Liu Peng Shuai, withdrew from the fight with Mattheis due to undisclosed reasons. He has been replaced by his compatriot Zhe, who burst to prominence competing in ONE Hero Series.
Zhe (5-1-2) is a veteran of four ONE Hero Series fights and this will be his fifth bout of the year. Meanwhile Mattheis (8-4) will be looking to establish his title credentials in a crowded strawweight division with a fourth straight win.
The Indonesian is a veteran of ten ONE Championship fights. He lost his first three bouts for the promotion but then bounced back to win six out of his next seven fights with all but one of those wins coming inside the distance.
As previously announced Petchmorrakot Petchyindee and Giorgio Petrosyan will meet again at ONE: ‘Masters of Destiny’. The Thai won the first fight by decision only to see the result controversially overturned a few days later.
The card also features Angela Lee. She will go up against former Evolve MMA training partner and team mate Michelle Nicolini in a strawweight fight while Ev Ting faces UFC veteran Daichi Abe in the lightweight division.
ONE: ‘Masters of Destiny’, July 12th, Kuala Lumpur
Kickboxing: Giorgio Petrosyan vs. Petchmorrakot Petchyindee (Featherweight Grand Prix Quarter Final)
Angela Lee vs. Michelle Nicolini (Strawweight)
Ev Ting vs. Daichi Abe (Lightweight)
Abro Fernandes vs. Gurdarshan Mangat (Flyweight)
Jihin Radzuan vs. Jomary Torres (Atomweight)
Dae Sung Park vs. Kimihiro Eto (Lightweight)
Troy Worthen vs. Chen Rui (Bantamweight)
Kickboxing: Hiroki Akimoto vs. Kenny Tse (Flyweight)
Kickboxing: Kai Ting Chuang vs. Janet Todd (Atomweight)
Aleksi Toivonen vs. Akihiro Fujisawa (Flyweight)
Muay Thai: Saiful Merican vs. Mohammed Bin Mahmoud (Bantamweight)
Adrian Mattheis vs. Li Zhe (Strawweight)
Bi Nguyen vs. Bozhena Antoniyar (Atomweight)
Kickboxing: Josh Tonna vs. Yoshisha Morimoto (Flyweight)
Muay Thai: George Mann vs. Sorgraw Petchyindee (Featherweight) | 1,266,053 |
At VW CENTRAL, we believe that your Volkswagen deserves to be at its optimum performance while also looking aesthetically superb all year round, that’s why we are always passionate about going the extra mile to acquire the most advanced parts and enhancements to your VW vehicles.
The passion which we strive to maintain in our products, services, and customer support, was manifested by our love for our own personal vehicles, which we create by making them both aesthetically and mechanically unique.
We understand what it feels like to be overcharged for vehicle modifications, parts and labor because we too have been there ourselves. By putting together the unique modifications on the MKV GTI Pirelli which sports a full colour instrument cluster, a MK6 R steering wheel and a MK6 climatronic just to name a few, we were able to create an outstanding interior retrofit design that has undoubtedly set the benchmark for other MK5 vehicles and induced inspiration to other customer builds. This therefore led to our decision to establish our services as a business in order to enable you to save money while also benefiting from our excellent customer support. We now possess a large support network with dealerships across Australia and New Zealand.
We are fully able to source Genuine European parts from Genuine European parts
Our experience and expertise has seen us become major partners with various renowned vehicle part distributors and manufacturers from around the globe, and as such it has seen us become exclusive distributors for Innotech Performance Exhaust (IPE), Wortec, OSIR, and Tire Stickers LLC.
We distribute a wide range of products through our partners Partners
Our distribution partnerships have guaranteed that we can always directly order genuine parts from any of these brands, and make them available to you at very competitive prices, with interest free options available. If the manufacturer of your choice does not feature on the list, please contact us and we will get back to you with pricing and availability solutions.
At VW CENTRAL, you can be rest assured that the product information you receive is unbiased and professional, as it is obtained from past experience and recommendations from qualified mechanics.
We also offer outstanding benefits to our loyal dealers, and are always looking to expand our network. If you are one of them, we would love you to be a part of this special opportunity by completing the dealer application form here:
Dealer Application
Take a special tour of our site and immerse yourself in an environment fully organized with a wide selection of very professional and exquisite VW Upgrades and Enhancement options.
Enjoy our feature showcase by having an in-depth view of our Demo Vehicle, a GTI Pirelli which we bought brand new and transformed it into a 220kW monster. This vehicle was already unique by Volkswagen only releasing 400 vehicle units into Australia. Our team has gone the extra mile with its upgrades and retrofits to ensure that it certainly remains one of a kind! | 1,266,054 |
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University Electrical and Computer Engineering
In their recent paper, Wireless NoC for VFI-enabled multicore chip design: performance evaluation and design trade-offs, researchers from Carnegie Mellon's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Washington State University identify a new approach for enabling energy-efficient multicore systems. Much like bypassing road congestion when traveling long distances, by using wireless on-chip communication between individually controllable clusters, researchers were able to provide an efficient communication backbone, which can be tailored for large scale multicore systems. This paper presents a platform that is poised to save significant energy with little or no performance penalty. The article is the featured IEEE Transactions on Computers paper for the month of April.
As the number of cores packed into a single chip rises, scalable power management strategies are needed to keep power under prescribed limits. Voltage frequency islands, or VFIs, have long been used to enable such strategies. In VFI-based designs, the system is partitioned into islands with individually adjustable voltage and frequencies so as to reduce the power within allowable performance penalties.
However, while enabling significant power savings, a main challenge of VFI-based designs is the on-chip communication cost which negatively impacts application performance. Indeed, mixed voltage/frequency interfaces must be used for inter-VFI communication, thereby increasing communication delay.
This paper presents two innovative solutions, the first of which is through the VFI clustering methodology. A hybrid VFI clustering that combines both per-VFI utilization and inter-VFI communication enables minimal inter-VFI communication without greatly increasing the inter-cluster utilization variation. Secondly, researchers utilized a small-world wireless Network on Chip or mSWNoC to enable fast and energy efficient on-chip communication. The mSWNoC exploits small-world connectivity for reducing communication costs through wireless long-range short cuts between VFIs.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon University Electrical and Computer Engineering
The wireless small-world connectivity is able to mitigate most of the performance penalties introduced by VFIs. Furthermore, VFI-based multicore systems with mSWNoC communication are shown to be significantly better in energy efficiency compared to classic systems using wired on-chip networks (e.g. mSWNoC improves the energy dissipation by 40% and the energy-delay product by 52% compared to a wireline mesh on common PERSEC and SPLASH-2 benchmarks)
Explore further Research could lead to dramatic energy savings at data farms
More information: Paper authors include: Ryan Gary Kim, Student Member, IEEE, Wonje Choi, Student Member, IEEE, Guangshuo Liu, Student Member, IEEE, Ehsan Mohandesi, Student Member, IEEE, Partha Pratim Pande, Senior Member, IEEE, Diana Marculescu, Fellow, IEEE, Radu Marculescu, Fellow, IEEE | 1,266,055 |
Union Minister Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday said that hugely popular 'achhe din' was originally coined by former prime minister Manmohan Singh and it has become a 'gale mein haddi' (millstone) for the NDA government
Days after comedian Kapil Sharma's now infamous tweet "Ye hain aapke acche din?" to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Minister Nitin Gadkari on Tuesday said that the hugely popular "achhe din" slogan was originally coined by former prime minister Manmohan Singh and it has become a "gale mein haddi" for the NDA government.
"Acche din maanne se hota hai (Good days depends on one's belief). It was at an NRI meet in Delhi that Manmohan Singh had said that Acche din ayenge (good days will come). When asked when acche din will come, Singh had replied, 'in the future'. Modiji said the same thing somewhere and it has now become the millstone around our neck," Gadkari said, reported PTI.
In response to former MP Vijay Darda's query, the minister claimed, "We just used the words achhe din and it should not be taken in the literal sense. It should be interpreted as progress is being made."
A few days back, comedian Kapil Sharma had alleged that that Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) officials have asked for a bribe of Rs 5 lakh bribe to construct his office space in Mumbai and had tweeted tagging Modi "Ye hain aapke acche din?" The entire incident snowballed into a big controversy with a FIR being filed against the television star.
Yeh hain aapke achhe din? @narendramodi — KAPIL (@KapilSharmaK9) September 9, 2016
However, Kapil Sharma is not the only one to question the BJP's oft-repeated slogan, which was generously used by the prime minister during his campaign for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
In the past, the Opposition parties have engaged in a war of words with the Modi government over the slogan. On completion of two years of the NDA government, Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari had alleged, "In the past two years, the NDA government ripped the social fabric, slayed institutions, demolished federalism, sunk the economy and shrunk India's emerging international profile. That is the sum and substance of acche din."
In response to the growing skepticism of the Modi government's promise of acche din, Gadkari on Tuesday said, "If a person has a bicycle, he would want a motorcycle, once the motorcycle is bought, the next target would be a car. Therefore, no one ever feels that good days have arrived," he said.
With inputs from PTI | 1,266,056 |
HALIFAX -- The leader of Nova Scotia's opposition New Democrats is raising questions about the qualifications and political ties of a former Ontario cabinet minister appointed Wednesday as president and CEO of Nova Scotia's key business development agency.
Maureen MacDonald said she hasn't seen Laurel Broten's resume but it's legitimate to ask about her political connections.
"Over the past decade, Ms. Broten held several portfolios in Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government (in Ontario) but economic development was never one of them," MacDonald said in a statement released after Broten's new job at Nova Scotia Business Inc. was announced.
"Nova Scotians need to be assured that the person just selected to manage economic investments on behalf of the province was hired due to her professional qualifications and not her political affiliations."
MacDonald went further in an interview, suggesting little is known about Broten's credentials.
"We know what her political experience is, but what is her experience with respect to working in the private sector doing economic development and attracting investment?"
Broten stressed that she was hired not by politicians but through the approval of a board led by private-sector members.
"My political past had nothing to do with the decisions that they made," she said in an interview, adding that her resume is replete with business experience.
"I bring 20-plus years of experience from both the private and public sector. I practised commercial litigation on Bay Street, I dealt with companies going through exciting mergers and acquisitions. I worked with companies that were having some struggles.... I was elected into government and had a breadth of portfolios."
She also pointed out that she served as the Ontario government's vice-chairwoman of the Treasury Board, which "looked at decisions on investing in economic development opportunities."
Nova Scotia Business Inc. issued a statement Wednesday saying Broten has experience in economic development, budgetary analysis, microfinance and job creation in the creative industries, food processing, green energy and clean-tech sectors.
As well, Broten said she has a good understanding of Nova Scotia's economy given the fact that she recently wrapped up a study that included a broad review of the province's tax system.
Her report released in November said Nova Scotia should introduce a carbon tax like British Columbia and broaden its harmonized sales tax to cover previously exempt items including children's clothing, diapers and home energy costs.
Broten's report also said those proposed tax increases should be offset by lower income and corporate tax rates and a government spending freeze.
Nova Scotia's Liberal government has yet to say what it will do with the report.
Broten is a lawyer who resigned from Ontario politics in June 2013. As a cabinet minister, her portfolios included education, environment and children and youth services.
Her appointment at Nova Scotia Business Inc. takes effect Jan. 26. | 1,266,057 |
Priebus’s comments come several days after the RNC unveiled its self-assessment. Priebus: Marriage is man-woman
Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus on Wednesday reiterated that the Republican Party believes marriage is between a man and a woman, even as he called for greater tolerance in the GOP.
“I know what our principles are, I know our party believes marriage is between one man and one woman,” Priebus told MSNBC’s Luke Russert. “But I also know our party’s going to be inclusive, and it’s going to listen to people and it’s going to allow for differences in our party.”
Under the heading “preserving and protecting traditional marriage,” the GOP’s 2012 platform reads in part, “…even as we believe that marriage, the union of one man and one woman must be upheld as the national standard, a goal to stand for, encourage, and promote through laws governing marriage. We embrace the principle that all Americans should be treated with respect and dignity.”
( PHOTOS: Pols who evolved on gay marriage)
Priebus’s comments on MSNBC come several days after the RNC unveiled an assessment of what’s ailing the Republican Party — and how to fix it.
“Our point in the report is, you know, when I was asked at the National Press Club … one [reporter] asked, are you still going to fund Rob Portman?” Priebus said, referencing the Ohio senator who has recently walked back his opposition to same-sex marriage. “My response was, of course we’re going to help Rob Portman. He’s a good conservative Republican … what I will tell you is, I think our party needs to have the attitude that if I disagree with you on one issue, it doesn’t mean you’re a lousy Republican. It means you’re a good Republican, it means we agree on most issues and it means we need to unite our party.”
He backed Portman earlier this week in an interview with POLITICO, noting that he hasn’t thrown Portman “under the bus” over the same-sex marriage issue.
“I’m trying to show what that leadership looks like, standing up for Rand Paul, by not throwing Rob Portman under the bus. I’m trying to lead by example, I guess, and reaffirm that we’re not compromising our principles either,” Priebus said in an interview with POLITICO’s Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen on Monday.
Next week, the Supreme Court will consider cases related to same-sex marriage. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week showed that Americans back gay marriage 58-36 percent. | 1,266,058 |
different techniques to measure sin2 2 theta-13, are in the process of starting up.
The MINOS far detector is located in a cavern half a mile underground in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in Minnesota. The collaboration records about 1,000 neutrinos per year. A tiny fraction of them seem to be electron neutrinos. Photo: Peter Ginter
“Science usually proceeds in small steps rather than sudden, big discoveries, and this certainly has been true for neutrino research,” said Jenny Thomas from University College London, co-spokesperson for the MINOS experiment. “If the transformation from muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos occurs at a large enough rate, future experiments should find out whether nature has given us two light neutrinos and one heavy neutrino, or vice versa. This is really the next big thing in neutrino physics.”
A large value of sin2 2 theta-13 is welcome news for the worldwide neutrino physics community and a boon for the NOvA neutrino experiment, under construction at Fermilab. The experiment is designed to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy. It will find out whether there are one light and two heavy neutrinos, or whether there are two light neutrinos and a heavy one. Together with several nuclear physics experiments, such as EXO and Majorana, NOvA will help scientists determine what early-universe theories are the most viable ones.
To measure directly the matter-antimatter asymmetry hidden among the neutrino transformations, scientists have proposed the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment. It would send neutrinos on a 1,300-kilometer trip from Fermilab to a detector in South Dakota. This would give muon neutrinos more time to transform into other neutrinos than any other experiment. It would give scientists the best shot at observing whether neutrinos break the matter-antimatter symmetry and by how much. For more information about MINOS, NOvA and LBNE, visit the Fermilab neutrino website:
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/science/experiments/intensity/
The MINOS experiment involves more than 140 scientists, engineers, technical specialists and students from 30 institutions, including universities and national laboratories, in five countries: Brazil, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Funding comes from: the Department of Energy Office of Science and the National Science Foundation in the U.S., the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the U.K; the University of Minnesota in the U.S.; the University of Athens in Greece; and Brazil's Foundation for Research Support of the State of São Paulo (FAPESP) and National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). | 1,266,059 |
Walmart Has Announced the Best Toys of 2020
Their crunchy, fluffy, porky goodness is good for more than just straight-out-of-the-bag snackin'.
We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back. Why trust us?
Sherry Rujikarn Often relegated to the aisles of your local gas station mini mart, pork rinds get a bad rap. They're actually a super-tasty, unique ingredient that's more versatile than you might expect. Don't believe us? Click on... View Gallery 7 Photos Sherry Rujikarn 1 of 7 Thai Mango & Pork "Yum" Whisk 3 Tbsp. lime juice, 1 Tbsp. fish sauce, 2 tsp. brown sugar, and 1 clove of pressed or mashed garlic. Toss with 1 mango, julienned; 1 handful cilantro leaves; 1/4 c. packed mint leaves, finely chopped; 2 to 3 serrano/jalapeno/Thai chiles, chopped; and 5 oz. (about 4 c.) pork rinds. Serve immediately. Sherry Rujikarn 2 of 7 Greens Sauté greens (like spinach, collards, or baby bok choy) with some garlic and fold in some chopped pork rinds right before serving. Sprinkle a few on top too, just for funsies. Sherry Rujikarn 3 of 7 "Chips" & Dip Do as they do in Mexico and use them as dippers instead of chips for guacamole and salsa. Sherry Rujikarn 4 of 7 Non-Bread Crumbs Grind them up in a food processor and use them as you would bread crumbs. Think chicken cutlets, fried green tomatoes, crab cakes, pasta, or mac 'n' cheese. Or just buy some Pork Dust. Sherry Rujikarn 5 of 7 Grilled Cheese Add chopped up or ground up pork rinds to a gooey grilled cheese (before cooking, of course) for some meaty crunch. Sherry Rujikarn 6 of 7 Tacos Toss pork rinds with enough salsa verde to coat. Spread them out on foil-lined rimmed baking sheet and bake at 400°F for 15 min. or until browned. Serve in warm corn tortillas topped with shredded Cheddar, cilantro, and a squeeze of lime. Sherry Rujikarn 7 of 7 Seafood Savior The lean acidity of ceviche is balanced beautifully by the salty, richness of these porky treats. Next Bridal Shower Guide Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io | 1,266,060 |
Why, for instance, are our bodies stuck with the same lame five senses our caveman ancestors had? Sure, we can go in for laser surgery to correct bad vision, but why can't we get super vision while we're there? Well the good news is, those human upgrades are on the way. They just hopefully won't need to be updated again a week later. (Seriously, Adobe, what's wrong with you?)
You may have noticed that our computer programs and devices are constantly being upgraded -- we've had to update Adobe five times while typing this sentence. So, when is the technology going to come along to upgrade us?
6 Gloves That Let You Feel Virtual Sensations
Visage/Stockbyte/Getty Images
Continue Reading Below Advertisement
Our fingers are pretty good at feeling the things they're currently touching, but not so good at feeling everything else. You know what the table in front of you feels like, but what if you want to touch, say, a rhinoceros, and there are none around? That's where science comes in. Scientists have designed a glove that'll allow your digits to feel virtual sensations, like the soothing skin of an alpaca, or the smooth surface of a brand new car, or -- OK, yeah, most people are gonna use this for porn, probably.
John Rogers/University of Illinois
It already has giant sperm stenciled on it.
Continue Reading Below Advertisement
So far, the researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have managed to create a set of "smart fingertips" that can send electrical signals to the skin. It's basically a tiny little condom made of a circuit-polyimide structure, which is fitted onto a finger-shaped tube of silicon and then your actual finger. The applications for this are numerous, from highly precise surgery to contact sports. Or porn, did we mention porn?
Not only can this thing theoretically transmit different sensations like hot or cold, but the article also mentions that it "could restore sensation to people who have lost their natural skin," like burn victims or amputees. Does that mean they could help disabled people actually feel their prosthetic limbs? Because that would be amazing.
Sgt Ian Forsyth RLC/MOD
Your missing arm will still itch, but now your replacement will, too!
Continue Reading Below Advertisement
But imagine a future where you can't just browse the Internet, but actually touch it. Imagine scrolling down your Tumblr feed and being able to feel the fur of that LOLcat, or Tom Hiddleston's face, or Tom Hiddleston's face again. For once, all that baffling talk of "feels" would be justified. Just make sure you take off your electronic glove before you go into 4chan or you could end up touching someone's virtual turd. | 1,266,061 |
window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-5', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 5', target_type:'mix' });
window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-10', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 10', target_type:'mix' });
window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-15', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 15', target_type:'mix' });
window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'thumbnails-c', container: 'taboola-interstitial-gallery-thumbnails-16', placement: 'Interstitial Gallery Thumbnails 16', target_type:'mix' });
Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close Image 2 of 17 Image 3 of 17 Image 4 of 17 Image 5 of 17 Image 6 of 17 Image 7 of 17 Image 8 of 17 Image 9 of 17 Image 10 of 17 Image 11 of 17 Image 12 of 17 San Jacinto River Waste Pits full-page cartoon San Jacinto River Waste Pits full-page cartoon Image 13 of 17 Image 14 of 17 Image 15 of 17 Image 16 of 17 San Jacinto River Waste Pits, full-page cartoon - how it looked in the paper. San Jacinto River Waste Pits, full-page cartoon - how it looked in the paper. Image 17 of 17 The San Jacinto River in Peril - Part One 1 / 17 Back to Gallery
I spent the last few months researching the San Jacinto River Waste Pits and how they affect the residents of the immediate area and the entire Houston community. This is something very different for me – rather than rely on the reporting of others and commenting on it, I’ve done my own reporting.
The result is equal parts editorial cartoon, investigative journalism and graphic narrative. Today I bring you the story of Jackie Young, a former resident of Highlands Texas and 2013 Houston Rodeo Queen. Jackie has suffered many mysterious illnesses at a very young age. This cartoon can be seen in a full-page display in the Outlook section of the Sunday, June 15 edition of the Houston Chronicle.
Here, you can watch a video of a Jan 30, 2014 EPA community meeting regarding remediation options for the San Jacinto Waste Pits. Jackie can be heard addressing the crowd at about 59:14.
Next week I will take a closer look at the toxic legacy the Waste Pits leave behind.
How it was presented in today’s paper: | 1,266,062 |
Len McCluskey has urged Unite members to take part in Jeremy Corbyn’s new project with business and workers which has been designed to tackle job insecurity and Britain’s productivity crisis.
The Unite general secretary hailed Workplace 2020 which Labour hopes will deliver a “new business settlement”.
Corbyn today visited Ecotricity, a green energy company in Stroud, Gloucester, to launch the project. It is one of the largest economic interventions made by Corbyn since he became leader and comes after claims from “moderates” that the leadership looking like it is “anti-business”.
“This is a fantastic move by the Labour party and is exactly the sort of initiative we expect from the real party of working people,” said McCluskey, who has urged Unite’s 1.4 million members to take part in the consultation.
“It sits in sharp contrast to a Conservative government that has always regarded workers and their unions as the ‘enemy within’, typified by their appalling trade union act.
“Crucially, this shows a Labour party willing to ask us all to consider what sort of country we want to be. One of low-wages, low skills and ever growing inequality, or one where people’s talents are harnessed and respected, and prosperity is shared by us all?”
Workplace 2020 comes in the wake of several efforts by Ed Miliband to boost Labour’s relationship with workers and business in the last parliament. He pledged to cut and then freeze business rates for 1.5 million small businesses properties but provoked a backlash by dividing some firms into “producers and predators”.
Corbyn’s new initiative has been set up to help Labour develop its offer for the “workforce of the 21st century”. It follows Corbyn’s pledge at the May Day rally – the first time a Labour leader had appeared there for 50 years – to boost workplace rights.
“Instead of David Cameron’s Agency Britain, with its zero hours contracts, insecurity and wage undercutting, we will be engaging with workers and employers to shape the policies that will deliver the high quality jobs of the future,” Corbyn said today.
“Instead of a race to the bottom in jobs, pay and workplace rights, we will be shaping a different approach for the 2020s: based on a full-employment, high-skilled workforce, with decent pay, rights for employed and self-employed, and a voice at work through collective bargaining.
“That’s the basis for a new business settlement in the economy of the future, one that benefits both workers and employers – and break with the low-pay, low-investment, low-productivity record of Tory Britain.” | 1,266,063 |
picture of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian child whose body washed up on the Turkish coast, should be careful what they wish for. For an intense period Kurdi’s image stoked interest and anger, donations to refugee groups rose, xenophobic rhetoric was toned down. But soon, things returned to abnormal. Support for far-right parties grew, donations fell, policies reverted.
There are two other things we can learn from both Alarcón and Alan when it comes to this picture.
The first is that it is bigger than just Donald Trump. There is a lot we can and should blame Trump for when it comes to the treatment of immigrants. This is the man who has galvanised popular xenophobia to obscene levels, and separated children from their parents at the border. An Associated Press report earlier this month from a Texas border patrol station described how a guard had handed a few girls, aged between 10 and 15, a two-year-old boy to look after. When the legal team saw him he was wearing a mucus-stained T-shirt but no nappy, and had wet himself.
That same week a government lawyer, Sarah Fabian, told a three-judge panel at the circuit court of appeals in San Francisco that soap and beds were not essential for detained migrant children.
But the truth is that while Trump has exacerbated a bad situation, he did not create it. Back in 2006 the author and lecturer Mike Davis, who lives in San Diego, described the border to me as “the most extreme economic precipice on the planet”.
The second is that this is bigger than just America. A German rescue boat brought 42 shipwrecked refugees into Italy earlier this month, prompting threats of fines from the Italian government. Four years ago the British government persuaded the rest of Europe to stop supporting search and rescue missions for sinking vessels because it was a “pull factor”. When they stopped trying to save drowning people, they duly drowned.
Play Video 1:21 US border: photo of drowned father and daughter highlights migrants’ peril – video report
This is a global tragedy. Just as Trump has his counterparts in power in Hungary, Australia, Italy and Britain, so Óscar and Angie Valeria have their peers in Syria and Libya, and at the bottom of the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. People are not simply seeking a better life. They are also fleeing a worse one, in which we are implicated. All too often they are fleeing dictators we are propping up, wars that we have started, weapons we have sold in regions we have destabilised, environmental chaos we have unleashed and poverty we have either bequeathed or imposed. There is pathos in this, but there is policy behind it. They don’t need our sympathy, they need our solidarity.
• Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist | 1,266,064 |
The Little Town Where Time Stood Still contains two linked narratives by the incomparable Bohumil Hrabal, whom Milan Kundera has described as “Czechoslovakia’s greatest writer.” “Cutting It Short” is set before World War II in a small country town, and it relates the scandalizing escapades of Maryška, the flamboyant wife of Francin, who manages the local brewery. Maryška drinks. She rides a bicycle, letting her long hair fly. She butchers pigs, frolics in blood, and leads on the local butcher. She’s a Madame Bovary without apologies driven to keep up with the new fast-paced mechanized modern world that is obliterating whatever sleepy pieties are left over from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. "The Little Town Where Time Stood Still" is told by Maryška and Francin’s son and concerns the exploits of his Uncle Pepin, who holds his own against the occupying Nazis but succumbs to silence as the new post–World War II Communist order cements its colorless control over daily life. Together, Hrabal’s rousing and outrageous yarns stand as a hilarious and heartbreaking tribute to the always imperiled sweetness of lust, love, and life.
Praise
Read the stories. Read the novels. Just read Hrabal.
—John Yargo, The Millions
Hrabal is a most sophisticated novelist, with a gusting humour and a hushed tenderness of detail.
—Julian Barnes
Hrabal’s comedy is completely paradoxical. Holding in balance limitless desire and limited satisfaction, it is both rebellious and fatalistic, restless and wise.
—James Wood
Czechoslovakia’s greatest living writer.
—Milan Kundera
Hrabal, to my mind, is one of the greatest living European prose writers.
—Philip Roth
Hrabal combines good humour and hilarity with tenderness and a tragic sense of his country’s history.
—The Observer
There are pages of queer magic unlike anything currently being done with words.
—The Guardian
A magnificent author.
—The Independent
Praise for Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (NYRB Classics)
Dancing Lessons unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence. The gambit works. Something about that slab of wordage carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel.
—Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review
What Hrabal has created is an informal history of the indomitable Czech spirit. And perhaps...the human spirit.
—The Times (London) | 1,266,065 |
Hi, my name is Wangari from Kenya and I have passion for beauty and cosmetics.
In Africa I noted that the big global color cosmetic brands you see in major department stores overseas are difficult to access and for that reason I decided I need to create a local cosmetic line. I have dreamt of creating my own brand for years but to create a cosmetic brand for my own sake would be self-serving. I would like to create a conscious product that is made with integrity. This line of merchandise would be made ethically and cruelty-free.
Our new colour cosmetics brand will focus on innovative shades and formula for healthy looking skin. Our goal is to provide makeup that suits people from all walks of life, is affordable yet of a luxury look & feel and of the best quality.
We have designed and built our website, started a page on Instagram and are currently in the process of finalising our product range. We have samples in the making as we speak and now we need your help to bring the brand to life.
Initially it will really help to fund the first line of product, packaging production, logistics and our product photography, we will then push our website live and use the funds from our sales to create the next product whether that be bronzers, new eyeshadow palettes and so on.
Since the beginning of my career, I have always loved being able to work with cosmetics and makeup, because it helps transform people from the inside out. I hope to create products that helps women break away from their everyday lives, and make them feel more confident about themselves while giving back to a good cause.
The cause that I'm referencing is helping the needy. With the help and support from people like you, I hope to create a thriving company that will give back in time. I would like to donate a certain portion of my proceeds to help end childhood hunger and help educate the needy to get better sanitation,access to healthcare, food and education.
In Africa, millions of children go hungry every day and lack basic sanitation and education. In today's society, we tend to be inundated with media images of starving children all over the world. Often, when we think about such devastation we are overwhelmed. We're not sure how to help. We even question if our small contribution could make a difference.
With the success of my cosmetics company, people will have a chance to provide assistance by choosing to purchase a better product that benefits the consumer as well as leaving a positive mark on the world.
So... calling all beauty lovers, bloggers, guru's, MUA's and anyone who really wants to help! We are so grateful and appreciate you taking the time to read this campaign.
Thank you for your support.
God bless you always.
**Kindly scroll below to see ways on how you can contribute. | 1,266,066 |
Sad! Breitbart commissions poll to unskew "mainstream media filter," still finds Trump losing to Clinton So much for claims of media bias -- even Trump's biggest media booster has Clinton beating him nationally
Donald Trump's most ardent supporters, following their candidate's lead,have rejected the ever more ominous post-convention polls showing rival Hillary Clinton widening her advantage over the GOP nominee. While Republicans were forced to "unskew" the polls in the final weeks leading up to the 2012 election, in order to deal with the impending loss for Mitt Romney, Trump's supporters, primed to rage against the librul media, were quick to cast aside poll results from mainstream media outlets -- now even commissioning their own polls.
Right-wing website and top Trump booster Breitbart News released its own poll Sunday, the first for the conservative site.
Advertisement:
“It’s an open secret that polls are often manipulated and spun to create momentum for a particular candidate or issue,” Alex Marlow, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart News, said in a statement announcing the poll. “Breitbart News Network’s first national poll marks the start of a major initiative to give our readers an accurate assessment on where the American people stand on the key topics and people of the day — without the mainstream media filter.”
Breitbart's poll was conducted with Gravis, a Florida-based marketing firm, that according to TPM's Allegra Kirkland "has a less than stellar record of tracking state congressional races":
In the 2014 midterm elections, Gravis published polls that were way off in predicting the results of Senate races in Kentucky and Texas. An “informed ballot” survey conducted by Gravis this spring was mocked for getting a Maryland congressional race wrong by 96 percentage points.
But despite their efforts to develop a more Trump friendly survey, according to Breitbart's poll, Clinton is leading a four-way contest with 42 percent of the vote to Trump’s 37 percent. Libertarian Gary Johnson earned 9 percent of the vote, while the Green Party’s Jill Stein received 3 percent.
Advertisement:
“In this environment, too many ambitious Republicans are willing to take their chances in 2020 against Hillary Clinton, instead of waiting out eight years of Donald Trump,” Doug Kaplan, the managing partner of Gravis Marketing, said to explain away Trump's lacking numbers. “Former rivals, who should be working to secure his base for him are stirring it up instead, forcing Trump to defend his own base, while reaching outside his base,” he said.
Trump's losing position in Breitbart's poll comes with some of the most favorable conditions found in any poll for the controversial Republican candidate.
According to Breitbart's poll, Trump garners an astounding 11 percent support from African-Americans -- doubling Mitt Romney's 2012 6 percent support. | 1,266,067 |
white men who control the nation's highest legislative body—portrayed as hapless victims here. Of course, the people accosting them were often their constituents, people they pledged to represent in office and who have a constitutional right to seek a redress of grievances through protest. There's a debate over which public figures deserve to be accosted in public, but the idea senators rushing through a controversial lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court are not on the list, particularly as they walk down the hall or get in an elevator at the Capitol, is absurd.
The reason they're making the argument, though, is to try to shift the bounds of the battlefield to cement their victory in the public record. It is not sufficient that Kavanaugh was confirmed; the opposition to his confirmation must be made illegitimate. It's a crazed mob, an unruly mass of nameless and faceless individuals who will not listen to reason—who would, in the words of some Kavanaugh defenders, "lynch" this upstanding white man. (In some Alex Jonesian formulations, including the president's, these protesters—many of whom say they are sexual assault survivors—are being paid by George Soros.) Soon, they'll come for "your husband, your son," as the president said at a rally recently. That's taken hold with The Base in a big way, even if the actual sons involved don't always agree. Even if this strategy does not succeed in shoring up the court's legitimacy, it might get the right folks out to vote.
JIM WATSON Getty Images
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below
Perhaps we should have all foreseen this would devolve into a festival of white male victimhood. One thing to remember amid the avalanche of rhetoric is that Kavanaugh was sitting for a job interview. He wanted a promotion. That the prospect of his being denied that promotion was compared to the extrajudicial murder of black men by actual crazed mobs tells you all you need to know about the blinding brightness of privilege. Some corners of the media got out over their skis on subsequent allegations, but even Republican senators won't directly take on Dr. Ford's claims. They now seem to say they believe she was assaulted, but that she's confused about who did it.
"Due process" and the "presumption of innocence" figured prominently in defenses of the nominee, including from the president last night. Those are important features of the criminal justice system, when the full power of the state can be leveraged to deprive someone of life and liberty. In this case, the accused was seeking a shiny new job, and had many of the most powerful people in the country—the president and his allies in the Senate—on his side. He was at no risk of losing his liberty, only something to which he felt, at the very core of his being, he was entitled.
Oh—and he got it. | 1,266,068 |
Cryptocurrency Secrets: How to Invest in Bitcoin Udemy Coupon Free Course:
Cryptocurrency Secrets: How to Invest in Bitcoin | Udemy Coupon Free Click To Tweet
Who this course is for: Cryptocurrency trading investment beginners who want to get started with this great opportunity
Anyone who wants to learn how to make money online this year with cryptocurrency investment
Anyone who wants to know what Cryptocurrency is and how it works
Anyone already knows a bit about cryptocurrencies and wants to get better at it. WHAT WILL YOU LEARN IN THIS COURSE:
You will have a basic understanding of blockchain technology and how it works
Understand and be able to apply the fundamentals of cryptocurrency investment
How to open an account to invest in Bitcoin and Altcoin
Identify trades with great potential profits
You’ll know how to buy and sell cryptocurrencies
How to keep your cryptocurrency safe and secure maximising profits and minimising losses
How to invest for your future with ‘buy and hold’
How to take your trading skills to the next level
How to make a full time income with cryptocurrency investment for the long-term
NOTE:
All Udemy promo codes and discounts for today listed here are specially reviewed and tested to make sure you get the best working deals for online courses.
and for today listed here are specially reviewed and tested to make sure you get the best working for. 100% Off Udemy coupons and free Udemy courses added daily, Visit This page : Udemy Coupons Codes For Today every days and get your coupons for the best courses on udemy platform before they expire!
and added daily, Visit This page : every days and for the platform before they expire! We are always first to provide fresh Udemy Courses deals for you! each Udemy coupon code is valid and ready to be used to save on all courses.
What are you waiting for? Browse through the list of latest Udemy coupons
We do our best to get you the best promotions on every course that is offered on Udemy Platform, But sometimes the owners of these courses Eliminate the Promotions/Coupons That means the coupon codes will expire and no longer work. We will updates these coupon codes according to the course’s owners, so if it didn’t work that means you have to purchase the course or wait when the owners set it up for promotions again.
Cryptocurrency Secrets: How to Invest in Bitcoin – This Course is Free For Limited Time
ALL THE LINKS:
TAKE THE COURSE FREE [ENROLL THE COURSE]
IF YOU FIND THIS COURSE USEFUL AND HELPFUL PLEASE GO AHEAD SHARE THE KNOWLEDGE WITH YOUR FRIENDS WHILE THE COURSE IS STILL AVAILABLE | 1,266,069 |
The British Olympic boxer Muhammad Ali is facing a lengthy ban after testing positive for a steroid in April, the amateur sport’s international federation, Aiba, has confirmed.
It is the first time since GB Boxing was established in 2008 that one of its fighters has tested positive. The news was met with shock and dismay at the GB Boxing headquarters in Sheffield, which has seen Nicola Adams, Anthony Joshua and James DeGale progress through its ranks.
Ali’s positive test came during a World Series of Boxing match between the British Lionhearts and Morocco Atlas Lions in Casablanca and, when notified in May, GB Boxing immediately suspended him from their programme.
The 21-year-old was the youngest Team GB boxer to compete at the Rio Olympics. He lost in the first round of the flyweight competition but the 2016 European Championships silver medallist is highly rated by coaches and was aiming to be selected for the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
It is understood Ali was tested six times in the year to March 2017 and did not return any adverse findings.
It is believed Ali asked for his B sample, which is used to confirm an initial finding, to be tested and that came back positive for trace amounts of the steroid.
GB Boxing, which won three medals in Rio, has a full-time nutritionist and prides itself on providing fighters with a rigorous anti-doping education. It is understood that between May 2015 and December 2016 Ali took part in four anti‑doping education sessions delivered either by GB Boxing or the UK Anti-Doping Agency.
Although he trained in Sheffield four days a week it is believed Ali also trains at his home gym in Bury, under Amir Khan’s former coach Mick Jelley. Ali, who was named after the man considered to be the greatest boxer of all time, was almost forced to give up boxing in 2012 when his younger brother Danish, also a talented boxer, suffered a brain haemorrhage. He credits the sport with helping him avoid being drawn into gangs.
A GB Boxing spokesperson said: “GB Boxing can confirm that a member of its squad has tested positive for a banned substance. The boxer is suspended from the GB Boxing squad pending the outcome of the process. The boxer has also been suspended from all international and domestic competitions, in accordance with the provisions of the World Anti‑Doping Agency and the International Boxing Association, until this process is finalised.
“This is the first time that a member of the GB Boxing squad has tested positive for a banned substance. GB Boxing is committed to clean sport and we work in partnership with UK Anti-Doping and our International Federation to provide extensive education and support to our boxers on anti-doping rules, the anti-doping obligations upon them as athletes and the importance of adhering to the principles of clean sport.” | 1,266,070 |
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
It's "yuge" — or at least that’s what Donald Trump wants you to believe.
The leading contender in the GOP’s race for president made sure the size of his hands — and his manhood — were front and center during the Fox News debate on Thursday night.
Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings. This site is protected by recaptcha
"Nobody has ever hit my hands before. Look at those hands," Trump said while holding them up, spread-fingered in a bid to address previous suggestions by rival Sen. Marco Rubio. "He referred to my hands — if they're small, something else must be small."
He added: "I guarantee you there's no problem."
The thrice-married real-estate mogul and self-confessed lover of gorgeous women reiterated the point later in an interview with NBC News' Katy Tur.
Trump says he thought the debate would be "a lot rougher". — Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) March 4, 2016
“See how beautiful my hands are, look at those hands. Those are powerful hands,” the former owner of the Miss Universe Pageant said. “Hit a golf ball 285 yards. Now I was very proud to hold my hands up because these are politicians, they say things and they make things up and you have to clear up the record.”
And just in case everyone had missed what Trump was trying to say, the billionaire tycoon compared hand size with a reporter in the green room after the debate.
“Lemme see your hands — see?” Trump said. “I have good-sized hands, and they say very beautiful.”
Trump in spin room just now comparing hand size with an entertainment reporter. pic.twitter.com/EHgK7sq1Qz — Jacob Rascon (@Jacobnbc) March 4, 2016
Trump has been self-conscious about "hands" for a long time, according Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.
“Just to drive him a little bit crazy, I took to referring to him as a ‘short-fingered vulgarian’ in the pages of Spy magazine. That was more than a quarter of a century ago,” Carter wrote in November 2015. “To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him — generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers.”
Carter said the missives from Trump have continued over the years, with last one coming earlier last year. | 1,266,071 |
Excavation of an ancient Egyptian site has found evidence of beer and bread-making in a newly discovered building complex.
The city of Tell Edfu, located around 400 miles south of Cairo in the Nile Valley, has been explored by archaeologists for the past 16 years.
At the end of 2017, researchers from the University of Chicago found a complex of buildings that marked the earliest point of the town’s occupation.
They dated from around 2400 BCE – the so-called “Old Kingdom” period of ancient Egypt, when the great pyramids were built.
Archaeologists discover mysteries of Egyptian civilisation in newly-discovered ruins
The structures consist of two large mudbrick buildings surrounded by vast open courtyards and workshops.
“It’s a wonderful find because we have so little information about this era of settlement in the southern provinces,” said Professor Nadine Moeller, an Egyptian archaeology specialist who co-led the excavation.
“We don’t know any such similar complexes for the Old Kingdom.”
The excavation uncovered storage containers and other artefacts in the workshops that suggested the towns inhabitants had been brewing beer and making bread on the site.
There was also evidence for copper smelting in the complex, which the archaeologists think was built to provide accommodation for important officials sent to oversee the mining of precious minerals from the eastern deserts.
Underneath the floors of the buildings the archaeologists discovered stamps marked with the name, in hieroglyphs, of an official who led a group of prospectors to mine for the pharaoh Djedkare-Isesi – the penultimate rule of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty.
“It’s just about this time that the Egyptian royalty, until then focused on the northern area directly around the capital Memphis, began to expand its reach after a period of contraction during the fourth and much of the fifth dynasties,” said Professor Moeller.
The use of Edfu as a departure point for expeditions to the east was further confirmed by the presence of shells from the Red Sea and rare imported ceramics from the ancient civilisation of Nubia, in what is now Sudan.
“This is a first sign that the ancient city of Edfu was evolving into an important departure point for large expeditions leaving for the Eastern desert regions, and possibly the Red Sea shore, located about 125 miles to the east,” Professor Moeller added.
The researchers also said the building may have had religious or cult ties, given their proximity to the temple of the falcon god Horus.
“It’s such a unique site. We’ve had a hard time finding architectural parallels, because no other settlement in Upper Egypt has such extensive remains from this time period,” said Professor Moeller. | 1,266,072 |
As more and more details spring forth regarding President Trump’s troubling conversation with the president of Ukraine, a new report suggests he made damning comments to other foreign leaders, too. Per the Washington Post, Trump’s infamous 2017 meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak—the very same in which he gloated over James Comey’s firing—also featured the president waving off Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
A memorandum featuring Trump’s broader comments about U.S.-Russia relations was reportedly limited to an unusually small group of people with high security clearances, according to the Post. Details of the memorandum were uncovered during the investigation of White House meetings deemed too politically sensitive for broader public view, as with the emerging record of Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.
According to three former officials with knowledge of the 2017 meeting, Trump told Lavrov and Kislyak he was “unconcerned” about Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election, given the United States “did the same in other countries.” Unnamed White House officials were reportedly aware of the nature of the comment, which came in the context of the president downplaying reports of election interference for fear they would harm his legitimacy. Steps were reportedly then taken to limit circulation of Trump’s comments to an unusually select group, though it’s unclear if the meeting’s memorandum was stored in the same “code-word” classified system that later housed the record of Trump’s call with Zelensky, and potentially other Trump communications that featured politically sensitive information.
The meeting itself took place on May 10, just one day after Trump fired Comey, inadvertently kicking off the special investigation into possible collusion with the Russian government, as well as Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice. It had previously been reported that Trump told Lavrov and Kislyak that firing Comey relieved “great pressure” on him with regard to the Russia investigation. He also reportedly shared classified information that exposed a source of intelligence from the Islamic State. White House aides were reportedly “worried about the political ramifications if Trump’s comments to the Russian officials became public,” according to the Post.
A fourth unnamed official did not recall Trump’s dismissal of Russian interference efforts in the meeting, but noted of the memorandum that—in light of Trump’s previously-scrutinized calls with leaders of Mexico and Australia—“It was more about learning how can we restrict this in a way that still informs the policy process and the principals who need to engage with these heads of state.” The same official also recalled Trump complaining about “all this Russia stuff” to Lavrov, as well that he remarked, “I could have a great relationship with you guys, but you know, our press.” | 1,266,073 |
The Ministry of Public Security of China has sent a taskforce to Pakistan to cooperate with its law enforcement agencies in their crackdown on Chinese gangs involved in fake marriages with Pakistani girls for trafficking them to China allegedly for organ harvesting and prostitution.“China’s position on the issue of transnational marriage is very clear, that is to protect legitimate marriages and combat crimes,” read a statement issued by the spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan on Friday.The statement comes on a day when the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) arrested two Chinese nationals at the Islamabad airport for their suspected involvement in human trafficking and also took three Pakistani women accompanying them into custody.“If any organisation or individual commits a crime in Pakistan under the banner of cross-border marriage, China supports the Pakistani side to crack down on it according to Pakistani laws,” according to the statement.The spokesperson further said the Ministry of Public Security of China had sent a taskforce to Pakistan to cooperate with its law enforcement agencies. “China will further strengthen cooperation with the law enforcement agencies in Pakistan, effectively combat crime, so as to protect the legitimate rights and interests of the two peoples, and jointly safeguard China-Pakistan friendly relations.”The spokesperson claimed that some media reports also fabricated facts and spread rumours and hoped “the people of China and Pakistan do not believe the rumours.”The FIA Lahore Zone-I busted another Chinese gang from Lahore’s Johar Town earlier for forcing Pakistan girls into prostitution after promising them a lawful marriage and prosperous future.Two members of the gangs were Pakistani and 14 Chinese. One of the rescued victims revealed the horrifying details of her exploitation in China. It was revealed that the girls who did not go into prostitution were used for illegal organ transplants.Nazir Ahmad, the father of one of the victims, registered a complaint with the FIA and told them that how some agents contacted him and lured him into marrying his daughter to a Chinese.The agents assured Nazir, for a brief period, he would be accompanying his daughter abroad where she would also be allowed to work.After marrying ‘Musa’, the girl travelled to Islamabad and left for China. After some time, the girl called her father to reveal that the family had been duped.According to Nazir’s daughter, her husband – who had not converted to Islam – was forcing her into prostitution.When Nazir contacted the agents, he was told to contact their boss Wei Linping in Islamabad. When he contacted Linping, Nazir was told that the agents had received Rs2 million and he would have to pay the amount to get his daughter back.Nazir was warned that the girl would be forced into prostitution or illegal organ transplantation if he did not pay the amount.After the Pakistani High Commission intervened, the victim was recovered. In her appearance before the FIA, she revealed that the den of this gang was located in Johar Town. | 1,266,074 |
Add that to the windpower bill: SA Battery cost $90m which is $220 per family of four
The ABC reports that finally the people of SA can find out what the emergency Tesla battery cost — $56 per person, or $220 per family, just for the purchase, not for the operation. Hands up South Australians, who would have rushed to sign up to be the Star Renewable State if they had to sign the checks themselves and their electricity bill had a item called: “The price of renewables”.
South Australia didn’t need a battery when it had coal power:
A 505-page report released by Neoen this month ahead of an initial public offering suggested the battery cost around $90 million, at the current exchange rate.
The giant 100-megawatt lithium ion battery near Jamestown in the state’s mid-north commenced operation late last year.
“It actually costs taxpayers’ money. There’s a cost of $4-5 million a year to have the battery in place.
“There are more costs than that involved.
Where does Giles Parkinson think these “revenues” come from?
However, Giles Parkinson said the battery was on track to “make revenues of about $25-26 million in its first year”
The battery makes no electricity. All it does is shift supply at the wrong time to the right time, a problem the state didn’t have til it tried to run off the wind.
The revenues are another cost to be added to taxes and electricity bills of companies and householders.
The battery saves millions of dollars in system security — another charge that I’m pretty sure wasn’t as significant before unreliable energy randomly bombed the grid:
Under the agreement, the South Australian Government has the right to access 70 per cent of the output at any one time to provide an urgent hit of power to prevent load-shedding blackouts, or to provide system-security services to the energy grid.
Before the battery’s installation, those services had come at a hefty price.
The Australian Energy Regulator found they had cost the state more than $50 million since 2015.
Are there any NEM experts out there who can confirm when charges for providing “system security” were introduced to the NEM? Noting that there are many flavours of security. There appears to be an explanation of the NEM situation published in 2001.
Grids using coal turbines (or gas or hydro) must have run for years without FCAS and other market structures.
h/t Dave B, OriginalSteve.
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
please wait... Rating: 8.6/10 (57 votes cast) | 1,266,075 |
The vice-president of Nicaragua, Rosario Murillo, has said that the communist government’s most recent brutal crackdown on priests and citizens was “the work of faith in God.”
Murillo, the wife of President Daniel Ortega, said that forcible removal of civilian protest blockades, which involved the death of four citizens, was nothing short of a divine miracle, according to reports Friday.
Having managed to recover mobility and security on the highway, Murillo said, allowing for traffic to move freely, was a “miraculous event, the work of faith in God.”
Over the past two months Nicaragua has been immersed in the bloodiest sociopolitical crisis since the 1980s, when Daniel Ortega was again president. The uprising and its suppression have resulted in more than 220 deaths in 75 days of anti-government protests.
The protests against Ortega and his wife began over failed reforms of social security but grew into a general demand that the socialist leader resign from his post after 11 consecutive years in power, amidst accusations of corruption and abuse of power.
The Catholic Church has been unusually critical of the leftist regime but has sought to play an intermediary role in a dialogue process between the government and the opposition. These efforts have been thwarted by the Ortega government, which has sought to crush the protests rather than enter into discussions.
In the latest skirmish, when a group of four priests from neighboring parishes tried to reach the highway blockade to speak with men under Ortega’s command, they were intercepted by a group of “five armed men, some of them wearing hoods,” according to Father Eugenio Rodríguez, who was one of the priests in question.
We were trying to draw near to “dialogue and prevent a clash between demonstrators and the police, but when we arrived, the paramilitary stopped us,” he said.
The paramilitary forces reportedly went beyond removing barricades, entering directly into neighborhoods, and social media showed pictures of armed men roaming the streets.
This week the human rights group Amnesty International announced that apparent overtures by the Ortega government to dialogue with the Catholic Church-backed opposition are “insincere,” since he has no intention of talking.
The Catholic Church has abandoned its “traditional solidarity” with the left — Ortega’s Sandinista Revolution — to support the oppressed opposition, Deutsche Welle (DW) reported.
“Long a pro-government entity there, Church representatives have become increasingly vocal against the Ortega government’s crackdown on protests,” DW declared. “In recent weeks it has become more directly involved as a negotiator and strongly aligned with the opposition.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 1,266,076 |
Solomon Soremekun died in an elevator shaft at the Hynes Building in Galway earlier this week. Andrew Downes
Gardai at the scene of a tragic accident involving a lift in Hynes Building in Galway City where Solomon Soremekun, inset, died.
A Three-year-old boy who died after he was crushed in a lift had called out to his mother begging her to help him.
Solomon Soremekun (3) died in a freak accident in which he was crushed in an elevator shaft in Galway city centre on Monday afternoon.
His mother, Omolara Alibi, who has been in a state of deep shock since the tragedy, has now begun to speak about her son's last moments.
The tragedy unfolded at the Hynes Building on St Augustine Street in the city.
Ms Alibi explained to her legal representative, Gerard O'Donnell, how Solomon had entered the lift without issue just moments before the tragedy occurred.
"She had been able to tell me that they were coming out of the social welfare offices and the door of the lift opened and the lift was level with the floor. Solomon stepped in but as her daughter went to step in, it snapped closed," explained Mr O'Donnell.
"Solomon was stuck in the lift and he was shouting to his mother for help. He kept shouting: 'Help me mommy, help me mommy'. He was calling and banging on the door to get help," he added.
PROBE
Emergency services rushed to the scene and attempted to free the child, however, he was found in the lift shaft having suffered crush injuries which resulted in his death.
A Health and Safety Authority investigation and a garda probe are under way. They will attempt to establish how the boy went from inside the elevator to being trapped by the lift shaft.
Mr O'Donnell said his client was "tormented" and was desperate for answers.
"First and foremost she is totally traumatised and shocked by what happened.
"She kept saying she went into the Hynes building with four children and came out with three. She wants to find out what happened and how it happened," he said.
The family had only recently moved to Galway and were visiting a Department of Social Protection office in the building, to complete paperwork associated with their move.
Ms Alibi is expected to meet with officials from the Health and Safety Authority next week.
The little boy will be laid to rest at the New Cemetery in Galway city following a prayer service at the hospital mortuary today.
His mother and father, Ade Soremekun, along with his three sisters, Princess, Esther and Zion, will attend the private service along with members of the local Nigerian community.
Caroline Crawford
Irish Independent | 1,266,077 |
President Obama's Sore Throat Consistent With Acid Reflux, Doctor Says The president was taken to Walter Reed for tests.
WASHINGTON -- The sore throat that sent President Obama to the hospital for tests today is consistent with acid reflux and will be treated accordingly, his doctor said today.
The tests came after Obama made an unusual and unexpected trip to Walter Reed medical center for a CT scan recommended by his doctor to check out inflamed tissue in hiss throat.
The results of the scan were normal, Dr. Ronny Jackson, Obama's physician, said.
"The president's symptoms are consistent with soft tissue inflammation related to acid reflux and will be treated accordingly," Jackson said in a written statement released by the White House.
Jackson recommended the scan after an ear, nose, and throat specialist from Ft. Belvoir Medical Center conducted a fiber-optic exam of the president's throat Saturday morning, under Jackson's supervision, "based on symptoms of a sore throat over the past couple weeks.
After that exam revealed swelling in Obama's throat, Jackson recommended "further evaluation with a routine CT scan," the doctor said.
"There's a lot in this story that didn't seem to hold true with what you'd normally see," ABC News Chief Medial and Health Editor Dr. Richard Besser said. "Normally for a sore throat, initially you'll do a test for strep. If it goes on for a couple of weeks, you might do a scope, but not a CT. It may be that he is a former smoker, he's the president of the United States -- you'll often see presidents get extra testing."
With nothing on Obama's schedule for the day, the presidential motorcade departed hastily just after 2 p.m., catching reporters off guard, for a rainy, 30-minute ride to the military hospital in Bethesda, Md.
It's unusual for a president to seek medical care outside the White House, but Press Secretary Josh Earnest insisted to reporters via email, during the president's visit to Walter Reed, that Obama's condition was not serious and that the president "has been complaining of a sore throat" and that Jackson had recommended some "diagnostic tests."
It was a quick visit: Obama's motorcade pulled out of the Walter Reed parking lot fewer than 30 minutes after it pulled in.
What treatment the president will receive depends on the severity of the symptoms and how long he has been experiencing them, Besser said.
"If this is the start of the symptoms for him, you would take a slow approach," Besser said. "You would have him raise the head of his bed, stop smoking, if he's still smoking, cut down on alcohol, and cut back on those foods that are causing problems. Only if those things don't work do you go with the medication." | 1,266,078 |
(CNN) -- The gunman who killed 13 people at an immigrant services center fired 98 shots in a minute or so, the police chief in Binghamton, New York, said Wednesday.
Police are trying to determine why Jiverly Wong picked the American Civic Association as his target Friday.
Jiverly Wong, a 41-year-old Vietnamese immigrant from an ethnic Chinese family, fired 87 shots from a 9 mm pistol and 11 shots from a.45-caliber handgun, Chief Joseph Zikuski told CNN.
Investigators believe the victims died almost instantly, Zikuski said.
Wong was an "accomplished marksman" who frequented a shooting range in Binghamton, the chief said, and he bragged to others that he had fired more than 10,000 rounds.
Wong strode into the American Civic Association on Friday, entered a classroom and started shooting, investigators said.
Wong had been taking English classes at the association, which helps immigrants and refugees from around the world. He was upset about recently losing a job, but police are still trying to determine why he chose to open fire at the association, Zikuski said.
The police chief said that "it's not unreasonable to think" that Wong fired his 98 shots "in just over a minute" before he shot and killed himself in the classroom.
Investigators have found that Wong came to the United States in the late 1980s, lived in Binghamton before moving to California in the early 1990s and returned to Binghamton in July 2007, Zikuski said. He became a U.S. citizen in 1995. He had married and divorced while living in California and had been convicted on a misdemeanor charge of writing bad checks there, the chief said.
At the scene of Friday's shooting, police found two semiautomatic handguns -- a.45-caliber and a 9 mm -- that were licensed to Wong.
Wong had attempted to purchase "a number of firearms," the chief said. Purchasing a gun in New York takes about two weeks, Zikuski said, and Wong would go back to a store during that period, "cancel that order and purchase another one."
Wong also was wearing body armor when he went on his spree, and since New York limits body armor purchases to law enforcement, "We're looking into that," Zikuski said.
The first funerals for the victims were held Sunday afternoon at a local mosque. An interfaith memorial service for all the victims was held Sunday evening, and hundreds of people took part in a candlelight vigil afterward.
"In a strange way," Binghamton Mayor Matthew Ryan said, "this tragedy has brought everyone together."
CNN's Susan Candiotti contributed to this report.
All About Shootings • Binghamton | 1,266,079 |
Overview of FFMC License
FFMC License in India is mandatory for certain entities to deal with foreign exchange or foreign securities. The responsibility to regulate FFMC License lies on the shoulders of Reserve Bank of India.
According to section 10 of the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999, authorized money changers are the only type of organizations engaged in money changing services and offer significant foreign exchange services.
FFMC License Holders purchase foreign exchange from Indian residents and non-residents and sell that foreign exchange to foreign visitors or tourists for private and business visits purposes.
Hotels, foreign visitors as well as travelers, along with the specific firms, get the registration to overcome the hindrances and also it will help them in the direction of traveler's cheques, coins, and foreign currency notes as per the RBI guidelines.
Before getting a money changer's license from the RBI end, no person has got the right to proceed or advertise that they deal in money changing activities. If there will be a person's involvement in any form of money changing business without a licit FFMC license in India, that person will amount to heavy penalties as per the Act.
Types of Authorised Money Changers
Here are the following types of AMCs:
Authorized Dealer Category- 1 Banks (AD Category 1)
Authorized Dealer Category- 2 Banks (ADs Category-2)
Full Fledged Money Changers (FFMCs)
What Activities can FFMC Perform?
An authorized FFMC can get into a franchise agreement for carrying out restricted money changing businesses, i.e., conversion of travelers' cheque, coins, or foreign currency notes to Indian currency.
FFMC and their Franchise are entitled with the liberty to buy coins, foreign currency notes, and travelers' cheques from both residents as well as non-residents.
An FFMC has got the green light to sell foreign exchange for Forex prepaid cards, Business visits, and also for Private visits.
An FFMC is authorized to sell Indian currency to tourists from different countries against their International debit/credit cards.
Eligibility Criteria for Applying for the FFMC License in India
The entities applying for the FFMC License in India must be registered under the Companies Act 1956/ Companies Act 2013.
To apply for a single branch, the corporation must have minimum net owned funds of Rs 25 Lakh, and for applying for a multiple branch license, the entity must have Rs 50 Lakh.
The entity's name must not be involved in any civil or criminal case. Department of Revenue Intelligence must not hold any criminal record against the company.
After getting the FFMC License, the entity must continue its business within six months of the date of license issue.
The object clause of Memorandum must have money exchange activity by the company adequately mentioned. | 1,266,080 |
The official website for Sanrio's Sanrio Danshi ( Sanrio Boys ) anime began streaming a promotional video for the anime on Tuesday. The video reveals the anime's January 2018 premiere, and shows how the previously shown key visual was "filmed" on location.
The website features the tagline "What's wrong with boys?"
The anime's main cast members are:
Takuya Eguchi (Haikyu!!'s Yūji Terushima, My Love Story!!'s Takeo Gōda) as Kōta Hasegawa, a high school boy who loves Pom Pom Purin.
Sōma Saitō (Dance with Devils' Rem Kaginuki, Rokka: Braves of Six Flowers' Adlet Myer) as Yū Mizuno, a high school boy who loves My Melody.
Jun Oosuka (Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu's Ogawa) as Shunsuke Yoshino, a high school boy who loves Hello Kitty.
Hiroyuki Kagura (Bungo Stray Dogs' Kenji Miyazawa) as Ryō Nishimiya, a high school boy who loves Little Twin Stars.
Yūma Uchida ( King of Prism's Yū Suzuno, Gundam Build Fighters Try's Yūma Kōsaka) as Seiichiro Minamoto, a high school boy who loves Cinnamoroll.
The project's premise follows Kōta Hasegawa, a high school boy who loves the yellow Pom Pom Purin dog. By mere coincidence, he ends up attending the same school as Yū Mizuno, a boy who likes the bunny My Melody. Yū tells Kōta that there's nothing to be ashamed of for liking Sanrio's cute characters. Together, Kōta, Yū, Shunsuke Yoshino, Ryō Nishimiya, and Seiichiro Minamoto learn to accept their love of the characters instead of feeling embarrassed.
The project launched in January 2016, and Sanrio launched a merchandise line for the project last April. Mai Andō is handling two different manga adaptations of the project, with a manga in the MangaOne app that launched last April, and one in Sho-Comi that launched last June. The first follows the everyday lives of the boys, while the second depicts the romance between a heroine and the boys. The first compiled book volume, which collects the story from both manga, shipped last June.
The Sanrio Danshi Birthday Memorial CD series of five character CDs are slated to ship this year around each character's birthday from March to September.
Sanrio also released a smartphone game adaptation in September, and the voice actors released a song single titled "Fun! Fantastic girl!" in November. The song is the theme song to the game. | 1,266,081 |
Health expenditure exceeded 10% of gross domestic product for the first time in 2015-16, data released on Friday shows.
The growth in health spending continues to slow, but not to the same extent as GDP growth. Last year, $170.4bn was spent on health, $6bn (3.6%) more in real terms than in 2014–15, the figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show. It was the fourth consecutive year growth was below the 10-year average of 4.7%.
A health economist with the Grattan Institute, Dr Stephen Duckett, said the share of the economy represented by health had hit 10.3% largely due to a slowing increase in GDP.
It was good news that health spending was not growing as fast as previously, he said.
“But breaching that 10% level is still important, because this means one in every $10 in the economy is being spent in the health sector. Almost 70% of health spending is government spending.
“I think it’s a sign that the overall settings that the previous Labor government put in place for public hospital spending is working. No dramatic changes are necessary. We’ve had in the past discussions about healthcare being unsustainable and unaffordable, but the rate of that growth is slowing without any draconian steps like co-payments being required.”
But a professor of health economics with the University of Melbourne, Philip Clarke, said state and federal governments needed to act now to avoid a spending and funding crisis.
“Inevitably this involves either spending less on other things and/or raising taxes,” Clarke said.
“The other option, which is the most politically difficult, is to look at ways of improving the efficiency of the system. In some cases this would involve tackling waste and reducing unnecessary care.”
The data showed that state and territory governments contributed 26.1% ($44.4bn) to health expenditure in 2015–16, up from 25.9% ($41.9bn) the previous year.
Over the same period, the share of spending by nongovernment funders, including individuals and private health insurers, fell. Individual spending fell only marginally, from 17.7% to 17.3%.
“I think as the economy slows down people are having second thoughts about purchasing over-the-counter medicines,” Duckett said.
“We also know that when people don’t have as much money to spend sometimes they won’t get their prescription medications filled, as they can’t afford them.”
In 2015–16, 68% of individual expenditure was spent on primary healthcare and 19.5% on dental services. Hospital costs accounted for 11.1%, a figure that has more than doubled since 2005–06. | 1,266,082 |
NEW DELHI: India and France on Saturday inked a key agreement on protection of classified information, widening the scope of confidentiality of high-technology exchanges, including in defence procurement.
The pact, which subsumes a 2008 agreement on the security of confidential information, comes weeks after the government refused to share cost details in Parliament of the Rs 58,000 crore deal to procure 36 Rafale jets from that country.
The agreement was exchanged between National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, and Philippe Etienne, diplomatic adviser to the French President, in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron.
According to a senior government official, the pact "subsumed the 2008 agreement and vastly enhances the scope of the protection of classified information which is critical to build an ecosystem to get major partners in high-technology area."
"It is important to give confidence to your defence partners that a particular protocol is followed and their sensitive information is safe and protected," the official said.
The reciprocal protection of classified or protected information pact defines the common security regulations applicable to any exchange of classified and protected information, officials said.
Last month, the government had refused to give an item-wise cost and other details about the Rafale deal in Parliament citing confidentiality provisions of a 2008 Indo-France pact.
A joint statement, issued after Modi-Macron talks, said the two leaders welcomed the signing of the pact on 'Exchange and Reciprocal Protection of Classified or Protected Information'.
It said the agreement reflected the high-level of strategic trust between the two countries.
India had signed a government-to-government deal with France in 2016 to buy 36 Rafale fighter jets at a cost of about the Rs 58,000-crore. The Congress has been demanding details of the deal, alleging that the deal negotiated under its rule was much cheaper than the contract signed by the Modi government.
Yesterday, the Congress accused the Modi government of "compromising" on national security and causing a loss of Rs 12,632 crore to the state exchequer while sealing the deal to purchase 36 Rafale fighter jets.
Quoting from the annual report of Dassault Aviation, makers of the fighter aircraft, the party alleged that the company sold each jet to India at a cost that was Rs 351 crore higher than the price on which it sold the jets to Qatar and Egypt 11 months ago.
Congress leaders Ghulam Nabi Azad and Randeep Surjewala said while 36 Rafale jets were sold to India at 7.5 billion Euros in 2016, 48 jets were sold to Qatar and Egypt at 7.9 billion Euros in 2015.
This amounted to Rs 1,670.70 crore per aircraft for India and Rs 1,319.80 crore to Egypt and Qatar. There was a difference of Rs 351 crore for each aircraft, the party claimed.
| 1,266,083 |
A Philippine national flag flutters on a part of a fishing boat with anti-China protest signs, as demonstrators march towards the Chinese Consulate, over the South China Sea disputes, in Makati City, Metro Manila, Philippines July 12, 2016. REUTERS/Erik De Castro MANILA (Reuters) - Philippine Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay called on China on Thursday to respect maritime law and security as well as the rule of law, to resolve disputes in both the South China Sea and the East China Sea.
Yasay met his Japanese counterpart, Fumio Kishida, in the Philippines to discuss regional security and cooperation on maritime security, with Japan reaffirming its help which includes vessels and aircraft.
"We... urge China to make sure that maritime law and security must be completely and uncompromisingly respected," Yasay told a news conference, adding the Philippines and Japan shared experiences in the South China Sea and East China Sea.
China claims almost the entire South China Sea where about $5 trillion worth of trade passes every year. Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims on the sea believed to have rich deposits of oil and gas.
Japan has no claim in the South China Sea but it is in dispute with China over small islands in the East China Sea.
In the South China Sea, Chinese land reclamation and construction on contested reefs over the past year has raised alarm in the region and beyond.
The United States, its Southeast Asian allies and Japan have questioned China's activity, particularly since an international court last month rejected China's historic claims to most of the South China Sea.
China says it has "indisputable sovereignty" over the area it claims and has refused to recognize the court ruling on a case brought by the Philippines.
Japan called on China to adhere to the ruling, saying it was binding, prompting a warning from China not to interfere.
"This is not the kind of action that is mandated by international law," Yasay told the news conference, referring to what he said the Philippines and Japan saw as Chinese intimidation and provocation in connection with their disputes.
CSIS/Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative
"Everyone must respect our maritime order and security in this area in the South China Sea and East China Sea and we urge them to respect the rule of law."
Japan last weekend reported a flurry of incursions by Chinese vessels into what Japan sees as its waters near the disputed East China Sea islands that it controls.
Kishida said Japan would maintain its support to the Philippines with the delivery next week of the first of 10 coastguard vessels. Japan is also leasing the Philippines four TD-90 surveillance aircraft.
"Maritime order based on the rule of law is indispensable for the region's stability and prosperity," Kishida said.
(Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Robert Birsel) | 1,266,084 |
A new program launching this week will bring cardboard boxes that can double as sleeping spaces to all parents across Alabama in an effort to reduce the state's high rate of infant mortality.
The partnership between Baby Box Co. and the Alabama Rural Development Office will be the third for the company, which has started similar programs in Ohio and New Jersey. Parents can go online, watch short educational videos and take a quiz to qualify for a box. Once they have obtained certificates of completion, parents can pick up boxes from distribution sites or arrange for home delivery.
"Each box is essentially a cardboard bassinet," said Jennifer Clary, CEO of the Baby Box Co.
Each box contains a firm mattress and fitted sheet and can hold a baby up to age six months, Clary said. Boxes also contain onesies, diapers, wipes and breastfeeding supplies.
"We are excited to be one of the first states to offer this program statewide to provide families with the tools and education to give their babies a healthy start in life," said Ron Sparks, Director of Alabama Rural Development Office, in a press release. "The ultimate goal of the program is to save babies' lives."
Boxes provide a safe sleeping environment for babies and are easy to transport. But Clary said parents also benefit from the educational component. The videos teach parents about safe sleep and baby care.
Alabama's infant mortality rate is higher than the national average. Every year, hundreds of babies born in the state die before their first birthdays. The infant mortality rate has risen for African-American babies in Alabama, who die at more than twice the rate of their white counterparts.
Many babies die as a result of suffocation from unsafe sleeping. Doctors encourage parents to put babies to sleep on their backs in cribs or bassinets without bumpers, pillows, blankets or stuffed animals.
The program is modeled after the Finnish tradition of providing sleeping boxes filled with baby supplies to expectant parents. The box gives babies "an equal start in life," according to a 2013 BBC News story about the program. Finland has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world. In Finland, 1.3 out of 1,000 children died during infancy in 2013, compared to 8.6 in Alabama.
"There is much work to be done to address the ongoing challenge of infant mortality here in the state," said Dr. Tom Miller, state health officer, in a press release. "This initiative will assist in addressing the challenge by providing education to parents from medical providers that practice within our state."
Baby boxes in Alabama will be available to all parents, regardless of income. Many parents in Alabama may not have a crib or bassinet where their baby can sleep. The boxes will fix part of the problem, Clary said.
"It really is the education that I think is going to lead to improved health," Clary said. | 1,266,085 |
In a major off-field coup, the Western Bulldogs have announced a ground-breaking three-year partnership with global automotive manufacturer, Mercedes-Benz Vans Australia.
It is the first time the Bulldogs have aligned with an automotive manufacturer, and the first partnership with a major sporting club for Mercedes-Benz Vans Australia.
As principal partner for the 2018 season and beyond, the Mercedes Benz-Vans logo will feature on the back of the Bulldogs’ AFL guernsey, with Mission Foods remaining on the front of the guernsey as the major partner of the Club.
The Mercedes-Benz Vans logo will also be prominent on the Club’s apparel and official media backdrop from next season.
Western Bulldogs President Peter Gordon said the new partnership was a great outcome for both Mercedes-Benz Vans and the Club.
“We are thrilled to welcome Mercedes-Benz Vans into the Western Bulldogs family,” said Bulldogs’ President Peter Gordon.
“This partnership breaks new ground for the club as our first automotive partner, and we are excited to work closely with such a high calibre global brand which shares similar values and ambitions to the Bulldogs.”
Managing Director Mercedes-Benz Vans Australia and New Zealand, Diane Tarr, said this partnership was the perfect fit for the Mercedes-Benz Vans brand.
“The Bulldogs are a nationally admired sporting team, and the values of the Club are very much aligned with our values at Mercedes-Benz Vans,” she said.
“Our products and people are known for their reliability, resilience and capability to get the job done. We support people in their business operations and have an unrelenting passion to be the best.
“I can’t think of a better club to align with than the Western Bulldogs. We will be so proud to have our Mercedes-Benz Vans logo on the back of every Bulldogs AFL guernsey.”
As part of the partnership, renowned chef Shane Delia, owner of Maha restaurant and Biggie Smalls, and an ambassador for the Bulldogs and Mercedes-Benz Vans, will work with both brands on some exclusive inner sanctum experiences.
And much like the Western Bulldogs’ recent on-field success, the stature of Mercedes-Benz Vans Australia is also set to strengthen.
The existing range, including the industry renowned Sprinter and Vito, will expand next year with the highly-anticipated introduction of the new Mercedes-Benz X-Class Ute.
“The X-Class will be a Ute that knows no compromise. Much like what the Western Bulldogs demonstrated last year, the X-Class will set new standards in a highly competitive and established field,” Tarr said.
To find out more on Mercedes-Benz Vans, click here. | 1,266,086 |
those things are already on the shelf, so the question was, Did they want the big enchilada that would inflict a lot of damage, or did they want small ones that would just send a little scare?”
As he described it, planning a cyberattack follows strict military protocol, moving up and down the chain of command as the parameters of an attack are determined, and its benefits and costs are assessed. President Obama had to sign off on all cyberattacks, but in August, 2018, Congress passed a military-authorization bill that allowed some cyberattacks to be authorized by the Secretary of Defense. Around the same time, the Trump Administration issued “National Security Presidential Memorandum 13,” a secret directive which reportedly further eased requirements for Presidential approval in certain cyberattacks. According to Brandon Valeriano, the Donald Bren Chair of Armed Politics at the Marine Corps University, under the old policy, there “was too much concern about authorities and legalities, and, by the time everything was signed off on, it was past the time to operate. The idea is that the new policy allows more leeway to rapidly react as situations evolve.” (Because the directive has not been made public, its specific contents are unknown; members of the House Armed Services Committee have repeatedly demanded a copy of the document, but the White House has thus far refused to release it. The spokesperson said that Cyber Command “does not act without Presidential authorization.”)
While the situation was evolving in the narrow shipping lanes between Iran and Oman, in late spring and early summer, private cybersecurity firms reported that Iranian hackers had stepped up their attacks, including what appears to be a sophisticated influence and disinformation campaign, on American institutions. This was to be expected. In 2011, Stuxnet, the joint American-Israeli cyberattack on an Iranian nuclear facility, disabled thousands of centrifuges. In response, the Iranians quickly mobilized their own technical resources to target at least forty-six U.S. financial institutions, including the New York Stock Exchange, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo with cyberattacks carried out over the course of more than five months. They also infiltrated the operating system of a dam in New York State, in 2013; attacked the servers of a casino owned by the prominent Republican donor Sheldon Adelson, in 2014; and held the city of Atlanta hostage with a ransomware attack, in 2018. “Every single day we’re basically under attack at all levels—not just the military but private citizens, businesses, government, academia—everything,” Spalding, the retired Air Force general, told me. “To prevent adversaries from doing this mercilessly, you have to create a deterrent, and the deterrent is the fear of retaliation.” (Stuxnet—which was widely credited with prompting the seven-country Iran nuclear deal of 2015—has never been officially acknowledged by the United States or Israel.) | 1,266,087 |
$ 79.99 $ 85.99
Please note: Each one of our holsters are handcrafted and made to order. Please check our lead time page for estimated delivery time information. Your patience will be rewarded with the finest concealed carry holster available.
Minimalist design for maximum comfort!
The Cloud Tuck Rapid has been designed for comfort and durability by using only the finest materials available. No expense was spared to bring the materials together to form the Ultimate small footprint hybrid holster.
LEATHER PLATFORM BACK BY A SOFT ANTIMICROBIAL PAD - An Industry first!
- An Industry first! ADJUSTABLE CANT ANGLE - Allows you to fine tune your holster to perfection.
- Allows you to fine tune your holster to perfection. BACKER SIZED TO YOUR GUN - Different size platforms for maximum comfort.
Different size platforms for maximum comfort. FULL CUSTOMIZATION AVAILABLE - Available in your choice of shell colors.
Available in your choice of shell colors. MOST HYGIENIC HOLSTER EVER - The Worlds first Antimicrobial Holster!
The Worlds first Antimicrobial Holster! ALL DAY COMFORT - Soft, light, strong, this holster was designed to make carrying easier!
Soft, light, strong, this holster was designed to make carrying easier! CONSTRUCTED FROM THE FINEST MATERIALS - From the brass washers to the medical-grade, Silver infused platform, the goal was nothing short of concealed carry perfection.
Hybrid Platform Perfection
The compact leather platform is available in different sizes to perfectly suite your handgun. The Premium top-grain black leather is backed by a thin, yet soft padding with a top layer that is silver infused. In an industry first, the long known antibacterial and antimicrobial properties of fine silver has been used to upgrade your concealed carry experience. Costs have typically relegated silver infused products to medical, aerospace and military products until NOW. With the introduction of the Silver Lining, Ultimate Holsters has brought all day carry comfort and hygiene to the next level.
ANTIMICROBIAL SILVER LINING
The Best Hybrid Holster Available?
In addition to being more hygienic, the Ultimate Holsters' Silver Lining material provides just the right amount of friction to help keep your gun in place. The material also creates a water barrier to keep your gun protected from corrosive sweat, while the antimicrobial properties of the pure silver infused keep the holster fresh and ready for all day use.
Each holster is hand made specifically for your firearm. If you do not see your model available, or would like to speak about custom options, feel free to call us or send us an email.
Available for a wide range of today's most popular firearms. in your choice of custom colors | 1,266,088 |
Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post
As you likely are aware, x-ray imaging scans have increasingly been linked in peer-reviewed scientific literature to an increased risk of cancer — particularly in children. Dental x-rays, for example, have actually been linked to a two-fold increase in brain cancer. It is therefore quite shocking to consider a new report which states that radioactive food (food contaminated with radiation from Fukushima or others sources) consumption is comparable to receiving hundreds of x-rays.
Furthermore, research conducted by a prominent doctor also draws a relationship between radioactive food and the occurrence of birth defects.
Prestigious physician, geneticist, and professor Dr. Wladimir Wertelecki conducted research back in 2010 regarding the relationship between contaminated food and birth defects. Now, years later, the professor is speaking out over the serious impact of the Chernobyl and the Fukushima-Daiichi disasters.
To illustrate this radioactive food issue, Wertelecki’s report states that, “One mushroom eaten in affected areas may deliver as much radiation as hundreds of chest x-rays.”
What’s more, Wertelecki is highlighting concerns over how officials are essentially treating citizens like ‘idiots’ and withholding the true extent to which the disasters could be affecting the health of the globe.
During a scientific gathering at the University of South Alabama, Wertelecki stated:
It is not the scale of a nuclear accident itself that makes a human disaster it is the response by officials afterward and the public panic produced. The public should not be treated as idiots and told only the ‘good half’ of the story, as is often done by official agencies. People have the right to know, the need to believe those who are in charge.
Fukushima radiation levels have already been confirmed to exceed 2 1/2 times the amount officials had originally admitted to, and a surprisingly large amount of the radioactive cesium is now known to have deposited into the Pacific.
Seafood, milk, meat products, and many other items are now subject to the extreme contamination risk posed by Fukushima, and the risk is very real to adults and children alike.
Explore More:
Dental X-rays Linked to Twofold Increase in Brain Cancer
Radioactive Strontium Detected at Fukushima Plant
Radiation Found in Seaweed Near Crippled Japan Plant
Fukushima Radiation Levels Exceeding Evacuation Zone Spreading Beyond Tokyo
New Study Challenges Official Fukushima Explanation | Radiation Released Exceeds Twice what Experts Claimed
Operators Admit Fukushima Radiation Levels Exceed 2 1/2 Times Announced
This article first appeared at Natural Society, an excellent resource for health news and vaccine information.
You can support this information by voting on Reddit HERE. | 1,266,089 |
There was much speculation that China’s snap decision to firstly ban ICOs, and then take a hard-line approach to Bitcoin exchanges, was a power play ahead of the 19th Communist Congress.
With that political flexing of the economic muscles out of the way, what is the new dawn for Bitcoin in the Socialist country?
Many are feeling there is a new wave of optimism, however, when it comes to Bitcoin, others think that it is a totally different ball game.
Cryptocurrencies are a special case
Gordon Chang, American columnist, blogger, television pundit, author and lawyer, has said that although the Congress was successful and there was optimism for the Socialist country, he does not sense liberalism on its way. Chang said:
"There has been optimism that after the Communist Party's 19th National Congress there is going to be liberalization in many areas of the economy -- that is possible. But cryptocurrencies are something of a special case."
Chang is of the opinion that Bitcoin flies too much in the face of the controlling Chinese government and that unless there are massive liberal changes, the current regime will not stand for it.
“The Chinese have been concerned that citizens can use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to expatriate money, and taking the capital controls and making a mockery of them, so there has been this clampdown on Bitcoin. I think it will continue,” Chang suggested ominously.
“I think the most fascinating thing are comments from the People’s Bank of China, about China developing its own sovereign digital currency, sort of as a replacement for Bitcoin. This is going to be fascinating to watch because the Chinese central bank is going to want to have control and the reason why these cryptos are so popular is because they take control away from the government and give it to the people, so this is going to a struggle.”
This indeed was the way in which Russia went about things as they banned access to Bitcoin exchanges, before announcing their own CryptoRuble.
Chang says that the prediction that the banning of Bitcoin was a power play for the Congress is maybe not entirely true. The current regime is looking to control more of the economy, as well as the markets.
“We have seen this so far, there has been the prohibition on ICOs and the closing of exchanges and everyone is thinking that this was in the run-up to the Congress. Under the current leadership, there has been an attempt to impose more control, not over only the economy but also the markets. So any sense of allowing Chinese citizens to export currency is just counter to what the government has been doing. I think what we will see is more of that trend after the Congress, but we will have to wait and find out - but I don't think signs are good for liberalization in the coming months,” Chang concluded. | 1,266,090 |
Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
New York state lawmakers approved a series of reforms intended to make it easier to vote on Monday, including giving voters 10 days of early access to the ballot box prior to Election Day and consolidating primary dates.
The reforms were passed by the new Democratic majority in the state Senate. Similar reforms have died in the legislature in recent years, thanks to Republican control in the Senate. The bills are expected to be signed into law by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who commended the legislature for taking "quick action" on the issue, soon.
"At a time when the federal government is doing everything it can to disenfranchise voters, we are taking action to make it easier for New Yorkers to participate in the democratic process and crack down on corporate influences in our election," Cuomo said in a statement on Monday.
Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings. This site is protected by recaptcha
The election reforms require officials to establish 10 days of early voting that wraps up two days before the election and includes two full weekends. Officials must also automatically update people's voter registrations when they move. Both changes will be rolled out in 2019.
Starting in 2020, young people will be permitted to preregister to vote when they are 16 and 17. Once implemented, a person's voter registration will be marked as pending until their 18th birthday, at which point they will be able to vote.
Additionally, state and federal primaries are now required to be scheduled on the same day, ameliorating a practice that cost the state millions, confused voters, and likely depressed turnout.
Last year, New York was the only state in the country to hold federal and state primaries on different days, and it was one of just 12 states without early voting. In November 2018, Election Day saw long lines and technology problems, particularly in New York City.
The election reforms are significant for a state that's long been dogged by low voter turnout and lagged behind on access to the ballot box.
Legislators on Monday also took steps toward implementing same-day voter registration and absentee voting without an excuse, but completing those reform will take years more.
Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. senator from New York and the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, applauded the measures in a tweet on Tuesday.
Yesterday, the New York state legislature voted to pass new bills allowing early voting, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and consolidated state and federal primaries. They're great first steps to fixing our democracy. Congratulations to all, and let's keep going! — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 15, 2019
"They're great first steps to fixing our Democracy," she said. "Congratulations to all, and let's keep going!" | 1,266,091 |
State’s Office.
The good news is, Democrats have time to learn from this mistake and prevent something similar from happening next year.
UPDATE: A reader says Stevens was told on May 30 that nominating papers had to be mailed Wednesday and asks, “Do you have evidence that it wasn’t stressed to him?” No, I don’t, because Pottawattamie County Democratic Party chair Linda Nelson has not responded to my inquiry (see update below), and Stevens didn’t want to talk about it. My point stands: someone with more political experience should have followed up and, if necessary, made arrangements to hand-deliver the nominating papers by Friday afternoon.
Holder comments, “And for the record I’m not a ‘conservative’, I’m a Libertarian who believes in Liberty and Justice for all- not just some of us.” I suspect that in this race Holder would help split the conservative electorate, especially since he ran in last year’s GOP primary for this Iowa House seat.
SECOND UPDATE: Nelson did answer my questions a few hours after I published.
Ray had someone giving him full attention in walking him through the process of filing nomination papers with the Secretary of State’s office. On Tuesday night we did have someone here on the ground from our state organization making certain that we were following the party guidelines in conducting our business of the special nominating convention. At the conclusion of the convention, the staffer gave Ray Stevens the paperwork to complete, in essence a sheet of paper that needed his signature in front of a Notary, as well as the Notary’s seal and initials. It was made very clear to Ray that this was top priority and needed to be completed and in the mail no later than Wednesday evening. When the state staffer checked on Ray, Ray said he put it in Thursday nights U.S. Mail, not getting to the Secretary of State’s office by the close of business on Friday. Most unfortunate. Many, many Democrats from across the region and from our local are still making plans to continue door knocking and phone calling, now to have a “write in” effort for Ray Stevens.
Someone should have called Stevens on Wednesday night to confirm that he had mailed the papers. If not, then he should have been instructed not to put them in the mail on Thursday after work. A volunteer could have been found to pick up the packet and drive it to Des Moines (only about two hours from Council Bluffs) by Friday afternoon.
JUNE 5 UPDATE: The Stevens campaign is educating voters that they need to fill in the oval as well as write in the candidate’s name on the special election ballot. Writing in “Ray Stevens” while leaving that oval blank may not be recorded as a vote for the Democratic candidate. | 1,266,092 |
SACRAMENTO (KPIX 5) — A singer who lives in the Bay Area stirred up quite a buzz Monday night when she took a knee as she sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” during the inaugural Sacramento Kings game at the new Golden 1 Center.
Leah Tysse is a vocalist who lives in Berkeley. According to her website, she is an experienced blues, gospel, jazz and soul singer.
Video and photos of Tysse taking a knee during performance for the Sacramento Kings preseason home opener at the team’s new arena were posted and spread on social media Tuesday night.
Woman singing national anthem at @SacramentoKings games takes a knee while singing "Land of the free and the home of the brave." @kcranews pic.twitter.com/ddaUjZO521 — Dana Griffin (@KCRADana) October 11, 2016
She took a knee at the climax of the song as she sang the lyric, “In the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
KPIX 5 spoke with Tysse Tuesday morning. She confirmed that she made the gesture during the anthem, but she wasn’t ready to talk about it. Later Tuesday afternoon, she posted a statement on her Facebook page.
ALSO READ:
The statement read, in part, “I love and honor my country as deeply as anyone yet it is my responsibility as an American to speak up against injustice as it affects my fellow Americans.”
Tysse continued: “I have sung the anthem before but this time taking a knee felt like the most patriotic thing I could do.”
Tysse told KPIX 5 she had a late night because of all the social media responses she got from her actions.
Reaction on social media to what Tysse did during her performance was mixed. Some people offered her praise.
Makayla Pratt tweeted, “@LeahTysse Much respect to you! I know you’ll get a lot of backlash but you have a lot of support! ”
Brian Weathersby tweeted, “@LeahTysse I was at the @SacramentoKings game and as an American of African descent and a veteran I thank you. You made my heart smile.”
But Twitter user C Sanchez called it a “disgusting display,” while Edward Coke took to Twitter to call Tysse “lame and unoriginal” and said he hopes she’s never invited back.
Tysse, a breast cancer survivor, was singing at the Golden 1 Center as part of news radio station KFBK’s “Survivors in 31 Days” breast-cancer series. | 1,266,093 |
emission reduction targets to combat climate change. In response, the grid is moving toward a system powered by battery-backed renewables and distributed generation such as solar.
But in the meantime, traditional sources of generation are still needed, according to Van Welie.
Steve Clemmer is director of energy research for the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a recent interview, he said when large nuclear plants suddenly retire, it can be hard to immediately replace them with renewable low-carbon resources.
"It takes time to ramp this up," he said.
Clemmer said when policy makers know far in advance that a nuclear plant is going to close, they can do a better job planning for its replacement.
In California, when Pacific Gas & Electric announced last year it would close its massive Diablo Canyon nuclear plant by 2025, the utility also announced plans to replace the capacity with a combination of energy efficiency, renewables, and storage.
Existing nuclear units in New England--Pilgrim in Massachusetts, Millstone in Connecticut, and Seabrook in New Hampshire -- now generate around 30 percent of the region's electricity.
Seabrook is licensed to operate until 2030, but has applied to keep running until 2050. Millstone won a 20-year federal license renewal in 2005. But the plant can't compete with natural gas plants, and seeks a legislative fix to stay open, reports the Hartford Courant. Pilgrim, beset with safety problems, is scheduled to close in 2019.
New York, which is not part of the ISO New England grid, plans to subsidize three aging nuclear plants while the state transitions to clean power. The bailout has prompted two lawsuits -- one from competing fossil fuel plants, and another from a coalition of environmental and consumer groups.
A similar nuclear subsidy in Illinois is also facing a legal challenge from competitors.
The prospect of building new domestic nuclear plants remains hazy. The Japan-based Toshiba announced Tuesday it would write off $6 billion and withdraw from building U.S. reactors after massive cost overruns and delays at projects in South Carolina and Georgia.
However, the Tennessee Valley Authority in October began commercial operation of its Watts-Barr nuclear plant, a 4.7 billion project completed on budget. It's the first new nuclear plant in the U.S. in 20 years.
While many oppose atomic power, saying it brings too many risks, others, including former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, insist that "next-generation nuclear" must be part of the solution to global warming.
Dave Anderson of the Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group, said the emissions uptick "provides further reason to ensure that retiring nuclear plants are replaced by renewable energy sources. Wind and solar power do not emit carbon dioxide when they generate electricity."
Mary Serreze can be reached at [email protected] | 1,266,094 |
A BRISBANE man fighting against ISIS says he is prepared to sacrifice his life and that the terrorist group must be stopped.
Ashley Dyball, 23, aka Mitchell Scott, took to Facebook last night to declare that he didn’t care if he could not ever return to Australia and that he wanted to keep fighting to liberate “innocent women and children”.
Mr Dyball, from Brisbane’s north, is believed to have joined the Kurdish militia three days after travelling through Jordan to Iraq on May 5.
After sending the Facebook message, Mr Dyball sent proof of life to his followers last night in a fresh photograph via instant social media Snapchat.
With a scarf wrapped around his head, he stares straight at the camera, his eyes hidden behind his signature sunglasses.
He appears to be wearing a backpack, and the reflection in his glasses shows he is behind a barbed-wire fence.
Have to make this short and sweet limited times at the moment first don't believe the media they're a bunch of headline... Posted by Mitchell Scott on Wednesday, 10 June 2015
In last night’s lengthy Facebook post, Mr Dyball said he only had limited time to send the message.
media_camera Ashley Dyball sent this photo via the Snapchat app last night.
He pleaded with family and friends to understand it was his life and his decision to fight ISIS.
He also criticised the media, saying “sh-t you see here is nothing like you see on bias (sic) news reports”.
The Courier-Mail reported last week that Mr Dyball had a $150,000 bounty on his head, with cashed-up ISIS terrorists targeting foreign fighters aligned with the Kurdish militia.
Mr Dyball is believed to be aligned to the same group former Queensland army reservist Ashley Johnston, 28, was fighting with when he was killed by ISIS in February.
No news is good news. Miss everyone from home hope your all well #YPG #FUCKTHEISLAMICSTATE Posted by Mitchell Scott on Sunday, 24 May 2015
Last month Mr Dyball’s brother took to Facebook to plead with his sibling to please come home.
“We’re all pretty distraught about this and need (I don’t even know how long) some time to just process all this,” he posted on Facebook.
“And... come home please.”
He wrote that he would rather see his older brother in jail than in a war zone.
“I’d rather he be here in a jail so I can actually see him than over there,” he posted on social media.
The Federal Government has warned that anyone involving themselves in the terror conflicts – including Australians fighting against ISIS – will be prosecuted. | 1,266,095 |
live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You [men] have aways a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. — Persuasion
These words, spoken by heroine Anne Elliot in a discussion about whether men or women are more constant in loving, compare women’s confinement with men’s agency and activity and more than imply that women would benefit from getting out and doing more. When you hear people talk about the sentimentality of Austen novels, consider that this declaration, spoken in the presence of Anne’s loved-and-lost hero Captain Wentworth, helps to bring about the novel’s resolution. She is not passive here; her speech inspires him to renew his declarations of love. Incidentally, Anne is quite likely to join her husband when he next ventures out to sea, rather than remaining home to be plagued by her feelings.
5. On biases against women in books:
[I]f you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove any thing. — Persuasion
In that same speech, Anne Elliot speaks out against evidence of women’s inconstancy as depicted in literature. The obvious criticism of male advantages and female deprivations contributes a significant literary example to counter those books that do not “prove any thing” about women’s character. Northanger Abbey‘s protagonist Catherine Morland also noted that history books typically contain “hardly any women at all” and thus declared that “a great deal of it must be invention.”
This list is, of course, far from complete (feel free to add your own examples!). The tendency of much of Austen’s writing is to put women in the spotlight and to give them their due. She seldom proselytizes. Instead, she shows middle and upper-class women in action, coming into their own within a society that offers them few avenues for exertion.
As we commemorate Austen’s 237th birthday and look forward to the Pride and Prejudice bicentennial, let’s also honor her contributions to the history of feminism. “Let us not desert one another,” the narrator of Northanger Abbey admonishes sister writers in the defense of the novel, continuing, “We are an injured body.”
Next time you hear someone dismissing Jane Austen’s work as “chick lit,” send them back to her books for some feminist schooling.
Drawing of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra from Wikimedia Commons | 1,266,096 |
Image copyright Public Image caption Pictures shared on social media appear to show James White and Alexis Guesto tied up and covered in paint
Police say they have had to "redirect resources towards investigating a serious assault" after two wanted men were "kicked and beaten with iron bars," in County Armagh.
They were then "further assaulted" and "covered in paint".
James White and Alexis Guesto were taken back into custody after they were found tied up on a bench in Mullaghbawn.
They were wanted for offences including breach of licence and warrants.
Images shared on social media on Saturday appear to show them tied up and covered in paint.
Police said that due to the "violent actions of a small number of people, we have had to redirect resources and efforts towards investigating a serious assault."
The police said both men had sustained injuries and have been taken to hospital for treatment.
One of the men has been arrested and the other remains in hospital.
Police said both men will appear in court at the "earliest opportunity in relation to the matters for which they were being sought".
Image copyright PSNI Image caption Police had said Alexis Guesto and James White were wanted for a range of offences
Det Ch Insp Jill Duffie, from the PSNI's Public Protection Branch, said: "Throughout yesterday as our search for the two men was ongoing, I was pleased with the response from the local community and the assistance being provided to police.
"Unfortunately, now, due to the violent actions of a small number of people, we have had to redirect resources and efforts towards investigating a serious assault.
"There is no excuse for individuals taking the law into their own hands nor for the violent scenes that we witnessed last night."
Earlier on Saturday, the police said it was believed the two men had travelled to Northern Ireland from the Republic.
There have been a number of reported sightings of them in south Armagh and Newry, County Down.
On Thursday afternoon, police seized a car from a car park on the Chancellors Road in Mullaghbawn after a member of the public expressed concern.
'Disgraceful'
SDLP Newry and Armagh MLA Justin McNulty said the incident was "disgraceful".
"It is important that the two wanted men can now be brought before the courts so that they can be subjected to the judicial process," he said.
"It is disgraceful however that the police now also have to deal with an assault case.
"There can be no middle man in the criminal justice system."
Mr McNulty encouraged anyone with information on criminality to go to the police.
"Those who believe they are unable to do so can contact Crimestoppers anonymously.
"No one is above the law," he added. | 1,266,097 |
Minor Kerala girl gives birth: Did family try to ‘cover up’ rape by accused Christian priest?
A priest has been arrested for allegedly raping the child, but was family under pressure to protect him?
news Child abuse
It seems no one had an inkling that she was pregnant. On February 7, 16-year-old Asha* was rushed to a hospital in Kannur where she delivered a baby. She was told that she had been operated upon for appendix.
Three weeks after the delivery, the Kelakom police in Kerala’s Kannur district arrested a Christian priest late on Monday evening, for allegedly raping a 16-year-old girl.
The minor girl was reportedly sexually abused multiple times by Father Robin of a church in Kottiyoor.
But what is unnerving is how the case unfolded. Though the family tried to keep the delivery a secret, Childline officials got wind of it and approached the girl.
Asha told Childline officials that she had been raped by her father.
Soon, police questioned the teenager’s father. “During questioning, the father too kept saying that he molested his child. He was not ready to say much, but only maintained that he was the culprit. But his statement was not matching that of the girl’s. This made us suspicious,” Pradeep, sub-inspector of police told TNM.
When questioned further, the father named the priest.
Father Robin had been working in the church for more than two and a half years. Asha was a student in a school associated with the church.
“The father finally named the priest. We then arrested him and filed a case of POCSO against him,” says the policeman. According to a source in Childline, the teenager too later confessed that the priest was responsible for the pregnancy.
Investigators now believe that the family had tried to save the church and the priest from getting embroiled in a scandal. Asha had attended school till the day before her delivery. On February 7, she was taken to a hospital when she complained of stomach pain. The parents claim that they never realized that their daughter was pregnant. They had taken her to a homeopathy doctor initially when she complained that she was not getting her periods, but later did not bother about it.
However, an officer added that the case was under investigation and the case against the priest had to be proven first with DNA evidence.
Asha has been transferred to a children’s home. Her baby who had been given to an orphanage by Asha’s parents has also been shifted to a government run home.
*- Name changed to protect identity.
Also read: Kerala priest who allegedly raped 16-year-old girl has worked with two media organisations | 1,266,098 |
Victoria E. Freile
ROC
Mayor Lovely Warren and Rochester Police Chief Michael Ciminelli Friday morning asked anyone who witnessed or filmed an encounter between a city police officer and a city resident this week to step forward.
The request followed the surface of a 77-second video posted on YouTube and social media showing a city police officer striking a man several times during an arrest.
A sergeant was at 369 Genesee Street about 1:30 p.m. Thursday to take Clem J. Long, 36, into custody in connection with alleged illegal drug activity in the area. Long allegedly started to resist arrest, said Rochester police investigator Frank Camp.
Another person allegedly repeatedly struck the sergeant with a metal broom handle prior to the arrest shown on the video. Warren and Ciminelli said the posted video, which is now being reviewed by police as evidence, shows the final minute of the encounter on the front porch of the Genesee Street home.
The alleged attack on the officer was not pictured in the posted video.
Warren said she learned of the video from concerned city residents.
"When videos rise, we take them very, very seriously," Warren said. "But we also need the community's help. This (video) tells a part of the story, but we want to be able to hear the whole story. We want a clear understanding of what actually happened."
Specifically, city and police officials are asking anyone who witnessed or recorded the first part of the encounter, or the entire exchange, to come forward.
While some other departments around the country have outfitted police officers with cameras on their person or in their patrol cars, Warren said Rochester officials and officers must first learn more about the technology before considering installing them locally.
Long, a Columbia Avenue resident, was charged with third-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance and second-degree assault, both felonies, resisting arrest, a misdemeanor, and unlawful possession of marijuana, a violation.
Court documents allege Long had 16 bags of cocaine and some marijuana on him Thursday afternoon. Ciminelli said the sergeant on Thursday was addressing numerous complaints of drug activity on Genesee Street when the incident occurred.
When Long allegedly resisted arrest and tussled with the sergeant, at least one more person joined the confrontation, Ciminelli said. Police are looking for the person accused of hitting the sergeant with a broom handle over his head and on his back.
The injured sergeant was treated at an area hospital and will remain off duty for several days to recover from his injuries.
Long pleaded not guilty on those charges and was remanded to the Monroe County Jail in lieu of $15,000 cash bail. He is slated to return to City Court for a preliminary hearing next week.
[email protected]
Twitter.com/vfreile | 1,266,099 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.