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With The Rise of Skywalker bringing an end to the Skywalker saga, the stories of the characters we've been following in this sequel trilogy have, more or less, been wrapped up. At least for the foreseeable future. Specifically, we know that Finn and Poe's legendary bromance didn't escalate to a straight-up, full-on romance, even if Oscar Isaac wanted it to head in that direction. But the so-called "Disney overlords" got in the way.
Ahead of the movie's release, Oscar Isaac, who plays Poe Dameron, and John Boyega, who plays Finn, explained that the nature of their relationship wouldn't become romantic in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. At the time, Isaac expressed his disappointment. Now, in a more recent interview, Isaac has doubled-down on his comments and was more than happy to put the blame squarely on Disney's shoulders. Here's what he had to say about it.
"I think there could've been a very interesting, forward-thinking. Not even forward-thinking, just, like, current-thinking love story there, something that hadn't quite been explored yet; particularly the dynamic between these two men in war that could've fallen in love with each other. I would try to push it a bit in that direction, but the Disney overlords were not ready to do that."
Ever since The Force Awakens, certain fans have been pushing for the story to go in this direction. Finn and Poe were separated from one another for almost the entirety of The Last Jedi, so their relationship wasn't given a chance to develop there. In Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, director J.J. Abrams could have leaned that way. Would Disney have stopped such a plot thread? That seems to be what Oscar Isaac is implying here.
For what it's worth, J.J. Abrams did include a same-sex kiss at the end of Episode IX, but it was a very brief, blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment that has been scrutinized by many since the movie's release. A Star Wars romance between Finn and Poe Dameron certainly would have been progressive, but Disney didn't feel that was a creative risk worth taking. While LGBTQ relationships have become far more accepted in the mainstream, Disney has been slow to bring that forth in its movies. Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok and Beauty and the Beast all had LGBTQ moments that were intended to be bigger than they ultimately ended up being.
Disney and Lucasfilm were in a tough spot with this movie given the divisive nature of The Last Jedi. Throwing in something as potentially controversial as a same-sex romance between two of the franchise's main characters would have certainly been a risky proposition, in terms of potential reception. But no risk, no reward. Star Wars didn't become what it is without taking some risks. Be that as it may, this is one risk Disney wasn't willing to take. This news comes to us via IGN. | 1,267,700 |
Image caption The report says the UK's economy needs more home-grown postgraduate researchers
The postgraduate system in the UK's universities is failing to produce the number of highly skilled staff needed by a modern economy, a report warns.
The Higher Education Commission says the system is geared towards attracting overseas students, rather than training more UK students.
The report warns that the UK is falling behind in investing in research.
A Department for Business, Innovation and Skills spokeswoman said: "We recognise there are some concerns."
The study from the Higher Education Commission calls for urgent reform of the postgraduate sector, saying that in its present state it will cause long-term problems for the UK's economy.
Postgraduate research has become increasingly important for innovative, hi-tech industries.
Tuition fees
But the Higher Education Commission, an independent group of education and business leaders, warns that the UK's current system seems to neglect UK students and instead is driven by universities wanting to recruit overseas students who pay high levels of tuition fees.
It says this risks making the UK the "education outsourcing capital of the world" - training international students rather than providing home-grown talent for UK firms.
The postgraduate sector needs to be brought in from the cold Graham Spittle, Higher Education Commission and IBM chief technology officer
Without an expansion of UK postgraduate students, it will mean UK firms will have to recruit more staff from overseas - or even have to re-locate to countries with a higher skilled workforce, the report says.
"We can't compete with countries like China and India on numbers, but we can compete, and win, on ideas and innovation. The postgraduate sector needs to be brought in from the cold and hardwired into the UK's strategy for economic growth," said Graham Spittle, IBM's chief technology officer, who chaired the group preparing the report.
The report identifies the scale of the growth of overseas postgraduate students - up 200% since 1999 - compared with a rise of 18% for UK students.
Within the group of countries in the wider European education area, it says that apart from England and Wales, the only other countries to have so few home students staying on for postgraduate are Andorra and Kazakhstan.
It calls for a reform of the support available for postgraduate students - so that they will not be deterred by higher tuition fees or difficulties in getting loans.
Earlier this year a report from the 1994 Group of research intensive universities warned of a looming crisis in postgraduate education - with a warning that successive governments had failed to address the problems facing this sector.
The vice chancellor of Oxford University has also highlighted his concerns about the funding of postgraduate studies.
A Department for Business, Innovation and Skills spokeswoman said: "We have asked the Higher Education Funding Council for England to monitor and review participation in postgraduate study as part of a longer-term assessment of the impact of the funding changes." | 1,267,701 |
on the lawsuit, “America’s News Headquarters” co-host Kelly Wright, claims that “despite his performance, and because he is black,” the veteran reporter has “been effectively sidelined and asked to perform the role of a ‘Jim Crow’ — the racist caricature of a Black entertainer.”
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In the class-action suit, Kelly alleged that O’Reilly refused to let him discuss the racial divide in Ferguson, Mo., on “The O’Reilly Factor and would not play his “Beyond the Dream” project, stories about the African American community, because it showed blacks in “too positive” a light.
Kelly also claimed that his career was stunted because Fox News promoted his white colleagues over him.
The federal discrimination lawsuit filed by Adasa Blanco, another employee in Fox News’ payroll department, listed 21st Century Fox, Fox News, Slater, Brandi and Susan Lovallo, another Fox employee, as plaintiffs, and alleged similar grievances as those outlined in the class-action lawsuit.
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Blanco claims she reported “the racially hostile work environment” at Fox to Brandi as early as 2008, eight years before Slater was fired. Blanco is Puerto Rican and was “constantly mocked” by Slater for her accent, according to the federal lawsuit.
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A Fox News spokesman told CNN in a statement that the company and Brandi “vehemently deny” the allegations in both lawsuits.
“They are copycat complaints of the original one filed last month,” the spokesman told CNN. “We will vigorously defend these cases.”
USA Today reported that Wasim Rafik, a former Fox News employee, filed a discrimination charge with the EEOC. Rafik was one of several employees who complained to human resources about Slater.
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Catherine Foti, Slater’s attorney, said in a statement that the lawsuits are “meritless and frivolous” and that the claims of racial discrimination are “completely false.” She called the language used by the plaintiffs’ attorneys in the lawsuit incendiary and said that “raising the shameful period of Jim Crow and plantations is outrageous and draws a comparison that demeans the atrocities committed during those times.”
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She continued: “These frivolous charges are solely aimed at generating headlines, inflaming racial tensions and poisoning potential jury pools and judges.”
Attorneys Douglas Wigdor and Jeanne Christensen are representing all 13 people alleging racial discrimination.
“When it comes to racial discrimination,” the attorneys said in a statement Tuesday, “21st Century Fox has been operating as if it should be called 18th Century Fox.”
This post has been updated with comment from Slater’s attorney. | 1,267,702 |
(CNN) It's a feat that hasn't been achieved since the days of NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain: James Harden scored at least 30 points in 32 straight games this season, the second-longest streak in history.
But it wasn't the shooting guard's incredible play that inspired Filip Peraic to make Harden the subject of a series of portraits entitled "James Harden Illustrated," all featuring the Houston Rockets star's profile and famous beard.
"I did not pick him based on his game. I just wanted to find someone aesthetically interesting," the Croatia-based artist told CNN.
Harden is certainly that, one of the more recognizable NBA stars thanks to oversized facial hair. "He has this really nice and unique profile with his beard," Peraic said.
"He already knew about my project because some reporters asked him," Peraic said. But while Peraic has yet to meet Harden, a Twitter shout out was the next best thing. "This was the first time that he directly spoke to me," said Peraic. "And it's a great feeling and I'm glad he did.
"That profile is sort of like a frame throughout which I express myself."
Peraic is also on top of popular culture -- his most recent rendition was a Harden-like black hole after the first image of a black hole was rendered
But all the time spent drawing and designing doesn't mean Peraic hasn't taken notice of Harden's impressive run.
"I'm a fan of his game and he's basically changing the game as we know it with his style of play," Peraic said.
Harden's beard has proven a source of fascination to Croatia-based artist Filip Peraic.
Harden is the focal point of the Houston offense, and at one point this season, he even went six straight games without a single basket coming on assist from a teammate, according to the Houston Chronicle
The Rockets' game plan has made for regular-season success, but it has yet to translate to an NBA Final berth with Harden on the squad.
However, Houston will certainly rely on its star, who helped last year's team come to within a game of the NBA Finals. And while Harden may have spent a few days retweeting Peraic's images, the Rockets' guard likely will have more pressing things on his mind during this postseason, namely, an NBA championship.
Here, Harden's profile appears as a Greek philosopher.
Peraic likely won't mind the fun being over. He can recognize Harden's dedication to craft. This season, the Rockets' star said : "Every single year you've got to find ways to get better and come back with something different, something new."
That's a hard-working sentiment that resonates with Peraic. "This project is like a creative challenge for me," he said. "It sounds really fun drawing James Harden over and over again. But I'm quite serious about it." | 1,267,703 |
A 38 North exclusive with analysis by Nick Hansen
New commercial satellite imagery from September 19, 2013 provides further evidence that North Korea has restarted its 5 MWe plutonium production reactor located at the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center. Imagery shows hot waste water being released into the Kuryong River from a recently installed drainpipe, part of a new secondary cooling system completed in summer 2013. This release of hot water indicates that the reactor is in operation and the turbine powered electrical generators are producing power.
Reactor Dumping Hot Water
New commercial satellite imagery from September 19 provides further evidence that Pyongyang has restarted its 5 MWe reactor. Previous imagery from August 31 showed hot steam rising from the generator building, indicating that North Korea was in the process of restarting the reactor. The new imagery shows a stream of hot water being dumped into the river from the end of a new buried pipeline that carries hot water and steam from the reactor’s generators (figure 1). (The recently built drain pipe is a critical part of a new secondary cooling system completed in summer 2013 to replace the cooling tower previously destroyed under a Six Party Talks Agreement in 2008.) The most likely explanation is that the reactor is now operating and the generators are producing electrical power.[1]
Figure 1. Waste water seen being dumped into the Kuryong River.
An analysis of satellite imagery from late July 2013 shows no indication of hot water being discharged into the river (figure 2). This was just after the flood waters from mid-July—which had covered the end of the drain pipe—had receded and the reactor had not yet been started. By August 25, it is possible that a small amount of water may have been discharged, indicating a reactor test had occurred (figure 3). On August 31, when white steam released from the roof of the turbine building was spotted in commercial satellite imagery—the first sign that the reactor was restarting—small amounts of foam and hot water were present at the end of the drainpipe, indicating that a test of the turbine-powered electrical generator system had occurred (figure 4). Imagery from September 19 shows the amount of white foam has increased, indicating that the turbines have been activated and have begun generating electrical power (figure 5).
Figure 2. No hot water discharge.
Figure 3. Little to no discharge.
Figure 4. Small amount of hot water discharge.
Figure 5. Increased discharge.
Start-Up of the Experimental Light Water Reactor: Signals to Watch For
The Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR) located adjacent to the plutonium production reactor is not believed to have entered its start-up period yet. The dumping of hot waste water from the drain pipe that comes directly out the back end of the turbine hall, past the pump house and into the river will be an indicator that the facility is becoming operational.
Figure 6. The drain pipe was under construction in March 2013; discharge would indicate start up activities had begun. | 1,267,704 |
Special counsel Robert Mueller has been monitoring George Papadopoulos‘ Twitter activity closely, a Wednesday filing shows.
Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, is attempting to stay out of jail pending the outcome of former Roger Stone aide Andrew Miller‘s challenge of Mueller’s authority. Papadopoulos’ 14-day jail stint was scheduled to begin on Nov. 26, but he and his new legal team have attempted to put that on hold.
Mueller responded to that motion to continue Papadopoulos’ bail on Wednesday by saying that this gambit should be denied because his “motion is made for purposes of delay, and he has not presented a substantial legal question that is likely to result in reversal.”
Basically, what this boils down to is this: Papadopoulos isn’t appealing anything, he’s asking the court to put off jail until a separate appeal reaches a conclusion. Even if Papadopoulos did file an appeal, Mueller said, “the defendant’s time to file any appeal expired on September 25, 2018, fourteen days after the entry of judgment.”
“Moreover,” Mueller continued, “the defendant expressly waived his rights to appeal a sentence within the statutory range, which he received.”
On the very same page of the document are the references to Papadopoulos’ Twitter account.
Mueller pointed out that after Papadopoulos was sentenced “he made a variety of public statements that appear to be inconsistent with his stated acceptance of responsibility at sentencing.”
That agreement did say the following:
“For example, on October 25, 2018, the defendant publicly tweeted that his prosecution constituted ‘the biggest case of entrapment!’ Appearing on a national television show the next day, the defendant stated that he was ‘considering withdrawing his agreement’ because he should not ‘have to serve even one day in jail for something that now it seems was completely orchestrated and I was framed,'” Mueller said. “Several days later, the defendant publicly tweeted: ‘I have been sentenced to prison in our country while having exculpatory evidence hidden from me. If I knew what I knew today, I would have never plead guilty.’ On November 9, 2018, the defendant tweeted, ‘Biggest regret? Pleading guilty.’”
The amusing thing isn’t just that these tweets are no longer on Papadopoulos’ Twitter account — it’s that the special counsel saw fit to add three identical footnotes to say so.
You can read the rest of Mueller’s response to Papadopoulos below.
Mueller Responds to George Papadopoulos by Law&Crime on Scribd
[Image via Alex Wong/Getty Images]
Have a tip we should know? [email protected] | 1,267,705 |
HONG KONG (AP) — China’s military deployed fresh troops to Hong Kong on Thursday in what it called a routine rotation amid speculation that it might intervene in the city’s pro-democracy protests.
Video broadcast on China Central Television showed a long convoy of armored personnel carriers and trucks crossing the border at night and troops in formation disembarking from a ship. Earlier, scores of soldiers ran in unison onto trucks, which the state broadcaster said were bound for ports and entry points into Hong Kong. A handover ceremony was held before dawn.
“This time the task has a glorious mission. The responsibility is great. The job is difficult,” an unnamed major said to troops before they departed. “The time for a true test has arrived!”
The official Xinhua News Agency said it was the 22nd rotation of the People’s Liberation Army’s garrison in Hong Kong. The previous one was in August 2018.
Nearly three months of fiery anti-government demonstrations have sparked concerns that the military will be deployed in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. The Hong Kong garrison earlier published a promotional video with scenes of soldiers facing off with people dressed like protesters.
Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Ren Guoqiang told reporters in Beijing on Thursday that the demonstrators must abide by Hong Kong’s laws.
A leader of 2014 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong said the city’s government is using the same tactics as five years ago.
“The government is just trying to threaten people with emergency law, with the entrance of the People’s Liberation Army,” Yvonne Leung said at a news conference.
A former British colony, Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997 under a “one country, two systems” framework, which promises the city certain democratic rights that are not afforded to the mainland. In recent years, however, some Hong Kong residents have accused Beijing of steadily eroding their freedoms.
The newly arrived Chinese troops have been educated on Hong Kong’s laws and vowed to defend the nation’s sovereignty, Xinhua said.
“We will firmly implement the guideline of ‘one country, two systems’ and the Basic Law and the Garrison Law of Hong Kong,” Liu Zhaohui, the garrison’s deputy chief of staff, said on CCTV.
The Garrison Law allows the Hong Kong-stationed troops to help maintain public order at the request of the city government. That has never happened, and Hong Kong authorities have said they can handle the situation themselves.
Troops stationed in Macao, another special administrative region, also completed a rotation Thursday.
The Xinhua report on the previous rotation in August 2018 did not mention “one country, two systems” or national sovereignty.
Wang reported from Beijing. Associated Press videojournalist Johnson Lai contributed to this report. | 1,267,706 |
The Man Your Man Could be Like- DRESDEN STYLE
by Taylor Hayes and Kate Wicker
"Thomas, did you mind whammie Murphy?" I demanded, staring in horror at the hardass blonde cop who was currently rolling on the ground, giggling like a schoolgirl. (Not that I would ever tell her that. I like all my limbs and organs right where they are.)
My brother smirked, shaking his elegant head. "Nope."
I glanced over at my apprentice, who projected the kind of tough chick attitude Han Solo would have killed for. She was also writhing on the floor of my front room in a fit of what looked like very painful laughter. "How 'bout Molly?"
"Nuh-uh."
But the bastard looked too smug for it to not be his fault.
"Okay. What the hell is going on then?"
Thomas held out a sheet of paper he had printed off. It was a short comic strip, prominently featuring… me.
I glared at the vampire then focused on the words of the comic.
Hello Ladies- look at your man, now back to me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me, but if he stopped wearing body glitter and wore a black leather duster, he could be like he's me. Look down, back up, where are you? You're on a city street, surrounded by ZOMBIES! With the man your man could be like! Look down, back up, what's in your hand, I have it, it's a blasting rod- look again! The blasting rod is now A TORRENTIAL COLUMN OF FIRE! Anything is possible when your man is Harry Dresden and not Edward Cullen. I'm on a dinosaur.
I looked up in confusion, and my puzzlement sent the Grasshopper into another fit of gasping laughter. Murph was no better, pointing at me, arm shaking from her giggles. Even Thomas let out a snort and started chuckling.
Shaking my head, I turned to the only other sane person in the room- my half-mastodan dog, Mouse. We exchanged a look, clearly agreeing that everyone else had gone crazy. Then he padded over to my side and got a look at the paper. His doggy mouth lifted in a canine grin, and before I knew what was happening, the traitor was letting out huffing barks that were his equivalent of laughter.
Even Mouse?
"Man's best friend," I muttered angrily, grabbing my staff and heading back out the door.
fin.
a/n So me and my friend Kate Wicker were hanging out last night, and before we knew it, we had rewritten the Old Spice commercial for Harry Dresden. *laugh* I couldn't resist adding a storyline and posting it. Hope you liked! | 1,267,707 |
水曜日のカンパネラとNHK Eテレ「にほんごであそぼ」によるコラボレーション曲「江戸っ子どこどこ」が11月13日（月）に同番組内で初披露される。
「江戸っ子どこどこ」はケンモチヒデフミ（水曜日のカンパネラ）が番組のために書き下ろした楽曲。江戸言葉をモチーフにした語感がユニークなナンバーだ。番組では江戸時代ふうのセットの中でコムアイ（水曜日のカンパネラ）が、みわサン（ 美輪明宏）、コニちゃん（ KONISHIKI）、 ラッキィ池田らと共にこの楽曲を歌っている。
また水曜日のカンパネラは11月18日に香港で開催される音楽フェスティバル「Clockenflap Festival 2017」に出演し、香港での初ライブを行う。
NHK Eテレ「にほんごであそぼ」
2017年11月13日（月）6:35～6:45
Clockenflap Festival 2017
2017年11月17日（金）香港 Central Harbourfront
2017年11月18日（土）香港 Central Harbourfront
2017年11月19日（日）香港 Central Harbourfront
※水曜日のカンパネラは18日に出演
水曜日のカンパネラのほかの記事
リンク | 1,267,708 |
After a series of horrific gang rapes in Malmo, local residents took matters into their own hands and have organized nightly street patrols to reassure neighbors and hoping to keep women safe from all kinds of abuse.
Two patrols of volunteers set off through the streets of Malmo Friday night, one organized by the Swedish Communist Party and the other by a community group called the Seved Association. “We from the Communist Party would like to welcome you all to this walk for making the streets safe,” said communist Nils Littorin. “We in the party are strongly against all kind of abuse to women, physical as well as verbal in workplaces, nightclubs and all other places, no matter who the offender is.”
The patrols come after three shocking sex attacks, each of them involving several assailants, occurred in the city over the course of just six weeks, with the latest victim being a 17-year-old girl who was assaulted in a children’s playground in the neighborhood of Sofielund. The girl was so badly injured in the assault that she had to be rushed to hospital. The wave of attacks sparked outrage and hundreds gathered in the city Tuesday carrying lit candles and banners reading ‘No rapists on our streets.’
The patrols are intended to have both a preventive and deterrent effect, Littorin told the Sydsvenskan newspaper. He emphasized that the volunteers are not vigilantes and will call the police if they see anything illegal or suspicious happening.
Read more
Malmo has a notoriously bad reputation for being a crime-ridden city in Sweden. Although being statistically far less dangerous than certain inner-city areas in the US, the murder rate in Malmo has been rising dramatically over the past few years, mainly as a result of the gang wars in deprived neighbourhoods with high unemployment rates and a poorly-assimilated migrant population.
Opponents of mass immigration have linked Sweden’s rape statistics – among the highest in the world by some measures – as a consequence of the country’s generous policy toward asylum seekers. However, while the dramatic rise in the foreign-born population since the '90s does seem to correlate with an explosion in the number of sexual assaults; during the same period, the legal definition of rape was also significantly expanded to include a much wider range of sexual assault scenarios. Sweden also has the highest reporting rate in Europe – over twice the United Kingdom, and 35 times that of Hungary.
Nevertheless, the issue of sexual assaults have been drawing increasing attention in Sweden, with the crisis so dire, that a female comedian is organizing a man-free music festival next year after a series of high-profile assaults this summer. Police in Malmo have long been complaining of a lack of resources to tackle the escalating levels of crime, and in the wake of recent attacks, advised women to only go out in pairs after dark. They were forced to retract the “unfortunate” statement following criticism, however. | 1,267,709 |
Redesigned Cover to Debut on Patent 10 Million Later This Year
AUSTIN, Texas - The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today unveiled the new design of the patent grant cover during a special ceremony at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. The redesigned cover will debut on patent number 10 million which is expected to issue sometime in 2018.
“American ingenuity has been at the forefront of every major technological revolution of the past two centuries, from steam engines to flight, and from the biotechnology revolution to the information revolution,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO, Andrei Iancu. “This new patent design not only celebrates how far we’ve come and the new frontiers we have yet to explore, it also represents the cornerstone and the currency of an American intellectual property system that has given so much to the world and will continue to do so for ages to come.”
The patent grant cover represents the physical document issued to inventors upon the granting of a U.S. patent. The 225-plus year history of the patent cover has seen fewer than a dozen basic designs since President George Washington granted the first patent in 1790. Previous designs featured calligraphy, elaborate engravings, and high-quality typesetting.
The patent office has only redesigned the document twice in the last hundred years, and the current design is more than 30 years old. A team of in-house USPTO graphic designers created the new patent cover design. After several iterations, Commissioner for Patents Drew Hirshfeld made the final selection.
“This new design portrays a modern day flair while reflecting the history of patent covers by taking design cues from 19th and early 20th century patent cover designs, mostly through the use of script typography and graphic ornaments,” said Commissioner for Patents Drew Hirshfeld. “When our designers and Patents team were creating the new cover we wanted to create a design worthy of the significance importance that the document itself has to inventors, and its significance as a physical representation of American invention and ingenuity.”
The ceremony, which was co-sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF), also featured remarks from Ethernet inventor, 2007 NIHF inductee, and laureate of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, Robert M. Metcalfe and IBM Master Inventor, Susann Keohane, IBM Global Research Leader for the Aging Initiative.
For more information on the historic evolution of the patent cover, including high resolution images of the new design, please visit: https://10millionpatents.uspto.gov/media-kit.html.
Stay current with the USPTO by subscribing to receive email updates. Visit our Subscription Center at www.uspto.gov/subscribe.
### | 1,267,710 |
Last updated on.From the section Football
Arsenal have completed the signing of Lille's Ivory Coast striker Gervinho for an undisclosed fee.
The 24-year-old scored 15 goals to help Lille win the French League and Cup double last season.
"It's a great feeling to be an Arsenal player. I've always dreamed to play for this club," he said.
Manager Arsene Wenger told the club's website external-link : "He has qualities that I find very important. I think he is a very good addition to the squad."
quote He [Gervinho] was the best provider in the French league with assists and he scored 15 goals
Wenger hopes the signing of Gervinho will help bring an end to the six-year trophy drought at the Emirates Stadium.
The Frenchman was attracted by the versatility of his new recruit, saying: "Gervinho is a player that can play in a number of positions up front. He can play on the right, on the left, and through the middle."
"He has the qualities we like technically. He is good one against one, he is strong and was the best provider in the French League with assists and he scored 15 goals."
Gervinho, who has signed what is described as a "long-term contract", added: "I've achieved this dream now and I am so happy. It's one of the most beautiful days of my life."
"I'm very happy to have the chance to work with Arsene Wenger. I came here because I believe that he can improve my game and help me reach another level, but the most important thing for me is that I bring a lot to the team for whom I'm playing."
IVORIANS IN PREMIER LEAGUE Emmanuel Eboue, Arsenal
Gervinho, Arsenal
Didier Drogba, Chelsea
Salomon Kalou, Chelsea
Abdul Razak, Man City
Kolo Toure, Man City
Yaya Toure, Man City
Cheik Tiote, Newcastle
Steve Gohouri, Wigan
Gervinho scored 36 goals in 93 appearances during his two seasons with Lille. He has won 27 international caps for Ivory Coast, scoring six times.
He began his career with ASEC Mimosas in Abidjan, the same club that Premier League players Kolo Toure, Yaya Toure, Salomon Kalou and new Arsenal team-mate Emmanuel Eboue started at.
After a two-match tour of Asia, Arsenal's pre-season continues with a friendly in Cologne on Saturday 23 July.
The Gunners then host the Emirates Cup starting on 30 July, a tournament that also features Paris Saint-Germain, Boca Juniors, and New York Red Bulls, and start their Premier League campaign at Newcastle United on August 13. | 1,267,711 |
While the system has meant “significant” costs for the State, the human cost is “not so easily conveyed”, Mr Justice John MacMenamin said yesterday.
The bifurcated system of separate applications for asylum and subsidiary protection lead to “vast” litigation here along with references to the European courts, he said. It was “hard to understand” the logic of having lower thresholds for judicial review of subsidiary protection decisions than for asylum applications.
This system meant many cases, including involving a Malawian family here since 2008, took years during which asylum applicants lived in a “state of suspense” with “no certainty” about their future and often living in “inadequate and substandard accommodation”.
He awaited evidence an effective and speedy decision-making process will necessarily create what some term a ‘magnet’ effect attracting “economic migrants” and was not persuaded an inefficient system can have a deterrent effect on what are termed “unmeritorious” asylum applicants.
While there are undoubted abuses of the system, many people, whatever the merits of their cases, frequently had young families with children who became established here and “often knew no other home”.
The case before the court was an example with one of their children born here in 2008 and the other living here since aged one.
An immigration system must also be capable of enforcement but, while the High Court upheld deportation orders for this family in 2012, they went “off the radar” in the asylum process but continued to be registered with the Department of Social Protection as being employed here for much of the time before re-engaging with the immigration process in 2015. It was not suggested the State took action to trace them but to do so would not have been difficult, he added.
He said he hoped the International Protection Bill, anticipated to be fully operational by the end of 2016, will result in an “effective”, “coherent, timely, and humane” system.
The judge was among a seven-judge Supreme Court which unanimously refused an application by the State aimed at revising a legal test on foot of which the Malawian couple and their children had secured an injunction, pending appeal, restraining deportation.
The Court of Appeal had granted them an injunction restraining their deportation pending their appeal against a High Court decision dismissing their challenge over being refused subsidiary protection and upholding deportation orders.
In his Supreme Court judgment, Mr Justice Frank Clarke said it was being invited, “once again”, to revisit the criteria for an order which essentially restrains deportations pending final resolution of immigration law proceedings.
He dismissed claims by the State the Court of Appeal had erred in finding the test set out in a 2012 Supreme Court “Okunade” judgment was applicable to the family’s application for an injunction. | 1,267,712 |
IT major Tata Consultancy Service (TCS) has set aside Rs 1,100 crore interest free cash advances as relief for TCS employees in Chennai, which saw one of the worst floods in the last 100 years. The money will be disbursed towards loans to employees, grants and for other purposes.
A few days back, Cognizant announced $40 million (Rs 260 crore) to help residents, its employees and business partners in Chennai, with relief and rehabilitation in the aftermath of the recent flooding.
In a letter to TCS employees in Chennai, N Chandrasekaran, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, said following the devastating flooding in Chennai, many of the employees have suffered significant losses.
To help them recover, rebuild and reboot their lives quickly, TCS has decided to offer various relief measures to all TCSers based in Chennai. TCS will make available up to Rs 1,100 crore for interest free cash advances in the range of Rs 1 lakh and up to a maximum of equivalent to three months Gross Salary. Advances will be disbursed from the week of December 14 to those who apply.
The company has 13 centres in and around Chennai and over 60,000 employees in these centres. Recovery of the advances will start after April 1, 2016 for 12 months and a special Chennai page is being set up on Ultimatix to facilitate this payment process.
In addition, TCS is setting aside Rs 50 crore for direct grants to deserving recipients including employees who have suffered extensive damage to their homes, ex-gratia grant of one month's salary up to a maximum of Rs 15,000 for TCS support and service staff who have been impacted, reimbursement of medical or hospitalisation expenses (over and above TCS medical insurance claims) for those employees and their families who have been impacted directly by the floods.
The company said bus transportation until December 31 will be at no cost to all employees as difficulties with public and personal transportation continue in the aftermath of the flooding
Free Medical camps including help for counselling will be held till December 31.
For immediate relief and rehabilitation in the community, the company TCS has formed a core team, which is working on relief measures for the citizens in Chennai including providing food relief to people in distress, installation of multiple RO Plants to provide fresh potable water in hamlets and communities in need of water, medical camps and assistance including distribution of first aid kits in these areas, distribution of school kits with notebooks and books to children to in these areas
The TCS Foundation will collaborate with partners including the Tata Sustainability Group and NGOs for implementing these projects, he said.
"Many of our colleagues and our support staff have shown the greatest spirit and commitment in these challenging times to display all that is great about this company. We hope these measures will help them and many others get back on their feet quickly and put this traumatic experience behind us, said Chandrasekaran in his letter. | 1,267,713 |
spot on. Still, bad enough that Israel gets demonized for the things it actually does, you have to go and make horrifying fake stuff up?" wrote Allison Kaplan Sommer, an English-language columnist for the Haaretz daily. "Satire or not, I'm afraid the American public is going to be left with the impression, that we are, in fact, gun fans when the truth is our gun control is a million times stricter than in the U.S."
Baron Cohen, 46, no doubt, knows his material. He is an observant Jew who belonged to a Zionist Jewish youth group while in high school in England. Upon graduation he spent a year working and studying on a kibbutz in northern Israel and has since returned for several visits. His fluency in Hebrew and grasp of Israeli politics and culture has found its way into his comedic acts before.
In Borat, the fake Kazakh that his wacky, misogynist and anti-Semitic character speaks is actually Hebrew — a twist that made the 2006 movie a fan-favorite in Israel. The film is filled with Hebrew vulgarities and in one scene Borat sings the lyrics of the legendary Hebrew folk song "Koom Bachur Atzel," meaning "get up lazy boy." Borat's signature catch phrase — "Wa wa wee wa," an expression for wow — derives from a skit on a popular Israeli comedy show.
Three years later, Baron Cohen portrayed Bruno — a flamboyant Austrian fashionista with a Nazi streak — and visited Israel, nearly sparking a riot in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem after strutting down the street in a sexed-up Hassidic outfit. He also comically referred to the chickpea dish "hummus" and the Islamic militant group "Hamas" interchangeably.
Showtime said Baron Cohen was not available for interviews about his new character.
With Moore, who has denied multiple allegations he pursued romantic or sexual relationships toward teenage girls while he was in his 30s, Morad taps into Israel's image as a high-tech nation to introduce its newest gadget — a "pedophile detector" that naturally beeps every time he swipes the wand in front of Moore.
But even that pales in comparison to the humiliation heaped on Jason Spencer, the Georgia state representative. Egged on by Morad, Spencer proceeds to repeatedly shout a racial slur for black people, derogatorily imitates Asian tourists while slipping a selfie-stick between the legs of someone in traditional female Muslim garb and then caps it off by charging at Morad with bared buttocks to incite fear in his homophobic assailant.
Dor Hillel, a 26-year-old former Israeli soldier, said he found the gullibility so astounding it took him a while to figure out what he was watching.
"Apparently these people are so naive that they really think we are like that," he said. "These Americans will believe anything." | 1,267,714 |
BRASILIA (AFP) – A sharp increase in forest destruction in March and April in the Amazon has led Brazil to announce the creation of an emergency task force to fight against deforestation.
The two-month total of 593 square kilometers (368 square miles) deforested represents a six-fold increase compared to the same period last year, according to official statistics.
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The office will be comprised of government experts and representatives of states badly impacted by recent deforestation, according to Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira, who announced the office at a press conference.
“Our goal is to stifle deforestation,” Teixeira said. “And we are going to do it by July.”
In the Amazon state of Mato Grosso alone, 480 square kilometers (298 square miles) of forest were destroyed in two months, according to official statistics based on satellite images. The land is used for cattle and soybean farming.
Teixeira said those responsible for illegal deforesting will have their cattle seized.
Officials in Mato Grosso are investigating how so much land was destroyed in their central-western state, Teixeira added.
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Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country by area, has 5.3 million square kilometers of jungle and forests — mostly in the Amazon river basin — of which only 1.7 million are under state protection. The rest is in private hands, or its ownership is undefined.
Massive deforestation has made Brazil one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.
But the pace of deforestation peaked in 2004 at 27,000 square kilometers a year, and in 2010 it dropped to 6,500 square kilometers.
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The announcement comes as Brazil’s Congress debates a bill that has sparked clashes between environmentalists and supporters of farmers and ranchers over how to regulate the country’s vast but vulnerable wilderness.
At issue is a reform of the 1965 law regulating forestry. The current law forces land owners that have forest on their property to keep part of it intact.
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A reform is being pushed by Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector, which is chafing under the country’s strict environmental rules.
Brazil is a major world exporter of grains — including wheat, rice and corn — as well as soybeans, coffee and beef, and posted record exports worth $80 billion over the past 12 months, according to recent government figures.
The government hopes the proposed reform would force private owners to re-forest land they have already destroyed.
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Debate has created splits across the political spectrum, and President Dilma Rousseff’s control over her party on the issue appears in question.
Rousseff pledged during her campaign to make no concessions that would result in further deforestation or threaten Brazil’s international environmental commitments. | 1,267,715 |
MANILA - Isa pang "person of interest" sa masaker sa San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan ang pinagbabaril ng mga hindi pa nakikilalang salarin Miyerkoles ng umaga.
Kinilala ang biktima na si Rosevelth Sorima, na unang nakapanayam ng ABS-CBN News at itinanggi ang kanyang koneksiyon sa pagpatay sa mag-iina.
Ayon kay Rosario, ina ng biktima, nagluluto ng tanghalian sa kanilang bahay sa Northridge Royale Subdivision sa San Jose del Monte nang pasukin sila ng 2 armado't nakamaskarang lalaki.
Giit ni Aling Rosario, walang kinalaman ang kanyang anak sa masaker at lagi siyang sumasama sa imbestigasyon ng pulisya kapag siya ay pinapatawag.
"Bakit naman po ginanoon ang anak ko na wala pong kasalanan? Palagi naman pong iniimbitahan ng mga pulis. Sabi nila wala naman daw nang problema 'yun," aniya.
Dagdag pa ng ina, agad itinakbo sa ospital ang kanyang anak pero sa balitang nakarating sa kanya ay binawian na ito ng buhay. Kinukumpirma na ng news team ang lagay ng biktima.
#TVPatrol Isa sa limang persons of interest sa masaker ng limang tao sa Bulacan, nangangamba sa kanyang kaligtasan | ulat ni @dolandcastro pic.twitter.com/UXpBPBmqZ4 — TV Patrol (@TVPatrol) July 4, 2017
Kahapon, natagpuan namang patay ang isa pang person of interest sa masaker na si alyas Inggo. Natagpuan itong walang t-shirt, napupuluputan ng pump belt ang leeg at may mga saksak.
Hinihinalang pinatay sa sakal sa pamamagitan ng pump belt si alyas "Inggo." Doland Castro, ABS-CBN News
Isang alyas Tony naman, isa ring person of interest, na dati nang lumutang sa pulisya ang hindi mahagilap ngayon, habang si Alvin Mabesa naman ay dinukot at hindi pa nakikita. Ulat ni Doland Castro, ABS-CBN News | 1,267,716 |
’s Congressional rule.
Ros-Lehtinen, the all time Congressional record holder for all manner of anti-Arab congressional initiatives’ over the past two decades. Yesterday she called for all Members of Congress to sign her latest letter to President Obama opposing his administration’s proposed $60 billion arms deal to Saudi Arabia, by the end of business on 11/6/10. Ros-Lehtinen is also expected to renew her call to cut off all aid to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. She has also expressed her intention to maintain what are essentially US sanctions against Lebanon by extending her predecessor Howard Berman’s ban on grants to the Lebanese Armed Forces until Hezbollah is disarmed to prevent it from benefiting from the military aid.
Other key committees chairmanships held by Israel loyalists are believed here to mean an even stronger choke hold on the US government starting January.
One Palestinian student who used to live in Nahr al Bared Camp near Tripoli before it was destroyed in 2007, explained how Cantor has already drawn pro-Israel skeptical reaction with his proposal that American assistance to Israel be taken out of the annual foreign aid bill and be passed separately, on its own. Cantor’s thinking is that, given his party’s intention to heavily cut foreign aid, he wants Israel’s annual $ 3 billion US taxpayer gift to remain untouched even as foreign aid to other nations get slashed. Some pro-Israel lobbyists worry that Cantor’s “going public” with his plan may result in the American public noticing how much aid Israel gets and begin to wonder why Israel’s aid is so sacrosanct. Voters might notice that Israel has received more foreign aid from the United States than any other country since World War II, according to a recent report compiled by the Congressional Research Service.
Voters may begin to learn about and perhaps even question the fact that over the years, multiple lobbying efforts have added countless perks to Israel’s special aid package such that Israel is the only recipient allowed to spend a portion of its military aid on purchases within Israel itself. Usually this kind of aid is designed for procurement of American-made weapon systems. Israel also receives its aid in the first month of the fiscal year as a deposit in an interest-bearing account. Aid to all other recipients is spread out throughout the year.
The Lebanese students verdict on the 2010 US midterm election:
Netanyahu and Israel won again.
Obama and America lost again.
Source: Saturday Mideast Report, BEIRUT ( Al-ManarTV :: News )
Franklin Lamb is doing research in Lebanon. He can be contacted c/o [email protected]
Related Video:
Norman Finkelstein – Hezbollah, the Honour of Lebanon
[youtube bDe65-nF3FQ]
Author Details Author Details G M This is a general posting account for VT | 1,267,717 |
coup d'etat, due to the obsessive efforts of the Venezuelan right, the Colombian oligarchy and the US empire," he said. He accused "imperialist" forces of seeking "to attack and overthrow a legitimate government to enslave Venezuela." Hide Caption 22 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Guaido, center, appears before reporters and photographers outside the airbase in Caracas. To his right is opposition activist Leopoldo Lopez, who is essentially his predecessor. Hide Caption 23 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Lopez raises his fist to a crowd of supporters in Caracas on April 30. Lopez is meant to be on house arrest, but he said on Twitter that he was released by the military. Hide Caption 24 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis People who oppose Maduro confront troops who were firing tear gas at them outside the La Carlota airbase on April 30. Hide Caption 25 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Maduro opponents face off with Maduro loyalists in armored vehicles. Hide Caption 26 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Opposition demonstrators help an injured man near the airbase. Hide Caption 27 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis A handgun belonging to a soldier is seen on the ground, along with bullets. Hide Caption 28 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis An opposition demonstrator throws back a tear-gas canister. Hide Caption 29 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis A water cannon in sprayed on Maduro opponents in Caracas on April 30. Hide Caption 30 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Soldiers who oppose Maduro's government take cover on an overpass. Hide Caption 31 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Military members loyal to Maduro run under a cloud of tear gas after being repelled with rifle fire from pro-Guaido military members on April 30. Hide Caption 32 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Opposition demonstrators prepare Molotov cocktails during clashes with soldiers loyal to Maduro. Hide Caption 33 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Soldiers who have joined Guaido's cause take position during clashes with Maduro loyalists in Caracas. Hide Caption 34 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis A pro-Guaido military member throws a tear-gas canister during a confrontation with guards loyal to Maduro. Hide Caption 35 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Opposition supporters march near the airbase. Hide Caption 36 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis A woman affected by tear gas is aided by fellow opponents of Maduro. Hide Caption 37 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis A person opposed to the Maduro government returns a tear-gas canister to the pro-Maduro soldiers who launched it. Hide Caption 38 of 39 Photos: In photos: Venezuela in crisis Military members gesture near the airbase. The blue armbands were worn in solidarity to the opposition. Hide Caption 39 of 39
Read More | 1,267,718 |
The mainstream media doesn’t understand pro-life Americans. They think you’re either stupid, uninformed, or some bizarre religious troglodyte opposing progress to satiate a deep lust for misogyny. Nowhere was this more evident than in Thursday morning’s bizarre tag team effort between the hosts on MSNBC Live with Velshi and Ruhle:
RUHLE: Teenagers in Europe and the United States, data will tell you, have the same sexual habits. Now, the care they're given, what they're provided in Europe is significantly more than we have here. And teen pregnancies are three times the amount here than they are in Europe. So it is about education and prevention, simply isn't, well, Planned Parenthood is where you head over for an abortion.
First, as The Week's socially conservative correspondent Matthew Walther asks, is there some ethereal “golden mean of fornication that is part of the fabric of reality itself?” Are the “sexual habits” of the American populous that Ruhle cites some immutable phenomenon predestined to a particular incidence? Or do people have agency? No matter- Ruhle points to the godless socialism of Europe as the panacea.
Second, Planned Parenthood is in fact where one “head[s] over for an abortion.” It’s the nation’s largest abortion provider, and it provides about one-third of U.S. abortions. Planned Parenthood’s abortion to adoption referral ratio is 113:1. The organization has been a tried and true opponent of banning partial-birth abortions, a procedure described below by NRLC:
“[A] procedure in which the abortionist pulls a living baby feet-first out of the womb and into the birth canal, except for the head, which the abortionist purposely keeps lodged just inside the cervix. The abortionist punctures the base of the baby’s skull with a surgical instrument, such as a long surgical scissors or a pointed hollow metal tube called a trocar. He then inserts a catheter into the wound, and removes the baby's brain with a powerful suction machine. This causes the skull to collapse, after which the abortionist completes the delivery of the now-dead baby.”
Of course pro-life Americans would be livid that their hard-earned tax dollars are going to support such an organization. And when Ali Velshi proceeds to break down for the audience what exactly Planned Parenthood does besides abortion, he misses the point- these services have been reliably provided by community health centers, and it doesn’t matter to pro-lifers what else Planned Parenthood does. To us, this is how that logic sounds. Trump has already challenged Planned Parenthood- give up the abortions, and we’ll significantly increase your funding. The response was, predictably, no.
Read the full June 22nd transcript below: | 1,267,719 |
He said he plans to hold regular radio chats with the country on Sundays at 11 am.
11.13 am: I am really glad to chat with you. Convey to me your ideas and I will share it on my next 'Mann ki Baat'.
I am really happy to be talking to you on the Radio. I can reach all of you through Radio, especially our poor, the villages: PM — PMO India (@PMOIndia) >October 3, 2014
11.12 am: Will meet you again on Sunday at 11 am, PM Modi says.
Today is the start. In future too I will keep talking to you on the Radio. It will be on a Sunday at 11:00 AM: PM >@narendramodi — PMO India (@PMOIndia) >October 3, 2014
11.11 am: "Come let's all serve for the country. Send me your suggestions and I will take it."
11.10 am: This is the people's country. Everyone should suggest for the development: PM Modi
This nation belongs to everyone. It is important for people to be a part of the development journey: PM >@narendramodi — PMO India (@PMOIndia) >October 3, 2014
11: 09 am: Many contact me through email, twitter and other social media. A suggestion on Twitter: Some special schems should be made for Specially abled child in corporations and other government
11: 07 am: Modi talks about the 'Clean India' campaign.
Let us pledge to affirm to remove dirt. Yesterday we began the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan & I want you all to join this Abhiyaan: PM — PMO India (@PMOIndia) >October 3, 2014
11: 05 am: Follow Gandhi, buy khadi products, says Modi
If you buy Khadi you light the lamp of prosperity in the house of a poor person: PM >@narendramodi — PMO India (@PMOIndia) >October 3, 2014
11: 05 am: We have great strength. we need to identify our strength
We have to understand ourselves better and integrate our strengths. We are not lacking in strength: PM >@narendramodi — PMO India (@PMOIndia) >October 3, 2014
Modi's interaction on Radio
Looking forward to sharing my thoughts on the Radio shortly. Join the programme. >http://t.co/qbnNpEbZdd — Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) >October 3, 2014
10: 50 am: Prasar Bharati has made arrangements for the broadcast to be made available across the Medium Wave, Short Wave and FM networks of AIR, Vividh Bharati and local radio stations which together reached 99.2 per cent of the country’s population. | 1,267,720 |
We know what the immediate future for the Ford Mustang looks like—a new Shelby GT500 later this year, and not too long after, a hybrid version. But the long-term plan for the Mustang is a little murkier. Automobile reports that we haven't heard a whole lot about a new Mustang because it's actually quite far away. An anonymous source speaking to the magazine said that a truly all-new Mustang might not arrive until the 2026 model year, while another guessed that it might not be until 2028 or 2029.
In the interim, Ford will reportedly roll out a heavily revised version of the current S550-generation Mustang with new bodywork. The Mustang hybrid was supposed to arrive with this mid-cycle refresh in 2020, though Automobile says it's been delayed to early 2022 now.
According to Automobile, the next Mustang—which is codenamed S650—will ride on Ford's new rear-drive CD6 platform, which underpins the new Explorer and Lincoln Aviator. Since this is an SUV platform, the Mustang will likely grow in size, potentially coming closer to the dimensions of the current Dodge Challenger.
DW Burnett/Puppyknuckles
So, what's with the long lifecycle for the Mustang? After all, hasn't the current S550 Mustang been around since 2014?
Well, as Automobile points out, this sort of thing isn't uncommon for sports coupes like the Mustang. Cars like this are expensive develop, and don't sell in huge numbers anymore, which means automakers have to stretch every dollar out of their platforms. Just look at the current Dodge Challenger, which has been around since 2008, and whose bones date back to the mid 2000s. Despite its age, Dodge doesn't seem to have a new Challenger in the works, and arguably, it doesn't need one since the car still sells relatively well. And just last month, we learned that Porsche is keeping the current 718 Cayman and Boxster around until 2023 or so.
Plus, Ford is investing heavily in electrification and autonomous car tech, so things like the Mustang get pushed further down the priority list.
This sort of thing isn't without precedent in the Mustang world, either. The Fox-platform Mustang debuted for 1979, received a heavy refresh and became the "SN95" for 1994 and stuck around until 2004. Plus, the last-generation Mustang was in production for around ten years.
So while waiting until at least 2026 for an all-new Mustang seems crazy at first, it actually makes a lot of sense. And at the very least, we should be glad that Ford is keeping the Mustang around as it switches its focus away from cars and towards crossovers, SUVs and trucks.
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 | 1,267,721 |
always stick in my mind was crossing the border and being separated from my mother, and being lost in the desert for a whole day, with nothing," she said. "No water, no food."
Luckily, Border Patrol agents found Fér, and gave her and her companions water and food before returning them to Mexico. She later reunited with her mother and father, and eventually traveled to Minnesota.
"One of the things that I want people to understand is that our parents shouldn't be demonized for bringing us here," she said. "Our parents wanted something better for us. And they wanted us to have the opportunities that they didn't have. Unfortunately, with DACA being where it's at right now, a lot of us feel that we have to go back into the shadows."
Xiong, 32, was born in France, but his parents are from Laos. The family came to Minnesota in 1995, with visas, but those expired.
"They tried to deport us, and they couldn't, so they gave us permission to stay," he said.
Xiong, 32, is a "Dreamer" who was born in France, and is ethnically Hmong, and agreed to speak if identified by first name only. Doualy Xaykaothao | MPR News
Neither France nor Laos would take the family back because of political wrangling at the time. France had colonized Laos in years past, and there were also repercussions from the Vietnam War. Neither country would recognize his family as citizens. As in other regions still reeling from civil wars, many ethnic minority groups were left stateless.
For Xiong, who had been checking in with immigration officials since high school, DACA was a temporary relief.
"I always had to report in at the INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] every week, every month... and then they finally told me every two or three months," he said. "When there was DACA, I didn't have to report in anymore, so it was kind of like freedom."
"I'm hoping that one day, I'll be able to travel without having to worry," Xiong said. "It hurts when I hear people talk about other people, that they should go back to their country, when I can't. I have no country."
Xiong speaks French, Spanish and English fluently. He wants to finish college and become a psychologist. Fér speaks Spanish, Italian, French and English. She wants to go into international business. And Daisy is relearning Swahili, her native language, and wants to be either a teacher or an attorney.
Like other "Dreamers," they say if Congress doesn't pass legislation to protect them, those dreams will have to be deferred.
Editor's note (Sept. 20, 2017): This article has been edited to more specifically state that information is lacking about the ethnic or racial breakdown of DACA recipients in Minnesota. | 1,267,722 |
unaware of them; Prometheus does this with a separate index, for example. The general pattern is that queries across dimensions first lookup the appropriate keys in an index (LevelDB for Prometheus), identify the series' involved, and then joins are done across those series by a query engine that supports all sorts of other aggregations.
It is perhaps at this level that some kind of cooperation would really bear fruit; some of the real world cardinalities I've seen makes me think it's unlikely related series could always be stored near each other on disk, but making them happen at least on one node is a distinct possibility.
In a dimension-aware store, the indexes involved in these queries will either point to tuples stored across potentially vast sectors of unrelated data, or contain the data themselves and be both enormous and slow to write to. While SSDs might smooth this, they still perform best when reading whole pages; locality still matters.
I suspect it will remain faster to do 1000 highly optimised reads than to do these kinds of ranges at scale.
I think there may be some clever maths to be discovered or combined here to save us from some of this madness, and do for time-series what HyperLogLog does for counting or what Bloom-Filters do for set membership, but I'm not that confident it will be generally useful. Google can get away with these tricks for Google trends, but people generally test TSDBs with known data and will see inaccuracies and query weirdness quickly.
Features like InfluxDB's continuous queries can alleviate this for known high-cardinality joins, but this particular implementation is expensive, and in practice these requirements can generally be aggregated into a single time-series manually without much effort.
Aggregation, Expiry, Etc.
Time-aggregation and data expiry are first-class citizens in round-robin databases, which are still really the open-source standard. There's rrdtool, an old mainstay in the industry, and there's graphite; specifically, its old "whisper" engine.
These have a few significant problems that make them unusable for some. RRDs are constant space, and lots of legitimate time series usage involves a large number of sparse series. Another problem is that it does compaction/aggregation on writes, which causes lots of write amplification.
If you get the basic storage layer right, aggregation and expiry start to look a lot like dimensionality: they can be implemented asynchronously in a separate policy layer. It doesn't seem important that the actual storage engine is mindful of these; in fact, it's probably better ignored for efficiency's sake.
If you are treating a Time-series database as a holistic concept, you'll definitely want some kind of approach to this; there's simply no good way of combining thousands of 1s-resolution series across 6 months that doesn't involve a lot of processing power or waiting quite some time. | 1,267,723 |
20,000 reward for information.
On a Dutch news program, Assange said, “Our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. A 27-year-old that works for the DNC was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons, as he was walking down the street in Washington, D.C.”
In another cryptic tweet on Monday, Assange presciently hinted that someone outside of Wikileaks might identify Rich as the source. Assange also uses the hashtag #SethRich in his tweets about him.
WikiLeaks has never disclosed a source. Sources sometimes talk to other parties but identities never emerge from WikiLeaks. #SethRich — Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) May 22, 2017
Shutting Down Coverage
Last week, the mainstream media attacked the testimony of Rod Wheeler, the private investigator hired by the Rich family. Wheeler had told Fox News that Rich leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks. However, he admitted later that he hadn’t personally seen the evidence. Rather, he came to that conclusion based on comments made by a federal investigator to Fox News. That anonymous source said he had seen the case file and that “44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments between Democratic National Committee leaders, spanning from January 2015 through late May 2016, were transferred from Rich to MacFadyen before May 21.”
Fox News pulled the article on Tuesday. The left is also putting pressure on Fox News and Sean Hannity’s advertisers to stop his ongoing coverage.
Rich’s family has asked people to stop their investigations, calling it conspiratorial. They hired a spokesperson who handles crisis communications for Democrats, Brad Bauman. They suggested pressuring Wikileaks to reveal its evidence of the connection to their son. Strangely, Bauman convinced them not to.
However, in this video, Rich’s parents profusely thank everyone who has been trying to find the murderers.
MSM LIED about #SethRich's parents not wanting coverage. Here's a them ON VIDEO thanking everyone for investigating! pic.twitter.com/TtEBKKDssZ — Democrats for Trump (@YoungDems4Trump) May 21, 2017
A Nathan Rich, who claims to be a cousin of Seth Rich, has been tweeting about the likely connection. In one tweet, he raised his suspicions. Another family member responded and admonished him for the tweet. He deleted it, but it has been archived.
The Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media are trying to shut down the investigative work, labeling it as conspiracy theories. But they don’t control the evidence. At this point, there’s more evidence that the DNC emails were leaked to Wikileaks than that the DNC was hacked by Russia. Congress and the FBI should at least expand their probe to question Assange and Dotcom.
Follow Rachel on Twitter at Rach_IC | 1,267,724 |
Iraq has launched an offensive against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Hawija, Kirkuk province, according to the country's prime minister. The territory is one of the last areas still controlled by the militant group.
"At the dawn of a new day, we announce the launch of the first stage of the liberation of Hawija, in accordance with our commitment to our people to liberate all Iraqi territory and eradicate groups that support terror," Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in a Thursday statement, as quoted by AFP.
READ MORE: Iraq plans to deport wives & children of Islamic State extremists – report
The Iraqi Army, Federal Police, Rapid Response, and the mainly Shiite Hashd al-Shaabi are taking part in the operation, according to Rudaw. The US-led coalition is providing air support to Iraqi forces, Iraqi state TV reported, as cited by NRT.
Iraq's Joint Operations Command also announced the operation, according to Rudaw.
The operation was confirmed by US Army Colonel Ryan Dillon, spokesperson for Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) - the US-led coalition against IS. He warned that the extremist group "now faces the might of the ISF (Iraqi Security Forces)."
#ISF launch Hawija operations to #defeatDaesh. #ISIS now faces the mighty #ISF the last two areas where they hold any territory in #Iraq. — OIR Spokesman (@OIRSpox) September 21, 2017
Dillon also tweeted on Wednesday that the Iraqi Air Force had dropped leaflets in the area, urging IS to surrender and providing safety instructions for civilians.
Iraqi Air Force dropped 3million leaflets in Hawija/Sharqat/elsewhere: Urging #ISIS surrender & providing safety instructions for civilians — OIR Spokesman (@OIRSpox) September 20, 2017
The US-led coalition has estimated that there are fewer than 1,000 fighters remaining in the Hawija area.
Hawija, located 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Baghdad, is one of the last territories still held by IS extremists, by whom it was captured in June 2014 along with about one-third of the country. The city has a population of about 245,000 and is a mostly Sunni Muslim-inhabited district.
Announcement of the operation comes after Iraqi and coalition planes stepped up airstrikes on Hawija earlier this month, targeting IS bases and weapons facilities.
The Iraqi ambassador to Russia, Haidar Mansour Hadi, had previously expressed optimism about eradicating IS from the country, telling RT in late August that Iraq is "at the very final stages or chapters of closing the terrorism page."
On Sunday, a US-led coalition base in Hawija was attacked by suicide bombers. However, all of the perpetrators were killed before carrying out their mission, and no Iraqi or international personnel were hurt, according to Dillon. | 1,267,725 |
NEW YORK -- Blue Jays right-hander Marcus Stroman likes pitching in the Bronx, and he'd love it even more if he wasn't facing the Bombers.
Asked Monday at Yankee Stadium about trade speculation connecting him and New York, Stroman stopped short of saying he was hopeful for a deal but insisted he could handle the city's notoriously tough stage.
"I love it, New York's like the Mecca of the world," Stroman said. "I love excitement. I love bright lights. I love competition. I love pressure.
"I've always loved pitching here, even though I haven't always pitched fairly well here, I've always enjoyed it. Yankee lineups are brutal. They're hard to kind of navigate. But yeah, I love the spotlight. The bigger the moment, that's where I've always wanted to be," he said.
The 28-year-old Stroman is from Long Island and still has family in the area. He was expecting about 40 family and friends for Monday night's series opener between Toronto and New York, including his brother's youth baseball team, which came early to watch batting practice. Stroman pitched six scoreless innings against the Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday and won't throw during this three-game series.
With the AL East-leading Yankees on the prowl for starting pitching before the July 31 trade deadline, Stroman is a sensible target. He's set to become a free agent after next season and is off to a strong start with a 3.04 ERA. He's just 5-9, but that reflects more on the rebuilding Blue Jays, who came into the day at 31-47.
Stroman is 2-5 with a 6.37 ERA in nine career starts at Yankee Stadium.
The right-hander said the trade talks have been "hard to kind of grasp," but he's had time to let it set in.
"Obviously, it's hard to ignore all the rumors," he said. "I don't think I'm at a point where they're going to sign me long-term. I've kind of come to terms with it, but it's not something I'm thinking about daily."
Asked if he would prefer a trade to New York, Stroman laughed, said "no comment," then elaborated carefully.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't really want to think about it like that just because I have no idea how it's going to play out or where it's going to go. I don't want to get all my eggs in one basket."
He's certain he could handle the Bronx, though.
"I'm built for this," he said. "Anybody can say whatever, but I'm built for the bright lights and the moment. I'm not scared of it. I've never been. I'll take that ball each and every time you put pressure on. I love it." | 1,267,726 |
Eisenhower Dollar: The Perfect Coin to Collect
The Eisenhower dollar is a series of coins minted between 1971 and 1978. Because of the limited duration of production, this is an excellent set of coins to start a collection with since the entire series is relatively easy for you to acquire. You can find a large number of uncirculated Eisenhower silver dollars on eBay for your collection.
The Eisenhower dollar is a series of coins minted between 1971 and 1978. There were no Eisenhower coins stamped with a 1975 date.
Two separate sets of coins were made. Eisenhower dollars intended for circulation were made of base metals. You can also find the collector's edition of the Eisenhower coins, which are 40% silver. Both types of Eisenhower coins are on eBay: the general circulation base metal version and the 40% silver collector's edition.
Most Eisenhower coins picture President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the front and have an image of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission on the reverse. In 1976, a special Eisenhower dollar was minted to celebrate the bicentennial of the American Revolution. For this year only, the coins are marked with the years 1776-1976. They also have a picture of the Liberty Bell rather than the Apollo 11 image on the back.
The Eisenhower silver dollars are typically certified. This means an independent expert has evaluated the coin and graded it. The two major certification companies are Numismatic Guaranty Corporation (NGC) and Professional Coin Grading Service (PCGS). Each company maintains a database of all their certifications; you should check these databases with the serial number of the coin you are interested in to get more information. Generally, certified coins have also been professionally encased in a transparent plastic display box to prevent further damage.
You can find different quality Eisenhower dollars on eBay. Circulation-grade Eisenhower coins typically are in a used condition and are uncertified. They are often sold in lots of 10-100 coins of different years and conditions. You can also find lots consisting of the 1976 bicentennial Ike dollars for sale.
The collector's version of the Eisenhower dollars for sale is generally sold certified and as a single coin. The condition is often excellent since most collectors did not put these coins into circulation.
In addition to the 1976 bicentennial coin, there are a few other notable years of Eisenhower coins.
The 1972 dollar coin produced by the Philadelphia mint exists in three different variations. Of particular note is the Type II 1972 one-dollar coin, which was minted using an incorrect die, and was only used in one production run. This type of Eisenhower dollar is rarer than the others due to the limited production run.
The last Eisenhower dollar was minted in 1978. While the 1978 one-dollar coin is nominally the same as the previous years, the San Francisco Mint introduced a new minting process that year. As a consequence, the 1978 silver dollar, but not the circulation dollar, has a much sharper look than previous years. | 1,267,727 |
Former FBI general counsel James Baker is under criminal investigation for unauthorized leaks to the media.
The development was made public in a letter sent Tuesday to the office of U.S. Attorney John Durham for the District of Connecticut by Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Mark Meadows of North Carolina.
In the letter, the two lawmakers cite the transcript of a congressional interview with Baker and his lawyer in October. “You may or may not know, [Baker has] been the subject of a leak investigation … a criminal leak investigation that’s still active at the Justice Department,” lawyer Daniel Levin told lawmakers, according to the transcript cited by Jordan and Meadows.
Levin then declined to answer any more questions about conversations Baker had with reporters. "As we continue our oversight and investigative work, we felt it prudent to write to you seeking an update. Without being apprised of the contours of your leak investigation and Baker’s role, we run the risk of inadvertently interfering with your prosecutorial plans," Jordan and Meadows wrote.
Baker was appointed FBI general counsel in January 2014 and reassigned by newly appointed director Christopher Wray in December 2017. Jordan and Meadows were part of a House GOP effort investigating how the Justice Department and FBI acted ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The letter comes days after a New York Times reported detailed how senior FBI officials, in the days after former FBI Director James Comey was fired in May 2017, opened an investigation into whether President Trump was working on behalf of Russia.
“Not only would it be an issue of obstructing an investigation, but the obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” Baker said in his testimony to House investigators, portions of which were read to the New York Times.
Politico reported in December 2017 that House Republicans had begun investigating Baker’s contact with Mother Jones reporter David Corn and their communications in the weeks leading up to the November 2016 election.
Corn was the first to report the existence of the Steele dossier, which has unverified allegations of ties between Trump and Russians. The revelation of Durham’s investigation marks the latest confirmation of a leak investigation into former FBI officials.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was fired for lying to federal investigators about his role in an unauthorized media leak pertaining to the Clinton Foundation, and his case was eventually referred to the U.S. attorney in Washington. McCabe resigned and went on paid leave in January 2018, before being fired in March 2018.
Durham is a seasoned prosecutor, who has overseen a handful of high-profile cases. From 2008 to 2012, he served as acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, where he investigated the destruction of CIA videotapes of detainee interrogations. He was also the special attorney in Massachusetts overseeing criminal conduct by FBI and other law enforcement corruption in Boston and their ties with the mafia. | 1,267,728 |
Most of Facebook Inc.’s punishment in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal has come from investors, who wiped out nearly $75 billion in Facebook market value last week. Monday brought a reminder that government action could prove even more expensive, though, and sent shares tumbling again.
The Federal Trade Commission said Monday that it was looking into the company’s privacy practices and was prepared to use “all of its tools” to protect consumer privacy.
“Foremost among these tools is enforcement action against companies that fail to honor their privacy promises, including to comply with Privacy Shield, or that engage in unfair acts that cause substantial injury to consumers,” Tom Pahl, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said in a statement.
See also: Facebook’s current woes exacerbated by six-year-old FTC settlement
Pahl refers to the FTC’s history with Facebook FB, -1.73%, which settled charges in 2011 that alleged the company didn’t adequately protect user privacy. As part of the settlement, Facebook was required to undergo independent assessments of its privacy practices for 20 years and agree to potential penalties for future malfeasance.
The “consent” decree that was issued upon resolution of those charges could mean a penalty of $40,000 per subsequent violation, David Vladeck, a former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, told the Washington Post last week. Vladeck, who was involved in the original decree, cited reports indicating that perhaps 50 million people were affected, which would amount to trillions of dollars in potential fines.
“That’s the maximum exposure, though it’s not clear to me that the agency would insist on that kind of a penalty,” he told the Washington Post.
Should antitrust laws be enforced against the tech giants' monopolies?
A fine of that size is unprecedented, and recent examples have been much smaller in scale. For context, Google GOOGL, -1.44% GOOG, -1.97% was fined $22.5 million for violating privacy violations with Apple Inc.’s AAPL, +3.03% Safari browser back in 2012. Separately, European regulators fined Google parent company Alphabet Inc. €2.4 billion last summer for antitrust violations.
Don’t miss: Why the Facebook controversy could be good for Apple
The consent decree includes two requirements that would likely apply in this case: It bars Facebook from misrepresenting the privacy of users’ information, and requires Facebook to prevent the access of data from anyone who has deleted his or her account, after 30 days. Facebook has pointed at misuse of the data by a researcher who received it and reportedly passed it along to Cambridge Analytica, and pointed out that the political consultant promised to delete the data when Facebook discovered its existence in 2015. | 1,267,729 |
An article appearing in Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper last week that suggested the Irish use potatoes as a form of currency has sparked outrage in the Irish community.
Reporting on the Melbourne Cup horse race, journalist Matt Stewart wrote: “It’s worth $6 million and they swarm from everywhere, from rich countries like Japan to countries offering up not much more than potatoes, like Ireland, to win it.”
Ireland’s Ambassador to Australia Noel White called the piece “deeply offensive.”
“This bizarre remark is at odds with Ireland’s role as a leading player in the global bloodstock industry,” said White. “The Irish horse-racing community enjoys excellent relations, based on mutual respect, with its counterparts here in Australia.
“Beyond that, and more importantly, it is deeply offensive to Irish people and to Australians of Irish descent. Mr Stewart should know better.”
Stewart took to his Twitter account to apologize and explain what he had written.
Read more: Send a potato to your enemies’ business a runaway success
“Apologies to the Irish! Did not mean to offend with ‘potato’ line in M Cup wrap. Only meant economy/race prizemoney struggling! Sorry!,” he wrote.
The Irish Times reports that the horse that won the Melbourne Cup, Protectionist, is part-owned by three Sydney-based Irish families.
Monique Doyle, the daughter of co-owners Fergie and Delia Doyle wrote a letter to Stewart, which was also published in Sydney’s Irish Echo newspaper.
“After being paid a one way ticket to Australia by the Australian government to help boost the economy, [MY PARENTS]have since employed well over 400 people through their businesses started from scratch,” wrote Doyle.
She added: “Your brief Twitter apology did not wash well with the Irish community who deserve much more than that.”
Read more: Why are so many Irish memes still about potatoes and drinking?
Stewart says he is completely taken aback by the uproar over his comment.
“I am extremely surprised by the reaction,” he said in an email. “The ‘potatoes’ reference was an obviously flawed attempt to explain that while Japan’s racing economy is strong, Ireland’s has been devastated by tough economic times.
“The point I was trying to make was that rich or relatively poor racing countries (poor as in stake money not culture) were all chasing the $6 million on offer.
“I am more than comfortable with my clarification and feel any further anger from the Irish community or from anywhere else is disproportionate.
“To suggest the comment was ‘racist’, as some have, via Twitter is to me ludicrous,” he said. | 1,267,730 |
The Palestinian Authority is scaling back the monthly payroll of the Palestinian civil servants, as a result of a cash crunch exacerbated by the Israeli regime’s recent decision to cut about five percent of the tax handovers to the West Bank-based administration over its financial support for jailed resistance fighters.
Speaking at a news conference in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah on Sunday, Palestinian Finance Minister Shukri Bishara said the Palestinian Authority will be paying only half of the wages paid to its employees for the month of February.
He noted that Palestinian civil servants whose salaries are below 2,000 shekels ($550) will receive a full salary for the month, while the rest of the employees will receive 50 percent of their monthly salary for February.
Civil servants earning more than that, including cabinet ministers, will have their wages cut by half, Bishara said.
However, he underlined that prisoners’ families will continue to be paid their full allocations. “No force on earth can alter that,” the Palestinian minister stated.
Bishara said the Palestinian Authority will have to take bank loans of between $50 million to $60 million for the coming five to six months to overcome the crisis.
In mid-February, Israel's cabinet froze about $138 million from within the taxes collected for the Palestinian Authority, stating that the Abbas administration paid the same amount in prisoner stipends in 2018.
“Abu Mazen (Abbas) continues each month to transfer fat salaries to those who are in prison,” Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked told Israel's Hebrew-language Reshet 13 television network. “We must find a way of stopping this money.”
Palestinian authorities condemned the Israeli decision as “piracy.”
“It is an attempt to pressure us and blackmail us,” Wasel Abu Youssef, a senior official with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), commented then. “Even if left with just one dollar, we will pay it to the families of the martyrs, of the prisoners and of the wounded,” he said.
Abbas said the Palestinian Authority would not accept any of the tax revenues, which totaled 700 million shekels ($193 million) in January and account for about half of the authority's budget.
Israel collects funds from imports that reach the occupied West Bank and run the Gaza Strip via Israeli ports, in addition to other taxes, and forwards a large sum of it to the Palestinian Authority, after deduction of payments for water and electricity.
The Palestinian Authority is facing steep aid cuts. US President Donald Trump's administration has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars to humanitarian organizations, including $360 million it used to give to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), in a bid to pressure the Palestinians to re-enter so-called peace talks with Israel that collapsed in 2014. | 1,267,731 |
late, the visual haunts you behind your eyelids. For a long time, my first thought with the show was the moment and each time I thought about it my stomach was left feeling wavy. Even thinking about it now leaves me uneasy.
As for the story itself, it involves a family, a terrible tragedy, and the hiring of an in house nanny. I know the details I’m giving are very vague but I feel the less you know the better the experience. For real. The show thrives off the atmosphere it creates and the tension between the characters and excels in creating something darkly mysterious and deeply emotional. Each episode leaves you wanting to know more and as the series progresses you find yourself maybe not wanting the answers. Sometimes the actual answer is more horrific then any theory and that’s where Servant lands its biggest gut punches. Hitting you with something so plausible that it makes you reassess how you viewed the majority of the characters.
Character is the strength of the show and there are some familiar faces abound. Nell Tiger Free not only has the best name in showbiz but plays the live in nanny. You’ll recognize her as Myrcella from Game of Thrones and her performance is haunting. There’s clearly more than meets the eye here but she plays Leanne both as a fish out of water and someone who is holding more answers than we know. You’ll recognize Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley himself) as he chews up the scenery every time he’s on-screen as the shifty, wine consuming, cigarette smoking, eff bomb dropping, older brother. Toby Kebbell plays the emotionally crushed/stinted husband dealing with tragedy and the shadow of what’s left of his wife. He’s both intense and deeply wounded and Kebbell gives a fantastic performance, but it’s Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under) who steals the show as Dorthy Turner. Ambrose gives us a character who is defiant, is as fragile as cracked glass, and borderline insane. The performance here is layered and emotional and all comes together in “Jericho” as Ambrose is breathtaking. Her performance stays with you long after the episode concludes and that speaks not only to the power of the actor but the show’s ability to wrap you up in the central mystery.
Servant doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to television but not everything you watch should have that type of pressure. Instead, we get ten very engrossing episodes that suck you into this universe and have you begging for more. Luckily the series has already been picked up for season two and after the way it concludes you’ll be almost relieved with this knowledge. There are bigger mysteries afoot and a story that immerses you deeper and deeper with each episode. And with thirty plus minutes per episode, it makes for a quick but lasting binge and more than worthy of a little time in the spotlight. | 1,267,732 |
A former St. Louis police officer pleaded guilty Friday in the shooting death of a fellow cop during a game of Russian roulette, according to a report.
Nathaniel Hendren, 30, pleaded guilty to charges of first-degree involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action for killing off-duty officer Katlyn Alix, 24, in January 2019. The pair had been playing a Russian Roulette-style game with a handgun in his apartment in Carondelet, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
As part of a plea deal with prosecutors, Hendren will serve seven years in prison for manslaughter, as well a three-year sentence for armed criminal action — to be served concurrently. The prison term is the maximum sentence he had faced, the newspaper reports.
“I don’t intend to try and explain anyone else’s hurt or make this day any more about me than it already is,” Hendren said while apologizing to Alix’s relatives in court. “I simply wish to express my sincere remorse to this court and to the family of Katlyn Alix, a wonderful woman full of tenacity and self-determination.”
Hendren, who had been set to go on trial next month, left the department less than one month after the shooting. The disgraced cop’s state peace officer license was suspended, meaning he was no longer able to work in law enforcement, according to the newspaper.
Court records cited by the Post-Dispatch indicated that Hendren removed bullets from a revolver before putting one back in the handgun. He then allegedly spun the cylinder, pointed it away and pulled the trigger.
The weapon didn’t fire, leading Alix to take the firearm and point it at Hendren before she pulled the trigger with the same result. Hendren then took the gun back, pulled the trigger and struck Alix in the chest, court records show.
Hendren and his on-duty partner, Patrick Riordan, reported the shooting on their police radios before rushing Alix — a married, two-year veteran — to the hospital in their department SUV.
Riordan, who was not charged in the fatal shooting, told investigators that he warned the pair that they should not be playing with a gun.
Hendren, meanwhile, did not fire the weapon believing that a round was in its active cylinder position, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner told the newspaper in a statement.
“Although there is nothing that the law can do to restore the life of officer Alix, it can make sure that the person responsible for her senseless death is held accountable for his careless behavior,” Gardner said in the statement.
Alix’s mother, meanwhile, filed a wrongful death lawsuit in November claiming that Hendren had a “complicated psychiatric history” and previously forced other girlfriends to play Russian roulette, the Post-Dispatch reported. | 1,267,733 |
player decisions are being made. This helped the world feel more real, and raised the stakes that teammate permadeath didn’t raise on its own. All in all, there’s a lot of game to go through, with quests being long enough to remain engaging, but rarely seemed to drag on.
Weapons abound in the wasteland, but besides guns, there are also an array of melee weapons to use as well, though I preferred the pew-pew. Notable upon the Director’s Cut‘s original release was the addition of the Precision Strike system, which of course returns for the Switch iteration. This allows the player to target individual limbs or armor, in order to prevent the enemy from using said limb, which can turn the tide in your favor, as it did for me on numerous occasions. It very much reminded me of the VATS system in the 3D Fallout titles by Bethesda, and I hope to see something similar in future installments of the Wasteland series as well.
From a presentation standpoint, the game is nothing to write home about, unfortunately. The graphics were serviceable, especially when playing undocked, but it’s hard not to notice the flaws when playing on the TV. This isn’t a problem that is exclusive to the Switch version, as the original console releases weren’t especially praised for their graphics. The color palette used is appropriate for the setting, and everything ran smoothly, but it definitely didn’t impress me in the visuals department.
The music, on the other hand, was sublime. It was mostly ambient noise between conflicts, but it still managed to hit the right chord. Once conflict arose, it picked up, and set the pace and tension perfectly. It makes sense, as composer Mark Morgan was the same who did the music for the first two Fallout titles, themselves isometric RPGS at the time, so he has plenty of experience with barren wastelands and grizzled survivors to set the tone for.
This is most assuredly a game to sink your teeth into. It offers dozens of hours of classic RPG story, with a turn-based gameplay that has just enough strategy to make it through the campaign. The presentation is a mixed bag, with dated visuals set to a great and fitting score, but the option to play on the go alleviates some of the complaints. Anyone looking for a solid throwback to the RPG days of yore will find plenty to love in this title. If you’ve never played an entry in the genre, this is the place to start, and the version to start with in my opinion, as it can be enjoyed anywhere, with no sacrifice in quality.
If you’re ready to throw down in the wasteland with the Rangers, Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut is available on the Nintendo Switch on September 13th, and available now for PS4 and Xbox One for $39.99, and Steam for $29.99. | 1,267,734 |
Today's question: Who will be the division MVP?
Jeremy Fowler, Pittsburgh Steelers: A.J. Green. Even if the Bengals fall short of the playoffs, here's to feeling Green has a Hello World, 1,500-yard season despite double teams and the offense's emphasis on runnning (in 2014, Andy Dalton's attempts dropped from 586 to 481). Green is in a contract year; he's much better than his injury-riddled, 69-catch performance from a year ago; and naturally he will explode after I just picked Antonio Brown as the AFC North's best receiver. Green will take his spot back as one of the game's two or three best at the position. Coordinator Hue Jackson's offense accentuates the intermediate-to-deep passing game, so Green must be a focal point along with Jeremy Hill and Gio Bernard in the backfield. Dalton's averages of nearly 3,800 passing yards and 26 touchdowns since 2012 are adequate enough for Green to get his. Dalton's career-low 19 touchdowns last season should rise with a healthy Green, who's about to get his money.
Coley Harvey, Cincinnati Bengals: Pittsburgh probably has more legitimate contenders for division MVP among Ben Roethlisberger, Le'Veon Bell and Brown. We'll go with Brown. A year after he led the league in receiving yards, don't be surprised if he does it again. A dynamic player on offense and special teams, he's a constant threat to score. Beyond him, Bell might deserve consideration -- as could Cincinnati's Hill or Green.
Jamison Hensley, Baltimore Ravens: Roethlisberger. He's the leader for an offense that could become the most explosive in the NFL. Roethlisberger has Brown on the outside, Heath Miller over the middle and Bell out of the backfield. Plus, he can go deep to Markus Wheaton and Martavis Bryant. The Steelers hit their stride in the final 10 weeks of the regular season, when Roethlisberger led the league in passing yards (3,094) and tied for the NFL lead in touchdown passes (22). There will be even more pressure on Pittsburgh to score points with a defense in transition. The Steelers are going to rely on Roethlisberger to carry them unlike in any other previous season. These aren't the Steel Curtain Steelers. This is Roethlisberger's team.
Pat McManamon, Cleveland Browns: As Roethlisberger goes, so go the Steelers. Roethlisberger has been going well for years, and lately he's been going better than ever. Roethlisberger is the division's best quarterback and its most important player for his team. He threw for nearly 5,000 yards last season. He has tremendous weapons around him. Bell will miss three games to suspension, but the Steelers have shown they can adapt. With Roethlisberger at the helm, the Steelers could have the league's best offense. He will be the AFC North MVP. | 1,267,735 |
first several bytes are cleared.
void MD5_Final( MD5_CTX *ctx, unsigned char digest[16] ) {.... memset( ctx, 0, sizeof( ctx ) );
The diagnostic message:
..\Doom3\id-Software-DOOM-3-a9c49da
eo\idlib\hashing\MD5.cpp(252):
Using size of pointer ctx, instead of size of its data.
Sample 3. The Doom 3 project
Memory is allocated as if for an array of items, but released as if it was allocated for only one item. The correct operation is [] sortIndex.
void idImageManager::PrintMemInfo( MemInfo_t *mi ) { int *sortIndex;.... sortIndex = new int[images.Num()];.... delete sortIndex;
The diagnostic message:
..\Doom3\id-Software-DOOM-3-a9c49da
eo\renderer\Image_init.cpp(2214)
Mismatching allocation and deallocation: sortIndex
Sample 4. The Quake 3: Arena project
An array consists of three items, but it is handled as if it contained four items.
void RB_CalcColorFromOneMinusEntity( unsigned char *dstColors ) {... unsigned char invModulate[3];... invModulate[0] = 255 - backEnd.currentEntity->e.shaderRGBA[0]; invModulate[1] = 255 - backEnd.currentEntity->e.shaderRGBA[1]; invModulate[2] = 255 - backEnd.currentEntity->e.shaderRGBA[2]; invModulate[3] = 255 - backEnd.currentEntity->e.shaderRGBA[3]; // this trashes alpha, but the AGEN block fixes it
The diagnostic message:
..\Quake3\id-Software-Quake-III-Arena-dbe4ddb\code\renderer\tr_shade_calc.c 628
Array 'invModulate[3]' index 3 out of bounds
Sample 5. The Quake 3: Arena project
The function printf() prints two numbers, but passes three parameters. Either one parameter is unnecessary, or the format string is incorrect.
static void do_uid(int x) { printf("<a href='#%d'>%d</a>", x, x, x); }
The diagnostic message:
..\Quake3\id-Software-Quake-III-Arena-dbe4ddb\lcc\src\2html.c 131
printf format string has 2 parameters but 3 are given
References | 1,267,736 |
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Thousands of refugees fleeing fighting between the army and armed groups in the central Democratic Republic of Congo have sought refuge in overcrowded villages across the border in Angola, the United Nations said on Friday.
More than 11,000 refugees have fled Kasai-Central province amid clashes between local militias and Congolese forces that started last August, with some 9,000 arriving since the start of this month, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said.
Refugees, about half of whom are children, are arriving in Angola in desperate conditions, many of them malnourished, sick and fearful for their lives amid reports of civilians being targeted, UNHCR said.
“Refugees are arriving in desperate conditions, without access to clean water, food or shelter,” the agency’s spokesman, Babar Baloch, told reporters in Geneva.
Refugees reported fleeing attacks from militia groups, who are targeting police, military officials and civilians who they believe are supporting or representing the government, Baloch said.
Some of the refugees have had to hide in the forest for days in their bid to reach safety in Angola, Congo’s southern neighbor, UNHCR said.
The latest violence in the central African country, a tinder box of conflicts over land, ethnicity and minerals, has worsened since security forces killed the leader of the Kamuina Nsapu militia.
The killing has sparked a rebellion against security forces in the impoverished Kasai region.
Fighting in Kasai has resulted in more than 400 deaths and displaced more than one million, with the United Nations identifying 40 mass graves.
Angolan authorities said on Wednesday they were reinforcing security patrols along the border with Congo in order to keep the militias from infiltrating their territory, local media reported.
The refugees would be treated humanely, police chief Ambrósio de Lemos was quoted as saying.
For those still caught between warring parties, the suffering endured by children was particularly worrying, the U.N.’s children (UNICEF) agency said.
Some 2,000 children in Kasai had been enrolled by the militias as child soldiers and another 300 had been seriously injured, it said.
“They should be safe in their homes... not forced to fight on the battle field and killed or injured in violence,” UNICEF representative Tajudeen Oyewale told reporters.
Late last month, the United Nations renewed its peacekeeping mission in the country, which currently counts nearly 17,000 soldiers deployed on the ground.
Still, analysts fear growing violence could spark a repeat of the conflicts between 1996-2003, mostly in the east, in which millions died, mainly from hunger and disease.
President Joseph Kabila’s failure to step down when his two-term mandate expired in December has further destabilized the loosely governed country. | 1,267,737 |
—central region balancing Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is a tough nut to crack. For a faith outreach director it would probably be best to do little more than the ordinary outreach to keep things close in the York-Lancaster-Harrisburg corridor, and try like hell to turn out the Philadelphia suburbs. Expect a lot of stops at mainline churches on the Main Line.
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North Carolina: Second only to Florida on this list for social complexity, but one thing is for certain: at 73% approval for Trump, North Carolina’s white evangelicals aren’t going anywhere. Religiously, the most likely scenario for a Trump loss is an exceptional GOTV effort by William Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign—North Carolina being his old stomping ground, of course. In a secular sense, it will come down to whether Democrats could motivate the highly-educated voters of the Research Triangle. If they could keep the Baptists at home and turn out students on the numerous college campuses, Trump would be in trouble.
Arizona: Like Florida, Arizona has a high percentage of religiously unaffiliated citizens: nearly half say they belong to no faith, or are “nothing in particular.” Combined with a low approval among Catholics (36%), this leaves an opening for Democrats. If they’re smart, Democratic organizers will spend a lot of time organizing Latino Catholics and reminding the unaffiliated of Trump’s love for the authoritarian former Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Wisconsin: You don’t know how much it pains me to report that of all the swing states, my own is the one with the highest support for the president (45%). Wisconsin has been balanced on a knife’s edge in recent years with the urban cores in Madison and Milwaukee falling into the Democratic column, and the conservative suburban WOW (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) counties going Red. Some of those heavily Catholic suburbs have been hesitant in their embrace of Trump, however. The trick here will be to drive Trump’s negatives up in those areas while keeping his opponent’s positives up in the cities. Best case scenario for Dems would be fore Bernie Sanders to win the nomination, thereby automatically scooping up the Prius vote in Madison, followed by a visit with the liberal Archbishop Cupich in Chicago. Trump would be infuriated and pick a fight with Cupich; Pope Francis would come to his defense, Waukesha voters would be disgusted, and that would be that.
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That’s a silly scenario, of course, but the serious point is that none of these states is a sure thing for Trump; 45% approval is enough to win re-election, but it’s not great. For what it’s worth, my thoroughly unscientific prediction is that Democrats will take back Michigan and Pennsylvania, with a good shot at North Carolina and Arizona. Florida and Wisconsin? Maybe God knows. I sure don’t. | 1,267,738 |
The important factor in the recent protests, and why they did not resemble the fight against tyranny Trump tried to portray in his tweets, is the dog that did not bark. The urban dissident voices did not join the populist call for economic justice. Why? First, urbanites, as note by the economist Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, have been the main beneficiaries of President Hassan Rouhani’s economic liberalization policies, like his talk of moderation, and have been the main backers of his pursuit of a nuclear deal. They had expected that the deal would end Iran’s international isolation, yield economic benefits, and also improve the political climate at home.
They saw in Rouhani an orderly path to change. Many among these urbanites actually feared that the protests could lead to chaos, or tilt Iranian politics in favor of their nemesis, the populist demagogue and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Without Tehran joining the protests, they never really posed an existential threat to the Islamic Republic. No regime is truly threatened unless it loses control of its urban areas, and most important among them, its capital city. Iran’s security forces were not organized to contain protests across a large number of small cities, and so were caught unprepared. Even so, without Tehran, the security forces could afford to think of the protests as small fires that would eventually burn themselves out—as they appear to have done.
Until and unless the urban middle classes and the poor join in common cause—as they did in 1979—there will be no revolution. And in this calculus of stability, it is more important to keep Tehran and the major urban centers happy. It is no coincidence that in his first public statement on the protests, the Commander of the Revolutionary Guards tied the protesters to former President Ahmadinejad, hinting that he was being investigated for his role in the disturbances.
But it’s not just fears of a Jacobin uprising that have kept Tehran quiet; it’s also Rouhani’s political promise. Rouhani won presidential elections twice, in 2012 and 2015, both times owing to his popularity with urban middle classes—and his firm hold on Tehran’s vote. The protests showed that he is not popular with the poor, but that Tehran’s middle-class urbanites don’t share the same degree of dissatisfaction. If stability depends on Tehran, then the protests have only strengthened Rouhani’s political position.
Indeed, Rouhani’s agenda favors Tehran. He has cut subsidies while also raising fuel prices; he has failed to tackle corruption; and has fallen short on delivering on promises of an economic bonanza to follow the nuclear deal. Details of the budget were made public for the first time in December, causing an uproar on social media. Rouhani had hoped that transparency would show that his hands were tied, and that he was not free to divert funding from security forces and religious establishments to entitlement programs. But this did not spare him the wrath of the protesters. | 1,267,739 |
you’ll get to the reality.
All this noise regarding Lack’s downfall towards the end of last season doesn’t necessarily do justice, when looking at the larger body of work. Even the dwindling sanity of a certain nameless bench boss couldn’t be put into question when looking at his reasoning for the switch from Roberto Luongo to Eddie Lack. There’s something to be said for that.
Logistically speaking, it was a disaster. Take out contractual factors and the feelings that we all too often associate as necessary stepping stones in management-player relationships and ask yourself which goaltender performed better going into that game? The answer is Eddie Lack.
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2014-2015 Outlook
Interestingly enough, Lack enters this season in the exact same position he was in yesteryear. The circumstances are considerably different, but at the end of the day he’s a backup again. The departure from a Lack and Markstrom tandem this season has implications beyond stripping the job away from Lack, who at 26 years of age could very well be ready to start.
Consider the dearth of goal scorers that were on this team last season and all the funds that could have been allocated to fixing that. Then consider for a moment that the Canucks could have entered this season with less than $3 million tied up in goaltending. Here’s Drance again, on what once seemed like an inevitability:
Lack and Markstrom are both signed through next season, on one-way deals that combine for a $2.35 million cap-hit. Consider that, in the 2012-13 season, the Canucks’ two goaltenders (Cory Schneider and Luongo) combined for a $9.33 million cap-hit. So should the Canucks wood with their Brynas tandem of Lack and Markstrom next season, it would represent a significant departure in the club’s approach to goaltending.
Just imagine, for a second, how much confidence you might have in the Canucks prospects of making the playoffs had they addressed the gaping second-line center gap, rather than the unnecessarily attended to goaltending?
For Lack, I think a lot of this season will be spent showcasing his abilities to land a starting gig again elsewhere. I’d hardly say he did anything to lose his job this season, especially to a goaltender that actually performed worse last season. How happy do you think Lack is about that?
Projecting goaltender talent, though, is a fickle matter no matter the subject. I could realistically see any one of three scenarios playing out. One of which, involves Lack regaining the starting job in net. The others involve trades at varying points in the season. And if the unpredictability of single-season save percentage has proven anything over these years, it’s that circumstance based, rather than performance based, projections are the wisest to make when forecasting goaltenders.
| 1,267,740 |
Measures to control emissions had positive results, experts say
Since an orange alert for air pollution took effect on Saturday, Beijing has adopted a raft of emergency measures to meet the smog challenge head-on.
On Saturday and Sunday, the city's housing and urban-rural development authorities investigated more than 2,000 construction sites, finding that 62 of the sites did not sufficiently improve pollution controls. Those sites were ordered to make corrections.
Also over the weekend, the city's transport authorities handed down punishments in 3,078 cases involving the illegal operation of trucks carrying construction materials. More than 1,500 high-emitting vehicles that were planning to enter Beijing were turned back.
The Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center said the capital will see pollution peak on Monday, and air quality is expected to improve starting on Tuesday night under the influence of a cold front.
Last week, the Ministry of Environmental Protection forecast that Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei province and neighboring regions would see slight to severe air pollution from Nov 4 to 8.
The orange alert that took effect on Saturday covered Beijing, Tianjin and some cities in Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong and Henan provinces. Orange is the second-highest level in the alert system.
Air quality usually worsens in late autumn and winter in northern China due in part to less wind and increased emissions from heating sources.
Despite the orange alert, air pollution in most parts of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region proved less severe than expected, according to the ministry.
Wang Zifa, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Atmospheric Physics, said a major reason the pollution turned out less severe than predicted was that authorities across the region issued warnings and took emergency actions to reduce emissions in advance.
"Research has shown that adopting emission-control measures one or two days before air quality starts to worsen can delay pollution peaks and reduce the density of PM2.5 levels at the peak," he said.
Chai Fahe, chief scientist specializing in atmospheric environment at the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, said authorities in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei province and neighboring areas took emergency actions in response to the warning, thereby effectively checking soaring PM2.5 levels across the whole region over the past several days.
"The fact that air quality is better than expected suggests that ongoing emission control measures have produced results," he said. "However, such emergency controls can only lessen the impact of severe pollution to a certain degree."
In August, China published an action plan to deal with air pollution governance in the region during autumn and winter through 2018.
Under the plan, from October this year until March, the average PM2.5 density in the region is expected to drop by more than 15 percent year-on-year.
Xinhua contributed to this story.
[email protected] | 1,267,741 |
its single-core score is 135cb. The Intel Core i7-8550U gets a high score.
Graphics Card Performance
The Lenovo ThinkPad T480 comes with an NVIDIA GeForce MX150 discrete graphics card. The MX150 gets 21,029 scores on the Cloud Gate of 3DMark. With such high score, the MX150 undoubtedly reaches the top standard in the low-range graphics card.
SSD Performance
Lenovo ThinkPad T480 features Samsung’s PM981 SSD. After using the AS SSD to test, the PM981 SSD’s sequential read speed reaches 1461.56MB/s, and its sequential write speed reaches 1,346MB/s. Although the PM981 doesn’t reach the standard it should have, it is enough to deal with daily use.
Heat Dissipation Performance
After using AIDA 64 and FurMark to test the laptop for 30 minutes, we find that the front keyboard has generated lots of heat, but its highest temperature is 44.9 degree which will not affect daily use. The temperature of the laptop’s central back is also high, but it will not cause any damage for normal use.
In hardware, the processor’s power consumption is around 9W after 30 minutes. The i7-8550 processor work at high frequency in short time (the processor’s power consumption keeps 18W in the first five minutes, and that’s why the i7-8550U get a high score on Cinebench R15). The processor’s final temperature is 68 degree, which has excellent performance in temperature control.
The graphics card that the Lenovo ThinkPad T480 features always keeps working at a 1.6GHz high frequency and its temperature remain 64 degrees. It suggests that the MX150 graphics card has excellent temperature control. Besides, the MX150 can completely support game experience except handling office work.
Battery Life
The Lenovo ThinkPad T480 has long battery life thanks to its dual-cell battery. We adjust screen brightness to 50%, volume to 20% and close all the background software, then play a 1,080p video for an hour. The battery only consumes 7%. Lenovo ThinkPad T480 can work round 14 hours inferred from that.
Upgrade Expansion
The Lenovo ThinkPad T480’s disassembly process is easy. The screws on the back cover can’t remove during the disassembly process. The user can upgrade wireless network card, memory, M.2 SSD and 2.5-inch HDD.
ThinkPad T480’s SSD still use the adapter connected to the motherboard, so the performance of the hard disk is limited. Users who need the hard disk speed need to pay attention to it. It is worth mentioning that another version of the T480 has a 2242 M.2 SSD and a 2.5-inch hard disk. | 1,267,742 |
Black Friday will be here in just a few weeks and that means a lot of cool things are going to be heavily discounted. A Nintendo Switch Black Friday bundle has been announced, but it might not be the best deal on closer examination.
Nintendo announced the bundle via a press release. Starting on November 28, 2019, select retailers will offer up a bundle that includes the Nintendo Switch and a download code for Mario Kart 8 at the price of $299.99 or your regional equivalent.
While this isn't any lower than the standard retail price for the Nintendo Switch, the inclusion of Mario Kart 8 in the bundle makes it a particularly tantalizing pick, although it is the same one that was featured last year. Well, it would, if it weren't for one particular downer noted in the fine print.
The Fine Print of the Nintendo Switch Black Friday Bundle
Zoom in on the box image and you'll see the catch:
Includes Nintnedo Switch console [model HAC-001], battery life ranges from about 2.5 – 6.5 hours. Visit: support.nintendo.com/switch/battery
Heading off to the page support.nintendo.com/switch/battery leads to a breakdown of the different Nintendo Switch models (which are rather confusingly named):
Read Next A Defense of Super Mario Sunshine
For Nintendo Switch model number: HAC-001 [product serial number begins with " XAW "], the battery life is approximately 2.5 to 6.5 hours.
[product serial number begins with " "], the battery life is approximately 2.5 to 6.5 hours. For Nintendo Switch model number: HAC-001(-01) [product serial number begins with " XKW "], the battery life is approximately 4.5 to 9 hours.
[product serial number begins with " "], the battery life is approximately 4.5 to 9 hours. For Nintendo Switch Lite model number: HDH-001, the battery life is approximately 3 to 7 hours.
While the Nintendo Switch Black Friday bundle might seem like a good deal on its face, you're going to be getting the older model of the console with a battery life that's 2–2.5 hours shorter than the newer HAC-001(-01) model, as Nintendo is seemingly using the Black Friday deal to get rid of their old HAC-001 stock
The catch for this deal might be a bummer, but there are still some great chances to pick up some cool Nintendo Stuff at a discount for this year's Black Friday sales: a number of Nintendo Switch games will be priced at $39.99, $20 off of their MSRP — and there's no bad news in the fine print, either.
What do you think of the NIntendo Switch Black Friday bundle? Are you disappointed that it doesn't contain the newer edition of the console? Let us know in the comments below! | 1,267,743 |
Still from Topic's Forest on Fire Image: Topic
One year ago, on September 2, 2017, a teenager threw a firecracker into a ravine on the Eagle Creek Trail, sparking a massive wildfire that covered 50,000 acres of the Columbia River Gorge and would take more than three months to contain. Local filmmaker Reed Harkness was swimming in the nearby Washougal River when ash began to rain down on him. "I didn't know what was going on," he says. "I was really upset once I got back and I heard the news and I saw those headlines about the teens giggling—I was really angry. Everybody was. I felt just deeply sad, by the loss of this natural area."
Forest on Fire, a 30-minute documentary directed by Harkness for Topic magazine (and available for free online), tells the story of that devastating blaze through the eyes of those who lived it: the woman who came across the firecracker-throwing teens and first reported the blaze; the people stranded by the fire and forced to march their way out; and the local citizens who stayed behind to support the firefighters. The film splices together interviews, maps, original footage of the Gorge, and cell phone footage to bring the story to the screen.
In and around Portland, the blaze sparked an outpouring of grief, sadness, and anger on social media and in the press. The teen responsible was eventually ordered to pay $36 million in restitution and serve a decade of probation, but that did little to assuage the shock of Oregonians at nearly losing one of the state's most iconic National Scenic Areas.
"For me, the Gorge is the symbol of home in this region," says Harkness. "It’s probably a reason that many of us live here. So when your home’s threatened, it’s a big deal. Now, of course, people in Cascade Locks and Corbett and Warrendale and Dodson—their homes were actually threatened. So I can see why there’s so much emotion around it. I felt it too."
Is it all bad news? Definitely not.
"What I started to learn is, first of all, the forest is doing all right. It was a mosaic burn," says Harkness, referring to the fire's patchy burn pattern. "We had access to the Eagle Creek Trail through the Forest Service and hiked that a couple times [during the filming]. That’s a very familiar trail to me. Being the epicenter, I imagined it would just be completely black and not recognizable. That wasn’t the case. It was the same trail, the same scenic beauty. There’s evidence of burning along the trail, but it wasn't devastated in my opinion. At Punchbowl Falls, you can barely tell that there's been fire there. You really have to look for it."
Watch the full documentary here. | 1,267,744 |
visited Sunday morning and spoke with Muslim community leaders, including Koya, who said he had also raised the issue of gun control.
“We don’t want to see civilians with military or automatic weapons,” he said. “This is New Zealand, a peaceful country. What happened was an aberration, and we want things to be back to normal.”
Koya said he knew at least six victims and many others who remain hospitalized. Among his friends was Mohsen Mohammad Al-Harbi, a citizen of Saudi Arabia who was also sometimes an imam at the Deans Avenue mosque. He was 61.
“He was such a strong leader of our community; he would always help us to fundraise whenever we had any events here at the mosque,” Koya said. “It came as a big shock. I’ve realized I could have been one of them.”
Officials canceled sporting events and religious gatherings scheduled to take place in Christchurch over the weekend, including a five-day cricket test match between Bangladesh and New Zealand due to begin Saturday. Some members of the Bangladeshi team narrowly escaped the attack Friday.
There were also calls for the Crusaders, a rugby team, to change its name because of its violent religious undertones. The Canterbury club released a statement on its site Sunday saying that members were deeply shocked by the tragedy and that the name was “a reflection of the crusading spirit of this community.”
The weapons and clothing used by Tarrant in the attack carried numerous references to the Crusades, when Christian armies from Europe tried to seize the Holy Land from Muslims during the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.
The club’s logo shows an image of a sword-wielding medieval knight with the emblem of a cross on his chest.
“What we stand for is the opposite of what happened in Christchurch on Friday; our crusade is one for peace, unity, inclusiveness and community spirit,” the club said.
Tarrant, who had no criminal record, had a registered address in southern New Zealand but lived in the country sporadically. The former fitness trainer led an itinerant lifestyle and traveled extensively, visiting Bulgaria, North Korea and countries with large Muslim populations, including Turkey and Pakistan, officials said.
Tarrant obtained a license in November 2017 for the guns that police say were used in the shootings at the two mosques; he began purchasing the weapons that December, according to officials, and at least some of them had been modified.
In Australia, Tarrant’s hometown of Grafton was also struggling to digest the news. His grandmother, Marie Fitzgerald, said it was hard to believe. “It’s only since he traveled overseas I think that this boy has changed completely to the boy we knew,” she told 9News in an interview. | 1,267,745 |
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The forest contained trees, mosses, shrubs and ferns
Enlarge Image
The exquisitely preserved remains were unearthed in a US coalmine in Illinois, and date back to 300 million years ago.
Writing in the journal Geology, a UK-US team said a diverse array of now extinct fossilised flora could be seen.
Covering a 1,000-hectare (10 sq km) site, it represents the largest fossil rainforest yet discovered.
"This is a significant find," said Professor Andrew Scott, a palaeobotanist from Royal Holloway University, London.
"These peat-forming systems are actually quite diverse and dynamic.
"What they are showing is that this ecological diversity is also seen spatially."
Ancient insights
The Pennsylvanian Epoch, which dates to 299-318 million years ago, is considered the "zenith of peat formation".
Geologists are keen to understand more about the period to gain insights into the formation of coal.
We were able to make a map of the forest by the light of our miner's lamps
Howard Flacon-Lang
The deposit in Illinois is thought to have been created when a major earthquake shook the forest, causing a vast swathe to drop below sea level and become preserved as peat and then coal.
Dr Howard Falcon-Lang, an earth scientist from the University of Bristol, was one of the scientists to discover the site. He said: "It was an amazing experience.
"We drove down the mine in an armoured vehicle, until we were a hundred metres below the surface.
"The fossil forest was rooted on top of the coal seam, so where the coal had been mined away the fossilized forest was visible in the ceiling of the mine.
"We walked for miles and miles along pitch-black passages with the fossil forest just above our heads. We were able to make a map of the forest by the light of our miners' lamps."
Species diversity
The scientists found a rich mixture of ecology. An abundance of 4m-high (12ft) tree ferns formed a sub-canopy over the forest, but they were dwarfed by club mosses, some more than 40m tall.
Dr Falcon-Lang said the discovery allowed researchers to understand how the make-up of the forest changed across the ancient landscape.
"As there is nothing like it around today, before our work we knew very little about the ecological preferences and community structure of these ancient plants," he said.
Other work is also starting to shed light on these systems.
A team from the Czech Republic recently discovered and mapped an ancient forest, from the same time period, buried under volcanic ash.
"Taken together, these two pieces of work are illuminating our understanding of how these vegetation systems work," said Professor Scott. | 1,267,747 |
The 7 Most Fervent Fan Bases In Music
There are fans and then there are super fan bases, the ones that take everything to the limit and then keep going.
You probably know the ones. They know the lead singer’s birthday and go to every cover show possible. These are the fans who have multiple band-inspired tattoos and their own nicknames within the community.
There’s nothing wrong with loving a band, and these fan bases will go to the extreme to show their devotion to these bands. They’ve earned their reputation and for good reason.
Click at your own risk: The 8 Most Terribly Infectious Music Videos of the Decade
1/7 Swifties Something about Taylor Swift inspires hordes of rabid fans to worship her every move. She was even credited for an 80,000 vote bump in Tennessee when she urged fans to get out and vote. Photo: Kevin Mazur/TAS18/Getty Images for TAS
2/7 KISS Army The first but not last clown-makeup-wearing rock band on this list, KISS fans have a reputation for being ubiquitous and loud. Their massive fan base is always ready to rock. Photo: Michael Bezjian/Getty Images for Gamers' Choice Awards
3/7 Maggots Slipknot fans (or "Maggots" as they prefer) have been known to overwhelm entire headliners for their main focus. The band's fans turn out in droves for every appearance and bring an energy to each show. Photo: Kevin Nixon/Metal Hammer Magazine/Team Rock (Getty Images)
4/7 Rush Fans Rush is one of those divisive bands where it seems no one has neutral feelings about them. You either love or hate their complex approach to songwriting and technically impressive musicianship, and lots of people love it. Photo: Steve Russell/Toronto Star (Getty Images)
5/7 Little Monsters Lady Gaga has done some weird stuff, including featuring concerts with a giant robot and wearing a suit made entirely out of meat. That doesn't stop her fans from packing every venue and following her everywhere. Photo: VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images
6/7 Deadheads The OG rabid fan base, Deadheads have earned their reputation through decades of devotion. Known for their affinity to share as well as their adoration of all things Grateful Dead, Deadheads are the original fan base that elevated their fondness for a band to almost worship-levels. Photo: Larry Hulst/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
7/7 Juggalos Fans of Insane Clown Posse don't just like a band, they get into a lifestyle. Juggalos appear everywhere from marches on Washington D.C. to annual festivals celebrating their favorite band. When you're a Juggalo, you're in it for life. Photo: John Lamparski/WireImage (Getty Images) | 1,267,748 |
-2 weeks2. https://pool.chunky.ms/paper/potcoin.html Chunky has setup a beta Paper Wallet for Potcoin. we will be branding it soon and creating a way for dispensaries to print up and wallet and accept it at their stores3. Creating a Credit Card (POTCARD.CC) type of Paper Wallet Branded for potcoin with your public and private address that you will be able to order online. Once you receive the card you can remove the private key sticker and keep it somewhere safe.4. We are currently in talk with a few rolling paper manufacturers to make custom Potcoin Rollies and Filter papers! we also have a company in the UK that is making us Potcoin Grinders. We plan integrate paper wallets on the rolling papers and filter etc so that when you purchase these products you will be able to redeem POTCOINS to your wallet. you will scan the QR code it will bring you to a website where you can redeem it for a free coin directly you wallet.the papers will be called BILLS and the domain will be ROLLINGPAPERBILLS.COM5. We are working with 2 companies potlocator.com and weedmaps.com to integrate Potcoin into their existing websites and also APPS on Android and Iphone. They will also be letting all of their existing thousands of users know they can accept POTCOINS for payment, this will be a big step for us. We would like to create our own similar mapping software to show a MAP with all the places in the world Potcoins are accepted!6. We are creating a Community website for all potcoin users called POT TALK, this will help bring all potcoin users together and listed under categories, we want to create a community of supporters world wide and help them connect with other.7. Potcoin Foundation - we will be creating a NON-PROFIT organization that will help raise money for Marijuana related charities world wide and try and support the legalization of marijuana world wide.8. Getting a full open API for people to use to accept Potcoin on their website.9. We have many many more ideas to come but for now we need to focus on getting the coin accepted all over the world. we have had so many emails and call from people all over wanting to know more and how to use the coin etc.10. Please let us know if you want to help or get involved or help. email us at [email protected] thankssmokemonTO THE MOONAJUANA!!
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South Korea has reported that many of their official government websites have been hit by powerful cyber-attacks that also coincide with the 63rd anniversary of the Korean War.
As of 0300 GMT, the official South Korean presidential Blue House website was shut down, with a message reading, “Under Maintenance”.
On Tuesday, June 25th the South Korean science ministry announced that a ‘five-stage’ national cyber alert was raised from level one to level two. “The government can confirm a cyber attack by unidentified hackers that shut down several sites including the Blue House,” the science ministry announced.
Hackers starting around 10:45 am GMT successfully hit a number of government websites including many news media sites. The office for Government Policy Coordination and the ruling New Frontier Party pages were hit in the attacks as well.
Strangely coincidental or possibly incidental, the multiple website attacks coincide with the 63rd anniversary of the start of the Korean War that began on June 25, 1950. Currently both North and South Korea are still in armistice, which is only a cessation in fighting, the implication being that the two are still technically in a state of war.
Almost immediately after the attacks began the South Korean ministry did not hesitate pointing the finger at their North Korean adversary. Other recent large-scale cyber-attacks on numerous South Korean media groups and banking sites were successfully traced to originate from North Korea. The South Korean government said there is no reason to think these sophisticated attacks did not come from anywhere else.
Some tried to say the hacktivist group “Anonymous” was behind the attacks, but those claiming to be connected to Anonymous denied any involvement, but have cheekily admitted hacking into many North Korean sites, such as the official North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and Rodong Sinmun website, which is North Korea’s official party newspaper.
South Korea suffered a large-scale attack on on March 20th earlier this year where numerous TV broadcasters such as KBS, MBC and YTN were taken offline. Many banking institutions were hit hard as well.
Soon after the attacks, the South Korean government working along side private and contract Internet experts traced the attacks directly to six computers used by North Korea’s military intelligence agency.
The United States has backed up South Korea’s assumptions that North Korea is behind the attacks and said the reclusive communist North was employing numerous “sophisticated computer hackers” that were expertly trained for cyber attacks. This testimony came directly from the U.S. Congressional Armed Services Committee and the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, Gen. James Thurman. “Such attacks are ideal for North Korea” because they can be done anonymously,” Thurman said. She further iterated that the North was, “employed against a variety of targets including military, governmental, educational and commercial institutions.” | 1,267,750 |
ESPN is an extremely profitable company and recently made two very expensive deals for television rights to tennis and college footbal. And yet, on Tuesday the network had its first round of layoffs since 2009. So what gives?
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Deadspin's John Koblin and veteran ESPN expert James Andrew Miller are both reporting ESPN is laying off between 300 and 400 employees today. That's a fairly significant chuck of the estimated 7,000 employees at the Worldwide Leader. ESPN is owned by Disney, and the word came down from on high, like the top of Space Mountain, that ESPN needed to make cuts. ESPN brings in over $10 billion in revenue each year. It's worth almost half as much (an estimated $40 billion) as all of Disney ($84 billion). When you look at those numbers, the layoffs make no sense.
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Despite the fact that ESPN brings in more revenue than almost any other arm of the Disney empire, the soaring costs of putting sports on TV were credited with a decline in Disney's profits last year. And Deadspin's Koblin reports ESPN's recent shopping spree forced some changes:
So where in the world did this come from? ESPN is monstrously profitable and we hadn't heard a word about this until this morning. Well, ESPN has been gobbling up live rights to events left and right, and those rights are really expensive. We've heard they needed to reduce costs as a result. Also: ESPN's parent company Disney is apparently asking all divisions to cut costs.
ESPN closed an 11 year deal worth over $770 million to broadcast the U.S. Open tennis tournament starting in 2015. The network also paid an unknown ransom for the rights to launch the Southeastern Conference Network in 2014, a channel dedicated to NCAA football's most powerful conference. That's the one with Alabama, LSU and Auburn, among others. ESPN declined to announce the financials of the deal, which, when you consider how much they paid for the Open, is not a good sign. So, yes, that means your already ESPN-inflated cable bill will be get even bigger next year.
Story continues
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"We are implementing changes across the company to enhance our continued growth while smartly managing costs," ESPN's statement on the layoff reads, via Sport's Illustrated's Richard Deitsch. Some back of the envelope math suggests the SEC network could fetch over $240 million in subscriber fees alone. That's a lot of money from one single source.
RELATED: Here's How to Fix ESPN's SportsCenter
Sources are telling Deadspin the layoffs are tied to ESPN not meeting its profit margins for this year. They chose cutting staff was the best way to do it. The network also just finished building a new SportsCenter set that cost a reported $125 million. | 1,267,751 |
click to enlarge Darwin BondGraham
Lieutenant Roland Holmgren of the Oakland Police Department will oversee a joint OPD-FBI task force. Bruce Stoffmacher of OPD in background.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is committing $110,000 toward the creation of a state-of-the-art center for investigations in the Oakland Police Department, according to a briefing provided by OPD and the FBI at the Oakland City Council's public safety committee meeting last night. The FBI funds will support the buildout of a $173,000 work space inside OPD's Police Administration Building, and officials said the center will utilize the latest technologies to analyze social networks and track persons of interest across state lines. The joint effort will bring as many as ten FBI agents into OPD’s criminal investigations division to expand the department’s investigative capacity.The new facility will include twelve computer workstations with access to FBINet, the bureau’s classified intranet. According to a 2007 General Accounting Office report to Congress, FBINet "communicates secret information, including investigative case files and intelligence pertaining to national security," and has been a critical tool in the creation of so-called fusion centers that collect and share law enforcement information between federal, state and local agencies.According to Bruce Stoffmacher of OPD’s strategic planning office, the cost of the workstations is due to the high level of encryption required by the FBI. Russell Nimmo, FBI special agent, said $35,000 of federal and city funds will be used to reinforce doors to the facility, install video security, and to install safes into which computer hard drives will be stashed every night.“This has been a very successful program and we want to keep it rolling,” Nimmo said. “Everyone in [OPD] homicide has been deputized as a task force officer and has access to the FBI database and access to resources outside of the state.”OPD Lieutenant Roland Holmgren said that recent joint FBI-OPD investigations have followed suspects to Nevada, Florida, and Southern California. “Without FBI assistance we would not have had the resources to undertake these investigations,” he said.Holmgren said OPD will have access to many of FBI tools, including software to conduct “social network analysis” of suspects and their social networks. “We can see what sphere of influence these individuals have,” he said. Holmgren added that the FBI-OPD team would be opening cold case homicide files from 1974 and 1979 by analyzing DNA evidence.According to OPD Assistant Chief of Police Paul Figueroa, the FBI has partnered with Oakland through this task force since June of 2014.“The FBI sent agents in response to low [homicide] clearance rates, and to help track suspects across state lines.”The full city council still has to approve a memorandum of understanding with the FBI for this task force expansion. | 1,267,752 |
obvious. Narrow down your choices by taking away whatever the least intelligent is. This can even work with choices written down on paper. However, one can never know just what question is being answered.
A hazel glass eye that allows the person wearing it to be able to see the structurally weakest point of an object, and to strike it with great accuracy. This item only shows the weakest points in objects, but is otherwise very handy. The “Destroyer’s Eye” can even be used to bypass any form of armour, from ancient plate to modern Dragonskin. However, it’s greatest drawback is the fact that it requires the user to cut out their own eye. If they already had a missing eye, and place it in that socket, it won’t do anything. It seems to need the shedding of blood to function. One good thing is that using the eye allows one to see through it. When the eye is in use, the user experiences a sharp pain.
A red glass eye that allows the person wearing it to be able to see the time until someone’s death. The time isn’t exactly in any known measure, though the numbers are readable as Arabic numerals, or at least, they are to any Western users. Others report seeing the numbers as Roman or Chinese numerals, or whatever their native numbering system is. The numbers correspond to roughly one third of a second. The eye even seems to know when a subject is going to die due to illness or chance, such as being hit with a piano or being hit by a stray bullet. The greatest drawback of these “Reaper’s Eyes” is that they require the user to sacrifice their own eye. Without giving up an eye and cutting it out themselves, the red glass eye is useless. When it is used, it allows the user to see through it as if it was real, but causes a sharp pain.
A green glass eye that allows the person using it to be able to tell the health of any person or creature they gaze upon. The user can instinctively distinguish between a healthy and an injured individual, and will be able to see where a person is injured, even if they’ve hidden their injuries. Injuries, as well as any diseases, can be seen as dark spots around the individual. By concentrating, the user can even see deeper into a body, getting a clearer picture of any illnesses. This isn’t the stereotypical 'X-ray vision’, but the user can get a sense of how deep a stain lies and see the inner workings of the body with an inhuman efficiency. As with other glass eyes, the “Healer’s Eye” requires the price of an eye, one of the user’s. As well, when it’s being used it allows the user to see as if it was their own flesh and blood eye, but with an intense pain in the socket. | 1,267,753 |
Police in Surrey are being applauded by cyclists on Twitter after producing a video that shows motorists how to safely overtake people on bikes.
The video, which lasts just over one and a half minutes, uses animation, real-life footage and text to educate motorists on the issue.
We’ve made a little video to help drivers plan and overtake of a cyclist safely.
The same advice would be relevant for overtaking a horse rider. Passing too close is dangerous and scary. You could be dealt with for driving without due care and attention: 3 points + £100 fine. pic.twitter.com/3TrBWJkuZ2 — RPU - Surrey Police (@SurreyRoadCops) December 13, 2017
Since it was tweeted shortly before noon today, the video has been retweeted more than 200 times.
A number of people congratulated the force on the video, including the Metropolitan Police Service's Cycle Safety Team.
Nice good — Cycle Safety Team (@MetCycleCops) December 13, 2017
One Twitter user asked if they could produce a video explaining why it is often safer for cyclists to ride two abreast, something that many motorists mistakenly believe is against the law.
We’ve discussed it. We need a drone and a group of cyclists so a little more challenging, but it’s pencilled in to develop! — RPU - Surrey Police (@SurreyRoadCops) December 13, 2017
In the replies, the officers behind the account also clarified some issues relating to cyclists' use of the road.
Yes, most cycle lanes are not maintained suitably for a road bike, so cyclists will not use them because of the risk of punctures, pot holes and debris. — RPU - Surrey Police (@SurreyRoadCops) December 13, 2017
Mark you have raised many points here… 1. Cyclists can use as much of their lane as they wish, they are a vehicle using the road.
2. It’s not illegal to ride 2 or 3 abreast, most of the time it makes overtaking them easier
3. Riding too fast - as in breaking the speed limit? — RPU - Surrey Police (@SurreyRoadCops) December 13, 2017
Let’s deal with the real issue of drivers doing the same (and a lot worse) first.
The majority of cyclists obey the rules. Motor vehicles pose a much higher threat level. We wouldn’t ignore an offence which we witnessed on patrol, from any road user. — RPU - Surrey Police (@SurreyRoadCops) December 13, 2017
Surrey Police have proved to be very proactive on Twitter in dispelling misconceptions about the law as it relates to cyclists, and in October invited a road.cc reader who had submitted a video shot in the county submitted as part of their Near Miss of the Day series to send them the footage. | 1,267,754 |
A peaceful march to London by unemployed Lancashire weavers in March 1817 had been broken up by troops.
The idea of a huge meeting in Manchester demanding parliamentary reform sent shivers of fear through not just high ministers of state, but the entire ruling class.
Those organising the meeting had ordered no sticks nor weapons of any description. Women played an important part in the protest. One group of 6,000 people had marched the 16 miles from Rochdale, “at our head were a hundred or two of women, mostly young wives. A hundred of our handsomest girls, sweethearts to the lads, danced to the music.” Hardly a violent revolution.
Terrified local magistrates knew what the government wanted. They brought in 600 mounted cavalry, a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery, 120 Yeomanry and 400 special constables. They also had two six-pounder guns.
The main speakers started about 1.20pm and by 1.30pm the magistrates had concluded that “the town was in great danger.” They ordered main speaker Henry Hunt and the other leaders be arrested.
As the yeomanry moved in members of the crowd began to link arms to protect the speakers. The soldiers drew their sabres and slashed their way through the crowd.
When they reached the platform they arrested not just the speakers but also the newspaper reporters observing the event.
Overenthusiastic but totally untrained special constables went wild attacking the crowd. This behaviour would be repeated throughout history – Derry’s Bloody Sunday, Kent State University in the US in 1970 and The Battle of Orgreave during the 1984 miners’ strike are just some examples of an uncontrolled militia attacking unarmed crowds with fatal results.
When it was all over up to 20 people including a woman and her young child were dead or would die from their injuries. Almost a thousand, a quarter of them female, were badly injured.
This was a time before A&E departments or ambulances. Most of the injured would have dragged themselves, or been carried, home to get treated in secret. Some injured were refused hospital treatment.
A journalist from the radical Manchester Observer was arrested and found guilty of producing a seditious publication. He was sentenced to 12 months in prison and fined £100. Police raids forced the paper to close in 1820.
Henry Hunt and eight others were tried for sedition at York. Hunt got 30 months jail, others between one and two years.
A civil case on behalf of a weaver wounded at Peterloo was brought against four members of the Manchester Yeomanry. All were acquitted. The court ruled their actions had been justified to disperse an illegal gathering.
Two hundred years after the massacre it is surely time for it to take its long deserved place in the story of our nation with a serious monument and a prominent place in the history we teach our children. | 1,267,755 |
Whether or not you use AOL, a recently exposed mass hack of the company's network promises trouble for everybody.
AOL (AOL) users: Hackers stole "a significant number" of email addresses, passwords, contact lists, postal addresses and answers to security questions, the company said in a blog post Monday. Anyone of the company's 120 million account holders might be affected. Judging by AOL's description of the incident, that total number could well be in the tens of millions. But AOL isn't giving any details about the incident for now.
Non-AOL users: Watch out for spam that looks like it came from you or your friends' AOL accounts.
It's a double whammy that's shows just how annoying hackers can be when they loot our contact lists.
Related story: Internet Explorer bug hijacks your computer
Hackers are doing something called email spoofing, and it's making it seem as if long-discarded AOL email accounts are back and sending spam. Emails appear to come from your friend's email address because the "From:" field shows their email address. But this spam is actually coming from someone else. Hooligans know who to send spam to because they have your contact list.
Although the massive hack likely affected untold millions, AOL estimates only 2% of its email accounts are being spoofed so far. So far, AOL has only been able to redirect these spoofed emails into people's junk mail folders.
The situation leaves folks like Mindy Sopher of Raleigh, N.C., feeling hopeless. Two weeks ago, she was approached by a few coworkers at the North Carolina State University who said she was spamming them from an AOL account she hadn't used in years. Curious, she logged in and realized her account wasn't sending anything. The situation soon grew worse. This was the account she used to teach her public speaking class seven years ago -- and her old students were now receiving a flood of one-line emails with questionable links to websites based in Russia and Thailand.
Sopher is overcome by embarrassment and the fear that an unsuspecting ex-student will think the emails are actually from her.
"It's disheartening," she said. "I would hate for something to go off on their computer because of me."
Related story: Cyber insurance bridges the gap between physical and digital
AOL is now asking that all users -- current and former -- change their credentials. It won't stop spoofing, but it'll limit any spillover damage from the larger data breach. Anyone who receives suspicious email is directed to forward the message to [email protected].
There's little else you can do, but you can tell if your account has been targeted, said Gary Davis at antivirus maker McAfee. If you're getting "mailer daemon" error messages for emails you never sent, and they're not in your email outbox? You're being spoofed. | 1,267,756 |
Chilean authorities have raided the headquarters of the Catholic church’s Episcopal Conference as part of a widespread investigation into sex abuse committed by members of the Marist Brothers order, prosecutors said.
The raid by investigating prosecutors and Chile’s equivalent of the FBI took place at one of the most important buildings of the Chilean church in the capital, Santiago. Prosecutor Raul Guzmán, who confirmed the raid, is investigating more than 35 accusations of abuse committed against former students at schools run by the Marists, who are religious brothers, not priests.
“The impunity of the Chilean hierarchy has ended. In Chile, we’re seeing what happens when the Catholic church is treated as an ordinary corporate citizen,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of the online abuse database BishopAccountability.org.
“Prosecutors in Chile have raised the bar for civil authorities in other countries. The children of Chile will be safer, survivors more likely to find justice, and the church ultimately stronger.”
Church authorities had no immediate response to requests for comment.
The Marists operate in dozens of countries around the world. The scandal in Chile came to light in August 2017, when the order revealed that at least 14 minors were abused from the 1970s until 2008 by Abel Pérez, a brother who worked at two of the order’s schools. Then it acknowledged that another Marist sexually abused five students.
The Marists opened a canonical investigation and launched legal action against Pérez. But many Chileans were outraged when the order admitted that Pérez had confessed in 2010 – seven years earlier.
Victims have also filed a criminal complaint against three Catholic priests, a Capuchin brother and six Marists. In that complaint and in interviews with the Associated Press, they have recounted numerous abusive encounters.
Pope Francis sent the Vatican’s leading expert on clerical sex abuse, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, to investigate allegations against Bishop Juan Barros, who was accused by victims of witnessing their abuse and ignoring it, as well as allegations of abuse involving the Marist Brothers, Salesian and Franciscan orders.
After receiving the report, the pope denounced a “culture of abuse and cover-up” in Chile’s Catholic church and said he was ashamed that neither he nor Chilean church leaders truly ever listened to victims as the abuse scandal spread.
Last week, however, victims were disappointed when Francis said in a letter to the Chilean church’s Episcopal Conference that he was “impressed by the reflection, discernment and decisions” taken by bishops after they recently met to discuss the avalanche of scandals.
Chilean prosecutors also recently summoned the archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, to appear in court and testify about the alleged cover-up of years of abuse.
In May, 31 bishops offered their resignation to the pope. So far Francis has accepted the resignations of five. | 1,267,757 |
Divorce records for Keith Ellison, who is fending off an allegation of abuse from an ex-girlfriend, contain no allegations that the Minnesota congressman physically abused his ex-wife. But Ellison said in a 2015 filing that Kim Ellison repeatedly hit him during their 25-year marriage.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune and conservative news site Alpha News sued for access to the divorce file, arguing it’s a matter of public interest after the claim by Ellison’s former girlfriend. Ellison, who is running for state attorney general and is deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has denied it.
The Ellisons tried to block release of the file, with Kim Ellison arguing that it would expose personal and painful details about her depression and health, but the Minnesota Court of Appeals rejected that bid on Tuesday.
Although the divorce proceedings began in 2010, Keith Ellison didn’t raise his allegation of abuse until 2015. That’s when Kim Ellison was seeking additional spousal maintenance and argued that her ex-husband had failed to provide her health insurance as agreed. Kim Ellison was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before their divorce, and has recently said in court filings that her ex-husband had failed to provide her health insurance as agreed.
Keith Ellison argued his ex-wife wasn’t credible, going on to say that Kim Ellison “hit me too many times to mention” during their marriage, once bit him on the arm and threatened to stab him.
“The Respondent constantly blamed her physical abuse of me on her depression and MS, but would always do it again,” Ellison said in the court filing. “Finally, I had to leave the marriage.” Later, he added: “I never hit or assaulted the Respondent, although I am physically larger, quicker, and stronger than she is.”
In a statement Wednesday, Ellison called the release of the file “shameful and outrageous.” He called Kim Ellison “a wonderful person” and said they have rebuilt a strong friendship since the divorce.
“I attribute the difficulties in our marriage to the disease and my failure to understand it,” he said in his statement. “I was not nearly sensitive enough to the symptoms of her medical condition at the time, and for that I am deeply sorry.” Related Articles Former Ramsey County commissioner Blake Huffman to repay charity funds in settlement with attorney general
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A representative for Kim Ellison didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ellison’s former girlfriend, Karen Monahan, accused him in August of dragging her from a bed at his home in 2016. The accusation came just days before the Minnesota primary election, but Ellison went on to win his party’s primary for attorney general. He is now in a close race with Republican Doug Wardlow. | 1,267,758 |
This past weekend, Brian Pillman Jr., the real life son of former WWE, WCW, and ECW great “Flyin'” Brian Pillman, took part in his first professional wrestling match, in a winning effort over Jonathan Wolf with Indianapolis Championship Wrestling. It was the culmination of a dream for Pillman, who was only three years old when his legendary father passed away from an undetected heart condition. It’s the completion of a near year long journey to the ring, that started with him reaching out to – and then training under – former ECW, WWE and WCW Superstar Lance Storm at Storm Wrestling in Calgary. Alberta. Canada. He trained with Storm from September to December.
Only 24 years old, Pillman earned high praise from his opponent that night, calling him “the real deal.” Although it wasn’t long before one of the indie’s newest loose cannons, Joey Janela, called him out.
You're gonna be waitin a while brotha, cause I got more soul than James Brown???? https://t.co/2Yvpz4FVjo — Brian Pillman Jr. (@FlyinBrianJr) December 31, 2017
With such a high profile father to live up, Pillman is bound to get offers and challenges. He’s already announced for Black Label Pro‘s Rumble on January 13th in Indiana.
We have our first entrant into the Black Label Pro Rumble! Making his BLP debut on January 13th is none other than @FlyinBrianJr! Tickets: https://t.co/V9utKuNM5h pic.twitter.com/2K4I4yfRIG — Black Label Pro (@BLabelPro) December 29, 2017
But one interesting match that’s been mentioned is one that has legendary historical ties between his tag partner and each of their fathers. On March 25, 2018, Pillman is scheduled to tag with Davey Boy Smith Jr. in Wrestle Club Pro, a new promotion in the UK. While originally mentioned by Dave Meltzer in the latest Wrestling Observer Newsletter, we reached out to Wrestle Club Pro who confirmed the match was in the works (pending travel Visas). Their two fathers – Brian Pillman and “The British Bulldog” Davey Boy Smith – have teamed up several times. First in Stampede Wrestling in the 1980s, where he partnered with both British Bulldogs.
But many WWE fans remember the new Hart Foundation that helped kick off the Attitude Era, that featured Hart family members Bret “Hitman” Hart, Owen Hart, Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart and British Bulldog. The only non-related member was someone the Harts always treated as family, Brian Pillman.
It’ll definitely be an emotional night as these two second generation Hart Foundation progenies tag up for the first time. | 1,267,759 |
Yamaha Corporation, creator of audio equipment, instruments, and synthesizers including the immensely popular voice synthesizer series known as Vocaloid, announced yesterday that it is developing an automated song generator called VOCALODUCER, which will automatically compose a song, given lyrics and a few basic parameters. It sounds like pretty soon anyone can be a Vocaloid song producer in no time!
Creating a Vocaloid song requires a voice, a melody, and accompaniment. People composing songs with VOCALODUCER will have the library of Vocaloid characters at their disposal when choosing a synthesized singer. This includes male and female voices, both ranging from forceful to sweet and childish in tone quality.
The melody line is created by a computer program based on user input in three categories: rhythm, pitch variation, and chord progression. There are approximately 18,000 different melodies that the program can produce based on different combinations of these items.
Then, all that’s left are the lyrics and the accompaniment, which can be chosen from a database of about 30 styles, including pop, rock, and dance music. The sound engine that supplies the accompaniment is the same one that’s used in Yamaha’s electronic keyboards. Then, users simply enter their lyrics (up to 50 Japanese characters in length, including numbers and kanji) to receive a song that is between two and eight bars in length. Before submitting their specs, users can choose to specify how the song is sung and then add effects, such as reverb, upon its completion.
Understandably, the algorithm that creates these songs will not be available for installation on individual computers. Instead, the software will be offered as a service, meaning that the program which produces the music will be stored on Yamaha’s own servers. VOCALODUCER users will be required to submit their song specifications over an Internet connection and download the results.
A release date for VOCALODUCER has not yet been announced, but there are already plans to expand the library of accompaniment styles and vocal templates, as well as to develop software which will support English and Chinese lyrics. Anyone living in the Tokyo area who wants to preview the upcoming digital composer should try going to Makuhari Messe in Chiba over the next three days (October 23-25) for the Autumn Web & Mobile Marketing Expo, where a sample of the program will be on exhibit.
Something tells me we’ll be seeing a lot more Vocaliod music on the free market in the near future, but I wonder how it will compare to the quality of practiced song producers’ previous works. Will this automatic composer be able to make maestros out of all of us, or will the Vocaloid music market become bogged down with musical muck?
Source: PC Watch via Jin115 (Japanese)
Additional resource: Yamaha News Release (Japanese)
Image: Crypton | 1,267,760 |
(NCAA) championships and one Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) championship. In her senior year she set a Sprints course record and won an IRA silver medal as …
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Andy Lally, vegan racing driver
Andy Lally is a world class racing driver who has achieved some notable milestones. He won the Rolex 24 hour at Daytona in 2001, 2009, 2011, 2012 (read more here) and 2016 (read more here), and holds the record for the most podium finishes of any driver in this race since the Grand Am era started …
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Yolanda Presswood, vegan powerlifter
Yolanda Presswood is a powerlifter who has achieved great things very quickly. Originally competitive in the bikini and fitness categories of bodybuilding, Yolanda started competing in Crossfit in November 2014 and then moved to powerlifting in October 2016, with her first competition in December of that year. World record breaker in squat, deadlift and competition …
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Alex Morgan, vegan soccer player
Alex is established as one of the most successful players of her generation in women’s soccer – with success at national and international level. She started playing for the California Golden Bears while at University before being drafted as the overall number one in 2011 which took her to Western New York Flash. In the …
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Lewis Hamilton, vegan racing driver
Lewis Hamilton is established as the leading Formula One driver of his generation and one of the all-time greats having taken numerous wins and Championships. By 2020 he was a six-time World Champion (the second most of all time) with 88 individual race victories. His career total points score of 3563 (as of August 2020) …
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Pat Reeves, vegan powerlifter
Pat was diagnosed with a serious genetic cancer in 1977 when she was 32, which led to her adopting a wholefood vegan diet. As a result her health has made an excellent recovery and the ‘terminal’ cancer has gone into remission while but continues to live a full and incredible life. Pat has conducted extensive …
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Ruth Heidrich, vegan endurance athlete
Ruth Heidrich is a prolific runner who has maintained an astonishing level of fitness into her senior years. A survivor of an aggressive breast cancer, Ruth turned vegan in 1982 aged 47 in response to the diagnosis. She has won over 900 medals for running of all distances, some of her most prestigious include: March …
Continue reading “Ruth Heidrich, vegan endurance athlete” | 1,267,761 |
John McDonnell has defended his controversial backing for tax cuts for top earners, telling rebel Labour MPs they risk defeat in another Tory “tax bombshell” election campaign.
The shadow chancellor was rocked by a revolt by 20 Labour MPs in a Budget vote last week, angry that he was failing to fight a shake-up that “overwhelmingly benefit the rich”.
Mr McDonnell admitted the clash – over the hike in the threshold before the 40p income tax rate kicks in to £50,000 – had been politically painful for the leadership.
But he pointed to Labour’s shock defeat in the 1992 general election campaign, after a Conservative onslaught on the party’s tax plans, as the reason for the stance.
“In '92 I went round knocking on doors,” Mr McDonnell said. “If you remember the campaign the Tories waged with the big posters - Labour tax bombshell.
“I was knocking on doors of people who were unemployed, who were on low wages as well, saying to me 'I can't vote for you because you will increase my taxes'.
“And we hadn't won the argument about a fair taxation system. So, of course, I am not going to make that mistake again.”
The comments confirm that Mr McDonnell ducked a confrontation in last week’s vote to avoid antagonising the middle-class voters who switched to Labour at last year’s general election.
Three days earlier, the tax cuts had been attacked by Jeremy Corbyn – prompting suggestions of a clash between the leader and his key ally.
But, in the interview with BBC’s Newsnight programme, Mr McDonnell laughed off the claim of a split between a pragmatic strategist as shadow chancellor and a “dreamer” as leader.
“This idea that Jeremy is a dreamer is absolutely rubbish,” he said. “Jeremy has got a steel about him that people out there will see increasingly.
“We complement one another all the time. In some ways, we have different virtues and different strengths and different weaknesses. And we work with each other in that way.”
The Revolution Foundation think tank said the changes to thresholds would overwhelmingly benefit wealthier households, with almost half the £2.8bn giveaway going to the top 10 per cent of earners.
The revolt was led by Lisa Nandy, a respected former shadow minister, and backed by senior figures including Yvette Cooper, David Lammy and Alison McGovern.
But Mr McDonnell said: “When you see your opponent digging a hole in front of you, putting the spikes into that hole, covering them with leaves and inviting you to step into it, sometimes you want to walk round it.
At the 1992 general election, won against the odds by the Tories under John Major, Mr McDonnell failed to win his London seat of Hayes and Harlington seat by just 53 votes. | 1,267,762 |
Shah Rukh Khan at Vadodara railway platform. Shah Rukh Khan at Vadodara railway platform.
One person died and another was left critical on the crowded Vadodara railway platform, teeming with fans of actor Shah Rukh Khan, who arrived on board the August Kranti Express on Monday to promote his upcoming film Raees. While the actor did not step down from the train, choosing to wave at the crowds and urged them to watch the film on a loudspeaker, fans in Vadodara swarmed the railway platforms since several hours before the scheduled arrival of the train.
WATCH VIDEO | SRK’s Raees Turns Deadly! 1Fan Dead, Another Injured As Police Baton Charges Overwhelmed Crowd
Farid Khan Sherani, in his late forties, had arrived at the railway platform with his wife and daughter as the family was an avid follower of the actor. However, shortly after the train left, the crowds rushed towards the exit, causing much chaos and a near-stampede, in which several persons, including Sherani, collapsed. Sherani and one other man were rushed to nearby hospitals, while other suffocated people were helped by police personnel and passersby.
See Pics | Raees: Shah Rukh Khan Takes Train Journey From Mumbai To Delhi
Sherani, who was rushed to a private hospital in Vadodara, was declared dead on arrival. Sherani was a known figure in the old city area of Vadodara and affiliated to the Samajwadi Party. He had also contested the civic elections in 2005 on a SP ticket, sources said. Among other businesses, Sherani ran a dormitory near the railway station.
Shah Rukh Khan’s visit to Vadodara was much publicised to gather the crowd as the actor announced on social media sites about his travel plans from Mumbai to New Delhi on board the August Kranti Express. The train, which arrives in Vadodara shortly after 10:15 pm every day, was running late by a couple of minutes. While fans could barely catch a glimpse of the actor, cricketers Irrfan and Yusuf Pathan got a special opportunity to meet the actor, as the film’s promotional team escorted the cricketers into the compartment to meet the actor, later sharing pictures of the two embracing the Raees star.
Two constables of the Railway police also collapsed during the chaos that ensued after SRK’s visit. The constables are undergoing treatment at SSG hospital and are said to be out of danger.
Several other persons were wounded and left bleeding during the near-stampede.
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© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd | 1,267,763 |
They have a dragon sorcerer and a half-dragon in their party. OF COURSE they were going to befriend a pack of kobolds, because why wouldn’t they? I’ll point out that the Hoard of the Dragon Queen book offers absolutely zero guidance for what to do if your players decide to recruit or other-wise join up with the cultists.
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If you’ve been looking for a way to help us stay afloat, but hate the idea of Patreon, look no further. We have finally have a store page:
https://www.yesthievescan.com/the-arcana-check-2/
They’re really just links out to our Arcana Check content on The DM Guild and DriveThruRPG, but that seemed like the best to us, since that’s *the* trustworthy place to go for RPG content, and I want my WordPress site handling credit card information like I want a hole in the head. And since I am a millennial and crave death, please understand that I am trying to say that I do not want credit card traffic coming through my website. Sorry for any confusion!
Speaking of Craving Death!
Zach and I are both attempting to find jobs in meat-space. We love Thieves Can’t, but it definitely does not put rent over our heads.
If I get a job, basically nothing will change for you guys. I do this for fun, and it takes up very little of my time. A decent portion of my income would go to making sure Zach gets to keep his starving artist lifestyle.
Jobs I’ve applied for: garbage person (it pays really well and the shifts start early, so this is kind of the dream); media assistant for the city of lawrence; camp counselor; instructing positions at local community colleges; administrative assistant positions, and just a mess of stuff I applied for so long ago that I forgot what they were. These are things I’ve applied for all in the last week or so. I’m in the wealthy end of Kansas, so I am hopeful that the economy is going to recover in such a way that one of these people looks at my resume and says, “yes, this person, call him.”
If you’re currently getting a master’s degree in communication, my advice for you is “haha, don’t do this.”
Alternatively, hey, if you need a friendly, lefty neckbeard, reach out to me. I am for rent.
If Zach gets a job, we’re almost certainly going to have to cut updates down to something less than one a week. He’s applying for really cushy graphic design jobs, though.
None of this should screw with the Kickstarter. That gets the brunt of our free time at the moment. | 1,267,764 |
PROJECTS INCLUDE
Site of Craig Ranch Regional Park. Site of Craig Ranch Regional Park. The 132-acre Craig Ranch Regional Park will be built in North Las Vegas, where there is now a golf course. $85 million. Site where Clark County Shooting Park will be built. Site where Clark County Shooting Park will be built. A sport shooting park, in far northwest Las Vegas Valley, will feature 700 to 800 acres of indoor and outdoor gun and archery ranges, surrounded by 2,100 acres of natural land. $64 million. Museum at the Springs Preserve. Museum at the Springs Preserve. Las Vegas Springs Preserve is a focal point of the city's cultural and natural history. Museums, exhibits and trails illustrate this history and preserve natural land. $49 million.
Federal land sale proceeds have helped pay for plans to ease the impact of development on endangered wildlife species. $53 million.
A portion of proceeds is budgeted for purchase of environmentally sensitive land in Nevada. So far, officials have bought more than 20,000 acres of ecologically valuable desert and upland property from private owners, protecting the land from future development. $346 million.
A variety of conservation initiatives have been funded, among them trash dump reclamation, abandoned mine closures, water use planning projects and organization of law enforcement resources to protect natural resources in the rapidly growing region. $181 million.
Red Spring Park. Red Spring Park. Red Spring, a small but popular park west of Las Vegas, is home to a rare snail species. Federal money has paid for an elevated boardwalk, picnic tables and interpretive signs. $1.8 million. Restrooms at Boulder Beach in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. Restrooms at Boulder Beach in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The federally managed Lake Mead's average water level has dropped, exposing once-submerged portions of boat ramps. Land sale money will pay for repairing erosion damage, augmenting asphalt construction with concrete and, in some cases, for building new ramps. $52 million.
The popular Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area will undergo a major facelift, with a new administrative/visitor center, road and parking upgrades and improvements to wild horse and burro fencing. $29 million.
Officials have earmarked $150 million from federal land sales for state education. Interest from the fund has helped pay for teacher salaries, utility bills and textbooks. $11 million in interest in fiscal year 2006-2007. Clark County School District buses at a staging and maintenance area. The facility is on land that the school district bought from the BLM at a discount. Clark County School District buses at a staging and maintenance area. The facility is on land that the school district bought from the BLM at a discount. The southern Nevada land program has also embraced the long-established practice of selling federal land to public bodies at heavy discounts. Among the beneficiaries has been the Clark County School District. 685 acres for $6,349. | 1,267,765 |
The Saint Louis University men’s basketball team lost a game to St. Bonaventure — and then its bus.
The Billikens walked out of the arena Wednesday night following the team’s 70-55 loss to the Bonnies, and their bus was nowhere to be found, New York State Police Trooper James O’Callaghan said. The driver, later identified as 56-year-old Linda Edmister of Gasport, N.Y., had taken off.
While authorities searched for the bus, the players sat in the arena. The team posted pictures on Twitter of players talking on their cellphones, playing cards and napping.
Just chilling in the Reilly Center while we try to find our missing bus. #SCNotTop10 pic.twitter.com/Au9LwpofO1 — SLU Men's Basketball (@SaintLouisMBB) February 9, 2017
“Just chilling in the Reilly Center while we try to find our missing bus,” the team tweeted.
State police said the bus eventually was stopped in Randolph, about 40 miles away. Troopers said they were able to find it through GPS on an item left on the bus. School officials said the item was Coach Travis Ford’s iPad.
“I’m not sure where their destination was after that. But yeah, it definitely wasn’t Randolph,” O’Callaghan said.
Troopers charged Edmister with driving a commercial vehicle while intoxicated. Police say her blood alcohol content was 0.22%, more than five times the 0.04% limit for commercial drivers.
It couldn’t be learned whether Edmister has a lawyer who could comment on the accusations. The Associated Press also left a message for her employer.
As for the team, it later posted an update on Twitter thanking the St. Bonaventure staff for helping out.
O’Callaghan said police don’t believe Edmister was drunk when she drove the team to the arena. He said troopers don’t know exactly when she left the campus or why. The game ended around 9:30 p.m. Edmister was pulled over shortly before 11 p.m., troopers said.
Another bus took the Billikens to Randolph so the team could retrieve their possessions from the first bus. They were then taken to the airport in nearby Bradford, Pa., for the return flight, which arrived in St. Louis around 3 a.m. local time.
ALSO
Why did Charles Oakley get kicked out of Madison Square Garden during the Clippers-Knicks game?
‘My record is still alive!’: High school boys basketball state record holder reacts to LaMelo Ball’s 92-point game
With genes like his, Santa Margarita sophomore Jake Kyman’s athletic skills were a slam dunk | 1,267,766 |
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - There has been no policy change with regard to U.S. Navy freedom of navigation operations under the administration of President Donald Trump, U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Scott Swift said on Monday.
FILE PHOTO: Commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral Scott Swift sits in front of a large poster of an Australian Navy frigate as he speaks during a media conference at the 2015 Pacific International Maratime Exposition in Sydney, Australia, October 6, 2015. REUTERS/David Gray/File Photo
Under the previous administration, the U.S. navy conducted such voyages through the South China Sea - most of which is claimed by China - angering Beijing. But none has been conducted in the region under the Trump administration.
The New York Times reported last week that a U.S. Pacific Command request in March to sail near the disputed Scarborough Shoal, a prime fishing ground that China seized in 2012, was rejected by top Pentagon officials.
Two other requests by the Navy in February were also turned down, it said.
Some saw this as an indication that the United States wanted to avoid antagonizing China while waiting to see how far it would go in helping to press North Korea to give up its ballistic missile and nuclear programs.
“There is nothing that has significantly changed in the last two or three months,” Admiral Scott Swift told reporters in Singapore, referring to the U.S. Navy excursions it says it conducts to ensure freedom of navigation.
“We just present the opportunities when we have a ship in the area and there’s an area of interest... They are either taken advantage of or they’re not.”
China’s extensive claims to the South china Sea, which sees about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade pass every year, are challenged by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, as well as Taiwan.
The United States has criticized China’s construction of man-made islands and build-up of military facilities in the sea, and expressed concern they could be used to restrict free movement.
Late last month, top U.S. commander in the Asia-Pacific region, Admiral Harry Harris, said the United States would likely carry out freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea soon, without offering details.
Swift said there has been no change in the importance the United States placed on the South China Sea issue.
“We are on track to conduct over 900 ship days of operations this year in the South China Sea,” he said.
On China’s recent unveiling of a domestically built aircraft carrier, Swift said: “If you have a global economy, I think you need a global navy to look after that economy.”
“If they think that they need carriers to support their maritime strategy, then I am not concerned about it.” | 1,267,767 |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. employers cut payrolls at the steepest rate in 5-1/2 years in September, slashing an unexpectedly large 159,000 jobs as employment contracted for a ninth straight month, suggesting the economy may be in recession.
People walk down Broadway past the Wall Street subway station in New York September 15, 2008. REUTERS/Chip East
The unemployment rate was unchanged from August at 6.1 percent, the highest rate in five years, as 121,000 people left the workforce, the Labor Department reported on Friday.
September’s job losses were much more severe than predicted by Wall Street economists surveyed by Reuters, who had forecast 100,000 jobs would be cut.
The report likely will ratchet up pressure on members of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote for a $700-billion rescue package for banks and other financial firms burdened by bad mortgage-related assets, which is contributing to a spreading credit crunch.
Some analysts said the monthly employment data pointed to deepening economic woes.
“We’ve seen weaker data in history, but these look pretty decisively to be the beginning of something worse,” said Pierre Ellis, senior economist with Decision Economics Inc. in New York, adding it might make the Federal Reserve more inclined to cut interest rates despite its concern over inflation.
But David Watt, senior currency strategist with RBC Capital markets in Toronto, said it was moderately encouraging that the unemployment rate, which is compiled from a separate survey, did not shoot higher.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that the labor market has weakened, but it’s not deteriorating quite as quickly as the headline indicated,” Watt said.
U.S. stock index futures rose on hopes Congress will approve the huge financial bailout package. U.S. government debt prices pared gains and the dollar pared losses against the euro. Federal fund futures held gains, with traders expecting a 50 basis point rate cut in October.
September’s cuts follow revised losses of 73,000 jobs in August and 67,000 in July and show the decline in employment is accelerating. Some 51,000 manufacturing jobs were lost last month on top of 56,000 cut in August, the 27th straight month in which manufacturers slashed their payrolls.
Job cuts were nearly across the board in September in every major category with the exception of government, which added 9,000 jobs.
The average work week in manufacturing industries was the lowest in three years at 40.7 hours.
Overall hours of work in all industries slipped to 33.6 a week in September from 33.7 in August -- the lowest since November 2004.
Hurricane Ike, which hit the Gulf coast, and a strike at aircraft maker Boeing Co. did not impact the data because the employees affected were on payrolls for at least part of the Labor Department’s survey period. | 1,267,768 |
Raheem Sterling: Subject of two newspaper reports in 48 hours
Liverpool will speak with winger Raheem Sterling after footage emerged of him apparently taking nitrous oxide.
Pictures published on The Sun's website appeared to show Sterling passing out unconscious after taking the substance, which is described as a legal high.
The report surfaced as Sterling was playing - and scoring the opening goal - in Liverpool's Premier League game against Newcastle at Anfield.
A club spokesperson said: "We are aware of the story and intend to speak to the player. Any subsequent action will be taken internally."
Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers told Sky Sports after the 2-0 win over Newcastle on Monday: "Internally we’ll always look after these types of items.
Brendan Rodgers said his side controlled the game and was full of praise for Joe Allen and Raheem Sterling after Liverpool beat Newcastle 2-0 Brendan Rodgers said his side controlled the game and was full of praise for Joe Allen and Raheem Sterling after Liverpool beat Newcastle 2-0
"He’s a young kid who has been in the spotlight now so he knows the demands of being a top class player and a top class professional.
"It’s not just on the field, it’s off the field as well but I will speak with him on it and we’ll move on."
In his post-match press conference, Rodgers later said: "For me it is something that when you are professional sportsperson at the top level of the game, I don't think it is something you should be doing. It is as simple as that.
"But I will speak to him on it, to see what he says on it. As you can imagine, I have only seen this today.
Speaking on Monday Night Football, Jamie Carragher said Raheem Sterling will eventually look back on this part of his career as a learning curve Speaking on Monday Night Football, Jamie Carragher said Raheem Sterling will eventually look back on this part of his career as a learning curve
"We want players here who are super-professional and focused on their football. I know he is. He very much is focused on his football and improving as a player.
"As I have said before, young players make mistakes. As long as they learn from them, that is what is important."
Another report on Sunday showed Sterling allegedly smoking a shisha pipe.
Sterling is currently stalling on talks over a new deal at Anfield and he has been linked with a number of other leading Premier League clubs as well as Real Madrid.
Speaking on Monday Night Football Gary Neville said Newcastle are too easy to play against and make far too many individual errors. Speaking on Monday Night Football Gary Neville said Newcastle are too easy to play against and make far too many individual errors.
Sky Sports subscribers can sign in to watch extended highlights of Liverpool's win over Newcastle. | 1,267,769 |
Nicki Minaj shared an emotional message to Instagram on Wednesday, revealing that she came to America as an "illegal immigrant" while addressing the migrant children crisis
Nicki Minaj Reveals She Came to the U.S. Illegally at Age 5: 'I Can't Imagine Having My Parents Stripped Away'
Nicki Minaj shared an emotional message to Instagram on Wednesday, speaking out about the migrant children being torn away from their parents at the U.S. and Mexico border, while sharing her own experience of coming to America as an immigrant.
The 35-year-old rapper (née Onika Tanya Maraj) was born in Saint James, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago and came to the U.S. as a young child, where she was raised in Queens, New York.
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She opened up about her past alongside a 2015 photo of the cages at the processing detention centers run by the Department of Homeland Security, where children have been held since being forcibly removed from their parents who were caught crossing into America under the Trump administration’s since-reversed “zero-tolerance” family separation policy.
“I came to this country as an illegal immigrant at 5 years old,” Minaj wrote on Instagram. “I can’t imagine the horror of being in a strange place and having my parents stripped away from me at the age of 5. This is so scary to me. Please stop this. Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now? Not knowing if their parents are dead or alive, if they’ll ever see them again… ”
Image zoom Nicki Minaj John Lamparski/WireImage
“We are keeping families together,” Trump said in the Oval Office, where he was joined by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Vice President Mike Pence.
“This will solve that problem. At the same time, we are keeping a very powerful border and it continues to be a zero tolerance. We have zero tolerance for people who enter our country illegally,” he said.
As CNN pointed out, in signing the order, Trump “officially reversed his debunked argument that he had no authority to stop separations of undocumented immigrant families at the border.”
Image zoom Kirstjen Nielsen, Donald Trump, and Mike Pence Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/Shutterstock
RELATED VIDEO: PEOPLE Writer Natasha Stoynoff Breaks Silence, Accuses Donald Trump of Sexual Attack
He had previously said that only Democrats can fix the migrant-child crisis, saying that they were responsible for his “zero-tolerance” policy.
“I hate the children being taken away. The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday. | 1,267,770 |
There are times when I like to bitch but this time I will try NOT to bitch. I have been staring at the computer screen for a long time. I don't recall ever having any issues with it. But as time went on and I kept staring more at it, I left that my eyes were getting a bit strained. I would get exhausted way earlier than expected, I wouldn't be able to work on things and worst of all, I wouldn't be able to read certain text unless I focused on it. That problem grew gradually until I finally said fuck it.
I tested my vision using some simple tests, I knew my right eye was a bit weak. Like 0.50 or 1 point drop but I knew I wouldn't have to worry about it. But since most of my work requires staring at small bits on the computer screen, I couldn't afford putting more stress on my eyes. Today I went ahead and booked one pair of glasses that are ideal for computer usages and actually have some nifty features that will allow me to work with small pixels without straining my eyes.
Normally I would go for a small frame like most of the people in Pakistan but since I am slightly more informed and I really do love myself I went with a Ray Ban type frame (yes, the frame is fake) which covers my eyes completely. Doing this ensures that my eyes don't have to refocus when viewing side angles, also the frame isn't that heavy & only a minor part of my viewing angle is hampered. I am not required to wear glasses all the time but it's a good idea to wear them when working on the system or reading or watching some movie.
I really had using glasses and most of them don't suit me at all, I only went with the RayBan type frame because I already have a set of RayBan and they look pretty good on me. The total cost is 4000 Rs which is quite high compared to what people normally pay but you can't take your eyes for granted and I don't mind spending some money on my own welfare. It's the least I can do for something that I rely on so much.
So, if you're reading this, don't wait for your vision to go out complete get them checked ASAP. Remember prevention is better than cure.
Here are the technical details:
RIGHT:
CYL 050
AXIS 10 DEGREE
VA 6/6
LEFT:
CYL 050
AXIS 160 DEGREE
VA 6/6
The correction I settled for was 0.50 for both eyes. According to the Doc, my eyes were fine but the Axis needed some correction. He said something about Irregular cornea or lens or something. I am sure about the word. And yes I will google this information and find out more about it but I guess glasses were something I was going to wear one day or another. | 1,267,771 |
to head on over to the Ripio GitHub and take stock of their development. Below are the code commits for their two most active repos.
Code commits to repos in past 12 months
As you can see, the developers have been quite active and have been pushing code regularly throughout the past year. It is also worth pointing out that they have a further 20 other repos in their GitHub on top of these two.
This is more development than we have seen on other projects at similar stages in their life. In fact, if you were to look at the ranking of Ripio on code tracking websites, they fair well amoung other projects. For example, Ripio is placed at 53 on Coincodecap.
Perhaps this frenetic pace of development is not a coincidence. The Ripio team has a pretty detailed roadmap that breaks down some of the most important priorities in development. Some of these are already in the advanced stages whereas others have yet to be taken up. You can see the full roadmap here.
Conclusion
The Ripio Credit Network has been smart to focus their energies on South America and grow from there. It seems to be working for them, and is a much better strategy than claiming they are going to immediately take on the global lending industry. The team knows and understands the South American lending environment and culture, which gives them an advantage in this region. Once they have gained a regional foothold they plan to focus on global growth.
Creating a lending platform based on blockchain makes sense, but allowing borrowers to deal in fiat and avoid the need for them to understand cryptocurrency is a good business plan. The RCN token works in the background, and that’s wise since the unbanked population likely has little knowledge of cryptocurrencies and if Ripio had to educate them it might present a hurdle that’s too large to overcome.
If you consider the ICO price of RCN tokens as fair then the current price is extremely undervalued and RCN is a bargain right now. Those who begin accumulating RCN tokens now could see their investment more than double in the coming months. And if prices approach all-time highs again the profits for investors now could be 15-20x their investment.
The lull in activity from the team in 2018 is a bit concerning, but they have moved forward during that time, so we have to assume there was a good reason for the silence. Investors obviously haven’t been put off as RCN was one of the top ten best performing tokens in the first quarter of 2019, gaining more than 175% in the first three months of the year.
That said, price is still less than half the ICO price, so early investors will have some time to wait to recoup their initial investment, and that could cap gains for the token.
Featured Image via Fotolia
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research. | 1,267,772 |
that having fun doing something can sometimes lead to your one true love...The artwork is lively and funny (do I see an American Idol reference?). His [Tim Bower's] pictures will keep your kids engaged and drawn into the story. Imagination-Cafe
This is a cute, poignant and inspiring tale that will encourage children to reach for the sky no matter the bumps in the road along the way. The illustrations by Tim Bowers are delightful. Baby Bloomer
Olympic figure skating champion, "Dancing With the Stars" winner and Bay Area resident Kristi Yamaguchi drives the point home with fun and flair...The illustrations featuring Poppy and all the animals in her world, including the impala skating instructor and a high-heeled lioness supermodel, are wonderful. San Francisco Chronicle
Yamaguchi [now] pens titles for the younger reader... clever, adorable, inspiring, funny ones at that, this one brought to the colorful page with humor and charm by illustrator Tim Bowers. Little Poppy is a "pot-bellied, toddling, waddling pig... who dreamed big!"... Being a persistent pig of New Pork City (surely you're giggling now), she's good enough to make the cover of the New Pork Times (snorting yet?). After such success, what's next for our dreamy pig? Here's a hint: "When pigs fly!"
Terry Hong Smithsonian Asian Pacific American blog
PreS-Gr 1—Another celebrity picture book that falls flat. Poppy wants to be a star. She tries to be a ballerina, a singer, and a model, but just isn't any good. However, she has a personal cheering section: her mom, grandparents, and best friend each have a mantra for her. Just when she is about to give up, she discovers ice skating and, after much practice, becomes good enough to have fans. "Poppy's dreams had come true!" Time passes and she decides she wants to be a pilot. Despite the skepticism of the other pilots, readers know she will try because, "She was a pig who dreamed big." The Disney-esque illustrations are packed with a variety of beguiling animal characters. Poppy is an appealing little pig, and Bowers imbues each creature with a distinctive personality. The artwork is done in a pleasantly subdued palette, and the use of single pages and spreads effectively adds a sense of motion to the story. Unfortunately, the well-meaning plot sends a mixed message. Poppy's endeavors are all to be famous in stereotypical ways. What's more, when the protagonist finally finds something she is successful at, the book doesn't end. Instead, there is the tacked-on ending about becoming a pilot. Yamaguchi's well-meaning effort doesn't live up to the many books about self-esteem that already fill library shelves.—Amy Lilien-Harper, The Ferguson Library, Stamford, CT School Library Journal | 1,267,773 |
Young Republicans are breaking with the party over climate change, according to a new poll.
A survey from the Pew Research Center released Monday shows that more than half of adult Republicans under the age of 38 say the federal government should be doing more.
The finding suggests that the GOP could be forced to move further away from its traditional stance on climate change at a time when the globe has witnessed youth activists taking to the streets to lead protests over inaction on the topic.
Photos: World's Youth March for Climate View All 32 Images
And it's not just young people. Nearly half of Republican women – 46% – also want the federal government to do more.
Overall, about 67% of people say the federal government should do more to reduce the effects of climate change, according to the survey.
When the responses are broken down by party affiliation, about 90% of Democrats agree that the government isn't doing enough. Republicans, on the other hand, fall just short of 40% agreeing with the statement.
The survey, which was conducted on over 3,600 adults from Oct. 1 to Oct. 13, also found that 2 in 10 people believe human activity plays little or no role in climate change.
The findings come as the Trump administration continues to roll back environmental regulations to boost fossil fuel industries. This month, the White House announced it has officially started withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement.
The generational differences may not be surprising, with increased attention being paid to the subject thanks to celebrities and sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who has been an influential figure in the movement.
"Young people are growing up in a time when climate change is here and has been very actively discussed during their lifetime," says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of Yale University's program on climate change communication. "It's the world they're going to live in, so they tend to be much more concerned about future-oriented potential impacts."
Possible reasons for the generational gap are increased media coverage of climate change in recent years and changing social norms, according to Leiserowitz, who was not involved in the Pew survey.
Women perceiving a higher risk than men is a trend that goes beyond just climate, Leiserowitz says. One factor at play could be the "white male effect," which is the tendency of white males to be less concerned about risks from a variety of events than women or minorities.
Sasha Mackler, director of the energy project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, says the poll shows an evolution in the climate views of Republicans and conservatives.
"I think that will motivate the party to start to do things we haven't seen them step into," says Mackler, who was not involved in the poll. "It's simply not sustainable for a conservative agenda to ignore climate policy."
While that likely won't translate to large, sweeping policy changes, he says it could mount to "small, meaningful steps." | 1,267,774 |
Bravery comes in many forms, but combat is where it shines brightest. On June 27, Captain (ret.) Christopher C. Palumbo received the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC), the nation’s second-highest award for valor under fire, for saving the lives of a Special Forces team in Afghanistan in 2005.
The then-Chief Warrant Officer Third Class (CWO-3) Palumbo used his UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter as a shield to protect the team from withering Taliban fire. Initially, Captain Palumbo had received the Silver Star—the nation’s third-highest award for valor—but under the current policy of re-examining military awards, the Army decided to upgrade it to a DSC.
The award citation states that “Chief Warrant Officer Three Palumbo inserted the Special Forces team to neutralize the threat. The soldiers were successful, but they didn’t realize that most of the insurgents were embedded in the caves. Two of the ground troops were hit and when the Apaches [AH-64 choppers that were flying as combat escort on that day] had to leave to refuel, the Black Hawks were left to provide support and protection for their comrades on the ground.”
Captain Palumbo was a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot with Company A, 3rd Battalion, 158th Aviation Regiment, 12th Aviation Brigade, Combined Joint Task Force 76.
During the award ceremony, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Beale, Captain Palumbo’s platoon commander during the action, gave an inspiring account of the event: “While flying figure-eight patterns, low-level, in a valley between the insurgents and the wounded Americans, Chris’ aircraft started taking heavy enemy fire. The crew chiefs took aim, shooting straight down at the insurgents attempting to maneuver on the wounded Americans. The crew members in the back of the Black Hawk neutralized one target after another, all while taking rounds to the aircraft.”
All in all, Palumbo’s Black Hawk helicopter received more than 50 hits during the action, resulting in considerable damage in the fuel compartment that led to a leakage. Despite the serious damage, Captain Palumbo first flew to a hospital so his wounded crew chief could receive medical attention.
“The events of that fateful day permanently impacted me and the soldiers of our platoon. For the first time in my short military career, I had witnessed extraordinary heroism and courage by otherwise ordinary men. The actions of all of the men on that early April morning embodied the Warrior Ethos. Chris and his crew showed us that day what warriors are made of. I am proud to have served with them and am honored to call them my friends,” added Lt. Col. Beale.
General James McConville, the Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army, presented the award to Captain Palumbo in a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Hall, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. | 1,267,775 |
It's essentially like looking into the darkness of the universe in its grand expanse of nothingness while contemplating the lifeless hole that has engulfed your soul as you age towards oblivion but with a BMW badge, grille, and headlights. It really is something you have to see for yourself because the car loses all dimension and looks like a silhouette even when the lights in the Coachella-rave-tent inspired room are turned on.
But even blackest black can't escape the power of lasers. LiDAR outfit Ouster took one of its sensors into the room to see what they could see and caught the vehicle in all its X6 darker-than dark-glory.
The sensor relies on a reflected laser and ambient light to "see" objects, and when you have something this black there's very little reflectivity. Mark Frichtl, Ouster co-founder and CTO explained his theory why a pigment that just sucks up light was caught on the company's LiDAR system.
Covering the X6 in Vantablack VBx2 reduces both (laser and Ambient light) of these parameters dramatically. At one-percent total hemispherical reflectance, it's 10-times less reflective than a typical 'low-reflectivity' scenario for specifying maximum ranges for LiDAR. The Ouster OS1-64 LiDAR sensor is specced at a maximum range of 40 meters for a 10 percent reflective target, so there's a maximum range of around 22 meters for a target that's one-percent reflective, like VBx2-coated X6.
In other words, it sees the car, but it needs to be close to it to do so. Fortunately, some parts of the car are very reflective so even at long distances, the Vantablack X6 is visible.
"You'll also notice that certain parts of the X6 are designed to be extremely reflective, like the license plate and retroreflectors in the headlights and signals. Those parts would be easily picked up at more than 100 meters away. And you can see that in the video, with the license plate being one of the brightest objects in the scene," Frichtl told Engadget.
Of course, BMW will never sell a car with Vantablack. But if someone decides to spend all their money on a custom paint job, the vehicle will still be detectable by sensors as long as they don't cover the entire vehicle (including the windshield).
LiDAR has become one of the go-to sensors for most automakers to help vehicles see the road, especially for driver's assistance features. In addition to adding redundancy systems that already have cameras and Radar, LiDAR's ability to create high definition images from the bouncing of light off surfaces from far distances gives vehicles a more robust piece of data about an object.
This demonstration is further evidence that a suite of sensors on vehicles is always better than just one. | 1,267,776 |
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NEW DELHI: In a move that might change the dynamics of India’s booming mobile phone market Samsung Electronics — the country’s largest phone maker — has decided to take the offline retail route even as the rest of the world is moving online. While its peers like Xiaomi and Motorola are busy selling millions of handsets online, the South Korean giant has given in to mounting pressure from thousands of brick-and-mortar retailers over predatory online pricing and has decided to extend exclusivity on selling rights of 48 models, including its much-awaited Galaxy Alpha and Note 4, to offline retailers.Offline handset retailers have been facing the heat from their online counterparts due to heavy discounts offered online, which they couldn’t match. This has led to the formation of All India Mobile Retailers Association (AIMRA), a body that has vowed to work for the mutual benefits of brick-and-mortar retailers and maintain price hygiene across trade channels.TOI had reported in August that Samsung was facing dealer unrest due to predatory pricing by online retailers.While addressing a large gathering of retailers from AIMRA in the capital recently, a senior executive with Samsung Electronics said: “We have taken action against many rogue distributors, who were dumping their stocks online and beating down the price of our handsets. We are working hard to bring back price hygiene in the market. Our revenues from online sales have come down from 30% to single digit. We also have plans to stop billing WS Retail, the largest reseller on Flipkart.”The executive said that Samsung has struck a deal with various e-tailers, wherein the company would give them exclusive rights to sell one or two models in return for the promise that they are going to maintain the price sanctity of Samsung handsets. Earlier this month, Samsung made Flipkart the exclusive launch partner for the Galaxy S5 Mini.Interestingly, according to retailers, the difference in prices between Samsung handsets sold online and offline has narrowed considerably since August when a Galaxy S5 that was being sold for Rs 38,000 at retail stores was being offered for Rs 36,000 online. “Now, there is hardly any difference,” an AIMRA spokesperson said.An emailed questionnaire to Samsung did not elicit any response.Retail experts have taken its move with a pinch of salt. “It’s a regressive move, especially before the festive season when you are going to see a lot of discounts online,” said Arvind Singhal, founder and chairman of retail consultancy, Technopak. “Perhaps the fact that around 80% of India’s Rs 60,000-crore handset business is still done through offline retail might be reason for the company to shy away from online trade. But, Samsung needs to wake up to the fact that it’s not the future since Chinese manufacturers are offering same spec handsets at one third of the price.” | 1,267,777 |
“I had been two weeks at the U.S. Open tennis tournament out in Queens and it finished on a Sunday, so I had Monday off and then Tuesday morning was my first day covering fashion week.
"It was my first show and I was covering a maternity fashion show by Liz Lange at Bryant Park. I was doing hair and makeup feature photos and it was interesting to see that they were using pregnant models.
"I got those backstage pictures out of the way and then went to the end of the runway to stake out my real estate for the fashion show. I was talking to a CNN cameraman who was shooting the fashion show and all of a sudden, he puts his finger to his ear and says, ‘There’s been an explosion at the world trade center… an airplane has hit the World Trade Center.’ Then, I got a call from my editor that said, ‘Bag the fashion show. You have to go.’ I took the 3 train down to Chambers Street to the World Trade Center. It was just before 9 a.m.
“When I came up the steps of the subway station I looked up and saw that both of the towers were on fire. I only knew of one airplane. I immediately started photographing people. I photographed one guy who was walking towards me with his head bleeding because I think it had been hit by debris. Already, some police had taped off the debris that had been blown over, cars had windows knocked out, and I slowly made my way over to the west side of the building by the West Side Highway because the wind was blowing west-to-east and I didn’t want the smoke obscuring my view.
"I ended up at the northwest corner of West and Vesey Street—where the Goldman Sachs building is now—where the ambulances were congregating. I had a perfect view of both buildings and figured that was where I could cover the assignment. I had a Nikon DCS-620, which was one of their early models—a hybrid Kodak-Nikon camera—and I was using a 70-200mm zoom lens. And I did my assignment.
“Myself as a photojournalist I’m like a first responder, as all journalists are in that situation, so we run to something instead of away from it when something happens. When I’m there I get in a zone and do my job and capture what’s there. I don’t really think about if I’m scared or not. You want to make sure you don’t miss that photograph. You get in a mindset. You have to commit to journalism, remember what your job is, and not get emotionally involved. The camera is like a filter for me, too. It’s not like I’m experiencing it, I’m seeing it through my camera. I have to remain emotionally uninvolved. | 1,267,778 |
The deputy director of a municipal police agency in Chihuahua was arrested and is under investigation for kidnapping and aiding organized crime.
The Deputy Director of Namiquipa, identified as Hélier Daniel Gutiérrez Quintana, alias “El Danys” or “El Chapo,” is also the cousin of one of Mexico’s most wanted fugitives, Carlos Arturo Quintana “El 80.” El 80 is the regional boss of La Linea–the armed wing of the Nuevo Cartel de Juarez also known as the “Juarez Cartel,” according to local media outlets.
The State Attorney General’s Office announced the arrest, which was carried out in conjunction with the Federal Police on Wednesday, February 21, at a local hospital in Chihuahua.
According to a statement by Federal Police Commissioner Manelich Castilla, Quintana, in his capacity of deputy chief of Namiquipa and police officer since 2006, was a criminal operative for La Linea and used his position to further their criminal activities which involve murder, kidnappings, extortion, and drug distribution in the surrounding municipalities. Commissioner Castilla also attributed La Linea with much of the cartel-related violence including clashes with authorities and rival criminal groups.
Breitbart Texas has reported extensively on the cartel violence in Chihuahua and most has been attributed to the turf wars between the Sinaloa and Juarez Cartels and affiliated criminal groups working on behalf of both drug cartels.
According to the ministerial complaint, Gutiérrez Quintana is accused of ordering the kidnapping of a victim at a police checkpoint on May 16, 2012, in Namiquipa. According to authorities, the victim was led to believe that he was going to be subject to a routine inspection but instead was kidnapped by uniformed police and transferred to a facility where he was handcuffed, gagged, beaten and threatened at gunpoint. He was later forced to call relatives with a large ransom demand on a three-day-deadline.
Prior to paying the ransom, the victim was kept in a detention cell at the police station. Involved officers reportedly took photos of the victim standing next to his vehicle with packages of marijuana planted inside.
Once the ransom was paid, the victim immediately filed a complaint naming Gutiérrez Quintana as one of his kidnappers since he was recognized at the time.
Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.) | 1,267,779 |
interview with investigators.
The report will also shine a light on the behavior of other senior officials involved in the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.
One such current FBI official is Peter Strzok, who played a key role in the Clinton email investigation and officially opened the Trump Russia investigation. He also served on the special counsel team until Robert Mueller removed him after Horowitz found thousands of text messages exchanged with his fellow FBI official and lover Lisa Page.
Page also played key roles in the Clinton and Trump-Russia FBI investigations, and also served briefly on the special counsel team. She left the FBI earlier this year.
Strzok and Page’s texts have provided insight into how they approached both investigations. In one text, Page warned Strzok in February not to go too hard on Clinton, since she “might be our next president.”
“The last thing you need [is] going in there loaded for bear,” Page texted. “You think she’s going to remember or care that it was more [DOJ] than [FBI]?”
The two also suggested that they preferred Clinton’s election over Trump’s. Strzok texted Page on August 15, 2016, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok texted on Aug. 15, 2016. “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Horowitz is expected to issue an additional report at a later date specifically addressing the DOJ and FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Fitton said he wants to know how personally involved former President Obama was in directing the DOJ’s decisions leading up to both investigations. Strzok and Page had also discussed preparing talking points for Comey, to give to then-President Barack Obama, whom they said wanted “to know everything we’re doing.”
Several congressional committees are expected to follow up on Horowitz’s report, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has already invited Lynch, Comey, and McCabe to testify.
House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) indicated Congress could take legislative action to prevent political influence in future investigations.
“My expectation is we will see a theme where senior leadership at the FBI and Department of Justice who are very interested in shaping public opinion by leaking information and by making statements to the media,” he told Fox News on Wednesday.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to craft some bipartisan solutions so that we don’t see further political infection of the FBI or the Department of Justice in the future,” he added. | 1,267,780 |
The demise of the walking dead : the rise of purgatory and the end of revenancy
By Elif Boyacıoğlu
Master’s Thesis, Bilkent University, 2007
Abstract: Folklore and popular belief strongly affect human behavior in any age, showing how people think, what they fear and how they react. The belief in the existence of the walking dead, that is, revenants, is no exception. Here, the possible reasons for the prevalence of the belief in the walking dead, as well as its comfortable existence within human culture are examined. The existence of the belief in these very corporal monsters, persevering at least into the thirteenth century in north-western Europe, cannot be disputed. However, subsequently, it diminished and then virtually disappeared. What force could be effective and widespread enough to remove this perception of the very physical threat of the dead bodily walking again among the living? Here, it is argued that it was the effects of the emergence of Purgatory that lead to the extinction of the revenant. Using various texts mainly from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, this study aims to capture this process of change within the folkloric beliefs of the people, to follow the procession of revenants into oblivion.
Introduction: Imagine a time when people actually believed in the existence of revenants, that is, the walking dead; there are records of people having heard them, seen them and partaken in countermeasures against these monsters, or at least those who recorded the stories fully believed the people who said that they had. The threat of the walking dead was very much present in the mind of these people: “Belief in corpses coming back to life is well attested for parts of medieval Europe, most notably Iceland, but also England, the Low Countries, northern France and parts of Germany,” though the belief was by no means limited to these areas.
It is important to emphasize that for the people of the time these accounts represented an actual belief; “all these stories, without exception, were told as being absolutely and historically true.” The question here is not whether revenants actually walked in Europe in the early and high Middle Ages; it is the fact that people believed them to have done so and acted accordingly, leaving behind evidence of the belief, some physical, but most explicitly written. The current study will focus mainly, but not exclusively, on the British side of the story. This is more a matter of convenience than anything else, the majority of sources available to me having come from this area. It should not be taken for granted that belief in revenants was most active there. The thesis will also primarily concern the period from the twelfth century to the end of the fourteenth. This again, in one sense, is partly a matter of sources, but I shall also argue that it is a period of profound significance for the belief in revenants.
Click here to read this thesis from Bilkent University | 1,267,781 |
Portugal police raid 'Russian football gang' Published duration 4 May 2016
image copyright Getty Images image caption The suspects are alleged to have gained the trust of football clubs facing financial difficulties, before using them as a front for money laundering
European and Portuguese police say they have dismantled a mainly Russian criminal gang laundering money through football in Portugal.
EU law enforcement agency Europol said the gang purchased football clubs and then used them as a front for an opaque network of holding companies.
It said four major football clubs were searched along with houses and offices, resulting in three "key" arrests.
Third division club Uniao de Leiria was among those raided.
Leiria's owner Alexander Tolstikov has been detained, along with two other club officials, Portuguese media report.
They are all due to appear in court on Thursday morning.
Bankruptcy
Uniao de Leiria was a top-flight club, at one point managed by Jose Mourinho, but it fell out of the Primera Liga in 2012 and dropped to the third division before going bankrupt and being bought by Mr Tolstikov in 2015.
It is currently fighting for promotion to the second division.
image copyright Getty Images image caption Leiria, who play in the Magalhaes Pessoa stadium, went bankrupt before being bought in 2015
Europol said the searches and arrests were carried out on Wednesday as part of Operation Matrioskas (Russian dolls), which had been going on for more than a year.
Links were found with serious and organised crimes carried out in the UK, Germany, Moldova, Austria, Latvia and Estonia, it said.
Three other clubs were searched, top sides Sporting Lisbon, Sporting Braga and Benfica - but Portuguese media said they were not under suspicion and were only linked to the investigation because of football transfer negotiations conducted with Leiria.
Several Russian players have been on Uniao de Leiria's books in the past two years, but only one has been in the main squad, Reuters reports.
The gang behind the alleged club takeovers was "thought to be a cell of an important Russian mafia group", the agency added. According to Europol, the group adopted a particular method:
Identifying EU football clubs in financial distress
Infiltrating the clubs with benefactors who gained trust through short-term donations or investments
Buying the clubs as a front for networks of opaque holding companies owned by offshore shell companies
Laundering money through over-valuing or under-valuing players on the transfer market, buying TV rights and betting activities
Due to the use of front-men, the real owners who ultimately controlled the club were unknown, it said.
The investigation was triggered due to suspicions raised by "strong red flag indicators" - mainly the "high standards of living suspects enjoyed".
Related Topics Portugal
Organised crime | 1,267,782 |
USD law school: Hawaiian Day party is offensive. Hawaiian state rep: No it's not.
The University of South Dakota allegedly pressured the Student Bar Association to change the name of its event from “Hawaiian day” to “Beach Day.” However, after first keeping leis in the program, USD later advised against wearing them, calling them “culturally insensitive.”
Now, a Hawaii state representative is accusing some at USD of having “their head stuck in a snowbank.”
“The lei is a symbol of our Aloha spirit in Hawaii, inclusive and welcoming. One individual’s objection to its use at a festive event is both patronizing and an insult to our island tradition"
Hawaii state Rep. Bob McDermott commented on the situation in a letter to the editor published by the University of South Dakota's school newspaper, The Volante, and claimed that usage of the leis is not offensive, but honorable.
[RELATED: 'Hawaiian Day' party flooded by cultural controversy wave]
“The lei is a symbol of our Aloha spirit in Hawaii, inclusive and welcoming," McDermott said. "One individual’s objection to its use at a festive event is both patronizing and an insult to our island tradition."
“It is also a demonstration of ignorance about the cultural significance of the lei," the state representative added.
McDermott continued by saying that the lei is typically used during joyous events and parties and that states and other parties, like the USD Student Bar Association, are welcome to participate in the tradition.
USD president Sheila Gestring said that USD has opened an investigation to determine if the law school interim administration broke the Board of Regents policy on free speech and intellectual diversity.
[RELATED: Victory for free speech in South Dakota]
“Administrative censorship of student speech and expression is a serious matter and not something USD condones without compelling justification consistent with Board policy, such as a genuine threat,” Gestring said Saturday.
Kevin V. Schieffer, president of the South Dakota Board of Trustees, was pleased by Gestring opening the investigation, according to a press release.
“The board has made it very clear in policy that neither professors nor administrators can block or unduly interfere with free speech simply because some might find it offensive,” Schieffer said in the press release. “We do no service to our students by indoctrinating them with ‘political correctness’ run amok."
The BOR’s general counsel, Nathan Lukkes, also sent a message to South Dakota university presidents stating that the board’s policy does protect “offensive, bigoted, or otherwise distasteful” speech, according to the Argus Leader.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @asabes10 | 1,267,783 |
Yet another federal lawsuit has been filed to challenge Donald Trump’s reinstatement of a ban on military service by transgender people.
This one comes from Equality California and seven transgender plaintiffs — four service members and three who have sought to enlist — with representation by the law firm of Latham & Watkins LLP.
The suit was filed today in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. “It principally presses claims that the ban unlawfully discriminates against transgender people on the basis of their gender identity; impinges upon transgender people’s fundamental rights by penalizing and stigmatizing them for expressing a fundamental aspect of their personal identity; and violates the right of transgender service members to openly express who they are,” according to an Equality California press release. “It states that the ban is arbitrary, without a rational basis, and motivated by animus against transgender people.”
The ban denies trans people “equal protection of the laws, their right to freedom of expression, and their right to liberty and privacy, in violation of the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution,” the complaint states. It names Trump, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and other top military officials as defendants.
“President Trump has attacked American heroes who have risen above discrimination, hostility and lack of acceptance to serve our country by putting their lives on the line in its defense,” said Rick Zbur, executive director of Equality California, in the press release. “His justification for the ban bears no relation to the truth. Contrary to what the president states, ejecting loyal members of the armed forces promotes chaos and division, not unit cohesion. The cost to the government of transition-related care is negligible. On the other hand, discharging thousands will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and will rip trained and loyal service members out of their units, harming military readiness and requiring the military to find and pay to train replacements. The order effectively leaves no discretion to military leaders, many of whom are firmly opposed to this ban.”
This is the fourth lawsuit filed against the ban. The National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Advocates and Defenders filed a joint suit August 9, and on August 28 came two more suits, one from OutServe-SLDN and Lambda Legal, the other from the American Civil Liberties Union with the firm of Covington and Burling.
Trump announced the ban via Twitter July 26, and on August 25 he signed a memo instructing the departments of Defense and Homeland Security on its implementation, reversing the lifting of the ban last year under President Obama. Mattis is assembling a panel to study how best to implement it. Trans people currently serving in the military can stay in for now, but Trump’s memo directs military leaders to craft a plan by February 21 to block future service by trans people. And it continues blocking enrollment of new trans service members and bans the use of federal funds to cover transition-related health care. | 1,267,784 |
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Jeremy Corbyn pledged to'reach out' to Labour MPs who oppose him today - as one of his key allies warned they could be deselected.
Shadow Defence Secretary Clive Lewis said local party members working to boot out sitting Labour MPs was a "democratic choice."
But he dismissed claims of the hard left mounting a hostile takeover of the party as "red under the bed scare stories."
He told the BBC's Andrew Marr: "I think we've had a robust debate in the party over the past year. Deselection hasn't come up as I understand it as an issue - if it does, as far as I'm concerned, that's a democratic choice for our members."
He added the party's MPs would be subject to "churn" as the boundary review reduces the number of constituencies by 50, and there would be "MPs that come up against one another."
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Less than an hour later, Mr Corbyn denied there was a threat of deselections.
He told ITV's Robert Peston: "There will be selections, made by local constituency parties, I have a democratic mandate as leader, that democratic mandate doesn’t give me the power to instruct, impose people all over the country. There will be boundary changes in all probability therefore pretty well every constituency will be a new boundary."
Asked if that was a "veiled threat" against MPs who oppose him, he said: "it’s not any kind of threat. What it is is simply describing the process. There are going to be 600 new constituency Labour parties formed, as there will be for other parties, and they will go through a selection process. Where the sitting MP has a substantial geographical claim on the constituency, they’re automatically put forward, if there is a trigger ballot to have an open selection, that MP is obviously automatically on the shortlist because of their existing geographical claims to the constituency."
He added: "Listen, my own constituency is being split into three by the proposal of the Boundary Commission which is rather unkind."
He said if he remains in place as party leader after next week's Leadership election, he would reunite the party by "reaching out" to MPs who oppose him.
He said: "By reaching out as I have tried to do in the past and will do so again, reaching out, recognising the talents of people who actually broadly agree these days on an anti-austerity economic strategy, absolutely agree on the need to defeat the Tories’ education strategy, absolutely agree on the need to fund properly our National Health Service including our mental health services. There is an awful lot on which the party is actually in complete agreement." | 1,267,785 |
can do that to you, Grundy, you should be doing it yourself,'" he said.
Darcy expressed hope that Grundy, 25, would develop his ruck craft more along the lines of Port Adelaide's 2004 premiership ruckman Brendon Lade rather than recently retired Fremantle giant Aaron Sandilands.
"Hitouts has always been the most overrated stat in the game and we saw it for years with Sandilands – great player, more hitouts than anyone in the history of the game, but if you can't change your set-up at times and react to what the opposition are doing you'll get beaten in clearances," he said.
"I always had great respect for Brendon Lade, who was probably at the bottom of the gene pool for athleticism, but he was tactically outstanding. He showed great leadership around stoppages to change tactics on the run.
"That may be the next evolution in Grundy's development. You're bigger, stronger, more athletic and more capable than anyone out there – the next level is that you become the leader of that (onball) group and be able to tactically adapt in-game to counter the opposition. He didn't do that against the Giants."
Grundy earned a second All Australian blazer in 2019. Picture: AFL Photos
Hawthorn assistant coach and club great Mitchell, a long-time stoppage specialist, told Channel Seven Network on Sunday: "There's no actual point having a hitout unless you win the clearances. I think Mumford would be sore and battered and bruised but I think that his coaches, when it comes to their best and fairest night, it wouldn't surprise me if he was one of the highest rated players from the Giants' point of view."
Early in the season Pies coach Nathan Buckley acknowledged his team's poor conversion of hitouts to clearances was an issue when he spoke of his desire to get more " bang for buck" from Grundy's dominance.
Brodie Grundy does the rucking and the roving! #AFLDogsPies pic.twitter.com/JihCIlp4qw — AFL (@AFL) June 23, 2019
The possible return of veteran Dayne Beams from hip and shoulder injuries and mental illness would likely help, as would improved output from the likes of inside midfielder Brayden Sier after an indifferent season littered with niggles, form issues and the infamous 'Phill Inn' social basketball blunder.
The Magpies' stoppage mediocrity didn't often leave them exposed largely because of their defensive mechanisms. However, they could take a considerable hit in this areas if they lose apparent coach-in-waiting Justin Longmuir, who in his two years at the club has had a profound influence while in charge of the backline and team defence.
COLLINGWOOD IN 2019 | 1,267,786 |
World End Syndrome launches for PS4, Switch in spring 2019
Anime News Network's coverage of Anime NYC 2018 is sponsored by Yen Press. Anime News Network's coverage of Anime NYC 2018 is sponsored by Yen Press.
Arc System Works announced at the Anime NYC event on Saturday that it will release the World End Syndrome game and the BlazBlue CentralFiction Special Edition game in North America.
Arc System Works plans to release World End Syndrome for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, but not PlayStation Vita, digitally in spring 2019. The game will feature Japanese audio and English text.
Arc System Works describes the game:
WES is a romantic adventure game from the collaboration of Arc System Works and TOYBOX.
Characters are designed by Yuki Kato, an artist and designer for the BLAZBLUE series. Other known creators on the project include Tomio Kanazawa for scenario and Takashi Nitta for music.
The story takes place in a coastal town called “Mihate Town.”
The protagonist gets transferred to “Mihate High School” in the town and begins a new life, where he meets the heroines: Maimi Kusunose, a cheerful girl, and Miu Amana, a quiet girl.
How you interact with the girls through unforgettable summer experiences and incidents that happen in the peaceful town will drastically change the ending.
Arc System Works released the game in Japan for PS4, PlayStation Vita, and Switch on August 30 after a delay from April 26. Ibuki Kido performed the game's ending theme song. The game stars Hisako Tōjō as Maimi Kusunose and Shiori Izawa as Miu Amana.
PQube had announced last month that it will release Arc System Works' Blazblue: CentralFiction Special Edition, the Nintendo Switch version of its Blazblue: CentralFiction game, on February 8. Arc System Works clarified with ANN that PQube's release will be in Europe, and Arc System Works will release the game in North America. Arc System Works is releasing the game digitally only in North America on February 7.
The release will feature Japanese audio and Japanese and English text. The Switch version will not feature cross battles with other platforms, and the online lobby feature will not be available.
The game will ship in Japan on February 7. The game will include all the DLC for the game's PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions on release, including system voices and character color palettes. The game will also include exclusive color palettes, and will bundle an acrylic keyholder.
Blazblue: CentralFiction originally debuted in Japanese arcades in November 2015, and the game launched in Japan for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 in October 2016. Aksys Games released the game in North America in November 2016.
Sources: Arc System Works' Anime NYC panel (Rai Kelly), Email correspondence | 1,267,787 |
Medical Transcriptionist Certification
If you’re looking for a career that is in-demand and can give you flexible working arrangements, medical transcription may be one of your career options. Medical transcription is the process of converting voice-recorded reports of physicians into text format.
Reviewing and editing medical documents using speech recognition technology are also part of a medical transcriptionist’s job. Doctors and other health practitioners dictate the procedures they have done on a patient and medical transcriptionists transcribe and interpret these and include it in patient’s medical histories, discharge summaries and other related documents.
Medical transcriptionists must have an understanding of medical terminology, anatomy and biology. Good grammar and knowledge of word-processing software are also pertinent requirements to become a successful medical transcriptionist.
According to the 2012 data of the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, medical transcriptionists receive a median pay of about $34,020 per year or $16.36 per hour. The projected employment growth is 8% from 2012 to 2022. The demand for medical transcriptionist services will continue to rise with the growing volume of healthcare services.
How to Become a Certified Medical Transcriptionist?
Enrolling in medical transcription classes and training course online can help you be equipped with the skills needed to start a career in this field. When choosing a school, make sure that its medical transcription courses will help you prepare for a medical transcription certification. Having medical transcriptionist certification will give you an advantage when you look for jobs because employers prefer those who have passed the requirements of a certification exam.
Taking the medical transcription training online certification at Meditec will help you prepare to become a successful practitioner. After finishing the program, Meditec can also assist you in your search for medical transcriptionist jobs. Of course, becoming a certified medical transcriptionist gives you an edge over other applicants. Some states require certification while others don’t. However, getting certified is recommended because it is a proof that you have undergone proper training and validates your skill as a medical transcriptionist.
Must Read: The Top 10 Skills a Medical Transcriptionist Needs
Must Read: The Bright Future of Medical Transcription
Must Read: Evolving Roles of the Medical Transcriptionist
Must Read: What’s Next for Medical Transcriptionists?
Medical Transcription Classes
Meditec’s medical transcription classes will help you develop the skills necessary to succeed as a medical transcriptionist. We consult with industry experts to ensure you learn everything needed to excel in your chosen path. Our online courses will teach you:
Medical root words, suffixes, and prefixes
Pharmaceutical terminology
How to transcribe in real-world situations
Surgical vocabulary
The program takes about six months to complete, assuming you study approximately 15 hours a week. Once you pass all your courses, you will receive a certificate of completion and be ready to begin your career in medical transcription. | 1,267,788 |
It's fair to say that Melanie Sykes has an incredible figure - but she slams the notion that is naturally toned.
Now 44, the television presenter told Fit & Well magazine that she joined the gym for the first time ahead of her 40th birthday.
She told the publication: 'I’d had two children, I was approaching 40, so I bit the bullet.
'I put the work in': Melanie Sykes, 44, says her toned body is down to regular exercise and healthy eating
‘I wanted to get toned. I wanted to start investing in my health – so I did. Everyone that says "You’re so lucky to look like that", I’m not lucky at all, I put the work in.
'Anyone can get fit. If I can, anyone can – it’s that simple! There hasn’t been pressure on me growing older in the spotlight. I keep fit for myself.
'It’s about my life and how I feel naked. It’s been a huge confidence and mood booster. It’s made the transition into my 40s a lot easier.'
She said: 'Anyone can get fit. If I can, anyone can – it’s that simple! There hasn’t been pressure on me growing older in the spotlight. I keep fit for myself'
Hot stuff: Revealing her secrets, Melanie added: 'Recently, I’ve been blitzing 20 minutes in the gym with high intensity and I don’t give myself a break at all. That’s as good as an hour pottering around'
Read the full interview in Fit & Well magazine
Talking about how she maintains her shape, she told the publication:
'I’m never in the gym longer than an hour.
'Recently, I’ve been blitzing 20 minutes in the gym with high intensity and I don’t give myself a break at all. That’s as good as an hour pottering around'
The former I'm A Celebrity contestant also revealed she rarely goes three days without exercise and does 100 abs reps as part of every workout.
While she eats healthily she never skips meals and if fancies a dessert she'll have one.
Typical meals include omelette with veg for breakfast, tuna and avocado salad for lunch and steak with kale and sweet potato.
Meanwhile, she was hard at work on her physique on Wednesday and tweeted from Champneys Spa: 'Arms, abs and swim done. what you doin today? #getfit Suns out guns out.'
She also posted a picture of her doing tricep, and wrote: 'No gym? No problem! Try @MsMelanieSykes @champneys 'Tricep Dips' and reap the rewards #WorkoutWednesdayards | 1,267,789 |
Friends! How is the New Year treating you so far? Good I hope. Have you made any resolutions yet? Any luck at keeping them? I love this post by Zen Habits for inspiration on goal setting. Do share your ambitions in the comments – we’d love to know!
We’ve been enjoying our new digs in Portland, have met a few new friends, tried new restaurants, and have been enjoying a few chilly, winter walks. 2015 has been treating us well thus far.
As far as cooking, we’ve been reaching for lighter things lately. After all that holiday goodness we’ve been craving all things light and fresh. For instance, these 30-minute, nutrient-packed rainbow spring rolls. Care to join?
Origins of Fresh Spring Rolls
Fresh spring rolls (also known as gỏi cuốn or summer rolls) are a common Vietnamese dish, but the concept is believed to have originated in China. It’s thought that they may be a modification from Chinese egg rolls, but with Vietnamese flavors.
They are typically made with fresh vegetables, herbs, and protein that are wrapped in rehydrated rice paper and served with a dipping sauce.
How to Make Rainbow Spring Rolls
It all starts with a rainbow of fruits and veggies for a full spectrum of colors and health benefits, such as:
Mint – antioxidants + calms stomach
Cilantro – Vitamin C, A + antioxidants
Bell Pepper – vitamin C, carotenoids + fiber
Mango – vitamin C, A, fiber + antioxidants
Carrot – beta carotene + vitamin A
Beets – fiber + antioxidants
So much goodness in one wrap. And we haven’t even gotten to the dipping sauce yet.
The filling is cool and all, but can we talk about my love for peanut sauce?
Spring rolls are great, but peanut sauce* elevates them to AMAZING! For some extra kick, I added some fresh grated ginger – a throw back to my Veggie & Rice Noodle Bowl days- and the result is a perfectly salty-sweet sauce with some zing. I’m in love.
*Note: you can learn more about the origins of peanut sauce here.
Need more reason to love these rolls? Good. They’re:
Light
Fresh
Healthy
Crunchy
Loaded with veggies and fresh herbs
Perfect with peanut sauce
Simple – no cooking
& quick – just 30 minutes
These make a delicious light lunch or dinner and leftovers save well for the next day – just see my note about the mango!
I hope you guys love these. If you do give them a try, let us know! Leave a comment or tag an Instagram #minimalistbaker so we can see. Cheers! | 1,267,790 |
Researchers have encountered a denial-of-service botnet that's made up of more than 25,000 Internet-connected closed circuit TV devices.
The researchers with Security firm Sucuri came across the malicious network while defending a small brick-and-mortar jewelry shop against a distributed denial-of-service attack. The unnamed site was choking on an assault that delivered almost 35,000 HTTP requests per second, making it unreachable to legitimate users. When Sucuri used a network addressing and routing system known as Anycast to neutralize the attack, the assailants increased the number of HTTP requests to 50,000 per second.
The DDoS attack continued for days, causing the Sucuri researchers to become curious about the origins of the attack. They soon discovered the individual devices carrying out the attack were CCTV boxes that were connected to more than 25,500 different IP addresses. The IP addresses were located in no fewer than 105 countries around the world.
"It is not new that attackers have been using IoT devices to start their DDoS campaigns," Sucuri CTO and founder Daniel Cid wrote in a blog post, using the abbreviation for Internet of things. "However, we have not analyzed one that leveraged only CCTV devices and was still able to generate this quantity of requests for so long."
Sucuri researchers queried a sampling of the boxes and found that all of them showed they were running what was called the "Cross Web Server" that had a default Web page titled "DVR Components." The researchers later found the malicious IPs contained the company logos of resellers of CCTV services and that all the devices were running BusyBox, a collection of Unix-based utility tools that run on embedded devices. To make it harder to block the attack, the malicious devices had been programmed to emulate normal browser behavior by displaying a variety of common user agents, such as those associated with the Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Safari browsers. The hacked devices also displayed "referrers" falsely showing they had most recently visited sites including Engadget, Google, and USA Today.
It's still not clear how the attackers enslaved such a large number of devices. Cid speculated they were hacked by exploiting a recently disclosed vulnerability that allows remote code execution on digital video recorders from 70 different manufacturers, but so far this theory hasn't been confirmed.
However the devices were compromised, the 25,000-strong botnet provided formidable firepower, and it had the added advantages of being freely available, geographically dispersed, and extremely hard for whitehats to take down.
It's by no means the first mass attack that uses Internet-of-things devices. Attacks that took down both the Xbox and PlayStation gaming networks in late 2014, for instance, were powered mostly by hundreds of thousands of hacked home Internet routers. Given the lax to non-existent security that by default accompanies most IoT devices, this latest attack involving CCTV devices almost certainly won't be the last such episode.
Listing image by Lydia | 1,267,791 |
With virtual reality being the latest hot topic of the gaming sector, many developers are vying for chance to create the first big VR success.
Now, bringing the fight to the competition, developer Criterion has claimed its upcoming racing game will be “the best Oculus game you’ve ever played”.
Despite being at least two years away from launch, Criterion is tipping its currently unnamed ‘beyond cars’ racer for VR success, with General Manager, Matt Webster, suggesting the title’s first-person nature will allow gamers to exploit the benefits of virtual reality.
“We think this is the best Oculus game you’ve ever played,”
Webster said with obvious bias.
He added: “It is clearly a super immersive thing to do and I can tell you from first-hand experience that playing this game in VR, it’s f***ing amazing.”
Discussing virtual reality and the company’s early tests with the likes of Oculus, Webster told us: “It is new tech and we love playing around with new technologies. VR is a new technology which is exciting for us and we’ve got a first-person game so it is not a very big leap for us to go playing around with VR.
“It’s something new and it’s consistent with what we are building so we thought let’s try and put those two together.”
Despite the hype surrounding the technology, virtual reality has its doubters, with isolating play, the cost of the headsets and ongoing motion sickness issues all acting as causes for concern. In its favour, however, is a most immersive level of gameplay, gamers have seen.
It is this level of immersion which has piqued Criterion’s interests.
Although praising the technology and the new benefits it is giving gamers, Webster has stated that Criterion will not force the technology on its new game and will only incorporate compatible features if it feels they truly benefits the title.
“VR is a bright shiny thing but it has a context for us and so therefore it is another thing for us to be playing with.
“Our goal in the games we have made prior to this is to really allow people to pick up the pad and have fun very quickly – whether that’s getting the arse-end of a car out at 100mph – and put a smile on their face.”
Looking at how VR could make this level of instant play difficult, he added: “The challenge of coming to control systems which work for these games is that they are underpinned by being fun and accessible first.
“Whether that means different types of input mechanisms I don’t know. We will start with the one which comes with every machine and that will be the pad.”
Read More: EVE: Valkyrie review | 1,267,792 |
Last December, an offshoot of the activist group Anonymous claimed to have hacked into the computers of security firm Stratfor in retaliation for the imprisonment of Bradley Manning and obtained personal information and credit card numbers. Now WikiLeaks has announced its intention to publish a trove of over five million emails allegedly obtained through that hack.
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According to a release posted on Sunday evening, “Today WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered ‘global intelligence’ company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defense Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment-laundering techniques and psychological methods.”
Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the release is that “Stratfor’s use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into a money-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman hatched an idea to ‘utilise the intelligence’ it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund.”
It goes on to say, “The emails show that in 2011 Goldman Sach’s Morenz invested ‘substantially’ more than $4million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors. Throughout 2011, a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But, confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff: ‘Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral… It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor… we are already working on mock portfolios and trades’.”
It also charges, “Stratfor claims that it operates ‘without ideology, agenda or national bias’, yet the emails reveal private intelligence staff who align themselves closely with US government policies and channel tips to the Mossad – including through an information mule in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Yossi Melman, who conspired with Guardian journalist David Leigh to secretly, and in violation of WikiLeaks’ contract with the Guardian, move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel.”
WikiLeaks will be partnering with more than 25 activists and media organizations to process the massive horde of emails. In the United States, these include McClatchy and Rolling Stone.
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An official press conference is to be held in London on Monday. | 1,267,793 |
would dictate that if you have 1,000 bikes in a tunnel… some of them were stolen.”
After Public Works employees discovered the stockpile two weeks ago, workers labored to drag the bicycles out of the tunnels before hauling them off in four large trucks to a nearby storage yard. Puckett said at some point the department probably will let the public look at the cache in an effort to reunite lost or stolen bikes with their owners.
Fountain Valley police Sgt. Kham Vang said the city hadn’t recently experienced an increase in bike thefts, though he noted that most bicycle thefts go unreported.
But neighborhood residents offer a different story, saying they’ve noticed an increase in bike thefts and other crimes.
“I’m not surprised at any of these things they found, other than the bunker,” said Kris Gillan, who owns a condo near the riverbed. “This is why we tried and tried to get (sheriff’s deputies and Fountain Valley) out there, but nothing was done for a long, long time.”
She said a neighbor’s bike was stolen recently off a patio, and that she regularly saw people lurking in the complex and looking inside parked cars. As the encampment grew, she said, so did crime.
“I feel safer now that they’re gone,” Gillan said.
“But how did it get this bad? I hope the county has learned their lesson.”
Earlier this year, the sheriff’s department and local police departments disputed which agency had jurisdiction over portions of the riverbed, leaving some areas largely unpatrolled. That changed in September, when the sheriff’s department began patrolling the Santa Ana River encampments, making hundreds of arrests. And during the past week, the county began enforcing a public-access curfew to the river trail, hiring private security guards to help enforce it.
Supervisor Todd Spitzer said Thursday that the bicycles and the recovered gun were proof that “the riverbed encampments are a serious public safety concern and the county must continue to clear out these trespassers.”
But as the county worked last Friday to clear the Fountain Valley encampment, many homeless people said they didn’t know where they would move. Social service workers said the action will simply push some people back to the streets of adjacent cities and force others to move to the already-crowded riverbed encampments in Anaheim and Orange, where neighbors and businesses also are complaining.
Editors note: A previous version of this story quoted the sheriff’s department as saying the bicycles were found near the Fountain Valley homeless encampment. OC Public Works later clarified that the bikes were found two miles northeast of the camp, just south of the river’s Fairview Street overpass in Santa Ana. This story has been updated to reflect that information. | 1,267,794 |
For far too long, young people have been suckered into unpaid internships where they are granted the opportunity to work in proximity to their dream career, but only in exchange for performing menial, repetitive tasks, all simply because they are completely unqualified to do anything else. It’s an all-too-common experience that occurs in every business where someone might actually want to work someday—everywhere except at The A.V. Club, where our interns are far too busy reenacting old Star Trek episodes for our amusement to do anything even close to an actual "task"—but it’s an exploitation for which Alex Footman and Eric Glatt, intern civil rights pioneers, are no longer going to stand.
Footman and Glatt (coincidentally, also the name of 1919’s second-most hated vaudeville duo) have filed a lawsuit against Fox Searchlight on behalf all unpaid interns, calling them out for all the indignities they suffered while working as interns on the production of Black Swan. Though drawn in by Hollywood glamour and the chance to become a vital part of the Dream Factory, the plaintiffs claim that they were instead forced to undertake nothing but “grunt work,” and failed to learn anything other than how unfair life is. And as clearly stated in this sub-clause, they already knew that.
Specifically, Footman, a 2009 film school graduate, complains that his duties included “preparing coffee for the production office, ensuring that the coffee pot was full, taking and distributing lunch orders for the production staff, taking out the trash and cleaning the office.” Glatt, a 42-year-old AIG employee who volunteered to work as an accounting intern, was handed the demeaning job of “preparing documents for purchase orders and petty cash, traveling to the set to obtain signatures on needed documents, and creating spreadsheets to track missing documents in each production employee’s personnel file.”
As you can see, at no time were either Footman and Glatt invited to step in behind the camera for director Darren Aronofsky to "give it a whirl," consulted on ideas for script revisions, or given the chance for a meaningful chat with Natalie Portman, aside from, presumably, that time she pointed and laughed at Footman and called him “Trash Bags.” “Hey, Trash Bags! Takin’ out the trash again?” Portman no doubt said, as she sped away cackling in her movie star convertible. Thus thoroughly humiliated, “incensed” (in Glatt's words), and hoping to eradicate this ugly practice from all corners of every industry, the two have now launched their case as a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all unpaid interns everywhere, unpaid interns who should stop reading this website and get moving, as that latte isn’t going to fetch itself. [via Movieline] | 1,267,795 |
The recount in Maine’s controversial 2nd Congressional District race, where the state’s new “rank voting” system was used for the first time in American history, is proceeding faster than anticipated.
When the secretary of state in Maine, Democrat Matt Dunlap, announced the beginning of the recount last Thursday, his office said it would take about four weeks, putting its completion in January, possibly after the convening of the 116th session of Congress on January 3.
But late Monday, Dunlap’s office announced the recount was proceeding ahead of plan.
“Democratic Secretary of State Matt Dunlap’s spokeswoman said election officials processed about 80,000 ballots as of Monday afternoon,” NECN reported.
State police Wednesday will start collecting ballots from towns with voting machines. Spokeswoman Kristen Muszynski said early counting moved quickly thanks to some results being pre-sorted due to previous recounts. But the process will likely slow down once machine counting gets underway.
As Breitbart News reported, “Secretary of State Matt Dunlap declared Democrat [Jared] Golden the winner in the November 6 election on November 15, despite the fact that [Bruce] Poliquin received 2,632 more votes than Golden on election day, due to the first-in-the-nation implementation of a controversial ‘rank voting’ system.”
Under the recently enacted “rank voting system,” however, Poliquin was not declared the victor because he received less than 50 percent of the votes cast on November 6.
Golden’s subsequent victory was due to the allocation of 10,232 votes that were cast as third and fourth choices under the rank voting system. Dunlap only allocated 4,695 of those votes to Republican Poliquin. Since 8,086 of those voters did not select second, third, or fourth choices in compliance with the 2016 “rank voting” state law, Dunlap threw them out.
These changes gave Golden a victory of more than 2,000 votes.
Poliquin and three voters in the Second Congressional District filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the 2016 Maine law that established the “rank voting system.”
In an earlier lawsuit, a state judge ruled that the “rank voting” system was a violation of the Maine Constitution, and the system was not used in the election of state legislators and statewide offices in the November 6 election.
The federal judge in the Poliquin challenge is expected to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the “rank voting” system this week.
In the likely event that the recount confirms the victory by Golden as declared by the secretary of state on November 15, he will be sworn in as a member of the 116th session of the U.S. House of Representatives as soon as the recount is certified, pending the outcome of the federal court case. | 1,267,796 |
The city Commission on Human Rights hit a leading headhunting firm with its second-biggest fine ever for failing to crack down on a creepy company executive who allegedly violated every HR policy imaginable — including groping an underling, telling the woman he wanted to “suck on her boobies” and humping her office door.
The firm, Wegman Partners, will have to pay the city $155,000 for the lecherous behavior of former executive chairman Scott Legg.
It has also agreed to provide new sexual harassment training for its employees, changes to its human resources policies and the creation of an independent counsel or HR firm to deal with harassment complaints.
Wegman Partners reached a separate, private settlement with Veronica McIlraith, who claimed she was forced out of her prestigious job as a managing director at the firm’s Manhattan office in 2017 for reporting Legg’s harassment.
Her attorney, Zoe Salzman, declined to comment beyond confirming that her client resolved her claims.
In July 2015, Legg “aggressively grabbed at Ms. McIlraith’s breasts in the office kitchen and tried to open her sweater,” sending her running into her cubicle, the complaint says.
McIIraith accused her boss of becoming violent when she rebuffed his advances, calling her a “bitch” and throwing furniture.
Her complaint included damning documentation of the harassment — photos of a sign Legg allegedly posted outside his office that read “Suck my balls,” a copy of a text message from Legg that read “Maybe I’ll suck on your boobies,” and a picture of Legg sprawled out on the office floor after an alleged cocaine- and booze-fueled bender.
Legg no longer works for the firm.
The Wegman penalty is second only to a $250,000 fine issued in 2015 against the 90-year-old owner of a meter-reading company for allegedly striking a female employee’s buttocks and shoving a newspaper in her underwear.
Legg and a Wegman rep did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
The commission has collected $2.2 million from sex harassment claims since the #MeToo movement started two years ago. The agency is currently reviewing 209 gender-based harassment complaints.
“Workplace sexual harassment is a longstanding issue that I have sought to address with the full enforcement power afforded by the NYC Human Rights Law,” said Carmelyn P. Malalis, chair of the commission.
“In 2017, the bravery of the hundreds of thousands of people who came forward for the #MeToo movement created a momentum that is still creating change today. We will continue to use these cases to send the message that New York City will not be idle in prosecuting workplace sexual harassment,” Malalis said. | 1,267,797 |
Vanguard launches active factor ETFs
Vanguard | 16 April 2018
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Vanguard today announced two new active factor Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) will begin trading tomorrow on the Australian Stock Exchange - its first actively managed ETFs for Australian investors.
The new active ETFs – Global Value Equity (ASX: VVLU) and Global Minimum Volatility (ASX: VMIN) - offer practical and low cost investment options for investors seeking to gain factor exposure.
The funds seek to achieve specific risk and return objectives through factor exposures to global value and global minimum volatility, both offered at a low management expense ratio of 0.28 per cent.
“Offering active management at a lower cost removes one of the most persistent barriers to active outperformance” said Daniel Reyes, Vanguard’s Asia-Pacific Head of Investments.
“This expansion of our ETF range offers more tools to help investors build well diversified portfolios – across and within asset classes and investment styles, and according to their appetite for risk.”
Managed by Vanguard’s Quantitative Equity Group (QEG) who employ rules-based active management to provide targeted and consistent exposure to factors in these active ETFs in a highly diversified, low cost and transparent way.
Michael Roach, Australian Head of QEG said “Factors are the DNA of an investment portfolio; the underlying characteristics that drive investment performance.
“Vanguard is taking a different approach to other factor fund offerings in the market – we are actively managing these portfolios, weighting shares according to their exposure to each factor whilst maintaining a broadly diversified investment portfolio.
“A major benefit of using active versus index management for factor implementation in these portfolios is that we reduce factor drift in the portfolio – rebalancing as needed rather than being tied to the index rebalancing date.
“These active ETFs carry with them all the usual benefits of Vanguard ETFs– they offer broad diversification, low cost, liquidity and are highly transparent.”
While best known in Australia as a leading index manager, the Vanguard Group has been actively managing assets since its establishment forty years ago. With approximately A$1.6 trillion in actively managed assets, Vanguard is the third largest manager of active funds globally.
Vanguard is keenly focused on helping Australian investors achieve better investment outcomes by helping to lower the cost of active investing, having successfully lowered the cost of investing for clients across the globe within both index and active markets.
Building upon an existing line-up of 22 ETFs, including four diversified ETFs launched in 2017, Vanguard continues to offer Australian investors more choice and diversity within its ETF offering.
Vanguard in Australia now manages more than $140 billion of assets for investors across index and active managed funds, exchange traded funds and separately managed accounts. Vanguard will continue to expand its product offering throughout 2018. | 1,267,798 |
So we are officially back on this site as Rainbow Turtle Translations has died. So updates on what is going on with LMS.
I’ve mentioned it on other places, but I have found okay raws for vol 49. There are still lots of errors but better than the previous ones and I know people are impatient =(. I know some people are like ‘why don’t you translate from the pdf or actual ebook instead of a txt file?’ However, the program I use to help make my life easier only accepts txt file. Not only does the program have an inbuilt glossary, but a txt file also allows me to copy and paste things I don’t know more easily. So yeh, txt file= needed to translate.
Due to the errors in the txt file I have, I’ve bought the ebook and have been trying to translate while comparing the txt. file to the proper ebook. It is extremely slow going. Not only that, the two new series I am translating on Wuxiaworld, Praise the Orc! and the Book Eating Magician, became popular way faster than expected. Therefore, I have been busy trying to keep up and maintain the goals I set with Patreon and sponsored chapters, leaving less time for LMS.
I did aim to release chapter 1 by the end of the month, but I don’t know if that will be happening right now with how busy I am.
Now Volume 50 and 51 of LMS. Some people have been telling me about this and yes, I already know. To give a short explanation, previously the author only published ebooks. But recently, he has started serialization, similar to a web novel, on a site called Kakaopage. Then after all the chapters of a volume are released on Kakaopage, it will take a bit before they are published in ebook form. Volume 51 has just started serialization but I won’t be translating from the web chapters.
First of all, I have absolutely no access to Kakaopage. Second of all, they are extremely strict about translation. If you read this post by Ensj, you will see that he already had to drop two novels simply because of Kakaopage. Honestly, I’ve kinda been expecting an email from them telling me to drop it, simply because LMS is one of their bigsellers. Another reason is that ebooks do tend to be more polished and with less typos than serialized works.
Anyway, last thing I want to say. I am translating LMS, albeit really really slowly. However, I don’t want to hold onto a project when I know it isn’t my main focus. If anyone else wants to translate it then I am happy to give it over to them. But I will keep translating until that happens.
Thanks for reading my long post. | 1,267,799 |
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