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The Florida high school principal who refused to say the Holocaust happened because "not everyone believes" the historical event actually occurred has been fired.
William Latson, principal of Spanish River High School in Boca Raton, was initially reassigned when it was revealed he made the comments in April 2018. But on Wednesday, the Palm Beach County school board voted to oust him from the district.
FLASHBACK: FLORIDA PRINCIPAL REASSIGNED FOR CONTROVERSIAL HOLOCAUST DENIAL REMARKS
Latson was fired on grounds of “ethical misconduct” and “failure to carry out job responsibilities," The Palm Beach Post reported.
Outrage was sparked after Latson told a student's mother via email he was not allowed to say whether the Holocaust occurred because of his employment with the School District of Palm Beach County.
NAZI WHO WAS CONVICTED IN WWII MASSACRE BUT NEVER SERVED TIME DIES, OFFICIAL SAYS
"I can't say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee," Latson wrote in an email, later published by the Post.
"Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened and you have your thoughts but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs so they will react differently, my thoughts or beliefs have nothing to do with this because I am a public servant," the principal said. "I have the role to be politically neutral but support all groups in the school."
Latson added: "I do allow information about the Holocaust to be presented and allow students and parents to make decisions about it accordingly." He said he does the "same with information about slavery."
FLORIDA CARETAKER ALLEGEDLY SCAMMED HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR AND HER HUSBAND OUT OF $116G LIFE SAVINGS
In another email, Latson said the school's curriculum, which reportedly includes Holocaust education in English and history classes, "is to be introduced but not forced upon individuals as we all have the same rights but not all the same beliefs."
Latson later apologized for his comments, explaining he regrets "the verbiage that I used when responding to an email message from a parent, one year ago, did not accurately reflect my professional and personal commitment to educating all students about the atrocities of the Holocaust."
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The school district called Latson's comments "offensive" and said his views were "not supported by either the School District Administration or the School Board."
Latson's firing is the first in years, as many principals often resign before any type of termination proceedings take place, according to the newspaper. The principal's attorney reportedly plans to appeal the termination, which is scheduled to take effect Nov. 21. Until then, Latson is suspended without pay.
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PARIS (REUTERS, AFP) - French authorities tightened their lockdown measures in the capital on Tuesday (April 7) by banning Parisians from outdoors sports activity between 10am and 7pm, aiming to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
The move came after many French politicians and doctors expressed dismay at the fact that the streets of Paris still feature people jogging or congregating near markets despite government orders to get people to stay in as much as possible.
The city's police and mayor's departments said in a joint statement that, from Wednesday, outdoor sports would no longer be permitted between those conventional daytime hours.
Mayor Anne Hidalgo and the capital’s police chief Didier Lallement said in a statement that "every excursion avoided aids the fight against the epidemic".
People looking to go for a run would have to do so between 7pm and 10am.
France has confined residents to their homes since March 17 to stem the spread of the virus. The measures have been extended until April 15, and are likely to be extended again.
Also on Tuesday, the Atlantic coastal resort city of Biarritz limited the amount of time people could sit on public benches or in other public areas to just two minutes maximum, saying the confinement rules meant that "dawdling is prohibited".
Biarritz, Paris and other cities have already closed public parks and gardens during the confinement, as part of the nationwide confinement that requires people to carry a document justifying their trips from home.
Those caught without the document face fines starting at 135 euros (S$209.66).
'FAR FROM OVER'
The tougher rules came after Health Minister Olivier Veran announced Monday a record daily coronavirus death toll of 833 people in 24 hours.
He said 478 people were admitted to intensive care in the period, a higher figure than in previous days.
Related Story Coronavirus explainers: What you should know to protect yourself
Related Story Coronavirus visual guide: Interactive graphics on the pandemic
"It is not over. Far from that. The path is long," the minister said, urging people to "stay at home and continue this confinement effort".
Interior Minister Christophe Castaner had already urged regional officials to toughen restrictions locally.
On Monday, the mayor of Sceaux, a commune south of Paris, issued a decree obliging all residents over the age of 10 to cover their mouth and nose when leaving the home starting on Wednesday.
Those who do not have surgical masks must wear a homemade alternative or tie a scarf or bandanna around their face, otherwise they could be fined 38 euros.
In a radio interview earlier on Tuesday, Ms Hidalgo said she was not making masks obligatory although she did encourage everyone to cover their faces and noses.
The French government requisitioned all medical masks earlier in the outbreak for doctors and nurses.
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“When police started chasing protesters, I ran. At some point I fell and then I do not know what happened. Everything went blank,” Tariq says. His right wrist had to be amputated due to a tear gas explosion. His right arm was operated upon by plastic surgeons on Thursday.
Three other students have serious injuries. While one, Nadeem Akhtar (22), has head injuries, Nasir, a BA student, is admitted to JNMC with fractures in hand. Another student, Tabrez, has been referred to Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital with stomach injuries. Dr Malik said Tabrez was seeing repeated episodes of shock, having been hit by two tear gas canisters in his stomach.
Also Read | How Jamia has ended up as the focal point of the current unrest
Students have alleged police stopped ambulance drivers from taking away those injured, with one ambulance driver telling The Sunday Express that police had threatened him. A total of 21 ambulances were deployed to ferry the injured.
Kashmiri students Zubair and Adil, both doing PhD in chemistry, questioned the AMU administration’s decision to abruptly advance winter vacations by six days, telling students to vacate hostels within 24 hours. The students fear their studies will be hit due to unavailability of Internet services.
AMU PRO Omar Peerzada said, “The university arranged four buses, with security, for students till Jammu and Kashmir. Trains were also specially stopped at Aligarh, with a request being placed to the Union government, for students going to Assam, Bengal and Bihar.”
With the Vice-Chancellor’s permission to police to enter campus also coming under fire, Peerzada said they were extending all help to the injured students, and that a probe was on into alleged police excesses. “We share the pain and anguish of the students.”
Also Read | How students, community rallied round for protests
Denying the allegations, the Aligarh police said they had brought the situation under control with “minimal” force. “The claims that police resorted to torture and beat people are false. With regards to tear gas shelling inside the hostel, no police personnel entered hostel premises. Shells were fired from a 100-metre distance outside since there was heavy stone-pelting from inside. It is possible that a shell bounced and went inside the room,” Anil Samania, Circle Officer (Civil Lines), Aligarh, said.
Police sources also claimed that some of the injuries were caused by students trying to throw back unexploded tear gas shells, including Nasir’s.
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Koala rescued in dramatic viral video dies of injuries The burns got worse and would not have gotten better, said the hospital.
Ellenborough Lewis, the koala whose dramatic rescue from Australian bush fires was a symbol of hope for the struggling koala population, has had to be put down because of the severity of his injuries.
The koala was found struggling to escape the fires on the east coast of the country by Toni Doherty, an Australian woman who saw him from her car. She took off her shirt and used it to bundle the burned and injured animal out of the fire zone, later pouring water over his feet to soothe the burns.
"It was terrifying to see him just come out of the flames," Mrs Doherty told local Australia outlet Today. "The poor koala, he was crying and screaming, because he was being burned. He was burning underneath, on his little back legs... I've never heard a koala before. I didn't realize they could cry out. It was just so heart-rendering."
Doherty named the koala Lewis after one of her grandchildren and was later reunited with him in the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital in the state of New South Wales, eastern Australia.
But his injuries were too severe.
“We placed him under general anesthesia this morning to assess his burns injuries and change the bandages,” the hospital said in their Facebook post. “We recently posted that "burns injuries can get worse before they get better". In Ellenborough Lewis's case, the burns did get worse, and unfortunately would not have gotten better. The Koala Hospital's number one goal is animal welfare, so it was on those grounds that this decision was made.”
Bush fires have been particularly bad in Australia this year after an unusually warm and dry winter was the catalyst to an early start to the annual fire season.
New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, announced the beginning of bush fire danger period in July and declared a week-long state of emergency on Monday Nov. 11, the first such declaration since 2013.
The Port Macquarie Koala Hospital has been trying to rescue and treat koalas since the first major fires began in late October with the first koala to be treated at the hospital arriving on Nov. 2. By the next day, they had estimated that up to 350 koalas may have died as fire burned through the koala's habitat.
The hospital is now full of injured koalas, one volunteer told ABC News, and it has set up a GoFundMe page to “help thirsty koalas.” They have raised over $1.6 million Australian dollars, far exceeding their goal of $25,000. To date, they have treated 31 koalas and the huge amount of money raised will allow them to establish a wild koala breeding program in addition to the rescue work they already do.
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of generation are bound to the number of users by a user authentication protocol. This requirement is not compatible with an objective to design a decentralized currency since user authentication requires issuing identity certificates either in a web of trust or with a certification authority.
The Bitcoin specifications not only fulfill the requirement for a limited money supply but also make provisions for transaction fees to provide a sustainable incentive for miners to keep mining even after the rewards for the generation of new bitcoins have dwindled to zero.
Because Bitcoins are traded electronically, unlike gold, they are infinitely divisible and enjoy a high velocity, so a deflationary spiral can only reduce the scope of bitcoin to the function of a store of value, a more practical process than is used for gold. In fact, the deflationary spiral would have adverse economic consequences only if bitcoins were the exclusive currency in a given territory. That’s not the case: as a complementary currency, bitcoins are supposed to coexist with the local state sponsored currency not to replace it. Prices will most likely be expressed in local currencies. In an electronic online transaction, the price expressed in a universal currency can be easily adjusted in real time for exchange rate variations. Only for off line transactions, price stability is a strong requirement for a new universal currency.
In short, deflation will augment the attractiveness of bitcoins as a store of value and will only marginally affect its application as a trade currency.
Conclusions
Where do we go from here? In a global economy, the inception of one or more universal currencies is bound to happen as soon as technology permits it.
Bitcoin, as the first, is paving the way for new applications. In particular, bitcoin can greatly enhance the efficiency of money transfer where it is lacking, specifically development aid that was once famously characterized (by economist Peter Bauer) as “an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries”. Bitcoin can leverage the generalization of mobile phones in developing countries to enable a money transfer directly to the recipient, bypassing all state bureaucracies and banking intermediaries. The institution or non-governmental organization responsible for the transfer could simply assign bitcoin addresses to recipients and their local merchants then fulfill the money transfers and payments in bitcoins.
The technology is enabling both a new kind of transaction network and a new universal currency.
By analogy, it is worth noticing that the World Wide Web does have a governing body, namely W3C, a non-profit organization made of more than 300 members among the largest companies in the high tech sector. Clearly, any leverage applied by a government to one of its constituents in W3C can be balanced out by the others if it does not fit the bill of the general interest. Because this principle holds successfully for the technology enabling new ways of producing and sharing as valuable an asset as knowledge, one is permitted to hope that a similar organization can also deal one day with the Bitcoin protocol specifications at a technical level to maintain its immunity from the hazards of macro-economic measurements.
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Masterpress/Getty Images
In the end—or, in the beginning, I suppose, given that it took him all of two days to eliminate 23 teams from the running—Japanese two-way superstar Shohei Ohtani’s criteria for a Major League team had nothing to do with money, and nothing to do with the DH. Instead, the very first cut apparently came down to pure geography.
All 30 MLB teams prepared presentations for the 23-year-old starter/slugger, who can sign with any team he wants after being posted on Friday. But very quickly, Ohtani’s representatives informed those who were not in the running. Some of those teams publicly acknowledged they had been told they were out; others quietly leaked it.
According to MLB.com
That leaves seven teams as finalists (a list confirmed Angels, Cubs, Dodgers, Giants, Mariners, Padres, and Rangers.
So. AL and NL teams in roughly equal measure. And money isn’t a factor, since three of the four teams with the largest international signing bonus pool—the Yankees, Twins, and Pirates—have been eliminated. (The money isn’t huge anyway. The Rangers, the team that can pay Ohtani the most of anyone, only have about $3.5 million. If money mattered, Ohtani could have waited two more years, hit MLB as a true free agent, and made $200 million.)
What is Ohtani looking for? Yankees GM Brian Cashman might’ve revealed what Ohtani’s reps are telling teams when he revealed that the Yankees, early favorites, were told they’re out of the running:
“I started getting a feel that wasn’t good a few days ago,” Cashman said. “I knew that our presentation was excellent. The feedback from that was outstanding, but I did get a sense that I can’t change that we’re a big market and I can’t change that we’re in the east.”
Ohtani’s list of finalists has five teams from the West Coast. (The outliers, and the most intriguing finalists, are the Cubs and Rangers, neither of which play in small markets.) It’s a much shorter trip to and from Japan, and that’s apparently a big deal to him.
How much will league matter? Speculation has Ohtani favoring an AL team, since the DH spot would likely give him more opportunities to hit, something he’s reportedly keen on. Or might some NL team actually let him play the outfield when he’s not pitching? He’ll find out in Round 2 of this process, which will be face-to-face meetings. And we’ll all find out by Dec. 22, the deadline for Ohtani to make his decision.
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will deal with that. But if we lose, if we no progressive Americans.
Shavit said Ben-Gurion was tough in battle, but he also understood that Israel “always always captured the moral high ground.” He maintained that credit by always appearing to be looking for peace. If Israel does not continue to do that, “we will find ourself on the wrong side of history.”
But Shavit’s own Rx for Israel the “frontier democracy” is not going to excite a progressive young American audience, or progressive Jews. Because his language was so undemocratic. When he said that Israel’s Jewish majority was in danger from Arab population numbers, he sounded like a white southerner from the Jim Crow era. The Zionist dream was to have a “massive Jewish majority” so as to have “Jewish sovereignty.” But right now Israel is “down to 75 percent Jewish in Israel”, he said. In 2025, that number will be 70 percent.
“If you are to add even 1 million Arabs into that fragile formula,” Israel will stop being Jewish or stop being democratic, Shavit said.
He also said that Israel cannot endorse the “two-state solution” now, but– “a two state vision, two state option, and two state dynamics.” Option means to keep the possibility of two states open by not building too many settlements “beyond the [settlement] blocs”. Dynamics means helping out Palestinians, bringing water to Gaza and building Rawabi, the new city deep in the West Bank. Israel must undertake such projects–
so the Palestinians go on a very long and gradual process of nation-building. Very slow, very cautious, it will take a long time. We have to go very slow, it’s trial and error all the time.
Imagine how Zionists would have greeted such a patronizing policy on the part of the British back when they were seeking self-determination!
Also, consider Shavit’s urgent comments about Israel’s dependence on young American Jews and on America in the context of two intellectual debates in our country:
–The debate over the Israel lobby. While Shavit credits American democratic processes, he is saying that having American Jews “stand by” Israel so as to maintain the support of the superpower is absolutely vital to Israel’s survival. That’s the lobby.
–Shavit’s own book, My Promised Land. His energetic renewal of Zionism, embraced by the New Yorker and Charlie Rose, was plainly a political undertaking aimed at capturing “the moral high ground,” as Shavit put it, preserving Israel’s image in the west. Only the Palestinian solidarity left, Jerry Slater, and Nathan Thrall in LRB pointed this out.
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a serving of ema datshi or chilli cheese (literally hot green chillies cooked with local cheese), and I couldn’t resist sampling this eye-wateringly spicy dish at least once a day. The key flavouring agent in Bhutanese cuisine, chilli, poses a greater challenge for many tourists than the availability of meat.
Favourite local dish ema datshi – literally just chillies and cheese (Wiki Commons) (Wikicommons)
But that said, it has been a somewhat bland culinary start to 2017 for locals in Bhutan. The government has been forced to rethink a 2016 ban on the import of “toxic” chillies from India that has seen the price of local chillies skyrocket. Poor families without the land to grow their own have thus faced flavourless mealtimes thanks to reduced access to their key source for taste.
The challenges of maintaining a self-sufficient chilli crop is just one of many hurdles Bhutan has faced while ploughing ahead to become the world’s first wholly organic country by 2020, an ambitious goal in an era when youth in developing nations like Bhutan are more reluctant to follow in the farming footsteps of their parents.
Despite its status as a poster child for sustainable development, Bhutan has not been left untouched by the effects of climate change either, with erratic weather over recent years having left some farmers struggling to reap a viable harvest without the use of chemicals.
While I thoroughly enjoyed being a pseudo-vegetarian during my trip to Bhutan, I’m grateful my choice to sink my chops into a juicy piece of meat sometimes isn’t under threat from a hardline vegetarian sect. If Buddha was okay with eating meat, surely Bhutan’s meat-lovers deserve a bit of slack?
Travel essentials
Getting there
British Airways (0870 850 9 850; ba.com) flies to Delhi from about £480 return, from where connecting flights are available to Paro with Druk Air (00 975 8 271 856; drukair.com.bt) from about £445 return. UK citizens transiting via Delhi also need to obtain a double-entry Indian visa (in.vfsglobal.co.uk).
Staying there
Tourist hotels run from the quaint and comfortable (such as Gangtey Palace in Paro; hotel.bt) to sheer luxury (such as the Aman group’s five Amankora lodges scattered throughout the country; amankora.com). Many organised tours include at least one night at a basic village homestay.
Visiting there
All travellers to Bhutan need to book a package with either an international or local tour operator. British passport holders require a visa to visit Bhutan, which is issued upon arrival – applications are submitted in advance by the tour operator. The writer travelled with G Adventures (gadventures.com).
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What about the activities of the Union? We assume that you are actively involved in the defence of the country, and today it is a reactionary position to be against Assad, but one day it will change. Can you tell us about a future strategy for your organisation?
WK: In some places, we cannot move, cannot do anything, it is “die or leave”. There, we have to hold a position together with the army, and we do not have any activity of our own in these places. But in places which are controlled by the government, by the Syrian army, as you said, we are active as we were before the war. I will divide our activities in two parts: First part is under the big banner “Syria will not kneel” which was created by our historical leader Halid Bakdash many years before. This patriotic banner is still up to date. Under this banner, we continue our struggle, we support the Syrian army, support the resisting people of Syria. We share this banner not only with the communists, our union or our party, but also with other important national forces which share this patriotism. We consider this as not only our national or class duty, but also an international duty since Syria represents an international struggle against the global imperialist attack.
And the second part is under the banner: “Defence of rights of the Syrian youth”. It is related to our economical and social struggle against the economical liberalism of our government. We are against the liberal activities of the government in health, in education, and in everything. We try to maintain the gains in health, in education, and in other areas. We also continue our struggle to get more social and progressive rights in housing and in employment of the young generations. We also support the nationalisation of the production for the country because we believe that is an important economic factor to support Syria.
We also have some other events. Before the war, we had the central carnival for all the country. But now, because of this situation, it has to become local. Another activity is the yearly cultural “Halid Bakdash meetings” in which we invite progressive artists, singers. Also as the organisation, we have discussions and analysis about the current issues.
We also have an exclusive school for our party and for our union members.
In our universities, especially in Damascus and in Aleppo, we represent our Union in most of the colleges and also in “Syrian Students’ Union”. This way we can get close to the students’ demands and we can spread our ideas as communists, our analysis and opinions with other students, as our first duty. The second duty is about communicating demands of the students and the youth in general.
We try to continue our struggle despite the war and we will never give up…
http://icp.sol.org.tr/asia/communist-youth-syria-we-will-never-give
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BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - The head of the European Union’s executive vented frustration on Friday at calls for deep reforms to reinvent the EU after Brexit, saying there were no proposals on what exact changes were needed to safeguard European integration.
European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker addresses a news conference on the second day of the EU Summit in Brussels, Belgium, June 29, 2016. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
The comments by Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, highlight the vulnerable spot the EU has found itself in after the shock British vote to leave what is still a 28-nation bloc cast a long shadow over its future.
“We have to re-explain the reform agenda which is under way,” Juncker told a news conference in Slovakia. “We are fighting red tape...We are modernising the European economy - digital union, energy union, deepening of the internal market, capital markets union, banking union.
“Everyone is saying ‘We need more reforms’. Nobody is saying what kind of reforms we would need in addition to those which are under way, including some initiatives we have taken in the field of the social dimension of the internal market.”
Juncker was speaking at a joint conference with Prime Minister Robert Fico of Slovakia, which took over the EU’s rotating presidency on Friday until the end of the year.
“I will not say that nothing has to change. But the things moving in the right directions will not change,” Juncker said.
Fico, who will host a Sept. 16 meeting of all EU leaders but the British one as the 27 ponder the future of their troubled union, is calling for more powers to be returned to national capitals at the expense of the Commission.
EU government leaders are keen to blunt the appeal of rightist eurosceptic parties that have mined growing discontent over a longtime trend of integration driven by Brussels seen by many to be eroding national sovereignty.
Fico also said Germany, France and other Western EU states could dictate the future. Some in the Western EU say the bloc should deepen integration in areas including its single-currency euro zone after Britain’s exit is complete.
Greece, which has gone through an acute debt crisis that nearly knocked it out from the euro zone, has called for a more “social” rather than liberal market Europe as it struggles with a weak, uncompetitive economy and high jobless rate.
Many EU government leaders name unemployment and migration as key areas to tackle to shore up the credibility of the grand post-World War Two project of European unity for the bloc’s 500 million people.
But there is scant agreement among EU capitals about how exactly to tackle these issues with the bloc still recovering from its debt crisis and polarised over immigration after 1.3 million refugees and migrants reached the continent last year.
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the John Doe investigation of Scott Walker. It was a possibility that that was going to blow up that summer, and they wanted a good candidate in place if it did. Plus, it helped me get the message out to try and help Mary Burke, who was running for governor against Scott Walker. So, I knew what the probable outcome was going to be, but there were reasons I got in anyway — in order to make someone fight for the seat.
JL: Paul Ryan won past elections by a healthy margin. Do you expect to attract some of his voters, or to turn out people who don’t tend to vote? Is there a certain type of voter you’re going after?
RB: I’ve already had people, like in the grocery store, who are Republican-leaning voters who know I’ll talk to them — we have stuff in common — come up and say, “Hey, I hear you’re running against Paul Ryan; I think that’s great.” We even had some union members who voted for Trump. They thought he was going to be really great for working people. But people are fed up. And all I have to say is, “Are you healthy? Look at Paul Ryan’s kids. They’re all healthy. They have great health care. He’s trying to take away your ability to see a doctor.” And he’s not here. He’s not here. So I’m reaching a lot of people.
We’re definitely counting on turning up the vote. Just the way that our launch took off shows that there is excitement everywhere — not just in this district, but across the country — for people willing to stand up to see one of their own elected.
JL: A lot of people in the national media and political scientists are still trying to figure out the November election and Trump voters. What’s your view of Trump voters and the decision they made last election?RB: He had a decent working person’s message. Somebody told him what to say to appeal to working people. Now I just tell the people that voted for him, “Nothing says ‘sticking it to the man’ like voting for a billionaire. How’s he helped you out?”
And they’re like, “Well,” and they kind of hang their heads. He’s not doing anything. So there’s a lot of buyers’ remorse.
JL: A lot of articles I’ve seen cast you as a Bruce Springsteen song come to life. How do you feel about that description?
RB: It’s funny and flattering at the same time.
JL: You’re a Springsteen fan?
RB: Oh yeah.
JL: Thanks for taking the time.
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We had a great time driving our 415 hp Tesla Motors Model S P85+ around for three days, but one thing we didn't get a chance to do was push the car to its top speed. Fortunately, Martin Messer Thompsen of EV Network.dk was able to do just that on the Autobahn on an unrestricted stretch outside of Berlin. Thompsen's video captures the instrument cluster of his P85+ Model S as he zips from 106 kph (about 65 mph) up to 212 kph (about 131 mph):
The Model S goes from roughly 100 kph up to 160 kph (60 to 100 mph) in about five seconds, exhibiting identical neck-snapping acceleration to the car Ars got to drive. However, the mounting air resistance quickly makes itself felt, with the car taking another 15 seconds to nose up to the 212 kph mark. The Model S has a very low coefficient of drag at 0.24, but it still takes a considerable amount of power to hurl the car's 4,673-pound (2,108 kg) mass up to that speed. The energy meter can be seen pegging at 320 kW during the acceleration, though after a few seconds it limits itself to 300 kW (the dotted line appears on the gauge) to avoid damaging the battery.
Such speeds can have a tremendously detrimental affect on the car's range, of course, as we found out in our own drive between Houston and Austin. Sticking close to the speed limit can yield close to the car's rated range of 265 miles; cruising at 80-90 mph can cut that by a third or even a half depending on accessory usage (heater, AC, and so on). According to Motor Authority, Tesla Motors sold 98 Model S sedans in Germany in its first two months; German Model S owners who want to take advantage of their country's world-famous awesome stance on speed limits will need to be aware of the impact such driving will have on range. However, to be fair, driving a normal car north of 100 miles per hour isn't even remotely fuel efficient either.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has promised Germans some extra attention, though. In addition to building a large number of Superchargers throughout the country, Musk announced in October that Tesla Motors will offer "free, optional high-speed tuning" for Autobahn-bound Tesla cars. Musk explained that the tuning would be designed to improve the Model S' handling at Autobahn-attainable speeds; it also might involve tweaking the car's top speed upward.
Although the unrestricted sections of the Autobahn are truly unrestricted, most German auto manufacturers limit their vehicles' top speeds to 250 kph (155 mph) as a result of an informal "gentlemen's agreement," so Tesla would only need to allow the Model S to be wound out another 40 kph or so to be able to run neck-and-neck with the big BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes (Mercedeses?).
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The New York Times on Monday issued a “correction” to their earlier reporting alleging that SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a woman at a college dorm party when some of his buddies “pushed” his genitals into a woman’s hands against her will.
And that “correction” wasn’t exactly a minor one.
The Times updated their piece to include the fact that the alleged victim in the whole incident said she has no memory of the event. Which, of course, seems like a relevant tidbit to have included in the original story – until, of course, you remember that this is the New York Times.
The allegation was supposedly made by a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s, Max Stier, who reportedly told the FBI he saw Kavanaugh expose himself at a frat party in college some 30-odd years ago, according to the Times. While Stier has declined to talk about the incident publicly, two Times reporters got ahold of his testimony from someone else and ran with it as the Gospel truth.
Those same reporters, however, never actually spoke with the woman who was supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and his friends – a woman who apparently says she doesn’t remember anything of the sort. That pertinent fact that was notably absent from the Times’ original hit piece, which was immediately seized upon by others in the liberal media as well as left-wing lawmakers who used the unsubstantiated claims to demand Kavanaugh's resignation and bolster their own "pro-woman" platforms.
That is, until the Internet learned it was included in the larger tell-all book from which the Times' article was pulled. Amid the resulting firestorm, the Times issued a "correction" to their reporting, adding that their supposed victim may not have actually been a victim at all.
Media Bias Related: Wacky MOLE: Media Breaks Out Its Biden Bias
"An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book's account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party," The Times wrote in a correction Monday. "The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article."
“That information has been added to the article.” Seriously? Here we’ve got a national news outlet publishing unverified claims of sexual misconduct against a sitting SCOTUS Justice – claims that Democrats are now using to call for his impeachment – and the Times never bothered to include that the alleged victim denies the whole thing?
And they wonder why Trump calls them the “enemy of the people.”
This. This would be why.
Coverage: Hundreds of Marylanders Protest Sanctuary City Policy After 8th Illegal Is Arrested for Sex Crimes
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AdTrap wants to help "make the Internet yours again."
Imagine a $120 box that sits between your cable modem (the box that brings the internet into your house) and your wireless router (the thing that fills your house with Wi-Fi) and blocks every kind of ad that can be delivered over the Internet. No more ads on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. No more ads on webpages, in music streams, in front of videos, or on mobile apps.
That's the goal of AdTrap, a device that is already in the working prototype stage. If you want to get your hands on one, you can pre-order it now by supporting the project on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter. If AdTrap's three Palo Alto, California-based creators can get enough pledges by December 8 — $150,000 worth — they'll start shipping the device.
AdTrap is basically a small computer running the Linux operating system, programmed to recognize and block every sort of ad its creators could identify. Many people already have ad blockers on our web browsers, but AdTrap's combination of simplicity and comprehensiveness are reasons it could take off. (As of this writing, AdTrap has less than $20,000 in pledges on Kickstarter.)
AdTrap is "open and very hackable," which means that it could be updated to block new kinds of advertisements. It also promises to block the user tracking that many internet advertisements engage in. Advertisers will hate that, of course, and so will the websites that depend on them. (Quartz might not do very well if everyone had an AdTrap.) The website Cult of Mac, which posted a little plug for AdTrap, also posted a little plea, asking any of its readers who buy an AdTrap to add Cult of Mac to their device's list of sites whose ads will not be blocked.
It seems unlikely that all but the most dedicated and conscientious Internet user would take the time to create such a "whitelist". But Cult of Mac can probably breathe easy, because it's also unclear that a majority of its readers would fork out $120 for an ad-blocker. Unless the processing power needed to display them actually slows your device down, ads quickly become mere background noise for many people.
Still, there is a subset of Internet purists who both care deeply about their privacy and hate ads with a passion, and maybe that group is big enough to make this into a nice little business. Since AdTrap is currently being crowdfunded, the usual caveats apply: Kickstarter is not a store, and pledging money for a project doesn't guarantee that it's going to deliver on all of its promises, or even that it will ever be delivered.
At the time of this writing, ten hours after being launched, it had raised just over 10 percent of its goal — respectable, but not yet a guarantee of success.
This article originally published at The Atlantic here
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Zach made a compelling argument for the new Link fleet to feature open gangways throughout the length of the train. Open gangways increase capacity without costly platform extensions by turning dead space into passenger space. Extra length low floor light rail vehicles are common in European tram systems and are slowly making their way across the Atlantic to Ottawa and suburban DC. Ottawa is a good case study for Seattle given the similarities.
I am going to call this conceptual open gangway Link vehicle Double Link. Double Link carries 11.5% more people than a 2-car Link train in the same footprint. It balances increased capacity with operational flexibility, allowing Sound Transit to run the equivalent of today’s 2- or 4-car trains.
Double Link is based on the 48 m (158 ft) long 4-segment vehicles from Alstom that Ottawa’s OC Transpo picked for its new Confederation Line. Their downtown subway platforms are 120 m (400 ft) long just like Link’s, while their surface platforms are 90 m with provision for future expansion. Likewise, the vehicles can be expanded to 59 m (194 ft) by inserting an additional segment. Siemens, the builder of Link’s new vehicles, offer comparable products outside North America. Link’s sister vehicles in New Jersey have been retrofitted with extra segments, opening the possibility for the current Kinkisharyo fleet to be lengthened as well.
Aside from its extra length, Ottawa’s vehicles feature a 100% low floor layout, as opposed to the typical 70% low floor layout. The raised areas at the ends that people are reluctant to climb up to are gone, making all seats more accessible. It may even be possible to place doors next to the cabs to eliminate dead-end aisles, improve circulation, and encourage people to use all available space.
Double Link is a 100% low floor light rail vehicle that is about 200 feet long. It can carry 438 people, 134 of which are seated. Standing capacity is 304 people at average peak crowding levels (4 people/m² ). Fourteen fewer seats creates standing room for 38 additional passengers. Two Double Link cars, equal to a 4-car Link train, can carry 876 passengers instead of 800.
Double Link features 9 double-width doors, one more than a 2-car train. There are designated spaces for eight wheelchairs, the same as the current vehicles. The open area for standees can be used for bicycles. It has a top speed of 65 mph and can navigate the same curves as existing Link vehicles.
I have seen the future of Link and it is in Ottawa. Does Sound Transit see it too? ST3 is Link’s biggest expansion yet. It deserves a vehicle to match its grand scale. Please [email protected] and tell them to amend the contract with Siemens to future-proof Link’s new vehicles with open gangways and expandability.
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The issue, first spotted by iFixit, affects the iPhone XR, XS and XS Max devices running iOS 12 and the iOS 13 beta. While the notification is getting wide attention currently, Apple says it first arrived in iOS 12.1 back in October; the company also has had details on it on its battery support page since last year. If you replace your own iPhone battery or get it replaced by an unauthorized repair shop, when you head to the Battery settings page you'll see a message:
Important Battery Message
Unable to verify this iPhone has a genuine Apple battery. Health information not available for this battery.
This message usually appears when there is a problem with the battery and it needs to be replaced. Now, however, this message is shown even if the battery you installed is genuine, brand new and working fine.
It seems that Apple is trying to scare off iPhone owners from getting a battery swap done at anywhere other than an authorized service provider. On the other hand, authorized repair outlets are guaranteed to use official parts and to perform repairs according to proper routines.
For Apple's part, the company explained in a statement Engadget received several days after this story was published that the warning is meant to alert owners when the phone is "unable to verify that a new, genuine battery was installed by a certified technician following Apple repair processes." It seems, then, that this warning would indeed occur whenever the battery change isn't done by Apple or an authorized repair center.
Here's Apple's full statement:
We take the safety of our customers very seriously and want to make sure any battery replacement is done properly. There are now over 1,800 Apple authorized service providers across the US so our customers have even more convenient access to quality repairs. Last year we introduced a new feature to notify customers if we were unable to verify that a new, genuine battery was installed by a certified technician following Apple repair processes. This information is there to help protect our customers from damaged, poor quality, or used batteries which can lead to safety or performance issues. This notification does not impact the customer's ability to use the phone after an unauthorized repair."
Apple had appeared to be easing up on its campaign against third-party battery swaps, as it reversed its policy against repairing iPhones with replaced batteries earlier this year. However, the company has introduced similar software limitations in the past to prevent users from repairing other Apple products such as MacBook Pros.
iFixit called the new battery message "user-hostile" and said the decision to add a warning after legitimate repairs is not about protecting users but is actually about "preventing you from having any autonomy with a device you supposedly own." Apple continues its fight against the right to repair movement which campaigns for the right of users to modify and repair technology that they own.
Update, 8/14/19, 2PM ET: This story has been updated with a statement from Apple and additional information about when this warning first rolled out.
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Plagued by injuries and misfortune, India's doubles shuttler Jishnu Sanyal has taken the path of crowd funding to find his way back in international circuit and prepare for 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
Jishnu, who has partnered with top players such as Jwala Gutta in mixed doubles and Akshay Dewalkar and Manu Attri in men's doubles in the past, is now raising funds on Milaap.org, India's largest crowdfunding platform.
In 2013, Jishnu took a year's break due to his mother's illness and her eventual demise. He returned to action last year but soon suffered a career-threatening ACL injury. This compelled him to stay away from action for some time and his dream of chasing a Rio Olympics berth was shattered. Jishnu resumed playing with Shivam Sharma, his current partner, from December last year and they would need to compete in various international tournaments around the globe to improve their ranking.
"My current partner Shivam and I currently hold number 1 position in doubles in the country. We still need to win 12-15 international tournaments in the next 8-10 months to gain the international ranking points we need," said Jishnu, who had won the International Series titles at Mauritius and Kenya, partnering Manu Attri in 2011.
"Due to lack of necessary support and funds, we are running a crowdfunding campaign on Milaap.org to keep our dreams alive," added Jishnu, who requires Rs 10-15 lakhs for travel, accommodation and nutrition costs.Arranging funds to compete in international circuit after a long injury lay-off is a bitter reality that every shuttler is confronted with at some stage of their career.
While the government spends considerable amount of money on top players, most shuttlers who make a comeback after a long gap due to various reasons, are forced to use their personal fund to compete in international events.
From P Kashyap to upcoming players like Tanvi Lad, they struggled to get sponsorships as, in most cases, neither the government nor private companies come forward to help independent athletes.
Recently, Pranaav Jerry Chopra and Sikki Reddy had spoken about their struggle for sponsorship after they had won the mixed doubles title in Brazil. Last month, Sourabh Verma, who is trying to make a comeback after a long injury lay-off, had reached the finals of two international challengers in Belgium and Poland and the money he earned barely took care of his flight fares.
"I am managing the funds myself. It is tough but thanks to my savings and past winnings that I am managing it. I am looking for a sponsor," said Sourabh.
"In international challengers, you don't get prize money if you lose in quarters but in Super Series you get paid if you reach last eight. I earned around USD 1200 and USD 400 in the last two events, which hardly takes care of the expenses."
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No taxis or buses to accommodate me and my wheelchair? Hold my tea. - Zahara Sedighi, probably.
When it comes to accessibility for the disabled, some countries do better than others. However, not even the best ones have it all figured out. This means that sometimes it’s up to the people affected to take action and show us how it’s done with varying degrees of badassery.
In the realm of badasses, Zahara Sedighi ranks pretty high. After suffering from polio as a child and losing the ability to walk, the woman from Mashhad, Iran, has had to face her share of hardships. Hardships including things like being hauled to school by her mother in a wheelbarrow. Sob story aside, her disability hasn’t stopped Zahara from thriving and going about her life despite the frustrating lack of adapted services in her home country.
"I cannot use the bus, I cannot find a taxi. There is no other transport for disabled people in society," she told Euronews.
Since taxis and public transit that can accommodate handicapped riders are vanishingly rare in Sedighi's hometown, she MacGyvered her very own wheelchair-friendly motorcycle. No transport, no problem.
CHECK OUT: LegUp Systems Allows Disabled Riders to Ride Any Bike
The contraption is built with two motorcycles halves attached to a platform (Looks like a pair of old Iranian Pishtaz bikes, but I have no idea what models they are -JM). It features a stowable access ramp and has a handlebar located at the center with all of the controls. This allows Zahara to roll onto her sweet ride with her wheelchair and drive away. No need to swap seats and figure out where to stow the chair.
If that doesn’t blow your mind, there’s more—Sedighi doesn’t actually have a motorcycle license. Not for lack of trying, though. While there is technically no law forbidding women to have a motorcycle license in Iran, authorities simply refuse most requests to issue them and she's never been able to attain one. That hasn’t kept her from riding her chariot for the past seven years, however.
A new parliamentary bill—the Comprehensive Protection Act for Disabled Citizens—could change things for her and the 1.3 million disabled people in the country soon though. If passed, the bill would greatly improve access to facilities and transportation. Plus, Iran's Vice-President for Women and Foreign Affairs (because both apparently go together) Masoume Ebtekar is looking into her situation, but the battle hasn’t been won.
CHECK OUT: Remington Bloch Turns Traumatic Injury Into Opportunity
In the meantime, Zahara Sedighi doesn’t have to wait for things to improve to go to work and to university. Where thrives adversity, so does ingenuity.
Source: Euronews
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A United Nations human rights expert said Wednesday that there’s “credible evidence” that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the killing of writer Jamal Khashoggi.
The 101-page report released by Agnes Callamard into the killing of Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul urges U.N. bodies or Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to “demand” a follow-up criminal investigation.
She admitted the “extreme sensitivity” of suggesting the criminal responsibility of the crown prince, in addition to Saud Alqahtani, a senior adviser to the Saudi royal court who hasn’t been charged.
KHASHOGGI'S FIANCEE ATTACKS TRUMP FOR MUTED RESPONSE TO JOURNALIST'S SLAYING
“No conclusion is made as to guilt,” she wrote of the two officials. “The only conclusion made is that there is credible evidence meriting further investigation, by a proper authority, as to whether the threshold of criminal responsibility has been met.”
She added that there was “no reason why sanctions should not be applied against the Crown Prince and his personal assets.” She said such measures were applied in the past on people even before their guilt was determined.
But the report downplayed the focus on a single official, noting that her focus is to identify those who may have failed in or abused their positions of authority. “The search for justice and accountability is not singularly dependent on finding a ‘smoking gun’ or the person holding it,” she wrote.
Eleven people are currently on trial in Saudi Arabia in largely secret proceedings, and 5 could face the death penalty.
SAUDI CROWN PRINCE ONCE SAID KHASHOGGI COULD BE SILENCED 'WITH A BULLET,' REPORT SAYS
The report author said she had access to a recording of Khashoggi’s killing and said she received information about a “financial package” offered to Khashoggi’s children, “but it is questionable whether such package amounts to compensation under international human rights law.”
Callamard has been investigating the killing since January and said her inquiry has limitations, including not receiving a response to her request to travel to Saudi Arabia
She added that she had received only a total of 45 minutes of tapes recorded within the consulate around the time of the killing, while Turkish intelligence reportedly had some 7 hours of recordings.
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The report details nearly minute-by-minute accounting of the events surrounding the killing, and notes the sounds of a buzzing saw that could have been used to dismember Khashoggi’s body. She also identified by name 15 suspects in the case.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Newly elected Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan pleaded with the city's residents to give him six months to turn things around before they leave for good.
"Give us six months to prove that we can turn things around," Duggan said during his inauguration ceremony last Tuesday. "Just push the pause button and don't leave that house yet. Let us prove to you what we can do."
Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy in July of 2013, becoming the largest municipality to file for bankruptcy in the United States. The city’s population has declined from a peak of 1.8 million to just 700,000 and there are an estimated 78,000-abandoned homes in the city.
Related: Detroit Bankruptcy a “Game-Changing Event,” Meredith Whitney Says
Turning around the fading city will be a tremendous undertaking -- around one-third of the city is now abandoned or derelict, 60% of children in Detroit currently live in poverty and unemployment is well above the national average.
The government agencies and infrastructure of Detroit are also in shambles. Forty-percent of street lights don’t work, the average police response time is 58 minutes, the murder rate is the highest it has been in 40 years, and only about one-third of the city's ambulances are operational.
Related: Detroit Goes Begging as Obama Sends Money Overseas
How does Mayor Duggan expect to fix all of this in six months? So far, he’s hired a new Department of Transportation director who will attempt to fix the city’s blighted public transportation system. He will also oversee the fire department and has implemented a 10-point plan to deal with Detroit’s abandonment problem that includes cracking down on businesses and homeowners who desert homes and buildings.
The city of Detroit is also putting a lot of effort into the North American International Auto Show which begins today and will contribute an estimated $365 million to the local economy. In an interview with The New York Times, Mayor Duggan explained that he saw it as a message to the rest of America that Detroit could once again thrive. The city is also building a streetcar rail system that should help the transportation problem.
Related: Detroit Will Get Worse Before It Gets Better
“We’ve been working in Detroit for years,” says Ben Hecht, president and CEO of Living Cities, “and what we’ve found is over the last decade while there’s a lot of dysfunction on the surface, underneath there is a strong foundation that’s built.”
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A few thousand US military service members will be sent to the border with Mexico in the coming days, the Pentagon confirmed, as another migrant ‘caravan’ made its way north from Honduras.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) requested additional surveillance capability and concertina wire, Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.
“We’ve responded with, you know, here’s how many people it would take,” Shanahan said. However, he would not disclose the exact number. When asked how many troops would be headed to the border, he said “Several thousand, and I’ll kind of leave it at that.”
Also on rt.com Troops to stay at Mexican border through September – Pentagon
A Pentagon spokesman later followed that up, explaining that the Department of Defense is “currently sourcing the units involved and there will be an increase of a few thousand troops,” and that “we will provide more clarity on the numbers when we have it.”
All the troops are in a “support role” to civilian authorities and not engaged in law enforcement, Shanahan stressed.
President Donald Trump initially ordered almost 6,000 troops to the southern border in late October, as two migrant caravans trekked through Mexico. His critics accused him of a publicity stunt ahead of the November midterms.
Some 3,600 of those troops have since returned to their bases, but 2,300 soldiers still remain on the border. Earlier this month, Shanahan authorized extending their mission through the end of September 2019. Another 2,200 National Guard troops are deployed on the border as well.
That decision came within days of another “caravan” forming in Honduras and setting out for Mexico, with the US as their final destination. According to multiple reports, its numbers have swelled from the original 2,000 members to something like 12,000.
Just so you all know there is a second migrant caravan heading towards the US-Mexico border right now as we speak, but still I see no coverage on it! #CaravanaMigrante — 🇲🇽Kev🇱🇰 (@kevinkandamby) January 26, 2019
Seeking to crack down on illegal immigration, Trump has vowed to build a border wall along several sections of the border with Mexico, but has been met with determined resistance by congressional Democrats, who refuse to authorize any funds for the purpose. The standoff has led to the recent 34-day government shutdown, the longest in US history.
Congress has less than three weeks to pass a border security bill that Trump would be willing to sign, and there have been no signs of a deal emerging. Reopening the government last week, Trump said he was prepared to invoke a national emergency and redirect Pentagon funding towards wall construction.
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The Center for American Progress has previously pointed out that the House Republican budget for fiscal year 2012 forces future beneficiaries out of Medicare into more expensive private plans. One of the ways Republicans are trying to sell their Medicare proposal is by claiming that beneficiaries would “be enrolled in the same kind of health-care program that members of Congress enjoy.” That claim is false. In fact, if the rate of growth under this Medicare proposal were applied to federal employees’ most popular health option, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Option, federal workers, including members of Congress, with family coverage would have to pay another $3,330 for the care they enjoy today. Those with individual coverage would have to pay another $1,555.
Most federal workers receive their health coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan, or FEHBP. The government contributes a portion of their health premium. That portion is set by law and applied to the weighted average of actual premiums charged in any given year. Beneficiaries make up the rest of the cost.
The Republican budget replaces the traditional fee-for-service Medicare for future beneficiaries with a voucher to private insurance companies that is established on very different terms. Unlike FEHBP, which has a consistent government contribution based on actual premiums charged in any given year, the amount of the voucher is determined independent of actual premiums. Its growth is instead tied to the rate of the consumer price index for all urban consumers, or CPI-U. Because health costs have typically increased faster than inflation, the level of government support from the voucher would become a lower share of actual premium costs over time. In other words, Medicare beneficiaries would be left holding the bag.
What would happen if FEHBP operated like the GOP Medicare proposal?
We examined what would happen if FEHBP had operated like the Republican Medicare proposal over the last decade. We used data from the Office of Personnel and Management to look at the annual premiums for federal workers enrolled in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Service Benefit Plan (Standard Family and Standard Individual). We chose this plan because nearly 60 percent of those enrolled in FEHBP have Blue Cross Blue Shield, and the Standard Option is the most popular FEHBP plan. We increased government support for the individual and family plans by the rate of growth in the CPI-U index from 2002 to 2011. We then compared the difference between the government’s share and the actual total premium in each year—which is the amount the beneficiary would pay—under the Republican proposal and the real FEHBP.
The result: A typical federal worker, or member of Congress, enrolled in family coverage in the Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Option, would have had to pay an additional $3,330.36 for the same level of coverage they have today. Those with individual coverage would have had to pay $1,555 more.
Nicole Cafarella is the Payment Reform Project Manager and Policy Analyst, and Tony Carrk is a Policy Analyst for American Progress.
See also:
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Keep the Cheap Wine Flowing
I blogged last week about blind wine tastings — my own casual experiments as well as some more serious academic ones. The bottom line is that in blind wine tastings, there is a zero or even slightly negative correlation between the ratings of regular people and the price of the wine they are drinking; for experts the relationship between rating and price is positive.
I’ve learned a few more things from blog readers about cheap wine over the last few days.
Robin Goldstein has an excellent book, The Wine Trials, which describes the blind wine tastings and which cheap wines people liked. The beauty of this book is that you can bring an $8 bottle of wine to a party and explain that it tastes better than the $28 bottle you would have bought. If the host of the party is an economist, you can tape a $10 bill to the bottle for an even split of the joint surplus.
Not until I read Goldstein’s book did I realize just how weak the correlation was in blind tastings between expert evaluations and price in experimental settings. Yet, somehow Wine Spectator, which claims to do tastings blind (at least with respect to who the producer is), has an extremely strong positive correlation between prices and ratings. Hmmm … seems a bit suspicious.
It turns out that the story with respect to cheap wine is even more true for champagne. I’ve never tasted a $12 bottle of champagne that I didn’t enjoy immensely. It turns out I am not alone. In blind tests, Domaine Ste. Michelle Cuvee Brut, a $12 sparkling wine from Washington, is preferred nearly two to one to $150 Dom Perignon if you strip away the labels.
Dan Ariely (author of Predictably Irrational) and his co-authors have an interesting experiment with beer and balsamic vinegar. If you tell people ahead of time there will be vinegar in their beer, they won’t like the taste. If you don’t tell them and do a blind tasting, they do like the taste. If you let them form their opinions and then tell them there was vinegar in the beer, most continue to say it tasted good.
I am generally skeptical of neuro-economics, but here is one such study which finds that the firing of neurons in the brain is affected by how much the subject thinks the wine he/she is being served cost. The bottom line seems to be that if you think a wine is more expensive, you really do enjoy it more.
Finally, a wonderful tale published in The New Yorker a year ago, written by Patrick Radden Keefe, profiled an ambitious conman who fooled the world’s leading wine experts for more than a decade before his nefarious plot unraveled. I can’t remember the last time I read an article this long from beginning to end in one sitting.
(Hat tip: Eric Jorgenson)
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killed in Everest (although the death toll from Friday's disaster is at 14, the remaining three who are missing are also presumed dead).
via OutsideOnline.com
A simple explanation for the increase in death tolls in the last few years might be the rise in number of expeditions on Everest. Consider this: Two years ago, 234 climbers reached to the top of Mount Everest. Last year, that number nearly tripled, as 658 climbers made it to the top of the summit. More climbers mean more guides. More climbers trying to make it to the top of the mountain in a small window of favorable weather also means more risks. In 2012, four climbers were killed in what was dubbed a "traffic jam on Everest," which was a result of a large number of people attempting to scale the peak at the same time.
To understand where Sherpas are coming from, it's important to understand who they are. For the Sherpa community that lives at the foothills of Everest, the mountain is sacred. They refer to it as Chomolungma, which means "Goddess Mother of the Land" in Tibetan language. For years, they did not climb the mountain, for fear of offending the god. Once the westerners arrived, the Sherpas saw an opportunity to maintain their livelihood by guiding them to the mountains, their own backyard.
But even today, no Sherpa goes on an expedition without performing a ritual at a local monastery, praying to the goddess and asking her protect them throughout the climb. Visible at the mountain and parts of the route to the top are colorful Tibetan prayer flags, left for the winds to spread blessings.
After reaching the top of Everest where he is surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags, Pasang Geljen Sherpa holds a flag of Nepal. (Da Dendi Sherpa/AP)
As a very tightly-knit community mourns the loss of their friends and family, it is natural for the Sherpas to question whether climbing a mountain they consider holy for money is worth the risks.
But risks aside, what has angered Sherpas the most in the wake of the most devastating accident on Everest is the government's response. Reacting to the demands of the mountaineering agencies, Nepal's deputy prime minister said, "We will do what we can, keeping with the standard practice to provide compensation.”
About 400 climbers are currently waiting on the mountain to reach the top of the world's highest peak. According to the head of Nepal Mountaineering Association, nearly an equal number of Sherpa guides, porters, cooks and cleaners are with those climbers. Whether the government will listen to the demands of the Sherpa guides is a different story, but what is clear is that if the Sherpas decide not to return to the mountains sooner, the western climbers hoping to achieve glory by scaling Everest will either have to give up or do it alone.
Related: How dangerous is the road to Everest. See these images.
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Archaeologists say the rusted Winchester Model 1873 rifle may have been left at the same spot more than a century ago
An 1882 Winchester rifle which was found leaning against a juniper tree in a clutch of rocks and branches on a remote Nevada range has confounded the archaeologists who happened upon it, standing as if casually left there more than 100 years ago.
The rifle, which is remarkably well preserved, was found by a team of archaeologists in Great Basin national park in November. It will go on display this weekend at the park, the chief of interpretation, Nichole Andler, said.
How the rifle arrived at its resting place, vulnerable to the elements, a curious animal or covetous passerby, is a mystery. “We just don’t know,” Andler said, pointing out that there were no other artifacts in the immediate vicinity that could hint at who put the rifle there.
Andler said the rifle was discovered with its wooden stock partially buried, its barrel rusted and its body so browned that it “really camouflaged in with the bark and shading of the juniper tree”.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A close-up photo of a Winchester Model 1873 rifle found by park workers in Great Basin National Park, Nevada. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
An engraving of “Model 1873” on the rifle’s side identifies it as one of the most popular guns of its era. Winchester manufactured more than 700,000 of the rifles, which Andler said were “fairly inexpensive” for the time and became known as “the gun that won the west”.
Winchester made the gun from 1873 to 1916. Until 1966, the Great Basin desert contained wilderness, ranches and mining camps; some metallic relics of the miners of Snake Valley are still scattered around the park.
Rangers, miners, settlers, ranchers or Native Americans are the likely candidates to have owned the rifle, but Andler said the owner could have been almost anyone.
“Humans have been in this valley for a very long time,” she said.
Nevertheless, park archaeologists will still search for any trace of the lost rifle in newspapers from the era, Andler said.
After its initial display, conservators will try to maintain the rifle’s good condition, which Andler attributed to the arid climate and shelter provided by the tree.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Winchester Model 1873 found by park workers in Great Basin National Park, Nevada, leaning against a tree. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
• An earlier Reuters version of this story was amended on 16 January 2015 to correct the model of gun mentioned. It is a Winchester Model 1873, not a 1773, as we first said. The headline was also changed to make it clear that an old gun had been found, not a decrepit cowboy.
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Religious right broadcaster Kevin Swanson agreed with one of his guests that Abraham Lincoln imposed socialism on the United States during the “war against the South” – more commonly known as the Civil War.
Swanson hosted neo-Confederate author Walter Kennedy last month on his radio program, reported Right Wing Watch, where the pair argued the Republican Party had been founded by “radical socialists and communists.”
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“The Democrats, both Northern and Southerners, believed in limited government, and the Marxists hated that concept,” Kennedy said. “They wanted to do away with states’ rights and limited government so that they’d have one big all-powerful indivisible government that could force its will upon the American people.”
The broadcaster – who has argued the Disney hit movie “Frozen” was a satanic tool for indoctrinating girls to become lesbians — agreed with his guest, saying Lincoln and Mark Twain helped ruin the U.S. by replacing Southern slavery with socialist slavery.
“It’s the socialist utopians that come into town and they promise deliverance from local fiefdoms, only to create a large tyranny in the Soviet Union, Soviet America and Soviet China and Soviet everywhere else in the world,” Swanson said.
Kennedy — who has written books such as “Lincoln’s Marxists” and the pro-slavery “The South Was Right!” — is a founding member of the neo-Confederate League of the South and has called for a new Southern secession.
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The author told Swanson that Lincoln had given a “big boost” to communism by winning the Civil War and then created a federal government that began an “incessant attack on religious values in America.”
“What Marxist dictator could ask for less?” Kennedy said. “All of these communists that have wormed their way into power, into powerful positions, they began to influence other people to pursue this objective of a big, indivisible government, and government supplants God as being sovereign.”
Swanson suggested that Lincoln imposed communist values through public schools.
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“Post-Civil War, you’ve got the socialist goals, the communist platform, the Manifesto platform, I think there are 10 elements to the platform, one by one they come about in our country – and first was the public schools,” Swanson said.
Kennedy agreed, saying public schools encouraged children to think alike and were no different than propaganda from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or North Korea.
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“They want all of the children to think alike, and what tyrant doesn’t want all of his subjects to think alike?” the author said.
[Image: lincoln dollar bill in macro shot via Shutterstock]
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BROOKINE (CBS) – The friend of a woman who accused now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct says she feels like her efforts were “all for nothing.”
Jennifer Klaus was friends with Deborah Ramirez at Yale, and lived with her after college. Klaus lives in Brookline now. She says when she heard the announcement that Brett Kavanaugh was President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee back in July, she laughed out loud, because of the man she knew at school – one she and friends used to refer to as “Brett Tool.”
Klaus first came out publicly in the bombshell New Yorker article that revealed disturbing allegations of sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh while at Yale. Ramirez claims a young Brett Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party in college – an event that Jen Klaus didn’t witness personally, but believes happened. “Hands down, definitely believe her,” she told WBZ-TV. “If she said it happened, I’m behind her 100 percent.”
While Klaus supports and believes her friend “Debbie,” she says she never had a questionable interaction with Kavanaugh. “He was a sloppy drunk,” she said. “For sure. Holding up the walls. Asleep on his feet. But he was never belligerent to me or did anything questionable to me.”
Two weeks after Ramirez’s claims were published in the New Yorker, and days after she was interviewed by the FBI, Judge Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court in a 50-48 Senate vote. “I don’t think this was a thorough investigation,” Klaus said. “I think she was pushed to the side. If anything, it’s infuriated me more since yesterday. I’m sure this has been devastating for her. And what did she get out of any of this? She just got brushed aside.”
Klaus was not interviewed by the FBI, but did receive a personal call from a staff member of the Judiciary Committee. She says the staff member asked her if her friend Debbie drank to excess, or if there were other boys at school known to drop their pants. “It made me think, is it to suggest that Debbie had a case of mistaken identity?” she said. “I couldn’t exactly comment on other people dropping their trousers, particularly.”
In an emailed statement to WBZ-TV, a spokesperson for Senator Grassley said the phone interview was “standard protocol.”
“No suggestion of mistaken identity was made,” the spokesperson said. “The committee has received numerous tips and asked Ms. Klaus for information she could provide one way or the other.”
Now that Justice Kavanaugh is confirmed, Klaus says she’s disappointed, and wishes more of her Yale classmates had come out to corroborate Deborah Ramirez’s story.
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Date: 31st May 2013
This is a continuation of the first half of this Coron island-hopping tour. After lunch, the boat set off towards the next stop on the tour.
We were supposed to go to Barracuda Lake next but we couldn’t because of some “problem” there. So instead, the boat took us to the Twin Lagoon. The water here looked far clearer than Siete Picados and the skies were clearing up too. So I got ready to jump in.
Here’s a brief video:
The next few photos are processed using this method.
The boat then just moved a few metres ahead to the second lagoon. It didn’t look drastically different, but I went in anyway!
When it was time to leave, the tour boat then rode to the final stop on this tour, CYC island.
Once we disembarked at Lualhati park, I headed straight to my room to freshen up and offload some of the contents of my bag.
When I got down, my legs were aching! I walked slowly because they were really stressed from climbing 700+ steps up and down. Once I got back to my room, I just lay in bed and gave my feet some rest for an hour or two.
I took a bath and later went out for dinner.
By the time I headed back to my room, the rains had reduced to a drizzle. This was my last night in Coron. Tomorrow afternoon I would fly back to Manila. Much like how El Nido capped off my 2011 journey across the Philippines, this year it was Coron that was the true highlight of my trip. I faced quite a few disappointments on this visit to the Philippines, but the Coron experience made this visit to the Philippines worth the while.
Anyway, back to Manila for now!
Previous posts in this series:
Philippines 2013: Coron island-hopping tour (Part 1) – Siete Pecados, Kayangan lake
Philippines 2013: Aerial view of Mount Mayon; arriving at Coron
Philippines 2013: Lignon Hill Park, Cagsawa Ruins and Mount Mayon
Philippines 2013: Arriving at Legazpi; going to Donsol to see whale sharks
Philippines 2013: Leaving Boracay; Kalibo to Angeles City
Beachfront hotels and resorts on White Beach, Boracay
Philippines 2013: Bulabog beach, Mount Luho viewpoint and sunset at White Beach
Philippines 2013: Boracay island tour, Puka beach and snorkelling
Philippines 2013: Flying from Manila to Boracay, White Beach
Philippines 2013: Taal Lake Volcano and Peoples Park, Tagaytay
The crap I went through to get my Philippines tourist visa this time
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Banks seeking to circumvent the EU's cap on bonuses for top staff could face further action from European regulators, a senior official has warned.
Michel Barnier, a vice-president of the European commission, with responsibility for financial services, said there could be "a coordinated policy response" to banks that dodge the EU bonus cap by paying allowances to their top staff.
The warning comes as the UK government sets out its case on Monday against the EU bonus cap in Europe's highest court.
The EU limited bankers' bonuses to one year's salary, or twice that amount with shareholders' approval, as part of a broader package of reforms aimed at encouraging banks to behave more responsibly, following widespread public anger at bailed-out banks paying lavish bonuses.
In response to the EU clampdown, which came into effect this year, several banks decided to pay their top executives allowances in cash or shares, instead of a bonus. Stuart Gulliver, the chief executive of HSBC, gets an additional £32,000 a week in allowances in top of his £1.2m salary. Bailed-out banks Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland have awarded their top executives shares, while Barclays are among other banks with similar schemes.
In a letter to the European Banking Authority, which monitors the industry, Barnier said: "I would like to underline my strong concerns with regard to continuing reports of the use of these allowances. It is important to show a collective pro-active stance on this important matter and address the claims made that the spirit – if not the letter – of union law is being disregarded."
The European Banking Authority launched an investigation into allowance payments in June and was due to report at the end of the year, to allow regulators to take action ahead of next year's pay-setting round at the banks.
But Barnier is now urging them to speed up their work. "I would therefore be very grateful if you could share with us the results of your work on this issue as soon as possible and at the latest by the end of September, in order to ensure that we can address any concerns in a timely manner through a coordinated policy response."
Barnier can propose amendments to the law, but any substantial re-working would be seen through by his successor, who has yet to be named. Barnier's successor is expected to take office on 1 November, under a European commission headed by former Luxembourg prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker.
After being outvoted 26 to one on the EU bankers' bonus cap in 2013, the UK launched a legal challenge at the European court of justice.
A Treasury spokesman said the cap had been "rushed through without a proper impact assessment" and "could undermine financial stability by leading to higher fixed costs at banks".
The UK government will make its case today at a hearing in Luxembourg, but the ECJ is not expected to make a ruling until the end of the year at the earliest.
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hatred and an obscene joy to watch.
The soundtrack is predictably drum heavy. The score’s standout piece is “Upswingin” by the film’s composer Justin Hurwitz but the performance of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” crowns the entire film.
Bird (Clint Eastwood, 1988)
Bird is a biopic about jazz legend Charlie Parker. Forest Whitaker is a tour de force as the troubled alto saxophonist and was recognised with a best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1988. Eastwood and Whitaker won best director and actor respectively at the Golden Globes the same year, while the movie won an Oscar for best sound, something that means a great deal for any Jazz enthusiast.
The film manages to encapsulate a great deal of the atmosphere of the 1950s bebop movement. As well as a biopic about Parker, the film evokes that wonderful period of jazz invention. The story of Parker’s painfully short life is tragic and sympathetically told with just as wandering a narrative as any great Charlie Parker solo, jumping freely between past and present.
Born to Be Blue ( Robert Budreau, 2015)
Dealing with the fraught and uneven life of Chet Baker, and with an uncannily convincing portrayal by Ethan Hawke, the film plays quite frivolously with fact and fiction – taking fewer notes from the first column than the latter.
The narrative involves Baker being cast to play himself in a movie about his early life as a jazz musician dealing with heroin addiction. Baker’s career goes off the rails in the mid-1960s when he is badly beaten by drug dealers, losing his front teeth and ruining his embouchure (mouth shape). The film tracks his efforts to learn to play again. It’s beautifully shot and Hawke’s performance is well-worth tuning in for.
Jazz lovers will have their own roster of movies, but honourable mentions must go to Michelangelo Antonioni’s uniquely confusing Blow-Up and David Cronenberg’s surreal adaptation of William Burroughs’ modernist masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Round Midnight – which features Dexter Gordon and a soundtrack by Herbie Hancock – also deserves a place in the pantheon, while Let’s Get Lost (1987), directed by Bruce Weber, is another movie about Chet Baker – this time a moving documentary.
Much of European cinema from the late 1950s and 1960s relies heavily on the use of powerful and memorable jazz soundtracks – from the French New Wave through the British New Wave of the early 1960s to New Italian Cinema. But for true jazz aficionados, the above five films are required viewing.
Martin Hall, Senior Lecturer, York St John University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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SEOUL (Reuters) - Hyundai Motor Co 005380.KS and Kia Motors Corp 000270.KS plan to recall 1.48 million vehicles in the United States, Canada and South Korea due to engine issues, the latest blow for two firms already struggling in key markets.
FILE PHOTO: Dave Zuchowski, President and CEO of Hyundai North America, introduces the 2015 Hyundai Sonata at the New York International Auto Show in New York City, April 16, 2014. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
The recall could cost the two firms hundreds of millions of dollars each revives quality concerns at a time when Hyundai and Kia face a sharp drop in China sales and sluggish demand in the United States and South Korea.
The South Korean companies are recalling 1.19 million cars and sport utility vehicles in the United States, 114,187 in Canada and 171,348 in South Korea due to the engine issue that increases the risk of a crash, according to safety regulators in those respective countries.
The U.S. recall involves Hyundai’s Sonata and Santa Fe and Kia’s Optima, Sorento and Sportage.
The recall could hit earnings with the recall costing each company as much as 250 billion won ($220.19 million), said Koh Tae-bong, an analyst at Hi Investment & Securities.
The companies declined to comment on the cost of the recall.
Hyundai Motor shares closed down 2.4 percent, compared to a flat broader market.KS11. Kia Motors were down 0.9 percent.
MORE RECALLS
This is not the first time Hyundai and Kia have been forced to recall vehicles due to defects in their Theta engines, which they manufacture themselves.
In 2015, Hyundai Motor recalled 470,000 Sonata sedans in the United States to replace faulty engine parts, prompting quality concerns in its home market of South Korea.
But Hyundai and Kia said last year that engines produced at domestic factories were not defective. They instead extended the warranty period for five Theta 2-equipped models in South Korea.
South Korea’s transport ministry said on Friday metal debris in crankshafts could cause engine damage, leading to possible loss of motive power.
The recall in South Korea covers Hyundai’s Sonata, Grandeur sedans and Kia’s K5, K7 and Sportage models equipped with a 2-liter or 2.4-liter Theta 2 gasoline engine produced before August 2013, the ministry said.
“The recall is related to a manufacturing process problem, not the structural problem of Theta 2GDi engines and we have completed improvements through appropriate measures,” the companies said in a statement.
Hyundai will replace a defective engine with a new one after inspection. The recall in South Korea will start on May 22.
($1 = 1,135.4000 won)
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Hello Margaret. I tried calling you last night but you didn’t answer. I swear every time a squirrel goes looking for a nut up there in Maine you lose your phone service.
I just don’t understand how your Howard can listen to that Rush Limbaugh each day. I tuned into him yesterday and couldn’t believe it. I mean, I know he is a Republican mouthpiece, I just didn’t realize we were dealing with Hoof and Mouth Disease.
Ask Howard to follow the logic of his argument today if you can. He said Republicans lost because they didn’t stick to their core values. They tried to be nice and tell people that they aren’t racists, bigots and homophobes. Once the Republicans got soft and started trying to be compassionate they began to lose. That is the problem with Republicans right now according to Rush. As proof he pontificated that conservative initiatives passed on the ballots.
So let me see if I understand. If Republicans would just admit that they are racists, bigots and homophobes and stop trying to be nice, they would win more elections. And the conservative movement which stands for less government was somehow validated because California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas just forced government even farther into people’s bedrooms? And yet all of the conservative pro-life measures (the bread and butter issue for most of that group) failed to pass. So basically the conservative movement has been reduced to Anita Bryant’s diary. My, my but how they love their aging beauty queens… and we all know that beauty queens are the brightest bulbs on the chandelier.
Wow. I guess all the drugs Limbaugh takes have finally eaten away most of the gray matter that was stored in that fat head of his.
Oh and then there was that other guy – can’t remember his name – who actually went on and on about how steep the hill was for McCain and it was amazing how well he did. Steep hill? The other guy was a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. But McCain had the steep hill. I am at a loss on that one. You know, they can’t win with grace and they can’t lose with grace. Remind me again what we like about Howard? Oh that’s right. He cooks. At least there’s that. And he tolerates me so I guess he can’t be all bad.
Harold must have heard me screaming bullshit and asshole at the radio because he surprised me with two tickets to see Dame Edna at our favorite theater in Austin for this Saturday. He said I needed a little break and remembered that you and Howard loved Dame Edna when you saw her in New York a few years ago. Isn’t that the show you told us about? I hope so.
I hope you will plan a visit soon. We really do need to visit and laugh about all this blog stuff.
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Harvard scholar Christopher Jencks reviews an edited volume, Legacies of the War on Poverty, where some of the best economists weigh in on what worked and what didn’t. Superb review. I learned a lot. The review was in two parts, and here’s the conclusion:
On the one hand, there have clearly been more successes than today’s Republicans acknowledge, at least in public. Raising Social Security benefits played a major part in cutting poverty among the elderly. The Earned Income Tax Credit cut poverty among single mothers. Food stamps improve living standards for most poor families. Medicaid also improves the lives of the poor. Even Section 8 rent subsidies, which I have not discussed, improve living standards among the poor families lucky enough to get one, although the money might do more good if it were distributed in a less random way. Head Start also turns out to help poor children stay on track for somewhat better lives than their parents had.
On the other hand, Republican claims that antipoverty programs were ineffective and wasteful also appear to have been well founded in many cases. Title I spending on elementary and secondary education has had few identifiable benefits, although the design of the program would make it hard to identify such benefits even if they existed. Relying on student loans rather than grants to finance the early years of higher education has discouraged an unknown number of low-income students from entering college, because of the fear that they will not be able to pay the loans back if they do not graduate. Job-training programs for the least employable have also yielded modest benefits. The community action programs that challenged the authority of elected local officials during the 1960s might have been a fine idea if they had been privately funded, but using federal money to pay for attacks on elected officials was a political disaster.
The fact that the War on Poverty included some unsuccessful programs is not an indictment of the overall effort. Failures are an inevitable part of any program that requires experimentation. The problem is that most of these programs still exist. Job-training programs that don’t work still pop up and disappear. Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act still pushes money into the hands of educators who do not raise poor children’s test scores. It has had little in the way of tangible results. Increasingly large student loans still allow colleges to raise tuition faster than family incomes rise, and rising costs still discourage many poor students from attending or completing college.
It takes time to produce disinterested assessments of political programs. The Government Accountability Office has done good assessments of some narrowly defined programs, but assessing strategic choices about how best to fight poverty has been left largely to journalists, university scholars, and organizations like the Russell Sage Foundation, which paid for Legacies. Scholars are not completely disinterested either, but in this case we can be grateful that a small group has helped us reach a more balanced judgment about a noble experiment. We did not lose the War on Poverty. We gained some ground. Quite a lot of ground.
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Unbeloved by critics at the time but having since built quite the cult following, “Event Horizon” may not be much more than the pithy ‘haunted house in space’ summary that often dismissively describes it but given that it delivers on that concept very, very well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
In the year 2047, a salvage team is sent to investigate and recover the long thought lost starship Event Horizon which has suddenly reappeared in orbit of Neptune. Having disappeared on its maiden voyage 7 years previously, its return is merely the harbinger of a darker mystery as the crew of the salvage tug Lewis & Clark – along with the designer of the Event Horizon Dr Weir (Sam Neill) – try to discover what happened during that fateful first mission.
It may be a hugely derivative mash-up of “Alien” and “Hellraiser” but it works thanks to bravura production design and a cast of committed thesps who lean into the grisly goings-on and give the science fiction shenanigans just the right amount of credibility to make the scares come off just right.
Something of a Hellish puzzle-box itself, the movie doesn’t give up its secrets easily or all at once and it keeps the tension simmering nicely for quite some time before it lets things boil over and all Hell breaks loose. Looking back, its now star-studded cast keeps it interesting for first-time viewers as you can’t be sure who’ll be killed off quickly and who might – just might – survive until the end.
While it has an admirable commitment to bringing some scientific realism to play – the recovery and reactivation of the Event Horizon features some nods to the real-world physics of space travel that wouldn’t disgrace an Arthur C Clark adaptation – it’s not afraid to really lean into the jump scares and gore of the horror genre. Of course, being a Paul (not yet W.S.) Anderson film, it lacks even a shred of subtlety and the soundtrack isn’t always a good fit for what’s on-screen (the opening titles, in particular, are weird kind of “Doctor Who”/ “James Bond” hybrid with a rejected “Blade” dance track to accompany them, but all-in-all it’s a cracking potboiler of a scary movie, gleefully gory and deceptively smart to boot.
With Fishburne, Sam Neill, Jason Isaacs and Joely Richardson firing on all cylinders, “Event Horizon” is one of the few times when in space they can hear you scream – as long as it’s in Latin!
7/10
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van driver was pictured driving while using his mobile phone today on the A3 going through Guildford, Surrey Credit: news.com.au
25 A van driver holding a mobile phone whilst driving on the M20 near Ashford, Kent Credit: PA:Press Association
25 A driver in Guildford, Surrey, seen chatting on a mobile phone while on the road today Credit: SWNS:South West News Service
25 A van driver holding a mobile phone whilst driving on the M20 near Ashford, Kent Credit: PA:Press Association
25 This man was seen driving on the A3 while using his phone and with his other hand off the wheel Credit: SWNS:South West News Service
The new measures are being introduced following a series of high-profile cases and research suggesting the practice is widespread.
New drivers can have their licence revoked if they get six penalty points in their first two years on the road, which could now be the result of sending a single text message.
More experienced motorists can lose their licence if they receive 12 points in a three-year period.
Twenty-two people were killed and 99 seriously injured in accidents on Britain's roads in 2015 where a motorist using a mobile was a contributory factor, latest figures show.
Lorry driver Tomasz Kroker was jailed for 10 years in October after killing a woman and three children by ploughing into their stationary car on the A34 near Newbury, Berkshire, while distracted by his phone.
25 Another driver was snapped today on the A3 through Guildford, Surrey, using a mobile phone Credit: SWNS:South West News Service
25 Dorset police officers on patrol today as penalties and fines for offenders caught using their phone behind the wheel have been doubled to six points and £200 respectively Credit: PA:Press Association
25 Another driver on the A3 through Surrey seen on his mobile phone on the day the law changed to give tougher penalties Credit: SWNS:South West News Service
According to the Transport Research Laboratory, reaction times are twice as long for drivers who are texting compared with those who have been drinking.
A new advert developed by the Government's road safety group Think! and the AA Charitable Trust shows a drunk man suggesting he should swap places with his sober girlfriend, who is texting on her phone while driving him home.
The campaign will be featured at cinemas and on billboards, radio and social media, with the message: "You wouldn't drink and drive. Don't text and drive."
Motoring groups believe a sharp decline in the number of offenders caught is partly due to police budget cuts affecting enforcement.
An RAC survey found that one in four motorists admits checking texts, emails and social media while driving.
We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online news team? Email us at [email protected] or call 0207 782 4368.
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A family in the United States says their five-year-old son with autism has been labelled a “sex offender” after he hugged a fellow classmate.
Nathan is a nursery school pupil at East Ridge Elementary in Chattanooga, Tennessee. School officials said he was warned several times but overstepped his boundaries in hugging another child.
Summery Putnam, the young boy’s guardian told a local TV outlet, News Channel 9, that she received a call from her son’s teacher at the start of September.
She said Nathan’s teacher told her he had been accused of “sexual activities” for hugging a child and kissing another on the cheek.
But Ms Putnam said the five-year-old was unaware he had crossed any kind of boundary.
What it’s like to live with autism: new simulation Auti-Sim gives mother a sense of her daughter's life Show all 4 1 / 4 What it’s like to live with autism: new simulation Auti-Sim gives mother a sense of her daughter's life What it’s like to live with autism: new simulation Auti-Sim gives mother a sense of her daughter's life pg-32-aspergers-3.jpg What it’s like to live with autism: new simulation Auti-Sim gives mother a sense of her daughter's life pg-32-aspergers-1.jpg What it’s like to live with autism: new simulation Auti-Sim gives mother a sense of her daughter's life pg-32-aspergers-2.jpg What it’s like to live with autism: new simulation Auti-Sim gives mother a sense of her daughter's life pg-32-aspergers-4.jpg
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong,” Ms Putnam said.
Ms Putnam told the TV outlet her son has now switched classrooms and teachers. He is enrolled in special education services.
In a private Facebook post shared with News Channel 9, Nathan’s grandmother, Debi Amick, questioned how just it was that the school would not listen to the family or their doctor about the challenges the five-year-old was facing.
“It was disclosed that it will go in his record for the rest of his life that he is a sex offender,” she said. “This child is autistic, he comprehends and functions very different than your typical five-year-old. What do you do?
“Who do you turn to for help when the school will not even listen to the child’s doctor when he explains the child’s difficulties in his comprehension of simple things such as boundaries?”
Spokesman for the Hamilton County Department of Education Tim Hensley said, in a statement, schools were entitled to report any concerns they had regarding a child.
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Image copyright BoyOfHeaven Image caption Twitter user BoyOfHeaven took pictures appearing to show the re-enactment
A Thai television station has apologised for re-enacting the Bangkok blast at the Erawan shrine with a staff member dressed as the main suspect.
The re-enactment on Thursday evening sparked outrage among Thais at the shrine and online.
Executives at Nation TV have since acknowledged it was insensitive and disrespectful to the dead.
The bomb blast on Monday evening killed 20 people and injured scores more. Police are hunting for the suspect.
Nation TV presenters read out an apology on television on Thursday night.
An evening news editor with the station said in a statement posted online (in Thai) a team was sent out to re-enact the bombing at around 18:00 local time on Thursday (11:00 GMT Thursday).
Image copyright Thai police/Khao sod Image caption CCTV footage from the night of the blast shows what police have called the main suspect in a yellow shirt and black bagpack
A member of staff was dressed up to look like the suspect, the statement said. The team stopped filming when people at the scene "expressed frustration" at them.
The president of Nation Broadcasting Corporation Adisak Limprungpatanakij said separately that the plan was made "without consideration for the sensitivity of the public and with disrespect for the dead," reported AP news agency.
He added that the station would consider disciplining those responsible.
Image copyright BoyOfHeaven Image caption Nation TV said a member of staff was dressed up to look like the main suspect
Twitter user BoyOfHeaven posted pictures on Thursday evening which appeared to show the Nation TV staff during the re-enactment.
"There is an unidentified TV crew, they have someone dressed as the suspect in the shrine. Police have asked him to leave the scene and people are shouting 'terrible' at him," he said in a tweet that was later shared thousands of times online.
Mistaken identity
The incident was the second controversy involving identification of the suspect in the days following the blast.
Australian actor Sunny Burns, who teaches English in Bangkok, was mistaken as the main suspect earlier this week after a Thai journalist pointed out that Mr Burns resembled him.
Mr Burns said he later found that private details including his home address were being spread online.
He went to the police to give a statement on Tuesday, and posted a picture of himself at the station "to share any evidence in case something went wrong", he said. He later posted CCTV video stills showing he was at his apartment building at the time of the blast.
Image caption Mr Burns said he was interrogated for hours by the police
Thai police have released a sketch of the suspect and say that he is a foreigner.
Two other men earlier identified as suspects in the bombing have since been cleared of involvement.
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“A lot of girls do it,” said an 18-year-old named Sara al-Tukhaifi who explained that a girl and her friends might cross-dress, sneaking thobes out of a brother’s closet, then challenge each other to enter the Saudi male sphere in various ways, by walking nonchalantly up to the men-only counter in a McDonalds, say, or even by driving.
“It’s just a game,” Ms. Tukhaifi said, although detention by the religious police is always a possibility. “I haven’t done it myself, but those two are really good at it. They went into a store and pretended to be looking at another girl they even got her to turn her face away.”
Grinning, Ms. Tukhaifi mimicked the gesture, pressing her face into the corner of her hijab with exaggerated pretend modesty while her classmate Shaden giggled. Saudi newspapers often lament the rise of rebellious behavior among young Saudis. There are reports of a recent spate of ugly confrontations between youths and the religious police, and of a supposed increase in same-sex love affairs among young people frustrated at the strict division between the genders.
And certainly, practices like “numbering” where a group of young men in a car chase another car they believe to contain young women, and try to give the women their phone number via Bluetooth, or by holding a written number up to the window have become a very visible part of Saudi urban life.
Flirting by Phone
A woman can’t switch her phone’s Bluetooth feature on in a public place without receiving a barrage of the love poems and photos of flowers and small children which many Saudi men keep stored on their phones for purposes of flirtation. And last year, Al Arabiya television reported that some young Saudis have started buying special “electronic belts,” which use Bluetooth technology to discreetly beam the wearer’s cellphone number and e-mail address at passing members of the opposite sex.
Image Shaden, 17, at her home in Riyadh. She spoke admiringly of the religious police, whom she sees as the guardians of perfectly normal Saudi social values, and she boasted about an older brother who has become more strict in his faith. Credit... Photographs by Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Ms. Tukhaifi and Shaden know of girls in their college who have passionate friendships, possibly even love affairs, with other girls but they say that this, like the cross-dressing, is just a “game” born of frustration, something that will inevitably end when the girls in question become engaged. And they and their friends say that they find the experience of being chased by boys in cars to be frightening, and insist that they do not know any girl who has actually spoken to a boy who contacted her via Bluetooth.
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what a negative pattern this has been for me.I continue to follow the tow truck, and eventually we make it out of some winding mountain roads and find ourselves on the other side of the roadblock, maybe 200 yards from the end we started at. It is also blocked, with police everywhere, but there is no construction yet on this side so the tow truck driver talks to the officer sitting guard in his car and gets us permission to pass. I follow, passing right by the officer, the danger of which never occurs to me. I can talk to police, I feel fine, I think to myself. Of course my pupils are likely quite dilated and who knows what I look like after over three days in ibogaine's ferocious embrace. However, nothing happens, we just drive by. E gets out of the car once we park and talks to the driver as he lowers her car down and places it in an empty spot. E gets out and writes a note and sticks it to the door, as the shop is closed for the day due to the construction. Then she gets in my car and asks if I can take her to the local university where she is going to set up to give massages today. The drive there is more of a same, fun, but uneventful. I drop her off and drive back home, and by the time I get there I'm glad to have arrived.I spend the rest of the day just soaking up the awesomeness of my life and the current mental state I have found myself in. I take another redose of methylone a few hours later, along with some 3-MMC, and then that is my last for the day. I spend time browsing Bluelight, compiling notes for my report on this experience, and then around 1:30pm I check my work email again, and see that they are still having issues with my study, and the person covering it for me is clueless on how to fix the issue. I, however, know exactly what to do. I decide to give them a helping hand and log in, tell them I am going to work the second half of this day (and hey, now I get an extra half day of vacation back). I proceed to spend a few hours working it out. The team is very appreciative. I guess I truly am lucid again finally.The rest of the day is more of the same. I talk to Morninggloryseed and other friends quite a bit on instant messages, and I gush to everyone who will listen about how I am cured and how amazing this feeling is. At some point I go to bed after I realize I am tired, and I sleep a comfortable, peaceful sleep, with several dreams that I do not remember after waking.I wake up Wednesday morning feeling even better than I did the previous day. A steady, pleasant, amazing, sparkling, coursing euphoria suffuses my entire being. Really it never left, but it's even more powerful than it was yesterday. I get up
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If you thought they were going to issue a formal apology after decades of flagrant dishonesty, you would be mistaken. But the DEA is at long last conceding marijuana's incredible medical value…by giving pharmaceutical companies exclusive permission to make pills out of it.
"[M]arijuana has no scientifically proven medical value." So stated the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) on page six of a July 2010 agency white paper, titled "DEA Position on Marijuana."
Yet only four months after the agency committed its "no medical pot" stance to print, it announced its intent to allow for the regulation and marketing of pharmaceutical products containing plant-derived THC -- the primary psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. (Alternet)
DEA can try to frame this any way they like, but the bottom line remains that authorizing cultivation for pharmaceutical companies is the end of the debate. Over. Done. Whatever nuanced distinctions the enemies of medical marijuana seek to advance from this point forward will be devastated by the simple fact that new medicines are being made out of marijuana with the blessing of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Conspiracy theories will abound, of course, regarding the potential for a widespread campaign to shut down state-level medical marijuana programs and instead shove expensive pills down the throats of patients, while arresting providers and cultivators who refuse to comply. That isn't going to happen. As much as the DEA and their corporate co-conspirators might fantasize about it, a full-scale assault on the medical cannabis industry is simply impossible from both a practical and political standpoint. These laws were put in place by the people and they won't be done away with over our objections.
On the contrary, the emergence of cannabis-based pharmaceuticals has real potential to vest corporate interests with a stake in the drug's overall reputation. Rather than distancing themselves from the origins of their products, manufacturers of THC-based medications will recognize that associating their product with marijuana is in fact a shrewd marketing ploy. Marinol has already done exactly that. People love pot and that's going to be the key to selling these pills. As a result, we could soon be witnessing a seemingly impossible scenario in which pharmaceutical companies actually share our frustration when some drug war idiot comes along claiming THC causes schizophrenia.
Obviously, it's unlikely that our goals will ever align perfectly with those of the pharmaceutical industry, but they're clearly better at working with the DEA than we'll ever be. Rather than viewing the situation as a threat to our continued progress, I think we need to recognize that various forms of industrialization will be the inevitable result of our hard work to de-stigmatize the drug. As that process unfolds, we'll encounter numerous new and interesting opportunities to reframe the conversation about the dangers of marijuana. Even if this latest move by DEA is nothing more than a cynical attempt to thwart our progress somehow, I imagine it will backfire just as surely as every other tactic they've deployed in the drug war debate thus far.
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which meant "someone who cheats." "Sharping" came about around the same time and meant "swindling or cheating." The words "loan shark" and "sharp practice" come from these words as well. So technically, "card shark" could be correct. But because "card sharp" appeared first, many linguists want to preserve it. Whether they'll succeed is anyone's guess, but it's a sharp point of contention for many. Spit and Image If you think you're the spitting image of your parents, you're forgiven. People have been messing this one up for decades. "Spit and image" was the original term, used from about 1825 on. The Oxford English Dictionary defined it as "the very spit of, the exact image, likeness, or counterpart of." "Spitting image" came about some 80 years later and was followed by a few other variations, including "spitten image" and "splitting image" (neither of which really caught on). In this case, "spitting image" has overtaken the use of "spit and image" for most English speakers. But when you're spitting out this phrase, take a moment to remember its original use and think about the image you're trying to project. Ironic Few words cause as much confusion or are used incorrectly as often as "ironic." Not that it's hard to understand why - the definition is not simple: "a pretense of ignorance and of willingness to learn from another assumed in order to make the other's false conceptions conspicuous by adroit questioning... the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning." What? In 1996, Alanis Morissette wrote an entire song titled "Ironic," which consistently used the word incorrectly. And even the people who are supposed to know what it means get it wrong. The American Heritage Dictionary gave the word "irony" to its distinguished panel of experts (the ones who help ensure the accuracy of all the words the dictionary defines) and asked them if either of the following sentences used the word correctly: 1. "In 1969, Susie moved from Ithaca to California, where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York." Seventy-eight percent of the panel's members agreed that this was an incorrect use of the word. 2. "Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market." In contrast, though, 73 percent agreed that this sentence used it properly. How "ironic" came to be defined as "coincidence" is anybody's guess, but for our purposes, we like to refer to the following quote from the 1994 film Reality Bites. When Ethan Hawke's character is asked to define "ironic," he says, "It's when the actual meaning is the complete opposite of the literal meaning." Thank goodness for Hollywood.
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An amnesty for an estimated 618,000 illegal immigrants in Britain would provide a £3bn boost to the economy, according to a London School of Economics study commissioned by the London mayor, Boris Johnson. The study, published last night by the London assembly, dismisses fears that an amnesty would trigger further large-scale illegal migration, arguing that Britain's border controls would be an effective deterrent.
"So, far from a financial burden, as some suggest, this new research has found an amnesty could be worth up to £3bn a year to the country's economy," the study said. Johnson welcomed the report, saying it had introduced some hard evidence and academic rigour into a debate dominated for too long by myth and anecdote.
The research estimated there are 618,000 illegal migrants in Britain, with more than two-thirds, 442,000, in London. But if their position was regularised, £846m a year would be raised in taxes. The short-term public sector costs of giving them indefinite leave to remain in Britain at about £410m a year, according to the study, rising to a possible £1bn a year in the long term if they received welfare benefits and public sector housing.
The study found that about two-thirds of those living in Britain as illegal migrants would be eligible for an amnesty which granted legal status to those who have been resident for at least five years as part of a regularisation programme. The detailed estimates suggest that regularisation could raise an individual's earnings by 25% and employment rates by 6%, and imply an additional £3bn a year boost to national gross domestic product.
Johnson first called for an amnesty for long-term migrants last April. It provoked accusations of naivety from Phil Woolas, the immigration minister, and claims that it would lead to more people-trafficking.
The study says amnesties and regularisation programmes have been common in many countries in recent years, including the US, France, Spain, Italy and Greece.
The LSE research came as a Commons public accounts committee report showed it would be at least another four years before the UK Border Agency reached its "optimum capacity" to remove failed asylum seekers.
Only 12,000 were removed last year. The MPs' report said Home Office staff on asylum cases are still using fax machines, paper files and handwritten interview notes and will not have a better IT system until 2013. It will also take four years to expand the availability of detention spaces to the 4,000 needed to step up the pace of removals.
The Home Office told the MPs that it was on track to finish working through the backlog of 400,000 to 450,000 cases, some of which date back years. The backlog will finally be cleared by 2011.
Edward Leigh, chairman of the public accounts committee, said: "The process of coming to decisions on whether to grant asylum is still too slow."
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sense that I'm getting used to it, focusing on an array of things, trying to make sure that you're giving enough room for all the players and making sure they feel comfortable on all sides where they're playing on the map. I definitely think that when I first started in the beginning of January to now it's definitely been an improvement, I'm learning new things every day through practice and official games.
One of the things that's just as important overall is that when you're playing an official match, and especially in a LAN environment, I'm not allowed to talk at all times and it's been a focus point for me in making sure that the guys have an understanding that we need to help each other as much as we can. When I call the timeouts, it should just really be some reads of the game and basic stuff if we're missing something. I am really hoping to get to a point where Xizt and Friberg are leading this team on both sides of the map and only needing me for the little things.
How are you enjoying that new experience?
fifflaren: I think it's great! It's fun to be back with all the guys and, like I said, I think hallzerk is just a fantastic fit overall, even in terms of personality. I think he goes along well with all the players, even in terms of humor and what-not. We're having fun playing and I think that's important.
What are your short and long-term goals for the new team?
fifflaren: This is definitely a long-term project. I think that us remaking this team set that one of the most important things is that we don't fall back to the old usual things. We obviously have to reinvent ourselves a little bit, so in the short-term, we obviously want to try and get everything done as quick as possible in the sense of knowing the basics, knowing everything, and just being able to be competitive. And then long-term, we should be even better than that, we shouldn't be doing a lot of mistakes... when we finally qualify and go to these events, we should be getting out of our groups.
Why Dignitas?
fifflaren: I think Dignitas is just a great organization overall. I think that all the changes they've made in the past few years have made them one of the best we have in esports. After being here for a little over two months, I have nothing but good things to say about all the people working in the back-end of Dignitas. I've been talking really well about Michael, the CEO. I think he's absolutely fantastic and all the people that he got around him and work for this team, it's been a great experience so far!
Stay up to date with everything fifflaren and Dignitas related on social media!
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PAYDAY 2: The Classic Heist Challenge
This challenge is intended to test players by limiting their skills and weapons to resemble what was allowed within PAYDAY: The Heist as much as possible. This is essentially a recreation of what Dallas, Hoxton, Chains, and Wolf would have had at their disposal, shortly after descending upon Washington D.C after the No Mercy heist.And for those who desire the ultimate challenge, try conforming to these limitations on DEATH WISH!Each player will choose a character (Dallas, Hoxton, Chains, or Wolf). Each of those characters signified a role in the original game (Assault, Sharpshooter, Support, and Technician) respectively. You will be provided a skill point build that can be used as early as Level 50. You may only use the skill build and the weapons exclusive to your character.All weapons may be modded as desired. A Silenced Bernetti 9 is allowed for all players to use for stealth, if desired. Otherwise, no weapon is allowed to be silent with the exception of the Mark 10. The AMCAR-4 is allowed for Stealth but may only use the Straight Grip and no attachments that decrease Concealment are allowed. Shotgun DLC Ammunition is also forbidden.Weapons: Brenner 21 (primary) and Crosskill.45/Mark 10 (secondary)Deployable: Ammo BagSkill Build: http://www.pd2skills.info/profile/classic-heist-assault/ Weapons: M308 Rifle (primary) and Locomotive 12G Shotgun (secondary)Deployable: Trip MinesSkill Build: http://www.pd2skills.info/profile/classis-heist-sharpshooter/ Weapons: Reinfled 880 Shotgun (primary) and Bronco.44/Compact-5 (secondary)Deployable: Medic BagSkill Build: http://www.pd2skills.info/profile/classic-heist-support/ Weapons: AK.762/Golden AK.762 Rifle (primary) and STRYK 18c Pistol (secondary)Deployable: Sentry TurretSkill Build: http://www.pd2skills.info/profile/classic-heist-technician/ No player can use any other deployable than the one exclusive to their role.No player can use any Armor higher than a Light Ballistic Vest.Domination is not allowed during an Assault Wave.Only the Technician player is allowed to use their Grenades.Assets may not be purchased, but assets obtainable within the heist itself are allowed (i.e. Big Oil and the Keychain for The Big Bank)The Big Bank Rule - Players may choose to use The Beast with the C4 Tunneling Escape or to use Thermite on the Security Area with the default escape. No other Drilling or Escape options can be chosen and no other options can be used in Preplanning. This is to emulate First World Bank as much as possible from the original game.
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Ned watched his youngest brother jog down the step hill. He bounced boulder to boulder and appeared oblivious to the shots being fired or the hundreds of zombies pouring into town. Their plague spread slowly like an overturned barrel of black mud leaking through the streets.
As Ned watched, the girl that Temple had his eye on turned and saw him rushing toward her. She paused uncertain and that was all it took.
“Help me,” Temple shouted. “I’ve been hounded by walkers for days. I had no idea people still lived here.” He drew in closer. “Is there a safe place…” His brother didn’t even bother finishing his sentence. Instead he cold cocked the girl in the jaw so hard that she lost consciousness.
Jonny started to chuckle until bullet shattered the window next to Temple’s face.
Temple gazed in the direction of the gunshots for a moment before crouching over and pulling the girl upright before his body. He walked backward for a moment and then kicked at the door to what appeared to be a tax company. It took him a few tries, but the door burst inward.
He had just started to drag her inside the buildings when grey arms reached out, and almost like they were aiding him, pulled both Temple and the girl through the doorway. Ned had barely been able to absorb what he’d just seen, when he heard Jonny cry out. Ned turned just in time to see his brother spin in a half circle and then drop to the ground.
* * *
The only thing worse than seeing the woman that you secretly love being dragged into a building by a half-mad marauder, would be finding out that the building is also filled with undead.
Why are these buildings filled with zombies when I personally saw to it that the entire town was cleared? Sheriff Dells thought, but when he saw two other men racing downhill toward the building that held Becca, he opened fire on them. He might have dropped the biggest one, but then found himself with new problems.
The zombies had arrived outside of the post office he had held up in. The first one on the scene grabbed the barrel of his rifle and it was all Dells could do to keep it from being pulled out of his hands. He drew back into the building, but cursed when the zombies pushed through the shattered glass and followed him.
More came in after the first ones and he was forced to retreat, but he barely noticed his own safety for it remained Becca’s fate that concerned him the most. As more shots rang out, Dells turned his back on the stumbling zombies and raced toward the back of the post office.
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Check each weekend for another episode in Dells fight to save his town from the Eternal Aftermath
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You can explore more of the Eternal Aftermath here!
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Vancouver International Airport (YVR) has been named the best airport in the world.
The CAPA Centre for Aviation crowned YVR with the prestigious title at the Aviation Awards in Amsterdam on Thursday.
The award is given each year to the airport that has been the “biggest standout strategically, established itself as a leader and done the most to advance the progress of the aviation industry,” according CAPA.
This is the first time YVR has earned the ranking and is the first North American airport to do so. Previous winners are Singapore Changi Airport, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, and Beijing Capital International Airport.
CAPA said Vancouver was selected for its “innovative marketing strategy and approach for incentivising growth.”
The organization also cited Vancouver’s increase in number of routes, technological innovation, and 32 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per passenger over the last decade.
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READ MORE: Latin Americans love Vancouver as YVR passenger numbers seek record year
“Vancouver Airport continues to be an industry leader on several fronts, enabling it to achieve impressive growth,” Peter Harbison, CAPA executive chairman, said.
“The airport also has a unique governance structure with a community-based, not-for-profit airport authority that reinvests all profits back into airport operations and development. Under this structure Vancouver Airport has been able to set and implement a highly successful strategy.”
READ MORE: YVR airport installs restroom for pets
In May, YVR was again named Best Airport in North America for the seventh consecutive year by the Skytrax World Airport Awards.
“This is an incredible achievement and is a testament to YVR’s success and our growing influence on the world stage,” said Craig Richmond, YVR’s president and CEO.
“We have achieved this milestone thanks to our focus on safety, teamwork, accountability and innovation—and our community based, not-for-profit governance model, under which we constantly improve the airport for our passengers, our partners and our communities.”
Among award-winning art and architecture, a stunning west coast-themed international departure area, and almost unanimous customer satisfaction reports (91 per cent), YVR features the largest Northwest Coast Native art collection in the world and two satellite Vancouver Aquarium exhibits.
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READ MORE: Vancouver Airport adding yoga space to domestic terminal
YVR has grown from serving only 1,072 passengers in 1931 to an expected 22 million in 2016. It now serves over 35 airlines from around the world.
Other award-winners at the event included Qatar Airways for CAPA Airline of the Year, Eastern Europe’s Wizz Air was named Low Cost Airline of the Year, and Icelandair was named Regional Airline of the Year.
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Introduction
If you follow me, you know that this year I started a series called Weekly Digest for Data Science and AI: Python & R, where I highlighted the best libraries, repos, packages, and tools that help us be better data scientists for all kinds of tasks.
The great folks at Heartbeat sponsored a lot of these digests, and they asked me to create a list of the best of the best—those libraries that really changed or improved the way we worked this year (and beyond).
If you want to read the past digests, take a look here:
Disclaimer: This list is based on the libraries and packages I reviewed in my personal newsletter. All of them were trending in one way or another among programmers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts. Some of them were created before 2018, but if they were trending, they could be considered.
Top 7 for Python
7. AdaNet — Fast and flexible AutoML with learning guarantees.
AdaNet is a lightweight and scalable TensorFlow AutoML framework for training and deploying adaptive neural networks using the AdaNet algorithm [Cortes et al. ICML 2017]. AdaNet combines several learned subnetworks in order to mitigate the complexity inherent in designing effective neural networks.
This package will help you selecting optimal neural network architectures, implementing an adaptive algorithm for learning a neural architecture as an ensemble of subnetworks.
You will need to know TensorFlow to use the package because it implements a TensorFlow Estimator, but this will help you simplify your machine learning programming by encapsulating training and also evaluation, prediction and export for serving.
You can build an ensemble of neural networks, and the library will help you optimize an objective that balances the trade-offs between the ensemble’s performance on the training set and its ability to generalize to unseen data.
Installation
adanet depends on bug fixes and enhancements not present in TensorFlow releases prior to 1.7. You must install or upgrade your TensorFlow package to at least 1.7:
$ pip install "tensorflow>=1.7.0"
Installing from source
To install from source, you’ll first need to install bazel following their installation instructions.
Next clone adanet and cd into its root directory:
$ git clone https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet && cd adanet
From the adanet root directory run the tests:
$ cd adanet
$ bazel test -c opt //...
Once you have verified that everything works well, install adanet as a pip package.
You’re now ready to experiment with adanet.
import adanet
Usage
Here you can find two examples on the usage of the package:
You can read more about it in the original blog post:
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This is a photo of the main suspect who tried to ram cyclists with a stolen car - wearing false plates - during rush hour in Clapham.
It has been released by Scotland Yard detectives who have named him as Shane Seymour.
Footage shows the black Audi almost hitting several cyclists with the driver also shouting at other motorists and even throwing missiles at them.
Dave Clifton, 50, was nearly struck by the driver at roughly 8am last Wednesday.
In the footage captured by Mr Clifton, an IT consultant, the video starts with the driver yelling while stopped at traffic near Clapham North station.
(Image: Metropolitan Police) (Image: Youtube)
The driver then swerves into a bus lane and nearly strikes the cyclist for the first time.
He stops at a further set of lights and the driver repeatedly throws debris from his car at the cyclist while continuing to shout swear words.
The Audi takes a left onto a side street where a witness said he nearly hit another cyclist, according to police.
A large group of bikers stop and the driver turns around, mounts the pavement and drives towards them.
A police officer in an unmarked car turns up to cheers, but the driver reverses down Dorset Road at speed.
(Image: Youtube) (Image: Youtube) (Image: Youtube)
Mr Clifton told MailOnline: "'It's worrying having drivers on the road like that, certainly.
"It's all just really bizarre. I don't know if he's just having a bad morning or what. He seems to be picking on everybody."
Detective Constable James Preston from Brixton CID, said: "We have been working hard to investigate this incident since first becoming aware of it - and now have an image of our main suspect.
"Today we are naming this man as Shane Seymour. He is known to have links to South London and the Canterbury area.
(Image: Youtube) (Image: Youtube)
"Have you seen him, or do you know where he is? Please contact us or Crimestoppers if so as we urgently need to speak to him in relation to this matter. If any members of the public spot him, do not approach him but call 999 straight away.
"It is only a matter of luck that no-one was seriously injured or even killed by this reckless driver. The sooner we can apprehend him, the better.
"We’d also still like to hear from anyone who witnessed this first-hand who have not yet come forward. Anything you may be able to remember and tell us could really help this investigation.
"I would like to thank the public in advance for their help with our enquiries."
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EV Camper Rendering Based On UK Delivery Truck Previews Future Vanlife
It's hip to be square.
Electric vehicles aren’t coming. They are already here, and it’s just a matter of time before the EV revolution enters the expansive realm of motorhomes. We already previewed such a creation from Vanlifer.com, a camper conversion company with roots both in the UK and New Zealand. The Tesla Semihome concept was large and in-charge, but now, Vanlifer designer Jason Hablous has something a bit more modest in mind. Say hello to the Arrival Electric Van Camper Concept from Vanlifer.
Gallery: Arrival Electric RV By Vanlifer
1 /2 Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer Arrival EV Camper Concept By Vanlifer
This square shape might be familiar to Motor1.com readers across the pond. EV automaker Arrival has a small fleet of these boxy “lightweight composite vehicles” serving with both UPS and Royal Mail in and around London. Vanlifer saw something more than just cargo capacity in these runabouts, and set about designing a small-yet-roomy EV camper from its rectangular design.
The compact camper is only a preliminary design at this point, so details on interior accommodations aren’t available. With no engine, fuel tank, or other components associated with internal combustion, the Arrival already has impressive space inside compared to standard vans of similar size. A pop-up roof not unlike a certain famous rectangular-shaped campervan from Volkswagen further adds to the space, and a pair of side windows break up the slab sides we see in the delivery version. Range for the Arrival is currently 150 miles, so this wouldn’t be a cross-country tourer per se. Rather, it could be an ideal weekend adventurer for those seeking a quick getaway.
There’s a reason this Vanlifer design is just a rendering at this point. Arrival is still in the concept stage with its delivery vehicles, with UPS and Royal Mail using these vans in a type of real-world beta test. However, we are absolutely in love with the idea of EV campers – the extra interior space with no thirsty engine sucking petrol by the tankerload will be tremendous benefits when such vehicles hit the market. And with companies like Vanlifter already working on designs, we suspect that day is just around the corner.
Check out unique & lightly used cars for sale Sell anything (free), get featured here
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Green Fire Forex Strategy
The Green Fire Strategy has been developed based on 5 indicators
MA in Color_wAppliedPrice Heiken_Ashi_Smoothed1lime time to next bar TrendLord Woodie_CCI_Adv.1.0
A template has been included as well.
After you install these indicators as well as add template, the chart will appear as the one you can see above.
Now, this strategy will enable you to witness amazing results in the trend market. You will simply have to abide by certain easy rules- detect whether the market has been trending or it is just noisy.
Guide to check market readiness to start trading
The most crucial thing to do here is to read & check the charts. It will enable you to gather a concrete idea on whether or not the market is actually conducive for trading. You require a clean trend here on charts and there must be very little ups & downs trends. Movement ought to be say from around 30-70 pips. And these movements should be clear, sans huge candles or noise.
The example that you can see above denotes excellent market condition which means it is highly conducive for trading.
But if you witness a market condition same as the chart you see below, do not trade.
After you find a market condition as you see with the image above, there’s hardly any scope to make the pips. Your only task here is to wait for a better condition. If you find a noisy market, don’t proceed to trade.
How to apply Green Fire Strategy in trading?
Before entering a trade, check out the current affairs of the market. You get 3 kinds of market for trading here- bearish, bullish & sideway trend.
Bearish trend
If you find a bearish market trend, you will only enter the sell trades, especially when you see white after green.
See the image above, I have already marked the entry points (1,2 3). Proceed with sell trades when you see white candles after the green ones.
Point to be noted: Never close trade or enter trade till the candle comes close to you. It’s to note here current candles may change colors at times. So, don’t proceed before a candle is near to you.
Sideway trend
If you find a market trend such as this on above, you may enter any kind of trend reversal. You will be able to enter trade after the candle closes in a different shade.
However, I will suggest you to trade specifically in bullish and bearish markets, especially if you’re a beginner.
In case you have any queries about the strategy, post your comments below. I promise to offer the best help possible.
Questions about this strategy? Ask our community
Related Article: Make money with Forex robots
Download Green Fire Strategy indicators with template
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TBS’s Full Frontal With Samantha Bee mocked a CPAC attendee for having “Nazi hair” in a Wednesday segment, but according to his friends and family, his hair looks that way because he’s undergoing treatment for brain cancer.
“This year, the bow ties were gone, replaced by Nazi hair, Nazi hair, Nazi hair…” correspondent Michael Rubens narrated, while showing images of young attendees with partially shaved heads, “and CPAC was decidedly Trump country.” (The YouTube video of the segment has since been deleted.)
The sister of one of the men, Kyle Coddington, cried foul on Twitter.
When @iamsambee makes fun of your brother for having “Nazi hair.” He actually has stage 4 brain cancer, but whatever floats your boat. pic.twitter.com/ULJC8nA3IX — Megan Coddington (@meg_kelly16) March 9, 2017
Coddington’s GoFundMe page for his medical expenses notes that he is undergoing radiation and chemo therapy. “It seems that I have stage 4 glioblastoma. It’s a very aggressive type of brain cancer. Currently, there is no cure, but there is a chance,” he writes.
Heat Street’s Kyle Foley also drew attention to the segment, and produced texts from a friend of Coddington’s indicating that he had just finished his first round of chemo before CPAC.
Hi @iamsambee. Guy w/”Nazi hair” has cancer and is going through chemo, that’s why his hair looks like that. You need to apologize for this. pic.twitter.com/mqbgNYHyaN — Kyle Foley (@KFoleyFL) March 9, 2017
For comparison, here’s a Facebook profile picture of Kyle posted a few weeks earlier.
Another man identified as having so-called “Nazi hair” — John-Pierre Maeli — happens to be a Never Trump conservative and editor at Refined Right. “Response to Samantha Bee: It’s Called Fashion,” he snarked.
Watch above, via TBS.
UPDATE — 4:10pm Full Frontal with Samantha Bee has made a donation to Coddington’s GoFundMe page.
UPDATE — Full Frontal has apologized to Coddington:
We deeply apologize for offending @_that_kyle in our CPAC segment. We only learned of his condition today & have removed him from the piece. — Full Frontal (@FullFrontalSamB) March 9, 2017
[image via screengrab]
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>>Follow Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) on Twitter
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American actress and #MeToo advocate Alyssa Milano is facing a wave of backlash for continuing to push her support of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden without addressing the accusations of sexual assault leveled against him by Tara Reade. On Thursday, Milano maintained her silence and instead posted a Twitter thread in which she doubled down on her demand for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to drop out of the race and let the former vice president take on Donald Trump in 2020.
“Sooooo…..a long thread with nothing on the claims of sexual assault against Biden?” one user wrote in response.
Others pointed to Milano’s past comments on sexual assault and the importance of believing survivors.
“You can’t pretend to be the party of the American people and then not support a woman who comes forward with her #MeToo story,” she previously remarked.
Although Milano told Sanders’ supporters that they could not “silence” her, some suggested Milano was trying to silence the allegations against Biden.
“Here’s the story @Alyssa_Milano doesn’t want you to see,” one user wrote, pointing to Reade’s claim that Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 while working for the former vice president’s U.S. Senate office.
Others supported Milano and her decision to back Biden, as well as her remarks about the Vermont senator’s supporters.
“All of these comments, this is why I must support Biden,” said another commenter. “Many of Bernie’s supporters are just toxic and mean.”
As reported by The Hill, Milano acted as co-host of a Biden fundraiser back in November at the home of Lanette Phillips and Rick Lynch in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. According to the publication, tickets were $500 for standard admission and $2,800 for entry along with a photo with Biden.
“I am proud to call Joe Biden a friend,” Milano tweeted at the time, before calling Biden a “leader” and “champion on fighting violence against women.”
Milano also said she had accompanied the former vice president to events with survivors, where he offered them empathy and comfort.
Reade recently opened up about the alleged assault on the podcast of Rolling Stone journalist Katie Halper. She has also pointed to other occasions during her time on Biden’s staff when he allegedly touched her inappropriately.
Neither Biden nor Milano have publicly addressed Reade’s recent accusation. In addition, Reade was unable to secure the help of Time’s Up, a #MeToo advocacy group with alleged links to a top Biden adviser. The group reportedly refused to publicize Reade’s claims and allegedly pointed to Biden’s presidential run and its nonprofit status as reasons for its decision.
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Democrats’ pledge to reject corporate-PAC money is mostly symbolic.
Now, four years later, as the 76-year-old Sanders positions himself toward a second run for president, it’s Warren who again looms largest over his designs. At a January strategy meeting at the Washington, D.C., apartment of the aide Ari Rabin-Havt, Sanders acknowledged to confidantes in the room that the biggest threat to his pursuit of the 2020 nomination would be the 69-year-old former Harvard Law professor, according to a person familiar with the discussion.
As the two most recognizable faces of the progressive movement, Sanders and Warren are natural allies on a host of liberal causes, none more so than the economic inequalities that strain the nation. And yet each side’s camp believes that when it comes to the next presidential contest, the Democratic primary is only big enough for one of them.
Advisers to both senators tell me they strongly doubt the two ideological allies would run against each other, given their genuine mutual fondness and the sober realization that their support bases vastly overlap. To do so would likely mean mutually assured destruction.
So which one goes? And how will they decide?
The ultimate resolution of this progressive predicament will be one of the most crucial factors in the fast-approaching battle on the left to topple President Donald Trump. The gathering threat of Sanders and Warren doesn’t seem lost on the president. In an echo of his approach to his competitors in 2016, he’s rebranded them with the disparaging monikers “Crazy Bernie” and “Pocahontas.” Recently, Trump has openly fantasized about debating Warren and presenting her with a genetic-testing kit to prove her claimed Native American heritage.
At the same time, allies of Warren and Sanders are beginning to privately pick apart their would-be competitor’s political pedigree, casting their favorite as the far superior choice to go up against the president. At this early stage of the race, their comments could be seen as mere posturing. But they are nevertheless revealing, exposing fault lines between the two lawmakers that could soon spill into public view.
Sanders advisers and allies believe he’s earned the right of first refusal: He was the runner-up to Clinton, galvanized a fresh flock of young voters, and fundamentally reframed the issue matrix for a hyper-progressive party going forward. He would start with a leg up: a nationally tested organization with the hardened experience of one presidential run already under its belt, an email list of 7 million proven donors, and the ability to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. (Tim Tagaris, Sanders’s digital–fund-raising guru, has privately floated a range of between $275 million and $300 million for a primary campaign, one aide recalls.) A common refrain bandied about in Bernieland is that Sanders won at least 40 percent of the primary vote in 37 states.
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Not long ago, computer science was considered a specialized field for a niche industry. Today, things have changed. As technology continues to grow, it has become more necessary for employees to hone computer skills in nearly all industries. This growing demand has experts like Professor Eric Roberts warning of a looming “capacity crisis” in higher education.
With more than 30 years of experience leading computer science in higher education, Professor Roberts most recently served as a faculty member at Stanford University and associate chair and director of undergraduate studies for computer science. Today he is the Charles Simonyi professor emeritus of computer science and a Bass University fellow in undergraduate education. He has also received many accolades for his research and work in computer science, most recently earning the SIGCSE Award for Lifetime Service to the Computer Science Education Community. As a leading expert in computer science education, he will be speaking at the annual SIGCSE Technical Symposium to present his insights on the field’s most critical challenges and opportunities that we should be paying attention to.
Ask Professor Roberts, and he’s clear: The most critical challenge facing computer science education today is a “capacity crisis.” In other words, there simply are not enough faculty to keep up with the rise in students. In fact, a report he authored notes, “Unlike the situation in conventional academic disciplines, the number of open faculty positions in computer science exceeds the number of candidates by about a factor of five.”
That growing number of computer science students can be linked with increased job opportunities that require or benefit from computer science training. “One of the issues is that there are no computer science faculty to hire,” Roberts says. “Almost every university is trying to hire.” He goes on to point out that most computer science students transition directly from graduate school to an industry job, as opposed to a teaching position, because of the stark contrast in employment incentives and opportunities.
Beyond simply falling short of demand, Roberts asserts that this limited supply in computer science teachers will also likely influence diversity of educators who are practicing in the higher education field. For example, Professor Roberts notes that at Stanford University, 2 percent of the faculty (computer science educators) are teaching 20 percent of the majors. “I believe that despite the enormous demand of computer science, the number of computer science graduates will fall in the next 20 years as restrictions will go up.”
While the capacity crisis poses a significant challenge to the field, Professor Roberts also notes that there are opportunities to make change. Since computer science educators are in extremely high demand, they now have the opportunity to leverage that power when it comes to decision-making. “New teachers have enormous power because of labor scarcity. Their jobs are secure because if there’s anyone else to replace them, universities would have done that,” he says. “People who are teaching have to make their needs known. They need to raise these issues of diversity and leverage their power.”
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drops', then because of the angle, slightly more of the span of the wing is exposed to free-stream flow, this generates slightly more lift, correcting the drop. Again, it's like a pendulum.
Righting Arms
Here's a diagram of a boat heeling in water. As it leans, on one side of the ship, a section of boat that was under the water line is now OUT of the water, and a corresponding section on the other side is now IN the water.
From this, it's clear to see that the center of buoyancy will shift towards the IN side. There is now more water displaced on this side of the boat. Just as we saw with the square section of the bar, this creates a righting arm, and the corresponding moment helps stablize the ship and push it upright again.
Improve Stability
As we've seen from above, there's a couple of ways to makes boats more stable:
We can lower the center of gravity. This is very popular with sailing yachts. A heavy mass (ballast) attached to the hull deep under water (this is especially important as sailing yachts tend to have tall masts) keeps the center of gravity very low. A negative consequence of this technique is that the draft (distance between the water line and the bottom of the keel) can be quite large. This restricts the boat, and it can't operate in shallow water.
Making the boat flatter means that when it heels, the center of buoyancy moves a long way out creating a large righting arm making the torque to push the boat back vertical stronger.
Even more so than flattening the boat hull, you can employ floating outriggers to push the righting arm out further. This is the reason that catarmarans, and trimarans (multi-hulled boats) as so stable.
You can shift the center of gravity. Sailers are very familiar with leaning out to prevent boats rolling over.
Metacenter
Ship designers pay careful attention to something called a metacenter (and the corresponding metacenter height). The metacenter is the point of intersection between a vertical line through the center of buoyancy of a floating body such as a ship and a vertical line through the new center of buoyancy when the body is tilted. It needs to above the center of gravity to ensure stability. For small angles, the metacenter does not move much, and acts a little like the pivot point of a pendulum with the boat rocks under. Adjusting the height, in addition to providing safety and stability is a trade-off between making the boat'stiff', or 'tender'. This affects the ride of the boat (important for passengers and cargo), and what accelerations and forces act of it in rouger waters.
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hip, Democrats said the administration has made close to zero effort to involve them in tax reform talks, on both the leadership and committee levels.
Trump’s principles also did not include investments in infrastructure, which had been considered a possibility to woo Democrats.
“This plan is just tax reform,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at an event at the Newseum Wednesday when asked if infrastructure spending could also be included as a way of courting Democrats. The proposal does call for a childcare tax credit that could interest some Democrats.
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Mnuchin also told reporters Wednesday that Trump's tax plan included a potential rollback of the popular deduction for state and local income taxes. That move would be a non-starter with most northeastern lawmakers in both parties, whose constituents benefit heavily from the deduction.
Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said that the administration had made no outreach to his fellow party members, and wondered aloud whether Trump was even on the same page as congressional Republicans.
“Are we for the border adjustment tax, are we for the president’s plan? It’s not very clear,” Neal told POLITICO, referring to the vagueness of Trump’s proposal. “Has the border adjustment tax succumbed? We need to know.”
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) echoed Neal’s sentiment. “All I know is what I read in the papers,” he said, adding dryly that “obviously, we are not a deficit-conscious Congress.”
The concern over the deficit is not only an issue for fiscal hawks. Republicans are likely to use a complex procedure known as budget reconciliation to circumvent a Democratic filibuster in the Senate and allow passage of tax legislation with a simple majority rather than 60 votes.
But under Senate rules, reconciliation can only be used if the bill will not add to the deficit after a decade. Non-partisan estimates say that even a two or three year temporary cut to the corporate tax rate would add to the deficit in the long run. That’s why House Republicans included major revenue-raisers like the border adjustment tax and a phase-out of a deduction businesses can take for the interest they pay on debt. Both combined would raise trillions over ten years, offsetting the rate cuts.
When pressed by reporters for more details on how to pay for the president’s goals Wednesday, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said simply, “We’ll get back to you with definitive answers on all these details.”
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A preliminary ruling by Kenyan High Court shows that the process started by BitPesa against Safaricom is to continue. Kenyan Central Bank warns against bitcoin. However, the leader of BitPesa is optimistic.
Safaricom is not obliged to restore BitPesa’s access to its famous mobile money system, M-Pesa, before the end of the process. This is a part of the preliminary ruling by the High Court judge Joseph Onguto. It also declared that some aspects of BitPesa’s activity may be considered as “money remittance”, making their regulation necessary under Kenyan laws.
The process was started by BitPesa together with the payments intermediary company Lipisha against Safaricom for freezing their accounts on 12 November. According to Safaricom, BitPesa does not meet anti-money laundering requirements necessary for a remittance company and needs to get a licence from the Central Bank of Kenya before its access to M-Pesa would be restored.
Meanwhile, the Central Bank of Kenya issued a public notice warning about the dangers of “virtual currencies such as bitcoin.” The notice is published in daily newspapers as a paid advertisement, meaning that the Central Bank is eager to spend money on attracting people’s attention to the perils of bitcoin. It especially targets such services as remittances:
“Domestic and international money transfer services in Kenya are regulated by the Central Bank of Kenya Act and other legislation. In this regard, no entity is currently licensed to offer money remittance services and products in Kenya using virtual currency such as bitcoin.”
However, BitPesa looks optimistic. They expressed their satisfaction “with the High Court's ruling, which permits BitPesa to continue to fight Safaricom's wrongful and unlawful bullying.” In their eyes, “the Court has not dismissed BitPesa's case, but rather has ruled only that BitPesa is strong enough as a company that it does not require access to M-Pesa to survive during the course of the case.” The company announced its integration with Airtel Money, another Kenyan mobile money start-up, and declared it looks forward to “expand across Africa” and “being fully vindicated by the court proceedings.” According to a blog post by Elizabeth Rossiello, CEO of BitPesa, Safaricom tries to stop the innovation because it feels it will be pushed away by the tide of progress.
BitPesa (“pesa” means “money” in Swahili) is perhaps the most well-known African bitcoin start-up. It runs a bitcoin-powered remittance service instantly delivering money to African mobile phone accounts. Most customers of the company use its services for business needs such as salaries, suppliers or operations. Since September it also runs a 24/7 bitcoin trade platform.
Alexey Tereshchenko
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Conservative viewers looking for a reason to tune in to the second round of the Democratic presidential primary debates might have just gotten one, compliments of President Donald Trump.
And it’s not the kind of reason the Democratic National Committee wants to talk about.
According to The Hill, Trump’s campaign plans to air an advertisement during the Democratic debates Tuesday and Wednesday that’s aimed at highlighting just how far to the left the party is running heading into the 2020 election.
Using footage from last month’s debates in Miami, it makes the point perfectly:
TRENDING: Pelosi Makes No Sense: Trump 'Is Trying To Have the Constitution of the United States Swallow Clorox'
The pivotal scene comes from the second night of the first round of debates, when candidates on the stage were asked if they supported giving taxpayer-funded health care to illegal aliens.
To a man — and woman — the candidates raised their hands to say yes.
“They’re all the same,” the ad’s narrator intones.
The Democrats running for president might present a clown car of different faces and bodies, but in their beliefs when it comes to handling the immigration crisis, they are all the same.
And when it comes to having taxpayers foot the bill for the health care needs of every Central and South American who can make it across the southern border — with families or alleged families in tow — those beliefs are at odds with those of the majority of American voters.
A CNN poll released July 1 showed a substantial 59 percent of those polled were against government-provided health insurance for “undocumented immigrants living in the United States.”
(It was 59 percent with the euphemism “undocumented immigrants.” If CNN had asked about “illegal aliens,” it likely would have been even higher.)
Judging by the reaction on social media, the Trump ad is already a hit.
BOOM! Excellent truth AD! — faithm (@flm22) July 30, 2019
RELATED: Pelosi Claims Police 'Murdered' Breonna Taylor, Laments That No One Held Accountable
Don’t forget irresponsible and deluded. — Russell L Roth (@RussellLRoth1) July 30, 2019
Lol 😂 I love it! The Dems have given so much material for political ads. Can’t wait to see more!!!! — TrumpMaga2020 (@trumpmaga2017) July 30, 2019
The mainstream media might do its best to pump up the Democrats, but this Trump ad is going to put a critical issue foursquare in front of the voters – and at a time when millions are going to be watching.
If you needed a reason to be one of them, Trump’s ad just might be it.
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
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Ahead of the launch of macOS Catalina, which Apple says will "soon be available," Apple is asking developers to submit Mac apps compatible with Catalina to the Mac App Store.
Apple encourages developers to take advantage of macOS Catalina technologies like Sign in with Apple, Sidecar, Core ML 3, and Metal. Apple also highlights Mac Catalyst, designed to bring iPad apps to the Mac.
macOS Catalina will soon be available to hundreds of millions of users around the world. With macOS Catalina, your Mac apps can take advantage of Sign in with Apple, Sidecar, and the latest advances in Core ML 3, and Metal. And with Mac Catalyst, you can bring your iPad apps to Mac. Build your apps using Xcode 11, test them on a Mac computer running the macOS Catalina GM seed, and submit them for review.
Separately, for apps that are designed to be distributed outside of the Mac App Store, Apple has reminded developers of a new notarization requirement.
Apple is requiring apps that are distributed outside of the Mac App Store to be notarized by Apple to run on macOS Catalina. First introduced in macOS Mojave, the notarization process is aimed at protecting Mac users from malicious and harmful apps.
To further protect users on macOS Catalina, we're working with developers to make sure all software, whether distributed on the App Store or outside of it, is signed or notarized by Apple. This will give users more confidence that the software they download and run, no matter where they get it from, has been checked for known security issues. In June, we announced that all Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple in order to run by default on macOS Catalina. Make sure to test all versions of your software on the macOS Catalina GM seed and submit it to Apple to be notarized.
For notarization, Apple offers trusted non Mac App Store developers Developer IDs that are required to allow the Gatekeeper function on macOS to install non Mac App Store apps.
Notarization is not required for apps that are distributed through the Mac App Store, and Apple recently relaxed its notarization rules, giving developers until January 2020 to comply.
Apple today released the golden master version of macOS Catalina to developers, which represents the final version of the software that will be provided to the public.
It's still not known when macOS Catalina will launch, but it could be as early as tomorrow based on previously leaked info from Apple's Danish site.
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A large inventory write-off for OrganiGram (OrganiGram Stock Quote, Chart, News: TSXV:OGI) is shaking GMP Securities analyst Martin Landry’s faith in the long term viability of the cannabis player.
On Friday, OrganiGram reported its Q3, 2017 results. The company lost $2.34-million on revenue of $1.92-million, a 6.1 per cent increase over the $1.81-million the company posted in the same period a year prior.
“Our No. 1 priority in Q3 was ensuring that product quality and safety remain a stated objective of Organigram,” said CEO Greg Engel. “Through the implementation of a Tier 1 quality assurance program and improved production techniques, the company will ensure that only the finest-quality product is sold to clients of Organigram. We are confident that these actions result in Organigram being well poised for future success. Our facility is among the best across Canada; and with our geographical-based cost advantages and improved product quality, I am very optimistic about the ability of the company to maximize stakeholder value going forward.”
Landry notes that although OrganiGram’s revenue fell below his expectation of $2.6-million, primarily due to non-recurring inventory write-off which reduced product availability during the quarter. Long term, however, the analyst isn’t worried about the company’s ability to deliver superior results.
“We view the Q3 production issues which lead to the inventory write-off as transitory in nature as the company streamlined its genetics to filter out low quality strains which were problematic,” Landry says. “With a stabilized, high-quality product line which could garner higher pricing, combined with continuing good brand recognition (patient count up 25% QoQ in Q3), we hope the likelihood of future crop failures has been reduced. OGI had solid 36% QoQ growth for oil in Q3 pointing to good consumer traction for these products. This combined with the large capacity of OGI’s new industrial extraction equipment (operational in August) could eventually translate into margin improvement. Lastly, while not overly concerning, we note OGI slightly delayed the expected completion date for its Phase II expansion to the end of December 2017 from October previously.”
In a research update to clients today, Landry maintained his “Buy” rating and one-year price target of $4.00 on OrganiGram, implying a return of 65.3 per cent at the time of publication.
Landry thinks OrganiGram will generate EBITDA of negative $600,000 on revenue of $8.9-million in fiscal 2017. He expects those numbers will improve to EBITDA of positive $10.7-million on a topline of $36.8-million the following year.
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Survey by site read mostly by right-leaning members suggests larger majority in support than in 2015 or 2016
Jeremy Corbyn meeting supporters
Analysis
A new poll of almost ten thousand readers and members published by LabourList has surveyed the opinion of Labour members and a wider selection of its readers for their opinion on whether there should be new leadership and deputy leadership elections in the party.
A clear majority of both members and readers said they did not believe there should be a new election for Corbyn’s position. Among readers, 59.4% opposed a new contest – but it’s among members that the number is most interesting.
63.3% of members opposed a new election:
Corbyn’s original leadership victory in saw him take 59.5% of the of the overall vote – but among members, 49.6%, with higher support among union affiliates pushing up the overall result.
In the 2016 contest against Owen Smith, Corbyn polled 61.8% overall – and 59% among members.
With the turmoil of Brexit and Corbyn’s attempt to bring the country together, some MPs and commentators trying to push Labour to side only with remainers by committing to a new referendum or annulling Article 50 have claimed that support for Corbyn among the party’s membership has been dwindling.
But the LabourList result suggests support for Corbyn has in fact risen, in spite of the constant media barrage and the efforts of the party’s right to undermine him and commandeer Labour’s direction.
The poll, however, did not reflect so kindly on deputy leader Tom Watson. A similarly large majority of Labour members – 63.1% – do want a contest to replace him.
Both of these results need to be interpreted in the context of LabourList’s positioning, which means that its readers tend to lean right in Labour terms. If the survey’s results are skewed, it’s likely that they understate Corbyn’s support.
SKWAWKBOX view:
In spite of the best efforts of Corbyn’s opponents to exploit the Brexit issue to drive a wedge between Labour members and the party’s leader – and the panic of a small number of left-wing remain MPs – the solidarity of the left does not simply appear undiminished.
It has grown.
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NEWARK -- About 1,000 runners will take to the streets Wednesday for a 5-kilometer race that serves as a fundraiser for fighting substance abuse.
The annual Integrity House Newark Corporate Run draws company teams to a race that is a rarity in New Jersey, in that it happens during the middle of the workday.
A staple in Newark for at least a quarter-century, the race will start at 12:15 p.m. on James Street, by Washington Park.
It will impact traffic flow in Newark, with sections of four roads along the 3.1-mile course closing to traffic starting at about 11:30 a.m., Newark Police Capt. Derek Green said.
The race is expected to raise at least $20,000 for Integrity House, a provider of addiction treatment and related programs. The house hosted a visit in 2015 from then-President Barack Obama.
About 10 companies have signed up employees to run, said Lauren Drew, special events manager for Integrity House.
Prudential is sending up to 500, nearly half the anticipated race field. A standout on the Prudential team is database administrator Ruscel Kirkland, who ran a 6-minute mile pace in 2016 and finished in fifth place.
Kirkland said support from spectators intensifies in the second half of the race.
"The crowd gets louder. It kind of ramps people up," Kirkland said.
The Newark Police Department announced on Tuesday afternoon the following road closures for the race:
University Avenue between Orange Street and Washington Street
Washington Street between Lincoln Park and Washington Park
Clinton Avenue between Martin Luther King Blvd and Lincoln Park
Additionally, southbound traffic on Broad Street will use one lane between Chestnut Street and Lincoln Park.
Roads are expected to reopen within about 30 minutes of the race's conclusion, Glenn said.
While team registration is closed, race-day registration for individuals, priced at $30, is available starting at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Integrity House President and CEO Robert J. Budsock will be cheering on the runners.
He said the race "provides an opportunity to bring the community together while raising awareness for substance use disorder."
"At Integrity House, we provide individualized treatment and comprehensive care to those battling the disease. Funds raised from this event allow us to continue to do so for the 3,000 clients we serve annually," Budsock said.
PSEG is sending more than 100 employee runners.
Ellen Lambert, president of the PSEG Foundation, said, "Not only is this a wonderful opportunity for our employees to get together, but it also reinforces our commitment to Newark."
For more information, visit https://integrityhouse.org
Rob Jennings may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @RobJenningsNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook
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If six years of driving in Los Angeles has taught me one thing, it’s that everyone here drives drunk constantly. The city’s sprawling layout and sheer size makes regularly cabbing financially impractical and our public transportation blows. Driving under the influence is a blasé part of LA culture. You get good at it. Only celebrities are stupid enough to get caught.So it’s easy to forget how the real world functions sometimes. Case in point – I’d been in Minnesota for less than 24 hours last summer while visiting my parents when I got pinched for boozin’n’cruisin.' I spent 36 hours staring at a jail cell wall (the Christian bible my only reading material option), my dad’s license plates got yanked and shredded, my driver’s license got clipped, I was fined $1000 and I had to wear one of those Lindsay Lohan alcohol-sensing anklets for two weeks for some nonsensical reason. It was a shameful and obnoxious ordeal. Though I do finally have an answer to the eternal question, “Can I ever be bored enough to read the Bible?” Apparently not. Some might have emerged from this experience a better person, realizing they had no one to blame but themselves. But I know better. It’s LA’s fault.
See, despite the bevy of alcoholic degenerates that comprise my friend base, I only know two people who have gotten DUIs in LA. One ran into seven parked cars – SEVEN – and got apprehended while attempting to push his destroyed vehicle into a “hiding place.” The other led the police on a 30-minute chase up towards Six Flags, none of which he can recall because he was so colossally shitfaced. Me? I got pulled over in MN cause I accidentally had my fog lights on. To put it simply - LA has conditioned me into thinking you need to be tossing flaming babies out your window to get pulled over. Unfortunately the po-po in cities without notorious cop shortages have nothing better to do at 2am then pull your ass over. Fortunately the solution here is obvious: Los Angelenos need special licenses that allow us the same drunk driving privileges elsewhere in America that we experience here. I’m not saying drunk driving isn’t dangerous. It is. But we let old people, complete idiots, teenage girls, and even people with no legs behind the wheel. I fail to see the difference.
Of course drunk driving is a privilege, not a right. You gotta prove yourself. There’ll be a section on your license exam where you’ll pound shots, then perform a variety of aptitude tests – backing up, headlights activation, red-light awareness, lane fidelity, Taco Bell drive-thru etiquette – and then you’ll receive a grade indicating your proficiency up to a certain blood-alcohol level. If anything, I will be remembered as a hero for alcoholics rights.
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August 07, 2014 11:21 IST
The Tamil Nadu police have nabbed four men from the terror outfit for the murder of Hindu Munnani leader Suresh Kumar. Their confessions disclose their deadly agenda, reports Vicky Nanjappa/Rediff.com.
In what is considered a breakthrough in the sensational murder of Hindu Munnani leader Suresh Kumar, the Tamil Nadu police have arrested four men said to be part of the deadly Al Ummah terror outfit.
The police arrested the four men from Bangalore, who were later identified as Mohammad Shammiullah, Mohammad Sadiq, Abdul Shameem and Nawaz. Shammiullah, who is based in Bangalore, is accused of sheltering the other three who are alleged to be directly involved in the murder of Suresh Kumar, which took place on June 18, 2014.
Bangalore’s Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) Hemanth Nimbalkar informed that the three had fled Tamil Nadu and sought refuge in Bangalore. “Shamiullah then provided them with painting jobs,” said Nimbalkar.
Currently in the custody of the Tamil Nadu police, the four have revealed to interrogators that the murder was part of their agenda of eradicating leaders of the Hindu Munnani, which the terror outfit considers a threat to Islam.
On June 18, Kumar, secretary of the Hindu Munnani's Tiruvallur district unit, had stepped outside his store when he was hacked to death by a gang. The police had then claimed that the murder had been perpetrated by Al Ummah operatives because of a hate speech that Kumar had delivered a few months earlier.
The Al Ummah, a deadly terror outfit banned by the Tamil Nadu government, has several strong pockets in Tamil Nadu, especially in Salem. Their aim is to radicalise Muslim youth and create a communal divide between Hindus and Muslims. Its biggest operation came in the form of the 1998 Coimbatore blasts in which over 50 persons were killed.
While the group is originally based in Tamil Nadu, over the past two years they have been setting up a base in Karnataka as well. Police and Intelligence Bureau officials say the blast outside the Bharatiya Janata Party office in Bangalore in April 2013 was a signal from the Al Ummah of their presence in the state.
Further proof of them expanding their operations in Karnataka was this year’s Chennai train blasts, which claimed the life of one and injured 12 others.
According to an IB report, the outfit has around 50 members today. The report also draws out the group’s intent and that assassination of Hindu leaders tops their agenda. They also carry out blasts to boost recruitments, the report further states.
Image (from right to left): Mohammad Shammiullah, Abdul Shameem and Mohammad Sadiq, three of the four Al Ummah operatives who have been arrested by the Tamil Nadu police.
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The 12 boys rescued from a cave in Thailand are reported to be feeling better Thursday morning. The boys and their soccer coach have been hospitalized since their 18-day ordeal ended earlier this week and are expected to spend at least a week at the hospital, followed by 30 days at home.
The British divers who found the boys also had a helper inside the cave: A student who was able to take a leadership role by translating for them. Staff at his school told CBS News' Anna Werner, that's not surprising. He's a boy who has already faced significant challenges in his life and overcome them.
Teacher Kru Nice says 14-year-old Adun Sam-On has always been a leader, despite the fact he doesn't have his parents with him or even an official home. Since Adun's parents slipped him out of Myanmar eight years ago to escape the ethnic conflicts there, he's become one of many students at this school considered "stateless." He's not a citizen of any country. Yet in Thailand, Adun is a top student and a standout athlete.
Kru told us she was so worried when she learned Adun was trapped in the cave. But Adun's proficiency in languages – he speaks four – proved key inside the cave, as he acted as translator for the British divers during the complicated rescue.
They were given anti-anxiety medication to keep them calm. In some portions of the journey, the boys were put into harnesses lying down. Rescuers used a rope system and high lines to pull them through the caverns.
Before they were found, a family member told CBS News the boys worked together to survive for nine days in the cave. When the boys entered the cave they each had a flashlight along with one watch and one mobile phone with light until the batteries died. They were able to check a watch for the time for the first three days. They slept close together for warmth and took turns digging in the cave to try and redirect the water that had trapped them.
Now, the boys are in the hospital where new video shows them sitting up in their beds, their relieved parents watching them through a window. It's the result Adun's teacher has been waiting for.
"He's a miracle boy," she told us. "I'm so happy he's safe."
CBS News has learned all of the boys want to become monks for a short period of time after they are released from the hospital. Sources also told us the boys have been asking about their cleats and when they can get back on the soccer field.
Thai Airways is providing round-trip tickets and an all-expenses-paid weeklong trip for all of the international volunteers who worked on this rescue. The tourism authority is also giving them all a five-year visa. Thai officials said they plan to create an interactive museum at the cave that will feature items such as the clothing worn by rescuers. But for now, the cave is closed.
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Lalu Prasad Yadav is currently serving a jail term in Ranchi in the fodder scam case. Lalu Prasad Yadav is currently serving a jail term in Ranchi in the fodder scam case.
The Supreme Court Wednesday dismissed the bail plea of RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav in multi-crore fodder scam cases. A bench headed by Chief Justice of India Rajan Gogoi rejected Yadav’s arguments that he has been in jail for 24 months, saying in comparison to the 14-year sentence awarded to him, 24 months was nothing.
The bench said merits of the case will be decided by the high court. “At present, we are only hearing the bail appeal,” it said.
Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Yadav, said there were no recoveries and no demand and the only major offence under which he was convicted was a conspiracy.
The CBI had on Tuesday vehemently opposed the bail plea of Yadav in the apex court, saying the ailing leader suddenly claimed to be “fully fit” to undertake political activities in the upcoming Lok Sabha polls.
The investigating agency alleged that Yadav has already been indulging in political activities for over eight months when he was admitted to a hospital citing health issues.
“During the period in which the petitioner (Lalu Yadav) remained in hospital, he is not only granted a special paying ward with all facilities but he is virtually conducting his political activities from there which would be clear form the list of visitors,” the CBI said.
Read | Lalu convicted in third fodder scam case: Tejashwi alleges conspiracy by Nitish, RSS, BJP
The CBI also pointed out that Yadav, who claimed to be unwell and cannot even remain in jail, has now suddenly become physically fit and is seeking bail.
Yadav, who has been in hospital instead of jail for last over eight months, had sought bail on medical grounds and for leading his party simultaneously, the CBI had said while arguing that granting of bail to him would set “very wrong precedent” in cases involving “serious corruption in high offices”.
The RJD chief, lodged in the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi, had challenged the January 10 verdict of the Jharkhand High Court dismissing his bail plea.
The three cases in which Prasad has been convicted are related to the over-Rs 900-crore fodder scam, which pertains to fraudulent withdrawal of money from the treasuries in the Animal Husbandry department in the early 1990s when Jharkhand was part of Bihar.
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Journeyman drummer Matt Sorum has lent his rhythms to the likes of Motorhead, The Cult, and Velvet Revolver, not to mention Guns N’ Roses, with whom he appeared on three albums. One might wonder how one could be so prolific, yet still live that hard partying rock star lifestyle of yore, but Sorum did it. In fact, according to a new interview on Matt Pinfield’s 2 Hours with Matt Pinfield podcast, it seems like he made a career out of it, too.
“I used to smuggle cocaine across borders,” Sorum told Pinfield. “I’d fly on airplanes with two kilos strapped around my waist. Most of my deliveries were [to] Hawaii, because I had a big connection there, but I would smuggle.”
(Read: The 10 Craziest Stories Revealed on VH1’s Behind the Music)
This was apparently before he caught his big break in the music scene. “Imagine the movie Blow,” he continued “and then think about coming up in rock and roll, before I got in the bands that I was in. My way to pay my way was smuggling, and that’s what I did.”
More details will apparently be available in his upcoming autobiography, which he promises to be “the juiciest of the juiciest of the G N’ R books,” He does, however, reveal that it wasn’t success so much as paranoia that caused him to give up the smuggling lifestyle.
“The last time I smuggled two kilos to Hawaii I remember thinking I was being followed, and it wasn’t because I was paranoid on cocaine; I really felt that I was being followed,” he remarked. “So, I told the guy that I flew this stuff for — I was the mule; and I got, like, a couple grand every time I went — ‘I can’t do this. I’m being followed.’ He’s like, ‘Oh, man, you’re just high.’ I’m like, ‘No, man. I’m being followed. I’m not doing it. I’m going back to L.A.’ I was living in Long Beach … the guy that took my place [as smuggler] got arrested: twenty years in a federal penitentiary [for] international drug smuggling. That would have been me.”
Sorum had plenty more say across the episode’s two hours, including his thoughts about being excluded from 2016’s Guns N’ Roses reunion tour (our Reunion of the Year, that) and some insight into Metallica’s well-documented hazing of bassist Jason Newsted. Listen to the whole interview below.
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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) told CNN Sunday that the U.S. can afford the left's expensive proposals such as the Green New Deal and Medicare for all. She added that such proposals are “not about a cost.”
“You’ll hear things like the Green New Deal. You’ll hear things like Medicare for all, you’ll hear things like, whether it’s taxes, you’ll hear things — at what point do you say, that’s our north star but we have to be realists?” CNN’s John King asked.
“There’s no question we have to be practical,” Harris replied. “But being practical also recognizes that climate change is an existential threat to us as human beings. Being practical recognizes that greenhouse gas emissions are threatening our air and threatening the planet and that it is well within our capacity as human beings to change our behaviors in a way that we can reduce its effects.”
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) repeatedly failed to give CNN’s John King a clear answer on how she would pay for her proposals, saying, “it’s not about a cost.” pic.twitter.com/w8UHy10heg — Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 24, 2019
The Green New Deal would cost into the trillions per year for just some of its goals, economists are warning.
As for Medicare for all, one study from George Mason University’s Mercatus Center found that it would increase government spending on health care by $32.6 trillion over 10 years. The study’s findings are “similar to those of several independent studies of Sanders' 2016 plan. Those studies found increases in federal spending over 10 years that ranged from $24.7 trillion to $34.7 trillion.”
“Can we afford it?” King asked of these ideas.
“Of course we can afford it,” Harris replied.
“Two and a half, three trillion dollars a year for Medicare for all, by some studies,” King pointed out. “Depending on which portions of the green new deal you choose to do first–That’s money. You know what the Republicans are going to say, tax and spend liberals, pie in the sky…”
"One of the things that I admire and respect is the measurement that is captured in three letters: ROI," Harris replied. "What's the return on investment? People in the private sector understand this really well. It's not about a cost. It's about an investment. And then the question should be, is it worth the cost in terms of the investment potential? Are we going to get back more than we put in?"
Harris did not offer a more specific answer about how both proposals would be funded.
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A Republican lawmaker from Florida brought a jar of mosquitoes to the House floor on Wednesday to pressure his colleagues to pass a compromise bill to fund the fight against the Zika virus threatening his state.
Rep. David Jolly (R-Fla.) held up the jar of mosquitoes — which he noted are not actively carrying the virus — as he delivered a morning speech on the floor.
“I rise today to talk about Zika. And I rise with about 100 mosquitoes straight from Florida,” Jolly began. “These mosquitoes can travel only about 150 feet, but with the assistance of a plane ticket and researchers at the University of South Florida, they have made their way from Florida to the well of this House.
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“Now, they are not active carriers, but they could be,” Jolly warned.
Jolly wondered aloud how fellow lawmakers would react if the mosquitoes in the jar were released into the House chamber. He argued that his colleagues would know how his constituents feel.
“Can you imagine, colleagues, the fear and anxiety in this chamber if these hundred mosquitoes were outside this jar and not inside this jar?” Jolly asked.
“Members of Congress would run down the hall to the physician’s office to be tested. They would spray themselves before coming down here," he said. "This is the fear of Floridians.”
Jolly told The Hill after House votes Wednesday that he has not one, but two jars of mosquitos; he's feeding them nectar provided by university researchers.
He said he might bring one or both of the jars back to the floor for another speech on Thursday, since no one admonished him for his earlier gambit.
"What I really wanted to do was let them loose. You want to see action, let them loose on the House floor," he joked.
Congress adjourned for its seven-week summer recess in mid-July without passing an emergency funding bill to combat the spread of the Zika virus. Since that time, additional cases of the virus have emerged in the U.S., particularly in southern Florida.
The Senate again failed to secure the necessary 60 votes to advance a $1.1 billion funding bill to mitigate Zika on its first day back from recess on Tuesday. The House passed the bill in June, but Senate Democrats have blocked its passage three times — primarily because of language targeting Planned Parenthood.
Lawmakers are hoping to reach a deal on Zika funding this month before leaving again for an extended pre-election recess, potentially as part of a spending bill to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1.
The Zika virus is most commonly spread by mosquitoes and can cause birth defects in the newborns of women who are pregnant when they contract the virus.
“We are wasting time. That is why I’m joined by these mosquitoes today,” Jolly said from the floor.
Updated at 5 p.m.
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American rock band Kiss will perform a gig for great white sharks to raise money for a conservation charity.
The performance will take place thanks to a partnership between Kiss and Airbnb.
The home-sharing platform cut ties with tourism that harms animals last October, including elephant rides, big cat interactions, and entertainment venues that keep wild animals. The announcement coincided with the launch of Airbnb Animal Experiences. The new initiative offers more than 1,000 ethical animal experiences in 58 countries.
Airbnb worked with World Animal Protection, a global animal welfare non-profit, to develop guidelines to ensure the animals involved were safe at all times.
The Kiss performance was the first Airbnb Animal Experience to be announced. The rock band will perform on a boat near Port Lincoln, South Australia. Matt Waller, owner of Adventure Bay Charters, and shark expert Dr. Blake Chapman will host the event.
Kiss will perform on the deck and the music will be projected down into the sea. According to Airbnb, the sounds may “entice” great white sharks to the area because they “love the low-frequency sounds of rock and roll.”
The host, Waller, uses music as a “responsible alternative to bait” and to “avoid disrupting the natural ecosystem of the ocean.”
Eight guests will be able to observe the animals in their natural habitats through the glass-bottom flooring of the boat.
‘It’s Not Like Going to the Zoo’
“Airbnb approached us with this idea that sounded, quite frankly, a little weird, but we’re used to being approached with things that are a little weird,” Paul Stanley told Rolling Stone. “I’ve played for a lot of land sharks. Now I finally get a chance to play for the ocean varieties.”
“It’s not like going to the zoo,” he added. “You’re actually experiencing them in their home. If people don’t cooperate, they’ll be treated like chum and thrown to the sharks.”
Musicians and Animal Welfare
More musicians are speaking up on behalf of animals. Canadian singer-songwriter Bryan Adams recently spoke out against whale hunting, saying there’s “no need” to hunt the “magnificent giants.”
Queen guitarist Brian May believes it “takes courage to stand up for animals.” He stopped wearing shoes made with animal leather, saying it made him feel “so much better.” Last year, he took a petition to the UK Parliament that urged the government to make Britain fur-free.
The Kiss Concert for Great White Sharks takes place on November 18 at $50 per ticket. The Australian Marine Conservation Society, the only national charity in Australia that exclusively works to protect ocean wildlife and their habitats, will receive all proceeds.
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“He said ‘the left malar was adjusted by external pressure’. They were precisely his words. I particularly [didn’t want to] write the note because accurately I would have had to write ‘Prof Peckitt punched the patient to try and move the left zygoma’ and that’s not something I would have wanted to do.
“I didn’t challenge him. Partly because he is a consultant and partly because I was so shocked that I didn’t have the strength to argue. I didn’t see any damage, I just thought it was a very unusual technique.
“I was holding his head very still. It must have moved a little [when he punched] but not much. Prof Peckitt is much stronger than I am so I could only give as much support as I could so it might have moved a little. If I asked you to hold something still then I punched it, you don’t know how hard someone is going to punch so you don’t know how much resistance to apply.”
Prof Peckitt has pioneered ‘engineering-assisted’ surgery techniques and written extensively on the subject, as well as cosmetic surgery.
Miss Rapaport said she came into the hospital on her day off to take part in surgery with Prof Peckitt to learn about his renowned techniques while he was working as a locum.
She added: “The benefits might be outweighed by the larger risks. Without control, punching a patient can lead to damage. That’s how some patients get fractured zygomas in the first place.
“I had seen so little of this man’s work that I didn’t know if it was a one-off or whether it was the way he worked.”
Panel chair Ian Spafford said: “You talk about people in the theatre gasping and they were as shocked as you. Who was gasping?”
Miss Rapaport replied: “I can’t remember. It was just a general sense of ‘wow’. If there was anyone in that theatre that could have stopped this it was me, but I didn’t because I was too overwhelmed.
“He is a consultant, he is older than I am, bigger than I am and has a very strong personality.”
In defence of Prof Peckitt, she added: “I did come to appreciate his manner and caring attitude towards patients and he was very much admired and liked by patients, including this gentleman we are talking about. They had a lot of faith in him.”
After graduating in medicine from the University of Sheffield in 1979, Mr Peckitt completed further training with the Royal College of Surgeons of England and became a Fellow of the Australasian College of Cosmetic Surgery in 2009.
The hearing continues.
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Okay, sure, this is just a post about a T-shirt. But there are two things you should consider when it comes to this particular T-shirt from Obey. First off, the message is a good one. And second, the proceeds are going to non-profits, so this isn't some cash-grab from the brand.
About that message, which is the focal point of the whole design, seeing as it's the only thing on the shirt other than a small Obey logo. Basically it's saying, "Don't be an asshole." But it's saying it the long way, and focusing on all the particularly egregious elements of American terribleness that have been bubbling to the surface of society lately.
Here's a closer look at what it says:
Courtesy
That's 156 words of straight text, which is a whole lot more than you find tees most of the time. But then, right now is most assuredly not "most of the time," at least as it pertains to the current American inclination, from some quarters, to get really worked up about the idea that all people should be treated with respect. "
"I hope that my art and clothing brand can make a difference in a relatable way for topics that have been taboo to cover in the past," artist Shepard Fairey, the founder and creative director of Obey, explained in an email. "As I've said in the past, OUR America is one of equal humanity, and does not demean or discriminate. We need you to help us take back this narrative. We don't have any one easy solution, but we do know this: We must be greater than fear, we must defend dignity, and we must protect each other."
'This Is an OBEY T-Shirt' Basic Tee Obey obeyclothing.com $28.00 Buy
The shirt is available to buy now, but it's a pre-sale, so you'll need to wait until August 23 for it to ship. And remember, proceeds from the sale of it will be donated to non-profits, specifically 501(c)(3) organizations "helping in the aid of the families of shooting victims as well as defending the rights of those that can’t defend themselves," according to Obey's site. A rep explained that the company is still vetting which organizations, exactly, will be receiving donations, but decided to move quickly to get the shirt on the market due to the initial response to a women's version. The brand's social channels and site will be updated with that info when a decision is finalized.
Jonathan Evans Jonathan Evans is the style director of Esquire, covering all things fashion, grooming, accessories, and, of course, sneakers.
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
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UPDATE: Infowars Official jumped to number 3 in Apple’s top downloaded news apps Tuesday evening, leapfrogging Reddit and putting it on track to soon be the number one most popular app.
We are now the number #3 app in downloads ahead of CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the dinosaur media #infowarsban #infowars pic.twitter.com/bkFQJZAGbW — Rob Dew (@DewsNewz) August 8, 2018
Get the app before it’s gone!
***Original article below***
Downloads of the Infowars Official App have completely eclipsed the rest of the dying media’s own apps in the face of Big Tech censoring Alex Jones and his platform on Monday.
The Infowars Official App is currently ranked at #4 in in Apple’s App Store, soaring above CNN (#6), Google News (#5), Buzzfeed (#10), Fox News (#7), The New York Times (#11), ABC (#19), and BBC (#26).
Well-informed and liberty-loving people alike immediately recognized the app is a direct line to Infowars and Alex Jones, circumventing the globalist tech gatekeepers who arbitrarily put conservatives under their boot of censorship.
The app’s popularity surge comes amid Big Tech’s coordinated Monday censorship and deplatforming of Infowars and Alex Jones content on YouTube, Facebook, iTunes, and Spotify.
Currently available as of this writing, the Infowars Official App is able to bypass the tried-and-true silencing tactics like shadow banning and putting a cap on view count.
The @infowars Official App is beating the NYT, ABC, BBC, WSJ, NPR, CNBC, CBS, USA Today, Reuters, Bloomberg, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Washington Post and more in app store rankings. Their response to this? A call for Infowars to be banned. https://t.co/IIwPvho1Q2 pic.twitter.com/uCf4R4B1z1 — Michael Zimmermann (@zimm3rmann) August 7, 2018
Perhaps this is why CNN advocates removing our app from the store.
Apple and Google are still selling the InfoWars app, which contains some of the same type of content that both tech giants have pulled from elsewhere on their platforms https://t.co/GjaCGPjcu5 pic.twitter.com/oDwVU9vneP — CNN (@CNN) August 6, 2018
Ironically, CNN’s Anderson Cooper tried to emulate Alex Jones’ live stream format, but it failed miserably and ended up being a multi-million-dollar dud.
Ben Warren and Jamie White contributed to this article.
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Lana Marks, whose products retail for $10,000 to $400,000, was born in South Africa but has not lived there for more than 40 years
This article is more than 1 year old
This article is more than 1 year old
A luxury handbag designer in Palm Beach, Florida, has reportedly been chosen by Donald Trump as the next US ambassador to South Africa.
The appointment of Lana Marks, whose products sell between $10,000 and $400,000, would be likely to cause some surprise: Marks was born in South Africa but has not lived there for more than 40 years.
South Africa condemns Trump's 'polarising' white farmers tweet Read more
Relations between South Africa and the US have soured in recent weeks following a tweet by the president inaccurately describing “large-scale killing” of white farmers in the country. Trump’s statement prompted outrage and a firm rebuttal from the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa.
But the post of US ambassador to South Africa has been vacant since the former ambassador, Patrick Gaspard, resigned in 2016.
Trump’s choice will still have to be approved by the Senate. News reports in South Africa appear to be based on an unusual leak from within the ministry of foreign relations. Before the nomination of an ambassador is announced it is common that the host country is informally consulted.
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Marks was born in the coastal city of East London and educated locally. A biography on the designer’s website makes no mention of her South African origins, and describes her studying ballet with the Royal Ballet.
In an interview with South African newspaper Business Day, Marks said this had been with the Royal Ballet’s local affiliate in her home town.
After spending time in Bermuda, she settled in Palm Beach in 1987, where she founded her luxury handbag business.
Her company website says her name “has become synonymous with the most luxurious, fashion forward handbags in the world, crafted from such exotic leathers as alligator, crocodile, ostrich and lizard”.
Marks has repeatedly described her friendship with the late Diana, Princess of Wales in the media. She has also said she played tennis in “Wimbledon, the French and South African Open”.
In 2006, a report in the South African Business Day cast doubt on this claim, saying their reporters had been unable to find any record of her playing in the French Open.
The Trump administration has been accused of ignoring Africa. Melania Trump, the first lady, is travelling to Ghana, Malawi, Kenya and Egypt this week, on her first extended solo international mission.
In January Trump reportedly described African nations as “shithole” countries and questioned why so many of their citizens had ever been permitted to enter America.
His remarks caused significant anger.
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The UK coalition government's planned NHS and welfare reforms, and their use of 'nudge' theory, hark back to ideas on welfare and recession from the end of the nineteenth century, according to studies by a University of Leicester historian whose research paper has recently been published in the Lancet.
Dr Kim Price's article is entitled, 'The crusade against out-relief: a nudge from history.'
Dr Price, a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the School of Historical Studies, commented: "Broadly speaking, I am interested in medical negligence under state medicine and I have focused on the pre-NHS (pre-1948) welfare system in the UK.
"The instability of doctor-patient relations has led to a fragile balance of power that is by no means set for the foreseeable future.
"The welfare debate has been divided for centuries by ideologically-driven attitudes to philanthropically, privately or publicly funded medicine.
"I see medical negligence as a complex relationship between time and place and, to varying degrees, society, law, ethics, medical practice, health professionals, and patients."
In his paper in the Lancet, Dr Price argues that the UK's Coalition Government has begun to tackle the annual deficit with the language and policy aims from the recession of 1870.
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In the late 19th century the Conservatives instigated a policy to cut back welfare expenditure and lessen reliance on poor law out-relief. This included cutting medical extras and payments to lone mothers, widows, the elderly, the chronically sick, and people who were disabled or had mental illness.
The result, Dr Price believes, lowered the health of many families and increased the number of people who could no longer be supported at home.
Dependency was criticised by both government and ratepayers, until by the 1880s the Victorian obsession with thrift and self-help had taken hold throughout the voting classes. Philanthropy and charity, however, could not compensate for government aid, and institutional care drove up national expenditure.
Dr Price argues that, under current UK Coalition government proposals for GP consortia, and its potential conflicts of interest, the doctor-patient relationship is in peril of shifting too far in favour of doctors and undermining the trust of patients.
This too harks back to 19th century Poor Law doctors who had to choose between their private and public patients, resulting in widespread neglect of the poor. As a result relations between doctors and poor patients suffered.
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries the drive to cut welfare backfired and fuelled change. Liberal (and later, Labour) reformers raged against the "false economy" of a nation without welfare so that by the start of the 20th century, the tide had begun to turn.
The people's health took centre stage when working class people as a whole were allowed to vote, resulting in a series of Acts which led towards the creation of the National Health Service in 1948.
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The Government is permitting petrol and mining exploration in marine mammal sanctuaries – home to rare dolphins, whales and seals.
Six sanctuaries around New Zealand's coastline are meant to provide a permanent refuge for marine mammals in fisheries waters.
But Green Party MP Gareth Hughes has branded them "sham sanctuaries" as oil companies have been granted 10 permits in four of the protected areas.
He said the exploration would threaten rare sea creatures such as the endangered maui's and hector's dolphin, as well as sea lions, fur seals and southern right whales.
"What we are seeing is a sham protection.
"Mineral exploitation will be able to happen where we are supposed to be protecting threatened animals."
He said there was "legitimate concern" about seismic surveys where airguns were used to produce powerful underwater sounds.
The Government says it will regulate seismic testing by placing observers on surveying ships and is reviewing a 2006 code of practice.
An Otago University marine scientist, associate professor Steve Dawson, said the low frequency pulses were "extremely loud" and could cause deafness or "the bends" in animals that came too close.
"These air guns are the loudest source that is possible to use without using explosives.
"The trouble with that is we really don't know much about how they affect hector's and maui's dolphins. But you'd have to argue that it's not likely to be good.
"You would have thought that it would have been a good idea in those very sensitive areas to be a little bit more precautionary."
In April, Forest & Bird called for most seismic testing off Taranaki to be halted to save maui's dolphins. It pointed to a mass stranding of dolphins in Peru as evidence that deep water sonar could be harmful.
The animals had damage to their middle-ear bones, a sign of "the bends".
Forest & Bird noted that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management halted deep-penetrating seismic surveys after sick and dead calf bottlenose dolphins washed up in New Orleans.
But Petroleum Exploration and Production Association chief executive David Robinson said the industry had been co-existing with marine mammals for decades.
"There is no evidence of adverse impacts from seismic surveying on marine mammals.
"Nevertheless the industry is always looking to improve and wants to ensure all steps are taken to minimise potential impacts on marine mammals without unduly affecting normal operations."
Conservation Minister Kate Wilkinson said activities such as seismic surveying could be restricted to minimise harm to marine mammals.
"The sanctuaries were originally created as a result of the maui's and hector's dolphins Threat Management Plan.
We have brought forward the review of this plan to make sure we are doing all we can to protect these rare treasures."
Ms Wilkinson said there were no current instances of mining in an MMS.
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fired at least 200 rounds into the hallway, which should have given law enforcement a clear location for exactly where their target was.
This new narrative is actually backed up by audio that was released this week capturing the first shots fired by Paddock, well before he began firing on the crowd.
6. Why did the owner of the Mandalay Bay Hotel sell off shares before the shooting?
Mandalay Bay Hotel is owned by MGM Resorts International. The company’s CEO, James Murren, made a notable move by selling 294,150 shares of MGM Resorts International (NYSE:MGM) stock less than one month before the shooting.
As a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission noted, Murren sold 294,150 shares at an average price of $34.08 each, for a total transaction of $10,024,632.00 on Sept. 8. This left Murren with 71,442 shares in the company.
Within 24 hours after the shooting occurred, casino stocks fell significantly, with MGM Grand International’s stock leading the charge and falling 5.6 percent. While selling stocks is nothing suspicious, when reviewing the records, Murren began dumping the stock in July of this year when it was at a seven-year high. The stock continued to go up, yet he continued to dump it, making the last and largest transaction—when the stock was close to the 52-week high—mere days before the attack sent the stock tumbling.
7. Why did it take so long for a police response, even though an employee for the hotel called 6 minutes before?
The revised timeline from the Las Vegas shooting includes the important detail about Paddock firing at least 200 rounds into the hallway and injuring Campos, before opening gunfire out of his hotel room window. When this occurred, there was a nearby employee who reported the scene to police.
Stephen Schuck, a maintenance worker at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, said on Wednesday that he was “checking out a report of a jammed fire door on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay when he heard gunshots and a hotel security guard, who had been shot in the leg, peeked out from an alcove and told him to take cover.”
“As soon as I started to go to a door to my left the rounds started coming down the hallway. I could feel them pass right behind my head,” Schuck said, noting that he told hotel dispatchers to report the shooting to police.
However, even with reports coming in minutes before Paddock opened gunfire from his window, it still took police around 1 hour and 15 minutes to locate and break down the door to Paddock’s hotel room. If they had simply acted on the first report from Schuck, there is a good chance that the massacre that was launched from Paddock’s window could have been prevented.
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Chelsea Manning ordered back to jail for defying grand jury subpoena Manning could face daily fines if she continues to defy a grand jury subpoena.
Fresh off a 62-day incarceration for defying a grand jury subpoena, Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and anti-secrecy activist, was remanded again Thursday afternoon after a federal judge held her in contempt of court.
United States Marshals took Manning back into custody at the U.S. District Courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, Thursday afternoon after she refused to cooperate, yet again, with a subpoena to testify before another secret federal grand jury.
Manning was set free last Thursday when the first grand jury’s term expired. Upon release, however, prosecutors hit her with a second subpoena to appear Thursday before a separate grand jury.
At a short press conference prior to a Thursday hearing, Manning said she was prepared to return to jail “indefinitely” rather than testify.
“No matter what happens today,” Manning said, “I’m not going to comply with this grand jury.”
After Thursday’s hearing, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, G. Zachary Terwilliger, told reporters that the “only thing being asked of [Manning] is to answer questions truthfully.”
Manning’s latest confinement will persist until she complies with the subpoena or until the grand jury expires, U.S. Judge Anthony Trenga said in court on Thursday. Unlike her first confinement, after 30 days, Manning will be subject to a daily fine of $500. After 60 days, Manning will face a fine of $1,000 per day.
Federal grand juries are impaneled for a maximum of 18 months, but it is unclear how long this particular grand jury has been on duty.
While the nature of the grand jury’s probe remains unknown, it convenes at the same federal court where prosecutors recently filed charges against WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Manning gained prominence when she was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for the unauthorized disclosure of classified materials made public by WikiLeaks in 2010. Her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017.
“In 2010, Chelsea took a principled decision to let the world see the true nature of modern asymmetric warfare,” Moira Meltzer-Cohen, an attorney for Manning, said Thursday. “It is telling that the U.S. has always been concerned with the disclosure of those documents than their damning substance.”
Assange was indicted in April on a computer hacking charge for his role Manning’s disclosure of those documents, a scheme the government called "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States."
Assange remains in Great Britain, where he is fighting extradition to the United States to face charges.
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Up to one target creature you control gains deathtouch and lifelink until end of turn. If it's a Vampire, put a +1/+1 counter on it.
-2: You may put a Vampire creature card from your hand onto the battlefield.
-7: You get an emblem with "Whenever you gain life, each opponent loses that much life."
4
We learned a lot from testing this version of Sorin. We enjoyed the play pattern on the plus ability making combat interesting and the -2 getting expensive Vampires into play. The main problem with this design was that once you chose an ability, you were likely locked into using the same ability again. -2ing would make Champion of Dusk draw into more Sorins and Vampires, which would encourage a -2 on the next turn and then playing a new Sorin. Once the +2 ability was used, building to the ultimate was too often more powerful than using the -2. Those play-pattern issues also made the card feel and play less like a planeswalker. With those findings in mind, we changed the design to three mana and looked for a different ability other than an ultimate. That got us to this:
2B
+1: Up to one target creature you control gains deathtouch and lifelink until end of turn. If it's a Vampire, put a +1/+1 counter on it.
???????????????????
-3: You may put a Vampire creature card from your hand onto the battlefield.
4
When looking for a new ability, we asked ourselves "What angle can we give Vampires that Mono-White Aggro doesn't have?" Mono-White Aggro's weakness is generally closing when the opponent has stabilized the board. We opted for something that could close out the game if the opponent was at a low enough life total, and ended up with Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord's second plus ability, "+1: You may sacrifice a Vampire. When you do, Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord deals 3 damage to any target and you gain 3 life."
To wrap things up on the Vampires, here is one of the many configurations of Vampires that we tried out to test Knight of the Ebon Legion and Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord:
I wanted to write about all the iterations that it took to get the Vampires deck to a fun and competitive level. But that goal conflicts with the original goal of this article which is to post decklists that we built during the making of M20. To compensate, here are my favorite decks that fall more into the "brew" category.
I'll be back once Throne of Eldraine rolls around to share some of my favorite Future Future League decks from the ELD FFL focus period. In the meantime, I'll be at most West Coast (best coast) Magic events. Come say hi!
—Abro
@Murk_Lurker
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Residents of the small Texas town of Encino (pop. 143), located on a major smuggling route between McAllen and Falfurrias, are being terrorized by cartel members and at the same time are seeing a massive influx of migrants abandoned by smugglers.
KVEO-TV spoke to a resident who described the terror her family and neighbors go through. The resident begged for a border wall to be built.
Excerpt from the KVEO report:
An Encino, TX resident says she lives in fear every day. She sees hundreds of undocumented immigrants attempting to enter her property, adding she feels threatened by criminal organizations surrounding the area. TRENDING: BREAKING: Senate Finance and Homeland Security Committees Release DEVASTATING Report on Hunter Biden, Burisma and Corruption -- CROOKED BIDEN FAMILY ENRICHED THEMSELVES AND OBAMA KNEW! “12 young men dressed in black. My husband automatically stopped and they just put a finger to their lips and it’s like… You better not say anything, they know what we drive, they know where we live.” “Soila”, who did not want to show her face for security reasons, says County Road 304 in Encino, which is only 7 miles away from the Falfurrias checkpoint is used by cartel members to smuggle drugs and people. “There was a young man, he kept telling him [husband] to stop right at the gate, he kept coming. My husband clocked the gun and right on his left-hand side, 12-15 more people pop out, they were trying to get in towards the house.” …“Soila” adds a wall is needed to protect U.S. Citizens. “Whoever tells you there is no danger out here and we don’t need the wall, they have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t care as long as the businesses keep thriving in McAllen or Brownsville.” She says everyone in her neighborhood is terrified when they call on the Border Patrol due to threats they receive by drug smugglers.
End excerpt. Please read the complete report by KVEO at this link.
Ht/ tip Angel Mom Mary Ann Mendoza.
“Whoever tells you there is no danger out here & we don't need the wall, they have no idea what they're talking about. They don't care as long as the businesses keep thriving in McAllen or Brownsville." https://t.co/UtKx2NhLWU — Angel Mom Mary Ann Mendoza ⭐️ (@mamendoza480) March 30, 2019
Meanwhile, the Texas border town of Comstock placed its lone school on lockdown Thursday after several illegal aliens were seen near the school, a concerned parent informed TGP. The same school was placed on lockdown in February due to illegal aliens.
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BOSTON – The NHL Department of Player Safety is busy in their situation room on Thursday night after the second period string of events in Boston’s 3-2 loss to the Colorado Avalanche at TD Garden. Colorado captain Gabriel Landeskog was ejected from the win nearly six minutes into the second period when he drilled Brad Marchand with a high blindside hit that sent the Bruins agitator spinning down to the ice.
Landeskog was slapped with a match penalty for his check to the head, and was done for the evening as a result. Marchand has a history of concussions, but didn’t seem to suffer any ill effects from the head shot as he raced over to Landeskog and slugged the apologetic Swedish forward in the jaw in retaliation for his dangerous hit. The punch landed Marchand in the box for two minutes, and wiped out a big portion of the potential five minute power play following the major penalty.
“Any time you get hit in the head, you know, you’re a little concerned…especially when I got a concussion a couple weeks back, so I was definitely nervous. But I think I’m okay,” said Marchand. “Things happen quickly. I know that I’ve been there. I’m sure [Landeskog] didn’t mean it. I don’t think he’s a dirty player so, you know…it’s hockey. It is what it is.”
A source indicated to CSNNE.com that both Landeskog and Marchand are being reviewed by the NHL Department of Player Safety: Landeskog for his reckless check on Marchand, and the B’s left winger for his reactionary “sucker punch” of the Avs forward.
At the heart of the NHL’s supplemental discipline decision on Landeskog will be whether or not Marchand’s head was the main point of contact as it appeared there was plenty of shoulder-to-shoulder contact between the two players. The Avalanche forward was apologetic following the game, but pretty adamant he felt like the main point of contact on his hit was Marchand’s shoulder.
“I tried to let up, and then I tried to skate up and apologize and tell him I didn’t mean to come across. Obviously he wasn’t hurt with that sucker punch,” said Landeskog. “I’m happy he didn’t get hurt. I feel like the principle point of contact was shoulder and, like I said, I’m happy he didn’t get hurt.”
Landeskog was fined for punching Mikko Koivu at the end of an Avalanche/Wild game last season, but has never been suspended by the NHL in his five year career.
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The relationship between dogs and their owners is very similar to the bond between young kids and their parents, a new study revealed.
For approximately 15,000 years, pet dogs have been closely associated with people, the research, published in PLoS One explained.
“The animals are so well adapted to living with human beings that in many cases the owner replaces conspecifics and assumes the role of the dog’s main social partner,” according to the experts.
Dogs and children seem to share what is known as the “secure base effect”. This effect is seen in parent-child bonding as well as the bond between humans and dogs.
This refers to the idea that when human infants interact with the environment, they use their caregivers as a secure base.
Since this effect had not yet been closely observed in dogs, Lisa Horn, from the Vetmeduni’s Messerli Research Institute, Austria, and her colleagues set out to examine the behavior of dogs and their owners.
The reactions of the dogs were analyzed under 3 different conditions:
“absent owner”
“silent owner”
“encouraging owner”
In the experiment, the pets had to manipulate interactive dog toys and then earned a reward of food.
The investigators were surprised to see that the animals were a lot less eager to work for food when their owners were not present than when they were.
Whether the caregivers further motivated their dogs during the task or remained silent had little impact on the pets’ level of motivation.
Horn and her team conducted a follow-up experiment where they replaced the dogs’ owners with strangers.
Results showed that when the unfamiliar people were present, the animals barely interacted with them and were not much more concerned about trying to get the food reward than when the strangers were not there.
The dogs were much more motivated to get the food reward when their owner was there, making the researchers conclude that a caregiver’s presence is critical for a pet to act in a confident manner.
The authors said:
“The study provides the first evidence for the similarity between the “secure base effect” found in dog-owner and child-caregiver relationships. This striking parallel will be further investigated in direct comparative studies on dogs and children.”
Horn concluded:
“One of the things that really surprised us is, that adult dogs behave towards their caregivers like human children do. It will be really interesting to try to find out how this behavior evolved in the dogs with direct comparisons.”
A previous report showed that having a pet, particularly a dog, can reduce a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease, while a different study indicated that having a pet dog can improve a person’s physical and mental health more than having a cat.
Written by Sarah Glynn
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(Representative image)
KANPUR: ‘Dogs are a man’s best friend’ isn’t just a saying, and this was proved yet again in Attarra town of UP’s Banda district on Friday night.
More than 36 people were saved by a pet, which woke them up by barking as a devastating fire broke out in a multi-storey residential-cum-commercial building in Lakhan colony of Attarra. However, the dog lost its life in a cylinder blast during the fire as it was tied up and no one escaping the fire had the time to untie it.
The fire started in the basement of the building, whose third and fourth floors were occupied by several families. The dog belonged to Rakesh Gupta, owner of the furniture and glass company showroom, who lives with his family in the building.
“The dog alerted us in the middle of the night, apparently warning through its loud barking,” said a resident of the building, adding that it died when a LPG cylinder blew up in the fire. Sadly, the families escaping the fire forgot to untie their saviour, he added.
“We were asleep on Friday night when around 11 pm I woke up to my dog’s barking, which was unusual for that hour. I ignored it initially, but when the barks grew louder and it almost started howling, I went out to check if everything was okay. It was only then that I realised that a major portion of the building had been engulfed in flames,” said Gupta.
“Following this, I rushed indoors and asked my family members and all other inmates to move out quickly. We all came out of the burning building safely. Soon after we were out, there were back-to-back cylinder blasts and the dog that was chained couldn’t escape and died in the inferno,” he added.
As the news about the dog’s death spread, inmates received phone calls from various quarters. “The callers praised the canine for its heroic act, we continue to receive calls,” Gupta told TOI over phone on Saturday.
Fire officer Vinay Kumar told TOI that the fire broke out due to a short circuit in the basement of the building. It caused back-to-back LPG cylinder blasts, razing four adjacent buildings.
ASP Banda Lal Bharat Kumar Pal said: “The building housed a furniture factory in the basement and first floor and an electronic showroom on the second floor. Several families lived on the third and fourth floors. The fire started in the basement and spread to other floors.” “We have come to know about a canine, whose heroic act saved lives of nearly 36 people living in the building. The saying that dog is a man’s best friend seems to have been proved yet again,” he added.
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So surprising was the find that Viviane Slon didn’t believe her results at first. “My first reaction was, ‘What did I do wrong?’” says Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. Ancient DNA is notoriously finicky. Because the old genetic material is so degraded and fragmented, it is easy to get tantalizing but false results. She repeated her experiments, again and again, extracting DNA six separate times. “It’s really when we saw this over and over again we realized, in fact, it was mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry,” she says.
Neanderthals and Denisovans split off from each other some 400,000 years ago, making them far more distinct than any two groups of modern humans living today. Yet both appeared to have lived in or around the Denisova Cave. In 2010, excavators also found a Neanderthal toe bone in the cave. This new bone fragment—from the daughter of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan—suggests the two groups not only inhabited the same place but at the same time.
It wasn’t just Neanderthals: Ancient humans had sex with other hominids.
Russian scientists first excavated this sliver of bone in 2012. It was one of more than 2,000 fragments that Slon’s collaborators at Oxford analyzed using a protein called collagen. The collagen in this one, they realized, was of human-like origin, so they sent it to the ancient-DNA lab at Max Planck for extraction. The inch-long fragment is too small to even tell which bone it came from. Nevertheless, it yielded a wealth of genomic information.
The daughter herself was a mix of Neanderthal and Denisovan. Her mother’s half of the genome most resembled DNA from a Neanderthal found in Croatia. It did not particularly match DNA from the Neanderthal actually found right in the Denisova cave in 2010, suggesting that Neanderthals migrated west to east in multiple waves. Her father’s Denisovan half of the genome actually had a touch of Neanderthal DNA—suggesting he too had a Neanderthal ancestor hundreds of generations ago. And somehow, 50,000 years ago or more, her mother and father met. The proof is in her DNA.
The discovery has stunned scientists, but it also has them questioning whether it is so stunning at all. Svante Pääbo, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, recalls sequencing a 40,000-year-old human in Romania, which turned out to have a Neanderthal ancestor just four to six generations back. Interbreeding is so rare, he thought at the time, that the discovery of such a recent ancestor must just be a fluke. But after sequencing just six individuals from the Denisova cave, they have already found a direct hybrid offspring. Maybe it was not so uncommon after all.
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do," Beadle said.
The OER Road Ahead
Beyond numbers, the North Dakota report offers recommendations for the university system’s further OER efforts, and a few warnings about possible pitfalls of moving too quickly.
Auditors saw major potential for savings in high-enrollment general education courses and urged the system to ensure that students know during registration which courses will include OER materials. Other benefits, according to the report, including the option to offer both electronic and hard copies to students, and early indications that course outcomes for students in OER courses are the same or better than in courses with traditional textbook materials.
The report’s outlook on OER isn’t entirely rosy. A section on “significant negative aspects” reads like a laundry list of concerns OER critics have long raised: OER doesn’t offer enough ancillary materials like quizzes and homework assignments; some disciplines haven’t yet developed a suitable repository of high-quality content; OER takes too much time and effort to implement.
Close to 80 percent of nearly 1,000 faculty members who responded to a survey from the auditors said that time and effort represent a “somewhat” or “very” significant barrier to implementation. More than 60 percent indicated that the lack of contractual incentives also played a role in their reluctance. Auditors suggested several such incentives: faculty stipends, which the system offers when feasible, and “release” time for interested faculty members, which sometimes requires an institution to hire an adjunct instructor as a temporary replacement.
In many cases, faculty members simply don’t know what OER is or how they might acquire it. Only 42 percent of faculty respondents to the auditor’s survey said they are aware of OER and understand how it can be used; the remainder said they’re somewhat aware but unclear on its utility, have heard of OER but don’t know anything about it or have never heard of it. Slightly more than 50 percent of faculty respondents said they have not used OER, compared with 27 percent who have used it as a supplement and 13 percent who replaced all traditional textbooks with OER.
The system’s response to auditors, published in the report, indicates that three North Dakota institutions are seeking funding for a “Great Plains Open Textbook Network” -- a systemwide portal with links to every institution’s OER content and other relevant resources.
Nicole Allen, director of open education at the Scholarly Research and Academic Publishing Coalition, cheered the report's findings and described the North Dakota system's OER approach -- for which she served as an adviser from 2015 to 2017 -- as a "model" with engaged librarians and suitable funding support.
"Hopefully this report will serve as a resource for other states looking for ways to make college more affordable, and renew interest at NDUS, too," Allen said.
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Back in the early 90s most people were just hearing about the Internet for the first time, even though it was invented back in the 70s. It had very few practical uses and was incredibly difficult to access. But only a few years later, most of us already couldn’t go an hour without checking our emails. It took the Internet 2 decades to make it into our hearts, minds, and computer screens. The next revolution, the Bitcoin revolution is set to happen much quicker than that.
Information about Bitcoin is changing so quickly that by the time you read this, the information within will already have changed. This is the problem that CoinDesk has in trying to become the world’s leading source of information on Bitcoin and other virtual currencies. This quick post is based on their State of Bitcoin 2014 Report, which you can access here.
At the moment, less than 1000 people are holding most of the Bitcoins. This chart shows the ‘current’ overall distribution. At the moment, the general public are holding only 20.7% of all the coins.
Just like the Internet in the early 90s, Bitcoin is not very easy to access. But that is changing very quickly. At the end of 2013 there were less than 1,000 places that accept Bitcoin. Today in April 2014, there are 3,872 places where you can spend them. (You can see the current map at: CoinMap.org)
However, that doesn’t include the amount of people accepting donations or people sending Bitcoin from person to person. Check out this guy for example. He received $24,000 from total strangers.
Source: The Daily Mail
It’s a lot cheaper than sending money any other way, which has these guys really scared…
Poor Visa & MasterCard, they worked hard to get into your Wallet but their technology is simply over-priced & out dated. Soon, we’ll be seeing these…
Everywhere except for Russia & Iceland…
Which is why $72 Million Dollars have been spent by Bitcoin entrepreneurs so far in 2014, and the price of Bitcoin has risen 56X over the course of 2013.
Of course it’s come down a bit since then. In fact, it’s probably the most volatile financial asset in history. So it’s certainly risky and probably not a good idea to invest your entire capital in Bitcoin.
In eToro, you can buy bitcoins as CFDs. Meaning, that you don’t need to worry about all the security details of a digital wallet. You can simply add them to your existing investment portfolio. With risky assets like this it’s a good idea to allocate only a small percentage of your total investment portfolio. This way, you’re not risking much if it goes down, and if it does go up to a million Dollars per coin, like some analysts are saying, then you can make an excellent return.
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Actor Alan Alda said he was twice approached on the set of the M*A*S*H by political organizers pleading him to run for office – but he turned down the offer to launch a U.S. Senate bid because he didn’t have any experience.
“I said ‘Why? I’m not experienced at that. I probably wouldn’t be good at that.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, but you can get elected.’ So that’s the criteria, I guess,” Alda told Chuck Todd on “1947: The Meet the Press Podcast.”
“That’s not my talent. My talent is what I am trying to do.”
The Emmy Award winner has built a second career for himself as a communications expert: He participated in the creation of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, and he’s now out with a new book, “If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?”
The book is geared toward bridging gaps in communication between professionals, often in the world of medicine.
“They need the training exactly as much – no more and no less – than the rest of us,” Alda said, noting that his Center for Communicating Science has trained over 8,000 scientists and medical professionals across the world.
Alda takes a grim view of the political environment today: “Science has become regarded as just another opinion,” he said. “It’s easy to throw doubt because there’s hardly a study of any kind that doesn’t end with the idea that more research needs to be done. Because you never know anything with one bit of research.”
American actor, director and writer Alan Alda in the driving seat of a jeep, surrounded by Loretta Swit and other cast members of the hit television show M.A.S.H, in costume as members of a US Army medical corp. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images) Keystone / Getty Images file
And clearly, Alda noted, leaders in Washington could benefit from a crash course on meaningful communication as well.
“I love the stories about how they’d argue on the Senate floor together and then go out and have a beer together,” Alda said. I don’t think that happens anymore.”
Should loyal viewers expect Alda to return to television screens in a M*A*S*H remake? It’s not likely, he said.
“We were a very lucky collection of people working on something that was really bigger than us. And we knew that,” Alda said. “It’s so far in the past, that to me it feels like it happened to someone else.”
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Responding to an anonymous Op-Ed in the New York Times detailing an active resistance within the Trump White House, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Reuters that President Trump is facing a "coup" the likes of which haven't been seen since the American Civil War.
“What you saw the other day was as serious as it can get. This is a direct attack on the institutions,” Bannon said while flying to Italy. “This is a coup, okay”.
The Wednesday column in the New York Times slams Trump's "amorality" and claims that "Many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations."
Bannon told Reuters that the last time a sitting US president had been challenged like this was during the American Civil War when Democratic General George B. McClellan went after Republican President Abraham Lincoln.
"This is a crisis. The country has only ever had such a crisis in the summer of 1862 when General McClellan and the senior generals, all Democrats in the Union Army, deemed that Abraham Lincoln was not fit and not competent to be commander in chief," said Bannon - whose departure from the White House was in large part over a fallout with Trump's "establishment" advisers. Bannon said at the time that the "Republican establishment" sought to nullify the results of the 2016 election and effectively neuter Trump.
“There is a cabal of Republic establishment figures who believe Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States. This is a crisis,” Bannon said in Rome.
“I am not a conspiracy guy... I have said there is no deep state. It is an in-your-face state.” -Steve Bannon
On Friday, President Trump called on the Department of Justice to investigate who wrote the piece, citing national security. On Thursday night, Trump told a crowd in Billings, Montana that the Times should publish the name of the author at once.
But for the sake of our national security, the New York Times should publish his name at once. I think their reporters should go and investigate who it is. That would actually be a good scoop. (APPLAUSE) That would be a good scoop. Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself. And I was so heartened when I looked
Bannon warned liberal progressives within the Democratic Party that they would suffer the same fate as Trump. For an example, look no further at how establishment Democrats shunned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arer after her upset primary victory over the 4th most powerful Democrat in the House, Joe Crowley.
"Don’t think it will be any different if you take power," Bannon warned outsider liberal candidates like Bernie Sanders. "Because this is the established order dictating that they know better than the people."
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Elon Musk’s tweet this week about taking Tesla TSLA, +2.59% private at $420 was pure Musk. Weird, risky, playful, cryptic, perhaps ill-advised, maybe even brilliant. His entire approach to life, work and social media in two sentences:
Morgan Housel, partner at the Collaborative Fund, tried to explain Musk’s behavior by comparing him to John Boyd, a legend of a fighter pilot who revolutionized his field, but didn’t make a lot of friends in the process. “Rude. Erratic. Disobedient. Impatient” — all words he used to describe Boyd.
“He talked back to superiors to the astonishment of his peers, and was once nearly court-martialed for setting ablaze hangars that didn’t have proper heating,” Housel wrote in his piece. “In meetings, he would chew calluses off his hands and spit the dead skin across the table.” Sounds kind of like the bizarre Tesla earnings call with analysts back in May.
Still, Boyd was too talented to keep down, as he rose through the ranks and eventually penned the definitive book on fighter maneuvers. “Throughout his career, no one knew what to do with him,” Housel said. “He pissed off a lot of people. He was unique in every way — good, bad, awful, and occasionally illegal.”
As for Musk...
“What kind of 32-year-old thinks they can take on GM GM, -1.61%, Ford F, -0.67% and NASA at the same time? A freakin’ maniac,” Housel explained. “The kind of person who thinks normal constraints don’t apply to them — not in an egotistical way, but in a genuine, believe-it-in-your-bones way.”
That brings us to a chart plucked from Brian Portnoy’s book, “The Geometry of Wealth,” which applies nicely to Musk and investors betting on his next move. Basically, the bigger the risk, the bigger the potential reward/downside. But, as you can see, Portnoy contends the relationship is not linear:
“Some people are natural maniacs,” Housel said. “You can’t ask for the maniac parts you like without realizing there are maniac parts that might backfire.”
We’ll see if Musk’s tweet ultimately backfires. As it stands now, even the Wall Street pros are scratching their heads. “Frankly, we’re as confused as anyone else,” Bernstein analysts wrote in a note.
The stock got a huge initial lift, but is drifting lower on Thursday after it came to light that regulators are taking a look at the tweet.
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The five main chemicals (JWH-018, JWH-073, JWH-200, CP-47,497 and cannabicyclohexanol) that are used to make synthetic marijuana products, have been put under extended emergency scheduling authority, to prohibit possession or selling of both the chemicals and the products that contain them. The additional authority will last for another six months and has been enacted by the DEA (United States Drug Enforcement Administration) as a follow up to emergency action taken a year ago, when an imminent risk to public health and safety was identified.
The action has been taken while legislation to permanently outlaw the products is being put in place by lawmakers. The DEA’s action has been published today, 1st March, 2012, in the Federal Register, and issues an alert to the public that these chemicals and their retail products will remain under Schedule 1 substance classification. Schedule 1 is reserved for the most dangerous drugs, which have the highest potential for abuse, and have no accepted medical use, even under supervision.
DEA Administrator Michele M. Leonhart clarified :
“We continue to address the problems of synthetic drug manufacturing, trafficking, and abuse. Our efforts have clearly shown that these chemicals present an imminent threat to public safety … This six month extension is critical and gives us the time necessary to conduct the administrative scheduling process for permanent control.”
The DEA continue in their announcement by stating that they have identified a tremendous increase in smoke-able, “legal” marijuana imitating products, that recreate the effects of the active ingredient in pot called THC. The brands have been marketed under names such as “Spice,” “K2,” “Blaze,” and “Red X Dawn” with labeling suggesting they are herbal incense, largely as a cover for their intended purpose.
The products are effectively just an inert plant ingredient that has been coated with research chemicals. They have been sold widely in “head shops” as well as over the internet. The FDA shares its concern with the DEA, as there is absolutely no oversight, regulation or quality control of the manufacturing process, thus consumers have no way to assess the purity or safety of what they are purchasing.
Since the products became popular in 2009, there have been a number of reports from hospitals and law enforcement agencies. The Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 amended the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) to allow the DEA Administrator to place a substance temporarily in Schedule I when it is necessary to avoid an imminent hazard to the public safety.
Emergency rooms have reported side effects ranging from convulsions and anxiety attacks to dangerously elevated heart rates, increased blood pressure, vomiting, and disorientation. Nonetheless, it is a fact that in recent years there has been far more abuse, addiction and accidental death from available prescription drugs, than there are from any of the so called street drugs that are so aggressively demonized and controlled.
Written by Rupert Shepherd
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referee, and he won the All Japan Judo Tournaments in 1951 and 1954. He had been a ninth dan since 1992.
Ichiro Abe — Mr. Abe was international chairperson of the All Nippon Judo Federation. Mr. Abe is head of the Promotions Panel at the Kodokan, and also head of the International Division. He has travelled extensively in Europe, and is a former national coach of Belgium.
Yoshimi Osawa — An international referee for many years, Mr. Osawa won the Fukuoka tournament in 1948. Osawa was a fabulous technician, in the eyes of some, the best ever. Despite being a lightweight, he was considered a true threat to win the All-Japan championships.
1933 photo of Jigoro Kano (center) with 10th dans Kunisaburo Iizuka (front row second from left), Hajime Isogai (rear left), Hidekazu Nagaoka (rear row second from left), and Yoshitsugu (Yoshiaki) Yamashita (rear row second from right). Kodokan 10th Dans in order of their promotion date: Yamashita, Yoshitugu (1865-1935) Promoted 10th Dan 1935
Isogai, Hajime (1871-1947) Promoted 10th Dan 1937
Nagaoka, Hidekazu (1876-1952) Promoted 10th Dan 1937
Mifune, Kyuzo (1883-1965) Promoted 10th Dan 1945
Iizuka, Kunisaburo (1875-1958) Promoted 10th Dan 1946
Samura, Kaichiro (1880-1964) Promoted 10th Dan 1948
Tabata, Shotaro (1884-1950) Promoted 10th Dan 1948
Okano, Kotaro (1885-1967) Promoted 10th Dan 1967
Shoriki, Matsutaro (1885-1969) Promoted 10th Dan 1969
Nakano, Shozo (1888-1977) Promoted 10th Dan 1977
Kurihara, Tamio (1896-1979) Promoted 10th Dan 1979
Kotani, Sumiyuki (1903-1991) Promoted 10th Dan 1984
Daigo, Toshiro (1926- ), Promoted 10th Dan 2006
Abe, Ichiro, Promoted 10th Dan 2006
Osawa, Yoshimi, Promoted 10th Dan 2006 Note: in addition to these Kodokan 10th dans the International Judo Federation promoted Anton Geesink (NED) and Charles Palmer (UK) to 10th dan in 1997. Some countries have also made promotions to 10th dan, such as Henri Courtine in France in 2007, and Jaap Nauwelaerts de Agé in Holland in 2008.
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It was an exciting panel as some favorite Hanna-Barbera characters made their appearance at Emerald City Comicon! The contemporary updates to some of the Hanna-Barbera classics was announced late January, and these true fans got a chance to see and hear all about it!
Moderated by DC Co-publisher Dan DiDio, writers Jeff Parker and Mark Russell joined the panel to discuss the upcoming series! The panelists were thrilled to show various covers and snippets from each of the future titles: Future Quest, Scooby Apocalypse, The Flintstones and Wacky Raceland!
First to be released on May 18, Future Quest features stories about the teenage adventurer Jonny Quest from Jeff Parker and DC Exclusive artist Evan “Doc” Shaner. Fans got a chance to see the action packed cover from “Doc”, variants by Steve Rude, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Aaron Lopresti, a glance at “Team Quest”, as well as learn all the fun ins and out of the story lines from Jeff himself!
Scooby Apocalypse, set to be released on May 25, is all monsters and mayhem as the room got a glimpse of the cover from Jim Lee, along with some really cool variant covers from Howard Porter, Neal Adams, Dan Panosian, Joelle Jones and Ben Caldwell, and a peek of some interior pages of Scooby and the gang from co-writers Keith Giffen and JM Dematteis and artist Howard Porter.
The crowd also got to take a look at The Flintstones, coming July 6th, including covers and a look at our favorite families the Flinstones and the Rubbles, as well as Wacky Raceland, including covers and some amazing looks at Penelope Pitstop in the Compact Pusscat!
Mark Russel said that the satire in The Flintstones is part 'where did the world go wrong' and part 'bird enslavement.' Pebbles ad Bamm-Bamm will be 'tweens and Barney and Fred's involvement in the Order of the Water Buffalo will be explained.
Jeff Parker said that Johnny and Team Quest are going to have fantastic adventures. He knows it's a daunting task to tie all the characters together into one shared universe, but he's up to it. And since "Doc" wants to draw dinosaurs, Dino-Boy will make an appearance.
If you weren’t in attendance to the panel, you can see for yourself what the buzz is all about in the gallery above!
For more, download the DC All Access mobile app on Apple’s App Store or the Google Play store to stay up to speed on everything DC, including upcoming convention signings, panels and stage events!
Web: http://www.dcallaccess.com
iOS: http://apple.co/1LdAO3H
Android: http://bit.ly/1S2iKLB
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BERLIN (Reuters) - General Electric GE.N will not abandon its high-tech strategy under its new chief executive even if the transition to digital equipment proves "uncomfortable" for many of its customers, senior managers said on Tuesday.
General Electric Co's incoming chief executive John Flannery is shown in this undated handout photo provided June 12, 2107. Courtesy General Electric/Handout via REUTERS
“There is no plan B. We’re not going back,” Ganesh Bell, chief digital officer of GE Power, the group’s largest industrial business, told Reuters on the sidelines of a Berlin conference to promote its digital products.
Bell was speaking a day after GE named insider John Flannery as its next CEO, taking over from long-serving Jeff Immelt, who reshaped the company to sharpen its focus on technology but failed to deliver profit growth fast enough for some investors.
Flannery said on Monday that he will conduct a swift review of the conglomerate’s business portfolio with “no constraint”, but that digital efforts will be at the heart of its strategy.
Bell said that all of GE’s senior managers, including Flannery, are “believers big time” in Immelt’s push to invest billions of dollars to build a digital business that marries electronic sensors and analytic computing with industrial equipment.
“Investors are starting to get the story. What they haven’t grasped fully is that it is not just about making existing business more efficient but about a whole new franchise,” he said.
Beth Comstock, who runs the innovations unit at the maker of jet engines and power plants, noted that Flannery was part of the strategy team that drove the digital push and had seen positive results in his own healthcare unit.
“You don’t go digital at your own peril,” she said.
Immelt had been due to speak at the Berlin conference, but pulled out after Monday’ announcement, leaving Comstock to speak in his place.
Comstock admitted that it can be difficult to persuade GE customers of the need to digitize, even though 50 billion machines are expected to have online connectivity by 2020.
“The more we can show how we have digitized, the more likely they are to try it,” she said. “They want examples of others that have done it.”
Comstock said that such initiatives represent a huge opportunity for GE, with only 30 percent of European companies currently analyzing data from their industrial equipment to inform decisions.
She cited the example of DB Cargo, the logistics arm of the German railways company, which she said had improved fleet reliability since adopting GE’s software on its locomotives.
“We have to accept that the old is going away and the new has not yet fully emerged,” she said.
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Last updated on: February 03, 2014 14:31 IST
As over 300,000 security personnel are needed for the upcoming general elections, Home Ministry sources tell Vicky Nanjappa it would be virtually impossible to guard the numerous stadia during the IPL’s seventh edition.
With the schedule of the Indian Premier League clashing with the 2014 general elections, the seventh edition of the popular Twenty20 tournament could be shifted to Sri Lanka.
The elections are scheduled for mid-April around the same time the IPL starts.
Claiming heightened security risk during the upcoming elections, the Home Ministry is likely to ask the Board of Control for Cricket in India to have the matches played outside the country, as was done for the second edition in 2009, when it was moved to South Africa.
In view of these claims, the BCCI is contemplating playing the first half of the tournament in Sri Lanka.
Home Ministry officials, who are in touch with the BCCI, have stated that with higher earnings expected from the matches played in India, the second half of the IPL can be played at home.
In 2009, after a major clash with the Home Ministry, the BCCI shifted the IPL to South Africa and the entire tournament was played there.
The idea of playing only the first few matches abroad was part of discussions in the BCCI's Working Committee meeting.
The proposals to this effect have been shared with the Home Ministry and Intelligence Bureau. The Home Ministry is considering the proposal and will take a final call depending on future Intelligence inputs.
Sources in the Home Ministry and Intelligence Bureau told Rediff.com that the possibility of a terror strike appears much higher this year.
“After the 26/11 attack we needed to be cautious, but the perception of threat was lower since terrorist groups from Pakistan are not known to carry out back-to-back attacks, especially after an attack of such a large scale. The threat at that time was more from internal groups,” IB officials pointed out.
However, over the last seven to eight months, there are credible intelligence reports about the possibility of a major attack, by two groups from Pakistan and two from India, during the elections.
Narendra Modi rallies and campaign trails are extremely high on the radar of a possible attack.
With the elections a priority, the Home Ministry has made it clear that it would be impossible to provide a large security contingent for the IPL.
The elections need over 300,000 security personnel and it would be virtually impossible to guard the numerous stadiums at that time, a Home Ministry source pointed out.
“We are analysing the situation and will convey the same to the BCCI, who have to have a second plan ready,” the official added.
The BCCI is also holding discussions with other cricket boards on this issue and will finalise things only once the notification for the pools is issued by the Election Commission.
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Motorcycling and fashion have been holding hands for quite some time now. Fashion houses are commissioning builds and using motorcycles in their marketing. And conversely, custom shops are turning to merchandise to help grow their brands.
Somewhere in the middle you’ll find Gentlemen’s Factory. Based in an old factory in Lille, France, it’s an apparel and dry goods producer now applying its aesthetic to bikes. And judging by this Kawasaki W650, they’re doing it right.
“Gentlemen’s Factory is more than a clothing brand for those who love motorbikes,” says co-founder Laurent Savone. “It’s a fellowship of men who live and breathe a passion for motorbikes each and every day.”
“We used to do design and photography work for other brands,” he continues. “So our studio quickly turned into a place for all kinds of creations. We customize motorbikes, fixies and skateboards.”
Gentlemen’s Factory has already rolled out four builds—and this folksy Kawasaki W650 is the latest. It was built in collaboration with Comete Motorcycles, who have just set up shop in the same premises.
“We wanted to create a simple and agile custom,” explains Laurent, “as light as a BMX, and which could be used in town or on a speedway track.”
The W650 certainly appears more svelte now, thanks in part to its new fuel tank. It’s a Suzuki VanVan unit, adorned with an eye-catching illustration hand-painted by Laurent’s business partner Bruno Allard. Flowing off it is a slim, full-length leather seat—designed by Laurent and executed by Comete.
Tossing the stock side covers, battery and air boxes has shed more visual weight. The bike now runs on K&N filters and the carbs have been upgraded with a Dynojet jet kit. The electronics—along with small Lithium-ion battery—are housed in a discreet, custom-made battery box under the seat.
The rest of the Kawasaki W650 has benefited from simple changes: There’s a pair of Progressive Suspension shocks (taken from a Harley-Davidson Sportster), blacked-out reverse cone mufflers and a set of Dunlop Trailmax tires. The rear fender is a modified Harley item, and the lighting is all from the Wrenchmonkees online store.
It’s an uncomplicated, slightly kooky build—and we dig it. Perfect for hopping curbs all day, or tearing up a dirt track without the fear of binning it. We’re looking forward to more from these gentlemen.
Gentlemen’s Factory website | Facebook
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In the past few weeks, numerous instances of discrimination or outright violence against atheists have shocked nontheists around the world. While groups like the International Humanist and Ethical Union have reported for years on the increasing trend of hatred and oppression experienced by atheists (IHEU through their Freedom of Thought Report), much of the world is just now learning about it because of recent media reporting on the hardships faced by nonbelievers globally.
The most recent instance of discrimination, in which Turkey’s first official atheist group had their website taken down after a court ruling, deemed it an “insult to religious values,” is a continuation of this trend. The Turkish organization, called the Atheism Association, responded to the ruling by stating:
Three months ago, the European Space Agency managed to put Philae on a one-km wide comet named 67P, which has a speed of 135,00p km/h, after a 3,907-day-long journey to a location 500 million km away. Meanwhile, courts in Turkey are still busy blocking websites, citing laws with vague expressions and trying to make a certain belief dominate the others.
While the Turkish case was thankfully a case of nonviolent discrimination, other nontheists have not been so lucky. A few weeks before, American citizen and prominent atheist blogger Avijit Roy was murdered in his native Bangladesh while returning from a book fair with his wife. Roy was hacked to death on a public street, while his wife lost a finger and was taken to the hospital.
In response to this public murder, the American Humanist Association sent a letter to US Senators and Representatives, demanding hearings on the global persecution of nonbelievers by religious extremists. In addition, the AHA is working with other nonreligious and religious groups to hold a congressional briefing on religious persecution faced by religious minorities and nontheists so as to educate congressional staffers about the issue.
Congress has a unique role to play in this situation, which could save countless atheists from needless discrimination and even death. By holding a hearing on this issue, Congress would show to countries around the world that the basic right to religious freedom is a top priority of the American people. This would have an impact on the numerous countries that receive US aid, which happens to include the majority of the countries in which atheists are discriminated against, as these countries recognize that our aid is conditional on the support of the American people. Congress could also pass resolutions calling on these countries to deal with their unjust laws against atheists or that direct the US State Department to focus more closely on the issue in their international work.
Discrimination against atheists solely due to their nontheistic beliefs can take many forms, from nonviolent social discrimination to abusive government oppression, but all these different forms of discrimination have the same effect: they intimidate many nontheists into silence for fear of reprisals. Congress must take the lead and show the world that such actions are unacceptable and will be firmly opposed by Americans of all religious beliefs and of none.
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REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGE
HYDERABAD: Doctors and paramedics in Larkana reacted with protests and boycott on Friday to the nomination of two female doctors in the rape and murder FIR of 10-year-old Zara Mangi. Dr Naila Bhutto and Dr Afsheen Bhutto, who conducted the medical examination of Mangi, who was killed on July 24, have been booked under Section 201 of the Pakistan Penal Code, which pertains to causing disappearance of evidence.
Their names were added to the FIR on the report of the joint-investigation team (JIT) and a renewed postmortem after the exhumation of Mangi's body earlier this month revealed different findings from the earlier examination. "A false and baseless allegation has been levelled against us," claimed Dr Naila at a sit-in protest at the Naudero government hospital.
She said she and Dr Afsheen had honestly conducted Mangi's postmortem and recorded their findings in the report. She said they were asked to find the cause of death which they stated in their report as strangulation with a rope. "To establish rape we sent the samples to the laboratory and until the lab report didn't establish rape, we couldn't have stated that in our report."
Dr Afsheen said they have evidence to prove their innocence. She said that they had met Larkana DIG Irfan Baloch who asked them to appear before the JIT next week. "The DIG insulted us by keeping us waiting for four hours." She argued that the police should have conducted an inquiry through the office of the health director-general prior to nominating them in the FIR.
"We are witnesses of Zara Mangi's murder. Without our statement her murderers can't get punishment." She claimed that after initial examination of the body she told an uncle of Mangi that the child was raped before murder.
The doctors maintained that the professor who exhumed the dead body and later claimed that their report did not mention fractures in Mangi's head and arm did not conduct scanning of the corpse. "When we knew the cause of murder after the postmortem then why was it necessary to further cut the body into pieces?" asked Dr Afsheen.
They said the DIG suspended the SHO for negligence but did not nominate him in the FIR unlike them.
Mangi left home on July 24 to buy milk from the home of the accused 13 year-old Shiraz Morio but she did not return home. Her dead body was later found from an orchard after hours-long search. The police arrested two more suspects, Abdul Hafeez Morio and Mumtaz Soomro alias Don, on August 7 besides Morio.
Medical Superintendent Dr Imdad Ghangro and other senior doctors of the hospital also joined the sit-in protest.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 25th, 2019.
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GDANSK, Poland (Reuters) - Carrying flags and candles in cold streets, thousands of Poles walked on Friday beside the coffin of Gdansk’s former mayor Pawel Adamowicz who was stabbed on stage at a charity event.
Slideshow ( 4 images )
The murder of a liberal critic of the ruling party’s anti-immigrant policies highlighted the charged atmosphere in parts of eastern Europe where populist leaders have fanned nationalist sentiment.
A car drove Adamowicz’s corpse slowly through the Baltic coast city from the museum of the Solidarity movement that helped to bring down communism in Poland 30 years ago.
From there, it passed schools, monuments and other places significant in 53-year-old Adamowicz’s life, en route to the city’s main church, St Mary’s Basilica, for burial on Saturday.
The streets, in some places covered with thin snow, were blocked, as crowds paid tribute to one of Poland’s longest-serving mayors who ran the city since 1998 and beat the candidate of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in October.
“We all feel great emptiness after the mayor has gone, mostly because he left in such a way, such a town, such a moment. I think that a certain stage of history, of humanity, is over,” said mourner Ewa Wasinska-Stelter, 46, a teacher.
Adamowicz was attacked on stage during one of Poland’s biggest annual charity events and died the following day.
Polish authorities have arrested a 27-year-old former convict, named only as Stefan W., over the killing. Speaking on stage, the attacker accused the mayor’s former party of putting him in prison, where he said he was tortured.
He was freed last month after serving 5-1/2 years for attempted bank robbery.
Authorities have also detained at least 10 people in recent days over calls on social media to murder and other acts of aggression in the wake of Adamowicz’s death.
Critics blame Poland’s politicians for cranking up hate speech in public life.
Adamowicz was one of 11 Polish mayors targeted with fake death certificates by a far-right group called All-Polish Youth in 2017, after signing a declaration to welcome refugees in opposition to government policy.
Support for the conservative PiS fell to 30 percent in the wake of Adamowicz’s death, according to a poll conducted by Kantar Millward Brown for Gazeta Wyborcza daily, from 33 percent in November. The biggest opposition grouping Koalicja Obywatelska has 25 percent.
As well as encouraging migrants to seek refuge in Gdansk, Adamowicz was known for backing a campaign to defend rule of law against what activists consider efforts by the PiS to increase political control over the judiciary and other bodies.
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Stephen A. Smith doesn't understand why people are saying Packers QB Aaron Rodgers has just as much to prove as new head coach Matt LaFleur this season. (2:00)
Aaron Rodgers was supposed to make his debut in the Green Bay Packers' new offense under first-year coach Matt LaFleur on Thursday against the Baltimore Ravens, but the team pulled the plug shortly before kickoff.
The Packers announced Rodgers, 35, would not play because of back tightness. They called the move "precautionary."
LaFleur said after the Packers' 26-13 road loss that he has no long-term concerns about Rodgers. However, he did not say for certain whether Rodgers would play in either of the remaining preseason games.
"I think we'd like to see him, but you're talking about a veteran quarterback that's played a lot of football," LaFleur said. "I don't think it's a necessity, but it's certainly something we'd like to see."
Rodgers had participated in all 14 of the Packers' training camp practices but did not play in last week's preseason opener against the Houston Texans.
When asked this week what he hoped to get out of his action against the Ravens, Rodgers said: "Healthy. Efficiency. Communication sorted out the right way with the plays. Coming in and then the delivery to the line and the adjustments within the plays, obviously be efficient."
Rodgers had said earlier in training camp that he expected to play both against the Ravens and in next week's penultimate preseason game against the Raiders in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It could mean Rodgers will play more than expected against Oakland, but the stadium in Winnipeg has never hosted an NFL game, so the Packers will want to make sure the field is up to standard before they put Rodgers on it.
Rodgers has not played in a preseason finale since 2012.
LaFleur said he did not play Rodgers and most of the starters last week against Houston because he "didn't want to put them at risk."
Rodgers has no known history of back injuries, but he's coming off a season in which he played most of the schedule with a sprained knee and a tibial plateau fracture. He also suffered a concussion, the third known one of his NFL career, in the regular-season finale.
Rodgers played only seven snaps of all last preseason. The thinking this summer was he needed reps because LaFleur is installing a new offense, but the Packers felt it wasn't worth exposing Rodgers to any further issues.
When asked this week if he holds his breath every time Rodgers takes the field in the preseason, general manager Brian Gutekunst said: "There's a lot of holding breath during the preseason."
The Packers are still trying to determine the backup job behind Rodgers, and it has been a close competition between DeShone Kizer and Tim Boyle, with some intrigue from undrafted rookie Manny Wilkins.
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