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Ten years ago today Hurricane #Ike sent a massive storm surge tide into Galveston and Trinity Bays. This is all that remained of KC Duff's home in the devastated community of #OakIsland, TX.https://t.co/utEQ3GK5MT pic.twitter.com/VnTEjCkGLd — Travis Herzog (@TravisABC13) September 13, 2018
An open tweet to coastal residents of the Carolinas:
10 years ago today, we took a hit from category 2 #Ike. Like #Florence, it was a large hurricane with peak winds of 110 mph. These before/after photos show what the 15-20' storm surge did to our coast.https://t.co/B0byHwOxsO pic.twitter.com/6yEPs1gI0F — Travis Herzog (@TravisABC13) September 13, 2018
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) -- As Texas keeps a close eye on the tropical disturbance in the Gulf and Hurricane Florence arrives in the Carolinas, we're also remembering Hurricane Ike.Thursday marks 10 years since the storm ravaged Galveston Island."Woke up about four in the morning, went outside and as you said, saw the flooding and it hadn't rained yet," Will Wright, Chief Creative Officer of the Galveston Historical Foundation, said.Wright had planned to ride out the storm, but that changed on the morning before landfall."Made the decision to leave that morning and was really glad I did. I sure did not want to be someone who was stuck, putting someone else in jeopardy to try to help me," Wright recalled.Ten years later, many of the homes and businesses on Galveston Island have been elevated to protect them from rising water.The storm did not wipe out the island, but it caused billions of dollars in damage."Had about 12 feet of water where I lived, lost everything, which was very common for everyone who lived in that area," Wright said.Now another storm is brewing in the Gulf. It has a 50 percent chance of forming into a tropical depression before moving over Texas Friday. So far, there are no plans to activate the Galveston County Office of Emergency Management."They are going to fly the system later this afternoon to see if they can find a center, but to be quite honest for us in this area, the impacts are going to be the same and that is just some periods of heavy rainfall," said Molly Merrifield with the National Weather Service.A Flash Flood Watch is in effect for the coastal counties until 7 p.m. Thursday. | 4,400 |
other limits on the system. They don't consider that the difference between heroic take-this-world-and-shove-it Dagny and stay-and-work-his-ass-off Eddie isn't ability, it's opportunity.
That's really what this election comes down to: those who are trying to pry the door of opportunity open wide vs. those who are trying to weld it in place. Those who think there's worth in every person vs. those who think there's worth in every Cayman Islands account. That's been true for a long time, of course. Making sure that women have opportunities, that minorities have opportunities, that people whose personal lives don't match a 50s sitcoms have opportunities–Democrats have been fighting that battle against Republicans for years. The difference now is simply one of degree.
Ayn Rand was wrong. The titans of industry stir the cup for a moment, but ultimately they all do leave, mostly by taking the same unglamorous exit that we all must file through eventually. Their fire goes out of the world—but the world does not go dark.
It doesn't go dark because the bounding factors on the system are not ambition and certainly not the willingness to work hard. We're blessed with those in abundance. The limiting factor has always been opportunity. It still is. Reducing the tax rate on the rich has played a large role in reducing opportunity. Reversing that trend will help bring it back. So will providing working people benefits that keep them from being bound to employers who dictate far more than the numbers on their paycheck.
Want to know what the wonderland of Galt's Gulch would look like? It could look like any interchange along interstate 70. You know the place. Massive big box stores merging cheap clothes and cheaper groceries, a pair of interchangeable hardware giants, two nearly identical office supply stores, two nearly identical steak houses, office supply stories, pet stores, along with a cadre of gas stations and an attendant flock of fast food joints. That's what the "Promethean Spark" of capitalism has brought us in the twenty-first century: endless rows of stores with all the soul of a styrofoam peanut and the warmth of a packing container.
But the truth is, Galt's Gulch really would be a paradise of sorts. All natural. Because in Galt's Gulch, all the people who can build, feed, and clothe the select would be excluded. Nobody to build all those stores, much less stock the shelves. Things there would get very quiet, very fast. Galt's Gulch? More like Galt's Graveyard. | 4,401 |
If a new research is anything to go by, automobile owners around the world may some day soon be driving on tires that are partly made out of trees, which could cost less, perform better and save on fuel and energy.
In the research, wood science researchers at Oregon State University (OSU), US, made some surprising findings about the potential of microcrystalline cellulose – a product that can be made easily from almost any type of plant fibres – to partially replace silica as, a reinforcing filler in the manufacture of rubber tires. A new study suggests that this approach might decrease the energy required to produce the tire, reduce costs, and better resist heat build up.
Early tests indicate that such products would have comparable traction on cold or wet pavement, be just as strong, and provide even higher fuel efficiency than traditional tires in hot weather.
“We were surprised at how favourable the results were for the use of this material,” said Kaichang Li, an associate professor of wood science and engineering in the OSU College of Forestry, who conducted this research with graduate student Wen Bai.
“This could lead to a new generation ofautomotive tire technology, one of the first fundamental changes to come around in a long time,” Li said.
Cellulose fibre has been used for some time as reinforcement in some types of rubber and automotive products, such as belts, hoses and insulation – but never in tires, where the preferred fillers are carbon black and silica.
Carbon black, however, is made from increasingly expensive oil, and the processing of silica is energy-intensive.
Both products are very dense and reduce the fuel efficiency of automobiles.
In the search for new types of reinforcing fillers that are inexpensive, easily available, light and renewable, OSU experts turned to microcrystalline cellulose – a micrometer-sized type of crystalline cellulose with an extremely well-organized structure.
It is produced in a low-cost process of acid hydrolysis using nature’s most abundant and sustainable natural polymer – cellulose – that comprises about 40-50 percent of wood.
In this study, OSU researchers replaced up to about 12 percent of the silica used in conventional tire manufacture.
This decreased the amount of energy needed to compound the rubber composite, improved the heat resistance of the product, and retained tensile strength.
At high temperatures such as in summer, the partial replacement of silica decreased the rolling resistance of the product, which would improve fuel efficiency of rubber tires made with the new approach.
Via The Times Of India | 4,402 |
played 17 games and averaged 26.9 possessions in 2013. Brett Deledio has been hot and cold this year, either taking the game by the scruff of the neck or being tagged out of the contest. Likewise, Dustin Martin has played some superb games but is not expected to poll consistently. Expect the evenness of Richmond's midfield to be reflected in votes also being shared among Brandon Ellis, Daniel Jackson and Reece Conca. - Nathan Schmook
ST KILDA: Leigh Montagna Leigh Montagna and Jack Steven have had solid years while David Armitage started the season well and could poll votes in rounds one and three, where he had 25 and 31 disposals respectively. Then there's Nick Riewoldt, who had a solid month towards the mid-part of the season and could very well sneak ahead with impressive displays in rounds six, seven and nine in particular. But it's likely to be Montagna who polls the most with a spate of handy performances in the second half of the season, including his 35 disposals against Melbourne in round 13. - Jennifer Phelan
SYDNEY SWANS: Kieren Jack
- James Dampney During the opening half of the season, Swans midfielder Dan Hannebery was being discussed as possibly the biggest challenger to Gary Ablett. But Jack has now gone past his great mate. No less than 12 times in 18 games Jack has scored better than 100 Dream Team points and his all-round ability will catch the eye of the umpires. Jack is leading the AFL Coaches' Association champion player award, having averaged 26 disposals, a team-high 7.2 tackles and one goal per contest. Some of his possible three-vote games include 32 touches and a goal against Adelaide in round 11 and a stunning 30-disposal, two-goal and career-best 13-tackle effort against the Bulldogs last week.
Is Sydney Swans midfielder Kieren Jack the biggest challenger to Gary Ablett? Picture: AFL Media
WEST COAST: Matt Priddis
It will be a tight, low-scoring race between Priddis, Scott Selwood and Luke Shuey for the highest polling Eagle but Priddis has played four more matches than Selwood to date and five more than Shuey. The 2006 Sandover medallist has polled 62 career votes and polled 19 in 2011 when he averaged 26 disposals. He's averaged 24 this season. Priddis gathered 33 touches in wins versus Adelaide and Melbourne and should poll three votes against St Kilda for 27 and two goals. - Alex Malcolm
| 4,403 |
The Los Angeles Dodgers on Friday asked a federal bankruptcy judge to reject all claims for damages filed by San Francisco Giants fan Bryan Stow over his severe beating in a Dodger Stadium parking lot on Opening Day of the 2011 season.
Attorneys for the team and its owner, Frank McCourt, argued that none of the entities in the baseball club’s corporate structure have any liability for the March 31 assault that left Stow in a coma for months.
Stow sued the Dodgers in May, alleging negligence and poor security arrangements at the ballpark.
Louis Sanchez and Marvin Norwood were arrested in July and charged with assault and mayhem. They have pleaded not guilty and are awaiting trial.
In August, the Dodgers and McCourt asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross to dismiss the claims brought by Stow’s minor children, Tyler and Tabitha, as well as the beating victim’s contention, which they claim is false, that half-price beer had been offered at the stadium that day and contributed to unruly behavior that pitted Dodgers fans against Stow.
FOR THE RECORD:
The motion in August was not filed before Judge Gross in Bankruptcy Court; it was filed in federal court before another judge.
The team also asked that Stow’s references in his lawsuit to McCourt’s wealth and lifestyle be deleted as irrelevant. Stow’s lawsuit alleged that the outlays of money exposed during McCourt’s bitter divorce from his wife, Jamie, led the team to cut back on security staff.
McCourt, who bought the team in 2004 under a highly leveraged financing arrangement, declared the team in bankruptcy in June and recently disclosed that the team has amassed $573 million in debt.
The 44-page motion filed Friday asks the bankruptcy court in Delaware to reject all of Stow’s claims for damages, arguing that he can’t prove a connection between the alleged security lapses and his beating.
“The Dodgers had no knowledge of any inappropriate conduct by Stow’s assailants prior to the time that Stow sustained his injuries and, as a matter of law, are not liable for failure to anticipate criminal acts of third parties,” the team said Friday.
Stow’s lawyers estimated his medical care for the brain injuries and other long-term effects from the beating will cost $50 million.
The Delaware court has been overseeing the team’s pending sale, proceeds of which are expected to be used to pay down the debt.
[email protected] | 4,404 |
Babachir Lawal removed from office after allegations that humanitarian aid was illegally diverted to companies he set up
This article is more than 2 years old
This article is more than 2 years old
Nigeria’s highest ranking civil servant has been sacked by President Muhammadu Buhari following allegations that he diverted aid funds intended for the humanitarian crisis in the country’s north-east.
Babachir Lawal, secretary to the government of the federation, was suspended in April amid allegations that contracts to administer projects in refugee camps and areas affected by the Boko Haram insurgency had been awarded to companies that he set up.
'A lot of people have a lot to lose': Nigeria launches website to combat corruption Read more
A preliminary report by the Nigerian senate alleged that funds intended to cover the cutting of weeds to prevent flooding in refugee camps and other vulnerable areas had been diverted through companies set up by Lawal.
An internal investigation led by the vice-president, Yemi Osinbajo, recommended the immediate dismissal of Lawal. The report on that investigation, which was submitted to Buhari in August, has still not been released.
Femi Adesina, the president’s spokesperson, said Lawal had been replaced following the internal investigation.
“Everything that the president ought to have done as regards the matter has been done already as per our statement,” said Adesina, who did not indicate whether Lawal would face criminal charges or whether the internal report would be released.
Lawal’s alleged actions have exacerbated concern in Nigeria, where a UN appeal for $1.05bn (£794m) to provide humanitarian aid to more than 6.9 million people had only been 64% fulfilled by the end of September.
Lawal is the latest casualty of a sweeping anti-corruption campaign that critics in Nigeria claim is partisan.
The Nigerian army’s recovery of north-eastern territories previously occupied by Islamist militants has left a humanitarian crisis that the UN has described as one of the worst in the world. Roughly 1.7 million people remain internally displaced and 5.2 million across the region are in critical need of food assistance.
The Nigerian government claimed in December that it had “technically defeated” Boko Haram, but attacks by the terrorist group have increased this year, killing hundreds of people. Buhari, who returned to Nigeria in August after months of medical leave for an undisclosed illness, has urged the military to step up operations against the terrorist group.
Babachir Lawal declined to comment on the allegations. | 4,405 |
What a neat Baking Partners challenge. I love baking bread and this one is from Valencia. Like 18th century Valencia or something along those lines. Pretty traditional to have it in the shape of a crescent moon. It looks like an anime kitty to me though. Can’t take me anywhere.
This bread has a soft crumb, a firm crust from steaming and a classic bakery loaf taste. Aka, pretty darn tasty. While the bread is soft the dough should not be too soft, it’s a bit rough to work with. Don’t worry, it will all turn out. If it is too difficult don’t worry about it and add a bit of water.
Pataqueta Bread Print Recipe Pin Recipe Ingredients For the ferment 100 ml water
50 g 1/3 cup all purpose flour
2 tsp active dry yeast
1/2 teaspoon sugar Bread dough 450 g 3 cups strong bread flour
200 ml tepid water
10 g 1 3/4 tsp fine sea salt
all the ferment
a little flour for dusting the work surface and the bread. Instructions Ferment Stir the yeast into the water in your mixing bowl, then add the flour and sugar and mix well. Cover with plastic film.
Put into the fridge overnight or up to 48 hours. Bread dough Keeping the ferment in its bowl, add the rest of the ingredients except the salt, and mix together with your scraper.
When everything starts to come together into dough, turn it out onto your work surface (don’t flour it first).
Start to work the dough for about 10 minutes, then add the salt and continue kneading until smooth and elastic. Let the dough raise in a warm place until doubled in size.
Divide dough into 150 g pieces and then form the dough into small balls.
Flatten with the palm of the hand, putting more pressure on the edges of the dough and make a slit at the top of the round (12 o'clock). Pull apart gently to form some ears or a cresent shape.
Place them on a baking tray and cover them again with a kitchen cloth dusted with flour. Leave to rest until them double in size, for about 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 400º F
Make two cuts on the bottom before baking. Sprinkle a little fine flour using a sieve or strainer.
Bake with steam, 30 minutes, cool on a wire rack.
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(Visited 58 times, 1 visits today) | 4,406 |
Image via Shutterstock
Last week at PS 120 in Queens, New York, more than 100 children were forced to sit in a dark auditorium within earshot of the screams of glee of their fellow classmates who were enjoying an end-of-year carnival outside. It was during school hours. The price of admission was $10, and the kids whose parents couldn’t afford it didn’t get to attend.
From the NY Post:
Close to 900 kids went to the Queens schoolyard affair, with pre-K to fifth-grade classes taking turns, each spending 45 minutes outside. The kids enjoyed inflatable slides, a bouncing room and a twirly teacup ride. They devoured popcorn and flavored ices. DJs blasted party tunes.
Not the poor ones, though. They were shuttled into a dark auditorium to watch old Disney movies. “It’s breaking my heart that there are kids inside,” one teacher told the Post. She spoke of a seven-year-old who was crying hysterically because she was the only one in her class who couldn’t go. One of the children in the auditorium asked if they were being punished for something. The six and seven-year-olds simply didn’t understand why they couldn’t attend. The admission fee excluded the poorest students in the school — most from Chinese immigrant families.
The principal posted a tally in each classroom of who had paid and who hadn’t, and refused to bend admission rules because it wouldn’t be “fair” to those who paid. Teachers were also given a bag of stuffed animals to give to the kids whose families had paid for admission tickets, again excluding the kids whose families couldn’t afford it. One teacher actually withheld the gifts until she could buy more for the students who were excluded.
The school made a $3,000 profit on the event, so they clearly would not have lost money had they let the kids who didn’t pay attend. And really, what would the cost to the school be had they attended? Popcorn is dirt cheap.
An end-of-the-year party is meant to reward students. There’s nothing wrong with also raising money for the school, but not at the expense of the feelings of small children. This would be a totally different story had the event taken place on a weekend, but during school hours? Any principal who is not only comfortable excluding young kids — but insists on it — is not in the right line of work.
Related post: Just For The Poor Kids | 4,407 |
made quick banners or messages with things like 'Obama's killed Osama', 'We never forget' and 'We never lose'."
Ms Do says among the sea of American flags and other patriotic paraphernalia she noticed Obama 2008 election campaign T-shirts and even some Obama 2012 material.
She says while some parts of the crowd were celebrating with abandon - she could even smelt marijuana at one point - others were more circumspect about bin Laden's death.
"From a distance, and even if you are there, it does seem like a bit of a celebration... not everyone is viewing it like that," she said.
"There are obviously still sane and sober people there."
New York celebrates
In New York, where some 3,000 people died when Al Qaeda hijackers crashed two commercial airliners into the the Twin Towers, tourists and New Yorkers descended on Times Square as well as at Ground Zero.
"It's a miracle," said New Yorker Monica King, 22.
"The attacks changed New York and now 10 years later we had our last word. Now we want to celebrate."
Gary Talafuse, visiting from Texas, said Americans "feel a lot of national pride".
"This may not change anything in Al Qaeda tactics, but after billions of dollars invested, this is a big loss for Al Qaeda, and that brings some degree of reward to our efforts," the 32-year-old said.
Even the New York Police Department, usually low key, parked a car in the middle of Times Square and started talking to people, laughing and posing for photos.
In Los Angeles, where the news was confirmed shortly before 9:00pm (local time), a roar of applause could be heard from bars with TV screens on the Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.
"After so much time trying to get bin Laden this is a big surprise and amazing news," said Mick Pleasant, 26, at the Cabo Cantina bar.
"Terrorism is down, and Obama's speech was great."
"I'm really happy that this guy is dead because he killed so many people around the world. I'm glad that our nation is save because of this," said Cesar Guellory, 25.
Carol Morrison, 35, said she had voted for Mr Obama.
"He's showing us how strong he can be... Today we can say that we are safe. I'm proud of United States," she said.
Websites including Twitter and Facebook were also deluged with reaction to the Al Qaeda leader's death.
- ABC/AFP/Reuters | 4,408 |
Washingtom (CNN) -- Internet traffic from several U.S. government agency sites was briefly diverted through servers in China in April, congressional investigators reported Wednesday.
For 18 minutes, about 15 percent of all web traffic was redirected through China, including traffic to and from the sites of the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, the office of the Secretary of Defense, the Senate and NASA, according to a report delivered to Congress by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Investigators say the web traffic was diverted by China Telecom, a state-owned enterprise.
They do not know whether the diversion was intentional, whether the government of China played any role, or whether any sensitive data was compromised.
The report says that the irregular routing could have allowed the surveillance of users or sites, the disruption or diversion of communications and the compromising of supposedly secure encrypted sessions.
Cyber warfare, corporate espionage
Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Col. April Cunningham said the Defense Department "is concerned about any Internet traffic being intentionally rerouted outside of the usual operations." But, she said, "the security of Department of Defense information is not affected by misdirection of internet traffic." The Pentagon had no information to confirm whether the incident occurred, she said.
The Pentagon is in the process of establishing procedures "to address any potential current and future vulnerability," Cunningham told CNN.
Larry Wortzel, a member of the commission, said that given access to a stream of military traffic for 18 minutes, it might be possible "with really good computers" to get "a little information."
But another risk, he said, was that it could create an opening for spyware infiltration. "If you were a pretty knowledgeable intelligence service, you would get the internet addresses of everybody that communicated. And then you could essentially engineer a fake e-mail," he said, "and if someone opened an attachment, you would then insert a virus into the whole system."
The report alleges that the diversion was caused when China Telecom briefly offered a false electronic notification to internet traffic on the web, causing some traffic to mistakenly conclude that the quickest way to reach its destination was to travel through the company's servers in China.
A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington rejected the claim.
"The commission's specious and unwarranted allegations against China and its enterprises are irresponsible," said Wang Baodong. "China will never do anything to harm other countries' national security, either in real or virtual worlds."
He also pointed out that China Telecom, in a statement to Reuters, has denied any hijacking of internet traffic. | 4,409 |
The days of wrangling drew in President Clinton as a major mediator, and Israel was eventually forced to release Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and spiritual leader of the Hamas movement. Moreover, Mr. Netanyahu came under strong American pressure to release additional scores of Hamas prisoners because the King was threatening a total breach of relations, the closure of the Israeli Embassy and a public trial by military court of the two Israeli agents, according to participants in the negotiations.
''Did we get to the brink?'' said Crown Prince Hassan in an interview at the Royal Palace last Sunday. ''Yes, we got to the brink.''
The exact nature of the toxin used to attack Mr. Meshal, who now appears fully recovered, is a closely-guarded secret here and in Israel. But according to accounts by people closely involved in the subsequent arm-twisting, who insisted on anonymity, Israel eventually told Jordan that the assailants had used a high-tech and previously unknown delivery system to blast a fatal overdose of a synthetic opiate called Fentanyl through his skin.
The delivery system remains a mystery: Jordanian officials insist that no device was found, and diplomats were left to speculate that it was perhaps some form of miniaturized gas canister that the assailants abandoned in a getaway car whose driver sped off after the assailants jumped out. The drug is in wide use in anesthesiology, usually in small controlled doses to control pain. But it is said to be 50 to 100 times more powerful by weight than morphine and an overdose is usually fatal, according to doctors in Europe.
An Offer to Mediate And Then the Attack
According to those physicians, the drug can be given orally, by injection or through the skin in what is called transdermal delivery. The body metabolizes it quickly -- meaning that traces of it in Mr. Meshal would likely have dispersed rapidly.
Mr. Netanyahu is thought to have authorized the operation in reprisal for a Hamas suicide-bombing in Jerusalem on July 30 that killed 16 Israelis. His rationale was that, as an Israeli statement put it, Mr. Meshal was ''the pre-eminent figure in Hamas and responsible for the murder of innocent Israeli civilians.'' Yet, by many Jordanian and Western accounts, Mr. Meshal limits his activities to what a diplomat called low-level ''propaganda and rhetoric,'' and it is the Hamas military wing based in Damascus that is held responsible for planning suicide bombings.
The timing also seemed odd. Only two days before the attempt, Jordan transmitted to Israel what it described as an offer to mediate with Hamas for a moratorium on suicide bombings, according to diplomats and King Hussein himself in a speech last week. | 4,410 |
CVS Health and Walgreens were among the retail chains announcing Monday that they will expand free coronavirus testing offered through their stores.
CVS said that it will “offer self-swab tests to individuals meeting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention criteria" beginning in May. The drugstore chain has offered large-scale testing in five states since March, while the expanded self-swab testing will expand to as many as 1,000 locations — just over 10 percent of its stores — by the end of May, USA Today reported.
The company will allow patients to schedule tests online. The tests will be conducted in parking lots or drive-thru windows, with a goal of processing 1.5 million tests a month, according to the newspaper.
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"Employees participating in the test collection process will maintain safety using personal protective equipment and follow sanitization protocols after each test," CVS said in a statement.
Walgreens, meanwhile, announced it will establish free drive-thru nasal testing in 49 states and Puerto Rico, although it was unclear how many locations will offer tests. Once the program is fully up and running, the company has a target of testing more than 50,000 people a week, according to USA Today.
The chain will “focus its efforts on improving access to testing in underserved communities, and over time will also be working with companies to provide testing to employees, to help more businesses reopen in the weeks and months ahead,” Walgreens said.
Walmart, which began opening free drive-thru test sites in mid-March, plans an expansion to more than 100 by the end of May, allowing it to test 20,000 people per week. The company said it has tested nearly 13,000 people so far, USA Today noted.
Grocery chain Kroger will also expand drive-thru testing, offering the option at 50 locations across 12 states with a goal of 100,000 tests by late May, according to the newspaper.
Deborah Birx, coordinator for the White House's coronavirus task force, called the expansion of testing the kind of innovation that would be necessary to reach adequate testing capacity.
"I think we really understood that you've got to bring the tests to the community, whether it's drive-thru, whether it's walk-thru, the community has to feel like tests are available to them," she said on Fox News's "Fox & Friends" Tuesday. "So just having it at hospitals or clinics was not going to be enough. And so, that part of this is critically important to expand community testing." | 4,411 |
Preliminary measles surveillance data released by the World Health Organization (WHO) has revealed a stark surge in reported global cases over the first three months of 2019. The WHO data indicates measles cases are 300 percent higher than at the same time in 2018, with major outbreaks currently occurring in a dozen different countries.
The WHO report notes its data is still incomplete and provisional, estimating only around one in 10 measles cases are officially reported, suggesting the real numbers are most likely considerably higher. With data gathered from 170 countries, the report says there have been 112,163 cases of measles reported so far in 2019. At this same time last year the WHO had noted 28,124 measles cases from 163 countries.
The biggest increases are being reported in African regions with cases on the continent up 700 percent from 2018. Official measles outbreaks are currently underway in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and Sudan. More localized spikes are also ongoing in countries with traditionally higher vaccination coverage, such as the United States and Israel.
In an editorial published by CNN, Henrietta H Fore, executive director of UNICEF, and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, are frank in their description of this event as a "global measles crisis." As well as pointing to countries where weak health care and poverty underpin the rise in measles cases, Fore and Ghebreyesus squarely direct blame in high and middle income countries at the growing wave of vaccine hesitancy and spread of misinformation.
Earlier this month, New York health commissioner Oxiris Barbot declared a public health emergency following the largest measles outbreak in the city in almost 30 years. Across the entire United States measles is presenting as a looming health emergency with 555 cases already reported this year alone. In comparison, only 372 cases were reported across the whole of 2018. If this rate continues for the rest of the year 2019 will present the highest volume of measles cases seen in the country in decades.
Fore and Ghebreyesus suggest a multi-pronged offensive is the only way to push back against the reemergence of this stubborn killer virus. While the WHO is working to respond to current outbreaks and distribute vaccines in those areas where the virus may be accelerating its spread, the battle is only just beginning for health workers around the globe, and for those fighting the growth of vaccine misinformation.
"It requires each of us to stand up for science, for health and for the importance of vaccines," Fore and Ghebreyesus write. "It means building basic scientific literacy – ensuring people can interpret and understand information about their health and vaccines."
Source: WHO | 4,412 |
Kolkata: West Bengal Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday to discuss "internal issues" of the state, including the law and order situation. The meeting comes two days after clashes between TMC and BJP workers in Basirhat killed at least five people.
The Union home ministry had on Saturday night sought a report from the Bengal government on the violence in Basirhat after BJP national executive member Mukul Roy informed home minister Amit Shah about the clashes.
At least five people were reportedly killed in a clash between the BJP and TMC workers at Bhangipara in Basirhat. While police claimed that one Qayyum Mollah was killed, the BJP claimed that four of their supporters lost their lives in the violence.
Speaking to News18, a Raj Bhawan spokesperson said, “The governor requested for an appointment with our Prime Minister. The appointment was fixed on Monday and the meeting will start around noon. The Governor has already reached Delhi.”
Besides discussing "internal issues", Tripathi is likely to discuss the Sandeshkhali incident in North 24-Parganas where people from both the parties were killed and the general law and order situation across the state deteriorated.
On many occasions, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has accused the governor of siding with the BJP and had alleged that he is "acting like a BJP block President".
Banerjee and Tripathi have indulged in verbal duel on several occasions with the former accusing the governor of ‘threatening’ her over phone (after the Bashirhat communal clash in 2017).
“Today the Governor told me a lot of things. I am feeling insulted. The Governor’s is a constitutional post. I have come to power through the mandate of the people. I am not here at his mercy. He is speaking like a block president of the BJP. He has called and threatened me. He should not forgot that he is a nominated person,” Mamata had said.
Recently, the Trinamool Congress slammed PM Modi for calling West Bengal Governor Keshari Nath Tripathi instead of talking to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to inquire about the ground situation in the wake of cyclone Fani.
On Tripathi’s meeting with PM Modi, TMC secretary general and education minister Partha Chatterjee, said, “His days are over in Bengal. We are not giving much importance his meeting with PM Modi. But still I would like to request him to tell the central government about BJP’s atrocities and involvement in political killings in Bengal.” | 4,413 |
Canada's most innovative companies and entrepreneurs could be hurt if a CRTC decision to cap bandwidth for small providers stands, Industry Minister Tony Clement said Tuesday.
"We need to make sure government telecommunications policies encourage investment and competition, increase consumer choice, minimize regulation and allow market forces to prevail. These are our policies and this is our focus," Clement told the House of Commons Industry committee Tuesday afternoon.
The committee's looking at the CRTC's usage-based billing ruling, which would have allowed large telecommunications companies to cap the bandwidth smaller internet service providers could use without paying extra.
The regulator's move would have made it difficult for smaller ISPs to offer unlimited plans to their customers, some of whom are heavy uploaders and downloaders.
CRTC chairman Konrad Von Finckenstein announced the commission would take another look at the issue, but after public backlash Clement said flat-out the government would not accept usage-based billing.
Clement said the CRTC decision "is quite simply the wrong way to proceed, and inconsistent with good public policy."
He said the smaller ISPs must not be required to have the same pricing as the incumbent providers.
"If such a decision were allowed to stand, the effects are far-reaching, not only for consumers, but for entrepreneurs, creators, innovators and small businesses throughout the country," Clement said, adding usage-based billing threatens to choke off creative and innovative businesses.
Bell Canada, which has been fighting the independent ISPs, argues heavy users cause congestion at peak periods and should pay for the extra bandwidth they use.
But Clement says he's not convinced there is congestion caused by the six per cent of internet users who are heavy downloaders, or that charging for that use would ease congestion.
Jean-Francois Mezei, a heavy internet user who's closely following the issue, went to the meeting and approached Clement on his way out. He said he wants the government to issue an order-in-council rather than wait for the CRTC to come back with more recommendations.
"There's no legal document that says they've actually removed those decisions... What if there's an election?" Mezei said.
Clement says it would take six to eight months to do what Mezei is suggesting, and that it's "more streamlined" to have the CRTC review their decision.
Last year, Clement also overturned a decision by the CRTC that barred Globalive from entering the cellphone market. The Federal Court overturned that decision. An appeal is scheduled for May 18.
As part of the review, the commission will seek public comments until April 29. | 4,414 |
Maintaining Accurate Information
Compressed gas cylinders are used to store a wide range of chemical compounds at high pressure. Petrochemicals are among the most commonly stored substances, but many other types of gas may be stored in these cylinders. OSHA regulations require that gas cylinders must display clearly readable information regarding their contents and any health or safety hazards associated with those gases. Working with a metal fabrication company can allow you to stay on the right side of federal, state and local regulations while providing the required information for distributors and end users of your compressed gas cylinders. Here are some of the key features of neck rings for compressed gas cylinder systems.
Cylinder neck rings are designed to remain permanently attached just below the base of the valve and display the current or original owner’s name. In some cases, these rings are color-coded to indicate the contents of the cylinder; however, this practice is not in use industry-wide and is discouraged by some experts due to the risk of misidentification by less experienced consumers. When cylinders change hands, the neck ring should be updated to reflect the most current information. A full-service metal fabrication company can provide the updated neck rings necessary to ensure the highest degree of safety for consumers and end users.
Versatile Design Options for Compressed Gas Cylinder Neck Rings
These customized rings can be embossed with your company’s name or left plain. Coarse or fine thread sizes are available, and these items can be plated with zinc or powder coated as your needs require. Specialty neck rings are designed to fit medical equipment and other compressed gas setups and are available in a number of different configurations, including the following:
* Scalloped
* Skirtless
* Short skirt
Each of these options can be embossed or left plain. In some cases, it may be more practical to install a new neck ring over an existing one. By using a reliable adhesive and a customized neck ring sleeve, you can add your company name or remove an outdated one in just seconds. This can streamline your regulatory compliance routine while ensuring the highest degree of safety for your workers and for end users of your compressed gas cylinders.
C R Industries is a leading force for innovation in the metal fabrication marketplace and carries a wide range of top-quality cylinder neck rings and sleeves to help you keep your compressed gas cylinders compliant with all regulatory and corporate policies. By entrusting your metalworking projects to the experts at C R Industries, you can be sure that your parts and components will be fabricated quickly and to the precise specifications of your business, allowing you to enjoy added peace of mind regarding your most critical projects. | 4,415 |
The more complex question than how to get the right (read ‘hot’) person in life (read ‘bed’) is how to get him or her out of it. It’s a real nasty problem when an asshole or a bitch transforms into a leech and sucks the awesomeness out of your life. So, the question arises, how to kick blast them out of your kingdom? Guru Ghantal helps us mere souls by giving us the solution. He explains that there are two situations to go about it. One in which you care for the brainsucker (Fuck U!), and one in which you don’t (Cheers!).
1. Talk. Explain. And get out. Simple.
2. If you are too chicken and emotional to do step no.1 (DumbFuck!), just write it all on a cheap quality paper, using paper quality as a metaphor for the quality of your life with him/her. Please see that it will not send out a strong message if the letter is soiled with your dried tears (Wiener!).
3. If you can’t even do that (Coward!), it is with great remorse to inform you that you are incapable of breaking up. Go to hell.
4. Here’s where the fun starts. Call him/her over. Screw him/her one last time. Let it be wild and violent, like a punishment. Spank all over. When having post coital talk, take the coldest I-don’t-give-a-fuck tone and say it’s over. (BAM!)
5. Do a Mr.India. No replies to messages, calls etc. Just drop dead. Involve all your friends, common friends and ask them to give no information about your whereabouts. After a few days, send a message saying, ‘Got the hint asshole? Goodbye.’
6. Start spreading the word around that you are single. Let this reach him/her through right channels. When they call you to ask you what’s all this that I am hearing, take an apologetic tone and say, ‘Oh I am so sorry darling, I should have told you first. My bad.’
7. Send them a package with things gifted to you by him/her with a note saying, ‘I want all my stuff back, It was all really expensive unlike you.’
P.S: If any of the above mentioned step backfires, then please don’t bother to contact Guru Ghantal. Thanks!
| 4,416 |
the tablet.
Smaller tablets like the Nexus 7 and iPad mini change this equation. They're large enough to be good at tablet-y things, but small enough to ride shotgun in your laptop bag when you're on long trips. The Nexus 7 in particular has been a constant companion on the road in the last six months, primarily because it's a near-perfect e-reader while also being a pretty good device for checking e-mail, managing calendars, and doing general Web browsing. It would probably be hyperbole to say that tablets have changed my life, but the smaller ones at least have found a very comfortable niche in between my laptop and my smartphone that I'd hate to see unfilled.
Jonathan Gitlin, Contributing Writer:
I won't deny it—when Apple announced the iPod, and later the iPhone, I was a skeptic. I didn't see the point, and I didn't want to be the first on the block to own either of the shiny new gadgets. The iPad, though, was different. PDFs no longer needed printing out. It had the perfect form factor for reading comics. Ten-hour battery life meant that needing a laptop on a plane for entertainment was a thing of the past. Those first few months saw me use it for note-taking in meetings, a task made slightly harder due to the constant stream of questions from colleagues about the new device: "Is that an iPad?" "Can you really type on it?" "Are you from the future?" A work-issued MacBook Air means I don't use it for meetings as much anymore, although with double the battery life and built-in connectivity thanks to LTE, I still break out the iPad from time to time.
Primarily though, it's a content consumption device for me. It keeps me occupied on my daily WMATA commute, and it streams familiar NPR stations in unfamiliar hotels. A transition to digital magazines means I no longer need to wait five or six weeks to get the most recent issue from the UK, and the only physical books I buy any more are coffee table sized. An upgrade to an iPad 3, with its retina display, has made reading comics or scientific papers a joy, and streaming Netflix or DirecTV in bed is a breeze. Yes, the keyboard is a pain to type with. Yes, it can be a little bit heavy when reading one-handed, but no more so than a hardback. Trying to read outside in the sun doesn't always work well, but when it's 2am and the lights are off it's a different story.
Happy Birthday, iPad. I can't wait to see what the next three years will bring. | 4,417 |
The 2013 MLS Supporters’ Shield-winning New York Red Bulls announced today that they have acquired defender Richard Eckersley from Toronto FC in exchange for New York’s natural 2017 MLS SuperDraft fourth round pick. Eckersley will be added to New York’s roster pending P-1 Visa approval and after he passes a team physical.
“We were impressed with Richard’s play at Toronto FC and are delighted to acquire him. He has a good soccer brain and is an energetic defender who can also provide positive attacking qualities on the flanks,” said Red Bulls Sporting Director Andy Roxburgh. “Richard will immediately provide another solid and versatile option for us on our backline and will certainly compete for a starting role on our team.”
Eckersley, who primarily plays as a fullback, moved to Major League Soccer when he joined Toronto FC on loan from English side Burnley in April 2011. He was a consistent face on Toronto’s backline over the last three seasons, appearing in 72 matches and being named to Toronto’s starting eleven 70 times. He appeared in 16 games for Toronto last season, all of which were starts.
The Englishman started his career at Manchester United’s academy program. He then progressed to Manchester United’s reserve side in 2007 and made two first team appearances from 2007-09. The 24-year-old earned the first medal of his career when he was named to the 18-man roster for United’s League Cup Final victory over Tottenham Hotspur in March 2009.
Eckersley signed with Burnley in July 2009 and was part of loan deals at English clubs Plymouth Argyle (2010), Bradford City (2011) and Bury (2011).
The Red Bulls begin their 2014 regular season schedule at BC Place, hitting the road to take on Vancouver Whitecaps FC on Saturday, March 8 at 7:30 PM. Tickets to the Red Bulls’ first regular season game at Red Bull Arena on March 15 against the Colorado Rapids at 4:00 PM are on sale now by calling 1.877.RBSOCCER or logging onto tickets.newyorkredbulls.com.
Richard Eckersley
Position: Defender
Height: 6-0
Weight: 169 pounds
Day of Birth: March 12, 1989 in Salford, England
Hometown: Salford, England
Previous Club: Toronto FC (MLS)
How Acquired: Acquired on January 27, 2014 from Toronto FC in exchange for New York’s natural 2017 MLS SuperDraft fourth round pick | 4,418 |
Canadians will need visas to enter the United Arab Emirates as of Jan. 2, 2011, according to Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada and the U.A.E.'s embassy in Ottawa.
Canada has been involved in an escalating spat with the United Arab Emirates since refusing its two state-run airlines more landing rights in Canadian airports.
The move is the latest salvo in a growing diplomatic spat between Ottawa and the U.A.E. over airline landing rights at Canadian airports that also saw Canada evicted from a key military base in Dubai.
Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada posted an update to its website that says the visas will be required for tourism and business purposes and can be obtained prior to travel at the U.A.E. Embassy.
Opposition critics have slammed Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government for its handling of relations with the U.A.E. — a key Mideast trading partner that had provided the Canadians with free use of the once-covert military base known as Camp Mirage to stage operations in Afghanistan.
But Conservative sources told CBC News the Canadian government viewed the U.A.E.'s use of the base as a bargaining chip in its request for Ottawa to grant state carriers Emirates and Etihad more access to Canadian airports as "blackmail." The Canadian military left Camp Mirage last week.
A U.A.E. embassy staff member noted that every U.A.E. citizen has always needed a visa to enter Canada, including diplomats and the embassy's head of staff.
Visa move a 'tit-for-tat thing': Rae
The Conservatives insist the relationship between the two countries remains robust, but Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae said the U.A.E.'s latest move belies the government's line that nothing's wrong.
"It's kind of a tit-for-tat thing that's going on," Rae said Monday during an interview airing on CBC's Power and Politics with Evan Solomon.
"It's obviously an inconvenience for travellers."
A 1999 agreement allows Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways to fly up to six times a week into Canada. But the U.A.E. government says that with 27,000 Canadians living in that country, and a significant trade relationship — the U.A.E. is Canada's largest trade partner in the Middle East and North Africa — six flights per week are not enough.
Air Canada has objected to any increased service by Emirates Airlines and Etihad Airways to Canadian destinations. It says that in certain areas, such as Dubai, there is very little originating traffic that comes to Canada. | 4,419 |
COLUMBIA, S.C. -- South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier said starting quarterback Connor Shaw can barely lift his right arm and will miss the next few days of practice.
"It's wait and see right now," Spurrier said Sunday.
Shaw was injured when he took a helmet to his right shoulder in the ninth-ranked Gamecocks' season-opening 17-13 victory at Vanderbilt last Thursday night. Shaw was diagnosed with a deep bone bruise. The hopeful news, Spurrier said, was that there was no damage to the shoulder joint. Still, Shaw won't practice until at least Wednesday and that puts his status for Saturday's home opener against East Carolina (1-0) in serious doubt.
"It's just painful for him," Spurrier said. "And he has trouble lifting his arm right now so it's pretty hard to play quarterback."
Spurrier said trainers and doctors say Shaw's shoulder may "loosen up" in three or four days. If things don't improve, the Gamecocks would most likely go with backup passer Dylan Thompson.
Shaw "won't play if he's not healthy," Spurrier said.
South Carolina was also holding its breath entering the game over how star tailback Marcus Lattimore's surgically repaired left knee would hold up in its first game action since he was injured at Mississippi State last October. The answer was just fine, Spurrier said.
Lattimore rushed for 110 yards and two touchdowns. He's had no swelling or other issues with the knee since returning home, Spurrier said. Lattimore acknowledge a few butterflies that led to a fumble the first time he touched the ball, but the junior tailback settled down and again led the way for South Carolina.
Spurrier said a friend of his said this past weekend Lattimore didn't look like his old, powerhouse self. Spurrier chuckled. "I said if you had about two defensive guys and an offensive lineman standing there waiting on you, there was nowhere to run," the coach said. "When there was a little bit to run, he made yards and he made some outstanding runs."
Shaw, despite the injury, returned to the game and led the Gamecocks on their final touchdown drive in the fourth quarter that put them ahead for good. Shaw finished with 92 yards rushing. He was also 7 of 11 passing, but much of that success came before getting hurt.
"Shaw is a tough kid," Vanderbilt linebacker Chase Garnham said. "I was really impressed with his toughness. He got bumped up a little bit, but he fought through it." | 4,420 |
15. At any other tournament, the game would have headed to overtime, but not at BLAST. Instead, the game ended there, and the community was left reeling. It was as if the tournament organizers took my fries while I was still eating them and threw them in the trash.
Expanding the fast food chain across the world
Photo via BLAST Pro
Like every American I’ve ever met, I like eating junk food once in a while. There are times when you don’t want to cook a meal or go to a good restaurant. Sometimes you just want to eat some Chick-fil-A at home in your sweatpants. I get it, and if BLAST had only a few events a year, I wouldn’t complain.
However, like every fast food chain, they’ve started to expand their operations. In 2017, BLAST had one event at the end of the year. In 2018, BLAST had three events. In 2019, they have seven events. Matthew “Sadokist” Trivett tweeted that there are a rumored 9 or 12 events scheduled for next year.
Junk food is not meant to be eaten all of the time, but that is what the CS:GO community is being served.
Tier one events are already starting to feel the pinch of this expansion. Astralis skipped out on StarLadder i-League Season 7 and IEM Sydney, as the dates were too close to BLAST events. Na`Vi did not attend IEM Sydney and will be skipping DreamHack Masters Dallas.
Duncan “Thorin” Shields tweeted that Liquid may be skipping out on ESL Cologne for a BLAST event. Jarek “DeKay” Lewis reported on Dexerto that RFRESH, the parent company of BLAST, are at odds with ESL over event dates.
BLAST’s expansion in the CS:GO calendar has been met with community backlash, and rightly so. At the end of the day, BLAST is trying to replace our full-course meals with junk food.
In some ways, I can respect what BLAST has accomplished. They’ve run successful events around the world that are focused on the fan experience. But in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator, they have stripped their tournaments of critical factors that make Counter-Strike a compelling game to watch.
They have diminished the narrative and competitive value out of their tournaments, and all we're left with are empty calories. | 4,421 |
Chinese elite also thinks that this is not such a big deal. You could say that many male members of the Chinese elite are the biggest beneficiaries of the current imbalance between men and women in China. The deformed marriage market has made them insufferably arrogant, and in terms of objectifying and demeaning women they are much worse than ordinary people. In the case of a male journalist who raped a female intern, most of the male colleagues supported him, and maintained that the woman was taking revenge on him for refusing her. In the case of a male professor who was suspended for molesting female students, many colleagues and students argued that the punishment was excessive, and some even doubted the female students’ mental state. In fact, a not inconsiderable number of men do not think there was anything fundamentally wrong with the actions of the journalist and the professor. People who have grown up in this kind of social atmosphere naturally cannot understand why Trump has been universally condemned for some dirty talk.
In addition, the vigilance against Islamic extremism displayed in Trump’s speeches is quite similar to the worldview of many of China’s elite. Since 9/11, “Islamophobia” has become a worldwide phenomenon, and China is no exception. Chinese Islamophobia has domestic causes, but it also cannot be separated from the impact of international events, particularly the refugee crisis and frequent terrorist attacks in Europe over the last couple of years. This has made many people shake their head at the European left, and think that Muslims are just using their high birth rate to occupy Europe and destroy the foundations of European civilization. European intellectuals and elites are so burdened by multicultural policies and political correctness that they cannot reject any plea from the refugees, do not dare to point out any of the issues with refugees, and even downplay crimes committed by refugees. Such naivety and wishful thinking in the end is nothing but nourishing a snake in one’s own bosom. Because of these views, Trump’s talk about banning Muslims and attacking terrorists is more welcomed by Chinese people than Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric about inclusiveness and cooperation.
Looking at the personal style of the two candidates, American elites do not like the fact that Trump’s speech is often illogical, vulgar and extreme. But in China’s imperfect market system, many elites come from rough backgrounds. Furthermore, decades of revolutionary ideology have made the whole society valorize coarseness, slovenliness, and lack of hygiene. This makes many people see Trump’s vulgarity and inconsistency as amusing, straightforward and honest. Hillary Clinton’s image as an orthodox politician, by contrast, leaves many people cold. | 4,422 |
Here is a little good news about Mideast Christians, for a change. Last week, the three principal Christian communities that maintain the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem announced that they have reached agreement on repairs to the Edicule, a nineteenth-century structure that encompasses the Tomb of Christ. At a joint news conference, the leaders of the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Roman Catholic communities announced that work on the structure, built a little more than 200 years ago, will start right after Orthodox Easter in May and last several months. The three communities will share the costs—about three million euros—and each appoint architects to help with the project. Pilgrims will continue to have access to the site while renovations are underway.
Readers who don’t know the history might fail to appreciate what an accomplishment this is. The three communities share the church, along with some smaller Christian communions, according to the terms of the Status Quo, a compilation of customs that dates to Ottoman times. The Status Quo governs the relationship among the communities in minute detail: which can use which altars at which times, how many lamps each community is allowed, and so on. Relations are often fractious. Because, under the Status Quo, maintaining or paying for repairs of a structure asserts ownership, each community has an incentive to prevent others from undertaking renovation projects. Needed repairs are often delayed until the situation becomes truly dire—as is the case with the Edicule, which has been held together by scaffolding since the 1940s.As Israeli scholar Raymond Cohen explains in a masterful history, Saving the Holy Sepulchre, it took the communities decades to agree on a plan to fix the church’s dome, and they reached agreement only when the dome was about to fall down. That project, the last major renovation of the church, was completed about 20 years ago.
Well, relations have improved. The new situation reflects in part what Pope Francis has called the “ecumenism of blood.” The persecution of Mideast Christians does not respect confessional boundaries. When ISIS is slaughtering your people, disputes about lamps do not seem so vital. The Facebook page of the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which represents the Armenian Apostolic Church, has pictures of the three happy Christian leaders at the news conference (above). Peace, it’s wonderful. Let’s hope the good feelings last for the upcoming Holy Fire ceremony at Easter, which often occasions conflict. Fistfights are not unknown.
Mark L. Movsesian co-directs the Tradition Project at the St. John’s Center for Law and Religion.
| 4,423 |
Turkey blocked access to WikiLeaks on Wednesday after the website published nearly 300,000 emails that were allegedly sent by members of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's ruling AKP party. Quoting a statement from Turkey's telecommunications watchdog, Reuters reports that an "administrative measure" was taken against the whistleblowing site, which published the emails and attached files on Tuesday.
In a statement on its website, WikiLeaks said the documents were obtained one week before Friday's failed military coup in Turkey, in which nearly 300 people were killed. "However, WikiLeaks has moved forward its publication schedule in response to the government's post-coup purges," the organization said. "We have verified the material and the source, who is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state."
Erdoğan has swiftly moved to stifle opposition following the failed coup, detaining or suspending more than 50,000 people suspected of plotting against the president and his government. The purge has targeted soldiers, police officers, teachers, and government employees, according to Turkish media. Erdoğan has also said he would be open to reinstating the death penalty in Turkey, raising concerns among human rights groups and drawing warnings from European foreign ministers.
After announcing plans to publish the so-called "Erdoğan emails," WikiLeaks announced on Monday that its website suffered a "sustained attack." The Sweden-based nonprofit said it could not determine the origin of the attack, though in a tweet it said that "the timing suggests a Turkish state power faction or its allies." The site was back up by Tuesday, allowing the organization to publish its first batch of emails and documents. It is not clear when other emails will be published.
"A free press and open internet have proved essential to everyone."
Turkey has blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites in the past, and Erdoğan has in recent years intensified his crackdown on journalists and dissident websites. But the embattled president embraced the internet to mobilize public sentiment against last week's attempted coup, calling for public demonstrations on Twitter and during a television interview conducted through Apple's FaceTime feature.
"The role of internet and press freedoms in defeating the coup presents a significant opportunity," Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece this week. "Rather than further polarization and painting of all dissent as illegitimate, the government should embrace real reforms and reverse its censorship policies."
"A free press and open internet have proved essential to everyone — even those at the height of power," Tufekci added. | 4,424 |
OMG! Mariah Carey performed a medley of songs on ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve’ special, but things didn’t go as well as planned on Dec. 31. The songstress literally walked off stage after having technical difficulties, proving she was lip-syncing! See the clips!
Mariah Carey, 46, gave her last performance of 2016, taking the stage for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest special, but unfortunately she suffered a very embarrassing moment. She walked off stage after having technical difficulties, which proved she lip-synced. When singing “Emotions,” the vocal track malfunction threw off the timing of her performance. Mariah was trying to keep a smile while singing for over one million people in Times Square, but it was clearly hard. She ended up making her exit after getting flustered!
The vocal track malfunction was also noticeable when she was performing “We Belong Together.” Her beau Bryan Tanaka, 33, and twins Moroccan and Monroe, five, were also there! Even though things didn’t go as expected, she still looked lovely in her sequinned get-up, and hopefully her boyfriend will comfort her. What a cringe-worthy way to end 2016! Ahead of the show, Mariah gushed about having the honor. “I am so excited to return and feel blessed to be a part of this year’s magical celebration,” she said about the show on ABC. “I can’t wait to perform once again for my incredible fans as we ring in the New Year.” She’s a trooper and we still love her!
Ryan [Seacrest] also felt very pleased to book the A-list songstress for this year’s celebrations. “Mariah was the first live performance from Times Square in 2005 when I joined Dick Clark as co-host,” he revealed. “After nearly a decade, I’m excited to join her again in Times Square, along with all our incredible performances, to ring in 2017.” The radio personality and executive producer definitely slayed the game when it came to booking A-list talent for the gig, boasting performances from DNCE, Fifth Harmony, John Legend, Gloria Estefan and more. Fergie hosted and Jenny McCarthy even reported live from Times Square, making us want an encore!
HollywoodLifers, what did you think of Mariah Carey’s NYE performance? Let us know! | 4,425 |
A Northern Virginia yoga teacher was mourned Friday evening at a vigil at the Sterling yoga studio where he taught, hours after he was found dead in a ravine in Mexico near where he had gone hiking four days ago.
Searchers found the body of Hari Simran, 25, in a narrow gorge in the rugged Tepozteco Mountains in the colonial town of Tepoztlan, a Mexican civil defense official told the Associated Press. Simran and his wife, who live in Leesburg, Virginia, were attending a yoga retreat there.
Simran appeared to have fallen from a cliff, another official for Morelos State told the AP. His family said he appeared to have suffered a fatal injury to his head and died instantly.
"This journey has been a testament to the enormous amount of love and goodness he shared with us all during his time on earth," his family said on the site they had been using to find him. "His last picture said 'Looking down on you.' We know he is an angel in the heavens now looking down on all of us."
Simran had sent his wife a photo of himself hiking in the Tepozteco Mountains around 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, pointing to the yoga retreat in the distance.
Simran, who is originally from Brooklyn, New York, and his wife Emily Smith had been attending a four-day yoga retreat called Sat Nam Fest near Tepoztlan, about 30 miles south of Mexico City, when he went for a hike Monday.
Smith said her husband was an experienced hiker, and that day had gone out with only water, trail mix, a phone and a knife. She said he texted her the day he left for the hike, suggesting he was lost.
The hike was supposed to be short, and as the hours passed, Smith's worry grew. After contacting local authorities, she told News4 Washington she was concerned searchers hadn't consistently used a helicopter with infrared radar while looking for Simran.
Hundreds of members of the Sikh community gathered Friday evening for a prayer service and vigil at the worship center and yoga studio in Sterling where Simran taught. They said some of the money that was donated in the search for Simran will be donated to further the good he tried to spread in the world.
"If I could just be one-hundredth of him, I think I could be a much better human being," Simran's friend Prabhjit Singh said. "He literally came [to Virginia] to raise people's consciousness, that's what he did as a meditation and yoga teacher. He lifted people up." | 4,426 |
These undated images published in the July 31, 2017, edition of North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper purport to show the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile late Friday.
President Donald Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed Monday to get tougher on North Korea, while the regime warned it will retaliate if Washington pursues “military action and ‘tough sanctions.’”
Trump, who spoke to Abe via telephone, promised to “take all necessary measures to protect” Japan after the North test-fired its second intercontinental ballistic missile late Friday, Abe told reporters, according to The Associated Press. Abe also said Japan would bolster its defense systems and capabilities in solidarity with the United States.
The pair plan to push for tougher sanctions and urge China to put pressure on the North, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un expressed “great satisfaction” with the missile, which splashed down into the Sea of Japan near Hokkaido, said a statement released Saturday by the Korean Central News Agency. Kim boasted that the launch proved the North’s missiles now have the ability to reach “all across the continental U.S.”
North Korea’s Foreign Ministry later warned the U.S. against responding with additional sanctions or military action, according to a statement released by KCNA.
“In case the U.S. fails to come to its own senses and continues to resort to military adventure and ‘tough sanctions,’ [North Korea] will respond with its resolute act of justice as already declared,” the statement said.
On Sunday, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley tweeted that she was “done talking” about North Korea, and later released a statement saying there was “no point” of seeking an emergency Security Council session over the matter.
“North Korea is already subject to numerous Security Council resolutions that they violate with impunity and that are not complied with by all UN Member States,” she said.
An addition Security Council resolution would be “of no value” because it sends a message to Kim that the international community isn’t willing to seriously challenge him, Haley said.
“China must decide whether it is willing to take this vital step,” she said. “The time for talk is over. The danger the North Korean regime poses to international peace is now clear to all.”
[email protected]
Twitter: @SethRobson1 | 4,427 |
Suffolk County Council set to commit £20m towards Wet Dock Crossing in Ipswich and the Lake Lothing bridge in Lowestoft
Colin Noble,Ben Gummer MP,Cllr David Ellesmere at the Wet Dock.
Suffolk is set to commit £20m to the first phase of building two vital new bridges in the county’s two largest towns.
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The county council’s cabinet to be asked to approve the spending to be divided between a new Wet Dock Crossing in Ipswich and a new third crossing of Lake Lothing in Lowestoft.
The money will be set aside from the budget to allow preparatory work to be carried out on the schemes, most of which will be funded by central government.
The money will be broadly spread across three years – and is just a fraction of the finance that needs to be raised locally for the project.
The Government has committed in principle to funding £77.5m towards the Ipswich Wet Dock crossing which has an estimated total cost of £96.6m. It will also pay £73.4m towards the crossing in Lowestoft, which has a total estimated cost of around £91.7m.
That means £37.4m has to be found locally. £10m of the funding from the county council will be used to start making planning applications, consultations, economic modelling and environmental assessments for both projects.
County council leader Colin Noble said: “These two crossing development schemes will unlock so much potential in the communities in and around Lowestoft and Ipswich; benefitting the wider East Anglia region, not just Suffolk.”
Ipswich MP Ben Gummer has been leading the calls for a new crossing near the entrance to the Wet Dock. He welcomed the development, saying: “I think this shows that sense of urgency to get on with the projects just weeks after the funding was confirmed in the budget.
“The government has given a clear signal that it wants the work to get under way and now the county council is stepping up to the plate to speed things along.”
The business community is also behind the projects. Suffolk Chamber chief executive John Dugmore said: “Through our active involvement in both Ipswich Vision and Lowestoft Vision, Suffolk Chamber of Commerce has strongly backed the overwhelming case for both crossings.
“These investment proposals by Suffolk County Council show that these are exciting and positive times which offer real economic benefits to local businesses”. | 4,428 |
and loaded onto a platform to be relocated.
In the 19th century, though, the process was a bit more involved. “They jacked up the houses and put them on rails lubricated with ordinary laundry soap,” says Ryan. “They then used horses to pull the houses along the tracks, stopping periodically along the way.”
Complicating matters more was the hilly terrain and the various waterways that the houses had to cross. “To the best of my knowledge, they didn’t lose any of the structures,” says Ryan.
Even more incredible was the fact that many of the residents continued to live in their houses as they were being moved. “Children would go off to school, return home, and find that their house would be in a different location,” adds Ryan.
While the town of new Katonah was partially made up of these moved structures—about 55 in all—some townspeople opted to build anew, which resulted in architectural uniformity throughout the newly planned community.
The Croton Dam That's *dam* impressive! Posted by Curbed NY on Tuesday, February 7, 2017
“Because it was all happening at the same time, the houses, whether they were moved or not, are of the same Victorian style,” says Bedford town historian John Stockbridge.
“When going down these streets today, it feels like a time warp to 1897. The houses were either being built then or being brought over then. Most are standing today, over a hundred years later.”
The new village hit the ground running, according to the book Katonah: The history of a New York village and its people, and even boasted that “social life was far less affected by the move. It continued in much the same pleasant pattern established in the old villages.”
A hundred years on, the village of Katonah still thrives today, easily accessed by train from New York’s Grand Central Station. Even more, the Croton Dam—and the greater water system installed in the last decades of the 19th century—still works. It is joined by two other systems to supply New York City residents with water.
As for old Katonah? It, too, can still be found by those who are adventurers at heart: “It’s just a couple of miles north of new Katonah—you could jog it,” says Stockbridge. “If you go out in a rowboat onto the reservoir, you can go up onto the land and find the old foundations.” | 4,429 |
Graphing the price movements for South Australia, the state with the highest proportion of wind energy, against its reliance on wind energy, Dr Saddler finds "absolutely no relationship between the two". The Curtis Liquefied Natural Gas project site in Gladstone, Queensland. Credit:Patrick Hamilton/Bloomberg South Australian wholesale prices have moved both down and up as the share of wind power grew to 45 per cent. Ahead of the latest increase, real prices in South Australia were lower than they were a decade earlier when the share of wind generators was only 5 per cent. "More detailed analysis shows that market wholesale prices are consistently lower when there is a high level of wind generation, than when there is little wind. Over the past four or five years in the South Australia wholesale market, volume weighted prices received by wind generators have been around 20 to 30 per cent lower than volume weighted average prices for the market as a whole." In contrast, the correlation between wholesale electricity and gas prices is "striking". Both move down and up together.
"Higher wholesale electricity prices, and hence higher retail prices are almost entirely caused by higher gas prices," Dr Saddler concludes. Source: AER, AEMO, Hugh Saddler, Australia Institute "A similar, though less stark effect is seen in the other mainland national energy market states. This is not a malfunction of the market, but precisely how it was expected to operate." "The launch of the market in 1998 was followed by a rush of construction of gas turbine power stations in Queensland, NSW and Victoria and even in Tasmania, accelerated in Queensland by a gas generation mandate policy introduced by the state Labor government. "It was envisaged that both the much lower greenhouse gas emissions and the superior operational flexibility of these power stations compared with coal would make them ideally suited to supplying hour-to-hour and day-to-day variations in demand for electricity, while also reducing emissions, by using a then relatively low cost source of fuel."
Gas is is used to augment other supplies at times of peak demand, meaning that although most electricity is supplied by coal, it is the price of gas-fired power that determines the final price when prices climb. The price rose sharply from 2015 with the opening of three gas liquification plants at Gladstone in Queensland, allowing the bulk export of gas previously supplied only to the Australian market. Loading "It seems that the decision to allow so much of the gas resources of eastern Australia to be exported was made without considering the likely effects on the electricity market," Dr Saddler writes. "Household and business consumers of electricity are now paying the price." In June Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced plans to impose export controls to try and guarantee supply and hold back prices. | 4,430 |
” islands. Only accessible by personal boat or the state run ferry, this white sand beach island houses a set of 3-mile hiking and paddling trails perfect for wildlife viewing. Relatively untouched, this island has only a snack bar, picnic area and gift shop near the marina with everything else naturally occurring. Fishing is authorized from a boat or surf.
Clewiston
Known as “America’s Sweetest Town” due to the long history of sugarcane cultivation, Clewiston is a great place to visit, especially in April for the Sugar Festival. Not only are there a variety of treats to stimulate your sweet tooth, the festival features music, art, crafts and examples of sugarcane grinding. For those looking to visit between the start of the current and end of the previous festival, Clewiston has plenty of activities to enjoy no matter the time of year. In Clewiston you can do everything from airboat swamp tours, visiting the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, hang gliding at the Florida Ridge Airsports park, visiting the Big Cypress Reservation and much more.
Bob’s River Place
Located on the Suwannee River near the “BBQ holiday” favorite (4th of July, Labor Day, etc.) Ginnie Springs, Bob’s River Place is the result of a grandfather’s love for his grandchildren. Built by Bob Hawkins for his family to enjoy when they visited, the talk of fun to be had there soon spread and eventually lead to Bob getting certified by the state to operate as a water park. Still privately owned by Bob, the park is opened to the public on weekends each year beginning in spring for a minimal fee of $35 per car of 4-6 people and $25 per car with 3 or less people. The park features a collection of rope swings, water slides, diving decks and even a water hammock that you need to see to understand. For an all-around fun time at a waterpark without the commercial feel, Bob’s River Place is the place to be.
Bahia Honda State Park
Around 40 miles away from Key West near Big Pine Key, Bahia Honda State Park has the feel you would expect from a tropical island. Home to two beaches (one overlooking a lagoon and the other the open ocean), visitors can take part in trail biking, snorkeling, kayaking, tarpon fishing and camping. For an admission fee of $8 per car of up to 8 people, you can enjoy all of the breath taking views that Bahia Honda State Park has to offer. | 4,431 |
the debacle with four words: "Sorry that didn't work."
GOP base doesn't want to give up
The concept of giving up is hard for many Republican rank-and-file members to swallow. Those who would have voted yes wish they could have gotten their colleagues there too. Members of the House Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, who were opposed to the bill, are grappling now with public admonishment from their new President.
"We're gonna get a 'yes,' we're gonna get to 'yes.' It will be a better bill and I think everybody is going to be very happy in the end," said Rep. David Brat, a Republican from Virginia and a member of the Freedom Caucus.
"I think we have plenty of time. We can fix this," said Idaho Republican Rep. Raul Labrador, another House Freedom Caucus member.
Texas Republican Rep. Randy Weber, a member of the House Freedom Caucus who opposed the GOP health care bill said Tuesday he thought that the GOP conference could find a way to get a revised Obamacare bill through the House if they all got in a room and put their heads together.
"We need to stay here on the weekend and have an all-day conference," Weber said, noting that the one-hour weekly meetings weren't enough time to work through the sticking points.
Weber, who didn't vote for Ryan for speaker in January, even complimented Ryan and said that he texted the speaker over the weekend when some conservative media figures pushed for him to step down and told him "don't even think about it. You're doing a good job. My prayers and my support are with you."
Still hard to govern
Womack said Republicans need to keep moving and show they can govern with their majorities in the House and Senate and Trump in the White House.
"The people who were 'yes' on the health care bill were reminding Paul this is something we promised and we got to push in that direction," Womack said. "It's more a reflection of the need to show that we can do something with our governing majority, but again it comes back to numbers. If you don't have the votes, you don't have the votes."
But Trump and Ryan say they want to go to tax reform next, but that's not going to be any easier.
"How do you move forward?" said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida. "If you can't do this, can you then do tax reform? If you think this is complicated and controversial, wait 'til we get into tax reform."
This story has been updated. | 4,432 |
Sleep problems, fatigue and attention difficulties in the weeks after a child’s concussion injury could be a sign of reduced brain function and decreased grey matter.
Researchers from The University of Queensland have studied persistent concussion symptoms and their link to poorer recovery outcomes in children.
UQ Child Health Research Centre Research Fellow Dr Kartik Iyer said information from the study could help parents and doctors assess the risk of long-term disability.
“In the MRI scans of children with persistent concussion symptoms, poor sleep was linked to decreases in brain grey matter and reduced brain function,” Dr Iyer said.
“Identifying decreases in brain function can allow us to predict if a child will recover properly.
“This knowledge can help clinicians ensure a child receives targeted rehabilitation such as cognitive behaviour therapy, medication to improve sleep, or safe and new emerging therapies such as non-invasive brain stimulation to potentially reduce symptoms.”
Researchers were able to predict with 86 per cent accuracy how decreases in brain function impacted recovery two months post-concussion.
“Generally, children with persistent concussion symptoms will have alterations to their visual, motor and cognitive brain regions but we don’t have a clear understanding of how this develops and how it relates to future recovery,” Dr Iyer said.
“It can have a serious impact on their return to normal activities, including time away from school, difficulties with memory and attentiveness, disturbances to sleeping habits and changes to mood – all of which affect healthy brain development.”
Most children recover fully after a concussion, but one in 10 has persistent symptoms.
“It is critical that children who receive a head injury see a doctor and get professional medical advice soon after their injury has occurred,” he said.
“While playing sports or riding bicycles or scooters, children should wear proper protective head gear to minimise the impact of a head injury.”
For children with persistent concussion symptoms, a child-friendly non-invasive brain stimulation therapy is being trialled at UQ’s KidStim laboratory.
Families interested in contacting the study team and registering their interest can contact the Acquired Brain Injury team.
This research is published in Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology (DOI:10.1002/acn3.50951).
Media: Dr Kartik Iyer, [email protected]; Faculty of Medicine Communications, [email protected], +61 7 3365 5118, +61 436 368 746. | 4,433 |
the access to parking at the complex would be from Kilpatrick Avenue, which he said already is congested. New driveways on Milwaukee Avenue and Irving Park Road are not allowed because the parcel falls within a “pedestrian street” zoning district, which is designed to maintain a continuous wall of storefronts.
Many supporters of the project have said on social media that the site has been vacant for too long and that it is time “to fill the hole,” in reference to where water collects on the parcel.
The site of the former Bank of America building in the 3900 block of North Milwaukee Avenue in the Six Corners shipping district has been a large hole in the ground for several years and it often collects a significant amount of water. (Nadig file photo)
Gardiner said that while he appreciates the sentiment that anything on the site is better than a “hole,” he would like to see a better long-term solution than the current proposal. “If you build a 10-story building, it could be there for 150 years,” he said. “Is it the right fit for the community?”
Gardiner said that he plans to work with the developer to make sure the vacant parcel is maintained and that he is interested in having the city conduct a new land-use study that would examine the district’s major redevelopment sites, including the Peoples Gas North Shop at 3955 N. Kilpatrick Ave. The utility company is relocating to a new facility in Sauganash.
Supporters of the project have argued that turning away a potential $130 million investment in the struggling shopping district makes little sense given that the project would generate millions in property taxes and serve as an economic catalyst for additional construction and business openings in the area.
Gardiner held a Sept. 17 community meeting on the proposal and also met privately without about 10 groups of residents and merchants to discuss the proposal.
Several hundred people attended the 2 1/2 meeting at the Copernicus Center, 5216 W. Lawrence Ave. At the meeting, Gardiner announced that he would not be taking campaign contributions from developers who are seeking a zoning change in the ward.
The Six Corners Association and the Old Irving Park Association support the project. It is estimated that the development would generate over a 10-year period more than $1 million in tax revenue which would go toward the Six Corners Special Service Area, which funds beautification projects and helps promote local businesses. Those groups have said that the senior project would meet several of master plan’s walkability goals, including plans for a pedestrian plaza. | 4,434 |
Throughout the eastern United States, claims that “George Washington slept here” at some local home or landmark are so exceedingly plentiful — and frequently fabricated to boost business — that the term has become something of a cliché. Connecticut, however, can point to many locations where George Washington did pass by or spend the night that are backed up by historical documentation — sometimes, even in the personal papers of Washington himself, as was the case on November 7, 1789.
Washington was in his first year as the first President of the United States, and on a grand tour of the newly-established Republic that would take him from Maine to Georgia. Acutely aware that he was setting a precedent with every official action, the new President avoided staying in the homes of private citizens or local officials to prevent seeming to show political favor to any person or party. Unfortunately for Washington — a member of the Virginia landed gentry — this often meant staying in places that didn’t quite live up to his expectations of decent hospitality. Such was certainly the case when Washington traveled through the “Quiet Corner” of northeastern Connecticut.
His brief sojourn in and to the rural town of Ashford was not destined to be one of the favorite parts of his trip. According to Washington’s diary, on this day in 1789 he ate an apparently mediocre breakfast in Thompson, Connecticut at a tavern owned by a Mr. Jacobs, which the president described as “not a good house.”. He then spent most of the day riding 33 miles on “intolerable roads” southwest to Ashford, where he lodged overnight. The next day, he wrote that on account of the Connecticut custom that discourages travel on the Sabbath, he “stayed at Perkins’ tavern (which, by the bye, is not a good one) all day,” and, upon attending church services at a nearby meetinghouse, was subjected to “very lame discourses from a Mr. [Enoch] Pond,” the local minister. Proof positive that the famously candid Washington did indeed sleep in Ashford — or at least he stayed in Ashford — on this day in Connecticut history.
Further Reading
“George Washington Slept Here (Just Perhaps Not Well),” connecticuthistory.org
Tedd Levy, “Looking Back: Washington Slept Here in Connecticut,” Shoreline Times
“Connecticut State Library tour: ‘Washington Slept Here’,” historypin.org
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What It’s Really Like Inside the North Shore’s Exclusive Volcom Surf House
Longhaired young surfers? Striking, sun-bronzed girls? Maybe a yard littered with red Solo cups? Think again. As surfing evolves into a multibillion-dollar industry, the legendary North Shore surf houses are changing to fit the times.
By Amanda Whiting
(page 1 of 6)
This story was originally published in the December 2014 issue of HONOLULU Magazine.
When the waves are hitting, there are two ways to watch: in the crowd on the beach, or from the lānai of an exclusive surf house. Writer Amanda Whiting got to do the latter (center of photo below).
Photos: Courtesy of Volcom
Last year, at the height of surf season, we sent writer Amanda Whiting into one of the most exclusive spots on O‘ahu’s North Shore: the Volcom surf house. The place is the stuff of legends, and we wanted an inside look to find out if all the stories were true. Here’s what Amanda found out.
Seven years ago, the apparel company Volcom purchased one of the most famous properties on the North Shore, a three-story house with a long history, at least in the annals of surfing. The company has multiple uses for the 3,000-square-foot home. On the evening I arrive, it’s serving as headquarters for Volcom’s team riders, the athletes paid to surf Banzai Pipeline in Volcom board shorts for as long as the winter swell lasts. There are at least 25 people milling in the backyard, 50 eyes focused on the waves in the distance. It’s growing dark, but the lineup is still packed.
I shake various hands in the shadow of the Volcom Stone, a 5-foot-tall plywood-and-paint rendition of the brand’s logo that was hung from the first floor lānai on move-in day. It’s a crush of hellos, all men, all wearing identical camo-printed Volcom truckers. “We need a hat,” someone calls, and pink promotional hats instantly appear. That someone turns out to be Dave Riddle, the Volcom team’s Hawai‘i adviser. Everything Volcom on O‘ahu runs through Riddle. “You’re gonna be nice to us, right?” he asks, laughing.
SEE ALSO: North Shore’s Surf Row: Where The Pro Surfers Live | 4,436 |
Image copyright PA Image caption Sajid Javid said a public office oath would set an example
Civil servants and other holders of public office should swear an oath to British values, Communities Secretary Sajid Javid has said.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Mr Javid said people could not play a "positive role" in public life unless they accepted basic values.
These included democracy, equality and freedom of speech, he said.
Mr Javid's intervention comes after a report by Dame Louise Casey warned of increasing ethnic segregation.
'Challenge attitudes'
Mr Javid's proposals would mean every new recruit in the public sector, including councillors, school governors and civil servants would be expected to commit to the oath, which may have to be read out loud before starting the role.
This could extend to those working in the NHS and the BBC.
Dame Louise said some sections of society did not accept British values such as tolerance.
Mr Javid said he was "drawn" to Dame Louise's recommendation to bring in an oath of allegiance.
"If we are going to challenge such attitudes, civic and political leaders have to lead by example," he said.
"We can't expect new arrivals to embrace British values if those of us who are already here don't do so ourselves, and such an oath would go a long way to making that happen."
'Building blocks'
Mr Javid said he did not want to see a "government-approved, one-size-fits-all identity" where everyone "drinks tea, watches cricket and bobs up and down at the Last Night of the Proms".
But, he added, people would struggle to play a positive role in British life if they did not accept the "building blocks of our society".
Mr Javid recalled how, aged about eight, he went to see a GP with his mother to act as her interpreter.
He said while today she is completely fluent in English, a minority of immigrants have failed to make such an "effort".
The new oath could include "tolerating the views of others even if you disagree with them", "believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from abuse", "a belief in equality, democracy and the democratic process" and "respect for the law, even if you think the law is an ass," Mr Javid writes.
A government source acknowledged that the oath on its own would be insufficient to weed out extremism or promote integration.
Mr Javid will set out his full response to Dame Louise's report on social cohesion in the spring. | 4,437 |
[Haskell] ANN YCR2JS, a Yhc Core to Javascript Converter
Hi, Ycr2js is a sub-project within the York Haskell Compiler (Yhc) project. It is aimed to create a tool to convert an arbitrary Haskell program into Javascript which in turn may be executed in any Web browser. I am pleased to announce that, with great amount of help from the Yhc Team, the converter has been integrated into the Yhc project, and initial stage of coding and development has been completed. Interested members of the Haskell community are invited to experiment with the Converter. It can be obtained with current Yhc snapshot from http://darcs.haskell.org/yhc At this point, it is possible to convert a Haskell program into Javascript and create a XHTML page for viewing in a Web browser. No framework is available to access DOM in type safe way, and/or support for AJAX. Not all low-level primitives have been mapped to Javascript or optimized for the Javascript environment. These are tasks for next stages and will be worked on in near future. It was by no means only my idea to generate Javascript from Haskell. Several people expressed this idea earlier in blogs and mailing lists. I was interested in this myself, and just decided to go ahead and implement it. Documentation (partially written) is available: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript At the moment of this announce, there is one live demo: http://darcs.haskell.org/yhc/web/jsdemos/Echo.html also referred to from the Wiki page mentioned. Type any text in the input field provided, and see it echoed right above after Enter is pressed. Just for fun, type any decimal number and see it converted to a Roman number, and vice versa. Roman numerals module (C) Malcolm Wallace, originally from ftp://ftp.cs.york.ac.uk/pub/haskell/contrib/Roman.hs On not so fast computers, the demo may show some delays (e. g. 3 - 5 seconds on a 375 MHz Intel Celeron, Netscape7, Linux) between the text is typed and echoed (mostly due to Roman number conversion). This is being worked on. Ycr2js is work in progress. What is most needed is users feedback that would help improve it. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. Thanks everyone who helped me in any way. Feel free to contact me at golubovsky at gmail.com -- Dimitry Golubovsky Anywhere on the Web | 4,438 |
News out of North Korean in notorious unreliable, but food shortages in the country have gotten so bad and people so desperate that there are now reports of men murdering their own children for food. These startling reports were compiled by independent reporters commissioned by Asia Press, a independent press agency focusing on Asia, and were published by the Sunday Times. And here's one of the most disturbing thing you'll read this morning:
The source said: "While his wife was away on business he killed his eldest daughter and, because his son saw what he had done, he killed his son as well. When the wife came home, he offered her food, saying: 'We have meat.' "But his wife, suspicious, notified the Ministry of Public Security, which led to the discovery of part of their children's bodies under the eaves."
And another from Gu Gwang-ho, one of the Asia Press's citizen journalists said:
"There was an incident when a man was arrested for digging up the grave of his grandchild and eating the remains."
The big question here is whether this is all true or new urban legends. Considering this is North Korea and taking into account the country's propensity to keep secrets and publish propaganda pieces—we'll likely never get real confirmation from their end. But Asia Press has worked with citizen reporters in the famine-struck regions of North and South Hwanghae for the past year, and The Independent considers their reports credible.
RELATED: North Korea Has Found a Secret Unicorn Lair, Apparently
Sadly, this isn't the first time we've heard reports of cannibalism from North Korea. Back in 2003, during another food shortage there were refugee accounts that people in the country began killing and eating their children and then selling their children's corpses. The Telegraph's Mark Nicol reported at the time:
Aid agencies are alarmed by refugees' reports that children have been killed and corpses cut up by people desperate for food. Requests by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) to be allowed access to "farmers' markets", where human meat is said to be traded, have been turned down by Pyongyang, citing "security reasons".
And then there's the fact that we know North Korea was devastated by storms and flooding in the summer of 2012. You can't hide a tropical cyclone. Thing have grown so desperate, that they almost took South Korean aid this September, which is a big deal considering the rocky relationship between the two countries and the North's fierce pride of independence. Reports of previous famines have been well documented and Asia Press claims that as many as 10,000 people may have died because of the "Hidden Famine" this year. | 4,439 |
The Department of Homeland Security says it knows the locations of all children separated from their parents under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy. Officials said Saturday night more than 2,000 separated minors remained in government facilities.
But it's not known how long the process to reunite families will take.
A new CBS poll finds 75 percent of Democrats say re-unifying separated families is a "high-priority, compared to 23 percent of Republicans.
Hundreds of protesters in Tornillo, Texas chanted "free the children" near the port of entry gates Sunday morning. The tent city is in a desolate part of the border.
The Department of Health and Human Services said in a release that they "have a process to ensure that family members know the location of their children and have regular communication after separation."
But federal public defenders in El Paso say that in a number of "zero-tolerance" criminal cases, their clients have not been told where their children are.
Shane McMahon, a federal public defender, says that when the president says the stories of grief are over-exaggerated at the border, he would respond "Mr. President, come to El Paso and I will show you stories that are real stories of grief and sadness. They're not phony and they're not made up for the people who don't know where their four-year-old child is."
On Saturday, a delegation of both Republican and Democratic politicians toured the site that's currently housing hundreds of unaccompanied teenagers.
Twenty-three of them were recently separated from their families, and there are at least seven girls inside.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, R-Texas, said what really struck him is "when you look around, we are in the middle of the desert and you have a tent. I think in many ways it's a monument to the failure of the fed government."
HHS also says separated children "are able to communicate (either telephonic or video depending on the circumstances) with their parent or guardian." CBS has confirmed that those calls are limited to twice a week, 10 minutes a piece.
"We need to make sure in Congress that the Trump administration provides a fully comprehensive list of every child and their parents so that we can then go an audit and make sure that everyone is reunited," Castro said.
The government says they know where all those separated children are, but what slows the process is confirming that the people who want to communicate with them are really parents or legal guardians.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling for an immigration czar to oversee the reunification process from here on out. | 4,440 |
Image caption Extinction Rebellion protestors sit outside Biffa gates on Tuesday morning
Proposals for a waste incinerator plant near Swansea have been rejected by city councillors in the face of protests.
Biffa planned to use a business park at Llansamlet to process non-hazardous waste which would otherwise go to landfill.
Planning officers had recommended approval saying there was no significant impact on residents.
But thousands of people have opposed the plans, with Extinction Rebellion staging a protest at Biffa premises.
More than 2,500 objection letters were sent in during a public consultation on the incinerator, intended to replace an unused warehouse on Swansea Enterprise Park.
Biffa said it would process 21,000 tonnes of non-hazardous waste that would otherwise go to landfill in Merthyr Tydfil, creating about 10 construction jobs, and 15 full-time jobs.
Image copyright Google Image caption The incinerator would be situated on Swansea Enterprise Park
A report by Swansea Council officers to councillors said the location was "acceptable in principle within an established commercial and industrial area".
Despite "significant concerns" about air quality and health, both the local health board and Swansea council's Pollution Control Division felt it would not have "any significant impacts" on the environment or human health.
The company insisted pollution levels would be below those set by UK air quality standards.
Swansea Council leader Rob Stewart was among those who spoke out against the plan at the committee meeting on Tuesday, saying support for the incinerator would be a "retrograde step", according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.
The committee voted unanimously against the proposal.
Jules Woodell, who took part in the Extinction Rebellion protest at Biffa's Swansea depot on Tuesday morning, said: "We've got to act now and act quickly and this is a step in the wrong direction - burning 20,000 tonnes of waste a year and putting carbon in the air."
He added: "The Welsh Government has declared a climate emergency and has the Future Generations Act; this flies in the face of all of that.
"We hope the protest will send a strong message to councillors in the meeting today, that the people of Swansea and residents are strongly opposed to this.
"They have to think of future generations and the bigger picture in how they deal with waste."
The Welsh Government said the decision over the incinerator was one for the local authority.
A spokeswoman for Biffa said: "We're disappointed with today's decision and we will be reviewing our position and next steps over coming days." | 4,441 |
District health boards have been "panic buying" stock, says a supplier of medical protective wear.
Photo: AFP
Jackson Allison Medical holds the national contract for the supply of protective cover jackets, overalls, and shoes.
The factories that make them are currently closed in Wuhan because of the virus, but are expected to open next week.
Earlier this week, RNZ reported potential shortages of protective equipment if Wuhan factories did not return to normal next week.
Jackson Allison Medical general manager John Bell said since then, district health boards had been upping their orders.
"Some of the hospitals have increased their pandemic reserve which has created some sort of - I hate to say in short - panic buying but that's what it seems to be like," he said.
Bell said they were monitoring ordering numbers and questioning DHBs which were increasing their orders.
He said they had about eight weeks of stock left, which was a tight timeframe for production and shipping.
"It looks like the factories in Wuhan are going to be going back to work between Monday and Wednesday of next week... and we should start getting stock here in seven to eight weeks... if there is panic buying we are going to run out of stock," he said.
Read more about the Covid-19 coronavirus:
Bell said there was no reason to panic, and if people did, it would make the situation worse.
He said all DHBs had about two months of reserves on top of normal stock, which could be used when a pandemic was declared.
There were also alternative markets where they could get products.
Photo: RNZ / Ana Tovey
Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said he was not surprised hospitals were taking extra precautions.
"There's a difference between panic buying and judiciously increasing their reserves - so I wouldn't be surprised if they're increasing their reserves and making sure there are reserves," he said.
Dr Bloomfield said there were 2.5 million masks on back order and 18 million in reserve stocks.
Family doctors had previously raised concerns about a lack of access to protective gear, but Dr Bloomfield said the ministry had rectified that.
"We have gone to great pains to work with DHBs and primary health organisations to ensure that early this week every practice had PPE [Personal Protective Equipment]," he said.
There are currently four confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country, and one probable case which is being tested.
Dr Bloomfield continued to say the risk of a community outbreak was still low. | 4,442 |
Zooey Deschanel appears to be just as quirky and adorable in real-life as her on-screen characters.
The 36-year-old New Girl star recently appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, airing Thursday, when she revealed how she came up with her 7-month-old daughter Elsie Otter's unique name.
"Otter, like the otter?" Ellen clarified, to which Zooey replied, "Animal, yeah."
WATCH: Zooey Deschanel and Megan Fox Swap Mom Stories on 'New Girl' Set
"Is that a family name?" Ellen quipped.
"In the sense that we're all mammals," the actress joked back. "No, we thought Elsie is kind of a classic name. A lot of people have grandmas and aunts name Elsie."
Zooey admitted that she and her husband, producer Jacob Pechenik, then went "a little bit wild" with their daughter's middle name.
"I love animals so much," the actress explained. "And we love otters because they're so cute, and playful and fun. And they’re really smart."
Zooey gave birth to her first child last August. Clearly, the first-time mom is enamored with her daughter, who we have yet to see a picture of.
"She's so cute," Zooey gushed. "She makes a lot of little, like, pterodactyl kind of noises -- like 'ahh, ooh, ahh.'
"And a noise that sounds like choking," she added. "She'll be, like, 'ah, ah, ah.' And I’ll be like, 'What’s wrong?' and she’ll be, like, 'ha, ha, ha!'"
... The joys of being a parent!
NEWS: Why Zooey Deschanel Isn't Posing for Any Post-Baby Body Photos
ET caught up with Zooey and her hubby last October at the New York City premiere of Rock the Kasbah, where the couple talked about how life has changed since welcoming their baby girl.
"It's sleepless, but wonderful," Zooey said.
Watch below:
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GSAT-31, will provide continuity to operational services on some of the in-orbit satellites, ISRO said.
India will launch its latest communication satellite onboard European launch services provider Arianespaces launch vehicle on February 6 from French Guiana, Indian Space Research Organisation said Friday.
According to Arianespace, the launch of Ariane-5 (VA 247) is scheduled for 2:31 am India time on Wednesday.
Weighing about 2,535 kg, the Indian satellite, GSAT-31, will provide continuity to operational services on some of the in-orbit satellites, ISRO said.
The satellite derives its heritage from ISROs earlier INSAT/GSAT satellite series, the space agency said, adding that it provides Indian mainland and island coverage.
GSAT-31 is the country's 40th communication satellite which is configured on ISRO''s enhanced ''I-2K Bus'', utilising the maximum "bus capabilities" of this type.
This satellite will augment the Ku-band transponder capacity in Geostationary Orbit, ISRO said.
With a mission life of around 15 years, GSAT-31 will be used for supporting VSAT networks, Television uplinks, Digital Satellite News Gathering, DTH-television services, cellular backhaul connectivity and many such applications.
It also provides wide beam coverage to facilitate communication over large oceanic region, comprising large parts of Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Indian Ocean, using a wide band transponder.
According to ISRO, two Ku-band beacon downlink signals are transmitted for ground tracking purpose.
Saudi Geostationary Satellite 1/Hellas Sat 4 will be the co-passenger of GSAT-31 during the launch, Arianespace said.
Comprising two payloads, Saudi Geostationary Satellite 1/Hellas Sat 4, also called HS- 4/SGS-1, is a geostationary condosat for KACST (King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology Saudi Arabia) and Hellas Sat (Greece Cyprus).
It will provide telecommunication capabilities, including television, Internet, telephone and secure communications in the Middle East, South Africa and Europe, Arianespace said on its website.
GSAT-30 is another geostationary satellite to be lofted soon by Arianespace.
Since the launch of Indias APPLE experimental satellite on Ariane Flight L03 in 1981, Arianespace has orbited 22 satellites and signed 24 launch contracts with the Indian space agency, it said. | 4,444 |
Quote First of all, everybody who thinks it's a grind to get this SH needs to get their heads checked. Running a flash point a few times does not qualify for grind. It just means your terribly lazy. You have the right to be lazy, just call it what it is.
Now, for the main topic.
BW have had the reactivation mechanic from the beginning. However, with each SH that was released there was also an increase in the total number of SHs you could have active. That was a patttern, but it was not a promise. I do get that it caught people off guard.
What BW should have done BEFORE releasing 5.4 is write this as part of the announcements or patch notes:
New Stronghold in Umbara. Please note:
You will not be able to get it till week two because of the weekly cap on the currency. We understand not everybody is happy with that but this is as intended.
Secondly, we will not be expanding the maximum amount of SHs you can have active with this release. So choose wisely.
Lastly, we said it is a smaller SH, but it is a fairly long train and will require over 400 decorations to fill up.
This is the sort of stuff I would like them to communicate. I do have a problem with them not communicating this properly so it actually causes unpleasant surprises. I do not understand that they leave this sort of thing out, when it can only lead to disappointment.
Also the hook placement on this SH is again terrible, albeit somewhat better than Manaan.
Personally I was ok with the weekly cap and I am ok with not being able to have all SH active. But I do understand other people's disappointment. What I do have a problem with is that it actually is a lot bigger than I thought it would be and have just gained another Stronghold I won't be able to fill up in a nice way because it will require too many decorations that I do not have enough of.
You still need to address the decoration issues. There are not enough copies available and not enough variety in basic types of things that you need to put together a nice Stronghold.
So sadly, it fails again. BW, you really need to open up the discussion with decorators because you barely respond to decorater complaints and you don't seem to get that there are some real issues that keep it from being a fully hobby within the game, which it could and should be really. Referral link for a week sub and some goodies: http://www.swtor.com/r/jMVTyB | 4,445 |
Vancouver Whitecaps FC 2011 Player of the Year and top goalscorer, Camilo Sanvezzo, has agreed to new terms with the Major League Soccer club. Per league and club policy, terms of the contract were not disclosed. Combined with 'Caps striker Eric Hassli and yesterday’s acquisition of Sebastien Le Toux, Whitecaps FC are currently the only team in MLS with three players who scored 10 or more goals last season.
“We’re delighted to agree to new contract terms with Camilo,” said Whitecaps FC head coach Martin Rennie. “He had an outstanding first season with us and will be an important part of our squad for years to come. Camilo can play up front as a striker or as a wide attacking midfielder. He’s got plenty of pace and skill, plus a real nose for goal. He’s also a big threat on set-pieces in and around the opposition’s penalty box.”
Camilo, 23, enjoyed a memorable 2011 campaign with Whitecaps FC after signing with the MLS outfit following a successful preseason trial last spring. A native of Presidente Prudente, Brazil, Camilo’s 13 goals in all competitions last term made him the club’s first Player of the Year and recipient of the Domenic Mobilio Golden Boot as top goalscorer in the MLS era. This included 12 goals, tied for fifth overall in the league, and three assists in 32 MLS appearances for 2,484 minutes of action in 2011, as well as one goal in four appearances for 311 minutes of action during last year’s Nutrilite Canadian Championship.
“I am very happy to sign this new contract with Whitecaps FC,” said Camilo. “I am really enjoying my time in Vancouver and the support of the Whitecaps FC fans. I aim to build on all that I achieved last season and help Whitecaps FC become a top club in MLS and the CONCACAF region.”
Prior to joining Whitecaps FC, Camilo had spells abroad with South Korean K-League side Gyeongnam FC and Maltese Premier League outfit Qormi FC. Camilo started his career in his native Brazil with Sport Club Corinthians Alagoano.
Whitecaps FC 2012 Major League Soccer season tickets start at $329, plus applicable tax and a $10 processing fee per order. To secure a seat and for additional information about Whitecaps FC MLS season tickets, including loge seats and suites, call 604.669.9283 or visit whitecapsfc.com/tickets. | 4,446 |
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A Florida couple’s big day turned into a nightmare after the maid of honour went on a booze-fueled bender culminating in her arrest – and it didn’t end there.
Now Amanda Willis, 29, is facing a litany of charges after she allegedly became extremely intoxicated, struck a guest, and nearly ran over the best man before being arrested and continuing her rampage at a nearby hospital.
“It was insane. Absolutely insane,” Jena Templeton, one of the wedding guests, told NBC-2 News in Florida.
The wedding of David and Jennifer Butler took place at the Charlotte Park Civic Association Banquet Hall in Charlotte County, Florida last Saturday. Guests say the ceremony went off without a hitch, but once the reception began, Willis began drinking.
“She was drunk within 20 minutes to half an hour,” bride Jennifer Butler told NBC-2 News.
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“She was a mess. She drank almost a whole entire bottle of Fireball [whiskey],” said guest Robert Templeton. Tweet This
READ MORE: Hospitalized dad badly injured by drunk driver meets newborn daughter on smartphone
Templeton says Willis then stole the best man’s car keys and attempted to drive his car, forcing him and other guests to drag her out of the car.
After being wrestled out of the car, Willis allegedly went back inside, grabbed a bottle of rum, and “just guzzled it” according to Butler.
She then allegedly became violent.
“As soon as I turned around, she came up and cracked me upside of the face,” Templeton said. Tweet This
It was at this point that police were called.
Police tell local media that Willis claimed to be having an asthma attack, so she was transported to a local hospital.
Once there, police say Willis assaulted EMTs, exposed herself to police, and kicked over her bedpan.
According to Willis’ arrest record with the Charlotte County Sherriff’s Office she faces a total of seven charges in relation to the wedding day bender, including grand theft auto, property damage, battery of a person 65-years or older, and probation violation.
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She also faces two charges of assaulting an officer or EMT following her actions at the hospital.
Records also show that this was Willis’ ninth arrest in Charlotte County.
Needless to say, Butler says she and Willis are no longer friends. | 4,447 |
The first day of the annual Pwn2Own contest in which security researchers can win cash and hardware if they successfully compromise machines using zero-day exploits is finished. Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, Firefox 3 on Windows 7, Safari 4 on Mac OS X 10.6, and iPhone OS 3 were all compromised during the competition. Google's Chrome was the only browser left standing—and in fact, was completely untested. None of the researchers at the competition even tried to attack Chrome.
So far, little is known about the successful exploits. Until vendors have been informed of the flaws and those flaws have been patched, details will not be made public.
The iPhone was not successfully hacked in 2009's competition, but was predicted to fall this year, and those predictions have come true. A zero-day Safari flaw was used to gain access to text messages stored on the device by Vincenzo Iozzo from German security firm Zynamics and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. Notable in the exploit was that it bypassed both iPhone's Data Execution Protection as well as its requirements that all code be signed.
A little more is known about the IE8 exploit, including an (abridged) video of the browser being taken down. The successful researcher, Peter Vreugdenhil, has published a rough outline of the techniques used to bypass IE8's DEP and ASLR protections.
The Safari hack came from Charlie Miller; this makes three years in a row now that Miller has pwned—and hence owned—a Mac at pwn2own. Thus far, nothing further about either this exploit or the Firefox one appears to have been published.
Neither the iPhone exploit nor the IE8 exploit managed to escape the OS-supplied sandboxes that protect these platforms. Without escaping the sandboxes, the impact that flaws can have is reduced, preventing, for example, writing to hard disk (and hence, preventing installation of malware). Nonetheless, read-only access is still valuable for data theft.
It is this sandboxing that might explain why Google's Chrome was untouched; no researcher even attempted to attack it. It is certainly not the case that Chrome has no security flaws—a couple of days before the Pwn2Own draw was made to decide who got to attack which machine and in what order, Google published an update to Chrome that fixed a range of security flaws, some of which were deemed to be high-risk. Google's sandboxing shouldn't be impenetrable, but it is sufficient to make the standard harmless exploit payload—starting up Windows calculator—harder to do. | 4,448 |
While on the Fantastic Beasts world premiere red carpet Thursday night, J.K. Rowling revealed how many years the five-part film series’ plot will be covering.
It’s a lot.
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Rowling told a reporter for Variety that she had always planned for Fantastic Beasts to be told across many movies, but initially told people it’d be three for the sake of signaling a big story.
“Originally, to tell you the truth, we said ‘a trilogy’ as a placeholder,” the Harry Potter author said. “We were feeling our way, and then there came a point in the drafting of the story […] where I could see an arc to five. It came out of the material.”
She added, “it’s ambitious to tell it in five, to be honest, because it’s spanning 19 years.”
Harry Potter author @jk_rowling explains the decision to make 5 #FantasticBeasts movies pic.twitter.com/yWm2Fw3Mht — Variety (@Variety) November 10, 2016
Fantastic Beasts begins in 1926. What do Harry Potter fans know happened 19 years later, in 1945? The global Wizarding War came to an explosive end when Dumbledore defeated Grindelwald in a legendary duel. This was the battle in which Dumbledore came into possession of the Elder Wand. Grindelwald was thrown into Nurmengard, the prison he created to hold his own enemies.
The war was led by Grindelwald — who’ll be played by Johnny Depp — “with the intentions of toppling the European Ministries of Magic, replacing them with a Wizarding empire that would control the entire wizarding population of Earth and enslave the Muggles for their long ago crimes against wizardkind,” as the Harry Potter Wikia reminds us.
Related: Rowling says she’ll dive into Dumbledore’s sexuality in future Beasts movies
Rowling’s “19 years” remark essentially confirms that this series is telling the story of the massive wizarding war. We just hope that there will be flashbacks to earlier times, when Dumbledore and Grindelwald first met in Godric’s Hollow — and when the latter accidentally killed Albus’ sister.
Funny that we’re talking about another “19 years” timeframe. Harry Potter fans know that length of time well.
Exciting!
Update: J.K. Rowling confirmed this news again on Monday, November 21: | 4,449 |
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, is chairman of the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (J. Applewhite / Associated Press)
Updated 4:40 p.m.
PUBLIC LANDS -- Don't trust federal land grabber Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. He's part of the problem.
Chaffetz made headlines last week and got some positive attention for withdrawing his unpopular legislation to mandate the sale of more than 3 million acres of public lands to states and private interests.
“…groups I support and care about fear it sends the wrong message,” Chaffetz wrote in the tweet, adding that he was a “proud gun-owner, hunter and love our public lands.” (See the S-R's Sunday story, Push to turn over federal lands to the states may be losing steam)
But it appears the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is just another anti-federal lands con man.
Chaffetz has so far refused to withdraw his even more damaging companion bill -- the Local Enforcement for Local Lands Act (H.R. 622).
"The bill would eliminate federal law enforcement officers on America’s national forests and Bureau of Land Management lands, leaving hundreds of millions of acres vulnerable to abuse and lawless behavior, taxing state and local authorities and fundamentally compromising American’s safety, both in and around public lands," says a post from the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers.
The Wilderness Society says the bill would " make it even harder for the chronically underfunded agencies to protect wildlife habitat, prevent poaching, preserve cultural sites, prevent reckless off-road vehicle use and otherwise take care of the nearly 440 million acres of land they collectively manage."
The purpose listed in the bill:
Pat O’Carroll, executive director of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, points out that “Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management officers and agents conduct complex investigations crossing county, state and international borders. They are highly trained and routinely investigate the destruction of archaeological sites, timber theft, drug trafficking, illegal immigration, wildlife poaching and catastrophic wildfires. FLEOA believes that Congress should be recognizing their valuable contributions to the protection of our endangered public lands.”
Chaffetz appears to be playing games with the public lands that set America apart from all other countries.
His bill is the type of legislation I referenced in my column, Transferring federal land: an old idea that still offends the masses.
It's the kind of Congressional crap that prevents federal lands from being properly managed. | 4,450 |
same with Iran. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, one of the leading liars about Iraq and proponents of its illegal invasion, is now telling us that “a nuclear Iran is a nightmare.” Frank Gaffney, director of hardline neoconservative Center for Security Policy and a leading Islamophobe, has claimed that the nuclear agreement with Iran is a “fraud” perpetuated by the President on the American people, because “It will not prevent Iran from getting the bomb, period.” He is the man who was “delighted” that the US invaded Iraq.
And, of course, those who have advocated the military option against Iran have not been idle, and have been aided by the media. CNN had a report on how bunker-busting bombs that can supposedly destroy even Iran’s Fordo site deep under a mountain are on standby to attack Iran, if the negotiations fail. At Business Insider Jeremy Bender has been publishing one scary story after another about how the bunker-busting bombs can be used against Iran. Bloomberg has also reported on the possible use of such bombs against Iran. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AK), an MEK supporter, has claimed that bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities can be done easily in only “a few days.” Cotton has also called on the President not to cooperate with Iran because “it has blood of hundreds of Americans on its hands,” whereas it was in fact the MEK that assassinated American advisers in Iran in the 1970s.
When Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, was Iran’s president, and Rouhani and Iran’s current Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, were his chief diplomat and nuclear negotiator, the George W. Bush administration prevented the three European countries, Britain, France and Germany, from reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran that would have severely limited Iran’s nuclear program. Now that Rouhani and Zarif, two moderate politicians, are leading Iran and its efforts for a nuclear compromise, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and their allies in the United States are doing their utmost to prevent the agreement from materializing. Iran has made all the necessary concessions to reach the agreement. If nuclear negotiations fail, it will be either because the Obama administration has excessive demands, or it may buckle and break under the pressure by the War Party in the United States. This time, the world will blame the US and its allies.
Muhammad Sahimi, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and the NIOC Chair in Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California, is co-founder and editor of the website, Iran News & Middle East Reports. | 4,451 |
-national state immediately and an Arab-majority state in the future; or Jewish Israel where the Jews would maintain rights and rule and the Arabs would be devoid of both.”
“No Israeli government,” the renowned academic wrote, “could face that dilemma and resolve it in any acceptable way.”
For Zionism, as it was for apartheid, equality and human rights are non-starters. The fear that a “one person, one vote” system and of a “state for all its citizens” instills in Zionists is no different from that expressed by defenders of South African apartheid.
Defended by de Klerk
Following John Kerry’s “apartheid” comment earlier this year, F.W. de Klerk, the former South Africa prime minister who presided over the dismantling of the apartheid regime, came to Israel’s defense. “I think it’s unfair to call Israel an apartheid state,” he said.
This is the same de Klerk, however, who two years earlier reflected that, while “[i]n as much as it trampled human rights, [apartheid] was and remains morally indefensible,” he still defended what he said was the system’s “original concept of seeking to bring justice to all South Africans through the concept of nation states.”
De Klerk explained that the Bantustanization of South Africa was conceived as a way to “bring justice for black South Africans in a way which would not – that’s what I believed then – destroy the justice to which my people were entitled.” He added that it was “not repugnant” to believe that “ethnic entities with one culture, with one language, can be happy and can fulfill their democratic aspirations in [their] own state,” separate from one another.
After his comments sparked negative reactions, de Klerk’s spokesman walked back his comments. When “an artificial creation” like apartheid fell, the spokesman said, “you can go two ways – either by going your separate ways like in the Soviet Union or in what is being suggested for Israel and Palestine, or by trying to build a multicultural society.”When “the first option” failed in South Africa, apartheid leaders “changed course,” he said, continuing, “It is not immoral for the Afrikaners to want to rule themselves any more than it is for the Israelis or the Scots to wish for the same things.” | 4,452 |
Fecal microbiota transplants (FMT) pose a risk of serious or life-threatening adverse events likely because of transmission of pathogenic organisms, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warns in a new safety communication.
The FDA said it is aware of infections caused by enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) and Shigatoxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) that occurred following FMT. The agency suspects the infections are a result of transmission of these pathogenic organisms from FMT product supplied by US stool bank company OpenBiome.
The company provides FMT product manufactured from pre-screened donors to healthcare providers and researchers.
In a statement on its website, OpenBiome said it was "immediately" implementing changes to the screening program in collaboration with FDA to ensure all FMT material is appropriately screened for these pathogens.
FMT-Related Infections, Two Deaths
The FDA safety alert describes six patients who received the company’s FMT product for Clostridium difficile infection unresponsive to standard therapies and who developed infections caused by EPEC (two patients) or STEC (four patients). Four patients required hospitalization.
The two patients who developed EPEC infection received FMT product prepared from two different donors' stool. All four STEC infections were tied to stool prepared from a single donor.
OpenBiome also notified the FDA that two patients died after receiving the FMT product that was prepared from the same donor associated with the STEC infections. The deceased patients had underlying chronic medical conditions and received FMT for C difficile infection. The patients both developed diarrhea following FMT, but were not tested for STEC.
The deaths occurred before the four patients with the STEC infections were reported to either OpenBiome or the FDA. The agency notes that it is not known if STEC infection contributed to the deaths.
In the safety alert, the FDA recommends that patients considering FMT for the treatment of C difficile infection should speak with their treating clinician and understand the associated risks.
The recommendation is in line with FDA guidance issued in July 2013, which requires physicians to obtain adequate informed consent. The consent, the agency says, should include a statement that the use of FMT to treat C difficile is investigational, and that physicians discuss potential risks with patients.
Adverse events or side effects related to the use of FMT products should be reported to the FDA's MedWatch Safety Information and Adverse Event Reporting Program.
For more news, follow Medscape on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. | 4,453 |
BSNL to Declare 4 Mbps As Minimum Download Speed For All Broadband Plans; Can It Set A New Precedent?
State-run BSNL is all set to again re-define Internet broadband speed in India. As per reports emerging from Kerala, BSNL may soon declare 4 Mbps as the minimum download speed for every broadband plan.
Last time BSNL redefined Internet speed was in 2015 when it made 2 Mbps as the minimum broadband download speed for all of their broadband plans. The news becomes viral, and BSNL is rumoured to have attracted a new generation of Internet users due to this standardisation of Internet speed.
Now, armed with minimum 4 Mbps speed, BSNL might again create ripples across the spectrum, as 4 Mbps speed, powered with their popular and blockbuster plans such as BB249 can actually prove to be a game-changer. Under this plan, subscribers can get up to 1 GB of data per day at a speed of 2 Mbps, and then unlimited data at 1 Mbps for Rs 249 per month.
Imagine this plan converting into 4 Mbps speed for 1 GB per day: It would be smashing hit.
When we tried searching BSNL’s official data about broadband plans, then we discovered one document, which lists their plans as “Broadband unlimited plans with speed varying from 4 Mbps to 24 Mbps”. Now, we are not sure whether this page has been updated recently or not.
But something is certainly brewing up…
BSNL Will Invest Rs 4300 Cr For Infrastructure Development
Meanwhile, BSNL has declared that they will spend Rs 4300 crore during FY2018, for improving and expanding their network infrastructure. Besides, they will also install 75,000 WiFi hotspots across India, in the same period.
Telecom Minister Manoj Sinha said, “BSNL presence is must for healthy competition in the industry and benefit of consumers. They have installed around 5,000 WiFi hotspots, going to install 35,000 more WiFi hotspots this fiscal and planning another 35,000 to provide quality service to consumers..”
As per available reports, L&T has already bagged a contract from BSNL to install 20,000 WiFi hotspots, whereas HFCL will install 5000 WiFi hotspots.
BSNL has allocated a budget of Rs 600 crore to install 35,000 WiFi hotspots from their own expertise.
As per BSNL Chairman and Managing Director Anupam Shrivastava, BSNL will be spending Rs 4300 crore during FY 2018 from their own capital funds for network expansion.
Source | 4,454 |
state house mug by julie.JPG
(Julie Bennett/[email protected])
Tax revenues to support education in Alabama fell barely short of expectations during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, with an unexpected decline in corporate income taxes.
The total receipts of $6.1 billion to the Education Trust Fund were 0.4 percent more than the previous year.
The Legislative Fiscal Office had estimated 1.6 percent growth.
Still, the state ended the year with a balance of about $116 million in the ETF.
Under a state budgeting law called the Rolling Reserve Act, $60 million of the balance goes into a budget stabilization fund to be used in times of proration, while $56 million goes into an advancement and technology fund.
The state has now put $178 million into the stabilization fund in the last two years.
The Legislative Fiscal Office presented the numbers today to the House Ways and Means Education Committee, which started gathering information and planning for the next legislative session, which begins Feb. 7.
The committee also heard presentations on the Teachers' Retirement System, the Alabama Reading Initiative and the Alabama Ahead Act, which is a plan to upgrade technology in schools.
New state School Superintendent Michael Sentance spoke briefly to the committee. The committee also held a discussion on tax exemptions for nonprofit organizations.
Rep. Bill Poole, R-Tuscaloosa, the committee chairman, said it was important to review how the last fiscal year ended and begin to consider some of the major issues lawmakers expect to face next year.
Income taxes and sales taxes are the biggest sources of money for the ETF.
Revenues from personal income taxes and sales taxes both increased during the fiscal year, signs of economic growth, Poole said.
Corporate income taxes, a much smaller component of the budget than personal income taxes, were expected to decrease because of some one-time payments made during the previous year. But corporate income tax revenues fell off about $60 million more than expected.
Poole said the downturn in revenue came in the final months of the fiscal year and was experienced in other states.
"It's something we need to determine what the root cause is," Poole said. "Certainly at this point we're just investigating, trying to understand it."
"We saw growth in sales taxes, which is a very positive economic indicator. We saw growth in the (individual) income tax revenues. So those are positives. But we need to understand what happened with the corporate income taxes and assess that as we do at the turn of every fiscal year." | 4,455 |
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A proposed settlement between Lyft and its drivers came under close scrutiny from the U.S. judge overseeing it on Thursday, an indication that the agreement that maintains drivers as independent contractors is still in play.
Maya Jackson, a Lyft driver from Sacramento, navigates a Lyft app on a smartphone during a photo opportunity in San Francisco, California February 3, 2016. REUTERS/Stephen Lam
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco issued several written questions about the deal, including some on the key issue of whether drivers for Lyft should be independent workers or employees.
Lyft and larger rival Uber face separate lawsuits brought on behalf of drivers who contend they are employees and entitled to reimbursement for expenses including gas and vehicle maintenance. The drivers currently pay those costs themselves.
The issue of employment status is a critical one for the so-called sharing economy technology companies.
The planned Lyft settlement, filed last month, provides for Lyft to pay $12.25 million, as well as give drivers notice if they are to be deactivated from the platform and other benefits.
Chhabria, who must approve the proposed class action settlement, noted that the deal would move drivers closer to independent contractor status.
“If that is correct,” he wrote, “is this aspect of the settlement agreement contrary to the original goal of the lawsuit?”
Chhabria directed both sides to answer his questions in writing, and a hearing is scheduled for March.
The Uber and Lyft cases have been closely followed because a determination that the workers are employees rather than contractors could affect the valuations for other startups that rely on large networks of individuals to provide rides, clean houses and other services.
While the settlement will involve some costs for Lyft, classifying drivers as employees would have been much more expensive and complicated.
Chhabria also asked if other “sharing economy” companies classify their workers as employees, and if “there any factors specific to Lyft’s business model that preclude it from classifying drivers as employees.”
One attorney for drivers had said last month that the deal should be approved, partly because an arbitration provision would make it difficult for Lyft drivers to ultimately prevail as a group.
However Chhabria questioned that assertion, given that Lyft lawyers had previously said the company would waive its right to assert arbitration.
“Those are excellent questions the court has asked, and we will provide the answers,” said Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney for the drivers.
A Lyft representative could not immediately be reached for comment. | 4,456 |
The court found no aggravating circumstances in the case and took into consideration the fact that Sokolovsky had apologized to the believers for the videos. The blogger has been ordered to delete all the videos that insult the believers’ feelings and banned him from taking part in mass events.
YEKATERINBURG, May 11. /TASS/. A court in Russia’s Urals city of Yekaterinburg handed down a 3.5-year suspended sentence to blogger Ruslan Sokolovsky who played the popular Pokemon Go game in a local church, a TASS correspondent reported.
The state prosecutor had earlier requested a 3.5-year prison sentence for Sokolovsky.
In accordance with an expert evaluation, the court found Sokolovsky guilty of inciting hatred, insulting religious feelings and illegal possession of special technical means - a pen with a video camera.
According to the court, the blogger’s guilt is proved by scandalous videos and witnesses’ testimony. During the court hearings, Sokolovsky did not deny that he had been the author of these videos.
The blogger called the verdict "almost an acquittal." "In general, I’m glad that I remain free," Sokolovsky said.
Pokemon catcher’s case
In early August 2016, Sokolovsky filmed a video of himself catching Pokemon in Yekaterinburg’s Church on Blood built on the site, where the last Emperor of Russia Nicholas II and his family were murdered in 1918. The video stirred up a controversy among believers while a criminal case was initiated in accordance with the Russian Criminal Code’s articles citing incitement to hatred and enmity, denigrating human dignity, as well as violating the right to freedom of conscience and religion.
In September 2016, the blogger was detained and later placed under house arrest for two months.
In October 2016, Sokolovsky was taken to a pre-trial detention center for breaching the terms of his house arrest after the young man had posted a video on the Internet though he had been banned from using the web and mobile communications. His defense attorney filed an appeal against this decision but the Sverdlovsk Regional Court rejected it.
In January 2017, a new charge was brought against Sokolovsky under an article citing illicit trafficking in technical equipment, with the intent of covertly collecting information, since a pen containing a small camera had been uncovered during a search of his apartment.
Sokolovsky was placed under house arrest until August 14, 2017. During the interrogation of eyewitnesses, the blogger apologized to all worshippers who had complained about being offended. | 4,457 |
the margins of society. Made for the Nikkatsu studio, where he would work until 1967, and indebted to the genre of sleazy, youth-focused taiyozoku-eiga (sun tribe films) that became popular in Japan in the mid-to-late 1950s, it’s a film of unbridled, manic energy. The camera moves along the crowded streets and within speeding cars with Akira, the main character, as he enacts his revenge on a couple who previously helped put him in jail. At times, it feels like the camera can’t even keep up with his unhinged behavior.
The Warped Ones is one of the most freewheeling films of the period and also one of the most disturbing. An under acknowledged part of the early Japanese New Wave, and one of the reasons some of these films are difficult to watch today, is their treatment of sexual violence. Rape is a dominant feature of many of these films, and when it’s not present there is some other sort of physical violence against women. There is certainly a criticism of masculinity and what filmmakers saw as the moral degradation invading the country conveyed, but these critiques tend to work against some of the better films. A case in point is Tsutomu Tamura’s The Samurai Vagabonds (1960), set in a small mining town that feels like a prison camp. The film concerns a twisted triangle of doomed love and hate and contains one of the bleakest endings ever printed on celluloid, where a man and woman are beat to death in a rock quarry while most of the town watches from a distance.
It might be better to view this early period of the Japanese New Wave as a battering ram that broke through the rigid barriers of the studio system, a raw, fevered reaction to the culture at large. For this reason, much of the films work at a screaming pitch, with little room for nuance. Many of these directors would go on to make more accomplished, interesting films: Tamura, for example, would go on to write the screenplays for much of Oshima’s best work, and Toshio Matsumoto would make the transgressive Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) before shifting toward video art. And much of these films would be made for independent companies where the makers had more control. They all emerged from a single howl, running on the fumes of political unrest. Where they ended up was more diverse and, ultimately, more shocking.
The Other Japanese New Wave: Radical Films from 1958-61 runs at the Japan Society (333 East 47th Street, Midtown, Manhattan) from April 5 through 27. | 4,458 |
Abaddon raising hell in her ‘Queen-dom’ and Dean’s decent into the dark side, season nine had more than enough plotlines to keep up with. Bloodlines had too much going on for one episode, and yes, if better received it could have been drawn out with more fluidity, for some it focused too much on another family, which took the focus away from the Winchester’s just as viewers were left biting their nails for the next shoe. Bloodlines may have come off as a rabbit hole-esque filler episode leading us down a pit of potential that was too big for its small start. Wayward Sisters on the other hand, was a bit more widely received, at least for those who followed the growth of Sheriff Jody Mills and her adopted misfits. We waited for the possibility of Claire and Alex pulling out the ‘Jody’s been gone on a hunting trip and hasn’t come home in a few days’ dialogue with a long-awaited fangirl squeal. However, Wayward Sisters would have once again shifted the focus off the Winchesters. Wayward was meant as a back door in case Supernatural didn’t make it through season 13, but as always, the fandom prevailed, and the famed series carries on.
With Supernatural going on for so many seasons the main culprit of Supernatural’s short coming may be the viewer-ship. Live television is the determining factor of whether a season makes or breaks, and with digital apps and underground pirating, modern day viewers watch on their own time. Faithful as we may be, life happens and some of us would rather rely on Putlocker than wait through commercials. Supernatural isn’t a tween phase, it’s timeless with something for every age and
interest. A juicy burger with all the fixings of how far you’ll go for family and hunting down every son of a bitch looking for a suicide a la Winchester. Fortunately, the force is strong with this one, as corny as it may sound Supernatural is the phoenix of broadcast television, raising through the ashes of desperation for the faith of the many to continue if only for a season more. It’s all about the Winchesters and company, our focus on their world is primary, we were there for the hello and cried through every goodbye (even when they came back). Short comings or not no one’s looking forward to the day when we finally see which Tumblr thread from 2009 predicted the final demise, but until then Supernatural’s only shortcoming is doubt.
What do you think?. | 4,459 |
co-author of that NDU white paper is Linton Wells, a 51-year veteran US defense official who served in the Bush administration as the Pentagon’s chief information officer, overseeing the National Security Agency (NSA) and other spy agencies. He still holds active top-secret security clearances, and according to a report by Government Executive magazine in 2006 he chaired the ‘Highlands Forum’, founded by the Pentagon in 1994.
Linton Wells II (right) former Pentagon chief information officer and assistant secretary of defense for networks, at a recent Pentagon Highlands Forum session. Rosemary Wenchel, a senior official in the US Department of Homeland Security, is sitting next to him
New Scientist magazine (paywall) has compared the Highlands Forum to elite meetings like “Davos, Ditchley and Aspen,” describing it as “far less well known, yet… arguably just as influential a talking shop.” Regular Forum meetings bring together “innovative people to consider interactions between policy and technology. Its biggest successes have been in the development of high-tech network-based warfare.”
Given Wells’ role in such a Forum, perhaps it was not surprising that his defense transformation white paper was able to have such a profound impact on actual Pentagon policy. But if that was the case, why had no one noticed?
Despite being sponsored by the Pentagon, I could find no official page on the DoD website about the Forum. Active and former US military and intelligence sources had never heard of it, and neither did national security journalists. I was baffled.
The Pentagon’s intellectual capital venture firm
In the prologue to his 2007 book, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, John Clippinger, an MIT scientist of the Media Lab Human Dynamics Group, described how he participated in a “Highlands Forum” gathering, an “invitation-only meeting funded by the Department of Defense and chaired by the assistant for networks and information integration.” This was a senior DoD post overseeing operations and policies for the Pentagon’s most powerful spy agencies including the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), among others. Starting from 2003, the position was transitioned into what is now the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. The Highlands Forum, Clippinger wrote, was founded by a retired US Navy captain named Dick O’Neill. Delegates include senior US military officials across numerous agencies and divisions — “captains, rear admirals, generals, colonels, majors and commanders” as well as “members of the DoD leadership.” | 4,460 |
The 4th Annual Cannabis World Congress & Business Exposition (CWCBExpo) is coming to the Javits Center in New York City June 14th through the 16th, and they have announced a heavy-hitter as one of their keynote speakers.
Former Minnesota Governor, professional wrestler, TV/movie personality and cannabis legalization advocate Jesse Ventura will be speaking on the 15th. “I am looking forward to speaking at CWCBExpo NY. I want to see cannabis legalized in all 50 states within my lifetime, and I will do all I can to help destigmatize it,” Ventura said. “Aside from being an invaluable medical resource for many Americans, cannabis is about job creation. Never before has marijuana had the potential to become a legitimate, multibillion-dollar industry in the U.S.- one that can rejuvenate our economy and make us healthier simultaneously.”
Ventura will also be signing copies of his book “Marijuana Manifesto” on the show floor, along with his co-author Jen Hobbs, after the speech.
“We are honored to have Jesse Ventura be one of our star keynotes. As a strong advocate of the benefits of the cannabis plant and its safe and legal access nationwide, his message will be inspiring and thought-provoking,” said Scott Giannotti, the Managing Director of CWCBExpo events. “Ventura’s keynote at CWCBExpo NY should not be missed!”
It will be the first time that Gov. Ventura will deliver the keynote speech at a cannabis event, which shows that he is serious about getting into this issue with both feet. Not that he is a “Johnny-Come-Lately” to the legalization community; below is a video of Ventura from 2010 discussing his support for marijuana legalization on the Fox Business Channel.
Love him or hate him, the former governor generates a lot of press, and over the last 7 or 8 months he has been devoting that press almost exclusively to the issue of cannabis law reform. Every person he causes to look further into the issue is another potential voter/supporter of the movement. And anytime someone with name recognition spends their time spreading the truth about cannabis, it’s a huge win for the movement.
The expo will also feature an expanded exhibit floor with suppliers in the industry showcasing cutting-edge products and services, educational workshops and more. The conference program will include 70 sessions and over 100 expert speakers, so if you can be in the NYC area in mid-June, it’s definitely something you’ll want to check out. | 4,461 |
Insight Editions has set an October 15 is release date for "Rush: Wandering The Face Of The Earth: The Official Touring History". The book includes a foreword from PRIMUS's Les Claypool, and an afterword by THE POLICE's Stewart Copeland. The 304-page hardcover was compiled by Skip Daly, a RUSH expert for over 30 years, and Eric Hansen, who started the popular "Power Windows" RUSH fansite at 2112.net.
Hansen stated about "Rush: Wandering The Face Of The Earth: The Official Touring History": "We first conceived it nine years ago, not long after the release of [the RUSH documentary] 'Beyond The Lighted Stage'. Covering the 40-plus-year touring history of our beloved band, it is a book that not only compiles the tour dates and setlists, but also tells the stories of what happened on tour. We weren't alone in our quest, though, and enlisted the help of many fellow fans (you know who you are) to help flesh out these stories. With early approval from the folks at [RUSH's management company] SRO, we were not only provided with their tour records, but they helped us connect with many crew members both past and present. In addition, we had the pleasure to speak to past band members such as Mitch Bossi, Lindy Young and Gerry Fielding, as well as John Rutsey's brothers, Mike and Bill. When it came to the cover, we pitched some ideas over the phone to Hugh Syme, and he came back to us with the amazing cover you see [below]."
Official book description: "Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Neil Peart performed together for the first time to an audience of 11,000 people in 1974. Forty years later, their last tour sold over 442,000 tickets. This is the story of everything in between. This is the story of RUSH.
"Fondly known as the Holy Triumvirate, RUSH is one of the top bands to shine through rock-and-roll history. 'Wandering The Face Of The Earth' covers RUSH's storied touring career, from their humble beginnings as a Toronto-area bar band playing middle school gymnasiums to their rise as one of the world’s most sought-after live acts, selling out massive arenas around the globe. This book includes every setlist, every opening act, and every noteworthy moment meticulously researched and vetted by the band themselves. Along with spectacular, never-before-seen imagery, this is THE must-have tour compendium for RUSH fans." | 4,462 |
By: Thomas Siebertz
1. Job security – The food industry is one of the largest on the planet, and people will always have to eat. This means if you are working anywhere along the food supply chain, you will always have a job. Although there are food companies that close or have layoffs, chances are you can apply your skills to other foods or processes, which I think is a huge benefit of this degree.
2. Diverse environment – When working in the food industry, there are literally thousands of different jobs available. You aren’t limited to lab work or a desk job. There is something for everyone, whether it be in quality, R&D, sales, marketing, manufacturing, teaching or in government. The food science degree is inherently multidisciplinary, which opens up a myriad of opportunities.
3. The people – Those I have met who work in food are some of the most hardworking and passionate people I know, and I am truly glad to call them friends. There is a certain attitude we all share and I think it stems from our drive to help people. After all, food is a service industry and we take pride in what we do.
4. Salary possibilities – A degree in food science offers many opportunities to earn top-dollar salaries. The median salary in 2011 for people with a B.S. in food science was $80,000 and even higher for those with graduate degrees. Median starting salaries were $44,000. People who got into management positions made six figures and above. (Source: 2011 annual IFT salary report).
5. The food – If you love food you will definitely enjoy working in this industry. Whether you are creating exciting new products, testing products for quality, or doing research, you will be exposed to a plethora of amazing food. You will discover dishes and flavor combinations you have never even knew existed (and may even like it).
6. Travel opportunities – The food industry is global, and many large companies in the United States also conduct business in several other countries. Depending on your position, it’s likely you will get to travel, often paid for by your company or agency. I’ve been lucky enough to travel around the US a little as a food inspector.
Why do you study food science? If you don’t, but are interested, what questions do you have for other food science students?
And want to learn more about food science as a career? Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for professional development, seminars, opportunities, and more!
Photo Credit: http://www.intercontinentaljournals.org/IJFN.htm | 4,463 |
US President Donald Trump and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election, will meet on Thursday amid uncertainty about the official’s fate.
In a statement on Twitter, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said on Monday that Rosenstein and Trump “had an extended conversation to discuss the recent news stories”.
She added: “Because the president is at the United Nations General Assembly and has a full schedule with leaders from around the world, they will meet on Thursday when the president returns to Washington, DC.”
The scheduled meeting comes after reports, saying Rosenstein had verbally offered his resignation to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly amid speculation that he would be fired. Several US media outlets, citing individuals familiar with the matter, said Rosenstein had expected to be fired on Monday as he headed to the White House for a national security meeting on opioid abuse. But he left with no action taken.
Last week, the New York Times reported that in 2017 Rosenstein had suggested secretly recording Trump and recruiting Cabinet members to invoke a constitutional amendment to remove him from the office. The newspaper said none of those proposals came to fruition. Rosenstein denied the report as “inaccurate and factually incorrect”.
As of Sunday, Trump said he had not decided what to do about Rosenstein. He angrily asked confidants, both inside and outside the White House, how to respond. He received mixed messages. Some urged him to fire Rosenstein. Others suggested restraint while seeing if the report was incorrect or if it was planted by some adversary.
Mounting pressure
Trump faces mounting pressure from the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is looking into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.
Rosenstein assumed supervision of the investigation after his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, recused himself because of his own contacts with Russia’s ambassador to Washington while serving as a Trump campaign adviser became public.
The US president had previously floated the idea firing Rosenstein in April after FBI raids of the office and home of the president’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who has since pleaded guilty to several felonies and taken part in interviews with Mueller’s team.
Congressional Republicans, Democrats and some Trump aides have warned for months that the president should not fire Rosenstein.
The reports about Rosenstein add to the turmoil roiling the administration, just six weeks before midterm elections with control of Congress at stake. In addition to dealing with the Mueller investigation, the White House is also struggling to win confirmation of its Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations. | 4,464 |
The bravery of the White Helmets in Syria is beyond dispute, but what is there left to say about them? Plus, any documentary about Aleppo is liable to seem dated within weeks. However, Last Men in Aleppo skilfully sidesteps these concerns, even if it necessarily feels like a long and depressing story of inevitable failure.
Directed by Feras Fayyad in collaboration with Danish film-maker Steven Johannessen and the Aleppo Media Centre, this documentary explores lives spent in a loop. Volunteers cast anxious looks skywards as planes fly over, embark on a series of desperate rescues, and hold long discussions about the future for them and their families. This cycle plays out and then restarts. It’s a difficult watch, and one that will end with more imminent deaths and defeat one day closer.
Fayyad doesn’t flinch from the gruesome details. We see hands, feet and other body parts in the rubble, as well as children’s gaping head wounds: there’s little break from the tears and desperation. This is a 100-minute account of lives lived in hell, without proper medicine and housing, where a gathering of friends is considered a legitimate bombing target, and where children’s hospitals are shelled. A trip to a playground offers a moment of joy, but in less than a minute, the children are begging to be taken home as jets fly over.
The film’s problem is that most of us have seen variations on this material in news reports. While we might not have seen this level of embedded access, we’ve seen enough to know what’s happening in Aleppo is distressing; Netflix’s The White Helmets is 40 minutes long, which feels about right. Some viewers will wonder if they need to spend 100 minutes seeing it all again.
Fayyad’s protagonists are engaging. They are bound by a desire to never leave the city they love, even as it disintegrates around them, and we’re with them in every rescue, even if the similarity of all the footage distances us from the action. There’s no hope, we know how this is going to end, and even a life saved temporarily feels almost as sad as a life lost. Last Men in Aleppo is one of the most difficult documentaries you’ll see this year.
There are touching moments – a boy rescued from certain death under the rubble refuses to let his lifesaver leave the house, insisting he stay for coffee. The embarrassment of his saviour is beautiful to see. But even he knows that Aleppo is not a place for happiness or gratitude. | 4,465 |
The bravery of the White Helmets in Syria is beyond dispute, but what is there left to say about them? Plus, any documentary about Aleppo is liable to seem dated within weeks. However, Last Men in Aleppo skilfully sidesteps these concerns, even if it necessarily feels like a long and depressing story of inevitable failure.
Directed by Feras Fayyad in collaboration with Danish film-maker Steven Johannessen and the Aleppo Media Centre, this documentary explores lives spent in a loop. Volunteers cast anxious looks skywards as planes fly over, embark on a series of desperate rescues, and hold long discussions about the future for them and their families. This cycle plays out and then restarts. It’s a difficult watch, and one that will end with more imminent deaths and defeat one day closer.
Fayyad doesn’t flinch from the gruesome details. We see hands, feet and other body parts in the rubble, as well as children’s gaping head wounds: there’s little break from the tears and desperation. This is a 100-minute account of lives lived in hell, without proper medicine and housing, where a gathering of friends is considered a legitimate bombing target, and where children’s hospitals are shelled. A trip to a playground offers a moment of joy, but in less than a minute, the children are begging to be taken home as jets fly over.
The film’s problem is that most of us have seen variations on this material in news reports. While we might not have seen this level of embedded access, we’ve seen enough to know what’s happening in Aleppo is distressing; Netflix’s The White Helmets is 40 minutes long, which feels about right. Some viewers will wonder if they need to spend 100 minutes seeing it all again.
Fayyad’s protagonists are engaging. They are bound by a desire to never leave the city they love, even as it disintegrates around them, and we’re with them in every rescue, even if the similarity of all the footage distances us from the action. There’s no hope, we know how this is going to end, and even a life saved temporarily feels almost as sad as a life lost. Last Men in Aleppo is one of the most difficult documentaries you’ll see this year.
There are touching moments – a boy rescued from certain death under the rubble refuses to let his lifesaver leave the house, insisting he stay for coffee. The embarrassment of his saviour is beautiful to see. But even he knows that Aleppo is not a place for happiness or gratitude. | 4,466 |
Following a fierce encounter between Left Wing Extremist (LWE) insurgents and paramilitary forces at Kuchai jungle in adjoining Seraikela-Kharsawan district, the rebels have resorted to poster campaign close to the steel city.
The police recovered two posters allegedly pasted by the banned outfit CPI (Maoist) on the wall of Tata-Kandra four-lane’s service lane near Gamharia market under Adityapur police station area on Friday morning.
Written in Hindi, the posters asked supporters to expedite the task of converting battle of ambush into a battle of mobile war. One poster was inscribed in red letters on a paper while the other was on a piece of cloth. The police removed both the posters and seized them immediately after the matter came to their notice at about 8 am on Friday.
Officer In-Charge, Adityapur police station, Shusma Kumari said that Maoist poster was seized from the Gamharia market area which comes under the Adityapur police station.
“We are in the process of investigation. We suspect that it might be a handy work of some local miscreants who are trying to disturb the ensuing Assembly polls in the region. But despite that we take the matter very seriously as this is election time,” said Kumari.
The OC informed that they have intensified the patrolling as the posters, fixed during the unearthly hours was aimed at disturbing the assembly elections scheduled on December 7.
On Thursday morning, one LWE rebel was shot dead and another sustained bullet injuries as an encounter took place at Raisindhri hills in Kuchai jungle in the Seraikela-Kharsawan district. During the search operation after the encounter that lasted for over 30 minutes, the police and paramilitary forces recovered powerful claymore mines from the encounter site.
Meanwhile, the recovery of posters and pamphlets has also triggered panic among the locals. A police official said that the Maoists usually resort to posters just to instill fear amongst the villagers.
Sources informed that apart from wall painting, waging poster campaign is a regular feature in the Maoist-affected areas. The red guerillas have been conspiring to hamper peaceful life in the villages. A police official said that the ultras were trying to create tension among villagers so that they can disturb them.
The administration is confident about conducting polls peacefully. About 800 police force of the district will be assisted by jawans of CRPF, Jharkhand Armed Police, home guards, Rapid Action Police (RAP) and Rapid Action Force for maintaining security at the 1626 polling booths in the constituency. | 4,467 |
“I killed a cow during the war,” said 90-year-old Eric Slade.
In 1943, Slade was serving in the Canadian Armed Forces as a truck driver and was stationed in London during WWII. On his way home one night he struck and killed a cow grazing on the grounds of Windsor Castle.
Eric Slade now. Submitted
He had attended a dance and had agreed to take some of the guests home in his truck.
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“We were pelting along inside the grounds of Windsor Castle, on the main highway,” said Slade, “and everything was going fine, and all of a sudden I hit this cow.”
The impact ran his truck off the road.
He told everyone not to make too much noise. “And don’t lose their hats,” he said. “Because it was risky, if they found a hat the cops would be at the barracks there in 15 minutes.”
“It happened once before.”
They managed to move the truck, and Slade said it wasn’t until they were on the way home that they found out it was a cow. He thought he had hit a deer.
“I hit that cow so hard and in the right place that it never even moved,” he said. There wasn’t much damage to the truck, as it was a robust army truck, but there was some damage to the bumper and and one tire.
He looked in the papers the next day and there was no announcement that anyone had killed a cow. Slade was relieved.
He forgot, until many years later when a fire broke out at Windsor Castle, and Slade remembered his experience on those grounds.
He told his son, who was visiting from Vancouver, and his son wrote a letter to Buckingham Palace on his dad’s behalf to say sorry and to offer any reimbursement.
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Buckingham Palace wrote back.
‘Her Majesty was interested to know of your father’s amusing story of when he was serving with the Canadian Army in the United Kingdom during the Second World War’ the letter said.
‘The Queen was touched by your father’s concern, but would be grateful if you assure Mr. Slade that no reimbursement would be necessary. His selfless service to his country, the Commonwealth, and the Allies during the War would be payment enough’.
“It’s pretty fantastic,” said Slade. | 4,468 |
CEDAR FALLS -- Kinnick Stadium will get a new score board and sound system in time for the fall 2013 season.
The state Board of Regents Thursday approved the UI proposal with little discussion during a meeting in Cedar Falls.
The lease financing for the project will cover $8 million, and the total project cost -- covering purchase of equipment, the screens and sound system, control room and installation -- is expected to be about $9 million, UI officials said. The cost will be funded with UI Athletics Department gifts and earnings, and no tax dollars or tuition dollars will be used.
The existing video walls, control room equipment and sound system at Kinnick are eight years old, UI Athletics Director Gary Barta said. Technology in that time has made great strides, and most of the UI's competitors have high definition video boards in their stadiums, Barta said.
"Think about the television sets in your own home, the amount of technology change just since 2005," Barta said. "Well, that's what's happened with our video boards. When we put them in in 2005 they were state-of-the-art. Since then HD has come along."
Some mechanical pieces on the current boards -- the pieces that rotate to show advertisements -- are obsolete, Barta said, making it hard to find parts and repair them.
In the south end zone, the current structure will be used, but the new board will be all high definition video screen with no mechanical parts on the side -- much more vibrant and crisp, Barta said.
"It will look differently but the placement is similar" to the current system, he said.
It's a tight timeline, but the project will be completed for this fall's football season, Barta said.
The new video display and sound system for Kinnick will be purchased from Daktronics, Inc., at a cost of up to $4.5 million. That's the same company from which Iowa State University purchased a new video board recently.
The UI project includes a large screen video display system within the existing south end zone structure, video displays in the northeast and northwest end zone corners and a ribbon display to be installed above the seating along the north side of Kinnick Stadium. That ribbon display will show game information, video, scores and advertising. In addition to those four video displays, the purchase includes two game clocks and four delay-of-game clocks.One piece of the project -- the infrastructure updates necessary for installation -- nearly doubled in price after bids came back much higher than expected. UI officials said that was due to a mistaken calculation on steel prices, along with the tight timeline. | 4,469 |
and jobs that rely on trade.”
Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Show all 13 1 /13 Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Supreme Court Brexit Challenge People wait to enter the public gallery outside the Supreme Court ahead of the challenge against a court ruling that Theresa May's government requires parliamentary approval to start the process of leaving the European Union, in Parliament Square, central London Reuters Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Gina Miller, co-founder of investment fund SCM Private arrives at the Supreme court in London on the first day of a four-day hearing Getty Supreme Court Brexit Challenge A man waves the EU flag in front of the Supreme Court Getty Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Satirical artist Kaya Mar poses with two of his paintings in front of the Supreme Court Getty Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Pro-Europe protestors dressed as Supreme Court Justices stand outside the Supreme Court ahead of the first day of a hearing into whether Parliament's consent is required before the Brexit process can begin. The eleven Supreme Court Justices will hear the government's appeal, following the High Court's recent decision that only Parliament can trigger Article 50 Getty Supreme Court Brexit Challenge The eleven Supreme Court Justices will hear the government's appeal, following the High Court's recent decision that only Parliament can trigger Article 50 Getty Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Businesswoman Gina Miller arrives at the Supreme Court ahead of the first day of a hearing into whether Parliament's consent is required before the Brexit process can begin Getty Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Attorney General Jeremy Wright arrives at the Supreme Court in London EPA Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Protesters outside the Supreme Court in London, where the Government is appealing against a ruling that the Prime Minister must seek MPs' approval to trigger the process of taking Britain out of the European Union PA wire Supreme Court Brexit Challenge A protesters wearing a judge's wigs and robes stands outside the Supreme Court ahead of the challenge against a court ruling that Theresa May's government requires parliamentary approval to start the process of leaving the European Union, in Parliament Square, central London Reuters Supreme Court Brexit Challenge A protester holds up a placard outside the Supreme Court ahead of the challenge against a court ruling that Theresa May's government requires parliamentary approval to start the process of leaving the European Union, in Parliament Square, central London Reuters Supreme Court Brexit Challenge Pro-Europe protestors dressed as Supreme Court Justices stand outside the Supreme Court Getty Supreme Court Brexit Challenge A man waiting to enter the public gallery waves a European Union flag outside the Supreme Court ahead of the challenge against a court ruling that Theresa May's government requires parliamentary approval to start the process of leaving the European Union, in Parliament Square, central London Reuters
The peer went on to say the Government should focus on trade with the EU and its WTO schedules, rather than trying to prepare deals with non-EU countries. | 4,470 |
civil penalties” in addition to College disciplinary action.
Zuckerberg declined to comment on whether he has faced any charges or disciplinary action.
‘Let the hacking begin’
Zuckerberg said his interest in computer science and boredom on a Tuesday night were the ingredients behind his rating recipe.
It took less than a week for him to create the site—and he chronicled the process in a journal published on the site itself.
He began at 8:13 p.m. last Tuesday: “I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough—now I just need an idea...”
Just 95 minutes later, at 9:48 p.m., he added another entry.
“The Kirkland facebook is open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics,” he wrote. “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”
Then, just before 1 a.m., a new post: “12:58am. Let the hacking begin.”
Starting with Kirkland and moving his way through the Houses, Zuckerberg described how he hacked into online facebooks one by one and put the photos onto his website.
Around 4 a.m. last Wednesday, Zuckerberg finished compiling ID photos of all undergraduates except for first-years and residents of Winthrop, Currier and Quincy, whose facebooks are not available online.
In his online account, Zuckerberg called the hacking “Child’s play.”
He describes how he got the photos from each House and then records the actions he took over the next few days to create the algorithms and codes to create the rating website.
Just before 7:30 a.m. on the morning of Halloween, he wrote that the site was finished.
Zuckerberg said his primary attraction to building the website was the science of creating the program and compiling the photos, not the prospect of publicizing it for widespread use.
“I’m a programmer and I’m interested in the algorithms and math behind it,” said Zuckerberg, who is no stranger to creating computer software and programs.
He received worldwide notice for an MP3-player that he created during his senior year at Philips Exeter Academy.
And at the beginning of this year, Zuckerberg said he created a “coursematch” website where students could voluntarily submit the courses they were taking so that other students in the same courses could find out who their peers were. | 4,471 |
America's greatest journalism show Fox & Friends had Newt Gingrich on this morning to discuss, among other things, Obama's call for "prayer" in last night's speech. Wasn't it offensive for this notorious God-hating monster to suddenly ask for His help?
You can tell it's going to be a great episode of Fox & Friends when a guest like Newt Gingrich — an amoral, lying, duplicitous fearmonger who has no problem telling the masses that Obama is trying to destroy Christianity if doing such a thing could ever-so-modestly improve his position with 2012 primary voters — has to play the judicious Christian "moderate" to balance the hosts' insanity.
In this clip we have Brian Kilmeade replaying Obama's terribly controversial God-ish line from last night: "We pray for the people of the Gulf, and we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a greater day." Complemented by the amazing headline "PRESIDENT'S RELIGIOUS SPEECH: MAKES MULTIPLE REFERENCES TO CHURCH, GOD," an important discussion ensues:
KILMEADE: Alright, Mr. Speaker, what do you think of that? GINGRICH: Well, I hope he means it. [...] I'm sad that it took a crisis of this scale, but I'm delighted that the president has recognized that we in fact all are subordinate to a larger God and that we need to seek guidance from that God. [GRETCHEN] CARLSON: But Mr. Speaker, did you find it at all disingenuous, because some people are analyzing that this morning as saying it was disingenuous from a president who does not go to Church on a regular basis? GINGRICH: [...] If he's prepared to publicly recognize God, maybe we should encourage him to do it more often.
Disingenuous! Was it disingenuous for Obama to say "let's all pray for the fucked Gulf people who are really fucked" because he doesn't go to church every week? she asks.
This does not go nearly far enough. Possible follow-ups for tomorrow:
Is Obama the biggest asshole on Earth since dinosaurs?
Is Obama disingenuous for breathing oxygen and then exhaling carbon dioxide, so as to "live," godlessly?
Has Obama ever walked by a church and not thrown Molotov cocktails through its best stained glass windows?
Why was Obama smashing pictures and action figures of Jesus Christ with his red Communist hammer throughout the entire speech last night, which he delivered from a radical mosque?
Etc. | 4,472 |
PewDiePie isn’t exactly the smoothest guy on Earth.
But couldn’t Felix not be weird, just once all year, for Valentine’s Day?
Instead Kjellberg had to go and make Cupid’s birthday all about his weird obsession with aquariums. Poor Marzia!
PewDiePie’s wife posted Instagram photos of her weirdest Valentine’s Day date ever with Felix. Nothing says romance like sharks, squid and those cold unblinking fish stares.
Marzia was cool about it though. She wrote:
Stopped by the acquarium to say hi to my puffer valentine 🐡💘 not sure what happened to the 3rd photo but let’s say that’s how joy looks like. Also check out that strange starfish at the bottom of the 4th photo. ⭐👀
Felix, you’re supposed to take her out to eat lobster, not watch them through a glass.
PewDiePie’s Weird Aquarium Obsession
PewDiePie has long been obsessed with the fish, the ocean and aquariums. What’s up with that? This is his second trip to the aquarium in three months.
The aquarium is fun, but no normal person goes to the aquarium twice in three months. In November, Felix went all the way to Canada just to visit an aquarium there:
PewDiePie can’t even play Minecraft without building aquariums. And the Bro Army have adopted his obsession for the ocean deep. They’re constantly giving each other Minecraft aquarium tips, and spotting PewDiePie themed fish in Minecraft.
PewDiePie’s official video game, Tuber Simulator, even has an aquarium building feature.
That’s fine if Pewds has a weird obsession with aquariums. But Felix, you’re supposed to do something that she’s interested in for Valentine’s Day bro.
Bro Fish
So why is PewDiePie obsessed with fish and aquariums?
Could it be evidence of the existential crisis that led him to take a break from YouTube in the first place? Maybe Felix relates to the fish in the aquariums. His life is like being a fish in an aquarium, always on display, behind the glass.
If PewDiePie were a fish, he’d be a dolphin with that relentless, annoying laugh.
Disclaimer: The opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of CCN.com | 4,473 |
In the wake of work strikes by at least 157 prisoners, Minnesota’s Rush City Correctional Facility has reversed a policy change that would have doubled the time prisoners must wait to receive canteen items they purchase. The change would have increased delivery delays from one week to two for items including hygiene products, over-the-counter medication, and food. Prison staff announced this reversal in an internal memo December 6, and the prison modified its daily schedule on December 10 to allow staff to catch up on canteen deliveries.
Information from prisoners in Rush City reveals that the number of participating strikers was higher than initially reported. According to prisoner Demetrius Dobbins, the 155 day and night shift Anagram Balloons workers who stopped work were joined by "a number of kitchen workers.” Moreover, many "workers who did show up for work… gave low production” on the job.
Strikers are pleased to see the reversal of the policy, but say that the canteen issue was only the final straw leading up to the action. According to Eric Johnson, the work stoppages were due to “a buildup of abusive behavior from some correctional officers, poor medical treatment, a lack of programming… and [an] employer who continues to make it harder to make a dollar.” James Jemming agreed, adding “it would have been nice if over 200 people did not have to put their safety and relative freedom on the line for someone to see or listen to just how [the change] would affect the population here.”
Following the canteen policy reversal, Rush City prisoners we spoke with are looking to the future, and to bigger goals. Dobbins argues that “the overcrowding problem should be central right now.” Because of overcrowding, “a majority of the prison population are not provided adequate healthcare and rehabilitative programs.”
Some see policy changes like good time and decreasing time served in prison, including for those with life sentences as central next steps, while to others continued conversation with administration is a prominent theme. To Kashaun Pierce, it is crucial “for now and the future [to come] together to build a good, peaceful, and respectful relationship between the Rush City correctional officers/staff and inmates.” Adds Jemming, such a relationship would “remove a huge percentage of the violence in the system.”
“For years the Department Of Corrections and especially Rush City Prison have suppressed our voices, our ideals, but not our thoughts,” says Pierce. “We are just fed up with being treated like our voices doesn't matter… some of us have said enough is enough.” | 4,474 |
and there are small, fast backs, but there aren’t a lot of big, fast backs like Williams.
For 128 days, since Boston College played its bowl game, Williams’ future has been suspended. It’s a long time to wait, although Williams hasn’t exactly been idle. The 21-year-old had skills to improve (he met with a sports psychologist to help with his pass-catching), lessons to learn from old pros (he trained with former NFL running back Garrison Hearst) and off-the-field dreams to fill up his free time. On Tuesday he FedExed a non-disclosure agreement to a mechanical engineer who’s going to help with an invention Williams wants to patent.
But for a planner like Williams, this holding pattern has been a bit vexing. He’s run through different scenarios in his mind: Will I be living on the West Coast, or maybe in the Northeast? Will the team that drafts me use me as a bell cow, or as part of a committee? For an instant he sounds a little bit like an incoming college freshman again, wanting to both fit in and stand out.
How the Backs Stack Up
Where does Andre Williams rank among the runners in the 2014 NFL draft? Peter King breaks it down. FULL STORY
“Most of all, I just hope that whatever team picks me up knows what they are getting,” Williams says. “I don’t want them to think that just because I am a deep thinker and I have big dreams that I’m not concerned with the task at hand, playing football and having a great NFL career, because that does come first and foremost. I want somebody to not just see what I’ve done and what I’m good at, but to see my entire potential and my work ethic so they can continue to mentor me and bring out my abilities.”
Those football abilities have brought his family together on several occasions—the last time was the Doak Walker ceremony in December—and this weekend will be another. His mom cleaned out the garage and put a TV in there so all four of the Williams kids and their closest loved ones can barbecue and watch the draft on Friday and Saturday. She asked if Williams wanted a DJ, but he told her no.
There’s one question that Williams hasn’t answered to anybody, nor will he in the remaining hours: What team do you want to draft you? He has four or five in mind, but that’s information he’s keeping to himself. Soon enough, only one team will matter. | 4,475 |
Video Game Studio goes ALL IN on Nicolas Cage
A Whole New Era of The Craziest, Meme-iest Adventures is HERE
Recently, we watched a documentary about how Nicolas Cage was almost Superman. It broke our hearts, seeing that movie not happen. We intend to rectify that wrong and center our games around our National Treasure, Nicolas Cage.
Battleon shall be renamed to City of Angels, and you shall be able to fly, which will be accessible through our new travel system, Con Air. Unless you’re undead, in which case, you’ll just be a Ghost Rider… Just don’t Drive Angry.
We realize this may be Inconceivable to those of you looking through the Looking Glass, but you have to put The Trust in us and be sure that no feature will be Left Behind. This is going to be The Best of Times.
Expect new Nicolas Cage classes, like Lord of War, The Wicker Man, MatchStick Men, WindTalkers, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which will be released in the Season of the Witch.
For you Undead fans, we’re going to be Bringing out the Dead, because the Vampire’s Kiss will now allow you to get married, and you can have your Honeymoon in Vegas. (Just be careful it’s not The Kiss of Death.)
Just like Peggy Sue Got Married after being Moonstruck while Leaving Las Vegas. You will be able to Face/Off again Amos & Andrew using Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, but you have to do it before it’s Gone in Sixty Seconds.
Next, if you have Time to Kill, you can jump Between Worlds like an Army of One to a land with Fire Birds or to The Frozen Ground.
If you’re Seeking Justice, you can unleash your Rage and Rank Up and become a Bad Lieutenant, like GI Joe‘s Snake Eyes.
Be sure to tell Your Mom and Dad about this game update, because if they want to get you our new upgrade so you can be a part of The Cotton Club, you can just Pay the Ghost.
We realize this Change may make us an Outcast, like a Valley Girl of the videogame industry, but we are Wild at Heart and our love of Nicolas Cage will last until The Dying of The Light.
Also prepare for Special Musical Guest: Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted. (Because God knows, we didn’t know how else to fit that in here!)
NICOLAS CAGE ON! | 4,476 |
the dreamboat to own this weekend with the captaincy armband, but I've just got a feeling that Mo's form will carry over at Burnley.
(VC) – Raheem Sterling (MCI): Is not Salah, it's Sterling. I think Brighton will be quite compact and might limit the score at The Etihad.
Other Gameweek Comments:
Every fibre in my body is telling me to wildcard this week due to injury and rotation concerns in my team. I'm trying to resist though so I can activate it over the international break.
FPL Scout Picks: Gameweek 4
Formation: 3-4-3
Starting 11
GK: Martin Dubravka
DEF: Alex Zinchenko
DEF: Lucas Digne
DEF: Trent Alexander-Arnold
MID: Gylfi Sigurdsson
MID: Raheem Sterling (VC)
MID: Mohamed Salah (C)
MID: Christian Pulisic
FOR: Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang
FOR: Sebastian Haller
FOR: Sergio Aguero
Substitutes
GK: Tom Heaton
MID: Daniel James
DEF: Emerson
DEF: Issa Diop
Want to know more about The Hype Train?
The Hype Train is an entertainment website founded in 2015, specialising in Fantasy sports reporting, starting with Fantasy Premier League (FPL), before expanding to MLS Fantasy coverage in 2018.
We pride ourselves in providing beautiful graphics, statistics, in-depth analytical reporting and free weekly insight for hopeful players attempting to climb rankings tables. We are also occasional media reviewers, with a keen interest to review games, live sport, and professional wrestling.
In 2019, Hype Train Football Club was formed, becoming the first Fantasy Football website to take to the field. HTFC is a socially active team across social and web channels, providing regular match highlights, match reports, comprehensive player statistics and unique player profiles.
The Hype Train were nominated and shortlisted for the 'Best Football Blog' in 2016 by the Football Bloggers Association at their annual Football Blogging Awards (The FBA's), and were again shortlisted as a finalist in 2019 in the 'Best Fantasy Football Blog' category.
You can follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, follow Hype Train FC on Instagram, subscribe to our YouTube channel for exclusive content, or visit our website here at www.thehypetrain.co.uk
All aboard. | 4,477 |
A red-tailed hawk in the Twin Cities that lived for days with an arrow lodged in one of its legs has died despite the best efforts to save its life, according to those who cared for the bird.
The executive director of the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota said Sunday that it’s most likely that the young hawk was intentionally shot, which is illegal.
“It appears based on the path of the arrow through the body that the bird was likely perched and shot from below,” said the center’s Julia Ponder. She said the center is unaware of anyone who has been held responsible for the hawk’s death.
The center said the damage to the hawk’s right knee could not be repaired, meaning it would never be able to hunt for itself if released and would be left with considerable lifelong pain and suffering if kept in captivity.
“While it is not the ideal ending we had hoped for,” the center said in a statement last week, “we can take solace in the fact that we prevented a seriously wounded hawk from a longer and more painful death.”
The center first learned of the wounded hawk on Nov. 30 when someone who saw the bird with the arrow lodged in its leg called. Despite the arrow, the hawk was able to keep flying.
“It was first sighted in the Brooklyn Center area, near the Mississippi [River], Lyndale Avenue and 53rd Avenue,” Ponder said. “We sent people to look and were unable to [spot] it for several days.”
She said it reappeared near the East Bank campus of the U, and two center staff members captured it Wednesday. After efforts to save it at the clinic in St. Paul failed, it was euthanized.
The shooting of raptors with “projectiles — pellet guns, BB guns, firearms, etc. — are more common than we would like,” Ponder said. It’s fairly rare for them to be wounded by arrows, however, she added.
Ponder said it was illegal to shoot the hawk, whether with a bow or a firearm and regardless of the time of year.
Red-tailed hawks, eagles and other migratory birds are protected under federal wildlife laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. These laws prohibit the possession, use and sale of the feathers or other parts of federally protected birds, as well as their unauthorized killing.
The red-tailed hawk’s geographic range is extensive, spanning from Panama and parts of the Caribbean north to Alaska. | 4,478 |
StarTrek.com is saddened to report the passing of actor David Ogden Stiers, who succumbed to bladder cancer on Saturday at the age of 75. According to his agent, he died peacefully at home in Oregon. The Emmy-nominated Stiers was best known for his role as Major Winchester on M*A*S*H, provided voices for such films as Beauty and the Beast and Lilo & Stitch, co-starred on the TV iteration of The Dead Zone, and made his mark in the Star Trek universe with his role as Dr. Timicin in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Half a Life.”
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Stiers touched Trek fans as Dr. Timicin, a scientist who must undergo the Resolution, a ritual suicide, in order to save the people on his planet, Kaelon II. However, his plans were thrown for a loop -- at least for a while -- when he met and fell for Lwaxana Troi. The episode remains well-regarded for its powerful story, rare focus on two guest stars, unusually serious Lwaxana arc and the strong performances by Stiers and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry.
StarTrek.com interviewed Stiers in April 2017, when the mostly retired actor agreed to a chat timed to the release of the film, Neil Stryker and the Tyrant of Time, which also featured Walter Koenig. During the conversation, he addressed the fact that Dr. Timicin, in the course of a single episode, experienced a full arc. “They really let it focus on the two of us, which was very unusual,” Stiers said. “I just watched a clip of it this morning. I had forgotten how beautifully written the arguments are. The whole moral dilemma was beautifully presented. I'm not jumping up and down, but I really like the idea that I live in a state with dignity legislation and physician assisted suicide, should it ever come to that. That seems to me to be an intelligent and mature middle ground. You don't use it if you don't want to, but it's there if you are in need, for whatever reason, of a legitimate reason for ending your life.”
Please join StarTrek.com in offering our condolences to Stiers’ family, friends, colleagues and fans. | 4,479 |
A rendering of the Bridge in Ice, coming soon to Finland. (Image: MNN/Bridge in Ice)
Sure, ice sculptures are impressive, but when you live on a wintery tundra, your average frozen swan just won’t cut it. So this year, students at Eindhoven University of Technology in Juuka, Finland have gone bigger: they’re resuscitating a 500-year-old bridge design by Leonardo DaVinci, all in ice.
To do this, they’ve put a futuristic twist on the age-old material. First, they mix water with cellulose fibers to make its frozen form extra-strong and extra-flexible. They then spray this reinforced water on giant balloon molds, and let it freeze one layer at a time. After enough layers are caked on, the supports are deflated, and the slippery structure stands on its own.
Da Vinci originally designed the bridge to span the Golden Horn, an offshoot of the Bosphorus that separates the center of Istanbul from the rest of the city. The 240-meter structure would have been the largest single-span bridge of its time, but a structure of that magnitude was thought to be impossible, and it was never built.
The students have retained this sense of ambition–although their bridge will be much smaller than Da Vinci’s, clocking in at 35 meters, it will still be, in their words, ”the world’s longest span in ice ever realized.” To accompany it, they are also building an igloo, an illuminated waterfall, and a series of more fanciful sculptures that show off new ice engineering techniques.
The students are old, cold pros at this point, having already built an ice model of the Sagrada Familia, which happened to double as the world’s tallest ice dome. But even these freezemasters need an extra pair of (gloved) hands every once in a while. If you happen to be around Juuka, you can help out up until the bridge’s proposed completion in mid-February. Or, for a less frigid experience, snuggle up with their series of daily timelapse videos.
2014’s project, the Sagrada Familia in Ice. (Photo: Niera/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0)
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to [email protected]. | 4,480 |
Microsoft opened up its Windows 10 Technical Preview to Windows Phone users last month, but only a scant few Lumia devices were supported. That's soon about to change. Microsoft has announced a second round of devices that will be able to run the very latest builds of Windows 10, and the good news is that the list has expanded considerably. The bad news is that there are still a few notable absences, including the Lumia 930 and any HTC Windows Phone devices.
Lumia 930 not yet supported
Of course, you should still sit down for a minute and consider if you really want to install the Windows 10 Technical Preview on your phone. If your Windows Phone is your daily driver, it's probably not a good idea — the operating system is still rough around the edges. Dual-SIM features are still severely lacking, and Messaging lacks, search, message drafts, voice notes, spam filters, support for multiple attachments, and other features. In addition, Cortana only speaks English and Internet Tethering will break your phone if you don't turn it off before powering down your device.
The next Windows 10 build will likely come out next week — below is the preliminary list of all the devices it will support.
Lumia 1020
Lumia 1320
Lumia 1520
Lumia 520
Lumia 525
Lumia 526
Lumia 530
Lumia 530 Dual Sim
Lumia 535
Lumia 620
Lumia 625
Lumia 630
Lumia 630 Dual Sim
Lumia 635
Lumia 636
Lumia 638
Lumia 720
Lumia 730
Lumia 730 Dual SIM
Lumia 735
Lumia 810
Lumia 820
Lumia 822
Lumia 830
Lumia 920
Lumia 925
Lumia 928
Lumia ICON
Microsoft Lumia 430
Microsoft Lumia 435
Microsoft Lumia 435 Dual SIM
Microsoft Lumia 435 Dual SIM DTV
Microsoft Lumia 532
Microsoft Lumia 532 Dual SIM
Microsoft Lumia 640 Dual SIM
Microsoft Lumia 535 Dual SIM
Correction: The Rooms feature has been discontinued on Windows Phone and will not be supported in Windows 10. You will lose access to your Rooms chat history if you upgrade. An earlier version of this article implied that support in Windows 10 was still in development — we regret the error. | 4,481 |
Some of America's largest utes are set to arrive in Australia this year following an unconventional arrangement between the US and New Zealand.
Full-size Ram trucks capable of towing more than 13 tonnes will go on sale around October after Fiat Chrysler New Zealand secured the rights to import and convert American left-hand-drive models in unlimited numbers for sale in Australia and New Zealand.
The deal extends to Ram 2500 and 3500 models, vehicles currently available in the US with a choice of 5.7-litre or 6.4-litre petrol V8s along with a massive 6.7-litre Cummins diesel six-cylinder option providing 1170Nm of torque.
The top-end Ram 3500 diesel can carry more than 3.3 tonnes in the tray and tow payloads of more 13 tonnes. By comparison, popular four-wheel-drive utes such as the Ford Ranger have a towing capacity of just 3.5 tonnes.
Ram trucks are coming to Australia in 2015 Photo: Supplied
Ram is likely to target mining, caravan, equestrian and industrial operators with the ute.
Australian specifications for the models have not been finalised, though larger 3500 models are likely to cost more than $100,000 locally.
Similar-sized Ford F250 models imported and converted by Queensland's Performax International are priced from $105,000 plus on-road costs.
The deal was completed by the Fiat Chrysler New Zealand's Australian owners, Clyde Campbell and Neville Crichton, who will bring the vehicles in outside Fiat Chrysler's established Australian framework.
Ram trucks are coming to Australia in 2015 Photo: Supplied
The duo are also understood to be hoping to offer Ram's smaller 1500 - a model that could put them at odds with Fiat Chrysler Australia's Pat Dougherty, who told Drive in February that the model was in his sights as a local proposition.
An insider for company says it is too soon to say exactly how the models will be sold and distributed, only that they will be available across Australia.
Campbell says there is a clear demand for heavy utes in Australia and New Zealand.
"Until now the only way to own one in Australia was through a low volume aftermarket conversion. Our vehicles are being developed with the full blessing of FCA's Ram division," he says.
"They have worked closely with our engineers to produce a vehicle that is as close to an official factory right hand drive vehicle as it can be without it having actually run down the factory production line."
The Ram 3500 can tow more than 13 tonnes. Photo: Supplied | 4,482 |
Assyrian Organization Condemns Kurdish Incursion Into Assyrian Villages in Iraq
The Assyrian Universal Alliance received ominous news from Assyrians living in the village of Rabatki in the district of Aqra in the Dohuk province, Northern Iraq. The village, which has never had any Kurdish inhabitants, has been fending off land grab attempts since the early 1990s. Seven cars full of Kurdish men armed with Kalashnikovs and other weapons, mostly belonging to the Zebari tribe, attacked the village on June 13 (AINA 6-13-2013). The motive behind the attack was to forcefully claim parts of the village. The village chief, Mr. Zaya Barcam Khoshaba, was beaten in the face by an attacker with the side of a Kalashnikov. A similar violation has been instituted against other towns and villages located on the outskirts of Dohuk, North of Iraq, in the Assyrian villages of Kori Gavana, Blejani and many others in which the defenseless residents in these villages were threatened and intimidated by the Kurds. Assyrians in many of these villages stopped sowing their rich agricultural lands - their only source of income -- because they were warned by the Kurds that if anyone attempted to produce a crop, their farms and houses would be burned to the ground. This threatening menace was the fundamental reason why hundreds of Christian families left their homes in the village and fled to neighboring countries. The Assyrian Universal Alliance condemns in the strongest terms possible these illegal and intimidating intrusions against the indigenous Assyrian people of Iraq by the Kurds. We hold the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) accountable for not stopping these discriminatory behaviours against Assyrians, deeming it a party to the unlawful and immoral occupation and transfer of Assyrian-owned lands to Kurdish squatters. These illicit acts are contrary to the obligations of Iraq's national unity and civil peace that the faithful citizens of the country are seeking. An appeal has been made to the world leaders to intervene with the Iraqi authorities to investigate and take immediate steps to reverse and prevent any further violations and abuse. We demand that the KRG immediately cease these unlawful aggressions against the Assyrian Christian inhabitants of our ancestral villages, returning any occupied lands to their rightful owners. On June 3 The Hon. Chris Bowen MP, Member for McMahon, raised in the Australian Federal Parliament a motion focusing on the Assyrian demand for the establishment of an autonomous province in the heart of the Assyrian ancestral lands in the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq (AINA 6-5-2013). The AUA feels compelled to formally bring this matter to the attention of the allied governments and seek their support to confer with the Iraqi authorities about this issue. | 4,483 |
Detroit News business columnist Dan Howes reports that the Obama administration has prodded Ford Motor Co. to pull its TV ad featuring a Ford (pick up) buyer saying that he wasn't going to buy a vehicle from any company that received a government bailout because that was un-American. Notes Howes:
[T]he White House questioned whether the copy was publicly denigrating the controversial bailout policy CEO Alan Mulally repeatedly supported in the dark days of late 2008, in early '09 and again when the ad flap arose. And more. With President Barack Obama tuning his re-election campaign amid dismal economic conditions and simmering antipathy toward his stimulus spending and associated bailouts, the Ford ad carried the makings of a political liability when Team Obama can least afford yet another one. Can't have that. The ad, pulled in response to White House questions (and, presumably, carping from rival GM), threatened to rekindle the negative (if accurate) association just when the president wants credit for their positive results (GM and Chrysler are moving forward, making money and selling vehicles) and to distance himself from any public downside of his decision. In other words, where presidential politics and automotive marketing collide — clean, green, politically correct vehicles not included — the president wins and the automaker loses because the benefit of the battle isn't worth the cost of waging it.
President Obama had assured everyone that just because GM and Chrysler got close to $100 billion in government money didn't mean that the government would start bullying the companies to do its bidding. But evidently bullying their rivals that didn't take government money is just fine.
One nit to pick with Howes' otherwise excellent account: He implies that Ford did not reject bailout money out of some high-minded principle. It was quite happy to accept government help to "retool" its plants in the past. But the "retooling" money that Howes is alluding to was meant to help the auto industry meet the government's hugely expensive CAFÉ mandate. Of course, Ford is not unsullied by government money. No company is or can be given the complex web of government regulations and subsidies that governs economic activity. But the bailout was not just like any other government handout. It was a handout that explicitly, expressly propped up Ford's failing rivals and therefore implicitly penalized it. Not allowing Ford to market that fact to distinguish itself from them is tantamount to imposing a double jeopardy on it.
Ford's campaign to sell cars has to yield to the president's campaign to sell himself. How is that for free enterprise and free speech in America?
Hat Tip: Sean Higgins, Investors Business Daily. | 4,484 |
3:04pm: St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman does not sound quite as enthused by the idea as Sternberg. He says he previously informed the club that the city would not authorize talks with Montreal, John Romano of the Tampa Bay Times tweets.
12:46pm: In an eyebrow-raising development, Major League Baseball has granted authorization to the Tampa Bay Rays to explore the possibility of becoming a two-city franchise. The approval will allow the organization to pursue concepts in which the team would split its home games between Florida and Montreal. Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times first tweeted the news and has more in a story.
Notably, this does not mean that the Rays necessarily will move to Montreal. Even a part-time move would likely not occur for several seasons. Rather, commissioner Rob Manfred says there’s a “broad grant” for Rays owner Stu Sternberg to build out options, as Evan Drellich of The Athletic tweets.
In a statement, Sternberg says he remains “committed to keeping baseball in Tampa Bay for generations to come.” But he says he also believes “this concept” — referring to some kind of Montreal split — “is worthy of serious exploration.”
It’s hard to fathom a situation where a Florida/Montreal split represents a long-term solution. Presumably, that’d mean building (or rehabbing) and operating facilities in both cities, creating untold logistical hurdles on top of those that already exist.
As things stand, the Rays are contractually obliged to play at the Trop through the 2027 campaign. Getting local authorities to release even a portion of home games seems like a challenge. League owners and the MLBPA will surely want to see details and have quite a few questions answered. And with conceivable two-market opportunities come vast potential inefficiencies.
Montreal has a storied history with the game of baseball. But the club lost the Expos to D.C. after the 2004 season and hasn’t hosted a big-league club since. The city has hosted some late-spring contests at Olympic Stadium, but that venue poses many of the same issues presented by the Rays’ current home at Tropicana Field.
While this development does more to create possibilities than answer questions about the club’s future, it comes with immediate consequences. The Rays have struggled to gain traction in stadium talks in the St. Petersburg/Tampa area. Recent plans for an Ybor City complex fell flat, leaving Sternberg and company looking for new options — and, no doubt, also some leverage. | 4,485 |
Scientists have compared fat samples from humans and other primates and found that changes in DNA packaging affected how the human body processes fat. Share on Pinterest Evolution made humans the ‘fat primate,’ researchers suggest. Our bodies need fat to store energy and protect vital organs. Fat also helps the body absorb some nutrients and produce important hormones. Dietary fats include saturated fats, trans fats, monounsaturated fats, and polyunsaturated fats, all of which have different properties. People should try to avoid or only consume saturated and trans fats in moderation because they raise low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad,” cholesterol levels. Monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, however, can lower LDL cholesterol levels. Triglycerides are the most common type of fat in the body. They store excess energy from the food we eat. During digestion, our bodies break these down and transfer them to the cells via the bloodstream. Our bodies use some of this fat as energy and store the rest inside the cells. Fat metabolism is key to human survival, and any imbalances in the process can lead to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that almost 18 million people died from the condition in 2016.
How humans became the ‘fat’ primate Modern eating habits and a lack of exercise have contributed to the obesity “epidemic,” but new research highlights the role that evolution played in the increasing formation of human body fat. The scientists found that changes to how DNA is packaged inside fat cells reduced the human body’s ability to turn “bad” fat into “good” fat. The results of the research now appear in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. “We’re the fat primates,” says study co-author Devi Swain-Lenz, a postdoctoral associate in biology at Duke University in Durham, NC. The researchers — who Swain-Lenz and Duke biologist Greg Wray led — compared fat samples from humans, chimps, and other primates using a technique called ATAC-seq. This analyzes how fat cell DNA is packaged in the bodies of different species. The findings revealed that humans have anywhere from 14% to 31% body fat, while other primates have less than 9%. Also, DNA regions in humans are more condensed, thereby limiting accessibility to the genes involved in fat metabolism. The researchers also found that around 780 DNA regions were more accessible in chimps and macaques compared with humans. This means that the human body has a reduced capacity to transform bad fat into good fat. | 4,486 |
the chances of a random collision here are clearly far too high to be worth ignoring.) And the more illegal 64-bit numbers there are, the worse those odds become.
It is debatable whether that chance is "beyond all reasonable doubt"; frankly, I doubt a court of law would ever decide otherwise. But computers are getting faster and increasing in number. In a hundred years' time, "exabyte" may be such a common quantity of data as to be a household term. So to set the threshold this low would be short-sighted.
By comparison, the HD-DVD AACS encryption key which was - to the horror of the MPAA - released publically onto the internet in early May 2007 is 32 hexadecimal digits long (well, 31 if we want to be pedantic, since it has a leading zero) - that's 128 bits. Each of those 64 extra bits makes a random collision half as likely, so this takes us a full twelve orders of magnitude below the point of "certainty".
128 bits, therefore, is an excellent size for the shortest possible illegal number.
Complexity
However, obviously, it would be ridiculous to try to make it illegal to distribute (for example) the encryption key "0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000". This is because such numbers, though arbitrarily large, would very probably turn up all over the place, generated independently by multiple sources.
More technically, the remark above about compression can be carried over here. We can compress, say, a billion zeros from occupying almost an entire gibibyte of computer space to a mere six bytes as the ASCII string, "1E9 0s". Other such simple patterns can likewise be compressed immensely to relatively short streams of ASCII using that famous compression routine, "do what the ASCII tells you to do". For example, "5E8 repetitions of 01" or "first 1E9 bits of pi". Since I argued above that a reversibly transformed version of a restricted file should hold the same distribution restrictions as the original, we cannot effectively enforce restrictions about these arbitrarily large but relatively simple bit streams, since they transform to something too short, meaning collisions are too likely.
English, of course (and other languages using relatively small character sets) is even more compressed a format than ASCII, since the vast majority of possible streams of ASCII mean nothing in English. Thus, "Generate and concatenate the first million prime numbers" is a 56 byte string = a 448 bit number (which describes the construction of about 7.3MiB of decimal digits) but still probably immune to distribution restrictions. | 4,487 |
Colton Haynes' Roy Harper has role in changes in Arrow season 4 premiere(Photo : Astrid Stawiarz | Getty Images Entertainment)
It is an open secret that "Arrow" season 4 premiere will introduce the "real" Emerald Archer of Star City.
Cast and executive producers of the CW Network TV series confirmed in earlier interviews that Stephen Amell's Oliver Queen will no longer be the Arrow that he is in the first three seasons.
He will now be called the Green Arrow, his original nickname in the DC comics where the show's characters were based from.
What prompted the show to embrace such change in the upcoming "Arrow" season 4 premiere episode? Executive producer Marc Guggenheim it is the event in third season involving Roy Harper (Colton Haynes).
"That's definitely the thesis statement of episode 401, the season premiere," Guggenheim told Green Arrow TV when asked about the major shift in fourth season of "Arrow."
"He can't be the Arrow anymore, because everyone believes that Roy Harper was the Arrow, and Roy Harper is dead, at least as far as everyone believes. So, he had to adopt a new identity. All of this is explained in the season premiere; we come straight out with it."
During the San Diego Comic-Con last month, Stephen Amell confirmed he will be wearing a green suit with lighter shade in "Arrow" season 4 premiere.
Aside from new identity, other things Oliver Queen will have to deal with in the pilot episode is his issues with other members of Team Arrow. The biggest is the hate Diggle (David Ramsey) feels towards him because of what he did to Lyla.
"Dig has a huge bone to pick with Oliver when they see each other again, at the top of Season 4," executive producer Wendy Mericle said in an interview with Collider.
"We're gonna work that out. It's not gonna be easy. With what happened to Dig's family, it's really tough to buy that back, and Oliver is not gonna to be able to. Obviously, they can't be mad at each other forever, or what are we doing? But also, in the intervening months while Oliver has been gone, Dig has, more or less, been leading the team. It's a little bit more democratic, Speedy and Black Canary are both super bad-ass and kicking butt. He's not happy, when he and Oliver meet again. It's not an open-armed, "Hey, buddy, all is forgiven," reunion."
"Arrow" season 4 premiere is on Oct. 7. | 4,488 |
Install and Configure OpenSSH Server on Windows 10 and Windows Server 1709
A couple of weeks ago I already wrote about how OpenSSH is now available on Windows 10. In this blog post I will cover how to install and configure OpenSSH Server on Windows 10 and Windows Server 1709.
Today, OpenSSH Client and Server on Windows are still in Beta, so they should only be used in secure test environments and not in production.
First you have to install the OpenSSH feature on your Windows machine. Remember that it needs to be the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (1709) or Windows Server version 1709 or higher.
Get - WindowsCapability - Online |? Name -like 'OpenSSH*' # Install the OpenSSH Server Add - WindowsCapability - Online -Name OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0 # Install the OpenSSHUtils helper module, which is needed to fix the ACL for ths host keys. Install - Module -Force OpenSSHUtils
On Windows 10 you can also use the UI to install it.
After the installation you can find the OpenSSH Server files and some more configuration options under C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH
Now you need to configure the OpenSSH Server (sshd)
To enable authentication into an SSH server on Windows, you first have to generate host keys and repair the ACL on the host keys.
Start-Service ssh - agent cd C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH # Generate Key.\ssh - keygen - A # Add Key.\ssh - add ssh_host_ed25519_key # Repair SSH Host Key Permissions Repair - SshdHostKeyPermission -FilePath C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh_host_ed25519_key # Open firewall port New - NetFirewallRule - Protocol TCP - LocalPort 22 - Direction Inbound - Action Allow -DisplayName SSH # Concider to configure the Profile for the Firewall rule
Now you should be able to connect to the Windows Machine using SSH for an SSH client. Of course this can be the OpenSSH client or the SSH client which comes with the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10.
If you are running OpenSSH Server on a Windows 10 or Windows Server 1709 virtual machine in Microsoft Azure, don’t forget to also configure the Network Security Group (NSG) to allow SSH inbound access on port 22.
Also check out how you can do SSH from PowerShell: Using SSH with PowerShell | 4,489 |
I was super excited to receive my order today from Shiro!
I have been wanting to place an order for a custom gloss for some time and finally made the plunge a week or so ago, along with needing to have Moon Prism Power in my collection!
I have never gotten any glosses from an indie company before so did not really know what to expect. Was it going to be sticky? Was it going to taste awful? Was it going to smell like chemicals or what?
This gloss at first opening the tube smells so sweet, I cannot seem to place the scent.
Then I swatched it, and it was so beautiful and had no trace of stickiness that I have come to expect from glosses.
It just glided on smoothly and without any patchiness.
I forgot to mention I made my custom gloss completely opaque.
Which I can say it delivered.
Also it does not really taste like anything to me, which I like.
The color is a shift between green and pink/peach sparkles in a white shimmer base. It matches the shadow so well, looks like a cream version of the powdered shade.
Moon Prism Power Shadow
I loved the container that the shadow came in, it is well sealed and seems durable.
It also comes with a sifter and a protective sticker on top of that!
The shade is exactly like the gloss and glides on smoothly and fully opaque/without patchiness with one swipe. It might just be me, but with the shadow I get more of the pink/peach in the shade and with the gloss I get more of the gold/green shade.
I received two sample baggies with my order(along with some candies!)
One of those was Hodor.
Th picture on the website does not do this shade justice.
It so it is a beautiful taupey brown shade and just looks amazing on swatching it.
The other sample I received was Cake!
It reminds me of Moon Prism Power a lot, but it seems to lack the greenpigment.
It is also more pigmented with a strong white shimmer base with a slight pink/gold shift.
Closer view of both Hodor and Cake!
All in all I am super happy with my order and see another one in the near future with full sizes of Cake! and Hodor!
Definitely Check out Shiro Cosmetics if you love eye shadows and glosses she is amazing: http://www.shirocosmetics.com/index.htm
-Kristyn | 4,490 |
Article content continued
“Generally, broadly speaking, energy is an unloved sector,” said Jennifer Rowland, a St. Louis-based oil and gas analyst for Edward Jones, who covers both U.S. and Canadian oil producers. “It just seems like the industry can’t win.”
The S&P/TSX Capped Energy Index is down 5.18 per cent year-to-date, even as the Standard & Poor’s U.S. Energy Index is up 5 per cent during the same period. U.S. crude is up 22 per cent for the year.
It just seems like the industry can’t win Jennifer Rowland, analyst, Edward Jones
For oilsands producers, Rowland said, costs have come down dramatically but they also started at the higher end of the cost curve and “it’s not like they’re taking costs out and everybody else is standing still.”
In 2014, she said, generalist and institutional investors wanted to own oil and gas stocks for their growth. Fund managers who want that type of growth in their portfolio have shifted their money into the tech sector.
Now, they want to see oil and gas companies demonstrate that they can be value-oriented stocks rather than growth, and more energy companies need to demonstrate their cost-discipline in order to be rewarded as value holdings.
Oilsands companies are also making increasingly bold moves to try and demonstrate this to investors — in some cases, acting completely opposite to actions taken in the lead up to 2014, when the oilsands were the world’s hottest energy play.
At MEG Energy Corp., for instance, president and CEO Derek Evans announced the company was not going to renew one of its leases on a future growth project and would instead “let those lands disappear” rather than pay the increasing annual rent on the land.
Still, generalist and institutional investors are staying on the sidelines, Rowland said.
Looking at Suncor Energy Inc.’s ability to generate $3.4 billion in cash from operating activities last quarter, she said, “These are the kind of stocks that investors should want to own.”
However, given the buyers’ strike, she said it was “just not fun right now” to be in the oil business or to be an analyst covering it.
“General investors are saying, ‘To heck with energy,’” she said.
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: geoffreymorgan | 4,491 |
The promise of Patreon, the membership platform for independent artists and creators, has always been simple: If your fans like your work, they will pay you for it. No need to slough off cash from advertisers, or make shady deals with brands. It's just you, your fans, and the stuff you make for them.
Patreon has slowly introduced new ways for creators to milk the most out of these fan relationships. They can give subscribers (called "patrons") a peek into their lives behind-the-scenes with Patreon Lens, a Snapchat dupe specifically for creators. They can host live Q&As with fans on Discord, the voice-and-text chat app. Now, Patreon has another trick up its sleeve: It's announcing an integration with Reddit, aimed at bringing creators closer than ever to the fan networks that support them.
Patreon/Reddit
Many of Patreon's 100,000 creators and 2 million patrons already have a presence on Reddit. Fans have made subreddits to discuss episodes of the German talk show Kurzgesagt, which relies on funds from fans, or the Patreon-supported podcast Chapo Trap House. The new partnership makes these fan enclaves official, adding a special flair to denote paying patrons and adding a widget to invite fans to give money.
“It seemed like a very natural partnership,” says Alex Riccomini, Reddit's director of business development and media partnerships. “We are the community specialists. They are the creator specialists.”
By teaming up with Reddit, Patreon hopes it can convert more Redditors into patrons, helping them discover, connect to, and financially support creators on the platform. It also hopes to build up the communities that surround these creators, inviting fans to connect to each other and offering a direct line of communication to artists. For those outside of the creator space, the new integration may seem only r/mildlyinteresting. But for creators, it could be another reason to resist joining the larger platforms, like Facebook and YouTube, and to remain within the creator ecosystem that Patreon hopes to reinvent.
Pay Your Dues
When the integration rolls out later this month, creators with existing communities on Reddit can indicate that they have a Patreon, then add a widget in the sidebar of their community. “That allows them to capture users who may not know they have a Patreon account, so they can start donating,” says Lei Gong, the product manager at Reddit in charge of the Patreon integration. Redditors who have contributed to a creator's Patreon will see flair—a short bit of text that says “patron”—show up next to their username. | 4,492 |
out Britt with a guillotine. Klein cut a good promo on the commentary booth after. Winner: Kelly Klein.
Tag Wars – Colt Cabana & Willie Mack vs Kenny King & MVP
This match was very back and forth, with plenty of action. When it kicked off, it started a bit slow but picked up quick. Willie Mack has a very interesting way of moving and is very innovative, I like him. MVP had some very krisp offence and they picked up the win, as King pins Colt. Winners: Kenny King and MVP.
Proving Ground Match – Dalton Castle vs Rocky Romero vs Jeff Cobb
This is easily the best match so far on this card. Cobb is so strong, Dalton is fantastic and Rocky is the King of Sneaky Style. Lots of back and forth action in this triple threat. They usually followed the ‘one rolls out as two fight in the ring’ format but still a very good match. Jeff Cobb is my favourite thing in all of ROH at the moment, he’s great. Out of nowhere, Rocky Romero reverses a Bangerang from Dalton and pins Castle for the win. Yes, Rocky Romero won. Rocky Romero won a proving ground match, earning a future ROH TV Championship match. Rocky. Everyone was stunned and shocked, even Rocky. Winner: Rocky Romero
Main Event
Handicap Match – Life Blood; Mark Haskins, Tracy Williams, Finlay & Juice Robinson vs The Briscoes, Silas Young, Shane Taylor & Bully Ray
Bully comes out before the match and talks lots of crap so Juice begs the ref to make this a 5-on-4 handicap match. Lots of shit talking before the match, but it eventually gets going and Haskins quickly takes control of Mark Briscoe and tags in Williams. Life Blood show plenty of heart in the early going. Bully Ray calls out Juice, who tags in. Juice gets worked over for quite a while with the five guys breaking all the rules whenever they can. * This was a very good match, due to an error, I lost what I originally wrote but, the winners were Life Blood after Bandido hobbled to the ring wrapped in bandages and referee Todd Sinclair said it was legal. Bandido pinned Bully Ray with a frog splash. Winners: Life Blood.
Thanks for reading this and don’t forget you can subscribe for free via email, tweet to me @ProWresMatthew or email me at [email protected]. You can also follow @altprowres on Twitter too. Comments, likes and shares are always welcomed. | 4,493 |
ALLAHABAD: With the ongoing Magh Mela, thousands are taking a dip into the Ganga to rid themselves of sins. But, the fact is that the river water has become toxic and unfit for bathing.The untreated water from various nullahs in the city is flowing into the Ganga, thus polluting the river water. Besides, the ever-increasing human settlements in Kachar (catchment area of river) area have added to the burden of the river.On Sunday, Team TOI, along with a group of advocates, journeyed on a boat from Kanhiapur to Sangam to trace the pollution level. Starting from Manauri to Kaniapur, Rajapur, Rasulabad, Sankarghat, Talirgunj, Salori to Mori Gate and finally the smaller nullahs -- all were seen flowing into the Ganga, before its confluence with the Yamuna. These nullahs were not only disposing of volumes of human waste, but also the waste from the state TB Hospital (the waste disposal plant, which was constructed by the British and located behind the hospital, has been lying defunct for ages).As far as government action is concerned, Ganga Action Plan (GAP), a Central government project, has proved to be futile. “So far, thousands of crores of rupees have been invested in cleaning up the Ganga, but in vain. Jal Nigam, the body responsible for keeping the river clean, has proved to be inefficient,” alleged Gopal Das Yadav, a former MLA, who had raised the issue in the state assembly in 1988.Since GAP was thought of, both the Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD) have gone up multifold. But, the city still awaits implementation of three important recommendations of the plan viz constructing treatment plants, pumping stations and laying of sewer lines, added Yadav."During every Magh Mela, Ardh Kumbh Mela and Kumbh Mela, history repeats itself. Seers raise a hue and cry over the change in colour of the river water and threaten to boycott bathing in the river in protest against the pollution. Authorities swing into action and release additional water from Narora Dam, so that the accumulated silt and other impurities get washed off, albeit temporarily. After culmination of the mela, things are back to square one. Perhaps the authorities have the answer to for how long such stop-gap measures would continue to convince the masses,'' said Prof S S Ojha of Allahabad University.At the end of the day, the question when the Ganga would be rid of pollution remains unanswered. | 4,494 |
St. Claude, MB –
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is kicking off the legalization of marijuana in a big way.
Trudeau is opting to celebrate in St. Claude Manitoba rather than Ottawa with a special afternoon ceremony at 4:20pm local time.
“There is no more fitting place to mark this historic moment,” Prime Minister Trudeau said, “We have a bi-lingual town in the middle of Canada that has honoured its ties with France by creating the world’s largest smokable pipe. This will be the most Canadian way to kick off the legalization of marijuana.”
Local planners buoyed by the influx of funding are planning a day long festival featuring fireworks and concerts. A diverse line-up of artist will include Bob Dylan, Snoop Dog, Eric Church, Lady Gaga, Lil Wayne, Willie Nelson, Drake and many more. Special M.C.’s will be Cheech and Chong and a full roster of comedian is coming soon.
“We are thrilled to be the location for this event,” organizer Serge Demers said. “We had people smoke weed in our big pipe before but never legally and never anyone this famous.”
Trudeau is slated to take the first rip at exactly 4:20pm followed immediately by a CF-18 fly by. The pipe will be kept lit for up to three hours to allow attenders a chance to sample the new government issue weed free of charge. A great selection of food trucks and concessions will be on-site all evening.
St. Claude hopes to make the event an annual one. “Around here we are calling it the 420 on the 240,” Demers explained. “I think we can move the weed celebration from April 20 to October 17 with the new laws in place.”
“I invite all Canadians to join us in person, on television or through the internet as we celebrate the coming of age of our nation,” Trudeau said in a statement.
More musical and comedy acts will be added to the festival as the date gets closer.
Stay tuned to CIPP-TV and check out the website CIPPTVPortagelaPrairie.com for more details.
Notice to readers/disclaimer – this is a fictional story and a fictional website. We don’t pretend to be real. We are not fake news or fake crap. We are imaginary, like most of our friends. Click here to read more about this.
Photo: Alex Guibord – https://www.flickr.com/photos/alexguibord/ | 4,495 |
done is significantly reduce its lead and first mover advantage. It has transformed its community into a bunch of oblivious naysayers who insist that it is impossible to do what hundreds of others are already doing: operating with significantly more capacity, and in many cases successfully hard forking to improve their coins.
Bitcoin is not dead. It is not even dying. But it is stagnating. Even while it reaches its highest prices and attain other record metrics, it is also slowly losing its significance. While before Bitcoin was seen as the future, it is now the legacy; perhaps Bitcoin's best usecase at this point is as an entry point for buying other cryptocurrencies.
There is no reason technically why it could not grow on-chain, fixing its main current problem and regaining a trajectory for being the dominant coin for decades to come. But the reason the change was never done was political, not technical. And the problem there has only been exacerbated by the brain drain of many talented and dedicated people to other coins and even leaving cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin will have a historical significance as the first of the cryptocurrencies, but if it will not grow, then in another ten years that may be about all it has.
Edit: One of the best quotes, from even earlier, which I'd missed on first pass as I reviewed the BCT comments and whitepaper but not the mailing list:
"Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.
The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.
If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal. "
-source | 4,496 |
Staff writers
Police in the Central American country of Belize said Monday they are seeking to question John McAfee, the Silicon Valley founder of the McAfee anti-virus software firm, in connection with the shooting death of another U.S. native whose body was discovered Sunday.
A housekeeper found the body of Gregory Viant Faull, 52, shot in the back of his head, according to a report filed by police in the tiny town of San Pedro.
Belize police spokesman Raphael Martinez said the 67-year-old McAfee, who has a home in San Pedro, was being sought for questioning in the case as “a person of interest.”
McAfee could not be reached for comment by this newspaper and Martinez said police had been unable to locate him since the murder.
McAfee, who launched McAfee Associates in 1989 in Santa Clara, left that company shortly after it went public in 1992 and moved to Colorado, where he pursued other activities, reportedly including teaching yoga, singing Vedic chants and starting a short-lived Internet communities site called Tribal Voice. Officials at Santa Clara chipmaker Intel (INTC), which bought McAfee in 2010, declined comment.
He moved to Belize in 2008, according to a story published in the San Pedro Sun, which said that nation’s police in April confiscated 10 firearms from his home and temporarily detained him in handcuffs. One of McAfee’s 11 dogs on the property was killed after it allegedly bit an officer and the story noted that McAfee was at the home with a 17-year-old Belizean girlfriend.
It added that McAfee was later released without being charged, although authorities were investigating whether antibiotics or antiseptics had been produced at the home without a license.
McAfee was quoted in the story as saying the police treatment of him was “brutal” and that he was kept in custody for 14 hours without food. The story noted that McAfee has been a major donor to authorities in that country, giving a boat worth more than $1 million to the Belize National Coast Guard in 2009.
Earlier this month, McAfee also offered to help equip the San Pedro police, provide them with use of a boat and let several police officers use “five air-conditioned rooms at his establishment,” according to a another story the San Pedro Sun published Friday, three days before Faull’s body was discovered.
Contact Steve Johnson at [email protected] or 408-920-5043. Follow him at Twitter.com/steveatmercnews | 4,497 |
Three powerhouse programs that failed to reach the Final Four this season sit atop some of the first odds to win next season's college national championship in Las Vegas.
The Westgate SuperBook has installed Kentucky, Duke and Louisville as co-favorites, each at 10-1 to win the 2018 NCAA tournament.
After reaching this season's championship game, North Carolina and Gonzaga are in the next tier of teams in the Westgate's odds at 12-1. Kansas and Villanova are also 12-1. Arizona, at 15-1, is the only other team with odds better than 20-1 at the Westgate.
Kentucky reached the Elite Eight before losing to North Carolina. Coach John Calipari's Wildcats routinely face plenty of offseason roster transition and are expected to experience significant turnover again next season. Freshman guards De'Aaron Fox and Malik Monk are considered top-10 NBA prospects by ESPN draft analyst Chad Ford. Fox announced Monday that he will enter the draft. Monk had not publicly declared as of Monday afternoon.
Duke freshman forwards Jayson Tatum and Harry Giles also could be lottery picks. Louisville is the only one of the three early favorites at the Westgate not to have a player projected as a lottery pick in this summer's NBA draft.
Odds To Win The 2017-18 National Title Duke, Kentucky and Louisville are the co-favorites to win next year's title, while 2016-17 finalists North Carolina and Gonzaga are given 12-1 odds. Team Odds Team Odds Duke 10-1 Florida 20-1 Kentucky 10-1 Indiana 20-1 Louisville 10-1 Michigan 20-1 Gonzaga 12-1 Michigan St. 20-1 Kansas 12-1 Wichita St. 20-1 N. Carolina 12-1 Butler 25-1 Villanova 12-1 W. Virginia 25-1 Arizona 15-1 Virginia 30-1 *-- Westgate SuperBook
Indiana, with new coach Archie Miller, is listed at 20-1. Michigan, Wichita State, Florida and Michigan State also are 20-1.
UCLA is in a group of teams at 25-1, with star point guard Lonzo Ball having already announced his intentions to enter the NBA draft.
Oregon, which reached the Final Four, opened at 60-1. South Carolina, which also reached this season's Final Four, opened at 100-1.
Georgetown, with new coach Patrick Ewing, is 200-1.
Other sportsbooks are expected to post odds to win the 2018 national championship in the coming days. Next year's Final Four will take place at the Alamodome in San Antonio. | 4,498 |
Senate lawmakers this week passed legislation, Senate Bill 1120, that seeks to preemptively quash many of the provisions of State Question 788 — an expansive voter initiative that provides physicians the discretion to recommend medical marijuana to those patients for whom they believe it will therapeutically benefit. Oklahomans will be voting on the measure, which NORML has endorsed, during a special election on June 26.
But state politicians who oppose the plan do not want to wait until June for the results of a statewide vote. Instead, they are trying to kill the measure now.
The language of Senate Bill 1120 guts State Question 788. It limits the pool of eligible patients only to those diagnosed with four distinct ailments. It arbitrarily caps the total number of licensed cannabis producers at no more than five providers. It limits the quantity of medical cannabis patients may possess, and also places undue limits on the formulations of marijuana products. It bars patients from smoking herbal cannabis and arbitrarily caps the potency of marijuana-infused products to no more than 10mgs of THC. Finally, it removes the right of patients and their caregivers to cultivate their own medicine.
Although SB 1120 initially failed to gain the number of votes needed for Senate passage, lawmakers reconsidered the legislation on Thursday and passed it by a vote of 26 to 11. The bill now awaits action in the Oklahoma House of Representatives.
If you reside in Oklahoma, please take action here to urge your representatives to oppose this undemocratic piece of legislation. Oklahoma voters, not a handful of politicians, ought to be the ultimate arbiters of State Question 788.
Unfortunately, as prohibitionist politicians become more desperate in their opposition to marijuana law reform, we are seeing more frequent attempts to undermine the voters’ will. In Maine, lawmakers have yet to fully implement key parts of a 2016 voter-approved marijuana legalization initiative, and are now pushing to either kill or amend many of its core provisions. In Massachusetts, lawmakers have also enacted numerous delays in the rollout of its 2016 voter-approved adult use law. In Tennessee, legislators last year passed legislation nullifying the enactment of citywide marijuana decriminalization ordinances in Nashville and Memphis, and prohibited municipalities from enacting similar marijuana reform measures in the future.
That is why it is more important than ever that the electorate remain engaged and vigilant. Please utilize NORML’s Take Action Center to stay abreast of pending federal and state legislation, register to vote, access NORML’s 2018 Candidate Packet, and review NORML’s Congressional and Gubernatorial Scorecards to know who is standing with use — and who is acting against us.
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