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Republicans may have a lock on Congress and the nation’s statehouses—and could well win the presidency—but the liberal era ushered in by Barack Obama is only just beginning.
Over roughly the past 18 months, the following events have transfixed the nation. In July 2014, Eric Garner, an African American man reportedly selling loose cigarettes illegally, was choked to death by a New York City policeman. That August, a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an African American teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. For close to two weeks, protesters battled police clad in military gear. Missouri’s governor said the city looked like a war zone. In December, an African American man with a criminal record avenged Garner’s and Brown’s deaths by murdering two New York City police officers. At the officers’ funerals, hundreds of police turned their backs on New York’s liberal mayor, Bill de Blasio. In April 2015 another young African American man, Freddie Gray, died in police custody, in Baltimore. In the chaos that followed, 200 businesses were destroyed, 113 police officers were injured, and 486 people were arrested. To avoid further violence, a game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Chicago White Sox was postponed twice, then played in an empty stadium with police sirens audible in the distance. Then, in July, activists with Black Lives Matter, a movement that had gained national attention after Brown’s death, disrupted speeches by two Democratic presidential candidates in Phoenix, Arizona. As former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley fidgeted onstage, protesters chanted, “If I die in police custody, avenge my death! By any means necessary!” and “If I die in police custody, burn everything down!” When O’Malley responded, “Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter,” the crowd booed loudly. Later that day, O’Malley apologized. Donald Trump, who had ascended to first place in the race for the Republican presidential nomination while promising to represent the “silent majority,” called O’Malley “a disgusting little weak, pathetic baby.” Anyone familiar with American history can hear the echoes. The phrase by any means necessary was popularized by Malcolm X in a June 1964 speech in Upper Manhattan. In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, Baltimore burned, as many cities did amid the racial violence that broke out every spring and summer from 1964 to 1969. In November 1969, in a speech from the Oval Office, Richard Nixon uttered the phrase silent majority. It soon became shorthand for those white Americans who, shaken by crime and appalled by radicalism, turned against the Democratic Party in the ’60s and ’70s. For Americans with an ear for historical parallels, the return of that era’s phrases and images suggests that a powerful conservative backlash is headed our way.
At least, that was my thesis when I set out to write this essay. I came of age in the ’80s and ’90s, when the backlash against ’60s liberalism still struck terror into Democratic hearts. I watched as Ronald Reagan moved the country hard to the right, and as Bill Clinton made his peace with this new political reality by assuring white America that his party would fight crime mercilessly. Seeing this year’s Democratic candidates crumple before Black Lives Matter and shed Clinton’s ideological caution as they stampeded to the left, I imagined the country must be preparing for a vast conservative reaction. But I was wrong. The more I examined the evidence, the more I realized that the current moment looks like a mirror image of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The resemblances are clear, but their political significance has been turned upside down. There is a backlash against the liberalism of the Obama era. But it is louder than it is strong. Instead of turning right, the country as a whole is still moving to the left. Bush destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right. That doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t retain strength in the nation’s statehouses and in Congress. It doesn’t mean a Republican won’t sooner or later claim the White House. It means that on domestic policy—foreign policy is following a different trajectory, as it often does—the terms of the national debate will continue tilting to the left. The next Democratic president will be more liberal than Barack Obama. The next Republican president will be more liberal than George W. Bush.
In the late ’60s and ’70s, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era ended. Today, amid left-wing militancy and racial strife, a liberal era is only just beginning. Understanding why requires understanding why the Democratic Party—and more important, the country at large—is becoming more liberal. The story of the Democratic Party’s journey leftward has two chapters. The first is about the presidency of George W. Bush. Before Bush, unapologetic liberalism was not the Democratic Party’s dominant creed. The party had a strong centrist wing, anchored in Congress by white southerners such as Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who had supported much of Ronald Reagan’s defense buildup, and Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, who had stymied Bill Clinton’s push for gays in the military. For intellectual guidance, centrist Democrats looked to the Democratic Leadership Council, which opposed raising the minimum wage; to The New Republic (a magazine I edited in the early 2000s), which attacked affirmative action and Roe v. Wade; and to the Washington Monthly, which proposed means-testing Social Security. Centrist Democrats believed that Reagan, for all his faults, had gotten some big things right. The Soviet Union had been evil. Taxes had been too high. Excessive regulation had squelched economic growth. The courts had been too permissive of crime. Until Democrats acknowledged these things, the centrists believed, they would neither win the presidency nor deserve to. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, an influential community of Democratic-aligned politicians, strategists, journalists, and wonks believed that critiquing liberalism from the right was morally and politically necessary.
George W. Bush wiped this community out. Partly, he did so by rooting the GOP more firmly in the South—Reagan’s political base had been in the West—aiding the slow-motion extinction of white southern Democrats that had begun when the party embraced civil rights. But Bush also destroyed centrist Democrats intellectually, by making it impossible for them to credibly critique liberalism from the right. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, centrist Democrats had argued that Reagan’s decisions to cut the top income-tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and to loosen government regulation had spurred economic growth. When Bush cut the top rate to 35 percent in 2001 and further weakened regulation, however, inequality and the deficit grew, but the economy barely did—and then the financial system crashed. In the late ’80s and the ’90s, centrist Democrats had also argued that Reagan’s decision to boost defense spending and aid the Afghan mujahideen had helped topple the Soviet empire. But in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, he sparked the greatest foreign-policy catastrophe since Vietnam.
If the lesson of the Reagan era had been that Democrats should give a Republican president his due, the lesson of the Bush era was that doing so brought disaster. In the Senate, Bush’s 2001 tax cut passed with 12 Democratic votes; the Iraq War was authorized with 29. As the calamitous consequences of these votes became clear, the revolt against them destroyed the Democratic Party’s centrist wing. “What I want to know,” declared an obscure Vermont governor named Howard Dean in February 2003, “is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president’s unilateral attack on Iraq. What I want to know is, why are Democratic Party leaders supporting tax cuts?” By year’s end, Dean—running for president against a host of Washington Democrats who had supported the war—was the clear front-runner for his party’s nomination.
With the Dean campaign came an intellectual revolution inside the Democratic Party. His insurgency helped propel Daily Kos, a group blog dedicated to stiffening the liberal spine. It energized the progressive activist group MoveOn. It also coincided with Paul Krugman’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal columnist and Jon Stewart’s emergence as America’s most influential liberal television personality. In 2003, MSNBC hired Keith Olbermann and soon became a passionately liberal network. In 2004, The New Republic apologized for having supported the Iraq War. In 2005, The Huffington Post was born as a liberal alternative to the Drudge Report. In 2006, Joe Lieberman, the Democratic Party’s most outspoken hawk, lost his Democratic Senate primary and became an Independent. In 2011, the Democratic Leadership Council—having lost its influence years earlier—closed its doors. By the time Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, in part because of her support for the Iraq War, the mood inside the party had fundamentally changed. Whereas the party’s most respected thinkers had once urged Democrats to critique liberal orthodoxy, they now criticized Democrats for not defending that orthodoxy fiercely enough. The presidency of George W. Bush had made Democrats unapologetically liberal, and the presidency of Barack Obama was the most tangible result.
But that’s only half the story. Because if George W. Bush’s failures pushed the Democratic Party to the left, Barack Obama’s have pushed it even further. If Bush was responsible for the liberal infrastructure that helped elect Obama, Obama has now inadvertently contributed to the creation of two movements—Occupy and Black Lives Matter—dedicated to the proposition that even the liberalism he espouses is not left-wing enough. Given the militant opposition Obama faced from Republicans in Congress, it’s unclear whether he could have used the financial crisis to dramatically curtail Wall Street’s power. What is clear is that he did not. Thus, less than three years after the election of a president who had inspired them like no other, young activists looked around at a country whose people were still suffering, and whose financial titans were still dominant. In response, they created Occupy Wall Street. When academics from the City University of New York went to Zuccotti Park to study the people who had taken it over, they found something striking: 40 percent of the Occupy activists had worked on the 2008 presidential campaign, mostly for Obama. Many of them had hoped that, as president, he would bring fundamental change. Now the collapse of that hope had led them to challenge Wall Street directly. “Disenchantment with Obama was a driver of the Occupy movement for many of the young people who participated,” noted the CUNY researchers. In his book on the movement, Occupy Nation, the Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin quotes Jeremy Varon, a close observer of Occupy who teaches at the New School for Social Research, as saying, “This is the Obama generation declaring their independence from his administration. We thought his voice was ours. Now we know we have to speak for ourselves.”
For a brief period, Occupy captured the nation’s attention. In December 2011, Gitlin notes, the movement had 143 chapters in California alone. Then it fizzled. But as the political scientist Frances Fox Piven has written, “The great protest movements of history … did not expand in the shape of a simple rising arc of popular defiance. Rather, they began in a particular place, sputtered and subsided, only to re-emerge elsewhere in perhaps a different form, influenced by local particularities of circumstance and culture.” That’s what happened to Occupy. The movement may have burned out, but it injected economic inequality into the American political debate. (In the weeks following the takeover of Zuccotti Park, media references to the subject rose fivefold.) The same anger that sparked Occupy—directed not merely at Wall Street but at the Democratic Party elites who coddled it—fueled Bill de Blasio’s election and Elizabeth Warren’s rise to national prominence. And without Occupy, it’s impossible to understand why a curmudgeonly Democratic Socialist from Vermont is seriously challenging Hillary Clinton in the early primary states. The day Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy, a group of Occupy veterans offered their endorsement. In the words of one former Occupy activist, Stan Williams, “People who are involved in Occupy are leading the biggest group for Bernie Sanders. Our fingers are all over this.”
Arguably more significant than the Sanders campaign itself is the way Democratic elites have responded to it. In the late 1980s and the ’90s, they would have savaged him. For the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to make the party more business-friendly, an avowed Socialist would have been the perfect foil. Today, in a Democratic Party whose guiding ethos is “no enemies to the left,” Sanders has met with little ideological resistance. That’s true not only among intellectuals and activists but among many donors. Journalists often assume that Democrats who write big checks oppose a progressive agenda, at least when it comes to economics. And some do. But as John Judis has reported in National Journal, the Democracy Alliance, the party’s most influential donor club, which includes mega-funders such as George Soros and Tom Steyer, has itself shifted leftward during the Obama years. In 2014, it gave Warren a rapturous welcome when she spoke at the group’s annual winter meeting. Last spring it announced that it was making economic inequality its top priority. All of this has shaped the Clinton campaign’s response to Sanders. At the first Democratic debate, she noted that, unlike him, she favors “rein[ing] in the excesses of capitalism” rather than abandoning it altogether. But the only specific policy difference she highlighted was gun control, on which she attacked him from the left.
Moreover, the Occupy-Warren-Sanders axis has influenced Clinton’s own economic agenda, which is significantly further left than the one she ran on in 2008. She has called for tougher regulation of the financial industry, mused about raising Social Security taxes on the wealthy (something she opposed in 2008), and criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (a trade agreement she once gushed about). Overall, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias has written, Clinton appears “less inclined to favor a market-oriented approach than a left-wing approach, a real change from the past quarter century of Democratic Party economic policymaking.” Her “move to the left,” notes Kira Lerner of ThinkProgress, “distances her policies from those of her husband and Obama.”
The same dynamic is playing out on criminal justice and race. Disillusioned by Obama, activists are pushing left. And they’re finding that Clinton and the rest of the party Establishment are happy to go along. If Occupy is one of Obama’s unplanned legacies, Black Lives Matter is another. The movement, which began when a jury acquitted George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and exploded in 2014 after the death of Michael Brown, has multiple roots. It’s a response to a decades-long rise in incarceration rates and to a spate of police killings, some caught on video. But it’s also an expression of disillusion with Obama. State violence against African Americans is nothing new. Yet the fact that it continued when an African American was ostensibly running the state convinced young African American activists that Establishment liberals, even black ones, would not, of their own accord, bring structural change. Only direct action could force their hand. “Black Lives Matter developed in the wake of the failure of the Obama administration,” argues the Cornell sociologist Travis Gosa, a co-editor of The Hip Hop & Obama Reader. “Black Lives Matter is the voice of a Millennial generation that’s been sold a bad bill of goods.” This new generation of activists, writes Brittney Cooper, a Rutgers University professor of Africana studies and women’s-and-gender studies, “will not invest in a nation-state project that hands them black presidents alongside dead unarmed black boys in the street.” And they take a dim view of veteran activists, such as Al Sharpton, who defend Obama. “The most faith they have, hubristic though it may turn out to be,” Cooper argues, “is in themselves to be agents of change.”
Had Black Lives Matter existed when Bill Clinton was seeking the presidency, he probably would have run against the group. In January 1992, less than three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Clinton flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, an African American man so mentally deficient at the time of his execution that he didn’t even realize the people he had shot were dead. Then, in June 1992, in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, Clinton plucked a rapper named Sister Souljah out of relative obscurity and publicly lambasted her for reportedly saying, in response to a question about African American rioters who attacked whites, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Eager to emphasize his centrist credentials, Clinton found African American militancy an invaluable foil. Today, by contrast, the Democratic Establishment has responded to Black Lives Matter much as it responded to Occupy: with applause. In July, at the Netroots Nation conference in Phoenix, Black Lives Matter activists repeatedly interrupted and heckled Sanders and his fellow candidate Martin O’Malley. At one point, an activist came onto the stage and declared that the event was occurring on “indigenous land” whose border “was drawn by white-supremacist manifest destiny.” For roughly 15 minutes, O’Malley stood in silence as the activists onstage gave speeches.
Afterward, liberal pundits mostly criticized O’Malley and Sanders for not expressing more sympathy for the people who had disrupted their events. “Both candidates fumbled,” argued The Nation. “Frankly,” MoveOn announced, “all Democratic presidential candidates need to do better.” The candidates themselves agreed. Later that day, O’Malley publicly apologized for having said that “all lives matter,” which activists said minimized the singularity of state violence against African Americans. He soon unveiled an ambitious plan to reduce police brutality and incarceration rates, as well as a constitutional amendment protecting the right to vote. Sanders apologized too. He hired an African American press secretary sympathetic to Black Lives Matter, added a “racial justice” section to his Web site, joined members of the Congressional Black Caucus in introducing legislation to ban private prisons, and began publicly citing the names of African Americans killed by police. Hillary Clinton, having already vowed to “end the era of mass incarceration” that her husband and other Democrats helped launch in the 1990s, has now met with Black Lives Matter activists twice. Bill Clinton has said he regrets his own role in expanding the incarceration state. And the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution supporting Black Lives Matter—which the movement itself quickly disavowed. During presidential primaries, candidates often pander to their party’s base. So what’s most remarkable isn’t Hillary Clinton’s move to the left, or the Democratic Party’s. It’s the American public’s willingness to go along.
Take Black Lives Matter. In the 1960s, African American riots and the Black Power movement sparked a furious white backlash. In April 1965, note Thomas and Mary Edsall in their book Chain Reaction, 28 percent of nonsouthern whites thought President Lyndon B. Johnson was pushing civil rights “too fast.” By September 1966, after riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cleveland, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s turn from racial integration toward Black Power, that figure had reached 52 percent. This time, however, the opposite is happening. In July 2014, the Pew Research Center reported that 46 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “Our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.” By July 2015, after the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore and the rise of Black Lives Matter, that figure had risen to 59 percent. From the summer of 2013 to the summer of 2015, according to Gallup, the percentage of Americans who declared themselves “satisfied with the way blacks are treated in U.S. society” dropped from 62 percent to 49 percent. In 2015, public confidence in the police hit a 22-year low. Much of this shift is being driven by a changing mood among whites. Between January and April alone, according to a YouGov poll, the percentage of whites who called deaths like those of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray “isolated incident[s]” dropped 20 points. There’s even been movement within the GOP. From 2014 to 2015, the percentage of Republicans saying America needs to make changes to give blacks an equal chance rose 15 points—more than the percentage increase among Democrats or Independents.
That’s not to say Ferguson, Baltimore, and Black Lives Matter have sparked no backlash at all. Donald Trump has called “the way they [Black Lives Matter] are being catered to by the Democrats” a “disgrace.” Ted Cruz has accused the movement of inciting the murder of police, a theme also promoted on Fox News.
Still, even as some Republican politicians attack Black Lives Matter, others are working with Democrats to promote an agenda of police and prison reform. Last year, then–Speaker of the House John Boehner declared, “We’ve got a lot of people in prison that frankly, in my view, really don’t need to be there.” In October, a group of conservative Republican senators—Chuck Grassley, John Cornyn, Mike Lee, and Lindsey Graham—joined Democrats in introducing legislation to reduce mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes, roll back harsh “three strikes and you’re out” sentencing laws, end solitary confinement for juveniles, and allow teenagers to have their criminal records expunged. Even among the Republicans running for president, the policy agenda is moving away from the punitive approach both parties once embraced. Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Ted Cruz have all condemned the excessive imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders.
Most interesting—because he is the Republican candidate with the keenest sense of how to appeal to the general electorate—has been the approach of Senator Marco Rubio. In August, a Fox News anchor asked him about Black Lives Matter. Instead of condemning the movement, Rubio told the story of an African American friend of his whom police had stopped eight or nine times over the previous 18 months even though he had never broken the law. “This is a problem our nation has to confront,” Rubio declared. Then he talked about young African Americans who get arrested for nonviolent offenses and pushed into plea deals by overworked public defenders. The government, he said, must “look for ways to divert people” from going to jail “so that you don’t get people stigmatized early in life.” Conservative Republicans didn’t talk this way in the ’90s. They didn’t talk this way even in the early Obama years. The fact that Rubio does so now is more evidence that today, unlike in the mid-’60s, the debate about race and justice isn’t moving to the right. It’s moving further left. What’s different this time? One difference is that in the 1960s and ’70s, crime exploded, fueling a politics of fear and vengeance. Over the past two decades, by contrast, crime has plummeted. And despite some hyperbolic headlines, there’s no clear evidence that it’s rising significantly again. As The Washington Post’s Max Ehrenfreund noted in September after reviewing the data so far for 2015, “While the number of homicides has increased in many big cities, the increases are moderate, not more than they were a few years ago. Meanwhile, crime has declined in other cities. Overall, most cities are still far safer than they were two decades ago.” On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more. And it’s not just crime where the Democratic Party’s move leftward is being met with acceptance rather than rejection. Take LGBT rights: A decade ago, it was considered suicidal for a Democratic politician to openly support gay marriage. Now that debate is largely over, and liberals are pushing for antidiscrimination laws that cover transgender people, a group many Americans weren’t even aware of until Caitlyn Jenner made headlines. At first glance, this might seem like too much change, too fast. Marriage equality, after all, gives gays and lesbians access to a fundamentally conservative institution. The transgender-rights movement poses a far more radical question: Should people get to define their own gender, irrespective of biology?
Yet the nation’s answer, by large margins, seems to be yes. When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people. It also found a dramatic rise in recent years in the percentage of Americans who consider anti-transgender discrimination a “major problem.” According to Andrew Flores, who conducted the study, a person’s attitude toward gays and lesbians largely predicts their attitude toward transgender people. Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a “mechanism of attitude generalization.” That is why, in the 2016 presidential race, Republicans have shown little interest in opposing transgender rights. In July, the Pentagon announced that transgender people will be able to serve openly in the military. One Republican presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee, denounced the move. Another, Jeb Bush, appeared to support it. The remaining contenders largely avoided the issue.
There has been little public backlash on economics, either. President Obama has intervened more extensively in the economy than any other president in close to half a century. In his first year, he pushed through the largest economic stimulus in American history—larger in inflation-adjusted terms than Franklin Roosevelt’s famed Works Progress Administration. In his second year, he muscled universal health care through Congress, something progressives had been dreaming about since Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Bull Moose. That same year, he signed a law re-regulating Wall Street. He’s also spent roughly $20 billion bailing out the auto industry, increased fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks, toughened emissions standards for coal-fired power plants, authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the production of carbon dioxide, expanded the Food and Drug Administration’s ability to regulate the sale of tobacco products, doubled the amount of fruits and vegetables required in school lunches, designated 2 million acres as wilderness, and protected more than 1,000 miles of rivers.
This intervention has sparked an angry response on the Republican right, but not among Americans as a whole. In polling, Americans typically say they favor smaller government in general while supporting many specific government programs. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, Americans said they favored “a smaller government providing fewer services” over “a bigger government providing more services” by 37 percentage points. When Obama took power in 2009, the margin was a mere eight points. And despite the president’s many economic interventions, the most recent time Pew asked that question, in September 2014, the margin was exactly the same. On health care, the story is similar: no public backlash. When Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in March 2010, most polls showed Americans opposing it by about eight to 10 points. Today, the margin is almost identical. Little has changed on taxes, either, even though Obama allowed some of the tax cuts passed under George W. Bush to expire. The percentage of Americans who say they pay more than their fair share in taxes is about the same as it was in the spring of 2010 (Pew does not have data for 2009), and lower than it was during the Clinton years. It’s true that Americans have grown more conservative on some issues over the past few years. Support for gun control has dropped in the Obama era, even as the president and other Democrats have pursued it more aggressively. Republicans also enjoy a renewed advantage on combatting international terrorism, an issue whose salience has grown with the rise of the Islamic State. Still, in an era when government has grown more intrusive, African American activists have grown more confrontational, and long-standing assumptions about sexual orientation and gender identity have been toppled, most Americans are not yelling “stop,” as they began doing in the mid-1960s. The biggest reason: We’re not dealing with the same group of Americans.
On issue after issue, it is the young who are most pleased with the liberal policy shifts of the Obama era, and most eager for more. In 2014, Pew found that Americans under 30 were twice as likely as Americans 65 and older to say the police do a “poor” job of “treating racial, ethnic groups equally” and more than twice as likely to say the grand jury in Ferguson was wrong not to charge Darren Wilson in Michael Brown’s death. According to YouGov, more than one in three Americans 65 and older think being transgender is morally wrong. Among Americans under 30, the ratio is less than one in five. Millennials—Americans roughly 18 to 34 years old—are 21 percentage points less likely than those 65 and older to say that immigrants “burden” the United States and 25 points more likely to say they “strengthen” the country. Millennials are also 17 points more likely to have a favorable view of Muslims. It is largely because of them that the percentage of Americans who want government to “promote traditional values” is now lower than at any other time since Gallup began asking the question in 1993, and that the percentage calling themselves “socially liberal” now equals the percentage calling themselves “socially conservative” for the first time since Gallup began asking that question in 1999. Millennials are also sustaining support for bigger government. The young may not have a high opinion of the institutions that represent them, but they nonetheless want those institutions to do more. According to a July Wall Street Journal/ABC poll, Americans over 35 were four points more likely to say the government is doing too much than to say it is doing too little. Millennials, meanwhile, by a margin of 23 points, think it’s doing too little. In 2011, Pew found that while the oldest Americans supported repealing health-care reform by 29 percentage points, Millennials favored expanding it by 17 points. They were also 25 points more likely than those 65 and older to approve of Occupy Wall Street and 36 points more favorable toward socialism, which they actually preferred to capitalism, 49 percent to 46 percent. As the Pew report put it, “Millennials, at least so far, hold ‘baked in’ support for a more activist government.”
This is even true among Republican Millennials. The press often depicts American politics as a battle pitting ever more liberal Democrats against ever more conservative Republicans. Among the young, however, that’s inaccurate. Young Democrats may be more liberal than their elders, but so are young Republicans. According to Pew, a clear majority of young Republicans say immigrants strengthen America, half say corporate profits are too high, and almost half say stricter environmental laws are worth the cost—answers that sharply distinguish them from older members of the GOP. Young Republicans are more likely to favor legalizing marijuana than the oldest Democrats, and almost as likely to support gay marriage. Asked how they categorize themselves ideologically, more than two-thirds of Republican Millennials call themselves either “liberal” or “mixed,” while fewer than one-third call themselves “conservative.” Among the oldest Republicans, that breakdown is almost exactly reversed. In the face of such data, conservatives may wish to reassure themselves that Millennials will move right as they age. But a 2007 study in the American Sociological Review notes that the data “contradict commonly held assumptions that aging leads to conservatism.” The older Americans who are today more conservative than Millennials were more conservative in their youth, too. In 1984 and 1988, young voters backed Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush by large margins. Millennials are not liberal primarily because they are young. They are liberal because their formative political experiences were the Iraq War and the Great Recession, and because they make up the most secular, most racially diverse, least nationalistic generation in American history. And none of that is likely to change.
One can question how much this matters. America is not governed by public-opinion polls, after all. Congressional redistricting, felon disenfranchisement, and the obliteration of campaign-finance laws all help insulate politicians from the views of ordinary people, and generally empower the right. But despite these structural disadvantages, Obama has enacted a more consequential progressive agenda than either of his two Democratic predecessors did. And there is reason to believe that regardless of who wins the presidency in 2016, she or he will be more progressive than the previous president of her or his own party. According to Microsoft’s betting market, Predictwise, Democrats have close to a 60 percent chance of holding the White House in 2016. That’s not because Hillary Clinton, whom the Democrats will likely nominate, is an exceptionally strong candidate. It’s because the Republicans may nominate an exceptionally weak one. According to Predictwise, in early November Marco Rubio—widely considered the GOP’s strongest general-election candidate—had a 45 percent chance of winning his party’s nomination. But according to Predictwise, there was also a 37 percent chance that Donald Trump, Ben Carson, or Ted Cruz would win the nomination. And if any of them did, Clinton’s election would be all but assured. Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. If Clinton does win, it’s likely that on domestic policy, she will govern to Obama’s left. (On foreign policy, where there is no powerful left-wing activist movement like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, the political dynamics are very different.) Clinton’s campaign proposals already signal a leftward shift. And people close to her campaign suggest that among her top agenda items would be paid family leave, debt-free college tuition, and universal preschool.
This agenda flows naturally from Clinton’s long interest in the welfare of children and families. But it’s also the product of a Democratic Party that leans further left than it did in 1993 or 2009. If elected, Clinton will have to work with a Senate that contains two nationally prominent Democrats, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, both of whom are extremely popular with liberal activists. Already, Obama has felt liberals’ wrath. In 2013, Lawrence Summers withdrew his name from consideration to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve after Senate liberals protested his nomination. In 2015, Obama’s pick for Treasury’s undersecretary for domestic finance, Antonio Weiss, withdrew his own nomination after Warren attacked his Wall Street ties.* Clinton will face this reality from her first day in office. And she will face it knowing that because she cannot inspire liberals rhetorically as Obama can, they will be less likely to forgive her heresies on policy. Like Lyndon B. Johnson after John F. Kennedy, she will have to deliver in substance what she cannot deliver in style. Just as Clinton would govern to Obama’s left, it’s likely that any Republican capable of winning the presidency in 2016 would govern to the left of George W. Bush. In the first place, winning at all would require a different coalition. When Bush won the presidency in 2000, very few Millennials could vote. In 2016, by contrast, they will constitute roughly one-third of those who turn out. In 2000, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians constituted 20 percent of voters. In 2016, they will constitute more than 30 percent. Whit Ayres, a political consultant for the Rubio campaign, calculates that even if the 2016 Republican nominee wins 60 percent of the white vote (more than any GOP nominee in the past four decades except Reagan, in 1984, has won), he or she will still need almost 30 percent of the minority vote. Mitt Romney got 17 percent. |
“Reform has already passed the House with a majority. It has already passed the Senate with a supermajority of 60 votes,” Mr. Obama said. “And now it deserves the same kind of up or down vote that was cast on welfare reform, that was cast on the Children’s Health Insurance Program , that was used for Cobra health coverage for the unemployed and, by the way, for both Bush tax cuts — all of which had to pass Congress with nothing more than a simple majority.”
Republicans were furious.
“They’re making a vigorous effort to try to jam this down the throats of the American people, who don’t want it,” the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky , told reporters after Mr. Obama’s remarks. “We think that’s a policy mistake, and we think resorting to these kind of tactics, to thumb your noses at the American people, is something that ought to be resisted.”
On Capitol Hill, the strategy could prove a heavy lift for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi , and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid , who are now under intense pressure from the White House to translate Mr. Obama’s wishes for a final bill into legislative language. Both leaders issued statements Wednesday praising Mr. Obama and vowing to press ahead. But, noticeably, neither publicly committed to Mr. Obama’s timetable.
Privately, Senate leadership aides said Mr. Obama’s deadline could be difficult to meet. The tentative plan is for the House to adopt the bill passed by the Senate, and for both chambers to use reconciliation to pass a package of changes that would bridge gaps between the initial House and Senate versions.
But the final language must still be sent to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office for evaluation, a process that takes time. Many aspects of the legislation remain unresolved, and rank-and-file Democrats in the House remain deeply uneasy over both the substance of the bill and the process by which it would be adopted.
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Ms. Pelosi does not yet have the votes she needs to pass the legislation. She faces complex negotiations with both the moderate and liberal wings of her party to come up with a package that can pass the House without deviating so much from the existing Senate version that Mr. Reid would have trouble assembling a majority for the final vote in the Senate.
“I am not inclined to support the Senate version,” said Representative Shelley Berkley, Democrat of Nevada , who voted for the House bill in November. “I would like something more concrete than a promise. The Senate cannot promise its way out of a brown paper bag.”
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As Democrats prepared for a final showdown with Republicans, other potential stumbling blocks emerged. House Democrats from New York met Wednesday with Ms. Pelosi to discuss their concern that the emerging bill would shortchange their state on Medicaid and other issues.
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“I am very, very disappointed and unhappy,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel , Democrat of New York. “The White House is taking us for granted, and they shouldn’t.”
Supporters of abortion rights, in and out of Congress, said Wednesday that they were alarmed at the prospect that lawmakers might impose new restrictions on insurance coverage of abortion in the push to enact sweeping health legislation. Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois , said language restricting insurers’ ability to cover abortions “remains in the president’s proposal, and we are very concerned about that.”
Friday will mark one year since Mr. Obama laid out his plans for a health care overhaul with a high-profile forum at the White House, where he engaged in a lively debate with lawmakers of both parties and executives from the insurance, hospital and pharmaceutical industries. On Wednesday, the scene at the White House was far different.
Mr. Obama spoke, without taking questions, to a group of sympathetic medical professionals, many of them clad in white lab coats to provide a TV-friendly image. After 12 months of legislative hearings, town hall meetings, speeches, polls and debates, Mr. Obama was in the position of selling not only the public, but his own party, on his top domestic priority.
“The American people want to know if it’s still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future,” Mr. Obama said. “They are waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead. And as long as I hold this office, I intend to provide that leadership. I don’t know how this plays politically, but I know it’s right.”
Seeking to reassure wavering Democrats that he would back them up, he pledged to do “everything in my power to make the case for reform.”
Moments after he finished speaking, the White House announced plans for him to visit Pennsylvania and Missouri — states that are home to vulnerable Democrats like Representative Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania and Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, who were among 39 Democrats to vote against the health measure when it passed the House last year. If Mr. Obama is to sign his legislation into law, he is going to have to convert some of those no votes into yeses; traveling to a lawmaker’s home state could be one way to do that.
Senior advisers to Mr. Obama are betting that the politics of health care will eventually turn in the party’s favor, if the president can actually sign a bill into law. The legislation includes popular restrictions on the insurance industry; some, like a provision barring insurers from discriminating against children on the basis of pre-existing conditions, would take effect quickly — a point noted by Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs .
“The president has always subscribed to the notion that the politics will catch up,” Mr. Gibbs said. |
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Never scared to try something new that could help his football team, San Francisco 49ers coach Chip Kelly once worked on developing a robotic tackling dummy while he was coaching at Oregon.
It was a good idea; it just didn't work.
"It broke after the first tackle," Kelly said, chuckling at the memory. "It went really fast, but we had a great guy that was a local guy in town at Oregon that did a great job with it."
Technology has come a long way since then. On Monday, the Niners received a shipment of three remote-controlled tackling dummies. The dummies, which have been seen in various other camps around the NFL and got their own segment during an episode of HBO's "Hard Knocks" with the Los Angeles Rams, are also known as Mobile Virtual Players, or MVPs. They are still in the testing stage but are making the rounds in the NFL and on college campuses.
While 49ers coach Chip Kelly sounded enthusiastic about the possibilities for robotic tackling dummies, the reception from players was more mixed. Courtesy Mobile Virtual Players
Former Dartmouth coach Buddy Teevens helped develop the current models, which are gaining popularity quickly in football circles. Kelly said he and Teevens go way back.
“We liked them," Kelly said. "I know Buddy Teevens from Dartmouth very well. They are the ones who designed them and came with up with the original idea. But, to put it together where it’s also safe, because you also don’t want to get an injury from it."
Therein lies the ultimate appeal of the dummies: Teams don't tackle live in practice for fear of injuries, but with a dummy, it can help alter the way you practice.
"I think it’s advantageous that you can do some live tackling," Kelly said. "We used it with the offensive line yesterday in our screen drills and some of them were cut-blocking it when obviously you’re not going to cut-block a player in practice. But you can cut-block a bag. So, I think it’s a huge step for everybody. You want to get accomplished a lot of things in training sessions, but you also want to do it in a safe environment. A lot of times, it’s not the guy doing the tackling, it’s the guy getting tackled. So the fact that the guy getting tackled is an inanimate object, lends itself to ... I think we’ll continue to do more with that.”
The 150-pound dummies can be controlled by coaches, who are able to manipulate them to move in any direction at speeds up to 18 miles per hour. The technology for the dummies originated at Dartmouth; their first documented appearance at the NFL level came during Pittsburgh Steelers camp in the spring.
Kelly said as he and the Niners get accustomed to using the MVPs, they'll be able to incorporate them in different ways during practice.
“Everybody on defense can tackle them," Kelly said. "So you get the whole defense who can use them to work on pass rush, trying to come up and under. I think, the longer our coaches put their heads together, there’s a lot of different things you can use them for. It’s, basically, we do a lot of work with sleds and dummies, but now you have a sled/dummy that can move. So, kind of, I don’t think there’s a limitation in terms of where we are from that standpoint.”
Not everyone is all the way on board with the dummies, though. Linebacker NaVorro Bowman said he didn't attempt a tackle on any of them, but saw a player he refused to name make an effort and fail.
"No, I haven't -- actually one guy tried to do something on it and it didn't turn out well for him," Bowman said. "He tried to tackle the robot and the robot tackled him a little bit.
"So I'm going to leave the dummies alone." |
The brown goshawk has adapted so well to suburban life that it sometimes chases small birds under verandas and into houses.
A medium sized raptor with piercing yellow eyes, this elegant bird has a tendency to become so intent on its prey that it pays no heed to its surroundings until the chase is over.
A brown goshawk searches for prey from the vantage of a fence post. Credit:Ross Jones
Known to the Noongar as gudjelan, it is as at home stalking small animals through the leaf litter of the forest floor as it is winging deftly between tangled branches in aerial pursuit of wrens and silver-eyes. On occasion it will even catch fish.
In fact anything smaller than a rabbit is fair game for the goshawk – including the odd chicken – which has seen it persecuted in some farming regions. |
As Occupy Wall Street protesters continued to rally in Oakland, Calif., hackers today targeted the Web site for the city's police department and offered a $1,000 reward for information on police action that appears to have left a protester injured.
Contact information, schedules, badge numbers, and other information about Oakland Police Department officers was posted to a public Pastebin page. Meanwhile, the department's Web site also was down temporarily this morning, according to SC Magazine.
"The time has come to retaliate against Oakland police via all non-violent means, beginning with doxing (releasing of documents and data) of individual officers and particularly higher-ups involved in the department's conduct of late," a statement on the Pastebin page said.
Asked for comment, Oakland Police Department spokeswoman Johnna Watson told CNET that the department was looking into the matter.
A peaceful demonstration in downtown Oakland turned violent on Tuesday night when Oakland police fired rubber bullets and threw flash grenades into the crowd. Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old former Marine and antiwar activist, was knocked to the ground after an officer threw something that hit him in the head. As other protesters flocked to help him, an officer can be seen in this video tossing what appeared to be a flash grenade into the group, followed by a loud bang and smoke.
It remained unclear exactly what happened and who was involved. Watson said there were no updates.
"It is still under investigation and we have multiple agencies on board with the investigation, including internal affairs," she said. "We want this to be an open investigation."
Olsen's condition had been upgraded to fair from serious this morning, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Hospital representatives could not be reached for comment by CNET.
"A protester who did two tours in Iraq is in critical condition with fractured skull and brain injury after a cop shot him in the head with a "non-lethal" weapon," the Pastebin statement said. "A crowd of protesters were deliberately hit with a flashbang while rendering first aid to an injured protester."
"I'm offering a $1,000 reward, no questions asked, for the name of the officer who threw a flashbang at the injured Iraqi vet," the statement added. It included links to other Pastebin pages with Oakland police phone numbers, e-mail addresses and other information.
The videos and photos of protesters being arrested, hit with batons, rubber bullets and tear gas, have provoked public outrage and prompted protesters to call for a general strike on November 2 as part of the Occupy Oakland actions. The police response to the protests also has galvanized hackers whose support for the cause have prompted the label "hacktivists."
Hackers have targeted their actions against a handful of bankers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and a New York police officer who was videotaped spraying pepper spray into protesters' faces. And they are threatening to take down the Web site of Fox News over its coverage of the protests.
The Occupy Wall Street campaign, which began in New York on September 17 to protest social and economic inequality and corporate greed, has spread to numerous cities in the U.S. and other countries. It was modeled on the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East in its heavy use of social media and tactic of occupying public spaces. |
Don’t be fooled by that cute little fluffball in the picture; mention the word “Marder” to any German, and you’ll send shivers down their spine. Marder is the German word for Marten, a little furry animal that crawls into cars’ engine bays and wreaks havoc on coolant hoses, spark plug wires and more, causing tens of millions of euros in damages each year. Tens of millions! Here’s what’s going on.
I recently met up with Jalopnik reader Andreas (TheSafetyEngineer) in Bavaria to wrench on his Mazdaspeed 6. While changing a serpentine belt, I noticed Andreas’s car had a random red cable underhood and that it was making this god-awful noise (listen below). Andreas said the noise was coming from his broken anti-Marten ultrasonic device, and that the red cable was a high voltage line meant to shock the little pests.
I thought this seemed a little random and odd to install into a sports sedan, but Andreas told me this was a big, potentially-expensive problem in Germany. Then I did some research, and holy crap was he right.
Marten Damage Is A Huge Deal In Germany
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I called up ADAC, basically Germany’s superpowered version of AAA, and asked for some info on this whole “Marder” issue. The woman over the phone sent me to the Association of German Insurers, GDV, and I found the plot you see above.
This column plot shows the number of claims related to Marten damage in thousands (on the left), and the number of millions of euros in damage those claims amount to (on the right). The takeaway is that between 2010 and 2014, these pesky Martens caused over 300 million euro in damage (or about $330 million) through 1.1 million insurance claims.
$330 million over a span of only five years!
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To put that into perspective, check out the table above. In 2012, Marten damage was the third most frequent insurance claim in all of Germany, with 233,000 cases amounting to 64 million euro in damages, according to GDV— bested only by cracked windshields and wildlife-related accidents.
And if you’re still not convinced, here’s a plot showing the number of times ADAC (again, Germany’s ‘AAA’) had to send roadside assistance out to help some poor motorist whose coolant hoses and spark plug wires had been torn apart by the little Martens:
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Yes, that’s over 14,000 roadside incidents every year since 1998, and those usually only happen if the car doesn’t run or drive. Many more incidents are overlooked and ADAC never called.
It’s such a big issue that in Stuttgart alone, one third of all parked cars were found to have some trace of Marten infiltration, a finding GDV attributes to the Nature Conservatory Nabu.
So yeah, this Marten damage (Marderschaeden) issue is a big deal.
They Can Totally Destroy Your Car
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Martens love to chew on rubber and plastic. The most common victims of Martens’ ridiculously sharp teeth are spark plug wires, coolant hoses, wiper fluid hoses, rubber CV axle boots, rubber steering rack bellows, wiring insulation and underhood sound deadening material.
Though ADAC says they haven’t seen any cases of brake hoses or tires being chewed up by the animals (thank god), the parts Martens do chew on can completely ruin a car.
Once a steering bellow (shown in the picture below) or CV axle boot gets a hole in it from a Marten bite, water and grime will get into the joint, compromising the lubrication and destroying the CV axle or inner tie-rod end in short order, and leading to very costly repairs.
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A hole in a coolant hose can cause a car to overheat, crack a cylinder head, blow a head gasket, or even seize—all potentially catastrophic for a car.
And driving with a chewed-up ignition wire, ADAC says, can lead to a misfiring engine, meaning unburned fuel will enter the exhaust stream and lead to destruction of catalytic converters, and those things aren’t cheap to replace.
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Plus, electric and hybrid cars, with their copious wires, are also highly vulnerable to costly damage, and they can catch fire if Martens chew off high-voltage insulation.
The worst part of all this is that some insurance plans only cover replacement of the chewed-on plastic or rubber part, and not the resulting damage. In other words, some insurance will only cover the coolant hose, not the blown head gasket; the spark plug wire, but not the blown catalytic converter.
So clearly, those huge $65 million-a-year insurance repair costs are conservative, and don’t account for people who don’t file claims, or whose insurance doesn’t cover potentially disastrous resulting damages.
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Why Do They Do It?
ADAC says martens used to be extinct in Germany back in the 1950s, as people hunted their precious furs. But now the marten population has swelled to the point where they’re not only in southern German like they were before, but also up north. Not to mention, they’ve adapted to cities, meaning this marten problem is truly Germany-wide.
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Martens invade engine bays because they are drawn in by the warmth and safety of the enclosed engine bay, or by the smell of urine and feces from other martens. Once inside, they bite into hoses and wires to make space for themselves or just for fun, ADAC says. They also urinate and leave bite marks in plastic and rubber as a way to mark their territory.
It gets worst in early summer, when the little critters start mating — a time when they’re highly territorial, and very likely to mark their space with torn cables and hoses.
There’s No Really Good Way To Stop Them
There’s actually a wildlife biologist name Hans-Heinrich Krüger (the man with the most German name ever) who has done research for car manufactures and suppliers for over a decade to figure out how to prevent Marten damage, GDV reports.
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He works for a place called the Otter Centre, and he’s been testing all sorts of methods to keep cars safe from martens, including use of hard plastic conduits to protect wires and hoses, closing off the engine bay to keep the animals out, using an ultrasonic sound-wave device to annoy the animals, and electroshock.
Other methods to protect cars against these critters, mentioned in the video above, include using wire mesh under the engine bay—martens hate walking on an unstable floor—and cleaning the engine bay of marten feces so other martens aren’t drawn by the smell
All of these remedies work to varying degrees, GDV says, but none of them works all the time. Martens get used to the ultrasonic sound (which tends to be damped by the various parts in the engine bay), and they find ways to get past closures.
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There are also ridiculous remedies that Germans have thought of, like sprinkling dog hair, urine cakes, garlic cloves, mothballs and even human urine on the engine. The problem is, Krüger and ADAC agree, Martens get used to smells very quickly, and these remedies just don’t work.
In the end, it seems Germany’s got a major problem with no perfect solution. As GDV puts it:
Every driver has to expect that one morning the engine can not be started because of a Marten damage. Annoying but effective remedies against the martens do not exist. The only thing that really helps: a decent insurance.
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But that quote is coming from the Association of German Insurers, so they would say that. |
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Introducing The Kindle Owners' Lending Library
With an Amazon Prime membership, Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free -- including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers -- as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates
SEATTLE, Nov 02, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- --Books can be borrowed and read on all Kindle E Ink devices and Kindle Fire
Today, Amazon.com, Inc. announced the launch of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. With an Amazon Prime membership, Kindle owners can now choose from thousands of books to borrow for free -- including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers -- as frequently as a book a month, with no due dates. No other e-reader or ebookstore offers such a service. With an annual Prime membership, the Kindle Owners' Lending Library is included at no additional cost. Millions of Prime members enjoy free two-day shipping, unlimited streaming of nearly 13,000 movies and TV shows, and now thousands of books to borrow for free with a Kindle.
"Owning a Kindle just got even better. Today, we're introducing a new Prime benefit built for Kindle: The Kindle Owners' Lending Library," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. "Prime Members now have exclusive access to a huge library of books to read on any Kindle device at no additional cost and with no due dates."
The Kindle Owners' Lending Library offers access to a wide array of categories and genres in fiction and non-fiction, and includes popular titles such as Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Big Short and Liars' Poker by Michael Lewis, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen --plus award-winning books such as The Finkler Question and Guns, Germs, and Steel, memoirs such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential , and motivational books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Just as with any other Kindle book, your notes, highlights and bookmarks in borrowed books will be saved, so you'll have them later if you purchase or re-borrow the book. Books are borrowed from a Kindle device, and customers can have one book out at a time. When customers want to borrow a new book, any borrowed book can easily be returned right from their device.
Titles in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library come from a range of publishers under a variety of terms. For the vast majority of titles, Amazon has reached agreement with publishers to include titles for a fixed fee. In some cases, Amazon is purchasing a title each time it is borrowed by a reader under standard wholesale terms as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents.
"The Kindle Owners' Lending Library is a great new benefit for Kindle owners and an entirely new growth opportunity for authors and publishers," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President, Kindle Content. "With the growth in Prime membership and the recent addition of Prime Instant Video, we've been able to broaden our relationships with movie and TV studios such as CBS, Fox, and NBCUniversal and significantly increase their revenue. We're excited to expand that investment to books -- with this launch, we expect three immediate results: Kindle owners will read even more, publisher revenues will grow, and authors will see larger royalty checks."
"We're excited to offer titles from our ebook 'Chapters' series, which covers some of the world's most popular destinations, to members of Kindle Owners' Lending Library," says John Boris, EVP Lonely Planet. "Our ebooks have done incredibly well on Kindle and this is a great way to showcase our travel expertise to an even broader audience."
"We're excited about any program that helps readers discover our authors and their books," said David Nussbaum, Chief Executive and Chairman of F+W Media Inc. "We think this will lead to more people reading F+W's books, and more profit for our authors."
To learn more about the Kindle Owners' Lending Library, visit www.amazon.com/kindleownerslendinglibrary . To learn about all of the additional benefits included with Amazon Prime, or to start an Amazon Prime free trial visit www.amazon.com/prime .
SOURCE: Amazon.com, Inc. |
New Obama TV Ad: "The Question" - Yes, we are better off
The following are screen shots of the Net Worth of the richest Congress Members as of 2011 and reported by Roll Call.
The details of each of these wealthy Congress members are presented here as screen shots taken from OpenSecrets.org. Open Secrets has diligently reported the net worth of Congress members since 2004; however, doesn't include 2011 yet.
None of these members of Congress, whether Republican or Democrat can say they are not better off today than they were four (4) years ago.
CONGRESS MEMBERS ARE BETTER OFF!
This Roll Call article, The 50 Richest Members of Congress (2011), provides some history details about each member; however, Roll Call seems to low ball the Net Worth of each. This Roll Call report is interactive. To read the details of the Net Worth of each Congress Member, go to the Roll Call report and click on each of the 50 named richest Congress members. Again, the financial gurus can decipher and report, if they are so inclined.
If you click on each of the following pictures, you will find the specific OpenSecrets.org link for each. Open Secrets provides an interactive service for those of you who enjoy digging deeper from 2004 - 2010. There are many stunning disclosures that the media doesn't seem too interested in.
I find this interesting because of the huge wealth gap that has been created over the past decade. If Congress truly represents "the people", the majority of whom are really struggling and, if not, are at least feeling degrees of insecurity for their future, I believe the fact that, as members of Congress, most considerably increased their Net Worth while in Congress IN THE MIDST OF THE WORST ECONOMIC DOWNTURN SINCE THE DEPRESSION, I wonder how they can really relate to THE PEOPLE. Perhaps I am wrong. I hope those in the financial know will take some interest in this phenomena and report back to those of us less savvy.
How did Congress Members financially thrive in the last 4 years? Very well!
Even PAUL RYAN, Yes, he's better off today, has increased his meager fortune since the crash of 2008.
2008 Net Worth: From $790,093 to $2,830,000
2010 Net Worth: From $927,100 to $3,207,000
And John Boehner? Yes, he's better off today!
2008 Net Worth: From $1,700,021 to $6,626,000
2010 Net Worth: From $2,099,107 to $6,085,000
Mitch McConnell? Yes, he's better off today!
2008 Net Worth: From $2,002,038 to $31,955,998
2010 Net Worth: From $9,839,049 to $44,587,000
Eric Cantor? Yes, he's better off today!
2008 Net Worth: From $1,853,155 to $6,707,999
2010 Net Worth: From $2,893,110 to $8,048,999
WHAT THE HECK ARE THESE REPUBLICANS SHOUTING ABOUT WITH THEIR "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago" MEME?
Again, most GOP and DEM Congress members are better off TODAY!
So, who are the richest few?
# 1 - Let's start with the richest member, Rep. Michael McCaul, whose Net Worth is five (5) times or 500% more than it was four (4) years ago from a measely $101 million to over $500 million: |
The State of the Pacers… isn’t strong.
It is weak, in fact. Hampered by injuries, which have forced Indiana to dig deeper into the bench than they could have expected, the results have not been encouraging. Even if Indiana hadn’t balanced the budget and kept more offense around, it may have not mattered as the Pacers department of defense has slacked off as well.
Many questioned are now being asked. Should the Pacers tank? Who has a future with in Indiana? Should the Pacers make a trade for Miles Plumee?
The fans want answers, and they want them now.
The fact is there isn’t any signs it is going to get better until the Pacers get healthy as Indiana isn’t going to do much this season without George Hill or Paul George. No team is going to do very well missing their starting point guard and small forward. The Pacers have known they were taking a step back before the season began, but the effect wasn’t expected to be so drastic. A year ago the Pacers defense dominated and the offense got the job done, but now the script has flipped.
At the halfway point of the season the Pacers are on track to finish with a record below .500 and nowhere near a playoff berth… Well, the Eastern Conference is pretty bad and Indiana is only 3 games behind the 8th seed Brooklyn Nets, but even if Brooklyn falls out, there is little reason for optimism. With the Detroit Pistons on the rise in the post-Josh Smith era, Hassan Whiteside looking like a starting NBA center, and Charlotte is looking better with Lance Stephenson leading the bench, the battle for the 7th and 8th seeds doesn’t look as easy as it did just a few weeks ago.
We still don’t know if Larry Bird and company are ready to sacrifice this season while there is still hope for a playoff spot, but perhaps we will know soon.
The state of the Pacers isn’t strong, and it may be time to look to the future, but let’s take a quick look at tonight’s game against the Atlanta Hawks. Indiana has actually been more efficient than usual this year when they play Atlanta. The problem lies in the fact the smaller, faster Hawks will keep running and gunning their way past Indiana’s defense. The Pacers will get spread out and Atlanta will start picking them apart. When you look at the lineups the Pacers have used against the Hawks that many of them are shooting over 60% in effective field goal percentage. Unless the Pacers can find a way to force Atlanta into a more grind-it-out, half-court style of game, it looks like Atlanta will continue to be a the best team in the Eastern Conference.
Tonight’s Betting Line
As mentioned in our tanking roundtable, tonight could be a good night to start the tanking process, as Atlanta is a -11.5 favorite over the Pacers with a 192.5 over/under. Take the over and the Hawks, because this could get ugly. |
A former athletic trainer who accused retired NFL star Peyton Manning of sexual harassment is speaking about the allegations in her first television interview. Jamie Naughright spoke with "Inside Edition" anchor Deborah Norville and accused Manning of inappropriate behavior as she treated him for an injury in 1996. Manning was a 19-year-old All-American quarterback at the University of Tennessee. He maintains he was horsing around with a teammate.
The interview includes never-before-seen video of Manning's 2003 deposition, responding to a defamation suit brought by Naughright.
"I briefly pulled down my pants to so-called 'moon' him," Manning said in the deposition. "One second, one and a half seconds. Pulled my pants back up and continued with Jamie's examination of the bottom of my foot."
Naughright called Manning's account of mooning "a lie" in her "Inside Edition" interview.
"I was repulsed. I was scared. I was intimidated," she said, adding, "It was definitely a predator -- intimidating, anger, violent eyes that he had."
Manning's attorney said in a statement: "Peyton Manning has been absolutely clear: Jamie Naughright's accusations are false. When her claims were first investigated 21 years ago, she told a very different story. Her current account was invented several years later in connection with her first of several groundless litigations against Peyton. Most recently, she left Peyton's mother a vulgar and extremely disturbing voicemail. Ms. Naughright should stop this abusive behavior."
Peyton Manning referenced in lawsuit alleging "hostile sexual environment"
Norville said Monday on "CBS This Morning" that Naughright called a sexual assault hotline and also filed an EEOC complaint after the training room incident, but it wasn't until Peyton and his father, Archie, published a book called "Manning" that Naughright filed a lawsuit.
"In the book, after a nondisclosure agreement had been signed when she left the university both by her and Peyton, the book was published and there was an excerpt that she considered defamatory," Norville said. "Among other things it said she spoke with vulgar language and it mentioned a particular incident. She sued based on the excerpt in the book and there was a financial settlement reached after the judge declined to dismiss the lawsuit. The judge said, quote, there was sufficient evidence to allow the jury to find existence of actual malice on the part of the defendant. So there was a settlement then."
So why is Naughright coming forward again now with this interview?
"Both parties are now free to talk. The reason this has come up more recently is in 2016, a Title IX lawsuit was filed against the University of Tennessee saying that there was a hostile environment and sexual harassment was going on. This was mentioned in that lawsuit and now more recently Harvey Weinstein. She said she's inspired by the women who've come forward," Norville said.
Watch the full report Monday, Oct. 30, 2017 on "Inside Edition." |
The faces under the Bahrain podium said it all. Toto Wolff and the rest of the Mercedes folk were stood watching Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas collect their second and third place trophies with glum faces, while around them Ferrari folk celebrated vigorously.
Team boss Maurizio Arrivabene, beaming from ear to ear, even sang along with the Italian national anthem.
A double podium finish is hardly a disastrous result for Mercedes – certainly compared with Spain 2016 for example – but it was all too clear in Bahrain that the reigning champions are now really under the pump.
Despite dominating qualifying and putting both cars on the front row, the team had been beaten fair and square by Sebastian Vettel and Ferrari.
"Losing feels much worse than winning makes you feel great, unfortunately," said Wolff shortly after the podium.
There were many contributing factors to the result, some small and some more significant.
The point is that at nearly all of the races held over the previous three seasons, the differences wouldn't have made much different to the overall outcome, other than perhaps to tip the balance in favour of either Hamilton or Nico Rosberg on that particular weekend.
But in 2017 Mercedes has to get everything absolutely right in order to fend off a fierce competitor.
Wrong side of the (wheel) tracks
Mercedes achieved its first target on Saturday when it swept the front row, and pole for Bottas was a significant boost for both the Finn and his side of the garage.
Hamilton was happy enough with second – and seemed genuinely pleased for his teammate – but in the grander scheme of things losing out was probably very costly. Had he started from pole on Sunday, his race might have turned out differently.
As it was, his life became even harder at the start when Vettel blasted past and demoted him to third. For a few laps he dropped back slightly – only as far 0.8s or so behind the Ferrari – before edging a little closer.
It appeared that initially he was trying to protect his tyres by not going too hard too soon, which became an issue for him in Australia.
Meanwhile , he had his mirrors full of Max Verstappen's Red Bull, which was something he probably hadn't anticipated. For a while fans enjoyed the glorious sight of the cars from the three top teams running around together, something they have been dying to see for the past few seasons.
Bottas appeared to leading in confident style, but after around nine laps he reported that he was "losing the rears more and more," and he was told that there was a pressure issue.
In fact Mercedes, had an equipment failure on the grid, and consequently had not been able to lower Valtteri's pressures to the optimum level.
The race was then turned on its head when Ferrari made an aggressive move and pitted Vettel for another set of supersofts as early as lap 10.
Red Bull responded with Verstappen, as requested by the driver himself: "I think we need to do something as well, like Ferrari".
But sadly for the race, the Dutchman departed into the tyre wall soon after the stop, the result of a sudden loss of rear brake pressure.
Mercedes under pressure in pitlane
Mercedes did not respond to the Vettel stop, but the Verstappen crash, and subsequent safety car, created an opportunity. Bottas led Hamilton, Ricciardo and the rest into the pitlane, and that opportunity suddenly turned into a challenge for Mercedes.
Knowing that he would be stacked behind his teammate in the stop, Hamilton slowed and held up Ricciardo, when the rules make it clear that there's a limit to such tactics.
Meanwhile, Bottas had a slight delay in the stop due to what Mercedes called a power issue in the garage that affected the wheel guns, and when he went to leave he had to wait for Ricciardo, who had been delayed by Hamilton, to come past.
Hamilton also had a wheel gun issue, and the Red Bull pulled out and joined the queue ahead of him.
It would have been fascinating to see how things would have played out without the safety car, where the Mercedes would have pitted and how they would have emerged on track relative to Vettel. However, there was still an intriguing contest left, made more so by the difference in tyre choice.
The queue was led by Vettel (supersofts), Bottas (supersofts), Ricciardo (softs) and Hamilton (softs). Mercedes had split its drivers, which gave Ferrari something to think about – the general idea was that Hamilton would be able to go much further and have more flexibility on when he stopped again.
In theory, he could even go all the way to the flag having used both compounds, but 44 laps was an impossible ask, so that was never really the plan.
Hamilton hit with penalty
This battle was nicely set up as the restart approached, but there was another twist – the FIA stewards were looking at the way Hamilton had slowed Ricciardo on the way into the pitlane, and it seemed inevitable that a punishment would result.
And sure enough a five-second time penalty popped up on the timing screens shortly after the restart.
Before that was confirmed, there was some great action when the green flag flew. Bottas made an aggressive attempt to get past Vettel, but he didn't quite manage it, instead running wide and losing momentum.
Meanwhile, Hamilton made his life easier by instantly getting past Ricciardo. They were both on the softs, but the Aussie struggled more to get his into the working window.
In China, Red Bull had gone for supersofts rather than softs precisely because the team felt it didn't have the downforce to get the latter to work. Passed by several other cars, Ricciardo faded out of podium contention.
Things were finely poised at the front, with Vettel edging away from Bottas, and Hamilton reeling in his teammate. There was a radio discussion about the Mercedes swapping places, with Hamilton even saying that if he was unable to ultimately pass Vettel, he would let his teammate back past.
Vettel was in turn told by Ferrari what his rivals were planning.
It took a few laps to play out, but at the start of lap 27 Bottas let Hamilton by at Turn 1. Mercedes didn't really want to get into that sort of thing so early in the season, but the pressure from Ferrari has made it inevitable.
Bottas, meanwhile, had told the team that his supersoft rears were overheating, and that softs were a quicker choice. On lap 30 he pitted and made the swap, and three laps after that, leader Vettel came in and made the same change, putting on softs for a 24-lap run to the flag.
Hamilton was now in front, making full use of the range of his soft tyres to stop much later than his rivals, but he had the spectre of the five-second penalty hanging over him.
He pushed it as far as Lap 41 before coming in, sitting for what to him must have seemed like an age before the team could finally start work and put on another set of softs for the 16-lap run to the flag.
He had expected supersofts for such a short stint, assuming that would be the logical way to win a sprint home, and he questioned the choice. He was told, "it's all based on data," backing up the earlier comments of Bottas.
Tense run to the flag
Those last few laps were great motor racing. Hamilton left the pits with a 19-second deficit to Vettel, and had 16 laps with which to deal with it. He was on softs, Vettel was on softs that had already done eight laps. It was a massive ask, but if anyone was going to have a go, it was Hamilton.
The gap began to come down, and on lap 47 Bottas let him through for a second time, although it looked a little bit fraught as he did it somewhere Hamilton wasn't expecting him to.
In the end, it wasn't enough. Vettel lost some ground in traffic as he fought his way through the midfield battle, but crucially he managed his tyres to perfection, and still had plenty in hand.
Hamilton got as close as 5.8s with three laps to go, but it drifted out by a second when both men crossed the line. It was perhaps appropriate that the final margin was greater than the five-second penalty that Hamilton had taken.
Mercedes had plenty to think about in the aftermath of the race, and post-mortem began under the podium, as Niki Lauda talked things through with a group of engineers. As noted earlier, the loss came after an accumulation of issues tipped the balance in Vettel's favour.
"Many marginal losses," said Wolff. "The loss of the generator at the start, so we weren't able to able to bleed the tyres in the right way – that means Valtteri's pace was compromised. Vettel running P2 straight after the start and Lewis running P3.
"Clever undercut from Ferrari. Not the perfect pitstop because of the power loss in the garage. I don't think that we lacked race pace."
The other issues for Wolff and the rest of the Mercedes management to ponder was the fact that in only the third race circumstances forced Bottas to cede position not just once, but twice.
Ferrari is piling on the pressure.
For a full version of the Bahrain Grand Prix analysis, check out this weekend' GP Gazzete |
Black River Wisconsin bald eagle photo essay
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Black River Wisconsin bald eagle comeback
Bald eagles have made an amazing comeback in Wisconsin in the past two decades. I remember as a kid, I would feel lucky seeing one bald eagle on a weekend trip adventure in Wisconsin. Now, I would be shocked not to see several. This weekend canoeing on the Black River, I was not shocked as a healthy number of bald eagles were perched on trees adjacent to the river and swooped out over the river when spooked by my passing boat. Here is a Black River Wisconsin bald eagle photo essay to feature the photos taken on this trip.
Memorial Day tribute
Since today is Memorial Day, I figured it would be a fitting time for another bald eagle photo essay. Here is another one I did on another patriotic holiday, the Fourth of July. Many of these pictures come from nearby Wisconsin River.
Comparing Wisconsin and Black River
The Black River is just north of the Wisconsin River and flows into the Mississippi River in LaCrosse. Since it is only an hour or so away from the Lower Wisconsin River Valley, the rivers share some attributes including beautiful tree colored bluffs, sandbars, and many of the same flora including bald eagles.
The one difference between the two rivers is the Black River features more pine trees. The abundance of pine trees gives the Black River a more northern Wisconsin feel to it as it is on the southern fringe of the Wisconsin northwoods.
Black River Wisconsin bald eagle photo essay
It took me a couple of hours to see my first bald eagle, but after the trip cherry was broken, it seemed I saw one around every bend. I got some really nice pictures of the first one. My favorite is the one where I captured him just as he was taking off.
The last bald eagle of the trip was spotted by its nest near the 108 highway bridge near Melrose. I usually like to give bald eagles near a nest a wide birth, but since the tree in question was on the river bank and the river was not that wide at this juncture, there was no way to avoid. I thought that I heard noises from the nest, so there may have been eaglets in the nest. I could not investigate as the current was strong here, and I did not want to bother the adult.
Despite the fact that bald eagles have become nearly omnipotent on some rivers, I still get a thrill seeing them and it always adds to the adventure. Each time one flies off of a tree in front of my canoe, it takes my breath away.
How to be a bald eagle paparazzi
• Try and get the sun behind your back in order to capture the colors of the bald eagle
• If the sun is behind the eagle you will only get a silhouette of the bird, which is still a good picture – sometimes we are not able to choose where the sun is in relation to the bird
• Try and drift slowly up to the bird as paddling will scare it away
• Do not bother eagles near a nest – Take photographs from a safe distance away
• A zoom lens of course helps, but I have gotten good photos with a point and click camera if you can get close enough
• Eagles congregate at dams along the Mississppi, Illinois, and Wisconsin River when the rivers are frozen in the winter as dams keep the water from freezing over allowing eagles to hunt their favorite food –fish
• Go canoeing or kayaking on wild rivers and lakes
• The Wisconsin River and the Black River in Wisconsin are two great options in Wisconsin – Provincial Parks like Quetico and Algonquin are two great places in Canada
• Take many shots in order to get the good one – I included some of my failures to illustrate this point
• When the eagle flies away, take note where he lands as you may be able to try again
• Know when to say when – Don’t be an eagle stalker
TT
The goal of Traveling Ted is to inspire people to outdoor adventure travel and then provide tips on where and how to go. If you liked this post then enter your email in the box to get email notifications for each new entry. Daily travel photos are excluded from your email in order to not flood you with posts. There is no spam and email information will not be shared. Other e-follow options include Facebook (click on the like box to the right) or twitter (click on the pretty bird on the rainbow above).
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A new NASA study predicts massive ecological changes for Canada's Prairies and boreal regions by the year 2100.
Those areas are in "hot spots" highly vulnerable to massive environmental changes this century due to global warming, the study states.
A NASA map shows ecological sensitivity for the next century, with purple representing regions only slightly vulnerable to change. The ecological stress increases through blue, green, yellow, and orange areas to red. (NASA)
Much of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba is predicted to see major shifts northward of plant and animal species.
"By about 2100, the climate change projections that we have today would suggest that there would be pressure on that grassland so prevalent in [the Canadian Prairies] to move further northward — and at the expense of the forest moving further northward as well," said NASA climate scientist Duane Walliser, who spoke with CBC News from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Walliser said that all across the globe, whole ecological zones such as deserts and tundra will be on the move because of "unprecedented" warming at a pace faster than at any time in 10,000 years.
But Western Canada will be among the areas hardest hit.
A map of the globe on the NASA study shows much the Prairies in bright red "hot spots" of ecological stress, where 100 per cent of the landscape is predicted to see major changes in plant species.
Researchers said the areas are vulnerable because they have wide transition zones where grasslands meet boreal regions.
"So anywhere in Canada where you are currently at what's called an 'ecotone,' or the transition zone between the prairie plant communities and the boreal forest plant communities, that's where the greatest change will be observed," said NASA collaborator, Jon Bergengren, a global ecologist and earth systems scientist.
The Saskatchewan Research Council is reaching similar conclusions.
One of its scientists, Jeff Thorpe, published a report last May suggesting the Prairies will see fewer trees, a loss in wetlands, and an invasion of species dependent on open grassland.
"Some of the grasslands species that we don't have yet, they're down in the United States, we expect them to shift northward into Canada," said Thorpe from Saskatoon Wednesday.
Some wildlife will not survive
The NASA study says 37 per cent of Earth's land surface will transform from one major ecosystem zone, or biome, into another, while 49 per cent of land surfaces will see at least some changes in plant species.
Bergengren said some wildlife will not survive these transformations.
"Obviously, it is much easier for plants and animals to migrate or adapt to this level of climatic change over 10,000 years than it is over 100 years," he said.
The NASA model used a global temperature increase of two to four degrees this century, as predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. |
By Lyte
Hey everyone,
As the 2014 season comes to an end, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate players who have demonstrated positive behavior. Players who haven’t been chat restricted or had their account suspended in the 2014 season will receive a 4-win IP boost. Due to the number of players receiving this reward, we’ll be granting the bonuses over the next week. Keep an eye out for a shiny new boost icon next to your IP balance.
We've recently been focused on addressing extreme cases of verbal toxicity, and will soon be testing additional systems that address gameplay toxicity like leavers, AFKs, and intentional feeders. However, it’s important to keep in mind that players engaging in these behaviors really are not welcome in our community. Fewer than 1% of players have been escalated to a 14-day ban or permanent ban or even received a chat restriction.
As we mentioned previously, we’ve been testing some new chat ban systems and wanted to give you guys an update on our progress:
8/16/2014 Update with latest data
Reviewed approximately 11,150 players
11,052 players were neutral or positive (99.1%)
94 were chat restricted (0.84%)
4 were escalated for extreme toxicity (0.04%)
So let’s spend some time highlighting the awesome behaviors in our community. If you’re a positive player in League, and are OK sharing some of your recent chat logs with the rest of the community, please post a reply here!
If you do, make sure you’ve verified your email account, because you may see something head your way in the near future. |
The winning bid on the Charitybuzz auction offering a coffee with Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped from $605,000 to $600,000 earlier this week. Why? Because the bid had been placed using a stolen credit card.
The auction, which quickly became Charitybuzz's biggest ever auction, offers the highest bidder the chance to sit down for a coffee with Cook at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino.
It appears that one bidder was so desperate to spend an hour in Cook's company that he or she stole a credit card in order to place a bid of $605,000 on the auction.
Fortune's Philip Elmer-Dewitt asked a Charitybuzz spokesperson to explain why the top bid for the auction had fallen $5,000 between Friday evening and Monday morning, and the spokesperson confirmed that there was indeed credit card fraud involved.
The coffee with Cook auction is still ongoing, with 12 days left to bid. At present, a total of 84 people have placed bids on the auction, with the current highest bid standing at $600,000. The proceeds will be donated to The RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights.
The winning bidder will be allowed to take one friend with them to the coffee date, where they will both be subject to security screenings. They'll also be responsible for their own travel and accommodation.
A statement on the Charitybuzz website says Apple will be expecting: "Polite manners and respect for the generous donor [Cook]."
Although the bidders remain anonymous, Macrumors has suggested some possible identities of top contenders. These include Larry O'Connor, the founder and CEO of Other World Computing, as well as Rory O'Neil, Vice president of Product and Channel Marketing at Blackberry.
See also:
Just how close is Apple's Tim Cook to being fired?
Apple's Cook resets 3 popular, and wrong, Apple rumours
Tim Cook says competition is "tough", but Apple's products are still the "best by far"
Skewering Rob Enderle's conspiracy theory about Apple stock |
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Five Cleveland mail carriers face federal marijuana charges for delivering marijuana to a drug dealer, according to a federal indictment unsealed Monday.
Devon Blake, 25, Rashon Blake, 25, Tamika Embry, 32, Aaron Kelly, 28, and Dartagnan Mitchell, 28, all face charges of conspiracy, accepting bribes and marijuana distribution.
The quintet worked with Kevin Collins for several months in 2015 to establish a method of delivering the drugs, according to charging documents.
The mail carriers gave Collins their work schedules and their postal routes. Collins would then have packages with marijuana shipped to addresses on their routes on the days the carriers were scheduled to work, the documents say.
The carriers delivered the packages to Collins instead of the addresses on the packages, and Collins would pay them for their services, court documents say.
The defendants are considered public officials under to federal law.
A grand jury handed up the indictment on Wednesday. It was unsealed Monday, following the arrests of Embry and Kelly. Both pleaded not guilty to Magistrate Judge William Baughman and were released on bond.
The other three defendants were issued summonses, according to U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Mike Tobin.
Collins pleaded guilty in March to drug charges. According to a plea agreement, he is cooperating with the federal government.
A spokesman for the Postal Service's Office of Inspector General said in an email Monday that Mitchell resigned in March. The other four are suspended pending hte outcome of the criminal case.
Charles Fleming, Kelly's federal public defender, declined to comment. Gretchen Holderman, Embry's appointed attorney, said she did not yet know enough about the case to comment.
It was not immediately clear whether the other defendants had attorneys.
If you wish to discuss or comment on this story, please visit Tuesday's crime and courts comments section.
Click here to read the indictment on a mobile device. |
This week, UAV Vision launched a new 3-axis gyro stabilised gimbal. The CM123 is a miniature, multi-sensor camera system designed for commercial and ISR applications. Weighing as little as 1kg and measuring just 120mm in depth and 200mm in height, the CM123 is the ideal gimbal for integration into multi-rotor, rotary wing and fixed-wing UAVs. The CM123 has thirty times electro-optic (EO) optical zoom and three times infrared (IR) optical zoom to give end users enhanced detection capabilities to improve the efficiency of each mission.
With 3-axis mechanical and digital stabilisation, the CM123 cancels out unwanted movements to provide operators with a stable and clear image. Other key features include object tracking, GEO-Lock, motion detection, reliable navigation and real-time video stabilisation. The CM123 is ITAR free and has no export restrictions. With an IP rating of IP66, the CM123 is suitable for a variety of platforms and mission types.
For more information on the CM123, contact [email protected] or visit www.uavvision.com |
ONE AFTERNOON, ten years ago, my grandmother looked out her kitchen windows toward the mountains and said, “Jesus, I never want to be the kind of person who sleeps in hotels. That would just make me feel so goddamn old.” She was seventy-seven and would die before the next summer, but neither of us knew it then. That day, in her kitchen, in Vermont, we were drinking cheap red wine, watching the wild roses bloom beyond the sill, and praising sleeping by the sides of roads. For thirty years my grandmother toured the country as a folksinger in a series of rusty vans my grandfather had converted into campers. The first versions were Volkswagen buses, but eventually those became too coveted so they took to buying secondhand Dodge vans and decking them out with a foldout bed, a pop-top, and a refrigerator. She drove them to gigs, to folk festivals, and to Tucson each winter. Her bedding was a beloved down sleeping bag and a Snoopy pillow someone had left at her house ten years earlier. The ambiance was night sky, crickets, highway, dust, rain, creosote bush, train whistle.
My grandmother came by her penchant for migrant, al fresco living naturally. Her stepfather had worked for the National Forest Service, and for a handful of years they’d lived in a tent in the Mogollon Rim of Arizona. She used to tell me she would fall asleep at night listening to coyotes yipping and to the cowboys, who were hired by the Forest Service, singing love songs around their fires.
She passed the habit along to my father, and to me. My childhood vacations involved six-hundred-mile road trips in a Volkswagen Rabbit. My parents often drove through the night en route to Arizona, or New Mexico, or British Columbia, but sometimes around midnight or two a.m. they’d pull over by the side of the road and set up a tent in the dark. We slept near wetlands and in pesticide-laden fields and far too close to train tracks. One night, in western Texas, they took us up a long dirt track and pitched our tent in a gravel pit; a half hour later we woke to pickup trucks, splintering bottles, and gunfire.
A month before my grandmother died, while driving home from a gig in the middle of the night, she realized that she didn’t know where she was, that she didn’t know where she was going, that something was wrong with her brain. She began to cry but didn’t pull over. Her body knew the back roads home and led her to her farmhouse on the hill. She died in that house with us by her side; through the open windows came bird song and the scents of decay and mud and lilacs in bloom.
What did she love so about sleeping out-of-doors? What is it about hotels that made her feel so old? I think: air, risk, the dissolution of the boundaries between the self and the world outside the self. Those fields one drives into, those farmers who wake you in the morning, tapping politely on your window to make sure you’re alive, those creeks one discovers, with their swimming holes and creatures and music. I think: what a way to know the world, the walls thin, porous, the body vulnerable to peepers, crickets, trains, gunshot, the ever-looming highway, the age-old companionship of moon. I’ve known terror on those roadsides, but astonishing splendor too. Aren’t the two most often joined? |
Former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta told an audience in Malta on Monday (27 February) that if the leader of the Front National wins the French elections, it would be “game over” for the EU. But there is a silver lining.
“You can have the end of Europe. I think the European Union can’t survive with Marine le Pen in the European Council representing France. It will be game over,” Letta said.
The former leader, who is also president of the Jacques Delors Institute, spoke to a think tank forum in Valletta, organised together with the Maltese Presidency of the Council of the EU.
Without naming current frontrunner Emmanuel Macron, Letta said that if “a younger pro-European” wins, he would be “very optimistic”, because he believes the elections in Germany would be won by a pro-European.
He added that Angela Merkel had now become much more pro-EU than she has ever been, while the SPD candidate, Martin Schulz, had become an “unbelievable” political phenomenon, by investing his remarkable European career in national politics.
But Letta said that the French elections were more important than the German ones, because after the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, the presence of France in the UN Security Council had become “crucial for the future” of international relations.
Le Pen still has chance of presidential victory With the polls narrowing and one of her main rivals embroiled in an expenses scandal, far-right leader Marine Le Pen could feasibly become French president in May, senior politicians and commentators say.
EU under attack
Letta stated the EU was under attack and that it was of major importance to show to the citizens that the Union is “useful”, especially on issues where national solutions don’t work, such as the migration crisis.
He stressed that the EU was too slow on delivery, explaining that the decision to establish the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (EBCG) was a good one, but that there was a risk of “very poor delivery”.
The forum in Malta was dedicated to the EU’s neighbourhood policy, and the venue largely focused on the refugee crisis. Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat emphasised in his speech that decisions taken at EU level should be implemented.
Muscat cited his own country as an example, which although exposed to refugee arrivals itself, has opted to take asylum-seekers from Greece and Italy under that is meant to see the relocation of 160,000 asylum seekers across the EU within a two-year timeframe.
European border agency inaugurated at Bulgaria-Turkey border The EU launched its beefed-up border force today (6 October) in a rare show of unity at a symbolic location – the Bulgarian-Turkeis border guarded by a metal fence and razor wire.
Muscat said that there should be a Commissioner in charge of monitoring how decisions made at EU summits are implemented by the member states.
euractiv.com asked Muscat and Letta what would happen if the decision to relocate the 160,000 asylum seekers is not implemented by September. Some countries from Central Europe simply refuse to relocate refugees, while other countries took in small numbers.
In theory, the Commission could launch infringement procedures.
Commission threatens to sue countries that don't take refugees The EU warned today (8 February) that it will consider punishing member states next month if they fail to share the burden of asylum seekers stranded in Greece and Italy.
Muscat said he didn’t want to be the one to say that relocation is impossible. He also said that he didn’t know what would happen if the decision was not implemented in the assigned timeframe.
Letta said that by failing to implement the relocation decision, EU countries would miss a great opportunity. He added that the EU was based on solidarity and responsibility, and that the first time that Germany had appealed for solidarity, the reaction was not at the level of expectations.
“It is inconceivable that some countries didn’t offer any reaction,” Letta said.
“Even in the time of the Internet, you cannot escape your history and geography,” he added.
Vladimir Bartovic, director of Czech think tank Europeum, asked if the “flexible solidarity” advocated by Slovakia and the rest of the Visegrád countries could be accepted as a contribution, to which Muscat clearly replied that this was not the approach of the rest of the Union.
Flexible solidarity: Slovakia gives 550 scholarships to refugees In a gesture illustrating the concept of “flexible solidarity”, Slovakia announced that it will offer 550 state scholarships to young people that will be able to come to Slovakia to study in its universities, but it will not grant them asylum.
The Maltese prime minster explained that in his experience EU countries have come to an agreement on external aspects of the migration crisis, rather than on the internal ones, such as burden sharing. He called the external aspects the “low-hanging fruit” where more unity could be achieved.
Muscat insisted on the need to push for a multi-speed Europe, although he added that as the leader of a small country, people would perhaps expect him to advocate for maintaining the status quo. |
Britain's BBC apologized to Queen Elizabeth on Tuesday after a senior journalist reported her private views about one of the country's best-known terrorism suspects, an embarrassing disclosure for a monarch who avoids public political statements.
BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner broadcast details of a private conversation with the queen during which she supposedly told him she had complained to the last government about radical Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.
The queen was said to be upset that Britain had not arrested him after he preached fiery anti-Western sermons outside a mosque in London after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
RECOMMENDED: 10 key moments in the life of Queen Elizabeth II
That was awkward for a head of state who has no political or executive role and is expected to stay neutral in public. The queen has never given a media interview and typically avoids controversial topics in her speeches.
The Egyptian-born cleric lost an appeal in the European courts on Monday and faces extradition from Britain to the United States. Washington accuses him of supporting al Qaeda, aiding a kidnapping in Yemen and plotting to open a U.S. training camp for militants.
Delays in arresting the cleric angered many in Britain. Newspapers campaigned for his extradition, with the Sun using the headline "Sling Your Hook", a reference to the metal hook he wore in place of a hand he lost in disputed circumstances.
The public broadcaster, mainly funded by a fee paid by everyone under 75 who owns a television, said the meeting had taken place some years ago.
"The conversation should have remained private and the BBC and Frank deeply regret this breach of confidence. It was wholly inappropriate," the BBC said. Buckingham Palace had no comment.
A former banker, Gardner has worked for the BBC since 1997. He was partly paralysed in 2004 after being shot on assignment in Saudi Arabia.
Elizabeth holds a weekly private audience with the prime minister to discuss topical issues. There have been 12 prime ministers since her coronation in 1953, from Winston Churchill to David Cameron.
Republic, a group that campaigns for the monarchy's abolition, accused the royal family of a "cynical PR ploy" designed to win popular support.
"The decision to disclose this one conversation while keeping all else secret smacks of a deliberate PR stunt to put the queen on the right side of public opinion," the group's head Graham Smith said.
After well-received celebrations to mark the queen's 60 years on the throne this summer, the royal family has suffered two embarrassing episodes in recent weeks.
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Naked pictures of Elizabeth's grandson Prince Harry at a Las Vegas hotel were published around the world, swiftly followed by topless photos of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge -- the former Kate Middleton who is the wife of Harry's brother William, second in line to the throne. (Editing by Stephen Powell)
RECOMMENDED: 10 key moments in the life of Queen Elizabeth II |
Couvrir une manifestation ou un événement public en France est aujourd’hui devenu une activité à haut risque pour les reporters et les photographes, qu’un brassard presse ne suffit plus à protéger face aux forces de l’ordre. Vidéos et photos à l’appui, RSF a pu constater de nombreux cas de violences policières, parfois délibérées, contre des journalistes. Pour dénoncer ces agissements, RSF saisit aujourd’hui le Défenseur des droits Jacques Toubon des cas de dix journalistes ayant subi des violences de la part de membres de la police ou de la gendarmerie, alors qu’ils ne faisaient que leur métier, celui de couvrir des événements qui concernent la collectivité, de rapporter des informations sur leur déroulement et de les diffuser au public. Ces dix dossiers illustrent une tendance plus large à laquelle de nombreux autres journalistes ont été confrontés ces derniers mois.
“Nous saisissons le Défenseur des droits afin qu’il mène des investigations, qu’il demande des sanctions le cas échéant, et surtout qu’il adresse des recommandations fermes et précises aux autorités, notamment celle de respecter la liberté d’informer des journalistes, déclare Paul Coppin, responsable juridique de RSF. Exercer des violences contre des journalistes qui couvrent des manifestations relève d’une forme de censure, que nous demandons au Défenseur de condamner sans détour.”
Certains des cas que RSF soumet au Défenseur concernent des journalistes qui ont reçu des coups de la part des forces de l’ordre, comme Maxime Reynié, photographe, qui a été frappé par des CRS en mars 2016 pendant une manifestation à Toulouse, bien qu’il ait très clairement fait valoir sa qualité de journaliste. De même pour Michel Soudais, rédacteur en chef adjoint de l’hebdo Politis, qui a reçu, sans motif, un coup de matraque dans le ventre de la part d’un CRS, et pour Martin Lagardère, photographe, brutalisé par un membre des compagnies de sécurisation et d'intervention (CSI) pendant une manifestation alors qu’il cherchait à prendre des photos.
D’autres ont été violemment maîtrisés, malmenés, sans motif, par les forces de l’ordre. Le journaliste Thierry Vincent a ainsi été jeté à terre par un CRS et a perdu connaissance pendant qu’il couvrait une manifestation en mai 2016, alors qu’il avait préalablement fait valoir sa qualité de journaliste.
D’autres ont été victimes d’un usage non autorisé des armes de défense par les forces de l’ordre, comme Estelle Ruiz, parfaitement identifiable comme journaliste, qui a reçu un tir délibéré d’une grenade de désencerclement alors qu’elle filmait un rassemblement en mai 2017. Les journalistes Ugo Amez, Louis Witter et Michael Bunel ont tous trois été victimes de tirs de « flashball », tirs qui étaient soit tendu, soit à bout portant, soit dirigé vers le visage.
Nombreux aussi sont ceux qui ont subi des blessures à la suite de ces violences, voire se sont vus reconnaître des jours d'ITT (incapacité de travail). Ugo Amez a dû être arrêté trois jours après avoir reçu un tir tendu de flashball, Michel Bunel a eu le doigt brisé par un coup de matraque.
Plusieurs enfin témoignent d’insultes, de menaces, de propos outrageants… Louis Witter a été menacé, Michel Bunel insulté, une autre journaliste qui souhaite rester anonyme a subi des humiliations à caractère sexuel…
Tous ces journalistes étaient pourtant identifiés comme tels, ou aisément identifiables, aucun ne participait à la manifestation, et aucun n’avait exercé de violence, tenu de propos déplacés, ou commis le moindre acte qui aurait pu justifier une telle réponse des forces de l'ordre. Si Reporters sans frontières reconnaît sans équivoque la difficulté du travail de la police, notamment dans le contexte actuel – celui de l'état d’urgence, des attentats répétés – cette difficulté ne peut en aucun cas justifier que les journalistes soient victimes de violences délibérées de leur part.
Les évènements que couvraient ces dix reporters, qu’il s’agisse de manifestations, de rassemblements, d’opérations policières, constituaient un sujet d’intérêt public. La couverture de ce type d'événements permet d’informer les citoyens sur leur tenue, de relayer les griefs ou les aspirations qui y sont exprimées, de rapporter la manière dont les autorités y répondent, etc. La couverture complète et précise des manifestations est fondamentale pour le droit du public à l’information.
C’est bien une forme de restriction, donc de censure, par l’Etat, sur une presse libre, que RSF demande au Défenseur des droits de condamner. Il est essentiel que, dans le cadre de ses compétences relatives au respect de la déontologie des professionnels de la sécurité, il rappelle aux autorités leurs obligations en terme de protection des journalistes et de respect de la liberté de la presse. |
Vietnam's transgender artists intrigue, but struggle to find larger social acceptance
Singers Khanh Chi Lam (L) and Huong Giang (R)
W as it a strategic move? Or was it curiosity? Was sympathy and/or curiosity trumping talent? Was this fair on other contestants?
These are questions that seemed to have escaped discussions about transgender artists who seem to make relatively successful comebacks after changing their sex.
When Huong Giang admitted on stage during the Vietnam Idol contest last year that she had been born a boy, she seemed to win more public support, and was voted into the top four. It was a huge contrast to when she had contested as a male in 2010. Then, he had failed to make it past the first round.
This time around, as a woman, she still failed to dazzle the judges who were critical of her performance, but her looks and story seem to have kept the public interested enough to keep voting for her.
So far all the sex change operations involving artists have been of males becoming females.
The new women have said that their sexual orientation is who they are, that the sex change is part of their artistic desire, that they want to make "sexier" appearances on stage, but are sad that they are criticized for hunting attention.
The Vietnam Idol judges did comment during the first rounds of the contest that Giang's appearance would be one of her key weapons.
It appears that the weapon was considerably sharpened after her admission that her appearance was not something she was born with.
A VnExpress report quoted her as saying on stage: "I love singing very much, and any change I made was for it.
"Everyone has their choice. And I think that when you want to appear on stage in some image, you need to change for it."
Giang said she had always felt like a girl even when she was a boy, and she used her savings from her part-time job to undergo a series of sex-change operations in Thailand.
Her mother, Dinh Thi Hien, told the Gia Dinh & Xa Hoi (Family & Society) newspaper that Giang, born Nguyen Ngoc Hieu, had been soft and gentle since she was little.
"He was playing modeling and singing with his sister and cousins, and I thought he had some love for performing arts. "
Hien said that she had no inkling about her son's sexual orientation in the beginning, but took notice when, as a teenager, he kept engaging in "girly acts" and appearances. She said she regrets now that she concealed her suspicions from her child and did not talk to him and show him her support.
She said Hieu started performing publicly as a student at the Hanoi College of Arts, and when he asked for permission to leave home for several days in February 2011, she thought it was for a show. It was only when one of his friends informed her later that she knew about the sex change operations.
"I regret every time thinking about it. It was the most difficult moment in my child's life and I could not be there."
Giang said her coming out had first drawn public curiosity, but "I feel people have gradually come to accept me as normal and treat me as an artist."
Like Giang, Lam Chi Khanh said she'd always felt like a girl.
The public had known Khanh as a "him" before the singer disappeared from public view in 2007 after a live show named "Abnormal Heart." He returned to the stage as a female, with a new stage name Khanh Chi Lam in late 2012, 33 years old.
Lam had tested the waters by posting many new images on her Facebook page before opening up at a press briefing in December.
Soon after, her online single drew more public attention than the songs she had sung when she was a male.
Lam said she has been able to demand higher payments for performances as also be picky about them, something she could not afford to do earlier as a man.
This has happened although her voice has not changed much from that of her male avatar.
Lam said she did not have any medical intervention for her vocal chords because she wanted to keep her voice.
She just tries to sing "softly and weakly" when possible, Lam said.
She also refrained from having any plastic surgery done on her face. All she had to do was to lose some weight, she said.
"I hope that the public will come to accept me and love me because I have changed (from male to female) to be true to myself, and still be real," she told entertainment news website Ngoi Sao.
Big crowds are expected at her upcoming live show this November, in which she will attempt to promote transgender rights.
She will sing along with five popular male singers amidst ao dai, gown and bikini fashion shows featuring five transgender beauty queens invited from Thailand and around ten female transsexuals from Vietnam.
Lam said it's wrong for people to say that she became a transsexual for fame, "because I did not know what would come after.
"If I knew I would be famous, I would have done it sooner."
She said she had been afraid of losing everything after the sex change. She had agonized over the decision, not having the support of her parents who felt it would affect her health badly.
She had to save money for four to five years to have the sex change operation in Thailand.
She also told local media about plans for a wedding with her gay boyfriend of eight years, and having a baby by in vitro fertilization. She has already adopted a relative's baby.
Other artists who have achieved renown after changing their sex include singer Hai Nguyen and designer Franky Nguyen. They have moved from relative obscurity to people regularly mentioned in local media reports.
Hai Nguyen has released several music products, and has even switched to a new career as a model for advertisements.
Franky Nguyen said she decided to undergo a sex change because she wanted to wear the clothes that she designs.
Longing for acceptance
As public figures, Giang, Lam and Nguyen might help continue the journey of their predecessors who fought to win public acceptance for transsexuals.
Cindy Thai Tai, a singer who owns a fashion store, was one of the first artists to come clean about her true sexual orientation and to receive surgery for a female body ten years ago.
Cindy said she still remembered the disgusting looks thrown at her during the first days.
She said it's not true that those who undergo sex change operations do it for fame, because such "fame" subjects the person to curiosity, doubt and disgust.
Cindy had become notorious for outfits that exposed too much flesh, but some sympathetic people in the business have said transsexuals are kind of desperate to show the body that they have longed for; to show off their success in being who they want.
While many have described their physical pains during and after the sex change process,
Cindy said it was much more painful to be rejected or not accepted by society.
Vietnam has not officially recognized transgender procedures and personal papers continue to mention one's gender according to birth.
"I am not considered a woman on paper and that affects my married life," she said.
"I don't want my marriage certificate to say it is between man and man," she told news website Dan Tri.
For now, Cindy is a single mother, raising an eight-year-old boy she adopted as an infant. |
I was just checking the predictions in the Obama campaign’s leaked delegate estimates and was floored. They nailed the hell out of it!
Here are their predictions:
Vote % Pledged Delegates State Delegates Obama Clinton Obama Clinton Ohio 141 46% 53% 68 73 Rhode Isl. 21 42% 57% 8 13 Texas 193 47% 51% 92 101 Vermont 15 55% 44% 9 6
The actual numbers, or at least decent current estimates (taken from DailyKos) are:
Vermont (15 delegates) Obama 9
Clinton 6 Rhode Island (21 delegates) Clinton 12
Obama 8 Texas Total (Nowhere near final) Obama ~99
Clinton ~94 Ohio (141 delegates, punching in results with 97% reporting here) Clinton 73
Obama 68
So as far as I can tell they were perfect on Vermont and Ohio, one delegate off in Rhode Island and maybe two delegates off in Texas?
Holy crap.
UPDATE: A couple of people pointed out that there are updated results over at DKos. These are different but not vastly different.
These are still not final numbers, since all counting of the Texas caucuses — stuck at about 35% — has yet to resume. But for now, Clinton has picked up a few delegates. Vermont (15 delegates) Obama 9
Clinton 6 Rhode Island (21 delegates) Clinton 12
Obama 8 Texas Total (Nowhere near final) Clinton ~97
Obama ~96 Ohio (141 delegates) Clinton 76
Obama 65
So Vermont and Rhode Island are still basically as estimated. Clinton is doing a touch better in Ohio and Texas than predicted. All in all a bang-up job by the Obama prediction team 🙂
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The Times of Israel reports: Amid growing Iranian complaints that world powers have failed to live up to their obligations under the nuclear accord with Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Monday that dialogue with the US had proven to be “a lethal poison,” as Washington had shown that it could not be trusted.
“They want us to negotiate with them on the regional issues but the nuclear deal experience tells us that this is a lethal poison,” he said in a speech in Tehran.
“The Americans want to take everything in return for nothing,” the Fars news agency quoted the leader as saying. “Negotiations with such a government mean diversion from the correct path of the country’s progress, making repeated concessions and bearing their bullying, violations and disloyalty in practice.”
Khamenei said that six months after the implementation of the deal, it had not prompted any tangible change in Iranians’ lives.
The deal reached on July 14, 2015 saw the US, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia agree to lift some international sanctions in exchange for guarantees that Iran would not pursue nuclear weapons.
Read more here. |
If there is a day to celebrate, companies will try to take advantage of it to get their brands out to new potential customers. You may not know, but Wednesday, June 10, 2015, is National Iced Tea Day. This news may not be something you get too excited about in itself, but because it’s National Iced Tea Day, there are a number of companies giving out freebies to celebrate the occasion. If you like the combination of iced tea and no cost, then June 10 is the day for you. Below you’ll find a list of companies celebrating the day, and the free offers they are giving away to those who visit their stores or websites.
Inko’s
Inko’s, which makes a variety of flavored organic white iced teas, is celebrating national Iced Tea day by giving out a coupon for a free 16-ounce bottle of any flavor of one of their teas. You can request the coupon for a free bottle by going to their contact page and placing you mailing address in the message area. That’s all you have to do, and you’ll receive the coupon by mail. The coupons are available while supplies last.
Wendy’s
Wendy’s across the nation will be celebrating National Iced Tea Day by giving away a free 12-ounce sample of their new Blueberry Pineapple FruiTea Chillers at participating restaurants on Wednesday, June 10 from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. These FruiTea Chillers are made with a combination of real blueberry puree, pineapple juice, a splash of pomegranate juice and hand-shaken with organic Honest Tropical Green Tea. One per customer and there’s no additional purchase necessary. (This is currently not advertised on the website, but the news release will be going out on the morning of June 10.)
Snapple & Walmart
Snapple, in conjunction with Walmart, is giving away a free Snapple as part of National Iced Tea Day on Wednesday, June 10, and their “Sip Your Way into Summer” campaign. Visit SipYourSummer on June 10 where you can print a coupon for a Free 16-ounce Snapple Tea, Juice Drink, or a free 18.5-ounce Snapple Straight Up Tea, which can be redeemed at Walmart stores. The coupon will be available while supplies last.
Teavana
Teavana stores in the US will be serving a free cup of Pineapple Berry Blue Iced Tea (16-ounce) to all customers who visit on Wednesday, June 10 while supplies last. There’s no purchase necessary. The Pineapple Berry Blue blend is a combination of Teavana’s Blueberry Bliss Rooibos tea and their Pineapple Kona Pop tea.
La Madeleine Country French Cafe
To celebrate National Iced Tea Day, participating La Madeleine Country French Cafes (see list here) will be offering customers a choice of a free glass of either their traditional or Mango Breeze iced tea all day Wednesday, June 10. Guests need to mention the promotion when at the cafe, and when doing so will receive their complimentary iced tea.
Do you know of any other free iced tea deals for National Iced Tea Day? if you do, please leave them in the comments so they can be added to this list.
(Top photo courtesy of All Things Michigan) |
Simple Scan is a great app and there’s a lot of love for it. It’s one of those reliable, indispensable tools that it would be hard to live without. Just because it’s great doesn’t mean that it can’t be improved, of course, and it was recently suggested that I take a look at its design.
Most of the improvements can be described as refinements. Right now there are a bunch of operations which can be a bit tricky to find, or which aren’t as obvious as they could be. There are also a few actions that are well and truly buried!
Let’s look at the mockups. First, the initial “ready to scan” state:
How it could look when scanning:
Finally, what a scanned document could look like:
The primary changes are the introduction of a sidebar for selecting a page and the use of an action bar at the bottom for performing page actions. This makes it much clearer which page is selected, which is important when you want to perform edits. It also helps to communicate the purpose of the edit buttons – right now crop and rotate are a little ambiguous, largely due to their placement.
There are some other smaller improvements. The scan button now communicates the image/text and single page/document feeder modes, which means that you don’t have to dig into the UI to find out what will happen when you click the button. Some options, like reorder pages, have been rescued from the relative obscurity of the app menu. The current “new document” action has been rebranded as “start again”, in order to communicate that it’s how you clear the current scan as well as start a new one.
I’ve also reworked the settings:
This uses an experimental approach to the brightness and contrast settings here. To be able to use these, someone really needs feedback on what the different settings look like in practice. To enable this, I’ve sketched out a test scan mode which produces samples using a range of settings. This allows the user to specify the settings by selecting the best sample.
Observant readers will notice a crop of new controls for features that don’t currently exist. This includes OCR text reading and editing, a zoom control, and a magic enhancement feature. These are mostly placeholders for features that Robert Ancell, the Simple Scan maintainer, would like to add at some point in the future.
As far as I’m aware, no one is lined up to implement these changes, so if anyone fancies taking a shot at them, that would be great. The initial changes are described in a couple of bug reports. For more details, you can also see the full mockups in all their warty glory. |
I have taken a little detour from my usual subject of medical cannabis to comment on the meteoric rise of Donald John Trump. It has left me terrified and saddened at the state of our nation. It looks like he is on his way out after a horrendous week of meltdowns.
It is time for me to get back to "my regularly scheduled programming," namely writing medical cannabis success stories. Without further ado, I would like to introduce you to MaryJane Piper. She is my new hero. This woman has overcome the most incredible emotional and health related challenges and she is still fighting to be a contributing member of society. Talk about self-preservation and the will to live. She is a mom to 4 children, 1 of which has cerebral palsy. That's what great moms do. They fight to stay alive for their children's sakes!
I spoke to MaryJane a few days ago. Not only does she have more health problems than anyone deserves, but she has identity problems. What I mean by that is that she has 2 social security cards, but she is a woman without an identity, if you can imagine that. It's a long, convoluted and ridiculous situation, so I am going to move along with her medical cannabis story.
MaryJane has had gastric problems since she was a teenager. I don't know about you, but those with chronic gastric problems will concur that it's about as miserable as it can get. She discovered that cannabis really helped control her gastric distress. We are talking 40 years ago. When some of her extended family members discovered her secret, instead of supporting her, she was shunned by them.
She had multiple surgeries for a myriad of gastric and musculoskeletal disorders. She was prescribed dozens of pharmaceutical drugs to control her pain and gastric distress as well as for her depression and PTSD. The drugs "fogged her mind" for 3 years. She was barely able to function, herself, let alone look after her children. Thankfully, she had a boyfriend at the time who adored her kids and he cared for them.
All the while, she was using cannabis which offset many of the adverse reactions of the multiple pharmaceuticals she was prescribed by her doctors. She had built up such a tolerance to the pharmaceuticals, that they ceased to work anymore. She was so tired of the adverse side effects of the pharmaceuticals, that she weaned herself off of them. But then, she couldn't eat, she was losing weight and she had nerve damage which has left her with very limited mobility, especially with the use of her hands. She was in a great deal of pain.
Enter the picture, Dr. Leslie Mendoza Temple. Some of you might recognize her name. She was on the Illinois Medical Cannabis Advisory Board until just recently when it was revamped by the Illinois Department of Public Health. Dr. Temple is one of the kindest, most caring people. She became MaryJane's doctor and got her into the medical cannabis program. Here's how it came to pass. MaryJane was in the hospital for surgery. Afterwards, she was referred to pain management who wanted her on a regimen of Norco 4 times daily, whether or not she needed them. They forced her to sign a ridiculous, binding contract for the medication. She went back to her PCP and told him she refused to do that. Thankfully, he referred her to Dr Temple who directs the NorthShore Integrative Medicine Program.
I asked MaryJane what her qualifying condition is and she told me she has something like 11 qualifying conditions including spinal cord injury, fibromyalgia, polyneuropathy and dystonia for starters. She has Irritable Bowel Syndrome which is not a condition although Crohn's Disease is...makes little sense. She often can't eat nor sleep. She has serious mobility problems with her hands, so she is very limited to what she can do. She just had multiple surgeries on her shoulder which keeps slipping in and out of its socket. Norco and Fentanyl make her sick. She could get as many of those as she wanted. Medical cannabis products, which actually help control her pain, help her sleep and stimulate her appetite are often out of her reach, financially. She has to ration her medical cannabis purchases based on whether or not she can afford them. No one should have to decide between buying food or buy life-saving medicine. There is something very wrong with this picture.
Since becoming an Illinois medical cannabis patient, MaryJane has used vaporization in the form of a vaping pen, using the flower strains of San Francisco Valley, Pre-98 Kush and Girl Scout Cookie. They worked at the beginning, but then stopped providing relief. She has tried tinctures and topical gels with some relief. Edibles just do not work for her. She tried RSO but she had a lot of trouble getting into the packaging. On the day I spoke with her, she was excited about going to her dispensary; they just started carrying Mary's Medicinals Patches. She planned to buy as many as she could afford.
Later that evening, I got this wonderful message from her. Here is what she told me:
This was an awesome way to wake up!! My right hand feels freedom it rarely has felt in years. This is the hand that suffers from the nerve damage left from stretching my brachial plexus, numerous time in the last year as my shoulder kept slipping out. I have dystonia due to that initial injury. This hand has deforming arthritis twisting my fingers, calcification deposits come and go in my knuckles, Raynaud's and pseudo gout (my uric acid levels aren't elevated).I slept so excellent! I woke in the same position I laid in when I went to bed, I usually wake to reposition especially with this sling/brace on. I don't recall waking at all as I usually do, I feel refreshed and wanted to get up and move this morning. My fingers have a slight stiffness but moving freer with not what I'd consider pain. I haven't felt this in so long, different experience without vaping and without the use of any IV or injected meds or strong pain meds that would have me ill feeling and non functional.I did smoke three hits of flower last night, which helped me to eat and kept my food in my body, certain strains of flower is the norm to make that happen and it did.I believe I'm going to like to use this patch. As I figure out what dosing I'll need and which works best for me this is going to be a wonderful relief to live with. The effects and convenience speaks volumes to a person who can't properly use fine motor skills. I'm not saying it was 100% but it sure felt like I was getting close as possible with the shoulder of this hand recovering from two surgeries this is such a welcomed method of relief.I feel like the sun is shining on me this gloomy overcast day!! I can't wait to tell my doctors. I don't want to over work my hand or arm, I want to maintain this now.I hope this information can brighten someone else's day by giving hope.My thanks to "Mary's Medicinals", GTI and to the state of Illinois for letting this method come through and to all who have been a part of this program.
Not only did it make her day, it made mine too. Thanks, MaryJane, for sharing your story. You are an inspiration to others. She was excited to tell me that she had "converted" a neighbor from someone who was completely against medical cannabis usage to one who is "singing its praises." As I told her, we are changing minds, one person at a time.
As always, I love to hear your comments.
I've written a series of posts about medical marijuana. If you want to read more you can click on the "Medical Marijuana" tag at the top of my page.
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However small, the demonstration will revive debate about diversity at the Oscars-awarding Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose voting members are overwhelmingly white and with an average age in their 60s. "The goal of the protest is to send a message to the Academy, send a message to Hollywood, send a message to the film industry," said Earl Ofari Hutchinson, head of the LA Urban Policy Roundtable group. "And the message is very simple: you don't reflect America, your industry doesn't reflect America. Women, Hispanics, African-Americans, people of color (are) invisible in Hollywood." [Oscar protest planned over all-white nominees, by Guillame Meyer, AFP, February 21, 2015]
A two day old whine from some rent seekers that the Oscars are too white is also the top "story" at the Huffington Post. [ Why It Should Bother Everyone That the Oscars Are So White , by Brennan Williams, Christopher Rosen, and Irina Dvalidze, February 20, 2015] So you have a small protest receiving mass media coverage and one of the largest and best funded media outlets in the world telling us that the Oscars need to implement affirmative action. As the political system of the West gradually depends on ratcheting up anti-White sentiment, we can expect culture to increasingly resemble the kind of crude agitprop you would see in an Eastern Bloc country or, for that matter, a typical American university. A recent podcast at The Right Stuff noted that many theater companies or orchestras will reluctantly put on popular shows so they can raise the money to do the shows they really want, i.e. incomprehensible and ugly leftist nonsense that no one wants to see or hear. Film will increasingly follow the same pattern. We will get a greater number of affirmative action movies that no one wants to see but will serve as a set-aside for various minorities and prevent them from protesting. Much like we subsidize the urban underclass in the hope that they will stop rioting, the thinking of Hollywood will be that all we need to do is give the protesters an award, tell them they are special, and hopefully they will go away and leave us alone. Those movies which feature heroic white male protagonists and do well will be discouraged and only reluctantly indulged in order to bankroll the more politically valuable films. The media's worshipful coverage of the government-subsidized Selma and the frothing hatred towards American Sniper is an instructive contrast . Of course, one of the many downsides is we will get far fewer good movies. Next from Paramount Pictures, Worker and Parasite! |
Earlier this month, I came across a fascinating opinion survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. The report asked people in forty countries whether belief in God is necessary for morality. Mostly, the results aren’t surprising. In advanced democracies, such as those in Western Europe, people say by at least a two-to-one margin that morality is not linked to belief in God—presumably, they think non-believers in God can be moral. In the developing world, the opposite is the case, with citizens of Muslim and poorer Catholic countries overwhelmingly saying the two are linked. And as might be expected, the United States is an outlier among developed countries, with a majority (53 percent) asserting the necessity of belief in God to anchor morality.
But then there is China, which at 14 percent has the lowest percentage affirming the need for belief in God of any country surveyed—even lower than in the secular democracies of Western Europe. It’s especially striking when compared to other Asian countries, such as Japan, where 42 percent of the population links morality to belief in God, and South Korea, where more than half the population asserts such a link. In fact, according to the Pew data, a full 75 percent of Chinese people say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral.
Pew doesn’t explain its findings, but they struck me as extremely odd. If there’s one trend in China that is hard to miss, it’s the growing desire among many Chinese to find some sort of moral foundation in their lives, whether by reengaging with age-old Chinese ethical traditions, or by taking part in organized religions. In view of this widely-documented situation, how can so few Chinese believe in the link between morality and a supreme being or force?
It is true that it is popular among some Western commentators to discount the importance of religion in both Imperial and Communist China. As late as the 1960s, informed people argued that religion wasn’t important in Chinese society. This reflected the fact that the West’s initial encounters with China had been through its elite, who, in the later imperial era, and especially in the Republican and Communist periods, denied the importance of religion in Chinese society and history. The argument was that China didn’t have real religions, only superstitious folk practices that didn’t rise to the level of the world’s great global belief systems. Most Chinese were not religious and morality was instilled primarily through Confucianism, which was incorrectly presented as a secular tradition.
But these assumptions have long been discredited by scholars. A landmark was the 1961 publication of Religion in Chinese Society by the University of Pittsburgh academic C.K. Yang. As Yang put it, religion in traditional China was “diffused” in society. There were hierarchically organized religious organizations (especially in Buddhism and parts of Daoism) but mostly, Chinese religious practice was part of daily life and organized by lay people. This didn’t make Chinese people unreligious; it was just that religiosity in China was different from that in other countries, especially civilizations dominated by the Abrahamic faiths. In fact, religiosity was so much a part of Chinese society that China has been described by the Sinologist John Lagerwey as a religious state—from the emperor to the peasant. The idea that morality and belief in higher forces could be separated—the premise of the Pew poll—would have struck people of traditional China as inconceivable.
But if this was true in the past, what about now? Have sixty-five years of Communist rule wiped out religion, or reduced it to such a minor role that the Chinese have done a complete about-face? This is easier to rebut; any casual visitor to China can’t help but be struck by how many new churches, temples, and mosques are being built.
How, then, to make sense of the Pew findings? According to Pew’s English-language report, the actual survey asked people to say which of the following statements came closest to their own opinion: “It is not necessary to believe in God to in order to be moral and have good values” or “It is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values.” I was immediately struck by the use of the word “God” in the survey statements, capitalized as it is in the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim tradition. Was the question referring solely to the god of these faiths? But I couldn’t imagine that Pew would ask such a narrow question—after all, the study doesn’t describe itself as asking whether belief in an Abrahamic being is necessary to morality, but rather asking whether belief in any supreme being is.
So I wrote to Pew and also called Horizonkey, the Chinese company that carried out the survey. It turned out that the question had in fact been formulated in precisely that very narrow way. I don’t know how the question was translated for other countries (especially Japan or India), but in Chinese, the question used a term for “God” that is applicable in modern China almost only to Protestant Christianity: shangdi (上帝).
In Chinese, the questions were: “不信仰上帝，也能有良好的道德和价值” and “为了有良好的道德和价值观，信仰上帝是必要的.” I would translate these questions back into English as “Even without believing in (the Protestant) God, one can still have good virtues or values” and “In order to have good virtues and values, one must believe in (the Protestant) God.”
Shangdi has a pre-Christian meaning—referring to a supreme deity—but it was appropriated by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth century and since then has come to be synonymous with the monotheistic God of the Abrahamic religions, especially Protestant Christianity. (Catholics eventually changed their nomenclature for God to “tianzhu”; see the Rites Controversy of the early eighteenth century, the dispute among Catholics about how far to incorporate indigenous traditions into Catholic practice.)
I emailed James Bell, director of international survey research at Pew’s offices in Washington, who clarified that the survey was purchased from Horizonkey, which has editorial control of its surveys, including translations. “Based on what we know about Horizonkey’s translation, we think it reasonably conveys the idea of a ‘supreme god/being.’ That would be in line with how we translate ‘God’ into other languages around the globe,” Bell wrote.
This is correct in the sense that shangdi is an accurate translation of “God” in the Protestant tradition, but it excludes the religious experience of the vast majority of Chinese, who do believe in higher spiritual forces—and very often link belief in such forces to morality. An alternative way of phrasing this question is found in the 2007 book Religious Experience in Contemporary China by Yao Xinzhong and Paul Badham. It is based on a study of 3,196 people, who completed a twenty-four-page survey. The authors found that 77 percent believed in moral causality—there is a long folk tradition of Baoying (报应) which holds that you reap what you sow, that consequences for moral failure are a form or divine retribution—and 44 percent agree that, “life and death depends on the will of heaven.”
How did Yao and Badham end up with results so different from the Pew survey’s? The crucial difference was that they were framed in a much broader way. One term the authors used was “heaven,” or tian (天), which literally means “sky” or “heaven” but also the idea of a supreme deity or force. It also included fo (佛) or “Buddha.” This is why their findings directly contradicted the Pew poll, which uses an Abrahamic paradigm to survey cultures with completely different religious traditions.
None of this means that the Pew poll is without value. It’s just that what it is telling us is something radically different than what has been suggested. If we are to interpret it to mean that morality is linked to Christianity (especially Protestant Christianity), then the response rate, 14 percent, is actually astonishingly high. Even the most optimistic estimates put the number of Chinese Christians at around 100 million, or 7 percent of the population. (The government’s figure is 23 million and more sober independent estimates run in the range of 60 million, or about 4 percent.) Hence the question implies that many non-Christian Chinese believe that morality is linked to a Christian-like God.
Can this be the case? It could be flawed methodology—perhaps the survey was disproportionately based in big Chinese cities, where Christianity is growing fastest. But it could also reflect studies showing that many non-Christian Chinese believe Christians to be especially moral. In her book Christian Values in Communist China, the University of Westminster professor Gerda Wielander—drawing on extensive readings of Chinese texts, websites, and speeches—argues that Chinese widely view Christians as more moral than others, while Christian terms for love, especially ai, are beginning to be accepted as something positive for society.
Thus the Pew poll, rather than showing something completely at odds with decades of evidence and research—that Chinese are irreligious—might actually be confirming one religion’s growing reach in society.
Update, May 29, 2014: After this post was published, Pew said that it was undertaking an internal review of the translation of the word “God” in its Chinese questionnaire. On May 27, it announced that the Chinese results had been excised from the final report. The reason given was that the term for God or a higher power was “mistranslated on the China questionnaire, rendering the results incomparable to the remaining 39 countries.” The Pew statement and the updated report can be viewed on the Pew website. |
There were political speeches, congratulations and spray from a bottle of champagne smashed against the bow of the Sir John Franklin on Friday as dignitaries gathered at North Vancouver’s Seaspan Shipyards to mark construction of the first large vessel to be designed and built in Canada in a generation.
“I’ve dreamed about this day just about every day for the past six years,” said Brian Carter, president of Seaspan Shipyards, standing below the looming bow of the federal fisheries vessel as it sat ready to be moved on to the shipyard’s movable dry-dock and floated off into Burrard Inlet over the weekend.
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The ship – currently 93 per cent finished - will be towed to Victoria Shipyards early next week where final work on the vessel will be completed. The company is expected to deliver the ship to the federal government next summer.
“This ship stands as a testament to the capabilities of our workforce and our company and our industry,” said Carter.
Carter added the federal government’s national shipbuilding strategy – under which Seaspan won the right to build a series of large non-combat vessels in 2011 – “will absolutely deliver on its goal of returning a proud sustainable industry to Canada.”
Jeff Hutchinson, commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard, praised Seaspan workers for building the vessel. “130,000 different ship parts don’t get assembled to look like that without all of you,” he told them.
The ship represents a “significant milestone,” for Canada, he said.
“A sailor needs iron will, courage and a ship,” he said. “The ship part’s really important.”
The Sir John Franklin, a 63-metre fisheries research vessel, is the first of three offshore fisheries vessels being built at Seaspan at a cost of a combined $514 million.
OFSV #1 - Seaspan Shipyards Launch Event from Seaspan on Vimeo. |
In the short time since the new video streaming platform Facebook Watch went live in September, clickbait videos have risen to the front page of the platform, obscuring smaller producers from the spotlight. It’s bad news for guys like Doug Kim, who bet $165,000 of his own money on producing his Facebook Watch series, Just Doug.
Kim describes Just Doug as a mix between Togetherness, the HBO drama about two couples pursuing their dreams, and Bojack Horseman, Netflix’s madcap show about an anthropomorphic horse who is also a failed actor. He co-wrote, executive produced and starred in the series, where he plays a version of himself in a semi-autobiographical tale about how Kim, a former professional poker player turned struggling actor, took $2.4 million home in 2006 from the World Series of Poker. In a sea of clickbait, Just Doug stands out as a bitingly sarcastic take on one Asian-American man’s struggle to break into Hollywood—the same thing the real Kim hopes to accomplish with the show itself.
Kim has made three episodes of the show so far—a total of 26 minutes of footage— although he has prepared a show bible for an entire season. His hope is that despite the odds, TV networks will see something in his nearly finished product that they like, especially as Facebook Watch hasn’t given him as many views as he would like.
The show pays particular attention to the specific struggles faced by Asian actors in Hollywood. In one episode, Kim is asked to play a stereotypical Asian character on a sitcom. It’s a situation that many Asian-American actors find themselves in when they’re starting out in Hollywood. Partway through filming, Kim gets fed up with the racism in the scene and throws a tantrum, storming across the set and shouting in an exaggerated Asian accent.
The showrunners decide to run with his tantrum take when the show airs, and the result is a scene where Kim seems to be participating in a racist caricature rather than criticizing it; on Twitter, he is attacked as a sellout. It’s moments like those that make Just Doug stand out, especially in a sea of Facebook Watch videos about “How to Date an Asian Girl” or “How to Get Out of the Friend Zone.”
Just Doug Teaser Poker. Hollywood. Asian penis debates. What more can you ask for? Posted by Just Doug on Tuesday, October 31, 2017
The premise of Just Doug sounds similar to Aziz Ansari’s Emmy-winning series Master of None, where Ansari plays a loosely autobiographical South Asian-American man pursuing an acting career.
“When I saw the Vulture article [about his show] I was like, fuck. We were so deep into it already and then his show came out in November,” Kim told The Verge. “Although I noted similarities, I’m not too worried. Master of None is like standup, every episode is a different topic. My show is more like Girls, it’s more narrative-based.”
To further differentiate himself from Master of None, Kim plans to develop his character in distinctive ways, perhaps getting back into his roots in the Las Vegas poker world.
“Eventually, I see the show being about compromise,” says Kim, “How willing are you to sacrifice your values to get to your goals? Is it worth it to stay in [Hollywood]?”
Kim knows that his show has been buried under clickbait since its release in early November. He’s been in talks for months with Facebook about getting the series in the featured section, and so for December 10th, Just Doug will be featured in Today’s Spotlight. The three episodes already filmed look nearly ready for traditional broadcast, and he's hoping a network will pick up the series.
When I asked him why he didn’t just make a web series with lower production values, perhaps on YouTube, so that he could afford to produce a whole season, he said he wanted to prove he could deliver higher quality work from the get-go, even if it’s not the way it’s usually done in Hollywood. “I’m a gambler,” he says, “You could say that this time, I’m betting on myself.” |
national
Parties such as the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, Bharatiya Janata Party, Shiv Sena, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and Aam Aadmi Party besides smaller groups will fight for 48 seats across the state
Mumbai: Maharashtra will elect 48 Lok Sabha members over three days in April.
The first lot of votes will be cast in 10 constituencies in eastern Maharashtra's Vidarbha region April 10.
These constituencies are Akola, Amravati, Buldana, Bhandara-Gondiya, Chandrapur, Gadchiroli-Chimur, Nagpur, Ramtek, Wardha and Yavatmal-Washim.
Representational pic
The next to follow will be 19 constituencies covering Marathwada and coastal Konkan regions -- April 17.
These are: Ahmednagar, Baramati, Beed, Hatkanangle, Hingoli, Kolhapur, Latur, Maval, Madha, Nanded, Osmanabad, Parbhani, Pune, Ratnagiri-Sindhudurg, Shirur, Shirdi, Solapur, Sangli and Satara (19 seats).
The remaining 19 constituencies in Mumbai region, parts of Vidarbha and northern Maharashtra will go to the polls April 24.
These include: Aurangabad, Bhiwandi, Dhule, Dindori, Jalna, Jalgaon, Kalyan, Mumbai North, Mumbai North-East, Mumbai North-West, Mumbai North-Central, Mumbai South-Central, Mumbai South, Nandurbar, Nashik, Palghar, Raver, Raigad and Thane.
The main parties in Maharashtra are the Congress, Nationalist Congress Party, Bharatiya Janata Party, Shiv Sena, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and Aam Aadmi Party besides smaller groups. |
Canungra locked down as police negotiate with man making bomb claim
Updated
A township in the Gold Coast hinterland is several hours into a lockdown after a man claimed he had explosives in his car and began making threats.
Police have closed off a number of roads into Canungra and warned people stay away from the area after a man called police, making the claims, early this morning.
Negotiators were called to the scene after a man then barricaded himself inside a vehicle in Kidston Street just after 5:00am.
Homes in nearby streets were evacuated and police have been attempting to talk to the man who, they say, is staging a protest of some kind.
ABC reporter Tom Forbes is in Canungra, where he says police have set up stingers across the road.
Earlier he said a man got out of the maroon Holden, which has towels up at the windows, and began gesturing at police while holding what appeared to be a walkie talkie.
The man, who at one point began bashing his vehicle with what looked like a stick, also threw water at a police robot.
A worker at the childcare centre says police told her the man may have a grenade in the car.
At 10am a man inside a maroon Holden, which is part of the police lock down area, stepped out of the car and is now standing at the bonnet of the car holding up what looks like a walkie talkie and making rude gestures to the police. ABC reporter Tom Forbes
Local newsagent Jody Devlin says everyone has been told to stay away.
"We've got our local emergency crews on site and there is quite a few police who have blocked off the main roads in," she said.
"I haven't heard anything about a man or a protest.
"All we know is there is a car that is under suspicion.
"I know most of the cars around here and it's not a local car and it has no number plates on it."
Police have declared an exclusion zone with the boundaries being Canungra Creek, Finch Road, Tamborine Mountain Road, Darlington Range Road, Lawson Court and Showground Road.
Topics: crime, canungra-4275, qld
First posted |
French police have arrested a man in the search for a driver who slammed his BMW into soldiers in a Paris suburb, leaving six of them wounded in what appeared to be a carefully timed ambush before he sped off.
The motive for the attack is unclear, but officials said he deliberately aimed at the soldiers, and counterterrorism authorities have opened an investigation. It is the latest of several attacks targeting security forces guarding France over the past year. While others have targeted prominent sites like the Eiffel Tower, Wednesday's attack hit a leafy, relatively affluent suburb that is home to France's main intelligence service, the DGSI.
They must've really planned this. — Jean-Claude Veillant , resident
Three of the soldiers suffered minor injuries while three were more were seriously hurt, but their lives are not in danger, according to the Defence Ministry.
They were from the 35th infantry regiment and served in Operation Sentinelle, created to guard prominent French sites after a string of deadly Islamic extremist attacks in 2015.
Witnesses described seeing a BMW with one person inside waiting in a cul-de-sac near a building used for Sentinelle soldiers, according to two police officials. One official said the attacker hit just as a group of soldiers emerged from the building to board vehicles for a new shift.
Authorities checked video surveillance of the area, near the city hall of Levallois, northwest of Paris, and police fanned out around the French capital and stopped numerous cars as they searched for the attacker.
Most were released. But in one case, police stopped a car on the A16 highway and arrested the driver, and were verifying his possible links to the attack, according to two police officials. One of the officials said the arrest was violent and police fired at the suspect to subdue him. The officials weren't authorized to be publicly named because of an ongoing police operation.
Police shot and wounded the suspect during the confrontation on the highway. A policeman was also injured by a stray bullet.
Officials later said police were searching a building in a suburb west of Paris believed to be linked to the suspect. Heavily armed police in masks could be seen entering and leaving the building.
The same officials said the suspect's identity has not been confirmed and it's unclear whether he lived in the building.
Police officers and emergency workers stand next to the suspect's damaged BMW car after he was arrested on the A16 motorway, near Marquise. (Philippe Huguen/AFP/Getty Images)
'Follow that car'
A witness to the Levallois attack described an ear-piercing scream of pain that is still echoing through her head.
Nadia LeProhon, 45, was startled by a loud crash outside her building and rushed outside her seventh-floor window to see two soldiers on the ground. Other soldiers ran after a speeding car, shouting "After him! Follow that car!"
"I'll never forget that scream — a scream of pain and distress," she told The Associated Press.
The street is normally guarded by posts that are removed when vehicles move in and out, according to residents. The driver must have known exactly when to strike, said resident Jean-Claude Veillant, 70.
Veillant said he saw two uniformed soldiers prone on the ground when he came down to the entrance of his 13-storey building at 7:50 a.m. local time Wednesday.
"It was horrible," he said, explaining that both soldiers appeared to be in bad shape and that one of them was unconscious.
"They must've really planned this," he said.
A woman stands by a security perimeter after the crash. The driver's motive is unclear, but officials said he deliberately aimed at the soldiers. (Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA)
'Odious attack'
Levallois Mayor Patrick Balkany called it an "odious attack" and said it was "without a doubt deliberate."
"A BMW pre-positioned itself in the alley [where the barracks is located] and barrelled into them," he said on BFM television. He said the car "accelerated very quickly when they left" the building.
A security perimeter was installed around the scene, and the defence minister and interior minister are expected to visit wounded soldiers Wednesday afternoon.
French counterterrorism prosecutors opened an investigation aimed at pursuing perpetrators on charges of attempted murder of security forces in connection with a terrorist enterprise, the Paris prosecutor's office said. The move means authorities believe the attack was deliberate and planned with a terrorist motive.
French President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to boost military spending and entrench security measures after a string of Islamic extremist attacks since 2015. |
An Ontario woman consumed by her religious beliefs not only turned a blind eye to the violence her husband inflicted on his daughter but encouraged the abuse that led to the girl's death, a judge found Monday in sentencing her to life in prison with no chance of parole for 16 years.
Elaine Biddersingh, 55, may herself have suffered on occasion at the hands of her husband Everton but she was his partner in the abuse that made Melonie Biddersingh's life "a living hell," Justice Ian MacDonnell said in his decision.
It's unclear what fuelled the couple's hatred of Melonie and the two siblings who came with her from Jamaica, MacDonnell said.
'Ultimately lethal' course of abuse
"While Everton and Elaine may have had different reasons for their hostility toward the Jamaican children, their antipathies came together in a combination that led directly to the shocking mistreatment of Melonie," who was made to sleep on the floor and sometimes confined to a barrel or chained to a wall as well as beaten frequently, the judge said.
"Melonie came to Canada with hopes and dreams," he said. "Over a period of up to three years, the persons entrusted with her care crushed those hopes and dreams with a cruel, callous, relentless and ultimately lethal course of physical, psychological and emotional abuse," he said.
"What happened to Melonie is inexplicably sad."
Biddersingh muttered and shook her head as the sentence was read in court. Earlier in the hearing, she railed against her conviction, shouting in court that she is innocent and pointing at four jurors sitting in the courtroom while accusing them of corruption.
Stepmother feels powerless, lawyer says
"He instructed them to find me guilty ... I didn't murder nobody, I'm not guilty of nothing," she yelled. "Jesus is the only judge."
Outside court, defence lawyer Alana Page said her client's outbursts were likely due to her frustration with the judicial process.
"She had a hard time listening to what the judge had to say and she feels very powerless in this situation," Page said, adding she expects Biddersingh to appeal her conviction.
Biddersingh was convicted in June of second-degree murder in Melonie's death. The 17-year-old's frail body was found in a burning suitcase in an industrial parking lot north of Toronto in 1994, but went unidentified for years until 2011, when her stepmother told an Ontario pastor the girl had "died like a dog" after being confined and denied food and medication.
Jury left to decide what killed girl
Melonie's father, Everton Biddersingh, was found guilty in January of first-degree murder in his daughter's death, which carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Second-degree murder also carries an automatic life sentence but the court has more latitude on determining parole eligibility.
Prosecutors had argued Elaine Biddersingh should spend 18 to 22 years in prison before having a chance at parole while the defence had suggested 10 years.
Melonie was dead before her body was stuffed in the suitcase, court heard, but what actually killed her remained unclear at trial, leaving the jury to determine whether she died from severe neglect and abuse or from drowning.
In his decision, MacDonnell said he was satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that the girl had drowned and that her father had carried out the attack.
Under the circumstances, however, "whether the immediate cause of death was drowning or the lengthy course of abuse is largely beside the point," he said.
"Regardless of which it was, the evidence is overwhelming that for almost all the 3.5 years that Melonie was in the charge of Everton and Elaine, she suffered through a horror of an existence that was inevitably going to kill her."
Defence argues stepmother was domestic abuse victim
Though she did not testify at the trial, Biddersingh's lawyers suggested Melonie's father was to blame for the teen's death, while his wife was a victim of domestic abuse.
Elaine Biddersingh spent most of her time in her bedroom, court heard, and her lawyers argued she was unaware of what her husband was doing.
But MacDonnell said there was no evidence to suggest Biddersingh was forced to stay in her room and no way she could have missed what was going on in the family's small apartment.
Instead, he said, it was more likely that she "became consumed by her religious beliefs" and chose to withdraw in order to watch religious programming.
Melonie's brother, Cleon Biddersingh, 42, told a sentencing hearing earlier this month he has night sweats, nightmares, and eating disorders as a result of what he saw his sister suffer through and what he experienced himself.
'Egregious breach of trust,' crown said
"No human being or animal should ever be treated the way Melonie and I were treated at the hands of Everton and Elaine Biddersingh," he said in a victim impact statement.
In its sentencing arguments, the Crown said Elaine Biddersingh committed an egregious breach of trust in subjecting her stepdaughter to "prolonged slow suffering."
The defence said Elaine Biddersingh was instrumental in solving Melonie's murder and has not been a danger to society since the girl's death.
The Crown withdrew a charge of indignity to a dead body because it was considered an aggravating factor in the murder sentence and is deciding whether to go ahead with a charge of obstruction of justice.
Everton Biddersingh is also still facing two charges of obstruction of justice. |
Kuwait team
The Kuwait national football team had to be escorted out of the Robina Stadium in Australia’s Gold Coast by police on Saturday after refusing to play a friendly against the UAE.
According to sources, Kuwait took exception to the fact the Asian Cup warm-up game couldn’t be filmed by their technical staff and so abandoned the friendly match in protest. They stayed on the field for an impromptu training session instead.
The stadium owners could only get the team off the pitch by turning on the sprinklers and when the team retreated indoors to a synthetic training pitch. The police were called and the players only left the complex after they were threatened with arrest.
It is not yet clear if Kuwait will be disciplined by Fifa or the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) over their behaviour, but the UAE could have a case for compensation to accrue money spent on travel and hotel in preparation for this game.
The UAE Football Association (UAE FA) president Yousuf Al Sarkal is holding a pre-Asian Cup press conference at the UAE FA headquarters in Al Khawaneej on Sunday from 11am, where the topic of Kuwait’s refusal to play is expected to make its way on to the agenda.
The UAE beat Jordan 1-0 at the same stadium last week and were due to take on Kuwait in further preparation for the Asian Cup, which runs from January 9-31. The UAE are in Group C and will play Qatar, Bahrain and Iran, while Kuwait are in Group A with hosts Australia, South Korea and Oman. |
Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'Difficult People' And Amusement Parks
Pop Culture Happy Hour: 'Difficult People' And Amusement Parks Listen · 42:48 42:48
Linda Holmes is this close to returning home from two and a half weeks at the Television Critics Association press tour — so close, she swears can practically feel the fabric of the sheets on her very own bed — but she's absent from this week's Pop Culture Happy Hour taping. Which, in turn, means two very special guests on this week's show: Super-librarian Margaret H. Willison and Code Switch lead blogger Gene Demby join Glen Weldon and me for a spirited and wide-ranging discussion.
First up: the new Hulu original series Difficult People, which stars Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner as best friends in New York who don't like very many of the folks around them. Opinions within our panel vary about as widely as opinions are ever likely to vary on this show; we disagree with the sort of intensity we usually reserve for debates about Tootsie Rolls or talking to people at parties. One not-very-shocking spoiler is that Glen is absolutely and utterly in the tank for this half-hour comedy and the people on it, but we've got plenty more to say from there.
From there, this week's episode just gets looser and looser as we take on amusement parks: theme parks, water parks, outdoor attractions of all stripes, and anywhere else funnel cakes are sold. Amazingly, all of our respective amusement-park roads somehow, at some point, lead to Pennsylvania — Hershey Park, Great Adventure, Kennywood outside Pittsburgh — but we also take detours through Coney Island, Wisconsin Dells, Disney-owned super-parks, childhood traumas and deep-friend Oreos.
Finally, as always, we close with What's Making Us Happy this week. Margaret is psyched for this new musical with a Sara Bareilles score, as well as a favorite TV comedy. It's been recommended on the show in recent months, but Gene throws additional praise in the direction of this recent book, as well as new albums by neo-soul acts: this one and this one. Glen is thrilled by The Odd Gentlemen's new reboot of a videogame classic. And I've got kind words for The New York Times' new TV critic, a Twitter feed close to my heart and a gorgeous moment from a recent TV finale.
Find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter: the show, me, Glen, Margaret, Gene, absent Linda, producer Jessica, and pal and producer emeritus Mike. |
Over the past 70 years, there have been a lot of different sides to Batman's character. Sometimes he's the Caped Crusader, battling against oddball criminals in the name of justice. Sometimes he's a silent guardian, a watchful protector ... a dark knight. And sometimes he's a weird super-strong baby with a grown-up brain who fights crime in Mickey Mouse pants.
OK, fine: That only happened once.
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But it did happen in Batman No. 147's appropriately titled "Batman Becomes Bat-Baby," a story so legendarily bad that it's often considered one of the worst comics of the Silver Age. It's definitely one of the weirdest, and considering that it hit newsstands right in the middle of an era when Batman went to space more often than he fought the Riddler, that's saying something. I've even had an actual request in my capacity as the world's foremost Batmanologist to figure this thing out, and I'm not even sure I can. But let's give it a shot anyway.
Our story opens with Batman and Robin dropping in on one "Nails" Finney in order to bring him to justice for a recent jewelry store robbery. Unbeknownst to the Dynamic Duo, however, Nails had added a new member to his gang: Garth, the Renegade Scientist, a name that doesn't exactly have the intimidating ring of, say, the Joker. He does, however, have a big green laser that he blasts Batman with so that he can turn him into a 4-year-old. |
India shares Myanmar's concern about 'extremist violence': PM Modi Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India shared Myanmar's concern about "extremist violence" in its Rakhine state, where a security force operation against Rohingya Muslims has sent about 125,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh.
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has sought to know government's stand on a plea challenging its plan to deport Rohingya refugees. India has for decades sheltered people fleeing conflict and disaster, though it is not signatory to any pacts obligating it to offer refuge. Here, a look at the Rohingyas' desperate situation:1. Myanmar has not recognised the Rohingya among its 135 ethnic groups under a 1982 citizenship Act.2. The Myanmar government terms them 'Bengali' to paint the Muslim minority in Rakhine state as recent migrants from Bangladesh.3. In Myanmar, the word Rohingya is taboo.1. There are about 10 lakhs Rohingyas in Myanmar.2. About 1.23 lakh have fled to Bangladesh since August 25.3. There are abput 40,000 Rohingya in Jammu, Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR, Haryana, UP and Rajasthan.1. India is not a signatory to 1951 UN refugee convention, or its 1967 Protocol2. The government decides asylum pleas on ad hoc and case-to-case basis3. Asylum-seekers whose plea is okayed are given long-term visa (LTV) to be renewed annually4. Long-term visa gives them right to work in private sector and access to education and banking1. Tibetans, the Chakmas of Bangladesh, Afghans and ethnic Tamil from Sri Lanka are among those given refuge in India.2. Tibetans (about 1L) got asylum. Can take land on lease and seek jobs in the private sector3. Tamil refugees, mostly in Tamil Nadu, numbering about a lakh get state government aid4. In 2016, the Modi government allowed Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan to buy property for self-living, obtain driving licences, receive PAN and Aadhaar IDs, etc.MoS Home Kiren Rijiju has said India wants to deport all illegal immigrants even those with UNHCR papers because...1. Immigrants are susceptible to recruitment by "terror" groups2. They "not only infringe on rights of Indian citizens but also pose grave security challenges"3. Influx of migrants also leads to social, political and cultural problems4. The idea to "ensure the demographic pattern of India is not disturbed"1. India has said it is talking with Bangladesh and Myanmar about deportation.2. Myanmarese laws have rendered Rohingyas stateless, hence they are left with no 'home' to return to.1. The 'principle of nonrefoulement' is binding on all states whether they have signed UN's refugee convention or not2. The customary law says refugees cannot be forcibly returned to a place where they face persecution or threats to their life or freedomThe government's plan was challenged in SC, the next hearing is on September 11. |
To newbies taking their first steps with encryption, or users looking to expend their knowledge we would like to recommend about a new Ebook – released just now, about GnuPG – that includes full explanations an usage guide for email & files encryption the book if FREE for download or in a “Pay as you can model” (leave a BTC donation – you will see us also listed there since we provided some minor contribution – any income will be donated to erowid.org)
Visit the Golden Keys Site
Download the Book Here (Don’t forget to support with a small BTC donation!) Visit the Golden Keys Site Here
Description of the book and content:
Written by The Golden Keys Team who decided to write a guide on how to use e-mail with cryptography because internet privacy is very important and most digital communications these days are insecure.
As we all know, Right now you are exposed to a lot of hidden security risks that can lead to the monitoring and exposure of your private communications without your consent. Those risks could be eliminated or minimized if you used cryptography with your e-mails and files.
Although cryptography is mostly used by a few security and privacy conscious users, we believe that the more people use it the more it will become the norm rather than the exception, and the more other users and companies will adopt this technology to protect their data and communications.
This is why they wrote this guide and tried to make it as easy as possible so regular people can understand how cryptography works and start using this system in minutes. Contrary to popular belief cryptography is not something expensive, complicated and restricted to the army. In fact it’s the opposite: it’s free, easy to use and anyone can start using right away at home and at work, with family and friends, with business colleagues and strangers.
In this guide you will learn:
What is cryptography
How cryptography works
The risks of not using cryptography and the benefits of using it
How to install and configure the necessary programs
How to use cryptography with e-mail and files in minutes
How to invite other people to use cryptography
What cryptography does and does not
This guide is divided into four parts to make comprehension easier:
PART 1 is introduction and explains what is cryptography, how it works and, the reasons to use cryptography and what is GNU Privacy Guard, the software we work with. This part is mostly theoretical, with lots of images and graphics.
PART 2 covers how to install and configure the necessary programs to use cryptography with e-mail, as well as as how to create a new private key pair.
PART 3 covers how to use cryptography mostly with files, in text and graphic mode. Although graphic mode sections were written for Microsoft Windows and *NIX systems (such as GNU/Linux), the working is practically the same in other systems such as Apple OS X.
PART 4 contains a command reference list for quick consult, a custom message to send to other people that you would like to introduce to cryptography, and our final considerations.
Darknetmarket’s users should be with full control at PGP – but as we know, everyone has to start at some point, so for people looking for a quick place with comprehensive explanation to start with, this book will be a great read.
Visit the Golden Keys Site
Download the Book Here (Don’t forget to support with a small BTC donation!) Visit the Golden Keys Site Here
Related: PGP Tutorial For Newbs (Gpg4Win) |
A Faulkner County teen is being charged as an adult in abattery case after prosecutors became aware of a YouTube video showinghim striking another boy.Kane Millsaps, 16, pleadednot guilty June 3 to first-degree battery, a felony, and possessing aninstrument of crime, a misdemeanor. Police say Millsaps hit a12-year-old boy while wearing brass knuckles.Millsapsis seen in the 23-second video flipping off the camera while wearing aset of brass knuckles on his left hand before punching the 12-year-oldboy in the face. The attack occurred May 31 at a walking trail inConway, according to a probable cause affidavit.Millsapshit the victim for “running his mouth saying he was an MMA [MixedMartial Arts] Fighter and he could beat him up,” the affidavit reads.The victim told authorities he did not know Millsaps.Officerslearned of the incident when a witness’s family member brought thevideo to the Conway Police Department on June 1. When officers spokewith the victim, they noted his right eye was bruised, there was a cuton his neck and he had broken teeth.The victim saidhe lost consciousness after being hit and “when he woke up he thought hehad gravel in his mouth but it was pieces of his teeth,” the affidavitstated.A witness who recorded the incident onMillsaps’s phone said Millsaps told her the victim had provoked him, aclaim she disputed. The witness told investigatorsthat the victim “did not even see Millsaps coming and did not know hewas going to be hit,” the affidavit stated.A girlseen pushing Millsaps off the victim at the end of the video said thevictim “had a hole in his cheek which may need stitches,” the affidavitstates.Millsaps was arrested June 2 at the FaulknerCounty Sheriff’s Office Juvenile Services division after meeting withhis probation officer. He told police “he found the brass knuckles athis apartment complex and after the incident he threw them in thedumpster,” the affidavit stated.Defense Attorney Frank Shaw represents Millsaps, who is set to appear in court next Aug. |
NEW YORK -- New Yorkers living around the rebuilt World Trade Center are fighting what they call the "fortresslike" security planned for their neighborhood. They say the $40 million barrier would block them in.
Residents have sued the New York Police Department, the city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the trade center.
In Manhattan state Supreme Court on Thursday, members of the World Trade Center Neighborhood Alliance asked Judge Margaret Chan to stop the plans for guard booths, gates, fencing and checkpoints.
The judge didn't rule and said she'll first visit the site.
Longtime resident Mary Perillo says the neighborhood has become far more residential since 9/11. She says the security plan isolates residents while accommodating tourists.
"The police seem to be doing everything for the tourists at the expense of the community," Perillo told CBS New York station WCBS-AM in November.
Perillo told CBS station WINS-AM that the security plan will make it difficult for residents and their personal cars to get through but that tour buses will be allowed.
"It creates a situation where we've got up to 42 tour buses an hour idling in front of two high schools and then on the busiest corner in our neighborhood before they turn and take up to 16 minutes a piece unloading their passengers," Perillo said.
The NYPD and other officials have said security concerns must be addressed and that their plan will make the streets more pedestrian and bike friendly. |
Bengaluru: Multinational liquor maker Diageo Plc on Tuesday opened its fifth enterprise operations centre in Bengaluru, which will provide finance and accounting services, business intelligence, analytics and data services for its global business.
Diageo’s global chief executive Ivan Menezes and Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah jointly inaugurated the centre at the Karle Town Special Economic Zone, which has been operating from a temporary facility at the same SEZ since October.
Speaking at the inauguration, Menezes said the Bengaluru centre could become one of Diageo’s biggest global centres. The company currently operates similar centres in Manila, Nairobi, Budapest and Bogota.
“Our business in India is stronger than ever and we see it as an important driver of growth. Karnataka is one of the most important markets for Diageo in India due to the increasingly progressive and transparent nature of the government’s policies," Menezes said, adding India is now its second-largest market globally.
When it opened the centre at an incubation facility at the Karle Town SEZ in October, Diageo—which owns United Spirits Ltd—had said it would soon move to a permanent facility. Diageo had said it planned to increase headcount at the centre from 100 at that point to 1,000 by the end of next year. On Tuesday, Menezes said the company will finish hiring over 1,000 people in the next couple of years, up from its current count of 300.
“I am fascinated that Diageo enterprise operations centre in Bengaluru will provide career opportunities for more than 1,000 professionals in the fields of finance and accounting, business intelligence analytics, technology and data services among others," said Siddaramaiah.
The centre will soon start offering new services including analytics, data and technology services as well as establish a robotics division, Diageo added. |
DENVER — The Denver Police Department is making numerous “philosophical” changes and policy modifications, officials announced Wednesday.
On Friday, the schedule for a series of community meetings was set where citizens can offer feedback on the plan.
The department released its overhauled use of force policy for public review.
The policy outlines when it is acceptable for officers to “control options” such as restraint techniques, batons, chemical agents, stun guns, service dogs and deadly force.
The policy said the goal is “force avoidance” and that de-escalation is a core component.
Instead of focusing on quickly taking control of a situation, officers will be encouraged to slow down, when possible, to evaluate the situation, and consider their resources and options.
Chief Robert White said the emphasis is switching from considering whether the use of force is justifiable to considering whether it will result in the best outcome.
“There has been a sustained demand for a change in the method traditional policing is accomplished,” White said. “Keeping in line with our mission of operating a police agency with a focus on preventing crime in a respectful manner, demonstrating that everyone matters, we continue to make numerous philosophical and policy modifications consistent with our mission.”
That could impact the way officers enforce other policies, all the way down to parking citations.
White said that for example, it could mean approaching a driver who has parked too far from the curb and asking them to move the vehicle instead of waiting until the driver leaves and issuing a citation.
The draft use of force policy provides officers with a decision-making model that includes a threshold for deciding whether to apply force based on the concepts of authority, necessity, reasonableness, and appropriateness.
The draft policy also includes the consideration of time, distance and cover when a police action is necessary, which should make it safer for officers, according to the statement released by the department.
“In the past, officers were trained to quickly take control of a situation, sometimes at the expense of the desired outcome,” officials said. “The time, distance, cover principle allows for officers to slow down when possible to evaluate the situation, consider resources before engaging a possible suspect, keep a safe distance, and allow for additional officers to arrive.”
The policy is in draft form until after the community has ample time to review it and make suggestions. Community members are encouraged to review the policy and send feedback to [email protected] before Feb. 5.
The meetings will be held from 5-8 p.m. Jan. 24 at the Boys and Girls Club of Metro Denver (3333 Holly St.); 9 a.m. to noon Jan. 28 at Elevate Denver Church (2205 W. 30th Ave.); and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Feb. 4 at Red Shield Community Center (2915 High St.). |
Welcome to the Tales Of The Quad - All Things CTYI Wiki
NOTICE: talesofthequad.wikia.com is moving to talesofthequad.ie. This wiki is no longer in use.
If you have any new pages to make, please make them at the new address.
The casual CTYIzen's resource for all things CTYI.
THIS WIKI IS NOT OFFICIALLY AFFILIATED WITH CTYI.
All CTYIzens welcome.
CTYI 2016 is over and you guys had better post the greatest quotes and happenings of your session, because this wiki can't have them if you don't! (Make sure they're not duplicates though!)
Whether you've just finished Session 1 or you're looking forward to Session 2, make sure to contribute anything that's missing to the wiki. :)
Most people will want to go directly here:
Quotes 2016
While that's being finished up, why not come around these pages? Even CTY veterans may come out learning something new!
Quotes 2015
Must-read for newbies.
Notable Individuals
Traditions
CTYI Slang |
It’s like sharing for one; Apple refers to it as continuity. With the latest OS X Yosemite and iOS 8.1 updates, Apple has greatly improved how you can save and share your files across multiple devices. Things have even improved regardless of which apps you are using and what version of the OS you are running. And with the majority of the APIs that enable continuity being open to developers, things will only get better with time. Of course the more up to date you are and the newer your devices are, the more seamless the experience will be.
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Hand off documents from one device to another
While it requires an iMac, MacBook or Mac Mini made in 2012 or later running OS X Yosemite and any iOS device running iOS 8.1, Handoff makes switching between devices as easy as possible. The number of apps that support Handoff are currently limited (Calendar, Contacts, Mail, Maps, Messages, Notes, iPhone, Reminders, Safari, Keynote, Numbers, and Pages), but the developer API to support Handoff is open to third-party developers. That means that despite the fact that it looks like Apple dominates the apps that currently support Handoff, it is not an exclusively Apple app feature and we should start seeing more apps support Handoff moving forward (Pixelmator for iPad please?).
You turn-on Handoff on your compatible Mac (noted above) from within the General System Preferences. Simply enable the “Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices” option. On your compatible iOS devices, go to the General Settings as well, then select “Handoff & Suggested Apps” and switch on Handoff. One thing to keep in mind is that this feature does assume that you will be leaving one device, and switching over to use your other device. It was not intended to be used on both devices as an extended editor of your documents simultaneously.
When moving from OS X to iOS, you will see an icon in the bottom left hand corner of the lock screen on your iOS device representing the app you were using on OS X. That’s right, the lock screen. Swipe up on the icon to launch into the iOS version of the app and it will reveal the same content you were working with on our Mac. Going the other direction from iOS to OS X, you will look towards the Dock for an icon representing the app you were running on iOS. It will look just like the apps icon, but will have a tiny iOS device in the corner. Click on the icon to launch the OS X version of the app and the same document will open on your Mac.
AirDrop from OS X to iOS and back again
AirDrop is another way to wirelessly share files between devices. Like Handoff, it can launch the default app when sharing a file between devices, whereas previously it only worked when sharing files between iOS devices or between OS X devices. Sharing between iOS and OS X was not possible, but now it is. I have even been successful using AirDrop to share files from my Mac running Yosemite to devices that are still running iOS 7.
You will need to use a Mac build in 2012 or newer and an iOS device capable of running iOS 8 in order to share across the OS X and iOS device boundary. If your Mac is older than that, you will be limited to Mac to Mac AirDrop sharing. To get it to work properly, you will need to make sure that you have turned on both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on all devices you wish to use AirDrop with.
On iOS you enable on AirDrop from within Control Center. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to display Control Center and tap on the AirDrop button located just below the volume control. Here you will be presented options to share with only those listed in your contacts or everyone nearby. Once enabled, you will then see a list of AirDrop enabled devices nearby whenever you tap on an individual apps Share icon (the square box with an arrow pointing up and out of it). Tapping the Share button within an app is also how you share content via Twitter, Mail, Facebook and even send content to a AirPrint Printer.
With OS X you turn on AirDrop from within the Finder. After launching the Finder and tapping on the AirDrop section from the list of locations on the left, you should see a setting titled “Allow me to be discovered by:” setting (it is small and on the bottom of the Finder window). Just like on iOS, you can choose between sharing with only those listed in your contacts or everyone.
As for what name shows up in AirDrop, it uses the Contact app’s “My Info” and “My Card” settings. On iOS this is configured within the “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” section of the Settings app. On OS X this is configured within the Contacts App. Navigate to the “Card” menu’s “Go to My Card” menu item. When using AirDrop between two devices that have the exact same contact info (sharing for one), a subtitle will display under your name indicating what type of device it is. That way you can control if you share content with your Mac or your iPad from your iPhone.
iCloud Drive for Windows and OS X alike
Seeing as how both Handoff and AirDrop are limited to sharing files between iOS and OS X, iCloud Drive would be the next best way to share files between iOS and Windows. Apple recently updated the iCloud for Windows client download, which now supports iCloud Drive.
iCloud Drive exposes what were once the hidden files and folders that apps installed on OS X. These same files on iOS are the ones that enable iCloud Data sharing across devices. These files were previously located in the “~/Library/Mobile Documents” folder on OS X. If you have not yet enabled iCloud drive, it is a good idea to make a backup or offline copy of this folder before doing so.
You enable iCloud drive from within your iCloud settings on both iOS and OS X. When you do switch your iCloud account over to using iCloud Drive, any device you own that is still running iOS 7 and older, or OS X Mavericks and older, will not be able to share and access your documents stored in iCloud Drive. So you may want to hold off on enabling iCloud Drive until you have updated all of your devices.
On OS X, you will see all of your iCloud Drive files and folders from within a special location in the Finder labeled iCloud Drive. You may have seen screen shots of what appears to be a similar iCloud Drive ‘app’ for iOS. This is actually just the document picker view from within apps that support accessing files on the iCloud Drive, not a standalone app. Individual apps will need to support access to iCloud Drive files in order for you to access and use it.
Taking control of your document provider extensions
Finally there are the document sharing extensions on iOS. These are typically installed alongside a third-party app you buy from the app store. There are extensions for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Pocket, Evernote, Dropbox and more. The most interesting extensions, the ones that will enable the most flexibility where your workflow is concerned, are the Document Provider Extensions that are new to iOS 8.
Document provider extensions behave much like iCloud Drive and will allow you to open and import files from different data providers as well as export and move files around more freely. Documents 5, Transmit, Dropbox and Box are among the developers that currently support this new feature. On iOS it behaves just like the iCloud Drive document picker.
To see it in action, you can open either Pages, Numbers or Keynote and tap on the More button when adding or opening files. Here you will see options to toggle on and off storage locations for third-party apps. This allows the developer that manages the hosted cloud storage and app to update the extension without having other developers that want to use and access their cloud storage to have to deploy the updates within their app. So the next time Dropbox for example makes an enhancement or performance improvement, you will not have to wait on Apple to push an update in Pages to use it. |
UNITED NATIONS/SEOUL (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council unanimously imposed new sanctions on North Korea on Friday for its recent intercontinental ballistic missile test, seeking to limit its access to refined petroleum products and crude oil and its earnings from workers abroad.
The U.N. resolution seeks to ban nearly 90 percent of refined petroleum exports to North Korea by capping them at 500,000 barrels a year and, in a last-minute change, demands the repatriation of North Koreans working abroad within 24 months, instead of 12 months as first proposed.
The U.S.-drafted resolution also caps crude oil supplies to North Korea at 4 million barrels a year and commits the Council to further reductions if it were to conduct another nuclear test or launch another ICBM.
North Korea on Nov. 29 said it successfully tested a new ICBM that put the U.S. mainland within range of its nuclear weapons.
Tension has been rising over North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, which it pursues in defiance of years of U.N. Security Council resolutions, with bellicose rhetoric coming from both Pyongyang and the White House.
In November, North Korea demanded a halt to what it called “brutal sanctions”, saying a round imposed after its sixth and most powerful nuclear test on Sept. 3 constituted genocide.
U.S. diplomats have made clear they are seeking a diplomatic solution but proposed the new, tougher sanctions resolution to ratchet up pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
“It sends the unambiguous message to Pyongyang that further defiance will invite further punishments and isolation,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said after the 15-0 vote.
The North Korean mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Wu Haitao, China’s deputy U.N. ambassador, said tensions on the Korean peninsula risk “spiraling out of control” and he repeated Beijing’s call for talks.
China’s foreign ministry said it hoped all parties would implement the resolution and urged all sides to exercise restraint.
It also reiterated a call for what it calls a “dual suspension” proposal for the United States and South Korea to stop major military exercises in exchange for North Korea halting its weapons programs.
South Korea welcomed the sanctions and called on the North to “immediately cease reckless provocations, and take the path of dialogue for denuclearization”.
North Korea regularly threatens to destroy South Korea, the United States and Japan, and says its weapons are necessary to counter U.S. aggression. The United States stations 28,500 troops in the South, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley attends the United Nations Security Council session on imposing new sanctions on North Korea, in New York, U.S., December 22, 2017. REUTERS/Amr Alfiky
On Friday, North Korea called U.S. President Donald Trump’s recently released national security strategy the latest attempt to “stifle our country and turn the entire Korean peninsula” into an outpost of American hegemony.
INCREASING PRESSURE
Speaking before the Security Council vote, analysts said the new sanctions could have a major effect on the North’s economy.
“The cap on oil would be devastating for North Korea’s haulage industry, for North Koreans who use generators at home or for productive activities, and for (state-owned enterprises) that do the same,” said Peter Ward, a columnist for NK News, a website that tracks North Korea.
The forced repatriation of its overseas workers would also cut off vital sources of foreign currency, he said.
China, which supplies most of North Korea’s oil, has backed successive rounds of U.N. sanctions but had resisted past U.S. calls to cut off fuel supplies to its neighbor.
John Park, director of the Korea Working Group at the Harvard Kennedy School, said it was important to manage expectations about sanctions, which could take years to have a full impact while the North was making progress in its weapons programs at a pace measured in weeks and months.
“If the game plan is to use sanctions as the last non-military policy tool to induce North Korea’s return to the denuclearization table, we may quickly find Washington prioritizing military options,” Park said.
The move to curb Chinese fuel exports to North Korea may have limited impact after China National Petroleum Corp CNPET.UL suspended diesel and gasoline sales to its northern neighbor in June over concerns it would not get paid.
Business has slowed since then, with zero shipments of diesel, gasoline and other fuel from China in October.
Russia quietly boosted economic support for North Korea this year, and last week Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov said Moscow was not ready to sign up to sanctions that would strangle the country economically.
In a bid to further choke North Korea’s external sources of funding, the resolution also seeks to ban North Korean exports of food products, machinery, electrical equipment, earth and stone, wood and vessels.
It also bans exports to North Korea of industrial equipment, machinery, transport vehicles, and industrial metals as well as subjecting 15 North Koreans and the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces to a global asset freeze and travel ban.
The resolution seeks to allow countries to seize, inspect and freeze any vessel they believe was carrying banned cargo or involved in prohibited activities.
Slideshow (10 Images)
Even if the sanctions have an economic effect, it is not clear whether that would push Pyongyang to negotiate or stop its weapons development, said Kim Sung-han, a former South Korean vice foreign minister.
“We have had numerous ... sanctions against North Korea over the past 25 years,” he said. “Almost none have worked effectively to halt the regime’s military and nuclear ambitions.” |
There are many signs and symptoms related to drinking problems. Alcoholism is a general term rather than the clinical term, which is alcohol use disorder. It is considered a progressive disease, meaning that effects of drinking alcohol become increasingly more severe over time.
Those who use alcohol may begin to show early signs of a problem, then progress to showing symptoms of alcohol abuse. If drinking continues, they may later show signs of alcoholism or alcohol dependence. Taking an alcoholism screening quiz can help you determine whether you have the symptoms of an alcohol use disorder.
Early Signs of an Alcohol Problem
Early signs of alcoholism include frequent intoxication, an established pattern of heavy drinking and drinking in dangerous situations, such as when driving. Other early signs of alcoholism include black-out drinking or a drastic change in demeanor while drinking, such as consistently becoming angry or violent.
Progressive symptoms of alcohol abuse occur when you continue to drink after your drinking reaches a level that causes recurrent problems. Continuing to drink after it causes you to miss work, drive drunk, shirk responsibilities or get in trouble with the law is considered alcohol abuse.
Symptoms of Alcohol Use Disorder
The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition," (DSM-5) published in 2013 lists 11 symptoms of alcohol use disorder. If you have two to three symptoms, you could be diagnosed with a mild disorder. If you have four to five symptoms, you are likely to have a moderate alcohol use disorder. If you have six or more of the symptoms, you have a severe alcohol use disorder, and it is likely that you would be considered to be an alcoholic under the common use of the term.
Here are the 11 symptoms:
You often drink alcohol in larger amounts or over a longer period than you intend. You want to cut down or control your alcohol use but your efforts may be unsuccessful. You spend a lot of time getting alcohol, using it, and recovering from the effects of your drinking. You have alcohol cravings. Your use of alcohol results in failing to meet your obligations at work, school, or home. You continue to use alcohol despite it leading to recurrent problems socially or in your relationships. You give up or reduce your participation in important social, occupational, or recreational activities because of your use of alcohol. You use alcohol in situations in which it is physically hazardous (such as driving, operating machinery, performing surgery). You continue to use alcohol even knowing that you have a physical or psychological problem that is caused by or made worse by alcohol. You experience alcohol tolerance, either by needing more alcohol to get intoxicated or you feel diminished effects when drinking the same amount of alcohol.
You experience withdrawal syndrome or you use alcohol or other substances to prevent withdrawal symptoms.
Previous definitions of alcohol dependence and alcoholism included having three of seven symptoms that included neglect of other activities, excessive use of alcohol, impaired control of alcohol consumption, the persistence of alcohol use, large amounts of time spent in alcohol-related activities, withdrawal symptoms, and tolerance of alcohol.
Physical Signs of Alcoholism
Alcohol use can have physical effects. These are some of the physical signs that can develop:
The frequent smell of alcohol on the breath, which can continue for hours after heavy drinking
Weight loss due to the neglect of eating in favor of drinking
Dry skin and brittle hair and nails from the dehydrating effects of alcohol, which can result in an increased appearance of aging and wrinkles.
Broken capillaries on your face and nose
Yellow eyes and skin due to liver damage
Poor hygiene.
A Word From Verywell |
Stone Age artefacts discovered at a site in Armenia have shown how innovative humans were in terms of technological development 325,000 years ago.
Published in the journal Science, researchers studied thousands of stone artefacts from the Nor Geghi 1 site in Armenia. The area is unique as it has been preserved between two lava flows dating from 200,000 to 400,000 years.
The archaeological material was found in layers of floodplain sediments and ancient soil between the lava flows.
Analysis of the artefacts, by researchers at the University of Connecticut, showed that human technological innovation occurred intermittently throughout the Old World, rather than spreading from a single origin.
Their finding challenges long held theories of how human technology developed – that it spread as human populations moved. Experts thought more advanced technology was invented in Africa and spread to Eurasia replacing older tools in the process.
Researchers found two types of technology at the site. Biface technology, such as hand axes, is associated with the Lower Paleolithic era, while the more advanced Levallois technology, a stone tool production method, is thought to have come from the Middle Stone Age in Africa and the Middle Paleolithic in Eurasia.
The tools found suggest simultaneous use of both biface and Levallois technology – a surprising discovery: "The co-existence of the two technologies at Nor Geghi 1 provides the first clear evidence that local populations developed Levallois technology out of existing biface technology," the authors said in a statement.
Daniel Adler, lead author of the study, said: "The combination of these different technologies in one place suggests to us that, about 325,000 years ago, people at the site were innovative."
Researchers believe the shift from biface to Levallois technology was gradual and intermittent, and that it occurred independently within different human populations who had shared technological ancestry.
Adler said their findings suggest Stone Age people were flexible and variable in terms of their technology – highlighting the "antiquity of the human capacity for innovation". |
Hours after Union Minister Arun Jaitley upbraided her in his blog, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and her aides took the Centre head on. While party MP Derek O'Brien launched a no-holds-barred attack on the BJP and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, his chief was riled enough to use unparliamentary language at a meeting of party workers, calling an unnamed BJP leader by a four-letter word.Trinamool Congress has already boycotted Sunday's all-party meeting in Delhi. On Monday, the Chief Minister plans to hit the streets in Kolkata in protest - the second Chief Minister since Arvind Kejriwal to do so in recent times. The day after, her MPs will take on the Centre in Parliament over the repatriation of black money, Foreign Direct Investment in insurance and communal riots.Mr Jaitley's blog had accused the Ms Banerjee of being irresponsible and anti-national in her Saturday's comment - that the BJP had "stage-managed" the Burdwan blasts.On Sunday, Derek O'Brien said the "stage-managed" blasts were "part of the BJP's devious master plan, concerted strategy used even during PM's poll campaign in Bengal".National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, who visited Bengal in the aftermath of the blasts and criticized the state government for being unaware of the mushrooming terror hubs, is a "known RSS sympathiser," he said. "The gameplan has been hatched in the RSS headquarters. All the facts will be made public in 48 hours," Mr O'Brien added.The state BJP, which had dismissed Ms Banerjee's yesterday's attack as a mark of desperation, today said she was miffed by her failure to cut any ice in Delhi last week.State BJP chief Rahul Sinha said: "She had gone with great hopes that the alliance would be formed that day itself. But she did not get on the dais, there was no separate meeting, no one talked to her. Humiliated, the CM left at half time and met the BJP leaders. But our party will not support the corrupt or try to save them."Ms Banerjee had met three top BJP leaders - Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley and LK Advani - during her visit. The Trinamool Congress government has lately found itself in a corner over the ongoing probe in the Saradha scam in which several of its leaders are under the CBI scanner. Parliamentarian Srinjoy Bose has been arrested, minister Shyama Prasad Mukherjee is being questioned and minister Madan Mitra, who has also been summoned for questioning, is currently in hospital. |
The TIME IS NOW for S 198 and H 3177!
Yesterday (April 14th) both the South Carolina House and Senate returned to Columbia from furlough. Here's what we need everyone in South Carolina to do.
I am going to be honest -- I'm about to ask a lot of you right now, so please carefully read through all of this most crucial message to you. This is not the time to be too busy to get involved or to short attentioned to not read through a VERY important message. This is the time to make time to be a Patriot!
It is time for us to go into a FULL COURT PRESS in both chambers. Crossover date is May 1st. That is the date that a bill or resolution must cross over from one chamber to the other in order to be voted on in the other chamber before this year’s session comes to a close in early June. Therefore, either our Senate resolution S 198 must be passed in the Senate or our House resolution H 3177 must be passed in the House by that date. For this particular Call to Action below to be effective, we need to all do this at the same time. We need to light up their phones and fill their email boxes all at one time.
To refresh your memory, the COS Project resolution S 198 was passed out of the South Carolina Senate with a vote of 13 to 8 on March 17th. Every single Republican present on that committee voted for this resolution. Unfortunately many Democrats in the SC Senate are opposing this effort to rein in the federal government and a “minority report” was placed on this bill when it was sent to the Senate floor. A “minority report” permits one person to thwart the efforts of the majority, and prevents debate and vote on our resolution!
The only way to bring this resolution up for debate and a vote is to have a majority of Republican Senators support and vote for what is called “Special Order”. The Republicans in the SC Senate have a strong majority and can easily bring S 198 up on “Special Order.” There are multiple bills “competing” for Special Order right now, and one of them is S 30 the Article V effort that is limited to a Balanced Budget Amendment. You know from my previous messages that a BBA all by itself will not address the deep issues of power imbalance between the states and the federal government. The only Article V effort that is using a template resolution in order to force Congress to call a Convention of States that will address the runaway federal government is S 198.
Over on the House side, our resolution (H 3177) is still in the House Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Constitutional Law.
It is HIGH time that the legislators in the South Carolina General Assembly summon the courage to take up the mantle left to them by our great founders. That mantle is the tool left specifically to the states in Article V of the United States Constitution that permits the states to go COMPLETELY AROUND CONGRESS and propose amendments to the Constitution to rein in an abusive and oppressive staggering power drunken federal government. These legislators are getting all the fear mongering and lies from the hand wringers and pants-wetters out there right now, and it is time for them to ignore that nonsense and step up to the plate to join the other states that have passed this resolution and save our country.
It is time for all of you that are interested in saving our country with the lawful, peaceful, orderly, and most importantly, the Constitutional tool specifically given to the people and the state legislatures to begin a MASSIVE calling and emailing campaign to let them know in no uncertain terms that we want them to MOVE and bring S 198 up on Special Order and pass it in the Senate and we want them to MOVE and bring H 3177 to a vote on the House floor and pass it!
So what we are asking of you is a TALL order, I know. But I also know that many if not all of you got involved in this effort in order to save our country for your children, grandchildren and all of our progeny. Our founders gave up their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor…they gave ALL. Is it too much to ask of ourselves to make phone calls and send emails? I can tell that in 2015 those are the things we need to do in order to let our legislators to know LOUD and CLEAR that S 190 (Senate) and H 3177 (House) are to be their primary order of business. All other issues before them truly pale in comparison to our state taking a stand against the growing tyranny by joining the other states calling for an Article V Convention of the States in order to propose amendments that will impost fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress.
It is time for us to get all over these legislators to let them know that they need to make this happen. Tell them that you are going to ask ten of your friends to do the same thing. Put them on notice that we will not let them rest until they pass the Convention of States resolution (S 198 if you are talking to a Senate office and H 3177 if you are talking to House office).
Ok, so let’s start with the Senate! Remember, the Senate resolution is S 198. When talking to a Senate office and sending your email use this message: we want S 198 brought up on Special Order and ultimately passed in the South Carolina Senate.
If you would like a sample for your email:
Dear Senator[*****],
Thank you for your service to the great State of South Carolina as a member of the Senate. I want to express my views regarding the Convention of States resolution S 198, which was passed out of full Judiciary with every single Republican voting in favor. I strongly support an Article V Convention of States to bring power back to South Carolina. I want SC legislators like you making decisions for South Carolina rather than someone in the federal government. I urge you to support Special Order for S 198 and vote for its passage on the Senate floor as soon as possible.
Thank you again for you service,
[Your name and Town]
District Name Email Phone SD2 Larry Martin [email protected] (803) 212-6610 SD5 Tom Corbin [email protected] (803) 212-6100 SD8 Ross Turner [email protected] (803) 212-6148 SD12 Lee Bright [email protected] (803) 212-6008 SD16 Greg Gregory [email protected] (803) 212-6024 SD23 Katrina Shealy [email protected] (803) 212-6108 SD24 Tom Young [email protected] (803) 212-6124 SD25 Shane Massey [email protected] (803) 212-6024 SD28 Greg Hembree [email protected] (803) 212-6016 SD33 Luke Rankin [email protected] (803) 212-6410 SD38 Sean Bennett [email protected] (803) 212-6116 SD41 Paul Thurmond [email protected] (803) 212-6172 SD43 Chip Campsen [email protected] (803) 212-6340 SD1 Thomas Alexander [email protected] (803) 212-6220 SD3 Kevin Bryant [email protected] (803) 212-6320 SD4 William O'Dell [email protected] (803) 212-6350 SD6 Mike Fair [email protected] (803) 212-6420 SD9 Danny Verdin [email protected] (803) 212-6230 SD13 Shane Martin [email protected] (803) 212-6100 SD14 Harvey Peeler [email protected] (803) 212-6430 SD15 Wes Hayes [email protected] (803) 212-6240 SD18 Ronnie Cromer [email protected] (803) 212-6330 SD20 John Courson [email protected] (803) 212-6250 SD31 Hugh Leatherman [email protected] (803) 212-6640 SD34 Ray Cleary [email protected] (803) 212-6040 SD37 Larry Grooms [email protected] (803) 212-6400 SD44 Paul Campbell [email protected] (803) 212-6016 SD46 Tom Davis [email protected] (803) 212-6008
Please email AND call all 28 Senators on this list. Yes, it will take a few minutes of your time. But we must get all of these Senators in order to get Special Order on S 198 in the Senate. We cannot let the Democrats defeat our efforts to use the single most powerful tool in the Constitution to rein in an out control federal government. So it is critical that you invest a few minutes now for the future of the country. Our children and grandchildren are counting on us!
Over on the House side, call the members of the House Judiciary Committee subcommittee on Constitutional Law and use this message: I’m asking that you quickly move on passage of H 3177 out to the full House Judiciary Committee so that this very important resolution can be passed this year.
The legislators listed below are the members of that committee.
If one of the committee members is YOUR representative, be sure to let them know that. But you can (and should) contact every one of the 5 members. Please remember to be kind, polite and professional. We have already been told by some of the legislators that COS people are highly regarded in the Capitol because they are not rude or obnoxious. We want to keep it that way.
If you would like a sample for your email:
Dear Representative [*****],
Thank you for your service to the great State of South Carolina as a member of the House and as a member of the House Judiciary Committee. I want to express my views regarding House Resolution 3177, which has already had two hearings in your subcommittee. I strongly support an Article V Convention of States to bring power back to South Carolina. I want SC legislators like you making decisions for South Carolina rather than someone in the federal government. I urge you to support H 3177 and approve its passage out of your subcommittee for a vote by the full House Judiciary Committee.
Thank you again for you service,
Hon. Bruce Bannister, Chairman (803) -734-3138 [email protected]
Hon. Greg Delleney (803) -734-3120 [email protected]
Hon. Weston Newton (803) -212-6810 [email protected]
Hon. James Smith (803) -734-2997 [email protected]
Hon. Walt McLeod (803) -734-3276 [email protected]
Please feel free to use the sample emails above as a guide, but I encourage you to use your own words to make it personal. And remember; be very nice!
Again, I know that this is asking a lot…to make all these calls and send emails…..but I ask you to remember what our founders sacrificed to give us our great nation and our great Constitution. We can do no less to save our country for our progeny. They need to hear from every one of you.
Again, this is not the time to be too busy to get involved. This is the time to make time to be a Patriot!
As always, THANK YOU for standing shoulder to shoulder with the founders and advocating for our states to use the tool given to us by those great men!
Respectfully,
Bob Menges
South Carolina State Director
Convention of States Project
Cell: 843-209-6121
Email: [email protected] |
Just in time for Edward and Bella’s second wedding anniversary — that’s today, Aug. 13 — comes a new edition of The Twilight Saga.
Twilight Forever: The Complete Saga, a 10-disc Blu-ray set or a 12-disc DVD set, will be available on Nov. 5 — right before the fifth anniversary of the first Twilight — and includes two hours of never-before-seen bonus material, including new cast interviews, as well as all five movies.
The special-edition package will be a delight for both teams — one side features Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Bella (Kristen Stewart), while the other showcases Jacob (Taylor Lautner) — and the discs come encased in a Twilight photo album.
Features also include a retrospective on both Edward’s and Jacob’s story throughout the series, and every extra ever made for the films. Check out a full list below: |
Supreme Court justices sometimes give the impression they are almost aggressively technology-averse, stumbling over the features of the V-chip or being stumped by instant messaging.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer told an audience at Vanderbilt Law School this week that one of the challenges of his job was the modern age of communications. "If I'm applying the First Amendment, I have to apply it to a world where there's an Internet, and there's Facebook, and there are movies like ... "The Social Network," which I couldn't even understand," Breyer said, referring to the film about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
But maybe the justices know more than they let on.
Justice Antonin Scalia told an adoring audience at the Federalist Society convention Thursday night that he not only had an iPod, but does his own downloading. Mostly classical and opera, he said in response to CBS correspondent Jan Crawford, who was interviewing him at the group's massive black-tie dinner.
Not only that, but he has an iPad that his staff loads with court work. "I don't have to schlep the briefs around," Scalia said, adding with a laugh, "Oh, it's a brave new world."
Alas, he's still allergic to cameras in the courtroom. Crawford asked whether televised hearings were in the court's future now that Justice David H. Souter - who had famously said cameras would roll in over his dead body - was gone.
"It's not just that Souter left the court but Specter left the Senate," Scalia quipped, referring to former Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, Congress's chief advocate of televising court hearings.
That brought a roar of approval from the conservative crowd, but Scalia said he didn't mean it that way. Only that Republican-turned-Democrat Specter had been "the major - what should I say? - stimulator" of the effort in the Senate.
Scalia said cameras could change the way the court operates, even though he'd probably make good television.
He said he could "ham it up with the best of them. I'd do very well."
On other topics, put him down as a "no" for the next State of the Union. He hasn't gone for years to the "juvenile spectacle" and repeated the concern of others that it has become a partisan pep rally that makes the justices uncomfortable.
But he is reluctant to tell others what they should do. He acknowledged it is a bit hard to not show up for a State of the Union address delivered by the man who nominated you to the court.
And for those not quite as thrilled with Scalia as the Federalist Society - stand down. No retirement plans on the horizon, he said.
Crawford noted he had once said he might leave the court when he was 65, to which the 74-year-old Scalia replied that meant he'd been working nine years for free. He said he had not thought about retirement, except to vow he "will leave the minute" he feels he's lost a step. |
Hey this is pretty much an open letter to anyone who needs help. I will be in the Golden area with 4 full days off work. I am 34 male, fit, capable and actually highly experiences with flood recovery. I only have a car so I cannot haul or traverse heavily destroyed territory. What this means is I have to be able to get to you to help physically.
I lost my home and was displaced and financially devastated in the Minot flood of 2011. Here is proof: http://imgur.com/a/O56h6#0
I know all about dealing with FEMA. I know shit loads of stuff about flood insurance. I know shitloads of stuff about Homeowners Insurance and how it WILL NOT help you out during this event. I know a lot about home damages. Basement damages, structural failures etc. I have a good sense of what should be repaired and what should be destroyed and re-built. Making this decision will be the difference between financial recovery and financial devastation.
I know a lot about scammers, rip-offs after disasters, looting and theft. Dealing with recovery contractors (see scammers above). Dealing with mental issues that you will face if you were hit hard during these events. There will be a lot.
I just spent 2 years living and recovering from what many of you are just starting to face. I came out of this mess quite a bit better off than many people I knew and I want very much to help people do the same.
Please feel free to contact me if you need physical help or informational help in ANY WAY. Some of the most difficult questions that I had trouble answering were about insurance, FEMA, government buy-outs for flood protection etc. Actions the city will take. Send me a PM for phone, text, email contact or just post questions here and I will reply as often as I can. -Dan
Hey, first, Im really sorry that your place was hit. You sound like you are in the same situation as I was. Stop pumping. There is no point until the event is over. It is kinda hard to describe but but basically the entire sewer system in the area is completely overwhelmed by the water. Water is a flowing liquid so it will level out even across huge areas. If you try to pump your basement when this water level is above the level of the lowest point in your basement you will only draw sewage in from the main sewage lines in this area. Sewage is WAY nastier than flood water and will make your cleanup much more difficult.
You want to do the opposite. Ironically, if you have a source of reasonably clear water (the hose is not a source. you need like a lake and a big gas powered pump...) you could pump clear water INTO your basement as the water level falls. This clean-ish water will displace the nasty trash that mother-nature deposited and make your cleanup much easier. If you do not have a massive source of clean water and a pump, just wait.
Sadly, that is going to be a recurring theme through all this. I had no pump and no source of water so I just waited for 5 days as the water level in my basement decreased. Surprisingly that was a very good move though because no sewage was drawn into my place at all. It really is nice to not have to shovel raw sewage out of your home.
Something you can do while the water is still there is start to dump bleach into your basement. It will take more than you think but it will make cleanup a bit safer. Don't worry about the bleach damaging anything down there. Remember, It is ALL destroyed. try to kill off the bacteria and other nastiness as best you can. I dumped maybe 7 gallons into my basement when it was completely full. This was not really enough honestly... It drained out and really kept the stink down though. Pure chlorox is only like 1% chlorine though so maybe the concentrated stuff they use to treat swimming pools would work better/be easier. |
FREE EBOOK: so you want to start a record collection
jes skolnik Blocked Unblock Follow Following Oct 5, 2016
Today this “Beginner’s Guide to Vinyl” thing crossed my path and irritated the crap out of me. I am a musician, and I also write about music for a living, and I have also put out records before (long, long ago), and I have worked at record stores at varying points over my lifetime. I did college radio. I am a sad, sad music industry lifer, the child of two musicians (one of whom is also a sound engineer, and one of whom is a Girls Rock Camp volunteer as a retiree. My parents are cool). This is my world. I know it can seem myopic at times.
It didn’t make me angry because I look down on people looking to get into collecting records. I didn’t make a bunch of flip posts about it because I want to guard the gate to my clubhouse. On the contrary: I want people to get into records. Records are a great joy in my life, and I want nothing more than to share them with others, in many different ways. Sharing music that made an emotional connection with you with people you care about and watching it maybe make an emotional connection with them is one of the purest and loveliest things in a world on fire.
It made me angry because it’s completely unnecessary: a waste of money and time. Whether you are a casual music listener looking to buy a few records that you listen to now and again or a budding head chasing the dragon of a never-ending collection of records that resonate deeply with you, you do not need this book. You don’t need any book on record collecting, not in an age of easily accessible Internet expertise. Starting a record collection is very easy, and you should never let some petty tyrant tell you you don’t belong there because you don’t listen to the right records or know the right passwords. Listen to what you love, on your terms.
Here is a completely free guide to starting a record collection in 2016, post-many trend pieces about vinyl being Back (it never left, it just wasn’t terribly popular for a while). (PS: nobody paid me anything or asked me to mention any of the products I mention. They are purely my preferences. You could make an argument that I get money from Bandcamp because it’s my job to write for them, but this was done purely because I care and I want people to get into records, and nobody at the company told me to do it. I really do believe in the platform.) |
In a Twitter message, for example, Mr. Ravi said: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”
Some of the charges that Mr. Ravi was convicted of fell under a state statute on bias intimidation that was ruled unconstitutional last year by the New Jersey Supreme Court. The statute said defendants could be convicted if their victims “reasonably believed” they were harassed or intimidated because of a characteristic such as race or sexual orientation.
The appeals court dismissed those charges and said that the evidence prosecutors used to prove them had “tainted the jury’s verdict on the remaining charges,” thus depriving Mr. Ravi of a fair trial.
On Thursday, Mr. Ravi wore a trim slate-blue suit, a collarless dress shirt with no tie and tan shoes. Before his hearing he kept his eyes on his cellphone. He had a full black beard that contrasted starkly with the smooth-faced, grinning school portrait circulated widely after his arrest.
When asked by the judge if he had any statement to make before he was sentenced, Mr. Ravi responded, “I have nothing to say.”
Steven D. Altman, Mr. Ravi’s lawyer, said he would file a motion for his client’s criminal record to be expunged, so Mr. Ravi, who is from India, could apply for United States citizenship and move on with his life.
“He just wants to disappear,” Mr. Altman said outside the courtroom.
After his original conviction, Mr. Ravi apologized and served 20 days in jail on some of the charges and was ordered to pay $10,000 to a program aiding victims of hate crimes and to perform community service. But his apology was dismissed by Mr. Clementi’s parents as a “public relations piece.” |
Talk about surreal.
The body of eccentric Spanish painter Salvador Dali was exhumed for a paternity test Thursday night -- and the late artist’s trademark mustache was found to be still intact.
Forensic experts said Dali's whiskers remained in the "classic shape of ten past ten,” referring to the positions of hands on a clock.
Spanish experts said they removed the deceased painter’s hair, nails and two long bones to find genetic samples to be used in a paternity test.
Dali was buried in the Dali Museum Theater in the northeastern Spanish town of Figueres, his birthplace, when he died at age 84 in 1989. The exhumation on Thursday followed longstanding claims by Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old tarot card reader, who says her mother had an affair with Dali in the town.
GRISLY DISCOVERY IN SPAIN: 45 INTACT SHRUNKEN BRAINS FOUND AT MASS GRAVE
In June, a Madrid judge ruled a DNA test should be performed to find out whether her allegations were true.
Lluis Penuelas Reixach, the secretary general of the Gala Dali Foundation, said during a Friday press conference that Dali’s remains – including his mustache – are well conserved, mummified after the embalming process was applied 27 years ago.
According to judicial authorities, only five people – a judge, three coroners and an assistant – were allowed to oversee the removal of the samples out of respect for the remains and in order to avoid any contamination.
Dali and his Russian wife Gala – whose birth name was Elena Ivanovna Diakonova – had no children of their own, although Gala had a daughter from an earlier marriage to French poet Paul Eluard.
SPANISH BANKER’S DEATH WAS SUICIDE, OFFICIALS SAY
If Abel is proved to be Dali's progeny, she could claim a significant portion of the painter’s estate, which is now in the hands of a public foundation, according to Abel's lawyer Enrique Blanquez. There are no current estimates of the value of that fortune.
If she is proved wrong, the Dali Foundation will seek financial compensation for the costs of the exhumation.
“It’s important for Salvador Dali to be returned to rest in the interior of his museum’s dome,” Penuelas said.
The foundation and the museum of Figueres took steps to make sure no images of the exhumation may emerge in public. Before work in the crypt began on Thursday, mobile phones were put in a deposit and a marquee was installed under the museum’s glass dome to prevent any photography or video from drones.
The biological samples will travel to a forensic laboratory in Madrid for analysis, a process that could take weeks.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. |
Jabhat al-Nusra is currently facing a very difficult position in western Qalamoun. Whether or not the warnings to swear allegiance to Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were made and proved to be valid, developments on the ground require al-Nusra’s Emir Abu Malik Talli to take a firm decision about his relationship with IS. This is especially true following the fire of the “jihadist elimination war” which reached Jabhat al-Nusra’s geographical area in the eastern Qalamoun and spread, for the first time, to the province of Daraa.
Jabhat al-Nusra in the Western Qalamoun kept silent about last week’s leaks, whereby IS warned the Qalamoun factions about the necessity to swear allegiance to its leader, al-Baghdadi, or else they would be deemed infidels and would be fought. IS neither confirmed nor denied this news.
Some IS media spokesmen, most notably Abu Musab Hafid Baghdadi (who was the first to post pictures of the slaughter of the martyr Ali al-Sayyed on Twitter), announced on social networking sites that most of the Qalamoun factions have recently pledged allegiance to Baghdadi, but without naming these factions. It was remarkable that those media spokesmen did not tackle, either directly or indirectly, the relationship between Abi Malek Talli and Jabhat al-Nusra in the region.
As-Safir learned, from a source close to Jabhat al-Nusra, that one of the legal “princes” in IS, Abu al-Walid al-Maqdisi, came to Qalamoun about 10 days ago to meet with a number of factional leaders, including the emir of Jabhat al-Nusra, Abu Malik Talli.
The source said that in addition to Maqdisi, the meeting with Talli was attended by a military commander whom the source did not name and Abu Musab Hafid al-Baghdadi, who is considered the media spokesman of IS in Qalamoun. The source said that what has been leaked about the content of the meeting was inaccurate, both in terms of the warnings given by the IS representatives about the necessity to pledge allegiance to al-Baghdadi, and in terms of Talli’s reported rejection of such a pledge, because he does not see a real succession or Khalifa that requires a pledge of allegiance.
The source said that should Abu Malek Talli find it necessary to issue a statement to explain what really happened at the meeting, he would. To prove that there is still a close relationship between Jabhat al-Nusra and IS in Qalamoun, the source confirmed that a couple of days ago, Talli organized a dinner that was attended by a number of IS leaders. Moreover, the source added, the joint “legitimate Council” between the two parties is still active and exercising its daily duties.
However, an activist in Qalamoun said the apparent friendly behavior adopted by Jabhat al-Nusra toward IS was not real and that this behavior only aimed at avoiding the same fate as Jabhat al-Nusra in the Eastern Region. The activist stressed that Talli would soon discover that his behavior would not be of any benefit to him and that IS, following its relative strength in Qalamoun and the increased number of pledges of allegiance, would eventually come into conflict with him.
Moreover, when the battles and clashes arrived in eastern Qalamoun, Daraa and the countryside of Homs, Abu Malek became the only “prince” in Jabhat al-Nusra not fighting IS. Will he be able to preserve this abnormal situation, especially in light of the clashes taking place near him in eastern Qalamoun and in light of IS’ quest to control the Bir Qasab region? Losing the Bir Qasab region would cut supply lines between western Qalamoun and Daraa province, the main stronghold of Jabhat al-Nusra.
People closely following the hidden details of the relationship between Jabhat al-Nusra and IS in Qalamoun said one of the reasons the latter wanted to control the Bir Qassab region was to indirectly place pressure on Abu Malik and push him to choose between willingly pledging allegiance or having to deal with the absolute siege during the difficult winter months.
In this context, clashes continued in the area of Bir Qassab between the factions that signed the Eastern Qalamoun Treaty, most importantly Jabhat al-Nusra in Eastern Qalamoun, which is led by Abi Amer, Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham on the one hand, and IS on the other. Clashes here are taking place amid conflicting reports about how much control the parties have over the disputed area. Bombings were obviously present but also Jaysh al-Islam said that it was able to kill an IS member wearing an explosive belt and that someone had tried to assassinate one of its leaders in the region. This comes just days after the assassination of Jaysh al-Islam leader Abu Mujahid in a car explosion in Ad Dumayr near Damascus.
Yesterday in Daraa, the first battle of its kind erupted between Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies on the one hand and between brigades affiliated to IS on the other. This confirmed what was published by As-Safir just days ago about the IS danger approaching Daraa province and the readiness of the factions, led by Jabhat al-Nusra, to fight it.
In detail, the Martyrs of Yarmouk Brigade, which is accused of having secretly pledged allegiance to IS earlier, have arrested three Jabhat al-Nusra members along with the wife and sons of one of them in the town of Jamla in Daraa. They were accused of forming a cell to assassinate IS leaders, led by Capt. Abu Ali al-Baridi, known as “the uncle.”
The Martyrs of Yarmouk Brigade showed videotaped confessions of one of the detainees it had captured, called Abu al-Abbas, in which he acknowledged the validity of the charges against him and his colleagues and that Shamel, his emir, had put him in charge of executing assassinations.
However, Jabhat al-Nusra believed that the arrest of its members, especially the arrest of the wife of a member, damaged the dignity of the “mujahedeen,” and shows the brigade’s bad behavior. This is why Jabhat al-Nusra had to begin a military campaign against the brigade under the pretext of ridding the city of corruption, the same excuse it had used in the military campaign it used to control the countryside of Idlib last month.
Jabhat al-Nusra, along with Harket al-Muthanna and the Syrian Revolutionary Front in the South, invaded the Martyrs of Yarmouk Brigade’s strongholds in Saham al-Jawlan and Tasil in Daraa’s western countryside. Deadly clashes erupted, resulting in several deaths and injuries on both sides. There are fears that these clashes will be the spark that will burn Daraa province, such as the case in Deir ez-Zor several months ago, especially in light of the information that was revealed yesterday about several new pledges of allegiance in Daraa to Baghdadi by Bayt al-Maqdis battalion and the battalion of Abu Mohammed Al-Tilawy.
It was noted that the Jabhat al-Nusra leaders who fled from the eastern region to Daraa following its defeat there, led by Abu Maria Qahtani, Abu Hassan al-Kuwaiti and Abu Osama al-Adni, were the first to accuse the Martyrs of Yarmouk Brigade of secretly pledging allegiance to IS, while many activists from the city denied the accuracy of this pledge. This raised questions about the reality of the role played by the former leaders of the eastern region, especially in light of information about Abu Maria Al-Qahtani — who apparently is only tied to Jabhat al-Nusra by name now and working alone, receiving a significant amount of money from a third party and has started buying cars and storing weapons. What increased doubt about this role was that Abu al-Abbas, whose confessions were published, was fighting against IS in Deir ez-Zor under the leadership of al-Qahtani himself.
In addition, the Lions of Islam Brigade led by Rafed Taha, one of the biggest brigades in Talbiseh in the Homs countryside, pledged allegiance to Baghdadi which forced Jabhat al-Nusra fighters to withdraw from the front of the village of Umm Hurcouh, out of fear of the brigade betraying them following its pledge of allegiance to Jabhat al-Nusra’s arch foe. |
It was right in the middle of a game still in doubt. Right in the middle of a contested moment between the Toronto Argonauts and Saskatchewan Roughriders on Saturday night. Tension all around as a TSN camera operator plunked their camera down on the ground to get an artful, tight shot of a yellow challenge flag laying on the turf.
All of a sudden, a player’s head was seen intruding sideways in the shot, a bright and friendly “hello” chirped into the open microphone.
Even in the middle of the building stress of a game on the line, Argos’ linebacker Marcus Ball was going to take time for a little levity.
“I just wanted to send a quick hello,” the 30-year-old veteran chuckled as we chatted a few moments after he and his teammates had put in some prep time for Thursday night’s home game against the Calgary Stampeders. “This game is fun,” he added. “It’s a fun game. If it’s not fun then we’re out here for the wrong reasons.”
With apologies to better writers who would not go down this path, here it is anyway: Marcus is having a ball in his second stint with the Toronto Argonauts.
With 28 tackles – two more on special teams – and a key, late-game interception against the Ottawa REDBLACKS a couple of weeks back, Ball has picked up where he left off with the Argos, rejoining the team after three seasons in the NFL. “I hope I’m better,” he laughed when asked if he’s a different man, a different player, this time around.
If not better, Ball is certainly similar, showcasing the same kinds of talents that popped eyes back when he wore a younger man’s clothes. A veteran-laden defence – with many new faces nevertheless – has looked much sharper than the double blue defence of 2016, and Ball’s persistent antagonism of opposing offences has been a big part of that improvement.
He has found a happy place and a happy scheme in which to play, insisting that the here and now is all that matters, with the “here” being an important part of his happiness.
“I’m a happily married man, I’m a father of two,” said Ball, referring to his wife, Ashley, and his children, Marley and Blaise, who were very likely the intended receivers of his sideways camera moment. “I’m a blessed individual.”
Marcus Ball is having a good time and the league that’s embraced him not once but twice, now, is a big reason why.
“I just wanted to go somewhere where I appreciated it,” Ball said of his reasons for returning to the CFL. “Somewhere where it was fun. Where I was appreciated.”
“Now, when it came to which team, it was no question I was coming to Toronto. I love Toronto. Toronto loves me. I love it here. It’s getting better than last time.”
After NFL tours with New Orleans, Carolina and San Francisco, Ball decided to no longer play a waiting game down south, signing with the Argonauts shortly before training camps opened. While a fondness for the city played a big part in his decision, so too did head coach Marc Trestman’s faith in veteran quarterback Ricky Ray. Ball was adamant; Ray had made a big impact on him when he first arrived in Canada five years ago.
“We developed a great relationship,” said Ball. “I know Ricky and he’s a great competitor. He has a huge heart. He’s a great team guy, he’s a leader. Once I’d seen Ricky was still doing it… I’ll play with Ricky Ray any day of the week.”
If Ball’s first stint with Toronto was notable for him because of the impression Ray made, it was notable, too, for football fans who were taken aback by Ball’s impact. As a 25-year-old, he joined the Argos in 2012 and immediately impressed with his closing speed and backpedaling prowess when it came to dropping into pass coverage. He racked up 75 tackles during his rookie season, adding three sacks and picking off a pass that he returned for a touchdown. Ball was named the team’s defensive player of the year and he added to his resume by picking off three more passes during the playoffs and adding six tackles on Grey Cup Sunday, the Argos besting Calgary by a score of 35-22.
“It’s a fun game. If it’s not fun then we’re out here for the wrong reasons.” Marcus Ball
His sophomore season was strong, too, with slightly fewer tackles (69) but three interceptions and four sacks on his tally sheet that year. That led to a chance south of the border, one Ball insists he wasn’t looking for at the time, nor is he looking for now.
“I was just fortunate enough to be playing the game and getting an opportunity, my first time around (in the CFL),” he said. “That led to another door opening and another opportunity, so I took that opportunity as well.”
“I’m not playing for anything but a Grey Cup,” Ball continued, when asked what his future goals are all about. “I’m not looking forward to what I could or can’t make from this. Only thing I’m trying to make from this is a championship ring. Honestly, that’s the only thing I’m focused on.”
There has been work to do, of course. Like most every professional football player, Ball takes nothing for granted. “We’re still learning,” he said of the Argos’ defence. “I’m still learning.”
Moreover, he’s had to adjust to a new way of covering pass catchers.
During his first go round, defenders could be more physical with receivers. The newer regulations, he admits, are messing with his head. “Arrgh,” he groans, comically. “Aww… I just wanna… aargh.”
Like pretty well any defender you could point to, Ball would welcome permission to be a little less polite on pass coverage. He says the CFL doesn’t look a lot different to him outside of that and he’s adapting.
“It is what it is, man. You just gotta learn the rules of the game and apply ‘em to your game.”
He’s applied them well thus far. Ball is the Argonaut leader in pass knockdowns this season with six, and although he trails teammate Bear Woods in total defensive tackles by two, Ball actually leads the team with 41 defensive plays made, including three quarterback pressures. He hands the credit to head coach Marc Trestman and defensive coordinator Corey Chamblin.
“They put together great game plans and with their longevity in this league, they obviously know the formulas to win,” he said. “We just try to bring it to life with a lot of fun. We just try to bring a lot of excitement and lot of energy out there.”
Might be a chicken and the egg thing when it comes to energy and excitement with Ball. Is he bringing it to the game or is the game bringing it to him?
“This is a kids’ game,” he said. “We can’t forget the energy and excitement that you get by playing in this game.”
And even in the tense moments, you can still find a smile, like laying your head on the field in front of a camera in order to say “hi” to your loved ones.
First time was a charm for Marcus Ball. So far, the second time is too, and he is lapping up all of it, enjoying his obvious football successes as well as those little moments that might come along during the course of a game.
“You can never have too much fun out here,” he said. |
Supporters of the Global Network Initiative are on the rampage.
The non-profit organization, whose mission is to promote “a collaborative approach to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy” among technology companies and human rights groups, was founded at the end of 2008. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were its charter corporate participants. But it has failed since then to sign up even one additional high-tech company.
Given the role played by IT in recent uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere, GNI supporters are hitting back, targeting companies including Facebook and Twitter for their failure to join.
Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and a long-time supporter of the group, has written repeatedly to the CEOs of the two companies (and others) demanding that they sign on to the self-regulating GNI or face the alternative of government intervention in their dealings with certain countries.
In February, Durbin again wrote to Facebook, complaining that “the company does not have adequate safeguards in place to protect human rights and avoid being exploited by repressive governments.”
A New York Times article earlier this month repeated the attacks on Facebook and Twitter, a theme picked up by a follow-on op-ed by Durbin in Politico. The Huffington Post’s Amy Lee simply asked, “Why won’t Twitter and Facebook sign on for free speech on the Internet?”
The PR campaign, which has the appearance of being coordinated, seems less like a recruiting effort for GNI and more like a sideways attack on up-and-coming competitors to the companies already participating.
But regardless of motives for the recent full-court press, it’s no surprise that no one else has joined GNI. I doubt any other leading technology company ever will. Here are just a few reasons:
During most of its short existence GNI has only barely functioned. The group took two years to agree to its organizing documents, and only recently recruited its first executive director and outside board chairman.
Though GNI says that one of its core activities is the independent “assessment” of participating companies and their compliance with the group’s basic principles, GNI has yet to begin a single review. (All three participating companies, according to executive director Susan Morgan, will be assessed in 2011.)
Its governance structure is complex and incomplete (there are still five empty board seats for corporate members). It cedes considerable power to non-technology NGOs such as Human Rights Watch to determine whether companies are in compliance with GNI’s principles for dealing with government requests for information.
The board, half of which is made up of representatives of human rights groups and academics with little to no experience in information technology, can also change the rules that apply (a super-majority is required to do that).
Participating companies most devote considerable resources to comply with membership requirements, a luxury start-ups and venture-financed companies can hardly afford.
Let’s take a closer look at some of these shortcomings.
Troubling Origins
It is ironic that the recent focus for Sen. Durbin and others has been to criticize companies who haven’t joined GNI rather than the organization and its current members. Facebook and Twitter have no offices and little business in countries like China, where current GNI members are active. (Both Facebook and Twitter are blocked or almost completely blocked in China as well as in other countries including Libya and Vietnam.)
In response to an earlier letter in 2009, Facebook explained it would not join GNI since, as a “start-up, our resources and influence are limited.” Moreover, the company reminded Durbin that it has “no business operations in China, or, for that matter, in most countries of the world.”
Behind all of the prodding to join, of course, is the explicit threat that if GNI doesn’t succeed in self-regulating the relationship between tech companies and repressive governments, Washington stands ready to regulate. In his most recent op-ed, Durbin acknowledged that the “jury is still out” on GNI, but wrote that if “U.S. companies are unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect human rights, Congress must step in.”
What kinds of legislation does Durbin have in mind? Perhaps restricting U.S. companies from doing business where First and Fourth Amendment values aren’t supported? Would similar restrictions be applied to foreign companies such as Baidu (a Chinese-based search engine that actively censors), which takes advantage of U.S. capital markets for funding and trading?
It was precisely these kinds of vague regulatory threats that motivated the original members to create GNI in the first place. GNI’s origins go back to 2006, when leading Internet companies were under considerable fire from lawmakers and human rights activists. In particular, the companies were facing strong criticism for their willingness to comply with Chinese censorship requirements and demands to turn over identifying information about political dissidents who were using the companies’ products to advance their agendas.
Yahoo, according to The New York Times, had turned over data that led to the imprisonment of several Chinese activists, while Microsoft had “shut down a blog by a Chinese journalist” who worked for the Times.
Google, meanwhile, had infamously introduced a censored version of its search engine in 2006 to comply with government requirements. Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy counsel--and later a deputy chief technology officer in the Obama White House—explained at the time that “[f]iltering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely.”
During this period, I served as Associate Dean of the University of California-Berkeley’s School of Information. (The School of Information is one of only three academic institutions listed as participants of GNI.) In May, 2006, I was invited to a meeting convened by Orville Schell, then Dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Journalism.
Schell has been a long-time advocate for Chinese human rights, and told the assembled group of faculty that criticism of Google’s conduct had opened a window of opportunity. The company, he said, wanted to promote a self-regulatory body that would allow it to continue doing business in China, and had asked Schell to help develop guidelines that were heavy on disclosure and light on actual limitations.
That formulation sounded familiar to me. As a management consultant in the 1980’s, I worked for Accenture (then Arthur Andersen) in apartheid South Africa. At the time, companies defended their engagement with the country in part by embracing the Sullivan Principles, an acceptable code of conduct for doing business in the country developed by a Philadelphia pastor named Leon Sullivan.
But Sullivan ultimately regretted his principles, which he later said did not go far enough to challenge the regime and which helped, through economic engagement, to keep it legitimate. Sullivan ultimately called on companies to pull out of South Africa altogether.
According to my notes from the meeting, some attendees worried that merely disclosing the kinds of censorship that Google agreed to would not advance the human rights agenda. “What you’re describing,” I said, “sounds like the Sullivan Principles all over again.”
“Exactly,” said Schell. “That’s just what we want.”
Two years later, GNI was launched with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as corporate members. (I was not invited to any subsequent meetings.)
A Slow Start
Schell presumably was unaware of Sullivan’s refutation of his own code, and there’s no reason to believe that GNI, as formally launched in 2008, was intended cynically as a cover for its corporate members. The list of respected human rights organizations who have signed on as participants in GNI speaks for itself. But GNI has always been open to the charge that it lets its members off too easily.
(GNI Executive Director Susan Morgan acknowledges Schell’s contribution to the organization’s founding, saying “Orville played a leadership role in one of the three independent sector-based efforts working to protect privacy and free expression online, and provided draft principles as an input into the process. The three groups effectively integrated in late 2006 and became the basis for today’s GNI.”)
The goal of the GNI, at least, is straightforward and admirable—to encourage tech companies to resist government demands to disclose private information about users, or to suppress political speech. Participants are encouraged to challenge court orders and other legal demands in local courts, and to lobby local governments to end repressive policies and practices.
But between 2006 and today, GNI has little to show for its efforts. In addition to the tortured process of developing its founding documents, the organization took considerable time to get a management team in place. Executive director Susan Morgan was only hired in June, 2010, two years after the organization was launched. And GNI didn’t appoint its first independent chairman, former PriceWaterhouseCoopers Chairman Jermyn Brooks, until January of this year.
When asked why it took so long for GNI to hire staff, Susan Morgan explains that the organization’s corporate, academic, and NGO stakeholders “came to the table with very different views of what the right guidelines should be.”
Indeed, according to Ebele Okobi-Harris, Yahoo’s Director of Business and Human Rights and a GNI Board member, GNI’s slow pace is par for the course. “The NGOs,” Okobi-Harris said, “are very outspoken on some issues.”
Okobi-Harris compared GNI’s slow ramp-up to a similar experience with the Fair Labor Association, another multi-stakeholder coalition launched in 1996 “to take steps to improve working conditions around the world and to provide the public with information it could use to make informed purchasing decisions makers.”
To create FLA, apparel and footwear makers along with human rights groups spent more than two years drafting a common Code of Conduct and Principles of Monitoring. (The group was finally incorporated three years after discussions began.)
Once GNI was incorporated and the Board formally established, executive director Susan Morgan says, “I was hired immediately and we brought on an outside Chairman about six months after I’d started, which was essential to conduct an extensive global search.” (No non-U.S. companies have joined GNI.)
Under the GNI’s Principles, corporate members must establish formal procedures for dealing with key human rights issues and for responding to government requests for private information or to limit freedom of expression. They must also submit to regular assessments of how well the company is complying with its own policies, conducted by outside assessors accredited by GNI. (Assessments are expected to begin this year.)
Still, not every human rights organization involved in the formation of GNI was satisfied with the results of lengthy debates. In 2008, Amnesty International, which had been involved in early discussions, broke away from the group and has refused to join.
According to a statement released by AI at the time, the final drafts of key documents “were not yet strong enough to allow Amnesty International to endorse them.” Amnesty cited numerous “weaknesses” and said that “several critical issues could not be resolved” during the talks. The World Organization for Human Rights USA also expressed disappointment that “the amount of effort didn’t produce something more substantial.”
The China Syndrome
Beyond the stalled progress on substance, it’s also increasingly unclear how much longer the founding members will continue to prop up the idea that GNI is working. Outside GNI, participating companies have taken very different approaches to continued relations with some governments, including China. These unilateral actions not only question the viability of GNI, they have also created tensions among the participating companies.
Between 2006 and 2010, for example, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all walked a fine line in dealing with Beijing. Then, in January of 2010, Google dramatically revealed that unidentified operatives had hacked into the Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents. In response, the company radically rewrote its China policy.
“We have decided,” Google announced, “we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”
Throughout the Chinese drama that ensued and which continues to this day, GNI “didn’t participate or comment.” That’s according to Cynthia Wong, Director of the Project on Global Internet Freedom at the Center for Democracy and Technology. (CDT is a participant in GNI and largely handled the organization’s administration until it was staffed.)
(According to Nicole Wong, Google’s Deputy General Counsel responsible for privacy, “The GNI principles are broad enough to support our policies in China, both before and after we changed our approach in the country.”)
Though CDT’s Wong agrees that Google is doing what GNI guidelines would counsel, rumors persist that Yahoo and Microsoft were furious at Google’s unilateral actions, believing it left the two companies and their continued efforts to work with the Chinese government badly exposed and a source of embarrassment.
CDT’s Wong had no comment on whether Google’s actions generated any backlash from Yahoo or Microsoft.
Microsoft turned down a request to be interviewed, saying instead that they would “prefer to defer to GNI.” The company did provide a statement, which said in part: “The GNI is an important vehicle for companies in our industry to work together with a variety of stakeholders to address important issues in other countries around the world.”
The risks of participation
Still, several people I spoke with who are involved in GNI argue that even without strong corporate representation and the slow start to the assessment process, the organization has already delivered considerable value to its few members.
In particular, GNI provides corporate members a forum for discussions of best practices –legal and otherwise--in dealing with repressive governments. It also provides quick and informal contacts with human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the World Press Freedom Committee, who can help verify the identity of possible government targets.
But why have no other companies joined GNI since its launch? According to CDT’s Cynthia Wong, “Companies aren’t joining because they don’t know what kind of value goes on in the internal discussions…but they’re in denial about the reputational risk they face.”
The difficulty companies have calculating the danger of cooperating with repressive governments could certainly be part of GNI’s problem. But social media companies including Facebook and Twitter are well aware of the “reputational” risk they face even when dealing with privacy and free speech issues in the U.S. In January, for example, Twitter fought court orders demanding the company turn over information it had on Twitter users associated with Wikileaks, and challenged a gag order on revealing the request. And Facebook is all too aware of the role its product has played in uprisings throughout the Middle East in the last few months.
So if denial about the reputational risk of not participating in GNI doesn’t explain the failure of companies such as Facebook and Twitter to join, what does?
Part of the problem is surely the risks of working with human rights groups that simply don’t understand how technology works. While Yahoo’s Okobi-Harris is confident the company’s interactions through with GNI have been “indispensable,” she acknowledged that working with so many different advocacy groups makes decision-making difficult.
And the NGOs aren’t just there to give advice. The “multi-stakeholder” structure of the founding group has been replicated in GNI’s permanent organization. Governance of GNI is based on a board of directors made up of equal numbers of company representatives and representatives of NGOs, academics and investors, plus a voting outside Chairman. (The non-corporate participants can join GNI “for a nominal fee,” according to executive director Susan Morgan.)
The current principles were adopted prior to the formal creation of its board of directors. But the board now has considerable power. It can amend the core documents, determine compliance of a participating company, change funding commitments or place a company on “special review.”
These actions, it’s true, require a super-majority of the board. But a simple majority can decide on accreditation of outside assessors, extend the term of existing board members, admit new members and adopt recommendations related to reporting and participation requirements for company members. “All members have the opportunity to participate in the policy, learning and outreach and communications work of GNI,” according to Morgan.
Time and Effort, and Money
If GNI were simply a forum for bringing corporate executives and human rights groups together, it’s possible more companies would join. But there’s much more to GNI. Its core documents run to over thirty pages and more than 13,000 words. The texts read much like those of some of the most notoriously obtuse E.U. and U.N. organizations, from which many of the key terms and definitions are drawn.
There are also significant costs to participating in GNI, not the least of which are requirements that demand significant time and human resources, especially for smaller companies and start-ups. Beyond the commitment to pursue GNI’s core human rights agenda, the organizing documents lay out a number of administrative obligations for participating companies. These include:
Creation within each participating company of a “senior-directed human rights team.”
Establishing “written procedures that ensure consistent implementation of policies that protect freedom of expression and privacy and documenting compliance with these policies.”
Disclosure requirements to users of what “generally applicable government laws and policies require the participating company to provide personal information to government authorities, unless such disclosure is unlawful.”
Disclosure of “what personal information the participating company collects, and the participating company’s policies and procedures for responding to government demands for personal information.”
Submission of an annual report to GNI “detailing its experiences in making the Principles operational, including challenges the participating company has faced and the nature of the reactions of governments.”
Participating in a bi-annual “assessment” of the company’s compliance with the Principles by a pool of “independent assessors” accredited by GNI’s board.
“Actively participate” in GNI meetings and/or other activities, or face termination by the board.
There is also the financial commitment. Though GNI would not disclose its cost structure, Morgan says that the membership fee for companies joining GNI “is a sliding scale based on revenue.” (Tech startups may have revenue, but profits and cash flow are different matters.)
Even more than money is the time commitment of already over-stretched employees, especially senior executives. Facebook and Twitter have only a fraction of the employees of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Even today, Twitter has only about 300 employees. Their legal and policy group is only a handful of lawyers. How big of a “senior-directed human rights team” would the company be expected to staff?
Whose job is this, anyway?
Participating companies could always quit the organization if these requirements become onerous or otherwise interfered with their ability to do business. But what is the “reputational risk” of turning your back on GNI and the powerful human rights organizations who are members?
Which suggests an even deeper problem with GNI. Why do the human rights groups who participate in GNI believe tech companies are responsible for foreign policy? GNI doesn’t just require its members to stretch the limits of local laws to protect human rights. It also expects companies to become political operatives on GNI’s behalf. According to the organization’s Implementation Guidelines, GNI participants are required to “engage government officials to promote the rule of law and the reform of laws, policies and practices that infringe on freedom of expression and privacy.”
But why does GNI believe it is the duty of companies to pressure foreign governments to improve their human rights laws and practices? Isn’t that the job of a country’s own citizens, or other governments as part of deliberated foreign policy? Why, in effect, is the U.S. government given a free pass on doing what might normally be understood as its duty to “engage public policy”? (Governments are not members of GNI.)
It’s true that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently called for global debate on the Internet’s use as a tool for both freedom and repression. But rather than threaten U.S. companies who don’t join GNI, as Sen. Durbin has done repeatedly, why doesn’t Congress put pressure on the governments who ask for the kinds of cooperation that most disturbs the human rights community?
One form of leverage governments have here is in trade negotiations, as Google in particular has pointed out. In November of last year, the company issued a white paper calling on U.S. and European governments to treat “limits on the free flow of information” as what they really are--a kind of unfair trade barrier.
When local governments restrict the kinds of information U.S. companies can deliver to their citizens, Google argues, they should be sanctioned just as if they blockaded physical goods to protect local suppliers.
The Power of Moore’s Law
In any event, companies who are not participants in GNI already lobby on behalf of human rights. Facebook provided a statement, which said in part,
We are in regular contact with governments and non-governmental organizations which have an interest in this issue in the U.S. and around the world, such as GNI. As Facebook grows, we’ll continue to expand our outreach and participation, but it’s important to remember that our global operations are still small, with offices in only a handful of countries.”
But Harvard Law School’s John Palfrey is among the members of GNI who aren’t impressed by such displays of substance over form. As he put it in a recent op-ed for The New York Daily News,
The Global Network Initiative is, at least so far, a relatively docile nonprofit organization; it is not yet feared by regimes like Egypt's, and it may never be. But there's a way to give it more teeth: Twitter and Facebook should immediately join in the effort, as should Cisco and other companies that are playing big roles in the ways that activism and governance are taking place in cyberspace. More powerful players will make it more robust - and its principles more enforceable.”
Palfrey goes on to say, “If the market does not work and companies do not come together voluntarily, we will need other mechanisms to ensure that platforms like Twitter and Facebook and many mobile digital tools - and those that will inevitably come after them - will stay live in times of crisis.”
Maybe not. Despite GNI’s failure, the market is doing just fine—or rather, the technology is. Though repressive regimes continue to view information technology as a threat to their control over citizens, it’s abundantly clear that the services offered by Internet companies have helped the causes of freedom and democracy tremendously. Indeed, technology has done more to advance human rights in the last ten years than all the multi-stakeholder coalitions put together.
China and other repressive regimes, of course, continue to keep information flows to a minimum, but the pressure of faster, cheaper, and smaller computers is unrelenting. Egypt shut down the Internet (an option that some U.S. lawmakers would like to give the President of this country as well.) But how long was Egypt’s government able to keep the Internet closed?
Facebook and Twitter were barely in existence in 2006 when discussions about GNI first began. But even today neither company can be blamed for steering clear of a group--however noble its principles--whose internal politics are unduly complex and whose progress has been so plodding and unremarkable.
Their employees are focused on making better products and services and serving more and more of the world’s population. Whether by design or happy accident, that turns out to be the best way to serve the cause of human rights.
And the most efficient, too. |
So there’s this couple in Texas looking forward to their second baby, a brother for their 2-year-old daughter.
Yet now my doctor was looking grim and, with chair pulled close, was speaking of alarming things. “I’m worried about your baby’s head shape,” she said. “I want you to see a specialist—now.” My husband looked angry, and maybe I did too, but it was astonishment more than anger. Ours was a profound disbelief that something so bad might happen to people who think themselves charmed. We already had one healthy child and had expected good fortune to give us two. Instead, before I’d even known I was pregnant, a molecular flaw had determined that our son’s brain, spine and legs wouldn’t develop correctly. If he were to make it to term—something our doctor couldn’t guarantee—he’d need a lifetime of medical care. From the moment he was born, my doctor told us, our son would suffer greatly.
And now you’re guessing the rest. You’re no fools; you didn’t miss the deadly “Texas” at the beginning.
Their doctor couldn’t do the abortion, because the hospital she’s affiliated with is Catholic (as so many hospitals, and more all the time, are). They had to go to a clinic. They went straight there.
My counselor said that the law required me to have another ultrasound that day, and that I was legally obligated to hear a doctor describe my baby. I’d then have to wait 24 hours before coming back for the procedure. She said that I could either see the sonogram or listen to the baby’s heartbeat, adding weakly that this choice was mine. “I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.
But it couldn’t be helped.
“I’m so sorry that I have to do this,” the doctor told us, “but if I don’t, I can lose my license.” Before he could even start to describe our baby, I began to sob until I could barely breathe. Somewhere, a nurse cranked up the volume on a radio, allowing the inane pronouncements of a DJ to dull the doctor’s voice. Still, despite the noise, I heard him. His unwelcome words echoed off sterile walls while I, trapped on a bed, my feet in stirrups, twisted away from his voice. “Here I see a well-developed diaphragm and here I see four healthy chambers of the heart…” I closed my eyes and waited for it to end, as one waits for the car to stop rolling at the end of a terrible accident. When the description was finally over, the doctor held up a script and said he was legally obliged to read me information provided by the state. It was about the health dangers of having an abortion, the risks of infection or hemorrhage, the potential for infertility and my increased chance of getting breast cancer.
This is pure evil. |
The logo of Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, is seen on top of the company's headquarters in New Taipei City, Taiwan March 29, 2016. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu/File Photo
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Foxconn, which assembles Apple Inc products, said on Monday two workers at its manufacturing facilities in China died last week, even as the company made efforts to improve labor conditions that came under scrutiny after a spate of suicides in recent years.
Foxconn, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, said a male employee, who joined the company last month, was found dead outside a building in Zhengzhou on Thursday, while a female employee died in a train accident on her way to work on Friday.
The company did not give further details, but said it was cooperating with authorities investigating the deaths.
The two employees worked at the Zhengzhou plant in the Henan province, which analysts say has become a hub for Foxconn’s production of Apple devices such as iPhone.
A year ago, another employee in Zhengzhou died. A labor rights group said at the time that it was a suicide.
Employee deaths in China are sensitive for the Taiwanese firm. After a series of suicides in 2010-2011, most at its Shenzhen manufacturing operation, Foxconn sought to improve labour conditions.
“Our efforts are ongoing and we are determined to do whatever we can to anticipate the changing needs of our large workforce in China,” Foxconn said in a statement Monday.
Foxconn employs about 1.3 million people during peak production times, making it one of the largest private employers in the world. |
OAKLEY, Summit County — Two snowboarders are "lucky to be alive," police say, after an avalanche overtook them on a backcountry slope Wednesday.
The two men, both in their early 40s, were in a group of 11 from the Salt Lake Valley who visited the mountainous area of Mud Lake Flat, roughly a mile west of Smith-Morehouse Reservoir in eastern Summit County. Around 4 p.m., someone in the group "jumped off a rock and triggered the avalanche," Summit County Sheriff's Lt. Andrew Wright said.
"This snow's going about 40 to 50 miles per hour, it's crashing into ... trees, snapping trees," said Craig Gordon, a forecaster for the Utah Avalanche Center.
The swift slide pinned one of the men against a tree, breaking both of his legs, Wright said. The other man was buried under 6 to 12 inches of snow for about eight minutes, he said.
"That is a long time when you don't have any oxygen," Wright said.
The group was able to locate the buried man because "his snowboard was barely sticking up out of the snow," according to the lieutenant.
"That is the only reason that they ... found him and were able to save his life," Wright said.
The man's avalanche beacon had been malfunctioning while on the mountain, so he had decided to turn it off, Wright said.
Two snowboarders are "lucky to be alive," police say, after an avalanche overtook them on a backcountry slope Wednesday. (Photo: Trent Meisenheimer)
Despite each man's remarkable survival, the ordeal wasn't over, as their group was unable to reach police until just after 8 p.m. The snowboarders had all arrived in the area using a snowcat, but the vehicle broke down as they tried to descend the mountain to get cellphone service and call for help, Wright said.
Eventually, three people from the group were able to make it to Oakley and contact police. Search and rescue crews reached the men near Smith-Morehouse Reservoir and used a medical helicopter to take the man with broken legs to a hospital in Salt Lake County.
The man who was initially buried "is said to be in OK condition," Wright said.
The slide measured about 4 feet deep, "several hundred feet wide" and cascaded down a slope for about 800 feet, Gordon said, noting avalanche danger in northern Utah has been extremely high and that "dangerous, human-triggered avalanches are likely" in that part of the state.
"It doesn't get more dangerous than this. ... Once triggered, avalanches can get quickly out of hand," Gordon said. "Any avalanche that you trigger right now ... is going to break deep, it's going to break wide, and there's a possibility that it might be unsurvivable."
Wright stressed that anyone thinking about spending time in the mountains should check avalanche advisories. Up-to-date conditions can be found at www.utahavalanchecenter.org.
"They are lucky to be alive, we're glad that they're alive, we're glad that we were able to get them the help that they needed," Wright said. "But, you know, it can be avoided."
Gordon said backcountry explorers need to have proper avalanche emergency equipment with them at all times. He added that, during periods of extreme avalanche risk, the wise choice is not to go into backcountry areas at all.
"The best avalanche is the one we don't trigger. ... Right now we just need to exercise a little bit of patience, tone down our objectives and just stick with gentle terrain," he said.
Those who just can't get enough of a challenging ride down the mountain always have resorts as a safe option, Gordon said.
"If you want to get into steep terrain, enjoy the greatest snow on Earth at the greatest resorts on Earth, where active avalanche reduction work is routinely performed," he said.
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BuzzFeed has deleted more posts than some smaller websites likely publish in an entire year.
The online publisher revealed the results of an internal review this week, which found that it has deleted 1,112 posts for reasons ranging from technical errors (263 deleted posts) to duplicated work (122 deleted posts) and copyright issues (65 deleted posts). Yet, it's the smallest number that is attracting the most controversy: three. That's how many posts BuzzFeed admits it deleted over "advertiser complaints."
See also: BuzzFeed writer resigns after controversy over deleted post
The internal review's findings again spotlight the issue of how a young publication for all things viral — one with arguably a lower bar for publishing and un-publishing content — transitions to becoming a true news organization, including all the editorial standards that brings. It also raises the question of how online publishers navigate relationships with advertisers, which form the bulk of their revenue.
Ben Smith, who took over as BuzzFeed's editor-in-chief three years ago, explained in a memo first obtained by Gawker that two of the three posts deleted for advertising reasons had effectively muddled the lines between editorial and the brand in question.
On March 5, 2013, an editorial staffer published an article ridiculing Microsoft's Internet Explorer, despite having previously worked on an ad campaign for Microsoft in a previous role at BuzzFeed. That led to a complaint from BuzzFeed's chief revenue officer, and the post was ultimately taken down.
The following January 2014, BuzzFeed editorial again dealt with blowback from its business side, after a writer criticized Pepsi's Twitter marketing at a time when the publication was producing Twitter content for Pepsi tied to the Super Bowl.
"We’d never previously considered the case of an editor would be writing about an ad that was produced by our creative team, but we decided it was inappropriate and deleted the post," Smith explained in the memo, which was sent to staff on Saturday.
The third case had to do with Mark Duffy, BuzzFeed's former ad critic who seemingly accused deodorant brand Axe of "worldwide mass rape." An advertising agency complained, the post was pulled and Duffy was later fired from BuzzFeed.
"He made me delete it one month after it was posted, due to apparent pressure from Axe's owner Unilever. How that's for editorial integrity?" Duffy wrote in a post after leaving BuzzFeed. "Ben Smith also questioned other posts I did knocking major advertisers' ads (he kept repeating the phrase 'punching down')."
In Saturday's memo, Smith attempted to frame the findings about posts deleted over advertising pressure in a positive light.
"I’m also frankly relieved that the review didn’t turn up any external pressures or advertiser contacts that I didn’t know about," he wrote. "And amid all this conversation about church and state, I do want to make one thing clear: We expect you to write and make decisions independently of our advertisers and our sales side."
The report comes a little more than a week after it was revealed that BuzzFeed had quietly deleted two posts critical of Dove and Monopoly. They were later restored, but not before some outlets accused BuzzFeed of pulling posts for portraying sponsors negatively.
Smith denied those allegations, explaining that they were removed for being personal opinions, but then admitted he had handled the situation poorly.
"I blew it," Smith wrote in an email to staff earlier this month. "Twice in the last couple of months, I've asked editors — over their better judgment and without any respect to our standards or process — to delete recently publish posts from the site."
To make matters worse, BuzzFeed implemented a new set of editorial guidelines at the beginning of this year precisely to prevent these issues from happening: "Editorial posts should never be deleted for reasons related to their content, or because a subject or stakeholder has asked you to do so." |
Come mid-April, you'll be able to jump off the Light Rail and, within minutes, be sitting at a bar throwing back skewered snacks and sipping on wine while you watch your dinner get cooked over a wood charcoal grill. That's the scene chef Ben Lefenfeld (formerly from the kitchens of Petit Louis Bistro and Charleston), his wife Amy, and brother Jacob envisioned when they started planning La Cuchara, the soon-to-open Basque Country-focused restaurant within Woodberry's Meadow Mill complex. The Basque region is along the border of southern France and northern Spain and known for serving pintxos (smaller tapas) and wood-grilled meats.
"I love the idea of going to a bar, nibbling on pintxos, and having a couple glasses of [Basque] Txakoli wine," Ben Lefenfeld excitedly said.
The wood-fire asador grill, Lefenfeld said, is not unlike an Argentinean grill, "but instead of cooking with raw wood, we produce charcoal with fire cages that will be behind the wood grill." He said that the use of charcoal eliminates the bitterness you can get from raw wood without losing the good sear and smoky flavor.
The menu will feature eight rotating pintxos at $2 each, six to 10 tapas for $7-$10, and a handful of entrees from $18-$32. The pintxos are also, as Lefenfeld described, a risk-free way to sample the goods. "Even if you're just getting a glass of beer or wine, you can try four or five things for under $10," he said.
The space will seat 185 people and feature two dining areas and a long 40-seat bar area where guests can watch the open kitchen and wood grill in action just behind it.
Pending permits and construction, Lefenfeld said they plan to have La Cuchara open for dinner service by the second or third week of April. Asked about being in the Woodberry neighborhood, where the food scene has grown dramatically since the opening of Woodberry Kitchen, Lefenfeld saw only positives.
"We're excited to grow with a lot of the restaurants in that area and really become another food destination in Baltimore," he said. |
Pearl Jam’s next album is entitled “Lightning Bolt,” which proved prophetic Friday at Wrigley Field as the band and its fans endured a 2 ½-hour rain delay. Sandwiched around the evacuation of the stage and infield, the Seattle quintet delivered a typically overstuffed 32-song, three-hour set.
“Ernie Banks likes to say ‘Let’s play two,’ ” singer Eddie Vedder said as he re-emerged just before midnight after the lengthy delay. “I say, ‘Let’s play until two.’”
He then produced Banks himself, and Vedder and the Cubs Hall of Famer sang a chorus of the singer’s diehard Cubs anthem, “All the Way.”
“I appreciate all of you coming to my house tonight,” Banks said.
Then Vedder and his bandmates made good on his promise – Pearl Jam did indeed play until 2 a.m., far past the Wrigley curfew of 11 p.m.
The concert began in mugginess, with the kind of slow build typical of Pearl Jam’s longer concerts. Dressed in black, Vedder, Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament and Matt Cameron entered with the simmering “Release” and some deep-album tracks, then the wistful “Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town.” Whispers were exchanged on stage shortly after 9 p.m., and pretty soon Vedder was telling the fans on the infield to move toward the grandstand to find shelter from the oncoming storm. The evacuation was orderly, the wait interminable. Within 30 minutes, the weather system had washed out the last half of the headlining set by Bjork at Union Park and the second half of Phish’s concert at Northerly Island a few miles to the south of Wrigley.
The storm wasn’t nearly as severe when it reached the ballpark, but the concert didn’t resume until officials were convinced that the threatening weather system had dissipated. Once things got started again, all the pent-up energy came crashing through on “Do the Evolution,” with a deranged Gossard guitar solo; a ferocious “Corduroy,” with McCready closing down an extended conversation among the three guitarists; and a sprint through “Rearviewmirror,” with Cameron delivering drum volleys worthy of Keith Moon.
The band dug out as many connoisseur’s cuts from its catalogue as it did hits. In some ways, Pearl Jam has become the alternative-rock era’s answer to the Grateful Dead, with its ever-morphing set lists and stadium-level following, even as the band has drastically slowed its output of studio recordings. Little wonder its sets are sometimes a bumpy -- if usually rewarding -- ride.
A few quibbles and observations about this one: A McCready solo is the band’s fallback position during its weaker moments. Whenever a song falters or doesn’t quite have enough juice to reach the finish line, the ball gets tossed to the wiry, mohawked guitarist – as during the title track from “Lightning Bolt” and the pedestrian “Even Flow.” Vedder also tested his fans’ goodwill by pulling out an accordion for the perverse “Bugs.” At least he left the ukuleles back stage.
Except for those missteps, Pearl Jam lived up to the sense of occasion that goes with one of Vedder’s hometown shows inside one of the city’s prized pieces of real estate. The singer is a longtime and therefore long-suffering Cubs fan, and he reminisced about “the corridor of light” when he first climbed the stairs to see Wrigley Field as a boy. He was in terrific voice, his baritone rich and resonant – never more so than on a staggering cover of Pink Floyd’s “Mother.” Accompanied by Gossard’s acoustic guitar, Vedder brought bite to certain phrases, poignance to others, and made the classic-rock standard sound surprisingly fresh.
Another distinctive touch was a cover of “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” by Mother Love Bone, a 1980s Seattle band that included future Pearl Jam members Gossard and Ament. Somehow Pearl Jam evoked the fragility and snakiness of the original – and its defining performance by the late singer Andrew Wood – in its own brawnier language.
By the time a cover of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World” closed the show, it was also nearly closing time at the Wrigleyville bars. Yet the park as well as the surrounding rooftops were still full of celebrating fans.
“We’d like to play here every summer,” Vedder said. Even if they do, it’s doubtful the band and its fans will have a night as long and strange as this one.
[email protected]
Pearl Jam set list Friday at Wrigley Field:
1. Release
2. Nothingman
3. Present Tense
4. Hold On
5. Low Light
6. Come Back
7. Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town
Rain delay
8. All the Way
9. All Night
10. Do the Evolution
11. Setting Forth
12. Corduroy
13. Faithfull
14. Mind Your Manners
15. Lightning Bolt
16. State of Love and Trust
17. Wishlist
18. Even Flow
19. Leatherman
20. Mike McCready solo: Eruption (Van Halen)
21. Bugs
22. Why Go
23. Unthought Known
24. Rearviewmirror
Encore
25. Future Days
26. Mother (Pink Floyd)
27. Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns (Mother Love Bone)
28. Porch
29. Wasted Reprise
30. Life Wasted
31. Black
32. Rockin’ in the Free World (Neil Young) |
Becoming a grandmother was never something Sandy had cared much about. But when Felix was born, she was thrilled. He was in the neonatal intensive-care unit when she arrived in Austin; doctors had detected a bacterial infection in his urine and were administering antibiotics. Sandy sat in a rocking chair alongside the bassinet, and Emily handed the infant to her, naked except for his diaper, the IV port in his tiny hand capped off until the next infusion. She gazed down at her grandson, placid and perfect. She cooed and babbled. For weeks afterward, she talked about those first moments holding Felix. “I don’t know what I was saying or what I was doing,” she would say. “But he just looked into my eyes.”
Emily was surprised to see her mother so at ease in the traditional role of Felix’s bubbe (Yiddish for “grandmother”). As a parent in the 1970s, Sandy turned every interaction with her children into a political act. During story time, she would go through their picture books with a bottle of Wite-Out and a Magic Marker, changing a hero’s name from male to female, revising plot lines, adding long hair or breasts to some of the drawings. Story time was a different experience with Felix. Sandy would cuddle with the baby and turn pages. If she couldn’t remember the word for “zebra” or “lion,” she wouldn’t fuss about it. “Oh, it’s some animal,” she would say.
She told Emily that her “new brain” might actually make her better suited to being a grandmother than her focused, hyperanalytical “old brain.” She seemed to have found a way of being that she liked, content to sing silly songs and make nonsense sounds for hours on end.
Emily liked her mother this way, too. It had sometimes been difficult to be Sandy’s daughter. As a child, Emily wanted to wear her hair long and take ballet lessons; Sandy, ever vigilant about gender stereotypes, nudged her to cut her hair and play soccer instead. But now Sandy didn’t seem to care about such things. Emily thought that her mother was taking pleasure in life in a way that the old Sandy could not have anticipated — and she found herself hoping that the joy her mother took in Felix might make her reconsider her intention to end her life quite so soon.
The others in Sandy’s inner circle saw her relationship with Felix and wondered what it would mean for her original plan. The old Sandy, who valued her rationality and her agency, had been clear that she would be unwilling to keep living when she could no longer articulate coherent thoughts. But this newer Sandy didn’t seem unhappy living her life in this compromised way. Ultimately, who should make the decision to die, the old Sandy or the new one?
Ronald Dworkin, an influential legal scholar and the author of “Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia and Individual Freedom,” wrote about a kind of hierarchy of needs for people in Sandy’s situation, who want their autonomy to be respected even as disease changes the essence of who they are and what autonomy means. He differentiated between “critical interests” (personal goals and desires that make life worth living) and “experiential interests” (enjoying listening to music, for instance, or eating chocolate ice cream). Sandy was appreciating her experiential interests — playing with Felix and working in her garden — but her critical interests were far more sophisticated and were moving out of her reach. Critical interests should take priority when making end-of-life choices on behalf of someone whose changed state renders her less capable of deciding on her own, Dworkin wrote, because critical interests reflect your true identity. The new Sandy seemed to love being a grandmother, but it was important to take into account what the old Sandy would have wanted.
Granting priority to critical interests is difficult even in a society that tries to do so. In the Netherlands, the Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Act makes it possible for a doctor to end a person’s life when she is not cognitively able to do it herself, as long as she laid out her intention while she was still competent. According to the 2002 law, if someone with Alzheimer’s disease has an advance directive declaring her wish to die when her dementia reaches a point she considers intolerable — when she has to be spoon-fed, for example, or put in diapers — that document is sufficient to allow a doctor to perform euthanasia. Nevertheless, it is rare for a doctor in the Netherlands to actually euthanize a patient who has dementia. In fact, one recent survey of 110 Dutch physicians treating dementia patients with advance directives asking to be euthanized found not a single one who had carried out the request. And of the 4,829 people who died in 2013 under the Dutch euthanasia act, just 97 of them, or 2 percent, had dementia. |
Read more of Slate’s coverage of Iran’s June 12 election and its aftermath.
Defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi addresses supporters
TEHRAN, Iran—Events here over the last two days have highlighted the vast differences in how supporters of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and those of his main rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, view the official results of Friday’s election.
From a logical point of view, the results seem dubious at best. Ahmadinejad is reported to have received well over 60 percent of the vote, compared with just more than 30 percent for Mousavi. Given the large number of Azeri Turks (Mousavi’s ethnicity) in Iran, the number of people in major cities campaigning for him—and, perhaps most important, the number of women mobilized by his outspoken wife, Zahra Rahnavard—the race seemed a lot tighter than the final tally would indicate.
A feeling of dejection hung in the air for most of Saturday. Spontaneous street demonstrations early in the day were small and were quickly broken up by riot police on motorcycles.
As reality set in, people began taking to the streets en masse. Around 5 p.m. on the approach to Fatemi Square, where the Interior Ministry is located, I could see that the entire traffic circle had been closed to car traffic. About 200 riot police waited in the middle of the square. I headed down an alley, just steps away, where protesters had created a blockade of flaming garbage cans.
The demonstrators pushed aside a garbage can, opening a path, and rushed forward. Simultaneously, baton-wielding police charged. The protesters hurled rocks, and the police responded by beating everyone who couldn’t escape into one of the connecting alleys.
Citizens, nearly all on the side of the protesters, left their front gates open just a little to offer those of us fleeing the police an escape route.
As we caught our breath in someone’s driveway, I asked a man in his mid-30s whether he had witnessed anything like this before. “Over the last two weeks,” he told me, “between the debates, the number of people in the street last week, and the violence now—no. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Along with the anger, there was still a sense of excitement and exuberance, as though the nation were releasing frustrations bottled up for decades.
Just to the south, above Valiasr Square, one of Tehran’s major commercial hubs, lines of protesters chanting “Death to the dictator” blocked traffic on the city’s busiest street. In every direction, small groups of four or five congregated to discuss what they’d seen, sometimes dispersing when the police began to move in.
A woman who was trying to cross the avenue was shoved onto the sidewalk by a member of the Basij militia, who spat at her, “We will kill those of you who come into the street!” As she walked away, she exclaimed in disbelief, “They steal our vote and then they talk to us like that?”
Chaos erupted again as people fled in all directions. As they attacked the crowds with their batons, the Basij responded to the protesters’ shouts of “Death to the dictator!” with cries of “God is great!”
I approached an elderly man who seemed riveted but disgusted by the scene unfolding in front of him. “I’ve never seen violence like this before,” he said, “What can you expect when you disrespect the people? This is a coup d’état. After blatantly cheating the people, they won’t be able to turn this off.”
Similar riots took place throughout Tehran Saturday night.
Sunday presented an entirely different scene. Starting early in the day, riot police positioned themselves throughout the city. The morning hours were quiet ahead of an official press conference at which President Ahmadinejad would address the foreign press.
After a short prayer—an offering of praise to God, the revolution, and a wish for the speedy return of the hidden imam—Ahmadinejad scolded the foreign press, accusing us of meddling in Iranian politics and disseminating propaganda against him and his government. As I listened, I couldn’t help but think how ungrateful he is—over the last four years, it’s the Western media that have given him a voice, and he knows it. The press conference wasn’t for the people of Iran; it was about giving the world the show it wanted.
In his opening remarks, Ahmadinejad proclaimed the election “the most glorious in recent history.”
He went on for some time, claiming a series of achievements that anyone who has spent time in Iran would dismiss as nonsense. Among the most laughable: “Iran has provided an international model for managing a state.” He went on to compare the current street violence to the aftermath of a soccer match and condescended to a domestic reporter, “Don’t worry about it too much.”
Halfway through the press conference, I joined some Iranian photographers who were heading out to Valiasr Square where Ahmadinejad was scheduled to deliver a speech to his adoring fans later in the afternoon.
As we approached the square by car, the crowd had grown so massive that we had to get out and walk the last half-mile. These people were very different from the folks who had gathered in the same spot 24 hours earlier. A mix of government workers, injured war veterans, schoolchildren, and the elderly filled the area, many of them bused in for the occasion from remote corners of the country. I saw some activity in the middle of the crowd and thought it was a fight, but it was just Basij handing out cookies and juice boxes.
The location of Ahmadinejad’s speech—the third-floor balcony of a rundown commercial building—was an odd choice. I joined the photographers on the ledge overlooking the throngs.
One of the people charged with stirring up the emotions of the crowd told them, “There are cameras from every major newspaper and TV station in the world. Let’s show the world our love for Dr. Ahmadinejad!”
When the warm-up guy led the crowd in the singing of the national anthem, he stopped partway through and asked them to start again with “more feeling.” The orchestrated nature of the event came as no surprise to this crowd, but I doubt that many of the non-Iranian journalists knew just how blatant the showmanship was.
I moved toward the back edge of the balcony, away from the stage and crowd, to give the photographers room to shoot. Behind me, in the alley below, I heard a few cars and saw a commotion as people rushed toward several Japanese SUVs. Then I saw blood. I thought a member of Ahmadinejad’s entourage had been hit by a car. No. They had slaughtered a calf for the auspicious occasion.
As the photographers snapped pictures, I made my way toward the only door leading from the street to the balcony to get a closer look.
Ahmadinejad is as short as he looks. I was able to stand among his security people for quite a while. I guess I look like one of them. I can’t go into detail about what he said, because, frankly, I was marveling at the manufactured spectacle of the whole thing and wondering what it must look like on television back in the United States. |
THE Daily Echo can today reveal the full explosive details of an investigation into Hampshire’s top police officer.
The chief constable of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, Andy Marsh, is facing a police probe from a separate force into claims he ordered a whitewash over the failure of police investigations into shocking sex abuse allegations at a Hampshire special school.
He is also accused of breaching confidentiality and contempt of court in connection with the same inquiry.
The complaints centre on Hampshire police’s investigation into allegations that a girl was raped and other pupils were sexually abused at the former Stanbridge Earls School near Romsey, which closed last year.
The full extent of the inquiry into Mr Marsh can be revealed for the first time today after the details of Essex Police’s investigation – named Operation Oregon – were leaked to the Daily Echo.
Their investigation is being carried out on behalf of Hampshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Simon Hayes – which is understood to be the first time a UK PCC has ordered a probe of its own chief constable.
The document shows how Mr Marsh is being probed over NINE complaints.
These include:
• A failure to undertake a thorough investigation into the sexual abuse of vulnerable pupils.
• As a result, a failure to protect a vulnerable child from harm.
• Giving “instructions” to officers that were designed to “mislead” parents of alleged victims.
• Leaking details of alleged victims.
Some of these relate to Operation Flamborough – an inquiry set up by Hampshire police after claims Stanbridge Earls failed to properly protect a vulnerable child who claimed to have been raped by fellow pupils.
Mr Marsh is being investigated over claims he told his boss, Mr Hayes pictured right, that the operation was “established to protect Hampshire Constabulary’s reputation”.
He is also facing claims that he leaked details of a criminal investigation and details of alleged rape victims to Caroline Nokes, the MP for Romsey and Southampton North, as well as to Hampshire County Council.
There is no suggestion that the authority or Mrs Nokes are under investigation.
The probe also focuses on whether officers from Hampshire police were instructed to “mislead” parents of alleged victims into thinking Operation Flamborough was an investigation into the sexual abuse of children.
When the Daily Echo revealed last year that Mr Marsh was under investigation, spokesmen from Hampshire Constabulary and Mr Hayes’s office said they were aware of a complaint that had been made and that it would be inappropriate to comment further.
As previously reported by the Daily Echo, a Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal found last year that the £39,000-a-year school had discriminated against a girl and that staff members failed to tell the youngster’s parents that she had complained of pain in an intimate part of her body.
The tribunal found that a vulnerable youngster had suffered “appalling abuse” at the hands of another student, while the school was slammed by panel members for being “unsystematic, unprofessional, ad hoc and completely inadequate” when it came to protecting the youngster.
Part of Operation Flamborough was to involve an internal inquiry into whether police involved in previous investigations into sex abuse claims at the school should be disciplined.
Mr Marsh was appointed in January last year to take over as chief constable from Alex Marshall – the same time that details first came to light of allegations that a vulnerable teenager had been groomed and sexually abused at Stanbridge Earls.
Mr Marsh joined Hampshire Constabulary as deputy chief constable in July 2010. When approached by the Daily Echo, Mrs Nokes, pictured left, said she did not intend to comment on the issue and had referred our questions to Essex Police.
A Hampshire County Council spokesman said: “We can confirm that we are aware of Operation Oregon, but are not able to provide any further comments – which should be sought from Essex Constabulary who are undertaking the investigation.”
Ongoing Controversey
THE revelations are the latest twist in the on-running controversy surrounding Stanbridge Earls.
Details came to light in January 2013 of allegations that a vulnerable teenager had been groomed and sexually abused by another student.
A Special Educational Needs and Disability Tribunal report said systems which should have protected the girl were “unsystematic, unprofessional, ad hoc and completely inadequate”.
Head teacher Peter Trythall was accused of “a failure of responsibility”.
The report described how the girl went to school staff and it became clear she had been involved in a sexual encounter. Her parents were not informed, and only found out when she told them at a later date.
In the months that followed, the Department of Education called the standard of care at the school “shockingly poor”, but Ofsted bosses had to take disciplinary action against some of their own staff after admitting mistakes were made while investigating the school.
Meanwhile, Hampshire police had set up Operation Flamborough to find out whether there had been “further criminal offences” at the school.
Later, an Independent Police Complaints Commission investigation began into complaints made to Hampshire police concerning their conduct over the abuse allegations.
In August last year, the Daily Echo revealed that chief constable Andy Marsh was under investigation.
The school closed when too few pupils were signed up for the next school year.
Caroline Nokes
The Accusations
IN A letter entitled “Operation Oregon – an investigation into your complaints against Chief Constable Andy Marsh”, Essex Police chief constable Stephen Kavanagh sets out the details of the probe.
Names of people involved have been changed to B, C and D to protect the identities of those
involved.
The letter, which is dated October 17 and headed with the Essex Police logo, sets out how it is
alleged that the chief constable of Hampshire Constabulary:
• Himself disclosed, and/or authorised or instructed a police officer serving with Hampshire
Constabulary to disclose, details of a criminal investigation, specifically details of a victim of alleged rape and/or sexual abuse and other personal data to third parties including; Caroline Nokes, Member of Parliament for Romsey and Southampton North, and Hampshire County Council. It is alleged that in doing so the Chief Constable; (1) breached the complainants’ and, where
applicable, their child’s right to confidentiality, (2) breached the Data Protection Act 1998, and (3) is in contempt of court.
• Prevented a Section 47 of the Children Act 1998 investigation without evaluating the risk to children involved.
• Concealed information from B’s child’s placing authority without evaluating the risk to the child.
• Gave instructions to officers which were designed to mislead two of the complainants, B and C, into thinking that Operation Flamborough was an investigation into the sexual abuse of children, when in fact merely represented a “strategy discussion” to prevent “negative publicity”.
• Informed the PCC that Operation Flamborough was established to protect Hampshire Constabulary’s reputation.
• Ignored his primary duties regarding investigating crime to the detriment of vulnerable children.
• Did not ensure that Operation Flamborough was a thorough investigation into the sexual abuse of female pupils and as a consequence D’s vulnerable child came to harm.
• Failed to protect D’s child from sexual abuse as a direct consequence of his actions.
• Breached C’s role as a possible witness. |
The Mariners’ second baseman takes home MVP honors after his homer in the top of the 10th gives AL a 2-1 lead.
MIAMI — Not playing wasn’t an option for Robinson Cano.
An admitted baseball junkie that can never get enough at-bats or ground balls, his love of baseball and the rush and honor of playing made it impossible to be a spectator for nine innings on baseball’s biggest stage.
And yet there were some people that didn’t want him to play.
Chosen to be a part of his eighth All-Star Game, the Mariners second baseman shrugged off the notion that he should rest his aching quadriceps in preparation for the second half of the season.
“If I’m here, I’m going to play,” he said defiantly to the talk-radio notion on Monday. “I want to play.”
Not only did Cano play, but he won the game for the American League on Tuesday night while taking home Most Valuable Player honors.
His laser of a solo homer over the right-field wall, on a curveball from Cubs closer Wade Davis in the top of the 10th inning, provided the go-ahead run for the American League in a 2-1 win at Marlins Park.
“He throws the hard cutter,” Cano said. “In my head, I was thinking, ‘You need to get the (bat) head out in front.’ But he hung the breaking ball and I put a good swing on it.”
He joins Ichiro (2007) and Ken Griffey Jr. (1992) as Mariners to be named an All-Star Game MVP.
“It’s always good to accomplish great things in front of your family,” he said, holding his young daughter, Galia Sofia, and his son, Robinson, to his right. “As a kid, you watch Griffey and all those guys that come to the All-Star Game and win MVP, you want to get that feeling. I got it once in the Home Run Derby. It feels great.”
Cano was definitely feeling no pain in that quad as he jogged around the bases, blowing bubbles and flashing his easy, toothy grin.
“It’s a little better,” he said, grinning. “You could see me limping a little bit.”
Cleveland’s Andrew Miller closed out the game to get the save while Boston closer Craig Kimbrel picked up the win in relief. After loading the bases in the top of the ninth, Kimbrel came back to strike out Redmond High product Michael Conforto swinging to end the inning.
In years past, Cano’s heroics might have ensured the Mariners or another AL team home-field advantage in the World Series. Aside from being a somewhat preposterous notion for a team that hasn’t sniffed the postseason since 2001, the rules for this year’s game have changed.
This time it didn’t count.
Like many All-Star Games before former commissioner Bud Selig’s controversial decision to allow home-field advantage to be determined by an exhibition game, Tuesday night’s game at Marlins Park was more celebration than competition, highlighting baseball’s growing number of talented young stars.
Per the recent collective-bargaining agreement, the All-Star Game no longer determines home-field advantage. Home-field advantage has reverted back to the team with the best record.
It was fitting, though, that this game went into extra innings. After all, it was the debacle of the 2002 game at Miller Park in Milwaukee that ended in a 7-7 tie after 11 innings that resulted, in the following season, making the game determine home-field advantage despite objections from the MLB players union.
Perhaps no moment summed up that return to fun more than just before Nelson Cruz stepped into the batter’s box in the sixth inning as a pinch-hitter, replacing starting designated hitter Corey Dickerson. Cruz reached into his back pocket and pulled out his cellphone and handed it to NL catcher Yadier Molina. He then asked plate umpire Joe West to pose for a photo.
“It was supposed to be a selfie,” Cruz said.
But his batting gloves made that impossible.
West, who surpassed the 5,000-game mark as an umpire in June, seemed confused initially, but then removed his mask while Molina knelt in front of the plate and snapped a few pics of the two smiling men.
“He’s a legend,” Cruz said. “I think that’s the only chance you have to take a picture with Joe West.”
Cruz also pointed out that West was the oldest person on the field. Something West relays to him during games. The relationship between the umpire and player dates to Cruz’s first year playing with the Rangers. That season, on a play at second where he should have slid but didn’t, Cruz thought he had made a silly baserunning out. Instead, West called him safe.
“He said, ‘Let’s go rookie, next time, slide,’ ” Cruz recalled. “That stuck in my mind. He saved my butt calling me safe.”
Still, it had to be a little awkward hitting with a cellphone in his back pocket — he did hit a deep fly ball to center.
“It was good,” he said. “I had it on silent if anyone called me.”
Asked if he was worried about damaging the phone, Cruz laughed and said, “I have insurance.”
Cruz wanted to do something similar in 2013. If he got on base he planned to take a picture with the first baseman. But he popped out in his first at-bat and left his phone on the bench in his second plate appearance when he drew a walk.
With the change in rules and the game not counting, Cruz felt like he could do the picture. The Fox broadcast did interviews with players during the game while they were playing in the field, and Alex Rodriguez delayed the game twice while doing interviews with players between innings on the field.
“I figured it wouldn’t be an issue,” Cruz said.
His teammate loved the picture.
“I really liked it,” Cano said. “This game is supposed to be fun. A lot of us liked that. That was one of the best moments in the game. Now I want to take one, too.”
It was one of a few highlights on a night where pitchers dominated. Though baseball is on pace to set a record for home runs in a season, the adage of good pitching beating good batting prevailed for much of the night. The teams combined to strike out 23 times with 17 total hits — only three of those for extra bases.
The American League grabbed a 1-0 lead in the fifth inning. Baltimore’s Jonathan Schoop doubled down the third-base line. He scored on Miguel Sano’s bloop single to right field. Three Nationals players — right fielder Bryce Harper, second baseman Daniel Murphy and first baseman Ryan Zimmerman — all sprinted for the ball, but each of them seemed unsure of what the other might do. So there was no diving attempt made by any of them and the ball dropped just feet inside the foul line.
Schoop scooted home to give the AL the lead.
“There are players that have played in like five All-Star Games and didn’t have a base hit,” Sano said. “I got a hit and a RBI.”
The NL tied the score in the sixth inning on Molina’s solo homer to right field. |
Indeed, this constant causal interaction with our environment raises doubts not only about how firm the core of the “self” is but, in a sense, how firm the bounds of the self are. Buddhism’s doubts about the distinctness and solidity of the “self” — and of other things, for that matter — rests on a recognition of the sense in which pervasive causality means pervasive fluidity.
The kind of inquiry that produced Buddhist views on the human psyche isn’t scientific; it doesn’t involve experiments that generate publicly observable data. It rests more on a kind of meditative introspection — somewhat in the spirit of what Western philosophers call phenomenology. Yet Buddhism long ago generated insights that modern psychology is only now catching up to, and these go beyond doubts about the C.E.O. self.
For example, psychology has lately started to let go of its once-sharp distinction between “cognitive” and “affective” parts of the mind; it has started to see that feelings are so finely intertwined with thoughts as to be part of their very coloration. This wouldn’t qualify as breaking news in Buddhist circles. A sutra attributed to the Buddha says that a “mind object” — a category that includes thoughts — is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”
Brain-scan studies have produced tentative evidence that this lusting and disliking — embracing thoughts that feel good and rejecting thoughts that feel bad — lies near the heart of certain “cognitive biases.” If such evidence continues to accumulate, the Buddhist assertion that a clear view of the world involves letting go of these lusts and dislikes will have drawn a measure of support from modern science.
Gopnik thinks that attempts to corroborate Buddhist ideas with modern science run into a contradiction. After all, Buddhism is in a sense suspicious of “stories” — such as those stories that mindfulness meditation can help liberate us from. And, Gopnik says, science is just “competitive storytelling” — which means, he says, that Buddhism is “antithetical” to scientific argument. He writes, “Science is putting names on things and telling stories about them, the very habits that Buddhists urge us to transcend.” Well, this irony doesn’t seem to have deterred the Buddhists who, a couple of millenniums ago, compiled the “Abhidhamma Pitaka,” which puts names on lots of mental phenomena and tells stories about how they relate to one another. And it doesn’t seem to bother the Dalai Lama, who has embraced science as a legitimate way to test Buddhist ideas.
I agree with Gopnik on one thing: There are parts of Buddhist philosophy that, even when properly understood, seem paradoxical or opaque. But these tend to involve the same issues that drive Western philosophers toward paradox and opaqueness — for example, the relationship of consciousness to the physical body. Language is indeed (as notable Western philosophers have held) incapable of encompassing all of reality, and I’m pretty sure that the human mind is incapable of comprehending all of reality.
All we can do is clear away as many impediments to comprehension as possible. Science has a way of doing that — by insisting that entrants in its “competitive storytelling” demonstrate explanatory power in ways that are publicly observable, thus neutralizing, to the extent possible, subjective biases that might otherwise prevail. Buddhism has a different way of doing it: via meditative disciplines that are designed to attack subjective biases at the source, yielding a clearer view of both the mind itself and the world beyond it.
The results of these two inquiries converge to a remarkable extent — an extent that can be appreciated only in light of the last few decades of progress in psychology and evolutionary science. At least, that’s my argument. It may be wrong. But it’s an argument that can be engaged by anyone willing to engage it — which is something it has in common with Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist psychology. |
Global climate talks got an inauspicious start in Durban, South Africa, on Monday with reports that Canada planned to withdraw fully from the Kyoto Protocol, a carbon-limiting multinational treaty first adopted in 1997 and scheduled to expire in 2012.
Canada had already signaled that it would take a hard stance at the Durban talks, where negotiators from around the world are hoping, among other things, to extend the Kyoto agreement with a new phase of emissions reduction commitments. But the suggestion that Canada also planned to abandon its commitments under the original Kyoto protocol, which the nation appears unlikely to meet in any case, was met with deep disappointment by advocates for climate action assembled at the conference.
"Canada has been very clear that it would not be taking on a second commitment period," said Tasneem Essop, a former provincial minister of environment, planning and economic development in the South African province of Western Cape and head of the delegation for the environmental group WWF. "But abandoning the first commitment period would mean that Canada will have absolutely no integrity in the international arena.
"I believe that there will be a backlash against Canada," Essop added in a phone call. "The NGOs are very angry about this news, and Canada will have to do a lot of hard work to regain credibility."
A report on Sunday by the Canadian broadcast network CTV suggested that the Canadian government, under the leadership of conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, had planned to make an announcement on the nation's withdrawal from Kyoto "a few days before Christmas." Speaking to reporters on Monday, Canadian representatives neither confirmed nor denied reports of its withdrawal plans, though the nation's environment minister, Peter Kent, asserted in no uncertain terms that "Kyoto is the past."
In a transcript of the press conference provided to The Huffington Post by a spokesman for the environment ministry, Kent also described Canada's participation in the Kyoto agreement as the folly of his government's predecessors. "Our government believes that the previous Liberal government signing on to Kyoto was one of the biggest blunders they made," Kent said, "particularly given they had no intention of fulfilling that commitment."
The Kyoto agreement -- which grew out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, 14 years ago -- bound more than three dozen industrialized countries to reduce emissions of certain greenhouse gases by a given percentage, averaging just over 5 percent, over 1990 levels. The protocol was to take effect only after at least 55 countries, representing 55 percent of global CO2 emissions, had ratified the document. Those conditions were fully met in 2004, and the treaty was entered into force in early 2005.
The emissions reductions were to be achieved between 2008 and 2012, the period during which countries would be required to report their progress. Developing nations were not required to make significant reductions, and the United States, accounting for nearly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and by far the largest global per capita emitter, refused to participate.
Europe has made up the bulk of the emissions reductions, and collectively, industrialized countries are on track to achieve the Kyoto goal of reducing their emissions by at least 5.2 percent over 1990 levels. This is true even when including U.S. emissions, which have increased by more than 10 percent over 1990 levels, according to an analysis of global emissions inventories published in September by the Netherlands environmental ministry.
But much of the decrease in emissions is attributed to the collapse of East European and Russian economies in the post-Soviet era, as well as to the current global recession, which has helped to reduce industrial output and overall energy use in many countries. Establishing a second phase for the Kyoto protocol, which officially expires at the end of next year, is a primary goal for negotiators gathered in Durban over the next two weeks -- although significant stumbling blocks make that outcome uncertain.
The United States -- and increasingly, Canada -- are among rich nations that have argued that developing countries like China must formally agree to emissions reductions of their own before a truly global and binding climate treaty can be reached. Short of that, they argue, industrialized economies are unduly hobbled, while powerhouses of the developing world, which are expected to account for an increasing share of global emissions, are able to grow and pollute with abandon.
Developing nations counter that the U.S., Europe and other developed countries became rich through profligate use of inexpensive and CO2-intensive energy sources like oil, coal and natural gas, and that they are to blame for the current build-up of greenhouse gases now warming the planet. They also suggest that it is unfair to ask poor nations to avoid use of inexpensive fossil fuels at precisely the time when they are poised to repeat the economic growth enjoyed by the rich world over the last century.
A $100 billion Green Climate Fund, first posited at the failed climate talks in Copenhagen in 2009, is designed to provide financial assistance to developing nations in their efforts to combat climate change, and establishing an architecture and funding for the trust is among the many goals of the Durban talks. But signs emerged even before negotiations got underway that progress on that front might also prove difficult.
Global greenhouse emissions, meanwhile, continue to rise, and even some participants in the first phase of Kyoto are expected to fall short of their goals under the agreement. This includes Canada, which had pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6 percent compared to 1990 levels. Canada's most recent inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, submitted to the United Nations earlier this year, showed that while the country had been making year-over-year reductions since 2008, its emissions are still nearly 20 percent higher than they were in 1990.
Critics in large part blame increased development of the tar sands, a vast and contentious deposit of sand, clay and oil in northern Alberta. The Canadian government has expressed strong support for stepped-up exploitation of the tar sands, which they view as an economic boon. But opponents have argued that the carbon footprint associated with such an expansion would permanently cripple global efforts to get global warming under control. |
The Canadian Press
NEW WESTMINSTER, B.C. -- A Vancouver-area police officer has been charged with second-degree murder in connection with a fatal standoff outside a casino two years ago.
B.C.'s criminal justice branch said Const. Jordan MacWilliams is charged in the death of Mehrdad Bayrami, 48, who was shot in November 2012. MacWilliams, who works for the police force in Delta, south of Vancouver, appeared in court Monday and was released on bail.
Police were called to the Starlight Casino, located in nearby New Westminster, on Nov. 8, 2012, after the reports that shots had been fired in the parking lot.
Police blocked off the area, including closing a major commuter bridge, and spent several hours attempting to negotiate an end to the standoff. Patrons in the casino were ordered to stay inside.
By the day's end, the province's Independent Investigations Office, which handles serious cases involving police officers, announced a suspect had been shot. Bayrami later died in hospital.
Neither police nor the Independent Investigations Office has said what prompted the shooting.
The Independent Investigations Office forwarded a report to Crown counsel in July of last year, though prosecutors subsequently requested more information, which they received this past July and earlier this month.
Delta police issued a written statement that said the force's "thoughts are with Mr. Bayrami's family."
In the statement, Delta police Chief Jim Cessford said he respects the roles of Crown and the independent investigators.
"This incident occurred almost two years ago and, given the independent nature of the investigation, I have limited knowledge of the details regarding this matter," the statement said.
"Also, considering the fact that this matter is now before the courts, I am not in a position to make any comment relative to the charges against Const. MacWilliams."
The criminal justice branch said MacWilliams is now out on bail, subject to a list of conditions.
His next appearance is scheduled for Dec. 18. |
From construction laborers and secretaries to physicians and lawyers, people experience better moods, greater vitality, and fewer aches and pains from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, concludes the first study of daily mood variation in employed adults to be published in the January 2010 issue of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. And that 'weekend effect' is largely associated with the freedom to choose one's activities and the opportunity to spend time with loved ones, the research found.
"Workers, even those with interesting, high status jobs, really are happier on the weekend," says author Richard Ryan, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester. "Our findings highlight just how important free time is to an individual's well-being," Ryan adds. "Far from frivolous, the relatively unfettered time on weekends provides critical opportunities for bonding with others, exploring interests and relaxing -- basic psychological needs that people should be careful not to crowd out with overwork," Ryan cautions.
The study tracked the moods of 74 adults, aged 18 to 62, who worked at least 30 hours per week. For three weeks, participants were paged randomly at three times during the day, once in the morning, the afternoon and the evening. At each page, participants completed a brief questionnaire describing the activity in which they were engaged and, using a seven-point scale, they rated their positive feelings like happiness, joy, and pleasure as well as negative feelings of anxiety, anger, and depression. Physical symptoms of stress, such as headaches, digestive problems, respiratory ills, or low energy, also were noted.
The results demonstrated that men and women alike consistently feel better mentally and physically on the weekend. They feel better regardless of how much money they make, how many hours they work, how educated they happen to be, or whether they work in the trades, the service industry, or in a professional capacity. They feel better whether they are single, married, living together, divorced, or widowed. And, they feel better regardless of age.
To tease out exactly why weekend hours are so magical, the researchers asked participants to indicate whether they felt controlled versus autonomous in the task they were engaged in at the time of the pager signal. Participants also indicated how close they felt to others present and how competent they perceived themselves to be at their activity.
The findings indicated that relative to workdays, weekends were associated with higher levels of freedom and closeness: people reported more often that they were involved in activities of their own choosing and spending time with more intimate friends and family members. Surprisingly, the analysis also found that people feel more competent during the weekend than they do at their day-to-day jobs.
The results support self-determination theory, which holds that well-being depends in large part on meeting one's basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This study, conclude the authors, "offers one of the first substantive and theory-based explanations for why wellbeing tends to be more favorable on the weekends: People experience greater autonomy and relatedness, which are, in turn, related to higher wellness." By contrast, write the authors, the work week "is replete with activities involving external controls, time pressures, and demands on behavior related to work, child care and other constraints." Workers also may spend time among colleagues with whom they share limited emotional connections.
The study also raises questions about how work environments can be structured to be more supportive of wellness. "To the extent that daily life, including work, affords a sense of autonomy, relatedness, and competence, well-being may be higher and more stable, rather than regularly rising and falling," the researchers conclude.
The weekend effect study was coauthored by Jessey Bernstein, professor of psychology from McGill University, and Kirk Warren Brown, professor of psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. |
SINGAPORE: Fans of McDonald's Nasi Lemak burger will no longer be able to get their fix, after the fast-food chain announced on Tuesday (Jul 25) that it was sold out islandwide, less than two weeks after it was first launched.
Other limited-edition items such as the Chendol McFlurry and Bandung McFizz have also sold out, McDonald's said in a press release in which it thanked Singaporeans for their "overwhelming support".
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The burger was launched as part of a special menu inspired by local favourites ahead of Singapore's National Day.
The Dinosaur McFlurry and EggCellent McSpicy. (Photos: McDonald's Singapore)
However, the chain also announced that from Wednesday it would be launching a new limited-edition item - the Eggcellent McSpicy. The new twist on the original McSpicy will feature spicy chicken thigh with a fresh golden fried egg, it said.
A new Dinosaur McFlurry will also be available, and both items will be on sale for a limited time, the fast-food chain added.
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McDonald's also said that as part of NS50 celebrations, all past and present National Servicemen can get a free apple pie or hot fudge sundae with every Extra Value Meal purchased (after breakfast hours) from Aug 4 to Aug 10.
Eligible customers have to present their SAFRA Card, 11B or Pink IC to redeem their treat. |
Responding to the statement issued by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterating its case and asking India to withdraw its soldiers from the Doklam area on Wednesday, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in a statement said, “India considers that peace and tranquillity in the India-China border areas is an important prerequisite for smooth development of our bilateral relations with China.” This comes amidst the continuing stand-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers in Doklam area.
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Earlier, China issued a 15-page statement even after the Indian National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval last week travelled to Beijing and held discussions with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi. In its statement, China provided the historical context and its arguments based on the 1890 Agreement between UK and China, and alleged that Indian soldiers “have illegally crossed the China-India boundary in the Sikkim sector and entered the Chinese territory”.
Giving out the details of the standoff, the Chinese statement said, “270 Indian soldiers moved down from Doka La post on June 18 to stop the Chinese from constructing the motorable road in what India believes to be Bhutanese territory. The number of Indian soldiers went up to 400, and three tents were also pitched by them as part of the stand-off. ” “There were still over 40 Indian soldiers and one bulldozer in the area, stopping the Chinese road construction party”, it said. Also Read | China reiterates its case on Doklam, asks Indian soldiers to leave the area | Click here
It asked India to “ immediately withdraw its trespassing border troops to the Indian side of the boundary and conduct a thorough investigation into the trespass”. The statement is also accompanied by a map of the area, two pictures and the text of the 1890 agreement.
Statement by China on the border row by The Indian Express on Scribd |
French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has been hurt after a fire broke out at his house outside Paris.
The blaze is thought to have started accidentally in a chimney where work was being carried out.
Marine Le Pen, who now leads the National Front party that her father founded, said: "His face was injured, but it is not serious, nothing to worry about."
There had been reports the elder Le Pen was shot in the face, though these appear to be incorrect.
The 86-year-old "fell while trying to escape the flames" at the house in Rueil-Malmaison, a source told AFP.
He and his wife were looked after by firefighters. They did not need to go to hospital.
Le Pen established the anti-immigrant and anti-establishment National Front in 1972.
His daughter took over the party in 2011 and helped increase its popularity so much it came first in France's EU elections last year. |
GENEVA — A school board in northern Switzerland said Wednesday that two Muslim boys who have refused to shake hands with their female teachers for religious reasons can be required to do so, ruling that their parents could face fines of up to 5,000 Swiss francs (about $6,500) if they don’t.
A public school in the northeastern Therwil municipality had sought the regional school board’s advice after accepting the boys’ belief that they should only willingly touch the women whom they will eventually marry. The school had temporarily exempted the teens from shaking hands with teachers.
The boys’ refusal set off a debate in Switzerland, which has a tradition of handshake greetings. Like elsewhere in Europe, Switzerland has at times struggled to strike the right cultural balance amid a recent influx of Muslims and other newcomers.
“The public interest concerning the equality of men and women as well as the integration of foreigners significantly outweighs the pupils’ freedom of religion and belief,” the school board said in a statement. “The social gesture of shaking hands is important if pupils are to be prepared for working life.”
Under the decision, teachers at the school can require their students to shake hands. Refusal to comply could land the parents with a warning, a call to a meeting with school leaders, other disciplinary measures, and in the extreme, fines of up to 5,000 francs as part of standard school policies, the board said.
Sanctions would need to have “an educational purpose and be proportionate,” it said.
The Central Islamic Council of Switzerland accused the authorities of “grossly overstepping their competency,” saying such measures won’t help integration but rather contribute to a feeling of alienation among Muslims. The council said it would take legal action against any effort to apply the sanctions, and ignore any fines.
School board spokeswoman Deborah Murith said the handshake requirement isn’t uniform policy at all regional schools, but that the Therwil school had enacted it years ago.
The Federation of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland has noted that politeness is a key aspect of Islamic tradition, and that refraining from handshakes is “inappropriate” in Switzerland. |
NASA’s Inspector General’s Office says an investigation is under way after a white powdery substance found at the Kennedy Space Center tested positive for cocaine.
I wanted to insert some puns somewhere in this post about astronauts, cocaine, high and outer space, but by the time I finished researching for this post I remembered that N.A.S.A. is through some though times at it is.
“Law enforcement personnel field tested the substance, which indicated a positive test for cocaine,” said Renee Juhans, an executive officer with the office. “The substance is now at an accredited crime lab for further testing,” she said.
The find was made last week when a small bag containing 4.2 grams of white powdery substance, which wouldn’t you know it turned out to be cocaine, was stumbled upon. Embarrassing enough, this wasn’t a premiere for N.A.S.A. either, as last year a small quantity of cocaine was found as well, this time in a secure part of a hangar that housed space shuttle Discovery. That time almost 200 space shuttle workers were tested for drug use, but no one was found positive. The investigation was eventually closed without any disciplinary or legal actions.
NASA has a zero-tolerance drug policy. All employees may be randomly tested. It is not known whether any employees have been asked to submit to drug testing in this investigation.
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Toronto Mayor John Tory is "tragically wrong" to want to keep the eastern Gardiner expressway, warned former mayor David Crombie, who is urging his old friend to reconsider.
Mr. Crombie remains a well-regarded figure in Toronto, decades after leaving office, and was one of the highest-profile endorsements Mr. Tory secured on his campaign to victory last year. But the man once known as the "tiny, perfect mayor" said Mr. Tory is making a big mistake in backing the elevated highway.
"He's a good man and I hope he listens to what's being said," Mr. Crombie told reporters Monday. "Rebuilding the elevated Gardiner Expressway of 60 years ago is building the city for yesterday."
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The former mayor – who was instrumental in stopping the Scarborough Expressway in the 1970s – said the Gardiner East debate was about Toronto ensuring "we are part of the 21st century and not simply riding in the 20th."
His remarks came the same day as the release of a poll showing that taking down the eastern Gardiner was the preferred option in every age group and region of the city, as well as among both men and women.
What to do with the Gardiner east of Jarvis is the biggest decision to face this council.
Rebuilding it in essentially the same form – the option often dubbed "the hybrid" – will cost $919-million over the life cycle of the road, while replacing the elevated highway with a boulevard would cost $461-million over the long term. Keeping the highway elevated will save a few minutes for a small group of motorists, according to the city's environmental assessment, but open up less city land for development.
City politicians are due to debate the issue at next week's council meeting. But downtown councillor and deputy mayor Pam McConnell hinted Monday that the debate could end up being deferred. She said that she would be ready to take more time to make a decision on the Gardiner East if that would allow for a broader consensus on the issue.
"We have to make the right decision, and I think right now it's an emotional decision that people are making that is not based on the facts," she said. "So if I can get some time for people to digest those facts, I'm perfectly happy to do that."
While guest-hosting a radio show earlier Monday, Mr. Tory reiterated his support for keeping the Gardiner elevated, arguing that he wasn't elected to increase congestion. His spokeswoman took to Twitter to criticize the new poll for using questions that, while they described the Gardiner options, didn't refer to keeping it up as the hybrid, the name preferred by advocates of that choice.
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Mr. Crombie was joined by former chief city planner Paul Bedford and Ryerson University President Sheldon Levy, both of whom argued for the boulevard option. Mr. Levy, who served on the mayor's transition team, made his case using language reminiscent of the argument made by then-premier Bill Davis when he cancelled the Spadina Expressway in 1971.
"Choosing people before cars," Mr. Levy said. He cited some of the other cities that have removed elevated expressways and added: "No one was ever sorry they made that decision to tear it down." |
Brazil: Dengue down big after release of Friendly™ Aedes genetically engineered mosquitoes in Piracicaba
Piracicaba’s Epidemiologic Surveillance service released new data this week which showed a 91% reduction of dengue fever cases registered in the CECAP/Eldorado district, an area of 5,000 residents, in the 2015/2016 dengue-year as compared to the 2014/2015 period.
The incidence decreased to just 12 cases in 2015/2016, the first year in which Friendly™ Aedes, the genetically engineered mosquitoes that fight wild Aedes aegypti, were released there, versus 133 cases in the previous year. According to Epidemiologic Surveillance the rest of the municipality saw a 52% reduction in dengue fever incidence during the same period, from 3,487 cases in the 2014/2015 period to 1,676 cases in 2015/2016.
Additionally, the overall incidence rate in CECAP/Eldorado for the dengue-year 2014/2015 was 195% larger than the rate recorded for the rest of the municipality. In the dengue-year 2015/2016, the rate in CECAP/Eldorado was 45% lower than the rate in the rest of the municipality. The latest data roundup also reports zero cases of Zika and chikungunya in CECAP/Eldorado.
“Over the course of one year, we were able to bring the dengue fever incidence down by more than 50% in Piracicaba — the outcome of diligent work to eliminate still water spots, the breeding site of the mosquito,” says the city’s Secretary of Health,Pedro Mello. “In CECAP/Eldorado, where we had the Friendly™ Aedes project, the reduction was extraordinary, going over 90%.”
“We are delighted with the result achieved so far by Friendly™ Aedes which shows the potential of our approach. We hope to see this effect on a larger scale beyond the limited area of CECAP/Eldorado with our expansion into Piracicaba’s downtown city,” says Glen Slade, Oxitec do Brasil director.
Oxitec has been working in Aedes aegypti control for more than a decade. It is a pioneer in the use of a biological method to suppress wild populations of this dangerous mosquito species through the release of Friendly™ Aedes males, which don’t bite and don’t transmit disease. When released, these males search for wild females to mate, and their offspring inherit a self-limiting gene that makes them die before reaching functional adulthood. |
Family playing scrabble
Modern mums regularly let their children win at board games – while dads stand by the ‘it’s the winning, not the taking part that counts’ mantra, a study found.
Researchers who studied ‘board game politics’ found mums will happily allow their kids to enjoy the thrill of winning if it makes life easier, whereas dads prefer a more competitive approach.
Dads enjoy a ‘school of hard-knocks’ type approach - partly because they themselves can’t stand losing, whilst also trying to teach their child how to handle defeat.
It also emerged that one in three parents have argued with their other half because they don’t let their kids get the better of them, especially as two thirds of youngsters regularly storm off, throw a tantrum, or even refuse to play board games if they don’t win.
Welsh parents were the most competitive when it came to their kids, with the least competitive being Northern Irish parents. Additionally, one in four parents said they ‘feel guilty’ if they don’t let their children win, the poll by LEGO Games found.
Jo Merton, spokesperson for LEGO Games’ Creationary, said: “Parents can be accused of mollycoddling their kids when it comes to playing Games. With younger children especially, it’s understandable that you don’t want to hinder their confidence but instead encourage them to take part in family games.
“To add to the pressure, sometimes losing can lead to tearful tantrums - which many parents would rather avoid at all costs.”
The study of 2,000 parents revealed that 71 per cent of parents do let their kids win whenever they play games with them, and almost three quarters admitted to making out they are rubbish at board games to prolong their family time and make it more fun for the kids.
One in five believe it’s more important that their child has fun - which they do if they win every time - than learn that you can’t come top in everything.
But the study found that not all parents are as sympathetic, with one in five admitting to being so competitive they will never let their kids win when playing games with them.
More than a third thinks it is character building to not come top in everything, while a hard-nosed 22 per cent claim they refuse to succumb to their kid’s tantrums.
Jo added: “Even the simplest of games can bring out the competitive streak in us. We therefore weren’t surprised to see examples of tactful parenting being put into practice.
“We need to remember that playing games is all part of the fun at Christmas time and it’s about spending time together and having fun, not having arguments.”
The study also revealed that it’s not just games where families are competitive as almost a quarter compare exam results with a touch of friendly rivalry.
Sporting achievements, success in education and even how many times it takes to pass a driving test are among the other things that leave siblings and parents battling each other.
Furthermore, the results revealed that despite all the high-tech toys and gadgets on offer this year, the popularity and demand for traditional gifts remains with 40 per cent of board games happening in December.
Jo said: “We understand the challenges parents face and that losing a game is always a touchy subject even more so when children are involved.
“This way LEGO Games are a great solution for families with children who just can’t bear to lose as there are various ways to play. You can make your own rules to suit the players and situations. The great thing about LEGO Games is that there are different modes of play offered and children and parents actually work together to build the game.
”For instance, with a game like Creationary, you can choose to play individually or in teams - great fun, competitive and keeps tantrums to a minimum.”
How often do you play family board games? Do you think board games are in danger of dying out? Click here to see new research suggestions, comment below with your thoughts on the matter or tweet us @FemaleFirst_UK
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Shabana Adam @Shabs_A
by Shabana Adam for www.femalefirst.co.uk
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As the economy continues to suffer, many people are cutting their budgets, looking for work, or preparing a plan of action in case a layoff comes. Fortunately, the Web offers some powerful new tools to help with those tasks. After asking some experts and a number of unemployed friends for recommendations, I put together a list of sites that can truly make a difference, whether you're conducting or anticipating a job search, or just trying to tighten the purse strings during these bad economic times.
Quicken Online
If your job does go away, a smart first step is to declare martial law on your budget, paring down or eliminating all but the most essential expenses. I've never (seriously) maintained a personal budget, but doing so will likely be one of the new experiences this downturn introduces me to. Since I'm unlikely to cut my broadband connection until I'm literally starving, I looked for a solid (and free) online budgeting tool--one that could pull information from elsewhere on the Web, and that was accessible from anywhere.
I settled on Intuit's basic and free Quicken Online service. The setup took all of 3 minutes, and before I knew it the service was pulling my income and expense information from the last nine months from my online bank account. The service reads every line item and intelligently applies a category to each (rent, food, entertainment, income, and so on), and then it charts where your money is going and gives you ideas on what you can cut back or eliminate. Quicken miscategorized a few of my entries, but correcting them was a snap. The service also sets up a series of alarms and reminders for when your bills are due, so that you never incur another late charge. You can have the reminders sent to your e-mail or to your cell phone--and yes, there's an iPhone app. (Also recommended: Mint.)
LinkedIn JobsInsider
One of the greatest comforts if you are unemployed (or if you're anticipating that you will be soon) is having a strong network of professional and social friends. Networking on sites such as LinkedIn, which focuses on career-related social networking, can be a powerful way to spread the word that you are looking for work, to advertise your expertise, to get difference-making recommendations from friends, and to find out about job opportunities.
But you already know that. What's new is that LinkedIn is developing some cool tools to help you while you're hunting for job opportunities. The company has introduced a downloadable browser add-on called LinkedIn JobsInsider that tells you, in a pane at the left side of your browser window, when you have a LinkedIn contact who might be able to help you with specific jobs you've found while searching on job boards (like Monster, for example). Whether you have an "in" with a particular employer can make the difference between expending effort in pursuing the opportunity or spending time looking for something better.
"In fact, one LinkedIn contact can make all the difference in the world," says Julie Erich, an insurance industry recruiter based in San Francisco. "Put yourself in the shoes of the hiring manager who has 200 resumes on her desk. She is busy and is looking for ways to reduce that pile to set of solid finalists who will make it to the second round." The mention of a mutual friend, in the real world or on LinkedIn, can cause the hiring manager to move your resume to the top of the pile, Erich says. "It can get you an interview, [whereas] without that mutual friend you might have been lost in the stack."
As you might imagine, LinkedIn and sites like it have seen a dramatic uptick in popularity since the economy took a nosedive. A spokesperson told me that LinkedIn has seen a 65 percent increase in recommendations (your friends/contacts saying nice things about you at your profile page) since December 2008. Meanwhile, she says, the number of applicants per job listing on LinkedIn has doubled over the last 6 months, while the number of job listings has plummeted. These days, a new member is signing up with LinkedIn at a rate of one per second.
SimplyHired
You've already heard about the large employment sites, such as CareerBuilder, HotJobs, and Monster. I'm not a big believer in such sites, and I don't often hear people talking about how wonderful any one of them is. Instead I recommend a relative newcomer called SimplyHired, a startup with financial backing from News Corporation, which owns Fox Networks.
SimplyHired does for (to?) job sites what Kayak does for travel sites: It aggregates job listings from all over the Web, including from the big sites. SimplyHired now lists about 4 million jobs. I did a few sample searches on the site for marketing positions, and saw openings from perhaps ten different job boards, along with postings that came directly from the hiring companies. The listings give the basic information about the opportunity, and then link you out to the listing at the hiring company's site or at the job board.
I like the fact that SimplyHired takes advantage of the job data it aggregates to benefit its users. For instance, the site mines the data to produce both salary averages and employment trends (the number of opportunities listed month-to-month, for instance) for the type of job you're looking for. SimplyHired also offers a couple of tools that seem to be more than window dressing. One is a Google Maps mashup where you can plot out various commutes to the same job--pretty useful, since the commute is an obvious factor in deciding whether to pursue a particular job listing.
DesperateDollars
DesperateDollars is filled with ideas for making money if you find yourself in really dire straits--things like getting tattoos for money, growing and selling your own food, doing for-pay surveys and secret-shopping assignments, volunteering for paid clinical tests, or donating sperm, blood, or hair. The site isn't the prettiest thing in the world to look at, but I found the assortment of money-making ideas entertaining, as well as somewhat of a comfort: It's a reminder that the world doesn't end if you lose your job. With a little creativity, in times of desperation you can still go out and bring home the bacon.
Free Napkin
FreeNapkin is like an eBay for free stuff. The site is a magnet for two types of people: folks looking for an easy way to recycle stuff they don't need by finding a new home for it, and those who are trying to cut costs by getting used stuff for free instead of going out and buying it. The "givers" post pictures and information about the items they want to dump, and the first FreeNapkin "claimer" to call dibs on the item wins it. The claimer pays the shipping on the item, or picks it up in person (the site filters the donations by city).
People have given away everything from dogs to farm equipment on FreeNapkin. I've never donated or claimed anything on FreeNapkin; but judging by the number of listings, the site seems to work well. FreeNapkin is no marvel of fancy Web design, but it gets bonus points for hitting squarely on the need to conserve and reuse things in tough economic times. |
Between now and national signing day on Feb. 5, The Oregonian is profiling high school football players who are expected to sign with the Ducks.
Name: Tanner Carew
Hometown: Chino Hills, Calif.
Position: Long snapper
Twitter: @tcarew10
Height: 6-foot-2
Weight: 215
High School: Damien High School
Stats: N/A
Why Ducks fans should be excited:
Oregon fans aren't likely concerned about the name of their next long snapper and that's the way Tanner Carew would prefer it.
The 6-foot-2, 215-pounder out of Damien High School in La Verne, Calif., specializes in a position of little recognition; a player whose name will only find its way into the game story following a miscue.
"This should be the last article written about him until he graduates," said Chris Rubio, a former UCLA long snapper who was dubbed the "Guru of long snapping" by The New York Times. "No one should know his name and that's exactly how he wants it to be until he graduates and goes pro."
Carew's ability to repeatedly snap a ball with speed and accuracy may never wow the crowd at Autzen Stadium, but it's won over the long-snapping community. Every year Rubio ranks the best snappers in the country, a list that once included graduating Oregon long snapper Drew Howell. This year, Carew is Rubio's clear No. 1.
"He's on a different level," Rubio said. "You can tell him what to do and he does it every time. You tell him to go faster, 'OK'. Put it right on his right hip, 'Not a problem.' He doesn't even have to think about it."
Rubio said Carew's "California quirkiness" helps him at a position that requires near perfection on every attempt. While kickers get most of the attention in pressure-filled situations, it all starts with a snap.
"He's got that laid-back attitude that you want from a long snapper," Rubio said. "You don't want him to be super wrecked and full of nerves out there."
It's easy to see the talent in Carew's recruiting videos. In one drill, Carew stands over a ball, bends over and zips it back 15 yards through a netted target. He then repeats the same tight-spiraled snap, hitting different targets from various distances.
What separates Carew, though, is his ability after the snap. Carew started at linebacker and tight end for Damien and has the athleticism to make additional plays on the field.
"He can snap and go," Rubio said. "This kid can move. He can snap, block and go down field and make plays."
Carew has been snapping throughout his high school career, though he didn't impress Rubio until a Las Vegas camp after his junior year. Rubio had seen Carew when he was a sophomore, but at the camp he noticed a drastic improvement in Carew's delivery. Essentially, when instructed, he was gripping and ripping.
"You can teach form and master it like a golf swing, but then it becomes a mental thing," Rubio said. "You want a lot of confidence. He had that. He was just letting the ball go."
Carew will be brought into the Oregon fold to replace Howell, the No. 1 long snapper in Rubio's 2010 class. Howell took the reins as the Ducks' long snapper in the fall of 2010 and never relinquished the role. At a position that many schools don't carry on scholarship, Howell flourished. Carew will be expected to do the same. Just don't expect to hear about it if he does.
-- Tyson Alger | @tysonalger |
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The Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin that is used by over 14 million WordPress blogs on the web has reportedly been open to an exploit where hackers can do a Blind SQL injection.
A Blind SQL Injection is a type of SQL Injection attack that asks the database true or false questions and determines the answer based on the applications response. This attack is often used when the web application is configured to show generic error messages, but has not mitigated the code that is vulnerable to SQL injection.
It can be used to insert an SQL query into the database to either extract data, modify data or delete data. It is often used to insert unwanted or unauthorized affiliate, spam links, or malware/adware on sites.
If you are on WordPress, there is a good chance you are using this Yoast plugin. To fix the issue, upgrade to version 1.7.4 immediately. This version is documented to be a security fix based on what Ryan Dewhurst found during a security scan. The security fix says:
Security fix: fixed possible CSRF and blind SQL injection vulnerabilities in bulk editor. Added strict sanitation to order_by and order params. Added extra nonce checks on requests sending additional parameters. Minimal capability needed to access the bulk editor is now Editor. Thanks Ryan Dewhurst from WPScan for discovering and responsibly disclosing this issue.
You can learn more about the vulnerability at TheHackerNews.com.
Postscript: Yoast announced that the WordPress team actually automatically pushed an update to WordPress installs that run an older version of this plugin. So many sites running this should be automatically updated. |
Relative says 23-year-old left Larvik for Somalia in 2009 and told his family in his last phone call home that he was in trouble
A 23-year-old Norwegian citizen of Somali origin has been named by the BBC as one of the suspects in last month’s attack on Kenya’s Westgate shopping centre.
The man, who reportedly arrived in Norway with his family as a refugee in 1999, is said to be one of four men seen in CCTV footage released by Kenyan authorities.
At least 67 people died in the Nairobi attack for which the al-Qaida-linked group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility.
The BBC’s Newsnight programme on Thursday said it had spoken to a relative of the Norwegian man, who said the man had left the town of Larvik for Somalia in 2009. The relative, who spoke to the programme on condition of anonymity, said the 23-year-old had made infrequent but increasingly erratic phone calls to the family. The most recent had been in the summer when he said he was in trouble and wanted to return home.
On being shown the CCTV footage, the relative told Newsnight: “I don’t know what I feel or think … If it is him, he must have been brainwashed.”
The programme said a former neighbour of the family in Larvik said the man had been “pretty extreme, didn’t like life in Norway … got into trouble, fights, his father was worried”. He said one person seen in the CCTV footage wearing a black shirt or jacket could be the man he had known.
Stig Hansen, an expert on security and political Islam based in Norway, told Newsnight that an estimated 20-30 Norwegians had gone to Somalia to sign up for al-Shabaab.
“The biggest problem is the so-called Generation 1.5, those who weren’t born in Norway but came when they were quite young, falling between two cultures,” he said. “[Al-Shabaab] need people who are quite ignorant about Somalia. That is in their interest because that will give them a more internationalist agenda. And it might also make them more dangerous when they return back to their home countries.”
Last week Norway’s intelligence agency, the PST, said it was attempting to verify reports that a Norwegian citizen had been involved in the assault on the shopping centre, which lasted four days.
“We have lately seen an increase in the number of persons leaving Norway to take part in acts of war, attend training camps or join terrorist networks abroad,” the Norwegian authorities said. “We are concerned that this development may have an increasingly negative impact on the threat situation in Norway.”
A Kenyan al-Shabaab leader whom US commandos targeted in a raid in Somalia on 5 October, but failed to capture, reportedly may have spent time in Norway, according to the Norwegian station TV2. It said Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir, also known as Ikrima, had travelled to Norway and applied for asylum in 2004 but left in 2008 before receiving a decision on his application. Norwegian officials have not commented on the claims. |
For Fake Corporate “Libertarians,” The World’s Just one Big Billy Jack Movie
Occasionally it seems to be “steam engine time” for some idea as I’m writing a column, with an apparently synchronicitous series of related news items coming to my attention in just a few days. This time it’s the large-scale expropriation of land by privileged classes, at the expense of those who would otherwise be cultivating it.
In the first volume of Capital, Marx mocked the idea — common in classical political economy — of a “primitive accumulation” by which abstemious capitalists had painstakingly saved up capital to found industrial enterprises and hire labor. Against this “fairy tale,” he juxtaposed the real story of primitive accumulation: Massive robbery including wholesale abrogation of peasant property rights in land in early modern Europe, the imposition of mercantilist empire around the world, enslavement of millions, and expropriation of land and mass colonization in the colonial world.
In England this took the form first of enclosure of Open Fields (the arable land worked in common by villagers) and later the Parliamentary Enclosure of pasture, forest and waste. One heroic act of resistance to this robbery survives in legend — the band of so-called Diggers under Winstanley in the mid-17th century, who broke down the enclosures and attempted to cultivate the waste at St. George’s Hill in Surrey before their crops and cottages were burned by soldiers. If you’re looking for a stirring anthem for the global justice movement, you could do worse than Billy Bragg’s cover of the Digger’s Song: “We work we eat together, we need no sword; we will not bow down to the masters nor pay rent unto the lord.”
But as Marx pointed out, this real-world primitive accumulation wasn’t just a one-time thing at the dawn of capitalism, after which the capitalists instituted bourgeois legality and said “OK, no more robbery, starting … now!” This primitive accumulation, this robbery, is an ongoing phenomenon without which capitalism — a system of state-enforced privilege and rent extraction, as opposed to the free market — would cease to exist.
Primitive accumulation continued in the full-scale colonial partition of the Third World in the 19th century, which peaked after Marx’s death. It went on in the neocolonial period of the 20th century, with Third World landed oligarchies dispossessing peasant cultivators of their remaining traditional rights in the land in order to consolidate their plots for cash-crop export agriculture. Western extractive industries, like mining and oil, operate on concessions previously extracted by such means, or continue to work through local governments to obtain access to il and mineral reserves by similar means.
I’ve got a whole string of open browser tabs on examples of this phenomenon that just came to my attention just over the last few weeks. In Cambodia, the government has handed around a quarter of the country’s land area over to private corporations — including pristine forests, national parks and farmland cultivated by many thousands of people. In recent weeks numerous reports have surfaced of government authorities murdering peasants trying to return to their land.
Ethiopia plans to lease three million hectares to foreign investors. As Center for a Stateless Society Media Director Tom Knapp pointed out (“Zenawi: The Ethiopian Marriage of Marxism-Leninism and Capitalism,” August 21, 2012), this has already been the policy of a self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist land-reforming regime for some time:
“At first, many of the previously state-operated ‘parastatal’ farms were retitled not to those who actually worked them, but to functionaries of Zenawi’s party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. Starting in 2008, the state began leasing ’empty’ (read: Inhabited and worked by the same serfs who had worked it under the monarchy and the ‘people’s republic’) farmland to foreign ‘investors’ (read: Multinational corporations looking for cheap land and cheap labor, courtesy of political connections).”
In Tanzania, the state may force up to 48,000 Masai nomads from their traditional lands to create luxury game preserves for Middle Eastern monarchs.
At the Daily Mail, Fred Pearce writes of an assortment of “land-grabbers” (“Chinese billionaires, Saudi sheiks, Wall Street whizzkids and a motley array of British adventurers who agree with the financial guru George Soros that ‘farmland is one of the best investments of our time’”) who’ve taken control of African land equivalent to ten times the area of Britain. That land seizure, as with every other from the eviction of English cottagers to the tractoring off of Okie sharecroppers, has entailed the dispossession of village cultivators from land they naively regarded as their own.
In Canada, the federal government is attempting to “privatize” First Nations land (i.e. abrogate traditional common titles to the land and convert it into individual parcels that can be bought up by fossil fuels and mining companies). You can be sure this will be attended by the same kind of skulduggery and collusion between the state and local First Nations elites that characterized the “privatization” of the Open Fields and commons in England three centures ago.
In the United States the GOP, together with so-called “sagebrush rebels” out West, calls for “privatizing” tens upon tens of millions of acres of federal land. Of course what they call “privatization” means funny auctions, closed to outsiders, involving a handful of major industry players, with mining or timber companies buying the land at fire sale prices. And then, with title to millions of acres of rightfully unowned land, they can exclude homesteaders until they’re ready to develop the whole ball of wax in one giant blockbuster project — without the hassle and transaction costs of buying out or working around the homesteaders who already would’ve settled it in a just world.
Such land robbery serves two purposes, under capitalism: First, it separates the laboring classes from the means of subsistence, making them increasingly dependent on wage labor and reducing their bargaining power in the labor market. And second, since it is stolen land, it carries no capital outlay cost to be amortized; hence, it increases the average rate of profit at a time when corporate capitalism is plagued by chronic tendencies toward overaccumulation and stagnation.
Yet another reminder that corporate capitalism has nothing to do with a free market. It’s a system of state-assisted robbery by the rich and powerful. |
Prostitution was illegal in Norway at the end of the 1800s but allowed in Oslo as long as the women submitted themselves to mandatory medical scrutiny. A new exhibition documents the lives of these women.
They look like bourgeois ladies, posing on chairs with fashionably arranged hair and their bustle gowns – but they are not high class gentlewomen.
The photos are from an album dated 1900 and it was the vice department of the police in Kristiania (Oslo) which kept official tabs on these women.
They were prostitutes.
An exhibition of paintings by Christian Krohg (1862-1925) titled Captivating Images has opened at the National Gallery in Oslo. Here, curators Vibeke Waallann Hansen and Ellen Lerberg are enlightening the public about prostitution in Christian Krohg’s Kristiania, including why this bohemian artist and others reacted so strongly to these women's plight.
Established in the trade
“Once the women started as prostitutes they would be fitted with beautiful gowns as work clothes, wear makeup and sport high hairdos. We see this in the Albertine picture too,” says Hansen.
She points to the large painting comprising the central work in the exhibition – Albertine to see the Police Surgeon, which the Norwegian artist, journalist and author first exhibited on 11 March 1887.
It depicts a scene from Krohg’s book Albertine, published in 1886. The young woman Albertine is about to partake in the so-called visitation – which included a gynaecological examination – for the first time.
Albertine is apprehensive about the examination, as we can understand the young women we see in the police files when they were questioned and submitted to such a probe for the first time. This was the Victorian era and it’s easy to imagine the trepidation of the young women photographed in the police album felt prior to their first check-ups.
As Christian Krohg perceived them, they still hadn’t lost their sense of shame.
Provoked by hypocrisy
A law against prostitution was passed in Norway in 1842, yet the authorities decided that men needed to have an outlet for their libidos before they wed.
So a system was established – a controlled continuance of prostitution, for society’s, and particularly the customers’, convenience.
The women had to attend such visitations as often as twice a week.
Another rule kept them off certain streets and parts of the city at designated times in the afternoon. For what if a gentleman strolling arm in arm with his wife were to run into a woman of ill repute whose services he’d recently enjoyed?
The whores faced prosecution and incarceration if they failed to abide these rules.
These were the conditions that provoked Krogh and other radicals of the day. A debate about prostitution raged in the newspapers and Krogh did his bit to attack the hypocrisy through his novel and his painting.
His novel about Albertine was banned and led to litigation. Unabashed, he upped the ante by painting his protagonist Albertine outside the inspection room, and the scandalous picture was exhibited in Kristiania.
“You can imagine that many of the visitors at the exhibition were men who had visited the brothels, and perhaps their wives accompanied them to the art show. It must have been embarrassing – perhaps many steered clear of it altogether,” says Hansen.
Job hunters
Who were these girls and women who established themselves in the city’s brothels?
The official records from what you could call the Kristiania Vice Squad reveal the women were not just poor lasses from greater Oslo – they were women from all over the country, north to south, who were desperate for work.
Many of them were newcomers to the city. The police protocols provide the data; their date and place of birth are listed.
The women in the album could be from the outskirts of the capital, or all the way from Grimstad and Kristiansand in the south to Norway’s northernmost county, Finnmark. But some were also locals born in Kristiania.
“Here’s a local girl: ‘Kristiane Kristiansen, age 16, comes from the city. Initial visitation: 26.3.1884’,” Hansen reads from the police protocol.
The day this information was written down was her first visit to the police doctor, just like Albertine in Krohg’s painting.
Not just the proletariat
Why women came so far and became prostitutes can be partly explained by contemporary Norwegian demographics and social developments.
“The capital city experienced its biggest population boom ever,” says Hansen.
In 1845, just a little more than 100,000 people lived in Oslo and its surrounding Akershus County. In 1900 the figure had risen to nearly 350,000, according to Statistics Norway.
“People poured in looking for work but not everyone could find decent jobs,” explains Lerberg. “The alternative might be to toil long hours in the toxic airs of some factory.”
Nor did all the prostitutes come from dire circumstances. Nicolai Rygg, who worked at Statistics Norway from the late 1800s, started a survey of prostitution in Kristiania just a few years later, in 1907, showing that some were not working class girls.
Out of the 304 women in his study, about half came from proletarian homes, while one was the daughter of a factory owner. Seven had fathers who were sea captains, eleven came from families in commercial trades and 41 were farm girls.
Photo picked up by husband
“Do you see these empty spots?” says Hansen, pointing to yellowed squares between some of the photographs.
On one we read: “Married 7.4.94. Remitted to her husband, Georg Dahl.”
If we were allowed to remove the album from its display case at the National Gallery and leaf through it, we’d come across more of these empty spots where official photos of prostitutes have been removed. The women could be stricken from the archives once they quit selling sex.
In other empty slots we read: “Emigrated to America – photograph picked up by mother” or tersely “Died”.
If one of the ladies quit the brothel and found a husband, Hansen and Lerberg agree he wouldn’t be a wealthy saviour from the posh side of town.
You mean there were no Pretty Woman stories?
“Very little that would remind us of Pretty Woman here,” says Lerberg, looking at the album full of female faces with eyes fixed on unknown photographers. |
In this blog, we will learn how to create a Node.js application with Node-Data. Let’s assume that you are building an application for blogs and you want to create REST APIs which can be used by a front-end/mobile application.
Create blogs into database Update blogs into database Delete blogs from database Find and fetch a blog using any existing blog ID from the database
Prerequisites:
MongoDB is installed and server is running on a default port
Node 6.9.0 is installed
IDE (Eg: VS Code)
REST client (Eg: Postman, Curl) for testing
Installation:
git clone https://github.com/ratneshsinghparihar/nodedata-demo-sample.git cd nodedata-demo-sample/Demo-Sample npm install
Code changes
Add a model blogmodel.ts inside the Models folder.
Add a repository blogmodelrepository.ts inside the Repositories folder.
View the code on Gist.
Model with @document to create a document inside Blogs collection.
A repository with the blog name will create all the necessary REST end points.
Testing
npm start Post a JSON {“name”: “testBlog”} to http://localhost:9999/data/blogs Hit the api to get data(http://localhost:9999/data/blogs) Hit the api with put method http://localhost:9999/data/blogs/{{blogId}} with body {“name”: “testBlog1”} Hit the api with delete method http://localhost:9999/data/blogs/{{blogId}}
Conclusion
Now you can see how creating rest apis is super easy with node-data. If you want to know more check out the our github
https://github.com/ratneshsinghparihar/Node-Data
Or visit our main page
https://nodedataio.azurewebsites.net/
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
votes, average:out of 5) |
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption David Cameron: "Clearly James Murdoch has got questions to answer in Parliament"
David Cameron says James Murdoch "clearly" needs to answer questions from MPs after his evidence on phone hacking was challenged.
Labour's Tom Watson wants a police probe after the evidence was disputed by two ex-News of the World executives.
The News International chairman had said he was not "aware" of an email suggesting hacking went beyond a single "rogue" reporter at the firm's paper.
He has now written to an MPs' committee to say he stands by his testimony.
Mr Murdoch appeared before the Commons culture, media and sport select committee on Tuesday alongside his father Rupert Murdoch, chairman of NI's parent company News Corporation.
Former NoW editor Colin Myler and NI legal manager Tom Crone maintain they "did inform him" about the email.
Following a statement issued by Mr Myler and Mr Crone on Thursday, committee chairman John Whittingdale said Mr Murdoch had agreed to write to them on various points he had been unable to address at the hearing.
He said: "I'm sure if the statement suggests there's conflict between what Colin Myler is saying and what he said, we will ask him to answer that as well."
In a letter sent to Mr Whittingdale, James Murdoch said he was in the process of preparing his written response.
He added: "Allegations have been made as to the veracity of my testimony to your committee on Tuesday. As you know, I was questioned thoroughly and I answered truthfully. I stand by my testimony."
Speaking during a visit in Warwickshire, the prime minister said: "Clearly James Murdoch has got questions to answer in Parliament and I'm sure he will do that.
"And clearly News International has got some big issues to deal with and a mess to clear up, that has to be done by the management of that company."
Labour leader Ed Miliband said: "People will want to look at the comments that were made and want to resolve the different versions of events that we've seen."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Labour MP Tom Watson: "This is the most significant moment of two years of investigation into phone hacking"
In April 2008, James Murdoch authorised the payment of an out-of-court settlement of more than £600,000 to Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, over the hacking of his phone.
Mr Watson said he was going to formally bring the matter of James Murdoch's disputed evidence to the attention of Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers, who is leading Operation Weeting, the investigation into phone hacking.
The Metropolitan Police later confirmed Mr Watson's request for an investigation into the disputed evidence "was being considered".
The West Bromwich MP told the BBC: "This is the most significant moment of two years of investigation into phone hacking.
"If [Colin Myler and Tom Crone's] statement is accurate it shows James Murdoch had knowledge that others were involved in hacking as early as 2008, it shows he failed to act to discipline staff or initiate an internal investigation, which undermines Rupert Murdoch's evidence to our committee that the company had a zero tolerance to wrongdoing."
The MP added: "More importantly, it shows he not only failed to report a crime to the police but because there was a confidentiality clause involved in the settlement it means that he bought the silence of Gordon Taylor and that could mean he is facing investigation for perverting the course of justice."
He said: "There is only going to be one person who is accurate. Either James Murdoch, who to be fair to him is standing by his version of events, or Colin Myler and Tom Crone."
In other developments:
claims of phone hacking and breaches of data protection in Scotland. Its inquiry will centre on allegations that witnesses gave perjured evidence in the perjury trial of ex-MSP Tommy Sheridan
John Yates, who resigned from his role as assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police on Monday, has issued High Court proceedings for libel against the London Evening Standard over aspects of its reporting of his conduct in the phone-hacking investigation
The Law Society is to write to the judge leading the inquiry into phone hacking to investigate after revealing that police have warned solicitors that their phone messages might have been hacked
The Solicitors Regulation Authority has launched its own investigation into the role of solicitors in the events surrounding the crisis
Labour MP Chris Bryant, who is suing over allegations his phone was hacked, has written to non-executive directors of News Corporation asking for James and Rupert Murdoch to be suspended by the company's board
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has confirmed he did raise questions about Mr Cameron's decision to bring ex-NoW editor Andy Coulson into No 10 as his director of communications
The BBC has learned following claims his mobile phone was hacked during a visit to the US. News International denies the claims.
'Every reason'
In 2007, the News of the World's royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed for hacking.
But the email referred to at the select committee was marked "for Neville" and Mr Watson's line of questioning was believed to be an attempt to see whether it implied that the News of the World's chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck also knew about such practices.
At the hearing, Mr Watson asked Mr Murdoch: "When you signed off the Taylor payment, did you see or were you made aware of the full Neville email, the transcript of the hacked voicemail messages?"
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption John Whittingdale: "The committee will want to hear from James Murdoch"
Mr Murdoch replied: "No, I was not aware of that at the time."
He went on: "There was every reason to settle the case, given the likelihood of losing the case and given the damages - we had received counsel - that would be levied."
In their statement issued on Thursday Mr Myler and Crone said: "Just by way of clarification relating to Tuesday's CMS select committee hearing, we would like to point out that James Murdoch's recollection of what he was told when agreeing to settle the Gordon Taylor litigation was mistaken.
"In fact, we did inform him of the 'for Neville' email which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor's lawyers." |
FILE - In this April 7, 2017, file photo, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington. Congressional Republicans and Democrats have reached agreement on a bill to make it easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire its employees. It's part of an accountability effort touted by President Donald Trump. The measure led by Rubio softens portions of a bill that passed the House in March. Democrats had criticized that bill as unfairly harsh on workers. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Congressional Republicans and Democrats have reached agreement on a long-stalled bill to make it easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire its employees, part of an accountability effort touted by President Donald Trump.
The deal announced Thursday could smooth the way for final passage on an issue that had been in limbo since the 2014 wait-time scandal at the Phoenix VA medical center. As many as 40 veterans died while waiting months for appointments as VA employees created secret waiting lists to cover up delays.
The bipartisan deal on Capitol Hill followed a fresh warning from the VA inspector general of continuing patient safety problems at another facility, the VA medical center in Washington, D.C. After uncovering serious problems there last month, the IG’s “rapid response” team visited the facility again on Wednesday and found at least two new instances in which patients were “placed at unnecessary risk.”
In one case, they found a patient prepped for vascular surgery in an operating room, under anesthesia, whose surgery was postponed because “the surgeon did not have a particular sterile instrument necessary to perform the surgery.” The team also found “surgical instruments that had color stains of unknown origin in sterile packs,” according to the IG. The VA last month had promised immediate fixes.
VA Secretary David Shulkin told senators at a hearing that he had “no safety concerns today” and that the auditors’ visit revealed a process “that works” — doctors stopping a procedure when they identified a potential risk. He agreed legislation was needed to improve the VA. “In the cases we need to make changes in management, today I just don’t have that ability to do it,” he said.
The Senate measure softens portions of a bill that had passed the House in March, which Democrats criticized as unfairly harsh on workers. Sens. Jon Tester of Montana and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, the top Democrat and the Republican chair on the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, worked to make modifications that would give VA employees added time to appeal disciplinary actions.
House Veterans Affairs’ Committee Chairman Phil Roe, sponsor of the House bill, said he would support the revisions.
“To fully reform the VA and provide our nation’s veterans with the quality care they were promised and deserve, we must ensure the department can efficiently dismiss employees who are not able or willing to do their jobs,” said Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the bill’s lead sponsor.
It comes after Trump last month signed an executive order to create a VA Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection, with an aim of identifying “barriers” that make it difficult for the VA to fire or reassign bad managers or employees.
The GOP-controlled House previously approved an accountability bill mostly along party lines.
The Senate bill adopts several portions of a bipartisan Isakson bill from last year, including a longer appeal process than provided in the House bill — 180 days vs. 45 days — though workers would not be paid during that appeal. VA executives would be held to a tougher standard than rank-and-file employees for discipline. The Senate bill also codifies into law the VA accountability office created under Trump’s order, but with changes to give the head of the office more independent authority and require the office to submit regular updates to Congress.
Still, the bill would lower the burden of proof for the VA to fire an employee — from a “preponderance” to “substantial evidence,” allowing a dismissal even if most evidence is in a worker’s favor. The American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, said it remained opposed to the bill as “trampling on the rights of honest, hardworking public sector employees.”
Conservative groups praised the legislation.
“These new measures will disincentivize bad behavior within the VA and further protect those who bravely expose wrongdoing,” said Dan Caldwell, policy director of Concerned Veterans for America.
The agreement comes in a week in which Senate Democrats are standing apart from Trump on a separate issue affecting veterans, the GOP bill passed by the House to repeal and replace the nation’s health care law. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., warned the House measure would strip away explicit protections to ensure that as many as 8 million veterans who are eligible for VA care but opt to use private insurance would still receive tax credits. A group of GOP senators is working to craft their own health bill.
Congress has had difficulty coming to agreement on an accountability bill after the Phoenix VA scandal. A 2014 law gave the VA greater power to discipline executives, but the department stopped using that authority after the Obama Justice Department deemed it likely unconstitutional. This week, a federal appeals court temporarily overturned the VA firing of Phoenix VA hospital director Sharon Helman over the wait-time scandal.
Critics complain that few employees were fired for various VA malfeasance, including rising cases of opioid drug theft, first reported by The Associated Press.
___
Follow Hope Yen on Twitter at https://twitter.com/hopeyen1 |
Here's a surefire way to destroy your expensive TV or severely injure your loved ones: CTA Digital's Wii Bowling Ball, an accessory that'll give Wii Bowling that extra edge of realism that's acquired by nearly guaranteeing you'll break something while using it.
For all that Nintendo tries to make sure that people's idiocy or clumsiness doesn't get the better of them and cause something to be destroyed while using the Wii, at some point it just becomes inevitable. Or, rather, more than inevitable if you're talking about using something like CTA Digital's newest accessory, the Wii Bowling Ball.
Designed to be the first accessory "to be fashioned after an authentic bowling ball," the Wii Bowling Ball, should you be ballsy enough to try it, will probably break windows, TVs, expensive vases, and maybe some bones too. It's supposed to turn your Wiimote into "the optimum performance-enhancing accessory," which I think is a secret code for wrecking ball.
Here's how it works: You open up the ball, place your Wiimote inside, and then stick your fingers into the three holes, just like a real bowling ball has. Then you can proceed to enjoy Wii Bowling, Brunswick Pro Bowling, Ten Pin Alley 2, and other quality bowling titles. Don't forget to put on that industrial strength wrist band though, and, finally: "Even though holding and bowling the ball is so like-like [sic] to the actual sport, never, ever release the ball!!"
There are two exclamation marks there, so don't forget that advice. CTA Digital is not liable for any kind of destruction you cause with this thing, as they point out twice (once in regular print, once in CAPS) on their product page. This product is not "licensed, designed, sponsored or manufactured" by Nintendo. Big surprise, they probably don't even want to be mentioned in the same breath as this thing.
[Via Engadget] |
Sony Pictures Entertainment is threatening to sue Twitter if the company doesn't suspend accounts containing links to hacked emails.
The film company's lawyer David Boies has sent a letter to the social network demanding that accounts sharing information be shut down.
US website Motherboard has posted a letter sent from Boies to Twitter.
In it one user is singled out, Val Broeksmit, who tweets screenshots of Sony emails as @BikiniRobotArmy.
In the letter to Twitter, Sony's lawyer says Twitter should "comply with all future requests with regard to any other account holder seeking to disseminate the Stolen Information via Twitter".
The letter also asks the network to send a copy to @BikiniRobotArmy user Val Broeksmit, advising him to stop publishing stolen information.
It continues: "If Twitter does not comply with this request, and the Stolen Information continues to be disseminated by Twitter in any manner, SPE will have no choice but to hold Twitter responsible for any damage or loss arising from such use or dissemination by Twitter."
Sony Pictures warned some American news outlets about using information from leaked emails earlier this month after its internal computer system was hacked.
The US accused North Korea of orchestrating the cyber-attack on the company in November, although the country has denied that.
The hack resulted in unreleased films and the script for the next James Bond movie being leaked online.
Details of corporate finances and private emails between producers and Hollywood figures were also released.
It also led Sony to cancel the Christmas release of The Interview, a film about the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Meanwhile, North Korea's entire internet went down early on Tuesday.
The US had warned the country that it would launch a proportional response to the cyber-attack on Sony Pictures but would not comment on any American involvement in the outages.
Follow @BBCNewsbeat on Twitter and Radio1Newsbeat on YouTube |
A new company is helping conservative Californians emigrate to Texas, where they can enjoy lower taxes, better economic opportunities, and friendlier politics.
Fox News reports that former Republican congressional candidate Paul Chabot has founded a company, Conservative Move, that helps would-be emigrants sell their homes in the Golden State and find new ones in the Lone Star State, and also helps them find “a good-paying job” in their new home.
Chabot’s prospective clients include those who, like him, have concluded that California has no future for them:
While California during the 1980s and early 1990s was anything but serene – there was the crack cocaine epidemic, widespread tensions between the African-American community and the police and a rash of homelessness, just to name a few issues – Chabot argues that unlike that time, it is almost impossible to maintain the type of middle-class existence he had during his childhood. He added that things like rising taxes, legalized marijuana, gun restrictions, sanctuary cities and declining public schools have all added to the disappearance of the state he once knew. “California is no longer the representation of the American Dream,” he said. “California has fallen morally on so many levels.”
In addition, the two states have completely different views of government’s role — with Californians preferring high taxes and heavy regulations, and Texas preferring the opposite. California conservatives are attracted to the Texan philosophy — and Chabot hopes to help them find more hospitable surroundings.
As Breitbart News noted earlier this year, Texas continues to add new residents from other states, and California is the number one source.
Texas governors have also been poaching California companies for years — most notably Toyota, which has moved from Torrance in Los Angeles to Plano, Texas. Some 9,000 companies reportedly left California between 2008 and 2015 — many of them heading to Texas.
Many of California’s conservatives want to go with them.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. |
WASHINGTON – Republican freshmen who came to Congress last year promising to transform Washington's free-spending culture are no different from most other lawmakers in at least one respect: They mailed out millions of taxpayer-funded flyers and brochures during their first year in office.
GOP freshmen sent more than 25.6 million pieces of unsolicited mail last year at a cost of nearly $9.8 million, according to a review of records compiled by the chief administrative officer of the House.
The figures cover only the nine months from April 1 to Dec. 31. Prior to that, mass mailings were not broken out from other taxpayer-financed mass communications allowed under the congressional franking rule. The costs include the expense of producing the piece and the price of postage.
Among the findings:
•House members sent out more than 77 million pieces of franked mail at a cost $27.9 million. That amounts to an average $63,000 for each of the 444 lawmakers who served at some point during the nine months.
•Of the 10 lawmakers who spent the most taxpayer money on franked mail, eight were GOP freshmen. Of the 25 who spent the most, 18 were GOP freshmen. Republicans Joe Heck of Nevada ($319,251), Bobby Schilling of Illinois ($293,021) and Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee ($282,385) topped the list.
House mass mailings House members sent out nearly 77 million pieces of unsolicited mass mailings in the last nine months of 2011 at a cost of $27.9 million (figures were not available for the first three months of the year).
Of the 10 House members who spent the most sending such mailings, eight are freshmen:
1) Joe Heck (R, freshman), Nevada: $319,251 2) Bobby Schilling (R, freshman), Illinois: $293,021 3) Scott DesJarlais (R, freshman), Tennessee: $282,385 4) David McKinley (R, freshman), West Virginia: $263,083 5) Gerald Connolly (D), Virginia: $261,799 6) Peter DeFazio (D), Oregon: $258,690 7) Todd Young (R, freshman), Indiana: $256,956 8) Vicky Hartzler (R, freshman), Missouri: $253,156 9) Kevin Yoder (R, freshman), Kansas: $244,488 10) Joe Walsh (R, freshman), Illinois: $237,355
Source: House chief administrative officer
•About 80 percent of House members — 347 — sent unsolicited mail. Those who sent none included seven of the 87 GOP freshmen and one freshman Democrat.
Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, said he's not surprised that newer members top the list of frankers — just like their Democratic predecessors.
"Clearly, this helps make the case that franking is really about protecting incumbency rather than informing their constituents about what's going on in Washington," he said. "It should give some constituents pause about changing the way of Washington, about whether these freshmen are doing that."
The congressional frank is essentially a facsimile of a lawmaker's signature that allows mail to be sent at taxpayer expense. Such mailings are restricted to official business and must not contain campaign-related content.
Newer House members, whom constituents may not know well, typically use the frank more than veteran lawmakers.
House members cannot send mass communications within 90 days of a primary or general election. The restriction is 60 days for senators. Senators tend to spend far less on franking due to a cap on mass mailings in any fiscal year, according to the Congressional Research Service.
A study last year by the independent Congressional Management Foundation reported that members tend to send less franked mail the longer they're in office and the better-known they become in their districts. Freshman members in 2010, for example, spent an average $101,764 apiece on franked mail, compared to $80,186 for second-term members and $46,805 for third-term members, according to the study.
Republicans captured the House in 2010 by campaigning to rein in the size and scope of government and change the profligate spending habits of a House then controlled by Democrats. Some singled out franking in making their case.
When he ran for Congress two years ago, New Hampshire Republican Frank Guinta blasted Democratic incumbent Carol Shea-Porter's frankings as "propaganda," and described them as "campaigning with our tax dollars."
As a freshman, Guinta sent 469,013 mass mailings last year at a cost to taxpayers of $206,276, ranking him 21st among House members for money spent on franked mail. In one piece distributed in October, he told constituents that he "is working to improve the economy for your family."
Guinta did not respond to requests for comment.
The mailings that GOP freshmen sent out last year covered a range of hot-button topics, including the federal budget, proposed changes to Medicaid, and immigration policies, according to a review of pieces from more than 20 lawmakers. Many included questionnaires asking constituents for their views or publicizing an upcoming town hall meeting in their community.
GOP freshman Rep. Vicky Hartzler of Missouri sent out 646,924 mailings last year. The $253,156 cost ranked eighth-highest among House members and sixth-highest among freshmen, records show.
Hartzler, who replaced longtime Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton, noted she's a new member representing a rural district.
"After 34 years of leadership by (Skelton), we feel like it's important for me people to get to know me and for me to hear from them," she said. "It's part of serving the people that you represent is to communicate with them, and that's always been a priority of mine."
Some mailers also paint partisan lines.
In one brochure Arizona Democrat Raul Grijalva sent constituents, the fifth-term lawmaker promised to "continue to fight against Republican efforts to end Medicare as we know it."
Eight Republican freshmen reported spending no taxpayer money on mass mailings over the nine-month period.
"I can't say that I'm opposed to it, but we… decided that we could force ourselves to work harder to be in front of our constituents," said one of the eight, Republican Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina. "We've tried to master social media as a way of saving money and touching more people and having a conversation and a dialogue more than you can really achieve through direct mail."
House lawmakers have wide latitude to decide how much to spend on taxpayer-funded mailings. On average, each lawmaker received a $1.45-million office budget last year to spend as he or she saw fit — on staff, rent for district offices, supplies, equipment and communications.
Republicans note they set an example for thrift by voting to cut their office budgets 5% in 2011, and several have returned more than $100,000 in unspent money to the Treasury.
Restrictions have been imposed on the franking privilege over the years to make mass mailings less promotional and more informational. Each communication must be reviewed and pre-approved by a bipartisan commission.
Even so, colorful mailers bragging about a representative's accomplishments and reminding constituents how hard the member works for them are common.
Freshman GOP Rep. Steve Southerland from Florida, who spent $90,759 on mailings last year, said they're an important way to reach out to his 740,000 constituents spread among 12,000 square miles and two time zones.
"Knowing that nothing of success ever occurs without there being proper communication, my question to you is how do I communicate with those limits placed upon me while at the same time bridge the gap between the people and their government," he said.
Contributing: Deirdre Shesgreen and Raju Chebium, Gannett Washington Bureau
Deirdre Shesgreen and Raju Chebium, Gannett Washington Bureau
Deirdre Shesgreen and Raju Chebium, Gannett Washington Bureau |
Bunnings is cashing in on Australia’s home renovation and construction boom by inflating prices of common building products and materials.
A sharp collapse in commodity prices and slowing consumer inflation delivered little joy to home renovators who shopped at Bunnings in the past year.
An investigation by The New Daily found the country’s largest hardware chain has been slugging consumers on prices for building materials such as concrete, paving sealers, plaster board, paints, doors, nails, screws, brushes, sinks and lighting since January 2015.
• The Bunnings of sporting goods prepares to invade
• Bunnings bringing smaller stores to shopping centres near you
• Comedian pokes fun at Bunnings snags
In some cases the mark-ups on these products were extreme, with the price of a popular stainless steel sink soaring 54 per cent during the 12-month period.
The cost of LED lights and paint brushes marketed by Bunnings spiked by more than 40 per cent.
The Bunnings price increases defy the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ official measures of inflation, which show that average retail price rises for building products such as cement, paints, renderings and plaster in 2015 were less than 3 per cent.
But The New Daily‘s research suggests the average cost of renovating a bathroom or extending a house ballooned by more than 11 per cent for Bunnings customers.
Click the owl for a full list of the price movements
Our audit of Bunnings’ prices
The New Daily compared the catalogue prices of 45 building and renovation products from the first week of January 2015 with prices advertised in a Bunnings catalogue published on January 6, 2016. We also compared the same 2015 prices with those online in late April.
We were able to check the accuracy of the price comparisons against a product number assigned by Bunnings to each item.
Bunnings fuels cost blowouts on renovations
The 45 building products we compared increased by an average of 11.3 per cent during the 12 months to January this year.
This is well above the three per cent annual inflation average for building products identified by the ABS.
Only two of the 45 products we reviewed fell in price – a Kaboodle kitchen suite (down 7.7 per cent) and a Mondello toilet (down 10.7 per cent).
Just one of the 38 marked-up products rose at a rate less than the three per cent benchmark published by the ABS. More than 15 jumped more than 10 per cent in price.
It meant the cost of renovating a bathroom with Bunnings’ materials soared in the last year:
– Floor tiles, up 20 per cent
– Concrete, up by as much as 14.8 per cent
– Waterproofing membrane, up more than six per cent
– Caroma toilet suite, up 14.4 per cent
– Taubmans bathroom paint, up 1.7 per cent
– Paintbrush set, up more than 47 per cent
Erecting a deck at your house would also set you back:
– Bailey ladder, up 11 per cent on last year’s prices
– Stainless steel decking screws, up 22 per cent
– Solar LED spotlight, up 43 per cent
– Decking oil, up around four per cent
Green fingers get a better deal
While home renovators are copping it between the eyes, gardeners are mostly enjoying inflation-free shopping at Bunnings.
The prices of most potting mixes and popular plants are still the same as they were in January 2015, while many garden implements, such as the Ozito line trimmer and the Gardena garden hose, are slightly cheaper.
But a few popular items have been marked up aggressively, including the Sherlock 80L wheelbarrow that has increased $20, or 20 per cent, to $119.
Nailing the profits
Bunnings is a consistent profit spinner for its owner, ASX-listed Wesfarmers group.
Wesfarmers, which also owns Coles, K-Mart, Target and Officeworks, recently announced a modest 1.6 per cent increase in operating profit to $2.1 billion for the six months to the end of December 2015.
However, the group might have posted a decline in profit without the sharp price hikes at its Bunnings outlets.
The hardware business was a star performer for Wesfarmers shareholders, after it generated a massive 13.4 per cent rise in half-year profit to $701 million.
Wesfarmers’ managing director Richard Goyder attributed the earnings lift at Bunnings to “solid execution of its strategic agenda”.
He did not comment on how the price hikes boosted the profit result. |
F5 uses Tcl as the interpreter for iRules. Many people often ask why that is. This questions is usually followed up by an immediate, "Why not Perl?" or "Why not Java" or "Why not <fill in my preferred language of choice>?". I understand the question, and frankly I'm a Perl guy from way back myself, so when I first landed at F5 and started devouring all things iRules, I was curious about the same thing. Since then I've discussed this topic with some of F5's best, in my opinion, and have come to understand that there are many solid reasons for choosing the runtime that we use.
When asked "Why Tcl?" my standard response centers around varying degrees of discussing:
• Speed
• Embeddability
• Usability
These all remain true today, and I will expand on each of them in hopes of illuminating our position with Tcl and iRules, and why the Perl lover in me was, and is to this day, convinced that we made the right choice.
History
Before I delve into the above list, first let me give some history of how we originally got to Tcl in the first place. Originally, back in the days of dinosaurs and BIG-IP v3.0, when iRules was introduced as a technology within F5, we used a custom syntax. We hand rolled commands and utility functions, and relied on no particular language to achieve this, other than C, which is the base for pretty much everything that runs on our box, and frankly darn near everywhere else. This was all well and good, but as any F5 historian knows, the world changed a lot for us in v9.
For version 9 we tore up pretty much everything on the drawing board. Heck, we tore up the drawing board and started fresh. Even still, the plan was to go forward with the same approach, I.E. custom roll commands to be used within iRules and rely on no outside language to achieve this. At this point, though, some testing was done and a shocking result surfaced. In testing Tcl against the custom built commands, Tcl was actually faster in many cases. (More about how and why in a bit.) This left us with a very interesting fact: Tcl was both faster and more feature rich than our hand rolled commands. That made the choice pretty simple.
Now then, on to the reasons why Tcl was and still is a solid choice for iRules. From the list above, let’s start with speed.
Speed
We talk about it all the time. iRules are fast. Think of the fastest thing you can think of, a speeding bullet perhaps. Now think faster. No, faster than that. Seriously, blazingly fast. Why so much emphasis on speed? Because it lies at the core of everything that we do.
I’m one of the first people to say that it’s not all about speeds and feeds, as it were, when talking about ADC solutions from a broad perspective. That is not to be confused with the concept that speed is not important. Speed, in fact, is absolutely paramount when speaking from a granular level. The faster the granular functions are; packet interrogation, re-writing, routing, forwarding, IP translation, the faster each atomic function is, the less resources are utilized on such things. This leaves more power available as overhead to build and complete complex logical functions. Building business logic into the network could be costly to a point of making it prohibitive if it weren’t for the fact that each minute operation being performed behind the scenes were streamlined to the nth degree. So when it comes to iRules or any programmable interface for the network, speed is absolutely paramount.
That’s all well and good, but how does Tcl fit into that? In testing Tcl against other, heavier languages such as Perl and Python, we deemed pretty quickly two things:
1) Tcl was far, far faster for our purposes than any of the other widely available options at the time, which is still the case with the exception of perhaps Lua.
2) Other options had large amounts of commands that we would either not need, or explicitly did not want to include for either security or performance reasons.
So out of the box Tcl is a faster choice for our needs. If that weren’t enough, however, we also have to take into account the fact that we need to heavily modify the functionality of the language. For our purposes we both add and rip out large chunks of commands and functionality. We need to make things network aware, event driven (which, by the way, Tcl explicitly is, and most other languages are not), add the notion of suspending/parking commands, ensure that garbage collection doesn’t occur in the middle of processing network traffic, and generally twist the language into something that understands what we are doing. Tcl is very easy to modify in all of these ways, compared to other options, so this one more way in which it is a good fit for our needs.
Also keep in mind that the reality is, we’re only using a very small slice of what is available in whatever language iRules makes use of. This is because the vast majority of iRules commands are actually custom functions being performed within the TMM. Things like the HTTP:: commands, the table command, class, iStats, sideband connections … by far the lion’s share of what iRules users rely on for the functionality to understand, interpret and modify their traffic are actually calls to native C code. That is, those things don’t actually exist at all in the Tcl world, beyond creating a Tcl wrapper to call and handle the underlying functions.
This is for various reasons, not the least of which is – you guessed it – performance. The functions within TMM that perform these actions are far higher performance in their native state than they could be in any interpreted language running per connection, Tcl or otherwise. So if a huge majority of our commands are actually just passing control back and forth between Tcl and C, then a highly adept interface for doing so becomes paramount. Tcl, again, pulls ahead of the pack in this arena. It just so happens that Tcl has one of the more thorough C programming APIs available, compared to other similar language options. Given how often this happens and how important it is to what iRules does at its core, this is a big plus.
Last but not least, Tcl supports the notion of compiling to byte-code. This is something we make extensive use of to boost performance at run time. Whenever an iRule is saved to the system it is compiled into byte code, which allows it to execute far faster than if it were in the native, human readable state. Most scripting languages combine the compilation and execution functions so that both occur effectively at the same time. With Tcl we're able to use a different model that allows for the compilation, syntax checking etc. to occur at load time, which means that at run time, the byte code is processed instead of the original iRule, thus skipping a large amount of the overhead that would otherwise be involved. This allows a far smaller footprint at run time (meaning when the iRule has to execute), in exchange for a bit of extra work at load time (when a user saves an iRule), which is a very, very solid trade for us. Anything we can offload to happen once at load time rather than for each connection that comes through the system is an extremely solid performance improvement. 1 execution per save vs 100k executions per second (on a highly traffic laden box) is a pretty simple picture to understand, and bytecode allows us to achieve that at least somewhat.
Embeddability
Tcl is not only extremely fast, but also supremely embeddable. It has a long history of being a go-to embedded interpreter in many fast paced, low level systems such as L2 switches. This is thanks to the fact that Tcl is very, very small, when compared to other languages that offer similar functionality (or more functionality, like Perl and Java, but more on that later). Also, Tcl is amazingly simple to integrate with C. So much so that it is considered near free in many cases, and anything written in C could easily be exposed via Tcl with minimal effort. Keep in mind here that when I talk about things written in C, that list includes a massive array of programs and systems, including many modern kernels, such as Windows and Linux. Tcl being friendly with kernels isn’t a bad thing when looking at integrating it with a custom micro-kernel, as is the case within TMM.
On top of the highly embeddable nature of Tcl, you also have to factor in the absolutely minuscule footprint. The entirety of Tcl is a few hundred kilobytes, including the parts we’re not using within iRules. That is tiny in comparison to its more feature rich cousins Perl and Java and <many others>. For instance the entire source download of Tcl (as of the writing of this article) is 4.3M whereas Perl is 15M. The size of the environment becomes very important the more you understand the inner workings of the iRules world.
One of the things that most people don’t take into account or don’t realize is the fact that each connection to the BIG-IP that invokes an iRule receives a unique Tcl context along with the accompanying state, variables, etc. This means that memory is allocated to every connection that uses an iRule to store that Tcl structure, allow it to interface uniquely with TMM, and do what it needs for that particular connection and the iRules associated with it. Keep in mind that this can occur millions of times concurrently on a busy, high-end F5 device, and to me it becomes extremely impressive. The memory footprint difference between a couple hundred kilobytes for Tcl and a couple megabytes for many other languages is large enough for a single instance. When you talk about a few hundred thousand or even a million concurrent instances, however, it becomes exponentially larger and more important, as you might imagine.
Surely you could not allocate, store, and process millions of copies of Perl in the same resource footprint. This is directly due to the size and simplicity of Tcl. Perl and other such languages have many, many more base capabilities than Tcl. This is a fantastic thing when and if you need them, and when you aren’t worried about resource constraints in such a blisteringly fast paced environment. In our world, when the vast majority of that added functionality isn’t needed anyway, and every byte or cycle counts, the overhead isn’t nearly worth the luxury.
One of the best engineers here at F5, from whom I gleaned some fantastic insight and new information when asking questions to help inspire this conversation, said it quite well:
“The full Tcl syntax can be described by just a handful of rules. In fact it's so simple you could write your own Tcl grammar parser in an afternoon. For contrast, only Perl can parse Perl.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big Perl fan, and still use it to this day for writing utilities and such on the command line. There is a tool for every job and in our particular case, given the performance requirements we have, Tcl just makes more sense.
Usability
Now that we understand the performance concerns and how Tcl plays well in that arena, the next most prominent concern on our list would be usability. When considering usability in this case it is important to remember our target audience. The people generally managing these systems are not full time programmers. As such, making use of a simple, easily readable language that is quick to pick up and master, and easy to read and pass from one user to the next makes a lot of sense.
The simplicity of Tcl plays into less overhead to the user when it comes to understanding the commands and tools available just as much as it plays into the system overhead required to load. It makes sense, I think, that a language with far greater capabilities and extended commands, memory structures, modules, etc. would take more time and effort to master. Given that doing so is often not the primary role of the individuals we hope to appeal to with iRules, the simpler approach makes more sense.
On top of that, most of that added functionality simply isn’t necessary. Keep in mind we’re not even exposing all of Tcl. We intentionally and specifically limit some of the base functionality. If we are limiting the much simpler, less complex language because we don’t need or want that functionality, there is little argument for moving to a more complex, feature rich language, given that the majority of the functionality would likely be “nice to have” at best, and undue overhead at worst.
Is Tcl still the right choice?
All of that being said, if we were starting from scratch today without thousands of iRules in the wild, a community built up to support the language, TMSH, iApps and many other technologies within the BIG-IP making use of Tcl, etc. would we choose Tcl again?
Given the needs iRules has for an interpreter: Fast, tightly embeddable, small footprint, fast, easily tied to native C and thus kernels, usability – yes, I think Tcl would still be a strong contender for being the best fit for our needs. If I weren’t convinced of it before, I’ve spoken to some of the core architects responsible for iRules today, and they share the same opinion, that Tcl is still as strong a choice today as it was in 2004. There are others that offer similar benefits today, Lua being chief among them, but there are drawbacks of those as well. To me, there is no clearly superior choice for our very specific needs even in today’s landscape. On top of that, we rarely get any complaints about iRules being Tcl based. Sure we get questions as to why, but once we explain the benefits and people are clear on the reasons we went down the road we did, it almost always results in a happy iRules user.
Are there some ways in which allowing users access to other languages may be beneficial? Certainly, but keep in mind they are largely available. It is quite commonplace for Perl and bash to be used for monitors already. Perhaps a better way of addressing the question is: What is it you would like to do with other languages that you cannot via iRules currently? Once that is understood, the discussion could turn to whether or not that is possible, feasible and reasonable to implement within BIG-IP in some fashion. Would this be built directly into the Tcl construct iRules is based on, or in some other fashion that may allow the use of a chosen language, or a subset thereof? Who knows, but it is a valuable conversation regardless of the outcome. The more we can understand what it is people would like to and are trying to do, the better we can continue expanding the already powerful tools that we offer to meet those needs.
Hopefully that paints the picture of why we chose and continue to use Tcl to support our powerful iRules framework. I am not by any means a Tcl zealot. Frankly I had far more experience in other languages before coming to F5, and rather enjoyed writing things in those languages. What I care about far more than writing in my favorite language, however, is using the right tool for the job. As I’ve learned more about iRules I have come to understand the reasons we use Tcl to do what we do, and appreciate what it allows us. |
The F-35 is the hugely expensive, and hugely complicated, fifth-generation stealth fighter jet. Perennially delayed and wildly over budget, it's had its share of problems and rightly earned piles of criticism. So here's some good news for once: The plane—maybe the most expensive weapon ever developed—has successfully taken off from a ski jump.
Before you start laughing, this is actually a significant milestone. The F-35 will come in a number of variants for different operational profiles (one source of complications and cost overruns), including the F-35C, designed for carrier operations with hardware allowing it to land and launch from flat-top aircraft carriers like US Navy's Nimitz and Ford class aircraft carriers, as well as folding wings and some other accoutrements. The F-35A is a more conventional fighter meant for use by the US Air Force and other land-based air forces.
Then there's the F-35B. It's the short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) variant. It's meant to be a replacement for the Harrier "hover jet", and it's able to take off from much smaller ships than the F-35C. It uses fancy hardware to aim engine thrust down, allowing the plane to take off and land at much slower airspeeds or even completely vertically, helicopter-style.
See, full-size aircraft carriers like the American Nimitz class—with longer runways and catapults to make taking off feasible—are incredibly expensive, and many of our allies can't justify the cost. Instead, they build smaller carriers with ski jump-like ramps at the end to assist planes in taking off.
The upward-sloped ramp at the bow simultaneously launches the aircraft upward and forward, allowing planes to take off with more weight onboard and with less speed than horizontal launch systems. Basically it's about saving money, because the ship can be a lot smaller and thus cheaper to build and run. They're used by navies around the world, including those of Britain, Australia, China, India, Italy, Russia, and Spain. The British, Italians, and Australians are all considering the F-35B. The US Marine Corps has committed to buying a number of them as well.
Last week, a BAE Systems (one of the main contractors on the F-35) test pilot successfully flew the F-35B off a ski jump for the first time at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland.
To make the process easier, the F-35B automatically adjusts control surfaces and nozzles for takeoff, allowing the pilot to focus on other things—and again showing how freaking complicated this thing is. If you look at the rear of the plane, you can see the thrust vectoring nozzles on the main engine pointing downward to mix lift and propulsive thrust, helping the plane get airborne.
We're sure the myriad companies involved in building the F-35B will get it all figured out (eventually), and that it'll be awesome once they do. But boy is it costing a lot of money. Depending on who you ask, the whole F-35 program will cost more than $350 billion over its lifetime (it got started in 2006), so it's really important that it, you know, work. This test is one small step in making sure it does. |
ADEN (Reuters) - A suspected U.S. drone strike killed two men believed to be al Qaeda militants in southern Yemen late on Friday, residents and local sources said.
The strike took place in the al Naqba area of Shabwa province where residents heard a loud explosion that they say completely destroyed a vehicle carrying armed people.
Shabwa is one of several provinces in Yemen where al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is active.
Yemen-based AQAP has exploited a more than two-year-old civil war between the Iran-aligned Houthis and President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s Saudi-backed government to enhance its influence in the impoverished country.
The United States has repeatedly attacked AQAP with aircraft and unmanned drones in what U.S. officials say is a campaign to wear down the group’s ability to coordinate attacks abroad. |
Rougned Odor's two new horses and the strangest contract clauses in Major League history
When we think of baseball players signing contracts, we normally focus on the years and dollars. Most of the time, that's all you really need to know. But there's a lot more that goes into every MLB deal, and the extra legalese can include some unexpected and offbeat conditions.
The latest comes from the Rangers and second baseman Rougned Odor, who agreed to terms on a six-year extension worth $49.5 million that will keep him in Arlington through at least the 2023 season.
Odor will also receive two horses as part of the deal. Yes, real horses:
MLB.com's T.R. Sullivan penned a piece about Odor's off-field activities back in October, and revealed that the second baseman enjoys spending his offseason afternoons horseback riding, as he owns four (now, six) horses that live on his family's ranch in Venezuela. In that light, this new contract perk makes all the more sense.
With that as your context, here are nine other relatively off-the-wall or otherwise unique contracts handed out in league history.
9. Adam Dunn's long-shot Gold Glove Award incentive
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While a number of player contracts come with standard award clauses, perhaps the most surprising was the $25,000 incentive that Adam Dunn would have received from the White Sox if he won a Gold Glove. Beyond the fact that Dunn was primarily a DH with the Sox, his career UZR at first base was -41.1: the second worst at the position since the metric's creation.
8. Troy Glaus' wife's equestrian business
When the third baseman signed with the D-backs in 2005, his contract included a clause calling for $250,000 a year for "personal business expenses." What were those expenses? His wife Anna's equestrian work in three-day-eventing and show jumping.
The names for those horses, if you were curious: Yes My Name is Bob and Rehy Lux.
And when the third baseman was traded to Toronto after just one year in Arizona, the Blue Jays made sure to pick up the slack on the extra expenses.
7. Rollie Fingers' mustache wax
When you think of the greatest mustaches in the facial hair pantheon, there's the Tom Selleck, the Clark Gable and the Rollie Fingers. Were it not for a $300 bonus from Athletics owner Charlie Finley though, the Fingers might never have been born.
After Reggie Jackson reported to camp in 1972 with a fuzzy mustache and refused to shave it, Finley went the other way and encouraged the entire team to grow them. As it morphed into a defining trait for the team and established them as counter-culture icons in the mostly facial hair-less league, Finley decided to hold "Mustache Day" on Father's Day. As part of the promotion, every player who could grow theirs out by that game would earn a $300 bonus. While many of the players kept their facial hair, it was Rollie Fingers' whirling dirvish of a stache that stood out.
Realizing that this was his #brand long before people did things like write #brand, Fingers not only kept the mustache, but he had a clause added to his contract where he would be supplied with $100 of mustache wax every year.
6. Joe DiMaggio's ketchup incentive
Joe DiMaggio's seemingly untouchable record of 56 straight games with a hit came up just a little short ... according to Heinz, at least. Had the Clipper reached 57 games, matching the "57 varieties" shown on Heinz ketchup bottles, he would have netted himself a cool $10,000.
Though it's possible that the deal was just talk and never formalized, DiMaggio was about not getting paid - and for good reason: A $10,000 bonus was equivalent to roughly a quarter of his 1941 salary.
5. George Brett's side job as an apartment super
What do you do when your team is located in one of the smaller markets in baseball, but you want to make sure that you can keep the face of your franchise around? You get him in on the real estate market.
With then-owner Avron Fogelman possessing a hefty portfolio of apartment and land holdings, Royals Dan Quisenberry and Willie Wilson got "lifetime" deals by investing in some of Fogelman's apartment complexes. But when it came time to sign Brett before the 1987 season, the team came up with a more creative solution: Actually giving him a salary from the Country Squire complex that was being built. We're not sure if he ever responded to those calls to unclog the drain, though.
4. Roy Oswalt's bulldozer
Most ballplayers want souped up cars that look more like discarded Batmobile designs than construction equipment. Not so for former Astros Roy Oswalt, who instead dreamed of a bulldozer. Before Oswalt's start against the Cardinals in Game 6 of the 2005 NLCS, then-owner Drayton McLane promised the pitcher that if he won, he'd get the bulldozer that he had always dreamed of.
Said McLane, after presenting Oswalt the construction equipment (with a red bow atop it):
"Each year, with our players, I ask them what their goals are. I said, 'Roy, what is one of your goals?' He said, 'To own a bulldozer.' That kind of took me back a little bit. I had never heard that before.'"
And because all high-priced gifts have to be disclosed, it was essentially a bonus given to Oswalt. Said GM Tim Purpura, "We've achieved a great historical milestone" for the first "bulldozer clause."
3. Carlos Beltran 's tennis ball launcher
When Carlos Beltran signed his $119 million deal with the Mets in 2005, he made sure there was a clause guaranteeing the lease of a "Conditioned Ocular Enhancement" training system, complete with trainer who could use it.
Huh?
I'll let USA Today explain:
The machine is relatively low-tech - a motor propels tennis balls out a 6-foot pipe. Each ball is inscribed with a number from one to nine, in red or black ink. The hitter, standing about 60 feet away and taking his normal batting stance, tracks the ball to the plate, trying to read the number and color...
A typical exercise will start shooting the ball at game speed (90 mph) and increase it to 150 mph, with random rotations. When returned to the original speed, and subsequently in live game action, the ball seems much slower and larger to the hitter, [Mets trainer Mike] Victorn says.
After Beltran and Juan Gonzalez helped pay for the $80,000 system with the Royals the year before, Beltran wanted his new team to foot the bill in his new deal. Just think of it like your work covering your gym membership.
2. Michael Jordan's multimillion-dollar Minor League deal
When Michael Jordan left basketball to play baseball for the 1994 season, it was huge news. After all, the greatest player in NBA history left the sport to ride around on cramped buses and play in stadiums that held just a fraction of what an NBA arena could. Turns out, he wasn't actually leaving a lot of money on the table in the process.
While Minor League players don't earn much, Jordan was still pulling in a cool $4 million thanks to Jerry Reinsdorf, who owned both the Chicago Bulls and the White Sox. The marketing possibilities would have made the contract a bargain if Jordan made the Majors, which might not have been that far-fetched of an idea. Jordan's MiLB manager -- a guy by the name of Terry Francona -- actually thought it would have been possible had he stuck with the sport.
1. Alex Rodriguez 's Division Series MVP
Alex Rodriguez's $252 million contract with the Rangers in 2001 -- the biggest ever, at the time -- raised a lot of eyebrows, but it was a clause in that contract that's most intriguing. A-Rod was due to earn $150,000 if he won the Division Series MVP Award. Pretty cool, right?
One catch: There is no MVP award given out during the Division Series. Whoops.
A portion of the above appeared on Cut4 in April 2016
Michael Clair writes about baseball for Cut4. He believes stirrup socks are an integral part of every formal outfit and Adam Dunn's pitching performance was baseball's greatest moment. |
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