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When the daughter of a former justice minister in Argentina demanded to be upgraded to business class on an Air France flight in October, the flight crew was unable to accomodate her. What happened next has become an international incident.
The daughter reportedly filed a complaint. According to the union that represents the cabin crew, who released a statement on Facebook, upon landing in Argentina the crew was “arrested successively by police forces, interrogated under conditions that flout fundamental rights, charged and for some detainees to finally be released without explanation.”
The union wrote a letter to the Argentine Embassy in Paris detailing the conditions under which crew members were held and interrogated, Reuters reported.
If the allegations are true, this would seem like overkill for not liking one’s seat assignment.
The union has been communicating with authorities in both Argentina and France in order to seek out the “the possibilities of legal redress to obtain compensation for the préjudicie suffered by our colleagues and the profession.”
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In a statement, the president of Air France-KLM, Jean-Marc Janaillac, “expressed his indignation to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs about the arbitrary detention conditions that the Air France crew were subjected to.”
Reuters reported that France's Foreign Ministry is demanding an explanation from Argentina, while Argentina's Foreign Ministry said it would look into the airport police's conduct. |
Still, she hinted she could be more flexible if countries undertook reforms to revive competitiveness. Spain, which adopted more business-friendly labor laws and other structural changes to its economy, is one of the few eurozone countries to show signs of recovery. In a visit this week with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, Ms. Merkel praised Spain as a model for how to rebound from the crisis.
Ms. Merkel has remained unmoved by her critics, even as Germany’s economy has slowed and been challenged by new pressures like the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. To some degree, the slowdown in Germany is being driven by a lack of demand for its exports from neighbors like France and Italy, which, lacking the ability to use government spending to spur growth, have struggled to gain economic traction. Italy, the third-largest eurozone economy, has returned to recession and remains saddled with a debt equal to 136 percent of gross domestic product, the highest ratio in the eurozone after Greece. Analysts said a new crisis in Italy could reignite fears that the eurozone will come apart.
Germany is further vulnerable to the strife in Ukraine. Sales of machinery to Russia, the industry’s fifth-largest export market, fell 19 percent in the first six months of the year. On Thursday, Ms. Merkel said the European Union would discuss tougher sanctions this weekend, hours after Kiev accused Moscow of a fresh incursion.
Germany is also grappling with its strained relationship with France, where Mr. Hollande is having trouble holding his party together as calls increase to challenge the supremacy of German economic policy leadership. While the two recessions that have hit France in the last five years have not been as deep as those in other countries, growth has failed to revive meaningfully.
Germans worry about the imbalance between the Continent’s two essential powers, while French leaders feel belittled by Ms. Merkel, who “wants to give us lessons,” said Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, a prominent French Socialist. “We are a great nation trying to pull ourselves together. We are not one of the German länder,” he added, using the German word for its 16 states.
“Germany is a strong country, but it is too weak to lead the Continent alone,” said Guntram Wolff, a German who runs the Bruegel organization in Brussels. While trade with France is important, their common projects — monetary union, the European Union itself, centuries of shared history — count for much more, he said.
A prolonged downturn in Europe, should it happen, could weigh on the American recovery and have far-reaching consequences for European society and politics at a time when far-right forces have emerged as challengers in France, the Netherlands, Greece and elsewhere, analysts said.
And as American imperatives point toward more multilateralism, Mr. Summers said, “a greatly diminished and stagnating Europe will mean that the United States will increasingly lack its best partners.” |
Justin Meram, right, could play for Iraq at the Olympics this summer.
Columbus Crew SC midfielder Justin Meram is a candidate to play for Iraq in the Olympics this summer.
Iraq informed the MLS club that Meram, 27, is under consideration for one of the country's three squad spots for players over 23.
If selected to play in August, Meram could miss up to a month of the MLS season, though the Crew do not have any games that month until Aug. 13 and the group stage at the Olympics ends three days earlier.
His club could refuse to release him to play in the tournament, but coach Gregg Berhalter told the Columbus Dispatch that Crew SC could be open to Meram going to Rio de Janeiro.
"It's not like I'm some 10-year vet, so it's quite an honor for me," Meram told the newspaper. "I could maybe miss a month with the Crew, but it's the Olympics, representing your country. It would be an absolute honor to go and do that."
Meram was born in Michigan to Iraqi-American parents and began playing for the Iraq national team in 2014. He has earned 17 caps for the nation and scored twice in Asian qualifiers for the 2018 World Cup, helping Iraq advance to the third round.
"Hopefully, with my experience, I could be calming for some of the younger guys going into it," Meram said of the Olympics. |
Linda Jones is mad as hell, and she’s taking it to the streets.
If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphorical references for a moment, please read on…
Jones has been a Mar Vista resident for many years and she has seen the state of Venice Blvd. deteriorate steadily. Unhappy with the number of potholes and gaping cracks, she reached out to her City Council representative to see what could be done – and that’s when she found out that Venice Blvd. is actually considered a State Highway, and is therefore under the jurisdiction of the California Department of Transportation, or CalTrans.
Repeated emails and phone calls to CalTrans have yielded very few responses and absolutely no resulting improvement in the streestcape.
She’s tried contacting every government official and agency that has anything to do with Venice Blvd., and still she’s received almost no responses and clearly, if you’ve been out to the street lately, absolutely no action.
And now she’s decided to make her protest big and public.
On Sunday, April 28th at 11am, Linda Jones will be protesting the state of Venice Blvd. on the corner of Venice & Grand View – and she wants you to join her.
If you want to see the State Highway that runs through our neighborhood repaired – so that it’s safe and smooth for strollers, wheelchairs, bicycles, car tires, and yes, walkers – then she’s asking you to join her. You can contact her for more information – [email protected] or (310) 397-8886.
What do you think of Venice Blvd.? Let us know in the comments section.
Here’s a letter from Linda: |
Ruben Loftus-Cheek will start for England against Germany, Sky sources understand
Ruben Loftus-Cheek will start England's friendly against Germany at Wembley on Friday, Sky sources understand.
Gareth Southgate is without midfielders Dele Alli, Jordan Henderson, Harry Winks and Fabian Delph for the high-profile game against Germany, which is followed by a friendly against Brazil on Tuesday.
Loftus-Cheek - on a season-long loan at Crystal Palace from Chelsea - was called into the squad and it is understood he will be given the chance to impress from the start on Friday when he makes his international debut.
The 21-year-old has played eight times for Palace this season, under the guidance of former England boss Roy Hodgson since he took over from Frank de Boer at Selhurst Park in September.
England boss Gareth Southgate denied there is a club v country row and insisted scans confirmed Tottenham duo Harry Kane and Harry Winks would be unavailable for both friendlies England boss Gareth Southgate denied there is a club v country row and insisted scans confirmed Tottenham duo Harry Kane and Harry Winks would be unavailable for both friendlies
Meanwhile, Southgate has declined to name his captain for the Germany match until the day of the game.
Chelsea centre-back Gary Cahill and West Ham's on-loan goalkeeper Joe Hart are the favourites to wear the armband, although neither are guaranteed to start.
Cahill did not train with the rest of the squad on Thursday and is having further treatment at St George's Park, leaving him a doubt for the game.
U20 players Jay Dasilva of Chelsea and Fulham's Tayo Eden - who were part of the England U19s side that won the European Championship over the summer - did train with the first team to make up the numbers. |
A pro-hunting group is up in arms after obtaining emails that it says indicate that a federal official withheld critical data on lead blood levels in the California condor until after gun control advocates in the California state legislature used the iconic bird’s plight to help push through a law last year to ban lead ammunition.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation obtained the emails as part of a Freedom of Information Act request showing that John McCamman, California condor recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, did not make the report public until the bill was on its way to the desk of Gov. Jerry Brown. Mr. Brown signed the measure in October 2013.
The annual update, which had been previously issued in June, found little change in the condor’s blood lead levels despite a 2007 ban on lead ammunition in the “condor zone,” a lengthy swath of habitat along the coast from Ventura County to Santa Clara County. The California state legislature acted at the urging of wildlife and animal rights advocates, led by the Humane Society, which argued that the California condor and other species were being poisoned by ingesting lead shot, fragments or contaminated prey.
Lawrence Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel, accused the Fish and Wildlife Service of deliberately sitting on the report in order to bolster the chances of passage of Assembly Bill 711, which ushered in the nation’s first statewide lead ammunition ban.
“[T]he email thread shows that they withheld that [information] from the public; they withheld it from the legislature purposely,” Mr. Keane said. “And why? Because the results show that despite the existing law and regulations that ban the use of traditional ammunition by hunters, it was not having an impact on condor blood-lead levels in California.”
Mr. Keane added, “Which suggests, as we have said all along, that condors in California are accessing lead from other sources, not ammunition.”
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Gun rights groups, which have blasted the law as a backdoor effort to ban hunting, countered that the lead-poisoning claim wasn’t backed up by scientific research. About 95 percent of U.S. hunting ammunition is made of lead.
Mr. McCamman could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but Fish and Wildlife spokesman Scott Flaherty said that while the 18-page report, entitled “California Condor Recovery Program, Project Update and 2011 and 2012 Lead Exposure Report,” had been held back, “I’m pretty sure it was not delayed simply to withhold it from the debate.”
The emails between Fish and Wildlife Service personnel show that a draft of the report was ready in April 2013. The state legislature passed a final version of the bill on Sept. 10, 2013. Seven days later, Mr. McCamman sent an email to agency wildlife biologist Joseph Brandt.
“Joseph — is this ready to go? I’ve attached a summary document — the state has been avoiding getting into the middle of the legislatures business (AB711) but now that that is over, this has to be ready to go. … [Are] you comfortable?” says Mr. McCamman in an email dated Sept. 17, 2013, provided by the NSSF.
The email suggests Mr. McCamman may have been trying to avoid embroiling the Fish and Wildlife Service on either side in the political debate over lead ammunition, but Mr. Keane said that such a decision was not the bureaucrat’s call to make.
“It’s disingenuous if he were to suggest that he was somehow trying to stay out of it,” Mr. Keane said. “By withholding that information, he injected himself into it, and again, that information was relevant — highly relevant — to the debate. The public should have been allowed to take that into consideration — certainly members of the legislature, and even the governor, before signing the bill.”
Mr. Flaherty said that while he was unfamiliar with the details surrounding the report’s release, “It’s not the business of the service to influence state legislation on condor matters.”
“Our concern is strictly focused on condor conservation and condor health and the effect that lead has on condors,” Mr. Flaherty said. “It’s a scientific fact that lead poisoning is a leading cause of death in condors.”
First in the nation
Other states have also wrestled with the lead ammunition issue, but California is the first and only state to ban it altogether. State wildlife agencies in Arizona and Utah, which are also home to California condor populations, have enacted successful voluntary programs in which hunters entering condor territory receive free nonlead ammunition.
“As of fall 2014, biologists were pleased that substantially fewer condors in the Arizona-Utah population had to be treated for lead exposure,” said the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources in an online post. “Only 13 birds were treated from Sept. 1, 2013, to Aug. 31, 2014, as compared to 28 birds that were treated during the same period the previous year.”
The California condor’s numbers, which had dwindled to just 22 in 1987, have since bounced back to 430. A scavenger with a nearly 10-foot wingspan, the California condor is known for eating carrion in the gut piles left by hunters, which often include bullet fragments, but also picking through trash and debris from other sources.
The Fish and Wildlife Service report released in October 2013 concluded that California condors continue to be exposed to lead despite California’s ban on lead ammunition in the “condor zone,” and offered explanations that included alternative sources to hunters’ bullets.
“[T]here are other sources of lead in the environment that condors may be accessing, including five individual condors apparently ingesting chips of lead-based paint in a fire tower (since remediated),” said the report.
The update also cited a 2012 peer-reviewed scientific paper that found nine condors “had lead detected in their blood that did not match the isotopic signature of ammunition, background levels, or paint, indicating an unidentified source of lead in the environment.”
It’s entirely possible that California’s Democratic-controlled state legislature would have approved AB 711 even if the Fish and Wildlife Service data had been made available before the vote — but “we’ll never know,” said Mr. Keane. The measure passed the state Assembly by a 44-21 margin in May and by a 23-15 margin in the state Senate in September.
“The legislature and the public did not have the opportunity to take that into consideration when debating and voting on AB 711,” he said. “And we think that is a very important issue, and the public deserves to know about it.”
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
I came across a long list of questions for Bernie Sanders supporters the other day. There were a lot of strawmen and red herring, but I felt that some of the questions were fair enough to merit a response. I couldn’t let some of the more egregious questions slide through though – at the end I decided to respond to several.
What is a democratic socialist?
Well, this one’s a little tricky. Truthfully, Bernie should drop the label since he doesn’t believe in the social ownership of the means of production and is therefore, strictly speaking, more of a social democrat than a democratic socialist. I think it would prove more insightful to look at how Bernie describes his beliefs:
“. . . the government has got to play a very important role in making sure that as a right of citizenship all of our people have healthcare; that as a right, all of our kids, regardless of income, have quality childcare, are able to go to college without going deeply into debt; that it means we do not allow large corporations and moneyed interests to destroy our environment; that we create a government which is not dominated by big money interests. I mean, to me, it means democracy, frankly.”
Essentially, Bernie is a New Deal Democrat and believes in combining free enterprise with public programs that maintain a minimum standard of living.
Where has socialism actually worked?
It’s worked where I was born, Germany, and it’s worked in many countries across Europe. In fact, it’s even worked right here when FDR was in office and the New Deal helped pull us out of the Great Depression.
Did you know that free college already exists? Ever heard of scholarships for performing well in school? Loans and grants for the low-income? ROTC? Even city colleges that pay you to attend?
I won’t go into incredible detail as these issues merit articles devoted entirely to themselves, but here is a breakdown of Bernie’s College for All Bill similar to what he would pursue as president and here is a breakdown of Bernie’s tax plan. On why college tuition is a problem, I recommend reading through the information here. Essentially, with the collapse in Pell Grants, inflation, and eleven-fold increase in the cost of college tuition over the past several decades, making public colleges and universities tuition free is actually a pretty conservative proposal—all we’re doing is going back to how things were. On taxes, with the absurd levels of income inequality in America, I think it is fair to ask the wealthy to pay a little more.
What has Bernie accomplished in his nearly three-decade-long career in Congress?
Quite a bit, actually. In a Republican-controlled House from 1994 to 2006, it was not a Republican who passed the most amendments, but rather Bernie Sanders. From a $100 million increase in health care funding to a $22 million increase in funding for heating for the poor, Bernie’s record is quite impressive. However, he didn’t stop when he was elected to the Senate in 2006: He won $10 million for the operation and maintenance of the Army National Guard and worked with Senator John McCain to pass one of the most comprehensive veterans bills in recent history, among many other things.
Do you really think climate change poses a greater threat than Islamic terrorism?
Yes, I think climate change is, in fact, one of the causes of terrorism. We won’t solve terrorism if we don’t address climate change—and we won’t have to worry about terrorism if we’re out of clean water and air.
If you hate corporations and capitalism so much, why do you own an iPhone? Why do you use Facebook? Instagram? Uber?
It isn’t that we hate or even dislike massively successful companies like Apple or Facebook. All we want is for these companies to contribute back to the infrastructure they benefited from so that we can have more successful entrepreneurs.
If you’re asking me to pay for your college now, do you also expect me to pay for your car, house, cellphone bill and Netflix account at some point?
No. My education is necessary for me, millions of others and the United States as a whole to remain competitive in a global economy, my binge watching old episodes of The Office is not.
Are you aware that the left-wing ideology that has produced Socialism, Marxism and the likes has claimed the lives of millions across the globe and impoverished and ruined the lives of millions more?
I wish you’d have been more specific here because I can’t help but think you are referring to Nazi Germany. Which, if you are, recognize first that the Nazis were not democratic socialists or even socialistic in any way. I’ve grown up in Germany and fully recognize the atrocities committed by my ancestors, so I don’t associate an ideology I disagree with with Nazism unless it actually is.
And did you know that your man, Bernie Sanders, has fraternized with these folk? He visited the Sandinista-run Nicaragua, vacationed in the USSR, and praised Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
There is a lot of nuance you are missing.
Did you know Bernie thinks it’s okay to abort a baby up until the day before it’s born?
I’d love a source on this because I couldn’t find anything.
Explain why Bernie wants to prosecute those who have exercised their First Amendment right in disagreeing with his view on climate change.
Let’s be clear: It is isn’t that he thinks climate change is real, but rather 97 percent of climate scientists. That aside, I can’t find anything suggesting he would support that. Personally, I think you can believe whatever you want in the comfort of your home—the problem is when you try to influence public policy on something that is objectively true.
@jtoz97 |
Skullgirls is a fast-paced, 2D fighting game developed by Reverge Labs and lead by tournament champ Mike “Mike Z” Zaimont and artist Alex “o_8” Ahad.
Drawing on the best features the genre has to offer, Skullgirls is designed to be a tournament-grade fighter while remaining approachable and engaging for the casual player.
Skullgirls features the most frames of animation per character of any fighting game, hand-drawn at high resolution and enhanced by real-time lighting courtesy of a powerful 3D engine
Classic six-button play gives characters a huge variety of attacks and special moves
With the Variable Tag Battle system, players can pit mismatched teams of one, two or three characters against one another
Custom Assists let you outfit your team with a huge variety of attacks for nearly endless strategic possibilities
A robust anti-infinite combo system keeps competitive play free of abusive tactics
Robust tutorials and an AI designed to teach eases new players into the traditionally intimidating fighting game genre and helps you improve from there
Official GGPO netcode ensures lag-free fighting online
A stunning soundtrack by Castlevania: Symphony of the Night composer Michiru Yamane draws you into the game’s unique “Dark Deco” world
TM and copyright 2012 Autumn Games LLC. All rights reserved. |
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The British Steel name is alive and well on Teesside as the company looks forward to a prosperous 2017.
The company ended 2016 in profit after investing £39m into its steelworks - including a £1.8m investment at Skinningrove’s special profiles works, one of two British Steel sites which employ around 700 people on Teesside.
Twelve new apprentices will be taken on in Teesside this year, with the region at the centre of plans for growth and job creation in the future.
Roland Junck, executive chairman, said: “We want to be an active facilitator for job creation. It is our responsibility in different regions and something we want to play an important role in.”
British Steel, which was created after the company was bought out from Tata around seven months ago, has already secured a series of significant contracts for the year ahead, including at Hinkley Point which will use steel from the Beam Mill at Lackenby.
The company ended 2016 in profit, and will reverse a 3% pay cut this year - a temporary measure that all staff agreed to last year.
And Mr Junck confirmed he recently spent time in London looking at how local steel could be used to build skyscrapers.
A 40-storey skyscraper at 100 Bishopsgate and ‘The Scalpel’ at 52 Lime Street will both include steel manufactured by British Steel.
Mr Junck continued: “Domestically we are in a unique position to provide large quantities of steel for developments throughout the UK, whether that be major infrastructure projects such as HS2 and Heathrow or smaller projects, such as the building of new schools or hospitals.
“It is therefore heartening to see positive steps by the Government over public procurement and the steel pipeline, two policies which should lead to more British Steel products being used in even more projects throughout the UK.
“While we undoubtedly face several challenges, the pace at which we have evolved allows us to believe that we can continue to strengthen our long-term capability and build a sustainable future as an industry leader serving our employees, our customers and our local communities.”
Responding to the positive news, Redcar MP Anna Turley said: “It is great to see that under new ownership and the return of an iconic steel brand, British Steel are making great progress in returning the business to a sustainable footing. They are not only back in profit but securing important contracts and investing in the next generation of steelworkers which is brilliant.
“The success is testament to both the new leadership and to the skills and the determination of the workforce who have worked hard to turn the business around. It is particularly good to hear the salary sacrifice is set to be reversed in the not too distant future.
“To continue this trend, securing contracts in major infrastructure projects like HS2 and Heathrow is crucial; as is addressing the competitive disadvantage UK steel has against our competitors
Ms Turley, whose constituency suffered heartbreak in 2015 when the SSI steelworks at Redcar closed, is part of the parliamentary all-party steel group who last week launched a new masterplan for the UK steel industry.
The Steel 2020 report sets out a blueprint for saving the embattled industry and protecting 40,000 jobs, outlining 43 recommendations including slashing electricity prices, tackling Chinese dumping and striking a strong post-Brexit deal with the EU.
“The Steel 2020 report we launched in Parliament this week set out a number of recommendations to the Government to address these issues and secure the future of steel,” continued Ms Turley.
“In British Steel the steel industry still has a stake in Teesside providing many skilled jobs, and we have the potential to develop other steel processes through the work of the MPI at South Bank. The progress so far shows that with the right support and the right leadership, our steel industry in this country can have a bright future.” |
As expected, a court in New York has ruled that there is no constitutional prohibition on dressing like Kris Kross. A Bronx man named Julio Martinez was ticketed by a New York City cop for cinching his pants below the buttocks, as is the style amongst the kids, and “potentially” (but not actually) exposing his “private parts.” The New York Post has all the fascinating details:
A Bronx judge has thrown out a summons issued against a Bronx man for wearing saggy pants, finding that "the Constitution still leaves some opportunity for people to be foolish if they so desire."... "While most of us may consider it distasteful, and indeed foolish, to wear one's pants so low as to expose the underwear . . . people can dress as they please, wear anything, so long as they do not offend public order and decency," the judge wrote. Martinez was given his summons for disorderly conduct on April 20 of last year.
The summons by the unidentified police officer charged that Martinez had acted in a disorderly manner because he had "his pants down below his buttocks exposing underwear [and] potentially showing private parts." There was no other reason listed for the ticket besides Martinez's pants, and Franco noted: "The issuance of this summons appears to be an attempt by one police officer to show his displeasure with a particular style of dress."
According to New York State Senator Eric Adams, if we can only “stop the sag” the social problems afflicting his constituents would away. Or something. In the video below (130,000 views and counting!), Adams explains that if we “raise our pants, we raise our image.”
UPDATE: I somehow missed that Damon Root flagged the same story, though with commentary from the august New York Law Journal and not the New York Post. But my post, while also making a Kris Kross reference, includes the "Stop Sagging" video. So I win. |
Deviana Morris has lost her mind, literally. There’s a blank where memories should inhabit space as a result a battle with an alien and enemy she barely remembers. That is on top of fighting for her life and realizing she might be the key to humanity’s salvation in the galaxy because of the occasional spreading of a black ink-like substance across Devi’s skin. You know, typical for a power-armor wearing bad-ass space-mercenary.
Honor’s Knight picks up where Fortune’s Pawn left Devi and her companions. A battle has been fought and Devi is burying one of her allies. Her boss, Captain Brian Caldswell, keeps asking about Devi’s lost memories and Rupert, the chef and Captain Caldswell’s seeming go-to-guy, is giving Devi the cold shoulder. Even worse, whenever Devi looks at Rupert she literally gets sick to her stomach. Not all of her memories are gone, and when she begins seeing phantoms, Devi becomes more concerned about her sanity until Caldswell believes what she has to say about the strange creatures few people can actually see. As Devi comes to learn, Caldswell is very high up in the ‘secret’ military organization known as the Eyes; an organization tasked with ridding the galaxy of these destructive creatures known as phantoms.
Devi wants more than the destruction of the phantoms, rather, she wants a whole new approach that will get rid of one of the main tools for destroying the phantoms. The Daughters of Maat have an ability to destroy the phantoms, but the cost is sacrificing the life of a young girl and tearing apart the family of the daughter. Throughout the novel, Devi struggles to regain all of her memories and to fight through what she sees as the corruption in the various organizations who set themselves with combating or controlling the phantoms. Devi comes across Brian’s old partner John Brenton and now rival, himself the leader of a paramilitary organization. Through it all, Devi’s character is consistent with what we learned about her in the previous novel – head strong, committed, a force to be reckoned with, and one who battles both physically and verbally for what she sees as right – even if the plot twists her around quite a bit.
Bach ratchets up the politics in Honor’s Knight and dials back the romantic element a bit. There’s also an ongoing discussion in the novel about the price of security and safety, in that can the fate of humanity be measured against the life of innocent girls who lose their identity and humanity? A difficult question to answer, and sometimes the easiest answers prove to be the incorrect answer in the long run. In other words, war breeds difficult moral choices, which leads to drastic consequences. The black ink-like substance afflicting Devi also happens to be like kryptonite to the phantoms, but Devi has little control over it and when it comes out on her skin.
There’s more action in the novel and Bach opens up the universe to a greater degree, bringing the phantoms more into the folds as the most alien creatures thus far encountered. At times described like bright firefly like creatures and other times, the larger creatures seem like something out of a Lovecraftian nightmare. In fact, what comes to mind are the Drej, the blue alien creatures from the animated film Titan A.E. (An animated film with the classic Don Bluth look and feel that deserved a much better fate at the box office than it received.)
While the romantic element takes a slight step back, it is still present and the tension between Rupert and Devi is palpable from the early disgust Devi feels whenever she looks at him to the time her memories of him, and her relationship with him, are resolved. This stage of their relationship works well enough in this novel (n case readers haven’t read the previous volume), but is very rewarding for readers who are familiar with these two characters.
With the Paradox series, Rachel Bach is crafting a sequence that hits so many of the right buttons – compelling characters, great plotting, thought provoking and difficult choices. Bach does some interesting things with character, giving readers a strong woman in a role most often associated with male characters and she does it so well. Readers who enjoy Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War novels would very likely enjoy these books.
I know one more novel about Devi is soon publishing, I just hope it will not be the last novel about these characters and this universe.
Highly recommended.
© 2014 Rob H. Bedford
Orbit February 2014
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-0-316-22108-5 384 Pages
Book 2 of The Paradox Trilogy (http://www.rachelaaron.net/books-paradox.php)
http://www.rachelaaron.net/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Orbit
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* Illustration: Nate Van Dyke * Tonight's subject at the History Book Club: the Vikings. This is primo stuff for the men who gather once a month in Seattle to gab about some long-gone era or icon, from early Romans to Frederick the Great. You really can't beat tales of merciless Scandinavian pirate forays and bloody ninth-century clashes. To complement the evening's topic, one clubber is bringing mead. The dinner, of course, is meat cooked over fire. "Damp will be the weather, yet hot the pyre in my backyard," read the email invite, written by host Njall Mildew-Beard.
That's Neal Stephenson, best-selling novelist, cult science fictionist, and literary channeler of the hacker mindset. For Stephenson, whose books mash up past, present, and future—and whose hotly awaited new work imagines an entire planet, with 7,000 years of its own history—the HBC is a way to mix background reading and socializing. "Neal was already doing the research," says computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith, who used to host the club until he moved from a house to a less convenient downtown apartment. "So why not read the books and talk about them, too?"
With his shaved head and (mildewless) beard, Stephenson could cut something of an imposing figure. But his demeanor is gentle, his comments droll and understated. ("He's on the shy side," Smith says. "A strong ego, but nicely hidden.") The session moves out of his kitchen, and a half dozen HBCers—including a litigator, a commercial real estate agent, and a chef/barkeep/PR guy—pull up chairs around the dining room table to talk and compare notes. Harald Bluetooth, Erik Bloodaxe, and Halfdan the Black are dispatched in a couple of hours. But before the members split for the night, they detour to the basement to see Stephenson's workshop, where he has an impressive assortment of metalworking tools to help him on his current DIY project: a scary-looking steel helmet to protect the shiny Stephenson noggin from accidental scalp removal while indulging in his recent passion, Western martial arts. This is the polite term for going medieval with swords and daggers. It's a hobby the author picked up during research for the Baroque Cycle, his three-volume, 2,688-page tribute to 18th-century science, philosophy, and swordplay. (Stephenson owns 12 swords.) He proudly demonstrates his welding setup—a bossing mallet to pound steel sheets and a 5-foot-high metal-shaping device called an English wheel. That particular tool once cost thousands of dollars but, thanks to Asian manufacturing, is now available at Harbor Freight hardware stores for less than $300.
Unmentioned is the other work performed in Njall Mildew-Beard's basement, the work involving intense eruptions of imagination that result in books the size of cinder blocks. These have made Stephenson the most avidly followed science fiction writer of his generation. His breakthrough 1992 novel, Snow Crash, has served as a blueprint for real computer scientists attempting the creation of virtual worlds. His deep understanding of not only computers but the people who go nuts over them has made him a god among the geek set. Salon called him the "poet laureate of hacker culture." Fanboys track his movements on blogs and try to top one another with praise on Amazon.com reviews. But Stephenson's sprawling, Pynchon-esque works transcend his cult status and are having an impact on the mainstream literary world. His last four books have all hit the New York Times best-seller list.
Only a few months ago, another epic bubbled up from his basement. Anathem, Stephenson's ninth novel, is set for release on September 9. The Nealosphere, of course, is over the top with anticipation. This time, Stephenson has given himself the broadest stage yet: a world of his own creation, including a new language. Though he's been consistently ambitious in his work, this latest effort marks a high point in his risk-taking, daring to blend the elements of a barn-burner space opera with heavy dollops of philosophical dialog. It's got elements of Dune, The Name of the Rose, and Michael Frayn's quantum-physics talkathon, Copenhagen. Befitting a novel written by a founding member of the History Book Club, its leitmotif is time—and its message couldn't be more timely.
Oh, and Stephenson manages to do it all in only 960 pages.
Set on a planet called Arbre (pronounced "arb"), Anathem documents a civilization split between two cultures: an indulgent Saecular general population (hooked on casinos, shopping in megastores, trashing the environment—sound familiar?) and the super-educated cohort known as the avout, who live a monastic existence defined by intellectual activity and circumscribed rituals called "auts." Freed from the pressures of pedestrian life, the avout view time differently. Their society—the "mathic" world—is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries. The avout are separated into four groups, distinguished by the amount of time they are isolated from the outside world and each other.11 Unarians stay inside the wall for a year. Decenarians can venture outside only once a decade. Centenarians are locked in for a hundred years, and Millennarians—long-lifespanners who are endowed with Yoda-esque wisdom—emerge only in years ending in triple zeros. Stephenson centers his narrative around a crisis that jars this system—a crisis that allows him to introduce action scenes worthy of Buck Rogers and even a bit of martial arts. It's a rather complicated setup; fortunately, there's a detailed timeline and 20-page glossary to help the reader decode things.
Stephenson says the story was inspired by the real-life Millennium Clock, a project thought up by inventor Danny Hillis and developed by the Long Now Foundation. The nub of the endeavor is the construction of a clock that has the mother of all warranties: It's built to last 10,000 years. Hillis conceived it to mitigate the mega-rapidity of the digital world. He was working on a massively parallel supercomputer, the Connection Machine, designed to scale to a million processors, and found himself obsessed with speed, slicing seconds into billions of pieces. "I was going for faster, faster, faster. But something in me was rejecting that," Hillis explained to me back in 1999, when he launched the project. "It wasn't clear that the world needed faster, faster, faster. So I began thinking about the opposite. Working on the fastest machine in the world got me thinking about the slowest." How slow? Hillis' timepiece would tick once a year, its insides would bong once a century, and the cuckoo would appear once a millennium.
Building the clock, it turns out, has been an antidote to the toxic fixation on short-term thinking that permeates our culture. Hillis and the friends who joined him—like fellow Long Now cofounders Stewart Brand (who wrote a book about the project) and Brian Eno (who composed a CD of chimes inspired by the clock)—found that its design and construction required recalibrating one's own mental clock to envision what things would be like in the distant future. Ideally, that mindset encourages behavior that tends to preserve the environment for clock customers in the year 12000, instead of gobbling up resources and leaving behind trash that tends to mess things up for those folks. Or so goes the thinking of the project's goofily optimistic supporters. Back at the launch, Brand marveled at the notion of looking so far beyond the temporal horizon. "It's the only 10,000-year-forward thing I know of," he said, "outside of science fiction, where it's fairly common."
Enter Neal Stephenson. He first heard about the clock from Hillis and Brand at the annual Hackers Conference, and in 1999 the Long Now asked him and a few others to share some thoughts for its Web site. "In my little back-of-the-napkin sketch, I drew a picture showing a clock with concentric walls around it," he says over lunch in downtown Seattle the day after the book club meeting. "I proposed that you could have a system of gates where it was open for a while at a certain time of year, or decade, or whatever, when you could go in and out freely. But if you were inside it when the gate closed, you'd be making a commitment to stay in until it opened again. And I talked about clock monks who would tend the clock. I put that idea in cold storage because I was working on the Baroque Cycle. When I recovered, I decided, what the hell, I'm just going to try writing this."
Stephenson measures his novels not by word count but by visually assessing the printout. "You've got manuscripts that are relatively short, and then you've got manuscripts that are taller than they are wide, and then you've got ones that are taller than they are long." Anathem falls into category three. "I was thinking shorter, but once you've done all the work to build the project and get the reader into it, there's the temptation to keep it going," he says.
In a sense, the length of Anathem, as well as its challenges to the reader, are part of its theme. Despite the monastic trappings of the clock-tenders, the avout are not driven by faith. What binds them is a commitment to logic and rationality. The robes and rituals, Stephenson says, are not religion but "their way of glorifying and expressing respect for ideas and thinkers that are important to them." Outside the walls ("extramuros," as the term goes—by the time you're a couple of hundred pages in, this language thing begins to fall in place), people zip around in an ADD haze of fast-food joints, persistent gadgets (instead of CrackBerry, they are addicted to handheld "jeejahs"), and evangelical religion. Stephenson sees a parallel to the George W. Bush-era wars between science and religion, made possible because the general population is either indifferent or hostile to extended rational thought. "I could never get that idea, the notion that society in general is becoming aliterate, out of my head," he says. "People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart."
Hillis is thrilled about Stephenson's choice of subject matter. "One of the more interesting things about the project has been what anybody adds to it," he says. "Clearly, Neal's imagination is extraordinary. He creates a whole world in his mind; he's got every building imagined in more detail than it's described in the book." Long Now executive director Alexander Rose is also delighted but makes it clear that Stephenson's ideas aren't exactly in sync with the foundation's plans, which include construction of the clock inside a mountain in eastern Nevada, where it will draw power from temperature changes and visitors stopping by to wind it. "We're not planning on locking up people for thousands of years," he says.
In every Neal Stephenson novel, there are characters who regard the world with an insatiable yet bemused curiosity; they are fascinated with the way things work and are forever eager to lay on hands, tinker, tweak, and obsess. In other words, they're hackers. In Anathem, the narrator, Erasmas, though not a techie, shares this trait. So does the author. Stephenson was born in 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland, a son of academics (his dad taught electrical engineering; his mother was a biochemistry researcher). He grew up in the college town of Ames, Iowa, a self-described theater geek who also had a streak of the hacker in him. "I played the role of Mephistopheles in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and on the technical side made a full-size mechanical Kong hand that, at one point in the play, reaches through a window and drags somebody offstage," he says. He graduated from Boston University in 1981 and moved to Seattle with his wife, Ellen, who did her medical residency there.
His early books, a satire about big universities and an eco-thriller, were well received but not huge sellers.22 In 1991, Stephenson says, his career "was moving along at low rpms." Then he wrote Snow Crash, a book that postulated the Metaverse, an exquisitely fleshed-out vision of a digital alternative world, and Stephenson found himself at the front ranks of cyberpunk authors. "I was sort of going for broke with Snow Crash," he told me a few years back. "I had tried to write stuff that was more conventional and that would be appealing to a large audience, and it didn't work. I figured I would just go for broke, write something really weird, and not be so worried about whether it was a good career move or not."
Other triumphs followed—The Diamond Age, a near-future chronicle set in Shanghai in which a young woman owns a nanotech book that puts the Kindle to shame; Cryptonomicon, a multithreaded excursion into the wonders of cryptography; and the ultimate steampunker, the Baroque Cycle, which rocketed the mathematical conflicts between Newton and Leibniz to best-sellerdom.
Stephenson spends his mornings cloistered in the basement, writing longhand in fountain pen and reworking the pages on a Mac version of the Emacs text editor. This intensity cannot be sustained all day—"It's part of my personality that I have to mess with stuff," he says—so after the writing sessions, he likes to get his hands on something real or hack stuff on the computer. (He's particularly adept at Mathematica, the equation-crunching software of choice for mathematicians and engineers.) For six years, he was an adviser to Jeff Bezos' space-flight startup, Blue Origin. He left amicably in 2006. Last year, he went to work for another Northwest tech icon, Nathan Myhrvold, who heads Intellectual Ventures, an invention factory that churns out patents and prototypes of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Stephenson and two partners spend most afternoons across Lake Washington in the IV lab, a low-slung building with an exotic array of tools and machines to make physical manifestations of the fancies that flow from the big thinkers on call there.
"In Neal's books, he's been fantastically good at creating scenarios and technologies that are purely imaginary," Myhrvold says. "But they're much easier imagined than built. So we spend a certain amount of our time imagining them but the rest of our time building them. It's also very cool but different to say, 'Let's come up with new ways of doing brain surgery.'"
That's right—brain surgery is one of the things Stephenson is tinkering with. He and his team are helping refine some mechanical aspects of a new tool, a helical needle for operating on brain tumors. It's the kind of cool job one of his characters might have.
Which indicates that Stephenson's afternoon job, besides letting him get his hands dirty on weird machines, is maybe not so different from the activity he undertakes in his basement. Myhrvold, while making sure his company is decidedly commercial, is still a sucker for big ideas from big brains. He's also a major funder of the Long Now and even has a prototype of the 10,000-year clock in his home.
It makes sense that people like Stephenson and Myhrvold are drawn to the Long Now's cosmically improbable but cerebrally galvanizing effort. "It's an insanely ambitious project; it is a total folly," Brand says of the clock effort. "It presents itself as rational, but that's like presenting the pyramids as rational. You can argue with it, but if you put it out there as this gonzo, over-the-top-crazy but weirdly plausible, adventurous thing to do, then people want to be part of it. About two out of 10 light up, and the other eight are going, 'Don't you have something better to do with your time?'"
Hey, that sounds like the reaction to a Neal Stephenson novel.
This fall, Stephenson will reluctantly break from his cherished routines to promote Anathem. "If I had to do a book tour every day it would kill me. But four weeks every four years isn't too much to ask," he says. The tinkerer in him has stuffed some extra elements into the final package. The book includes three appendices consisting of passages that didn't make it into the text—fascinating digressions involving puzzle-like conundrums (sort of the hard-copy equivalent of the bonus deleted scenes on a DVD). Another subsidiary project is a CD that re-creates the spooky a cappella hymns, based on mathematical proofs and behavior of cellular automata, sung by the clock-tenders inside the concents. David Stutz, a former Microsoft techie now involved in early classical music—and an HBC member—composed and produced the effort, which is being considered for widespread release. "It's a pseudo-liturgical use of mathematics and higher thinking," Stutz says. Actually, to the untrained ear it sounds like the neo-Gregorian chanting that accompanies ritual baby sacrifice in horror films.
Anathem asks a lot of its readers, but Stephenson's got a lot of devoted ones. The hardcore (Brand's "two out of 10") will just buy his books no questions asked. It will be interesting to see what the rest will do. "It's really about the difference between people who can sit down and focus their attention for a long period of time on something complicated in a patient and steady way—versus people who never read anything longer than a sentence or paragraph and who get very impatient if you try to go on at any length," Stephenson says.
The author himself concedes that's he's got one foot on either side of the Saecular/mathic divide. He's trapped in his own theme, our society's secret war between the Long Now and the now. "When I'm working on a book, I need to be uninterrupted—a long-attention-span kind of thing. On the other hand, there are a lot of things in my life that are important and keep me communicating over email. It's harder for me even to read books than it used to be, and there's an obvious irony there." But after the Anathem tour ends this fall, he fully expects to be back in the basement, using a fine-nibbed fountain pen to fill up another cinder block of paper.
Senior writer Steven Levy ( [email protected])* also writes about the Chumby in this issue (16.09) of* Wired.
Researchers Recover 1,000-Year-Old Viking DNA
The Sci-Fi Rejection Letter That Time Forgot
Sci-Fi Solves 100-Year-Old Siberia Mystery With Apocalyptic Plotlines |
It’s been quite some time since the Toronto Maple Leafs made a major player acquisition. Today, Toronto acquired 26-year-old goaltender Frederik Andersen from the Anaheim Ducks in exchange for a 1st Round pick in 2016 (30th overall), and a 2nd Round pick in 2017.
Following the trade, they signed him to a five-year contract worth 25 million.
[Photo: Amanda Bowen of AKB Multimedia].
Prior to this move, Toronto had the tandem of Jonathan Bernier and Garret Sparks heading into the 2016-17 season. Both goalies were bottom-ten in the NHL for GAA last season, so this is definitely an big upgrade in the net.
Anderson has 125 games of regular season NHL experience as well as 28 games in the playoffs. He’s split the crease with John Gibson over the past two seasons. This deal is an indication Anaheim has decided they would like to move forward with Gibson getting full-time. GM Bob Murray referred to the deal as one that “had to happen”.
Both a 1st and 2nd do seem like a pretty steep price to pay with caliber goalies like James Reimer already going to free agency and Ben Bishop reportedly on the trade market. But, let’s not forget that the 1st Rounder is at 30th overall, and the Leafs still have the 31st overall pick as well as rights to 10 other picks throughout the 2016 draft.
The Leafs have made several notable goaltending acquisitions over the last decade and none of them have really gone as planned: Raycroft, Toskala, Bernier. Meanwhile, one of the goaltenders they decided to trade away during this time period in Tuukka Rask has gone on to thrive with the Boston Bruins.
Many are comparing the addition of Anderson to the acquisition of Jonathan Bernier in 2013. Similarly, Bernier was another young, highly touted goaltender with the LA Kings who was traded away due to a crowded depth chart; Jonathan Quick had already established himself as the starting goaltender which made Bernier expendable.
Here’s a comparison of both goaltenders and their pre-Leafs careers. The data definitely suggests that Anderson is a better goaltender than Bernier was when he arrived to the Leafs. Anderson beats Bernier in every category.
PLAYER GP GAA SV% QS% 5ON5ADJ.FSV% F. Anderson 125 2.34 .916 .679 0.69 (70th Percentile) J. Bernier 62 2.36 .912 .574 0.00 (40th Percentile)
QS% stands for Quality Start Percentage. “A quality start (QS) as a game when the goalie stops more than the median save percentage for the League or gives up less than three goals while stopping .885 or more of shots faced.” – NHL.com.
5ON5ADJ.FSV% stands for Adjusted Fenwick Save Percentage in Even-Strength situations. It basically looks at the difference between a goaltender’s actual save percentage and their expected save percentage based on the quality of shots they faced. As you can see, Bernier was below average in this stat before coming to the Leafs. Meanwhile, Anderson has been one of the best goalies in the stat over the past three seasons (top 30%).
We’ll have to wait and see if those numbers translate into on-ice success this upcoming season.
Anderson on starting with 30th-place Leafs: “They’re better than their record shows. I know how hard they work (from games in Anaheim).” — Lance Hornby (@sunhornby) June 20, 2016
[Stats: Corsica Hockey]. |
Deputy takes man's Xbox during traffic stop David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Friday November 21, 2008
Print This Email This The known hazards of "driving while black" may have to be amended to add those of driving while black, dreadlocked, and toting an Xbox.
When Kenyatta Hillman and a friend were pulled over by a Orange County traffic cop for speeding outside Orlando, FL, the deputy claimed to smell marijuana and searched the car. No drugs were found, but the deputy did spot an Xbox and eight games and seized them from Hillman, alleging they might have been stolen.
Even after the deputy checked the serial numbers and nothing came up, he insisted he wanted to hold onto them in case they were reported later. Hillman told WFTV News, "He said, 'When you've got your receipt and your box and stuff, call me and we'll meet someplace, and you show me the receipt and I'll give you your game.' I didn't understand him."
Hillman believes he was targeted because of his clothing and his dreadlocks. "It's probably the neighborhood, it's probably looking at me because of my hair, I've got gold in my mouth, probably the way I dress."
Hillman later went to the sheriff's office with the original receipt and packaging, but staff were unable to find his Xbox and games. "They was actually saying, 'We don't know what's going on,'" Hillman explained. "'It wasn't no arrest, it wasn't no police report filed, it's no case number, we can't find it.'"
The Orange County Sheriff's Office told WFTV there had simply been a miscommunication and the gaming system had not yet been transferred to the evidence room.
Hillman later reached the supervisor, who said he had the system and could return it, but not before the end of the week. "'I can't do anything this week,'" Hillman said the man told him. "'I'll call you Friday and I'll meet you Friday and then give you your Xbox back.'"
Ironically, Hillman heads a rap band called "Central Flawda's Most Wanted." On the band's MySpace page, Hillman says of himself:
"Born and raised right here in the 'O' and this is where I'm gonna die at (ya feel me) I was raised in these streets and had to adapt to them. so I do I what I say and I say what I do. And when I say it I speak the truth. And I also had to face changes. Some trials and tribulations but you have to go through that type of stuff some times in order to become a better person so I guess why I am who I am........Orange County stand up."
The WFTV report can be read here.
This video is from CNN.com, broadcast Nov. 20, 2008.
Download video via RawReplay.com |
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The Bureau of Meteorology warns of below-average rainfall across Australia after El Niño brings record ocean temperature increases
El Niño, one of three strongest recorded, brings high drought risk for Australia
The El Niño in the Pacific is now one of the three strongest ever recorded.
The Bureau of Meteorology said sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific, a key driver of the climatic phenomenon, were 2.4C above average – the highest since the El Niño was declared six months ago.
El Niño usually brings below-average rain and increased daytime temperatures, particularly to eastern Australia in the southern spring. The bureau’s latest El Niño southern oscillation wrap-up said the strength compares with the two strongest recorded – in 1997-98 and 1982-83.
Both brought devastating droughts to eastern Australia.
El Niño could leave 4 million people in Pacific without food or drinking water Read more
“International climate models suggest the peak in El Niño sea surface temperatures is likely to occur before the end of the year, then gradually ease in the first quarter of 2016,” the wrap-up said.
Typically, El Niño’s influence on rainfall decreases, although warmer daytime and night-time temperatures tend to persist.
But record warm sea-surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean may cause below-average rainfall to drag on across Australia, the bureau warned.
This warming, known as the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), has existed for more than three months, with temperatures now 0.88C above average – the highest anomaly since reliable records began in 1981.
The record has already been broken twice this spring – in September (+0.52C) and October (+0.65C).
An above-average IOD tends to reinforce the effect of an El Niño, especially in the south-east. It is expected the dipole will begin to degrade later in November.
Despite recent rainfall in some areas, parts of inland Queensland, northern and western Victoria and southern South Australia have severe or record rainfall deficiencies stretching back as much as three years. |
Hey friends, I’m going to try and do these recaps each week or every other depending on what's going on. Here’s a few items I can talk about:We are going to be introducing a fix with DLC 1 that will resolve the issue and retroactively reward the gifts you didn’t get.: Tuesday to be exact. We will be providing some of the first details about DLC 1.it will also include a patch with a number of fixes and changes that we will provide info on in an accompanying blog. I can’t speak to specifics yet but that information is coming.– Thanks all that have been giving thoughtful feedback. We’ve seen the survey and many more suggestions from all over. I’ve enjoyed reading the debates! The team is always looking for community feedback and reads a lot of it. Any changes that are pushed whether it's a patch or hot fix will be posted in the Game Updates section.- we've seen feedback about players getting maps repeatedly and we'll be reducing its likelihood in a hotfix coming next week.- We're investigating ways to reduce the frequency of join-in-progress matches, while making it a more rewarding experience when it does happen. Some of our ideas require further iteration and testing, but be assured that we've heard your feedback and will address it in the future.– We use Fairfight for catching cheaters in game and so far any follow ups we’ve done on reported cheaters has showed that they were already banned. If you do see cheaters, it’s best to capture video of it and send to [email protected] We take cheating seriously and continue to look at how we improve catching them. Fairfight does not do immediate action on cheaters but is catching them and banning.– If you folks are reporting this please include dxdiags from PC users so QA can see the entire spec and driver dates/versions used and this also allows us to try and reproduce on our end.I'm also looking into getting more context around PING and localization issues. Have a great weekend all! We'll have lots of fun stuff to share and talk about next week. |
Newly appointed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci answers questions at a press briefing on July 21, 2017. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/TNS)
At his first briefing as White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci acknowledged that he wasn’t ready to answer every question reporters threw at him -- including one about whether there were 3 million illegal votes cast in the 2016 presidential election.
At one point, a reporter asked Scaramucci, "Do you stand by some of the factual claims that have been made by this administration? Three million illegal votes cast for president? Do you now endorse all those statements of fact?"
Scaramucci responded, "So, it's a little bit of an unfair question, because I'm not up to speed on all of that. I'll just candidly tell you that."
The reporter pressed: "He said 3 million people voted illegally."
Scaramucci then said, "Okay, so if the president says it -- let me do more research on it. My guess is that there's probably some level of truth to that. I think what we have found sometimes is that the president says stuff, some of you guys in the media think it's not true. It turns out it's closer to the truth than people think. Let me do more homework on that and get back to you."
We can be of help here.
Last November, PolitiFact gave a Pants on Fire rating to President Donald Trump’s statement that he "won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally."
In fact, we found zero evidence for Trump’s charge, as well as a lot of reasons to conclude that it didn’t happen.
Almost 3 million vote margin
A comprehensive vote-tracking analysis is published by David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. According to Wasserman’s calculations, Hillary Clinton led Trump by roughly 2.87 million votes -- specifically, 65,853,516 for Clinton, 62,984,824 for Trump, and 7,801,446 for other candidates.
So "3 million votes" would be enough to hand Trump the popular-vote victory as well as an Electoral College victory.
For a sense of scale, 3 million votes is more than were cast for any presidential candidate in three dozen states plus the District of Columbia. And 3 million people is more than a quarter of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States — a group that Alex Jones’ conspiracy website InfoWars specifically singled out as the source of 3 million illegal votes.
As evidence of its claim, InfoWars referred to a report from VoteFraud.org and tweets from Gregg Phillips, whose Twitter profile said he founded VoteStand, a voter fraud reporting app.
However, there was no report from VoteFraud.org, and Phillips told PolitiFact he is not affiliated with that website. Tweets by Phillips on Nov. 11 and Nov. 13 said that "we have verified more than 3 million votes cast by non-citizens" and that Phillips had "completed analysis of database of 180 million voter registrations. Number of non-citizen votes exceeds 3 million. Consulting legal team."
Phillips did not respond to PolitiFact’s queries for additional information. He had told us previously that he has chosen not to release more information because he is still working on analyzing the data and verifying its accuracy. Phillips would not say what the data is or where it came from, or what methodology he used. He said he would release the information publicly once he is finished. He does not appear to have done so publicly.
Voter fraud uncommon
Research of other elections suggests that voter fraud is not widespread.
• News21, a national investigative reporting project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, found just 56 cases of noncitizens voting between 2000 and 2011.
• A report by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that most cases of noncitizens voting were accidental. "Although there are a few recorded examples in which noncitizens have apparently registered or voted, investigators have concluded that they were likely not aware that doing so was improper," reads the 2007 report.
• In 2012, Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s administration started an effort trying to crack down on noncitizens voting by comparing driver's license data against voter rolls. The Florida Department of State created a list of 182,000 potential noncitizens that had voted. That number was whittled down to 2,700, then to about 200 before the purge was stopped amid criticism that the data was flawed given the number of false positives — including a Brooklyn-born World War II vet. Ultimately, only 85 people were removed from the rolls.
Meanwhile, ProPublica, an investigative journalism project, tweeted that "we had 1,100 people monitoring the vote on Election Day. We saw no evidence the election was ‘rigged’ " and "no evidence that undocumented immigrants voted illegally."
Experts unconvinced
Experts dismissed the substance of Trump’s claims about the election.
"This is patently false," Costas Panagopoulos, a Fordham University political scientist, told us in November. "There would need to be a massive national conspiracy and coordination effort to do this, and illegal aliens would need to be on the voter rolls in states across the country months earlier to be eligible to vote. It is also very convenient the estimated fraudulent vote is just enough to give Trump the popular vote. Not likely a coincidence."
University of Denver political scientist Seth Masket said the claim was short on basic logic.
"It’s bizarre to claim that Clinton had the ability to generate millions of illegal voters but not use them to help her win the Electoral College," Masket said. |
DAKAR, Senegal — Government security forces were implicated in the deaths of at least 90 of the hundreds of people killed in religious violence in the central Nigerian city of Jos last month, Human Rights Watch said Saturday.
At least 400 people died when fighting broke out between Muslim and Christian gangs in the city on Nov. 28 and 29 after a dispute about local elections. Each side accused the other of rigging the vote.
Muslims and Christians mingle uneasily in the so-called middle belt region of Nigeria, and tension frequently flares along religious, ethnic and political fault lines.
Initial accounts of the killing in Jos indicated that the gangs had set upon each other’s neighborhoods, burning churches, homes, businesses and mosques.
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But based on testimony from witnesses interviewed in the aftermath of the violence, Human Rights Watch researchers documented seven shootings in which the police had killed at least 46 men and boys, almost all of them Muslim. |
Here's what the Mummy: The Curse Storyteller's Screen includes:
Full color, 11" x 25.5" collage of selected beautiful art from Mummy: The Curse
Three 8.5" x 11" pages of collected charts and tables selected to make your Storyteller job a bit easier
One cover sheet with the product info on it
About Mummy: the Curse:
Imagine being both dead and deathless at the same time. Imagine being cradled in the arms of death for years, sometimes decades on end, but all the while knowing that you will eventually not only arise again, but awaken to an unfamiliar world that mostly fears and hates you. Now imagine that your purpose, your entire existence, is bound within this cycle -- that you are chained to it for all eternity. You sleep, you wake, your serve your Judge's will in the lands of the living, and you return to the death-sleep once more. The ancient culture that empowered you is gone, lost to the sands of time... yet you endure.
In Mummy: the Curse, a Storytelling game set in the World of Darkness, you play one of these beings. Those who know they exist, from the cultists who serve them to the dark forces arrayed against them, call them the Deathless.
We call them mummies. |
According to the report, 70.4% of students who started in 2008 at a Michigan public university had graduated by 2014.
Buy Photo Michigan universities are doing a good job of getting student to graduate, a new report says. (Photo: Detroit Free Press file photo)Buy Photo Story Highlights 70.4% of students who started in 2008 at a Michigan public university had graduated by 2014
The national average for total completions is 62.85%
Michigan's public universities are doing a good job of making sure students who enroll are graduating, even if the graduation comes at a different university, a new report shows.
The state's community colleges aren't performing as well when measured against the national average, the same report, compiled by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, shows.
The report, issued today, tracked students who enrolled in college in the fall of 2008 and where they were at the end of the school year in 2014. Unlike other college completion reports, this one followed transfer students and looked at how they were doing, giving a clear picture of college completion, said NSCRC's Associate Director Afet Dundar.
Details for individual universities were not available.
Michigan is outperforming the national average at the four-year university level. According to the report, 70.4% of students who started in 2008 at a Michigan public university had graduated by 2014 and 13.87 % were still enrolled in school somewhere. Of those who started in 2008, 60.51% graduated from the university they started at, while 9.88% had graduated from a different school.
The national average for total completions is 62.85%, with 49.80% graduating from the university they started with 13.06% graduating from a different university and 14.44% still enrolled.
Micah Thomas, 22, of Ypsilanti, is among those who started at one university and then then headed elsewhere.
"I went to Western (Michigan University), but my freshmen year, my mom got sick and I got homesick," the current Eastern Michigan University senior said. He's on pace to graduate this spring.
"I liked Western, but Eastern is a better fit for me – for my whole life, not just the school stuff. I know a lot of people who have transferred to another school for all kinds of reasons."
The numbers aren't as good at the community college level.
In Michigan, 35.87% of those who started at a public community college had graduated six years later, 24.55% at the community college they started at. In Michigan, 14.01% had graduated from a four-year university six years after starting community college and 19.62% were still enrolled somewhere.
Across the nation, 39.13% of those who started at a public community college in 2008 had graduates, 26.14% from the community college they started at. Nationally, 16.18% had graduated from a four-year university and 17.93% were still in school somewhere.
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Management Summary: Greenlight Re is an interesting special situation in my opinion combining 2 bets in one stock: 1. It is a bet that David Einhorn will come back after his worst year ever and 4 years of underperformance
2. Greenlight Re, the Reinsurance company whose investments he manages “mean reverts” at least closer to its historical price book ratio. This “bet” should be relatively uncorrelated to the overall market and due to the construction of the investment mandate, Einhorn can charge only half of the performance fee for some time. Disclaimer: This is not investment advise. DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!
“Put your money to where your mouth is” is something I do preach indirectly since I started the blog 5 years ago. In my 5th anniversary post last week I said the following with regard to David Einhorn:
As I have said many times, I do think Einhorn is one of the very good HF investors. He really had a hard year. If I would be responsible for allocating money to hedge funds, I would actually increase my investment as good managers very often come back strongly after a bad streak.
As a private investor, I don’t think that I would be able to invest in one of his funds. But then I remembered that there is a possibility to do so even for “small guys” like me:
Greenlight Re is a Cayman based, US listed Reinsurance company with one specialty: The investment portfolio is managed by DME advisors which is basically David Einhorn and he is Chairman of the company.
The idea behind it is relatively easy: It is some kind of “Berkshire light” company. You have equity capital plus reinsurance. The reinsurance creates “float” which allows the company to leverage Einhorn’s investment results by a certain amount. Ideally, the leverage doesn’t cost anything but could even add to the overall result if the do good underwriting.
Reality check
So far the theory. If we look at Greenlight’s stock chart since its IPO in 2007, we can see that the strategy didn’t work that well, at least compared to the chart of the “real Berkshire”. Actually the stock price is now lower than the 19 USD IPO price back in 2007:
The drop in the current year clearly has to do with Einhorn having a horrible year. Interestingly, Greenlight Re discloses Einhorn’s Performance on a quarterly basis back to 2004. -20,2% for 11 months in 2015 is clearly a disaster.
Digging deeper: Insurance vs. Investments & structural value creation
In order to assess if Greenlight Re is a proxy for Einhorn’s performance, we need to check if the “structure” is value creating or not. “Value creating” means that the Greenlight Re shareholder actually gets at least the same return (Return on equity) as the return on the investments.
There is a simple way to do this: Greenlight Re reports Einhorn’s performance as well as the investment result separately. We can therefore pretty easily compare the investment result with the overall result in the table below:
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Einhorn Performance 5,90% -17,60% 32,10% 11,00% 2,10% 7,10% 19,60% 8,70% Invest result 27,6 -126,1 199 104 23,1 78,9 218,1 122,6 Total result 35,3 -120,9 209,6 90,6 6,8 14,6 225,7 109,6 Equity 605,6 485 729,2 839,2 845,7 860,4 1086,3 1194 Comprehensive Income 36,5 -120,6 244,2 110 6,5 14,7 225,9 107,7 Greenlight ROE 7,95% -22,12% 40,22% 14,03% 0,77% 1,72% 23,21% 9,45% vs. Stated perf, 2,05% -4,52% 8,12% 3,03% -1,33% -5,38% 3,61% 0,75% “Leverage” 135% 126% 125% 128% 37% 24% 118% 109% “Leakage” 7,7 5,2 10,6 -13,4 -16,3 -64,3 7,6 -13,0
This table does 2 things: It calculates the “leakage”, which is the overall result of the company minus the investment results. A positive result means they made extra money with the insurance business, a negative result means they lost money and had to “pay” for the float. In total, the “leakage” was around 76 mn USD or around 9,5 mn USD per year. So clearly the “float” and the structure do not come for free.
The “leverage” shows how much better or worse the actual ROE was compared to the underlying performance of the investment portfolio. In the beginning, this was around 1,25-1,3 but declined. In years with low returns the “leakage” of course has a bigger impact and in years with negative performance the leverage via the float of course works the other way.
Now we can calculate in a second step the compounded effect of leverage and leakage and see if the overall structure adds value or destroys value. Those are the results for 2007-2014:
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 CAGR 2007-2014 Einhorn Perf 105,90% 87,26% 115,27% 127,95% 130,64% 139,91% 167,34% 181,90% 7,77% GL ROE 107,95% 84,08% 117,90% 134,44% 135,47% 137,81% 169,79% 185,83% 8,05%
So the good news is: The Return for shareholders is slightly better than the underlying investment return but not by much. So the leverage of the structure adds a little bit to Einhorn’s underlying returns.
How does this compare to S&P and the “real” Berkshire ?
This is a table comparing the stated ROE of Berkshire in the 2014 annual report and the S&P 500 against Greenlight:
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 CAGR 2007-2014 S&P 105,50% 66,47% 84,08% 95,01% 97,00% 112,52% 148,98% 169,39% 6,81% Berkie 111,00% 100,34% 120,21% 137,16% 143,47% 164,13% 194,00% 210,11% 9,72% GL ROE 107,95% 84,08% 117,90% 134,44% 135,47% 137,81% 169,79% 185,83% 8,05%
So it is easy to see that the “real” Berkshire was better than Greenlight Re, but the still did beat the S&P 500 by a good margin. One has to take into account, that Einhorn charges “1,5% plus 20%” on his services. Without those fees, Greenlight’s performance would have been most likely pretty much similar to Berkshire.
2015: Annus Horiblis
If we look at at Einhorn’s relative track record to the S&P 500, we can see that the last 4 years were tough for him, but 2015 is clearly the worst ever:
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 11/2015 Einhorn Performance 5,90% -17,60% 32,10% 11,00% 2,10% 7,10% 19,60% 8,70% -20,20% S&P 500 5,50% -37,00% 26,50% 13,00% 2,10% 16,00% 32,40% 13,70% 1,22% Delta 0,40% 19,40% 5,60% -2,00% 0,00% -8,90% -12,80% -5,00% -21,42%
Being -20% behind the benchmark is really tough, even for a start manager like Einhorn. The reasons are quite obvious: He runs a relative “market neutral” strategy at the moment. His longs (Sunedison, Consol) are not doing well and being short was no fun over the past few years.
According to Bloomberg, his biggest long positions are:
Security Ticker Source Position Pos Chg % Out Mkt Val APPLE INC AAPL US 13F 11,227,274 +3.84MLN .20 1.19BLN GENERAL MOTORS CO GM US 13F 16,298,818 +1.65MLN 1.05 548.78MLN ISS A/S ISS DC EXCH 9,262,706 0 4.99 325.49MLN AERCAP HOLDINGS NV AER US 13F 7,344,500 +1.76MLN 3.72 294.81MLN CHICAGO BRIDGE & IRON CO N CBI US 13F 7,481,471 +758,014 7.13 287.59MLN MICHAEL KORS HOLDINGS LTD KORS US 13F 7,043,700 +3.42MLN 3.83 279.63MLN TIME WARNER INC TWX US 13F 3,814,700 +36,300 .48 242.27MLN CONSOL ENERGY INC CNX US Form 4 29,609,565 0 12.93 218.52MLN ARKEMA AKE FP Research 3,137,005 -212,997 4.21 218.37MLN AECOM ACM US 13F 6,469,412 -44,092 4.27 189.10MLN GREEN BRICK PARTNERS INC GRBK US 13F 24,118,668 0 49.41 179.44MLN MICRON TECHNOLOGY INC MU US 13F 12,371,980 -25.58MLN 1.20 177.66MLN ON SEMICONDUCTOR CORP ON US 13F 17,305,600 0 4.19 173.23MLN BANK OF NEW YORK MELLON CO BK US 13F 4,000,000 0 .37 160.88MLN TAKE-TWO INTERACTIVE SOFTW TTWO US 13F 4,158,306 0 4.91 144.54MLN VOYA FINANCIAL INC VOYA US 13F 3,649,381 -2.23MLN 1.69 131.52MLN SUNEDISON INC SUNE US 13F 18,605,373 -6.24MLN 5.87 121.12MLN
The portfolio is clearly a pretty “contrarian” portfolio, no “FANG” stocks to be found. I wouldn’t invest in most of them, but on the other hand that says nothing if they are going to be good investments.
Double hit for shareholders: Insurance losses
For Greenlight capital shareholders there is even a double hit in 2015: Looking at the Q3 report we can see that in the first 9 months, the overall result at -283 mn USD loss is even -47 mn lower than the -236 mn USD investment loss.
So the insurance side added a big loss at the same time that the investment result was really really bad. That had clearly an impact on how investors value Greenlight. This is the “end of period” Price/Book valuation for Greenlight Re since IPO:
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2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 P/B Ratio 1,24 0,96 1,23 1,23 1,08 1,03 1,19 1,05 0,78 P/B Ratio adj. B Shares 1,48 1,15 1,46 1,47 1,29 1,23 1,42 1,25 0,93
For some reason, the official Bloomberg ratios do not include the class B shares held by David Einhorn, so I adjusted them accordingly.
We can see clearly that in the past, investors valued Greenlight at around 1,2 -1,4 times book value. Following the incredibly bad 2015, the stock now trades below book value.
A quick look at the Insurance side:
What Greenlight does in its Insurance area can be best described as “commodity business”. I don’t think that they have any competitive advantage.
Greenlight is doing around 60% Liability insurance. Liability insurance is one of the most dangerous business lines in Property and Casualty (P&C) because it can take very long time until the claims materialize. Take car insurance for instance. If claims go up to much, you see it directly, with liability insurance you often see claims occurring many years later. If done smartly and cautiously, liability insurance can be quite interesting, because due to the long time horizon’s it creates float. In Greenlight’s case however they seem to have underwritten some bad contracts. Overall, I would not attach any significant value to the iInsurance business.
One positive observation: It seems that they do underwrite now more opportunistically which is good. Premium income declined significantly from 2013 to 2014. Reducing premium when prices are down (as they are now) is a good sign that they might have learned a lesson or two.
The “kicker”: Investment management fee agreement
This is the relevant section from the annual report:
Pursuant to the venture agreement and the advisory agreement, DME Advisors has the exclusive right to manage substantially all of our investable assets, subject to the investment guidelines adopted by the respective Boards of Directors of Greenlight Re and GRIL, for so long as the venture agreement is in effect. DME Advisors receives a monthly management fee based on an annual rate of 1.5% of the capital account balance of each participant. In addition, DME receives a performance allocation based on the positive performance change in such participant’s capital account equal to 20% of net profits calculated per annum, subject to a loss carry forward provision. The loss carry forward provision allows DME to earn a reduced performance allocation of 10% on profits in any year subsequent to the year in which a participant’s capital account (other than DME) incurs a loss, until all the losses are recouped and an additional amount equal to 150% of the loss is earned. DME is not entitled to a performance allocation in a year in which the investment portfolio incurs a loss.
This fee structure is interesting especially after such a down year as 2015. If we assume that Einhorn finsihes -20% for 2015, he needs to earn first the -20% back and then 30% more until his old 20% carry kicks in. So for the next 50% or so he “only” can charge 10% performance premium instead of 20%. Although this is still no super bargain, it does increase the “come back” bet further as Greenlight Re shareholders will have a better upside profile than compared to the last 8 years. All other things equal, Greenlight should actually trade at higher comparable valuations than the years before because the upside is better for shareholders than in the past.
Investment case / Valuation
My investment case is quite simple. The upside case includes the following components
a) Einhorn gets his Mojo back and outperforms (10-30%) over 2-3 years
b) the upside participation for GRLE shareholders is better than in the past as the performance fee will be 10% instead of 20% for some time (+1-3%)
c) Greenlight Re at some point in time trades back to 1,2 times book value (30% upside)
d) Maybe even the Insurance part makes some profits (not included)
So overall I think the stock could earn me between 40-65% over the next 2-3 years.
I think the “Einhorn recovery” stand-alone would not be enough, but that the mean-reversion potential makes the stock interesting. However the “mean reversion” clearly is directly corellated to the outperformance. Without any outperformance, the current valuation around book value is clearly a realistic level.
Of course, Einhorn could underperform another 3 years and/or the stock market could tank. In those cases one could even imagine some more discount on the book value. Nevertheless I see better a upside than downside at this point for Greenlight in the coming 2-3 years. On top of that I think the “Einhorn come back” bet is relatively uncorrelated to the overall market.
The downside case would mean further losses from Einhorn, Insurance losses and a further detoriation in the P/B multiple. The probability is definitely not zero, but overall I do think the upside outweighs the downside.
For the portfolio I therfore assume to buy a 2,5% position at ~18 USD per stock.
What’s my edge or what do I know that others don’t ?
Finally one should always ask oneself the question: What do I know more or why am I a better shareholder than those who sell at those prices.
For me, I think those are the major points to justify an investment:
– I have no problem with having an underperforming stock in my portfolio at year end (many public funds do)
– I have followed David Einhorn over quite some time now and I think he is a very good investor and will come back at some point in time
– Few people do allocate money to underperforming managers although that is statistically the best time to do so
Another interesting observation: Only one analyst is following this company….. |
On a chilly evening in March, around 50 angry protesters gathered in a cramped in room in San Francisco’s Taraval Police Station. Dr. Floyd Huen was there to talk to business owners and other community members about a cannabis dispensary he planned to open in their neighborhood. But as he began to speak, the protesters interjected.
“You are poisoning our young people!” one cried. Their shouting got so loud that Huen had no choice but to leave, barely uttering a word.
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Most of the protesters were residents of the heavily Chinese American Sunset District, the future location of the dispensary—the Apothecarium Sunset—approved by the San Francisco Planning Commission in July and expected to open next year. Residents had blocked earlier attempts to open dispensaries in the neighborhood; as of mid-July, the city had around 40 permitted dispensaries, none of them in the Sunset District, according to The San Francisco Examiner.
The location is no coincidence; despite the legalization of recreational use in California last November, cannabis remains heavily stigmatized among Asian Americans. In a 2016 UC-Berkeley poll of California voters, 64% of respondents supported legalization—but only 58% percent of Asian Americans did, the lowest of all racial groups polled.
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But 70-year-old Huen, a medical advisor for the Apothecarium patient collective, says these attitudes unjustly block Asian Americans from the medical benefits of cannabis. Sunset District residents who do use cannabis, including many of Huen’s Chinese-speaking patients, have to travel far to access dispensaries, which are English-only.
“I define it as a civil rights issue if the Chinese community in particular continues to obstruct and be unfriendly to all options open to our patients,” he says.
He and other activists are on a mission to shatter that stigma. Huen plans to do so largely through the Apothecarium Sunset, which he would co-own with his wife, former Oakland mayor Jean Quan. The dispensary would be San Francisco’s first partially Chinese-owned and bilingual dispensary. It would offer services in Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as partner with traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and Chinese American physicians, and host community workshops on acupuncture, including how to use it with cannabis for chronic pain. Traditional practitioners could also hold office hours at the dispensary.
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Huen even envisions physicians collaborating with traditional practitioners to develop treatment plans for patients they have in common. He hopes that seeing a dispensary staffed with people who share their language and culture, and a Chinese American doctor “as opposed to a white hippie doctor,” serving patients who look like everyday folks rather than what residents might think of as the “pothead” stereotype, will dispel their fears.
Huen and I meet in the cushy, chandeliered waiting area of the Apothecarium’s Castro District dispensary. He has kind eyes, side-swept hair, and a mustache. Serious and soft-spoken, he recalls his young activist days at UC-Berkeley, where he was arrested at a protest in 1969. As a doctor, he advocated for healthcare access, turning his focus to cannabis in the 1990s after he saw it increase appetite and lower pain in his AIDS patients.
Many Asian Americans see cannabis as going against the cultural values of obedience and self-restraint.
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Ironically, cannabis had been used in Chinese herbal medicine for thousands of years—until Britain and other Western countries began heavily exporting opium to China in the 18th century, causing widespread addiction that devastated the Chinese empire. After the Communist Party took control in 1949, China’s opium fields were destroyed and addicts sentenced to mandatory rehabilitation. Today, China and several other Asian countries take a hardline anti-drug stance.
This history might explain what Huen characterizes as pervasive ignorance about marijuana in recent immigrant communities. He says Asian American seniors don’t realize that a compound in cannabis known as cannabidiol, or CBD, can relieve pain without getting them high. As a result, many rely on highly addictive opiates or dangerously high doses of over-the-counter drugs for chronic pain. (Huen’s own aunt-in-law died after taking high doses of Motrin for her arthritis.)
Many recent immigrants and Asian Americans who stay within their communities see cannabis as going against the cultural values of obedience and self-restraint. “Drugs are something we really would not tolerate openly in our community, in the same way you’re not supposed to have bad grades,” says Crystal Lu of the Silicon Valley Chinese Association, who advocated against legalization in California.
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It’s part of a narrative Asian Americans often hear growing up, 57-year-old cannabis activist Ophelia Chong says. “You have to stay in the lines,” or “you’ll bring shame to the family.”
Chong, a Los Angeles-based creative director with red lipstick and a quirky, outspoken personality, traces her foray into cannabis activism to her sister, who has an autoimmune disease and wanted to try cannabis for pain relief while visiting from China in 2015. They drove to a dispensary and bought a weed cookie. Chong’s sister ate too much.
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“Whoa, that’s a stoner,” Chong thought as she watched her sister ride out a bad trip. Immediately, she felt guilty for stereotyping her. “It upset me that people would see her like this.” A stock photography industry veteran, she searched online for images of cannabis users. But that only turned up more stereotypes: the white stoner dude, ripping a bong on the sofa; the scary black drug dealer. “I thought, ‘This is an opportunity to change the conversation.’”
Soon after, Chong launched StockPot Images, a stock photo agency for weed. The two-year-old company licenses more than 20,000 photos of a diversity of cannabis users—including Asians—to show that they fall into more than a handful of offensive stereotypes. One photo series, for instance, features a 90-year-old Chinese grandmother huddled next to her grandson, helping him tend his cannabis plants. “It’s one of the most loving images I’ve ever seen,” Chong says.
A few months after starting StockPot, Chong co-founded Asian Americans for Cannabis Education (AACE), an organization that also aims to smash cannabis stereotypes, especially in the Asian American community. She profiles a different Asian American cannabis entrepreneur on AACE’s website every week—like Anh Solis, a dispensary owner and mother. “We just want to show people that we’re parents, we’re normal, we’re just like everybody else,” Chong says.
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She’s optimistic that the younger generation will help their elders come around. So is Huen, who says that as young Asian Americans learn about cannabis’ health benefits, they are persuading older relatives to give it a shot. “Young people are always leading the way” when it comes to social change, just like he did as a student activist.
Twenty-five-year-old Nick Lau, chair of the Apothecarium Sunset’s community advisory committee, convinced his dad to let him give cannabis to his grandmother, who suffers from lung cancer. She had been taking opiates for pain relief, which made her nauseous and lose her appetite. Now, cannabis alleviates her pain, but without those side effects.
Lau has shared his grandmother’s story with local Chinese and English media outlets. Huen says the Apothecarium Sunset will act as an organizing center, encouraging patients to share stories like these, which he predicts will embolden others to step out of the shadows.
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Eventually, Huen believes, “the fear will be overcome.” For now, opponents aren’t ready to let that happen, filing an appeal of the San Francisco Planning Commission’s approval of the dispensary late last month. Huen isn’t fazed. “We’re going to win it,” he says.
Melissa Pandika is an independent journalist whose writing has appeared in Discover, the Los Angeles Times, VICE, OZY and other outlets. She lives in Berkeley, California. |
BEIJING — China plans to extend by 2020 a railroad on the high trans-Himalayan plateau of Tibet to the borders of India, Bhutan and Nepal, according to a report in People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party.
The extension would lengthen a 157-mile rail route that is expected to open next month from Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, to Shigatse, the traditional seat of the Panchen Lama, a revered spiritual leader. In 2006, China opened the first railway to Tibet, linking Lhasa to China via the province of Qinghai.
The planned lengthening was criticized by Tibet advocates who said it would bring too many ethnic Han migrants to Lhasa and other Tibetan areas. The Wednesday report in People’s Daily cited Yang Yulin, deputy head of the railways administration in Tibet, saying that two additional rail lines would be added from Shigatse — one to Yadong, a point near the Indian and Bhutan borders, and one to Jilong, an area near the border with Nepal.
China and India have a long-running dispute over their Himalayan border. Two areas are in contention: one in the Aksai Chin area of China, which abuts the Ladakh region of India, in the western Himalayas; and the other in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, in the east. Of the two, the dispute over Arunachal Pradesh is more contentious. |
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A strange thing happened during the October 2013 battle in the US Congress over a government shutdown and threat of default. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, denounced the Republicans as anarchists. So did Elizabeth Warren, one of the most liberal Senators. As did the editorial page of the New York Times. Other leading politicians and pundits also called the far-right Republicans (who dominate their party caucus) anarchists.
Historically this is very unusual. Far-rightists have usually been called conservatives. (They are rarely called the more accurate term, reactionaries -- those who want to go backward.) Those in the center or the left may call them other names, such as nuts or fascists. (They are mostly not fascists in the sense of wanting to overthrow bourgeois democracy and replace it with a rightwing dictatorship but they shade into such people.) But they were rarely, if ever, called anarchists. Why now?
There may be three reasons. One is that the real anarchist movement has grown and impacted on popular consciousness. Anarchists were part of the Occupy movement. Calling rightists anarchists manages to smear them with the conventional opprobrium of the left-wing, masked, bomb-throwing, window-smashing, anarchists (as widely pictured). Simultaneously it smears real anarchists with the opprobrium of the far-right politicians. For once, the Democrats have turned the tables on the Republicans. After all, the latter regularly denounce Obama and the Democrats as socialists, or even communists or Marxists (leaving aside Muslims). If only.
A second reason is that the far-right is loudly anti-statist, due to its supposed love of liberty and freedom (but not democracy and certainly not equality). The newspapers refer to them as libertarians, meaning pro-capitalist anti-statists (almost no one knows that libertarian once meant socialist-anarchist, and still does in much of the world). They declare, in the famous words of President Ronald Reagan, The government is not the solution; the government is the problem. They claim they oppose Obamas Affordable Care Act because they want to keep government out of health care.
A third reason, I suspect, was that the far-rightists were generally acting in a destructive, uncompromising, and chaotic fashion. For the Democratic politicians and editorialists, this brought to mind the behavior of the anarchic anarchists, who are supposedly committed to chaos, destruction, and ruin. Is the Far-Right Against Government? It is true that the far-right loudly declares its opposition to government and a love of liberty. An analogy might be seen in 1920s Germany. Then there were large workers parties, the Socialist and the Communist parties. The far-right organized its own party, which aimed to draw off some of the discontent channeled through the left parties. It called itself, the National Socialist German Workers Party. So it was national and German but also socialist and workers in short, National Socialist (Nazi). But its leaders really aimed to provide benefits for German big business, not for the workers. (Again, I am not calling the Republicans fascist.) Today, in the US, there is a strong, valuable, belief in freedom and individual rights, as well as (a wholly justified) distrust of government. So it makes sense for the right to claim to represent that anti-government, pro-freedom sentiment, whatever its real program.
In certain ways the right really is against government. Of course it opposes taxes, or at least taxes on its core constituency, the wealthy. It does not agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.s comment, Taxes are the price of living in a civilized society. It wants others to pay this price. (An anarchist society would not have taxes because it would not have either a state or capitalism.)
Further, it is against any use of the government for social benefits for the middle class, the working class, or the poor. It has opposed every social program ever implemented, no matter how popular they became: from Social Security to Aid to Dependent Children to Obamacare. They oppose any government enterprise, no matter how efficient, from the post office to the Tennessee Valley Authority. The question for them is the class issue. Benefits for the working class strengthens it, makes it more independent of the boss class. If the government provided enough services, then people might ask whether business is necessary, and think in terms of some sort of socialism.
The right vigorously opposes any sort of government regulation which effects the rich. Anti-pollution laws may be good for the whole community, but cut into profits. Worker safety laws, anti-discrimination in hiring laws, and protection of the right to unionize strengthen the workers against the owners. All are opposed. They oppose laws against landlords discrimination against African-Americans or GLBT people.
In short, the wealthy do not want to be told what to do with their property or their workers. That is what the rights anti-state program comes down to.
The right also campaigns around any government limitation on gun ownership. The right raises this topic in order to get support, helping it to fight for its real, pro-business, agenda. It is almost impossible in the US to have a sensible discussion about guns at this time, or for the majority to get its voice heard. Authentic anarchists are not for banning guns, but might be for some reasonable community regulations for safety. In any case the right is not for replacing the standing, official, army with a popular militia, which is what the Second Amendment is really about and which anarchists favor.
However, the rest of their program is quite heavily pro-statist. There are parts of the government which they cannot get enough of.
The Republican Party is strongly for the expansion of the US military (so are most Democrats). They never see a weapon, or missile, or base they do not like, especially if it is built or located in their district. This is consistent with their mostly pro-war stance. Military spending is actually a huge subsidy to a central group of big businesses. It is a form of government underwriting of the corporate economy.
Similarly, the rightists are strongly pro-police and heavily subsidize police forces, local and national. They support big government snooping into everyones lives through the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and all the other alphabetical agencies unless it involves spying on business secrets. They want a strong police force to prevent immigrants from coming over the border, and to expel as many immigrants as possible. For justification, they build up hysteria about war, terrorism, and crime. (Again, these policies overlap with most Democrats.)
Finally is their use of government to impose their cultural and religious values on everyone else. To whip up support for their core program of supporting big business, they deliberately play up cultural and moral issues, especially around sex. They have vigorously campaigned to outlaw abortion at all stages. They have tried to limit contraceptives. They have opposed sexual education for youth. They have sought to suppress homosexuals in every way. These very intrusive policies are to be carried out through the legislatures, courts, and police of local and national governments.
This ties in with their effort to use the government to impose (their version of) Christianity onto everyone, in the form of school prayers, other public prayers, denial of evolution in the schools, twisting school curricula in other ways, public displays of Christian symbols, and open rejection of Islam and other religions. They are also among the strongest supporters of the drug laws. They campaign for getting tough on crime, that is, more police, more prisons, more executions.
These are not the policies of anarchists, nor of libertarians, however you stretch the definitions. Groupings on the Right I have been writing of the right, the far-right, and the Republicans. A conservative reader might object that I have been melding together a range of people with quite a variety of views. There is some truth in this complaint. I have been summarizing the overwhelmingly common views held within todays Republican Party, especially its dominant right wing. Yet there are many variants of these views, often subtle.
For example, Rand Paul and his son Ron Paul are well-known far-right Republicans, with their own quirks. The oppose the Fed (the central bank of the US, without which it would not work very well) and want to put US money back on a gold standard, which would no doubt cause a depression. They call themselves libertarians and oppose most of the laws and rules that let the government spy on US citizens. They oppose the big military and the USs current wars. Their pro-civil liberties and anti-war stance has made them somewhat popular among people who might otherwise be attracted to anarchism.
Yet they are both strongly against womens right to choice to have an abortion if they want. For this, the Rands do not mind having the police intervene in the most personal of matters. Similarly, they are for repressive governmental anti-immigration policies. These are hardly libertarian opinions.
There are those who have tried to be more consistent than the Rands or the Republican right. Calling themselves libertarians, they oppose the big military and overseas wars, are against large police forces, are against government spying (but are not against all military and police forces), are for civil liberties and free speech (but not for civil rights for oppressed people), against government regulation of business, big or small, against government support of unions, against laws related to drugs, sex, abortion, and morality, etc. They even have a party, the Libertarian Party. Ron Paul ran for president on the partys ticket (a compromise on the part of both, since he does not agree with its pro-choice position).
Even if these so-called libertarians fully reject the pro-state opinions of the Republicans they still have an inconsistency. They reject the big, bureaucratic, centralized state. But they accept big, bureaucratic, centralized businesses. Why is this any better? Would not the big corporations of todays monopoly capitalism work together and be the new (big, bureaucratic, centralized) state?
Once upon a time, there were small businesses and a weak state. Over time these businesses evolved into gigantic multinational semi-monopolies. The weak state also evolved, partly to try to control the huge businesses for the good of all but mainly to serve the big businesses for the good of the corporate rich. A magical return to the days of small businesses and a weak state would just start the cycle all over. Anarcho-Capitalism? Finally, there are those who believe in a free-market capitalist economy, completely unregulated because there is no state at all (Rothbard 1978). Besides labeling themselves libertarians, they have also called themselves anarcho-capitalists or similar terms. That is, they themselves claim to be anarchists.
Anarchism, as a historical movement, has never been simply an anti-statist struggle. Anarchists have opposed all oppressions, in every sphere: political, social, familial, religious, and economic. A hypothetical society without a state but with, say, human slavery, would hardly be regarded as anarchist. In particular, anarchists have always opposed both the state and capitalism as such. The anarcho-capitalists do not.
Nor would their program work very well. As they see it, the state would be replaced by private security forces, armed rent-a-cops. We could expect the big corporations to hire the largest private police forces. Then they would work together to develop common policies, including coordinating their private police/military forces. This would then be the new (capitalist) state, in all but name. (Socialist-anarchists also propose to replace the states police and military by voluntary armed people, so long as it remains necessary. But this would be in a society of equality, with coordination by workers and community assemblies and councils.)
Anarcho-capitalism was created by mixing classical liberalism with individualist anarchism. But there were core aspects of individualist anarchism which were left out of the mixture.
Benjamin Tucker was a great US individualist-anarchist of the 19th century. He opposed state-socialism and advocated use of the market rather than planning. But he regarded himself as anti-capitalist and a socialist. He saw anarchism and state-socialism as the two schools of socialistic thought which were united by the common claim that labor shall be put in possession of its own (Tucker, 1966; p. 62). Like Proudhon, he wanted enterprises larger than an individual to be be voluntary associations (p. 67), self-managed by the workers. The anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian democrats (p. 69). He based his analysis and his program on the labor theory of value -- as it appeared in various versions in Smith, Proudhon, and Marx. He saw this as the basis of a new economic philosophy (p. 63).
Rothbard and other theorists of libertarian capitalism reject both the anti-capitalism/pro-socialism of Tuckers individualist anarchism and the labor theory of value. They advocate the wage system of capitalism, where workers work for a boss, who pays them as little as possible and works them as hard as possible, producing a profit from their labor (that is, exploiting them). Instead, anarchists advocate self-managed workers associations.
In my opinion, Tuckers theory (and Proudhons) pointed in two contradictory directions. One was toward revolutionary socialist-anarchism, as began to be developed by Bakunin and Kropotkin. (For example, Voltairine de Cleyre developed from a follower of Tucker to a class-struggle anarchist, without abandoning her basic beliefs Brigati 2004.) The other was to pro-capitalist, pro-market, politics. That is, out of anarchism.
I am usually pretty broad-minded about who is an anarchist? questions. There have been debates among anarchists as whether to include primitivists, mutualists, Pareconists, gradualists, etc. In general I do not care. I would rather argue that, say, primitivist anarchists are wrong on various topics, than argue whether they are anarchists. (People have accused me of not really being an anarchist, due to my various unorthodoxies, although I think I am in the broad anarchist tradition.) However, I draw the line at anarcho-capitalists. People who support capitalism may be good people with all sorts of virtues, but they are not anarchists. As I have shown, even the historical individualist (pro-market) anarchists believed in a version of decentralized, libertarian, socialism.
It is a sort of back-handed compliment that even conventional politicians and editorialists raise anarchism as an insult to attack the far-right Republicans, who present themselves as against the state. It shows that anarchism has made an impression on society. It is also a compliment that some supporters of unfettered capitalism declare themselves to be anarchists. Unfortunately, both uses of anarchism are misleading. Anarchism is the struggle for the fullest achievement of freedom in all spheres, the end of the state, of capitalism, of classes, and of all other oppressions. Nothing else.
References
Brigati, A.J. (Ed.) (2004). The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader. Oakland CA: AK Press.
Tucker, Benjamin (1893/1966). State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far they Agree and Wherein they Differ. In Patterns of Anarchy (eds.: L. I. Krimerman & L. Perry). Garden City NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday. Pp. 6169).
Rothbard, Murray (1978). For a New Liberty; The Libertarian Manifesto (revised ed.). NY: Collier Books.
*written for www.Anarkismo.net A strange thing happened during the October 2013 battle in the US Congress over a government shutdown and threat of default. The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, denounced the Republicans as anarchists. So did Elizabeth Warren, one of the most liberal Senators. As did the editorial page of the New York Times. Other leading politicians and pundits also called the far-right Republicans (who dominate their party caucus) anarchists.Historically this is very unusual. Far-rightists have usually been called conservatives. (They are rarely called the more accurate term, reactionaries -- those who want to go backward.) Those in the center or the left may call them other names, such as nuts or fascists. (They are mostly not fascists in the sense of wanting to overthrow bourgeois democracy and replace it with a rightwing dictatorship but they shade into such people.) But they were rarely, if ever, called anarchists. Why now?There may be three reasons. One is that the real anarchist movement has grown and impacted on popular consciousness. Anarchists were part of the Occupy movement. Calling rightists anarchists manages to smear them with the conventional opprobrium of the left-wing, masked, bomb-throwing, window-smashing, anarchists (as widely pictured). Simultaneously it smears real anarchists with the opprobrium of the far-right politicians. For once, the Democrats have turned the tables on the Republicans. After all, the latter regularly denounce Obama and the Democrats as socialists, or even communists or Marxists (leaving aside Muslims). If only.A second reason is that the far-right is loudly anti-statist, due to its supposed love of liberty and freedom (but not democracy and certainly not equality). The newspapers refer to them as libertarians, meaning pro-capitalist anti-statists (almost no one knows that libertarian once meant socialist-anarchist, and still does in much of the world). They declare, in the famous words of President Ronald Reagan, The government is not the solution; the government is the problem. They claim they oppose Obamas Affordable Care Act because they want to keep government out of health care.A third reason, I suspect, was that the far-rightists were generally acting in a destructive, uncompromising, and chaotic fashion. For the Democratic politicians and editorialists, this brought to mind the behavior of the anarchic anarchists, who are supposedly committed to chaos, destruction, and ruin.It is true that the far-right loudly declares its opposition to government and a love of liberty. An analogy might be seen in 1920s Germany. Then there were large workers parties, the Socialist and the Communist parties. The far-right organized its own party, which aimed to draw off some of the discontent channeled through the left parties. It called itself, the National Socialist German Workers Party. So it was national and German but also socialist and workers in short, National Socialist (Nazi). But its leaders really aimed to provide benefits for German big business, not for the workers. (Again, I am not calling the Republicans fascist.) Today, in the US, there is a strong, valuable, belief in freedom and individual rights, as well as (a wholly justified) distrust of government. So it makes sense for the right to claim to represent that anti-government, pro-freedom sentiment, whatever its real program.In certain ways the right really is against government. Of course it opposes taxes, or at least taxes on its core constituency, the wealthy. It does not agree with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.s comment, Taxes are the price of living in a civilized society. It wants others to pay this price. (An anarchist society would not have taxes because it would not have either a state or capitalism.)Further, it is against any use of the government for social benefits for the middle class, the working class, or the poor. It has opposed every social program ever implemented, no matter how popular they became: from Social Security to Aid to Dependent Children to Obamacare. They oppose any government enterprise, no matter how efficient, from the post office to the Tennessee Valley Authority. The question for them is the class issue. Benefits for the working class strengthens it, makes it more independent of the boss class. If the government provided enough services, then people might ask whether business is necessary, and think in terms of some sort of socialism.The right vigorously opposes any sort of government regulation which effects the rich. Anti-pollution laws may be good for the whole community, but cut into profits. Worker safety laws, anti-discrimination in hiring laws, and protection of the right to unionize strengthen the workers against the owners. All are opposed. They oppose laws against landlords discrimination against African-Americans or GLBT people.In short, the wealthy do not want to be told what to do with their property or their workers. That is what the rights anti-state program comes down to.The right also campaigns around any government limitation on gun ownership. The right raises this topic in order to get support, helping it to fight for its real, pro-business, agenda. It is almost impossible in the US to have a sensible discussion about guns at this time, or for the majority to get its voice heard. Authentic anarchists are not for banning guns, but might be for some reasonable community regulations for safety. In any case the right is not for replacing the standing, official, army with a popular militia, which is what the Second Amendment is really about and which anarchists favor.However, the rest of their program is quite heavily pro-statist. There are parts of the government which they cannot get enough of.The Republican Party is strongly for the expansion of the US military (so are most Democrats). They never see a weapon, or missile, or base they do not like, especially if it is built or located in their district. This is consistent with their mostly pro-war stance. Military spending is actually a huge subsidy to a central group of big businesses. It is a form of government underwriting of the corporate economy.Similarly, the rightists are strongly pro-police and heavily subsidize police forces, local and national. They support big government snooping into everyones lives through the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, and all the other alphabetical agencies unless it involves spying on business secrets. They want a strong police force to prevent immigrants from coming over the border, and to expel as many immigrants as possible. For justification, they build up hysteria about war, terrorism, and crime. (Again, these policies overlap with most Democrats.)Finally is their use of government to impose their cultural and religious values on everyone else. To whip up support for their core program of supporting big business, they deliberately play up cultural and moral issues, especially around sex. They have vigorously campaigned to outlaw abortion at all stages. They have tried to limit contraceptives. They have opposed sexual education for youth. They have sought to suppress homosexuals in every way. These very intrusive policies are to be carried out through the legislatures, courts, and police of local and national governments.This ties in with their effort to use the government to impose (their version of) Christianity onto everyone, in the form of school prayers, other public prayers, denial of evolution in the schools, twisting school curricula in other ways, public displays of Christian symbols, and open rejection of Islam and other religions. They are also among the strongest supporters of the drug laws. They campaign for getting tough on crime, that is, more police, more prisons, more executions.These are not the policies of anarchists, nor of libertarians, however you stretch the definitions.I have been writing of the right, the far-right, and the Republicans. A conservative reader might object that I have been melding together a range of people with quite a variety of views. There is some truth in this complaint. I have been summarizing the overwhelmingly common views held within todays Republican Party, especially its dominant right wing. Yet there are many variants of these views, often subtle.For example, Rand Paul and his son Ron Paul are well-known far-right Republicans, with their own quirks. The oppose the Fed (the central bank of the US, without which it would not work very well) and want to put US money back on a gold standard, which would no doubt cause a depression. They call themselves libertarians and oppose most of the laws and rules that let the government spy on US citizens. They oppose the big military and the USs current wars. Their pro-civil liberties and anti-war stance has made them somewhat popular among people who might otherwise be attracted to anarchism.Yet they are both strongly against womens right to choice to have an abortion if they want. For this, the Rands do not mind having the police intervene in the most personal of matters. Similarly, they are for repressive governmental anti-immigration policies. These are hardly libertarian opinions.There are those who have tried to be more consistent than the Rands or the Republican right. Calling themselves libertarians, they oppose the big military and overseas wars, are against large police forces, are against government spying (but are not against all military and police forces), are for civil liberties and free speech (but not for civil rights for oppressed people), against government regulation of business, big or small, against government support of unions, against laws related to drugs, sex, abortion, and morality, etc. They even have a party, the Libertarian Party. Ron Paul ran for president on the partys ticket (a compromise on the part of both, since he does not agree with its pro-choice position).Even if these so-called libertarians fully reject the pro-state opinions of the Republicans they still have an inconsistency. They reject the big, bureaucratic, centralized state. But they accept big, bureaucratic, centralized businesses. Why is this any better? Would not the big corporations of todays monopoly capitalism work together and be the new (big, bureaucratic, centralized) state?Once upon a time, there were small businesses and a weak state. Over time these businesses evolved into gigantic multinational semi-monopolies. The weak state also evolved, partly to try to control the huge businesses for the good of all but mainly to serve the big businesses for the good of the corporate rich. A magical return to the days of small businesses and a weak state would just start the cycle all over.Finally, there are those who believe in a free-market capitalist economy, completely unregulated because there is no state at all (Rothbard 1978). Besides labeling themselves libertarians, they have also called themselves anarcho-capitalists or similar terms. That is, they themselves claim to be anarchists.Anarchism, as a historical movement, has never been simply an anti-statist struggle. Anarchists have opposed all oppressions, in every sphere: political, social, familial, religious, and economic. A hypothetical society without a state but with, say, human slavery, would hardly be regarded as anarchist. In particular, anarchists have always opposed both the state and capitalism as such. The anarcho-capitalists do not.Nor would their program work very well. As they see it, the state would be replaced by private security forces, armed rent-a-cops. We could expect the big corporations to hire the largest private police forces. Then they would work together to develop common policies, including coordinating their private police/military forces. This would then be the new (capitalist) state, in all but name. (Socialist-anarchists also propose to replace the states police and military by voluntary armed people, so long as it remains necessary. But this would be in a society of equality, with coordination by workers and community assemblies and councils.)Anarcho-capitalism was created by mixing classical liberalism with individualist anarchism. But there were core aspects of individualist anarchism which were left out of the mixture.Benjamin Tucker was a great US individualist-anarchist of the 19th century. He opposed state-socialism and advocated use of the market rather than planning. But he regarded himself as anti-capitalist and a socialist. He saw anarchism and state-socialism as the two schools of socialistic thought which were united by the common claim that labor shall be put in possession of its own (Tucker, 1966; p. 62). Like Proudhon, he wanted enterprises larger than an individual to be be voluntary associations (p. 67), self-managed by the workers. The anarchists are simply unterrified Jeffersonian democrats (p. 69). He based his analysis and his program on the labor theory of value -- as it appeared in various versions in Smith, Proudhon, and Marx. He saw this as the basis of a new economic philosophy (p. 63).Rothbard and other theorists of libertarian capitalism reject both the anti-capitalism/pro-socialism of Tuckers individualist anarchism and the labor theory of value. They advocate the wage system of capitalism, where workers work for a boss, who pays them as little as possible and works them as hard as possible, producing a profit from their labor (that is, exploiting them). Instead, anarchists advocate self-managed workers associations.In my opinion, Tuckers theory (and Proudhons) pointed in two contradictory directions. One was toward revolutionary socialist-anarchism, as began to be developed by Bakunin and Kropotkin. (For example, Voltairine de Cleyre developed from a follower of Tucker to a class-struggle anarchist, without abandoning her basic beliefs Brigati 2004.) The other was to pro-capitalist, pro-market, politics. That is, out of anarchism.I am usually pretty broad-minded about who is an anarchist? questions. There have been debates among anarchists as whether to include primitivists, mutualists, Pareconists, gradualists, etc. In general I do not care. I would rather argue that, say, primitivist anarchists are wrong on various topics, than argue whether they are anarchists. (People have accused me of not really being an anarchist, due to my various unorthodoxies, although I think I am in the broad anarchist tradition.) However, I draw the line at anarcho-capitalists. People who support capitalism may be good people with all sorts of virtues, but they are not anarchists. As I have shown, even the historical individualist (pro-market) anarchists believed in a version of decentralized, libertarian, socialism.It is a sort of back-handed compliment that even conventional politicians and editorialists raise anarchism as an insult to attack the far-right Republicans, who present themselves as against the state. It shows that anarchism has made an impression on society. It is also a compliment that some supporters of unfettered capitalism declare themselves to be anarchists. Unfortunately, both uses of anarchism are misleading. Anarchism is the struggle for the fullest achievement of freedom in all spheres, the end of the state, of capitalism, of classes, and of all other oppressions. Nothing else.Brigati, A.J. (Ed.) (2004).. Oakland CA: AK Press.Tucker, Benjamin (1893/1966). State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far they Agree and Wherein they Differ. In(eds.: L. I. Krimerman & L. Perry). Garden City NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday. Pp. 6169).Rothbard, Murray (1978).(revised ed.). NY: Collier Books. Digg this del.icio.us Furl Reddit Technorati Facebook Twitter << Back To Newswire
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Over the past year, two competing explanations for the populist wave have emerged. On the one hand, journalists like John Judis and Nate Cohn have traced political discontent to economic inequality and insecurity. In The Populist Explosion, Judis argues that Democrats in the United States and Europe’s social-democratic parties gave up the traditional working-class vote when they embraced free trade, failed to acknowledge class conflict, and withdrew from their traditional alliances with unions. By contrast, writing in The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that Republicans won by mobilizing voters who rejected a black president. At Vox, Dylan Matthews reviewed polling data and concluded that the concerns of Trump supporters are “heavily about race.”
It is perfectly clear that both economic inequality and racism fueled support for Trump. Only the left is equipped to explain how these two factors are entangled, by looking at the experience of life under capitalism. In this economy, most people lack important forms of security and control over their lives. They answer to bosses, who answer to investors, who answer to global flows of goods and capital. As Marx pointed out long ago, the system assigns the roles, and people fill them. An investor need not be a greedy person, nor a boss a bossy one; but if they do not maximize returns in the face of competition, they will be replaced by someone who will try harder, so they had better be prepared to act greedy, or bossy, or—in the case of the line worker—diligent and subservient.
When no one talks about how the system itself produces economic insecurity and a loss of control, scapegoating falls on the groups and individuals closest at hand. Immigrants particularly get scapegoated because often they are willing to take low-paying jobs or lack legal authorization to work. When no one in politics talks about brutal economic realities—including a merciless and de-unionized labor market, the unfettered mobility of capital, and the investor-driven imperative to squeeze every possible “efficiency” out of people—then your competitor for wages on the building site becomes the only economic rival you can actually see. Racism and xenophobia are not merely symptoms of economic anxiety, and are not to be morally or politically excused on account of hard times. But they are likely to be stronger and more politically effective when there appears to be no other way for people to address their sense of helplessness.
Liberals tend to ignore this analysis, and to personalize racism and xenophobia as moral failings, because they think the necessary preconditions for a decent cosmopolitanism are already in place: markets and multiculturalism. Conservatives from Edmund Burke to Ross Douthat have argued almost the opposite. They posit that people are basically tribal, and therefore all forms of cosmopolitanism, from liberal humanitarianism to socialist solidarity, are utopian fantasies that will reliably fall apart in the harsh light of human nature.
The left presents an alternative view: We simply don’t know what kinds of solidarity people would be capable of if they felt control and security in their lives. Historically, xenophobia and racism have been inseparable from enslavement, imperialism, economic domination or competition, and fear of losing one’s place. At the same time, people have shown enormous flexibility and resilience when they encounter changing notions of national identity (a concept that hardly existed in present form a few centuries ago), religion (witness rising secularization and syncretism), and gender identity (where our notion of “human nature” is turning out to be full of new expressions). There is no reason to assume, as conservatives tend to conclude, that what we already know marks a natural limit of human behavior or potential.
On the national stage, however, the left has not always made these ideas clear. The Sanders campaign lacked a political vocabulary for talking about the complex realities of capitalism. On the issue of trade, for example, Sanders roundly criticized liberal agreements such as NAFTA for hollowing out American industry, but he often failed to follow this deeper economic logic to its conclusion. Restricting imports would not, by itself, bring back some twentieth-century idyll in which workers shared the fruits of robust economic growth. Yes, American industries might gain a greater portion of global expenditure. But that would merely increase profits at the top—so long as investors like Mitt Romney and bosses like Donald Trump can hold automation or mass firings over the heads of recalcitrant workers.
To understand how the U.S. economy is changing, you have to understand not just trade but property law that gives workers no claim on the wealth they help to produce; labor law that makes firing easy and union organizing hard; and corporate law that helped Donald Trump stay rich while leaving indebted municipalities and investors in his wake. Turning these features of the market into political issues would help show economic life not as a naturalseeming struggle for survival, but as a legally constructed competition as arbitrary as the rules of the Hunger Games.
The left needs to get better at talking about how the economy affects the way workers view themselves and their political options—their sense of what they deserve and what is possible. The Rolling Jubilee gets at these themes by suggesting that debt is not necessarily a deep moral obligation, that there is justice in eliminating it. Calls for a universal basic income reflect the idea that people deserve some share of the world’s good things, some elementary security, just for showing up—that not everything has to be earned on the market or inherited from one’s parents. Likewise, in the Sanders campaign’s insistence on social entitlements as a right of citizenship, not a shameful badge of dependence, there was a glimpse of the older, social-democratic idea that the economy should produce not simply abstract efficiency, but security and dignified work.
The current resurgence of populism is linked to a crisis in the functioning of democracy itself. Trump won the election by scorning the political system and vandalizing its norms. But he did not create the conditions for his chaotic campaign; he merely fed on them. In much-discussed recent work, political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa found that young people across Europe and the United States are increasingly skeptical of democracy and sympathetic to strong-man rule, even military government. People may not be clear what they are rejecting when they say they don’t care about democracy, but the air of indifference and hostility is unmistakable.
In the months since the election, many have struggled to understand why voters behaved the way they did. Some centrist commentators have expressed misgivings about democracy itself, arguing that it becomes self-indulgent and destructive unless responsible elites step forward to guide political passions. Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian émigré economist, provided a memorable slogan for these worries when he wrote, in 1942, that “the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field.… He becomes a primitive again.” In democracies, Schumpeter continued, political judgment is “unintelligent and irresponsible,” and “may prove fatal” to any country that it governs. Writing in New York magazine after the election, Andrew Sullivan seemed to agree, arguing that support for Trump was “absolute and total . . . not like that of a democratic leader but of a cult leader fused with the idea of the nation.”
There is some truth to these arguments. We know from our everyday lives that much of our decision-making is not entirely rational. But Trump has played on a deep sense of unreality about the political process. His candidacy reflected the peculiar idea that someone “strong” and “smart” could singlehandedly master a complex world, untangle the politics of the Middle East and the South China Sea, renegotiate trade agreements, and see behind the obfuscations of intelligence agencies. This is a bizarre view of what it means to act in politics. It combines the epistemic amateurism of the conspiracy theorist with the virtual self-assertion of a first-person-shooter video game. It is an approach to politics tailored to people for whom politics is a domain of fantasy.
Who could expect political judgment to arise spontaneously in a world that does not afford many people the experience of participating in actual self-rule? Political judgment, like any other skill, is trained in practice. The decline of unions has meant fewer opportunities for workers to vote, debate, and even strike over issues that directly affect them. At the same time, the consolidation of businesses into large, integrated operations has meant that the ordinary experience of work for many people involves taking orders in a one-way and often remote hierarchy. The decline of voluntary civic and political organizations has made opportunities for democratic participation scarcer still. Although people can express themselves loudly online, or at concerts, sports events, and Trump rallies, they have few chances to practice making shared decisions with concrete consequences. The essential links between opinions and consequences are, in daily life, very weak.
This weakened sense of what it means to participate in a democracy comes at the same time as a crisis of shared truth. Rough-and-ready American success once bolstered the notion that a rich country with a “free market of ideas” should be able to sustain a good-enough democracy more or less automatically. It is increasingly clear, however, that the market for ideas works much like the market for recreational drugs: People consume the ones that relieve them of their ordinary miseries and make them feel special. Thanks to the proliferation of ideological media, citizens now enjoy the same range of choice in facts as in ideas.
Liberals and those further to the left differ sharply over how to respond to these threats to democracy. The Democratic Party professionals who circulated among the Clinton campaign and its affiliated institutions tend to accept Schumpeter’s pessimism about democratic irrationality. Instead of appealing to voters’ reason, their campaigns slice and dice voters into marketing categories. They then make targeted moral and emotional appeals to them (Trump is a bad man; be with Hillary), and use canvassing technology to prod swing-state voters who, their data models inform them, will likely support the Democrat. Clinton canvassers in Michigan, where she narrowly lost, were instructed not to engage in “persuasion,” but just to make yet another phone call or flyer drop to beleaguered folks who showed up on party lists as likely Democrats. Clinton counted on the political rationality only of an elite class of technocrats, whom she expected to bring in a victory.
By contrast, there is a swath of activists to the left of the Democratic establishment whose politics center on fostering self-rule. Labor organizers try to shore up the power of workers in workplaces from fast-food chains to universities that run on the labor of underpaid and overworked adjunct faculties. In places like Durham, North Carolina, activists from Black Lives Matter have gone beyond street protests to craft alternative municipal budgets that would redirect new expenditures on police into more inclusive and productive forms of community investment. The Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of groups within Black Lives Matter, has called for community oversight boards to supervise police departments.
These activists reject the idea that our current political crisis will be resolved by technocratic solutions or get-out-the-vote strategies alone. Over the past 50 years, low-information, low-energy democracy has limped through a period when technology and elite institutions kept disagreement within a workable range of opinion. Today, however, technology and markets will produce increasingly self-indulgent and nihilistic forms of politics, unless our response goes beyond trying to restore the familiar consensus, and pushes toward deeper forms of democratic power.
The Sanders campaign showed that it is possible to connect this sort of ground-level democracy-building with demands for a larger-scale renovation of democracy. Sanders campaigned on overturning the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which gives corporations the power to invest unlimited sums in political campaigns, and on moving toward a system of public financing for elections, breaking the undue influence of private wealth altogether. He also advocated easing ballot access and making Election Day a national holiday—effectively halting Republican efforts to deny the vote to minorities and other Democratic-leaning constituencies.
It would be implausible to suggest that the American left is on the cusp of any great victory. It remains far from most concrete forms of political power. Yet its intellectual clarity can help guide and coordinate the work of grassroots activists, open up new alternatives for voters, and raise the bar of public argument. Five years ago, when Occupy set up in Zuccotti Park, talk of economic inequality had long been condescended to as “class warfare.” Today, no serious argument about American politics can avoid the underlying economic reality. Pundits like David Brooks may still get away with regretting, as he recently did, that “globalism” suffers only from being “despiritualized.” In the years ahead, perhaps it will finally become impossible to talk about globalism without talking about capitalism and democracy.
Two caveats are terrifically important. First, none of this will be easy. That is in large part because the Democratic Party establishment believes in the rightness and adequacy of its ideas and is committed to maintaining its power. From the Democratic National Committee to Clinton-friendly commentators such as Paul Krugman, mainstream Democrats mocked and belittled the Sanders campaign and its supporters. Many will continue to denounce anyone to their left as naïve at best, dangerous at worst. The left must respond with ambitious but rigorous argument. We will need to challenge the establishment to address the threat of rising nationalism and the crises of inequality and democracy, while also building power that the mainstream cannot ignore.
Second, none of this criticism of liberals means jettisoning or demoting the core liberal commitments to personal freedom, especially free speech and other civil liberties. The point of the left’s criticism of liberals is that these sorts of rights are not enough to secure dignified lives or meaningful self-rule under capitalism, inherited racial inequality, and an ever-deepening surveillance state. Liberal values are not enough; but they are essential. A broader left program would work to deepen people’s lived experience of liberty, equality, and democracy—values to which liberals and the left share a commitment.
A political party, as Trump and the Tea Party have both demonstrated, is well worth fighting to take over.
For now, the left should follow the lead of Bernie Sanders, and that of many activists who have entered state and local politics, by fielding candidates for elected office. In the two-party system of American elections, the Democratic Party is the natural vehicle for campaigns like those of anticorruption activist Zephyr Teachout, who ran for Congress in upstate New York, and Occupy veteran Jillian Johnson, who won a seat on the city council in Durham, North Carolina. The party exists to maximize political power and to support a network of consultants, think tankers, friendly journalists, and patronage seekers. The left wastes energy when it vents its indignation at the Democratic Party for being an ordinary party in these respects. By the same token, however, the left owes nothing to everyday partisanship. A political party, as Trump and the Tea Party have both demonstrated, is well worth fighting to take over; beyond that, there is nothing in it that deserves loyalty or deference.
Nor should the left take its blueprint entirely from the Sanders campaign, as extraordinary as it was. Back in October 2011, in the convivial shipwreck that was the Occupy library, it would have seemed impossible for a self-described democratic socialist to become the country’s most popular politician, as Sanders was in October 2016. In Zuccotti Park, it seemed utopian to imagine that the young activists who shut down Wall Street would wind up reviving generations of work for economic justice and democracy. Now their insights and efforts, once derided as hopelessly insufficient, serve as our starting point, however tenuous and endangered in this bizarre and chauvinistic political moment. Who can say what utopias will come over the horizon next? |
Nedum Onuoha is famously the footballer with three grade 'A’ A-levels whose dedication as a Manchester City schoolboy was such that, if he was ever late, the academy staff would joke that they were more worried about the bus driver.
By common consent, Onuoha epitomises the phrase 'model professional’ and so it is striking to hear the critical honesty that seeps through the self-analysis of his playing career. It is also deeply moving to hear how “a strong reality check” was derived from a personal tragedy that placed football in its proper perspective. Onuoha’s mum, Dr Anthonia Onuoha, had been an ever-present at matches involving her son until she fell seriously ill with cancer. She died last year and, having offered the support on which Onuoha’s early career thrived, her memory is now providing a lasting inspiration.
“She was massive in my career,” says Onuoha. “She literally went to all my games, no matter where it was. She would always find a way.
“I just realised that I needed to strive to do more. It’s only within the past year or 18 months that I have really started to understand everything about the sport. A lot of people have said that I have a lot of potential but I don’t want to be the guy who has got potential. I want to be someone who people want to be in their side.
“Even in her passing, some of the things that I heard about her illness, that she never really told me, were inspirational. In my eyes, she was just incredible.”
Onuoha was five when he arrived with his parents in England from Nigeria and it is the value of hard-work, irrespective of the obstacles, that he regards as one of her great examples. “There’s a saying that you chop your own wood and you feel double the benefit,” he says. “She was never given anything for free. She has had to work her socks off for everything. She had a PhD in environmental sciences and, a bit later in life, that led to people saying that she was overqualified for jobs that she wanted.
Despite the unsurprising admission that his head was “a little bit all over the place” at times last season, Onuoha remains one of the few QPR players whose on-field attitude was never in question.
After relegation, chairman Tony Fernandes accused some players of taking the club’s money without giving their all. Onuoha is sympathetic to that anger but believes that a central difficulty was simply the process of integrating so many players in such a short space of time. “I think one of the difficult jobs in a football club is to be the owner,” he says. “It is your investment, your company and business but you can’t control everything on a day-to-day basis that actually defines the club’s success.
“As much as things were bad last season, they were never as bad as people were saying. It sort of happened at Manchester City. You bring in players and they have to integrate. I feel for the people who were here six months in, couldn’t really speak the language but saw that people who had been here longer were getting frustrated at them because they were not doing the jobs that were expected of them. City are doing better now because they are not bringing in lots and lots of new players. They have a core. In the same way, if we do get promoted, I think we will be in a better situation.” The situation, quite clearly, is already dramatically improved. QPR sit top of the Championship ahead of tomorrow’s match against third-placed Leicester City and Onuoha, even allowing for a hamstring injury, has been one of their players of the season. Central to the change was a pre-season training schedule of quite exceptional rigour.
“It was so hard that you only completed it if your heart was in it,” says Onuoha. “You wanted to just say, 'I can’t do this any more’, but when you look around and have your team-mates there, you carry on.
“Everyone was in the mood to work to get back in the Premier League.” At 27, Onuoha should be approaching his prime. He previously won 20 caps for the England Under-21 team and, although he also remains eligible for Nigeria, does not want to make any firm decisions until he feels that his own club form merits international selection. Regular first-team football with QPR in the Premier League is the target following eight seasons at Manchester City where the likes of Sylvain Distin, Vincent Kompany and Joleon Lescott have restricted his opportunities.
Beyond that, Onuoha would like to pass on his knowledge to the next generation of young home-grown players. “If I was to retire soon, I think one of the things I would do is go and speak to younger players,” he says. “I’d say it’s important to look after your body to the nth degree. You have to listen to what the coaches say. There is no problem doing more after training in terms of extra ball work. Some of that I think is perceived to be a bit busy.”
The deadline for submitting evidence to the FA’s commission into the future of English football expires in two weeks. Greg Dyke would do well to pay a visit to QPR’s training ground. |
T-Mobile's Kids Are Free Promotion Will Keep Families Connected More Affordably
T-Mobile Makes It Easier Than Ever to Stay Connected With Free Add-a-Line Service on New Family Plans
BELLEVUE, Wash. -- Sept. 8, 2010 -- Continuing its efforts to give families the freedom to stay connected on their terms, T-Mobile USA, Inc. today announced a new promotional offer called Kids Are Free to make family communication easy and more budget friendly. With Kids Are Free, new and existing T-Mobile customers who sign up for a qualifying family plan through Nov. 2, 2010, receive free add-a-line service on up to three lines of their plan until 2012.1
Families are busier than ever. Between soccer practice, school, time with friends and work, families are always on the go, and mobile phones provide a vital line of communication for them. According to a study published in April 2010 by the Pew Research Center, 75 percent of children ages 12 to 17 now have a cell phone.2 That said, it can be a struggle for parents to balance the family budget in order to keep the whole family in touch while on the go.
"Not only is T-Mobile offering the most flexible and affordable family plans among national carriers today, we are also making it more affordable than ever for families to add their kids or other family members by eliminating the associated monthly service fee until 2012," said Ashley White, marketing director of value offers at T-Mobile USA. "The up-front cost of purchasing new phones and dealing with monthly service fees for an entire family can add up quickly, so this promotion is designed to make it easier for families."
Special deals on the latest devices. Starting today customers who purchase a Samsung Vibrant receive a second Samsung Vibrant for free after a $50 mail-in rebate with a two-year service agreement. Also, T-Mobile's new line of messaging phones are all under $75 after a mail-in rebate with a two-year service agreement. Adding unlimited texting for the whole family is just $20 per month.
T-Mobile's Even More ® and no annual contract Even More Plus ® family plans offer customers affordable options for their family's wireless communication. T-Mobile's Even More family plans start at $59.99 per month and T-Mobile's Even More Plus family plans start at just $49.99 per month.
and no annual contract Even More Plus family plans offer customers affordable options for their family's wireless communication. T-Mobile's Even More family plans start at $59.99 per month and T-Mobile's Even More Plus family plans start at just $49.99 per month. T-Mobile's Family Allowances™ service lets parents set up-front monthly allowances for their family's phone usage -- minutes, messages, and downloads.
http://www.t-mobile.com
1 Offer expires Nov. 2, 2010; applies to voice and messaging on up to three lines added to qualifying two-line family plans. Taxes, fees (including $1.41 regulatory programs fee, $35 activation fee, and up to $200 early termination fee for two-year contracts) and other services additional. After Dec. 31, 2011, regular pricing applies.
2 Pew Research Center: Teens and Mobile Phones, United States; by Amanda Lenhart, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, Kristen Purcell; April 2010. |
Wallet Service
Wallet Service
Coinbase offers our USD Wallet and Hosted Digital Currency Wallet Service free of charge. This means we will store your USD and Digital Currency at no cost to you. “Digital Currency” means any digital currency currently supported by Coinbase. We do not charge for transferring Digital Currency from one Coinbase wallet to another. Coinbase incurs and pays network transaction fees, such as miner's fees, for transactions on digital currency networks (i.e., transfers of Digital Currency off the Coinbase platform). For these transactions Coinbase will charge you a fee based on our estimate of the network transaction fees that we anticipate paying for each transaction. In certain circumstances, the fee that Coinbase pays may differ from that estimate. All fees we charge you will be disclosed at the time of your transaction.
Digital Currency Transactions
General
In addition to sending or receiving Digital Currency through Coinbase, customers can (1) purchase or sell a single Digital Currency (a “Digital Currency Purchase” or “Digital Currency Sale”), (2) convert one type of Digital Currency into another type of Digital Currency (a “Digital Currency Conversion”), or (3) purchase a market-weighted basket (the “Coinbase Bundle”) of selected Digital Currencies supported by Coinbase (each a “Digital Currency Transaction”).
When you request a Digital Currency Transaction, Coinbase will attempt to fill that order through one or more orders on Coinbase’s trading platform, Coinbase Pro. Coinbase establishes the exchange rate for Digital Currency Transactions (“Consumer Exchange Rate”) by adding a margin, or spread (the “Spread”), to the market exchange rate on Coinbase Pro (“Pro Exchange Rate”). Coinbase may also charge a separate fee (in addition to the Spread) that is either a flat fee or a percentage of the transaction (the “Coinbase Fee”), as further described below in the section entitled, “Buy/Sell Transactions.” Coinbase Fees may vary based on your location, payment method, and other circumstances. In some cases, we may charge an additional fee on transfers to and from your bank account. We will always notify you of all Coinbase Fees (not including the margin) and any other service fees that apply to each transaction immediately before you confirm each transaction and in the receipt we issue to you immediately after each transaction has processed.
Coinbase reserves the right to reject a transaction if Coinbase is unable to fill a corresponding order on Coinbase Pro due to changes in the market price of a Digital Currency, an order exceeding the maximum order size on Coinbase Pro, or an order timing out due to slow server response time. In rare circumstances, the Pro Exchange Rate may not be available due to outages or scheduled maintenance. In order to provide you with uninterrupted services at such time, we may derive market pricing data from unaffiliated currency exchanges. Exchange rates quoted in these circumstances are subject to a quoted
Buy/Sell Transactions
Coinbase charges a Spread of about one-half of one percent (0.50%) for Digital Currency Purchases and Digital Currency Sales. However, the actual Spread may be higher or lower due to market fluctuations in the price of Digital Currencies on Coinbase Pro between the time we quote a price and the time when the order executes.
We also charge a Coinbase Fee (in addition to the Spread), which is the greater of (a) a flat fee or (b) a variable percentage fee determined by region, product feature and payment type. The flat fees are set forth below:
If the total transaction amount is less than or equal to $10, the fee is $0.99.
If the total transaction amount is more than $10 but less than or equal to $25, the fee is $1.49.
If the total transaction amount is more than $25 but less than or equal to $50, the fee is $1.99.
If the total transaction amount is more than $50 but less than or equal to $200, the fee is $2.99.
For example, if you are in the United States and wish to purchase $100 of bitcoin and pay with a U.S. bank account or your USD Wallet, the flat fee would be calculated as $2.99. As noted below in the variable fee section, the variable percentage fee would be 1.49% of the total transaction, or $1.49. Since the flat fee is greater than 1.49% of the total transaction, your fee would $2.99. If you wanted to purchase bitcoin with a credit or debit card, we would charge a fee of 3.99% since the variable percentage fee is higher than the flat fee.
Variable percentage fee structure by location and payment method are shown in the last section below. These fees do not apply to Digital Currency Conversions. As a reminder, the Coinbase Fee will always be the greater of the minimum flat fees described above or the variable fees described below.
Digital Currency Conversions
With a Digital Currency Conversion, you can accomplish in a single transaction what would otherwise require two separate transactions. For example, you could directly convert Bitcoin to Ethereum (a Digital Currency Conversion), or you could sell Bitcoin and then purchase Ethereum (a Digital Currency Sale followed by a Digital Currency Purchase).
Coinbase charges a Spread of one percent (1.00%) for Digital Currency Conversions. However, the actual Spread may be higher or lower due to market fluctuations in the price of Digital Currencies on Coinbase Pro between the time we quote a price and the time when the order executes. We do not charge a separate Coinbase Fee for Digital Currency Conversions.
Coinbase Bundle
When you request to purchase the Coinbase Bundle, Coinbase determines the proportion of each asset to be purchased based on that asset’s market capitalization relative to the market capitalization of all assets in the Bundle. Coinbase then calculates the Consumer Exchange Rate for each individual asset separately. The Coinbase Fee is calculated as a single transaction rather than separate transactions for each individual asset. For example, if you request to purchase $100 of the Bundle, your total fee will be $2.99 if you are located in the United States and pay with your bank account, the same fee as a single purchase of $100 in Bitcoin. If you made five separate transactions (one for each asset) totaling a $100 purchase, your total fees would be significantly higher. As another example, if you request to purchase $300 of the Bundle (assuming you are purchasing from a U.S. Bank account or your USD Wallet), the transaction fee will be simply 1.49% of the transaction amount ($295.60), or $4.40.
Variable Fees by Location and Payment Method
Australia
Credit / Debit Card Buys 3.99%
Canada
Credit / Debit Card Buys 3.99%
Europe
Standard Buy / Sell Instant Buys (Credit / Debit Card only) Bank transfers (SEPA) - in / out* 1.49% 3.99% Free / €0.15
Singapore
Buy / Sell Credit / Debit Card Buys 1.49% 3.99%
UK
Standard Buy / Sell Instant Buys (Credit / Debit Card only) Bank wires - in / out * 1.49% 3.99% Free / £1
USA
Base rate of 4% for all transactions**
Payment Method for Purchase/Payout Method for Sale Effective Rate of Conversion Fee (after waiver) U.S. Bank Account 1.49% Coinbase USD Wallet 1.49% Credit/Debit Card 3.99%***
USD Deposit Method Fee ACH Transfer Free Wire Transfer $10 ($25 outgoing)
* Note - In some cases your bank may charge additional fees for transfers between your bank account and your Coinbase account.
** The base rate for all Purchase and Sale transactions in the U.S. is 4%. Coinbase waives a portion of the Digital Currency Transaction Fee depending on the payment method you use. The effective rate of the Digital Currency Transaction Fee disclosed here is calculated as the base rate, net of fee waivers. The base rate does not apply to U.S. Dollar deposits and withdrawals.
*** Note - Your bank may charge additional fees for Coinbase credit card purchases. To avoid these fees, switch to debit card or bank account.
**** All credit cards and debit card payments are processed through Coinbase UK, Ltd, an affiliated company of Coinbase, Inc. |
The State Department Inspector General’s (IG) investigation report leaked out a day early on May 25 makes a number of significant points. These matter, and need to be considered by anyone voting in November.
What’s in the IG Report
Neither Clinton nor any of her senior staff would participate in the IG’s investigation.
Clinton never sought approval, legal or technical, for her unprecedented private email system.
IT staffers and others at State warned her against it.
Had she sought approval, the State Department would not have granted it.
Clinton violated Federal Records laws.
Clinton did not turn over all of her work-related emails. Several (unclassified) were quoted in the IG report that had never been released.
Clinton violated State Department policies and guidelines in place at the time, even as the State Department enforced those on the rank-and-file.
IT staff at the State Department who raised concerns internally were falsely told the server was approved and ordered to not discuss it further.
Clinton’s use of a non-standard email account caused many of her emails to not reach their recipients inside State, and ended up instead in Spam.
State Department staffers not in Clinton’s inner circle aware of her private email address could not communicate with the head of their agency.
His State Department bosses did not know their employee, Bryan Pagliano, was simultaneously working directly for Clinton maintaining her private server.
The server came under severe enough hacker attacks that its administrator had to physically unplug it to prevent intrusions.
The question of classified material handling is, by agreement, being left by State to the FBI, and is thus not addressed in the IG report.
All of that is in the report. I’ve read the whole thing, and if you do not believe my summary, above, or wonder what specific laws and regulations are being cited, you can also read the whole thing and learn for yourself.
What Matters
For the first time, a set of actual facts of Clinton’s actions and decisions have been laid out by an independent, government entity. The IG was appointed by Obama and his report is dispassionate. No one can realistically claim this is a hit job. Sources are cited and laws footnoted.
Clinton did break Federal Records laws and violate State Department regulations that her organization held others to.
Despite repeated promises of transparency and cooperation, neither Hillary nor any of her senior staff would agree to participate in the IG’s investigation. Former Sectaries of State Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright did participate fully and voluntarily in the investigation. Clinton alone did not.
Clinton never sought approval, and ignored advice to stop what she was doing. She ran the server with no oversight. With no oversight, the only check on Clinton was Clinton herself.
That lack of oversights extended to potential destruction of evidence. It was Clinton alone who determined which emails to turn over to the State Department as “work related” and which to delete, some 30,000. It was Clinton who made the decision to then try and wipe the server clean. It is unclear whether or not the FBI can forensically retrieve and review those 30,000 deleted emails.
Simply put, what she did wasn’t supposed to be done.
Why It Matters
Hillary Clinton lied when she claimed her actions were approved. She lied when she said there were no regulations in place at the time of her server decisions. She lied when she said she broke no laws. She lied when she said this all was a Republican hit job. She lied when she said she would cooperate with any investigation.
Hillary Clinton covered up her actions for four years as Secretary, then another two years after she left office, and only admitted to anything after it hit the news last year.
Hillary Clinton asks voters to trust her with the most important job in America. She has not shown she is trustworthy.
Hillary Clinton asks to be America’s leader. She did not lead her State Department, and she showed contempt for its rules. She did not lead by example.
Hillary Clinton made clear by her actions that she believes rules that apply to others do not apply to her.
Hillary Clinton by her actions succeeded in hiding all of her official emails from the Freedom of Information Act for six years in open contempt for that process and the American people.
Hillary Clinton purposefully and willfully created a system that exempted her from the oversight applied to every other government employee.
Hillary Clinton alone in the entire U.S. government conducted 100% of her official business on a private email server.
Defense?
The other shoe has yet to drop. Though the Inspectors General from the intelligence community have stated unequivocally that Clinton did handle highly classified material on her unsecured server, the FBI report on the same matter has not yet been released.
For those who wish to defend Clinton with the “but everybody did it” argument, Condoleezza Rice did not send any emails on any unsecured system at all. Powell and Albright sent a handful in the early days of the web. All of them cooperated in the State IG investigation. None of them ran a fully private system for four years and most importantly, none of them are asking us to trust them now running for president.
If your support is whittle down to a sad Hillary is down to “well, she’s not Trump,” do be careful what you wish for. She’s not Trump, but she is all of the above.
For those who wish to defend Clinton by saying “she’s not indicted,” well, actual criminality is a pretty low bar to set for the most important job in America. Also, the FBI has yet to release its report which may point to actual national security violations.
And lastly, it is not about crime per se, but about trust and judgement.
BONUS: If Bernie Sanders will not discuss any of this publically, he does not want to be president.
Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. His latest book is Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99 Percent. Reprinted from the his blog with permission. |
The number of people purchasing firearms has increased drastically over the last year. Gun owners across the nation were facing the very real possibility that Hillary Clinton could become President of the United States, meaning gun control was in the works. Because of that, ammunition sales also increased drastically as gun owners – both old and new – stocked up.
In November alone, the number of ammunition imports jumped more than 200 percent. Over 17,850 tons of ammunition have been sold to civilian buyers over the last 18 months.
“It’s very unusual in an import industry like this to see such a big move,” Panjiva research analyst Chris Rogers told CNNMoney. “It tells you that there’s a customer demand that’s not being met by U.S. manufacturers.”
The last time ammunition imports were studied, they had risen 48.9 percent from May 2015 to May 2016.
Italy’s Fiocchi Munizioni and Serbia’s Prvi Partizan are two of the top ammunition importers in the United States. |
Nice-Ride-sidewalk-station.jpg
Nice Ride Minnesota is the Twin Cities' public bike share program.
(Courtesy of City of Portland)
With this week's announcement that Portland's
will run
, it seems like a good time for an update on what's happening with Portland's go-by-bike plans: The organizers are in pedal peddling mode -- fundraising, that is.
Portland --
to oversee its bike-share system -- plans a kickoff next spring with 750 bikes, 75 stations and a fee schedule to-be-determined. The idea is that people will pay to borrow the bikes for short trips and errands in the city core. The mantra for how it works: "Join. Ride. Return. Repeat."
has launched a campaign for private sponsors to raise up to $6 million over the next five years to supplement $2 million in federal money to start and operate the local nonprofit program.
For $1.25 million annually and a minimum three-year commitment, you can become the system's one and only "title sponsor." That brings the right to pick the color of the loaner bikes and stamp your logo on the bikes, stations and even key fobs if you want.
The funding model is much like public broadcasting sponsorships, says Steve Hoyt-McBeth, a project manager with the Portland Bureau of Transportation. Other categories include "station sponsorships" for $12,000 a year and "supporters" for negotiable rates.
The Capital Bikeshare program has more than 1,800 bikes and 200-plus stations across Washington, D.C., Arlington, Va., and Alexandria, Va.
A
estimates 8,000 annual members of the bike-share program within five years and 700,000 trips in the fifth year with revenue projected to reach $1.8 million by the fourth year.
"We've gotten a lot of positive feedback," Hoyt-McBeth said. But it's too early to talk about any sponsor names or amounts, he said.
The program also hasn't decided yet how much to charge to rent the bikes. The city's
"The majority of American systems require riders to become 'members' before checking out a bike. Memberships ... range from $5 to $7 for a day and range from $50 to $85 for a year ... Once you're a member, the first 30 minutes of every ride are typically free. Ride longer, and a small fee is added to a rider's total cost. However, you may return the bike to any station and receive another free 30 minutes."
The bikes will be "sturdy and sleek," Hoyt-McBeth says. They'll have step-through frames, chain guards and built-in lights.
And no doubt a logo -- or two.
-- Margaret Haberman |
Our friends at Football Outsiders released their 2014 Almanac last week, which you can purchase HERE. As has been the case the last couple years, they see some regression in the cards for our San Francisco 49ers. Their mean projection for the 49ers is 9.0 wins, and they give them a 51.4 percent change of making the playoffs.
Naturally, this has plenty of people scratching their heads in confusion. Aaron Schatz put together some thoughts on this issue over at ESPN Insider. It's a subscription article, so for those without an Insider password, I'll try and give you some of the high points.
Schatz opened by talking about the fact that there is significant churn in the number of teams making the playoffs. Since 2002 (the move to 8 divisions), half of all teams did not make the playoffs the following season. According to Schatz, 49 teams have gone 12-4 or better, and 22 of those teams did not return the following year. And of course, there is the fact that the 49ers are the 11th team to lose to the eventual NFL champions in three straight postseasons. 4 of the previous 10 got back to the Super Bowl the next year, and 6 missed the playoffs.
The 49ers have bucked some of the odds, so thankfully Aaron went into detail as to the specific issues the 49ers face. He pointed to five factors:
1. 49ers schedule - They have the 4th toughest projected strength of schedule based on FO's numbers
2. Conference - The general notion that the NFC is better than the AFC
3. Home Field - Apparently in a new field, home field takes some time to get used to. That makes some sense given that there are quirks to the new stadium
4. Aldon Smith suspension
5. NaVorro Bowman injury
In the conclusion, Aaron did point out that the latter three factors point to the 49ers potentially being an ascending team when the playoffs arrive. Naturally, I think the 49ers can overcome some of these issues. I think the roster depth can help make up for the Smith and Bowman absences, at least to some extent. But depending on the length of Aldon Smith's suspension, the first month of the 49ers season will likely prove critical.
The 49ers open at Dallas, then host Chicago, travel to Arizona, and then get Philadelphia and Kansas City in back-to-back home games. If Smith were to get a 4-game suspension, that covers some interesting offenses. All four games feature offenses that could cause problems. Many will view the Cardinals offense below the other three, but they're nothing to sneeze at.
The 49ers defense will face serious challenges early on, but if they can get through that first quarter of the season in decent shape, things could definitely look up from there. It's hard to say for certain exactly how the team will perform without Bowman and Smith, or even just without Bowman after Smith returns. I'm optimistic, but that's my natural disposition. That being said, the first few games that cover both Smith's suspension and Bowman's injury could tell us quite a bit about how this season could shape up. A poor or strong start does not guarantee anything the rest of the way, but the 49ers have the tools to be ascending later in the season. |
It isn’t long before one gets the sense that there’s something off about Agora; something not quite right. Chances are it’s when Rachel Weisz, as the beguiling fourth-to-fifth-century Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia, drops a cloth stained with her menstrual blood at the foot of a student who seeks to woo her (a style of abstinence-only education today’s advocates might do well to copy). Despite every indication that what you’re watching is a standard Hollywood period epic, you begin to doubt that it will ever get to the obligatory love scene. If you happened to read Hypatia’s Wikipedia page on the way to the theater, you might even begin to fear for not seeing her undressed until the end, when she is stripped and torn to pieces by a bestial Christian mob.
Alejandro Amenábar’s $73 million, English-language movie (which just began a limited US release in New York and, on June 4, Los Angeles) is bursting at its formulaic seams. In two overwrought hours it crams in sex appeal, city-sized sets, gory battle scenes, political intrigue, religious zealotry, and enough of Neoplatonism’s greatest hits to give us a sense for what Hypatia is supposed to be standing for. This last part, while being the toughest to reconcile—not least because of Hypatia’s inconvenient celibacy—is also Agora’s best hope. It comes as a welcome contrast, for instance, to HBO’s Rome, which turns figures like Cicero and Cato into wimps compared to a muscular Mark Antony, with no mention of the intellectual feats by which we now know them best. Ancient world or this one, big ideas don’t easily compete on screen with messy power struggles and lustrous bodies. But it’s worth a try.
“I believe in philosophy,” Hypatia declares, against all odds.
“Philosophy,” growls a sensible politician. “Just what we need in times like these.”
Amenábar stands with the heroine; he didn’t just make this movie for his health. Since Voltaire and Edward Gibbon, the story of Hypatia has been a favorite nugget of the Enlightenment narrative: her death at the hands of crazed monks marks the end of Greek high culture and the start of a steady descent into the Dark Ages. The story is supposed to stand as a beacon, like the lighthouse that towered over Hypatia’s Alexandria, of the danger that religious passions pose to all that is wise and tolerant about the human spirit.
Just in time for my own childhood indoctrination (one which I am loathe to disavow), Carl Sagan repeated this telling in his Cosmos TV series. Sagan followed Gibbon in associating Hypatia’s murder with the destruction of Alexandria’s famous library; with her body, away went the literature of the ancient world, lost forever. To remember Hypatia is now to take a stand for liberation against dogma. (No less than two journals of feminist thought bear her name.) It is this mantle that Agora seems to inherit and this message, for our own age of zealotry and intolerance, that it appears meant to convey. Ideas are propped up to fight like gladiators, with Faith in one corner and Reason in the other.
“I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenábar that his movie might incite violence against religious people…”
Hearing about Agora’s success in Spain last year (it was the highest-grossing film of the year, sweeping up awards) couldn’t help but bring to mind the empty insides of so many of that country’s churches, still charred after the various anti-clerical mobs of the last few centuries. I wasn’t the only one to make that association. With predictable ressentiment, an open letter came to Amenábar from the Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory, a Catholic watchdog group in Spain, warning him: “Your film is going to awaken hatred against Christians in today’s society.”
American “Catholic evangelist” Father Robert Barron adds in his Catholic New World review, “I wonder if it ever occurred to Amenábar that his movie might incite violence against religious people, especially Christians.” One can only hope that it’s not a good enough movie to drive people to the streets.
In an interview with the New York Times, though, Amenábar turned the tables on his pious critics. “Fundamentally, this is a very Christian film about the life of a martyr,” he explained. “Jesus would not have approved of what happened to Hypatia, which is why I say no good Christian should feel offended by this film.” In this respect, at least, his sentiments have historical basis.
Our best period account of the life and death of Hypatia comes from Socrates Scholasticus, a Christian historian in Constantinople who had among his sources a pair of refugee pagan priests from Alexandria. His decree on the whole matter is, exactly, Amenábar’s: “Surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.”
Nor were his sentiments any fluke; Hypatia was widely admired by Christians in antiquity and afterward for her learning, chastity, and martyrdom—beginning with her onetime student Synisius of Cyrene, portrayed in the movie as a surfer dude trapped in bishop’s clothes. The Suda, a tenth-century Byzantine (Christian) encyclopedia wistfully remembers her beauty and eloquence, reserving no sympathy for the fellow-Christians who did her in.
From that point the Gibbon-Sagan narrative only continues to unravel. First, it isn’t at all clear that the great library was destroyed by Christians in Hypatia’s time, as the movie suggests. Caesar set it on fire half a century before the birth of Christ. And the last straw may have been a Muslim conquest of Alexandria in 642. What is given in Agora as the orgiastic immolation of the library’s volumes corresponds with the Christians’ destruction, in 391, of a magnificent temple dedicated to Serapis, essentially a political god intended to unite the Alexandrian ethnic maelstrom under imperial rule. The Serapeum was not the library, though it seems to have housed at least an offshoot of the library’s collection. In any case, Agora reminds us that its destruction was provoked by a prior pagan attack on Christians (provoked, in turn, by Christians, etc., ad infinitum).
Early accounts differ about what actually led to Hypatia’s death. The Suda places the blame squarely on the Christian Patriarch Cyril (that’s St. Cyril to you), who grew jealous of the crowds her lectures gathered and sent goons to kill her. Socrates Scholasticus’ depiction is a bit more messy: a triangle of political intrigue between Cyril, Orestes the Roman prefect, and the lady philosopher. This is the scenario Agora most closely follows. And despite Amenábar’s noble effort to squeeze in a scientific discovery before the end, her death just doesn’t seem to have been about ideas, ultimately.
In Alexandria at the time, people were getting martyred left and right for not much good reason at all. Socrates Scholasticus tells us, “The Alexandrian public is more delighted with tumult than any other people: and if at any time it should find a pretext, breaks forth into the most intolerable excesses; for it never ceases from its turbulence without bloodshed.” With Jews, Christians, pseudo-Christians, philosophers, and pagans all angling for power, Hypatia’s may be more a story about universal stupidity than anything else.
As the Stars, the Streets
The best-developed character in Agora, held as a foil against the street riots, is the sky. Amenábar used a starscape calibrated to look exactly as it would have in antiquity, accounting for axial precession. Several times he juxtaposes the stars’ stillness, and the Earth’s roundness, with the chaos below. Like a good Platonist, Hypatia was obsessed with the stars, which Plato and Aristotle held to be demigods, eternal as the universe and its Prime Mover. Contemplating of their order and their perfection is where her philosophy lurked. Unfortunately, other Platonic legacies mar her contemplation in Agora: an obsession with the circle, which blinds her to the elliptical motion of the planets, together with sitting atop a society predicated on slavery and gross inequity.
The Christians turn out to be even worse astronomers, but they do get some things right. The Parabalani (a band of the patriarch’s bodyguards that Agora implicates in Hypatia’s murder) were actually a fellowship chosen from among the poor, principally to serve the poor. They tended to the sick and buried the dead, risking infection in the process. Between violent mob scenes, the movie does at least give a glimpse of what brought so many in the vast Alexandrian underclasses to wear the sign of the cross: bread, freedom, and the good news of the Beatitudes. Hypatia’s slave Davus is, to her, only a slave, albeit a clever one; among Christians, he learns that feeding the hungry is better than fattening the full.
Hypatia’s society collapsed around her, it must be admitted, because its time had come. Alexandria had built its wonders on slavery (Sagan called it, in the Cosmos segment on Hypatia, “the cancer of the ancient world”), and those who enjoyed them didn’t bother to do anything about the streets. But Christians did—or at least, in their way, they tried to.
The lesson of Hypatia, inscribed as much in Agora as in the historical record, is not one of reason over faith or inquiry over intolerance. It’s that as we yearn for the peace of the stars, we have to take care of our city too; we have to make this world just, and thereby safe, for philosophy. |
Tehran. — A two-day international conference in support of Palestine opened here yesterday, with Speaker of Parliament Advocate Jacob Mudenda condemning Zionist Israel for its continued violation of a series of UN resolutions, including the regime’s ongoing construction of illegal settlements within Palestinian territory.
The conference, dubbed “Together Supporting Palestine” was sponsored by the Iranian government, with more than 500 delegates from over 60 countries in attendance.
“The relationship between the people of Palestine and the people of Zimbabwe is deeply and firmly rooted in our comradeship forged in our common struggles for independence and sovereignty driven by the humanitarian motive force against oppression and ethnic supremacist misdirected as political ideology,” Adv Mudenda told the 6th conference which was officially opened by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Zimbabwe fully supports the just cause of Palestine to be a sovereign state (and) Zimbabwe upholds the principle that only a two-state solution is the open sesame to the current apartheid arrangement, where Israel has usurped the right to self-determination of Palestinians.”
The Speaker is leading a three-member Parliamentary delegation, whose other members are chairman of the Portfolio Committee on Foreign Affairs Kindness Paradza and committee member Priscilla Misihairambwi-Mushonga.
Among the countries represented at the conference, whose focus is to support Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, are superpowers Russia and China, North Korea and a host of other pro-Palestine militant groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Adv Mudenda said efforts to resolve the Palestinian crisis should now go beyond just UN resolutions or conferences to include a “concrete plan of action” to deal with the 70-year-old crisis “once and for all”.
Said Adv Mudenda, “Our hope now lies in intensive and robust Parliamentary diplomacy.” This was in reference to current efforts to expel Israel from the International Parliamentary Union.
The Speaker reminded the delegates of President Robert Mugabe’s speech to the UN General Assembly on September 12, 2002 when he stated that,
“The Palestinian question should be resolved without further delay as it is causing untold suffering to the people in the occupied territories.
Israel must withdraw her forces from Palestinian land soon and the Palestinians must be afforded the opportunity of having a state of their own. Israel must know that her chances of peace and security lie in having a Palestinian state that will live side by side with it in mutual respect of sovereign states.”
As proof for its support to the Palestinian cause, Adv Mudenda said Zimbabwe was among the first countries that in 1988 recognised Palestine as an independent state and upgraded the then PLO offices in Harare to become a fully-fledged embassy with an accredited ambassador.
The Speaker paid tribute to Iran for its unwavering support for the Palestinian cause, a move that has led Tehran to endure a cocktail of sanctions imposed by the US and its European allies.
He narrated several attempts that were made, over the years, at international level to resolve the Palestinian crisis, which failed as successive Israeli governments ignored or violated all the agreements.
“The greatest tragedy is not the manner in which Israel has conducted itself with respect to Palestinian occupied territory, but the double standards demonstrated by some Western powers with respect to Israel,” said Adv Mudenda. |
Microsoft Exploring ‘Smarter Home Appliances’ with Appliance Manufacturer Miele
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Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images(HANOVER, Germany) — Microsoft is looking into integrating its technology into household appliances in a consumer-friendly way as part of a collaboration with appliance manufacturer Miele.
In a series of videos, the company unveiled work being done in conjunction with various companies, including Fujitsu, Kuka and Miele. One customer-minded concept focuses on integrating the web into high-end domestic appliances sold by Miele.
For example, Microsoft says, users would be able to browse recipes at Miele’s website, select one, have the necessary food preparation stages downloaded to their mobile device and via a matching program, loaded to their oven. “The oven is programmed to cook the specific meal using the proper operating mode, temperature, cooking time, humidity and other factors,” Microsoft notes, “taking out guesswork and promising great results.”
“This is just one example of how the Internet of Things and cloud technology are moving from enterprise experiences to personal experiences,” Microsoft’s General Manager for Worldwide Manufacturing and Resources Caglayan Arkan said.
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Fianna Fáil is to block plans by Minister for Transport Shane Ross to automatically disqualify drivers found under the influence of alcohol.
Mr Ross has received Cabinet approval to proceed with legislation to replace current penalties for drink-driving with an outright ban.
However, Fianna Fáil’s spokesman on transport, Robert Troy, said his party would not support such measures.
Mr Troy said the Minister had not produced any evidence to support the proposals.
Speaking to The Irish Times, he said: “Minister Ross is being lazy in my opinion. There is nothing to suggest such a road safety measure will be effective or will save lives.
“There are many proposals that Mr Ross should be focused on including restoring the Traffic Corps to the level of 2010 and ensuring adequate enforcement of current legislation.”
Current law stresses drivers caught with an alcohol limit of between 50mg and 80mg per 100ml will receive three penalty points and a €200 fine if it is their first offence.
The legislative change was introduced by former minister for transport Noel Dempsey in 2009.
The move was seen as a concession to Fianna Fáil backbenchers who had threatened to vote against the measure at the time because it lowered the alcohol limit from 80mg to 50 mg.
The general scheme of a new Bill has proposed to end that loophole and ensure every driver caught under the influence can receive the same penalty.
Alcohol limits
It is understood many Fine Gael TDs and some members of the Independent Alliance had similar concerns showing it would have been difficult to pass the legislation. Fianna Fail’s opposition will ensure it will not proceed.
Mr Ross did not respond to calls for comment on the Fianna Fáil decision. He is also preparing a number of changes to drink-driving legislation including lowering the alcohol limits further from 50mg to 30mg if current trends on our roads continue.
This would see even one small alcoholic drink place a driver over the limit.
The Road Safety Authority Amendment Bill 2017 will provide for other road safety matters including the provision of a database of disqualified drivers
Meanwhile, it has also emerged Mr Ross has not delegated any responsibility to his Minister of State, Patrick O’Donovan.
In response to a parliamentary question, the Minister for Transport confirmed there had been no statutory delegation of functions to Mr O’Donovan.
He has been given general responsibility for a number of areas including sports issues, domestic tourism marketing and tourism-generating events.
In addition, he is asked to assist in attending public events and attending Oireachtas business. Mr O’Donovan is the only Minister of State not to have delegated powers and is understood to have written to Mr Ross requesting a formal decision be taken. |
Perhaps you've been burning to build an online feature around some interesting government data source; if so, the Federal Communications Commission just made the task simpler. The agency has released the Application Programming Interface (API) specs for four of its big repositories of information: its consumer broadband test, broadband provider database, license owner storehouse, and latitude/longitude to county converter.
"We want the FCC's Web presence to be larger than a single Web site," FCC Geographic Information Officer Michael Byrne posted on Tuesday. "We want the developer community to run with these APIs to make mash-ups and data calls connecting FCC data assets to other sources for creative and useful applications to the public."
Although the Commission has done a fine job of making its public filings much more accessible, that's only the tip of the vast data iceberg which is the FCC. The biggest challenge is figuring out where this juicy stuff actually resides at fcc.gov.
License lookup
For example, suppose you wanted to learn something about an FCC wireless or broadcast license holder—say, the details of its latest license application or transfer agreement. It's actually easier to search for those databases via Google than to try to locate them in the agency's online labyrinth. And once you do find them, there isn't a lot that you can do besides punch in the name of a station and see what's up.
Now the FCC's License View API opens up a new range of possibilities. It lists the crucial data fields and methods needed to offer snapshots of license ownership patterns across various services, such as wireless broadband, plus when these licenses are up for renewal.
So, if you want to get a rundown of all the FCC licenses owned by Verizon Wireless, the License View API discloses all the relevant GET methods and how to script them into your URL line.
"GetLicenses" is the method in question. The API call is:
http://data.fcc.gov/api/license-view/basicSearch/getLicenses
The method's parameters include
searchValue (Required) pageNum (Optional) - Default is 1. sortColumn (Optional) - Default is licName. Valid values are: licName, frn, callsign, service, status, expdate sortOrder (Optional) - Default is asc. Valid values are: asc, desc pageSize (Optional) - Default is 100. format (Optional) - Default is xml. Valid values are: xml, json, jsonp jsonCallback (Optional) - Default is callback.
Thus if you set up a GetLicense URL link, plugging "Verizon Wireless" into the "searchValue" param:
http://data.fcc.gov/api/license-view/basicSearch/getLicenses?searchValue=Verizon%20Wireless
—you'll get a truckload of licenses in XML form when you click the hyperlink.
A more interesting parameter is getRenewal, which returns the number of licenses up for renewal in a given month (in the form of twelve months worth of data). Plug Verizon into that script:
http://data.fcc.gov/api/license-view/licenses/getRenewals?commonName=Verizon Wireless&limit=50
—and you get a new trove of XML intel. As every PHP and JSP coder reading this knows, from these methods flow all kinds of nifty online forms by which consumer groups, bloggers, businesses, and researchers can now peer into the FCC's data repositories in new, interesting, and distinctly public ways.
Broadband test data
You can also do this with the data being collected by the FCC's Consumer Broadband Test, which gives you an evaluation of your upload and download speeds, then plugs the results into a county-by-county database.
For example, in Ruther Glen, Virginia, you'd plug Caroline County's latitude and longitude numbers (38.0/-77.5) into the URL line via the API's "speedtest/find" feature:
http://data.fcc.gov/api/speedtest/find?latitude=38.0&longitude=-77.5
And get an XML result as so (the numbers are presumably Kbps):
<Response executionTime="0.163" status="OK"> <SpeedTestCounty> <wirelineMaxDownload>0.0</wirelineMaxDownload> <wirelineMaxUpload>0.0</wirelineMaxUpload> <wirelineAvgDownload>9072.4</wirelineAvgDownload> <wirelineAvgUpload>4562.2</wirelineAvgUpload> <wirelessMaxDownload>14490.0</wirelessMaxDownload> <wirelessMaxUpload>11180.0</wirelessMaxUpload> <wirelessAvgDownload>9146.5</wirelessAvgDownload> <wirelessAvgUpload>6498.5</wirelessAvgUpload> <wirelineTests>0</wirelineTests> <wirelessTests>12</wirelessTests> </SpeedTestCounty> </Response>
ISP intel
Another API offers broadband provider data in a given state via ISP FCC Registration Numbers (FRNs).
The FRN search program has two methods: "getList" and "getInfo." So a query using the getList method and the stateCode parameter for California:
http://data.fcc.gov/api/frn/getList?stateCode=CA&multi=Yes
—gets you a nice long list of ISPs (which we won't print out here). Using the first listed ISP's FRN number (0016639023), we can access more data via the "getInfo" method:
http://data.fcc.gov/api/frn/getInfo?frn=0016639023
—about a specific ISP.
Finally, the FCC has released a method to help developers do census block conversions (latitude/longitude to census block numbers). That, in turn, will help them translate individual locations into census data for a wide array of government databases.
More of this is coming, the Commission promises.
"The release of these APIs marks an important day for us at the FCC," Byrne says. "The FCC has long published many data sets. Now we are allowing developers direct access to our data via live queries. Your feedback on these APIs—what you think, how you are using them, what needs to be improved—helps us continue in this direction." |
For people in the LGBT community heading to college, a welcoming campus is a high priority. The good news is Campus Pride has done in-depth reviews of more than 300 campuses throughout the country and rated them on their LGBT-friendliness.
Campus Pride rates the colleges based on more than two dozen issues dealing with academic and student life, policies, course offerings, campus safety and housing and health services. Instead of coming up with a top 10 ranking, they've put together ratings based on a ranking system with five stars.
Almost half of the campuses with a five-star rating were located in California, Oregon or Washington.
Campus Pride is a national nonprofit organization for student leaders and campus groups working to create safer, more LGBT-Friendly learning environments at colleges and universities. Besides the ratings, they also work with school administrators to try to improve policies on campuses to become more welcoming toward LGBT students.
Take a look at the five-star colleges on the Campus Pride Index:
PHOTO GALLERY The Five-Star Rated Colleges By Campus Pride |
By Nicole Nalty
Pixar Pier was announced at D23 Expo this summer, and next year the transformed land will make its debut at Disney California Adventure park with newly themed attractions, entertainment, foods, and merchandise. Our friends at the Disney Parks Blog have just shared more information about the upcoming enhancements (and you can read even more in the latest issue of Disney twenty-three!). Here’s what you can expect to see when Pixar Pier opens in summer 2018.
New Neighborhoods
The permanent area will include four new neighborhoods inspired by favorite Disney•Pixar stories: The Incredibles take on the first new neighborhood with the thrilling Incredicoaster, a permanent transformation of California Screamin’, with a mid-century-modern-style loading area, new character moments, and a new look for ride vehicles. California Screamin’ will close on January 8 to make its Incredible transformation. Then, head over to the Toy Story-inspired neighborhood, where you’ll find the fan-favorite Toy Story Mania!. On the western side of the boardwalk, an Inside Out-inspired neighborhood will come to life with a new family-friendly attraction, scheduled to open at a later date. The final neighborhood will be a celebration of many favorite Pixar stories––Mickey’s Fun Wheel will keep its iconic face on the Paradise Bay side and the gondolas will feature different Pixar characters. All of the midway games will be inspired by Pixar characters and join the existing Bullseye Stallion Stampede game at Games of the Boardwalk. Mickey’s Fun Wheel, Games of the Boardwalk, and Sideshow Shirts will close on January 8.
New Eats
Ariel’s Grotto restaurant and the Cove Bar will be transformed into a new lounge and grill, with both locations closing January 8––Cove Bar will reopen briefly in April before closing again for its permanent transformation.
New Land
On the other side of the lagoon, Paradise Gardens, Silly Symphony Swings, Jumpin’ Jellyfish, Goofy’s Sky School, Golden Zephyr and The Little Mermaid ~ Ariel’s Undersea Adventure will be part of a new land called Paradise Park.
Pixar Pier will open during Pixar Fest, a limited-time celebration beginning April 13.
Stay tuned for more exciting updates from Pixar Pier! |
Key Highlights
Ripple price is correcting lower and is currently testing a major support area near $0.2400 against the US Dollar.
Yesterday’s highlighted crucial bullish trend line with support at $0.2500 was breached on the hourly chart of the XRP/USD pair (data source from Kraken).
The price is trading near a major support area of $0.2400-0.2350, which must hold further losses.
Ripple price started a downside correction against the US Dollar and Bitcoin. XRP/USD is now trading above a major support of $0.2350.
Ripple Price Downsides Limited
There was a minor decline in Ripple price from the $0.2803 swing high against the US Dollar. The price moved below the $0.2650 support and the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $0.1980 low to $0.2803 high. It opened the doors for an extended correction and the price moved below $0.2550. During the downside move, there was a break below yesterday’s highlighted crucial bullish trend line with support at $0.2500 on the hourly chart of the XRP/USD pair.
The price moved below the $0.2500 support and the 100 hourly simple moving average. However, the 50% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $0.1980 low to $0.2803 high is holding losses. There is a clear major support forming near $0.2400-0.2350, which must hold further losses. There is a chance of a dip towards $0.2350-30 to fill buy orders before the price recovers.
The 61.8% Fib retracement level of the last wave from the $0.1980 low to $0.2803 high is also near $0.2297 to prevent declines. On the upside, the price needs to move back above the $0.2550 resistance to gain momentum.
Looking at the technical indicators:
Hourly MACD – The MACD for XRP/USD is now placed well into the bearish zone.
Hourly RSI (Relative Strength Index) – The RSI for XRP/USD is currently near the oversold levels.
Major Support Level – $0.2350
Major Resistance Level – $0.2550
Charts courtesy – Trading View, Kraken |
Alastair Majury and Robert Davies made comments about Catholics and black people.
Conservatives: Party membership handed back to two Stirling councillors (file pic). PA
Two Conservative councillors in Stirling have been readmitted to the party despite posting a string of offensive posts on social media.
Alastair Majury and Robert Davies were suspended just weeks after being elected in May.
A host of offensive tweets were brought to the party's attention after they were unearthed by the Stirling Observer and the Scottish Catholic Observer.
Majury tweeted in 2012: "Why is the Catholic Church against birth control? Because they'll run out of children to molest."
The Conservative councillor also used the term "tarrier", a derogatory term for Catholics, in another tweet.
In 2013, Davies posted a series of tweets captioning a picture of black people waiting to board a cargo plane.
One such tweet read: "In the interests of security keep your loin cloths with you at all times. Spears go in the overhead locker."
Another post over the same picture said: "No, I am not your lunch. I am your flight attendant."
Despite the posts, both have had their party membership handed back to them.
A spokesman for the party said: "Having served a suspension, both councillors have been readmitted to the party after offering unreserved apologies for any offence caused.
"It has been made abundantly clear that behaviour like this will not be tolerated in future."
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…the simpering excuse of the Moral Coward.
It’s lesser form, “I’m just doing my job,” brings to mind the incompetent half-ass; the man at the printing store who delivers $500 worth of stationary to you, with an obvious typo in the title – a typo you missed as you wrote the order in haste – which he didn’t think worthy of a telephone call to verify.*
For any Man of Red Blood, no explanation of the Nuremburg Defense is necessary: Right is Right, and Wrong is Wrong. The very pathways of our souls are ordered along these lines. Debates, perhaps, when the situation is particularly nuanced – but there exists a common sense as to what Justice means, as well as an acknowledgement that it is a social construct, existing objectively, outside of us; that it is not something subjective, ammenable to our whims and fancy. There’s no need to write down what everybody knows.
But because we are Men, we have codified it explicitly. The Canadian Forces Code of Conduct says:
…every member of the CF [Canadian Forces] has an obligation to disobey a manifestly unlawful order regardless of rank or position.
Emphasis mine.
In other words, if your CO commands you to execute a disabled enemy soldier, it is your duty to turn around and train your rifle on him.
Yet another document emphasizes just how serious Ethics are to a True Military Man:
QTC: You are an ambulance driver. Your military ambulance is clearly marked with the Red Cross. You are about to return to the front to pick up more wounded. A senior NCO approaches you and orders you to open up the ambulance so that he can load ammunition into it. You tell him that such action is illegal. The act of transporting the ammunition in the ambulance is illegal under the Law of Armed Conflict. True or false? A: True. The use of a vehicle marked with a Red Cross for a military purpose is perfidy. Therefore, it is illegal to transport ammunition in an ambulance.
Now, I can’t say I’m a fan of the Law of Armed Conflict – it reeks of Univesalism, and the rampant Leftism of the UN. There’s a callow vegetarianism to the whole thing, with an authorship coming out of the well-fed classes. It lacks an understanding of aggression, violence, or the implications of total war, and yet…
And yet the soul of the document is bold statement, shouted out at the great unwashed masses of the world: “We are Civilized Men; we are Men of our Word. We shall grant quarter to a defeated enemy, and respect the courage with which he fought. We disdain the use of torture, indignity, and the savagery of chemical/biological weapons. Violence is instrumental – not a principle. We reject your Big Man State. We shall fight you, and grind you into the earth… but we shall fight with Honour.”
This has been a principle I’ve lived my life by, in spite of Doctor Milgram; I always figured that the 65% who failed at morality were the cattle living in the suburbs, the doughy soy-bean people, the group which cops and criminals alike refer to as ‘citizens’ (not to be mistaken for Heinlein’s gun toting, meat eating, spaceship building, family raising Citizen). I understood the world to be a place where the majority of Armed Men carried the Authority of the Karateka in their heart.
At least, that’s what I believed until a year ago; as I made my way through the distended bowels of that gluttinous beast known as the ‘Justice System’ I saw first hand the divergence of values between the militar,y and the government as a whole.
“Listen-” said the Probation Officer, after I pointed out, not just the cruelties and indignities, but the outright material harm she was subjecting an Innocent Man to; “I’m just doing my job. We’ve all got a job to do. I could have you put back in prison, right now, to await trial. Is that what you want?”
Reading this article on The Spearhead got me thinking, again, on all of this; on just how Low and Contemptuous is the character of the modern Cop, Prison Guard, Prosecutor, Probation Officer, and Bureuacrat.
Events such as this – all too common nowadays – bring up discussions about the “militirization of the police force” – and in one sense, that discussion is bang on. SWAT Teams have become paramilitary death squads, using weapons and tactics similar to what you’d find in Afghanistan.** But there’s one important difference.
Before a Civilized Army attacks you, they declare war. They are clear about their intentions; they are clear about their behaviour; they are clear about what led to the conflict. And when they lock you in a POW camp, make no mistake – you are still resisting. You may have acquiesced for the time being, but you are still their enemy. They know this; you know this. And yet, chances are, you will be better treated than any two-bit crook locked up by the government which claims to represent him.
The acutal military at least has the civility to Declare War before grinding you under the heel of their boot; our Modern Police State bellows “We are your Friend!” whilst tasering you for no reason at all.
The concept of Right and Wrong as Abstract Ideals has flown out the window long ago; we’re back to the scoiety of the Big Man. The legal system has grown capricious, schizophrenic; Right has become a question of Might – be it from the barrel of the gun, or from back-room politics. Might makes Right, and Lies rule the day. You show me a corrupt cop getting fired, and I’ll show you a bigger, stronger, better connected Media Conglomerate who took issue because the Innocent Victim had a sympathetic nature – a Media Conglomerate who turned a blind eye to the past hundred victims; members of the Unfavoured Class who wound up “bleeding from the forehead” as the cops like to say.
The book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent (review) is a compendium of Legal Insanity. Its eponomy based on the fact that – yes – thanks to excess legalislating, we all commit three indictable offenses per day, but it gets worse: most of these crimes lack the element of mens rea. In other words, you don’t have to have evil intent, and your ignorance is no excuse (a premise which only makes sense when the laws are sensible). Just piss off the wrong cop and you will find out, first-hand, what a Horror prison is to the Free Man.
So if I could offer one piece of advice to any of you Good Folk out there, it would be this: never leave your house without some cash in hand, your phone in your pocket, and a fresh pack of cigarettes.
You never know who’s going to be taken next.
* The inverse of the lesser form is LFCA TC Meaford motto: “Never pass a fault.” If you see something that’s all fucked up – you stop and fix it.
** I lie, there are two important differences: the second being that SWAT Teams are utterly incapable of dealing with a trained, alert, and determined Man of Violence. Their tactics – the cowards! – assume docility in the target. Anything more dangerous than a gangbanger with his blat-blat is utterly beyond them.
Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent |
No matter how successful entertainers become, they’ll always remember the first gig—whether it was disastrous, wonderful, or strange. Gotta Start Somewhere embraces these nostalgic moments by asking established entertainers to tell the story of the first time they graced a stage, as well as their memories of other musical firsts, from the first record they ever bought to the first concert they ever saw. In this edition, The A.V. Club talks to Steven Ellison, a.k.a. Flying Lotus, about middle-school band medleys, MC Hammer, and Thom Yorke.
First show:
Steven Ellison: It might have been my middle-school band, playing some medleys or some shit in the auditorium. You’re trying to make me dig in a place that I tried to bury. I played alto saxophone. From sixth grade to ninth grade I played saxophone. I must have been 11 to 13, and I went to Hale Middle School in the San Fernando Valley.
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The A.V. Club: Do you think you could still play the saxophone?
SE: No. [Laughs.]
AVC: Why did you decide to play the saxophone?
SE: I decided to play the saxophone because it was the most obvious instrument in my family. There were a lot of saxophone players in my family and there were extra saxophones, so that was an easy one to pick up. It was fun, it was okay, it just wasn’t me. It didn’t feel like my instrument, so I never followed through. But there was a song we played called “Exaltation” that I really liked. I think every band plays that song at some point.
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AVC: Was saxophone the first instrument you ever learned how to play?
SE: I actually did take a little piano before that, but I didn’t really take it seriously at the time. I was more into learning the saxophone than piano for a while, then I started making beats.
First beat
SE: I started making hip-hop beats when I was 14 or 15, and I was doing that for a little while. My cousin bought me a Roland MC-505 Groovebox, which was an amazing machine for a 15-year-old kid who wants to make beats, cause you can do everything and all the sounds were inside. It was so amazing. I need to buy one of those just to look at it. Just to remember everything.
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AVC: Did you know at the time that you wanted to make music for a living?
SE: I did, I fell in love with it. But I didn’t really think that. Where I came from, no one gave a shit about making hip-hop beats. I wasn’t in a scene where people were doing that. There was no Low End Theory. It was nothing. It was me and my little sister in the middle of Who Cares, California. There was no YouTube or none of that shit, so I didn’t really believe in it. Maybe that’s why it worked, because I just did it and I didn’t think about it. It was just fun.
It’s funny, because I meet a lot of people who are interested in making music and they’re discouraged a little bit because they’re worried about, you know, “Everyone else is so awesome already.” You kind of need to not give a shit and just be doing it for fun. That’s how you know it really means something: When it doesn’t matter and you know you’re in a new world that you’re creating.
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First professional breakthrough
SE: I was working at Stones Throw Records in L.A., and we were about to go on winter break for a couple of weeks. The office was going be closed and everyone got their Christmas bonuses. I was kind of in the intern place, but I was a paid intern, and they were talking about if I wanted to come back and all this stuff, and they gave me a couple extra hundred bucks because I wasn’t really able to get a bonus.
I was just getting signed to Warp Records in the U.K. and I was thinking, “Maybe I can really do this. I’m doing enough shows, maybe I can make a living. Just give it a shot.” I didn’t come back after break. I needed to work and do some shows and I said I’d maybe come back after those shows, but I never came back. That was a crazy time, pulling up to the parking lot knowing that might be the last time I come back.
First favorite song
SE: There are some songs I could say, but I don’t really recall the memories. But when I was I was in middle school there was a tape that was very, very pivotal in my whole being here and doing this music now. It was a mixtape by this guy out here [in California] called R.A.W. It was a jungle, drum-and-bass mixtape. I wouldn’t have gotten it if I wasn’t in band. It was a guy who played tuba in band, and he had this R.A.W. mixtape. He let me borrow it and I made a copy of it and it was amazing.
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AVC: What did you like about it?
SE: Honestly, it was the first time I heard drum and bass, jungle, and the sound was just too insane. It was something I had never heard before and I felt like it was something missing from my life. I was a big fan after that. I’m a kid from the Valley, where this whole scene has been happening for a long time before I had this tape, and I’m just now hearing this for the first time in the most random way. It blew my mind. I made a copy of this tape and listened to it every day. Every day. Over and over.
AVC: Was it an actual cassette tape?
SE: An actual tape tape. I had a little Walkman, the worst Walkman ever. It was the yellow one, that underwater Walkman. Like you need to take a Walkman under water.
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First record purchased
AVC: What was the first record you ever bought?
SE: I think the first tape I might have bought was MC Hammer or some shit, or Madonna or something like that.
First concert
SE: The first show I went to might have been a Stones Throw show. No, before that. I think I saw one of the all-ages Def Jux shows.
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First song
SE: The first beat that I ever made that I thought was actually worth a damn was called “Toilet Paper Nostrils,” and I made it when I had a cold. I had the worst cold ever. And I had toilet-paper nostrils making music, but it was really reflective of how I felt. It was a really sad trumpet sound. That was the first one where I was like, “Hey, you know what? Maybe I got something, maybe. Maybe I’m not horrible at this.”
First “a-ha” moment
AVC: Do you remember the first time you thought, “People are actually coming to my shows. Thom Yorke knows who I am”?
SE: I get that every day. [Laughs.] The first time was maybe right around when I got on MySpace. I was making stuff and people were like, “You should make a MySpace account.” I said, “Nah, I got Friendster and I don’t like it. I’m already on Black Planet. Whatever, MySpace, fine.” And then I saw people who were making music were checking my music out, saying it was cool. It was like, “What, man? You really think it’s all right?” That was the way I kind of came up. And if it wasn’t for that, I don’t know how—especially nowadays—I wouldn’t know what to do if I was a brand-new artist. |
That's Nice MPG!
This year's Tour to the Shore fuel economy competition had the goal of beating the previous record: 75 MPG in a Honda Insight hybrid. That might seem hard to do, unless you are Jack Martin, a member of the Triad Electric Vehicle Association in Burlington and teacher of Sustainable Transportation at Appalachian State University. He squeezed outin his unmodified Insight hybrid (and he has one passenger).
He did it by using hypermiling tricks. More details below.
List of Hypermiling Tricks
Hypermiling requires some dedication, but the basic principles are easy to learn:
Pumping up your tires to the maximum rating on their sidewalls, which may be higher than levels recommended in car manuals. This reduces rolling resistance.
Use engine oil of a low viscosity.
A useful, but controversial, practice is drafting behind other vehicles on the highway to reduce aerodynamic drag. If the guy in front of you slams on brakes, you will need to see a surgeon to have that tailpipe removed from your head.
Keep speeds down
Accelerate gently
Avoid excessive idling
Remove cargo racks to also cut down on aerodynamic drag.
Avoid unnecessary braking; coast to slow down.
King of Hypermilers
The unofficial "King of the Hypermilers" according to Jack Martin is Wayne Gerdes from Chicago. He drove "2,254 miles on a single 13.7-gallon tank of gas during the Honda Insight Marathon in Oklahoma last year." That's an average of 164.53 miles per gallon over the whole distance.
"Gerdes estimates that hypermiling has saved him $15,000 in fuel since he began the technique after the attacks of September 11, events that convinced him that U.S. national security was being undermined by its dependence on oil from the Middle East, and motivated him to reduce his own fuel consumption."
Hypermiling and Fuel Efficiency
More on Jack Martin's Hypermiling Record
Thanks to Eric Henry for the tip! |
A woman killed herself by jumping off the Norman Wood Bridge early Tuesday afternoon, York County Coroner Pam Gay said.
In fact, Gay said, the woman threw herself off the bridge twice because her first attempt to kill herself failed. She did not release the name of the victim, who was in her 20s, pending notification of the family.
Gay said the incident occurred at 12:24 p.m. The woman was seen walking on the catwalk of the bridge in Lower Chanceford Township before falling 15 to 20 feet to a sandbar.
Witnesses said the woman got up, told bystanders she was all right, then climbed back onto the catwalk, went farther out and jumped again, Gay said. That time, she said, the woman plummeted 100 to 120 feet and hit some trees before landing on rocks beneath the bridge's support pillars.
Deputy Coroner Matthew Groft pronounced the woman dead at 1:18 p.m. Gay said the death was due to blunt force trauma and there won't be an autopsy.
State police at Lancaster are investigating the incident at River and Holtwood roads because the bridge is in their jurisdiction. |
It takes seven minutes.
A dusting of Clinique Stay-Matte powder in honey. A hand-stitched wig. Eyebrows glued up into tiny peaks. The rest is left to Alec Baldwin: the puckered lips, a studied lumbering gait and a wariness of humanizing a man he reviles.
The transformation of Mr. Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, into the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, for his running parody on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” entails a tangerine hairpiece and a tricky tightrope walk. It means balancing a veteran actor’s determination to subsume his identity into a character, even as, in his offstage life, he is firm in his belief that the man about to take office is a dangerous figure.
The key to a convincing Mr. Trump, the actor said, are “puffs” — his word for the pregnant pauses in the president-elect’s speech. “I see a guy who seems to pause and dig for the more precise and better language he wants to use, and never finds it,” Mr. Baldwin said in an interview on Saturday in his dressing room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, six hours before show time, his eyebrows already peaked. “It’s the same dish — it’s a grilled-cheese sandwich rhetorically over and over again.” |
Jerry Bower, an entrepreneur who recently started a company, Wine Galaxy, that offers wine-of-the-month memberships for corporations to give to employees or clients, said he, too, often travels with more than one bag. “I have to travel quite a bit in order to build relationships,” he said. “I do carry a lot of different literature and presentation pieces, and sometimes wine samples.”
The new fee of $25 for a second bag is being levied by Continental, Delta, Northwest, United and US Airways . The low-fare carrier AirTran has announced that it will charge $10 for a second checked bag. Airlines have long levied fees for checking a third bag. Some carriers have recently increased those as well, and the fees on the major carriers now run as high as $100.
As the airlines struggle to stay in the black, charges for amenities formerly included in the ticket price are on the rise. Depending on the carrier, travelers now can wind up paying extra for everything from food to curbside check-in to bulkhead seats that offer extra legroom.
As for the extra-bag fee, even those who say they pack lightly for their trips foresee problems caused by price-sensitive fliers overfilling their carry-on bags and using large amounts of scarce overhead-bin space.
“The thing that scares me about this is that it’s just going to encourage people to lug more stuff onto the plane,” Mr. Mitchell said. “For those of us that have only one bag, if I don’t board early, there’s no place for my bag.”
Professionals in the travel industry who cater to business travelers say they are seeking ways to reduce the financial and logistical inconveniences.
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Paul Lang, manager of travel services at Bayer North America , said the company’s corporate travel policy reimburses employees for laundry services. So even those on extended trips do not have to pack a lot of clothes.
Sue Fern, president of the conference-planning business Event Pro-SSSS, is urging the associations whose conferences she manages to switch from bulky handouts to CDs or small flash drives. Because association members generally have to pay their own way to and from these events, this will keep them from being saddled with an extra baggage fee on their return trips, she said.
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“We’re seeing a bigger trend toward electronic transfer of information,” said Paul Kiewiet, management consultant and immediate past chairman of the Promotional Products Association International. “At P.P.A.I.’s expo in Las Vegas , we had several days of education and we went totally paperless.”
Mr. Kiewiet said he also expected that people who give business gifts, awards or knickknacks with logos would turn to pocket- or purse-size items. “From a promotional products standpoint, I think we’re seeing a resurgence in the smaller items such as writing instruments, journals or business card holders,” he said.
Dana Slockbower, director of marketing for Rymax Marketing Services Inc., a company that manages corporate gift and reward programs, said her clients had been asking for physically smaller gifts so travelers would not have to pay extra to send them home. “We’re definitely seeing requests for smaller gifts like iPods or watches,” she said.
Some business travelers say they would express their displeasure with the new regulation by opting for carriers that do not charge a separate fee for checking a second bag. They concede, however, that this may become impossible as more airlines, reeling from the escalating cost of fuel, might look toward imposing similar fees in the future.
“I will switch to another carrier that doesn’t charge the fee,” Mr. Bower of Wine Galaxy said. He conceded, though, that this might become more difficult as more airlines follow suit.
He recently booked a business trip with AirTran to avoid paying the extra baggage charge. On April 11, however, AirTran announced that it, too, would start charging passengers to check a second bag. Although Mr. Bower’s trip is scheduled for a few days before the start of the new fee, he says next time he may just have to carry on two bags.
“I’ll check one, and carry on a duffel bag plus my laptop. Unfortunately, they’re forcing people to do that.” |
Perhaps the strongest response to cruelty is kindness. And in the aftermath of the April 7 attack in Stockholm, Sweden has done just that, with public figures and private citizens reaffirming their values of tolerance and openness. Sweden, they remind us, is stronger than the man who hijacked a lorry and turned it into a weapon.
On Sunday thousands turned out in Sergel’s Square, near the site of the tragedy, to show their support for the victims and their families. Among the four who died were two Swedes, one of whom was only 11 years old, a British man and a Belgian woman. Fifteen more were injured, and nine of them remained hospitalised on Sunday.
Among those paying tribute was Melodifestivalen 2017 star Nano, whose song “Hold On” has become an anthem of perseverance.
“I want to show my support and to spread hope and love,” he said after his performance. “For me, that is where I come from, it’s an honor to come here, so there was nothing to hesitate over when they called me last night.”
He announced his performance on Instagram on Sunday morning, posting an image of the Stockholm skyline.
“Today I sing for Stockholm,” he wrote in the caption. “The love that you have shown each other these days begets hope. Come and show your support! #SergelsTorg #Stockholm #HoldOn”.
His Melodifestivalen 2017 song “Hold On” is timely, as it encourages people to push past their struggles to find peace.
He embodies that message better than most, having moved from prisoner to pop star, even winning the Melodifestivalen televote in March.
Sarah Dawn Finer — beloved singer and Melodifestivalen personality — also came out to show her support.
Sarah, known to many Eurovision fans from her comedic character Lynda Woodruff, performed a stripped-back, acoustic version of her Melodifestivalen 2009 song “Moving On”.
Strumming the guitar and showing off her lovely vocals, she proved that “Moving On” doesn’t just work as a power ballad, but also as an singer-songwriter ode to self-belief. |
Courtesy of Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, we are thrilled to offer one of our lucky readers the opportunity to win a copy of ‘Bad Moms’ On Blu-ray Combo Pack. Hit the jump for the simple instructions on how you can enter for your chance to win.
Courtesy of Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, we have one (1) copy of ‘Bad Moms’ on Blu-ray Combo Pack (Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD) to give away to one of our readers. The winner will be selected following the entry deadline and contacted via email at which point the Blu-ray will be shipped to the winner directly from the studio. Just follow the two simple steps listed below in order to enter the giveaway for your chance to win and good luck!:
PLEASE NOTE: The Deadline for entering is Friday, November 4, 2016! No entries submitted after November 4 will be accepted and only US residents are eligible to win.
First:
Simply send an email to [email protected] with the header/topic ‘BadMoms’ and in the body simply put ‘Enter’
Second:
Do any one of the following three options:
A. Like our Facebook page and the giveaway post (or any top post) on the page.
B. Follow us on Twitter and favorite the giveaway post (or any top post) on there.
C. Sound off in the comments telling us who your favorite actor(actress) in the film is and/or why you’re looking forward to owning ‘Bad Moms’ on Blu-ray Combo Pack! (please note that first time commenters to the site will experience a delay before your comment becomes visible)
‘Bad Moms’ Arrives On Blu-Ray Combo Pack & DVD November 1, 2016; Now Available on Digital HD from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. |
Many of our readers have expressed their desires for a Chrome OS tablet. The idea seems a bit off, but we have already moved to touchscreen Chromebooks with the Pixel, who is to say the next step isn’t a Chrome OS tablet? If you are hoping this will happen, today’s news will be the highlight of your day – it seems Google is currently working on making an on-screen keyboard for Chrome OS.
This would allow users to type and use the web without the need of a physical keyboard, allowing the platform to jump into the tablet space. The keyboard would “float” on your screen, which means it will work much like those early virtual keyboards for Windows touch-screen computers. One was able to move them around and resize them, making for a more flexible experience.
We have no idea when/if this on-screen keyboard will reach Chrome OS, but we are definitely expecting. There are already some apps that do this in the Chrome Web Store, but a native solution would be best for Google to move into the ultimate touchscreen experience.
What do you guys say? Would you get a Chrome OS tablet if all of this becomes a reality?
[Source: Chromium Via: Craig Tumblison] |
IRVINE, Calif. - Tenth-ranked Arizona sand volleyball stayed perfect on the 2015 season with victories over Irvine Valley College and Concordia on Tuesday. The Cats improved to 6-0 on the year with the sweeps.
Against IVC, the Cats swept all but one match, downing the Lasers 5-0.
Madi Kingdon and Kaitlyn Leary went to three sets, but defeated the IVC No. 1 team of Marisa Doran and Kob Pekich (21-10, 20-22, 15-6).
The remaining Wildcat pairs swept: Madison and McKenna Witt (21-13, 21-16), Allie Cook and Taylor Arizobal (21-14, 21-19), Kendall Polan and Rachel Rhoades (21-14, 21-12), Sarah Seiber and Hailey Devlin (21-15, 21-14) and Olivia Macdonald and Taylor Lane (21-11, 21-10).
Arizona would go on to sweep Concordia as well in dominant fashion. The Cats did not drop a set in the 5-0 victory.
Kingdon/Leary (21-12, 21-11), Witt/Witt (21-16, 21-13), Polan/Arizobal (21-9, 21-9), Rhoades/Cook (21-9, 21-9), Devlin/Seiber (21-13, 21-11) and Macdonald/Kiser (21-12, 21-10).
Arizona is back in action this weekend when it hosts Boise State, Nebraska and Cal State Northridge for the Wildcat Spring Challenge. UA opens up the event with Boise State on Friday at 2 p.m. PDT. |
The helicopter pilot who crashed into Pauatahanui Inlet is facing charges of careless flying related to earlier incidents in the region.
Rick Lucas, who escaped unharmed after his twin-engine BK117 helicopter crashed into the water near Porirua, north of Wellington, about 11.30am on Tuesday, is due in Wellington District Court later this month, charged with operating an aircraft in a careless manner over Pukerua Bay and Wellington.
Lucas, whose Helipro company was put into receivership in 2014, owing an estimated $25-$30 million, was flying on Tuesday for Heliforce, carrying power poles.
CAMERON BURNELL/FAIRFAX NZ Pilot Rick Lucas after his lucky escape from a helicopter crash in the Pauatahanui Inlet.
He said after the crash that he immediately knew he was in trouble. "I thought 'this was it' ... I feel a bit lucky.
READ MORE:
* Investigation into fatal West Coast helicopter crash begins
* Fatal helicopter crash near Reefton
* DoC suspends the use of all Robinson helicopters
"I felt quite an intense vibration that got worse and worse, and the machine started to rotate so I just carried out what I considered to be the normal emergency procedures – and got away with it."
Life Flight's Westpac Rescue Helicopter Footage of the rescue of helicopter pilot Rick Lucas after his chopper crash.
He closed the throttles and lowered the lever to try to stop the rotation.
"But it was still a significant impact and I ended up under the water. I couldn't get the seatbelt off.
"[I] couldn't tell up from down until I saw some light and I was able to head towards the light and emerge in the cockpit, so I was pretty happy."
GEORGINA RUSSELL/SUPPLIED Rick Lucas on top of the helicopter that crashed into the Pauatahanui Inlet.
Lucas said he was able to keep his cool.
"I didn't panic. I almost went into some sort of state that allows you to think logically and consciously. I looked for the seatbelt, found it and, yeah, thought my leg was trapped, which was my biggest concern."
He said he had been flying for 35 years and said this was only the second tail rotor failure in that time.
JOHNNY HUYNEN/JUCE MEDIA Drone footage of the Porirua helicopter crash
His only injury was a cut to his mouth. The blow to his helmet had also been quite hard, but he considered himself very lucky.
"I'm thankful there was nobody else involved, and thankful that when it all goes bad you don't forget your basics and your training ... I think that's what saved me."
He was pleased that two kayakers had paddled out to check on him.
"Andy and Rick, great guys, thanks very much," he said. "I think they were expecting the worst, they were pretty happy to see me sitting on top of the helicopter."
'IT JUST STARTED SPIRALLING TOWARDS THE WATER'
Porirua City Council worker Paul Hiha was leaf-blowing at a nearby walkway when he saw the incident unfold.
CAMERON BURNELL/FAIRFAX NZ A helicopter lies on its side in the Pauatahanui Inlet, in Porirua.
"I thought he dropped the pole there, and was then just circling it, until I realised he was getting faster ... what was going through my mind? Oh my God. It just spiralled down until it hit the water."
Hiha estimated he was only about 200 metres away from the crash site.
"I was surprised that I saw a guy come up out of the helicopter, the speed that he hit the water in. Amazing. I'll never, ever forget that sight."
ROSS GIBLIN/FAIRFAX NZ Boats gather to assist with the helicopter crash.
'I BURST INTO TEARS WHEN I SAW THE PILOT'
Crash witness Reuben Kunst said the helicopter was carrying telephone poles when the cable snapped and hit the tail rotor, spinning the chopper around.
The helicopter took off from Motukaraka Point in Pauatahanui minutes before the crash, another witness said.
GEORGINA RUSSELL/SUPPLIED The Westpac Rescue Helicopter at the scene of the crash.
Georgina Russell, who lives in the Porirua suburb of Whitby, on a hill overlooking the inlet, described hearing the helicopter taking off and making an "odd" sound.
She raced to her window to see it submerged in the water.
She grabbed her binoculars and was amazed to see a man was sitting on top of the aircraft.
VIRGINIA FALLON/FAIRFAX NZ Emergency services at the scene of a helicopter crash in Pauahatanui Inlet.
Soon after that, she watched as a canoeist paddled up to him and appeared to be chatting to the man while they awaited emergency services.
"He was just sitting casually, obviously very shocked, and a canoeist rode up to him and was just chatting to him."
Matt Newton, manager of Precision Helicopters, the parent company that oversees work carried out by other helicopter companies, said he saw the chopper go down.
"I just burst into tears when I saw the pilot climb up out of it.
"I don't know what happened, everything was serviceable on the machine."
The Civil Aviation Authority confirmed on Tuesday that Lucas had been charged in relation to previous incidents, but would not specify the charges.
The Transport Accident Investigation Commission (TAIC) confirmed it was investigating Tuesday's crash, and was assessing the options for salvage on Tuesday evening.
"We have to factor in tides, and mud flats, so it's not easy procedure," air investigations manager Peter Williams said.
"We are running out of day time so it may not be achieved until tomorrow."
TAIC issued a protection order on Tuesday evening which restricts any person from coming within 200 metre of the helicopter or its parts. Anyone who failed to comply with the order is liable to a fine not exceeding $10,000. |
Photography Advocate/Journalist Acquitted After Arrest Over Filming Police; Intends To Sue Back
from the good-for-him dept
An e-mail disclosed during the trial showed the police had been monitoring Miller's Facebook page and had sent out a notice warning officers in charge of evicting the Occupy Miami protestors that Miller was planning to cover the process.
We've linked to the blog, PhotographyIsNotACrime.com (PINAC), a few times in the past (it recently moved locations). Its author, Carlos Miller, not only covered a number of cases involving photographers being arrested or harassed for photographing buildings, police or something else, but was a defendant in just such a case himself . Miller was arrested back in January while videotaping police at an "Occupy Miami" event. Not only was he arrested, but his camera was confiscated and the police deleted footage from the camera -- including footage of the encounter that led to his arrest. The police claimed that Miller had disobeyed an order by the police to "clear the area." However, the videotaped footage -- which Miller was able to recover despite the deletion -- showed a different story. It showed a clearly-aware-of-his-rights Miller making the case that he was doing nothing wrong. Furthermore, other journalists were allowed to stay in the area, and one of those journalists, Miami Herald reporter Glenn Garvin, testified at the trial about how he was allowed to stay. In fact, he went to the officer who arrested Miller and asked her if he needed to move, and she told him he was "under no threat of getting arrested."It also turned out that police were specifically on the lookout for Miller:Given all that, it's not too surprising that the jury wasted little time in finding him not guilty. But the case isn't over just yet. Miller is vowing to sue, claiming the arrest and (attempted) deletion from his camera violated his constitutional rights. And he's got some precedent on his side. As we've noted, Boston recently had to pay Simon Glik $170,000 after an appeals court ruled, in a similar case, that his arrest for filming police was a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments -- though that was based on wiretap laws, so it was slightly different. Either way, Miller's follow up suit should be worth watching.
Filed Under: carlos miller, civil liberties, photography |
Oil giant Shell has announced planned office closures in Reading, Aberdeen and Manchester following the takeover of BG Group.
The company is cutting more than 10,000 jobs across the world, with 2,800 of those connected with the BG deal.
Shell plans to close the Thames Valley Park campus by the end of the year.
All Aberdeen-based onshore operations will move to Tullos, with BG's offices at Albyn Place closing, as will Shell's Brabazon House office in Manchester.
Shell said the decisions were subject to the outcome of staff consultation.
The company is also planning to open a voluntary redundancy arrangement at Thames Valley Park.
Royal Dutch Shell shareholders approved the company's $49bn takeover of BG Group in January.
Of those who voted, 83.08% of shareholders were in favour of the deal, one of the largest in the energy sector in the past decade.
Shell announced last April that it had agreed to buy oil and gas exploration firm BG Group. |
Scientists Show How Gene Implicated in Parkinson ’s Disease Repairs and Replaces Nerve Cells
The Trinity research group, led by Smurfit Professor of Medical Genetics, Professor Seamus Martin, has just published its findings in the internationally renowned, peer-reviewed Cell Press journal, Cell Reports.
Although mutation of Parkin has been known to lead to an early onset form of Parkinson’s for many years, understanding what it actually did within cells has been difficult to solve. Now, Professor Martin and colleagues have discovered that in response to specific types of cell damage, Parkin can trigger the self-destruction of ‘injured’ nerve cells by switching on a controlled process of ‘cellular suicide’ called apoptosis.
Using cutting-edge research techniques, the Martin laboratory, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, found that damage to mitochondria (which function as ‘cellular battery packs’) activates the Parkin protein, which results in one of two different outcomes – either self-destruction or a repair mode. Which outcome was chosen depended on the degree of damage suffered by the cellular battery packs.
Importantly, these new findings suggest that one of the problems in Parkinson’s disease may be the failure to clear away sick nerve cells with faulty cellular battery packs, to make way for healthy replacements. Instead, sickly and dysfunctional nerve cells may accumulate, which effectively prevents the recruitment of fresh replacements.
Parkin-expressing cells (red) undergoing programmed cell death.
Commenting on the findings, Professor Martin stated: “This discovery is surprising and turns on its head the way we thought that Parkin functions. Until now, we have thought of Parkin as a brake on cell death within nerve cells, helping to delay their death. However, our new data suggests the contrary: Parkin may in fact help to weed out injured and sick nerve cells, which probably facilitates their replacement. This suggests that Parkinson’s disease could result from the accumulation of defective neurons due to the failure of this cellular weeding process.”
Professor Martin also added: “We are very grateful for the support of Science Foundation Ireland, who funded this research. This work represents an excellent example of how basic research leads to fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of how diseases arise. Without such knowledge, it would be very difficult to develop new therapies.”
The work was carried out in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology. The research team was led by Professor Martin and included Trinity PhD student Richard Carroll and Research Fellow Dr Emilie Hollville. The Trinity research team is internationally recognised for its work on the regulation of cell death.
Media Contact
Thomas Deane, Press Officer for the Faculty of Engineering, Mathematics and Science | [email protected] | 01 896 4685 |
The sensitivity of Northern Hemisphere sea ice cover to global temperature change is examined in a group of climate models and in the satellite-era observations. The models are found to have well-defined, distinguishable sensitivities in climate change experiments. The satellite-era observations show a larger sensitivity—a larger decline per degree of warming—than any of the models. To evaluate the role of natural variability in this discrepancy, the sensitivity probability density function is constructed based upon the observed trends and natural variability of multidecadal ice cover and global temperature trends in a long control run of the GFDL Climate Model, version 2.1 (CM2.1). This comparison shows that the model sensitivities range from about 1 to more than 2 pseudostandard deviations of the variability smaller than observations indicate. The impact of natural Atlantic multidecadal temperature trends (as simulated by the GFDL model) on the sensitivity distribution is examined and found to be minimal.
4. Conclusions Section: Choose Top of page Abstract 1.Introduction 2.The ice cover sensitivi... 3.Natural variability of ... 4.Conclusions << REFERENCES CITING ARTICLES In this paper we have investigated the sensitivity of Northern Hemisphere ice cover to global warming in observations and models. The interpretation of this sensitivity is more straightforward than that of the ice cover response itself. We have used the robust simulated proportionality between the ice cover change and global temperature change to factor out influences such as global sensitivity and forcing that primarily affect the latter. The sensitivity is also better constrained by observations than the ice cover response. This can be shown using the multidecadal variability of ice cover, sensitivity, and global temperature from the GFDL CM2.1 control run along with the values of these quantities in the observed record—our central estimates of the forced component. From these we can form a noise-to-signal ratio as the ratio of the standard deviation of the variability to the observed changes. These coefficients of variation are 0.38, 0.31, and 0.27 for the ice cover change, the ice-temperature sensitivity, and the temperature change, respectively. The sensitivity is considerably better constrained than the ice response and nearly as well constrained as the temperature response—remarkable considering that the northern ice covers only about 2% of the globe. The reason for the tight constraint on the sensitivity is the similarity in the ratio of ice and temperature changes in the natural variability and observations. Even though the observed changes are too large to be solely due to natural variability, a natural component does little to disturb the relationship. Currently, the sensitivity distribution is approximately symmetric with the model true sensitivities ranging from about 1 to more than 2 pseudostandard deviations less sensitive than the observed apparent sensitivity. Only the least sensitive model of the ensemble used in this study is falsified using the 95% confidence interval. It is interesting to contrast this situation with that for observational estimate of the TCR. Gregory and Forster (2008) found that the 95% confidence interval for the TCR estimated using 1970–2006 observations was very similar to the range of TCRs in climate models. Here we find that the models occupy only the less sensitive portion of the ice-temperature sensitivity confidence interval. Using the IPCC recommended language all but one of the six models used in this study have ice-temperature sensitivities that are unlikely (<33% probability), four are very unlikely (<10% probability), and one is extremely unlikely (<5% probability). The IPCC also recommends characterizing the level of scientific understanding behind a result based on the amount of evidence and the level of agreement between evidence. Since only one model has been used, the level of understanding for these results is low. Clearly, a next step toward answering the title question is to estimate the sensitivity PDF using the natural variability of other climate models. Climate models are known to have differences in the magnitudes of their variability and the alignment of GFDL CM2.1 natural trends and the observed trends might also be fortuitous. Assuming the fidelity of the GFDL CM2.1 natural variability, the AMO does not introduce significant uncertainty in the sensitivity since it affects ice cover and temperature in a proportion similar to general natural variability and the observed sensitivity. To ascertain the natural variability component of the observed trends it would be useful to understand the nature of the variability in the perpendicular direction, which associates ice cover increases with increases in global temperature, for example. This is left to future work. Although most models are not strictly ruled out by the analysis here, substantial natural variability is necessary to reconcile even the most sensitive model with observations. The observational constraint will tighten slowly with time but in the interim it is useful to explore the possibility that the models are not sufficiently sensitive. This has been the theme of several analyses of IPCC AR4 models since the Stroeve et al. (2007) study (Bitz et al. 2011; Boé et al. 2009b). The results here support the importance of this work while holding onto the possibility that, at least for some of the models, the model–observations discrepancy may be due solely to natural variability.
Acknowledgments The author thanks Isaac Held, Rong Zhang, Ian Eisenman, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful reviews. The author acknowledges the following international modeling groups for providing their data for analysis: the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) for collecting and archiving the model data, the JSC/CLIVAR Working Group on Coupled Modeling (WGCM) and their Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and Climate Simulation Panel for organizing the model data analysis activity, and the IPCC WG1 TSU for technical support. The IPCC Data Archive at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. |
Though the quest to find water on distant planets is the most talked-about way that researchers are looking for extraterrestrial life, one of our best bets at understanding life’s complexities lies with comets, not planets.
In fact, the icy space balls are already known to form amino acids and nucleobases, two key substances needed for life to take root. And now, researchers may have found another necessary ingredient: ribose, the 'R' in RNA.
Before we dive into the new discovery, it’s important to understand what life, as we know it, needs to get started, and how we think it may have happened here on Earth. Life on Earth requires three macromolecules: RNA, DNA and proteins. The current understanding is that RNA, or ribonucleic acid, came before DNA on Earth.
However, the conditions needed for ribose, a simple sugar needed for RNA, were not formed yet on Earth before life started. So, the question remained: where did ribose come from?
To answer this, the team of researchers led by chemist Cornelia Meinert from the University Nice Sophia Antipolis in France, set out to recreate the conditions of our early Solar System to see whether or not ribose could form, Deborah Netburn reports for the Los Angeles Times.
This process involved freezing water, ammonia, and methanol to -195 degrees Celsius, which basically created a fake comet in the lab. Then, when temperatures were right, they blasted it with ultraviolet light so that the 'comet' would experience the same type of radiation that a young star would produce. The last step was to let the comet warm back up and see what molecules were created.
The team discovered about 55 organic molecules were present after analysis, with the most important and exciting being ribose. Though this same experiment had been done countless times across the globe in the past, this team is the first to use multidimensional gas chromatography, a new technique that makes detecting individual molecules easier.
"Our ice simulation is a very general process that can occur in molecular clouds as well as in protoplanetary disks. It shows that the molecular building blocks of the potentially first genetic material are abundant in interstellar environments," Meinert explains.
The discovery hints that ribose from comets or dust clouds might have fallen onto a young Earth, establishing a needed building block for life.
But there are still a few things for researchers to figure out. For example, this study was done in a lab, which means we will need to back up the findings by discovering ribose on a real comet or in a real dust cloud. Also, the team also doesn’t know when the ribose actually formed. Was it the heating or the cooling that did the trick?
With any luck, researchers will have these answers in the coming years, with many more missions focusing on comets coming in the near future. Despite its shortcomings, the discovery is a big step in understanding how life on Earth - and possibly elsewhere in the Universe - formed.
The team’s study was published in Science. |
We've already gotten an intimate look at the Xbox One controller on multiple occasions, but Microsoft's just snuck in some new tidbits about how the gamepad will work with its new console. Ballmer and Co. quietly disclosed on the gaming machine's official site that the gamepads have a 30-foot range, and that up to eight of them can simultaneously connect to a single One. Naturally, developers will have to account for the additional controllers before you can hop into a Halo match with seven friends on a single machine. We can't imagine that divvying up a display into eight parts will result in a terribly comfortable experience, but there are certainly other ways to include extra folks in multiplayer games.
Update: Shuhei Yoshida confirmed on Twitter that the PlayStation 4 will only support four controllers simultaneously -- so if you plan to game in person with more than a quartet per console, it looks like Xbox is the way to go. |
Scientists aiming to take the bite out of malaria have produced a strain of mosquitoes carrying genes that block its transmission, with the idea that they could breed with other members of their species in the wild and produce offspring that cannot spread the disease.
The researchers said on Monday they used gene-editing, a genetic engineering technique in which DNA can be inserted, replaced or deleted from a genome, on a species called Anopheles stephensi that spreads malaria in urban India.
They inserted DNA into the germ line, cells that pass on genes from generation to generation, of the species, creating mosquitoes with genes that prevent malaria transmission by producing malaria-blocking antibodies that are passed on to 99.5 per cent of offspring.
Malaria is caused by parasites transmitted to people through the bites of infected female mosquitoes. The goal is to release genetically modified mosquitoes to mate with wild mosquitoes so that their malaria-blocking genes enter the gene pool and eventually overrun the population, short-circuiting the species' ability to infect people with the parasites. |
Click here to start learning Norwegian for free.
A verb tells something about what is happening or the action taken. Associated with a verb is the tense of the verb. Norwegian verbs can use one of four tenses: presens, preteritum, futurum and perfektum.
If you are new to Norwegian verbs, please read:
Let us continue learning about the groups of Norwegian verbs.
Gruppe 1
Verbs in group 1 have preteritum ending in et and perfektum ending in et.
Gruppe 2
Verbs in group 2 have preteritum ending in te and perfektum ending in t.
Gruppe 3
Verbs in group 3 have preteritum ending in de and perfektum ending in d.
Gruppe 4
Verbs in group 4 have preteritum ending in dde and perfektum ending in dd.
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(in piquet) an act of winning a game against an opponent whose total score is less than 100, in which case the loser's score is added to rather than subtracted from the winner's." and did some more research and found out Piquet is a type of card game. so I decided to make something a little sad out of something funny.
btw I made Bill's mom an upside down equilateral triangle and Bill's dad an upright isosceles triangle.
(plus baby Bill sitting on his mom's head is too cute!)
I like to imagine Bill got his
also both Dolly and Buck, are inspired by nicknames for the dollar bill "Buck" is a very common slang for Money, and "Dolly" well "Doll" is the first four letters in "Dollar Bill"
originally I was going name her "Penny" after the one cent but decided I liked "Dolly" better.
I imagine that Bill grew up in a bit of a poor family, not poverty poor but where they couldn't always afford luxuries.
also I like to imagine Bill inherited his hat from his dad.
oh and the "Misses home and can't return" and "Says he's happy he's a liar!" is from this from his mom, but his upright position and color from his dad (though he's dad is darker and duller)also both Dolly and Buck, are inspired by nicknames for the dollar bill "Buck" is a very common slang for Money, and "Dolly" well "Doll" is the first four letters in "Dollar Bill"originally I was going name her "Penny" after the one cent but decided I liked "Dolly" better.I imagine that Bill grew up in a bit of a poor family, not poverty poor but where they couldn't always afford luxuries.also I like to imagine Bill inherited his hat from his dad.oh and the "Misses home and can't return" and "Says he's happy he's a liar!" is from this disneyxd.disney.com/gravity-fa…
This is inspired by this 66.media.tumblr.com/7f131fd29c… it was a Youtube Caption fails I did some research and "Rubicon' is "equilateral |
Beginners Guide To Trading Futures
In order for you to be evaluated for the TopstepTrader Combine and earn a funded account you have to trade Futures.
This guide is to make you become familiar with what Futures are and how to trade them.
Message to my newsletter subscribers: If you are reading this post because of my direction from the newsletter then congratulations on taking a step closer to achieve the goals you are working the reach!
Trading For Beginners
What are Futures?
Most of us just starting out are pretty familiar with Stock/Equity trading. For the most part, technical analysis is pretty much the same.
Where the confusion and the difference needs to be pointed out is the difference between a Share in Stocks and a Contract in Futures.
In stocks we buy and sell shares. If we buy one share of FB (facebook) at $50.00/share and sell it at $50.01/share what did you profit? One cent.
Futures work a bit differently, but in a big way.
For one, you don’t trade shares, you trade contracts. It is important to understand the contract specifications of each product you may decide to trade.
Let me explain…
Tick Size vs. Tick Value
Futures don’t move by the penny. Futures move by the tick. A tick’s size, or the minimum move it can make varies from market to market.
The E-mini S&P 500 minimum tick size is .25 cents. So the E-mini will move from $24000.00/contract to $24000.25/contract.
Similarly if trading the 30 Year Bond. The minimum tick size is a fraction, 1/32nd. So the bonds would move from $150 0/32nds per contract to $150 1/32nds per contract.
That is about as complicated as that gets. But here is what really sets Futures apart.
Tick Value is the amount of money you can make or lose if the contract price moves.
If the E-mini S&P 500 moves one tick (.25 cents) and you sell, you will make $12.50.
Similarly, if the 30 Year Bond moves one tick (1/32nd) and you sell, you will make $31.25.
The Value of one tick depends on the market you want to trade. These are leveraged, derivative markets. A lot of math and paperwork goes into the figuring of these values, nothing I am familiar with, and for our purposes, nothing for us to cover here.
Below is a list of the more popular markets to trade and their tick values.
In Some Real Terms
If you traded the 30 Year Bond market today, you can expect the market to move somewhere around 32 ticks (one point) a day. On a good day two points. So everyday that you trade the 30 Year Bond you have to potential to win or lose $1000 per contract.
$1000 = ($31.25/tick X 32 ticks).
Can you begin to see the reason futures are awesome?!
There is a lot of money to be made using the leverage that each tick value has to offer.
For this reason Futures are fantastic for Day Traders.
Contract Expiration and Rollover
Another concept you need to understand and be aware of is Contract Expiration.
The 30 Year Bond is one market. But the 30 Year Bond allows you to trade different contracts based on their time of year.
Every quarter, for Bonds, their current contract expires. This means that that contract will be closed by the expiration date. So if your are trading the December 30 Year Bond contract, by the time December comes around you will have to stop trading December and move on to the March contract.
The easiest way to not get caught in this “rollover” period is to only trade the contract the has the most volume. You can easily determine this on your platform or at CMEGroup.com.
Depth of Market
The DOM, Depth of Market, or price ladder is like “Level 2” data in stocks, but for Futures.
Futures only trade on one marketplace. So you don’t have to track what the NSDQ is bidding compared to ARCA’s offer. So on and so on.
There is one market. And a much simpler data feed to read of just Bids and Offers of the product you are trading.
This is the DOM for t he 30 Year Bond.
Please note, I took this photo during a very low volume period.
The specific contract, March 2016 is shown at the top.
In the middle of the ladder you can see the contract price. The current price is $15307. This really translates to $153 7/32nd’s like we talked about earlier.
The Blue on the left will show you the amount of Bids at each price point.
The Red on the right shows you the amount of Offers at each price point.
Typically the low of the day, the open and the high of day is highlighted on the ladder.
The name of the game is Bulls against Bears.
Will the big Buyers win or will the big Sellers.
Of course the trick is to get on the right side at the right time.
It is worth further reading to learn to read the DOM and order flow.
Futures Never Sleep
While stock trader’s markets fizzle down and close at 4pm, futures traders are still making money.
The majority of futures products trade all day and through the night even when the stock market is closed. Futures markets will typically only choose for about one hour a day between 4pm and 6pm eastern time.
Although, the best, highest volume times to trade the majority of domestic futures markets is between 8am and 4pm eastern time.
But the possibility of an overnight trade in futures is always possible. Just know what you are doing first. These markets act very differently overnight.
Reading Charts and Technical Analysis
Compared to Stocks and using Basic Technical Analysis Techniques, reading Futures charts are basically the same. Read more about Technical Analysis here.
End Note
This is the very basic premise and explanation on the way Futures trading works. As always, I suggest continuing your own research until you feel ready to take the Combine and get evaluated for a funded account.
Good Luck Team.
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Our analysis of the mtDNA variation in a total of 23,121 individuals from East Asian populations and Jews reveals that mtDNAs of four Ashkenazi Jewish individuals can be allocated into eastern Eurasian haplogroups A and N9a, suggesting that Ashkenazi Jews received a genetic contribution from East Asia (Table 1). Intriguingly, our results also disclose that 14 eastern Ashkenazi Jews belong to haplogroup M33c (Table 1), for which sister clusters, M33a, M33b and M33d, are prevalent in the Indian Subcontinent and thus most plausibly trace their origins there11,12.
Table 1: The shared eastern Eurasian haplotypes between Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese Full size table
To achieve further insight into the phylogeographic distribution of M33c, mtDNA variants (mainly from the control region) of an additional 32,474 Eurasian individuals were analyzed, so that the total number of Eurasian mtDNAs considered here was 55,595. As shown in Table 1, besides the 14 Ashkenazi Jewish M33c lineages, an additional 38 M33c mtDNAs (with the specific control-region motif showing transitions at positions 16111, 16223, 16235, and 16362) were pinpointed, among which 34 are from China, 2 from Vietnam, and 1 from Thailand, with the remaining individual most likely from Europe but with ambiguous ancestry. Thus, despite the restricted distribution of M33a, M33b and M33d in South Asia, it is most likely that M33c originated, or at least differentiated, in eastern Asia. This notion receives clear support from the median network, in which virtually all of the diversity of this haplogroup is observed in China (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Median-joining network of haplogroup M33c. The median-joining network is reconstructed on the basis of mtDNA hypervariable segment I (HVS-I) variation. The sampling locations are shown by different colors in the map. Transversions are highlighted by adding suffixes “A”, “C”, “G”, and “T”. The prefix @ designates back mutation, whereas recurrent variants are underlined. * denotes that this individual's whole-mtDNA genome information is shown on the phylogenetic tree. The size of the circle is in proportion to the number of individuals. The geographic locations are abbreviated as follows: CHS (Hunan or Fujian), GD (Guangdong), GX (Guangxi), GZ (Guizhou), HN (Hunan), JL (Jilin), JS (Jiangsu), SC (Sichuan), SN (Shaanxi), Thai (Thailand), Viet (Vietnam), and YN (Yunnan). Note: M33c individuals in Europe. M33c individuals in Asia. M33a, M33b or M33d individuals. Sampling locations of all the other samples considered in this study. The map was created by the Kriging algorithm of the Surfer 8.0 package. More details regarding the populations are displayed in Supplementary Table S1. Full size image
To shed light on the phylogeny within haplogroup M33c, 11 mtDNAs, covering the widest range of internal variation within the haplogroup, were chosen for whole-mtDNA genome sequencing. In good agreement with the previous result13, the resulting phylogenetic tree (Figure 2), incorporating five previously reported mtDNA genomes13,14,15 as well as one whose information was released online (A Genetic Genealogy Community; http://eng.molgen.org), confirms that M33c is defined by mutations at positions 3316, 4079, 5894, 8227, 8848, 16111, and 16235. Of note is that five clades within M33c appear respectively characterized by diagnostic coding-region variant(s), and these are named M33c1 to M33c5 here. With the exception of M33c2, all the samples in these clades are from China. The likely origin of M33 in South Asia and the restriction to China of M33c, dating to 10 kya according to the estimation based on whole-mtDNA genome, implies some dispersal from South to East Asia in the immediate postglacial.
Figure 2: Phylogenetic tree of haplogroup M33c. The nucleotide positions in the sequences are scored relative to the rCRS27. Transversions are annotated by adding suffixes “A” and “T”. The recurrent variants are underlined and prefix @ designates a back mutational event; “s” means synonymous and “ns” means nonsynonymous mutation; “nc” refers to mutations at the intergenic noncoding regions in segments 577–16023; and “r” and “t” denote mutations in rRNA genes and tRNA genes, respectively. Length polymorphisms (e.g., 309.1C, 309.2C and 315.1C) are disregarded from the analysis. The newly sequenced samples in this study are marked in rectangles, while mtDNAs from the published literature are displayed in ellipses. Note: a This individual is from A Genetic Genealogy Community (http://eng.molgen.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=141). Full size image
Intriguingly, sub-haplogroup M33c2 (defined by three additional coding-region variants at positions 4182, 4577, and 7364) consists of three different haplotypes (one seen in three Ashkenazi Jews, another in a single Chinese individual and the third in the likely European with unknown ethnicity). Although there is no control-region variant in the defining motif of M33c2, multiple lines of evidence suggest that the pinpointed 14 Ashkenazi Jewish M33c mtDNAs most likely all belong to this clade: (1) all of the 14 mtDNAs share an identical control-region motif (Table 1); (2) the three completely sequenced Ashkenazi Jewish mtDNAs with this motif (EU148486, Bel 1 and Forum 1) belong to M33c2 (Figure 2); (3) M33c shows a virtually exclusive distribution in Ashkenazi Jews in western Eurasia, even though 55,595 mtDNAs have been checked (Table 1 and Supplementary Table S1). Thus, it is plausible that the unknown European individual (JQ702003) was in fact from a Jewish population or had Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.
Age estimates for M33c2 are similar whether based either on the whole genome or on the control region alone (Table 2), and the age of ~1.4 kya fits well with the medieval operation of the Silk Road. We note that this is an upper bound for the gene flow event during which the lineage was assimilated into the Ashkenazim; it is the age of the subclade overall, which most likely arose within China, and indeed there is no variation at all within the Jewish lineages, suggesting a very recent event. If we assume that the unidentified European lineage belongs within the Ashkenazi diversity, we can date the Ashkenazi subclade itself more specifically to about 640 years ago – around 1350AD. This in turn would then provide a minimum point estimate for the age of the gene flow event (although the range taking account of errors in the estimates is of course much wider).
Table 2: Ages of the major clades of haplogroup M33c estimated from control-region and whole-mtDNA genome data with 95% confidence intervals Full size table
The ancient Silk Road was an important transportation hub connecting China and the Mediterranean region from the Han Dynasty (206BC–220AD) onwards, and there are likely to have been Jewish merchants at the eastern end of the Silk Road from the early centuries AD. Moreover, Jewish merchants in Europe, referred to as Radhanites, were involved in trade between west and east as early as the ninth century16. It has been suggested, on the basis of contrasts between patterns of mtDNA and Y-chromosome variation17, that such merchants may have formed the nucleus for a number of extant Jewish communities.
Ashkenazi origins are controversial18. According to recent archaeological evidence, the Jewish community of Cologne, mentioned by Emperor Constantine in 321AD, existed in the city continuously until they had to leave in 1423–1424AD19. This suggests that Ashkenazi Jewry may date to Roman times, possibly originating in Italy, which is also suggested by analysis of mtDNA8 and autosomal data20. An early eastern European Ashkenazi origin from Italy (first millennium and earlier) would also agree with the finding that an origin mainly from Germany21 or another central or western European country18 during the late Middle Ages, is demographically not possible. Recent work also suggests a sizable Jewish presence in eastern Germany (the Danube region, rather than the Rhineland) prior to the expansion in Poland between 1500 and 1650AD22. The M33c2 mtDNAs are confined to eastern European Ashkenazim in the present database (the single unknown example is of likely East European ancestry14), suggesting that these groups had contacts to the east to the extent that they mediated female gene flow.
Extensive genetic admixture has been observed in populations residing around the ancient Silk Road region23,24. Our currently observed genetic imprint echoes the previously observed ancient communications between Jews and Chinese and, most significantly, implies that such historical exchanges were not confined to the cultural realm but involved gene flow. This unexpected ancient genetic connection between Ashkenazi Jews and the Far East, as witnessed at least by mtDNA haplogroup M33c2, provides the first evidence for a significant genetic contribution from Chinese to eastern European Ashkenazi Jews that was most likely mediated by the Silk Road between around 640 and 1400 years ago. Although the involvement of male Jewish traders has been suggested before17, our results, focusing on the female line of descent, specifically point to the involvement also of women. Well-resolved evidence from the male-specific part of the Y chromosome and from the autosomes would help to further illustrate the rather complex, pan-Eurasian ethno-history of Jews. |
Aaron S Kesselheim , associate professor of medicine , Bo Wang , medical student , Jessica M Franklin , assistant professor of medicine , Jonathan J Darrow , research fellow 1Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL), Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston 02120, MA, USA Correspondence to: A S Kesselheim akesselheim{at}partners.org Accepted 17 August 2015
Abstract Objective To evaluate the use of special expedited development and review pathways at the US Food and Drug Administration over the past two decades. Design Cohort study. Setting FDA approved novel therapeutics between 1987 and 2014. Population Publicly available sources provided each drug’s year of approval, their innovativeness (first in class versus not first in class), World Health Organization Anatomic Therapeutic Classification, and which (if any) of the FDA’s four primary expedited development and review programs or designations were associated with each drug: orphan drug, fast track, accelerated approval, and priority review. Main outcome measures Logistic regression models evaluated trends in the proportion of drugs associated with each of the four expedited development and review programs. To evaluate the number of programs associated with each approved drug over time, Poisson models were employed, with the number of programs as the dependent variable and a linear term for year of approval. The difference in trends was compared between drugs that were first in class and those that were not. Results The FDA approved 774 drugs during the study period, with one third representing first in class agents. Priority review (43%) was the most prevalent of the four programs, with accelerated approval (9%) the least common. There was a significant increase of 2.6% per year in the number of expedited review and approval programs granted to each newly approved agent (incidence rate ratio 1.026, 95% confidence interval 1.017 to 1.035, P<0.001), and a 2.4% increase in the proportion of drugs associated with at least one such program (odds ratio 1.024, 95% confidence interval 1.006 to 1.043, P=0.009). Driving this trend was an increase in the proportion of approved, non-first in class drugs associated with at least one program for drugs (P=0.03 for interaction). Conclusions In the past two decades, drugs newly approved by the FDA have been associated with an increasing number of expedited development or review programs. Though expedited programs should be strictly limited to drugs providing noticeable clinical advances, this trend is being driven by drugs that are not first in class and thus potentially less innovative.
Introduction Before a new prescription drug can be sold widely in the United States, it must be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. The FDA must determine, based on the data it receives, that the drug seems safe enough and that there is substantial evidence that the drug will have the effect it is represented to have, based on adequate and well controlled investigations such as randomized controlled trials assessing validated clinical outcomes. The FDA makes these determinations by reviewing results from experimental clinical trials conducted by or on behalf of the drug’s manufacturer, usually divided into three phases: phase 1 trials in a small number (generally 20-80) of often healthy participants to identify the drug’s pharmacokinetics1; phase 2 studies in somewhat larger numbers of patients (no more than several hundred) with the disease or condition under study2; and phase 3 trials in hundreds or thousands of patients to generate safety and efficacy data sufficient to evaluate the overall benefit-risk relation of the drug.3 The FDA must then review the data, and currently has a 10 month window in which to make its approval decision. While this multistage drug development and regulatory review process screens out many unsafe or ineffective experimental drugs, it also delays widespread access to those drugs ultimately shown to be safe and effective, which may be problematic for patients with serious or life threatening conditions who have no other treatment options. In response, regulators and legislators created four programs—one pathway and three designations—to expedite approval of promising new drugs intended for unmet medical need (table 1⇓).4 In 1983, the US Congress passed the Orphan Drug Act, which created special tax breaks and market exclusivity periods for products that are intended to treat patients with diseases potentially too rare for large randomized trials and for which the market may not provide adequate incentives for investment.5 Though an orphan drug designation does not formally change the statutory approval standard, studies show that orphan drugs are often approved on the basis of clinical trials that would be insufficient for traditional non-orphan products, such as small, non-randomized, unblinded, single arm trials.6 In 1988, the FDA formalized the “fast track” designation, which permitted approval of drugs treating life threatening or severely debilitating diseases after a single phase 2 study.7 In 1992, Congress authorized the “accelerated approval” pathway, allowing drugs treating serious or life threatening illnesses to be approved on the basis of surrogate endpoints reasonably likely to predict patient benefit.8 Surrogate endpoints consist of markers such as laboratory measurements or radiographic images, and contrast with clinical endpoints such as reduction in patient symptoms or mortality.8 In 1992, the FDA also made official a priority review designation, the predecessor to which was established in 1975,9 that guaranteed FDA review of new drug applications within six months of submission for drugs seeming to offer a therapeutic advance over available therapy.10 Table 1 Food and Drug Administration expedited development and review programs View this table: Studies have suggested that these programs reduce development and review times; for example, in one sample of anticancer drugs, there was a trend towards a shorter clinical trial period (median 5.1 years for orphan (interquartile range 4.5-7.0) v 6.9 years for non-orphan drugs (6.5-8.0)),8 whereas the US Government Accountability Office reports that the FDA acts on 90% of all priority review drugs within six months.11 In addition, numerous transformative drugs have emerged from these designations.12 The first tyrosine kinase inhibiting drug, imatinib (Gleevec; Novartis, Basel, Switzerland), benefited from all four programs, leading to approval for chronic myelogenous leukemia after only 2.5 months of FDA review. However, these programs have also been a source of controversy. Approving drugs on the basis of surrogate endpoints, for example, can be risky, since promising surrogates may later be found not to accurately predict actual changes in patient health outcomes.13 For example, gemtuzumab (Mylotarg; Pfizer, New York City, NY) benefited from all four programs leading to its approval in 2000 for acute myeloid leukemia based on surrogate endpoints.14 In 2010, the drug was removed from the market after confirmatory studies contradicted the initial studies, demonstrating no efficacy and increased mortality.15 Studies have also found increased safety issues in the post-marketing phase for drugs benefiting from expedited approval, including adverse events and boxed warnings for agents receiving shorter review times.16 17 18 Given the widely recognized risks to public health inherent in approving prescription drugs for widespread use on the basis of limited data, the FDA’s expedited drug development and approval programs were intended to be limited in scope, applying only to investigational agents offering the greatest promise of therapeutic advance to patients with no other reasonable therapeutic choices.8 19 However, a growing number of new molecular entities has been associated with these programs; in 2013, 15 (56%) of the 27 new drugs benefited from at least one such program, with 12 (80%) of these benefiting from multiple programs.20 We have previously collected a database of all new molecular entities and original therapeutic biologics approved by the FDA between 1987 and 2013.21 Using those data (updated through 2014), we sought to analyze trends in the FDA’s utilization of its expedited drug development and review programs and to determine whether the recent expansion in the number of products approved using these programs is related to the FDA’s review of more truly innovative drugs.
Methods Study drugs We have previously described how we collected our study sample of novel therapeutics between 1987 and 2014.22 Briefly, we scoured the Drugs@FDA monthly drug approval reports database (including original new drug approvals and biologic license application approvals) and the FDA’s annual reports summarizing new molecular entities and new biologics spanning 1999 to 2014. We used historical sources, including published articles as well as the Federal Register, to identify drugs approved but later withdrawn during this period. Some drugs categorized by the FDA as new molecular entities were associated with the same generic name (for example, hyaluronidase is the generic name for both Amphadase (Amphastar, Rancho Cucamonga, CA) and Vitrase (Bausch and Lomb, Tampa, FL). In these cases, the convention of the FDA was followed and each drug was treated as a distinct new molecular entity. In other cases, new biologic license application approvals were not characterized by the FDA as new molecular entities. For example, a biologic license application for streptokinase (Streptase, CSL Behring Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) was approved in 1997, but streptokinase had been “widely employed”22 for decades; in this case also, the convention of the FDA was followed and streptokinase was not included as a new molecular entity. Vaccines and diagnostics were not included in this study. From this list of drugs we extracted their year of approval and then categorized their innovativeness as either first in class (first agent approved within its respective drug class) or not first in class, using a framework previously published by FDA scientists.23 Next, we used the World Health Organization’s Anatomic Therapeutic Classification (ATC) system as our framework to classify each drug into one of 13 different therapeutic categories: allergy and pulmonology; cardiovascular disease and its risk factors, including diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension; dermatology; endocrinology; gastroenterology; genitourinary disease; hematology; infectious disease; musculoskeletal disease and immunomodulators; neuropsychiatry; oncology; ophthalmology; and all other therapeutic areas.24 In the cases of drugs associated with multiple ATC codes, we examined the earliest available approval documents and other data sources to determine which code most closely corresponded to the indication associated with the initial US approval. For the approximately 6% of drugs in the database not listed in the WHO ATC database, the authors assigned a primary ATC code by consensus. Finally, we also determined which of the four primary expedited development and review programs were associated with each drug: orphan, fast track, accelerated approval, and priority review (we did not study the breakthrough therapy designation because of its recent implementation6). All four programs are intended to encourage the development and speed the evaluation of innovative products to meet serious unmet health needs. A product may qualify for more than one such program. Drugs were categorized as priority review using the FDA’s annual priority approval reports, the Drugs@FDA database, and information provided by the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act. Though the two tiered priority review classification system was formalized by Congress in 1992, a previous three tiered classification system grouped drugs into types A (important therapeutic gain), B (modest therapeutic gain), and C (little or no therapeutic gain).25 For drugs approved between 1987 and 1992, types A and B were considered to correspond to priority review and type C to standard review. Drugs were categorized as subpart E or fast track drugs using an FDA document entitled “CDER fast track products approved since 1998 through June 1, 2010,”26 the FDA’s annual new drugs summaries, a law review article,27 and information provided by the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act. Drugs were categorized as benefitting from accelerated approval using FDA documents including “accelerated and restricted approvals under subpart H (drugs) and subpart E (biologics),”28 “CDER drug and biologic accelerated approvals as of September 30, 2011,”29 and the FDA’s annual new drugs summaries. Drugs were categorized as orphan drugs using the FDA’s monthly drug approval reports database and the FDA’s orphan drug list.30 A few drugs not listed as orphan drugs in the Drugs@FDA monthly approval reports were listed as having received an orphan designation in the FDA’s orphan drug list; the orphan drug list was considered to be more authoritative if the difference could not otherwise be explained. Statistical analysis We first descriptively analyzed the association between therapeutic class and designation under expedited programs, calculating the proportion of drugs in each therapeutic class associated with each program. We then fit a series of logistic regression models to evaluate trends in the proportion of drugs associated with each regulatory program. The dependent variable in each model was a binary indicator of whether a given drug was associated with at least one expedited development or FDA review program (yes or no). In the first model we included data on all drugs and modeled the trend associated with at least one of the four possible programs using a linear term for the year of drug approval. In the second logistic regression model, we assessed the difference in trends of being associated with at least one early access program between drugs that were first in class compared with those that were not. To evaluate the number of programs associated with each approved drug over time, we also estimated Poisson models with the number of programs as the dependent variable and a linear term for year of approval. Poisson models were conducted to analyze trends in the mean number of expedited programs associated with all drugs and the difference in trends in the mean number of all expedited programs associated with first in class versus non-first in class therapeutics. We examined the same trends excluding the orphan drug designation, as a sensitivity analysis. Patient involvement No patients were involved in setting the research question or the outcome measures, nor were they involved in recruitment or the design and implementation of the study. There are no plans to involve patients in dissemination.
Results Study sample From 1987 through 2014, the FDA approved 774 drugs meeting our inclusion criteria, ranging from 17 approvals in 1988 to 53 in 1996 (table 2⇓). The most common therapeutic areas were infectious disease (n=109, 14%), oncology (n=107, 14%), cardiovascular disease and its risk factors (n=99, 13%), and neuropsychiatry (n=97, 13%). First in class agents comprised one third of the drugs for which FDA classification data were available (33%, 252/760). Table 2 Characteristics of new therapeutics approved by Food and Drug Administration, 1987-2014 View this table: Across nearly all therapeutic classes, priority review was the most common of the four programs in our study, whereas accelerated approval was least common (fig 1⇓). Oncology was the most prevalent therapeutic category for all four programs—priority review (76%, 81/107), orphan drug (61%, 65/107), fast track (48%, 51/107), and accelerated approval (30%, 32/107). By contrast, few dermatology agents participated in any program, with only 6% (2/31) being granted priority review and none being associated with the orphan drug, fast track, or accelerated approval programs. Participation rates in the different expedited programs were not always correlated. Though 62% of ophthalmology agents (21/34) received priority review, few were approved through the orphan drug (9%, 3/34), fast track (6%, 2/34), or accelerated approval (3%, 1/34) programs. Fig 1 Expedited designations granted to therapeutics approved US Food and Drug Administration in each therapeutic category. Proportion of newly approved therapeutics from 1987-2014 that were associated with at least one of four FDA expedited programs (orphan, accelerated approval, fast track, priority review), divided by therapeutic area Trends in expedited development and FDA review programs Drugs could qualify for more than one program, and the average number of expedited development and review programs granted to each newly approved agent varied from a low of 0.53 in 1987 to a high of 1.72 in 2014 (see supplementary appendix for yearly data). During the entire study period, we observed a significant increase in trend of 2.6% per year (incidence rate ratio 1.026, 95% confidence interval 1.017 to 1.035), P<0.001) (fig 2⇓). We also observed a 2.4% increase in the proportion of drugs associated with at least one program (odds ratio 1.024, 95% confidence interval 1.006 to 1.043, P=0.009), peaking at 75% (15/20) in 2005. The results were consistent when the orphan drug designation was excluded, with a 2.5% increase in the number of programs for each drug (incidence rate ratio 1.025, 95% confidence interval 1.014 to 1.036) and 2.3% increase in the proportion of drugs associated with at least one program (1.023, 1.005 to 1.042). Fig 2 Time trend analyses of all expedited programs associated with therapeutics approved by US Food and Drug Administration, 1987-2014. Top: mean number of expedited development and FDA review programs (orphan, accelerated approval, fast track, and priority review) granted to each newly approved prescription drug from 1987-2014. Drugs can be associated with more than one program. Bottom: proportion of newly approved prescription drugs from 1987-2014 that were associated with at least one of the four programs When we considered first in class and non-first in class drugs separately (fig 3⇓), we found that the average number of expedited development and review programs assigned for each first in class drug reached a maximum of 2.25 programs in 2011 and 1.91 for each non-first in class drug in 2005 (P=0.16 for interaction). However, an increase in the proportion of approved drugs associated with at least one program was observed only for drugs that were not first in class (P=0.03 for interaction). Fig 3 Time trend analyses comparing all expedited programs associated with first in class and follow-on therapeutics approved by US Food and Drug Administration, 1987-2014. Top: mean number of expedited development and FDA review programs (orphan, accelerated approval, fast track, and priority review) granted to each newly approved first in class (red dotted line) and non-first in class (blue solid line) prescription drug from 1987-2014. Drugs can be associated with more than one program. Bottom: proportion of newly approved first in class (red dotted line) and non-first in class (blue solid line) prescription drugs from 1987-2014 that were granted at least one of the four programs
Discussion We found that in the past two decades, newly approved drugs have been associated with an increasing number of expedited development or Food and Drug Administration review programs and that these programs have expanded to include a larger proportion of products approved overall. Though some drugs associated with an expedited program may indeed provide noticeable clinical advances, this trend is being driven by drugs that are not first in class and thus potentially less innovative. These data have important implications for patient care. Special regulatory designations allow drugs to be approved at earlier stages based on less rigorous clinical testing; for example, one review showed drugs with orphan designations or granted accelerated approval are also more likely than drugs without these designations to be tested in single arm studies without placebo or active comparators.4 While many physicians and patients trust that FDA approved products are effective and safe for use, products approved on the basis of more limited data are at greater risk for later changes to their effectiveness or safety profiles.31 Ponatinib (Iclusig, Ariad Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, MA)—designated for priority review and orphan status, and granted accelerated approval—was approved for refractory chronic myeloid leukemia in 2012 and its approval was suspended a year later as emerging data showed it to be less safe than it originally appeared. The suspension was lifted a few months later, with a stronger warning label and limitations to prescribing.32 Given the increased likelihood of post-approval changes in the prescribing information for these therapeutics, regulators may want to ensure that the provisional nature of these drugs is well communicated to patients and physicians. Currently, only drugs approved through accelerated approval have this information integrated into their official labels. In addition, the FDA may want to consider new guidance on advertising practices to ensure that all advertisements prominently feature the limited nature of the data supporting agents approved through these pathways. Much information can be learnt about drug effectiveness and safety after a drug is approved, particularly through prospective trials and well controlled observational studies. Provisional evidence leading to a drug’s approval may later be validated; for example, one FDA review showed that most anticancer drugs approved using the accelerated approval pathway are eventually confirmed as safe and effective on the basis of successful post-approval studies.33 However, post-approval studies requested by the FDA may be delayed or sometimes not completed at all.34 In light of the growing proportion of drugs associated with expedited programs, it is increasingly important for patients that post-marketing commitments are honored in a timely manner, which may require granting the FDA strengthened statutory authority to impose fines on tardy manufacturers (such fines are difficult to impose in practice and have never been invoked) or, in extreme cases, to temporarily suspend approval until the requested studies are completed. Expedited development and FDA review programs are generally intended for drugs treating serious or life threatening conditions that address unmet medical needs. In evaluating the hypothesis that more drugs intended to treat such conditions are being approved over time, we observed that a greater proportion of programs were being applied to drugs that were not the first members of their classes. Such drugs are more likely to be only incrementally innovative and may not represent a clinical advance. Though incremental innovation can be important, new drug classes are more likely to represent transformational advances in patient care. Another study of drug approvals in Canada similarly found only a fair correlation between an expedited review designation and a drug’s therapeutic value.35 Less innovative products moving through the FDA’s expedited development and review programs can divert limited governmental resources. Our results suggest that the inclusion criteria for these pathways are expanding over time to include less serious conditions. For example, bimatoprost (Latisse; Allergan, Coolock, Dublin, Ireland) was granted priority review when it was first approved in 2008 for hypotrichosis of the eyelids, a clearly less serious condition.36 In addition, the increasing complexity of the expedited approval regulatory framework may itself require substantial resources, both of the FDA in developing, explaining, and administering these programs, and of industry in strategically considering and applying for them and in complying with their requirements. One reason why drugs receive more than one designation is that though each designation is intended to expedite drug development and review, each has slightly different regulatory implications. Designations also can be granted by different entities within the agency at different times. In particular, orphan drug designation is determined by the Office of Orphan Products Development, whereas fast track and priority review are assigned by the group responsible for drug review. Fast track is usually assigned early in development, whereas priority review may be requested along with submission of a full application.37 Policy implications Despite the growing application of expedited development and FDA review programs to new drugs, Congress continues to authorize more such pathways. In 2012, as part of the FDA Safety and Innovation Act, which re-authorized prescription drug user fees that pharmaceutical manufacturers pay to FDA to support its budget, legislators created the Breakthrough Therapy designation,38 which was intended to provide certain highly promising drugs with more internal FDA resources and attention to ensure that their development was given enhanced attention by regulators (it did not formally alter the approval standard). Mirroring the pattern of program expansions we observed in our study, the FDA received nearly 250 applications for breakthrough therapy status in the first two years, of which it granted 68,39 even though its sponsoring legislators intended it to apply to only a handful of drugs each year40 and the FDA predicted that two to four drug candidates each year would be granted breakthrough drug designation.41 Among these 68, 12 have since been approved by the FDA, including four treatments for chronic lymphocytic leukemia. It is doubtful that a single disease condition can be the subject of four true “breakthroughs” in such a short time frame. Although the creation of the breakthrough therapy designation coincided with a statutory increase in user fees (substantial increases in user fees have occurred at each renewal of the original 1992 user fee legislation), the 2012 statutory amendments did not specifically allocate any resources to administering the growing breakthrough therapy program, despite the substantial resources that it now requires. The 21st Century Cures Act, which recently was approved by the US House of Representatives, would create an even further expedited pathway for new antibiotics and antifungals, which would permit their approval without conventional clinical trials.42 Limitations of this study Our study has certain limitations; in particular, in examining trends in the application of the expedited development and FDA review programs, we did not investigate individual outcomes from the drugs in our sample. Therefore, we do not claim that the programs were improperly utilized in any specific case, or that FDA approval of any particular drug was not justified. In addition, the programs we analyzed have some varying characteristics; for example, accelerated approval and fast track formally change the nature of the evidence considered sufficient for approval, whereas the orphan drug and priority review designations do not. However, all four programs share a common thread of emphasizing speed and efficiency during drug development and FDA review. Finally, some of the programs are correlated, for example, in that a drug granted accelerated approval designation is more likely to receive priority review status. In a sensitivity analysis, we excluded the orphan drug designation from the analysis, and the trends we identified did not change. Conclusions In this review of FDA drug approvals we found an increasing prevalence of expedited development and review programs that cannot be attributed to an increase in the number of innovative new drug classes over time. Though these programs were designed as exceptions to the standard drug development and FDA approval process for drugs addressing unmet needs associated with serious or life threatening diseases, by the end of our study period, a majority of newly approved drugs were associated with at least one of these special programs, meaning that the exceptions had become more common than the rule. What is already known on this topic The US Food and Drug Administration offers four primary pathways that can expedite the development and review of qualifying drugs
The pathways are: orphan drug designation (intended for drugs treating rare diseases), priority review (guaranteeing no more than six months of drug application review time for drugs seeming to offer a therapeutic advance over available therapy), and fast track and accelerated approval (for drugs treating serious or life threatening conditions)
The FDA’s expedited development and review programs are controversial; though they have facilitated the approval of numerous transformative drugs, they also rely on early stage trials and surrogate endpoints, which produce less robust data What this study adds Over the past 20 years, there has been a statistically significant increase in the number of drugs qualifying for the FDA’s expedited development and review programs, and in the number of programs for which each drug qualifies
The trend in the increased use of the FDA’s expedited development and review programs is being driven by non-first in class drugs, which are less likely to be innovative or clinically transformative therapeutics
Notes Cite this as: BMJ 2015;351:h4633
Footnotes Contributors: ASK and JJD conceived the study. All authors analysed and interpreted the data. ASK and BW drafted the manuscript. ASK, BW, JMF, and JJD revised the manuscript and all authors approved the final version. ASK is the guarantor of the study. All authors had full access to all of the data (including statistical reports and tables) in the study and can take responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
Funding: This investigator initiated study was not funded by industry. ASK’s work is supported by the Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics and the Harvard Program in Therapeutic Science. The funders had no role in the conception, writing, or review of the manuscript.
Competing interests: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form at www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf and declare: no support from any organisation for the submitted work; no financial relationships with any organisations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. |
Whitehall, Montana consists of approximately 1,000 people and is nearly 70 miles south from the capital city of Helena. KTVM NBC Montana is reporting that at least two households in the Jefferson County town are finding gold flakes in their tap water, and that has them concerned.
Sharon Brown was washing dishes earlier this week when something caught her eye. Her husband, Mark Brown, told KTVM, "She had pulled the plug to let the water out and it was glistening, gleaming little flecks." Mr. Brown did not believe that it could possibly be gold, but after multiple tests were done, they found that it actually was the precious metal. He told the Montana station, "Everything I tried to do to dispel this, I got nothing. And I can't explain it either. It's bizarre."
Mark and Sharon Brown’s next-door neighbor, Paul Harper, deals in antiques and gold, and he’s encountering gold flakes in his tap water as well. He, like the Browns, is concerned that if they’re finding gold in their water, there might be more harmful pollutants in there that aren’t visible to the eye. However, KTVM spoke with Whitehall Public Works Director Jerry Ward, who told the station there was nothing indicating there was anything harmful in the water.
KTVM does point out that there is an open pit goldmine only 5 miles away from Whitehall, but state water quality officials don’t believe that it has anything to do with the tap water. They think it’s more likely that the flakes, “came from pipes or a pump, or some approved equipment tied to the Whitehall water supply.”
More info: KTVM |
The suburb of Rhodenbank. St Alfred's Hospital
[80, 0] a junkyard
[81, 0] the Elcomb Building
[82, 0] Club Meatyard
[83, 0] Mor Road
[84, 0] Luffman Grove
[85, 0] Club Farrel
[86, 0] St Dunstan's Church
[87, 0] Nash Park
[88, 0] Barlow Avenue
[89, 0] Underhill Square
[80, 1] Moberly Library
[81, 1] the Otero Building
[82, 1] the Higgdon Museum
[83, 1] a junkyard
[84, 1] Cull Avenue Police Dept
[85, 1] Tikanoff Park
[86, 1] Mallard Towers
[87, 1] a cemetery
[88, 1] a junkyard
[89, 1] Cowgall Avenue
[80, 2] Lahey Towers
[81, 2] Meetcham Drive Fire Station
[82, 2] wasteland
[83, 2] Devenish Avenue
[84, 2] Sawtell Road
[85, 2] Tinkler Plaza School
[86, 2] the Floyd Monument
[87, 2] a factory
[88, 2] Attrell Avenue
[89, 2] Darbey Cinema
[80, 3] Hindmarsh Row Police Dept
[81, 3] Standfast Plaza
[82, 3] a junkyard
[83, 3] Billinghurst Place Police Dept
[84, 3] St Matheos's Church
[85, 3] the Brain Museum
[86, 3] the Garard Building
[87, 3] Bargery Square
[88, 3] the Wallbutton Building
[89, 3] Thorp Towers
[80, 4] the Bizzell Building
[81, 4] Pask Walk
[82, 4] wasteland
[83, 4] a junkyard
[84, 4] Lockwood Walk
[85, 4] wasteland
[86, 4] Salter Grove Railway Station
[87, 4] Orome Avenue
[88, 4] the Carlyle Building
[89, 4] Wilmut Crescent
[80, 5] St Alban's Hospital
[81, 5] Milne Park
[82, 5] the Devonshire Building
[83, 5] a carpark
[84, 5] the Guiday Monument
[85, 5] a factory
[86, 5] St Mark's Hospital
[87, 5] a factory
[88, 5] Gable Walk Fire Station
[89, 5] St Helier's Hospital
[80, 6] the Uglow Building
[81, 6] the Upshall Monument
[82, 6] the Parks Building
[83, 6] Lindell Grove
[84, 6] the Anstruther Building
[85, 6] the Ablett Arms
[86, 6] Sealy Grove
[87, 6] the Cabble Monument
[88, 6] the Starr Building
[89, 6] Amatt Boulevard
[80, 7] Club Hagan
[81, 7] wasteland
[82, 7] Wickett Place
[83, 7] a factory
[84, 7] Tompsett Library
[85, 7] Spirrell Street
[86, 7] Craske Park
[87, 7] Fitzgerald Lane
[88, 7] the Spenser Museum
[89, 7] the Edridge Museum
[80, 8] a carpark
[81, 8] Woodland Cinema
[82, 8] Club Knyps
[83, 8] Woodman Grove
[84, 8] Club Greene
[85, 8] a factory
[86, 8] the Rendell Monument
[87, 8] Marcellus General Hospital
[88, 8] a factory
[89, 8] Attewill Way
[80, 9] the Robotier Building
[81, 9] the Fletcher Motel
[82, 9] wasteland
[83, 9] Pownall Cinema
[84, 9] Doswell Lane
[85, 9] Nichols Drive
[86, 9] Clipper Grove Railway Station
[87, 9] Nulty Auto Repair
[88, 9] Brittan Walk
[89, 9] Menu City Map
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Sorry for the recent down-time, dudes - I didn't realise so many people still used it! I've updated the code, so there shouldn't be any more problems and the map should stay on-line for another five years (at least). :) If you notice any bugs or want to suggest improvements, you can contact me at udmap at aypok dot co dot uk . |
London Taxi Drivers Association taking action against minicabs that use app as fare meter, which it says is illegal
London's black-cab drivers are to launch private prosecutions against minicab drivers who use Uber, the booking software that allows smartphone users to hail private-hire cars from any location.
The legal action emerged a day after Travis Kalanick, Uber's chief executive, confirmed the Silicon Valley company, which has rolled out its service to 115 cities globally, was set for a "record breaking" private fundraising that could see it valued at close to $17bn (£10bn).
The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association is issuing summonses to six Uber drivers on Thursdayon the grounds that it is illegal for private-hire vehicles to be fitted with meters.
The test cases hinge on whether the app comes within the definition of a meter and could affect hundreds of Uber drivers operating in the capital and Manchester, where it launched this month.
The London cabbies' union is so concerned about Uber that it is planning a mass protest on 11 June with drivers parking in Parliament Square, Trafalgar Square and along Whitehall in central London from 2pm.
Transport for London, which regulates private-hire vehicles, has said the law is "unclear". On Thursday, it said it would seek a "binding" decision from the high court.
Steve McNamara, LTDA's general secretary, , said a decision from the high court would be unlikely before the end of the year and described the move as a stalling tactic designed to prevent his union from calling a judicial review. "It is crystal clear Uber are breaching the Private Hire Act," he said.
The act defines a meter as "a device for calculating the fare to be charged in respect of any journey by reference to the distance travelled or time elapsed since the start of the journey".
Licensed drivers in cities across Europe and America are protesting at the new wave of taxi-hailing services, which licensed drivers argue endanger passengers and threaten cabbies' ability to make a living.
Last week, the offices of British startup Hailo, which was set up by three London cab drivers, were vandalised after the company extended its smartphone booking service from black cabs to private-hire vehicles.
In Paris, major roads have been gridlocked by protests and an Uber car was attacked, while the government is looking at ways to outlaw the new wave of cab booking services. There have been demonstrations and legal action in Brussels, Toronto, Berlin and New York.
Despite the opposition, Jo Bertram, UK general manager of Uber, insisted: "I don't think we're wiping out anyone, we're increasing the size of the market."
She said the technology could mean lower fares and increase consumer confidence: "It's opening up private hire to people who wouldn't use it before." Bertram said existing regulations did not reflect the change in technology, with minicab offices being "the analogue equivalent" of Uber, and added that Uber would welcome the High Court's scrutiny: "The laws were written prior to smartphones and Google maps, for public safety."
However, she said that the technology would make passengers safer than ever, as the app gave passengers details of drivers and stored journey records.
Searches for taxis made by users of the Uber app are analysed in the US head offices, while data of journeys has been shared with police in the UK.
Bertram would not disclose whether Uber pays taxes on fare earnings in the UK, although she said it paid all taxes it was liable for. Passengers are charged through a third-party payment system based in Holland. "We keep our financials extremely confidential."
However, she said drivers' records would be "very traceable" compared to any cash-in-hand earnings in other minicabs.
The Uber smartphone app shows the user a map, with the location of nearby cars looking for passengers. The customer can order the car and pay the fare from their phone, and Uber uses GPS tracking of the driver's smartphone (issued by Uber for a £150 deposit) to measure the time and distance travelled by cabs.
For London's 65,000 private-hire vehicles, the app saves money by reducing the number of journeys they make in search of passengers – for example by ensuring drivers can drive to and from an airport with a fare either way. In return, Uber takes a cut of the fare, typically 20%. The LTDA says measuring time and distance travelled constitutes metering and that only black cabs are licensed to use meters. Customers of private-hire vehicles have to agree the price before the journey based on standard charges.
In a statement, TfL said: "On the issue of taxi meters, the law is unclear and we have taken a provisional view. We will be asking the high court to provide a binding ruling. This is the sensible approach, and we hope that London's taxi drivers and private-hire drivers and operators will work with us to bring clarity on this issue."
After his London office wall was graffitied with the word "scabs", Hailo founder Ron Zeghibe published an open letter on the company's website urging drivers to accept the upheavals in their industry. Zeghibe said: "The worst thing the taxi industry could do now is deny that things are changing and hold on to the past. Complaining is not a strategy." |
Tom Glover (18)
Luke Amos (18) Cameron Carter-Vickers (18) Milos Veljkovic (20) (c) Anthony Georgiou (18)
Filip Lesniak (19) Harry Winks (19)
Andros Townsend (24) Anton Walkes (18) Will Miller (19)
Shaq Coulthirst (21)
Emmanuel Sonupe for Lesniak, 57.
Joe Pritchard for Walkes, 73.
Cy Goddard for Miller, 82.
Sub not used:
Voss
Chelsea: Collins, Dabo, Tomori, Clarke-Salter, Dasilva, Colkett (c), Mitchell, Ali (Kiwomya 45), Abraham, Palmer, Musonda
With Kyle Walker-Peters on trial at Roda JC ahead of a probable loan move, and Connor Ogilvie on loan at Stevenage, Spurs lined up without a natural full-back. Defensive midfielder Luke Amos filled in on the right, and winger Anthony Georgiou started on the left.
With Shayon Harrison missing through injury, Nathan Oduwa, Dominic Ball, Grant Ward, Ogilvie and Walker-Peters on loan, and Josh Onomah recently promoted to the first team, Spurs lacked some of their best talent but still had smatterings of quality throughout the side.
The game began in an open, flowing style with both teams playing balls in behind for their wingers to chase; Chelsea’s winger won a corner off the retreating Georgiou which was easily cleared at the near post.
Charlie Musonda gave Luke Amos a scare when he beat him on the outside and put in a low cross, but Cameron Carter-Vickers was there to clear for a corner (which was overhit).
Georgiou on the other side stuck to his task well to dispossess Mitchell and set up a spell of Spurs possession, led by Winks and ending when Veljkovic’s angled long pass went straight out for a throw-in.
Winks was showing a willingness to take the ball under pressure in central midfield and with Veljkovic happy to step into midfield and switch play, Spurs were looking more than competent in possession, although Chelsea were keeping them at arm’s length.
A long ball from Carter-Vickers was nearly brought down in a great position by Will Miller, but it just got away from him and, although he did well to play the ball off his man for a corner, a goal-kick was awarded.
Luke Amos did well to win a free-kick through beating his man on the outside and being tripped, but Andros Townsend’s set-piece sailed out for a goal-kick. We’ll blame the wind for that one.
A poor pass from Lesniak trickled through a Chelsea man to find Townsend, but as he was dispossessed he looked to the referee, with no free-kick being awarded – he had a case that time.
Georgiou was guilty of a cynical foul out on the left, as Mitchell burst beyond him and Georgiou knocked him off the pitch with a lunge which fortunately went unpunished. Glover claimed the angled free-kick with ease.
Coulthirst made a good run in behind to get on the end of an excellent Veljkovic long-ball and, when he was fouled, Townsend swung in a fantastic right-footed (I really like that he can use both feet) free-kick which Carter-Vickers somehow missed.
Coulthirst then burst through the middle and his battle with Tomori ended in the Chelsea centre-back’s favour, as he made a strong challenge to force Shaq wide.
On 18 minutes it was 0-1 through Tammy Abraham. Tom Glover played a poor pass out from the back, Mitchell pounced on it on the right with Georgiou upfield; he ran forward and put it on a plate for Abraham to tap in.
It took just two minutes for Spurs to equalise. Winks found Miller with a really nice forward pass, Walkes held the ball and played it back for Georgiou. His first-time cross found Coulthirst, who had an awful lot to do, but he guided a looping header over Collins and into the corner.
Veljkovic made a terrific clearing header in his six-yard box, but from the resulting corner Tomori got on the end of a ball helped back in by Clarke-Salter and he headed home – he’d got between Georgiou and Carter-Vickers in doing so. Spurs are very poor at defending set pieces at this level.
Spurs put together a neat move on 24 minutes, with Walkes passing to Miller and the little attacking midfielder finding Georgiou, but he ran into a blind alley and the momentum was lost. From the resulting throw-in, though, Winks went on a driving run and was brought down right on the edge of the box. Townsend stepped up and nearly found the bottom corner of the net with the wall jumping in tandem.
Abraham got on the end of a Palmer pass and went down under pressure from Carter-Vickers – the referee somewhat generously waved play on as the ball ran away from the forward. I felt that our centre-back had clipped him – perhaps there wasn’t enough contact to justify a spot-kick being awarded.
At the other end, Townsend played in Coulthirst, but he tried to turn and shoot from a difficult angle when some composure was required. Townsend then whipped in a fantastic ball which Miller got on the end of, but it was blocked for a corner. Townsend’s corner was punched clear by Collins before Spurs made more headway through Winks and Miller linking nicely, but Townsend lost it on the right.
There was another terrific clearance again from Veljkovic with Palmer arriving behind him ready to finish a ball from wide, as the game became a little more open.
Winks made inroads don the left and fed Georgiou to cross, but it was a bit behind Coulthirst as he looked to turn. It went all the way through to Townsend though, and he took on two men, beating both and earning a free-kick from Musonda.
He took it himself — short to Amos — who returned it and, after eventually getting a cross in, it came to nothing.
Veljkovic gave the ball away cheaply in the Chelsea half but retreated and intercepted a poor pass form Musonda to win it back.
Coulthirst drove an effort well wide from another good Winks pass, before the forward then dropped off his man to control a Winks pass and find Townsend. His dangerous cross was cleared to Winks but his shot was blocked.
Townsend made another burst down the right and his cross was a good one which Coulthirst perhaps could have done better with – he was caught on his heels a little.
Chelsea won a free-kick just on the stroke of half-time. Colkett whipped it in left-footed and Carter-Vickers met it with a strong header.
The teams went in level at half-time – it was generally a good half from Spurs, who were the better team in open play. Glover made a bad error and then the team let themselves down defending a set piece (again).
The second half began with Kiwomya (nephew of Chris) replacing Ali for Chelsea. He played on the right with Mitchell switching to the left.
Cameron Carter-Vickers made a thundering challenge on Musonda early in he half as the Chelsea man looked to run in behind, before Spurs got into their stride again, Winks heavily involved as he was in the first half.
Chelsea made it 3-1 through a calm finish from Palmer. Abraham rolled Veljkovic too easily from a throw-in, and Carter-Vickers gave Palmer too much space to finish from his cross.
Abraham had another chance when Mitchell got in behind (with three Spurs players left appealing for a free-kick) and his volley at an awkward height was wayward.
Spurs were struggling to get a foothold in the game, but some strong challenges from Winks and then Coulthirst showed that they had not given up just yet.
As the game became a bit more attritional, Ehiogu made his first change, bringing on Emmanuel Sonupe for Lesniak. This saw Winks play at the base of a midfield three (or a 4-1-4-1), flanked by Miller and Walkes.
Twice in quick succession the hard-working but limited Walkes had the ball in good areas on the break but failed to find Coulthirst with through-balls.
Dasilva was defending much better one-on-one agaisnt Townsend in this half, and three times in quick succession he got the better of his man.
Winks lost out to Palmer, who played Abraham through. Glover darted out to pick up the pieces but then tok a touch t get onto his right foot and got a little lucky when toe-poking clear to a teammate.
Townsend whipped in a fantastic right-footed ball after being found by Miller, but Coulthirst, again, couldn’t get on the end of it.
Soon after, Carter-Vickers gave the ball away cheaply, Kiwomya broke down the right but the centre-back threw himself into a challenge and made up for his error. Veljkovic then went to ground in the box to clear the ball.
Townsend got down the right again and played in yet another fine cross but Sonupe got his volley all wrong, possibly put off by Coulthirst’s attempted overhead kick.
Winks showed his quality once more, beating men and carrying the ball forward, but he had few options with Spurs’ final third movement lacking.
Winks then had the ball in midfield and frustratedly raised his hands, asking for movement. At that moment, Veljkovic stepped into midfield and received the ball from Winks. He took his time and played a clever slide-rule pass through to Coulthirst who clipped the ball over the keeper to make it 2-3. A great pass and clever finish.
On 73 minutes Walkes was replaced by Joe Pritchard as Spurs stepped up the pressure.
Abraham got between Georgiou and Veljkovic, brought a ball down and smashed it straight at Glover. Spurs went up the other end and Sonupe played a lovely cross towards Pritchard – it drifted agonisingly beyond him.
Pritchard pinged a lovely ball through to Sonupe who cut inside his man and smashed a wonderful low drive goal-wards. Collins did well to keep it out and Townsend’s corner was cleared well by Abraham.
Sonupe did well to beat Dabo but Collins was equal to his shot again – Sonupe had made a difference though.
Georgiou was booked for tugging back Kiwomya as the Chelsea winger got the better of him on the left – Georgiou being caught up-field as Spurs pressed or a goal.
Colkett’s shot went over as Carter-Vickers and Pritchard battled to stop him scoring.
Winks then played a lovely pass out to Sonupe who ran at Dabo and went down under pressure, but this time Dabo had defended him well.
It was 2-4 when left-back Jay Dasilva scored the goal of the night. He cut in on his weaker right foot as Pritchard committed himself, and curled a wonderful shot over Glover.
Goddard replaced the tiring Will Miller on 82 minutes.
Carter-Vickers got caught on the ball by Abraham, but managed to recover and pushed him wide.
On 85 minutes Cy Goddard had an almost instant impact as he won a penalty with quick feet to beat Tomori in the box. Andros Townsend found the corner with his kick.
Glover took a chance dribbling past Abraham deep in his box but got away with it.
Spurs equalised when Coulthirst got the ball wide early to Townsend, who went on the outside of Dasilva and drove firm, right-footed shot under Collins – a great goal from Townsend, who was carrying the fight.
Veljkovic did really well to make a solid challenge as Musonda strode through to try to nick it in the 92nd minute. Spurs went up the other end through Townsend and Pritchard had the ball nicked away as he went to strike. The action went straight down the other end again and Glover stood firm to stop Abraham, getting a strong left-hand to a fierce effort.
Chelsea took the lead again when a free-kick was floated into the box. Abraham held off Veljkovic, Carter-Vickers didn’t get close enough to Clarke-Salter, and he finished brilliantly across Glover.
It was a breath-taking match to watch and a gruelling match for both teams, with some naive midfield play leaving both defences exposed. Winks and Townsend both had fantastic matches for Spurs, with the talented centre-back pairing struggling against Chelsea’s excellent forward, Tammy Abraham. Of course, the centre-backs were not helped by having a make-shift full-back either side of them and the holding midfielder being withdrawn as Spurs looked for goals.
The win moved Chelsea up to 7th on 14 points and Spurs stayed 3rd on 18 points, one point off second.
Glover 4 – Young Aussie Tom is having a bit of a rough patch at the moment, occasionally inviting pressure onto himself by taking unnecessary risks in trying to play out from the back. His left-handed save at the end was him at his best, though, and he’ll come back stronger from this performance.
Amos 5 – Luke is very much filling in at right-back, and I am getting increasingly concerned about him playing out of position week in, week out. A talented central midfielder, it’s time he got a run of games there.
Carter-Vickers 5 – this was not a good game for the strong centre-back, who struggled with Abraham throughout and found himself giving players too much space in the box. He was constantly having to react to his own mistakes tonight.
Veljkovic 5 – not his best match and, sadly, possibly his last. However, he played a lovely pass through to Coulthirst for the second goal, and looked good pretty much every time he stepped into midfield – perhaps he should be starting in his alternative position of defensive midfield instead.
Georgiou 5 – did an adequate job of filling in, and provided some attacking impetus. Got caught out a few times – that was inevitable as it is not his normal position. The booking he did get could easily have been his second – he was lucky to get away with a cynical foul early on.
Lesniak 6 – didn’t stand out, but we missed him defensively once he came off. He keeps things simple and takes up useful positions, without ever excelling.
Winks 9 – an excellent performance in which his decision-making, close control and temperament stood out. Can be relied upon to do the right thing nine times out of ten.
Andros Townsend 9 – a constant threat, he whipped in some fantastic crosses and could have had three assists for Coulthirst alone. Took his two goals well, particularly the second.
Walkes 4 – a bit of a struggle for the ever-willing Walkes. I just cannot see the logic of him playing as a ten – he’d be better off covering full-back right now.
Miller 6 – started off really positively and helped to set the tempo. Faded a little and needs more games to build up his match fitnes.
Coulthirst 7 – gets a seven for his two excellent finishes, but really he should have scored more, and he still struggles to create a platform. He has been training with Fleetwood Town, presumably ahead of a permanent move.
Sonupe – nice, positive impact for the wide man.
Pritchard – it’s lovely to see him back, having recovered from a broken leg. Added some attacking thrust but did commit himself for Dasilva’s goal.
Goddard – instant impact in winning the penalty. For me, he’d be starting as a ten in place of Walkes. May not cope physically, but we won’t know until he’s tried.
In closing, I feel that Ugo Ehiogu’s not helping us with a pairing of Walkes and Coulthirt at the sharp end. Both are hard-working players with tenacity, but both lack finesse and ability. In addition, Luke Amos — a talented pivot player — is being held back by filling in at full-back. There will be a clear-out at the end of this season that will see a number of these players leaving. With this in mind, I expect a few of the better Under-18 players to be given games before the season is out (the likes of Bennetts, Sterling, Edwards and perhaps even Shashoua). |
Earlier this year, Edwin Hart Turner (38) was executed by lethal injection after being convicted of murdering Eddie Brooks and Everett Curry in a robbing spree near Mississippi. Shortly before the murders, Turner had been admitted at a mental hospital for depression after an attempted suicide. The defence attorneys’ main argument against Turner’s execution was his unstable state of mental health. Guilty or not guilty, Turner’s lawyers argued that a mentally ill person should be exempt from state execution.
Charles Whitman was a sporty, popular man who became increasingly aggressive and violent, while complaining of ‘tremendous headaches’. In 1966 he shot 13 people dead and wounded 32 others at the University of Texas in Austin before committing suicide. His autopsy discovered a cancerous tumour the size of a walnut invading his amygdala – a part of the brain important in regulating fear and rage.
Currently, the trial of Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik is dividing both social and professional opinion. Breivik, led by his far right-wing views, killed 8 people with a car bomb in Oslo and 69 more on the island of Utoya, a camp for the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party. Breivik maintains that he is not legally insane and that he should be held fully culpable for his acts. Legally this would mean the difference between him being sectioned in a mental hospital, possibly indefinitely, or being incarcerated for a very long time. Professional opinions of Breivik’s mental health vary from him being ‘lucid but lonely’, to having personality disorders, including extreme narcissism; paranoid schizophrenia or psychosis; being both suicidal and homicidal; to having ‘a rare form of Asperger’s and Tourette’s syndrome’.
Admittedly, cases such as these aren’t exactly common. However, with further advances in our understanding of mental illness these stories are increasingly relevant, necessitating a level of crossover between neuroscience and legal ethics. This crossover poses a major dilemma for society, the question of how much personal control we have over our own brains and whether or not we can be held entirely responsible for our actions? Must all mass-murderers be, to some extent, mentally ill since they fall so far outside a ‘normal’ moral spectrum? Are we less accountable for our actions and decisions since our brains’ functions are a product of our biology and social influences?
These more general philosophical questions lead us to specific practical questions about how society should act. Should all criminals be psychologically and neurologically tested when being trialled? Should brain scans be used as evidence in a court of law? How should we treat people who have committed terrible crimes but are psychologically or neurologically unwell and should there be a distinction between the two?
At the end of 2011 The Royal Society published a report stating that in the USA, neurological or behavioural genetics were used as evidence for 722 legal defences between 2005 and 2009. In Italy, a woman had her sentence for murdering her sister reduced after the defence lawyers presented genetic and imaging evidence that her brain’s anatomy was different to that of 10 normal women. On the other hand, in 2008 an Indian woman was convicted of poisoning her husband when a scan of brain activity allegedly revealed that she had knowledge of events surrounding her spouses death which could only have been gained through experience. Neuroscientists are now often called upon as expert witnesses and so should have a understanding of the legal and ethical implications of their testimonies.
Following this, there has been a lot of research investigating how people perceive neurological or psychological evidence. In this research, mock-jurors were asked to decide whether a virtual defendant was guilty or ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ (NGRI). The virtual defendants had different levels of neurological or psychological evidence to support their claim of insanity. For example, in some cases medical evidence was provided proving the defendant had suffered brain damage, whilst in other cases the results of psychological analysis was given showing various types of personality disorder. This research found that around 50% of mock-jurors will find the defendant NGRI on the basis of evidence suggesting the defendant has suffered physical brain injury or neurological disease, especially if this is backed up by a brain scan. However, only about 10-12% of mock-jurors find virtual defendants with a personality disorder or psychopathy to be NGRI.
So what does this mean in real life? Today, it is estimated that 90% of UK prisoners have a diagnosable mental illness or substance abuse problem (Office for national statistics). About 1 in 7 of all prisoners in the UK are thought to have four concurrent mental health problems, often not simply associated with the time spent in prison. Also more than half the reported prisoners who commit suicide in prison exhibit symptoms of mental health problems on entering prison. Whether or not these mental health issues preceded or even contributed to their crime is unknown (and I can’t say how one would ever prove that beyond reasonable doubt), but I think that this has huge implications for the prison system. Seeing as people outside prison with mental illnesses are treated as patients rather than criminals, I think the government should focus on treating and rehabilitating, rather than punishing, prisoners who have been incarcerated on their brain’s behalf.
Post by: Natasha Bray |
One popular fact included on numerous list of “science facts that sound wrong” is the claim that there are more trees on Earth than stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. This claim has its origins in a September 2015 paper published in the scientific journal Nature titled “Mapping Tree Density at a Global Scale,” which provided an estimate for the number of trees on Earth of 3.04 trillion:
We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.30 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.66 trillion in temperate regions.
According to NASA education and outreach specialist Maggie Masetti, most estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at between 100 billion and 400 billion stars:
There are different models for estimating the number of stars in the Milky Way and the answers they give differ depending on what is used as the average mass of a star. The most common answer seems to be that there are 100 billion stars in the Milky Way on the low-end and 400 billion on the high end. But I’ve seen even higher numbers thrown around.
Inasmuch as these estimates approximate the actual (and impossible to verify) numbers of trees on Earth and stars in the Milky Way, the claim is accurate. However, it should be noted that estimating both the number of trees across the globe and stars in the sky is extremely difficult, and thus any such numbers come with plenty of caveats and limitations.
The Nature paper that estimated the number of trees arrived at a total an entire order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate, made in 2005, of 400.25 billion trees. To arrive at the 2015 estimate, scientists used 428,775 actual field measurements from selected areas and from different biomes, then created mathematical models to extrapolate to a global scale.
As discussed by Space.com’s Elizabeth Howell, coming up with an estimate for the number of stars in our galaxy carries with it even more uncertainty:
The primary way astronomers estimate stars in a galaxy is by determining the galaxy’s mass. The mass is estimated by looking at how the galaxy rotates, as well as its spectrum using spectroscopy … Once a galaxy’s mass is determined, the other tricky thing is figuring out how much of that mass is stars. Most of the mass will be made up of dark matter, which is a mysterious substance believed to bind most of the universe together … So is there any way to figure out how many stars are for sure? In the end, it comes down to an estimate. In one calculation, the Milky Way has a mass of about 100 billion solar masses, so it is easiest to translate that to 100 billion stars. This accounts for the stars that would be bigger or smaller than our sun, and averages them out. Other mass estimates bring the number up to 400 billion.
Unless someone develops a new methodology for counting stars which yields a much higher number than current estimates, it does seem as though there are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way.
Also relevant to the discussion is the fact that the authors of the tree study estimated that around 15 billion trees are cut down every year. |
Okay, this is the best beer belly any one of us could ever dream of having. A 61-year-old man found himself getting drunk without ever drinking alcohol because he had brewer's yeast in his gut. Basically, whenever he ate any carbs, the man's intestinal tract would start turning that into beer and make him drunk. He had a brewery in his belly.
The NPR explains:
The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch — a bagel, pasta or even a soda — the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
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Brewer's yeast in your belly! Awesome. The man with a brewery gut had a "history of home-brewing" beer and had been recorded with a 0.37 BAC level without drinking at all. Usually, brewer's yeast doesn't do harm and goes right through us. It is incredibly rare for it to make itself at home in our gut and turn food into alcohol. If we should all be so lucky. [NPR, Image Credit: Roman Sigaev/Shutterstock] |
Manager Carlo Ancelotti presided over Real Madrid's first home defeat in the Champions League for 22 matches
Real Madrid coach Carlo Ancelotti has apologised for his team's performance against Schalke, admitting they deserve all the criticism they get.
The defending champions were booed off at the Bernabeu after losing the second leg 4-3 - despite reaching the quarter-finals 5-4 on aggregate.
Fans also waved white handkerchiefs - a symbol of disgust at a bad performance.
"I'm very sorry. We played very badly and that is bad for our image," said Ancelotti.
"We're professionals, we don't make ourselves look ridiculous."
Cristiano Ronaldo looked dejected at full time and announced after the match he would not be speaking to the media for the rest of the season
The 10-time European champions have qualified for their fifth successive Champions League quarter-final but were left hanging on at the Bernabeu as they suffered a fifth defeat of 2015.
Schalke, who were trailing 2-0 from the first leg, applied heavy pressure late on for the one goal they needed to qualify as Real lost for the first time in 22 home Champions League matches.
Ancelotti ended his first season in charge by winning the Champions League last May, but has faced growing criticism from sections of the club's support this time round.
Real's home dominance The only two teams to beat Real Madrid at the Bernabeu by two goals in the last 10 years of the Champions League are Juventus in November 2008 and Barcelona in April 2011.
"All the criticism we get is justified," Ancelotti said. "We need to look at our defence, that's where all our errors were. No team has put four past us at home.
"We had problems in every aspect of the game: offensive; defensive; desire; fight and concentration.
"It's not easy to explain what's happened. We've lost confidence. It is quite incomprehensible after what we did until December," said Ancelotti, whose players including Gareth Bale appeared dejected at the final whistle.
Real Madrid goalkeeper Iker Casillas appeared to drag midfielder Isco to face the angry fans at the end of the match
Schalke threatened to become only the third team to win by two goals at Real in the last 10 years of Champions League football, taking the lead on the night on two occasions through first-half goals from Christian Fuchs and former Real striker Klaas-Jan Huntelaar.
Ronaldo twice pulled Ancelotti's side level with headers before half-time, and Karim Benzema put the hosts in front early in the second half.
But Schalke earned a fully deserved win thanks to further strikes from Leroy Sane and Huntelaar.
Schalke boss Roberto Di Matteo, who won the competition with Chelsea in 2012, said: "We have mixed feelings.
"The team showed a really high level. We tried everything to stay in the competition. Tonight we won the match, but nevertheless it wasn't enough." |
On 8 June, voters will go to the polls for perhaps the most important UK general election since 1945. The importance arises in great part from profound differences in economic policy, reflecting different views of the nature and health of the British economy.
The Conservative manifesto calls for continued austerity, which will tend to slow the economy at a crucial juncture, against the backdrop of Brexit negotiations. Their spending cuts have hurt the most vulnerable and failed to achieve their intended debt and deficit reduction targets.
In contrast, Labour’s manifesto proposals are much better designed to strengthen and develop the economy and ensure that its benefits are more fairly shared and sustainable, as well as being fiscally responsible and based on sound estimations.
We point to the proposed increases in investment in the future of the UK and its people, labour market policies geared to decrease inequality and to protect the lower paid and those in insecure work and fair and progressive changes in taxation.
There is no future for the UK in a race to the bottom, which would only serve to increase social and economic inequality and further damage our social fabric. On the contrary, the UK urgently needs a government committed, as is Labour, to building an economy that really works “for the many, and not only the few”.
Dr Adotey Bing-Pappoe, lecturer in economics, Alan Freeman (personal capacity), Alfredo Saad Filho, Professor of Political Economy, SOAS University of London, Andrew Cumbers, Professor of Regional Political Economy, University of Glasgow, Andrew Simms, author of The New Economics, co-director New Weather Institute, Andy Ross FAcSS, Visiting Professor, Birkbeck University of London , Andy Kilmister, Department of Accounting, Finance and Economics, Oxford Brookes University, Ann Pettifor, Director of PRIME Economics (Policy Research in Macroeconomics), Dr Antonio Andreoni (PhD Cambridge), Senior Lecturer in Economics, SOAS University of London, Anwar Shaikh, Professor, New School for Social Research, USA, Arturo Hermann, Senior research fellow, Italian National Institute of Statistics, Rome, Italy, Professor Ben Fine, Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, Robert Rowthorn, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Cambridge., Bruce Cronin, Professor of Economic Sociology, Director of Research, Director of the Centre for Business Network Analysis, University of Greenwich, Dr Bruno Bonizzi, Lecturer in Political Economy, University of Winchester, Carlos Oya, Reader in Development Studies, SOAS University of London, Carolina Alves, PhD Economics, Carolyn Jones, Director, Institute of Employment Rights, Cem Oyvat, Lecturer, University of Greenwich, Christopher Cramer, Professor of the Political Economy of Development, SOAS University of London, Ciaran Driver FAcSS, Professor of Economics, SOAS University of London, Professor Colin Haslam, Professor of Accounting and Finance, Queen Mary University of London, Costas Lapavitsas, Professor of Economics, SOAS University of London, Cyrus Bina, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics, University of Minnesota, USA, Dr Dan O’Neill, Lecturer in Ecological Economics, University of Leeds, Daniela Gabor, Professor of Economics and Macro-Finance, University of the West of England, Daniele Archibugi, Professor, Birkbeck College, Professor Danny Dorling, University of Oxford, Writer and Academic, Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, DC, Dr Deborah Johnston Pro-Director (Learning and Teaching) SOAS (University of London), Diego Sánchez-Ancochea, Associate Professor in Political Economy, Director, Latin American Centre, University of Oxford, Dr Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos, The Open University Business School, Elisa Van Waeyenberge, Lecturer of Economics, SOAS University of London, Dr Emanuele Lobina, Public Services International Research Unit, University of Greenwich, Dr Faiza Shaheen, Economist (in a personal capacity), Frances Stewart, Professor of Development Economics and Director, Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity, University of Oxford, Gary Dymski, Professor of Applied Economics, Leeds University Business School, Geoff Harcourt, Honorary Professor, UNSW Australia, Gerald Epstein, Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute, and Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, Dr Giorgos Galanis, Lecturer in Economics, Goldsmiths University, Gregor Semieniuk, Lecturer in Economics, SOAS University of London, Guglielmo Forges Davanzati, Associate professor of Political Economy, University of Salento, Italy, Dr Guy Standing FAcSS, Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, Ha-Joon Chang, University of Cambridge, Hannah Bargawi, Lecturer in Economics, SOAS University of London, and Research Partner, Centre for Development Policy and Research, Dr Hassan Hakimian, Reader in Economics, SOAS University of London, Professor Dr Heiner Flassbeck, former Chief Economist of UNCTAD, Geneva, Heikki Patomäki, Professor of World Politics, University of Helsinki, Howard M. Wachtel, Professor Emeritus of Economics, American University, Washington, DC, USA, Howard Reed, Director, Landman Economics, Dr Hugh Goodacre, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Westminster, Teaching Fellow, University College London, Hugo Radice, University of Leeds., Hulya Dagdeviren, Professor of Economic Development, University of Hertfordshire, Ilhan Dögüs, Department of Socioeconomics, University of Hamburg, Germany, James K. Galbraith, Professor of Government, University of Texas, USA, Jan Toporowski, Professor of Economics and Finance, SOAS University of London, Dr Jane Lethbridge, Public Services International Research Unit, University of Greenwich, Jeanette Findlay, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Glasglow, Jeff Faux, Founder & former Director, Economic Policy Institute, Washington D C, Dr Jeff Powell, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Greenwich, Dr Jeff Tan, Economist, Aga Khan University in the UK, Jeremy Smith, co-director, PRIME Economics (Policy Research in Macroeconomics), Dr Jo Michell, Senior Lecturer in Economics, UWE Bristol, Professor John Grahl, Economics Department, Middlesex University, John Palmer, former Political Director of the European Policy Centre, Dr Johnna Montgomerie, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Deputy Director of the Political Economy Research Centre, Goldsmiths University of London, Jonathan Dawson, Coordinator of Economics, Schumacher College, Professor Jonathan Michie, Professor of Innovation & Knowledge Exchange, University of Oxford , Dr Jonathan Perraton, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Sheffield, Jorge Buzaglo, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Stockholm, Sweden, Dr Julian Wells, Principal Lecturer of Economics, Kingston University, Kate Bayliss, Research Fellow, Economics Department, SOAS University of London, Professor Kate Pickett, University of York Champion for Research on Justice & Equality, Dr Kevin Deane, Senior Lecturer in International Development, University of Northampton (personal capacty), Dr Kitty Stewart, Associate Professor of Social Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, Klaus Nielsen, Professor of Institutional Economics, Birkbeck University of London, László Andor, Associate Professor, Corvinus University, Hungary, Leslie Huckfield, Yunus Centre for Social Business & Health, Glasgow Caledonian University, Malcolm Sawyer, Emeritus Professor of Economics, University of Leeds, Marco Veronese Passarella, Economics Division, Leeds University Business School, Maria Nikolaidi, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Greenwich, Dr Mario Seccareccia, Full Professor, Department of Economics, University of Ottawa, Canada, Dr Martin Watts, Emeritus Professor of Economics, The University of Newcastle, Massoud Karshenas, Professor of Economics, SOAS University of London, Dr Matteo Rizzo, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, SOAS University of London, Mehmet Ugur, Professor of Economics and Institutions, University of Greenwich Business School, Michael Roberts, financial economist and author of The Long Depression, Professor Mushtaq Khan, Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, Professor Ozlem Onaran, Director of Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre, University of Greenwich, Pallavi Roy, Lecturer in International Economics, SOAS, University of London, Paulo dos Santos, Assistant Professor of Economic, New School for Social Research, USA, Paul Mason, economics writer, Prem Sikka, Emeritus Professor of Accounting, University of Essex, Dr Pritam Singh, Professor of Economics, Oxford Brookes University, Radhika Desai, Professor, Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba, USA, Richard McIntyre, Professor, Chair, Department of Economics, University of Rhode Island, USA, Richard Murphy, Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University of London and Director of Tax Research LLP, Richard Parker, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, USA, Richard Wilkinson, Emeritus Professor of Social Epidemiology, University of Nottingham, Dr Robert Calvert Jump, Lecturer in Economics, Kingston University, Robert Neild, Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Cambridge, Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, Roberto Veneziani, Queen Mary University of London, Susan Himmelweit, Emeritus Professor of Economics, Open University, Dr Sara Gorgoni, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Greenwich, Dr Sara Maioli, Lecturer in Economics, Newcastle University, Dr Satoshi Miyamura, Lecturer in the Economy of Japan, SOAS University of London, Shawky Arif, The University of Northampton, Simon Wren-Lewis, Professor of Economic Policy, Oxford University, Professor Steve Keen, Department of Economics, Kingston University, Professor Engelbert Stockhammer, Kingston University, Simon Mohun, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, Queen Mary University of London, Dr Sunil Mitra Kumar, Lecturer in Economics, King’s College London, Susan Newman, Senior Lecturer of Economics, University of West England, Dr Susan Pashkoff, Economist, Dr Suzanne J Konzelmann, Director, Postgraduate Programmes in Corporate Governance and Business Ethics, Director, London Centre for Corporate Governance and Ethics, Co-Executive Editor, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Tom Palley, Former Chief Economist, US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Tomás Rotta, Lecturer in Economics, University of Greenwich, Trevor Evans, Emeritus Professor of Economics, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Germany, Will Davies, Reader in Political Economy, Goldsmiths, University of London, Dr William Van Lear, Economics Professor, Belmont Abbey College, USA, Yanis Varoufakis, Former Minister of Finance, Greece, Yannis Dafermos, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of the West of England, José Gabriel Palma, University of Cambridge, Yulia Yurchenko, University of Greenwhich, Laurie Macfarlane, Economics Editor, Open Democracy, Meghnad Desai, London School of Economics, Clive Lawson, University of Cambridge, Professor Lawrence King, University of Cambridge
It’s clear to the many young people and to unsceptical party veterans like me, who are out canvassing every day for Labour, that Corbyn, “…not the person he has been portrayed as…”, is creating rather than riding the surge (“Corbyn rides Labour surge as pollsters look for an explanation – but volatile electorate could keep them guessing”, Election Special).
It is only now, though, since television stations have given him and Labour equal air time, which they are legally obliged to do during the election campaign, that Labour’s poll ratings have started to improve. It’s clear evidence of the negative effect of the months of undermining by the majority of the media, including the Observer and members of the parliamentary Labour party, of a man I believe is genuinely trying to improve life for those less well off.
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey
On 14 May, in questioning the Labour party manifesto proposal to increase police numbers, the Observer editorial wondered “why 10,000 extra police officers when crime is falling?” Now, in the aftermath of the Manchester atrocity, it has instead praised Labour for its “robust opposition” to cuts in community policing, emphasising how community police officers, “who can build trusted relationships with local communities, are a vital part of any intelligence-gathering operation” (Comment).
My surprise is not in the smoking U-turn a politician would be proud of, rather the Observer’s earlier questioning of Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on police numbers.
Denis Murphy
Bantry, Co Cork
Theresa May claims she has called for a general election to obtain a strong mandate for her Brexit negotiations. This is nonsense. It is clear that she has called this election now as she knows that in 2020 the disaster that is Brexit will have manifested itself and that those who voted Leave will be unforgiving. She is hopeful that by 2022 some form of damage limitation will be in place and that the Labour party will continue to remain feckless.
As for Scotland, it is claimed that Labour supporters left the party in droves after the 2014 referendum. This is not true. It was the Labour party that left us. For the Labour party to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Tories, advocating a No vote, was unforgivable.
After the inevitable win for the Conservatives on Thursday, the Scottish Labour party should break away from the UK Labour party and embrace Scottish independence. By doing this, I am sure that thousands of Labour supporters like myself will return to the fold. In my view, an independent Scotland is inevitable and the sooner the better. I would like to think that, in 10 years’ time, if I am spared, I will be living in an independent Scotland that is a member of the European Union and is being governed by a Scottish Labour party.
William A Ross
Aberdeen
We face a major task with Brexit and security. Labour is a divided house and despite the milk and honey its manifesto offers voters, it risks bankrupting the nation at a very crucial time. It would be calamitous to hand over security, EU negotiations and public finances to Corbyn and divided Labour.
Nneka Akwaeze
London NW9
Despite all the smears, there is a noble courage of coherence about Jeremy Corbyn’s record, which makes him not only fit to be prime minister but a necessity for this century. Where peoples have linked hands, as in Ireland and Europe, wars have ended and people have prospered. People such as Corbyn deserve the support of the sane.
Ian Flintoff
Oxford
In all my life, I have never seen a government try so hard to lose an election as the present one appears to be doing.
William W Scott
North Berwick, East Lothian |
I wrote recently about the increasing level of insights we can glean about people from the content they share on Twitter. It found that we can gain a decent understanding as to the income of users from the tweets they make.
Now, a second study is exploring the egocentricity of posts based upon the device used to send the tweets.
The researchers conducted a detailed analysis of tweets to explore whether the content we share differed when we posted via a mobile site.
Mobile tweeting
For instance, were tweets more likely to be egocentric when posted on a desktop or mobile device?
Over a six week period over 230 million tweets were crawled, with a common psychological method then used to analyze the language used. This involved testing the frequency and ratio of words normally associated with certain characteristics.
It emerged that whilst tweets sent from mobile devices weren’t noticeably more egocentric than tweets sent from desktop devices, the ratio of egocentric vs non-egocentric tweets was substantially more on mobile devices.
It’s believed that this is one of the first studies to explore the role platforms play in the way we engage online, and in particular the kind of language we use.
“Very little work has been done comparing how our social media activities vary from mobile to non-mobile. And as we increasingly use social media from mobile devices, the context in which one uses social media is a critical object of study,” the authors conclude. “Our work is transformative in this understudied field as we found that not all tweets are the same and the source of tweets does influence tweeting patterns, like how we are more likely to tweet with negative language from mobile devices than from web-based ones.” |
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OKOBOJI, Iowa -- A northern Iowa teacher was arrested while chaperoning at his school's prom.
Okoboji teacher Royce Van Roekel, 33, was arrested Saturday after someone reported a drunken teacher at prom.
Milford police say Van Roekel had blood-alcohol content more than twice the legal limit at 0.191. He was arrested, booked into jail, and later pleaded guilty to public intoxication.
One parent told KTIV that teachers are supposed to set examples for students.
"They don't want them (the students) coming to the prom drunk or with drugs on them, so why would the teacher be allowed to,” said Stacy Lockey.
The Okoboji Community Schools’ superintendent declined to comment on the case but did say the school is handling the situation "administratively."
Van Roekel resigned from his position on Tuesday. |
LONDON (Reuters) - British police will examine a batch of email exchanges between climate scientists which appeared on the Internet Tuesday as part of an inquiry into the hacking of the private documents, police said Wednesday.
The University of East Anglia, whose Climate Action Research Unit is considered one of the world’s leading institutions on climate science, said the emails appeared to be “a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change.”
Negotiators from almost 200 countries meet from November 28 in South Africa for a U.N. climate summit, where only modest steps are expected toward a deal on cutting greenhouse gas emissions despite warnings from scientists that extreme weather will likely increase as the planet warms.
An anonymous group or individual called FOIA posted a file on a Russian server, here.zip,
which included more than 5,000 emails.
Two years ago, a series of emails written by climate experts from the university were stolen by unknown hackers and spread across the Internet in what became known as “Climategate,” just before a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen.
The leaked emails contained private correspondence from 1995 to 2009. Climate change skeptics claimed they showed scientists manipulating data to support global warming.
However, independent inquiries cleared the university of all accusations of fraud and data manipulation, although they did recommend it change the way it handled requests for information.
“We are aware of the release of the document cache. The contents will be of interest to our investigation which is ongoing,” said police spokeswoman Nicola Atter.
“Nothing so far leads us to believe the emails raise any new issues. If, on closer study, we see anything that requires further investigation, that we will do,” Edward Acton, vice chancellor of the university, told reporters Wednesday.
“It may throw more light on the perpetrator rather than the victims of this invasion of privacy. I am very keen to know who did it,” he added.
Police would not reveal information about suspects but said it was following “all lines of enquiry, some of which have been international in nature.”
Acton said the way numbers appeared, using full stops instead of commas, was uncommon among British or American English speakers.
In addition to the 5,000 emails released Tuesday, there are another 39,000 pages which cannot be accessed yet as they require a password, the vice-chancellor said.
Those seen so far include quotes on discussions between scientists over how to portray climate data, the workings of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and how to share information.
“I have looked at 100 or so and those highlighted are quite cherry-picked (...) They are quite representative of frank and honest discussion between scientists,” said Phil Jones, head of the university unit.
In a statement immediately after the emails appeared on the Internet Tuesday, the university said: “This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change when that science has been vindicated by three separate independent inquiries and a number of studies.” |
As Islamic State stands on the brink of defeat in its previous heartlands in Syria and Iraq, analysts say the group’s effort to win the information war is also failing.
As its propagandists can no longer maintain a pretense of military victory, they are switching attention to trying to inspire attacks overseas.
A recent video produced by the media arm of Islamic State demonstrates the dramatic change in the group’s multimedia efforts.
Gone are the scenes of hundreds of victorious ISIS fighters, the huge arsenals of weapons and the boasts about the swaths of territory the militants control. There is no illusion either of the populations living in purported blissful harmony in the Islamic State’s dreamed-of caliphate.
WATCH: Huge Decline in ISIS Propaganda Mirrors Losses on Battlefield
Big change recently
Instead, the video shows a handful of fighters on an armored truck.
“It looks like this is in Raqqa. They’re trying to portray the Islamic State’s army as still this professional, capable, well-oiled machine. But, I mean, this is three guys in one truck in an abandoned city. It’s miles apart from what they used to do,” said Charlie Winter, an expert in terrorist propaganda at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at Kings College London.
Winter says the most significant change occurred during the past few weeks.
“The Islamic State is far less productive than it’s ever been,” he said. “I mean, it’s almost as if someone has pressed mute on its propagandists. But in October, that was when it really suddenly went silent, and I think that’s because a media center or a few media centers had been destroyed around Raqqa and Mayadin (in Syria) in particular.”
Shrinking territory, same ideology
The territory held by Islamic State has shrunk to a fraction of the area it controlled just a year ago and it has far less source material from which it can create its media.
U.S.-backed coalition forces battling ISIS have also learned the importance of its propaganda. On the ground and online, its media operations have been targeted. Winter says the militants are recalibrating their followers’ expectations of victory — from dreams of an Islamic caliphate to mere survival.
“Even if it doesn’t have the territory, it still has the ideology, it still has the adherents, it still has the true believers killing themselves in its name,” Winter said.
New message
In previous years, ISIS propaganda was aimed at luring foreign believers to live in its purported Islamic utopia.
“No longer is it calling for people to travel to Iraq and Syria,” Winter said. “Instead, it’s really trying to double down on getting people to carry out operations back in their home countries.”
That is where Islamic State propaganda is trying to claim success. Despite little evidence of direct links, the group trumpets that it has the ability to inspire terror attacks anywhere in the world, such as the series of vehicle attacks in London and other European cities, and in New York in October.
That puts a big responsibility on global media that Winter says is effectively sustaining Islamic State, even as the group is defeated on the battlefield.
“So, how the global media responds to these operations. Because increasingly they are going to be the Islamic State’s lifeblood. They are going to be the thing that keeps it afloat as an ideology, as a movement, as an organization,” he said.
The latest video release from ISIS claims that Egypt’s Sinai peninsula will become part of its territory. Islamic State fighters attacked a mosque in the region last week, killing more than 300 people. |
At least two people, including one on the French intelligence services’ watchlist, were taken into custody after police found several gas canisters in an abandoned vehicle next to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, officials said, as cited by French media.
The car, a Peugeot 607, was found parked next to one of the Paris’ most famous attractions on Sunday morning with at least seven gas cylinders inside. One empty canister was sitting on the passenger seat, but no detonators were found during the investigation, sources told Le Figaro.
Police had initially arrested at least six people in connection with the case, but iTele later reported that four have been released and two suspects remain in custody, of whom one is a woman on the “Fiche S” list, an indicator used by France to flag people considered to be a threat to national security. Those on that list are not arrested, but are thoroughly monitored by the authorities.
Police officer stabbed in Paris suburb, attacker shot dead https://t.co/2k7krBu7aL — RT (@RT_com) September 3, 2016
Le Figaro added that the two being detained were a 29-year-old woman and 34-year-old man, and police told AFP sources that the pair was previously known to law enforcement, and one of the suspects is believed to be the owner of the car.
“The car was parked for almost two hours, according to my information,” in an area where parking “is forbidden,” Florence Berthout, the head of the neighborhood where the car was found, told BFMTV.
The car was found with its hazard lights flashing as if to attract attention, police said, and documents found inside the vehicle were in Arabic.
“We think he may have been trying to carry out a test-run,” one of the officials said, as cited by Reuters.
#ISIS planned more attacks across Europe after Paris massacre of November 2015 https://t.co/nRZcsEscJIpic.twitter.com/tfvL0ffvNe — RT (@RT_com) September 6, 2016
France has been on high alert since January of 2015, when it was hit by a series of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL)-linked terrorist attacks.
The biggest loss of life took place in November of 2015, when at least 130 people were killed in Paris. A tragedy in Nice on July 14 of this year killed at least 84 people when a truck driven by an IS sympathizer plowed through crowds during Bastille Day celebrations.
France was also shaken by the murder Father Jacques Hamel in northern Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in July, when the 85-year-old priest had his throat cut by two purported IS militants. |
August 17, 2011 13:53 IST
They are thousands of miles away from anti corruption crusader Anna Hazare, but to support him and his fight against corruption, people of the northern California's San Francisco Bay Area are keeping fast.
"I will be on fast for the next eight days," said Madhu Mujoo, now a naturalised US citizen.
Stating that she was strongly motivated by Hazare, Mujoo told rediff.com, "A 73-year-old person is doing so much for the country; it's really a evolution rather than revolution."
Mujoo said she did not know about the Gandhian till April, when she started tracking his philosophies.
"It was deeply inspiring for me," she said.
"I am fasting not just for Hazare, I am doing it for the upcoming generation. Corruption has a global impact, it is a problem that will impact not only India but
Mujoo was among the many who had gathered to participate in a candle light vigil hosted by the members of India Against Corruption in South San Jose on Tuesday, August 16.
Rohit Jately, organiser of the candle light vigil, said: "We have been independent for a while but we have always been slaves of corruption and it is affecting everybody."
Jately, who left office early to organise the candle light vigil, said: "Anna is a simple man and is not looking for power. He is fighting for you and I. So, if somebody is fighting for us why not support him?"
He added, "It is unfortunate, when I go and visit my country, I have to pay bribes to get my luggage through." |
MIT scientists have shown (in simulations) that nanoporous graphene can filter salt from water at a rate that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than today’s best commercial desalination technology, reverse osmosis (RO). This could lead to more efficient and smaller water desalination facilities.
The graphene is used as a membrane material that allows a flow of water with full salt refection via size exclusion. Other materials have been investigated for the same purpose, but the researchers say that graphene is the "ultimate" thin membrane as it's the thinnest one possible and as water flux across a membrane scales inversely with the membrane’s thickness.
This is not the first research into graphene-based water treatment. Back in October 2010 researchers from Australia and Shanghai have developed a Capacitive deionization (CDI) application that uses graphene-like nanoflakes as electrodes (CDI is a relatively new way to purify water). Earlier in 2010 Korean researchers have made a new type of composite material made from reduced graphene oxide and magnetite that could effectively remove arsenic from drinking water. |
The hockey season may be over and done with, but the wound that is this last season as a Vancouver Canucks fan is still relatively fresh. There’s plenty of meat left on these bones and with the draft and the opening of free agency now in the rear view mirror, it’s time we got cookin’.
The process starts with a series of player-by-player reviews for the season that was. Today’s will be centered on Old Probiotic himself, Derek Dorsett.
Let’s break it all down on the other side of the jump.
(Derek Dorsett’s season, in a nutshell.)
Acquired in the first flurry of moves to mark Jim Benning’s tenure as the Canucks general manager, Dorsett was brought in to “rub shoulders” with the younger players, protect his teammates and provide defensive value from the fourth line. Of late, Canucks brass have gone on to suggest that Dorsett helps to “carry their culture” as well – sometimes two-gallons of Activia at a time!
Dorsett represented an increasingly rare breed of NHLers, capable of punching faces and playing the game at near parity from a prescribed bottom-six role. Given the reduced role of enforcers in this generation of the NHL, acquiring a player of Dorsett’s ilk represented an acceptable middle-ground between the more progressive fan and the grit, heart, soul and compete level crowd.
Further to Dorsett’s ability to keep his head above water at evens, he presented upside shorthanded, and in a limited sample of data collected by Corey Sznajder he proved a solid neutral zone contributor. Interestingly enough, these abilities seemingly left Dorsett’s game in a matter of weeks, as he proved a significant drag in nearly every aspect of the game that once made him such a rare and coveted asset.
Playing in a role that wouldn’t facilitate the best of underlying results, Dorsett spent most of the season on the left flank of rookie center, Bo Horvat and opposite Jannik Hansen. Rookies often take time to round out their two-way games and can struggle to push play at evens as a result; Horvat was no exception, especially in the first-half of the campaign.
While the context is worth noting, it would seem wholly disingenuous to blame Dorsett’s territorial shortcomings last season on Horvat. A cursory glance at Dorsett’s WOWY statistics shows that Dorsett was actually benefiting from playing alongside Horvat, from a strictly territorial perspective. Digging deeper, it became apparent that exactly zero of Dorsett’s teammates benefited as a result of skating alongside Dorsett. When looking at Dorsett’s dCorsi, which takes into account usage, linemates, deployment, team effects, etc. to show how the player performed against expected results, Dorsett posted an almost unimaginably awful -160 dCorsi impact.
Then again, while Dorsett’s often unnoticed ability to thrive from the bottom-six was a welcomed addition to the package on the whole, it’s his fists that endeared himself to management, I am sure. With 17 fights on the season, Dorsett did exactly that. It was the second-highest number of fights in Dorsett’s NHL career and by www.HockeyFights.com voting, he won eight of them. I consider face punching to be one of the less important facets to winning a hockey game, but for a team that places value on this (because, if nothing else, the acquisition of Brandon Prust makes this perfectly clear) that’s an impressive wrinkle to Dorsett’s game. And even someone as opposed to fighting in hockey as myself can’t help but appreciate Dorsett’s willingness to take and deliver punches for his teammates.
Looking strictly at his offensive production, Dorsett continued to produce at a highly efficient rate for a player in his role. Actually, his offensive output increased by almost half a point, per 60-minutes of even strength ice-time. Meanwhile, his personal shot-rate remained relatively impressive. Of course, context is key here and I’d hardly suggest that Dorsett is an offensive force in the making. By that same token, one would expect that Willie Desjardins would have been cognizant of as much. Instead, Dorsett saw the occasional shift in spot duty on the second-unit of the Canucks power play as the net-front presence. Amazing what being a former Medicine Hat Tiger can do for your usage…
In the playoffs, Dorsett performed more or less how one might expect. He fought a fair amount and left with his head above water in territorial play, despite a significant slant in defensive zone starts. The sample is small and the opposing team a possession disaster, but it was an encouraging six games all the same.
Crunching Numbers
Boxcars:
Dorsett’s 25-points clear the benchmark generally set for what one might expect from a third line winger. One wonders if this couldn’t have been higher, if not for a low even strength sh% – although, that is slightly mitigated by his PDO of 101.8. These 25-points marked the single highest Dorsett has ever posted in a single season over the seven year span of his NHL career.
Corsi:
With a CF%Rel of -7.8%, Dorsett had the lowest mark of any Canuck not named Top Sixtito. That is… less than ideal. It was the fourth straight season Dorsett found himself in the red by this metric, but never to this extent. Dorsett’s raw Corsi For of 43% was also the lowest mark of his career. Unsurprisingly, both his ability to help drive attempts and suppress them depreciated immensely to result in these low grades.
Goal-based:
The underlying goal-based data shines a much more favourable light on Dorsett. With a Goals For of 48%, it’s hardly an ideal mark, but an improvement on his Corsi results all the same. By GF%Rel, the Canucks actually fared marginally better with Dorsett on the ice than off. Although, I’d caution against putting too much stock in this data, as Dorsett was clearly benefiting from an elevated on-ice sh%.
Scoring Chances:
Scoring chances aren’t giving Dorsett a particularly good look. Vancouver bled chances, to the tune of nearly 28 SCA/60 with Dorsett on the ice. For a player who’s game is based on strong defensive play, that’s a little less than encouraging.
The ten-bell scoring chance data more or less reflects Dorsett’s performance where standard scoring chances are concerned. Again, the Canucks are hemorrhaging these types of scoring chances with Dorsett on the ice.
Shot-based:
I didn’t think I could find a metric that reflected more negatively on Dorsett’s season than his possession numbers, but the shot-share is even more grim. That SF%Rel of -9% is nearly 5% lower than his previous career low of -4.1. These results are driven by Dorsett’s ghastly 32.2 SA/60.
Going Forward
Last season has to be concerning for the Vancouver Canucks, who opted to re-sign Dorsett to a four-year deal, with an AAV of $2.65-million. Dorsett is only 28-years old, but he’s played some grueling, fisticuffs filled years and one can’t help but wonder how that affects the long term trajectory of Dorsett’s career. These are just some of the many reasons why I am so opposed to the type of contract the Canucks opted to offer Dorsett. While Dorsett is a valuable fourth line piece, he is still a fourth liner. Ideally, these players shouldn’t be given any sort of term, as even the most marginal reversion and they become a replacement level player.
That said, Dorsett is traditionally a very strong player at even strength for someone in his role. A good bet is that last season was an aberration and not a newly developing trend, but again though, there is legitimate reason for concern here. What I find especially disconcerting though is how his body will respond to the high toll it has suffered these last two campaigns.
One instant from the last campaign sticks out in particular. Dorsett was hit by a blindside elbow, delivered by none other than Ryan Kesler. He suffered an “upper body” injury then proceeded to fight in his first two or three games back from said injury. Dorsett’s body wouldn’t be wrong in hating him and it might exact its revenge as Dorsett ages into his thirties.
I would expect that the load is lessened for Dorsett next season, though. The Canucks acquired Prust to help share the workload with Dorsett and form the opposite flank on what should, in theory, be a defensively slanted fourth line. Assuming the parts remain constant, Dorsett should spend most of the season with Linden Vey as his pivot. The pair were carried a CorsiFor of nearly 48% last season, so there’s potential for them to form a more consistent and steady fourth unit.
I remain a little skeptical that a Canuck who willingly had his face punched on 17 separate occasions will be in the best physical shape for the next campaign, but then again it’s knuckleheads running the show anyways, so Dorsett might be the least of our fist related concerns. |
At a meeting of the oil cartel in Vienna on Wednesday, OPEC members agreed on a proposal by Algeria to reduce production by around 4.5 percent. Qatar's energy minister and president of the conference, Mohammed Bin Saleh Al-Sada, told reporters that the reduction would be 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd), to "bring its ceiling to 32.5 million barrels per day."
OPEC's top producer, Saudi Arabia, accepted the biggest hit to its output, reducing its production to 10.06 million bpd - down by 0.5 million bpd.
The deal came about as Saudi Arabia's arch-rival Iran also agreed to the proposal, which called on Teheran to freeze output at close to current levels of 3.797 million bpd. Iraq will cut its output by 200,000 bpd to 4.351 million bpd beginning in January.
In addition, OPEC will exempt Libya and Nigeria from the reductions as their output has been crimped by unrest and sanctions.
Prices for future contracts for North Sea Brent crude oil jumped 8 percent to more than $50 a barrel upon the news that Riyadh had finally reached a compromise with Iran after insisting in recent weeks that Tehran fully participate in any cut.
OPEC watcher Amrita Sen from Energy Aspects said OPEC had proved to the skeptics that it was not dead. "The move will speed up market rebalancing and erosion of the global oil glut," she told the news agency Reuters.
Non-OPEC producers on board
OPEC accounts for a third of global oil production, currently extracting 33.64 million bpd. But its 14 members have been hit hard by falling oil prices which have halved since mid 2014.
Watch video 01:58 Share Low oil prices hit OPEC members hard Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/2TX0y Low oil prices hit OPEC members
Following the meeting in Vienna, Al-Sada also said that major producers outside the oil cartel had signaled their willingness to join the production cut.
"It will help rebalance the market and reduce the stock overhang," he said, adding that Russia had committed to reducing its output by 300,000 bpd - half of the 600,000 bpd OPEC had hoped for.
Gary Ross, founder of Pira consultancy, said the impact of the deal nevertheless would be huge. "You remove a lot of oil from the market and you get the Russian participation," he told Reuters.
Non-member Azerbaijan already signaled its willingness to participate Wednesday. Energy Minister Natig Aliyev said the move could bring stability and price growth to the market. He indicated his country would attend OPEC's meeting on December 9 if invited.
But there is also skepticism among OPEC watchers and oil market analysts. John Kilduff from Again Capital in New York said the market was still in a wait-and-see mode. "We're going to have to see these cuts truly get implemented. The production trend has been higher."
A view shared by Bob McNally, president of Washington-based consultancy Rapidan group. "In deals with Russia, OPEC is like President Reagan used to say: 'Trust but verify'," he wrote on Twitter.
uhe/kd (Reuters, AFP, dpa) |
WAMU is implementing a long-brewing reorganization of its newsroom, station leaders told the newsroom Wednesday afternoon. Local beats based on geography are going away, and will be replaced by five broader subject areas: Transportation and development, education and inequality, race and ethnicity, power and influence, and arts and culture.
WAMU plans to hire seven new positions, and it has eliminated what it calls in a press release “two reporter positions focused on geographic coverage.” Those would be jobs previously occupied by Virginia reporter Michael Pope and Maryland reporter Matt Bush. A senior news editor was also eliminated, but the person in it may stick around in one of the new positions, news and content chief Andi McDaniel tells Washingtonian. Bush and Pope have also been given the opportunity to apply for new positions, McDaniel says.
Patrick Madden will lead the power and influence beat, Armando Trull will be the lead on race and ethnicity, Martin Di Caro will lead transportation, and Kavitha Cardoza will head up education. The lead arts job is “still shaking out,” McDaniel says. The teams will be split, two and three, between two desk editors, and each desk will have a multimedia editor.
The changes are part of the NPR member station’s substantial overhaul under McDaniel and general manager J.J. Yore. Both wanted the station to move away from high-tempo, WTOP-style news coverage and toward stories that would be more resonant, and more shareable. “We would like to do fewer things, but better and more consistently,” McDaniel says. Local news is still what will drive the station: “That’s why we exist,” she says. But rather than stories whose importance is relative to their location, “we want the story and the topic to be what drives our coverage,” she says. The station plans to hire an editorial director who will guide its local coverage.
Some big changes are coming to the station’s digital shop, which before McDaniel arrived was separate from the newsroom. Ally Schweitzer and Martin Austermuhle, who are technically web producers but also report (Schweitzer also runs Bandwidth, WAMU’s music site), will have their titles changed to reporter. “I’m particularly excited about them being reporters because they’re models for delivering content across platforms,” McDaniel says.
A new website is coming in the fall, built around a content management system so easy that even journalists can use it, eliminating a current “pain point,” as McDaniel puts it, where reporters often have to send scripts for stories through producers to turn them into web content.
The seven new positions will shake out as revenue neutral thanks to the job cuts and the elimination of a good deal of the station’s budget for part-timers, the thinking being that it’s better to have “a full-time team devoted to thinking about these kinds of coverage” rather than “people being here part of the time, filling in,” McDaniel says.
McDaniel expects these changes to be complete by summer. The reporting teams will embark soon on listening tours to help sharpen their beats beyond their names. “We want them to have a little more crisp approach and a defined angle,” she says. The reporters will engage with leaders and stakeholders in their respective beats.
“This is step one in a big plan,” McDaniel says. “This is really the initial reset.”
Here’s the station’s press release, and an org chart of the new newsroom.
WAMU 88.5 Unveils Ambitious New Vision for a Growing Multiplatform Newsroom Against a backdrop of shrinking newsrooms around the country, today WAMU 88.5 announced the first stage of an ambitious plan to grow its news staff and strengthen its regional coverage. WAMU’s reimagined newsroom will focus initially on five regional beats that are especially important to the Washington region: · Transportation and Development
· Education and Inequality
· Race and Ethnicity
· Power and Influence
· Arts & Culture Inspired by multiplatform news desks at NPR and organizations outside public media, the new beats will deliver in-depth reporting via broadcast, digital, on-demand, and social platforms. “As the NPR station in the nation’s capital, we have a responsibility to be a leader in public radio journalism—both in the quality of our on-air work and in the inventiveness of our digital offerings,” says Andi McDaniel, Senior Director of Content and News. “In the coming months, listeners will hear greater consistency on our air, and they’ll see more appealing digital content on all of our platforms.” The new coverage teams for these beats will include multimedia producers and editors who will drive topical coverage. To deliver this coverage, WAMU has redesigned a number of existing positions, and will be hiring for seven new roles:
· A new Managing Editor of Digital will lead efforts to engage digital audiences
· Two new Desk Editors will drive the multiplatform beat teams
· A Live Events and Partnerships Producer will leverage WAMU content into in-person experiences
· An Editorial Project Manager will manage long-term reporting projects and new initiatives
· News Producers for All Things Considered and Morning Edition will report spot news and keep listeners abreast of news headlines A search for an Editorial Director to lead WAMU’s regional news coverage is already underway. Multimedia Producer positions will open up this Fall. The revamped newsroom builds on WAMU’s nationally recognized successes in journalism, including reporter Kavitha Cardoza’s education reporting, transportation reporting by Martin Di Caro, and investigative work by Patrick Madden. WAMU is making these changes while remaining budget neutral. As part of a long-planned move from geographic to topical beats, WAMU is integrating coverage of Virginia and Maryland into its new beat system. This will result in the elimination of two reporter positions focused on geographic coverage. The Next Five Years The changes announced today represent the first phase of an ambitious five-year plan that will add new beats and grow WAMU’s news team to triple its current size, putting it on par with news staffs of other leading public radio stations. The 2021 newsroom plan includes an investigative unit and a total of eight to 10 beats. “As other news providers retreat from local coverage, we see a unique opportunity for WAMU,” says General Manager JJ Yore. “By combining the power of radio with so many new digital platforms, we will fill a growing need for in-depth coverage of the Washington region.” WAMU’s regional news operation is the most recent area of the station to undergo change. Led by Yore, WAMU has recently completed a comprehensive assessment of the station and a new five-year strategic plan that is guiding these changes. Other recent programming changes include the newly created podcast sampler show, The Big Listen; the introduction of new programs such as The New Yorker Radio Hour, Freakonomics Radio, and Reveal to its schedule; and the reinvention of The Kojo Nnamdi Show into a one-hour program addressing regional issues with a greater focus on community conversations and digital offerings. |
Review originally found at The Founding Fields
Paul S. Kemp is back for his third installment of the Egil and Nix trilogy. An epic story about two best friends going out and causing havoc with an extra large dose of smartassery. ~Larry Killian, The Founding Fields
The Egil & Nix storyline is one that I’ve been following for years now, waiting with bated breath for the third installment to finally release after the series was sold to Del Ray. When the book was finally announced I was like a little school girl waiting for the book to become available for reviewer. Upon opening the book I knew the magic was still there, I knew this was something that the wait was worth it, and something that I hope is not finished yet. I think it would be great if Paul would take the series and make it into an epic saga instead of just a trilogy.
Nix is a nimble thief with just enough knowledge of magic to get into serious trouble. Egil is the only priest of a discredited god. Together, they seek riches and renown, but somehow it is always misadventure and mayhem that find them—even in the dive bar they call home. And their luck has yet to change.
All Nix wants to do is cheer Egil up after a bout of heartbreak. And, of course, strike it so rich that they need never worry about their combined bar bill. But when the light-fingered scoundrel plunders a tomb and snatches mysterious golden plates covered in runes, the treasure brings terrifying trouble. Pursued by an abomination full of ravenous hunger and unquenchable wrath, Egil and Nix find all they hold dear—including their beloved tavern—in dire peril. To say nothing of the world itself.
Egil and Nix are two characters that have an Odd Couple dynamic to them but it just fits. You’ve got the “magic school dropout” full of glib and sarcasm with Nix. Then you have someone who is serious but not quite totally straight faced with Egil, the priest of the momentary God, the only priest. The character dynamic between the two just grows even more with the third book. I do have to say takes on a bit of a darker tone compared to the first two. While there is still comedy there I feel as if there’s not as much as there used to be. This does not make the book bad, in fact it makes the book its own, not a cookie-cutter that is copying off the two previous books.
If you ask me if I’m going to recommend this book I’m going to say absolutely there’s no reason not to read it, it’s fun, it’s exciting, it has moments that make you hold your breath. Of course this is the third book in the series so you need to go read the first two. Paul definitely does not disappoint with this series, it is fantasy at its best. |
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (For a fascinating view of the application of these and other social psychology principles to human-machine interaction, see The Media Equation.) by Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D. This book focuses on the persuasion tactics of marketing and sales organizations, but the principles it describes apply to all persuasion situations. Is persuasion part of education? Do teachers face a persuasion challenge in getting students to engage more deeply and persistently with challenging but rewarding work? Should principals and administrators work to persuade teachers to work collaboratively to improve the quality of work undertaken and completed by students in the school? Can Board members see their tasks, at the Board table, with other community leaders, and with parents and other community members in terms of persuasion? And, what are the ethics of viewing these roles and relationships in terms of persuasion? If these are worthwhile questions, then reading this book is a worthwhile effort. From research in the field of social psychology, Dr. Cialdini identifies six powerful approaches to persuasion tasks: 1. Reciprocation: repay gifts. 2. Commitment and Consistency: follow through. 3. Social Proof: when in doubt, follow the crowd. 4. Liking: believe those you like. 5. Authority: be part of the team, listen to experts. 6. Scarcity: value what is rare. Each of these approaches is based on "shortcuts" we use to make decisions in the absence of complete information and full analysis. And, each also generally supports the functioning of culture to provide mutual support and increased well-being for each of us. The dishonest use of these approaches is manipulative in the extreme, and undercuts our ability to help and care for one another. Used honestly and consistently with their cultural importance, they can be powerful tools for collaborative achievement, success, and satisfaction. Like many principles of social psychology, stories make them easier to remember, and the stories from the actual research are often fascinating Recpirocation: repay gifts. Dennis Regan of Cornell University did an experiment reported in 1971 where the subjects were told they were to rate the quality of some paintings as part of an experiment on "art appreciation." Dr. Regan's assistant, call him "Joe" posed as another rater in the subject. Joe behaved the same with each subject, including leaving the room briefly during a short rest period. However, in some cases, he would return with two bottles of Coca-Cola, one for the subject and one for himself, saying, "I asked him [the experimenter] if I could get myself a Coke, and he said it was okay, so I bought one for you, too." In other cases, he simply returned empty handed. After the "ratings" were finished, Joe would ask the subject to buy some raffle tickets on a new car to help Joe win a prize. The tickets were a quarter each. The subjects for whom Joe had bought a Coke bought twice as many tickets as the subjects who had not received the prior favor, far more than the value of the Coke! This rule says that when someone does something for us, we are obligated to return a similar favor in the future. Dr. Cialdini cites anthropologists, sociologists, and archaeologists for the proposition that subscribing to this rule, becoming part of the “web of indebtedness”, is a unique adaptive mechanism allowing for the exchange of goods and services and the development of supportive communities. Other examples of this persuasion approach include · Public solicitation schemes based on a “gift”, then a request for a contribution. · Office holders doing little services for constituents – ever wonder why Congresspersons don’t spend as much time getting government programs to operate more efficiently as they do “helping” constituents get their benefits from those programs? Is it possible somewhat unresponsive (to constituents) programs are actually good for Congresspersons? · Free samples · From the lone survivor of the Jonestown mass suicide who refused special food offered by Jim Jones when she was ill, and then later also was able to refuse the command to drink the poison kool aid, “I knew once he gave me those privileges, he’d have me. I didn’t want to owe him nothing” · Rejection-then-retreat: asking for something you know will be turned down, then “giving” the concession of making a reduced request that requires the reciprocal “gift” of compliance. Much of the posturing in labor negotiations would seem to be based on efforts by both sides to use this technique on the other without having it turned against them. The power of this version was evidenced by an experiment the author conducted. The percentage of college students who agreed to chaperon a group of juvenile delinquents on a trip to the zoo tripled when preceded by a request to spend two hours a week for two years mentoring a juvenile delinquent! However, the first request cannot be so extreme as to be viewed as “bad faith”, to use a term with much history in labor negotiations. But, note that not all uses of this rule are inherently bad, or even manipulative. For example, in Shackleton’s Way, Sir Earnest Shackleton would take sick sailors into his cabin and nurse them back to health. Also he would routinely order extra or special rations after a particularly difficult experience. Yet he used the influence thus gained to hold the entire crew together and get every man home alive! Moreover, other stories in that book suggest that Shackleton’s giving was such a part of his nature, or had become so over the years, that he did it routinely in circumstances where any influence he thereby gained was unlikely to ever be used. Commitment and Consistency: follow through. Bettors at a race track become more confident of their chances of winning just after they place a bet. Attendees at a transcendental meditation program rushed to sign up after the presentation was "demolished" by an audience member during questioning. The participants admitted that they understood the arguments against TM and found them persuasive, but they signed up and paid a deposit quickly so they wouldn't have to think about those arguments! They wanted what TM promised and they used commitment to lock themselves into it. A small action apparently changes a person's view of self; thereafter, the person tends to act in concert with that view. Thus, persons who signed a petition to "Keep America Beautiful" were far more likely to agree to having a large "Drive Safely" sign placed in their front yard. We tend to do what we have committed to and what is consistent (and makes us appear to others to be consistent) with prior behavior and statements. Dr. Cialdini cites numerous experiments for this: · When a researcher pretending to be a sunbather at a beach got up and left his radio and another researcher came by, grabbed the radio and hurried off, only four out of 20 subjects objected. But, when the “sunbather” asked the subject to “watch my things” and they agreed, 19 out of 20 took strenuous and possibly personally perilous action to confront the “thief.” · Bettors feel better about the horse they bet on 30 seconds after the bet than just before placing it. · Researchers asked some residents of an area to accept and display a small 3-inch sign that said “BE A SAFE DRIVER”. Almost all did. Two weeks later, the researchers sent another representative around to ask both this group and another group of residents that had not received the first contact to allow a large billboard saying “DRIVE CAREFULLY” on their front lawns. As part of the request, they were shown a picture of a nice house almost completely obscured by a very large, poorly lettered sign with that message. Eighty-three percent of the residents who had not received the first request refused, but 76% of those who had accepted the small sign agreed to placement of the large one! Moreover, in a further variant, the residents were first asked to sign a “Keep California Beautiful” petition. Two weeks later, they are asked about placement of the large billboard, and 50% agreed, even though the first request differed in subject (beauty) and action (signing)! The researchers theorized that the first action actually changed way the participants viewed themselves, e.g., “public-spirited citizens” in a way that influenced them to act in accordance with that view in the future. · This same foot-in-the-door technique was used for brainwashing of American captives in the Korean war. A small agreement, e.g., that America isn’t perfect, could lead to public reading of a list of criticisms of America . To be fully effective in changing self-image, a commitment must Active – actions, especially those that leave a record like writing something down, are harder for the actor to deny or forget, plus they can be used to change way others view the actor, and the actor then often continues to shape his or her self-image (and future actions) to support those views. For example, New Haven housewives who heard that they were considered charitable people gave more money to a canvasser from the Multiple Sclerosis Association. Public – obviously, our desire to be seen as consistent plus our tendency to conform our self-view to the perceptions of others create a powerful combination punch in the direction of future consistent actions. Effortful – as two social psychologists put it in 1959, “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain o attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.” Think primitive tribal initiations or fraternity hazing during “Hell Week.” In the researchers’ experiment, coeds who went through either embarrassment or pain (electric shock) to be admitted to a discussion group rated the group and its activities more interesting, intelligent, and desirable than their peers who were admitted through no such experience, and the more the embarrassment or pain, the higher the perceived value. Owned – It must be “owned” by the individual. He or she must perceive that they acted, in public, and at some cost to themselves, because of his or her own choice and not due to coercion or bribes. Thus, fraternities resist substituting public service activities in a “Help Week” for the hazing of “Hell Week” and Chinese brainwashers refused to offer more than token prizes in contests for pro-communist essays among prisoners of war in Korea . Note the acronym “APE” for the first three components and its appropriateness for a powerful principle that seems to access mechanisms hardwired in our minds that can short-circuit our judgment, logic, and even our commitment to civilized, caring behavior. “APE-O”? Click and judge for yourself. It sounds appropriate to me. We can use the power of commitment can too build our best behaviors into consistent patterns also. In fact, Dr. Cialdini recites an example of this. A researcher had families in Iowa contacted prior to winter. The “interviewers” shared tips for energy conservation and asked the families to try and save fuel that winter. All agreed to try. But, some of the families were also told that they would have their names publicized in the paper as public-spirited, fuel-conserving citizens. After a month, the group that had received the promise had saved an average of 422 cubic feet of natural gas. The group that had just received the tips and the request to conserve had not altered their fuel usage. At this point in the experiment, one group, apparently motivated by the promise of positive publicity, had changed their behavior, they had acted. The other group had not. Then, the researchers sent the families that had received the promise a letter saying that it would not be possible to publicize their names after all. Now, you have a group that has acted, and in a way that changed their view of themselves. If they quit now, they have to change that view to one of “hypocritical publicity hound.” You can probably guess what happened: rather than slacking off, these families increased their energy-saving behavior through the remainder of the winter! Meanwhile, the unmotivated group that had not acted continued in their old behaviors. Social Proof: when in doubt, follow the crowd. This principle could be stated, “When in doubt, follow the crowd (especially if it’s your crowd). If you want a picture, you’ve probably seen a comic with one person stopping on a busy street and looking up, then another, and another, and soon there is a crowd. Or, think of the old practical joke where the two jokesters get down in a busy public place, and start acting like they are looking for a contact. Then, when others are into the effort, they ease out, stand up and leave. We use the actions of others as another short cut to decision-making, and that tendency can be used to persuade us to act in ways we otherwise might not. Then, of course, the action causes us to fabricate additional reasons justifying our decision, as described in the preceding section. From 1820’s opera goers who sold their “applause” (a practice known as “claquing”) to the canned laugh tracks of current sitcoms, sellers—of products, services, and ideas – have abused this principle to persuade us. But the principle can also operate perversely without anyone’s conscious intent to manipulate. One such case is the “pluralistic ignorance phenomenon.” This occurs when multiple witnesses fail to react to an unusual, but somewhat ambiguous situation, e.g., “Was that a gunshot, or a car backfiring?” “Is that woman screaming in fear, or is she angry at her neighbor?” An individual might well analyze and react to the situation appropriately while a group will covertly observe each other and, seeing no reaction (because the others are likewise looking for clues), assume the situation is not as far out of the norm as it appears and react accordingly. In one experiment, a student faking an epileptic “seizure” received help 85% of the time when there was only one bystander, but only 31% of the time when there were with five bystanders present. Social proof is more persuasive to us when the observed behavior comes from someone whom we see as similar to ourselves. In an experiment, researchers placed a large, addressed, stamped envelope on the street with a letter and a wallet inside. The letter was from someone who had found the wallet earlier, and was returning it to the owner. The wallet contained a small amount of money and items identifying the owner. However, in some cases the letter was written in “standard” English. In others, it was written in “broken” English by someone who identified himself as a recently arrived foreigner. Otherwise, both letters expressed the person’s pleasure at being able to help by returning the wallet. The researchers watched to see what would happen. Seventy percent of the envelopes with the “standard” letter were dropped in a mailbox. Only 33% of those with “broken” English were returned. Here’s a more chilling example of this principle. Newspaper stories of suicide victims who die alone result in an increase in single-fatality automobile crashes in areas where the story is reported, and the increase is greater when the amount of coverage is greater. When the stories are of suicide-murder, the increase is in multi-fatality wrecks! Sociologist David Phillips of UC-San Diego (at least at the time this book was written) has suggested this is an example of the “Werther effect”, named after the character in a Goethe novel of the 18th century who committed suicide. The novel was very popular and caused such a wave of emulative suicides wherever it was published that authorities in several countries banned it. Not only are there more fatal wrecks in the period immediately after a published suicide, but the victims die much more quickly (evidencing an intent to commit suicide) and they tend to be similar to the suicide victim in age to the suicide victim! Professor Cialdini sees this as clear evidence of the principle of social proof at work. He notes that the greatest risk is 3-4 days after the story, with another, smaller spike at seven days. Even non-fatal aggression can affect homicide statistics. Dr. Phillips found that in the period after a heavyweight championship bout, homicides of young black men went up if a black fighter lost, and of young white men if a white fighter lost. In a positive example of the use of social proof, small children who were terrified of dogs watched film clips of children playing happily with a dog for twenty minutes a day. After four days, 67 percent were willing to climb into a playpen with a dog and remain confined there, petting and scratching it while everyone else left the room. When extremely shy, solitary preschoolers watched film clips in which a solitary child watching some social activity ultimately joined in to every ones enjoyment, they quickly began to interact with their peers at a level equal to that of normal children. Six weeks later, the withdrawn children who had not watched the films were still withdrawn; those who had were leading their schools in social activity. Liking: believe those you like. And we like those who are: physically attractive
similar to us
who give compliments
with whom we have contact in a cooperative environment (not competitive)
whom we are conditioned to associate with positive things. Let's look at these in a little more detail. Physical attractiveness: In a “halo effect”, we assign favorable traits such as talent, kindness, honest, and intelligence to attractive individuals, without being aware that we are unconsciously equating good looks with being good. We vote for good-looking politicians and hire good-looking job applicants, all the while denying that their looks had anything to do with it. Even scarier, we acquit good-looking defendants or give them lighter verdicts. Even in children, we view aggressive actions as less naughty when performed by a good-looking child, and teachers presume good-looking children to be more intelligent than their less-attractive peers. Similarity: When looks are not a significant issue, we like folks that are similar to us. Whether it’s similar opinions, personality traits, background, or life-style. So, smart persuaders dress like their targets, claim to have (or actually develop) similar backgrounds, lifestyles, attitudes, and beliefs. The attraction of private schools, especially expensive ones, isn’t all academics. Compliments: Flattery works. Period. Even if we know it’s not sincere. Contact and Cooperation: In general, we like folks better when we have had more exposure to them, unless that exposure was in a frustrating, conflict-riddled, or competitive situation. Thus, school desegregation, rather than decreasing prejudice was found to increase it. Schools aren’t friendly places. Classrooms are frustrating, anxious, competitive places for students, especially as they get older. Out of this research came the focus on “cooperative learning”. The “camp” research of Muzafer Sherif (conducted in a boys camp), showed that just separating campers into cabins produced “we” vs. “they” feelings. When competitive interactions between the groups were introduced (tug-of-war, etc.), the hostilities escalated rapidly. Then, even when the groups were put together in neutral setting (movies, cookouts), they quickly turned them into hostile events. Only when situations requiring cooperative efforts (the only truck available to go get food on a day hike was found to be “stuck”), did the hatreds subside. Educational psychologists such as Elliot Aronson applied this research to the classroom and created the “jigsaw” classroom. Students are formed into teams and each one is given only part of the information necessary to pass an upcoming exam. While Cialdini cites this research as showing that the minority students improved their learning, the majority students learned at least as much as their peers in “traditional” classrooms, and both groups feeling of self-esteem, liking for school and for members of the other group increased, he also warns against becoming overly enthusiastic about a single, simple solution. And he notes that competition, too, has its place. Note that Jaime Escalante apparently used the “team” approach with students (we’re working together for you to get a 3 or higher on the AP exam) as a way of increasing his ability to persuade them to put in the hard work that was necessary to reach that goal. Conditioning and Association: Tang’s association with the space program. Any questions? Need more? “The official _____ of the U.S. Olympic ______ team.” See the association? Any doubts that savvy corporate marketing department, armed with reams of data and sophisticated statistical analyses have any doubts about the power of this approach as they are spending billions of dollars on it? Celebrity advertising. Etc., etc., etc. Fans of sports teams exhibit another form of conditioned association. We identify with sports teams, and are uplifted by their successes and dejected by their defeats. And, in the eyes of others, those associated with successful teams are persuasive. Authority: be part of the team, listen to experts. This chapter begins with a description of a series of experiments at Yale in the 1960’s in which the subjects were brought in to supposedly participate in a study of the effects of punishment on learning. Each subject was placed in the role of “Teacher” and thought that the person in the role of “Learner” was another volunteer. In actuality, both the “Learner” and the “Researcher” in the experiments were part of the project. The “Teacher” would help the “Researcher” strap the subject into a chair and attach devices to his arms to develop an electric shock. Then, the researcher would read a question, and if the “Learner” answered incorrectly, flip a switch that would supposedly administer a shock. There were a series of switches that the Teacher was told would administer progressively greater shocks. As the experiment progressed, the “Learner” would first wince, then say “that hurt!”, then demand that the experiment stop, then yell, then plead, then scream and kick, and finally go virtually catatonic. The “Researcher” however, would keep instructing the subject to deliver the next shock, and 65% of them complied. They might plead with the “Researcher” to stop the experiment, they might sweat, they might put their head in their hands and say, “This can’t go on.” But they complied. The overwhelming percentage that continued to the bitter end stunned the psychologist who had designed the experiment. Prior to the experiment, he had asked colleagues, graduate students and Psychology majors what percentage of the subjects would throw all the switches, and the answers had invariably been in the 1% to 2% range. Subsequent experiments changed various factors and ruled out the possibilities that the subjects were sadists, that the sex of the subject had any bearing on the results, and that the subjects might not have realized the danger to the “Learner” had the voltages posted actually been delivered. The results never changed, and post experiment tests showed the subjects to be very normal, average individuals without a hint of psychosis. The researchers reached the only possible conclusion: we all carry in us a deep-seated sense of duty to authority. “It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study.” Professor Cialdini suggests this makes sense from a societal perspective. As a species, having individuals act in accordance with authority allows for more elaborate and effective social organization, thus maximizing survival chances. And, like all psychological components of influence, obedience to authority is not normally bad for us. In fact, it lets us, as groups, accomplish far more than would otherwise be possible. Of course, this type of influence can also be used against us by the unscrupulous (con men, advertisers, etc.). Even waiters can become authority figures and, especially when combined with the reciprocity component, substantially increase the size of a groups bill and the percentage of the tip. (Read the book!) Even more scary, however, are the ways it can work against us even when everyone is operating from good motives. For example, Dr. Cialdini suggests that medication errors may frequently go uncorrected because, once the “authority figure”, the doctor, writes the order, others in the work group such as nurses, etc., think only of complying, and never even really engage in careful thought about whether the order is right. Symbols of authority are, therefore, very powerful. Titles can influence our willingness to be persuaded: doctor, M.D.,Ph.D., Ed.D., lawyer, attorney, Esq., J.D., L.C.S.W., etc., etc., etc. We create, pursue and defend them because of their power. Clothing can also communicate authority, including uniforms and business suits. In one experiment, a researcher would cross a street against the light, sometimes wearing a business suit and tie, sometimes just slacks and a shirt. Three and a half times as many other pedestrians would step off into the street with the man when dressed in a business suit. Dr. Cialdini suggests that two questions can help determine when to defer to authority: Is this person a true authority in this situation? If so, how truthful can I expect this authority to be in this situation? Scarcity: value what is rare. When we are convinced that an opportunity or thing is limited in its availability, we are more easily persuaded to want it, and to take the actions necessary to get it. Just the statement of the principle can cause examples from the world of commerce to come to mind: “today only!”, “going out of business sale!”, “only X lakeshore lots left!” and so forth, and so on. As a corollary, we are more easily persuaded to act by the threat of losing something than by promises of gain. For example, more individuals women will perform self-examinations for breast lumps when a brochure threatens loss of health benefits than when it promises gains in such benefits. Further, we are especially motivated if the loss is of freedom: the “terrible twos” and the teenage years being prime times for especially strong reactions in this regard. Ban a book – kids will read it! Moreover, they are more persuaded by the information. In a dated example, Dr. Cialdini cites an instance where students at the University of North Carolina became more opposed to the idea of coed dorms on learning that a speech supporting the banning of coed dorms had been banned! The scarcity principle can affect judgment in other ways, also. For example, when consumers were offered a “taste test” of two brands of cookies (though actually the cookies were identical), with one offered from a jar with 10 cookies, and the other from a jar with only two, the tasters registered a distinct preference for the “scarce” cookie. Moreover, a sudden increase in scarcity is more persuasive that constant scarcity, and, if the sudden increase is due to demand for the item from others, it is more persuasive still. Can you say, “Beanie Babies?” But, it is instructive to note the way in which participants in the cookie experiment preferred the “scarce” cookie. The raters said they wanted to have more of the scarce cookie and would pay a higher price for them. But, they did not rate the cookies as better tasting! In other words, the pressure seems to be to possess the scarce item, not necessarily to experience it. In politics, James C. Davies has proposed the theory, based on substantial research, that violent political actions occur when a period of increasing freedom and well-being is followed by a sharp downturn in either or both. In the American Revolution, a period of growth, increasing wealth, and increasing political and commercial independence from England was followed by the “crack-down” of King George III. In a more recent example, the riots in U.S. cities in the 1960’s came after a period of steadily improving conditions for African Americans and then a backward slide in incomes and social opposition to the legal gains of the 1950’s. Application to Schools and School Systems The obvious application to all persuasion situations was highlighted at the beginning of this note, as was the need for ethical application and integrity. However, I would suggest that, when we confront systemic, cultural behaviors that are not what we desire, Dr. Cialdini's work can help us see ways in which we may be unintentionally persuading students, teachers, parents or community members to act in those ways. Then, it can provide tools for effecting change. |
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At least, that's how it feels to Europeans, according to a new survey.
Finding a European city with both ample jobs and affordable housing isn't possible. At least, that's what European city-dwellers think. According to a recent survey that polled residents across the continent, only one major city makes its residents feel that jobs and reasonably priced apartments are there for the taking. You probably won't guess which city, because it isn't really in Europe and it's not very famous. It's Antalya, Turkey, a Mediterranean beach town of around one million citizens currently enjoying a tourism boom. Antalya is the only European city where a majority of residents agreed (either strongly or somewhat) that jobs and affordable housing are easy to come by, according to the EU's new Eurobarometer report (which includes Turkey but excludes Russia and non-EU members). On the rest of the continent, city dwellers seem to have little faith in their access to jobs and housing. In only nine cities surveyed (out of a total of 83) did a majority of people think finding a job was easy. This lucky group is, in order of resident optimism from higher to lower, Oslo, Prague, Munich, Antalya, Zurich, Stockholm, Helsinki, Istanbul and Bratislava. The lowest performers – cities where more people disagreed slightly or strongly that jobs were easy to get – are mostly located in crisis-stricken Southern Europe. With the worst placed first, these are Palermo, Naples; Malaga, Spain; the Athens region and Athens proper; Miskolc, Hungary; Barcelona; Oviedo, Spain; Turin, Italy; and the Lisbon region.*
Europeans felt that affordable housing wasn’t quite so difficult. Most residents in 20 European cities agreed strongly or somewhat strongly that it was easy to find somewhere reasonably priced to live. The faint silver lining for low jobs-scorers Athens, Miskolc and Oviedo is that they all made the top ten for this group (with top place taken by the Romanian city of Piatra Neamt). Less happy were the people of Turin, who have some of the lowest expectations for job hunting, and also believe that reasonably priced housing is tough to come by. While no other city touches Antalya's confidence, a couple of other places have a relatively rosy outlook. In Denmark's Aalborg, Britain's Cardiff and Manchester, Turkey's Istanbul and Ankara and the Romanian city of Cluj Napoca, over 30 percent felt that jobs and housing were both easy to find. While this mosaic of European cities' hopes and fears is interesting, there's a clear limit to its scope. The figures gauge not the reality of the jobs and housing markets, but how people feel about them. This explains why cities in the former Czechoslovakia fared so well for job availability. The Czech Republic is doing better than many during Europe's ongoing crisis, but its unemployment rate in August was a not-negligible 6.9 percent. Prague's joblessness levels were slightly above that level as of this spring. This is higher than the 4.7 percent rate in neighboring Austria, yet 63 percent of Praguers agree strongly or somewhat that it's easy to find a job. Only 48 percent of Viennese feel the same way. This suggests that the Czech's rocky economic progress has lowered expectations and made people less sensitive to precarity.
Likewise, Munich residents were slightly more likely than Parisians to say that affordable housing was hard to find. In fact, while median salaries are roughly 1.7 times higher in Paris ($9,000 monthly compared to $5,234 in Munich), average rents per square meter are 2.6 times higher ($43 per square meter compared to Munich’s $16.4). Munich's citizens may object to high rents even more than Parisians do, but their attitude is likely shaped more by higher expectations than by the difficulty of making ends meet. Cities are changing fast. Keep up with the CityLab Daily newsletter. The best way to follow issues you care about. Subscribe Loading... And the bigger picture isn't as bleak as it seems. In all 83 cities, most residents said they were satisfied to live there. In 82 cities, most said they were happy with cultural facilities (the one flop was Valletta, Malta). Public spaces were considered satisfactory by most people in 79 cities. Most people were happy with schools in 75 cities; with the state of streets and buildings in 73 cities. If Europeans are finding new jobs and good housing hard to come by, they still seem pretty confident that they have resilient, attractive cities that will see them through. * Correction: Due to an editing error, this story originally misstated Turin's location. All charts courtesy of Eurobarometer. Top image: Antalya. Yarygin /Shutterstock.com |
"But now we have to, for him, for Seamus, get to that World Cup. For everyone in the country, but for him now after what has happened it will be a big thing, you know?"
"I had a hypnotherapy birth and they taught Shane to help me to breathe through it. He told me, 'It all came back to me. I was just talking to Seamus, teaching him how to breathe through it.' He remembered it all." Kayleah Long , wife of Republic of Ireland forward Shane, tells the Sunday Independent that her husband helped comfort team-mate Seamus Coleman after he sustained a leg break by using a breathing technique he learnt during her pregnancy
"Seeing my name being given to this airport is something very special, everyone knows that I am proud of my country and my especially my home city. I never asked for this, but I’m not a hypocrite, and I’m happy and honored. I will try to dignify Portugal and especially Madeira with a spirit of sacrifice, dignity and passion." Cristiano Ronaldo speaks at the official celebration of the newly named Aeroporto Cristiano Ronaldo in Madeira
"It is impossible to please the Greeks and Trojans. Neither did Jesus please everyone." Emanuel Santos , a Madeiran sculptor who created a bust of The Best FIFA Men's Player 2016 to celebrate the newly named Aeroporto Cristiano Ronaldo, responds to critics of the design
Republic of Ireland defender *John O'Shea *speaks with Off The Ball about the team's desire to get to the World Cup for captain Coleman*
**
"Going from Nigeria to Arsenal is a difficult task because a lot of young players want to go to England. It’s all about determination and hard work. I went to Chile and played as the captain, won the trophy and best player award. It was a very big platform for me to continue my career. Nigeria is not like Europe, so it’s a difficult place to survive. You have to work hard to get what you want. Both my mum and dad played important roles before I got to where I am today. I lost my dad in 2006. He was a big Arsenal fan, a diehard Arsenal fan and he and my mother contributed a lot, buying boots, jerseys and taking me to training."
Arsenal and Nigeria's Kelechi Nwakalispeaks in an exclusive with Goal about the importance his parents played in his development as a player and how the FIFA U-17 World Cup Chile 2015 gave him a platform to showcase his talent
"I think the World Cup is the very best competition in terms of the feelings and emotions that it generates. If you haven't played in it, you can't know exactly what it means. I was lucky enough to play in it in 2014 and Algeria played very well. It was a dream come true for millions of Algerians and we made history by reaching the last 16 for the first time. We played a historic tie against Germany in which we were on the verge of knocking them out. I was very happy and proud to take part in that incredible adventure. I'd like to play in it again in 2018, although it will be very difficult to qualify."
Algeria and West Ham United winger Sofiane Feghoulitalks with the club's official website about the importance of the FIFA World Cup™
"I remember the game like it was no time ago. It was a massive game for me – I just thought to myself: ‘If only my dad was here.’ I wish my dad could have been there but he passed away. So to myself I said: ‘I need to play well for him because he’s never been at a football match. He’s never seen me on a football pitch.’ So I wanted to win that game and we never won in the end but it was an alright performance from me. I was just so determined to do well."
Speaking in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, England and Manchester City winger Raheem Sterlingrecalls making his World Cup debut against Italy at Brazil 2014 in Manaus
"You just have to see how much his influence is important for our players. It was the mood, the atmosphere. Everyone was inspired. Everyone wanted to give their best and everyone's thrilled to play next to Bastian. I think we got not only a world class player but a world class person and a man who can inspire our players, our fans and our city."
Chicago Fire head coach Veljko Paunovicspeaks about the club's new signing, World Cup winner Bastian Schweinsteiger, in an introductory press conference
"Relationships are important off the field, we are friends. On the field, we complete each other. Messi and I play on the wings, Suarez in the middle. Messi is a player that I've admired since I came to Barcelona. He's helped me since the moment I arrived. I've always admired his determination and attitude."
Barcelona and Brazil winger Neymarspeaks with Russia's Sport-Express about his partnership with Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez
"The way we are playing is being watched all over the world. People are saying that the champions are back. I think this is really important, to play with confidence. But it is also important to keep humble, realistic, be conscious that we haven't won anything yet. And that our biggest aim is the World Cup. I guess we can celebrate for being qualified. We're almost there or we have just sealed our passport, but everybody knows which celebration we want to make the most."
Chelsea's Willianspeaks after Brazil's 3-0 win over Paraguay and the South Americans became the second team, after hosts Russia, to qualify for the 2018 World Cup
"I don't think Bayern Munich alone is responsible for how good we are doing. If we are 13 points clear after 25 games, it means that other well-positioned clubs like Schalke or Wolfsburg haven't performed consistently well. Borussia Dortmund are an unbelievably talented team who could have made the Bundesliga title race a lot closer. Although you have to say the rest of the Bundesliga lacks quality."
Bayern Munich captain Philipp Lahmtalks with stern magazine about his club's dominant form in the Bundesliga
"You know what made me proud? That day, the Arsenal fans sang the Ozil song. I've never experienced anything like it at any other club. It gives me goose bumps every time the fans sing that song."
Arsenal and Germany midfielder Mesut Oziltells Sport Bild about his admiration for the support he receives from the club's fans
"I can't say that because I played with [Zlatan] Ibrahimovic, [David] Beckham... great players at PSG. But Antoine is a great player and I think he can go even higher and I hope for him that he'll do it. For me, it's a pleasure to play with him. We have fun on the pitch, and you can see it every weekend."
Atletico Madrid and France forward Kevin Gameirospeaks with Omnisport about his team-mate Antoine Griezmann's potential
"I don't like comparing players. Mbappe has to become Mbappe. And that's all. But my word, he is good. Ooh la la. I met him, and he gave me the impression that he has a good head on his shoulders. l really like watching him play. He thinks. There's a thing that annoys me sometimes. We talk about players, 'He's quick, he's strong, he can jump high'. We never talk about players' brains and that annoys me. When I watch him dribble, he's thinking. He thinks when he plays and that for me is the most important thing in a player. He thinks. He uses his brain. Yes, he's quick, but he's thinking and that is the sign of a kid who can go a long way in the game."
France legend Thierry Henrydiscusses Monaco wonderkid Kylian Mbappe with Olivier Dacourt on Canal Plus
"For me, it is Buffon. We have been playing together since we were 15 years old in the Italy squad. We still speak often. What if he came to New York too? He is a bit old for that move now, but he is still the best."
New York City midfielder Andrea Pirlospeaks with Corriere dello Sport about former team-mate Gianluigi Buffon |
After announcing in September that it would begin “removing problematic and abandoned apps” in an effort to clean up the App Store, new data shows Apple is now fulfilling that promise with removals dramatically increasing around 238 percent last month.
The data below from research firm Sensor Tower (via TechCrunch) shows around 47,300 apps were removed in October, around 3.4 times more than the average month for the App Store prior to the new purging initiative.
The best 4K & 5K displays for Mac
Most of the app removals were games— around 28 percent— according to the report, but there is no indication of what percentage of apps were considered abandoned versus apps that didn’t meet guidelines. While Apple first announced the new App Store purge back in September, it gave developers warnings and a 30-day grace period to submit updates to old apps in order to avoid removal.
It’s unclear what Apple is considering an “abandoned” app, but it’s likely apps that don’t support the latest iOS releases and iPhone hardware will be targets for Apple. The latest guidelines for the App Store recommends developers remove apps that they are no longer updating.
The effort is ultimately to help users avoid potentially running into apps that break Apple’s guidelines or out-of-date apps that might not offer an ideal experience. It shouldn’t make much of a difference in terms of the amount of apps available on the App Store, as even at close to 50,000 app removals in October, Apple continues to get 100,000 submissions a week and maintains at over 2 million apps available. |
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- President Obama has a forged birth certificate and is ineligible to be on the Alabama Democratic Primary ballot because he is not a citizen, a Birmingham man has said in a lawsuit filed in Jefferson County Circuit Court.
The suit asks Circuit Judge Helen Shores Lee to hold an evidentiary hearing and issue an injunction against Mark Kennedy, the Alabama Democratic Party chairman, from putting Obama on the March 13 party primary ballot.
"Barack Hussein Obama, II, is not a natural-born citizen and is not qualified to be on the ballot as a presidential candidate," Albert E Hendershot Jr., who filed the suit on his own behalf, said in an accompanying affidavit. "In 2008, when Mr. Obama ran for the U.S. Presidency, he was never vetted and he never provided documentary evidence of his natural-born status."
Although Obama's 1961 birth in Hawaii is a settled fact with most voters, some people remain unconvinced.
Hendershot's suit claims he has "staggering" evidence that Obama is using a fraudulently obtained social security number issued in Connecticut. His also claims the Obama birth certificate from Hawaii is a forgery and says he has other evidence of misrepresentation, fraud and identity theft.
Hendershot has requested oral arguments. Lee has not set any hearings in the case. |
Live Chat with Atul Gawande and Jeffrey Brenner » Wednesday July 27, 1 p.m. ET Dr. Jeffrey Brenner is a local physician who some believe might have the model to solve one of America's most intractable problems: lowering the cost of health care. While analyzing medical billing data in Camden, N.J., he mapped out "hot spots" of the impoverished city's high-cost patients. By targeting unique care -- including home visits and social workers -- at the city's most costly patients, he developed a program that he argues has both lowered health care costs and provided better care in Camden. His organization, the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers , and other similar models were the subject of a January 2011 feature in The New Yorker by journalist and physician Dr. Atul Gawande. Since then, Dr. Brenner's medical strategy has garnered considerable attention -- praised by some as a promising model worthy of more intense study and charged by others as a dangerous expansion of the health care system. But as Brenner tells FRONTLINE correspondent Gawande, "Better care for people is disruptive change." This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on May 13, 2011. Highlights
The incident that sparked Brenner to action
What the data showed: 1 percent of patients account for 30 percent of costs
Why losing the art of the home visit harms us
How much did his medical model cost -- and how much did it save?
Why isn't his program taking off elsewhere? So tell me about Camden. It's a city of 79,000 people. It's one of the poorest cities in the country -- first, second or third poorest city depending on how you measure it. It's one of the most dangerous cities in the country. It's had three of its last six mayors indicted and convicted of corruption. It's just recently laid off half its police department. [It's an] incredibly challenged place. It's been taken over by state government -- the city government, school district, police department -- in various stages, at various points. So it's a very challenged small city. How does that get reflected in health care? Is that any different? We have two hospitals, three emergency rooms; we've got about 12 primary care offices in the city of Camden. ... People really struggle to get health care in the city. There are long waits in the emergency room. People call for an appointment, and first available appointments can be days, weeks or months away. “It pretty quickly became clear that there were hot spots of everything. There were hot spots by disease, hot spots by patient... There were hot spots by ZIP code and by neighborhood. … You could begin to take the data and tell stories with the data. And that's an incredibly powerful tool for making change.” They struggle with environmental contamination both inside their house and outside. We have a lot of air pollution in the city of Camden, high rates of asthma. There are very old homes here, so that makes health conditions worse. People can't exercise [when] they're afraid to walk on the streets. It's a very violent place, so it's hard to get exercise here. People are afraid to let their kids out of the house. The schools are falling apart, so it's just a really tough place. The overwhelming sense I get from practicing medicine here, and living here as well, is that it's an unbelievably stressful place. So you came to practice here. Why? I finished residency in Seattle, and I grew up around here and wanted to come back to New Jersey, and I really wanted to practice in an underserved community where I could speak Spanish. Camden is a great place to be if that’s what you want to do. I wanted to see kids, adults, delivery babies, and wanted to take care of families, and there are lots of families here that need good care. ... ... Was it really that different from what you were seeing when you were training in Seattle or in medical school in New Jersey, or was it a different set of illnesses and a different set of conditions entirely? No, it's all the same conditions. I worked in a federally [subsidized] health center in Seattle and took care of homeless people and undocumented immigrants for three years as part of my training, so I was pretty deeply steeped in how to care for complex problems. And there are so many ways that illness manifests. It manifests as diabetes and hypertension and headaches and back pain and knee pain, but the common denominator to all that is stress. When people feel like their life is out of balance, when they feel like their life is out control, that they can't change their life circumstance, that's an overwhelming feeling. So that's what I saw pretty quickly in my office, is that all of the broken school district, the broken police department, broken city government, all of that added up to an enormous amount of stress, and that it was impacting people's health and wellness and their sense of themselves and the sense of their family. … [What changed your whole perspective on how you did things?] It was a gradual process. Living in the city, you hear gunshots ring out all the time. It feels very unsafe in the city, and you're constantly sort of looking over your back and just thinking about where you are at all times. And that's a low level of stress that you live with every day, and it has an impact on you. Working in my office, we got broken into pretty frequently. … Patients come into your office who have been beaten up, who have been assaulted, who have been held up at gunpoint, who are rolling around in wheelchairs because they've been shot, and they're around my age or younger than I am. And it's just a sense of overwhelming chaos, and you think, there has to be a fix to this. I mean, someone has to be figuring this out. There has to be a better way of doing this. There was a lot of literature around violence being a public health... So I really began to dive into just reading about cities and urban history and economics and policing strategies and what's gone on in New York, and realizing that people have made a lot of progress. The neoconservative literature on community policing is very interesting, because it essentially says that poverty doesn't have to equate to crime and violence; that it's possible to have a safer community, a healthier community without fixing poverty. And over and over I think people have been paralyzed thinking that until we fix all of poverty there's no hope for education, for making a place safer and healthier. And the neoconservative literature says that [is] wrong, that you can actually improve these public systems and make health care work better for people and help them get healthier. You can make education work; you can make policing work. ... The final culmination of this was, I was working in my house one evening and heard gunshots and then got a call from a neighbor, and the neighbor said: "There's someone [who's] been shot in the neighborhood. You should come down and see what you can do." So I had stuff in my house, a pocket mask and a stethoscope, and went running down the street. It was in the evening; it was dark. There were lots of flashing lights; the police had gotten there already. There were probably about 12 officers standing around, and there was a station wagon near a street lamp, and there [were] people milling around. So I walked up and asked the police: "I'm a physician. Where is the victim?" And they all sort of turned around and said, "He's over there." And he was lying down. He had gotten out of the car probably and sort of fallen, and he was laying on his side, facing the back tire. And [I] ran over, and he had pulse. He wasn't breathing. [I] rolled him over on his back, opened his airway [and] started rescue breathing. Eventually his pulse stopped. [I] started compressions. Eventually a Rutgers police officer came over, and I slowly heard an ambulance pulling up and people coming over. We ended up getting him in the ambulance. It was dark; he was in a shadow. It just wasn't clear what was going on. You just do whatever you need to do in the situation. And I was furious. I stood up and started screaming at the cop, "Why didn't you guys do anything?" You were angry that they hadn't been even tending to the victim? Yeah, that they hadn't done anything. And I said, "Why didn't you guys help him?" And the police officer said, "We didn't want to dislodge the bullet." It was just a complete blow-off, and I was just so furious. I'd had patients come in all the time and tell me crazy stories about the police department and what goes on in the city. You just don't want to believe that social disorder has broken down to that extent. And I thought this is the most dangerous city in the country; there are people being shot all over the city and being hurt; every night there's a couple of these incidents. I couldn't imagine how we could have reached the point in our society in this city where you would just leave a victim lying there in their own blood. ... And it turned out that -- I lived close to Rutgers -- he was a Rutgers student, and he was a senior. The victim? Victim. He had grown up in the city. He had worked hard. He had succeeded. He'd come from a very poor family, and he was close to graduating. He already had a job lined up at a bank, and he was one of the wonder kids that make it out of urban communities, and he was just about to make it out. He still had friends that were part of the drug trade in the city, and they were trying to get one of his friends and kind of got him instead. And you sort of snapped at that point? I was furious. I was so angry and didn't know what to do. I just didn't have even a framework for what do you do in this circumstance. We had some public meetings and really started reading and trying to figure out, get to the bottom of this. … We ended up organizing a march [with] all of his friends from Rutgers. We started at Rutgers and marched to the police department, and we [brought] CPR manuals and CPR equipment and first aid equipment. They wouldn't come out and talk to us, so we walked one at a time into the police department and left it there in their lobby. I think [we] made a very strong statement that they were an unaccountable system that had behaved very poorly and needed to change how they operate. The striking thing is that they put you on the citizen reform commission for the police department. Did you want to be the citizen member of the police reform commission? There were two of us, and I did. I thought it would be a chance to really start fixing some of this stuff. … It is incredibly revealing to be on the commission, because the police department had been in takeover for many years, and I'm sitting with the county leadership from the prosecutor's office, leadership from the state police, from the state attorney general, and they're talking very bluntly [behind] closed doors about how frustrated they are to fix it, and how for many, many years they been working to fix it. They brought in really amazing outside consultants to come in to help to figure all this out. And I got a chance to meet many of the disciples from New York, from [former NYPD Chief of Police William J.] Bratton's department, and people who had helped turn New York around and rethink policing across the country. It was an amazing experience to talk to people who had really figured this out, who understood the connection between poor service delivery on the end of a system and how you build a system and what the structure of the system looks like. So what do you think you do if you are trying to tackle crime in a city like Camden and you're getting lessons from elsewhere? What do you zero in on as a way to get a handle on it? You can't fix a hard problem unless you have a way of counting the hard problem. It became very clear that the city had no ability to track statistics, to map things, and that their system was really missing a lot of data, I thought. It was pretty clear to me that a lot of patients weren't reporting crime, that I would have people come in and they'd been beat up and I was taking their stitches out, and they said: "Why should I report the crime to the police department? No one will follow up on it." The clearance rate for crimes, meaning the solve rate for crimes, was only about 18 percent in the city. That's for severe crimes. So I really felt like the first thing to do in solving a problem is to count it. ... And is that [what] they'd done in other cities? Yeah. My understanding is the first thing that they did in New York is really put together something called CompStat, which was a way of recording crime data and then mapping it so that you knew at the block level, at the neighborhood level, what the crime rate was. You could see where the hot spots for crime were? Where the hot spots are, exactly. And then what would they do? They created a management structure to support that. Fundamentally, the question is, if a system is failing or if crime is high, who's the accountable manager? And Bratton decided that the precinct captains would be the accountable managers, and he brought them every week to a room, and they put the maps for their precinct up, and he asked: "What are you doing about it? What's your plan to fix the problem?" … Did the police have maps? Were they mapping just like everywhere else? No, they weren't. No. The police really didn't have good data, and they had bought systems that they didn't know how to get to work. They had paid a lot of money for the systems, and they kept buying new systems, and they still struggled to really use maps in a productive way. So we decided to go directly to the hospitals, and I went to the hospital that I worked for and submitted a proposal to collect patient-level information for everyone who had had an accident or injury, so this included people who had been shot, people who had been assaulted or fallen down the stairs. We got the data and began -- it was a student project. I was working with a student, and we mapped it, graphed it, charted it, and it was just an unbelievable data set. … It pretty quickly became clear that there were hot spots of everything. There were hot spots by disease, hot spots by patient; there were certain patients who had been [admitted] over and over and over. There were hot spots by ZIP code and by neighborhood. … And because I knew the city so well, you could begin to take the data and tell stories with the data. And that's an incredibly powerful tool for making change. So next thing you know, you've got the maps of the city for crime from the hospitals, and you start seeing patterns in the health of the population as well. What were you starting to see? Yeah. At some point I gave up on thinking that I could impact the police department… [I] eventually just said, "I'm going to go back to being a doctor." But then you had on your computer all of this -- All these great maps and graphs and charts, and so we decided to widen the database out and went back and decided that there are such wonderful patterns to all of the accidents and injuries that there's probably wonderful patterns in other things as well. So we went back and asked each hospital for all their claims data for a full-year period, and did the same thing with that data and began to find buildings in the city that were hot-spot buildings, where there were a lot of elderly and disabled people living in the building that were generating enormous amounts of costs, going to the emergency room and hospital over and over; that there were specific patients in the city that were going over and over to the hospital. Here was the leap that really struck me: You went from mapping one kind of consequence, assault and crimes, to really mapping the costs of the city and how they unfolded, and you found they were incredibly concentrated. Very concentrated. How concentrated is it? So the two most expensive buildings in the city are both beautiful buildings that have good people running the buildings. One building had $15 million in payments to the three hospitals for emergency room and hospital care, for the people living in that building. It's about 350 people. The other building had about $12 million in payments to the three hospitals for about 600 people living in the building. That's over a five-and-a-half-year period. … What percentage of the city accounts for, say, half or two-thirds of the costs? One percent of the city residents are responsible for about 30 percent of the hospital and emergency room costs. So it's very, very concentrated. In a one-year period, half the population uses an ER hospital, which is higher than the national rate. The leading reason to come to an emergency room in Camden over a five-year period is head colds. There were 12,000 visits for head colds. Number two is ear infection. Number three is sore throat. Number four is asthma. Number [five] is stomach virus. I mean, it's all primary care problems. Even if you take out the uninsured patients from the data and just looking at people with insurance, it's the same list. You said 1 percent accounts for 30 percent of the costs. Five percent accounts for 60 percent of the costs. Is that unique to Camden? What we've learned and what I've learned over time is that every group that you look at in health care has similar patterns. If you look at commercially insured patients, if you look at Medicare patients, if you look in a specific company, that it's all from the same pattern. It's about 1 percent of the patients [that] are costing about 30 percent of the health care resources. So that makes a certain amount of sense: The sick people cost the most. Right. … I would have guessed that they're very expensive because they are getting expensive and great care. You didn't think that was the case? So the nice thing about being a practicing physician and getting a chance to look at this kind of data -- which never happens, by the way; doctors never get a chance to look at data; it's really hard to get this kind of data -- is that it's a small city, and my patients from my practice that I've taken care of for years are in the data. So you sit and begin to look through the data, and I'm looking at my patients who are in the data and realizing I had no idea how much health care cost. I had no idea how expensive it was. It was just shocking. … Did you think that when you looked at the most expensive patients in your numbers that it looked like what they were getting was great care? It was really obvious from the data that the most expensive people were getting terrible care. They were getting disorganized, fragmented and uncoordinated care. And I knew them, so I knew what kind of care they were getting. And it was a very common scenario to have an extremely complex patient discharged from the hospital, show up in my office, and I'd walk in the exam room, and say: "Mrs. Rodriguez, I haven't seen you in three months. Where have you been?" "Well, I've been in the ICU for a month and a half. I've been in the hospital for another couple of weeks and just got out a couple of days ago." And I said, "Well, what happened?" And she'd say: "Well, I'm not really sure. Lot of doctors came in the room. They never really explained anything to me. No one translated, and I'm not really sure. But I got this scar, and I've got this whole bag of medicine, and I've got a one-page carbon-copy discharge sheet, and all the meds have been changed, and [it] doesn't really say anything." So you'd call the hospital, and the hospital had not done the discharge summary yet. They hadn't dictated anything. They couldn't find the chart. You couldn't figure out who had actually taken care of the patient. So now you've got this incredibly sick person who's got new complaints. They're complaining of chest pain today and shortness of breath. You really have no idea what happened to them in the hospital. They cost $20,000 while they were in the hospital, so the public paid $20,000 for their health care, and now I'm trying to figure out how to make sure they don't go back to the hospital, and I can't figure out what the hospital did to them. So you've got a group of people who are the most expensive people in Camden. Some of them are in your own practice. And you thought they were not getting great care. How did you think you could tackle that? ... One approach to reducing costs is what they call consumer-directed health care. That's giving patients more skin in the game. That means upping your deductible, your co-pay, so that you're penalized for using more services. The problem is, the most expensive people are lying in ICU beds, and you're hardly empowered to turn your card over and check your deductible or to open up Consumer Reports and find out how expensive your care is. So we talk about consumer-directed health care, but it only works essentially for a healthy person who wants an MRI. And that's really at the margins. That's a small part of the cost drivers. The bulk of the cost drivers are the most sick people who are least able to be consumers within the system. So that model of saving money doesn't really work. … What's your approach then? What I knew from my office is that I'm paid to go from room to room to room as fast as I can, and the faster I go from room to room to room, the more money I make. When I slow down and I get involved in a complex case, I may as well hand money over the patient. I lose money. So that's a terrible model of care. …You can't do good care in 10 minutes. It just doesn't work. If it's a head cold, that's fine, but if it's a complex diabetic who's just left the hospital and has got a healing diabetic foot ulcer, it's going to take some time to explain to the patient what's going on and to straighten out their medications and talk to the family members, and I knew that when I spent more time with people that they began to understand their care, and they felt empowered, and they were less likely to go back. For that 1,000 people who are 30 percent of the costs, how many doctors could they have had just on the bills that they were paying? A good way of thinking of that is in one of these buildings that we talked about. So for the amount of money that we're spending in one of these hot-spot buildings that are filled with elderly and disabled people, $12 million over five years is enough to put a nurse practitioner on every floor of the building. If you look at the total spent on the most frequent utilizers in the city, it's about $10 million a year. That would be enough to hire 50 of me, which is more than the total number of primary care providers in the city. Essentially what's happened over time is that we built a specialty care and hospital system on steroids, and if you pay more for something, you're going to get more of it, and you pay less for something, you're going to get less of it. We have shrunk and shriveled our primary care base. And the impact for patients in Camden is that if I want a patient to get evaluated for a kidney transplant, I can get them in this week. If I want a patient to be able to get in for a basic appointment to control their diabetes and adjust their blood pressure medicine, they could wait for weeks or months. And that just doesn't make sense. We're being foolish in how we're deploying resources in our health care system. [What does] American health care need to focus on and pay for? American health care doesn't do a good job taking care of sick people. The way we built our system is really a system that's very hard to access. It works well for the average patient, but if [you] are blind, if you're deaf, if you're disabled, if you're in a wheelchair, if you don't speak the language, if you're developmentally delayed, if you have a complex mix of illnesses with many providers involved, the whole system starts to break down. Patients often get overwhelmed. They are going from doctor to doctor, specialist to specialist. They're getting conflicting recommendations. The doctors aren't talking to one another, and they get confused, and they get overwhelmed. They get lots of medications added to their regimen. ... And those are the people that were in your top 1 percent most expensive people? Those are the people that are in our database, and those are the people that live in every community all over the country. …The story that I'm telling [is], you don't really understand until you've been one of those families. ... Tell me about the first patient that you tried to understand. …This was a 45-year-old patient with an acute attack of gallbladder disease who had a history of heart failure, poorly controlled diabetes, severe obesity. ... He was morbidly obese. He was probably about 600 pounds. So this was a very complex patient when he came into the hospital and, within a day of being in the hospital, ended up in the intensive care unit with severe infection, and was there for about a month and a half and close to dying. Was that that pattern of how it had been for him, or is this just a particularly terrible and very expensive episode at the top of the chart? He'd been in the hospital in the last six months two other times, in nearby hospitals, and each time for a month for heart failure episodes, and also other problems with his gallbladder. So he was a really sick guy with a lot of complex problems, and he was scared. He understood that he had almost died in the intensive care unit. Was he going to be a high-cost patient again in the future? Or he sounds to me like a guy who got really sick, had his expense in the past, and now would gradually get better and of course would be lower-cost over time. He would highly likely continue to be a high-cost patient. Heart failure patients are one of the most complex and expensive patients to care for. It's a chronic disease. You don't get better. It gets worse and worse over time. So, you know, he was highly likely to continue ending up in the hospital over and over. ... Sounds kind of hopeless to me. So I was very worried. Here we had gotten funding for this project. We were going to begin meeting and addressing the needs of these patients, and our original model was just to hire a nurse. And I quickly realized that, based on this patient, that these are patients that weren't getting access to care; that just giving them an appointment wasn't going to mean that they were going to get follow-up care; that we were going to actually have to deliver their follow-up care. This guy sounds like he was getting good care. He was so obese that he couldn't move around, and getting him from doctor to doctor, appointment to appointment and follow-up appointments is very challenging. He was homeless, living in a motel room, and was poor, didn't have access to transportation, so he had a lot of barriers to getting access to care. So he would be discharged back to the motel, and in fact was discharged back to the motel from this hospital visit as well. And how is that bad care? He was getting bad care because fundamentally the question is, are we going to be a proactive delivery system that brings good care to patients, or are we going to be a passive delivery system and wait for patients to come to us? And sick people are overwhelmed by their illnesses sometimes. … It's much cheaper to bring good care to people than to wait for them to figure out how to access care. ... What was the way that you then tried to tackle the problem? [I] really felt like we needed to go out and see these patients and bring care to them and not wait for them to come to us. So -- Would that keep them out of emergency rooms and ICUs? That's what we thought. And it turned out it's true. That is the answer. So we hired a nurse practitioner, community health worker and social worker. And the four of us as a team began to care for these patients. We asked for referrals directly from the hospitals of their complex, high-cost patients. We'd often meet the patient while they were still in the hospital and then follow them out, so they got to know us in the hospital, and then when we knocked on the door the next day, they were excited to see us, and they felt like finally someone cared about them. If you didn't do that, how often would they end up back in the hospital? Nationally, the statistics for older patients who have Medicare -- so these are people over 65 -- is that 20 to 25 percent of Medicare patients end up back in the hospital within the first 30 days. And how often do you think that's the case for these really high-cost patients that you were concentrating on? I think that half of them end up back in the hospital within the first 30 days. And you could change that? We thought we could change that by bringing care to them. We've lost the art of the home visit. There's something very powerful about going into someone's home, building a relationship, sitting down with them, getting to know them, getting to know their family members. And there's something very empowering to patients when you come to them. It can be frightening to be in a doctor's office, and it can be frightening to have a doctor in a white coat walk into the room. It can be alienating to patients. And it sends a really powerful message of how much you care about them when you come to their house. And you also realize the circumstances they're living in. As physicians and health care providers we often blame patients when they don't follow our directions. The number of times I've had clinicians and nurses and doctors tell me, "Well, if the patient would just follow my directions, if they would just take the pill that I gave them, if they would just follow the diet I gave them, then they'd stop being sick; they'd stop coming back to the hospital" -- and it's not that simple. ... It almost sounds like a science of connecting the dots in why people become unhealthy. Absolutely. It's like detective work. And you just keep pulling one lid after another, and you just realize how complex health care is and how complex illness is, but that we can do better, and that it is solvable. … You were talking earlier about that [the] really high-cost patient is the most frustrating patient for doctors. I see some of these folks who -- they don't follow what you ask them to do, and what you're saying is you can connect the dots to change their situation? You can't completely alter people's life circumstances. We're not going to cure poverty in my lifetime, I don't think. So the question is, how can you take the current situation that a patient is in and improve it enough to make them a little bit healthier, and lower their unnecessary ER and hospital use, and make them have a more productive interaction with the health care system? ... How much does it save walking in the door and actually finding a solution for that very micro problem? … One emergency room visit can be $1,000 to $3,000. One night in the hospital could be $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000. … ... What's the cost of your team? Two hundred twenty-five thousand dollars in a year. The most expensive patient that our team is caring for had $600,000 in hospital bills paid out over the last five years, and 43 of the patients we're caring for had $3 million in payments to the hospitals over the last five years. So the care right now for these folks is really expensive. So it's much cheaper to bring care to them and deliver better care than it is to have them keep going to the emergency room and hospital over and over. How much has your team been able to lower the costs for this really expensive group of patients? So we've seen some preliminary results of 40 to 50 percent reductions in visits and costs. And we're now -- Forty to 50 percent reduction in costs? In costs and visits. And we're beginning to dive deeper into the data and have partnered with a research team to really pull this data apart and figure it out, and understand in more detail what are the cost drivers and how well is the project working. Yeah, I'm sure trying to calculate exactly what the savings are is pretty tough. But your $225,000 team is saving millions for sure? We think so, yeah. We think that we're pointing the way with this team to better care at lower costs by bringing care to patients in the community. And this is not a new idea, by the way. There are wonderful projects around the country over the years that have done similar things. There's a program called PACE, Program for All-Inclusive Care [for] the Elderly, that is a similar, very proactive, very well-developed model of bringing care to frail, elderly patients that's demonstrated savings. There's another model for severely mentally ill patients called Assertive Community Treatment Team [ACTT] that brings better care right to the community for patients and saves money. So this isn't a new idea; we're just applying it in a different environment. … So your $225,000 team that can save millions, it exists in other cities around the country in a similar way. Why haven't they taken off? There are no billing codes for this. There's no way currently to bill insurance or to bill Medicaid or Medicare for the kind of care that a team like this delivers. And there have been similar projects that have gone away. There were sites in California that couldn't continue their funding and had to fold. So this isn't an entirely new idea. Other people have tried this, but it's just very hard to get sustainable funding for this kind of work. So now you're actually trying to harness health reform to change the entire way things are paid for in Camden, so that you can build teams like this? Right. We've worked closely with the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, the New Jersey Hospital Association, Citizen Action, nursing groups, provider groups to put together legislation in New Jersey that is close to passing that would essentially create a sustainable funding model for this kind of work. It says we don't want any up-front money, but if we generate savings that the state will share a portion of those savings back with us. So we think that this is, right now, the way to go forward in this kind of work, which is share some of the savings we're generating back with the project so that we can grow this kind of work. I thought President Obama's health reform was supposed to do that. Is it not going to do that for you? Oh, no. I think health reform is an incredible opportunity for agents of change all over the country to begin building projects like this and fixing health care from the bottom up. … The problem is that the pace of cost increase is going up so quickly that I'm not sure that the pace of innovation is going to be fast enough. … Your small investment of time up front is leading people to use the emergency room less, not show up in the hospitals. You're trying to get the hospitals to come along with you on this. Why is that going to work at all? You're taking away business that is their financial lifeblood. They want to keep the hospitals full, keep the emergency room going. So the one part of the market share that all the hospitals are gladly willing to give up is complex homeless people who might have substance abuse histories or mental illness. So we went to a group of patients that everyone had given up on and that no one wants more of. … As this kind of an experiment works, though, you're talking about dropping the number of hospital visits as a whole. Yes. You're talking about removing people from emergency rooms. Yes. They could have to shut down floors and beds. Yes, yes. They're not going to be with you on this, are they? This kind of work is a game changer, and this is a Blockbuster Video moment for America's hospitals, and -- What do you mean by a Blockbuster Video moment? So along comes Netflix, and Blockbuster Video has closed down stores all over the country, and there had to have been a moment somewhere when a young executive walked in and said, "Hey, they're starting to rent videos online," and Blockbuster said: "No, people like coming to the video store. We're not going to make any change. We've got a good business model, and it's working." So disruptive change comes along, and it can take a model and turn it on its head. And I think better care for sick people is disruptive change. And if we scale this model up that we don't need as many hospital beds, we don't need as many specialists, that's a really big problem. We have an enormous political problem, which is if we want to balance the federal budget, if states are going to balance their budgets, if businesses aren't going to go bankrupt or drop health care coverage from the increase in costs, then we're going to have to deliver better care to sick people. And the impact of that is going to be big change. It's going to be fewer hospital beds, fewer hospitals and fewer specialists, and that's going to be a pretty big change. We have inflated a capacity bubble in our country to do expensive, high-tech, hospital-based care, and it's a little like the bubble we inflated for housing. At some point you inflate a bubble past its true need in society, and when we pop that bubble, it's going to be a very painful process. … One criticism that I've heard about the approach that you're taking [is that you're] bringing people into people's homes, looking in their refrigerator, checking what they're eating. Isn't this the nanny state being inserted right into people's homes in order to control health care costs? What we have found is that patients are really excited about this model of care. We are not pushing ourselves on patients; we're asking patients whether they'd like to be part of the project. And by and large, almost all of the patients we've ever met have been incredibly excited. They feel like the health care system ignores them. … They're getting a medical Sherpa coming right to their home. ... It's like getting an intensive care doctor who actually comes to your home. Exactly. That's right. ... We're bringing better care to them so they feel like they're being taken care of. Someone is paying attention to them finally. So do they experience it as a nanny state? ... They don't ever push back and say, "Stay out of my fridge"? No. It really has not been the response. Our biggest problem is getting patients transitioned back off the team. Our single biggest problem right now is that the health care system is so broken that we, when we want to -- our hope is to take care of someone for three to six months, provide their primary care, get them kind of tuned up and then pass them back to the system. And there is no one to catch them. The primary care is so broken and underfunded and undercapitalized, there's no one to catch them. There's no one to pay attention to them, you know? There are doctors running from room to room to room in 10-minute encounters who can't pay attention to these people. So the biggest challenge is that we tune them up, and we have no place to send them, which is sort of sad. So with Derek Williams, severe asthma, bouncing in and out of the hospital, what is it that you're trying to make sure your team does? The core solution to all this is teamwork, and it's case conferencing, and it's meeting regularly and talking about the problem with a team of professionals who bring different perspectives. If you had a problem in your business, you would bring a group together, and you'd talk through it and try and solve it. And we don't do that in health care. Who's his team? His team is a nurse practitioner, community health worker and a social worker. It's our outreach team, and every week they do internal case conferences, and they run all the cases, and they talk about what the barriers to care are, the challenges, and brainstorm solutions. And every month the whole city comes together -- front-line providers, social workers -- and we do anonymous case discussions at the city level. And what we do is try and pull out common barriers and themes that we're seeing over and over among the patients, and then elevate that up to my board and think in an organizational level, how can we be solving systematically the barriers to care? So you're changing medicine from being individual, physician-focused to specialist is the king to a team of people having to work together, and the team is the king. Is that the concept here? That's exactly right. So this is team care, and it's using story by story by story to pull out narratives that indicate where the system is failing, and then systematically working through those problems at a patient level, but then putting those stories together at the city level and trying to solve those problems at the city level. So if Derek has trouble where his asthma is being driven by the conditions of his home, what are you trying to get your team to do? We've reached out to partners in the city and we've asked them to help us, so [we] reached out to an organization that can help to do rehabilitation in homes and partnered with them and asked them to help us -- you know, what can we do for rehabilitation in his roof and fix the leaks and see if we can make a difference? And ultimately we think that would dramatically reduce his asthma exacerbations. Why don't we just say, "Derek, clean up your house?" Why don't [we say,] "Fix your house; you've got this and that falling apart"? His family probably lives on about $1,000 a month, so they're not really capable -- they're barely able to make ends meet. So it's poverty again? Yes. It's poverty. You said earlier we're not going to fix the poverty. Right. So you're stepping in to fix a corner of it that is causing his health problems? Yes. So how do you bring a team to focus? I'm not going to fix the poverty. What are you going to focus on? Change is really lots of little baby steps that add up to better and better care, so the smallest things can make a difference. If a patient is not able to get their refills, it can be a matter of getting a pharmacy that delivers. If they can't get across town to a doctor, it might be finding a doctor that's closer to their house. If they don't understand what time of the day to take the medicine, it could be a matter of doing a lot of education and writing it out or drawing pictures if they can't read. It can be a matter of pulling on family support or pulling on church support. There are lots and lots and lots of ways to solve problems, and it's a matter of pulling a team of people with different perspectives to work together to solve those problems. Yesterday Cathy, the nurse practitioner, discovered that Derek had run out of refills on his medications and wasn't allowed to refill them. How do you as a team try to tackle that kind of problem? So a lot of the time it's advocacy. You end up calling the insurance company or working with the pharmacy to kind of work through those things and get permission to be able to get refills. I think he had lost his machine, his nebulizer machine for his asthma, and the pharmacy wouldn't give him another one because the insurance company wouldn't approve it. So it's a matter of getting on the phone and explaining who he is and what's going on, and helping him get another nebulizer. And he was going to the emergency room over and over, partly because he didn't have a nebulizer in the house to be able to get his treatment and didn't have refills on his medicine. Patients can be really overwhelmed by their problems and not be able to advocate for themselves, and [they may] need some help to be able to navigate the very complex approval processes that we've created. … So Derek, you've sent teams out to visit him at home, and then you're bringing them back to do what? Mm-hmm. So the irony with Derek is that for a small portion of the cost of the hospital bills he's generating, we could buy him a brand-new house and put it in Camden. Penny-wise and pound-foolish. The way we built our public systems is they're in silos. There's a bucket of money here and a bucket of money here. So there might be housing subsidy here; there might be health care subsidy here; there might be education money; there might be prison money. What we don't realize is that if you push down over here, it pops up over here. So you know by not providing people with decent housing, they're going to overrun the hospital. You're having a meeting at the end of this month with other folks around the city. What is that going to possibly do for Derek? It's going to widen our team. [It shows] that it takes a community to begin to address these issues. … I'll give you an example. Most housing agencies don't put a priority on patients who are going to the emergency room and hospital too much, so we have federally funded housing agencies that have slots, and it's just sort of a waiting list, a random waiting list to get into those slots, whereas what we should be doing is prioritizing people like Derek and his family to be able to get into those slots, or patients that are overutilizing the emergency room and hospital. The message that we've been taking to Trenton and policy-makers is if you only have so many resources, why not invest money here to reduce costs over here, and do it in a measurable way? READINGS & LINKS Atul Gawande first wrote about Dr. Brenner's health care "hot spotting" pilot program and others like it in the Jan. 24, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. Since then, the strategy has garnered considerable attention, praised by some as a promising experiment that could be funded on a larger scale for more intense study under President Obama's health care reform plan. Others are less optimistic. Some question whether it is feasible to replicate Dr. Brenner's strategy elsewhere, particularly in less controlled environments and with less self-motivated administrative support from a dedicated and expert staff. More ardent critics doubt whether Dr. Brenner's program truly resulted in a significant reduction in costs -- arguing that an additional heart transplant could have wiped out the savings -- and warn against nationalizing a similar program, charging that it "fuels the sort of bureaucracy that ... strangles innovation." They have also raised fears that such a program could isolate those who favor limited government by pushing an "unsustainable expansion of the medical establishment" to respond to societal issues traditionally not within the scope of health care. Dr. Gawande hosted a live chat at The New Yorker to discuss some of these criticisms. CREDITS WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY
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Starting with Chrome 13, we'll have HTTPS pins for most Google properties. This means that certificate chains for, say, https://www.google.com , must include a whitelisted public key. It's a fatal error otherwise. Credit goes to my colleague, Chris Evans, for much of this.
The whitelisted public keys for Google currently include Verisign, Google Internet Authority, Equifax and GeoTrust. Thus Chrome will not accept certificates for Google properties from other CAs. As ever, you can look at the source if you wish (search that file for "Verisign"). DigiCert also issues some of our certificates, but we aren't yet enforcing pinning for those domains.
This works with HSTS preloading of Google properties to ensure that, when a user types gmail.com into the address bar, they only get the real Gmail, no matter how hostile the network.
What about MITM proxies, Fiddler etc?
There are a number of cases where HTTPS connections are intercepted by using local, ephemeral certificates. These certificates are signed by a root certificate that has to be manually installed on the client. Corporate MITM proxies may do this, several anti-virus/parental control products do this and debugging tools like Fiddler can also do this. Since we cannot break in these situations, user installed root CAs are given the authority to override pins. We don't believe that there will be any incompatibility issues.
Why public key hashes, not certificate hashes?
In general, hashing certificates is the obvious solution, but the wrong one. The problem is that CA certificates are often reissued: there are multiple certificates with the same public key, subject name etc but different extensions or expiry dates. Browsers build certificates chains from a pool of certificates, bottom up, and an alternative version of a certificate might be substituted for the one that you expect.
For example, StartSSL has two root certificates: one signed with SHA1 and the other with SHA256. If you wished to pin to StartSSL as your CA, which certificate hash would you use? You would have to use both, but how would you know about the other root if I hadn't just told you?
Conversely, public key hashes must be correct:
Browsers assume that the leaf certificate is fixed: it's always the starting point of the chain. The leaf certificate contains a signature which must be a valid signature, from its parent, for that certificate. That implies that the public key of the parent is fixed by the leaf certificate. So, inductively, the chain of public keys is fixed, modulo truncation.
The only sharp edge is that you mustn't pin to a cross-certifying root. For example, GoDaddy's root is signed by Valicert so that older clients, which don't recognise GoDaddy as a root, still trust those certificates. However, you wouldn't want to pin to Valicert because newer clients will stop their chain at GoDaddy.
Also, we're hashing the SubjectPublicKeyInfo not the public key bit string. The SPKI includes the type of the public key and some parameters along with the public key itself. This is important because just hashing the public key leaves one open to misinterpretation attacks. Consider a Diffie-Hellman public key: if one only hashes the public key, not the full SPKI, then an attacker can use the same public key but make the client interpret it in a different group. Likewise one could force an RSA key to be interpreted as a DSA key etc.
(It's possible that a certificate could be reissued with a different SPKI for the same public key. That would be a second sharp edge but, to my knowledge, that has never happened. SPKIs for any public key type should have a distinguished encoding.)
Can I get this for my site? |
Common Cat Diseases
As a cat parent, it is important to recognize the signs and symptoms of common illnesses so you can seek veterinary help for your feline friend in a timely manner if necessary. Read on for information about diseases and other medical inflictions that frequently impact cats.
Cancer
Cancer is a class of diseases in which cells grow uncontrollably, invade surrounding tissue and may spread to other areas of the body. As with people, cats can get various kinds of cancer. The disease can be localized (confined to one area, like a tumor) or generalized (spread throughout the body).
Expand to read more Causes of Cancer Cancer is a “multifactorial” disease, which means it has no known single cause. However, we do know that both hereditary and environmental factors can lead to the development of cancer in cats. cat-care_cat-diseases_body1.jpg Squamous cell carcinoma of the ear, eyelid or nose is a skin cancer caused by repeated exposure to the sun. White, or light colored, cats are more susceptible to squamous cell carcinoma.
of the ear, eyelid or nose is a skin cancer caused by repeated exposure to the sun. White, or light colored, cats are more susceptible to squamous cell carcinoma. Lymphosarcoma or lymphoma (LSA), is one of the most common type of cancer in cats. Some reports estimate that 30% of all reported cat cancers are due to LSA. Feline leukemia virus (FeLV) is linked to most forms of LSA except for the gastrointestinal (GI) form. FeLV is a transmittable retrovirus that can be passed in utero as well as through saliva and direct contact. Primarily a disease in younger cats, the virus doesn’t always manifest symptoms, so it is important to have your cat tested regularly to prevent transmission and progression. There is a vaccine available for FeLV that your veterinarian can discuss with you based on your cat’s lifestyle and risk of exposure to FeLV. The GI form of LSA (the most common form) can cause a large mass in the stomach or intestine or diffuse infiltration throughout the intestinal tract.
It is important to take your cat to your veterinarian if any evidence of disease is noted. LSA is not curable, however, most cats respond well to treatment. Cancer Symptoms Symptoms of cancer in cats may include: Lumps (which are not always malignant, but are always worth having a veterinarian examine)
Swelling
Persistent sores or skin infections
Abnormal discharge from any part of the body
Bad breath
Listlessness, lethargy or other marked change in behavior
Weight loss
Sudden lameness
Diarrhea or vomiting
Scaly and/or red skin patches
Decreased or loss of appetite
Difficulty breathing, urinating or defecating
Change in behavior Diagnosing Cancer in Cats If a lump is present , the first step is typically a needle biopsy, which removes a very small tissue sample for microscopic examination of cells. Alternately, surgery may be performed to remove all or part of the lump for diagnosis by a pathologist.
, the first step is typically a needle biopsy, which removes a very small tissue sample for microscopic examination of cells. Alternately, surgery may be performed to remove all or part of the lump for diagnosis by a pathologist. Radiographs, ultrasound, blood evaluation and other diagnostic tests may also be helpful in determining if cancer is present or if it has spread. Cats More Prone to Cancer Though cancer can be diagnosed in cats of all ages and breeds, it is much more common in older cats.
Certain breeds are prone to specific cancers, but cats with white ears and heads are particularly susceptible to skin cancer. Ask your vet if your cat falls into specific at-risk categories. Cancer Prevention Keeping your cat indoors will protect her from certain skin cancers caused by repeated sun exposure and sunburn.
caused by repeated sun exposure and sunburn. Breast cancer is a common cancer for cats, but it can be avoided by having your cat spayed before her first heat cycle. Cancer Treatments Treatment options vary and depend on the type and stage of cancer.
Common treatments include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and immunotherapy or a combination of therapies. Success of treatment depends on the form and extent of the cancer and the aggressiveness of the therapy. Of course, early detection is best.
Success of treatment depends on the form and extent of the cancer and the aggressiveness of the therapy. Of course, early detection is best. Some cat owners opt for no treatment of the cancer, in which case palliative care, including pain relief, should be considered. Regardless of how you proceed after a diagnosis of cancer in your pet, it is very important to consider his quality of life when making future decisions.
Regardless of how you proceed after a diagnosis of cancer in your pet, it is very important to consider his quality of life when making future decisions. Some cancers can be cured, and almost all patients can receive at least some benefit from treatment. Please note that if your cat’s cancer is not curable, there are still many things you can do to make your pet feel better. Don’t hesitate to talk to your vet about your options. And remember good nutrition and loving care can greatly enhance your cat’s quality of life. Knowing When to Consult Your Vet Contact your veterinarian immediately if your cat shows any of the clinical signs mentioned on the list above. Should your cat receive a diagnosis of cancer, you may wish to consult a veterinary oncologist, often employed by specialty veterinary practices and teaching hospitals.
Diabetes
Diabetes in cats is a complex disease caused by either a lack of the hormone insulin or an inadequate response to insulin. After a cat eats, her digestive system breaks food into various components, including glucose—which is carried into her cells by insulin. When a cat does not produce insulin or cannot utilize it normally, her blood sugar levels elevate. The result is hyperglycemia, which, if left untreated, can cause many complicated health problems for a cat.
Expand to read more It is important to understand that diabetes is considered a manageable disorder—and many diabetic cats can lead happy, healthy lives. Some may even go into remission! Diabetes can be classified as: Type I (lack of insulin production)
(lack of insulin production) Type II (impaired insulin production along with an inadequate response to the hormone). Cats with type II diabetes can progress to type I diabetes. In fact, by the time most cats are diagnosed with diabetes, they are identified as having the type I disorder. These cats require insulin therapy for survival. Cats with type II disease may respond to other forms of therapy. Diabetes Symptoms in Cats The following are signs that your cat may be diabetic: Change in appetite (either increased or decreased)
Weight loss
Excessive thirst/increase in water consumption
Increased urination
Urinating in areas other than litter box
Unusually sweet-smelling breath
Lethargy
Dehydration
Unkempt hair coat
Urinary tract infection Causes of Diabetes The exact cause of diabetes is unknown. Genetics, pancreatic disease, certain medications and abnormal protein deposits in the pancreas can play a role in causing this disorder. The most important factors in the development of diabetes seem to be obesity, gender (male cats are more commonly afflicted than females) and age. Diagnosing Diabetes To properly diagnose diabetes, your veterinarian will collect information about clinical signs, perform a physical examination and check blood work and urinalysis. Treating Diabetes Every diabetic cat is an individual and will respond differently to therapy. Diabetes treatment is based on how severe the signs of disease are and whether there are any other health issues that could complicate therapy.
Diabetes treatment is based on how severe the signs of disease are and whether there are any other health issues that could complicate therapy. Some cats are seriously ill when first diagnosed and require intensive hospitalized care for several days to regulate their blood sugar levels.
for several days to regulate their blood sugar levels. Cats who are more stable when first diagnosed may respond to oral medication or a high-fiber diet.
For most cats, insulin injections are necessary for adequate regulation of blood glucose. Once your pet’s individual insulin treatment is established, typically based on weight, you will be shown how to give him his insulin injections at home.
Once your pet’s individual insulin treatment is established, typically based on weight, you will be shown how to give him his insulin injections at home. Your vet may also show you how to perform glucose tests at home. Other routine blood work may also be necessary. As your veterinarian will explain, it’s important to always give your cat insulin at the same time every day and feed her regular meals in conjunction with her medication; this allows increased nutrients in the blood to coincide with peak insulin level. This will lessen the chance that her sugar levels will swing either too high or too low. You can work with your vet to create a feeding schedule around your pet’s medication time. It is also important to avoid feeding your diabetic cat treats that are high in glucose. Diabetes Prevention A proper diet and regular exercise can go a long way to avoid the development of feline diabetes. Aside from other negative effects, obesity is known to contribute to insulin resistance. If You Suspect Your Cat Has Diabetes If your cat is showing any abnormal clinical signs as listed above, make an appointment to see your veterinarian immediately. If a diabetic cat is not treated, he can develop kidney disease, neurological disorders or other metabolic diseases. Cats with type I diabetes require insulin therapy for survival.
Feline Immunodeficiency Virus (FIV)
Cats infected with feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) may not show symptoms until years after the initial infection occurred. Although the virus is slow-acting, a cat’s immune system is severely weakened once the disease takes hold. This makes the cat susceptible to various secondary infections. Infected cats receiving supportive medical care and kept in a stress-free, indoor environment can live relatively comfortable lives for months to years before the disease reaches its chronic stages.
Expand to read more An FIV-infected cat may not show any symptoms for years. Once symptoms do develop, however, they may continually progress—or a cat may show signs of sickness interspersed with health for years. If your cat is demonstrating any of the following symptoms, please have examined by your veterinarian: Enlarged lymph nodes
Fever
Anemia
Weight loss
Disheveled coat
Poor appetite
Diarrhea
Abnormal appearance or inflammation of the eye (conjunctivitis)
Inflammation of the gums (gingivitis)
Inflammation of the mouth (stomatitis)
Dental disease
Skin redness or hair loss
Wounds that don’t heal
Sneezing
Discharge from eyes or nose
Frequent urination, straining to urinate or urinating outside of litter box
Behavior change FIV Transmission FIV is mainly passed from cat to cat through deep bite wounds , the kind that usually occur outdoors during aggressive fights and territorial disputes—a perfect reason to keep your cat inside.
, the kind that usually occur outdoors during aggressive fights and territorial disputes—a perfect reason to keep your cat inside. Another, less common mode of transmission is from an FIV-infected mother cat to her kitten. FIV does not seem to be commonly spread through sharing food bowls and litter boxes, social grooming, sneezing and other casual modes of contact.
FIV does not seem to be commonly spread through sharing food bowls and litter boxes, social grooming, sneezing and other casual modes of contact. Although any feline is susceptible, free-roaming, outdoor intact male cats who fight most frequently contract the disease. Cats who live indoors are the least likely to be infected. Please note: FIV cannot be transmitted from cat to human, only from cat to cat. Preventing FIV The best way to prevent your cat from contracting the virus is to keep him indoors, avoiding any chance of contact with infected felines.
If you walk your cat, keep him on a leash when outdoors.
If your cat is going to be spending any time in a cattery or in a home with other felines, make sure all cats have tested negative for FIV.
Any recently adopted cat should be tested for FIV prior to entering your home.
You may also want to speak to your veterinarian about the FIV vaccine and if it is appropriate for your cat. When to Consult Your Veterinarian If you suspect your cat has FIV, have him examined and tested by your veterinarian right away. During your visit, be ready to describe any symptoms that you have detected, no matter how minute they seem. Also make sure to keep your cat indoors, away from other felines who might possibly be infected or whom he could infect, until you have a diagnosis. Without proper treatment, the secondary infections that can occur as a consequence of FIV can progress to life-threatening conditions. Additionally, cats with FIV can develop various forms of cancer, blood diseases or kidney failure, which will ultimately claim the cat’s life. Diagnosing FIV FIV infection is routinely diagnosed by blood testing.
The FIV status of every cat should be known.
The most common type of test looks for the presence of antibodies to the virus in the blood. No test is 100% accurate all of the time, and your veterinarian will interpret the test result and determine whether further testing is needed to confirm either a positive or negative test result. Once a cat is determined to be FIV-positive, that cat is capable of transmitting the disease to other cats.
No test is 100% accurate all of the time, and your veterinarian will interpret the test result and determine whether further testing is needed to confirm either a positive or negative test result. Once a cat is determined to be FIV-positive, that cat is capable of transmitting the disease to other cats. Since it is possible for an infected mother cat to transfer FIV antibodies to her kittens, these kittens may test positive from their mother’s antibodies until they have cleared them from their systems, which happens by six months of age. Kittens who test positive for FIV antibodies when they’re younger than six months should undergo antibody tests again at a later date to see if they are infected. FIV Treatment Unfortunately, there is no specific antiviral treatment for FIV. Cats can carry the virus for a long time before symptoms appear. Therefore, treatment focuses mainly on extending the asymptomatic period or, if symptoms have set in, on easing the secondary effects of the virus. Your veterinarian may prescribe some of the following treatments: Medication for secondary infections
Healthy, palatable diet to encourage good nutrition
Fluid and electrolyte replacement therapy
Anti-inflammatory drugs
Immune-enhancing drugs
Parasite control Caring for an FIV-Infected Cat Keep your cat indoors. This will protect him from contact with disease-causing agents to which he may be susceptible. By bringing your cat indoors, you’re also protecting the uninfected cats in your community.
This will protect him from contact with disease-causing agents to which he may be susceptible. By bringing your cat indoors, you’re also protecting the uninfected cats in your community. Watch for changes—even seemingly minor—in your cat’s health and behavior. Immediately report any health concerns to your vet.
Immediately report any health concerns to your vet. Bring your cat to your vet at least twice per year for a wellness checkup, blood count and urine analysis.
for a wellness checkup, blood count and urine analysis. Feed your cat nutritionally balanced food —no raw food diets, please, as bacteria and parasites in uncooked meat and eggs can be dangerous to immunocompromised pets.
—no raw food diets, please, as bacteria and parasites in uncooked meat and eggs can be dangerous to immunocompromised pets. Be sure your cat is spayed or neutered.
Feline Leukemia Virus (FelV)
First discovered in the 1960s, feline leukemia virus is a transmittable RNA retrovirus that can severely inhibit a cat’s immune system. It is one of the most commonly diagnosed causes of disease and death in domestic cats. Because the virus doesn’t always manifest symptoms right away, any new cat entering a household—and any sick cat—should be tested for FeLV.
Expand to read more FeLV weakens an animal’s immune system and predisposes cats to a variety of infections and diseases, including anemia, kidney disease and lymphosarcoma, a highly malignant and fatal cancer of the lymph system. Young kittens and cats less than one year of age are most susceptible to the virus. Cats living with an infected cat, allowed outdoors where they may be bitten by an infected cat, and kittens born to a mother who is FeLV positive are most at risk for infection. The FeLV virus is shed in many bodily fluids, including saliva, nasal secretions, urine, feces and blood.
FeLV is most commonly transmitted through direct contact, mutual grooming and through sharing litter boxes, food and water bowls.
It can also be passed in utero or through mother’s milk.
Infected outdoor cats fighting with other cats can transmit the disease through bites and scratches. Healthy cats over three months of age and vaccinated for FeLV are highly unlikely to contract the virus from another cat. Signs of FeLV Cats can be infected and show no signs. Others may exhibit: Loss of appetite and weight loss
Pale or inflamed gums
Poor coat condition
Abcesses
Fever
Upper respiratory infections
Diarrhea and vomiting
Seizures
Changes in behavior
Vision or other eye problems
Enlarged lymph nodes
Reproductive problems (in females)
Jaundice
Chronic skin disease
Respiratory distress
Lethargy Preventing FelV There is a vaccine available for cats who are at risk of contracting FeLV . Like all vaccines, there are risks involved in vaccination, and the vaccine is not a 100% guarantee against infection. Your veterinarian can best evaluate whether this vaccine is right for your cat.
. Like all vaccines, there are risks involved in vaccination, and the vaccine is not a 100% guarantee against infection. Your veterinarian can best evaluate whether this vaccine is right for your cat. As with any infectious disease, the best prevention is eliminating sources of exposure. Routine FeLV testing and keeping your cat indoors and away from cats whose FeLV status is not known remain the best way to prevent your cat from becoming infected. Diagnosing FelV There are several types of tests available to diagnose FeLV. Most veterinarians and shelter professionals use the ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) test, which detects antigen to the FELV virus in the bloodstream.
Other tests like the IFA (indirect fluorescent antibody) test or PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test are recommended to confirm positive ELISA test results. Caring for a Cat with FelV Feed your cat a nutritionally balanced diet , one free of raw meat, eggs and unpasteurized dairy products, which can harbor bacteria and parasites and lead to infection.
, one free of raw meat, eggs and unpasteurized dairy products, which can harbor bacteria and parasites and lead to infection. Provide a quiet place for your cat to rest indoors and away from other cats who could promote disease.
who could promote disease. Bring your cat to the vet every six months —at the very least—for a wellness checkup and blood tests.
—at the very least—for a wellness checkup and blood tests. During the early stages of infection, a cat may not show any clinical signs, but he can still pass the virus to other cats. It’s not advisable to introduce a new uninfected cat into the household, even one who has been properly vaccinated against FeLV. Those living in close quarters with infected cats are most at risk for infection, and should be tested for the virus and, if negative, be housed separately.
Those living in close quarters with infected cats are most at risk for infection, and should be tested for the virus and, if negative, be housed separately. FeLV is contagious to other cats, but not to humans or other species. Other cats in the house can acquire the virus from an infected cat. Though the virus doesn’t live long outside of the body, and is easily inactivated with common disinfectants, it can be passed through mutual grooming, shared food and water as well as common litter boxes.
Other cats in the house can acquire the virus from an infected cat. Though the virus doesn’t live long outside of the body, and is easily inactivated with common disinfectants, it can be passed through mutual grooming, shared food and water as well as common litter boxes. Sadly there is no cure for FeLV, and it is estimated that less than 20% of clinically infected cats survive more than three years of active infection. In the case of those cats who develop cancer, chemotherapy can help prolong life, but treatment often focuses on providing the best quality of life.
Heartworm
Spread by infected mosquitoes, heartworm is increasingly being recognized as an underlying cause of health problems in domestic cats. Cats are an atypical host for heartworms. Despite its name, heartworm primarily causes lung disease in cats. It is an important concern for any cat owner living in areas densely populated by mosquitoes, and prevention should be discussed with a veterinarian.
Expand to read more You may have thought heartworm disease only affects dogs, and it’s true that the infection is less common in cats. The cat is not a natural host for the heartworm parasite, Dirofilaria immitis, and so the heartworm is not likely to complete its entire life cycle. That means that fewer and smaller worms survive, and many do not reach a cat’s heart. The worms that do survive—and the resulting immune reaction that the cat’s body sets up to kill the developing worms—can cause severe health problems. cat-care_cat-diseases_body2-left.jpg cat-care_cat-diseases_body2-right.jpg Causes and Signs of Heartworm Disease When a mosquito carrying the heartworm parasite, Dirofilaria immitis, bites a cat, larvae are transmitted into the bloodstream. The larvae migrate toward the heart over a period of around four to six months, maturing as they go, then settle in the heart, pulmonary arteries and blood vessels of the lungs. Because a domestic cat is not a natural host for the heartworm parasite, many of the worms die. These—along with the living worms—cause severe inflammatory and immune responses in an infected cat. Cats of all ages, living in any region, can contract heartworm, but the disease is more prevalent in felines who live in areas densely populated by mosquitoes. Outdoor cats are at greater risk because of increased exposure to mosquitoes. However, indoor cats are also susceptible to mosquito bites, so it’s smart to discuss prevention with your vet. The heartworm infection can be especially life-threatening to kittens and older cats. The following signs may indicate that your cat has been infected: Persistent cough
Breathing difficulties (panting, wheezing, rapid or open-mouthed breathing)
Depression
Loss of appetite
Weight loss
Sporadic vomiting
Lethargy
Sudden death Breathing difficulties that occur in the first stage of heartworm disease, caused by worms newly arriving in the heart and lungs, were likely previously diagnosed as feline asthma or bronchitis. However, these breathing problems are now thought to have actually been due to what is now called heartworm-associated respiratory disease (HARD). Heartworm Prevention There are several FDA-approved medications available that reliably prevent feline heartworm infection. Check with your vet and please remember, it’s recommended that cats are screened for heartworm infection with blood tests before being given any type of preventative medication.
Check with your vet and please remember, it’s recommended that cats are screened for heartworm infection with blood tests before being given any type of preventative medication. It’s also a good idea to limit your cat’s exposure to mosquito-infested areas and bring her in for preventative screenings during vet visits.
and bring her in for preventative screenings during vet visits. Regular checkups are key to detecting early infections and can give your cat a good chance at recovery. Diagnosing Heartworm Disease
Heartworm disease is not as easily diagnosed in cats as it is in dogs. Routine testing requires a combination of blood tests.
When cats show signs of respiratory difficulty and heartworm is suspected, diagnosis is usually based on a cat’s history, physical examination, radiographs, echocardiogram and blood tests. Treating Heartworm Disease There are currently no products in the United States approved for treating feline heartworm infection. The good news is that many heartworm-infected cats are able to fight the infection themselves, and can be monitored with radiographs every few months, while waiting out the worms’ lifespan. If an infected cat shows symptoms of lung disease, the cat can be given a cortisone-like medication as needed. Medication can also be given to help control coughing and vomiting. Although some cats are able to fight the infection on their own, the following can occur if heartworms are not monitored and treated: Damage to walls of heart
Damage to pulmonary blood vessels
Possible obstruction of blood flow through pulmonary arteries
Impaired breathing
Heart and lung failure
Kidney and liver damage
Sudden death
High-Rise Syndrome
Many pet parents eagerly open their windows to enjoy the weather during the summer months. Unfortunately, unscreened windows pose a real danger to cats, who fall out of them so often that the veterinary profession has a name for the complaint—High-Rise Syndrome. Falls can result in shattered jaws, punctured lungs, broken limbs and pelvises—and even death.
Expand to read more Cats have excellent survival instincts, and they don’t deliberately “jump” from high places that would be dangerous. Most cats fall accidentally from high-rise windows, terraces or fire escapes.
that would be dangerous. Most cats fall accidentally from high-rise windows, terraces or fire escapes. Cats have an incredible ability to focus their attention on whatever interests them . A bird or other animal attraction can be distracting enough to cause them to lose their balance and fall.
. A bird or other animal attraction can be distracting enough to cause them to lose their balance and fall. Because cats have little fear of heights and enjoy perching in high places, pet owners often assume that they can take care of themselves. Although cats can cling to the bark of trees with their claws, other surfaces are much more difficult, such as window ledges, concrete or brick surfaces.
Although cats can cling to the bark of trees with their claws, other surfaces are much more difficult, such as window ledges, concrete or brick surfaces. When cats fall from high places, they don’t land squarely on their feet. Instead, they land with their feet slightly splayed apart, which can cause severe head and pelvis injuries.
Instead, they land with their feet slightly splayed apart, which can cause severe head and pelvis injuries. It is a misconception that cats won’t be injured if they fall from one- or two-story buildings. They may actually be at greater risk for injury when falling shorter distances than by falling from mid-range or higher altitudes. Shorter distances do not give them enough time to adjust their body posture to fall correctly.
They may actually be at greater risk for injury when falling shorter distances than by falling from mid-range or higher altitudes. Shorter distances do not give them enough time to adjust their body posture to fall correctly. When cats fall from high-rise buildings, they may end up on sidewalks or streets that are dangerous and unfamiliar to them. Never assume that the animal has not survived the fall; immediately rush the animal to the nearest animal hospital or to your veterinarian.
Never assume that the animal has not survived the fall; immediately rush the animal to the nearest animal hospital or to your veterinarian. There is a 90% survival rate for cats who are high-rise victims if they receive immediate and proper medical attention. Preventing High-Rise Syndrome To keep your cat safe during the summer, take the following precautions: Install snug and sturdy screens in all your windows.
If you have adjustable screens, please make sure that they are tightly wedged into window frames.
Note that cats can slip through childproof window guards—these don’t provide adequate protection!
Rabies
Rabies is a viral disease that affects the brain and spinal cord of all mammals, including cats, dogs and humans. This preventable disease has been reported in every state except Hawaii. There’s good reason that the very word “rabies” evokes fear in people—once symptoms appear, rabies is close to 100% fatal.
Expand to read more Rabies Transmission There are several reported routes of transmission of the rabies virus. Rabies is most often transmitted through a bite from an infected animal.
Less frequently, it can be passed on when the saliva of an infected animal enters another animal’s body through mucous membranes or an open, fresh wound.
The risk for contracting rabies runs highest if your cat is exposed to wild animals. Outbreaks can occur in populations of wild animals (most often raccoons, bats, skunks and foxes in this country) or in areas where there are significant numbers of unvaccinated, free-roaming dogs and cats.
In the United States, rabies is reported in cats more than in any other domestic species.
Unvaccinated cats who are allowed to roam outdoors are at the highest risk for rabies infection.
Feral cat populations remain a reservoir host for the rabies virus. Rabies Prevention Vaccination is the key—and in many areas of the country, such as New York City, it's the law.
Some local ordinances require lengthy quarantines—or euthanasia—of pets who have bitten someone if their owners do not have proof of current vaccination.
Vaccinating your cat doesn't just protect her from rabies—it also protects your cat if she bites someone.
In municipalities where rabies vaccinations for cats are not required, the decision to vaccinate is best left to the judgment of the veterinarian and the cat guardian because some cats experience serious side effects to the rabies vaccine.
The vaccine should definitely be administered if your cat spends any time outdoors (ASPCA experts recommend keeping pet cats indoors). Symptoms of Rabies Animals will not show signs immediately following exposure to a rabid animal. Symptoms can be varied and can take months to develop. Classic signs of rabies in cats include:
Changes in behavior (including aggression, restlessness and lethargy),
Increased vocalization
Loss of appetite
Weakness
Disorientation
Paralysis
Seizures
Sudden death Diagnosing Rabies There is no accurate test to diagnose rabies in live animals.
The direct fluorescent antibody test is the most accurate test for diagnosis, but it can only be performed after the death of the animal.
The rabies virus can incubate in a cat’s body anywhere from just one week to more than a year before the virus appears in the saliva and the cat is capable of transmitting the disease.
When the animal becomes infectious, symptoms appear quickly. It is possible for a cat, or dog, to shed the virus for several days before clinical signs appear.
There is no treatment or cure for rabies once symptoms appear. The disease results in fatality. What to Do if Your Cat Interacts With a Rabid Animal Put gloves on to protect yourself from infection.
Call your veterinarian for an immediate appointment!
Contact local animal control officers if the animal who bit your pet is still at large; they will be best able to safely apprehend and remove the animal from the environment.
A cat who is up to date with his vaccinations and who has been bitten by a possibly rabid animal should also be given a rabies booster vaccine immediately and kept under observation for 45 days.
If you think you’ve been bitten by a rabid animal, see your doctor immediately! Note: Do not attempt to handle or capture a wild animal who is acting strangely (i.e., a nocturnal animal who is out during the day, an animal who acts unusually tame). Report the animal to local animal control officers as soon as possible.
Ringworm
Although the name suggests otherwise, ringworm isn’t caused by a worm at all—but a fungus that can infect the skin, hair and nails. Not uncommon in cats, this highly contagious disease can lead to patchy, circular areas of hair loss with central red rings. Also known as dermatophytosis, ringworm often spreads to other pets in the household—and to humans, too.
Expand to read more Ringworm Symptoms Classic symptoms of ringworm in cats include: Skin lesions that typically appear on the head, ears and forelimbs.
Ringworm can cause flaky bald patches that sometimes look red in the center.
In mild cases, there may be localized areas of redness or simply dandruff, while more severe infections can spread over a cat’s entire body.
It’s also possible for a pet to carry ringworm spores and not show any symptoms whatsoever. Ringworm Transmission A cat can get ringworm directly through contact with an infected animal—or indirectly through contact with bedding, dishes and other materials that have been contaminated with the skin cells or hairs of infected animals. Ringworm spores are notoriously hardy and can survive in the environment for more than a year! Any cat can develop ringworm, but kittens less than a year old and geriatric cats are most prone to infection.
Long-haired cats and those who are immunocompromised are also more susceptible.
Ringworm can quickly spread in shelters or other crowded environments.
Warm and humid conditions tend to promote ringworm infections. Diagnosing Ringworm Because infection can potentially spread over a cat’s body, it is important that you see your vet for an accurate diagnosis if you suspect your pet has ringworm. And because the infection can easily spread to you and other animals in the household, it’s a smart idea to immediately quarantine your cat until a veterinarian can confirm a diagnosis. You should also thoroughly wash your hands after you touch your cat. Since some cats show few or no symptoms, a diagnosis of ringworm is rarely made just by looking at the skin.
A veterinarian may use an ultraviolet light to diagnose ringworm, or may examine a fungal culture taken from a cat’s hair or skin cells.
Skin biopsy and microscopic exam are sometimes also performed. Treating Ringworm Treatment of ringworm depends on the severity of the infection. A veterinarian may prescribe a shampoo or ointment that contains a special medication to kill the fungus.
In some cases, oral medications are necessary.
To ensure that you’ve eradicated this resistant and hardy fungus, treatment may have to be given for several months or more and fungal cultures rechecked periodically.
It’s also important to treat the cat’s environment to prevent infection from recurring. If your veterinarian has diagnosed your cat with ringworm, he or she will explain what you must do to prevent the fungus from spreading to your other pets—and to the human members of the household. But keep in mind that if you have other pets, it’s likely that most of them have been exposed as well. Your veterinarian may recommend that you do the following: Bathe all pets in the household with a medicated rinse or shampoo.
Wash the infected animals’ bedding and toys with a disinfectant that kills ringworm spores.
Discard items that are impossible to thoroughly disinfect (carpeted cat trees, etc.)
Frequently vacuum to rid the house of infected hairs and skin cells. (Yes, the fungus can survive on hair and skin that your cat sheds!)
Thoroughly wash your hands after you bathe or touch your cat. If a cat with ringworm is not properly treated, the lesions can spread over large areas of the animal’s body, causing hair loss and skin infections.
Upper Respiratory Infections
A cat’s upper respiratory tract—the nose, throat and sinus area—is susceptible to infections caused by a variety of viruses and bacteria.
Expand to read more Causes of Upper Respiratory Infections Viruses are the most common causes of upper respiratory infections (URIs) in cats.
Feline calicivirus and feline herpesvirus account for 80 to 90% of all contagious upper respiratory problems, and are prevalent in shelters, catteries and multi-cat households.
These viruses can be transmitted from cat to cat through sneezing, coughing, or while grooming or sharing food and water bowls.
Once infected, cats can become carriers for life, and though they may not show clinical signs, they can still transmit the viruses to others.
Cats often develop bacterial infections secondary to these common viral infections.
There are also upper respiratory infections in cats that are primarily caused by bacteria. Chlamydia and Bordetella—commonly found in shelters and areas with multiple cats—are two such bacterial infections.
Less common in cats than dogs, Bordetella is usually associated with stress and overcrowded living conditions. Preventing Upper Respiratory Infections Keep your cat indoors to minimize the risk of exposure to infected animals.
Properly isolate infected cats to protect other pets living in the same environment.
Minimize stress.
Keep your cat up to date on vaccines as recommended by your vet. Vaccines for upper respiratory disease in cats may not actually prevent infection, but they help lessen the severity of the disease in some cases.
Regular veterinary exams and preventative care can help catch and treat problems early. A cat’s best defense against upper respiratory infection is a healthy immune system.
Practice good hygiene and wash your hands thoroughly when handling multiple cats. Symptoms of Upper Respiratory Infections Symptoms differ depending on the cause and location of the infection, but some common clinical signs of upper respiratory problems in cats include: Sneezing
Congestion
Runny nose
Cough
Clear to colored nasal discharge
Gagging, drooling
Fever
Loss of or decreased appetite
Rapid breathing
Nasal and oral ulcers
Squinting or rubbing eyes
Open-mouth breathing
Depression Diagnosing Upper Respiratory Infections Age, vaccination status and physical condition all play a role in a cat’s susceptibility to upper respiratory infections.
Cats who live in multi-cat households or shelters are most susceptible.
Veterinarians have found that stress plays a role in causing outbreaks of URI, and cats in any shelter, cattery or boarding facility are generally experiencing high levels of stress.
Cats who have recovered from URI can become carriers, and may experience recurrences when stressed.
Certain breeds like Persians and other flat-faced breeds have a predisposition to develop upper respiratory infections due to their facial structure. It’s important to bring your cat to a veterinarian if you think she may be suffering from an upper respiratory infection. A brief exam by a veterinarian will help to determine if your cat requires medication, has a fever or is dehydrated. Avoid self-diagnosis, since your cat may be infectious and require isolation, antibiotics or additional veterinary care. Treating Upper Respiratory Infections Your veterinarian will prescribe the best course of treatment for your cat, which may include: Medications
Isolation
Rest
Support with fluids
Nutritional support Left untreated, some upper respiratory infections can progress to pneumonia or have other serious complications, such as blindness or chronic breathing difficulties.
Worms
Cats can acquire a variety of intestinal parasites, including some that are commonly referred to as “worms.” Infestations of intestinal worms can cause a variety of symptoms. Sometimes cats demonstrate few to no outward signs of infection, and the infestation can go undetected despite being a potentially serious health problem. Some feline parasitic worms are hazards for human health as well. |
The IRS says it has stopped targeting the tea party — but three years later, the tax agency is still holding on to the sensitive information it pried from the conservative groups through invasive questions, and officials are even vowing to make the answers public.
Groups caught up in the scandal say that is proof the targeting is continuing, and they want the IRS to expunge the information or, at the very least, to make sure it is never released.
Obama administration officials insist they have stopped targeting but say the groups are at fault for following the misguided IRS requests for information. Now, the administration says, there is nothing the tax agency can do but make the information public as the law requires.
On Thursday, a federal appeals court in Washington will be asked to referee the dispute, just one of the legal problems still plaguing the IRS after its 2013 admission that it inappropriately singled out conservative and tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny.
“They asked for things to which they were not entitled,” said Cleta Mitchell, an attorney for True the Vote, one of the tea party nonprofits that got caught up in the targeting scandal. “This is the fruit of the poisonous tree.”
The IRS acknowledged that the questions it asked were inappropriate and weren’t needed to decide on tea party groups’ applications for nonprofit status.
Questions included such sensitive information as the names of all financial contributors; lists of family members, details of their political affiliations and speculation about their plans to run for office; and details of organization members’ outside jobs.
Groups were even told that they must detail members’ private communications with their local legislators or any contact with reporters.
Tea party groups said the questions trampled on their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and association.
Some tea party organizations, advised by their attorneys, refused to comply. Others figured that the IRS had the upper hand, so they turned over the information despite misgivings.
The IRS has apologized for the intrusive questions but still holds on to the information it gleaned from dozens of tea party groups from 2010 through 2013.
The agency did not provide responses to questions from The Washington Times about how many groups were still awaiting approval, nor did it say what it planned to do with the reams of information pried from tea party groups.
But in briefs with the appeals court, the Obama administration says the fault lies with the tea party organizations that complied with the IRS requests.
“The IRS expressly advised plaintiff that, if the application were approved, the IRS ‘will be required by law to make’ the ‘information that you submit in response to this letter available for public inspection,’” administration attorneys said. “Plaintiff still submitted the information to the IRS to support its application, knowing that if it were granted, the information would be subject to public inspection.”
According to the IRS, tea party groups could have simply ignored the agency’s demands, then sued if their applications were denied.
Fat chance, the tea party groups replied.
They said that under IRS rules, applications without all of the information requested are considered incomplete and the cases are closed without any final determination. No determination means no chance to sue, the tea party groups said.
“Under the threat of its application being closed, TTV chose to provide information to the IRS, information it believed was requested in the ordinary course of the application process. The retention of such information is an ‘affront to the taxpayer’s privacy,’” the group argued.
The tea party groups likely have a tough road ahead of them.
A lower court dismissed True the Vote’s complaints along with those of several dozen other groups. It found no current harm because the IRS says it is no longer singling out the tea party and almost all of the groups have been approved for tax-exempt status.
Attorneys for the tea party groups say the judge did not address the sensitive information that the IRS still holds.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission. |
United Nations (CNN) -- Pakistan's military-led former government failed to protect former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto before her 2007 assassination, and intelligence agencies hindered the subsequent investigation, a U.N. commission concluded in a report released Thursday.
The three-member investigative panel issued a scathing report Thursday afternoon, concluding that the suicide bombing that killed Bhutto "could have been prevented" and that police deliberately failed to pursue an effective investigation into the killings.
Bhutto had returned from a self-imposed, eight-year exile to run in the country's general elections two months before her assassination and already had escaped one attempt on her life. She was killed in December 2007 by a 15-year-old suicide bomber while campaigning in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, the seat of the country's military.
"No one believes that this boy acted alone," the report states. "A range of government officials failed profoundly in their efforts first to protect Ms. Bhutto, and second to investigate with vigor all those responsible for her murder, not only in the execution of the attack, but also in its conception, planning and financing."
A spokesman for then-President Pervez Musharraf said Friday the government offered adequate protection for Bhutto.
"I believe the government at the time did whatever they thought was reasonable," said Muhammad Ali Saif, a spokesman and adviser to the former president.
"It was repeatedly stressed [to Bhutto] that she should be careful because of numerous credible threats against her," the spokesman said. "Unfortunately, she did not heed these requests, and she went ahead and took part in the procession. The government did take whatever reasonable measures to protect her.
"There's no prescribed standard for maximum or minimum security. The very fact that she deemed it necessary go to a public meeting shows that she herself was satisfied with the level of security the government provided."
Pakistan's government and the CIA blamed the killing on Baitullah Mehsud, a top Pakistani Taliban leader with ties to al Qaeda. Mehsud was killed last year in a suspected U.S. drone strike.
While Thursday's report did not identify a particular culprit, it found that police failed to preserve evidence at the scene of the bombing and said the investigation "suffered from a lack of commitment to identify and bring all of the perpetrators to justice." In particular, the "pervasive reach" of Pakistan's intelligence agencies left police "unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions, which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken," the report states.
The current Pakistani government, led by Bhutto's husband, Asif Ali Zardari also responded to the report.
"The U.N. Commission has meticulously identified the criminal attitude of the previous dictatorial regime that led to Mohtarma Benzazir Bhutto's assassination," said Farahnaz Ispahani, a media adviser to the president. "Mohtarma and President Asif Ali Zardari's position [have] been vindicated. This report will pave the way for a proper police investigation and possible penal proceedings."
Another spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, said the U.N report will "lend speed and strength to the domestic investigation that is ongoing."
The U.N. commission's chairman, Chilean U.N. Ambassador Heraldo Munoz, said the panel's role was "fact-finding" and not prosecutorial. Asked whether the failure to protect Bhutto was deliberate, he said, "it is not up to us to make inferences."
But he added, "It is clear that warnings were passed on, on various occasions, and Ms. Bhutto received also information in this regard from outside Pakistan.
"Nevertheless, what we have found is that the passing of information was not accompanied by commensurate measures to protect her, particularly given the fact that an assassination attempt had been made against her the very day she returned to Karachi, [Pakistan]," he said.
Nationwide polls conducted shortly after Bhutto's death found that a majority of Pakistanis believed Musharraf's government was complicit in the assassination. Bhutto's supporters took to the streets after her killing. The ensuing riots left 58 dead and more than $200 million in property damage.
Bhutto's return to Pakistan came amid a struggle between the country's political leaders and Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup. At the same time, the country was besieged by a surge of attacks by Islamic extremists. Her first night back in her homeland, a pair of bombs went off near her armored truck, killing 149 people and wounding more than 400.
Further heightening tensions, Musharraf declared a state of emergency in November 2007, suspending the constitution, sacking the country's chief justice for a second time and imposing what amounted to martial law. Thursday's report criticized the influence of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in the country's government, including efforts to influence elections and the courts.
"This pervasive involvement of intelligence agencies in diverse spheres, which is an open secret, has undermined the rule of law, distorted civilian-military relations and weakened some political and law enforcement institutions," the report states. "At the same time, it has contributed to widespread public distrust in those institutions and fed a generalized political culture that thrives on competing conspiracy theories."
Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party went on to win the most number of seats in elections held in 2008, and Musharraf resigned. Zardari asked the United Nations to look into his wife's death after taking office, and he was one of the more than 250 people interviewed by the commission.
Bhutto faced threats from "a number of sources," including al Qaeda, the Taliban and local Islamic militants and "potentially" from Pakistan's ruling establishment, the report states. Two months before her death, she wrote a letter to Musharraf that identified three people she considered threats to her safety. But Pakistan's investigation failed to investigate Mehsud, al Qaeda or other organizations that might have been involved, according to the U.N. report.
"Investigators also dismissed the possibility of involvement by elements of the establishment, including the three persons identified by Ms. Bhutto as threats to her in her 16 October 2007 letter to Gen. Musharraf," the report states.
U.N. officials said the question of whether to reopen a criminal investigation into Bhutto's assassination now lies with Pakistan.
"We cannot accuse or absolve anyone," Munoz said. "That is not our task. That is the task of the competent authorities in Pakistan."
CNN's Joe Vaccarello at the United Nations and Reza Sayah in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report. |
Five U.S. senators including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said they have “significant concerns” that Charter Communications Inc.’s proposed $55.1 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable Inc. could raise prices and thwart competition from cable’s online video rivals.
The deal to create the second-largest U.S. cable provider behind Comcast Corp. would “effectively create a nationwide broadband duopoly” controlling nearly two-thirds of U.S. homes with high-speed Internet connections, the senators said in the Feb. 25 letter to leaders of the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department.
Regulators need to act to “prevent any possible harm,” the senators said. Signers included Sanders, a Vermont independent who is running for the Democratic presidential nomination, and Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Al Franken of Minnesota, Ron Wyden of Oregon.
Charter is “committed to providing superior broadband and video services at competitive rates,” Tamara Smith, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
The agencies are reviewing the deal proposed in May. With the deal, Charter would almost quadruple its cable subscribers, gaining 12 million customers in cities including New York, Los Angeles and Dallas. The combined business would have about 17 million basic cable customers, compared with Comcast’s 22 million. |
Nearly 200 Felines are Waiting for Homes at AHS
In celebration of AHS’ 60th Anniversary, we are reducing all cat adoption fees! On Saturday, June 17 and Sunday, June 18, 2017, all adult cats 7 months and older can be adopted for just $0.60 and kittens can be adopted for $60.
When the weather warms up in the spring, hundreds of cats arrive at AHS’ doorstep. Many are too young to go up for adoption when they first arrive, and have been raised in AHS’ Bottle Baby ICU, Kitten Nursery, and in loving Foster Hero homes. Now that a few months have passed, these cats and kittens are ready for adoption! There is a feline for every cat lover – from affectionate cats with full-throttle purrs to spunky kittens with a limitless supply of energy. There’s bound to be the purrfect cat for your family here!
Click here to see all of AHS’ adoptable cats and kittens or visit one of AHS’ three adoption locations:
Nina Mason Pulliam Campus for Compassion
1521 W. Dobbins Road
Phoenix, AZ 85041
Driving Directions
Phone: 602.997.7585
Sunnyslope Campus
9226 N. 13th Avenue
Phoenix, AZ 85021
Driving Directions
Phone: 602.997.7585
Petique at The Shops at Norterra
2450 W. Happy Valley Road, Ste. 1149
Phoenix, AZ 85085
Driving Directions
Phone: 602.761.2973
Adopt a Cat! |
For the third time in the past two weeks, a national poll has found that roughly 60% of all Americans oppose eliminating collective bargaining rights for public employee unions, the highly contentious proposal put forward by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) that has deadlocked the state government and prompted weeks of protests inside the Wisconsin State Capitol.
In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 62% of Americans said it was “unacceptable” to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees, nearly twice as many as the 33% who said that was acceptable. Furthermore, nearly eight in ten said public employees should have the same bargaining rights as people in the private sector.The results are striking in that they affirm what have become incredibly consistent findings on the issue of whether people think public employee unions should have the power to collectively bargain. Three national polls now, including this latest one, have produced similar results within a two percent margin.
In a Gallup poll released last week, 61% of all Americans said they would oppose a bill that would roll back collective bargaining rights for public employees if one were proposed in their state. And in a New York Times/CBS poll released Monday, 60% of Americans said they opposed cutting collective bargaining rights for public employee unions.
The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll is also interesting in that the wording of the questions, more so than previous polls on the issue, most closely reflected the situation in Wisconsin. The survey asked whether it was acceptable for elected officials to do a number of things to reduce a state’s budget deficit, including:
Eliminate public employees’ right to collectively bargain over health care, pensions, and other benefits when negotiating a union contract.
That’s the argument Gov. Walker has been making in Wisconsin. Unions have already agreed to make a number of concession on the amount of money they contribute to their benefit packages, though the Governor has held out, insisting that collective bargaining rights must also be eliminated in order for the state to balance its budget.
As Walker continues his push to roll back collective bargaining rights for public employees, polls continue to show public opinion firmly against his proposals. Most ominously, a poll of Wisconsin voters found the state evenly split over whether he should be recalled — even though he’s only been in office for two months.
The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was conducted February 24-28 among 1,000 adults nationwide. It has a margin of error of 3.1%. |
Sen. Ben Sasse Benjamin (Ben) Eric SasseTrump claims Democrats ‘don’t mind executing babies after birth’ after blocked abortion bill Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators Democrats block abortion bill in Senate MORE (R-Neb.) on Sunday said Americans should applaud the choice of former FBI Director Bob Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russia’s meddling in the United States election.
Sasse, in an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” said there is “lots of good stuff” about the fact that Mueller is leading the investigation.
“The FBI is a special institution that is supposed to be defending the American Constitution by letting investigative paths go where they lead,” Sasse said.
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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein last Wednesday announced the appointment of Mueller to lead the probe.
Sasse on Sunday praised Mueller’s record and questioned the motive of Russia, which the intelligence community concluded tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. |
Unlike other cookie-cutter suburbs in Northern Virginia, Vienna offers walkability, a historic center, and unique businesses that give Vienna an identity all its own.
A town green anchors the community and serves as a gathering spot for local events, like the Concerts on the Green summer series. A 45-mile bike path and park built on the roadbed of a former railroad cuts right through town, and downtown is dotted with one-of-a-kind stores and homegrown eateries. The small-town feel comes with access to all the D.C. metro area attractions.
All that comes at a cost: Real estate prices and taxes are among the highest in the county. A typical three-bedroom can sell for $600,000 -- and bidding wars are the norm. Then there's the traffic, though that's just a fact of life for anyone near the nation's capital. --Ismat Sarah Mangla |
Helicopter String Quartet The Dutch Grasshoppers aerobatics team, flying the Alouette helicopters they used in the world premiere of the
The Helikopter-Streichquartett (English: Helicopter String Quartet) is one of Karlheinz Stockhausen's best-known pieces, and one of the most complex to perform. It involves a string quartet, four helicopters with pilots, as well as audio and video equipment and technicians. It was first performed and recorded in 1995. Although performable as a self-sufficient piece, it also forms the third scene of the opera Mittwoch aus Licht ("Wednesday from Light").
History [ edit ]
Helicopter Quartet Irvine Arditti, leader of the Arditti Quartet, who premiered and made the first recordings of the
The Helicopter Quartet was originally commissioned by Professor Hans Landesmann of the Salzburger Festspiele in early 1991 (Stockhausen 1996, 214). Stockhausen's initial reaction was that he was not interested in writing a string quartet, but then one night he dreamed he was flying above four helicopters, each carrying a member of a string quartet; he could see into and through the transparent helicopters (Dirmeikis 1999, 21–22). He subsequently made some sketches and plans, but it was not until 1992–93 that he found the time to compose the quartet (Stockhausen 1996, 214). By this time, he had had several more dreams concerning the piece, including one involving a swarm of bees and a violinist, about which Stockhausen said, “The buzzing made by lots of bees is a magic sound to me” (Schweitzer 2008). The Arditti Quartet was to play the première. After Stockhausen finished his score, it was sent back to Professor Landesmann for criticism. His reaction was positive, as was that of the Director of the Festspiele, Gerard Mortier. A long series of negotiations started with the Festspiele and the Austrian army, who were to lend the helicopters, as well as various TV channels who were airing the piece. In part because of protests by the Austrian Green Party, that it would be "absolutely impossible for Austrian air to be polluted by performing this Stockhausen", in the end the planned 1994 première had to be cancelled (Stockhausen 2004, 90).
The first performances of the piece took place in Amsterdam on 26 June 1995, as part of the Holland Festival, with Alouette helicopters from the Royal Dutch Air Force display team, The Grasshoppers. The performers were: first violinist Irvine Arditti and pilot Marco Oliver; second violinist Graeme Jennings and pilot Lieutenant Denis Jans; violist Garth Knox and pilot Lieutenant Robert de Lange; cellist Rohan de Saram and pilot Captain Erik Boekelman (Stockhausen 1996, 216). There were three performances given, at the Westergasfabriek, after two test flights at the same location the day before, and several earlier at an airfield in Deelen for the purpose of trying out the microphones (Stockhausen 2004, 90). Following these performances, Stockhausen revised the score, adding about three minutes of material near the end, just before the descent, increasing the overall duration from about 29 minutes to 32 minutes (Stockhausen 2004, 91). Since its premiere, the Helicopter Quartet has been performed "fairly regularly" and has become "the most iconic piece of classical music from the 1990s", though it was not presented in its full context, as the third scene of Mittwoch aus Licht, until the opera's staged premiere in August 2012 (Fallows 2012, 1284).
In 2001 Angelin Preljocaj choreographed this music for a modern dance work titled Helikopter.
Composition [ edit ]
Mittwoch aus Licht, Argyle Works, Digbeth, Birmingham, 23 August 2012 Jennymay Logan, second violin, Elysian Quartet, in the Birmingham Opera production of, Argyle Works, Digbeth, Birmingham, 23 August 2012
The Licht cycle—as a whole and in all of its parts—is serially composed, being based upon a three-layered "superformula". This design principle is an extension of the series-based techniques Stockhausen developed at the beginning of the 1950s—a connection to which Stockhausen himself has repeatedly called attention in his theoretical explanations (Misch 2004, 36). The Quartet is based on a short portion of the Eve layer from the Wednesday segment of the superformula: D–F–G♭. After the initial ascent, there are three iterations of the three-voiced superformula, each time distributed among the four instruments, and each time with the Michael, Eve, and Lucifer lines in a different vertical arrangement. The superformula as a whole is successively transposed so that the Eve layer begins each time with the corresponding pitch from the "helicopter" segment: D–F–G♭ (Shimizu 2004, 66). The durations of the three statements of the triple formula are also determined by the rhythms of the small "helicopter" segment (Stockhausen 2004, 98).
More general traits found in the work are also characteristic of the serial fabric of Stockhausen's music. For example, the interpenetration of macro and micro dimensions, found in earlier compositions such as Kontakte, where Stockhausen compresses rhythm into pitch, or in Hymnen, where he slows down the sound of geese until they are revealed as the shouts of a football crowd. The violin tremolos here and also in Mittwoch's preceding scene, Orchester-Finalisten, invoke the sound of a buzzing mosquito, so "what the composer is also saying is that the mosquito is also a tiny helicopter", and the connection between the two is being made by the violin (Maconie 2005, 514). Another is the way in which the scenic character of the Helicopter Quartet forms one of four "serial variants": The first and fourth scenes of the opera represent the idea of communication and cooperation, first when World Parliamentarians meet to debate the topic of love, and then when interplanetary delegates consider cosmic problems, while the second scene and this one revolve around the idea of community music making (Misch 2004, 42–43).
A third serial principle is the integration of distinct elements into a whole. This was expressed by Stockhausen in a text written in 1953:
Evidently, self-contemplation and the awareness of a universal, planned order exist today "more than ever”. With this comes the desire to give the individual tone a very specific sense that transcends momentary saturation and the merely impulsive play of organization and combination; a sense, that is, of music as a representation of that comprehensive "global" structure in which everything is integrated. (Stockhausen 1963, 46)
In Licht generally this is seen in "scenic contexts that are not tied to a single, linear, teleological narrative, but as the compositional events in multi-dimensional, process-independent, run in folding, intersecting, or parallel layers and yet are held together by the principle of uniformity" (Misch 2004, 42). In the Helicopter Quartet in particular this is manifested spatially, as the physical separation of the players from the audience and among themselves, circling in the sky in four different helicopters, is overcome through the use of audio-visual equipment, so that "only when transmitted via television screens and loudspeakers in the concert hall do the four-layered musical events fit together into a unified whole" (Misch 2004, 43).
Performance practice [ edit ]
Mittwoch aus Licht at the Argyle Works, Digbeth, Birmingham Moderator DJ Nihal introduces members of the Elysian Quartet (Laura Moody, cello, Vincent Sipprell, viola) before a performance on 23 August 2012, as part of the Birmingham Opera production ofat the Argyle Works, Digbeth, Birmingham
A performance requires: four helicopters, each equipped with a pilot and sound technician, television transmitter and three-channel sound transmitter, and an auditorium with four columns of televisions and loudspeakers, a sound projectionist with mixing desk, and a moderator (optional), as well as the members of the string quartet.
The piece focuses on Stockhausen's dreamed idea of a string quartet playing tremolos which blend so well with the timbres and the rhythms of the rotor blades that the helicopters sound like musical instruments (Stockhausen 1996, 214). This is accomplished by using microphones placed so the helicopters may blend with the stringed instruments, with the instruments being heard as slightly louder than the blades (Stockhausen 1996, 215).
The piece is played as follows: A moderator, who may be the sound projectionist, introduces the quartet, and then explains the technical aspects of the piece. The players then walk out, always being visible to the auditorium audience via the video cameras that follow them, until they have all arrived at and boarded their helicopters (Stockhausen 1996, 214–15).
From the moment of takeoff until disembarkation the musicians and helicopters remain constantly in the view of the cameras, with video and audio (using three microphones in each helicopter) of each string player transmitted to his assigned group of television monitors in the auditorium. "The earth can be seen through the glass cockpit of the helicopter behind each player" (Stockhausen 1996, 215).
Then the piece begins. The helicopters circle at a radius of 6 km from the auditorium, changing altitude constantly to create the 'bounce' of the piece. All twelve incoming signals are controlled by the sound crew (Stockhausen 2012, 36, 82).
The descent lasts five minutes, with the decreasing sound of the rotor blades acting as a background as the quartet re-enter the hall. The moderator then takes questions and leads applause (Stockhausen 2012, 36, 39, 82, 84).
Press reviews [ edit ]
Writing for the New York Times, Alex Ross called the premiere a "memorable spectacle" citing the virtuoso performances by both the Arditti and the Grasshoppers. However, his review was mostly negative:
German experimentalism in its classic form has evidently run its course. Nothing illustrated its obsolescence more lucidly than the recent premiere at the Holland Festival of a Helicopter String Quartet by Karlheinz Stockhausen...it was not, as Mr. Stockhausen claimed, important research into new sound materials, nor anything of consequence in purely musical terms. It was a grandiose absurdist entertainment, not unlike Christo's wrapping of the Reichstag back in Berlin. (Ross 1995)
Andrew Clements in The Guardian marveled at Stockhausen's logistical achievement:
The technological complexities of making such a thing work almost flawlessly are immense (a planned performance in Salzburg last year failed, literally and metaphorically, to get off the ground), and in the context of Stockhausen's achievement as a composer the Helicopter Quartet may not be hugely significant, but as a reminder of the sheer force of his creative personality and organisational ability it is a remarkable if impossibly bizarre achievement. And what it all has to do with the opera only time will reveal. (Clements 1995)
In his review for The Times, Paul Griffiths discusses how the piece comments on the chamber music mentality and hints that the piece has a richer life as a concept:
Helikopter-Streichquartett says things about quartet psychology the placing of oneself at risk, the trust that others will come in on time (isolated visually and aurally, the players could get directions only from a click-track heard on headphones) and the devotion to duty...this is a work that can be just as well imagined as experienced. Indeed, the Helikopter-Streichquartett of the imagination is probably to be preferred, since the one big disappointment of the Amsterdam performance was that one had so little sense of the musicians the Arditti Quartet being up aloft: the monitors just showed us four guys in cramped conditions, bowing away. (Griffiths 1995)
Marlise Simons, writing in The New York Times, provides a snapshot of multiple critical reactions in the Dutch press:
The performance was widely reviewed in Dutch newspapers, which admired the flawless technical delivery but had less ear for the unusual sounds. The influential NRC-Handelsblad found "the hot-tempered music" from clattering aircraft disturbing and said the "noise of the rotorblades created tension" in the audience. But Yannis Anninos, a Greek composer who had flown from Athens to attend the concert, said the Helicopter Quartet was the "superb work of a genius." Mr. Stockhausen said he had other performances in mind for the quartet. He was also asked if he thought it possible to raise an entire orchestra aloft in helicopters. "Why not?" he said. (Simons 1995)
The CD [ edit ]
The first CD was created on request of the Arditti Quartet themselves,[citation needed] and includes both the world-première recording and a studio recording of a revised version, which adds some material composed after the world première. The studio recording was made by the WDR, on 7 December 1996 in Kürten, using the Übertragungswagen, or mobile studio. They used four different rooms in the studio, with the helicopter sounds dubbed in, using Sony 24-track tape.[citation needed]
Discography [ edit ]
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. Helikopter-Streichquartett: Uraufführung 1995 + Studioproduktion 1996 . Arditti String Quartet (Irvine Arditti, Graeme Jennings [world premiere] and David Alberman [studio recording of the revised score], violins; Garth Knox, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello); "The Grasshoppers" (helicopter acrobatic team); Karlheinz Stockhausen, musical direction, recording supervision, sound projection, mix-down, and moderation [of the world premiere]. Stockhausen Complete Edition, Compact Disc 53 A-B (2 CDs). Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag, 1999. Studio version also released on Montaigne Auvidis MO 782097 (CD).
. Arditti String Quartet (Irvine Arditti, Graeme Jennings [world premiere] and David Alberman [studio recording of the revised score], violins; Garth Knox, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello); "The Grasshoppers" (helicopter acrobatic team); Karlheinz Stockhausen, musical direction, recording supervision, sound projection, mix-down, and moderation [of the world premiere]. Stockhausen Complete Edition, Compact Disc 53 A-B (2 CDs). Kürten: Stockhausen-Verlag, 1999. Studio version also released on Montaigne Auvidis MO 782097 (CD). Stockhausen, Karlheinz. Helikopter-Streichquartett. Arditti String Quartet (Irvine Arditti & David Alberman, violins; Garth Knox, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello); "The Grasshoppers" (helicopter acrobatic team, recording from the third Amsterdam performance, mixed in). Arditti Quartet Edition 35. Montaigne Auvidis MO 782097 (single CD). 32'00". Paris: Montaigne Auvidis, 1999.
Filmography [ edit ]
Helicopter String Quartet , a film by Frank Scheffer. Close-up: documentaireserie waarin Frank Scheffer zijn visie geeft op diverse 20e-eeuwse componisten . [S.l.]: AVRO. Televisie-opname, 1995. German DVD release (German and English, DVD) Helicopter String Quartet . Frank Scheffer; Karlheinz Stockhausen. Kürten, Germany: Stockhausen-Verlag, 2006. UK release: Helicopter String Quartet . Frank Scheffer; Ton van der Lee; Karlheinz Stockhausen. German. Videorecording: DVD video 1 videodisc (77 min.). London: 2008. French DVD release. Helicopter String Quartet . Karlheinz Stockhausen; Frank Scheffer. Videorecording: DVD video (77 mins. [erroneously listed as 113 min. in publisher's catalogue]). [Paris]: Idéale Audience International, 2008.
, a film by Frank Scheffer. . [S.l.]: AVRO. Televisie-opname, 1995. Stockhausen: Helikopter Streichquartett (archive from 8 September 2012, accessed 13 March 2018). Sound Director: André Richard. a co-production with Red Bull & Salzburg Festival. Bernhard Fleischer Moving Images, 2003.
Sources [ edit ]
Clements, Andrew. 1995. "Super Soaraway Stockhausen". The Guardian (June 29).
Dirmeikis, Paul. 1999. Le Souffle du temps: Quodlibet pour Karlheinz Stockhausen . [La Seyne-sur-Mer]: Éditions Telo Martius. ISBN 2-905023-37-6.
Fallows, David. 2012. "Mittwoch aus Licht: Birmingham Opera Company at the Argyle Works, Birmingham, August 22". Opera (October): 1284–86.
Griffiths, Paul. 1995. "Stockhausen Has Lift-Off". The Times (July 5).
Maconie, Robin. 2005. Other Planets: The Music of Karlheinz Stockhausen . Lanham, Maryland, Toronto, Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. ISBN 0-8108-5356-6.
Misch, Imke. 2004. "Serielles Denken in LICHT.” In Internationales Stockhausen-Symposion 2000: LICHT. Musikwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität zu Köln, 19. bis 22. Oktober 2000. Tagungsbericht . Edited by Imke Misch and Christoph von Blumröder, 36–51. Münster, Berlin, London: LIT-Verlag.
Ross, Alex. 1995. "Classical View; In Flux, Berlin Remaps, Reminds", The New York Times (August 13).
Schweitzer, Vivien. 2008. "Fulfilling a Dream With Strings and Rotors". The New York Times (13 July).
Shimizu, Minoru. 2004. "Potentiale multimedialer Aufführung und 'szenische Musik'—einige Bemerkungen zum Helikopter-Streichquartett ". In Internationales Stockhausen-Symposion 2000: LICHT. Musikwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität zu Köln, 19. bis 22. Oktober 2000. Tagungsbericht . Edited by Imke Misch and Christoph von Blumröder, 61–73. Münster, Berlin, London: LIT-Verlag.
Simons, Marlise. 1995. "A Helicopter Quartet. What Else?". The New York Times (July 31).
Spahn, Claus. 2007. "Abheben in Braunschweig". Die Zeit , no. 26 (21 June): 50.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1963. "Zur Situation des Metiers (Klangkomposition)”. In his Texte zur Musik 1, edited and with an afterword by Dieter Schnebel, 45–61. DuMont Dokumente. Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1996. "Helikopter-Streichquartett". Grand Street 14, no. 4 (Spring, "Grand Street 56: Dreams"): 213–25. ISBN 1-885490-07-0. Online variant version [1999], as "Introduction: HELICOPTER STRING QUARTET (1992/93)" (some omissions, some supplements, different illustrations; archive from 17 November 2014, accessed 21 April 2015).
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 1999. Helikopter-Streichquartett , booklet for the Stockhausen Complete Edition CD 53.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 2004. " Helikopter-Streichquartett : Eine 8-Spur-Tonbandaufführung mit Erläuterungen". In Internationales Stockhausen-Symposion 2000: LICHT. Musikwissenschaftliches Institut der Universität zu Köln, 19. bis 22. Oktober 2000. Tagungsbericht . Edited by Imke Misch and Christoph von Blumröder, 89–114. Münster, Berlin, London: LIT-Verlag.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. 2012. "Helikopter-Streichquartett (1992/93): Dritte Szene vom Mittwoch aus Licht" / Helicopter String Quartet (1992/93): Third Scene of of [sic] Wednesday from Light". In Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mittwoch aus Licht: Uraufführung, Birmingham Opera Company: London 2012 Festival, 35–40, 81–84. Kürten: Stockhausen-Stiftung für Musik.
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