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Rand Paul, the newly elected Republican/libertarian/Tea Party candidate from Kentucky just came out and said what no other Republican will dare say — that in order to balance the budget he would be willing to cut military spending.
It is such an obvious thing, really. We currently spend more money on our military than the rest of the world put together. We spend ten times more than any other country. Has this made us any safer? Has it brought peace and stability to the world?
Hardly.
I’m not a pacifist, but our military budget is way beyond out of control and threatens more harm to our country than our enemies could ever do.
The only question is, will any other Republicans figure this out? Or will they shut him up? |
By Carlos Boogs
BoxingScene.com has been advised by multiple sources that 2016 United States Olympian Carlos Balderas is going to become the first promotional signing of Richard Schaefer's newly formed Ringstar Promotions.
Schaefer, co-founder and former CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, started Ringstar a few months ago and stages the first company event on December 10 USC Galen Center, Los Angeles, California. Balderas is being positioned to make his pro debut on that card, which is headlined by Abner Mares challenging Jesus Cuellar for the WBA 'regular' featherweight title.
Balderas, 20-years-old, is coached by his father Xenon and his uncle David.
Balderas represented the USA Knockouts in the World Series of Boxing (WSB). In 2015 he took part in five bouts, defeating Fabio Introvaia of Italy, Dawid Michelus of Poland, Brian Nunez of Argentina and Adrian Javier Martinez Morales of Puerto Rico but losing to Azerbaijan's Albert Selimov. In 2016 he won his first two bouts against Lindolfo Delgado and Moroccan Hamza Rabii.
He qualified for the men's lightweight event at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro Brazil via his results in the WSB where he won the gold medal in his elite division and was named Outstanding Boxer of the event. Balderas was given his Olympic allocation by the International Boxing Association (AIBA).
He breezed through the first two fights of the Olympics, beating Berik Abdrakmanov in the first bout and then Japan's Daisuke Narimatsu in the following fight. He lost a decision to two-time Olympic bronze medal winner and three time amateur champion Lazaro Alvarez of Cuba in the quarter-finals. |
Janosik will be remembered for his stores as well has philanthropic work
Johnny Janosik and his wife, Mary, at their furniture store. He died Friday at the age of 90. (Photo: Courtesy of Janosik Family)
Funeral services are planned Thursday for Johnny Janosik, a World War II veteran who was the force behind Laurel-based Johnny Janosik World of Furniture, one of the 100 largest furniture retailers in the nation.
Janosik died Friday. He was 90.
A native of Hopewell, Virginia, Janosik started his business in 1953 as a television repair shop in downtown Laurel. He grew the operation to include furniture, and eventually made tens of millions of dollars in annual sales.
Today, the company operates two stores in Dover and the original showroom in Laurel, a sprawling 180,000-square-foot space at 11151 Trussum Pond Road billed as the largest furniture store on the Eastern Shore.
"From an industry perspective, he was very well recognized as a visionary and someone who had a dominant market share in the furniture business in Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland," said David Koehler, the company's CEO.
Buy Photo The Johnny Janosik World of Furniture Store in Laurel is shown. (Photo: JASON MINTO/THE NEWS JOURNAL)
Because of failing health, Janosik had not been active in the business over the past decade, Koehler said.
Koehler said he doesn't expect any changes to the business in the wake of Janosik's death beyond a previous announced plan to consolidate the two Dover stores. The Dover locations will be combined into a new, 60,000-square-foot store in southern Dover, near Camden. Between 10 to 15 new employees will be hired to staff the new location, Koehler said.
Before settling in Laurel, Janosik served in the Navy during World War II. He was injured when a suicide bomber crashed a plane into the USS Louisville. After the war, he graduated from Valparaiso Technical Institute.
In Laurel, residents remembered him for charity work and commitment to the community. Janosik was dedicated to several charities including the Laurel Public Library, The Laurel Redevelopment Corp., Hope House, which provides transitional housing for homeless and domestic violence victims, and Good Samaritan Aid, a thrift store serving low-income families.
Johnny Janosik at his television store that eventually grew into Johnny Janosik's World of Furniture. Janosik died Friday at the age of 90. (Photo: Courtsey of Janosik Family)
In 2005, he was honored with the Thomas C. Maloney Civic Award by the First State Gridiron Dinner & Show, a state philanthropic organization.
"There were so many things that he did that most people do not know," said Donald Dykes, executive director of the Laurel Chamber of Commerce and a friend of Janosik's for more than 50 years.
Dykes recalled Janosik buying and repairing used cars and then giving them to people who had no means to get to work.
A few years ago, Hope House's annual fundraiser did not raise enough money to cover some of its initiatives, said Janosik's grandson, Kevin Christophel. He said that Janosik and his wife, Mary, made up the difference with their own pocket.
STORY: Wilmington business turns junk into gold
STORY: Kraft Heinz to add 28 jobs in Dover
Christophel said some of his fondest memories were when he was a little boy and would accompany his grandfather picking up trash left over from Laurel's Independence Day Parade.
"He was the best man I've ever known," Christophel said. "I really feel as though he wanted to give back because the community helped him succeed. He constantly gave back every chance he possibly got."
Both Christophel and Brian Shannon, property manager for Laurel Redevelopment Corp., recalled the dedication of a downtown park named after Janosik. They said Janosik would get on his hands and knees to help workers install metal benches and lay bricks.
Buy Photo The Johnny Janosik World of Furniture showroom in Laurel is shown Tuesday. Janosik, who died Friday, be remembered for his stores as well has philanthropic work. (Photo: JASON MINTO/THE NEWS JOURNAL)
"This is a huge loss for Laurel," Shannon said. "He was a real hands-on person who knew how to get things done."
Janosik's daughter, Lori Morrison, called him "a good, loving father." She said people may never know all the contributions he made to the community.
"He never told people what he did," she said. "He didn't do it for the glory, but just to help others."
Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday at Our Lady Lourdes Catholic Church in Seaford. A life celebration is 3-6 p.m. at the Laurel Fire Department Hall.
In lieu of flowers, contributions are suggested to the Good Samaritan Shop, P.O. Box 643 Laurel, DE 19956
Contact Jeff Mordock at (302) 324-2786, on Twitter @JeffMordockTNJ or [email protected].
Read or Share this story: http://delonline.us/29eVXbV |
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On a recent episode of the ‘Bischoff on Wrestling’ podcast, Eric Bischoff answered some fan questions. During the podcast, Eric was asked if he was in charge of WWE at the moment, what is the one thing that he would change.
As many fans know, Bischoff has tons of experience in the wrestling business. He makes a good point about making the current product feel more unpredictable, so fans don’t skip episodes.
Here is what he said:
“The only thing for me and this is just preference, it’s just taste, I would endeavor to produce my shows in a way, particularly Monday Night RAW, in a way that just had a little bit more grit. It was a little less polished. I would work pretty hard, pretty consistently, to try to create the impression and try to build the anticipation with the audience that anything could happen. It doesn’t mean that anything can happen on every episode because you can’t sustain that. If you create that feeling, subliminal as it may be sometimes, that you can’t afford to miss an episode because there is a chance something crazy could happen and you don’t want to miss out on that.
He continued:
“If you can establish that consistently with the audience and then deliver on it as often as possible that’s when you create that kind of water cooler type buzz that people used to have. Now it’s social media chatter after the show. Buzz is buzz wherever it is. That’s how you create it. That’s how you create must see TV is by creating that relationship with the audience where they believe your product could have something actually occur that they never would have anticipated. Right now to me, because of my taste, the WWE is such a polished and perfect production that I lose that sense that anything can happen because they won’t let it. If they do create it it’s so perfectly and flawlessly executed that it doesn’t feel like something that wasn’t supposed to happen”
[irp posts=”26152″ name=”Eric Bischoff Explains The Bullsh*t Narrative” That Exists About WWE vs WCW”]
Let us know what you think in the comment section below. Do you agree or disagree with him? |
In the round-up: Rubens Barrichello tests for IndyCar team KV Racing at Sebring.
Barrichello joined friend and fellow Brazilian Tony Kanaan at the two-day test.
Links
Top F1 links from the past 24 hours:
Barrichello and his first lap! (YouTube)
Barrichello has no plans beyond 2-day IndyCar test (Associated Press)
“I have been a racer for too long to just give it all away right now. I have a lot of speed in myself. I know that and I want to continue to race.”
KV Racing via Twitter
“Tony Kanaan leaves pits for the first time and stalls, Rubens Barrichello says ‘last time I get advice on car from TK’.”
McLaren dismisses PURE rumours (Autosport)
“McLaren has had absolutely no contact with PURE for many months. Moreover, the contact we did have with PURE, many months ago, was of an entirely informal nature, and was merely a courtesy gesture.”
Sutil apologises in court for Lux attack (Reuters)
“‘I did everything to try to settle this row,’ Sutil told the court, adding he had even offered to support a Lux charity project in Africa.”
Bahrain has failed to grasp reform ?����ǣ so why is the grand prix going ahead? (The Guardian)
“Reporters Without Borders has just named Bahrain one of the world’s top 10 most repressive regimes, while Freedom House downgraded Bahrain from ‘partly free’ to ‘not free’.”
Interesting to note Reporters Without Borders ranks China, which of course is another F1 host nation, below Bahrain.
Nico Hulkenberg via Twitter
Hulkenberg’s 2012 helmet design.
Follow F1 news as it breaks using the F1 Fanatic live Twitter app.
Comment of the day
Beneboy was not moved by my optimistic view on the season ahead:
I?������m finding it increasingly difficult to get even a little bit excited about the start of the season. Ugly cars, stupid rules, artificial overtaking, boring circuits and a complete denial of reality from FIA/FOM/Teams that the main problem with F1 is that the cars have become so dependent on aerodynamics that the driver is almost an irrelevance and that the racing has become close to non-existent without the use of artificial devices such as DRS and silly tyre rules. I?������m in the process of moving home at the moment and I?������m struggling to decide if I want to get Sky or not, I do like other sports that they show but the only reason it?������d be worth paying for is to get Sky F1 HD but I?������m struggling to justify spending hundreds of pounds to watch a sport that has become one big corporate middle finger aimed directly at the fans.
Beneboy
From the forum
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday to Sharan!
If you want a birthday shout-out tell us when yours is by emailling me, using Twitter or adding to the list here.
On this day in F1
We were treated to a trio of launches on this day last year: Renault, Sauber and Lotus unveiled their new cars on the same day: |
If you went to TNA’s TV taping at Wembley in January, chances are you’ll have picked up a flyer about IPW:UK’s April show at the Troxy, East London.
They’re working with NWE (Nu-Wrestling Evolution) for the first time ever, and have put together a line-up with imports such as Chris Masters, Kevin Nash, Davey Richards and Carlito, and the best of UK talent including Friends of TOWIS Noam Dar, Lion Kid, Mark Haskins and Marty Scurll.
“We’ve been working on it for a very long time,” says head booker Andy Quildan. “We’ve been needing to confirm the US talent, and work it around our talent and showcase the UK guys – that’s what it’s about. We’ve got the guys who are there to enhance the show quality in-ring, and some there to attract the casual fans. It’s a varied card but we’ve got some world-class talent.”
One of the matches on the card looks particularly brilliant – a six-way ladder match featuring Dar, Lion Kid, Supernova, Matt Cross, Kris Travis and Martin Kirby.
“That match just came together – those guys will be wanting to steal the show,” says Quildan. “But everyone on the show will be excited. I don’t think you’ll see something better in the UK in-ring or in terms of production.”
IPW:UK are looking to the future and hoping for big things. “For it to be taken seriously, we have to show we can attract big crowds and that we have high production values. It’s important to evolve and move forward – it’s a marathon, not a sprint. We want to expand the fanbase and run bigger mainstream shows – but we won’t sacrifice show quality in order to do this.
“Making matches is the most important thing – we will guarantee the high quality of our shows. They are and will always be about using the best talent from around the world.”
IPW:UK’s show with NWE is on at the Troxy on 28th April 2012 – tickets from £15.
Line-up includes:
Undisputed British Cruiserweight Championship: ‘Party’ Marty Scurll vs. ‘The Callihan Death Machine’ Sami Callihan
Six-Man No DQ Tag Team Elimination Grudge Match:The Rockstar Spud, T-Bone & Sha Samuels vs. Dave Mastiff, ? & ?
High Stakes Ladder Match: Supernova vs. Martin Kirby vs. Kris Travis vs. ‘M-Dogg 20’ Matt Cross vs. The Lion Kid vs. Noam Dar
Plus: Kevin Nash, Carlito, Chris Masters, Mark Haskins and more!
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Daisky wants to store files in a way that will make them available to future generations.
People worry a lot about archiving digital files for long periods of time. The concern is legitimate. I wouldn't go as far as the people who insist that burned CDs and DVDs (the kind you buy blank and write files to on your PC's drive) last for only two to five years. But it is true that these burnable discs use unstable light-sensitive dyes, and will probably not be readable in 20 years. And if they are, will you still have optical drives for reading them? Or software that can read the files?
[Email your tech questions to [email protected].]
It's impossible to answer any of these questions definitively at this time. But a few precautions and educated guesses will improve the likelihood that your great-grandchildren will enjoy your wedding photos.
Let's consider software first.
Stick with popular file formats that everyone uses and that aren't controlled by one company. The more applications support a format now, the greater the chance that someone will support it in 50 years. And just to be safe, if it’s possible, save the same files in more than one format.
Save and store documents in .docx, .doc, .pdf, and .html. For photos, go with .jpg and .png. For music, .mp3 and .wav.
Video is a real problem, because the format standards aren’t real standards. A device that can play one .avi file may not be able to play another. Your best bet is probably to burn the files to video DVDs or Blu-ray discs.
Which brings us to the next question: On what media should you save these files?
First, keep them on your main internal storage--be that a hard drive, SSD, or cloud service. And make sure the files are included in your regular daily backup routine.
Then, for added protection, burn them to special, archival optical discs. Your best bet here are probably M-Discs. Burning an M-Disc is a bit like carving the bits in granite, and the company claims that they'll last for 1,000 years.
Is that claim accurate? I can’t tell you for another 999 years. But I've seen government test reports suggesting that M-Discs are far more stable than other burnable discs.
You need a special drive to burn M-Discs. But once burned, they can be read on any DVD drive (Blu-ray M-Discs are on the way).
I can't say for sure whether optical drives will be available in the future, but I suspect that they will be—even if no longer common—for a very long time. If enough people have discs to read, there will be profits in making drives. You can still buy a new floppy drive, VHS player, or turntable, even one that plays 78's and 45's.
Read the original forum discussion. |
One of the biggest criticisms of Elite: Dangerous, the vast spaceflight simulation now on Windows PC and Mac and slated for release on Xbox One and eventually PlayStation 4, has been that there's nothing to do. 400 billion channels, and nothing's on. While that's not entirely fair, the team at Frontier Developments have taken it to heart. Their next update will completely revamp the quest and faction system, adding a kind personality to the game that simply doesn't exist right now.
The core of the change is adding what are called Powers to the game. Since the early alpha, political factions have existed in Elite. But the evidence of their influence on the game world has been limited to what amounts to futuristic faxes, text-only stories that players can pick up when they dock at starports. There is revolution, betrayal and intrigue but right now it's only communicated through in-fiction dispatches from far-flung parts of the Milky Way galaxy.
With Powerplay, that changes. When players join a faction they'll be more intimately involved with the day-to-day triumphs and trials of their cohorts in new and hopefully engaging ways.
"Every Power is a fully fleshed-out organisation or character with a figurehead, biography, political leaning and faction-specific perks," reads a recent update emailed to Elite's playerbase. "Each one dominates an expanse of human-occupied space and your actions will see their influence grow as they overthrow neighbouring systems, or collapse as other players move against them."
Lavish concept art, like that shown at the top of this story, gives each faction a visible figurehead for the first time. Outside of early teaser trailers, these are the first human forms to show up in the game, now largely comprised of spaceships and spreadsheets.
"These characters offer us a chance to get deeper into the fabric of the Elite: Dangerous galaxy," art director Chris Gregory said in the same update. "Some of these Powers are new, and some will be familiar. You'll see fresh faces alongside names like Aisling Duval, Torval and Denton Patreus. Fans may already have a picture in their heads of what these people look like, but in some cases I think they'll be intrigued when they see those faces for the first time."
In addition to the powers, Elite will add a new strategic layer to the game that is not unlike a "massive strategy boardgame." New strategic maps, released on Vine, make it clear that maneuver and supply lines will be key to gaining advantage over another faction. With luck, it will increase the player density in some areas and contribute to heightening the roleplaying in the game.
But the team at Frontier is quick to point out that participating in Powerplay's faction-based warfare is optional. Improvements to the questing and mission system will trickle down to all players, but the real improvements will be in making each faction a living, breathing entity.
The beta of Powerplay launches May 20th. |
Seagulls on two continents have been found to carry a dangerous and highly drug-resistant form of E. coli, raising the specter that these birds could be spreading the deadly bacteria around the world.
Colistin resistant E. coli strains were found in the droppings of seagulls in Lithuania and Argentina, reported National Geographic. Researchers who found the bacteria think that the birds were infected by eating garbage that could have been contaminated with sewage or medical waste.
Colistin is a powerful antibiotic and is the last-resort antibiotic for multidrug-resistant bacteria, i.e. superbugs. It was created decades ago but fell out of use because of its potential toxic effect on the kidneys, which is why it’s still powerful enough to kill many stubborn bacteria. Resistance to the antibiotic is rare but was first found in a pig living on a farm near Shanghai in 2013 and colistin-resistant bacteria has continued to spread. It infected the first person in the U.S. in May, an unnamed 49-year-old woman in Pennsylvania who sought treatment for a urinary tract infection, leading many to worry that a new era of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria is upon us.
Now that the colistin-resistant bacteria has been found in seagulls, scientists are worried that the bacteria could spread wider and faster than previously thought.
“The lifestyle of gulls allows them to carry and disseminate pathogenic and resistant microorganisms despite country borders,” wrote the Lithuanian researchers. “Water contaminated by feces of birds should be foreseen as important risk factor for transmission of resistant bacteria.”
The colistin-resistant gene is still very rare in the U.S. The CDC has tested more than 55,000 samples of bacteria from humans, animals, and food to check for the strain. Only two samples from pigs slaughtered in Illinois and South Carolina were identified. The woman who was diagnosed this year has fully recovered from her infection but continues to carry the resistant bacterium in her system, and doctors haven’t yet figured out where she contracted the dangerous bacteria.
Officials are continuing to track the dangerous drug-resistant strain and are now building a surveillance system that can alert health systems and planners as it moves. It also provides yet another justification for better incentives that will spur innovation by pharmaceutical and biotech companies. |
Disaster in Nepal: IDF's first delegation took off at night to the disaster areas following the severe earthquake that shook the Asian country yesterday. Meanwhile, the death toll in the 7.8 Richter earthquake has increased to 1910, with over 4,000 injured.
The delegation will include six medical and rescue experts including senior officers from the Home Front Command and the Medical Corps, and a representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The team will examine the extent of the needed assistance and formulate an estimate. IDF is preparing to send another delegation which will include some 250 soldiers and officers, including a search and rescue team, and a team of medical force capable of carrying out field surgeries.
The IDF will work in Nepal to help the country in light of the devastating earthquake that hit it, and will of course help Israelis in the area in need," Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said.
Defense Minister Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon said that "IDF will work in Nepal to help the country in light of the devastating earthquake that hit it, and will of course help Israelis in the area in need. As we did in the past, we willingly share the experience of the IDF and the Home Front Command to help Nepal, through evacuation, rescue and medical aid and equipment.
"This is a human task. We cannot stand idle by in light of the tragedy. This is a moral and ethical duty. I hope that the Home Front Command will provide residents of Nepal assistance that will benefit them and enable them to cope with the tragedy that befell them." |
- BART police released an update Wednesday after a mob of 40-60 young people streamed onto a BART train in Oakland Saturday night, robbing multiple riders of bags and cell phones and injuring at least two people.
According to BART police, multiple suspects have been identified using video surveillance from inside the train car. At this point, they are not releasing the identities of those suspects.
Investigators continue to work on getting more information from the victims and they are hoping to identify more suspects. “We will continue to have increased police presence in and around the affected area and throughout the entire system. We are currently developing a regional plan working collaboratively with allied agencies to address and solve the issue,” according to BART police.
Witnesses reported that the suspects jumped the fare gates at the Coliseum station around 9:30 p.m. Saturday, then boarded a Dublin train and committed at least seven robberies, the agency's police log said.
Two people suffered facial and head injuries and were treated by paramedics, according to the log.
The suspects took one purse, one duffel bag and five cell phones, with six of the robberies taking place on the train car and one on the platform, the log said.
The suspects were reportedly unarmed, according to BART officials. Before BART officers could get to the station, the suspects fled, the report said. The Dublin train was held for about 15 minutes as a result of the incident.
BART police are pulling surveillance video they plan to share with Oakland police, Oakland Unified School District officials and the Oakland Housing Authority in hopes of identifying the suspects.
The images, however, can't be shared with the public because the suspects are minors, BART officials said. |
Kim Davis: Defiant Kentucky clerk's supporters want deputy clerks fired over marriage licences issued to gays
Updated
Supporters of Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who refused to issue marriage licences to gay couples due to her religious beliefs, say that any of her deputies who provide gay marriage licences without her permission should be fired.
Key points Supporters of Davis want deputies who defy her orders fired
Davis says her position has not changed
Gay couples return to clerk's office to have documents filed
US district judge David Bunning ordered Ms Davis be released on Tuesday after six days in jail, warning her not to interfere with her deputy clerks who are issuing the licences, or face further sanctions.
Mr Bunning had found Ms Davis, clerk for Rowan County in eastern Kentucky, in contempt after she stopped issuing licences to any couples, citing her belief as an Apostolic Christian that a marriage can only be between a man and a woman.
Ms Davis will return to her US$80,000-a-year job ($114,000) on Friday or Monday after spending time with family.
However, her lawyer, Mat Staver, founder of Christian religious advocacy group Liberty Counsel, said on Tuesday her position had not changed, raising the possibility she could return to jail if she moves to block the issuance of licences.
Raising the stakes further, deputy clerk Brian Mason said on Wednesday he would continue issuing marriage licences after Ms Davis returns, even if she tells him not to.
"I'm still going to issue licences," he said.
Ante Pavkovic, one of the people who helped organise pro-Davis rallies outside the Grayson, Kentucky, detention centre where Ms Davis was jailed, lectured the deputy clerks not to violate their oaths of office, like Mr Bunning and the US Supreme Court justices who backed gay marriage did.
"Do not join them in this any further, and if you can't do that, then you should just quit," Mr Pavkovic, 49, of North Carolina, said, standing in the clerk's office in Morehead, Kentucky.
He waved a sign in the faces of the deputy clerks that read, "Fire the cowardly clerks that are lawbreakers".
He was asked to leave by a deputy sheriff.
Defying the US Supreme Court
The US Supreme Court issued a ruling in late June legalising gay marriage in all 50 states, but a small number of elected clerks and lower-level judges have voiced opposition on religious grounds.
Some in Texas, Alabama and elsewhere have refused to issue licences to anyone, gay or straight.
At the Rowan County clerk's office on Wednesday, the first of seven gay couples to obtain marriage licences last week returned to have the documents legally filed.
Ten licenses in all have been issued.
Nashia Fife, secretary-elect of the Rowan County Rights Coalition, which supports the rights of gay couples to get marriage licences, said the struggle over the issue has exposed divisions that were not visible before.
"The ante has been upped at this point," she said of Mr Bunning's warning to Ms Davis not to interfere.
Another of the gay couples who got a marriage licence last week remained wary about what they would face when they return to have the document filed by the clerk's office.
"I guess I'm pessimistic, but I'm hopeful," David Moore said on Tuesday evening, confirming he had not yet married partner David Ermold.
Mr Staver, Davis's lawyer, said his client still wants an accommodation to remove her name and her authority from the marriage certificates.
Mr Bunning secured assurances from the five of six deputy clerks that they would comply with the court order and issue licences to all legally eligible couples.
Only Ms Davis's son Nathan refused, but he was not jailed.
Reuters
Topics: lgbt, marriage, law-crime-and-justice, united-states
First posted |
JOHANNESBURG — In this second part of the BBC’s series on the controversial Gupta family and the role of British PR firm Bell Pottinger in the Zuptas’ propaganda campaign in South Africa, there are some strong words from ordinary South Africans about state capture. The BBC, in this radio broadcast, asked normal, unemployed South Africans on the street about what they thought about the country’s latest economic woes. Many of those interviewed said they’d like to see Jacob Zuma gone and blame him and his cronies for stealing billions (even trillions) of rands while placing a stranglehold on job creation. The BBC goes on to talk to many other people, including EFF leader Julius Malema and Bell Pottinger CEO James Henderson, who largely plays down his company’s role in its massively controversial ‘white monopoly capital’ campaign. But it is the words from Nicholas Wolpe that sum up what many an angry South African would feel: that Bell Pottinger should be shut down and that the company is responsible for driving a knife into South Africa’s non-racial efforts. Wolpe is a white South African whose father fought to end Apartheid and whose uncle was on trial with Nelson Mandela. He now runs anti-Apartheid memorial Liliesleaf Farm and is the CEO of the Liliesleaf Trust. If his words don’t resonate with Bell Pottinger staff involved with the Guptas, then nothing will. – Gareth van Zyl
(You can read the full transcript of this interview below:)
“They have to use sunscreen because they don’t belong here. They must go back to their country where there’s no sun.”
“This country is ours. Africa is ours.”
This is SA in 2017.
“All land in SA, all of it, belongs to us and all of it was taken from us.”
The British PR firm, Bell Pottinger, stands accused of the mounting racial tensions through their work for the controversial Gupta family but was the issue of economic apartheid manufactured by Bell Pottinger for a campaign?
“In any good propaganda it needs to contain a kernel of truth.”
So, is economic apartheid a reality? Well, the gap between rich and poor is wider in SA than almost anywhere else in the world and they have some of the worst educational standards making it even harder for the poor to improve their lot. In the townships, the disparity is obvious.
Hello.
“Hi.”
What’s your name?
“Precious.”
Precious, what do you want to be when you grow up?
“I want to be a doctor.”
Is this your daughter? She said she wants to be a doctor.
“Yes, it’s great.”
Are you working?
“No, I’m not working.”
Are there any jobs here?
“No, there’s nothing and we’ve been applying but no answers.”
How long have you been out of work?
“Five years now.”
Five years?
“Yes.”
And out of your neighbours here, in Soweto, and people in your family. How many people are like you and struggling to find jobs?
“There are so many people applying, there’s no answers – no jobs.”
Do you think it will be different by the time your daughter grows up? Do you think she can be a doctor?
“Maybe.”
What needs to change?
“Maybe if we can get a new president maybe it will change.”
Here in Soweto some parts of the township have effectively become a tourist industry so, as you walk along the road there are stalls set out selling souvenirs, bright clothes, jewellery, but there’s no real model for the economic growth and a lot of the people here still don’t have jobs or any prospect of getting them.
Hi, how easy is it to get jobs in Soweto now?
“Ai, it’s really hard mammy. As you can see us, we are not working but we are hustling.”
“Many of us go to school but we end up in the streets. It’s even worse now that our people are in charge, you see.”
Why is that?
“Me, personally, I think maybe it was better off in apartheid days, you see because people used to get jobs.”
It’s really surprising for me to be standing here in the middle of Soweto very close to where Nelson Mandela lived and hear people saying it was better under apartheid.
“Yes, I can still say it was better-off you see because now the government they only think for themselves and their families. The corruption rate is high. Everything is high because back then there were better decisions. I don’t say whites are better than blacks. I’m just saying their government was doing better before.”
These are exactly the people a campaign on economic apartheid should aim to help but the allegation is that Bell Pottinger was running a campaign that shifted the spotlight onto white business leaders and away from President Zuma’s leadership.
“President Zuma doesn’t do any right for us or for our country. They’re eating a lot of money, billions, almost trillions and we’re suffering a lot. We’re suffering.”
“I say President Zuma needs to step down.”
Who would you all support?
“EFF.”
“Zuma is the one who must withdraw – you are withdrawing the wrong person.”
The EFF or Economic Freedom Fighters are a revolutionary militant socialist party led by the firebrand politician Julius Malema. They’ve become the third biggest party in SA and their members arrive in Parliament wearing matching red jumpsuits in solidarity with the labourers of the country.
“The white monopoly…’
I’m just signing in here at the headquarters of the EFF and they ask for full names, date, company, reason for visit, firearm – yes or on? I think I might be a little bit blander than their average guest.
Julius Malema has spent years talking about white monopoly capital and the economic challenges facing the country so, how does he view the campaign by Bell Pottinger?
“Well, they’ve vulgarised the whole point. They just wanted to find something to hide their corruption and they used it in a manner that causes unnecessary divisions because if you use it for opportunistic reasons, to hide corruption of blacks and you say no, black corruption is not a problem. The problem is white monopoly capital. That’s absolute nonsense which we are not going to accept. The corruption of the Guptas held by Bell Pottinger must be exposed. It must be dealt with but it doesn’t mean that white monopoly capital is not a problem. It is a problem.”
But do you worry, and we saw it a bit with the Bell Pottinger campaign and what they were doing? Do you worry that by talking about white monopoly capital and making it the issue it might stir up the sort of anger which goes against the spirit of reconciliation?
“No, to speak about reality it is actually going to help us. When you deal with issues in an ore, genuine way you seek to resolve these imbalances. It will not cause problems unlike how Bell Pottinger was using it. They were using it not in a genuine way, not to resolve inequalities but they were using it to conceal crime and that is divisive. It all depends on how you carry out your message. We’ve been saying this. It has never caused divisions in the country. People have known and accepted that there is a certain phenomenon that we’re seeking to deal with.”
That’s really the crux, inequality and economic apartheid are very real but the campaign run by Bell Pottinger didn’t target the problems, which are holding back the very poorest in the townships like poor standards of education or a lack of access to the jobs market. Instead, it railed against the banking system after all 4 of the big banks in SA refused to give Guptas an account.
The Guptas and President Zuma have denied any involvement in corruption and the CE of Bell Pottinger, James Henderson, told me he refuted Julius Malema’s claims too.
“There was certainly no intention or collaborating with corruption. We were trying to do a good job for a client in managing their reputation and defending them from a number of accusations. Some of which were within the political arena.”
Whatever the reasons behind the campaign it’s had a very real effect on the lives of ordinary South Africans.
“You could feel the systemic tension emerging. At one point, I said to a colleague of mine, I, as they say, a son of the ANC, felt uncomfortable. So, I can’t imagine how ordinary white people began to feel so their campaign was working because it was fostering a sense of anger – a sense of resentment. Everything that Mandela, the stalwarts of our liberation struggle were fighting against.”
Nicholas Wolpe is a white South African whose father fought to end apartheid and whose uncle was on trial with Nelson Mandela. He now runs Liliesleaf Farm, a memorial to the anti-Apartheid movement.
“What Bell Pottinger did by coming in and taking something that is so sensitive, which is a political dynamite and utilised it for personal exploitation and gain. They have managed to inculcate into our vocabulary a terminology, which is cancerous. We are now battling that. The ANC in every single historical document you read says, ‘SA cannot fulfil its full potential unless it creates a non-racial society where all South Africans participate.’ And Bell Pottinger has come in and stuck a knife into the heart of that very ethos and fabric by exploiting something that is extremely sensitive and they’ve been malicious.”
Bell Pottinger has apologised now and they’ve sacked one of the people who was involved with the account and they’ve suspended a few more. Are you happy with that? Has that helped?
“That’s tokenism. You can’t suddenly once the horse has bolted and somebody closes the stable door and then find a few sacrificial lambs and say they behaved on their own. They were rouge PR publicists who had no mandate to do what they did. Bell Pottinger, as a company, must take responsibility for the damage that they have caused in this country. Damage that undermined our struggle and what so many people sacrificed for. If they had any appreciation for what Nelson stood for they would not have agreed to do what they were asked to do. Money would not have come into it. If there was any moral fibre in the leadership of Bell Pottinger, they would say, this is not acceptable.”
So, what would you like to see what Bell Pottinger do?
“Bell Pottinger should be put out of business for immoral business ethics. For the pain and suffering that has been caused by their immoral campaign. I definitely think the British Government should take steps.”
Not only do the Guptas and President Zuma deny these allegations but the CE of Bell Pottinger, James Henderson, says his company’s actions in SA have been misunderstood.
“At worst, we were very naïve in what we got involved with but there was no, at any point, intention to create the impact that’s claimed that we created. We went out predominantly with a corporate campaign trying to handle an issue in a responsible way and I believe that that will come out. However, I believe there was naivety and that we were involved in a very political situation and we’ve allowed ourselves to become the story but the actions we’ve been accused of, in time, I hope it will come out that we did not do that and we have been called guilty before any real evidence has been shown of what we did do. We clearly take huge concern of this, which is why we commissioned a Herbet Smit Report to look into every aspect, every email, every document that was produced. The proposals I saw on this issue looked into corporate responsible proposals. They did not fuel racial tension or have an intention of doing so.” |
Netflix is partnering with thriving Nordic outfit Miso Film on its first Scandinavian original drama, “The Rain,” a dystopian thriller series created by critically acclaimed writers/filmmakers Jannik Tai Mosholt (“Borgen”), Esben Toft Jacobsen (“The Great Bear”) and Christian Potalivo (“The Pig”).
Produced by Miso Film, the FremantleMedia-owned outfit behind “Those Who Kill,” “Acquitted” and “Modus,” “The Rain” unfolds a decade after a brutal virus has wiped out most of the population in Scandinavia. The series follows the perilous journey of two young siblings searching for safety, guided by their father’s notebook about the virus and the hazards of this new world. Joining a group of other young survivors, the pair quickly realize that the greatest danger comes from within.
“I’m interested in finding out what we humans will do if the day should come when civilization as we know it vanishes,” said Tai Mosholt, who will be writing the series and showrunning alongside producer Potalivo. “And I want to see it through the eyes of youth. Those who are too young to understand it all when everything and everyone disappears around them, and who then have to find out who they are and what they will become.”
Tai Mosholt added that, “in broad terms, ‘The Rain’ is a story about hope and finding out what there is to hope for when all hope seems gone. It’s a story about responsibility and whether survival is about the individual or the group.”
Erik Barmack, VP of international original series at Netflix, said Tai Mosholt, Potalivo and Miso had all contributed to the recent rise in Scandinavian television. “We believe that Netflix will be the perfect global platform to showcase their talents,” Barmack said.
Netflix will premiere “The Rain” in 2018, across all the territories where the service is established.
Netflix previously acquired Scandinavian series such as “Rita,” the Danish comedy-drama created by Christian Torpe, and “Lilyhammer,” the American-Norwegian show created by and starring Steven Van Zandt.
Since launching in 2004, Miso Film has produced a flurry of high-end drama series such as “Veum,” “Those Who Kill,” “Dicte,” “Acquitted” and “Modus,” which earned critical acclaim and traveled to many territories. |
The taste of tea is changing—and generally for the worse if left unmanaged," declares ethnobotanist Selena Ahmed, an assistant professor of sustainable food systems at Montana State University. Ahmed is the project lead of a research group from Tufts University in Massachusetts studying the effect of climate change on tea. And not only is flavor being compromised, but ultimately, due to erratic precipitation and extreme temperatures, "there are [fewer] areas suitable for [growing] high quality tea" around the world, she finishes.
Taiwanese farmer Alfredo Lin, a relatively new tea producer, would agree. He planted his first tea farm four years ago in Nantou County, in central Taiwan, and confirms that his crops have already experienced the effects of climate change.
"The extreme rain last year really overwhelmed my plants," he says. "It never used to be this serious. The rain is threatening the root systems."
Although Lin is new to the tea game, he’s not short of experience. Lin’s family has been growing oolong tea in central Taiwan for decades. His aunt and uncle are oolong tea producers, and his own mother works full-time as a tea picker, rising daily at 6 a.m. during the harvest season to pluck tender tea buds underneath the increasingly harsh sun. Lin calls his mother and her friends, adoringly, "mother pluckers." They are all Taiwanese women over the age of 60, and they wear long protective layers and a thick hat to prevent themselves from heatstroke in the fields.
"Young people don’t want to do this job anymore," Lin’s mother says. "It’s too much hard work. It’s getting too hot."
Lin’s crop of choice is Ruby Red #18—a highly oxidized black tea cultivar bred by the government-sponsored Tea Research and Extension Station, whose sole purpose is to improve tea plantations in Taiwan. Scientists there created Ruby Red #18 by crossing a Taiwan native variety with an Assam cultivar from Burma. The result: a wonderful brew distinguished by its cinnamon and malt sugar undertones.
"The average yield for Ruby Red tea is around 500 kilograms," explains Lin. "I only brought in 125 kilograms and 80 kilograms during my two harvests this year." Lin admits he is also afraid that the intense scorching summer heat this year will damage his plants’ buds.
"The taste of tea is changing—and generally for the worse."
"In Taiwan this spring, it was cold for a long time, and all of sudden it was hot. This decreased yields," explains David Tsay, a tea teacher who specializes in organic farming and travels around China and Taiwan giving lectures at universities. "We’re also currently waiting for the typhoon season, which is delayed this year."
These observations are not uncommon. All over the world, tea farmers are dealing with irregular precipitation and higher temperatures. In the last 15 years, global surface temperatures have been increasing; 2015 was the hottest year on record.
Too Much Rain Is Dulling the Flavor of Tea
Global warming has brought unseasonally high levels of rainfall in parts of the world. Because the atmosphere’s water-holding limit increases by about 4 percent for every one degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature, extreme precipitation is more likely when a storm passes through a warmer atmosphere holding more water. These places include major tea producing areas like Japan, China’s Yunnan province, and Assam and Darjeeling in India. Tea plants can only take a certain threshold of rain, and in all of these areas, plants are being pushed past their precipitation limits.
"For tea, when there’s too much rain, there’s a dilution effect of the secondary metabolites," Ahmed explains, referencing the compounds that tea drinkers value—like flavor, antioxidant properties, and caffeine levels.
"Those are basically the aromatic compounds that give tea all of its flavors and really distinguishes one tea from another tea," she adds. "When it’s really wet, the plant doesn’t have the ecological cue to make these compounds, and they also get diluted."
And so while size and the weight of the tea leaves may nearly double because of the rain, the plant's major phytochemicals will decrease to about half.
Farmers Are Hiding Lower-Quality Tea
Generally speaking, all tea comes from the same plant, Camellia sinensis. But it’s the processing method a farmer follows that differentiates teas—white, black, oolong, pu’erh, red, green, yellow—from one another.
For producers of high grade green pu’erh tea in Yunnan, the quality of leaves has decreased so severely during monsoon seasons that farmers are forced to diversify their processing mechanisms so consumers won’t notice the drop in tea quality. If they don’t, the prices of the tea will sink.
"It never used to be this serious."
So, that means, instead of making green pu’erh, these producers are opting for oolong and black teas during the monsoon season instead. Oolong and black tea require heavy processing methods and undergo more fermentation than green pu’erh. The fermentation process covers up some of the aromatic imperfections of the raw leaf. "With green pu’erh, it’s hard to hide the decrease in quality," Ahmed says. "With oolong or black tea, you can sort of cover up some of the issues in the growing conditions in the ecosystem itself."
Temperature Fluctuations May Mean Less Tea
Beyond rainfall, in places like Zhejiang and Fujian in eastern China and Taiwan, the biggest hurdle tea producers must overcome is temperature variability.
This spring in Zhejiang, where the famous Longjing green tea (Longjing, or Dragon Well, refers to the area in Hangzhou—the capital of Zhejiang—where, arguably, the best green tea in China is produced, also a favorite of the Qianlong Emperor) grows, the weather was warm enough to cause an early bud burst. It was followed up by frost, which ended up damaging some plants. Although this didn’t affect tea quality, it did impact yield. Zhejiang tea farmers weren’t able to harvest as much tea compared to previous years.
Who Else Is at Risk? Geographically speaking, lower elevation tea sites are at higher risk because they experience greater fluctuations in temperature. With rainfall, water will run down a mountain and can potentially flood fields. High mountain tea farms aren’t subject to as many erratic changes.
Southern tea-producing regions like Yunnan and Guangdong are more susceptible than more northern places like Japan. "The temperatures are higher [in southern tea-producing regions] and the annual distribution of rain isn’t even," explains Wenyan Han, a scientist at the Tea Research Institute in Hangzhou, China.
"The early budding also impacted the harvest schedule," Ahmed says. "It was difficult getting laborers to harvest the tea last-minute this year."
How to Save Tea
Ahmed offers several suggestions on how farmers can best protect their tea plants from climate change, but first and foremost, she believes that plants which grow in a diversified ecosystem have the best chance to withstand weather changes and produce high quality leaves. Right now, the majority of tea farms around the world exist as monocultures, which makes them more susceptible to unpredictable weather patterns.
"Traditionally in southwestern China, tea plants were grown in a forest ecosystem," Ahmed explains. "This multistoried structure, or agroforest, helped manage pests and diseases." Agroforests are also more resilient to weather changes and erratic rainfall.
Next, she notes that organic farming yields higher quality plants compared to conventional farming. "We studied quality from organic farms at sites in Fujian and Zhejiang," she says. "Organic teas have higher phytochemicals." Simply put: organic teas taste better. This is most likely because organic tea plants live under greater stress than conventional tea plants since farm managers don't apply the same amount of pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals to protect them. Under stress, organic plants produce more phyochemicals. Additionally, strong pesticides used in conventional farming strip the soil and shortens the lifespan of a tea bush to a couple of years versus a couple of decades.
And finally, for sites that are susceptible to erosion from heavy rainfall, Ahmed advises farmers to plant their crops from seed. "The plants grown from seeds or seedlings have stronger roots," she says. Clonal propagules, or trees planted from cuttings, aren’t able to dig as deep and absorb nutrients from the soil and water.
While the future of tea may seem bleak, on the contrary, some parts of the world may actually be benefitting, and even producing higher quality tea, as a result of climate change.
"A little bit of drought is actually good for tea quality," admits Ahmed. "It creates complex flavored teas, but if it’s too extreme, this is detrimental to the tea plant." She notes that there was a drought in southwest China in 2012 and 2013. In Yunnan, pu’erh producers were able to charge higher prices for their drought-ridden product—which had a more full-bodied and intense taste.
Tea as a Case Study
It’s difficult to pinpoint flavor subtleties in crops like wheat and rice. But tea, with its hundreds of compounds, is sensitive and complex enough to reflect minute changes in temperature and precipitation.
In the last 15 years, global surface temperatures have been increasing; 2015 was the hottest year on record.
Although weather fluctuations are normal in any ecosystem, these variables have been especially unpredictable in the last 15 years. What’s taking place with tea is a sobering microcosm for what’s happening to agricultural products around the world. "Tea is really an indicator species for climate change," Ahmed says. "It has all of these variables and makes for a really good case study."
Master tea connoisseurs, she points out, are able to drink a cup and relay the different environmental conditions in which a leaf was grown. Tsay, the tea teacher in Taiwan, is one of those people. He works with farmers across Taiwan and the greater China region to transition to organic farming. He’s a staunch advocate for the preservation of wild tea trees and agroforests in Yunnan.
"You can immediately notice the difference in taste when people cut corners," he states. "When farms blindly pursue yield, quality is at risk."
That, it seems, is the entire crux of the climate change conversation. While yields may decrease based on factors like temperature fluctuations, for tea enthusiasts, the quality of the tea is the most important component. And quality, according to Ahmed and her team, can best be maintained by diversifying planting systems.
"We need to think about ways of having our agricultural system like a naturally functioning ecosystem," Ahmed adds. "More consumers these days are aware of organic and sustainable food systems. The next step is developing a climate smart system."
Editor: Kat Odell |
Oxford Circus tube station evacuated, police respond to 'incident'
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Update 17:43: Met now say found no trace of suspects or of shots having been fired.
Update 17:19: Police say they are responding to reports of shots fired and a potential terrorist incident.
Oxford Circus tube station in London has been evacuated after reports of an ‘incident’, armed police are on the scene.
There are reports of people running away from the scene.
Just been caught up in loads of people screaming and running away from Oxford Circus station after being evacuated, police telling people to get inside. Sounds like some serious shit is going down. — Alex Irons (@IRONSBREW) November 24, 2017
Police are advising people to avoid the area.
Our officers are on the scene at #OxfordCircus tube station with @BTP Please avoid the Oxford Circus area whilst we deal with the incident. More info asap — Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) November 24, 2017
Met also telling people to get inside a building. |
Folks, I wasn't able to listen to Bill Belichick's press conference after the game. My girlfriend said that I had to give some form of attention to the guests at our apartment and that I should probably put football away.
She said that I wouldn't miss anything from his press conference, anyways. She said that she already knew what he was going to say.
I agreed to socialize on the condition that she grant me this interview. Here are the results:
PP: So how did Tom Brady do?
GFB: Okay, so Tom Brady is the quarterback and he threw the ball and sometimes he threw them for touchdowns. Next question.
PP: So what did you think about the play of Rob Gronkowski?
GFB: ...what play?
PP: Sorry, how did you like his touchdown?
GFB: Well, Gronkowski made a touchdown and that's what he's supposed to do because he's a football player. So...next question?
PP: So what did you do to prepare for Peyton Manning?
GFB: We practiced football. Next question.
PP: How did the weather affect your decisions as a coach?
GFB: We play football in all sorts of weather.
PP: Well, I know you had an issue with the weatherman this week. How did the forecast change your game plan?
GFB: Wait, I want to answer this well. Can I have the hot sauce?
PP: Bill, I'm including all of this.
GFB: Well, I'm Belichick, so I don't make wrong decisions. I only make the right decisions. But I don't need a dome to protect me.
---
I actually think this is a fair representation of the press conference. So. Thanks for the interview "Bill". |
RCMP say a man being pursued by Mounties forced the closure of a small airport in Edson, Alta., after he drove through a security gate and onto a runway before his pickup truck caught fire.
Police say the man has been arrested and charges were pending, including endangering the safety of an aerodrome and possession of methamphetamine.
RCMP say it all started Monday afternoon when an officer stopped a pickup for a traffic check but it sped off, hitting a police car.
Mounties say when they caught up with the truck at the airport it was burning and a man fled into some nearby woods.
Officers later arrested a suspect in a residential area.
No one was hurt and no aircraft were damaged.
"The actions of one put the safety of the airport in substantial danger," Staff Sergeant Peter King said in a release.
"We are pleased the man was apprehended quickly and through the work of our officers and emergency service partners it brought this incident to a prompt resolution."
The man was being held in custody pending a bail hearing.
Edson is about 200 kilometres west of Edmonton. |
Why startups should focus on a very small market
Kilometer.io Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jul 26, 2015
Everybody will tell you that if you are building a company you should make sure that your market is big enough. Otherwise, even if you dominate the whole market, you might not be making enough money to build a big and successful business.
The problem is that it’s almost impossible for a new startup to compete with the big guys and conquer a significant market share of a big market.
Luckily, there’s a workaround.
In this post I will share my thoughts on how to start with a small market, dominant it and expand your success to a huge market.
When you are just starting out, no one knows you, trusts you or believes your promises. If that’s not enough, big markets have big competitors that are well known, have many customers, reputation and reliability.
How are you going to position yourself against the big guys?
Are you going to offer a cheaper price? Simpler user interface ? More features?
Usually, this will not be enough to fight the natural scepticism of the users. Not enough to make people take the risk and make an effort to try what you have to offer.
Let’s analyze an hypothetical example:
You’re building a mobile-phone and want to compete with iPhone.
The market for mobile phones is huge, so if you can even acquire a tiny part of this market, you’ll be considered a success story.
You create a cheaper mobile phone with a longer battery life and a bigger screen. But iPhone has millions of apps, it’s branded, trendy, highly publicized and much more.
What are the chances to acquire a share of that huge market? Probably very low.
Let’s consider another scenario:
You are focusing on a small market of professional athletes, and building a mobile-phone that will be tailored for their needs.
Since your market is so small you can build the very best product on earth for this specific market.
You can build a mobile phone with special sensors that are important for athletes. Add an ecosystem of apps allowing to use those sensors in order to share training results with teammates and coaches.
iPhone’s market is huge, Apple can’t focus on professional athletes, it needs to build an “one fits all” phone. This is your advantage, since hypothetically you can build a much better product for a very narrow market.
Doing this successfully will allow you to dominate that narrow market.
But what is the point of dominating a small market ?
So now you have a big market share of a tiny market, since the market is so small dominating it might seem useless and you might be losing money.
You need to remember that dominating a small market is only the first stage.
When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, the market for it was very limited- Harvard students. It wouldn’t make any sense for the vast majority of today’s Facebook users
to sign up and create a profile (and it wasn’t event possible because of the invite only policy).
Then Facebook expended to other universities, and the rest is history.
Another great example is Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors company. Tesla started out by building luxury electric sport cars. By focusing on great innovation and technology, Tesla dominated the market, and built it’s brand.
Later Tesla introduced the S-model, an electric Sedan, and the upcoming X-model was the cross-over. Currently over 70K Tesla vehicles were already sold and the company is growing rapidly.
Back to our mobile-phone example:
Most of the professional athletes are using your phone and since it’s perfect for their needs they are absolutely loving it. They are talking about your phone and showing it to their friends and family. Their friends might not be professional athletes, but since they occasionally jog in the park they might seriously consider trying it.
Expanding to the mainstream
Now you’ve built a good product, your brand name and your users love the product and tell their friends about it. Your next step will be to create another version of the product for the general public.
Now you’re no longer just starting out, you’re selling your product, your company gets bigger and you gain interest from investors and press.
Although this is an hypothetical example, I think we can agree that focusing on a small market at the beginning of the way eventually will increase your chances of building a successful company in a big market.
Implementing the “small market first” strategy at Kilometer.io
When I started Kilometer I realized that the Online Analytics market is huge and that we need to focus on a small part of that huge market.
That’s why in general we’re following this strategy:
Focus on a small market (within the Online Analytics market)
Talk to users in this specific market, understanding in depth their problems and needs
Build a product that’s 10 times better than the existing products for the specific users included in your target market
Get feedback and improve until you dominate that small market
Expand to a broader market, repeat the previous steps, until reaching the mainstream
How did we choose our market?
The first step was researching our competitors, who are the users they are serving.
We divided our research into three parts:
Type of companies using our competitors:
SaaS Companies
Ecommerce stores
Content Websites
Size of companies using our competitors:
We found out that the size of the companies using our competitors varies from small unfounded startups to hugeenterprise organizations.
Type of users using our competitors:
Analysts
Data mining professionals
Marketers
Product managers
Founders
Of course, a product that serves all of the above audiences can’t fit them all perfectly. So we tried to find out which users slip from the main focus of the big analytics companies.
It took hundreds of emails, conversation, surveys and meetings in order to focus on one narrow audience:
Founders of small SaaS startups
Here are some of the reasons that made us believe that they are most likely to embrace our product over the existing solutions:
Startup founders have a huge need for analytics that will help them find out what’s going on in their business.
Founders usually don’t have the analytics knowledge, background and experience which is required in order to use the existing tools.
It’s relatively easy to reach out and connect with startup founders (compared to data mining professionals for example).
Startup founders are more likely to be interested in trying out early products and providing valuable feedback.
Building a 10 times better product for our specific audience
After we choose our audience, we asked ourself the following question:
What a typical SaaS founder should go through in order to understand what is going on in his startup?
And, how long will it take?
In order to describe the process I am going to use Mixpanel — a $865,000,000 worth analytics company, which is considered one of the leaders of this market.
From “I am blind!” to “I have awesome dashboards that tell me all I need to know” with Mixpanel the process is as following:
Sign up to Mixpanel
Go over the documentation, learn how to transmit events to Mixpanel
Research and define which KPIs and metrics are important for you to measure in your SaaS company
Define which events are needed in order to calculate the above metrics, focusing on naming and choosing which data to send with each event
Research which formulas to use in order to calculate metrics such as Life Time Value, MRR, User Churn, User Growth and more
Create charts and metrics based on the event-data sent to Mixpanel
Build dashboards that will include charts and metrics that show the big picture (custom coding required)
Roughly speaking the process should take around 3 working days.
Since we’re building a product for a narrow market, we can make the above tasks much easier.
We already know which KPIs and metrics are important for a SaaS businesses and we know how to calculate them.
We know which data we need the user to send us and we can supply ready made code snippets (copy & paste approach) — No thinking required
We can automatically create all the charts, metrics and dashboards a typical SaaS founder needs.
Finally, we just need the user to copy & paste a few lines of code to his project and that code will send to Kilometer all the information required in order to create three pre-defined dashboards:
User Acquisition
User Retention
Finance
The dashboards will be automatically filled with 27 metrics such as Life Time Value, MRR, User Churn, User Growth etc.
The whole integration process should take the user around 290 seconds.
Here is an example of our user acquisition dashboard:
Acquisition Dashboard
We’re using “the power of focusing on small market” in order to create a better product for saas startup founders.
Is Kilometer a better tool for analysts and data scientists? Probably not, they need much deeper analytics capabilities.
But, we’re perfectly fine with that at this stage, as I explained in our strategic plan above.
This post was heavily inspired by the ideas shared in a book called “Zero to One” by PayPal’s founder Peter Thiel. I highly recommend this book to any entrepreneur.
What do you think , does our plan make sense to you? Join the conversation and comment below: |
A major blast is reported to have ripped through Aleppo, Syria’s largest city. The bomb allegedly targeted the headquarters of Syria’s ruling Ba'ath Party.
According to local media, unidentified gunmen hurled a grenade at the headquarters of Syria’s ruling party, killing a security agent and damaging the building. Guards then opened fire at the assailants, though it was not clear whether anyone was killed in the exchange.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), told AFP that “initial details indicate that the Aleppo blast was targeting the local branch of the ruling Ba'ath party and there is no information until now on the number of victims that fell in the explosion.”
However, one guard at the headquarters died, apparently in a round of gunfire following the explosion, reports Reuters citing SOHR. Activists in the city said they heard a very loud noise that appeared to come from an area in center of Aleppo.
"The sound was so loud and after that there were a lot of echoes of gun fire. Now all the roads leading to Saadallah al-Jabiry square are closed down," Reuters cites an activist who asked not to be named.
The blasts come hours after Syrian authorities killed a would-be suicide bomber, foiling a potentially major terror plot. The terrorist was shot before he had a chance to detonate 1,200 kilograms of explosives stashed in his minibus.
Also on Friday night, RT’s Sara Firth, on location in Damascus, has reported another possible explosion. The strength of the blast is not yet clear, and there has been no official confirmation. However, Firth said the RT crew could hear and feel something like a bomb going off from their hotel room. According to Firth, the feeling was akin to one they’d experienced “when the May 10 bombs exploded” near intelligence headquarters in the Syrian capital.
Only two days ago, 55 people were killed and 372 more injured by two powerful blasts in Damascus, the worst attack since the uprising began more than a year ago.
Two car bombs went off in quick succession during the morning rush hour, just as employees were arriving to work. A small initial explosion was followed by a much larger blast, allegedly targeted at paramedics and security forces arriving at the scene.
The explosion left two craters – three and six meters wide – in front of a military compound. The two cars were stuffed with more than 1,000 kilograms of explosives, said Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdissi.
The blasts were branded a terrorist attack by state television and the authorities, but there has been no claim of responsibility yet.
SOHR – Who can you trust?
Earlier, Russia questioned the reliability of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The activities of the controversial London-based group were denounced by Russia’s Foreign Ministry back on February 2012, with spokesman Aleksandr Lukashevich casting doubts on SOHR’s reliability.
"As far as we know, this organization employs only two people (its head and secretary-translator). It is headed by Rami Abdulrahman, who has no training either in journalism or law or even a complete secondary education," Lukashevich said.
The SOHR is one of the most widely-quoted sources of Syrian casualty figures and Lukashevich pointed out that many information agencies, primary Western ones, often refer to SOHR data in their reports on Syria.
Historian Pierre Picolin also says the Observatory is a source Western media choose to rely exclusively on when it comes to getting information about Syria.
“I say that there are two such 'observatories,' and they are both connected with the opposition. In reality these organizations are the opposition’s propaganda agencies, propaganda tools.” he said.
“It is part of the journalist’s job to think critically, verify sources and be extremely cautious. But they decide to just spread the information they receive from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, without asking any questions.”
In fact there are two sites each claiming to be an official observatory and providing different data. Both sites report slightly different figures, none of which can be independently confirmed, leaving media outlets wondering how reliable their sources are. |
February 26, 2010
James Illingworth explains how the budget crisis got so bad in California--and describes the development of a movement that is challenging the cuts.
ON MARCH 4, thousands of students, workers, and teachers will take action across California to resist the ongoing attack on public education. The scale of the fightback in education has inevitably focused attention on the cuts in that sector, but the crisis extends into every area of the state government.
How did things get so bad in California?
Budget crises are hitting states across the U.S. According to the Economic Policy Institute, state governments entered the 2010 fiscal year with a collective budget shortfall of $156 billion. This was partially overcome with $68 billion in federal stimulus spending and about $1 billion in rainy day funds. That left $87 billion to be accounted for through spending cuts and tax increases.
The crisis is sharpest in California for several reasons. First, its economy was the most reliant on construction and financial services, two of the sectors hardest hit in this recession. California lost half a million jobs in 2009 alone.
Over 2 million Californians are out of work today, and the unemployment rate stands at more than 12 percent. Statewide, construction, manufacturing and business services have each lost well over 150,000 jobs during the last 18 months. And, of course, tax revenues have slumped as a result of the downturn.
Some 4,000 students, faculty and staff demonstrated on Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley last September
Second, California's peculiar political character exacerbated the crisis. One key factor is the 1978 Proposition 13 ballot measure, which put a strict limit on property taxes and mandated a two-thirds majority vote of the legislature to raise any state taxes.
For a decade, Republicans in Sacramento refused to raise taxes, forcing the majority Democrats to fund the state government through massive borrowing. This strategy worked fine while the economy kept growing, and cheap credit stayed available. But the financial meltdown of late 2008 caused both a huge drop in state tax revenues and also the drying up of credit.
Now, almost 5 percent of the state budget is dedicated to servicing California's massive debts. That's $4.5 billion this year, and it's projected to rise to more than $9 billion, or 6 percent of the budget, before the end of the 2010s.
From the beginning of the crisis, therefore, the state government consistently sought to make poor and working-class Californians pay the price. Rather than introduce publicly funded jobs programs to replace employment lost in the private sector, the state used the crisis to attack social welfare programs, privatize whole parts of the public sector and attempt to break the back of the teachers' union.
THE SCALE of the attack to come became clear in November 2008, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger responded to the Wall Street meltdown by proposing a furlough program for state workers, elimination of some paid holidays and restrictions on overtime.
By early 2009, Schwarzenegger and California Democrats were proposing to fix the $42 billion budget deficit with ballot measures that would have raised indirect taxation on working people and capped spending on education. Voters went to the polls in May 2009 and overwhelmingly rejected these measures--so Schwarzenegger and the Democrats were forced to take a different tack.
After many delays and much political wrangling, the legislature managed to pass a budget in July 2009 that included $15 billion in cuts--including more than $6.5 billion slashed from K-12 education and community colleges, and $2 billion taken from the California State University (CSU) and University of California (UC) systems.
Democrats in the legislature voted unanimously for the cuts. They were able to secure passage of the budget when state Sen. Abel Maldonado--who has since gotten Schwarzenegger's endorsement to serve as lieutenant governor--defected from the closed ranks on the Republican side, and voted in favor.
At $20 billion, the projected budget deficit for 2010-11 is smaller than last year's. But Schwarzenegger clearly intends to continue his strategy of cuts, privatization and war on the unions.
In January of this year, he announced plans for state workers to take a further 5 percent cut in wages, and to pay 5 percent more into their pensions out of their paychecks. The proposed budget also calls for privatization of those pensions, which would strip many workers of any protection for their retirement benefits.
For good measure, the governor wants to curtail seniority protection for teachers. And he wants to do all of this without sitting at the negotiating table with public sector unions.
If education took the biggest hit last time around, it's now the turn of Health and Human Services, which the governor is targeting for 8 percent cuts, totaling almost $3 billion. Included in this is an attack on In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), which cares for more than 430,000 of the poorest elderly and disabled Californians.
Despite the fact that a federal judge issued an injunction to stop the state government from implementing similar cuts during the 2009-10 budget year, Schwarzenegger now proposes to eliminate this service entirely for 87 percent of recipients, which could destroy more than 300,000 union jobs.
The governor's latest budget also proposes to end public assistance for legal immigrants, which would save a paltry $300 million, but leave thousands of elderly and disabled people at the mercy of the recession.
If his plan is approved, the CalWORKS welfare program, which provided $723 for a two-parent family of three in January 2009, will now pay out only $585 to the same family. The budget also proposes a $750 million cut to Medi-Cal--California's version of Medicaid--as well as cuts in day care services.
ALTHOUGH EDUCATION will take a smaller hit in the new budget, this sector has become the main symbol of the California budget crisis. It's also the area that most clearly demonstrates the "shock doctrine" approach of the California ruling class in the current crisis--it's become a testing ground for a policy of austerity and privatization.
Schwarzenegger has had a grudge against public education ever since he took office. In 2004, he agreed to a "Higher Education Compact" with the heads of the CSU and UC systems, under which student fees would rise at an average of 10 percent a year.
With so much cheap credit available during the debt bubble of those years, Schwarzenegger and university administrators figured that students and their families could fund the increase in fees through ever-more student loans, based on the equity from rising house prices. The idea that higher education should be a luxury for the wealthiest Californians reached its logical conclusion when the UC Regents raised tuition by 32 percent in November 2009.
At the same time, state authorities have gone on the offensive against public schools in the K-12 system. Schwarzenegger stacked the State Board of Education with advocates of privatization. The result has been a steady push towards charter schools, which often employ non-union teachers and are run by private business interests.
At first, public-sector unions were slow to react to the attack. In early 2009, the California Teachers Association even made the extraordinary decision to back Schwarzenegger's ballot measures, though they were hugely unpopular with California workers and would have led to an increase in regressive taxation.
Soon after, however, the first sparks of a fightback appeared on university campuses.
On September 24, the first day of classes in much of the University of California system, two campus unions--the Union of Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) and the Coalition of University Employees (CUE)--organized a one-day strike, and found a deep well of support from students and faculty. Professors and lecturers throughout the UC system signed on to an open letter calling for walkouts against the cuts. At UC Berkeley, as many as 5,000 students and workers rallied against the cuts on September 24, and thousands took action elsewhere.
September 24 also saw the beginning of the student occupation movement. At UC Santa Cruz, some two dozen protestors took over the graduate student commons and remained barricaded inside for almost a week. The tactic spread--occupations took place on UC campuses at Davis, Berkeley and Los Angeles, plus San Francisco State and Fresno State, among others.
On October 24, some 800 students, workers and teachers gathered in Berkeley for a conference to coordinate the fight against the cuts, and voted for March 4 to be a day of strikes and actions to defend public education at all levels.
The movement took another big step forward when the UC Regents met in November for their vote to raise tuition by 32 percent. When they were meeting, students and their allies occupied buildings at half a dozen schools across California. Some of the occupations involved hundreds and even thousands of people, and led to confrontations with riot police at UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC Santa Cruz. Authorities only regained control on these campuses after several days of protests.
THE SCALE of the November protests and the inspiration they gave to many rank-and-file workers in the public sector finally forced union leaderships to take the movement seriously.
One by one, during December and January, the teachers' unions endorsed the March 4 actions. Even if their organizing efforts were often top-down or half-hearted, this development demonstrated the depth of anger among union members and showed how a radicalized and mobilized membership could shift the direction of labor officials.
So far, the movement against cuts in education has won mostly symbolic victories. In early January, Schwarzenegger proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee funding for education and stated that California "can no longer afford to cut higher education." Hours later, the governor's chief of staff called campus protests "the tipping point" in producing this partial reprieve for schools.
In mid-February, a California state legislature committee responded to student and worker anger about UC spending priorities by announcing an audit of the entire system.
But simply demanding more money from Sacramento isn't enough. The movement is also calling for the democratization of education--an end to the system where political appointees and bureaucrats, many with an ideological predisposition to privatization, make decisions that affect millions of students, workers and teachers. We need to stand up against charter schools and all other attempts to introduce market relations into our basic social services.
Meanwhile, activists' demands have gone on to focus on a radical change in the distribution of wealth in California.
Today, working-class Californians pay a higher share of their income in taxes than some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the state. Many profitable companies actually pay no state taxes at all--overall, the share of state taxes paid by corporations in California has shrunk to about 7 percent. Many activists are also demanding an end to regressive taxation and the repeal of Proposition 13.
The crisis in California should serve as a warning to workers and students in other states. Because of its unique tax structure and political make-up, California is feeling the effects of the credit crunch first. But almost every state in the country--particularly those where the boom and bust of the housing market hit hardest, like Nevada, Arizona and Florida--face a similar crisis. The Obama administration's decision to call a three-year freeze on non-military spending is a signal of the austerity measures that lie in wait for students and workers everywhere.
No matter how inspiring they are, the March 4 Day of Action won't be enough to stop the cuts by itself. This is a long-term struggle, and the movement needs to prepare for that.
Where the fightback has already begun, activists must strengthen and broaden existing organizations--the networks of rank-and-file teachers, campus unions and student assemblies. These forces should attempt to bring into action still greater numbers of workers and students, while remaining independent of the educational bureaucracy and the Democrats in Sacramento, who have tried to corral the protest at every turn.
At the local and statewide level, we need to strengthen the cooperation and coordination among different sectors of education.
But we also need to broaden the struggle. We need a movement that unites students and teachers with other public sector workers and the poor people who are losing vital services. The activism and protests we've seen so far show the potential to move forward. |
rfc:propertygetsetsyntax-v1.2
Version: 1.2
Created: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2013-01-17
Author: Clint Priest <cpriest at php dot net>
Contributors: Nikita Popov
Status: Declined, Vote Failed
Fork
RFC are available here: The changes for thisare available here: https://github.com/cpriest/php-src/tree/accessors
Introduction
This document describes the property accessor syntax. The RFC which this was crafted from is located here: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/propertygetsetsyntax Previous Revision: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/propertygetsetsyntax-v1.1
What Are Property Accessors?
Property accessors provide a clean, easy to understand and unified syntax for get/set accessors. They allow read and write requests (gets and sets) from a class property to be run through a method first. This method can perform validation or a transformation, or update other areas of the class. Properties do not even have to be associated with a class member, and can generate their own data on-the-fly.
Terminology / Glossary
To provide clarity of documentation, the following glossary and example are provided: Traditional Property - A property which has no accessors, a class “variable,” the only type of property presently available
Guarded Property - A property with accessors which guard read, write, isset and unset access through code
Accessor - A method defined for a property which implements code that is executed when a property is accessed getter - A type of accessor which is used to retrieve the value of the property setter - A type of accessor which is used to change the value of a property issetter - A type of accessor which is used to determine whether the property isset() unsetter - A type of accessor which is used to unset() the property
// Code sample indicating the terminology class TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; // <-- Traditional Property public $Hours { // <-- Guarded Property get ( ) { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } // <-- Accessor, more specifically a getter set ( $x ) { $this -> Seconds = $x * 3600 ; } // <-- Accessor, more specifically a setter isset ( ) { return isset ( $this -> Seconds ) ; } // <-- Accessor, more specifically an issetter unset ( ) { unset ( $this -> Seconds ) ; } // <-- Accessor, more specifically an unsetter } } A fully implemented, symmetrically defined property with accessors should be functionally identical to a traditional property
Syntax
Basic Syntax
This is the basic property accessor syntax as implemented. class TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; // Properties accessors are implemented just like you would define an actual property public $Hours { get ( ) { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } // In the set accessor, the variable $x holds the incoming value to be "set" set ( $x ) { $this -> Seconds = $x * 3600 ; } } } // Accessing the property is the same as accessing a class member $time = new TimePeriod ( ) ; $time -> Hours = 12 ; // Stored as 43200 echo $time -> Hours ; // Outputs 12 Typehints The setter also allows for optional type hinting, such as set ( callable $x ) { ... } Version 1.1 did not have parenthesized syntax, v1.2 adds optional parenthesis format. If no parenthesis are provided, then $value is automatically provided in the case of a setter, the following is equivalent to the previous block: class TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; // Property accessors are implemented just like you would define an actual property public $Hours { get { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } // In the set accessor, the variable $value holds the incoming value to be "set" set { $this -> Seconds = $value * 3600 ; } } }
Overloading Properties
Properties can be overloaded in extending classes. An overloaded property can replace an existing accessor declaration without touching the other, replace both the get and set declarations, or add an omitted accessor declaration turning the property into a read/write property. Additionally, a property may have its visibility increased through overloading. Get or set declarations cannot be removed or hidden by the child class in any way. class TimePeriod { protected $Seconds = 3600 ; public $Hours { get { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } set { $this -> Seconds = $value * 3600 ; } } // This property is read only as there is no setter public $Minutes { get { return $this -> Seconds / 60 ; } } /* public getter, protected setter */ public $Milliseconds { get { return $this -> Seconds * 1000 ; } protected set { $this -> Seconds = $value / 1000 ; } } } class HalfTimePeriod extends TimePeriod { /* Overload getter, inherit setter */ public $Hours { get { return ( $this -> Seconds / 3600 ) / 2 ; } /* The base setter will be inherited */ } public $Minutes { // A setter is added, turning this property into a read/write property instead of read only set { $this -> Seconds = $value * 60 ; } } public $Milliseconds { // An accessor can have its visibility increased in a child class, just like regular PHP methods // This accessor is now public instead of protected public set { // Due to technical limitations accessing the parent property is only possible through Reflection ( new ReflectionPropertyAccessor ( get_parent_class ( ) , 'Milliseconds' ) ) -> setValue ( $this , $value ) ; } } }
Removal of Accessor
Subclasses may also eliminate the accessor aspect of a property by re-declaring the property without the accessor syntax. This prunes the accessor functions from the sub-class that would ordinarily be inherited by the sub-class. Take this example: class A { public $Foo { get { return 1 ; } } } class B extends A { public $Foo = 5 ; } $o1 = new A ( ) echo $o1 -> Foo ; // Echos 1 via A::get:$Foo $o2 = new B ( ) ; echo $o2 -> Foo ; // Echos 5 from direct property access (no accessors present in class B) Note that the re-defined property must still be public (may not be redefined as private or protected). The accessors are only removed when using the public $Foo; syntax. public $Foo { } on the other hand will inherit the parent accessors without modifying them.
Asymmetric Accessor Accessibility
Property accessors can have different levels of visibility for the getter and setter. This is achieved by setting either the get or set accessor to a lower visibility than the property is set to. class TimePeriod { private $Seconds = 3600 ; public $Hours { get { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } protected set { $this -> Seconds = $value * 3600 ; } } } $o = new TimePeriod ( ) ; echo $o -> Hours ; // Prints 1 $o -> Hours = 12 ; // Fatal error: Cannot set protected property TimePeriod::$Hours from context '' In the above example the getter inherits the public access level of the property definition while the setter becomes protected.
isset / unset
To facilitate complete functionality with properties it is necessary to provide accessor functions to act on isset() and unset() calls. These operate just like their magic __isset() and __unset() functions but are definable within the property block. class TimePeriod { private $Seconds = 3600 ; public $Hours { get { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } set { $this -> Seconds = $value ; } isset { return isset ( $this -> Seconds ) ; } unset { unset ( $this -> Seconds ) ; } } }
Guarding
Accessors guard properties access such that if a property has accessors defined for it, the accessors will be called whenever the property is accessed. Only the appropriate accessors themselves may directly access the underlying property, even from within the same class. class TimePeriod { public $Hours { get { return $this -> Hours ? : "not specified" ; } set { $this -> Hours = $value ; } } } $o = new TimePeriod ( ) ; echo $o -> Hours ; // echos not specified $o -> Hours = 1 ; echo $o -> Hours ; // echos 1
For Additional Clarity
All interaction with a guarded property is proxied through the appropriate accessor except when within the same accessor: Within a get scope, reads are not proxied; the property is read directly.
Within a set scope, writes are not proxied; the property is written to directly.
Within an isset scope, calls to isset() are not proxied; isset() will function normally and read the underlying property normally which will be through the getter.
Within an unset scope, calls to unset() are not proxied; unset() will function normally and remove the underlying property. This will not remove the accessors, only the value that the property inherently had. Accessors are free to interact with other properties which are visible to them, but access to other guarded properties is always proxied. Accessors are not required to use the property value, but it always exists.
Interaction Between Accessors
Accessors are independent, in the below example the get accessor Foo::get:$b attempting to access $this→a goes through the getter for a. class Foo { public $a { get { $this -> a = 1 ; return 2 ; } set ; } public $b { get { return $this -> a ; } } } $foo = new Foo ( ) ; echo $foo -> a ; // Echos 2 but underlying property is set to 1 echo $foo -> b ; // Echos 2 via getter for $a which again sets its underlying property $a to 1 /* Note, that without the set; a warning would be produced by an attempt to set $this->a from the getter for $a, this is because a setter is required to write to the property, even the getter cannot write to it's own property without the setter, only the setter may do that. */
Automatic Implementations
You may also use automatic implementations of accessors by not defining a body to the accessor. Doing so causes an automatic implementation to occur. Because property accessors shadow traditional properties, the property data storage is accessible only from within the accessor. The isset automatic implementation tests for the property to be non-null. (See php equivalent below) The unset automatic implementation sets the property to be null. (See php equivalent below) class TimePeriod { // Accessors are implemented just like you would define an actual accessor, but without a body public $Hours { get ; set ; isset ; unset ; } } Translates to this: class TimePeriod { public $Hours { get { return $this -> Hours ; } set { $this -> Hours = $value ; } isset { return $this -> Hours !== NULL ; } unset { $this -> Hours = NULL ; } } } Note: isset & unset implementations are always provided with default implementations unless the author explicitly defines their own.
Invalid Usage of isset()/unset()
There are two cases where isset and unset do not logically make sense as detailed below: If there is no getter defined, then an isset() call is technically invalid since the value cannot be obtained to see if it was set. In this case, isset() will silently ignore the invalid state, return false and continue execution.
If there is no setter defined, then an unset() call is technically invalid since the value cannot be changed as there is no setter. In this case, unset() will emit a warning and continue execution but otherwise have no effect.
Recursion
Recursion with property accessors works identically to their __get() and __set() cousins in that recursion is guarded. When the accessor that was called attempts to access the property it will directly access the underlying property, this is the only context in which the recursion guard is bypassed. 1 class A { 2 public $Foo { 3 get { 4 if ( $this -> Foo ) 5 return $this -> Foo ; 6 return $this -> Foo = 5 ; 7 } 8 set ; 9 } 10 } 11 $o = new A ( ) ; 12 echo $o -> Foo ; 13 echo $o -> Foo ; Line 12 : Calls A :: get : $Foo ; Line 4 : Directly reads the underlying property ( getter is guarded from a 2nd call ) Line 6 : Calls A :: set : $Foo ( 5 ) and finally returns the value 5 Line 13 : Calls A :: get : $Foo ; Line 4 : Directly reads the underlying property ( getter is guarded from a 2nd call ) Line 5 : Directly reads the underlying property ( getter is guarded from a 2nd call ) and returns the value
Illegal Context Access (Recursion Guarding)
If an accessor is called while it is already being guarded (from recursion) from an illegal context (anything that isn't the same accessor) then the following occurs: get called from illegal context: Recursion warning is emitted, NULL is returned.
set called from illegal context: Recursion warning is emitted, set is ignored.
isset called from illegal context: Recursion warning is emitted, false is returned.
unset called from illegal context: Recursion warning is emitted, unset is ignored.
Abstract Accessors
Individual accessors may be defined abstract which will cause the class to be abstract and require any extending classes to define a body for the abstract accessors. class Foo { public $bar { abstract get ; } } class SubFoo extends Foo { } /* Fatal error: Class Foo contains 2 abstract accessors and must be declared abstract or implement the remaining accessors (Foo::$bar->get, Foo::$bar->isset) in ... */ Just like abstract functions, it is illegal to declare an accessor abstract and to provide a body: class Foo { public $bar { abstract get { return 'test' ; } } } /* Fatal error: Abstract function Foo::$bar->get() cannot contain body in ... */ You may also declare an entire property as abstract such as: class Foo { abstract public $bar { get ; } } /* This marks all declared accessors as abstract, as well as the class. An extending class would need to provide a body for any declared accessors */
Final Properties
Properties declared final are not allowed to be overloaded in a child class, just like final methods. class TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; public final $Hours { get { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } set { $this -> Seconds = $value * 3600 ; } } } class HalfTimePeriod extends TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; // This attempt to overload the property "Hours" will throw an error because it was declared final in the base class public $Hours { get { return ( $this -> Seconds / 3600 ) / 2 ; } } } Final Accessors The get or set accessor of a property can be declared “final” independently of each other. This would allow for one of them to be overloaded, but not the other. class TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; // Notice there is no "final" keyword on the property declaration public $Hours { final get { return $this -> Seconds / 3600 ; } // Only the get accessor is declared final set { $this -> Seconds = $value * 3600 ; } } } class HalfTimePeriod extends TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; public $Hours { // This attempt to overload the getter of the "Hours" property will throw an // error because it was declared final in the base class get { return ( $this -> Seconds / 3600 ) / 2 ; } // This would be accepted set ( $this -> Seconds = ( $value * 3600 ) * 2 ; ) } }
Static Property Accessors
Static property accessors will not be in the first release of accessors, there are too many engine changes needed to enable this functionality.
References
Functions such as sort() require a reference to the underlying data storage value in order to modify them, in these cases you can place the & before the get to indicate the returning of a reference variable. class SampleClass { private $_dataArray = array ( 1 , 2 , 5 , 3 ) ; public $dataArray { & get ( ) { return $this -> _dataArray ; } set ( & $value ) { $this -> _dataArray = $value ; } } } $o = new SampleClass ( ) ; sort ( $o -> dataArray ) ; /* $o->dataArray == array(1,2,3,5); */
All of the following work and have test cases written for them
$foo→bar[] = 1
$foo→bar[123] = 4
$foobar = &$foo→bar
$foobar→baz = $x with $bar being object or empty or non-object value
$foo→bar{$x} = “foo” (string offsets)
Operators
The following operators have tests written for them and work as though it were any other variable. If the operator attempts to make a change to a property for which no setter is defined, it will produce an error such as “Cannot set property xxx, no setter defined.” If a setter is defined, then the assignment operator works as expected. The following operators have code tests written already: Pre/Post Increment/Decrement, Negation, String Concatenation (.), +=, -=, *=, /=, &=, |=, +, -, *, /, %, &, |, &&, ||, xor, ~, ==, ===, !=, !==, >, <, >=, ⇐, .=, «, », Array Union (array + array), instanceof
Read Only And Write Only Properties
Defining properties with only a getter or only a setter will make them read only and write only respectively but this does not enforce anything with subclasses. Developers wishing to prevent a setter from being defined by sub-classes will need to use the final keyword with something along these lines: class TimePeriod { private $Seconds ; public $Hours { get ( ) { return $this -> Hours ; } private final set ( $value ) { throw new Exception ( "Setting of TimePeriod:: $Hours is not allowed." ) ; } } }
Interface Property Accessors
Interfaces may define property accessor declarations without a body. The purpose of this is to define property accessors that must exist in an implementing class. When a class implements an interface that defines a getter, it can add in a setter to turn the property into a read/write property. The inverse is also true for implementing an interface with a setter only. This is because interfaces are designed to enforce what should be in a class, and not what should not be in a class. interface iSampleInterface { public $MyProperty { get ; set ; isset ; unset ; } } Furthermore, a traditional property satisfies any requirements that an property accessor declaration within an interface declares, therefore, the following is a valid implementation of the above interface: class A implements iSampleInterface { public $MyProperty ; }
Traits
Property accessors work as expected with traits including automatic accessor properties. You can use any feature with traits that you could with classes including asymmetrical access levels, isset, unset, etc. trait SampleTrait { private $Seconds = 3600 ; public $Hours { get { return $this -> Seconds * 3600 ; } set { $this -> Seconds = $value / 3600 ; } } }
Miscellaneous Q/A
__FUNCTION__ and __METHOD__ will resolve to the internally used function name: class Bar { public $foo { get { var_dump ( __FUNCTION__ , __METHOD__ ) ; } } } ( new Bar ) -> foo ; string ( 9 ) " $foo->get " // __FUNCTION__ string ( 14 ) "Bar:: $foo->get " // __METHOD__ These names are also used in backtraces and error messages, for example: Fatal error: Call to protected accessor Test::$foo->set() from context '' These functions are not directly callable by the user, e.g. doing something like $this->{'$foo->get'} will not work.
Reflection
ReflectionProperty changes
The class has the following functions added: getGet(): Returns a ReflectionMethod object for the getter or false if no getter is defined.
getSet(): Returns a ReflectionMethod object for the setter or false if no setter is defined.
getIsset(): Returns a ReflectionMethod object for the isset accessor.
getUnset(): Returns a ReflectionMethod object for the unset accessor.
hasAccessors(): Returns true if the property has accessors, false otherwise. A fairly extensive test-suite has been created to test the functionality as well.
Backward Compatibility
There are no known backward compatibility issues.
Internal Implementation
Implementation Details Document: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/propertygetsetsyntax-implementation-details
Impact on APC and other Zend extensions
In addition to the “implementation details document” linked in the previous section this section outlines the impact the accessors implementation has on APC and other Zend extensions. Most Zend extensions should not be affected by this change. Accessors are normal zend_op_array s, they are called as any other function and have a meaningful name. As such extensions like XDebug should not need any adjustments to support accessors. One extension that will require minor changes is APC. APC has to copy all zend_op_array s and zend_property_info s because they may be modified at runtime. Due to this proposal additional op_array s may be located in property_info→accs and need to be copied too. Here are the code snippets that need to be inserted in APC to do this: https://gist.github.com/4615156 (full code with the changes: https://gist.github.com/4597660). Other extensions that do something similar will require updates along the same lines. Thus the impact of the change on Zend exts is rather small.
Tests
2012-12-30: 67 tests at this time
2013-01-17: 83 tests at this time
Voting
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Change Log |
Comfort food: The woman who suffers from a rare disorder that means she cannot stop herself from eating... sofas
A mother-of-five has been diagnosed with a rare disorder called Pica after seeking medical help for her addiction... to eating sofas.
Adele Edwards, of Bradenton, Florida, has been eating the foam inside couch cushions for 21 years.
She sought help when the cravings started getting out of control.
Scroll down for video
Foam in at the mouth: Adele Edwards checks the foam from a sofa cushion at Bob's Bargain Barn in Bradenton, Florida, to see if it is the kind she likes to eat
Miss Edwards, 31, said: 'In the last year I’ve eaten seven sofas.
'I unzip the cushions and snack on the foam inside. And once I start I just can’t stop.
'But now doctors have told me that if I carry on, my addiction will kill me.'
Pica is a disorder found most commonly in toddlers and pregnant women who lack certain nutrients, causing them to crave non-nutritive substances like chalk, coins, batteries and even dirt.
Sometimes it’s caused by stress, and Adele admits her first time happened during a very emotional period in her life, when her parents were on the brink of divorce.
More! More! Adele digs in to get another handful of the foam, something she has been doing since she was 10
She said: 'My life was out of control at the time. I didn’t understand my parents breaking up. This was something I could control.'
When her cousin decided to chew a piece of sofa for fun, something in Adele’s head made her want to try too.
She said: 'I was 10 years old. I liked the flavour, I liked the way it felt in my mouth. Twenty-one years later, I’ve eaten couch cushions every day since.'
Today, Miss Edwards is trying therapy and hypnosis to rid herself of the compulsion.
She has recently been eating pieces of couch cushion 15 times per day and consumes the equivalent of a throw pillow each week.
If this continues, doctors say Adele could die.
Miss Edwards said: 'It bothers me how much control it has over me now.
A terrible addiction: Adele is finally seeking help to rid her of her fondness for foam
'It’s hard to try to get people to understand how bad this addiction is.
'I’m aware of the life risks. Doctors have told me I could get a stomach blockage so bad I’d go septic and my intestines could explode. That scares me.'
Three years ago, Miss Edwards woke up in the middle of the night in terrible agony.
Crying, she tried to get up, but collapsed by the side of her bed. She was rushed to hospital, where doctors found a serious blockage in her lower intestine.
After six days with a tube down her throat trying to clear the impasse, doctors were preparing for major surgery to remove the obstruction.
Thankfully for Miss Edwards, enhanced doses of laxatives were able to pass the stubborn ball of cushion through her body.
'It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced,' she said.
'I’m scared to go back to the hospital for a blockage again.'
The blockage was the size of a grapefruit, and made of pure sofa.
A sofa-eater's paradise: Adele surrounded by chairs with soft seat cushions Like many addicts, Miss Edwards didn't get hooked overnight.
She started by chewing the cushion foam before spitting it out. But it wasn’t long until she began to swallow each small piece of cushion she put in her mouth.
Today, Adele’s habit includes added levels of disgust.
'I unzipper the cushion cover and tear off a piece about the size of half a pencil,' she said.
'Then I take it outside and rub it in dirt. The dirt makes it crunchier. Then I chew on it and swallow it.'
Her gastroenterologist, Dr. Christopher Olenec of the Digestive Health Center in Sarasota, Florida – the man who diagnosed Miss Edwards with Pica – was alarmed when Adele told him of her new habit with the dirt.
'The question became, "did she have a deficiency in her iron? And was that what was driving her to ingest the seat cushions?"
In fact she did. Miss Edwards’s blood contains half the amount of iron of a normal woman. For most, an easy solution would be regular consumption of iron supplements. But Miss Edwards has always struggled to combat her addiction with regular treatment.
'I’ve taken the iron supplements and they seem to actually work,' she says.
A couch-less challenge: Adele faces a new crossroads after leaving her couches behind and moving in with her sister
But what does Miss Edwards’s family think of her repulsive habit?
'They know about it, but I never do it in front of them,' she said.
'My fiancé helps me monitor how much I eat.
'He makes sure I’m cutting down little by little.'
But Miss Edwards knows a more serious approach to quitting is necessary.
She and her family have recently moved into her sister’s home, where she faces a crossroads ahead.
Having left her couches behind, Adele has stockpiled enough cushion to tide her over for a matter of weeks.
But when her supply runs out, will she begin to eat her sister’s couch?
Miss Edwards, who is in discussions to enter a therapy center in California for people with similar strange addictions, believes this is the time for her to be serious about quitting. |
CELTIC could finally be set to offload Efe Ambrose - with Wolves boss Paul Lambert ready to offer the defender a trial.
Blunder Bhoy Ambrose has been axed from the Hoops first-team by Brendan Rodgers after a series of pre-season howlers.
Kenny Ramsay 2 Celtic flop Efe Ambrose has become a joke figure among Hoops fans in recent seasons
And now ex-Parkhead skipper Lambert could hand the Nigerian flop a chance to prove himself in the English Championship, according to Own Goal Nigeria.
It was widely expected that Ambrose would end his four-year spell at Parkhead in the summer, with Bayern Leverkusen interested.
But the 28-year-old opted to stay and fight for his Celts future.
However Ambrose hasn't featured since July and is behind the likes of Kolo Toure, Dedryck Boyata and Eoghan O'Connell in the pecking order.
PA 2 Wolves boss Paul Lambert could be set to hand Ambrose a career life line
And it now looks certain the error-prone defender - who is out of contract in the summer - will be sold in the New Year transfer window.
It comes after Emilio Izaguirre emerged as a target for MLS side San Jose Earthquakes.
The Honduran defender was watched by Glasgow-born San Jose coach Dominic Kinnear in Wednesday's Champions League defeat to Barcelona.
Meanwhile Norwegian starlet Kristoffer Ajer could be farmed out on loan after struggling to break into the first-team.
The highly-rated midfielder, 18, was signed by ex-Celtic boss Ronny Deila on a pre-contract last season but has made just one appearance so far. |
I recently completed "100 Questions & Answers about ADHD in Women" by Dr. Patricia Quinn. It is a moving novel, filled with narratives, research stats, and insights on how otherwise girls show challenge and ADHD symptoms because of this. Yes, I am a guy, therefore I am only able to comprehend the struggle that is female up to a point. However, I hear stories from girls who reach out online through websites, my Twitter account, YouTube, and elsewhere. I often hear stories of disaster, misdiagnoses, melancholy resulting from delayed investigations, etc.
What Is The Reason?
Why females are generally more detached in regards to investigations and their ADHD symptoms? While research does indicate that ADHD affects more men than females, that doesn't mean there isn't a big group of women suffering from acute ADHD symptoms -- usually with very small (if any) support from others.
Gender roles play an enormous part in women going misdiagnosed or undiagnosed. In our society, girls are under tremendous pressure to be an entire host of stereotypical, and silent, tender, pretty, media-caused gender conventions. It is no wonder females with ADHD frequently cover their symptoms, attempting to fit in. Speaking excessively and easily distracted are possible red flags for ADHD, but they also are not "ladylike," so they're concealed. Other indications, including obsessional analyzing to get excellent scores, secret struggles with depression, stress and eating disorders, go undetected or are chalked up to other states. Those cues mesh with girls are expected to act for a lengthy time. Testing for ADHD is skewed to understand behaviours that are natural to lads.
You will find three coexisting states that appear to disproportionately impact girls with ADHD. All of us -- the guys who could not live without them as well as girls themselves -- should be willing and conscious to receive and/or give support when these issues are presented:
Eating Disorders
Such disorders in women with ADHD seems to be fairly common, due to internalizing the symptoms as an alternative to asking for help. Some females with ADHD and stress quit eating as a way of commanding a world they see as being from their management. By becoming fanatical with the eating patterns they attempt to recover control, which can readily lead to several ailments. Some girls eat to feel as they're deflected others forget to eat, then once they recall the meals they have missed overeat.
Stress
I was not surprised to read that Dr. Quinn also finds an important link between the two illnesses. In the end, our thoughts are usually active, preoccupied, enthusiastic, and hyper! That surely is not rocket science, but study offers much-needed credibility to such truths. Anxiety is led to by the absolute pressure of having a head like ours. What is worse is that for girls, stress is frequently written off raising multiple kids or due to your busy program. They can not crumble as easily as males do under the pressure of stress, so a diagnosis is more difficult to locate.
Depression
Nothing enhances when a physician treats a female for melancholy as an alternative to ADHD. The inherent symptoms all are not being dealt with, so the female will probably have a really difficult time in other places of life, which no anti-depression pill will mend. She can develop coping skills to carve out the niche in life to get by, but for many the melancholy analysis can not be constructive, or even fatal. The female is led to believe she is "healed" of the melancholy and then have other symptoms creeping up and sabotaging everything worked on so hard to repair.
We must keep this knowledge building. Countless lives actually depend on it. Females are suffering in silence, which simply will not do. ADHD impacts us all, and this can be an all-for one, one-for-all type of conflict. It is time to say "We Are with you, women." |
About This Game
Nonlinearity - depending on your choices, different scenarios will be opened with unique levels - besides visual differences (cities, deserts, snow-covered forests), you can take part in a sea battle, escape from enemies on the train through the desert and go on a bomber flight, shooting enemies from all sides.
Story - your decisions will influence not only the war itself but will also change fates of your squad mates. They can leave your squad, die or join enemy ranks, thus leading you to one of four endings.
Active participation in battle - you can't just build towers and watch the battlefield passively. Key to victory lies in constant buffing you turrets and cleverly using special abilities.
Diverse gameplay - from defending evacuation convoys and participating in an ambush to breaking through enemy defenses and fighting giant bosses.
Heroes - in addition to the player, storyline develops around several persons, who actively participate in both dialogs and combat - each of them can be sent into the battle. Sniper, machine gunner and even a flamethrower tank will aid you with defeating enemies.
Special abilities - In addition to building guns on the battlefield, in the arsenal of defense there are barricades, slowing down nets, mines, rockets and even a tactical slowdown!
Weapons specialisation - different towers work better agains different enemies. For example, a machine gun will do nicely against infantry, and cannons will lay waste to enemy tanks.
Hardcore - this game will make you sweat, but if you want to have some casual fun, you can always select the easy mode.
Molten Armor is an action tower defense game with a non-linear story in sci-fi setting!Command defenses and stop hordes of enemies! Fight on land, sea and in the skies!Decisions taken in the heat of battle will change the course of the war.The history of the game unfolds on a remote planet Marina - one of the colonies of the Earth Empire, the conflict on which turned into a full-fledged long-term struggle for influence, territory and wealth of the planet. In the game you will take on the role of the brave commander of the defensive unit, who, in the course of the game, will often need to make a difficult choice. What will your decisions lead to - only time will tell, and now is the time to stop the enemy with the firepower of your turrets! |
Image copyright AFP Image caption Timochenko (centre) attended a ceremony on 26 June marking the end of Farc's disarmament process
The leader of Colombia's Farc rebel group, Rodrigo Londoño, is being treated in hospital for a stroke.
Mr Londoño, who is known as Timochenko, is expected to leave hospital on Tuesday and make a full recovery, doctors who are treating him said.
The 58-year-old was admitted to hospital in the city of Villavicencio on Sunday morning.
His health is "in a stable and satisfactory condition," doctors said in a press conference.
The Farc initially denied reports that he was ill.
But one of its leaders, Felix Antonio Muñoz Lascarro, known as Pastor Alape, later spoke to journalists at the hospital in Villavicencio.
Timochenko will not be transferred to another hospital, he said, adding: "This clinic provides the necessary conditions to treat him."
'No love for guns'
Timochenko suffered a heart attack two years ago when he was in Cuba negotiating a peace deal with Colombian officials.
The left-wing rebels signed a historic peace accord in November after four years of negotiations.
They agreed to hand over their weapons after more than five decades and are now allowed to set up a political party.
Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos was awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to put an end to the conflict.
Image copyright AFP Image caption The Farc leader (right) and Mr Santos (left) shook hands for the first time in 2015 after a meeting facilitated by Cuban President Raul Castro (centre)
The Farc concluded its disarmament process last month, handing over its 7,000 registered weapons to the United Nations mission in Colombia.
Timochenko became commander of the left-wing rebel group in 2011, when its then leader, known as Alfonso Cano, was killed by the Colombian armed forces.
In an interview with El Espectador newspaper published on Sunday, he said he was "not nostalgic" of his days as a guerrilla in the jungle.
"I honestly feel a great relief for having concluded this stage and preparing for the next phase," he said.
"For me, as revolutionary, the weapons were simply a tool that were with us for many years.
"But at the Farc we are not in love with guns. We love our cause and our ideals. And if we can carry on with our ideals without the guns, so much the better," he told El Espectador. |
Share. All falling into place. All falling into place.
Ubisoft has announced a new partnership with The Tetris Company that will see it bring the classic game to Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
2014 marks the seminal puzzler's 30th anniversary. Originally devised by Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris has now sold in excess of 170 million copies and is frequently championed as one of the greatest games ever made.
Henk B. Rogers, the managing director of The Tetris Company, spoke optimistically about the new partnership, “We welcome Ubisoft to the Tetris family. I am 100% sure they will develop one of the best versions of the Tetris game ever."
Meanwhile, Ubisoft co-founder and CEO Yves Guillemot, shared his enthusiasm: “We’re very excited to start working with this world-renowned brand, and can’t wait to combine Ubisoft’s expertise and all the capacities of next-gen consoles to create an exciting new Tetris experience for fans."
The Tetris license has passed through many hands over the years. Recently, EA published a version of the game for mobile devices and PlayStation 3.
No further details about the game and how it will take advantage of the new hardware were revealed at this time.
Daniel is IGN's UK Games Editor. He's like you to follow him, but not in real life and leave his kids alone (he doesn't have kids). Anyway, follow him on IGN and Twitter. |
Fahd Suleiman Abdulmohsen Al Qaba’a, 23, was something of a loner who held ultra-conservative beliefs from a young age, despite his immediate family being considered moderates, Justin Vela reports.
Fahd Suleiman Abdulmohsen Al Qaba’a, arrived at the Al Imam Al Sadeq mosque last Friday. He got out of the car quickly and entered the building. The car’s driver sped off.
Moments later, Al Qaba’a detonated the explosives he was carrying. Twenty-seven worshippers inside the mosque, named after an important Shiite figure, were killed and more than 200 wounded in the worst recent terror attack in Kuwait.
On the same day, terror attacks were also carried out in France and Tunisia.
ISIL’s Saudi Arabian affiliate, Najd Province, claimed responsibly for the bombing. In a video released online, Al Qaba’a, identified by the nom de guerre Abu Suleiman Al Muwahid, addresses Shiites in Kuwait and says “we are on the lookout for you”. ISIL considers Shiites to be heretics.
Al Qaba’a, 23, was quickly identified by officials as a Saudi Arabian citizen. An investigation by newspaper Al Hayat has shed light on how the young man became radicalised.
He was originally from Buraidah, the capital of Saudi Arabia’s Al Qassim region, about 300 kilometres north-west of Riyadh.
The area is well known for being one of the most fundamentalist in the country. In November, two members of Saudi Arabia’s security forces were killed while trying to detain suspects in Buraidah following attacks on Shiites in the country’s Eastern Province.
Mosques in the Eastern Province were also attacked by ISIL suicide bombers on May 22 and May 29.
Though his immediate family were considered moderates, Al Qaba’a had a number of relatives in prison on charges of incitement and terrorism.
Several uncles introduced him to extremist ideology, apparently before they were jailed, according to Al Hayat.
Al Qaba’a was also something of a loner, a personality trait shared with others who have been recruited by extremist groups. He kept to himself, especially after the family moved to Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh. While growing up, he even refused to meet some of his relatives because they did not follow a strict enough interpretation of Islam. For instance, he did not like that some of them shaved their beards.
One relative told Al Hayat that he had tried to travel to Syria and Iraq to fight with extremist groups, but had been unsuccessful. It was unclear what had stopped him from reaching his destination.
His family wanted to help him. They tried to keep him close and help him find work in either the public or private sector, but he was not interested. Instead, he stayed in his room and did not interact often with the outside world.
It is not known when Al Qaba’a’s contact with ISIL began, nor his exact motivations for becoming a suicide bomber. Before carrying out the attack, he was apparently not being watched by security forces.
This allowed him to set off from Riyadh’s King Khalid International Airport last Thursday without attracting notice. He first flew to Bahrain, where he sat in the transfer area of Manama International Airport for about two-and-a-half hours. He then entered Kuwait early on Friday morning. The attack took place during afternoon prayers.
Al Qaba’a’s driver, Abdulrahman Sabah Eidan Saud, was arrested in Al Riqqa, a district of Kuwait’s southern Ahmadi Governorate.
The owner of the house where he was hiding, described by authorities as a Kuwaiti citizen who was a backer of extremists, was also arrested.
The car’s owner, Jarrah Nimr Mejbil Ghazi, and his brother were also detained. They, along with the driver, are bidoons, or stateless people.
Attention were focused on bidoons earlier this year when Mohammed Emwazi, also known as “Jihadi John” the ISIL militant who executed Western hostages, was identified as a member of the group. Emwazi left Kuwait for Britain when he was six years old, but returned briefly before joining ISIL.
There are believed to be more than 100,000 bidoons in Kuwait.
Kuwait’s deputy prime minister and interior minister Sheikh Mohammed Al Khaled Al Hamad Al Sabah said on Tuesday that there are more militant cells in the country and that security forces “will not wait” to pre-empt them.
“We are at a state of war,” he said. “I do not care much that a 23-year-old man travels from Riyadh to Bahrain and then to Kuwait in less than 12 hours to blow himself up. We are after those managing him and will target them.”
[email protected] |
Water fountains at the new M.S. 839 can fill up bottles. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Leslie Albrecht
MANHATTAN — Roughly 83 percent of 1,544 school buildings across the city had elevated lead levels in their water in the past six months, according an analysis of Department of Education data released Friday.
There were 1,281 school buildings across the five boroughs where city inspectors found at least one sample of water with more than 15 parts per billion (ppb) lead levels, which is the federal action threshold. That number — found under more stringent testing ordered in September by Gov. Andrew Cuomo following concerns about tainted water elsewhere across the nation — was dramatically higher than the 509 buildings the city reported had elevated lead levels last year.
Schools found to have at least one elevated sample included:
►Manhattan: 88 percent of 234 school buildings
► Brooklyn: 87 percent of 469 school buildings
►Staten Island: 82 percent of 98 buildings
►Queens: 80 percent of the 408 school buildings
►The Bronx: 76 percent of 332 buildings
There were 123 schools with more than a quarter of elevated samples, including:
► 57 in Brooklyn
► 29 in Queens
► 17 in the Bronx
► 11 in Manhattan
► 9 in Staten Island
William Grady Career and Technical High School in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn had the highest number of elevated samples — with 101 fixtures with lead in the water above the allowable ppb.
The city collected a total of 132,000 samples from potential drinking water sources, and found that a total of 8 percent were found to have lead levels high enough to be of concern under federally allowable guidelines, the figures showed. Of those, 1.5 percent of the elevated samples came from drinking fountains in particular.
DOE officials emphasized that the city’s water is safe for students and staff to drink and that the city school figures are lower than the statewide average of 14 percent of samples with elevated levels.
Still, the number of outlets with lead is up significantly from a less rigorous round of testing completed last school year, which reported only about 1 percent of samples had results over 15 ppb.
Last year’s testing protocol came under fire after experts found the city had been running the water pipes the night before testing against recommendations from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
All cooking and drinking water fixtures with lead levels found over 15 ppb were immediately taken out of service, DOE officials said, and they were only restored to use once they were replaced and once subsequent tests showed lead levels below 15 ppb.
► READ MORE: Here's What You Need to Know About Lead Water Testing in City Schools
Under the terms of Cuomo's state executive order, the city was required to notify families at schools across the city with the results of their children’s school lead tests within 10 days of the school getting the results.
The letter and the complete lab reports, including the specific locations of each outlet, and what its lead levels were in ppb are now posted on each school’s website, with translated versions available in 10 languages.
The city's Friday lead data was hailed by Marc Edwards, the Virginia Tech professor who helped uncover the water crisis in Flint — but he cautioned that lead levels in water are not a fixed condition.
"NYC should be applauded but should remain vigilant. A tap that tested good today, can dispense dangerous levels of lead tomorrow, as long as lead is in the plumbing."
DOE Deputy Chancellor Elizabeth Rose called the lead in school water "minimal."
“As our citywide test results confirm, the number of elevations are minimal and we take immediate action to remediate all fixtures with results above 15 ppb. We have shared detailed information with schools and families, and will continue to keep communities updated.”
The city only included detailed information about each school's exact lead levels on the individual schools' websites, and did not include it in their much-touted "Water Safety Portal."
“Families should rest assured that water in schools is safe for students and staff to drink,” Rose added.
But there’s still debate whether 15 ppb should be the threshold for what’s considered safe.
The American American Academy of Pediatrics this summer urged a change in new federal standards to ensure that water fountains in schools do not exceed water lead concentrations of more than 1 part per billion rather than the current 15 parts per billion allowable now.
First Deputy Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot noted that since 2005 the city has seen an 86 percent drop in lead poisoning cases among children.
“We feel confident that the DOE is taking the right actions by taking drinking fixtures that have had lead exceedances off line until they can be replaced,” she said in a statement. “Generally, these elevated levels are not reflective of the water children drink throughout the day, but concerned parents should speak to their child’s health care provider.”
Levels tend to be more elevated when water has been stagnant, after a fixture hasn’t been in use for several hours — which is why the city urges New Yorkers to run their tap in the morning for at least 30 seconds. Health officials believe that the fixtures with elevated levels would see those levels then decrease during the day.
Risk associated with lead also depends on how much a child is consuming and the size of the child, which is why there’s greater concern about lead poisoning with smaller children. While children under the age of 3 are required to have their lead levels tested, school-age children are not required to do so — and some watchdogs believe that the new data should force the city to reconsider that.
“Given that 83 percent of school buildings had outlets with water above the legal limit, this is a problem that should not be minimized,” said Leonie Haimson of the advocacy group Class Size Matters. “The DOE should also consider testing blood levels of students at schools found to have high concentrations of lead in their water.”
But Edwards said once a child is exposed to high levels of lead, "The harm that was done cannot be undone."
He added that parents who are considering blood tests for their children in light of the lead levels may have already missed the window "since evidence of harm disappears after about 30 days of removing the exposure, any blood lead testing would just create a false sense of security."
2017 NYC DOE Water Tests Results Summary(2) by DNAinfoNewYork on Scribd
Correction: An earlier version of the story incorrectly estimated the ratio of affected schools. |
The 4 day long battle of The Memorial Championships presented by Discraft began today with the amateur divisions teeing off at Fountain Hills and the professional divisions doing the same at Vista del Camino. The highlight of day one has historically been the action on the final MPO card of the day, typically stacked with four of the best male disc golfers in the world taking on the par 60 Vista XL course. What happened instead was what will likely be a new single round rating record for any female player in the history of the sport, not to mention the fact that a few FPO competitors shot better rounds than a huge percentage of the MPO players on the same layout.
The hot round of the day overall was shot by Philo Brathwaite (#26416), who finished with an unofficially rated 1077 round of 48. Right behind Philo, with just a single throw more sits a 6-way tie of competitors in 2nd place. The top 18 finishers in MPO for the day threw rounds between 48 and 52, with the other 102 competitors in the field finishing between 53 and 74 throws.
The hot round for the FPO division belongs to Catrina Allen (#44184) after shooting an incredible 52 for the day. Her round of eight under par is already unofficially rated at 1042. If that rating remains as is after becoming official, or simply remains close to what it is currently, it will be a new women's record for a single round on a course with an SSA between 54-60. Break down her round down even further and you'll quickly notice that she threw a better round than 102 of the 120 MPO competitors!
And that’s not where it ends. Paige Pierce (#29190) finished the day just 3 strokes behind Catrina with a 55. That score alone is the same or better than an unbelievable 92 of the 120 MPO competitors! If for some reason you weren't already aware, the top women in this sport are not to be underestimated.
Want to hear more record breaking madness from the day? Anthony Barela (#44382), fresh off his win in the advanced division at the Gentlemen's Club Challenge in Las Vegas is tied for the lead in the advanced divison here at The Memorial Championships. Why is that so interesting you ask? Well, because he's 13 years old! And no, that was not a typo.
The divisions switch places tomorrow with the amateurs taking on Vista XL and the professionals heading up to Fountain Hills Park. Fountain Hills Park is comparatively shorter and more technical than Vista XL meaning the big arms won't have as much of an advantage. Missed putts and mistakes off the tee usually mean a lost disc and/or a penalty stroke. The water hazards alone can make or break anyone's round and the lead in both the MPO and FPO divisions are easily still up for grabs.
Tune in tomorrow to PDGAlive.com for live scoring and throw-by-throw coverage for both the FPO and MPO lead cards. The commentray will include plenty of pictures and videos at one of the most beautiful courses on the planet. Don't miss out! |
In bitter cold temperatures, hundreds of thousands of pro-life activists, including about 30,000 youth, assembled on the Mall in Washington D.C. Friday for the annual March for Life. This year, the march coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since the landmark ruling, an estimated 55 million babies have been aborted in America.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum spoke at the rally.
“Can a nation long endure that does not respect the sanctity of life? Can a nation conceived in liberty carry its head high if it denies protection the youngest and most vulnerable of its citizens?” Sen. Paul asked. “I believe great nations and great civilizations spring from a people who have a moral compass. Our nation is adrift, adrift in a wilderness where right and wrong have become subservient to the hedonism of the moment.”
Sen. Santorum, at the rally with his wife and children, spoke about his young daughter, Bella, born with Trisomy-18, whom he and his wife were encouraged to abort.
“The response to this little girl and the struggles she was going through and who she was…was just amazing to us, and affirmed to us the goodness of the people in this country,” Santorum said. “One day, we will be here and triumph, because love and truth always triumph.”
Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus, also spoke at the rally, directly challenging President Obama:
Know this, the pro-life movement is comprised of noble, caring, smart, and selfless people. It is an extraordinarily powerful, non-violent, faith-filled human rights struggle that is growing in public support, intensity, commitment, and hope. And know this, Mr. President: The pro-life movement is not only on the side of compassion, justice, and inclusion; we are on the side of responsible science and of history.
Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston opened the march rally with a prayer and an announcement of Pope Benedict’s tweet from his account, @Pontifex, “I join all those marching for life from afar, and pray that political leaders will protect the unborn and promote a culture of life.”
A Mass of the National Prayer Vigil for Life was held on Thursday night at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington. During the Mass, attended by 13,000 people and hundreds of bishops, priests, and other clergy, Cardinal O’Malley said, “Abortion is not a necessary evil, it’s simply evil.”
O’Malley, the chairman of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities, added, “Abortion, like slavery, is not just a religious issue, it is a human rights issue.”
Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life commented on the progress of the pro-life movement in the states. “We got 33 pro-life governors. We got a lot of pro-life legislators,” he said. “We’re going to make great, great progress in the states.”
Pavone added that pro-life leaders are encouraged by the role science is playing in affirming the view that life begins at conception.
“The status of the unborn child is increasing,” he said. “Medical science acknowledges the child as our newest patient. Fetal therapy, fetal diagnosis, and surgery- no question- and laws are beginning on the state level to recognize the unborn as a real person, as a real victim.” |
Answered: What's Something You Don't Get?
Some aspects of feminism. Mainly "femin a zis ." Woah. Don't dismiss me just yet. Don't close this tab putting me into the category of another idiot. Let’s take a look at my opinion, and then you can do whatever you want.
Sometimes, I think feminism goes too far.
Sometimes, I find feminism to be hypocritical.
For example, when women complain that the air conditioning is sexist.
They say that the people controlling the air conditioning is controlled by the male managers, and males prefer a lower temperature, and the women are left out to freeze.
I know the real reason why we have this problem.
Women are allowed to wear skirts to the office, while men have to burn because they are not allowed to wear shorts. So if you complain about the air conditioning being too cold, give up your freedom to wear skirts and wear full out pants.
Sometimes, the media portrays all men to be rapists. Society has a problem with Muslims being terrorists, but not a problem with men being rapists. Huh? I see no difference.
Look, being a woman and being a man have their pros and their cons.
I full on support equality, but you do not achieve this by degrading men and portraying them as rapists.
I don’t understand how people can’t see the hypocrisy of some aspects of feminism.
Let’s make the world an equal place for all, but not how we’re doing it right now. |
Mumbai: Finance minister P. Chidambaram on Friday urged Indians to contain their “uncontrolled passion for gold" to reduce the import bill, asking them instead to turn to financial instruments to hedge against inflation and boost savings that would help fund infrastructure creation.
“India needs $1 trillion, or ₹ 55 lakh crore, towards improving its infrastructure," Chidambaram said at a function to mark the platinum jubilee of public sector Dena Bank. “Half of it will come from government and half will come from private investors, but ultimately it will be the savings that will be used to finance it."
“Unfortunately, we have difficulty in shedding our old habit—that of putting our money in gold. We must be able to contain our passion for gold," the finance minister said.
Chidambaram noted that India imported $5 billion of gold in the last fiscal. Unless gold imports are curtailed it will be difficult for the government to bridge its current account deficit in case capital inflows slow down.
Chidambaram said the launch of inflation-indexed bonds will help savers to hedge against inflation and urged investors to buy them instead of gold.
He also pledged to stick to measures to contain inflation.
“We have taken a number of steps to contain inflation. One measure is to contain fiscal deficit. I have drawn a red line on fiscal deficit. And I will not breach the red line and whatever measure is needed will be taken to contain fiscal deficit." |
Can we get an overview of the occupations of the persons associated with the Panama Papers? Well … that might be difficult, but we can get a biased plot by using the listing in Wikidata, where persons associated with the Panama Papers seems to be tagged and where their occupation(s) is listed. It produces the plot below.
It is fairly straightforward to construct such a bubble chart given the new plotting capabilities in the Wikidata Query Service. Dutch Wikipedian Gerard Meijssen seems to have been the one who has entered the information in Wikidata linking Panama Papers to persons via the ‘significant event‘ property. How complete he yet has managed to do this I do not know. Our Danish Wikipedian Ole Palnatoke Andersen set up a page on the Danish Wikipedia at Diskussion:Panama-papirerne/Wikidata tabulating with the nice Listeria tool of Magnus Manske. Modifying Ole’s SPARQL query we can get the count of occupations for the persons associated with the Panama Papers in Wikidata.
SELECT ?occupationLabel(count(distinct ?person) as ?count) WHERE { ?person wdt:P793 wd:Q23702848 ; wdt:P106 ?occupation . service wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . } } group by ?occupationLabel
Some people may see that politicians are the largest group, but that might simply be an artifact of the notability criterion of Wikidata: Only people who are somewhat notable or are linked to something notable are likely to be included in Wikidata, e.g., the common businessman/woman may not (yet?) be represented in Wikidata.
The bubble chart cuts letters of the words for the occupation. ‘murd’ is murderer. Joaquín Guzmán has his occupation set to murderer in Wikidata, – without source…
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Image copyright PA Image caption The smouldering ruins of the sports car after the crash
A driver lost control of his new £200,000 Ferrari and careered off a motorway before it burst into flames - after owning it for just an hour.
The high-performance Ferrari 430 Scuderia was reduced to a twisted wreck after the smash on the M1 near junction 37 in South Yorkshire on Thursday afternoon.
Police described how the car "went airborne" in the wet conditions.
The driver walked away with just cuts and bruises.
Image copyright South Yorkshire Police/Twitter Image caption The driver damaged more than his pride
The car went 50 metres down a bank and ended up in a field, where it turned into a fireball and had to be extinguished by firefighters.
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In a statement on Facebook, South Yorkshire Police said: "Officers asked the driver what sort of car he 'had' to which he replied 'it was a Ferrari'.
"Detecting a sense of damaged pride he then said 'I've only just got it, picked it up an hour ago'."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption This is what a Ferrari 430 Scuderia is supposed to look like
The force urged drivers to take care on the roads.
"Over the past couple of weeks there has been a number of collisions where driving styles have not reflected the road and weather conditions. Please take more care." |
The new TGV rail link fast-tracks Robin McKie along a very civilised route from London to Barcelona via Paris, a theme he continues with a stay on a sailing boat in Sitges
The romance of rail travel is hard to define. Even the grandest terminus is often grubby and crowded, and there is little allure in most station shops or cafes. Yet a journey by train has a contemplative appeal that no other form of transport can offer. Security mayhem is minimal, and there is generally a lot more comfort in a rail carriage than in a car. You can stare out of a window, read or simply contemplate the good things in life – a prospect that has just been spectacularly enhanced with last month's launch of the new Paris-Barcelona TGV link. This has cut the journey time from London to 10 hours, and this will be cut by another hour in May. You can leave Paris in the early afternoon and reach the Catalan capital by evening, making it possible to breakfast in London, lunch in Paris and dine in Barcelona in a day.
Certainly, for a train enthusiast and a glutton, such a prospect was irresistible. I persuaded my partner Sarah to join me and on a wintry Monday last month. After a St Pancras breakfast of eggs, croissants and coffee, we caught the 8.30am Eurostar that reached a snowy Paris just before noon – in time for a leisurely lunch of omelettes and beer at Taverne Karlsbrau opposite the Gare de Lyon, before boarding the 14.05 to Barcelona.
This is rail travel on a different scale. The TGV Duplex trains that run on French rails, and now on to Spanish ones, are mighty affairs with double-decker carriages that carry up to 540 passengers at 180mph – although the experience feels anything but frenetic.
We sat on its upper deck and sipped Macon Villages (there is no restaurant car, just a well-stocked buffet) as we swept south through snow-covered country that slowly transformed into a greener, warmer countryside of cypress trees, sage and gorse bushes, and whitewashed houses with terracotta roofs. At Sète we got our first glimpse of the Mediterranean. We had travelled the length of France in a matter of hours with nothing to stress us. The woes of winter dropped from our shoulders.
The new double-decker TGV
At Figueres, just over the Spanish border, we had to change to a local high-speed train for the final leg into Barcelona – an inconvenience, but not for too much longer. From May (or 28 April according to a hunch from train guru the Man in Seat 61, seat61.com) the Paris TGV will run directly into Sants station in the heart of Barcelona in just under 6½ hours (or nine hours from London, excluding the change of train and station in Paris).
We spent one day in Barcelona ticking off the sights and tapas at Café del Centro, the oldest cafe-bar in the Eixample district, but our final destination was the port of Sitges, half an hour away by local commuter train. A few boats moored here offer bed and breakfast. We picked the Willowmoon, which looks like a traditional English trawler but which was actually built in 1942 to hunt U-boats. You can have an evening drink on the spot where its main gun was mounted.
Our cabin was compact but comfortable: a bit like sleeping in a large cigar-box. The plumbing is basic, as befits a boat, but the overall experience is snug. Owners Lisa Ruby and Vick Hall also provide superb breakfasts – coffee, croissants, boiled eggs, cold meats, cheeses and fresh fruit – which we had on deck in the lukewarm February sun. In summer, Lisa and Vick also offer dinners.
Sitges is a town noted for its gay community, but is attractive as a standard tourist destination in its own right: a bit like Brighton but warmer. The high point for us was lunch at the Eguzki restaurant which offers platefuls of great pinchos.
Sarah on board the Willowmoon
Lisa and Vick offer trips further afield, including visits to nearby Montserrat and a five-hour tour of the Penedès region. These are undertaken "in the comfort of an open-top Saab", according to the website. This is not a phrase I would have used. After our trip to Barcelona airport, I emerged from the Saab bent double like a rheumatic octogenarian and I suspect that comfort depends on the car's jammed seating being repaired.
It was a calming break nevertheless, especially enhanced by our choice of transport to Spain. The soothing nature of rail travel was underscored at Barcelona airport on our return journey. The security queue resembled a rugby scrum; I was frisked twice for no discernable reason other than incompetence, or possibly my shifty demeanour, and the flight was so full our hand luggage had to go in the hold.
A Rail Europe ticket to Barcelona allows you to break your trip in Paris, not just for a few hours but for several days if you wish, at no extra cost, before you move on to Barcelona. Thus for under £200 return, you can have not just a meal in these three great cities but a lengthy break in each.
• Train travel was provided by Rail Europe (0844 848 4070, raileurope.co.uk) which has return fares from London to Barcelona from £185. (The Rail Europe website will only allow you to book an overnight train from London to Barcelona; to book the faster daytime train reserve the London-Paris and Paris-Barcelona legs of the journey separately.) Accommodation was provided by Willowmoon (+34 699 794983, willowmoon.uk.com) which offers B&B from €50pp pn
This article contains affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a reader clicks through and makes a purchase. All our journalism is independent and is in no way influenced by any advertiser or commercial initiative.
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Over the course of a few weeks, I seem to have attracted the scorn of Reddit. In this one particular subreddit, r/badeasternphilosophy, someone took interest to my blog and made a topic about how extreme my criticism of Western philosophy was. While there were people who mocked me under the presumption that I only read Nietzsche, some of the more thoughtful topic posters pointed out that many Western philosophical schools don’t really delve into Eastern philosophy at all.
The chief reason why I find Western philosophy to be largely beneath me is because most Western philosophers tried reconciling their limited knowledge of the world with Christian values. Specifically, the doctrine of original sin, this is to the point that they would make up other causes for why humans were intrinsically evil. After joining a Christian club in college, I got more curious about Jesus’s teachings and decided to read the King James version of the Sermon on the Mount. I expected peaceful teachings because I was led to believe it was the pivotal teaching of peace by Christians and a significant cornerstone for championing peace under Western schools of thought. Needless to say, I was dismayed by what I read, which I’ll explain further on.
I’ll number the criticisms I have so that I may better address each of the specific contentions that I have with Christian theology.
#1: Open interpretation isn’t a solution.
Most modern Christians try to find a middle ground between the reality of the modern day with the teachings in the Bible. A convenient way to ignore biblical teachings that explicitly condone treating women as the property of men and all of the violence within the Bible itself is to use open interpretation. Stories of violence upon other tribes in the Old Testament or violence condoned in the New Testament is ignored because it is inconvenient to acknowledge the wrongful actions within a supposed holy book.
Open interpretation is largely an attempt to feel consistent with identifying oneself as a Christian because of the implicit assumption that you must be a “Christian” to live by positive morals. It allows modern Christians of the West to feel consistent with Christian values by ignoring whatever they dislike and disagree with. Yet, they don’t see the inherent self-contradiction in trying to feel consistent with being a Christian through ignoring teachings that make them feel uncomfortable. Arguably, the less significance modern Christians place on the Bible, the more Christian they can feel through the parameters of what open interpretation can allow. It is an attempt to maintain the supposed bliss of being a Christian while ignoring how modern conveniences and modern moral sensibilities would shun, feel outraged, penalize, and criminalize actions conducted within the Bible should they occur in modern times. Beheadings, the murder of children, the mass death of civilians, depictions of torture/”enhanced” interrogation, and so forth.
Open interpretation is an empty argument. Christians who believe in open interpretation either don’t realize or willfully ignore this severe issue. When violence is committed by Christians in the name of Christianity, whether in the West or in non-Western countries when the perpetrators of violence are Christians, then many Christians argue that violence is not a true interpretation of the faith. But they don’t seem to acknowledge the contradiction.
How can there be a true interpretation of the faith, if the faith is openly interpretative?
Open interpretation is the ultimate convenience for moral problems and self-contradictions in the Bible. In Western “feel-good” culture, everyone is right and open interpretation allows us to continue the feel-good culture by ignoring moral problems with the Bible by arguing anyone’s interpretation of the Bible is correct. Arguably, all that would be required is acknowledging Jesus Christ as your lord and savior and that would be the only requirement. After that, you can be right as many times as you want, because you don’t have to do anything but interpret the Bible in any way you please. Christian priests are also doing this by ignoring the explicit texts and trying to re-contextualize misogynistic and violent passages commanded by God as being above human knowledge or arguing that we don’t really know the significance. Essentially, doing everything possible to ignore the sadistic aspects of the teachings while being careful to give reverence to the supposed holy book.
However, there is a clear danger to believing in open interpretation as a valid middle ground for maintaining one’s faith in Christianity. Some modern Christians acknowledge the contradiction in believing open interpretation is a valid choice and then arguing that violence isn’t the true interpretation of the religious faith. After all, if faith is openly interpretative then the violent extremists are just as morally right as you. Thus, in order to stay consistent with their Christian identity, some moderate Christians concede to the idea that the violent extremists are just as morally right as they are and that they cannot know whether their moderate beliefs are truly better than the violent extremists because open interpretation does mean that everyone is right about how they interpret the Bible.
Due partly to the fact they cannot conceive of morality beyond the Christian God and see no ethical significance to the world beyond such a framework; the aforementioned moderate Christians are willing to concede that violent extremists killing innocent people is just as morally valid as their moderate Christian beliefs. These moderate Christians detach themselves from what extremists do, they don’t observe it as their problem, and seem to feel no shame in justifying extremist violence that allows for the murder and rape of innocents to feel secure in their own Christian identity. In other words, to feel secure in their ethical significance of God and Christian identity, they concede to violence being an option so long as they’re not the ones participating in it. They give up on core moral principles to maintain their so-called moral system.
#2: Jesus Christ’s teachings were insane. Not even self-described Biblical literalists will follow them.
You’ve probably heard that Jesus Christ is constantly being misunderstood by people of different political affiliations than you. If you’ve grown up in the US or possibly other predominately Christian countries, then you’ve probably heard “Jesus said” followed by some vague agreement with your moral beliefs so many times online and especially when some vaguely Christian topic comes up in the news media. Perhaps you’ve even heard that Jesus never really wrote anything down except with a stick on the sand once, only to allow the waves to wash them away. Jesus is portrayed as “misunderstood” because modern Christians, including Evangelical Christians, will not follow the explicit texts because they’re insane.
The explicit truth of the matter is that only someone completely crazy would follow his teachings in our modern times. That is why Christians always attempt to emphasize that the Bible is meant to be read in “parables” and not explicitly. Atheists who come from Christian backgrounds are freely willing to insult the Catholic Church, Protestant beliefs, and Jesus’s divinity but many shy away from criticizing Jesus’s teachings, they still hold respect for them and, just like Christian preachers, insist that Jesus was speaking in parables.
What do I mean when I argue that they’re insane? Take a look at these passages of the King James version of the Sermon on the Mount, the so-called cornerstone of peaceful teachings within the Bible:
Matthew 5:29-30 KJV
29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Christians will insist that he’s speaking in parables, but you can read the Sermon on your own. It is clear that he meant these two teachings to be taken literally. It was within the instructions of how to act towards divorced women and Jesus is teaching his disciples of how to avoid sinful thoughts and deeds. He explicitly calls for people to cut off their right hand and pluck out their right eye.
These are the teachings of peace? This is the cornerstone of Christianity’s peaceful doctrines? Even self-described Biblical literalists will vehemently argue that Jesus was speaking in parables here because he asks people to commit two acts of self-mutilation and identifies it as good moral behavior. This is nothing but the ramblings of a deeply insane individual. Is that blasphemous to say? Is that shocking? Am I being too extreme? If we can vilify Mohammed for being a pedophile, why is it wrong or uncomfortable to vilify Jesus Christ as an insane man for instructing Christians to cut off their right hand and right eye? If we agree that he’s speaking parables, then should Muslims believe that whatever historical misdeeds Mohammed committed should be regarded as parables too? Should every religion with violent parables, Christianity among them, just ignore when they’re acted upon by true believers? If you are a Christian, then should you continue to act on “faith” whenever it is convenient for you and in only ways that make you feel comfortable while ignoring the passages in the texts that other people could interpret more violently than you?
When you argue that Jesus was speaking in parables, all you’re really admitting is that you don’t want to follow his explicit teachings because you don’t agree with them. You live by a moral system outside of Christian values.
#3: The Sermon on the Mount’s self-contradictions make them worthless teachings.
A short excerpt from the book I’m still writing:
You must always strive for “perfection” to enter the Kingdom of God but you’ll always be contradicting the steps towards being a good Christian (Matthew 5:48). As a result, you must always seek Jesus’s forgiveness because you’re committing thought crimes when you have normal and healthy sexual desires (Matthew 5:28), you’re speaking wrongly when you make any attempt at asserting self worth.
Should you speak only in “yea, yea” and “nay, nay” (Matthew 5:33 – 5:37) or are you one of the so-called “hypocrites” when speaking in “vain repetitions” (Matthew 6:7 – 6:13),
Should you should turn the other cheek when wronged (Matthew 5:39) and love your enemies (Matthew 5:44) or return any behavior that wronged you with a response of your own (Matthew 7:12)
Should you rejoice in persecution (Matthew 5:10 – 5:12) or avoid being tried and persecuted for your beliefs at all costs? (Matthew 5:25)
Moreover, even evangelicals and other Bible literalists would never take Matthew 5:29 – 5:30 literally and therefore the most extreme Bible worshippers require a degree of open interpretation because of how disastrous those verses ultimately would be, if taken literally.
No matter what, you’ll never be a good Christian under the guidelines of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus contradicts himself too often for that to ever be possible. Christians may perceive the self-contradictions as beyond human understanding or proof of human folly, but the former is just an argument from ignorance and the latter is further evidence of my next contention.
#4: Original Sin is misanthropy revered as humbleness
For all the arguments about the lack of morality without a God, original sin seems to invalidate the significance of Christian morality. This notion of humanity’s intrinsic folly is subsumed into Western culture to give a detached justification for all forms of human violence. Worst of all, when these misanthropic beliefs are applied to humanity, they become increasingly revered as “deep”, “profound”, and “humbling” because people go on ridiculous diatribes about humanity being inherently violent, evil, stupid, and other semantics. All this celebration for acknowledging the apparent sinfulness of human existence. Western people seem to act as if this misanthropy is always new and cool. Any violence anywhere in the world is used as “proof” of humanity’s intrinsic folly.
This folly is seen as being “only human” and admitting to being flawed, worthless, and similar to a speck of dirt compared to a perfect creator. The more you show loathing and disgust for being a human, the more “profound” and “humble” you are. It can, and often does, go so far as to belittle and denigrate any human accomplishment as arrogant, evil, and wicked. Any desire for more in life, especially physical objects, is spurred as self centered, arrogant, and disgusting and often viewed as explicitly evil. To not carry the belief in original sin, i.e. to not feel misanthropy for the human race, makes people perceive you as shallow and arrogant. To argue against the extreme belief that all humans are born evil causes people to perceive you as naive and stupid. The belief that humans are born sinful is a powerful and pernicious belief within Western cultural norms. Yet, the pernicious nature of this belief seems to make people ignore the consequences or be blissfully unaware of what types of behavior is being implicitly condoned.
Original sin posits that humans will always fail to uphold morally good actions because of their intrinsic sinfulness. Therefore, the belief in original sin destroys the ethical significance of morality. Original sin makes morality become pointless because humans are expected to constantly fail in following moral principles. Wrongful deeds are met with staunch indifference because it is expected that a human being would commit horrible acts of cruelty. This is particularly true in regards to strangers who are depicted in the news after undergoing a tragedy. A woman being raped, a child being murdered, a Christian priest raping a child, a war in a foreign country, or a mass shooting. Unless such events are happening to a loved one, you probably wouldn’t care. Now, would Christianity ceasing to exist stop such events? Of course not. However, because of the belief that humans are intrinsically prone to folly is so pervasive, original sin strongly influences people to be complacent with such horrible events. Instead of being motivated to change systems of violence or to stop the propensity of violence, Christianity motivates people to be detached and complacent. Often associated with the detached complacency is the belief that the physical world isn’t real and that the afterlife is the true world with all the answers. Original sin permits people to shut themselves off and shy away from life’s consequences by insisting that all horrific acts should be expected. This is true of fellow Christians too and not just people deemed as outside groups.
The concept of original sin creates a self-defeating moral system. This self-defeating system is honored as a form of humility while ignoring the cruel impact of the belief system.
The credit for this argument partly goes to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Genealogy of the Morals. I had always wondered about why religion emphasized human negatives but could never really put it into words until reading genealogy. What Nietzsche identifies as the will to nothingness, I’m willing to explicitly point out the misanthropic aspects of this will to nothingness.
#5: Jesus Christ’s doctrine of forgiveness removes all responsibility.
The doctrine of forgiveness is just as extreme as original sin. It doesn’t have any parameters on what heinous actions should be punished. At best, the belief the people committing atrocities may serve time in hell despite accepting Jesus Christ as their lord and savior is a possibility. But this creates apathy and complacency with allowing human violence to occur throughout the world. Due to the fact the hardships of the physical world are seen as a test for the afterlife, people wouldn’t be motivated to improve their own lives or that of others. Instead, people would simply be apathetically awaiting Jesus’s return.
Perpetrators of all heinous offenses, including rape and murder, need only come to Jesus to be forgiven of all their sins. A person could participate in genocide and still be forgiven by Jesus Christ for their heinous atrocities. Rape and murder become expected norms, the murderer or rapist would only need to seek Jesus’s forgiveness, and Christian culture would associate it with good behavior and humbling oneself for God. Meanwhile, should the victim be a non-Christian, or a Christian who doesn’t accept the forgiveness after being raped or nearly beaten to death or is a relative of a murdered victim, then they would be seem as being too extreme in their hate and would be insisted to forgive the criminal. The presumption being that the perpetrator acknowledges that humanity is intrinsically sinful, acknowledges they committed sin, and sought Jesus’s forgiveness. Meanwhile the victim or relative of the victim is admonished for allowing “evil” in their heart for not forgiving the perpetrator and disrespecting the sacred doctrine of forgiveness. The victims and relatives of the victim’s feelings don’t matter in this worldview. Only the perpetrator coming to Jesus for salvation matters. Their heinous acts are par for the course of humanity under the doctrine of original sin and therefore forgivable.
Functionally speaking, the perpetrator forgives themselves by accepting Jesus into their heart and doesn’t have to concern themselves with how the victims and loved ones of the victim feel. You could commit wrongdoing, including murder and rape, and forgive yourself of any horrible deeds by accepting Jesus Christ into your heart.
No perpetrator can ever be held accountable for their actions after seeking forgiveness. Christians believe that accepting Jesus is atonement. However, all the perpetrator is doing is accepting that they’re a sinful human being and recognizing Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. They don’t have to acknowledge the victims or seek to atone themselves by apologizing to the victims. All they have to do is accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior. After that, you’re no longer responsible for your actions.
Is that an extreme interpretation? Well, unfortunately that is a legitimate interpretation. Open interpretation allows for such an interpretation.
Furthermore, consider this thought experiment I made:
If a criminal, who is a serial child rapist and killer, comes to Jesus, sincerely accepts Jesus into his heart, before death row then he’s going to heaven. The pastor who has convinced him to come to Jesus, who has studied his theology for the majority of his life and believes in Jesus’s forgiveness just as any other Christian, sincerely believes that the criminal has been forgiven by accepting Jesus into his heart under the doctrine of forgiveness. Therefore, the criminal, who is a serial child rapist and killer, should be going to heaven. If either of them is wrong, then Jesus’s doctrine of forgiveness doesn’t save everyone.
If the criminal was targeting Jewish or Muslim children then those children are going to hell for not accepting Jesus into their heart. If they die believing in their respective religions, or called to their respective Jewish or Islamic deity, then they’ve deceived themselves and they’re going to hell. If they’re allowed in heaven, then accepting Jesus into one’s heart, and Jesus’s doctrine of forgiveness, isn’t necessary to go to heaven. Thereby, making Jesus Christ’s doctrine irrelevant. If they’re in purgatory and have to seek forgiveness for being sinful, then Christianity doesn’t save innocent children who have been raped and murdered.
The only response I received from genuine Christians who were asked this thought experiment was that the children need to acknowledge their sinfulness and accept Jesus Christ. Evidently, raped and murdered children have some “sinfulness” in them because they don’t acknowledge Christ as their savior. But that shouldn’t be surprising, as stated prior, original sin is just misanthropy and the misanthropy is being extended to include innocent children.
If you believe this is extreme, you should recall exactly how St.Augustine interpreted Christian values in regards to the violence when Christians wage wars:
Difference between Augustinian “just war” and “crusade”:
The standard for a Christian “just war” as developed by Augustine (c. A.D. 400) is: “rightful intention on the part of the participants, which should always be expressed through love of God and neighbour; a just cause; and legitimate proclamation by a qualified authority.” (Quoted from J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Yale University, 1987.) The doctrine of holy war/crusade added two further assumptions: 1) Violence and its consequences–death and injury–are morally neutral rather than intrinsically evil, and whether violence is good or bad is a matter of intention. (The analogy is to a surgeon, who cuts into the body, thus injuring it, in order to make it better/healthier.) 2) Christ is concerned with the political order of man, and intends for his agents on earth, kings, popes, bishops, to establish on earth a Christian Republic that was a “single, universal, transcendental state’ ruled by Christ through the lay and clerical magistrates he endowed with authority.
It follows from this that the defense of the Christian Republic against God’s enemies, whether foreign infidel (e.g. Turks) or domestic heretics and Jews was a moral imperative for those qualified to fight. A Crusade was a holy war fought against external or internal enemies for the recovery of Christian property or defense of the Church or the Christian people. It could be wages against Turks in Palestine, Muslims in Spain, pagan Slavs in the Baltic, or heretics in southern France, all of whom were enemies or rebels against God.
What does this mean? It isn’t morally wrong for Christians to launch a war, violence of any kind committed by Christians isn’t morally wrong, and Christians should detach themselves from any negative moral consequences and shouldn’t feel responsible for their violence according to Saint Augustine. The doctrine of Just War helps to ignore the physical realities of child deaths, rape, and mass civilian casualties of war and that has been consistent with Christian doctrine since 400 AD.
Therefore, a pertinent cornerstone of Christian theology should be made clear:
Jesus Christ’s doctrine of forgiveness and Christian theology itself is fundamentally about having no responsibility for one’s wrongful actions so long as you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. You can be forgiven for rape, murder, and mass civilian deaths by accepting Jesus Christ into your heart and worshiping him as your Lord and Savior.
It’s no wonder that predominately Christian nation-states can call predominately Muslim nation-states savages for beheadings while ignoring all of the multitude of bombing campaigns all over the world paid for by Western taxpayer monies and the consequences of which are never significantly questioned in the West.
#6: Jesus Christ was a narcissist with a God complex
If you’re a Christian, or grew up with a Christian background, then please try considering Jesus Christ from an outsider perspective.
You’re expected to believe that he was meek and mild while he proclaimed himself God, the Son of God, and said anyone who didn’t believe in him was going to hell. Whether or not hell is hellfire and brimstone or the absence of God as modern Christian apologists argue is irrelevant. The point is: you’re expected to believe a man who proclaimed himself God and Son of God was being meek and mild. You’re expected to feel guilty for a torture and murder that happened before you were even born. Why not accept responsibility for slavery, all the genocides that happened in the world, and all horrible events in the world as well?
You’re expected to believe that his death on the Cross was worse than the Holocaust and every other human genocide. Worse than that, you’re expected to believe it’s all a part of God’s plan.
You’re expected to love Jesus more than your parents, your friends, your spouse, and your own children.
Do you not see the problem here? You’re expected to believe a man who supposedly died more than 2000 years ago loved you more than all of your family, friends, and spouse. You must always expect to have a second-handed love by your loved ones compared to their love for Jesus Christ. Their love for you and your love for them must always be eclipsed by the love for Jesus.
If this were any other context, it would be recognized as being mentally abused by a narcissist.
But Jesus is “divine” i.e. He told people that he had special qualities like narcissists are prone to do and was able to dupe villages of uneducated bronze age people from over 2000 years ago.
All he really gave people from his Sermon was meaningless mental torture for the crime of having natural sexual feelings and thoughts for women and he denigrated divorced women as the property of men, who should constantly have to live with the crime of being adulterous under the view of all men.
Matthew 5:27-32 KJV:
27 Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
28 But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
29 And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
30 And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
31 It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement:
32 But I say unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery.
Final Thoughts :
To be clear, I have no animosity whatsoever to modern Christians. I just think that it’s negatives get far too much of a pass because of the reverence for Christianity in Western culture. Having read the Sermon on the Mount, I’ve come to the conclusion that Christianity was never anything special. Some would argue that its popularity and perseverance make it so, but I would argue that it simply lucked out at being the chief religion during the time of the West’s technological revolution. Furthermore, none of the contemporary religions of our time are anything like their centuries old version. Do any Christians burn witches at the stake? Would Western Christians feel okay with Christian soldiers eating civilians like what happened during the first Crusade? Would you be committing to war over squabbles about Jesus Christ being a bodily figure versus a pure spirit like during Constantine’s time in ancient Rome?
In all honesty, I feel a bit of pity for the Christian worldview, because you’re expected to live by such self-contradictory guidelines in the hopes that you will “get all your answers” after your death. The whole point of any religious tradition, but especially Christian religious tradition, is to die appropriately so that you obtain some reward that is apparently beyond your own understanding. If that’s how you wish to live your life, I hope it makes you happy, but I cannot condone forcing such views in the political realm and trying to coerce others to obey the doctrines of a religion that they never agreed with. If it’s attempted to influence public policy, then it deserves criticism and being taken out of any rule of law. Anything less would be a theocracy. I hope that you seriously consider all that I’ve written.
Please send your opinions on this topic in the comment section or email me at [email protected]. Thank you for reading.
If you’d like to read more on my contentions on religion:
A sample chapter of a book I am currently working on regarding the failures of Original Sin as a concept.
Why the Abrahamic faiths are worthless and how they justify violence upon your fellow human beings. |
Greek authorities have launched an investigation into allegations that riot police used a female protester as a human shield during angry demonstrations over a visit to Athens by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, this week.
Witnesses told the Guardian the young woman, who has yet to be identified, was frogmarched in handcuffs ahead of riot police as protesters threw stones at officers.
News of the investigation came as magistrates launched a separate inquiry into a Guardian report that anti-fascist protesters, arrested after clashing with extremists from the neo-nazi Golden Dawn party, were subjected to torture by officers at the Attica General Police Directorate. Human Rights Watch said accountability for police abuse was urgently needed.
The group said: "The scenes described by the victims to reporters are deeply shocking. No one should be treated that way by police. Greece needs to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation of their allegations."
The inquiry into the human shield allegations was opened after photographs of the incident began to circulate on the internet, triggering condemnation of the tactics law enforcement officials stand increasingly accused of employing in Greece. "It is being investigated," said Lieutenant Colonel Christos Manouras, Greece's police spokesman. "We want to find out what these pictures hide."
In the pictures, a young woman, her faced daubed in white anti-teargas solution, with a pink rucksack on her back, is seen being escorted by riot police before being placed in front of the unit when it encounters stone-throwing protesters. Witnesses said the woman appeared to be disoriented and terrified as she was marched through Athens in handcuffs.
Foula Pharmacides, a shipping company employee, had participated in the demonstration outside parliament, but fled down a side street off Syntagma Square when police fired teargas to disperse the crowds. She described terror on the woman's face. "As the squad moved down Xenofontos Street with the girl, the protesters appeared," she said. "Then when the protesters started throwing things, the cop holding the girl takes her from the front of the unit to the back to face them and he starts moving her like a shield from left to right.
"The girl was falling down and he was picking her up. She was crying and clearly terrified. I couldn't believe it. You only ever see this sort of thing in the movies. Everyone started screaming 'Shame on you! Shame on you!' I remember there were two women next to me and they were crying, too, and screaming for the police to stop."
Sokratis Michalopoulos, another witness, said the episode ended when the "booing got so loud" and the riot squad decided to move on. "I don't think I will ever forget her face," said the 36-year-old television technician. "It was as if she were an object not a human being and I think she was in shock. She was definitely being used as a shield. Thank God photographers were there and we now have cameras on phones otherwise people would think we were mad. No one would believe us."
Veteran photographer Spyros Tsakiris, who also witnessed the incident, said the riot policeman who had been holding the woman had written "killer" in English on one of his bag straps.
As Greece descends into further chaos amid mounting social and political tensions, accusations of police brutality are growing. In recent months, reports have multiplied of codes of conduct being flouted by law enforcement officers.
The heavy-handedness has been attributed to links between the police force and the far-right Golden Dawn, whose popularity has surged on the back of soaring crime and anti-immigrant hysteria.
"The police are angry. They are overstretched and underpaid and becoming increasingly anti-government and radicalised in this case to the right," said Panos Garganas, a prominent leftist activist.
"Since democracy was restored in 1974 [with the collapse of military rule] I have attended hundreds of demonstrations and have seen police sit on people and kneel on people, but never someone being used as a human shield," he said. |
The 4-minute video introducing Amazon's Echo seems at first like a parody or a glimpse into some dystopian vision of the near-future.
The premise: A seemingly normal family of three brings what looks like a white noise machine into their homes. Echo is actually a speaker, but it also listens to what you're doing. Not all the time, though. Amazon is quick to point out early on that Alexa — the Siri-like voice recognition device Echo employs — only listens when you use a chosen "wake word."
It's not clear though when it stops listening since it's also "always on" and can listen from across the room. (Amazon reps could not be reached for clarification on that point.)
Further on into the video our family grows increasingly accustomed to and dependent upon Alexa/Echo to fulfill their daily needs. It wakes them up, answers trivia questions, compiles shopping lists, plays music and news on command and even tells jokes.
Though for some this is an appealing vision, my initial response was to ask What fresh hell is this?
I'm not the only one.
Over at Hacker News, a savvy commenter summed it up better than I could: "This 'Internet-of-things' trend coincides unfortunately with the 'dragnet surveillance' trend. With every new product launch from a "cloud company," I increasingly feel as if I'm reading the tombstone of modern society."
While the discussion thread inevitably veered off into the NSA and Snowden, there's a commoditization aspect as well. Our homes have always seemed a refuge from the merciless world of commerce. I say "seemed" because it's not actually true. Our homes are filled with stuff we've bought, for instance, and our TVs and Internet-connected devices are constantly hitting us with ads.
Increasingly though, Corporate America is looking to use the Internet of Things as a trojan horse to penetrate our remaining private moments. Amazon's not the only company looking to do this. Microsoft filed a patent in 2012 that would allow its Kinect-enabled motion-sensing devices to "see" how many people are watching at a given time and allow advertisers to tailor ads accordingly.
Google has also told federal regulators that it may at some point serve ads on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.” That came before Google's $3 billion purchase of Nest and its eponymous thermostat. Google has since "clarified" the language in that filing and disputed reports that ads will eventually come to Nest.
Serving ads is definitely different than the type of spying that Microsoft has in mind, but we seem to be quickly moving toward a world in which almost every action — in public and at home — is viewed as a marketing opportunity.
Looking at the numbers, it doesn't seem like consumers have any qualms about this. The Internet of Things is projected to be a $7 trillion market by 2020, according to IDC.
That growth all depends on a certain degree of trust. It remains to be seen whether consumers will trust that Alexa's listening is purely "on chip" or whether some data might be transmitted to the cloud. One thing holding Amazon back is space limitations. Constant, 24/7 listening of that sort would require 20.7 GB of storage per household a month, according to one estimate.
It's also far-fetched to think that ISPs would ignore those kinds of massive uploads. Still, Amazon itself points out that the cloud-based Echo "adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences" the more you use it.
Most likely, Echo isn't the privacy doomsday machine that some fear. Even if it never records a word you say, it's worth stepping back a second to assess the weird social and technological crossroads we're at in late 2014. The fact is, we are increasingly willing to allow for possible surveillance and commoditization of our private moments in the name of convenience.
At this point we've been pretty well trained to not care. |
It is AD 1364, a dark time for the small village of Calcares in southern France that finds itself in the grips of a lethal plague that has decimated its population. The prior of the abbey at nearby Carcassonne suspects the disease to be of demonic origin, so he summons notorious inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich to investigate the case. Eymerich's reputation as a resourceful and committed – and suitably ruthless – defender of the Catholic Church makes him the ideal candidate for the job, and he is directed to visit the village to determine the nature of the illness as well as the fate of a missing monk, Father Corona. But even before he can saddle his horse, Eymerich stumbles onto evidence of heresy at the abbey itself, which delays his trip and sets up the first episode in the planned four-part series, The Inquisitor. Subtitled The Plague, this opening installment is an erudite, nuanced and unapologetically cruel start to a grim, socio-religious mystery, and despite many minor gameplay nitpicks that tarnish its appeal, it is a sincere, ambitiously crafted game that achieves its core objective of creating interest in the ongoing series.
The game is adapted from a set of sci-fi / fantasy novels by contemporary Italian author Valerio Evangelisti, who in turn has drawn inspiration from the real Nicholas Eymerich, a Dominican priest and Inquisitor General of the Spanish Inquisition, entrusted with pursuing – and where possible, quashing – paranormal and Satanic incidences in medieval Europe. This three-hour debut details the history-laden plot via conversations and books, and features a moderately challenging mix of inventory quests and standalone puzzles. Clever use of light and shadows, detailed facial expressions, well-written and nicely voiced dialogues, and a steady pace of revelations create a palpable sense of something wrong beneath the all-pervading veneer of sanctimony, and will keep you engaged till the cliffhanger-ish end. This is despite some clunky game mechanics like maneuvering Eymerich and objects at times, as well as pixel-hunting, randomly activated locations and hotspots, some poorly clued puzzles, and a few disruptive glitches. Even with these foibles, however, the interesting story and superb characterisation of Eymerich are sufficient reasons to give this Inquisitor a fair chance.
The plot blends religious beliefs and supernatural events to create horrors both real, like the putrefied, distorted corpses of those killed by the pestilence, and surreal, where visions of pagan deities – demon women with flames for hair and such – haunt the followers of the Church. Underneath this overarching crisis lies a more insidious problem: moral and ideological corruption within the Church itself. Centuries of crusades against various groups of people have resulted in a multitude of covert opposition, and this in turn has led to increasing paranoia among Church members over their weakening grip on those they controlled through force and fear. The abbey at Carcassonne is no longer a haven of pure faith, and appears, at the moment, to be the tip of the proverbial iceberg of internal conspiracies.
Meanwhile, Eymerich is the polar opposite of a conventional hero. Tall, bony and middle-aged, he is arrogant, impatient and indiscriminately rude towards anyone who offends his finely-honed sensibilities, be it other monks, guards, servants, ladies, and even the wheezing, manipulative prior, Abbot Vinet. Fanatical in his devotion to the Church, he considers the calculated, gruesome murders of those he condemns as heretics his duty, to the extent of even enjoying the process. He frequently refuses tasks with snide putdowns like, "I hate touching things. Particularly for no particular reason," and is downright vicious when offered a well-meaning glass of lemonade. However, at no point does he come across as boorish, as his outrageous superiority complex is justified by his obviously high intelligence, bolstered by the vast amount of knowledge he possesses from his travels and studies; his keen sense of the true motives of people; his unwavering personal integrity (within the limitations of his faith); and interestingly, his scathing wit. The game walks a constant tightrope with his characterisation, balancing each shocking negative trait with an impressive positive one, and thereby gives us one of the most offensive, intriguing, and perversely likeable protagonists of all time.
There are few other characters in this episode. The elderly Vinet is a crafty, politically-savvy man who subtly obstructs Eymerich's quest despite being the one who initiated it. A shady librarian stutters his way through a web of half-truths that threaten the very core of the abbey, while a few errand boys gossip about the recent goings-on at the village. Vinet's crass mercenary guard excels at grating on Eymerich's sensitive nerves with his shenanigans, while a rustic innkeeper incurs his wrath by merely being polite. There aren't too many locations either: set almost entirely at the abbey except for a brief segment at Calcares at the end, Eymerich shuttles via long corridors between Vinet's office, a cluttered kitchen, a tiny library, a dreary courtyard, his miniscule room and a couple of secret chambers.
The gameplay unfortunately lacks the finesse of the storytelling. The process itself is uncomplicated, as left-clicking an object brings up the possible interactive options, such as look at, get a close-up, or take, open, or use it, while right-click is left unused. Collected items, about half a dozen at a time on average, are added to an inventory at the top of the screen, to be used with each other or onscreen hotspots. But the playing experience is hampered by a litany of nitpicks: objects are described in plain white text at the base of the screen, which is frequently lost amidst the background art; some hotspots are extremely small or placed right next to others, and in the absence of a hotspot revealer, require sweeping each screen with the mouse to detect; the inventory must be clicked to open and items then clicked to bring up usage options, requiring a third click to use them; and areas, objects and even alternate viewing perspectives of existing places become accesible without notice, making you repeatedly revisit previous scenes scouting for such changes. One puzzle that needs a part to be dragged onto another may take a few tries to manage, while a sometimes-there-sometimes-not hotspot had me stumped at a crucial juncture towards the end. The game also froze up frequently for me, proving the ten save slots to be essential.
Eymerich jots his objectives in an omnipresent journal and recites them aloud ad nauseam when kept idle. He also sketches out, in amusing chicken scratches, key events in the diary, skipping pages if you miss something – which is possible, because the game is not entirely linear, and quite a few activities appear to be optional. His reference notes chronicle the bizarre abominations he has encountered in the past, some of which refer to the plots of Evangelisti's novels. While the stories are not legible, sometimes Eymerich deigns to reminisce a bit about a particular case. Continuing the little annoyances, unfortunately, the journal always opens on the first page instead of the latest one. At one point, a map of the abbey is added to your repertoire, which usually – but not always – marks out Eymerich's location, and is supremely helpful in allowing teleportation between most available areas. The map also shows your current score out of a hundred, which is augmented by collecting items, solving puzzles, and discovering Easter Eggs like developer logos. The latter warrants serious pixel-hunting, and it's obviously easy to miss lots of stuff because I ended with a paltry score of 73. |
As the Vatican defends against lawsuits and launches a public relations blitz to defend the Pope, editorial cartoons may be the most visible, powerful and damning criticism the church faces. The cartoon floodgates have opened as editorial cartoonists around the world have released a deluge of Pope bashing cartoons.
By an odd coincidence, the Catholic Church has a strong presence in countries that happen to have a strong tradition of cartooning and the passionate anger of cartoonists who were raised in the church has been on display recently like never before.
Here is a selection of church scandal cartoons from around the globe.
Daryl Cagle is a political cartoonist and blogger for MSNBC.com; he is a past president of the National Cartoonists Society. Daryl’s cartoons are syndicated to more than 850 newspapers, including the paper you are reading now. Daryl’s books “The BIG Book of Campaign 2008 Political Cartoons” and “The Best Political Cartoons of the Year, 2010 Edition” are available in bookstores now. |
Copyright by WSPA - All rights reserved Revonda Randolph Henderson
Copyright by WSPA - All rights reserved Revonda Randolph Henderson
SPARTANBURG Co., SC (WSPA) - A Chesnee woman accused of DUI, pulled down her pants in peed in the testing room, according to a report from the Spartanburg Co. Sheriff's Office.
Spartanburg Co. deputies say they stopped Revonda Henderson for driving erratically on 4/19 around 10:00 am/m
The deputy said he smelled an odor of alcohol coming from Henderson.
She told the deputy she had drank 2 malt liquors and they were still in the vehicle.
The deputy said she had trouble walking and keeping her balance.
He said she had to reach out and grab his arm to keep her balance.
She failed the field sobriety test and was arrested for DUI, according to the report.
When she was placed in the patrol car she started to curse the deputies and threatened to punch the deputies.
The report says they got her to the jail and she refused to provide a breath sample.
She then pulled down her pants and urinated on the floor of the testing room, according to the report.
She is charged with DUI 1st Offense and Open Container in Vehicle, according to the detention center. |
Image copyright Reuters Image caption News of next weekend's peace talks emerged as fighting on the ground in Yemen has intensified
The UN has confirmed that peace talks it is brokering between Yemen's Houthi rebels and the government will take place in Geneva on 14 June.
The announcement came as the conflict escalated on the ground throughout Saturday with rebels stepping up their attacks on targets in Saudi Arabia.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon called on all parties to enter the talks in good faith and without pre-conditions.
Several months of war in Yemen have claimed more than 2,000 lives.
Saudi Arabia on Saturday shot down a Scud missile fired from across the border by Houthi rebels and their allies, the state Saudi Press Agency said.
Image copyright AP Image caption Protests against Saudi airstrikes were held in Sanaa on Saturday
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The target of the Scud attack was the Prince Khaled air base in Khamis Mushait, a pro-Houthi military spokesman has been quoted as saying
It was intercepted by a Patriot missile battery near the south-western city of Khamis Mushait in the morning.
The attack follows on from fighting on the border on Friday, in which four Saudi soldiers and a number of Yemeni rebels died.
BBC Middle East Editor Sebastian Usher says that both the government - now mostly in exile in Saudi Arabia - and the rebels have confirmed that they will attend the peace negotiations and each seems to be trying to strengthen its hand before the talking begins.
Our correspondent says that the call by Mr Ban for all parties to meet in good faith will be easier said than done, as the Houthis and their allies launch ever bolder attacks inside Saudi Arabia to show they have withstood two months of air bombardment - while the Saudis only pound them more.
A pro-Houthi military spokesman told Yemen's rebel-controlled Saba news agency that the target of Saturday's Scud attack was the Prince Khaled air base in Khamis Mushait.
Image copyright EPA Image caption The latest fighting comes as the humanitarian crisis in Yemen has been described as 'catastrophic' by the UN
Correspondents say that while there has been cross-border artillery and rocket fire into Saudi Arabia, there have been few if any missile attacks since the air war began.
The rebels "aimed to penetrate our borders", and were eventually repelled, a Saudi statement said.
Destroying the missile capabilities of the Houthis and their allies is a top priority of their 10-week bombing campaign, officials say.
Image copyright Map
But they say that the task is not easy because the rebels are hiding about 300 missiles in caves.
The bombing campaign was launched to support Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who escaped to Riyadh when the Houthis advanced on his southern Aden stronghold.
The humanitarian crisis in Yemen has been described as "catastrophic" by the UN with 20 million civilians - 80% of the population - in need of aid. |
Image copyright AAAS Image caption Holt, a research physicist, represented Central New Jersey in Congress
The head of the world's largest scientific membership organisation has given his backing for a planned protest by researchers in Washington DC.
Rush Holt, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), said that people were "standing up for science".
His remarks reflect growing concern among researchers that science is disregarded by President Trump
Scientists across the US plan to march in DC on 22 April.
"I've never seen anything like it in my entire career," the former Democratic congressman told BBC News.
Image caption A letter of concern was drawn up at MIT
"To see young scientists, older scientists, the general public speaking up for the idea of science. We are going to work with our members and affiliated organisations to see that this march for science is a success."
Mr Holt made his comments at the AAAS annual meeting in Boston as President Trump appointed a fierce critic of the Environmental Protection Agency as its head. Scott Pruitt has spent years fighting the role and reach of the EPA.
Campaigners accuse him of being too close to the oil and gas industry, and allege that he is "lukewarm" on the threat posed by climate change.
Rush Holt says that the concern among US scientists has gone well beyond the usual uncertainty that comes with a change in the Oval Office.
"It is partly because of the previous statements of the president and his appointees on issues such as climate change and vaccination for children which have not been in keeping with good science," the AAAS CEO told BBC News.
"But mostly by what we have seen since the new administration has come in, [which] is silence about science. Very few appointments to positions are filled by people who understand science, very few comments about the importance of science; there is no science advisor in the White House now and we don't know whether there will be one.
"And so the silence is beginning to sound ominous."
Image copyright Reuters Image caption Donald Trump has yet to appoint a senior advisor on science and technology issues
There has been unease among researchers ever since Mr Trump was elected in November. More than 600 professors from one of the country's leading research Universities, MIT, signed an open letter before his inauguration expressing their concerns.
It stated: "The president-elect has appointed individuals to positions of power who have endorsed racism, misogyny and religious bigotry, and denied the widespread scientific consensus on climate change... Science is not a special interest; it is not optional. Science is a foundational ingredient in how we as a society analyse, understand, and solve the most difficult challenges that we face."
Among the signatories' worries are the president's statement that climate change is a hoax, his alleged muzzling of environmental agencies and his apparent interest in setting up a commission to investigate whether vaccines cause autism.
Prof Nancy Kanwisher, who is a brain researcher at MIT, explained why she helped organise the petition.
"This is the most frightening and serious threat we have faced in my lifetime," she told BBC News.
"The political tactic of denying scientific fact is a huge threat to the health of our people. It is also a huge threat to our planet from climate deniers."
Image caption Prof Nancy Kanwisher: "The most frightening and serious threat we have faced in my lifetime"
Sarah Schwettmann, who is a PhD student working with Prof Kanwisher, said that many of her fellow students felt just as strongly as their professors.
"Science has unfortunately taken a political beating," she argued. "It has been drawn into a realm where we have to stand up for the necessity of science in informing public policy and potentially averting the global crisis we see in environmental change and climate change."
Ms Schwettmann has designed black-hooded sweatshirts for protestors. On the back is "MIT" in the shape of a clenched fist. On the sleeves is the electrical symbol of resistance.
But President Trumps supporters, such as Myron Ebell, who is a director at a libertarian advocacy group, Competitive Enterprise Institute, accuses the academics of being an out-of-touch elite - and says they should listen to the electorate.
"The people in the heartland of America who make stuff, dig up stuff and grow stuff for a living voted for Donald J Trump as president," he told BBC News.
"The people living in New York City and working in the university towns across America did not vote for him. They lost the election and they are going to have to get used to it."
There is little sign of that happening. All across the country many scientists are preparing for their march for science on Washington. They are in a battle to win the hearts and minds of their countrymen. |
Gareth Bale returned from injury to help Real Madrid win the 2017 Champions League in his home town of Cardiff
Gareth Bale says he needed to take painkillers to play last season.
The Wales and Real Madrid forward had ankle surgery in November 2016 that sidelined him for three months.
The 28-year-old then suffered a calf tear 10 games into his comeback during a match against Barcelona in April that kept him out for another six weeks.
"I had to take a lot of painkillers to be able to play... I think I should have taken more time to recover," Bale told Spanish newspaper El Pais.
"I could have played much better when I returned and be able to do all those things with the ankle which I wasn't able to."
Bale has helped Real win 10 trophies since joining the Spanish giants in 2013 for a then world-record £85m fee, including three Champions League titles.
But he has often been criticised in Spain over some of his performances and fitness.
Bale managed to return to play in the Champions League final in his home city of Cardiff, where he appeared for the final 13 minutes of Real's 4-1 win over Juventus.
After the game the former Tottenham player admitted he needed to rest his ankle during the summer to "get it properly recovered".
Media playback is not supported on this device 'Two down, two to go' for Wales
"On one hand it's easy now to say that I should have rested more," added Bale, who has been linked regularly with a move back to the Premier League with Manchester United.
"But when you've been injured for three months and you see your team-mates playing, you really want to return and that's what I did.
"An injury is something that's very frustrating when you're a professional sportsman.
"Of course it's been difficult not being able to play, but I've had a good pre-season and I'm training hard to be able to help the team win more titles."
Bale has played in five of Real's six competitive games so far this season, scoring one goal, and in both of Wales' wins over Austria and Moldova in September that put them back into World Cup qualifying contention. |
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Hey Steve,
Heard you’re doing some major clean up this summer and thought I’d share my 2cents. There are plenty of things that comes to mind, but I will lay down 5 key things that you may want to consider (listed in no particular order of priority).
1. Lose the hierarchy.
Empire building is a well understood concept internally at Microsoft, leadership strength is often displayed and determined by the number of folks reporting upto you. Next time you see an exec under you with > 4 levels of reports under them, fire him/her.
2. Want to beat Apple, Google or whoever else? – Get them to adopt your Employee Review system.
Employee Reviews are supposed to be healthy and the most constructive part of the career building and retention plan for employees. Instead the MS review system has effectively created a bunch of unhealthy practices that promotes the politically savvy, backstabbers and kills any incentives to collaborate within and across teams. Change the review system to promote collaboration and reduce the heavy focus on the monetary benefits. And please make a sign that threatens to fire anyone who says the words “it is not part of my commitment” and post it everywhere on campus.
3. Be Lean.
Program management is just the glue that ensures a coherent engineering process. You don’t need to hire Program Managers at a 1:1 ratio to developers. Put an end to these senseless hiring practices. The same applies to Product Management and Test roles as well. One simple rule that could help – Never let any manager hire for “a project”, invest in hiring great talent for Microsoft and staff them appropriately.
4. Product Management.
Product management is not a dormant advisory role, but a thought process that needs to be an integral part of the engineering and product innovation process. Have the Product Managers report to Engineering leadership and make them key stake-owners in defining the product vision – no 2 ways about that.
5. You have done well – Now Retire.
Unlike popular notion, I do think you did well in terms of making sure the house of cards didn’t come tumbling down after the departure of someone as charismatic as Bill Gates. But you also didn’t fare well when it came to riding the new wave of mobile and tablet innovation. It’s past time you handed over the reins to someone new and fresh who is technically savvy and loves to be a CEO. My recommendation- Tony Bates, he is new and unadulterated by the Microsoft culture and understands how to operate like a startup. Oh and if you need some motivation or a plan for retirement, check out the career page on Gates foundation.
All that said and regardless of what you choose to do, this re-org has the potential to redefine your legacy – Don’t screw it up!
Good Luck, |
ELLSWORTH — Audience members will be encouraged to sing along to a screening of Disney’s “Frozen” at The Grand on Sunday, Dec. 4, at 2 p.m.
When a prophecy traps a kingdom in eternal winter, Anna (Kristen Bell), a fearless optimist, teams up with extreme mountain man Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) and his sidekick reindeer Sven on an epic journey to find Anna’s sister Elsa (Idina Menzel), the Snow Queen, and put an end to her icy spell. Encountering mystical trolls, a funny snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad), Everest-like extremes and magic at every turn, Anna and Kristoff battle the elements in a race to save the kingdom from destruction.
In this special sing-along edition, audience members can join the characters in every song they sing, even “Let It Go!” Elsa will even be on hand to meet and greet audience members before and after the show.
General admission tickets cost $10 for adults and $5 for youths 12 or under. Call 667-9500 or visit grandonline.org. |
She is 14 years old, and apparently French. Not much else is known about this precocious young guitarist who goes by the name "Tina S" on her YouTube channel.
Tina became an Internet sensation in late May, when she posted an astonishing cover version of "Eruption," from Van Halen's debut album. Eddie Van Halen's son Wolfgang was so impressed he tweeted, "I need to meet this girl!!!"
Writing as "@Tina_Guitare," the young musician replied, "I need to meet you too! Haha :))" Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres also went on Twitter and said, "This girl is incredible. If you know where she is, I want her on my show immediately." There was no reply to that one -- at least not on Twitter.
Now Tina is back with a new video, made by her teacher Renaud Louis-Servais, in which she rips through a cover of "Vivaldi Tribute," Patrick Rondat's speed metal adaptation of the climactic "Presto" (very fast) movement of the Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi's "Summer" concerto from The Four Seasons. It's an amazing performance for a 14-year-old, although you should also see her playing classical guitar when she was nine.
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In years past, the primary method of developing an F1 car was to test it on track. Dedicated test teams travelled the world testing new components virtually non-stop, running thousands of kilometres every week. It was a hugely expensive method of proving out new components.
Today, such testing is heavily proscribed, limited to a few days ahead of the new season and perhaps an in-season or end-of-season test too. It has forced F1 teams to rely more heavily on different methodologies. The race to innovate has been intense, with the fidelity of correlation between track and lab becoming a key performance differentiator between teams.
In an ongoing effort to stop a spending war on track simply becoming a spending war in the lab, there are ever tightening limits on various types of simulation, forcing teams to become much more efficient in their use of the tools at their disposal.
It’s a technical challenge every bit the equal of the one on track – but just what armoury of simulations tools are in a top F1 team’s arsenal?
We find out…
ENGINE DYNO
The key tool for power unit development is the engine dynamometer. Engine manufacturers in F1 will have development engines running constantly on test beds as they seek to improve reliability and power output. Work on the dyno begins early in the development cycle, usually with single-cylinder concepts, and continues throughout the design phase and into the working life of the engine.
The infrastructure of the dyno cell consists of a representative air supply, a ventilation system for exhaust gasses, a fuel supply, an absorption mechanism to provide resistance and a suite of sensors to measure torque, power output, rotational speed, fuel consumption etc.,
The engine on test is computer controlled and, rather than running at constant speed or with regular ramps, it will be commonly put through lap simulations. Track running provides excellent source data, and from that engines on a transient dyno can accurately replicate the loading they would undergo during a grand prix.
In the modern era there is more to dynamometer work than simply running the engine. The sophisticated energy recovery systems used in a modern F1 power unit require careful management to optimise their ability to store and return power to the drivetrain. Testing out the various charging and restoration modes is a task that begins on the dyno.
GEARBOX DYNO
The dedicated transmission or gearbox dynamometer is an integral tool in F1 teams’ never-ceasing quest to develop gearboxes that are smaller, lighter and more reliable. Despite F1 now using gear ratios fixed for the entire season, the gearbox dyno is still a valuable tool in race preparation, analysing shift patterns, lubrication requirements and heat rejection.
The gearbox dyno requires a drive-motor to simulate engine load and an absorption device to simulate the downstream drivetrain. Sensors will measure input and output torque, lubrication temperatures and flow as the dyno puts the gearbox through race simulations.
After a run on the dyno, a gearbox will be inspected in much the same way it would be after a run in the car, with gearbox oil sampled in a mass spectrometer to check gearbox health – testing, among other parameters, for the tell-tale tiny slivers of metal (in the parts per million range) that indicate wear.
BRAKE DYNO
A brake dyno is used to test brake pads, discs and callipers beyond the most extreme conditions they are expected to face on track. As with other dyno tests used by F1 teams, the run cycle of a brake dyno is typically built to replicate the loadings and airflow experienced under race conditions. Depending on the sophistication of the dyno, this is either performed with the disc ‘naked’, or housed within a wheel. The brake dyno consists of a motor to drive a simulated half-shaft mated to a flywheel. The dyno needs to run at 3,000rpm+ to simulate race speeds.
Brake performance in F1 has a number of variables, ranging from the cooling requirements at a particular circuit to the personal material preferences of each driver to get the right ‘feel’. Finding the correct setup is a constantly moving target, with the initial work better done on the dyno than at the circuit. Dyno testing measures braking performance and temperatures, allowing engineers to select the brake correct duct sizes and material composition for each race.
DRIVER-IN-LOOP SIMULATOR
A driver-in-the-loop simulator is a very serious tool, not a video game. It’s always worth stressing this point. Granted, gaming has become very sophisticated, and some drivers admit their first experience of a new circuit has been via a PlayStation – but there is little real comparison. Pioneered by McLaren, the driver-in-the-loop simulator is a method of modelling realistic car behaviour in a virtual environment, using real-world driver inputs.
Driver-in-the-loop builds on the work done with earlier lap simulators, in which the behaviour of vehicle characteristics is represented by values in an equation, usually derived from genuine track data. In a lap simulator, a mathematically modelled driver would then ‘drive’ the car. Replacing this with a real driver (putting a driver-in-the-loop) creates a more realistic simulation.
The physical components of the driver-in-the-loop simulator are a seven-poster rig with an authentic survival cell mounted on top, surrounded by a wide-angle display wall. The cockpit features additional haptic feedback (steering wheel and brake pedal kick, seatbelts that pull and give under acceleration/braking) to make the experience as realistic as possible.
The driver-in-the-loop simulator will be used in car design – for example new steering wheel display and button layouts will be trialled before going onto the car – though it is of greater value as a set-up tool. The simulator will help the team to arrive at the baseline setup ahead of FP1. It will then run across the weekend, with a dedicated team at the factory patched into the engineers at the track, verifying set-up decisions taken in the garage and sometimes suggesting new directions, based on the data acquired from the car on track.
It plays a vital role during what is traditionally a time-poor activity. Set-up changes that might consume a half-hour of session time for a full crew of mechanics can be affected at the flick of a switch in the simulator, providing a good ‘read’ to the race engineers.
The driver-in-the-loop simulator has seen intense development in the years since limits were placed on track testing. Such has been its success, the technology has been exported to a variety of other industries.
WIND TUNNEL
The wind tunnel has been an F1 staple for the last four decades. Despite the growth and increasing sophistication of computational fluid dynamics (CFD – see below), the wind tunnel remains the primary aerodynamic test tool used in F1.
F1 uses low-speed, closed-circuit wind tunnels (also known as ‘racecourse’ tunnels as the air circulates around a closed loop) and tests highly detailed models, usually to the maximum allowed 60 per cent scale. Various data collection techniques are available, from photographing smoke trails to Doppler effect radars and strobe light/high-speed camera arrangements.
Recent curbs on wind tunnel use (limiting wind-on hours, total hours and number of runs per week) have seen F1 teams greatly improve the efficiency of their work, one element of which is placing a model in continuous motion, driving it through various attitudes, acquiring data dynamically.
McLaren’s tunnel is located within the McLaren Technology Centre, it has a four-metre fan capable of rotating at 600rpm. The tunnel itself is 145m long and 400 tonnes of steel went into its construction. The ‘ornamental’ lake in from of the MTC is a cleverly disguised component of the wind tunnel’s cooling circuit.
CFD
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a relatively recent development in the armoury of F1 teams. It is used to simulation the flow of air (a fluid) around the vehicle and the interaction between the air and the various surfaces.
While the theory is not new, using a computer simulation to model airflow around the car requires a level of processing power that was prohibitively expensive in the last century. As processors have become more powerful (and cheaper), so CFD has gained in popularity. It is more cost-effective that building models and placing them in a tunnel but, at its current level of sophistication, CFD is less reliable. It is, however, making great strides.
The technology could be seen as a rival to wind tunnels, but, more commonly in F1, it is viewed as complementary, frequently used as a ‘first pass’ simulation to test ideas. The most successful designs in CFD are then built as physical models and taken to the wind tunnel. This has proved useful with the limits imposed on tunnel time (though CFD is now also limited).
CFD is used not only to research the pure aerodynamics of the car, but also to study exhaust flows, cooling requirements and anything else in the realm of fluid dynamics.
CHASSIS DYNAMICS RIG
A chassis dynamics rig – sometimes called a ‘shaker rig’ or ‘seven-poster’ exerts forces on an F1 car to dynamically test suspension. The rig can be set up for general testing or to emulate specific race tracks, bumps and all, using data captured from a car on track. It will apply appropriate lift, downforce, braking, cornering and acceleration forces to the vehicle and record the compliance of the suspension.
The seven ‘posts’ are hydraulic actuators mounted on a seismically isolated concrete slab buried below floor level. The technology originated in the road car industry as a four-poster rig – with one actuator positioned under each wheel, used mostly for squeak and rattle tests. For racing, three more ‘posts’ were added to ‘aeroload’ the chassis, simulating the aerodynamic forces and weight transfer acting on the sprung mass car.
The chassis dynamics rig is one of the few testing tools to use a complete car body (perhaps minus the wings). While each component will have been tested individually, the seven-poster allows a team to see the interaction between all of those parts. It provides valuable data for set-up parameters such as ride height, spring rates and damper settings.
TRACK TESTING
After petabytes of data have been generated at the factory, an F1 car will finally take to the track for the final stage of testing.
In modern F1, track testing is limited to a few short weeks of group tests. This is very different to the situation of a few years ago, when teams would employ dedicated test teams, running almost every day of the year – sometimes simultaneously at two different venues. Simulation tools have largely replaced those track days – but the official tests, and the FP1 & FP2 sessions on a grand prix weekend are now more important than ever.
Track testing is extremely useful for tyre work – as no-one has yet invented a satisfactory method of transient tyre modelling in the lab – but much of the work done on track is for the purposes of verification: proving empirically the conclusions drawn in simulation.
The key word is ‘correlation’. The data produced in simulation needs to closely mirror the data generated on track. A team with a poor correlation between track and any of its simulation tools is developing its car based on false data – and often ends up being led increasingly astray as it grapples to find ‘true north’.
As such, track time is frequently given over to data collection. Cars will be adorned with sensors, ranging from simple heat stickers to complicated aero rakes and pitot masts, measuring turbulence, air pressure and various other flow parameters.
Sometimes low-tech solutions are the best: F1 teams commonly use ‘flo-vis’ – a thin, luminous paint solution that is applied to bodywork in the garage. The car goes out, completes a lap and then is closely photographed to see the flow pattern. It’s very effective – but generally disliked by the crew because it creates a mess in the otherwise spotless garage! |
Login to see winners.
Kirby_Corbin check the list of names and if your name is up their above this chat box with 2 boxes next to it, you won something :)
McGriffinDog I'm new to this site And I would like to ask how do you check to see if you won
Auhtwoo For anyone who sees this: I've started reraffling already.
Methcake Can I have SOME of what people rejected?
his appendages reach the heavens Ill have anything rejected, no collected please
Carlos I can take only one rejected :3
Detective R.S. SugarGlider I'll gladly take the thing people rejected :D
Auhtwoo v. brigade winner declined trade offer and removed me
Auhtwoo g. battle bob winner rejected FR twice
Kite What are you going to do with the rejected items? Reraffle them?
injazza А ты должен был что-то выиграть? Глупое русское дите.
Tin @_@ Ту пая раздача я тоже не хрина не выйграл ХОЗЯИН РАЗДАЧИ ДЕБИЛ!
Auhtwoo v. goggles winner rejected FR twice and blocked me and hit the X (what even)
Auhtwoo g. k-9 winner rejected FR twice
Auhtwoo Panama winner rejected FR twice, not adding again
Auhtwoo v. whiskered winner rejected FR
Auhtwoo (note that, if any of these winners read these, they're free to add me to claim their prize at any time, but I won't be bothering to try delivering to them myself)
Auhtwoo v. hound dog winner rejected trade offer
Auhtwoo v. panama winner rejected FR
Auhtwoo Scratch that, stuffer lv63 winner rejected trade offer and removed me
Auhtwoo - Stuffer lv63 winner rejected FR twice
Auhtwoo Putting notes here.
Soldier 100% win percentage but I didn't win anything....
Zeutrinox THanks! Got the prize!
smitty werbenjagermanjensen hi im one of the winners
EDGE my chance of winning any raffle -10000%
Ernani o filho do Troll aaannddd 1 more rafle thath i lost...EVERYONE! THIS WEBSITE IS 100% USELESS!!
Reandd I want the crates...really
IsaacFreemare V404 Wait...so the "I'l add you " mesasage doesnt mean you won?
Eins\drei silly Tjthelegokd, it was only put there so there won't be a crap amount of invites to Auhtwoo
Slangs THANKS ! , I cried when i know i won the unusual ;w;
[RϟG] Tjthelegokid I'm confused, my notifications say I didn't win anything, but under the raffle it says "Unlimited delivery time, I'll add you, be patient." So, have I won something or not? I am a relatively new user, having discovered this recently, so I'm not 100% sure...
smitty werbenjagermanjensen wares my think
IsaacFreemare V404 Authwoo you are the amazing for doing a raffle like this. Don't let people do that to you.
Auhtwoo you guys are silly, if I want to give things away it shouldn't matter to whom they go
iliacCrest @Forgivable I get what you're saying. I don't want to just be a leach & I don't think anyone should do that. But in my mind, if someone can part with a good item then they are rich. I want to be rich enough to give back to this site because it's do awesome
(-_-)Anonymous(-_-) It's sad when you don't win these
vvvvvvv Pff I'm so sad, I didn't won anything.
Blaze.xTH3RM4Lx congrats to the winners
Forgivable @iliacCrest, what is bad is not about being rich or poor its about sharing some stuff,even a poor player can share a het sometime and gain some rep
Forgivable eeew dat 0 rep
iliacCrest People get rep by making raffles - good raffles. What's so bad about people with low rep winning? Otherwise it's just rich people giving each other stuff...
Mr. Pootis Yeah I won G. Tyrant...added yah! :D Thanks
IsaacFreemare V404 so how bout those mets huh?
-GoV- dak1ne csgo-skins.com damn O/O winnong unusual :D how lucky you are ;) merry Xmas
smitty werbenjagermanjensen when i am going to get mine when all of the users clam
smitty werbenjagermanjensen vintage rag not unusual
smitty werbenjagermanjensen nope i use it for free stuff thats it
Ultra Command™ How do you see the other 84 winners?
Diez'n a 0 rep won an unusual how typical, bet he'll never raffle once in his life.
smitty werbenjagermanjensen hey i won wares my rag i added you
>:PSlayer>:3 wow... just wow... my luck must suck as hell, 100 winners and I was not in...
IsaacFreemare V404 5th winner and it got the unusual I was hoping for XD dang
NamenRoodlesPenguin man i didnt win nothing
IsaacFreemare V404 steam will be back online soon i hope
Jack Of All Nades gunna cry because i lost and i had caps on
IsaacFreemare V404 chat is dead. Not big surprise
Revenger by killing steam
Revenger i hate gaben
Reandd I cant buy Plants Vs Zombies :(
Reandd OR not :(
Revenger Steam is working now
Reandd YAY THE STORE IS WORKING FOR ME!! :D
[=ΩH=] Australium Sweetie Bot do what you want cuz a pirate is free
Reandd The l4d2 pirates shut down that shit?
Revenger i didnt know steam was that sensitive
Reandd 119 error code
Revenger butty no shit
smitty werbenjagermanjensen oh 1 key 1 key its worth only one key ok http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG2kFXDPot8
Reandd Why I cant go to steam store I want to buy plants vs zombies :(
Revenger everybody did i think
TafuSeler anyone spotted that the prizes are shaped in a christmas tree shape?"
TafuSeler bye bye, episode 3
Revenger at the farm he had a spy
TafuSeler old gabe had a farm
Revenger they need to learn to count in 20 years right?
[=ΩH=] Australium Sweetie Bot tf3: now in 5d with 9 bazillions hats
smitty werbenjagermanjensen yes yes that is so ture
Revenger maybe if they wait 20 years
TafuSeler thats why games are f2p not f3p
TafuSeler valve cant count to 3, skittles
Revenger 20 years later: tf3 free to play!
TafuSeler amazing raffle btw.
Reandd In the next day the l4d2 is free,
TafuSeler year ago portal 1 was free for some time. now l4d2. i wonder what will be next year. maybe Tf2?
TafuSeler i wonder if anybody will ever raffle a game
Sōsei no Megami Iriasu With an avatar like that, Vehlex is the luckiest person in the world.
Revenger only thing what i want is a wish: let gaben fix the world
TafuSeler vehlex is actually the luckiest from those 3 people who won
things So much traffic on steam
TafuSeler l4d2 is free now. and that makes shitload of lag to steam servers
Sōsei no Megami Iriasu Yes, I know what pirating is, but I don't understand. They're making a crack for L4D2 now?
things v getting for free i think
Revenger people are making a crack for l4d2 so they can play it forever (only singeplayer)
TafuSeler and i mean piracy but hardcore
TafuSeler LOL i sold an item in market and because of the lag its dubbed, in market and in my bp
Revenger good thing steam works for me :)
TafuSeler because 100% of people are now pirating l4d2
things Every steam connected page is exploding
Revenger no shit
TafuSeler YOU DONT SAY
smitty werbenjagermanjensen oh steam went down
sportakus1 didnt win anything :(
smitty werbenjagermanjensen in your dreams pal your gonna have to pry this out of my cold dead heads if you want it for that
Revenger i offer 0.33 scrap
TafuSeler ppl, we got an unusual winner!
Revenger good idea
TafuSeler i offer one 1.33 hat
Revenger i offer 10 crates and 4 naughty crates
smitty werbenjagermanjensen no im trying to go to backpack.tf
TafuSeler 5 crates
TafuSeler i can buy it for 1 crate
smitty werbenjagermanjensen oh ok well whats the do rag worth then
Revenger becuase its 1 to 1
smitty werbenjagermanjensen well how do you know
TafuSeler the only green bar i got is "your raffle has ended" :D
Revenger butty i think i said 9001 times : no
smitty werbenjagermanjensen no i am asking if you can win more then once
TafuSeler everyone who won is lucky as hell, except some that won the shittiest items. and i say one thing: gratz and thanks for amazing raffle.
Revenger and then it was quiet
Sōsei no Megami Iriasu Why are you asking to win again?
Carlos Ima masturbate again cause of the 4th winner
TafuSeler ramses: so true
smitty werbenjagermanjensen can you win more the once
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs I took all my achievement items and crafted them into dirty refined. Then deleted it after it annoyed me to stare at it.
Revenger no unusual winners?
RAMSESKIP Oh, here's something which is kinda fitting. http://horobox.co.uk/u/decc_1326232837.swf
TafuSeler UNCRAFTABLE REFINED METAL FTW
Revenger thats unusual scrap haunted im not talking about that
TafuSeler scrap haunted
Revenger they should make unusual metal
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs They'll do it when TF2 is finally dying.
smitty werbenjagermanjensen dont realy care
TafuSeler maybe lets do christmas tree train with everything everyone won
things butty now i see why you have -10 rep
smitty werbenjagermanjensen why OH it would fuck over the market
Revenger im afraid not butty
TafuSeler UNUSUAL BUDS
smitty werbenjagermanjensen that sounds like a good idea to me
smitty werbenjagermanjensen can i win one more
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs How long before valve starts selling "Unusualizer Recipes" for $99 each? :D
Revenger i just opened my notes and guess what
RAMSESKIP Lol butty you already checked for the Heavy Rag. Do you even know how this site works.
TafuSeler trolololololo, unusual won by a person with alot of negatives
Chimaera Didn't win :( Congrats to the winners and thanks to Auhtwoo for the amazing tafffle
Forgivable keep crying babies :'(
Revenger Ok... Im curious now.... If anyone won an unusual please tell us
IsaacFreemare V404 vvvvvvvvvvvvv all the kids crying below
smitty werbenjagermanjensen plase be me plase by the hat gods plase bless me
Revenger they can reraffle it maybe
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs Anyone know what a vintage batters helm goes for? I want to paint one.
TafuSeler whoever won the unusual batter is a lucky bastard
Carlos pretty sure
smitty werbenjagermanjensen so out of all those items you can only get 1
TafuSeler and everyone gets green notifications on crate raffles, its just the pure trolling of tf2r.com
Carlos I wonder whos the fourth winner and butty u cant win twie i think :P
smitty werbenjagermanjensen i have 81 suck it down
Revenger you already won something
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs I bought 40 ToD tickets. If the price goes back up I'm selling for a profit. If it doesn't I'll play the game.
smitty werbenjagermanjensen hopefully its me
TafuSeler and if you see crying in "70 t.o.d. is one bud" then you are retarted
Revenger i smell something purple
#DEAL WITH IT! I always get green Notifications on crate raffles :D
TafuSeler i wonder who is the 4th winner
IsaacFreemare V404 Forceman please stop crying
smitty werbenjagermanjensen no stupid keybord
smitty werbenjagermanjensen bo fuckin way ok
TafuSeler 70 t.o.d. is one bud
smitty werbenjagermanjensen i have 81 tour of duty tickets
smitty werbenjagermanjensen well im kind of rich
Revenger i hate crates
smitty werbenjagermanjensen trying to use backpack.tf to see what its worth
TafuSeler its unfair only richest people will win and the most poor always lose
Chimneywaffles where do I go to find the prize
TafuSeler butty, please reraffle :3
smitty werbenjagermanjensen did i win anything eles
TafuSeler everyone sees that
smitty werbenjagermanjensen hey i won
Revenger *clicks on notifications* *sees something red like always*
Carlos Done masturbating
TafuSeler i wonder if the you didnt win anything block was deleted for this raffle and only the you have won an item has been keep'd
Chimneywaffles it says'unlimited delivery time,i'll add you , be patient
TafuSeler no you idnt
Chimneywaffles a parently I did
Revenger oh did somebody just win earbuds?
Chimneywaffles how do I find out how I won
things Dont even worry, you probably didn't win
Forgivable silent hill snowflakes ;_;
TafuSeler i got a block!
Chimneywaffles if I won how do I claim and it says 'unlimited delivery time,ill add you , be patient
TafuSeler it is, its mmore gray
things It's not different
TafuSeler im the only one that spotted the snow is different now?
Revenger i smell purple
TafuSeler i can smell you are dirty
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs I didn't get a notification for this raffle end... not red or green. Hmmm.
Forgivable i do remember the countdown, we were so happy backthen :'(
TafuSeler the yellow block is the best
Revenger not white
Revenger well atleast its red
TafuSeler do you remember the countdown? you all counted to win and won. a red. fucking. block.
things v we need the key to go down for that
TafuSeler i think we need more big raffles like this.
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs Of course, since I cant get on to Steam to see anything, what do I know? :P
Revenger or only p2p players can use the workshop
Revenger p2p people must get free dlc for l4d2
Duck And the winner number 4 taking the rest of items
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs I don't thik you get to keep it. If so, that's the first time ever. I think ppl just don't know what a "free play day" is.
TafuSeler ahahahaha, the only thing people get for buying l4d2 before f2p is an achievement
Duck 3 winners
Revenger good thing i bought it
TafuSeler woooh so fast, 4 winner
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs Forceman, I don't buy it. They have free days all the time.
Forgivable Nice rep Butty :D
IsaacFreemare V404 HOW DARE GABEN MAKE A GOOD GAME FREE TO PEOPLE
JJChinchilla Some guy with -10 rep won X.X
CVBlizzard992 LVL 91 HEAVY DO RAG im so jealous right now
things We will keep here until all winners are revealed
TafuSeler butty the clown won!
Revenger first tf2... then dota 2.... now l4d 2..... damn u gaben
TafuSeler jafafa: really, you download once and get it forever now. not just for today, and its for free download only for today
IsaacFreemare V404 BUTTY THE CLOWN WON
Carlos REFRESH FOR 3RD WINENR
CVBlizzard992 New Winner; Refresh
Revenger never heard of luck
TafuSeler carlos: go to l4d2 page and download it for free
BlackFox f2p l4d2. my nightmares became real
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs People rread "free today only" and think that means if they DL it today they get to keep it. Thats why Steam is down.
Revenger its becoming a f2p haters chatroom
Carlos Is L4D #firstone free?
CVBlizzard992 This is becoming a new chatroom
TafuSeler too much "l4d2 is f2p" comments
Carlos wait L4D2 is npow F2P?
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs There are tons of ppl saying "glad I got logged in long enough to grab my free copy! Probably most of those keeping Steam down think they get to KEEP the game
Revenger i need to kill gaben for making l4d2 f2p
TafuSeler that avatar is too old
CVBlizzard992 siepka v.batter helm meh
Carlos LUCKY SIEPKAA D:
Forgivable dat avatar, dat rep :3
IsaacFreemare V404 VEHLEX AND K.SPIEKA: THE RAFFLE GODS OF THE ALMIGHTY KEY
Tartugo^_^ 2 winners here
Duck NEW WINNER
CVBlizzard992 Santa Gaben trolled us all (?)
Carlos I must masterbate for the new christmas tree
Duck OMG OMG NEXT WINNER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
TafuSeler i wonder which key vehlex won, one on the left side or the right side
plivnik46 B>CS:GO trading cards wtf someone gave a red rep (I fixed it :D)
Revenger or they will sell it for tons of dollars
IsaacFreemare V404 Guys l4d2 is only free for TODAY XD its a holiday deal
Duck I must burn this christmas tree
TafuSeler and maybe everyone who win will reraffle everything?
Carlos Owner wake up pleeaseee D: just give all a checkmark
Revenger Why did they make it free to play?!?!
CVBlizzard992 The only winning move is pretending to lose
IsaacFreemare V404 A PLAYER DIDNT WIN! VEHLEX! SEND THEM KEYS! *vehlex the key raffle god shoots keys everywerhe*
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs Is this a good place to hate on the L4D2 moochers that took Steam down for the day?
TafuSeler the only winning move is to lose.
Revenger i only see 1 winner WHERE ARE THE OTHER WINNERS!?!
IsaacFreemare V404 Guys if you didnt win it's okay.
TafuSeler 99% of the chat are cries "I DIDNT WIN HELP MUH"
CVBlizzard992 And of course i didn't win anything...
KamilosPL Fuck my life i dont win :(
Carlos Welp guys ima wait for a winner while i masturbate :3
TafuSeler better to win a key than a genuine wilsons weave
Revenger i wonder if someone has a valve weapon?
Carlos I.W.A.M.M.O.K = I Wasted All My Money On Keys :3
IsaacFreemare V404 BUT SIR ALL THE STU- JUST THE KEY
IsaacFreemare V404 Vehlex won he just wanted the key XD
TafuSeler i wonder how people will react if they will see they won an unusual
Jᴀғᴀғᴀ Hᴏᴛs If it had been just 4294967294 entry slots instead of 4294967295 I woulda had a shot!
Duck Its a new chat
TafuSeler i think we will chat here until everyone will get the prize
Revenger day 9319314 still no unusual.
cool kid I wish all these retards crying about not winning would realize that they should be grateful that they got to even ENTER a raffle as magnificent as this.
Duck fku xD
TafuSeler jking but got you all :D
Duck i refreshed page
Carlos Welp wasted like from wed 11 -we 25 of my life drinking cola :P
Weiss Schnee ( Tazers Hunter ) EVERYTIME I'M IN MY OFFICE I GOT MY COCK SUCKED MOTHAFACKA'
TafuSeler refresh the page for 2 winner |
On the very worth-your-time-to-follow official Amazon Web Services blog, Jeff Barr announced today that EC2 spot instances will now get "two-minute warning" termination notices.
The long and short of it is that you can now query instance metadata or the DescribeSpotInstanceRequests API to find out if a spot instance has been marked for termination. At that point, you'll have two minutes to react and shut down cleanly. This gives your application time to wrap up any work in progress.
In the post, Jeff describes the mechanism in more detail, but it is basically an instance metadata endpoint that returns a 404 HTTP status code until the instance is marked for termination. AWS recommends polling this endpoint every five seconds. This can be done in a variety of ways, but one of the easiest to start experimenting with is to periodically curl the endpoint and trigger shell scripts upon notification.
An obvious first resort for polling something and running a shell script on change is crond , but cron only provides minute increments for job scheduling. So, a simple alternative is to just background a shell script (using rc.local , supervisord , daemontools , or whatever you like) that polls every five seconds and runs your shutdown hook script when it detects the notification.
#!/bin/bash while truedo if [ -z $(curl -Is http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/spot/termination-time | head -1 | grep 404 | cut -d -f 2) ] then logger "Running shutdown hook." # Call your shutdown script here.breakelse # Spot instance not yet marked for termination. sleep 5fi done
This is a simple implementation, but it may be just what you need if you have a simple application shutdown hook. A more robust tool, Shudder, helps with graceful shutdowns in autoscaling groups; that is expected to add support for spot termination notifications soon.
We're excited about spot termination notices, and we will definitely be using them in our Fugue product. |
A Birmingham native has launched his second company out of Chattanooga, and he's bringing this one home.
Matt Patterson, a Vestavia Hills High School and University of Alabama graduate, cofounded The House with Matt Harb. It launched in Birmingham this week.
The House app shows events, happy hours and other specials from local restaurants and bars.
"What I wanted was to build something for the consumer that was needed, that I would use," said Patterson, 31. "I never know what's going on on a random Tuesday."
The House is free for the consumer, but it makes money by charging the restaurants. Birmingham restaurant partners so far include Innisfree Irish Pub, Taco Mama, Trim Tab Brewing, Chez Fon Fon and many others .
Patterson worked for BBVA Compass before starting his own company, a moving company called Bellhops . He's still an equity owner in that company, but he's no longer involved in the day-to-day operations of it.
The House launched in Chattanooga in March. So far, it has more than 8,000 downloads and about 50 restaurant partners.
The House is starting its launch in Birmingham, Vestavia Hills, Homewood and Mountain Brook, but Patterson eventually plans to expand to Hoover and other surrounding areas.
"(Birmingham) is a great culinary city. The food and entertainment scene is pretty strong, so I knew it was a great market," Patterson said. "I also just wanted to bring it to my hometown. There's some sentimental value there." |
2017 ended with Grigor Dimitrov's mark. The Bulgarian player won his biggest career title at the ATP Finals in London in November, and after training hard in Monte Carlo he is about to start the 2018 season in Brisbane, where he won the first of his four titles in the 2017 season.
Interviewed by Italian newspaper La Repubblica, the 26-year-old spoke about his mental improvements. 'Tennis is a particular world that changes people. I always repeat that tennis can't be everything for me, in life other things matter as well.
I don't want to be good at just one thing in life, I would like to do other [things]. Maybe teach. In order to send a message to younger players and to who will come after [me]. If you don't contribute something, what did you live for? That's how I like to define myself, as a guy who has a lot of passion.
I like to paint and take pictures.' Did his personal life affect how he was perceived by the world? 'I think I was misunderstood. Not knowing me, people had a wrong idea. Of course there were tough moments, where I wasn't surrounded by right people.
Let's forget about the cliché on girlfriends, from Serena [Williams] to Maria [Sharapova], it's useless to get around it. I say that it's easy to be losen in beauty, but is it a mistake? But today with Nicole (Scherzinger), my current girlfriend, I am careful about my privacy.' Explaining why he was called "Baby Fed", Dimitrov said: 'Maybe it's my father's fault who taught me the one-handed backhand,' he joked.
'Federer and Nadal are two phenomena who marked my sports life: the funny thing is that I, who was called "Baby Fed" was "saved" by Rafa and his academy. It's one of life's paradoxes.' Who will dominate 2018? 'Good question, but if these amazing players will keep playing, the truth will be about just one thing: in tennis, age doesn't matter anymore.' ALSO READ: Dimitrov: 'If there's one person that can return, that's Andy Murray' |
As the end of my pregnancy approaches I’ve been starting to appreciate my bump a bit more because I know that I will miss it when it’s gone. Especially as I’m not sure whether or not we will be having any more children.
There is something so special about carrying a baby and although I haven’t enjoyed this pregnancy as much as I could have, there is no denying that my body has done something incredible.
I only have a couple of photos of me when I was pregnant with Iyla and I really regret not taking more so this time I have been taking photos fortnightly. I want to do as much as I can to remember how my body looked when pregnant.
anthros.net
There is also something else that can be done as a reminder and that’s belly casting, you can even then have your cast turned into a ceramic belly sculpture.
It is something which seems to divide opinions. Some people totally get it and others don’t ever want to look at a reminder of their pregnant body again. Dad2BabyInsomniac doesn’t get it, he actually compared it to him getting a cast made of his balls! I am however determined to change his mind and luckily I have been given the opportunity because this week I went to have a cast made of my bump. The first step in the process of having it made into a ceramic sculpture.
I had heard of belly casting before but apparently the casts don’t last for that long so having it turned into stoneware means that it will last forever, as long as it isn’t dropped. It also means you can keep it in the garden if you have no room in the house.
This is done by a lovely lady called Caroline Harris who is based in Glastonbury, Somerset. You can either go to her house to have the casting done or she will travel to you if you are based in the South-West.
As I only live a couple of miles away I went to her house, along with Iyla who was found it very amusing to watch!
Caroline made me feel very comfortable and we had a little chat about what kind of sculpture I would like. I wanted mine to just focus on the shape of my tummy, without any detail and I had a picture in my head of it being black with a glossy finish. She said that this would be possible and ran through a few different options.
There are all kinds of lovely things you can have added into the sculpture such as spirals and patterns, and there is also a choice of colour and the type of material it is made of, depending on where you will keep it.
Then the casting started. It didn’t actually take very long at all as the plaster dries really quickly so by the time Caroline had finished applying it, it was already starting to warm up and set. Within about 5 to 10 minutes it had started to fall away from my body.
The process was a bit messy but the plaster washed off really easily in the shower so it wasn’t a problem at all. You do have to wear old knickers though, not that this was a problem as nine months into your pregnancy you don’t tend to ever be wearing nice underwear!
Now my cast will go through a six stage procedure and when I get it back in around six weeks it will be a ceramic piece of art, how amazing is that?! I will be writing another post and sharing photos of the finished piece as soon as it is complete. Caroline also makes casts of new babies feet which I will write more about in the next post too.
If you live in the South-West and would be interested in having this done, or if you would like to know more about the process then you can read all about it here – www.earth-rising.co.uk
Disclaimer – I had the casting done, free of charge, for the purpose of this review but all of the opinions are, as always, my own. |
The eight-hour workday hasn’t changed much since Henry Ford first experimented with it for factory workers. Now, Americans work slightly longer–an average 8.7 hours–though more time goes into email, meetings, and Facebook than whatever our official job duties actually are. Is it time to rethink how many hours we spend at the office ?
In Sweden, the six-hour workday is becoming common.
“I think the eight-hour workday is not as effective as one would think,” says Linus Feldt, CEO of Stockholm-based app developer Filimundus. “To stay focused on a specific work task for eight hours is a huge challenge. . . . In order to cope, we mix in things and pauses to make the workday more endurable. At the same time, we are having it hard to manage our private life outside of work. We want to spend more time with our families, we want to learn new things or exercise more. I wanted to see if there could be a way to mix these things.”
Filimundus switched to a six-hour day last year, and says that the change hasn’t really made a major difference in how people work. The leadership team just asked people to stay off social media and personal distractions, and eliminated some standard weekly meetings.
“My impression now is that it is easier to focus more intensely on the work that needs to be done and you have the stamina to do it and still have energy left when leaving the office,” Feldt says.
The company is not alone. Brath, another tech startup, made the move three years ago. For them, one of the biggest advantages is that it helps them hire and keep employees, as the CEO writes in a blog post:
We also believe that once you’ve gotten used to having time for the family, picking up the kids at day care, spending time training for a race or simply just cooking good food at home, you don’t want to lose that again. We believe that this is a good reason to stay with us and not only because of the actual impact longer hours would make in your life but for the reason behind our shorter days. . . . We actually care about our employees.
It’s also happening in the public sector. In one recent experiment, nurses at a government-run retirement home were able to switch to a six-hour day for the same pay. In that case, it did cost more money. But the costs were offset by better care for patients because nurses were less exhausted. |
11/2018
Ways to find more meaning in your work (and life) and make the most of your career
What sets great leaders apart from other managers? ESADE Associate Professor Josep F. Mària reveals some of the qualities that make a great leader in his latest book ' Getting to the Heart of Things '. The publication is a collection of tips that can help leaders - and anyone else interested in self knowledge - to find more meaning in their work and in their professional careers.
"Deep down, everyone wants to find the meaning to life. Life can bring brief moments of happiness, something it can be dull and repetitive, and may even seem to lack meaning altogether during rough patches," says Mària.
"The book aims to help people to find more meaning in their lives by revealing clues and encouraging open questions that can trigger awareness and positive change within."
Good leaders know when they can take their masks off and see both their best and worst traits
6 qualities that make great leaders
1. Self-demanding attitude
A self-demanding attitude is good for getting results but it can also create frustration, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. A great leader is aware of this risk and knows how to balance his demands and reformulate his/her purpose and lifestyle.
2. Learning from failure
Great leaders accept failure. They know how to ask themselves the right questions about what triggered their failure and how to use that mistake as a learning opportunity.
3. Authenticity
Children are the greatest example of authenticity because they do not wear a mask. As we grow older, wearing a mask becomes something of a social requirement. Good leaders know when they can take their masks off and see both their best and worst traits.
Great leaders accept failure and know how to use their mistakes as learning opportunities
4. Acceptance
When something bad happens to us, we tend to fall prey to negative emotions. Great leaders know how to deal with these negative thoughts and accept them, thus avoiding frustration and anger.
5. Empathy
Putting yourself in other people's shoes can be emotionally exhausting. Great leaders empathise with others yet they also know how to separate themselves from others' emotions. Basically, one cannot help others if one succumbs to their negative thoughts.
6. Take the long view
If you were about to die, would you be happy about what you have done in life or would you have regrets? To achieve happiness both at work and in life, try to imagine you are 90 years old and how you would like to have lived, then live accordingly. |
× Gen Con 2016 convention again shows increased attendance
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Gen Con 2016, which for the first time featured more than 500 exhibitors and an expansion into Lucas Oil Stadium, continued a seven-year streak of record turnstile attendance with 201,852 attendees, up 2.5% from 2015 attendance. Unique attendance remained nearly flat, ending at 60,819. Unique 4-Day Badge holders increased 4% year over year.
“Our goal when planning Gen Con 2016 was to optimize the attendee’s experience,” said Adrian Swartout, Owner/CEO of Gen Con LLC. “We introduced a new pricing structure to help with badge purchases and to help improve show planning, and also created more comparative value with our 4-Day Badge. By growing the Exhibit Hall and expanding into the stadium, we were able to improve attendee traffic flow and offer more entertainment opportunities. Reviews of this new show experience have been overwhelmingly positive.”
Gen Con also set records with the number of events at the convention, surpassing 16,500 ticketed events. The Pre-show Trade Day program, held August 3, once again sold out with more than 550 participants. Gen Con’s official charity partner of 2016, The PourHouse, will receive more than $35,000 from donations created from on-site programming, including a large contribution from Mayfair Games.
The convention will return next year to Indianapolis, August 17-20, which mark the 50th historic Gen Con 50. |
Sen. Rand Paul is recovering from five broken ribs and bruises to his lungs, and it is unclear when he will return to Washington, aides said Sunday, signaling that injuries he sustained Friday are far more severe than initially thought.
The second-term Republican senator from Kentucky and 2016 presidential candidate was attacked, allegedly by a next-door neighbor, Rene Boucher, 59, who was charged with fourth-degree assault.
Paul made his first public comments since the incident on Sunday, tweeting that his wife "Kelley and I appreciate the overwhelming support after Friday's unfortunate event. Thank you for your thoughts and prayers."
[Suspect in attack on Sen. Rand Paul might face more serious charges, police say]
Doug Stafford, Paul's chief of staff, said in a statement Sunday that the senator has five rib fractures, including three displaced fractures, meaning the bones are partly or completely cracked.
"This type of injury is caused by high velocity severe force. It is not clear exactly how soon he will return to work, as the pain is considerable as is the difficulty in getting around, including flying," Stafford said.
This photo provided by the Warren County, Ky. Regional Jail shows Rene Boucher, who was arrested and charged with assaulting and injuring Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.). (AP/AP)
Paul has lung contusions, or bruises, caused by the broken ribs, Stafford said. He could not say whether one lung was bruised or both, but said Paul's recovery could last several months. Such fractures can cause other significant medical problems, including internal bleeding, damage to other organs or pneumonia.
The nature of the dispute between Paul and Boucher remained a mystery Sunday to locals who know both men as medical professionals based in this southwestern Kentucky town.
Paul is an ophthalmologist who has practiced in town since moving here with his wife in 1993. He continues to provide free medical care to low-income Kentucky residents on a regular basis throughout the year when the Senate is not in session.
Boucher is an anesthesiologist and the inventor of the Therm-a-Vest, a cloth vest partly filled with rice and secured with Velcro straps that is designed to help with back pain. He has worked at several local medical facilities through the years, according to public health records.
David Ciochetty, a doctor with Interventional Pain Specialists in Bowling Green, said in an interview Sunday that Boucher worked there as a "general pain medicine physician" for about a year and a half beginning in January 2010 before leaving.
Asked whether he knew what might cause Boucher to lash out, Ciochetty said, "The rest of Bowling Green would like to know that, too. I was quite surprised to see this in the news."
Ciochetty said Boucher used to work as an anesthesiologist at the hospital but "told people that he sustained a neck injury and could not continue his anesthesiology duties."
After Boucher left IPS, Ciochetty did not hear of him practicing anywhere else.
Paul had full staff privileges at the hospital when Boucher worked there, so Paul and Boucher "must have worked together at some point," Ciochetty said.
Boucher was released Saturday on $7,500 bond, according to county jail records. He is scheduled to appear in court Nov. 9.
A motive is not known, and there is no indication that the attack was political in nature.
Jeff Jones, a registered nurse who worked with Boucher at the Bowling Green Medical Center, described Boucher's politics as "liberal."
"He was active on social media and said some negative things about the Republican agenda," Jones said.
"I think it was unfortunate that they lived so close together," he added.
A Facebook page that appeared to be Boucher's included links to articles and memes critical of President Trump and a news article about a Montana Republican congressional candidate who attacked a reporter the day before winning his seat. The page said Boucher is a former Army pain-management specialist and graduated from the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Des Moines in 1984.
By late Saturday, the page had been overrun by other Facebook users criticizing Boucher for the alleged assault. On Sunday, the page appeared to be blocked from public view.
Jim Bullington, a former member of the city commission, knows both men. He said Sunday that Boucher is divorced and lives alone. Bullington described Boucher as a socialist.
"He's pretty much the opposite of Rand Paul in every way," Bullington said in an interview.
The neighbors had been known to have "heated discussions" about health care, Bullington said, adding that Boucher is an advocate of a national health system.
Paul, an outspoken libertarian, voted last summer against a Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, saying the plan didn't go far enough in repealing the 2010 health-care law.
Robert Porter, a friend of Paul's, said late Saturday that the senator was mowing his lawn moments before the attack.
Paul and Boucher live side by side along a small lake in Rivergreen, a close-knit gated community with large houses. On Sunday afternoon, nobody answered at Boucher's home. Next door at the Paul residence, four people were seen doing yard work. Other neighbors were out walking, enjoying the unseasonably warm weather.
The senator joins a growing list of lawmakers in both parties who have been attacked or threatened with violence this year. Congressional security officials have investigated thousands of general or specific threats against Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
The threats turned to violence during the summer when House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) was nearly killed by a gunman who showed up at a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Va.
Paul, a member of the team, was on the field at the time of the shooting but was not hurt.
More recently, Rep. Frederica S. Wilson (D-Fla.) skipped several days of votes after threats were made against her after she sparred with Trump over the treatment of the widow of a U.S. soldier killed in Niger.
O'Keefe reported from Washington. Alice Crites, Caitlin Dewey and David Weigel contributed to this report.
Read more at PowerPost |
Every week of the year Free Loaders dutifully brings a bunch of free games to you, like a servant with small handful of grapes. But now, the winter moon rises. The journalist slumbering in me growls and shakes his legs. Game time, joy time, thumbs are sundered. List time, award time, hear the keyboard howl.
Here are the best games covered by Free Loaders this year, listed and granted their well-deserved awards.
Scariest parser – The House Abandon
Interactive horror fiction with twists and warbling Stranger Things music. There’s a house and you’ve got to get in it. Type those commands, just like you always used to do. Go north, go south, go west, go upstairs, go into the room. Look at that thing on the bed. What wonderful memories. What wonderful times.
Oh god. Oh god no.
Bloodiest hockey – Super Blood Hockey
Old-bit inspired ice hockey with horrendous amounts of blood. Get stuck in, bash your opponents, pass the puck, shoot the puck, and hit your enemies with the puck. Good, you have broken all his teeth out. I expect no less from a warrior of the ice. Uh oh, here comes the glazing machine, watch out.
Best pack ‘em up – Fitz Packerton
Pack things away with care and precision. You can do this, it is very easy and it will only take a couple of minutes. There’s absolutely nothing suspicious about any of this. Just get packing, and be thorough – you never know when you might need that bonesaw.
Hardest citizen integration examination – NORTH
First-person city of confusion. We are running out of things to say about NORTH, a game of being a refugee in a strange and otherwordly city, never knowing where to go or how to act or what to do. But it did feature in our 50 best free games list, the only game on this list to do so. In short, it is good. It also has some fantastic intro music.
Most desirable lanterns – Samurai Lantern
Brutally tough arcade sword-slashing. Slash the baddies, collect the lanterns, and escape to the next level once you’ve got 15. This was only released last week, but it is such a tight, finely-tuned beast that I have been playing it on and off since. I am convinced of its merit as a minimalised Super Crate Box.
Best game for Windows – Windowframe
Puzzle platformer where the conundrum is your own window size. Smart and confounding in equal measure, it sometimes takes control of the window size and at other times tasks you with dragging and adjusting to figure out the solutions to small puzzles. A meta-mechanical micro-mindscratcher.
Goodest boy – Acrodog
Two-button canine reflexes. Make Acrodog jump by shifting the bouncey platform left and right. Keep him in the spotlight to please the audience, while using the beach ball to gain height and avoiding fruit thrown by unworthy observers. Ignore the haters. They do not know art. They do not know Acrodog.
Least goodest boy – Cooldog Teaches Typeing
Typign is importnant and you al need to learn how to type correctyl. Dont worry, though, Cooldog knows all the best triscks for excellent typeing mastery. Just clatter away on that keybored and try not to make to many mistakes. If i can laern it so can you!
Best dust trails – Shapeshifter Biker
Desert motorbiking as a shapeshifting roadhog. The black cars are after you, we all know why. But you mustn’t let them catch up. Let her rip and change your form with a button press, becoming a dragon that can pass through lava, an angry T-Rex, a flying eagle, and seventeen other creatures both fast and slow.
Most unsettling fish – Tangaroa Deep
Deep dive interactive fiction. Head into the depths as a research scientist to discover the mysteries within. Stay calm under the pressure and take note of the deep sea creatures. Is the King of Herrings out there, lurking? A giant squid perhaps? How long can you stand to dive before coming back up for air? Not long enough, loser!
Most points – The Mother of Bird Men
Artistic and vivid adventure about birds that look good. It’s part of the Adventures of Miss Libellule, a trilogy of such point and clicks, and I described it as “tomb-raiding your way through a giant Aztec kaleidoscope”. I stand by those remarks.
Most clicks – Project Perfect Citizen
Unsettling desktop investigation. You are part of a surveillance project, keeping an eye on ordinary citizens by peeping through the folders on their computer. Both voyeuristic and sometimes disturbing, it’s a game with an obvious but important message. Privacy has been dead for years, but nobody wants to be seen at the funeral.
Cleanliness next to godliness award – Breach & Clean
GO GO GO. Hotel cleaning staff simulator. Open that guest’s door, with dynamite if necessary, and clean the room from top to bottom. Wipe those stains, pick up that can, replace that towel, renew the toilet paper, and get out of there god dammit, we have a whole building to clean. GO GO GO.
Dadliest game – Lily: The Colors of Santa Luz
Stealthy dad and daughter adventure. Get yourself and your daughter out of the gorgeous Santa Luz, which has been invaded by some stout Nazi looking suckers. Avoid patrols, escape dogs, and make important split-second decisions that your daughter will remember for the rest of her life.
Most boy-like robot – You Are Robot Boy!
You could have fooled me, Robot Boy. But it looks like you really are a robot after all. And here’s the thing: Japan needs you! Get yourself ready to defend the country, imbibe great wisdom, and learn what the girls at school really want from a potential boy partner. Hint: it’s well-proportioned and non-patronising flattery!
Most mortal words – Words Must Die
First-person-word-shooter. Proceed through this interactive tale of many deaths by shooting the words you want to follow. It’s just like reading a choose-your-own-adventure book, except instead of looking at the book with your eyes you are blasting the book at point blank with a Smith & Wesson, shouting “yeeeeehaw” and spitting on its blackened pages.
Gnarliest depiction of future Califonria – Surf Shogun
Sword-slicing and surfing on the shores of Neo-Kalifornia. Can be played with up to 4 players locally, each of you fighting both the waves and your enemies in a bid to overcome the evil overload known only as the Surf Shogun.
Best deductions – Disorient on the Murder Express
Murder mystery on a colourful train. As an aging detective you are the most qualified person on this train to both detect and deal with a murder case. It is a good thing a murder has happened then. Gather your thoughts and the suspects around the fire and press ‘A’ to sip your whiskey thoughtfully before getting everything incredibly wrong.
That’s it for the 2016 awards, folks. But there were lots of other great games this year too, which you can see in all their glory here or by checking out our Best of Free Loaders Collection on itch.io. See you next year for more Free Loaders |
Hillary Clinton as President Obama listens during a campaign rally in Charlotte, N.C., on Tuesday. Obama made his debut campaign appearance on Clinton's behalf hours after the FBI director called Clinton's handling of sensitive e-mails as secretary of sta Credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Email has been the source of constant headaches for Hillary Clinton, but this time the email news has nothing to do with a private server in Chappaqua, N.Y.: It appears that the Clinton campaign recently received an influx of potentially lucrative email addresses, possibly a transfer from the Democratic National Committee.
Email measurement firm Return Path says the Clinton campaign's email database has nearly doubled in size since mid-June, linking the campaign to a larger pool of potential donors.
According to the company, which evaluates email campaigns using estimates based on its panel of 2.5 million active email users, the number of addresses that the Clinton campaign sent messages to grew 93% as of June 14, compared to the previous week, and has remained the same size since then. The growth represents only emails sent directly from the Clinton campaign, according to Return Path.
The research comes on the heels of the FBI's decision not to recommend criminal charges against Ms. Clinton for using a private email server while discussing sometimes-classified information as secretary of state.
According to Return Path, the Clinton campaign list is more than 1000% larger than that of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. The actual number of email subscribers in the Clinton camp's list is not publicly available, though it is likely to be in the multi-millions.
Related Stories New Trump Campaign Capability Should Have Clinton Seriously Worried
The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign did not respond to requests to comment for this story.
"She has probably been one of the larger lists," said Tom Sather, senior director of research at Return Path, who said duplicate emails or profiles were most likely removed during the integration process.
When there is such a large increase in the size of an email list, the growth is probably not the result of people volunteering their addresses to a campaign. Rather, it is likely the result of a list purchase or transfer.
Purchasing email lists or paying to send email messages to subscribers of publications such as partisan news sites is a common and legal practice in political campaigning. CAN-SPAM law governing commercial email does not apply to political campaigns.
During the 2014 midterm elections, voter data, analytics and predictive models from President Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns were made available to Democratic candidates via the DNC's database. However, it wasn't until around a year ago that Obama supporter email addresses were handed over to the DNC.
The fortification of the Clinton campaign email list does not necessarily indicate a direct infusion of Obama supporter email data into the Clinton campaign's email system.
But closer coordination between the Democratic Party and the Clinton camp is to be expected as the presidential campaign shifts from primary to general election mode.
An increase in list size is one thing, but whether those emails are deliverable and accepted by recipients is another. So far, Return Path research shows that Clinton campaign emails sent since June 14 have not resulted in an uptick in spam complaints among recipients. "We're not seeing a significant change in her engagement in a negative way," said Mr. Sather. The Clinton campaign's spam rate has been at or around zero percent throughout the election season.
"You would think that they would see a decline in email deliveries for her if she's emailing a bunch of new people," said Democratic digital consultant Colin Delany of Epolitics.com. He added that while some Bernie Sanders supporters might not appreciate receiving emails from the Clinton campaign, "The ones who are still angry enough at Clinton to mark her email as spam are probably the less likely ones to be on the DNC list in the first place." |
Kids Hurt After Bounce House Soars High In The Air
Two kindergartners were seriously hurt after the "bounce house" they were playing in was sent high into the air by a strong gust of wind Monday in upstate New York. Both children needed to be hospitalized after falling out of the inflatable playhouse.
The boys, ages 5 and 6, fell to the street from at least 15 feet in the air, according to the Post-Star of South Glens Falls, N.Y., north of Albany. A girl, 10, who also had been in the playhouse was hurt when she fell out at a lower height.
The inflatable play set had been set up in the yard of an apartment complex but was carried off after a strong wind pulled its stakes out of the ground, the Post-Star reports.
Resident Taylor Seymour tells the newspaper that the small house looked like it was caught in a small tornado.
"It was like a horror movie," she said. "It just kept going up and up. It cleared our building and the trees."
One boy struck a car in the apartment building's parking lot as he fell, suffering a serious head injury; the other fell to the pavement on a nearby street, breaking both arms and his jaw, according to an update from the newspaper Wednesday morning. Both boys are now said to be in stable condition.
The play set was reportedly a Little Tikes inflatable house, measuring about 10 feet on each side. The newspaper says a resident of the apartment building had set it up for kids to play in several times before.
"It's just a tragic accident," Police Chief Kevin Judd told the Post-Star on Wednesday.
As scary as the incident was, it could have been even worse: A photo from the scene captured the shocking sight of the empty bounce house soaring more than 50 feet in the sky after the children had fallen out. It eventually landed at a middle school about three blocks away from the lawn where the kids had been playing.
That photo has been circulating in news stories and on social media; the Post-Star says fees for its use will go toward helping the injured children's families:
"South Glens Falls student Emily Boucher, who was preparing for a lacrosse game at the Middle School, took a shocking picture of the toy as it flew through the air. The Bouchers gave The Post-Star exclusive rights to use the photo, and proceeds of its sale to other media outlets will be donated by the Bouchers to the families of the boys who were hurt."
Update at 6 a.m. ET Thursday: About The Weather
The Post-Star's Don Lehman tells WBUR's Here & Now that the weather Monday was unusual for the area for this time of year — in the upper 80s, with high wind gusts.
"We did get a call from another meteorologist who said he thinks it was something called a dust devil, which is like a mini-tornado," Lehman says. "But the Weather Service in Albany kind of discounted that, saying they didn't really see any evidence of that."
Lehman says the weather service's reporting station is about 5 miles from the lawn where the house floated away. |
Which NBA team has been the most efficient over the past 10 games? Surprisingly enough, it is not the Miami Heat or the Oklahoma City Thunder. The most efficient team (judging by Net Point Differential per 100 Possessions) has been the Denver Nuggets.
Denver has been the most efficient team in the past 10 games due to its very good offensive efficiency and excellent defensive efficiency. Surprisingly, Miami is scoring three less points per 100 possessions and giving up 2.2 points more per 100 possessions than Denver. If we take a look at more advanced metrics the differences between the three teams is pretty marginal (as expected).
Some things to point out are Miami’s relatively poor offensive rebounding rate and the Thunder’s high true shooting percentage, even though the Thunder have a relatively low assist percentage (the number of made shots that are assisted). The latter is surprising because usually more/better passing leads to better scoring opportunities. However, due to the Thunder’s assortment of scoring threats, perhaps they are very effective off pick-and-roll actions where the ball handler (i.e. Kevin Durant) keeps the ball — another explanation is that the chucking of Russell I-Never-Saw-A-Shot-I-Didn’t-Like Westbrook is balanced by the scoring efficiency of Kevin Durant.
If we examine the schedules of the three teams, the Heat probably had the easiest schedule (at least on paper) with the tougher opponents being Atlanta, Memphis, Knicks, and the Pacers. That being said, one could argue that the Heat faced everybody’s A-game as they were riding a historic win streak and everybody wanted to end it, but there is no evidence of this….yet. The Thunder probably have had the hardest schedule, having to face Denver, the Lakers, the Clippers, the Knicks, Boston, and San Antonio. The Nuggets did not have a walk in the park either having to face the Lakers, At Portland, the Thunder, Atlanta, the Clippers, the Knicks, and Memphis.
The metrics data can be found here.
Nuggets Schedule (Last 10 Games):
Thunder Schedule (Last 10 Games):
Heat Schedule (Last 10 Games): |
Tyra Banks New Host of 'AGT' Third Time's a Charm
Tyra Banks Tapped to Be New Host of 'AGT'
Breaking News
Tyra Banks will be the new host of "America's Got Talent" ... this after multiple attempts to hire a comedian failed.
Tyra was not on the radar after Nick Cannon quit. The top 3 candidates were Marlon Wayans, Brandon Mychal Smith and Tone Bell. Marlon was asking for more loot than producers would pay, and then Brandon was tapped but we're told some of the honchos just weren't down with it.
Filming was supposed to begin last week, but Mel B had a death in the family ... so it was put on hold, rendering the show hostless.
Howie Mandel posted a video Sunday announcing the news, and Tyra confirmed it as well. She just finished her long-time gig on "America's Next Top Model."
So finally ... someone everyone agreed on. Season 12 is off and running. |
Recently I made the decision to move out of my parent’s home. I’m 21, a month and a half away from 22 and since moving in, thoughts of purpose, life and relationships have been steadily increasing each day. Daytripper is a graphic novel founded on the clichés and expectations derived from a typical life story (at age 11 he has his first kiss, at age 21 he meets his first love, 28 where he meets his true love, age 41 his son is born) explored in depth during touching passages of introspection divided by the unfortunate fates of the protagonist, ever so amplifying the quiet beauty of our melancholy lives. I wanted to write this very brief analysis in response to a few comments and fan reviews that expressed confusion in why each issue ends in death.
The events of the story aren’t always necessarily based in the “oasis we like to call love”, yet each issue dives into the intimacy of our interpersonal relationships and struggle of legacy, whether it be his somewhat difficult relationship with his father, or his eventual destructive relationship with his best friend, whom he fell out of communication with after receiving great praise from the literary community due to the release and success of his first novel. It is through these details of life Fabio and Gabriel ask what the most important days of our lives are, and how do we find the heart to achieve our goals and one day look back and remark on a life well spent.
When we are introduced to Bras de Oliva Domingos at age 32, we see from the first issue that he is an obituary writer that has dreams to be a successful author much life his father. Bras’ career progression, from writing about death restricted to small pieces in newspapers to writing freely and openly in books demonstrates what I believe to be the point of this novel, that focusing on life ending only restricts our enjoyment of living, and how we perceive our most memorable experiences of life whether they be focused on relationships, family, or achieving our dreams, are often wrapped in between seconds of our day to day lives.
And with this in mind, as we flip through page after page, adoring the magic of the artwork, and the delicateness of the dialogue, it is almost like a punch to the gut each time Bras meets his untimely deaths, and subconsciously inserts the idea that the multiple final moments of his lives, have great significance and value, despite mirroring moments in our pasts or futures that may end up being taken for granted.
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Ron Suskind's brand new book, Confidence Men, portrays the Obama administration as an old boys club in liberal garb.
I've been waiting for this sort of book, and narrative, to emerge, because it describes within the administration a growing estrangement between liberalism and feminism that I've sensed percolating from the ground up for a while now.
There are plenty of feminists who think like liberals; there are also many liberal feminist organizations, such as the Feminist Majority and NOW.
While most feminists still think like liberals, it doesn't follow that most liberals still think like feminists. It seems to me that many don't.
My feeling as a feminist isn't one of being disowned so much as being only selectively and expediently owned, like that nerdy, uncool friend who doesn't get claimed in public, and whose gratitude for any scrap of attention from the boys is assumed, such that they know she'll be there come election time.
And, since any politician is bound to be more feminist than a Christian conservative evangelical, our fidelity is pretty much assumed. Where else can a feminist go?
In the late 1970s, things were different. You could argue (and I have) that feminism was the muse of the liberal conscience writ large. In 1977 The Nation saw great promise for feminism as the unifying worldview for liberals and the left. "The women's movement has become a bridge," they wrote, "between groups that represent very different social interests" within the liberal ranks. In a more prosaically tactical way -- and, for better or worse -- pro-choice donors filled liberal coffers. Liberals sounded the depths of notions like "equality" and justice through the treatment of women in the workplace and home.
It wasn't just that most feminists were liberals, but that most liberals thought like feminists, with intuitive ease.
Today, feminism is getting marginalized in the liberal conscience at just the moment when it should be more central to it. Geopolitics are often a proxy story of women's status and misogyny. Among many other examples, misogyny and the control of women is central the brutalizing views of the Taliban, al shabaab and other extremist movements; regional wars in Congo are fought through rape, an efficient weapon by which to weaken communities and shred the social fabric; authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn argue persuasively in their galvanizing book Half the Sky that lasting progress internationally hinges on the improvement of women's status.
Now, especially, we need a liberal conscience that understands that women's and feminist issues often are a, if not the, big issue at play.
Instead, liberals sound, think, act, talk -- and, if Suskind's correct, comport themselves -- less like feminists than before. Among other examples of feminism's newfound expendability, abortion rights were bartered in health care negotiations; the administration talks about a "good Taliban" and "bad Taliban" strategy; and, now, Suskind takes us inside the boys' club culture of the administration itself.
How and why would feminism recede in the liberal conscience at the moment when potentially it's more relevant to the liberal worldview than ever?
One reason (and there are many -- I'm just talking about one here) is tactical. In national campaigns from the 1980s onward, Democrats became fixated on the display and assertion of what I think of as liberal muscularity. This was an intuitive tactic to combat "bleeding heart" charges of weakness and a (too feminine) sentimentality toward society's less fortunate, or the non-millionaires.
This liberal muscularity campaign began in earnest when Michael Dukakis cartoonishly donned combat fatigues and a helmet and rode a tanker to inglorious defeat in the 1988 presidential campaign. He fooled no one.
The campaign for liberal muscularity continued with Bill Clinton's assertion of his no-mercy bona fides on a death penalty case, and his politically pivotal repudiation of Sistah Souljah in his first presidential campaign.
Then, John Kerry flanked himself with his Vietnam War comrades and marshaled the uber-virile Bruce Springsteen as stagecraft. And, while I didn't entirely share their view, critics of President Obama alleged vehemently and not at all unreasonably that his campaign and supporters committed routine, casual misogyny against opponent Hillary Clinton.
The tactical purging of the feminine in pursuit of liberal muscularity has diminished the place of feminism along with it. The skirmish in October, 2009 over President Obama's all-male basketball games and all-male golf outings seemed a relatively trivial intimation of the larger and more consequential trend that Suskind's work is now describing: it illustrated visually that liberalism and feminism aren't as close as they once were.
Maybe, as with any other long-term relationship, feminism and liberalism simply grew to take each other for granted. Maybe we feminists got lulled into a false sense of security that liberals are our natural, stalwart and obvious allies, and wouldn't display misogyny or old boys' tendencies. It's understandable, but a gravely simplifying loyalty and trust, if so, because misogyny is something that all of us can struggle with or exhibit -- whether male or female (women engage in women-hating, self-loathing, and sexuality-hating behaviors, too), and whether liberal or conservative.
It's all sadly ironic, this quest for Democratic toughness, because second wave feminism was a very muscular thing. It's one of the most successful anti-feminist gambits of the last three decades that it gets associated today with a sensibility of victims and not with the feisty, sexy heroism of the Gloria Steinem generation.
The opposite of victims, second wave feminists audaciously did something and, in the frontier spirit of American self-reliance, claimed responsibility for their own lives and happiness. A feminist story of heroic strength has gotten re-written into a sensibility of weakness -- as if to be a feminist is to be a whiner, buffeted passively by circumstance and mean men that we dully condemn and vilify at every chance.
Somehow the feminist rallying cry of the 1970s, "I am Woman, Hear Me Roar" has slipped into the misperception, "I am Woman, Hear Me Whimper."
The new generation of self-respecting young female liberals don't want to appear flaccid any more than newly-muscularized liberal males. Who would? Two very disparate sources -- one a woman in her mid-20s, and the other a liberal man in his 50s -- explained feminism's diminished urgency among liberal women in almost exactly the same terms to me: young women want to show that "they can take it" instead.
It's an evocative phrase. A man in his late recently 20s confessed to me that he was "appalled" by the shabby and sometimes marginally abusive ways that young women allowed themselves to be treated by men in public. They apply the calloused perseverance of the boxing ring to their own bad treatment, as if they can secure a prized status as one of the boys by not complaining. Everyone is so toughened up that they've forgotten what it's worth being tough for.
Undergraduate women at Yale University are fighting back, and claiming a hostile environment, after undergraduate male pledges paraded through a residential quadrangle chanting, "No Means Yes." But as Yale women tell it, this was only the final straw of a sad history of women "taking it" from men before this point, and tolerating an enervating, low-level din of sexual bullying, assault and disrespect at one of those Ivy League bastions, on paper, of the northeastern liberal intellectual elite.
If you raise the questions I'm raising here -- or that they're raising st Yale -- you'll look prissy, humorless or naïf as a liberal, to be inquisitively perturbed. You'll look stodgy if you dust off the feminist liberal chestnuts of women's "exploitation," "violence," "subjugation" or "oppression." |
Amazon already owns the high-income shopper segment in the U.S. Now it’s making a bid to court those who have less income at their disposal.
On Tuesday, Amazon announced that it is offering a 45 percent discount on Prime memberships — $5.99 a month instead of $10.99 month — to U.S. residents receiving government assistance.
Shoppers with an Electronic Benefits Transfer card — used for benefits like the Women, Infants, and Children Nutrition Program — are eligible for the lower price but they also have to re-qualify every year for up to four years.
The move comes a little over a year after Amazon first introduced the $10.99 monthly payment option for Prime, which was previously only available for an annual fee of $99.
The monthly option comes with the same perks like free two-day shipping on tens of millions of items and access to a large selection of online movies and TV shows for no extra charge.
The monthly payment option was seen as a way to attract lower-income customers — the type of shopper who might otherwise prefer, say, Walmart — who could not cough up $99 at one time. Since then, Prime membership growth has been the strongest among households making less than $50,000 annually, an R.W. Baird study found.
The offer follows an announcement Amazon made earlier this year that it would start accepting food stamps for its grocery items beginning this summer. Amazon’s grocery service costs an additional monthly fee on top of the Prime membership. It’s unclear if lower-income customers taking advantage of Amazon’s new Prime offer would also get a discount on the grocery delivery fee.
Amazon Prime is the most crucial piece of the Amazon shopping machine, since those customers spend more and buy more frequently than non-Prime members do. CEO Jeff Bezos has said he wants to add so much value to Prime that it becomes irresponsible to not use it.
Amazon’s discount offering is just the latest salvo in a renewed rivalry between Walmart and Amazon since Walmart last year acquired Jet.com, started by former Amazon employee Marc Lore.
The two sides are currently engaged in a price war in packaged goods that is terrifying some of America’s biggest grocery brands. Amazon has also recently taken Walmart’s lead more often than in recent years. Amazon followed Walmart’s 500-store expansion of a grocery pick-up model with two Amazon locations of its own and has also lowered its free-shipping threshold to $25 in what looks like a way to combat Walmart’s free, speedy delivery offering. |
For the past three decades, the religious right has largely been the public face of Christianity in America. Televangelists such as Rev. Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Rev. Pat Robertson became household names by relentlessly presenting a rigid form of conservative theology. Their rise was aided by the emergence of talk radio and cable television -- which served as huge mega-phones -- and GOP leaders who blessed them as "the base."
In recent years, the moral authority of the right has been weakened by numerous political and sex scandals -- Sen. Larry Craig, Rev. Ted Haggard, Rep. Mark Foley and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, to name a few. Widespread disenchantment with George W. Bush, the right's one-time savior, has also damaged the conservative brand.
The right's relative decline has finally opened the door for mainstream religious leaders to challenge dogmatic interpretations of the Bible. Into this war over "The Word" stepped Barack Obama, a churchgoer who can communicate with religious voters in a way a politician like former Democratic nominee John Kerry never could. Obama's rare platform to present an alternative version of Christianity posed a direct threat to the religious right.
This explains the tirade by Focus on the Family's founder James Dobson, who attacked Obama for a speech he gave on religion, saying that Obama "distorted" the Bible. While the spotlight is on Obama's beliefs, the mainstream media has failed to examine the serial distortions of Dobson, who has long had a stormy relationship with the truth.
In the past two years, seven prominent scientists and authors have publicly upbraided the right wing leader for twisting or cherry picking their work.
The first researcher to step forward was New York University educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, PhD. She was upset when Dobson misused her research to claim in Time Magazine that Mary Cheney was wrong to have a child because she is a lesbian. In Sept., 2006, Gilligan responded by appearing in a video for the organization I founded, TruthWinsOut.org (TWO), and pointedly tells Dobson to "refrain from ever quoting me again."
"I was mortified to learn that you had distorted my work this week in a guest column you wrote in Time Magazine," wrote Gilligan in a letter addressed to Dobson. "What you wrote was not truthful."
Another researcher misquoted in the Time article was Dr. Kyle Pruett, a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. In Time, Dobson wrote:
"The fact remains that gender matters -- perhaps nowhere more than in regard to child rearing. The unique value of fathers has been explained by Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale Medical School in his book Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child. Pruett says dads are critically important simply because 'fathers do not mother.'
Dr. Pruett appeared in a TWO video and wrote a letter demanding that Dr. Dobson stop misrepresenting his research:
"There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions," Pruett wrote in his letter to Dobson. "On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, 'What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.'"
The most recent scientist to claim Double-Talk Dobson distorted his work was University of Minnesota's Gary Remafedi, M.D., M.P.H. In a letter to Dobson, dated April 28, 2008, he wrote, "I want to draw your attention to a gross misrepresentation of our research at the website of 'Focus on the Family.'"
Other leading researchers who have taken issue with Dobson's use of their work include: Dr. Robert Spitzer, Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; Angela Phillips, Professor, Goldsmiths College in London; Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, Associate Professor, school of nursing, University of British Columbia; and Dr. Judith Stacy, Professor of Sociology, New York University. (Videos and letters to Dobson can be viewed at www.RespectMyResearch.org)
If just one professor was outraged, it could be chalked up to a misunderstanding. If two had come forward, this could be a mere coincidence. Three complaints would look suspect, but still a possibility of an honest disagreement. But, when seven leading academics from three countries (The Untied States, Canada and the United Kingdom) have stepped out of the ivory tower to publicly give Dobson failing marks, it is clear that a disturbing and deliberate pattern of deception has emerged.
Dobson's frequent misquoting of the Bible is understandable because he is neither an ordained minister, nor a theologian. His well-documented fabrications on scientific matters, however, is inexcusable considering he began his career as an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine. Dobson's pedigree underscores that he understands precisely what he is doing and suggests that these distortions are a premeditated attempt to twist science to conform to his conservative views.
It is time for the "liberal media" to stop treating Dobson as America's God-fearing grandfather. Until this powerful right wing leader addresses these credible accusations that he manipulated research, he should not be given a platform by the media. His weird views on homosexuality -- such as proclaiming that Sponge Bob Square Pants might be gay -- may be good for ratings. However, the media's first goal should always be accuracy -- and Dobson is incontrovertibly misapplying research to support his political views on homosexuality. |
Chief Keef ARRESTED Weeeeeeeed
Chief Keef -- ARRESTED in Atlanta
EXCLUSIVE
Mystery solved ... it's a marijuana arrest.According to the police report, obtained by TMZ, Keef was busted for allegedly smoking weed at a fancy hotel.-- the 17-year-old rap sensation -- was arrested in DeKalb County, Georgia yesterday for disorderly conduct ... TMZ has learned.The details surrounding the arrest are unclear.According to the booking sheet, Keef -- real name Keith Cozart -- was listed at 5'9" and 160 lbs.After the arrest, Keef tweeted, "Jus Got Out Of Dekalb County jail In Atlanta Mad As f**k."Keef is considered a prodigy -- and has rapped with huge stars likeandKeef is no stranger to the law ... he's been arrested at least two times before -- and even has a gun conviction under his belt.It's been a rough year for the rapper ... We broke the story, he was recently sued for child support by his middle-school-aged baby mama who claims Keef fathered her kid -- born in 2011 -- when he was only 15. |
Abortion in Iran has been the subject of internal controversy for many years. Iran's abortion policy has been notoriously quick to change in accordance with changes in the regime; most significantly, the more modern policies developed by the government of Reza Shah under his family planning programs and moves towards more Western social policy were quickly deposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after he took power from the deposed shah in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
Abortion was first legalized in 1978.[1] In April 2005, the Iranian Parliament approved a new bill easing the conditions by also allowing abortion in certain cases when the fetus shows signs of handicap,[2][3][4] and the Council of Guardians accepted the bill in 15/June/2005.[3] Abortion is currently legal in cases where the mother's life is in danger, and also in cases of fetal abnormalities that makes it not viable after birth (such as anencephaly) or produce difficulties for mother to take care of it after birth, such as major thalassemia or bilateral polycystic kidney disease. There is no need for a consent from the father and request and consent of mother with approval of three specialist physicians and final acceptance by legal medicine center suffices. Legal abortion is allowed only before 19th week of pregnancy.[2]
Much of the controversy has historically stemmed from Iran's status as a theocracy as it was established after the 1979 revolution; many policies, including those concerning social topics, are based on sharia law as interpreted from the Qur'an through the nation's Shi'a legal philosophy. While abortion is not actually referenced in the Qur'an, infanticide is specifically condemned, and this has been used as an argument to keep abortion illegal in most or all cases in which it might be sought. The sections of the Qur'an that detail the importance of health for women have been used to combat this argument,[5] and have been moderately successful at changing the reactionary legislation against abortion enacted after 1979. Nowadays, most Islamic legal schools of thought hold that the ensoulment of a fetus takes place four months after conception, which has extended the discussion of abortion in many nations and communities that base their judicial codes off of Islamic law; in Iran, a consensus has recently developed that abortion is legitimate if it is before this four-month mark.[6]
Arguing for the legality or partial legality of abortion has the potential to be successful in Iran only if it is through religious discourse. All religious ruling in Iran has its final approval or veto assigned by the Guardian Council, a reviewing and regulatory body that has the ability to support or strike down all policies of Iran.[7]
History [ edit ]
There is a long history of abortion in Iran. In medieval Iran, it was not shocking to have plant-based agents of abortion and their relative effectiveness listed in physicians' texts; other means of abortion were also described with warnings and instructions for treatment of the woman after the procedure.[8] The dissemination and translation of different medical texts to and from China, India, Greece, and Persia led to attempts to develop extensive lists of all medical practices, including abortion, and the practice is described in detail in texts from many different regions. One text, written by physician and jurist Hakim Esmail Jorjani (1042-1137 AD), gives instruction for the appropriate use of natural abortifacients, with the caveat that these instructions are meant only for "a very young mother who fears she may die...or when there is disease in the uterus". [9] For a long time, abortion in Persia (and then Iran) was a legal gray area, which may explain why it was not uncommon to describe the correct procedure. Natural abortifacients continued to be used for centuries in Iran, and national law said little about the practice itself until European colonial and imperial intervention in the area.[10] Because of this, up until the last years of the shah's regime, Iranian policy on abortion was partially based on parts of Islamic law and parts of law from the French colonial empire, which had carried influence in the region for some time.[11]
The immediate pre-revolutionary period was full of stops and starts in terms of social policy and family planning in Iran, as the regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fell in and out of favor with Iranians in quick fluctuation, eventually collapsing in the 1979 revolution. The pointed nationalism of the shah's government in the early 1960s made for a generally pronatal policy, as the White Revolution began to reform social and economic law; families were encouraged to have children, and the country was set to expand until the shah began a national family planning program in 1967, when the country's extreme population growth made officials worry about resources diminishing too quickly.[12] Abortion became legal at that time under a set of circumstances and restrictions; in fact, a law passed in 1977 even allowed abortion on request.[11] A law a year earlier "broadened access and granted an official license" for abortions to be performed in medical facilities such as clinics and hospitals. Abortions were legal so long as the pregnancy had not exceeded twelve weeks, the ensoulment period - or, if it had, so long as the mother's life was endangered specifically by carrying the child to term.[13]
The conversation about abortion had begun even before the shah's family planning program in 1967, however; a new global interest in reproductive health and progress in contraception and sexual health matters led a gynecologist in Iran to receive a fatwa from Ayatollah Mahallati of Shiraz that approved of, and even encouraged, contraception with the aim of reducing unwanted pregnancies among Iranian families.[5] One of the reasons the legality of abortion was debated in such open air at this time was that the number of women who had abortion declined in Iran in the 1960s due to increased use of contraceptives.[14]
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian public policy in general began to go in a more conservative direction. Iran joined a small list of nations including Saudi Arabia and Sudan to use Islamic law in every possible question of jurisprudence—a trait that still characterizes Iran today.
The 1991 law of Islamic Penalties stated that though abortion was still legally prohibited, it could be allowed to save the life of the mother.[11] This law stands today as a background for further discourse on legalizing abortion in Iran. The legal medicine organization that had the ability to approve of the abortion of a fetus suffering from a specified list of problems was a bureaucratic system that made actual approval hard to obtain. Nearly half of the applicants in the 1999-2000 year were not accepted.[13] Abortion is still haram, or forbidden, according to both Islamic law and to post-revolutionary Iranian law, and the punishments for providing or receiving an illegal abortion can be strict. Under current law, physicians can be sentenced to months of imprisonment, and women who get abortions before ensoulment are at the least fined blood money.[10] In other cases, for example if the abortion takes place after ensoulment, the punishments are more severe: both woman and physician can be sentenced to up to ten years' imprisonment.[5] This is because of the fact that after much debate over the possible legality of abortion in general, the 16-week limit (when ensoulment is believed to happen) was determined by all involved in that policymaking as the last possible time to have a legal abortion for any reason.[7] Regardless of this baseline, the policies now in place regarding the legality of receiving or providing an abortion are vague in some places.
Recent developments [ edit ]
As a global trend, in recent years, it has become more common for members of relatively developed nations to bring up the question of selective abortion, as science about genetics and techniques for predicting and improving neonatal health has become both more advanced and more common.[7] Iran has been no different; in fact, it is one of the few governments in the Middle East and North Africa that actively supports programs in sexual and reproductive health for its young people.[11] While abortion remains technically illegal in most cases, and in all cases once the pregnancy passes the ensoulment time of 16 weeks, the government has expanded upon its earlier caveat concerning maternal health.
In 2005, the Legal Medicine Organization of Iran created a list of 29 fetal problems and 32 maternal issues in pregnancy that indicated that abortion might possibly be legal—only if, however, it was determined that the life of the mother and the fetus were both endangered if the pregnancy went through, and that the mother could be saved by an abortion.[6] Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa to this effect, allowing abortion in the first trimester for these special cases.[11] The Therapeutic Abortion Act of 2005, passed by the Iranian parliament,[7] stated that if the reason for an abortion was not one of the 61 listed disorders or abnormalities, the cases could be referred to the physician and then the organization, which would decide on an appropriate course of action.[13] The ambiguity of the guidelines for acceptance and the unpredictability of health during pregnancy, however, has not created much definition in the gray area that is Iranian abortion policy.[6] In fact, the Guardian Council rejected the Therapeutic Abortion Act after its passage in 2005,[11] adding to the confusion.
Today, most abortions happen "in unsafe and hazardous circumstances" because the penalties for receiving or giving an abortion can still be quite strict.[13] Common reasons for getting an abortion range from fertility concerns (i. e., already having many children), possible or existing health complications, and socio-economic impediments to pregnancy, such as not being able to support another child.[15] In a nation whose economy depends almost solely on oil, with 50% of revenue coming from those earnings,[14] the distribution of wealth can be strained, and for many families it is not feasible to have many children despite the government's use of oil money to fund statewide welfare systems. With abortion counting for 5% of maternal deaths by some estimates,[13] it is evident that illegal and unsupervised practice of the procedure does occur, and furthermore that it can be quite dangerous to the mother; and with 34% of surveyed pregnant Iranian women in one study reporting their pregnancies as "unintended", [13] it has been noted that the danger has not disappeared in the shift from firm illegality and condemnation of abortion in Iran to its place in a current legal limbo.
Statistics and trends [ edit ]
The abortion rate in Iran is contested, and many surveys on the topic land with estimated numbers as opposed to hard data. This is due not only to the inherent difficulty in reaching all populations of Iran, which is a diverse country with large groups of the poor and rural, but also because of the sensitivity of the issue; especially in highly religious groups, the questioning about abortion trends is difficult, and the on-and-off receipt of honest answers has the potential to skew data in a way that makes real conclusions rather vague.
The abortion rate does vary significantly among Iran's provinces, but estimates include .26 lifetime abortions per Iranian woman, an estimated 73,000 a year,[16] 27 abortions per 1000 women and 7.5 abortions per 1000 married women,[13] and 11,543 abortions annually in Tehran, the nation's capitol.[15] These statistics are as scholarly accepted as other quite dissimilar ones, such as one study's claim that more than a thousand unsafe abortions "take place every day in Iran" [11] and another that reports that 100,000 younger women have illegal or induced abortions annually.[17] The exact numbers on abortion in Iran are thus unknown, but there are some trends in the practice that have been widely reported and verified.
All over the world, there is a negative correlation between the use of contraceptives and the abortion rate;[16] as the world adapts to new and accessible technologies developed for family planning and reproductive health, Iran is one of many nations that has found a lower rate of abortion in those areas that have higher rates of contraceptive use, which accounts for governmental acceptance and support of family planning and sexual health programs for the young. Additionally, ardent religious objections against the practice of abortion have become less legitimate in the eyes of many, especially in the middle and higher classes of Iran, as developments such as pre-natal genetic testing make abortion more of a viable option in the case of a difficult pregnancy.[7]
See also [ edit ] |
It’s been a breakout year from young star s1mple, who won the hearts of many fans when he managed to do the impossible and make NA almost win something. However, the year is coming to an end with a spiral of drama after Valve have announced that s1mple will no longer be allowed to participate in Valve sponsored events.
This response from Valve comes after allegations were made against the (soon to be) Russian star by a player under the alias of “DINOSOWER! <3Pasha www,g2a,com” – who claims that s1mple had made racist comments towards him, calling him a “dirty toilet cleaner” and a whole selection of other stock HLTV racist phrases.
Valve immediately responded by issuing a statement which stated that s1mple is no longer allowed to attend the ELeague Major or any subsequent major. “While we do encourage a competitive atmosphere, we can’t have players making fun of Poland – statistically, they have the 2nd highest amount of blindly loyal fans and we’d lose a lot of profit from the impending riot that would occur from this toxicity.”
Reddit have been quick to jump to the defence of the poor child. One fan told Global Defensive, “Valve are just a bunch of bullies. They’re the racist ones – picking on s1mple because he’s from Russia. s1mple didn’t even say anything that bad, it was just banter. If Valve are going to ban anyone for racism, it should be the stupid monkey teams that think they’re too good for us to see their foreheads.”
“Again, Valve with the stupid move,” another fan told us, “He’s obviously not racist, he once spoke to Black DDK.”
“I’m a simple man,” another fan told Global Defensive, “I see that Valve has done something – I’m outraged.”
Fortunately for Global Defensive (and the karma-whores who post every article to the subreddit in hopes of getting instant karma), the drama did not stop there. s1mple, himself, took to Twitter to make sure that his side of the argument was known. In order to share it, Global Defensive had to hire a translator to translate it from “Angry Eastern European” to “English”, as a high proportion of our viewers are under the age of 18 (it is posted to the CS:GO subreddit, after all).
“Who cares what Valve thinks?” S1mple told his Twitter, “They not own CS:GO and if they did all employees are fat and will die of heart attack. Their desks have wheels because they cannot walk.”
While we attempted to score an interview off of comedian Thorin, he was reportedly “out getting cigarettes” and was last seen with a car battery, a foot of rope and a plushie Magiskb0y.
Так я мав звичай переводити, щоб зробити забавний жарт в кінці статті. Будь ласка, дотримуйтесь @GlobalDefensive спасибі моєму другові
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Guilty until proven innocent.
That sums up San Jose’s fireworks crackdown policy, according to a handful of Blossom Hill neighbors who received $500-plus citations in the mail.
Several residents on Garrison Circle, including Amy Guzules and Sally Phan, said in an interview the only way to get off the hook is to somehow prove they weren’t using fireworks as alleged by anonymous complainers.
Guzules said she was shocked when she received a $500 ticket in the mail almost a month ago.
“I almost tore it up because it was addressed to ‘Resident,’ ” Guzules said, adding that the ZIP code printed was also wrong. “The invoice was for the 13th of July, and it says I did illegal fireworks on June 12.”
A quick check of the calendar showed that June 12 was the same day the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship.
“There were fireworks going off all over the Bay,” she said. “Maybe people look up and see things explode, they look on Google Maps and go ‘Hmm, looks like it’s probably over there; it’s these people,’ and they put those addresses in.”
In response to numerous complaints last year, the San Jose City Council increased fines for people caught using banned pyrotechnics. Fines for first-time offenders rose from $350 to $500. The fines go up to $700 for second offenses and $1,000 for each subsequent violation. Police this year nevertheless received more than 500 reports about illegal fireworks on July 4 alone, compared to about 600 last year for the entire Fourth of July weekend when the holiday fell on a Monday.
Phan, who lives four doors down from Guzules, said she also received citations for illegally using fireworks, which she denied doing.
“Our first warning came on June 28,” Phan said. “They gave us two more citations; one was for the seventh of June and the other was for July 4.”
Phan said she can’t remember exactly what she was doing on June 7 but likely her family was still at work or in school because it was a Wednesday. On July 4 she said they stayed inside all day and went to bed early for work the following day.
“At night there was an occasional loud sound that I would assume was fireworks, but we don’t know where they were coming from,” Phan said. “They were close enough where we could hear it, but not close enough that we could see it.”
San Jose code enforcement says fireworks citations are treated the same as parking tickets because they are administrative violations. This means that Guzules must pay $500 for her one citation, and Phan $1,200—$500 for the first ticket and $700 for the second. Both women must first pay the fines within 30 days of notification before they contest them to avoid late fees and interest.
San Jose Deputy Fire Chief Ivan Lee acknowledged that not much investigating is done after a complaint is filed.
“Outside of contacting the reporting party, there is no additional investigative effort put forth to go forward to the site where the alleged fireworks activity was reported,” Lee said. “It’s simply the information that has been provided by the reporting party to the online report.”
Last year, he said, complainers had to supply evidence such as video and photos that someone was illegally setting off fireworks. But the city dropped the evidence requirement to not “put the public in danger,” he added.
“It was not required (this year) because it was a concern for their safety at the time of them taking the video evidence,” Lee said, explaining the city wanted to avoid possible confrontations between neighbors.
Guzules and other neighbors said they think an online report that doesn’t require any hard evidence shouldn’t be the basis of issuing citations.
“It may be one of those things where people think it’s just easier to pay the fine,” she said. “If they’re just sending things out based on people reporting things that people didn’t actually see them doing, then that’s just not right.”
Lee said some people who could prove they didn’t break the law had fines dismissed.
“One (complainer) stated that her neighbor had been using fireworks for basically an entire week,” he said. “(She) never stated where she was observing the fireworks activity.”
The home in question was actually a duplex, and the neighbor who was cited managed to show they were out of town at the time through receipts and other paperwork.
“There’s always the potential for things like that to occur in which you try to make adjustments,” Lee said. “There’s room for improvement in any process, but one of our major concerns is trying to address illegal fireworks activity.”
Those who can’t afford to pay a fireworks fine upfront can apply for the city’s hardship waiver program, which requires proof of income and other personal information. That program is managed through the city finance department.
A city report on fireworks activity is due sometime this month; it’s possible that the reporting process could be revised again.
“We may have to go back to providing video documentation of some sort that undeniably shows who it is and hopefully captures the residence that they’re in front of,” Lee said. |
Turkey’s prime minister resigned Thursday after a public rift with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, throwing the country’s politics into turmoil and paving the way for Erdogan to consolidate power at a time of domestic and regional crises.
In an otherwise defiant speech, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said he would bow out of upcoming elections for leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The decision meant he would also step down as premier.
“I decided to step down from my post,” Davutoglu said at the televised news conference in Ankara, the capital, after a meeting with AKP’s central committee. The party, which Erdogan founded, has governed Turkey since 2002. Davutoglu has served as prime minister since 2014.
[Turkey’s Erdogan tightens his grip on power]
“I have never negotiated or bargained with anyone” for any of my positions, Davutoglu said, hinting at recent divisions within the party. But “I am not planning to become a candidate in the upcoming [party] elections” on May 22.
The move marks another potential step by Erdogan to weaken the country’s parliamentary system and establish a strong presidency, further cementing his authority. Erdogan has taken an increasingly hard line against perceived opponents, and the president’s relationship with Davutoglu also grew strained.
Davutoglu, a former professor and foreign minister, reportedly was less enthusiastic about the push toward a stronger executive. And the two disagreed over many issues, such as economic policy and pretrial detention for dissidents. Erdogan has prosecuted scores for the crime of “insulting the president.”
In a surprise move last week, the AKP stripped Davutoglu of his power to appoint provincial-level party officials. On Thursday, Davutoglu cited the blow as a key reason for his resignation, saying it was “not behavior I would expect from fellow colleagues.”
[Turkey faces flash points on many fronts]
“Having mandated [Davutoglu’s] resignation . . . Erdogan is now head of state, but also de-
facto head of government and head of the AKP,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Davutoglu was seen as a largely compliant AKP party chief and prime minister, but “that does not seem to have satisfied Erdogan’s urge to consolidate political power in his hands,” Cagaptay said.
In addition to the latest political turmoil, Turkey faces numerous and overlapping crises, including a raging Kurdish insurgency, attacks from Islamic State militants and negotiations with the European Union over how to handle migration flows over the Aegean Sea. Turkey is a key U.S. ally in the war against the Islamic State.
Davutoglu led the discussions with E.U. leaders to secure a deal under which migrants would be returned to Turkey in exchange for aid and visa-free travel for Turks in Europe. Turkey is now hosting nearly 2 million refugees, most of them from Syria.
[Tracing Turkey’s authoritarian trajectory]
“It’s a bit too early to define if it will have implications and, in
that case, of what kind,” E.U. foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini, on a visit to Kosovo, said of Davutoglu’s resignation, the Reuters news agency reported.
The Obama administration, too, saw Davutoglu as more of a collaborative realist than the prickly Erdogan.
Davutoglu said Thursday that he will remain loyal to Erdogan and stay in the AKP as a deputy. “You will not hear one negative word from me about our president,” Davutoglu said, warning against “speculation” over deepening rifts.
But others saw the resignation Thursday as an ominous sign of the direction of Turkish politics.
“Never before in this system has one person amassed so much power in his hands as Erdogan has,” Cagaptay said. “The risk that looms for Turkey here is the hollowing out of all institutions.”
Erdogan’s consolidation of power will “render the country so brittle politically that when Erdogan leaves office one day, there will be nearly no institutions left standing to keep the country together,” he said.
Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more
Hear someone insult Erdogan? Report it to us, says Turkish consulate.
Turkey’s Erdogan came to Washington, and things got a bit crazy
What the search for a missing Ottoman skull says about Turkish politics
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world |
Brand New Music trainees Lim Young Min and Kim Dong Hyun, who appeared on Mnet’s “Produce 101 Season 2,” will be debuting next month as a unit.
A source from Brand New Music said, “Lim Young Min and Kim Dong Hyun are currently preparing for a mini album, and are aiming for a release date in late August. They will be debuting as a unit; their team name has yet to be decided.”
Lim Young Min and Kim Dong Hyun received a lot of love through “Produce 101 Season 2.” Lim Young Min made it through to the live finale, finishing in 15th place, while Kim Dong Hyun was eliminated prior to the live finale.
Ahead of their debut, Brand New Music released new profile pictures for the two trainees:
Source (1) |
Update 06.11.2015 (Server Update)
Markers have been removed from Air SB;
Difficulty level “Custom” in custom battles has been fixed;
Bug that led to an exploit - increased RP gain for bombers after crashing - has been fixed.
Some players’ profiles have been blocked for 1 day for repeatedly exploiting an identified bug in game mechanics, thus committing a repeated violation of paragraph 1.6 of the War Thunder EULA - Engage in any act that Gaijin deems in its reasonable discretion to be in conflict with the spirit or intended use of the products and related service, including but not limited to circumventing or manipulating this Agreement, game rules, game mechanics or policies;
Note: This server update applies to all platforms unless specifically highlighted.
The current provided patchnotes reflect the major changes within the game as part of this Update. Some updates and fixes may be not listed in the provided notes. War Thunder is constantly improving all the time and certain fixes may be implemented without the client being updated. |
The Pullman Strike was a nationwide railroad strike in the United States that lasted from May 11 to July 20, 1894, and a turning point for US labor law. It pitted the American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Company, the main railroads, and the federal government of the United States under President Grover Cleveland. The strike and boycott shut down much of the nation's freight and passenger traffic west of Detroit, Michigan. The conflict began in Pullman, Chicago, on May 11 when nearly 4,000 factory employees of the Pullman Company began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages. A total of 30 workers were killed by railroad agents and their allies.
Most of the factory workers who built Pullman cars lived in the "company town" of Pullman on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois.[1] The industrialist George Pullman had designed it ostensibly as a model community.[1] Pullman had a diverse work force. He wanted to hire African-Americans for certain jobs at the company. Pullman used ads and other campaigns to help bring workers into his company.[2]
When his company laid off workers and lowered wages, it did not reduce rents, and the workers called for a strike. Among the reasons for the strike were the absence of democracy within the town of Pullman and its politics, the rigid paternalistic control of the workers by the company, excessive water and gas rates, and a refusal by the company to allow workers to buy and own houses. They had not yet formed a union.[1] Founded in 1893 by Eugene V. Debs, the ARU was an organization of unskilled railroad workers. Debs brought in ARU organizers to Pullman and signed up many of the disgruntled factory workers.[1] When the Pullman Company refused recognition of the ARU or any negotiations, ARU called a strike against the factory, but it showed no sign of success. To win the strike, Debs decided to stop the movement of Pullman cars on railroads. The over-the-rail Pullman employees (such as conductors and porters) did not go on strike.[1]
Debs and the ARU called a massive boycott against all trains that carried a Pullman car. It affected most rail lines west of Detroit and at its peak involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states.[3] The Railroad brotherhoods and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) opposed the boycott, and the General Managers' Association of the railroads coordinated the opposition. Thirty people were killed in response to riots and sabotage that caused $80 million in damages.[4][5] The federal government obtained an injunction against the union, Debs, and other boycott leaders, ordering them to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars. After the strikers refused, President Grover Cleveland ordered in the Army to stop the strikers from obstructing the trains. Violence broke out in many cities, and the strike collapsed. Defended by a team including Clarence Darrow, Debs was convicted of violating a court order and sentenced to prison; the ARU then dissolved.
Background [ edit ]
The condition of laboring man at Pullman. The employee is being squeezed by Pullman between high rent and low wages, July 7, 1894.
During a severe recession (the Panic of 1893), the Pullman Palace Car Company cut wages as demand for new passenger cars plummeted and the company's revenue dropped. A delegation of workers complained that wages had been cut but not rents at their company housing or other costs in the company town. The company owner, George Pullman, refused to lower rents or go to arbitration.[6]
Boycott [ edit ]
The American Railway Union escalated the Pullman strike beginning with the blockade of the Grand Crossing in Chicago during the night of June 26, 1894.
Many of the Pullman factory workers joined the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V. Debs, which supported their strike by launching a boycott in which ARU members refused to run trains containing Pullman cars. At the time of the strike approximately 35% of Pullman workers were members of the ARU.[3] The plan was to force the railroads to bring Pullman to compromise. Debs began the boycott on June 26, 1894. Within four days, 125,000 workers on twenty-nine railroads had "walked off" the job rather than handle Pullman cars.[7] The railroads coordinated their response through the General Managers' Association, which had been formed in 1886 and included 24 lines linked to Chicago.[8][9] The railroads began hiring replacement workers (strikebreakers), which increased hostilities. Many blacks were recruited as strikebreakers and crossed picket lines, as they feared that the racism expressed by the American Railway Union would lock them out of another labor market. This added racial tension to the union's predicament.[10]
On June 29, 1894, Debs hosted a peaceful meeting to rally support for the strike from railroad workers at Blue Island, Illinois. Afterward, groups within the crowd became enraged and set fire to nearby buildings and derailed a locomotive.[11] Elsewhere in the western states, sympathy strikers prevented transportation of goods by walking off the job, obstructing railroad tracks, or threatening and attacking strikebreakers. This increased national attention and the demand for federal action.
Federal intervention [ edit ]
Violence erupted on July 7, 1894, with hundreds of boxcars and coal cars looted and burned. State and federal troops used force to quell the mob, as this study by Frederic Remington illustrates.
Under direction from President Grover Cleveland, the US Attorney General Richard Olney dealt with the strike. Olney had been a railroad attorney, and still received a $10,000 retainer from the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, in comparison to his $8,000 salary as Attorney General.[12] Olney obtained an injunction in federal court barring union leaders from supporting the strike and demanding that the strikers cease their activities or face being fired. Debs and other leaders of the ARU ignored the injunction, and federal troops were called up to enforce it.[13] While Debs had been reluctant to start the strike, he threw his energies into organizing it. He called a general strike of all union members in Chicago, but this was opposed by Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, and other established unions, and it failed.[14]
City by city the federal forces broke the ARU efforts to shut down the national transportation system. Thousands of United States Marshals and some 12,000 United States Army troops, commanded by Brigadier General Nelson Miles, took action. President Cleveland wanted the trains moving again, based on his legal, constitutional responsibility for the mails. His lawyers argued that the boycott violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and represented a threat to public safety. The arrival of the military and the subsequent deaths of workers in violence led to further outbreaks of violence. During the course of the strike, 30 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. Property damage exceeded $80 million.[4][5][15]
Local responses [ edit ]
Lurid depiction of Illinois National Guardsmen firing into the mob on July 7, 1894, the day of greatest looting and violence.
The strike affected hundreds of towns and cities across the country. Railroad workers were divided, for the old established Brotherhoods, which included the skilled workers such as engineers, firemen and conductors, did not support the labor action.[citation needed] ARU members did support the action, and often comprised unskilled ground crews.[16][citation needed] In many areas townspeople and businessmen generally supported the railroads while farmers—many affiliated with the Populists—supported the ARU.[citation needed]
In Billings, Montana, an important rail center, a local Methodist minister, J. W. Jennings, supported the ARU. In a sermon he compared the Pullman boycott to the Boston Tea Party, and attacked Montana state officials and President Cleveland for abandoning "the faith of the Jacksonian fathers."[17] Rather than defending "the rights of the people against aggression and oppressive corporations," he said party leaders were "the pliant tools of the codfish monied aristocracy who seek to dominate this country."[17] Billings remained quiet but on July 10, soldiers reached Lockwood, Montana, a small rail center, where the troop train was surrounded by hundreds of angry strikers. Narrowly averting violence, the army opened the lines through Montana. When the strike ended, the railroads fired and blacklisted all the employees who had supported it.[18]
In California the boycott was effective in Sacramento, a labor stronghold, but weak in the Bay Area and minimal in Los Angeles. The strike lingered as strikers expressed longstanding grievances over wage reductions, and indicate how unpopular the Southern Pacific Railroad was. Strikers engaged in violence and sabotage; the companies saw it as civil war while the ARU proclaimed it was a crusade for the rights of unskilled workers.[19]
Public opinion [ edit ]
American Railway Union President Eugene V. Debs was pilloried in the press for the disruption of food distribution and passenger traffic associated with the 1894 Pullman Strike.
Public opinion was mostly opposed to the strike and supported Cleveland's actions.[20] Republicans and eastern Democrats supported Cleveland (the leader of the northeastern pro-business wing of the party), but southern and western Democrats as well as Populists generally denounced him. Chicago Mayor John Hopkins supported the strikers and stopped the Chicago Police from interfering before the strike turned violent.[21] Governor John Peter Altgeld of Illinois, a Democrat, denounced Cleveland and said he could handle all disturbances in his state without federal intervention.[22]
Media coverage was extensive and generally negative. A common trope in news reports and editorials depicted the boycotters as foreigners who contested the patriotism expressed by the militias and troops involved, as numerous recent immigrants worked in the factories and on the railroads. The editors warned of mobs, aliens, anarchy, and defiance of the law.[23] The New York Times called it "a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital."[24] In Chicago the established church leaders denounced the boycott, but some younger Protestant ministers defended it.[25]
Aftermath [ edit ]
Debs was arrested on federal charges, including conspiracy to obstruct the mail as well as disobeying an order directed to him by the Supreme Court to stop the obstruction of railways and to dissolve the boycott. He was defended by Clarence Darrow, a prominent attorney, as well as Lyman Trumbull. At the conspiracy trial Darrow argued that it was the railways, not Debs and his union, that met in secret and conspired against their opponents. Sensing that Debs would be acquitted, the prosecution dropped the charge when a juror took ill. Although Darrow also represented Debs at the United States Supreme Court for violating the federal injunction, Debs was sentenced to six months in prison.[26]
Early in 1895 General William M. Graham erected a memorial obelisk in the San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio, in honor of four soldiers of the 5th Artillery killed in a Sacramento train crash of July 11, 1894, during the strike. The train wrecked crossing a trestle bridge purportedly dynamited by union members.[27] Graham's monument included the inscription, "Murdered by Strikers", a description he hotly defended.[28] The obelisk remains in place.
In the aftermath of the Pullman Strike, the state ordered the company to sell off its residential holdings.[citation needed] In the decades after Pullman died (1897), Pullman became just another South Side neighborhood. It remained the area’s largest employer before closing in the 1950s. The area is both a National Historic Landmark as well as a Chicago Landmark District. Because of the significance of the strike, many state agencies and non-profit groups[when?] are hoping for many revivals of the Pullman neighborhoods starting with Pullman Park, one of the largest projects. It was to be a $350 million mixed used development on the site of an old steel plant. The plan was for 670,000 square feet of new retail space, 125,000 square foot neighborhood recreation center and 1,100 housing units.[29][incomplete short citation]
Politics [ edit ]
Following his release from jail in 1895, ARU President Debs became a committed advocate of socialism, helping in 1897 to launch the Social Democracy of America, a forerunner of the Socialist Party of America. He ran for president in 1900 for the first of five times as head of the Socialist Party ticket.[30]
Civil as well as criminal charges were brought against the organizers of the strike and Debs in particular, and the Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision, In re Debs, that rejected Debs' actions. The Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld was incensed at Cleveland for putting the federal government at the service of the employers, and for rejecting Altgeld's plan to use his state militia rather than federal troops to keep order.[31]
Cleveland's administration appointed a national commission to study the causes of the 1894 strike; it found George Pullman's paternalism partly to blame and described the operations of his company town to be "un-American". In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court forced the Pullman Company to divest ownership in the town, as its company charter did not authorize such operations, and the land was annexed to Chicago.[32] Much of it is now designated as an historic district, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Labor Day [ edit ]
In 1894, in an effort to conciliate organized labor after the strike, President Grover Cleveland and Congress designated Labor Day as a federal holiday. Legislation for the holiday was pushed through Congress six days after the strike ended. Samuel Gompers, who had sided with the federal government in its effort to end the strike by the American Railway Union, spoke out in favor of the holiday.[33][34]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Sources [ edit ]
Primary sources [ edit ] |
Open source work 16 Nov 2015
As of today I am quitting all maintenance roles / responsibilities of any open source project I am involved in. I am now looking for maintainers for any of those projects. Volunteers can contact [email protected] to discuss handovers.
I work full-time, a full 40 hours a week. Outside of that work, I am writing Multitenancy with Rails, 2nd Edition. That work gets done primarily on my way into and out of the office, a 30 minute train journey one-way. I also spend the occasional weekend day doing some writing.
Outside of this full-time work, I have lots of "life stuff" that I'd like to do. Things like spending time with my wife, going outside or just generally relaxing. Having open source emails sitting in my inbox during those times makes me feel guilty for doing those things instead of working on open source.
I do not have the time or energy to invest in open source any more. I am not being paid at all to do any open source work, and so the work that I do there is time that I could be spending doing "life stuff", or writing. It is not fair to expect me to do even more work outside of my regular work, and then not get fairly compensated (time or money) for it. It's also a great recipe for burnout and making me just generally grumpy. To have an open source email sit in the inbox for days or weeks at a time just leads me to feeling more guilty about not having found time + energy to get to it yet.
It's for this reason that I've decided to end all my engagements with open source effective today. I will not be responding to any comments, issues or pull requests that get filed on any repository that I am in charge of. The only thing I will be responding to (in this regard) is volunteers who want to take over the maintenance of the projects.
Thank you for respecting my decision. |
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- One of the themes of the New England Patriots bye week was the overall health of the team's roster as coach Bill Belichick noted improvement in that area from last year.
This was reflected in the team's initial injury report coming off the bye and leading into Sunday night's home game against the Seattle Seahawks. There are just three players listed -- tight end Martellus Bennett (ankle), defensive tackle Alan Branch (back) and receiver Julian Edelman (foot), as each was limited as limited in practice.
How does this compare to the rest of the season?
First week: 8 players (3 out)
Second week: 11 players (1 out)
Third week: 7 players (0 out)
Fourth week: 8 players (0 out)
Fifth week: 12 players (3 out)
Sixth week: 14 players (2 out)
Seventh week: 9 players (0 out)
Eighth week: 7 players (0 out)
BYE WEEK
Tenth week: 3 players (0 out) |
Australia's pistachio farmers expected a bumper crop this year. Instead they had a harvest of horrors, with nuts blackened by a fungus that had never before caused an outbreak in pistachios.
The culprit was anthracnose, a fungal disease best known for infecting mangoes. It raced through the industry, resulting in a harvest some 50 percent smaller than expected – and half of that was inedible.
What the disease means for the future of Australia's pistachio farmers remains to be seen, but for the rest of the world it's yet another cautionary example of fragility in modern agriculture.
"The wide cultivation of genetically uniform plant populations fosters rapid evolution among the pathogens," said Scot Nelson, a plant pathologist at the University of Hawaii. "Because of this greed, new pathogens or newly reported host-pathogen combinations arise almost daily around the world."
Anthracnose, usually caused by the fungus Colletotrichum gloeosporiodes, is the most important and destructive of all known mango diseases. Affected plants develop blackened lesions on flowers, leaves and fruit, the skins of which become crusty and split.
Until recently, anthracnose was considered to be mango-specific, showing little inclination to infect other members of the mango family, including cashews and pistachios. In 2001, when Australian researchers noted a case of anthracnose in pistachios in New South Wales, it was the first report of its kind.
A year later, Themis Michailides, a plant pathologist at the University of California, Davis, Kearney Agricultural Center, also noticed anthracnose in a commercial pistachio orchard. Like the Australian case, it was caused by a Colletotrichum species closely related to C. gloeosporiodes, but neither of those infections led to outbreaks, and the disease seemed consigned to background levels of harm.
However, in December 2010 and January of this year – Australia's summertime – the country experienced torrential rainfalls unprecedented in the nation's modern record-keeping history. Conditions were prime for an outbreak of moisture-loving pests, and anthracnose grows best in precisely those conditions.
Seemingly out of nowhere, it exploded. Farmer losses ranged from 40 to 100 percent.
>'Pathogens will adapt and evolve in relation to our unbalanced systems. In this sense, the evolution of plant pathogens is largely human-directed.'
According to Nelson, the outbreak isn't just a function of weather. It's likely a result of monoculture crop practices, in which just one or a few varieties of a crop are planted. Australia's pistachios are descended almost entirely from a single cultivar developed in the early 1980s; selected for the nuts' flavor, aesthetically pleasing color and easy-splitting shells, the variety was an easy choice for farmers – but with that choice, the seeds of an epidemic may have been planted.
"Those are the varieties that are best for them. That's why we have monocultures: They can't plant something that isn't profitable. But monocultures create these problems," said Michailides.
Monocultures are the rule in modern agriculture, and are especially vulnerable to disease, as a pathogen that can infect one plant will likely be infectious to the rest. That's happening now in Australia with Tropical Race Four, a fungus that threatens to destroy the country's banana industry, and may eventually doom modern bananas altogether.
But increased vulnerability isn't the only problem. Monocultures also function as evolutionary crucibles for pests, exerting selective pressure in a single direction: toward any mutation that helps the pest spread.
That seems to be happening in the resurgence of wheat rusts – the defeat of which decades ago was the Green Revolution's founding achievement. And that may have happened, at a smaller scale, with the emergence of anthracnose in pistachios.
"Evolution lies in the probabilities and numbers. In a larger pathogen population there is a higher probability of fit mutants developing," said Nelson. "Not only do the genetically uniform crops provide no physical barrier to between-plant dispersal of pathogens, they provide a large population of plants upon which enormous populations of the pathogen develop."
Fortunately for Australia's pistachio growers, fungicides do exist that may contain anthracnose for a while. But eventually the fungi may adapt to those, and it's unlikely to disappear. The spore load from this year's outbreak will be so massive that ordinary, less-than-record rainfall may be able to trigger future outbreaks.
As for whether the disease might spread to California, Themis voiced concern. More generally, the combination of monoculture practices and increasingly extreme weather will likely generate even more such outbreaks, as pests that might otherwise have stayed dormant are released.
"Pathogens will adapt and evolve in relation to our unbalanced systems," said Nelson. "In this sense, the evolution of plant pathogens is largely human-directed."
Image: Anthracnose-infected pistachio. (Themis Michailides)
See Also: |
K-PAX Racing with Flying Lizard Motorsports has announced its lineup for the Pirelli World Challenge season, with McLaren factory ace Kevin Estre joining Robert Thorne in the pair of new McLaren 650S GT3s.
Both drivers tested at Sebring International Raceway earlier this month for a two-day test, which marked the first test for the upgraded McLarens since the K-PAX Racing with Flying Lizard Motorsports partnership was announced.
“The test went really well, we did quite a lot of laps, and Sebring is a really demanding track so it was important to drive there and get a feel from the car on this kind of track,” Estre said. “The biggest gain was to get mileage on the car for the mechanics, engineers and drivers.”
Estre raced most of the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship season last year with Park Place Motorsports, but will make his first voyage into PWC this season.
He co-drove the new McLaren 650S GT3 at its debut at the Gulf 12 Hours in Abu Dhabi in December, and replaces Alex Figge in the No. 9 entry for 2015.
“K-PAX and Flying Lizard Motorsports are looking really professional,” he said. “I felt a lot of experience in the mechanics and engineers, and I’m really glad to be part of this awesome team. I love sprint races so I think this championship is going to suit me.”
Thorne returns for his second full season in K-PAX Racing’s No. 6 McLaren after finishing seventh in the 2014 championship. He won his first GT race at the Miller Motorsports Park season finale, and had two other podium finishes.
“It felt great to get back on track in a McLaren and test the new 650S GT3,” Thorne said. “The new car is so agile and a lot of fun to drive.
“In addition to the new car, we have this new team, which is a combination of two incredibly strong efforts. My engineer, Will Moody and I were able to get to know the Flying Lizard Motorsports guys very well at Daytona, so it was nice to come into this test and already have that familiarity.”
Program manager Darren Law praised the car after the Sebring test.
“I have to say, I am seriously impressed with the new McLaren 650S GT3,” Law said. “It is honesty one of the most impressive GT cars I have had a chance to be involved with. We spent last weekend at Sebring, rolled off the truck, and ran for two solid days without issue.” |
Last year, Motorola released the first smartwatch that truly turned heads, the Moto 360. A round watch in a sea of squares, the 360 looked great and became the poster child for Android Wear. But it wasn't without issues: namely its large size, disappointing battery life, and odd design details (such as those pesky internal strap mounts). Just about a year later, Motorola is taking the wraps off of its second-generation Moto 360. This time around, one size doesn't fit all.
The new Moto 360 is actually three distinct smartwatches: a men's version in two sizes, a women's version, and a dedicated sport version, complete with on-board GPS and outdoor-readable display. Motorola is now calling its smartwatch offerings a "collection," a term borrowed from the fashion world that feels apt here. Like the first Moto 360, buyers will be able to customize the appearance and finishes of their watches, and this year Motorola says it has over 300 possible combinations of looks with bands, colors, bezels, and sizes all in the mix.
The men's and women's Moto 360s are available for preorder from Motorola's website starting today and will begin shipping in a couple of weeks, while the Moto 360 Sport will be available later this year. Pricing for the new Moto 360s ranges from $299.99 to $429.99, a premium over last year's watch, and the company isn't yet saying how much the Moto 360 Sport will cost.
For the men's and women's 360s, Motorola is still using a round watch design, though it's made some small, yet significant changes. The men's version comes in 46mm (same size as last year) and 42mm versions, while the women's version is available with a 42mm face and narrower, 16mm strap mounts. The strap mounts on both versions are now standard lugs fused to the outside of the watches, which make it easier to swap bands and give the watches a more traditional and flattering look. (Motorola's bands also include quick release pins, even in the metal link bracelets, for quick strap changes.) The smaller size versions should make the new Moto 360 more appealing to those that were put off by the rather large size of the original. Minor updates make a big difference in the new Moto 360's appearance Other details include a slight repositioning of the button to the 2 o'clock position and the ability to customize the finish of the small bezel that surrounds the display. The men's version will be available in silver, gold, and black, while the women's version can be optioned with silver, gold, or a new rose gold color. The women's version is also available with a few new strap options, including a leather double wrap. Motorola has kept the overall shape of the display the same, including the "flat tire" at the 6 o'clock position. The company insists that this design allows it to have the highest screen-to-case ratio of any smartwatch, and customer research showed that most buyers do not find it to be an issue. (The flat spot is also where Motorola puts the ambient light sensor that enables automatic brightness adjustments, something that many other smartwatches do not offer.) The display itself is slightly higher in resolution than last year, but it's still an LCD and not the OLED of other watches. It's improved, but still doesn't look as nice as the screens on the Apple Watch or LG Watch Urbane. |
Share. IGN OPINION: Bethesda must explain how and why the company shipped a game that is broken. IGN OPINION: Bethesda must explain how and why the company shipped a game that is broken.
In the weeks since the PlayStation 3 version of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was released, it has become clear that something is badly wrong. Now the game's publisher Bethesda faces some tough questions, which it must face without delay, and with absolute clarity and frankness. Serious accusations from frustrated fans are growing in volume; that the company knew there was a problem before it released the game.
Trust in the Bethesda brand, one of the most beloved in the business, has been damaged by the company's release of a sub-par product. Doubts must now be raised as to Skyrim's status as the game most likely to scoop all those lucrative 'Game of the Year' awards. This erosion in trust can only be rectified by a full disclosure on what has happened, how it happened, and what plans the company has in place to correct the situation.
Here's what's been going on. PlayStation 3 players with larger save files of Skyrim - for example, those who have played the game in excess of 60 hours - have reported significant slow-down, almost to the point of unplayability. Media sites have visually demonstrated the problem of large saved games set against much faster virgin games. Experts who understand the PlayStation 3's architecture have weighed in on why the problem exists and why it may ultimately be unfixable in such a huge, open world. Players on Xbox 360 and PC versions have also experienced some problems, though not at the scale being reported for PS3.
Exit Theatre Mode
Bethesda released Patch 1.2, which the company says "improves occasional performance issues resulting from long term play." More fixes are promised, but details are thin.
But the clue to the firm's nervousness about this crisis is in its official response. The word "occasionally" is in stark contrast to the ubiquity of complaints online, and various polls that suggest problem-rates as high as 36 percent. Of course, we can't know how many people are experiencing problems, another opportunity for Bethesda to add clarity to a confused situation.
IGN has reached out to Bethesda for comment. We want to know how this happened, how it can be fixed and, most crucially, if the company knew about the problem before it released the game to a public eager to drop $60 on what was arguably the most eagerly anticipated title of 2011. As of Noon, Monday (Pacific) we have received no response.
We have also reached to out to Sony Computer Entertainment America. We want to know how long the Quality Assurance guys spent playing the game, if they came across the problem, and what correspondence they shared with Bethesda on any lag issues on large game saves. We have received no reply, as yet.
When IGN reviewed Skyrim, it's surely significant that we were given free access to the Xbox 360 and PC versions prior to launch, but had to buy a PS3 copy from retail after it was released to the world. We are currently playing large-save files across a variety of PlayStation 3 models and will be publishing a follow up story.
Exit Theatre Mode
The most important issue for Bethesda's many fans is whether or not the company knew there might be a problem. We cannot say for sure, but it seems inconceivable to us that no-one at the company came across these problems while play-testing the PS3 version.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the pressure to release across all platforms at the same time would have been immense, and that a delay to fix specific problems with one version would have been extremely damaging to the game's retail performance. Therefore, for Bethesda, Sony and their powerful retailer partners, there was a clear and significant motive in getting the game out on November 11.
We all understand that big games like Skyrim, or Bethesda's own previous hits like Fallout 3 or Oblivion, can come with quirks and bugs. It's part of the reason why we find these worlds so charming. We also understand that the talent that goes into creating these worlds is immense. But there is a big difference between a backwards flying dragon, and a game that is running so slowly that it's just no fun to play.
And it's even more damaging that the very people who are most affected by this problem are those who have invested the most time into the game.
This is why Bethesda owes the world a full explanation, the sooner, the better.
Colin Campbell is Head of News & Features at IGN. You can follow him on Twitter. |
We’ve been promised blockbuster episodes for the new series of Doctor Who… and the trailer released today shows just how blockbuster they’re going to be!
There’s a real epic quality to much of the trailer - we see majestic snowy plains, a terrifyingly vast array of Daleks, huge explosions, the Doctor and the Ponds plunging through an enormous tunnel of light and even dinosaurs on a spaceship! But it’s also great to get a glimpse of River Song and scary little moments like Rory and the stone cherub…
It’s all part of the build up to the new series which begins with Asylum of the Daleks. You can still catch the first preview, see exclusive photos of the New York shoot and check out the latest new series image – now available to download as wallpaper.
And finally, stay tuned, because we’ll be bringing you more news very soon… |
By EDRi
New net neutrality guidelines from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) confirm strong protection for net neutrality, and for the free and open internet, in the European Union.
Europe is now a global standard-setter in the defence of the open, competitive and neutral internet. We congratulate BEREC on its diligent work, its expertise and its refusal to bend to the unreasonable pressure placed on it by the big telecoms lobby,
said Joe McNamee, Executive Director of European Digital Rights (EDRi).
“Based on a preliminary reading of the text, this is a triumph for the European digital rights movement. After a very long battle, and with the support of half a million people, the principles that make the internet an open platform for change, freedom and prosperity are upheld in the EU,” said net neutrality activist Thomas Lohninger from SaveTheInternet.eu.
“BEREC has completed the work started by the EU legislators and delivered what the public have been asking repeatedly for the past three years: robust and clear protection for net neutrality” added Estelle Massé, Senior Policy Analyst at Access Now. “The final guidelines are a true testament to BEREC’s hard work.”
The guidelines adopted today are the final step in the three-year process of adopting net neutrality legislation in the European Union. In June 2016, BEREC launched a public consultation on implementation of net neutrality rules approved by the European Parliament last year. This consultation led to over half a million responses in support of strong net neutrality rules that were sent with the help of the SaveTheInternet.eu campaign.
Civil society now has to stay vigilant to ensure the enforcement of these new rules.
Net neutrality is a global issue. Following huge victories in the USA, India and Latin America, Europe has now cemented a global trend towards strong net neutrality protection. This is a cause for celebration.
We thank everybody involved in helping to make this happen, especially Access Now, AK Vorrat Österreich, ApTI, Avaaz, BEUC, Bits of Freedom, Digitale Gessellstaff, Digitalcourage eV, Fastweb, FFDN, Fight for the Future, Initiative für Netzfreiheit, IT-Pol, Mozilla, La Quadrature du Net, OpenMedia, Start-ups For Net Neutrality and X-Net. If it wasn’t for their support, we would be stranded without net neutrality.
Background
Net neutrality is a principle that all the internet traffic has to be treated equally, without blocking or slowing down certain data. This is crucial for fair competition between online services, for innovation, and for freedom of expression online.
In September 2013, the European Commission proposed legislation (pdf) which would have destroyed the open and competitive internet in Europe and would have set a disastrous example on a global level.
Subsequently, in April 2014, the European Parliament adopted amendments to overturn the European Commission’s proposal.
In June 2015, negotiations between the EU Council and EU Commission (both opposed to net neutrality) and the European Parliament led to a compromise text which is ambiguous on some key points. It tasked BEREC with publishing guidelines, by 30 August 2016, to provide a common approach to implementing the Regulation in the EU Member States. This compromise text was adopted, following legal “scrubbing”.
On 6 June 2016, BEREC published the draft guidelines for how the net neutrality Regulation should be implemented, together with the launch of a public consultation. The consultation gave citizens and innovative businesses the opportunity to provide their input and support a free and open internet. EDRi responded to the consultation, and encouraged citizens to send their answer to the consultation through the SaveTheInternet.eu. More than half a million messages were sent to BEREC through the platform.
Key figures
Seven versions of the campaign website (savetheinternet.eu) were prepared for every step of the legislative process.
40 000 fax messages were sent by individuals to Members of the European Parliament.
Six marches in support of net neutrality were organised in cities across Europe.
Over 500 000 responses to BEREC were sent by concerned internet users in support of the open, innovative and neutral internet. |
The odds have more than doubled that South Florida will be hit within 28 years by storm surges of historic proportion, according to a new analysis by Climate Central. Sharlene Leurig and Hal Wanless discuss some of its implications with NBC 6's Jeff Burnside. (Published Thursday, March 15, 2012)
The odds have more than doubled that South Florida will be hit within 28 years by storm surges of historic proportion, according to a new analysis by Climate Central.
The analysis by the non-partisan advocacy group says that human-caused climate change and rising sea levels are accelerating – and that Miami has more to lose in terms of assets than any city in the world.
More than Shanghai, Mumbai, New York, and more than New Orleans.
The study says that storm surges will reach much farther inland than they do now – not a far-off future risk, but perhaps during the life of the mortgage you hold now in Hollywood, for example, or Miami Shores.
Rock Stars: Then and Now
“South Florida is really the canary in the coal mine for the United States,” said Sharlene Leurig of Ceres, who works with industries on climate change.
She thinks investors should note what South Florida counties anticipate. When she sees a new high-rise going up on the coast, Leurig says, “I want to know whether or not they’ve planned for those 7 inches of sea level rise, and more, over the life of that investment. I want to know that."
Acclaimed scientist Hal Wanless says that most of our flood control structures won’t function within 18 years, and heavy rains won’t drain easily.
Weird News Photos: Man Shoves Snake in Pants
“By 2070, 2080, we’ll probably be at 3- or 4-feet sea level rise. And by that time, Miami-Dade and Broward counties will be a much diminished place,” says Wanless, a climate scientist at the University of Miami. “There’s almost no way around it. I used to think that this was something my kids would probably have to deal with. But now, it’s unbelievable. I’m not even sure we have a full mortgage cycle that’s safe, if you’re in the low-lying areas.”
Click here to use Climate Central’s interactive map, which lets you see the sea level rise and flooding you could possibly see in your neighborhood. |
I think we can all agree that, whether or not you belive Andrew Stanton‘s 3D mega-budget fantasy John Carter is going to deliver, the second trailer was a vast improvement over the teaser. Finally we got a glimpse at the massive scope we can expect from the Oscar-winning director on March 9.
Piggybacking off that, and a few new posters, two new TV spots have come on line that include some new battle/actions scenes. And, dare I say, they improve on what we saw in the last trailer. Check them out below.
Thanks to Yahoo Movies for these TV spots which they, conveniently, put into one video. The first one is kind of mediocre but the second one is worth the wait.
While the latest trailer trumps both these commercials in their explanation of what the heck is going on in this world created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, these spots really highlight the adventure aspects of the series and will definitely raise some eyebrows.
My only question is if these spots might be running too early. The movie is still about three months away and very few people are thinking post-Oscars. At least during the Super Bowl people are used to seeing commercials for movies coming several months down the road. Now, sitting around the fire with your family, you’re just trying to decide between Mission: Impossible, Tintin, Sherlock or Chipmunks.
Here’s a brief John Carter plot description:
War-weary, former military captain John Carter is inexplicably transported to Mars where he becomes reluctantly embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions amongst the inhabitants of the planet, including Tars Tarkas and the captivating Princess Dejah Thoris. In a world on the brink of collapse, Carter rediscovers his humanity when he realizes that the survival of Barsoom and its people rests in his hands.
John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch, Lynn Collins, Thomas Haden Church, Willem Dafoe, Mark Strong and James Purefoy will be released March 9. |
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The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allowed corporate and union money to flow freely in American elections, rested on a critical assumption: that so-called outside groups would not corrupt the political system because they would be legally separated from the candidates. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged that without a fire wall between the candidates and outside groups making “independent expenditures,” deep-pocketed donors would come to have an undue influence over politicians. “By definition,” Kennedy wrote confidently, “an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate.” Ad Policy
In the wake of the ruling, however, candidates have been forging close bonds with the outside groups from which they are supposedly independent, but that are spending vast sums to put them in office. Often the sharing of consultants and ad makers means that any “fire wall” is merely symbolic. But there have been no consequences for these potential violations of federal law, because there’s been no enforcement of the law, thanks to partisan gridlock at the Federal Elections Commission (FEC).
The growing phenomenon has been showcased by both Republican and Democratic candidates in the marquee races of the current election cycle.
GOP Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader and the loudest voice on Capitol Hill in support of private influence over election campaigns, is relying upon a constellation of outside groups to shore up his re-election bid as he faces one of the toughest challenges in years, from Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes. In many cases, the pro-McConnell outside groups have close personal links to the candidate and his campaign.
Take Larry McCarthy, the veteran Republican political television producer, who rose to fame in 1984 for creating the “Hound Dog” spot that catapulted McConnell to the Senate (one of the “Top 10 Game-Changing Political Ads of All Time,” according to Advertising Age). Today, McCarthy is simultaneously working for McConnell and for a Super PAC that is legally barred from coordinating with the candidate, American Crossroads, which, along with its 501(c)(4) affiliate, Crossroads GPS, has spent over $1.6 million on the Kentucky race. In the 2012 presidential election, McCarthy crafted ads for many of the leading anti-Obama Super PACs, but in deference to federal law prohibiting coordination between outside money and candidates, he did not work directly for Mitt Romney. Since then, the ad maker has apparently dispensed with any concerns about juggling work from candidates and from unregulated outside groups.
Consider, also, the fact that Josh Holmes, McConnell’s chief of staff and campaign adviser, is married to Blair Latoff Holmes, the media director of the US Chamber of Commerce, a corporate-funded nonprofit that has spent more than $1 million to boost McConnell. And that, this past summer, the Koch brothers–backed Americans for Prosperity hired a director for its newly opened Kentucky branch—the wife of a member of McConnell’s Senate staff.
Both the Chamber and Americans for Prosperity are prohibited from coordinating with McConnell’s campaign on explicit efforts to re-elect the senator. But discussions between a husband and wife would undoubtedly be regarded as beyond the purview of campaign regulators, who have already shown a lack of interest in enforcing or investigating the no-coordination rules.
* * *
The FEC remains gridlocked by a 3-3 partisan split among its commissioners, with all three Republicans voting in lockstep to block any serious investigation of illegal coordination. Though staff may review allegations of wrongdoing, the FEC may only formally open an investigation with the approval of at least four commissioners. The current Republican chair of the commission, Lee Goodman, was recommended by McConnell himself. The FEC has provided what experts decry as a narrow definition of coordination and has declined to follow up on multiple requests to look into potential violations of the law. The Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that lobbies for campaign-finance limits, has filed nearly a dozen complaints with the agency to request an inquiry into illegal coordination since 2010, but the FEC has failed to act.
“The FEC has some incredibly gifted and hardworking employees,” says Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, an associate professor at Stetson University College of Law. “Unfortunately, at the commission level, the FEC was designed to fail and does. But deadlock after deadlock at the FEC leaves the distinct impression that if an electoral spender breaks the rules, there is little risk of legal sanction.”
Beyond the FEC, the only federal agency that could plausibly take up the charge is the Justice Department, which has historically deferred most action back to the FEC. Although the Justice Department has independent authority to act on the criminal provisions of campaign-finance law, which apply when a violation is “knowing and willful,” it pursues very few cases.
* * *
Eagle-eyed campaign watchers have noticed that outside-spending groups often air their advertisements just as the candidate’s own ads go off the air, meaning that voters never stop seeing ads from a certain point of view, as Bloomberg News reported in August. Increasingly, the ads even carry the same theme and identical cuts of B-roll footage. These trends are on display in the competitive Senate elections this year, from New Hampshire to Alaska. While some have theorized that the candidates and outside groups communicate via public “dumps” of video and information—which may be the case in some instances—an easier route for coordination exists: simply hiring the same consultants and media agencies.
Just as McConnell and the American Crossroads groups share an ad producer (the aforementioned Larry McCarthy), they also share a media-buying agency, Mentzer Media, which has flooded the Kentucky race with ads critical of McConnell’s Democratic opponent. The Towson, Maryland–based agency has collected over $4 million this year from Crossroads (for ad buys in races across the country) and $3.2 million from McConnell.
What’s more, American Crossroads—like other outside groups active in the Kentucky Senate race—has leadership that hails from McConnell’s inner circle. The group’s president is Steven Law, McConnell’s former chief of staff in the Senate in the 1990s and a former adviser to his wife, Elaine Chao, when she served as President George W. Bush’s secretary of labor. Law also sits on the board of Kentuckians for Strong Leadership, a Super PAC focused solely on supporting McConnell’s re-election this year.
Another pro-McConnell outside group, the Kentucky Opportunity Coalition, a nonprofit that doesn’t disclose its donors, counts several McConnell alumni among its team, including its spokesman, J. Scott Jennings, a consultant to McConnell’s two previous re-election campaigns. Jennings’s group has aired ads that feature video released by McConnell’s campaign.
The practice of outside groups sharing consultants with the candidate’s campaign is often masked by an array of subsidiaries and companies with little identifying information.
Since July, for example, Representative Ron Barber of Arizona has contracted with GMMB, the powerhouse Democratic advertising company, to produce advertisements. And throughout this year, House Majority PAC, a Democratic-aligned Super PAC, has created advertising in opposition to Martha McSally, Barber’s Republican opponent in the race. House Majority PAC employed a company called Waterfront Strategies, a consulting firm that lacks a website but shares an office with GMMB. As the Huffington Post reported, Waterfront is in fact “an internal branch of GMMB” run by a GMMB managing partner. The same address is also shared by yet another Democratic media-buying firm, Great American Media, which is also employed by several campaign committees. Though Barber is prohibited from coordinating with House Majority PAC, his own campaign consultants manage the outside-money attacks on his opponent.
When contacted for comment, GMMB e-mailed a statement saying, “We take the law and compliance with the law very seriously. To ensure the most stringent security and client confidentiality, we’ve put in place strict firewalls, separate financial streams and password-protected areas on our computer networks.”
McSally’s campaign has its own ties to outside groups, which share office space with firms working for the candidate. Just beyond the exit ramp off the George Washington Parkway in Alexandria, Virginia, a large building houses a half-dozen GOP campaign-consulting firms, including Purple Strategies, OnMessage, National Media Public Affairs and American Media. The McSally campaign directly employs OnMessage at the same time that YG Action, a GOP Super PAC aiding her campaign, retains National Media Public Affairs.
Another collection of firms sharing the same address resides across town on Canal Street. This office space was profiled by The New York Times in 2012 because of the then-novel appearance of multiple firms balancing their work for Republican outside groups alongside their work for the Romney campaign. One firm at this address, Crossroads Media, is now employed by the GOP Senate campaigns of Dan Sullivan in Alaska and Pat Roberts in Kansas. The Super PAC American Crossroads, which is active in both races, contracts with a firm called Main Street Media, a company with no website but with the same employees as Crossroads Media as well as the same address.
In mid-October, a Democratic group, the American Democracy Legal Fund, filed a complaint alleging that the Republican National Committee has engaged in a brazen violation of the FEC’s coordination rules by contracting directly with a voter-targeting firm that also provides services to the largest pro-GOP outside groups, including nonprofits associated with the Koch brothers.
Still, experts are pessimistic about enforcement action. Daniel Weiner, counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program and a former attorney for FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, mentioned numerous potential instances of collusion. “If you had an enforcement agency that was actually committed to getting to the bottom of this stuff, some of that might have violated the FEC’s coordination rules,” Weiner says. “But it doesn’t really work when you’ve got an agency that dismisses these cases before they’ve even been investigated, and that’s what we have happening today.
“It strains credulity that there is no coordination as the ordinary American would understand it.” |
Advisory
On July 9, 2015, a cell phone was discovered hidden in a women’s restroom at a "Starbucks", 855 West Avenue K, Lancaster. The cell phone appeared to be in a positon to record patrons using the restroom. The Lancaster Sheriff’s Station was immediately notified of the incident. Lancaster deputies arrived at the business and recovered the cell phone from the restroom.
The cell phone was found by a mother and her child, while they were using the restroom. The child found the cell phone taped to the sink’s pipe lining.
On Thursday, July 16, 2015, Lancaster Sheriff Station detectives in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Fraud and Cyber Crimes Bureau, were able to retrieve a photo of a suspect from the recovered cell phone and were able to identify the suspect.
Later that day, Lancaster Station detectives arrested 38-year-old Antonio Serrano for Videoing in a Bathroom without Consent. He is a transient in the Lancaster area. During the investigation, the detectives also discovered the suspect was in possession of a government document with a false seal, additional cell phones, and Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards.
The suspect is being held in lieu of $20,000 bail and is scheduled to appear in Antelope Valley Superior Court on Monday, July 20, 2015.
A preliminary investigation revealed there might be numerous victims and additional locations in the Lancaster and Los Angeles areas, due to the fact that the suspect had additional cell phones and SIM cards in his possession at the time of the arrest. The suspect also told detectives he has been video-taping women and children using the restroom for couple months. Detectives confirmed this information, upon reviewing the videos recovered from the cell phones and SIM cards.
Lancaster Station detectives are asking for the public’s help in locating additional victims, who used this particular restroom from the time period of June 2015 through July 9th, 2015.
At this time no additional victims have been identified.
If you believe you are a victim and/or have information about this incident is encouraged to contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Lancaster Station at (661) 948-8466. If you prefer to provide information anonymously, you may call "Crime Stoppers" by dialing (800) 222-TIPS (8477), or texting the letters TIPLA plus your tip to CRIMES (274637), or by using the website http://lacrimestoppers.org.
Written By:
Deputy Joshua R. Stamsek
Lancaster Sheriff’s Station
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Jim McDonnell, Sheriff
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department |
Technology that tracks customers as they navigate shopping centres by picking up signals from their mobile phones has come under fire from civil rights campaigners and consumers.
The system means centres can analyse data such as how long visitors stay, where their favourite spots are and their preferred routes as they move around a mall. Shopping centres argue the system benefits both customers and retailers and insist privacy is not compromised because individuals are not identified.
But campaigners are claiming it is wrong that shoppers have no choice but to be monitored. Nick Pickles, of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: "The only way to opt out is to turn your mobile phone off. You're not asked if you want to take part, you're not asked if you want to opt out."
Pickles said he was pleased that customers remained anonymous. But he added: "It is assumed that the shopping centre has the automatic right to track people's mobile phones – to me that's wrong."
Under the FootPath scheme a series of monitoring devices are installed throughout a shopping centre. The units pick up signals from a customer's mobile phone and can pinpoint the person's position to within 2m. The data gleaned is fed to a processing centre where it is collected, analysed and fed back.
According to Path Intelligence, the Hampshire-based company behind FootPath, the information can help centres understand what mix of shops works best, how promotions affect the number of customers and can optimise rents by finding out which spots are the most profitable. It can also give an insight into where facilities such as food-courts or toilets are best sited and can help plan for emergencies.
It says its detector units do not allow it to obtain telephone numbers, listen to calls, read messages or identify the user. Path Intelligence says it has consulted with the information commissioner to make sure that privacy is not infringed.
However the company refused to say how many shopping centres in the UK used the technology or identify any of those that had installed it. The company only said that it was used in seven countries.
One of the centres that does use the system is Princesshay in Exeter, where small signs read: "To improve out customer service we monitor the use of mobile phones to help show us how this centre is used by its customers. No personal data is stored at any time."
But shoppers were not impressed. Dave Jones, who was looking for a bargain in the sales, said: "It feels like an invasion of privacy whatever they say about it being anonymous. I don't like the idea of anyone being able to pick up my mobile phone signal as I go about my business. If feels a bit creepy."
Wayne Pearce, the director of the centre, said: "The anonymous data we receive each week allows us to monitor footfall, dwell time and the way in which shoppers use the centre. This is turn helps us make decisions on improving the mix of retailers, providing better service by deploying greater numbers of staff to meet shoppers needs and helping avoids bottlenecks by improving the safety and layout."
Gus Hosein, the executive director of Privacy International, said: "Simply notifying people that their every move is being tracked does not absolve Path Intelligence or the shopping centres that install their technology. Until a proper opt-out is introduced, this technology will be a serious threat to personal privacy." |
HONG KONG — The chief justice of the Supreme Court is on trial for corruption — on live TV, no less — and an American boxer has accused the Philippine national hero, Manny Pacquiao, of being dimwitted. But the story truly consuming Filipinos is the saucy cover of a men’s magazine.
Some merely saw an alluring photo of a light-skinned Filipina actress in a swimsuit, Bela Padilla, emerging from a group of dark-skinned models, with the caption, “Stepping Out of the Shadows.” Sexy, they said. Artistic.
Others found the photo to be racist and repugnant.
The outcry and outrage were enough that Summit Media, the local publisher of FHM magazine, apologized and pulled the magazine. The company said in a statement that it would release the March issue with a new cover, one that would again feature Ms. Padilla.
Summit publishes more than 20 magazines in the Philippines, including Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Disney Junior and Town & Country. Summit says FHM is the largest men’s magazine in the country, with more than 1 million readers a month.
“DISGUSTING representation of colorism and racism in the Philippines!’’ said Michelle Renee See on Twitter.
Katrina Stuart Santiago, in an opinion piece on GMA News Online, a large news and entertainment portal in the Philippines, said the cover, as usual, played into men’s sexual fantasies.
“But to layer that fantasy with skin color and race, to imagine the fantasy to be about a white-skinned cover girl stepping into the light and out of the shadows represented by dark-skinned girls? That is a clear line being crossed,’’ Ms. Santiago said.
“It’s a line that’s about taste on the most superficial level, which fundamentally can only fall within the bigger discourses of skin color and discrimination, racism and white supremacist ideology. That FHM cover reveals how all of these are inextricably tied.’’
Ms. Padilla, 20, said she was proud of the photo and did not regret doing the shoot. She said the photo and an accompanying story were intended to signify the jettisoning of her own inhibitions while changing her image to appeal to an older demographic.
“So they wanted to me to come into a ‘coming-of-age’ sort of article — that’s why they chose that caption,’’ she said in an interview with the BBC.
“Racism,” she added, “was totally out of our heads.”
I meant no harm with this cover. I’m so sorry to everyone who got offended. I hope all of you see the beauty of the cover and appreciate it — Bela Padilla (@belavly) February 26, 2012
And I’m so thankful that people of DIFFERENT nationalities have so many good things to say about the @FHMPhil cover! — Bela Padilla (@belavly) February 28, 2012
“Honestly,” Ms. Padilla said, “some of those girls were actually Filipinas painted in black, not to represent Africans, but we were really doing that to portray shadows because, like I said, it’s my coming of age. And we weren’t thinking of harming anyone, and we weren’t thinking of racial discrimination.”
The BBC interviewer, Mishal Husain, replied: “Some people might think that it’s even more offensive that some people in that shoot were Filipinas who were painted black.”
Ms. Padilla: “Honestly, when I see a black person, I don’t initially think of a certain race because we also have black Filipinos. We didn’t really think of harming anyone when we did that shoot.’’
It’s racist to assume that @FHMPhils‘ March cover is racist.. @belavly i’m so proud of the way you have dealt (cont) tl.gd/g57ms2 — Cory Abalos (@cOryabaLos) February 27, 2012
“Emerging as she does from the darkness of the other girls on that cover,’’ Ms. Santiago said in her commentary, “is a display of white supremacist ideology at its most vicious because it’s shameless. It is a display of whiteness against blackness that is sold us as fact: The white woman can only emerge as her true self from the shadows created by the black girls.
“It is said that this is about Bela emerging from her ‘inhibitions.’ But pray tell, why would a white girl’s inhibitions appear as a bevy of black girls? Why pit one woman’s white body against five women’s black bodies? Why highlight one at the expense of the others?’’
Meanwhile, in other news, prosecutors in the trial of Chief Justice Renato C. Corona rested their case on Tuesday. Their impeachment charges say Mr. Corona enriched himself while on the bench and failed to declare all his assets.
In New York, the boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. said at a news conference, “Just by speaking to Pacquiao on the phone, I mean, he’s not one of the sharpest knives in the drawer.’’
Mr. Mayweather, the W.B.C. welterweight champion, is preparing for a title fight against Miguel Cotto, the super welterweight champ, on May 5 in Las Vegas.
Boxing fans are eager to see a match between the undefeated Mr. Mayweather and Mr. Pacquiao, the W.B.O. welterweight champion, whose record is 54-3, with two draws. Financial and drug-testing issues have kept their camps from agreeing to a fight. |
Kaine, Granholm said, is “as decent, honorable, selfless soul as you will ever meet. A man with the heart of a servant, who is ‘woke’.”
.@timkaine is as decent, honorable, selfless soul as you will ever meet. A man with the heart of a servant, who is "woke". @HillaryClinton — Jennifer Granholm (@JenGranholm) July 23, 2016
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“Woke” is not an easy word to define. It grew to prominence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and has largely been used to mean a person aware of — and fighting against — systemic racism and bias in society.
According to Bustle , by 2011 the word “woke” “had begun to gain popularity as a way of describing an informed, questioning, self-educating individual, which is essentially how we use it today.” |
It’s home to the Formula One but there’s more to Bahrain than fast cars and oil. Lisa Haynes discovers what the Arab state has to offer.
The deafening roar of F1 engines reverberates from my eardrums to the pit of my stomach. Somebody offers me a pair of earplugs to muffle the sound, but I politely decline. We are just metres away from the starting grid at the Bahrain International Circuit and there is no adrenaline rush like it.
The fact that we’re stone-cold sober – watching from a ‘dry’ box to respect our local hosts – means we’re even more focused on all 57 laps as Sebastian Vettel cruises into pole position. Even the podium finish vetoes champagne spray in favour of a sparkling non-alcoholic drink called Waard (though drinking alcohol isn’t banned in Bahrain for non-Muslims).
Home to the Formula One since 2004, the annual race spectacle in mid-April is undoubtedly Bahrain’s biggest tourism pull (tickets from £123 at bahraingp.com). Revving up over three days, a schedule of practice sessions, driver meet-and-greets, pit lane walks and pre-race concerts (hello, Enrique Iglesias) means that hotels, hip restaurants and plane seats get booked up fast during the F1 buzz window.
But the small island state in the gulf is gearing up to be a tourist destination in its own right; like a baby Dubai of sorts – but with more history and cultural pull.
Bahrain is made up of 33 islands but the most people live on mainland Bahrain and the island of Muharraq. Islands such as Hawar and Umm An Na’san are mainly sanctuaries for Bahraini wildlife, like spiny-tailed lizards, sand gazelles and protected Socotra Cormorant birds.
Bahrain – still known as the Pearl of the Gulf – first discovered oil in 1931, which coincided with the collapse of the once flourishing world pearl market. We visit the very unassuming site of the first ever Oil Well No.1 at the foothill of Jebel Al Dukhan. The clunky machinery is a far cry from the high-tech hydraulics we saw in action at the Formula One.
Now, with limited reserves and oil prices plummeting, Middle East countries like Bahrain have switched their focus from trade to tourism – attracting 200,000 visitors a week in the process.
New Instagram-able additions include high-gloss hotels, like the Four Seasons Bahrain Bay, which you’ll find on its own exclusive island, and chic international restaurants, like Asia de Cuba.
Bahrain Bay, on the north coast of capital Manama, is the equivalent of Dubai’s mega-luxe The Palm – an ambitious $2.5bn project that includes the new Wyndham Grand Manama Hotel, an iconic twisted glass structure that you can see for miles.
But despite the hype of shiny new development, it’s the Bahraini culture and history that’s perhaps the biggest draw.
We visit Haji’s Cafe, the oldest restaurant in Manama dating back to 1950, to refuel for a day of sight-seeing. A recent visit from celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck has made the authentic café even more popular with locals and tourists.
There’s no set menu because it changes by the hour, so we’re warmly welcomed with red tea and saffron milk as we receive plate after plate of surprise mini breakfast dishes (all for around £4 each). It’s a banquet of egg mixed with tomato and coriander, chickpeas, cheesy beans, warm Bahraini flat breads and natural yogurts.
Going back even further in time, to around 2300BC, we brave the searing midday heat to explore an archaeological site which was once the capital of Dilmun, one of the region’s most important ancient civilizations. The ruins of the 16th century Portuguese fort Qal’at Al Bahrain, now a World Heritage Site, perch there.
Another trip highlight is wandering through the magical narrow alleyways of Muharraq, Bahrain’s second largest island and another World Heritage Site. Extensive restoration projects – some still ongoing – have brought some of its oldest properties back to life.
We seek shade at Sheikh Isa Bin Ali House in Muharraq, which gives you a glimpse into how 19th century Bahraini royalty lived.
With its ornate wall carvings and stained-glass windows, it’s considered one of the most impressive examples of Gulf Islamic architecture in Bahrain. Other features include a natural take on air-conditioning – we stand under a mini ‘wind tower’ to feel the light breeze created by the building’s cooling system.
We make a pit-stop at the House of Coffee for a mid-tour energy boost. Gahwa (Arabic coffee) is lighter and sweeter than black coffee at home and often flavoured with cardamom and other spices.
We head back to Manama, to weave through the colourful markets.
The original location for Manama’s jewel trading, the Gold Suq has more than 30 family-owned stores selling nothing but gold. The purest available in Bahrain is 24 carat and the price per gram is £31.86 (around 15.50BHD).
With his pearl diving ancestry, it’s only fitting that our guide Fadhal takes us to one of Manama’s most prestigious pearl shops, Al Hashimi Pearls. The owner proudly showcases dana pearls, which can set you back around £20,000 for a necklace.
Well, there might be a Formula One driver just around the corner... |
Image by Valve on Flickr
Ahead of the qualifiers for this year's International, we caught up with Team NP support player Aui_2000 to talk about the new/old team and his thoughts on the scene as a whole, especially with his insight on organizations and their dynamics.
Hello Aui, you guys just came back from three tournaments, Manila Masters, Zotac Cup and The Summit, 3rd, 2nd and 4th place respectively. Did you expect to do this well going into these events and why did the results get worse towards the end?
I think going into the first two events we expected to do very well. At the time we were performing very well in scrims and that gave us a lot of confidence. It was a bit disappointing that we weren't able to win one of those tournaments. Coming into Summit I think we were a bit less confident--a bunch of people got sick after Manila/Zotac and the high amount of travel meant we weren't able to practice as much as we would have liked to.
Do you think knowing each other so well contributed to the early results? 4/5 of your team’s players have played together before after all. Or did the team chemistry just fit?
I think our confidence mostly came from scrims. It’s nice to have a history together, but it’s been a long time since we’ve played together. Even though you can have some idea how well you’re going to work together, you can’t know for sure until you actually play.
Image by ESL | Chris Romano
How have Fata, Envy and pie changed the last time you played with them?
To be honest, everyone’s sort of similar. We’ve all gone to different teams where we’ve had some success, so we’ve all learned different things that we can now bring back to the team. But I’d say all the strengths and weaknesses of the players are still the same things.
When did Team NP decide to change its roster?
For me it was after DAC. We had a poor showing at the event. I knew something had to change, because we weren’t going to find any success.
Did you moving back to the support role have anything to do with how the roster changes were made?
Personally, I didn’t think it was good for Envy to be mid and me to be carry on the same team.
Fata doesn’t get a lot of attention himself, but is often part of really successful teams. I’ve listened to him on LAN and it always sounds like he is making a lot of calls. If I said he seems like the captain behind the captain, would you agree?
He makes the second most in-game calls in the team. So you could say that.
TI qualifiers are upon you guys. Is there any concern of "overconfidence", considering the fairly strong performances and results recently and the fact that everybody looks towards NP as one of the favorites?
I don't think we will have an overconfidence problem. And it's not because we don't think we're a strong team that's able to win, but because we think our opponents for this qualifier are super strong. I don't think na has ever looked better, so we won't underestimate them.
Now that you’re back to the 4 position, how would you say has the role changed since all the way back when you first picked it up?
I never really played a traditional 4. All the way back to C9, I don’t think we ever played the 4 role similar to anybody else and I don’t think we’re doing that now either. So I think it’s difficult for me to answer.
How much did playing with world class supports such as PPD or Pie change the way you play/perceive the support position? Are there things you picked up from them that you would’ve never thought of before?
You learn a lot from every teammate you have, so it’s hard to specifically point out things. The best thing ppd taught me was about your presence of mind, i.e. staying calm and stuff like that. Pie is a really good laner. He has some really cool things he thinks about in a game. But it’s difficult to answer this, because you play in a team, so you learn from everyone at the same time.
In our last interview, you said something interesting. When asked about the lack of an invite for TI2 qualifiers, you said: “Despite TI being huge, it still is not the only tournament in the world.” - Would you still respond this way if you didn’t make it to TI or its qualifiers?
It has changed a lot since then. TI was like a 1.6 Million Dollar tournament and other tournaments were a lot bigger than they are now because they had crowdfunding. Right now though, only TI has crowdfunding, not even the Majors have crowdfunding. In the Dota ecosystem, TI has become even more important.
Do you like this change?
I think it’s pretty bad for the scene. Having Majors is good I suppose, but I’m not entirely sure either. It’s weird right now. We have huge tournaments like Epicenter or DAC with 500,000 USD prize pools, which show that the scene has this potential for really big tournaments. These 3rd party tournaments may be bigger now than they were before, they are still relatively smaller compared to TI. I preferred crowdfunding, it made events feel bigger and more important.
You’ve been part of many organizations, Dignitas, EG, but also “modern” ones with DC and NP. What do you think about this trend towards player owned organizations? Do you think this is healthy? Or are there aspects of traditional organizations that you think are also important?
I think it doesn’t really matter if you’re in a player owned organization or in a traditional one, as long as your contracts are tailored towards Dota. The reason why you have had a lot of player owned organizations pop up after TI4 is because a lot of contracts were not tailored towards Dota. Dota is a game where, at the time, prize pools were overwhelmingly responsible for your income. The traditional model of teams providing support in salary in return for cut of prize pool did not work out that well. I know there are a lot of teams where the organization would recover their investment just off of prize pool cuts, which didn’t make much sense for the players.
But in this day and age, where contracts are tailored towards Dota, I wouldn’t care if I played in a player run organization or in a traditional one.
I think you needed things like Secret or DC to happen for traditional orgs to want to tailor their contracts to the economy of Dota. At this point, I think enough change has been enacted that traditional orgs would work just as well in Dota.
How important is coaching right now?
I think it’s decently important. Dota is a very complex game, so if you have an impartial party that can look at the game and process it during the game, they’ll be able to give you a more valid answer on what went wrong or what you can improve/focus on. Sometimes people also have opposing viewpoints, and the most important thing in Dota is to be on the same page. Even if you do the wrong strategy all together, you have a higher chance to win than if you all try to do your own thing. Having a coach can help to get everyone on the same page and let players learn from their mistakes faster.
Are a lot of people suited for coaching?
I think it’s pretty hard to be a coach. I don’t think I made a particularly good coach for Secret. When you come in, I think everybody would be a good coach. I think when I came in to Secret, my initial coaching was helpful. After a while, it became pretty hard for me. I think it’ll be the same for a lot of people that will try to coach. I think you need a certain type of personality. You need a certain approach to the game.
For people who pull a lot from their team to learn, it’s hard to be a coach, because then you’re only learning the same thing your team is learning, so you teach them exactly what they already know. That’s not what being a coach is about. You should want to improve on their ideas or come up with new ideas.
What would you say makes Bulba a great coach then? Is it this trait or is there something else that lets him stand out?
I think Bulba is really good at learning from outside sources. He’s good at taking stuff from replays or talking to people and taking stuff from that. He’s also good at fighting for his idea. As a coach, you have to know when to defer to a player, or when to push for an idea you believe in. He’s good at knowing that.
At TI5, he was the one who fought for the “CDEC-Style”, to invade the Radiant jungle as Dire to take the safe lane and control of the enemy jungle. As a result, we were able to play around that idea and it helped a lot during the tournament.
You play support in pubs. What’s that about?
I know, it’s awful.
Why?
I haven’t played support in a long time, so I just need to play these heroes (laughs). Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play them that well. |
A Utah couple has taken "casing the joint" to a whole new level. According to KUTV, Shawn Nelson and Jessica Perry ate at a Utah County Arby's shortly before they decided to rob the place.
Apparently, the fast food Bonnie and Clyde went back to the restaurant claiming Nelson had left his wallet. After the store closed, the two returned and were allowed inside when they told workers money was missing from the wallet. Once inside, Nelson pulled a gun on the store's manager, forced him to the safe, and stole an undisclosed sum of money.
The couple's crime spree was short lived, as Nelson was pulled over and arrested by Lindon police the same night. In addition to almost all of the stolen money, police also found a fake gun and drugs inside of the vehicle. Nelson, who did not resist arrest, was charged with possession of drug paraphernalia and aggravated robbery. Lindon police are still searching for two more suspects in connection to the robbery.
Nelson and Perry are following in the footsteps of many thieves who have posed as customers before making the bold move to rob an establishment. Just last month, a Waffle House customer made sure to enjoy breakfast before making off with all of the money in the register, and a couple of UK robbers previously cooked up some burgers and left a thank-you note before stealing 10 bottles of booze. One Washington thief was even kind enough to pay for a beverage and leave a tip before walking off with a few bags of cash. |
Are protests taking place near you? Please share photos, videos and thoughts with CNN iReport if you can do so safely.
(CNN) -- The sparks of outrage that started in Ferguson, Missouri, have ignited a firestorm of protests across the country and beyond.
But the furor isn't just about one grand jury's decision on one shooting case. To many protesters, the death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown -- and the lack of an indictment for the officer who shot him -- are symbolic of racial injustice in America.
"I think that it's important for people to know that the decision not to indict (Officer) Darren Wilson means that the system does not value black lives," one protester marching through Los Angeles told CNN.
Complete coverage of what's happening in Ferguson
"I think that it means that a cop can kill a black or brown kid when he's defenseless and unarmed and not get charged. I think that it means that we either fight back and stand up and end police terrorism."
More than 170 protests sprouted up across the country Tuesday. Some crowds blocked bridges, tunnels and major highways. But unlike the violence that erupted in Ferguson on Monday night, most of the demonstrations were peaceful.
In New York, a protesters spanning an array of races and ages filled Times Square with their hands up, some chanting, "Don't shoot." In Washington, a crowd including prep school students lay silently on a sidewalk, as if dead. And in Boston, even jail inmates joined in the protest silently from a window.
Here's what the country looked like late Tuesday and into Wednesday:
ATLANTA
The Public Enemy anthem pumping from mounted speakers at a protest in downtown Atlanta captured the mood of the crowd of roughly 300 Tuesday night.
"Fight the Power," the rapper's voice shouted over the speaker. "Fight the powers that be. ..."
Some Atlanta protesters held signs that read "Enough" and "We are all one bullet away from being a hashtag."
"It's a travesty; it's just not right," ShaCzar Brown said, holding up a sign that read, "Stop killer cops."
"Seventy years ago, it was legal to kill black people," Brown said, referring to the spate of lynchings that spread through the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "It's essentially still legal."
BOSTON
About 1,000 protestors marched through the streets of Boston Tuesday night, passing by the South Bay House of Correction where inmates looked on from windows -- many of them holding their hands up in the air. On one window, someone had written "Mike Brown" in tape.
Even though police said 15 people were arrested, the gathering was peaceful. "I'm very proud of the young people here," Police Superintendent in Chief William Gross told the Boston Globe. "Do you see any cars burning? Do you see any broken windows? No."
Protester Daniel Jose Older told CNN the demonstration rapidly grew from a small gathering to hundreds of people.
"Folks have taken over the streets," Older said. "It's a beautiful thing to see."
CHICAGO
About 200 members of the Black Youth Project 100 started a 28-hour sit-in outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office starting on Tuesday morning.
Why 28 hours? According to the group, a black person is killed by a police officer or a person protected by the state every 28 hours in America.
Some lay motionless on the City Hall floor, as if they had been shot.
But by Tuesday night, the protest was over. After City Hall closed for the day, police threatened to arrest those attempting to stay inside.
LONDON
The protests weren't just in the United States. Some were in Canada, and hundreds turned out Wednesday in London -- starting outside the U.S. Embassy before spreading elsewhere in the English city.
Waving placards that read "Justice for Michael Brown," "Solidarity with Ferguson" and "Black Lives Matter," protesters held candles in the chilly November drizzle in Grosvenor Square.
The speakers included Carole Duggan, whose nephew Mark was shot dead by police in 2011, sparking days of riots in London and other cities across England. Marcia Rigg, whose brother Sean died in police custody in London in 2008, said "institutional racism" was a global problem.
"We need change," Rigg said. "There needs to be a political will to change, a political will for justice."
LOS ANGELES
A stretch of the 101 Freeway in Los Angeles was temporarily shut down in both directions Tuesday evening after protesters took road blocks from the streets and put them on the freeway, police said.
But protesters who gathered outside Los Angeles police headquarters demonstrated peacefully. "We have detained people. We don't have any property damage to speak of," Officer Jack Richter said. "We are letting (the people) exercise their constitutional rights."
Demonstrators returned to the city's streets again Wednesday. Scores of them began at the federal courthouse, then marched with signs held high through downtown.
As of 6 p.m. (9 p.m. ET), the event -- which, by then, had already been underway for hours -- was peaceful, said California Highway Patrol Officer Edgar Figueroa. Police were steering the demonstrators, keeping them downtown and away from freeways, according to Figueroa.
MINNEAPOLIS
A woman in a group of protesters blocking an intersection was run over by a car during a demonstration Tuesday.
The Star Tribune newspaper reported that the driver honked at the protesters before knocking a few people onto the hood of the car and apparently running over the woman's legs. The woman injured was hospitalized with "minor injuries."
NEW YORK
A massive protest Tuesday wound its way from Union Square to FDR Drive and to the United Nations, Times Square and Harlem.
"Now it's not clear where we're going," said CNN's Miguel Marquez, who was interviewing protesters as they continued marching after midnight into early Wednesday.
One demonstrator said he didn't even know about the protest until he saw it pass by his workplace on Times Square. He decided to join in.
"I just want to help bring about change ... sometimes I am profiled based on my race," said the protester, who is black.
"I think this is progress ... now we're going to make sure things are going to change."
As they marched, some protesters chanted, "Mike Brown! Mike Brown!"
Police, who were nearby in large numbers, stayed back and let the marchers go.
OAKLAND
Perhaps the most turmoil Tuesday night was in Oakland, California, where vandals smashed the windows of a car dealership and looted several businesses, including a T-Mobile cell phone store.
Some also set bonfires in the city. One row of bonfires stretched across a road, blocking off access.
At least one person was seen adding more items to the fires.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
In Washington, protesters lay down on a sidewalk outside police headquarters as if dead, Nikki Burdine of CNN affiliate WUSA tweeted Tuesday.
Some had handwritten notes on their chests: "Black lives matter."
Read what Darren Wilson told the grand jury
'A thousand Fergusons across America'
CNN's Paul Vercammen, Jessica Ravitz, Lorenza Brascia, John Blake, Greg Morrison, Rob Frehse, Bryony Jones, Tina Burnside and Bill Kirkos contributed to this report. |
Movie Review Movie Review Chimpanzee C- Movie Review Chimpanzee C- C- Chimpanzee Director Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield Runtime 78 minutes Rating G Cast
On the Werner Herzog Nature Scale—1 being adorable emperor penguins in love and 10 being “the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder”—no Disney documentary is ever going to score anywhere above 5 or 6, tops. These are movies made for children, so there’s always going to be some cuddly anthropomorphizing, like half-formed cubs rolling on the forest floor or clinging to a mother’s teat. The better recent examples, such as Earth and Oceans, combine astonishing nature footage with at least periodic attempts to show the effects of global warming, or the Darwinian struggle for survival. But as they dip closer to 1 on the Herzog Scale, like the new Chimpanzee does, the wild kingdom starts appropriating the stories of Bambi and The Lion King, and the motives assigned to these creatures become steeped in bullshit.
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Directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, who were also responsible for Earth, do pick up on a basic, compelling story through their gorgeous footage of a group of chimps in the Tai Forest in Ivory Coast. Here’s what’s real: A baby chimp, who the film calls Oscar, loses his mother in a battle with a rival clan and finds an unlikely adoptive father in “Freddie,” his group’s alpha-male leader. It’s a small miracle, because little Oscar, who doesn’t yet have the tools to take care of himself, would have died under normal circumstances. Here’s where the bullshit comes in: The rival clan, led by a glowering chimp dubbed “Scar”—a name he shares, not coincidentally, with The Lion King’s villain—is made to seem diabolical for his hostile encroaching on Freddie’s turf in search of food.
It not only seems likely that Freddie’s group would do likewise under similar circumstances—the film shows them pilfering food from Scar’s territory, though not by ambush—but Tim Allen’s narration refers to Scar and his group more than once as “thugs.” It isn’t easy to insult the intelligence of preschoolers, but Chimpanzee’s insistence on turning the two gangs into the Sharks and the Jets does the job long before Allen lapses into his Home Improvement grunting. Fothergill, Linfield, and their crew worked hard to collect mesmerizing images—an hour just of chimps cracking nuts would be sufficient entertainment—but the enforced narrative is so Disneyfied, the animals might as well be stuffed with fluff. |
Looks like Holy Joe is slithering toward the helmet hair and polyester confab known as the Republican National Convention.
Sneak preview offered in this YouTube — expect the words "the conscience of the Democratic Party" to be uttered more than once.
Meanwhile, let me fully endorse this counterprogramming note from Spencer Ackerman, who recalls Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s appearance at the 1984 Republican National Convention:
On Aug. 20, 1984, Kirkpatrick, the arch anti-communist who served as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, took the microphone at the GOP convention in Dallas and inaugurated a tradition. Kirkpatrick was, she told her audience, a "lifelong Democrat." The trouble, she had come to realize, was that she was also an American. So in an electrifying speech that was at turns vitriolic and sentimental, she implied very strongly that you couldn’t really be both. When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich — convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand. … They said that saving Grenada from terror and totalitarianism was the wrong thing to do — they didn’t blame Cuba or the communists for threatening American students and murdering Grenadians — they blamed the United States instead. But then, somehow, they always blame America first. And on and on in that vein. In one brief speech, Kirkpatrick introduced the world to the phrases "Blame America First" and "San Francisco Democrat"—well understood to mean "Faggot." Subtly, "San Francisco Democrat" had another purpose: it differentiated the alleged radicals in San Francisco from the salt-of-the-earth, America-loving Democrats that could now safely vote for Ronald Reagan. It was demagogic, incendiary, and ugly. And it was also a masterstroke. The conversion narrative has been a staple in the rise of the New Right since it was new: After all, Reagan himself famously said he never left the Democratic Party, the party left him. But by connecting that sentiment to national security, Kirkpatrick gave her grievance myth a sense of world-historical importance, all before the television cameras. It was a template repeated, among other places, at the 2004 GOP convention by a rabid Zell Miller. Expect Kirkpatrick’s bile to be recycled by Joe Lieberman this summer in Minneapolis.
But as Spencer notes, Democrats now have within their ranks a superb antidote in the person of one Jim Webb:
Webb can top it all. He can start out with his family’s extremely long history of military service, stretching back countless generations through to Webb’s son, a Marine veteran of Fallujah. The Webbs serve when called—but the contract of service is for the country never to call upon men to give their lives in a futile, unnecessary cause. After Vietnam, Webb can say, he became a Republican because the GOP seemed to understand that—and because they also understood that there are certain things that are worth fighting for when viewed through clear, dispassionate eyes. But somewhere along the line the GOP lost its way. His campaign for Senate in 2006 was predicated on the idea, at least implicitly. As much as he continued to resent John Kerry’s outspoken anti-war advocacy in the 1970s, he could nevertheless understand that, this time around, the greater enemy wasn’t overzealous opposition to a disastrous war, but the disastrous war itself. And the source of that disaster is in a militarism gone out of control, unmoored from any intelligence conception of the national interest, cheapened by its condescending view of soldiers as mere tools of foreign policy or else as political wedge issues, and indicative of a broader corruption at the heart of an exhausted GOP.
Really, Webb has it within him to drive a stake through the heart of the GOP.
The Republicans are welcome to the flaccid, stale, Bush-groping Lieberman banging on about "bipartisanship" and teh awesomeness of the surge.
I think we’ve got the man who can get the job done. |
Nervous about the Chinese stock market? You should be. First, it looks expensive, even after a dip. Second, the authorities in Beijing, by adopting increasingly desperate measures to prop up share prices, are sending an unmistakable message that they fear a crash is a possibility.
The latest official attempt to manipulate the stock market would be laughed out of court if it were attempted in the west. The central bank is shovelling cash towards a state-backed finance company that lends to individuals who would like to make bigger bets on the stock market than they can afford. That’s right, in today’s communist China, there are subsidies for stock market speculation.
By way of further encouragement, the state itself is piling in. A state-backed wealth fund is buying blue-chip stocks. Meanwhile, supposedly independent brokers and fund managers have decided this is the ideal moment to invest the equivalent of £12bn and pledge not to sell until the main Shanghai index has risen at least 20%. This extraordinary effort, apparently, is required to “uphold market stability”.
So what catastrophe has befallen the Chinese stock market? Well, nothing to justify all-out panic. Having risen 150% in a year, the Shanghai Composite Index has surrendered 30% of its gains. That’s how excitable developing markets often work: an enormous rise can be followed by a smaller fall. It’s not unusual. And, at about 20 times earnings, the Shanghai market is not a bargain given the slow-down in growth in the Chinese economy.
The authorities in Beijing, one assumes, know all that. But they are inventing and deploying emergency measures anyway. Why? One assumes they think a serious slide in share prices would cause financial distress among 90 million individuals with share accounts. That might damage the real economy or, conceivably, create social unrest. Alternatively, the authorities think a crash could kill Chinese companies’ long-term access to capital.
Whatever it is, Beijing has put its credibility on the line. Share prices must rise because the state, in effect, has issued an order.
The authorities may win the immediate battle with the market, though it’s by no means certain. Monday’s action was mixed. Blue-chip stocks, such as banks, rose because that is where the wall of money is being directed; small companies’ shares mostly fell.
Whatever the outcome in the next few weeks, a policy of state-directed share prices is unsustainable in the long run. If investors believe there is an official safety net to protect them from losses, the next bubble will be bigger and even harder to deflate safely.
This is a fight Beijing should have avoided. It will end badly – if not this time, then next.
Rocky Rolls
What does Warren East bring to the job of chief executive of Rolls-Royce? Two days in, more of the same, meaning another profits warning from the engine maker. Yesterday’s was the third since last October.
Only two factors in the latest dip are easy to understand. Oil and gas producers are cutting budgets to respond to a lower oil price; Rolls-Royce’s marine division, which makes almost two-thirds of its revenues from the offshore industry, was bound to be hit. Similarly, everyone knows demand for business jets is soft because oil sheikhs are feeling less wealthy and western sanctions are making life trickier for Russian oligarchs.
The third factor, though, is the biggest and most mysterious – the speed of the fall-off in demand for Rolls’ Trent 700 engine. Decline was inevitable as the engine is nearing the end of its lucrative life, to be supplanted by the Trent 7000. But Rolls-Royce needed one last hurrah from the 700 to make the progression smooth. It fully expected to get it, only to be disappointed on both volumes and prices. This looks like an old-fashioned case of over-optimism. We’re not talking marginal differences. The City cut its forecasts for Rolls’ 2016 profits by about 30%.
To compound the forecasting error, Rolls had been planning to spend £1bn buying back its own shares. East has halted the process at the halfway point, an embarrassing but correct decision. How can Rolls’ board form a view on whether the stock is cheap enough to buy if it can’t rely on internal projections for demand in the biggest division, civil aerospace?
Shareholders will hope that East’s appointment, and the arrival of finance boss David Smith last November, marks the moment when the company’s revenue and profit forecasts can be relied upon. It might, but there is always the threat that East’s promised review of operations brings yet another adjustment to reality.
On a 10-year view, Rolls remains a terrific business; the two-year outlook, however, is fuzzy. |
By Lisa Haven
On January 19th-21st, David Brock, a political operative, author, and commentator who founded the liberal media leftist group Media Matters, held an event where 100 top donors gathered together to discuss how to “attack Trump” at a Turnberry Isle Resort in in Aventura, Florida.
While inside details from the meetings have been kept quite, a leaked memo has surfaced detailing sick plans the progressive left has for not only Donald Trump, but also alternative media and conservatives. Some of the things on the agenda include: getting Google and Facebook to intensify censorship of opposition and conservative news, defeat Donald Trump through impeachment or the ballot box in 2020, and intensify attack campaign against Trump to levels never before seen with any other president. I believe this is one MEMO you need to see. But I must warn you it just might tick you off…
For More Information See:
http://freebeacon.com/politics/david-brock-memo-attack-trump/
https://www.scribd.com/document/337535680/Full-David-Brock-Confidential-Memo-On-Fighting-Trump#download |
Just days after the departure of host Megyn Kelly from Fox News, the network replaced one of its few Trump skeptics with Tucker Carlson, an unabashed booster of the president-elect.
But Carlson—who recently compared some anti-Trump politicians to segregationist George Wallace—wasn’t always such a supporter of The Donald.
Carlson had a bit of a more measured take on Trump’s candidacy in a piece he wrote for Politico in January of last year. The premise was basically that Trump could teach Republicans a valuable lesson and that he demonstrated that their brand of politics had failed.
It also began with a pretty stunning anecdote.
“About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair,” Carlson wrote. “I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day. “It’s true you have better hair than I do,” Trump said matter-of-factly. “But I get more pussy than you do.” Click.”
Carlson goes on to say that “The message had all the hallmarks of a Trump attack: shocking, vulgar and indisputably true” and that Trump was not his “first choice for president.”
But in the months that followed, something changed. Nevertheless, he did or said something that warranted the specific praise of the president-elect.
“.@tuckercarlson is doing a really good job on Fox, especially when talking politics,” Trump, an avid cable news watcher, tweeted in early May 2015. “He has come a long way fast!”
(The day prior, Carlson had gone on Fox News to discuss the attack on Pamela Geller’s “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas.)
Carlson also has something else in common with the incoming leader of the free world. They both have a soft spot for Alex Jones, America’s leading conspiracy theorist, 9/11 truther, Sandy Hook truther, and anti-Beyoncé crusader who also actually advised Trump during the 2016 campaign.
Carlson has been on Jones’s paranoid-conspiracy-theory-mongering show multiple times for cozy chats, and Jones has lauded Carlson’s “great coverage on Fox” as recently as last year.
In late May 2015, for instance, Carlson went on Jones’s broadcast to complain about President Obama and liberals pushing "ethnic politics" and “Nazi stuff.” (Alex Jones has frequently told his viewers and listeners that Barack Obama is very much like a dictator and a black Adolf Hitler.)
Carlson only recently gotten a gig with Fox to host a show during the 7 p.m. hour after leaving his position as editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller.
In the two months that Carlson’s show has been on the network, he has made headlines for acrimonious exchanges with writers like Teen Vogue’s Lauren Duca and for one particularly odd segment with Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, which started as a discussion of journalistic ethics and Trump’s mental health and rapidly degenerated into several minutes of non-sequiturs, visual aid, and embarrassing snippiness. He recently also brought on left-leaning journalist Glenn Greenwald to brush off allegations and reports of Russian government-directed, pro-Trump hacking during the presidential election.
While Carlson hasn’t necessarily stooped to the boot-licking level of fellow Trump acolyte Sean Hannity, he has been vocal about his support for the 45th president.
In August, Carlson made an appeal to Republicans who didn’t support Trump by appearing on Fox and Friends and saying that a Hillary Clinton victory would fundamentally change America.
“She’s going to open the borders, pack the Supreme Court and you are not going to have the same country,” Carlson said on the program, which is a favorite of Trump’s. “Maybe you like that, maybe you don’t. But we’re not going back to the status quo, period. And so Republicans need to understand if Trump loses, it is a new America, OK? A lot is on the line, whether you like him or not. That is real.”
The 47-year-old conservative commentator has been a fixture on cable news since the early 2000’s, during which time he co-hosted CNN’s Crossfire and went on to have a short-lived show on MSNBC, Fox’s left-leaning cable-news competitor. His libertarian-ish, Ron-Paul-loving, right-leaning role back then was vastly different from the Tucker Carlson of his Daily Caller and Fox News era, which has been defined largely by a fealty to Fox News, and unveiled racial anxieties.
For instance, in late 2006, Carlson, on his MSNBC show Tucker, went after one of Fox News’s biggest stars, Bill O’Reilly, practically thrashing him as a rape-apologizing victim blamer. (O’Reilly had just done a radio segment on how a New Jersey teenager who was raped and murdered was in part to blame because of her intoxication, what she was wearing, and where and when she was walking alone.)
"So, she's got a halter top with a bare midriff and she's drunk; therefore, she gets raped and murdered, as if that's natural? That's what happens when you've got a bare midriff and you're loaded? Not in my America, buddy," Carlson said on-air in response to O’Reilly’s criticism of the dead rape victim, knocking him for his "pretty low standards."
“I don't know if O'Reilly is attempting to blame her for luring this guy in…It’s sick all around; you ought to be able to wear whatever you want on our streets and not get raped and murdered,” Carlson continued. “Period."
(Roughly a decade later, the Carlson of Fox News fame would of course go on to opine about how Americans who complained about a statutory rape case were “whiny,” and why identifying rape-y tones in popular culture is repressive feminism.)
Nowadays, calling out Fox News is the farthest impulse from Carlson’s mind. Despite the fact that his new Fox show is all about how “The Media” is liberally biased, self-beclowning, and corrupt, Carlson’s time leading The Daily Caller was marked by the voluntary self-censorship of his own site—to the point where he would kill stories critical of Fox News, his other source of income.
This is merely scratching the surface when it comes to his hypocrisy and breach of basic journalistic standards when running his right-wing website.
“I have two rules,” Carlson said in early 2015. “One is you can’t criticize the families of the people who work here. And the other rule is you can’t go after Fox. Only for one reason, not because they’re conservative or we agree with them [or] because they’re doing the Lord’s work. Nothing like that. It’s because I work there, I’m an anchor on Fox.”
Carlson has, again, been rewarded for his unwavering loyalty. |
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