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DALLAS — Wilbert James Veasey, Jr., 65, of Dallas, was sentenced this morning in federal court in Dallas on a health care fraud conspiracy conviction, announced U.S. Attorney John Parker of the Northern District of Texas.
Veasey was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Sam A. Lindsay to 210 months in federal prison and order to pay $23,123,897.18 in restitution to Medicare and $506,880.08 in restitution to Medicaid. He has been in custody since February 2016, after violating his conditions of release.
Veasey, along with co-defendants, Jacques Roy, M.D., 59, of Rockwall, Texas; Cynthia Stiger, 54, of Dallas; and Charity Eleda, R.N., 56, of Rowlett, Texas, were each convicted following a six-week-long trial on one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud. In addition, Roy was convicted on eight, Veasey on three and Eleda on four counts of health care fraud. Roy was also convicted on two counts of making a false statement relating to healthcare matters and one count of obstruction of justice. Eleda was also convicted on three counts of making false statements for use in determining rights of benefit and payment by Medicare.
Three other defendants charged in the case, Cyprian Akamnonu and his registered nurse wife, Patricia Akamnonu, both of Cedar Hill, Texas, and Teri Sivils, of Midlothian, Texas, each pleaded guilty before trial to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud. Cyprian and Patricia Akamnonu are each currently serving a ten-year federal prison sentence. They were also ordered to pay $25 million in restitution. Sivils pleaded guilty in April 2015, and was sentenced to 3 years probation.
The government presented evidence at trial that Dr. Roy, Stiger, Veasey and Eleda engaged in a large-scale, sophisticated health care fraud scheme in which they conspired together and with others to defraud Medicare and Medicaid through companies they owned/controlled: Medistat Group Associates, P.A., Apple of Your Eye Health Care Services, Inc., Ultimate Care Home Health Services and Charry Home Care Services.
As part of the conspiracy, Stiger, Veasey and Eleda, along with others, improperly recruited individuals with Medicare coverage to sign up for Medicare home health care services. Eleda recruited patients from The Bridge homeless shelter in Dallas, sometimes paying recruiters $50 per beneficiary they found and directed to her vehicle parked outside the shelter’s gates. Eleda and other nurses would falsify medical documents to make it appear as though those beneficiaries qualified for home health care services that were not medically necessary. Eleda and the nurses prepared Plans of Care (POC), also known as 485’s, which were not medically necessary, and these POCs were delivered to Dr. Roy’s office and not properly reviewed by any physician.
Dr. Roy instructed his staff to certify these POCs, which indicated to Medicare and Medicaid that a doctor, typically Dr. Roy, had reviewed the treatment plan and deemed it medically necessary. That certifying doctor, typically Dr. Roy, certified that the patient required home health services, which were only permitted to be provided to those individuals who were homebound and required, among other things, skilled nursing. This process was repeated for thousands of POCs, and, in fact, Medistat’s office included a “485 Department,” essentially a “boiler room” to affix fraudulent signatures and certifications.
Once an individual was certified for home health care services, Eleda, nurses who worked for Stiger and Veasey, and other nurses falsified visit notes to make it appear as though skilled nursing services were being provided and continued to be necessary. Dr. Roy would also visit the patients, perform unnecessary home visits, and then order unnecessary medical services for the recruited beneficiaries. Then, at Dr. Roy’s instruction, Medistat employees would submit fraudulent claims to Medicare for the certification and recertification of unnecessary home health care services and other unnecessary medical services.
The government presented further evidence at trial that the scope of Dr. Roy’s fraud was massive; Medistat processed and approved POCs for 11,000 unique Medicare beneficiaries from more than 500 different home health agencies. Dr. Roy entered into formal and informal fraudulent arrangements with Apple, Charry, Ultimate and other home health agencies to ensure his fraudulent business model worked and that he maintained a steady stream of Medicare beneficiaries.
The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG), and the Texas Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit (MFCU) and was brought as part of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force supervised by the Criminal Division Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys P.J. Meitl and Nicole Dana and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Chad Meacham prosecuted the case.
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(CNN) -- More than 200 indigenous people who refused to vacate their land in eastern Paraguay were sprayed late last week with what some believe was pesticide, sending seven to the hospital, a government cabinet member said this week.
The 217 members of the Ava Guarani community in the Itakyry district suffered vomiting, diarrhea, headaches and nausea, said Esperanza Martinez, Paraguay's minister of health. Although one person was in serious condition, she said Monday, the rest are improving.
"For us, it's very clear that this is an acute community-wide intoxication caused in a premeditated manner by an unknown substance," Martinez said on her ministry's Web site. "But it is very clear because all of the similar symptoms occurred after this incident."
The Amnesty International human rights organization said Tuesday it "condemned the use of apparently toxic pesticides to intimidate an indigenous community after they resisted being forcibly evicted from their ancestral lands."
The tension in Paraguay is identical to that found in other parts of Latin America, where the rights of indigenous communities collide with the business interests upon which nations' economies depend. The traditional ancestral homes of indigenous communities are sought for use by mining, oil, logging, agricultural and ranching businesses.
Some in Paraguay say that legal protections often are not enough.
"A new constitution recognizes indigenous rights, but political reality is proving to be quite different from the constitutional ideal; the problems facing Paraguay's indigenous people are not likely to go away anytime soon," the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management said in a 2006 study. "The economics and politics of Paraguay make sustained improvement unlikely."
Government critics say not much has changed in three years.
"Indigenous peoples' lives are being put in jeopardy by those who should protect them," said Louise Finer, Paraguay researcher at Amnesty International. "The risk faced by the Itakyry communities was predictable. Insufficient action was taken to protect them from the threats they faced from this renewed attempt to evict them from their ancestral lands."
The latest incident occurred Friday near the border with Brazil, when more than 200 Ava Guarani community members refused to leave land local soy growers say belongs to them.
An eviction order against the indigenous people was supposed to be carried out Friday, but a district prosecutor canceled the mandate right before it was to be executed.
"And, according to what the indigenous said, that apparently angered the soy growers, who went there to try to remove them," Paraguayan Health Minister Martinez said. "They went in trucks to try to forcefully remove them."
Amnesty International said the Ava Guarani fought back against the 50 men who tried to evict them.
"The indigenous peoples resisted using bows and arrows," the rights group said in a release Tuesday.
Police were present, which limited the fight, Martinez said.
"Afterward," she said, "came a low-level flight by airplanes where the people were working in their fields, in their community orchards, with the spraying of a liquid over the people who were there, who later presented with massive symptoms."
Officials are investigating who may have been responsible, she said.
Amnesty International urged Paraguayan officials to step up their efforts to protect the indigenous communities.
"The Paraguayan authorities -- the executive, congress and the judiciary -- must work together to address the immediate needs of the communities after this attack, but also to ensure that it does not happen again." Finer said.
The native populations have been losing ground since the 1700s.
"As agriculture and grazing came to occupy larger and larger tracts of land, the traditional subsistence foraging and hunting of most of the groups could not support their numbers, and they were forced to take extremely low-wage jobs," the University of Maryland's conflict and development group says. "Indigenous peoples throughout Paraguay are among the very poorest of society."
Indigenous communities also were legally disenfranchised, the study said.
"Until the 1960s, only one law addressed the future of indigenous groups in Paraguay, and well into the 1970s it was not a crime to kill 'Indians,' " the university study said.
Some recent government efforts to help indigenous communities have been tied up in courts.
"In 1996 and 1997 the Paraguayan Indigenous Institute, the state body that advises on protecting indigenous peoples' rights and processing land claims, acquired 2,638 hectares (6,518 acres) of the indigenous communities' ancestral land on their behalf," Amnesty International said in a recent release. "However, landowners have taken legal action against the five communities."
More recently, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered Paraguay in 2005 and 2006 to return ancestral lands to two indigenous communities. It was not clear Tuesday whether that order had been carried out.
The University of Maryland study points out that the indigenous population of Paraguay consists of 17 ethnic communities divided into five linguistic groups: the Mascoi, Mataco, Zamuco, Guarani and the Guaykuru. These communities live on either side of the Paraguayan River, in the sparsely populated Chaco region to the west, and along the Brazilian border to the east. Less than half of the indigenous population remaining in Paraguay lives in the Chaco; fewer groups, related to the Guarani, remain in the east.
About 95 percent of Paraguayans are mestizo, of mixed Spanish and Amerindian ancestry, the CIA World Factbook says.
The official language of Paraguay is Spanish. However, the university report said, the majority of Paraguay's 7 million residents speak Guarani better than they speak Spanish. Spanish is used mainly in public speech, while Guarani is used in everyday speech.
The 1992 constitution stipulated that all government documents be published in Spanish and Guarani. But despite the general population's fluency with Guarani, the study said, Paraguayans do not consider themselves of Indian descent and their culture is thoroughly Hispanicized. |
uBlock Origin | The Best AdBlock Alternative
Category: addons
A 3 Minute Read
20 Feb 2016
The conversation surrounding adblockers is actually quite interesting. On one side we have website operators claiming they’d starve if it weren’t for the online advertising industry. On another side we have users doubling down on blocking ads because they either find them visually unappealing or find their tracking to be unacceptable.
Increasingly, however, a third aspect of this debate is coming into the frame: malware protection. As large ad networks from the likes of Google permeate the web, so too does the malware embedded into the ads that are served. Commonly known as malvertising, this happens when hackers load malware into ads and then upload them onto the ad network. It’s because of this that Violet Blue once said, “You say advertising, I say block that malware”. She’s right too, as these dangerous ads are being loaded millions of times per day on sites as large as Forbes, MSN, and Yahoo. In other words, ad blocking is hardly about privacy or visual appeal anymore, its about the security and integrity of your computer; not using an adblocker is reckless.
Of course, even in terms of adblockers there has been quite a bit of controversy, most notably around AdBlock Plus. For years, we’ve known that AdBlock Plus is taking money from companies like Google in order to whitelist their ads. This means that even if you use AdBlock Plus, you’re still not fully protected against malvertising. Thus, an alternative adblocker is needed.
uBlock Origin
Among a field crowded with a diverse range of adblockers, uBlock Origin stands out as one of the best available for a number of reasons. First, its memory footprint is not just nill, its negative. This is because of the fact that the memory that is saved by not having to display advertisements is larger than the memory required to run the application. On Chromium, this provides a memory reduction, which is especially impressive when compared to the memory increase that AdBlock Plus induces. On Firefox, both uBlock Origin and AdBlock Plus save memory, but uBlock still saves more than double the memory that AdBlock Plus saves. If you’re curious about more specific differences, give this page a read.
The second area where uBlock Origin shines is in its extensive selection of blocklists. As shown in the image below, there are dozens of blocklists that amount to hundreds of thousands of blocking filters, at least when used together. Not shown in the image are the additional regional blocklists for countries like China, Korea, Russia, or Poland, among many others. When this array of included blocklists is taken together with the ability to add your own custom rules, uBlock Origin easily has the most comprehensive adblocking solution around.
Installation & User Guide
Installing uBlock Origin is identical to any regular addon, just give this page a visit to install it onto Firefox (including Firefox for Android). The Chrome/Chromium installation can be found here.
Using uBlock Origin is equally simple, as it works great right out of the box. However, in case you want to enable more than just the default blocklists, go to the addon’s page by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+A on Firefox, clicking uBlock Origin’s Preferences , and then clicking Show Dashboard . The page you will land on has a few extra settings, such as disabling WebRTC (which leaks IP addresses when using VPNs), as well as enabling Advanced mode (which allows for more fine grain control over which content is blocked, similar to uMatrix).
At the top of the dashboard is a tab called 3rd-Party Filters . Navigating here will present you with a multitude of blocklists categorized by function. The more of these that you enable, the more content that will be blocked, though this comes at the expense of a bit of your computer’s memory. Regardless of which extra lists you enable, be sure to click Apply Changes at the top right, before pressing Update Now at the top left to make sure you have the latest rule-sets.
Of course, there is always a risk, though typically small, that a site will break when using uBlock. In cases such as this, just click uBlock Origin’s logo (a small shield) on your browser, and click the power button to disable uBlock Origin on that page. Additionally, this menu shows the number of requests blocked since installation, providing a nice metric of just how useful the extension is over time.
Other than that, the addon rarely needs to even be touched, and can easily be loaded onto family members’ computers as well to keep them protected against malware. After all, there’s nothing worse than being the only techie in the family when one of your relatives gets compromised. |
Six Marines stopped by a restaurant in a small island city to grab a bite on a Saturday afternoon, and one of them accidentally left their cell phone behind. Instead of returning by traditional means, the missing device was retrieved by servicemembers who flew two Marine Corps helicopters to the island, landing one in a ball field.
As reported by the Mount Desert Islander, the incident took place on Bar Harbor-Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine.
According to Thirsty Whale server Jess Witherell, the forgotten cell phone rang shortly after the Marines left the restaurant, and the caller ID displayed a number for the Hancock County-Bar Harbor airport, located in the city of Trenton.
When Witherell answered the phone, the caller asked, “How far away are you from the town ball field?”
Witherell asked whether the person on the phone was “walking or driving,” likely assuming the caller intended to visit the local tavern.
The caller replied, “We’re landing a helicopter at the ball field.”
Based on the caller’s response, Witherell let them know the eatery was “about ten minutes” away on foot.
According to Witherell, the person on the phone inquired as to whether anyone at the restaurant could bring the cell phone to the ball field, and she asked Bryce Lambert, a dishwasher, if he could handle the delivery.
“I got chosen to be the person to go,” said Lambert. “I hopped in the car.”
While residents of Bar Harbor understand that helicopters occasionally use the field as a landing area, particularly those associated with LifeFlight, a helicopter-based ambulance service, a Bell AH-1W SuperCobra and Bell UH-1Y Venom took the neighborhood by surprise and even set off at least one car alarm.
“That’s not LifeFlight,” said resident Finn Jordan. “That’s an attack helicopter, like an Apache.”
The SuperCobra landed in the field while the Venom circled above. After landing, one person exited the SuperCobra and Lambert ran to meet him.
“He pulled the [Velcro] patch off of his jacket and handed it to me,” said Lambert, a sign of appreciation for helping the Marine out.
Once the phone was in hand and the serviceman back aboard, the helicopter took off. |
Despite changes in state law and several attempts at overhauling teacher evaluations, New York City remains one of the most difficult places in the country to fire an ineffective teacher.
That’s according to a report released Thursday by the conservative-leaning Thomas Fordham Institute, which ranked New York City fourth out of 25 large, geographically diverse school districts in terms of how hard it is to fire low-performing teachers.
The findings offer another piece of evidence that the national effort to remove ineffective teachers through harsher evaluation systems — which have already been significantly rolled back in New York state — has not taken hold locally.
“We made this massive push to improve teacher quality,” said David Griffith, a co-author of the report, referring to efforts around the country to overhaul the way teachers are evaluated. “The bottom line probably hasn’t changed as much as people might think.”
The report assessed teacher contracts and state tenure policies and rated each school district on three key questions: Does tenure protect veteran teachers from performance-based dismissal? How long does it take to fire an ineffective teacher? And how easy is it to challenge a decision to dismiss a teacher?
New York City ranked as more favorable to teachers than Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco’s school districts on those questions, but is still among the most challenging places to fire a tenured teacher in the country, according to the report.
The only question on which New York City did not receive a zero when it came to toughness on teachers: The amount of time it takes to fire a tenured educator. It takes two years of consecutive “ineffective” ratings to dismiss one in New York City, roughly a third of the time it can take in Los Angeles, in some cases. (In response to the report, New York City education officials said teachers can be removed for incompetence, even without two ineffective ratings.)
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Still, the vast majority of New York City teachers rated ineffective are never fired — even those who have received that bottom ranking multiple times.
Out of 77 city educators who received two consecutive ineffective ratings since September 2014, 57 had cases brought against them, but only nine have been fired, according to state officials. (Nineteen of the 57 cases are still active, two were withdrawn, and 27 were settled. The results of those settlements were unclear at press time.)
City education department officials noted those statistics don’t account for the all the ways in which teachers can be removed for incompetence, and that teachers may leave the system before charges work their way through the full removal process.
In the 2014-15 school year, for instance, incompetence charges lead to 106 teacher “exits,” an education department official said, nine more than the previous year.
“We are using the tools at our disposal to recruit and retain great teachers and also to move those who shouldn’t be teaching out of the system,” department spokeswoman Devora Kaye wrote in a statement.
But when it comes to removing teachers who have received two ineffective ratings, Griffith said, the process can often keep school leaders from following through on firing a teacher.
“During those two years [in which teachers are rated ineffective] you have to do at least eight formal observations and teachers have the ability to challenge it during a grievance process that can take months,” he said. “And if you make a minor mistake, then the whole thing can be thrown out.”
Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, blasted the report, and said the focus should be on improving teaching conditions. “Hundreds of teachers depart the New York City public schools every year based on their professional performance – failure to maintain licensing requirements, disciplinary action and similar reasons,” he wrote in a statement.
“But every year thousands of teachers in good standing leave of their own volition because the system has failed to provide the supports they need to effectively help the students in their classrooms. That’s the real scandal that critics like the Thomas Fordham Institute ignore.”
Nationwide, job protections for teachers have been under increased scrutiny in recent years, and lawsuits have been filed from California to New York that claim leaving ineffective teachers in place can violate students’ civil rights — though the courts haven’t necessarily bought that argument.
The Fordham Institute’s Griffith said there is not one single policy lever that would protect quality teachers while allowing low-performing ones to be fired, but he pointed to the tenure process as one place for reform. (There’s been some recent movement on that front: Teachers can now be considered for the job protection only after four ‘probationary’ years, up from three.)
A focus on delaying tenure is in line with former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s approach. His administration promised to move toward “ending teacher tenure as we know it” and oversaw a massive decrease in tenure approval rates.
Under current Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is considered more union-friendly, the education department has quietly started approving more teachers for tenure — though still far below pre-Bloomberg rates. Still, both administrations have held rejection rates essentially flat at 2 percent.
“To fix the process would require a lot of little changes,” Griffith said of the teacher tenure and removal process. “If it’s a lifetime guarantee of a job, the bar to getting it should be really high.” |
Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station started operation in 1972 and will close no later than June 2019.
At a Beacon Hill hearing in November, Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Matthew Beaton was asked whether the state, if it continues current policies without taking new action, would meet its legal obligation to make substantial cuts to its carbon emissions by the end of the decade.
“Not a chance,” he told members of the state Senate Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change, even as he stressed that the administration supports new steps, such as importing hydroelectric power, to reduce emissions.
That answer, which alarmed some lawmakers, has been cited as evidence in briefs to the Supreme Judicial Court that the state has failed to take sufficient action to comply with the state’s 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act, which requires the state to cut its greenhouse gases 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
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This week, lawyers for the Conservation Law Foundation will argue before the state’s top court that the administrations of Governor Charlie Baker and former governor Deval Patrick have violated the law by not enacting policies that would result in the required emissions reductions. The challenge of making those cuts, they note, will be greater with Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station — the state’s largest provider of clean power — set to close as early as next year.
Globe staff/FILE 1996 A bounty of wild berries grew along the powerline that comes from Hydro-Quebec and traverses New Hampshire.
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“The delay in implementing the law is egregious,” said Bradley Campbell, president of the foundation. “There have been no efforts to implement the additional policies called for in the state’s clean energy and climate plan.”
State officials say they hope to meet the law’s requirements, but they say it will be far easier if lawmakers help out by passing a bill that would compel utilities to sign long-term contracts to buy hydroelectric power from Canada.
Beaton declined to be interviewed.
In a written statement, he said: “Massachusetts remains a nationally recognized leader on combating climate change, but action is needed on existing policies and the administration’s proposal for cost-effective, low-carbon hydroelectric power generation.”
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Environmental advocates insist the state has fallen behind and needs a major course correction — not just action on the hydro plan — to meet the law’s requirements. They also note that even if lawmakers pass a hydroelectric bill, the expensive power lines might never get built. They would probably pass through New Hampshire, where the proposal remains highly controversial.
In 2014, before Pilgrim announced it would close, a collaborative effort by local environmental groups called the Global Warming Solutions Project released a report that projected that Massachusetts would cut its emissions by only 20 percent below 1990 levels. A more recent report by the Conservation Law Foundation, which factors in the closure of Pilgrim, estimates that the state, without any significant policy changes, is more likely to cut its emissions between 16 percent and 19 percent.
In their lawsuit against the Department of Environmental Protection, which the justices will hear on Friday, lawyers for the foundation will argue that the state has fallen behind because regulators have failed to mandate annual limits on specific emissions, which they say the law required to be set in 2012.
They also blame the Baker and Patrick administrations for focusing more on extending natural gas pipelines than on promoting offshore wind and solar energy, increasing energy efficiency in buildings, and a range of other policies that don’t require legislation, including pressuring utilities to seal methane leaks more quickly, adding incentives for electric vehicles, and planting more trees.
“Massachusetts passed a landmark law that made us a leader in addressing greenhouse gases, but if we allow significant portions of the law to go unmet, it’s simply an empty gesture,” said Jennifer Rushlow, who will be arguing the foundation’s case. “This is a law that does have teeth, but we’re not using them.”
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In its response to the lawsuit, which was dismissed by a Superior Court judge last March but taken up by the SJC on appeal, state officials argue that the Global Warming Solutions Act requires the agency to set targets — not caps — on emissions. They also say that the law gives the agency broad discretion on how to cut emissions.
They also note that the agency has enacted specific policies to reduce greenhouse gases, such as limiting leaks of sulfur hexafluoride, a potent greenhouse gas used in electricity distribution switches, a cap and trade program between states designed to cut emissions, and the adoption of a California program that curbs emissions for certain types of vehicles.
“We’re working hard to meet the goals,” said Martin Suuberg, commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Protection.
He said the hydropower plan would play a crucial role, reducing the state’s carbon emissions by an estimated 5 percent below 1990 levels. Asked what would happen if the power lines are delayed or rejected by New Hampshire, Suuberg said: “We’re doing a suite of policies to make sure we meet the goal, and this is one element. . . . We’re not putting all of our eggs in one basket.”
He declined to comment on the lawsuit but said: “We’re fully anticipating carrying the day in the SJC decision.”
Keith Bedford/Globe Staff/File Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station could close as early as 2017.
Ken Kimmell, who served as the department’s commissioner during the Patrick administration, said the law may have set unrealistic requirements. He also blamed the potential shortfall on unexpected developments, such as the failure of Cape Wind to build turbines on Nantucket Sound and the closure of Pilgrim.
“Part of the problem is that the goal is ambitious,” he said. “We could have set 20 percent, and we would have been there.”
He urged the Baker administration and lawmakers to invest more in renewable energy, electric vehicles, and new ways to heat buildings that go beyond switching from oil to gas.
“That needs to happen now, because the infrastructure needs to get built to meet the deadline,” he said. “It’s up to all of us to figure out a solution. People would be right to be disappointed if we don’t meet this goal.”
Supporters of the lawsuit said they hope the court prods the state to act soon, noting that 2020 is just four years away.
A dozen environmental groups, in a brief to the court, compared the state’s efforts to climbing a mountain at night “without the benefits of trails or guideposts.”
“With no mandated emissions limits to light the way, the commonwealth is adopting and rejecting energy policies and projects blindly,” they wrote. “The only way that such an approach could result in the commonwealth meeting the 2020 mandate is by pure chance.”
After hearing Beaton testify in November, Senator Marc Pacheco, a Taunton Democrat who chairs the Global Warming and Climate Change Committee, said he was “extremely concerned” that the state wouldn’t meet the requirements.
He blamed both administrations for not doing more, noting the legislation also calls for cutting the state’s emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. He plans to push a bill in the coming months that would require specific emissions cuts for 2030 and 2040.
“We can do this,” he said. “But right now I just don’t see the urgency of getting it done. We need some political will to move us forward.”
David Abel can be reached at [email protected] . Follow him on Twitter @davabel |
For years I’ve been pointing out that two bulwarks of Democratic Party campaign fundraising and prestige, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, don’t have to play by the Diversity rules that most of the rest of American business is supposed to play by.
Every few years since the 1990s, Jesse Jackson would try to shake down the Tech Industry and he’d be laughed out of town. Silicon Valley and Hollywood were too liberal, too rich, too powerful, too successful in the global marketplace (America can only wish we had as big a share of jetliners, much less cars, as Silicon Valley and Hollywood have of their respective markets) to let Jesse Jackson throw a wrench in the works.
But 2014 was the year in which liberal ideology overwhelmed liberal hypocrisy. From New York Times columnist Joe Nocera:
Silicon Valley’s Mirror Effect DEC. 26, 2014 “If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley,” wrote David Sacks in an email to The Times’s Jodi Kantor. Kantor was working on an article, published in The Times on Tuesday, about the Stanford class of 1994 — the class that graduated a year before Netscape went public, and, for all intents and purposes, started the Internet economy. She was exploring why the men in that class had done so much better in Silicon Valley than the women. Sacks, meanwhile, was one of the most successful members of the class. At Stanford he wrote for The Stanford Review, “a conservative-libertarian campus newspaper,” where he befriended Peter Thiel, a fellow libertarian.
Then, in 1998, Sacks, Thiel and a handful of others — overwhelmingly white and male — founded PayPal, which made them all very rich. Since then, the PayPal Mafia, as these men are known in Silicon Valley, have seeded companies, founded companies and sold companies — in effect, financing another generation of (mostly) young white men.
… But, as Kantor pointedly asks in a short introduction to Sacks’s email, if Silicon Valley is truly a meritocracy, “why do mostly men prevail?”
This is a question that has become increasingly urgent. This summer, Jesse Jackson shamed a number of important Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and LinkedIn, into publishing a breakdown of their employees by race and sex. The numbers are appalling — something the companies were forced to concede once the figures became public. At LinkedIn, 2 percent of the work force is black, and 4 percent is Hispanic. Google is 70 percent male, with 91 percent of its employees either white or Asian. Facebook: 69 percent male and 91 percent white or Asian. When it comes to leadership positions or board seats, the numbers are even worse. Can this really be the result of “meritocracy?”
There aren’t many women or African-Americans working in Silicon Valley who would agree.
“Silicon Valley’s obsession with meritocracy is delusional,” Freada Kapor Klein, the co-chair of the Kapor Center for Social Impact, told The Los Angeles Times in May.
“Unless someone wants to posit that intelligence is not evenly distributed across genders and race, there has to be some systemic explanation for what these numbers look like.”
Her husband, Mitch Kapor, designed Lotus 1-2-3, the seminal spreadsheet program that helped to make the IBM PC famous,
And were wildly unpopular dissidents on campus for opposing the regime of diversity worship that Jesse Jackson’s Hey Ho Western Civ Has Got To Go protests had imposed on Stanford. Obviously Thiel and Sacks were wrong because Science. Blacks and women (nobody ever seems to care enough about Mexicans to mention them, even though there are many millions in California) are just as likely to found successful companies once Jesse Jackson gets to revamp education. I mean, who are you gonna believe is smarter: Jesse Jackson or Peter Thiel?So, Sacks and Thiel have tested their discredited theories, using themselves as their test subjects, and …Why do mostly men prevail in the NBA?Yes.Why the constant insensitivity, the microagressions against the missing Mexicans not working in Silicon Valley, Mr. Nocera?How did Freada Kapor Klein get to be the co-chair of the Kapor Center for Social Impact?I want to posit that intelligence is not evenly distributed across genders and race.Question answered! |
Immigrants suspected of being here illegally should be served more ‘culturally diverse’ food, a removal centre has been told.
Caterers face claims that meals at Yarl’s Wood, where suspected illegal immigrants are held supposedly pending deportation, are ‘too Western’ for detainees’ tastebuds.
Inspectors said inmates had complained that lunch at the £100 million centre usually consisted of baguettes and salad.
Only one in seven detainees thought the food was good compared to one in four in 2015, according to the prisons watchdog.
Caterers face claims that meals at Yarl’s Wood, where suspected illegal immigrants are held supposedly pending deportation, are ‘too Western’ for detainees’ tastebuds
Now private firm Serco, which runs the centre in Bedfordshire, has been told to improve its menus. Yarl’s Wood is home to just over 300 detainees, mainly women, from 61 countries. Most inmates are from India, China or nations in Africa.
A report by Peter Clarke, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, said: ‘The food that we sampled was adequate, but most dishes comprised Western-style food and the menu lacked cultural diversity. The lunchtime meal consisted largely of baguettes or salad. There was very little in any of the menus to reflect the normal diets of, for example, Chinese or African women.’
Food should be suited to the ‘religious and cultural needs’ of detainees, said the report for HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP). Menus should ‘reflect the diverse needs of the population’.
However, managers were praised for preparing meals suitable for vegetarians, vegans and those with halal diets. Detainees also had access to kitchens where they could cook their own food.
Tory MP Philip Davies said: ‘These are people who should not be in the country in the first place, so they should be grateful that they are being looked after so well. That wouldn’t be the case in lots of other countries.’
Previous reports on the centre, which opened in 2001, have found that food was not good enough.
In its 2015 report on Yarl’s Wood, the Independent Monitoring Board – a watchdog that checks conditions inside prisons and removal centres – criticised bosses for dishing up too many pizzas, chips and baguettes.
Despite activists dubbing Yarl’s Wood a ‘prison camp’, HMIP praised staff in the latest report for providing yoga and aerobics classes for women. Detainees were also given mobile phones so they could contact family and lawyers.
Some of those held at the centre will be sent home. However, others will be granted permission to remain in the UK or bailed. A Home Office spokesman said: ‘Detention and removal are essential parts of effective immigration controls. It is vital these are carried out with dignity and respect and we take the welfare of our detainees very seriously.
‘We are taking action to address the recommendations.’
Earlier this year, it was revealed that suspected illegal immigrants at Morton Hall in Lincolnshire were offered courses on how to make to be bartenders specialising in alcohol-free fruit cocktails known as ‘mocktails’.
Also on offer were short courses including how to fold napkins in restaurants, window-cleaning, training to be a barista and classes in hotel housekeeping.
The courses, which pay the detainees £1 an hour, are intended to make sure they have skills to secure jobs when they return to their homeland.
It has been estimated that a place at a removal centre costs £30,000 a year. |
Google Now has a tendency to add voice commands without most people noticing. Besides the few listed in-app, Google hides most of its commands, perhaps the most useful ones. For example, Google's voice actions have been integrated and implemented within YouTube, so you can control video playback with your mi... wait, no that's the next update.
To get started, just start playing any video in the YouTube app. Then you can use any of these voice commands, triggered by the "OK Google" keyword, provided you have enabled its detection from any screen:
"Pause" - Pauses the video.
- Pauses the video. "Play" - Resumes the video.
- Resumes the video. "Stop" - Stops the video and quits buffering, works exactly like switching to another app and switching back.
- Stops the video and quits buffering, works exactly like switching to another app and switching back. "Minimize" - Moves the video to the tiny window at the bottom right.
- Moves the video to the tiny window at the bottom right. "Maximize" - Makes the video full screen.
- Makes the video full screen. "Exit", "Close player " - Closes the video, but leaves YouTube open.
" - Closes the video, but leaves YouTube open. "Play on...", "Connect to..." - Starts playing the video on another device, choices are "TV", "Chromecast", or "Console." Unfortunately, you can't seem to be able to say the name of the device (such as a Chromecast's name).
- Starts playing the video on another device, choices are "TV", "Chromecast", or "Console." Unfortunately, you can't seem to be able to say the name of the device (such as a Chromecast's name). "Disconnect from..." - The opposite of the last command, stops playing the video on a remote device.
- The opposite of the last command, stops playing the video on a remote device. "Skip ads" - Somewhat self-explanatory.
You may ask yourself, "Why would I waste precious seconds talking to my phone instead of pressing a button?" I can actually think of many uses for these commands. If you're doing something where your hands are tied up, like following a cooking video or a car-repair tutorial, being able to tell the phone to pause or play the video with your voice is helpful. If you're driving and using the YouTube app for music playback, using voice commands for playback control is much safer than looking down at your phone.
We're not sure when exactly these commands started being functional; our best guess is sometime in 2016. Cody had discovered their existence long before, more than a year ago, in a YouTube teardown, but they weren't working then. Some of you may already be using these commands, others may be hearing about them for the first time now, so that's why we think they're worth highlighting again. |
In my opinion, archeology fails to understand what it finds because: 1) most archeologists are male, and… 2) most archeologists are not doctors.
Because they are male, they tend to think in terms of what ancient men did; they hunted and they fought wars. They don’t think in terms of women, who raised children and spent many more hours in caves. Because they are not doctors, they neglect fundamental facts. My favorite is that life expectancy in ancient prehistory must have been 20 or so. The human brain is not fully formed until about that age. So most of what those people did was done during their teenage years.
The latter fact explains why so many actions of “primitive” people appear irrational and barbaric to us. It is not necessarily that the human brain “evolved”, but quite simply that society was mostly made of very young kids. Imagine turning the government of your country over to teenagers.
The male bias is even more pervasive and may account for several mysteries that archeologists never cracked.
For example, archeologists routinely assume that the first tools were stone tools that require strong men to make and strong men to use, and mostly used for hunting and killing in general. If you are a woman, and try to think like a woman of two million years ago, you reach a different conclusion: before those brave athletic men could go hunting, they had to survive their childhood.
A child in those days, just like today in many poor countries, is constantly with the mother. Mothers know what fathers easily forget: that babies (of both genders) are helpless for several years. Before the invention of kindergartens, and especially when grandparents were dying young, mothers had to take care of those helpless babies, and many of them. One tool that is common to all societies is a tool to carry babies around. The first tool was probably invented by women to carry babies with them wherever they had to go. A baby can never be left alone, especially in the conditions of two million years ago.
Another tool that is necessary to survive childhood is: clothes. Babies were protected from cold and sun by the tool to carry them but, once they started walking on their own, needed clothes: children can get sick much more easily than adults. Once they survived childhood, those brave boys could go on and become hunters and, yes, build amazing tools for hunting (and for killing each other). Therefore the story of tools from a woman’s perspective is very different from the story of tools from a male
perspective.
Ditto for art. Archeologists consistently come up with “male” theories to explain the frescoes of prehistoric caves even if they admit that it was women, and not men, who spent more time there. After all, the paintings show men hunting animals. Male archeologists conclude that it was men drawing their mighty adventures in the world.
But try to think like a woman and you get an alternative interpretation: why does a woman make a drawing on a blackboard of, say, the shape of the USA for the children of the class? Who is more likely to make that drawing for children? The men who fought in the wars to create and protect that country, or the women who stayed home and raised the citizens of the future? Who is more likely to draw an elephant for children to explain what an elephant is? The one who hunts elephants or the one who stays home and teaches children what they need to know to become one of those hunters? |
During recent investigations conducted using cameras and robots at the site of Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, after six years of the triple meltdown, it has likely identified melted fuel rods for the first time underneath the damaged reactor 2, Japan Times reported. Following a major earthquake on March 11, 2011, a 15-metre tsunami disabled the power supply and cooling of three Fukushima Daiichi reactors, causing a nuclear accident.
Before this investigation, robots were also sent inside the reactor 2, in mid-February, which was the first time since the plant's meltdown in 2011, but due to extreme high radiation levels, even those could not survive, the Guardian had reported.
Read: Fukushima News: Even Robots Failed To Survive In 'Unimaginable' Nuclear Reactor Radiation
The Fukushima Daiichi tragedy is the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl that occurred April 26, 1986.
Although experts have pointed out that getting a peek into the vessel of reactor 2 was an accomplishment but the investigation also highlighted the difficulty level of reaching the exact location of the melted fuel. Removing it is still a distant thought.
Last month, the facility’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), had said atmospheric readings has reached up to 530 sieverts an hour, which was recorded inside the containment vessel of reactor No 2. Just a single dose of one sievert can cause radiation sickness and nausea and 5 sieverts can kill half those exposed to it within a month and a single dose of 10 sieverts can be deadly within weeks, according to the Guardian.
The biggest challenge to remove the melted fuel underneath the reactor 2 is the extremely lethal levels of radiation inside the vessel that have crippled even robots and other mechanical devices. Experts are concerned about how to take out the melted fuel in the crippled reactors, Japan Times reported.
“The work to probe inside the containment vessels and remove the fuel debris will be extremely tough because of the high radiation levels,” said Hiroshi Miyano, who heads a panel of the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, which is discussing ways to decommission the Fukushima plant and making recommendations to the government.
It might take 30 to 40 years to clean up the plant and the industry ministry recently estimated the cost at 21.5 trillion yen ($189 billion), according to the Guardian. |
The Air Force issued a press release on Tuesday stating that two pilots in training have gone missing from Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.
According to WISTV, "multiple law enforcement agencies" were notified by the base about the missing pilots. They were both screened before coming to the United States over a year ago. As in, they went through our security screening process for coming here. It's a process you've probably heard mention of in the news from time to time recently.
Moody Air Force Base's full press release can be viewed below:
Two male Afghan air force students did not report for duty yesterday at their regular maintenance training at Moody AFB in Valdosta, Georgia. Both are assigned to the 81st Fighter Squadron. They have been at Moody since. February 2015 and were screened prior to their arrival in the United States more than a year ago. The students have trained alongside American counterparts for the entirety of 2015 and do not pose any apparent threat. There is a well-coordinated process among federal agencies to locate the individuals as quickly as possible and return them accordingly to the proper authorities to manage their present situation. Please contact Public Affairs with any questions at 229-257-4146 during normal duty hours (7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.) or the Command Post at 229-257-3501 outside of normal duty hours.
The men were there as part of a comprehensive training program:
In August of 2014, the Air Force selected Moody as the stateside training location for Afghan A-29 Super Tucano pilots and maintainers. The Air Force said that Moody would support 20 planes, 17 Air Force instructor pilots, and 24 maintenance and support personnel, to train a total of 30 Afghan pilots and 90 Afghan maintainers over the next four years.
As RedState notes, this is not the first such incident.
The incident isn’t the first time Afghan military personal have disappeared while in the U.S. for training. In 2012, three senior Afghan national army officers disappeared while at Joint Base Cape Cod. The men were later discovered and detained after trying to cross over the Canadian border. Also in 2012, two Afghan policemen in Washington, D.C. for training disappeared during a sightseeing trip. They were later found by officials at an undisclosed location.
Truth Revolt will update this story as information becomes available. |
Over the last few years, the 5th-generation 4Runner has become one of the most popular four-wheel drives in the overland segment, and it’s not hard to understand why. They are capable, reliable, relatively affordable, and easy to modify, making them perfect for both new enthusiasts and experienced travelers alike. But recently, we’ve noticed a growing problem. With so many 4runners out there, and only a limited number of aftermarket parts, these Toyotas are all beginning to look the same, which is why we contacted Adrian van de Water to spice things up a bit. While Adrian’s bread and butter is shooting road cars, he recently got into four-wheel drives, and built the seriously cool 4Runner you see here. So without further adieu, let’s take a closer look, and learn a little more about the logic behind this project.
After looking at your website, it’s clear you have a passion for cars and work with some truly unique and exotic vehicles. What was it that drew you toward the 4Runner for your latest purchase?
I had never owned a 4WD vehicle before, and at the time I was driving a 2001 4Runner Sport. It was costing me a TON of money in repairs, and it was only 2WD. We took a couple trips to Anza Borrego and Joshua Tree, and I continually found myself wanting more. I remember one incident in particular. We were coming up to a sand bar that was probably 100 yards long, and you had to cross it to continue down the trail. I was by myself, and didn’t want to risk getting stuck, so I turned around and found another way. It sucked, and I told myself that my next vehicle had to be 4WD.
That’s when Toyota released the TRD Pro. I was stoked to see that it already came with most of things I wanted, so I wouldn’t really need to change much to get to the locations I needed to reach. I made up my mind and started hunting for a TRD Pro, but I soon learned just how hard finding one would be. People were ordering them a year in advance, dealerships were only getting a certain amount of allocations, etcetera. After quite some time, I finally found one that hit port and was told it was mine at no mark up. I WAS STOKED!!! There was no deposit required, and the paperwork was set. “We will give you a call,” they said. They didn’t.
Weeks went by, and I finally decided to call them. My TRD Pro was gone. The dealer said that they had hit their allocation for the year and they couldn’t hold it for me. I was bummed. I found a couple more, but all of them had a 5-10k markup, and I wasn’t willing to pay that. At this point, I had poured over $6,000 into my 2001 4Runner’s repairs and I was over it. I sold it, bought another vehicle for work, and called it quits.
Fast forward 12 months, and I was looking again. This time, I had compared the Pro and the Trail Premium packages, and noticed they weren’t that far off. So I went searching for a white, silver, or black Trail Premium. I eventually found one, and pulled the trigger on a 2016 Toyota Trail Premium 4Runner.
Alright, so usually we see people waver when choosing modifications for their first four-wheel drive, but you did a great job. What drove you to build this truck the way you did? Did you know everything you wanted from the beginning, or figure it out as you went?
I have been building cars for a while, and found that I can never leave them alone. My 2001 Sport was only 2WD, but I purchased a 2-inch lift to fit my 32-inch Toyo RTs for better traction, and even installed a set of sliders in case I got into a situation where some rocker panels would get damaged—so I knew this 4Runner wouldn’t be stock for long. The first thing I did, within 24 hours in fact, was take it off road and up some steep inclines. I had to see what the hype was all about. The rear locker, ATRAC, and crawl control are definitely cool options, and got me up about everything I attempted. I did notice that my factory tires were slipping a lot, and that the front end of the 4Runner was extremely low. I tapped the factory skids a few times, and drove home with a growing list in my head.
The next day, I ordered a skid plate, a 3-inch lift, and put in a order for some 285/70s to fit my new 17X8.5 wheels. I bought the new wheels for two reasons. First, I had read on forums that many people had experienced trouble with the 285/70 popping the bead with factory wheels when aired down. Second, well they just look cooler than the factory wheels. I drank the Kool-Aid and bought wider wheels. The combination of the lift, skids, wheels, and tires gave me better clearance, traction, and some protection, which resulted in peace of mind.
As I started to take my truck off road more though, I noticed that I wanted something to protect the paint. I was super OCD about pin stripes, and hadn’t realized how many I would actually get, so I started looking for solutions. I decided to wrap my truck, and was able to pick my color of choice, Olive Drab in a matte film. It has held up AMAZINGLY well, and I love the way it looks. Truthfully, the second reason I wrapped it was because I wanted something different and unique. The Olive Drab wrap sets my truck apart from all of the other 4Runners out there.
The rest of the truck came together by me wanting to try different things or because they were needed in previous trips. I’ve been through three styles of tires, two different suspension setups, and a few other mods that I feel were needed for the type of exploring I like to do. I didn’t install lights, a winch, and sliders because I simply wanted them, but because I had needed them in actual situations, and they would help to make the experience safer and more enjoyable.
Overlanding is about exploring the world around us, which for many of us means using our four-wheel drives to pursue other passions like fly-fishing, kayaking, or rock climbing. Has your 4Runner enabled you to pursue your passions in ways that weren’t possible before?
I make my living as a photographer, and since owning my 4Runner I’ve discovered many locations that I would have never seen without an off-road vehicle. The places that it has taken me in the last year have been nothing short of incredible. Experiencing these dramatic locations from the backcountry has made the entire process more exhilarating, and has driven me to get out and see more whenever I can. With the 4Runner I’m always looking for my next adventure.
It sounds like you made the right choice in a vehicle then! With all of this inspiration, where have you been able to take your 4Runner so far? Do you have any big dreams for trips in the future?
In the last year, I’ve had the opportunity to take the 4Runner on a few different trips. When I first got it back in October, I was on the trails almost twice a week trying to figure how the truck would handle, getting a feel for the 4WD system, and just having a good time. The first multiple day trip in the 4R was with a few buddies leading us through Dumont dunes. We took a trail over into Troana, up into Alabama Hills, and ended up in this rad little ghost town right outside of Lone Pine called Cerro Gordo. The next trip I took was in January 2017 and is an annual run I do with some friends down the Mojave Road. We usually spend about 3-4 days on the trail, and it was the first time going in the 4Runner. It handled it like a champ, but I definitely came back wanting some new mods to make the next year even better!
My favorite trip I have taken so far though has been the trek from California to FJ Summit in Ouray, Colorado. To keep it short, the trip out there consisted of Toquerville Falls, hitting the infamous Top of the World Trail in Moab, and then finally arriving in Ouray for the experience of a lifetime. The entire trip was a week long, and I want to go back! The scenery, trails, multiple types of weather, and great company made it an amazing experience. I also did a recent trip to Arizona. We hit a few popular trails like the backway to Crown King, Broken Arrow, and Schnebly Hill. It was a quick 3-day trip, but I will definitely be going back soon.
I haven’t really thought about where I want to go next. I see different locations all the time and have locations mapped out, but nothing is set in stone as of yet. My season of work slows down a bit in the winter months, so I’ll be planning a trip soon.
Now that you’ve driven the vehicle for a while and really used it off-road, would you change anything about it?
One of the things I wish they would have done was added a little more power. I remember having this similar motor in my 2008 Tacoma, and it felt sluggish then. A front locker and a solid axle up front would have been nice, but I think that’s wishful thinking. For upcoming mods though I have plenty more planned, and I’m just waiting for the opportunity to arise. I’m currently looking at a roof top tent, installing new gears, and a front locker, and then hoping to figure out my rear bumper situation. As of now, at least until the first of the year, I am pretty content with the 4Runner. It takes me where I need to go, and I have a blast getting there. Of course, we always want more.
To learn more about Adrian and his work, visit his website here.
To follow his adventures on Instagram, check out his account @fotornr here. |
Samuel Sochukwuma Okwaraji (19 May 1964 – 12 August 1989) was a professional footballer who played internationally for Nigeria. He was also a qualified lawyer who had a masters in international law from the University of Rome.[1] He collapsed and died of congestive heart failure in the 77th minute of a World Cup qualification match against Angola at the Lagos National Stadium in Surulere, Lagos State on 12 August 1989.
Career [ edit ]
Okwaraji was born on 19 May 1964 in Orlu, Imo State, Nigeria.
Okwaraji had a career in Europe which included playing for AS Roma (1984-1985), NK Dinamo Zagreb (1985-1986), Austria Klagenfurt (1986-1987), VfB Stuttgart (1987-1989) and SSV Ulm 1846 (loan) (1987-1988) while finishing his education in law. In his short stay with Dinamo Zagreb, Samuel scored 3 goals in a friendly game vs NK Budućnost Hodošan. The game was played on 30 April 1986, and Dinamo Zagreb won 12-0. Samuel's only official game for Dinamo in the Yugoslav First League was as a substitute on 18 May 1986 against FK Priština. The game was played at Maksimir stadium in Zagreb, the 29th round of 1985/86 season. Dinamo Zagreb won 4:3.
International career [ edit ]
He made the Green Eagles squad in 1988 and at that year's African Nations Cup he scored one of the fastest goals in the history of the championship against the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon. He played along until the final match, where the Eagles lost to their perennial rivals Cameroon by a lone goal.
Last game and death [ edit ]
Okwaraji collapsed ten minutes from the end of a 1990 World Cup qualifier against Angola in Lagos and died from congestive heart failure. An autopsy showed that the 25-year-old had an enlarged heart and high blood pressure. The sudden death was similar to that of Marc-Vivien Foé less than 14 years later.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
External sources [ edit ] |
Podcast in Print: Defining expectations for Bears QB Mitch Trubisky
The Chicago Sun-Times’ Adam L. Jahns and WGN Radio’s Adam Hoge have co-hosted a Bears podcast since the 2015 season. The “Hoge & Jahns Podcast” can be found on chicago.suntimes.com and wgnradio.com. It’s also available on the WGN Radio app, iTunes and the TuneIn app.
Adam L. Jahns: Well, Adam, Mike Glennon had a fair run. Four full regular-season games isn’t much of a body of work, but it’s still work nonetheless. And he didn’t work out well. He’s a nice guy with more charisma than he’s given credit for but production matters. Wins matter. And he simply turned the ball over too much. Enter second overall pick Mitch Trubisky. It’s an exciting time for fans and the organization. But what should everyone expect from him? Surely, no one expected that Glennon would be that bad. But here we are. We get to see what the kid can do in real games.
Adam Hoge: We should expect Trubisky to be a more mobile, athletic quarterback with better footwork and better pocket awareness. That’s what his tape from North Carolina and the preseason showed. What he lacks in experience, especially when it comes to reading NFL defenses, he’ll make up for with his ability. Will there be growing pains? Absolutely, especially against defenses — like the Vikings — that disguise coverages well. But Trubisky instantly makes the Bears’ offense more difficult to prepare for, which should lift some pressure off the running game and lead to more points. Once again, the key will be not turning the ball over.
Jahns: I get all that. I’m sure there will be some run-pass options that help him by opening up throwing lanes and providing easy reads. I’m sure there will be read-option looks, too, since he’s a threat with his legs. North Carolina’s offense included those play calls. Offensive coordinator Dowell Loggains surely will implement the same. There will be variety. But so what? Sure, Trubisky provides more than Glennon, but the Vikings have a defense full of veterans. Trubisky isn’t a unique threat to them. Heck, they’ve already faced Drew Brees, Ben Roethlisberger, Matthew Stafford and Jameis Winston this season. I’m watching Trubisky’s poise and his willingness to play within the pocket. I want to see him get the Bears’ offense in order and call out the “Mike” linebacker correctly.
Bears quarterback Mitch Trubisky. (AP)
Hoge: Well, he can’t do any worse than Glennon in that regard. The idea that Glennon could get the offense lined up properly without false starts and cadence issues turned out to be false. I actually expect Loggains to keep things pretty simple with Trubisky in there. The Bears have already proven they can hang with good teams as long as they don’t turn the ball over. I think there will be some wrinkles, but low-risk wrinkles. Honestly, a Glennon-like game plan with a quarterback that can actually move and make plays on his own isn’t a bad idea, especially with the lack of weapons at Trubisky’s disposal. Right or wrong, I expect the Bears to be conservative with Trubisky’s on-field development until he earns more aggressive play-calling. Remember, he’s not supposed to be on the field yet.
Jahns: Well, he is on the field, and I don’t think we’ll see a Glennon-like game plan. That’s not how this works. Trubisky is too different a player. The Bears are 29th in scoring. Scrap everything. Move on from Glennon. I get what you’re saying. You want to protect your rookie quarterback with play-calling. But keeping things the same only hurts Trubisky. You want to protect him? Identify what he did well in college and do your best to implement it at this level. That’s your starting point. Sorry. It’s just that the phrase “Glennon-like game plan” will make some fans shudder. Trubisky is a better player. Design your attack knowing that.
Hoge: I’m not saying you keep everything under 10 yards, but quick passes are the name of the game in the NFL these days, and that won’t change with Trubisky. I like what he said Tuesday about being a “distributor” and getting the ball to his playmakers (those are limited, admittedly). Glennon was woefully inaccurate on screens, especially to his wide receivers on the outside. Going back to his UNC film, that’s one of Trubisky’s strengths. The Bears won’t get away from those plays because Trubisky is in there. But no matter what Loggains ends up calling, it should all look better. Like the fans, I’m excited to see what No. 10 can do. Trubisky brings optimism to a dormant franchise, and I’m on record saying I think he can be pretty special.
Jahns: The setting of “Monday Night Football” should suit those special qualities, too. He seems to possess prime-time intangibles. The team itself learned during the preseason that he excels when the lights are on. The stage certainly is bigger now, but Trubisky naturally exudes confidence. The Vikings are a daunting challenge; they will blitz him. But a national-TV audience should come away impressed with Trubisky. That said, it’s important to temper expectations for him overall. He’ll look like a franchise savior on some plays; other times, he’ll run around like an overwhelmed rookie. That will happen this week and next and after that, too. But the hope is real. The franchise needed this; the fanbase needed this. All of it was overdue. It’s finally Trubisky time.
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The man tasked with leading the most ambitious effort in years to clear San Francisco’s streets of tents began his mission on his knees.
Jason Albertson knelt the other day before a wary crowd of hard-core homeless campers along the waterfront near Cesar Chavez and Indiana streets after asking them to gather together for a few moments, and as he opened his mouth they didn’t really know what to expect. They knew he’d come to tell them they had to tear down their sprawling camp by the end of August. But they’ve heard orders to clear out before, here and at other camps.
Would this just be a quick heads-up followed by an army of police and street cleaners tearing down their tents?
Not this time. What Albertson, head of the newly created city Encampment Resolution Team, brought to this colony of about 50 people was something new: a straight-up splash of reality, on-the-spot offers of shelter and counseling, and promises to help them get ready for the clear-out day.
Albertson came with counselors from several organizations to back up the offers, and said he’d be the camp’s advocate for an orderly dismantling — not a sudden roust by an army of police and street cleaners.
Beginning his talk with the colony on his knees was no accident. They were seated on benches, and he was meeting them eye-to-eye: Not talking down to them, but with them.
His effort is a pilot project ordered up by Jeff Kositsky, director of the new city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, and so far Albertson, who officially started in mid-July, is the team’s only member.
The goal is to find healthier situations for desperate people while trying to eliminate the most visible and, to many, the most aggravating manifestation of San Francisco’s chronic inability to clear its streets. It’s the first team of its kind in the city — and the task is mountainous, considering there isn’t enough housing or shelter space to quickly move hundreds of street campers inside.
For Albertson, the job started with persuading these 50 camp dwellers that accepting government help was better than living on a plot of land co-owned by the Port of San Francisco near Interstate 280. He’d been steered to the camp, one of the biggest in the city, by flurries of complaints from the port and nearby residents.
“I understand that on some level this is a great place to be, and in another way it’s a terrible place to be,” Albertson said evenly, as he looked up at his little audience from his spot on the sidewalk in front of them. “But once the port noticed it, you can’t un-ring the bell. You will have to leave. But I am here to help with that.”
People in the crowd sighed. He went on.
The help, Albertson said, means he’s arranging for portable toilets and showers to be brought in. And trash bins for them to toss out the stuff they won’t take with them. There might be a mini-health fair on site for the campers to be checked for tuberculosis and other afflictions that can come with living rough.
And, most important to the camp dwellers, when the California Highway Patrol came that morning for a roust, he negotiated a delay.
“The idea is to give you a chance for a little more dignity as we go through this process,” Albertson said.
The campers, many of whom had lived there for more than a year, visibly relaxed with every sentence he spoke. After a few minutes, the 20 who stayed for the whole talk were putting their names and cell phone numbers on a contact list so counselors could follow up.
In similar situations, when told they have to abandon an encampment, some homeless people have shouted angrily or stomped away, and there were no trash bins, toilets or health checkups before it was time to go. But this was different.
The new ingredient was 53-year-old Albertson. He’s been working with hard-core homeless people and the mentally ill in San Francisco and on the Peninsula for 25 years, and there are few counselors or longtime street people who haven’t heard of him. He’s tough, but he listens.
“Here’s my cell phone,” Albertson said, reading out the number. “Call me any time, day or night. The more I know about the conditions here, what you need, the better I can protect and defend, represent your needs.”
Katherine McClain, 36, began listening to Albertson with a dejected look on her face. She’s been kicked out of camps before. By the end of the 20-minute talk, though, she was smiling.
“We were curious about what he’d say, and this is actually good,” McClain said. “The last time anyone sat down with people like us like this was, well, never. This is actually helpful.”
Eric Smith, a substance abuse counselor from the Health Right 360 health services nonprofit who accompanied Albertson, shook his head admiringly as the city official read out his phone number.
“That’s huge right there,” he whispered. “To have an advocate like that? You just don’t see that.” Smith got two takers that morning for his offer of residential rehabilitation programs.
Albertson said he’s still assembling his approach, drawing on best-practice techniques by existing counseling teams and resources, including a U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness guide for addressing tent camps. As he solidifies his plan, he hopes to enlist participants from departments including Public Health, and to create a tracking system for every homeless camper so their needs can be better addressed.
Both he and Kositsky said they realize the waiting lists for shelters and housing are too long to immediately house everyone now living in a tent, and that public interest in clearing camps has become so intense that members of the Board of Supervisors have crafted proposed laws and a November ballot measure to speed up dismantlements.
But by working with every player involved — from police and businesses to street cleaners and the homeless people themselves — camps can be reduced in a more orderly fashion and prevented from re-forming in short order a block or two away, they believe.
Albertson oversaw the dismantlement in 2012 of what was then the city’s biggest homeless camp, near the Caltrain station at Fourth and King streets. He helped set up a counseling triage center that housed virtually all the campers, which served as a prototype for the one-stop Navigation Centers created a few years later. He also helped clear out the old Transbay Terminal before it was torn down.
“One of the key things is, how do you coordinate all the jurisdictions involved and bring all the resources together in the best possible manner?” Albertson said. “That’s what we’re here to figure out.”
Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @KevinChron |
hayyyWanted to draw the girls as....well humans, and, after watching a couple of episodes, and wasting 1 hour on a sketch I ruined with the lineart, I decided towell why notDigital it is(traditional, why you failed me, YOU WERE MY FRIEND)ahemMoving on, this is how I like to imagine them as humans:- Twilight Sparkle being the tiny twig all cute- Rarity as a big sexy girl- Apple Jack is on the side of muscular farm girl- Pinkie Pie our cute chubby prank-cutie,- Flutter Shy has an hourglass figure but you can't see with her clothes- Rainbow Dash is kinda like AJ but has no curves (better for flying am I right)My otp is FlutterDash with no doubt (there's hint's in the draw, find them all and I'll give you a cookie), but that RariJack? man so adorbs =u=Anyhay, I want to work more with them, also draw Spike and some other pony andmaybesomelovechildsbecausewhynotMy Little Pony: FiM (c) HasbroHuman designs (c) |
"What we want to do tomorrow [Monday)] is to open a case against the SAPS [South African Police Service]," said George Tyobeka, a worker representative.
A man identified by mine workers as Mtshunquleni Qakamba (48) died when police fired rubber bullets and teargas to disperse a gathering on a hill on an Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) mine in the northwestern town of Rustenburg on Thursday.
"They shot against the people ... until they killed one of our colleagues," Tyobeka told AFP, adding that the workers wanted to file charges of murder and attempted murder.
"Employees weren't fighting, they were just sitting on the hill," he said.
Authorities have not confirmed the man's identity or cause of death.
An independent police watchdog has meanwhile taken over the investigation "as the incident appeared to have arisen from police action", police said in a statement.
A day after the death Amplats, the world's top platinum producer, formally dismissed 12 000 of 28 000 striking workers following disciplinary hearings.
Workers had downed tools on September 12 demanding wages of R16 070 – more than double what some earn.
On Saturday around 1 500 people gathered at the hill where the clashes occurred to commemorate Qakamba. Vowing to fight for higher wages, the worker representatives will meet with government mediators on Monday about their demands, but not to discuss their sacking, Tyobeka said.
"Tomorrow we don't want to mention the issue of dismissal.
Dismissal is an issue of management," he said.
Wildcat strikes have spread across South Africa's mining sector as workers reject their conventional union structures. Lonmin, the world's third largest platinum producer, gave strikers pay rises of up to 22% in September after 46 people were killed, including 34 shot by police on August 16, during six weeks of illegal work stoppages. – Sapa-AFP |
State Of Origin is just two sleeps away (excluding nanna naps…).
Everybody has had their say about the Blues squad, and very little has been discussed regarding the Maroons. Rightly so.
The only bloke I would’ve included in the Queensland mob would be Dave Taylor. There’s something in the air around him at the moment, and that something reeks of a redemption story. I feel it would’ve been a great time to show the rugby league world that he is back.
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>> TURNER: Behind the scenes of Origin preparation
In saying this, how can we argue that they’ve made a ‘mistake’? Everybody in the Queensland squad is more than capable. Just ask anyone who has played for the Blues over the last eight years.
I think the Blues have picked a fantastic squad, and with the probable return of Bird and Fifita next match it’s only going to get stronger. No matter who Laurie Daley and the selectors were going to choose, they were always going to be subject to somewhat of a public bashing. Again… rightly so. That comes with the territory after eight consecutive series losses.
I love the Blues squad. It has a real fresh, enthusiastic feeling about it. Watching TV interviews over the past week, the Blues players look as though they’re hiding something.
There’s a real underlying confidence about them. It’s as if they’re playing up to the underdog tag and the media are more than happy to run with it.
I was chatting to Paul Gallen after our loss to the Tigers last Saturday and I was saying that if you lined both teams up next to each other, looked at both teams’ individuals, took into account current form, athletic ability, and then took away the blue and maroon colours, plus the hype and passion of Origin, then I think the odds would come in a whole lot more even.
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Many may disagree, but I honestly believe the hype and aura of the mighty Maroons is what beats the Blues, not the physical ability of the players.
The fact is, that hype, passion and aura will all be there Wednesday. This time, I think the Blues, debutants included, will be more than ready. I doubt very much that we’ll see any sort of a blow out game. I think we’re in for an absolute ripper.
Having both left and right side centres and wingers, the halves, and Robbie Farah and Aaron Woods together is a master stroke. They’d be so comfortable playing next to one another that it’ll be second nature.
Trying to gel and form a football relationship with someone you’ve never played with in a frantic 10 days can and often does spell disaster.
When you know how your footy neighbour plays the game and communicates, you can concentrate on firing, as opposed to learning how to handle a new teammate.
All these boxes are being ticked, but don’t forget who the Blues are up against. This is why Origin is one of, if not the most exciting event on the planet. You can’t pick it. It sounds silly after eight consecutive Queensland wins, but nobody is ever over confident when choosing a winner for Origin.
Will the Blues win game 1? I’m asking you. I believe they definitely can. But will they?
The current Maroons squad is phenomenal. A team of champions and more importantly, a champion team. The media are portraying them as very very relaxed and dare I say, almost bored.
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Well played media! There’s no way the Maroons are expecting a walk in the park.
If the Blues can pull off a series win this year, they will be Gods. They will go down in history as monster killers.
I cannot wait for this.
So, here we are. I can almost taste it. I’m asking you: who wins and by how much?
I’m tipping the Blues in an upset by seven points. |
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will try to rev up Democrats in Ohio during a two-day visit, as the number of states that could swing to either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump narrows to just a handful.
Obama heads to Columbus on Thursday to be the featured speaker at an annual dinner benefiting Ohio Democrats and Gov. Ted Strickland, who is running to oust incumbent Republican Sen. Rob Portman. On Friday, Obama will hold a rally in Cleveland for Clinton emphasizing early voting, a major focus for Democrats across the U.S. this year.
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This week Obama entered the final 100 days of his presidency, and he's increasingly devoting his time to trying to push Clinton over the finish line in the presidential race. With Trump and Republicans threatening to undo much of what Obama has accomplished over the last eight years, campaigning for Democrats is the most productive way for Obama to try to protect his legacy.
Before flying to Ohio, Obama planned to speak in Pittsburgh at the "White House Frontiers Conference," where aides said he'd announce new funding for technology and research and tout innovations like self-driving cars and artificial intelligence. Obama, in an op-ed in the magazine Wired, said the U.S. needed to adapt its skills to address emerging threats like antibiotic-resistant "superbugs," cybersecurity and climate change.
"To accelerate that change, we need science," Obama said.
Ohio, with its diverse mix of cities and rural areas, is a coveted prize every four years, seen as a barometer for the shifts in the nation's political climate. This year, it's one of just four states that polls suggest are currently toss-ups between Clinton and Trump, along with Nevada, North Carolina and Florida.
Trump, too, was setting his sights on Ohio on Thursday, with a speech in Columbus and an evening rally in Cincinnati.
The shrinking of the political battlefield reflects demographic shifts that have benefited Democrats in several states and Trump's struggles to expand his appeal to a broad cross-section of America. But Obama and Democrats have been wary not to take anything for granted, particularly as the final weeks of the campaign have taken a series of unpredictable turns.
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Obama and his wife, Michelle, are two of the country's most popular Democrats, making them the most effective voices to vouch publicly for Clinton. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that makes the first couple particularly useful in freeing up Clinton to focus her limited time elsewhere.
"The real value of having somebody as high-profile as the president or the first lady on the stump campaigning for you is that you don't have to also go there in order to get attention. You've got somebody else there who can make a forceful case in support of your candidacy," Earnest said.
Hoping that broad disdain for Trump will sink other Republican candidates, Democrats have been particularly bullish this year about retaking the Senate, which would significantly strengthen Clinton's hand legislatively should she win the White House. Democrats had expected Strickland's race to be one of their better prospects to win a GOP-held Senate seat, but he has been running consistently behind Portman in the polls.
Yet in a sign of how toxic Trump has become for other Republicans, Portman revoked his support for Trump after video emerged of Trump making offensive comments about women. Portman has said he's backing Trump's running mate Mike Pence instead.
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___
Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP |
For a thing (that you may hear more about at some point in the future) I needed diagrams of traffic lights. But Google Image Search didn’t really have what I was looking for. Everything was either too realistic or not CC-licensed so I couldn’t use the images how I wanted.
So I decided to do it myself. But I’m not exactly artistic. I far prefer it when I can get computers to draw images for me. I’ve dabbled with SVG before and it seemed like the perfect tool for the job. And there’s a module from CPAN that makes it simple to create SVG images from Perl.
It only took an hour or so before I was drawing images like the one above – which was exactly what I was looking for.
Initially, I shared my code as a Gist, but since then I’ve extracted the useful bits into a module which I’ve uploaded to CPAN as SVG::TrafficLight. I’ve tried to make it as configurable as possible, so you should be able to use it for all your traffic light drawing needs as well.
Starting to use it is pretty simple.
Basic use of SVG::TrafficLight use SVG::TrafficLight; my $tl = SVG::TrafficLight->new; # default image print $some_file_handle $tl->xmlify; 1 2 3 4 use SVG:: TrafficLight ; my $tl = SVG:: TrafficLight-> new ; # default image print $some_file_handle $tl -> xmlify ;
The default sequence of lights shows the UK’s standard traffic light sequence (green, amber, red, red and amber, green) but it’s simple enough to produce a different sequence (even one that you would never see on the roads).
A different sequence of lights my $tl2 = SVG::TrafficLight->new({ sequence => [ { red => 1, amber => 1, green => 1 }, # all lights on { red => 0, amber => 0, green => 0 }, # all lights off ], }); 1 2 3 4 5 6 my $tl2 = SVG:: TrafficLight -> new ( { sequence = > [ { red = > 1 , amber = > 1 , green = > 1 } , # all lights on { red = > 0 , amber = > 0 , green = > 0 } , # all lights off ] , } ) ;
If you read the documentation, you’ll see how you can customise pretty much anything in the diagram – the size of the lights, the padding between them, even the colours used.
Let me know if you find it all at useful. SVG is fun. I’ll think I’ll investigate it some more.
Also published on Medium. |
I’ve ranted about this at length before, I’m sure – even in print, in O’Reily’s Open Sources 2. But now Debian have proved me right (again) beyond my wildest expectations. Two years ago, they “fixed” a “problem” in OpenSSL reported by valgrind[1] by removing any possibility of adding any entropy to OpenSSL’s pool of randomness[2].
The result of this is that for the last two years (from Debian’s “Etch” release until now), anyone doing pretty much any crypto on Debian (and hence Ubuntu) has been using easily guessable keys. This includes SSH keys, SSL keys and OpenVPN keys.
What can we learn from this? Firstly, vendors should not be fixing problems (or, really, anything) in open source packages by patching them locally – they should contribute their patches upstream to the package maintainers. Had Debian done this in this case, we (the OpenSSL Team) would have fallen about laughing, and once we had got our breath back, told them what a terrible idea this was. But no, it seems that every vendor wants to “add value” by getting in between the user of the software and its author.
Secondly, if you are going to fix bugs, then you should install this maxim of mine firmly in your head: never fix a bug you don’t understand. I’m not sure I’ve ever put that in writing before, but anyone who’s worked with me will have heard me say it multiple times.
Incidentally, while I am talking about vendors who are bad for security, it saddens me to have to report that FreeBSD, my favourite open source operating system, are also guilty. Not only do they have local patches in their ports system that should clearly be sent upstream, but they also install packages without running the self-tests. This has bitten me twice by installing broken crypto, most recently in the py-openssl package.
[1] Valgrind is a wonderful tool, I recommend it highly.
[2] Valgrind tracks the use of uninitialised memory. Usually it is bad to have any kind of dependency on uninitialised memory, but OpenSSL happens to include a rare case when its OK, or even a good idea: its randomness pool. Adding uninitialised memory to it can do no harm and might do some good, which is why we do it. It does cause irritating errors from some kinds of debugging tools, though, including valgrind and Purify. For that reason, we do have a flag (PURIFY) that removes the offending code. However, the Debian maintainers, instead of tracking down the source of the uninitialised memory instead chose to remove any possibility of adding memory to the pool at all. Clearly they had not understood the bug before fixing it.
P.S. I’d link to the offending patch in Debian’s source repository. If I could find a source repository. But I can’t.
(Update)
Thanks to Cat Okita, I have now found the repo. Here’s the offending patch. But I have to admit to being astonished again by the fix, which was committed five days before the advisory! Do these guys have no clue whatsoever? |
One of the most striking facts about neural networks is that they can compute any function at all. That is, suppose someone hands you some complicated, wiggly function, $f(x)$:
No matter what the function, there is guaranteed to be a neural network so that for every possible input, $x$, the value $f(x)$ (or some close approximation) is output from the network, e.g.:
This result holds even if the function has many inputs, $f = f(x_1, \ldots, x_m)$, and many outputs. For instance, here's a network computing a function with $m = 3$ inputs and $n = 2$ outputs:
This result tells us that neural networks have a kind of universality. No matter what function we want to compute, we know that there is a neural network which can do the job.
What's more, this universality theorem holds even if we restrict our networks to have just a single layer intermediate between the input and the output neurons - a so-called single hidden layer. So even very simple network architectures can be extremely powerful.
The universality theorem is well known by people who use neural networks. But why it's true is not so widely understood. Most of the explanations available are quite technical. For instance, one of the original papers proving the result* *Approximation by superpositions of a sigmoidal function, by George Cybenko (1989). The result was very much in the air at the time, and several groups proved closely related results. Cybenko's paper contains a useful discussion of much of that work. Another important early paper is Multilayer feedforward networks are universal approximators, by Kurt Hornik, Maxwell Stinchcombe, and Halbert White (1989). This paper uses the Stone-Weierstrass theorem to arrive at similar results. did so using the Hahn-Banach theorem, the Riesz Representation theorem, and some Fourier analysis. If you're a mathematician the argument is not difficult to follow, but it's not so easy for most people. That's a pity, since the underlying reasons for universality are simple and beautiful.
In this chapter I give a simple and mostly visual explanation of the universality theorem. We'll go step by step through the underlying ideas. You'll understand why it's true that neural networks can compute any function. You'll understand some of the limitations of the result. And you'll understand how the result relates to deep neural networks.
To follow the material in the chapter, you do not need to have read earlier chapters in this book. Instead, the chapter is structured to be enjoyable as a self-contained essay. Provided you have just a little basic familiarity with neural networks, you should be able to follow the explanation. I will, however, provide occasional links to earlier material, to help fill in any gaps in your knowledge.
Universality theorems are a commonplace in computer science, so much so that we sometimes forget how astonishing they are. But it's worth reminding ourselves: the ability to compute an arbitrary function is truly remarkable. Almost any process you can imagine can be thought of as function computation. Consider the problem of naming a piece of music based on a short sample of the piece. That can be thought of as computing a function. Or consider the problem of translating a Chinese text into English. Again, that can be thought of as computing a function* *Actually, computing one of many functions, since there are often many acceptable translations of a given piece of text.. Or consider the problem of taking an mp4 movie file and generating a description of the plot of the movie, and a discussion of the quality of the acting. Again, that can be thought of as a kind of function computation* *Ditto the remark about translation and there being many possible functions.. Universality means that, in principle, neural networks can do all these things and many more.
Of course, just because we know a neural network exists that can (say) translate Chinese text into English, that doesn't mean we have good techniques for constructing or even recognizing such a network. This limitation applies also to traditional universality theorems for models such as Boolean circuits. But, as we've seen earlier in the book, neural networks have powerful algorithms for learning functions. That combination of learning algorithms + universality is an attractive mix. Up to now, the book has focused on the learning algorithms. In this chapter, we focus on universality, and what it means.
Before explaining why the universality theorem is true, I want to mention two caveats to the informal statement "a neural network can compute any function".
First, this doesn't mean that a network can be used to exactly compute any function. Rather, we can get an approximation that is as good as we want. By increasing the number of hidden neurons we can improve the approximation. For instance, earlier I illustrated a network computing some function $f(x)$ using three hidden neurons. For most functions only a low-quality approximation will be possible using three hidden neurons. By increasing the number of hidden neurons (say, to five) we can typically get a better approximation:
And we can do still better by further increasing the number of hidden neurons.
To make this statement more precise, suppose we're given a function $f(x)$ which we'd like to compute to within some desired accuracy $\epsilon > 0$. The guarantee is that by using enough hidden neurons we can always find a neural network whose output $g(x)$ satisfies $|g(x) - f(x)| < \epsilon$, for all inputs $x$. In other words, the approximation will be good to within the desired accuracy for every possible input.
The second caveat is that the class of functions which can be approximated in the way described are the continuous functions. If a function is discontinuous, i.e., makes sudden, sharp jumps, then it won't in general be possible to approximate using a neural net. This is not surprising, since our neural networks compute continuous functions of their input. However, even if the function we'd really like to compute is discontinuous, it's often the case that a continuous approximation is good enough. If that's so, then we can use a neural network. In practice, this is not usually an important limitation.
Summing up, a more precise statement of the universality theorem is that neural networks with a single hidden layer can be used to approximate any continuous function to any desired precision. In this chapter we'll actually prove a slightly weaker version of this result, using two hidden layers instead of one. In the problems I'll briefly outline how the explanation can, with a few tweaks, be adapted to give a proof which uses only a single hidden layer.
To understand why the universality theorem is true, let's start by understanding how to construct a neural network which approximates a function with just one input and one output:
It turns out that this is the core of the problem of universality. Once we've understood this special case it's actually pretty easy to extend to functions with many inputs and many outputs.
To build insight into how to construct a network to compute $f$, let's start with a network containing just a single hidden layer, with two hidden neurons, and an output layer containing a single output neuron:
To get a feel for how components in the network work, let's focus on the top hidden neuron. In the diagram below, click on the weight, $w$, and drag the mouse a little ways to the right to increase $w$. You can immediately see how the function computed by the top hidden neuron changes:
As we learnt earlier in the book, what's being computed by the hidden neuron is $\sigma(wx + b)$, where $\sigma(z) \equiv 1/(1+e^{-z})$ is the sigmoid function. Up to now, we've made frequent use of this algebraic form. But for the proof of universality we will obtain more insight by ignoring the algebra entirely, and instead manipulating and observing the shape shown in the graph. This won't just give us a better feel for what's going on, it will also give us a proof* *Strictly speaking, the visual approach I'm taking isn't what's traditionally thought of as a proof. But I believe the visual approach gives more insight into why the result is true than a traditional proof. And, of course, that kind of insight is the real purpose behind a proof. Occasionally, there will be small gaps in the reasoning I present: places where I make a visual argument that is plausible, but not quite rigorous. If this bothers you, then consider it a challenge to fill in the missing steps. But don't lose sight of the real purpose: to understand why the universality theorem is true. of universality that applies to activation functions other than the sigmoid function.
To get started on this proof, try clicking on the bias, $b$, in the diagram above, and dragging to the right to increase it. You'll see that as the bias increases the graph moves to the left, but its shape doesn't change.
Next, click and drag to the left in order to decrease the bias. You'll see that as the bias decreases the graph moves to the right, but, again, its shape doesn't change.
Next, decrease the weight to around $2$ or $3$. You'll see that as you decrease the weight, the curve broadens out. You might need to change the bias as well, in order to keep the curve in-frame.
Finally, increase the weight up past $w = 100$. As you do, the curve gets steeper, until eventually it begins to look like a step function. Try to adjust the bias so the step occurs near $x = 0.3$. The following short clip shows what your result should look like. Click on the play button to play (or replay) the video:
We can simplify our analysis quite a bit by increasing the weight so much that the output really is a step function, to a very good approximation. Below I've plotted the output from the top hidden neuron when the weight is $w = 999$. Note that this plot is static, and you can't change parameters such as the weight.
It's actually quite a bit easier to work with step functions than general sigmoid functions. The reason is that in the output layer we add up contributions from all the hidden neurons. It's easy to analyze the sum of a bunch of step functions, but rather more difficult to reason about what happens when you add up a bunch of sigmoid shaped curves. And so it makes things much easier to assume that our hidden neurons are outputting step functions. More concretely, we do this by fixing the weight $w$ to be some very large value, and then setting the position of the step by modifying the bias. Of course, treating the output as a step function is an approximation, but it's a very good approximation, and for now we'll treat it as exact. I'll come back later to discuss the impact of deviations from this approximation.
At what value of $x$ does the step occur? Put another way, how does the position of the step depend upon the weight and bias?
To answer this question, try modifying the weight and bias in the diagram above (you may need to scroll back a bit). Can you figure out how the position of the step depends on $w$ and $b$? With a little work you should be able to convince yourself that the position of the step is proportional to $b$, and inversely proportional to $w$.
In fact, the step is at position $s = -b/w$, as you can see by modifying the weight and bias in the following diagram:
It will greatly simplify our lives to describe hidden neurons using just a single parameter, $s$, which is the step position, $s = -b/w$. Try modifying $s$ in the following diagram, in order to get used to the new parameterization:
As noted above, we've implicitly set the weight $w$ on the input to be some large value - big enough that the step function is a very good approximation. We can easily convert a neuron parameterized in this way back into the conventional model, by choosing the bias $b = -w s$.
Up to now we've been focusing on the output from just the top hidden neuron. Let's take a look at the behavior of the entire network. In particular, we'll suppose the hidden neurons are computing step functions parameterized by step points $s_1$ (top neuron) and $s_2$ (bottom neuron). And they'll have respective output weights $w_1$ and $w_2$. Here's the network:
What's being plotted on the right is the weighted output $w_1 a_1 + w_2 a_2$ from the hidden layer. Here, $a_1$ and $a_2$ are the outputs from the top and bottom hidden neurons, respectively* *Note, by the way, that the output from the whole network is $\sigma(w_1 a_1+w_2 a_2 + b)$, where $b$ is the bias on the output neuron. Obviously, this isn't the same as the weighted output from the hidden layer, which is what we're plotting here. We're going to focus on the weighted output from the hidden layer right now, and only later will we think about how that relates to the output from the whole network.. These outputs are denoted with $a$s because they're often known as the neurons' activations.
Try increasing and decreasing the step point $s_1$ of the top hidden neuron. Get a feel for how this changes the weighted output from the hidden layer. It's particularly worth understanding what happens when $s_1$ goes past $s_2$. You'll see that the graph changes shape when this happens, since we have moved from a situation where the top hidden neuron is the first to be activated to a situation where the bottom hidden neuron is the first to be activated.
Similarly, try manipulating the step point $s_2$ of the bottom hidden neuron, and get a feel for how this changes the combined output from the hidden neurons.
Try increasing and decreasing each of the output weights. Notice how this rescales the contribution from the respective hidden neurons. What happens when one of the weights is zero?
Finally, try setting $w_1$ to be $0.8$ and $w_2$ to be $-0.8$. You get a "bump" function, which starts at point $s_1$, ends at point $s_2$, and has height $0.8$. For instance, the weighted output might look like this:
Of course, we can rescale the bump to have any height at all. Let's use a single parameter, $h$, to denote the height. To reduce clutter I'll also remove the "$s_1 = \ldots$" and "$w_1 = \ldots$" notations.
Try changing the value of $h$ up and down, to see how the height of the bump changes. Try changing the height so it's negative, and observe what happens. And try changing the step points to see how that changes the shape of the bump.
You'll notice, by the way, that we're using our neurons in a way that can be thought of not just in graphical terms, but in more conventional programming terms, as a kind of if-then-else statement, e.g.:
if input > = step point: add 1 to the weighted output else : add 0 to the weighted output
For the most part I'm going to stick with the graphical point of view. But in what follows you may sometimes find it helpful to switch points of view, and think about things in terms of if-then-else .
We can use our bump-making trick to get two bumps, by gluing two pairs of hidden neurons together into the same network:
I've suppressed the weights here, simply writing the $h$ values for each pair of hidden neurons. Try increasing and decreasing both $h$ values, and observe how it changes the graph. Move the bumps around by changing the step points.
More generally, we can use this idea to get as many peaks as we want, of any height. In particular, we can divide the interval $[0, 1]$ up into a large number, $N$, of subintervals, and use $N$ pairs of hidden neurons to set up peaks of any desired height. Let's see how this works for $N = 5$. That's quite a few neurons, so I'm going to pack things in a bit. Apologies for the complexity of the diagram: I could hide the complexity by abstracting away further, but I think it's worth putting up with a little complexity, for the sake of getting a more concrete feel for how these networks work.
You can see that there are five pairs of hidden neurons. The step points for the respective pairs of neurons are $0, 1/5$, then $1/5, 2/5$, and so on, out to $4/5, 5/5$. These values are fixed - they make it so we get five evenly spaced bumps on the graph.
Each pair of neurons has a value of $h$ associated to it. Remember, the connections output from the neurons have weights $h$ and $-h$ (not marked). Click on one of the $h$ values, and drag the mouse to the right or left to change the value. As you do so, watch the function change. By changing the output weights we're actually designing the function!
Contrariwise, try clicking on the graph, and dragging up or down to change the height of any of the bump functions. As you change the heights, you can see the corresponding change in $h$ values. And, although it's not shown, there is also a change in the corresponding output weights, which are $+h$ and $-h$.
In other words, we can directly manipulate the function appearing in the graph on the right, and see that reflected in the $h$ values on the left. A fun thing to do is to hold the mouse button down and drag the mouse from one side of the graph to the other. As you do this you draw out a function, and get to watch the parameters in the neural network adapt.
Time for a challenge.
Let's think back to the function I plotted at the beginning of the chapter:
I didn't say it at the time, but what I plotted is actually the function \begin{eqnarray} f(x) = 0.2+0.4 x^2+0.3x \sin(15 x) + 0.05 \cos(50 x), \tag{113}\end{eqnarray} plotted over $x$ from $0$ to $1$, and with the $y$ axis taking values from $0$ to $1$.
That's obviously not a trivial function.
You're going to figure out how to compute it using a neural network.
In our networks above we've been analyzing the weighted combination $\sum_j w_j a_j$ output from the hidden neurons. We now know how to get a lot of control over this quantity. But, as I noted earlier, this quantity is not what's output from the network. What's output from the network is $\sigma(\sum_j w_j a_j + b)$ where $b$ is the bias on the output neuron. Is there some way we can achieve control over the actual output from the network?
The solution is to design a neural network whose hidden layer has a weighted output given by $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x)$, where $\sigma^{-1}$ is just the inverse of the $\sigma$ function. That is, we want the weighted output from the hidden layer to be:
If we can do this, then the output from the network as a whole will be a good approximation to $f(x)$* *Note that I have set the bias on the output neuron to $0$..
Your challenge, then, is to design a neural network to approximate the goal function shown just above. To learn as much as possible, I want you to solve the problem twice. The first time, please click on the graph, directly adjusting the heights of the different bump functions. You should find it fairly easy to get a good match to the goal function. How well you're doing is measured by the average deviation between the goal function and the function the network is actually computing. Your challenge is to drive the average deviation as low as possible. You complete the challenge when you drive the average deviation to $0.40$ or below.
Once you've done that, click on "Reset" to randomly re-initialize the bumps. The second time you solve the problem, resist the urge to click on the graph. Instead, modify the $h$ values on the left-hand side, and again attempt to drive the average deviation to $0.40$ or below.
You've now figured out all the elements necessary for the network to approximately compute the function $f(x)$! It's only a coarse approximation, but we could easily do much better, merely by increasing the number of pairs of hidden neurons, allowing more bumps.
In particular, it's easy to convert all the data we have found back into the standard parameterization used for neural networks. Let me just recap quickly how that works.
The first layer of weights all have some large, constant value, say $w = 1000$.
The biases on the hidden neurons are just $b = -w s$. So, for instance, for the second hidden neuron $s = 0.2$ becomes $b = -1000 \times 0.2 = -200$.
The final layer of weights are determined by the $h$ values. So, for instance, the value you've chosen above for the first $h$, $h = $ , means that the output weights from the top two hidden neurons are and , respectively. And so on, for the entire layer of output weights.
Finally, the bias on the output neuron is $0$.
That's everything: we now have a complete description of a neural network which does a pretty good job computing our original goal function. And we understand how to improve the quality of the approximation by improving the number of hidden neurons.
What's more, there was nothing special about our original goal function, $f(x) = 0.2+0.4 x^2+0.3 \sin(15 x) + 0.05 \cos(50 x)$. We could have used this procedure for any continuous function from $[0, 1]$ to $[0, 1]$. In essence, we're using our single-layer neural networks to build a lookup table for the function. And we'll be able to build on this idea to provide a general proof of universality.
Let's extend our results to the case of many input variables. This sounds complicated, but all the ideas we need can be understood in the case of just two inputs. So let's address the two-input case.
We'll start by considering what happens when we have two inputs to a neuron:
Here, we have inputs $x$ and $y$, with corresponding weights $w_1$ and $w_2$, and a bias $b$ on the neuron. Let's set the weight $w_2$ to $0$, and then play around with the first weight, $w_1$, and the bias, $b$, to see how they affect the output from the neuron:
As you can see, with $w_2 = 0$ the input $y$ makes no difference to the output from the neuron. It's as though $x$ is the only input.
Given this, what do you think happens when we increase the weight $w_1$ to $w_1 = 100$, with $w_2$ remaining $0$? If you don't immediately see the answer, ponder the question for a bit, and see if you can figure out what happens. Then try it out and see if you're right. I've shown what happens in the following movie:
Just as in our earlier discussion, as the input weight gets larger the output approaches a step function. The difference is that now the step function is in three dimensions. Also as before, we can move the location of the step point around by modifying the bias. The actual location of the step point is $s_x \equiv -b / w_1$.
Let's redo the above using the position of the step as the parameter:
Here, we assume the weight on the $x$ input has some large value - I've used $w_1 = 1000$ - and the weight $w_2 = 0$. The number on the neuron is the step point, and the little $x$ above the number reminds us that the step is in the $x$ direction. Of course, it's also possible to get a step function in the $y$ direction, by making the weight on the $y$ input very large (say, $w_2 = 1000$), and the weight on the $x$ equal to $0$, i.e., $w_1 = 0$:
The number on the neuron is again the step point, and in this case the little $y$ above the number reminds us that the step is in the $y$ direction. I could have explicitly marked the weights on the $x$ and $y$ inputs, but decided not to, since it would make the diagram rather cluttered. But do keep in mind that the little $y$ marker implicitly tells us that the $y$ weight is large, and the $x$ weight is $0$.
We can use the step functions we've just constructed to compute a three-dimensional bump function. To do this, we use two neurons, each computing a step function in the $x$ direction. Then we combine those step functions with weight $h$ and $-h$, respectively, where $h$ is the desired height of the bump. It's all illustrated in the following diagram:
Try changing the value of the height, $h$. Observe how it relates to the weights in the network. And see how it changes the height of the bump function on the right.
Also, try changing the step point $0.30$ associated to the top hidden neuron. Witness how it changes the shape of the bump. What happens when you move it past the step point $0.70$ associated to the bottom hidden neuron?
We've figured out how to make a bump function in the $x$ direction. Of course, we can easily make a bump function in the $y$ direction, by using two step functions in the $y$ direction. Recall that we do this by making the weight large on the $y$ input, and the weight $0$ on the $x$ input. Here's the result:
This looks nearly identical to the earlier network! The only thing explicitly shown as changing is that there's now little $y$ markers on our hidden neurons. That reminds us that they're producing $y$ step functions, not $x$ step functions, and so the weight is very large on the $y$ input, and zero on the $x$ input, not vice versa. As before, I decided not to show this explicitly, in order to avoid clutter.
Let's consider what happens when we add up two bump functions, one in the $x$ direction, the other in the $y$ direction, both of height $h$:
To simplify the diagram I've dropped the connections with zero weight. For now, I've left in the little $x$ and $y$ markers on the hidden neurons, to remind you in what directions the bump functions are being computed. We'll drop even those markers later, since they're implied by the input variable.
Try varying the parameter $h$. As you can see, this causes the output weights to change, and also the heights of both the $x$ and $y$ bump functions.
What we've built looks a little like a tower function:
If we could build such tower functions, then we could use them to approximate arbitrary functions, just by adding up many towers of different heights, and in different locations:
Of course, we haven't yet figured out how to build a tower function. What we have constructed looks like a central tower, of height $2h$, with a surrounding plateau, of height $h$.
But we can make a tower function. Remember that earlier we saw neurons can be used to implement a type of if-then-else statement:
if input > = threshold: output 1 else : output 0
That was for a neuron with just a single input. What we want is to apply a similar idea to the combined output from the hidden neurons:
if combined output from hidden neurons > = threshold: output 1 else : output 0
If we choose the threshold appropriately - say, a value of $3h/2$, which is sandwiched between the height of the plateau and the height of the central tower - we could squash the plateau down to zero, and leave just the tower standing.
Can you see how to do this? Try experimenting with the following network to figure it out. Note that we're now plotting the output from the entire network, not just the weighted output from the hidden layer. This means we add a bias term to the weighted output from the hidden layer, and apply the sigma function. Can you find values for $h$ and $b$ which produce a tower? This is a bit tricky, so if you think about this for a while and remain stuck, here's two hints: (1) To get the output neuron to show the right kind of if-then-else behaviour, we need the input weights (all $h$ or $-h$) to be large; and (2) the value of $b$ determines the scale of the if-then-else threshold.
With our initial parameters, the output looks like a flattened version of the earlier diagram, with its tower and plateau. To get the desired behaviour, we increase the parameter $h$ until it becomes large. That gives the if-then-else thresholding behaviour. Second, to get the threshold right, we'll choose $b \approx -3h/2$. Try it, and see how it works!
Here's what it looks like, when we use $h = 10$:
Even for this relatively modest value of $h$, we get a pretty good tower function. And, of course, we can make it as good as we want by increasing $h$ still further, and keeping the bias as $b = -3h/2$.
Let's try gluing two such networks together, in order to compute two different tower functions. To make the respective roles of the two sub-networks clear I've put them in separate boxes, below: each box computes a tower function, using the technique described above. The graph on the right shows the weighted output from the second hidden layer, that is, it's a weighted combination of tower functions.
In particular, you can see that by modifying the weights in the final layer you can change the height of the output towers.
The same idea can be used to compute as many towers as we like. We can also make them as thin as we like, and whatever height we like. As a result, we can ensure that the weighted output from the second hidden layer approximates any desired function of two variables:
In particular, by making the weighted output from the second hidden layer a good approximation to $\sigma^{-1} \circ f$, we ensure the output from our network will be a good approximation to any desired function, $f$.
What about functions of more than two variables?
Let's try three variables $x_1, x_2, x_3$. The following network can be used to compute a tower function in four dimensions:
Here, the $x_1, x_2, x_3$ denote inputs to the network. The $s_1, t_1$ and so on are step points for neurons - that is, all the weights in the first layer are large, and the biases are set to give the step points $s_1, t_1, s_2, \ldots$. The weights in the second layer alternate $+h, -h$, where $h$ is some very large number. And the output bias is $-5h/2$.
This network computes a function which is $1$ provided three conditions are met: $x_1$ is between $s_1$ and $t_1$; $x_2$ is between $s_2$ and $t_2$; and $x_3$ is between $s_3$ and $t_3$. The network is $0$ everywhere else. That is, it's a kind of tower which is $1$ in a little region of input space, and $0$ everywhere else.
By gluing together many such networks we can get as many towers as we want, and so approximate an arbitrary function of three variables. Exactly the same idea works in $m$ dimensions. The only change needed is to make the output bias $(-m+1/2)h$, in order to get the right kind of sandwiching behavior to level the plateau.
Okay, so we now know how to use neural networks to approximate a real-valued function of many variables. What about vector-valued functions $f(x_1, \ldots, x_m) \in R^n$? Of course, such a function can be regarded as just $n$ separate real-valued functions, $f^1(x_1, \ldots, x_m), f^2(x_1, \ldots, x_m)$, and so on. So we create a network approximating $f^1$, another network for $f^2$, and so on. And then we simply glue all the networks together. So that's also easy to cope with.
We've seen how to use networks with two hidden layers to approximate an arbitrary function. Can you find a proof showing that it's possible with just a single hidden layer? As a hint, try working in the case of just two input variables, and showing that: (a) it's possible to get step functions not just in the $x$ or $y$ directions, but in an arbitrary direction; (b) by adding up many of the constructions from part (a) it's possible to approximate a tower function which is circular in shape, rather than rectangular; (c) using these circular towers, it's possible to approximate an arbitrary function. To do part (c) it may help to use ideas from a bit later in this chapter.
We've proved that networks made up of sigmoid neurons can compute any function. Recall that in a sigmoid neuron the inputs $x_1, x_2, \ldots$ result in the output $\sigma(\sum_j w_j x_j + b)$, where $w_j$ are the weights, $b$ is the bias, and $\sigma$ is the sigmoid function:
What if we consider a different type of neuron, one using some other activation function, $s(z)$:
That is, we'll assume that if our neurons has inputs $x_1, x_2, \ldots$, weights $w_1, w_2, \ldots$ and bias $b$, then the output is $s(\sum_j w_j x_j + b)$.
We can use this activation function to get a step function, just as we did with the sigmoid. Try ramping up the weight in the following, say to $w = 100$:
Just as with the sigmoid, this causes the activation function to contract, and ultimately it becomes a very good approximation to a step function. Try changing the bias, and you'll see that we can set the position of the step to be wherever we choose. And so we can use all the same tricks as before to compute any desired function.
What properties does $s(z)$ need to satisfy in order for this to work? We do need to assume that $s(z)$ is well-defined as $z \rightarrow -\infty$ and $z \rightarrow \infty$. These two limits are the two values taken on by our step function. We also need to assume that these limits are different from one another. If they weren't, there'd be no step, simply a flat graph! But provided the activation function $s(z)$ satisfies these properties, neurons based on such an activation function are universal for computation.
Earlier in the book we met another type of neuron known as a rectified linear unit. Explain why such neurons don't satisfy the conditions just given for universality. Find a proof of universality showing that rectified linear units are universal for computation.
Suppose we consider linear neurons, i.e., neurons with the activation function $s(z) = z$. Explain why linear neurons don't satisfy the conditions just given for universality. Show that such neurons can't be used to do universal computation.
Up to now, we've been assuming that our neurons can produce step functions exactly. That's a pretty good approximation, but it is only an approximation. In fact, there will be a narrow window of failure, illustrated in the following graph, in which the function behaves very differently from a step function:
In these windows of failure the explanation I've given for universality will fail.
Now, it's not a terrible failure. By making the weights input to the neurons big enough we can make these windows of failure as small as we like. Certainly, we can make the window much narrower than I've shown above - narrower, indeed, than our eye could see. So perhaps we might not worry too much about this problem.
Nonetheless, it'd be nice to have some way of addressing the problem.
In fact, the problem turns out to be easy to fix. Let's look at the fix for neural networks computing functions with just one input and one output. The same ideas work also to address the problem when there are more inputs and outputs.
In particular, suppose we want our network to compute some function, $f$. As before, we do this by trying to design our network so that the weighted output from our hidden layer of neurons is $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x)$:
If we were to do this using the technique described earlier, we'd use the hidden neurons to produce a sequence of bump functions:
Again, I've exaggerated the size of the windows of failure, in order to make them easier to see. It should be pretty clear that if we add all these bump functions up we'll end up with a reasonable approximation to $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x)$, except within the windows of failure.
Suppose that instead of using the approximation just described, we use a set of hidden neurons to compute an approximation to half our original goal function, i.e., to $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x) / 2$. Of course, this looks just like a scaled down version of the last graph:
And suppose we use another set of hidden neurons to compute an approximation to $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x)/ 2$, but with the bases of the bumps shifted by half the width of a bump:
Now we have two different approximations to $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x) / 2$. If we add up the two approximations we'll get an overall approximation to $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x)$. That overall approximation will still have failures in small windows. But the problem will be much less than before. The reason is that points in a failure window for one approximation won't be in a failure window for the other. And so the approximation will be a factor roughly $2$ better in those windows.
We could do even better by adding up a large number, $M$, of overlapping approximations to the function $\sigma^{-1} \circ f(x) / M$. Provided the windows of failure are narrow enough, a point will only ever be in one window of failure. And provided we're using a large enough number $M$ of overlapping approximations, the result will be an excellent overall approximation.
The explanation for universality we've discussed is certainly not a practical prescription for how to compute using neural networks! In this, it's much like proofs of universality for NAND gates and the like. For this reason, I've focused mostly on trying to make the construction clear and easy to follow, and not on optimizing the details of the construction. However, you may find it a fun and instructive exercise to see if you can improve the construction.
Although the result isn't directly useful in constructing networks, it's important because it takes off the table the question of whether any particular function is computable using a neural network. The answer to that question is always "yes". So the right question to ask is not whether any particular function is computable, but rather what's a good way to compute the function.
The universality construction we've developed uses just two hidden layers to compute an arbitrary function. Furthermore, as we've discussed, it's possible to get the same result with just a single hidden layer. Given this, you might wonder why we would ever be interested in deep networks, i.e., networks with many hidden layers. Can't we simply replace those networks with shallow, single hidden layer networks?
Chapter acknowledgments: Thanks to Jen Dodd and Chris Olah for many discussions about universality in neural networks. My thanks, in particular, to Chris for suggesting the use of a lookup table to prove universality. The interactive visual form of the chapter is inspired by the work of people such as Mike Bostock, Amit Patel, Bret Victor, and Steven Wittens.
While in principle that's possible, there are good practical reasons to use deep networks. As argued in Chapter 1, deep networks have a hierarchical structure which makes them particularly well adapted to learn the hierarchies of knowledge that seem to be useful in solving real-world problems. Put more concretely, when attacking problems such as image recognition, it helps to use a system that understands not just individual pixels, but also increasingly more complex concepts: from edges to simple geometric shapes, all the way up through complex, multi-object scenes. In later chapters, we'll see evidence suggesting that deep networks do a better job than shallow networks at learning such hierarchies of knowledge. To sum up: universality tells us that neural networks can compute any function; and empirical evidence suggests that deep networks are the networks best adapted to learn the functions useful in solving many real-world problems.
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CLOSE When it comes to declaring emergencies, the type of emergency it is can determine how much funding the federal government will allocate to solve it. Video provided by Newsy Newslook
President Trump displays a presidential memorandum declaring the opioid crisis a 'public health emergency' after a speech in the White House Thursday. (Photo: JIM LO SCALZO, EPA-EFE)
WASHINGTON — The public health emergency that President Trump ordered Thursday allows the federal government to open up a toolbox of otherwise off-limits authorities to combat the opioid addiction epidemic.
But the emergency declaration doesn't go as far as some had hoped in bringing federal resources to bear. Here's what the action does — and doesn't do.
What it does
► Allow telemedicine: Current law requires doctors who prescribe controlled substances to see their patients face-to-face. Trump's order relieves that restriction, allowing substance abuse patients in rural areas to seek treatment from doctors hours away.
► Grant flexibility: Federal rules put strings on what state and local health departments do with federal money, telling them who they can hire and how they can spend the money. An emergency could clear some of that red tape, allowing the hiring of substance abuse specialists and letting HIV/AIDS programs to also spend money on opioid treatment.
► Provide Dislocated Worker Grants: These grants are usually available only to workers who lose their jobs because of economic conditions or natural disasters. The emergency allows states to apply for grants to help people struggling with opioid addiction to get job training and placement.
► Tap the Public Health Emergency Fund: The declaration allows the Department of Health and Human Services to access a special fund Congress set up to allow a fast response to unexpected health emergencies. However, that fund has a balance of only $57,000.
What it doesn't do
► Affect patient privacy: With a presidential national emergency declaration, the government can waive patient privacy laws — and the associated paperwork burdens — that can get in the way of delivering medical care in an emergency. A public health emergency, which Trump ordered Thursday, doesn't do that.
► Eliminate the 16-bed rule: A federal rule known as the Medicaid Institutions for Mental Diseases Exclusion prohibits federal reimbursement for residential substance abuse treatment facilities of more than 16 beds, since mental hospitals have traditionally been a state responsibility. However, Trump said he would ask HHS to grant case-by-case waivers to the rule if states ask for it.
► Provide new money: Treating the opioid epidemic like a hurricane or other natural disaster — a tricky legal maneuver, to be sure — would allow access to the billions of dollars Congress is spending on disaster relief bills. Trump did not do this, so Congress still needs to appropriate money for opioids.
Read more:
Those battered by opioid epidemic applaud Trump effort, but ask 'where's the money?'
Trump says opioids are an emergency, but it's not the declaration some were looking for
Trump orders public health emergency for opioids, a partial measure to fight drug epidemic
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The '23rd-century' hi-tech ID travelcard MultiPass, named after The Fifth Element, is very much here and now
A futuristic all-in-one travel pass that you could use on trains, buses, the tube and even to catch flights, all at the lowest possible price, is the stuff of sci-fi, but will move a step closer to reality when MultiPass is trialled in London and Glasgow next year.
The Technology Strategy Board, the UK government's innovation arm, has awarded a £1.1m grant to an industry consortium to pilot the new technology, which takes its name from a fictional bit of kit featured in the 1997 science fiction movie The Fifth Element starring Bruce Willis.
But could developments in contactless payment technology risk leaving it looking redundant?
In The Fifth Element, directed by Luc Besson and mainly set in the 23rd century, the MultiPass appears to be a hi-tech ID card that is used, among other things, for space travel – in one of the most quoted scenes, a young woman known as Leeloo, played by Milla Jovovich, flashes her pass as she attempts to board a spaceship. The real-life version would be a single nationwide combined ticket and travelcard with an "e-ink" screen similar to those on many e-readers.
Those behind it claim it is designed to solve two problems: the need to carry, or buy, lots of different cards and tickets for different journeys, and the challenge of negotiating Britain's byzantine ticketing systems in order to obtain the cheapest fare.
MultiPass could replace a rail season ticket or Oyster card, and you could also use it to pay for car parking and refreshments during the journey. And – because it can display a barcode on its screen – it could even be used for air travel. With government-backed funding, and a consortium which includes players such as train operating company Greater Anglia and the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London, it suggests that unlike some flights of fancy this one just might get off the ground.
The consortium plans to run two pilot schemes during the middle of next year – one involving journeys into London, the other in and around Glasgow – ahead of what they hope will be a full rollout in 2015.
However, millions of Londoners and visitors to the capital are about to get an all-in-one card that will allow them to do many of the same things. Since December 2012, passengers on London's 8,500 buses have been able to pay using debit and credit cards displaying the contactless symbol, and from "early 2014" they can be used across the capital's network, including the tube, overground, Docklands Light Railway and trams.
Oyster cards will continue to be accepted, but Transport for London claims that using a contactless card instead will mean no more queuing for tickets, no need to keep topping up your Oyster, and no need for visitors to get a ticket on arrival. Ahead of the launch, TfL will carry out a controlled pilot to test the system and rectify any "operational issues" that rear their head.
However, Jeremy Acklam at London-based company MultiPass, which is leading the consortium, suggests its invention goes several steps further than that. He says it would offer a simple proposition: seamless "best price" travel across Britain.
Some will wonder what the point is of a single travel pass, and may take the view that having to carry and buy different tickets for different types of travel is hardly a major hardship. However, Acklam says people won't need to think about what ticket to buy – the aim would be that the MultiPass would charge the lowest possible fare for any journey the passenger makes, on any form of transport, with any operator.
"Because we are managing all these different tickets 'up in the cloud', we can pretty much guarantee to get you the best price. That's the big attraction," he says, adding that one of the reasons for the pilots was to determine customer reaction – "how they like to use it, which bits they find useful". Several hundred people will be recruited for the pilots, some of them existing season ticket holders. |
Thursday, June 16th marks the 5th anniversary of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Yet, violations of human and environmental rights continue, and access to justice remains as difficult as it ever was.
Just look at the pollution by Shell in the Niger Delta, where there still hasn’t been a proper clean up. Or consider oil palm company Wilmar’s track record of land grabbing and deforestation, and lack or corporate accountability by either the company or its financiers. Then there is Chevron which refuses to pay compensation for oil damages in Ecuador. And seven months after the largest environmental crime in Brazil at Doce River, caused by Vale and BHP Billiton, no concrete solution was presented to the affected population.
"The truth is that neither the UN Guiding Principles, nor the related National Action Plans, have been able to hold large multinational corporations to account." We’d like to be celebrating today to commemorate the fact that five years ago in Geneva the members of the UN Human Rights Council endorsed the Guiding Principles, written by then UN Special Representative on business and human rights, John Ruggie. That this lead to dramatic changes in laws and corporate behavior, safeguarding rights for all. But we’re not celebrating. Sadly. Because…
“Endorsed”, is not the same as “accepted” or “voted upon”. Always good to get the record straight: the Guiding Principles are not official UN criteria or guidelines. They are discussed by UN members, business and non-governmental organizations in so-called multistakeholder spaces, but they are not standing UN policy negotiated by States. So States are not obliged to incorporate the Guiding Principles into their own national policy. Instead, all States are ‘strongly encouraged’ to develop, enact and update a National Action Plan (NAP) on business and human rights.
The truth is that neither the UN Guiding Principles, nor the related National Action Plans, have been able to hold large multinational corporations to account. They have also not been able to provide affected people and communities with a strong, enforceable mechanism to ensure they have access to justice, and secondly that any judgment or verdict on their case will be also implemented. So the UN Guiding Principles have not brought us any closer to getting access to justice or stopping corporate impunity.
Luckily, it is not all doom and gloom. On 26 June 2014, the UN Human Rights Council adopted resolution 26/09 calling for an intergovernmental working group to establish binding rules for transnational corporations and other businesses in relation to human rights – a process commonly referred to as the “Treaty”. This historic decision means that, if the Treaty is adopted and enforced, international human rights law will for the first time apply to the activities of transnational corporations.
Hundreds of non-governmental organizations and social movements have joined in the discussions of the content, nature and scope of this treaty. Many engaged in UN discussions and premises in Geneva for the first time, as they claim that this was the first time there was a UN process that they believed in, and that, if adopted and endorsed, would be able to change the lives of the people they campaign for.
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"The EU’s and US’s lack of support for the UN treaty on business and human rights stands in stark contrast with its support for securing privileged treatment for corporations around the globe."However, the European Union, as well as other UN Members, voted first against the resolution and later tried to derail and boycott the process. They claim more attention needs to be given to the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles. So one would expect the first step towards adopting National Action Plans for the UN Guiding Principles should be taken by the home countries of the biggest transnational corporations with records of human rights violations worldwide. The European Union is not really giving the right example though, as only seven out of 28 member states have adopted a National Action Plan (NAP) since 2011(*). Yet other states, such as South Africa, stress the need for something that goes beyond the UN Guiding Principles.
The EU’s and US’s lack of support for the UN treaty on business and human rights stands in stark contrast with its support for securing privileged treatment for corporations around the globe through investment treaties and trade deals. These often include business-friendly private tribunals that wield the power to make governments compensate corporations for any new laws or regulations that reduce corporate profits.
We need to have a UN treaty on business and human rights that takes precedent over special privileges given to corporations by trade deals. There should be space to have the discussion at the UN that has been enabled to us by the resolution 26/09 without the regulations being captured or negotiated away by corporations. It is time for UN member states to rule over transnational corporations, and not be ruled by them. One of the UN's primary purposes is "promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion". Human Rights are not negotiable and should be put by the UN and all states above corporate interests.
This is our unique opportunity to put these words into a meaningful legal instrument, an opportunity which we believe may only come once in a lifetime. Let’s seize this chance, and stop the current corporate impunity. |
We are now just four days away from the January transfer window closing and the rumours linking Leeds United with a number of players continue.
I will start this week with those leaving. Jonny Howson has finally completed his move to Norwich City. There was no surprise when it was announced that he had moved for an undisclosed fee.
The biggest worry now is we will lose any more of our other main players in the side.
Robert Snodgrass would probably be the biggest loss with Leicester City and West Ham linked with the Scottish international.
West Ham have reportedly had a £4 million bid turned down by Leeds.
Ben Parker was linked with a loan move to Carlisle United earlier in the week and he signed for the Cumbrian side on loan until February 25th.
Alex Bruce has been linked with a surprise move to American MLS side LA Galaxy, something that manager Simon Grayson has confirmed.
The players being linked with Leeds have slowed down.
Former striker Jermaine Beckford has been linked with a return after being told by Leicester City that he is free to find another club.
Ken Bates in his weekly interview on Yorkshire Radio confirmed that he had been contacted regarding the availability of Beckford.
Beckford`s Leicester teammate Richie Wellens has also been linked with a move to Leeds.
Estonian international defender Enar Jaager has also been linked with Leeds this week and he is also being chased by Scottish Premier League side Glasgow Rangers, where he had a trial last week.
Swansea City attacking midfielder Stephen Dobbie has been linked with a loan move to Elland Road.
Stoke City defender Danny Higginbotham could be on his way out of the Britannia Stadium. Leeds along with Nottingham Forest, Derby County and Reading have been linked with him.
Just over 72 hours now to go until the window closes. Will we see any more players sign for the club and will we see some off the deadwood moving out Of Elland Road?
Do not worry on Wednesday we will hear all the excuses. We were so close, they wanted too much money, they had agreed to sign but???.
Also, we are not selling anymore of our first team players – Watch this space.
If you see or hear of anything then feel free to post them in the comments box at the bottom of this article.
Leeds transfer rumours
IN
Keith Andrews – Blackburn
Andros Townsend – Tottenham Hotspur (signed on loan)
Mark Marshall – Barnet
Alan Smith – Newcastle (Again)
Martin Kelly – Liverpool
Jason Puncheon – Southampton
Adam Smith – Tottenham Hotspur
David Cotterill – Swansea City
John Flanaghan – Liverpool
Graham Dorrans – West Brom
Celso Borges – Fredrikstad (Norway)
Steed Malbranque – Fulham
Chris Birchall – LA Galaxy
Jason Koumas – Free agent
————————————————
Kirk Broadfoot – Glasgow Rangers
Sean St Ledger – Leicester City
Fabian Delph – Aston Villa (loan)
Kris Boyd – Eskisehirspor (Turkey)
Emile Heskey – Aston Villa
Sammy Clingan – Coventry City
Brian Stock – Doncaster Rovers
Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – Arsenal (loan)
Kevin Foley -Wolverhampton Wanderers
———————————————
Nick Montgomery – Sheffield United
Craig Jones – TNS (Welsh Premier) – Having trial at Elland Road.
Matthew Pattison (Mamelodi Sundowns -South Africa) – Having trial at Elland Road
Banana Yaya (Cameroon)
Joan Angel Roman – Man City
——————————————
Richie Wellens – Leicester City
Enar Jaager – (Estonia)
Stephen Dobbie – Swansea
Jermaine Beckford – Leicester City
Danny Higginbotham – Stoke City
OUT
Andy O`Brien – Bristol City
Aidan White – Bolton & Arsenal
Billy Paynter – Brighton (permanent)
Alex Bruce – Huddersfield (permanent)
Luciano Becchio – Middlesbrough
Ross McCormack – Wolves & Everton
—————————————
Jonny Howson – Bolton
———————————
Adam Clayton – Bolton, Stoke, Fulham & Wigan
Tom Lees – Bolton
Jonny Howson – Norwich (signed for Norwich)
Ross McCormack – Wigan
Lloyd Sam – Millwall
——————————-
Robert Snodgrass – West Ham & Leicester City
Ben Parker – Carlisle United (Joined on loan for a month)
Alex Bruce – LA Galaxy
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Democrat Manka Dhingra held a double-digit lead over Republican Jinyoung Englund Tuesday night for the 45th District state Senate seat.
Holding a double-digit lead Tuesday night over her 45th District Senate opponent, Democrat Manka Dhingra appeared set to hand her party control of the Washington Senate — the last GOP-held legislative chamber on the West Coast.
In the highest-profile state legislative race in years, Dhingra led Republican Jinyoung Lee Englund with 55 percent of the vote.
While vote counting will continue in the coming days, Dhingra’s general election lead Tuesday was larger than her eight-point margin over Englund on primary night in August.
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A Republican-led coalition holds a one-vote majority in the Senate, while Democrats control the House and the governor’s office.
The lead for Dhingra, a first-time candidate and senior deputy prosecutor for King County, had Democrats eager to pronounce victory.
“We become the last brick in the big blue wall up and down the West Coast,” state Democratic Party Chair Tina Podlodowski told supporters at Dhingra’s election-night party.
Democrats also hold the governor’s offices in Washington, Oregon and California.
In a statement, Gov. Jay Inslee, who is in Switzerland, took it upon himself to call the 45th District race, saying, “I send hearty congratulations to Sen.-elect Manka Dhingra on her decisive win tonight.”
At the Redhook Brewery in Woodinville, Dhingra thanked a jubilant crowd and took a congratulatory call from former Vice President Joe Biden.
Without mentioning President Donald Trump, she spoke about political themes that have echoed nationally since his election.
Manka Dhingra, leading by 10 points in her 45th District Senate race, talks about the campaign, her lead and her election-night chat with Joe Biden. (David Gutman / The Seattle Times)
“Somewhere along the way these people started making this election about us versus them and I don’t have to tell you, in this story, I was the them,” Dhingra said.
The Senate seat came open with the death of Republican Sen. Andy Hill last year. The 45th District includes Duvall and Woodinville, and parts of Kirkland, Redmond and Sammamish.
The winner will serve the year left in Hill’s term, and the seat will be back on the ballot next year.
In a gracious speech Tuesday night, Englund talked about her admiration for Hill and the need to preserve the balance of power in Olympia with a divided Legislature.
“Andy quietly exemplified that balance,” she said. “Until the end of his life he fought to protect it. Our movement here, it is born of a conviction that we couldn’t let that creative bipartisan cooperation die with Andy.”
With so much at a stake, about $9 million in campaign cash — raised by the candidates and independent political groups — poured into the district. The contest easily set a record as the state’s costliest legislative race.
Dhingra, 43, of Redmond, became active in politics after Trump’s victory last year.
She has blamed the Republican Senate for stalling legislation on women’s reproductive health and gun-safety regulations, and has promised to take up those issues if sent to Olympia.
She’s called for ending some business tax breaks to raise more money for K-12 education. And she’s said she’d support a capital-gains tax to roll back the state property-tax increase lawmakers approved this year to boost school spending.
Englund, of Woodinville, is also a first-time candidate. She has worked for Republicans Dino Rossi and U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, as well as in nonprofit and business roles.
She’s argued that recent years of divided government in Olympia have made for better legislation and more fiscal responsibility. Englund touts herself as a moderate Republican, while warning darkly of Seattle’s “extremist” values.
Should Dhingra prevail, Senate Democratic Minority Leader Sharon Nelson, D-Maury Island, sketched out an ambitious agenda for the 60-day legislative session that starts in January.
The agenda includes proposals on voting rights and campaign-finance disclosure, as well as women’s reproductive health, clean energy and gun safety, Nelson said.
Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler, R-Ritzville, said he believed Englund’s charisma as a candidate will carry they day.
If Republicans lose the Senate, he said, “it means fiscal responsibility gets flushed.”
Elsewhere around the state, 31st District Sen. Phil Fortunato, R-Auburn, led Democratic challenger Michelle Rylands with 57 percent of the vote.
In the Eastside’s 48th District, Sen. Patty Kuderer, D-Bellevue, beat Libertarian Michelle Darnell with 68 percent of the vote.
In the 7th District, Sen. Shelly Short, R-Addy, beat Democratic challenger Karen Hardy, also with 68 percent.
In the 37th District, Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, ran unopposed. |
Exxon spends 1% of record profits on alternative energy David Edwards and Stephen C. Webster
Published: Thursday July 31, 2008
Print This Email This On Thursday, Exxon announced its largest profits ever: $11.68 billion in the second quarter of 2008. Yet with all that money, says ABC's Good Morning America, the oil giant only spent 1 percent on alternative energy sources. "Today's announcement of Exxon's massive profits continues what has been a very good year for big oil," reports ABC. "Just how good? Well, it's expected to be even better than last year, when the combined sales of the top five oil companies added up to $1.5 trillion. That's greater than the GDP of Canada." With oil prices up nearly 50 percent from the same time last year, and demands for alternative, renewable sources of energy on the rise, what is Exxon doing with its record-breaking, windfall profits? ABC News "crunched the numbers." "They're probably spending more on the advertising than they are actually spending on the actual research," said Bernard Picchi, a senior managing director with Wall Street Access. "Exxon has publicly said that it is not in the renewable energy business, but rather focused on oil and gas," said the report. "So it should be no surprise that out of the five largest oil companies, Exxon spent just 1 percent of its $41 billion in profits last year on alternative energy sources." Among the other oil giants, said the report, British Petroleum spent the most on renewable energy in 2007: some 2.9 percent of its $21 billion profit. "What the spent on alternative energy was just a drop in the bucket," said Picchi. "Probably about $2 billion. This video is from ABC's Good Morning America, broadcast July 31, 2008.
Download video |
I am curious about people who wanted to have a child or children but decided to have none or fewer because of concerns over population growth. I'm *not* interested in hearing from people who condemn the choice to have chidren but rather from people actually feel and understand the tug towards parenthood but have chosen not to.
Have you had feelings of loss? What ways have you found to satisfy the tug without actually having children?
I'm asking because there obviously needs to be a real cultural conversation about population growth and how many kids we should all have. But I don't think that a conversation about how much damage more children would cause is the answer. I don't think guilting and shaming each other helps.
For one, I personally find it a downer. And for two, I don't think it helps people who are struggling with the choice.
What would help people who are struggling with the choice is stories of others who have struggled with it before them. Aspirational stories of struggling with the choice and finding ways of resolving the struggle happily. Perhaps in creative ways that made your life or the life of someone else better.
If you have a story like that, perhaps you'd be willing to share it with us in the comments? |
Now analysis suggests strong similarities between the handwritings of Alexander I and the monk. Picture: Vesti Tomsk
Rumours have long suggested that emperor Alexander I staged his death in 1825 and became holy man Feodor Kuzmich, also known as Feodor Tomsky.
A theory was that he wanted forgiveness for any role he may have played in the assassination of his father Pavel I in 1801, or in benefiting from the work of others in slaying the tsar.
Now analysis by Svetlana Semyonova, president of Russian Graphological Society, suggests strong similarities between the handwritings of Alexander I and the mysterious monk. 'I was given a handwritten by Alexander I at the age of 45, and also another handwritten sample by Feodor Kuzmich,' she said. 'As a graphologist, I have noted an unusual style of both handwritings.'
Svetlana Semyonova, president of Russian Graphological Society, suggests strong similarities between the handwritings of Alexander I and the mysterious monk. Picture: RIA Tomsk
Tiny characteristics of the handwriting and the psychological portraits of both authors suggest with the high level of certainty that 'it was one and the same man.
'The only difference is that in the handwriting of an 82 year old man we can see that he was deep in his spiritual world, arches and circles appeared in his writing.
'But key features remained the same in all works.'
Handqritings' comparison, portraits of Tsar Alexander I and monk Feodor and a sample of Alexander I's handwriting. Pictures: Vesti Tomsk
The tsar died 1 December 1825 at the age of 47. He contracted a cold which developed into typhus, from which he died in the southern city of Taganrog. His wife and empress Elizabeth died the following year, but again amid rumours that the death was faked, and that she became a nun, known as Silent Vera.
Newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that her handwriting of the tsarina and nun were also similar.
The monk appeared in the Siberian city of Tomsk in 1837 and lived there until his death in 1864.
Since 1995, the remains of 'saint monk' Feodor are treated like a relic in Tomsk.
Professor Andrey Rachinsky, of the Paris Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilisations, said at a forum on Alexander I in Tomsk that various other facts point to a link between the royal and the monk. For example, a portrait of the monk was on the wall of Tsar Alexander III office next to those of his royal predecessors.
Two samples of monk Feodor's handwriting and an icon depicting the monk. Pictures: Vesti Tomsk
A merchant from Tomsk, Semyon Khromov, in whose house Feodor lived, passed his belongings after his death to the head of Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev, a man seen as close to the tsar. The professor also noted that the empress Elizabeth (Elizaveta) did not act as might have been expected after her husband's death in Taganrog.
This year is 190th anniversary of Alexander I's death and the 20th anniversary of the discovery of the remains of monk 'Feodor Tomsky'.
Tomsk branch of the Orthodox church is not against the idea of holding a DNA test of the remains of monk Feodor.
Writer Leo Tolstoy wrote: 'Even when monk Feodor Kuzmich was alive - he came to Siberia in 1836 and lived for 27 years in various places there - there were strange rumours about him that he was hiding his real name and position and that it was Emperor Alexander I. After the monk's death these rumours only spread and became stronger. Not only common people believed them but many from the elite, including the royal family of Tsar Alexander III.
Alexander's wife and empress Elizabeth died the following year, but again amid rumours that the death was faked, and that she became a nun, known as Silent Vera. Pictures: Wikipdia
'The reasons for these rumours were the following: Alexander died unexpectedly, he did not suffer from any disease before, he died far away from home in a remote place of Taganrog, and when he was put in the coffin many who saw him, said that he changed a lot, this is why the coffin was quickly sealed.
'It was known that Alexander said and wrote that he wanted so much to leave his post and to stay away from this world. And one more fact which is less known is that in the official statement where Alexander's dead body was described there was a line that his back and bottom were of dark red colour and it was hardly possible to be a true description of the body of the emperor'.
Monk Feodor on his deathbed. Picture: Vesti Tomsk
'Back to Kuzmich and why he was thought to be Alexander. First of all the monk's height and appearance was so much like the emperor's, that people (especially servants who confirmed Kuzmich was Alexander) who saw Alexander or his portraits have found them really identical.
'The age was the same, the same kind of round shoulders.
'Secondly, this Kuzmich who used to say that he was a homeless man who does not remember his family, knew foreign languages and was in a noble way gentle with others which clearly meant that he was the person with a high position in the society.
'Thirdly, the monk never told his name and position to anyone but sometimes he clearly behaved in a way he was higher than other people.
'Fourthly, before his death he destroyed some papers but one sheet remained, it was a coded message signed with initials A. and P. (which supporters of the theory see as standing for Alexander Pavlovich, his name and patronymic).
'Fifthly, despite of all his faith, he never fasted. When an archpriest tried to persuade him to follow his duty of a believer, he said: 'If I had not confessed the truth about myself, the heavens would have been surprised, if I had confessed it, the earth would have been surprised'.' |
The starting point of this post is a simple question: can we use R to analyze punk bands ? And, as a result: what can we learn from applying data analytics methods to punk music ?
Whether we like it or not “punk rock is arguably the most important subgenre of music to come out of the ‘70s” and consequently still an integral part of our mainstream contemporary culture. After years of being declared too outrageous to be accepted, its legacy is so astonishingly extensive that it deserves careful consideration and serious attention. Since decades, many music critiques, fine arts experts, social and political scientists or historians of pop culture have devoted time and energy to study the punk scene, its cultural production and legacy, the attitude of the punk generation, its tangle of ideologies, the ways it was perceived and received. Facts and figures, however, are still missing, perhaps because there apparently is nothing more distant from data analytics than punk music. So, is data analytics of punk rock possible ? Would it make any sense ? My answer is a loud and bold yes –yes, statistics on punk rock matters.
Although the punk scene cannot be condensed into a single band, the Ramones are still considered by many as the first “pure punk band” and, perhaps –and more importantly–, one of the most influential. This does not imply that other punk rock bands (Clash, Dead Kennedys, The Stooges, Misfits, Sex Pistols, Social Distorsion, Patti Smith Group, etc) are less noteworthy or not as good. Yet, since I need to start somewhere, I decided that my first attempt would focus on the Ramones –which I paradoxically like a lot despite being more of a baroque and classical music person.
What did the Ramones do ?
From 1976 to 1994, the Ramones released 14 studio albums. In their original USA release, the albums comprised 176 different songs in total that were quite short (median: 2M 32S) and mostly written in a Major key (only 2 songs are in a minor key: Em).
Year Album Nbre of Songs Length 1976 Ramones 14 28M 52S 1977 Leave Home 14 28M 57S 1977 Rocket To Russia 14 28M 5S 1978 Road To Ruin 12 28M 9S 1980 End Of The Century 12 28M 50S 1981 Pleasant Dreams 12 28M 53S 1983 Subterranean Jungle 12 28M 21S 1985 Too Tough To Die 12 28M 18S 1986 Animal Boy 12 28M 44S 1987 Halfway To Sanity 12 28M 53S 1989 Brain Drain 12 28M 2S 1992 Mondo Bizarro 13 28M 25S 1993 Acid Eaters 12 28M 3S 1994 Adios Amigos 13 28M 1S
Musical purists always reproached the Ramones for knowing a couple of chords only and making an excessive use of them. Data show that the band knew at least… 11 different chords (out of too-many-to-bother-counting possibilities) although 80% of their songs were built on no more than 6. And there is no evidence of a sophistication of the Ramones’ compositions over time.
Just as the number of different chords in a Ramones’ song is independent from the song writer/s –t.test of number of different chords ~ writers don’t allow to exclude alternative hypothesis–, even with each band member having a very distinct personality, according to the biographers.
In terms of official charts ranking in the USA, the success of the Ramones fluctuated over their career. The first years of the band were definitely the most successful, from the creation of the band till the early 80’s. Then, from 1985 onwards, it looks like that the sales didn’t follow the strengthening of their reputation not only within but also outside the punk rock scene.
What did the Ramones say ?
Im my dataset, the Ramones’ lyrics come from azlyrics.com. I preferred this source over many other available sources since that website provides the lyrics without the verses repeats, which, in my opinion, would over-emphasise and, ultimately, biais the relevance of n-grams or topics. The dataset (a data frame) contains a lyrics variable, i.e. a character string of the track (without the verses repeats) including the < br> tags to mark the end of each line.
An example of the lyrics variable is like the following:
Hey ho, let s go < br>Hey ho, let s go < br>They re forming in a straight line < br>They re going through a tight wind < br>The kids are losing their minds < br>The Blitzkrieg Bop < br>They re piling in the back seat < br>They re generating steam heat < br>Pulsating to the back beat < br>The Blitzkrieg Bop. < br>Hey ho, let s go < br>Shoot em in the back now < br>What they want, I dont know < br>They re all reved up and ready to go
Tidying the text up (adopting the data principles recommended by Hadley Wickham) is the necessary first step of the lyrics mining exercise. For that, I follow the tidy text approach developed by Julia Silge & David Robinson.
First and foremost, it is worth noting that whatever the Ramones say, they say it in very few words ! Ramones songs are brief in time, but also short in lyrics (but not so much in vocabulary with 2,139 different unique words in total).
Whereas uniGrams are usually considered suitable for analysis after expurgation of stop words, in the Ramones lyrics the raw uniGrams show an interesting pattern. The 2 most frequent words in the 14 studio albums are i and you. One could provocatively argue that Tea for Two, a well-known 1925 song from Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar, is a good representation of the Ramones musical universe that seems to be mainly centered on you and i, and i and you !
In the uniGrams table below, the columns of the cleaned uniGrams highlight that the top word in the Ramones lyrics is dont, expressing an atmosphere of clear negation. But there is also a fascinating tension pointing to the future that shows through words such as wanna, gonna and ll (will or shall). Rock and punk amongst the top 20 words definitely remind you what type of music you are listening to but also what subculture the band belongs to. In an all-men band, words such as baby, love, girl witness the significance of man-woman relationships in the Ramones songs. Perhaps it took statistical analysis of lyrics to take the risk of forming the hypothesis of the Ramones as a romantic band…
All uniGrams Freq | Cleaned uniGrams Freq i 1510 | dont 317 you 800 | baby 241 the 773 | yeah 161 a 615 | love 154 to 584 | wanna 122 s 498 | gonna 117 and 438 | time 90 it 402 | ll 78 my 372 | life 61 me 322 | rock 58 dont 317 | day 57 oh 259 | girl 55 in 258 | hey 55 of 251 | remember 54 baby 241 | punk 52 t 237 | ve 52 m 232 | world 48 no 215 | fun 43 can 202 | feel 42 on 200 | bad 41
The identification of most frequent uniGrams per album is a further step into a more granular analysis:
In addition to identifying the most frequent single words, we could also highlight when they are used in the discography using a simple Token Distribution Analysis. Let’s limit this exercise to 5 words only from the list of the top 20: love, gonna, rock (or rocker), life and dont.
A quick visualisation of ‘raw’ nGrams (stop words not removed) confirms the feeling of a narrative universe mainly focused on i, you and negation (don’t).
What did the Ramones feel ?
As a (brief) final chapter of this post, I would like to run a very quick –and limited– sentiment analysis of the Ramones’ studio albums lyrics. Actually, rather than a sentiment analysis, this is nothing but scratching the surface of sentiment analysis. The bing sentiment lexicon was used here, but a similar analysis could be carried out using afinn or nrc lexicons (all available in the tidytext r package) or using all of them for a comparative approach.
Although the sentiment lexicon gives the word punk a negative value, there is little risk in asserting that this is not the way the Ramones intended it.
In order to both fine tune and expand the approach, a more accurate sentiment analysis could be undertaken paying attention to 5 additional tasks at least:
in the lyrics, identify the sentiment words preceded or followed by not;
review and, perhaps, amend the sentiment lexicon(s) to better reflect the punk rock subculture;
focus on relative more than absolute frequencies of words;
add terms’ inverse document frequency analysis to measure the impact of the words that are rarely used;
use ML to spot/predict combinations of n-Grams, topics, writers that would “guarantee” a better ranking in the charts.
The dataset and complete R code of this post can be downloaded from this link. |
Duke students are serious when it comes to attending the UNC game. If you don’t know the tradition, students take drastic measures to ensure that they have a spot in the stands for the big game. K-Ville tenting is a process where students, coined “Crazies”, live in tents for weeks leading up to the game. There are three types of tenting – black, white, and blue, black being the longest and most intense.
For each kind of tenting, there have to be 12 members living in the tent. Each type of team sleeps outside for varying degrees of time, starting with the black tenters. The order in which you are place is determined by a campus scavenger hunt for both black and blue tenters. So here is the breakdown.
Black tenting: The twelve members of the tent aren’t even sleeping in a tent for the first week but instead have to sleep under tarps until blue tenting starts. Two out of the 12 members must be present in the tent at all times during the day, and 10 of the 12 must be present during nights. All tenters are subject to tent checks, and if they don’t have the right amount of members present, they get warned once. After a second missed tent check, they get moved to the back of the line. Black tenting 2013 began on January 9th.
Blue tenting: The week after black tenting, the blue tenters arrive. They also have 12 members, but only 1 must be present during the day, and six members must be present at night. They have the same deal with missed tent checks. This year, blue tenters arrive on January 16th.
White Tenting: This begins two weeks before the big game. These tenters aren’t guaranteed a spot in K-ville, so they must scour campus to find a person to give them a placement number. If those seeking white tenting are lucky enough to get a spot, one person must be in the tent all day, and just two have to be in the tent at night. White tenters come to K-ville on the 30th of January.
The last two days before the game, some other rules kick into place, and you can read about those here.
Luckily, if you don’t go to Duke and had not heard of tenting until now, we’ve found a first-hand account of a black tenter on Twitter, and it’s a fun read. Jordan DeLoatch’s tenting session began the night of January 9th – the UNC game isn’t until February 13th. Unfortunately, we can’t fit all the tweets into this post, so if you want to read about the rest of the crazy details, check out @jstorm64‘s Twitter page.
First night of black tenting! First 3 AM tent check…. First line monitor who thought the requirement was 12 instead of 10! — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 10, 2013
A schedule with no morning classes has its own obvious benefits, but it’s also incredibly compatible with tenting. #zzzzzzz — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 10, 2013
@kville_nation Tents are looking good and the weather is looking even better! #kville twitter.com/Duke_MARKETING… — Duke Marketing (@Duke_MARKETING) January 10, 2013
Night 2. The good news is that the tent that was being way too loud last night is quiet. The bad news is another tent is just as loud. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 11, 2013
1 tent check down for the night. Obviously have no idea how many more to go. 1? 2? 0? We’ll see… — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 11, 2013
Hey, I just met you, and we are Crazies… — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 11, 2013
This is the longest into night hours the line monitors have taken to call a tent check. We are TWO minutes in and counting. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 12, 2013
So far, the obligatory loud drunken tent does not seem to have materialized. I expect we’ll see one after the inevitable check. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 12, 2013
TENT CHECK! 18 minutes in, and it sets the season record for longest night hours before the first tent check. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 12, 2013
“I’m ready! I’m ready! I’m ready! I’m ready!” “Why is there a saw on the ground?” “Thomas, what tent do I live in?” #KvilleSounds #TentCheck — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 12, 2013
I’m in K-ville right now. The tent next to us (which was drunk and loud on Wednesday night) apparently is short a person. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 14, 2013
Until now, I had no clue there was so much innuendo that could be derived from inflating an air mattress. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 14, 2013
It’s windier in K-ville than the gale force a ref feels when confronted with the wrath of Mike Krzyzewski. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 15, 2013
Some areas of K-ville have nicer tarp structures than others. In other words, we have slums in K-ville. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 15, 2013
One of our tent members didn’t show after that last grace period. Tent check missed. We’re hanging by a thread until Wednesday night. — Jordan DeLoatch (@jstorm64) January 15, 2013 |
NEW YORK/IMMOKALEE, Florida (Reuters) - America’s leading mortgage lenders vowed in March to end the dubious foreclosure practices that caused a bruising scandal last year.
Margery Gunter, who turns 87 later this month and is almost completely deaf, stands at the door of her home in Immokalee, Florida in this May 6, 2011 file photo. America's leading mortgage lenders vowed in March to end the dubious foreclosure practices that caused a bruising scandal last year. But a Reuters investigation finds that many are still taking the same shortcuts they promised to shun, from sketchy paperwork to the use of "robo-signers." In its effort to seize the two-bedroom ranch house of 87-year-old Margery Gunter in this down-on-its-luck Florida town, OneWest Bank recently filed a court document that appears riddled with discrepancies. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/Files
But a Reuters investigation finds that many are still taking the same shortcuts they promised to shun, from sketchy paperwork to the use of “robo-signers.”
In its effort to seize the two-bedroom ranch house of 87-year-old Margery Gunter in this down-on-its-luck Florida town, OneWest Bank recently filed a court document that appears riddled with discrepancies. Mrs. Gunter, who has lived in the house for 40 years and gets around with the aid of a walker, stopped paying her loan back in 2009, her lawyer concedes. To foreclose, the bank submitted to the Collier County clerk’s office on March 3 a “mortgage assignment,” a document essential to proving who owns a mortgage once the original lender sells it off.
But OneWest’s paperwork is problematic. Among the snags: state law permits lenders to file to foreclose only if they already legally own a mortgage. Yet the key document establishing ownership wasn’t signed and officially recorded until months after OneWest filed to foreclose on Mrs. Gunter. OneWest declined to comment on the case.
Reuters has found that some of the biggest U.S. banks and other “loan servicers” continue to file questionable foreclosure documents with courts and county clerks. They are using tactics that late last year triggered an outcry, multiple investigations and temporary moratoriums on foreclosures.
In recent months, servicers have filed thousands of documents that appear to have been fabricated or improperly altered, or have sworn to false facts.
Reuters also identified at least six “robo-signers,” individuals who in recent months have each signed thousands of mortgage assignments — legal documents which pinpoint ownership of a property. These same individuals have been identified — in depositions, court testimony or court rulings — as previously having signed vast numbers of foreclosure documents that they never read or checked.
Among them: Christina Carter, an employee of Ocwen Loan Servicing of West Palm Beach, Florida, a “sub-servicer” which handles routine mortgage tasks for banks. Her signature — just two “C”s — has appeared on thousands of mortgage assignments and other documents this year.
In a case involving a foreclosure by HSBC Bank USA, a New York state court judge this month called Carter a “known robo-signer” and said he’d found multiple variations of her two-letter signature on documents, raising questions about whether others were using her name. That and other red flags prompted the judge to take the extraordinary step of threatening to sanction HSBC’s chief executive officer.
In a phone interview, Carter acknowledged signing large numbers of mortgage assignments this year, but said they all were legally done. To her knowledge, she added, no one else used her name.
‘CUTTING CORNERS’
One of the industry’s top representatives admits that the federal settlements haven’t put a stop to questionable practices.
Some loan servicers “continue to cut corners,” said David Stevens, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association. Nearly all borrowers facing foreclosure are delinquent, he said, but “the real question is whether the servicer complied with all legal requirements.” The loss of a home is “the most critical time in a family’s life,” and if foreclosure paperwork is faulty homeowners should contest it. “Families should be using every opportunity they can to protect their rights.”
Federal bank regulators signed settlements in March with 14 loan servicers — banks and other companies that perform tasks for mortgage investors such as collecting payments from homeowners and when necessary, filing to foreclose. The 14 firms promised further internal investigations, remediation for some who were harmed and a halt to the filing of false documents. All such behavior had stopped by the end of 2010, they said.
Of these companies, Reuters has found at least five that in recent months have filed foreclosure documents of questionable validity: OneWest, Bank of America, HSBC Bank USA, Wells Fargo and GMAC Mortgage.
So have half a dozen large servicers that weren’t party to the agreements, including Ocwen Financial Corp and units of Credit Suisse Group AG.
Spokesmen for the banks and servicers named in this article said that they halted any wrongdoing after disclosures last autumn of robo-signing led them to revise their practices, and they denied filing false documents since then.
In general, they said their foreclosure cases were legitimate, but for a small number of exceptions, and that criticism by defense lawyers and judges of some types of documentation is based on misinterpretation of the law.
The persistence of the paperwork mess poses a dilemma for American policymakers and society at large.
The vast majority of homeowners in foreclosure are in fact delinquent on their mortgage payments. Many bankers and judges view the issue as a technicality. Regardless of legal niceties, they say, people should pay up or lose the collateral on the loans — their houses and condos.
Increasingly, though, courts are holding that the trusts suing to foreclose don’t actually own the mortgages. Judges have ruled that foreclosing based on flawed or missing evidence violates longstanding laws meant to protect all Americans’ property rights.
In a landmark decision in January, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned a foreclosure because of a lack of proper documentation.
“The holder of an assigned mortgage needs to take care to ensure that his legal paperwork is in order,” wrote Justice Robert Cordry in a concurring opinion. “Although there was no apparent actual unfairness here to the (homeowners), that is not the point. Foreclosure is a powerful act with significant consequences, and Massachusetts law has always required that it proceed strictly in accord with the statutes that govern it.”
(U.S. Bank National Association, trustee, vs. Antonio Ibanez, 458 Mass. 637.)
A THOUSAND QUESTIONS
Reuters reviewed records of individual county clerk offices in five states — Florida, Massachusetts, New York, and North and South Carolina — with searchable online databases. Reuters also examined hundreds of documents from court case files, some obtained online and others provided by attorneys.
The searches found more than 1,000 mortgage assignments that for multiple reasons appear questionable: promissory notes missing required endorsements or bearing faulty ones; and “complaints” (the legal documents that launch foreclosure suits) that appear to contain multiple incorrect facts.
These are practices that the 14 banks and other loan servicers said had occurred only on a small scale and were halted more than six months ago.
The settlements included the four largest banks in the United States — Bank of America Corp, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase & Co, and Citigroup Inc. The other parties were lending units of Ally Financial Inc, HSBC Holdings PLC, MetLife Inc, PNC Financial Services Group Inc, SunTrust Banks Inc, U.S. Bancorp, Aurora Bank, EverBank, OneWest Bank and Sovereign Bank.
The pacts were struck with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the main regulator of national banks, as well as with the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of Thrift Supervision.
Some state and federal officials have called the settlements weak. Authorities are still working out financial penalties to be imposed on the 14 firms. The banks didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing, and many of the practices banned were previously illegal anyway, such as filing false affidavits and making false notarizations. And regulators left it to the banks to oversee their own internal investigations.
The OCC confirmed it has received complaints that questionable practices continue. But spokesman Bryan Hubbard said the settlements “are intended to address many of the root causes of improper foreclosure actions,” thus preventing future harm.
WAVE OF FORECLOSURES
The collapse of the housing boom in late 2006 led to a wave of foreclosures. Federal Reserve data show that some 4.5 percent of U.S. mortgages are in foreclosure. In 2010, 2.5 million foreclosures were initiated, with a similar number expected this year.
In the housing boom, lenders created millions of new mortgages, packaged them into pools, and securitized them rapidly for sale to investors in so-called mortgage-securities trusts.
The agreements setting up the trusts, called “pooling and servicing agreements,” require that key documents, properly executed and endorsed, be turned over immediately for each mortgage when a trust is established. The two most important ones are a promissory note and mortgage assignment.
A mortgage really has two parts. One is the actual mortgage (in some states called a “deed of trust”). Its purpose is to pledge the home as collateral for the loan. To transfer ownership of this collateral pledge, the seller must issue a document called a mortgage assignment. The other is the promissory note, which is the loan agreement itself. The homeowner signs it, promising to pay principal and interest.
The Reuters examination turned up thousands of instances —more than 2,000 in Florida alone — involving recently filed mortgage assignments which ostensibly transferred mortgages to these trusts years after they were formed.
The problem, according to Georgetown University law professor Adam Levitin, an expert on securitization: About 80 percent of all trust agreements provide that New York State law applies, and under New York law, any mortgage assignments made later than specified in the agreements would be void.
Reuters has also uncovered problems with the other key document used in foreclosure cases, the promissory note.
To foreclose, a trust, bank or mortgage finance giant such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac must possess the original “blue ink” signed promissory note. The crucial parts of the note are at the bottom — the endorsements, somewhat like those on the back of a check. The agreements establishing trusts require a proper chain of endorsements showing legal transfers of a note from the original lender, through any intermediary owners, and finally to the trust itself.
Attorneys defending homeowners contend that improper endorsements are rife. Reuters obtained from public court records and defense attorneys more than 100 examples of notes that for various reasons appear to be improper.
MYSTERY OF MARY ARTHUR
One example: The attempt by Credit Suisse unit DLJ Mortgage Capital to foreclose on Mary Arthur of Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mrs. Arthur, 63 and legally blind, works part time as an assistant in a doctor’s office. Originally from Trinidad, Mrs. Arthur became delinquent on her $427,500 loan after her parents and sister died and she ran up debts traveling home for the funerals, according to her attorney, Linda Tirelli.
The loan servicers, Select Portfolio Servicing of Salt Lake City, threatened to foreclose on DLJ’s behalf. Mrs. Arthur arranged with Select Portfolio a trial mortgage modification to see if she could keep up with the reduced payments. She made the payments but, Tirelli said, Select Portfolio filed to foreclose.
DLJ filed in two separate court cases what it said were authentic copies of Mrs. Arthur’s promissory note. Because they were supposed to be copies of the same document, the endorsements filed with both courts should be identical.
But a look at the documents shows that the version filed in state court and the one filed in bankruptcy court had completely different endorsements on them — naming different owner banks and signed by different people. Tirelli said she has brought this to the attention of the bankruptcy judge and is awaiting a ruling.
Credit Suisse, which owns both DLJ Mortgage Capital and Select Portfolio Servicing, declined to comment, as did Casey Howard, the lawyer representing DLJ in the bankruptcy case.
Bank of America, meanwhile, is coming under fire from a New York federal bankruptcy judge.
Last Tuesday, Judge Robert Drain ordered an investigation involving a foreclosure case brought by the bank. Two earlier copies of a promissory note filed in court had lacked any endorsement, but then one appeared on the note when bank lawyers produced the original.
The judge said the sudden appearance of an endorsement, and his own close look at it, raised questions about whether it had been added illegally to make the note look legitimate.
It “raises a sufficiently serious issue as to when and more importantly by whom this note was endorsed,” the judge said.
A Bank of America spokesman said the bank will produce evidence that “will demonstrate to the court’s satisfaction that the endorsement is proper.”
(In re: Priscilla C. Taylor, Debtor, United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, Case # 10-22652.)
MISSING SIGNATURES
These banks aren’t alone in filing doubtful documents. Reuters found cases in which Wells Fargo didn’t obtain mortgage assignments — and hence the right to foreclose — until well after it had filed foreclosure cases.
Wells Fargo, as a trustee, has moved to foreclose on homeowners who have mortgages from now-defunct Option One Mortgage Corp. In June, a bankruptcy appellate panel of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a decision to allow Wells Fargo to foreclose on an Option One mortgage. It said that there was no evidence that the note and mortgage had ever been turned over to Wells Fargo as trustee.
In court files of Florida foreclosure cases by Wells Fargo on Option One mortgages, none of the promissory notes filed as exhibits in 10 cases found by Reuters had any endorsements on them.
A Wells Fargo spokeswoman said it is possible that proper endorsements exist but were omitted from the copies of the promissory notes filed in court.
In other cases reviewed by Reuters, Wells Fargo and GMAC Mortgage, a unit of Ally Financial, this year assigned mortgages from defunct lender New Century Mortgage Corp., which went under in 2007. Securitization lawyers say it is technically impossible for a defunct company to directly assign a mortgage over to another owner.
Documents and statements made to courts that are found to be false can amount to crimes under state and federal laws. Daniel Richman, a Columbia University law professor and former federal prosecutor, said such acts can be perjury, and preparing fraudulent documents can be prosecuted under federal mail and wire fraud statutes. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act makes it a crime punishable by up to 20 years in jail to file false documents in a bankruptcy case, including foreclosures.
ROBO-SIGNERS RETURN
Reuters also found that loan servicers are still using the corner-cutting tactic that most captured the public imagination last year: robo-signing.
The investigation identified six known robo-signers who have continued to churn out large numbers of mortgage assignments since the beginning of 2011 - months after the industry vowed to stop the practice.
Among them is Bryan Bly, an employee of Nationwide Title Clearing of Palm Harbor, Florida.
Bly testified in a July 2010 foreclosure case in Florida that he signed up to 5,000 mortgage assignments per day at the loan-servicing company. Although he is an employee of Nationwide, he signed the documents as a “vice president” of Option One Mortgage, Deutsche Bank, CitiBank and other institutions. (Case # 2009-CA-1920, Circuit Court of the Fourth Judicial District, Clay County, FL)
In his deposition, Bly said Nationwide multiplied his output by electronically stamping his signature on additional mortgage assignments that Bly said he never saw. He testified, too, that all the documents then were falsely notarized. Nationwide’s notaries were given stacks of the already-signed documents, he said, and attested falsely that Bly had signed the legal papers in front of them. Bly said he didn’t verify the information in the papers he signed, and that he didn’t understand key words and expressions in them.
Despite these disclosures, a Reuters search of county clerk records in Florida, New York and Massachusetts shows that Bly continued to sign thousands of mortgage assignments this year.
A Nationwide spokeswoman said there is nothing illegal about signing large numbers of mortgage assignments. After Reuters inquired about Bly, however, she later said that because of recent questions raised about him by Nationwide customers, Bly has been moved to a job at the firm that doesn’t involve signing documents.
R. Christopher Rodems, a lawyer for Bly, said there is nothing improper about signing large numbers of mortgage assignments. Rodems said Bly had received death threats after a videotaped deposition Bly gave in November 2010 was posted briefly on YouTube, in which he testified about signing massive numbers of mortgage assignments.
A LAWYER’S NAME
Robo-signing isn’t limited to low-level employees at loan servicers.
Lawrence Buckley is a lawyer who manages the Dallas, Texas law firm Brice, Vander Linden and Wernick. In March, he testified that he had allowed his electronic signature to be affixed to sworn court documents that he had never seen. The documents, known as “proofs of claim,” included one filed with the federal bankruptcy court in New York. It sought permission for Deutsche Bank to seize the Bronx, New York, house of 59-year-old Virginia Obasi. (United States Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, Case # 10-10494 MG)
Buckley said he had never seen the document, and that another lawyer at his firm had filed it using Buckley’s electronic signature. The signature appears on the document as “/s/ Lawrence J. Buckley.”
Buckley said that other lawyers at his firm were permitted to use his signature to file documents electronically with bankruptcy courts. He testified that it was standard practice at the firm not to review any of the original documents the claim was supposed to be based on, such as the original promissory note and mortgage.
Luke Madole, a lawyer for Buckley, said he saw nothing wrong with Buckley letting lawyers he directly managed use his electronic signature. Later, in an e-mailed statement, Madole added that what occurred “is nothing like ‘robo-signing’” and to use “that loaded term would be unfair in the extreme.”
A JUDGE INVESTIGATES
Robo-signer Christina Carter resurfaced in a ruling earlier this month, when Arthur Schack, a New York State court judge in Brooklyn, threw out an attempt by HSBC to foreclose on a Brooklyn house.
Schack said he had instructed HSBC’s chief lawyer in the case, Frank Cassara, to confirm key facts directly with HSBC officials. The judge said Cassara subsequently “affirmed ‘under the penalties of perjury’” that he had done so. But the judge said it turned out that Cassara had never checked with anyone at HSBC, and that the employees Cassara had said he spoke with at HSBC actually worked for a loan servicer.
The judge also said signatures on documents in the case were filed by known robo-signers, three of whom he identified by name, including Carter of Ocwen Loan Servicing. He personally had examined multiple examples of their signatures, the judge said, and found wide variations, raising the possibility that other people had been signing their names.
Judge Schack then took an unusual step: He formally threatened HSBC’s CEO, Irene Dorner, as well as lawyers for the firm, with sanctions for relying on known robo-signers, filing false documents and making false representations to the court. The possible sanctions could range from an oral reprimand to financial and other penalties.
“If HSBC has a duty to make money for its stockholders,” Schack wrote, “why is it purchasing nonperforming loans, and wasting the Court’s time with defective paperwork and the use of robo-signers?” [ID:nN1E76612C]
HSBC spokesman Neil Brazil said that the servicer, Ocwen, was responsible for what occurred in the case, and that HSBC had had no role in it.
Paul Koches, Ocwen’s general counsel, said in an e-mail: “To our knowledge, there was nothing submitted by our legal counsel to the court that was in any way misleading as to who is the owner of this mortgage and note, nor was there any conduct of any kind that would justify sanctions.”
Carter says she did nothing improper, and left Ocwen voluntarily in May for another job.
DOWN IN FLORIDA
The bank now trying to foreclose on Marjorie Gunter has produced a troubled paper trail. OneWest submitted a document signed this February to prove that the original lender for her mortgage, a company called MortgageIT, had signed over ownership to OneWest. But MortgageIT, owned by Deutsche Bank, wasn’t in business in February. It had ceased operations three years earlier, in 2008.
A Deutsche Bank spokesman declined to comment.
Even if the February document were authentic, it wasn’t recorded until nearly 10 months after OneWest had launched its foreclosure action, which began in May 2010. Real estate law throughout the United States requires that before moving to foreclose, a trust or bank must already own the mortgage and related promissory note. Otherwise, courts have ruled, a forecloser has no right to seize a house.
OneWest also filed two separate copies of what it said was the 87-year-old homeowner’s original promissory note. The first had an endorsement only from MortgageIT to now-defunct IndyMac Bank. Weeks later, OneWest filed a second copy of the note, with the addition of a “blank” endorsement — an endorsement by IndyMac, but with the name of the payee left empty. OneWest has filed no evidence in the case that the note was subsequently transferred to Fannie Mae.
OneWest declined to explain the multiple apparent discrepancies in the Gunter foreclosure documents. A spokesman said in an e-mail: “OneWest is dedicated to ensuring that it meets the needs of its customers, acts in accordance with applicable laws, and complies with its contractual mortgage servicing duties to the highest standards.”
A Fannie Mae spokeswoman said Fannie does own the Gunter note, but declined to explain how the mortgage finance giant obtained it, “due to it being in active litigation.”
The judge in the Gunter case hasn’t ruled yet on OneWest’s documents. (20th Judicial Circuit Court in Collier County, FL, Case number 10-2982-CA).
Mrs. Gunter lives in Immokalee, a scrubby town 34 miles inland from Fort Myers on Florida’s Gulf coast. About 40 per cent of the townspeople live below the poverty line, census data show. She shares her home with her three dogs; her one surviving son lives in a nursing home.
In an interview at her house, on a dusty road off the main highway, Mrs. Gunter said she doesn’t understand why the bank is foreclosing.
OneWest says that Mrs. Gunter now is delinquent by more than $160,000. Her lawyer, Joseph Klein of the Legal Aid Service of Collier County, argues there are extenuating circumstances.
Slideshow (3 Images)
Copies of her mortgage application forms show that in December 2006, an agent for Deutsche Bank’s MortgageIT unit signed up Mrs. Gunter for a $149,900 mortgage. The forms, listing her income, show that the agent knew that the monthly payments — $1,151, including insurance — were more than her monthly income of $800 from Social Security plus about $200 in food stamps.
In an affidavit filed in court, Mrs. Gunter said she had asked the salesman for a “reverse mortgage,” which allows senior citizens to remain in their homes without making mortgage payments, with the value of the house going to the bank when they die. But the documents the salesman gave her to sign were for an ordinary 30-year mortgage.
Losing her place would be a devastating blow, Mrs. Gunter said. “If they take the house,” she said, “they’ll take me, too.” |
Glenn Beck, Johnnie Moore Evacuate 149 Iraqi Christian Refugees to Slovakia (EXCLUSIVE)
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Refugees seeking to flee war-torn Iraq smile for cameras. | (Photo: Mercury One) A refugee washes dishes. | (Photo: Mercy One) Refugee children at play. | (Photo: Mercy One) An Iraqi woman stands next to a door with a painted cross. | (Photo: Mercy One) A visually impaired Iraqi refugee fingers beads. | (Photo: Mercy One) Humanitarian Johnnie Moore (far right) poses with Father Douglas Bazi (center right), and two colleagues. | (Photo: Mercy One) Television personality and radio host Glenn Beck smiles on a street in Slovakia. | (Photo: Mercy One) An Airbus 321 evacuated 149 Iraqi Christians to safety in Slovakia. | (Photo: Mercy One) View Photos
One hundred and forty-nine Iraqi Christian refugees rested easier Thursday night after escaping the murderous grip of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL, thanks to the coordinated evacuation efforts led by media personality Glenn Beck and faith leader Johnnie Moore.
The refugees did not face treacherous ocean waters in an unsafe vessel or resort to the dangers of illegal smugglers in order to make their escape. Instead evacuees were whisked to safety in the security and comfort of a privately chartered Airbus that carried them from their home in IS-ridden Nineveh Plains, a region in northeast Iraq and near Mosul, to safety in the central European country of Slovakia.
The effort was shrouded in secrecy, with one of its key operatives, Johnnie Moore, who authored the 2015 book Defying ISIS: Preserving Christianity in the Place of Its Birth and in Your Own Backyard, tweeting out a cryptic message requesting prayers just hours before executing the mission. "Requesting prayer for something I have been quietly working on for a long time. The next 24 hours are critical," he wrote.
Moore, a humanitarian who for years has focused on the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians and on helping the Church in Iraq and Syria, broke news of the successful operation in an exclusive interview with The Christian Post Thursday evening, expressing both excitement and relief. "It's been a crazy week, but we got it done," he told CP.
"We've been working on this for about six months," said Moore, explaining that coordinating evacuation efforts with other countries had previously fallen through. "We've been working on Slovakia, specifically, for about two and-a-half months. This is the first group in a number of groups that we hope to be able to resettle in the coming months."
Moore, who is also senior contributing editor of The Christian Post, and his coalition have had their hands on the pulse of the refugee crisis and "saw it coming" about two months before it reached a tipping point and hundreds of thousands of people began fleeing Iraq and Syria. "We decided to work on providing safe and legal ways for people to get out," he shared. "We began negotiating with countries. Unfortunately very, very few countries would even talk to us."
"Over the course of all of it, I appeared on Glenn Beck's radio television show, and Glenn decided to make this [evacuation effort] a significant emphasis, and because of that we were able to raise over $12 million to facilitate evacuations like this," Moore revealed.
In early September, Glenn Beck spoke out about what he felt was a lack of support for persecuted Middle Eastern Christians among American Christians, claiming that Americans' inaction on the issue suggests that the Statue of Liberty "means nothing anymore."
That month, Beck told The Daily Caller that he planned to raise $10 million before Christmas in order to bring Christians from Syria into the U.S. He also said he'd "gladly grace a jail" as a consequence for bringing Syrian Christian refugees into the country without proper permissions. Beck claimed, "We will vet them ourselves."
The radio host kept his word. His Nazarene Fund, an initiative with the objective of evacuating vulnerable Christians from countries like Iraq and Syria, raised more than $12 million before Christmas from the donations of 130,000 people.
The outspoken TV personality has ensured the safe and legal transplantation of the fund's first group of Iraqi Christians. When it came to vetting the refugees, Beck enlisted the help of Peregrine Consultants, which managed logistics and security, and utilized a vetting strategy that exceeded current international standards, according to The Blaze.
Beck is pleased with the safe passage of the first round of refugees. He flew to Iraq to meet with them before their departure from the country. "I am so grateful to the 130,000 individuals whose generous contributions made this journey possible, and I'm sure, if they could, the refugees would thank them too," Beck said in a report by The Blaze.
"The Christian populations in Iraq and Syria have declined by more than 2 million people over only a few years. While the world watched in near total silence, their ancient churches and monasteries were destroyed, their children were sold on slave markets, their property was confiscated, and those who survived have faced extortion and continued threats of kidnapping and beheading," said Beck. "While we wish we had the resources to save everyone, I'm hopeful that this trip was a meaningful step in the right direction to help those who cannot help themselves."
Johnnie Moore echoed Beck's sentiments to CP. "[We're] literally saving the lives of people that have no future — their homes have been taken over, their communities have been taken over. … There's no clear solution in sight. So now, rather than paying people-smugglers and risking life and limb to hop across the sea and hope that they find a place of refuge, we were able to put them on an airplane with warm clothes and deliver them [to safety] with a negotiated future and asylum in a new home."
For more information on the Nazarene Fund, click here. |
What a great way to start my morning! I walked out, tea in hand, to check out my garden’s progress only to be surprised by these delightful beauties!
What do we have here? Perfectly ripened tomatoes with a beautiful stalk! I already see a few new flowers forming – it looks like I’ll have another harvest in a few weeks.
Two green peppers just in time for fajita night! These guys are going to be so tasty – yum!
I love the color contrast of these Serrano peppers – the well-ripened ones are bright red while the up and comers are still a vibrant green. This is one of my husband’s plants – it’s done very well.
And the cucumbers are looking great – they’ve even begun to flower already. The leaves act as sun protections for the fruit to come. Mother nature has it pretty well figured out, I’d say.
This Basil is completely out of control! I’d always heard that it was difficult to keep alive, but this plant is huge! I’ve decided to make a massive batch of pesto and freeze a portion of it. The pesto will hold for a few months frozen allowing us to enjoy it throughout the summer.
Now you all told me that this mint was going to take over – and you were right. This is another massive plant – I’ve been cutting stalks of mint and drinking lemon/mint water throughout the day. It’s been pretty amazing – it definitely has assisted with my water intake goals. 🙂
The Kale is chugging along – I’ll be watching these guys over the next few months.
Does anybody know how to keep my tomatoes from getting these ridges? Or did I just wait too long to pick this one?
Skylla doesn’t seem to care whether the tomatoes have “stretch marks” or not, she just wants to eat them! As a funny side note, about ten minutes after I took this photo, she ran from the back porch and did a Superman leap into my garden bed – luckily she didn’t break any of the plants! It was like she just realized that there was food in the wooden box. Silly little dog. ❤ |
According to a recent study, an increasing number of women are opting out of standard hospital births in favor of more natural, intimate birthing experiences. So, why are more women choosing to give birth without any drugs and while whooshing down a waterslide?
Mothers have said they feel closer to nature when giving birth outdoors on a waterslide.
Parents have found that waterslide births not only reduce tension and ease stress, but they also help the child make a smooth transition from womb to adrenaline-filled ride.
Waterslide births give mothers control over their environment. Women can choose the slide to fit their specifications, depending on how fast they want to go and how many twists and turns they want to slide through while giving birth. Women who wish to maintain modesty can choose a closed tube for their slide.
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Beyond these many documented benefits, women who choose waterslide births say that the experience is something they recommend to all expectant mothers.
“I didn’t want to be on a lot of drugs or surrounded by doctors for one of the most beautiful, important moments of my life,” said Orlando, FL resident Bethany Goldblatt, who gave birth to her son on Blizzard Beach’s Summit Plummet in September. “I wanted to give birth naturally while going down a tube at 60 miles per hour and screaming ‘woo!’”
For Bethany’s husband, Mark, there was no question in his mind that a waterslide birth was the right choice for their family.
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“We considered our options—the Scorpion’s Tale, the Black Anaconda, King Cobra—but ultimately we felt the Summit Plummet was right for Bethany and, most importantly, for our son,” Mark said. “The moment when Bethany and Daniel came zooming down the slide and we swam together to the shallow end—that’s a moment I’ll remember for the rest of my life.”
While many doctors are emphasizing the risks in waterslide births—primarily the challenge of finding the right community pool and waiting until free swim to give birth—a growing number of women say the benefits far outweigh the risks.
“From the moment my obstetrician blew his whistle and I went flying down the waterslide, I’ve never looked back,” Bethany said. “It was the right choice for me. Nothing compares to the feeling of racing your newborn baby to the bottom of a waterslide.” |
This article is from the archive of our partner .
When WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange struck a deal with publishers Alfred A. Knopf and Canongate back in December to write his memoirs, he expressed hope that the book would be a "unifying document" and that the $1.5 million advance would help sustain him in his various legal battles. But according to a new Guardian report, that deal has "fallen through, at least in its original form, after Assange indicated he no longer wished to write the kind of book that was initially envisaged."
It's still not totally clear if Assange was worried about jeopardizing his legal status or just didn't care much for the book business. The Guardian's story leaves things open to interpretation, first citing intel that Assange had become "unhappy with the process" before noting he was also wary of the book giving "ammunition to US prosecutors, whom he fears may seek his extradition on terrorist charges relating to WikiLeaks disclosures."
A spokesman from U.K. publishing house Canongate denied that Assange was bailing on his memoirs, telling the paper that the publisher's contract with Assange is "very much alive" and plans to distribute the finished product 35 countries remain on-track. Assange's agent and ghost writer both declined to comment.
The Atlantic's Nicholas Jackson reported back in December that Assange was going to be facing some grueling deadlines, with "a first draft due to his editor by March."
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected]. |
Witness - Soros and Royalty Killed Kids!
Child-Killing-by-Royalty from Truth Warriors on Vimeo.
Anne Marie van Blijenburgh, a key eyewitness to ritual child killings by Dutch royalty and other elites including George Soros, describe the murders that have occurred since 2004 in Belgium and Holland. She made this statement before officers of the International Common Law Court of Justice this past summer, as part of its prosecution of Pope Francis and others for child trafficking and Ninth Circle ritual killings.
Anne Marie exposes a criminal organization known as the Octopus started in 1960. She reports that Queen Beatrix was involved with organizing torture, rape and killing of children in a public setting! They do this through youth detention centers in the Netherlands. This is mind blowing information that must be shared everywhere! We must expose these monsters to the general public so they know just how bad things really are out there!
Source:
http://www.project.nsearch.com/profiles/blogs/witness-says-soros-an...
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In the attic of an old shophouse in central Singapore, a space the size of a typical living room has been transformed into what could pass for a student dormitory, complete with piles of laundry, mismatched furniture and makeshift dividers for privacy.
But to its three current occupants, this attic is more than a temporary place to stay - it is a sanctuary where they live as females, not as the males they were born as.
"It is Singapore's first shelter for homeless transgender individuals," co-founder June Chua said proudly as she showed The Sunday Times around.
She is 42 years old. When she was 17, she had a sex-change operation in Thailand. Her partner in running the shelter is her 45-year-old sister Alicia, who was also born male but lives as a woman, although she has not chosen surgery.
When the younger Ms Chua returned to Singapore after her sex-change operation in 1990, she found that few people could accept her new identity, so she dropped out of junior college.
But she considers herself lucky - her parents did not make any fuss about her taking hormones to develop breasts, or when she went under the knife and later changed her sex officially in her identity card.
"I know a lot of transgender people who face difficulties in finding acceptance from their families and getting employment," said Ms Chua, whose day job is running a women's healthcare centre. "They get kicked out of their homes, drop out of school and get rejected by employers. They have to fight to survive."
Shelters and community care centres have also rejected transgender individuals or insisted on placing them apart, making it tough for them to seek social support among one another, said Ms Chua.
Mr Leow Yangfa, deputy executive director of Oogachaga, a counselling and personal development agency for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, said: "We understand that in Singapore, many social service and healthcare service providers refer to the gender indicated on official identity documents, instead of recognising the person's gender identity.
"Understandably, some service providers are unsure of or not trained in how to handle such situations in a sensitive way and may choose to turn away people who need help."
Wanting to fill what she calls a "void", Ms Chua decided to set up a shelter under her social cause, The T Project. Last September, she secured the attic space on the goodwill of a non-profit organisation.
She requested that the identity of the organisation and the shelter's address not be published because of worries that they could become targets.
The space can comfortably house five people and maintenance is overseen by a few volunteers from the transgender community. There have been about a dozen applicants so far asking for a place and all go through a vetting process to ensure they really need help.
"I have one other rule: no fighting with one another," said Ms Chua.
"I don't want to tell them how to live. Too many people have already told them what they can and cannot do. I don't want to be another bully. When they are here, they are in charge of their own lives."
The three transgender women living in the attic are: a 21-year-old who was kicked out by her family; one in her 40s who has had problems getting a job because of health issues; and a 77-year-old divorcee and former sex worker.
Since January, a group of National University of Singapore students have been selling locally designed goods, such as tote bags, in order to help raise funds for the running of the shelter.
More than $7,000 has been raised so far and the money will also go towards the purchase of home appliances such as a refrigerator.
Ms Chua said she plans to eventually run a larger, independent place for transgender individuals here, but hopes that attitudes towards the community improve so that there will no longer be a need for such shelters.
"There is still this stigma," she said.
Mr Leow said: "In some cases, transgender people who are bullied or ostracised in school because of their gender identity drop out of formal education prematurely. This, in turn, limits their employment opportunities and reduces their earning potential."
But in the decades since Ms Chua underwent her surgery, things have improved. "People don't call me 'ah gua' (colloquial derogatory term for cross-dressers) any more," she said.
Those who wish to find out more about the shelter can visit: https:// www.facebook.com/TheTprojectsg
[email protected] |
Still, speeds in the United States remain behind those in the world’s most connected countries, like South Korea, Japan and Switzerland. Equally importantly, American broadband, at an average price of $6.14 per Mbps, is more expensive than in most other developed nations.
This has little to do with the actual cost of moving bits. The price of transporting data wholesale across the Internet has fallen to about $1.57 per Mbps, down from $1,200 when Mr. Medin was helping start @Home. And high prices discourage Americans from opting for higher speeds. Though 10 Mbps broadband is available in 90 percent of homes around the country, and four out of five homes have access to 100 Mbps service, last year only 28 percent of homes that had access to broadband at a speed above 6 Mbps actually bought it.
What’s most worrying is that the handful of companies offering high-speed broadband to American consumers may have little incentive to expand their networks, increase their speeds and lower their prices.
According to the F.C.C.’s latest calculation, under one-third of American homes are in areas where at least two wireline companies offer broadband speeds of 10 Mbps or higher. Even including the spottier service offered by wireless providers, which tends to come with strict data caps limiting use, the share is less than half.
That means that in most American neighborhoods, consumers are stuck with a broadband monopoly. And monopolies don’t strive to offer the best, cheapest service. Rather, they use speed as a tool to discriminate by price — coaxing consumers who are willing to pay for high-speed broadband into more costly and profitable tiers.
Blair Levin, who headed the F.C.C.’s broadband initiative until three years ago and is now at the Aspen Institute, traces the roots of broadband’s limits to telephone companies’ decision, back in the 1990s, not to match cable’s costly investments in fiber, trusting that their DSL service would be an adequate competitor.
But DSL couldn’t follow cable past 3 Mbps. Verizon did eventually get on the ball — investing in its FiOS fiber network, which is expected to reach 17 million homes when it is completed. But that’s the exception. |
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) - Records obtained by The Associated Press show that a Mexican national accused of raping a 13-year-old girl on a Greyhound bus in Kansas had been deported 10 times and voluntarily removed from the U.S. nine other times since 2003.
Three U.S. Republican senators demanded this month in a letter that the Department of Homeland Security provide immigration records for 38-year-old Tomas Martinez-Maldonado.
That man is charged with felony rape in the alleged Sept. 27 attack aboard a bus in Geary County in north-central Kansas, where he is now in jail.
Defense attorney Lisa Hamer declined to comment. David Trevino, a Topeka immigration attorney who has provided legal advice to Martinez-Maldonado’s family, said that many immigrants have multiple entries without legal permission because they have family members in the U.S.
A status hearing is set for Jan. 10.
___
This version of the story corrects Trevino’s relationship to Martinez-Maldonado. |
Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather will meet face-to-face for the first time this week when the two fighters embark on a world tour to promote their Aug. 26th clash in Las Vegas.
Four press conferences in four separate cities across the globe will mark the official opening of hostilities between McGregor and Mayweather, the first of which is scheduled for Tuesday at 9.30pm BST from the Staples Centre in Los Angeles. Toronto will host the second event on the following day, again at 9.30pm BST, before stops in New York City on Thursday at 10.30pm and London on Friday at 7pm.
The presidents. A post shared by Conor McGregor Official (@thenotoriousmma) on Jul 9, 2017 at 11:22pm PDT
Each of the four pressers will be streamed live and free on the official SHOWTIME Sports News YouTube channel. A massive global audience is expected to log-in to view the press conferences in real time, ahead of the potentially record-breaking fight next month.
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Kane Williamson wasn't, then was, now isn't going to get to play in the Black Caps' final warm-up match.
Despite the New Zealand cricket team trying to ignore the Kevin Pietersen drama, it's having a bigger effect on their tour than hoped.
On Friday Mike Hesson was asked Pietersen questions and on Thursday it was Martin Guptill. Both tried to avoid being dragged into the controversy, but now it has directly affected the Black Caps and their preparation for the first test, against England at Lord's starting next Thursday.
Pietersen has been told he will not be selected for England so decided to head to the IPL instead.
READ MORE:
* Guptill ready to come out swinging
* Vaughan: Ghost of KP haunts ECB
* Lyth to open for England at Lord's
But a knee injury has ruled that out so his team, the Sunrisers Hyderabad, have opted to keep fellow import Kane Williamson around.
Williamson was always expected to be a late arrival to New Zealand's UK tour alongside Sunrisers' team-mate Trent Boult, Tim Southee and Brendon McCullum, but that looked set to change when Pietersen was India-bound.
The first day of the final warm-up match was a wash-out on Friday morning (NZ time).
Williamson wasn't expected to play any part in it, then he was and now he isn't again.
"We didn't [initially] expect him to come," Coach Mike Hesson said.
"We had some hopes, but they've now been dashed."
Hesson had no concerns about Williamson's lack of preparation ahead of the first test.
"He's a very professional young man. He'll be doing a lot of work over there and obviously use the two or three days he gets when he gets here to prepare himself as well as possible. I'd still expect him to put in a good performance in the first test."
Hesson said while it was frustrating to have the first day of the four-day match washed out, the weather forecast looked good for the remaining three days and he expected his side to be well prepared for the English at Lord's.
The English media are more concerned with their own side and how they've been struggling, but Hesson would not be drawn into the debate.
He was asked how he expected England to be affected by the Pietersen saga and by underperforming in their drawn series with the West Indies in the Caribbean.
"I don't really know, there's obviously plenty going on off the field, but every team has that from time to time and that's where you just need to focus on your job and I'm sure they'll be doing that," he said.
The Black Caps would be confident, but certainly not taking England lightly, he said.
"England have a good record here and we don't – we've only won four tests ever in our history here." |
Garden salad? Fuck that noise. If you are going to eat a salad, eat a BIG. ASS. SALAD. I was thoroughly impressed with myself after making this kale salad in under a half hour.
There are a few parts to this salad, but it literally took me under 30 minutes to whip this bad boy into shape. So get ready to get on your superfood game – this salad is healthy and so effing filling!!
The Buffalo Tempeh Recipe
This recipe is much like the one we did for our Tempeh BLP.
You will need:
1/2 block tempeh (I use this one from Trader Joe’s)
1/2 cup Frank’s Red Hot Sauce
2 tbs Earth Balance butter
1 tbs maple syrup
1 tbs soy sauce
1 tsp coconut oil
To make:
Slice your tempeh into thin strips (about 10-12).
Add all ingredients (except tempeh) to your fry pan, over simmering heat.
Once the butter and coconut oil is melted well, add tempeh strips. Cover and let sit for 5 minutes. After 5 minutes, turn, cover, and let sit for another 5 minutes.
After 10 minutes of this “marinating,” turn heat up to medium, uncover, and allow tempeh to soak up the remaining liquid. Keep a close eye – it can burn easily!
Turn off heat and set pan aside. [WARNING: You will want to eat ALL. THE. BUFFALO. TEMPEH. Try to refrain.]
Buffalo Tahini Dressing
Two ingredients, guys. This is really easy.
To make:
Mix 3 tbs Trader Joe’s Tahini Dressing w/ 2 tbs Frank’s Red Hot Sauce.
Set aside. The end.
Sweet Potato Wedges
You will need:
2 sweet potatoes, cut into wedges
Chili powder
Garlic salt
Paprika
Olive oil
To make:
Toss your wedges with the following 4 ingredients.
Lay out on a baking sheet, and bake at 375 F for 20 minutes.
Set aside.
Putting Together the Salad
You will need:
Buffalo Tempeh
Buffalo Tahini Dressing
Sweet potato wedges
2 cups kale
1/3 cup fire roasted corn (I used the bag from Trader Joe’s)
1/4 cup black beans
1/4 avocado, sliced
1 stalk celery, diced
To make:
Massage the shit out of your kale! I added 1/2 of my buffalo tahini dressing to this while I massaged. Mmm!
Plate your kale, and add your toppings (so basically, everything).
Drizzle the last bit of buffalo tahini, and there you have it!
I am thinking about making this salad again for dinner tonight, because wow… totally craving it!! It is gorgeous, colorful, and so so filling! Salads never have to be boring, loves. xx Bianca
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NEW DELHI: The Central Statistics Office CSO ) revamped the index of industrial production on Friday by shifting to a new base year, deleting ‘irrelevant’ items such as calculators, gutka and colour picture tubes, and inducting new items to better reflect changes in the industrial sector over the years.The base year was revised from 2004-05 to 2011-12.As a result, industrial output growth in 2016-17 rose a healthy 5% compared with 0.7% under the 2004-05 base year.In March, industrial output clocked 2.7% growth, slower than the 5.5% growth posted in March 2016.As part of the overhaul of industrial output data, the new series has 809 items in the manufacturing sector.The CSO has added 149 new items such as steroids and hormonal preparations, cement clinkers, surgical accessories, prefabricated concrete blocks and refined palm oil while 124 products such as calculators, colour TV picture tubes and gutka have been deleted from the 2004-05 series, which had 620 items.To reflect the increasing significance of electricity generation from renewable sources, the CSO has also added data from this segment.Anew category of infrastructure and construction goods has been added to the overall industrial data. The coverage of the mining sector has also undergone a change.Economists said the new series reflects the changes in the economy over the years.“This is much more realistic and more or less closer to the new GDP data,” Pronob Sen , former chief statistician said. But he called for faster revision to better capture the changes in the economy.“Even this revision is outdated by 6 years as we are in 2017-18. The work on the next revision should start right away,” he said.Economists have called for revision of the industrial output data given the volatility in the 2004-05 series and the inclusion of obsolete items in the product mix used for calculating the key data.The government has also set up a technical review committee, headed by the secretary, statistics, which will monitor the data and help in revising the list of products and the panel of factories.The panel will meet at least once a year for identifying new items that need to be included in the basket of products and those that need to be dropped.“The new series shows higher growth rates compared with the old series which can be attributed to shifting of base to a more recent period, increase in number of factories in the panel for reporting data and exclusion of closed one and inclusion of new items and exclusion of old ones,” said Madan Sabnavis, chief economist at Care Ratings “In FY17, as per the new series the industrial growth improved to 5%. Overall industrial activity is expected to witness expansion in this fiscal year owing to improved demand from across sectors.Thus we expect the industrial output to grow by a similar range of 5-6% in FY 18,” Sabnavis said.For capital goods, data in the new series will now be captured in terms of “work in progress” to better represent the growth of capital goods and to avoid reporting of production figures in bulk after the completion of production.Data for the capital goods sector has been volatile in the old series prompting economists to call for an overhaul to help derive a trend.The CSO said the shift to a new base year for IIP will also align it with the the base year of other macroeconomic indicators like the gross domestic product and wholesale price index (WPI). |
May 16, 2011 | by VIDA |
“Numbers don’t lie.” “What matters is the bottom line.”
Such sayings sound definitive, like the dead-end of a boring story. But as these facts come to light–no longer imagined or guessed at–so does the truth of publishing disparities, the unfortunate footing from which we can begin to change the face of publishing. We are no longer guessing if the world is flat or round; we are wondering how to get from point A to B now that the rules of navigation are public and much clearer. Questions long denied will lead us to new awareness, to challenge current publishing practices, and to query the merits of selection on the level of individual publications and review journals alike.
Please take a look. Scroll slowly. Notice the Red. Your favorite publication might be here. Atlantic? Boston Review? Granta? Harpers? London Review of Books? New Republic? New Yorker? NY Times Book Review? New York Review of Books? Poetry? Times Literary Supplement? And many more…
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The truth is, these numbers don’t lie. But that is just the beginning of this story. What, then, are they really telling us? We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity. Many have already begun speculating; more articles and groups are pointing out what our findings suggest: the numbers of articles and reviews simply don’t reflect how many women are actually writing. VIDA is here to help shape that discussion. Please tell us about the trends you’ve witnessed in your part of the writing world. Let us know what you think is going on. We’re ready and anxious to hear from you. We’re ready to invest our efforts and energy into the radical notion that women are writers too.
– Amy King
Images by Ana Božičević
The Atlantic – Overall The Atlantic – Authors Reviewed The Atlantic – Book Reviewers The Atlantic – Cover to Cover Boston Review – Overall Boston Review – Authors Reviewed Boston Review – Book Reviewers Harpers – Authors Reviewed Harpers – Book Reviewers London Review of Books – Overall London Review of Books – Authors Reviewed London Review of Books – Book Reviewers New Republic – Overall New Republic – Authors Reviewed New Republic – Book Reviewers New Yorker – Overall New Yorker – Authors Reviewed Book Reviewers New Yorker – Briefly Noted New York Review of Books – Authors Reviewed New York Review of Books – Book Reviewers New York Times Book Review – Authors Reviewed New York Times Book Review – Book Reviewers New York Times Book Review – Essay Poetry – Overall Poetry – Authors Reviewed Poetry – Book Reviewers Paris Review – Overall Paris Review – Interview Authors Threepenny Review – Overall Threepenny Review – Authors Reviewed Threepenny Review – Book Reviewers Tin House – Overall Tin House – Authors Reviewed Tin House – Book Reviewers TLS – Authors Reviewed TLS – Book Reviewers TLS – In Brief
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"A hilarious, hardcore, procedural shooter from 1996 design-inspired by Quake, Doom and Wolf3D? YES! Back this baby! " - John Romero - DOOM, QUAKE
"I FUCKING MISSED FPS GAMES LIKE STRAFE." - Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers)
"Strafe is the goriest, most realistic shooter of 1996" - Destructoid
"This is the best game trailer ever, everyone else can go home" - Polygon
"I want to swim in gibs. Can I swim in gibs? Like a meat-ball pit?" - Pendleton Ward - Adventure Time
"I will do a ton of booze and drugs and then record a Squirty Play of this while barking 90s gibberish." - Jim Sterling
"DYING" - Cliff Bleszinski - UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2004, GEARS OF WAR
"After reviewing this KS campaign, I called my mom and yelled at her that she needs to fund Strafe OR GO TO HELL!" - Matt Super Best Friends Play
"Humour aside, it is actually pretty impressive..." - Kotaku
STRAFE® is the fastest, bloodiest, deadliest, most adjective-abusing, action-packed first-person shooter of 1996! Auto-generating levels of pure mayhem constantly change up the carnage.
The future of 3D gaming is in your hands. Are you ready to push the limits of computer-generated realism and hardcore scifi action to a new level that threatens the very existence of humanity?*
Good. Humanity is not worthy of STRAFE®:
• BILLIONS of level possibilities with a unique level generated on every load
• OCULUS RIFT compatibility - put yourself inside 100% virtualized "real" environments
• Randomized enemies, monster closets and hidden secrets surprise at every turn
• ÜBER-GORE® Tech for ludicrously persistent gibs
• Lifelike digital gravity
• BLAZING fast gameplay and responsive controls
• Realtime first person upright biped simulation
• Weapon upgrades and power-ups that’ll change your play style
• Unsigned 32 bit colors!
• Colored lighting!
• Ultra large resolutions with a unique 16:9* screen ratio (*only in 2d mode)
• Multi dimensional polygonal meshes derived from over a thousand unique vertices
• STRAFE®!
The insanely detailed worlds of STRAFE®: From concept art to breathtaking reality.
You survived the hell demons of DOOM, the pure evil of QUAKE and the insane Nazi regime of WOLFENSTEIN 3D. But nothing can prepare you for the depravity of deep space in STRAFE®.**
The story moves at the speed of STRAFE®.
It’s your yearly scrapping mission, but this year is different. Your humble scout ship has been recruited to join the massive spacecraft ICARUS. They plan to head to far edge of the galaxy, to a remote sector where other scrappers have not yet dared to venture.
The rewards could be unimaginable. But so are the risks. It may be unexplored space, but it’s a gamble you know you must take.
You lost.
You return from a run empty handed, but worse, ICARUS is no where to be found. You check your coordinates. You try the coms. No answer from your comrades on ICARUS. Yet their teleporter appears in-range and responsive.
So you grab a gun “just in case” and teleport onto ICARUS. What could go wrong?
Everything goes wrong. This is STRAFE®. Prepare for hours of uninterrupted chaos that won’t stop for storylines or anything short of a melted CPU.***
The gameplay can never truly be mastered, because STRAFE® is never the same.
You start by picking one of three tools of death.
SHOTGUN. Schklikt, klikt VOOMP
MACHINE GUN. Brrrat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat
RAILGUN. Vmmmm-PHT
Each weapon includes a secondary firing method and is affected by two types of powerups as you progress through STRAFE®!
Common power-ups affect your weapon attributes such as magazine size, damage, reload time and firing speed.
Rare power-ups alter your secondary fire, like turning your machine gun into a mine launcher to set traps or splitting your shotgun flak at mid-range into a wider net of punishment.
But obviously STRAFE® must include more than three weapons. And it does. More are hidden throughout the world, including a secret SUPER WEAPON.
As a scrapper, you also collect scrap around levels and off enemy corpses to craft armor and ammo. Use it for protection, or sell it to merchants for credit towards perks and other power-ups that make you an evasive, agile killing machine.
Death is on discount at the STRAFE® market. Buy now.
To survive in STRAFE® you adapt your killing methods as you go. You can avoid power-ups and perks if you choose, but be warned: when you die in STRAFE®, you die for real****. You restart at beginning and face a new level where…
EVERYTHING.
HAS.
CHANGED.
For the worst.
Levels get painted red with the glorious permanent gibs of your enemies. Because when you draw blood in STRAFE®, the blood stays put as your twisted work of art.
Every shell casing. Every blown-off limb. Every drop of monster juice. It all persists in the environment and never fades away, disappears, or disappoints. Just as you’d expect from a real-world massacre.
Learn more from a detailed post on the STRAFE® devblog.
Makes you want to stick out your tongue and catch a taste.
Since the levels constantly change, this blood and gore is your compass in STRAFE®. It informs you where you’ve previously traveled and directs you toward new paths of destruction in each level set.
The levels of STRAFE® are radically different environments that will alter your killing methods. Additional details on three of these areas are closely-guarded secrets of STRAFE® only available upon playing the final game.
ICARUS - Massive spacecraft with short to mid-range based combat.
You should have stayed on your scout ship.
AREA 2 - Open levels where death is quick to surround you and trap you with pits, ledges and enemies with the high ground.
You should have stayed on Icarus.
AREA 3 - Open areas and close quarters combine with environmental hazards for frantically varied gameplay.
AREA 4 - Close quarters finale filled with all previous enemies and hazards for maximum difficulty. Are you up for the challenge?*****
It’s the enemies that will have you strafing helplessly in your dreams.
Movement is your best defense, as there is no cover. Health does not recharge. Your only hope is to learn the unique behaviors and weakness of each enemy, shoot and STRAFE. Some will rush at you and beat in your skull. Others impale you with a shower of projectiles from afar.
The ICARUS levels will feature 7 enemy types, with more to come in later levels.
Make them pay for living.
Secrets are special in STRAFE®. You won’t find them by simply STRAFING around a corner. Because ammo hiding under stairs is not a rewarding find.
From unique levels with original art, to modes that affect graphics or gameplay, to minigames, secrets offer rewards or punishments based on your performance. There is no greater accomplishment than discovering every secret of STRAFE®.******
Below is just one of the early secrets in STRAFE®. If you don't want to spoil the surprise, skip ahead past this video to the next section. If you're still reading this, STRAFE® loathes your impatience but respects your bravery. For you're about to experience LUFTENSTEIN, a hidden minigame with original art, enemies, music and gameplay. Win and be rewarded. But lose and... well, STRAFE®.
LAST CHANCE TO NOT SPOIL THE SURPRISE.
The STRAFE® team is a small group united by an unrelenting love of games. Specifically, of STRAFE®. Which is the first project from the STRAFE® team, led by director Thom Glunt, who has the gall to think he can jump in and speak on behalf of STRAFE®.
Hi everyone,
Thom Glunt here, creative director of STRAFE® at Pixel Titans. This has been fun, but I want to be serious for a second. STRAFE® is the best game of all time.
Kidding, obviously. Because it’s not done yet! Which brings us to Kickstarter.
STRAFE® has been a side hobby of mine next to my other career: music video/commercial directing, which doesn't pay great, and playing video games, which hasn’t paid anything and in fact has suffered disastrous losses over the last 26 years. Same story with our lead programmer, Steve Raney. But after attracting fantastic contributors to the project and receiving great reactions at VRLA (Virtual Reality Los Angeles), we’re ready to take the game into full-time development.
But that requires time. And because time equals money, that means we need your money. Without funding we've seen a number of team members come and go. Pixel Titans at its core is two people, and the STRAFE® team in full is currently five. A successful Kickstarter will allow us to concentrate on the game and hire an additional animator, artists and a part-time programmer to stay on schedule for an early 2016 release.
We already have 9 months of part-time development in the can. Most systems have been implemented and major technical hurdles solved. This includes the procedural level generation and a persistent gibs system that doesn’t destroy performance. So we’re confident in our promise to make STRAFE® as awesome as possible, finish it with all planned content and also never ever threaten Gabe Newell’s life. We love you, Gabe.
Thanks for the support!
Thom
Kickstarter is the perfect model to release a forward-thinking game like STRAFE®.
Surprises, secrets and first impressions are important. Releasing an incomplete version in early access is the only force that could compromise the enjoyment of STRAFE®. A successful Kickstarter allows us to release the game only when it is final and deserving of the title GAME OF THE YEAR, 1996.
As STRAFE® is all about STRAFE®, physical rewards are limited so as not to cannibalize the development funds. But there are occasional exceptions (especially at higher tiers), like our STRAFE® poster:
Blow away the rest of your art collection.
We also have many high-tech digital rewards, including the ultimate digital reward, the STRAFE® game. Rewards are only for backers, so don't miss out.
FUND STRAFE®
PLAY STRAFE®
STRAFE®!
*The threat level STRAFE® poses to humanity is not currently quantifiable.
**Hardcore players only. Not recommended for children or elderly.
***If STRAFE® does melt your CPU, please send us a picture of the damage, so we can post it on Twitter. @STRAFEGAME
****STRAFE® will not literally kill you. Most likely. If by coincidence death does occur during a STRAFE® session, number one, what better way to go out, and two, we do not accept liability or responsibility. If you're worried about the effects of hardcore gaming on your health, we encourage you to consider our $10,000 reward tier.
*****No.
******Developing STRAFE® is a greater accomplishment, but that is not an accessible goal for you. |
Post in Hyper Drive on Effort to Cut Social Security and Medicare
The Washington Post is throwing all journalistic norms aside in its drive to cut Social Security and Medicare. It continues to hype the budget standoff as an ominous "fiscal cliff" and tells readers on the front page of its web site that it could provide a "magic moment" in which Social Security and Medicare can be cut. The piece begins by telling readers:
"Two years ago this month, the leaders of a presidential commission rolled out a startling plan to dig the nation out of debt. After decades of stagnating incomes, they said, Washington must tell people to work longer, pay higher taxes and expect less in retirement."
Okay I tricked you, this is the Washington Post which doesn't acknowledge economic realities like stagnating income. The piece actually began:
"Two years ago this month, the leaders of a presidential commission rolled out a startling plan to dig the nation out of debt. After decades of profligacy, they said, Washington must tell people to work longer, pay higher taxes and expect less in retirement (emphasis added)."
This departure from reality gives you the gist of the story. The piece continues:
"Lawmakers recoiled from the blunt prescriptions of Democrat Erskine Bowles and Republican Alan K. Simpson. But their plan has since been heralded by both parties as a model of clear-eyed sacrifice, and policymakers say the moment has come to live up to its promise."
Well, yes people have praised their plan. They have also ridiculed it. For example it proposes immediate cuts in Social Security benefits that would be a larger share of the income of the typical beneficiary than President Obama's proposed tax increases on the top 2 percent would be for most of the affected taxpayers. It also proposes increasing the age for Medicare eligibility, even though this would add tens of billions to the country's health care costs over the next decade. And, it proposed a minimum Social Security benefit for low wage earners that few low wage earners would actually qualify for due to the number of working years required to qualify.
There were many other carefully detailed criticisms from people who did not find the plan "startling" nor saw the need to "dig the nation" out of a debt that was almost entirely due to the economic plunge caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. As all budget wonks know the deficits were just over 1.0 percent of GDP prior to the economic collapse and were projected to stay low for the near future, until the collapse of the housing bubble sank the economy.
Source: Congressional Budget Office.
These people focused on the need to get the economy going again and to get people back to work, which would eliminate the bulk of the deficit all by itself. But, just as the Post ignored all the people warning of the housing bubble before it burst, it continues to ignore those who try to put the large budget deficits in the economic context in which they arose.
The piece continues to shamelessly push its agenda:
"In the past, policymakers have handled such moments by delaying the pain and giving themselves new deadlines for getting the budget under control. Now, however, the national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period after World War II — and it’s rising rapidly. Avoiding hard decisions could have grave consequences, analysts say, potentially undermining the U.S. economic recovery and the world’s confidence in American leadership."
A more serious newspaper might point out that the ratio of interest payments to GDP is near a post-war low.
Source: Congressional Budget Office.
The piece includes the Post's usual collection of terms and phrases that would ordinarily be reserved for the opinion pages of a newspaper; for example telling us that a budget deal was "tantalizingly" close back in 2011 and telling us about efforts at "taming" the debt, as opposed to reducing it. And it tries to conceal plans to cut Social Security benefits, referring to Republican demands for:
"applying a stingier measure of inflation to Social Security."
It is unlikely that most readers would understand that this would mean reducing benefits for current retirees by 0.3 percent annually from scheduled levels. This would accumulate to a cut of 3 percent for someone who had been retired 10 years, 6 percent after 20 years and 9 percent after 30 years.
Anyhow, we will no doubt see many more pieces pushing the Post agenda for cutting Social Security and Medicare littered throughout the paper's news section in the weeks ahead. |
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Unmanned Russian rocket “Proton-M” with three navigation satellites “Glonass-M” again didn’t reach Earth orbit. The flight lasted only a few seconds, then the rocket exploded and crashed to the ground one kilometer from the launch site at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Another failure of the Federal Space Agency of Russia is estimated at $ 200 million. The launch of the rocket “Proton-M” at Baikonur was broadcast live on the TV channel “Russia 24”.
TV announcer comments on the rocket launch:
“And that’s the launch, a colorful spectacle… But something seems to go wrong. Something is wrong. It seems to be a crash. And the rocket goes to the ground and breaks up in the air. And the explosion. So, unsuccessful launch of the rocket “Proton-M” with three Russian navigation satellites on board was broadcast live. ”
The flight was so short that during the fall the fuel tank was almost full with approximately 600 liters of highly toxic heptyl fuel. Fortunately, most of the fuel burned in the air in the blast. But the remnants could still get on the ground and in the air.
And here is the video taken earlier, when the rocket was transported to the launch site.
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FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., April 9 (UPI) -- The former purchasing director of a Florida city panicked while he was being pulled over in downtown Fort Lauderdale in December and stashed a glass methamphetamine pipe in the only place he could think of -- his rectum.
Carlos López, who was working for the city of Hialeah at the time, was arrested Dec. 29 on drug charges and taken to a hospital to have the pipe removed.
“López appeared visually shaken and sweating. López’s face was flushed from an apparent rise in body temperature and pupils were dilated,” according to the arrest report. “As López searched for his license I observed involuntary muscle spasms in López’s face as well as slurred repetitive speech. These symptoms are consistent with being under the influence of methamphetamine.”
In the report, an officer identified as R. Goderstad noted that after a metal container with methamphetamine was found, he observed that López had his pants unbuttoned.
A canine officer who was on the scene “began speaking with López at which time López admitted to have a methamphetamine glass pipe inside his anal cavity. López then stated he placed it in his rectum as he was being pulled over so I wouldn’t find it if I searched his vehicle.”
Weeks after the arrest, the 45-year-old was transferred to a leadership post in Public Works.
[Miami Herald] [CBS Miami] |
Swift Playgrounds is a revolutionary app for iPad that makes it fun to learn and experiment with code. You solve interactive puzzles in the guided “Learn to Code” lessons to master the basics of coding, while additional challenges let you explore code and create programs that are engaging and unique.
Swift Playgrounds requires no coding knowledge, so it’s perfect for students just starting out, from twelve to one-hundred-and-twelve. The whole time you are learning Swift, a powerful programming language created by Apple and used by professionals to build many of today’s most popular apps. And because it’s built to take full advantage of iPad and the real iOS SDK, Swift Playgrounds is a first-of-its-kind learning experience.
Lessons built-in
• Apple-created lessons guide you through the core concepts of programming by using code to solve puzzles
• See your code run in a beautiful, interactive 3D world that you can rotate with a finger and pinch to zoom
• Animations introduce each new coding concept at a high level before you dive into the puzzles
• Choose from three animated characters to carry out the steps of your code
• Glossary covers a comprehensive list of common terms, or tap a word in the instructions for additional help
Explore and create
• Challenges encourage experimentation and creativity by playing with game logic, music, and various other themes
• New challenges are released regularly to keep improving your emerging coding skills
• Interactive coding shows the results of your code instantly, either beside the text or acted out in the live view
• Step through your code to highlight each line as it is run
• Use your own photos, images, sounds, and files within a program to make it uniquely yours
• Templates are a head start to create your own programs that use graphs, graphics, touch, or a chat with the computer
• Create your own playgrounds from scratch to take your coding skills to entirely new places
• Reset any page to start over, or duplicate and rename any document to give a family member their own copy
Built for touch
• Quick Type suggestions for code are so smart you can write entire programs in just a few taps, no keyboard required
• Tap and hold to grab any command and move it around to change the order of your code
• Drag a brace with your finger to wrap a block of code inside a loop or conditional statement
• Drag and drop snippets of commonly-used code directly into your playground
• Tap a number or color in your code to display a pop-up in which to enter a new value or choose from a color picker
• Amazing new coding keyboard has all the common Swift characters, just swipe to pick the alternate symbol on any key
Real Swift and iOS code
• Learn the same powerful Swift programming language used by the pros to create thousands of apps in the App Store
• Access iOS frameworks such as SpriteKit for 2D games, SceneKit for 3D graphics, UIKit, and more
• Your code has direct control of iPad hardware such as the gyroscope, accelerometer, camera, and touch events
• Use Bluetooth APIs to write programs that control robots and other real-world devices with your iPad
• Every concept and skill you learn directly applies when writing real apps
Share
• Send your creations to friends and family using Messages, Mail, AirDrop, or other Share Sheet extensions
• Record a video of yourself coding or running your creation, complete with your own voice narration
• Broadcast a coding session live to the world using any streaming service app that supports ReplayKit
• Homework hand-in with iTunes U makes it easy to bring coding into the classroom
• Turn on iCloud Drive to enable Xcode on your Mac to edit and extend the same documents that are on your iPad
Swift Playgrounds requires a 64-bit iPad with iOS 10 or later, including iPad mini 2 or later, iPad Air or later, or iPad Pro |
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's statement that Turkish warships would escort the next Gaza-bound aid flotillas spared a row in Israel and across the world. The remarks were perceived as particularly aggressive, creating a basis for further escalation in the deteriorating relations between Israel and Turkey.
Now it seems the Turks are attempting to soften the statement, claiming that Erdogan's words were translated in a way that distorts his original intention.
More on Israel-Turkey diplomatic crisis:
"Turkish warships, in the first place, are authorized to protect our ships that carry humanitarian aid to Gaza," Erdogan was quoted as saying this week. "From now on, we will not let these ships to be attacked by Israel, as what happened with the Freedom Flotilla.
According to official sources in Turkey, reporters artificially combined two different remarks made by the Turkish prime minister, creating one sentence perceived as a threat of a military clash in high seas.
Erdogan. Remarks taken out of context? (Photo: Getty Images)
The new version, sent to the media from Erdogan's office, attempts to clarify the statement.
"We stressed the principle that we will ensure the safe movement of Gaza's aid vessel," said a senior Turkish government source. "The eastern Mediterranean Sea is not Israel's private playground. As long as it avoids intervening in the freedom of movement in the region, we won't send any warships to escort the vessels."
The source dismissed the published quotes as a bad translation which failed to understand Erdogan's intention. "It appeared as if we were offering to have warships escort every aid vessel. This is not true. Turkey will defend the rights of its citizens only when Israel chooses to intervene and prevent free movement in international waters."
The diplomatic relations between Ankara and Jerusalem reached a new low last weekend, after Israel refused to apologize for the May 31, 2010 deadly IDF raid on a Gaza-Bound flotilla.
In response, Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador and senior diplomats and said it would increase its Navy's activity in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and suspended all military trade ties between the two countries.
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Chinese Film Critics Hate Guardians Of The Galaxy, Here's Why By Kristy Puchko Random Article Blend Guardians of the Galaxy is on track to be the highest grossing movie of the year, not to mention possibly the most popular Marvel outing yet. But the love for all things Groot, Gamora, Rocket, Drax and Star-Lord is being lost on the Chinese. Well, lost in translation anyway.
Guardians of the Galaxy is receiving mixed reviews from Chinese film critics and moviegoers, predominantly because of atrocious subtitles. One of the could-have-been fans of the film, a social media user identified as Gudabaihua, picked out 80 translation mistakes, but notes that may not be Guardians of the Galaxy's biggest problem. Gudabaihua explains, "Aside from a lot of mistranslations, the subtitles failed to show the original feel of the movie, such as jokes, puns and homophones. We cannot help but doubt the professionalism of the translator."
As someone who has sat through my fair share of sloppy English-subtitled movies, I feel for the Chinese audiences of Guardians of the Galaxy. It's a maddening experience, where for 90-minutes or so you just feel stupid or confused because the word salad in front of you refuses to make sense. Typically, this has happened to me with niche genre films that few in the U.S. have heard of anyway. Can you imagine the level of frustration the Chinese must have experienced when a movie the whole world has gone bonkers for comes to your theater, only to be garbled by poor translation?
At least the joy of dancing Groot can't be ruined by subtitles screw-ups:
Maybe we shouldn't be too surprised by the botched subtitles, considering the translation China's distributors
Guardians of the Galaxy opened in China on October 10th, and the complaints about the translation came fast and furious. As China has become a major market for Hollywood productions, this translation snafu could pose a serious problem for its numbers there.
The distributor for this superhero ensemble in China is HuaXia. Notably, this is the same company that distributed Pacific Rim, which raised similar subtitle complaints. Yet that film banked enough in China to Men in Black III, The Hunger Games and Skyfall. All of which is shocking considering how intensely Hollywood is courting the Chinese market.
There's no word on whether or not HuaXia will be revisiting the subtitles for is on track to be the highest grossing movie of the year, not to mention possibly the most popular Marvel outing yet. But the love for all things Groot, Gamora, Rocket, Drax and Star-Lord is being lost on the Chinese. Well, lost in translation anyway. China Daily reports thatis receiving mixed reviews from Chinese film critics and moviegoers, predominantly because of atrocious subtitles. One of the could-have-been fans of the film, a social media user identified as Gudabaihua, picked out 80 translation mistakes, but notes that may not be's biggest problem. Gudabaihua explains, "Aside from a lot of mistranslations, the subtitles failed to show the original feel of the movie, such as jokes, puns and homophones. We cannot help but doubt the professionalism of the translator."As someone who has sat through my fair share of sloppy English-subtitled movies, I feel for the Chinese audiences of. It's a maddening experience, where for 90-minutes or so you just feel stupid or confused because the word salad in front of you refuses to make sense. Typically, this has happened to me with niche genre films that few in the U.S. have heard of anyway. Can you imagine the level of frustration the Chinese must have experienced when a movie the whole world has gone bonkers for comes to your theater, only to be garbled by poor translation?At least the joy of dancing Groot can't be ruined by subtitles screw-ups:Maybe we shouldn't be too surprised by the botched subtitles, considering the translation China's distributors gave Guardians of the Galaxy : "Interplanetary Unusual Attacking Team."opened in China on October 10th, and the complaints about the translation came fast and furious. As China has become a major market for Hollywood productions, this translation snafu could pose a serious problem for its numbers there.The distributor for this superhero ensemble in China is HuaXia. Notably, this is the same company that distributed, which raised similar subtitle complaints. Yet that film banked enough in China to make a sequel possible . Other big Hollywood releases that have been accused of sloppy Chinese translation have beenand. All of which is shocking considering how intensely Hollywood is courting the Chinese market.There's no word on whether or not HuaXia will be revisiting the subtitles for Guardians of the Galaxy. RELATED: Avengers 4 Cast Looks Back On 10 Years Of Marvel Blended From Around The Web Facebook
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Welcome to Offbeat Oregon History, a public-history resource for the state we love. Here's what you'll find here:
A weekly newspaper column published in about a dozen Oregon community newspapers;
published in about a dozen Oregon community newspapers; An archive of columns we've published since 2008, with pictures (arranged by date of first publication);
of columns we've published since 2008, with pictures (arranged by date of first publication); A daily podcast (7 to 12 minutes long) optimized for mobile-device listening via iTunes, Stitcher, or the podcatcher of your choice;
(7 to 12 minutes long) optimized for mobile-device listening via iTunes, Stitcher, or the podcatcher of your choice; A weekly RSS feed optimized for smartphone newsreader apps like Pulse or Feedly;
optimized for smartphone newsreader apps like Pulse or Feedly; An active Facebook page, Twitter feed, Pinterest boards.
Enjoy! And if you have any comments on stories, suggestions for column topics or other feedback — or if you're coming by the OSU campus and have time for a cup of coffee with a fellow history dork — drop me a note at fj-@-offbeatoregon-dot-com any time!
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Alexis Sanchez could return to Arsenal's starting XI but Mesut Ozil (L) is still absent
Alexis Sanchez is set to start for Arsenal as they attempt to overturn their 5-1 first-leg deficit against Bayern Munich in the Champions League last-16, but Mesut Ozil is still out with an illness.
The Gunners host the German giants at the Emirates on Tuesday night knowing only a near-miracle will see them make it into the quarter-finals for the first time since 2010.
Sanchez was left out of the starting line-up as Arsenal were beaten 3-1 at Liverpool in the Premier League on Saturday, but Arsene Wenger denied there had been a reported bust-up on the training ground involving the Chilean.
Alexis Sanchez and Arsene Wenger shake hands at Arsenal training following reports the Chile striker is unhappy at the club Alexis Sanchez and Arsene Wenger shake hands at Arsenal training following reports the Chile striker is unhappy at the club
When asked about the supposed incident, Wenger said: "I am not aware, nothing happened. Nothing at all.
"I explained after the game at Liverpool that I decided to go for a more direct option in the game and that's what happened. That was the unique reason for my decision.
"For the rest, his attitude… He is a committed player, sometimes with excessive behaviour, but you have seen that many times in history in every squad."
Team news
Ozil, who also missed the trip to Anfield at the weekend, will also be absent in midweek as Wenger confirmed he wasn't yet "ready physically" to be considered.
Aaron Ramsey was an unused substitute at Liverpool following his return from injury and could feature on Tuesday.
Key players Mats Hummels, Arjen Robben, Franck Ribery and Xabi Alonso were all on the bench for Bayern's win over Cologne on Saturday and all four are set to return.
Wenger has denied he dropped Sanchez for Arsenal's defeat at Liverpool because of a row between the Chile striker and his team-mates Wenger has denied he dropped Sanchez for Arsenal's defeat at Liverpool because of a row between the Chile striker and his team-mates
Opta stats
No club has progressed in a Champions League knockout tie after losing the first leg by 4+ goals. A first-leg four goal deficit has happened nine times before this season, with six of those occasions seeing the defeated team play the first leg away from home.
Since the beginning of 2003/04, Arsenal have lost just 10 of their 62 home games in the Champions League, however six of those defeats have come in the knockout stages.
In fact, four of Arsenal's last six Champions League defeats at Emirates Stadium have come in the last 16, with two of those losses coming at the hands of Bayern Munich in 2013 and 2014.
Arjen Robben was one of several Bayern Munich players to be rested at the weekend
This is the 12th meeting between these sides in the Champions League, Bayern have won six of the previous 11 games with Arsenal winning three (D2).
The German side have won just one of their last six Champions League away games, losing three and drawing twice in that run; however their three defeats all came by a single goal.
In the first leg, Arsenal failed to record a single shot on target in the second half, compared to Bayern's nine, this after firing five shots on target in the first half.
Betting
Arsenal are up against odds of 20/1 to overturn their first-leg deficit at make the quarter-finals, with Bayern 23/20 favourites to win on the night. The Gunners are 2/1 just to record a victory, while a 4-0 triumph, which would see them progress on away goals, is a 66/1 chance, while a draw is priced at 11/4. |
LOS ANGELES, CA - JUNE 05: A woman gets an istant HIV/AIDS test inside a moblile clinic of John Wesley Community Health Institute during a health fair sponsored by World Literacy Crusade and the American Health and Education Clinics at the Church of Scientology community center on June 5, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. The event will also include a town hall meeting to discuss physical and mental health therapies for Latino and black communities. (Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images) Gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) make up 2 percent of the U.S. population but are the group most definitively affected by HIV, with 63 percent of those newly infected by HIV representing this group. (Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)
Gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) make up 2 percent of the U.S. population but are the group most definitively affected by HIV, with 63 percent of those newly infected by HIV representing this group.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly “Morbidity and Mortality” report shows that among persons newly infected with HIV in 2010, 63 percent were men who have sex with other men. Among Americans living with HIV, 52 percent were MSM – and a significant number of men with HIV are not receiving treatment.
“Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) represent approximately 2 percent of the United States population, yet are the risk group most affected by human immunodeficiency virus (HIV),” reads the Sept. 26 CDC report. “Most gay and bisexual men acquire HIV through anal sex, which is the riskiest type of sex for getting or transmitting HIV.
“Having more sex partners compared to other men means gay and bisexual men have more opportunities to have sex with someone who can transmit HIV or another STD. Similarly, among gay men, those who have more partners are more likely to acquire HIV.”
Just one in two gay or bisexual men who have been diagnosed with HIV receives treatment for the virus, and only 42 percent had achieved viral suppression.
Among the 416,730 MSM living with diagnosed HIV in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, 42 percent achieved viral suppression at their most recent test, according to the CDC.
Of the 10,093 MSM with the HIV infection diagnosed during 2010, 77.5 (7,826) percent were linked to care within three months after diagnosis. In regards to race and ethnicity, African-American MSM had the lowest percentage of linkage to care (71.6 percent), followed by Hispanic/Latino (80.3 percent) and white MSM at 82.9 percent receiving care.
“It’s unacceptable that treatment, one of our most powerful tools for protecting people’s health and preventing new HIV infections, is reaching only a fraction of gay men who need it,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention, said in a release. “A top prevention priority at CDC is making sure every gay man with HIV knows his status and receives ongoing medical care—otherwise, we will never tackle the HIV epidemic in the country.”
The CDC noted its aim to “direct attention to the continuing and disproportionate impact of human immunodeficiency virus infection (HIV) and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) on gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (MSM) in the United States.”
A CDC report released in 2013 found that 62 percent of American men who self-reported being HIV-positive said they had unprotected anal sex with a male partner in the last 12 months. In 2011, men who had sex with men accounted for at least half of persons diagnosed with HIV in all but two states. Anal sex is cited by the CDC as having the highest-risk practice for HIV infection.
“High HIV prevalence, lack of awareness of HIV-positive status, and unprotected anal sex” between gay, bisexual and other men are cited by the CDC as contributing to continued new infections among this population. |
Psychological warfare Angered that their professional organization has adopted a policy condoning psychologists' participation in "war on terror" interrogations, many psychologists are vowing to stage a battle royal at the APA's annual meeting.
The 150,000-member American Psychological Association is facing an internal revolt over its year-old policy that condones the participation of psychologists in the interrogations of prisoners during the Bush administration's "war on terror."
Last summer, the APA adopted new ethical principles drafted by a task force of 10 psychologists, who were selected by the organization's leadership. That controversial task-force report, which is now official APA policy, stated that psychologists participating in terror-related interrogations are fulfilling "a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm."
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But Salon has learned that six of the 10 psychologists on the task force have close ties to the military. The names and backgrounds of the task force participants were not made public by the APA; Salon obtained them from congressional sources. Four of the psychologists who crafted the permissive policy were involved with the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or served with the military in Afghanistan -- all environments where serious cases of abuse have been documented.
APA president Gerald Koocher, who handpicked the task-force members along with the organization's former president Ronald Levant, said in an interview that the psychologists' military and national-security backgrounds did not raise conflict of interest or broader questions about the task force and its report. He defended choosing psychologists with such backgrounds, saying "they had special knowledge to contribute."
The 10-member task force enunciated the new principles for interrogations in a June 2005 report. The 11 pages of ethical obligations include 12 statements on interrogations, including one directing psychologists to report abuse and remember that suspects may be innocent. But detractors say its ban on "torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment" is pro forma, an insufficient safeguard in the post-9/11 atmosphere.
Critics of the APA's interrogation policy are planning an all-out assault during the organization's annual meeting Aug. 10-13 in New Orleans, using tactics that include taking out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper.
Opponents argue that when psychologists use their technical training to help break down the resistance of a prisoner, they are performing in a role diametrically at odds with their professional mission to serve as a healer. "I do not believe that psychologists should be involved in interrogations which are intrinsically coercive and inherently harmful to the person being interrogated," said Steven Reisner, a psychologist and senior faculty member at Columbia University's International Trauma Studies Program.
Joining in this chorus of dissent, former APA president Philip Zimbardo said psychologists used "the wrong model" to come up with the interrogation ethics principles. As the architect of a famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students who were instructed to pretend they were guards in a mock prison quickly began to exhibit sadistic behavior, Zimbardo has more than a passing familiarity with the dynamics of cruelty. He warned against "abandoning the high moral ground in unquestioned support for ideological banners of 'national security.'"
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Reisner said in an interview that the revelations of the close ties between the Department of Defense and a majority of psychologists on the task force would help galvanize opposition to the policy. The biographies of the task force members underscore these extensive and questionable connections.
Task force member Col. Larry James was the chief psychologist for the intelligence group at Guantánamo in 2003. In 2004, James was at Abu Ghraib working as the director of the behavioral sciences group in the interrogation unit there. His biography said he was sent to Abu Ghraib "in response" to the abuse scandal. Requests to interview James were rebuffed; U.S. Army Medical Command spokeswoman Cynthia Vaughn referred Salon back to the APA.
Col. Morgan Banks spent four months during the winter of 2001 and 2002 "supporting combat operations" at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, where serious abuses have been reported. Banks told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker last summer he had also "consulted generally" on Guantánamo interrogations, but could not recall any specific cases. Banks' biography lists him as one of the founders and the senior psychologist at the Army's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the military trains elite soldiers to resist torture in case of capture. The techniques used to harden those soldiers against torture -- sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, bags on the head, long exercise -- have been used on detainees in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. (Salon reported last month on a military document showing that SERE instructors taught their techniques to interrogators at Guantánamo.)
APA task force member Capt. Bryce Lefever was assigned to the Navy's SERE school in the early 1990s and deployed with Special Forces to Afghanistan in 2002, "where he lectured to interrogators and was consulted on various interrogation techniques," according to his bio.
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Two other members of the task force worked for the Department of Defense Counterintelligence Field Activity, which coordinates Pentagon security efforts. One of them, R. Scott Shumate, was in charge of a team of psychologists who "engaged in risk assessments of the Guantanamo Bay detainees." Another psychologist on the APA task force worked for the Navy.
Requests to interview the APA task force members who had military ties were unsuccessful, even though Salon approached them through both the APA and, in most cases, the military.
Zimbardo, the former APA president, warned that the task force members' independence could be curtailed by their ties to the Pentagon. "There likely would be implicit pressures on them to keep the scope of their recommendations restricted," Zimbardo said.
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Some psychologists go so far as to wonder if the APA has allowed its interrogation policy to be set by the military. "The military seemed to be very well represented on that committee," Reisner said. "This issue, which is never spoken about, is the relationship between the American Psychological Association and the military. This has been in the back of my mind throughout this whole debate."
That relationship appeared to be codified last month, when the Pentagon effectively embraced the psychologists' interrogation guidelines. In May, the American Psychiatric Association reacted to the detainee-abuse scandal by barring psychiatrists' participation in interrogations. A month later, in June, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs William Winkenwerder Jr. unveiled a new policy clarifying the role of medical professionals in interrogations. It laid out a preference for psychologists (rather than psychiatrists) to advise on interrogations. That 10-page document also set other guidelines for military medical professionals who deal with detainees, such as establishing a barrier between acting as caregivers and those who advise interrogators.
Speaking to reporters last month, Winkenwerder said that, when the system works correctly, psychologists assess "the character, personality, social interactions and other behavioral characteristics of detainees." The psychologists, he explained, do not conduct the interrogations themselves, but instead "coach and counsel the interrogator in a way that allows him or her to build a relationship with the detainee."
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Dr. Steven Miles, the author of "Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror," said that the use of psychologists in these interrogations flowed from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's orders to get tough with prisoners. "They devised interrogation plans to exploit the physical and emotional vulnerabilities of the prisoners," Miles said in a telephone interview. "They turned to psychologists because they wanted to find every way of breaking people down."
APA president Koocher, the editor of the journal Ethics and Behavior and a former associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said it was unfair to link task force members to abuses at Guantánamo or elsewhere, just because they worked there. "The conceptual leap required to conclude that the particular person on our task force was involved is unreasonable," Koocher said.
The task force was empaneled last summer as news reports were piecing together a disturbing portrait of medical professionals stationed at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan and Iraq -- rifling through medical files for interrogation tips, withholding medical treatment from detainees, omitting evidence of abuse from records, or just remaining silent about what went on around them. "Physicians have a checkered past on this," said Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. "Who knows better how to inflict pain and suffering, physically and psychologically, than somebody who has studied the human body?"
In response to the scandals, some medical organizations have raced to develop new ethical standards that would bar anyone from using their professional training to assist in breaking down prisoners. Typical was the unequivocal new policy of the American Psychiatric Association, adopted in May, that forbids participation in interrogations.
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"I think it is wrong to use one's professional knowledge in the service of breakdown -- breaking people down," author and psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton said in a phone call from his home at Cape Cod, Mass. He called the psychological association's willingness to participate in interrogations "wrong." Lifton added, "Even though they do not take the Hippocratic oath, they are in the healing profession."
In defense of his association's position, Koocher pointed out that many psychologists are behavioral scientists, and as such aren't caregivers. The APA president cited examples such as psychologists who evaluate people's competence to stand trial or who train hostage negotiators.
To underscore the difference between caregiver and interrogation consultant, the APA's ethics principles bar the same person from performing both functions, stating that psychologists should "refrain from engaging in such multiple relationships."
APA director of ethics Stephen Behnke added that psychologists may actually help keep interrogations safe, by encouraging interrogators to talk to prisoners rather than employ harsher methods. "Psychologists take advisory or consultative roles in relation to interrogations to help ensure interrogations are safe, legal, ethical, and effective," Behnke wrote in an e-mail.
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That may be true in some cases, but the presence of a psychologist did not prevent the interrogation of so-called 20th hijacker Mohammed al-Khatani at Guantánamo from turning brutal. Khatani was stripped naked, isolated, given intravenous fluids and forced to urinate on himself, and exercised to exhaustion during interrogations that lasted 18 to 20 hours a day for 48 of 54 days.
Part of the plan was to humiliate Khatani and submit him to extreme psychological stress. He became exhausted, disoriented and hopeless. He was called a homosexual, forced to wear a mask and dance, and leashed and made to perform dog tricks. Interrogators hung pictures of fitness models on his neck and had a female interrogator "invade his personal space," according to the unredacted interrogation log obtained by Salon.
To help break down Khatani's psyche, the interrogation team included a psychologist, Maj. John Leso, a member of the military's Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, called BSCTs. The teams are a newly minted tool in the "war on terror." They include psychologists who are supposed to help interrogators break down resistance and pry loose useful information. Former Guantánamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller called the teams "essential in developing interrogation strategies" in a September 2003 internal military report.
At various points during the questioning of Khatani, Leso's BSCT operators instructed interrogators to keep the prisoner awake, force him to stop staring at a wall, and advised on the effectiveness of techniques. "BSCT observed that detainee does not like it when the interrogator points out his nonverbal responses," reads an entry in the log from Dec. 29, 2002.
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Leso's actions may not be typical. But the press has obtained a much more detailed record of Khatani's interrogation than that of any other "high-value" prisoner.
Leso's behavior would appear to violate the ethics principles that were later established by the APA task force, which bar "torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment." Those prohibitions might ordinarily appear to be unequivocal, but the Bush administration's "war on terror" has made them far murkier. As Zimbardo, the former APA president, noted, that kind of terminology is precisely the lexicon that Bush administration lawyers have turned into Swiss cheese. The Bush administration has "changed the definition of torture, the definition of detained prisoners, and the nature of their prolonged confinement without due process," Zimbardo said. In the Bush administration's eyes, Zimbardo said, "nothing done to such detainees qualifies as torture."
Several civilians close to the APA task force criticized the final product for failing to make a clear statement about the excesses of the "war on terror" and failing to explicitly say what psychologists can and cannot do. "It is a bunch of platitudes without any situational reality to it," said Jean Maria Arrigo, a civilian psychologist who served on the APA task force and founder of the Intelligence Ethics Collection at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "This was not a politically adequate document. There are no specifics in it. We needed to at least say that we can't do waterboarding," Arrigo said.
Arrigo said she doesn't have any complaints with the military members of the task force. Instead, she blames Koocher for the vagueness of the APA position statement, which allows psychologists broad latitude in interrogations. "Koocher was involved in appointing the task force, he strongly guided and monitored it and had taken the position of representing the document," she said.
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Other civilian psychologists on the task force agree that the fault lies not with individual military members of the task force, but with the APA leadership. Task force member Michael Wessells, a psychology professor at Randolph-Macon College, resigned from the task force in protest early this year. According to his resignation letter, which he provided to Salon, "At the highest levels, the APA has not made a strong, concerted, comprehensive, public and internal response of the kind warranted by the severe human rights violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay."
Wessels said that the ethics guidelines, which sailed through the APA's board of directors and Council of Representatives to become APA policy, never addressed such controversial questions. "I think by going this route, strategically, the organization was playing it safe," he said. "As a response to the nature of the situation, it was completely inadequate." Despite promises that the standards would be further debated, Wessells said that there was never any follow-up. As a result, he said, "I felt more than a little exploited."
Both sides expect intense debate next month over the interrogation standards -- and the question may overwhelm the other items on the APA's agenda at the convention. Koocher has asked Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, the surgeon general of the Army, to come to New Orleans and address the organization's leadership.
Koocher acknowledged that his organization could revisit the issue in the future. "Remember that as far as APA is concerned, the issue is not over," Koocher said in a phone call.
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But some psychologists are not satisfied with bland promises of further review. "At the moment, the American Psychological Association is complicit in the mode of interrogations going on at Guantánamo, by focusing on the justification for interrogation," said Reisner. "We are being used to further the ends of what amounts to torture." |
Rebecca Cook/Reuters Amir Hekmati is seeking damages from the government of Iran for false imprisonment and torture during his time in custody.
WASHINGTON -- A former U.S. Marine who was imprisoned in Iran for over four years is suing the Iranian government after publicly disclosing details about the torture he says he endured there.
Amir Hekmati was one of four Iranian-American prisoners released from the country in January as part of a negotiated prisoner agreement with the U.S. He is now seeking unspecified damages from the Iranian government for false imprisonment and torture, according to a civil complaint filed Monday with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
In the complaint, Hekmati’s lawyers allege that Iranian intelligence officials whipped their client's feet, struck him with a Taser, forced him to into a “stress position” for hours, hit him with batons, threw cold water on the floor of his cell to keep him awake, and left a bright light on in his room at all times to “invoke sensory deprivation.” His captors forced him to take addictive medications like lithium pills, only to withhold the medication later to induce symptoms of withdrawal, the lawyers charge.
The complaint states that Hekmati was held in solitary confinement in a 1.5-by-1-meter (roughly 5-by-3-feet) cell for the first 17 months of his confinement at Tehran's Evin Prison. He was allowed to leave his cell once every three days for 20 minutes to take a cold shower, according to the complaint.
During that time, intelligence officials allegedly tried multiple tactics to pressure the former Marine into confessing to be a spy for the CIA. In one interrogation, Hekmati’s lawyers said, Iranian officials told him that his sister was in a serious car accident and he could only call his family after submitting a confession.
By December 2011, evidently frustrated at Hekmati’s refusal to say he was a American spy, his captors moved him to the Parsian Esteghlal International Hotel, gave him a change of clothes, food and cigarettes, and told him he would be released after being interviewed for a training video for the Iranian Intelligence Ministry.
During the interview, Iranian officials told Hekmati to state that he worked for the CIA. He initially refused, but ultimately complied in hopes of being sent home. Afterwards, he was returned to his solitary cell in Evin and his “confession” was broadcast on Iranian state TV.
The former Marine later wrote Secretary of State John Kerry a letter that was smuggled out of prison, stating that his confession was “obtained by force, threats, miserable prison conditions and prolonged periods of solitary confinement.”
The treatment detailed in Hekmati's 11-page complaint is just the “tip of the iceberg,” said one of his lawyers, Scott Gilbert, in a phone conversation on Tuesday. Gilbert, who worked with the former Marine's family last year to help secure his release, also represented Alan Gross, a former U.S. development worker who spent five years imprisoned in Cuba.
Hekmati traveled to Iran in August 2011 to visit family. He planned to return home later that month to begin a graduate economics program in Michigan, but was arrested two days before his scheduled departure.
After a 15-minute, closed-door trial in January 2012, Hekmati was convicted of "espionage, waging war against God, and corrupting the earth," according to his complaint, becoming the first American to be sentenced to death in Iran since the 1979 revolution. An appeals court overturned his death penalty sentence in March, and he was re-sentenced to 10 years in prison for "cooperating with a hostile government," his complaint states.
Hekmati was freed in January 2016, along with Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, Christian pastor Saeed Abedini and Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, who said he has worked as an FBI advisor. In exchange, the U.S. released or dropped the charges against seven Iranians accused of violating sanctions.
Gilbert spoke positively of the State Department’s efforts to release his client, but Hekmati’s family has expressed concern that his freedom was tied to the fate of the nuclear negotiations between Iran, the U.S. and five other world powers. Indeed, the prisoner exchange occurred just hours after the nuclear accord was implemented earlier this year.
The State Department declined to comment on Hekmati’s current legal proceedings.
Hekmati’s lawyers are seeking damages from the Iranian government under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. Iran, which does not recognize dual nationality and treated Hekmati as a U.S. citizen, is unlikely to honor a U.S. court ruling. If the court rules in Hekmati’s favor, it is possible he could collect damages from seized Iranian assets, an outcome that may be supported by a recent Supreme Court ruling.
A spokesman at Iran's mission to the United Nations did not respond to a request for comment on Hekmati’s case.
Hekmati served in the U.S. Marines from 2001-2005 as an infantry rifleman and translator, and later worked as a government contractor with a focus on translation services.
Now, nearly five years after his arrest, Hekmati is back home in Michigan, living mostly with his mother. After surviving two tours in Iraq as a Marine, he is plagued by post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in prison, said Gilbert. |
Image copyright Science Photo Library
A new combination of chemotherapy drugs should become the main therapy for pancreatic cancer, say UK researchers.
The disease is so hard to treat that survival rates have barely changed for decades.
But data, presented at the world's biggest cancer conference, showed long-term survival could be increased from 16% to 29%.
The findings have been described as a "major win", "incredibly exciting" and as offering new hope to patients.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly cancers, with patients often given just months to live after diagnosis.
It is aggressive, resists treatment and, because pancreatic tumours cause nondescript symptoms, is often found only after it has spread throughout the body.
In the UK alone, 9,400 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and 8,800 die from the disease each year.
Double team
The trial on 732 patients - in hospitals in the UK, Sweden, France and Germany - compared the standard chemotherapy drug gemcitabine against a combination of gemcitabine and capecitabine.
The results, released at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual conference, showed that average survival times increased from 25 to 28 months.
But there was a far more dramatic impact on long-term survival with 29% of patients alive for at least five years with combination therapy compared with 16% normally.
There was no difference in side-effects.
Prof John Neoptolemos, from the University of Liverpool, who led the study, said: "This important trial shows that this drug combination could give pancreatic patients valuable extra months and even years and so will become the new treatment for patients with this disease.
"The difference in short-term survival may seem modest but improvement in long-term survival is substantial for this cancer.
"This drug combination will become the new standard of care for patients with the disease."
It is not entirely clear why there is the difference in survival rates, but one idea surrounds the new drug being less toxic allowing patients to tolerate higher doses.
'Exciting'
Alex Ford, chief executive of Pancreatic Cancer UK, said: "These are incredibly exciting results from a major trial for those diagnosed with this dreadful disease.
"The outlook for pancreatic cancer has been grim. With few treatment options, survival rates have barely changed in 40 years in the UK. Currently just 5% of pancreatic cancer patients can expect to live for five years.
"At the same time, incidence is set to soar by a third to more than 12,000 people being diagnosed every year by 2030.
"The possibility of increasing survival for those who have undergone surgery for pancreatic cancer will give great hope to hundreds of patients and their families who may benefit. The importance of clinical trials to help transform the outlook for pancreatic cancer cannot be over-estimated.
"We now need to see these results quickly translate to a change in approach by clinicians so that patients start to benefit more widely straightaway."
The study was funded by the charity Cancer Research UK.
Its chief clinician Prof Peter Johnson said: "Pancreatic cancer remains a very difficult disease to find and treat.
"Despite this, we are making steady progress, through trials like this one, where the use of better chemotherapy after surgery was able to increase the number of people surviving the disease."
Around 340,000 people worldwide are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year with the highest incidence in North America and Europe.
Dr Smitha Krishnamurthi, from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said: "Pancreatic cancer remains one of the most hard-to-treat cancers.
"It is a major win to find that adding a generic chemotherapy not only improves survival for these patients, but does so with little effect on patients' quality of life."
Follow James on Twitter. |
Photos by Philip Cosores
Julian Casablancas did a lot to help expand the beach goth sound of The Growlers as producer on their new LP, City Club. However, The Strokes frontman didn’t just provide services behind the boards, as he also put in a guest verse on the track “Too Many Times”.
The song itself is a synth-y slice of West Coast garage, guitars bouncing through distortion like so many rusty springs. Casablancas comes in on the second verse, and his lackadaisical delivery is so similar to The Growlers singer Brooks Nielsen that it would almost be indistinguishable if not for the slight crackle in the latter’s vocals. Take a listen below.
Take a listen to the track below.
City Club is out now via on Casablancas’ own Cult Records. Stream the whole thing here. |
A 15-year-old orphan from Russia proves that nothing can stop you from participating in the power of art. The boy, who has no fingers, has become an internet sensation showing the whole world that such a handicap is not an obstacle in reaching for your dreams.
Alexey Romanov from the city of Kazan, central Russia, was born without fingers on his hands and toes on one foot. He was abandoned by his parents at birth and was raised in a local orphanage. At 12 he was adopted and has been living with his new parents since.
The teen told Ruptly that has he “always liked classical music.”
Russia: Handless pianist shows off his skills Handless Russian pianist almost broke the internet's heart Опубликовано RT Play 15 февраля 2016 г.
“[For] a long time I only thought about it but in the end I decided to try to play. At first I played the simplest things such as 'Jingle Bells' but now I can learn some more serious works."
The young prodigy says he has been playing the piano for only a year and a half. “It's not professional and only three weeks ago I started to study musical notation and everything else.”
The boy has taken part in many concerts and even played with local star band La Primavera. His YouTube video where he plays a piece from the ‘Love-and-Vampires’ Twilight movie has granted him national sensation status. |
Two Houston teens are facing charges after they carjacked a man last weekend, holding a gun to the victim's head and forcing him to teach them how to drive the vehicle’s stick shift, Click2Houston.com reported.
"The suspects were unfamiliar with the operation of a standard transmission and they tried to get the victim to show them how to drive the standard while he was being held at gunpoint," Stefan Happ, an inspector, told the station.
The victim explained the stick shift, and the teens took off with the vehicle. The crash course, however, proved insufficient and the suspects were reportedly forced to abandon the car a few blocks away and flee the old-fashion way: by running.
They were caught a short time later.
"The officers were chasing the vehicle and apparently they had issues operating the vehicle," Happ told the station.
The alleged robbers are 17 and 15 years old. The 17 year old was charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. |
The LA Times decides not to print letters from readers claiming there's no evidence for human-caused climate change
Here's an excerpt from a Letter to the Editor, printed earlier this week in The Australian newspaper.
"While [temperatures] have been higher than before the past 15 years, they have not increased in line with fossil fuel emissions, just as they failed to do over the 1948-77 period. This makes incorrect the theory that fossil fuel emissions cause temperature increases." Des Moore, South Yarra, Victoria.
Wrongheaded and simplistic views like this are a regular feature on the letters page of The Australian newspaper and no doubt hundreds of other newspapers around the world where readers respond to stories about climate change.
Some letter writers have accepted that humans cause climate change, a conclusion backed by multiple lines of evidence from thousands of studies around the world going back a century or more.
Some readers haven't.
The mailbag and inbox at the Los Angeles Times is also stuffed with climate science denial, but letters editor Paul Thornton has revealed that correspondence claiming there's no evidence that humans cause global warming will no longer be printed. If Des Moore lived in LA, he'd have to take his thoughts elsewhere. In a recent column, Thornton wrote:
Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying "there's no sign humans have caused climate change" is not stating an opinion, it's asserting a factual inaccuracy.
Thornton's decision could well leave a few editors wondering if they should follow suit.
Julie Lewis, who is the co-editor of the Sydney Morning Herald's letters page, for example, told me by email the Herald letters team is planning to make a statement to readers outlining the paper's approach to climate change and letters.*
Letters pages occupy prime real estate in printed newspapers. You could see the decision of the LA Times a few ways, depending on how you see the role of newspaper letters pages.
If we see them as a place where statements of fact need to backed by evidence, which Paul Thornton and the LA Times clearly does, then it's hard to argue against banning letters claiming there's no evidence for human caused climate change.
But if you see the letters pages of newspapers as a reflection of what the community of readers believe - which presumably some newspaper editors do - then it's clearly OK to run views by readers who find it hard, for whatever reason, to accept the existence of mountains of evidence.
Letters pages usually sit side-by-side in modern newspapers with opinion columns, and both these spaces have been targeted by climate sceptics over the years. In 2011, one climate sceptic group the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) revealed in a strategy document that they purposefully targeted these pages. The document stated:
The letters to the editor section is the most frequently read part of many newspapers, aside from the front page, so letter submissions are a worthwhile activity for ICSC. Regional newspapers publish about 10% of letters received from the public, with a typical paper receiving about 100 or more letters a day.
Now climate science denial organisations would not be alone in encouraging members to write letters to newspapers. Plenty of environmental groups no doubt do the same, and it's up to editors to decide if they want to play a part in that or not.
One Australian study, published in the journal Rural Society, looked at the content run by newspapers around the publication of Heaven + Earth - a book written by Australian climate science denier and mining company director Professor Ian Plimer.
The study, titled "Duelling realities", analysed 48 items from 13 rural newspapers and found half of the coverage of the book came in the form of readers' letters.
"Climate change is not man-made," said one letter in The Kalgoorlie Miner. "We can ponder the way the world has been fooled into thinking that climate change is man made," wrote a Newcastle Herald reader. A letter in The Townsville Bulletin described human-caused climate change as a "scam".
Study author Elaine McKewon, of the University of Technology Sydney, told me:
The LA Times policy would certainly have excluded most of the letters in my study, because they repeated the same unsupported scientific claims and conspiracy theories used by climate change deniers around the world. It is patently untrue that there is no evidence that human activity is the main driver of global warming. The first commitment of the news media should be to truth and accuracy. So I think this decision is laudable and I hope it gives other mainstream media outlets the courage to stop appeasing the climate denial noise machine. In the scientific community, the debate about anthropogenic global warming has been over for decades. The scientific consensus on climate change is as strong as the consensus on human evolution or the link between smoking and cancer.
McKewon argues the LA Times' decision shouldn't be dismissed as unwelcome censorship.
This is not about censorship or free speech. Keeping errors of fact out of the newspaper is what responsible editors do. The letters page is there to enable readers to engage in valid, meaningful public debate. Pseudoscience and misinformation serve only to create false scientific controversy. It is not the role of the news media to provide a platform for claims that were refuted long ago in the scientific literature.
Away from the letters pages, the US magazine Popular Science announced last month it was going to take away the ability of readers to comment on its stories online, because of concerns that "trolls and spambots" could "skew" their readers' understanding of the issues being covered. In a story justifying the move, Popular Science's online content director Suzanne LaBarre wrote:
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
Editors are obviously in a difficult position.
Moderating comments on stories takes time (I know this myself, after moderating more than 10,000 comments on an environment blog I used to write for News Ltd). Guardian columnist George Monbiot has written how companies specialise in creating fake online identities in order to target comment threads.
If a newspaper or other media outlet is publishing content which it knows is factually questionable or demonstrably wrong, does it have a responsibility to keep such pseudo-science statements off its pages?
While we ponder that, I'm off to check my horoscope - courtesy of the LA Times and hundreds of other mainstream newspapers around the world. Alternatively, I offer an excerpt from another "Letter to the Editor", also printed in The Australian earlier this week:
"What's the difference between a computer and a global warming denier? You only have to punch information into a computer once." Chris Roylance, Paddington, Queensland
*This paragraph has been changed to clarify the SMH's intention to communicate its position to readers. |
New Cold War.org, June 14, 2015
The following is a partial translation of a news item appearing in the Ukraine news outlet Segodnya (Today), on June 13, 2015. It is headlined, ‘Military commissars search for recruits in street markets and supermarkets’.
A new round of hunting for recruits has failed in Ukraine. This one is the fifth wave of military conscription within one year. All previous rounds were not fulfilled. It seems almost no one wants to fight for the government in this civil war.
Only one out of 12 recruits receiving call-up paper appears voluntarily to defend the country. To fulfill the plan, military officers have staged round-ups in hostels, stopped cars with traffic police right on the roads, and searched markets and supermarkets. Lawyers say the roundups are all about reaching recruitment goals and they violate citizens’ rights.
In the previous, fourth, wave of the military draft, only one out of eight served with papers appeared voluntarily. In this fifth wave, that has dropped to one in 12. Moreover, even those 7.5 per cent of recruits who come voluntarily after receiving call-up notices usually have serious health problems so they have no fear of enlistment. A sixth wave of military conscription is set to begin on June 20. [Ukraine’s new, right-wing government reintroduced compulsory military conscription on May 1, 2014. It had been abolished the previous year.] [Ukraine’s new, right-wing government reintroduced compulsory military conscription on May 1, 2014. It had been abolished the previous year.] Read also:
* Ukraine’s military mobilization undermined by draft dodgers, Washington Post, April 25, 2015 * According to a new poll by KMIS commissioned privately on political preferences in Ukraine, only 24 per cent of Ukrainians in the east, 34 per cent in the south, 40 per cent in the center and 56 per cent in the west selected a party that they would vote for. The other respondents: would not vote, refused to answer, do not know, or are against all parties. No one political party reaches nationally more than 8.3 per cent of the vote. Support for presidential candidates has a similar pattern. All this speaks to the huge distrust of existing political parties and the fact that the majority of people do not see their representatives in the existing political spectrum. Many representatives or parties who people surveyed might choose are formally banned by Ukraine’s new, right-wing laws, or they are unable to function in the prevailing vigilante and witch-hunt atmosphere of the country. * Survey by Sofia Center for Social Studies, May 6 to 18, 2015, more than 3,000 respondents: Economy: Two-thirds (66.0%) of believes that things in Ukraine are going in the wrong direction (“clearly in the wrong” or “probably in the wrong”). Only 4.1% of respondents believe that things are “definitely in the right direction”; one in five (21.2%) tend to think that things are developing “rather in the right direction.” (Could not answer – 8.7% of respondents). Decentralization of power: Two-thirds (61.5%) of respondents “strongly support” or “probably support” the idea. Those who do not support decentralization: 18.8% of respondents. Did not answer: 19.7% of respondents. For some respondents, the idea of decentralization of powers is unclear). |
Morgan Library & Museum: ‘Lincoln Speaks: Words That Transformed a Nation’ (through June 7) This exhibition, presented thematically and chronologically, homes in on Abraham Lincoln’s leadership and its relationship to language. In his exhibition review for The New York Times, Neil Genzlinger wrote: “For Lincoln admirers, simply being in the same room with so many artifacts he touched will be a delight. And if they give the exhibition the time it requires, they will certainly come away with a fuller appreciation of the man.” 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, 212-685-0008, themorgan.org.
Morgan Library & Museum: ‘In the Margins’ (through Sunday) The Morgan is holding a pop-up exhibition to celebrate some of its latest acquisitions of books by authors who have won the Man Booker Prize. Examples include Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” Ian McEwan’s “Amsterdam” and Julian Barnes’s “Metroland.” Each book comes with annotations, letters and other material from the author. 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, 212-685-0008, themorgan.org.
Museum of the Moving Image: ‘Matthew Weiner’s “Mad Men” ’ (through June 14) As one of the most critically acclaimed TV shows in recent years nears its finale, “Mad Men” gets the exhibition treatment in this look at the series’s creative process. On display are large-scale sets, such as Don Draper’s office, as well as costumes, art and research material used by the show’s staff. Viewers should expect not only a look behind the scenes of the show, but also, as in “Mad Men” itself, a peek into the era it depicts. 35th Avenue at 37th Street, Astoria, Queens, 718-784-0077, movingimage.us.
New York Transit Museum Grand Central Terminal Gallery Annex: ‘New York’s Transportation Landmarks’ (through Nov. 1) It’s been 50 years since New York passed its Landmarks Law, which covers over 30,000 buildings and structures around the city. To celebrate the anniversary, the New York Transit Museum has created an exhibition that explores the history of development, use and even rescue of these landmarks. More information: 212-878-0106, web.mta.info/mta/museum.
New York Transit Museum: ‘Spanning the Narrows: The Verrazano Bridge at 50’ (through fall) Photographs, maps, drawings, models and other archival materials related to the construction of the bridge (including correspondence from Robert Moses, who oversaw the project) are part of this exhibition commemorating its 50th anniversary. Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street, Brooklyn Heights, 718-694-1600, mta.info/mta/museum. |
By Ryan Draghi
In 2016, 72,788 NCAA athletes participated in college football, but only an estimated 1.6 percent of these players moved on to compete at the professional level.
Indiana wide receiver Mitchell Paige hopes to join this minority group in the 2017 NFL Draft next April. Although he is projected to go undrafted next spring by Drafttrek.com and other several mock drafts, Paige is not ready to give up his dream just yet. Paige said, “After I graduate, I will do everything I can and everything in my power to get onto an NFL roster.”
If anyone knows the process of overcoming odds, it is Paige. At first glance, he may resemble an average high school football player. The senior from Carmel, Indiana is listed at just 5-foot-7 and 175 pounds, but Paige’s coaches and teammates compare his work ethic to that of a veteran NFL player. Being called “too small” and “too short” his entire life, Paige has defied the odds time and time again. Although he was a two sport all-state athlete in both basketball and football in high school, Paige did not receive any division I scholarships. Paige calls his journey, “nothing but a wild roller coaster ride.”
The scrappy slot receiver proved the doubters wrong once more as he led the Hoosiers in receptions in 2016 and second on the team in 2015. He also received All-Big Ten honors in respective years. Despite these accolades, the transition to becoming one of the best players on IU was not ordinary or easy. Paige got his opportunity as a result of an injured teammate before the 2015 season. The former walk-on seized the chance by impressing coaches, teammates, and fans with his resiliency and dedication to the team. Fellow teammate Nick Westbrook told the Indystar last month, “He [Paige] is always one of the first people in the building … in order to get that extra work in.” Paige’s commitment to improve paid off as he became one of the top targets for a high powered offense that ranked second in the Big Ten in 2015 and third in 2016. The undersized wideout was second only to Nick Westbrook in total touchdowns (6) in 2016, while totaling over 1300 yards in two years for the Hoosiers. Paige has been a consistent target and shifty slot weapon for both quarterbacks Richard Lagow and Nate Sudfeld in consecutive seasons. This, all while returning punts and often switching field position for the offense with a 11.1 average in 2015, the fifth best in the Big Ten.
But, Paige’s plight to become a student athlete is even more impressive considering his busy academic schedule. Paige starts weekdays during the season by waking up at 5:30 a.m. to arrive for 8 a.m. practice extra early for treatment and meetings. After practice ends three hours later, Paige gets lunch in the stadium and heads into campus for class. His classes include a focus on telecommunication and several different business courses. After class ends at 4 p.m., Paige attends the team dinner. After, he watches extra film by himself and attends more meetings until 8 p.m. Finally, he ends his day with either doing homework, studying or spending time with his roommates. Although Paige calls his schedule during the football season, “cumbersome at times” he does not take his life as an athlete for granted. He said, “Being a student athlete is not for everyone for certain, but it is worth every second to me.” Unlike some athletes, Paige puts academics over sports first.
Although Paige has starred in his final two years of eligibility at IU, the “little big man”, his nickname amongst his teammates, values a degree tremendously. An education from Indiana private school Guerin Catholic prepared him well for IU. “We are offered tutors through our Academic Center,” he said. With daily practices, meetings,workouts and film sessions classes and schoolwork could easily fall through the cracks. Paige emphasized the importance of the resources athletes, not just on the football team, are offered at IU. If he struggles with a certain course or assignment, Paige does not hesitate to reach out for help at the Academic Center. Given the football team’s demanding schedule, Paige and his teammates are given a few more advantages. He said, “We get our own advisors too, which is nice. The biggest benefit we get with that is priority class registration.”
When Paige showed up for fall camp in 2012 he admitted to being quite intimidated. In an ESPN article last October, former head coach Kevin Wilson said, “I thought he was like a frat guy playing in the intramural league.” As he looked at giant offensive lineman nearly twice his size, Paige thought he may have made a wrong decision. Thankfully, he stuck with it. A few years later, Paige was offered a scholarship by IU. Speaking on behalf of both academics and football, Paige said, “There have been great days but also days when I was not sure how I was going to keep going and not give up.” Completing 15 hour days filled with a demanding workload of practice and schoolwork, especially without a scholarship, takes incredible perseverance. As Paige looks back on his time at Indiana, he does not regret anything, “It [failure] has taught me that there is no price that can be paid for putting your head down everyday and going to work, because it may not be the first day, or the 10th day, or even the 100th day, but eventually that work will have an incredible reward.” After this gratifying learning experience, Paige told kids while volunteering at local Bloomington elementary schools, “You really can do anything you want to do, I’m living proof of that.” This type of demeanor is certainly required if Paige wants to fulfill his ultimate goal, making an NFL roster.
Stats courtesy of: ESPN.com, IndyStar.com, Drafttrek.com, Draftwire.com, Draftsite.com
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Reverse Migration
Reverse migration also called reverse misorientation[1] is a phenomenon in bird migration where a bird will fly in the opposite direction of what is species typical during the migration time.[1]
If a bird sets off in the opposite direction, shown by the orange arrow, it will end up in Western Europe instead of South East Asia. This is a mechanism that leads to birds such as Pallas's warbler turning up thousands of kilometres from where they should be. Keith Vinicombe suggested[2] that birds from east of Lake Baikal in Siberia (circled) could not occur in western Europe because the migration routes were too north-south. Most of these lost young birds perish in unsuitable wintering grounds, but there is some evidence that a few survive, and either re-orient in successive winters, or even return to the same area.[3]
Reverse migration is genetic or learned behaviour? [ edit ]
Some large birds such as swans learn migration routes from their parents.[4] However, in most small species, such as passerines, the route is genetically programmed, and young birds can innately navigate to their wintering area.[4] Sometimes this programming goes wrong, and the young bird, in its first autumn, migrates on a route 180° from the correct route. This is shown in the diagram, where the typical migration route is shown in red but a reverse migration has occurred as seen in orange in the image.
So with some species such as swans that the migration route is learned[3] and reverse migration could occur from learning improper route from parents or other birds.
As migration is most often genetically programmed before birth into most birds there can be rare variations and defects that change the migration programming.[3] These variations will account for some of the reverse migration cases but would not account for most of these reverse migrations.[3] After these birds have changed their migration path and are surviving they may breed with others who are also follow the different migration route and reproduce.[3] These offspring from the birds following a different migration route have not learned this new migration route, for them it is genetic.[3] These offspring may also reproduce with others the may pass the new route along to their own offspring continuing this new route though generations.[3]
A station like this can be used to track transmitters on birds for tracking.
Methods of examining reverse migration [ edit ]
Tracking radar [ edit ]
A single individual bird is tracked using a manually operated tracking radar to understand the targets exact position and trajectory to predict where it will be.[5] As the bird flaps their wings the echo can be recorded and compared to patterns to understand flight patterns and changes in flight patterns.[5] These were primarily used to monitor specific individuals during nocturnal migration through the night.[5]
Radio telemetry [ edit ]
This is a technique used to track animals with a transmitter and receivers. A miniature transmitter is attached to the subject animal and this transmitter emits a very high frequency (30-300 MHz) which can be picked up with one or more receivers. For studying the moment behaviour of birds in a migration hotspot south-west of Sweden called Falsterbo near Falsterbo bird observatory three receivers were used to triangulate and track the birds.[5]
A band around the leg of the bird is used during ringing for identification purposes.
Ringing [ edit ]
Ringing birds is when a light weight metal band is attach to the foot to not impair movement but stay on the bird with a identification number. This identification number can provide people catching and these birds movement and history with information such as how old they are and where they have been. At the Falsterbo bird observatory these birds are caught with a mist net measured and banded.[5]
Patterns In Reverse Migration [ edit ]
Reverse migration is the opposite direction or random directions? [ edit ]
Reverse migration is widespread around the world and occurs for many species migrating during the night and also during the day.[6] This irregular migration direction is most often aproximatly opposite to what is species typical not a random direction.[6] This phenomenon occurs not only with species migrating to a tropical area during the winter months but also with temperate zone migrants, short irruptive food migrants, short distance migrant, and long distance migrants.[6]
A Yellow-breasted Bunting which is considered lower on the probability of being a pseudo-vagrant for migration.
An article in British Birds by James Gilroy and Alexander Lees suggests that misorientation primarily occurs approximately opposite direction but can occur in random directions.[3] These random directions could be partly due to genetic variations or abnormalities.[3] These birds that adopt and continue to migrate in this atypical directions have been called Pseudo-vagrancy migrators.[3] Pseudo-vagrancy is the possibility that a bird will migrate in a different area or direction from the normal migration route.[3] Some species have been found to be more likely then others for having the pseudo-vagrancy migration changes.[3] Yellow-breasted Bunting is considered a lower chance of pseudo-vagrancy behaviours as compared to the Yellow-browed Warbler for having higher chance of pseudo-vagrancy behaviours [3]
Solitary reverse migration during the night [ edit ]
It was found that solitary birds migrating during the night are more likely to reverse migrate West, when East is the regular migratory path.[1][5] This West to East reverse migration was observed more often than a reverse migration to the North rather than the normal South migration.[1] To only examine single species this study examined birds solitarily migrating during the night so that they do not group-migrate and influence other species to follow or follow other species.[1]
Reverse migration due to inadequate fat stores [ edit ]
Reverse migration is more likely to occur with bird species that have low fat storage compared to higher fat storage.[7][8][9][6]
Example of a Swainson’s thrush.
Using radio tracking thrush songbirds migrating southwards were tracked to examine when and why some during a stopover along the northern coast of Mexico some would not continue south but fly inland northerly.[9] These songbirds that changed their normal seasonal southerly migration were almost all found to be lean and low on fat stores.[9] This inland northerly path may show that the normal stopover location did not have adequate resources to increase fat stores of these birds. So, because they were unable to gain enough fat stores these reverse migrating songbirds moved inland northerly in search of more food.[9]
The reverse migration behaviour has also been seen in the shorebirds red knots who fly in the reverse to typical migration direction.[10] These red knot shorebirds who travel 200 km reverse migration behaviour have been documented over the last 10 years and is a common occurrence.[10] In this study there was not significant difference in body mass fat stores or sex for these reverse migrating birds. It was seen that the birds that made the reverse migration had significantly lower hematocrit which is the percentage of red blood cells.[10] It has been examined before that birds increase their hematocrit before consuming large amounts of food for fat stores in order to have energy for their long migration flight.[10] This would explain why these birds chose to travel in reverse 200 km for high quality soft shell prey to supply fat and increase their hematocrit blood levels before attempting the long migration flight.[10]
See also [ edit ] |
Tim sat in his living room in silence, listening to phone ring in his hand. Why did people feel compelled to stop him? Was the decision not his? Had he no right to want something that much? Did he somehow break a moral rule he was unaware of?
The phone stopped ringing.
It was his last day in his house. He would be leaving soon for orbit, for good, until the end. Oh, how he desired to see the white shining city again. He had seen it once before, in a dream. Thirty years and still his mind could not make it fit, it could not understand it, the beauty of it.
He remembered what he saw clearly. He was being lifted into the sky by an unknown force at unimaginable speeds. He saw myriad stars and nebulas fly past him, he saw galaxies as one would see vehicles in the road as he passed them. He felt time stretch itself and he saw space bend around him, and beyond him a white light glowed intensely. It was something he had never experienced, brighter than diving into the sun itself and yet not hurting his eyes. He could see buildings rise from within it. Huge buildings. Buildings the size of planets and roads the size of asteroid belts. The city itself seemed larger than the milky way. Unfathomable, a cool breeze wrapped around him and he felt what he had rarely felt in his life… peace. It was not like sleeping, it was not like getting a massage, it was not like sitting outside his farm during the late hours of the day listening to the mild sounds of the night and watching the dim light of the stars illuminate the sleeping animals. No, it was a peace that made all his problems fade away into darkness, it was happiness. He knew where it was and he had to reach it again. He had to… through time, through space, through the lives of all living things in the universe. To the end of times.
The phone on his hand rang again.
“Hello?”
“Tim… why haven’t you answered my calls? I’ve been trying to get in touch with you…”
“What do you want John?”
“Tim, please. Just… listen to me okay?”
“Okay.”
“Tim…”, John paused on the other end, unable to translate his anguish into word that Tim could understand, unable to express his sad frustration, “…you don’t have to go.”
“John, we’ve already talked about this… I know it’s difficult to understand, I know that. I do. It must sound crazy to you… to everyone.”
“Wait, just listen okay?”
“Okay.”
“Look Tim. I can help you start something new, I can help you move to a new city… I’ll move with you even, if that’s what it takes. We can start like, just anew. Okay? You won’t know anyone! No one will know about your past or anything, it’ll be a new life! I have everything ready, just please come over… we can go right now, we’ll leave all this behind. We can go to china! I don’t know, anywhere! Mars? We’ll start new jobs, no one will know you… just… please… come over to…”
“John, please. Just stop. It’s not that okay? It’s not my life… I… We’ve talked about this. You know why I’m going, just say goodbye. Please. Say goodbye now, because I’m leaving in five minutes.”
There was silence on the other end and Tim waited for a response. His mind raced with the possibilities John had mentioned. He pictured himself arriving at the spaceport in Mars, walking off it, seeing the faces of strangers move by him. He pictured himself living by the shores of orion beach, watching the small sun set in the horizon. He pictured himself working as a fisherman… in peace. It was a good life, that one he would not have, he only wished someone else could live it, if only so that it would not go to waste. But he did not struggle with his decision, he could see the white city in his mind’s eye and happiness washed over him. No human emotion could stop him from pursuing his dream, no one could stop him from taking the journey to the end of the universe.
“You’re my only family left… Goodbye Tim, I will miss you.”
“I will miss you too John, maybe we will see each other again in this future… or the next…”
John ended the call and Tim smiled. He stood up from his chair, grabbed a small bag of things he would need and left his empty house.
On his way to the International Spaceport on the back of the blue cab Tim blanked his mind and avoided the feelings of regret any normal human would have. He focused on his breathing and he counted each one, and each felt like a small victory against human nature, against the human instincts that told him to stay, to enjoy his life while there was still a world left to enjoy them.
He had counted four hundred and fifty two breaths when he found himself standing outside a shuttle with a hatch open leading into the vault he had designed listening to a man speak about safety measures. Safety measures, those were useless now. Everything from here on out is an all or nothing bet.
“…in case you wake up from hyper sleep any time there will be spare infusions and this manual will be stored in the yellow box next to your bed. There will be food stored in the orange box that will last you three days. More than three days awake from hypersleep and you are done Tim. Everything I just told you will also be written in a manual, this because once you wake up your mind will take a few hours to even remember who it belongs to. And one last thing, we can’t control for the future, of course you know that, so the possibility still exists that someone will find your vault circling the sun in a million years, or a billion and take you out, and I don’t think they’ll speak english… so it’s gonna be tough explaining. It’s a risk and I want you to acknowledge it right now.”
“I’m aware of the risk.”
“Okay. Well, that’s it. Last chance to change your mind. I know it’s not my business to tell you but still, I advise you to reconsider. This is almost one hundred percent a death sentence.”
“Noted. I would like to proceed.”
“Alright Tim. Good luck.”
Tim walked through the open vault and looked around it. The hypersleep bed was in the center and the multiple boxes of various colors sat in a row on the floor next to it. Tim took one last look outside the vault, five people stood outside it. Three of them were Spaceport staff, the other two were transmitting his ordeal through two cameras.
“I’ll see you in a trillion years”, he said with a smile, and he proceeded to lock the door, hoping that no one would ever open it again. No one but him.
8000 years later
“Look in here honey, do you see that?”
“Yes! It looks like a box! Is it a satellite?”
“No honey, this one does not go around Earth, it goes around the Sun. You see a long time ago a man decided to find out what awaits the universe once it ends. And that’s him in there… circling the sun, sleeping, waiting to be awoken in a trillion years.”
“Is that more than a million years?”
“Yes. Much more! Time is odd for us humans… it seems like lifetimes ago that this man sailed into orbit, but in reality it’s only just the beginning of his long journey.”
They layed back down on the cool ground and watched the twinkling lights in the sky.
“I wonder how many of those lights are travellers… moving through the galaxy to find something they didn’t find at home…”
1 billion years later
Translated
What is that? Pre-analysis indicates a box with organic material inside. Is elimination required? Wait for thorough analysis... ... ... ... Results: Human ancestor. Alive in a state of extended sleep. DNA is ancient. It is of no use to us. It is of no danger to us. Proceed to next sector for scanning. Confirm.
100 billion years later
“Are preparations for the Induced Star Initiative ready?”
“Yes sir. But we have a problem… The life scanner indicates there is a lifeform in the old solar system. But it’s too small… it can’t be a planet with life. Should we proceed?”
“No. Send a scout out to investigate. We don’t want to crunch the whole system together only to find out we destroyed one the last lifeforms in the universe.”
“Yes sir. Sending scout…”
The two men looked out the window of their ship, waiting for the results to be negative, waiting so they could start creating a new star. Entropy would not beat them, if they conquered the galaxy they could conquer the so called laws of physics. They were all a myth after all, nothing was law.
“Sir, the scout indicates a small container circling the deceased star. There seems to be a lifeform inside. How do we proceed? Should we bring it in for examination?”
“No. Abort mission. We’re moving to the next deceased star. Leave that thing where it is. We’ll be back…”
1 trillion years later
His heart boomed in a slow manner. It had forgotten how to be alive. His eyes sagged and his vision was blurry. He tried to move his feet, or his hands, or his fingers, but the chemical and electrical signals from his brain were unable to reach their destination, so he waited. He had waited more lifetimes than ever existed, why not wait a little more?
Tim stood in the center of the shiny metal room floating somewhere in the proximity of the location where Earth had thrived in another time. He knew, of course, that space-time expansion made those coordinates inaccurate, irrelevant almost as the traditional passage of time had deformed space enough to make it a different place, an alien place.
His head throbbed with each beat of his heart. His eyes were beginning to fail, or was it the cryo-fluid wearing off? He felt tired. More so than he had ever been. Who wouldn’t be at the ripe old age of over one hundred billion years? A cold current of wind passed around him and his body screamed at him to sit down, to relax, maybe take a nap, maybe fall into unconsciousness and die. But he was stronger than that. He hadn’t reached this time just to nod off and take a comfortable never ending nap.
He took one cautious step forward, like a drowsy chameleon, making sure that his foot was placed in the right direction and with the correct amount of force. His foot came down on the cold metal floor and the room creaked with his sudden movement. Sudden for the room at least, which had felt no action within it for a trillion years. Tim’s pain fused with that of the room and his mind raced through the countless opportunities he had had the chance to turn back, to live a normal life, to stay behind and enjoy the little things. The little things. He didn’t care for them. He had to see what was out there, he needed to see if he had awoken in a new universe, if stars shined again, if planets again spun around their own axis, if entropy had somehow been reversed, he needed to know if he was right, if the shining city waited for him out there.
He took another step towards the peephole in the metal door a few meters in front of him and he wondered if he had made the right decisions. He remembered his days below the sun, the beautiful days on Earth when he could nap in his garden, when his dog Mat would sleep beside him, when the blue color of the sky could be taken for granted.
He placed his weak hands on the door and looked outside through small window on it. The first thought in his mind was that it had somehow been blocked. Obscured by the passage of time. He tried cleaning it with his sleeve and his breath, but before he was done reality hit him with in the face. The window was not obscured… he was looking at the dead remnants of the universe, black, empty, dead space. No stars were left alive, no planets moved in any orbits, nothing. Entropy had been fulfilled, it had all been a dream… His shining city was a delusion of his own mind, and he had just wasted a trillion years of sleeping, waiting for something that didn’t exist. He felt numbness begin to crawl over his body, and his thoughts began to fade away. He thought of his brother… of his last words… a single tear rolled down his cheek, cooling his skin on the way down. Entropy again working, ensuring he too would become one with the darkness.
There was nothing left to live for, no one out there to save him or comfort him, so he didn’t resist.
“Goodbye…”, he said, and opened the door to the ever expanding darkness outside, and as he did it engulfed him and the vault. He felt his body go cold and saw the lights in his bed go out.
“I’m sorry”, that was the last thought to ever exist, and with that entropy increased to the maximum. His frozen body floated in an undescript location in the space that used to thrive with life, with a blue world, with a yellow star, with the longest lasting people of the galaxy.
Original content here is published under these license terms: X License Type: Read Only License Summary: You may read the original content in the context in which it is published (at this web address). No other copying or use is permitted without written agreement from the author. |
CHONBURI — A crazed, knife-wielding man broke into a stranger’s condominium room in South Pattaya early this morning, only to lock himself in the restroom and tell police he’s a friend of God.
It all started just after midnight when a woman, identified only as Nid, said she was in her room with her lover at the TW Jomtien Beach Condominium when a man broke into the room with a knife.
Nid said she immediately ran into the hallway in terror, while her lover Ek ran to the balcony and leaped to the ground floor. Ek did this because he thought the man was her boyfriend arriving home earlier than expected. Fortunately for Ek, Nid’s room is only on the second floor, and he was only slightly injured by the fall.
At that point the story took another twist when the intruder, who was unable to identify himself to police, locked himself in Nid’s restroom. He waited there until police arrived and broke down the door to disarm and arrest him.
The man appeared to be intoxicated and would not give any details to police other than repeatedly vouchsafing that he is a good friend of God.
He was later taken to a police station, where he was charged with breaking and entering during the night. He also tested positive for drug use, police said.
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Alcohol intervention programs fail to curb drinking habits of fraternity members
June 20th, 2016 | Rachael
Alcohol is America’s one of the biggest problems, which is evident from high mortality rates due to alcoholism in the country. Many intervention programs designed and implemented to curb alcohol use among the American population have not yielded the desired results mainly due to the ambivalent attitude of Americans towards its intoxicating properties.
In fact, drinking habits are so deeply entwined with the country’s culture that any effort to curtail drinking needs to be backed by a proper research in the area.
Gauging effectiveness of alcohol intervention programs
A study backed by 25 years of research and conducted on over 6,000 university students has revealed that alcohol intervention programs designed to decrease alcohol use among fraternity or sorority members have no effect. The observations of the study, titled “Alcohol Interventions for Greek Letter Organizations: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, 1987 to 2014,” pinpointed the restricted level of efficacy of current intervention programs in lowering alcohol consumption and the problems related to drinking habits among members of a particular fraternity.
In the study, published online by the American Psychological Association in the journal Health Psychology in May 2016, lead author Dr. Lori Scott-Sheldon of the Miriam Hospital and Brown University said, “Stronger interventions may need to be developed for student members of Greek letter organizations.”
Limited efficacy of alcohol intervention programs
For the study, the scientists systematically combined relevant qualitative and quantitative data obtained from 15 studies based on 21 different interventions. The interventions included details from 6,026 members, including 18 percent women, and various fraternities and sororities.
The scientists observed no major difference between those receiving the interventions and the others with no access to any interventions for alcohol consumption or problems stemming from alcohol abuse. On the contrary, the scientists noted that in some cases, alcohol consumption spiked after intervention.
The study pointed to an interesting practice of Greek students taking drinks in greater frequency and higher quantity when contrasted to students outside the Greek system. Further observation concerning the impact of alcohol-related habits of Greek system students revealed that this group suffered more from alcohol-related disorders than their non-Greek counterparts.
Meta-analyses of similar alcohol interventions among general college students indicated that reduction in alcohol use is possible by executing these programs. This is in contrast to the observations made during the implementation of interventions among college students of Greek letter organizations, wherein the authors of the study believed that the interventions would be effective in diminishing alcohol consumption and its related problems in the students, compared to those who had not experienced them.
The research that was conducted by evaluating and assessing the observations obtained from different studies failed to focus on sororities exclusively, partly because women constituted only 18 percent of the total respondents in the studies. But the findings can be applied to members belonging to different fraternities. The study stressed on the need to design a separate intervention model for those belonging to Greek fraternities. However, further research would be needed to understand the implications of existing interventions on various sororities.
Road to recovery
There could be many reasons for people turning to alcohol, though they all end up suffering from similar alcohol-related disorders or complications. Despite its addictive properties, alcohol is easily available and its use is not deemed illegal. Among a host of reasons, such as socio-economic conditions and peer pressure, easy availability of liquor also contributes to alcoholism.
If you or your loved one is addicted to alcohol or any other substance and is seeking relief from addictive habits, you may get in touch with the Arizona Substance Abuse Helpline for more information about the leading substance abuse treatment centers in Arizona. You may call at our 24/7 helpline number 866-857-5777 or chat online for further expert advice on addiction treatment centers in Arizona. |
Why You Should Learn Jiu Jitsu to Get Better At Dating
Kyle T Blocked Unblock Follow Following May 8, 2017
Growing up, I was a stereotype of a weak and wimpy kid. If I were to be thrust into a situation where I would need to physically defend myself, I would have been 100% useless. Unless my opponent was a 4th grader with asthma. This extreme lack of toughness hindered my social confidence. All of this changed for me when I started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I am almost three years into my Jiu Jitsu journey now and I have noticed some fantastic benefits that relate directly to social skills, particularly in success with attracting women. Here are the main benefits…
1. It will destroy your ego- When you first start Jiu Jitsu, or any martial art that emphasizes hard sparring, you will get your ass kicked over and over and over again. Any notion that you had about yourself being a tough guy will be crushed. It quickly becomes obvious that anybody who has been training for a while can kill you with their bare hands with relative ease. Every new person comes to a mental fork in the road. Do they simply never show up again to preserve their self-image? Or do they accept their lacking physical capabilities to deal with the reality of this new sport? Those who choose the latter option learn to put their ego aside. They will probably not think of themselves as hot shit anymore and begin to honestly look at what they lack in order to improve. This kind of egoless mindset helps greatly when you go out to meet women. In a situation where you approach a woman and she rudely blows you off, you have a choice to make. You can get pissed because this hurt your self image, or you can laugh it off and go approach the next girl. The guy who does martial arts will be far more inclined to choose the second option because he has already had his ego crushed at the gym, so a social hit to the ego is not a big deal.
2. It Resolves Primal Insecurities- You know that feeling you get when you see an attractive woman that you want to talk to, but she is in a group with her guy and girl friends, so you feel scared because you will be judged by these people? That feeling comes from a primal part of our brains. As a result of evolution, your mind subconsciously tells you not to go talk to this person because you could be ostracized from a social group, or some guy near her will beat you up for talking to the girl he is with. Those feelings dissipate after training Jiu Jitsu for a while. You begin to think yourself as more of an “alpha chimp” who can handle himself in adverse situations. The subconscious fear of violence is not there because you know that you have the upper hand in a physical confrontation. After these insecure feelings go away, you will start to carry yourself with a sense of ease. Intimidating situations start to seem very manageable.
3. It Teaches Your Brain to do Difficult Things- As the great Joe Rogan once said, “when you are doing Jiu Jitsu, there is hardly anyone doing something more difficult within a 100 mile radius.” Doing something at the peak of physical and mental difficulty has a profound psycological effect. It teaches you how to push through very difficult tasks, which is a lacking quality in many people. From doing Jiu Jitsu, you can become a top performer in terms of mental toughness. This psychological strength that you build is massively beneficial when you go out to meet new woman. As we all know, putting yourself out there as a potential romantic partner for someone is no easy feat. If you go out a lot, you have likely encountered people laughing at you, girls ignoring you and various other harsh rejections. This is very mentally taxing, but it is easier to deal with if you have mental toughness built up from Jiu Jitsu. A girl ignoring you at a bar does not seem so bad when you pushed yourself to a mental breaking point regularly in the gym.
I encourage every person reading this blog to at least go try one Jiu Jitsu class. It is usually free to try and there is a good chance you will get hooked. I promise that it will help you in all areas of your life, especially with dating. |
Canon 5D Mark IV vs Canon 5D Mark III - Image Comparison
We are doing a early image comparison between these two iconic DSLRs. The Canon 5D Mark III was announced 2nd March 2012 and after 4 years and 5 months of time its successor is finally coming. Canon really invested a lot of time in the development and design of the upcoming Canon 5D Mark IV camera.
Update – Canon 5D Mark IV Announced
Let’s see the image comparison between these two DSLRs and spot out the difference.
The biggest difference we can spot in the first look is the new logo design of the Canon 5D Mark IV camera.
We can clearly spot the new button that appeared on the rear side of the camera, it’s may be a switch or joystick ? SHARE YOUR VIEW WITH US
Canon 5D Mark IV – we can spot re-arrangements of ports rest of the design remains same.
Again almost identical, so both sides of the camera is almost same and no major change is visible.
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2 The Industry Fakes a Shortage So Much That There's a Black Market for It The Industry Fakes a Shortage So Much That There's a Black Market for It
Let's get one thing clear -- pumpkin spice is seasonal by choice and choice alone. As we've already pointed out, nothing about the flavor relies on the harvesting of its namesake, and so if we wanted to we could be lathering in the stuff head-to-toe every morning. Instead, the industry shuts down the moment spring hits, creating a controlled withdrawal from the seductive aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg.
Jason Iannone
If only there were a way to procure such rare and exotic treasures.
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So why not just keep the doors open all year round? Well, as any rookie marketing strategist could tell you, there's a little something called "artificial demand" used to hype goods and services that are otherwise completely worthless. By limiting it to one season, the pumpkin spice industry has created scarcity that gives the product such a heightened value that there is actually an underground offseason black market of monstrously sad humans hawking substitute products on eBay. So instead of opening the floodgates, they've actually created a subculture of consumers alerting one another about which Starbucks are selling pumpkin spice lattes later or earlier in the fall.
Izabela Zaremba/Hemera/Getty Images
Pictured: A modern-day squashbuckler.
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This leads to the final mystery: why did they choose fall in the first place? Or pumpkins? There's a reason for that as well. |
REUTERS France's President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks with French soldiers at Camp Warehouse in Kabul on Wednesday.
With news sinking in on Wednesday that France suffered its biggest military loss of life in 25 years, the political opposition in Paris is demanding a rethink of the country's mission in Afghanistan.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy rushed to Afghanistan and visited his country's troops on Wednesday morning in a show of support after 10 of their comrades were killed and 21 injured during an ambush on Monday and in fierce fighting that continued into Tuesday. France has about 2,600 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, and Sarkozy said they must remain there.
"France is resolved to pursue the fight against terrorism, for democracy and liberty," Sarkozy said. "I don't have any doubt about that. We have to be here."
Monday's attack marked the worst single loss of life in combat for international forces in Afghanistan since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. The ambush came only months after Sarkozy agreed to send 700 additional troops to the war-torn country at a NATO summit in April. The decision proved deeply unpopular at home, prompting the left-wing opposition to file a motion of no confidence in the government's decision to beef up its presence in Afghanistan.
While the opposition Socialist Party (PS) has been careful to express its condolences to the families of those killed, it has also questioned the objectives of France's mission in Afghanistan. The national debate in France appears to mirror recent discussions in Berlin about the German Bundeswehr's mandate in Afghanistan, where polls show most opposing the military's mission.
"What Are the Aims of this War?"
On Tuesday, Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande called for an urgent meeting of the parliamentary foreign affairs and defense committees to be held in order to obtain clarification on the nature of the French presence in Afghanistan. "What are the aims of this war?" he asked in a statement. "And how many troops do we need to achieve those objectives?"
In an interview with radio station France Info, Hollande said it was time to "redefine the mission and decide on precise objectives." He added, "It is the Afghans themselves who need to provide security for Afghans and not an operation of occupation."
Other opposition parties also voiced deep-seated criticism of the French mission. Nöel Mamere of the Green Party said "France should renounce this adventure," while the French Communist Party reiterated its calls to pull the troops out of Afghanistan.
"Our soldiers should not get themselves killed for Uncle Sam," Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of the right-wing populist National Front, said in a statement released on Tuesday. "They died in an endless war that the United States is waging in this country in its own interests."
But representatives of Sarkozy's conservative ruling party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), defended the deployment of French troops. UMP General Secretary Patrick Devedjian lashed out at the political sniping, warning against "using the deaths of the soldiers to launch polemics." He said this would just be "falling into the trap of Taliban who want to shake our resolve with their recent spectacular action." Meanwhile, UMP spokesperson Dominique Paillé expressed his "consternation" at the reaction of the opposition Socialists. "At this time of suffering, it seems to us that national unity in the face of the terrorism that threatens us should prevail."
During his visit to Afghanistan, Sarkozy tried to stiffen his troops' resolve. "The best way of remaining faithful to your comrades is to continue the work, to lift your heads, to be professional," he told soldiers at a base on the outskirts of Kabul. "A part of the world's freedom is at stake here," he said, adding: "This is where the fight against terrorism is being waged." Commenting on his decision to increase troop numbers following US pleas for its NATO allies to do more in Afghanistan, the president said "if it had to be done again, I would do it."
Sarkozy also met with Michel Stollsteiner, the French general who heads ISAF troops in Kabul and surrounding areas, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai during his trip to Kabul on Wednesday.
Karzai said he wanted to express the "condolences and the pain of the Afghan people to the French people for the loss they have suffered." He added that the "rise in violence is attributed directly to our lack of attention, the allies and us, to the sanctuaries, to the training grounds, to the financial resources, of terrorists and the Taliban. ... Unless we do that we will continue to suffer."
The 10 French soldiers were killed in a major 13-hour battle that occured in the district of Sarboi, some 50 kilometers from Kabul. Around 100 Taliban insurgents attacked a small group of soldiers who had been sent on foot ahead of a convoy of around 100 soldiers to check the terrain. The head of the French army, Gen. Jean-Louis Georgelin, described it as a "classic ambush." It was the single worst incident to befall the French military since 58 paratroopers were killed by a suicide bomber in Lebanon in 1983.
The French Defense Ministry has been quick to emphasize that the soldiers killed in the deadly ambush were not among the extra 700 soldiers sent to Afghanistan by Sarkozy this summer.
French left-leaning daily Libération wrote on Wednesday that the presidential staff estimates that this means the "worst has been avoided." "The worst would have been if this ambush had occured in Kapissa, a few kilometers to the north. That is where Nicolas Sarkozy sent a contingent of 700 men, placed under American command."
Meanwhile, conservative Le Monde wrote, "The attack on the French contingent will be a disappointment for the Elysee (a reference to Sarkozy's office, the French White House). Since the spring, the risk that the military was running in this Eastern zone, where the jihadists are regrouping, was both anticipated and feared."
Libération concluded: "From now on France will not be able to ignore the fact that it is at war 5,000 kilometers (3,1000 miles) from its borders."
smd/ap/afp |
Big Government is Flocking to Blockchain
Jayson Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 3, 2017
Coming soon to a country near you — blockchain and all its glorious wonder.
It’s happening. For those of us staying close to the wires, we have seen and heard reports of governments testing, approving and rumors of developing blockchain technology. Soon, we will start reading about confirmed programs being developed and from there, the flood gates will open.
Dubai has made no secret that it plans and fully intends to be a city completely built on blockchain technology. The US Federal Reserve has approved Ripple’s xCurrent software as the preferred cross boarder financial transactions method for the US, Japan already made the same move to Ripple for all oversea transfers to Taiwan earlier this summer. Now, news that the EU and UN will be using Ethereum’s blockchain to help refugees. The list is long here, from governments creating blockchain sandboxes for developers to other countries in initial research of blockchain…it’s coming, soon and fast.
For the average person like you and I, this is great news. As blockchain becomes more accepted, our personal information becomes more secure with identity fraud much more difficult to near impossible for even the most advanced hacker. But one question remains in my mind: do governments REALLY know what they are signing up for? Making this move potentially places every move they make public and trackable. For US Residents, think about the power of this technology. The pentagon has reported numerous times they have ‘lost’ trillions of dollars. Could this mean that we no longer wonder where our taxpayer money is ‘disappearing’ too? Unfortunately, no I cannot see this happening, at least not soon. But one day, without a doubt I can see this happening. More than likely there will still be ‘off the books’ records, but as blockchain becomes a reality — citizens will demand this forcing the hands of government officials.
The advancements blockchain will provide are far too great to be ignored, I have been clear on my passion and belief on this. Now, think about terrorists. How much more difficult does it become for an organization to create fraudulent passports and gain entry into countries using blockchain? Instant data transfers been nodes on the blockchain provide first time ever real-time data on an individual’s movements, financial transactions and more.
Now, before you go all ‘1984’ on me. Remember, there are BILLIONS of people in the world. No singular government or entity will have the energy nor the desire to watch you go from home to the grocery store, then back and honestly, the majority of us are just too boring to track. Could that happen, sure I guess…but to what gain would that benefit a government? Resources would need to developed…you get my point. My focus is the true bad guys, they need to be very afraid of blockchain. Once you are keyed or entered into the system — there is no going back, there is NO delete button. You can and will be tracked — and very easily.
So why do I tie blockchain to bad guys (aka terrorists)? Simple — in the U.S. there are a small group of (what I describe as ignorant and uneducated) Senators that are pushing cryptocurrency being tied to ISIS and other terrorists. True, we have had hackers use Bitcoin as payment for their ransoms, but this angle is driven more by fear of the unknown than actual facts. Besides, while I cannot confirm this — I am guessing that bad guys have some US FIAT lying around…should be ban the US Dollar now?
My call to these Senators is simple. Stop fighting cryptocurrency. You are essentially fighting blockchain technology. Spend a few moments studying blockchain (like the rest of the world) and learn just how powerful this technology is and will be. Study how to integrate both blockchain and cryptocurrency into our current world. Once they accept and do this, the fear of the unknown will become the power of the people. Bad guys will still do bad things, but blockchain in government provides better tools to track down these terror organizations and provide the citizens of these countries more transparency into government.
Blockchain is coming to a country near you. Identify fraud is potentially nearing its end. The world and how we engage it is changing.
See you in our Brave New World.
~CryptoJayson~
Follow me on twitter @crypto_jayson
Donation Addresses:
NEO: AXZ5AiCHXeEefG5Zo45waEV2QHdrqA93qc
ETH: 0x84f95A68FE5Ff16BB7e047c1484f4cd07fd1cB0a
BTC: 19uUE9K4ybS6zMMxCcjzDx9cz6cazh2ZTx |
Ghost / Alias / Linked Clips: a feature where duplicating a clip with specified modifier key would make the copies 'linked' to the original, so whenever a change is made in the original clip all its copies will get updated accordingly. This should work within Arranger and also between Clip Launcher and Arranger (so original clip can be in Launcher, linked copies in Arranger) 122 8%
Track freeze: ability to temporarily bounce a MIDI or audio track to audio (ideally at specified point in device chain, leaving other devices and their automation intact), so that the CPU can be freed from processing performance-hungry instruments or effects; but the bounce should be reversible, so - at any point in time - one should be able to choose "unfreeze" to go back to original MIDI / audio data with full devices chain and automation 177 11%
Comping: ability to record several takes of audio or MIDI, put all of those takes synchronised in a 'folder' and switch between the best segments of the takes for a final output - those segments could be either selected manually by user, or could be automated e.g. an LFO could cycle between different takes 160 10%
Pitch Follower modulator: a modulator, which would respond to the pitch of incoming audio signal, i.e. the audio equivalent of Keytrack (for MIDI data) or Envelope Follower (for volume of audio signal) 55 3%
Resizeable track volume faders: both in mixer panel and - in particular - in mix view 78 5%
Time-stretch in Sampler: additional playback mode, where the playback is key-tracked (so responds to a pitch of incoming MIDI note) but the speed of playback remains constant - this would be useful for complex samples or loops that change their sonic character over time (e.g. highly modulated lead, guitar riff loop) where the cycle and/or timing of events should remain constant regardless of the pitch 168 10%
Keep sample in RAM: for bigger audio clips (or slow HDD setups), it would be beneficial if Inspector panel gave an option to load and keep the sample in RAM, instead of streaming it from hard drive 41 3%
Expanded devices view: the devices panel is limited in height and obviously width, whereas the ability to layer and nest devices makes complex setups difficult to control and manage. It would be useful to have a dedicated view - like for ARRANGE / EDIT / MIX now - that'd show the device chain on a full screen as a hierarchical tree, ideally with ability to also show modulators 99 6%
Extended MIDI channel support: this is important for hardware users and would also allow building of more sophisticated device chains, with per-note or per-clip channel information controlling which devices are triggered by which notes 66 4%
Plug-in grabber: an option to automatically create a multi-sample from a VST instrument, with specified pitch & velocity ranges and intervals (like in Renoise: an option to automatically create a multi-sample from a VST instrument, with specified pitch & velocity ranges and intervals (like in Renoise: http://tutorials.renoise.com/w iki/Render_or_Freeze_Plugin_In struments_to_Samples 59 4%
Groove pool: a more advanced version of current shuffle, where you can 'extract' groove from existing MIDI or audio clips and apply it to your own clips (like Live has: a more advanced version of current shuffle, where you can 'extract' groove from existing MIDI or audio clips and apply it to your own clips (like Live has: https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/using-grooves/ 79 5%
Video playback: so that users could use Bitwig to synchronise their music with video 90 6%
Time signature automation: ability to automate the change of the time signature of the song on the fly 102 6%
Global tuning: a feature that makes sure your project adheres to specified scale and key, by restricting / re-mapping notes falling out of the scale. It should also make it possible to change the scale & key of existing parts if user so requests. 59 4%
Advanced step sequencer / MIDI editor: to allow streamlined step-by-step recording of notes with a MIDI controller or keyboard, with adjustable note lengths, intervals, velocity, etc. for when one can't play the sequence live but also doesn't want to break the flow constantly using mouse & keyboard 69 4%
Live looper: make the Clip Launcher live-looping friendly, by allowing per-clip controllable post-recording action and action type, MIDI-controllable reverse, double & halve functions, etc. 50 3%
More volume meters: proper volume meters on all I/O dropdown menus to help seeing where the signal comes and goes, how high is it, etc. to facilitate gain staging while patching things (on all levels: audio settings, tracks, devices I/O etc...) 29 2%
Support for multi-channel audio I/O VSTs: ability to send and receive separate audio signals to and from single instance of VST that support that (e.g. Moebius Looper) 28 2%
Flexible GUI: make all the panels detachable, dockable and resizeable, so that users can arrange their workspace in accordance with their setup and workflow 62 4% |
Location, as they say, is everything – in real estate, and as it turns out, in high-stakes diplomacy as well.
This week’s case in point: Iran’s rejection of Istanbul as the venue for planned talks between Tehran and world powers on the Iranian nuclear program. Western powers had thought the Turkish city that spans two continents, Asia and Europe, would be ideal.
But Iran is having none of it, for reasons that say more about Tehran’s peevishness over Turkey’s rise as a regional power than about any Iranian dislike for the Bosphorus.
“Iranian officials are not interested in Turkey as the host,” sniffed Alaeddin Boroujerdi, chairman of Paliament’s powerful committee for national security and foreign policy. In one short sentence, Mr. Boroujerdi dissed an erstwhile friend that Tehran is now alarmed to see emerging as a regional rival.
His comment masks a mountain of Persian hurt over the Turks and their shifting diplomacy in the region.
Perhaps Istanbul’s candidacy for the high-profile meetings wasn’t helped by the fact that US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is the one who announced – apparently prematurely – that the talks would take place there between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the US, Russia, China, France and Britain) plus Germany.
But Iran’s issues with Turkey run much deeper than a pique over Ankara’s friendship with Washington, which is nothing new. What galls the Iranians is how Turkish leaders have seized upon the Arab Spring, and in particular the crisis in neighboring Syria, to establish Turkey as a regional power and influence – and in ways that don’t suit Tehran.
That is new, and it is Iran’s displeasure with this turn of events that hangs like a backdrop to Boroujerdi’s dismissal of Istanbul as the nuclear-talks venue.
Iran has long had its own designs on emerging as the region’s dominant power, and it saw that calling boosted in a number of ways over the past decade – not least by the demise of Saddam Hussein and the advent of an Iraqi regime dominated by the country’s Shiite majority. (As telling as Boroujerdi’s rejection of Istanbul was his support for holding the nuclear talks in Baghdad, which he described as ideal because of Iraq’s good relations with both Iran and the US.)
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A pillar of Iran’s regional design is its close relationship with Syria and the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The cracks that have weakened that pillar, as Mr. Assad has battled an unbending opposition, have alarmed Tehran and presented it with the prospect of losing a crucial base of influence. Iran has watched its regional power wane as Turkey has waxed stronger, playing an important role as go-between for the region and the West, and siding with the winners in the region’s revolutions.
Iran sees Turkey playing a role it fancied for itself – although certainly it would have cut it from a different cloth – and it is miffed. It will also do what it can – like nix Istanbul as the venue for talks the whole world will be watching – to slow Turkey’s rise to a position of regional influence it envisions for itself. |
At the 74th Annual Golden Globe(R) Awards last night in Hollywood, actresses and actors were bedecked in some of the finest jewelry and watches on the market. In fact, more than $3 million worth of Harry Winston jewelry was worn on stage by a variety of celebrities. Both Piaget and Tiffany also commanded the spotlight.
Presenter, Drew Barrymore wore $2.5 million worth of jewelry, while actress Meryl Streep, nominated for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy Motion Picture, and recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award, wore discreet 13.62 carat radiant-cut yellow diamond earrings by Harry Winston.
Barrymore's ensemble included Mrs. Winston Diamond Drop earrings weighing 27.5 carats. a Sparkling Cluster 2.35-carat platinum and seven diamond rings of varying carat weight, with the most impressive piece being a South Sea pearl and 37.03-carat diamond ring set in platinum.
Presenter Kristen Bell also wore more than 115 carats of Winston jewelry in the form of 42-carats of vintage diamond hoop earrings, multiple rings and a 68.57-carat diamond bracelet.
Jessica Chastain and Ryan Reynolds, both international brand ambassadors for Piaget, wore Piaget for the red carpet. Chastain donned an 18-karat white gold Rose necklace set with 265 brilliant-cut diamonds, while Reynolds, nominated for his role in “Deadpool,” wore a Piaget Altiplano 38mm watch. Matt Damon wore an ultra-thin Piaget Altiplano watch. Piaget also had a starring role in Pablo Larrain's "Jackie" movie -- via a vintage Tradition watch that once belonged to the First Lady. |
The first of the 76 million baby boomers began receiving Social Security retirement benefits this year. The number of beneficiaries will grow much faster than the number of workers paying taxes, creating financial difficulties for the program. Social Security would still receive tax revenues and could pay 78 percent of promised benefits if the trust fund ran out of money in 2041 as predicted, the trustees said.
The Democratic candidates for president have set forth detailed proposals to provide health insurance for all Americans, but have said less about how they would finance the costs of Medicare, for people who are 65 and older or disabled. Efforts to squeeze even modest savings from that program typically provoke a frenzy of lobbying on Capitol Hill.
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, one of two contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, said the trustees’ report “should give Americans confidence that we can keep Social Security strong for future generations if we come together and address its real but manageable long-term cash flow issue.”
“As president,” Mr. Obama said, “I will reduce costs in the Medicare program by enacting reforms to lower the price of prescription drugs, ending the subsidies for private insurers in the Medicare Advantage program and focusing resources on prevention and effective chronic disease management.”
Aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is also seeking the Democratic nomination, had no immediate comment on the report.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has described Medicare as a “fiscal train wreck.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain, said the trustees’ reports reinforced the need to get health costs under control.
Medicare has a separate trust fund to pay for doctors’ services and other outpatient care. The trustees foresee a steep increase in those costs, but said the trust fund would not run out of money because, under federal law, it had access to whatever general revenue were needed. In addition, beneficiaries’ premiums can be adjusted each year to cover about 25 percent of the expected costs of this part of Medicare, known as Part B.
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The standard premium for Part B has increased 64 percent in the last five years and is now $96.40 a month. Under the formula set by existing law, the premium will stay at that level in 2009 and 2010, the trustees said.
But the report, prepared by government actuaries and economists, said these projections were unrealistic because they assumed that Medicare payments to doctors would be cut by more than 10 percent in July and by an additional 5 percent in January 2009 and in each of the next seven years, for a cumulative reduction of about 40 percent.
In fact, Congress usually intervenes to block such cuts and, in recent years, has approved small increases for doctors, thus increasing the costs of Part B and the premiums charged to beneficiaries.
President Bush set forth his vision for Medicare in February, in a budget that proposed savings of more than $180 billion in the next five years. The House and the Senate rejected those proposals in budget blueprints adopted earlier this month.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the reports reflected policy decisions made by Mr. Bush early in his administration. The president inherited a budget surplus, but, rather than using it to shore up Social Security and Medicare, she said, he squandered much of it on “tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.”
Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the senior Republican on the Budget Committee, said the reports showed that the looming crisis in entitlement programs “is not a phony issue, as some Democrats have stated, but a very real problem that is on our doorstep.” |
Property Observers
Property observers are “regular” variables, but with a twist. Any time that their value is set (after initialization), they give a chance for code to be run in response to an observed change. They look like this:
This looks very similar to the computed variables, but it’s important to remember that items or name in the example above always has a value, which is not dynamically generated every time it is accessed.
Property observers are great when you need to perform a certain action every time something is updated, especially when it can be updated from multiple different points in your code.
I’ve personally found that it works well when creating your own delegate pattern. For example, consider the case of a toy I’m basing on one that I enjoyed in my childhood (but have hopefully altered enough so that I don’t get sued =) ):
Notice how startNewGame() and setNewRandomAction() both modify current action. Instead of placing the logic for the delegate callback in both places, it’s cleaner and simpler to place it in the property observer on the currentAction variable.
You can check it out by combining the snippet above with this code below in a playground (or click here for the full example): |
Kellyanne Conway, working for and against her boss at times, says she’ll talk to Donald Trump about about defusing his violent rhetoric toward journalists.
“Yes, I will tell him that,” Conway told Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday, in response for a request from the CNN host that Trump tone down the attacks against the media.
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“The working journalists who are traveling with them all the time — they go to all these rallies, they’re in this pen, he points to them — he sort of eggs the crowd on to go after them. There are a lot of young journalists,” Blitzer said to Conway. “He shouldn’t be doing that. Can you talk to him and say to him, ‘Mr. Trump, we only have a few days left. These are hardworking, young journalists and they deserve to have some security, if you will? Because some of those Trump supporters get pretty nasty out there.”
When Blitzer reiterated that many journalists are scared to cover Trump’s campaign because of how he whips up the crowds against them, she repeated, “I appreciate you saying that, and it will be conveyed. But they need to be fair.”
There have been a number of high-profile incidents in which journalists covering Trump’s campaign have reported overt hostility from his crowds. These include CNN’s Jim Acosta, who reported being hit with a sign, CNN’s Sara Murray, whose car was keyed and who had the cables to her truck cut, and NBC’s Katy Tur, who had Trump single her out during one of his rallies and turned the audience against her.
Watch the exchange below: |
EE BrightBox router hacked - bares all if you ask nicely
Shortly after having my new fibre broadband installed, I discovered a method to permanently compromise the security of the BrightBox router provided by EE. After a brief period of traffic analysis, something I do to all new devices on my network, I had found that it is incredibly easy to access sensitive information. This includes the md5 hash of the device admin password and my ISP user credentials, amongst other sensitive data. Allowing me to pass account security over the phone with EE, this not only leads to a total compromise of the device, but gives an attacker control of your account too.
Introduction
The BrightBox router is issued as the standard equipment for broadband and fibre packages taken out with EE. It was also previously issued by Orange for their broadband packages too. At the time of writing, ISPreview state that EE has around 714,000 subscribers in the UK and I just became one of them. The engineer came out and connected my fibre broadband (FTTC) and as with all new devices on my network, I decided to take a closer look at the traffic going to and from the device. It became apparent that the device leaks access to all kinds of sensitive data to clients on the network and there's also the possibility to exploit this remotely. It discloses the password of the EE account holder so I can call EE and pass account security, leaving me in a position to go as far as cancelling someone else's broadband package altogether. In this blog I'm going to cover the various weaknesses present in the EE BrightBox and demonstrate how they can be exploited. Throughout the blog you will find many links to files or pages hosted on the BrightBox. These links will work assuming you are on the same network as a BrightBox router and that it has the standard IP of 192.168.1.1, otherwise they will likely result in an error.
Logging In
First up was to see what happens during the login process. The login page doesn't run any transport layer security so we can expect to see the credentials zipping over the wire in plain text. Here is what Fiddler saw when I submitted the login form.
The call to login.cgi grabbed my attention and sure enough, there are my user credentials.
Interestingly, the username and password appear twice in the data and the first occurrence of the password looks like an md5 hash. Could we consider this to be a good indication of how the password is stored on the device? Either way, at this point we're sniffing plain text traffic which is nothing special, so, on we go.
Exposing Configuration Variables
There's an awful lot of JS files loaded when you login and the first few turned out to be nothing much interesting really. Once I got down to the /cgi/ folder though, things changed somewhat drastically. Navigating to the cgi_status.js file manually, I was greeted with an awful lot of information.
I couldn't really give a much bigger view of the page as it starts to detail a lot of sensitive information, like my ISP user credentials. Looking through further I believe it actually outputs almost every single piece of sensitive information stored on your router . That includes things like all of your WiFi SSIDs and their WPA2 keys.
Ok, that's not so bad. I mean, we're logged in to the router as an admin, what does it matter if we can access all this data like this? The problem is, that even when you're not logged in, any client on the network can access the information. Here I am using incognito mode to view the page without needing to login to the web interface.
This would allow anyone to completely bypass any restrictions you had imposed on the WiFi networks for example. The router offers the ability to setup multiple SSIDs on independant VLANs. To each of these you can apply different restrictions like bandwidth throttling, firewall rules, QoS and even time restrictions . Once a user has access to your "Guest Network" for example, they could simply view the WPA key for your "Main Network" and completely bypass all of your restrictions with a simple copy/paste operation. Not only that, but if someone has brief access to your premises and perhaps connects to your LAN, they can steal a copy of your WiFi password/s. This would allow them remote access to your WiFi from outside the premises without you ever divulging the passwords to anyone. Not so good.
Password Management
The next thing I like to check out is the change password or password reset options. So often done completely wrong, they generally expose any weaknesses in how passwords are handled and stored. Navigating through the Advanced Set-Up menu, I found the change password option.
After submitting the form I saw a POST request to apply.cgi and found the data being sent back to the router.
Interestingly, there was only one parameter being sent back to the router and it wasn't my new password in plain text or an md5 hash. Time to have a quick dig through the source.
So, the password is being "encrypted" before being sent over the wire without any transport layer security. Phew, at least we're safe from pesky hackers... A quick 'hex to string' conversion of '70617373776f726432' confirms that the value is indeed 'password2'. At this point it dawned on me that there was no communication of my original password, 'password1', to the router. The form asked for it, and the password was successfully changed, so it must have validated the existing password, surely? Either the original password isn't validated and is merely a place holder, or, the original password must have been available on the client side to verify prior to submission. Both of these are very daunting prospects. If the original password isn't verified and someone walked by a computer with a logged in session, they could simply reset the password without knowing the existing password. If the password is available on the client side it means the router transmitted the current admin password to the client. A quick scroll through the Network tab in the Chrome Developer Tools and I'd found my culprit.
Retrieving The Admin Password Hash
When loading the page, a file called cgi_sys_p.js is requested, which contains the md5 hash of the current admin password. I then confirmed this was indeed the case with the change password function. You can see that the existing password the user provides is hashed with md5 and then compared to the current password.
Knowing that the existing password is simply an md5 hash, I can quickly crack it using the enormous rainbow tables available on sites like CrackStation or MD5Decrypter.
So, now we know the path of the file where the admin credentials reside, we can simply navigate to the file and view it from any network connected device.
Just to be sure, I fired up an incognito window and ruled out any existing cookies granting me access to the file. I also tried from a different client on the network as the device also seems to use your IP address as a form of authentication.
There you have it! Once you're on the network, via LAN or WiFi, you can retrieve the md5 hash of the admin password and run it through any rainbow tables you happen to have handy. Even if that's taking a while to run through HashCat, there is still a wide range of information you can grab from all the other files that expose information. Simply type the IP address of your router into the address bar and append any of the following file paths to take a look. I've highlighted the ones that expose particularly sensitive information in bold and hyper-linked them assuming you have the device's standard IP so you can just click the links.
Hijacking Your Broadband Account
As mentioned above, the /cgi/cgi_wan_eth.js file exposes my ISP user credentials. The password that the router uses to connect to the EE network is also the password that EE use to verify my identity when calling them. As the password is just base64 encoded in the file it's incredibly easy to make a quick telephone call to EE customer support and access my account. The only thing I was asked when dialling through to the cancellation team was my name, my telephone number and the 2nd and 4th character of my password. To add insult to injury, EE obviously don't even hash the passwords that they store... In most instances obtaining the name of the account holder and the telephone number could be done very easily with a little social engineering. Imagine a sales call from a "rival ISP" asking to speak to the current account holder, they already have your phone number and they're about to get your name, too. At a home or small business address it would be incredibly easy to obtain this information. The telephone directory and/or the electoral register would provide this information in most circumstances anyway. To make matters even worse, a little further down I will detail a method to allow you access to this information remotely. Not only could a malicious attacker incur some hefty cancellation fees on your account and leave you without any internet connection, they wouldn't even have to get out of their chair.
Cross Site Request Forgery
To determine if the device was also vulnerable to CSRF, I started tracking some of the POST requests in Fiddler and I decided to replay some forged requests to see how easy it would be to control the device. Taking a look at the initial request it looks pretty standard; this is for a device reboot.
Nothing out of the ordinary and no anti-CSRF so I was good for a straight up replay which rebooted the device nicely. Even cutting the request right down in Fiddler I still got a successful device reboot so it appears that it's using the source IP as my authentication to control the device.
This makes for a nice, simple html form. Of course, there is no need for the submit button, you could just fire it with JS, but for the purposes of demonstration it's nice to have a button.
The command for a factory reset is frighteningly similar and whilst CSRF requires the user to be logged in to the device, it still has the potential to do some real harm. If embedded into a page such as the EE help forums, or any internet/broadband related help forum, for example, it could have some devastating effects on people visiting the pages. Again, I realise that this is an incredibly narrow attack vector, and most people probably wouldn't even consider it worth patching, but an attacker does have the scope for a lot of harm. With a single POST request an attacker can enable a secondary or tertiary WiFi network, assign an SSID of their choosing and set a WPA PSK. Unless you have serious suspicions about what would most likely appear as a neighbour having a new WiFi access point, the attacker now has the ability to access your network at will. As demonstrated above they can then gain administrative access to the device and recover your ISP credentials to pass account security over the phone. A long shot, but all perfectly feasible with a little social engineering. I've setup a CSRF demo page here for you to try out.
Exploiting The Device Remotely
Whilst digging through some of the files with obscure names, it became apparent that one of them was the administration options for remote management of the router over the Internet. The page can only be viewed once you're logged in to the router and is then protected by another, different password. After some investigation I couldn't find a way to bypass it. Here is a link to the page: z983erv3210ba.htm
It seems the password protection is handled in JavaScript, as disabling JavaScript on the page loaded up the form.
Rather than trying to bypass the password, I decided to see if I could construct a forged POST request and set the configuration variables myself, without using the form. The file cgi_sys_r.js from the list above has some interesting variables, "rm_en", "rm_start_ip" and "rm_end_ip". I took a guess that these were remote management (rm) variables and we had enabled (en) and then the start and end ip for allowed client connections. The required CMD parameter for the POST request can be looked up in the subformvar.js file. This file lists all the possible values of the parameter and the "SYS_RMT_MGMT" one looked like the one for the job.
With this we can construct the first part of the POST request, "CMD=SYS_RMT_MGMT&GO=system_p.htm". The "GO" parameter is simply where we want to end up after the request is completed. Next up we need to assign values to the fields on the form. Fortunately, this is done with the unique ID for each field that is stored alongside it's value in the appropriate file in the /cgi/ folder. Going back to cgi_sys_r.js we can see the three ID values we need.
Now with the ID numbers we can construct the rest of the request. You can submit as many parameters as you want on one page and they are simply labelled sequentially as SET0, SET1, SET2 etc... To set the "rm_en" variable to '1' we would use SET0=117703168%3D1. The %3D is just the hex code for an equals sign '=' so the parameter reads 117703168 = 1. All of the query parameters are now:
CMD=SYS_RMT_MGMT
GO=system_p.htm
SET0=117703168%3D1
SET1=117768704%3D0.0.0.0
SET2=117834240%3D255.255.255.255
With that done, we can use the Composer in Fiddler to construct the POST request and submit it to the router. Once submitted, you should be able to see the new values in the cgi_sys_r.js file.
Now, with everything set, the only thing left to do is to visit your public IP and see if the web admin login is available, but more importantly, if the device leaks all your sensitive data publicly too. I decided to use my phone over 3G to rule out any conflicts. If you visit your external IP from inside your network, the router serves up the web admin login anyway. This is not remote management as it happens before you enable remote management, it's just some odd behaviour on behalf of the router.
Oh dear... That means, with a little CSRF, I can enable remote management on your router and steal all of your sensitive data like WPA keys, ISP credentials and the md5 hash of your admin password over the Internet. Once I've cracked the hash I can login and do just about anything I like with your device or not bother with any of that and just call EE to cancel your internet connection. To try and restrict access to the remote management config page but then still allow the feature to be enabled is a huge oversight, especially considering how much data the device leaks! What's even worse is that there are bugs and odd behaviour taking place over the web interface that aren't normally present. If an admin is logged in to the web interface and another device on the network visits the page, you get a message saying an admin is already logged in and there isn't much you can do. However, if an admin is logged in from the local network and then someone visits your public IP, the device hands over the valid session to the visitor on the public IP and kicks you out!!! No effort required, just visit the IP of the device, that's it.
It's now incredibly obvious why EE disabled this feature in a previous firmware patch. An attacker could quite easily traverse the entire collection of EE IP address ranges collecting the md5 hashes of each device as they go, along with every other bit of information exposed. Each device does have a unique password but given the relatively weak strength there are only just over 2 billion combinations. The passwords are 6 characters long and contain only lower case letters and numbers. With even a low end GPU in your computer, a rainbow table is almost a waste of time given that Hashcat can easily generate md5 hashes to the tune of hundreds of millions per second without breaking a sweat. On any decent specification machine you could just crack them on the fly as you retrieve them. Once all the hashes have been cracked, the attacker would then be free to visit each and every device and take total control of every device they could access.
Into The Rabbit Hole
If you're interested in hardware hacking then read on to see how you can get a root terminal on the router, if not, feel free to jump to the Conclusion below. Whilst I came across some of the files referenced in this article by monitoring traffic, trying to capture them all by sniffing the traffic of every page on the router admin panel seemed like too much effort. It was time to delve a little deeper. I tossed caution to the wind and decided it was time to open this thing up and the first security measure didn't take too long to bypass. Does everyone hate these security screws?!
With the PCB out of the case I was able to spot the serial header, labelled 'J3' on the board, and soldered on some makeshift pins. They could have left the old ones in place for me...
There are four pins on the board, 1, 2 and 3, with number 4 not having a number printed on it. Pin 2 is Tx, pin 3 is Rx and pin 4, the one without a label, is the ground pin. Once I had the pins in place I could connect my PL2303 Serial to USB converter. This would allow me to open a console to the device from my PC.
With everything connected all you need is the COM port for the USB converter, in my case COM5, and the baud rate for the device which is 115,200. Grab yourself a copy of Putty and get setup with the router powered off, then hit 'Open'.
Now Putty is waiting for some activity on the serial port you can power the router on and should immediately see some output in the window.
As the router boots you should see a considerable amount of output, too much to list here so I've uploaded it to my PasteBin. Unfortunately though we don't get a root terminal. Having a look around online it seems that most of the hidden config pages on the earlier versions of the BrightBox router firmware have been disabled, except one http://192.168.1.1/u132xzp32aai.htm, manufacturer mode. Once 'manufactory mode' has been enabled the device will provide us with a root terminal over the serial port.
Once we have a root terminal onto the device, it's pretty much just a stripped down Linux machine. This means we can dig out a little info about the device like CPU and memory information.
It's also quite interesting that using netstat I can see the device is listening on port 5438 though I'm not exactly sure what for, it seems to drop into a redirect loop to 'login_guest.html'.
But, as there is a lot of poking around I could do with the device I decided to record most of the outputs and upload them all to my PasteBin account. You can find everything there. As I was initially interested in what other files I could find in the /cgi/ folder a quick 'ls' of the directory revealed the following.
Using the rather handy USB port, I connected a flash drive, which is automatically mounted under /mnt/, and dumped out a copy of the entire /www/ folder for inspection. It's quite odd, having a brief look over some of what's included, that this is actually production code. I realise that a web interface for a router hardly needs to be optimised, but the code is littered with comments, example code and references to bug ID numbers and their outcomes for starters. Jack, if you're reading this, please don't comment out huge chunks of code saying "we no longer need this", just delete it! A simple JS minification would have reduced some of these files by up to 64%!!! It's also quite worrying that some of the bug fixes are dated as far back as 27 Feb 2007... The router also contains a lot of outdated image resources and Orange branding from the previous generation of firmware before EE took the helm. Do we not even bother tidying up after ourselves these days?
I realise that before I started any of this that the device has already revealed the MD5 hash of the administrator password. At that point all is pretty much lost. However, if an attacker can't crack the hash in time to use it, or may not have an opportunity to return once they do crack it, having access to all of the information exposed in these files could prove incredibly useful. It would allow you to quickly grab the WPA keys, DDNS account credentials or ISP/3G user credentials. Whilst my little venture into the internals of the BrightBox didn't reveal anything as drastic as I'd hoped, it was still interesting and useful to take a look around.
Conclusion
Being able to grab details like the WPA keys or the hash of my admin passwords was bad enough, but exposing my ISP user credentials represents a huge risk. This is made even worse by the fact it's possible to access all of the data remotely. Even if the device is only used in the home or small office, this represents a total compromise of the device's security and an attacker could wreak havoc with your account causing huge inconvenience and even financial losses. Whilst a session fixation attack, or a session hijacking attack, could get you access to the web interface as an admin, it would not expose the password and you wouldn't be able to gain access again after the session had expired or was invalidated. Yes, you could always try and sniff the password from the initial login, but you would be dependant on local network access and someone logging in to the admin interface for you to carry out the attack. With the details being available to any client on the network at any time, there are no such restrictions and the CSRF exploit means you don't even need local access. Anyone on the network could compromise the device at will and a targeted social engineering attack could be easily crafted to gain remote access. Just because we allow people access to our network, we certainly aren't intending to allow them access to this kind of sensitive information and exposing it over the WAN interface is the nail in the coffin.
Responsible Disclosure
Initially I had some difficulties trying to contact EE via their customer services email and going through their call centre was a lengthy and arduous task, which I gave up on. I sent them a couple of tweets informing them that I had found some vulnerabilities and asked them to follow and DM me and took a similar approach on Facebook. Eventually I gave up and emailed the CEO and CTO directly. Be it chance, or a reaction from going directly to the top, I had a response from the Head of Security Operations a few hours later. I explained the issues I had found and a day later I got a response confirming there was indeed an issue. As EE seemed keen to resolve the issues quickly, I offered to refrain from disclosing my findings until the patch was available, in the interest of protecting those affected. Initially the issue was supposed to be patched in December, but after several weeks of updating them with new findings, things started to slow down. I was then informed that a new firmware was in testing and that it would be deployed to all affected devices, remotely, by mid January, which included extra time allowances. At the time of publishing, the latest information I have is that the firmware is back in development to resolve further issues found during testing. Updates and information from EE regarding when this might be patched seem to have dried up completely. I don't even have an estimate of when the patch will now be available and my questions remain unanswered. I strongly considered when to publish this blog, but after much debate, I decided it was in the interest of the public to do so, due to the lack of confidence I now have in EE.
Replacing The BrightBox Router
I always replace the routers provided by my ISP for several reasons. The hardware isn't usually up to standards, your ISP generally has far more access than I'd care to allow them and the firmware on the device is usually a bit flakey. I replaced my BrightBox with the Asus RT-N16 and loaded up the opensource firmware from DD-WRT. Running a custom firmware like DD-WRT gives me a rock solid device, allows me to harness the full potential of the hardware and gives me considerably more options like VPN integration, hotspot capabilities, bandwidth monitoring and much, much more.
Now that I had no use for my old BrightBox router, I didn't really see any reason to keep it around...
An EE spokesperson has provided the following:
"We are aware of Mr Helme's article. As is the case for all home broadband customers, regardless of their provider, it is recommend they only give network access to people they trust. Customers should also be suspicious of any unsolicited emails and web pages, and keep their security software up to date.
“We treat all security matters seriously (no personal data will be compromised by the device itself), we would like to reassure customers that we are working on a service update which we plan to issue shortly, and which will remotely and automatically update customers’ Brightboxes with enhanced security protection.” |
A small Greenville church with a predominantly black congregation is rejoicing after receiving an anonymous $2,000 donation that also came with a unique apology.
Members of the Nicholtown Presbyterian Church, at 201 Carter St., found the typed letter along with two post office money orders, each for a $1,000, in the church's mailbox last week.
In the letter dated May 13, the donor gave two reasons for sending the money.
"First, I am white and used to be a terrible racist."
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The $2,000 donation they said was a "heartfelt apology to African American Community, and a sign of God's love for you, and as a sign of my love for you as well."
The second reason was to show that "miracles, just as in Biblical times, still happen today, this is it!"
Beverly Kelly, pastor of the Mattoon Presbyterian Church and moderator of the session for Nicholtown Presbyterian Church, said the donation came at the perfect time.
"It's like a miracle," Kelly laughed.
Kelly said she was in the process of requesting a $1,400 grant from the Presbytery, to supplement the church's mission of transporting neighborhood children to and from church on Sundays. The mission also provides the children breakfast.
Funds at the Nicholtown church, which has been around since 1951 and currently has 25 members, were becoming limited, she said, and the church had been working with Fourth Presbyterian Church to provide breakfast to the children.
"That mission has been something from Sunday to Sunday, and we always find someway to feed them.
The letter writer asked that the money be used for "any purpose you see fit."
The money orders will be deposited soon, Kelly said, but there hasn't been any decision on how to use the money.
Kelly said while she's thankful for the donation, she's more thankful for the donor's transformation.
"We know that if this person has truly asked God to forgive them, we know that God has heard that confession and truly does forgive," she said. "Forgiveness means more than saying I'm sorry. Forgiveness means, that 'I am going to change, I'm going to turn around and live differently. I'm going to live as God wants me to live.'"
"I would like to meet and have a conversation with someone who has made such a change and be able to thank them in person." |
Avianca Flight 203 was a Colombian domestic passenger flight from El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá to Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Cali. It was destroyed by a bomb over the municipality of Soacha on November 27, 1989.[1] The aircraft took off from the Colombian capital Bogotá en route to Cali. It was in the air for five minutes and flying at a speed of 794 kilometres per hour (493 mph) when an explosive charge detonated on board, igniting fuel vapors in an empty fuel tank. Contents
Flight Edit
The aircraft was a Boeing 727-21 with registration number HK-1803, purchased from Pan Am. It took off as scheduled at 7:13 a.m. Five minutes into the flight, a bomb placed near the fuel tank exploded at 13,000 feet. The blast ripped the airliner apart: The nose section separated from the tail section, which went down in flames. All 107 people on board were killed, as well as three people on the ground who were killed by falling debris.
Aftermath Edit
Later events Edit
On November 28, 2016, the Colombian newspaper El Espectador started publishing an investigative report, consisting of 8 chapters, on Flight 203.[6] It argues that the explosion was caused by a malfunctioning fuel pump inside a tank, which had been reported several times before.[7] The report was heavily criticized by Avianca and by the family members of the victims.[8]
Popular culture Edit
In the 2015 Netflix original series, Narcos, the bombing is portrayed as having been carried out unwittingly by a naïve new recruit of Escobar's cartel. |
One of the wrinkles in the new collective bargaining agreement that should make for an even more interesting offseason across the NHL is the use of compliance buyouts – buyouts that don’t count against the salary cap.
Beginning 48 hours after the Stanley Cup final ended Monday night to 5 p.m. on July 4, general managers can use none, one or both of the two compliance buyouts at their disposal.
Unsurprisingly, General Manager George McPhee didn’t tip his hand when asked if he expected to use a compliance buyout this offseason but added that he was scheduled to meet with Capitals ownership about it Monday.
“I don’t know,” McPhee said Monday. “Ownership can view it different ways…Some owners don’t like it. Some owners say, ‘Boy this is a weapon let’s use it, let’s buy this guy out and use this money to go get someone else.’ People view it in different ways.”
While compliance buyouts won’t count against the salary cap, teams will still be paying a player while they’re playing elsewhere. That can be a tough sell for some organizations.
But the ability for a mulligan on any regrettable long-term, over-valued contracts or poorly-structured deals, will be too good for some teams to pass up. It’s also why McPhee isn’t fond of compliance buyouts.
“I wish we didn’t have them,” McPhee said. “I think in a lot of cases teams have done real bad deals or cheated a little bit and shouldn’t be able to get out of them. Because we haven’t done a lot of bad deals here, we haven’t cheated on contracts we haven’t had the back-diving deals. We never did that, didn’t think it was the right way to do business. But other teams did and they’ll get out of it, but that’s life.”
Some teams’ plans are already known. Philadelphia will buy out Danny Briere, who was slated to earn $5 million over the final two years of his contract but had an annual salary cap hit of $6.5 million and Montreal will buy out Tomas Kaberle, who was slated to make $4.5 million ($4.25 million cap hit) in the final year of his contract.
If the Capitals opt to use a compliance buyout this offseason, Jeff Schultz is a likely candidate. Schultz, seldom used over the past two seasons, recently asked to be traded and McPhee said Monday that he is trying to accommodate that request. Should McPhee not be able to move Schultz, though, buying him out would free up another $2.75 million in space under the salary cap.
As things stand, Washington has a little more than $58 million committed to 19 players for next season. The Capitals have roughly $6.2 million under next year’s $64.3 million salary cap to sign restricted free agents Karl Alzner and Marcus Johansson in addition to any other offseason roster moves McPhee might make. While the Capitals aren’t desperate to shed salary like some teams, they could use the flexibility that comes with a little more wiggle room under the cap.
A few notes about compliance buyouts |
SpaceX Rocket Explosion Linked to Secret Space War
A series of video frames taken of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket explosion on September 1 show two UFOs in the vicinity, just before and during the failed pre-launch test. The video frames are hard evidence linking the SpaceX explosion to an alleged space war being fought between rival secret space programs according to whistleblower Corey Goode.
The SpaceX rocket was carrying a $150 million satellite belonging to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg who was quick to tweet his disappointment:
Elon Musk tweeted an initial analysis that only identified where the explosion took place:
According to investigative reporter, Jim Stone, the way in which one of the UFOs interacted with the rocket just as it exploded suggests it was an attack, and not a case of a fuel tank breach in the upper stage:
This explosion started at the top of the rocket, right where the UFO was, and not near the bottom, where virtually all rocket explosions start. No malfunction caused this, if this started at the top of the rocket only a fuel tank breach in an upper stage that was not being tested could have caused this, and that means the rocket was most likely shot with something.
The attack was intended to prevent the satellite reaching Earth orbit to perform a nefarious purpose, Stone stated:
Before it blew up, a UFO showed up, fired something at the rocket, and then quickly flew away. The image here shows the UFO quite clearly. If Spacex can’t explain what this UFO is, then I am going to say that either off world help arrived to keep Facebook grounded or white hats in American intelligence destroyed this rocket to keep something evil from being launched.
An analysis of 10 frames from the video of the explosion (see BBC video below) show two UFOs appearing just before the rocket test, and one flying just above the rocket as it explodes.
The author, who conducted the frame by frame analysis, concludes:
You will see a small looking ufo/object buzz by the rocket as it explodes! The ufo buzzes by the head of the rocket coming from the right side and moving to the left side of the screen at incredible speed. This is definitely some type of secret space program weapon technology being used. The secret space program war is in full affect and this time in full view.
The alleged attack follows earlier claims by Secret Space Program whistleblower, Corey Goode, that space battles have recently intensified between rival secret space programs. Goode provided an artist’s depiction of one of these battles fought over Antarctic skies space in early 2016.
Circumstantial support for Goode’s claims emerged with President Barack Obama delivering a report to the U.S. Congress on May 26 proposing an “integrated policy” to deter potential enemies in space. In a letter released through the White House Press Secretary discussing the report along with a classified Annex, Obama said:
The report is the result of an interagency process with the objectives to reduce risks to the United States and our allies in space; and to protect and preserve the rights, access, capabilities, use, and freedom of action of the United States in space. Success will require a multi-year effort and commitment across all departments and agencies, and I look forward to your continued support.
Obama’s “multi-year effort and commitment across all departments and agencies” was clearly intended to create and fight space wars as soon as possible.
It appears that Obama’s proposed interagency space defense policy was really intended to help what Goode describes as a lower level secret space program comprising the USAF Space Command, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Goode claims that in February this year, he was abducted by operatives from this lower level space program who wanted to find out where he was getting his information from, because he has been accurately revealing details of highly classified space activities.
Apparently, the USAF/NRO/DIA is wanting to beef up its own space assets during a time of increasing military hostilities between spacecraft that are of unknown origin to them. Goode, however, identified these the warring spacecraft as belonging to differing factions of secret space programs allied with rival alliances comprising humans and extraterrestrials.
What adds significant support to Goode’s incredible claims of warring space alliances is a recently published paper by an astrophysist, Duncan H. Forgan, in the prepublication science website, arXive.org. Forgan claims that rival alliances, what he describes as ‘cliques’, may disagree over the extent to which contact is allowed to happen on more primitive planets such as Earth:
One clique attempting to place an interdict on contacting ‘primitive’ civilizations is likely to encounter significant problems if another clique disagrees … It may well still be the case that the Earth resides in a region of space occupied by a conservative clique bent on non-contact.
UFOs captured on camera just as the Space X experienced an upper stage explosion while conducting its pre-flight rocket testing is further evidence that a secret space war is indeed occurring between rival space programs and alliances.
© Michael E. Salla, Ph.D. Copyright Notice
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Tags: Barack Obama, Corey Goode, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, secret space programs, SpaceX, UFOs |
Image caption Artist's visualisation of a George Square cultural festival
George Square is to be transformed into a hub for theatre, dance, music, comedy and arts performances as part of the 2018 European Championships.
Scotland and Germany are to co-host the first European Sports Championships.
Glasgow is to stage cycling, rowing, swimming and triathlon events, while Berlin is to host athletics.
The cultural festival will run alongside the championships and aims showcase the best of culture in Scotland and Glasgow.
The 11-day programme, from 2 August next year, is to bring together the already-established Merchant City Festival with the Scottish government's Year of Young People programme and the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Chair of the Glasgow 2018 European Championships Board, Bridget McConnell said: "Glasgow is Scotland's sporting, creative and cultural powerhouse, and we know how to celebrate in style.
"During the Glasgow 2018 European Championships the city and nation will, once again, come alive with a fantastic celebration of our finest artistic talents.
"We're counting down the days until Glasgow shines once more on a global stage."
Paul Bush, of VisitScotland, said the championships were a direct legacy of Scotland hosting the 2014 Commonwealth Games and The Ryder Cup.
"The cultural festival secures the legacy further and ensures Scotland continues to be recognised as a global leader in the delivery of sporting and cultural events," he said. |
'Ghost Rider' director Brian Taylor will write and direct the feature, which XYZ Films is selling in Berlin.
Nicolas Cage has signed on to star in Mom and Dad, an upcoming horror thriller from Ghost Rider director Brian Taylor.
The feature, which XYZ Films is selling worldwide to buyers in Berlin, is set to begin shooting in July. Armory Films' Tim Zajaros and Christopher Lemole are producing with Cassian Elwes and Jere Hausfater as executive producers.
The plot of Mom and Dad has two kids—a teenage girl and her little brother—who have to survive 24 hours of horror when, for some unknown reason, parents begin to turn violently against their own children. Cage will play the children's father.
“This is the kind of role Nick was put here to play. Human, funny, scary - somehow grounded while at the same time completely off the rails,” said Taylor in a statement. “For a filmmaker there is nothing quite like the experience of Nick Cage bringing a character you've written to life.”
Mom and Dad will be the second project from Zeal Media, the new financing/production outfit Elwes and Armory launched ahead of Berlin. The first is Billionaire Boys Club, a biopic based on 1980s white-collar criminal-turned-murderer Joe Hunt, which James Cox directed starring Kevin Spacey, Ansel Elgort and Taron Edgerton. Good Universe is handling sales on Billionaire Boys Club at Berlin.
Cage is repped by CAA, Mike Nilon at Link, and Jake Bloom and Patrick Knapp at Bloom Hergott Diemer Rosenthal La Violette Feldman Schenkman & Goodman. |
On November 20th, a Penn Stater followed the new nationwide trend for colleges and universities and created a “Penn State Compliments” Facebook page. This site is a social project meant to spread happiness, joy, rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns across the Penn State community.
If you’re feeling awkward and don’t want to compliment someone on your own, don’t fret. All you need to do is inbox a compliment for any Penn Stater and they will post it on their page anonymously, and even tag their name if the person has already friend requested them. Be careful what you say, because all rude or hateful remarks will be disregarded.
The creator of Penn State Compliments, who wants to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, saw a compliments page on one of her friend’s Facebooks who goes to another university and wanted to bring it to Penn State, but was a little intimidated by the whole 40,000 person student body thing.
“Within a few hours, a University Compliments Facebook Group was set up for all the owners of the Facebook pages to share ideas and seek advice,” the creator of the page said. “It has turned into a little community and there are actually 53 members as of now from Canada, the US, and Scotland!”
Here are some samples from the site to give you some inspiration to write about me and your friends:
“I don’t think you will ever understand how many peoples’ lives you make an impact on day in and day out.”
“You literally brighten up every room you step into. You are so caring and always go out of your way for others I do not think anyone in the world could not love you!”
“I look up to you as the kind of person that I aspire to be one day, and I’m so lucky to have been your friend.”
“Keep being exactly who you are, because you do it so well!”
What do you think of this social project? A cesspool for awkwardness or cute social tool? Leave a reply in our comments section.
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About the Author
Bailey Siegel Bailey is a Public Relations major and Psychology and Sociology minor from right outside Washington D.C. with a passion for Penn State Football and good music.
East Renovation Continues With Approval For Sproul, Geary Halls Penn State’s Board of Trustees approved the next phase of East Halls renovations at its meeting Friday, setting the stage for construction to begin on Sproul and Geary Halls. |
Norris, making his fourth spring appearance as he vies for the fifth spot in Detroit's rotation, left with lower back stiffness after 25 pitches against six hitters, the last five of which reached base safely. After Josh Donaldson deposited a bloop single into right field, Jose Bautista battled Norris for a nine-pitch walk. Tulowitzki sent a 93 mph fastball from Norris to the left-field berm for a 3-0 lead and his fourth homer of the spring.
LAKELAND, Fla. -- The Blue Jays brought close to their Opening Day lineup to town and feasted on an injury-shortened start by former teammate Daniel Norris, using home runs from Troy Tulowitzki and Justin Smoak in a 16-1 win over the Tigers on Tuesday afternoon at Joker Marchant Stadium.
LAKELAND, Fla. -- The Blue Jays brought close to their Opening Day lineup to town and feasted on an injury-shortened start by former teammate Daniel Norris, using home runs from Troy Tulowitzki and Justin Smoak in a 16-1 win over the Tigers on Tuesday afternoon at Joker Marchant Stadium.
Norris, making his fourth spring appearance as he vies for the fifth spot in Detroit's rotation, left with lower back stiffness after 25 pitches against six hitters, the last five of which reached base safely. After Josh Donaldson deposited a bloop single into right field, Jose Bautista battled Norris for a nine-pitch walk. Tulowitzki sent a 93 mph fastball from Norris to the left-field berm for a 3-0 lead and his fourth homer of the spring.
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After Chris Colabello's ensuing double and back-to-back high fastballs for balls to Smoak, Norris was out, walking gingerly back to the Tigers' clubhouse.
Colabello, who finished a homer shy of the cycle, added a two-run triple off Minor Leaguer Dustin Molleken an inning later. Smoak jumped on a 95 mph fastball from Tigers relief candidate Bobby Parnell and sent it off the back of the bullpen fence in right field for a solo homer, his third of the spring, in the fifth. Tulowitzki drove in another pair of runs later in the inning.
Darrell Ceciliani's three-run homer off Whit Mayberry in the seventh extended the margin.
"Let's be honest: The Blue Jays clubbed the ball today," Tigers manager Brad Ausmus said. "It really didn't go well for any of our pitchers. I think it was just one of those days."
Blue Jays starter Drew Hutchison allowed a first-inning ground-rule double to Nick Castellanos, which scored Miguel Cabrera. Hutchison held Detroit hitless for the remainder of his four-frame outing.
"Obviously the two walks in the first were the only thing I wasn't pleased with, but I liked how I rebounded after that and attacked the zone," Hutchison said.
Up next for the Blue Jays: The fifth-starter competition continues Wednesday in Dunedin, Fla., when Aaron Sanchez faces the Mets at 1:07 p.m. ET at Florida Auto Exchange Stadium. The game can be heard exclusively at bluejays.com. Sanchez and fellow righty Gavin Floyd have each been pitching well in their bids to make Toronto's rotation. Sanchez enters Wednesday with a 1.98 ERA in four Grapefruit League outings (two starts).
Up next for the Tigers: Following Wednesday's off-day, the Tigers renew their rivalry against the Blue Jays with a 1:05 p.m. ET matchup in Dunedin. The game can be heard live on Gameday Audio. Matt Boyd, the former Jays prospect who was part of the David Price trade last July, will try to continue his quest for the fifth spot in the Tigers' rotation against his old club's power-packed lineup. |
So yes, Thermaltake is paying attention to consumers from tropical and desert climates all over the world with its latest gaming chair. The X Comfort Air is a new gaming chair that sports active cooling, whether your environment requires it, or you're just going through a really aberrant, hot day. The cooling system leverages four high-pressure fans, embedded in the base of the chair (perforated faux-leather that permits airflow from the three-speed fans.) Thermaltake claimed that the system can cool the seat by between 0.6ºC and 1.5ºC. The noise level of the fans is stated as 32 DB(A), but Thermaltake didn't specify the correlating fan speed for this.Like all other Thermaltake gaming chairs, the Comfort X Air chair features adjustments such as height, back angle, rocking tilt, tilt lock, and four-way armrests. Basic construction points include an aluminum frame, padding made from 75 kg/m3 foam, a class-4 gas piston, and an aluminum five-spoke base with three-inch casters. The X Comfort Air gaming chair is available in red or black options, both going for $500. For that pricing, one would expect to have heated seats as well.
23 Comments on Thermaltake Announces X Comfort Air Gaming Chair With Active Cooling
#1 Xzibit
Too bad they didn't think it through and just made it out of strong mesh material. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 2:38 Reply
#2 RejZoR
Waiting for water cooled chair... Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 2:55 Reply
#3 THE_EGG
I was wondering when we'd see this. It does make a big difference in cars (especially in AU summers). Though at that price I'd consider a Herman Miller office chair. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 3:00 Reply
#4 natr0n
This is great for those people with swamp ass. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 3:05 Reply
#5 Assimilator
A whole 1.5 degrees!
Considering the stupid amounts of money they'll likely charge for this tat, you're better off investing in something that can make a real difference... like an air conditioner.
I'm sure Thermaltake will also be the first to introduce RGB LEDs on gaming chairs, so that you can show that you are the most tasteless of your zero friends. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 3:10 Reply
#6 silentbogo
natr0n said: This is great for those people with swamp ass. That was the first thing that came to my mind. All that's missing is a reverse mode for fans, and a carbon filter. :roll: That was the first thing that came to my mind. All that's missing is a reverse mode for fans, and a carbon filter. :roll: Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 4:24 Reply
#7 riza_kasela
if you fart,
the gas will go up to your nose Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 5:38 Reply
#8 RejZoR
Wouldn't it be easier to create a mesh seat with fans underneath? I have a chair with full mesh back support and it's impossible to sweat on the back and it doesn't even have any fans. If seating part would be the same, problem solved. But it wouldn't be so soft and comfy, that's for sure... Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 5:54 Reply
#9 Hugh Mungus
RejZoR said: Waiting for water cooled chair... and I'm waiting for LN2 chair! XD Than my a$$ will stick to the chair, letting me focus better on the game! XD and I'm waiting for LN2 chair! XD Than my a$$ will stick to the chair, letting me focus better on the game! XD Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 6:18 Reply
#10 Vayra86
When you've finally assembled that silent gaming rig, and you can hear your chair fans instead. Good times
Honestly we need a bizarre newspost section for these kinds of releases. PC gaming has gone crazy Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 6:47 Reply
#11 TheDeeGee
Use Real Leather instead... problem solved. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 7:05 Reply
#12 lZKoce
Every time I tell myself nothing can surprise me in gaming gear... Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 7:20 Reply
#13 FreedomEclipse
~Technological Technocrat~ RejZoR said: Waiting for water cooled chair... Hugh Mungus said: and I'm waiting for LN2 chair! XD Than my a$$ will stick to the chair, letting me focus better on the game! XD AMATURES
Everyone knows its all about that Phase Change cooling!
You wanna Cryo-cool your butt so you dont need to poop. It is the OCZ Way
Everyone knows its all about that Phase Change cooling!You wanna Cryo-cool your butt so you dont need to poop. It is the OCZ Way Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 7:46 Reply
#14 c4rloz
WOW! 500$ professional shit bucket. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 9:05 Reply
#15 INSTG8R
My Custom Title So now I have to plug in my chair? :rolleyes: Truly idiotic... Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 9:20 Reply
#16 zo0lykas
I dont see any information, its on cable or have battery? Depends charge overnight, on cable,and day time unplug cable and use like normal chair with air cooling?
Btw for 500 can get really SOLID COMFY OFFICE LUXURY MEGA NICE CHAIR. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 9:30 Reply
#17 Manu_PT
I knew you guys would make jokes about this. But this is more important than what you think. I´m glad you live in not so hot countries. Try to sit on the chair with 35º C every day. Trust me, it sucks. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 10:37 Reply
#18 Chaitanya
RejZoR said: Waiting for water cooled chair... jokes apart, it will be really useful for people living in tropics or hot desert regions. In summers I cannot stay seated in my PC chair for more than a few minutes and having a fan blowing air will be certainly helpful. jokes apart, it will be really useful for people living in tropics or hot desert regions. In summers I cannot stay seated in my PC chair for more than a few minutes and having a fan blowing air will be certainly helpful. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 10:44 Reply
#19 Vya Domus
A chair with a CFM airflow metric. Something I though I would never see. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 10:53 Reply
#20 Tartaros
Raise Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 11:26 Reply
#21 hat
Enthusiast
Who is this for? Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 12:31 Reply
#22 thesmokingman
Now here's an untapped market. Posted on Nov 13th 2017, 13:08 Reply |
Benefits on cognition from docosahexaenoic acid (DHA, 22 : 6 n-3) intake are absent in humans carrying apolipoprotein E ε4 allele (APOE4), the most important genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). To test the hypothesis that carrying APOE4 impairs DHA distribution, we evaluated plasma and brain fatty acid profiles and uptake of [(14) C]-DHA using in situ cerebral perfusion through the blood-brain barrier in 4- and 13-month-old male and female APOE-targeted replacement mice (APOE2, APOE3, and APOE4), fed with a DHA-depleted diet. Cortical and plasma DHA were 9% lower and 34% higher in APOE4 compared to APOE2 mice, respectively. Brain uptake of [(14) C]-DHA was 24% lower in APOE4 versus APOE2 mice. A significant relationship was established between DHA and apoE concentrations in the cortex of mice (r(2) = 0.21) and AD patients (r(2) = 0.32). Altogether, our results suggest that lower brain uptake of DHA in APOE4 than in APOE2 mice may limit the accumulation of DHA in cerebral tissues. These data provide a mechanistic explanation for the lack of benefit of DHA in APOE4 carriers on cognitive function and the risk of AD. Using human APOE2, 3, and 4 isoform-specific transgenic mice, we found a lower brain uptake of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) in APOE4 than in APOE2 mice that may limit the biodistribution of DHA in cerebral tissues. These data provide a mechanistic explanation for the lack of benefit of DHA in APOE4 carriers on cognitive function and the risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD).
© 2013 International Society for Neurochemistry. |
After two defeats in three league games, Chelsea needed to set some season-high stats at home to Liverpool. They did, but sadly for Andres Villas-Boas's pension plan, it wasn't a good one: during the course of the 2-1 defeat, they equalled the record for most off-target shots (14, level with Man City vs Wigan).
What is Stats Zone? The analytical app from FFT & Opta
All five of the Blues' first-half attempts were wayward and although they managed three on target after the break, they also had nine off-target, with two blocked. Also off-beam were their two mainstays: John Terry misplaced eight passes and Frank Lampard 14, each man's most in a game this season. (For the record, David Luiz â blamed by many for the defeat â only misplaced six.)
By contrast, Robin van Persie was yet again Arsenal's main man this weekend, scoring both goals as the Gunners came from behind to win at Norwich. Not only has van Persie scored 31 in 29 Premier League matches during 2011, he also has seven assists in that time â meaning he's been involved in 38 of ArsenalâÂÂs 58 league goals in 2011 (66%).
For the ninth time in 12 Arsenal games this season, Van Persie had the most shots; of his six three were on target and two went in. Strike partner Gervinho managed four on target â more than any other player this weekend â without scoring.
Gervinho was the main victim of an excfellent afternoon from Norwich keeper John Ruddy, who kept the score respectable: Arsenal had 11 shots on target, the fifth-most by a team in the PL this season, and five more than any other side this weekend.
Van Persie converted one of the four chances Theo Walcott created from the right wing, taking the England winger to seven assists in 2011 â a total topped only by David Silva (10), Ashley Young (10) and Nani (9).
Despite Newcastle scoring a late consolation goal, Roberto Mancini will have been pleased with the way his Manchester City side played out from the back in their 3-1 win: the leaders didn't misplace a single one of 88 passes in their own defensive third. As Michael Cox noted in Friday's Stats Zone preview blog, Newcastle's tackling tends to take place in their own third, and even more so this weekend â although it did them no good: for the sixth successive league game City scored at least three goals.
More tidy possession, as usual, in Swansea's game â but this time shared with their opponents, Manchester United. Swans midfielder Leon Britton completed 63 out of 64 passes, but Michael Carrick's 92 (out of 96) topped the weekend league for successful passes â with City right-back Angel Rangel second on 69 (out of 77).
Again, Michael Cox's Friday blog had noted that Swansea frequently build from the back through the Spanish right-back dâ but sadly for Rangel and his team, one of the passes that didn't get there was gobbled up by Ryan Giggs who set up Javier Hernandez for the winner.
It was the Mexican's only shot all day, but typically deadly â his 18th goal from 33 shots on target in his Premier League career. His strike partner, meanwhile, was much busier: Wayne Rooney completed 59 of 64 passes, including more in the final third than any player this weekend (30, Nasri 28).
If that game was one for the passing purists, Stoke v QPR would have made Cesc Fabregas vomit into his paella. The game featured just 309 successful passes, 53 fewer than any other Premier League match this season (362 in Sunderland vs Newcastle), and the fewest in a Premier League game since Stoke and Blackburn managed 290 in February 2010.
To give that stat some context, nine of the other 14 teams playing on Saturday made more successful passes than QPR and Stoke combined. (Meanwhile, during their most recent game in the Champions League â also trackable on Stats Zone â Barcelona completed 790 out of 859 passes.)
The uncompleted passes at the Britannia were partly because of an extraordinary number of clearances â 130 (split 66/64 in QPR's favour). That's 40 more than any other Premier League match this season (Stoke vs Newcastle 90). But the sides were widely different in their efficiency in front of goal.
Both had five shots on target, but Stoke had 15 other efforts (13 off target, 2 blocked) compared to QPR's three (two blocked, one off target â Shaun Wright-Phillips hitting the post). Stoke's profligacy fits a pattern: they have the Premier League's poorest shooting accuracy with only 33% on target: next is Aston Villa on 36%. Only two sides have had more shots off target in a match this season: Chelsea yesterday against Liverpool, and Man City against Wigan in September, both recorded 14 wayward attempts.
One more Hoops stat for you: QPR are the only Premier League side this season to have had more half of their shots (52%) from outside the box, but only one of these has resulted in a goal. By contrast, six of WiganâÂÂs 10 Premier League goals this season have come from outside the box this season, including two in their absorbing 3-3 draw with Blackburn.
The Latics had almost three times as many shots (26) as their visitors (9), who attempted only four crosses from open play in this match â the joint-lowest total in a Premier League game this season (with West Brom against Wolves). Setting a better record was Rovers defender Scott Dann, whose six blocks is the most by a Premier League player this season.
The draw did neither strugglers any favours and Bolton complete a trio of lacklustre Lancastrian laggers in the relegation zone after a 2-1 loss at West Brom. It truly was a game of two halves at The Hawthorns, to the visitors' chagrin: before half-time Bolton had more passes and shots than the home side, but fell away spectacularly.
Although Bolton's passing stats remained consistent in each period (152 out of 216 in the first half, 147 of 205 second half), the Baggies all but doubled their passing rate â from 137/186 in the first half to 247/305 after the break, as can be seen by examining the two halves side by side.
The density of second-half passing on West Brom's left wing shows that Roy Hodgson had pinpointed Bolton right-back Joe Riley as a weak link. Although the youngster totalled four successful tackles out of six - topped only by Baggies anchorman Youssuf Mulumbu's six out of six â only two of these (and only one successful) came in the second half.
As can be seen on the Player Influence screen â which shows players in their average position, with the biggest names being the most involved â first-half goalscorer Jerome Thomas stayed wider and was helped by the overlapping Nicky Shorey, who created five chances, more than any other Premier League player this weekend.
The net result was that despite maintaining their levels of passing, Bolton managed only two second-half shots compared to their eight before the break â and compared to 10 from West Brom, who had managed just six in the first half. For their part, Wanderers need to feed the Croat and he will score: Ivan Klasnic scored again to make it six goals from 10 shots on target this season.
West Brom's local rivals Wolves almost gained a very efficient point at Everton. Stephen Hunt's penalty was their only attempt from inside the area and their only shot on target. They managed just five shots in all; only five teams have had fewer shots in a Premier League game this season, including another visitor to Goodison â QPR, who scraped together just four in their 1-0 win back in August.
The difference this time was Leighton Baines, who scored the winning penalty himself after setting up Phil Jagielka's equaliser. Baines now 12 assists since the start of last season, more than any other defender and seventh best overall.
Stats Zone, the app from FourFourTwo powered by data from Opta, is available now at the iTunes App Store |
Judicial Watch was hoping that "Team Trump" would also mean team transparency. But the conservative watchdog group was disappointed Monday after State Department lawyers were still insisting — even under their new President Trump-appointed leadership — that they have no intention of trying to find any potential as-yet uncovered Hillary Clinton emails from her time at the department.
Given that Trump once joked that Russia should find Hillary's missing emails, it's an ironic twist for Judicial Watch that it can't get Trump's own State Department to cooperate.
At a hearing in Washington on Monday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the State Department said it will continue to seek a dismissal of Judicial Watch's case attempting to force them to locate Clinton's emails.
With Cause of Action also acting as a plaintiff, Judicial Watch is hoping to use a small bit of the Federal Records Act to force the State Department to locate more Clinton emails from her tenure as secretary of state.
The lawsuit has had a long journey. John Kerry's State Department got the case dismissed in early 2016 in the court of Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, but the dismissal was overturned by the Court of Appeals this past December. Despite having the case sent back down to the District Court, State Department attorneys were undeterred, arguing Monday they would again file for a dismissal and hoping that new information learned in the past year — specifically the release of the Clinton email report from the FBI — might be enough to satisfy Judicial Watch, or be enough to get all courts to agree that the case is now moot.
But Judicial Watch was clearly hoping that the new administration would have meant a shift in strategy.
"What's surprising is the Trump Administration is continuing the Obama Administration's legal strategy to obstruct and defend Hillary Clinton's email practices," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said after the hearing. "This is an example, in my view, of the 'deep state' still running things, in many respects." The "deep state" can be most broadly defined as the unelected federal bureaucracy.
"This judge, again, wants us to go through the same arguments cycle that didn't work out for the State Department the first time," said James Peterson, senior attorney for Judicial Watch. "What is undisputed here is that records still remain out there to be recovered."
With the State Department attorneys making clear they would again try to dismiss the case, the next hearing is set for April 21. |
To establish the scale of land degradation, experts have been conducting research from space. A team of scientists from Bonn's Center for Development Research and other partner institutions has been shifting through huge quantities of satellite images.
They also carried out studies in 12 world regions and countries, including India, Argentina, Central Asia and parts of Africa. "The results are pretty dramatic. Worldwide 33 percent of grasslands and 25 percent of croplands have experienced degradation," said Joachim von Braun, the center's director.
The Center for Development Research presents its findings on land degradation in Berlin.
Land degradation spells a loss of resources and a loss of income. It is the poor who are left struggling with this shortfall.
Joachim von Braun said the global costs of land degradation amount to 300 billion euros ($337 billion) per year. That's 40 to 50 euros per person per year across the globe. "The rural population in low-income countries loses between 10 to 20 percent of their income through land degradation," said von Braun. Farmers in developing countries are particularly badly affected.
In Africa, about 28 percent of the land is being degraded and this costs the continent an estimated 56 billion euros annually. Natural causes are only part of the explanation. "Other countries [on other continents] have been busy looking for strategies to improve land management and prevent land degradation, Africa lagged behind", says Oliver Kirui, a researcher with the Center for Development Research.
The problem is largely man-made. Farmers fell trees to convert grassland and forests into croplands. Animals graze on small patches of land for long periods, damaging the soil. The impact is dramatic. Malawi lost about 216 million euros between 2001 and 2009 because of land degradation. Kenya has lost more, about 1.1 billion euros, Tanzania about 2.3 billion.
Farming activities and overuse of the soil are major cause of land degradation.
Reversing the trend
One of the poorest countries in the world has succeeded in reversing the spread of land degradation. Niger lost 6 million hectares (15 million acres) to land degradation between 2001 and 2009. The government introduced new land management policies and communities were trained to take better care of their fields. The large-scale restoration of land had begun.
"Communities came together to do what we term as 'land closure'. They preserve some particular environment and say 'We are not going to do anything on this farm', said Oliver Kirui. "When you go there now, you see a totally different environment in these areas."
Job for development specialists
Germany's Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development funded the research project. "It does not make any sense to fight hunger through producing more food, if the basis for that production, the soil, gets lost at the same time," said Stefan Schmitz, coordinator of the ministry's initiative called "One World, no Hunger".
German specialists are helping Ethiopia avoid soil erosion through improved land management
The ministry is investing in land management and land restoration projects in Ethopia, India and Kenya. Projects in Benin and Burkina Faso are in the pipeline. Other countries are expected to follow. "We have to fight hunger around the world, but we also have to ensure that the basis for fighting hunger is preserved," said Schmitz.
Degradation driving migration?
Other development experts agree with this choice of priorities. "If we talk about fighting the root causes of mass migration, then land degradation is an important factor. When people cannot grow their own food, they will think about moving elsewhere", said Klaus Töpfer, former head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
Töpfer said land degradation is receiving much more attention than it did in the past. He remembered calling a press briefing about land degradation a few years ago and only one journalist turned up. When the Center for Development Research presented its latest findings, the room was packed. |
When it comes to sci-fi and fantasy movies, I think pretty much everyone can agree that the genres wouldn’t be nearly as popular if it weren’t for their special effects. Whether you prefer the innovative outer space effects of the original Star Wars trilogy, the animatronic puppets that were all over the ’80s, or the insane stuff being done with CGI today, most would agree that none of it would be possible were it not for one man: Ray Harryhausen.
The special effects pioneer made a big splash with his particular brand of stop-motion animation — known as Dynamation — in 1949’s Mighty Joe Young and then throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s before he finished his career with 1981’s Clash of the Titans. Simply put, Harryhausen changed what people thought was possible in movies, and his work paved the way for the industry of today where essentially no special effect is impossible. He also made an entire generation of movie fans believe that monsters were real, and when you hear someone going on about “movie magic,” there’s a good chance they’re talking about him.
Harryhausen, who passed away four years ago this May 7, designed over 70 special effects (most of them strange creatures) throughout his incomparable career. And while they are all special, these 11 stand above the rest.
1. The Roc – The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad
Most people remember the Cyclops from the movie, but this giant bird was insanely realistic and absolutely terrifying. Its baby was no slouch, either.
2. The Squirrel – The Three Worlds Of Gulliver
Sure, a squirrel may not sound like a terrifying monster. But this is a giant squirrel (or rather, a normal squirrel attacking tiny people) that will have you convinced it’s an actual animal rather than a special effect.
3. The Crab – Mysterious Island
Another giant, hyperrealistic animal from the master.
4. The Allosaur – One Million Years B.C.
Harryhausen created a lot of great dinosaurs for various films throughout his career, but this fluid-moving carnivore is his greatest prehistoric achievement.
5. Talos – Jason & the Argonauts
This thing looks and moves exactly how I expect a giant statue come to life would. The way it switches its sword from right hand to left adds a subtle but crucial element of realism to the whole effect.
6. Pegasus – Clash of the Titans
The impressive flying horse in Harryhausen’s final picture showed how much he’d learned in his career. Blending real-life elements with pure fantasy was what the master did best, and this is one of the best examples of that skill in action.
7. The Hydra – Jason & the Argonauts
Seven independent heads and a swirling forked tail to boot, this was one complex animation.
8. Kali – The Golden Voyage of Sinbad
Still one of the coolest fight scenes ever seen in a movie.
9. The Troglodyte – Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
The third and final Sinbad movie that Harryhausen worked on may not be as highly-regarded as the two prior installments, but it still gave us this highly-expressive cave-dweller.
10. Medusa – Clash of the Titans
Is it bad that we think the effects of this 1981 film hold up better than the CGI-laden 2010 remake? Medusa’s eerie movements and evil eyes are still one of the most haunting experiences ever created on film.
11. The Skeleton Warriors – Jason & the Argonauts
Arguably Harryhausen’s greatest achievement, not even Game of Thrones was able to pull off this effect quite as convincingly.
Be sure to check out more of Ray Harryhausen’s special effects during COMET’s upcoming Ray Harryhausen Movie Marathon. We’ll be showing ‘The 7th Voyage of Sinbad,’ ‘The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,’ ‘The Three Worlds of Gulliver,’ and of course, ‘Jason and the Argonauts,’ one right after the other. The special effects wizardry kicks off at 11am/10C on Sunday, May 7.
Title image courtesy of Columbia Pictures |
“For decades, the United States was operated and has operated a very low-skill immigration system. … This policy has placed substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers and community resources. Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been immigrants and, very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against brand-new arrivals. And it has not been fair to our people, to our citizens, to our workers.”
— President Trump, remarks on the RAISE Act, Aug. 2, 2017
President Trump has endorsed a sweeping Senate bill that would slash legal immigration levels by half over a decade: the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act.
The Trump administration wants to restrict legal and illegal immigration. While a lot of Trump’s campaign rhetoric was focused on illegal immigration and building a wall, Trump has railed against the economic impacts of legal and illegal immigration since his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention.
Is the United States operating a “very low-skill immigration system,” and does low-skilled immigration create “substantial pressure” on U.S. workers, especially minorities?
The Facts
While Trump says that the United States has operated a low-skilled immigration system, the trend is changing. The share of highly skilled immigrants is growing. Low-skilled immigration increased sharply after 1970, but leveled off by the mid-2000s. New immigrants to the United States are more highly educated than native-born Americans, and the overall population of low-skilled immigrants has remained stable, according to researchers from Brookings Institution and the Libertarian think tank Cato Institute.
(From “Along the watchtower: The rise and fall of U.S.
low-skilled immigration,” by Gordon Hanson, Chen Liu, Craig McIntosh)
The impact of legal immigration and workers’ wages is a complex issue. It is difficult to isolate the impact of legal immigration of low-skilled or high-skilled workers on the wages of specific subgroups of native workers. Leading researchers of this topic have arrived at various conclusions using different methods and debate each other’s findings.
The White House pointed us to this column by George Borjas, a Harvard Kennedy School economics and social policy professor and leading researcher of the view that low-skilled immigration hurts wages of less-educated Americans.
Borjas’s research looks at the economic and labor impacts of immigration. He found that an influx of immigrants can be a net positive to the economy because it increases the total wealth of the population. But low-skilled immigrants compete for jobs with native workers without high school diplomas, and the population of low-skilled natives without high school diplomas is disproportionately African American. The total wage impact on native high school dropouts could be up to 5 percent of their income over the past two decades, according to Borjas’s research.
Immigration is not the only factor that affects the drop in wages among low-skilled workers, and one should not presume it was the main factor, Borjas said. But he said immigration “clearly contributed and exacerbated whatever decline was going to happen.” Other factors include the decline in unionization, changes in technology, trade policies and more. Some researchers who dispute Borjas’s studies say that these other factors contribute far more to native high school dropouts’ wages, and that low-skilled immigrants have zero to negligible impact.
We turned to a 500-page report published earlier in 2017 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. This is a comprehensive study by a panel of economists, demographers and other experts on the economic and fiscal impact of immigration over the past 20 years.
Overall, there is no evidence that immigration depresses wages or employment of natives, according to NAS researchers. However, as Trump says, low-skilled immigration did have small effects on wages of certain subgroups of native workers: high school dropouts, teenagers, low-skilled African American workers, and low-skilled Hispanics (immigrants and native-born), especially those with poor English skills. Wages of immigrants with poor English skills are more sensitive to immigrant inflows than are immigrants with good English skills, the report says.
These groups experienced somewhere between zero and modestly negative impact in the short-term. Over a period of 10 years or more, the impact of immigration on wages of native-born workers is “very small,” and not enough to account for stagnant wages within those groups, according to the researchers.
Trump said low-skilled immigration placed “substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers and community resources.” The NAS report found that low-education immigrants cost taxpayers in the 1990s, but that cost has been shrinking relative to native-born Americans. As we previously noted, first-generation immigrants are more costly to the government, but descendants of immigrants are a net positive for the states in general.
Over time, their descendants contribute enough taxes to balance out the costs of the earlier generation. First-generation immigrants cost state and local budgets $57.4 billion annually in 2011-2013. But second-generation immigrants create a benefit of $30.5 billion annually.
The NAS report also found that in the long run, immigration — both high- and low-skilled — is a net positive to the U.S. economy. For example, the availability of low-skilled immigrants at lower wages allows businesses to expand, which increases total employment, the report says. The report found that over 75 years, each immigrant represents $259,000 in net present value for federal, state and local governments.
The Pinocchio Test
Trump exaggerates the impact of immigration on U.S. workers’ wages by saying that the immigration of low-skilled workers has created substantial pressures on American workers, taxpayers and resources. Over time, immigrants are a net positive to the U.S. economy.
As Trump noted, there are subgroups of low-education low-skilled native workers who are affected by the influx of low-skilled immigrants. But this needs context. The NAS report found between negligible and modestly negative effects of low-skilled immigration on the wages of those subgroups of native workers, and not enough to create stagnant wages among those groups. Moreover, immigration is not the only factor that contributes to lower wages among those subgroups of workers.
We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios. Trump’s claim is a mix of statements that are outdated (“for decades, the United States was operated and has operated a very low-skill immigration system”), exaggerated (“substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers”) and rooted in research (“among those hit the hardest” are minority workers or immigrants). His over-the-top rhetoric, which is more hyperbole than fact, pushed his rating to Three Pinocchios.
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Australian politicians are keen property owners. Data compiled by Lindsay David, Deakin University’s Philip Soos and Paul Egan from the parliamentary register of members’ interests shows the 226 members of federal parliament (both houses) have an ownership stake in some 563 properties. While these properties may be jointly owned with a spouse, this is an average of 2.5 properties per member.
In 2013, the 76 members of the Senate had 202 property holdings and the 150 members of the House of Representatives had 361 property holdings.
Top of the leader board is National Party Senator Barry O’Sullivan with a portfolio of 50 properties. David Gillespie follows with 18 and Palmer United Party Senator Clive Palmer has a seemingly conservative 13, although the total value of Palmer’s properties is unknown (see table below).
Compiled by Lindsay David, Philip Soos and Paul Egan.
The estimated total value of these properties is said to be around A$298 million. This was calculated by multiplying the 563 properties by the median dwelling price of $530,000, as of July 2014. If these properties are located in major cities or other high-value areas the property holding could be substantially higher.
Property, democracy and fairness
Major Australian cities have been feeling the housing affordability squeeze for some time now. Owning multiple investment properties does nothing to ease the upward pressure on real estate prices or to increase first home buyer opportunities. Ensuring housing equality – for example, by providing adequate housing for all social groups – is becoming an increasingly complex task in Australian cities.
When the philosopher John Rawls coined the phrase the “property-owning democracy” he was interested in how property might be used to satisfy the principles of justice as fairness. Rawls could hardly have known the illuminating irony he might cast on the property holdings of politicians.
Should we be alert, perhaps even alarmed, at the real estate investment practices of the guardians of Australian democracy? Well, maybe. Some 94% of the members of federal parliament owned real estate in 2013. More than 50% own investment or commercial property. By comparison, ABS data show less than 20% of the general population owned a property other than the one they lived in in 2012. But it’s politicians that set the taxation and housing policies that attempt to address our housing concerns.
Policy push
Senator Xenophon is currently seeking changes to the Superannuation Act that would allow funds to be released to purchase a first home. This would not put downward pressure on first home buyer housing stock. In fact, it could diversify the investment pool and lead to upward pressure.
According to the register, Independent Senator for South Australia Nick Xenophon has a portfolio of eight investment properties.
A spokesperson for Senator Xenophon said the register was outdated, but confirmed the Senator owns four investment units and his super fund also owns a property (under management). The correct figure is expected to be reflected in the next register of Senator’s interests.
Addressing housing disparity
Australia’s democratic process is predicated on notions of impartiality and transparency. The parliamentary register of members’ interests is an important citizenry “watch dog” mechanism. It is a mechanism that should be employed to monitor the property holdings of Australian politicians and then deployed to call their actions to account.
It is important to note that the research doesn’t show a causal link between property holdings and decisions of politicians. But it would be imprudent to assume prima facie that the property holdings of Australian politicians do not play a role in their political thinking, especially as this thinking relates to housing, taxation or even superannuation policy.
What is needed is a broader discussion about housing disparity that fully acknowledges and accounts for these vested interests and tools of political influence. This should include the politics and interests of the politicians themselves.
The naïve assumption that housing wealth will trickle down through a property-owning democracy have been shattered by the realities of 21st century Australian cities. The question which remains is whether our democratic processes can be reorganised to address these now clearly evident housing disparities. A discussion about the real estate ideologies that underwrite the investment agendas of Australian politicians seems like a fitting starting point. |
In many ways, Thanksgiving is an un-American holiday. Consumption seldom goes beyond an excess of turkey and pumpkin pie, and garish displays are limited to a few stupid parades and some of the most mediocre football of the year. Good old all-American chaos is down — but not entirely out.
Thanksgiving Day Massacre, Reno, 1980
Priscilla Ford had a long history of psychiatric problems and bizarre behavior, marked by such quixotic acts as suing the Mormon Church and attempting to speak at the 1972 Republican Convention. The capper came on the Thanksgiving afternoon when she got even with the City of Reno. In front of the downtown casinos, she steered her black 1974 Lincoln onto a crowded sidewalk and mowed down the crowds of holiday gamblers and gambolers. She left six dead and 23 injured in her wake. Pulled over a few blocks later, she told police, "Sometimes I am called Jesus Christ." She later expressed a fervent hope that she'd nailed 75 people, and explained the voice of Joan (Mrs. Edward) Kennedy had told her to do it. Nonetheless, she was found legally sane and duly convicted of murder.
Founding of the Ku Klux Klan, Atlanta, 1915
At 35, failed preacher William Simmons had found his true calling as a fraternal lodge leader. In addition to commanding five regiments of the Woodmen, he was a heavy in several Masonic orders and a Knight Templar. But his dream was to have his own personal fraternal organization. And he wanted more than funny hats and secret handshakes — he wanted to revive the Ku Klux Klan. His dream came to fruition Thanksgiving Eve when 40 handpicked men gathered to re-launch the Klan. A group of 15 stalwarts recessed to the top of nearby Stone Mountain for an early morning cross-burning. Simmons tied his first recruitment drive in with D.W. Griffith's famous film The Birth of a Nation, which opened in Atlanta the following week. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The Great Football Fry, San Francisco, 1900
Back in the good old days of Thanksgiving Day football, the hearts and minds of Bay Area football fans were not on dinner, but the day's "Big Game" between the University of California and Stanford. The 1900 edition of this classic was, of course, sold out. The roofs of the buildings surrounding the stadium were crowded with budget-minded fans craning for a glimpse of the action. Twenty minutes into the game, the roof of one building collapsed. Unfortunately, the building housed a glass factory, complete with a red-hot furnace filled with molten glass. Turkeys weren't the only things getting roasted in San Francisco that day. Twenty-two people were killed and over 80 injured in what remains the worst — and most bizarre — disaster ever to befall American sports fans.
Missionary Massacre, Zimbabwe 1987
Early on Thanksgiving morning, Marxist Zimbabwean rebels descended on two farms run by white Pentecostal missionaries. What they lacked in Thanksgiving spirit they made up for in their revolutionary zeal. First they tied up the 16 white missionaries — men, women, and children, including two Americans. Then, as they gleefully sang revolutionary songs, they hacked their captives to death. Officials could only describe the resulting carnage as "barbaric."
Executive Assassination, Cordoba, Argentina, 1973
At the height of the Argentinean urban terrorist fad, a band of 15 young men waylaid John Swint, the general manager of a local Ford subsidiary, on Thanksgiving Day. The Peronist gunmen, upset with the way President Juan Peron had turned on them, later claimed they'd only wanted to kidnap the American executive. But according to witnesses, it was a turkey-shoot from the get-go. The gunmen immediately started blasting away with shotguns and assault rifles, killing Swint's bodyguard and chauffeur and critically injuring another bodyguard. One blond gunner unloaded a quick machine gun blast into Swint's body at close range — just to be sure.
See also:
Reverend Billy Wants You to Stop Shopping |
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