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A Mountie in Kelowna, B.C. is under investigation after he was caught on video allegedly kicking a man in the face during an arrest.In the video, the suspect is kneeling on the street beside his truck when an officer appears to wind up and kick him. When the suspect stands up, his face is covered in blood, and there appears to be a pool of blood where he was lying.Kelowna RCMP Supt. Bill McKinnon ordered a criminal investigation into use of excessive force, as well as a conduct of conduct investigation."In my opinion, I feel there's sufficient evidence to order a full investigation," McKinnon told reporters.Police were responding to reports of shots fired at the Harvest Golf Club when they stopped the suspect's truck.Officers ordered him out of the vehicle, and told him to get down on the ground before the apparent kick.On-lookers were shocked."I suddenly I see him and he comes up and kicks him so hard. He never fought," said a witness, who asked not to be named."What was the reason to kick him so hard?"The Mounties uncovered a shotgun from the suspect's truck, but McKinnon said he was a former employee of the golf course who had a permit to scare away geese with his gun. The man was reportedly on disability leave after suffering a brain injury.The officer shown in the video has been placed on administrative leave while the investigation is underway. |
Image copyright Olana Tansley-Hancock Image caption Olana Tansley-Hancock has spent more than two decades with misophonia
Why some people become enraged by sounds such as eating or breathing has been explained by brain scan studies.
The condition, misophonia, is far more than simply disliking noises such as nails being scraped down a blackboard.
"I feel there's a threat and get the urge to lash out - it's the fight or flight response," says Olana Tansley-Hancock, 29, from Kent.
UK scientists have shown some people's brains become hardwired to produce an "excessive" emotional response.
Olana developed the condition when she was eight years old. Her trigger sounds include breathing, eating and rustling noises.
She told BBC News: "Anyone eating crisps is always going to set me off, the rustle of the packet is enough to start a reaction.
"It's not a general annoyance, it's an immediate 'Oh my God, what is that sound?' I need to get away from it or stop it'.
"I spent a long time avoiding places like the cinema. I'd have to move carriages seven or eight times on 30-minute train journeys, and I left a job after three months as I spent more time crying and having panic attacks than working."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Misophonia: Examples of the sounds that can make some people angry
Scientists, including Olana, at multiple centres in the UK scanned the brains of 20 misophonic people and 22 people without the condition.
They were played a range of noises while they were in the MRI machine, including:
neutral sounds such as rain
generally unpleasant sounds such as screaming
people's trigger sounds
The results, published in the journal Current Biology, revealed the part of the brain that joins our senses with our emotions - the anterior insular cortex - was overly active in misophonia.
And it was wired up and connected to other parts of the brain differently in those with misophonia.
Dr Sukhbinder Kumar, from Newcastle University, told BBC News: "They are going into overdrive when they hear these sounds, but the activity was specific to the trigger sounds not the other two sounds.
"The reaction is anger mostly, it's not disgust, the dominating emotion is the anger - it looks like a normal response, but then it is going into overdrive."
Image copyright Thinkstock
There are no treatments, but Olana has developed coping mechanisms such as using ear plugs.
She also knows caffeine and alcohol make the condition worse, "which is rubbish".
"But I have a relatively mild case and am still able to have a job, I know a lot of people who aren't able to have that, I feel quite fortunate really," she said.
It is still not clear how common the disorder is, as there is no clear way of diagnosing it and it was only recently discovered.
Ultimately, the researchers hope, understanding the difference in the misophonic brain will lead to new treatments.
Targeted electricity
One idea is that low levels of targeted electricity passed through the skull, which is known to adjust brain function, could help.
Tim Griffiths, a professor of cognitive neurology at Newcastle University and University College London, said: "I hope this will reassure sufferers.
"I was part of the sceptical community myself until we saw patients in the clinic and understood how strikingly similar the features are.
"We now have evidence to establish the basis for the disorder through the differences in brain control mechanism in misophonia."
Follow James on Twitter. |
Some of the biggest stars of anime and manga are going to be spending their summer at the Osaka theme park.
You have to respect the ability of Universal Studios Japan to make lemons out of lemonade. Obviously, Disney’s extensive pantheon of beloved animated characters are out of the Osaka amusement park’s reach, since their images are reserved for use at Tokyo Disneyland and Disney Sea. The other side of the coin, though, is that USJ (as Universal Studios Japan is also known) can theoretically create themed attractions based on just about any fictional characters that aren’t Disney properties.
In particular, the rosters of anime and Japanese video game series are wide open, and in the past USJ has teamed up with franchises including Attack on Titan and Evangelion. This summer the park is going back to the anime and manga well again for the Universal Jump Summer event, a collaborative effort with the Weekly Shonen Jump manga anthology.
Three of the magazine’s biggest hits will be represented. Pirate tale One Piece has been the basis of previous live-action performances at Universal Studios Japan, and is coming back again for a brand new show dubbed the One Piece Premier Show 2016.
Fans of psychological/supernatural thriller Death Note won’t want to miss Death Note The Escape, in which they join forces with the series’ detective L for what sounds like a themed version of the “escape games” that have become increasingly popular in Japan over the past few years.
Finally, Dragon Ball Z The Real 4-D pits Dragon Ball’s heroic Goku against the evil Frieza. The term “4-D” often gets used in Japan to describe movie or video attractions that also make use of atmospheric effects such as flashing lights, gusts of wind, or sprays of water, all of which sound like they would make fine enhancements to the experience of watching the two martial artists pound on/fire energy blasts at each other.
The one flaw in this manga-rich ointment is that supplemental tickets will have to be purchased for admission to the One Piece and Death Note attractions (access to Dragon Ball Z The Real 4-D is included with regular admission to the park). Pricing has yet to be announced, but evn if it means shelling out a few more yen, we imagine plenty of fans will think its money well-spent.
The Universal Jump Summer attractions open on July 1, and will be around until September 4.
Follow Casey on Twitter as he hopes this news paves the way for future City Hunter and Eyeshield 21 attractions.
Source: IT Media
Top image: Universal Studios Japan
Insert images: Universal Studios Japan (1, 2) |
TUSCALOOSA, Alabama -- The
visited University Place Elementary Tuesday afternoon with a delivery of school supplies and toys for students, many of whom were affected by the
.
Susan Laxton, kindergarten teacher at Wildewood School in Ralston, Neb., and mother of former Tide gymnast Meredith Laxton, organized a drive with her students and sent the toys and supplies that the gymnasts distributed.
"So many of our current and former gymnasts did so much after the tornado to help get Tuscaloosa back on their feet," head coach Sarah Patterson said. "When Meredith Laxton's mother, Susan, heard what had happened, she gathered her students together and asked them what they could do to help and they sent boxes of toys, books and school supplies."
The gymnasts helped students pick out items to take home in the school's library.
"It was such an amazing moment when the children saw everything laid out on the tables in the library," Patterson said. "It was like Christmas morning. It meant so much to our ladies to see that and to have a hand in helping children who lost so much."
Many University Place students and their families lost their homes and possessions in the April 27 tornado. Students are temporarily attending classes at the former Stillman Heights Education Center after their school was damaged by the storm.
"Today was amazing," junior All-American Ashley Sledge said. "There was so much to do, and so much that was done right after the tornado hit, but there are so many in this community who are still working to overcome all the damage, and everything that was lost. Today is a great example of how people can continue to make a difference in the recovery effort that is going to be going on for quite some time." |
In the future, our cars will drive themselves. That much is clear. But what we choose to do with our time while being driven to our destinations has sparked a weird, little-noticed movement in the technology and auto industries to redefine automobiles as social environments on par with our homes and work places, a space also known as the “third place.”
Take Rinspeed, for example. The Swiss automaker (and self-described think tank) showed up at CES this year with a concept car that turned more than a few heads: the Oasis, an adorable, semi-translucent, self-driving pod with gesture control, white leather swivel seats, an augmented reality windshield. Funkier still, the Oasis had a tiny garden of succulents growing on the dashboard, injecting a little photosynthesis in our increasingly synthetic lifestyles. It was a literal breath of fresh air in a sea of sterile technology.
“I personally think what we know today as cars will change drastically.”
The Oasis is not a real car, nor will it ever be. It was meant to serve as a platform on which other carmakers, designers, and transportation visionaries could potentially build their own visions for the future of mobility. But it also fit neatly into a growing trend among technology and automotive companies to turn our cars into a third place for social interaction.
I asked Frank Rinderknecht, CEO of Rinspeed, what inspired him to design a vehicle as whimsical and unrealistic as the Oasis. “We wanted to have tangible vision of urban mobility of tomorrow,” he said. “I personally think what we know today as cars will change drastically. They will be automotive, you’ll be expecting a completely different interior, and its a march not only of mobility and technology, but mobility and third living spaces.”
The concept of the third place has been around for decades, but was probably best articulated by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. In it, he wrote that third places all over the world share common and essential features. “The eternal sameness of the third place overshadows the variations in its outward appearance and seems unaffected by the wide differences in cultural attitudes toward the typical gathering place of informal public life,” Oldenburg wrote. “The beer joint in which the middle class American takes no pride can be as much a third place as the proud Viennese coffeehouse.”
Barber shops, cafes, parks... cars?
Typical third places include barber shops, cafes, parks, clubs, or even Starbucks. But can cars, with their enclosed environments, no fixed location, and demands on our attention, be considered a third place? Beyond Rinspeed, mainstream automakers are beginning to embrace this idea as well, thanks to two trends in transportation: the growing popularity of ride-sharing, car-sharing, and carpooling; and the advent of driverless technology. They think that as our attention shifts from driving to being driven, we will use our time to work, play, consume content, and interact with one another. Some companies have declared explicitly they want their cars to be the new third places. It’s a dramatic reinterpretation of what constitutes a social environment, and maybe not in a way we’re ready to accept.
At CES this year, Fiat Chrysler unveiled its Portal concept minivan, which the company billed as a “third space” designed to bridge work and home. The car is loaded with a multitude of screens and creature comforts like selfie cameras and docking stations. Chrysler sees the Portal as “an open and serene atmosphere that provides an alternative environment between work and home.”
The Portal is supposedly the first vehicle designed “for millennials, by millennials,” which is a silly way of saying that it includes a lot of bells-and-whistles that marketing companies think appeal to the smartphone generation. In some ways, the emphasis on millennials and the third space distract from a lot of the interesting technological and design elements in the Portal, like light rings around the doors and 360-degree cameras in the interior.
This idea of autos as third places goes beyond reimagining the utility of cars, like Honda did with its NeuV concept. The Japanese automaker says the two-seat vehicle could be programmed to pick up and drop off passengers when its owner isn’t using it, or to sell back remaining energy to the grid, making it one of the first vehicles designed for the express purpose of ride-hailing.
During CES, Hyundai unveiled something it called its “Mobility Vision” — a mashup of a smart home with an autonomous vehicle, with futuristic furniture moving seamlessly between both. The idea is your autonomous vehicle is docked to your home via some sort of portal, becoming a cool extension that just detaches when you’re ready to be whisked across town for an errand or road trip. The motivation, Hyundai says, is to “blur the line between mobility and living and working space, integrating the car into the daily lives of users.”
what we do with our time once untethered from operational demands of driving
The effort to redefine cars as social spaces is rooted in a much older idea about what we would do with our time once untethered from operational demands of driving. Back in September, Uber’s vice president of engineering and head of self-driving Anthony Levandowski acknowledged that history, typified by magazines like Popular Science, while kicking off the ride-hail company’s first autonomous service in Pittsburgh.
“Even in the '50s there were advertisements about families riding around in the back of vehicles, playing dominoes, and just driving down the highway efficiently and safely, Levandowski said. “I’m sorry to say there’s going to be no domino playing in these vehicles.”
Of course, there was an unspoken “yet” after his statement. Uber is on the record about wanting to eventually deploy Level 5 autonomous vehicles, without drivers, steering wheels, or pedals. And without those controls, where else will our attention turn but to each other, especially if these driverless cars are being utilized in a carpooling capacity?
other hallmarks of third places that cars don’t (or can’t) have
How safe is all this? I asked Mark Rosekind, the outgoing head of the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, whether the transformation of automobiles into third places comes at the expense of safety. “I think that’s part of the excitement,” Rosekind said. “All this stuff is going to change. We, of course, put safety at the top of it. But all those things are another competitive space. How do you give control of it? How do you use it?”
He also said he was trying to stay realistic about the pace of innovation. “The full societal transformation will take 20 or 30 years,” Rosekind said. “It’s not just your vehicle, it’s buses, it’s trucks. But it won’t happen overnight.”
But Oldenburg suggests other hallmarks of third places that cars don’t (or can’t) have, complicating this redefining effort. He says third places should be free or inexpensive, feature food and drink, be highly accessible, involve regulars, be welcoming and comfortable, and be a place where both new friends and old can be found. This basically describes the bar from Cheers. Can your self-driving car get you to where you need to go, and also be a place where everybody knows your name? |
Canon finally updated the 7D to the Mk II version this last month. The camera features some of the most impressive specs ever seen on a Canon APS-C body, with an AF system that rivals that of their Flagship EOS-1D X. So, it should come as no surprise that rumors are now surfacing of the impending arrivals of the 5D MkIV and 1D X MkII.
Canon 5D Mark IV, EOS-1D X Mark II Coming In Early 2015
According to the new report, posted over on PhotoRumors, both cameras are slated for an early 2015 release – likely for the CES or CP+ trade shows. The rumor also stipulates that the 1D X MkII will be announced first, so maybe it’s possible we will get the 1DX Mk II at CES (early January) and then the 5D Mark IV at CP+ (March).
Currently, there are no details on what the new cameras might feature, specs wise. But I would hazard a guess that whatever AF advancements that were made to make the 7D Mark II so great will likely be beefed up and moved into the two newer bodies. There was also that rumor that Canon would announce two new bodies in 2015 utilizing Sony sensors – could these be those rumored cameras?
Speaking of Sony, rumor has it that they have a new E-Mount camera coming in early 2015 as well. Nothing is known about that product at this point either, other than that Mirrorless Rumors’ ‘best sources’ have been telling him about it.
So it seems that if you are a Canon or Sony fan, early 2015 will be a fun time. If I were you, I would start saving your money now, maybe ask for camera fund donations for Christmas. |
The space industry could bring hundreds of jobs to Scotland’s industrial heartlands
SPACECRAFT will be mass-produced “like cars” at a factory that could bring hundreds of jobs to Scotland’s beleaguered industrial heartland by the end of the decade.
Clyde Space plans to manufacture up to 100 satellites each month within the next few years at a purpose-built site in Glasgow.
The firm, which designed and built the first Scottish satellite, is gearing up for an expansion starting next year, when it expects to more than double its monthly construction rates to 10.
Staffing levels at the company have risen by 100% annually over the past few years and the workforce is now 75 to meet “exponential” demand.
Interest is rising further following the completion last month of the inaugural mission of Scotland’s first satellite.
UKube-1, which is… |
The history of the world is the history of violence. I had planned to write this column about the most critical act of violence in human history and its superhuman aftermath -- the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Easter, which celebrates His resurrection in a few days, is the centerpiece of all Christian belief. Without the risen Christ, we are doomed. Only with Him can we be saved.
An old Irish priest told me in my youth that Easter means there is hope for the dead. And if there is hope for the dead, there is hope for the living.
But the living must do more than just hope, because governments continue to crush hope with violence, irrespective of moral and legal norms.
Last week, as Holy Week was approaching, the United States launched 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield because President Donald Trump was morally repulsed at the use of poison gas in Syria in the days preceding.
Trump argued that the gas could only have been deployed intentionally by the Syrian government on its own people and that that behavior was so repellant, so contrary to civilized moral norms, so disruptive to the world order as to constitute a national security threat to the United States -- hence his use of force. Was his action legal?
Here is the back story.
Syria, along with the United States, is a signatory to the United Nations Charter. The U.N. Charter is a treaty signed by President Harry Truman and ratified by the U.S. Senate. Under the Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land, alongside the Constitution, and the federal government has a moral and legal obligation to be bound by them. The U.N. Charter limits member nations' use of military force to defensive responses to actual attacks, pre-emptive strikes prior to nearly certain attacks and correctives pursuant to U.N. consent or pursuant to another treaty obligating military force to help an ally.
These limitations are based on Judeo-Christian just war theory, which has been accepted in the Western world for centuries and is now codified into international law. Under this international law, military force must be a last resort, used only when necessary to fight back or to prevent an imminent attack. It also must be proportional to the harm it seeks to eradicate and be likely to produce the result it seeks. Anything short of this violates international law, to which the U.S. is bound by numerous treaties.
Syria is not a threat to the U.S., nor is it likely to become one. Nor is the argument that we needed to send a message to Syria lest it use poison gas on the U.S. a valid legal argument or a realistic political one. Were this subjective fear a valid legal basis for the use of military force, the president could send missiles anytime and anywhere at anyone or anything with legal impunity.
The president’s revulsion at the sight of children suffering horrifically from the effects of poison gas is an emotional reaction -- a very human and utterly normal one. Yet it in no way legally justifies an attack on a sovereign nation.
In addition to various treaties, the president is subject, of course, to the Constitution, which provides that only Congress can declare war. Yet Congress gave the president a small window in which to use military force on his own in the War Powers Resolution of 1973. That law was written in the midst of President Richard Nixon’s undeclared war in Cambodia to limit the president’s emergency use of military force absent a declaration of war from Congress to defensive strikes, pre-emptive strikes and treaty obligations.
Earlier this week, 21 retired military, intelligence and FBI personnel jointly argued that President Trump was moved to this attack by misguided or incomplete intelligence. Their view -- which is based on eyewitness reports from U.S. military on the ground in Syria and intelligence reports from their former colleagues -- is that Syrian President Bashar Assad did not use poison gas on his own people earlier this month. They note that Assad is clearly winning his long-fought civil war and does not need the international headache of being tarnished as a person who gassed children; nor would there be even the remotest military gain to him if he did so.
These former federal officials point out that the U.S. military is playing a sub-rosa role with Russia and Syria in fighting Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group. In this case, Syrian and probably Russian military erroneously thought a warehouse the Syrians attacked stored only conventional Islamic State weapons. It apparently stored an Islamic State chemical arsenal, as well, which, after explosions and exposure, unleashed a plume of poisonous gas that traveled in the atmosphere to a nearby village and slaughtered innocents.
Assad, for all his faults, is vigorously fighting Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Why would America harm another sovereign entity that is trying to take out al-Qaida and the Islamic State? Attacking Syrian military assets only aids al-Qaida and the Islamic State, which constitutes providing material assistance to terrorist organizations. Could anyone have imagined our country's ever doing that?
For months, I have been warning about the unchecked power of the intelligence community to manipulate the president by selectively revealing and selectively concealing what it knows about our enemies and our friends.
Did Trump have all the intelligence he needed in front of him before he attacked Syria? Apparently not.
Did he use proportional force defensively or pre-emptively to prevent harm to the U.S.? Clearly not. C
an he legally use military force to punish or to teach a lesson to another sovereign state that poses no threat to the U.S.? Absolutely not, or there will be no end to government violence.
Yet in this time of violent madness, there is the joy of the Resurrection. Happy Easter. |
In the operating theatre, scalpel in hand, Sara Dalby is reminded of snow: “When you’re making the first incision, it’s like making a set of footprints in it. It’s never going to be the same.”
Patients may expect a surgeon to operate on them, but Dalby is one of a small group of nurses who have advanced to the role of surgical care practitioner (SCP).
Soon Dalby’s role will become even more special: come September, she will be able to carry out surgeries, such as facial skin cancer excisions, with possible skin grafts and flap reconstructions, without a consultant by her side.
Unlike other nursing roles in the surgical team, an SCP, as defined by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS), is involved with the patient from the moment they set foot in the hospital until the moment they go home. Dalby’s nursing background has certainly helped her to this point. She says: “I have a wealth of knowledge from being a nurse that’s helped me take the next step into advanced practice.”
The new SCPs take part in everything from preoperative assessments – including taking histories and conducting physical exams – to assisting in theatre, training trainee surgeons, and postoperative care, such as wound assessment and discharging patients.
The NHS does not currently record an overall figure for how many SCPs are employed by the service, but a recent report from the RCS, which included studies of surgical teams in eight NHS hospitals, counted no SCPs at St George’s hospital in London, but as many as seven at University Hospital of North Tees.
Becoming an SCP requires a background as a registered healthcare professional, such as a nurse, a love of clinical practice and academic aptitude. Dalby had an MSc in advanced nursing and took on additional training and study for the post. Now the recommended training is a two-year master’s programme at university – a much higher barrier to entry than training for general nursing roles.
Having qualified as a nurse in 2003, Dalby’s interest in surgery has grown throughout her career – from observing a hip replacement as a student nurse to training as one of the hospital’s first surgical first assistants, tasked with camera holding for laparoscopic surgery when the service was introduced by a colorectal consultant.
Becoming an SCP was a chance to push herself professionally, develop her clinical skills and still work directly with patients. She is now Aintree University hospital’s only SCP and works across two specialities – the maxillofacial unit and upper limb orthopaedics.
Dalby says: “I feel a responsibility to ensure that I provide high standards of patient care in my capacity as an SCP and to evidence the role as a success, to prove non-medical practitioners are worth investment.” She adds: “Being in advanced roles give nurses with experience an alternative career path to management. It keeps them on the frontline providing clinical care for patients.”
Matthew van Loo, a senior lecturer at Teesside University’s school of health and social care and a former SCP, adds: “There hasn’t been a huge investment in careers on the clinical side of nursing, so this role is attractive to people. Not everyone wants to get a pay rise by going into management, so it does open up another door.”
Ian Eardley, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, says such non-traditional roles can help create a “flexible and permanent workforce” for hospitals. While junior doctors move between specialities for their training, for example, SCPs will remain in post.
The RCS report looked at changes to the surgical workforce, including the use of SCPs and other non-medical roles, and suggests that patient care and continuity of care has improved where such jobs have been introduced.
The nursing background of many SCPs is particularly beneficial. “Medical training is quite different from a nurse’s training, in the way that you approach things.” says Eardley.
“The nursing approach is often more holistic, often more caring than we are. The two styles are slightly complimentary, but it’s now becoming clearer that there are certain things that can be done for surgical patients by people with different training.”
Dalby adds: “My consultants and I may have different viewpoints about things and I think that’s to the benefit of the patient, because then all aspects of care are considered. Sometimes I know what the nurses are going through on the ward or what the theatre staff will be thinking.”
The role now shows signs of improving junior doctors’ surgical experience. SCPs may take on activities in theatre, allowing a consultant more time to focus on training or perform duties outside theatre that allow juniors to spend more time operating.
“We’ve moved from a situation where there were doctors and nurses doing very different things to functioning far more as a team with overlapping roles,” says Eardley.
But this is no fast-track to becoming a surgeon. While traditional roles may blur at a lower level – an SCP may lead ward rounds and carry out surgical procedures for very specific conditions and within certain limits, for example – a clear distinction between the responsibilities of consultants and SCPs remains. Consultants lead the surgical team, perform far more complicated surgeries and oversee the work and training of everyone on that team. They will also have medical training, qualifying first as doctors before undertaking extensive further training to specialise.
Andrea Thomas, deputy director of nursing and quality at Aintree University hospital says the introduction of SCPs is about the changing shape of surgical teams and, in addition to other advanced clinical roles, a response to broader hospital and patient needs. These posts can help the NHS face the future, explains Thomas, by helping services plan for anticipated shortages in junior doctors training for surgery and other specialities.
She says: “Who’s going to replace [junior doctors] in the clinics, in the theatres, in the wards? What will that look like and who will it be? Developing some of these roles in those areas is an absolute must do.”
Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to read more pieces like this. And follow us on Twitter (@GdnHealthcare) to keep up with the latest healthcare news and views.
If you’re looking for a healthcare job or need to recruit staff, visit Guardian Jobs. |
The Islamic Republic of Iran is no longer the most despised country in the eyes of Americans, with bellicose North Korea taking over the top spot, according to a new Gallup poll. Just 11% of Americans hold a “favorable view” of the East Asian communist state, which is lower than any of the other 22 countries mentioned in the survey. South Korea, by contrast, was viewed positively by 64% of the Americans polled.
A recent slight thawing in relations with Tehran has seen American attitudes improve ever so slightly, from 9% approval last year to 12% currently.
For Kim Jong Un’s regime, however, there seems little hope — the latest poll was conducted before this week’s damning U.N. report that catalogued “crimes against humanity” in the Hermit Kingdom, and so the true approval rating today is probably even lower still.
More: What’s at Stake in North Korea’s Power Struggle?
Contact us at [email protected]. |
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The Supreme Court is considering taking up the travel ban case. | Getty Trump blasts 9th Circuit for ruling against travel ban 'at such a dangerous time'
President Donald Trump criticized the judiciary on Tuesday for ruling against the administration’s travel ban, writing on Twitter that the 9th Circuit "did it again.”
“Well, as predicted, the 9th Circuit did it again - Ruled against the TRAVEL BAN at such a dangerous time in the history of our country. S.C.,” he wrote online.
Story Continued Below
The 9th Circuit on Monday unanimously rejected the White House’s request to lift an injunction blocking key parts of the Trump’s revised executive order. In May, the Virginia-based 4th Circuit also rejected Trump’s revised travel ban executive order.
The Supreme Court is considering taking up the travel ban case.
Trump has attacked the judiciary and the 9th Circuit in particular in the past. In April, Trump blasted the 9th circuit for both ruling against the travel ban and for blocking an executive order allowing federal funds to be withheld from localities that do not turn over undocumented immigrants to federal immigration officers. A U.S. District Judge, not the 9th Circuit, blocked Trump’s sanctuary city action. |
India’s central bank governor Raghuram Rajan is known for straight talking, from his pull-your-socks-up email to bank employees earlier this year to his comments on religious intolerance.
So it is no surprise that when the Reserve Bank of India governor spoke to students graduating from the National Institute of Bank Management in Pune, he delivered a frank and to the point message.
The former professor of economics told students that if they thought becoming an executive, Nobel-prize winner or mega movie star would make them happy, they should think carefully. Taking a job they disliked to achieve those goals, might not be the way forward.
“You are rarely happy simply because you are successful, but you are much more likely to be successful if you are happy, doing work you enjoy,” said Mr. Rajan, who left his native India for university in the U.S. and returned three years ago after working at the International Monetary Fund and University of Chicago.
“So when you choose what to do, don’t focus on the end point. Instead, focus on whether you like the work itself. Not only will you be more likely to reach your goal, even if you don’t arrive at that end point, you will have had a joyful life.” he said, according to a transcript published on the RBI website.
He also delivered some home truths about the economy.
“We are still one of the poorest large countries in the world on a per capita basis, and have a long way to go before we reasonably address the concerns of each one of our citizens,” he said.
Last year India passed China as the world’s fastest-growing major economy in terms of gross domestic product expansion. India cannot become complacent and needs to continue at this pace for decades, Gov. Rajan said.
“I cannot get euphoric if India is the fastest growing large economy,” he said, adding that the country needed to repeat the hard work of getting the country’s economy to grow for 20 years to give citizens a decent standard of living.
“We cannot get carried away by our current superiority in growth, for as soon as we believe in our own superiority and start distributing future wealth as if we already have it, we stop doing all that is required to continue growing,” he said. “This movie has played too many times in India’s past for us to not know how it ends.”
This is not the first time Mr. Rajan has been blunt. In January, the governor sent his staff a biting email about working practices.
Mr. Rajan said in the email he was “worried that people are losing curiosity, the desire to learn and improve themselves” and warned that change was required “if the organization is to remain vibrant. In complacency and self-satisfaction lies a slow descent into mediocrity.”
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The fate of Jared Cowen’s contract buyout now rests in the hands of an impartial arbitrator, and that impending decision carries significant consequences for both the 25-year-old defenceman and the Toronto Maple Leafs.
It could take as long as 30 days for a ruling, per the terms of the NHL collective bargaining agreement, after the sides held a hearing in New York on Wednesday.
At issue is whether Cowen was healthy enough to have the final year of his contract bought out by the Leafs last summer. A lengthy section of the CBA is devoted to “procedures for determining fitness to play,” and they include a player’s right to pursue a second medical opinion beyond what is provided by the team.
That information, plus witness testimony and other evidence, will be taken into account by the arbitrator while rendering a decision.
For Cowen, there is $3-million in salary at stake. That represents somewhere in the neighbourhood of 25 per cent of his career NHL earnings to date – a huge amount given his injury history and diminished future earning potential.
For the Leafs, there are serious salary cap ramifications hanging in the balance.
They are currently operating about $800,000 below the $73-million upper limit, according to capfriendly.com, but that is factoring in a unique $650,000 buyout credit they received for terminating the Cowen contract.
Should the arbitrator rule that they’re unable to do that because the player was hurt, they would lose the credit while reassuming his $3.1-million cap hit this season. That’s a $3.75-million cap swing in total and would almost certainly result in the Leafs invoking long-term injury relief on one of three players – Nathan Horton, Stephane Robidas or Joffrey Lupul – to remain compliant.
Even though the LTI maneuver would offer immediate relief, it’s something the Leafs hope to avoid since it would increase the size of the cap overage penalty they’ll carry into next season because of performance bonuses expected to be earned by as many as five rookies in their current lineup.
Toronto has shown tremendous creativity with the way it has managed the salary cap the last couple seasons and only took on Cowen’s contract from Ottawa as a sweetener in the Dion Phaneuf trade on Feb. 9.
The player was immediately shut down because of issues that have bothered him dating back to a 2012 surgery repairing a torn labrum in his left hip. As Cowen explained to Sportsnet in a Feb. 25 interview, that area of his body had bothered him ever since.
“The next year (2013-14) was the tough year because I wasn’t feeling as good, the season kind of wore on me because it’s so long, so I felt worse and worse,” said Cowen. “I kind of just got used to how bad I was feeling so it didn’t even seem that bad anymore. It was the new normal.
“Then after that year I kind of had a hernia and I played the whole next year with that hernia without knowing. It hurt a lot. I couldn’t skate well, so I just had surgery last summer (in 2015).
“I’m just trying to get rid of all those symptoms I’m having but they just keep building up.”
Cowen was eventually cleared to play by team doctors and assigned to the American Hockey League on Feb. 27. He was later given permission to leave the Marlies and returned home to Saskatoon in March having never even suited up for one game with the organization.
Lou Lamoriello, the Leafs general manager, announced his intention to buy out Cowen’s contract while speaking with reporters after the Feb. 29 trade deadline.
The player was due to earn $4.5-million in salary this season and that provided Toronto favourable conditions to do so. Since Cowen is under age 26, his buyout came in at one-third of the remaining value spread over two years – giving the Leafs the rare $650,000 cap credit in 2016-17 while assuming a hit of $750,000 for 2017-18.
It is now up to the arbitrator to decide whether that holds.
With big stakes involved for the former ninth overall pick and the Leafs organization, his ruling will be final. |
Abstract
Background: A protective effect of vitamin D on risk of multiple sclerosis (MS) has been proposed, but no prospective studies have addressed this hypothesis.
Methods: Dietary vitamin D intake was examined directly in relation to risk of MS in two large cohorts of women: the Nurses’ Health Study (NHS; 92,253 women followed from 1980 to 2000) and Nurses’ Health Study II (NHS II; 95,310 women followed from 1991 to 2001). Diet was assessed at baseline and updated every 4 years thereafter. During the follow-up, 173 cases of MS with onset of symptoms after baseline were confirmed.
Results: The pooled age-adjusted relative risk (RR) comparing women in the highest quintile of total vitamin D intake at baseline with those in the lowest was 0.67 (95% CI = 0.40 to 1.12; p for trend = 0.03). Intake of vitamin D from supplements was also inversely associated with risk of MS; the RR comparing women with intake of ≥400 IU/day with women with no supplemental vitamin D intake was 0.59 (95% CI = 0.38 to 0.91; p for trend = 0.006). No association was found between vitamin D from food and MS incidence.
Conclusion: These results support a protective effect of vitamin D intake on risk of developing MS. |
Michael Giles is a master illusionist who, along with his wife Melanie, has brought joy and wonder to audiences around the world. Now he is in need of some financial magic. Michael Giles needs your help. Michael has been diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer, and it has spread to his liver and possibly his spine. Not only is Michael in for the fight of his life, he and Melanie are facing severe, mounting medical expenses.
CLICK HERE to go to Michael Giles’ Magical Medical Fund Page.
As most entertainers know, it is not easy to get health insurance in our industry. You can help Michael and Melanie by going to his Go Fund Me page and making a contributuion. Any amount helps. It all adds up but the bills are also adding up. Please help Michael and Melanie fight. Give this amazing man a chance.
If you don’t already know Michael, here is some background information. His talents and achievements have forged a career to stardom and he has performed to standing ovations in over 16 countries across 6 continents. He has accrued accolades, awards, and worldwide recognition, earning the distinction of an impressive cover story in Magic Magazine. Michael has also been featured on the covers of Las Vegas’ What’s On, “Vegas” magazine, and dozens more. He has starred on a multitude of global television shows including Disney’s Magic and Beyond, and highlighting this merit with multiple appearances on NBC’S, “World’s Greatest Magic”, as well as The CW’s Masters of Illusion. For the past several years he has been touring with the LIVE Masters of Illusion show.
As a young boy, Michael’s passion for magic was undeniable and by the time he was 12, he was already entertaining audiences. With his commitment to the art of magic, he trained endless hours perfecting his skills and creating innovative feats that have inspired the magic world. Soon, Michael was discovered by the world renown, Magic Castle in Hollywood, where his impressive performance at the historical venue launched his career and placed Michael at international performance and competition levels while winning numerous coveted awards such as, “Stage Magician of the Year” and “Best Magic Show”.
Michael Giles’ Magical Medical Fund has reached 50% of its goal. Michael and Melanie are thankful for all of their friends that have contributed so far! They are half way there so please go to the page, give what you can and then share this article on all your social media channels. |
Photo Clinton in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Saturday. Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
During a 33-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, I served presidents of both parties — three Republicans and three Democrats. I was at President George W. Bush’s side when we were attacked on Sept. 11; as deputy director of the agency, I was with President Obama when we killed Osama bin Laden in 2011.
I am neither a registered Democrat nor a registered Republican. In my 40 years of voting, I have pulled the lever for candidates of both parties. As a government official, I have always been silent about my preference for president.
No longer. On Nov. 8, I will vote for Hillary Clinton. Between now and then, I will do everything I can to ensure that she is elected as our 45th president.
Two strongly held beliefs have brought me to this decision. First, Mrs. Clinton is highly qualified to be commander in chief. I trust she will deliver on the most important duty of a president — keeping our nation safe. Second, Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.
I spent four years working with Mrs. Clinton when she was secretary of state, most often in the White House Situation Room. In these critically important meetings, I found her to be prepared, detail-oriented, thoughtful, inquisitive and willing to change her mind if presented with a compelling argument.
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I also saw the secretary’s commitment to our nation’s security; her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding that diplomacy can be effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary; and, most important, her capacity to make the most difficult decision of all — whether to put young American women and men in harm’s way.
Mrs. Clinton was an early advocate of the raid that brought Bin Laden to justice, in opposition to some of her most important colleagues on the National Security Council. During the early debates about how we should respond to the Syrian civil war, she was a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach, one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold in Syria.
I never saw her bring politics into the Situation Room. In fact, I saw the opposite. When some wanted to delay the Bin Laden raid by one day because the White House Correspondents Dinner might be disrupted, she said, “Screw the White House Correspondents Dinner.”
In sharp contrast to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump has no experience on national security. Even more important, the character traits he has exhibited during the primary season suggest he would be a poor, even dangerous, commander in chief.
These traits include his obvious need for self-aggrandizement, his overreaction to perceived slights, his tendency to make decisions based on intuition, his refusal to change his views based on new information, his routine carelessness with the facts, his unwillingness to listen to others and his lack of respect for the rule of law.
The dangers that flow from Mr. Trump’s character are not just risks that would emerge if he became president. It is already damaging our national security.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.
Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.
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In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.
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Mr. Trump has also undermined security with his call for barring Muslims from entering the country. This position, which so clearly contradicts the foundational values of our nation, plays into the hands of the jihadist narrative that our fight against terrorism is a war between religions.
In fact, many Muslim Americans play critical roles in protecting our country, including the man, whom I cannot identify, who ran the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center for nearly a decade and who I believe is most responsible for keeping America safe since the Sept. 11 attacks.
My training as an intelligence officer taught me to call it as I see it. This is what I did for the C.I.A. This is what I am doing now. Our nation will be much safer with Hillary Clinton as president. |
Half a century ago, on March 7, 1965, state troopers knocked down, gassed, and beat a number of men and women who were participating in a peaceful march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama. That same day, radio listeners around the country might have heard Sam Cooke singing a lyric he’d written and recorded several months earlier, but which could have been describing the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. _Then I go to my brother
_ _And I say, “Brother, help me please.”
_ _But he winds up knockin’ me
_ Back down on my knees. Like the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Cooke’s brooding but bright civil-rights anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come” recently marked its fiftieth anniversary. The song, which was released as the B-side of Cooke’s posthumous hit single “Shake” just days after his funeral, in December 1964, entered the national pop and R&B charts during the first week of 1965. It fell off the pop countdown, after peaking at No. 31, on March 13th, and would slip from the R&B charts, where it climbed to No. 9, on April 10. These anniversaries have passed without much commemoration—somewhat surprisingly, given that Cooke’s recording remains as beloved and as timely as ever. Then again, it may be that the song’s persistent relevance explains the neglect. The serial shootings of unarmed black men by law enforcement; the Justice Department report on police abuse and corruption in Ferguson, Missouri; the gutting of a Voting Rights Act provision that was one key consequence of the Selma marches—these and other dispiriting headlines have perhaps rendered the confident optimism of Cooke’s masterpiece difficult to sing along to without seeming naïve. If Cooke were alive to update “A Change Is Gonna Come” for the current political scene, he might be tempted to rename it “The More Things Change.”
In a story that has come to symbolize the ways in which American popular music intersected with and helped sustain the civil-rights movement, Cooke was motivated to write “A Change Is Gonna Come” by another sixties anthem, Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.” When he first heard that song, Peter Guralnick writes in 2005’s “Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke,” he “was so carried away with the message, and the fact that a white boy had written it, that . . . he was almost ashamed not to have written something like that himself.” The soul singer and former gospel star was further inspired when he heard Peter, Paul and Mary singing Dylan’s song on the radio. As Daniel Wolff explains in his 1995 biography of Cooke, “You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke,”_ _the folk trio piqued Cooke’s commercial ambitions. Their recording proved that “a tune could address civil rights and go to No. 2 on the pop charts.” For Cooke, the result of these racial and artistic challenges was “A Change Is Gonna Come.” As origin stories go, this one is satisfyingly precise and frustratingly incomplete. It pinpoints exactly what prodded Cooke to write a civil-rights-themed protest song, but says nothing about the specific protest song Cooke wound up writing, let alone the record he created (a key distinction, which is too often elided). For one thing, “Change” delivers a message notably distinct from Dylan’s in “Blowin’ in the Wind.” On the recording, Dylan is obviously concerned about the troubles he’s addressing, but his flat delivery conveys none of the urgency, hope, or confidence that are so paramount in Cooke’s performance. Soon afterward, Dylan would write “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” in response to the murder of Medgar Evers, and he would travel to Greenwood, Mississippi, in support of voter registration, and perform at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But the Dylan of “Blowin’ in the Wind” muses over important issues from a third-person distance that Cooke’s song (“I was born by the river…”) eschews from the jump. Dylan poses philosophical musings and rhetorical questions amid antiquated word choices (in the days of “Ban the Bomb,” he’s going on about “cannonballs”), geological time frames (those washed-to-the-sea mountains), and Old Testament allusions. “Blowin’ in the Wind” intimates that the answers we crave are where they have always been and where, tragically, they may well remain. “A Change Is Gonna Come” is unequivocal. The two recordings also sound as unlike one another as two early-sixties records could: Cooke and Dylan were wading up different streams of the American song for inspiration. Dylan found much of his melody in the nineteenth-century black spiritual “No More Auction Block for Me” (also known as “Many Thousands Gone,” which was a source for another anthem of the era, “We Shall Overcome”), while his voice and phrasing, and his austere and static strum, are indebted to the Depression-era folk style of Woody Guthrie. By contrast, the melody to “A Change Is Gonna Come,” with its long dynamic lines that trek the peaks and valleys of arranger René Hall’s lush orchestral landscape, shows Cooke working off of Tin Pan Alley standards, film music, and show tunes. “Change” opens with a regal assemblage of strings, buffeted and borne heavenward by kettledrum and French horn, all of which build theatrically and then clear out quickly for Cooke’s entrance—you can imagine the singer moving downstage into a spotlight, or a camera zooming to close-up. But while the musical setting is grandiloquent, Cooke’s tale is down-to-earth. He was born alongside a river that, like him, has never stopped rolling. He’s been run off when trying to see a movie downtown and beaten to his knees when asking for help. He’s had his moments of fear and doubt, but through it all—big finish—he’s nurtured a faith, now a conviction, that change is on the way. Cue tympani. None of this sounds or feels like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” It sounds like “Ol’ Man River.” |
Chaperone binds protein responsible for Alzheimer’s disease Dangerous mistaken identity
NMR/SAXS structural model of the Hsp90-Tau protein complex (light blue: Hsp90, orange: tau-protein) (image: Tobias Madl / TUM/HMGU)
Research news
Tau proteins, which are responsible for Alzheimer’s disease, bind to the folding protein Hsp90. The molecular recognition mechanisms that play a role here, have been unveiled by an international team of scientists led by the Technische Universität München (TUM) and the Helmholtz Zentrum München. This might open the door for new approaches for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, as the scientists report in the trade journal “Cell”.
Proteins like the so-called heat shock protein Hsp90 play an important role in almost all processes within human cells. They help other proteins fold into their three-dimensional structure or return damaged proteins back into their proper shape.
Recently, there has been increasing evidence indicating that the heat shock protein Hsp90 may also be involved in the folding processes of the tau protein. Deposits of tau proteins in brain cells are typical for Alzheimer’s disease and are held responsible for decaying nerve cells.
However, while dissolved tau proteins look more like long, stretched chains, HSP90 binds predominantly proteins that have already been prefolded. This contradiction has now been resolved by an international team headed by Dr. Tobias Madl, leader of the BioSysNet Working Group and TUM Junior Fellow at the Technische Universität München and leader of the Emmy-Noether Group Structural Biology of Signal Transduction at the Institute of Structural Biology at the Helmholz Zentrum München, as well as Prof. Stefan Rüdiger from the Dutch University of Utrecht.
Using a combination of very different technics like magnetic resonance spectroscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering and computer modeling, they successfully determined structure and dynamics of the interactions between the two biomolecules: For Hsp90 the tau protein looks like a prefolded larger protein. Furthermore they were able to deduce how Hsp90 influences the aggregation of tau proteins with one another.
“Deposits of tau proteins can cause Alzheimer’s disease. We have discovered the protein regions in which the proteins interact. This is a novel and important starting point for influencing structural formation and for developing future therapies for Alzheimer’s disease,” says Madl.
In addition to Alzheimer’s disease, further neurodegenerative diseases are caused by protein aggregation. Chaperones also play a role in the development of cancer and cystic fibrosis. These scientific insights thus provide an important basis for better understanding the disease mechanisms.
The research was funded by the European Community, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Portugese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and the National Institutes of Health (USA), as well as the Bavarian Ministry of Science and Research. The small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) experiments were conducted in the outstation of the EMBL at DESY in Hamburg. The computer modeling was done at the Leibniz Supercomputing Center of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences.
Original publication:
Karagoz, G. E. et al. (2014), Hsp90-Tau Complex Reveals Molecular Basis for Specificity in Chaperone Action. Cell, 156, (5), 963-974 Doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2014.01.037
Contact:
Dr. Tobias Madl
BioSysNet & Emmy Noether junior research group leader
Technische Universität München
Department of Chemistry
Lichtenbergstr. 4, 85748 Garching Germany
Tel.: +49 89 289 13018 - E-Mail - Internet |
He’s an uber-liberal Democratic presidential candidate, a senator from Vermont, and a 74-year-old Brooklyn native.
His political agenda, which includes raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, lowering college tuition, the legalization of marijuana and fighting big business, is the groundwork for a potential political and economic revolution.
His name is Bernie Sanders. But to many – namely his massive following of young people who praise him on social media – he is known simply and affectionately as Daddy.
I slid into the Twitter DMs (direct messages) of some of those loyal Bernie supporters to find out exactly why they address him this way.
Some teens look up to Bernie as a literal father-like figure who serves as a moral compass.
“I call Bernie Sanders Daddy because he is always watching over me. Every time I consider doing something bad, like hard drugs, or not paying the meter, I hear a heavy Brooklyn accent echoing in my head, talking about the shrinking middle class. It’s my Daddy, Bernie Sanders, telling me to rethink my actions,” said Breanna Ghazali (@JollyGhazali), a 19-year-old Des Moines Area Community College student from Urbandale, Iowa.
“I call Bernie Sanders Daddy because he has all the qualities of a steadfast father: loyal, loving, supportive – he’s like the type of dad who shows up to your soccer game, and even if you don’t win, he buys you ice cream. He believes in you, he respects you – especially as a young woman – and he wants the best for you,” said Kiara (@kgdrue), an 18-year-old DePauw University student from Greencastle, Indiana.
Some teens call Bernie Sanders ‘Daddy’ because it’s funny, even though his campaign is no joke.
“The reason I call Bernie Sanders Daddy is because of the humor in saying that. And also because he’s been able to win over people on social media, not by trying to be funny, but by talking about issues that matter to young people like college affordability, universal healthcare and minimum wage. Once you win over teenagers, all the jokes and memes will come naturally,” said Ben Forte (@BEEN_JAMM1N), a 19-year-old Butler Community College student from Wichita, Kansas.
I’ll let Jack White field this one: “Hey Americans, what, nothin’ better to do? Why don’t you kick yourself out? You’re an immigrant too.”
“Bernie is Daddy because he actually knows what he’s doing. He genuinely cares about the working class and younger people rather than the GOP, who seem to only care about helping the rich stay rich and literally deporting everyone that’s not white,” said Noura (@nochillnoura), a 17-year-old from Gainesville, Florida.
Bernie is their Bill Clinton.
“With his age and his status, I’d love to be his Monica Lewinsky,” said 18-year-old Kody (@k_horvath23), a Florida State University student from Tallahassee, Florida.
They have daddy issues, and Bernie knows how to solve them.
“I call him Daddy because I have deep-seated Daddy issues and I need a father figure in my life. Also his drug policy is my shit,” said Chris (@crasstopher_), a 22-year old Michigan State University student.
He’s famous and important, and therefore he should be addressed strictly as “daddy.”
“Well, at the base of it, it was to join in on the meme of calling him daddy. You see this “daddy” thing on Twitter a lot with famous and important men,” said Lucas Coberly, (@hipstersandwich) a 20-year old University of Arkansas student. “It’s usually reserved for men that people look up to, and since I look up to Bernie and also wanted to be in on the joke, I decided to call him daddy.”
Some teens support Bernie Sanders for superficial reasons.
“I call Bernie Sanders Daddy because he WOKE, he CUTE, he FINE, and he old,” said Will (@EGGSERCISE), a 15-year-old from Salt Lake City, Utah.
They believe he is their actual father as he is the first being they gazed upon after hatching out of their Twitter egg.
“I call Bernie Sanders Daddy because he is Daddy. He knows exactly what the millennials want and everything he says just makes me go ‘YASSSSSSS!!!,” said Lauren Pellegrino (@TrippyLoner), a 20-year-old Valencia College student from Orlando, Florida.
They share mutual respect.
“I do it to be humorous for the most part, but I do think it speaks to our generation as a whole that someone who looks like Bernie Sanders gets called “Daddy.” He’s not a bad looking man, it’s just that it’s his mind we’re attracted to. Bernie Sanders is Daddy as F because he cares about my rights. I can sit on his lap and call him “Daddy,” and he’d still give me the respect I deserve. That makes him the epitome of “Daddy,” said Alex (@tophatstevie), a 20-year-old from San Pedro, California.
They believe in what he stands for.
“I am a teen and I can admit I’ve called him Daddy multiple times. I believe many teens do it because they think he’s pretty cool and they like some of the points he stands for. The others are probably just following the trend,” said Meme (@badpyt_), a 16-year-old Joliet High School student from Chicago.
Because age is just a number.
“Bernie Sanders has been a Daddy since day one. If he’s 74, I’m 74 ;),” said Dre Harris (@Dre_Harris14), a 17-year-old Alemany High School student from Los Angeles.
They respect him.
“For me, it’s more of a joke than anything,” said Antonio Del Otero (@antoniodelotero), a 15-year-old Huron High School student from Detroit, Michigan. “However, I do respect and support Bernie Sanders very much because we stand for similar ideals. I think a huge percentage of his supporters are young and influential teenagers who tend to be ‘in with the times,’ if you will, and use words like Daddy to jokingly describe him. Also, I call Bernie Sanders Daddy because he know what he talking about, he sassy, and he fine AF.”
They are being controlled by a shapeshifting pizza demon named Nefarious who wants to pursue a romantic relationship with their label manager, Matt.
“I call Bernie Sanders Daddy because I am being controlled by a shapeshifting pizza demon named Nefarious who wants to pursue a romantic relationship with my label manager, Matt,” said Justin Andrew (@falsepanic), a 21-year-old University of Tennessee student from Knoxville, Tennessee.
To express favor.
“I think millennials really enjoy the terms “mom” and “dad” to express our favor in regard to a particular celebrity,” said Raquel Ochoa (@sadnpathetic), a 22-year-old gender studies major at UCLA. “Bernie is quickly becoming a social media sensation since he’s the most popular presidential candidate for us millennials. Bernie doesn’t have to try.
“He’s a born dad. Dad chic is effortless, it’s relatable, it’s laughable, but not in the way you’d think. People are pushing out positive memes about Bernie, what he’s promising, what we have to look forward to in a nation under Bernie. Meme culture is our culture right now, and he’s the one who is looked at favorably.”
email: [email protected]
Twitter: @Almasi_ |
Does staring at breasts improve men's health? According to a German study, the answer is yes! Dr. Karen Weatherby of Frankfurt, Germany, created this provocative study with the help of 200 male outpatients. According to the study, half of the sample set were asked to look at female breasts, while the other half were instructed to refrain from doing so.
Five years later, the study published the following results: "Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out." According to Weatherby's findings, men that stared at breasts daily had lower blood pressure, slower resting pulse rates, as well as fewer instances of coronary artery disease.
"Sexual excitement gets the heart pumping and improves blood circulation," explains Dr. Weatherby. "There's no question: Gazing at breasts makes men healthier." "Our study indicates that engaging in this activity a few minutes daily cuts the risk of stroke and heart attack in half. We believe that by doing so consistently, the average man can extend his life four to five years."
We're sorry, gentlemen. The Weatherby study is a hoax. In fact, the fake study has got many outlets talking. Even MSNBC covered the topic and suggested that men that stare at breasts have a healthier heart than men that don't. That said, a story from Men's Health did try to bridge breasts oogling and health together with a somewhat scientific explanation.
Men's Health explained that looking at breasts and looking at kittens benefit your health by creating a positive mindset. Pleasant emotions can make individuals, both men and women, make better decisions about their health. In a study of 756 participants, all subjects wrote down personal health goals. One half of the subjects were frequently encouraged to think positive thoughts and make multiple self-affirmations throughout the day.
After one year, researchers noted that one half of the patients with coronary artery disease have increased their physical activity versus 37 percent from the control group. 42 percents of those with high blood pressure stuck to their medication plan compared to 36 percent in the control group.
The study does not prove that men that stare at breasts have better heart health, but it does show positive attitude plays an important role in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. |
A man who spent 21 years in prison for murder had his conviction overturned today - and says he lost decades behind bars because of a crooked cop.
Derrick Hamilton, 49, was imprisoned for supposedly murdering Nathaniel Cash in 1991, but has always been adamant he had nothing to do with it.
Instead, he says, he was locked up because former NYPD detective Louis Scarcella intimidated a woman into claiming she witnessed him shoot Cash dead.
Exonerated: Derrick Hamilton, 49, was wrongfully convicted of a 1991 murder - and has only now had formal recognition that he was innocent all along
Family: Hamilton, pictured above holding his daughter outside court in Brooklyn, said was paroled three years ago and got a job as a paralegal even before the exoneration
Cash’s girlfriend, Jewel Smith, told a court that she saw Hamilton kill her boyfriend, but later recanted.
A review of evidence in the case showed that Cash was shot in the back – while Smith’s testimony said he was hit in the chest. Ballistic analysis also showed that more than one gun had been fired, ABC7 reported.
Hamilton today held his young daughter in his arms as he spoke to reporters outside of a Brooklyn courthouse. He said: ‘One day in prison is too much for an innocent man. [Today is] exhilarating. It's a grateful day.’
He was paroled in 2011, and got a job as a paralegal, but was only formally cleared of the murder on Friday.
In 'Crooked cop': Hamilton, pictured above in court, says that former NYPD officer Louis Scarcella intimidated murder victim Nathaniel Cash's girlfriend into saying she saw him kill the victim
Joy: Hamilton, who said he is 'grateful' for the overturned conviction, hugged attorneys in court after the judge made his decision
Hamilton wore a baseball cap which said ‘wrongfully convicted’ on the front, and on the side said ‘victims of Detective Scarcella’.
He is the fourth man to be exonerated in an investigation Scarcella contributed to, the New York Daily News reported.
According to the News, Hamilton admitted he was ‘bitter’ about his years in jail, but said he is coming to terms with it. He added his first priority is to ‘party, party, party’.
However, lawyers for Detective Scarcella issued a blanket denial that he had done anything to wrongfully convict anybody during his policing career.
They said: ‘To date there has been no finding by any judge, nor has there been a statement by any prosecutor, to sustain the sensational claims that have appeared in the press that Detective Scarcella contributed to any person’s wrongful conviction’. |
We've got a brilliant song premiere from German technical death metal masters Obscura . The band has partnered with us for the exclusive stream of "Sermon of the Seven Suns," the opening track from Obscura's fourth full-length album, Akróasis .
Akróasis is the highly anticipated follow-up to 2011's Omnivium , which brought an increased compositional tact to Obscura's already ultra-technical approach. Obscura promise Akróasis to be the heaviest, most complex record in the band's history, using odd time signatures "never heard before in metal." The album's title track has already been released, and it absolutely rips.
If you dig the Akróasis title track, "Sermon of the Seven Suns" will surely melt your face. “'Sermon of the Seven Suns,' the opening track of our fourth album Akróasis , perfectly blends all sides of Obscura, past and present," says Obscura frontman Steffen Kummerer. "Signature riffing, shredtastic seven strings and trade off solos combined with the unique use of multi-tuplet odd time rhythms, multilayered patterns on all instruments and the high end production we have been looking for years. Using analog equipment and our live setups only, Akróasis turned into the most organic record up to date. The drums sound crystal clear, each bass and guitar notes are audible with the vocals framing each arrangement within a bright mix and wide range of dynamics.”
Take an exclusive listen to Obscura's "Sermon of the Seven Suns" in the player below. Obscura's Akróasis is set to arrive Feb. 5 through Relapse Records. To pre-order a copy of the album, click here .
Obscura, "Sermon of the Seven Sons" - Exclusive Premiere |
Kael Cup Championship
Day 1: 5 rounds of Standard, 5 rounds of Peasant
Day 2: 5 rounds of Unlegendary, Cut to a top 16 based on total score
Top 16: Standard format
How to get an invite
Win one of the weekly Kael Cup tournaments.
Win or top 5 a ladder.
Win a major SBE or community event such as the golden gauntlet.
Win a Kael Cup Qualifier
How to get a bye
Win one of the weekly tournaments while already invited
Win a Kael Cup Qualifier
Top 5 a ladder while already invited
Win a ladder to get 2 byes. This is currently the only way to get 2 byes.
When: Saturday 18th Oct, 2014. 12:00 PM (America - New York) (Time and Date subject to change)Prizes: Winner recieves a special Kael Cup Champion trophy. Guaranteed $500 value minimum total prize pool. More details to be announced later.Who: Anyone with an inviteCost: Nothing. Just need an inviteFormat:Byes may be applied to any one format. Double byes must be applied as a first round bye in two different formats. Single byes do not stack. |
Advertisement
The World Wind Energy Association released its mid-year report for 2011, and showed an increase in installations over the same period a year earlier. A total of 18,405 megawatts of wind power were installed in the first half of this year around the world, up from 16,000 MW in 2010.
Unsurprisingly, China accounted for a huge chunk of the 2011 installations, with 8,000 MW of new wind power. The U.S. followed far behind, at 2,252 MW; that represents a big increase over a lackluster 2010 for the U.S., though, when 1,200 MW were added in the first six months of the year. Some other countries adding a lot of wind capacity through June 2011 were India (1,480 MW), Germany (766 MW), and Canada (603 MW). WWEA expects another 25,500 MW to be installed around the globe the rest of this year, bringing the total for 2011 to 43,900 MW. This represents almost a 17 percent increase over 2010's 37,642 MW.
The world's total wind energy capacity reached 215,000 MW at the end of June, and China accounted for an impressive 24.5 percent of that total, at 52,800 MW. The top five countries on the capacity list -- China, U.S., Germany, Spain, and India -- own almost three quarters of the world's capacity.
Notably, though, the global wind energy market is expanding. There are now 86 countries using wind energy (the latest three to join the party are Venezuela, Honduras, and Ethiopia), and those countries outside the top 10 in capacity now account for about 14 percent of the world's total.
Stefan Gsanger, the secretary general of WWEA, said in a press release: "We hope that especially the UN climate change conference in Durban will lead to better frameworks for wind energy mainly in developing countries. Amongst the industrialized countries, we expect that Japan will play an active and positive role in wind power in the foreseeable future and join soon the group of leading wind countries.” This, of course, being particular relevant in the wake of the Fukushima disaster and Japan's decision to rely less heavily on nuclear power.
(Image via WWEA) |
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All the artists playing this year's Glastonbury festival – from the Rolling Stones and Cat Power to … Bruce Forsyth
Pyramid stage
Friday
Arctic Monkeys
Dizzee Rascal
The Vaccines
Professor Green
Rita Ora
Jake Bugg
Haim
Toumani Diabate
Saturday
The Rolling Stones
Primal Scream
Elvis Costello
Ben Howard
Laura Mvula
Billy Bragg
Rokia Traoré
Sunday
Mumford & Sons
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Vampire Weekend
Kenny Rogers
Rufus Wainwright
First Aid Kit
Bassekou Kouyate
Other stage
Friday
Portishead
Foals
Alt-J
Tame Impala
The Lumineers
Enter Shikari
Amanda Palmer
The Hives
TBA
Saturday
Chase & Status
Example
Two Door Cinema Club
Alabama Shakes
Noah and the Whale
Azealia Banks
Dry The River
The 1975
The Staves
Sunday
the xx
Smashing Pumpkins
Editors
Of Monsters and Men
Pil
I Am Kloot
Stornoway
The Heavy
Zulu Winter
West Holts stage
Friday
Chic
Seasick Steve
Tom Tom Club
Toro y Moi
Alice Russell
Goat
The Child of Lov
Classica Orchestra Afrobeat
Saturday
Public Enemy
Major Lazer
Maverick Sabre
The Orb and Indigenous People
Badbadnotgood
The Bombay Royale
Fatoumata Diawara
Troker
Sunday
Bobby Womack
Lianne La Havas
Sérgio Mendes
Ondatrópica
The Congos
Dub Colossus
Matthew E White
Riot Jazz
Park stage
Friday
The Horrors
Django Django
Dinosaur Jr
Palma Violets
Solange
King Krule
Half Moon Run
Teleman
Rachel Zeffira
Saturday
Fuck Buttons
Calexico
Rodriguez
Devendra Banhart
Haim
Ed Harcourt
Melody's Echo Chamber
Josephine
Nick Mulvey
Sunday
Cat Power
Steve Mason
Michael Kiwanuka
Laura Mvula
Tim Burgess
Stealing Sheep
The Pictish Trail
Rozi Plain
John Peel stage
Friday
Crystal Castles
The Courteeners
Bastille
Frightened Rabbit
Miles Kane
Local Natives
Peace
Kodaline
Dog Is Dead
San Cisco
Fránçois and the Atlas Mountains
Saturday
Hurts
Everything Everything
Savages
Johnny Marr
Daughter
The Strypes
Toy
TBA
Jagwar Mar
Prāta Vētra
RPM
Sunday
Phoenix
Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt
James Blake
Jessie Ware
Tom Odell
Villagers
Deap Vally
Suuns
The Bots
The Dancers
Acoustic tent
Friday
Sinéad O'Connor
Glen Hansard
Bill Wyman's Rhythm Kings
Martha Wainwright
Martin Stephenson and the Daintees
Jake Bugg
Joel Rafael
Lucy Ward
Rainy Boy Sleep
The Riptide Movement
Saturday
The Bootleg Beatles
Steve Winwood
The Proclaimers
Kt Tunstall
Deacon Blue's Ricky Ross
Zac Brown Band
Steve Forbert
Blues Boy Dan
Hudson Taylor
Bridie Jackson and the Arbour
Sunday
Lucinda Williams
Gabrielle Aplin
Seth Lakeman
Jack Savoretti
Gretchen Peters
London Community Gospel Choir
The Gypsy Queens
Matt Corby
Trevor Moss & Hannah-Lou
Port Isla
Avalon stage
Friday
Shooglenifty
Stornoway
Lucy Rose
Oysterband
Molotov Jukebox
Crowns
Gordie MacKeeman and His Rhythm Boys
Hobo Jones & the Junkyard Dogs
Saturday
Vintage Trouble
Beverley Knight
Newton Faulkner
The Urban Voodoo Machine
Penguin Cafe
Headmix
Mad Dog Mcrea
Ben Caplan
Josh Doyle
Sunday
Xavier Rudd
Gary Clark Jr
Evan Dando
The Staves
JJ Grey & Mofro
Sir Bruce Forsyth
The Destroyers
The Demon Barbers Xl
Bridie Jackson & the Arbour
Left Field
Friday
Billy Bragg and Band
The Milk
Emmanuel Jal
The comedy spot
The Radical Round-Up
Debates
Saturday
The Beat
Wayne Kramer
Dizraeli and the Small Gods
The comedy spot
The Radical Round-Up
Debates
Sunday
Amazing Grace Live! featuring Sam Duckworth, Jehst, Sweet Billy Pilgrim and special guests
Kate Nash
Geoff Berner
The comedy spot
The Radical Round-Up
Debates
William's Green
Friday
Guilty Pleasures
Mount Kimbie
Bobby Tank (DJ)
Fenech-Soler
MS MR
65daysofstatic
The Black Angels
Tribes
Savages
The 1975
Pinkunoizu
Parlour Flames
The Rainband
Laurence Fox
Saturday
Motown Party
New Untouchables Mod Club
The Sheepdogs
Willy Mason
Lewis Watson
Josh Record
Martha and Rufus Wainwright
Revere
Half Moon Run
Swim Deep
Treetop Flyers
Drenge
The Others
Scott & Charlene's Wedding
Sunday
Sink the Pink and Georgia Lewis
Cover to Cover
The Beat
Department S
Public Service Broadcasting
Everything Everything
New Build
Barbarossa
The Vaccines
Palma Violets
The View
Ben Caplan
Ulrich Schnauss
Carrie Tree
Sonic
Friday
Hot Natured
Maceo Plex
Disclosure
Dog Blood
Sbtrkt (DJ set)
Julio Bashmore
Steve Aoki
Gold Panda
Forget Me Not
Mount Kimbie
Forget Me Not
The Other Tribe
Davos
Saturday
Family Stone, featuring original members of Sly and the Family Stone Jerry Martini, Cynthia Robinson and Greg Errico
MistaJam
Nas
MistaJam
Rudimental
MistaJam
AlunaGeorge
Wiley (DJ set)
Iggy Azalea
Charlie Sloth
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
Charlie Sloth
Angel
Charlie Sloth
Sunday
Sub Focus Live
Skream & Benga feat Sgt Pokes and Youngman
Netsky Live
Flux Pavilion
Zane Lowe
Redlight Live
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaur
Dr Meaker
Bobby Tank
Wow!
Thursday
TBA
Eats Everything
T.Williams
The 2 Bears
Zebra Katz
Hackman
Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde
Friday
Carl Craig
Rustie
Scuba
George FitzGerald
Justin Martin
Bondax
Space Dimension Controller
Melé and Slick Don
Monki
Hospitality boat party hosted by MC Wrec presents Metric, Fred V & Grafix, Nu:Logic and Danny Byrd
Saturday
Maya Jane Coles
Kerri Chandler
Bicep
Huxley
Dusky
Futureboogie boat party featuring Christophe & Lukas, Outboxx, Futureboogie DJs, PBR Streetgang, Crazy P, Waifs & Strays and Maxxi Soundsystem
Sunday
Pearson Sound
Ben UFO
Pangea
Hessle Audio takeover presents Pangea, Ben UFO and Pearson Sound
Joy Orbison
Jackmaster
B.Traits
Friction with Scrufizzer, P-Money and Linguistics
KOAN Sound
Loadstar
Rockwell
Dismantle
Skreamizm boat party presents …
Gully
Friday
Jupiter & Okwess International
MO DJ
Rebelution
Dub Pistols
Black Roots
Katchafire
Laid Blak
Fimber Bravo
Generals Hi-Fi
Saturday
David Rodigan's Ram Jam
TBA
Stylo G
Iration Steppas
The Nextmen
Prince Fatty
Rootikal
Resonators
Channel One
Onlyjoe
Sunday
The Congos
Dreadzone
Hollie Cook
Natty
Babyhead
Blue King Brown
Saritah
Dub Mafia feat Buggsy
DJ Flora and DJ Skylion
Cinema
Thursday
Brave
Beasts of the Southern Wild
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Robot & Frank
Good Vibrations
The House I Live In
Friday
The Croods
Ice Age 4: Continental Drift
Searching for Sugar Man
Iron Man 3
Django Unchained
Sightseers
The Chemical Brothers: Don't Think
Saturday
Monsters Inc 3D
Life of Pi
Moonrise Kingdom
Star Trek Into Darkness 3D
Cloud Atlas
God Bless America
Otway: The Movie
Sunday
TBA
Frankenweenie
Oblivion
Trance
Svengali – advance preview
Last Shop Standing
The Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling
Shut Up and Play the Hits
Kidz Field
Thursday
Alex, Andy, Sid and Katy – our CBeebies friends
Rainbow Theatre's Paper Wings
Prof Panic's Puppet Circus
CBeebies: Joe and Andy
Re:play/Access to Music
The Amazing Coreo Hazzard
Clown Zaz
Aliens and Wolves Walkabouts
Bell & Bullock
Make 'n' Do craft marquee
Friday
Tucked in Theatre's Golden Cowpat
CBeebies: Joe and Andy
Rainbow Theatre's Romeo and Juliet
The Wolf Collective
Re:play/Access to Music
Face-painting/craft workshops
360-Degree BMX Show
John Row storytellers' crew
Nct/Tumbletots/Tatty Bumpkin
Seikou Susso Kora Player
Saturday
TBA
Tucked in Theatre's Golden Cowpat
Coreo Hazzard
Rainbow Theatre's Paper Wings
CBeebies: Joe and Andy
Clown Zaz
Gorilla Hugs/Pedro the Clown
Sisters of Percy/Ape Project
Nicada Puppets/Zu Aerial Dance
Seikou Susso Kora Player
Sunday
Rainbow Theatre's Paper Wings
Alex, Andy, Sid and Katy – our CBeebies friends
TBA
Story Don/Christine Willison
Captain Kipper/The Wicked Wolf
Bubbles the Clown/Stilt Affliction
CBeebies: Joe and Andy
Re:play/Access to Music
Woodcraft Folk
Albion Kids Show |
(CNN) Lyn Balfour promised her son, limp in her arms, that she would never let it happen to another parent. She vowed to her baby she would tell every mother, every father, everyone who has had the responsibility of caring for a child. That's all she could do now.
She would be the world's horrific reminder that people can and do leave their children in hot cars.
"The pain -- it's not like a normal death in your family where you lose a child ... you get to grieve and move on," Balfour said, her voice cracking. "That pain is every day. It's always there. It never goes away."
Leaving a child in a car seems unfathomable to many. Isn't a child a caregiver's priority at all times? What kind of person just forgets? If you are quick to say, 'I could never,' consider that people who devote their lives to studying these incidents say that anyone of any age or profession is liable to do it. So are people who are educated and not, rich, poor or middle class, mothers as much as fathers. It happens more than one might think: about three to four times a month in the United States. Criminal charges can vary widely from case to case.
On Thursday, a suburban Atlanta dad whose toddler died after he left him in a car for seven hours on a sweltering summer day will appear in court. Justin Ross Harris faces murder and second-degree child cruelty charges.
It has been seven years since Balfour forgot her 9-month-old Bryce in her backseat while she spent hours at work. That morning she was rushing to deal with an emergency at her Charlottesville, Virginia, job. Her routine was off. She normally dropped Bryce off at day care.
But that day she had tucked the 9-month-old in a car seat directly behind her driver's seat, rather than his usual spot behind the passenger seat. She parked, got out and went inside to work.
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About 4 p.m., the sitter called her to see how Bryce was doing.
Balfour paused. She was confused. Wasn't the baby with his sitter?
"No, Lyn, you didn't drop him off this morning," the babysitter answered.
Stunned, realizing what she'd done, Balfour ran to her car. She started CPR on Bryce.
The mother's cries for help would be heard on a 911 call later played in court, but it was too late.
Overheated, Bryce died.
How often does it happen?
At least 44 children died in 2013 from heatstroke caused by being left in cars in the United States, according to national nonprofit organization KidsAndCars.org . At least 13 children have died this year for the same reason. Over the past decade, the group figures, there have been at least 388 children who have died of vehicular heatstroke.
KidsAndCars bases its data on U.S. news reports, and when it's possible, the group's volunteers confirm the information independently with law enforcement, attorneys and families, director Amber Rollins said.
Rollins said she's unaware of any group that tracks the number of children worldwide who have died after being left inside vehicles.
The group hears from parents who reach out after years of living in silent shame about the time they forgot their child in a car, she said.
Charged with second-degree murder, Balfour could have gone to prison for 40 years, according to the Washington Post, which told her story and others involving caregivers who left their children in cars.
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A jury listened to the mother's 911 call, her voice full of panic and horror.
They found her not guilty.
"I never made excuses for his death," she said. "It was my lapse in responsibility ... why he's not here."
Over the years, Balfour has gone over and over in her head how she could have done it. She is a person skilled at doing many things at once. She's a former service member with one tour in Bosnia and two tours in Iraq and a professional who, she says, won a Bronze Star for managing tens of millions of dollars in projects.
On KidsAndCars, Balfour wrote of that day: "I am in shock and overcome in disbelief that this cannot be happening to me, I cannot be the type of mother who would accidentally forget her child. ..."
Who would do such a thing?
A mother is just as likely as a father to leave her child in a vehicle, the Post reported.
The people who have done it range in age and financial and educational background, experts say. A veterinarian, a doctor, a dentist, a professor, a school principal and a rocket scientist are among the parents who have accidentally forgotten about their children and are now among KidsAndCars' members.
It doesn't matter if a person is highly organized or often absentminded, though people with intense demands in their lives can have more stress and be more sleep-deprived -- two factors that can increase the likelihood their minds could be sidetracked away from a baby in the backseat, said David Diamond, a psychology and molecular physiology professor at University of South Florida.
He studies memory, and for a decade has focused his attention on a phenomena that's come to be known as Forgotten Baby Syndrome. He, too, said he wasn't aware of any international figures on how many children have died after being left in vehicles.
Diamond wrote recently on HLNTV.com that Forgotten Baby Syndrome, is a "failure of prospective memory, which refers to the planning and execution of an action in the future."
Two brain structures process prospective memory: the hippocampus, which stores new information, and the prefrontal cortex, which enables planning, he wrote. The hippocampus processes that a child is in a car. The prefrontal cortex enables a person to create a route, factoring in a change in plans like going to day care rather than going directly to work.
Forgotten Baby Syndrome seems to involve a "clash between prospective memory and another form of memory, referred to as habit memory," he wrote. "Habit memory is formed subconsciously through repeated activities, such as learning how to ride a bike or, in the case of FBS, repeatedly driving to and from home and work."
Lately, Rollins has noticed a greater awareness of how diligent, loving caregivers forget their children in cars. More people who have gone through the experience seem willing to discuss it, she said. They're opening up online, particularly in the comments section of news stories.
"More people seem to be saying, 'Hey, this happened to me, this can happen to wonderful parents,'" Rollins said.
After the hot car death of the Georgia toddler in June, CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin wrote about how she and her husband accidentally left their infant daughter in a hot car during a shopping trip.
They realized the mistake minutes into a shopping trip, and ran to the car, she said in a CNN.com Opinion piece.
"Walking into the garden center, my husband turned to me and said: 'My God. We left Paloma in the car.' I screamed, dropped my purse, ran to the car and opened the door. The car was already warm. Her face already flushed. But she was fine and still sleeping. I was ashamed, embarrassed and horrified at what I had done.
"It dawned on me immediately -- I could have killed my girl," she wrote.
Hostin's daughter wasn't hurt.
Had Hostin never experienced what it was like to forget her own child, she would have said that all parents must be prosecuted for an act like that.
"I punish myself all the time for leaving my girl in that car for a few minutes," she wrote.
What charges have caregivers faced?
When parents go to court after leaving their children in hot cars, the outcomes can vary greatly.
Daniel Gray was recently sentenced to four years in prison for the death of his infant, who was left in a car for three hours during a hot Arizona summer, according to the Arizona Republic
Gray pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
In April, authorities arrested Eric Fred Carlin in Florida for allegedly leaving his 9-month-old son in a hot car for 20 minutes.
The baby survived, but Carlin was charged with child neglect without great bodily harm and unattended child in a motor vehicle in excess of 15 minutes, CNN affiliate WPTV said.
In March, investigators charged Shanesha Taylor of Arizona with felony child abuse after she allegedly left her children in her vehicle while she went on a job interview.
Recently, Taylor spoke publicly for the first time about what happened, giving details of her life to a New York Times reporter
Without childcare options, Taylor said she chose to leave her kids in her car so she could go to an interview for a job that she needed to pull herself out of poverty.
Taylor parked in a Scottsdale lot. There was no shade, and it was 71 degrees, the newspaper reported. Attributing to a police report, the Times said Taylor left her sons in their car seats, cracked her car's tinted windows and left the keys in the ignition with the fan on but the engine off.
In 10 minutes, a car can heat up 20 degrees Fahrenheit, and cracking a window does little to keep a car cool; a child's body temperature can rise up to five times faster than an adult's, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Many who felt passionately about Taylor's case spoke out on social media. While some viewed her as a criminal who should be prosecuted, others saw her as a desperate single mother and a symbol of Americans suffering in a terrible economy.
She is out of jail on $9,000 bond, according to Jerry Cobb, a spokesman for Maricopa County Attorney's Office.
Taylor has pleaded not guilty.
How can accidents be prevented?
KidsAndCars has tips on how to keep the unthinkable from happening. Place something you'll need, such as a cell phone, handbag or briefcase, near the child in the back seat. Keep a large stuffed animal in the child's car seat when it's not occupied.
When the child is in the car seat, put the stuffed animal in the front passenger seat to remind you that the child is in the back. Tell a child's day care center or babysitter that they will always be called if your child isn't coming in as scheduled. If the child is absent without an explanation, the day care center or babysitter is expected to contact a parent or another designated caregiver.
Those human tricks may be the best available options for caregivers. Technology, by and large, doesn't seem to have caught up to the problem yet.
Pam D'Angio with Texas-based Baby Alert International is trying to change that. The company has designed the ChildMinder Infant-Toddler Elite Pad System. It's essentially a sensor under an infant or child safety seat that is activated by a child's weight. If someone tries to get out of the car without removing the infant, an alarm sounds on a key fob, she said.
CNN's Gary Tuchman tested the product with a Sugar Land, Texas, family. The ChildMinder appeared to work.
But Tuchman noted that products like the ChildMinder are not foolproof. Batteries go low. Someone might not hear the alarm.
And two years ago, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a study that deemed devices intended to prevent infant car heatstroke deaths "inconsistent and unreliable."
Researchers noted numerous concerns, CNN reported in 2012 . Some devices required caregivers to situate a child a certain way within a restraint. Others stop functioning when they get wet and cell phone interference hinders some, the report said. In its analysis -- the first of its kind -- the government stressed that the devices should not be the sole option for caregivers trying to avoid accidentally forgetting their child in a car.
Memory expert Diamond argues that products like the ChildMinder could at least be a good start.
A parent himself, he turned his attention to the topic of parents forgetting their children in cars when he was horrified by a news story about a Florida dentist whose son died in a hot car.
"The bottom line is that there hasn't been sufficient government funding to address this," he said. "You put a man on the moon but you can't detect a child in a car? If there were funding, there would be technology."
Diamond said in his car a sensor on the passenger side door rings if he puts a bag of groceries or something relatively heavy there.
"If we can figure that out," he said. "We can come up with something to tell us if our child is still in the car." |
HOUSTON (CBS) — It doesn’t sell newspapers, and it doesn’t draw radio or TV ratings, but the play of the Patriots’ offensive line this season has been as big a reason as any other for the Patriots’ being able to reach the Super Bowl as opposed to falling short.
The reason it’s not the most inspirational topic is that the intricacies of the position don’t always translate well to the offensive line layman. Whether it’s footwork, pre-snap communication, punch technique or any other bit of mechanics, it’s typically not what folks discuss while sitting around and enjoying the game. It’s more of a results-oriented business than anything else.
But the offensive line has been a unit of strength for the Patriots all year long, and it’s no coincidence that its rebound has come in Dante Scarnecchia’s first year back on the job as the offensive line coach.
As far as football coaches go, Dante’s name is legend. He’s got more than four decades of coaching experience, and whatever it is that he’s been able to do since returning from his brief retirement, it’s been working.
It’s rare for any Patriots assistant coach to speak to the media, so media day — excuse me, “Opening Night” — presented the rare opportunity to hear from Scarnecchia himself.
Here’s what he had to say.
About being at Media Day…
No, no, I hate this. Being out here right now? I like coaching. Coaching’s good. I never didn’t like coaching. I didn’t get away from the game because I didn’t like coaching. I didn’t like — I still don’t like — getting off the bus at 5 o’clock in the morning. … The first day I was back, we went into a personnel meeting at 7 or 8 in the morning, and I left at 7:30 at night.
But that’s part of the deal, and you know, you just deal with it. I like being out there. I like meeting with them in the classroom, I like being out on the field, I like teaching the game. All that stuff’s a lot of fun for me. And I like the games. All that other stuff, it’s tough, but you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do every minute of it.
On if he was ‘ready to come back’ after his time off…
I don’t know if I was ready to come back when it was time to come back. I never thought that I would have the opportunity to come back, and I wasn’t even looking for that. I guess, the call was made, and my wife and I talked about it for about 10 days, and we decided to go ahead and do it again. I’m going to be 69 years old next month. I like what I’m doing right now and I’m going to continue to do it, see how it all goes.
On how fortunate the offensive line has been in terms of health…
Yeah, it’s been unbelievable, and I think that’s been a huge factor in us improving as an offensive line. Two things: continuity — everybody’s playing the same position — and health. I mean, really good health. We haven’t even put anyone out there that before a game you say, ‘I hope they can make it all the way through.’ I mean, we’ve got some guys who have been out there and have really had good health, they’ve practiced every week. I mean, really, we haven’t even had anybody miss any practices. And that’s a tribute to [strength and conditioning coach] Moses Cabrera and the strength guys. They’ve done a great job. The players themselves have done a great job. So I think those have been the big things.
On the rarity of enjoying such a healthy season on the O-line…
I think the Falcons have had all five of their starters for all 16 games, all 18 games, so you’re talking about two teams. Other than the first three games for us, we had some guys that missed, but after that, we were all right.
On the changes from the rotations on the line last year compared to the continuity this year…
Yeah, I think we all felt that way. It’s not a good thing. I think you have to have flexibility within your line, because you only take seven to a game. If you lose one or two guys, I mean, you’ve got to have guards that can play tackle and tackles that can play guard, and guards that can play center. If you don’t have that flexibility, you’re dead. You’re dead in this league.
So, having said that, there’s a difference between flexibility and continuity. I just think, if you have the left guard and left tackle playing together for 16 games, then when he says ‘A,’ the other guy knows what ‘A’ means, whatever that is. It’s just so much easier. And that’s been a big factor — the biggest factor. Believe me.
On what makes Bill Belichick unique, and what their working relationship has been like…
It’s always been good. He has a vision of what he wants things to look like, and he shares that — well, I was going to say share that vision, but he certainly makes it clear what that vision is. And that’s why he’s easy to work for. He wants things a certain way, and he expects things to be done a certain way, but he really gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility and trusts us to do the things that we want to do.
Now, he’s the boss. The thing about doing it this way, and what you want is either an explanation or, ‘Yeah, all right, we’ll do it that way.’ The explanation of why we shouldn’t, or no explanation. Just, ‘Yeah, we’ll do it.’ But I think he’s easy to work for, and hey, the guy’s one of the greatest coaches that’s ever lived. It’s a pleasure to work for him. It really is.
On Belichick being open to assistant coaches having freedom, and whether that’s rare…
No, I don’t think [it’s rare]. I think the good ones all possess that quality. I really believe that.
On one of his players saying that he’s very funny in meetings and can connect with the younger players on the team…
[Laughs] Who said it?
It was Shaq [Mason].
[Laughs] I don’t know if I’m funny in meetings. I wouldn’t say like I’m Shecky Greene up there. No, I just think you’ve got to get your work done and whatever you have to do to get it done. that’s pretty much it.
On if his workdays are still as long as they were earlier in his coaching career…
Yeah, it’s worse. I don’t know why. It should be easier, shouldn’t it? I mean, shoot, 45 years, it should be easier. I think what really happens now is that we have all these ways to look at our opponents that we never had before. Really and truly, we have access to every game that they’ve played over the last 15 years. I mean, if we wanted to research Dan Quinn, we could do it, and we have. The way they call their defenses, all that. And so, instead of saying it’s just going to be this or that, you always want to make sure, and so you just stay in there and grind it and grind it and grind it. Because it’s so big. Every week, it’s so big. And you want to do your best work. And really, this week, we better do our best work.
On what time he arrives to work in the morning…
Oh, that’s between me and me.
You can email Michael Hurley or find him on Twitter @michaelFhurley. |
SAN FRANCISCO — Web wanderers are more likely to get a computer virus by visiting a religious website than by peering at porn, according to a study released on Tuesday.
“Drive-by attacks” in which hackers booby-trap legitimate websites with malicious code continue to be a bane, the US-based anti-virus vendor Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.
Websites with religious or ideological themes were found to have triple the average number of “threats” that those featuring adult content, according to Symantec.
“It is interesting to note that websites hosting adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked tenth,” Symantec said in the report.
“We hypothesize that this is because pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet and, as a result, have a vested interest in keeping their sites malware-free; it’s not good for repeat business.”
The report was based on information gathered last year by the Symantec Global Intelligence Network, which monitors cyber attack activity in more than 200 countries through its services and sensors.
Symantec said that it blocked 5.5 billion attacks in 2011 in an increase of 81 percent from the prior year.
In keeping with trends seen by other Internet security firms, Symantec reported surges in hacks aimed at smartphones or tablet computers and in attacks targeting workers in companies or government agencies. |
With the constant media onslaught of startups raising colossal funding rounds and the perceived “norms” in the startup world, the common path for early stage companies is to raise venture capital; however doing so too early can put the future of your business in jeopardy.
Getting your startup rocking and rolling obviously requires cash but where do you source that cash? Believe me, raising money requires a lot of precious time and focus, which could be better spent developing your product and fulfilling customer needs. If you raise VC money expect to serve these Sith lords when commanded, again something that requires a lot of your time and patience.
Like any dichotomy, there will always be entrepreneurs battling on either side. To raise or not to raise, that is the question.
From personal experience, bootstrapping your business can be one of the biggest saving graces, one that will help you create a much more resilient and more valuable business.
So without more bla bla, here are 5 reasons you should take the risk and bootstrap your business.
1. Jedi Like Focus And Self-Imposed Pressure
Bootstrapping a business means the funds you are burning are yours, not the butcher down the street nor the bankers…yours. There is no better incentive than having personal money invested to make sure you are 1000% focused on every element of the business so it comes out of the oven looking like Ferran Adria’s latest culinary delight rather than my attempt at cheesecake. If you don’t make this work then there is no getting that money back.
One of the greatest things about bootstrapping is that it allows you to focus your time on creating an uber mega super startup without having to worry about spending hours of your day wining, dining and pleading to investors to give you money. You have more time to focus on building a product that customers actually want and focusing all of your time on your core business.
A lot of the time entrepreneurs who bootstrap find a sustainable model more quickly than companies backed by VCs as the founders have more time to focus on the build-iterate cycle thus arriving to market fit more rapidly than their wealthy brothers.
Bootstrapping means no investors involved so the pressure comes from internally (is your own). So instead of outsiders shouting at you and pressuring you to reach deadlines, hit targets and employ more people you can just stand in the mirror and shout at yourself. It’s much nicer and more fun.
2. You Become A Master of Prioritizing And Will Burn Less
When your own money is on the table and knowing that when you hit a certain limit that the funds are gone, you really learn to watch your burn and to prioritize what comes first. Bootstrapping means you need to become an expert at controlling costs and keeping overheads to a minimum, staying lean and focusing on achieving higher profit margins. It will help you to take a step back and look at your company from an outsider’s point of view. It’s incredible what you will see and how capable you will be to turn things around.
Bootstrapping forces you to prioritize every single cost and to cut out any nonsense that isn’t needed, and believe me you will find plenty. Social media expert who is spending 10 minutes a day posting on FB, Get outtttaaa hereee!
As you have become a Jedi master of focus, the quicker your business model will be validated and the more chance you have of revenue coming in which reduces your burn and makes everyone a happy little camper.
3. Hey Mum Look At Me, I’m Independent, And I’m Flexible Too!
If you raise venture capital, be prepared to feel the heat (actually its more like a horrible sunburn that won’t go away). VC’s expect you to spend their money quickly and to see results even more swiftly so expectations are set very high. Every VC is different, some will play a very active role and some won’t but they all like things done their way.
Most VC’s have expert entrepreneurs at hand who have “been there and done it” who are there to help but this is your baby and you don’t want anyone else playing ball with it or telling it which way to run. Investors are thinking about their return so expect them to want to implement their own methods, monthly meetings, and possibly even people (if you don’t perform well they might replace you with a CEO of their choice).
Being a good ol’ bootsrapper means that you have the independence to run the business the way you want without anyone breathing down your neck. You now have the power to revolutionize the world with your idealistic vision without anyone stifling your creativity. Instead of being directed in a way that might lead you off your yellow brick road, you are accountable for your own decisions so don’t go looking over you shoulder for someone to blame if it doesn’t work out.
4. Execution
Less funds means a short runway and a huge necessity to work quickly to prove your business model. Bootstrapping means you don’t have an endless supply of cash to bring your product to perfection (which if you follow the lean methodology you don’t want to be doing either), so forcing you to get it to market more quickly.
Knowing that you are going to bootstrap a business means you start and get it to market more quickly than if you were chasing investors around like a loco and then trying to perfect your product a zillion times before it’s released.
5. Keeping A Big Piece Of The Pie
Not raising money means not giving up equity, yeyyy! If you bootstrap in a successful manner and manage to grow your business to a mini behemoth then you will have your chance to raise venture capital.
As you will have given up no equity, you’ll be in a much better position to negotiate with investors. If you raise money at an early stage, you’ll have already given up lots of equity that will be further diluted on every following round. Bootstrapping means you keep a bigger piece of the pie and if you do well and are acquired/go public then the math says that on payday you’ll have a bigger smile on your face.
Also when raising VC money, the clauses in the term sheets can be pretty strict on the founders, especially at the early stages. Founder’s shares (which were yours anyway) are usually vested over a period of 3-4 years, which means that if you don’t stick around then you lose the majority of the shares. Plus decision-making processes can be more lengthy and difficult as certain things must be approved by the board. Obviously having a sensible shareholder agreement between co-founders is essential but more often than not the conditions aren’t so harsh.
Bootstrapping can put a lot of financial pressure on the founders and in some cases it might not even be a viable option. It does however give you a great starting point and strong foundations for future success. There have been many success stories of bootstrapped startups selling their startups for billions of dollars so without a doubt it can be done. Give it a whirl on your next adventure!
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Energy industry jolted by advice to Norwegian government from its central bank, which runs $1tn fund
The Norwegian central bank, which runs the country’s sovereign wealth fund – the world’s biggest – has told its government it should dump its shares in oil and gas companies, in a move that could have significant consequences for the sector.
Norges Bank, which manages Norway’s $1tn fund, said ministers should take the step to avoid the fund’s value being hit by a permanent fall in the oil price.
The fund was built on the back of Norway’s hydrocarbon wealth, and around 300bn krone (£27.73bn), or 6%, is invested in oil and gas companies.
Norway’s $885bn-nil advantage in Britain’s sea of social troubles Read more
The recommendation by Norway’s central bank pushed down shares in European oil companies. Europe’s index of oil and gas shares hit its lowest level since mid-October on the news and was trading down 0.39% by late afternoon.
“The return on oil and gas stocks has been significantly lower than in the broad equity market in periods of falling oil prices,” the bank explained in a statement.
“Therefore, it is the bank’s assessment that the government’s wealth can be made less vulnerable to a permanent drop in oil prices if the GPFG [sovereign wealth fund] is not invested in oil and gas stocks.”
The Norwegian government said it would consider the proposal, but a decision should not be expected until next year and a “thorough assessment” was required.
“The issues raised by Norges Bank are complex and multifaceted,” the finance ministry said.
The bank did not set a deadline for when the fund should drop its oil and gas holdings. However, it made clear that its recommendation involved divesting from existing oil and gas shares as well as ruling out future investments.
The fund’s biggest oil and gas holding at the end of 2016 was $5.36bn in Anglo Dutch firm Shell, followed by $3.06bn in ExxonMobil, $2.04bn in fellow US oil firm Chevron, $2.02bn in the UK’s BP, and $2.01bn in France’s Total. It also has shares worth more than $1bn in oil services firm Schlumberger and Italy’s Eni.
The central bank’s move was welcomed by Paul Fisher, former deputy head of the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority and senior associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
“It is not surprising that we see the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund managers no longer prepared to take the increasing risk associated with oil and gas assets, which do not have a long-term future,” he said.
Greenpeace Norway welcomed the central bank’s intervention, but said Norway must now also cease exploring for oil in the Arctic.
“Norway is already heavily invested in oil and gas resources, so selling off the oil fund’s fossil stocks will clearly help reduce our financial carbon risk,” said Truls Gulowsen, head of the group.
Norway’s largest private pension by value said that if the fund did ditch oil and gas stocks, the action could influence other investors.
Jan Erik Saugestad, chief executive of Storebrand Asset Management, said: “From a financial point of view this makes perfect sense, and we have been arguing for this for many years. This is a rational move given the overall exposure the Norwegian economy has towards oil.”
Bill McKibben, co-founder of climate group 350.org, said the move was “as astonishing as the moment when the Rockefellers divested the world’s oldest oil fortune”.
McKibben was referring to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s decision to divest from fossil fuels in 2014.
The oil price fell below $30 a barrel in January 2016 during a two-year slump, but has since recovered to just over $60 in recent weeks on geopolitical uncertainty and expectations that major oil-producers will extend production curbs.
• Follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk, or sign up to the daily Business Today email here. |
The spat arose after Donald Trump tweeted accusations that Sen. Ted Cruz's "people" were "doing very sleazy and dishonest 'pushpolls'" on him. | AP Photo Cruz denies Trump accusation over 'push polls'
Ted Cruz denied all knowledge of robocalls being made in South Carolina on Thursday after Donald Trump accused the Texas senator's "people" of "doing very sleazy and dishonest 'pushpolls' on me."
"I have no idea. We had nothing to do with them. I don't know what they were. We had nothing to do with them. So I had read reports of what is being said but somebody else is doing them, not us," Cruz told reporters before a rally with Glenn Beck in Fort Mill.
Story Continued Below
Brian Phillips, the Cruz team's rapid-response director, tweeted an hour after Trump's initial accusatory tweet, "The push polls are not coming from Cruz. Period."
The push polls are not coming from Cruz. Period. https://t.co/zrtoSnthTO — Brian Phillips (@RealBPhil) February 11, 2016
The episode follows a report by The Washington Post published earlier in the day that refers to robo-calls to potential voters in South Carolina that become hostile when the respondent voices support for a candidate other than Cruz. The Texas senator's campaign denied for that story that it was responsible for the calls, which said they were being conducted by Remington Research, the name of the consulting firm started by Jeff Roe, Cruz's campaign manager.
“We’re not doing any robo-polls in South Carolina,” Cruz’s director of research told the Post. "It’s not us making those calls. Anyone can make those calls as Remington Research to screw with reporters and make Jeff look like he’s doing something.”
Thursday is not the first time that Trump has accused Cruz's campaign of conducting push polling against him. In January, he tweeted:
Just found out that @tedcruz is spending a fortune on Iowa push polls negative to me. Not nice, but OK! New polls are great. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 13, 2016
Campaigns often use automated surveys to test different messages, which are often confused with push polls, which are designed to advance negative information or opposition research and are usually conducted under false pretenses. Message-testing, by contrast, is used by campaigns to gauge the effectiveness of various talking points.
Burgess Everett reported from Fort Mill, South Carolina. |
It appears the Twitter account of Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails County GOP in Minnesota shares image comparing Sanders to Hitler Holder: 'Time to make the Electoral College a vestige of the past' MORE's campaign chairman has been hacked.
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"I've switched teams. Vote Trump 2016. Hi pol," John Podesta's account tweeted Wednesday evening.
The tweet was quickly deleted.
Podesta has also been the target of email hacks. WikiLeaks has released thousands of emails stolen from Podesta's account and published them on its website.
The emails contained portions of the Democratic presidential nominee's private speeches to Wall Street firms.
The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm any of the leaked material and claims that WikiLeaks is acting as a front for the Russian government. |
There is a certain arrogance required to be a top-level professional fighter. The best fighters are filled with hubris, believing they'll prevail no matter the obstacle.
Jon Jones (R) delivers a blow vs. Glover Teixeira. (Getty)
It's often difficult for them to wrap their hands around a loss. It's rarely about what the opponent did or the horror of all horrors, the opponent might be better.
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But that kind of absolute confidence is required to make it to the top.
Glover Teixeira had plenty of it after winning 20 consecutive bouts and going unbeaten for nine years heading into his title bout with light heavyweight champion Jon Jones on April 26 at UFC 172 in Baltimore.
However, performance didn't match confidence as Teixeira took a massive pummeling from Jones. Bruce Buffer wasn't needed to read off the judges' scorecards to understand who won, and who lost, that fight. All it took was a peek at each man after the final bell to know.
Teixeira, though, is one of the rare fighters who acknowledges the ugly truth. Six months after that devastating loss, he's yet to make his first excuse.
He's preparing to fight Phil Davis in the co-main event of UFC 179 on Oct. 25 in Rio de Janeiro and is training as if he's facing another championship bout. He can't afford another one-sided loss and still harbor dreams of somehow, some way, getting another title shot.
UFC president Dana White isn't in the business of giving guys who were routed return matches very quickly, and Teixeira understands it's going to take some time. But he also knows he met a rare athlete in Baltimore.
"I'm upset I lost the fight, of course, but losing is a part of the game," Teixeira said. "I lost to a great fighter, one of the greatest ever, maybe the greatest ever. Jon Jones is a great champion and he's done what he's done for a reason."
Glover Teixeira (top) fights against Ryan Bader during UFC Fight Night in 2013. (USA TODAY Sports)
Story continues
The UFC heavily hyped Teixeira going into the bout and portrayed him as the most serious threat that Jones had faced in his title reign. That's what you do when you're trying to sell tickets and get people to buy pay-per-views.
It was also a bit of a subliminal message, because the Teixeira fight was Jones' first following a titanic struggle with Alexander Gustafsson in the main event of UFC 165 in September 2013:
If Teixeira is better than the guy Jones just fought, we might have a chance to see history made tonight.
Reality set in – it almost always does when the cage door is shut and marketing and public relations and promotion cease to matter – and Teixeira was handled like he'd never been handled before.
However, Teixeira had two things going for him in the bout with Jones that led many to believe he had a chance: He is an extremely hard hitter, both with the overhand right and the short left hook, and he has great jiu-jitsu skills.
Jones hasn't been the UFC's most popular champion, and so he hasn't gotten the credit he deserves for being as great as he is. But Teixeira made a major mistake early and got caught in a shoulder crank. It happened a little past the midpoint of the first round.
It resulted in a torn labrum, but the immediate problem was that Teixeira's great punching power was gone.
His weaknesses against Jones – a lack of speed and an inability to deal with the champion's length and reach – became more prominent.
Teixeira never stopped trying and kept stalking forward after Jones, but it was obvious fairly quickly there would be no historic upset on this night.
Teixeira, who avoided surgery, says he's left the loss in the past. He's using it as a reference point for where he needs to be in order to reach the championship level.
Phil Davis (red gloves) fights Anthony Johnson during UFC 172. (USA TODAY Sports)
"Part of being a professional is understanding how to deal with a loss," Teixeira said. "It's up to me to figure out how to correct the mistakes I made. I'm not worrying about Jon any more, because I have to deal with Phil Davis. But I have a lot of work to do to get back to the point where I'll put myself in position to get another shot [at the title]."
So Teixeira, who has never been a flashy or outspoken guy, simply took the time off he needed to let his wounds heal and then set about figuring out how to correct what had gone wrong.
He'll get a chance on Oct. 25 to display his progress and to show that his absolute confidence in his ability was warranted.
Who knows what will happen? But remember this: Jones is in a different league from the rest of the fighters in the world, and it's never a great idea to bet against a guy who had won 20 in a row over a nine-year span.
Related Video: |
good
In Gaza, children,
you learn that the sky kills
and that houses hurt.
You learn that your blanket is smoke
and breakfast is dirt.
You learn that cars do somersaults
clothes turn red,
friends become statues,
bakers don’t sell bread.
You learn that the night is a gun,
that toys burn
breath can stop,
it could be your turn.
You learn:
if they send you fire
they couldn’t guess:
not just the soldier dies -
it’s you and the rest.
Nowhere to run,
nowhere to go,
nowhere to hide
in the home you know.
You learn
that death isn’t life,
that air isn’t bread,
the land is for all.
You have the right to be
Not Dead.
You have the right to be
Not Dead.
You have the right to be
Not Dead.
The estimated turnout for this protest, according to Andrew Murray, was 200,000. I don't mind what precise figure people put on it, but it was, and certainly above 100,000. To this can be added the protests across the UK, which respectively numbered in hundreds and thousands. As I said earlier, this was the largest ever pro-Palestinian demonstration in the United Kingdom. I met a guy I know from MPAC at the start, and he agreed that the size of the demo was astonishing - this was as we were crowding into Hyde Park, before it even really kicked off. The severity of what Israel is imposing on Gaza, with the assistance of UK arms and the benevolence of UK diplomacy, has galvanised people in a way that we haven't seen since 2003. The tone of the protest was also very different from past demonstrations. For one thing, there was much more visible condemnation of the Arab regimes that are complicit in this attack. When speakers called for the Egyptian regime to be overthrown, the cheers were among the loudest of the day. For another, there is a great desire that this historic demonstration become the basis for a campaign. In some form or another, there is a desire to sanction Israel, up to and including a full-blown boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign. I would be delighted if such a campaign could be made to work.This brings me to something else I want to point out about the demonstration. In today's Guardian, over seventy Jewish writers and activists wrote to condemn Israel's atrocities in Gaza . The letter calls for a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions, which was also recently backed by Naomi Klein. This letter was cited twice by speakers, one of them Azzam Tamimi, who said "this war is not between Muslims and Jews, it is between the oppressed and the oppressor". The other speaker who I think was Ismail Patel said something that I think is extremely important, reflecting what Alexei Sayle said at last week's demonstration: it is long past time to stop allowing the state of Israel to call itself "the Jewish State". It is a travesty that a racist state that imposes apartheid and mass murder on the Palestinians has for so long been allowed to legitimise itself with reference to Jewish suffering, and particularly the Nazi holocaust. When its soldiers are bestialising themselves in Gaza, coldly murdering people in the most humiliating way, and imposing a system that seems in some respects to be deliberately redolent of the Warsaw Ghetto, the idea that Israel is the bearer of a legacy of resistance to fascism is disgusting, and absurd. Now, I know full well that we are not watching a repeat of the Final Solution, but it shouldn't have to get that far before Palestine has its Marek Edelmans. And we should not hesitate to support them when they defend Palestine.Finally, a word about the apparent ruckus outside the Israeli embassy. I didn't see it become at all serious, but I do know the police sealed off hundreds and perhaps more people in the area, and it has to be said that the police acted as if they wanted a fight. They had tried to confine an enormous amount of people into a densely barricaded bottleneck and, as far as I could see, this made the stewards' job more difficult. A number of protesters did evidently want to get into the Israeli embassy, and I did notice that one of them got onto the entrance walls and waved a Hamas flag around. Frankly,. The logical thing to do at this point would be to expel the Israeli ambassador and convert the building into the embassy of a future Palestinian state. But, as angry as people justifiably are, and as much as one would have every reason to expect a riot at this point, I personally saw nothing that could have even notionally justified the kind of clampdown that the police eventually imposed.Update: Here is the poem that Michael Rosen wrote, and read out for the protest:And since my digital camera wasn't working today, here are some good quality pics from Ellis Sharp . More from septicisle here . Jamie's pics, videos and report are here . See also, pictures from the Paris demo
Labels: air strikes, gaza, hamas, invasion, Israel, palestine, war crimes |
TEHRAN - Narges Kalbasi, the Iranian-British philanthropist, has been acquitted of murder charges by the ruling of an Indian court.
She posted on her Telegram channel that according to the Rayagada appealing court, she can claim damages because of all the problems and difficulties caused for her during this time.
In 2014, when Narges had set an excursion for her blind children, a child who was not part of her children’s home and was tagged along by his parents to the picnic, went missing.
After the disappearance of that healthy 5-year-old boy, the Rayagada court found Narges guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced her to a year in jail and $4,300 in fines.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry expressed happiness over the news.
“I’m very happy to see that nonstop efforts of the country’s (Iran) Foreign Ministry bore fruit,” said spokesman Bahram Qassemi in a Telegram message.
Over the past few months a big online campaign has begun in the support of Narges, the benevolent Iranian-British woman who left the comfort of West to help the underprivileged children in India.
Earlier, top Iranian celebrities, actors, artists, as well as some Indian actors asked for the freedom of Narges.
Famous Iranian people like Mahmoud Farshchian, Ezatollah Entezami, Parviz Parastui, Asghar Farhadi, Majid Majidi, and many more came to join in the online campaign for freedom of Narges.
In a letter, the top Iranian celebrities asked Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to help resolve the Narges case.
To that letter Zarif responded: “I, too, have personally been involved in Ms. Kalbasi’s case in my latest trip to India and held talks with high level Indian officials regarding her. I assure you our goal is to immediately free her from all hardships and troubles and ask for a fair hearing with respect to her charitable services to the poor.”
After just two days of Zarif’s reply to the celebrities, came the twitter message of the Indian foreign minister which brought much hope to supporters of Narges.
Following Swaraj’s message, Narges expressed happiness in a personal message she left for one of the journalists at the Tehran Times, saying “I’m counting down the days to freedom.”
“Within the space of just a few days, both Dr. Zarif and Sushma Swaraj made public statements regarding my case which I am extremely grateful for. Obviously because this has happened in India, it is a huge step that Sushma Swaraj has now gotten involved. It just shows that if you fight for your rights, eventually you will have to be listened to. That's all I ever wanted, to be heard and to be given a fair chance”, she noted.
NA/AK |
The author speaking in Second Life.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with friend and 2016 Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, who last month polled at 10 percent in general election picks. One of the things we spoke about was the future of political campaigning. Johnson won his New Mexico governorship in 1994 before the internet was being used much. Now, mastery of the internet and courting new media is a requirement to win any major election.
But the near future will be even more complex, with virtual reality, wearable tech, and holographic imagery all part of the show. The entire way a candidate runs for the presidency—from crowded rallies to handshakes at New Hampshire diners to their campaign buses—may soon change.
Politicians like Bernie Sanders already get it. He recently did a campaign event in virtual reality, a speech some are calling a historic first. Some of the advantages of campaigning in virtual reality might not be obvious. But on the YouTube video, one commentator talked about being able to get up close to read what was on Bernie's notes. That sounds cool, indeed—and not something you can't do in standard reality unless you can get past muscular security guards.
As a presidential candidate myself, I also recently gave a virtual speech in Second life. At the Terasem Annual Colloquium on the Law of Futurist Persons, I spoke to an audience that consisted of about 50 avatars—some who appeared as creatures, cyborgs, and significantly mutated transhuman beings. My own avatar—kindly created by transhuman spiritual organization Terasem for this event—looked quite like me, and even had the afternoon shadow, which apparently I'm often guilty of having.
Many experts cite President Obama's tech savvy 2008 and 2012 campaigns against John McCain and Mitt Romney, respectively, as a large reason he won. Obama was one of the first candidates to place ads in video games and other online environments. Some of his most remembered game ads were in NFL Madden 13 and NBA Live 09.
So far, no visible political candidates have really upped the ante with wearable tech, partially because we're so brainwashed with them wearing the same boring clothes for the last half century: tie, slacks, and coat. That's not to say American politics haven't been male-dominated over the last half century, or that US presidential elections, specifically, haven't always been male-dominated. Of course they have been.
But I hope that will change in the future. Built-in tech and LED lighting to candidate's shirts might enable viewers to see them better in various environments, like when it's shady outside or at night. In fact, we might be able to even feel our candidate's presence by shirts that create energy fields—or what some might call auras. At the very least, shirts could tell people candidate's moods if we wanted—already pets have collars that do that.
For me, wearable tech would be personal. In one of the biggest speeches so far of my campaign, I opened the Financial Times Camp Alphaville event in Europe. It was one of the hottest July London days on record at 95 degrees. Like everyone, I sweat right through my shirt—and it didn't look pleasant. I would've appreciated a shirt that could've automatically cooled me. I learned later that such innovations are on their way or already here.
But it's not just wearable tech. It's also implants. I have a small microchip in my hand—an RFID NFC implant—that can transfer business cards to smart phones with a quick hand swipe—and it's also programmed to text people: Win in 2016! It's a fun way to connect with supporters.
Coming in the future too will be augmented reality that mixes with the normal world. If Donald Trump wants a wall across the border, he can show it to us in live stream. The same can go for presidential candidate Jill Stein of the Green Party—show me 3D pie charts of how democratic socialist policies will not dramatically raise people's taxes. These tech advantages can surely help get important messages across.
Likely, the biggest change we'll see in the 2020 presidential elections will be the use of holographic images of candidates. Already we have robots that can be Skyped through and wander around interacting with people, but the holographic image will be the real deal. Slain rapper Tupac has done some concerts this way, and it's been a big hit with fans. The holographic tech, which is already here but is currently prohibitively expensive, will likely eventually replace video conference calls.
In fact, by 2020, we're likely to have driverless campaign buses filled with only holographic images traveling in them, ready to campaign and interact with journalists. Just in case you haven't had enough of Hillary Clinton, you could have ten buses with her hologram self campaigning in all the Super Tuesday states at once.
On my campaign bus, we had drones. They were never sophisticated enough to carry things very well, but in 2020 I'm sure candidates will be using them to hand out bumper stickers, carry banners at rallies, and project holographic images—including maybe fake cheering crowds.
It's possible the coming age of artificial intelligence and robots may replace the need for politicians. At least human ones.
Lest we think future elections are all about the candidates, perhaps the largest possibility on the horizon could come from digital direct democracy—the concept where citizens participate in real time input in the government. I gently advocate for a fourth branch of government, in which the people can vote on issues that matter to them and their decrees could have real legal consequence on Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency.
Of course, that's only if government even exists anymore. It's possible the coming age of artificial intelligence and robots may replace the need for politicians. At least human ones. Some experts think superintelligent AI might be here in 10 to 15 years, so why not have a robot president that is totally altruistic and not susceptible to lobbyists and personal desires? This machine leader would simply always calculate the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, and go with that. No more Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, Greens, or whatever else we are.
It's a brave new future we face, but technology will make our lives easier, more democratic, and more interesting. Additionally, it will change the game show we go through every four years called the US Presidential elections. In fact, if we're lucky—given how crazy these elections have made America look—maybe technology will make future elections disappear altogether.
Zoltan Istvan is a futurist, author ofThe Transhumanist Wager, and presidential candidate for theTranshumanist Party. He writes anoccasional columnfor Motherboard in which he ruminates on the future beyond natural human ability. |
A Breitbart staff writer is joining the Trump White House, Politico reported Sunday night.
Julia Hahn will be a special assistant to the president, according to the report, and is expected to work primarily under chief strategist and former Breitbart executive Stephen Bannon.
The report is based on “briefed on the move” and Politico said it’s “not clear whether the hire has been entirely finalized.”
In May 2016, Hanh penned an article for Breitbart headlined, “Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE Says U.S. Must Admit Muslim Migrants, Sends Kids to Private School that Screens Them Out.”
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That piece became an often pointed-to example of the rocky relationship between the Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and the Trump campaign after the candidate brought Bannon aboard.
Hahn’s piece suggested that Ryan was a hypocrite for sending his children to a Catholic school that offers tuition discounts to parishioners, contrasting the school’s position with Ryan’s opposition to Trump’s proposed religious test for Muslim immigrants.
Bannon had talked of wanting to destroy the Speaker when he headed Breitbart News, though since Trump’s victory, Ryan and Bannon appear to be getting along. |
Call it what you want, but Indeed Brewing Company can no longer market or label its seasonal spring honey beer as LSD Ale.
The feds made the brewery change the name of its Lavender Sunflower Date (that’s where the acronym came from) Honey Ale so that the acronym was no longer apparent.
The brewery did not face federal regulation until it started to cross state lines, and for a while, when Indeed was selling only in limited Wisconsin markets, they kept that particular beer in Minnesota. Regulators were concerned that the name implied there were drugs in the beer.
“The feds did not like the name LSD,” said Indeed co-founder and co-owner Thomas Whisenand. “They made that clear very quickly.”
But this year, the brewery has expanded to more Wisconsin markets and all of North Dakota, and they wanted to bring the beer to all their customers.
“We tried to find a way we could keep it on the label, like could we spell out the words and just bold the first letters,” Whisenand said. “But unfortunately we sell a regulated product and there’s not much you can do when the feds say no.”
The change came at a time when the brewery changed the packaging of the beer, which used to be sold in 750-milliliter bottles, but will now be sold as four-packs of 16-ounce cans.
Cans are better for the beer, and better for customers, Whisenand said.
“We’re much more efficient at canning, and it costs less,” he said. “And there are killer graphics on the can that sort of imply the roots of the beer.”
The beer, he says, is still the same product fans have come to expect.
“In fact, I think it’s even better,” Whisenand said. “It’s one of those love it or hate it beers. We think that’s a good sign, actually. If we can do that, it means we’re pushing the envelope. With the name, I think we were pushing the envelope, too. Unfortunately, the envelope broke.”
Lavender, Sunflower Honey, and Dates Honey Ale will be available in Indeed’s Northeast Minneapolis taproom starting this weekend and in cans at retail outlets the week of April 18. |
Republican men in Congress “aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be” when it comes to running against female candidates and appealing to female voters, Speaker John Boehner John Andrew BoehnerEx-GOP lawmaker joins marijuana trade group Crowley, Shuster moving to K Street On unilateral executive action, Mitch McConnell was right — in 2014 MORE (R-Ohio) said Thursday.
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“We’re trying to get them to be a little more sensitive,” Boehner said at his weekly Capitol press conference. “You look around the Congress, there are a lot more females in the Democratic caucus than there are in the Republican caucus. And some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be.”
The Speaker was responding to a question about an article in Politico reporting that Republican men were getting a form of sensitivity training from party leaders.
In recent elections, a number of Republican Senate candidates have torpedoed their chances by making comments decried as insensitive or outright offensive to women. |
Sept. 22, 2012; Pasadena, CA, USA; UCLA Bruins defensive end Owamagbe Odighizuwa (94) and linebacker Anthony Barr (11) sack Oregon State Beavers quarterback Sean Mannion (4) and force a fumble in the third quarter of the game at the Rose Bowl. Oregon State won 27-20. Mandatory Credit: Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports
UCLA Football, due to the rotational Pac-12 scheduling, will face the Oregon State Beavers this year for the first time since 2012.
RELATED: UCLA Schedule Preview, Colorado Buffaloes
The Beavers are embarking on a new era after the departure of iconic head coach Mike Riley. The Bruins will look to take advantage of Oregon State’s transition to grab a win before the Beavers inevitably improve.
The Oregon State Beavers:
Head Coach: Gary Andersen, 1st year
2014 Record: 5-7 overall, 2-7 Pac-12
The story of the season for Oregon State is the change at the head coach position. For fourteen of the last eighteen years, Mike Riley was the face of Oregon State football. His affable nature, quiet competence, and ability to find unheralded talent have defined the modern era of Beaver football. This is why his departure for the Nebraska job was so shocking.
But as beloved as Riley is/was among Beaver faithful, there’s a definite undercurrent of relief that Riley was able to depart on his own terms and that the athletic department was not forced to fire perhaps the most successful head coach in program history. Because Riley’s teams had started to stagnate, and his modest accomplishments were getting overshadowed by the meteoric rise of the hated rival Oregon Ducks in Eugene.
So Gary Andersen, coming off of a phenomenal rebuilding job at Utah State and then a successful, if brief, tenure at Wisconsin, has a rebuilding job ahead of him.
The Oregon State Offense:
The other locus of turnover for the Beavers is at quarterback, where Sean Mannion had held down the job, starting all but three games in four seasons.
As a result, the Beavers do not have a quarterback on the roster who has ever taken a snap in a college game. True freshman Seth Collins is expected to land the starting gig, and he’ll be well equipped with senior RB Storm Woods, junior RB Chris Brown, senior WR Victor Bolden, sophomore WR Jordan Villamin, and a strong offensive line.
The offense will be switching from Riley’s old pro-style offense to a modern spread attack. A realistic measure of success for the Beavers will be laying the groundwork this season for future offenses, and the UCLA defense will be looking for a big day against a freshman-led squad making a system transition.
The Oregon State Defense
The defense is making, if possible, an even bigger overhaul than the offense. New Defensive Coordinator Kalani Sitake will try to change the 4-3 unit to a hybrid 3-4, all while replacing nine of eleven starters. Senior CB Larry Scott anchors a secondary with a lot of promise, while the front seven is full of question marks. If Josh Rosen has the UCLA offense clicking by the time this game rolls around, the Bruins could be looking at a big day.
The Oregon St. vs. UCLA Outlook and Early Prediction:
Oregon State will not always be this vulnerable. The Beavers were always a tough matchup under Riley, and there appears to be a higher ceiling with Andersen at the helm. This is a win that a UCLA team with aspirations of a big season must expect, but the Bruins cannot take the Beavers lightly.
Prediction: UCLA 35 – Oregon State 6 |
A Dorchester man who says he looked out his window Monday and spotted a teenage boy hacking a stray cat to death with a machete behind an abandoned home on Mount Everett Street said he was stunned by what he witnessed.
“It was very disturbing,” said Evins Justin of Dorchester, who immediately called the cops. “A person who would do that would do just about anything. He was just having fun cutting it up. Four or five cruisers showed up. He wasn’t even hiding.”
Cops arrested the teen and charged him with two counts of cruelty to animals, possession of a dangerous weapon and trespassing, police said. He was arraigned yesterday in the juvenile session of Dorchester District Court and held pending a dangerousness hearing. Due to his age, his name was not released.
“Officers observed dismembered animal parts in the yard, as well as a machete, handsaw, folding knife, a right hand rubber glove, bottle of Clorox bleach and a black trash bag marked with the defendant’s first name,” according to a statement from Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley’s Office.
Neighbors knew something strange was had been going on over there. A large, dilapidated house with one collapsed wall sits on the overgrown lot. The home is boarded and covered in “No Trespassing” signs.
But last week some had spotted a group of three boys walking over there.
An errant football pass sent a 12-year-old girl, her sisters and a 2-year-old neighbor to the abandoned lot last week to track down the ball when the 2-year-old spotted what she thought was a toy — the severed head of a stray cat.
“She wanted to keep it,” said the 12-year-old, who spoke in the presence of her adult caretaker but did not want to be identified for the story. “She thought it was a toy. I told her ‘No.’ Then we saw the body.”
The girl took pictures with her phone that she shared with police. The cat’s body had no head and the paws had been cut off. She said the paws were littered around the large back yard.
The girl said she and her sisters were glad that their own cats — Dora, Sparky and Minny — were OK. |
Monday, September 1, is Labor Day, a holiday celebrating the American labor movement and the achievements and importance of American workers. The holiday has also become known as a great occasion for sales, as the long weekend gives consumers more time to shop and bring home large purchases. Summer is almost over, and in many areas of the country kids are already back in school while others are still shopping for last-minute supplies. With so much activity centered around this weekend, we thought it was an excellent time to give away a 16GB Apple iPad with Retina display and a $50 Amazon gift card!
As we mentioned before, there's a lot going on for most people on Labor Day weekend. Leave a comment on this post telling us what you plan on doing, and you'll receive one entry into our drawing. To earn more entries, subscribe to our daily emails and share contest details on social media (you can do this every day for more entries). We'll draw and announce the winner on Tuesday, September 2 at 5PM CST. Have a great holiday, and good luck!
Click here to enter the Contest!
Thanks for Visiting and Happy Shopping! |
Student-filed assaults prove false
MSU police have determined that a report filed by a student who said she was assaulted twice in the same night is false.
An 18-year-old East Holmes Hall resident told police she was confronted outside her dorm room on Oct. 28 by her ex-boyfriend, who supposedly pointed a gun at her head and threatened her before leaving five minutes later.
The victim also told police that she was sexually assaulted about eight hours after the incident when an unknown suspect entered her room and groped her while she was sleeping.
The incidents were said to have happened between 2:55 a.m. and 10:30 a.m.
Following the report, a campuswide crime alert was distributed via e-mail.
Through further investigation and interviews with those involved in the incident, police discovered the two incidents did not take place, MSU police Sgt. Florene McGlothian-Taylor said.
The alleged victim was transported to a local hospital, treated and released following the reported assault.
McGlothian-Taylor said police have to provide medical treatment for all alleged sexual assaults, regardless of available proof.
“It’s standard procedure. It’s not up to us to judge her,” McGlothian-Taylor said. “We took her at her word and followed our standard protocol.”
False reports are seldom filed, McGlothian-Taylor said.
It is not yet known if the student will face charges for filing the false report.
“That’s not up to (police),” McGlothian-Taylor said. “The investigator will be submitting a supplemental report to the Ingham County prosecutor’s office for review.” |
Offers to “take it outside” at Tower Hamlets Council meeting
A member of the public threatened to “take it outside, one on one mate” after a dispute with Conservative group leader Cllr Peter Golds at last night’s council meeting.
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Ruhel Miah asked a question requesting councillors “uphold the highest levels of personal and professional integrity” when reporting complaints to authorities.
Naming Cllr Golds, he made a series of allegations prompting the Tory leader to ask for an address so his solicitor could write to him.
Mr Miah responded: “We can take it outside after the meeting, one on one mate.”
Speaking later, Cllr Golds said: “Anywhere else, the police would have been called and he would have been arrested.
“The threat was made and I am seeing what can be done”, he added. |
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FIFA 15 ModdingWay Mod Update coming this week
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By S. Murlidharan
The trial court that convicted the former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Yadav in fodder scam condemned him to prison for five years and slapped a penalty of Rs 25 lakh.
The size of the scam was guesstimated at Rs 950 crore. Nobody knows the true size. It may be egregiously exaggerated given the Indian fascination for hype.
The CAG itself has been accused of exaggerating the notional loss in assorted scams the country has been a witness to. The auditing profession's smug and self-serving defence against inaccurate valuations is auditors are not valuers though they are intimately concerned with values and that they are in any case trained to overstate the anticipated losses and understate the anticipated profits. Thus the CAG can wriggle out of the criticism of exaggeration if ultimately the size of the loot turns out to be smaller. Be that as it may but courts cannot similarly do an incomplete job because the buck stops with them.
They ought to meticulously compute the true extent of loss and ideally ask the perpetrator(s) of the scam to disgorge, or return all the ill-gotten wealth through malpractices to the public. Unfortunately Indian courts are willy-nilly remiss in doing this sacred duty.
There are broadly three justice dispensations - retributive, restorative and reformative. A person who has been convicted of looting must be asked to disgorge. This is restorative justice, the one that meets the ends of justice when the crime is misappropriation or swindling especially when the fence eats the crop. In the event, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party is entirely correct when he instigates people humorously to merrily indulge in financial crimes taking a cue from L'affaire Lalu and taking comfort from the fact that the worst that can happen to them is a brief incarceration in prison coupled with a fine that is just a slap on the wrist.
In the US, Rajat Gupta was called upon to pay up $15 million though the quantum of profits he made through insider trading or helping his friend Rajaratnam in insider trading was only $5 million. The difference in the justice system of the two countries, both democracies, cannot be lost on the discerning - in India the penalty is a tiny fraction of the loot but in the US the penalty is several times the loot with the loot itself being asked to be disgorged.
It is another matter that there could be some merit in the contention that the US justice system is harshest on black and brown skinned people. It must be, however, conceded that another scamster Kenneth Lay, an unadulterated Caucasian, was called upon to disgorge $250 million that he made by unloading the shares of Enron to unsuspecting employee welfare funds after ratcheting up the profits of the company and its market valuations by booking future sales as current. Unfortunately, he did not live to serve his sentence. Neither could he vindicate his innocence through an appeal against the sentence.
Both the Indian company jurisprudence and political saga have very little to offer by way of deterrent tales on disgorgement. Harshad Mehta, who tinkered with the share market in early nineties with singular nonchalance, too died like Kenneth Lay. Perhaps, with due respect to the departed souls for the black if not macabre humor, it would be more accurate to say that Kenneth Lay died like Harshad Mehta except that he, unlike Mehta, didn't set his foot into the prison.
The special court appointed for retrieving the loot, mainly belonging to banks that succumbed to Harshad Mehta's blandishments and wile and guile, could retrieve only a part by freezing his bank accounts.
The Indian courts' reluctance to pass disgorgement orders has perhaps something to do with the dawning realization that their orders would remain largely unimplemented what with benami holdings frustrating them. Intuitively, therefore, it can be said that they do not pass disgorgement orders where one is warranted to spare themselves the blushes.
In fact, the market regulator Sebi made no secret of this when it passed a disgorgement order in the 2006 IPO scam. The Sebi had asked the depositories and banks to cough up the money made by a wily investor in multiple names so as to be able to get maximum allotments under the retail investor quota. The regulator found in the banks and depositories a convenient whipping boy, a fall guy whose coffers contained enough to disgorge albeit vicariously.
That was vigilante justice, the kind meted out to me when I was a callow youth and found allowing my seat mate to copy from my answer sheet. The invigilator slapped me across the face even while leaving the copier with a mild reprimand. The irrationality of the order was palpable so much so that SAT (Securities Appellate Tribunal) quashed the disgorgement order, leaving the public bemused and the trickster laughing all the way to bank.
Disgorgement orders can work only in a milieu where benami holdings simply do not work. Otherwise it can turn out to be meaningless and a butt of joke. Late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's attempt at institutionalising machinery for confiscating properties held benami was thwarted by vested interests. Benami properties defy both administration and justice.
Another uniquely Indian factor frustrating meaningful disgorgement orders being passed is the touch-me-not status accorded to political parties through a conspiracy of silence and all-round acquiescence.
It is common knowledge that the major beneficiary of every scam in the country is the ruling dispensation. Imports come handy for the political class because the attendant over-invoicing and kickbacks remain outside the pale of investigation with our CBI finding itself out of its depths in unravelling scams having their epicenter in foreign countries.
The Bofors scam has defied unravelling thanks largely to the intransigence of the Swiss authorities and the CBI's bumbling. The cognoscenti also know that the coal blocks allotted gratis was in fact done for a quid pro quo - in return for hefty political donations in cash to the ruling dispensation.
One only hopes the Supreme Court goes after the culprits in the Coalgate and retrieve the loot for the benighted citizens of this country with the same zeal it displayed way back in 1990 when it retrieved the loot perpetrated by promoters of Skipper Construction Ltd. The company had collected as much as Rs 11 crore from flat buyers in advance even while thumbing their noses at DDA, stalling payment of the cost of land of about Rs 9 crore after making only 25 percent down payment.
The Apex Court used to the hilt the power given by Article 142 of the Constitution - doing complete justice in the manner it deems fit in the circumstances of the case in hand. This judgement remains till date the only serious effort made to make the swindlers disgorge.
One hopes the 2G and Coalgate verdicts take the Skipper verdict as a worthy precedent and thereby send a stern message that what you gorge ravenously has got to be disgorged one day in addition to incarceration and monetary penalty.
Restorative justice is the most apt form of justice for paper or financial crimes though it is carried to ridiculous levels in certain parts of Africa even today - a woman freshly widowed must be married by the man who brought about the widowhood on her. We should, however, take it to mean disgorgement and nothing more.
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The job of a hotel concierge is to accomodate customer needs whenever possible, to ensure that their stay is pleasant and that whatever comforts from home they require are available to them.
At San Antonio’s Hotel Indigo on the Riverwalk, that is apparently something they take very much to heart, as Imgur user “FreePsychicReadings” learned when she responded to a text from Ramon, the hotel concierge, offering her anything she might need to make her stay comfortable:
That’s a curious request, certainly, but not an unreasonable one: After all, if part of what it takes to make a person feel at home is the chance to stare at Nic Cage’s face framed by a hilarious wig as he prepares to battle imaginary terrorists in a very bad film from 1997, what hotel concierge wouldn’t want to offer that to their guest?
Of course, is just one Nicolas Cage photograph sufficient for an extended business say?
That’s the question that quickly bubbled up, as the guest—following a text asking her to rate her service (she gave the hotel a 5 out of 5)—asked for a photo of Cage from 1987’s Moonstruck to be affixed to her mirror, along with some fresh towels.
The hotel was late in offering the amenities, but quickly responded to a follow-up:
The “Sorry I’m late” note there is great, although you could be forgiven if, at this point, you began to suspect that this was less about a Cage-y personal requirement the guest had and more about a curious game that she and the concierge were playing, ostensibly to break up the monotony of both a business trip and boring requests for dumb shampoo or something.
Indeed, by the end of her trip, the guest and Ramon appear, via the texts she shared on Imgur, to have bonded somewhat over their shared affection for Cage:
Sure enough, upon returning to her room, Cage as Tom Welles, the star of Joel Schumacher’s misunderstood masterpiece, was affixed firmly to the side of her television.
All of this is ridiculous, obviously, but also wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, that MySA.com reached out to the manager to learn about the encounter after it went viral:
“We certainly get odd requests every day, but nothing of this nature,” he said in a phone interview with the San Antonio Express-News. Rangel responded, telling the woman it would be a pleasure to assist her. “I immediately thought we were being trolled, so I figured I’d just go along with it,” Rangel said.
They were definitely being trolled, and they definitely handled it perfectly. Great work, Hotel Indigo, lady on the Internet, Nic Cage, and all people everywhere who have made ours a culture that appreciates such things. |
At a fast food restaurant, the manager, Sandra, is having a bad day. Suddenly, she gets a phone call from a man claiming to be a police officer who has a complaint that one of her young female employees has stolen from a customer. At the orders of this authoritative sounding stranger, Sandra takes the apparent accused, Becky, to a back room to search her before she is picked up. Once there, the phone scammer manipulates the gullible personnel into participating in Becky's sexual humiliation that grows more twisted with every new sucker on the phone. Only when one final person has the conscience to revolt do they realize the crime they were tricked into, which the real police are hard pressed to solve. Written by Kenneth Chisholm ([email protected]) |
Jump Force In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Weekly Shōnen Jump magazine, characters from renowned mangas join forces to help the actual world against a greater evil in a brand-new adventure. In Jump Force, some of your favorite manga characters will even seek your help to bring peace back on Earth. Does this seemingly bigger than life concept actually deliver?
ZLD Performance Series 1.1 Performance L-Desk Do you need a GAMING desk to accompany your GAMING setup? Do you have a need for RGBs that just can’t be pleased with a normal desk? Then check out the Performance Series 1.1 L-Desk from ZLD!
Mutant: Year Zero In this review we take a look at the pen & paper RPG from Free League Publishing and Modiphius, Mutant: Year Zero, that inspired a recent game of the same name. Set in a post-apocalyptic world...
Respawn-200 Gaming Chair Respawn Products have graciously sent us one of their gaming chairs, the RSP-200, for testing and review. Let's dig in and see what they are all about! |
Delaware Memorial Bridge aerial, 2012. Wilmington, Delaware is at top right of photo.
Delaware Memorial Bridge, approaching eastbound from the Delaware side, 2005.
The Delaware Memorial Bridge is a twin suspension bridge crossing the Delaware River. The toll bridges carry Interstate 295 and U.S. Route 40 between Delaware and New Jersey. The bridge was designed by the firm known today as HNTB with consulting help from engineer Othmar Ammann, whose other designs include the Walt Whitman Bridge (which is similar in appearance, except for the fact that it is a single span) and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. It is also one of only two crossings of the Delaware River with both U.S. Highway and Interstate Highway designations, the other being the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
The bridges provide a regional connection for long-distance travelers.[1] While not a part of Interstate 95, they connect two parts of the highway: the Delaware Turnpike (Interstate 95 in Delaware) on the south side with the New Jersey Turnpike (later Interstate 95 in New Jersey) on the north side. They also connect Interstate 495, U.S. Route 13, and Route 9 in New Castle, Delaware with U.S. Route 130 in Pennsville Township, New Jersey (at the settlement of Deepwater, New Jersey).
The bridges are dedicated to those from both New Jersey and Delaware who died in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Persian Gulf War. On the Delaware side of the bridge is a War Memorial, visible from the northbound-side lanes. The toll facility is operated by the Delaware River and Bay Authority.
The Delaware Memorial Bridge is the southernmost fixed vehicular crossing of the Delaware River and the only fixed vehicular crossing between Delaware and New Jersey. However, at Fort Mott, N.J., there is a small amount of land on the New Jersey side of the river that is part of the State of Delaware, and thus there are pedestrian crossings in between those states, but not spanning the river. The Cape May–Lewes Ferry provides an alternate route between travelers from New Jersey and the Northeastern States to southern Delaware.
History [ edit ]
The first span [ edit ]
Following the opening of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, residents of Delaware and New Jersey began to advocate a crossing of the river in the area of Wilmington, Delaware. As commercial pressures mounted, a ferry service begun in 1926 as an interim measure, and this ran near the bridge's current location. Advocates of a bridge crossing between Delaware and New Jersey faced strong opposition from the Philadelphia Port Authorities, which claimed that the bridge would be a menace to navigation. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard were also concerned that the bridge would be vulnerable to an enemy attack. If the bridge were to collapse into the river, it could render the Philadelphia Navy Yard unusable.
As traffic by cars and truck increased rapidly, the benefits of a bridge in this area became evident, and its construction was authorized by the highway departments of Delaware and New Jersey in 1945. Originally, a two-lane highway tunnel was considered, but the costs for a four-lane bridge was found to be equivalent in price, therefore being the reason a four-lane bridge was chosen. Congress approved the bridge project on July 13, 1946, and its construction began on February 1, 1949.
The project cost $44 million, and it took two years to complete the 175 feet (53 m) high span with towers reaching 440 feet (134 m) above water level. The first span opened to traffic on August 16, 1951, and at the time was the sixth-longest main suspension span in the world.[citation needed] The Governor of Delaware, Elbert N. Carvel, and the Governor of New Jersey, Alfred E. Driscoll, dedicated the bridge to each state's war dead from World War II.
The bridge quickly proved a popular travel route when the New Jersey Turnpike connection was completed at its north end. By 1955, nearly eight million vehicles were crossing the bridge each year, nearly twice the original projection. By 1960, the bridge was carrying more than 15 million cars and trucks per year, and this increased even more when the bridge was linked to the new Delaware Turnpike, Interstate 95, in November 1963.
The second span [ edit ]
Construction of the second span began in mid-1964, 250 feet (76 m) north of the original span. At a cost of $77 million, the second span of the Delaware Memorial Bridge opened on September 12, 1968, and was dedicated to those soldiers from Delaware and New Jersey killed in the Korean War and Vietnam War. The original span was closed down for fifteen months for refurbishment: its suspenders were replaced and its deck and median barrier were removed and replaced with a single deck to allow four undivided lanes of traffic. Finally, on December 29, 1969, all eight lanes of the Delaware Memorial Bridge Twin Span opened to traffic, making it the world's second longest twin suspension bridge.[2]
While they are similar in basic appearance, major differences can be seen between the original and second spans. The original span was constructed of riveted steel plates, and it has an open-grate shoulder access walk. In contrast, the second span was constructed mostly of welded steel plates (with heavy riveted joints in crucial areas) and it has concrete access walks.[3]
The original suspension span carries northbound traffic for Interstate 295, whereas the newer span carries the southbound traffic. Crossover lanes on each side of the bridge can allow for two-way traffic on one span if the other has to be closed for an extensive period of time.
The bridge had a close call with disaster when on July 9, 1969, the oil tanker Regent Liverpool struck the fender system protecting the tower piers. The bridge itself was spared damage, but the fender suffered about $1.0 million in damage.
The Delaware River and Bay Authority began a $13 million project in 2003 to resurface the bridge, refurbish the expansion joints, upgrade the electrical system, and replace the elevators in the four towers. This work was completed in 2008.
As of 2018 , more than 80,000 vehicles cross the twin spans on their combined total of eight lanes daily.[4]
On clear days, the skyline of Philadelphia is visible in the distance on the left going to New Jersey and on the right leaving New Jersey. Wilmington, Delaware, only a few miles away from the bridge, is also visible. Vice versa, the Delaware Memorial Bridge is visible from the One Liberty Observation Deck on clear days. Other landmarks that can be seen from the bridge includes the cooling tower for PSEG's Hope Creek Nuclear Generating Station near Salem, New Jersey, the Delaware City Refinery in Delaware City, Delaware, the Reedy Point Bridge, also in Delaware City, both the St. Georges Bridge and the Senator William V. Roth Jr. Bridge in St. Georges, Delaware, and the Commodore Barry Bridge in Chester, Pennsylvania.
The largest single day of traffic had 72,249 private and commercial vehicles cross the bridge one-way on November 29, 1998. The largest single weekend for traffic totals had 194,199 vehicles cross the bridge one-way, July 24–26, 1998.[4]
Toll [ edit ]
Delaware Memorial Bridge toll plaza
One-way tolls for traffic entering Delaware were instituted in 1992.[5] As of November 30, 2018 , the toll is $4.00 for passenger vehicles using E-ZPass.[5] Frequent Traveler discounts are available. About $270,000 in tolls are collected daily.[6] The DRBA has proposed to raise the toll to $5.00 on March 1, 2019,[7] however New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy vetoed this plan in January 2019.[8] In February, the DRBA and the governors of Delaware and New Jersey reached an agreement which postpones the toll hike to May 1, as well as providing a 25 cent E-ZPass discount for passenger vehicles. The frequent traveler rate will increase from $1.25 to $1.75.[9]
Prior to the introduction of E-ZPass, both tokens and frequent traveler tickets were used, with special, discounted ticket books for local residents. They were phased out upon the introduction of the new system, and the tokens are no longer valid. Despite the toll booth being in Delaware, only New Jersey E-ZPass users are eligible for discounts, and must pay a $1/month fee to New Jersey to hold an account. Delaware E-ZPass users pay the full toll.
War Memorial [ edit ]
Since opening of the first bridge in 1951, annual ceremonies are held at the bridge's War Memorial on Memorial Day and Veterans Day to honor the sacrifices of American war veterans.[10] The memorial is located in Veterans Memorial Park in New Castle, Delaware, and it features a reflecting pool, a statue of a soldier, and a wall containing the names of 15,000 men and women from Delaware and New Jersey who were killed in World War II, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf War.[11]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
An atmospheric setting as the Delaware Memorial Bridge is approached from the Delaware side, 2017.
Further reading [ edit ]
Miller, William J. (1983). Crossing the Delaware: The Story of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the Longest Twin-Suspension Bridge in the World. Middle Atlantic. ISBN 978-0-911293-02-9.
Official website |
If you have been waiting for John Constantine to step into the Arrowverse, then your wish will soon be granted. ComicBook can confirm from the CW that the supernatural hero will appear on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow for multiple episodes next season.
According to a release by Warner Bros., Matt Ryan will reprise his role as Constantine in the third season of Legends of Tomorrow. The character will have a part in episodes nine and ten. No other details were given about the hero’s role in the series, but fans can look forward to seeing an extended storyline for the character.
ComicBook reported Constantine would be coming to the Arrowverse last week during New York Comic Con. The announcement is one that fans have been waiting for after NBC cancelled its Constantine series. The show, which aired between 2014-2015, was a cult hit with fans but failed to draw in widespread ratings. Audiences had hoped The CW would pick up the series and add it to its on-going slate of Arrowverse series, but the dream never came true. After a short bit on Arrow in 2015, John Constantine faded away from the franchise. That is, until now.
Fans have long suspected that Constantine would show up on Legends of Tomorrow, and they only became more suspicious when showrunner Phil Klemmer told audiences it would be a “crime” to keep the hero out of the show. Recently, the producer even told Rotten Tomatoes that the hero will appear in season three to do “an exorcism,” so the show’s gang will likely come face-to-face with some supernatural threat soon that requires Constantine’s expertise.
If you are not familiar with Constantine, then you have a bit of history to catch up on. The hero first appeared under DC Comics during a run of Swamp Thing, but the hero proved popular enough to get his own series. John Constantine is a working-class occult detective and unparalleled con man whose known for his cynical wit. Despite his gruff attitude, Constantine is known for his humanitarian interests as the detective continues his dangerous work to help others who are being plagued by all things supernatural.
Legends of Tomorrow returns on October 10th. |
Even after Mitch Marner was drafted fourth overall in one of the best draft classes of the post-lockout era, there was apprehension over how his game would translate to the NHL level. Even after he became a four-time MVP in his post-draft season, debates raged over whether the diminutive winger should be sent back to the London Knights for one final season.
The NHL needed a more lenient agreement with the CHL which would allow teams to send top prospects to the AHL, Leafs Nation said. After all, Marner struggled in his first training camp with the Leafs as a scrawny, timid teenager and he didn't dominate rookie camps and tournaments like he was expected to either. The 19-year-old was the perfect case study, too good for junior but not quite physically developed enough for the NHL, they said. He was destined to be in and out of the press box, a healthy scratch as he found his feet, they said.
But from the first day of his second training camp, it was clear that there was something about Marner’s game that would enable him to make it work. Quickly, the doubts faded.
By the time the regular season rolled around, even as Auston Matthews and William Nylander stole the show on opening night with a combined six points while Marner went scoreless, it was his six shots and shift-to-shift creation that wowed viewers. When the inevitable 10th NHL game mark arrived and a decision had to be made on whether to burn a year of his entry-level contract, the answer was simple.
Ever since that first game in Ottawa, the generously listed 170-pound forward has battled poor powerplay luck and a low early shooting percentage to climb back into the picture as one of the NHL’s best rookies.
But what about his game has enabled him to create, produce, and even dominate so early in his NHL career?
Well, what better way to find out than against the reigning Stanley Cup Champions on the tail end of a back-to-back.
I recorded the entirety of Saturday’s Leafs game against the Penguins, including all of Marner’s shifts. Below I have meticulously broken each of those 20 shifts down descriptively, before drawing certain conclusions about how Marner has adapted his game to succeed in the NHL.
Editor’s Note: All of the sequences below are organized sequentially from left to right.
Shifts
First Period
First Shift: 1:22-2:15
Sequence 1: After Zach Hyman opens the scoring, Marner’s line comes on for the centre ice draw. When the puck is pushed deep, Marner applies pressure twice on his natural right wing, once forcing a turnover to Bozak and once forcing a wraparound after he pursues the puck on his off-wing. Here, Marner is the primary retriever on his line, with Bozak providing support higher in the zone.
Sequence 2: After the puck is forced out of the zone, Marner identifies that he needs to provide weak-side support at the blueline above the puck and receives it when the Pens force a chip play up the boards. Having identified a potential entry on his off-wing, Marner feigns a blueline carry and drops a behind-the-back pass to Bozak, who is able to enter before turning it over. Prior to the turnover, Marner continued his path on the far side, before curling back to centre ice to provide more support above the puck.
Sequence 3: After Gardiner receives another chip play in the neutral zone, Marner (already well-positioned in centre ice), skates once more to his off wing to provide support for Bozak in the event he is checked. That support enables him to receive a pass from Bozak, create another zone entry and find the trailer — who he had previously identified — for a scoring chance.
Freeze Frame: Notice how, at the end of the third sequence, Phil Kessel circles back to retrieve the loose puck in the slot and Marner circles behind the Pittsburgh net. After a hard back check, Marner is the first man back, providing support above the puck and forcing Kessel to push the puck back into the neutral zone for a line change.
This is a near-perfect shift spent entirely in control of the play, even when the Pens have possession.
Second Shift: 4:27-5:35
Sequence 1: After a clean offensive zone draw win for Bozak, Marner goes straight to the high slot without turning his back to the puck. After Matt Hunwick’s shot is blocked, he immediately begins to hunt the puck, eventually chipping it down the boards to maintain control of the play. After pushing the play down the boards to Bozak, Marner goes back to the slot (again) to receive a pass, putting his scoring chance just wide.
Sequence 2: After the puck is forced up ice moments later by the Pens and Bozak goes for a quick change, Marner stays on the ice to provide help defensively as the deep support. By staying low in the zone, Marner creates a 50/50 battle in the corner.
Freeze Frames: Knowing he has his back to the play and that he’s being pursued by a bigger 6-2 Tom Kuhnackl, Marner decides against pinning the puck up against the boards to attempt a clean retrieval and instead leans away from contact to one-touch the puck up the boards to Kadri for a chipped exit and a line change.
Third Shift: 8:02-9:23
Sequence 1: Fresh off the bench, Marner receives a pass in the neutral zone and uses his footwork to go wide, leaning on his inside edge to cut to the net and attempt an inside-out tuck on Murray. Here, rather than using raw speed or size he doesn’t have, it’s Marner’s puck protection that creates the scoring chance. Rather than stopping up to retrieve the loose puck on Murray’s pad and find Corrado at the far point from the right wing, Marner keeps his feet moving to go to the far post and open up a lane cross-ice for the feed to Corrado, forcing Murray to move laterally and make a tougher save.
Sequence 2: Later in the shift, after another quick Bozak change, Marner stays on to provide deep support (again) and puck pursuit. As with the 50/50 play on his second shift, Marner turns away from the forechecker here, this time with the puck rather than chipping it up the boards, creating another zone exit and a completed line change with a quick, decisive play — and no engagement physically.
Fourth Shift: 13:31-14:25
Sequence 1: When the puck is sent down the ice, Marner is forced into a footrace (one he starts from behind) against Justin Schultz. After he beats Schultz to the inside track, Marner looks over his shoulder at the top of the faceoff circle to identify not only how much space he has over Schultz but also to locate the trailer (van Riemsdyk). When he arrives at the puck, Marner keeps his feet moving to avoid being checked and perfectly wraps the puck around the boards to van Riemsdyk for a chance on net — broken up by a nice defensive play by Ian Cole.
Sequence 2: Later in the shift, Marner provides backside help for Morgan Rielly, who gives Marner the puck deep in the zone because he didn’t have any other outlets. Marner looks, identifies the forechecker (Matt Cullen), spins away from contact (this is a recording) and leaves the puck for Nikita Zaitsev to create another exit.
Fifth Shift: 15:59-16:55
Freeze Frames: When the Marner line is hemmed in for the first time, it is Bozak (circled in red) who has assumed the more traditional role as the deep man in the defensive zone. Here, Evegeni Malkin (Bozak’s man) is allowed to retrieve three loose pucks and make plays in space before eventually picking up a shot on goal. Unlike Marner, who had applied puck pressure when he was the deep man on his line throughout the first period, forcing the Pens into turnvoers, Bozak remains stationary (taking himself virtually out of the play) in front of the net for the entirety of the defensive zone shift. In frame 2, when Malkin goes to the front of the net and Bozak does have his man for the first time, he lets him go, rendering Marner neutralized.
Sixth Shift: 19:07-19:25
Kadri takes a delay of game penalty and Marner takes an inconsequential 18-second shift before the PK unit comes on.
Second Period
Seventh Shift: 21:35-22:21
Sequence 1: Through the neutral zone, Marner keeps his feet moving to gain some speed and create a clean zone entry before he’s taken down trying to cut to the inside. Here, for the first time in the game, Marner makes the wrong decision with the puck. Rather than going to his backhand for a shot or a net-drive, or turning away from traffic to stop up and find the trailer, Marner cuts into two defenders for a lower-percentage play.
At the other end, Corrado takes a penalty to end the shift and bring on the PK unit.
Eighth Shift: 23:28-24:30
Sequence 1: On a neutral zone faceoff, Marner gets underneath Kuhnackl to gain the inside track on a scrummed draw. Coming away with the puck, Marner decisively cuts to the outside under pressure and throws it on net — instead of pushing it deep — in an attempt to make a play.
Sequence 2: When the play goes the other way, Marner actively stays above the puck and forces Kuhnackl to the outside, resulting in a Pens dump-in that cedes possession to Matt Hunwick.
Sequence 3: After Hunwick finds van Riemsdyk on his wing, van Riemsdyk ices the puck for a 50/50 race. For the second time in the game, Marner beats the icing, turns away from the check without instigating a physical man-on-man battle, keeps his head up to identify his trailers and finds Bozak down low.
Sequence 4: After the puck is wrapped around to Rielly at the far point, Marner goes directly to the front of the net where — rather than engaging in a physical fight for his space — Marner spins off of Brian Dumolin and Kris Letang to successfully disrupt, stay on top of the crease, and nearly get his stick on a scoring opportunity.
Ninth Shift: 26:28-27:35
Sequence 1: After receiving the puck just outside the offensive zone, Marner pivots and looks cross-ice to identify his linemates, cutting to the middle of the zone to draw attention before flipping a backhand pass to a streaking Bozak. When Bozak throws a shot on net, Marner engages below the goal line. Once again, he gets underneath Dumolin and Bonino spinning away twice from both before deftly pushing an off-balance pass across his body to Bozak.
Tenth Shift: 28:08-29:00
Sequence 1: On for his first powerplay shift of the game, Marner sets up on the blueline for the entry as part of a set play. When Bozak passes it to him, Marner has three choice: put the puck around the boards for a likely retrieval by van Riemsdyk, chip it into the corner for a tightly-checked Bozak or blindly drop for Rielly. As part of the set play, he drops the pass for Rielly. Rielly, who goes to the boards anticipating a bank-pass off of Marner’s backhand, isn’t prepared when Cullen blocks the passing lane with his stick, forcing Marner to put the puck towards the centre of the zone instead, resulting in a failed exit. Here, Marner makes the higher risk play, hoping to find Rielly in the slot rather than setting up the powerplay down low for van Riemsdyk.
Eleventh Shift: 31:06-31:47
For the second time, the Marner line is hemmed in against the Malkin line with an inactive Bozak in front of the net and van Riemsdyk and Marner covering the points. Andersen smothers an easy point shot after Corrado loses a footrace against Malkin without support from Bozak.
Twelfth Shift: 34:04-35:05
Sequence 1: On an offensive zone draw, Marner once again gets the inside track on Letang. Despite losing the physical battle for the puck, Marner’s pressure forces Letang into a dump and a turnover.
Sequence 2: After Gardiner carries the puck through the defensive zone, Marner identifies an open lane on the far-side boards and turns his back to the puck, anticipating a reception. After receiving the pass, Marner stops up and spins to look to the slot before being tripped up from a stick-on-shin play from Letang — without a call.
Sequence 3: Towards the end of the shift, Gardiner and Marner link up on a nearly identical play. This time, Gardiner’s pass is behind Marner and he is forced to stop up and put the puck deep to effectuate a line change. Here, it would have likely been more effective to put the puck back to Corrado to buy time and maintain possession.
Thirteenth Shift: 38:41-39:42
Sequence 1: When the puck is flipped off the glass, Marner is already in motion, gathering speed through the neutral zone to pick it up, create an entry, cut to the high slot and get another shot attempt. Here, Olli Maatta does an excellent job staying with Marner to get a stick on the puck and avoid a scoring chance on Murray.
Freeze Frame: After Bozak receives a pass in the neutral zone, he turns it over. Marner, too high in the neutral zone after the turnover, is caught behind the play. At the other end, Chris Kunitz scores on a scramble in front.
Third Period
Fourteenth Shift: 41:11-42:25
Sequence 1: When Bozak receives the puck along the left-wing boards, Marner sets up behind Carl Hagelin to give himself a cushion to receive a pass in the high slot. He faces the play, receives a pass and pivots to find Corrado. After Corrado’s shot is blocked, Marner is already in position to redirect the loose puck to Gardiner for a second completed pass.
Sequence 2: When Gardiner’s shot is blocked, Marner hunts the retrieval and has the wherewithal to bank the puck off the boards to himself, somehow maintaining control before protecting the puck on his backhand to feed Bozak with time and space.
Sequence 3: After van Riemsdyk’s chance cross-ice is prevented, Marner continues to pursue the puck before the Pens carry it up ice.
Freeze Frame: Marner, behind the play after Gardiner pinches and gives up an odd-man rush, back-checks to disrupt a Kessel chance.
Fifteenth Shift: 44:28-45:01
Bozak bobbles a pass in the offensive zone from van Riemsdyk after a draw, Maatta goes the other way for a shot, Frederik Andersen smothers it and Marner takes a quick shift.
Sixteenth Shift: 47:42-48:53
Sequence 1: Marner, pursuing the puck on his off-wing while the Matthews line changes, slides it out of a man-on-man battle between Gardiner and Kessel. Thanks to his edgework, he is able to quickly pivot towards the net and shoot (blocked by Kessel).
Sequence 2: After Kessel retrieves the puck and goes the other way, Marner back checks hard from the middle of the offensive zone to remove Kessel from the puck with his first (necessary) physical man-on-man play of the game.
Sequence 3: Back the other way, in the offensive zone, rather than trying to win an out-numbered puck battle on his own, Marner pins Bonino against the boards and stick-checks Maatta, buying time for Bozak to pull it out and start a passing play that ends with a Rielly chance.
Seventeenth Shift: 50:14-50:54
Sequence 1: On a zone entry, Marner delays to allow van Riemsdyk to carry the puck over the blueline. When van Riemsdyk finds him as the trailer, Marner cuts across the offensive zone blue line. There, he lifts his head and has a split second to decide on one of three options; feed Hunwick off the wing, feed Bozak who is well covered by Hagelin, or cut to open space in the middle. Immediately after lifting his head, Marner pivots to the slot, goes to his backhand and follows his shot to the net for a second chip-shot at the top of the crease.
Eighteenth Shift: 51:39-52:06
After van Riemsdyk wanders off of his wing, he’s bailed out by a big glove save from his open wing by Andersen, resulting in a quick shift.
Nineteenth Shift: 54:44-55:35
Sequence 1: After coming back deep in the defensive zone on a wing-swap with van Riemsdyk, Marner picks up the puck and leads a perfect sequence — with van Riemsdyk — up ice, making two quick passes before picking up a drop pass to nearly find Corrado in the slot.
Freeze Frame: Knowing that Corrado (circled in red) is now deep in the zone, Marner imediately takes over his point, despite that being Bozak’s assignment.
Sequence 2: Thanks to his strong positioning, Marner is ready when the puck comes back to the point. After receiving it, he quickly redistributes to van Riemsdyk and then cuts hard to the slot to draw attention. This was a perfectly played shift, late in the tail end of a back-to-back.
Twentieth Shift 58:09-58:55
Sequence 1: On his final shift of the game, Marner recognizes that Gardiner has no outlets and flees the zone early. Gardiner sends the puck down the ice to the opposite corner and Marner beats his third icing of the game, forcing Murray to come out and play the puck.
Sequence 2: After the play goes the other way, Marner back checks hard, picks up a loose puck and keeps his feet moving to draw a penalty as Malkin trails just out of reach.
Conclusions
It is uniquely difficult to digest a player’s game through his performance on the tail end of a back-to-back against one of the league’s best teams. Late in the game, pace can become an issue, taking away some of the advantages an up-tempo team like the Leafs might have. But what’s clear from the tape of Marner’s 20 shifts on Saturday night, is that the success of his game is in the details. While Marner’s puck skills and an increasingly elusive release allowed him to cleanly beat opposing teams at the junior level, it’s the little things in his game that have allowed him to transition so successfully to the NHL.
Despite being held scoreless and picking up a minus-1 rating, Marner was not only the deep defensive zone man on his line but also it’s primary puck retriever. Without the puck, Marner either filled in to provide support for teammates, supported the puck, or hunted on the forecheck to force turnovers, avoid icings, and regain possession. The end result was that in a game where the Leafs were outshot 49-36, Marner led all forwards in Corsi For% at 58.33% (28CF, 20CA) at even strength.
In puck battles, despite being one of the least-physical players on the ice, Marner routinely came away with the puck by choosing to engage primarily without initiating contact. Instead, he leans in and out of tight spaces to make quick decisive plays on pucks or to turn away from forecheckers to identify his teammates.
With the puck and without the puck, Marner is rarely ever stationary, always above the puck, and often in motion, keeping his feet moving to draw attention as a carrier or to force plays in pursuit. As a carrier, Marner uses edgework more than speed to evade checks and make fast plays on net, to the point, to the slot, or to teammates on the cycle. On a line with two of the Leafs’ most veteran players, it is Marner who was consistently checking, making plays, and providing defensive support to retrieve possession. Oftentimes, it is Marner who is compensating for Bozak, a centre who is counted on to be defensively responsible and more engaged in the play than he is (or at least was on Saturday night).
And while the flash is still there, and evident in spurts on cuts to the inside or blind spin passes, it’s the shoulder checks on a beat-icing or the body positioning on one of the world’s best defensemen in a 50/50 puck battle that have made the difference at the start of his NHL career. Marner seldom made a mistake and when he did it was in the offensive zone when the lower-risk play also had an uncertain result and he wanted to attempt to make something happen.
Really, the magic of Mitch Marner exists in his on-ice maturity. His enchantment captivates in the details we don’t expect out of a scrawny, junior hockey scoring champion. In youth, we are trained to look for the wow factor, the dazling breakaway speed or forceful power that isn’t always there. With Marner — the better-suited for the AHL case study — the magic is in the sum of many little parts, working in unison to dictate one touch-pass and inside lane at a time. |
Hail Yon Blues!!! I seek conversation with thee!
From afar I see thy 1.0.4 patch, but strangely it shimmers and disappears whenever I look at it or move in its direction???
Is this a mirage? Are ye building said device in secret or some-such?
Thy reply I desire, to this or the post before this. Verily I say Farewell to thee
~Regards
A Rampant AI~
'Lo I have journeyed long and far to bear ye the message that the wavering footprints that stretch into the glittering horizon are not a mere mirage, nor are they a devious cultist’s grand illusion.They are real and solid, and I have ran mine own hands along their well-kept secrets. But they will not remain clasped in mystery forever. This, I promise thee.Soon, news of thy patch will approach in caravan with lush scrolls of information. I merely request thy understanding that further sand must run its course through the hourglass before light can be shone on yonder details. |
[Thanks to Tyler for today's post -yfbb]
In the past couple of years, the NBA Development League has seen a significant rise in its' value, and overall acceptance among NBA teams. Today, of the 30 NBA teams, 19 have their own affiliate, leaving 11 clubs without, and zero left for them to pursue. There are varying reasons why one of the 11 clubs may not have an affiliate, one may be due to finances, and another may be not seeing the actual value of the league itself. For the Chicago Bulls, the latter seems to be issue at point.
Over the last nine seasons, the Chicago Bulls have sent a player down for an assignment in the D-League a total of three times. One of those was James Johnson, while the remaining two were Marquis Teague. Aside from those, the D-League has been an after thought for the Bulls organization.
This situation of the Bulls and their relationship with the D-League percolated with myself more so than ever this past season. The much-heralded rookie Doug McDermott began the season in former coach Tom Thibodeau's rotation. However, through the first month of the season McDermott's play suffered as did his minutes, and eventually had surgery to repair a torn meniscus in December.
Upon his return in late January, McDermott was out of the rotation, Tony Snell having supplanted him. With the season in full swing, and hardly any practice time to be had, it left little to no time for McDermott to receive quality practice as a means of gaining reps and getting back into a rhythm. It was very apparent that McDermott wasn't going to crack the rotation, only scraping minutes, seconds most times at the end of a blowout. Thus, I began to beg the question, why not send McDermott, and even fellow rookie Cameron Bairstow to the D-League? Although both were around veteran teammates, which certainly helps to some capacity, neither of the two were getting any better by continually sitting on the bench during games, in addition to getting no reps in between.
And with another heralded rookie in Bobby Portis entering his first season with the Bulls, the previous question becomes relevant again. As a sophomore out of Arkansas, Portis was deemed to be a lottery selection in this past June's NBA draft. However, as the night wore on, Portis fell to the Bulls at 22, in what most called the steal of the draft. Portis played well in July's Las Vegas Summer League, and appears to be far enough along to warrant playing time in his rookie season. But it's probable that that won't come to fruition given the Bulls quality of depth in the frontcourt.
Of course, no one knows yet whether Portis will fit into Fred Hoiberg's rotation, but it seems bleak at this time. Furthermore, Hoiberg's exact thoughts on the D-League and its' value is unknown. Nevertheless, I spoke with two prominent D-League scribes to get their thoughts on the Bulls, Portis and the D-League.
The following questions were answered by Upside Motor's Chris Reichert (@Chris_Reichert), and Rolling Stone, Sporting News NBA and Upside Motor's Editor in Chief Scott Rafferty (@crabdribbles).
Since 2009, Chicago has only assigned three players to D-League stints, one of those being James Johnson, and the other two Marquis Teague. Last season, Doug McDermott coming off an early season injury as well as rookie Cameron Bairstow could've used time in the D-League, but didn't. Why is it, do you think the Bulls, and even teams alike don't utilize the system more with their rookies or even second year players?
CR: I think that the value of the D-League has substantially risen over the past 2-3 seasons and some teams just have not jumped on board yet. The Bulls are one that most point to for lack of use in the D-League and rightfully so as they simply neglect the entire league at this point. I think not having their own team is a hindrance but it comes down to value. If they don't see value in having a team then why use the league at all? Hopefully in the coming years they can see the light and start to utilize this amazing resource at their disposal.
SR: With the Bulls no longer own the Iowa Energy, sharing the Fort Wayne Mad Ants with so many teams last season made it hard to develop players.
The Raptors, for example, assigned Bruno Caboclo to the Mad Ants and he only played 62 minutes in seven games. It was infuriating for the Raptors, who have a promising prospect in need of in-game reps, but it's understandable that the Mad Ants used him sparingly. As the only independent team in the league, they won't play someone if they aren't going to help them win games. The Hornets had the same issue. Noah Vonleh wasn't getting minutes in Charlotte, so they assigned him to the Mad Ants hoping he'd get some burn. He played 27 minutes over two games.
The Raptors have since established their own affiliate and the Hornets are hoping to do the same by the 2016-17 season. Also, the Pacers are in the process of buddying up with the Mad Ants. Teams are quick to act once they realize how sharing an affiliate with nearly half the league hurts development, and it certainly has a domino effect. Now that the Bulls have someone they need to develop in Portis, perhaps they're next.
Looking ahead to next season at a rookie like Bobby Portis, who has the potential to see minutes in his first year, although he probably won't as he is behind a line of quality frontcourt players. Do you think him spending time in the D-League, as far as getting reps and experience, be a wise move by Chicago, or should they keep him with the team in hopes some spot minutes arise?
CR: I think any time young player can get live-game action it can benefit them. The problem with assigning Portis is the Bulls don't know where he will play as of now. The Fort Wayne Mad Ants have been purchased by the Indiana Pacers and now there isn't a shared team for NBA clubs without a team to use. If Portis can get minutes in the D-League then certainly it would benefit him and the Bulls in the longrun. If he's getting reps in the NBA he can still play in the D-League on other nights a la Mitch McGary last year with OKC.
SR: I think they should give the D-League a shot. It remains to be seen how the D-League handles assignees once the Mad Ants sale is official but it could be postponed until 2016-17, meaning the Bulls will likely be in the same position this upcoming season. Even so, Portis is much further along than a player like Caboclo. While he won't get the minutes and opportunities he would if the Bulls had their own affiliate, he's in a position to help D-League teams win ball games. There's no reason why he wouldn't get minutes.
The other option is the Bulls play the system, much like what the Hawks did. The flexible assignment system only allowed four NBA players (or two at the same position) on the Mad Ants at one time. Wait until the roster is full with NBA players and see if a team that runs a similar system to Fred Hoiberg's is willing to take on Portis. That way, he's getting the best of both worlds.
Even though the Bulls do not have their own affiliate (yet), some might point out Portis wouldn't be playing under Hoiberg's exact system, could it create concern for familiarity's sake? And regardless of what system Portis (hypothetically) would be playing in, there are still plenty of positives in spending time in the D-League for a rookie in Portis' position, correct?
CR: The benefit of having your own D-League team is consistency from top to bottom, so without that in place there is always a worry that players will have to learn a different system. In truth, if the Bulls send Portis down it will be to work on specific things and he can still improve those things without being in their system. Being comfortable with the lingo from each coach is important but players like Portis can still find value in spending time with another club in the D-League most certainly.
SR: It depends. While the odds of Portis getting minutes behind Noah, Gasol, Mirotic and Gibson as a rookie are slim, assigning him to the D-League for half the season (like the Rockets did with Terrence Jones and Clint Capela) might not pay off in the long-run because he'd be learning an entirely different system. But there's value in playing basketball in a structured environment rather than sitting on the bench all season long, even if it's only for a few short stints.
For confidence reasons alone, assigning Portis for a couple of games here and there to shake off some rust makes sense. And if an opportunity presents itself for him to get minutes with the Bulls, they can simply call him up.
Both Chris and Scott brought up similar points throughout their answering of the questions above. One subject that both pointed to in their answers, that may contribute to the Bulls lack of D-League involvement especially of late is the fact that Chicago does not have their own affiliate. Whereas prior, Chicago was affiliated with the Iowa Energy, and even the Fort Wayne Mad Ants were shared, those teams are no longer directly available. However that doesn't mean the Bulls are completely unable to utilize the D-League.
As Chris and Scott stated, the D-League does have the Flex Assignment System in place for those teams without their own affiliate. Per Upside Motor, the Flex Assignment System is as follows:
"Flex Assignment System: To accommodate assignments to Fort Wayne, a flexible assignment system will be utilized when an independent NBA team assigns a player at a time when the Mad Ants already have either the maximum of four NBA players on assignment or two assigned players at the position of the NBA player who is being assigned. In either event, the NBA D-League will identify to the assigning NBA team any singly-affiliated NBA D-League team that is willing to accept the assigned player, and the independent NBA team assigning the player will choose a team from among those teams to assign the player. If no singly-affiliated NBA D-League team is willing to accept the assigned player, he will be assigned to one of the non-NBA-owned single affiliate teams pursuant to a lottery."
While it's understandable that the Bulls may have some hesitancy in using the D-League since they do not have their affiliate (see Scott's examples in question 1), Chicago is still able to utilize the league via other available means. Moreover, Chris and Scott both agreed that any sort of playing time and reps in the D-League is more profitable for a young prospect then the bench throughout the length of a season.
This isn't meant to say that Portis, or even McDermott last year should've spent the entire year or even large portions of their rookie season in the D-League. McDermott and Portis having the opportunity to be around the veterans the Bulls have, more specifically with Portis, will be tremendous for his learning curve.
Nonetheless, spending a few short stints here and there can be beneficial to a rookie that was in McDermott's and possibly Portis' position. Much like what Chris pointed out that the Oklahoma City Thunder did last year with Mitch McGary, the Bulls could follow a similar pattern. Doing so allows the player to work on specific parts of their game, stay in game shape and an overall rhythm, but more importantly keep their confidence high. In looking back at last year, McDermott struggled immensely finding consistency with his shot and a rhythm offensively. Simply sending him down for a few games in the D-League could've done wonders for both areas.
The Chicago Bulls have an invaluable system available for their young players in the NBA D-League. Last season would've been an opportune time to utilize such system with McDermott and even Bairstow. But moving forward to next year with Portis in the fold and the depth in the frontcourt that he'll face, if minutes aren't presenting themselves on a regular basis, Chicago should start taking a hard look at the rising values of the D-League. |
Rim Overlook Trail
Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
Here are six photos from the Rim Overlook Trail in Utah's Capitol Reef National Park. The trail is 4.6 miles round-trip with an elevation gain of 1,100 feet.
Capitol Dome (left)
Pectols Pyramid
Pectols Pyramid and lava rock
Ferns Nipple (right) viewed from Rim Overlook
Waterpocket Fold viewed from Rim Overlook
Rim Overlook panorama including the Henry Mountains (Click the photo for a larger version)
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April 24, 2015
2015-05-17T20:00:00-04:00
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Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield, veteran of three missions on the International Space Station and author several books on the experience including You Are Here: Around the World in 92 Minutes and An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, talked about life in space and life on earth. He also spoke about the different countries who fund and run the International Space Station, and how the cooperative venture works. In conjunction with the Canadian Space Agency, Mr. Hadfield produced numerous videos from the space station to better inform the public about what life in space is like and how space station funding is used. This program included a number of his videos.
Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield, veteran of three missions on the International Space Station and author several books on the experience… read more |
A new report from Toronto's auditor general has found that more than a quarter of the city's licensed holistic centres appear to be offering unauthorized services that may be sexual in nature.
The report examined the 410 licensed holistic centres operating in the city and found that 107 of them appeared to advertise erotic massages and "other services" that may violate city bylaws.
Some of the centres also used sexually explicit photographs and included suggestive descriptions about services on their web sites.
"Aside from potentially being a violation to the city's licensing and zoning bylaws, holistic centres offering unauthorized services could potentially pose an array of health, safety and community issues, including the risk of human trafficking," wrote Auditor General Beverly Romeo-Beehler.
According to the report, only 37 holistic centres were charged with bylaw violations between 2015 and 2016, and all of them continue to operate under a holistic licence.
In the wake of the findings, Romeo-Beehler is recommending that city council approve a reassessment of the bylaws covering holistic centres, professional holistic associations and body rub parlours.
This spa in a Toronto strip mall holds one of the city's 25 body rub licences. (Google)
Centres approved by professional associations
Under Toronto's bylaws, holistic centres are to be not-for-profit organizations that administer services including natural medicine, reflexology, reiki and shiatsu.
The practitioners must be licensed and the centres must also be members of an accredited professional holistic association (PHA) to receive a city licence.
However, the report found problems with several of the 10 most popular PHAs in Toronto, some of which appear to operate "on paper only."
Two of the PHAs were found to be using dubious addresses, including an abandoned building and cottage. The operators of three others were previously convicted of operating unlicensed body rub parlours.
Coun. Jim Karygiannis sat in on Friday's audit committee meeting and said he wasn't surprised by the findings in the report.
"According to the police department, I do have a lot of rub-and-tugs, if I can put it that way," he said. "They're very open about it. They're even advertising. It's something we have to deal with very quickly."
Holistic centres vs. body rub parlours
Since the 1970s, Toronto has licensed a maximum of 25 body rub parlours, which are permitted to offer non-medical and non-therapeutic services including "kneading, manipulation, rubbing, massaging, touching or stimulating a person's body."
Tracey Cook, executive director of Municipal Licensing and Standards, says the city should 'revisit the entire regime' around holistic centres and body rub parlours. (CBC)
Toronto's municipal licensing and standards director Tracey Cook said it appears the demand for those types of services exceeds the number of body rub parlours permitted by the city, and that people are using holistic licences to fill the gap.
"People who saw an opportunity to exploit something, exploited it," she said.
The licence to operate a body rub parlour costs $13,102 with a $12,660 annual renewal cost. A holistic licence costs just $270 and $148 to renew, and the city has no cap on the total number of centres.
"It's a very complicated body of work that we need to do," she added. "There was an interest in something that we've put a cap on."
The recommendation to reassess the bylaws was adopted by the audit committee Friday, but still needs to be approved by city council to proceed. |
Humbled by the slumping oil price, Saudi Arabia, long the world's major oil producer, has been forced to take an axe to government spending by slashing a host of subsidies - including the price of oil.
As a result, Saudis will be faced with steep rises in the price of petrol and a host of other charges as a range of government subsidies are reduced.
Saudi Arabia is trying to maintain its share of the global oil market rather than use its power in OPEC to curb US producers. Credit:Bloomberg
The reality check has seen the domestic oil price rise from 0.60 riyal to 0.98 riyal a litre (36¢), which is still around a quarter the price paid at the bowser by most Australian motorists.
Price hikes have been outlined for utilities such as electricity and water, as the country battles slumping revenues thank to the fall in the price of oil, which has collapsed to around $US36 a barrel in recent trading from more than $US100 a barrel as recently as 18 months ago - declining 50 per cent in the past six months alone. |
Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag policy–sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo.
In the last couple of days, there’s been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday, Obama plucked Islam “Isi” Siddiqui from the nation’s most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry’s future profits–and perilous for global food security and the environment.
And today, Obama’s Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA’s newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).
A creation of the 2008 Farm Bill, the NIFA “replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, which distributes $200 million in competitive grants and about $280 million in ‘formula funding’ to land-grant universities,” Science blog reports.
Science continues:
The Farm Bill adds another $106 million annually of competitive funding for research into organic farming, biomass, and fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a “distinguished scientist” to be appointed for a 6-year term as director.
So this is a critical post. If the sustainable farming movement is going to scale up and really start providing a large portion of the nation’s calories–and deliver on its potentially huge environmental promises–than we’re going to need a significant commitment of federal research dollars.
Photo: Courtesy of the Danforth CenterAnd what are we getting with the appointment of Beachy? The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto’s St. Louis home town, is essentially that company’s NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center “was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri.”
Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center’s board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country’s notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early ’90s.
Romo used his connections to build a company called Seminis into the globe’s biggest vegetable-seed concern, with dreams (as yet unrealized) of loads of new GMO veggie varieties. Monsanto bought Seminis in 2005. Here’s a revealing Wall Street Journal profile of Romo from 1999; and here’s what I wrote about him and the Monsanto/Seminis tie up back in 2005. (Interesting tidbit: Romo claims credit for innovating those insipid and ubiquitous “baby carrots”; and for reducing the spiciness of jalepeno peppers.)
On its short list of “partners” we find several research-oriented universities and one corporation: Monsanto. In the Danforth Center’s 2007 annual report (PDF), Monsanto is mentioned no fewer than ten times funding this or that project.
So essentially, the public face of Monsanto’s research efforts now has his fingers on the USDA’s research purse strings. Score a big one for agribusiness!
So Obama has become an agribiz shill, right? Well, it’s not nearly so simple.
Last winter, the administration tapped Kathleen Merrigan as deputy USDA secretary. This is traditionally a powerful position within the agency; under Bush, a paid-up industrial corn man held the post. Merrigan has pristine credentials as an organic advocate–and from the whispers I’ve heard, has been pushing that agenda within USDA.
I’m told she’s met with many prominent sustainable-ag advocates–folks who were completely frozen out by the Bush USDA. The latest: On Twitter, Michel Dimock of California’s Roots of Change recently announced he has “4 mtngs w/ USDA nxt 2 days.” That sort of access simply wasn’t available at Bush’s USDA.
Then there’s Merrigan’s brainchild, “The Know Your Farmer Know Your Food” initiative (complete with splashy new web site). It’s essentially an attempt to alert players in the sustainable food movement to possibilities of getting existing USDA funding. (I wrote briefly about its limits and promise lat week.) Again, you can call the initiative largely symbolic, but nothing remotely like it was happening under Bush.
It’s certainly energizing sustainable ag NGO chiefs. On Chews Wise blog, Sam Fromartz reports that such folks are “pumped” by the initiative. He asked several for their reactions. Words like “fantastic,” “thrilling,” and “quite encouraging” tripped off their tongues.
Meanwhile, Michelle Obama–and her food ambassador, White House assistant chef/gardener Sam Kass–continues to push sustainable ag from the East Wing. One can assume she has some influence in the Oval Office.
So what’s going on here? Whither the Obama administration on food and ag–toward a food future that seeks big, top-down, corporate-led answers, always straining to leapfrog ecological limits–and creating new sets of problems to be (lucratively) solved? Or toward one that works within ecological limits, builds resilience, and generates wealth and health within communities?
Right now, we’re getting a kind of policy whiplash. But I have a conjecture–based completely on my own observation, not on any inside info. I’ll give it here; and I urge readers to give their own conjectures below.
My conjecture is this: Obama likes cutting-edge ideas. You look at the ag landscape, and you see two distinct areas with great innovation, energy, and movement: biotech and organic/sustainable. So he’s coming out strong behind both camps, and plans to sit back and see which one develops the best ideas.
The problem is that the biotech side has a massive advantage in terms of resources; and, as I’ve shown before, has benefitted from years of government cronyism and coddling. Moreover, it utterly dominates the university research agenda, aided by the draconian intellectual rights the government has awarded it.
So if Obama is setting up a kind of contest between the two camps, the game is rigged in advance.
That’s what I think. Please write what you think below. |
Share. DC offers a look inside the mind of Morrison. DC offers a look inside the mind of Morrison.
Final Crisis isn't the only major DC event comic Grant Morrison has spearheaded. Ten years before he depicted the "death" of Batman and the rise of the Fifth World, Morrison was responsible for an event called DC: One Million. This rather ambitious setup saw Morrison and artist Val Semekis create a weekly mini-series that linked the present day DCU with that of the 853rd Century (so chosen because that will be the time period when Action Comics theoretically reaches issue #1,000,000). The basic plot involved a crossover between the Justice League of today and the Justice Legion Alpha of the future as they collectively battled against the immortal Vandal Savage and Solaris, the Tyrant Sun. For one month, every single DC book skipped to its millionth issue and tied into the event, showing us how the legacy of heroes like Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern evolves in the far future.
DC has previously published a trade paperback collecting the mini-series and a handful of the more relevant tie-ins, but there's never been a way for fans to read the entire event without hunting down every single back issue. Until now, that is. DC will be releasing the One Million Omnibus this week. This massive tome collects the mini-series and every single tie-in issue, including more recent throwbacks like Superman/Batman #79-80 and Booster Gold #1,000,000.
In advance of that release, DC has offered us an exclusive look at some of the bonus material included in the Omnibus. These sketches show Morrison's concept designs for some of the DC: One Million characters. Rough as they are, they serve as a reminder that Morrison has some artistic talent in addition to being an accomplished wordsmith.
The DC: One Million Omnibus is scheduled to be released on October 30.
Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN. |
This isn't a good time for monopolies to bully the market. I wonder how Microsoft is feeling today, now that Intel has been told to stop its anticompetitive rebates programs? From the EU Commission's press release: Intel awarded major computer manufacturers rebates on condition that they purchased all or almost all of their supplies, at least in certain defined segments, from Intel... Certain rebates can lead to lower prices for consumers. However, where a company is in a dominant position on a market, rebates that are conditional on buying less of a rival's products, or not buying them at all, are abusive according to settled case-law of the Community Courts unless the dominant company can put forward specific reasons to justify their application in the individual case.... As a result of Intel's rebates, the ability of rival manufacturers to compete and innovate was impaired, and this led to reduced choice for consumers....Intel also interfered directly in the relations between computer manufacturers and AMD. Intel awarded computer manufacturers payments - unrelated to any particular purchases from Intel - on condition that these computer manufacturers postponed or cancelled the launch of specific AMD-based products and/or put restrictions on the distribution of specific AMD-based products. The $1.4B fine is record-breaking, so Microsoft no longer holds that dubious crown. You know what this means? It means AMD told us the truth since at least the year 2000, when it first filed a complaint with the Commission, according to this ruling. I invite you to look back at the media coverage of AMD's complaints, and ask yourself: how well did most of the mainstream media cover what was happening to AMD? Of course, Intel can appeal, and it says it will. It's so significant a turn of events, I will place the press release on Groklaw, as part of our permanent record of this part of antitrust history. And should you ever, ever, hear of anything like this happening again in Europe, you know who to tell. The EU Commission even has a form you can fill out, should that day ever come.
Of course, such conduct isn't done out in the noon day sun. So how did Intel get caught? Here's the kind of evidence that convinced the Commission: The Commission obtained proof of the existence of many of the conditions found to be illegal in the antitrust decision even though they were not made explicit in Intels contracts. Such proof is based on a broad range of contemporaneous evidence such as e-mails obtained inter alia from unannounced on-site inspections, in responses to formal requests for information and in a number of formal statements made to the Commission by the other companies concerned. In addition, there is evidence that Intel had sought to conceal the conditions associated with its payments. Intel has issued a statement: EC Ruling: Statement by Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 13, 2009 Paul Otellini, Intel Corporation president and CEO today issued the following statement regarding the European Commission decision on Intels business practices: Intel takes strong exception to this decision. We believe the decision is wrong and ignores the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor marketplace characterized by constant innovation, improved product performance and lower prices. There has been absolutely zero harm to consumers. Intel will appeal. We do not believe our practices violated European law. The natural result of a competitive market with only two major suppliers is that when one company wins sales, the other does not. The Directorate General for Competition of the Commission ignored or refused to obtain significant evidence that contradicts the assertions in this decision. We believe this evidence shows that when companies perform well the market rewards them, when they dont perform the market acts accordingly. Intel never sells products below cost. We have however, consistently invested in innovation, in manufacturing and in developing leadership technology. The result is that we can discount our products to compete in a highly competitive marketplace, passing along to consumers everywhere the efficiencies of being the worlds leading volume manufacturer of microprocessors. Despite our strongly held views, as we go through the appeals process we plan to work with the Commission to ensure were in compliance with their decision. Finally, there should be no doubt whatsoever that Intel will continue to invest in the products and technologies that provide Europe and the rest of the world the industrys best performing processors at lower prices. Microsoft at first swore it was not guilty too, but its threat to appeal was eventually dropped. According to lawyers quoted in this article in the Wall St. Journal, Intel's may not work out either: "There is nothing in the commission's decision that pushes the established law," said Thomas Vinje an antitrust partner at law firm Clifford Chance. Ultimately the case will come down to Intel's word against that of the commission on whether or not the rebates were tied to excluding the competition or just used as a regular sales practise, lawyers said. "Usually when it comes to contesting the interpretation of facts at the European Court of First Instance, the commission has the upper hand," said Stephen Kinsella, a partner at lawfirm Sidley Austin. The only way Intel can win this appeal is if the commission is wrong about the facts, Vinje added. Here, then, is the EU Commission's press release. Update: And to answer many of your questions, I am adding, after the double row of stars, the EU Commission's FAQ, linked from the press release. It tells you things like where the money goes: *********************** Antitrust: Commission imposes fine of 1.06 bn on Intel for abuse of dominant position; orders Intel to cease illegal practices The European Commission has imposed a fine of 1 060 000 000 on Intel Corporation for violating EC Treaty antitrust rules on the abuse of a dominant market position (Article 82) by engaging in illegal anticompetitive practices to exclude competitors from the market for computer chips called x86 central processing units (CPUs). The Commission has also ordered Intel to cease the illegal practices immediately to the extent that they are still ongoing. Throughout the period October 2002-December 2007, Intel had a dominant position in the worldwide x86 CPU market (at least 70% market share). The Commission found that Intel engaged in two specific forms of illegal practice. First, Intel gave wholly or partially hidden rebates to computer manufacturers on condition that they bought all, or almost all, their x86 CPUs from Intel. Intel also made direct payments to a major retailer on condition it stock only computers with Intel x86 CPUs. Such rebates and payments effectively prevented customers - and ultimately consumers - from choosing alternative products. Second, Intel made direct payments to computer manufacturers to halt or delay the launch of specific products containing competitors x86 CPUs and to limit the sales channels available to these products. The Commission found that these practices constituted abuses of Intels dominant position on the x86 CPU market that harmed consumers throughout the EEA. By undermining its competitors ability to compete on the merits of their products, Intels actions undermined competition and innovation. The Commission will actively monitor Intels compliance with this decision. The world market for x86 CPUs is currently worth approximately 22 billion (US$ 30 billion) per year, with Europe accounting for approximately 30% of that. Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said: "Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years. Such a serious and sustained violation of the EU's antitrust rules cannot be tolerated". The computer manufacturers concerned by Intel's conduct in the Commissions decision are: Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC. The retailer concerned is Media Saturn Holding, owner of the MediaMarkt chain. Conditional rebates and payments Intel awarded major computer manufacturers rebates on condition that they purchased all or almost all of their supplies, at least in certain defined segments, from Intel: Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer A from December 2002 to December 2005 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing exclusively Intel CPUs
Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer B from November 2002 to May 2005 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing no less than 95% of its CPU needs for its business desktop computers from Intel (the remaining 5% that computer manufacturer B could purchase from rival chip maker AMD was then subject to further restrictive conditions set out below)
Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer C from October 2002 to November 2005 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing no less than 80% of its CPU needs for its desktop and notebook computers from Intel
Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturer D in 2007 conditional on this manufacturer purchasing its CPU needs for its notebook computers exclusively from Intel. Furthermore, Intel made payments to major retailer Media Saturn Holding from October 2002 to December 2007 on condition that it exclusively sold Intel-based PCs in all countries in which Media Saturn Holding is active. Certain rebates can lead to lower prices for consumers. However, where a company is in a dominant position on a market, rebates that are conditional on buying less of a rival's products, or not buying them at all, are abusive according to settled case-law of the Community Courts unless the dominant company can put forward specific reasons to justify their application in the individual case. In its decision, the Commission does not object to rebates in themselves but to the conditions Intel attached to those rebates. Because computer manufacturers are dependent on Intel for a majority of their x86 CPU supplies, only a limited part of a computer manufacturer's x86 CPU requirements is open to competition at any given time. Intel structured its pricing policy to ensure that a computer manufacturer which opted to buy AMD CPUs for that part of its needs that was open to competition would consequently lose the rebate (or a large part of it) that Intel provided for the much greater part of its needs for which the computer manufacturer had no choice but to buy from Intel. The computer manufacturer would therefore have to pay Intel a higher price for each of the units supplied for which the computer manufacturer had no alternative but to buy from Intel. In other words, should a computer manufacturer fail to purchase virtually all its x86 CPU requirements from Intel, it would forego the possibility of obtaining a significant rebate on any of its very high volumes of Intel purchases. Moreover, in order to be able to compete with the Intel rebates, for the part of the computer manufacturers' supplies that was up for grabs, a competitor that was just as efficient as Intel would have had to offer a price for its CPUs lower than its costs of producing those CPUs, even if the average price of its CPUs was lower than that of Intel. For example, rival chip manufacturer AMD offered one million free CPUs to one particular computer manufacturer. If the computer manufacturer had accepted all of these, it would have lost Intel's rebate on its many millions of remaining CPU purchases, and would have been worse off overall simply for having accepted this highly competitive offer. In the end, the computer manufacturer took only 160,000 CPUs for free. As a result of Intel's rebates, the ability of rival manufacturers to compete and innovate was impaired, and this led to reduced choice for consumers. Rebates such as those applied by Intel are recognised in many jurisdictions around the world as anti-competitive and unlawful because the effect in practice is to deny consumers a choice of products. Payments to prevent sales of specific rival products Intel also interfered directly in the relations between computer manufacturers and AMD. Intel awarded computer manufacturers payments - unrelated to any particular purchases from Intel - on condition that these computer manufacturers postponed or cancelled the launch of specific AMD-based products and/or put restrictions on the distribution of specific AMD-based products. The Commission found that these payments had the potential effect of preventing products for which there was a consumer demand from coming to the market. The Commission found the following specific cases: For the 5% of computer manufacturer Bs business that was not subject to the conditional rebate outlined above, Intel made further payments to computer manufacturer B provided that this manufacturer: sold AMD-based business desktops only to small and medium enterprises sold AMD-based business desktops only via direct distribution channels (as opposed to through distributors) and
postponed the launch of its first AMD-based business desktop in Europe by 6 months.
Intel made payments to computer manufacturer E provided that this manufacturer postponed the launch of an AMD-based notebook from September 2003 to January 2004.
Before the conditional rebate to computer manufacturer D outlined above, Intel made payments to this manufacturer provided that it postponed the launch of AMD-based notebooks from September 2006 to the end of 2006. The Commission obtained proof of the existence of many of the conditions found to be illegal in the antitrust decision even though they were not made explicit in Intels contracts. Such proof is based on a broad range of contemporaneous evidence such as e-mails obtained inter alia from unannounced on-site inspections, in responses to formal requests for information and in a number of formal statements made to the Commission by the other companies concerned. In addition, there is evidence that Intel had sought to conceal the conditions associated with its payments. x86 CPUs are the main hardware component of a computer. The decision contains a broad range of contemporaneous evidence that shows that AMD, essentially Intel's only competitor in the market, was generally perceived, by computer manufacturers and by Intel itself, to have improved its product range, to be a viable competitor, and to be a growing competitive threat. The decision finds that Intel's practices did not constitute competition on the merits of the respective Intel and AMD products, but rather were part of a strategy designed to exploit Intel's existing entrenched position in the market. Intels worldwide turnover in 2007 was 27 972 million (US$ 38 834 million). The fine in this case takes account of the duration and gravity of the infringement. In accordance with the Commission's 2006 Guidelines on Fines (see IP/06/857 and MEMO/06/256) the fine has been calculated on the basis of the value of Intel's x86 CPU sales in the European Economic Area (EEA). The duration of the infringement established in the decision is five years and three months. The Commissions investigation followed complaints from AMD in 2000, 2003 and 2006 (the last having been sent to the German competition authority and subsequently examined by the European Commission). The Commission's decision follows a Statement of Objections sent in July 2007 (see MEMO/07/314), a Supplementary Statement of Objections sent in July 2008 (see MEMO/08/517) and a letter sent to Intel in December 2008 setting out additional factual elements relevant to the final decision. Intel's rights of defence have been fully respected in this case. See also MEMO/09/235. ****************************************
**************************************** MEMO/09/235 Brussels, 13 May 2009 Antitrust: Commission imposes fine of 1.06 billion euros on Intel for abuse of dominant position; orders Intel to cease illegal practices - questions and answers
(see also IP/09/745) What must Intel do to comply with EU law? The Decision sets out how Intel has breached EU antitrust law by engaging in two types of practices which have harmed competition. First, Intel gave wholly or partially hidden rebates to computer manufacturers on condition that they bought all, or almost all, their x86 central processing units (CPUs) from Intel. Intel also made direct payments to a major retailer on condition it stock only computers with Intel x86 CPUs. Second, Intel made direct payments to computer manufacturers to halt or delay the launch of specific products containing a competitor's x86 CPUs and to limit the sales channels available to these products. Intel is obliged desist from the specific practices identified in this case and not to engage in these or equivalent practices in the future. What is the geographic scope of the remedy? This is a worldwide market. Within this context, Intel is obliged not to engage in any abusive practices that have an effect within the European Economic Area (EEA). How will this Decision help innovation in the market? Intel limited consumer choice and stifled innovation by preventing innovative products for which there was a consumer demand from reaching end customers. Such practices deter innovative companies which might otherwise wish to enter and compete in the market. By ordering Intel to end its abusive practices, competition on the x86 CPU market will play out on the merits with the effect that innovation to the benefit of the consumer can flourish. Does the Commission seek to limit companies' ability to provide customers with discounts? No. This case is about the conditions associated with Intel's rebates and payments, not the rebates and payments themselves. What is at stake here are loyalty or fidelity rebates, granted on condition that a customer buys all or most of its requirements from the dominant undertaking, thereby preventing that customer from purchasing from competitors. Intel also paid clients to delay or not launch computers incorporating a competitor's CPUs, a conduct which is not linked at all to a company's ability to provide customers with discounts. Does the Commissions Decision seek to protect competitors? No, the Commission acts in the interests of consumers. The Commission does not look at the specific interests of individual companies, but is charged with ensuring that competition on the merits is safeguarded. This creates an environment where consumers can benefit and where innovation can flourish. What is the case-law underpinning the Commissions case? The legal underpinning of the Commissions case is based on a consistent pattern of Court jurisprudence, including Case 85/76 Hoffmann-La Roche v Commission, Case T-203/01 Michelin v Commission, Case C-95/04 British Airways v Commission, Joined Cases T-24/93 and others, Compagnie Maritime Belge v Commission and Case T-228/97, Irish Sugar. Has the Commission applied its Guidance Paper on its enforcement priorities in applying Article 82? Formally, the Guidance Paper does not apply to this case since proceedings were initiated before it was issued. The Decision is nevertheless in line with the orientations set out in the guidance paper, and includes a rigorous, effects-based analysis which has demonstrated that Intel's conduct has reduced consumer choice and limited innovation in the market. Intel is a US company. What gives the European Commission authority to decide whether its behaviour is legal or not? Intel sells its products inter alia in the European Union, which is one of its main markets in the world. It must therefore respect EU antitrust rules in the same way that European companies must respect US law when operating on the other side of the Atlantic. Did the Commission co-operate with the United States on this case? The Commission and the United States Federal Trade Commission have kept each other regularly and closely informed on the state of play of their respective Intel investigations. These discussions have been held in a co-operative and friendly atmosphere, and have been substantively fruitful in terms of sharing experiences on issues of common interest. Does Intel have to pay the fine immediately? The fine must be paid within three months of the date of notification of the Decision. Where does the money go? Once final judgment has been delivered in any appeals before the Court of First Instance (CFI) and the Court of Justice, the money goes into the EUs central budget, thus reducing the contributions that Member States pay to the EU. Does Intel have to pay the fine if it appeals to the European Court of First Instance (CFI)? Yes. In case of appeals to the CFI, it is normal practice that the fine is paid into a blocked bank account pending the final outcome of the appeals process. Any fine that is provisionally paid will produce interest based on the interest rate applied by the European Central Bank to its main refinancing operations. In exceptional circumstances, companies may be allowed to cover the amount of the fine by a bank guarantee at a higher interest rate. What percentage of Intel's turnover does the fine represent? The fine represents 4.15 % of Intel's turnover in 2008. This is less than half the allowable maximum, which is 10% of a company's annual turnover. How was Intel able to exercise its rights of defence? Intel has been provided full access to the Commission's file, with the exception of legitimate claims relating to business secrets of other companies and internal Commission documents. Intel has been able to fully comment on the evidence on which the Commission has based its Decision. The file in this case comprises several hundred thousand pages and the Decision is based on a broad range of contemporaneous evidence from a variety of sources. How long is the Decision? The Decision is 542 pages long. When is the Decision going to be published? The Decision in English (the official language version of the Decision) will be made available as soon as possible on DG Competitions website (once relevant business secrets have been taken out). French and German translations will also be made available on DG Competitions website in due course. A summary of the Decision will be published in the EU's Official Journal L series in all languages (once the translations are available). |
A tip of the mortarboard to Lebanon High School Principal Kevin Lowery. His introductory speech at commencement included a moment of silence, for which he has been forced to apologize.
Nope, he was forced to apologize not for having a moment of silence, which is legal, but for what Hilton describes next, which is illegal. Oh, and FYI, where do you get the idea that Lowery was “forced to apologize.” The only statement he’s made about his “apology,” such as it is, notes that he apologized of his own free will. Do you have other sources for your information?
Lowery told the audience that he used his moment to pray for the students, thanked God for them, their parents, teachers and the community, and asked God to protect them in the future. A University of Chicago professor who saw part of the remarks on YouTube declared Lowery’s talk was “clearly a violation of the First Amendment.”
Nonsense. You can view the supposedly objectionable portion of Lowery’s remarks here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctwrBqcBcgM.
It’s not nonsense; it’s settled case law. If you doubt that, read the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s letter of complaint to the Lebanon School Superintendent and School Board.
Dr. Jerry A. Coyne, an evolutionary biologist trained at Harvard, has a blog called “Why Evolution Is True,” also the title of his most recent book. He posted his first rant against Lowery May 31, along with a letter to Dr. Duane Widhalm and the school board.
“Lowery’s behavior during that graduation ceremony is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment, and of court decisions that prayer in public schools by officials of those schools is illegal,” Coyne claimed. “Apparently, by making a public display of his faith, Mr. Lowery wished to voice his disdain for those rulings, and for our Constitution.”
I think Dr. Coyne should stick to monkeys and their uncles. You can judge for yourself.
Here we see the first hint that perhaps Ms. Hilton isn’t down with modern evolutionary science. “Monkeys and their uncles”? Really? This makes me wonder whether Lebanon High School even teaches evolution, or whether they sneak in intelligent design or other forms of creationism. Perhaps one of the several LHS students who reads this site can tell us.
The First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
Lowery clearly isn’t Congress, nor did he establish any religion at commencement. He did exercise his right to pray during the moment of silence that he requested, and he did exercise his right to free speech when he shared what he had chosen to pray.
This is breathtaking inanity. Lowery doesn’t have to be “Congress” to violate the Constitution! All he has to do is be a government official who tries to promulgate religion in the organs of government. He is and he did. The courts have clearly established that “free speech” does not include an official’s right to pray to a captive high-school audience at official events—like graduation. This has been decided by the courts over and over again. When I read stuff so blatantly ignorant and self-serving, I wonder whether Ms. Hilton really understands the issues, or that she does but is just ignoring them. Like a good theologian interpreting the Bible, she picks and chooses from the Constitution what she wants to see. Unfortunately for Hilton, the courts consistently disagree with her interpretation. Her take on the Constitution is like a garden-variety Catholic telling people what official Church dogma is, despite the Vatican saying otherwise.
Coyne was satirized in February as “censor of the year” by the Discovery Institute. According to the institute’s website, Coyne and the Freedom From Religion Foundation caused Ball State University to ban teaching the scientific theory of intelligent design. ID is a theory that contradicts Coyne’s Darwinism.
“The scientific theory” of intelligent design? Here again we see hints that Ms. Hilton rejects evolution as it’s accepted by scientists (not just “Coyne”). If the people of Lebanon want to parade their ignorance of evolution as visibly as they parade their ignorance of Constitutional law, by all means let them, for they only make themselves look like ignoramuses. |
JP Arencibia has been catching RA Dickey without a cup to build concentration
Toronto Blue Jays catcher JP Arencibia may have a difficult responsibility this season if the team allows him to catch for R.A. Dickey. Knuckleball pitchers like Dickey and Tim Wakefield will oftentimes have their own personal catcher, but Arencibia is hoping to convince the Jays that he is up to the task.
According to ESPN the Magazine’s Chris Jones, Arencibia has been living life on the edge while working with Dickey in spring training. While catching for Dickey during practice and drills, Arencibia has been using only a mask and the oversized catcher’s mitt that that Dickey takes with him wherever he goes. That means no leg guards, no chest protector and no — gulp — athletic supporter.
“I don’t want to miss every fifth game,” Arencibia explained. “It also makes you really, really concentrate.”
Arencibia said he has been bothered by the belief that he is an average defensive catcher, and he is hoping to prove that he is more than that. Opting to not protect his family jewels is certainly a means by which the 27-year-old can sharpen his senses, but I wouldn’t advise doing it during games. You know, with foul tips and all that.
“He does not want to be made out to be a fool,” Dickey said. “He wants to really figure this thing out, and I think he will.”
If he doesn’t, Arencibia may be in for a world of pain and infertility.
H/T Eye on Baseball |
Youth evangelist Matt Pitt was arrested Tuesday night after a brief run from Jefferson County sheriff's deputies and Birmingham police officers.
Pitt, who was was apprehended near 20th Street South in the Vulcan area near the overlook.
The 30-year-old leader of had been at a local television station for an interview when authorities were notified of his location.
The sheriff's office sent deputies to the station and requested the assistance of the Birmingham Police Department. Shortly after officers arrived, Pitt fled the scene on foot into a wooded area. After a brief struggle with officers, Pitt was taken into custody around 9:30 p.m. and transported to the Jefferson County Jail. He was released around 1:30 a.m. Wednesday and was promptly taken into custody by Shelby County authorities. Pitt is being held in the Shelby County jail without bond.
Wednesday, a Shelby County judge ordered Pitt to undergo drug testing. Typically, the results are not released unless authorized by a judge.
FILE - Mugshot of Matt Pitt following his 2012 arrest in Shelby County for impersonating a peace officer.
In September 2012, Pitt to misdemeanor count of attempting to impersonate a peace officer and was given two years of unsupervised probation. A judge Monday after learning of his newest charge in Jefferson County, and he now faces a year in jail for violating the terms of his plea agreement.
It is unknown at this time if Pitt has retained a lawyer.
{}
{} |
Out In The Open
Rachel Dolezal
When Rachel Dolezal was outed as a white woman who identifies as black in June 2015, she inadvertently started an important conversation about race. With the launch of her memoir, In Full Color, Piya tries to understand the story that sparked so much hurt and outrage from the eye of the storm — that is to say, from the perspective of Rachel Dolezal herself. Hint: she hasn’t backed down.
Social Sharing
Rachel Dolezal in a studio in Spokane County, Washington talking to Piya down the line Listen to the full episode 54:00 When Rachel Dolezal was outed as a white woman who identifies as black in June 2015, she inadvertently started an important conversation about race. With the launch of her memoir, In Full Color, Piya tries to understand the story that sparked so much hurt and outrage from the eye of the storm — that is to say, from the perspective of Rachel Dolezal herself. Hint: she hasn't backed down.
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HOUSTON — Floodwaters in two Houston neighborhoods have been contaminated with bacteria and toxins that can make people sick, testing organized by The New York Times has found. Residents will need to take precautions to return safely to their homes, public health experts said.
It is not clear how far the toxic waters have spread. But Fire Chief Samuel Peña of Houston said over the weekend that there had been breaches at numerous waste treatment plants. The Environmental Protection Agency said on Monday that 40 of 1,219 such plants in the area were not working.
The results of The Times’s testing were troubling. Water flowing down Briarhills Parkway in the Houston Energy Corridor contained Escherichia coli, a measure of fecal contamination, at a level more than four times that considered safe.
In the Clayton Homes public housing development downtown, along the Buffalo Bayou, scientists found what they considered astonishingly high levels of E. coli in standing water in one family’s living room — levels 135 times those considered safe — as well as elevated levels of lead, arsenic and other heavy metals in sediment from the floodwaters in the kitchen. |
Uruguay players Andres Scotti, Walter Gargano, Luis Suarez and Diego Godin celebrate qualifying for the 2014 World Cup after beating Jordan in the play-off in Montevideo
The past few months - and especially the past few days - have exposed a stark contrast in South American football.
All the evidence points to the conclusion that, in global terms, the continent's national teams are extremely strong - while the club sides are alarmingly weak.
First the good part. Moving into World Cup year, the South American nations are generally considered to be amongst the favourites - and not just because they will be playing the tournament on home soil for the first time since 1978.
South Africa 2010 revealed the continent's contemporary strength in depth, and there has been plenty more proof in 2013.
The blend that Brazil have found over the past six months would make them strong World Cup contenders wherever the competition was being played. Argentina can count on a dazzling array of attacking firepower.
Chile showed their quality with victory over England at Wembley in November
Chile showed their quality with their win at Wembley - and only a stoppage-time equaliser stopped them beating Spain in a match staged in Switzerland. Colombia have just won away to Belgium and held Holland.
Ecuador are often dismissed as mere altitude specialists. But earlier this year they won away to Portugal.
Uruguay may have finished fifth in South America's qualifiers, and needed a play-off to reach the World Cup. But the same thing happened last time round, when they went on to reach the 2010 semi-finals - and since then, if many of the team have grown old together, their strikeforce of Luis Suarez and Edinson Cavani have come into their footballing peak.
Perhaps the most astonishing display of South America's strength in depth came a few months ago when Paraguay, who finished bottom of the qualification table, travelled to Germany and came away with a 3-3 draw.
There could be no clearer indication that there are no easy games in the South American qualifying process. Those who make it through are battle-hardened and ready to take on the best the planet can throw at them.
But that is something Atletico Mineiro, the continent's champions, were clearly unable to do in the recent World Club Cup in Morocco.
Atletico's level of performance was frankly very poor. They lost 3-1 to Raja Casablanca in the semi-finals, then secured third place when a last-minute goal gave them a 3-2 win over China's Guangzhou Evergrande. But the Asian champions were unlucky; they were denied a clear penalty, and there was a strong suspicion of offside about Atletico's winner.
South America's best players, while available for the national teams, spend their peak years with European clubs
For much of the game, Guangzhou were simply the better side. Indeed, in terms of level of play, Atletico were probably only the fifth best team on show in the competition, losing out as well to Monterrey of Mexico. And yet this team were the legitimate champions of one of football's big two continents.
So why the huge discrepancy between the relative strengths of club and country?
A large part of the explanation is obvious - it is a consequence of the globalisation of the game. South American football has become an export industry, and so the continent's best players, while available for the national teams, spend their peak years with European clubs.
This, of course, cuts both ways. It is only since the last World Cup, for example, that many around the globe have finally realised that, with so many foreign players, the strength of the Premier League does not necessarily translate into a top-notch England team.
But there is more to it than this.
Over recent years there has been a significant increase in the revenues of Brazilian clubs - and Brazil has supplied the past four South American champions. This development has by no means levelled the financial playing field between Brazil and the top European clubs. But it has altered the balance a little.
On the field, though, the gap looks wider than ever. All four of those teams spent months eagerly awaiting the World Club Cup - over here it is considered the highlight of the club calendar. Only one came back with the trophy, and there was nothing heroic about the defeats suffered by the other three.
For Internacional in 2010, Santos the following year, and now for Atletico, participation brought more humiliation than pleasure.
The exception was Corinthians last year. True, there is always a danger of reading too much into a short competition, especially one still striving for credibility such as the World Club Cup.
And Corinthians had the good fortune to meet Chelsea, the least convincing European champion of recent times. Even then, they needed an inspired performance from keeper Cassio to win.
But it also seems clear that Corinthians had one vital advantage over their compatriot clubs; they had a model of play that equipped them for the challenge. Corinthians were not a defensive side. But they were defensively solid.
Atletico Mineiro's Ronaldinho (left) celebrates with Josue after scoring against Guangzhou Evergrande in the Club World Cup soccer tournament in Marrakech, Morocco
Their coach Tite, based, as he told me recently, on hours well spent on the training ground, managed to construct a side that were compact, and difficult to play through.
The contrast with Atletico this year could not be clearer. In a competition where the champions of all the continents were present, Atletico's defensive line appeared to be on a different land mass from the attack.
There were gaping holes between the lines of the team, all too inviting for the opposing attack. For their own self-esteem, it is probably just as well that Atletico lost their semi-final and avoided a meeting with Bayern Munich.
It is much more, then, than a case of mere finance. It is also all about the idea.
Bayern's success makes it apparent just how good the Barcelona years have been for European club football. Barcelona triumphed with an idea of play. And since winners are copied, that idea has been dissected and many of its tenets incorporated - Bayern were doing so even before they hired Pep Guardiola.
The best contemporary European clubs have the top players from all over the world, and a coherent, constructive, collective idea of play. The South American clubs, with the exception here and there, are muddling through. Once the best in the world, South American club football now stands waiting for the great leap forward.
Questions on South American football to [email protected], and I'll pick out a couple for next week.
From last week's postbag;
Is there any chance Ronaldinho could make the World Cup now? I thought that maybe if Atletico won the World Club Cup and he produced the kind of performances I think many of us had a sense he would deliver, Scolari would surely select him, even if in a minor role. Can you see him getting a call-up? Or is this Brazil side better off without his influence? Matt Pike
What influence? I think that Scolari has come to the conclusion, like the two Brazil coaches before him, that from open play Ronaldinho can no longer exert much influence on a top level game. It was the stand Scolari took on Romario in 2002, and I'm pretty sure it will be repeated this time.
Not that there is much of a clamour for his inclusion, and any remote chance he had has surely gone with his performances in Morocco. Those superb free-kick goals speak volumes about the extraordinary talent he has. But the way he waddled round the periphery of both matches tells us just as much about how, for seven years now, that talent has been wasted. |
We are glad to present you a new release of Blend4Web - an open source framework for creating 3D web experiences. Here are the most significant features of this release: pathfinding using navigation meshes, new logic node for switching between camera movement styles, updates in the Project Manager and even more optimizations!
Navigation Meshes and Pathfinding
This feature will be much appreciated by developers of online shopping malls, virtual museums, interactive maps and open-world games. We have realized the classical A* algorithm so that you can now easily implement walking around walls and other obstacles in a location and finding the shortest path to follow.
Pathfinding is based on the so-called navigation mesh (aka navmesh) which determines which territory is accessible to the player and non-player characters. You can create navmeshes manually or, if you are feeling lazy, using a tool designed for generating navmeshes which was borrowed from the Blender Game Engine.
Tool for building navigation meshes.
To use an object as a navigation mesh, simply select the corresponding option in its physics properties. Notice the nice coloring Blender immediately applies to it!
Navigation mesh option is assigned under Physics tab.
The programming part includes retrieving the ID of a navmesh part to which the object belongs (navmeshes can consist of isolated islands):
var island = m_phys.navmesh_get_island(navmesh_obj, pos);
...and calculating the path (as an array of coordinates) between the starting and destination points inside this part:
var path = m_phys.navmesh_find_path(navmesh_obj, start_pos, dest_pos, island);
Moreover, the calculated path is further smoothed by applying the so-called string pulling technique. Still, it is possible to use the pure A-star algorithm where the path connects the centers of triangles instead. Other supported parameters can be seen in the API reference.
You can study the full listing in the corresponding code snippet - run the example now!
Node-Based Logic Editor
The new logic node, Set Camera Move Style, is a very helpful feature requested more than once by our users. A typical scenario where this node can be used is transitioning between outside and inside views in a building or an apartment. Now this task can be done by artists themselves, without any coding! Check out the example below.
Another important update: the JS Callback node, which is used for calling a JavaScript function in the programming code out of the node tree, has become much more advanced. The node will be now set to "freeze mode" if the callback function immediately returns true. It won't proceed along the logic tree and will keep calling the callback function until it returns false. We used this feature in the demo of an exciting quest game that will first be revealed at the Blender Conference 2016. Don't miss it!
JS Callback node will call move_to_target() function and will pass an object to its input.
Optimization
For the third month in a row we have been focused on optimizations. Firstly, frustum culling was made more efficient as bounding volumes are now properly calculated to better fit rotated objects.
Another measure we took is that the geometry data format, which is used for storing vertex information both in .bin files of scenes and in the GPU memory, was significantly reworked. The precision of most data (for example, normals, (bi)tangents, vertex colors and some others) was decreased to the minimum level necessary for correct representation of 3D models. This reduced memory bandwidth, improved performance and also reduced the size of exported scene files. Please remember to re-export scenes of your projects after applying this update (you can do it with one click in the Project Manager).
After reviewing the code responsible for the generation of shadow and hair particle batches, we managed to decrease their quantity which eradicated lots of redundant draw calls.
Needless to say, all these measures resulted in a good frame rate win, which we traditionally detect in our most graphically-intensive Farm demo.
Project Manager
This web-based tool slowly but surely becomes the core component in organizing Blend4Web workflow. We, therefore, decided to deprive the Scene Viewer from the "global" list of scenes (together with the assets.json file from which it was generated) as the list of projects is maintained by the Project Manager anyway.
There are more changes, some of which are cosmetic while others are rather important. Now applications, blend files and project assets are opened in new browser tabs, thus, leaving the main tab with the Project Manager untouched.
The compile project command was renamed build project as it does much more than just compiling programming code.
List of possible operations with projects.
This was a tedious task but it had to be done: lots of the asset files in the SDK were moved to new places so that all projects, from large apps to small tutorials, follow the unified file structure offered by the Project Manager.
The Project Creation Wizard was made more functional and intuitive to use at the same time. Engine Binding Type now includes a new option named None meaning that the Project Manager will not change your projects during the build phase. Also, the Update option has been removed as this type is now covered by the Copy option and the deployment feature of the Project Manager.
Project creation options.
Other Improvements
The tangent shading feature introduced in one of the previous releases now works for geometry with edited normals as well.
The galore of blend types existing for world textures in Blender is now all supported by Blend4Web.
The Sphere option is now supported for Point and Spot lights to specify the distance at which the light’s intensity drops to zero.
The new API methods get_fog_params() and set_fog_params() have been added to the scenes module. These functions, requested by our users, allow controlling the parameters of mist in a scene, including its intensity, depth and distribution.
The more precise gamma-correction formula is used in ULTRA quality mode. The effect is mostly notable in dark areas where the simplified function doesn’t yield precise enough colors.
For your convenience, buttons have been added to the World tab for switching the visibility of world background (which before could only be done using the right side panel of the 3D View window). Use these buttons to preview actual sky colors right in the viewport.
With these buttons you can turn background visibility on and off.
In Closing
Starting from this release, we will additionally provide so called "lite" download options, which were requested by some of our users, for both the PRO and CE SDKs. These builds are stripped of all demos and tutorials as well as the source files of the Bullet physics engine and documentation. The lite versions, therefore, are much more compact than the full SDK while keeping most functionality intact (unless you are patching Bullet or generating the documentation), and, thus, are well suited for upgrading your projects quickly.
As usual, you can find the source files of the examples presented in this article inside the SDK. For the complete list of changes and bugfixes see the release notes.
And those of you who will be in Amsterdam at the Blender Conference we invite to attend the insightful presentation and the gamedev workshop which will be held by our teammates this Saturday, 29 October. See you at #bcon16! |
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republicans will be unlikely to compromise on immigration reform unless U.S. borders are first secured, and the possibility of a broad immigration bill reaching President Barack Obama’s desk this year is “clearly in doubt,” Representative Paul Ryan said on Sunday.
Demonstrators march against amnesty for illegal aliens, during a rally against the immigration reform bill in Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington July 15, 2013. REUTERS/Jose Luis Magana
“Security first, no amnesty, then we might be able to get somewhere,” Ryan said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Immigration reform legislation, which the Senate has already passed, has stalled in the Republican-controlled House. Ryan’s comments follow a House document released last week that presents a path toward legal status for 11 million undocumented workers now in the United States.
The plan, rolled out by House Republican leaders, outlines “principles” for immigration reform and embraces an agenda that gives their candidates a campaign message that goes beyond political attacks on Obama.
Asked if Obama would get a bill to sign this year, Ryan replied: “I really don’t know the answer to that question. That’s clearly in doubt.”
It remains unclear if the House principles will advance any further amid deep Republican divisions. The principles are seen as gauging the party’s willingness to tackle such a controversial issue during an election year, when all 435 House seats are at stake.
Last June, the Senate passed a comprehensive bill that would provide a path to citizenship for the approximately 11 million immigrants living in the United States illegally and tighten border security.
The bill stalled in the House, and some conservative Republicans in both chambers remain staunchly opposed to offering legal status for millions of adults who live in the United States unlawfully.
Obama last week hinted in an interview that he might be open to a plan that would first give undocumented workers legal status, as long as they were not permanently barred from becoming citizens.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said the principles offered by the House Republican leadership appeared to represent “pretty good progress.” He added: “We feel pretty good that we will get a bill this year.”
PATH TO CITIZENSHIP?
Obama and his supporters may soon face a hard decision over whether to shelve the creation of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants and instead embrace border enforcement efforts that they have previously criticized.
“The bottom line here is that he (Obama) doesn’t want to see an America where we have two permanent classes - citizens and non-citizens,” McDonough said.
Ryan said Republicans have made it clear that they will not be forced to compromise with the Senate on a deal and refuse to go to conference committee with the Senate immigration reform bill.
“This is not one of those issues that has a deadline,” he said in the ABC interview. Ryan emphasized that securing the U.S.-Mexico border was a crucial first step before changing rules around legal residency.
“We don’t know who’s coming and going in this country. We don’t have control of our borders,” he said. “Doing nothing on the security side of this isn’t the responsible thing to do.”
House leaders must contend with several conservatives who are suspicious of Obama’s agenda and are reluctant to give the president a long-sought legislative victory.
“We are still having a debate in our caucus,” Ryan said.
House Republican Leader Eric Cantor, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” said his party wants to make progress on immigration, “step by step.”
“We want to help the situation,” Cantor said.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) departs after a news conference by U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) and other Republican House members in Washington October 10, 2013. REUTERS/Gary Cameron
Incumbents facing a primary challenge or a close general election in this year’s campaign season may have an incentive to oppose the plan’s path to citizenship.
Still, many lawmakers agreed to revamp U.S. policy on immigration after exit polling showed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2012. The Republican National Committee made it a priority to reach out to minority voters after the election.
Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Republicans should go ahead with immigration reform since it remains the right thing to do and not “because of what some pollster tells us.” |
Thanks to new technology that looks like Total Recall, you soon might be able to pass through airport security faster than you can say “get your ass to Mars.”
Aviation officials from the United Arab Emirates announced earlier this week that they’re bringing virtual security tunnels to Dubai airports. Fans of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Paul Verhoeven’s mindbender already have some familiarity with the basic concept of such checkpoint tunnels.
However, the Emirati tunnels rely on artificial intelligence instead of X-rays to check whether a traveler poses a threat. Designed so that it looks like travelers are walking through a virtual aquarium, the tunnel is equipped with face-scanning fish. A.I. is used to speed up the verification process, according to the Emirati news outlet The National.
“The fish is a sort of entertainment and something new for the traveller,” said Major General Obaid Moheir bin Suroor, deputy director general of Dubai’s general directorate of residency and foreigners affairs. “But, at the end of the day, it attracts the vision of the travelers to different corners in the tunnel for the cameras to capture his/her face print.”
Passengers will have to register their faces at an airport kiosk before going through the tunnel, which can also display other scenes or even advertisements. Using biometrics and facial recognition software, the about 80 cameras in the tunnel will read each passenger’s face and match the profile against the identity. If there’s an issue with the scan or the ID, security is alerted and the passenger will be subject to a more extensive check.
The idea for the aquarium walk-through tunnel stemmed from authorities trying to find ways to deal with to growing number of passengers passing through Dubai airports:
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Even though airport officials have managed to cut down the time spent at the security clearance desk to five seconds, it is still not fast enough when passenger numbers hit 120 million, said Maj Gen Al Hameeri … He added that security, as much as speeding up procedures and enhancing the travel process for passengers, is a priority.
Sea change at Dubai airport security as virtual aquarium tunnel replaces counter and queues https://t.co/X778PCaD1z pic.twitter.com/fxxRu7A5lK — The National (@TheNationalUAE) October 8, 2017
Officials predict that the UAE’s biggest city will see more than 120 million passengers per year by 2020, according to Dubai Airports’ strategic plan. The new security structure means Dubai — which estimates it had 80 million pass through last year — could easily accommodate the 1.5x increase in people over the next three years without sacrificing customer experience and plane delays.
The first tunnel should be installed at a terminal in Dubai International Airport by the summer of 2018, and rolled out at all Dubai terminal by 2020, The National says.
Dubai airports are often among the first globally to experiment with new advanced technologies, including “smart gates” that allow UAE residents to quick pass through border control and fingerprint readers in the security check process. |
A fight over ObamaCare is spilling into Congress’s December agenda, threatening lawmakers’ ability to keep the government open.
President Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE signed stopgap legislation Friday aimed at averting a shutdown and keeping the government funded through Dec. 22. The bill allows lawmakers to focus on the next — and seemingly more difficult — negotiating period.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have a host of priorities they want to include in the bill, but the question of funding ObamaCare’s cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments appears to have divided Republicans.
Senate Republicans want to include the cost-sharing payments in the spending package, but House conservatives have little interest in funding subsidies they see as bailing out a law they despise.
Senate Republican leaders view the payments as a necessary bargaining chip.
In order to pass their tax-reform bill and get a much-needed legislative victory, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Addison (Mitch) Mitchell McConnellHouse to push back at Trump on border Democrats block abortion bill in Senate Overnight Energy: Climate protesters storm McConnell’s office | Center-right group says Green New Deal could cost trillion | Dire warnings from new climate studies MORE (R-Ky.) made a deal with Sen. Susan Collins Susan Margaret CollinsHouse to push back at Trump on border Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators GOP Sen. Tillis to vote for resolution blocking Trump's emergency declaration MORE (R-Maine), a key swing vote.
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In exchange for Collins’s vote for the tax bill, McConnell gave an “ironclad commitment” to pass a pair of bipartisan bills.
One bill, sponsored by Sens. Lamar Alexander Andrew (Lamar) Lamar AlexanderPence meeting with Senate GOP ahead of vote to block emergency declaration Addressing repair backlog at national parks can give Congress a big win The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump MORE (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray Patricia (Patty) Lynn MurrayThis week: Congress, Trump set for showdown on emergency declaration Senate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks Johnson & Johnson subpoenaed by DOJ and SEC, company says MORE (D-Wash.), would temporarily fund the cost-sharing payments. Another would provide “reinsurance” — money to pay for the costs of sick enrollees and bring down premiums.
Together, the bills would shore up ObamaCare’s insurance markets, which experts predict could be gutted by a provision of the tax bill that repeals the mandate to buy health insurance.
But the commitment to Collins came from McConnell, who can’t force the House to take up legislation. Speaker Paul Ryan Paul Davis RyanBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Five takeaways from McCabe’s allegations against Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Sanders set to shake up 2020 race MORE (R-Wis.) hasn’t given any indication that he would support passing the ObamaCare bills, though he also hasn’t ruled it out.
“I wasn’t part of those conversations,” Ryan told reporters Thursday when was asked about McConnell’s promise to Collins. “I’m not deeply familiar with those conversations.”
Earlier in the week, Ryan reiterated his commitment to repealing ObamaCare, but didn’t tip his hand on the spending bill.
“We think health care is deteriorating. We think premiums are going up through the roof, insurers are pulling out and that’s not a status quo we can live with,” Ryan said.
House conservatives have also said they have little energy for passing a government funding bill that contains any ObamaCare provisions.
“None of us voted in favor of ObamaCare, so supporting it, sustaining it’s not exactly a high objective,” said Rep. Tom Cole Thomas (Tom) Jeffrey ColeDon’t look for House GOP to defy Trump on border wall GOP dismisses polls showing losing battle on shutdown Bottom Line MORE (R-Okla.), a leadership ally.
Rep. Mark Walker Bradley (Mark) Mark WalkerPartnerships paving the way to sustain and support Historically Black Colleges and Universities Lawmaker seeks to ban ex-members from lobbying until sexual harassment settlements repaid Florida governor suspends Palm Beach County elections supervisor MORE (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said that he had been assured by House leaders that ObamaCare payments would not be attached to the next funding bill.
“The three things that we’ve been told are not going to happen as part of our agreement: no CSRs, no DACA, no debt limit,” Walker said, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which offered protections for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children. Trump ended the program with a six-month delay in September.
When asked about any assurances made to Walker, Ryan’s office declined to comment on member discussions.
Separately, Walker said any effort to add ObamaCare provisions to the spending bill would cost Republicans more votes from the GOP than they would gain with Democratic lawmakers.
If the Senate includes ObamaCare payments in the funding package, it could force a showdown with House Republicans, who would be under pressure to pass the Senate’s bill or risk a shutdown.
For now, Democrats are trying to maximize their leverage and are content to let Republicans fight among themselves.
Republicans need at least eight Democrats to break a filibuster in the Senate for any spending bill, and often rely on Democrats to make up for GOP defections in the House.
Alexander, who has long pushed for his bill to be included in a year-end spending bill, dismissed the idea that Republican senators need to pressure their House colleagues.
“The president’s for it, Sen. McConnell’s for it, most Republicans in the House have voted for both two years of cost sharing” and reinsurance in the past, Alexander said. “I feel pretty good about it.” |
We need some real hands-on here
This marks the second E3 we've seen Tom Clancy's The Division, an ambitious online open-world RPG that sees a players dealing with a disaster after society has fallen. This is also the second year in a row that we could not get our hands-on with the game.
Instead, Ubisoft played through a build for us. First they showed us what you all got to see during Ubisoft's press conference (video above). Then we got to see the same area, but during a nighttime setting.
The reason the developers behind The Division showed us the same district twice was to show how the same area can be experienced differently based on factors like time of day, player progression, and so forth.
One major new detail we learned was that players won't be front loaded with class choices. The team at Massive Entertainment wants players to grow into roles organically. The skill system in place is very open with multiple levels of depth to them, and you can alter your choices whenever you want. One player in the demo went towards more of an assault role as he picked from all of his skill options, selecting an ability to wield shotguns better, and a pulse perk that gave him a better tactical read on his surrounding area. The other player went more toward the support role with a healing skill and a portable turret.
Doing all this can happen on the fly, and it appears it's designed this way to make working with other players an easier process. The Division is definitely going to be one of those rare games that I'll want to play with other players, for me at least.
I'm still especially hyped about how people can work with other players straight from their tablet. This is more than just a companion app. Tablet players control a drone to support those playing on consoles/PC, and it's all happening cohesively. Meaning the tablet player and console/PC players are sharing the same world, same space, and experiencing everything together live.
The Division has a ton of potential. The visuals are remarkable, and working with other players looks like it will be a blast. But I'm ultimately holding judgement until we can get some actual hands-on time, as it's hard not to see what we were shown as simply a vertical slice of the real product.
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"Lucky Man" is a song by the English progressive rock supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer, from the group's 1970 self-titled debut album. Written by Greg Lake when he was 12 years old and recorded by the trio using improvised arrangements,[1] the song contains one of rock music's earliest instances of a Moog synthesizer solo. "Lucky Man" was released as a single in 1970 and reached the top 20 in the Netherlands. The song also charted in the United States and Canada. The single was re-released in 1973 and charted again in the U.S. and Canada.
Background and composition [ edit ]
The origin of the song, as stated by Greg Lake in interviews, is that it was the first song he wrote, when his mother bought him a guitar at the age of 12. With the first chords he learned (D, A minor, E minor, and G), he wrote an acoustic version of the song. The song came to be used on Emerson, Lake & Palmer's debut album when they needed one more song. Greg played the version he had written from childhood, and the rest of the band did not like it, or feel it would fit. Lake then worked on it in the studio with Carl Palmer. Lake added numerous overdubs of bass, triple-tracked acoustic guitars, electric guitar, and harmony vocals until it sounded like a record. This version of the song is featured on the deluxe edition, it has a second electric guitar solo in place of where Emerson would later overdub his Moog solo.
Unlike several songs on the album, which use a distorted fuzz bass to sound like a guitar, "Lucky Man" is an acoustic ballad.[2] The lyrics tell the story of a man who had everything, went to war, and died.[1] A Moog synthesizer solo, recorded in one take,[1] is performed by Keith Emerson at the end of song, making it one of the first rock compositions in which a Moog was a featured solo instrument.[3][4] The solo begins as an ominous drone on a low D before leaping up two octaves and using the glide control throughout.[5]
When asked in an interview if he felt "lucky" to have written the song, Lake responded:
I did write “Lucky Man” when I was 12. My mum bought me a guitar and I was very lucky in that sense, the answer was yes instead of no. There was the first bit of luck because had the answer been no, my life would have probably been totally different. I got the guitar and I learned the first four chords that were D, G, A Minor and E Minor and with those chords I wrote “Lucky Man”. I truly cannot remember everything about writing it other than I think it struck me as being a sort of minstrel type of event with these chords, G, D, E Minor and A Minor, gave me this sort of minstrel feeling. “Lucky Man” has kind of an almost medieval element tone to it. It is like a medieval folk song in a way. That was the essence of the idea. I wrote the song in its entirety and I finished it and I remembered it. As far as its significance regarding me and how lucky I was, I suppose it does really. You cannot disassociate the tune, the song has been very lucky for me. It came about because of a piece of good fortune, which was my mother giving me the guitar and it has been lucky for me ever since. I would say if I was going to be honest, I have been very lucky in life. I certainly have been.[6]
Release and reception [ edit ]
"Lucky Man" was released in 1970 and reached number 48 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100,[7] number 25 in Canada,[8] and number 14 in the Netherlands.[9] The single was re-released in January 1973 and peaked at number 51 on the U.S. Hot 100[7] and number 71 in Canada.[10] In a 1971 issue of Billboard, the song was described as being "loaded with programming appeal and should make its mark on the sales charts."[11] In a review of the 2004 film Moog, MTV's Kurt Loder said "'Lucky Man' demonstrated for delighted keyboard players everywhere that it was at last possible for them to blow amp-shredding lead guitarists right off the stage, if they so chose."[12] Former Moog technician David Van Koevering praised "Lucky Man" as the instrument's "big breakthrough" in popular music.[13] Emerson, however, has remained somewhat embarrassed about the song, saying "That's the solo I've had to live with!"[13] He noted that during the recording of the solo, he was "just jamming around", and was "devastated" to learn that it was going to be used in the final version of the song without having the chance to record another take, as all the tracks had been used.[13]
When called upon to play Lucky Man in concerts in later years, Emerson found he was not sure how the solo went:
...late 70s I hadn't played the solo from Lucky Man for quite a long time, so I actually called up Keyboard Magazine. I knew they'd done a transcription of the solo; "do you think I could have a copy of the solo from Lucky Man?" They said "What? Keith Emerson wants a copy of..." I hadn't played it...they managed to transcribe it quite accurately...I said "it'll save me time if you send me what you came up with..." So that was it. Thank you Keyboard Magazine and Dominic Milano, I think.[14]
Live versus studio versions [ edit ]
Lucky Man is not performed in concert the way it was recorded. Emerson explains:
It is a shame that we really can’t perform it the same way it is on the album. There’s a lot of double-tracked vocals. Greg’s playing electric, bass and acoustic guitar on it. If we had really thought about it, and we ourselves, had wanted to release it as a single, then we would have considered these points, and possibly re-arranged it so we could have done it some way on stage. Now we come out and people want to hear it. Greg performs it as an acoustic piece and I guess it's rather disappointing to some people because they want to hear the recorded version. There we were, in the position of it having been released and us not knowing that people want to hear it, and the way it was done on the album being impossible for us to do on stage.[15]
In popular culture [ edit ]
The introductory track on Flower Travellin' Band's 1972 album Made in Japan is an advertisement for a concert at Stanley Park Stadium by Flower Travellin' Band, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Bob Seger and Teegarden & Van Winkle, with a clip of "Lucky Man" playing in the background.
The song appeared in the love scene at the end of the German film NVA (2005).
The song is referenced in Sun Kil Moon's 2008 album April, in a song of the same name.
In 2010, the song appeared in The Simpsons episode "Million Dollar Maybe", where Homer Simpson found an Emerson, Lake & Palmer CD and sang to the song as he drove.
It is used as the closing theme music on CBC Radio One's The Next Chapter.
In 2013, the song appeared on American television as the background music in a VW Passat commercial.
The song appeared in the 2018 film BlacKkKlansman.
Track listing [ edit ]
7" Single
"Lucky Man" (Lake) - 4:35 "Knife-Edge" (Emerson, Frazer, Janáček, Lake) - 5:04
7" Atlantic Oldies Series Single
"Lucky Man" (Lake) - 4:35 "From The Beginning" (Lake) - 5:04
Personnel [ edit ]
Chart performance [ edit ]
Chart (1971) Peak
position Canadian Singles Chart[8] 25 Dutch Top 40[9] 14 U.S. Billboard Hot 100[7] 48 US Cashbox Top Singles[16] 65 Chart (1973) Peak
position Canadian Singles Chart[10] 71 U.S. Billboard Hot 100[7] 51 US Cashbox Top Singles[16] 63 |
In the oil-rich Middle East, that US-led order requires the vast natural wealth of the region to be not controlled by the majority of the region’s people, but by Western corporations. The Saudi regime and other Western client regimes function to maintain this hegemonic parasitic arrangement. The “reward” for these client regimes is massive Western military support that props up the elite, anti-democratic clients.
Two years after signing the international nuclear accord, Washington is still pursuing a war of aggression against Iran
by Finian Cunningham*
This week the United States Senate implemented further economic sanctions on Iran allegedly over Iran’s development of ballistic missiles. The Iranian government condemned the US move, saying that it was aimed at thwarting Iran’s legitimate right to defensive capability. This political development from the US illustrates many issues raised recently by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
In a speech earlier this month, Ayatollah Khamenei referred to Iran’s government as a “government of resistance”. He said that because of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 and subsequent governance, the nation has been the target of constant attack by its enemies. Those enemies can be identified as, primarily the United States of America, its European allies and Washington’s surrogate regimes in the Middle East region. The latter include Israel, Saudi Arabia and the other [Persian] Gulf monarchies.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a “resistance” force because it resists the global order that the US and its allies represent and always seek to impose. That order is one that serves elite power interests. That order is antithetical to genuine democracy, justice and peace. It relies on subjugation and dominance over people and their sovereign right to justice with regard to economic resources. The US-led order is a negation of justice and democracy, and in order to maintain such a “disorder” against principles of morality and law, the negation must be enforced with military power, aggression and repression of the inevitable democratic dissent. A perfect illustration of the negation is the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia. The latter regime is an abomination of democratic principles, international law and indeed Islam, despite its claim to be custodian of two holy mosques of Islam. The Saudi rulers are a cruel, elitist, barbaric regime that sows terrorism and violence across the Middle East and beyond. This is all well documented. Yet the House of Saud regime is a favored ally of the US, not so much in spite of its evident evils, but rather precisely because of its vile repressive character. That despotic character is essential to maintaining the US-led hegemonic order which is an artificial suppression of natural justice and democracy.
The US and its European allies are proponents of a capitalist global order which serves a global elite of corporate power. That order relies on the suppression of democracy, both at home and abroad. In the oil-rich Middle East, that US-led order requires the vast natural wealth of the region to be not controlled by the majority of the region’s people, but by Western corporations. The Saudi regime and other Western client regimes function to maintain this hegemonic parasitic arrangement. The “reward” for these client regimes is massive Western military support that props up the elite, anti-democratic clients.
Under the former US president Barack Obama, the US sold a total of $115 billion-worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia alone. This week, the new American president Donald Trump is traveling to Saudi Arabia where he is reportedly lining up $3.5 billion of weapons sales over the next 10 years. That amount of $3.5 billion in military gear is what the Israeli state receives every year from the US. This fearsome military power is what is required to prop up the unjust US-led order in the region.
Such reward is an indictment of American corruption, considering the Saudi slaughter against the people of Yemen and the decades-long genocide against the Palestinian people under the Israeli regime.
This is why Iran’s Islamic Revolution is so intolerable to the US and its allies. Iran’s commitment to developing the wealth and dignity of its own people from within as opposed to serving the elite interests of foreign powers is the antithesis of the imperialist order demanded by Washington. Iran is thus a mortal threat to the elite interests of the anti-democratic Western elites and their surrogate client regimes across the Middle East. Iran is the embodiment of resistance to the unjust “order” that the US-led axis depends on. And the Americans have the cheek to label Iran as part of an “axis of evil”.
Ever since 1979, Iran has been targeted for destruction or in other words “regime change”. That is “regime change” back to the client regime status, as existed under the CIA-backed Shah before 1979, and which exists in contemporary form in Saudi Arabia, the other [Persian] Gulf absolute monarchies and under the illegal occupation of Palestinian homeland by the Zionist Israeli regime. Part of the targeting by the US-led axis is to vilify and demonize Iran. Iran is accused of being a “sponsor of international terrorism” – because it supports legitimate resistance movements in Palestine or Hezbollah in Lebanon, or the Syrian government. Such defamation is a breath-taking inversion of reality by the real sponsors of state terrorism. But, from the point of the aggressors, it is an essential function to discredit, demonize and delegitimize Iran and what is otherwise its noble position of resistance.
Part of the defamation is to accuse Iran of “destabilizing the region” and trying to spread its “influence” as if the latter is somehow inherently bad. We see this with regard to Yemen, Bahrain and Lebanon. The actual destabilizers of the region are the Western-backed client regimes who spread sectarian hatred and conflict, and who sponsor terrorist networks like Daesh in Syria. The real fear they have of Iran is its inspiration to people of the region to rise up and to challenge the unjust, alien, undemocratic US-led disorder. The unwieldy House of Saud is particularly fearful of democratic influence in the region because of its fragile, oppressive hold on dynastic power. Listening to Saudi leaders speak about Iran is a case study of paranoia.
So, under prevailing hegemonic conditions of the US-led imperialist order in the region, Iran will always be viewed as an enemy. Because it is intrinsically an enemy of that order. Iran represents a repudiation of that order. And as such Iran can always be expected to be vilified and demonized, and set upon with aggression.
Two years after Iran signed a historic international agreement to restrict nuclear weapons development in exchange for normalization of relations, Washington is still pursuing an agenda of aggression towards Iran, as can be seen from its Congressional approval for increasing sanctions on Iran this week. The cited reason, ballistic missiles, is only a pretext for this aggression. What the Americans are saying, in effect, is that Iran is forbidden to develop its defensive capabilities. Why? Because the US and its clients want to maintain their aggressive posture of trying to intimidate Iran into capitulating from its resistance to the US-led hegemonic order.
Fortunately, the formidable deterrent power of Iran’s military developed under the government of resistance ensures that the country will not be attacked by its enemies in an overt way.
What the US-led enemies of Iran are endeavoring to do, as they always have done, is to try to assail Iran indirectly. We saw that during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) when the US and its client regimes utilized Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime as a proxy force. We see it through the covert sponsoring of terror groups like Daesh, Al Nusra Front and the MEK inside Iran, by the West and its clients as a way to destabilize Iran.
Ayatollah Khamenei in the above cited speech referred to a hybrid of aggressive strategies employed by the US-led axis. This includes undermining Iran’s deterrent military power by imposing sanctions under the pretext of Iran’s ballistic missile development. It includes sowing political and social unrest inside Iran. It includes undermining the political authority of Iranian institutions and leaders. It includes sanctions aimed at curtailing Iran’s economic prowess and potential. This is a war of aggression in all but name.
All such strategies of attack can work in tandem or in parallel over different time scales. But ultimately, the objective is to destroy the Islamic Republic of Iran for having the audacity to resist the hegemonic desires of the US-led axis.
*Finian Cunningham is a freelance journalist based in East Africa. His articles have extensively been published mainly on international affairs, and in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry with experiences as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England. Cunningham has worked as an editor and writer in news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He regularly appears on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV, as a freelance journalist.
The views, opinions and positions expressed on Op-Ed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of Khamenei.ir. |
Looking west on Lee Highway in Arlington, lines of cars split between taking Interstate 66 or staying on Lee during rush hour. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
The Interstate 66 toll lanes opened Monday in Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs with prices so steep they could be among the highest drivers have paid for the privilege of traveling on a state-owned highway in the United States.
Tolls in the high-occupancy toll lanes hit $34.50 — or close to $3.50 a mile — to drive the 10-mile stretch from the Beltway to Washington during the height of the morning commute. The toll reached $40 on Tuesday morning.
The lanes, on one of the region's most congested highways, were billed as a way to help the state better manage traffic, foster carpooling and public transit use, and give commuters more options.
But whatever excitement drivers might have initially felt at having another choice quickly gave way to shock as they watched toll prices tick up — from $4.50 at 5:36 a.m. to $28.50 just before 8 o'clock to $34.50 at 8:36 a.m.
[Toll reaches $40 on Tuesday morning]
"I drove onto I-66 around 8:10 this morning to Washington and my one-way toll was $17.25 — which I at first thought I'd misread," Justin Cole said. "With tolls reportedly climbing to around a daily one-way peak of $34.50, that is going to introduce a real hardship for people on low wages or working in the nonprofit or public sector."
Others took to social media to express their outrage, with the hashtags #I66tolls and #highwayrobbery trending.
"This is like a bad telethon, watching the number go higher and higher all morning," tweeted commuter Cameron Gray.
"The tolls on I-66 are being increased so only the 1% can afford to use it. Time to get that private jet," said another.
"It's price gouging," said Virginia Del.-elect Danica Roem (D), who won office last month on a platform that focused on traffic in her suburban Prince William County district. She said she will push to cap tolls in the coming General Assembly session.
"We are talking about $34.50 for a few miles inside the Beltway. That's clearly price gouging," Roem said. "Where else in the country do you pay a $34.50 toll to go somewhere?"
[Interstate 66 tolling starts Monday. Here’s what you need to know.]
Critics complained that state officials sold the project on projections that tolls would peak at $7 for the morning rush and $9 in the afternoon. State transportation officials said Monday that those projections were based on the average trip — not peak-of-the-peak trips.
"This was the very first rush hour," said Michelle Holland, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Transportation. "Every express lane facility has a ramp-up period because it is such a major change. It probably will take at least three months for us to be able to determine the typical traffic pattern and toll price pattern."
Here's how it works: From 5:30 to 9:30 a.m. eastbound and from 3 to 7 p.m. westbound, Monday through Friday, tolls will fluctuate to maintain a minimum average speed of 45 mph; there is no cap on tolls. Put simply, as traffic increases the toll rises to help manage the vehicles entering the roadway. The tolls change every six minutes.
Solo drivers, who before were barred from I-66 during rush hour, can use the lanes if they pay. That includes drivers of hybrid vehicles, which are no longer exempt. Motorcycles and vehicles carrying two or more people have free use of the lanes.
State transportation officials said average speeds Monday morning were 57 mph (the posted speed limit is 55), and about 37 percent of vehicles were carpools that traveled free.
Holland said state officials don't expect tolls of $34.50 to be the norm. Rates were lower for the evening commute, with westbound I-66 drivers paying $6.25 to travel from Washington to the Beltway at 4:15 p.m.
But there's no guarantee that prices won't top $30 again. Monday, for example, is typically a lighter commuting day because of federal workers who telework, so it's conceivable that tolls will rise again on days when there is typically more traffic.
Although Monday's prices on I-66 are higher than average for U.S. toll roads, experts and transportation officials say they aren't unheard of in an industry that generates $13.8 billion in annual revenue.
Driving on U.S. toll lanes costs drivers an average of 10 cents per mile, according to data from the Federal Highway Administration. The data, however, doesn't include average costs from all U.S. road systems. The most expensive interstate tolls cost drivers about 50 cents per mile, and those are on relatively short lengths of road — including the 14 miles of Virginia's Interstate 495 express lanes, where tolls have hit $32.30.
"This is the point of the dynamic pricing — it doesn't prohibit someone from using the lane but it raises the price to keep traffic flowing and a driver considers their time, value for the cost," said Bill Cramer, a spokesman for the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association, which represents toll facility operators.
Some commuters and officials said those complaining about high tolls should simply choose a different option. They note that solo drivers have never been able to use I-66 during rush hour — with the exception of hybrid owners. However, the rush-hour periods were extended 90 minutes with the toll lanes. So drivers who timed their morning commutes to leave before 6 a.m. or at 9 a.m. to avoid the restrictions no longer have that option. For those in the outer suburbs, Metro and carpooling aren't easy choices.
The I-66 lanes are unique when compared with the region's other toll lanes, the 495 express lanes. The 495 express lanes added capacity and give drivers the option of using general travel lanes if they don't want to pay a toll. I-66 was tolled without adding lanes.
If officials thought the tolls would encourage more people to use transit, that did not happen Monday morning — at least not for Metro. According to the transit agency, the four stations at the western end of the Orange Line in Northern Virginia (Vienna, Dunn Loring, West Falls Church and East Falls Church) had 13,239 entries during the rush-hour time frame — about 2 percent lower than the same time one week ago.
There also did not appear to be a significant amount of bailout traffic as some had feared might happen on arterial routes such as the George Washington Parkway and Routes 7, 29, 50, 123 and 193. State transportation officials said that on average, traffic volumes, speed and travel times were similar to the same time last year.
Officials are still betting that more people will turn to mass transit even if tolls don't come close to $35 again. And toll revenue will be used for transit improvements in the corridor, including new bus routes and park-and-ride facilities.
Lori Aratani and Martine Powers contributed to this report. |
“Stranger Things 2” included a scene with a short reference to Mormons in the show's sixth episode.
SALT LAKE CITY — “Stranger Things 2” included a scene with a reference to Mormons.
In the show’s episode “Chapter Six: The Spy,” new character Maxine (Sadie Sink) goes outside to speak with Lucas Sinclair about all the drama unfolding.
When Max turns around, she meets her brother, the villanous Billy (Dacre Montgomery), who has been adamant about Max not hanging out with Lucas.
So Max uses “Mormons” as her excuse for talking with Lucas.
Watch the moment below. Warning: mild profanity.
“Stranger Things 2” debuted over the weekend on Netflix. All nine episodes of the show’s second season are available for streaming.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been referenced many times throughout the history of TV and sitcoms. |
The assumption that Russia's humanitarian aid cargo for eastern Ukraine may carry something more dangerous than food, medicine and water "look paranoid," deems Simon Shuster, a TIME correspondent.
MOSCOW, August 14 (RIA Novosti) — The assumption that Russia's humanitarian aid cargo for eastern Ukraine may carry something more dangerous than food, medicine and water "look paranoid," deems Simon Shuster, a TIME correspondent.
"The goal of this convoy, though likely a lot more complicated than simple humanitarian aid, has more to do with domestic Russian politics than military strategy … All the Western warnings of a Russian Trojan horse … start to look a bit paranoid," Shuster emphasized in his article "Putin Calls Western Bluff With Humanitarian Convoy Stunt."
The author, an outspoken critic of Russia's political course, argues that while most of the time the West’s deep distrust of Russia has been right, "the humanitarian convoy appears to be one of the few exceptions to the rule." Russia may accuse the West of bluffing, he notes, citing Matthew Rojansky, an expert on Russia and Ukraine at the Wilson Center in Washington. "It allows him [Vladimir Putin] to call the West’s bluff. He is calling out this hyperbolic position that everything Russia does is aggressive and counterproductive," explains Mr. Rojansky.
© RIA Novosti . Mikhail Voskresenskiy Gorlovka residents receive humanitarian aid from self-defense forces
Indeed, the groundless accusations made by NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the UN, deserve the epithet "paranoid", as it the journalist calls. Experts point out, that Mr. Rasmussen has been beating the war drum since the very beginning of the standoff in Ukraine in order to increase the EU's military spending on extremely expensive NATO projects. As Russia has not yet demonstrated any signs of preparations for the invasion of Ukraine, NATO chief hastened to call Russia's humanitarian aid to eastern Ukraine a plausible "pretext" for Russia's military intervention.
"We see the Russians developing the narrative and the pretext for such an operation under the guise of a humanitarian operation and we see a military buildup that could be used to conduct such illegal military operations in Ukraine," he said as cited by Reuters.
US Ambassador Samantha Power also stressed that Russia's proposal for a "humanitarian corridor" was "completely unacceptable and deeply alarming — and it would be viewed as an invasion of Ukraine," the Associated Press reported.
© RIA Novosti . Artem Zhitenev Trade unions hold charity campaign "Support Ukrainian People"
It should be noted that according to the UN Refugee Agency report, there are more than 117 000 civilians displaced inside Ukraine, while about 168 677 have already crossed into Russia this year. Up to 87 percent of the total displaced population consists of eastern Ukrainian civilians, suffering from heavy bombardment by Kiev. At the same time the Ukrainian leadership didn't provide sufficient assistance to tens of thousands of destitute civilians, stressed a Human Rights Watch representative in his official letter to Petr Poroshenko, published in July, 2014.
Russia had accepted all Kiev's conditions of the humanitarian cargo transfer, including "the route, the choice of a border crossing near Kharkiv, the use of Ukrainian license plates once across the border, and the presence on the trucks of not only international monitors but representatives of the Ukrainian government as well … with the logistics left to the Red Cross," according to The New York Times.
Surprisingly, the next day the Ukrainian authorities announced that they would not allow the trucks' convoy entry. Moreover, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov called Russia's goodwill gesture the "provocations of a cynical aggressor" in a statement published on his Facebook page.
This would play right into Moscow's hands, according to Simon Shuster: while "on the one side would be the Russian convoy waiting to provide assistance to the victims of war, … on the other would be the Ukrainian military trying to block it."
The question remains open whether tens of thousands of destitute Ukrainians should suffer from Kiev's political ambitions and the western obsessive phobias. The TIME correspondent underlines that the West runs a risk to compromise itself with its concerns about the Russian Trojan Horse looking unjustifiably overblown. |
After a confusing legal back-and-forth, some 70,000 ex-offenders are believed to be newly registered to vote – potentially affecting several important House races
Tammie Hagen has a secret code for finding felons. Touring the streets of Richmond on her bicycle, the 51-year-old former restaurant manager stops Virginians and asks if they are registered to vote.
If the answer is “I can’t”, she follows up with the stigma-sensitive phrase: “Are you still on supervision?”
It elicits a knowing response from those who, like her, want to take part in democracy but have been barred in their millions across the US, due to a brush with the criminal justice system at some point in their lives.
As the deadline approaches for registering to take part in one of the most consequential US elections in a generation, Virginia is the exception to controversial state rules that ban those convicted of a felony from voting.
The state’s Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, had to circumvent Republican-led attempts in the state supreme court to block a blanket amnesty, and he did so by individually clearing felons to vote – one signature at a time. An estimated 70,000 ex-offenders are now thought to have been registered to vote before the deadline of 17 October.
In the presidential election, Virginia – a state Donald Trump once hoped to win – looks so far out of reach that Trump’s campaign is reported to have pulled out. But several tightening House races there could yet make the difference in the battle for control of Congress.
The on-off nature of the restoration of rights in Virginia has confused many. Thirteen thousand former offenders who registered to vote when McAuliffe first attempted an automatic clearance were later told they had been disenfranchised once again, when the court ruled his executive action was in breach of the state constitution.
Hence the effort through individual signatures, as groups such as New Virginia Majority, for which Hagen now works, are scrambling to find suitable candidates for gubernatorial clemency. The effort is as much about overcoming weary cynicism as getting paperwork to the governor’s office in time.
“It felt pretty bleak,” says Hagen as she describes reaction to the first setback. “People were really discouraged. I came across lots who were reluctant to try again. ‘It’s not going to happen,’ they’d say, ‘my vote’s not going to happen.’”
It is a feeling with which she can sympathise, as she says she had “consigned” herself “to never voting in my life”, thanks to a string of “petty drug offences” that led to her first felony conviction at 25 and a last one six or seven years ago.
But rehabilitation led to a conviction that ex-offenders deserve to play a role in political life. Hagen estimates she has registered 600-800 Virginians and submitted “several hundred requests” for restoration of voting rights to the governor’s office.
In the north of the state, where Democrats are targeting several House seats once seen as impossibly out of reach, on Tuesday volunteers knocking on doors registered 200 new voters out of the Alexandria office alone.
But this last-minute rush for electors is not welcomed by all. A few miles from Alexandria, a leading conservative critic of the governor’s policy is deeply uncomfortable with what he sees as a nakedly partisan attempt to enfranchise voters who largely lean Democratic.
“If you are not willing to follow the law then you can’t demand a right to make the law for everyone else, which is what voting is about,” says Roger Clegg, the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
“You can’t assume somebody has turned over a new leaf once they have walked out of prison.”
Clegg is particularly scathing of the argument that preventing ex-offenders from voting is a ploy to limit the voice of African Americans in politics.
“The fact that felons are disproportionately this or that colour does not make these rules racist any more than the fact that felons are disproportionately male makes these laws sexist,” he argues.
Even the harshest critics of the reforms concede that a rush of new faces to the polls can also be a sign of a healthy democracy. They would simply prefer more stringent tests before the right is restored.
“The best argument that the other side has to make is that it is important to do what we can to reintegrate felons back into society and it certainly would be a bad thing if society sent a message that once you have committed a felony your civil life is over,” Clegg says.
“But the automatic reinfranchisement of felons misses an opportunity to do that kind of reintegration. There should be a ceremony like a naturalisation ceremony, where you go down to the courthouse and the person brings their friends and family around and everyone has a little American flag. That would be meaningful.”
For those on the streets trying to persuade ex-offenders to give democracy a second chance, there is plenty of meaning in the process already.
“These are folks who have been systematically kicked out of the system, who have been ignored,” says Matthew Rogers, regional field director of New Virginia Majority in Alexandria.
“Many of them do not even know their rights have been restored. So many of them break down in tears they are so excited.” |
by Richard A. Muller
Richard Muller is the P. J. Zondervan Professor of Historical Theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan. This address was given by Professor Muller at a meeting of the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council on November 9, 1993 and appeared originally in the March and April numbers (1994) of New Horizons, the publication of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The essay is republished here with the permission of the publishers.
I have selected as my topic this evening, “Confessing the Reformed Faith: Our Identity in Unity and Diversity.” The central issue that I will address is the issue of Reformed identity-specifically as indicated by the body of confessional documents that both unites us in faith and distinguishes us into branches and denominations. I would also argue that retention and maintenance of the integrity and stability of the Reformed faith in its confessions is one of the two greatest issues confronting our churches today. The other, I would venture, is the parallel and profoundly related issue of the retention and maintenance of our tradition of liturgy and hymnody in which the doctrinal stance of the confessions is put, as it were, into action and application in the corporate life of believers. In fact, the two issues are inseparable. I propose to address these issues with a view to: (1) our confessional diversity; (2) the nature of our unity in diversity; (3) pressures on confessional integrity in our times; and (4) ways of reaffirming and strengthening confessional integrity today.
1. Confessional Diversity
Virtually all of us here, tonight, represent, in one way or another, a branch of the Reformed faith. More than that, we represent, for the most part, two major branches of the Reformed faith-one identified by its adherence to the Westminster Standards (the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, and the Westminster Larger Catechism), the other by its acceptance of the Three Forms of Unity of the Dutch Reformed churches (the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort). In both confessional families, the teaching of the confessions and catechisms has been echoed in forms of worship and in traditions of hymnody reaching back into the Reformation of the sixteenth century and reflecting the life of our churches throughout the intervening years.
When in recent years, however, I have visited churches, whether of the “Reformed” or of the “Presbyterian” confessional type, I have been struck by the increasing variety of forms of worship, by the loss of traditional hymnody, and by the decreasing interest on the part of these churches in their confessional traditions. In the context of this erosion of identity, some way of refocusing our church life in the light of our confessional heritage appears to be in order.
When I was considerably younger and, more importantly, a bit less wise (some would say less cynical) about the problems of church life, administration, and direction, I was very enthusiastic about the movement from monoconfessional to multiconfessional standards in what we were accustomed to calling the “Northern” and “Southern” Presbyterian churches. It seemed to me at the time that the augmentation of the Westminster Standards with such revered confessional writings as the Second Helvetic Confession, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Scots Confession, and the Geneva Catechism could only enrich our churchly perceptions and lead to confessional renewal-that this was a primary way of refocusing our attention on the confessions.
I well remember a wise, elderly deacon of the country church that I served saying to me, “Rick, we’ve, got enough trouble just learnin’ the Westminster Standards.” At the time, I argued the case of multiconfessional enrichment to him-today, I would stand in agreement with his worry. The adoption of multiconfessional standards has done little to enrich the life of Presbyterians in the United States. In fact, it has done little other than contribute to the dilution of Reformed confessionalism, whether through the adoption of a looser form of subscription, on the ground of diversity among the confessions now present in the Book of Confessions, or, as my deacon feared, through an increased ignorance about all of the confessions. A greater number of unread, unused, undeclared confessions solves no problems.
To make the point succinctly, adopting one another’s confessions, with the result that each Reformed group professes its faith through the use of more confessions, neither brings about a renewal of interest in the confessions nor a richer or fuller sense of the meaning of the confessions-at least not necessarily. Nor does it bring about a genuine unity in the faith: churches that hold to the same confessions do not necessarily hold them in the same way or with i the same level of interest and commitment.
In addition, from the very beginnings of our history, the Reformed faith has been expressed in and through the diversity of regional and national confessions-the Tetrapolitan Confession, the Gallican Confession, the Belgic Confession, the First Confession of Base[, the First Helvetic Confession, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Scots Confession, the Thirty-nine Articles, and others. All of’ these confessions were understood in their time as Reformed. The various confessing groups recognized each other as belonging to the same family of faith, without feeling the need to subscribe to each other’s confessions or to prove at length that the teaching of any one confession was identical with that of all the others. And, more often than not, these distinct confessions were accompanied by, and reflected in, distinctive regional and national orders of worship.
The closest that the Reformed churches have ever come to a single book of confessions, shared by all was in 1580, when the Genevan theologians produced the Harmony of the Reformed Confessions, a document based on the Second Helvetic Confession and including quotations from all of the major Reformed confessions of the age. The document was admired and praised, but never acknowledged as the normative confession of any of the branches of the Reformed church. Similarly, the Canons of Dort were pressed for a time as a standard beyond the Netherlands, and they did gain some authority during the seventeenth century in Switzerland, but they have never become a universal standard. The regional and national confessions together with their distinct orders of worship have, in fact, prevailed down to the present day.
2. Unity in Diversity
Granting this diversity, we might well ask what unites us. From the perspective of orthodox, confessional Lutheranism, any claim we might make to a unity of the faith is immediately called into question by the diversity of our confessional standards. Lutheran confessional theologians have pointed to the diversity of our confessions and spoken of the internal contradictions of Calvinism in contrast to the theological harmony of Lutheranism, indeed, the unity of churchly confession, as expressed in the Book of Concord. And a contemporary historian of the sixteenth century has argued, on the basis of differing emphases in the doctrine of the covenant of grace in Calvin and Bullinger, that there are in fact two rather divergent Reformed traditions.1
The Lutheran criticism can, of course, be relatively easily countered. Reformed theologians of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were able to note that the Lutherans’ monoconfessional standard, the Book of Concord, was not really as indicative of a unified confession as it claimed to be. It not only had arisen out of terrible controversy, and attempted (with relative success, we might add) to find a middle course between doctrinal extremes, but also w as not entirely unified in its own documents.
Thus, after the Lutheran concord, several great questions remained unanswered for Lutherans and, indeed, remain unanswered to this day: Is a “true Lutheranism,” distinct from the presumed problems caused for Lutheranism by the teaching of Philip Melanchthon, an attainable doctrinal position? Or does the role of Melanchthon in producing the confessional standards (he was the author of the Augsburg Confession and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession) cause a rift within the confessional documents themselves, given Luther’s authorship of the Larger and Smaller Catechisms? Does the late sixteenth-century scholastic style of the Formula of Concord preclude a genuine unity between it and the earlier documents in the Book of Concord? Then again, there are those many Lutheran confessions of the sixteenth century that were not included in the Book of Concord and which also point toward a diversity in Lutheranism. It is also the case that even after the signing of the Formula of Concord, differences in the understanding of grace and election continued to trouble Lutheranism.
The claim of a monoconfessional unity in Lutheranism, over against the Reformed diversity, is not quite accurate. On the Reformed side, moreover, we are certainly able to recognize a common ground and fundamental agreement in doctrine arising from the general acceptance or several major Reformed symbols. A monoconfessional standard does not in itself guarantee unity—and, even so, a multiconfessional family does not in itself indicate disunity.
But what of the claim that there are two Reformed traditions? It is certainly true that Calvin’s covenantal teaching tends to emphasize the sovereign activity of God in establishing the covenant of grace and that Bullinger’s covenantal teaching tends to emphasize human responsibility in covenant. Nonetheless, it is also surely the case that Calvin never sought to remove human responsibility before God, and that Bullinger never claimed that genuine response to the covenant could occur apart from God’s grace. Both Calvin and Bullinger stressed the necessity and priority of grace in the work of salvation—and both recognized the difficulty of maintaining that fine balance, typical of Reformed theology, between an emphasis on divine sovereignty and an insistence on human responsibility before God. The difference in stress between the teachings of these two pillars of the Reformed tradition does not indicate two divergent ways of being Reformed, but rather a certain breadth of doctrinal statement and emphasis in the Reformed tradition itself.
Reformed unity, then, is neither the unity of a single confession nor even the unity of a book of confessions, such as Lutheranism boasts. Nor is it a unity of utter agreement between its various confessional documents. Rather, Reformed unity is a unity of faith represented as a spectrum of opinion-a unity within boundaries. By way of example, in the fundamentally infralapsarian pattern of the Reformed confessional doctrine of election, we nonetheless can move from the infralapsarian and single predestinarianism of the Second Helvetic Confession, to the infralapsarian but double predestinarianism of the Canons of Dort, to the mingling of infra- with supralapsarian (with, I think, an infralapsarian conclusion) in the Westminster Confession, without feeling the need to argue either that one or another of these confessions falls outside of the bounds of the Reformed faith or that the high supralapsarian position, which is definitively found in none of the documents, violates our confessional teaching.
Even so, there are only two Reformed confessional documents that teach the two-covenant schema of a covenant of works and a covenant of grace—the Irish Articles and the Westminster Confession—and the schema is, admittedly, a minor theme in the Irish Articles. Nonetheless, the two-covenant schema is a significant, even central, doctrinal motif in much Dutch Reformed theology, where it has never been a confessional theme. In the English Reformed tradition, the schema became a matter of confessional teaching—in the Dutch Reformed tradition, it did not. We might even hazard the guess that the difference is rooted purely in the historical development of Reformed theology and in the fact that the Dutch Reformed confessional development came to a close at the Synod of Dort, before the great flowering of Reformed covenant theology, while the Puritan Revolution brought about a confessional situation in England after that flowering had taken place. In any case, this confessional diversity does not mark a point of dissention in doctrine between branches of the Reformed faith. Terminology and interpretation of the prelapsarian covenant varies in the orthodox Reformed systems sometimes the concept is absent, sometimes it is present as a “covenant of nature,” and other times as a “covenant of works.” More importantly, the outworkings of the doctrine of the covenant of grace are clearly present in the baptismal teaching and practice of all the Reformed churches.
In the midst of our confessional diversity, there is a genuine unity. It is not a unity framed by confessional doctrines that are absolutely uniform, throughout the Reformed churches. We not only can experience differences in emphasis among our churches, we also ought to be able to recognize that the unity of all the Reformed churches functions very much like the confessional unity of believers under any one of the documents. In other words, once a churchly confession is accepted as a doctrinal norm, it provides boundaries for theological and religious expression, but it also offers considerable latitude for the development of varied theological and religious expression within those boundaries.
Thus, two fully orthodox but nevertheless different systems of theology, like Herman Hoeksema’s Reformed Dogmatics and Louis Berkhof s Systematic Theology, both stand within the confessional boundaries identified by the Three Forms of Unity. Similarly, given the breadth of Reformed teaching on the doctrine of predestination—from the Second Helvetic Confession to the Westminster Confession—we can acknowledge such diverse statements of the doctrine as those of Berkhof, Hoeksema, Hodge, or, among the older dogmaticians, Ames, Perkins, and Turretin, as all expressing Reformed teaching. Nonetheless, we raise an eyebrow (or perhaps two) at the hypothetical universalism of Moises Amyraut, and we feel quite justified in the sentiment that Arminianism is excluded not only by the Canons of Dort, but also by a correct understanding of any and all of the confessions in the Reformed family.
Each confession singly permits a variety of teaching within its boundaries-typically a variety caused by theological explanations and elaborations that enter into greater detail than the confession. The family of confessions permits this kind of variety as well, but it also permits within the larger Reformed faith—a variety within the spectrum of belief caused by differences among the confessions themselves. Our unity, then, is a unity that exists along a spectrum of doctrinal statements and, at the same time, remains within the boundaries established in one way by our particular confessional standards and in yet another by the larger family of Reformed confessions. And it is a unity that has belonged to the Reformed churches from the very beginning of their history without either a monoconfessional or a multiconfessional standard held in common by all of the churches.
3. Pressures on Confessional Integrity in Our Times
Granting the confessional unity of the Reformed churches within the boundaries set by their several sets of confessional standards, the second issue to be addressed is that of confessional integrity within the diversity. The issue here is not simply one of allegiance to the doctrines contained in our confessional documents—the issue is also one of the fundamental acknowledgment of the importance of having and holding our confessions as such and, as a group or confessional family, recognizing the importance and the distinctiveness of our Reformed faith. Perhaps I should say from the outset of this part of my presentation that I am not about to offer a ready-made solution—what I want to do is to frame or, more precisely, to re-frame a particular problem and, by drawing attention to it from a slightly different vantage point, to encourage others to develop solutions with a particular view of the problem in mind.
It is all too easy to identify the loss of interest in, and the loss of desire to maintain, traditional points of doctrine, such as salvation by grace alone through faith as grounded in God’s election, or Christ’s purchase of salvation in an act that was both a substitution for us in the place of punishment and a satisfaction for us to the divine demand of payment for the offense of sin, or of the spiritual presence of Christ to believers in and through their faithful participation in the Lord’s Supper, as the result of a national and international slide down the slippery slope into liberalism. After all, liberal Christianity typically inserts a positive view of human nature and its abilities into its doctrine of salvation and grace; it expresses difficulty with the seeming inhumanity and arbitrariness of divine decrees; it can scorn penal substitutionary atonement either as an unforgivable legalism or as a patriarchal teaching about an abusive father, and it finds little use for the mystery of the Lord’s Supper and quite easily and comfortably reduces the Supper from the status of sacrament or means of grace to that of ordinance. There is, however, another source of confessional erosion that produces similar and, at times, identical results—and to which we are much more susceptible.
I am speaking here of the noncredal, non-confessional, and sometimes even anti-confessional and anti-traditional biblicism of conservative American religion. One recent evangelical systematic theology makes the point that confessional theology is a form of “indoctrination” that ought to be avoided-and, over the years, I have heard similar comments from students who were associated with the noncredal churches: Confessions are unnecessary at best when. one has the Bible. At worst, they prevent their adherents from encountering the meaning of Scripture. I have usually asked such students whether they believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, specifically, the doctrine of one divine essence in three persons. When they nearly invariably respond positively, I point out to them that they are not really noncredal or non-confessional, but are in fact adherents to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed from the Second Ecumenical Council (A.D. 381).
I ask next whether, from their noncredal perspective, they view it as permissible to hold a doctrine of the Trinity according to which only the Father is truly God, and the Son, as “the firstborn of all creation” who himself confesses, “The Father is greater than I,” might be viewed as an exalted creature of God. Of course, they deny such a possibility-but they have very great difficulty arguing against it in brief, without recourse to the Nicene formula: Arianism, after all, did have its scriptural proof texts. The point is, then, quite simply made that we need creeds and confessions so that we, as individuals, can approach Scripture in the context of the community of belief. It is not that creeds and confessions stand above Scripture as norms. Not at all. They stand below, but also with Scripture as churchly statements concerning the meaning of Scripture. And therefore, they also stand above the potentially idiosyncratic individual and prevent him from becoming his own norm of doctrine even as they provide entry for him into a churchly perspective.
The noncredal, anti-confessional tendency thus understands the sola Scriptura of the Reformation in a manner that the Reformers themselves never did and surely would have repudiated. On this particular count, had they the opportunity, the Reformers would most probably associate much conservative American religion with the biblicism of Servetus and the Socinians or with various Anabaptist groups. Of course, someone will object, conservative American religion, much of which identifies itself as fundamentalist or evangelical, is not anti-trinitarian. That it true-but much of it is doctrinally dispensational, premillennial, anti-sacramental, opposed to the baptism of infants, anti- or non-covenantal, and stylistically anti-liturgical and revivalistic. It is distinctly non-Reformed-or, more broadly, not rooted in the Reformation-granting that our confessional Lutheran brethren are presently experiencing the same kind of erosion of confessional and liturgical sensibilities.
4. Reaffirming and Strengthening Confessional Integrity
As said previously, I have no specific solution to this problem of Reformed Christianity in America, but I do have a series of suggestions or, more precisely, a series of points to ponder at the pastoral, the educational (whether in the local church or in. our seminaries), and the denominational levels. We must rind ways to express our unity with one another as Reformed Christians-and this can clearly and constructively begin with a consistent reference to our confessional and liturgical heritage. Differences in confessional allegiance within the Reformed family ought not to be the basis for doubts concerning either our unity or our need for ongoing dialogue and discourse with one another in a world that increasingly appears to doubt the significance of confessions and of liturgy.
We must be convinced enough of the continuing significance of our confessional heritage (including its relation to liturgy and hymnody) to resist the desire to create church growth by losing our identity. One of the most appalling “strategies” of contemporary evangelization is the assumption that we must find the least distinctive, least offensive, lowest common denominator in order to attract the most people. Christian symbols, distinctive services, traditional hymnody, and disturbing language about the human predicament can all be set aside in order to appear open-this in a religion where the authoritative canon of Scripture tells us that the cross, the central redemptive event in the plan of God, is a scandal and an offense! Our confessions and their active expression in worship present the fundamental teachings of our faith: the issue is not popularity but, one might say, “truth in advertising.”
We must, in addition, become more conscious of the crucial linkage between our confessional and our liturgical heritage. The forms of worship and the hymnody of the Reformed churches have consistently reflected and supported the teaching of our confessions-and, indeed, have historically been one of the primary avenues of instruction in our confessional teaching alongside of preaching and catechesis. Thus, the orders of baptism in the Reformed and Presbyterian churches echo the confessions in their own declarations that our children “belong, with us who believe, to the membership of the Church through the covenant made in Christ,”2 or that “God graciously includes our children in his covenant, and all his promises are for them as well as us…. We are therefore always to teach our little ones that they have been set apart by baptism as God’s children.” 3
Similarly, the words of virtually all Reformed services of the Lord’s Supper, “Lift up your hearts,” and the response, “We lift them up unto the Lord,” although one of the very ancient parts of the service, stand in a special relationship to the Reformed understanding of the Lord’s Supper. The spiritual uplifting of the heart in and through the words of the liturgy echo and instruct in the faith of the confessions, where we read that we truly partake of Christ’s body and blood “not by the mouth but by the Spirit, through faith” inasmuch as “Christ remains always seated at the right hand of God the Father in heaven.”4 The confessional and liturgical point, to paraphrase one of my favorite Protestant orthodox theologians, Amandus Polanus, is that we do not claim to drag the risen and glorious body of our Lord down to this wretched and miserable earth, but that, by the power of the Spirit, our hearts are joined to him in heavenly places. The connection between liturgy and confession is clear. Loss of the Reformed order of worship can lead directly to a loss of relevance of the confessions to the life of the believing community.
I would make a similar case for the confessional character of Reformed hymnody and the danger of its loss or replacement with popular hymns not rooted in the faith of the Reformation. Perhaps I have become a bit over-sensitive when I begin to cringe during a service of worship at the sound of the contemporary evangelical hymn, “Father, I Adore You,” sung to the neglect of such traditional Reformed hymns as “God of the Prophets,” “Now Thank We All Our God,” or “All People That on Earth Do Dwell.” And perhaps I am a bit too analytical when I examine “Father, I Adore You” and note that the only subject of its several clauses is the human “I”—all of the movement in the hymn begins in the human self, and all that we are directly taught by its words is something about ourselves. This identification of all religion as subjective experience is the point at which the conservative, evangelical community joins hands with Schleiermacher and tacitly confesses that he is the church father of the modern era. By way of contrast, our Reformed hymnody seldom loses itself in subjectivity. The human subject is assuredly present, not as a naked “I,” but as a member of the corporate community of faith: “Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices.” But, then, immediately, the hymn speaks to us objectively of the providential and redemptive ground of our thanks: “who wondrous things has done, in whom his world rejoices.”
Yet another instance is what appears to me to be the incredible liturgical insensitivity of including “Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees” in our service of the Lord’s Supper, given that kneeling at the Supper was set aside by the Reformers at the very beginnings of our faith because of its association with the adoration of the host in the Roman Catholic Mass. At the very least, standing (or sitting) while singing about kneeling is incongruous—at most, it points to a variety of eucharistic piety that Calvin and his contemporaries took pains to avoid. Examples could easily be multiplied.
We must, I would suggest, be ready to test new orders of worship and new hymnody not only through popular practice but according to confessional standards. It is, I admit, a rather difficult task in some of our churches, where freedom in hymnody and order of worship has replaced the liturgical straitjacket that was the norm several decades ago. Like confessional diversity, liturgical diversity has been characteristic of the Reformed churches since the beginning and has never been a threat to our unity or to our integrity. There is no need to deny new orders of worship, or the adaptation of old orders to new circumstances, or the use of new hymns. But there is a need to test carefully the new orders and any new hymns before we admit them to our regular worship. The point here is much the same as the point I made concerning church growth: we are called upon by our confessions to maintain our identity for the sake of our Reformed understanding of the very nature and meaning of the gospel.
We must do all that we can to assure the contemporary use of our confessions and catechisms in the life of the church. They must not be relegated to the status of dead standards that are brought to bear only when problems arise and are then put back on a shelf in a closed book when the crisis has passed. It is well for us to remember that the confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, first and foremost, declarations of faith. They were not (and, therefore, ought not to become) rules for belief imposed on the church from without: they are normative declarations spoken from within by the church itself, for the sake of pronouncing the church’s biblical faith. We do justice to their contents only when we declare them—only when we confess them—as the expression of our corporate faith and corporate identity. More confessions and varied patterns of subscription are not the solution to our problem. Only the regular use of our confessions as standards for the expression of biblical truth can render them effective and, indeed, contemporary in their significance. Only by declaring the confessions, by using them in the contexts of preaching, of teaching, and of corporate worship, can they fulfill their intended role as positive guides, arising out of the faith of the church in its meditation on Scripture, to the ongoing work of the Reformed churches.
In closing, I would simply commend to you our great heritage and commend to you as well the work of holding fast to what is most valuable in our tradition for the sake of our present and future work in the service of the gospel. Our unity will appear clearly in the declaration of our faith through our distinctive confessions and through the reflection of our confessional heritage in our forms of worship. Our Reformed identity depends on our willingness to declare our confessions and in so doing to confess the faith.
Endnotes
1 J. Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant: The Other Reformed Tradition (Athens, Ohio, 1980).
2 The Book of Common Worship (Philadelphia, 1946, 121).
3 Psalter Hymnal (Grand Rapids, 1987), 961.
4. Belgic Confession, 35. |
Microsoft Surface Book Melia Robinson/Business Insider Microsoft reported earnings today, showing solid growth in its all-important Office 365 and Microsoft Azure cloud computing businesses. Still, it wasn't all good news.
The Microsoft Surface hardware business, encompassing the Surface Pro tablet, Surface Book laptop, and Surface Studio desktop PC, shrunk revenues 26%, a $285 million decrease, over the same period in 2016.
The reason for the decline, according to Microsoft: "increased price competition in the premium 2-in-1 category and product end-of-lifecycle dynamics."
No doubt, that's not great news for the Surface business. Still, in a weird but real way, it's good news for Microsoft.
"Increased price competition" just means that other manufacturers are building their own Surface-style, high-end convertible tablet/PC devices, and selling them for less than Microsoft's own product lineup.
This would be a problem if, like Apple, Microsoft was a hardware company. But the whole point of the Surface products in the first place was to get PC manufacturers building more touch-friendly, stylus-friendly Windows tablets and computers.
Microsoft Surface Pro 4 Microsoft
So if every PC manufacturer out there is building lots and lots of Windows PCs that compete with the Surface...well, again, that's bad for the Surface business, but good news for the Windows business. Given the overall shrinkage of the PC market, Windows is fighting against Apple's Macs for a bigger piece of a smaller pie— and its tactics appear to be working.
Apple isn't sitting idle, pitching its iPad Pro tablet as a laptop alternative, trying to match the sales pitch for the Surface Pro. Users haven't exactly come along for the ride, though, with the i Pad still lacking the right mix of features to replace a laptop.
As for the bit about "product end-of-lifecycle dynamics," that could refer to the fact that the Surface Pro 4 tablet is now over a year and a half old, possibly hinting at a rumored Microsoft Surface Pro 5 yet to come.
In the meanwhile, Microsoft is holding an event in New York City on May 2nd. And while the Surface Pro 5 is unlikely to make an appearance, expect some kind of update on the Microsoft hardware front. |
The Great Republican Wave is supposed to crest in the first weekend of November, knocking down senators, members of Congress, state lawmakers and governors from Florida to Alaska.
But some Democrats are hoping they have at last found a firewall in the unlikeliest of places: Oklahoma, a state that by reputation is as welcoming to Democrats as Saudi Arabia.
A poll out on Monday by Democratic polling firm Clarity Campaign Labs shows Democratic state lawmaker Joe Dorman trailing by just 2 percentage points to Republican incumbent Mary Fallin, with voters disapproving of the job Fallin is doing by a 46-42 margin. The poll found that Dorman suffers from low name recognition, but also that 8 percent of likely voters have not yet made a determination about whom to vote for.
“The result confirms that the Governor’s decline in support has continued unabated over the past several months, and shows no sign of changing course,” wrote pollster Tom Bonior in a memo released by the Dorman campaign. “It’s worth noting that this two percent margin is well within the margin of error of the survey, making this race a statistical dead heat. What’s more, history would suggest the Governor’s re-election prospects are dim—in the 2010 election only one incumbent standing for reelection with a two-way polling average below 50 percent went on to win.”
The poll comes as the 2014 election cycle shapes up to be one of the strangest in years, with Republicans preparing to make statehouse gains in dark blue Democratic states like Massachusetts, Illinois and Hawaii. Democrats meanwhile seem to be building some kind of Great Plains firewall, with competitive statewide races not just in Oklahoma but in neighboring Texas and Kansas as well.
“The mainstream Democratic Party has forgotten us,” says Trav Robertson, executive director of the Oklahoma Democratic Party. “And it just goes to show you—Oklahoma is an extremely young state. It is an independent state that has trended Republican because, frankly, Democrats have not run good campaigns, and sometimes that is extremely hard to admit to yourself.”
Oklahoma Democrats say that is not the case with Dorman, who has run an aggressive campaign that has put distance between him and the national Democratic Party and President Obama, who sports an approval rating below 30 percent in the state. In one ad, Dorman touts his A+ rating from the National Rifle Association and the spot ends with him standing in front of a church.
“He is a rural good ol’ boy from Rush Springs with 300,000 miles on his truck,” says Keith Gaddie, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma. “He is probably the last of the breed of rural Democrats who are passing from the scene.”
National Democrats do not seem to be taking notice, but Washington Republicans are: the Republican Governors Association poured $200,000 into the race to bolster Fallin, calling Dorman “Liberal Joe” and tying him to President Obama’s unpopular health care law.
Dorman joked to a reporter that, trailing in the money race by about five-to-one, he appreciated the attention that the RGA was giving him and in the wake of the release of the favorable poll, slammed Fallin, tying her to the unpopular Congress, where Fallin served two terms before running for governor.
“Historically, an incumbent with such low numbers at this point does not win,” says Dorman. “We have worked tirelessly throughout this campaign to get to know the issues that are facing Oklahomans while Fallin has spent more time thinking about her Washington, D.C., cronies.”
Publicly, Republicans say they are not worried, pointing to another series of polls which show Fallin with a lead by as much as 15 points.
“I don’t put much stock in that [poll],” says Mike McCarville, a longtime Republican pundit, “given Obama’s lack of popularity, and Dorman’s registration as a Democrat. He is a conservative Democrat, but he is still a Democrat and I don’t think that will be enough to beat Mary Fallin.”
Fallin has received high marks for her leadership after a tornado devastated the town of Moore. But she has been slammed for initially embracing Obamacare, and only reversing position due to a heavy lobbying effort by conservative political groups. That “almost Mitt Romney-like reputation for flip-flopping,” as Gaddie calls it, grew further after Fallin initially embraced the Common Core education standards.
Fallin reversed course on that as well, but not before a mini-revolt grew among suburban parents. Fallin faced a primary with two unknown, Libertarian-leaning challengers—one of whom campaigned on the slogan “God, Grass and Guns”—but who were still able to combine for a little more than 25 percent of the vote. In June, state schools Superintendent Janet Barresi—a one-time Fallin ally—badly lost re-election in her own primary, coming in third place with 21 percent of the vote.
“This Common Core thing really rattled the governor and she never really recovered it,” says Gaddie.
Since those early stumbles, Fallin has painted herself as one of the most conservative governors in the nation, as critics say she attempts to position herself as a possible running mate for a Republican presidential candidate in 2016. She has attempted to eliminate the state’s income taxes, paying for it with the largest cut in education funding in the country. She has quashed the efforts of municipalities to raise their own minimum wage. She has presided over the highest number of executions per capita as any state in the country, even though an execution earlier this year went tragically awry, embarrassing state officials. Fallin has tried to institute some of the most restrictive reproductive health laws in the country, and when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel moved to grant benefits to National Guard members in same-sex marriages, the governor refused.
Democrats say that the state has been ignored for so long, that it will be difficult for them to put together the infrastructure or raise the money to actually defeat a sitting governor. But they do think that the next five weeks can get very interesting.
“If that poll is even half true, than Mary Fallin is in trouble,” says Robertson. “Election Day is just like football, and on any given Saturday anything can happen.” |
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Kerala recently in a bid to campaign for the BJP. Usually known for his high power public speaking skills, Modi’s speech ran into trouble when he compared infant mortality rate in Kerala to Somalia.
First he drew fire from Kerala Chief Minister Oomen Chandy who asked him to have some “political decency” and to withdraw his remarks. Now, the prime minister s drawing ire from angry Twitter user pointing out the flaws in his comparison with the hashtag ‘Po Mone Modi’.
The phrase “Po Mone” is Mollywood actor Mohanlal’s iconic dialogue from his film ‘Narasimham’. In the film, Mohanlal’s refrain is “Po Mone Dinesha!” which roughly translates to “go man!” or “get lost!”
One Twitter user explains what the hashtag means –
What’s #PoMoneModi mean? Friends tell me: “ja beta ja”. ‘Go home!’…but ‘mone’ is ‘son’, so sort of ‘go home kiddo’’ meets ‘chup be!’ — Prasanto K Roy (@prasanto) May 11, 2016
Some people are comparing the statistics of Modi’s home state (Gujarat) with Kerala and saying that he should get his facts right.
.@narendramodi Ji - Please compare the rankings of Kerala & Gujarat. Stop insulting people of Kerala . #PoMoneModi pic.twitter.com/hIcwPXssfh — Alankar (@AlankarTweets) May 11, 2016
Yet others have used the logic of numbers to ridicule his faux pas, warning that it may cost him votes in the upcoming election.
The arithmetic of Kerala explained below
Kerala literacy ..... 94%
BJP vote share.... 6%
That makes it 100%#PoMoneModi — Vinay Dokania (@vinaydokania) May 11, 2016
There are many others who are not taking the comparison lightly at all and are in fact using the controversy over Modi’s education qualifications to make their point.
Modi's ignorance is so appalling huge racist nature of his gaffe in comparing Kerala to Somalia! Foreign relations Mr PM? #PoMoneModi — swati chaturvedi (@bainjal) May 11, 2016
Kerala happens to be in Top Five in most of the Social Indicators.But what wud a Fake Degree Holder know about Education.#PoMoneModi — Ajeet Singh (@ajeetsin) May 11, 2016
Twitter users took a dig at the photoshop controversy that had surrounded Modi’s visit to Chennai to survey the damage caused by the floods.
Modi hates #Kerala because its achievements are real and not merely photoshopped! #PoMoneModi — Jay Ambadi (@jay_ambadi) May 10, 2016
And then of course, there were memes galore! |
In this posttest-only experimental design, participants played one of two versions of the video game Quake with either a human-looking target or a nonhuman-looking target. Dependent measures included perceived human appearance of the target, perceived violence in the game, immersive presence, physically and verbally aggressive intentions, and aggressive cognitions. Of specific interest was the relative effect of the manipulation compared to the effect of the players’ perceptions (humanness of the target, experienced immersive presence) on aggressive outcomes. We utilize schema theory to argue that game perceptions, including those of the manipulation, and other perceptual variables partially mediate the relationship between game features and aggressive outcomes. First, we found that the manipulation was successful and less human-looking targets were perceived as less human. In addition, the more experience someone had playing violent games, the less violent they perceived the stimulus game to be. Second, men were more physically aggressive than women. Third, the manipulation of humanness had no direct effects on aggression. Last, the more human players perceived the aggressive targets to be, the more verbally aggressive they were and the more violent words they generated. Thus, perceptions of the manipulation were more important than the experimental manipulation itself in predicting outcomes. |
NOTE: This mod requires the BoilerPlate Lib mod to run.Get it HERE.
Steamcraft 2 is the second iteration of Proloe's Steamcraft mod, which was discontinued back in Minecraft B1.8.1. Other than the name, and a few of the original Steamcraft features/ideas, the mod has an entirely new take on all things steampunk. Its aim is to extend Minecraft by adding post-apocalyptic, retro-futuristic blocks/items for your (and our) enjoyment. With everything from Rayguns and Lightning Rods to Tea and Smog, this mod is inteded to immerse you in a Victorian-era world.
Changelogs are attached to each file. Alternatively, a full changelog & key is available here: https://github.com/BrassGoggledCoders/SteamCraft2/blob/master/changelog.txt
(In Dev)
https://ftb.gamepedia.com/Steamcraft2
(And bug reports)
Think you have found a bug? Head on over to our github, and use it's issues page (Here, have a link: https://github.com/B...amCraft2/issues). Create a new issue, with a descriptive title and if possible steps to reproduce in the description. Don't forget to tag it as bug. If it causes a crash, tag it with critical too.
In a similar vein, suggesting features is also handled through the github issues page. This time, tag the issue as feature, if it is something entirely new, or enhancement if it is a new feature for an old one.Want to go one better? Submit a pull request to the repository, with your bugfixes/new features, and we will look it over, request any changes that are necessary, if any, and accept it at our discretion.
This is a section for listing the features added for inter-mod compatibility. Firstly, everything that needs to be is ore-dictionary registered, and so should help with compatibility.
Compatibility Added:
Version Checker- This mod is compatible with this tidy update checker. Recommended that you install this to stay up to date.
Thermal Expansion - This mod uses the RF API for some of it's machines.
Incompatible Mods:
None, so far, that have been found.
warlordjones: author of the mod Steampunkery (which was merged into SC2), programmer; speciality: fancy, items/vanity system, lots 'n' lots of ideas, and breaking things
decebaldecebal: programmer; speciality: complicated tile entities, power systems, GUIs
Artists:
wierdude1999: texture-artist
WolfieWaffle: texture-artist
Testers/Other:
Surseance: Ex-Coder, team creator, ideas
domi1819: core modular armour system creator
MrIbby: handyman, occasional coder.
HCSarise: Documentor
frothiny: texture contributor
seanvanpelt2: logo creator, artist
Falkok15: modeler, texture-artist
Rongmario: support, beta tester
ClockwerkKaiser: Chief Motivator.
Email - [email protected]
Twitter - https://twitter.com/brasscoders
Github - https://github.com/BrassGoggledCoders
Want to support us?
Simply using the adfly links to download the mod supports the team in creating more awesome features. Want to support more directly?
http://www.patreon.com/BrassGoggledCoders
This mod uses the MMPL v1.0, which can be found here: https://github.com/B.../master/LICENSE Also, please don' just copy and paste chunks of code and claim it as your own! In the words of the CoFH team, "Don't be a jerk!";
Modpack Policy:
You can include this mod in any modpack, public or private. We'd appreciate it if you gave us a notification about it though. :) Go ahead! |
AMSTERDAM – A trying Saturday for European clubs fielding Americans continued as Timothy Chandler's FC Nürnberg hosted a 0-0 Bundesliga draw with Jermaine Jones and Schalke.
The US internationals each shined for their respective sides, with defensive midfield pest Jones going close to a winning goal on both 29 and 83 minutes. Chandler, meanwhile, consistently drove the FCN attack on the dribble and fired a game-high four shots.
Seventh place Schalke stayed winless in their last five road contest across all competitions, while Nürnberg posted their league-high 11th draw in 17 games this season to remain above the cellar on goal differential.
Next door in the Eredivisie, Aron Jóhannsson rang the bell in a losing cause, striking the lone AZ Alkmaar goal in a galling 5-1 home defeat to Heerenveen.
Hosting the Frisians for the second time this week after a KNVB Cup win featuring two Jóhannsson goals, AZ were more error-prone than overrun in a match that saw them hold 57% of the ball and fire 17 shots. The US forward buried his only chance, deftly chesting down on the run to make it 2-1 in the 40th minute.
Due to their fourth straight league loss, the Cheese Farmers stand vulnerabl to three Sunday contestants in seventh place.
Turning to France's Ligue 1, Alejandro Bedoya put in a decent shift as Nantes dropped a 2-0 result at Saint-Étienne. Consecutive losses have dipped the Canaries down to sixth place.
In the English Championship, Tim Ream ably held down central defense as Bolton settled for a 1-1 home share with Charlton. Despite the point earned, Wanderers slipped a rung to 17th place.
Reading midfielder Daniel Williams gave a decent account of himself with five tackles, but also saw yellow late in a 2-1 home loss to Wigan. Unable to recover from two goal leaks in the opening 12 minutes of the contest, the Royals were nudged down a place to sixth.
Eric Lichaj hopped off the bench at intermission to pitch in a capable half at right back in Nottingham Forest's 0-0 draw at Birmingham City. While only two Championship clubs have lost fewer games, the Tricky Trees fell to seventh place thanks to their league-high ninth share of the season. |
An Islamic cleric living in Europe reportedly has warned Muslim women not to get too close to bananas, cucumbers or other produce -- to avoid having “sexual thoughts.”
The unnamed cleric, whose directive was featured in an article in el-Senousa, a religious publication, purportedly said that if women wanted to eat these foods, a third party -- preferably a male related to them, such as their father or husband -- should cut the items into small pieces before serving, the Egyptian website Bikya Masr reported.
Carrots and zucchini also were added to the alleged cleric's list of forbidden foods for women.
News of the statement quickly spread online, leaving many liberal Muslims embarrassed and angry, evoking a flurry of mockery in online forums.
"Many of the commentators are Muslims themselves, who have expressed their anger against the cleric for making Islamic religious practices appear unreasonable," The International Business Times reported.
BikyaMasr.com said the cleric, identified only as a sheikh, was asked in the interview how to “control” women when they are shopping for groceries, and whether holding these items at the market would be bad, to which he replied that the matter was between them and God.
Questions also arose about the validity of the original published interview. An online search for the el-Senousa article, for instance, yields only results linking to the Bikya Masr report.
But the mere suggestion of a strict order for Muslim women handling food has been enough to send people to website forums and Twitter to air their indignation.
Danish/Lebanese journalist Helen Hajjij tweeted on Wednesday: “So if Muslim women should stay away from cucumbers and bananas, should men stay away from melons?” |
TORONTO — Anthony Bennett is coming home to play.
The 22-year-old from Toronto announced on Twitter that he has signed with the Raptors, confirming a move that has been the subject of speculation for the past couple of days.
“Glad to officially be a part of the Raptors organization, Excited to get this year started !!! #LetsGo,” Bennett tweeted.
Bennett reportedly signed a one-year, league-minimum deal.
Glad to officially be a part of the Raptors organization, Excited to get this year started !!! #LetsGo — Anthony Bennett (@AnthonyBennett) September 27, 2015
The Canadian has had a rough two seasons in the NBA since he was the surprise No. 1 overall pick drafted by Cleveland in 2013.
He battled injuries in both his rookie season with the Cavaliers, and second season with the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he landed in the Kevin Love deal.
Bennett averaged 5.2 points and 3.8 rebounds in 57 games for the Timberwolves last season.
The Timberwolves placed Bennett on waivers last week and after clearing them, Bennett took a $3.65 million buyout from his now former team.
The Timberwolves have a load of power forwards on the roster, including Kevin Garnett, 2015 No. 1 overall pick Karl-Anthony Towns, Euroleague MVP Nemanja Bjelica and Adreian Payne in addition to Shabazz Muhammad, a small forward who could slide to the post in small-ball lineups.
All of those players figured to make finding consistent playing time a challenge for Bennett, so he sought his release to join a team where he might be able to fill a defined role.
“When you look at our team, our deepest position is probably power forward,” Wolves GM Milt Newton said in a statement issued by the team. “This move balances out our roster while also allowing Anthony another opportunity in the NBA. He has a lot of talent and his play this summer internationally made this a difficult decision for us.”
The UNLV product got a fresh start with Canada’s national team over the summer, playing well at both the Pan American Games in Toronto and the FIBA Americas Olympic qualifying tournament in Mexico City.
He joins fellow Toronto native Cory Joseph with the Raptors, who hold their season-opening media day Monday.
— With files from The Canadian Press and The Associated Press |
BlackBerry users on T-Mobile who want to upgrade will now receive $250 towards any BlackBerry phone, or $200 toward any other manufacturer's phone in T-Mobile stores. The deal was introduced after a recent furore between BlackBerry and T-Mobile in which the carrier sent out an email to its BlackBerry-using customers that urged them to upgrade to an iPhone 5S for a discounted price. In response, BlackBerry CEO John Chen penned an "outraged" blog post in which he blasted the "clearly inappropriate and ill-conceived marketing promotion," and lauded the significant number of BlackBerry fans who'd contacted T-Mobile CEO John Legere directly to complain about the email.
T-Mobile customers upgrading from BlackBerry phones will receive $250 toward a new BlackBerry
T-Mobile responded quickly to Chen's post. It first offered expedited shipping of the BlackBerry devices on its online store, but the offer — currently only applicable to a refurbished version of the manufacturer's Q10 phone and an older BlackBerry 7 model — felt limited. The new deal, outlined in a post by Mike Sievert, T-Mobile's chief marketing officer, is a greater benefit to BlackBerry loyalists keen to keep using BlackBerry products, and is something of a visible apology from the carrier to the company after a stronger-than-expected backlash.
Sievert opened his post by addressing that backlash. "Wow. Mind blown. The passion we've seen from the BlackBerry Loyal over the past couple days has been pretty amazing." But even as he detailed the BlackBerry trade-in scheme, Sievert stopped short of a direct apology to John Chen and BlackBerry. "The premise of [Chen's] article," Sievert said, "was that it's best for customers if we restrict the free flow of information and limit consumer choice. At T-Mobile we totally reject that premise." The deal itself offers $50 more for BlackBerry customers keen to stick with the manufacturer, but the $200 trade-in price to put toward other phones — the iPhone 5S that started the whole dispute, for example — is still incentive enough for people to switch away from BlackBerry.
It’s simple. We give options to the 2/3 of #BlackBerry users who switch to a different OS when they upgrade. #fact #uncarrier — John Legere (@JohnLegere) February 19, 2014
T-Mobile boss John Legere joined his chief marketing officer in undermining any direct apology present in the scheme or the carrier's post, saying that his company focused on "choice and freedom," and that every BlackBerry customer could "now make a choice," with T-Mobile providing the incentive. Legere, in describing the new deal, dared the BlackBerry CEO to respond again, saying "Feel free to call me next time, Chen! ;)" |
Pop goes the philosophy–it’s time for top 10 ancient atheist philosophers and their quotes.
Philosophers aren’t always atheists. The one I dated for 7 years was though–I still tease her by saying God is controlling the universe. It seems like a weird thing to tease someone about I know–but she often teases me by telling me that everyone’s brain is just existing in a vat someone and the universe isn’t real. As the philosophers say, people do weird things. Then I make her reassure me that it is because Hilary Putnam made many arguments against the theory we are all brains in vats. Also, my man Ned Block said that we have no reason to think we are living in a simulation. Take that, the Matrix.
Atheism, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “a lack of belief or a strong disbelief in the existence of a god or any gods.” Atheists stress that atheism is not a religion. It is not a disbelief in a god or any gods, but is rather a lack of belief. It’s as if you reach into your pockets to see if you have any belief on you, turn them inside out, and they’re empty. That being said, atheists are also very diverse in what they believe in–there can be a multitude of subtle differences to a belief or non-belief. They have different reasons for their lack of belief. The only commonality in their belief is that there is no god nor supernatural beings.
If you are wondering where atheism came from, or how long it has been existing, here is the answer. Atheism is believed to trace back its origins to Ancient Greece–which is why we have what we call the ancient atheist philosophers. Atheism also has roots in the Vedic period of India. There are also ancient atheists hailing from pre-Socratic Greece, like Thales and Anaximenes. In the ancient time, atheist philosophers were persecuted and punished for what they believed and did not believe in. There were philosophers who were thrown out of their cities and some were even executed.
At one point in history, Christians were tagged as atheists by non-Christians because of their lack of belief in the Roman gods. When Christianity became well-established, their positions shifted, and soon enough non-Christians were dubbed as either pagans or atheists.
18 Most Famous Atheists in the World
There have been several ancient atheist philosophers who had their mark in history over the years. They were most popular because of their quotes that defined what they did and did not believe in. Here, we enumerate the top 10 ancient atheist philosophers and their quotes, and we have also prepared 18 Most Famous Atheists in the World. No ranking is necessary, as there is simply no way to really rank them from greatest to least. They were all great in their own right. We just searched for the 10 great ones who made an impact with their arguments through the quotes they once have said in their lifetime. We used data from Arguments For Atheism and BBC–as well as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Now, let’s take a look at the list of top 10 ancient atheist philosophers and their quotes. |
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Corupția politică este o boală care omoară mii de români în fiecare an. Îi omoară pentru că banii care ar trebui cheltuiți pentru sistemul de sănătate sunt furați și ajung în conturile politicienilor și ale partidelor politice. Costul corupției politice se vede zilnic în sistemul nostru educațional, aflat într-un accelerat proces de degradare, în trenurile învechite și în sistemul de autostrăzi inexistent.
Fiecare 50.000 de euro care sunt furați de la bugetul de stat reprezintă o viață pierdută din cauza unei boli tratabile sau viitorul unui copil care este sacrificat din cauza unei educații precare. Am văzut prea mulți români murind din cauză că statul nu își permite să le ofere medicamente de bază în lupta împotriva cancerului.
Ofensiva românească anticorupție, condusă de remarcabili procurori, judecători și agenți de informație, suscită atenția întregii lumi deoarece corupția este recunoscută în prezent ca fiind cea mai mare problemă care privește drepturile omului. Dacă nu ar exista corupția politică, am pune capăt foametei, am învăța fiecare copil să citească și am oferi servicii medicale de bază fiecărui cetățean.
Nu sunt surprins de faptul că România este lider în combaterea corupției. Nimeni nu urăște corupția mai mult decât cetățenii români.
Foto Voicu Bojan Din păcate, guvernul nu își face treaba. Instanțele de judecată au acordat prin hotărâri definitive sume în valoare de aproape 1 miliard de euro care TREBUIE folosite pentru reconstruirea sistemului nostru educațional și procurarea de medicamente care pot salva vieți. Guvernul nu colectează acești bani! În prima săptămână din mai, Parlamentul a propus adoptarea unor legi noi care ar duce la slăbirea sistemului anticorupție, astfel încât câteva sute de membri ai stabilimentului politic să poată fura în continuare banii contribuabililor, ignorând costurile amețitoare plătite de milioane de români. Schimbarea nu începe prin taxarea bacșișurilor unor bieți ospătari. Ea începe din vârful Parlamentului. Exemplul moral începe întotdeauna din vârf. Parlamentul trebuie să înceapă să se comporte ca o democrație vestică, iar nu ca un stat postcomunist. Asta începe cu eliminarea amnistiilor penale și a voturilor secrete în Parlament. Parlamentul trebuie să se supravegheze pe sine prin intermediul propriilor comitete de etică, care să investigheze corupția printre parlamentari și să aprobe fiecare membru de cabinet propus. foto Voicu Bojan, restaurant chinezesc Turda Românii sunt oameni buni, care știu să distingă binele de rău. Fiecare membru al Parlamentului trebuie să se uite în oglindă și să se întrebe: „Care este rolul meu când permit ca țara cu cea mai mare bogăție minerală din Uniunea Europeană să aibă cea mai redusă speranță de viață și cel mai prost sistem de educație publică?” Cetățenii români le datorează propriilor părinți și copii să-i facă pe deputați și senatori direct responsabili pentru întărirea fiecărei instituții anticorupție și pentru recuperarea banilor din fiecare hotărâre definitivă. Mai devreme sau mai târziu, viața ta va depinde de asta! Găsește-ți senatorul și deputatul pe https://romaniaone.org/harta_electorala. Nu uita să-i întrebi de sănătate când ai o problemă. Fiindcă dacă tăcem, ei o să creadă că nu existăm.
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Articol preluat de pe Romania One
Ai informatii despre tema de mai sus? Poti contribui la o mai buna intelegere a subiectului? Scrie articolul tau si trimite-l la editor[at]contributors.ro |
Dear Melissa Benoist and Chyler Leigh,
You met thousands of people last weekend. I want to tell you about your impact on three of them. Three little girls, specifically, who were all wearing Superman pajamas and were camped out at the front of the autograph lines on Saturday morning. (I would love to get them Supergirl pajamas, but we couldn’t find any. DC should really get on that).
Supergirl is the first show that our entire family watches together. After dinner on Monday nights, the younger two girls always race upstairs to put on pajamas and brush teeth, so as not to be late for the opening credits.
But it’s our oldest daughter that has gained the most from Supergirl. She identifies strongly with Kara Danvers. Like Kara, our girl has long blonde hair; she wears glasses; she was adopted. And just as Kara does, our girl misses her first family, and she struggles with feeling alien at times.
Over the past year, our oldest girl has grown more independent. She is in middle school now and prefers to hang out in her room with the door shut, listening to music, watching YouTube videos and reading YA books. Her dad and I and her two younger sisters feel wistful for the days when she plopped herself front and center into every family interaction.
But her intense (and developmentally normal) desire to separate from the family melts away for an hour on Monday nights, when she curls up beside us on the couch as we all snuggle together to watch Supergirl. During commercials, she loves to run across the room, pulling off her glasses and shouting, “I Am Supergirl!” while her younger sisters sit giggling in delight. She is proud to be adopted, just like Kara Danvers.
Her relationship with her younger sisters is complicated. They are our biological daughters, and this creates deep and unavoidable conflict for her. No matter how much we reassure her that we love her the same as the younger girls, she tests us.
During the scenes in Supergirl where Alex and Kara explore the painful aspects of their relationship as sisters through adoption, our whole family absorbs every word, every expression, because seeing this dynamic on mainstream television makes our family feel less alone. The fact that both Alex and Kara are kickass, strong, smart, flawed, beautiful women who work hard, cry, laugh, yell, fight, and make mistakes has been an incredible model for all of our girls.
When your family is built through adoption, you rarely see nuanced portrayals of adoptive families in the media. It’s all about extremes. Fairy tales and fantasy shows usually resort to the trope of the evil step-parents or the abusive adoptive parents, with the adoptees depicted as mistreated victims. On the other end, modern stories often present the adoptive parents as saviors who rescued abandoned orphans and gave them the perfect life. In reality, neither of these fits our adoptive family. Watching Supergirl has normalized our experience, where some parts of adoption are amazing and other parts are really difficult, but what never changes is that we are family, and we love each other. Thank you for that.
On Saturday morning, our middle daughter was having a rough time as we were trying to leave the house to come see you. Often, in these situations, our oldest daughter can act as an agitator, which escalates the problems. I pulled my oldest aside and said, “We are going to meet Supergirl. How do you think she would respond to her sister?” Instead of falling into the typical sibling patterns, she swooped over to her younger sister and comforted her. The effect of her behavior was instant and soothing. She was her best self when she was trying to be the Supergirl within.
Since I was working at a booth at C2E2, I was able to get the girls in early, and we made a beeline for the autograph area. Our plan was to get into Melissa’s line first and then head to Chyler’s. The girls grew impatient after an hour, but we plied them with hot pretzels and books to read.
When you both arrived, all three of my daughters leaped up from the floor with shining eyes. Our five-year-old is so small that my husband carried her in his arms so she see could over the autograph table. Melissa, you were the first one we met.
“Hi, guys!” you said with a big smile, taking in the three girls dressed alike. When we explained to you that our oldest likes to pretend she is you, because she is adopted and wears glasses and has long blonde hair, you went with it without missing a beat, addressing her as Supergirl.
Our oldest told you how excited she is for the upcoming episode with The Flash, and your face lit up as you expressed how you, too, couldn’t wait. Our younger girls wanted to talk about how you went bad in the previous episode after being exposed to Red Kryptonite. You looked at them and saw the concern in their faces and said with empathy, “Wasn’t that awful?” Your warmth immediately reassured them that you are the kind-hearted Supergirl that they adore.
After you signed an autograph for my daughters, I asked you to sign a piece of paper for our bullying prevention nonprofit, the Pop Culture Hero Coalition, and you did. I couldn’t wait to show my colleagues. Meeting you and Chyler was the highlight of my own personal C2E2 experience, I will admit!
After you gave everyone high fives and smiles, we said goodbye and headed to meet Chyler.
Chyler, you were amazing, so approachable, so kind. You asked each girl her name and age; you told me that you are also a mom of three kids. “We would have a lot to talk about,” you said to me, making me feel as if you could be a friend and not just a television star. My middle daughter explained that whereas our oldest is Supergirl, she likes to think of herself as Alex. You nodded and agreed that she is Alex.
When I asked you to sign a paper for the Pop Culture Hero Coalition, you enthused about how important bullying prevention is. The girls chatted with you about how awesome Alex is, and you could not have been easier to talk to. After high fives all around and autographs, we left.
Melissa and Chyler, your reflected glow surrounded all five of us for the rest of the day. Merging fantasy with reality is always fraught with expectations, but you both were the heroines our girls have grown to love.
Last night, when we all settled in to watch the latest episode of Supergirl, there was a different feel. “Hi, Kara!” the girls shouted at the screen. “Hi, Alex!” they yelled. “We know you!!!!” We plan to frame your autographs and hang them right over the television, a forever reminder of the day we met the Danvers sisters, an adoptive family that strikes a responsive chord with ours.
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There are misconceptions and unproven facts about what’s healthy or not that circulate in Paleo community and that lead people to mistakes, confusion or frustration when it comes to eating the healthiest diet possible.
The quasi-omnipresence of some of those myths and misconceptions has become so strong that some bloggers now feel bad about being associated with Paleo community and prefer being on the side of organizations such as the Weston A. Price foundation, which gets things right at places where some early paleo authors are wrong.
Other authors, like Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet from the Perfect Health Diet, have taken the best science and facts about healthy eating and created their own spin of a diet adapted to our species, good health and longevity.
As a movement gets bigger and starts getting popular in the mainstream, mistakes and misconceptions are bound to be spread and the phenomenon is unavoidable. When that happens, the community should unite in teaching the right information and poking open some unfounded facts that prevent the movement from being fully credible.
Some have decided to talk openly about common misconceptions in order to expose the truth and change the way people think about a healthy Paleo diet. One such author, Dr. Kurt Harriss from the popular PaNu (later renamed to Archevore) blog, proposed the term Paleo 2.0 to differentiate old and unproven Paleo diet sticking points from the real science and anthropology about food and its relation to our health.
This website is fully on board with the ideas brought forward by the Paleo 2.0 concept. In other words, we could say that this website is Paleo 2.0 compliant.
Something to always keep in mind is that trying to imitate our past is futile and impossible so we should always consider things through multiple lenses. Science, anthropology and common sense are three such lenses. The idea of eating like caveman shouldn’t be viewed negatively because it’s what instantly made sense for many people. Other recent and fad diets like the standard American diet aren’t rooted in any history, ancient tradition, or thorough science, and haven’t endured the test of time.
Some of the wrong things that are taken as fact by many people about Paleo have already been discussed in previous articles. For example, the place of dairy on a Paleo diet and the many virtues of butter try to dismantle some of the myths around dairy. Other articles, like my article on the health benefits of saturated fat try to break the myth about our ancestors eating only lean meat.
I think that it’s in good order though to discuss those sticking points all at once in order to explain why some early Paleo authors are wrong in their assumptions and why some of the diet recommendations on this website differ from the earlier writings about the subject.
The most important concept and one thing that should be kept in mind through any endeavor into Paleo is this one:
The goal is and has always been optimal health and well-being, not sticking to dogmas just for the sake of being righteous.
The three main ideas that need to be tackled are the idea that healthy meat is lean meat, the idea that all dairy is bad and the idea that potatoes and other starchy vegetables are bad or suboptimal.
Paleo and lean meat
There are a lot of people in the Paleo community who think that healthy meat is lean meat. Most of those people base their assumption around the fact that grain-fed muscle meat tends to contain much more fat than grass-fed muscle meat. Those who can’t afford or can’t find a reliable source of grass-fed meat often also think that the fat of grain-fed meat shouldn’t be consumed and that only lean grain-fed meat should be bought. Some earlier Paleo authors have pushed the notion that healthy meat is lean meat so much that a large part of the community now associates Paleo with eating lean meat.
This assumption is completely false and shows that the lipid-hypothesis is still alive and kicking even in the Paleo community and that trying to imitate our ancestors can lead to fundamental mistakes.
It should be noted though that lean meat is not unhealthy per se, only that excess protein from eating only lean meat is.
The thing is, the body isn’t able to metabolize more than about 30% of our calories as proteins and the absolute need for proteins is much lower. Proteins are a bad source of energy. Carbohydrates and fats are the real fuels for our cells. Instead, proteins are used for growth, repair and many enzymatic functions, not direct energy production.
To metabolize proteins, the body creates toxic by-products like ammonia and urea. In excess, this can be detrimental. Protein poisoning, also called rabbit starvation, is possible in the most extreme cases of protein overconsumption.
Saturated and monounsaturated fat, for their part, are an excellent and reliable source of energy, so good that our own bodies store extra energy as those kinds of fats in roughly equal parts. In addition to being a great source of energy, saturated and monounsaturated fats have many important functions in the body. Contrary to metabolizing proteins and carbohydrates, no toxic by-products are created with those fats and they stay neutral in high amount instead of becoming toxic and detrimental.
The fallacy of cavemen eating mostly lean meat
First of all, our ancestors probably didn’t eat much lean meat. The muscle tissues of wild ruminants might be lean for many species for a good part of the year, but most studies that look at the fatty tissue composition of wild animals tend to overlook the fat outside muscle tissues like subcutaneous fat, marrow fat, brain fat and fat around organs like the kidneys.
Traditional cultures were well aware of the importance of fat as a great source of energy and went out of their way to seek out the fattest animals and utilize every bit of fat found in them. They knew which animals to hunt and in which season they were at their fattest state. For example, Eskimos are good at spotting fat caribous in herds just by looking at the horns.
In addition to that, some wild ruminants are especially fatty and those were often the most hunted and prized animals. Many hunters will tell you that wild game is often far from being lean.
So, if today we eat steaks with much more marbling than the steaks of animals living in the wild, it only compensates for the fact that we don’t eat the other sources of fat that were available in those animals.
Fatty grain-fed meat
Another subset of people accepts the fact that saturated and monounsaturated fat are healthy in high amount, but still tend to think that the fat of grain-fed animals is highly problematic and too high in polyunsaturated fat.
While it’s true that sourcing grass-fed meat is beneficial and desirable because it’s more nutritious, it’s not a reason to shun and believe false facts about grain-fed meat. The elitist attitude that only grass-fed meat should be eaten scares away a lot of people who first become interested in a Paleo diet.
The fat composition of grain-fed animals isn’t higher in omega-6 fat, rather it’s lower in omega-3 fat. That simply means that those who regularly eat grain-fed meat might need to make sure that they regularly eat fatty fish like salmon or sardines to bring their omega-3 fat intake in balance with their omega-6 intake.
A lot of people are also scared by the amount of some hormones found in the fat or grain-fed animals. While it’s true that the fat of grain-fed animals usually contains more hormones like testosterone, it’s nothing compared to the amount of those hormones found in ruminant bulls, which our ancestors used to eat much more.
To summarize, grass-fed meat is always the gold standard, but you shouldn’t shy away from fatty cuts of meat even if you’re budget or geographic situation only allows for grain-fed options.
Paleo and dairy
Even though this point has been discussed before on this website, many people are dead stuck in believing that any dairy from any source is inherently bad and that it should be avoided at all cost.
Here again, we’ve focused our attention on imitating our ancestors instead of looking at what’s really going on and what’s really important. The main focus should always be on eliminating the biggest sources of malnutrition and toxicity in our diets: grains (especially wheat), legumes (especially soy), sugar and vegetable seed oils.
The main undesirable element in milk is the sugar lactose, but many dairy sources contain very little to no lactose at all. Aged cheeses, properly fermented yogurt, butter, clarified butter and heavy cream are good examples. In addition to that, although lactose is not properly digested by most people, raw milk still contains the lactase enzymes that help break it down and should be well tolerated.
The second undesirable element in dairy is the protein casein. Some people seem to have issues with that protein present in milk. Here again, butter and heavy cream are two choices that contain extremely low amounts of the protein casein. Also, many people who can’t tolerate cow’s milk end up doing just fine with dairy from other sources like sheep or goats, mainly because their milk contains a different form of the casein protein. Finally, some react to casein as a cross-reaction linked to wheat consumption. This means that they no longer have a problem with casein once their body is healed from the damages of wheat and other gluten-containing grains.
Not many traditional cultures have been noted for consuming milk, but many have been noted for consuming high amounts of dairy fat or fermented dairy of some kind. Those cultures were most often really healthy and thriving.
Additionally, by shunning all dairy for ideological reasons about imitating our past, we miss out on a great source of healthy fat, butter fat. Of course, dairy is not necessary at all on a healthy diet and its products should still be avoided by people with digestive issues or an autoimmune disease.
Paleo, starchy vegetables and potatoes
Another misconception running around in the Paleo community is that starchy vegetables are unhealthy and that regular white potatoes are especially bad. The bias against starchy vegetables probably comes from the low-carb ideas about a healthy Paleo diet.
It’s important to understand that our ancestors probably enjoyed calorie-dense starchy vegetables as much as they could once they knew how to cook them properly, which dates back a very long time ago. The amount of amylase, an enzyme that digests starch, in our saliva is much higher than in most other mammals, showing that we became adapted to eating and digesting starchy vegetables.
We now know than an optimal diet is not a long-term zero or very low carb diet and that some amount of carbohydrates is healthy and desirable. In fact, in a discussion about the perfect macronutrient ratio, it has been established that 20% of our calories as carbs is probably optimal. Obtaining that amount of carbohydrates by eating only non-starchy vegetables is very difficult if not impossible and is not necessary at all. Many people understand the need for at least some carbohydrates, but choose fruits instead of starchy vegetables to fulfill that need. This is fine as long as fruits are eaten in very moderate amount, but the fructose content of most fruits makes them problematic in too high amount.
Contrary to the simple sugars like glucose and fructose found in fruits, starchy vegetables are often mostly starch, a polymer of glucose molecules. Starch is broken to simple glucose molecules in our digestive systems and our bodies end up only dealing with glucose, which is a sugar that can be used by all our cells for energy, contrary to the toxic fructose.
Therefore, as a source of carbohydrate, starchy vegetables, provided that they don’t contain toxic proteins, are often healthier than most fruits. They are also often very nutritive and contain high amounts of some key minerals and vitamins.
Of course, the story is almost never all black or white and two main subgroups of people might want to take it slow on the starchy vegetables:
Metabolically deranged people: Those with a broken metabolism that isn’t insulin sensitive anymore might find it hard not to overeat starchy vegetables and might struggle to lose weight if they eat just a little too much of them. Those people often do better if they go on a lower carbohydrate diet for a while in order to heal and help their body learn to use fat as a source of energy. Some people might never be able to go on a higher carb diet, but most people end up being able to include healthy amounts of carbohydrates without problems after a while.
People with digestive issues such as bacterial overgrowth: Some people with digestive issues and IBS-like symptoms, especially those suffering from bacterial overgrowth in the small intestine, have a hard time breaking down starch and should limit their overall starch consumption.
White potatoes
Regular white potatoes are a vegetable that has received its load of hatred from Paleo community in general, often without reason. It’s already established that, like eggplants, tomatoes and bell peppers, potatoes are in the nightshade family of vegetables and can create problems for those already sensitive to other nightshades. Unlike other nightshades though, most of the toxins are found in the skin of potatoes and not in their flesh. We now have access to simple tools to detoxify vegetables such as potatoes: potato peelers.
Potatoes, especially green potatoes and those with green spots (try not to pick those), also contain saponins, mainly solanine and chaconine, which are also toxic in high dose. Once again, the major part of those compounds is found in the skin and is easily removable. Many studies have failed to demonstrate that the amount of those compounds found in commercially available potatoes could be detrimental to our health.
It’s very important to keep in mind that virtually all vegetables contain some amounts of toxins. Potatoes are no exception and are often not any worse than other commonly eaten vegetables. This is why it’s a good idea to eat a diet that’s diverse when it comes to plants.
I myself have been dealing with digestive issues and many otherwise healthy food choices are still off limits for me. In spite of that, I tolerate potatoes pretty well and include them as a source of healthy carbohydrates in my diet. Many people are in similar situations where they struggle to properly digest many sources of carbohydrates, while peeled and cooked potatoes are just fine.
Potatoes are a great source of vitamin C, potassium, vitamin B6 and magnesium. Potatoes are also a source of complete protein and can be eaten exclusively in periods of scarcity without the risk of being protein deficient. Many cultures have thrived on diets very high in potatoes.
I’ve abstained from including recipes with regular potatoes in the past in order not to confuse people, but I can not stay on the safe side anymore and have to speak the truth in what’s really healthy and what’s not. I’ve already done so in showing that most nuts and seeds are often suboptimal, even if many people swear by them. The association against potatoes is strong and will take a long time for some people to break.
Some people with digestive issues might still want to abstain from potatoes, like they should already do for other nightshade vegetables like tomatoes or peppers, but most healthy people can eat potatoes, without the skin, and benefit from them. Starting now, some of the recipes on this site will feature potatoes. If you’re still not sure about eating potatoes because of everything you’ve heard around Paleo circles, now is the time to practice your skeptic muscle, try them for yourself and see how it goes. |
When I originally published the first novel in The Conjurors Series in 2011, I had no concept of self publishing. It never occurred to me to promote my book. I simply used Amazon as an easy way for friends and relatives to download my book so I didn’t have to buy them a hard copy and mail it.
Two years later, self publishing had become a phenomenon, and my brother suggested that I market my novel and see what happened. But with a cover cobbled together using Microsoft clip art and no outside editing expertise, I wondered if my book was ready for public consumption. I’m very glad that I did some research and realized that for a self published author to be successful, she needs to have a polished product. A great story is at the core of any good book, but it’s hard to see through typos, horrific formatting, and a generic title that doesn’t provide any clues as to the content inside.
Below are some tips I would recommend any writer take before releasing a first novel or re-releasing an existing story.
Invest in professional cover art. Unless you’re a graphic designer (or are close friends with one) this is a monetary investment that will pay off. It’s the first glimpse readers have of the quality of your work, and it needs to shine. I used Streetlight Graphics, and was thrilled with the quality of their work. Hire a professional editor to review your writing. I thought I had all of the expertise required to edit my own book – I was a double major in journalism and English in college, and part of my day job involves editing others’ writing. But I was astonished at how many nits my editor found in my writing. She also provided a much-needed sanity check to ensure that there weren’t any inconsistencies in the story. I worked with Shelley Holloway, and found her eye for detail was exactly what I needed. Evaluate the title of your book. I recommend searching Amazon books and using a search engine to see what pops up when you enter your title. I found that there were at least a dozen books with the title I had chosen, which would make it difficult for someone to search for. Write a blurb that’s as interesting as your novel. I was glad that I spent some time writing and having my editor review my book’s blurb as well. After your cover and title, it will make the biggest impact on whether or not readers choose to buy your book. For tips from successful authors who have done this well, check out this post. Create a web presence for yourself as an author. At the very least, have a Twitter and Facebook account that can keep fans, friends and family updated on everything you publish. This is also a valuable place to direct fans as your book attracts attention so they can hear about future works that you publish. I also recommend having a website with information about yourself and your books. A blog is great as well if you have the time. It’s an excellent way to network with other writers and communicate with your fan base. Consider releasing both an e-book and a physical copy of your book. Despite a slight learning curve when it comes to formatting for an e-book, there is no downside to making your book available in digital form. It’s free and is a great way for you to have giveaways without breaking the bank. At the same time, there is something powerful about a copy of your book that you can hold in your hands and bring to local libraries and stores to see if they are willing to display it.
So I’m proud to announce that I am re-releasing the first book in The Conjurors Series. It has a new title, The Society of Imaginary Friends (formerly Into the Dark), has been properly edited by an outside professional, and is rewritten with some of the knowledge I’ve gained in the years since I originally wrote it.
Below is a blurb about The Society of Imaginary Friends (available on Amazon):
Belief is a powerful magic.
Valerie Diaz has a power that she can’t contain, and it’s killing her.
Bounced between foster homes and the streets, she only has time to concentrate on staying alive. But a visit from the imaginary friend of her childhood opens a world of possibilities, including a new life half a universe away on a planet that is bursting with magic.
The Society of Imaginary Friends follows Valerie on a journey that straddles two worlds. In order to survive, she must travel many light years away to a realm where anything is possible.
On the Globe, imaginary friends come to life, the last of the unicorns rules the realm, and magic seeps from the pores of all the Conjurors who live there.
But choosing to embrace her potential will set Valerie on a treacherous course–one filled with true love, adventure and perilous danger.
The second novel in the series, Knights of Light, will be released in early March. I’d love to hear what you think about my story, and I welcome any reviews!
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In a recent article, Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution suggests that we should decouple income from work through a “universal basic income” based on the premise that the labor market no longer equitably distributes the gains from economic growth to those at the bottom of the income distribution.
This is the wrong policy route for several reasons. First, a basic income is anti-work.
The primary problem in the labor market isn’t that economic growth hasn’t reached low-income workers, but that people aren’t working.
As James Sherk and I have written in National Interest, the primary problem in the labor market isn’t that economic growth hasn’t reached low-income workers, but that people aren’t working. A basic income would not eliminate poverty—understood as a household’s ability to sustain itself above subsistence without depending on government. Nor would it necessarily increase economic opportunity.
According to economists V. Joseph Holtz and John Karl Scholz, when the “negative income tax” was proposed in the 1960s, “President Johnson … opposed the [negative income tax] and a leading alternative proposal at the time, a guaranteed annual income, on the grounds that both proposals undermined work effort.” Furthermore, state experimentation with the negative income tax in the 1960s and 1970s shows that it tends to reduce work without a significant effect on household consumption.
The current welfare system provides very generous benefits to low-wage working parents. For example, a single mother working full-time or nearly full-time at the minimum wage has a combined income from earnings and welfare that is well above the poverty level. The main effect of a “universal basic income” policy would be to raise the government benefits of able-bodied adults who work very little or not at all. Compared to the present system, such a policy would significantly increase the rewards of non-work relative to work, accelerating the trend to disengagement from labor and increasing long-term dependence and welfare costs.
Why is it more important to focus on work rather than income alone?
In 1759, Voltaire expressed a fundamental truth in his “Candide, ou l’Optimisme” in that “work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.” In the Malthusian world that existed before modernity, material living standards declined as population increased, and income was frozen at a subsistence level. Work and charity were the only ways to fulfill a household’s needs.
To put bread on the table, one had to work. To put more bread on the table, one had to work harder or be more industrious with one’s talents. The relationship between output and input (if you needed more, you had to put more in) was pretty constant from the beginning of history until about 1850.
The industrial revolutions of the last three centuries ended this static relationship and in the process turned hunger and premature death into a cornucopia. As economist Deidre McCloskey has eloquently phrased it, “we’re no longer asking ‘how will we eat, but where will we do lunch?’”
Today, we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, driven by computers and other smart machines, which are again increasing the “size of the economic pie” in a way that is replacing need with want, both in the U.S. and globally.
Work is no longer a necessary condition required to save one from need in the same way that Voltaire spoke about the relationship 257 years ago. How we deal with the way in which this fundamental change affects our culture and relationship with work has meaningful implications for our future.
Sure enough, as the relationship between work and need has broken down, there has been a real structural disengagement from work over the last 50 years. Groups of people that once participated in the economy through work are leaving the labor market.
This disengagement is, in part, correlated with segmentation in skills and a growth in the welfare system. Highly skilled workers in technical fields (those working with the smart machines) have continued to work, as they are able to collect higher returns for their labor than ever before. At the same time, those in service industries with high initial human capital costs—including medicine and law—have also been able to collect high returns.
Likewise, we’ve realized record opportunity in the service economy, which has spawned a variety of boutique industries increasing the quality and quantity of goods available for consumption.
However, those not equipped to participate in the new economy are disengaging at record numbers. And this trend started well before the 2007-2009 recession. In 1964, 94 percent of men between 25 and 54 were working. Today, employment for this group has fallen to 83 percent. In other words, while population has nearly doubled, employment has increased by only 70 percent. For some time, women were making up for the fall in employment of men. However, that trend has reversed, as labor force participation for women between 25 and 54 is at its lowest level in almost 25 years.
This record disengagement has also had a meaningful effect on our culture, which has been weakened by the shrinking size of the population that participates in the economy. This is especially true in areas where labor participation is low and the norm is that men and women are not working.
If work provides benefits besides monetary gains (e.g., providing a greater connection to society), the substitution of leisure for labor likely decreases well-being more than economists estimate. This shift in cultural standards is already having deep effects in other areas, such as the ability to build lasting relationships, that increase opportunity and general fulfillment.
Given that the causes of the great disengagement seem to be structural and long-term rather than cyclical, it is unlikely that higher levels of economic growth will significantly increase employment. It is also unfair to say that technology is the reason for unemployment (technological unemployment is often predicted but never realized).
The policy challenge is not to find a more equitable way to distribute national income, but rather to support opportunity and a strong civil society through work.
This could be achieved by reducing the disincentive to work through reforms of the tax and welfare systems, removing onerous and costly federal regulations that prohibit job creation and innovation in human capital markets, and reducing the burden of government that we pass to each generation through continued deficit financing of consumption. |
It’s been more than 20 years since Disney “imagineer” Roland “Rolly” Crump retired, but the Carlsbad artist’s indelible stamp can still be seen at the company’s Disneyland theme park in Anaheim.
During the ’60s, Crump designed and carved the totems that stand outside The Enchanted Tiki Room, built the iconic ghostly contraptions for The Haunted Mansion and helped develop “It’s a Small World.” His 40-year contribution was honored with a Walt Disney Legends Award in 2004, and on Aug. 11 a documentary about his life will be shown at the Oceanside International Film Festival.
“The Whimsical Imagineer,” produced by Vista filmmaker Ken Kebow, traces Crump’s unlikely path from a comics artist with a historically bad portfolio to a revered senior designer whose name is permanently enshrined on a store window on Disneyland’s nostalgic Main Street: “Fargo’s Palm Reader, Roland F. Crump.”
Now 86, Crump and his wife, Marie, share a sunny two-story Carlsbad condominium where every inch of wall space is decorated with his paintings, mobiles and models, which range from original Disney sketches to colorful portraits of Josephine Baker and geishas, pen and ink female nudes and vibrant Day of the Dead designs.
Walt Disney Co. Walt Disney, right, and Rolly Crump with a model of Crump’s Tower of the Four Winds monument for the “small world” ride at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Walt Disney, right, and Rolly Crump with a model of Crump’s Tower of the Four Winds monument for the “small world” ride at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. (Walt Disney Co.)
Although Crump had lucrative side jobs over the years designing counter-culture posters, Ball guitar string packages and themed malls and attractions, his life and heart will forever be connected with Walt Disney.
“I loved him,” Crump said of his former boss, who died in 1966. “He was the leader of the pack. He knew how to take ideas to the next level and he loved all of his guys. He could climb inside of you and see through your eyes.”
Crump said he started drawing as soon as he could hold a pencil, filling sketchbooks from the age of 3 with stick figures and eventually more sophisticated comics art. After seeing Disney’s animated “Three Little Pigs” in 1933 as a toddler, he dreamed of working one day at the studio. That opportunity came in 1952, when a friend arranged for the 22-year-old amateur artist to present his drawings to executives at the 60-acre Disney studio in Burbank.
“I didn’t know what animation was and it scared the poop out of me when I figured it out,” he said. “Someone told me I had the worst portfolio of anyone ever hired by Disney Animation Studios.”
For the next several years, Crump worked as an “in-betweener,” finishing the painting on animation cels drawn by the lead artists for films including “Peter Pan,” “Lady and the Tramp” and “Sleeping Beauty.” For “One Hundred and One Dalmatians,” he spent six months doing nothing but painting the spots on dozens of cartoon puppies. The work could be tedious and the pay was low, but he loved the creative, playful atmosphere at the studio.
In the early 1950s, Disney began work on his theme park. Intrigued, Crump started hanging around the model studios, hoping he would be asked to contribute. In 1959 — four years after Disneyland opened — he was finally invited to join WED Enterprises’ design department.
A screen grab from Ken Kebow’s documentary “The Whimsical Imagineer” shows Rolly Crump working in the mid-1960s on models for “The Haunted Mansion” at Disneyland. A screen grab from Ken Kebow’s documentary “The Whimsical Imagineer” shows Rolly Crump working in the mid-1960s on models for “The Haunted Mansion” at Disneyland.
The reason was a short 8-millimeter film Crump had made years before of an art exhibit he created by turning strips of metal into air-driven propellers. Disney saw the film and wanted Crump to create a field of flowers with propeller petals for an indoor ride. Impressed by Crump’s energy and honesty, Disney would later put him on some of the park’s most high-profile projects.
For the Tiki Room, which was first conceived as a tropical restaurant with caged live birds, Crump created the “outdoor pre-show” where animatronic tiki gods talk to the audience. His very first sculpture, “Maui, the mighty one,” is still in operation.
In mid-1963, Disney asked his imagineers to come up with an international children’s boat ride for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Working from designs by artist Mary Blair, the team built more than 300 singing and dancing dolls and hundreds of toys and backdrops in just nine months.
Before Disney would sign off on the ride (which would reopen at Disneyland in 1966 as “It’s a Small World”), the design team had to assemble the whole set, with music and electronic dolls, inside a sound studio. Then they pushed Disney through the different sets in a rowboat on wheels so he could see it himself from every angle.
For the World’s Fair exhibit, Crump designed a large monument for its entrance. He created a model for the tall, delicate propeller-filled sculpture, the Tower of Four Winds, which was inspired by his favorite artist, Alexander Calder. But when engineers reimagined his design in life size, it became heavy, short and squat. Crump didn’t spare his criticism with his boss.
“Walt asked me what I thought and I said ‘it’s a piece of crap.’ He said ‘it can’t be a piece of crap because I paid $200,000 for it,’” Crump recalled, saying that Disney insisted his employees call him by his first name.
Rather than installing the tower at Disneyland, Crump instead created the huge animated clock on the front of the ride, which still sends out a parade of tin soldiers and dolls every 15 minutes.
“It still brings tears to my eyes when I see people coming out with a smile,” he said of his work on the ride.
Crump’s next big project was the Haunted Mansion, where he and designer Yale Gracey spent four years building all of the ride’s spooky illusions. They had so many extra models and drawings that Disney promised he’d use them in a “Museum of the Weird” that riders would walk through as they exited, but it was not to be.
Disney was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 1966 and told only his family. Employees were told he was hospitalized for a polo injury but Crump could see Disney was gravely ill when he came to meet with the imagineers after his release.
Screen grab from “The Whimsical Imagineer” shows Rolly Crump, left, and Walt Disney reviewing a model Crump’s clock on the exterior of the “It’s A Small World” ride, which opened six months before Disney’s death in 1966. Screen grab from “The Whimsical Imagineer” shows Rolly Crump, left, and Walt Disney reviewing a model Crump’s clock on the exterior of the “It’s A Small World” ride, which opened six months before Disney’s death in 1966.
“His eyes were already sinking back in his head, I thought ‘oh my god, this man is sick.’ Two weeks later he died,” Crump said. “It was the worst thing that ever happened in my life. Not only was everyone profoundly sad but the management didn’t know what to do without him.”
Crump said Disney left behind 25 years of plans, including Disney World and EPCOT in Orlando, but the company’s management didn’t know how to bring his plans to fruition. There was mismanagement and cost overruns and cheap shortcuts were made.
“Disneyland hugs you but this park didn’t,” he said of Florida’s Magic Kingdom. “They lost that love and caring. It wasn’t Disney anymore. What we were left with was a dog’s breakfast.” |
A 28-year-old man was taken to hospital in critical condition after being stabbed multiple times in the chest early Wednesday morning.
The altercation happened outside the front door of the Embassy Hotel & Suites at 25 Cartier St., near City Hall in downtown Ottawa, at about 1:20 a.m.
A man was stabbed multiple times in the chest outside of the Embassy Hotel & Suites on Cartier Street in downtown Ottawa early Wednesday morning. (CBC) When paramedics arrived they found a man in critical condition with multiple stab wounds. He was treated on scene before being transported to The Ottawa Hospital's Civic campus trauma unit.
The victim is now in stable condition, police said later Wednesday.
Another man, 21 years old, was arrested in the area shortly after the incident and charges against him are pending. Police said they could include aggravated assault and attempted murder.
The Ottawa police major crimes unit is investigating.
Friend says victim lost legs in Libyan Civil War
At the scene on Wednesday morning, a motorized scooter was wrapped in a yellow tarp and two prosthetic limbs were lying on the ground nearby.
A man, who identified himself as a close friend of the victim, told CBC News the victim lost both of his legs in the 2011 Libyan Civil War, and that the victim came to Canada eight or nine months ago for medical treatments. OsamaAlakouky, the victim's friend, also lost an arm in the conflict.
Alakouky said the victim's family called him from Libya early Wednesday morning to say that something was wrong.
"I immediately came here and I don't understand anything. Police [are here], his [prosthetic] legs, blood," Alakouky said. "I don't know what's happened. I don't understand anything."
The Canadian Libyan Council told CBC News that it's hearing both the suspect and the victim are former Libyan rebels.
They said dozens of rebels came to Canada for medical treatment after Muammar Gaddafi's regime fell in 2012, with many living in Toronto but some coming to Ottawa in recent weeks to be closer to the embassy.
The Canadian Embassy in Libya suspended operations on Tuesday as the heaviest fighting since the revolution breaks out. |
Hannibal Lecter is arguably the world's most famous psychopath. I know -- he's not real. Still, the anti-hero of "The Silence of the Lambs" embodies the chilling constellation of traits generally associated with this rare mental disorder. A highly-intelligent physician and psychiatrist, Lecter is superficially charming, even urbane -- at least when he's not cannibalizing his innocent victims. He is rarely emotional, and despite the brutality of his crimes, he shows absolutely no evidence of empathy or a guilty conscience.
That's what makes psychopaths so mysterious and incomprehensible -- the lack of normal human feeling. How could somebody's child develop into that kind of merciless automaton? What did Hannibal Lecter's inner life feel like as he was growing up?
One leading idea is that this psychopathic derangement is linked to childhood temperament, specifically fearlessness, which lays the groundwork for the development of full-blown psychopathic disorder in adulthood. There is evidence to support this notion: Psychopaths have great difficulty learning about pain -- learning to avoid electrical shocks and loud noises, for example -- and their ability to recognize fearful faces is also impaired. Perhaps most notably, psychopaths don't respond normally to fear-inducing punishments -- making it very hard for parents and others to teach them right and wrong.
Despite the popularity of the so-called "fearlessness hypothesis," a growing number of experts question whether it goes deep enough. Perhaps, they argue, the problem is even more fundamental, perhaps neurological -- a problem with attention, which makes psychopaths unresponsive to fear-provoking cues in the world. According to this competing theory, psychopaths appear fearless because they aren't paying close enough attention to the things that normally scare people. This theory has inspired clinical interventions that train kids to consciously focus on emotional cues around them -- an approach that has not been especially successful.
Now, another group of psychological scientists is going even further, suggesting that the roots of the disorder may reach deep into the unconscious mind. Patrick Sylvers, of the University of Washington, working with Patricia Brennan and Scott Lilienfeld of Emory, suspected that psychopaths may suffer from a deficit in "preattentive processing" -- the constant, automatic scanning of one's surroundings that takes place outside of conscious awareness. Theoretically, if children lack this basic cognitive machinery, they would never learn to decode normal signs of danger, and without this acquired fear, they would fail to socialize into adults with conscience.
At least that's the theory, which the scientists decided to test in the laboratory. They recruited 88 boys, between 7 and 11 years old, who had troublesome histories both at school and at home, and screened them for what's called "callous unemotionality." This includes an unsettling disregard for others' needs, shallow emotions and lack of remorse and empathy -- very similar to the core traits of the adult disorder. They also tested them for impulsivity and conduct problems and for signs of narcissism, like bragging a lot, which is also seen in many adult psychopaths.
Following this screening, the scientists gave the boys a visual test that measures unconscious emotional processing. Specifically, they wanted to see if the test subjects, compared with normal boys of the same age, were slower to become aware of fearful faces that were flashed rapidly -- so rapidly that they were not registered by the conscious mind. If so, this would be evidence that the troubled boys are not automatically assimilating threatening cues in their world. They also flashed happy, disgusted and neutral faces for comparison. |
My original lead sheet tutorial was written using MuseScore 1.0, and quite a few things have changed (for the better) between versions 1.0 and 1.1. So I have completely rewritten the tutorial to take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of MuseScore 1.1. I am leaving the 1.0 version in place, however, for the benefit of people who for whatever reason are unable to upgrade. Sections in italics are sections that no longer apply to version 1.1 and later.
The new version of the tutorial is located here .
MuseScore contains all the tools needed to create great-looking lead sheets, and for the most part, the process of creating them is at least as easy as with Finale or Sibelius or any other program. However, some things can be tricky to figure out on your own. This article walks you through the process of creating a lead sheet in MuseScore, using a tune of mine in a bebop style as an example. This also serves as something of a tutorial on the process of creating good lead sheets in general.
Initial Setup
Before you begin creating your own lead sheets in MuseScore, there are a few things to configure up front to avoid having to repeat work later.
First, you will want to download the ZIP archive attached to this tutorial and extract the two Jazz Lead Sheet templates and the customchords.xml file. The two templates should be installed in the MuseScore "templates" folder; the xml file to the "styles" folder. The other two files in the archive are the completed lead sheet created for this tutorial (Bud-Like.mscz) and a chart showing the chord symbols that can be entered using customchords.xml as configured. More on that in a moment.
If you decide you would like your own lead sheets to look different than the defaults provided in my templates, you may wish to edit them to do some additional customization and then re-save them. Most of the settings you can customize as part of a template are found in Style->Edit General Style and Style->Edit Text Style. You can browse those dialogs yourself to see if anything strikes you. On my own system, I actually use different fonts for several of the text style elements, but since I don't know what fonts you might have installed, I have stuck to commonly available fonts in my template. In this article, I have customized my title, composer, and poet fonts to use Comic Sans MS, a font normally available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's a font with a bad reputation in some circles, but it's the only "script" font available on all of these systems. You can also customize the settings in the Layout->Page Settings dialog, including the overall scaling of the notation.
The main customization you may wish to make that cannot currently be made through the menus is in how you like to write your chord symbols. The customchords.xml file controls the input and display of chord symbols. It is currently configured to work with the symbols "ma" for major, "mi" for minor, "o" for diminished, and "mi7b5" for half-diminished. This is my own adaptation of the Brandt & Roemer standard. It is very similar to the system used in the New Real Book series from Sher Music, except that I do not use parentheses around my alterations. If you prefer a different system for your chord symbols - like using "maj" for major and "-" for minor as in the original Real Book, or using triangle for major and circle with a slash through it for half-diminished as in some other fakebooks, or using parentheses around alterations - then you will need to edit customchords.xml. The instructions for doing this are included at the top of the file. I have tried to make this process as easy as possible. If you do edit the file, be sure to make a copy of your customized version so that your changes aren't lost the next time you install a new version of MuseScore.
You may also at some point wish to customize your keyboard shortcuts or other program preferences, but let's get on to creating a lead sheet!
Creating A New Document
To create a new lead sheet, go to File->New (or hit the toolbar icon, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-N) and enter your Title, Composer, and Copyright info. Anything you type in the Lyricist field is displayed at top left of the chart, so I use that for instructions like "Med. Swing". In the Copyright field, you can type "(c)" to get the international copyright symbol (if you have enabled that option under Edit->Preferences->Text).
After filling in these fields, select "Create new score from template", hit Next, and select "Jazz Lead Sheet" from the resulting list. At that point you can either hit Finish to get a lead sheet with all defaults, or hit Next to specify the key signature, time signature, pickup measure, and total measures, and then hit Finish.
Here is what my lead sheet looks like just after creating it:
Remember, I have customized my title, composer, and lyricist fonts to use Comic Sans MS (bold for the title). If you decide you want to try some different fonts, you can right click the title and other fields, select Text Properties, and select whatever you like. If you own another notation program, it may have come with a text font that works well. I use the Jazz font that came with Finale in much of my own work. There are of course plenty of freely available fonts online as well. Some day, I hope MuseScore will provide its own appropriate font. Until then, however, realize that while you can use other fonts on your own system, if you choose a font that is not installed on other people's systems, then they will not be able to see your charts the same way you do. The same is true about the customizations made to the XML files.
Entering Notes
The process of entering notes for a lead sheet is not different than it is for any other type of score, so I will not dwell on it here. You can find some excellent tutorials at www.musescoretips.com. Also see www.musescore.org/en/handbook for general information on using MuseScore.
The basic process is this: click a measure, hit "N" to enter Note Input mode, and start typing. First press a number to control the duration of the note or rest to be entered, and then you press the letter corresponding to the note you want or "0" for a rest. Hit Ctrl-up/down to transpose the most recently entered note an octave, up/down to raise it or lower it a half step. Courtesy accidentals and unusual accidentals like C flat can be entered using the Accidentals palette or via a customized keyboard shortcut. There are plenty of other options for editing notes that you can learn about from the resources I listed above, but I wish to point out a couple of non-obvious things that come up often when putting together lead sheets.
The first is beaming an eighth to a sixteenth triplet. This is a common bebop idiom, but by default, MuseScore does not do this. So after entering the notes, you need to back up to the first note after the break you wish to remove, then open the Beam Properties palette and double-click the "Middle of beam" icon.
As it happens, the opposite situation happens a few bars later: MuseScore wants to beam some notes together that I do not. So this time, you select the note you want to come after the break and then double-click the "Start of beam" icon.
When I come to the end of the first eight-bar section of the tune, I like to place a double bar. You do this by selecting the barline, opening the Barlines palette, and double-clicking the "Double bar" icon.
In tunes with eight-bar sections like this, I normally like to lay them out four bars per line, but in this particular tune, MuseScore does not want to fit that many measures on a line by default. There are a number of ways to change this, including reducing the overall scaling of the document via Layout->Page Settings->Space. I purposely set the scale in my Jazz Lead Sheet template to be larger than the default because lead sheets are so often sight read in dimly lit bars
So before resorting to making things smaller, the first thing to try would be to simply squeeze the notes together a little closer. You do this by selecting the measures you wish to squeeze together and then hitting Layout->Add Less Stretch or the keyboard shortcut "{". In this case, I had to do that twice to compress things enough to get the first four measures onto the same line.
If you have the opposite problem - too many measures on a line - you can solve that by placing a line break on the measure you want to be last. You can do that either by dragging the "Line break" icon from the Breaks & Spacer palette onto the measure, or else selecting a barline and hitting Enter. I also like to use this approach just to "lock in" any changes I've made to layout through use of stretch, which was actually the case on both of the first two lines here.
Entering Chord Symbols
Because the second eight bars are going to be almost the same as the first eight, I am going to enter my chord symbols next, so that I can then simply copy and paste the first eight bars onto the next eight.
Assuming you like the style of chord symbols provide, or else you have customized your XML file to use the style you prefer, entering the chords is easy. Select a note or rest over which you would like a chord symbol to appear, hit Ctrl-K, and type your chord symbol normally.
You can then hit Esc to exit chord entry mode, or Space to move to the next note or rest. I generally stay in chord entry mode and just keep hitting Space, entering chords when I reach the right places.
There are two things that one might typically might need to deal with manually. One is the situation where two chords entered overlap each other. That happens in this measure:
In this particular case, I can see that the measure is unusually narrow compared to other measures, because it contains fewer notes, so I can try increasing the stretch in that measure. I keep increasing stretch until I can no longer fit all four measures on one line, then I back up one notch.
The two chords are still a little too close for comfort, so I double click the chord on the left and hit the left arrow a few times to nudge it over. During this process, the chord is displayed without the formatting provided by the XML file, so you cannot judge exactly how many times to hit the arrow key. Trial and error has to suffice.
The trickier problem that sometimes occurs with chord symbols is entering two (or more) of them in a measure that contains only a whole note or rest. There are a couple of different ways to do that. Probably the simplest way is to exit chord entry mode after entering the first, then select the note or rest it is placed over and hitting Ctrl-K again to enter a second chord. After typing the second chord but before hitting Esc or Space to leave it, you can hit the right arrow few times to nudge it over to where you want it.
The drawback of this approach is that the placement of the second chord really is trial and error, and it is likely to appear very wrong if the layout of the page subsequently changes. So I prefer a method that is a little more work up front, but more reliable in the long run. What I do is enter some notes in voice 2 and attach my chords to those.
Then I can delete those notes I added. The chords remain behind, firmly locked to the beat positions they were initially attached to.
This situation did not actually come up in this particular piece, but I thought it was important to cover it, since it does come up often in my experience.
Editing Operations
Most tunes that are written in lead sheet format have phrases that are repeated somewhere else within the form. As I mentioned previously, the second eight bars in my example are almost the same as the first. The last eight are also the same as the second. So I select the first eight bars, hit Ctrl-C to copy, then click on the next bar and hit Ctrl-V to paste.
As you can see, MuseScore did not preserve the stretches and breaks I had performed on the original eight bars, so I have to repeat those operations. But still, in almost no time at all, I have the second eight bars together.
Now I just need to replace the last two measures. I can select them and hit Del to remove the old notes.
Note that the chords are left behind, but I can re-enter those after I enter new notes
One issue comes up entering the new notes in this measure. There is a C flat at the beginning of the measure, and another in the next beat. Upon entering the second C flat, the flat sign displays even though it is not needed. The solution here is not obvious at all: enter the notes without the flats, then go back and add them in reverse order (right to left).
Since the last eight are the same as these second eight, I go ahead and get those done, and while I am at it, I enter line breaks so the third eight bars (the bridge) will be laid out four bars to a line. I also add the double bar at the end of the bridge. Note that the final double bar is added automatically by MuseScore.
Now I have everything but the bridge.
Slash Notation
As is the case with a few other bebop tunes, this particular composition does not actually have a written bridge - it is left open for improvisation. That means I will want to enter slash marks in each measure. To do this, I start by entering four quarter notes on the middle-line B in the first measure. I then select the four notes, right click, and select Note Properties. In the resulting dialog, I select Stemless, set Note Head Group to "slash", and just in case I decide to use the playback facility, I set the "velocity" of these notes to 0, after first setting "velocity type" to "user".
After hitting OK, I see that my measure has turned into four slash marks.
I can then copy and paste this measure to the rest of bridge, but MuseScore also provides a useful shortcut here. After copying and pasting the measure once, I can simply select the measure and hit "R" to repeat the measure again. Hitting "R" six times fills the rest of the bridge with slashes.
Now I can go back and add my chord symbols.
Final Touches
Looking over my chart, I notice a few places where I should add courtesy accidentals. Occasionally doing that causes a measure to grow to the point where I no longer fit four measures per line, so I simply select the measures and reduce stretch one more notch. After doing that, I noticed a wrong note or two, which I also fixed. The completed chart is included as an attachment.
Other Topics
I selected this particular composition for my example because it illustrates most of the issues one commonly encounters putting together a jazz lead sheet. A few other common issues do come up that we did not see in my example, though. So I will touch on these now using other examples.
Lyrics
Entering lyrics is easy. After entering your melody, just click on a note, hit Ctrl-L, and start typing.
MuseScore automatically moves to the next note any time you type a space or a hyphen. An underscore can be used on the second and subsequent notes of a tie to create a horizontal extender. The example above shows these on the words "small" and "yet".
Rhythmic Notation
In Bud-Like, we saw slash notation - stemless slashes used to show that a measure is open for improvisation. A related style of notation that is used often in lead sheets is sometimes called "rhythmic notation" - using slash-headed notes but with stems intact to show a particular accompaniment rhythm. The basic process for creating these is exactly like it is for slash notation, except you leave the Stemless option unchecked in the Note Properties. So you can enter a rhythm like this:
and then turn it into this:
What complicates this is the fact that often, we wish to have both ordinary notation and rhythmic notation on the same staff, to show melody and accompaniment together. You can do this by entering the melody and accompaniment in different voices. If you like to put your accompaniment rhythms above the staff, you may use voice 1, which defaults to having stems up, with the melody stems down in voice 2. Since I have already entered my accompaniment notes on the middle-line B, I select them all and hit the up arrow a few times to move them to just above the staff. I then go back to Note Properties and mark the notes Small. The stems will all be pointing down at first, but as soon as I enter notes into voice 2 for the melody, the stems in the accompaniment rhythms will point up automatically.
The stems on the accompaniment rhythms are longer than I would like, and the rest in the accompaniment is clashing with the melody, but I can double click on these elements and edit them.
Second Staves
Although lead sheets normally just contain one staff, sometimes it is necessary to split into two staves to notate a bass line or other part. I have provided a Jazz Lead Sheet 2 template that is set up this way. But if you have already begun work on a piece and then decide you need to add a staff, you can do this yourself by hitting "I" to bring up the Create Instruments dialog. and adding another instrument. Here, I am adding another Piano part, then deleting the treble clef staff from that part.
After hitting OK, you will see your staff has a name that you probably do not want displayed. So you will have to right-click the staff select Staff Properties, and delete both the Long and Short instrument names. You will also have to add the key signature by dragging it from the palette, and delete the curly brace at the start of the staff.
Now that you have a second part, you can enter your music there. Of course, some of your systems may need both staves, and some may need only one. Just leave the staves you don't need blank. In this example, you can see I am using both staves for the first system but only the top staff for the second system.
When you are done entering your music, you can enable Style->Edit General Style->Score->Hide empty staves. MuseScore will automatically hide any staves that contain no notes.
Other Markings
Many lead sheets use repeat signs, segno and coda signs, and various text markings to help direct the reader. Repeat signs can be dragged in from the Barlines palette; segno and coda signs from the Repeats palette. There are palette elements and/or shortcuts for common types of marking such as dynamics, rehearsal letters, and tempo markings. You can enter your own text markings by selecting a note or rest, hitting Ctrl-T, then typing your text. Afterward, you can drag your marking to place it more precisely.
Jazz charts also tend to make use of various articulations such as falls and "doits". The next version of MuseScore will contain support for more of these. In the current version, you can add these markings by creating graphic files in another program and then importing them via drag & drop. Or, you can try using the Symbols palette - the full version accessed by pressing "Z", not the abbreviated version that displays within the Palettes pane - and finding a symbol that comes close enough.
Transposing
If you write music to be played by wind instrument players, or to be sung by singers with different ranges, you will probably need to transpose your chart accordingly. The simplest way to transpose is to hit Ctrl-A to select all then Notes->Transpose. You can then select the new key or the interval to transpose by in the resulting dialog. Here, I am transposing up a major second, which is the transposition appropriate for Bb instruments like trumpet and tenor saxophone.
When creating versions for transposing instruments, I like to indicate that right on the lead sheet. I normally do this by double-clicking the style indication I had previously placed at top left, and inserting a line that reads "Bb version" in front of the style. The flat sign can be inserted within the text by hitting F2 to bring up the text symbol palette and then clicking the appropriate button.
Do note that a bug in MuseScore 1.0 means you will lose your courtesy accidentals when you transpose,so expect to spend a few moments re-adding them. Also, the flat sign inserted using the text symbol palette is on the small side. I would recommend selecting it and increasing the size using the controls at the bottom of the MuseScore screen. |
Jessica Jung, the former member of Girls’ Generation who was fired in October over a conflict with management company SM Entertainment, has released photos of herself performing solo for the first time.
Text accompanying five photos on her Weibo account on Sunday says the singer had watched a boxing match between Philippine champion Manny Pacquiao and American Chris Algieri at the Venetian Macau hotel on Nov. 23. The pictures also show a selfie and a photo of the singer performing on stage with American rapper Ja Rule.
In the text, Jung thanks Reggie Martin, the hotel’s senior manager of special events and sports.
“Rocking it with Ja and watching Manny do his usual winning thing: simply awesome!” adds Jung.
Jung’s relationship with SM Entertainment since 2007 was shattered when the company allegedly banned her from managing her fashion brand BLANC.
She claimed the company treated her unfairly after it had agreed she could run her fashion business. |
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