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The geographic range of the red-shanked carder bee declined by 42 per cent between 1980 and 2013 Steven Falk
A third of wild bee and hoverfly species are in decline across Great Britain, raising concerns about biodiversity declines and the potential loss of pollinators.
Analysis of 700,000 naturalist records going back to 1980 has found that about 33 per cent of 353 species studied declined in the extent of their range across the island. Losses worsened in wild bees after 2007, four years after the introduction of a group of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, which have since been almost entirely banned by the EU.
The assessment found that the key group of 22 wild bees and hoverflies behind crop pollination had been doing relatively well. Overall, 11 per cent of the species studied increased their range between 1980 and 2013.
That is no reason for complacency though, says Gary Powney of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, who was involved in the work. “It’s a risky pollination strategy to rely on just 22 species.”
While not immediate cause for alarm in terms of food production, the shrinking of many species’ range is a concern for a loss of richness in nature.
The geographic range of the common carder bee increased by 82 per cent between 1980 and 2013 Lucy Hulmes
“The widespread common species, in very broad terms, are doing okay. The rarer species are doing less well. If you only care about wildlife and biodiversity, it’s bad news. If you only care about whether your crops are being pollinated, it’s okay,” says Nick Isaac, who also worked on the research at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
The once widespread red-shanked carder bee (Bombus ruderarius) is among the losers, down 42 per cent. By contrast, the ashy mining bee (Andrena cineraria) increased its range fivefold.
Farming, habitat loss and pesticide use have all been blamed for insect losses in recent years. Key crop pollinators could be doing well because of a sevenfold increase in land given over to oilseed rape since 1980, and more strips of wildflowers in farm fields, experts say.
“If further evidence were needed, this new study confirms that declines in insects are ongoing,” says Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex, UK.
Emily Bailes of Royal Holloway, University of London, says the research suggests that agricultural environment schemes are having a positive impact. However, she foresees new threats: “I see climate change as an increasing issue for pollinators in the future, alongside habitat loss from urban development.”
Journal reference: Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08974-9 | {
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By Robert F. Service, ScienceNOW
Two independent research teams report today in Science that they've taken key strides toward harnessing the energy in sunlight to synthesize chemical fuels. If the new work can be improved, scientists could utilize Earth's most abundant source of renewable energy to power everything from industrial plants to cars and trucks without generating additional greenhouse gases.
Today, humans consume an average of 15 trillion watts of power, 85% of which comes from burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas. That massive fossil fuel consumption produces some nasty side effects, including climate change, acidified oceans, and oil spills. These problems are likely to grow far worse in coming years, as worldwide energy use is expected to at least double by 2050.
Renewable power sources, such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, aim to fill this demand, and they are making steady progress at providing electricity at ever cheaper costs. But electricity has a key drawback as an energy carrier. It's difficult to store in large quantities, which means it can't be used for most heavy industry and transportation applications, such as flying planes or driving heavy trucks. So researchers have long sought to use the energy in sunlight to generate energy-rich chemical fuels, such as hydrogen gas, methane, and gasoline, that can be burned anytime anywhere. And though they have demonstrated that this goal is possible, the means for doing so have been inefficient and expensive.
That's where the new advances come in. In the first, researchers led by Daniel Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, report that they've created an "artificial leaf" from cheap, abundant materials that splits water into molecular hydrogen (H 2 ) and oxygen (O 2 ), somewhat similar to the way plants carry out the first step in photosynthesis. The leaf consists of a thin, flat, three-layered silicon solar cell with catalysts bonded to both faces of the silicon. When placed in a beaker of water and exposed to sunlight, silicon absorbs photons of sunlight, generating electrons with enough energy to conduct through the silicon.
The process leaves behind positively charged electron vacancies called "holes" that can also move through the material. The holes migrate to a cobalt-containing catalyst painted on one face of the silicon cell, where they strip electrons from water molecules, breaking them into hydrogen ions (H+), and oxygen atoms. The catalyst then knits pairs of oxygens together to make O 2 . Meanwhile, the H+ ions migrate to another catalyst on the opposite face of the silicon cell, where they combine with conducting electrons to make molecules of H 2 . In principle, the H 2 can then be stored and either burned or run through a fuel cell to generate electricity.
In the second study, a team led by chemists Richard Masel of Dioxide Materials in Champaign, Illinois, and Paul Kenis of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, report that they've come up with a 2 more energy-efficient approach to converting carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) into carbon monoxide (CO), the first step to making a hydrocarbon fuel. Other researchers have worked for decades to devise catalysts and the right reaction conditions to carry out this conversion. But converting CO 2 to CO has always required applying large electrical voltages to CO 2 to make the change. That excess voltage is an energy loss, meaning it takes far more energy to make the CO than it can store in its chemical bonds.
But Masel, Kenis, and colleagues found that when they use a type of solvent for CO 2 in their setup called an ionic liquid, it reduces the extra voltage needed approximately 10-fold. Ionic liquids are liquid salts that are adept at stabilizing compounds such as CO 2 when they are given an extra negative charge, the first step in converting CO 2 to CO. And the Illinois researchers suspect that this added stability reduces the need for applying an external charge to do the job.
"These papers are nice advances," says Daniel DuBois, a chemist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who works on catalysts for both splitting water and re-energizing CO 2 . But he cautions that neither solves all of their respective issues. The oxygen-forming catalyst in the artificial leaf, for example, remains slow, DuBois says. And the efficiency of the overall leaf is only 4.7% at most, and just 2.3% in its most simplest design. The catalyst in the CO 2 system is even slower. But DuBois says that because other researchers in the field now have a good examples of systems that work, they can now focus on designing improved catalysts to speed them up.
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
Image: A new device absorbs sunlight (blue) and sends that energy to catalysts that split water (green) and generate hydrogen gas (black). (S. Y. Reece et al./Science)
See Also: | {
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BUFFALO, N.Y. - Well, this is awkward.
Brady Tkachuk and his family have already explored the possibility of him becoming an Edmonton Oiler, which would add a new element to the Battle of Alberta since Brady's older brother Matthew plays for the Calgary Flames.
"It's definitely been discussed in our family," Tkachuk said Friday during his media avail at the 2018 NHL Scouting Combine.
"It would be pretty cool but I think it would be pretty stressful for my mom."
Video: COMBINE | Brady Tkachuk speaks to the media
Tkachuk scored eight goals and 31 assists with the Boston University Terriers this past season. At the World Junior Championship for Team USA, he tallied another three goals and six assists in seven games.
The forward spoke with several teams this week and said no specific interview stood out to him.
"I thought I had a pretty good interview with everybody," he said. "I just wanted to be myself and have fun with it, too." | {
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A smoke trail is seen as a rocket is launched from the Gaza Strip towards Israel August 20, 2014. \REUTERS/Baz Ratner
RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will participate in a conference next month in Bahrain aimed at encouraging investment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s long-awaited Israel-Palestinian peace plan.
The “Peace to Prosperity” economic workshop, to be hosted on June 25-26 in cooperation with the United States, has already been rebuffed by Palestinian officials and business leaders who want their political demands to be addressed in any solution to the decades-old conflict.
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Islamist group Hamas have called for an Arab boycott of the meeting.
The Saudi minister of economy and planning will attend, state news agency SPA reported on Wednesday. The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said Abu Dhabi would also send a delegation.
The Palestinian Authority has boycotted U.S. peace efforts since late 2017 when Trump decided to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, reversing decades of U.S. policy.
The Trump administration has sought to enlist support from Arab governments. The plan is likely to call for billions of dollars in financial backing for the Palestinians, mostly from oil-rich Gulf states, according to people informed about the discussions.
Saudi Arabia has assured Arab allies it would not endorse any U.S. plan that fails to meet key Palestinian demands which include Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, a right of return for refugees displaced by the Arab-Israeli wars, and a freeze on Israeli settlements in lands claimed by the Palestinians.
The U.S. initiative follows a recent upsurge in cross-border fighting between Gaza militants and Israel. | {
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Watch Now: Fantasy Football: Training Camp Winners ( 3:58 )
Note: Draft Season is upon us. For the best draft party, have your draft at B-Dubs! Players receive food and drink specials, plus a free draft kit. Sign up HERE today!
One of the easiest starting points for projecting the upcoming season is looking at seasons past. So naturally, one of the easiest ways to find an edge is filtering out those things from the past that are unlikely to repeat themselves.
\Sometimes it's a volume issue because of changes in a player's circumstance, but sometimes it has nothing to do with circumstance at all. Often, what happened in the past is largely unrepeatable, and natural regression -- positive or negative -- is bound to happen.
In this piece we'll look at receivers likely to regress in one direction or another and how it will affect their Fantasy value: | {
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Battlefield has always enjoyed evoking reality in its weapons, graphics, and more recently its campaigns, but it's still goofy at heart, with stunt videos and plane wing acrobatics deeply embedded in DICE's DNA. World War 3's goal seems to be to eschew that playfulness for a grittier and more realistic take on Battlefield's 64-player scale.
Whenever I had enough points for the Battle Robot, that's obviously what I called in.
World War 3 redeploys some of Battlefield 3 and 4's look and feel directly, right down to the setting, squads, target marking, vehicles, maps, modes, and its blue/red/green color coding to differentiate friendlies, hostiles, and squads. It's instantaneously recognizable to BF veterans, but quickly you realize that this isn't simply a clone. Bullets hit like a sack of bricks, weapons are usually a one-shot headshot, and a magical defibrillator won’t save you.
WW3 uses systems that Battlefield has only ever flirted with over the years. Soldiers peek around corners with manual Q and E leaning more often seen in smaller-scale FPSes like Rainbow Six Siege, and ammo is limited to encourage teamwork. But developer The Farm 51 still makes plenty of concessions in the name of fun, like easily accessible first aid that restores your health in seconds. The competing influences of realism and fun can produce shooters that feel real to the point of unfair or discordantly silly (see: Arma 3), but so far WW3 manages to avoid this.
The guns consist of mostly conventional military fare, but there’s a lot more freedom of choice in WW3’s loadouts. Classes aren’t really a thing here. Instead, player roles are defined by which gadget they choose to bring along. I can be a feared sniper who also lays down ammo for my squad. A circle above teammates’ heads reveals what they’re carrying, so I can find a buddy with a first aid kit and hit X to request they use it on me.
The closest that WW3 gets to classes comes at the beginning of a match, when you choose to play as an attacker or a defender. This is admittedly confusing: choosing defender doesn’t restrict your ability to attack, it simply tells your squad what you plan to do. It’s not only a symbolic gesture, though, since sticking to your role awards you extra Battle Points that can be used to call in “strikes”: drones, missiles, and vehicles.
In practice, the roles really work. The Battlefield series has tried many times to encourage players to stick by a point and not just run around wildly, but I’ve always felt pressure to keep moving from flag to flag. In WW3, even when I'm being alerted about which objectives are being captured, knowing that I should be focusing on an attack or defense makes my next move a lot clearer. It’s a small thing, but surprisingly transformative.
WW3 also adds a clever twist on the Conquest mode popularized by Battlefield. Each capture zone is broken up into two separate objectives: for example, area A1 and area A2. Adjacent objectives sit within spitting distance of each other and can be captured separately. This adds a fun layer to attacking and defending objectives because suddenly the struggle over a single location is broken up in phases. Instead of losing my whole squad and having to respawn across the map at zone D to take back zone B, I can respawn at B2 and have an immediate shot at redemption. Battles feel more like prolonged struggles than a race to quickly capture an objective so the enemy has to respawn far away.
Better than before
World War 3's unforgiving damage modeling adds weight to everything you do. Running across a wide road toward an objective carries a real risk, since anyone who can land a few good shots can put me down. Snipers are powerful, but maybe not for the reason you'd think. WW3's maps are actually smaller than Battlefield's, so bullet drop isn’t much a factor. One shot to your unarmored back or sides is an instant kill.
There are only four maps in the game right now, but the density of each one is impressive. Every objective area is appropriately balanced to support infantry infiltration from buildings and vehicle capture. In Battlefield, I’ve always hated the feeling of getting punished for playing medic when tanks kill me and I have no way to counter them. WW3’s maps are refreshing because they usually allow a single soldier to mostly avoid wide-open death marches and still quickly navigate the map via underground tunnels and side alleyways.
And vehicles, in general, feel like less of the focus here anyway. Instead of pre-determined spawns for tanks or cars, everything is delivered by helicopter a la carte with your battle points. You can equip any three you’ve unlocked with in-game currency. I usually stuck with a UAV, an ATV, and the Battle Robot. Map layouts tend to have more inside areas for infantry than open land for tanks, so even after saving your battle points for 10 minutes to call in an APC, it’s not always the best option to drive into an objective. Especially when anyone can take C4 and quickly blow you up.
Whenever I had enough points for the Battle Robot, that's obviously what I called in. This remote-controlled APC can drive over anything, capture objectives, and make quick work of enemies with its mounted machine gun. Battles take on a different pace when vehicles are dropped on command. Instead of waiting for the next tank to respawn, it’s more like everyone has an ultimate ability they can deploy every once in awhile. Vehicles don’t tend to turn the tide of a match, though.
Between matches, players donate resources to the conflict zones of Europe to outbid the rival faction and win bonuses that give them advantages in subsequent matches. After a month of real time, the overall winner is awarded with a tactical nuke. This is the area of the game that feels underbaked and largely inconsequential. The rewards given to the winning faction are minor and, at least right now, the deck seems stacked against the East faction. More players seem to have chosen the West when prompted by the game on first launch. This leaves the minority East faction with no hope for securing the bonuses.
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Grace Miguel is leaving Usher, after less than three years of marriage!
UsWeekly reported that the famous duo have been living separately for some time, and are now moving towards a formal divorce.
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“After much thought and consideration we have mutually decided to separate as a couple,” Usher and Miguel said in a joint statement to Us on Tuesday, March 6. “We remain deeply connected, loving friends who will continue supporting each other through the next phases of our lives. The enormous amount of love and respect that we have for each other will only increase as we move forward.”
The shocking news comes after Usher, 39, debuted his new bizarre throat tattoo, which features a lotus flower and a mystical open eye.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bf4bvPvAk7e/?hl=en&taken-by=usher
As RadarOnline.com readers know, Usher and Grace were last spotted looking happy together on October of 2017, right after the performer was accused of cheating on her and infecting four other partners with Herpes.
While the singer’s manager and longtime love did not speak out following his lawsuit, it was alleged by Laura Helm that Usher cheated on Grace with her in April 2017, and infected her with the incurable STD. | {
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CLEARWATER — A man who crept into a sleeping couple's home died early Tuesday after the husband hacked him repeatedly with a machete kept under the bed, according to the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.
Sheriff's deputies say Steven Aiosa retrieved the machete after a rifle also stashed under the bed malfunctioned and the intruder began attacking his wife.
Aiosa and his wife, Heather Aiosa of 3063 Terrace View Lane off McMullen-Booth Road, told deputies they had gone to bed around midnight. They awoke around 2 a.m. Tuesday to find a stranger standing in their bedroom doorway.
Deputies say the man, later identified as Robert James Alcalde, 31, who lived at an apartment complex less than a mile away at 1319 N McMullen-Booth Road, broke into the home through a front window.
Alcalde was behaving "very characteristic of people who have taken drugs," Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a Tuesday afternoon news conference. As he stood in the bedroom, Alcalde told Heather Aiosa, 40, he had already called 911 because he believed someone was trying to kill him.
Gualtieri said the couple told investigators Alcalde began acting paranoid and irrational, crouching in the corner of the room before throwing things off shelves and trying to climb the walls.
The sheriff said Steven Aiosa, 43, grabbed a .22-caliber rifle from under the bed and walked with his wife out the home's back door to the back yard to try to load it. But the gun was malfunctioning and he couldn't get a round in the chamber.
Aiosa left his wife outside and went back to the bedroom to grab the machete. When he went back outside, Alcalde followed.
"He tackled (Heather Aiosa) to the ground," the sheriff said. "It was a very, very violent struggle at this point. There was a lot of fighting — active fighting, brawling."
To defend his wife, Steven Aiosa started striking Alcalde with the machete, giving him severe gashes all over his legs, Gualtieri said, but Alcalde continued to fight.
Deputies soon arrived and fired an electronic weapon at him, hitting Alcalde six times before he showed any change in behavior and was able to be handcuffed, Gualtieri said.
He called it an "extremely bloody situation" and said Alcalde suffered gaping wounds on both his legs.
Paramedics treated the injuries and gave Alcalde medication outside the home, but he stopped breathing on the ride to Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg, where he was pronounced dead, Gualtieri said. The Aiosas were uninjured.
Gualtieri said Clearwater police had responded to Alcalde's apartment complex an hour before the break-in after receiving a report that he was behaving strangely.
"A witness said he was walking around the apartment complex talking to himself, talking about someone being after him who was going to come kill him," Gualtieri said. He said the officer left because Alcalde did not appear to be a danger to himself or others.
Alcalde had an extensive criminal record dating to 2003. It shows charges of trespassing, DUI, credit card fraud, fleeing and eluding arrest, unlicensed telemarketing and several counts of burglary and battery. Alcalde's father, Robert Alcalde, told investigators his son was on a "slippery slope" and it was "only a matter of time before he went back to jail or was dead," the sheriff said.
Robert Alcalde told the Tampa Bay Times Tuesday that he thinks his son started using prescription drugs a year or two ago and it just went downhill from there.
"My son was a mess," he said.
Gualtieri said the investigation is ongoing, and the Sheriff's Office will be in communication with Clearwater police about their interactions with Alcalde before the incident, but he is sure nothing could have been done differently.
"He didn't meet the criteria for an involuntary examination under the Baker Act," the law that allows law enforcement to detain someone having a mental health crisis that could be dangerous to themselves or others. "If someone hasn't broken the law and doesn't meet the criteria, there isn't any (law enforcement) can do."
Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Contact Megan Reeves at [email protected] or (727) 445-4153. Follow @mreeves_tbt. | {
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Ritter only appeared on a single episode of the teen soap Gossip Girl, but she was initially set to do much more. She was a part of the Season 2 episode "Valley Girls," which was supposed to be a backdoor pilot for a spinoff of the same name. The series, set in the 1980s, was set to follow the younger version of Kelly Rutherford's Lily van der Woodsen, here played by Brittany Snow. Ritter's character was her sister, Carol Rhodes, an aspiring actress whom Lily leaves to go live with after running away from her parents.
Although fans responded well to the episode, it wasn't picked up to series due to The CW's tough line-up that year. Still, we can't help but wonder what could have been with a Ritter-starring, '80s-set Gossip Girl spinoff, especially considering the fates met by some of the other shows The CW ordered that season, which included the one-season wonder Melrose Place reboot and the Mischa Barton-starring The Beautiful Life, which got canceled after airing only two episodes. But hey, The CW did order The Vampire Diaries that season, so they weren't all failures, and Ritter ended up moving on to bigger and better things. | {
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Angus Young is reportedly working on a new AC/DC studio album with Axl Rose, according to two stories from the Australia-based Noise11. Both items arrived in the wake of Young's guest appearances during Guns N' Roses concerts at Melbourne and Sydney.
"The chemistry between Axl Rose and Angus Young has inspired Angus to start planning another AC/DC record," Noise11's Paul Cashmere reports, "but Guns N’ Roses' touring commitments throughout 2017 will make it difficult to finalize the project." The story, which is dated today, is headlined "New AC/DC Album Not Expected Until 2018."
It should be noted that there has been no previous mention of any sessions from either camp, and no confirmation of these reports.
Rose took over after longtime AC/DC singer Brian Johnson was suddenly sidelined by a hearing issue in 2016, ultimately playing 23 concerts on the troubled Rock or Bust tour. He previously hinted that this surprise collaboration with Young quickly produced new musical ideas.
"I feel protective; I feel I do not want to let this guy down – more than almost anybody I’ve ever known – and I don’t know why," Rose said last June. "And he’s very responsive to me. And they said they hadn’t seen him this happy, they hadn’t seen him moving around [this much]. In between songs, he’s playing other stuff [that has inspired potential new song ideas]. So that’s kind of a neat thing between musicians.”
Cashmere's son Tim, also writing for Noise11, mentioned a proposed recording project as well. "Axl Rose fronting AC/DC was controversial," the younger Cashmere said on Feb. 15, "and if you didn’t like that combination, you will be horrified to learn there is an album on the way.”
Rose was frank about those expectations when he joined AC/DC. “I know how hard it is," Rose said. "Lots of bands do not want to open for [Guns N’ Roses]; they just don’t want to. They don’t want to deal with our fans. It’s kind of the same with AC/DC fans. They’re very serious about their band.”
Paul Cashmere also notes that all of the AC/DC shows with Rose were recorded for possible future use. "It is possible fans may be treated to a live album with Rose from the Rock Or Bust tour prior to the new studio album," he added. | {
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The Solicitor General’s office has filed an amicus brief in support of the New York State Pistol and Rifle Association’s petition at the U.S. Supreme Court.
The petitioners in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York argue that a ban on licensed gun owners bringing a gun to a residence or gun range outside of the city violates the Second Amendment and the Commerce Clause. Paul Clement, the petitioner’s attorney, lays out in the writ of certiorari why he thinks New York City’s ban did not apply “heightened scrutiny” for a government restriction on guns in our post-District of Columbia v. Heller world:
[T]he City has presented precisely zero empirical evidence that transporting an unloaded handgun locked up in a container separate from its ammunition (an activity that federal law affirmatively protects) poses any material safety risk. Moreover, the City’s transport ban only undermines its professed public safety concerns, as the ban has the perverse effects of forcing residents to keep handguns in their vacant New York residences, and to transport their handguns all around the city—the very activity the City claims is dangerous—in search of one of seven in-city shooting ranges tucked into the boroughs.
In its brief, the Trump Administration agreed with the petitioners. It argued that “the purposes of the right to keep and bear arms confirm that the right includes the freedom to take arms from the home to appropriate places outside the home.”
“Few laws in the history of our Nation, or even in contemporary times, have come close to such a sweeping prohibition on the transportation of arms,” the brief added later.
Cert was granted in January 2019. The case is expected to be argued this fall.
This appears to be yet another salvo in the ongoing battle between President Donald Trump/the Trump Administration and New York. Back in April, Trump accused New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) of attacking the NRA by “illegally using the State’s legal apparatus to take down and destroy” the gun rights group.
The NRA is under siege by Cuomo and the New York State A.G., who are illegally using the State’s legal apparatus to take down and destroy this very important organization, & others. It must get its act together quickly, stop the internal fighting, & get back to GREATNESS – FAST! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 29, 2019
James’ office released a statement saying that she “is focused on enforcing the rule of law. In any case we pursue, we will follow the facts wherever they may lead. We wish the President would share our respect for the law.”
[Image via Alex Wong/Getty Images]
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Afghan government tackles displacement as millions face eviction
War has forced millions to flee their homes but a housing project aims to improve conditions for displaced Afghans. | {
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Choose a parking spot near a cart return It'll save you an annoying walk across the parking lot and get you on your way quicker.
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Oprah Winfrey said she is not interested in running for president, in comments published this week that were made before the current wave of speculation that followed her speech at the Golden Globes.
Over the years, Winfrey’s popularity has frequently prompted conjecture that she could be a viable presidential candidate. Winfrey, however, has never made a formal bid for the presidency.
Play Video 0:25 'I'll beat Oprah': Donald Trump dismisses 2020 election speculation – video
“I’ve always felt very secure and confident with myself in knowing what I could do and what I could not,” Winfrey told US magazine InStyle three weeks before the Globes. “And so it’s not something that interests me. I don’t have the DNA for it.”
At the awards show earlier this month, host Seth Meyers made a joke about Winfrey being president just before she delivered a rousing speech at the awards show.
A deluge of news stories and editorials followed, with commentators debating whether Winfrey would run for president and what such a bid would look like.
Donald Trump was even asked whether he could defeat Winfrey in a presidential election.
“Yeah, I’d beat Oprah,” Trump said. “Oprah would be a lot of fun. I know her very well. I like Oprah. I don’t think she’s gonna run.”
Winfrey’s friends, including best friend Gayle King, said Winfrey was likely not running for president. But her partner, Stedman Graham, fueled further speculation when the Los Angeles Times asked him whether Oprah would run.
“It’s up to the people,” Graham said. “She would absolutely do it.”
“Gayle – who knows me as well as I know myself, practically – has been calling me regularly and texting me things, like a woman in the airport saying, ‘When’s Oprah going to run?’ So Gayle sends me these things, and then she’ll go, ‘I know, I know, I know! It wouldn’t be good for you – it would be good for everyone else,’” Winfrey said.
“I met with someone the other day who said that they would help me with a campaign. That’s not for me.” | {
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China's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday announced it will expel U.S. journalists for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post in response to what it called "unwarranted restrictions" on Chinese media in the United States. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo
March 17 (UPI) -- China on Tuesday moved to expel American journalists working for multiple U.S. news outlets in what it described as a "countermeasure" to restrictions on Chinese media in the United States.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that journalists from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post who are U.S. citizens and whose press credentials are due to expire before the end of the year return their press cards within 10 days.
"They will not be allowed to continue working as journalists in the People's Republic of China, including its Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions," the foreign ministry said.
The Chinese government also ordered Chinese branches of Voice of America, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Time to declare information about their staff, finance, operation and real estate in the country.
RELATED Trump administration imposes employee cap on Chinese state media
The ministry said the moves were made in response to the U.S. government placing "unwarranted restrictions" on Chinese media in the United States including ordering Chinese media organizations to register as foreign agents and designating five Chinese media entities as foreign missions.
In response, the country said it would take reciprocal measures against American journalists for the "discriminatory restrictions" the United States has imposed on Chinese journalists with regard to visa, administrative review and reporting.
"The above-mentioned measures are entirely necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the U.S.," the Ministry of Financial Affairs said.
The U.S. National Security Council condemned China's decision, describing it as "another step toward depriving the Chinese people and the world of access to true information about China," while calling on the Chinese government to instead turn its attention toward combatting the COVID-19 outbreak. | {
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HOUSTON (Reuters) - T. Rowe Price Group Inc said on Monday it intends to vote against the Occidental Petroleum Corp board of directors because the company will not allow shareholders to vote on its bid for Anadarko Petroleum Corp, which T. Rowe Price and other shareholders oppose.
FILE PHOTO: The Occidental Petroleum Corp headquarters is pictured in Los Angeles, California September 16, 2013. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni/File Photo
Several other investors also said they might vote against approving Occidental’s board of directors at the annual meeting on Friday. Occidental on Sunday increased the cash component of its $38 billion bid to acquire Anadarko, removing a requirement for Occidental shareholders to approve the deal.
That move led Anadarko on Monday to name Occidental’s $76-a-share offer as superior to that submitted by Chevron Corp, requiring Chevron by Friday to revise its offer or walk away.
“We don’t feel we have any choice,” said fund manager John Linehan, portfolio manager at T. Rowe Price. “We really struggle to understand the logic of not putting a transformational deal to your shareholder base.”
T. Rowe Price, Occidental’s sixth largest shareholder, held 21.1 million shares of the oil company as of Dec. 31, along with 865,000 shares of Anadarko and 8 million in Chevron, which offered $33 billion for Anadarko.
Occidental risks the ire of billionaire activist Carl Icahn, who has been amassing a stake in the Houston-based oil producer intending to challenge its Anadarko offer, according to sources.
Icahn’s involvement throws a wild card into the merger battle, said David Katz, president of Matrix Asset Advisors, which held 241,700 shares of Occidental and 61,300 shares of Chevron at the end of April.
Matrix opposes the merger and may vote against the Occidental board “to send a message,” Katz said. “We don’t think they’re correctly handling their fiduciary decisions.”
Occidental Chief Executive Officer Vicki Hollub said on Monday the decision to increase the cash portion of the offer was designed to address Anadarko’s need for greater certainty the deal would go ahead.
“Our objective in doing this was not at all to avoid a shareholder vote. It was to ensure we had a reasonable chance to make this happen,” she said on a conference call on Monday. “We weren’t at all on a level playing field,” she said, noting that the Anadarko board had failed for days to make a decision.
It has “been a 12-day process” and “our proposal still wasn’t deemed superior, which is why we’ve yesterday submitted the increased cash offer,” Hollub said.
Occidental’s bid includes a pricey financing deal with billionaire Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway would receive preferred shares paying an 8 percent dividend.
“Occidental putting in more cash is really a ploy to not have a shareholder vote,” said Christian Ledoux, investment chief at South Texas Money Management, which holds shares of Chevron and Occidental. “That’s upsetting from an investor point of view.”
Ledoux opposes the merger, fearing that Occidental would go into the next oil price downturn with a debt-laden balance sheet. He has not decided how his company will vote on the Occidental proxy. It will wait to see what else develops and whether Icahn takes a stand, Ledoux said.
“I would imagine there’s going to be a lot of votes against (the board) as a protest,” Ledoux said. | {
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A federal lawsuit filed by a pro-Trump PAC against the DNC and Clinton campaign has provided evidence confirming that the Clinton campaign knowingly violated federal campaign limits.
The lawsuit, filed in a DC district court by pro-Trump PAC Committee to Defend the President, presents detailed Federal Election Commission filings showing that state Democrat committees exploited a loophole allowing pooled funds from major Democratic donors to be transferred outside the states directly to the DNC and Clinton campaign.
According to attorney Dan Backer, there was “extensive evidence in the Democrats’ own FEC reports, when coupled with their own public statements that demonstrated massive straw man contributions papered through the state parties, to the DNC, and then directly to Clinton’s campaign — in clear violation of federal campaign-finance law.”
The documents show that Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and 32 state Democrat committees established the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) in 2016 to accept contributions from large donors.
“To comply with campaign finance law, the HVF needed to transfer the donations to the specified recipients, whether the Clinton campaign, down-ticket Democrats, the DNC, or state committees,” the Federalist reported.
“FEC records, however, show several large contributions reported as received by the HVF and the same amount on the same day (or occasionally the following day) recorded as received by the DNC from a state Democratic committee, but without the state Democratic committee ever reporting the contribution.”
Of the contributions state Democrat parties reported as received from the HVF, 99 percent ended up at the Clinton-controlled DNC, and most of those funds went to pay off its debt accumulated by former President Obama, according to former DNC Chair Donna Brazile.
“Obama left the party $24 million in debt – $15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign and had been paying that off very slowly,” she wrote in her book Hacks. “Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America and the Hillary Victory Fund had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the DNC on an allowance.”
Additionally, it was the Clinton campaign who ultimately decided how the money was used, not the state Democrat committees.
“While state party officials were made aware that Clinton’s campaign would control the movement of the funds between participating committees, one operative who has relationships with multiple state parties said that some of their officials have complained that they weren’t notified of the transfers into and out of their accounts until after the fact,” Politico reported in 2016.
“Particularly the parties in states that are not competitive, they worry that the DNC won’t let them keep any of the money, but the historical reality is that they wouldn’t have gotten the money anyway,” the operative said.
What’s also shocking is the way the corporate media ignores these revelations.
They’re much more content reporting on porn star Stormy Daniels while mounds of concrete evidence continue to pile up showing the Clinton campaign illegally laundered millions to rescue the DNC and finance her campaign.
View the lawsuit below:
Twitter: Follow @WhiteIsTheFury
The Emergency Election Sale is now live! Get 30% to 60% off our most popular products today! | {
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In October's Action Comics 894, the DC Universe's baldest baddie, Lex Luthor, will meet an unlikely guest star...Death from Neil Gaiman's Sandman. These characters come from two very different corners of comicdom, but their confluence is a win for readers.
In Paul Cornell's current run on Action Comics, Lex is attempting to unlock the secrets of the Black Lanterns, who unceremoniously trampled all over the DCU during Blackest Night. Cornell (Doctor Who, Captain Britain and MI:13) had this to say about Neil Gaiman allowing him use everyone's favorite (and gothiest) anthropomorphic representation of mortality:
I knew I wanted to take him to areas he hadn't been, and one of those areas was the supernatural/the theological. I initially thought, "Oh, there's the Black Racer for Kirby's Fourth World books! The guy on the skis - that's the personification of Death there." I had happily been thinking of pitching that, and then suddenly it occurred to me that there's another Death, isn't there, that's from even further across the reach of the DC Universes [...] Then I set up to talk to Neil and had a word with Neil, not expecting him to say yes, but he said yes!
This isn't the first time Neil Gaiman's Endless have crossed over into the mainstream DCU — indeed, Dream appeared in Grant Morrison's 1998 run on JLA — but this is the first time in a good long while. Also, the team up of Death and Lex is an odd mix. Death is the personification of dying (who happens to look like Siouxsie Sioux). At a certain juncture in his career, Lex was so down-and-out that he spent a good portion of his time screaming at Superman about peanut butter recipes.
The point is, these two characters come from different traditions. Death comes from the late 80s/early 90s proto-Vertigo DCU and dresses like a hot alternate dimension Robert Smith. Lex Luthor's been part of the Superman mythos for 70 years and has suffered a lifetime worth of undignified merchandising. It's the commercial meets the critically acclaimed.
At first blush, it seems downright sacrilegious to team them up. Imagine of McG — a director whose career is built on pop panache — announced that he was going to remake 2001 (but call it 4002..."because it's twice the sequel!"). The internet would have a fanbolism. Similarly, Lex has dabbled in pastry theft during his career in supervillainy. That's ain't Vertigo material.
So why am I not worried about this crossover? Two reasons. First, I happen to like Cornell as a writer (his run on Marvel's Wisdom was way underrated). And second, I don't think this crossover will devalue Death. It's already been demonstrated that a character can try out different "tenors" and still remain interesting. Just look what Marvel's done with the Punisher over the years.
Marvel's never really known what to do with the Punisher. He's too violent for overt superheroics but too lucrative and famous to exile to crime comics. He fit in during the angsty early 90s (Anyone remember Hearts of Darkness? Punisher + Ghost Rider + Wolverine = anti-hero overload!) but was later consigned to the periphery of continuity until Mark Millar brought him back in Civil War.
Since then, Marvel's been able to divide Frank Castle between two titles: Frankencastle (which depicts the Punisher as a shambling undead vigilante in the main Marvel U.) and PunisherMAX (which is a "real world" take on Frank). In a way, Marvel's imposed a form of selective continuity on Frank. Fans can take their Punisher with a side of the supernatural or leave him in a non-superheroic reality. Both are valid takes, complete with their own continuity and tenor.
What does the Punisher have to do with Death and Lex? By placing this incongruous duo in one tale, DC is increasing the spectrum of stories that can be told with these characters. Who knows? If this goes well, maybe Gaiman will greenlight more Endless tales down the road. Options are good. Some folks like their Batman dark'n'gritty. I like my Batman fighting Swamp Thing. And with DC reincorporating Vertigo-lite characters back into the DCU, such editorial barriers will appear more and more arbitrary. | {
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So far, the feature is only known to work with newer iPhones like the 6s, 6s Plus and SE. We've reached out to Apple for confirmation of the feature and will let you know if it has something to say. With that said, it's not at all shocking that Apple would go this route. It's helpful to both the company and customers: you might rescue your device when there's a close call, while Apple spends less time and money on repairs.
[Thanks, Kristy] | {
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india
Updated: Dec 04, 2016 18:37 IST
A 42-feet-long carcass of a whale was found at Baidhara Pentha beach in Puri district of Odisha, an official said on Sunday.
The forest officials recovered the dead marine species on getting information from the local people.
“It’s a rare whale shark mostly seen in the Pacific Ocean. Cause of death can be ascertained after the post-mortem examination,” said Satapada Forest Ranger Achyutananda Das.
He said the veterinary college doctors have been requested to conduct an autopsy to establish the reason of death.
The marine mammal might have died 10-15 days back and the carcass may have washed ashore, Das said. | {
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ISTANBUL // On the fringes of Kasimpasha, a working-class Istanbul district, and just opposite an old graveyard sits Yashar Hoca’s Place, a cafe and living shrine to the neighbourhood’s most famous son, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“He used to come around all the time,” says Hassan Camurluayak, enjoying an evening tea with his friends beneath rows of pictures, some framed, some glued to the cafe’s white tiles, of Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, of Mr Erdogan, its present-day leader, and of the Ottoman sultans.
“He was both serious and courteous, all prayer and mosque,” Mr Camurluayak, a pensioner, says of the young Mr Erdogan. “Me and the guys, we were religious too, but we sometimes played cards. He’d never join. We drank coffee. He’d never drink with us.”
On August 28, Mr Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister since 2003, will move across the capital Ankara to set up camp in the presidential residence. By the time his first term comes to an end, he will have ruled Turkey for nearly 17 years, longer than Ataturk, and will have arguably reshaped the country as much as the revered leader.
Under Ataturk, Turkey crawled out from the debris of the Ottoman Empire, embraced secularism, at least nominally, and tried to forge a new, entirely Western, identity, abandoning all pretensions to being a Muslim power.
Under Mr Erdogan, political Islam, paired with economic liberalism, has made a triumphant comeback.
The newly elected president, who turned 60 this year, was 43 when Turkey’s generals, the self-appointed guardians of Ataturk’s legacy, pressured his Islamist mentor Necmettin Erbakan into resigning as prime minister, the fourth such intervention since 1960.
Mr Erdogan was 45 when he sentenced to jail for four months, convicted of incitement to religious hatred. His offence was to have read a nationalist poem at a political rally. It was 1999.
By the time he came to power at the helm of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) three years later, the former Istanbul mayor had ditched the overtly Islamist rhetoric, embraced ties with the West, and successfully courted Turkish liberals.
In his third and last term as prime minister, many of these alliances crumbled. Mr Erdogan’s once lauded efforts to remove the army from politics increasingly resembled a vendetta. Democratic reforms stalled, prompting liberal allies to jump ship. As the economy took off and as Europe began to turn inward, the dream of EU accession, a one-time strategic goal, faded into irrelevance.
Starting with foreign policy and ending with soap operas centred on the lives of the sultans, Turkey embraced its Ottoman past, albeit with mixed results. Having lent almost unconditional backing to the rebels fighting Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria, Mr Erdogan’s government now finds itself bordering not one but two failed states. In Egypt, where it backed deposed president Mohammed Morsi, Turkey is left with precious few friends. Relations with Israel are at rock bottom.
The country is increasingly conservative. After new taxes, alcohol prices are among the highest in Europe. A ban on the Islamic headscarf in public places, including state universities, has been dismantled. Religious school graduates are free to enter the bureaucracy. Among secular Turks, but not only, statements like those made by deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc, who recently argued that women should avoid laughing in public, are met with a mix of ridicule and alarm.
In Kasimpasha, however, the range of superlatives used to describe Mr Erdogan grows with each day.
“They like to say he was a brawler when he was young,” says Eyup Guzel, a former printer. “It’s not true. He was always polite.”
“Now he’s become ever nicer, even more tolerant,” adds Mr Camurluayak.
Mr Erdogan himself has produced plenty of evidence to the contrary. In 2009, at a panel in Davos, he snapped after the moderator, a journalist, refused to allot him more time to condemn an ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza. “When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill,” he told Israeli president Shimon Peres, seated beside him, seconds before leaving the stage and vowing never to set foot in Davos again.
The episode, which won Mr Erdogan plaudits at home and in the Arab world, consolidated his reputation, cultivated carefully since, as a champion of oppressed Muslim peoples. In the run up to Sunday’s presidential election, Mr Erdogan had sprinkled his rhetoric with numerous references to the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and the Muslim Brothers in Egypt.
Mr Erdogan was born in Kasimpasha, but he spent part of his childhood in Rize, his father’s hometown, on Turkey’s rugged Black Sea coast. “He’s like the people here,” says Huseyin Akyol, an AKP party boss from Ordu, another town in the area. “When you’re with him one on one, he’s friendly and warm, but when necessary he turns aggressive.”
Mr Erdogan’s critics fear his aggression might be getting the better of him. Over the past week alone, he pledged to continue his crackdown on the Gulen community, an influential Islamic movement, which he accuses of having tried to topple his government in December by engineering a massive corruption scandal. He took exception to being called an Armenian, which he considered an insult. Finally, he lashed out at an Economist correspondent, the last of many journalists to end up in his crosshairs, calling her “shameless” and “militant”.
Among opponents at home and allies abroad, unease about an Erdogan presidency has grown since last summer’s brutal crackdown against anti-government protesters, which left eight dead and the country split down the middle.
A recent cartoon featured Mr Erdogan addressing his electorate with the words, “I’ll discriminate and insult everyone until the elections, but I’ll be the president of all Turks thereafter.”
At Yashar’s Place, within eyeshot of a small roundabout festooned with flags bearing Mr Erdogan’s image and the words, “Man of the People,” there are few such qualms.
“He was the prefect prime minister, and he’ll be the prefect president,” says Mr Camurluayak.
Someone volunteers that Mr Erdogan might be to Turkey’s 21st century what Ataturk had been to its 20th. The comment falls on deaf ears. “He’s like Suleyman,” says Senol Yuras, a kitchen maker, comparing the new president instead to the 16th century sultan, whose drawing hangs in the back of the cafe. “Magnificent.”
[email protected] | {
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Sewage is being discharged into the lighthouse stormwater outlet on Fish Hoek beach after its station pump failed due to load shedding that took place on Sunday, February 9.
Residents are being asked to exercise caution as although the leak was contained on Monday, February 10, a strong South Easterly wind may have dispersed the harmful sewage resulting in longshore drift.
Water quality tests have not yet been completed to confirm whether the effects of the spill have been reversed.
The pump stations are fitted with mechanisms that are supposed to sound an alarm and send an SMS to management when faults occur, but this was not the case on Sunday as load shedding caused the server to remain offline.
The City is investigating whether this occurred due to cellphone towers not being given enough time to recharge between intervals. Usually, the failure rate per month is between 1.5% and six out of 402 pump stations. Recently, this has changed to 20 out of 402.
With load shedding becoming more frequent, the pump stations are under massive strain. The City is doing what it can to minimise the failure but in reality, the problem is a lack of power.
Although all pump stations were fitted with generators in 2014 or 2015 at the height of power failures, the smaller pumps still overflow when the power goes out. The City says it may be impossible to prevent this from happening.
Residents are asked to please alert the City to sewer blockages/overflows via any one of the following channels: [email protected], SMS to 31373 (maximum 160 characters), Log a service request by phoning the call centre on the telephone number 0860 103 089.
Picture: Facebook | {
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Andy McCabe admitted to FBI investigators that he lied | {
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ABU DHABI (Reuters) - Ride-hailing services such as Uber [UBER.UL] and others will have to register their apps and heed new regulations to operate in Abu Dhabi, a top official at the Gulf emirate’s taxi regulator said on Monday.
An illustration picture shows the logo of car-sharing service app Uber on a smartphone next to the picture of an official German taxi sign September 15, 2014. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/Illustration/File Photo
U.S.-based Uber and regional rival Careem suspended services in the capital of the United Arab Emirates on Aug. 27 after many of their drivers were stopped by authorities over violations of regulations, sources told Reuters at the time.
Careem has since resumed services in Abu Dhabi, although Uber has yet to do so as it awaits clarification on some issues.
The new regulations are coming “very soon” and will include a provision requiring ride-hailing apps to register with The Centre for Regulation of Transport by Hire Cars (Transad), its general manager Mohamed Darwish al-Qamzi said.
“This will help us to control the market easier by blocking any unregulated application with us,” he told Reuters. Currently, ride-hailing services are not regulated in the UAE.
Qamzi said companies such as Uber and Careem suspended their services after Abu Dhabi began enforcing tighter regulations to curb malpractices and a growing black market.
“There was a black market, many illegal drivers doing part-time work, over-charging customers and not following regulations,” he said.
A spokesman for Careem denied any wrongdoing by the company and its drivers. An Uber spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment, although the company has previously said it complies with all existing regulations.
According to the new Abu Dhabi regulations, ride-hailing apps must work only with luxury private hire companies and strictly follow their price structure. They must also send a list of drivers and cars to Transad, he said.
At the moment, ride-hailing apps work with drivers who operate limousines as well as smaller cars that are not registered with Transad.
Transad works with seven franchisee taxi companies with 7,645 registered taxis operating in Abu Dhabi.
“We are not against the apps services,” said Qamzi. “It is the choice of the people. But we need to make sure the cars are safe, drivers are genuine and the safety of customers is first.”
Uber, which launched services in Abu Dhabi in 2013, said last year that the Middle East and North Africa contained some of its fastest-growing markets and that it planned to invest $250 million to expand in the region.
It said on June 1 that had raised $3.5 billion from an investment by Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Public Investment Fund. | {
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Who stole the American dream?
While billions of dollars are spent on US presidential election campaigns, tens of millions still live in poverty. | {
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When Microsoft officially announced that Windows 8.1 had been released to manufacturing, the company said that MSDN and TechNet subscribers would have to wait until October 18th to try out the new software. This was a big—and universally unpopular—change in policy, with a massive online backlash immediately following.
Microsoft has heard the response and has changed its mind. Its new policy is the old policy: MSDN and TechNet subscribers will get immediate access to Windows 8.1 for testing and development purposes. Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will be available to download now, and volume license versions of Windows 8.1 will be made available by the end of September. The company does warn that it is continuing to develop the online services that Windows 8.1 uses, so the software will not deliver the full, final experience just yet.
In addition to Windows, Microsoft is also making available Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate. This version will be go-live licensed, so it can be used for developing desktop and Web applications.
One thing it can't be used for is publishing Metro-style Windows Store applications. Microsoft still isn't taking submissions of updated applications until October 18th. Our expectation is that the final version of Visual Studio 2013 will be published at some point between now and then and that app submissions will need to be built with that final version. | {
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By TERRY SPENCER, Associated Press
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump sought to intervene in Florida's legally mandated vote recount Tuesday, calling on the state's Democratic senator to admit defeat and again implying without evidence that officials in two pivotal counties are trying to steal the election.
"When will Bill Nelson concede in Florida?" Trump said in a morning tweet. "The characters running Broward and Palm Beach voting will not be able to 'find' enough votes, too much spotlight on them now!"
There have been bumps as Florida undergoes recounts for both the governor and Senate races. Palm Beach County said it won't finish its recount by the Thursday deadline. In oft-criticized Broward County, additional sheriff's deputies were sent to guard ballots and voting machines, a compromise aimed at alleviating concerns. Those counties are both Democratic strongholds.
Still, the state elections department and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which are run by Republican appointees, have said they have seen no evidence of voter fraud. A Broward County judge challenged anyone who has evidence of fraud to file a report.
Meanwhile, a flurry of legal action continued. Nelson and a Democratic campaign committee filed two more lawsuits on Tuesday, including one that asks a federal judge to set aside looming deadlines for a machine recount as well as a hand recount, if it is ordered.
Presidents have historically sought to rise above the heated partisan drama surrounding election irregularities. Former President Barack Obama wasn't so publicly involved when a recount and legal process in the 2008 election delayed a Democrat taking a Minnesota Senate seat until July 2009. Former President Bill Clinton struck a lower tone during the 2000 presidential recount, which also centered on Florida.
But this year, the Florida recount was personal for Trump. He aggressively campaigned in the state in the waning days of the election and put his finger on the scales of the Republican gubernatorial primary this summer by endorsing former Rep. Ron DeSantis. After Election Day, Trump's aides pointed to the GOP's seeming success in the state as a validation that the president's path to re-election remained clear — a narrative that has grown hazier as the outcomes have become less certain.
White House spokeswoman Mercedes Schlapp said Tuesday the president "obviously has his opinion" on the recount.
"It's been incredibly frustrating to watch," she said.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump is attempting to bully Florida election officials out of doing their jobs. Schumer and Nelson, both Democrats, spoke with reporters Tuesday in Washington.
"It's just plain wrong. It's un-American." Schumer said. "If he really wants an honest and fair election, President Trump will stop bullying, harassing and lying about the vote in Florida, and let the election proceed without the heavy hand of the president tipping the scale of justice."
Schumer said election officials should have all the time they need to count every vote, rather than Sunday's deadline. Nelson and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee filed two lawsuits aimed at that goal. One lawsuit questions rules used by the state for hand recounts, while a second asks a federal judge to give counties more time to complete both a machine and a hand recount. Right now counties are doing a machine recount.
Marc Elias, a campaign attorney for Nelson, contended there was no legal need for the existing deadlines since the Senate winner would not be sworn in until January.
Still, there's not much choice but for Florida to go through the process. State law requires a machine recount in races where the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. In the Senate race, Republican Rick Scott's lead over Nelson was 0.14 percentage points. In the governor's contest, unofficial results showed Republican former Rep. Ron DeSantis ahead of Democratic Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum by 0.41 percentage points.
Once the recount is complete, if the differences in any of the races are 0.25 percentage points or less, a hand recount will be ordered, meaning it could take even longer to complete the review of the Senate race if the difference remains narrow.
The recount process has drawn a sharp focus on several county election officials, especially Broward Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes.
Snipes has drawn criticism from Trump and other high-profile Republicans as her county's election returns showed a narrowing lead for Scott during the ballot-counting in the days after Election Day, and even former Gov. Jeb Bush — who appointed her in 2003 — said she should be removed. Asked about those criticisms Tuesday, she hinted that she may not run for re-election in 2020.
"It is time to move on," she said, later adding, "I'll check with my family and they'll tell me what I'm doing."
Speaking to about 200 supporters in Orlando church Tuesday night, Gillum said claims without evidence by Trump, Scott and Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio that electoral fraud was taking place were sowing seeds that could undermine confidence in the democratic process.
"Disenfranchisement shows up with the president of the United States, the sitting governor of the state of Florida, the junior senator of the United States from the state of Florida when they take to Twitter, and Facebook and ... accuse the supervisor of elections, or an entire county for that matter, of fraud, of stuffing the ballot box, of doing everything they could do manipulate the outcome of the election without a shred of evidence. That is called disenfranchisement," Gillum said.
Meanwhile, in Palm Beach, Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher said the county's 11-year-old tallying machines aren't fast enough to complete the recount by Thursday. The county is doing the Senate race first and will then do the governor's race. If the deadline is not met in a race, the results it reported Saturday will stand.
___
Associated Press writers Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Florida; Gary Fineout and Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida; Mike Schneider in Orlando; and Alan Fram, Darlene Superville and Zeke Miller in Washington contributed to this report.
___
For AP's complete coverage of the U.S. midterm elections: http://apne.ws/APPolitics . | {
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Microsoft is bringing dictation to its Office web apps to help people with dyslexia
Microsoft first started rolling outs its dictation feature in the Word desktop app earlier this year, and it’s now making its way to web versions of Office. Dictation (speech to text) will be available in both Word and OneNote online in the coming weeks, as part of a push by Microsoft to better help people with dyslexia. The dictation feature lets you simply type with your voice, and it’s availability in the Office web apps will make it more broadly used in schools.
Word and OneNote will be the first web apps to get dictation and PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook will all get the same feature in 2019. Microsoft is also adding real-time translation inside its immersive reader to Word, OneNote, and Outlook online, as well as OneNote for iPad, Mac, and Windows 10. The translation feature will support translating full pages, words, or sentences into another language. Full page and word translations will start rolling out in the fall, with sentence translations to follow later. | {
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mark barron.jpg
Mark Barron of the St. Louis Rams causes Arizona Cardinals running back David Johnson to fumble during an NFL game on Dec. 6, 2015, in St. Louis.
(AP Photo)
An All-American safety for Alabama and a starter at strong safety for the first 37 games of his pro career after being the seventh player picked in the 2012 NFL Draft, Mark Barron stepped in as the St. Louis Rams' weakside linebacker in the fourth game of the 2015 season and went on to make 116 tackles.
Just think what he might do now that he's being coached as a linebacker.
Barron is working out of the Rams' linebackers room this offseason instead of continuing to prepare with the defensive backs, as he did last season.
"I'm in the process of learning some new things because last year they just kind of threw me in there and I was just playing based off mostly instincts," Barron said. "This year, as of right now, I'm in the process of actually learning some of the intricacies of linebacker, because before most of everything I learned has been from a safety standpoint. Now I'm just learning from a different standpoint."
In a video interview with Rams Reporter Dani Klupenger for the team's official web site, Barron couldn't quite bring himself to say he's a linebacker, though.
"Some people will probably call it linebacker; some people will call it hybrid; some people will still be saying safety," Barron said. "It'll probably be a mixture of all of them."
A special-teamer and third safety for the Rams when he entered the starting lineup last season, Barron got his chance to play full-time because Alec Ogletree broke his leg. Ogletree is back for this season, but he will play middle linebacker. The Rams released James Laurinaitis, their middle linebacker for the previous seven seasons, and he's now on the New Orleans Saints.
FOR MORE OF AL.COM'S COMPREHENSIVE COVERAGE OF THE NFL, GO TO OUR NFL PAGE
Barron had a chance to leave the Rams, too. Instead, he stayed with the team for its move to Los Angeles.
In 2014, the Rams could have picked up the fifth-year option on Barron's rookie contract, which would have paid him $8.263 million for the 2016 season. They declined to do so.
After Barron's standout 2015 campaign, the Rams signed him to a five-year, $45 million contract that included a $5 million signing bonus and $20 million in guaranteed money.
Barron signed with the Rams on March 9, a few hours before he would have become a free agent.
"It was just a lot of variables that made this the best situation for me," the former St. Paul's standout said. "I was already comfortable with the coaching staff. I love everybody on the coaching staff. I love my teammates. I like playing with everybody. And then moving forward, just the opportunity we have as a defense. What kind of team we can be as a defense, it was exciting to me. And, of course, the other parts of it. Everything was just in place, and I felt like it was the right situation for me."
The Rams will practice through Thursday this week in Oxnard, Calif. After Thursday, the Rams will be off until their first training camp practice on July 30 at UC Irvine. | {
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Strong as a lion, small as a mouse. The Tango PC functions as powerfully and dynamically as a desktop at work, and then slips into your front pocket so you can head over to your friend Corenelius' house and unleash an intense evening of FPS gameplay afterwards. A self-funded startup, the Tango team has been working on its tiny PC technology for over 2 years. The finished product seeks to obliterate clunky plastic towers and boxes and emerge from their dust as slick bricks of power we tote like our smartphones.
Tango PC Benefits & Uses
Tango activates via small docking stations that connect to the various PC and gaming accessories users want to pair it with. As a PC it will remove much of the clutter and back-and-forth surrounding multiple home and office desktops, serving as a universal computer transferrable between both locations--or any location with a docking station. Using Tango is described as a "smooth and snappy experience" that encompasses everything from Web browsing to watching HD videos and movies with home theater sound quality to running CAD software applications.
Able to handle sophisticated gaming demands and output high-quality graphics, Tango also doubles as a pocket-sized Xbox 360 or PS3. Yes, think last-generation consoles, but a little better. With a GCN (Graphic Core Next) GPU matching those of the latest generation, Tango's capabilities are miles ahead of dated console GPUs.
In addition to satiating computing and gaming needs, Tango can also act as an IPTV set-top box, and use an iPad as its touch panel interface to the Windows system.
Tango further sells itself as a cost cutter. Since the compact PC can essentially eliminate the need for purchasing separate computers for the home and office, plus HTPCs and gaming consoles, plus cut out software licensing fees for multiple systems, it could save its users thousands. One PC, a few docking stations, and boom! Wads of cash left over for booze and hookers.
Fine. Gatorade and pizza. And Red Vines. And Doritos Flamas.
Tango PC Purchasing Information
Back Tango PC on Indiegogo through March 6, 2014. Basic packages include a Tango PC, docking station 32 GB SSD, 4GB RAM, and a Windows 7 Trial version. For an additional $100, Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium will be included in the bundle. Anticipated delivery date is April 2014.
August 2014 Update: Tango exceeded its crowdfunding goal and is now available for direct purchase through the company's website--follow the link below. | {
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Streaming live 24/7 since 2008 to Europe, Asia, North/South/Central America, Africa and world wide. Now streaming 128K AAC for near CD quality, with over 18,000 songs and 6400+ lossless audio files in the library.
Not a show or podcast, it is non-stop ska, reggae, rocksteady, 2Tone, ska/punk and more. From 1960's Jamaican classics to today's newest albums we play it all.
Music by the fans for the fans. Non-commercial streaming ska radio Listen for exclusive live and unreleased tracks not available anywhere else.
Show schedule:
Daily: 12 Noon and Midnight (Pacific Time) Bob's Got You Covered For Lunch. 30 minutes of all ska covers.
Top Mobile Apps - Just install then search for and bookmark Bob's Ska Radio.
http://www.xiialive.com/
http://tunein.com/mobile/
http://streema.com/mobile/
Have a newer Iphone / Ipad ? No player needed, just click the icon and the stream will play in the native player. However, you may prefer to use one of these apps.
Top Desktop Programs
http://www.winamp.com
https://www.muses.org
https://www.foobar2000.org
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html
Got Itunes?
Go to View, Internet Radio, select Reggae / Island and play Bob's Ska Radio. | {
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A Blikk novemberben hozott le egy termékelhelyezésekkel megspékelt videointerjút, amelyben az Alexandra-bolthálózat tulajdonosának lánya, Matyi Alexandra egy 30 milliós Mercedes volánjánál ülve meséli el, milyen jól talpra állt a cég a 2016-os krach óta. Ez felkeltette a könyvkiadók érdeklődését is, akik a mai napig nem kapták meg a pénz jó részét, amivel a pécsi üzletember cége tartozik nekik. Galambos Ádám, az érdekvédelmi szervezet elnöke például nyílt levélben vetette fel Matyi Dezsőnek a Librarius.hu-n, hogyha ilyen jól mennek a dolgok, akkor talán az évek óta húzódó milliárdos tartozásaikat is megfizethetnék.
Kedves Matyi Dezső!
Mint a Magyar Könyvkiadók Érdekvédelmi Szövetségének (MKÉSZ) vezetője, örömmel láttam és tapasztaltam az alábbi, a lánya főszereplésével készített fizetett PR-filmből, hogy Ön és az Alexandra könyvkiadói csoport kezd talpra állni a 2016-os válságból.
Sajnos ezt az általam képviselt közel 30 kiadó munkatársai és azok családtagjai nevében már nem mondhatom el…
A magyar könyvkiadóknak több mint 3 milliárd forinttal tartozik az egykor az Alexandra-csoport tulajdonolta Könyvbazár Kft., amelynek döntéseit Ön hozta meg, és amely ellen jelenleg is csődeljárás folyik. Örültünk volna, ha a videóban arról is említést tesznek, hogy:
– miből finanszírozták meg az Alexandra Kiadó közel 150 idei kiadványát?
– miből fedezte a kiadója karácsonyi reklámkampányát?
Tudom, a kérdések költőiek, hiszen NEM az ÖN 3 milliárd forintja tűnt el nyomtalanul – ahogy a lánya ezt valótlanul állítja a videóban –, hanem bizony a MI, azaz a könyvkiadók pénze!
De mivel velünk már nagyon sok mindent megtettek és megtehettek, csak arra várnám a válaszát, hogy a videóban is említett, bevallottan sikeres idei év profitjából mikor szándékozik kifizetni a becsapott könyvkiadókat?
Várom mielőbbi válaszát!
Könyvbaráti üdvözlettel,
Galambos Ádám
a Magyar Könyvkiadók Érdekvédelmi Szövetségének elnöke | {
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The first two groups of MLG Columbus 2016 have been announced via the organizer's Instagram page.
Rarely do we see groups being announced in parts, but it seems to be the case for MLG Columbus 2016, as MLG have started announcing the groups two at a time on their Instagram page.
So far groups A and B have been announced. The groups have to follow the seed pools, which have been decided according to the team's placing at the previous major, DreamHack Open Cluj-Napoca, and the main qualifier.
Hiko's Liquid will face FaZe, fnatic and SPLYCE in group B
Whether the groups were drawn randomly or not has not been revealed, but here are the first two groups for the next major, taking place in Columbus, Ohio from March 29th-April 3rd.
Group A Group B NiP FaZe Luminosity fnatic mousesports Splyce FlipSid3 Liquid
Eight more teams are still waiting to find out what their groups will be:
Remember that teams from the same pools cannot meet each other in the group stage.
The remaining two groups will be revealed via MLG's Instagram tomorrow, so stay tuned to HLTV.org as we will keep an eye on the coming announcements. | {
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23:35
The most amazing amateur huge tits on cam ever 92% 5096 | {
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PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron’s quick tongue has repeatedly landed him in trouble since he took office, but he shows no signs of backing away from his straight talk, telling an unemployed man he could easily get a job if he tried.
Slideshow ( 2 images )
Despite crumbling poll numbers -- his approval rating has fallen to 31 percent from above 60 percent shortly after he was elected last year, according to Ifop -- Macron seems convinced that “telling it how it is” is what the nation needs.
During an open-house at the Elysee Palace over the weekend, the 40-year-old president chatted with members of the public, including a 25-year-old man who said he had a diploma in gardening but was finding it difficult to land a job.
Macron, a former investment banker, asked if he had tried the restaurant or hotel trade, to which the man shook his head.
“If you’re keen and motivated, in the hotel trade, cafes, restaurants, the building trade even -- there’s nowhere I go that people don’t tell me they’re looking to hire,” the president told him, speaking frankly but not unkindly.
“Honestly. Hotels, cafes, restaurants -- if I cross the road I can find you something. They simply want people who are ready to work,” he persisted, suggesting that the man look around Montparnasse, a touristy district of Paris.
France’s 24-hour news channels played video of the exchange in a loop, calling it the latest gaffe from Macron, who has previously referred to people as “slackers”, berated striking workers for “kicking up a bloody fuss” and upbraided a young boy for addressing him too familiarly.
Government members rallied around Macron on Monday, arguing that straight talk is what voters want, rather than the spin and doublespeak -- known as ‘langue de bois’ in France -- so common in politics.
“If he’d had a conversation with the man and said to him: ‘that’s terrible, give me your CV, we’ll call you’... that would have been total ‘langue de bois’,” Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin told RTL radio.
The finance, education and environment ministers mounted a similar defense, saying Macron’s economic reforms -- some of which are already in force while others are to be unveiled soon -- were aimed at retraining the jobless to find work in new areas.
French unemployment is stuck at around 9 percent, with many people unable to find work in their field while other sectors, such as the hospitality industry, are always short of staff.
Last week, a union representing hotel, cafe and restaurant employees asked the government to speed up its asylum process to allow migrants to secure work permits more quickly and fill thousands of empty jobs.
Christophe Castaner, the head of Macron’s party, who is battling to keep the movement tight amid falling popularity and the resignation of a high profile member at the weekend, said Macron’s assessment on finding work was right.
“I prefer a president who tells it straight,” he said, pointing out that you can’t create jobs to match people’s training, but you can train people to do jobs the economy needs.
“Gardening work has fallen in recent years,” he said, underlining that there was no contempt for the unemployed. “This young man, we need to help him get the right training.” | {
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President Trump Donald John TrumpOmar fires back at Trump over rally remarks: 'This is my country' Pelosi: Trump hurrying to fill SCOTUS seat so he can repeal ObamaCare Trump mocks Biden appearance, mask use ahead of first debate MORE is delivering remarks on manufacturing and the military as he visits the last remaining tank plant in the U.S.
Watch live in the feed above. | {
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If you are an Erlang user, you probably know what atoms are. Chances are also high that you are aware of the major caveat regarding atoms in Erlang:
“Atoms are not garbage-collected. Once an atom is created, it is never removed. The emulator terminates if the limit for the number of atoms (1,048,576 by default) is reached.”
The text for atoms is stored (once for each unique atom) in an atom table, which is never garbage collected. A configurable limit exists for the number of entries in the table. Hitting the limit (e.g. by dynamically generating atoms) can result in a VM crash.
Atoms are great, but dynamically generating them (e.g. via the list_to_atom/1 function) can lead to trouble. After all, there is a reason why the list_to_existing_atom/1 function exists. Here is an interesting thread on the Erlang Questions mailing list discussing the pros and cons of atoms with input from both Richard A. O’Keefe and Joe Armstrong.
Since having too many atoms can cause your system to crash unexpectedly, it is crucial to keep an eye on the number of entries of the atom table on a long-running production system. Given that at Klarna we have one or two of these long-running systems, we collect a few metrics which help us doing so. Let’s see what these metrics are.
In the current version of OTP (19.2 at the time of this writing), information about the memory used for the atom table is available to the user via the erlang:memory/1 function. There are actually two flavours of the same function that can be used. Let’s have a look at the first one:
1> erlang:memory(atom).
202481
The function returns the amount of memory used for the atom table itself plus the amount of memory reserved for atom strings at a given point in time. The amount of memory reserved for atom strings grows in chunks. The return value is expressed in bytes.
Let’s now look at a slightly different version of the function:
2> erlang:memory(atom_used).
187410
This variant returns the amount of memory used for the atom table itself plus the amount of memory of atom string space actually used. Once again, the return value is expressed in bytes. Thanks to Mikael for confirming the difference for me.
Some weeks ago I was looking at exactly these metrics for a cluster of six Erlang nodes and noticed that the atom table was constantly growing on the nodes. I considered that normal, given that in a long-running Erlang system atoms are created all the time (new modules are loaded, commands are typed in shells, etc). What was weird, though, is that the growth was more evident in one of the nodes.
Erlang atom tables growing over time.
A quick investigation showed that this behaviour started immediately after our latest release. The change-log revealed that a new Erlang application had been deployed and started on exactly that node. That application could have very well been the source of dynamically generated atoms. The issue was worth investigating.
In our monitoring graphs I could only see the memory allocated for the atom table, but what I really wanted to know was how many atoms were present in our production system and whether we were close to the notorious 1M limit or not. Interesting enough, I could not locate any other relevant metric in our monitoring system and, after going through the official Erlang documentation, I got convinced that the information was actually not exposed to the user. It was at that point that my colleague Daniel suggested that it was possible to extract this information from the (semi-undocumented) binary output returned by the erlang:system_info/1 function. Let’s have a look at it.
3> erlang:system_info(info).
<<"=memory
total: 13227160
processes: 4383720
processes_used: 4383496
system: 8843440
atom: 202481
atom_used: 187410
bi"...>>
The output is truncated by the Erlang shell, so let’s print the return value in a slightly nicer format (output has been truncated):
4> io:put_chars(erlang:system_info(info)).
=memory
total: 13287200
processes: 4394640
processes_used: 4394416
system: 8892560
[...]
=index_table:atom_tab
size: 8192
limit: 1048576
entries: 7227
=hash_table:module_code
[...]
Indeed, the information we need is there. Let’s implement a trivial helper module to extract it:
Let’s finally see our helper in action:
1> atom_table:count().
7085
Not the best API ever, but at least we got the information we need. Since we believe this is an important metric for any production Erlang system to track, my colleague Mikael raised a pull request to the OTP team suggesting a better way to retrieve this precious information. The PR was accepted, meaning that starting from OTP 20 the following API to retrieve information about the number of atoms in use will be available:
erlang:system_info(atom_count).
Cute, isn’t it?
Once we had the metric we wanted, we back-ported the new feature to our own fork of Erlang/OTP and setup a periodic job to send the number of atoms present in our production system to our monitoring tool. That showed that we were way below the 1M limit and that the growth was in fact negligible.
For crucial metrics such as this one, it is usually a good idea to raise an alarm if a predefined threshold is passed and to set the threshold to a very low value (e.g. 50% of the limit). Even in huge Erlang systems it’s unlikely to see hundreds of thousands of atoms — so seeing such may highlight problematic dynamic generation of atoms. In that case, we want to be alerted as soon as possible.
Let’s now imagine that our system leaks atoms. How can we figure out which atoms are getting generated? There are a few ways for retrieving the list of atoms from a running Erlang system, but my favourite one is the one proposed by legoscia on StackOverflow. It’s pure evil and it uses an undocumented feature of the external term format.
We could use the code sample from Stack Overflow to fetch the list of atoms in our system, wait a little bit and then run it again, peeking at the difference. We probably don’t even need to run the code in production, since a local workstation or a test system could be enough to spot the root cause behind the unexpected generation of atoms.
If we find atoms being dynamically generated, we may want to ensure that it does not happen anymore. In that case, I’d recommend to use something like the Erlang Style Reviewer Elvis of which my colleague Juan is the main contributor.
But what about you? Are there other Erlang metrics that you track (or that you’d love to track) that are difficult to retrieve or otherwise hidden? Let us know in the comments. | {
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Total shipments for all three versions of Yo-Kai Watch 2 (Ganso, Honke, and Shinuchi) have topped six million, publisher and developer Level-5 announced.
The number includes both retail shipments and download sales.
Yo-Kai Watch 2: Ganso and Honke launched for 3DS in Japan last July. Yo-Kai Watch 2: Shinuchi followed in December.
Last week, Level-5 announced that total sales across the series topped seven million. This coming Tuesday, April 7, Level-5 will host its annual Level-5 Vision press conference (which will be live streamed), where it’s planning to announce its latest Yo-Kai Watch developments, including Yo-Kai Watch 3. | {
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Update
While guitarist John Mayer is expected to focus on his solo career in 2017, he’ll apparently have at least some time to devote to Dead & Company, the band featuring Grateful Dead members Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann along with Mayer, Jeff Chimenti and Oteil Burbridge. This morning the first 2017 Dead & Company date has surfaced.
Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio outside of Cleveland will host Dead & Company on June 28 as per a Facebook event page and listing on LiveNation.com. The ticket listing shows a general public onsale starting on December 9 at 10 a.m. There will be multiple presales ahead of tickets going up for grabs to the general public including an artist presale on Monday, so expect a full announcement sooner rather than later.
Dead & Company first toured in Fall 2015 and returned to the road this past summer.
Watch D&C play “Friend Of The Devil” in Chula Vista via blisstanger:
[Hat Tip – @Duanebase] | {
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The Planetary Insanity of Eternal Economic Growth
July 19, 2019
This is the fantasy: we can rebuild our entire global industrial society every generation or two forever.
"Earthrise" is one of the most influential photographs ever published. Taken on the Apollo 8 mission in late December 1968 by astronaut Bill Anders, it captures Earth's uniqueness, isolation and modest scale: a blue and white dot on a vast sea of lifeless darkness.
The revelation that strikes me is the insanity of pursuing eternal economic growth, not as an option but as the only possible path: there is literally no alternative to extracting ever greater quantities of the planet's resources to enable ever greater consumption by the planet's 7.7 billion humans.
Stripped to its essence, this mad drive is about profit and power. The necessity is sold as the only path to prosperity for humanity, but it's really about securing wealth and power for the few.
A recent article in Scientific American magazine highlights how the idealistic impulses of protecting the planet's diverse life from the machinery of "growth" are inevitably subsumed by the necessity for profit: The Ecologists and the Mine.
Here's what these kinds of articles never say: markets cannot price in the value of non-monetized natural assets such as diverse ecosystems. Whatever cannot be monetized right now is worthless, as markets lack any mechanism to price in what cannot be valued by market supply and demand in the moment.
There is no way to fix this fatal flaw in markets, and attempts to do so are merely excuses deployed to enable the profitable exploitation and resulting ruin.
(Recall that neoliberalism is the quasi-religious ideology of turning everything on Earth into a market, so it can be exploited and financialized by the few at the expense of the many.)
As for renewable energy: as my colleague Nate Hagens has observed, renewables are more properly called "rebuildables," as solar panels, windmills, etc. don't last forever but must be replaced every 20 years or so. Yes, dams last a long time, but solar panels, wind turbines, and all the other forms of "renewable" energy must be periodically replaced at enormous expense.
And where do the resources and energy come from to replace the immense base of "renewable" energy installations? From oil/natural gas and vast pit-mines.
As Chris Martenson noted in a recent conversation with me (paraphrasing his comment), "I'll be impressed with renewable installations when they can power the fabrication of their replacements."
This is the inconvenient reality few want to discuss publicly: none of the renewable energy sources is remotely capable of generating enough energy to smelt and mold industrial metals at scale, fabricate silicon wafers and so on.
The "eternal growth" model has dominated all political-economic ideologies for hundreds of years. When humanity first industrialized the planet, there were fewer than 1 billion humans. Now 7.7 billion humans all want the resource/energy intensive lifestyle of the developed-world middle class.
There is no way our planet has enough resources to provide all the goodies for 8 to 10 billion humans. We can't even provide clean fresh water to 8 billion people, much less Roombas, electric vehicles, refrigerated medications, frozen spring rolls, door-to-door delivery of the latest gizmo and cheap flights to every corner of the globe.
The technological fantasy is that new efficiencies will magically make eternal growth possible. But all these fantasies overlook 1) that markets cause the destruction of everything that isn't being monetized for profit in the moment; 2) that "renewable" energy all depends on cheap hydrocarbons in essentially limitless quantities and 3) that replacing everything every generation creates what my colleague Bart D. calls The Landfill Economy.
In other words, the tech "solution" to 500 million internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles is to toss those 500 million vehicles in the landfill (recycling is a nice idea but not always financially practical) and then go mine the immense amounts of metals, minerals and hydrocarbons needed to built 500 million all-electric vehicles.
Then, in a generation, repeat the process, as "more efficient" vehicles are developed.
This is the fantasy: we can rebuild our entire global industrial society every generation or two forever, and fuel the entire process of replacement with hydrocarbons, essentially forever, and pay for it all with more debt.
The impossibility of this vision--a tech-enabled Landfill Economy that tells itself it's "efficient" and "sustainable" because the full costs are never calculated, indeed, cannot be calculated in a market economy--is what drives me to keep working on an alternative socio-political-economic system, CLIME: the community-labor-integrated-money economy: A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All.
One glance at Earthrise informs us that the only sustainable path is DeGrowth: squandering far fewer resources on consumerist waste, a path that will spell the end of the current Landfill Economy of profit-driven eternal growth, and the entire financialization structure built on the Landfill Model that enriches the few at the expense of the many.
"Renewables/rebuildables" are a tiny sliver of global electrical generation, just enough to power the marketing of consumerist junk headed for the landfill.
Here's the energy production of the World's Workshop, i.e. China: "renewables/rebuildables" are a tiny sliver.
Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic ($6.95 ebook, $12 print, $13.08 audiobook): Read the first section for free in PDF format.
My new mystery The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake is a ridiculously affordable $1.29 (Kindle) or $8.95 (print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)
My book Money and Work Unchained is now $6.95 for the Kindle ebook and $15 for the print edition. Read the first section for free in PDF format.
If you found value in this content, please join me in seeking solutions by becoming a $1/month patron of my work via patreon.com. New benefit for subscribers/patrons: a monthly Q&A where I respond to your questions/topics.
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Thank you, John M. ($10), for your most generous contribution to this site-- I am greatly honored by your support and readership.
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(Atualizada às 10h36) O Comitê de Política Monetária (Copom) avaliou que a inflação apresenta dinâmica favorável, com sinais de menor persistência. Além disso, o processo de queda de preços está mais difundido na economia e indica desinflação nos componentes mais sensíveis ao ciclo econômico e à política monetária, como o preço dos serviços. “Isso aumenta a confiança na sua continuidade”, afirmou o colegiado do Banco Central (BC) na ata da reunião da semana passada, divulgada nesta quinta-feira.
O Copom também chamou a atenção para a queda no preço dos alimentos, movimento que constitui choque de oferta favorável e que pode ter efeitos secundários na inflação. “Notadamente, pode contribuir para quedas adicionais das expectativas de inflação e da inflação em outros setores da economia”, afirmou o colegiado no trecho da ata dedicado a avaliar o balanço de riscos.
Todos os participantes do comitê concordaram que as perspectivas para a inflação evoluíram de maneira favorável e, em boa parte, em linha com o esperado desde a reunião do Copom em janeiro. “O amplo conjunto de medidas de núcleo da inflação acompanhado pelo Copom aponta para inflação em níveis compatíveis com a meta de 4,5% para 2017 e 2018. As expectativas de inflação seguem ancoradas”, informou o documento.
No cenário em que a Selic fica estável em 13% e o câmbio permanece em R$ 3,10 - que o BC evitou classificar expressamente de cenário de referência -, a estimativa para o IPCA em 2017 está em 3,8% e, para 2018, em 3,3%. Na ata anterior, essas projeções estavam em torno de, respectivamente, 4% e 3,4%.
Já no cenário de mercado, que considera câmbio entre R$ 3,30 e R$ 3,40 e Selic em 9,5% neste ano e em 9% em 2018, a projeção para o aumento do IPCA se situa em 4,2% neste calendário e fica estável em 4,5% para o próximo ano.
O BC voltou a enfatizar que, em um ambiente com expectativas de inflação ancoradas, a autoridade monetária pode se concentrar em evitar possíveis efeitos secundários de ajustes de preços relativos que possam ocorrer ao longo do tempo.
“Isso se aplica ao choque de oferta favorável nos preços de alimentos. O Copom entende que deve buscar identificar os efeitos primários desse choque de oferta, aos quais a política monetária não deve reagir, levando em conta as condições de demanda no setor”, afirmou a ata.
Assim, a política monetária deve se concentrar em possíveis efeitos secundários desse choque, que podem contribuir para quedas adicionais das expectativas de inflação e da inflação em outros setores da economia.
O quadro é relativamente incomum, pois nos últimos anos os choques de preços foram negativos, ou seja, de aumento de preços, notadamente de alimentos e administrados, que obrigaram o BC a atuar para evitar que esses aumentos concentrados em um segmento se difundissem para outros setores da economia. | {
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Gov. Charlie Baker on Sunday ordered all Massachusetts public and private elementary and secondary schools to close for three weeks, as public health officials announced there are now 164 coronavirus cases in the state.
It was the most significant in an "unprecedented" slate of orders and proposed legislation that Baker put forward Sunday evening, his broadest attempt yet to limit the spread of the new coronavirus, which has killed more than 60 people nationwide, in the commonwealth.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker ordered schools to close for three weeks starting Tuesday, banned meetings of more than 25 people and stopped restaurants from serving food in-house in an effort to stymie the spread of the deadly new coronavirus.
Other actions announced Sunday include limiting the size of gatherings, restricting where people can eat at restaurants and who can visit hospitals and nursing homes, and expanding when people can file for unemployment -- the outbreak is expected to have a deep impact on the economy and jobs market.
Baker said the three-week suspension of educational services is out of an abundance of caution for the health and safety of children and school staff and given the evolving data regarding the cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The school closures go into effect Tuesday and will remain in place through April 7, the governor said.
"I'd like to thank Governor Baker for taking the step that many residents, Senators and myself have called for: implementing a statewide approach to school closures," Massachusetts Senate President Karen Spilka said in a statement.
Officials understand that many districts rely on school buildings for essential services outside of educational programs, like meal programs and special education, Baker said. Closing down schools for classes will not impact these types of services, he argued, and officials will work with school districts to keep school buildings open whenever possible to continue to offer these services.
President Donald Trump on Sunday urged Americans to not "buy so much," referring to long lines and empty shelves at stores around the U.S. "Just relax," he said. "It all will pass."
While schools must suspend in-person educational operations, Baker said that staff should be planning for how to equitably provide alternative access to learning opportunities during this period and potentially beyond.
"It's important that we all take a couple of minutes to think about why dispersing classes and school gatherings is necessary to help us mitigate the spread of COVID-19," he said. "Our public health officials have made clear COVID-19 will feel like the flu for the vast majority of the people who get it but it's highly contagious. By breaking up large gatherings and encouraging social distancing, we can prevent the spread, but we can't simply transfer a group full of kids from the classroom to a neighbor's playroom for days on end. We will not be doing our part to prevent the spread if there are a ton of kids hanging out, playing video games and sharing snacks every day from one house to the next."
At a news conference Sunday, Walsh issued an urgent plea for residents to engage in social distancing amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Baker urged parents and caretakers to use the next three weeks to truly practice social distancing, meaning maintaining a safe separation of at least six feet from others.
"This means no free-for-all playdates and more time at home with only immediate family for the next three weeks," Baker said.
Although he is not ordering the closure of child care programs, Baker said, he is strongly urging child care providers to strictly observe guidelines that are being issued by the Department of Early Education and Care and the Department of Public Health.
This order does not apply to residential schools for special needs students or other group homes, Baker said.
Researchers in China released a new study that shows many children infected with coronavirus do not show the same symptoms as adults, making early detection more challenging.
With regard to higher education, Baker said it is strongly recommended that colleges and universities, both public and private, continue to pursue strategies to reduce the need for students to be on campus and shift to remote learning to allow students to successfully complete courses.
Among the other coronavirus-related actions announced Sunday were:
Any restaurant, bar or establishment that offers food or drink won't be allowed to serve food on-premises, effective Tuesday, March 17, and continuing through April 6. Instead, they can offer food for takeout or delivery. They must also follow social distancing protocols outlined in Department of Public Health guidance. The order does not apply to grocery stores or pharmacies, Baker said: "This is about bars and restaurants and those places people do not absolutely have to go."
Gatherings of over 25 people will be prohibited, including all community, civic, public, leisure, faith-based events, sporting events with spectators, concerts, conventions and any similar event or activity that brings together 25 or more people in a single room or a single space at the same time. This includes venues like fitness centers, private clubs and theaters. This order amends last week's guidance that prohibited gatherings of 250 people or more.
Emergency regulations will be filed to expand eligibility around collecting unemployment for people who have been impacted by COVID-19.
Some requirements will be relaxed around current unemployment claims, allowing many workers who are affected by closures to get some financial relief faster.
Emergency legislation will be filed to allow new unemployment claims to be paid more quickly by waiving the one-week waiting period for unemployment benefits that currently exist under state law.
Long-term care facilities and nursing homes will be prohibited from allowing any visitors.
Hospitals will be required to screen visitors and restrict visitation.
The Registry of Motor Vehicles will extend the renewal timeline for certain credentials to reduce the need for customers to physically visit an RMV service center for in-person transactions.
Hospitals will be directed to postpone elective surgeries to ensure medical workers and hospital space is available.
All commercial health insurance carriers will be ordered to allow providers to deliver services via Telehealth, allowing people to avoid physically going anywhere should they need to consult a medical professional.
A legislative package will be filed to help address challenges surrounding the municipal governance issues that have been raised by many cities and towns, including potential delays and holding town meetings and adopting Fiscal Year 2021 municipal budgets.
While it was announced last week, legislation will be filed Monday to officially postpone the Boston Marathon until Monday, Sept. 14, 2020.
"I realize these measures are unprecedented. But we are asking our residents to take a deep breath and understand the rationale behind this guidance," Baker said. "As we said yesterday, grocery stores are getting restocked. The reason we are seeing bare shelves on the news and when we shop is because people are taking stocking up a little overboard. Just remember if you buy two years worth of canned soup, that just means your neighbor may have to go without."
Baker also addressed rampant rumors regarding a shelter-in-place order, saying he has no plans for that.
"Everybody needs to get their news from legitimate places, not from their friend's friend's friend's friend," he said.
The new center will help coordinate the commonwealth's lab testing, quarantining and more, and it will have the authority to tap into whatever state funds are needed, the governor said, including $15 million appropriated by the Legislature for coronavirus.
For the vast majority of people, approximately 80% of the population, getting infected with the coronavirus will mostly feel like the flu and will not lead to hospitalization, Baker said.
"But the reason we are taking this so seriously is because it is incredibly contagious," he said. "There will be more cases of COVID-19, but we also know that if we take decisive steps now and everyone plays their part by following the best medical guidance, we can slow down the spread, and our healthcare system can be better positioned to care for the people who need it."
The number of residents who have already been tested for COVID-19 jumped from 475 Saturday to nearly 800 Sunday, health officials said Sunday. Baker said expert teams will plan to expand lab capacity for testing and will plan quarantine operations as well.
Twenty-six new cases were announced earlier Sunday, a day after restrictions were loosened on testing protocols.
New guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only requires clinicians to submit one nasal swab, as opposed to submitting both nasal and throat swabs that were required before. With the change in clinical testing protocols, and new guidelines put in place by Massachusetts this weekend, the state lab's testing capacity has doubled, increasing to approximately 400 patients a day, up from 200.
Massachusetts clinicians now also have more flexibility to determine which patients should be tested without having to call the Department of Public Health’s Epi Line.
With more clinical labs in the Bay State working to get FDA approval, health officials say even more testing capacity will be available soon.
Forty-five of the state's 164 positive cases have been subsequently confirmed by the CDC.
Four of the 26 new cases announced Sunday are related to the employee meeting held at a Boston hotel by the Cambridge biotech firm Biogen last month. Health officials say 108 of the 164 cases are now tied to the Feb. 24-27 meeting held at the Marriott Long Wharf hotel, which has since closed "in the interest of public health."
The Marriott Long Wharf hotel in Boston was closed indefinitely, days after it was determined that a company's meeting there was the center of a coronavirus cluster.
Included in the new cases is a health care worker at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. The hospital announced the case Sunday morning and said patients and staff who may have had contact with the infected worker are being contacted.
Eight more cases are associated with travel, bringing that total to 13. Eight remain associated with a cluster in western Massachusetts and 35 of them are now under investigation, health officials say.
Northeastern University announced in an email Sunday that one of its students living in off-campus housing in Boston tested positive for COVID-19 at a Boston-area hospital. a Boston-area hospital. School officials say this student, who has been in isolation since Thursday, March 12, will remain in isolation at an off-campus apartment.
The Boston Public Health Commission is reviewing the student's movements since returning from spring break on Monday, March 9, and any individuals who may have been in direct contact with the infected student will be notified.
"We realize that knowledge of this positive test will surely increase anxiety among the Northeastern community. This is understandable," the university said in its email to students, faculty and staff. "A positive test result—presumptive or confirmed—underscores the need for the university to continue its swift and comprehensive response to the COVID-19 outbreak."
Of the state's 164 cases, 74 are women and 90 are men. Middlesex County residents still account for nearly half, 75, of the cases statewide. Norfolk and Suffolk counties both have 31 cases, while there are nine cases in Berkshire County. There are now six cases each in Essex and Worcester counties.
Plymouth, Hampden, Barnstable and Bristol counties have one case each. Two cases are of unknown counties at this time.
Two more patients have been hospitalized, bringing the total to 13 so far, though 36 other cases are listed as being under investigation, according to Sunday's figures.
Boston EMS urge people to not call 911 to request COVID-19 testing. People are asked to call their primary care providers, the mayor's health line at 617-534-5050, or the state DPH information line at 211.
Virus-related symptoms include fever (100.4°F or higher), cough, trouble breathing or shortness of breath.
Baker said that, in addition to the role we all have to play in pushing back against this virus, there are other things we can do. Call neighbors, friends and your families, he said, adding that those friendly check-ins can help someone through their day.
Do you have symptoms of coronavirus and wish to get tested? We want to hear about your experience. Please share your contact information with the NBC10 Boston Investigators here or email [email protected]. | {
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If I brush my teeth I can't eat while doing things on my laptop my school gave me when im going to sleep in my comfy bed
119 shares | {
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Former Milwaukee County Sheriff and prominent President Trump Donald John TrumpHR McMaster says president's policy to withdraw troops from Afghanistan is 'unwise' Cast of 'Parks and Rec' reunite for virtual town hall to address Wisconsin voters Biden says Trump should step down over coronavirus response MORE supporter David Clarke Jr. will face trial for taunting a man on Facebook, USA Today reported.
Clarke is set to stand trial on Jan. 22 after he called Daniel Black a "snowflake" on Facebook. Black said that Clarke abused his authority to harass him after an encounter on an airplane on Jan. 15, 2017.
No criminal charges were filed in the case, but Black also filed a civil rights lawsuit against Clarke. A judge on Friday dismissed many of the charges, but said a jury should decide whether Clarke's Facebook posts were threats or retaliation against Black.
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“Cheer up, snowflake ... if Sheriff Clarke were to really harass you, you wouldn’t be around to whine about it," one post from Clarke said.
Clarke allegedly ordered six sheriff's deputies to take Black aside and question him upon arrival in Milwaukee, Wis., after Black showed disapproval of Clarke on a plane.
"While Clarke's actions reflect poor judgment, they do not shock the conscience," U.S. District Judge J.P. Stadtmueller said. | {
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Annulment (sometimes known as ‘nullity’) is a different way of ending a marriage.
You or your spouse must have either:
lived in England or Wales for at least a year
had a permanent home in England or Wales for at least 6 months
Unlike divorce, you can apply for annulment in the first year of your marriage or any time after. However, if you apply years after the wedding, you might be asked to explain the delay.
You’ll need to show that the marriage:
was never legally valid (‘void’)
was legally valid, but meets one of the reasons that makes it ‘voidable’
Because of coronavirus (COVID-19), annulment applications are taking longer than usual to process.
Your marriage is not legally valid - ‘void’ marriages
You can annul a marriage if it was not legally valid in the first place, for example:
you’re closely related to the person you married
one or both of you were under 16
one of you was already married or in a civil partnership
If a marriage was never legally valid, the law says that it never existed.
However, you may need legal paperwork (a ‘decree of nullity’) to prove this - for example if you want to get married again.
Your marriage is ‘voidable’
You can annul a marriage for a number of reasons, such as:
it was not consummated - you have not had sexual intercourse with the person you married since the wedding (does not apply for same sex couples)
you did not properly consent to the marriage - for example you were forced into it
the other person had a sexually transmitted disease ( STD ) when you got married
) when you got married your spouse was pregnant by someone else when you got married
one spouse is in the process of transitioning to a different gender
As with divorce, your marriage legally exists until you annul it using one of these reasons. | {
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Just a couple of months ago, in the wake of Jared Loughner’s shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, simple talk of “targeting” a political opponent for defeat was treated as beyond the pale. But let’s look at some more recent language — and conduct — that our bien-pensant punditry can’t be bothered to notice, let alone condemn.
In Michigan, protesters opposed to Gov. Rick Snyder’s austerity budget broke a window to get into the capitol building. One faces felony charges after assaulting police with an edged weapon; 14 were arrested.
In Washington, DC, the windows at GOP headquarters were shot out, not the first time that Republican offices have been subject to such attacks.
In Madison, Wis., the state capitol was occupied for weeks by teachers-union members and their supporters. Doors and windows were broken; a mob tried to keep Republican state senators from entering the Senate chamber to vote.
And blogger Ann Althouse — a Wisconsin law professor who voted for Barack Obama — received nasty threats for the crime of posting video depicting this thuggish conduct on YouTube: “We will f— you up,” the threateners wrote. This was not the first threat she has received for her blogging.
The GOP state senators who supported Gov. Scott Walker’s budget also received death threats, including an e-mail reading, in part: “I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die.
“This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult [sic] you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head.
“However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun.”
This threat was more credible because mobs of union protesters had already visited senators’ houses, screaming and banging on the windows.
At the Huffington Post, liberal Lee Stranahan wonders why this kind of thing isn’t getting more attention from the traditional media who were tut-tutting over much more minor (and even imaginary) offenses to civility so very recently. “Ignoring the story of these threats is deeply, fundamentally wrong. It’s bad, biased journalism that will lead to no possible good outcome and progressives should be leading the charge against it.
“Just before writing this article, I did a Google search and it’s stunning to find out that the right-wing media really isn’t exaggerating — proven death threats against politicians are being ignored by the supposedly honest media. If you’ve never agreed with a single thing that Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly et al have said about anything, you can’t in any good conscience say that they don’t have a point here. Death threats are wrong and if a story like Wisconsin is national news for days, then so are death threats.”
He’s right, but the big-media folks seem so anxious to peddle the same tired storyline — right-wingers are violent and ignorant, left-wingers are peaceful and virtuous — that they almost have to ignore anything that will spoil the narrative.
But in doing this, they only undermine their own position more. Word still gets out — even to liberals at the Huffington Post. And people catch on: If there are big stories out there that traditional media won’t cover because it offends their storyline, then why listen to traditional media at all?
Glenn Reynolds teaches law at the University of Tennessee. He also hosts “InstaVision” on PJTV.com. | {
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After two months of forecasting, it comes down to this: Republicans are favored to win the Senate. Their chances of doing so are 76 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast, which is principally based on an analysis of the polls in each state and the historical accuracy of Senate polling.
But they are not necessarily favored to have the race “called” for them on Tuesday night. Because of a variety of circumstances like possible runoffs in Georgia and Louisiana and the potential decision of Kansas independent Greg Orman about which party he chooses to caucus with, the outcome of the Senate may not be determined until days or weeks from now. The forecast refers only to the probability that Republicans will eventually claim control of the Senate by the time it convenes in January.
Still, for Republicans, it would be worth the wait after failed attempts to win the Senate in 2010 and 2012. They’ve been modest favorites in the FiveThirtyEight forecast all year, in part because the national environment is favorable for them: the group of states holding key Senate elections lean red; several Democratic incumbents have retired and the others were last elected in 2008, a high-water mark for the Democratic party; President Obama is unpopular and midterm elections have a long history of being challenging for the president’s party.
Unlike in 2010 or 2012, however, the polls have moved toward Republicans in the closing days of the campaign — making their position more robust. The movement has been clearest in states like Kentucky, Arkansas and Georgia that typically vote Republican, suggesting the election may be converging toward the “fundamentals” of each state.
Difficult Math For Democrats, But Uncertainty About Poll Accuracy
The uncertainty in the forecast is fairly high. Compared to Republicans’ roughly 75 percent chance, President Obama had about a 90 percent chance of being reelected in 2012, while Democrats had a 95 percent chance of keeping the Senate that year, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. And Republicans had about an 85 percent chance of winning the House on Election Day in 2010.
For Democrats to make good on their 25 percent chance of keeping the Senate, they would need to win two or three races where they are underdogs according to the polls. Nevertheless, the GOP’s advantage is narrow in many states. Furthermore, polls in midterms and other elections have sometimes proved to have a systematic bias, overestimating the performance of one or the other party in most or all competitive races. If the polls underrate Democrats, they could win.
The uncertainty runs in both directions, however. Historically, the polls have been just as likely to be biased toward Democrats as they are to be biased toward Republicans. If Republicans beat their polls, they could win North Carolina and New Hampshire, which only narrowly favor Democrats, and finish with as many as 55 Senate seats — a potential 10-seat swing.
It has sometimes been hard this cycle to place the states into neat groupings. Republicans need to win a net of six seats from Democrats. But at least three of these — Montana, South Dakota and West Virginia — are all but guaranteed Republican pickups, while a fourth, Arkansas, has become increasingly certain. On the other hand, Republicans could easily lose Georgia and Kansas, meaning that they’d need to win a gross of seven or eight Democratic seats to finish with a net of six.
The battle will mostly be concentrated in the eight states which neither party has established more than a 95 percent probability of winning. These are Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire and North Carolina. Other states — particularly Arkansas, Kentucky and Michigan — were once competitive but would now require pronounced polling errors for the trailing candidate to win.
Still, eight is a large number of competitive states. The good news for Republicans is that they’ll win the Senate if they split them 4-4. The better news is that the forecast favors Republicans in five of them — Alaska, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa and Louisiana — while it gives even odds in a sixth, Kansas. Only New Hampshire and North Carolina favor Democrats. The math is not impossible for Democrats — but it’s difficult.
That may be why some Democrats have begun to hope the polls are “skewed” against them.
Indeed, the FiveThirtyEight model accounts for the possibility that the polls could have an overall bias toward one party. But suppose they do not. In the final set of simulations we ran, Democrats won just 14 percent of the time when the overall bias in the polls was less than one point in either direction. This represents what we’ve called the “squeaker” scenario — Democrats eke out victories in just enough of the competitive states to win, even though the polls do a reasonably good job overall.
The Democrats’ alternative is the “shocker” scenario — the case where the polls do prove to be skewed against them. In the simulations where the polls had at least a 1-point Republican bias, Democrats won the Senate 61 percent of the time. (As should be obvious, Democrats will have no chance at all if the polls prove to have a Democratic bias; instead, Republicans will finish with something like 54 seats.) At this point, most of the Democrats’ 24 percent overall win probability comes from the “shocker” scenario. Their situation is not as bad as Mitt Romney’s was in 2012, but their chances are slim if the polls are basically telling the right story.
Forecasting Models Largely Agree
Although the polls could be wrong, there isn’t much disagreement about what they’re saying. Of the seven forecasting models tracked by The New York Times, all point to a Republican win, and most with about the same probability (75 percent) as FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. Furthermore, they agree on the outcome of all states but Kansas. These include models that rely on polls alone and those like FiveThirtyEight’s that account for polls along with other factors.
Those other factors — the so-called “fundamentals” — have tended to converge with the polls over the course of the year. If used properly, they can make a forecast more stable and reduce the statistical noise associated with polling. But they make little difference now, since even those models that once used the fundamentals no longer weigh them heavily. The modest exceptions are in Kansas and Alaska, where the polling has been sparse and (especially in Alaska’s case) potentially unreliable; the FiveThirtyEight model sees the fundamentals as favoring Republicans in each state. But it would still have Republicans favored on the basis of the polls alone in Alaska. And in Kansas, the fundamentals are not enough to make Republican Pat Roberts the favorite.
Expect A Long Night — Unless Republicans Get A Big Win Early
Even if Republicans win, the outcome may not be determined quickly. David Perdue, their candidate in Georgia, has gained in the polls — but the model still has the race going to a runoff about half the time. Louisiana will almost certainly require a runoff. Alaska’s vote may take days or weeks to count, as it has in the past. The FiveThirtyEight model — even with its optimistic forecast for Republicans overall — estimates there’s just a one in three chance that the election will be called for them on Tuesday night or early in the day on Wednesday. For Democrats, meanwhile, there’s almost no chance to win without going to “overtime;” the party will hope to extend the race for as long as possible.
There are two Republican wins, however, that could end the race quickly. Pay attention to races in North Carolina and New Hampshire. Both states have early poll-closing times (7:30 EST for North Carolina and 8:00 EST for New Hampshire) and a Republican win in either state would require Democrats to run the table in almost every other competitive race. But Republican wins would simultaneously indicate that the polls might be biased toward Democrats rather than against them, making a Democratic sweep the rest of the night very unlikely.
Although this represents FiveThirtyEight’s pre-election forecast, we’ll be tracking the elections for as long as it takes on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. That will include live updates of our forecast as our partners at ABC News project the winners of various states. We’ve appreciated your readership this election cycle and we hope you’ll join us tonight for our liveblog coverage as the results come in. It should be a fun one. | {
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"Poliisi sai tiistaina 27.11.2018 ilmoituksen, että Luvian yhtenäiskoulussa on oppilaan repusta löytynyt tyhjä pistoolikotelo ja patruunoita. Poliisin aloitettua asian selvittämisen ilmeni, että kyseisessä kotelossa on ollut pienikokoinen käsiase, jota poika oli näytellyt koulussa jo edeltävänä päivänä joillekin kavereilleen."
Teksti on lainaus poliisin tiedotteesta. Syytä sille, miksi oppilas toi aseen kouluun, ei tiedotteessa kerrota. Poliisin käsityksen mukaan oppilaan tarkoitus ei ollut uhkailla tai vahingoittaa ketään aseella, mutta varmaa käsitystä asiasta ei ole.
Kyseinen uutinen pysäyttää lukijansa jälleen kerran pohtimaan, mitä ihmettä koulumaailmassa tapahtuu. Koulurauhan suurin ongelma ei ole tunneilla käytettävät kännykät, vaan taustalla on suurempia ongelmia.
Psyykkisesti oireilevien lasten määrä on rehtoreitten antaman palautteen perusteella lisääntymään päin. Taneli Tiirikainen
Kansallisen koulutuksen arviointikeskuksen keväällä julkaiseman selvityksen (siirryt toiseen palveluun) mukaan kolmannes koulutuksen järjestäjistä kertoo, että väkivaltatapaukset ja häiriökäyttäytyminen ovat lisääntyneet Suomen kouluissa viimeisen kahden vuoden aikana. Tuloksia ei voi pitää selvityksen mukaan hyväksyttävinä.
Asiantuntijat aluehallintovirastosta, OAJ:sta ja Porin kaupungin sivistystoimesta ovat yhtä mieltä siitä, että lasten ja nuorten psyykkinen oireilu on selvästi lisääntymässä. Tämä näkyy koulujen arjessa.
– Usein käytösongelmien takana on psyykkisiä ongelmia. Koulun näkökulmasta asian hoitaminen on hankalaa, eikä se etene riittävän nopeasti. Psyykkisesti oireilevien lasten määrä on rehtoreitten antaman palautteen perusteella lisääntymään päin, vahvistaa Porin kaupungin sivistyskeskuksen opetusyksikön päällikkö Taneli Tiirikainen.
Väkivallasta ilmoitus poliisille entistä herkemmin
Otetaan vielä esimerkkilukuja Porin koulumaailmasta. Kouluväkivallasta tehtiin Porissa viime lukuvuotena yhteensä 64 ilmoitusta. Näistä tapauksista yli puolet sattui alakouluissa. Psyykkinen oireilu siis lisääntyy yhä nuoremmilla lapsilla.
Kyllä siinä hiki tulee. Lapsi on tilanteessa hädissään, ja siinä joutuu jonkin aikaa kuitenkin olemaan. Tero Grönmark
Poliisille asti väkivaltatapauksia ilmoitetaan porilaiskouluista vuosittain nollasta viiteen kappaletta. Taneli Tiirikaisen mukaan kynnys poliisille ilmoittamiseen pitäisi olla matala.
– Takavuosina aika rajujakin tappeluita selviteltiin kouluissa omin voimin. Ajan henki on sellainen, että nykyään väkivaltatilanteiden selvitteleminen kuuluu poliisille, ei kouluille, Tiirikainen sanoo.
Kansallisen koulutuksen arviointikeskuksen selvityksessä kävi myös ilmi, että monet vakavat häiriötilanteet, kuten varkaudet ja väkivaltatilanteet, käsitellään useimmiten yhä edelleen koulun sisäisesti. Selvityksen mukaan koulujen yhteistyötä lastensuojelun ja poliisin kanssa pitäisi lisätä entisestään.
Opettajat turvautuvat fyysisiin keinoihin harvoin
Vuosia alakoulun rehtorina toimineen Tero Grönmarkin mukaan jokaisen opettajan on oltava joka päivä valmiudessa kohtaamaan väkivaltaa. Monesti taitava puhuminen riittää rauhoittamaan tilannetta, mutta joskus opettajan on turvauduttava myös fyysisiin keinoihin.
Grönmark on joutunut urallaan muutaman kerran tilanteeseen, jossa yksi aikuinen ei ole riittänyt rauhoittamaan oppilasta. Aggressiossa olevan oppilaan ottaminen syliotteeseen on aina vaativa tilanne käsitellä.
– Akuutti tilanne estetään sillä tavoin. Kyllä siinä hiki tulee. Lapsi on tilanteessa hädissään, ja siinä joutuu jonkin aikaa kuitenkin olemaan.
Tero Grönmark on juuri aloittanut uudessa virassaan kasvatuksen ja oppimisen tuen yksikön päällikkönä. Käytännössä hän on Porin koulukuraattorien ja koulupsykologien lähiesimies. Porissa virka on aivan uusi.
– Tällä yksiköllä pyrimme siihen, että tuki tulee koulun arkeen entistä voimakkaammin, sillä kyllä tuelle tarvetta on, Grönmark sanoo.
Ammattijärjestö suomii resurssipulaa
Opetusalan ammattijärjestö OAJ on seurannut tilannetta huolestuneena. Liiton koulutusasiain päällikön Nina Lahtisen mukaan kouluissa ei ole riittävästi oikeanlaista tukea tarjolla. Hän löytää syyn myös muun muassa liian suurista opetusryhmistä.
– Osa oppilaista käyttäytyy huonosti ja jopa aggressiivisesti sen vuoksi, että hän hakee aikuisen huomiota. Isossa ryhmässä hän ei saa sitä riittävästi.
Kaikille pitää taata turvallinen opiskeluympäristö. Sellaiset tilanteet ovat kestämättömiä, joissa esimerkiksi psyykkisesti sairas lapsi joutuu odottamaan kuukausia ennen kuin saa apua. Nina Lahtinen
Nina Lahtinen pitää toimimattomana kehityssuuntana nykyistä mallia, jossa erityishuomiota vaativat oppilaat on integroitu normaaliopetukseen ilman tarvittavia tukitoimia. Avuntarpeeseen pitäisi hänen mukaansa paneutua huomattavasti nykyistä huolellisemmin.
– Lapsen pahoinvoinnin taustalla voi olla monia syitä, joita pitäisi lähteä analysoimaan. Myös ryhmän kokonaistilanne pitää huomioida. Kaikille pitää taata turvallinen opiskeluympäristö. Sellaiset tilanteet ovat kestämättömiä, joissa esimerkiksi psyykkisesti sairas lapsi joutuu odottamaan kuukausia ennen kuin saa apua, Lahtinen sanoo.
Kansallisen koulutuksen arviointikeskus päätyi selvityksessään suosittamaan, että lisätään opetuksen eriyttämistä ja oppilaan tukea sekä ennaltaehkäistään häiriötilanteita lisäämällä opettajien täydennyskoulutusta.
"Kolmiportainen tukimalli laitettava kuntoon"
OAJ vaatii korjausta kolmiportaiseen tukimalliin (siirryt toiseen palveluun), joka perustuu yleiseen, tehostettuun ja erityiseen tukeen. Mallia muutettiin perusopetuslaissa vuonna 2010.
OAJ:n selvitysten mukaan esi- ja perusopetuksen oppilaille laissa turvatut oppimisen tukitoimet eivät toteudu (siirryt toiseen palveluun), sillä tuen järjestämisessä on suuria puutteita.
– Koulussa on oltava tarpeeksi opettajia. Pitäisi päästä pois siitä ajattelutavasta, että meillä ei tarvita pienryhmiä, Nina Lahtinen sanoo.
Samaan tulokseen on tullut myös kansallisen koulutuksen arviointikeskus, joka keväisessä selvityksessään toteaa, että pienellä luokka- tai ryhmäkoolla ja mahdollisuudella pienryhmätyöskentelyyn on työrauhaa parantava vaikutus. | {
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When I walk home drunk from the bar and find a car taking up two parking spots i pee all over the driver's side door handle
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Hi everyone! Last weekend my sister & I were at the Big on Bloor festival selling our nail products from our line - Beyond the Nail. The festival was held in Toronto on Bloor Street. The street was blocked off and there were TONS of booths where people were selling clothes, food, toys, sunglasses, nail polish and more. It was so fun! I was so shocked because a lot of people came specifically to see us! That was probably the best part about the show because it shows how much people really like our products! :) It was also nice to see people coming and supporting us because we were are a local indie nail polish brand. So awesome!
There was a pet store on Bloor Street that also had a booth out on the street and they were showing off some of their reptiles - snakes, chameleons, lizards, etc. I even got to hold a snake !! It was so creepy. I was hesitant at first because well.. it's a snake and I don't want to get bitten lol! But the handler said it was safe to hold it. Here I was holding the snake, afraid it was going to bite me, but what did it do instead? It wrapped itself on my arm and start to constrict! They are such powerful animals! They feel so silky and smooth, and feeling all their muscles move is so weird!
Okay, on to the pictures :)
This was our booth set up.
We had our decal board up on the left, two nail polish racks (that my sister MADE!! I am so impressed lol) and we had caviar beads and dotting tools laid out on the table.
We even posted some pictures of people's nail art/swatches of our products. That really helped people get an idea of what our nail products would look like.
Click read more below for more pictures!
This was our board that had all of our nail decals on them. They were on sale for $2.50 each, and we even put up some that were on sale (they were the sets that were missing a decal or two).
These were both of the shelves that my sister made for our nail polish! Aren't they awesome?? I thought they were too big at first, but they turned out to be PERFECT! They can hold three polishes in a row (front to back) which really helped since we made TONS of nail polish in preparation for the festival :)
My sister (left) & me!!
You can really tell how big the shelves were!!
Thanks for reading!
Labels: art show, beyond the nail | {
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It was in 2013 that Hyundai established a new performance division to leverage its motorsport technology, honed primarily in the World Rally Championship, for hot versions of its road cars.
The new performance division was named the Hyundai N division, and it had its official coming out party at the 2015 Frankfurt auto show. The "N" signifies Hyundai's Namyang R&D center located in Hwaseong, Korea, as well as the Nürburgring where a lot of the track testing will happen.
Today we have new spy shots and video of the first N-developed Hyundai, a high-performance version of the i30 hatchback that we get here as the Elantra GT.
2018 Hyundai i30 spy video from Motor Authority on Vimeo.
We know this is the N-developed i30 because of its additional air intakes, dual-tip exhaust system, lowered suspension, and uprated wheels, tires and brakes.
The car, to be called the i30 N, will be unveiled later this year—most likely at September’s 2017 Frankfurt auto show. And to ensure it’s convincing, Hyundai will enter two virtually production-ready examples in the 2017 Nürburgring 24 Hours in late May. Some readers will recall Hyundai also raced one of the development mules in the 2016 Nürburgring 24 Hours. It finished 90th overall.
Unfortunately, the car isn’t headed for the United States. Instead, we’ll get a hotted-up version of another Hyundai, most likely the Elantra sedan or possibly the next-generation Veloster.
Hyundai i30 N race car on the Nürburgring
That’s a shame, because the i30 N will be quite the formidable rival to cars like the Ford Focus ST and Volkswagen Golf GTI. It will be powered by a turbocharged inline-4 thought to be delivering 246 horsepower in standard guise and 271 hp in a more hardcore, track-focused version. In comparison, the Focus ST and Golf GTI have 252 and 210 hp (220 hp with Performance Package), respectively.
Drive will be to the front wheels only and at launch there will only be a 6-speed manual. An 8-speed dual-clutch transmission is due to be made available eventually, however.
Stay tuned for updates as development continues. | {
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The first thing Dr. Carey Andrew- Jawa does with each and every newborn he delivers is sing “Happy Birthday” to them.
Dubbed the “Singing Doctor,” Andrew-Jawa inherited the delightful tradition from a mentor “who used to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ very lustily to his babies,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette back in 2002.
“I liked that, and I would join him and we’d both really belt it out. When he was retiring, he asked me to continue the tradition. ‘It’s all yours,’ he told me.”
“I started to sing to my babies ever since then and I do it every time,” Andrew-Jawa explained in a video uploaded to YouTube by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Magee-Womens Hospital last year.
The video of Andrew-Jawa’s special ritual has been receiving renewed attention after it was posted on Reddit and picked up by other outlets – pulling at new heartstrings.
“How absolutely beautiful! I am in tears,” wrote one YouTube user.
Andrew-Jawa says singing to babies is his way of celebrating their birth and welcoming them to “a wonderful world.” It’s also a mantra that’s awarding him with praise and recognition among his patients and peers.
In April, Pittsburgh Magazine named Andrew-Jawa as one of the best physicians in his field in its annual “Best Doctors” list.
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Also on HuffPost | {
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This week, the U.S. Department of State’s Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG) met to decide whether to classify “cyber products” as munitions, placing them in the same export control regime as hand grenades and fighter planes. Thankfully, common sense won out and the DTAG recommended that “cyber products” not be added to the control list. EFF and Access Now filed a brief joint statement with the DTAG urging this outcome and we applaud the DTAG’s decision.
There were a number of problems with the proposal to place “cyber products” on the U.S. Munitions List, but most importantly, no one knows how “cyber products” would be defined. As we’ve long argued in other contexts, trying to draw definitions around “defensive” and “offensive” tools is essentially impossible and any vagueness would have significant chilling effects on the security community. In essence, we think that the threshold problem of defining which “cyber products” are subject to control is likely an insurmountable obstacle to effective regulation.
But beyond the definitional problem, we fundamentally disagree with the idea of classifying any computer security tools as weapons. Until the late 1990s, encryption itself was included on the U.S. Munitions List. Indeed, one of EFF’s flagship cases from that era was a constitutional challenge to that listing. We won, and cryptographic tools are no longer legally defined as “munitions” in the United States.
Export controls on software, as we told the DTAG, have in the past had serious unintended consequences. Previous export controls on software have resulted in widespread risk to all Internet users. For example, the inclusion of encryption technology on the Munitions List led to deployment of an “export grade” standard to avoid the export controls. As it turned out, that persistent “export grade” standard, even 20 years after encryption controls were lifted, left millions of users susceptible to the “FREAK” and “Logjam” attacks used to monitor and modify website browsing data.
We strongly oppose the use of surveillance and other technologies to facilitate human rights abuses. We think countries should be held accountable when they use malware to spy on political opponents, and have gone to court saying so. We also think that companies should similarly be held liable for knowingly facilitating violations of human rights. But export controls on “cyber products” aren’t the solution and we’re happy that the DTAG recommended against moving forward with regulating them.
In the export control wars, this is a rare victory for common sense. | {
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The NHL Players’ Association has long been considered one of the strongest unions not only in sports, but in any industry. They are a different type of monster. That’s why back in 2004 when the NHL released a report they had lost $273 million the previous year there was a collective gasp in the hockey world. They knew trouble was on its way. They were right.
When the NHL revealed that big red number in 2003-04, writers and fans alike knew that a lockout was unavoidable. The philosophies were just so different. The owners were probably willing to cancel 2 seasons to get cost certainty, and the players thought they were unfairly being blamed for the league’s financial woes when really it was the owners who could not control their spending. Former NHLPA Executive Director Bob Goodenow argued at the time, “The owners already have cost certainty. It’s called a budget and you stick to it.”
The owners knew they could not control themselves then, and they know they cannot do it now. The problem with the owners’ collective bargaining strategy is that they think they can wait out the players just as the NFL and NBA have done multiple times. Unfortunately for them, this strategy is unlikely to work and if they have the gall to cancel another season over being less than $200 million apart, the relationship between the owners and players will be forever divided. No smiles. No handshakes. All that will be left is resentment toward the owners from the players, as if it hasn’t already been bubbling fiercely under the surface over the last decade or two.
In 2004, everyone knew the league was headed for a lockout. In 2012, I think most people were cautiously optimistic it would probably be a lockout but not a terribly long one. The collective gasps weren’t there like they were in 2004.
When Frank Seravalli from the Philadelphia Daily News put out a story about Flyers chairman Ed Snider not being one of the “hard liners” essentially, it sounded legitimate. Frank is a high integrity journalist and would not just publish something like this carelessly. Same with Bruins insider Joe Haggerty claiming that Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs was rude and expressing immature and inappropriate behavior toward an alternate governor of the Winnipeg Jets who had a differing opinion on lockout strategy. These are 2 world class journalists who are pretty much accused of being liars now. Something just isn’t right.
Owners like Jacobs probably got a whiff of how the NFL and NBA’s CBA negotiations went and started licking their chops. But just one problem: The NHL Players Association is nothing like the NFLPA or NBPA. NHL players have a sense of tradition, a sense of loyalty to those that came before them and those that will come after them. Hockey players grew up bonding on outdoor rinks on winter days, or with their parents renting out ice time for them at 5 AM at a local rink.
Hockey is not a cheap game to play. The majority of hockey players are not coming from the same backgrounds and same upbringings as a lot of NFL and NBA players are. This isn’t saying that those backgrounds are a bad thing, just very different. Many NHL players are coming from a strong family-first upbringing. In most cases, in order to make it in hockey it requires a total commitment from not just the player, but from their families growing up. We don’t see that same type of thing from NFL and especially NBA players. We saw a big problem with NBA players needing money so bad they had to come prematurely straight from high school. That’s why in the past it has been easier for those unions to cave.
Many NHL players have lawyers for parents, college professors, bankers, small business owners, farmers, etc. Many stars came from a deep rooted culture in rural Canadian communities. It just isn’t the same as the other leagues. There’s a greater overall sense of loyalty.
In 2005, the NHL owners got the deal they wanted, but at what cost? It took awhile for the NHL to completely rebuild back into respectability, and the discovery of the Winter Classic was a big reason for that. The Winter Classic has done a ton to bring media to the NHL in the United States, and yes, the owners cancelled it. The NHL bridged the revenue gap and got somewhere close to the NBA with the future of potential popularity looking bright. They were cemented in that 4th spot for North American sports, a spot they almost lost in 2004-05. That’s all gone now and getting worse every day.
Nobody is suggesting the Collective Bargaining Agreement shouldn’t change. There are a lot of things there the players should work to fix. The back loading contracts that worked so well in circumventing the salary cap was a major loophole providing a large advantage to big market teams. But a 50/50 split and honoring contracts the owners negotiated in good faith seems reasonable. It’s almost as if the owners knew they were going to get the players to give some of that money back when they were negotiating. It’s hard to believe that’s even legal.
In this round of negotiations following the fallout of the NFL and NBA negotiations, it’s almost as if the NHL is just looking out for the teams in very deep trouble such as Phoenix and Columbus, almost as if to say, “If this new CBA doesn’t allow all 30 of us to make money, it’s not good enough for us!”
That strategy simply will not work. The only people to blame for those markets being in trouble are well, the league owners. Many forecasters didn’t see success in those markets to begin with, but those expansion fees probably just looked nice to the owners at the time.
The NHL Players Association is unique. They have always been iron clad. It took cancelling a whole season to get the players to cave in 2005. They now have arguably the most successful union director in modern times guiding their negotiations on top of the bond and strength they already had.
Jeremy Jacobs, Gary Bettman, Bill Daly and the hard line crew: You may get the players to cave, but you won’t do it before sacrificing another season. Is that something you’re really willing to do? Just think about the strength of the union you’re attempting to claim total and complete victory over. Is it really worth it? Or is it time to negotiate on ideas other than just the ones that are your own? | {
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| Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | Courtesy of the Utah Attorney General's Office A multi-agency investigation of heroin and cocaine trafficking near the 210 S. | {
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The injured Brendan Gallagher will skate with his Montreal Canadiens teammates at practice Thursday, according to Renaud Lavoie.
The Canadiens followed up by confirming all injured players including goaltender Carey Price will be in Boston for Friday’s 2016 Bridgestone Winter Classic, though it doesn’t appear Price will take to the ice.
Winter Classic Live: Latest news, videos, social content
Gallagher has missed 17 games due to a hand injury suffered when blocking a shot. He had 19 points in 22 games prior to the injury. | {
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A mural in Mosul painted by the IS group, as propaganda. The Arabic says: We will win and we know that all the coalition countries are our enemies. (photo: جيتي)
On the western side of the city of Mosul, the extremist organization known as the Islamic State is readying itself for battle. Over several months of fighting, the Islamic State, or IS, group has lost most of the eastern side of the northern city to Iraqi pro-government forces. Although many of the IS fighters have been killed or have fled the city, the leaders who remain continue to try and convince the local populace of their invincibility. News has arrived that the north-eastern side of the city, often referred to by locals as the Left Bank, has been cleared of the IS group but it seems to many still in the western side, that the extremist organisation doesn’t want to accept that reality.
For example, an IS member recently asked a member of staff at Mosul’s General Hospital why there were not as many doctors and nurses anymore. Incredulous at the question, the staff member told the fighter that many doctors and nurses had lived on the other side of the city and they could no longer cross the Tigris river to come to work.
We have started to burn the furniture for cooking. We’ve already gone through the chairs, closets and beds.
Every week the IS group sends written instructions to their clerics to tell them what the subject of the weekly sermon should be, as well as any messages the extremists want relayed by the church. This week’s instructions indicated that the sermon should be particularly enthusiastic about the fighting to come.
So last Friday, at sermons in Mosul’s mosques on the western side of the city, clerics asked local families to send their sons to fight with the IS group. And according to an attendee at one mosque, the preacher scolded locals for not doing so.
“A young man ascended to the pulpit and began to tell us off,” the eye witness, whose name and location cannot be revealed due to security concerns, told NIQASH. “He began shouting, saying that if you think the infidels [meaning the pro-government forces] are going to reach the right side of the city, you’re dreaming. ‘I swear to you that God will help us win this battle, and that it will be a miracle - in the same way that God supported the Prophet Mohammed and his companions at the Battle of the Trench 1,400 years ago, when he sent violent winds into the infidels’ camps.”
But the IS group is clearly not relying on God alone, other locals say. Dozens of both Arab and foreign fighters are being stationed in the medical complex beside the Tigris river. Snipers occupy the higher floors of the hospital.
The ruins of the Iraqi Central Bank in Mosul, being bulldozed by the IS group.
The same kind of thing is happening in other neighbourhoods near the river and on the southern outskirts of the city, which is where the pro-government forces are expected to come in from. IS fighters are taking control of taller buildings and making sure they can move easily between and through them. In the Ghazalani neighbourhood, one resident says suicide bombers have been lining up behind IS leaders and chanting to display their courage: Either victory or martyrdom, they shout.
Locals in the western part of the city can actually see the Iraqi national flag flying on the other side of the city, while the black flag of the IS group still hangs over their own heads. Desperate for news, they discuss every overheard snatch of conversation.
In terms of daily life, the besieged parts of the city haven’t had any deliveries of fresh food for weeks. What is available is being sold at extremely high prices and it seems likely that any stores still open will have to close soon. There is no fuel coming in either and some parts of the city are almost empty of vehicles.
There’s no gas for cooking or heating and locals share stories of how everyone is surviving in these conditions.
“We have started to use the furniture for cooking – we’ve already gone through the chairs, closets and beds,” one woman told NIQASH in a phone interview; throughout the interview she was coughing because of all the smoke in her house, she said. “Now we are onto the wooden doors. In the near future we are going to have to start burning our clothes, if the Iraqi army doesn’t come soon. It’s like we are living in a different era. Thanks to the Caliph [which is what the leader of the IS group likes to call himself] everything in here is black with smoke: The walls, our faces and everything else.” | {
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Transcript for One-on-one with boy who was stuck in Thailand cave
Okay. How old is mark. And he thirteen. I am very happy indeed very happy to be out and yeah. Anything. So what has he were leave anything. He then that's the day that he had to eat his mom's cooking you haven't had a mom's cooking. Not yet. If they eat steak tonight you're gonna have your first male power lines. And how does mom feel. This SE CB. Come back now I'm home and my home my. I think Atlanta hey my coffee and same as they say he'd react six indicate he fainted. And then you went down to the cave immediately off to the from the hospital. And what was it like being that they pay for all those days. They said it was me. Community that belt seat he's really happy she Susie thanks to all of the world but it comes to health. Will be there can't. How do you feel about the Navy SEALs they pay me big time ABC news they heroes Bryant didn't have seeing happiness. Needed any told him. Eat in a holiday. He is really important it would is about as bad as. He how to handle breath but I cannot easily. Very fast easy. And which group would you parts all coming out 123. He was. Lobster and. You with the thirteenth to come out the last one. Packing. You very brave. 888. And what was that like to wait for everyone else to me first why did you did use us to stay. Price. Day. There's a mile. Me here. But you also strong. And oh yeah. So they pay me that you could stay longer because he'll stronger. Call. Think he can. Maybe. I'm just. What did you know that your mom was outside the K did you feel annual hot that she was waiting for you outside. It's call. C a month at. People you moment come into the bay and then leave those funny but then she stayed the whole time. Well not yeah. I. And then. What were you thinking in your mind when new in the cave for we've thinking all of the video. Fifty years and at the then he cast comes out every. So this is how. Is that gray. Along this eight what. Kennedy doesn't look. To say thank you didn't just back. Today they think we'll let you have dinner now enjoy a moment. Below last. I'm from London. Well look. But this is an American television. America unite America. Why he can't he 8 PME of the fire and and a laughing and. And we were getting many messages from Americans. People all over America I'll steam power use. We're praying for the Bruins win thinking about the boys. I think Paul yeah but not. Mall last night who you know he's looked thank you give people a night. You're famous now. We even. And in Haiti would be good enjoy.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate. | {
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Seleccione país Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Anguilla Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Aruba Australia Austria Azerbaijan Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bermuda Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil British Virgin Islands Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burundi Cambodia Cameroon Canada Cape Verde Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Congo (Brazzaville) Congo (Kinshasa) Cook Islands Costa Rica Cote D'Ivoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Djibouti Dominican Republic East Timor Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Ethiopia Faroe Islands Fiji Finland France French Polynesia Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Gibraltar Greece Greenland Grenada Guadeloupe Guatemala Guernsey Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana Haiti Honduras Hong Kong Hungary Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Isle of Man Israel Italy Jamaica Japan Jersey Jordan Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Macedonia Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Martinique Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Moldova Monaco Mongolia Morocco Mozambique Myanmar Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands Netherlands Antilles New Caledonia New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria Norfolk Island North Korea Norway Oman Pakistan Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Pitcairn Islands Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Reunion Romania Russia Rwanda Saint Helena Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Pierre and Miquelon Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia and Montenegro Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Swaziland Sweden Switzerland Syria Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Togo Tokelau Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Turks and Caicos Islands Tuvalu Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom United States Uruguay US Virgin Islands Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Wallis and Futuna Western Sahara Yemen Zambia Zimbabwe y arrastra el geomarcador para localizar el contenido. | {
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ASTM International Regulations:
ASTM F 963-11, Section 4.3.7, Stuffing Materials
ASTM F 963-11, Section 4.5, Sound Producing Toys
ASTM F 963-11, Section 4.25, Battery-Operated Toys (except labeling and/or instructional literature requirements)
ASTM F 963-11, Section 4.27, Stuffed and Beanbag-Type Toys
ASTM F 963-11, Section 4.38, Magnets (except labeling and/or instructional literature requirements)
Code of Federal Regulations:
16 CFR Part 1303 – Ban of Lead-Containing Paint and Certain Consumer Products Bearing Lead-Containing Paint
16 CFR 1500.18(a)(9) – Toy intended for children under 3 must not present a choking, aspiration, or ingestion hazard because of small parts
16 CFR 1500.48 Technical requirements for determining a sharp point in toys and other articles intended for use by children under 8 years of age.
16 CFR 1500.49 - Technical requirements for determining a sharp metal or glass edge in toys and other articles intended for use by children under 8 years of age.
16 CFR 1500.50 - Test methods for simulating use and abuse of toys and other articles intended for use by children.
16 CFR 1500.51(b): Impact, 4.5 ft ± 0.5 in
16 CFR 1500.51(d): Flexure, 120° Arc 30 Cycles 10 lb ± 0.5 lb
16 CFR 1500.53(c): Bite, 100 pounds ±0.5 pound
16 CFR 1500.53(e): Torque, 4 lbf-in ± 0.2 lbf-in
16 CFR 1500.53(f): Tension, 15 lb ± 0.5 lb
16 CFR 1500.53(g): Compression, 30 lb ± 0.5 lb
16 CFR 1500.87 Children's products containing lead: inaccessible component parts.
16 CFR 1500.88 - Exemptions from lead limits under section 101 of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act for certain electronic devices.
16 CFR 1500.91 - Determinations regarding lead content for certain materials or products under section 101 of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.
Part 1501- No toy or other children's article subject to § 1500.18(a)(9) and to this part 1501 shall be small enough to fit entirely within an approved cylinder
U.S. Codes:
15 U.S. Code § 1278a- Children’s products containing lead; lead paint rule
15 U.S. Code § 2057c - Prohibition on sale of certain products containing specified phthalates
15 U.S. Code § 2063 - Product certification and labeling
| {
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Facebook facial recognition faces class-action suit Published duration 17 April 2018
image copyright Getty Images
Facebook must face a class action lawsuit over its use of facial recognition technology, a California judge has ruled.
The lawsuit alleges that Facebook gathered biometric information without users' explicit consent.
It involves the "tag suggestions" technology, which spots users' friends in uploaded photos. The lawsuit says this breaches Illinois state law.
Facebook said the case had no merit and it would fight it vigorously.
However in his order, US District Judge James Donato wrote that Facebook seemed to believe individual lawsuits would be preferable to a class action "because statutory damages could amount to billions of dollars".
'Face templates'
On Monday, Judge Donato ruled to certify a class of Facebook users - a key legal hurdle for a class action suit.
In a successful class action suit, any person in that group could be entitled to compensation.
The class of people in question is made up of Facebook users "in Illinois for whom Facebook created and stored a face template after 7 June 2011," according to the court order.
The decision comes days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg faced intensive questioning by US lawmakers over the company's collection and use of user data.
He is also due to meet European Commission Vice President Andrus Ansip in San Francisco this week, reports Bloomberg.
What does the facial recognition do?
June 2011 was the date on which Facebook rolled out its "tag suggestions" feature.
The feature suggests who might be present in uploaded photos, based on an existing database of faces.
In Judge Donato's ruling, he laid out the four-step process behind the technology:
Initially, the software tries to detect any faces in an uploaded photo
faces in an uploaded photo It standardises and aligns them for size and direction
Then, for each face, Facebook computes a face signature - a mathematical representation of the face in that photo
- a mathematical representation of the face in that photo Face signatures are then run through a stored database of user face templates to look for similar matches
image copyright Facebook image caption The tag suggestions feature is not currently available in the UK
"If you've never been tagged in a photo on Facebook or have untagged yourself in all photos of you on Facebook, then we do not have this summary information for you," the company says.
The feature is not available to users in most countries, including the UK - and can be turned off in settings for US users. | {
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Surrey RCMP say a 52-year-old man has been charged after allegedly assaulting a recent Syrian refugee.
Police say Mark Nijjer was walking near the Newton bus loop when he allegedly elbowed the 18-year-old victim in November 2017.
Cpl. Scotty Schumann said the family was surprised with the charge.
“When you’re fleeing from a country that’s war-torn like Syria is, and coming to a country like Canada with an excellent reputation… It caught this family off-guard,” he said.
READ MORE: Police release updated suspect description after Syrian refugees pepper sprayed in Vancouver
RCMP say Nijjer is known to police, and is scheduled to appear in court next week.
Story continues below advertisement | {
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Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum of Acting Man blog,
Reuters reports that UKIP's Nigel Farage has held talks with the leader of Italy's 5-Star movement, Beppe Grillo, to explore the idea of the two parties teaming up in the European parliament.
Farage made it clear that UKIP doesn't wish to be associated with European far-right parties, which as a rule have a protectionist and statist outlook.
“The leader of Britain's anti-European Union UK Independence Party (UKIP) said on Sunday he hoped to form an alliance with Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement in the European Parliament. UKIP's Nigel Farage met with 5-star leader Beppe Grillo earlier this week after both parties performed strongly in European Parliament elections earlier in May. […] "I met Beppe Grillo last week … I am hoping we can do a deal with him and our group will sit bang in the middle politically of that parliament with a strong Euro-skeptic agenda," Farage told the BBC in an interview. Forming a political group would give its members more power to support or block legislation, greater access to funding and the right to sit on committees. To form such a group in the 751-seat Strasbourg-based parliament, 25 members of parliament from seven states are needed. In the new legislature, UKIP will have 24 seats and 5-Star will have 17 seats. Farage repeated previous comments that he would not work with France's National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who this week struck a deal with four other Euro-skeptic parties. "They come from a different political family," he said. "We want nothing to do with that party at all."
We're not surprised to hear that Farage is ruling out a coalition with Marine Le Pen's FN, but it it should be noted that the European and US mainstream media have displayed a tendency to lump all these parties together under the label 'far right'. As Justin Raimondo remarked to this:
“The "far right" meme is based on the results in France, where the National Front of Marine le Pen has for the first time won a plurality of seats in the European Parliament, and this news is usually coupled with panic-stricken reports of UKIP’s sweep across the Channel. Yet the two parties have nearly nothing in common except for opposition to the euro and the European project. The French Front is statist, protectionist , and carries red banners in the streets on May Day. UKIP is a quasi-free market split from the Tories, pro-free market and vaguely Little Englander. They aren’t opposed to immigration per se: they just want immigrants with assets, as opposed to the poorer variety. The only thing these two movements have in common is opposition to the rule of Brussels, but that is quite enough for the Eurocrats and their journalistic camarilla to cast them in the role of volatile "extremists," dangerous "populists" out to tear apart the "social fabric" of Europe. One prominent Eurocrat, the former Prime Minister of Luxembourg, foresees a replay of 1914: "I am chilled by the realization of how similar the crisis of 2013 is to that of 100 years ago," intones Jean-Claude Juncker. While there aren’t many Archdukes left to assassinate, whatever the similarities to 1914, the so-called right-wing populists have little to do with it. Indeed, it is the EU, in seeking to assert itself as an international power, that has ratcheted up the war danger by challenging Russia in Ukraine, allying with Washington to push NATO to the very gates of Moscow. In opposing the EU’s very existence, these parties – whatever their other characteristics – are taking on the forces that make war more likely.
Indeed, it is those striving for more centralization and a 'Federated Europe' whose efforts are likely to end up increasing the probability of Europe getting tangled up in wars. With respect to the Ukraine and Russia, Martin Schulz, the president of the EU parliament since 2012 (soon likely to be replaced by JC 'I lie when things get serious' Juncker, a bureaucrat-politician who is a fixture in Brussels), recently said in a TV interview that the EU had nothing to offer in terms of military aggression that could be directed against Russia, so it had to make do with sanctions. To his credit, it didn't really sound as though he regretted this fact, although we cannot be 100% sure whether we interpreted his body-language and tone of voice correctly.
And yet, there are those who dream of a 'European Empire', a socialist super-state that sooner or later very likely will be deemed to need to throw around its weight militarily as well. After all, it is all about being 'taken seriously on the world stage'. There are already a number of papers floating around which are inter alia bemoaning the 'EU's defense deficit' ('defense' meaning 'war-making capability').
The problem of the EU's political elites is that the average citizen couldn't care less about their 'weight on the world stage' and instead worries about more tangible and immediate problems that are far removed from the political elite's concerns. Hence the electoral success of parties like UKIP (and due to lack of alternatives, FN in France).
Anyway, the upshot is that if UKIP and 5-Star can form a coalition, their move will likely undercut David Cameron's reported attempts to cut off UKIP's EU funding by trying to poach UKIP allies which hitherto were said to be 'unacceptable' to the Tories.
Lastly, the future entertainment value of the European parliament has surely been vastly increased by the election result, and that is just about the best one can hope for anyway.
Grillo and Farage have a laugh (presumably at Cameron) | {
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Let’s start with those high deductibles. Apparently Trump is unaware that the man he has tapped to dismantle Obamacare, Rep. Tom Price of George, wants to steer us all into such “high deductible” insurance plans, with routine care paid for by patients from individual tax-free health savings accounts.
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The reason Price and others like high-deductible policies is simple enough: They lower insurance premiums and give patients a strong financial incentive to consume only the routine care they need and shop around for the best value. But, as Price surely knows, it’s not possible to lower deductibles and lower premiums at the same time.
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Trump faces the same dilemma when it comes to “poor coverage,” by which he means the medical services that insurers are required to pay for.
Obamacare required that all health insurance policies cover services such as maternity and newborn care, home health care, mental health services and treatment for drug addiction, birth control, preventive screening, nursing home and well-baby care. The law also prevents policies from setting annual or lifetime limits on how much medical care an insurer must cover. The effect of these mandated benefits was to push up premiums and outlaw the kind of “skinny” insurance policies favored by some cash-constrained consumers and employers.
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But Trump cannot make good on his promise to lower premiums with one hand while offering more comprehensive coverage with the other. In any market-driven system, you can’t expect Trump International service at EconoLodge prices.
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This kind of fantasy thinking about health care — that we can have lower prices, better care, more choice and no mandates — permeates the Republican critique of Obamacare. To be fair, one reason such a message has resonated is that Democrats and the Obama White House did much the same thing, selling Obamacare as a free lunch for almost everyone. In reality, it involved significant transfers — from the rich to the poor, the healthy to the sick, the young to the old and from medical providers to their patients.
To ensure that everyone could afford health insurance, Obamacare now provides roughly $130 billion annually in premium subsidies and tax credits to working-class households, with another $75 billion to extend Medicaid to those households living just above poverty.
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To help pay for those subsidies, the law mandated a roughly $75 billion a year reduction in the fees paid by Medicare fees to doctors and hospitals, while imposing another $30 billion annually in new taxes on the pharmaceutical and medical device industries and employers offering gold-plated insurance policies. Another $35 billion a year comes from extending the Medicare payroll tax to the self-employed and the investment income earned by wealthy investors.
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The law also required those who were young and healthy to buy comprehensive insurance, even if they didn’t want it, while paying more for it than they had in the past. It was only those higher premiums that made it possible for insurers to charge less for those who were older and sicker and guarantee them coverage irrespective of pre-existing conditions.
The dilemma now faced by Republicans who would repeal Obamacare is that they can’t provide relief to those who have been required to pay the price for universal coverage — the young, the healthy and the wealthy — without a roughly equal and offsetting toll on the old, the sick and the poor who benefit from this progressive arrangement. Republicans will do their best to disguise this reality under the cloak of liberty, deregulation and consumer choice, but the economic and political trade-offs cannot be avoided.
Of course, there’s a word for all this. It’s called governing. | {
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As I have noted in the past, I am a huge fan and devoted user of Amazon WorkSpaces. In fact, every blog post that I have written and illustrated over the last 6 or 7 months has been written on my WorkSpace. The most recent set of AWS podcasts were edited on the same WorkSpace.
Several months ago the hard drive in my laptop crashed and was replaced. In the past, I would have spent several hours installing and customizing my apps and my environment. All of my work in progress is stored in Amazon WorkDocs, so that aspect of the recovery would have been painless. At this point, the only truly personal items on my laptop are the 12-character registration code for my WorkSpace and my hard-won set of stickers. My laptop has become little more than a generic display and I/O device (with some awesome stickers).
I have three pieces of good news for Amazon WorkSpaces users:
You can now bring your Windows 7 Desktop license to Amazon WorkSpaces. There’s a new Amazon WorkSpaces Client App for Chromebook. The storage volumes used by WorkSpaces (both root and user) can now be encrypted.
Bring Your Windows 7 Desktop License to Amazon WorkSpaces (BYOL)
You can now bring your existing Windows 7 Desktop license to Amazon WorkSpaces and run the Windows 7 Desktop OS on hardware that is physically dedicated to you. This new option entitles you to a discount of $4.00 per month per WorkSpace (a savings of up to 16%) and also allows you to use the same Windows 7 Desktop golden image on-premises and the AWS cloud. The newly launched images can be activated using new or existing Microsoft activation servers running in your VPC, or that can be reached from your VPC.
To take advantage of this option, at a minimum your organization must have an active Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft and you must commit to running at least 200 WorkSpaces in a given AWS region each month. To learn more, take a look at the WorkSpaces FAQ.
In order to ensure that you have adequate dedicated capacity allocated to your account and to get started with BYOL, please reach out to your AWS account manager or sales representative or create a Technical Support case with Amazon WorkSpaces.
New Amazon WorkSpaces Client App for Chromebook
Today we are making Amazon WorkSpaces even more flexible and accessible by adding support for the Google Chromebook. These low-cost “thin client” laptops are simple and easy to manage. They run Chrome OS and were designed specifically for internet users. This makes them a great match for Amazon WorkSpaces because you can access your cloud desktops, your productivity apps, and your corporate network from devices that are simple to manage, secure, and available at a low cost.
The newest Amazon WorkSpaces client app runs on Chromebooks (version 45 of Chrome OS and newer) with ARM and Intel chipsets, and supports both touch and non-touch devices. You can download the WorkSpaces client for Chromebook now and install it on your Chromebook today.
The Amazon WorkSpaces client app is also available for Mac OS X, iPad, Windows, Android Tablet, and Fire Tablet environments.
Encrypted Storage Volumes Using KMS
Amazon WorkSpaces enables you to deliver a high quality desktop experience to your end-users and can also help you to address regulatory requirements or to conform to organizational security policies.
Today we are announcing an additional security option: encryption for WorkSpaces data in motion and at rest (this includes the disk volume and the snapshots associated with it). The WorkSpaces administrator now has the option to encrypt the C: and D: drives as part of the launch and configuration process for each newly created WorkSpace. This encryption is performed using a customer master key (CMK) stored in AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
Encryption is supported for all types of Amazon WorkSpace bundles including custom bundles created within your organization, but must be set up when the WorkSpace is created (encrypting an existing WorkSpace is not supported). Each customer master key from KMS can be used to encrypt up to 30 WorkSpaces.
Launching a WorkSpace with an encrypted root volume can take additional time. Once launched, you can expect to see a minimal impact on latency or IOPS. Here is how you (or your WorkSpaces administrator) choose the volumes to be encrypted along with the KMS key at launch time:
The encryption status of each WorkSpace is also visible from within the WorkSpaces Console:
There’s no charge for the encryption feature, but you will pay the standard KMS charges for any keys that you create.
— Jeff;
PS – Before you ask, I am planning to ditch my laptop in favor of a Chromebook immediately after AWS re:Invent! | {
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FILE - In this Jan. 25, 2019 file photo, White House deputy chief of staff for communications Bill Shine stands in the Rose Garden before President Donald Trump speaks at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh
FILE - In this Jan. 25, 2019 file photo, White House deputy chief of staff for communications Bill Shine stands in the Rose Garden before President Donald Trump speaks at the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who took over as President Donald Trump’s communications director last summer, exited the White House on Friday, the latest person to step away from a job that has become a revolving door within the turbulent West Wing.
Shine will join the president’s Republican re-election campaign, the White House said in a laudatory statement that quoted Trump and other top White House officials.
When Shine joined the administration, he was viewed as an experienced hand whose television experience could help shape Trump’s message. But like others before him, Shine was forced to grapple with a president who preferred to run his own communications strategy via tweet. In recent weeks, Trump had expressed frustration that Shine had not done more to improve his press coverage, said two people close to the president who were not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
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The announcement took many in the West Wing by surprise, though there were signs of unrest lately. Shine did not join Trump on his high-stakes trip to Vietnam for a summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Still, Trump said in a statement: “We will miss him in the White House, but look forward to working together on the 2020 Presidential Campaign, where he will be totally involved.”
Shine was Sean Hannity’s top producer for several years at Fox News Channel, rising to network leadership when founding chief executive Roger Ailes was forced out following sexual misconduct allegations. Shine wasn’t accused of such misdeeds, but he was named in lawsuits as someone who tried to keep a lid on allegations of bad workplace behavior instead of trying to root it out.
He was known as Ailes’ operations man and enforcer, the one who tried to put his boss’ directives into action.
Shine’s work at Fox, and the close relationship the network has with the Trump White House, was given new attention this week through a lengthy story in The New Yorker magazine. That article led to the Democratic National Committee saying it would not partner with Fox on any debates involving 2020 presidential contenders.
Shine called his eight-month stint in the White House “the most rewarding experience of my entire life.”
Shine succeeded Hope Hicks as communications director. Others who served in that role were Anthony Scaramucci, who lasted just 11 days, Sean Spicer and Mike Dubke.
___
Associated Press writers Jonathan Lemire and David Bauder in New York and Catherine Lucey in Washington contributed to this report. | {
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In a stunning development earlier today, the SEC released the final Regulation A+ equity crowdfunding rules under Title IV of the JOBS Act that pre-empts state law, paving the way for $50M unaccredited investor equity crowdfunding. Growth companies will soon now be able to raise up to $50 million from unaccredited investors in a mini-IPO style offering serving as a potential alternative to venture capital or other institutional capital. Imagine Uber or AirBnb, instead of going to big institutions for capital, now offering their stock directly to their drivers, riders, renters and tenants as well as the general public.
When the JOBS Act was passed in April of 2012, many believed that Title IV would actually be the most powerful change, but given that there was no deadline for implementation of the rules, most ignored Title IV as too remote to pay serious attention. There was also concern about the same problem that haunts existing Regulation A, namely state securities laws that would require registration in every individual state where securities are sold, making it too expense/complicated to be workable. The infamous example of this was in 1980 when Massachusetts deemed the offering of Apple Computer stock to be “too risky” and did not allow its citizens to participate in the offering.
Last November, however, the SEC shocked the securities community by introducing Proposed Regulation A+ rules that, through a clever legal maneuver, pre-empted state securities regulation.
Since that stunning announcement, there has been great uproar about “pre-emption,” whether it is legal and whether it is appropriate for a federal agency to pre-empt the states in this manner. Most in the pro-business community ardently support pre-emption and argue that securities offerings constitute interstate commerce and that state by state regulation is antiquated in a world where the internet blurs state lines. Many regulators, investor protection groups and even one crowdfunding platform opposed such pre-emption, arguing that state review adds value and necessary investor protections. In response, the states introduced a coordinated review process, which was designed to address these concerns. Critics argued that this was too little, too late and only resulted from the states being forced to act by the threat of pre-emption.
In the final rule release, the SEC settled the dispute through a brilliant compromise by confirming pre-emption for Tier II Regulation A offerings up to $50M but also increasing Tier I Regulation A offerings from $5M to $20M and leaving pre-emption intact, thus giving “coordinated review” a chance to prove itself. This appears to be the result of an extensive negotiation between Commissioner Stein who opposes pre-emption and several of the other Commissioners. In coming to this decision, the SEC noted that:
Coordinated review is new and unproven and pre-emption is necessary at least until there is a track record of a functioning coordinated review program
Coordinated review has great potential if the states can stick together and maintain a seamless process
NASAA may appoint an individual to serve with the SEC internally on implementation of Reg A+
States will retain full enforcement and anti-fraud jurisdiction in all cases
Now, with pre-emption under Tier II and coordinated review under Tier I, it looks like Title IV (Reg A+) could make Title III Equity Crowdfunding a relic.
Regulation A+ will likely go into effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register (June 2015). Here are the highlights of the new Regulation A+ exemption:
High Maximum Raise: Issuers can raise up to $50,000,000 in a 12 month period for Tier 2 and $20,000,000 for Tier 1. Anyone can invest: Not limited to just “accredited investors” – your friends and family can invest. Tier 2 investors will, however, be subject to investment limits described below. Investment Limits: For Tier II, individual investors can invest a maximum of the greater of 10% of their net worth or 10% of their net income in a Reg A+ offering (per offering). There are no investment limits under Tier 1. Self-Certification of Income / Net Worth: Unlike Rule 506(c) under Title II of the JOBS Act, investors will be able to self-certify their income or net worth for purposes of the investment limits so there will be no burdensome documentation required to prove income or net worth. You can advertise your offering: There is no general solicitation restriction so you can freely advertise and talk about your offering, including at demo days, on television, and via social media. Offering Circular Approval Required: The issuer will have to file a disclosure document and audited financials with the SEC. The SEC must approve the document prior to any sales. The rules indicate that the Offering Circular may receive the same level of scrutiny as a Form S-1 in an IPO. This is the biggest potential drawback of using Reg A+. Audited Financials Required: For Tier 2, together with the Offering Circular, the issuer will be required to provide two years of audited financial statements. Tier 1 offerings require only reviewed financials (not audited). Testing the Waters: An issuer can “test the waters” and see if there is interest in the offering prior to spending the time and money to create the Offering Circular. This would be “Preview” mode on SeedInvest where investors can express interest, but can’t yet invest. This is important so that companies don’t have to gamble on their fundraise and can see if there is interest prior to investing in legal and accounting fees. Ongoing Disclosure Requirements: For Tier 2, the issuer will be required to make an annual disclosure filing, a semi-annual report, and current reports, each of which are scaled back versions of Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and Form 8-K, respectively. These reports will also require ongoing audited financials. These disclosures can be terminated after the first year if the shareholder count drops below 300. There are no ongoing disclosure requirements for Tier 1. State Pre-Emption: As discussed above, the old Regulation A (now Tier I) was never used because it required registering the securities in every state that you make an offer or sales. New Reg A+ Tier 2 preempts state law – again – this is huge. Tier 1 Reg A+ again does not have state pre-emption but will be a testing ground for NASAA Coordinated Review. Shareholder Limits: In a welcome departure from the proposed rules, it appears that the Section 12(g) shareholder limits (2,000 person and 500 non-accredited investor) will not apply to Reg A under certain circumstances. This fixes a major problem from the proposed rules which would have limited the potential for very small investments (i.e. $100). Unrestricted Securities: The securities issued in Reg A+ will be unrestricted and freely transferable, though many issuers may choose to impose contractual transfer restrictions. Many believe this will pave the way for a secondary market for these securities in the form of Venture Exchanges. No Funds: Investment companies (i.e. private equity funds, venture funds, hedge funds) may not use Reg A to raise capital. Integration: There are several safe harbors so it seems that you can use Reg A+ in combination with other offerings. There are safe harbors for the following:
No integration with any previously closed offerings
No integration with a subsequent crowdfunding offering
No integration where issuer complies with terms of both offerings independently – can conduct simultaneous Reg D – 506(c) offering.
The Fate Of Title III
Interestingly, the SEC did not mention Title III Equity Crowdfunding a single time either in this meeting or in Chairman White’s recent testimony before Congress. This furthers the belief by many that Title III Equity Crowdfunding is dead in the water as it currently stands and may only be revived by an act of Congress.
Equity Crowdfunding Rules Comparison Chart
Check out this chart comparing Reg A Tier 1, Reg A Tier 2, to Reg D: Rule 506(c) and Regulation Crowdfunding. Choosing among the various options will require careful consideration by issuers and their counsel.
You can also download the PDF version of the Comparison of Equity Crowdfunding Regulations. Which exemption would you use? | {
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A group of white teens apparently attempted to hang an 8-year-old biracial boy by a noose in Claremont, New Hampshire on August 28.
Lorrie Slattery, the boy's grandmother, told Valley News that her grandson was playing with the teenagers at a yard in their neighborhood when the teens started calling him racial slurs and throwing sticks and rocks at his legs.
Then, Slattery said, some or all of the kids took a rope nearby that was part of a tire swing.
"The [teenagers] said, 'Look at this,' supposedly putting the rope around their necks," Slattery told Valley News. "One boy said to [Slattery's grandson], 'Let's do this,' and then pushed him off the picnic table and hung him."
RELATED: States with currently active KKK chapters
22 PHOTOS States with currently active KKK chapters See Gallery States with currently active KKK chapters Washington Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo via REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst) Pennsylvania
Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images) (Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images) Oklahoma Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo credit ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images) Ohio Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo credit DAVID MAXWELL/AFP/Getty Images) (Photo credit DAVID MAXWELL/AFP/Getty Images) New York Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo credit WILLIAM EDWARDS/AFP/Getty Images) (Photo credit WILLIAM EDWARDS/AFP/Getty Images) Michigan Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo credit ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images) (Photo credit ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images) Maine Klan groups based in state: 1 (Staff photo by Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images) (Staff photo by Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images) Louisiana Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo by Nathan Benn/Corbis via Getty Images) (Photo by Nathan Benn/Corbis via Getty Images) Illinois Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo by Tim Boyle/Newsmakers) (Photo by Tim Boyle/Newsmakers) Florida Klan groups based in state: 1 (Photo via REUTERS/Chris Keane) (Photo via REUTERS/Chris Keane) West Virginia Klan groups based in state: 2 (Photo by Chet Strange/Getty Images) Virginia Klan groups based in state: 2 (Photo via REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst) (Photo via REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst) North Carolina Klan groups based in state: 2 (Photo by NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images) (Photo by NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Missouri Klan groups based in state: 2 (Photo via REUTERS/Heikki Ahonen/Lehtikuva) (Photo via REUTERS/Heikki Ahonen/Lehtikuva) Maryland Klan groups based in state: 2 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Georgia Klan groups based in state: 2 (Photo by Getty Images) (Photo by Getty Images) Arkansas Klan groups based in state: 2 (Photo by Greg Smith/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) (Photo by Greg Smith/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) Texas Klan groups based in state: 3 (Photo by Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Sygma via Getty Images) (Photo by Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Sygma via Getty Images) Tennessee Klan groups based in state: 3 (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) Kentucky Klan groups based in state: 3 (Photo via REUTERS/Chris Keane) Alabama Klan groups based in state: 4 (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) Mississippi Klan groups based in state: 5 (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
The boy allegedly swung back and forth three times from the rope before he was able to free himself. He was flown to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and sustained cuts and welts to his neck, according to a now-deleted Facebook post by his mother, Cassandra Merlin.
"So my son is being flown to Dartmouth after a 14-year-old kid decided to hang him from a tree," the post said, according to The Root. "I don't care if this was a so called accident or not. My son almost died because of some little s--- teenage kids."
Merlin's brother also posted about the incident on Facebook:
The boy did not suffer serious physical injuries and is now recovering.
Claremont authorities have said they are investigating the attack but did not comment on specific details of the case because it involves juveniles.
"These people need to be protected," Claremont Police Chief Mark Chase said of the teenagers accused of hanging the boy. "Mistakes they make as a young child should not have to follow them for the rest of their life."
Cassandra Merlin spoke out about the incident again last Thursday, saying in a Facebook post that the reason she had publicized her son's story was to "show this country that racism does in fact still exist."
She added that while her son "used to love being able to go to the park with his older sister and shoot some hoops," he's now "not even allowed to go outside without me."
Merlin said it was "sad that in a city we considered to be safe, we aren't safe at all."
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Book Buddies By kyrtuck Watch
31 Favourites 14 Comments 593 Views
Alex Wilder from Marvel's Runaways comic
Dipper Pines from Gravity Falls
Lee Ping from the cartoon Detentionaire
I thought this would be an excellent little crossover since each of those franchises followed teenagers seeking clues and solving an ever deepening, increasingly sinister mystery leaving them wonder who to trust, that concerns their family, and ultimately leads to a potentially end of the world event.
IMAGE DETAILS Image size 900x694px 306.87 KB Show More
Published : Mar 30, 2017 | {
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Del Rey and A Bitter Draft are at it again with a special giveaway. This time one lucky winner will receive the entire trilogy that is Jason M. Hough’s Dire Earth Cycle. I reviewed the first book, The Darwin Elevator, back in July and loved it. If you haven’t heard a thing about the series, here’s the blurb for the first one:
In the mid-23rd century, Darwin, Australia, stands as the last human city on Earth. The world has succumbed to an alien plague, with most of the population transformed into mindless, savage creatures. The planet’s refugees flock to Darwin, where a space elevator—created by the architects of this apocalypse, the Builders—emits a plague-suppressing aura.
Skyler Luiken has a rare immunity to the plague. Backed by an international crew of fellow “immunes,” he leads missions into the dangerous wasteland beyond the aura’s edge to find the resources Darwin needs to stave off collapse. But when the Elevator starts to malfunction, Skyler is tapped—along with the brilliant scientist, Dr. Tania Sharma—to solve the mystery of the failing alien technology and save the ragged remnants of humanity.
The series is definitely worth checking out, and it’s already fully released, so there’s no waiting between books!
For Entry:
E-mail me at [email protected] with the subject DIRE EARTH to enter
Include a valid mailing address (snail-mail) – not doing so will result in disqualification
One entry per person
Giveaway ends at 12:00am EST on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013
Winner will be randomly selected and notified via email
US/CAN only
Be sure to follow me on Twitter for more giveaways and reviews! | {
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Like many Americans, conservatives and liberals alike, I am appalled by recent reports about the treatment of children of alleged illegal immigrants. U.S. officials have separated thousands of children from parents arrested for illegal entry into the U.S. and detained them in holding facilities described as “cages.”
But to my mind, this controversy highlights the inconsistency of Americans’ moral attitudes and reactions to the suffering of others. Since 9/11 military operations of the U.S. and its allies have inflicted enormous harm on children and other civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere.
According to the Costs of War project, U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have resulted in the direct (via bombs and bullets) or indirect (from displacement, disease, malnutrition) deaths of more than 1.1 million people. Most of the victims are civilians, including children. Roughly 10 million people in these war zones have been displaced and are living in “grossly inadequate conditions.”
The watchdog group Airwars.org estimates that U.S.-coalition attacks have killed at least 6,321 civilians in Syria and Iraq since anti-ISIS operations began in 2014. According to Iraq Body Count, between 2003 and 2011 U.S. coalition forces killed at least 1,201 children in Iraq alone. In a previous column, I quoted Neta Crawford, a political scientist who contributes to Costs of War. She told me that counting children harmed by U.S. military operations invariably leads to under-estimates:
“Most children killed and injured directly by U.S. forces and their allies were killed the same way as their parents: they died when bombs fell; when they were caught in ‘cross-fire’; shot in night raids; shot at check-points and run over by U.S. convoys who speed through the streets and roads. The roadside deaths are often not recorded unless the U.S. gives some compensation to the families.” Crawford added that “the harm to children in war is also indirect--morbidity and mortality due to the destruction of infrastructure which impairs delivery of medical care, makes drinking water unsafe, and makes food scarce.”
U.S. and allied forces are of course not the only armed groups harming children. A recent report from Save the Children, an international nonprofit, notes that some militant groups have intentionally killed and maimed children as well as enslaving and raping them. U.S. military officials insist that they do not intend to harm children, and occasionally they apologize when they do. But apologies ring hollow when you keep committing the same “mistake” over and over again.
This month, Amnesty International reported that recent U.S./allied attacks on the Syrian city of Raqqa “killed hundreds of civilians, injured many more and destroyed much of the city.” As usual, many of the casualties were children. The attacks “failed to take the precautions necessary to minimize harm to civilians” and “violated international humanitarian law.”
The U.S. should set a higher moral example for the rest of the world. Its callous attitude toward children and other innocent people in war zones lowers the bar for other groups, making it easier for them to commit atrocities. According to Save the Children, “children are more at risk in conflict now than at any time in the last 20 years.”
Returning to the recent controversy over immigrant children: Yes, please protest policies that result in kids being separated from parents at our borders. But please also demand an end to policies that that have killed, sickened, maimed and displaced hundreds of thousands of children overseas.
Further Reading:
Where Is Outcry Over Children Killed by U.S.-Led Forces?
How Google Could Help End War
War Is Our Most Urgent Problem--Let’s Solve It
We Need a New Just-War Theory, Which Aims to End War Forever
Meta-Post: Horgan Posts on War and Peace | {
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The son of former Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Pascal Calogero Jr. has been arrested on suspicion of paying for sex with a 14-year-old girl and arranging prostitution dates for the girl with other men.
Pascal Calogero III, 59, was charged Wednesday with conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of a minor, FOX 8 of New Orleans reported. Prosecutors said he paid for sex with the girl on multiple occasions in May 2017.
An indictment said a co-conspirator identified as J.B. met the girl in New Orleans and recruited her into prostitution.
Between May and June 2017, J.B. advertised the girl online and scheduled prostitution dates. She earned nearly $1,000 daily but he required her to hand over all or most of the money.
J.B. sent the younger Calogero sexually explicit photos of the girl to entice him to meet her, prosecutors said.
Calogero III, a resident of the New Orleans suburb of Metairie, paid at least $120 each time he met her for sex, prosecutors allege.
The indictment said he then began advertising the girl by sending explicit photos of her to other men through text messages, negotiated prices, and used his home on at least one occasion so the girl could meet a date.
Calogero Jr. declined comment on the allegations against his son but said he was not aware of any developments in the case, according to the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
His son faces up to to life in prison, up to $250,000 in fines and between five years and a lifetime of supervised release after imprisonment and a mandatory $100 special assessment.
Calogero Jr. served on the Louisiana Supreme Court for 36 years, longer than any justice in state history, according to his online biography posted to a New Orleans law firm. He retired in 2008 and went into private practice law. | {
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Last Tuesday, the future finally sounded like the future. A coalition of willing billionaires, spaceflight professionals, and scientific advisors under the banner of Planetary Resources announced their deadly serious intention to go out there and mine themselves some asteroids (video). And the scientific community responded with a heartfelt finally. Assuming this plan isn’t the prelude to some kind of Bond-villian-esque scheme to hold the world hostage for trillions of dollars or they’ll drop an asteroid on our heads (note to self: screenplay??), what’s going to happen? What does it mean for astronomers and planetary scientists? What contributions will the scientific community make, and what data do we stand to gain?
Asteroids are not just little floating gold mines, they’re precious scientific relics. They are the only nearby remnants of the presolar nebula, and preserve a vast trove of data about the cloud of gas and dust that formed our Sun and Solar System, the processes that built up the planets, and even fragments of what came before. Asteroids can provide vital insights into theories of planet formation by telling us about disk composition and temperature. They preserve the history of the processes that built them up, telling us about how dust and rock clump together to form larger bodies, a subject of great interest to those who study extrasolar planets. They’re also the best source for the composition of the presolar nebula, and by extension provide one of the benchmarks for the solar abundance set, or the relative abundances of the chemical elements, key to our understanding of nucleosynthesis and related topics. Right now, however, our only access to asteroids is via meteorites (ah, astronomy; where waiting for research material to fall out of the sky is a viable strategy). Meteorites are often found after sitting on the surface for a long time, enduring Earth’s many chemical processes. This destroys any volatiles that may have been retained, and introduces contamination. And they’re quite rare. In particular the CI carbonaceous chondrite group, upon which the solar abundance set is benchmarked, is very rare; the majority of our data comes from 12 pounds of rock in a jar in France.
So astronomers and planetary scientists would love to get their hands on tons of pristine space rock. Why haven’t we done it yet? Mining asteroids – or at least returning samples from them – has long been a staple not just of science fiction, but of decadal surveys and mission concepts. NASA, JPL, and even some private firms have studied mission concepts for sample returns and rendezvous with asteroids for a long time. But only a few targeted missions have been launched, such as the Dawn spacecraft currently studying the asteroid Vesta and the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft, which successfully returned 1500 grains of material from the Near-Earth asteroid 25143 Itokawa. Other spacecraft such as Deep Space 1 and Galileo have swung by asteroids on their way to other destinations, but done little more than photograph the objects in passing. And NASA’s planetary science budget has suffered greatly in recent years as the agency struggles to keep JWST alive in the face of Congressional budget cuts.
Recently, however, interest has been growing in Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) not just as potential scientific targets or potential hazards, but as stepping stones for revitalizing the space exploration program. After the Moon, Near-Earth Asteroids are the closest bodies to Earth that could be the target of human missions. The Augustine Report, which set out to chart the future of NASA’s human spaceflight plans, recommended asteroid exploration as the next phase of manned missions, and the White House endorsed the idea. Several mission concepts have been offered up, some manned and some robotic. But so far no firm plans have been made. Until now. Planetary Resources, whose headliners include Larry Page and Eric Schmidt from Google, director James Cameron, Peter Diamandis from the X-PRIZE foundation, Chris Lewicki of Spirit and Opportunity fame, and Dr. Sara Seager from MIT (seriously guys, Bond movie plot), have decided to take matters into their own hands.
How are these guys different from any other pie-in-the-sky startup dreaming of a huge payoff? All of us have heard grandiose claims about the future of space exploration before. How do we know we’re not going to get our hearts broken again? Well, the ideas they’ve put forward, the team they’ve assembled, and the resources this group can bring to bear are remarkable enough for everyone to give them a second look. Just the fact that they have a plan rather than simply making a grand proclamation is a good sign.
Planetary Resources’ mining strategy as currently described comprises four stages: survey, using cheap robotic telescopes to catalogue NEAs; reconnaissance, using small satellites to fly past asteroids passing close to Earth; assessment, sending robotic spacecraft to study potential targets; and mining proper, when the resources are finally extracted. Let’s break it down step by step. If you’d like to watch some videos on the subject, by the way, the company has posted several on their Youtube channel.
Survey: The first stage of the Planetary Resources plan is simply to launch a fleet of robotic telescopes into low Earth orbit (LEO) expressly for the cataloguing of asteroids. Although NASA’s Spaceguard program has catalogued about 93 percent of the large (> 1km) NEAs, there are still plenty of mid-size and smaller objects to be found. Because NEAs are small, dark objects, it’s hard to find them. New objects are being discovered all the time, and a fleet of telescopes that do nothing but look for them can only be good for astronomers. The Planetary Resources plan describes a small satellite called “Leo” mounting a telescope with arcsecond resolution. Their description also implies that time on the Leo telescopes may be publicly available for purchase, which could be interesting. No word on what band these telescopes operate in, but if they’re smart, they’ll put at least a few in the mid- to far-infrared – as this article describes, far-infrared telescopes are better at finding asteroids because they can see their thermal emission rather than just searching for reflected sunlight.
Feasibility: Let me dust off my aero/astro degree here for a second. According to Phil Plait, the Leo telescopes will have a mirror diameter of 9″, quite sufficient to give arcsecond resolution, and an overall satellite size of 16″. This miniscule form factor is absolutely vital; the single biggest line-item in any small satellite project is far and away the launch, so Planetary Resources is going to take advantage of so-called “secondary payloads,” smaller cargo carried to fill out a rocket that’s hauling a much larger satellite. In order to take advantage of these piggyback rides into space, however, the Leos must be small enough to pack into a payload shroud without disturbing the prime cargo. I’d guesstimate their overall weight in the realm of 50 – 75 kg, within the standard limits for ESPA ring launches (one image on the website even shows what looks like an ESPA ring connector plate attached). Eyeballing the graphics on the website, it looks like the Leo satellites have a system of cold-gas thrusters for pointing, probably coupled with a set of small reaction wheels. They have a single small solar panel that likely doubles as a sunshield for cooling the camera and the electronics, and possibly a couple of star trackers for orientation and navigation. It’s a fairly standard small satellite design and eminently feasible. Order-of-magnitude I’d guess each bird will cost in the neighborhood of $1-2 mil in parts and labor.
Planetary Resources says they’re going to launch several of these, which could be a costly endeavor, and that they’re making them in-house – that, in fact, they’ve already started. Making them in bulk will make things easier – if one fails, just iterate on the next one – but regardless of how off-the-shelf the technology may seem, putting anything in space is never an easy or routine operation. Still, this is something that has been done before.
Reconnaissance: The second phase described by Planetary Resources involves fitting out a couple of the Leo telescopes with rocket motors and slinging them up past geosync to flyby asteroids passing through the Earth-Moon system. A surprising number of NEAs pass between the Earth and the Moon, and a disturbing portion of them are only spotted during near-misses with Earth. Presumably the Leo network from the first phase will come into play here, spotting a flyby candidate in time for a rendezvous to be arranged. These “Interceptor” missions will try to hitch a ride with satellites heading not to the relatively nearby confines of LEO, but the distant reaches of geosynchronous orbit (GEO), about 40,000 km out; from there it only takes a relatively small additional boost to push themselves far away from Earth. These satellites would study passing asteroids much more closely, and with a wider suite of scientific instruments. There’s even a mention of a possible sample return from one of these flybys, a prospect that should make all astronomers giddy.
Feasibility: Hitching a ride to geosynchronous orbit is a trickier proposition. Boosting an object up to geosynchronous orbit takes a lot more energy than low Earth orbit, so a rocket that can put N tons into LEO can only put a small fraction of that into GEO. That means payload space is much tighter heading up to GEO, leaving far less room for hitchhikers. The extra poundage of the added scientific instruments and the rocket maneuvering system will also probably beef the Interceptor spacecraft up to 150 – 200 kg. But that’s well within the realm of possibility, and there’s no reason these spacecraft couldn’t get a great look at an asteroid as it cruises by. Sample return may be harder to manage in such a small package. Hayabusa managed to return a sample, but that spacecraft was purpose-built, and even then only got the sample back by the skin of its teeth.
Assessment: Once we’ve catalogued the NEAs, it’s time to pick out our favorites. The Interceptor satellites already have, in theory, everything they need to operate away from Earth. This phase involves outfitting the satellites with “deep space laser communication technology” and sending them out away from Earth entirely to meet up with the chosen asteroids. There the spacecraft, or more likely the group of spacecraft, will park themselves in a matching orbit and survey the asteroid with all the instruments at their disposal. They’ll be able to collect all the data necessary for a more permanent rendezvous, such as maps of the surface and measurements of rotation rates and density. No word on whether this phase of the mission also has the potential for sample return, but it would be an obvious place to do it. Scientifically this phase is rich. Detailed, up-close data from several asteroids would be great news for a lot of astronomers. Hopefully at this point NASA will also be building their own missions to survey and possibly send manned missions to NEAs, and the synchronization of the two could provide a wealth of fresh data.
Feasibility: Launching satellites into Earth-trailing or Earth-leading orbits has been done many times. Really the unusual part about this phase is the addition of laser communication. Laser communication in space is a new technology that has great promise, but not a lot of proven reliability. Currently, deep space missions use radio communications, so the signal spreads out according to the inverse square law as it travels. This means that spacecraft traveling farther from Earth see nonlinear increases in the amount of power, and therefore size and mass, required to sustain communication. Deep-space missions have data transfer rates that would make the 1980s laugh. Laser communication, by contrast, promises a much more focused signal at lower power. It’s a great innovation and one that has a lot of potential for dropping the cost of deep-space missions. But it’s not entirely a proven technology. The MESSENGER spacecraft was able to signal Earth with an onboard laser during a flyby, and NASA has lofted a Technology Demonstrator Mission to study it, but that’s about it. Laser communication is key to preserving the second phase design without heavy modification, and keeping the size and weight of the satellite down to the level where it can reasonably piggyback on other launches.
Mining: After all this exhaustive surveying and assessment, it’s time to reap the rewards. It’s not clear how Planetary Resources plans to actually mine the asteroids. However, they aren’t going to just haul a rock into Earth orbit and start breaking it down for scrap. One of the aims of their mining program is to harvest not just precious metals but volatiles such as oxygen or water that are key to future manned spaceflight missions. Every pound of water or air on a manned mission must be hauled up from the surface of the Earth at a cost of roughly $50,000 per kilogram. Since volatiles captured from an asteroid are already in space, they can be had for a fraction of the cost. I can imagine robotic probes carving ice from an asteroid, to be slung back to the Earth-Moon system and picked up by a manned mission waiting in LEO to fuel up before heading off to parts unknown. A mission to a destination such as Mars might even plan to meet up with asteroid-launched containers of volatiles along the way. Solving the volatile problem would make planning human missions orders of magnitude easier – and cheaper. In the end this might be the most valuable contribution of the program. I’m not going to assess the feasibility of this part, because it’s far enough into the future that who knows what kind of tech we’ll have around.
So there you have it. At first glance, this plan sounds like science fiction. At second glance, it totally is. But that’s okay, because this is the future and if it doesn’t sound like science fiction then you haven’t been paying attention. It is a remarkably well-thought out plan that seems to have some serious engineering backing it up. More importantly, it doesn’t rely on too many unspecified, as-yet-undiscovered technological advances like many other doomed startups. The tech described has largely been invented, and requires only resources and ingenuity to combine into a working program. The slew of backers makes me think this isn’t a group that will give up easily, and they certainly have the resources to pour into it to keep things alive till the big payoff at the end. And what does this mean for us as scientists? If the program gets off the ground, we stand to harvest an incredible trove of data, particularly with planetary science budgets being slashed.
But it’s not clear how science will be incorporated into the program, and that worries me. There are some concerns about the fact that Planetary Resources is a private company. First of all, we don’t know how public the data from their surveys will be. And because their motives are, ultimately, profit, their list of target asteroids may not sync up with a scientist’s priorities. An astronomer interested in the composition of the presolar nebula, for example, will want to investigate the stony carbonaceous chondrite asteroids, which would be of little interest to a miner interested in platinum-group metals. An astronomer might be reluctant to dismantle an asteroid for fear of disturbing potential data, while a miner’s entire plan is to take it apart. Scientific study and resource exploitation can coexist, often quite fruitfully – in this case it will require astronomers to tell the miners where to mine, and miners to get the astronomers their data – but that does not mean the relationship will not be tense at times. This is not a government mission, where scientists can argue for control on the grounds of public benefit; it’s privately-funded and privately-executed, meaning Planetary Resources can act as they will.
Plus, there are legal intricacies to be tackled. The current treaties governing space and space resources classify asteroids as scientific resources that cannot be used for commercial exploitation. However, a lot of the treaty language is deliberately vague. This program isn’t going to plant the first shovel in an asteroid’s surface for several years at the least, so there’s time to work out the law in advance. But if there is a conflict between the priorities of the scientific community and the commercial concerns, it could get messy.
Despite these concerns, I’m all for it. I think this can work, and I really, really hope it can work. There is a deeper motive here. In other sciences, the counterpart to a theorist is an “experimentalist.” In astronomy, it’s an “observer.” By and large astronomy is the science of staring at things you know you will never touch. None of us will ever see the objects we study firsthand. Excepting those few lucky scientists working on planetary missions, we will never be able to interact with our subjects. Sometimes it is easy to feel as though the sky itself is just a big globe encircling the Earth, and astronomers are engaged in a thorough study of the wallpaper. When a meteorite falls, a piece of the stars has come to Earth. For one brief moment, we can touch what we have spent our lives watching.
It’s time to stop waiting around for our field to come to us. It’s time for us to go out and find it. | {
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The Homebrew Industrial Revolution is based on a series of research papers on industrial history I did at Center for a Stateless Society.
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In writing Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, I found myself most engaged in researching the material on micromanufacturing, household microenterprises, the alternative economy, and the singularity resulting from them.
A major part of the material in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution is drawn from Organization Theory, but was imperfectly tied together and developed there. I attempted to draw these themes together into my first C4SS monograph, and then found myself developing them in a series of followup papers. Those papers gradually took shape in my head as a book.
One theme is the rise and fall of Sloanist mass-production in light of Mumford’s paleotechnic/neotechnic periodization and his theory of the cultural pseudomorph, and the rise of networked manufacturing as (in the words of Michael Piore and Charles Sabel) the rediscovery after more than a century of how to integrate electrical power into industry.
Another is the contrast of Sloanism to the leanness, agility and resilience of the alternative economy, with low overhead as the central conceptual principle around which my study of the latter is organized. Large inventories, high capital oulays, and high overhead have the same effect on mass-production industry that shit has on a human body bloated by constipation. The higher the fixed costs required to undertake an activity, the larger the income stream required for a household or firm to service that overhead; the enterprise must either get big or get out, and the household must have multiple sources of full-time wage income to survive. The alternative economy, on the other hand, operates with almost no fixed costs, so that almost all its revenue is free and clear and it can survive prolonged periods of slow business. Because it’s organized stigmergically, with modular open-source designs, innovation costs are spread over the widest possible product ecologies with a minimum of transaction costs. The alternative economy is breeding the rats in the nests of corporate dinosaurs. | {
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SEATTLE - On the night the Broncos drafted Noah Fant — first round, 20th overall, a rather lofty spot for a tight end — he was shown a video from his parents, Kathy and Willie Fant.
Mom’s and Dad’s message to their youngest son was so sweet and meaningful to him he cried.
His mom, who would know, acknowledged: “I knew when you were born God had definitely blessed you with size at 11 pounds, 1 ounce.”
(Twenty-one years later, he’s ripped, a marble statue of a young man, 6-foot-4, 250 pounds.)
His dad, who was 8-year-old Noah’s first coach, showed a father’s duty is never done: “I need you to remember: always be a man of God.”
There’s no doubt what drives Noah Fant going into Thursday’s preseason game against the Seahawks here at CenturyLink Field. It’s his family, from Kathy and Willie to older brother Chris, who coached him at Omaha (Neb.) South. And identifying the first-round pick’s motivation in football seems important for the Broncos. All the other boxes are checked: brains, size, speed, hands (19 touchdowns in college, the record for a tight end at Iowa).
Thursday night, the Broncos prefer to see more from one first-round pick (Fant) and the same dazed and confused look they saw over three forgettable seasons from another (Paxton Lynch). Lynch is competing for the backup quarterback job with the Seahawks. Fant is competing for starter snaps as a Broncos rookie.
Family ties matter. Lynch’s inner circle emboldened him to believe the Broncos were at fault for his struggles, not him. And there was Julius Thomas, the most recent Pro Bowl tight end at UCHealth Training Center, whose father was prone to throw shade on John Elway, Peyton Manning and “loser” Broncos fans on the internet. Ah, those were the days.
When Noah Fant was at Iowa his brother criticized Kirk Ferentz and the coaching staff on Twitter. “Hard to watch that mess over and over!” is part of what Chris Fant tweeted.
At least publicly, Noah Fant handled the sticky situation with maturity, sticking up for his family while maintaining good relations with coaches.
“My goals in the NFL are to become one of the best. It’s pretty simple,” Fant told me after practice at UCHealth Training Center on Tuesday. “I have super-high expectations for myself in that aspect. I feel like the coaches do also. They expect great things from me. I’m not trying to play like a rookie. I’m trying to push myself forward, so it’s a building block into next year, too. I always want to be building.”
Fant certainly looks the part. But it has been a slow start. So far in Broncos camp — his first training camp in the pros, always a rough go — he’s stood out for two things: how fast he can run (like a swift wide receiver, plus 40 pounds), and how often he pukes on the practice field (at least four times, by my count). Fant said the speed of the NFL game and how coaches disguise a defense have been key adjustments.
“I go against nickels, corners, safeties, linebackers, anybody. Sometimes Von (Miller) and (Bradley) Chubb drop out in coverage,” he said. “There’s so many moving parts in that defense it’s crazy.”
Fant cited Chris Harris Jr. and Justin Simmons as his fiercest defenders. Makes sense. Defensive backs are the only ones who can catch him.
”I think each day (the pro game) starts to get slower for me,” he said.
It’s rare to see a tight end go in the first round, especially to the Broncos. The last time the Broncos drafted a tight end in the first round was in 1972 with Houston’s Riley Odoms. Watching Harris, Simmons, Kareem Jackson and Will Parks laugh as they count their interceptions after camp practices, it’s hard not to wonder what this defense would look like if Denver had stayed at No. 10 to draft Michigan linebacker Devin Bush. Time will tell if trading back to select Fant was a smart move.
Fant was the second tight end taken in the first round. His Iowa teammate, T.J. Hockenson, went No. 8 overall. Fant was only the ninth tight end taken in the first round in the past decade.
Short list, is what I’m saying.
The best of those was Evan Engram of the Giants (64 catches, 722 receiving yards, six touchdowns, a banner rookie year by any measure). The average rookie-year production from Engram, Hayden Hurst, O.J. Howard, David Njoku, Eric Ebron, Tyler Eifert and Jermaine Gresham: 36 catches, 409 yards and four touchdowns.
Would the Broncos take those stats from Fant in 2019? Yes, in roughly the time it took Fant to complete the 40-yard dash at the combine (4.51 seconds, fastest among tight ends). The Broncos haven’t had a tight end catch 36 passes since Owen Daniels (46) in 2015. It’s an issue.
Fant’s motivation is not an issue. It’s a blessing.
“I have a very special relationship with my family. Especially in sports, my dad’s always pushed me harder and harder. He always wants me to get the most out of what I’ve been given,” Fant said when I asked of the draft-night video.
“The one that kind of got my tears jerking was when my mom came on,” he said. “My mom was always involved in the sports side of my life, but she was always the one to hear me out and give me a hug after the game. Being able to make them proud and accomplish a life goal like that was special for me. I’ll never forget it.”
Broncos to wear No. 87 include Ring of Famers Rich “Tombstone” Jackson and Lionel Taylor, as well as two-time world champ Ed McCaffrey, heartthrob Eric Decker and Manning’s practice target from the Super Bowl 50 season, Jordan “Sunshine” Taylor. They pray Fant is another they will never forget, but not like Paxton Lynch.
Contact Gazette sports columnist Paul Klee at [email protected] or on Twitter at @bypaulklee. | {
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Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and a member of CoinDesk’s product team. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.
The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a free newsletter for institutional investors interested in cryptoassets, with news and views on crypto infrastructure delivered every Tuesday. Sign up here.
In nature, fast is better than slow. Being able to outrun your predator increases your chances of survival, as does being able to outrun your prey. So, evolution does its thing and we emerge hardwired into believing that speed is a prerequisite to success.
This sentiment has spilled over into financial markets. Speed is associated with competitive advantage and additional profits. Just ask any high-frequency trader.
It also reared its head at a recent security token event in London, a small but compelling gathering with entrepreneurs, investors and traditional finance representatives debating what form this new type of asset will take.
One of the exercises was to split participants up into groups and rank the supposed benefits of security tokens. We were given a list of outcomes to choose from, which included liquidity, operational efficiency, transparency, innovation and many others. The lack of a clear consensus was unsurprising, given the diversity of the participants (much like the sector itself). What was surprising, however, was the number that insisted the main benefit was “speed.”
This was surprising, as it is based on three assumptions:
1) That speed is desirable
2) That blockchains confer speed
3) That it is a technology issue.
All of these assumptions, however, are mistaken.
Speed is not a priority
First, let’s look at why we think faster transactions would be desirable.
The main reason is risk reduction. The longer a trade takes to settle, the greater the risk that the buyer will default on its payment commitment. In capital markets, things can happen fast, and an investor who wanted to purchase an asset on Tuesday could be out of funds (or hacked, or have its accounts frozen) by Wednesday.
Traditional markets usually get around this problem with a Central Clearing Party (CCP), which steps in to buy and sell from each participant in the trade in its own name and with its own funds. Yet this adds costs and middlemen to the system, and there is still the (remote) risk that the CCP will disappear, leaving trades half complete.
Security token markets do not yet have a CCP figure. Maybe one will emerge as the market matures, adding further liquidity and reliability. Meanwhile, in crypto assets, lack of a fast trade cycle adds risk.
Faster transactions would also be desirable, in theory, because cash could be used more efficiently — but this is only partially true. If I am the seller and you are the buyer, I would like the cash sooner rather than later, thank you. The sooner I can invest it for a return or use it to meet payments, the better. You, on the other hand, would rather give it to me later, since you probably have it parked somewhere earning interest. Or, maybe you need to sell an asset to raise the cash that you need to give to me.
For the instant settlement that blockchain tech promises, you would need to have funds deposited at the relevant exchange or broker. Even if you do get a return on that (a big “if”), it will be much lower than you could get elsewhere. And if you’re managing money on behalf of others, that’s unlikely to be acceptable.
And, what if I am the owner of the asset, but don’t actually have it on me? Maybe I’ve lent it out to a short-seller or used it for collateral. It might take me a bit of time to unwind that commitment to be able to transfer it to you. The requirement to have it on hand for immediate settlement could curb the growth of lending and collateralization, which would preclude the emergence of a sophisticated market.
To highlight the point, a few years ago the Moscow stock exchange moved from same-day to two-day settlement, in what was touted as a “modernization.”
So, speed in settlement may reduce risk, but it adds a degree of inefficiency.
Blockchains are not fast
Now let’s look at the misconception that a blockchain-based transaction would be faster than one on traditional rails.
Blockchains are much slower than centralized databases. The technology involves validation of a transfer by the entire network, and, depending on the relevant blockchain’s consensus algorithm, could take somewhere between a few seconds and some minutes.
Even private blockchains, which do not have the same consensus considerations, have some degree of latency.
On the other hand, trades on traditional markets take nanoseconds.
Settlement is not faster, either. Last week the Bundesbank released the results of a series of trials it performed with Deutsche Borse which tested blockchain technology vs traditional rails in financial settlement. The blockchain-based system lost in terms of speed and cost.
Technology is not the problem
But, of course, blockchain-based settlement must be faster than traditional settlement – blockchain cuts out middlemen, right? Fewer steps should mean faster transfers of assets and payment.
Perhaps, but the number of steps and middlemen is not a technology issue. It’s about processes, and they evolve over time in response to problems and circumstances. Moving to a blockchain-based transfer and settlement system will not necessarily solve these problems. As we saw earlier, instant settlement is not always desirable.
So, expecting a new type of asset to “solve” a problem that isn’t really there, with technology that isn’t faster, is placing unrealistic expectations on an emerging concept.
And unrealistic expectations will not help these new assets find their market.
What is needed?
What that market will look like is still unclear. What is clear is the sector’s rapid evolution and its potential to help reform capital markets through the spread of blockchain-based assets and settlement.
For that to materialize, however, several things need to happen:
Standards need to be adopted across the sector to ensure interoperability and the smooth transfer of assets and funds.
Regulation and/or oversight needs to be crafted to prevent fraud and a dangerous build-up of risk.
Stablecoin markets need to evolve to enable immediate payment without having to rely on fiat transfers.
And smart contracts need to develop to ensure the reliable transfer of ownership and rights.
All of the above is likely, but even once in place, there is no guarantee that security tokens will trade and settle faster than traditional assets.
Unlike in nature, the evolution of financial markets has shown us that speed is not always in our interests.
In finance, efficiency and resilience are more important than “winning” – just ask the tortoise and the hare.
Cars speeding on freeway image via Shutterstock | {
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Slowly but surely, the gentleness of Jim Jarmusch’s lovely new film steals up on you. It has an almost miraculous innocence. I can’t remember when I last saw a movie whose adult characters had so much simple, unassuming goodness, goodness that breaks everything in the modern culture rulebook by going unironised and unpunished. And Adam Driver’s face is something to fall in love with. An Easter Island statue reborn as a sensitive, delicate boy.
Punch the keys now! Why cinema keeps churning out films about writers Read more
It is about a man called Paterson, played by Driver, who works in Paterson, New Jersey; the coincidence underscores his matter-of-fact hometown loyalty without any great emphasis, though it echoes a similar alignment in the epic poem of that name, and about that place, by William Carlos Williams. Paterson has evidently served in the US military and is now a bus driver. He is also a poet on his own time (an admirer of Williams, in fact), thoughtfully writing in a notebook during breaks. His simple, accessible verses appear on screen in squiggly handwriting as he works. He is not supposed to be a genius, but neither is his work hilariously awful or inadvertently revealing, as it might be in another type of film.
Paterson is very happily married to the beautiful Laura (Golshifteh Farahani) who stays at home, pursuing her talents: painting, decor, cooking. She begs Paterson for money so she can buy a guitar and pursue her dream of being a country singer. But again: this guitar does not bring the financial ruin or mortification that you might expect. The point is that Laura is rather good and her plans are not that implausible. At all times, we laugh the way Paterson laughs – with Laura, not at her.
In the evenings, Paterson walks their English bulldog Marvin and has a quiet beer where he chats with barkeep Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley) and helps sort out the unhappiness of some other bar regulars: young former lovers Marie (Chasten Harmon) and Everett (William Jackson Harper). And his life continues in its utterly happy, non-careerist way until he is confronted with a terrible loss, which appears at first comically absurd but is very serious.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Happy home … Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani. Photograph: Mary Cybulsky/Window Frame Films
This is a real place with real landmarks, yet Jarmusch can’t help reconfiguring it into one of the unreal, ghost-town sites of his imagination. Paterson will walk streets that are weirdly uninhabited, except for sudden, startling cameo-apparitions. It is not that far from the ruined Detroit of his vampire fantasy Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and Paterson’s easy self-reliance is like Forest Whitaker’s in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999).
There is a very real, nuanced moment when, listening in to his passengers’ conversation, Paterson starts smiling at the machismo of a couple of bragging, sexist guys – but a female passenger frowns at them while getting off: Paterson sees that and thoughtfully corrects his own smirk.
Adam Driver’s Paterson is robust, candid, ingenuous – 'without side', as the English say
Yet so much of the rest of the movie is not quite real, or perhaps it is rather that Jarmusch does not replicate reality in the way other film-makers do. Paterson is walking the dog when a crew of gangbangers surreally roll up, yet there is no tension or confrontation: they just ask (admiring) questions about his pet.
The unreality extends to Laura’s persistent, fateful questions about making sure Paterson’s poetry gets out to the public, and worrying that he has made no copies. Both have evidently never considered or even heard of public performance or poetry slams, or sending his work to magazines, or self-publishing digitally. No, all Laura means is Paterson going to a store and getting his poems photocopied – though, unlike her technosceptic husband, she has a smartphone and could presumably photograph them all herself in five minutes. Yet you accept all this as part of the tender protective unworldliness that Jarmusch creates for his characters like an almost magic canopy: Paterson’s work exists in a pre-Gutenberg state and this meshes with Jarmusch’s film-making vernacular.
Adam Driver’s Paterson is robust, candid, ingenuous – “without side”, as the English say. Or, as American soldiers say: he is squared away. That equine, distinguished face is far from the villainy of the new Star Wars movies. He sometimes looks as if he could be any age from 27 down to 17; it is an open and generous face, clouding heartbreakingly at the moment of loss, clearing wonderfully at a final, mysterious, serendipitous encounter. He has never been more beguiling as an actor. | {
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A federal judge in Massachusetts has struck down four key portions of a 2016 municipal ordinance in Newton, a Boston suburb that effectively banned drones.
The lawsuit, which was filed in January 2017 by a local doctor, involves a question that has yet to be fully resolved in the age of increasingly pervasive and inexpensive drones: how much can localities restrict them?
The Newton law, which was passed in December 2016, bans drone flights over private property at or below 400 feet without the property owner’s permission. The law also requires that all drones be registered with the city and that drones not overfly schools, city property, or sporting events without specific permission.
In a Thursday court order, US District Judge William Young concluded that these particular parts of the law went too far. He allowed the other sections of the law to stand and noted to city officials that they could re-draft it to accommodate federal law.
The judge wrote:
Newton's choice to restrict any drone use below this altitude thus works to eliminate any drone use in the confines of the city, absent prior permission... This thwarts not only the FAA's objectives, but also those of Congress for the FAA to integrate drones into the national airspace. Although Congress and the FAA may have contemplated co-regulation of drones to a certain extent, see 81 Fed. Reg. 42063 § (III)(K)(6), this hardly permits an interpretation that essentially constitutes a wholesale ban on drone use in Newton.
Judge Young allowed other unchallenged sections of the ordinance that had to do with privacy, noise, and safety to remain in force.
As Ars reported earlier this year, other cities have already tried to restrict how and where drones can fly. More than a year ago, lawmakers in West Hollywood, California, voted to regulate drone flights after one crashed into a power line.
Last year, a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures noted that in Nevada, property owners now have the right to sue for trespass for any drone operator who flies at a height of less than 250 feet over their property if the owner has warned the pilot once before. Similarly, a law in Oregon also allows for civil suits, but the height requirement is less than 400 feet. Ars is not aware of any civil complaints that have been filed in those states as a result.
Amanda Essex of the NCSL told Ars that at least seven states—Arizona, Delaware, Maryland, Michigan, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Virginia—have passed laws that forbid municipalities in those states from regulating drones.
For his part, the Newton doctor, Michael Singer, told Ars that he was pleased with the ruling.
"The Newton ordinance would have outlawed life-saving technology that may soon be available to our community," he e-mailed, citing this June 2017 press release from Sweden.
Attorneys for Newton did not immediately respond to Ars' request for comment. | {
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The future of the long-stalled Jefferson Parkway was thrown further into disarray this week after elected leaders in Broomfield signaled the city plans to withdraw from the organization overseeing the planned $250 million highway.
In a unanimous vote Tuesday night, the Broomfield City Council formally gave notice to the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority that it wants out after being a voting member of the authority for nearly 12 years.
Broomfield cited an elevated reading of plutonium discovered last summer in the proposed path of the highway — adjacent to the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge and former nuclear weapons manufacturing plant — as the chief reason behind its decision to withdraw.
“After that soil sample, I think it would be irresponsible to move forward with this alignment,” Councilman William Lindstedt said minutes before he cast his vote Tuesday.
What Broomfield’s departure means for the fate of a project that has generated a steady helping of controversy over the last decade or more isn’t clear. But Andrew Goetz, a professor of geography at the University of Denver who is with the school’s Transportation Institute, said Broomfield’s decision is a serious setback.
“It’s a major blow to the project to have a long-standing member decide they don’t want to do this anymore,” Goetz said. “If it’s not the death blow, it’s still a major blow.”
The professor said what’s most in doubt is whether the parkway will have to find a new alignment should Broomfield try to stymie the portion of the proposed tollway that lies within its borders.
Bill Ray, the parkway authority’s executive director, said he was unable to comment on what Broomfield might do going forward. He also said it’s too soon to determine what the city’s move might mean for the overall project, a 10-mile segment of toll road that would run between Broomfield and Golden and serve as one of the last major segments in Denver’s still-elusive beltway.
“Withdrawal requests are governed by the terms of the Establishing Contract creating the Authority,” Ray told The Denver Post. “The ability to withdraw requires unanimous consent of all the member governments.
“Once that negotiation is completed, Jefferson County and Arvada will separately consider the next steps for the parkway. The establishing contract does contemplate both expanding the board or reducing it to as few as two members.”
What the separation likely means in immediate terms is that Broomfield will have to pony up some money to the authority to settle any obligations it has, the council was told by city staff Tuesday.
The city and county has yet to pay the authority the $2.5 million it owes in annual dues for 2019.
According to the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority, Arvada and Jefferson County have each put approximately $6.25 million into preliminary work for the parkway since the authority’s inception in 2008, while Broomfield has contributed $3.4 million in that time.
Arvada Mayor Marc Williams said he was “disappointed” in Broomfield’s decision to head for the exits.
“I would have preferred that they not take any action until we had the analysis completed by the (state) health department,” Williams said Wednesday.
But Councilwoman Guyleen Castriotta was blunt about Broomfield’s dashed faith in the Jefferson Parkway. Rocky Flats, where workers assembled plutonium triggers for the nation’s Cold War arsenal for nearly 40 years, left a legacy of fires and leaks that spread toxic contaminants throughout the site and beyond.
“I can’t believe they built anything there — it should never have been touched,” she said of the land surrounding Rocky Flats that has slowly filled with neighborhoods over the last decade. “Now we have a council that is health and safety first.”
The Jefferson Parkway has faced strong headwinds in the past year, starting with the elevated plutonium reading discovered in August along the eastern fence line of the refuge and inside the corridor for the proposed highway. Then in December, the Jefferson Expressway Group said it was dropping out of consideration as a private-sector partner to design and build the parkway.
The firm said “anticipated (toll) revenue potential does not adequately support the Project’s costs by a sizable gap” and it also cited “ongoing environmental challenges” as a reason for pulling out. There are still two consortiums in the running to build and operate the parkway.
While the plutonium hot spot made headlines, all of the other soil samples taken on or next to the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge — a total of 350 or so — show levels of radioactive contamination well within the federal government’s safety threshold.
Several Broomfield City Council members on Tuesday fretted about losing a seat at the table by withdrawing from the parkway authority.
“It ends the conversation to some extent, as far as Broomfield is concerned. It limits our input on the project going forward,” said Councilman Stan Jezierski.
But Councilwoman Heidi Henkel said the city was accustomed to being outvoted on the board by Arvada and Jefferson County.
“With my experience on the board, we’ve always been outnumbered 2 to 1,” she said.
Most of the people in council chambers Tuesday seemed to be of one mind on Broomfield’s decision to withdraw from the parkway authority: The vote was met by loud applause. | {
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Os Hillman, the right-wing preacher behind the dominionist “Reclaiming the Seven Mountains” website, took to Charisma magazine today to ask the question that has been on everyone’s minds: “ Is God using Donald Trump to wake up the nation?”
“Only God knows the answer to that,” Hillman vaguely concludes, while suggesting that Trump through his “prophetic voice” may be the American equivalent of King Cyrus, the Persian ruler who liberated the Jews. Hillman writes that “God is using” Trump “to uncover the veil of the current political leadership and culture in America to show us the corrupt nature of what is under that veil” and “bring the nation back to some semblance of sanity.”
Hillman also writes that “God seems to be using Fox News to bring light to moral injustices.”
“Fox News has become a prophetic mouthpiece to call the nation back to some sense of moral behavior,” he gushes. “They are bringing attention to issues that the anti-God liberal press refuses to own up to.” | {
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The Best of Rochester Primary Ballot is now closed. Please check back on Wednesday, September 23, for our final poll.
It's time to revisit the Flower City.
Rochester has a wealth of interesting places to explore, people to meet, and things to do. So what is it about this city that you want to tell a newcomer? Or maybe your neighbor is a Rochester native; what should they know in order to see this city with a fresh perspective?
Each year, City Newspaper asks its readers to tell us what YOU think about the best people, places, and things in Rochester. This time, we want to take it a step further: As the Best of Rochester process moves forward, we want our readers to use this opportunity to explore Rochester again. To try a new restaurant. Check out a new mural. Really think about where you would take an out-of-towner.
To get started, we need your suggestions.
Fill in YOUR favorites in at least 40 of the 140 categories for your ballot to count. Voting in the Primary Ballot will close promptly at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 18.
Then check back on Wednesday, September 23, to see which local people, places, and things made the Best of Rochester Final Ballot.
REMEMBER: We are looking for the best of Greater Rochester. Votes for national chains will not be counted.
Did we screw something up? Get rid of a category you love? Neglect to add one you requested? Let us know! E-mail [email protected].
Make sure to follow City Newspaper on Facebook and Twitter for Best of Rochester updates. | {
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I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THE NATIONAL LAWYERS’ GUILD FOUGHT MCCARTHYISM INSTEAD OF SUPPORTING IT: Professor who argued ‘all cultures are not created equal’ targeted for removal from teaching law class.
A law group at an Ivy League university is encouraging the school’s administration to consider barring a professor from teaching a mandatory first-year law course, citing her “segregationist” worldview, “bigoted views” and “cultural elitism.”
In a statement posted to the group’s blog, the National Lawyers Guild chapter at the University of Pennsylvania Law School condemned Penn professor Amy Wax’s recent op-ed at The Philadelphia Inquirer, in which Wax, along with a co-author, lamented the “breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture” and declared: “All cultures are not created equal.”
The members of Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote that Wax’s comments are a “textbook example of white supremacy and cultural elitism” and alleged she is a “segregationist” with “bigoted views.”
“We call on the administration,” Penn’s National Lawyers Guild wrote, “to consider more deeply the toll that this takes on students, particularly students of color and members of the LGBTQIA community, and to consider whether it is in the best interests of the school and its students for Professor Wax to continue to teach a required first-year class.”
Professor Wax is the instructor for a mandatory course at Penn’s law school titled “Civil Procedure.” | {
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Thousands of tenants in Dublin face an unwelcome extra bill this year as spiralling rents tip them above the €2,500-a-month level at which a little-known 1 per cent stamp duty applies.
Some 55 per cent of three-bedroom Dublin city family homes currently up for rent through online property firm Daft.ie are quoting above the threshold, according to an analysis by Goodbody Stockbrokers. A third of apartments in the capital are in the same territory.
The €30,000-a-year level at which the duty kicks in was set in 2008, when it was raised from €19,050. This served to remove liability from most tenants during the financial crash.
Additional costs “In Dublin, families and those sharing accommodation are increasingly being charged rents that now exceed the stamp duty threshold,” said Colm Lauder, a property analyst with Goodbody Stockbrokers.
“This means that they have to pay at least another €300 or more to cover their annual rent costs, on top of already paying record rents in many parts.”
Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe said in response to a parliamentary question from Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy that the duty raised just €150,000 last year with 238 taxpayers declaring liability. That was up from €90,000 for the previous year and €50,000 for 2013.
“It’s not a tax that’s well-known at all,” said Philip O’Sullivan, an economist with Investec in Dublin. | {
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Almost everyone knows someone who works or has worked in one of McDonald’s 7,850 European stores. While McDonald’s portrays itself as a vital provider of jobs, particularly for youth, its workers o‑en experience precarious, low-wage work with little prospect for steady employment or advancement. In the U.K., for instance, the vast majority of McDonald’s 97,000 workers are on zero-hours contracts – employment contracts with neither guaranteed hours nor work schedule stability.
While McDonald’s poor working conditions are well-known, this report is the first to shed light on the company’s tax record. It relies on primary data drawn from the financial accounts of the company and its subsidiaries as well as press and research reports. While transnational corporations like McDonald’s are avoiding taxes in Europe, public sector workers are having their wages slashed, and nurses and social carers are facing layos. In fact, more than 56,000 tax inspectors have been cut throughout the E.U. at precisely the moment they are most needed to investigate companies like McDonald’s. This report provides further ammunition to encourage governments, parliaments, and the European Commission to shine a light on these practices, hold corporate tax avoiders accountable, and begin a real democratic dialogue that results in deep reforms and restores confidence in a fair, progressive, transparent, and effective tax system.
Since 2005, Change to Win has advocated on behalf of workers and the general public for consumer protections, healthcare access, tax fairness, and other safeguards to rebuild the middle class. We are grateful to the team of researchers at Change to Win for compiling these data and hope this report will help put tax justice on the menu at McDonald’s.
For more information | {
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday gave final legislative approval to a $1.2 trillion spending bill to keep the government open through September, a measure President Donald Trump is expected to sign before Friday’s deadline.
FILE PHOTO: The dome of the U.S. Capitol is seen in Washington September 25, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File photo
Senators from both Republican and Democratic parties voted in favor of the bill, which passed 79 to 18 with only Republicans opposing the measure, citing minimal changes to spending levels.
The bill, which was passed 309-118 in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, now heads to Trump. While it failed to include many of the items Trump had requested, he is expected to sign the bill before midnight Friday, when without his signature the government would shut down.
As soon as this spending measure is law, lawmakers and Trump must already begin looking forward to the next deadline on Oct. 1. Lawmakers are hopeful they can pass regular spending bills but the process is likely to be complicated by Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare, a desire to rewrite the tax code and a need to find a deal to raise the debt ceiling since the limit is expected to be reached in the fall.
Under the compromise measure, the Pentagon’s funding increased, a priority that had been laid out by Republicans and Trump. It also funded Democratic priorities, including health care subsidies.
“This bill is far from perfect, but it’s better than how we are spending our money today, better than how we were spending our money a year ago,” Republican Senator Roy Blunt said on the Senate floor.
Democrats also claimed victory in the passage of the legislation, arguing that it fails to fund Trump’s priorities including money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Additionally, the bill funds subsidies for health care coverage provided through the Affordable Care Act, former Democratic President Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislation.
Republican Senator Ted Cruz gave his reasons for voting against the bill.
“While I am pleased to see increased funding for our men and women in uniform and their critical missions across the globe, this bill fails in a number of ways, including by continuing to fund sanctuary cities, Planned Parenthood, and Obamacare,” Cruz said.
Sanctuary cities are those that give limited cooperation to the federal government in enforcing immigration laws and Planned Parenthood is a conservative target because abortion is among the women’s health care services it provides.
The spending bill does not include many of the spending cuts on domestic programs Trump had sought and adds $2 billion for the National Institutes of Health, $295 million for Puerto Rico’s underfunded Medicaid healthcare for the poor and $407 million for firefighting in Western states.
The legislation adds $12.5 billion in defense spending. It makes $2.5 billion more available after Trump gives details on his plans for fighting the Islamic State militant group.
The bill was approved months after the Oct. 1 2016 deadline to pass government funding for the fiscal year. For the past seven months, federal agencies have been operating mainly on simple extensions of the previous year’s funding and the priorities that came with that. | {
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Sweepstakes closes Tuesday, June 13, 2017 at 11:59PM PT
See Official Rules here
CLICK HERE for more details on VIP packages available and to purchase | {
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The BBC has obtained exclusive material from activists from the divided northern Syrian city of Aleppo.
It shows what they say is the rescue of an 11-year-old boy from his home following an air strike on the rebel-held district of Tariq al-Bab early on Monday morning.
Warning: Graphic content. Some viewers may find the images distressing. | {
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'When I photograph my black cat, I end up with a photo of a black blob with eyes. What am I doing wrong?' It's a common problem for people with black pets, not just cats. And if they don't turn out a black blob with eyes but no definition in the coat, they get a grey fluffy mass that isn't black at all. While the kitten, puppy, or bunny might not be too concerned by this sudden change in appearance, anyone who loves her or him might. With a little bit of know-how, it's something that can be overcome, though.
1. Lighting
As a general rule, you don't want to photograph anything in bright, direct sunlight. It'll produce harsh shadows and difficult contrasts. This is especially true for black-coated animals. What you want is soft, diffuse light. If you're taking photos outside, look for the shade from a tree, awning, or building, or take advantage of a cloudy day. A bit of fill-flash to balance the ambient light might help you on your way if it's unavoidably bright. | {
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Western expectations of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s imminent fall were misplaced, says Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Assad has public support, meaning no peaceful resolution of the conflict is possible without his participation, he added.
“All the forecasts made by our colleagues in the West and some other parties that the people would rise up and oust him never came true. This means one thing: Assad represents the interests of a significant part of Syrian society. So no peaceful solution can be found without his participation,” the top Russian diplomat said on Thursday in an interview with Radio Russia.
Earlier US President Barack Obama reiterated he does “not foresee a situation in which we can end the civil war in Syria while Assad remains in power” and that he is not the legitimate leader of Syria.
According to Lavrov, senior officials around the world are coming to realize the truth of Russia’s position on the issue and are beginning to distance themselves from Washington’s policies. Eradicating Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) should take precedence over all other issues, he added.
“I believe that [French President Francois] Hollande’s call to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin after those horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, his suggestion to coordinate our efforts and President [Putin’s] response, which was the willingness to do so as allies – those things signify that now level-headed politicians are dropping secondary issues and realizing the need to concentrate on the biggest issue at hand: stopping ISIS’ attempts to spread influence globally,” the minister said.
READ MORE: Hollande to tell Obama Europe can’t wait for US war of attrition with ISIS to succeed – report
Lavrov reminded that countries, such as France or Assad’s long-time enemy Turkey, had earlier insisted the Syrian president should go immediately and called him a magnet for Islamic State.
“This logic dictates that not only Assad is a magnet for ISIS, but also Lebanon, Turkey, France and Egypt,” Lavrov said, naming the four countries where the terrorist group staged successful attacks in October and November. “ISIS is trying to achieve its goal of creating this so-called caliphate regardless of what happens in Syria and the attitude that anyone has towards Bashar Assad.”
The attacks in Paris were some of the worst instances of violence that Europe has seen in decades. It is believed that groups affiliated with IS planted a bomb on a Russian passenger plane in Egypt and organized bombings in Ankara and Beirut. The combined death toll from the four attacks stands at almost 500.
Russia is calling on the US-led coalition to join forces and defeat IS, arguing that a peaceful resolution will only be possible in Syria after violence is stopped.
“We are currently acting in Syria legally and are willing to cooperate in practice with the members of the [US-led] coalition that are prepared to respect Syria’s sovereignty and the goals of the Syrian government,” Lavrov said.
ISIS magazine claims it could've been British instead of Russian jet downed over Sinai https://t.co/5ioW9oY8Ulpic.twitter.com/sNaYSst81q — RT UK (@RTUKnews) November 19, 2015
He added that IS terrorist attacks are a threat to world peace and stability and fall under Article 7 of the UN Charter, which allows the UN Security Council to use force.
“I am certain that we must pass a UN Security Council resolution, which would state the need to act in accordance with Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and destroy ISIS. The same as we did after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001,” Lavrov said.
He added that Russia proposed a draft resolution to the UNSC that would call on all nations to join forces against IS in September, but it was opposed by other members of the security body.
“Our Western partners said they didn’t like that the resolution stated that anti-terrorist operations should be coordinated with the governments of the states, where such operations take place,” Lavrov said. “Unfortunately we see the willingness to band together on an anti-terrorist platform only after tragedies. I hope more will not occur – even though it cannot be guaranteed – and that we can act preemptively. Terrorists don’t quarrel; they manage to agree pretty well.” | {
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Ubuntu launches the first in a series of converged devices alongside European partner, BQ
Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet brings full Ubuntu experience to life
Ubuntu is the only platform that runs both a mobile-based full touch interface and a true PC experience from a single smart device
Canonical’s long held vision of a single, converged personal computing experience took an important step forward today with the launch of the first fully converged Ubuntu device – the Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet. Shipping with the latest Ubuntu software, the device features a dynamically adaptive user experience, capable of providing both a true tablet experience and the full Ubuntu desktop experience.
Ubuntu is already firmly established as the preferred desktop experience of over 30 million users worldwide. The first three models of Ubuntu phones quickly sold out when they hit the market last year. With this latest software release and the launch of the Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition, Ubuntu is now the only platform that runs both a mobile-based full touch interface and a true PC experience from a single smart device. This gives device manufacturers the opportunity to create true device convergence and bring the full power of personal computing to modern touch-based mobile devices.
Jane Silber, Canonical CEO said: “We’re bringing you everything you’ve come to expect from your Ubuntu PC, now on the tablet with BQ, soon on smartphones. This isn’t a phone interface stretched to desktop size – it’s the right user experience and interaction model for the given situation. Also, in terms of applications, we have something no other OS can provide: a single, visual framework and set of tools for applications to run on any type of Ubuntu smart device.”
Key Ubuntu convergence features
Building on the secure, reliable core of Ubuntu, the native Ubuntu tablet experience also features the ability to access content and services readily through scopes, as popularised on Ubuntu Phone. Hundreds of apps and scopes are already available in the Ubuntu App Store. Additionally, the tablet “side stage” feature allows you to view two different applications on the same screen, with each intuitively optimised for available tablet screen space.
Further convergence features include:
Effortless multitasking and window management;
Full range of desktop applications and thin client support for mobility and productivity;
Integrated services with desktop notifications;
Ability to manage applications and easily organise favoured ones for fast access;
Simple file browsing, file and folder creation and management;
Responsive applications developed for both touch and point/click input and which re-shape to whichever UI is being displayed;
Comprehensive system control and access to the underlying OS if required;
Single application store with a range of compatible third party services;
Communication from the desktop interface using the phone’s telephony and messaging applications;
All the security, updates, and reliability features appreciated by Ubuntu users worldwide.
Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet features
The Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition is the first device to offer an Ubuntu convergent experience. It is also the first tablet with the Ubuntu Operating System. Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition brings Ubuntu’s rich full touch experience to life. It’s simple to connect a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to convert the Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition into a full Ubuntu PC, featuring everything you know and love about Ubuntu. Then, connect the tablet to an external display for a full-sized PC experience.
“The Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition is our third mobile device to ship with Ubuntu. Our customers were delighted with the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition phones, and we’re excited to be the first OEM to ship the converged Ubuntu experience. It’s this kind of innovation that makes BQ and Ubuntu such a great fit,” said Rodrigo del Prado, Deputy CEO of BQ.
The Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet has a 10.1 inch multitactile FHD screen with Dragontrail Asahi protection. This light and compact tablet offers an excellent balance between sleek design and autonomy: with 8.2 mm of thickness and 470 grams in weight, it includes a 7280 mAh LiPo battery. It has a powerful MediaTek Quad Core MT8163A to 1.5 GHz processor which gives the extremely high performance. View the full spec.
What’s the value to the enterprise?
For businesses, Ubuntu convergence combines everything you need to take your work with you. It works seamlessly with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and thin client services and easily mixes local and web applications for mobile and desktop use. Excellent security comes as standard as part of the Ubuntu OS but Ubuntu convergence brings unparalleled enterprise-grade, system-based security. For many organisations wanting to take tight control over their own systems, avoiding third party access, Ubuntu is ideal.
For consumers?
If you love being able to connect your PC to your TV, this is now simple via your mobile device. You can run all your favourite apps on the tablet but benefit from a full PC interface – familiar and easy to navigate. It’s all about making life easier and so now it’s simple to create documents, send messages and stay connected in the same way as you do on the PC.
And what about partners? (OEMS / ODMS/Operators)
For partners there’s a real opportunity to diversify and differentiate from nearly identical slabs of glass, and to participate in real innovation in the mobile space. Canonical’s mobile experts have deep knowledge and experience working with a range of OEMs and ODMs having successfully launched devices worldwide.
The opportunity for developers
Third party developers will be able to easily create new Ubuntu applications which only need to be developed once but which can be available and used across all Ubuntu interfaces. The Ubuntu SDK provides the fundamental tools developers need to make their apps easy to adapt and run on any display. When you see your application on the phone and then use that application on the desktop, it is the exact same code running each application. Ubuntu does not need to know if the app is coded for a mobile or desktop display rather it is the application that surfaces the appropriate interface depending on which display is required.
The Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition tablet will be on sale from Q2 2016 via BQ’s online store.
-Ends-
About BQ
BQ is a leading European technology company. Its goal is to help people to understand technology, encourage them to use and inspire them to create it. It is committed to education in technology, DIY philosophy and the Open Source Initiative. BQ applies this philosophy to its products (smartphones, 3D printers, robotics and much more) and software solutions by working to make technology a tool for improving the world and the lives of its users. | {
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Although researchers know that cancer risk increases as a person ages and gains weight, whales, the world’s largest mammals, do not experience this correlation. In fact, they are some of the animals least likely to get cancer. New research aims to find out why that is. Share on Pinterest The humpback whale (pictured) and other cetaceans have an extremely low risk of cancer. How is this relevant to human cancer research? At its core, cancer starts when cells mutate abnormally and start growing and dividing uncontrollably, in a way that disrupts the normal functioning of their biological environment. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer is the second leading cause of death at a global level, affecting millions of people of all ages worldwide. Some researchers have argued that the diseases that fall under the cancer umbrella have become more widespread in the modern world, largely due to factors such as pollution and other environmental changes caused by human action. Still, many studies show that people have experienced cancer for thousands of years. The earliest case of cancer that researchers have so far been able to document occurred in a hominin (early human ancestor) whose remains date back 1.7 million years. Investigators located these remains in a South African cave, and they yielded evidence of osteosarcoma, an aggressive type of bone cancer, at the dawn of the human race. Yet humans and their ancestors are not the only animals to have been affected by cancer through history. Anecdotally, cancer is the leading cause of death in cats and dogs, and some birds, reptiles, and fish — in captivity and in the wild — can experience cancer, too. Furthermore, according to recent discoveries, even dinosaurs sometimes developed cancer.
Age, weight, and cancer risk Experts explain that a person’s age and their weight can heighten their risk of developing cancer. That makes sense because the longer someone lives, the more time there is for cells to mutate, and because, as the body ages, its cells may be more susceptible to mutations. Also, the more a person weighs, and some scientists even suggest, the taller they are, the more cells there are that can undergo mutation. However, these correlations do not apply evenly across species in the animal kingdom. In fact, some animals are extremely unlikely to develop cancer, despite the fact that they are very large and long-lived. Elephants, porpoises, and whales have incredibly low rates of cancer. Researchers have been wondering why and considering whether these animals’ resistance to cancer could help humans better understand the disease and how best to fight it. A study published last year and covered on Medical News Today may have found the answer in the case of elephants. These large pachyderms, it turns out, have a tumor-suppressing gene that allows their bodies to stop cancer from forming. Humans have this gene, too. However, while humans have only one copy of it, elephants have as many as 20 copies. So what about whales? A team of researchers from Northern Arizona University, in Flagstaff, the Arizona State University, in Tempe, and other collaborating institutions believes that the answer may, once more, lie in these aquatic mammals’ genes.
Why cancer doesn’t affect whales For this study — the findings of which appear in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution — the researchers obtained permission to analyze a skin sample from Salt, an adult female humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). Salt frequents the waters off the coast of Massachusetts, and the researchers decided to focus on her because other scientists, as well as humpback whale-watchers, have been following her for a long time, since the mid-1970s, to be precise, so there is no shortage of data about her. The research team — led by Marc Tollis, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University — performed DNA and RNA sequencing on the skin sample collected from Salt in order to assemble a map of her genome. Once they had accomplished that, the investigators compared these data with information on the genetic makeup of various mammals, including members of 10 other cetacean species, such the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus), and the sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus). The investigators’ analysis revealed that certain genomic loci (specific parts of the genome) had evolved at a faster rate in whales than they had in other mammals. Specifically, these were loci containing genes that regulate cell cycle, proliferation, and the process of in-cell DNA repair — essentially, the maintenance process of healthy cells. Tollis and the team note that the genes responsible for these cell maintenance processes mutate in human cancers. Another characteristic that sets whales apart from other mammals is that they have many duplications of tumor-suppressing genes, the genes that prevent cancer from developing and growing. “This suggests that whales are unique among mammals, in that in order to evolve their gigantic sizes, these important ‘housekeeping’ genes, that are evolutionarily conserved and normally prevent cancer, had to keep up in order to maintain the species’ fitness,” explains Tollis. “We also found that despite these cancer-related parts of whale genomes evolving faster than [in] other mammals, on average, whales have accumulated far fewer DNA mutations in their genomes over time, compared to other mammals, which suggests they have slower mutation rates,” he continues. | {
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Award-winning comedian Jimmy Brogan is known for his
very funny, sparkling clean comedy act. Los Angeles City Beat called him, "the funniest audience interactive comedian in the business."
Jimmy Brogan has performed his act on
The Tonight Show
with Jay Leno and The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson as well as
Late Night with David Letterman .
This bright clean comedian just might be right for your next event | {
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“I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead, hunted by scavangers, haunted by those I could not protect. So I exist in this Wasteland.” — Mad Max
“Where must we go, we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?” — Epilogue
George Miller opens and closes Fury Road with references to The Wasteland, the Grail Legend in which the spiritual sickness of a king is reflected in the barrenness of his kingdom. Just as in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem which takes its themes from the same story, in Fury Road the allusion is used to suggest that the bleakness we see in the external world finds its source in individual spiritual malaise.
This emphasis on psychological suffering is the reason Max is introduced to us as a subhuman character who lives a “half life” and suffers from a failure of reason (madness). His unkempt appearance and predatory behavior stresses his animalistic nature, as does his subsequent transformation into a beast of prey (“hunted by scavangers”) and his getting branded like cattle and muzzled like a dog. Fury Road will eventually restore both reason and humanity to Max, but in its first act the film paints its lead as less than human, even denying his character a name and referring to him simply as “blood bag”, a commoditization of life in tune with the script’s comparison of blood to gasoline (“top me up,” shouts Nux) and of men to machines.
As the film picks up, George Miller shows us the consequences of this individual madness and human commodification: the emergence of the Wasteland with its scarred and deformed people, the “sour” soil which parallels the infertile people, the exploitative economic structure (depicting a white elite subjugating an aboriginal community) and the predominance of death personified in the figure of Immortan Joe. The loss of humanity in these scenes is also reflected in the assembly-line production of “mother’s milk” (corporate profiteering replacing maternal affection), the general reliance on child labour, as well as Miller’s ironic repurposing of corporate symbols into religious and artistic artifacts, as in the War Boys’ worship of the V8 engine, casual religious references to “McFeasting in Valhalla” or even the transformation of music itself into a tool of war. We see all of these dystopian practices most directly with the Citadel, but George Miller generalizes his complaint about the destructive qualities of capitalism through casual references to other predatory settlements, such as “Gas Town” run by “The People Eater”.
Thematically, the point Fury Road is making is that the dysfunctional corporatism it sees as corrupting modern society is the consequence of humans living inauthentic and isolated lives, and that the consequence of any such a mode-of-living is self-destruction. And this is why the first part of Fury Road ends with a spectacle of violence and death. As the Citadel is betrayed by Furiosa, undone by the very forces it has engendered in classic Marxist fashion, an orgy of Roman-themed violence (note the visual references to the chariot race from Ben Hur) unfolds to suggest the essentially fascist and imperial nature of the regime. When Max sees his car (mirroring himself) repurposed into a tool of war and asks what else will be taken from him, the film has already given us its answer: his life. Visually crucified riding into an apocalyptic storm, Max is portrayed in these scenes as an ironic Christ figure, a “universal donor” whose blood sacrifice will ultimately topple the Empire. And thus the first part of the film ends with the death of Max as light fades to darkness in the sands of the lifeless desert.
With his characterization of the Wasteland complete, Miller turns his attention to the question of escaping from it, and as the second act of the film begins, the aggressive death imagery of the Wasteland is replaced by visuals of fertility and life, with day replacing night, the women unchaining themselves from locks suggestive of patriarchal control, and water (a symbol of life here) spilling onto the sands in sexualized anticipation of the larger release we will see at film’s end. Max is also symbolically reborn, yet as his character draws upwards from the grave, we see that he is still chained to Nux (“worthless” in proto Indo-European languages), the figure he most closely resembles and whose “night fevers” (bad dreams) make him a double for both Max (who is haunted by the dreams of his family) and Furiosa (who is obsessed with a vision of the past). The film has opened the possibility of redemption, but only to small degree: this idyllic interlude is unsustainable and the characters are still threatened from without.
The fight scene that follows ends with Max’s inability to escape in the stolen rig, a thematic failure that follows from his violent and selfish behavior. Yet as the escape continues and Max and Furiosa come to place greater trust in each other and promote each other’s welfare (as Max becomes “useful” to the community) their actions trigger a series of psychological changes. While letting Furiosa back onto the truck earns Max the file, for instance, it is Max’s voluntary decision to repair the sabotaged rig which triggers the removal of his animal mask. This same logic — victory following community-oriented acts of self-sacrifice — continues right up through Max’s defeat of the Bullet Farmer, where his character risks abandonment for the sake of the women and his selfless actions lead symbolically to his rediscovery of hope and restoration of sanity, and he returns to taste feminine love (mother’s milk) for the first time.
In these scenes and others, Fury Road argues that eliminating social exploitation requires a return to the communal love first experienced in childhood, and particularly between mother and child. This motif is most obvious with Furiosa, whose quest is quite literally an attempt to return to the green paradise of youth. Yet the journey is a return to the past in other ways too, such as the canyon entrance suggestive of a vaginal crevice, the dream-like realm of crows (a common symbol of the otherworld) beyond which we find the lost elders, not only Furiosa’s family but historically the pre-capitalist aboriginal communities from which “stolen children” were historically abducted by Australian society. The journey into the past is redemptive because it recovers an awareness of love, the seeds (of fertility and hope for the future), the wisdom of the elders, and turns society towards democratic forms of government instead of autocratic tyranny.
While George Miller sees the memory of childhood as necessary for overcoming our tendencies towards inhumanity, he is not so naive as to argue it is possible to recreate the past. Traveling back into the symbolized womb, we are shown it transformed into an infertile swamp. Furiosa is driven to despair on her recognition of this fact, and Miller pulls back from romanticizing pre-modern society, cautioning that living in the past is not only futile (the seeds won’t take) but that a true paradise requires movement into the future. As indicated by Miller’s allusions to The Wasteland, spiritual reformation will trigger social renewal, but it will come through a restoration of the barren kingdom introduced to us at the start of the story, not the creation of a new and better one elsewhere: the society that must change is the Citadel, for the Citadel is the only society there is.
This is the thematic and mythic reason driving the closing act, and this is also why the third act offers a conscious structural reversal of the first one. Standing on the cliff, Max is motivated by his past demons to rescue his friends from a fruitless attempt to find arable land in the ocean saltlands (the chaser and not the chased). Similar reversals continue through the journey home, as Max’s visions of the dead now help where they had previously hurt him, in one case even triggering a physiological response that saves his life. Now that Max is surrounded by community and properly motivated, even his suffering is transformed into a positive force. It is possible Miller is arguing that suffering is necessary for change, and that our experience of it enables us to become a catalyst for social change.
Regardless, the reversals we see in Max are paralleled by psychological transformations in other characters. As the film veers towards the death of death itself, Max’s doppleganger Nux regains his humanity through a romantic relationship that gives his life new meaning and his white face paint visibly fades as he recaptures his individual identity (note the somewhat paradoxical idea that the individual can only exist in community). By the time of his sacrificial death (a giving of blood that parallels Max’s donation to Furiosa) we even see Nux undergo a genuine religious experience where the emphasis is on his individuality (“witness me“), and his sacrifice contrasts with the suicide attacks by the War Boys, characterized as those are by ritualistic face-painting (the covering of the self) and drug-induced mania (the loss of human reason).
When Rictus describes his baby brother as “perfect in every way”, the audience intuitively understands that this is an ironic comment on the Wasteland, and the way human values in such an apocalyptic condition value life only as a commodity and without regard to its most important characteristic (conscious existence). But the defeat of Joe Immortan offers the defeat of death and this entire mindset, and the chase closes with Max donating blood to Furiosa in a re-enactment of the Christ myth: an inversion of the first act in which Max’s similar donation was involuntary. By shedding his blood for the community, and of his own free will, Max finally recovers his name (and full humanity) and becomes symbolically whole again as the group rides off into the sunset in an ending which echoes the positive conventions of the Western genre.
The closing scenes serve as epilogue which confirm this reading. The return to the Citadel shows the Wasteland restored. It is the protagonists’ acts of mutual rescue (their sacrifice to save Furiosa) which now save them in turn as the group is lifted heavenward by the children (the future rather than the past) who respond to maternal affection. The masses of humanity are uplifted where they had been previously downtrodden and water spills out into the desert in an image suggestive of both life and sexual fertility. Politically and mythologically, Australia has come to integrate its past into its present and undermined an exploitative and racist class structure. At the same time, Miller continues the Marxist themes of his previous films, showing that while Max may be the catalyst of this social change, he is denied it as a force trapped forever in his own time. | {
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Introduced in April, support for the Oculus Rift seemingly opened the doors for an all new experience. Like Minecraft VR, making use of the up-close-and-personal viewpoint allows Roblox creators to generate content that previously couldn’t be realized by simply using a flat monitor.
Despite the Rift’s current cost, Roblox isn’t going to hesitate on its VR rollout. We asked David Baszucki about the company’s roadmap regarding virtual reality, and the response it has seen thus far in regards to Oculus Rift usage, and generated content for VR on a whole.
Digital Trends: Roblox launched on the Oculus Rift back in April. How are things progressing?
David Baszucki: The feedback from the community has been incredible. We recently had several of our developers try out various Roblox experiences in VR for the first time during our Roblox Developers Conference in August, and the universal comment is that the immersion and the social connection are radically heightened. For example, if users play Bird Simulator, they will actually feel as if the trees and other creatures are flying past them in real life.
In addition, we’re already seeing positive improvements in terms of comfort and control for our users since the launch of Roblox on VR. We have experimented with a variety of ideas to improve the comfort of the default camera and game/mouse controllers, and have shipped improvements to both. We have redesigned most of the in-game GUI to be native VR, so it is floating and fixed in 3D space at a comfortable distance. We have also revamped how notifications work, eliminating slide-in alerts and introducing a centralized notifications review panel.
How does the VR aspect work in regards to free access to Roblox versus the Builder’s Club?
All of our platforms, including VR, are available for every user to use as they wish. By default, we allow all developers, whether they’re part of our Builders Club or not, to publish their experiences to the cloud so that it is playable across any device, including PC, Mobile, Tablet, Xbox One, and VR.
What’s your view of virtual reality gaming and its relation to user generated content?
Our vision at Roblox is to fulfill a core human need that not only involves communication and storytelling, but most importantly, doing things together. That’s why the vast majority of our most popular games tend to be social experiences, where users are hanging out in a virtual club, exploring, or building with their friends.
User Generated Content (UGC) platforms, like Roblox, are carving a new niche in virtual reality gaming called “social co-experience.” As virtual reality matures, the social co-experience genre will become the dominant category on VR, ultimately surpassing video games.
The video hosted on your Roblox blog shows an individual using the Oculus Rift and a controller. Can players utilize a mouse and keyboard?
Although keyboard and mouse controls can be used in conjunction with the Oculus Rift, gamepads provide a much more natural sense of control. You are not constrained in one direction, and you are given more freedom to turn and move your body.
Once hand controllers become more prevalent, they will become the preferred input method for immersive VR experiences. We are currently working to incorporate hand controllers to provide a much more authentic, life-like experience.
When we talk about Roblox and VR, we can’t ignore the fact that Roblox is aimed at users between 8 and 18. Do you think gamers in that age group will get on board with VR?
We are creating the future of play. Our vision is to empower the imagination of kids and teens so that they are encouraged to create and think outside of the box without boundaries or limits. The emergence of VR allows us to take our vision to the next level. We are creating an opportunity for up-and-coming game developers to create an experience and immediately have it work on computers, mobile devices, Xbox One, and now VR.
Over time, more and more people will want to use VR as a social platform to chat and co-experience with their friends. While it’s still in a relatively immature state, more and more people over time will want to use VR as a social platform to chat and co-experience with their friends. We are excited to grow and support this industry as it continues to evolve, especially as the hardware matures and more immersive, high fidelity Roblox experiences emerge from our community.
Given the benefits of VR, do you expect Roblox to become a platform for a larger, more adult audience?
Roblox is a platform for all ages. What’s really exciting is hearing from the parents about how enthusiastic they get about the imaginative and open world that’s available for their children to create and explore. Kids who dream about becoming an artist or game developer are motivated to go to college and continue pursuing those careers because of the remarkable experiences they have building on Roblox.
There have also been many stories about how young and older developers alike are paying for their college tuition using the funds they’ve earned from their experiences as part of our Developer Exchange Program.
For the average 20-year-old, building a game from scratch, publishing it on multiple platforms, and monetizing it is a complex process. Roblox already does all of that for the next generation of game developers.
What’s the roadmap look like for the rest of 2016? What about 2017?
With Roblox’s success on Oculus Rift, our plan is to ultimately expand to additional VR platforms and incorporate hand controllers in order to increase a user’s ability to immerse themselves in their environment.
Our efforts are currently focused on two areas: clients optimized for premium, PC- and console-coupled VR hardware and mobile VR experiences. While the mobile efforts are currently constrained somewhat by the technical specifications of available hardware, our long-term goal is to make Roblox the world’s premier platform for both publishing and consuming VR game experiences.
Everything that we do today and in the future will adhere to our vision of driving social immersion and co-experience, powered by user-generated content. As the market for VR headsets matures and as we expand to new platforms, you’re going to see Roblox become more immersive as environments look increasingly real over time.
Can you talk about Roblox and PlayStation VR?
We are not yet ready to announce any plans, but it’s a safe assumption that that’s where we should be heading next. Since we shipped on Xbox One in February, we have been the top most downloaded game on the Xbox Store. It’s a real logical conclusion that we will get the same effect on PlayStation 4, and we will also be in an environment to take advantage of PlayStation VR at the same time.
Editors' Recommendations | {
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– För mig är det nästan omöjligt att tro att hormonerna vi utsätts för i livmodern inte också påverkar hur vår hjärna formas, säger han.
Medfött eller inlärt?
För att testa om kvinnors och mäns förmågor skiljer sig åt skapade man i filmen ett stickprovstest i två delar som sex män och sex kvinnor fick utföra. Den första delen handlar om rumslig planering, kopplat till navigering och kartläsning, något män ofta tror sig vara bättre på än kvinnor. Här visade också i resultatet att männen lyckades lite bättre än kvinnorna.
I nästa del testades istället hur bra deltagarna var på att avgöra känslor hos en annan person, ett område där kvinnor stereotypt har övertaget. Mycket riktigt visade det sig också att kvinnorna presterade bättre än männen i testets andra del, och samma resultat har kunnat ses i större skala med 300 deltagare.
Men betyder det här att mäns hjärnor faktiskt är mer lämpade för navigering, medan kvinnor är mer i kontakt med sina känslor? Eller kan det här vara något som lärts in sedan födseln?
Gina Rippon, professor i kognitiv neuroradiologi har gjort liknande försök men menar att det istället handlar om hur man lärt sig att närma sig en uppgift. Ändrar man uppgiftens utformning kan man lätt ändra resultaten. Man är helt enkelt inställd på att som kvinna vara sämre på vissa saker.
– Jag har haft svårt att hitta skillnader i hjärnan, säger hon. Våra erfarenheter formar hjärnan, och ändrar hjärnans banor. Man har lärt sig att ”tjejer är inte bra på matte”, och då blir det en självuppfyllande profetia i sådana här tester.
Apor väljer leksaker
Leksaker är ett annat område där det råder het debatt. Barn uppmuntras att leka på olika sätt och det rättfärdigas med biologi. Men kan det ligga något bakom det?
2002 försökte psykologer reda ut detta i ett experiment på apor – en grupp de ansåg omöjligt kan ha utsatts för samhällets påtryckningar om könsroller. I försöket spred man ut leksaker som är typiskt förknippade med flickor eller pojkar på en gräsmatta. Sedan testade man vilka leksaker aporna helst tog i och hur länge. Enligt resultaten såg man att hannarna var mer intresserade av bilarna och honorna av dockorna, något som forskarna ansåg visa att det faktiskt ligger biologi bakom leksaksvalen.
– Tidigare har vi trott att vi uppmuntrar barn att leka med olika leksaker baserat på kön för att förbereda dem för olika könsroller i vuxenlivet. Men vi ser här att även apor som aldrig kommer köra bil väljer att leka med bilar. Jag tror det kan bero på att den manliga hjärnan är mer benägen att tycka om att titta på saker som rör sig, säger Melissa Hines, professor i psykologi, som låg bakom den ursprungliga studien 2002.
Men Malin Ah-King, evolutionsbiolog och genusforskare, är inte imponerad av resultaten. Hon menar att man i studien har fått kämpa för att få statistiken att visa det man ville eftersom resultaten inte var tydliga.
– Man tänker att man ska använda apor som en modell för det biologiska i människan där man kan ta bort den sociala faktorn. Men apor har ju också erfarenheter med sig från sin sociala omgivning som påverkar. Dessutom visar den ursprungliga studien inte att hannarna hade någon preferens i leksaker över huvud taget, säger hon till SVT.
Testosteron påverkar social utveckling
Simon Baron Cohen, professor i utvecklingspsykologi, är en av filmens forskare som tror att hormoner ligger bakom könsskillnader. Han forskar speciellt på autism, en sjukdom som drabbar främst män och som han tror kan vara en extrem form av den manliga profilen. I hans studier mäter han de testosteronnivåer som ett barn utsätts för i livmodern och följer sedan upp barnet för att se om deras beteende påverkats av nivåerna senare i livet.
– Man kan se ett samband mellan höga halter testosteron och en benägenhet att analysera system. På samma sätt hänger de höga halterna också ihop med långsammare social utveckling, säger han.
Går inte att avgöra
Men finns det verkliga bevis för att kvinnors och mäns hjärnor faktiskt är skapta olika? Ett forskarlag i Philadelphia har genomfört en studie av hjärnans mikroskopiska kopplingar, och kommit fram till att de skiljer sig mer än man trott mellan män och kvinnor.
– Jag trodde det måste vara ett misstag. Jag är inte van vid att få ut så rena resultat av en studie, säger Ruben Gur, professor i psykologi, som är en av forskarna bakom studien. Studien har dock blivit kritiserad för att inte visa så tydliga resultat som den påstår.
Forskarna har skapat en karta över kopplingar mellan hjärnhalvorna och har bland annat sett att kvinnor har fler kopplingar mellan höger och vänster hjärnhalva. Skulle det kunna förklara stereotypt kvinnliga beteenden, som simultanförmåga?
Det anmärkningsvärda i studien är att dessa skillnader inte finns hos barn utan uppstår någon gång i tonåren. Det får forskarna att fundera över om skillnaderna skulle kunna bero på socialt tryck snarare än att de är något medfött. Tyvärr är det kanske något vi aldrig kan få reda på, menar Ragini Verma, en av forskarna bakom studien. Även Malin Ah-King tror att det kan bli en svår uppgift.
– Olika hjärnfunktioner kan bero på att hjärnan utvecklas efter hur vi använder den och behöver inte vara något medfött, och det är svårt att utröna vilket som är vilket. Vi är så pass sociala varelser att det är otroligt svårt att göra ett experiment som ger svar på detta, säger hon.
Filmen Flickor och pojkar – Födda olika? visas i Vetenskapens värld ikväll, där det kommer handla mer om Michael Mosleys och Alice Roberts jakt efter svar. Efter programmet kan du chatta med Malin Ah-King och andra forskare om filmen klockan 21.00. | {
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Fed Up With Harassment, Author Reveals Her Cyberstalker
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jordan Edwards Jordan Edwards
Each week, Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.
Melissa Anelli is the author of Harry, A History, a best-selling book about Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling's famous series. And for more than five years, she has also been the victim of a cyberstalker.
Anelli initially reached out to New Zealand resident Jessica Elizabeth Parker when moderators of Anelli's online forum reported harassing behavior. "I wrote her an email with all of my staff cc'd, asking her to please listen to my staff," Anelli tells NPR's Rachel Martin. "She told me she would immediately, and the next morning, I woke up to a death threat."
She went to the police, but a restraining order would only be useful if the stalker was in New York, where Anelli lives. As the rate of harassing messages increased, she finally turned to the FBI.
There, she got immediate assistance. "The agent was a massive Harry Potter fan, which helped, I think," Anelli says. "She was the first one to say to us that no, you absolutely shouldn't be going through this, and we can help."
There was no big break in the case until late 2011, when Parker was arrested for criminal harassment in New Zealand. Parker was instructed not to contact Anelli, and to stay off the Internet. But the day Parker's restrictions were lifted, Anelli received another threat.
The normal is 3 to 5 times a week. She'll go on a string so ... I'll get 20 messages you know, in a day. And they range from really, really, really graphic rape threats to really graphic death threats, to threats of both of them at once. And it goes in waves, you know? So it's very, very, very very frequent.
Anelli was hopeful that because Parker had been arrested once, it would be easy to have her apprehended again, for her more recent messages. Not so, but she has been blocked from entering the U.S. Getting a cyberstalker placed on the Interpol database was a really big deal at the time, Anelli says.
Since then, the harassment has continued. Anelli takes comfort in the fact that Parker's a long way away, but "that doesn't stop you from fearing what's behind the door every time somebody unexpected is there." She's sought therapy, locked down her online presence, and turned to her family and friends.
But being quiet doesn't feel like enough. "You're not supposed to engage her ... but whether you like it or not, you do forge a familiarity with your stalker," she says. "When she makes a fake account, I can spot that account by the name, instantly." So Anelli decided it was time to start talking about her experience publicly.
Anelli's experience has dramatically affected the way she lives her life. She built her career online, and she once enjoyed connecting with people there. "This has completely changed that in the sense that I'm a much more suspicious person."
Join Our Sunday Conversation
When you use social media, do you worry about bad, even criminal online behavior, such as bullying or stalking? Tell us on the Weekend Edition Facebook page, or in the comments section below. | {
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The last human to walk on the moon was Eugene Cernan, commander of the Apollo 17 mission, on December 14, 1972. That was 43 years ago, and to this day, the Apollo program is still the high point of crewed space flight. Apollo missions are still the only ones that ever sent human beings to walk on another (natural) celestial body of any sort.
Earlier this month Kipp Teague, the founder of the Apollo Project, (independent from NASA) added a Flickr gallery of photos that were painstakingly scanned from the original film rolls astronauts took with large-format Hasselblad cameras. The photos themselves were in the public domain—they just weren't available so easily online, at such high resolution.
Some photos in the stream are recognizable; the iconic shot of Buzz Aldrin standing with the reflection of the Apollo lunar module in his visor is among the images. But some are less so: two of the astronauts on the mission, one of them Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert, working to ensure they'd survive the near tragic voyage. And there are less dramatic, but human moments: Harrison "Jack" Schmitt shaving in the Apollo 17 lunar module, Ronald Evans spacewalking during Apollo 12's return trip to retrieve film, or his crewmates Schmitt and Gene Cernan sitting together, grinning on the trip home. | {
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Long before he was Christopher Nolan's Batman, Christian Bale made one of his earliest big-screen performances in Newsies, a musical based on the Newsboys Strike of 1899. Despite being unpopular with critics, and one of the biggest box office failures in Disney's history, the film has developed a huge cult fan base over the years—so much so that Disney decided to adapt the film—which was released 25 years ago today—into a very successful Broadway show almost 20 years after its initial release.
1. CHRISTIAN BALE DIDN'T REALIZE IT WAS A MUSICAL AT FIRST (BECAUSE IT WASN'T).
In 1997, Christian Bale told Movieline that he never had any interest in doing a musical. "I still don't. In fact, when I first read the script, I thought it wasn't a musical. Later, after I realized it was, I asked [director] Kenny [Ortega] if maybe I could duck over here into the pub while the numbers were going on, and then come out when it was over. I hoped I could be the lead in a musical without doing any singing and dancing! Eventually I said, 'F**k it, let's just do it.' But I had a lot of doubts about it—I never liked musicals, and even then I knew I'd never do anything like that again."
Newsies was originally written as a drama. Disney CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg asked that it be turned into a musical after the success of The Little Mermaid (1989).
2. MILLA JOVOVICH AUDITIONED TO PLAY SARAH.
Milla Jovovich didn't get the part, even though she could sing. Her readings with Bale were considered "abrasive." Ele Keats was cast in the role, despite her lack of singing talent (which is why a planned Sarah song was cut).
3. MAX CASELLA DID HIS HOMEWORK.
Max Casella, who played Racetrack Higgins, was so excited about starring in his first major motion picture that he "lived" at the Los Angeles Public Library researching the role. Casella, Bale, and the rest of the principal cast of kids spent 10 weeks training in singing, dancing, gymnastics, and martial arts for the musical numbers.
4. BALE'S SISTER PLAYED MEDDA'S ASSISTANT.
Louise Bale originally had a song of her own, but she only ended up appearing briefly, grabbing Medda (Ann-Margret) after Racetrack was punched at the riot.
5. ALAN MENKEN COLLABORATED WITH THE CO-WRITER OF TONY BENNETT'S "COPACABANA."
To write the music for the film, composer Alan Menken partnered with his old friend, lyricist Jack Feldman. Feldman claimed the two had to write the songs quickly because they had to be pre-recorded.
6. BALE GOT HIS OWN COLORS.
YouTube
Jack purposely stood out in dark colors, contrasting with the other newsies in brown. Bale's character was also the one person with the "touch of red."
7. THE BOYS KEPT PRANKING THEIR DIRECTOR.
First-time director Kenny Ortega (who would go on to direct the High School Musical movies) was the victim of multiple water gun attacks. In one incident, some of the cast failed to dump water over Ortega's head as he was leaving the set to go home. To make sure they got their man, Bale and David Moscow (David Jacobs) unleashed a ground assault on their target. Aaron Lohr (Mush) also claimed that Ortega's trailer would be filled up to the ceiling in newspapers, ready to topple whenever Ortega opened it.
8. A 25-MINUTE HORROR MOVIE SPOOF WAS MADE ON SET.
Michael Goorjian (Skittery) directed Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square. In the film, "Don Knotts" (Mark David, a.k.a. Specs) methodically kills off the newsboys after he doesn't get a part in Newsies.
9. SARAH'S DRESS WAS AN AUTHENTIC OLD DRESS THAT WAS CONSTANTLY ON THE VERGE OF FALLING APART.
In the Irving Hall scene, Ele Keats wore an antique dress sent from a New York clothing collector. After each take, the delicate attire's small holes had to be sewn back up.
10. BOOTS GOT LOST IN THE CROWD.
Arvie Lowe Jr., then 12 years old, went MIA briefly, thanks to the large number of extras used in the production. “Kenny [Ortega] was looking for me on the bullhorn,” Lowe said. For the big finale, “that’s not CGI—that’s a sh*tload of people.”
11. FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA WANTED THE SETS WHEN THEY WERE FINISHED.
Newsies was the first film to shoot at the reconstructed New York City backlot at Universal Studios, which had been destroyed by a fire that caused $25 million worth of damage in November 1990. Coppola wanted the Newsies set for his upcoming production of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). Unfortunately for him, the sets built were Disney's property. Universal Studios ended up charging Disney for anything they took away from the lot, leading Disney to leave most of the work behind, including the World Press building.
12. JOSS WHEDON WAS ONE OF THE FEW PEOPLE TO SEE THE MOVIE IN THE THEATER.
"We saw it in the theater, okay?," the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer said. "We were among the 10. At that point I was working for Disney. I think the greatest musicals—with the exception of South Park—that have come out of American cinema in the last 10 or 20 years have all been Disney musicals. Menken and [Howard] Ashman were like gods to me, so I went to see Newsies ...There are some songs in there that aren't bad, actually. If you listen to the score, you forget why you hated the film, and then you watch it again and go, 'Oh yeah, right.'"
13. THE FILM EARNED MENKEN HIS ONLY RAZZIE.
“I won three Academy Awards within the course of three years and one Razzie. The Razzie was for Newsies," Menken remembered. The eight-time Oscar winner, 11-time Grammy recipient, and Tony award winner claimed recently that he knew Newsies was good. “I really liked it, but I have a trunk up to here with things I love that just didn’t work, and I chalked up Newsies to be one of those. It became more.”
14. DISNEY LAUNCHED THE MUSICAL TO COLLECT ON THE ROYALTY FEES OF THE SONGS.
At least that's what lyricist Jack Feldman has said. Nearly 20 years after the film's release, Newsies launched as a stage show in New Jersey in 2011, then began a 12-week trial run on Broadway. It ended up running there for two years. Ortega was quoted as saying Disney first realized there was a potential audience when they learned that high schools had been putting together unofficial musical productions of Newsies, without Disney's permission, for years.
15. BALE WON'T SEE THE MUSICAL.
"I'm not really into musicals," Bale said in 2012. "But I wish them the best. And I'm sure the person playing the character I played exceeded whatever I did, and congratulations to them."
Despite its disappointing performance at the box office, Bale—for one—recognized the passion of Newsies' fans back in 1997, long before Disney did. "You say something bad about Newsies and you have an awful lot of people to answer to," Bale said. | {
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CAMPAIGNING for a second term as Brazil’s president in an election last October, Dilma Rousseff painted a rosy picture of the world’s seventh-biggest economy. Full employment, rising wages and social benefits were threatened only by the nefarious neoliberal plans of her opponents, she claimed. Just two months into her new term, Brazilians are realising that they were sold a false prospectus.
Brazil’s economy is in a mess, with far bigger problems than the government will admit or investors seem to register. The torpid stagnation into which it fell in 2013 is becoming a full-blown—and probably prolonged—recession, as high inflation squeezes wages and consumers’ debt payments rise (see article). Investment, already down by 8% from a year ago, could fall much further. A vast corruption scandal at Petrobras, the state-controlled oil giant, has ensnared several of the country’s biggest construction firms and paralysed capital spending in swathes of the economy, at least until the prosecutors and auditors have done their work. The real has fallen by 30% against the dollar since May 2013: a necessary shift, but one that adds to the burden of the $40 billion in foreign debt owed by Brazilian companies that falls due this year.
Escaping this quagmire would be hard even with strong political leadership. Ms Rousseff, however, is weak. She won the election by the narrowest of margins. Already, her political base is crumbling. According to Datafolha, a pollster, her approval rating fell from 42% in December to 23% this month. She has been hurt both by the deteriorating economy and by the Petrobras scandal, which involves allegations of kickbacks of at least $1 billion, funnelled to politicians in her Workers’ Party (PT) and its coalition partners. For much of the relevant period Ms Rousseff chaired Petrobras’s board. If Brazil is to salvage some benefits from her second term, then she needs to take the country in an entirely new direction.
Levy to the rescue?
Brazil’s problems are largely self-inflicted. In her first term Ms Rousseff espoused a tropical state-capitalism that involved fiscal laxity, opaque public accounts, competitiveness-sapping industrial policy (see article) and presidential meddling in monetary policy. Last year her re-election campaign saw a doubling of the fiscal deficit, to 6.75% of GDP.
To her credit, Ms Rousseff has at least recognised that Brazil needs more business-friendly policies if it is to retain its investment-grade credit rating and return to growth. This realisation is personified by her new finance minister, Joaquim Levy, a Chicago-trained economist and banker and one of the country’s rare economic liberals (see article). However, Brazil’s past failure to deal promptly with macroeconomic distortions has left Mr Levy to grapple with a recessionary trap.
To stabilise gross public debt, he has promised a whopping fiscal squeeze of almost two percentage points of GDP this year. Part of this is coming from the removal of an electricity subsidy and the reimposition of fuel duty. Both measures have helped to push inflation to 7.4%. He also plans to curb subsidised lending by public banks to favoured sectors and firms.
Waxing and waning: Brazil's economic woes, in charts Ideally, Brazil would offset this fiscal squeeze with looser monetary policy. But because of the country’s hyperinflationary past, as well as more recent mistakes—the Central Bank bent to the president’s will, ignored its inflation target and foolishly slashed its benchmark rate in 2011-12—the room for manoeuvre today is limited. With inflation still above its target, the Central Bank cannot cut its benchmark rate from today’s level of 12.25% without risking further loss of credibility and sapping investor confidence. A fiscal squeeze and high interest rates spell pain for Brazilian firms and households and a slower return to growth. What makes this adjustment perilous is the political fragility of Ms Rousseff herself. On paper she won a comfortable, though reduced, legislative majority in the October election. Yet the PT is already grumbling about Mr Levy’s fiscal policies—partly because the campaign did not lay the ground for them. Ms Rousseff suffered a crushing defeat on February 1st in an election for the politically powerful post of head of the lower house of Congress. Eduardo Cunha, who vanquished the PT’s man, will pursue his own agenda, not hers. Not for the first time, Brazil may be in for a period of semi-parliamentary government. The country thus faces its biggest test since the early 1990s. The risks are clear. Recession and falling tax revenue may undermine Mr Levy’s adjustment. Any backsliding may in turn prompt a run on the real and a downgrade in Brazil’s credit rating, raising the cost of financing for government and companies alike. Were Brazil to see a repeat of the mass demonstrations of 2013 against corruption and poor public services, Ms Rousseff might be doomed.
From weakness, opportunity
Yet the president’s weakness is also an opportunity—and for Mr Levy in particular. He is now indispensable. He should build bridges to Mr Cunha, while making it clear that if Congress tries to extract a budgetary price for its support, that will lead to cuts elsewhere. The recovery of fiscal responsibility must be lasting for business confidence and investment to return. But the sooner the fiscal adjustment sticks, the sooner the Central Bank can start cutting interest rates.
More is needed for Brazil to return to rapid and sustained growth. It may be too much to expect Ms Rousseff to overhaul the archaic labour laws that have helped to throttle productivity, but she should at least try to simplify taxes and cut mindless red tape. There are tentative signs that the government will scale back industrial policy and encourage more international trade in what remains an over-protected economy.
Brazil is not the only member of the BRICS quintet of large emerging economies to be in trouble. Russia’s economy, in particular, has been battered by war, sanctions and dependence on oil. For all its problems, Brazil is not in as big a mess as Russia. It has a large and diversified private sector and robust democratic institutions. But its woes go deeper than many realise. The time to put them right is now. | {
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CANADIAN BACKER MEDIEVAL SET - A pair (2) of Sabertron soft touch interactive swords in medieval style. This is the same reward as the other $99 medieval set, but with the additional shipping calculated for Canada. If outside Canada, pick another reward that ships international or use the "Contact me" link on the project page for more options.
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Subsets and Splits