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Lidl reagiert auf Kritik von Greenpeace
Der Lebensmitteldiscounter Lidl will ab dem Jahr 2020 bei der Herstellung von Kleidung und Schuhen auf giftige Chemikalien verzichten. Lidl habe eine entsprechende Vereinbarung mit der Umweltorganisation Greenpeace getroffen, hieß es vom Unternehmen. Greenpeace kritisiert, dass in der Kinderkleidung aus dem Supermarkt umwelt- und gesundheitsschädliche Chemikalien enthalten seien (Studie als PDF).
Laut Greenpeace will Lidl bis Ende Juni 2016 gefährliche Schadstoffe wie Alkylphenolethoxylate verbannen, durch die im Abwasser hochgiftige Stoffe für Wasserorganismen entstehen. Außerdem gibt es Stoffe, die das Immunsystem und die Fortpflanzung teilweise schädigen können. Auch auf diese müsse bis spätestens Juli 2017 in Textilien, Schuhen und Heimtextilien verzichtet werden. Lidl habe sich zudem dazu verpflichtet, dass 80 Prozent seiner Lieferanten bis Ende 2015 ihre Abwasserdaten offenlegen, sagte Greenpeace.
Bei schmutz- und wasserabweisenden Sport- und Funktionstextilien habe Lidl bereits sogenannte poly- und perfluorierte Chemikalien (PFC) durch eine "ökologische Alternative" ersetzt, teilte das Unternehmen zudem mit. Der Stoff sei biologisch abbaubar und bilde keine schädlichen Nebenprodukte.
Ziehen andere nach?
Mit der Entscheidung mache Lidl einen "gewaltigen ersten Schritt nach vorne", sagte Greenpeace-Chemie-Experte Manfred Santen. Nun müssten andere Discounter wie Aldi und Penny folgen.
21 international führende Modeunternehmen und sechs italienische Zulieferer haben sich gegenüber Greenpeace bereits verpflichtet, ihre Produktion bis 2020 zu entgiften, darunter auch Tchibo.
Der Umweltschutzorganisation zufolge verunreinigen die Abwässer aus Textilfabriken Gewässer weltweit. Vor allem in Asien sei das Problem schwerwiegend. So seien in China etwa zwei Drittel der Gewässer mit umwelt- und gesundheitsschädlichen Chemikalien belastet, die vor allem aus der Textilproduktion stammen. | {
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The U.S. Navy has a tradition when it comes to shipbuilding. Two, actually. The first involves building large, technically complex ships. The second is to rapidly build smaller, technically simple ships when war looms on the horizon. From the dawn of the Navy until the end of the battleship era, this latter tradition dominated shipbuilding. With the rise of the aircraft carrier, the ship-launched surface-to-surface missile, and afloat computing, the cost and complexity of ships skyrocketed.
Even before taking command as Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt saw the writing on the wall. As part of his “Project 60” he developed the “Hi-Low Mix” concept of shipbuilding. The “Hi” was made up of technically complex technology-laden Aegis weapon-systems ships—the Ticonderoga and later the Arleigh Burke classes. The “Low” was composed of the Oliver Hazard Perry class, predicated on the idea that if a high-end combatant needed two of something, then a Perry ship would get by with one. Admiral Zumwalt paid the construction bill for the new ships by decommissioning more than 300 legacy Navy vessels, most of them dating to World War II.
Somewhere in the middle of the pack was the fledgling Spruance class. Conceived as a modular build (constructed in big chunks that were then joined together) and with modular combat systems (to allow easier upgrades as the ships aged) the class was nevertheless mocked as “the least armed ship for its tonnage since the Constitution.” Or so Ensign Junge was told when he reported aboard the USS Moosbrugger (DD-980) in 1991. When Lieutenant Junge left the “Moose” in 1994, she was in Charleston Naval Shipyard living out the proof-of-concept of modular combat systems as a year-plus overhaul removed her dated ASROC launcher and replaced it with a state-of-the-art Mark-41 vertical-launch system. Less than a decade later, and only halfway to her desired service life, she was decommissioned, one of the last of the entire Spruance class to meet an early demise as successive CNOs from Admirals Frank Kelso to Vern Clark cut the Fleet to pay for modernization after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In January 2013 retired Admiral B. J. Mcullough wrote in Proceedings that the Arleigh Burke class, now at the Flight III, was “The Right Destroyer at the Right Time,” advocating for the continuing construction of a design first put forward in the 1970s. It is long past time for the Navy to stop looking backward in ship design. Long past time for the Navy to break the two traditions of shipbuilding. Long past time for the Navy to design and build an affordable, moderately capable baseline surface combatant that can be upgraded and downgraded as needed to meet mission requirements.
One Hull to Serve Them All
But wait! Isn’t that what the littoral combat ship (LCS) is? Possibly. Except a future naval combatant needs to be more than the LCS. The modern lessons of both the LCS and the Zumwalt destroyer need to be incorporated with modern shipbuilding, modern computing, and modern thought.
The CNO’s payloads-over-platforms concept is not a new discussion to the naval services.1 In 1989 the Society of Naval Architects published “Designing the Future US Navy Surface Fleet of Effectiveness and Producibility.”2 Cowritten by Commander Michael Bosworth and Captain Clark Graham, this study introduced and supported the idea of a common hull that would replace aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, and fleet auxiliaries. These “carriers of large objects” would be complemented by “scout fighters”—surface combatants with common hulls. Likewise, Graham and Bosworth advanced the idea of “technology clusters,” which would seek synergistic linkages within programmatic structures.
The 1989 study clarifies the value inherent in using a single hull form. At that time the Navy employed 26 distinct classes of ships—each with varied hull forms, propulsion systems, and weapon systems. In today’s more streamlined Navy we have five classes of surface combatants. Most use LM2500 gas-turbine engines for propulsion and some form of the Aegis weapon system. There remain, however, efficiencies that can be gained by moving toward more common systems and construction. There are also efficiencies that can be gained by streamlining combat systems, as well as all man/machine interfaces into a single common-core system. How we do this is the challenge.
A single common anything increases efficiency by reducing training requirements, maintenance complexity, and material-support costs. If all ships were powered by the same propulsion system there would be only one engineering school, one set of engineering standards, and one set of parts, manuals, and technicians. Yet this only addresses one part of the equation. At the end of World War I the Navy commissioned more than 150 Clemson-class destroyers, most of which served less than two years in the active Fleet. In fact, over the history of the destroyer the average service life hovers around two decades. Whether or not efficiencies are realized by single-system designs, the reality is that technologies, and missions, change. Any ship class that does not also have the ability for rapid, and inexpensive, modernization runs the risk of the Clemsons.
Two Baselines: One Large, One Small
What to do? Simple: The Navy must leverage modular plug-and-play operation systems in two different-sized, moderately armed and manned baseline hulls. The larger hull would fill the Graham/Bosworth role of “carrier of large objects” with reconfigurable holds and flight decks, while the smaller hulls would fill the “scout fighter” role. Neither term, however, fits today’s parlance well. In fact, because of the concepts presented here, naming the variants so that they meet both traditional and future naming convention and concepts proved exceptionally difficult.
For the sake of simplicity, we chose a more mythic naming concept of Leviathan and Cerberus—Leviathan for the large and capacious ship, Cerberus for the smaller but equally multimission craft. But, to press the concept farther, the modular systems and interfaces would be designed so that the Leviathan class could carry any or all of the Cerberus-class modules, while the Cerberus class would only be limited by the volume and size of modules. True reconfiguration, true modularity. Not only following the CNO’s dictum that “we must decouple the platform and the payload” but moving toward the 20-foot equivalent unit that transformed break-bulk cargo ships to modern container ships, a concept of truly universal and interchangeable platforms and payloads.
Begin with the Cerberus variant. As the smaller of the two, the most tradeoffs must be made here, and Cerberus should be thought of as the threshold requirement. In modern taxonomy, think of Cerberus as a “moderately capable large destroyer hull” with several payload spaces throughout. The use of such spaces allows one hull to meet the requirements across most surface-combatant classes. If the combatant commanders need a specific capability, the existing Cerberus can be tailored to meet mission requirements with a minimally invasive yard period instead of a lengthy modernization. The same ship can meet simple presence, theater antisubmarine warfare, or integrated air- and missile-defense requirements throughout her life. Over the past decades combat systems have become the primary drivers of warship costs; further, over the 30 years of a ship’s life it is the combat systems that are the fastest to reach obsolescence. A modular Cerberus provides three advantages, allowing the Navy to tailor the ship to mission needs, allowing for a single Fleet-wide hull form, and allowing a scalable model of manning, maintenance, and training to increase efficiency.
The proposed baseline Cerberus is a large hull that by itself—without the incorporation of a single mission package—could replace the LCS in low-intensity conflict scenarios or presence missions but is accepted as not tailored to any one specific high-end complex mission.
The Leviathan variant would be based on the modern amphibious-assault ship hull. The current gas-turbine technology would transition to electric drive, and the mission modules would fit within the hangar, hull, and superstructure. The ship would share common control systems, hull, mechanical, and electrical interfaces and designs, as well as basic armament and combat systems. In essence, the Leviathan version would be “Cerberus + large flight deck”—with the added capacity and volume to berth and feed more crew and passengers.
Plug-and-Play Payload
The mission payload kits bring the capabilities that turn these bare-bones ships into high-capability single- or multimission platforms, tailored for the needs at the time. Unlike the European MEKO or the “Carrier of Large Objects” from the 1989 study, the payload kit is not assembled into the platform at the point of construction; that would limit the long-term adaptability of a given hull. Our proposed kits would be large and would need an intermediate-level maintenance facility to install—somewhat similar to the LCS mission modules.
The type commander, Naval Surface Forces (SURFOR), would review the required Fleet capabilities and then decide what payload kit to assign to a given hull prior the sustainment phase of a given Fleet Response Training Plan (FRTP) cycle. During the ship’s maintenance phase she would receive the kit and additional personnel to man the systems. A Cerberus may maintain the same kit for the next FRTP or switch to another depending on the combatant commander’s requirements. The payload kit is designed to plug into the existing service connections in the hull, which would supply chill water, data connections, and electrical power buses in set locations ready to be uncapped and fitted to the kit’s component modules. Sound familiar? This was how Mk-15 Phalanx close-in weapon systems (CIWS) were first installed. The difference here is that where CIWS was a stand-alone installation, the universal plug-and-play (UPP) modules are integral parts of the ship’s sensor and weapon suites:
• DDG kit: An air- and missile-defense radar (AMDR) in a composite housing that fits atop the existing superstructure, an additional Mk-41 (64 cell), rail-gun assembly, or laser weapon is fitted into the topside weapon bay. Platforms equipped with the DDG kit would replace the need for the Arleigh Burke Flight III and, over time, the current inventory of destroyers and cruisers. This kit meets the proposed requirements for a new-design area-defense surface combatant described in the Congressional Research Service report Navy DDG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer Programs: Backgrounds and Issues for Congress.3
• DDE kit: This is an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) kit with a multifunction towed-array (MFTA) sonar and SLQ-25 Nixie towed torpedo decoy (already in their own self-contained modules) fitted in the payload bay aft under the flight deck and around the stern ramp. As part of this payload kit, Mk-32 surface-vessel torpedo tubes (SVTT) are fitted to the weather decks. This kit could be further augmented by the undersea unmanned vehicles designed for use with the LCS ASW mission package.
• DDL kit: This would turn the baseline Cerberus into a fully functional multimission combatant armed with an AMDR in composite housing, MFTA sonar, SVTT, SLQ-25, and Mk-41 (64 cell). This kit turns the low-cost, affordable-presence, mission-oriented Cerberus into a high-cost frontline fighter. It would be used for ships assigned as carrier strike-group escort in an anti-access/area-denial environment. The kit contains the personnel for area air defense, ASW operations, and a fully manned Tomahawk strike team.
• DDA kit: This will provide artillery support in a permissive environment with one 155-mm advanced gun system mounted in the main-deck mission bay. This kit would also include a fully manned Tomahawk strike team.
And each of these, or a combination of them, could be installed in the Leviathan as well—building from the Soviet Moskva and Japanese Hyuga concepts and placing a modern plug-and-play, UXV slant on the blended combatant/carrier concept.
As technology changes and new systems mature, we can produce new kits that incorporate new technologies and modules without the necessity of a significant modernization to the platform itself. The payload kit allows the Navy to field updated equipment over time and fit the new kit into the platform and remove it if it does not prove successful in providing a capability. The kits do not have to stay the same over 30 years; they just have to be able to plug into the standardized payload bays—in much the same way that homes built in the 1940s have plasma TVs and PCs, technology that did not exist when the homes were built, but is absorbed into existing and common infrastructure.
SURFOR would periodically evaluate the requirements from the combatant commanders and would change kit assignments to ensure that the correct amount of capability is available in the Fleet at a given time. Since the DDG and DDE payload kits affect different parts of the platform, it is possible to equip more than one at a time if the operating environment and fiscal realities deem it necessary and available. Tailoring the Fleet to the exact capability the combatant commanders require will allow the surface force to rein in manpower, training, and maintenance costs by reducing excess.
Single Hull = Greater Efficiencies
One hull with such built-in versatility has a number of significant advantages. Our proposed modular Cerberus with modular UPP payloads makes it possible for a single hull design to meet the widest variety of missions. The un-augmented Cerberus meets low-intensity LCS missions, and the fully equipped DDL package meets the 12,000-ton alternate to the DDG-51 Flight III design in the Congressional Research Service study.
The proposed modular Leviathan-Cerberus concept could begin the Navy’s shift of focus from physically smaller ships to fiscally smaller ships. A surface combatant built to be affordable does not have to be a small hull. The driver of warship cost and replacement is combat systems. Steel, on the other hand, is relatively cheap, and air is free. A larger ship does require a larger propulsion plant, but much of that cost can be offset by the efficiencies of electric propulsion and lower overall ship-design density, combined with the efficiency of a single common prime mover across a future Leviathan-Cerberus fleet.
Nor must it have a fixed mission and small flight deck or be of destroyer lineage. A larger hull has other advantages than just being able to mount the payload kits. It provides capacity for fuels and supplies, greater stability and sea keeping, and more space around vital machinery, weapon, and command components.
The tailorable modular Cerberus concept allows the Navy to field only the resources required by the combatant commander at a given time. Not only can the surface fleet tailor the actual equipment installed on board a given ship, but the ship’s manning and training requirements can be tailored as well. If a combat system is not installed on a platform, there is no need to have personnel or supplies on board to do maintenance. Removing a system is preferable to simply placing a system in layup. The removed payload translates into less weight, which in turn provides additional fuel savings and steaming range.
Our proposed baseline Cerberus and larger Leviathan will meet or exceed many of the missions tasked to our legacy Oliver Hazard Perry frigates or the envisioned use of the LCS. Using the modular payload kits, those same platforms can be rapidly and cost-effectively upgraded to fulfill the roles of a Ticonderoga cruiser or Arleigh Burke destroyer. A true modular design gives the Fleet the ability to tailor the mix of baseline ships, single-mission ships, and multimission ships to be exactly what the combatant commanders require. The scalability of the Fleet lends itself to cost and time savings for manpower and training resources (afloat and ashore) since manning and training are delivered at the particular requisite level. Finally, the single hull across our entire surface-combatant fleet greatly increases numerous efficiencies and as an added bonus would complicate adversary targeting of our assets as noted in the 1989 shipbuilding study.
Instead of continuing to finance a larger batch of LCSs and attempting to shoehorn an advanced combat-system upgrade into a 30-year-old hull with no growth margins, we need to develop a family of affordable ships that meet our baseline missions and are also cost-effectively upgradable to meet current, and future, combatant requirements.
1. Admiral Jonathan Greenert, “Payloads over Platforms: Charting a New Course,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, vol. 138, no. 7 (July 2012), 16–23.
2. The National Shipbuilding Research Program, “1989 Ship Production Symposium Paper No. 24: Designing the Future US Naval Surface Fleet for Effectiveness and Producibility,” NSRP 0310, September 1989.
3. Ronald O’Rourke, Navy DDGG-51 and DDG-1000 Destroyer Programs: Background and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, March 2013), 41.
Lieutenant Commander Smidt is a surface warfare officer currently serving on the OPNAV staff. He has served in a variety of platforms including DDGs, FFGs, T-AH, CVNs and DESRON staffs. Captain Junge is a career surface officer serving as a military professor at the U.S. Naval War College. He has served in DD-, DDG-, FFG-, LHD-, and LSD-class ships, commanding the USS Whidbey Island (LSD-41). System specifics for the Cerberus variant
• Electric Drive Propulsion
• A medium-caliber main gun, Mk-45 mod 2, Mk-110, or Mk-38
• 32 vertical-launch-system cells, Mk-41, Mk-57, or Mk-56
• A fully capable electronic warfare suite
• A double helo hanger capable of housing multiple MH-60Ms or MQ-8 Fire Scouts
• A small 3D air- and surface-search radar and navigation radar
• Point defense, close-in weapon system or rolling-airframe missile
• A hull-mounted sonar
• Multiple “mission bays” on and under the weather deck
Topside bays that are large enough to drop in a modular 64-cell vertical-launch-system block
Belowdeck bays that can fit a multifrequency towed-array sonar
The foundation fittings for larger radar structure
• An aft-mounted stern ramp for small boats and unmanned vehicles
• Excess cooling-water capacity, excess power generation capability, excess combat-systems electronics space with large accesses and empty server racks, and berthing for about 100 more personnel | {
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When Donald Trump jumped into the presidential race a year ago, few thought the New York real estate mogul had much of chance to actually win the Republican Party nomination. His brash style was in sharp contrast to most of his primary opponents. Now the businessman and reality show star is the ultimate survivor as the presumptive GOP nominee.
A local psychology professor set out to see what makes Trump tick and created a psychological portrait of the man. What resulted became the June 2016 cover story of The Atlantic magazine.
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Read the Atlantic article: The Mind of Donald Trump
“[I was] trying to describe what this man is fundamentally about psychologically without resorting to diagnosis,” said the author, Dan McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University where he is also the director of the Foley Center for the Study of Lives. “Trying to be objective, trying to be dispassionate, and try to use principles from personality and developmental psychology to apply, to understand who he is and what he’s about.”
McAdams doesn’t know Trump personally, nor did he interview the presumptive GOP nominee.
“We asked him for the interview, but he said no,” McAdams said. “I spent a lot of time reading about Donald Trump. … Immersing myself in all things Trump for about two or three months. The big question for me early on was, 'What's behind the mask of Donald Trump?’
“That was hard to find. I spent a lot of time talking about the role: how he is as an actor, his high extroversion, his social dominance, his very low agreeableness.”
McAdams said when you look behind this so-called mask, you find a story about winning.
“I think it’s the motto of his life story: to win, to drive hard, to be number one,” he said. “I think he wants to win this election, but I’m not sure that he really wants to be president.”
McAdams says Trump’s combination of extreme extroversion and very low agreeableness does not look like a recipe for presidential success when you compare his traits to those of past presidents. But, he says the findings aren’t inherently negative.
“In terms of the personality, you could argue, ‘Yeah, low agreeableness, maybe that’s a good thing because then you don’t get swayed when you’re doing negotiations, you don’t get swayed by sentimentality,’” McAdams said. “So you could put a positive spin on this. I don’t want to suggest that it’s necessarily negative.
“I’ve gotten a lot of mail from some Trump supporters who say, ‘We loved your article, it was great! That’s why we like him.’”
In the following excerpt from his Atlantic article, McAdams further describes his goals for the piece:
“Trump’s personality is certainly extreme by any standard, and particularly rare for a presidential candidate; many people who encounter the man—in negotiations or in interviews or on a debate stage or watching that debate on television—seem to find him flummoxing. In this essay, I will seek to uncover the key dispositions, cognitive styles, motivations, and self-conceptions that together comprise his unique psychological makeup. Trump declined to be interviewed for this story, but his life history has been well documented in his own books and speeches, in biographical sources, and in the press. My aim is to develop a dispassionate and analytical perspective on Trump, drawing upon some of the most important ideas and research findings in psychological science today.”
McAdams is also the author of the book, “George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream: A Psychological Portrait and The Art and Science of Personality Development.”
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June 8: The day after Hillary Clinton became the first female candidate of any major party to claim a presidential nomination, all eyes turned to her rival Bernie Sanders, who said he has no intention of backing down.
As Primaries Wind Down, Trump Seems Assured, Clinton and Sanders Scuffle
May 19: With less than a month until the end of the presidential primaries and caucuses, Donald Trump appears confident he'll pick up the Republican nomination. Despite Hillary Clinton’s commanding lead in pledged and unpledged delegates, Sen. Bernie Sanders pushes on.
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After discovering that two Pokemon clones had weaseled their way onto the App Store, The Pokemon Company has said it will take action against anyone selling counterfeited goods based on its popular franchise.
In conversation with industry mag Develop, The Pokemon Company issued the following (semi-)warning: "We continue to combat the unauthorised release of games, applications and merchandise that trick our fans into purchasing something that does not meet our quality standards."
The clones in question are Pokemon Yellow and Pokemon - Pocket Edition, which both popped up on the App Store recently. Somehow, they'd managed to escape the attention of Apple's App Store approval team. Yes, we don't know how, either.
Fans of the series who downloaded Pokemon - Pocket Edition, for example, soon discovered that the iPhone app just contained screenshots from the Game Boy Pokemon outings, rather than the full-on Pokemon adventure they had hoped for.
Both of the Pokemon clones have since been removed from the App Store. | {
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During the 1990s, when Neon Genesis Evangelion exploded in popularity, voice actress Yuko Miyamura was along for the ride. Like many other voice actresses, she wasn't merely someone who read lines, she was an idol. Fans worshipped her.
That is, until the unthinkable happened: A porno.
In Japan there are, generally speaking, idols who are supposed to be pure and idols who are not. The pure idols are usually young popstars and voice actresses. They've got a girl-next-door quality to them, and like American idols during the 1980s and for much of the 1990s, they are supposed to refrain from things that most humans do: You know, have lives, get married, have sex, or even make people. The other types of idols, such as voice actress Chiaki Takahashi, are given the go-ahead to run wild with their sexuality.
Image is extremely important in Japan—not just for celebrities, but for regular people. While Western celebrities can seemingly re-invent themselves over and over again and survive scandal after scandal, the Japanese public is far less forgiving, which is why super famous variety show host Shinsuke Shimada left the entertainment industry after a scandal broke out over ties with organized crime.
This pigeonholing is why game and anime voice actress Aya Hirano is catching heat for leaked photos of her with male companions. Those photos are tame, but they place against type. So much of image in Japanese entertainment is manufactured the way it was in Hollywood during the old studio system. With Hirano losing fans over the photos, Japanese publication Men's Cyzo looked at other voice actresses who weathered even worse storms, with the worst of them all seeming to be Yuko Miyamura.
When Kissing a Dude Is Bad People have sex. It's a natural and normal part of being a human being. Famous folks have sex, too. Read more
As the voice of Asuka Langley Soryu, one of Evangelion's principle characters, Miyamura grabbed a brass ring in Japanese voice acting. The anime took the country by storm during the 1990s, and Miyamura scored other major roles, such as Kazuha Toyama in the Detective Conan anime. She also released CDs and picked up game roles like Chun-Li in the Street Fighter Alpha and EX games as well as Akane in Pokémon.
But in 1997, a porno, dubbed Experiencing Erotic S&M as a Couple, surfaced. The video was apparently from when she was in her early 20s. It wasn't until the following spring that Japanese tabloid Friday ran a story on the video. Fans were certain that the woman in the video was Miyamura, who was still riding high with Evangelion. But the video, combined with her marriage, quick divorce, and second marriage changed the way fans viewed her.
By 1999, Miyamura was in the hospital from fatigue (it was later discovered that she suffered from Graves' disease). Outside Evangelion and Conan, the voice work slowed, and the TV appearances came screeching to a halt. The music CDS, always a good indicator of an idol's popularity, stopped. Her image had been changed.
It's a shame the scandal more than anything else ultimately impacted her work, because Miyamura, who is originally from Kobe, is a talented voice actresses and often voices characters in the Kansai dialect. While work dropped off significantly, Evangelion and Conan stuck with her. She also picked up memorable roles, such as the lady who explains "Battle Royale" in the landmark film of the same name, and more recently took over the role of Larxene in Kingdom Hearts. She continues to occasionally appear in movies, and every once in a while, she pops up on TV to talk about Evangelion.
It's no longer a popularity contest. Game makers and anime companies who now hire Miyamura aren't doing so because she has otaku fans. They do it because she's good at her job and that's more important than baggage, innuendo, or even image. Voice actors and actresses are supposed to become the characters fans love, not be the characters.
Culture Smash is a daily dose of things topical, interesting and sometimes even awesome—game related and beyond.
(Top photo: 宮村優子 | PR)
You can contact Brian Ashcraft, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page. | {
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As Katie reported late this afternoon, ABC News is quoting sources close to former FBI Director James Comey who say he will not testify that President Trump obstructed justice when he privately expressed his hope to Comey in February that fired National Security Adviser Michael Flynn would emerge from legal peril unscathed. CNN's Jake Tapper received independent confirmation of Comey's intentions from his own source, reporting the news earlier this evening. The take-away seems to be that Comey will tell the truth about what happened, but does not intend to offer any fresh, dramatic revelations:
Comey will testify "as a fact witness and will leave the legal analysis for others," source close to former FBI director tells @jaketapper pic.twitter.com/x07psCUhxm — The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) June 6, 2017
"[Comey] will not come to any legal conclusions about whether President Trump's actions in his meetings Comey constituted obstruction of justice...Comey does not believe it's his place to do so. The source says Comey will be there as a fact witness, and leave the legal analysis for others. As far as any big dramatic revelations, the source also suggests 'the center of gravity is going to be what's already out there.'"
If these sources are correct in their characterization of Comey's approach to the upcoming hearings, we can probably start to piece together his likely responses to some of the questions I posed in this analysis today. I'd still imagine that it's quite unlikely that the president or the White House will come out of Thursday's proceedings smelling like roses, but Comey's reported unwillingness to classify Trump's actions as unlawful would take some wind out of impeachment-itchy Democrats' sails. One obvious irony in all of this is that Comey is apparently preparing to side-step the legal question of obstruction, leaving such decisions up to others -- which is precisely the opposite of what he did vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton's improper, national security-endangering email scheme.
In that case, Comey underscored her many lies and scolded her reckless conduct, but took it upon himself to let her off the legal hook by claiming 'no reasonable prosecutor' would bring a case against her under the Espionage Act. In reaching that heavily disputed conclusion, Comey effectively rewrote the relevant statute to make intent a decisive factor, which is not what the law says. He also claimed to be unable to divine her intent, a conclusion that Trey Gowdy adroitly filleted through a series of prosecutorial questions. Still, it could turn out that Comey's aversion to attributing criminal intent to major political figures may end up leaving Trump in the clear. And he's going to complicate their preferred narrative, Democrats may flip back to despising Comey -- again treating him with open hostility, as opposed to as a martyr. If you aren't sure how one political party feels about James Comey at any given moment, wait five minutes. Stay tuned. | {
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These sneakers that arrive with anti-microbial foot beds offer you arch assist by means of internal shanks. The light-weight cushioning procedure makes sure that the sneakers safeguard the toes and aid the arch with out seriously making it annoying to get the footwear all day long. Water-proof linings are standard in many sneakers developing them ideal for moist weather conditions. | {
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Former Vice President Joe Biden was cheered Saturday by a crowd at the Delaware Democratic Party dinner where he said he has the "most progressive record of anybody running." He quickly corrected himself and said, "anybody who would run" — and then added, "I didn't mean it."
Biden is one of the last high-profile holdouts in the race for the Democratic nomination after former U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke announced Thursday that he was running for president. Delaware Sen. Chris Coons told CBS News podcast "The Takeout" recently that Biden is "95 percent" ready to run for president and an announcement should be coming "in the coming weeks."
Some of the Democrats who have already jumped into the race have highlighted their progressive records, especially Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
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Biden has faced criticism from the left-wing of the Democratic party, especially after he called Vice President Mike Pence a "decent guy." He acknowledged in his speech Saturday that he gets criticized by the "new left," but he said "we don't treat the opposition as the enemy."
"We Democrats, we choose hope over fear, we choose unity over division, and we choose truth over lies," Biden said. "Folks it's still our century, we have to remember that."
Former Vice President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the First State Democratic Dinner in Dover, Delaware, on Sat. March 16, 2019. Reuters
Biden also repeatedly railed against President Trump for stoking division and anger.
"As Americans, we are much bigger than ourselves and this president snares at those values and thinks that we are weak, but he is wrong ... it is these values that make our country strong and you can't define any American by religion race or gender," Biden said.
Biden, 76, has long been known for gaffes — in 2012, he said he was "absolutely comfortable" with legalizing gay marriage. The comment sent the White House scrambling since then-President Obama had yet to actually publicly declare his support, according to Jo Becker's book "Forcing the Spring." Mr. Obama said later that Biden had "got out a little bit over his skis, but out of generosity of spirit." | {
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Katy Tur, who covered the Donald Trump campaign for NBC News, talks with Rachel Maddow about Trump's disdain for the media and the First Amendment, and how Trump rallies bring out the worst in his supporters. | {
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Seth Wenig / AP Devotees pray at the Al-Mahdi Foundation in New York, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2012. As it canvassed the Northeast looking for Iranian terrorists, the New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques based solely on their religion, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document. The document offers a rare glimpse into the thinking of NYPD intelligence officers and how it drove the departmentÃs aggressive spying operations.
The AP released Thursday a secret 2006 NYPD document it had obtained, showing how a department within New York City’s police force had systematically profiled and solicited intelligence regarding members of New York’s Shi’ite community. The leaked document adds further fuel to the fire being kindled by legal advocacy groups and Muslim community organizations, angry at the NYPD’s apparent targeting of an entire segment of the city’s population. The AP writes:
[New York City] Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said police only go where investigative leads take them. But the document lists no leads justifying spying at Shiite mosques.
Just last week, Bloomberg was forced to defend Kelly, his Police Commissioner, over the latter’s appearance in The Third Jihad, a scare-mongering documentary that warns of the threat of Muslim radicalization within the U.S. “I think it’s fair to say that there is a little bit of embarrassment that this film was made,” said the mayor. “I think anything like this doesn’t help credibility.” The film was also shown to some 1,500 NYPD officers, a screening which deepened the impression among some Muslims that New York’s Finest see them as a bloc threat.
(PHOTOS: Muslims in America)
To its credit, the AP has diligently spearheaded investigations into the NYPD’s secret surveillance operations for more than a year. Last August, after interviewing 40 police and federal officials and reviewing classified documents, the AP reported on the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, a little-known bureau that “covertly” moved “into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program” in the wake of 9/11. It employed undercover cops, informants and, significantly, “unprecedented help” from the CIA, which is technically barred from spying on Americans. A taste of the NYPD’s activities:
In just two episodes showing how widely the NYPD cast its net, the department sought a rundown from the taxi commission of every Pakistani cab driver in the city, and produced an analytical report on every mosque within 100 miles, officials said.
Some Muslims, particularly cab drivers, complain of being subjected to “voluntary interrogations” by police, encounters that, while legal, prove intimidating and alienating.
The latest report disclosed by the AP, dubbed “U.S.-Iran Conflict: The Threat to New York City,” was authored by the NYPD half a decade ago. But, given the current climate of tensions and diplomatic pressure surrounding the fraught U.S.-Iranian relationship, the concerns that it expresses seem as relevant now as they were then. It airs suspicions — albeit largely unfounded ones — over the influence of Tehran-backed militant groups like Hizballah and Hamas in pockets of New York’s Shi’ite community. Unlike most other countries in the Middle East, Iran is majority Shi’ite, and its theocratic government styles itself at the revolutionary vanguard of a form of messianic Shi’ism. But that doesn’t justify such a full-scale sweep of Shi’ite mosques and neighborhood centers, the vast majority of which were frequented by those not of Iranian descent. Though the NYPD strenuously denies carrying out such operations in the city solely on the basis of a community’s religious denomination, it seems hard to arrive at any other conclusion.
(Photos: 30 Mosques in 30 Days — An American Trip)
Still, the report betrays an almost amusing level of shoddy, speculative reporting. One mosque identified as Shi’ite is actually Sunni; the report spends a fair amount of time wringing its hands around the possible affairs of Mujahidin-e-Khalq (MEK), a group that is actually vehemently anti-Tehran, deemed a cult by the State Department and backed by a conspicuous cadre of neo-conservatives in Washington.
Mayor Bloomberg has always presented himself as a champion of multiculturalism and tolerance — in 2010, he took an unflinching stand against those who sought to block the construction of an interfaith Muslim-led community center not far from the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. But frustrations among many New York City’s Muslims are growing. A month ago, over a dozen Muslim clerics and community leaders boycotted the Mayor’s interfaith breakfast, an annual event aimed to showcase the city’s diversity and harmony. Now, Muslim community groups and advocacy organizations plan to stage a rally Friday at Lower Manhattan’s Foley Square. Imam Al Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, President of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York and an organizer of the protest, declared Thursday: “Muslim New Yorkers are fed up with the NYPD unjustly targeting our community, violating the civil liberties of too many people, and lying about it with no repercussion.” Tensions, it seems, are only about to heat up.
MORE: Islamophobia and the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ Debate | {
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I asked from something that could only be found in my matches country, so he sent me this cool amulet, that provides a protection from something called the 'Evil-Eye'.
It's awesome, and I'm gonna put it on my wall :D
http://i.imgur.com/qCCe5uS.jpg | {
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(CNN) The US Army Corps of Engineers has granted an easement in North Dakota for the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, allowing the project to move toward completion despite the protests of Native Americans and environmentalists.
"With this action, Dakota Access now has received all federal authorizations necessary to proceed expeditiously to complete construction of the pipeline," said Energy Transfer Partners, the parent firm of the company building the pipeline.
Vicki Granado, spokeswoman for the Energy Transfer Partners, said work would start "immediately."
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which has long opposed the part of the project near its home, has promised a legal fight. It didn't immediately respond to CNN's request Wednesday for comment.
Trump executive action
Just a few weeks ago, President Donald Trump signed executive actions to advance approval of this pipeline and others, casting aside efforts by President Barack Obama's administration to block construction.
That order directed "the acting secretary of the Army to expeditiously review requests for approvals to construct and operate the Dakota Access Pipeline in compliance with the law."
Acting Secretary of the Army Robert Speer's moves to grant the easement and stop the preparation of an environmental impact statement were anticipated.
"The decision was made based on a sufficient amount of information already available which supported approval to grant the easement request," the Army said Tuesday.
Speer called granting the easement a "final step" in meeting the tasks of the President's executive action.
The Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said Tuesday the Obama administration had determined other locations for the pipeline should be looked into by the Army.
"Trump's reversal of (President Obama's) decision continues a historic pattern of broken promises to Indian tribes and a violation of treaty rights," Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, who is representing the tribe, said. "Trump and his administration will be held accountable in court."
The Standing Rock Sioux said they will argue in court that the environmental impact statement process was wrongfully terminated.
Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Fireworks lit the sky at the Oceti Sakowin Camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota on December 4, 2016, after the Army Corps of Engineers halted the Dakota Access Pipeline route. An executive order by President Donald Trump in January allowed work to resume. Hide Caption 1 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Activists embrace after the December halt of the Dakota Access Pipeline route. The $3.7 billion project that would cross four states and change the landscape of the US crude oil supply. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe says the pipeline would affect its drinking-water supply and destroy its sacred sites. Hide Caption 2 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests An activist rides down from a ridge on the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation on December 4. Hide Caption 3 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Activists celebrate at Oceti Sakowin Camp on December 4. An executive order by President Donald Trump in January allows work to resume on the Dakota Access Pipeline, which the activists oppose. Hide Caption 4 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Dan Nanamkin of the Colville Nez Perce tribe drums a traditional song by the Cannonball River in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, on Thursday, December 1. Hide Caption 5 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests A procession makes its way down to the Cannonball River to take part in a Native American water ceremony on December 1. Hide Caption 6 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Snow covers the camp on Wednesday, November 30. Hide Caption 7 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests A person walks through snow and wind on Tuesday, November 29. Hide Caption 8 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests People against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline speak at a news conference near Cannon Ball on Saturday, November 26. Hide Caption 9 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests A sculpture stands at an encampment where protesters of the pipeline have been gathered for months. Hide Caption 10 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests People protest along Highway 1806 as they walk past a sprawling encampment on Thursday, November 24. Hide Caption 11 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests A man stands along Highway 1806 on November 24. Hide Caption 12 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests In this image provided by the Morton County Sheriff's Department, law enforcement and protesters clash near the pipeline site on Sunday, November 20. Hide Caption 13 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Tonya Stands recovers after being pepper-sprayed by police on Wednesday, November 2. Stands was pepper-sprayed after swimming across a creek with other protesters hoping to build a new camp to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Hide Caption 14 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Dozens of protesters wade in cold creek waters as they confront local police on November 2. Hide Caption 15 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Tribe members make their way back to their camp on Saturday, October 29. Hide Caption 16 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Cousins Jessica and Michelle Decoteau take part in a protest outside the North Dakota state capitol in Bismarck on October 29. Hide Caption 17 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests The burned hulks of heavy trucks sit on Highway 1806 on Friday, October 28, near a spot where Dakota Access Pipeline protesters were evicted a day earlier. Hide Caption 18 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Pipeline protesters sit in a prayer circle as a line of law enforcement officers make their way across the camp to relocate the protesters a few miles south on Thursday, October 27. Protesters had camped on private property. Hide Caption 19 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests A protester is arrested as law enforcement surrounds the camp on October 27. Hide Caption 20 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Tires burn as armed soldiers and law enforcement officers stand in formation to force Dakota Access Pipeline protesters off the private land in Morton County. Hide Caption 21 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests A protester shows where he was hit by a bean-bag round fired by officers trying to force protesters off the private land. Hide Caption 22 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests JR American Horse leads a march to the pipeline site on Friday, September 9. Hide Caption 23 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Native Americans head to a rally at the state capitol in Denver on Thursday, September 8. They were showing their support for members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota opposting the Dakota Access Pipeline. Hide Caption 24 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests People hang a sign near what they say was sacred burial ground disturbed by bulldozers in Cannon Ball. Hide Caption 25 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Marlo Langdeau of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe joins hundreds of Native Americans for a march near Cannon Ball on Sunday, September 4. Hide Caption 26 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Protesters march on September 4 in opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline. Hide Caption 27 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Native Americans march to the site of a sacred burial ground on September 4. Hide Caption 28 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Native Americans ride with raised fists to the sacred burial ground on September 4 to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. Hide Caption 29 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests The Missouri River is seen beyond an encampment near Cannon Ball, where hundreds of people gathered to join the protest on September 4. Hide Caption 30 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Flags of Native American tribes from across the United States and Canada line the entrance to a protest encampment on Saturday, September 3. Hide Caption 31 of 32 Photos: North Dakota pipeline protests Phil Little Thunder Sr. attends an evening gathering at an encampment of Dakota Access Pipeline protesters on September 3. Hide Caption 32 of 32
The decision gives the pipeline's developer -- Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners -- right-of-way through government land at Lake Oahe Dam and Reservoir in North Dakota.
The tribe has been concerned that digging the pipeline under Lake Oahe -- a section of the Missouri River in North Dakota -- would affect the area's drinking water, as well as the supply for 17 million people living downstream.
The proposed underground route at Lake Oahe is half a mile upstream from the tribe's reservation.
The tribe and its allies have protested in North Dakota for months, blocking the path of the pipeline during peaceful demonstrations and clashes that have sometimes turned violent.
Greenpeace said the President was looking out for the rich.
"We are less than two weeks into this administration, and already Trump has put on full display a blatant disregard for Indigenous sovereignty, public health, and public outcry," the environmental organization said. "This decision to smash through the (environmental impact statement) process is nothing but a reward to Trump's corporate, oil industry cronies."
Runs more than 1,100 miles
Dakota Access and pipeline supporters say the $3.7 billion pipeline project would be an economic boon.
The developer estimates the pipeline would bring $156 million in sales and income taxes to state and local governments and will add 8,000 to 12,000 construction jobs.
The pipeline will stretch 1,172 miles through four states -- from North Dakota into South Dakota, winding through Iowa and ending in southern Illinois -- moving 470,000 barrels of crude oil a day across the Midwest. It is completed, except for the contested portion under Lake Oahe.
Like Dakota Access, the Keystone XL Pipeline had been the subject of environmental concern from activists, residents and indigenous tribes who worried that the pipeline would pollute as many as 2,500 aquifers.
But pipeline supporters touted the jobs it would create and other economic benefits.
The $8 billion Keystone XL Pipeline was proposed to stretch nearly 1,200 miles across six states, shuttling carbon-heavy petroleum from Canada to the Gulf Coast.
In November 2015, Obama nixed the proposed pipeline, virtually ending the fight over the project that had gone on for much of his presidency.
But Trump's executive actions on both pipelines signal how his administration will take a different approach to energy and environmental issues. | {
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Design for progress over perfection
Increase your capacity to execute and develop your intuition through mini-feedback loops.
Make it a daily goal to show progress
Early on in my career I had a bad case of imposter syndrome. I would delay showing my work until I thought it was perfect trying to cover all the possible use cases. Other times I would underestimate the project and start on it later — how difficult can it be? But when I did start, the complexity became quickly apparent raising more questions than answers.
Both of these scenarios led to more work (and stress) in the end. But most importantly they deprived me of the opportunity to get better, faster.
Today’s design process is in flux. Gone are the days of rigid handoffs from execs to product managers to designers to engineers. To be effective, Design has to involve other cross functional disciplines throughout the process. Features change in scope. New issues come up all the time.
Showing your work-in-progress early and often will help you stay ahead of these changes.
You don’t have to come up with a perfect version of a design by end of day. Instead — make it a daily goal to show progress over perfection.
The side-effect of progress is focus. Realistically, taking into account the time for meetings, breaks, etc. — there are only so many hours in a day to sit down and design. Having a clear daily outcome from the onset will help you prioritize and triage your time effectively.
Moving fast is also a good way to build up experience and mature as a designer. You want to get to a place where you can comfortably advance several projects every day thus increasing your capacity for output.
Sometimes with all these changes progress becomes harder to see. In my design drafts I tend to organize my work by day (e.g. “March 16, 2020”). This acts as a historic record to quickly see where I moved fast, where things got stale and any other interesting ideas that came up. It’s a useful way to troubleshoot and improve one’s design process.
Lastly, the forcing function of delivering something every day will keep your momentum going especially in times when you’ll get stuck.
As you’re moving fast — get frequent feedback along the way.
Seek out feedback early and often
Feedback on in-progress work is helpful to identify potential blind spots — areas that you didn’t consider or were not aware of for the project. You want to ensure you are moving fast working on the right thing and heading in the right direction.
Resist temptation to not share
Sharing work in-progress can be hard. Going from an idea to execution is not a linear path and our wires may look half baked with artboards all over. But that’s part of the creative process.
You might even hear that voice in your head, “shhh maybe you should just present at the next meeting…” Resist this temptation. By delaying feedback you are only delaying the inevitable rework later on. Only on the rare occasion, when there’s little to no design done, you might want to hold off.
Mini-feedback loops help you get to high quality work faster while not losing sight of the details
Seek feedback throughout the product cycle — from initial ideation all the way to the “final” shipped design and beyond. Yes, the feedback doesn’t stop when the product is launched. Closing the loop by understanding if the customer has benefited from your latest feature is the ultimate test.
Create opportunities for others to give you feedback
Sometimes it’s hard to find avenues for getting feedback. People are busy. Calendars booked. In this case you’ll need to get creative. Don’t wait until a formal review, take action into your own hands.
If you can take the time to do a quick sketch and briefly chat with your PM about the future direction then do it. Post your work so that people can access it and give feedback asynchronously as you’re working on the next version. Look for other existing channels and meetings and see if there’s an opportunity for you to present your work then.
To get high quality feedback — frame it first
To get the most helpful feedback you’ll need to frame it appropriately. Sometimes well-meaning stakeholders (including designers) may go on tangents reacting to what they see. It’s your job as a feedback facilitator to keep them focused on areas you need most help with.
Here’s how:
Set the context of what problem you’re trying to achieve, how you went about doing it, what you’re focusing on in this phase of the process Mention what’s off limits for feedback right now — you’re still working through these things and need the time to execute
Then dive into the story. Let your stakeholders empathize with the customer by describing the feature from the outside in. How does the user discover this new feature? How do they begin using it? What’s a good outcome for them?
This all might seem like a lot of work. It is! But by spending a little time upfront you’ll get quality feedback. Design doesn’t speak for itself — that’s why framing your work in the proper context is key.
Not all feedback is equal — curate it
Not all feedback will be valuable. Some of it will be distracting or pull you in the “wrong” direction. At times you’ll get conflicting information. It’s your job as a designer to reconcile the differences.
Sometimes the feedback might get solutions oriented, e.g. “Have you considered using a link instead of button?”. You’ll need to unpack the statement by getting to the root cause, e.g. “What would changing to a link instead of a button do?”. Uncovering the principle and the motivation behind the statement can help you solve the larger problem beyond reacting to minor UI infractions.
When in doubt — clarify. Ask why. It’s better to ask a “dumb question” in the meeting and save the agony of working on the wrong thing after.
And repeat…
Design is always a work in progress. Once you’ve sought, framed, curated, and acted on the feedback the work continues.
As you advance through this process you can start to develop intuition that’s based over the course of many interactions with your stakeholders and customers. This is not an excuse to avoid showing work — even with perfect intuition you’ll still benefit from feedback.
Everyday progress + early feedback = faster growth
Design is a vast discipline. There are so many things to learn and so many skills to master. Sometimes we hear vague advice that expertise comes with experience. But does it? What specifically should you do to get better?
One way you can grow and become more effective is by holding yourself accountable to your own standard. Set your own pace by:
Showing progress every day, which feeds into Getting frequent feedback to get to high quality output faster
All of this translates into a stronger intuition that can help you produce strong work from the start. As you increase your capacity you can take on more projects and explore new ideas rapidly thus influencing product strategy through design craft. | {
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Suojelupoliisin päällikön Antti Pelttarin mukaan yleisen järjestyksen ja turvallisuuden uhka on kasvanut.
Suojelupoliisin päällikön Antti Pelttarin mukaan ääriliikkeet eivät ole uhka Suomen kansalliselle turvallisuudelle, mutta suojelupoliisi seuraa aktiivisesti tilannetta.
– Yleisen järjestyksen ja turvallisuuden uhka on kasvanut, mikä on johtanut paikallisiin väkivaltaisuuksiin, mutta edelleen perusteesimme on, etteivät nämä järjestöt uhkaa kansallista turvallisuutta, Pelttari sanoo Verkkouutisten haastattelussa.
Pelttarin mukaan ääriliikkeiden uhka kansallisen turvallisuuden kannalta on Suomessa pienempi verrattuna muihin Pohjoismaihin. Hän huomauttaa, että liikkeiden jäsenmäärät ovat myös suhteellisen pieniä lähtien muutamista kymmenistä joissain tapauksissa muutamaan sataan.
Yksi viime aikojen muutos on radikaalien ympäristö- ja eläinoikeusliikkeiden aktivoituminen. Suojelupoliisin alkuvuonna 2015 julkaisemassa toimintaympäristön 2015–2016 kuvauksessa todettiin, että ”radikaalin ympäristö- tai eläinoikeusliikkeen piirissä ei ole ilmennyt viime vuosina merkittävää laitonta toimintaa”.
Pelttari toteaa, että ”tilanne on muuttunut” ja toimintaympäristöä arvioidaan nyt radikaalin ympäristö- ja eläinoikeusliikkeen osalta toisin. Viime keväänä Fennovoimaa vastustaneiden aktivistien mielenilmauksessa Pyhäjoen Hankivellä sytytettiin tuleen poliisiauto ja heiteltiin poliiseja kivillä.
– Tämä oli Suomen mittakaavassa laajamittainen, pitkäkestoinen ja varsin väkivaltainen mielenosoitus.
Alkukesästä taas eläinaktivistit sytyttivät tahallaan tulipalon Vantaan bussivarikolla, koska linja-autoyritys oli tehnyt yhteistyötä turkisyrityksen kanssa. Tuhopoltto aiheutti miljoonavahingot ja vaaratilanteen lepäämässä olleille bussikuskeille.
– Radikaalit yhden asian liikkeet ovat nostaneet aktiviteettiaan, Pelttari katsoo.
”Olemme todenneet tämän järjestön luonteen”
Helsingin Asema-aukion tapahtumat ovat nostaneet keskusteluun myös äärioikeistolaisen Suomen vastarintaliikkeen (SVL) aseman. Poliisihallitus ja valtakunnansyyttäjänvirasto tekevät lähiaikoina ratkaisunsa siitä, lähtevätkö ne ajamaan kyseisen järjestön lakkauttamista.
Suomen vastarintaliikkeeseen kuuluvaa miestä epäillään pahoinpitelystä ja törkeästä kuolemantuottamuksesta muutaman viikon takaisen mielenosoituksen yhteydessä Helsingin Asema-aukiolla.
Suojelupoliisin Pelttari korostaa, että aloite Suomen vastarintaliikkeen lakkauttamisesta on Poliisihallituksen ja valtakunnansyyttäjäviraston harkinnassa. Suojelupoliisin tehtävänä on ylläpitää ääriliikkeisiin liittyvää tilannekuvaa.
Pelttari huomauttaa kuitenkin, että pohjoismaista, kansallissosialistista valtiota tavoitteleva järjestö on ”selkeästi toimija, joka on osoittanut valmiutta väkivaltaan ja sillä uhkailuun, myös poliittisia toimijoita vastaan.”
– Olemme todenneet tämän järjestön luonteen myös julkisesti. Sen tavoitteena on kumota Suomen yhteiskuntajärjestys ja demokratia. Siinä mielessä järjestön olemassaolo ei ole suomalaisen yhteiskunnan kannalta hyvä asia. | {
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Justin Bieber is still making childish digs at The Weeknd, it seems.
Following The Weeknd's performance at the Grammy Awards, a video appeared on Instagram appearing to show Bieber dissing his track 'Starboy'.
The Canadian singer chose to sit out of the awards - reportedly over objections to representation at the ceremony - alongside Kanye West and Drake.
In the video Bieber is shown driving his car as a friend films and asks him what his favourite song was, according to NME.
Bieber responds: "'Starboy' by The Weeknd," after which the pair burst out laughing, and the friend ends the live post.
Viewers have interpreted this as a joke aimed at The Weeknd; Bieber recently dismissed his music as "wack" after it was reported that The Weeknd was dating Bieber's former girlfriend Selena Gomez.
Unlike Bieber, The Weeknd did appear at the Grammys where he performed with Daft Punk.
Bieber recently returned to Instagram after branding the social media platform as "the devil" in August 2016. | {
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NBA fans no longer have to figure out a summer hobby after the post season ends! ESPN reporter, Cassidy Hubbarth reveals why Summer League is hotter than ever, and she tells us who her rookie standouts are!
True basketball fans know that the NBA is now a 365-day sport. Between the juicy storylines, free agency and trade bombshells, and the social media interactions, it couldn’t be a better time to be an NBA fan. When the post season ends and one of the 30 franchises (aka the Warriors) take home the Larry O’Brien championship trophy, fans don’t have to wait for good basketball to begin in the fall. The NBA’s Summer League may be in its hottest year yet, where “the talent is real and the match-ups are exciting,” ESPN sideline reporter, Cassidy Hubbarth tells HollywoodLife.com!
Hubbarth, who’s covered Summer League for the past three years, is one of the network’s lead reporters on the court in Las Vegas where the games are being held. This year marks the first time ever that all 30 NBA teams are at Summer League, which means more games! “It’s been incredible… We’ve taken on a lot,” Hubbarth says, adding that her team is producing 82 games in 12 days. “The first weekend was a marathon, we did 10 games on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. It’s nonstop action!”
So far, Summer League has seen the likes of some of the NBA’s biggest stars, including new Laker, LeBron James and legend, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. “We’ve had such great turnouts form some of the biggest stars,” Hubbarth says, before explaining just why Summer League is where everyone needs to be. “What’s great about the event, people want to be around Summer League. It’s really the only event where everyone is just coming together and able to spend time in a relaxed environment… Things are happening here, in the stands, in the shmooze pit, maybe at the poker tables in the casinos. There’s too many people in one space and too many conversations for things not to happen here!”
Sadly, Hubbarth won’t be reporting from the Summer League championship stage for its trophy ceremony, as she’s got to catch a plane to LA, where she’ll be representing ESPN on the red carpet at the ESPYS! The annual awards show will air at 8 PM on ABC, July 18, so be sure to tune in, and check back with HollywoodLife.com for live coverage!
Read the rest of our interview with ESPN’s Cassidy Hubbarth!
How does last year’s Summer League compare to this year’s?
Last year was pretty crazy, given Lonzo and LaVar Ball, but this year with the crop of talent, it’s so spread out. There’s a lot more games people are excited to see. — People are excited to see Wendell Carter Jr., Kevin Knox, DeAndre Ayton, Mo Bamba. I mean, this class is deep and the talent is real, so that has made the week go by fast. Every day, there’s a handful of matchups you’re excited to see because of this rookie class.
Who are your standout rookie stars at Summer League?
I think the talk of Summer League has been Kevin Knox, and I think the biggest reason is because he got booed on Draft night. I think that’s more of a knock on Knicks fans or just a few Knicks fans who showed on Draft night. But, he has been so impressive. He had a “off night” last night, where he was a little quiet form the field, although he put up 15. I think it’s exciting because Knicks fans are starving. One thing that’s really interesting is that he stays and watches games almost everyday, we’ve seen him stay after his games and sit and watch. Clearly he’s a hoop head, a gym rat and someone who’s probably going to be up for the task in New York, so he’s certainly been a standout.
Wendell Carter Jr. has also been a standout with his energy. He’s probably been the most impressive among the bigs. Of course, there’s DeAndre Ayton who’s NBA ready, but Wendell Carter Jr.’s had some highlights that I think have gotten people excited.
Josh Hart, of course. He’s a second-year player and there’s talks that he shouldn’t even be playing in Summer League. But, here’s the thing, this is an opportunity for guys to get better. He may be “too good” for Summer League, but it’s still playing ball, it’s still working out. He’s certainly, at times, looked like a man amongst boys, but that’s a good sign for the Lakers for sure.
There’s a lot of buzz around Hart because he’s showing out as a second-year player at Summer League. Do you think it humbles these guys to still come out and play against the incoming rookies?
We were talking with Dave Yager on Coaches Appreciation, and he goes ‘look, it’s a mindset, it’s either you decide that you’re committed to getting better and you’re not too good for this. Or, you come out there and you let your ego get the best of you.’ This game, you have to gain confidence. The level of talent is high that if you don’t continue to gain confidence in your game and your growth, you’re never going to continue to ascend to the highest level. I’m sure Lakers fans are wondering when they’re going to take him out, but he might be trying to chase Kyle Kuzma and Lonzo Ball and take both the Finals MVP and League MVP (laughs). | {
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Sdp
täyskäännös. Sdp:n Antti Rinne on kääntymässä perustulon kannattajaksi, koska työelämä on muuttunut. Sdp
täyskäännös. Sdp:n Antti Rinne on kääntymässä perustulon kannattajaksi, koska työelämä on muuttunut.
Antti Rinne antaisi perustulon myös eläkeläisille
15.7.2015 15.57
Annakaisa Suni
Sdp:n puheenjohtaja Antti Rinne on valmis harkitsemaan perustuloa. Rinteen linjaus on merkittävä muutos, sillä sdp on ollut Suomen tiukimpia perustulon vastustajia.
"Maailma muuttuu sillä tavalla, että meidän on järkevää miettiä erilaisia vaihtoehtoja, joilla säällinen toimeentulo turvataan", Rinne sanoo Vihreälle Langalle Porin Suomi-Areenassa.
"On niin erilaisia kokonaisuuksia, mistä ihmisten toimeentulo muodostuu. Se alkaa olla niin risainen, että sitä on tavallisten ihmisten vaikea hallita", sanoo Rinne, joka kannattaa myös nollatuntisopimusten kieltoa.
Perustuloa mieluummin Rinne puhuu perustoimeentulosta. Hänellä ei ole vielä selkeää linjaa siitä, millainen malli olisi hyvä. Rinteelle on tärkeää, ettei perustulo estäisi työn vastaanottamista.
"Ei saa tulla uutta kynnystä, että joku kokee sen riittäväksi tasoksi pitkäksi aikaa."
Vihreät on ajanut perustuloa pitkään. Viime talvena esitellyssä päivitetyssä mallissa vihreät antaisi 560 euron perustulon kaikille paitsi eläkeläisille, joilla säilyisi minimitasona nykyinen 743 euron takuueläke.
Sdp:n Rinne sen sijaan ulottaisi perustulon koskemaan myös eläkeläisiä.
"Meillä on tällä hetkellä yli 100 000 eläkeläistä, jotka tienaavat alle 750 euroa kuukaudessa. Niiden ihmisten toimeentulon tasoa nostettaisiin niin, että toimeentulo olisi säällinen."
Perusporvarihallitus lupaa ohjelmassaan perustulokokeilun. Rinne ei vielä sano, voitaisiinko asiaa valmistella parlamentaarisesti yhdessä opposition kanssa.
Hänen mukaansa sdp:n täytyy ensin käydä sisäistä keskustelua siitä, millainen malli voisi olla mahdollinen.
Rinne kertoi uudesta linjastaan ensimmäisenä Suomen Kuvalehden haastattelussa.
perustulo | {
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Rejects your application Actually calls you and explains why you didn't get the job
5,589 shares | {
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Montreal Public Health officials say that once Montreal's supervised injection sites open, they will likely be overseeing anywhere between a total of 200 and 300 drug injections a day.
Montreal's three sites, plus one mobile truck, will be the first of their kind in Eastern Canada. There are currently two injection clinics in the country — both in Vancouver.
"We are the first in Quebec to do this, so it's very motivating. We are eager to start," said Caroline Boilard, one of the 16 nurses who will be working at the clinics.
Work at the sites is almost complete. Only the final approval from Health Canada is required before they can open their doors.
One of the sites will be located in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve area, in the city's east end, and will be operated by the community organization Dopamine.
Two others will be located in the downtown borough of Ville-Marie and operated by Cactus and Spectre de rue, groups that provide support to drug users.
A mobile supervised injection site, called Anonyme, would circulate in downtown Montreal.
Estimated number of injections per day
Cactus : between 140 and 215 injections
Spectre de rue : between 43 and 65 injections
Dopamine : between 12 and 18 injections
Anonyme: between 10 and 20 injections
Confidentiality assured
Nurses have been in training for the past three weeks. Some even went to Vancouver to learn from the city's opioid and fentanyl crisis.
Laurie Mercure, program manager for Montreal's sites, says nurses here will take a similar approach to their Vancouver counterparts.
"It's the approach we have to have with people — responding to their needs and what stage they are at that will be the key to success."
Sixteen nurses will be working at the sites, along with support from community workers.
The centres will be open 22 hours a day, 365 days a year. The mobile site will offer services during overnight hours.
People who wish to use the sites must register at the time of their first visit.
The drug users' information will remain confidential.
"At the first visit, they must sign up using their real names, but then we call them by a pseudonym," said Mercure. "And that personal information at the safe injection site will not be in any other medical file of the various institutions of the health care system. So people who use can do so in complete anonymity."
There are an estimated 4,000 injectable drug users in Montreal. Every year, about 70 of them die from an overdose. | {
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willw:
Why drug dealers who sell me their iPhones should wipe the data. | {
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This is awesome, how long did it take you to create this? | {
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After months of Phoenix and Maricopa County officials promising that the East Lot will remain open indefinitely, the asphalt parking lot that's served as a de facto overflow shelter for up to 400 men and women in downtown Phoenix is officially closing.
"The East Lot's last night of providing low demand shelter will be the 14th (closing the morning of the 15th)," Lindsey Roberts, Communications Manager of the Central Arizona Shelter Services, writes to New Times.
CASS--which also runs a 470 bed shelter on the Human Services Campus across the street--has operated the East Lot since April 2013, at the behest of the Phoenix Police Department, who saw opening it as an opportunity to keep both the neighborhood and hundreds of homeless men and women safe. Though philosophically no one thought it was a good idea, crime rates dropped dramatically, and many people suddenly had a relatively safe place to sleep at night. (The CASS-operated Men's Overflow Shelter, the original "temporary solution," was at capacity every night, and had been for years.)
When news spread that the Men's Overflow Shelter was closing, people began questioning the future of the adjacent East Lot. CASS has said in the past that it only has the budgetary means to continue running the East Lot through mid-May.
See also: -Homeless in Phoenix's East Lot Face Uncertain Future Because of Budget Shortfall -As Overflow Shelter in Downtown Phoenix Closes, New Homeless Plan Emerges
At a community forum in late February, however, county and state officials promised they would begin more actively looking into low-demand shelter options and that they would not allow the parking lot to close until an alternative was in place.
As we've written about in the past, a small group comprised of individuals from the city, county, state, and private sector met almost daily to hash out a plan for indoor shelter before the worst of the summer heat set in. (They simultaneously worked to acquire $2.5 million for rapid re-housing programs and are accepting RFPs for the money.) With less than three weeks until the East Lot closes, the details of this new plan are firming up by the day.
New Times spoke with Laura DiTroia, Director of Programs for the Lodestar Day Resource Center--the sort of programmatic arm of the Human Services Campus--about those plans. Here's what we know so far:
For six months, beginning on Friday, May 15, two buildings on the campus, the LDRC day room and the dining room at St. Vincent De Paul, will open as a new low-demand shelter. DiTroia explains that women, and elderly or disabled men, will sleep in St. Vincent De Paul, and rest of the men--who make up the majority of those staying in the East Lot--will stay in the LDRC.
The East Lot population has fluctuated between 375-400 individuals in the last few weeks, meaning that not everyone will get indoor shelter. (Collectively, the two buildings have space for 250 people.)
"We're looking at alternatives on the campus," DiTroia explains, "but we're still navigating that." It's looking more and more likely that they will use a section of the lawn near the LDRC entrance as an immediate solution, and she expects a final decision to be reached by the end of this week. (The area will be cordoned off, covered with a canopy, and all individuals will be given a mat to sleep on, and have access to indoor restrooms.)
So who will get those coveted indoor spaces? For the first few weeks she expects they'll operate on a first-come, first-serve basis, "but we're looking at ways to prioritize the most vulnerable people."
The Welcome Center on the Human Services Campus, the coordinated entry point for services on the campus, uses what's called the VI-SPDAT (Vulnerability Index-Service Prioritization and Decision Assistance Tool) to do an initial assessment of an individual's needs and relative vulnerability.
DiTroia predicts that they'll use an individual's score to help prioritize which individuals get to sleep inside but adds that it's possible other organizations on the campus will open their doors at night too. Plus, once the rapid-re-housing money and 270 Section 8 vouchers from the city of Phoenix kick in, the overall population of people needing emergency shelter is expected to go down. "Our goal is to end homelessness," DiTroia emphasizes.
Since the announcement came a few weeks ago that these buildings were opening, there's been concern and questions about certain details of the plan. New Times asked DiTroia about some of them:
Who can stay there The goal is to mirror the daytime rules and culture of the Human Services Campus at night. If you have a campus ID, you can come in. (There's an appeals process if you get kicked off the campus.) And contrary to myth, sex offenders are allowed on campus--they're just not allowed in CASS--so they will not be left out of this new low-demand shelter. Each person will be allowed a small overnight bag and will need to check their other belongings in Bag-N-Tag.
Segregated Sexes There was a lot of debate and discussion about what to do with couples, but in the end, those organizing the operation decided to split men and women. "Cohabitation in close quarters can be hard to monitor, and we just want to keep things as simple as possible," DiTroia says.
Pets As for animals, right now only service dogs will be allowed to spend the night, but DiTroia says they're working with local animal-centered groups to figure out a better solution. (The Human Service Campus is also talking with Arizona State University about setting up a teaching Veterinary Hospital on or near the campus in the future._
Restroom Facilities DiTroia says one of their goals is to avoid using port-a-potties--"We're not expecting 400 people to need to use the bathroom at the same time"--but the LDRC is remodeling the men's restroom so it can better accommodate a 24/7 flow of people. And like all things with this operation, they're prepared to be flexible and to change how they do things as problems arise--meaning, if there's an obvious bathroom shortage, they'll bring in portable ones.
Hours of Operation At least in the beginning, the hours of operation are slated to be 6:30 p.m. to 6 a.m.--wake up time will be 5:30. The early hours, she explains, are so that St Vincent De Paul has time to set up before serving breakfast at 7, and the LDRC can be cleaned and readied for its 7:30 opening time.
Staff/Security Staff will consist of 11 people with a behavioral health background, one shelter manager, a contracted EMT, and a contracted crisis-management specialist. There will be six people on duty at all times: two staff in each facility, plus an EMT and a crisis specialist. ("We're hiring," DiTroia says enthusiastically.) They are still in the process of finalizing security plans, though for at least the first few weeks she thinks they are likely to have contracted security (or off-duty police) to help smooth out the transition from the East Lot "party culture" to the campus culture.
Funding CASS has said in the past that it spends $300,000 annually on operating the MOS/East Lot, and though the final budget for this new indoor operation is yet to be finalized, it's likely to cost about the same.
And the biggest question of all, DiTroia explains, is always about what will happen in six months.
"I don't have an answer exactly," she says, "but we have the next six months to figure it out."
The agencies on the campus are analyzing recent assessment data and shifting to a new computer-based tool that allows a case manager to overlay an individual's needs and eligibility for housing, hopefully improving the process of finding people appropriate shelter. She says they're looking into whether they need to build a permanent low-demand shelter, or whether, as some folks like to say, "We can house our way out of this."
With a little more than two weeks until opening night, DiTroia and others have no shortage of things to organize and problems to solve: the flow of traffic, and how that will work with Bag-N-Tag; the number of mats they need to order; hiring and training all the staff; explaining the changes to those who use the East Lot.
"It's certainly exciting," she says, "and I just hope that the people who are putting a lot of energy into this continue to be part of the change to find people housing."
Got a tip? Send it to: Miriam Wasser.
Follow Valley Fever on Twitter at @ValleyFeverPHX. Follow Miriam Wasser at @MiriamWasser. | {
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President-elect Donald Trump Donald John TrumpBarr criticizes DOJ in speech declaring all agency power 'is invested in the attorney general' Military leaders asked about using heat ray on protesters outside White House: report Powell warns failure to reach COVID-19 deal could 'scar and damage' economy MORE called NATO obsolete, according to a Bloomberg Politics report about an interview the president-elect gave to Germany’s Bild newspaper.
“It’s obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump was quoted as saying about NATO. “Secondly, countries aren’t paying what they should” and NATO “didn’t deal with terrorism.”
He also said BMW would face a 35 percent import duty on foreign-built BMWs sold in the U.S. Trump told Bild that the company should halt plans to open a new plant in Mexico and instead create a U.S. factory.
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The president-elect also dinged German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying she hurt Germany by letting “all these illegals” into the country.
When asked if he’d like to see her reelected, he told Bild he couldn’t say because he doesn’t know her, according to Bloomberg Politics, although he respects her.
During the campaign, Trump made waves by saying he would look at whether NATO allies have “fulfilled their obligations to us” before deciding whether to defend them if they are attacked.
He also repeatedly called NATO obsolete over the course of the campaign, saying it should do more to fight terrorism. | {
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lok-sabha-elections
Updated: Apr 03, 2019 21:59 IST
BJP lawmaker Kirit Somaiya who had taken the lead role in hurling darts at Shiv Sena boss Uddhav Thackeray during the 2017 municipal elections, has not been re-nominated by his party. Instead, the BJP on Wednesday replaced Somaiya from the Mumbai North-East seat with its municipal corporator Manoj Kotak.
Kirit Somaiya had been confident of the party ticket and launched his election campaign nearly three weeks back. But the 65-year-old politician had increasingly figured that he may just have hit the road a little too soon.
Behind closed doors and in public, top Shiv Sena leaders had made it clear that they would not have Somaiya running for the Lok Sabha.
Also Read : Kirit Somaiya, a victim of his own ways?
Not after the tirade that, as the Sena saw it, Somaiya had launched against Uddhav Thackeray during the 2017 Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections and beyond. He had accused Thackeray of corruption and alleged that the Shiv Sena-controlled BMC was in the grip of a powerful mafia run by a ‘saheb’ in Bandra.
Those attacks came back to haunt him after the Shiv Sena, which had announced its intention to contest the Lok Sabha elections on its own, agreed to stay put in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. The once-a-day barbs that Shiv Sena had been throwing at the BJP stopped soon after. So did its praise for Rahul Gandhi and other opposition leaders.
Also Read:Shiv Sena toughens stance against Kirit Somaiya
When BJP chief Amit Shah went to file his nomination from the Gandhinagar seat in Gujarat, Uddhav Thackeray was among the alliance partners who were by his side.
Kirit Somaiya put up a brave face. “I am very happy that Manoj Kotak ji standing with me here has got the ticket. We all will support him and ensure he wins,” he told reporters, according to news agency ANI.
“Ultimately our aim is a second term for Modi ji. The responsibilities within party keep shifting, there is nothing new in it,” said the BJP leader who last week attempted to reach out to Thackeray. According to reports, he didn’t get the appointment. | {
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NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Verizon Communications Inc said on Monday it would buy Yahoo Inc’s core internet properties for $4.83 billion in cash, marking the end of the line for a storied Web pioneer and setting the stage for a big new internet push by the telecom giant.
Verizon VZ.N will combine Yahoo's YHOO.O search, email and messenger assets as well as advertising technology tools with its AOL unit, which it bought last year for $4.4 billion. Verizon has been looking to mobile video and advertising for new sources of revenue outside the oversaturated wireless market.
The No. 1 U.S. wireless operator is betting that it can take data on more than 200 million unique monthly visitors to Yahoo sites, many of them on mobile devices, and combine it with data on 150 million or so unique monthly AOL users and data on its own user base of over 100 million wireless subscribers to offer a more targeted service for advertisers.
Barclays said last month Verizon could save $500 million a year in costs of acquiring internet traffic and other expenses by buying Yahoo’s internet business.
The deal likely means more investment in popular content sites such as AOL’s Huffington Post and Yahoo Finance when they become part of a much larger entity.
“It now becomes somewhat easier to justify investing in content,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research.
Verizon said it would provide more detail on the strategy behind the acquisition when it announces second-quarter earnings on Tuesday.
LONG WAY DOWN
The deal came after activist investors led by Starboard Value LP lost faith in Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer, who was hired in 2012, and forced what became a protracted sale process.
Slideshow ( 5 images )
Yahoo, founded in 1994, was a dominant player in the early days of the internet, but has long lost its leadership position in internet search and advertising to Alphabet Inc's GOOGL.O Google, Facebook Inc FB.O and others.
Mayer said on a conference call with investors that she planned to stay at Yahoo through the deal’s close. Marni Walden, head of product innovation and new business at Verizon, will head the combined internet unit and said no decisions had yet been made on the management team.
“Yahoo gives us scale that is what is most critical here,” said Walden, adding that the company’s audience will go from the millions to the billions. “We want to compete and that is the place we need to be.”
Mayer, in an interview with Reuters, said she still saw a “path to growth” for Yahoo, especially in mobile. “What’s exciting about the Verizon transaction is that it brings us back to growth sooner,” she said. She said she was “open-minded” about a possible role with the combined companies.
But analysts expect AOL CEO Tim Armstrong - like Mayer a one-time Google executive - to be the driving force behind the combined companies.
Yahoo is still one of the largest properties on the internet, with hundreds of millions of customers using its email, finance and sports offerings, among others, and a heavily trafficked home page.
But Google has a stranglehold on the internet search business and built an industry-leading email service, while Facebook dominates in mobile and social media. Meanwhile, traditional web banner advertising, long Yahoo’s strength, has become much less lucrative in the age of mobile and video.
“It’s a decade of mismanagement that has finally ended for Yahoo,” said Recon Analytics analyst Roger Entner. “It’s the continuation of an extension of Verizon’s strategy toward becoming a wireless internet player and a move away from (telecom) regulation for Verizon into an unregulated growth industry.
Slideshow ( 5 images )
Under Armstrong, AOL has beefed up its advertising technology with a string of acquisitions, and launched the mobile video service go90. Verizon has not disclosed how financially successful the unit has been, but Armstrong, known as a formidable salesman, has clearly won the confidence of Verizon’s leaders.
FAR BEHIND GOOGLE, FACEBOOK
The integration of Yahoo will not come without challenges. In its latest results, it reported a second-quarter net loss of $439.9 million as it wrote down the value of Tumblr, the microblogging and social media service it acquired in 2013 for $1.1 billion.
Even with AOL and Yahoo, Verizon would still be far behind s Google and Facebook. According to eMarketer, Yahoo is expected to generate $2.32 billion in net U.S. digital ad sales, while AOL is expected to make $1.3 billion in 2016. Facebook and Google are forecast to deliver sales of $10.3 billion and $24.63 billion, respectively, by the end of this year.
The Verizon deal would transform Yahoo into a holding company, with a 15 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd BABA.N and a 35.5 percent interest in Yahoo Japan Corp 4689.T as well as Yahoo's convertible notes, certain minority investments and its non-core patents.
Yahoo executives said the remaining company is structured to “indefinitely” hold its Yahoo Japan and Alibaba stakes. They are worth about $40 billion based on their market capitalizations, while Yahoo had a market value of about $37.4 billion at Friday’s close.
Yahoo will continue as an independent company until the deal receives shareholder and regulatory approvals, the companies said. It is expected to close in early 2017. It plans to change its name and become a publicly traded investment company.
Yahoo currently has $7.7 billion in cash, in addition to the $4.8 billion it will receive at the close of the deal, which it plans to return to shareholders, Yahoo executives said on the call.
Verizon prevailed over rival bidders, including AT&T Inc T.N; a group led by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert and backed by billionaire Warren Buffett; private equity firm TPG Capital Management LP [TPG.UL]; and a consortium of buyout firms Vector Capital and Sycamore Partners.
Under pressure from Starboard, Yahoo launched an auction of its core business in February after shelving plans to spin off its stake in Alibaba. | {
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Image : Pixbay
A weird thing happened this year: Apple put its brand new iPhone on sale just a few weeks after release. Well, it wasn’t an outright sale. Faced with poor sales, the company boosted trade-in values of old iPhones so that you could get an iPhone XR for up to $300 off. These slumping sales numbers are part of a trend, too. People just aren’t buying as many iPhones as they used to, so Apple has been scrambling to figure out its future.
What will it look like? It might look pretty rotten, in my opinion.
I know, I know. “Rotten” is a too-easy quip to describe potentially troubling times for a company named after a fruit. But I can’t stop thinking about the company’s trajectory, especially the degree to which it’s just stuttered in the past few months. I also can’t stop seeing reports of Apple’s plummeting stock price. Just last week, Apple entered a death cross, which is a very bad thing that happens when a stock’s 50-day moving average falls below its 200-day moving average. The same thing happened to Google, Facebook, and Netflix earlier this year, which some observers believe signals the beginning of a bear market or even a recession. I’m personally circling back to this rotten Apple idea.
The last time the United States faced a major financial crisis, Apple was a much different company. It was almost a dozen years ago that Steve Jobs showed the world the first iPhone and announced that the company would be dropping “Computer” from its name to become Apple Inc., a consumer electronics business. By the time Lehman Brothers abruptly collapsed in September 2008, Apple had become the third largest mobile handset maker in the world and launched the App Store, which Jobs said would become a billion-dollar business. This year, Apple bragged about how people spent $300 million on App Store purchases on New Years’ Day alone. And that was after App Store developers made $26.5 billion in revenue the year leading up to that milestone day.
Apple didn’t just survive the Great Recession. The company skyrocketed in value and stretched its tentacles out into all kinds of new categories. Not only did Apple make a tablet, but the company’s iPad has become the most popular tablet in the world. Apple made a watch, and that Apple Watch is now the best selling wearable in the world. And yes, Apple has sold a shitload of iPhones in the past decade, but those sales figures have flattened out. It also looks like Apple’s next big thing might not even be a thing at all.
After the iPhone, Apple’s second-biggest moneymaker is its services business which generated $37 billion in revenue last year. This includes App Store and iTunes purchases, iCloud plans, Apple Music subscriptions, and Apple Pay, and the segment could soon include new products like a streaming video service or a news subscription service. After all, Apple has already invested $1 billion into producing its TV programming, and earlier this year, the company acquired Texture, a digital magazine subscription service, reportedly in order to launch a premium news service of its own. There are even rumors that Apple will purchase Condé Nast, although it’s unclear if this is a real possibility. Apple did hire a former Condé Nast executive to turn Apple News into a media powerhouse. So clearly, Apple has plans for growth. Unfortunately for some, that growth might not include exciting new hardware.
Somewhere along the way to becoming a trillion dollar company, Apple’s taste for hardware innovation seemed to sour. Some would argue that the iPads, Watches, and iPhones haven’t gotten any meaningful new features in years. Many would argue that MacBooks and Macs are overpriced versions of machines that Apple competitors released years ago. I mean, what has the company invented in recent memory? The Touch Bar debuted on MacBook Pro computers in 2016 and was widely panned as a gimmick. Face ID came out last year, and while some love it, some people hate it so much they’re buying older iPhones to avoid it. Just a few months ago, Apple earned accolades for adding electrocardiogram (ECG) capabilities to the Apple Watch, but the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) also had to point out that the feature doesn’t always work. The HomePod is also an Apple product that now exists, but it sucks.
Gripes like these might sound whiney. Like, “Oh no, the company that used to make magical gadgets now makes fewer magical gadgets, and that’s a real tragedy.” It’s not. Apple will continue to make expensive phones, watches, and computers for many years to come. The company will also apparently make a lot more services and content that let you continue to spend money after you’ve bought the gadgets. It’s possible that Apple will invent more gadgets at some point in the future, but it seems very unlikely that we’ll to see radically new hardware in the next few years. In other words, Apple appears to be settling down for a little innovation nap, conveniently at the same time that a bear market arrives.
This lull might not last long. Apple is reportedly working on an augmented reality headset that would compete with the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap One. Such a device would tap into the existing ecosystem of AR content that developers have already built for iOS using the relatively new ARKit, and according to rumors, it would connect wirelessly to a box equipped with a new, super powerful Apple processor. While some believe that these undeniably futuristic mixed-reality headsets might be as ubiquitous as smartphones one day, others have a hard time believing that people want to live in a world that looks like a scene from Ready Player One. Would you want that future?
It’s also possible that Apple is content being a luxury hardware company that makes boatloads of money by selling software and services for its devices. The company is already pushing up the average price of an iPhone and now sells premium models for well north of $1,000. Maybe the iPhone XR is selling poorly because loyal users are happy to spend a few hundred dollars more and get the very best model. And maybe Apple is fine selling fewer devices since more and more of its revenue is coming from the seemingly limitless services business. The company seems hip to this since it decided recently to stop disclosing hardware unit sales in quarterly earnings reports as it encourages investors to watch for growth in services.
But let’s be real. If you’re an Apple fan, you’re not flipping out over updates to iCloud. You’re not pooping your pants over new Siri features. You won’t be standing in line to check out Apple’s new premium news service. You’ve probably never even seen Apple’s original TV programming, and if you have, you probably regret it, because it is awful. Pretty new hardware and seeing machines do new things is what’s always been most exciting about Apple.
If Apple’s future really is all about services and not about hardware, what a rotten future that is. It probably won’t be rotten for Apple, a company with nearly $240 billion of cash on hand. Apple is rich and will almost certainly find all kinds of new ways to get richer. If that involves taking money from people in the form of subscriptions and fees instead of fun new gadgets, well, that sucks for Apple fans. | {
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Best Buy got a little too enthusiastic with its promotional copy for Madden NFL 13, promising features such as "slow-motion chain kills," pickpocketing unsuspecting victims, and a new pursuit system involving a canoe. Truly, this is how you innovate in the sports genre.
Yes, obviously, some Best Buy web manager accidentally copypasted a bullet point from Assassin's Creed III into the Madden 13 listing, but that hasn't stopped the folks at EA Tiburon. Sources inside the studio today provided to Kotaku this, ahem, exclusive look at a motion capture session for what appears to be real-time, Kinect-enabled canoe rowing, which will or will not appear in Madden NFL 14 next year.
Personally, I can't wait to see James Harrison's counter-kill animation. The non-canoe version of Madden NFL 13 hits shelves on Tuesday. | {
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Essentials
WHAT Northwestern at Michigan WHERE Michigan Stadium
Ann Arbor, MI WHEN 3:30 Eastern
October 10th, 2015 THE LINE Michigan –7.5 TELEVISION BTN TICKETS From $91 PARKING From $20 WEATHER sunny, chilly AM, mid 60s gametime, 0% chance of rain
Picture at right posted in a spirit of genuine love and admiration for Bo Cisek.
Overview
Run Offense vs Northwestern
Anthony Walker is not to be confused with Antoine
This has been up and down for the Wildcats. They've hampered Stanford and Minnesota (a combined 3.5 YPC after sacks are removed), but both Duke and Ball State gashed the Wildcats for more than five yards a carry, nearing 200 yards each. Duke's output was their best of the year on a per-carry basis; they just rushed for under a yard per carry in a 9-7 win(!) over Boston College. Ball State also just rushed for under a yard per carry against Toledo. They did not win.
So this is very different than Michigan's run D. It's not exactly bad. But it's not amazing. Northwestern is 44th in YPC allowed, and that's after facing the #35, #39, #83, and #109 rush offenses plus an FCS team. That is average performance against an average schedule. (For comparison, Michigan is fifth against #21, #32, #41, #84, and #115. IE: on another level entirely.)
Northwestern has a much more extreme version of the linebacker dichotomy Michigan does. Anthony Walker has been heroic this season, with a typical statline of 18 tackles, 3 TFLs, one baby saved from a burning building, and a PBU. Ace:
MIKE Anthony Walker flew under the radar heading into the season, but it's hard not to notice him now that he's amassed 44 tackles and 8.5 TFLs through five games for one of the most surprisingly strong defenses in the country. While he's a tiny bit undersized at 6'1, 235, he's got great athleticism for an inside linebacker, and his ability to read and react only makes it easier for him to shut down plays in a hurry: Walker is at his best going sideline to sideline but he can also shed blocks and make plays between the tackles; he's also a solid cover linebacker.
The rest of their linebackers are nowhere near his level; I have seen them make weak tackle attempts in many games, get out of position, etc. After Walker, Northwestern's next two leading tacklers are the starting safeties. Only then do the other starting LBs come. Get Walker blocked and you can get to the secondary.
The Northwestern defensive line is fine. They're solid. They execute their assignments. They have something of a playmaker in Dean Lowry (4.5 TFLs). Ace compared him to Ryan Van Bergen and I think that's on point. I really liked RVB's game, but he's not Joey Bosa or Yannick Ngakoue. I am more optimistic about Michigan's ability to pound out yards against this defense than Ace is; the numbers for the season aren't great, and Minnesota's infinite offensive problems probably inflated the assets of the Northwestern D.
As for Michigan, Steve Lorenz is reporting Michigan should have De'Veon Smith back for this game. I have heard similar; I expect he will be available but maybe not 100% depending on his pain tolerance level.
Smith's projected return is a major boost. Michigan's anger back had his most impressive outing of 2014 in the #M00N game:
He was at his most effective against Northwestern, when he was able to slip through the line and utilize that power and balance to bludgeon the Wildcats. One particular third and short conversion was whistled dead despite Smith still inching forward with two different Wildcats hanging off him like 300-pound Christmas ornaments.
This is much the same crew he's going up against; if he can duplicate that performance Michigan has gone a long way towards winning.
That is somewhat likely. While Northwestern's taken a step forward on defense, it hasn't shown up too much in the run game; meanwhile this is basically the same Michigan rushing offense with a much better coaching situation. Consistent production is likely.
KEY MATCHUP: DE'VEON SMITH versus THE FLAILING ARMS OF THOSE WHO PLEAD FOR HIM TO STOP HIS BLOODY REIGN OF TERROR
[Hit THE JUMP for a SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE and a SIGN THAT NORTHWESTERN IS ALWAYS THEMSELVES]
Pass Offense vs Northwestern
It's a weird year in the Big Ten, and there's nothing weirder than the fact that Northwestern's secondary could be the best in the conference. Michigan would strenuously dispute that, but non-insane arguments can be had about it. For those of us raised on good old fashioned Northwestern #chaos #brand football this is a disappointment. For Promethean Northwestern fans, a break from having their liver eaten must be nice.
But, yes, they are legit good. Nick Van Hoose and Matthew Harris are the best duo in recent memory for the Wildcats. Ace:
[Harris] plays the ball very well in the air. VanHoose is less of a playmaker but is in the receiver's hip pocket so much that he doesn't get thrown at much.
I've watched the Wildcats in three of their games (Stanford, Ball State, and Minnesota) and have been impressed with both guys' ability to stick with their charges. It is not particularly difficult to see them doing so against Michigan wide receivers not named Chesson, and Chesson's had issues with consistency. He is also not at all like Ball State's Jordan Williams, who torched the Wildcats for 133 yards thanks in large part to the fact that he is huge and leaps well for jump balls. Jump balls that Michigan does not throw.
The Northwestern safeties have also impressed as the Wildcats are once again amongst the national leaders in preventing long plays from the opponent. They're 9th in preventing 20 yarders and haven't given up a 40 yard play this year. (Michigan is tied for second in 20 yarders and has one play of 30+, that towards the end of the UNLV game.)
This is a nice combination, and when you add in a super-fast MLB the underneath stuff gets difficult as well. Northwestern's back seven has largely earned its ranking.
Not so good is the pass rush, which has just nine sacks on the year, three of those against Eastern Illinois. Against D-I competition the Wildcats are averaging 1.5 sacks a game; DL Deonte Gibson and Ifeadi Odenigbo lead the way with 2.5 each.
Meanwhile this has been a struggle for Michigan. Jake Rudock has been erratic and mostly bad so far in his Michigan career. He's taken a significant step backwards even from his middling form at Iowa, missing short passes repeatedly and suddenly unable to complete a long pass. Turnovers have made an unwelcome resurgence after he got through the entirety of 2014 with just 5 interceptions.
The light could go on at some point since a lot of the problems are either things that used to be strengths or clearly a result of an unfamiliarity with Michigan's offense. At this point Michigan fans just want mediocre production and no turnovers.
One possible advantage for Michigan will be their tight ends. Northwestern has not faced a team that plays them other than Minnesota and their hopeless broken offense. If Michigan can put someone on Northwestern's shaky-non-Walker LBs profit can be had.
KEY MATCHUP: SAD GHOST JAKE RUDOCK versus I GUESS WE'RE GOING WITH HAPPY PRODUCTIVE IOWA JAKE RUDOCK NO MATTER HOW LUDICROUS THAT SOUNDS
Run Defense vs Northwestern
Jackson is default Northwestern tailback
Lead back Justin Jackson is in the mold of most Northwestern lead backs: undersized, shifty, not particularly athletic, and more than the sum of his parts. Skip the worthless first minute of this highlight package but do examine the second and third:
Jackson is at his best picking through traffic on the infinite iterations of inside zone that Michigan is about to see; he is a bit like Mike Hart without the power.
Jackson's backed up by a couple guys who are almost exactly like him; Solomon Vault had a spectacular one-handed touchdown catch against Minnesota that replay overturned.
Northwestern can and does run quarterback Clayton Thorson, but since a 42-yard QB draw that scored the only touchdown in the Stanford game he's been pedestrian. Minnesota and Duke bottled him up; he went for 45 yards on 22 carries in those games. Thorson is about as mobile as Jake Rudock; he is a bit bigger. Northwestern mostly runs him to keep defenses honest and occupy defenders when Jackson and company have the ball.
The combine these things and you have an offense that has veritably shredded lower-level competition (5 YPC against Ball State and EIU) and been just good enough against Power 5 teams. The typical Northwestern rushing day has 50 carries and change, rushes for close to 4 yards a pop, and lacks a truly explosive play.
Michigan's brutal defense is never more brutal than when opponents try to run. Occasionally the ball will pop outside the tackles when a linebacker fails to maintain leverage. Every once in a while a DL will get cut or fly up in the wrong gap. All other carries to date have been crushed in the meaty hands of Michigan's DL.
No opponent since Utah has cracked 100 yards on the ground; Michigan is giving up 2.3 yards an attempt. Maryland leads the nation in interceptions and still passed about two thirds of the time against the Wolverines. Michigan's backups would be an upper-echelon Big Ten defensive line. They have done all these things with five and six man boxes.
There are two caveats to the previous two paragraphs. One: starting WDE Mario Ojemudia has been lost for the season. After struggles in space in the opening game Ojemudia was playing very well. His backup, Royce Jenkins-Stone, is a senior who has played pretty well in limited opportunities, but a dropoff is likely.
Two: the sole opponent to rush even semi-competently against Michigan, Utah, did so largely because their QB Travis Wilson went for 57 yards on 11 carries. While Michigan largely shut down a mobile QB the next week, in that game they blew a scrape exchange and let the Beavers rip off a 20-yarder.
Those two events could combine unpleasantly. If Royce Jenkins-Stone is shaky as the option guy in his first start at DE, the very very spread option Northwestern offense could make unexpected headway.
But until I see that, or any team move the ball on the ground effectively, my assumption is that rushing against Michigan is a cordial invitation to second and nine.
KEY MATCHUP: ROYCE JENKINS-STONE and maybe LAWRENCE MARSHALL versus EVERY OPTION TRICK NORTHWESTERN HAS IN ITS BOOK
Pass Defense vs Northwestern
If Dan Vitale was a 1970s blaxsplotation star something would have gone very wrong in casting but also he'd star in SUPERBLACK SUPERBACK so that's all fine then
Clayton Thorson is a redshirt freshman who has been largely sheltered from major responsibility. Ace's run/pass-by-down breakdown is stark:
Down Run Pass PA 1st 21 3 1 2nd 15 1 3 3rd 3 12 --
Thorson's scuffling along in his many obvious passing downs, completing 57% on the year for 6.3 YPA. He has not exceeded 128 passing yards against a Power 5 opponent thus far in his career, though his game against Minnesota was reasonably efficient.
Opponent Att Comp Pct. Yards YPA TD Int Stanford 25 12 48 105 4.2 0 0 @ Duke 23 9 39.1 70 3 0 2 Minnesota 19 14 73.7 128 6.7 0 0
6.7 YPA against a kind-of-good defense (Minnesota has been bludgeoned by injuries) is decent. 9.1 yards a completion indicates how Thorson acquired the majority of those yards: dinking and dunking. One wide receiver, the steady and uninspiring Christian Jones, has more than six catches. WRs have been targeted 59 times; tailbacks (including SUPERBACKS(!)) have been targeted 46. Northwestern has only given up four sacks, and that's not because they've got a lights-out line in pass protection. Ace:
The line looked okay in pass protection; the quick-passing scheme helped them a lot. The right tackle got beat by Theiren Cockran for a sack and another quick pressure—he looked pretty vulnerable. The rest held their own, though the degree of difficulty was low.
It will be interesting to see how Michigan treats SUPERBACK(!) Dan Vitale. Vitale is an excellent and frequently deployed receiver; his 100 yards receiving came in big game-saving chunks against Ball State. He leads the team in targets, catches, and receiving yardage. He is also a fullback. Michigan has generally responded to three-wide formations with a nickel package and will continue that; I bet we see a lot of safeties drawing man coverage against him.
Other than Jones—a possession guy who will catch some hitches and slants and the like—there's not much data on the Northwestern receiving corps. Rutgers transfer Miles Shuler has done little this year but will be a guy to watch in the flats and on the horizontal double move routes that have given Peppers some trouble this year. Shuler returned a punt 65 yards against Minnesota to set up Northwestern's first touchdown and was on the end of Northwestern's sole big passing play against the Cardinal. He has some talent, but as a slot receiver in an offense that's allergic to throwing over the middle he hasn't been used much.
Where are the screens, you ask? They have been rare because many teams are pressing the Northwestern receivers. Stanford did; Minnesota mostly did. Michigan will follow suit, forcing Thorson to get it at least a little downfield if he's going to add to his passing stats.
This matchup leans heavily in Michigan's favor but the many quick slants Maryland found profitable could frustrate if Michigan does not adapt to remove them. Those are the short quick hitters that have allowed Northwestern to move the ball when they have in fact done that; Michigan showed itself slightly vulnerable there.
One other thing of note: if Michigan does end up in the redzone, they are likely to have an advantage. When the field constricts, NW freezes up; Thorson is not reliable in that department.
KEY MATCHUP: MICHIGAN'S UNDERNEATH COVERAGE against YOU GET A HITCH and YOU GET A HITCH and YOU GET A HITCH and BEEEEEEEEEEES
Special Teams
Michigan projects to have an advantage in the field position battle.
Northwestern kicker Jack Mitchell is middling. He hit a 49 yarder against Stanford but it's been mostly chip shots since, and he's missed three of those plus a PAT. He is not their kickoff guy; said guy is really struggling with just 6 touchbacks in 28 attempts and lots of kickoffs from the 35 that look like this:
That is not an attempt to pop it up just in front of the goal line and swarm for the 5 or 10 yards it gets you. Also that was with the wind.
With a 39 yard average, Punter Hunter Niswander is also struggling. He's only got one touchback, but he's also only put four inside the 20—just about all of those punts are Niswander trying to kick it as far as he can and coming up with 39 yards or so. He has been very good at preventing returns—opponents have 5 for negative 8 yards this year. That tends to happen when you are punting it short.
The Wildcat return units have been one 65-yard Miles Shuler punt return last week and an incredibly important Solomon Vault KO TD against Duke and subpar otherwise. This still adds up to very good, but Michigan is all of a sudden much much better in coverage for some reason.
Michigan's end of this is tantalizing if they can just get a return with Jabrill Peppers, who is chomping at the bit for opportunities. K Kenny Allen is still a bit of a question mark but has ben perfect from inside 40 so far in his career; Blake O'Neill has been masterful aside from a shank or two. He has 11 punts inside the 20 and probably a half-dozen inside the five without a touchback.
KEY MATCHUP: MATE PUT THE BALL THROUGH THE BIG STICKS NO WORRIES
Intangibles
Cheap Thrills
Worry if...
Michigan's having trouble containing a read option.
Sad ghost passes to sad ghost receivers prevent YAC or touchdowns.
Targeting issues let unblocked guys show up into otherwise successful runs.
Cackle with knowing glee if...
Michigan is blowing the NW DL off the ball.
Michigan finally hits a deep ball.
Blake O'Neill is punting from the 40.
Fear/Paranoia Level: 6 (Baseline 5; +1 It Me, They Us, +1 for Sad Ghost Rudock, -1 for Meaningful Special Teams Advantage In A Field Position Game, +1 for They Did Crush Stanford's Offense, –1 for The Defenses, While Superficially Similar, Aren't That Close When You Look At The Stats, –1 for How Are They Getting In The Endzone, +1 for This Is Michigan-Northwestern, This Is Chaos)
Desperate need to win level: 9 (Baseline 5; +1 for Hyarrr There Be Validation In Beating A Top 15 Team, +1 for Stakes! There Are Now Stakes!, +1 for Let's Keep The Harbauneymoon Going WOO I CAN HARMANTAEAU ANYTHING, +1 for The Intoxicating Scent Of An Elite Defense Will Evaporate If A Loss Is Placed Upon Our Heads, –1 for I Mean We Kind Of Owe Them A Dumb Win, +1 for Spent Most Of This Week Petting The Computer Screen While Looking At Various Statistical Rankings And Purring Excellent And It Was A Good Time)
Loss will cause me to... board up the windows, the Juggalo hurricane is about to hit town (and leave at halftime)
Win will cause me to... LET ME FIND THAT SWIRLING VORTEX OF BRAHS AND PUNCH IT IN ITS AMORPHOUS FACE BRAH
The strictures and conventions of sportswriting compel me to predict:
This is bad news for Northwestern's offense. Michigan has given up one play of more than 20 yards this year, that a late heave by UNLV's Blake Decker. Northwestern's red zone offense is dismal, currently 127th in TD percentage. A Northwestern touchdown would be something of a surprise. Two would be a shock.
On the other side of the ball, Michigan can attempt a boring dinosaur offense approach and expect a reasonable amount of success—enough to move the ball and pin the opponent back with their punting advantage, and eventually that will turn into points. I expect Harbaugh will have a couple things Northwestern hasn't seen and they'll hit some chunk plays as a result.
Finally, three opportunities for me to look stupid Sunday: | {
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President Donald Trump criticized leaders of Chicago on Thursday, blaming them for the increase in shootings during the summer.
“They had 63 incidents last weekend and 12 deaths,” Trump said during a roundtable on prison reform. “That’s bad stuff happening.”
Trump called for all communities to strengthen their bonds with law enforcement and for leaders to take responsibility.
“That’s bad leadership,” he said. “There’s no reason in a million years that something like that should be happening.”
In response to the shootings, Chicago Mayer Rahm Emanuel announced that 430 additional police officers would be put on the streets and a surge of up to 600 officers would be deployed this weekend.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/chicago-police-deployments-officers-shootings/
Trump has repeatedly criticized the violence in Chicago, particularly when the shooting rates rise in the summer.
“The killings are at a record pace and tough police work, which Chicago will not allow, would bring things back to order fast,” Trump wrote on Twitter in May. “The killings must stop!” | {
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I wrote in June about my problem with the growing ICO trend.
Even though we haven’t seen an acceleration since June, I now believe the field will continue accelerating further. And with good reason.
I had breakfast this week with Ami from SPiCE VC. Ami explained to me their ICO model … and I think something finally clicked with me. I actually understood why blockchain is needed, and isn’t just a buzzword. I understood how they’re doing a legal token sale… and I think I’m finally over my anti-ICO phase.
SPiCE explain their model, so I’ll just summarize:
It’s a liquid VC. They invest in various companies (not just blockchain), with the added bonus over a traditional VC that your investment is liquid/tokenized. They are fully legal and compliant. They studied regulation from around the world and are codifying it into their ICO & token redemption mechanisms. They are not “fully decentralized”. The government has the option to freeze an account, in case of legal issues e.g. theft/money laundering. Still, blockchain is useful to them. Even in the presence of such a freeze button, since they are running as a standard Ethereum ERC20 token, they get all the benefits of transparency & immutability of the ledger. In other words, private/modified/not-fully-decentralized blockchains or are not equivalent to a centralized database as many have claimed.
The conversation with Ami was a real eye opener for me. As an early Bitcoiner and a leader of the world’s first ICO who got burned in the process, I was opposed to almost every ICO I heard of. I tagged them as either scams or incompetence. Not anymore.
There is still a lot of buzz in the field, and 90%+ of ICOs will fail. But I will be keeping an eye out for those that don’t — they are going to change the world. | {
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Unfortunately the operational costs were too high compared to the revenue and we weren't growing fast enough, so after a run of almost 3 year it is time to say goodbye. We will be back though! Please follow our Twitter Channel to stay informed about our new launch date. | {
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James May's Lego abode may be shaping up to be spectacular, but he's far from the first person to build a house out of something novel. Here are ten more amazing homes with, shall we say, unorthodox constituents.
Advertisement | {
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According to the report, Uber won't be sending its cars out alone. A human supervisor will sit in the driving seat, as required by law, "with their fingertips on the wheel." A second person will be sat in the front passenger seat, taking notes on a laptop while cameras inside and outside the vehicle record everything that happens during the ride. Customers won't be expected to pay for their journey in Uber's XC90s, at least to begin with, which may help put nervous riders at ease.
Pittsburgh serves as the ideal environment for Uber's autonomous trials. The city is home to its Advanced Technologies Center (ATC) and local authorities have already approved the testing of its self-driving fleet. When the do hit the road, only a handful of cars will be available right away, but Uber has struck a deal with Volvo to take delivery of 100 vehicles by the end of the year.
With Ford announcing yesterday that it intends to have fully autonomous cars on the road within five years, Uber is moving swiftly. It wants to be out ahead of its rivals with its own tried-and-tested solution, not a ready-made one from a car manufacturer that could one day eat its lunch. | {
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Sen. Bob Corker to his successor: 'I will be cheering you on each step along the way'
Sen. Bob Corker | The Tennessean
Editor's note: The USA TODAY NETWORK - Tennessee reached out to Sen. Bob Corker for an open, nonpartisan letter to his successor, whoever that will be come November. Think of it as a letter a governor or president might place on his or her desk when leaving office.
Dear senator-elect,
I never dreamed of being a United States senator. I dreamed of building a business, and after graduating from the University of Tennessee, I built a construction company from scratch.
By my late 20s, our company was operating around the country and growing rapidly. I had worked hard, sure, but I also knew that I was blessed beyond measure and that I needed to give back to the community I still to this day call home.
One day, I was looking at our church bulletin and saw that they were organizing a mission trip to Haiti and needed someone who knew something about construction. Working with people in such need touched me in ways you cannot imagine.
Sen. Bob Corker: The Tennessean's 2017 Person of the Year The Tennessean Editorial Board noted the senator's courage and independence and fight to end human slavery.
I began to focus on the inner city in Chattanooga and saw that people there had similar needs. And that is where my foray into public service began — not as a political endeavor, but a civic one, on a mission to help thousands of families have the opportunity for a decent home so they could have a better life.
More: U.S. Sen. Bob Corker turns down offer to become next U.S. ambassador to Australia
More: U.S. Sen. Bob Corker on leaving the Senate: 'I hope the divisions will diminish'
That is how I have tried to approach each job along the way.
It is how I approached my time as commissioner of finance and administration for the state of Tennessee, telling newly elected Governor Don Sundquist on my first day exactly how long I would serve.
It is how I served as mayor of Chattanooga, working with our citizens to reimagine our city, and after checking off every item on our agenda, stepping down after one term.
And it is how I have approached my service in the Senate, telling Tennesseans when I ran in 2006 that I could not imagine serving more than two terms.
I think when you approach public service that way and are willing to walk away from “power” it allows you to serve in a different capacity.
It allows you to get your uniform dirty on every play and to call ‘em how you see ‘em. It allows you to think big and tackle major issues without thinking about the next election. And it allows you to focus on what unites rather than what divides. Our state has been served in the Senate by individuals who have played outsized roles on the national stage because of their focus on solving problems and on appealing to our country’s better angels.
In my 11 years and six-and-a-half months in the Senate, I have done my best to serve in the same vein and move the ball forward on the issues that matter most to our state and country. And in our form of government, the only way to do that successfully is by working with members on both sides of the aisle.
Serving the people of Tennessee in the United States Senate has been the greatest privilege of my life, and I know it will be for you too.
More: Where Tennessee's Senate candidates stand on the key issues
More: Analysis | Tennessee's US Senate race proving competitive, will have national implications
The people of Tennessee are special. They are passionate, proud people who are always willing to lend a hand to their neighbors. They love their families and strive to provide a better life for their children. They are people of faith, in God and country. They work hard and will expect you to as well.
In Genesis 12, God tells the Jewish people that they are blessed so that they can be a blessing to others. That is a verse I have often thought of throughout my Senate tenure. It has helped ground me during times of chaos and helped inspire me during times of sorrow.
This job will not always be easy, but it will be worth it because of the people I — and now you — have the privilege of serving. I will be cheering you on each step along the way. Congratulations and good luck.
Sincerely,
Bob Corker
Join the conversation Talk Tennessee politics on our Facebook group
| {
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We appreciate your entry and we'll be in touch with further product competitions. Robert & Amanda | {
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Devin Townsend doesn’t slow down with new album Empath, tons of touring, festival headline dates in 2020, the ERAS Vinyl Collection Parts 1-4, now he will release By A Thread – Live in London 2011 will see its very first vinyl release on March 13th, 2020. These shows saw DTP performing each of the quadrilogy of albums – Ki, Addicted, Deconstruction and Ghost – over 4 nights in London, with each album coming as a gatefold 2LP plus a bonus 2LP featuring the encores from each evening. The set also includes an LP-booklet with brand new liner notes that see Devin reflecting back on these special shows. All LP’s are available on 180g vinyl, and mastered specifically for the format. The original CD/DVD release has long been sold out.
Pre-order now here: https://DevinTownsendProject.lnk.to/ByAThreadLive
Devin Townsend is currently on his Empath Vol. 1 European tour, with Haken as main support. Many of the shows are already sold out, and you can find a list of the remaining dates below.
29th November – A2, Wroclaw, Poland
30th November – Barba Negra, Budapest, Hungary
2nd December – Simm City, Vienna, Austria
3rd December – X Tra, Zurich, Switzerland
5th December – The Great Hall, Cardiff, UK
6th December – Academy, Dublin, Ireland – SOLD OUT
7th December – Limelight, Belfast, UK
9th December – SWG3 Galvanisers, Glasgow, UK – SOLD OUT
10th December – Albert Hall, Manchester, UK – SOLD OUT
12th December – Roundhouse, London, UK – SOLD OUT
13th December – Rock City, Nottingham, UK – SOLD OUT
Tickets and VIP upgrade packages available here: https://www.hevydevy.com/tourdates/
Devin will take the Empath Vol. 1 tour to North America in 2020, before embarking on a Summer festival run in Europe which includes a headline appearance at Bloodstock Festival in the UK.
‘EMPATH’ is out now on Limited 2 CD Digipak in O-Card (including an entire disc of bonus material), Standard CD Jewelcase, Gatefold 180G 2LP Vinyl + CD + LP-booklet & as digital album. Order now here: https://devin-townsend.lnk.to/Empath
Watch the video for ‘Why?’ now here: https://youtu.be/fT-uWOVP5q0
Follow Devin Townsend:
http://www.hevydevy.com
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By Bryan Wilson, The Texas Law Hawk | April 08, 2014
Yep. Just like Boomhauer pictured on the left, I also enjoy drinking a frosty cold beer outside with my friends while enjoying the Texas heat. But are Boomhauer and the rest of the King of the Hill crew above breaking the law? I get a lot of questions about public consumption of alcohol, so I wanted to write something to help everyone out.* Let's talk about drinking beer outside, y'all.
Consuming Alcoholic Beverages in Public.
Many people believe it's illegal to walk down the street drinking a beer in Texas. Contrary to popular belief, there is no general statewide prohibition on public consumption of alcohol in the Texas Penal Code. In other words, Texas law allows a person to drink a beer while walking down the street (or while standing in an alleyway) unless an exception applies.
The TABC notes two exceptions on its website, even though there may be more depending on the situation. For example, the law prohibits public consumption of alcohol in public places in state parks. Also, you can't drink booze in any specific area that a city has made it illegal to drink alcohol. This may include certain areas during special events, such as concert grounds or festivals. The TABC website on public consumption of alcohol can be a helpful resource when you have questions about drinking laws, such as which cities have banned public drinking in certain areas.
So Which Cities Have Bans on Public Consumption of Alcohol?
To ban public drinking, a city must request approval from the TABC under §109.35 of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code. Even if the TABC approves this request, it is not a complete ban across the city. Instead, cities can only ban public consumption of alcohol in the "central business district" area of the city. This means that cities can only ban in locations where 90% of the buildings are commercial, so a city can't ban public drinking in other areas like a residential neighborhood (e.g., the King of the Hill picture above, which means Boomhauer is legally entitled to finish that beer!).
The easiest way to check if there is a ban in your city is to look it up on the TABC website above. According to the website as of April 8th, 2014, here are the cities with orders against public consumption of alcohol:
Amarillo
Claude
College Station
Corpus Christi
Dallas
El Paso
Farmersville
Giddings
Groveton
Houston
Hubbard
Jefferson
McAllen
Rosenberg
San Angelo
San Antonio
San Marcos
Shamrock
Sinton
South Padre Island
Taylor
Timpson
Vernon
Let's use Dallas as an example. Below is the map that shows the portion of Dallas where public drinking has been banned, with the banned area highlighted in yellow:
The highlighted yellow shows the area where public drinking is illegal in Dallas
Essentially, this means that there is no general ban on public drinking in Dallas exceptfor the portion in the map above that is highlighted in yellow. Thankfully, Fort Worth is not on the list, so there is no general ban in Fort Worth on public consumption of alcohol.
But before you hit the streets with your beer funnel and a sixer, there are some important exceptions and qualifications to the general rule. The exceptions from the TABC website I discussed above are not a complete list. For example, the TABC website doesn't mention that it is illegal to consume alcohol in most convenience store parking lots. They also don't mention that driving around with an open container is illegal or that you can't be intoxicated in public (even inside of a bar). These are just a few examples of why you should consult an attorney before relying on any discussion of the law on this or any other website.
One Final Point: Use Your Common Sense When Drinking.
One last point of great importance: just because something is technically legal does not necessarily mean it's a good idea. Cops don't know every criminal law or the intricacies of how they are applied; even criminal lawyers look up statutes and case law on a daily basis. You may be legally entitled to drink a beer in public, but most folks don't do it, so it might draw attention to yourself and raise a red flag to a cop to investigate you for a public intoxication charge. If you’re over 21, enjoy your beer just like Boomhauer, but understand the risks of public drinking-and educate yourself on your rights when dealing with police: www.TexasLawHawk.com/your-rights/.
For you visual learners out there, here is a chart that summarizes this post:
Know your rights. If you've been arrested for drinking, that doesn't necessarily mean you are guilty. You are presumed innocent until proven guilty. After an arrest, you need a criminal defense attorney who knows the law and isn't afraid to fight back.
Call Attorney Bryan Wilson at (817) 440-3953 , and get the Texas Law Hawk on your side today.
*Since we are talking about drinking, here’s a quick disclaimer: nothing in this post (or on this website) is legal advice. I write my impression of the law, but that doesn't mean that you should apply these legal principles to your situation. Your facts might be (and probably are) different than the examples above, and would command different advice. It is against the law to consume alcohol if you are under 21 years of age. Talk with an attorney before you rely on anything in this post or other portions of this website. | {
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Bony Bulters By Itachei Watch
362 Favourites 42 Comments 2K Views
Bone appetite!
is there a butler AU out there somewhere??? there gotta be cause undertale has at least 50 XD
I just did this cause i like drawing formal wear
would you have these guys as your butlers?
IMAGE DETAILS Image size 2508x2935px 3.66 MB Show More
Published : Jun 26, 2016 | {
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Night mode
Athena raised her hand, putting a barrier between herself and Arachne. Here in her nanoverse, it wasn’t a barrier of anything. It was just a barrier, a spot in the universe through which matter could not pass. A fundamental law. Inviolable for anyone who was not Athena.
Which is why she was completely unprepared when Arachne tore through it like it was paper.
Anansi danced out of Arachne’s path, swinging for her gut with the butt of his flint dagger. Without even pausing, Arachne’s hand snaked down to catch his wrist and fling him aside. When Anansi struck the wall, the stone turned soft to encase him, leaving only his face exposed.
What? Athena thought as she teleported herself out of reach of Arachne’s hands. “Arachne, stop!” she commanded. She erected another barrier, this time encasing Arachne in it like a cocoon. She didn’t just let it stand as before, pouring her will into it.
Arachne strained against the bonds. Athena could feel pain build up behind her eyes, a headache from the effort of restraining someone within her nanoverse.
“No!” Arachne shouted. “You won’t kill me!”
“I’m not here to kill you, I’m here to free you!” Athena shouted.
The pressure against the barrier stopped. The headache began to fade. Athena’s heart did not stop pounding. For as long as she had lived, she’d never imagined anything threatening her in her nanoverse. “What?” Arachne asked, blinking.
“I’m here to free you,” Athena repeated. “It’s…it’s been too long.”
Arachne took a deep breath. “Then release me.”
Athena did so, and at the same time removed the stone barrier from Anansi. Arachne stood there, taking things in. She looked at her hands, flexing the fingers she had not known for trillions of years. “I haven’t had an endocrine system since you locked me in here. Emotions are stronger than I remember.”
Athena relaxed. “I understand.”
Arachne shot her a withering glare. “No, no you do not. Lock yourself as a base animal, one that can barely even reason, for several lifespans of a universe, and then you can say that. Know what it’s like for a single thought to take millennia upon millennia to form, and then you can say that. Endure one tenth of what you have done to me, and then you can say you understand.”
“I…” Athena started to say, and she was grateful for Arachne’s interruption, because she had no idea what she could possibly say.
“I had to relearn how to think, Athena. I have no idea how many millennia, how many universes, I spent as mindless beast. Even once I did figure out how to think, that brain was so weak, so pitifully dominated by instinct, cognition was an effort that took longer than you can imagine. How long has it been, Athena? How long did you lock me in hell?”
“Five millennia,” Athena whispered.
“Five millenia for you. Nanoverses need to be reset every few hundred years or so, don’t they?” Arachne took a deep breath. “Ten universe lifetimes, at least. Hundreds of trillions of years. And now…what? You want to release me? You want to let me go out there, live a mortal life for mere seconds of what I’ve endured, then die?”
“I preserved your nanoverse,” Athena said. “Locked it in temporal stasis in here. It’s unchanged over the time. You’ll still be a goddess.”
Arachne studied Athena, then looked over Anansi. “Who are you?”
Anansi bowed. “I am Anansi. I never was in your land while you were there.”
“And you’re friends with…her?” Arachne asked with a sneer, gesturing towards Athena. “You let her bring you into her nanoverse?”
“Yes,” Anansi said simply. “I trust her.”
Arachne sneered. “So did I. I hope you never learn how foolish that is.”
“I came in here knowing your fate, Arachne,” Anansi said calmly. “I came in here to provide support for Athena as she undid the crime done to you – and to chastise her if she wavered in doing it.”
Both goddesses looked at him in shock. “Chastise?” Arachne asked coolly.
Anansi shrugged. “In here, there was little else that I could do. But I am very good at chastising. I once lectured a python so thoroughly, it swallowed its own tail. I imagine I could have gotten Athena to at least taste her ankle.”
Arachne looked at him, her eyes widening, and then she let out a harsh laugh. “I’d like to see that.”
Athena was at a loss for words. Arachne glanced at her with a raised eyebrow. “I’m not done with you, Pallas Athena. But I am sick to death of this cave. Take me out of here.”
“Of course. My staging area is right outside this cave.”
“My nanoverse?” Arachne asked.
Athena gestured and summoned it to her hand. “Right here.”
Arachne snatched it out of Athena’s fingers and held it close to her chest, starting to walk out of the cave. “Why didn’t you kill me?” Arachne asked, not turning back to look at Athena. “Why this hell? You had every right to slay me permanently under the laws of Olympus. Why did you instead lock me away?”
“I couldn’t kill billions,” Athena said, watching the back of Arachne’s head. “I couldn’t kill all those innocent people in your nanoverse. They did nothing wrong. And…and I failed you. I didn’t believe you deserved death, because the fault was partially mine.”
“Death would have been a kindness,” Arachne said, her voice harsh. “Don’t you dare claim you did it for me. You did it to assuage your guilt.” She glanced down to the nanoverse in her hands. “And for them. I can believe that.”
“I’m sorry,” Athena said.
Arachne whirled on her, pointing a finger at Athena’s face. “No. Your guilt grew strong enough that it forced you to action. You didn’t do this for me. You’ve done none of this for me. I don’t want your apology, Athena.”
“Then what do you want?” Athena asked, her voice soft. “Revenge?”
Arachne glared at her. “And if I did, would you have any right to deny it to me?”
Athena shook her head.
“Good. At least we can agree on that. For now, I want honesty.”
“You will have that,” Athena said.
Arachne spun and talked out of the cave again, seemingly too furious for words.
In silence, Athena followed. | {
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Warning to Yo Gotti fans: Wanna be tackled so hard by a muscle-bound security guard that your soul leaves your body? Simply jump onstage like this guy did, and ... good luck!
Gotti was rocking The Block Party festival Saturday night in San Antonio when one excited and very brave fan decided to get a little closer. What's amazing about the moment is ... Yo Gotti never flinches for a second.
Play video content TMZ.com
Gotti was so unfazed by the fan ... it's almost like he knew what was about to happen.
One of his security guards rushed in, looking exactly like an NFL linebacker, and absolutely destroyed the fan!!! According to concertgoers, Gotti's security worked the guy over a little bit after the tackle ... and then police detained him. | {
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Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 People in New York watch the SpongeBob SquarePants balloon as it floats during the 89th annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday, November 26. Hide Caption 1 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Spectators look on during the parade. Hide Caption 2 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Ronald McDonald waves to the crowd during the parade. Hide Caption 3 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 The Harold the Policeman balloon floats along the parade route. Hide Caption 4 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Members of the New York Police Department stand guard before the parade. A record number of police officers were patrolling the parade as security is on high alert after the terror attacks in Paris. Hide Caption 5 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Police cars block a street as spectators await the parade. Hide Caption 6 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Performers stand at attention during the parade. Hide Caption 7 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 A balloon of Finn and Jake from "Adventure Time with Finn and Jake" floats along the parade route. Hide Caption 8 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Police officers walk on Central Park West before the parade. Hide Caption 9 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 People in clown costumes watch the parade. Hide Caption 10 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 A spectator takes a photo of the balloon Toothless as it floats past. Toothless is a character from the animated movie "How to Train Your Dragon." Hide Caption 11 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 A float makes its way down the street during the parade. Hide Caption 12 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Dancers move down Central Park West during the parade. Hide Caption 13 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Spectators react as Santa Claus passes by. Hide Caption 14 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 A couple dressed as Santa Claus and Mrs. Claus wave to spectators. Hide Caption 15 of 17
Photos: Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2015 Children react as Santa Claus passes. Hide Caption 16 of 17 | {
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The Royal Mint has struck gold with its bullion trading business.
The company, which is owned by the U.K. government, makes billions of coins for 40 countries. It posted the highest revenues in its 1,100-year history on Tuesday, as revenues from gold and silver trading soared 64%.
At the heart of the growth is a new online trading service, which makes it easier for investors to buy and sell gold. Nearly 20,000 accounts were opened between the launch in 2014 and the end of March, the Royal Mint said.
With record low interest rates, gold and silver have proven popular alternatives to savings accounts.
"The growth in our bullion business has been built across many activities but our increased competitiveness in the U.S. silver market has been at the center of our growth," said Adam Lawrence, the mint's chief executive.
Gold and silver coins produced by the mint are now accepted as investments within USA Individual Retirement and Health Saving Accounts.
The Royal Mint could get a boost this year too from soaring demand for gold following Britain's vote to leave the European Union, which triggered a big devaluation of the pound and talk of even lower interest rates.
There was a 7-fold increase in sales of gold bars in the two weeks following the June 23 referendum, and there's little sign of demand easing up since, the mint said.
Related: China to buy $90 billion gold vault in London
The Royal Mint's website offers several kinds of coins which customers can buy within a few minutes. The flagship "Sovereign" is a 22-carat gold coin currently selling for just under $350.
Gold, which is seen by investors as a safe haven, got a boost from the global market turmoil in the aftermath of the Brexit vote last month. Gold prices have risen nearly 25% so far this year, to $1,320 per ounce. | {
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ON WHEELZ SEND US YOUR SHOES :
You can send us your favorite shoes and we will adjust them in order to realize your dream: transform them into On Wheelz !
(Validation of the boot to be made by FlaneurZ and shipping shoes at your expense)
Less | {
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Probing Outer Planet Storms
A Hubble project called Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) has been producing long-term information about the four outer planets at ultraviolet wavelengths, a unique capability that has paid off in deepening our knowledge of Neptune. If you kept pace with Voyager 2 at Neptune, you’ll recall that the spacecraft found huge dark storms in the planet’s atmosphere. Neptune proved to be more atmospherically active than its distance from the Sun would have suggested, and Hubble found another two storms in the mid-1990’s that later vanished.
Image: Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, a large anticyclonic storm similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, observed by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989. The image was shuttered 45 hours before closest approach at a distance of 2.8 million kilometers. The smallest structures that can be seen are of an order of 50 kilometers. The image shows feathery white clouds that overlie the boundary of the dark and light blue regions. Credit: NASA/JPL.
Now we have evidence of another storm, discovered by Hubble in 2015 and evidently vanishing before our eyes. This is a storm that was once large enough to have spanned the Atlantic, evidently visible because primarily composed of hydrogen sulfide drawn up from the deeper atmosphere. UC-Berkeley’s Joshua Tollefson, a co-author on the new paper on this work, notes that the storm’s darkness is relative: “The particles themselves are still highly reflective; they are just slightly darker than the particles in the surrounding atmosphere.”
Image: This series of Hubble Space Telescope images taken over 2 years tracks the demise of a giant dark vortex on the planet Neptune. The oval-shaped spot has shrunk from 5,000 kilometers across its long axis to 3,700 kilometers across, over the Hubble observation period. Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then only Hubble has tracked these elusive features. Hubble found two dark storms that appeared in the mid-1990s and then vanished. This latest storm was first seen in 2015. The first images of the dark vortex are from the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, a long-term Hubble project that annually captures global maps of our solar system’s four outer planets. Credit: NASA, ESA, and M.H. Wong and A.I. Hsu (UC Berkeley).
The differences between Neptune’s storms and famous Jovian features like the Great Red Spot are interesting though not yet fully understood. The Great Red Spot has been a well described feature on Jupiter for more than two centuries, still robust though varying in size and color. A storm that once encompassed four Earth diameters had shrunk to twice Earth’s diameter in the Voyager 2 flyby of 1979, and has now dropped to perhaps 1.3. As to its heat sources, they are still under investigation, as we saw in 2016 (check Jupiter’s Great Red Spot as Heat Source).
Neptune is another story, with storms that seem to last but a few years. Thus the fading of the recent dark spot, which had been observed at mid-southern latitudes. Michael H. Wong (UC-Berkeley) is lead author of the paper:
“It looks like we’re capturing the demise of this dark vortex, and it’s different from what well-known studies led us to expect. Their dynamical simulations said that anticyclones under Neptune’s wind shear would probably drift toward the equator. We thought that once the vortex got too close to the equator, it would break up and perhaps create a spectacular outburst of cloud activity.”
But the storm drifted not toward the equator but the south pole, not constrained by the powerful alternating wind jets found on Jupiter. Moreover, we have no information on how these storms form or how fast they rotate. And as the new paper notes, the five Neptune dark spots we’ve thus far found have differed broadly in terms of size, shape, oscillatory behavior and companion cloud distribution. We have much to learn about their formation, behavior and dissipation.
When you think about flyby missions like Voyager 2 at Neptune, the value of getting that first look at a hitherto unknown object is obvious. But we are moving into an era when longer-term observations become paramount. The OPAL program with Hubble is an example of this, studying in the case of Neptune a phenomenon that seems to exist on a timescale that suits an annual series of observations. Hubble has been complemented by observations from other observatories, including not just Spitzer but, interestingly, Kepler K2. A robotic adaptive optics system tuned for planetary atmospheric science is being prepared for deployment in Hawaii, offering a way to scrutinize these worlds over even smaller periods.
From the paper:
Clearly, there is much room in the discovery space of solar system time domain science. There is room in this discovery space for exploration by a dedicated solar system space telescope, a network of ground facilities, and cadence programs at astrophysical observatories with advanced capabilities.
The paper is Wong et al., “A New Dark Vortex on Neptune,” Astronomical Journal Vol. 155, No. 3 (15 February 2018). Abstract. | {
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Personal Injury
Have you or a loved one recently suffered a serious or catastrophic injury? Are you facing an insurance company whose best offer won’t even begin to compensate the losses your family experienced, both financially and emotionally? It may be time to find yourself an experienced personal injury lawyer. Choosing the right New Jersey personal injury lawyer can make a significant difference when it comes to you getting fair compensation for the harm that you have experienced. You deserve an advocate in your corner who will represent you with compassion. We will take on insurance companies with determination so you can rest with peace of mind as you move forward | {
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Holland 5 –3 Hungary: Different Hungary formation, different game
After their dominant away ’tiki taka style’ victory only a few days ago, Holland manager Van Marwijk will not have felt the slightest incentive to change his line-up either in terms of tactics or his choice of a starting eleven. And with all players fully fit he wasn’t forced into any changes either. This allowed the unique situation of two consecutive matches started by 11 players all playing for different clubs.
How different were things at Hungary? No less than five changes were made, with Liptak, Elek, Varga, Koman and goalkeeper Kiraly all left out. Perhaps even more significantly, manager Egervári decided to trade his 4-2-3-1 for a classic defensive 4-4-2. This pushed Gera to the right wing position and allowed Priskin to join Rudolf up front. Both central midfielders were changed as now Pinter and Vadocz, a substitute in the past match, are fielded. Finally, Vanczar moved from right-back to the right central defense position, allowing Lazar back in at right-back.
A different game
In the first half, in terms of entertainment value, the difference with the away game was huge. Hungary’s switch to a flat defensive 4-4-2 formation ensured a tight midfield game with Holland dominating possession, but ‘Oranje’ rarely found a way through the dense and packed midfield.
Hungary learnt from their recent encounter with Holland and aimed their strategy at limiting space in midfield. In order to obtain that, they kept their two backs of four tight together and both wide midfielders focused primarily on their defensive tasks, either guarding Holland’s full-backs, who played much less of an offensive role now, or doubling up on the wings against Afellay and Kuijt.
The theoretical advantage of Holland’s 4-2-3-1 over Hungary’s 4-4-2 would be the potential of outnumbering of the midfield in a 3v2 situation. While this was indeed true on the pitch, the Hungarian tight banks of four limited space effectively and it was much more difficult for the likes of Van der Vaart and Sneijder to find enough space for their killing through-balls.
In a sense, Holland contributed to this situation too. Just like in the away game, where it proved very effective given the vast amount of space conceded by Hungary in midfield, Afellay played an inside left winger role with loads of positional freedom, drifting across the pitch. On top of that, Van Persie deployed his favorite false-nine role, regularly appearing on the right side of the central midfield area. The presence of both Afellay and Van Persie in addition to the nominal midfielders crowded space even further as they generally drew their man-markers with them.
An early goal
Keeping two tight banks of four is one thing, not giving any space away is quite another. On either side of the two banks, be it deep in Holland’s midfield or behind Hungary’s defensive line, lay Holland’s opportunities. Van der Vaart and Sneijder regularly switched positions and both of them frequently dropped deep, even to the level of the central defenders. This allowed them to break free of Hungary’s dense midfield zone and they generally looked to take advantage of the space conceded behind their opponent’s defensive line. A number of through-balls were the result, and despite Van Persie and Kuijt being called offside a number of times, some chances resulted too.
But it was a set piece goal that opened up the game. Robin van Persie fired in a right sided corner by Wesley Sneijder after the ball bounced up in front of him at the far post.
After this 13th minute goal, Hungary did advance their stance, inducing a fair share of pressure in the process. The result was Holland’s midfield retreating even further and the process game plan of midfielders Sneijder and Van der Vaart looking for direct balls in behind Hungary’s defense was even more clear to see.
Second half goal bonanza
A true goal fest may be the best description of the second half, although Dutch fans would have liked this term to be used in a different context. Only five minutes into the second half Holland saw itself facing a 1-2 score line after conceding twice due to sloppy defending, allowing unpressured crosses into the box. First from a left sided short corner variant and later from a left sided cross which was nicely volleyed in by Hungary captain Zoltan Gera.
By then, Holland had traded injured striker Robin van Persie for cult-hero Ruud van Nistelrooy and Hungary replaced left central midfielder Pinter for the more offensive Vladimir Koman.
Facing this surprise score line, Van Marwijk was forced to show his in-game management skills in order to prevent Holland’s first ever European qualification home loss. He instructed both full-back to make frequent runs from deep, effectively changing to wing-backs here. The fact that Urby Emanuelson had to replaced the injured Erik Pieters only helped the offensive wing-back game.
A lucky combination where Wesley Sneijder effectively combined in a one-two pass with a Hungarian defender ensured the equalizing goal. And quickly hereafter Ibrahim Afellay’s work rate was expressed when he won the ball at the left-back position and dribbled past two defenders to pass to Dirk Kuijt. The Liverpool player crossed for veteran striker Ruud van Nistelrooy to make it 3-2. And with that goal, Van Nistelrooy equaled legendary striker of the ‘fifties’ Faas Wilkes’ total of 35 goals.
But the advantage was short-lived as another episode of untidy marking laid the base for Hungary’s third goal of the game. Emanuelson completely lost track of Zoltan Gera and the Hungary captain fired in his second goal to make it 3-3.
In the end, two goals by Dirk Kuijt won the game for Holland and the game finished with the unusual score line of 5-3.
In the end
Two matches by the same Dutch national team, yet two entirely different games. After the dominant tiki taka performance in Budapest most Dutch fans were expecting a similar football show in Amsterdam, but Hungary’s switch to a defensive 4-4-2 proved very effective in limiting the danger that arose from Holland’s deep passing midfielders in the first game.
At the very least these two games must be considered as an excellent demonstration of the power of tactics in a football match. The very different approach taken by Hungary in both matches led to two very different matches and the lack of defensive sharpness at the start of the second half allowed them a way back into the match that they firmly grabbed. In the end, an unusual score line of 5-3 was the result of an end-to-end second half where Holland was close to breaking their impressive record of not losing any point in four years of European Championship and World Cup qualification football. | {
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KINSHASA (Reuters) - At least four civilians and a police officer were killed in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday in clashes between security forces and protesters demanding the departure of President Joseph Kabila this year, Human Rights Watch said.
The national electoral commission announced this month that an election to replace Kabila, whose mandate expired last December, cannot take place until April 2019. The delay has raised fears of an escalation of violence in Congo, which is Africa’s biggest copper producer.
Activist groups in the eastern city of Goma had called for a general strike on Monday to protest against the election delay.
Unrest broke out by 5 a.m. (0300 GMT) between police and protesters, who barricaded roads and burned tires, local residents and the police said.
Security forces killed at least four civilians and one police officer also died in the clashes, said Ida Sawyer, central Africa director at New York-based Human Rights Watch.
A spokeswoman for the U.N. mission in Congo said it had documented 37 arrests but could not yet confirm a death toll.
Provincial police commissioner Placide Nyembo said that the police officer was beaten to death by protesters and one demonstrator was killed by a stray bullet.
The police also said in a statement that they broke up a planned demonstration in the northern province of Tshopo by protesters with jerrycans filled with petrol.
Deteriorating security across Congo this year, including a spike in militia violence, has prompted fears the country could slip back to the multi-sided civil wars of the turn of the century, when hundreds of thousands were killed in violence and millions are believed to have perished of hunger and disease.
Kabila says the election delays are due to challenges registering millions of voters. His opponents say he plans to change the constitution to remain in power, as other African leaders have done. | {
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I’m really rooting for this to succeed.
Dignitaries will gather Monday to symbolically start construction of wider sidewalks and dedicated bus lanes meant to enhance Post Oak Boulevard and offer improved transit service, even as some residents and business owners continue fighting to block a project they consider a huge mistake.
Though it has passed a number of government hurdles, the $192 million project has faced increasingly stiff headwinds as opponents question the decision-making process as well as the data justifying the bus lanes.
Plans call for adding two dedicated bus lanes – one in each direction – along the center of Post Oak. Riders would board and exit the buses at stations, similar to how light rail operates. Special lanes also would be added along Loop 610 between a future Bellaire Transit Center and the Northwest Transit Center near Interstate 10.
Post Oak would be widened, without reducing the current number of general use lanes.
The project is led by Uptown Houston, the management district for the Post Oak area. The Metropolitan Transit Authority would operate the bus service. Funding comes from local, state and federal sources, and the project has been approved by Uptown Houston’s board, the Houston City Council, the Houston-Galveston Area Council and Texas Department of Transportation.
It has faced some political hurdles, despite broad agreement that peak-hour traffic congestion on Post Oak was hindering the area’s ability to further develop. Supporters said transit was the logical next step, noting that in most other U.S. metro areas, Uptown’s job and business scene would make it the urban core and a transit hub. Its employment numbers are on par with downtown Denver’s.
“I think it is the correct solution,” said John Breeding, the president of Uptown Houston. “But it is not that I think it – it was voted on by public agencies and planners looked at it.” | {
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По статистике, каждый третий человек, умерший насильственной смертью, знал своего будущего убийцу. Как сохранить жизнь и не сойти с ума, подозревая самых близких?
Текст: Ольга Разумихина
Коллаж: ГодЛитературы.РФ
Стюарт Тёртон. «Семь смертей Эвелины Хардкасл»
Пер. с англ. Александры Питчер. СПб.: Азбука, Азбука-Аттикус, 2018
Доктор Себастьян Белл приходит в себя в лесу неподалёку от Блэкхита, фамильного имения Хардкаслов. Неподалёку кто-то гонится за девушкой; она зовёт на помощь, но вскоре слышится выстрел и крики прекращаются. А затем некто подходит к Беллу, вручает ему компас и объясняет, как добраться до имения. Но зачем убийце помогать свидетелю? И для чего супруги Хардкасл пригласили столько гостей, в том числе давнего друга Себастьяна, в годовщину гибели их сына?
Белл не может вспомнить не только события прошлого дня: он забыл даже своё имя, не узнаёт себя в зеркале и понятия не имеет, откуда на его руке ножевые ранения. Он уверен только в одном: погибшую девушку звали Анной, её убийцу непременно нужно разыскать. Белл даже не подозревает, что погоня в лесу — лишь одно из загадочных событий, происходящих в особняке; что кто-то пытается убить единственную дочь Хардкаслов — Эвелину; и, наконец, что он на следующий день проснётся совершенно другим человеком…
Так начинается детективный роман Стюарта Тёртона «Семь смертей Эвелины Хардкасл» (в США вышедший под названием The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle), книга с таким закрученным сюжетом и детально проработанным миром, что заблудиться в особняке рискует не только читатель, но и сам автор. Почти каждый обитатель Блэкхита что-то скрывает, а главный герой, разгадывая их тайны и выслеживая убийц Анны и Эвелины, то попадает во временную петлю; то спорит с внезапно проснувшимся внутренним голосом, принадлежащим незнакомому человеку; то обретает врага в лице того, кто ещё недавно был другом; то сталкивается с таинственными существами, которые считают имение Хардкаслов не обычным домом, а — буквально — одним из кругов ада. К счастью, все детали головоломки в итоге оказываются на своих местах, а новых персонажей автор представляет так ловко, что запомнить их не составляет труда. Это тем более удивительно, если знать, что «Семь смертей Эвелины Хардкасл» — дебютный роман Стюарта Тёртона.
Впрочем, хороши в романе не только задумка и атмосфера. Книга добротно переведена, красиво оформлена (на форзаце можно найти подробную карту имения), напечатана на белоснежной бумаге и — что немаловажно — грамотно «распиарена». Единственное, что смущает, — это помещённые на обложку восторженные отзывы А. Дж. Финн (автор бестселлера «Женщина в окне») и Софи Ханны (цикл «Отдел уголовного розыска Спиллинга»). Маститые писатели утверждают, что перед нами «нечеловечески хитроумный», «уникальный роман, не похожий ни на кого и ни на что». Увы, современный читатель привык к тому, что подобными заверениями часто привлекают внимание к «средним» книгам, и рискует пройти мимо романа, который и вправду, без этих преувеличенных похвал, заслуживает прочтения.
Элис Фини. «Иногда я лгу»
Пер. с англ. Виктора Липки. М.: Издательство АСТ, 2018
Старинные замки, сплетни служанок и прогулки по потусторонним мирам — не ваш вариант, поскольку вы привыкли идти в ногу со временем? Тогда, возможно, вам понравится роман Элис Фини «Иногда я лгу» — история о 35-летней жительнице Лондона Эмбер Рейнольдс. Эмбер работает на радио, где каждый день выслушивает колкие замечания коллег, а вечером возвращается домой к мужу-писателю, который давно к ней остыл и целыми днями просиживает в кабинете над набросками нового романа. У героини почти нет друзей, да и с родителями и сестрой отношения натянутые. Эта грустная история была бы заурядной, если бы не одно «но»: всё это англичанка «вспоминает», пребывая в коме.
Как и главный герой предыдущего романа, Эмбер почти ничего не помнит о своей прошлой жизни, а обрывочные воспоминания никак не складываются в общую картину. Всё потому, что миссис Рейнольдс слишком привыкла лгать и недоговаривать. Эмбер знает, что впала в кому после аварии, и уверена, что это не просто несчастный случай: в происшествии виноват кто-то из близких. Но можно ли установить истину, если всё, что ты можешь, — это сражаться со своими внутренними чудовищами и прислушиваться к разговорам немногочисленных посетителей?
Роман «Иногда я лгу» написан куда более простым языком, чем «Семь смертей Эвелины Хардкасл», и героев здесь в несколько раз меньше. Однако читать новую книгу Элис Фини тоже тяжело — психологически. Жизнь главной героини никогда не была простой: здесь и трудное детство, и абьюзивные отношения, и тревожное расстройство, и другие проблемы со здоровьем. Но труднее всего будет смириться с развязкой, и правда непредсказуемой — настолько, что некоторые читатели могут посчитать себя обманутыми: недаром роман вышел в серии «Двойное дно». Поэтому не торопитесь сочувствовать Эмбер Рейнольдс, пока хорошенько её не узнаете.
Наташа Престон. «Твоё сердце будет моим»
Пер. с англ. М. Чайковской. М.: РОСМЭН, 2018
Если роман «Семь смертей Эвелины Хардкасл» — изящный сборник задачек для интеллектуалов, а «Иногда я лгу» — неплохой подарок любителю психологии, то новый роман Наташи Престон — книга сугубо развлекательная, притом рассчитана она на молодёжную аудиторию. «Твоё сердце будет моим» — триллер, где события разворачиваются по простому сценарию: дружная компания подростков сталкивается с маньяком. Но вместо того, чтобы держаться вместе, часть ребят впадает в панику, а кое-кто решает встретиться со злодеем один на один, и из этого, естественно, не выходит ничего хорошего.
Итак, главная героиня романа — второкурсница Лайла — снимает коттедж вместе с пятью друзьями. Жизнь ребят напоминает сказку: юноши и девушки увлечены учёбой, тусовками и романтическими приключениями, а если у одного из них и случается какая-то мелкая неприятность, остальные сразу же бросаются на помощь. Но вот в канун Дня святого Валентина один из ребят — грубоватый и шумный Сонни — получает странную записку, а затем бесследно исчезает. В лучших традициях жанра, похититель оказывается удивительно ловким и умудряется доставлять новые послания, даже когда дом оцепляют сотрудниками полиции.
Увы, Наташа Престон не сумела интересно обыграть шаблонный сюжет, а также допустила ещё одну грубую ошибку — не проработала характеры героев. Так, к середине повествования оказывается, что тихоня и паинька Шарлотта, которую никто не может вытащить из дому, ещё недавно залихватски выпивала с подругами в баре. А трусоватый эрудит Айден, в начале романа почти вычисливший преступника и угадавший, что следующей жертвой похитителя станет он сам, вдруг начинает вести себя удивительно беспечно, и так далее. Поэтому «Твоё сердце…» понравится в первую очередь любителям слэшеров: чего-чего, а кровавых сцен в книге более чем достаточно.
Просмотры: 0 | {
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A geopolitical history of all empires, nations, kingdoms, armies and republics. More than 500 world maps spanning all historical events up to today. View in the high resolution. Turn on annotations for labels if you cannot read the key in the upper-left corner.
Most of what is shown here are civilizations with a writing system and urban centers. There are some exceptions to this where possible. This does not include most pre-historical cultures. | {
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Stories of Asheville for the rest of us by David Forbes June 6, 2014
In the five days since I posted An Asheville for the rest of us, I’ve been happily overwhelmed by the response. There’s clearly a real desire to discuss and address the issues raised; of how to create a functioning city for those of us that aren’t millionaires.
One of the major points of the piece concerned the huge number of stories that aren’t told, about what (and who) gets ignored in the perception of Asheville both inside and outside our city. Just after the piece went live, some of the replies also noted a list citing us as a great place for “creative 20-somethings,” one of the populations that has the hardest time making ends meet in this city (unless the article actually meant “trust-fund kids”).
I hope in some small way the Asheville Blade will serve as an antidote to this mess. At its best, when it lives up to even a shred of its Fourth Estate promise, the press breaks the complacent “everything is grand” narratives. It afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted, as a mentor of mine used to put it. We do this because the people who can buy a third mansion or a restaurant chain already have far too many ways to get their views and stories heard. But they are a sliver of a sliver, and in the end, the future of this city — or any city — doesn’t turn on them.
As people reposted and commented on the piece around local social media, I was pleased to see personal stories and actual discussion about leaving Asheville, fighting to stay, facing reality on the ground and wondering about the future. Such talk is desperately needed here, and reading them feels like a breath of fresh air.
So let’s continue this. If you have such a story and want to share it, send it to ashevilleblade at gmail. Keep it anonymous or use your name as you see fit. A few paragraphs will work, though if you feel like more, go for it. I’ll pull together the entries and post them.
—David Forbes | {
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Want updates on the Pakt Travel Backpack? Sign up for our newsletter here.
Now that we've wrapped up our Kickstarter campaign for the Pakt Coffee Kit, we figured it's high time we gave you an update on the backpack we’ve been developing with Chase Reeves (known in some circles as the Backpakt).
Features and Must-haves Inspired by Community Input
In the early planning days of the backpack, we asked our community to answer the following questions to help inform the design process:
What are some "must have" features you need in a travel backpack? Are there some great features you love from an existing backpack or travel bag?
What’s something about a bag or backpack that you’ve used and really disliked because it was useless, unnecessary, or didn’t function well?
Do you have an idea for an awesome feature that you’ve never seen anywhere?
We were totally blown away by the response -- we got over 300 extremely thoughtful submissions. Here’s a look at some of the input that we've been testing and will probably make the cut.
Waterproof Pouch
Waterproofing + water bottle storage was one of your top concerns, so we designed the bag to feature an internal waterproof pouch. This shallow pouch will be at a top access point of the backpack and will be a nice place to store your water bottle, dopp kit, wet bathing suit, a green chile smothered burrito, etc.
Straps
The people have spoken: and they want hip + sternum straps! Except for the ones who do not! So to make everyone happy, both the hip and sternum straps on the Pakt Backpack will be removable. Fear not, hip strap enthusiasts -- we’ve made sure that they are supportive and comfortable as hell (and include some slick bonus features, to be revealed at a later date).
Chase is a big fan of load lifters, but only IF they work right, and he pushed us to add them. They are more common in trekking packs than travel packs. After a few tries we almost abandoned them on our pack but we made some changes and now they are a great addition.
(Malcolm and Chase in a tender load lifter embrace)
Zippers
Security seemed to be on many of your minds, so we will definitely be including a way to secure your zips. After experimenting with a few varieties, we’ve gone with a tried and true outer lock version (YKK, of course).
Updated Timeline*
*a more realistic estimate
September We’re still testing and making small refinements to the many features on the bag. We estimate that we’ll need two more rounds of samples.
October We’ll head to our factory in Vietnam to work directly with our manufacturing partners (and the best product manager ever, Claire). This will speed up the sampling process and get us closer to the initiation of production. It will also get us closer to banh mi.
November We’ll (hopefully) have our Golden Sample at this point, and will begin a small production run. This is an important part of the process for our manufacturing partner to work out any kinks and order the appropriate materials needed for MP (mass production).
Early 2020 Crowdfunding launch / pre-orders begin! | {
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There are a total of 130 classes in ArcheAge
Classes are formed by combining 3 Skillsets.
These are all the class names in ArcheAge
(Original credit goes to user Ferin from the official forums, forums.archeagegame.com/showthread.php?5363-Complete-Class-Listing) | {
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The ultimate fortnite Guide to dominate in Solo | {
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Chefarchitekt über Brandschäden Notre-Dame könnte jederzeit einstürzen
In nur fünf Jahren will die französische Regierung Notre-Dame wieder aufbauen. Doch der Chefarchitekt für historische Bauwerke sagt: "Das Gewölbe könnte nächste Woche genauso gut einstürzen." | {
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ProspectsASEAN talks to Daud Vicary Abdullah, former President & CEO of the International Centre for Education in Islamic Finance (INCEIF), to discuss about the field of Islamic Finance and his views on what this dynamic industry has to offer in terms of the region’s growth and graduate career opportunities. He also shares valuable career advice with young ASEAN talents who are interested to embark on a career in this blooming sector. Daud is currently retired, but is still doing advisory work through his company – DVA Consulting.
Let’s begin with your story and how you actually got started in the industry of finance. Specifically, in Islamic finance. What got you interested in the Islamic finance banking industry and how did you arrive in this sector?
I often describe myself as being an accidental tourist. About 25 years ago, I was running my own consulting company, which specialised in process reengineering. One day, I received a sub-contract to assist a Malaysian bank, which was implementing a new IT system, and my job was to help reengineer processes around centralized accounting and centralized banking.
I was working on this project for about a month when I was called to a meeting with the steering committee, who advised that they had been asked by the Central Bank of Malaysia to consider opening up an “Islamic window”. This was in the early 1990s and at that point I had not heard of Islamic finance or Islamic banking, let alone an “Islamic Window!”. However, that didn’t stop them from asking me to look into this matter and explore how this could be achieved for the bank. Being a diligent individual, I went to find somebody working in Bank Islam (the first Islamic bank in Malaysia), where they gladly shared with me their knowledge about the subject over the next few months.
My interest in Islamic Finance was aroused because it was an alternative system, and I was intrigued by the concept of Islamic “duty of care” and responsibility for humanity and everything on the planet. From then onwards, I became increasingly interested in Islamic finance and started reading about the subject to further refine my understanding. A year later, I found myself in a position to convert to Islam. As it happened I ended up marrying a Malaysian who was on the project.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s when I came back to Malaysia and began working on full-time assignments. From the year 2002 onwards, I was involved in various consulting roles and, after several years, went on to become a partner at Deloitte. Subsequently, I became the first managing director of Hong Leong Islamic Bank, and not long after, I moved on to the Asian Finance Bank. I then returned to Deloitte consulting in an advisory role, which eventually expanded into an opportunity to lead them as their global partner in Islamic finance. Finally, I was asked to run the global University of Islamic Finance INCEIF.
This concludes the story of how I became an accidental tourist.
What are the qualities that firms usually seek in a candidate for Islamic finance related roles?
The answer to this is not as many as one would think. A given would have to be to have a basic understanding of the subject matter. What is more important I think is attitude. Their attitude to learn more and attitude of “ how do I apply this knowledge”? Let me explain that a little bit further. Yes you do have to be confident, you do have to be develop some skills. You do need to understand what the products are and how the system works. That’s a given. However, I think over the last 6 or 7 years there has been an increasing need for young people to actually demonstrate more in terms of there softer skills – interaction, presentations, decision making, entrepreneurial skills.
I believe that it is a fairly fluid situation. There isn’t a checklist of 20 things that you have to do, because that checklist of 20 things you have to do today will be different by tomorrow. It’s changing rapidly so it’s more of an attitudinal thing – developing self-confidence, building your professional network, managing risks, communication, and entrepreneurial skills, rather than focusing too much on the technical knowledge.
I think the next question is, what is your take on the prospect of Islamic finance in ASEAN? How does a region of such diverse culture and systems impact the work that you do?
I think the diversity actually is a great help. Many people are often fixated with the idea that Islamic finance is only for Muslims. However, that’s definitely not the case. In fact, when you look at the development of Islamic finance in Malaysia, which is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-religious, Islamic Finance is a very viable alternative solution.
When I was running an Islamic bank here, the majority of our Islamic banking customers where ethnically Chinese. And why did they choose Islamic Finance? Well, it offered them a better deal, better products, better service, better pricing, and ultimately, better returns. So, it was purely a business decision.
The challenge is articulating the value proposition to everybody. Presenting Islamic finance to a non-Muslim audience. Using a lot of Arabic terminology and interspersing it with “Allahuakhbar” every 3 seconds doesn’t help. It’s really about how you articulate the story and speak to the audiences listening.
So, I think with the diversity in ASEAN, there is plenty of opportunity for Islamic finance to be seen as a particular asset class. Additionally, it shares common values related to sustainability, responsibility, ethics and transparency, all of which are values that appeal, no matter what religion you are from because they are core values which everyone can agree on.
Related: UpClose with Mark Billington, ICAEW Regional Director
What moves the market for Islamic finance? What factors come to play and how can we accelerate the growth of Islamic finance services across the ASEAN region?
There are two words I would use here – “Perception” and “Liquidity”.
1. Perception – the association of Islamic Finance and Islam negatively in various ways. Predominantly, those perceptions are wrong. Thus it is a challenge for us to properly educate the masses to change those perceptions.
2. Liquidity – to ensure you have the money in the right place and at the right time in order to facilitate the business. Thus, I would define Islamic Finance as an efficient and effective mobilisation of capital for the benefit of the real economy.
The real economy is the economy that creates jobs, makes things, builds assets, and this is underlying and fundamental to the dynamics of a country’s economy. This is in contrast to financial economy, which revolves around financial institutions trading with each other and where there are no underlying assets or intrinsic economic value, other than one entity gaining profits and the other experiencing losses.
Related: Exploring the Career Prospects in Islamic Finance
What are the major firms that compete in the Islamic Finance sector in this region?
Typically, there are the major banks (local and regional), insurance institutions, and asset management companies. Interestingly, we should take a closer look at professional services firms, namely the Big 4, accounting firms, and consulting firms. Another area that is increasingly important and popular now is crowdfunding. An increasing development of FinTech is also providing us the greatest potential for growth, whereby we link FinTech with Islamic Finance.
It’s not just about getting a job in the financial institution anymore. It’s now more on the notion of “where can I create an impact?” and the impacts are likely to be created in professional services firms, advisory, crowdfunding, and FinTech. We can see a number of companies that are starting up and utilising Islamic Finance as the weapon of choice to achieve different goals and produce impact.
Of all the locations in the world, what made you relocate to the region and what do you think are the opportunities the region has to offer?
As I’ve explained previously, I was an accidental tourist. Initially, I came to the region because there was work where I could apply my skills and make a living – that’s an honest and direct answer. However, as I built up my knowledge on Islamic Finance over the years, and with Malaysia being in a world-leading position, it makes perfect sense for me to stay in the region. This is the centre of the universe as far as Islamic Finance is concerned. This is where the thought leaders and experts are based. Most importantly, I have created a new career for myself that would not have been possible had I not been in ASEAN. | {
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Python coroutines with async and await
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It is already possible to create coroutines for asynchronous processing in Python. But a recent proposal would elevate coroutines to a full-fledged language construct, rather than treat them as a type of generator as they are currently. Two new keywords, async and await , would be added to the language to support coroutines as first-class Python features.
A coroutine is a kind of function that can suspend and resume its execution at various pre-defined locations in its code. Subroutines are a special case of coroutines that have just a single entry point and complete their execution by returning to their caller. Python's coroutines (both the existing generator-based and the newly proposed variety) are not fully general, either, since they can only transfer control back to their caller when suspending their execution, as opposed to switching to some other coroutine as they can in the general case. When coupled with an event loop, coroutines can be used to do asynchronous processing, I/O in particular.
Python's current coroutine support is based on the enhanced generators from PEP 342, which was adopted into Python 2.5. That PEP changed the yield statement to be an expression, added several new methods for generators ( send() , throw() , and close() ), and ensured that close() would be called when generators get garbage-collected. That functionality was further enhanced in Python 3.3 with PEP 380, which added the yield from expression to allow a generator to delegate some of its functionality to another generator (i.e. a sub-generator).
But all of that ties coroutines to generators, which can be confusing and also limits where in the code it is legal to make an asynchronous call. In particular, the with and for statements could conceptually use an asynchronous call to a coroutine, but cannot because the language syntax does not allow yield expressions in those locations. In addition, if a refactoring of the coroutine moves the yield or yield from out of the function (into a called function, for example), it no longer is treated as a coroutine, which can lead to non-obvious errors; the asyncio module works around this deficiency by using a @asyncio.coroutine decorator.
PEP 492 is meant to address all of those issues. The ideas behind it were first raised by Yury Selivanov on the python-ideas mailing list in mid-April, it was enthusiastically embraced by many in that thread, and by May 5 it had been accepted for Python 3.5 by Guido van Rossum. Not only that, but the implementation was merged on May 12. It all moved rather quickly, though it was discussed at length in multiple threads on both python-ideas and python-dev.
The changes are fairly straightforward from a syntax point of view:
async def read_data(db): data = await db.fetch('SELECT ...') ...
read_data()
async def
await
read_data()
db.fetch()
await
yield from
That example (which comes from the PEP) would create acoroutine using the newconstruct. Theexpression would suspend execution ofuntil the awaitable completes and returns its result.is similar to, but it validates that its argument is an awaitable.
There are several different types of awaitable. A native coroutine object, as returned by calling a native coroutine (i.e. one defined with async def ) is an awaitable, as is a generator-based coroutine that has been decorated with @types.coroutine . Future objects, which represent some processing that will complete in the future, are also awaitable. The __await__() magic method is present for objects that are awaitable.
There is a problem that occurs when adding new keywords to a language, however. Any variables that are named the same as the keyword suddenly turn into syntax errors. To avoid that problem, Python 3.5 and 3.6 will "softly deprecate" async and await as variable names, but not have them be a syntax error. The parser will keep track of async def blocks and treat the keywords differently within those blocks, which will allow existing uses to continue to function.
There are two other uses of async that will come with the new feature: asynchronous context managers (i.e. with ) and iterators (i.e. for ). Inside a coroutine, these two constructs can be used as shown in these examples from the PEP:
async def commit(session, data): ... async with session.transaction(): ... await session.update(data) ... ... async for row in Cursor(): print(row)
async
__aenter__()
__aexit__()
__aiter__()
__anext__()
Asynchronous context managers must implement two magicmethods,and, both of which return awaitables, while an asynchronous iterator would implementand. Those are effectively the asynchronous versions of the magic methods used by the existing synchronous context manager and iterator.
The main question early on was whether the deferred "cofunction" feature (PEP 3152) might be a better starting point. The author of that PEP, Greg Ewing, raised the issue, but there was a lot of agreement that the syntax proposed by Selivanov was preferable to the codef , cocall , and the like from Ewing's proposal. There was a fair amount of back and forth, but the cofunction syntax for handling certain cases got rather complex and non-Pythonic in the eyes of some. Van Rossum summarized the problems with cofunctions while rejecting that approach.
There were also several suggestions of additional asynchronous features that could be added, but nothing that seemed too urgent. There was some bikeshedding on the keywords (and their order, some liked def async , for example). The precedence of await was also debated at some length, with the result being that, unlike yield and yield from that have the lowest precedence, await has a high precedence: between exponentiation and subscripting, calls, and attribute references.
Mark Shannon complained that there was no need to add new syntax to do what Selivanov was proposing. Others had made similar observations and it was not disputed by Selivanov or other proponents. The idea is to make it easier to program with coroutines. Beyond that, Van Rossum wants the places where a coroutine can be suspended to be obvious from reading the code:
But new syntax is the whole point of the PEP. I want to be able to *syntactically* tell where the suspension points are in coroutines. Currently this means looking for yield [from]; PEP 492 just adds looking for await and async [for|with]. Making await() a function defeats the purpose because now aliasing can hide its presence, and we're back in the land of gevent or stackless (where *anything* can potentially suspend the current task). I don't want to live in that land.
Over a two to three week period, multiple versions of the PEP were posted and debated, with Selivanov patiently explaining his ideas or modifying them based on the feedback. For a feature that seems likely to be quite important in Python's future, the whole process went remarkably quickly—and smoothly. It will probably take a fair amount more time for those ideas to sink in more widely with Python developers. | {
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Two years ago, the administration eased portions of the arms embargo that had been in place since 1975 to help bolster Vietnam’s maritime security in the South China Sea, where China’s move to exert more naval control of crucial shipping corridors has angered Vietnam, the Philippines and other nations that have claimed sovereignty.
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Obama said the latest step "was not based on China or any other considerations. It was based on our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process of moving towards normalization with Vietnam."
With U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry, a veteran of the Vietnam War, in the front row at the Hanoi Convention Center, the president heralded "a new moment" in the bilateral relationship. The lifting of the ban "will ensure Vietnam has access to the equipment it needs to defend itself and removes a lingering vestige of the Cold War."
Obama acknowledged, however, that the United States and Vietnam share a mutual concern over China's provocations in the region, and he reiterated a previous pledge that the United States would "continue to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows."
The new arrangement would allow the United States to sell military weapons to Vietnam on a case-by-case basis and would be predicated on improvements in the country on human rights and freedom of expression, White House officials said.
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Ahead of Obama's trip, human rights advocates in the United States had called on the administration to maintain the weapons ban until more progress has been made by the ruling Communist Party.
"The United States government has been telling the Vietnam government for years that they need to show progress on their human rights record if they are going to be rewarded with closer military and economic ties," said John Sifton, Asia policy director for Human Rights Watch. "Yet today President Obama rewarded Vietnam even though its government has done little to earn it: It has not repealed any repressive laws, nor released any significant number of political prisoners, nor made any substantial pledges."
At the news conference with Obama, Quang asserted that his country has made progress on human rights.
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"We need to work closely together and expand dialogue together," he said. "By so doing, we can narrow the gap in understanding and narrow the differences between the two countries."
A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Beijing is "pleased to see Vietnam developing normal relationships with all countries including the United States, and we hope it benefits regional peace, stability and development." But ahead of Obama's visit, China's state news service Xinhua accused the United States of having “shown no restraint in meddling in a regional situation” in the South China Sea.
The conflicts in the South China Sea have escalated in recent years after China installed an oil drilling rig off the coast of Vietnam, within the exclusive 200-mile economic zone established under international law. The Chinese military has embarked on a massive land reclamation project in the disputed Spratly Islands, prompting the U.S. Navy to conduct two freedom-of-navigation missions aimed at dissuading Beijing from militarizing the area.
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The Philippines has taken its claims against China over sovereignty in coastal regions to an international tribunal at The Hague, a case being closely monitored in Washington. A ruling is expected in June, but China has said it does not recognize the tribunal’s authority in the matter.
"Our hope is that ultimately the various claims and disputes can be resolved," Obama said. "We are doing everything we can to promote that."
Last year, Obama visited the Philippines and announced $250 million in new U.S. aid for maritime security efforts in the region, including Vietnam. In February, Obama hosted leaders from 10 Southeast Asian nations at the Sunnylands retreat in Southern California.
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Patrick Cronin, an Asia-Pacific expert at the Center for a New American Security, said Washington and Hanoi were aiming to convey to China that its neighbors are "determined to provide their own self-defense against aggression and assertiveness. Not looking for a fight but very much just saying, 'We're not going to be endlessly pushed around.'"
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Obama became the third consecutive president — after Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — to visit Vietnam since the normalizing of relations in 1995. Air Force One arrived late Sunday, and the president was greeted on the tarmac in Hanoi with a red carpet and a bouquet of flowers.
Children dressed in red, white and blue outfits lined the streets Monday as Obama’s motorcade made its way to the presidential palace, an ornate mustard-colored building with sculptured gardens and a massive water fountain. Quang greeted Obama, and they were feted by a military band playing each country’s national anthem during an official welcome ceremony.
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In addition to closer military cooperation, the United States and Vietnam are partners in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), an expansive free trade and regulatory accord that Obama has made a centerpiece of his economic and foreign policy agenda. However, Congress has not yet ratified the agreement, and the major presidential candidates have publicly opposed it.
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Three congressional Democrats — Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.), who supports the TPP, and Reps. Joaquin Castro and Beto O'Rourke, both of Texas, who remain undecided on the pact — flew to Vietnam with Obama on Air Force One. They sat in the front row during his news conference, along with Kerry, national security adviser Susan E. Rice and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.
Obama said he remains confident that Congress will approve the trade deal.
"I have not yet seen a credible argument that once we get TPP in place that we are worse off," he said. "We will be in demonstrably better shape." | {
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PRINCETON, N.J.--Recent studies of mortality trends paint a gloomy picture for many middle-aged and older Americans, but a new study focused on children reveals a more optimistic future.
Death rates have declined among children and young adults in the poorest counties in the United States, according to the study published in Science. These children may be more likely to be healthier as they grow older, regardless of the poverty level where they live, the findings suggest.
Better health care, food and nutrition programs and less pollution are all potential contributors, the researchers say. The results should be particularly encouraging to policymakers engaged in projects aimed to promote public health, like anti-tobacco initiatives or food and nutrition programs.
"There have been tremendous improvements in the health of poor American children over the past 20 years, and yet the dominant narrative has completely ignored these improvements," said co-lead author Janet Currie, the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "This is the reason we got interested in this project. It's surprising how large the reductions in mortality are for younger people, how they extend through childhood into young adulthood, and how little anyone has paid attention to this incredible health success story."
"Our big message here is that the health of the next generation in the poorest areas of the United States has improved tremendously, likely due to social policies that helped the most disadvantaged families," said co-lead author Hannes Schwandt, an assistant professor at the University of Zurich. "It's an important message, opposing the popular narrative of 'Everything is getting worse.' It tells people that their tax money is not wasted. Going forward, we need to find out which policies were most effective and how to scale them up in order to maximize their positive impact on the lives of the poor."
Recent mortality studies have shown worsening conditions, especially for middle-aged Americans. Anne Case and Angus Deaton from Princeton published a paper in November 2015 that uncovered a "quiet epidemic" of drugs, alcohol and suicides plaguing middle-aged white Americans. Most recently, a study led by Stanford University economist Raj Chetty has shown a huge mortality gap between the rich and poor in the United States.
These mortality studies use data based on older people, who likely have cumulative health issues -- making it hard to pinpoint the exact cause of death. Child death rates provide a much more "real time" measure of population health, Currie and Schwandt said, as kids respond more quickly to their external environments. Therefore, evaluating these rates can provide a powerful indicator of conditions at the time.
Currie and Schwandt focused on mortality rates at particular age groups, from infancy to old age, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Vital Statistics. Sifting through county-level data for 1990, 2000 and 2010, they grouped 21 million deaths into 20 groups based on the county's poverty level. Each group represented 5 percent of the overall U.S. population. Breaking it down in this way gave the researchers an ability to compare people living in the poorest and richest counties over time.
The researchers examined age-specific mortality rates, or the probability of death at a certain age, as well as life expectancy at birth--which measures a newborn's predicted lifespan based on the age-specific mortality rates in that year. Overall, they placed more emphasis on the mortality rates because mortality rates change over time, making measures of life expectancy problematic.
"When you calculate life expectancy for a newborn, you assume that when that person turns 20, 40 or 60, he or she will face the same mortality rates that people of those ages face today," said Currie, who is also director of Princeton's Center for Health and Wellbeing and chair of Princeton's Department of Economics. "But in an era when mortality is changing, this is not a very good assumption. If we want to know how healthy current children are going to be when they are 40, we are better off looking at those children instead of at a current 40-year-old."
In terms of life expectancy at birth, the research team found a difference of six years between males living in rich and poor counties. For females, the difference was only three years. Between 1990 and 2010, life expectancy at birth increased across the entire poverty spectrum. For males, this improvement in life expectancy was similar between poor and rich counties, while the increase has been slightly stronger in rich counties for females.
But these trends in overall life expectancy at birth mask important differences in the mortality trends at different ages, the researchers note.
When turning to mortality rates, the researchers found that death rates for children declined across all county groups. The improvement was much more pronounced in the poorest counties, strongly decreasing the inequality in mortality at these younger ages. In the richest counties, deaths in the first three years of life decreased by 4.2 per 1,000 births between 1990 and 2010. In poor counties such deaths decreased by 8 per 1,000 births in the same time period.
"Mortality at young ages is a sensitive indicator of social conditions because infants and children respond more quickly to their environments," Schwandt said. "This can tell us a lot about health in a particular region."
"There is a great deal of research showing that healthier children grow up to be healthier adults," Currie said. "This is why there has been so much emphasis on programs for pregnant women and young children."
When looking at older children and young adults, the researchers found that both male and female mortality rates decreased up to age 20, especially in poor counties. The improvements were strongest for young children between 1990 and 2000. For older children, there were also large declines in deaths between 2000 and 2010.
When evaluating even older ages, the picture starts to shift. At middle ages, improvements in mortality rates stagnated, especially for women. After age 50, death rates declined for both men and women, but these improvements were strongest in the richest counties, implying increasing inequality at these older ages.
"It is important to emphasize that our results for middle and older ages are entirely consistent with those of previous studies such as Case and Deaton, or Chetty et al.," Currie said. "What is new here and more hopeful is the investigation of what is happening to death rates at younger ages."
"We often get the sense that people believe that great economic inequality will inevitably lead to greater inequality in health outcomes," Currie said. "While there is a strong connection between these two types of inequality, one thing we hope that people will take away from this study is a sense that differences in mortality are not inevitable but are strongly mediated by policy. Health insurance, income support, anti-tobacco initiatives, and reductions in pollution really do make a noticeable difference at the population level, especially at younger ages. So we hope the results will encourage policymakers to take measures that promote public health."
Moreover, Currie and Schwandt point out that even the rising inequality in mortality observed at older ages could be part of a positive story, linked to reductions in smoking.
"Smoking rates have decreased dramatically over the past 50 years, but the decline occurred first among the rich and only later among the poor," Schwandt said. "In cohorts who entered old age during the past 20 years, the rich had largely stopped smoking while smoking rates remained high among the poor. Hence, the increasing inequality that we're currently seeing in old-age mortality may simply be the consequence of the great reduction in smoking that occurred with some lag among the poor."
While this analysis focuses on the United States, Currie and Schwandt said similar results may be found elsewhere.
"Our hypothesis is that countries that had more robust safety net programs to start with will have seen smaller declines in inequality among the young over the period covered in our study. We are currently investigating that hypothesis but have no hard evidence yet," she said.
###
The paper, "Inequality in Mortality Decreased Among the Young While Increasing for Older Adults, 1990-2010," was published in Science. The study was supported by the National Institutes for Health under the Princeton Center for Translational Research on Aging (grant no. 2P30AG024928). | {
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Too tired to let you stay awake during the day Too tired to make you fall asleep at night
414 shares | {
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Opportunities in the city abound, if only we have the eyes to see them. Highland Park resident Jack Moreau has such vision and he's looking to share it with others this Saturday, by leading a walk along the Arroyo Seco with the help of pedestrian advocate group Los Angeles Walks.
"The Arroyo Seco has this great bikeway on it. It's the best piece of bike infrastructure in Northeast Los Angeles and it can really connect us to the city if we let it," says Moreau. "The funny thing about it is that chain link fences run all along the path; when you also realize that it's the same path that is also lined with parks, you begin to see how strange that is."
Moreau astutely points out that the bikeway allows cyclists to speed through one point to another, but doesn't allow them to really enjoy the amenities that are just over the chain link fence -- amenities such as Debs Park in Montecito Heights, the Hermon Dog Park in Highland Park, all the way to the Arroyo Seco stables in South Pasadena.
The path could even go beyond the neighborhood, says Moreau. Horse trails on the north side go from the Arroyo Seco through Pasadena and into the foothills, all the way up to the Angeles National Forest. On the south side, the bikeway could go all the way to Los Angeles' downtown -- an idea that's been around for more than a hundred years.
Photo: Courtesy of Jack Moreau
At the turn of the 20th century, Pasadena mayor Horace Dobbins envisioned the California Cycleway, a nine-mile elevated bicycle path with easy grades that would connect Pasadena's Hotel Green to Los Angeles Plaza. The project, which was projected to cost a hefty $200,000, would have been funded through 10-cent tolls from cyclists using the bikeway. The advent of the automobile, however, heralded the demise of such an ambitious project. Only 1.25 miles was ever built of the 9-mile path, and four decades later the Pasadena Freeway took over much of its right of way.
But such dreams of a bikeable neighborhood continues to be resurrected. After major floods had resulted in a cemented Arroyo Seco, the County of Los Angeles built a path on the riverbed in 1983, as an experiment in joint use of flood control facilities. But unlike the modern day bike path proposed for downtown, the Arroyo Seco path is just that -- a path with no six-inch elevation above the riverbed to allow for water flow. As a result the path can be slippery with algae on a particularly wet day, and dangerous during heavy rains; nonetheless, it continues to be a scenic place that holds a lot of promise.
That promise was glimpsed back in June of 2003 when the river-adjacent Pasadena Freeway was closed to car traffic and over 3,000 cyclists and several thousand pedestrians took over, for the much talked about ArroyoFest. The reclaiming of the Arroyo Seco for recreational use was a topic in many people's minds during the event.
"That's exactly what we want to aim for. There's so much room in the riverbed, you could have festivals right down there," says Moreau. "The goal is to inspire people with something like that, to see the potential. But the first step is just increasing access to it."
A transportation planner for Metro by day (he's currently arranging the festivities for this year's Bike Week), Moreau is used to seeing potential for non-motorized ways of getting around. "We're always looking at how we move around the city and trying to find alternatives to driving alone in the freeways," says Moreau. It isn't so strange that this Highland Park resident suddenly saw the opportunity right in his backyard.
Photo: Courtesy of Jack Moreau
Moreau sees a lot of wasted opportunities in this part of the neighborhood. He says that access points to the parks from the bikeways are few and far between, despite the community obviously wanting more. During his research he found many clandestine access points carved out by the community. "There are four or five legal access points that are so far apart," he says. "There are about ten to fifteen more holes just cut on the wall. Clearly people want access and we shouldn't have to go through these means to get it."
One of the aberrations of the path is also what he calls the "stairs that lead to nowhere" -- flights of stairs that go up to the parks from the bikeway, but again, blocked by chain link fence. "It wouldn't be that expensive to take these out," says Moreau.
The sight is also a poignant symbol of the city's history with water and how changing views have affected physical access to our waterways. The stairways were created at a time when this area was meant to offer grand, sweeping views of green landscape and the bustling city. The coming of the chain link fences heralded an era of protectionism, when flood protection was the highest priority, thus impeding access by the public to became the solution.
But times are changing once again. More and more people are clamoring for a change in the way we relate to our water. A recent momentous decision to revisit the city's vegetation clearing management practices on the Los Angeles River and the introduction of river-specific guidelines for nearby properties, not to mention the increased incidences of residents using the river as a place of gathering and community building all points to a dawning of a new river sensibility.
Moreau is simply raising the question, "Why not make simple changes along an already great amenity in Highland Park and be part of this change?" With his easy two-mile walking tour on Saturday, he hopes to start such a conversation. He says, "I just want people to be aware of what's happening and share some ideas of what can be."
The Dry River walking tour is on March 7, 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. More information here. | {
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While visiting Chip Johannessen we had some time to take a look at some top secrete stuff for the new season of Homeland. (This however is just a storyboard from a previous season) | {
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A Câmara de Lisboa debate na quarta-feira a requalificação das ruas da Palma e do Benformoso, na Mouraria, que assenta na criação de uma praça coberta, jardim e nova mesquita para a comunidade muçulmana até meados de 2017.
"O projeto denominado 'Praça-Mouraria' prevê a criação de uma praça coberta e jardim entre a Rua da Palma e a Rua do Benformoso, permitindo, desta forma, a criação de um área de permanência de grandes dimensões que liga um eixo da cidade de importância relevante, da Rua da Palma/Avenida Almirante Reis ao Bairro Histórico da Mouraria", refere o vereador do Urbanismo da autarquia, Manuel Salgado, na proposta a que a agência Lusa teve hoje acesso.
Este projeto, que será debatido na reunião camarária pública de quarta-feira, "prevê, ainda, uma mesquita que tem por objetivo servir a comunidade muçulmana, que já ocupa atualmente um espaço na Mouraria, com condições muito reduzidas face às suas necessidades, assim como uma sala polivalente que possibilita todo o tipo de atividades culturais", acrescenta o autarca.
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Manuel Salgado explica no documento que "a comunidade muçulmana do Bangladesh tem enfrentado várias adversidades na utilização da Mesquita da Mouraria [localizada no Beco de São Marçal], pois encontra-se instalada num prédio destinado a habitação, não reunindo, assim, as condições necessárias para acolher mulheres para as orações".
"Acresce, ainda, as queixas dos vizinhos da mesquita sobre o ruído e a movimentação de várias pessoas à volta do local de culto, à sexta-feira, que, apesar do seu comportamento adequado, atendendo às circunstâncias, não é possível evitar", assinala, referindo que o espaço é frequentado por 600 pessoas.
Para concretizar o projeto -- que visa "melhorar a qualidade do espaço público" no bairro "mais multicultural da cidade, não só em termos de população residente como em termos de atividades económicas" --, terão de ser feitas demolições: de um edifício municipal situado nos números 248 a 264 da Rua da Palma e dos edifícios que o confinam a norte, com frente para a Rua do Benformoso.
De acordo com o estudo prévio de arquitetura, o edifício municipal em causa, com dois pisos, "está parcialmente ocupado", sendo que, "nas suas traseiras, foram anexadas três construções precárias". Já na frente do lote havia três edifícios de três pisos, um dos quais já demolido.
"Todos os edifícios estão devolutos e em mau estado de conservação", pode ler-se.
Para os demolir, a Câmara terá de "requerer ao Governo a declaração de utilidade pública da expropriação, com caráter de urgência", o que implica o pagamento de indemnizações autónomas de 712 mil euros relativamente ao prédio municipal e de cerca de 762 mil euros quanto aos prédios particulares.
Segundo a proposta, o estudo prévio de arquitetura foi analisado pela Direção Regional de Cultura de Lisboa e Vale do Tejo (DCRLVT) e pelo Instituto de Gestão do Património Arquitetónico e Arqueológico (IGESPAR) -- atual Direção-Geral do Património Cultural (DGPC) -- em 2012, tendo sido considerado como "adequado ao espaço em que se insere".
Quanto a prazos, o cronograma anexo à proposta indica que o projeto de execução se inicia em novembro e as obras em maio do próximo ano, estando previsto concluir a intervenção em abril de 2017. | {
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And they said it wouldn’t last. Well, whoever they are were wrong, as we bring you the 100th episode of “There’s Still Time”, the AFTN Soccer Podcast.
We’re in joyous mood at AFTN towers and it’s not just because Vancouver Whitecaps got their first win of the new MLS season. We’re celebrating a ton of pods with a ton of fun. Shenanigans ensured.
We thought after a hundred episodes we still don’t really know all that much about the Whitecaps players off the pitch, so let’s change that with our new section “Teammates”. Let’s get some home truths about the players from those that spend the most time with them outside of their families. Or in other words, lets have teammates have a heap of fun letting rip on the rest of the locker room!! Whitecaps left back Jordan Harvey kicks the new feature off, but rest assured there will be a lot more to come!
The ‘Caps Canadian international Russell Teibert gets in on the act with a Canadian national team “Teammates” feature and Russell enjoyed it so much, he asked to do a Whitecaps one as well!
And we also discover some strange “lost footage” from the AFTN vaults of 2011. Strange, because the podcast didn’t even exist back then!
All that and there’s still time for Carl Robinson’s big question! What will it be this week? Want to ask your own one? Then get in touch.
Celebrate our century with us and have a listen.
You can listen to this, and all previous, episodes of the podcast on iTunes HERE.
Or download it for your later listening delight HERE.
We also have an iPhone app, so you can now add our podcast to your phone as an app. Visit the podcast’s mobile site HERE and then at the bottom of the screen just click the “Quick Launch” icon and the podcast will be added to your home screen and appear as an app.
And if that’s not enough, we’re on Stitcher Radio Network . Download the app and listen to the AFTN podcast on your device, along with over 20,000 other shows HERE.
Or after all that, you could just listen on the player below!
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Remaniement : Ministre? Daniel Cohn-Bendit ne dit pas non à Macron 13h04 , le 31 août 2018, modifié à 13h07 , le 31 août 2018
INFO JDD - Alors que le remaniement se profile, qui pour remplacer Nicolas Hulot. Daniel Cohn-Bendit a été appelé par Christophe Castaner. S'il dit "tenir à sa liberté" et pense "ne pas être fait pour être ministre", l'intéressé ne tranche pas, "tant qu'[il] n'a pas discuté avec Macron". Ce devrait être dimanche.
Bientôt l'imagination au pouvoir? Et pourquoi pas Daniel Cohn-Bendit à la place de Nicolas Hulot à la Transition écologique et solidaire. Ira, ira pas? Cette semaine deux ministres, Benjamin Griveaux et Christophe Castaner l'ont testé. Pas une offre d'emploi ferme, mais une sérieuse prise de température. Serait-il intéressé par la succession de Nicolas Hulot? A priori, c'est non. "Plusieurs options sont à l'étude mais je crains qu'in fine, il ait dit non même si certains ont tenté de le convaincre", explique un macroniste.
Depuis quelques temps, l'"anarchiste allemand" - comme le surnommaient les communistes en 1968 avec le tact de piliers de comptoir - est devenu Français. L'affaire sur le plan juridique est donc jouable. Daniel Cohn-Bendit s'entend bien avec Macron, ils échangent souvent. Un bon point pour "Dany". Il a une notoriété aussi grande que celle de Nicolas Hulot. Un autre bon point. Il est écologiste. Troisième bon point. Bref, il est la poule aux œufs d'or.
Lire aussi - Comment remplacer Nicolas Hulot? Le casting s'annonce compliqué pour Macron et Philippe
Il ne s'interdit pas de se laisser convaincre
Reste un très léger problème. Le poste ne l'intéresse pas. Ou pas beaucoup. C'est ce qu'il a expliqué aux deux ministres avec lesquels il a échangé. Il est libéral-libertaire, pas libéral-ministère. A part à la mairie de Francfort, où il était adjoint, il n'a jamais souhaité participer à un exécutif. "Castaner m'a appelé, confie Daniel Cohn-Bendit au JDD. Je lui ai dit que je ne croyais pas que c'était une bonne idée. Je ne suis pas du tout fait pour être ministre. Si ministre, ce n'était que faire des conférences de presse, ça je peux faire, tous les jours, toutes les heures et dans toues les langues". Mais voilà ministre, ce n'est pas que ça. Il faut aussi gérer le quotidien, le poids de l'administration, régler des questions personnelles, il vit à Francfort, il y faisait d'ailleurs du vélo ce matin. Et puis ajoute-t-il : "Je tiens à ma liberté."
Donc plutôt un non. Mais, il y a un codicille qui peut tout changer. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, qui n'était pas en France ces derniers jours, doit passer à Paris en fin de semaine. Il devrait pouvoir en profiter, dimanche, pour voir Macron. Jusqu'ici, vu les emplois du temps respectifs, les échanges entre les deux n'ont pas été très poussés. Et Daniel Cohn-Bendit ne s'interdit pas de se laisser convaincre. Son "non" n'est pas définitif, "tant que je n'ai pas discuté avec Macron". | {
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Athletically, Guerrero—“Vlad,” “Bad Vlad,” or “Vlad the Impaler,” in the inevitable shortenings of his name—could do it all. He had the big, round shoulders of a natural slugger, the speed to be a constant threat on the basepaths, the eyesight and coordination to track difficult pitches, the arm to cut down runners from wherever in the outfield’s depths he corralled the ball. Had he simply employed these gifts in the conventional way, he would have been one of MLB’s best players for much of his career, a “five-tool star” in the classical mold.
Guerrero’s defining characteristic, though, was his utter disregard for convention. Since he could hit anything, he reached for everything, offering at pitches as high as his shoulders and as low as his ankles and, often as not, connecting with them. Frantic and violent, his swing, compared with those of his peers, looked like a piece of abstract expressionism in a room of 15th-century portraits. Guerrero’s baserunning and defensive adventures had less consistent outcomes; during his peak base-stealing years, he was caught about half as often as he made it, and his throws sometimes sailed over their intended recipients. His successes produced such remarkable highlights, though—lasers from the outfield gap straight to home plate, a pitch hit after it bounced in the dirt—that only the most buttoned-down fan could have asked him to rein in his approach.
Guerrero’s backstory was as unlikely as any of his on-field exploits. Growing up in the Dominican Republic, he was unable to attend school past the fifth grade, asked instead to work to alleviate his family’s poverty. “My sons could not get the education they wanted,” his mother said, “because we had to work so hard just to survive.” Dan Le Batard’s 2002 profile remains startling in its detail: The future MVP sometimes turned to puddles for drinking water, and he lost a roof to a hurricane. That lack of schooling, combined with the language barrier once Guerrero reached Canada and the United States, is commonly understood as the source of his reticence with the media; he was as tight-lipped away from the field as he was jaw-dropping on it.
His colleagues didn’t need any explanations in order to appreciate his talent. “I believe God reached out with a finger and touched him and said, ‘You are a baseball player,’” said Guerrero’s onetime Expos teammate Rondell White. “He’s blessed.” “Vladdy had no strike zone,” said the Hall of Fame pitcher Pedro Martinez, another former teammate. Mike Scioscia, who managed Guerrero in Anaheim, said he checked every strategic box: “He could run, he could throw, he was about as complete of a player as a person could be.”
It is hard to envision how a player like Guerrero, even with his immense skill set, would be received in today’s MLB. The talk is of swing paths and launch angles; players scrutinize their at-bats by the millisecond in search of an uptick in efficiency. Guerrero famously didn’t even like to watch video of opposing pitchers, preferring to get ready for games by playing Playstation. A good portion of his appeal came from the fact that he so obviously followed no customs but his own, never allowing the standard thinking—about calming his swing or dialing back his daring—to intrude on his singular sense for the game.
There will be players who match and exceed his statistical output—some of his Hall of Fame classmates, by simple counting, had more accomplished careers—but there will almost certainly never be another player quite like Guerrero. He played not only as hard but as much as he could, a blur of action. “Since I was a little boy,” he said during his first season with the Angels, “I’ve been swinging at everything I see that comes near home plate. That’s one thing I’ve never changed.”
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to [email protected]. | {
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the incoming U.S. representative from New York City, has an idea that could make voting easier: Take Columbus Day off the federal holiday list and replace it with Election Day.
In a tweet Saturday, the progressive Democrat wondered why Columbus Day is a federal holiday while Election Day, when we engage in perhaps our most important civic duty, is not.
Columbus Day, after all, celebrates a man who never actually set foot in what is now the United States and who certainly did not “discover” America.
Daily Mail editor David Martosko tried to make a joke about Ocasio-Cortez “angling for more vacation days” before even beginning her new job.
“While I would disagree with your complaint that Americans get too much vacation time ...,” Ocasio-Cortez responded, “I am willing to compromise by eliminating Columbus Day to give Election Day off.”
While I would disagree with your complaint that Americans get too much vacation time (we work some of the longest hours of any dev country & have no Fed required paid leave),
I am willing to compromise by eliminating Columbus Day to give Election Day off.
See? I can be pliant. https://t.co/NITFcBSmxw — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 18, 2018
“See?” the soon-to-be congresswoman added. “I can be pliant.”
Ocasio-Cortez also noted that people in the U.S. work some of the longest hours among developed nations and have no federally required paid leave.
Martosko later tweeted, “One of the requirements of public service should be a sense of humor.”
In the past, legislators like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have introduced bills that would make Election Day a national holiday. But with Republicans in control of the Senate and White House ― and not eager to make it easier to vote these days ― this might be a long shot. | {
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Please donate to the Ron Paul Institute Copyright © 2015 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given.
Last week, Retired General Wesley Clark, who was NATO commander during the US bombing of Serbia, proposed that “disloyal Americans” be sent to internment camps for the “duration of the conflict.” Discussing the recent military base shootings in Chattanooga, TN, in which five US service members were killed, Clark recalled the internment of American citizens during World War II who were merely suspected of having Nazi sympathies. He said: “back then we didn’t say ‘that was freedom of speech,’ we put him in a camp.”He called for the government to identify people most likely to be radicalized so we can “cut this off at the beginning.” That sounds like “pre-crime”!Gen. Clark ran for president in 2004 and it’s probably a good thing he didn’t win considering what seems to be his disregard for the Constitution. Unfortunately in the current presidential race Donald Trump even one-upped Clark, stating recently that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a traitor and should be treated like one, implying that the government should kill him.These statements and others like them most likely reflect the frustration felt in Washington over a 15 year war on terror where there has been no victory and where we actually seem worse off than when we started. The real problem is they will argue and bicker over changing tactics but their interventionist strategy remains the same.Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, who was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, told al-Jazeera this week that US drones create more terrorists than they kill. He said: “The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just … fuels the conflict.”Still Washington pursues the same strategy while expecting different results.It is probably almost inevitable that the warhawks will turn their anger inward, toward Americans who are sick of the endless and costly wars. The US loss of the Vietnam war is still blamed by many on the protesters at home rather than on the foolishness of the war based on a lie in the first place.Let’s hope these threats from Clark and Trump are not a trial balloon leading to a clampdown on our liberties. There are a few reasons we should be concerned. Last week the US House passed a bill that would allow the Secretary of State to unilaterally cancel an American citizen’s passport if he determines that person has “aided” or “abetted” a terrorist organization. And as of this writing, the Senate is debating a highway funding bill that would allow the Secretary of State to cancel the passport of any American who owes too much money to the IRS.Canceling a passport means removing the right to travel, which is a kind of virtual internment camp. The person would find his movements restricted, either being prevented from leaving or entering the United States. Neither of these measures involves any due process or possibility of appeal, and the government’s evidence supporting the action can be kept secret.We should demand an end to these foolish wars that even the experts admit are making matters worse. Of course we need a strong defense, but we should not provoke the hatred of others through drones, bombs, or pushing regime change overseas. And we must protect our civil liberties here at home from government elites who increasingly view us as the enemy. | {
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Mojtaba Hassan, Sawkat Shaikh
KOLKATA: They can treat us when we are ill, but can't be our neighbours. This "message" was allegedly conveyed to four Medical College and Hospital alumni, now doing their house-staffship at various hospitals in West Bengal, by their neighbours at a south Kolkata housing society.
Aftab Alam, Mojtaba Hassan, Nasir Shaikh and Sawkat Shaikh are now counting their days at their Kudghat flat and have approached a volunteers' group, Sanghati Abhijan, to resist their eviction. "Our members will file a general diary... we plan to talk to the neighbours and the local municipal councillor to find a solution," said Dwaipayan Banerjee, on behalf of Sanghati Abhijan.
The four MCH alumni rented the Kudghat flat two months ago. "Our landlord did not have any problem with us but, right from the beginning, some of our neighbours created a hostile situation. Things worsened on Monday when a friend came to visit us. He was heckled by some neighbours who asked him to show an 'identity proof'. One of them - a middle-aged man - has asked us to find accommodation elsewhere as we are Muslims," Alam, a resident of neighbouring Howrah district , said on Wednesday .
"Many landlords rejected us because of our religion. We got this flat after several weeks of house-hunting," he added.
The four have not yet moved out of the flat but Sawkat said they had "more or less decided" to shift. "No one can stay peacefully in such an environment," he said .
TOI spoke to their landlord, who said, "A few of my neighbours spoke to me against my decision... Their sole objection was my tenants' religion." He added that it would set "a bad example" if he was forced to turn out his tenants. "But I can take only so much of pressure," he said.
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From just 25 leeches, the team found DNA from six mammals, including pigs, cows, the small-toothed ferret-badger, and the threatened goat-like serow. They also found DNA from the Annamite striped rabbit, which was discovered in 1999 and had (at the time) never been seen in over 2,000 hours of camera-trap recordings. And they even detected DNA from the Truong Son muntjac, a small deer that was discovered in 1997 and has never been seen in the flesh. “That suggests that these animals aren’t as rare as we think or that the leeches are very good at finding them,” says Gilbert.
All conservation efforts are predicated upon knowing what lives where, and that knowledge is hard to come by in dense, rugged forests, whose residents are often rare, reclusive, and wary of humans. In such places, direct observation is almost impossible. You could interview villagers, but that’s challenging and often imprecise. You could pepper an area with camera-traps, but you’d have to lug heavy and expensive batteries to and fro. And all of these methods might miss small, tree-dwelling, or burrowing species.
Leeches, however, seem to feed on everything, and so miss little. Collecting them is also cheap, fast, and requires no special skills; as Gilbert says, “The leech collector simply offers his/herself up for bait.” Just by standing around in a rainforest for a day, a lucky collector (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it) can attract hundreds of leeches.
Attracting funding is a bigger problem. “The funny thing about leeches is that I’ve spectacularly failed to get anyone in Denmark to give me any money to study them,” says Gilbert. Fortunately, others have had better luck. Douglas Yu from the University of East Anglia and China’s Kunming Institute of Zoology, has enthusiastically leapt onto the leech-sequencing bandwagon, bringing money and extensive sequencing facilities with him. His involvement allowed the team to scale up.
They are now working with the WWF in Vietnam to find traces of the saola—a recently discovered, rarely seen, and critically endangered antelope that’s also known as the Asian unicorn. Yu has also been working with the Forestry Department of Yunnan Province to train an army of leech collectors. Some two hundred of the departments’ rangers have been walking around, plucking leeches from their bodies, stashing them in rubber pouches, and noting their GPS locations along the way.
Through their efforts, Yu ended up with some 20,000 leeches. Once preserved, the worms turn into dense, rubbery pellets that are too painful to pulverise by hand—the team resorted to small blenders. They then analysed the resulting slurry using a technique called metabarcoding, which amplifies small sections of DNA that vary distinctively between species, and compared these sequences against existing databases. They discovered sequences from martens, bears, tree shrews, mice, mongooses, monkeys, deer, cats, and more. | {
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"There's no reason for this, most certainly in 2014. We're way beyond this as a country, and I wish we could get way beyond it as a parade. Boston and New York, come on!"
- Martin Walsh, Mayor of Boston
You know we're over this, right? (S)
real
Being Irish, and gay, I was clearly quite disappointed to hear that New York and Boston's Saint Patrick's Day parade committees have been banning LGBT groups from the celebrations for over 20 years.However, I was glad to hear about the resistance to these committees' homophobia. Both Boston and New York's mayors are boycotting the parade, and Guinness (possibly the biggest sponsor you could hope for in an event like the Saint Patrick's Day parade) has dropped their sponsorship of the NYC celebrations. Despite this tainting today's celebrations (because it's just not the same without Guinness), I'm rather satisfied."Oh Patrick, you're such a party pooper!" No, I'm glad that people are showing these narrow-minded people that this is not tolerated in modern society.Philip J. Wuschke Jr, one of the organisers of the Boston parade, told the Globe: "Messages of LGBT equality are not in keeping with the messages of pride in Irish heritage the parade promotes." Excuse me? "Not in keeping with the messages of pride in Irish heritage the parade promotes"? Well I'm sorry Philip, but if we're going down that road you had best change your surname.Although gay rights may not have been greatly supported when your great-great-grandmother sailed away from Cork, Philip (because Iyou havegrain of Irish in you), right now LGBT rights are supported by the majority of the Irish population. Gay marriage in Ireland is being put to a referendum the government is so confident in the people. According to polls, 75% of Irish people support marriage equality.As for Guinness pulling away from sponsorship, good! I think we've just witnessed the fact that if Guinness were a sponsor of Sochi, they probably would have pulled out of there too, unlike Coca-Cola (an American company, "land of the free") who didn't have the courage to say no to a big bad bully.So, dear homophobic Paddy's Day parade organizers, I have one quick question to ask you before I get back to looking after my sheep in my thatched-roofed, white stone cottage (since you seem to be so much more attached to representing Irish heritage than anyone else, and seem to be tellingIrish people their business). What really made you think taking rainbows out of Patrick's Day was a good idea? | {
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CLEVELAND, Ohio - About one out of every 17 deaths in state prisons across the country is the result of suicide, ranking behind illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, the latest data from the Justice Department shows.
The share of deaths attributed to suicide is much higher at local jails, where prisoners are held for shorter periods of time and often have just been arrested.
In Ohio prisons, there were 63 suicides from 2001 through 2011, according to a mortality report published last month by the Justice Department's Bureau of Statistics. (See state by state details in chart below.)
At state prisons nationally, suicides accounted for 5.5 percent of state prison deaths in 2011, ranking behind cancer (30.7 percent), heart disease (25.5 percent), liver disease (10.1 percent) and respiratory disease (6.1 percent).
There were 185 suicides in state prisons, the lowest number in 10 years, but more than double the number deaths attributed to homicide (70).
In contrast, suicide is the leading cause of death in local jails, accounting for 35 percent of the deaths, the report showed.
The 310 people who committed suicide in local jails in 2011 amounted to 43 suicides per 100,000 prisoners.
The 185 suicides in state prisons nationally represented 14 per 100,000 inmates.
Overall, Ohio's state prison mortality rate was 218 deaths per 100,000 inmates in 2011, ranking 35th nationally.
Here are the causes for deaths in Ohio state prisons from 2001 through 2011:
Cancer: 392
Heart disease: 366
Liver disease: 76
Respiratory disease:95
AIDS-related: 30
Other illness: 191
Suicide: 63
Drug or alcohol intoxication: 4
Accident: 5
Homicide: 15
Other/unknown:6
State prisoner deaths, 2001-2011
State Total Suicide Pct.
suicide Homicide Pct.
homicide Alabama 835 15 1.8% 9 1.1% Alaska 100 18 18.0% 2 2.0% Arizona 831 67 8.1% 20 2.4% Arkansas 462 26 5.6% 9 1.9% California 4,051 364 9.0% 142 3.5% Colorado 478 38 7.9% 14 2.9% Connecticut 322 47 14.6% 3 0.9% Delaware 175 19 10.9% 2 1.1% Florida 2,707 75 2.8% 44 1.6% Georgia 1,267 59 4.7% 31 2.4% Hawaii 105 17 16.2% 4 3.8% Idaho 152 19 12.5% 2 1.3% Illinois 942 85 9.0% 9 1.0% Indiana 680 44 6.5% 18 2.6% Iowa 156 22 14.1% 1 0.6% Kansas 251 14 5.6% 2 0.8% Kentucky 526 11 2.1% 1 0.2% Louisiana 989 17 1.7% 4 0.4% Maine 40 3 7.5% 2 5.0% Maryland 667 52 7.8% 26 3.9% Massachusetts 349 34 9.7% 2 0.6% Michigan 1,346 76 5.6% 9 0.7% Minnesota 146 19 13.0% 0 0.0% Mississippi 579 26 4.5% 7 1.2% Missouri 806 41 5.1% 12 1.5% Montana 77 9 11.7% 1 1.3% Nebraska 103 4 3.9% 1 1.0% Nevada 342 19 5.6% 7 2.0% New Hampshire 71 10 14.1% 0 0.0% New Jersey 669 36 5.4% 8 1.2% New Mexico 188 17 9.0% 7 3.7% New York 1,676 138 8.2% 16 1.0% North Carolina 912 28 3.1% 10 1.1% North Dakota 10 1 10.0% 0 0.0% Ohio 1,243 63 5.1% 15 1.2% Oklahoma 803 42 5.2% 35 4.4% Oregon 373 26 7.0% 3 0.8% Pennsylvania 1,587 76 4.8% 8 0.5% Rhode Island 75 16 21.3% 1 1.3% South Carolina 696 28 4.0% 21 3.0% South Dakota 76 10 13.2% 2 2.6% Tennessee 789 32 4.1% 17 2.2% Texas 4,498 273 6.1% 38 0.8% Utah 110 23 20.9% 3 2.7% Vermont 36 5 13.9% 0 0.0% Virginia 949 32 3.4% 8 0.8% Washington 381 21 5.5% 6 1.6% West Virginia 175 4 2.3% 2 1.1% Wisconsin 454 55 12.1% 0 0.0% Wyoming 53 4 7.5% 0 0.0%
Source: Department of Justice | {
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Thank You, Hauntzer
As we’ve briefly touched on in a previous announcement, Kevin ‘Hauntzer’ Yarnell will be departing from TSM, bringing an end to the three years he has spent with our organization. After being signed at the end of Season 5 as an up-and-coming top laner in the NA LCS, Hauntzer shattered and surpassed every expectation that was made of him. Not only has he won three NA LCS playoff titles with the team, he proved that he could more than stand his ground against the influx of star top lane talent imported into the scene over the last few years.
TSM has seen some of our most dominant seasons and performances with him, and we’re immensely grateful to Hauntzer for all the hard work and time he has contributed to our successes in the NA LCS over the last few years. We hope that our fans continue to support him as he moves on to other ventures and we wish him only the best for his future. Thank you Hauntzer, and good luck on your new team!
"For 3 years, I've been on TSM and I enjoyed every bit of it. All the friends I've made, memories I've forged, and my growth as a player and person wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't joined them. I couldn't be more grateful for the opportunity. It is time to part ways - I don't believe you can grow to your full potential if you stay in one place, you must find new challenges and new opportunities to prove yourself. Thank you TSM."
-Kevin 'Hauntzer' Yarnell | {
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Article content
In defiance of a Nova Scotia court ban on naming a high-profile child pornography victim, supporters have taken to the web to flout the measure, arguing that it does a disservice to the girl’s memory.
[np_storybar title=”Christie Blatchford: Ban on naming of well-known victim seems ludicrous, but is the right call” link=”http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/09/22/christie-blatchford-ban-on-naming-of-well-known-child-porn-victim-seems-ludicrous-but-its-the-right-call/”]
You know her name.
We apologize, but this video has failed to load.
tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Websites defiantly flout publication ban in widely known child porn case Back to video
Almost everyone in Canada does.
As one of the lawyers involved in the case said once, the girl achieved “quasi-celebrity status” such that she’s known now by her first name, like Rihanna.
You also know the bare bones of the story.
Continue reading…
[/np_storybar]
Two U.S. news websites published the girl’s identity this week, noting that Canadians “can’t even say her name.” A Halifax journalist risked jail time by openly breaking the ban on his blog. The victim’s parents have attended court hearings wearing T-shirts emblazoned with their daughter’s name. | {
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Originally Posted by NameNotAvalible Go to original post Originally Posted by
Just to clarify how many redeems do the codes you're giving out on twitter actually have? I would assume it's a modest number as otherwise this might not work out so well but I'm not sure why you'd have it set up as 4 codes with 5 redeems as opposed to 1 with 20 if that's the case. The original promotion strikes me as not completely thought through in the first place which is why I ask (although I like the promotion I can't help but feel splitting it into tiers so people gain 1/2/3 packs according to levels gained might have made it better received and more or less achieved all the positives of the current system)
Relevant codes:
WOE-JYZF-4RZZ-KC7M
WOE-NCJZ-EHFZ-4QAT
WOE-RYLE-CMJN-LMPP
WOE-RZR7-EXRE-RCXZ | {
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AUSTIN -- Texas Baseball head coach Augie Garrido has been given a two-year contract extension, pending approval of The University of Texas System Board of Regents, Men's Athletics Director Steve Patterson announced Tuesday.
The extension keeps Garrido, who has guided Texas to a national-best eight appearances in the College World Series since 2000, including the 2002 and 2005 National Championships, under contract through the 2017 season.
"We're pleased with the great postseason run the team had this year," Patterson said. "We're excited to have Augie around for another three years to try and win more National Championships."
In 2014, Garrido guided Texas to a 46-21 record, finishing tied for third nationally after falling one win shy of the CWS championship round. The Longhorns' postseason run included winning the Houston Regional and the Austin Super Regional before going 3-2 in Omaha, where they were eliminated by eventual champion Vanderbilt.
Garrido, the winningest coach in college baseball history with 1,920 career victories, has a 769-368-2 (.675) record in 18 seasons at Texas. Since taking over the Longhorns program prior to the 1997 season, he has led Texas to 14 NCAA Tournaments including nine Regional and eight Super Regional titles.
"We as coaches and our support staff are all excited to have the opportunity to continue to help develop the baseball and life skills of the current players and incoming recruits at The University of Texas," Garrido said. | {
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After injuries to the run game forced the Seattle Seahawks to turn to their passing game last year, coach Pete Carroll is ready to get the team back to their running ways.
Carroll joined “Brock and Salk” on 710 ESPN Seattle last week and expressed he wants to run more than they did last year.
“We lost 100-something runs last year,” Carroll said. “And that was basically the story. That was basically the tale of why everything came about as it did. The defense had to do some more stuff. We had to throw the ball more. We had to pass protect more and all of that because the running game got knocked up.”
The Seahawks’ leading rusher last season was Christine Michael, who played just nine games before he was released and signed with Green Bay. Seattle had 18 different players with at least one touch throughout the year.
Seattle finished last season ranked 20th in rushing attempts with 403 after leading the NFL the previous four years with an average of 517.5 attempts. Their yards per carry also dropped off from 4.5 in 2015 to 3.9 last season. This number could also be attributed to offensive line issues struggles the team has attempted to correct with additions this offseason.
“We definitely will [run more],” Carroll said.
Seattle’s success in recent years has been based on their strong running game. Marshawn Lynch’s absence was felt last season as starting running back Thomas Rawls missed time due to various injuries, but Eddie Lacy and a healthy Rawls should create a formidable duo. Add in second-year back C.J. Prosise, who impressed, averaging 5.7 yards per carry in limited time last season, and they could have one of the better groups in the league.
The addition of Lacy should provide a huge boost for Seattle. Before injuries limited him to five games last season, he had missed just two games in his first three seasons. He already has two 1,000 yard seasons under his belt and a career 4.4 average of yards per carry.
The lack of rushing last season put more pressure on an already hobbled Wilson so the Seahawks will look to take some pressure off of their star quarterback. | {
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Report Summary
The global intravenous immunoglobulin market size was estimated at USD 8,820.44 Million in 2017 and is anticipated to gain significant traction over coming years.
Immunoglobulin denotes the analysis of blood plasma containing antibody. Intravenous Immunoglobulin (IVIG) is a product which is administered intravenously. IVIG comprises polyvalent IgG antibodies that are extracted from a number of blood donor’s plasma. In general, the intravenous immunoglobulin treatment is given to the individuals who are suffering from common variable immunodeficiency due to the insufficient amount of antibodies such as X-linked agammaglobulinemia (XLA), Wiskott Aldrich Syndrome, and other forms of hypogammaglobulinemia. This treatment aids patient by maintaining the proper amount of antibodies in the body.
The global intravenous immunoglobulin market is driven by increasing occurrence of immunodeficiency. For instance, according to one industry reports, acquired immunodeficiency is a type of congenital immunodeficiency. Moreover, approximately 50,000 new cases of congenital immunodeficiency are diagnosed in the U.S. each year. In addition, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) 2016, approximately 36.7 million people are living with HIV globally. Thus, increasing prevalence of such cases demanding appropriate treatment and upsurge in the use of immunoglobulins to treat inflammatory myopathies, GuillainBarre syndrome or specific antibody deficiency is anticipated to boost the market growth. Additionally, the rise in the authorization of intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) drugs from the government as well as organizations such as European Medicine Agency (EMA), and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is anticipated to boost the sales of immunoglobulin. Growing in the elderly population and developed IVIG production due to the development of technological advancement are the other key factors that contributing to the intravenous immunoglobulin market growth.
However, strict government policies and high cost associated with the therapy, and side effects with the use of IVIG are factors hampering the market growth.
Segment Analysis
The global Intravenous Immunoglobulin Market is segmented on the basis of Application and geography. On the basis of application, the global Intravenous Immunoglobulin Market is categorized into Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP), Hypogammaglobulinemia, Congenital AIDS, Immunodeficiency diseases, Multifocal motor neuropathy, Myasthenia Gravis, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, Kawasaki disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome, and Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP).
In 2017, Hypogammaglobulinemia is estimated to dominate the application segment. The dominance is attributed to the growing global occurrences of primary immunodeficiency diseases (PID). It is the most common chronic immune defect in patients with lymphoproliferative disorders (LPDs). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2012, the global occurrence rate of hypogammaglobulinemia was around 2 per 100,000 populations moreover, the number of people suffering this type of disease is estimated to increase during the forecast period. Growing occurrence of immunodeficiency disorders associated with the high implementation of IVIG therapies is expected to drive the segment growth significantly.
Regional Analysis
In terms of geography, North America is estimated to dominate the global Intravenous Immunoglobulin Market. Increasing healthcare expenditure, growing level of consciousness for the products involved in the treatment of immunodeficiency disorders, and rising inclination of clinicians towards immunodeficiency therapies are the key factors attributing towards the market growth. Rising elderly population and changing lifestyle susceptible to chronic diseases are some of the factors contributing to the growth the intravenous immunoglobulin market growth in this region. Additionally, growing occurrences of primary immunodeficiency (PID) is anticipated to enhance the market growth in North America. According to American Autoimmune Related Disease Association Inc. (AARDA) 2012, approximately 50 million Americans were diagnosed to have autoimmune diseases and the number of people suffering this disease is expected to increase during the forecast period further bolstering the market growth.
Competitive Landscape
Major firms are focusing on small firms with a working methodology of securing the end goal to manage position in the market and are associated with mergers and acquisitions, key joint efforts, and novel item advancement to pick up profit share in the business. Some major key players in global Intravenous Immunoglobulin Market are Baxter International Inc., CSL Ltd., Grifols S.A, Octapharma AG, Kedrion Biopharma Inc., LFB group, Biotest AG, China Biologics Products, Inc., BDI Pharma Inc., and Bayer Healthcare among others. | {
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india
Updated: Feb 20, 2019 20:42 IST
Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday launched a sharp attack on the Congress during his Odisha visit, accusing the Congress of following policies that, he alleged, had fuelled terrorism. Yogi Adityanath’s pitch was that the country could only remain safe under PM Narendra Modi’s leadership.
Addressing a meeting of BJP’s booth-level workers in Bhawanipatna town of Kalahandi district, Adityanath said the Manmohan Singh government had said minorities have first claim over country’s resources.
“Terrorism is the result of this appeasement. Till the appeasement policy is there, this country cannot be saved. This is why PM Modi said we would work for all classes of people,” said the UP CM.
“Every Indian knows that only Narendra Modi-led government can give befitting reply to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism,” he said. The firebrand BJP leader lashed out at previous governments saying earlier forces were asked to wait till terrorists fired but that is not the case anymore.
“The bullets of terrorists do not wait for the bullets of our jawans. But in last 4 and half years of our government everyone know that if anyone plays with the integrity of the nation then they would get a befitting reply and each of the terrorists would be eliminated. The jawans at the borders of our country are giving befitting replies to the terrorists.”
Also read ; ‘Will kill anyone who picks up gun in Kashmir Valley,’ says Army
He hailed 15 Corps commander Lt Gen KS Dhillon, who said in Srinagar on Tuesday that anyone who takes up the gun in Kashmir Valley will be “killed and eliminated”, unless they surrender.
“This statement inspires a new confidence in every Indian. Pakistan and Pak-sponsored terrorists are now dumb-founded. The fight against terrorism is not of an individual, it is of a nation. Every individual of the country should help Modi in this,” he said as he pitched for Modi’s re-election at the polls.
Comparing the achievements of his government to that of Naveen Patnaik government, he said despite not completing 2 years. UP has constructed 20 lakh houses under Pradhan Mantri Grameen Awas Yojana while Naveen Patnaik in last 19 years has completed only 17 lakh houses.
Later addressing another meeting of booth-level workers in Nachuni area of Khurda district, Adityanath accsued the Patnaik government of deliberately not sending the list of beneficiary farmers for the Pradhan Mantri Kishan i Samman Nidhi to Centre.
“The Prime Minister would launch the Pradhan Mantri Kishan Samman Nidhi on February 24 in which farmers would get Rs 6000 per year. But Odisha government is not sending the farmers’ list to Centre. They are scared that if they send the list, then the poor farmers would get money. When Odisha farmers get money, then the Naveen Patnaik government will not be able to fool them.” | {
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O Distrito Federal completa 100 dias sem chuva nesta quarta (30), após registrar o menor índice de umidade do ano nessa terça-feira (29), com 9% no Gama. No Plano Piloto, a umidade do ar ficou em 12%. O Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (Inmet) disse ao G1 que a capital ainda deve enfrentar, pelo menos, duas semanas de seca intensa.
A medição de 9% indica estado de emergência, mas segundo a Defesa Civil, a situação somente poderá ser decretada depois de dois dias consecutivos abaixo de 12%. "Por enquanto, o DF permanece em estado de alerta, quando a umidade varia de 12% a 20%", afirma a Defesa Civil.
A porcentagem considerada ideal pela Organização Mundial de Saúde (OMS) é de 60%. Mas a tendência no DF, segundo o meteorologista Mamedes Luiz Melo, é que a umidade se mantenha em níveis baixos até a segunda quinzena de setembro.
“O DF está batendo na porta do estado emergencial. E vai ficar ainda mais quente.”
2 de 1 Vegetação seca em Brasília e a fumaça dos incêndios que castigam o cerrado — Foto: TV Globo/Reprodução Vegetação seca em Brasília e a fumaça dos incêndios que castigam o cerrado — Foto: TV Globo/Reprodução
Mamedes explicou ao G1 que a temperatura é inversamente proporcional aos índices de umidade. Por isso, nesta época do ano em que a seca chega ao ápice, os termômetros podem marcar até 32ºC de máxima e 12ºC de mínima, durante a noite.
“Como quase não há nuvens, o calor que a terra recebe durante o dia não fica retido e acaba se dissipando rapidamente para o espaço.”
Clima de deserto?
É comum ouvir do candango, nessa época do ano, que Brasília tem “clima de deserto”. No meio do cerrado, em uma região de planice e altitude elevada, a capital está mais próxima do clima desértico que das florestas tropicais. Mesmo assim, o meteorologista Mamedes diz a afirmativa é errada.
“No deserto, o dia amanhece com entre 5% e 3% e se mantém assim até a noite. Para nós esse pico de baixa ocorre só em um determinado horário."
O período de menor umidade durante o dia é das 15h às 16h, segundo ele. “É quando o índice pode chegar a 10%.” A OMS recomenda que quando a umidade chega ao estado de alerta – entre 20% e 12% –, as pessoas devem evitar fazer exercícios físicos de alta intensidade e lugares com grandes aglomerações.
3 de 1 Incêndios florestais no DF, em agosto, aumentaram em 61,5% em relação ao ano passado — Foto: TV Globo/Reprodução Incêndios florestais no DF, em agosto, aumentaram em 61,5% em relação ao ano passado — Foto: TV Globo/Reprodução
Pra driblar a seca
Para minimizar os efeitos da seca no organismo, a pneumologista Aída Alvim listou ao G1 algumas dicas imprescindíveis para a saúde. A primeira delas é aumentar o consumo de líquidos, não só água, mas suco natural, água de coco e chás gelados também.
“A indicação é aumentar aquela recomendação de beber 2 litros por dia dia.”
A hidratação também vale para a pele. Ela sugere a utilização de cremes corporais, manteiga de cacau para os lábios e colírio nos olhos.
“É bom evitar os banhos muito quentes e prolongados e o uso excessivo de sabonete também, porque isso retira a hidratação natural da pele.”
Como nesta época do ano o morador do DF costuma aproveitar o céu azul para fazer exercícios ao ar livre e tomar sol, a médica lembra da importância de passar filtro solar. No caso das atividades físicas, ela também recomenda priorizar horários antes das 10h e depois das 16h.
De pegar fogo
4 de 1 Bombeiro apaga fogo na Floresta Nacional, em Brasília — Foto: TV Globo/Reprodução Bombeiro apaga fogo na Floresta Nacional, em Brasília — Foto: TV Globo/Reprodução
Com a umidade baixa e a incidência solar alta, o DF registrou 2.469 incêndios em áreas florestais somente no mês de agosto, segundo o Corpo de Bombeiros. O índice é 61,5% maior que o do mesmo período do ano passado.
Por conta disso, a Floresta Nacional amanheceu pegando fogo nesta segunda-feira (28). Os bombeiros deslocaram dois caminhões pipa e dez militares para fazer o combate às chamas, que foi das 14h à meia-noite.
Na terça (29), os militares retornaram para fazer uma ronda por volta das 10h e encontraram novos focos de incêndio. De acordo com eles, foram cerca de 250 hectares queimados – o equivalente a 250 campos de futebol.
O comandante do Grupo de Proteção Ambiental dos bombeiros, Glauber de La Fuente, disse à TV Globo que, além do dano à vegetação, o fogo em larga escala representa um risco às nascentes. | {
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Victims Tiffany York and Michael Roark
The families of two teenagers shot to death execution-style in the Georgia woods in 2011 by a gang of American soldiers trying to cover up their criminal enterprise and delusional plot to overthrow the government took the first step today in a $30 million wrongful death lawsuit against the U.S. Army.
Charging the Army with a long list of negligent acts, the families are seeking $15 million for each murdered loved one: Tiffany York, 17, a high school junior, and her boyfriend, Michael Roark, 19, a former soldier who was discharged three days before he was killed.
The Army’s negligent acts and omissions – particularly its handling of an earlier investigation into the death of the gang ringleader’s wife – “directly and foreseeably caused the deaths of Claimants' children,” says the document.
The young sweethearts were murdered by members of an antigovernment militia called FEAR, or Forever Enduring Always Ready. FEAR was made up of active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Stewart in Hinesville, Ga. Roark served with the gang members.
All told, 11 people, most of them current or recently discharged soldiers, have been arrested in connection with the gang and the murder in the woods on Dec. 5, 2011. Six members of the gang have pleaded guilty, including Pvt. Isaac Aguigui, the ringleader, who was sentenced in civilian court in July to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Aguigui, 22, is also facing an upcoming court martial in military court for the murder in July 2011 of his 24-year-old wife, Sgt. Deidre Aguigui, an Army linguist who was five months pregnant when she died. Isaac Aguigui was initially questioned by Army investigators but was not held long. A military autopsy proved inconclusive.
Within weeks of his wife’s death, Aguigui received a $500,000 life insurance policy and used much of the money, prosecutors say, to fund his militia that stockpiled nearly $90,000 worth of military-grade weapons. But it wasn’t until April 2013, after a civilian medical examiner ruled the death a homicide following a new look at the autopsy reports, that Aguigui was charged with his wife’s murder.
“I wish we wouldn’t have to file a lawsuit,” Brenda Thomas, the mother of Tiffany York told Hatewatch today. “I wish things would have been handled differently back in July 2011. I wish the Army had done its job. But I feel someone needs to be held accountable for the Army’s negligence.”
Brian C. Brook and Matthew J. Peed, the lawyers for the families, filed what is known as an administrative claim, an official notice of the family’s intent to sue the military in six months unless the Army pays the $30 million or agrees to a settlement.
A spokesman at Fort Stewart did not immediately respond to a Hatewatch request for comment.
Much of the wrongful death claim revolves around the death of Aguigui’s wife and the Army’s handling of the investigation. Military police were apparently skeptical of Aguigui’s story and said the death scene appeared to have been “staged.” Yet nothing was done for more than a year.
“Despite the wealth of incriminating evidence,” the complaint charges, “the Army negligently failed to even classify Sgt. Deidre Aguigui’s death as a homicide, much less arrest and prosecute Pvt. Isaac Aguigui for her murder until April 3, 2013, almost two years later. … Incredibly, both the April 3, 2013 arrest and the July 26 referral [for a court martial] appear to have been supported by evidence that was known or available to the Army prosecutors well before December 5, 2011, the date when Claimants’ children were murdered.” | {
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Who Charted? #282
Brody Stevens, comedian and the Prince of Periscope, joins Howard and Brett for a special tribute episode to Prince. Howard and Brody debate what year “Erotic City” was released and reflect on listening to the prolific musician back in the day during the top 5 Prince songs chart. His top 5 movies inspire conversations about Prince’s multiple talents and the pros and cons of millennials’ technology usage. During Two Charted, Howard breaks down his bumpy road trip to his great shows in Bloomington and Chicago. | {
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Microsoft is unveiling a new Whiteboard app for Windows 10 today. It's an app that's designed for the company's Surface devices, and provides two-way inking for Windows 10. Currently in private preview for Surface Hub devices, the new whiteboard includes collaborative inking, geometry recognition, table conversion, and automatic table shading. It’s really designed to let people share ink across multiple devices, and will be available on all Surface devices later this year.
Alongside the new Whiteboard app, Microsoft is also making improvements to the inking experience in its Office apps. Pencil texture and new ink effects will be available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Office 365 subscribers next month, and Microsoft has also created a digital pencil case that lets you personalize your favorite pens, pencils, and highlighters and sync them to all Windows 10 devices.
Office will also support the new Surface Pen low-latency and tilt options. This means you’ll be able to adjust the thickness and texture of ink in Office apps just by physically tilting the Surface Pen on the new Surface Pro. | {
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Az első útján egy jéghegynek ütközött és elsüllyedt luxushajó maradványait 14 év után először kereste fel augusztus elején egy expedíció, amely nagyfelbontású képeket készített a roncsról.A kutatásról beszámoló The Irish Post hírportál emlékeztet arra, hogy a hajótest 1 Celsius fokos vízben fekszik, erős örvényeknek és változó tengeri áramlásoknak van kitéve. A roncsot a sókorrózió és a fémevő baktériumok is pusztítják. Az expedíció ember vezette tengeralattjáróval szállt le a 4000 méteres mélységbe, az Atlanti-óceán északi részén augusztus elején. A mélytengeri kutatócsoportot a felfedező Victor Vescovo vezette, a tagjai között volt Parks Stephenson Titanic-szakértő, Rob McCallum expedícióvezető, valamint a Triton Submarines technikai csoportja.Nyolc nap alatt öt alkalommal merültek le az Új-Fundlandtól mintegy 600 kilométerre fekvő helyszínen a Titanic roncsához egy kétszemélyes mélytengeri búvárhajóval. Először készítettek 4K-felbontású képeket különleges kameráikkal, és egészen rendkívüli, újdonságokkal szolgáló felvételeket készítettek a roncsról. Victor Vescovo, a tengeralattjáró vezetője arról beszélt, hogy még őt is meglepte, milyen hatalmas a hajóroncs. "Az volt a legcsodálatosabb pillanat, amikor a Titanic mellett haladtam, és a tengeralattjáró fényei visszatükröződtek egy kapuról: mintha a hajó rámkacsintott volna. Elképesztő volt" - idézte fel.A kutatók a kamerarendszerrel aprólékosan feltérképezték a roncsot, így a felvételek lehetővé teszik a fotorealisztikus 3D-modellek elkésztését a Titanicról. Ezek segítenek felmérni a roncs jelenlegi állapotát és előrevetíteni a jövőjét, emellett az AR (kiterjesztett valóság) és VR (virtuális valóság) technológiával meg is jeleníthető a hajó maradványa. Az expedíció a helyszínen koszorút helyezett el és rövid ünnepséget tartott azoknak a tiszteletére, akik 1912-ben életüket vesztették az elsüllyedt luxusgőzösön.Parks Stephenson, a Titanic történésze szerint a legjelentősebb romlás a tisztek lakóhelyének, köztük a kapitány kajütjének a területén fedezhető fel. A rajongók egyik kedvence, a kapitány kádja már az enyészeté lett. A hajótest ezen az oldalon összeomlik, és a pusztulás folytatódik. Lori Johnson elmondta, hogy a roncs pusztulása az idő múlásával természetes folyamat. Az expedíció tudósai eredményeik publikálása mellett egy dokumentumfilmben is beszámolnak majd a hajóroncs állapotáról és az expedícióról. | {
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Reading Time: 5 minutes
George H.W. Bush, known to family and friends as “Poppy,” celebrated his 90th birthday this year parachuting from a helicopter, one of several jumps he’s made to mark his birthdays with a nod to his career as a WWII naval aviator. He made his first jump on Sept. 2, 1944, when the plane he was flying got hit by Japanese fire over the Pacific. His escape by parachute became an essential part of his image as a war hero, a status that fuelled his political ambitions.
Here to mark the 70th anniversary of Bush’s first jump is an excerpt from WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker’s bestseller, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years. This section of Chapter 2 examines the enduring discrepancies surrounding Bush’s story of survival over the Pacific.
(Note: Although this excerpt does not contain footnotes, the book itself is exhaustively footnoted and sourced.)
A Changing Story
The enveloping fog extends even to Poppy Bush’s most sterling political symbol: his record as a war hero. On September 2, 1944, the plane he was piloting was hit by Japanese fire during a bombing run over Chichi Jima, a small island in the Pacific. Bush successfully parachuted to the ocean surface, where he was rescued. His two crew members perished.
A documentary film about the rescue was aired as part of a 1984 Republican Convention tribute to Vice President Bush. And on September 2, 1984, forty years to the day of his doomed bombing mission, a ceremony was held at the Norfolk Naval Station, complete with a Navy band and an encomium from Navy Secretary John Lehman. Bush’s war service, Lehman declared, was the beginning of a career “which went on to mark some of the most remarkable achievements in the annals of American politics.”
The real story turns out to be far more complicated. In particular, there are two unresolved issues: What did Bush know of his crew members’ fate? And how badly was his plane hit at the moment when he decided to bail out? These are not merely hypothetical: as the pilot, Bush’s decision to ditch the craft would have doomed anyone still on board. Navy regulations dictate that officers who are thought to have abandoned crew members could be court-martialed.
On board with Bush that day were Radioman Second Class John Delaney, situated below in the plane’s belly, and, directly behind Bush, the turret gunner Lieutenant Junior Grade William Gardiner “Ted” White. Bush would claim in an early 1980s interview with author Doug Wead that he had seen at least one parachute leaving the plane.
In 2002 he told the author James Bradley that he had not known the fate of either of his crew members. After Bradley had finished conducting an interview with Bush for his book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, the former president turned to the author and asked if he had any information on the fate of his two crewmen.
“It still plagues me if I gave those guys enough time to get out,” Bush said.
Bradley would later write in his book: “No one knew exactly what had happened to Ted and John that day, only that both of them died.”
Yet Poppy has offered multiple conflicting versions of the episode. In a letter to his parents following his rescue, Poppy asserted that after the plane was hit, he had ordered his crew members to parachute out. He was uncertain what happened next, he claimed, due to the smoke that filled the cockpit:
They didn’t answer at all, but I looked around and couldn’t see Ted in the turret so I assumed he had gone below to get his chute fastened on.
Another version surfaced in the 1980s, when his staff decided that Bush had previously been too modest and now needed to acknowledge his heroism.
They hooked him up with a writer, Doug Wead, who prepared the book George Bush: Man of Integrity. In that book, which got little attention, Poppy says:
I looked back and saw that my rear gunner [White] was out. He had been machine-gunned to death right where he was.
There also exists a tape of Bush being interviewed by Wead, as part of a set of interviews the author conducted with famous figures, including Jimmy Carter and former Israeli leader Menachem Begin. On that tape, Bush can be heard to refer clearly to White, and to mention that he saw that White was very much in the plane before bailing out:
One of them jumped out and his parachute streamed. They had fighter planes over us and they could see the chute open, and the other one… he was killed in the plane. You can see, [in] a torpedo bomber, the pilot is separate from the crew, but you can look over and see the turret, and he was just slumped over. [Emphasis mine.]
Another claim of Poppy’s would later be challenged: that his plane was effectively crippled. In Looking Forward, a 1988 campaign book co-authored by Bush and campaign staffer Victor Gold, Poppy writes:
The flak was the heaviest I’d ever flown into . . . Suddenly there was a jolt, as if a massive fist had crunched into the belly of the plane. Smoke poured into the cockpit, and I could see flames rippling across the crease of the wing, edging toward the fuel tanks.
Not so, said Chester Mierzejewski, the tail gunner in the plane directly ahead of Bush’s. Mierzejewski came forward to challenge Bush after noticing inconsistencies in public accounts of Bush’s mission that day. He was struck by how all the versions differed from what he saw.
Mierzejewski had the best and most unobstructed view, and could see directly into Bush’s cockpit. A nonpolitical man who had been Bush’s partner in shipboard bridge games, Mierzejewski wrote a personal letter to the vice president in March 1988, stating that his memory of that day was “entirely different” from what Bush had been saying in television interviews.
Bush, an assiduous letter writer, never responded, so Mierzejewski took his story to the New York Post in August 1988. The Post quoted the tail gunner as saying that only Bush himself had bailed out and that Bush’s plane was never on fire.
No smoke came out of his cockpit when he opened his canopy to bail out . . . I think he could have saved those lives if they were alive. I don’t know that they were, but at least they had a chance if he had attempted a water landing.
In interviews with other papers over the next few days, Mierzejewski, also a recipient of a Distinguished Flying Cross, would say that he was inclined to give Bush the benefit of the doubt until he realized the extent of the inconsistencies.
Perhaps this problem with story discrepancies, a problem that would resurface time and again in Poppy’s life, so often it became a virtual theme, explains why Poppy Bush never penned a comprehensive autobiography.
There were too many secrets, too many different stories to keep straight. More than half a century later, when he was seventy-two years old, Poppy again began parachuting out of planes, ostensibly as a birthday celebration. He would continue this show of bravado and virility into his eighties. Jim McGrath, Bush’s assistant, said when the 1997 jump was announced,
The reasons behind this are strictly personal. It has to do with World War Two. When it happens, we’ll explain it.
But when the time came, no satisfying explanation emerged. Poppy treated his skydive as a novelty and a thrill—and never clarified what happened on September 2, 1944.
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– According to The Wrestling Observer, there has been a lot of discussion backstage in Ring of Honor as to WWE expressing interest in the Briscoes.
As you may recall, WWE was previously said to be interested in them back around when Jay Briscoe first won the ROH World Title in May of 2013, but Briscoe’s controversial comments about marriage equality put an end to that at the time. | {
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Tropical countries may face a risk of ‘peak timber’ as continued logging of rainforests exceeds the capacity of forests to regenerate timber stocks and substantially increases the risk of outright clearing for agricultural and industrial plantations, argues a trio of scientists writing in the journal Biological Conservation. The implications for climate, biodiversity, and local economies are substantial.
Reviewing an extensive body of recent scientific literature, Philip Shearman of the University of Papua New Guinea and Australian National University, Jane Bryan of the University of Papua New Guinea and the University of Tasmania, and William F. Laurance of James Cook University conclude that dominant harvesting practices in tropical forests do not allow enough time for forestry recovery, leading to significant degradation of biodiversity and carbon stocks. The researchers extend their argument to conventional logging approaches as well as “sustainable forest management” techniques like reduced-impact logging (RIL), which aim to cut collateral damage to the forest from selective logging.
Giant rainforest tree in Sumatra. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.
“The recovery time taken for logged forest to resemble primary rainforest in biomass, timber volume and species diversity has been variously estimated at 45–100 years, 120 years, and 150–500 years,” they write. “Larger rainforest trees can range in age from many decades to a millennium or more, illustrating that recovery of large trees in logged forests requires far more than the nominal 30–35 year logging cycles commonly applied in the tropics.”
Shearman and colleagues says this inherent lack of sustainability motivates loggers to continually move into virgin forest areas to maintain timber production. Eventually loggers will find it harder and harder to find high value tropical forests to log, say the authors, pointing to several Asian countries — including Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands — which have already seen their timber production peak.
Shearman and colleagues use the Solomon Islands as a case study for the fate that can befall tropical countries that rely heavily on old-growth forest logging to produce raw-logs, which are “generally absent” from secondary forests.
“For nearly a decade, the nation had been warned that the volume of timber annually harvested from native forests was too high and, if unchecked, that timber stocks would be seriously depleted by 2012,” they write. “In 2009, the Central Bank of the Solomon Islands asserted that exhaustion of timber stocks had arrived even earlier than predicted and its economic consequences were likely to be severe.”
Boom and bust. Sawlog and veneer-log production for the Solomon Islands and five key South-East Asian nations (derived from FAOSTAT, 2011). Courtesy of Shearman et al 2012.
The scientists note that even rich countries have struggled to successfully implement “sustainable” forestry in the tropics, where valuable trees occur at a lower density than in temperate regions due to the high levels of biodiversity.
“Even in north Queensland, Australia, where advanced stand-yield models were eventually used to set annual timber quotas and the Queensland Forestry Department was heavily subsidized by government revenues, timber yields declined sharply from the 1960s to 1980s, as virgin or near-virgin forests were exhausted,” they write. “If sustainable logging largely failed in north Queensland, what chance does it have in most developing nations, where economic pressures are paramount and a range of other complications, such as poor enforcement of environmental regulations, weak or non-existent land tenure, and often-high discount rates, further militate against sustainable forest management?”
The experience in Australia seems to suggest that certification schemes based on first-time logging of primary tropical forests would require extended recovery times — upwards of 50 years — to be considered remotely sustainable. Like other resource-extracting industries, the logging sector tends to overcapitalize and overexploit.
“Having lower harvest intensities and longer rotation times becomes very difficult under these circumstances,” Laurance told mongabay.com via email. “It’s usually about ‘cut and run’, which is the pattern one really sees now with the Malaysian and other logging multinationals. This is fine for the multinationals but bad for timber-producing countries.”
Logging today, gone tomorrow
Selective logging can be damaging in and of itself to forest ecology, but even more worrying for the authors is that logging in any form substantially increases the risk of complete forest clearing.
“[Rigorously implemented RIL] fails to address the insidious problem that, in most parts of the world, logging catalyses much deforestation,” they write. “Across tropical Africa, Asia, and the Americas, labyrinths of logging roads have opened up vast swaths of formerly remote forest for colonization, hunting, illegal mining and other destructive activities.”
Clearing of previously logged forest is particularly acute in Indonesia, where palm oil producers and pulp and paper companies have converted vast swathes of land for plantations. The authors note that Indonesia’s recent decision to exclude some 35 million hectares of logged-over secondary forest from their moratorium on new concessions for plantations was in part driven by accessibility granted by logging roads.
Could carbon payments stop unsustainable logging
Raw logs in Gabon. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.
Logging is expected to figure prominently in a climate change mitigation measure known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), which is currently under discussion in international climate talks. The concept originally aimed to fund relatively conventional forest conservation, but has since been expanded to REDD+ to include activities that degrade forests and therefore produce carbon dioxide. REDD+ may involve logging in two ways: providing funds to prevent it outright in a project area or acting as a form of subsidy to shift conventional logging practices toward less damaging ones (REDD+ compensation is based on reductions in emissions relative to a predetermined baseline). The authors make the case that because any form of logging degrades tropical forest, “REDD+ funds should be directed at initiatives designed to keep loggers and their associated road networks out of forests, rather than merely modifying logging operations.”
“Compensating governments not to log is arguably the easiest and most practical means to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions from the forestry sector, whereas paying to restore logged forests in regions, where their degradation continues apace is difficult to justify.”
The authors also highlight opportunities to directly tackle tropical forest logging, including bans on raw-log exports that have been adopted by many countries, reducing annual allowable cuts and extending rotation times, eliminating barriers to community ownership of forests through land tenure reform, cutting subsidies that favor industrial forestry, and establishing protected areas where logging is prohibited. Shearman, Bryan, and Laurance conclude that unless the logging industry undergoes fundamental changes, “logged tropical forests will continue to be overharvested and, far too frequently, cleared afterward, leading to an inevitable global decline in native timber supplies.”
The impacts could be dire for global ecology as well as forest-dependent economies. The authors compared it to concerns in other sectors.
“It has become common these days to speak of ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak phosphorus’. In the tropics, we assert, we should also begin seriously to consider the implications of ‘peak timber’.”
CITATION: Shearman, P., et al. Are we approaching ‘peak timber’ in the tropics? Biol. Conserv. (2011), doi:10.1016/
j.biocon.2011.10.036
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The team at Gods Unchained is absolutely blown away by the support and excitement the auction has received.
But it’s more than that. This sends a signal that digital assets backed by the blockchain have all the same benefits as tangible items (value, tradability, immutability, and complete and irrevocable ownership). That the scarcity Magic: The Gathering is so known and loved for can be guaranteed within the convenience of a digital context. A trading card game where you actually own your digital cards.
Mythics?
Mythic cards are extraordinarily rare, completely unique cards which can be found in various, novel ways — a maximum of 4 are created every year.
Competitive players fret not — mythic cards feature fun and unique mechanics which unlock a radically new game style for both players. It’s essentially a unique mini-game mode.
If you fancy yourself lucky, there are two mythic rarity titans hidden inside our packs, each with a one-in-a-million chance of being found… check them out below. | {
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http://gty.im/588950492
Months of waiting, wanting, just trying to find out some type of football news and action. Luckily we here at the Detroit Lions Podcast we have been able to keep your offseason hangover to a low din, but now that time is over and it is time for some football! Detroit still seems to have some troubling issues with the offensive line’s blocking and the receiving corps’ drops. The defense stepped up and while the Steelers had 14 points on the board, not all of that was allowed by the defense. Now that we’ve seen some game action, Detroit’s coaching staff and the fans have a piece of what is to come when the real season begins on September 11th. Let’s review what happened in the first game of the preseason in…
Preseason Week 1 Review
http://gty.im/588950494
Offense
The first team offense did well, but struggled at times. Stafford went 4/6 for 58 yards and he got hit three times, something Lions fans didn’t want to see. Fans had hoped this would be corrected with Taylor Decker getting picked in the first round and Reiff moving to the right tackle spot. Dan Orlovsky at times looked great, but mostly didn’t. He threw a perfect deep ball that was dropped and avoided a sack, but later literally gave the ball away with a panic pass that was intercepted, and worse yet, more than 10 yards away from any other Lion. Orlovsky ended going 16/25 for 164 yards, a touchdown and an interception. Jake Rudock made his preseason debut and went 8/11 for 72 yards and a touchdown. Rudock looked comfortable in the pocket and two of his three incomplete passes were his only bad throws.
The running game was average, as Ameer Abdullah was out, Theo Riddick took the start. He had four carries for 15 yards and couldn’t find the holes and got hit hard a few times. Zach Zenner was the next leader in carries with seven for 24 yards, along with three catches for 32 yards. He was able to bust through a hole and make a play with a 12 yard run, his longest of the day. Stevan Ridley also contributed for 14 yards on five carries. Overall the run game was able to produce 95 yards on 27 carries, not a great day day, but with vanilla formations, we often tipped the run.
Receiving was lead by Andre Roberts, getting three catches for 57 yards and a touchdown. Roberts did well and could end up in that sixth wide receiver spot if he keeps this up. Jeremy Kerley had five catches for 36 yards but had a huge drop early on. Orlovsky threw a dime right into Kerley’s hands and he dropped it. Anquan Boldin had a catch for 30 yards as he broke a tackle and dragged a man a few yards before getting taken down. Marvin Jones only had one catch for 16 yards, but it was a good catch at that, tiptoeing on the sidelines. Jace Billingsley was the other receiver who had a touchdown showing some great moves through the Steelers’ secondary. Tight ends were lead by Orson Charles with two catches for 15 yards. Cole Wick only had one catch for 10 yards as the hype train died down somewhat this game.
The offensive line had an inconsistent day. Taylor Decker’s blocking was hot and cold,picking up a holding call along the way and getting beaten by James Harrison. He also allowed a sack and fumble. Tomlinson and Reiff did well, but Warford and Swanson struggled at times. Graham Glasgow had a bad snap, but besides that he blocked well. Joe Dahl got beat a time or two and Geoff Schwartz did well. Surprisingly Cornelius Lucas did well at tackle and could be an acceptable backup. Besides the starters and the backups, nothing else was noticeable by the third stringers.
http://gty.im/588952730
Defense
The defensive line was able to bring pressure to the offense, as Devin Taylor, Quanterus Smith, and Anthony Zettel forced a sack and the team had five tackles for a loss. The run game for Pittsburgh struggled, with only 20 carries for 85 yards. Tyrunn Walker got the start alongside Ngata, Taylor and Ansah. Behind the starters, the backups were able to keep the run game at a dim, and were able to put pressure on the quarterbacks.
Linebackers were lead by Khaseem Greene with five tackles and a sack. Kyle Van Noy had three tackles and rookie Antwione Williams had five tackles. Zavier Gooden got hurt during the game and didn’t return. Besides those three people, the linebacking core didn’t do anything too fantastic or too horrible to warrant notice.
The defensive backs were consistent and able to make some nice stops. Crezdon Butler did allow the only touchdown while covering Darrius Heyward-Bey but the coverage was on point, Heyward-Bey just made a good play. Darrin Walls had three tackles, while Isaiah Johnson had four total tackles. Johnson Bademosi almost had an easy interception but misjudged the trajectory of the ball in the air and completely overran it.
Special Teams did well as Matt Prater and Devon Bell made all three of their field goal attempts, the longest going from 42 yards out. There were two punts, one by Bell and one by Martin. Both ended up inside the 20 as Bell’s went for 50 yards and Martin’s went for 47. Returning was impressive on the kicking side with Andre Roberts having two returns for 36 yards and Kerley had one for 23 yards, but the leader of the group was Dwayne Washington who had his kick return go for 96 yards and a touchdown. Punt returns were quiet with only six returns for 51 yards.
http://gty.im/588950444
Preseason Week One – What it Means
The offense did well despite having some issues early on. They had 379 yards compared to the Steelers 187. The offensive line could improve with more time for the quarterbacks and better holes for the run game. The defensive line depth is impressive and gives Detroit some insurance if the injury bug strikes. Dwayne Washington with the kick return for a touchdown gave himself a shot to make the team if he can keep up the good work.
Preseason Week One – What to Think About
While there are some positives, there are also a few negatives and things fans need to think about. Will the offensive line improve? Sure it was only a series or two, but they had some troubles that we can only hope are improved upon coming into week two. Jake Rudock looked good, could he have a shot to make the roster and maybe, just maybe, sneak up to the backup spot? Will the defensive line continue to dominate? The defensive line was holding up the Steelers offensive line all game, plugging holes and putting pressure on the quarterbacks. Finally, one thing to think about ahead of week two is whether the tight ends will actually show up for the game. Matthew Mulligan was the starter, but he didn’t produce and nobody behind him really showed any promise in the competition to become the third string tight end.
Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter @BKnappBlogs, find me on Reddit at /u/sportsguy4life and leave me your thoughts on the Detroit Lions subreddit. | {
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TEHRAN (FNA)- The US Army sent a new military convoy to Eastern Deir Ezzur after popular unrests and clashes between the people and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) intensified in the region, informed sources said.
“A US military convoy comprising military vehicles and equipment have been dispatched to the town of al-Shahil in Southeastern Deir Ezzur,” local sources in Deir Ezzur were quoted as saying.
The sources reiterated that the US military convoy was dispatched to Southeastern Deir Ezzur after the residents of al-Shahil town held massive rallies against the SDF fighters.
They pointed to the armed conflict between the tribesmen of the region with the SDF in the surrounding oil-rich areas of al-Amr, and said a number of people were wounded in clashes.
Meantime, Southeastern Deir Ezzur is now under SDF-imposed curfew after an unknown group attacked an SDF military post in al-Tayaneh South of Zabian town in the region.
In a relevant development on Saturday, a large number of people poured into the street in Eastern Deir Ezzur to show their protests against the SDF.
Residents of the town of Abu Humman in Southeastern Deir Ezzur launched massive protests and closed the roads leading to the town, battlefield sources in Eastern Deir Ezzur said.
The sources reiterated that the civilians staged massive protests against SDF’s measures, including piling up fuel products, corruption and other offenses in the region.
“The residents of Deir Ezzur called for releasing the people who have been arrested by the SDF fighters,” they said.
The residents of Shaitat town in Southeastern Deir Ezzur also held massive protests and called for their rights with regard to oil revenues.
The report comes as the armed tribesmen had clashed with SDF fighters in the town of Khasham over control of oil resources of the region.
The popular uprising in Deir Ezzur is taking place while Raqqa was also scene of protests and clashes between civilians and SDF fighters over the past three years.
In a relevant development in early December, a large number of people poured into the street in a key town in Northeastern Hasaka, calling for the withdrawal of the US and Turkish troops and their allied militants from their region.
SANA reported that a large number of civilians, social activists and parties in the town of Qamishli took to the streets, opposing occupation of the region by the US and Turkish troops.
It further said that the protestors condemned a visit by the former French Foreign Minister to al-Jazeera region controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), calling for independence of the Syrian parties from the US policies and asking for their affiliation to Damascus again.
The protestors, also, opposed US forces’ illegal bases and presence of militants, affiliated to Turkey and the US, in Syria as a violation of international law and against Syria’s national unity and integrity, SANA said, adding that the protestors called for expulsion of the occupiers and their allied militants from Syria.
In a relevant development in Northeastern Syria, media activists reported last month that protesters took to the streets and called for the expulsion of the US army men and the SDF from the city of Raqqa in Northeastern Syria.
“Tens of Raqqa residents revolted against the US deployment and SDF forces in al-Mansour district of Raqqa city and called for their expulsion,” media activists in Raqqa said.
The sources, meantime, said that the Raqqa residents in their slogans called on the Syrian army to free the region from the occupiers, and said that the protests took place after the SDF forces launched attacks on civilians which resulted in the eruption of clashes between the two sides.
In the meantime, the SDF forces arrested several protesters in a new wave of suppression of civilians.
Raqqa residents have many times held uprising against the US occupiers and their allies in Raqqa region. | {
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Not sure if getting a boner during a game of gay chicken Means I win...or I lose.
134 shares | {
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Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, a group of scholars from George Mason University arrived to investigate the aftermath. They've been taking a close look at the recovery process ever since. With the 10th anniversary of the storm on the way, GMU economist Peter Boettke has posted a detailed account of what they've learned.
Here's his summary of some of the most important lessons:
1. the nested nature of the private, public and social sectors cannot be ignored; 2. initial conditions in the private, public, and social sectors determine the resiliency of the communities; 3. individuals and communities are far more robust and resilient than existing theories of cultural dependency predict; 4. commercial society provides the social space for the building of effective social capital and civil society; 5. self-governing democracies operate best when government organization follows the principle of subsidiarity and gives priority to local governance over state and national policy initiatives.
The group has been examining other disasters as well, sometimes through historical research and sometimes hitting the field right after the events happen; Boettke writes about that too. To read his full account, go here.
Bonus links: I'm not going to go through all of Reason's reporting on natural disasters, but as the Katrina anniversary approaches you might find it interesting to look at this package of pieces we published after the storm. And this column on the post-Katrina rumor mill. And this series of stories on Katrina myths. And, looking more broadly at this set of issues, my articles "Disaster Utopianism" and "Resilient Japan." And Matt Welch's "7-Step Guide to Our Idiotic Disaster-Relief Politics." And…oh, hell, just check out the archive. | {
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Across America's cities, the middle class isn't what it used to be.
The middle class has retreated in nine out of 10 U.S. metropolitan areas since 2000, as income inequality widened after the recession, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. The report expands the organization's research into the fortunes of the country's middle class, which Pew in December found had declined to less than 50 percent of households, representing a major shift in America's economic fabric.
The picture at the level of the metropolitan region isn't any sunnier, although the new research illustrates that economic health -- or lack of it -- can vary dramatically depending on the local labor market and which industries are thriving or withering.
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While the middle class is losing ground across urban America, the dynamic is complex: Some families dropped into the lower-income bracket, but many others climbed up from middle class and into the upper-income bracket. Overall, the share of adults living in middle-income households fell in 203 of the 229 U.S. metropolitan areas Pew studied.
"It is a very, very widespread phenomenon. North, south, or west, the middle class was losing ground in almost every metropolitan area," said Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research at Pew. "It wasn't that more populated areas or poorer communities were disproportionately affected. This was a change affecting almost every community in the country."
Middle class can be a confusing definition, given that almost all Americans describe themselves as part of the economic group. While it can be considered a state of mind, middle class also indicates a certain economic status, such as having a basic level of financial security. In Pew's analysis, members of the middle class are those with annual household income between two-thirds to double the nation median, or about $42,000 at the low end to $125,000 at the upper limit for a family of three.
By that measure, the share of Americans living in middle-income households shrank from 55 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2014.
So where did those families end up? A fair number of them climbed into the upper-income range. The share of wealthy households rose from 17 percent in 2000 to 20 percent in 2014. Poor households also rose, from 28 percent to 29 percent during the same time period.
"The other commonality isn't just the shrinking of the middle class, but a movement both up and down the ladder," Kochhar said. "There's a polarization. There are more in the upper tier and more in the lower, and fewer in the middle."
While more Americans are now part of the upper-income group, that's not necessarily a positive trend because it reflects widening income inequality. The gap between rich and poor prompted the ratings agency Standard & Poor's in 2014 to warn that the trend could hamper America's long-term economic growth.
Without a healthy and growing middle class, fewer Americans with purchasing power will be able to invest in everything from education to housing, leading to a weaker economic fabric.
Not every city is experiencing these changes in the same way. Some metropolitan regions are coming out as winners, while others have witnessed significant declines in economic status. (Pew measures that by considering the change in the share of adults who were upper income minus the change in the share who were lower income.)
But many of the biggest losers have a common thread: ties to manufacturing, which has been hard-hit in the last decade.
The Rust Belt city of Springfield, Ohio, saw a 16 percent decline in economic status, tying it with Goldsboro, North Carolina, the home to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, as the biggest losers of economic status. On the other hand, some winners were buoyed by the recent oil boom, with Odessa, Texas, and Midland, Texas, both gaining 26 percentage points in economic status.
The cities with the largest shares of upper-income residents tend to be located on the coasts, such as Boston and San Francisco, and have ties to high-paying industries, such as finance, technology or energy. In only 17 out of 229 cities are one-quarter of adult citizens considered upper-income. In the vast majority, the upper-income tier represents less than 20 percent of all households.
Along with the hollowing out of the middle class, Americans are generally making less money than they did in 2000. The median income of U.S. households in 2014 was $62,482 compared with $67,673 in 2000. Earnings for all groups -- low income, middle class and upper income -- suffered during that time.
For instance, the upper-income group earned median annual income of $173,207 in 2014, down 7 percent from more than $186,000 in 2000. Middle-class and lower-income families saw their incomes shrink 6 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
Those findings may help shed light on the discontent that many Americans, regardless of income, are feeling these days. Despite improving economic metrics such as lower unemployment, many workers feel as if they're still struggling to get ahead. In a December poll, Pew found that most Americans feel the government isn't doing enough to help the middle class.
"There has been a lot of talk about the 1 percent and income inequality," Kochhar said. "This report shows they really are reflections of two sides of the same coin. There is a tight relationship between the size of the middle class and how the size of it changes over time, with inequality and how it changes overtime." | {
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"As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise." Galatians 3:27-29 (NRSV) | {
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1999 – LIB is born
Jesse and Josh Flemming unknowingly throw a birthday party in the woods of Los Padres Forest that will change their lives forever.
2004 – No longer just a birthday party
We were inspired to take what was a birthday party and grow it into something bigger so we could offer it to more people. The 24 hour gathering was such a success that we took off 2005 to search for a perfect venue to host what is now Lightning in a Bottle Arts and Music Festival.
2006 – The Woogie Stage appears
The Woogie has undergone more transformations than any other signature element at the festival. Originally, the Woogie was started by Do LaB and taken over by Sammy Bliss and Jesse Wright (of the Pocket Underground Crew), who had a beefy Pocket Turbo sound system and a laundry list of local DJs to bring the house party vibes.
2006 – Yoga classes are introduced
2007 – Om Shan Tea pours its first cup
Om Shan Tea brought a fully immersive ceremonial tea house to revive and rejuvenate the masses, which led to an outpouring of tea rituals at events all over.
2007 – Lightning in a Paintcan inaugural year
We brought a collective of live painters to the festival to showcase a wide array of visionary arts.
2007 – Talks and discussions by world renown visionaries, leaders, and teachers are introduced as part of the festival’s main programming
LIB’s learning hub—known as the Temple of Consciousness starting in 2008 which evolved into what is now known as The Compass—was created with the intention to activate bodies, expand minds, and open hearts. This area of the festival offers workshops and talks from world renown visionaries, wisdom keepers, master teachers, healers, activists, performers, musicians, and more.
2007 – Practical how-to sustainability workshops become a staple of LIB
Long time Burning Man icon, “Chicken” John Rinaldi, brought a gasifier to LIB to demonstrate alternative ways of producing energy that can power cars, homes, and more!
2010 – The Grand Artique at LIB is founded
The Grand Artique began as a roaming cart and quickly added a small general store and stage at LIB. The collective of artists and producers have grown the attraction into a small township that gets bigger and more interactive each year. Still true to its pioneering roots, the general store is the only place at LIB where barter is the key form of currency.
2010 – JiveJoint at LIB is established
Super Tall Paul and Ross “Rossome” Steeves at the JiveJoint started late night shenanigans in the shake down street marketplace row at LIB 2010 during our first year at Oak Canyon Ranch in Silverado. Widely loved as an oasis from the larger stages, their presence and talent has increased each year.
2010 – Lightning Stage established
2011 – The Squigs, Scrambled Eggs, and The Pagoda make their LIB debut
2013 – The Village is established
Started as a way to address the growing hunger for richer learning experiences at LIB, the Village was founded in 2013. The Village was celebrated as a space for hands-on education surrounding and array of ancestral arts. Workshops and presentations were offered here to cultivate curiosity towards lost cultural crafts, forgotten customs, and social change efforts. Since 2017, the Village has merged to be part of The Compass.
2013 – Treepees rise at LIB
2013 – Beatnest becomes the new Woogie Stage
2014 – Eeperts are erected
2015 – Thunder Stage replaces the Bamboo Stage
The structure that housed the 2015 Thunder Stage, named Big Fish, was built for Coachella but won the hearts of LIB lovers all over.
2015 – Favela and Pagoda Bars evolve into LIB’s late night dance party spots
Started as just your plain ol’ watering holes, both these bars organically became the place to be when the main stage music got quiet for the night.
2015 – Bridges are constructed for easy passage across the festival grounds
In 2014, our first year at Lake San Antonio, LIB goers traversed tough terrain across peninsulas and and down through ditches. We heard the feedback after the festival and instantly knew something had to be done about it. Fast forward one year, and we were building bridges that would become known for the place to go to give or receive a high five.
2016 – Festival goers enter the LIB gates on Wednesday for the first time ever with Early Arrival Passes!
It was always our dream to have LIB be a full 5 Day experience, so our community could spend as much time together at their favorite place. Now Early Arrival has become popular among attendees who want to snag a coveted camp spot and savor the LIB vibes for as long as possible.
2016 – Soap Box Derby introduced
One of LIB’s most beloved interactive activities, the Soap Box Derby Invitational draws spectators from far and wide to see the many departmental crews of the festival bring their A game and race down a steep hill for a chance at the gold.
2017 – A wet winter turns our barren lake bed into Lake LIB!
For the first time ever, attendees had a body of water to relax and cool off in. Shoutout to Mother Nature.
2017 – Talks and Discussions are enriched with the addition of content partners like Bioneers, Indigenous Environmental Network, Planet Experts, and more
Learn more about our content partners here.
2017 – 9 new structures are debuted: Beacon, Lilikoi, Wallapod, 2 Smallapods, Artichoke, and 3 Starpods
This was the most structures we have ever debuted at LIB! Our total structure count—including the Lighting Stage, Woogie Stage, Learning Kitchen and 2 yoga tents—came to 14!
2018 – Wapiti replaces Big Fish as new Thunder Stage, and becomes the largest structure at LIB to date holding a whopping 10,000 attendees
Read more about Wapiti here.
2018 – New hands-on art classes at the ArtClave are introduced
Started as a way to get more attendees to explore expression and get creative while learning, the ArtClave was born. Featuring an array of experiential art classes taught by artists in the festival community, this area invites LIB goers of all skill sets to come and activate the artist within.
2018 – Glitzern Grime designs the most colorful Woogie Stage thus far
All the way from Australia, our friends at the art and event collective Glitzern Grime unleashed a whole new level of Woogie.
LIB is on the move again! Keep a look out for our new venue announcement coming soon!
LIB | {
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PETALING JAYA: Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad refused to apologise over claims of building an authoritarian regime during his 22-year tenure as the nation's fourth Prime Minister, Financial Times reports.
In an May 28 interview, Dr Mahathir was reluctant to acknowledge his role in building a flawed political system that led to systematic power abuse during former prime minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak's administration.
“When I was in power, I was no authoritarian,” Dr Mahathir said, dismissing his pre-election public apology for politeness and “Malay custom”.
“The fact is that people say I did something wrong. I do not agree with them,” he was quoted as saying.
Financial Times said Dr Mahathir's "revolutionary changes" answers his detractors who labelled him as "authoritarian" and a "dictator".
Dr Mahathir responded to those labels, saying that it does not affect him.
“When I came back into politics, I found that the labels that I got tend to cause people to believe that I was really like that and therefore they should reject me.”
“Now, if they say anything, I’m already Prime Minister. The most they can do is to throw me out,” he said.
Dr Mahathir also insisted that his former deputy prime minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim had learnt his lesson after being sacked and subsequently incarcerated on sodomy charges in 1998.
“I think he is quite a different man now. I think he realises that things do not just go the way you want it to go. So he will have to be a bit more patient,” Dr Mahathir said of Anwar who is expected to take over the Prime Minister's position in two year's time.
However, Dr Mahathir apologised for appointing Najib to his cabinet and promoting him in the latter's bid to become Prime Minister in 2009.
He described it as the “biggest mistake” of his life.
Dr Mahathir told Financial Times that his priority now is to restore democracy in Malaysia and reduce the capacity for abuse by the Prime Minister.
“Soon I’ll be 93... I will try to accomplish as much as possible in the short time given to me,” he said.
Financial Times said Dr Mahathir, who previously played with racial politics, is now heading a more racially diverse government.
Yet, Dr Mahathir admitted that racism in the government still runs deep.
“At the top level, there’s less racism in this government,” he said. “But at the ground level, the racial feeling is still very strong.”
On the international diplomacy front, Financial Times said the return of Dr Mahathir will reverberate beyond Malaysia as he renews working relationships with old friends such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Najib, known to be close with US president Donald Trump, a relationship Dr Mahathir said he has no plans to pursue for now.
“I don’t know how to work with a person who changes his mind overnight,” Dr Mahathir said.
“For example, he wants to meet the president of North Korea, then he doesn’t want to meet, and now he’s saying maybe it’s going to happen,” he added.
Dr Mahathir, however, said he has always supported the rise of China even before the territorial dispute with Malaysia over the South China Sea.
He also warned that South-East Asian nations have to be careful with how hard they push back against Beijing.
“The powerful will take what they will, the weak will concede what they have, what they must,” he said.
For neighbouring Singapore, Dr Mahathir said the effects of Pakatan Harapan's toppling of Barisan Nasional's 61-year rule could inspire a similar electoral earthquake in the island nation.
“I think the people of Singapore, like the people in Malaysia, must be tired of having the same government, the same party since Independence,” he said of the long-ruling People’s Action Party. | {
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I’m certainly open to other political opportunities.
My decision not to run for the Senate was because I do not want to serve in the Senate. I think that there are people who are running who are the right people for that job. And I’m going to do my best to ensure that they can become the senator from Georgia. And that means fighting voter suppression. That means making sure that we are learning things from our 2018 campaign.
But as I think about my next step, my first responsibility is to ensure that when the primary is done — when the nominee decides to choose their running mate — that they are choosing based on knowing that we are in a country where we have built the infrastructure in those battleground states. And that I’ve done my part.
So in saying you’re open to other opportunities, that includes any potential selection for vice president?
I would be honored to be considered by any nominee.
But my responsibility is to focus on the primary. And that means using the primary as an opportunity to build the apparatus to fight voter suppression. Because in the end, no matter where I fit, no matter which ones of our nominees win, if we haven’t fought this scourge, if we haven ’ t pushed back against Moscow Mitch and his determination to block any legislation that would cure our voting machines, then we are all in a world of trouble.
Wouldn’t the best way to fight Mitch McConnell be to run for Senate?
I appreciate the importance of that role. But I am not so arrogant as to believe I’m the only one who can win that.
So does this decision mean that there won’t be a Stacey Abrams endorsement during the primaries?
I do not foresee making any decisions about the candidates in the primaries right now.
One of the conversations dominating the primary is about electability, and obviously that has had connotations with race and gender. As you’ve seen that play out, what goes through your mind? | {
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[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
ALBANY — In an attempt to work around the White House, Democratic lawmakers in Albany are trying to do what their federal counterparts have so far failed to accomplish: to obtain President Trump’s tax returns.
Albany lawmakers are seeking state tax returns, not the federal ones at the heart of the current standoff in Washington. But a tax return from New York — the president’s home state, and the headquarters of his business empire — could likely contain much of the same financial information as a federal return.
Under a bill that is scheduled to be introduced this week, the commissioner of the New York Department of Taxation and Finance would be permitted to release any state tax return requested by leaders of three congressional committees for any “specific and legitimate legislative purpose.”
The bill is the most recent proposal from New York lawmakers trying to cast light on the president’s personal finances and business dealings, but it could also open the Democratic majorities in the Legislature to charges of politicizing state law to embarrass the president ahead of his expected re-election campaign. | {
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Have you wondered wether League of Legends is actually a Sport? Me too! I'd love to know your opinions.
This is a survey for a paper I have to write for school. Thank you for participating ;) | {
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Subsets and Splits