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Nakiska Ski Resort doesn't open for several weeks, but clearly Mother Nature didn't get the memo.
The Kananaskis facility received a dusting of snow Sunday morning, with five centimetres in the forecast for the day.
The area is looking for a high of 7 C and a low of zero.
View from the bottom of the mid mountain gold chair express high speed quad looking up to the summit, Sunday morning. (Nakiska Mountain Cam)
Don't put the skis on the rack just yet. The resort has a staggered opening with full operations beginning in early December.
The snow may not stick around for long, though. Next Saturday, the resort is forecast to hit 22 C.
Nakiska is not alone.
Further west, Sunshine Village in Banff also received some snow, reporting the white stuff in a Facebook post.
"Are you like us and SNOW happy to see the white stuff back on our webcams?" the post reads.
Sunshine Village spokesman Dave Riley says he's optimistic that even with the poor economy, the resort will be busy.
Dave Riley with the Sunshine Village resort in Banff says their hills got up to six centimeters of snow this weekend. (Kate Adach/CBC)
"In 2008, when we had a real dip in the economy, a lot of ski areas had a really great year that year because they had good snow. So a lot of different factors converge and snow pretty much cures everything in our business."
Riley says the resort's expected to open its hills in mid-November, but they could open sooner, depending on the conditions. | {
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KOMA Elektronik has announced that their new Komplex Sequencer – described as ‘a musical monster’ – is now available.
The new step sequencer lets you construct complex musical patterns, via both MIDI and CV/Gate.
Built around four full-featured 16-step sequencers in a compact and light enclosure, the Komplex Sequencer is a powerful tool both live and in the studio. All features have their own dedicated controls; no screens or submenus, and all features have their own dedicated inputs and outputs on the large 87-point patch bay.
By patching both internal and external CV sources through the patch bay of the Komplex, you can control any parameter of the sequencer immediately and “sequence the sequence.”
Controls include Speed, Sequence Length, Gate Length, Play Mode, Glide, Division, Transpose, Repeat, Sequence Start Point and Skip. Additionally, the sequencer can vary output range and also has a quantizer on board operable in different scales.
Not only is the sequencer compatible with almost any synthesizer with CV/Gate, MIDI note, velocity and CC information can also transmitted by any of the four sequencers.
A seven bank CV Recorder is also on board and can output up to 5 banks at once.
Here are KOMA’s official demo videos:
The KOMA Komplex Sequencer is available now, priced at US $1,625 (USA/International)/1699 EUR (EU, Incl. VAT). | {
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Adult coloring books are all the rage and colored pencil sales can prove it.
With so many options for various types of coloring books, it seems natural that the activity would take a customizable route. Enter Color Me Book, which allows users to turn their Instagram photos into a totally custom coloring book.
SEE ALSO: Notorious RBG riding a unicorn and stunting like Drake makes for an epic coloring book
"My fiancé was coloring in an adult coloring book and I thought it would be a great idea to get a personalized one made with photos of our dogs," Color Me Book creator (and CCO, or "Chief Coloring Officer") Cory Will told Mashable in an email.
"I was shocked I couldn't it anywhere. So I had a friend, who owns a print shop, make me one. When I showed friends and family my gift to her, the reaction was so positive. I decided to build a website on Shopify and we officially launched on [April 12]."
All you have to do is upload your favorite Instagram posts to the Color Me Book website and soon enough, they'll come back to you ready for a coloring session.
In terms of what makes for the best coloring pages, Will likes to keep it relatively simple.
"I personally think photos of people and pets are the best," he says. "I mean, who doesn't want to color in pictures of their pets?"
As for whether you can use any Instagram account you'd like, Will cautions to keep it in the family.
"If you use a different [Instagram] account, you should know the person you are ordering for," he says. "For example, a surprise gift or coloring books for a birthday party."
So maybe don't try to use one of Justin Bieber's Instagram pictures this time around. Unless you're surprising him for his birthday, in which case you should definitely use this photo.
The custom five-page coloring book will cost you $25, but the ability to change the color of your shirt or ice cream cone flavor from the original Instagram picture is priceless.
Image:
Image: color me book
Image:
Image: color me book
Just make sure you take a well-filtered photo of your coloring book pages to post to your Instagram.
[h/t Cosmopolitan]
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. | {
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Results
The best answer to the question "Who do you want to play Moon Knight?" is shown on the poll results page. | {
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Zcoin - Private financial transactions, enabled by the Zerocoin Protocol | {
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While most members of British Parliament opposed a petition to ban Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump from the United Kingdom, they didn’t hold back their opinions of Trump and his views. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
While most members of British Parliament opposed a petition to ban Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump from the United Kingdom, they didn’t hold back their opinions of Trump and his views. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)
In nearly a millennium of history, the Palace of Westminster has played host to kings and queens, endured Nazi bombing raids and showed the world how a people could govern themselves through representative democracy.
But it has never seen a day quite like the one expected Monday, when the building’s cold stone walls will echo with a parliamentary debate over whether to ban from Britain the leading Republican contender for president of the United States.
It will be a strange moment for politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Normally, British officials avoid getting involved in U.S. politics — and vice versa. The Anglo-American alliance, a bedrock of Western security, is supposed to transcend politics.
Donald Trump’s reality-show-style emergence as Republican front-runner, however, is putting that notion to the test. Brits have watched his rise with a mixture of bemusement, alarm and indignation — the latter coming after he alleged that certain areas of London were off-limits to police because of rampant Islamic radicalization.
[The world reacts to Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S.]
The parliamentary debate was triggered when more than a half-million people signed an online petition arguing that Trump should be outlawed from visiting Britain because of his call last month to ban Muslims from entering the United States. Trump’s proposal, petitioners said, amounted to “hate speech.”
For three hours Monday — beginning at 11:30 a.m. Eastern time — members of Parliament will have a chance to say whether they agree. But although Trump’s words have been widely condemned in Britain — from across the political spectrum — there is little chance he will be banned. Instead, he may well find himself invited for a visit.
“I’d offer myself as a guide to take him around town,” said Paul Flynn, a member of Parliament from the center-left Labour Party. “I’d be delighted if he took me up on it.”
Flynn has been designated to argue on behalf of the petitioners who want Trump banned — and Flynn said in an interview that he has sympathy for their cause. Trump’s remarks on Muslims, Mexicans, women and the disabled, Flynn said, “are outrageous.”
But Flynn said he will ultimately argue against a ban.
“The last thing we want to do is assist him by awarding him a garland of victimhood,” said the 80-year-old, who represents an immigrant-heavy area of Wales. “A ban is not going to achieve anything. It would be far better to test his claims.”
The Muslim Council of Britain has taken a similar line, calling for Trump to name the no-go neighborhoods of London and saying it would be happy to “organize a multi-faith delegation to accompany Mr. Trump and tour these areas.” The group even promised to pay for Trump’s lunch.
The British Home Office, which has the power to ban Trump, said in response to the petition that “coming to the U.K. is a privilege and not a right and [the Home Secretary] will continue to use the powers available to prevent from entering the U.K. those who seek to harm our society.”
But the statement also said that “exclusion powers are very serious and are not used lightly.”
Prime Minister David Cameron, meanwhile, has called Trump’s comment about Britain “divisive, stupid and wrong.” But the Conservative Party leader has suggested that the government won’t ban him — arguing instead that a visit from the bombastic billionaire would “unite us all against him.”
In keeping with the theme, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn told the BBC on Sunday that he would like to take Trump to visit a mosque in Corbyn's north London constituency.
Despite Monday’s debate, Parliament doesn’t actually have the power to ban Trump. There won’t even be a vote.
[Trump accused of throwing a tantrum over effort to ban him from the U.K.]
But Trump, who is of Scottish heritage, has not taken kindly to the debate. He has threatened to withdraw $1 billion of planned investment in his Scottish golf courses if the government moves against him.
A travel ban, the Trump Organization said in a statement, “would send a terrible message to the world that the United Kingdom opposes free speech and has no interest in attracting inward investment.”
Some in Parliament, while not siding with Trump, have argued that the debate is frivolous.
“The absurdity of Trump’s candidacy is matched only by the fact that he is set to be the subject of a debate in the House of Commons,” Jamie Reed, a Labour member of Parliament, wrote in a piece for Newsweek. “In the midst of so many domestic crises, this is a huge waste of U.K. taxpayers’ money.”
But the idea has attracted support from several prominent members, as well as from independent groups such as British Future, a migration-focused think tank. The group has noted that radical Islamist preachers and anti-Muslim bloggers, including Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, have been banned.
“Trump’s statements are more extreme than theirs,” wrote British Future’s director, Sunder Katwala.
Citing those cases, Scottish National Party lawmaker Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh told the BBC on Monday that she would argue in favor of banning Trump.
“What I will be doing today is asking that [Home Secretary] Theresa May exercise constancy in her approach to people who preach hatred,” she said.
Flynn, the member of Parliament who will present the petitioners’ argument, said the difference between those cases and this one is that Trump “wants to be leader of the free world.”
Selecting that leader, he said, is entirely up to U.S. voters. But if nothing else, he hopes that Monday’s debate offers a reminder: “It’s of huge consequence to the world who’s living in the White House.”
Karla Adam contributed to this report.
Read more
The big thing missing from Europe’s solution to the refugee crisis? Refugees
A British exit could be just the start of Europe’s unraveling in 2016
Even Europe’s humanitarian superpower is turning its back on refugees
Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world | {
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The video about police preparing for riots has me extremely worried. But protestors need to understand that they’re part of the dynamic too. This is a very complex conflict dynamic. Demonizing the police isn’t going to help. It will more likely make things worse. And if things escalate beyond a certain point, an incident could easily turn into a situation like the L.A. Riots, because as police lose control troublemakers come out of the woodwork.
America needs some official or officially recognized group to act as legal third party observers in these kinds of protest situations, like the observers that we sometimes send to other countries to observe elections, or like U.N. Peacekeepers, except unarmed—-not to interfere, but to observe. They should be easily recognizable. With observers on hand, both police and protestors would likely be more well behaved.
This is an extremely dangerous dynamic! And if protestors aren’t careful, they’ll play right into the hands of authoritarians, giving them the perfect excuse for violent crackdown. Then the movement will have lost the moral high ground for good. And a dangerous dynamic of conflict escalation will have begun.
Protestors need to learn to be as polite as angels when protesting. They shouldn’t show anger in any way. They should show only gentleness and compassion. They should not resist arrest. And they should become model prisoners once arrested. That was Gandhi’s way. It removes any justification for police violence. The slightest deviation from that strategy can only lead to dangerous escalation. | {
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Waves inundate Beach Boulevard in Bay St. Louis, Miss. on Sept. 1, 2008 during Hurricane Ike, a Category 2 storm. (AP photo)
(CNSNews.com)—It has been 117 months since a major hurricane, defined as a Category 3 or above, has made landfall in the continental United States, according to 2015 data from the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
This is the longest span of time in which no major hurricane has struck the mainland U.S. in NOAA hurricane records going back to 1851.
The second longest time between major hurricane strikes was the eight years between 1860 and 1869—146 years ago.
A recent study published May 5 and co-authored by Tim Hall of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies entitled The Frequency and Duration of U.S. Hurricane Droughts also confirmed that the current "admittedly unusual" drought is “unprecedented in the historical record."
That study found that major hurricane droughts only occur every 177 years, and calculated that there is less than a 5 percent chance (0.39%) that the current drought will end this hurricane season, which lasts from June 1 to November 30.
Hurricane Wilma, the most recent major hurricane to strike the U.S., was a Category 3 when it made landfall in North Carolina on October 24, 2005—almost 118 months ago.
Since the end of the 2005 hurricane season, the U.S. has experienced a nine-year major hurricane “drought,” which is approaching 10 years at the end of the 2015 season this November.
Last month, Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, told CNSNews.com that this is “easily the record—with all the necessary caveats.”
Blake co-authored NOAA’s The Deadliest, Costliest, And Most Intense United States Tropical Cyclones from 1851 to 2010 report, which explains that “category assignment is based on wind speed from 1851-1930 and 1990-2010 and on a combination of wind, pressure and storm surge from 1931-1989.”
The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale assigns categories from 1 to 5 based on sustained wind speeds and potential for damage. The scale was developed in 1969, so storms before then were assigned categories retroactively, using the historical measurements on record.
Blake told CNSNews.com that measurements for storm categorizations have improved over time.
While a Category 3 or greater storm has not struck the U.S. since Wilma in 2005, several hurricanes of lesser wind speeds have still caused considerable damage, including Ike in 2008 (Category 2), Irene in 2011 (Category 1), and Sandy in 2012 (Category 1).
According to NOAA, Category 1 storms cause “some damage” with sustained winds between 74-95 mph, and Category 2 storms cause “extensive damage” with winds between 96 and 110 mph.
Category 3, 4, and 5 hurricanes are considered “major” because of their ability to produce “devastating” and “catastrophic damage” with wind speeds of 111-129 mph, 130-156 mph, and 157 mph or higher, respectively.
"Small differences today that we could detect, you couldn’t detect a long time ago,” Blake told CNSNews.com. “Given that we just see things a little better, we‘ve got more data and better satellite data, we can give a little better estimate than we could a generation ago.”
“But nonetheless, it is a record. It’s easily the record,” he continued.
That a 117-month pause in major hurricane activity follows the most active Atlantic hurricane season in history is “an unlikely event, so ascribing the significance of it is a challenge,” Blake told CNSNews.com.
“I like to think of it as Mother Nature giving us a little bit of a break after giving us a beating in 2004 and 2005.
That’s my best guess, but I don’t know.” | {
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The posts at WeAreThe99Percent are sobering, shocking.
They are some of people caught in the downward spiral of the US economy, but in reality it’s been happening for years as the split between the wealthy and the ‘middle class’ gets increasingly large.
The stories are of cripplingly high health care costs that destroy families, of foreclosures on mortgages and of the obvious result of years of banks pushing debt to customers.
There are also strong themes of ever-increasingly expensive education that is of diminishing value in the job market, and people are loaded up with tens of thousands in debt and low paid or no jobs.
These are signs of a society that is failing its people, and a strong articulation of exactly what the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about.
Is this the real Tea Party?
David Koch, second richest man in New York is apparently a cornerstone funder of the Tea Party, and he and his brother hold strong Libertarian views. Some of those views I regard as part of a fair society (legalisation of prostitution and drugs, gay marriage, removal of farm subsidies) but some are downright dangerous (removal of Social Security, the Federal Reserve Board and welfare).
The Tea Party movement was arguably taken over and certainly accelerated by Fox News into what seems to be a nutty right wing group, but the mass membership are driven by much of the same concerns as Occupy Wall St.
We are faced with interesting times over the next weeks – will the Tea Party followers increasingly realise that they have been duped?
This newer Occupy Wall Street movement appears to be a genuine one, rising from a sea of frustration from people who are under-served and with little prospect. It started from a suggestion in a email from Adbusters to their readers, and seems to have no leaders.
Many of the participants made mistakes, perhaps taking on too much debt or studying the wrong degrees. But many more of them have done what society demanded of them, attending university, paying insurance, buying a car – and then got clobbered. The safety net in the USA has many holes, and doesn’t last for long.
The problems are not so simple
A lot of what the financial industry (Wall Street) does is good, even the slicing and dicing of mortgages up into CDOs was a good idea. What was not good was the pricing of those CDOs, the way they were sold and the way that mortgages were granted to people who realistically had no hope of ever paying them off. What is worse is the propensity to clip the ticket for increasing amounts. The short term dealmaking, get the money now nature of the street has its place as lubricant for helping businesses make tough decisions, but it encourages unacceptable banking practices in the long run. The US really does need to reinstitute the separation of retail banks and investment/trading banks, and bring in adult supervision.
The financial institutions do not stand alone in being recipients of fury. US corporations there are paying an increasingly small share of the overall tax burden, with some such as GE earning billions and paying little or no tax, or even receiving rebates. This is the result from years of corporate lobbying for tweaks in tax law, and the results are repugnant. The USA could learn from New Zealand should dramatically simplify their tax code, much like Roger Douglas did in 1984, and introduce a GST.
That’s not to say that that everyone on Wall Street is repugnant, or that even they see themselves doing wrong – far from it. It’s a game where the choices are laid out in front of you, and if you excel then the money will come. It’s a game where the amount of money flying around is so high that it’s relatively easy to ensure that a little sticks to those making the transaction.
Financiers however play within rules set for them by legislators in Washington DC. Those legislators are there thanks to a host of donations from thousands of people, but some of the larger amounts come from companies and individuals on Wall Street. That mixture of politics and money has lifted the concerns of corporations and diminished the relative concerns of individuals. It’s got to stop, but a recent Supreme Court decision actually went the other way – defending the right of corporations to get involved in elections.
A decent society is decent to everyone, regardless of whether they are old, young, sick, or healthy, or even whether they chose at times not to abide by our rules. I reject completely the idea of living in a society that accepts homelessness, that does not care for mentally and that locks up people for offenses that are relatively harmless. We humans are better than that.
Being part of the 1 percent
I was lucky enough to study and work at two elite USA institutions – Yale University and McKinsey & Co. The experiences at those two places were outstanding – the level of education at top schools and the scale of the work available in the USA at the top end far exceeds anything here. I helped, for example, 2 organisations with over $500 billion in assets at the highest level. I was taught by people that wrote the books we study from and met a group of ultra smart, globally savvy, fun and driven people. In short I was becoming part of the 1 percent, even though for four of my five years in the USA I was in debt, and even though my income paled in comparison with those on Wall street.
I deliberately chose not to apply for Wall Street jobs during my MBA, as despite the fun of playing with large sums of money there seemed to be little reward beyond chasing the money god. I was lucky (or unlucky) enough to temp for a few months in a bank that sold structured financial products in London, counting the amount of money that the bankers had made over and above the internally calculated value of those products. It was a calculation of a knowledge advantage, and the units were millions of dollar per day. Those bankers or traders were seen as the elite within the bank people, but in reality they were arseholes, and like everyone else there, including me, they were dedicated to making money and to little else. I was lucky because I managed to get kicked out relatively quickly.
Being part of the 1 percent as a professional isn’t easy either. You are expected to work incredibly hard, maintain a certain sense of decorum and not rock the boat. It helps to have gone to the right school, for undergraduate and graduate studies, if not before. You don’t get much in the way of holidays, and are expected to be on call at all times.
I managed, courtesy of the last recession, to again break away from the USA corporate scene.
New Zealand
Meanwhile in New Zealand many are experiencing at some of the negative impact of the GFC, though I am unsure as to how bad it really is. Compound that with the hammering that Christchurch took, and while we are just getting on with it, we potentially have some real problems.
However we are blessed with a society and politics that, ACT party notwithstanding, generally and genuinely finds it unacceptable to treat people so harshly.
We are seeing increasing disparity between the wealthy and the rest in NZ, and we therefore need to doubly continue to ensure that the social welfare safety net is working. That means free or cheap education and health, as fundamental rights, it means a living income for everyone regardless of their circumstance and it means making sure we don’t have a situation where housing is unaffordable and can create catastrophic losses for families.
At the same time we need a society and economy where businesses can start, nurture, grow and prosper. We already have some good elements in our tax system, but there is a way to go before we get a fair tax system that rewards entrepreneurialism and has minimal loopholes. We don’t, for example, tax capital gains at all here. A simple across the board 20% tax on capital gains worked well in the USA for many years, and a tax I would welcome here, excluding only primary residences.
While there are problems, we have a good society here, and many live the life that many of the 1 percenters do not manage to live in the USA. We have the lifestyle many in the world dream of, while we have the ideal economy to start and grow businesses.
So what can we do about it here in NZ?
There is not a lot we can do about US policy, and it is senseless to get buried in US politics as it is something which we can and should not try to influence. Also it is, as far as I know, illegal for non-citizens to donate to campaigns.
But we can make sure that we don’t follow in the footsteps of the US by making sure we stay vigilant on the things that make our society great. We missed for example, decent regulation of finance companies, resulting in the loss of billions. We succeeded though in standing up to banks, and their current strength is partially a function of that.
Why can’t we make our 1% into 100%? Why not aim to make New Zealanders the envy of the world, combining a (minimum) decent living with a vibrant economy and the world’s best lifestyle.
It’s something worth pushing for, and here are some of the basic elements I believe we need to (continue to) push for*:
A simple social welfare system that ensures everyone gets a living wage, regardless of the reason they need help Low or no income taxes for those earning under a minimum amount Free or near free high and consistent quality education for those who cannot afford otherwise Free or near free health care for those who cannot afford otherwise A flat capital gains tax (say 20%) on all capital gains except for sale of the primary residence Decriminalization of all and legalization of certain drugs, to drive safer drug taking though better messaging, less drug taking (Portugal example), higher income from tax on drug sales and removal of the largest cause of crime from the mandate of police. Constant effort to maintain our short election campaigns and campaign financing that cannot be influenced by wealth of individuals or corporations. Constant effort to increasingly simplify tax law, making it as easy for corporates to understand their income liability as it it is with GST. Firm and fair regulation from well educated and informed regulators of companies that take money from investors. Continued celebration of individuals who make it big by building great companies with strong values, and condemnation of those who create wealth through financial trickery and do not give back.
There is more. However for now my main question is just how bad is it in New Zealand? Are we seeing the desperation of the US, or are our limited resources being largely applied where it matters? We will always have perceived and actual individual injustices, and we should seek to clear them, but for now it is the systemic ones that we need to worry about.
*Note that I don’t believe, for now anyway, in a financial transaction tax as has been mooted by some. The call is for a, say, 50 cent tax on each financial transaction. The difficulty is in understanding exactly what a transaction is. Traders could simply gather up all trades for a day between themselves and other institutions and call them one transaction. Alternatively if the tax was based on the number of securities exchanging hands, then bankers would simply construct products with higher face value and lower numbers of securities. And so on. For every tax a financial product can be created off-market that avoids the tax, but only the largest banks will be able to do this. The smaller investors would pay the tax regardless. | {
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KAKTOVIK, Alaska (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When Inupiaq hunters wrestle a 100-ton bowhead whale back to land from the high seas, the next challenge is where to store all that meat.
For centuries, the Inupiaq, a Native Alaskan group that lives north of the Arctic Circle, have dug cellars into the permafrost as a form of natural refrigeration.
Now those “ice cellars” are under threat. Warming temperatures are melting permafrost, while coastal erosion is exposing the underground chambers.
Rising water, humidity and warmth create food-safety risks for these once-reliable alternatives to electric freezers.
Scientists and the Inupiaq are split on whether climate change or human factors, like shoddy construction, are to blame for the collapsing cellars, found in all eight villages scattered across Alaska’s North Slope, an area roughly the size of Britain and home to about 9,800 people.
When it comes to the crumbling cellars, “some communities have it much worse than others”, said Qaiyaan Harcharek, an Inupiaq anthropologist who hunts for his family’s food.
Besides whale meat, Inupiaq hunters use the cellars to store caribou, fish, geese, ducks and walrus, he said.
Harcharek, who is at the planning stage of building a family ice cellar, said Utqiagvik, the region’s largest settlement, had less of a problem than outlying villages like Point Lay and Kaktovik, where melting permafrost is more of an issue.
In Kaktovik, a coastal Inupiaq village of about 260 residents at the northern edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, nearly all the ice cellars are defunct.
“Most of them have been not in use perhaps since I was a boy,” said Matthew Rexford, tribal administrator for Kaktovik. Only his family’s cellar still functions, he added.
EXXON MONEY
Under threat of losing this Inupiaq tradition entirely, the Kaktovik Community Foundation spearheaded a process to design and build a new community ice cellar on the edge of town, which opened in 2017.
Unlike traditional cellars that are little more than holes in the ground, this facility is encased in a white metallic shed with reflectors and surrounded by vents.
Inside, the cellar is about 3 meters (10 ft) deep, and has enough room for one whale.
The community plans to expand it to accommodate up to three whales, the village’s seasonal harvest quota.
In addition to a winch for meat and safety harnesses for people climbing in and out, this cellar has high-tech heat siphons that eject warm air before it can cause melting and humidity, along with real-time temperature monitoring.
The $120,000 investment needed to install the cellar was donated as an act of corporate philanthropy by petroleum company ExxonMobil, which operates the Point Thomson oil field 100 kilometers (62 miles) west of Kaktovik.
Oil companies fund much of the infrastructure on the North Slope through royalties they pay to local government.
But for those who believe global warming caused mainly by burning fossil fuels is a major contributor to the traditional ice cellars’ demise, the financial backer of the new start-of-the-art cellar is a slap in the face.
“It’s a superficial, ingenuine check off the box,” Harcharek told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
He holds companies like ExxonMobil “hugely responsible” for the rapid warming of the Arctic, which is rising in temperature twice as fast as the rest of the planet, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“It’s a cowardly way of supposedly helping out a people where you’re destroying their way of life,” he said.
Rexford, who is also president of the community foundation’s board, disagrees. “Folks try to tie climate change to the oil and gas industry,” he said.
On Jan. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the Massachusetts attorney general to obtain records from ExxonMobil to probe whether the oil firm for decades concealed its knowledge of the role fossil fuels play in climate change.
ExxonMobil did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the Alaskan ice cellar project.
FIT FOR A WHALE
There is no scientific consensus on the root cause of the malfunctioning of the traditional ice cellars.
Scientists monitored 71 cellars in Utqiagvik, formerly called Barrow, from 2005 to 2015, and found no evidence of thermal change.
But, according to an annual assessment by NOAA, permafrost temperatures in 2016 at many sites around the Arctic were among the highest recorded, dating back as far as 1978, with some of the biggest increases since 2000 seen in the Alaskan Arctic.
As Harcharek prepares to build his family’s ice cellar in Utqiagvik, he is not taking any chances.
He plans to find higher ground, dig deeper, and use more naturally insulating sod, as well as waterproof PVC pipe.
Whether at risk from a changing climate or old construction techniques with a limited shelf-life, Harcharek wants his cellar built to last, given the importance the Inupiaq place on their customary method of preserving food.
“The cultural and spiritual significance is extremely high, and carries just as much weight as the actual functionality of the ice cellar itself,” he said.
In preparation for each whaling season, the Inupiaq clean their cellars meticulously.
“The belief is if you don’t have a clean ice cellar, the bowhead whale isn’t going to give itself to that crew because that’s an extension of its home and they want to be placed in a nice clean home,” he said. | {
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Nuclear war may break out for reasons that no one speaks about
Scientists from the United Nations University named a place in the world, where a nuclear conflict may break out already in the near future.
"The Indus river basin may be seen as a water time bomb, which may go off any time with increasing water scarcity, variability and progressively changing climate. There are similar water-related accumulating tensions and issues in other major river basins and UNU-INWEH has embarked on the scrupulous analysis of those to ensure peaceful and sustainable trajectory of river basin developments," UNU-INWEH Director Vladimir Smakhtin said.
It goes about two warring countries, both being nuclear powers - India and Pakistan.
A month ago, India announced the termination of the work of the bilateral Indus River Commission. The commission had been in charge of water relations between India and Pakistan since 1960, when the countries signed the Indus Waters Treaty. Islamabad, in turn, declared it a hostile action on the part of New Delhi and said that such a move of the Indian government would be regarded as "an act of declaration of war."
The problem remains serious not only because of the irreconcilable hostility between India and Pakistan, but also because of the growing consumption of water in China and Afghanistan - the adjacent countries to India and Pakistan.
The Indian subcontinent already has water supplies problems, and the further increase of the shortage of water resources may give rise to internal political instability in the country. The instability will in turn push the country's leadership to a move to "solve all problems at once."
In March of 2016, former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Russia (in 1998-2004), Igor Ivanov, said that the danger of a nuclear war in Europe was higher than it was in the 1980s.
Ivanov, who now heads the Russian Council for International Affairs, noted a high risk of confrontation with the use of nuclear weapons in Europe. According to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, Russia and the United States currently own fewer nuclear weapons than they did during the Cold War. However, even though both Russia and the USA have 7,000 warheads each, the countries still own approximately 90% of all nuclear weapons in the world.
The former minister, speaking in Brussels to foreign ministers of Ukraine and Poland and a US congressman, said: "We now have fewer nuclear warheads, but the risk that they will be used, is increasing."
He also accused the United States and Europe of raising such risks by deploying the European missile defense system. A part of the nuclear shield is being built on one of the bases in Poland. The missile defense system will be deployed in 2018, which is particularly sensitive for the Kremlin, as the US missile defense system will be taken very close to Russia's borders.
Pravda.Ru
Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru | {
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Cei doi au remarcat silicoanele unei femei din loja lui Marius Copil, dar au făcut și unele remarci referitoare la Simona Halep.
– Silicoane.
– Pfffff.
– Auzi, e la fel de slab ca Simona.
– Minuni românești?
– Mda, minunate. Nu cred că sunt silicoane. Dar îmi plac oricum.
– Sâni să fie!
– Ce meci plicticos! Și celălalt a fost la fel.
Salt de 33 de locuri
Marius Copil a reușit cel mai bun turneu din carieră la Basel, unde, deși a început din calificări, a ajuns până în finală. Acolo, el a făcut o figură onorabilă în fața lui Roger Federer, care a câștigat greu, cu 7-6 (5), 6-4.
Urmărește cel mai nou VIDEO Știri VIDEO | Sărbătoare mare la Timișoara după ce a câștigat Dominic Fritz
În urma acestui turneu fabulos, Marius Copil a făcut un salt de 33 de locuri în clasamentul ATP, de pe locul 93 până pe locul 60.
VIDEO/ Daniel Robu și Silvia, foști colegi în trupa De La Vegas, nu au mai urcat pe scenă împreună de zece ani! Sunt ceruți la pachet la evenimente!
A pierdut jobul plătit cu 10.000 de dolari pe lună, după ce a comis un atac revoltător pe stradă. Ce a putut face femeia
PARTENERI - GSP.RO Simona Halep despre cele mai grele două momente din viață: „E ceva personal. Nu am vorbit despre asta, nici părinții nu au știut”
PARTENERI - PLAYTECH Noua hartă politică a României. Câți primari și consilieri au PSD, PNL, USR-Plus, în țară
HOROSCOP Horoscop 28 septembrie 2020. Peștii au nevoie de mult dorita liniște și aceasta este greu de obținut
Scoala9.ro EDUCAȚIA ÎN LUME. Protestul „nu contează cât de lung am părul” al elevilor thailandezi | {
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GÖTTINGEN, Germany — German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen has unveiled plans to establish a new cyber force to enhance the defense effectiveness of the country's armed forces.
To this purpose, existing IT capabilities of the Bundeswehr will be bundled within the new branch of cyber and information space (CIR). A total of 13,500 posts from other branches will be assigned to CIR, which will be headed by an inspector with the rank of a lieutenant general. The inspector would take over the leadership of CIR on April 1, 2017.
A cyber/IT (CIT) department also will be set up within the MoD by Oct. 1. There, a chief information officer will assume responsibility for the subjects of cyber and IT with budgetary sovereignty, according to the MoD.
The minister also announced Tuesday that the buildup of the entire structure will take till 2021.
According to an MoD spokesman, CIR will have access to investment funds of more than €1 billion (US $1.1 billion). CIR will be commanded from Bonn, Germany, and oversee operational tasks like cyber, IT, military and operational communications, and geological information. | {
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Many members of Congress, like Mr. Cuellar, had expected Mr. Kelly to be a force for stability in a White House that has at times seemed consumed with dysfunction, but have found a different reality.
“He brought some order to the chaos that was there, but it’s a long way from a functioning White House,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat, said in an interview for “The Daily,” a New York Times podcast. “His role from time to time I’ve considered to be destructive, sometimes constructive. I wonder, you know, if he really is the man I thought he was when I voted for him as secretary of D.H.S.”
Mr. Durbin, who has clashed with Mr. Trump over his assertion that the president used a vulgar term in an immigration meeting last week, was referring to the Department of Homeland Security, which Mr. Kelly led before taking his current position.
Mr. Kelly has made little secret of the fact that he never wanted to be White House chief of staff, and took the job out of the same sense of duty that led him to a four-decade career in the Marines.
In the West Wing, Mr. Kelly seldom allows the staff to forget the dynamic, according to people who have observed him, often positioning himself as a one-man check against dangerous or reckless moves by the commander in chief. His loyalty is not to the president, “but to the Constitution and the country,” he has said, according to two people with direct knowledge of his remarks.
Mr. Kelly, officials say, has made a conscious decision not to focus as much on curbing the president’s penchant for tweeting or saying inflammatory things, and to instead pour his efforts into controlling who sees and talks to Mr. Trump and trying to shape his thinking on key issues.
“I have said many times I was not put in this job to change the way the president of the United States does business,” he said in an interview with Fox News on Wednesday. “I was put in the job to make sure the staff process better informs him on a range of issues.” | {
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I used to play a ton of Roller Coaster Tycoon when I was a kid. I loved the game but I was never very good at making the roller coasters. They always felt too spread out, or too unnatural looking. As a ten year old I idly wondered about writing a computer program that was really good at playing the game. What sort of parks would it make? How would a computer approach the freedoms inherent in an empty park? What would we learn about the game engine from doing so?
Sadly, this one wasn't generated by a computer
In case you're not familiar, Roller Coaster Tycoon is a amusement park simulation game most notable because the entire game was written in x86 assembler by Chris Sawyer.
Finally a few months ago, I had the tools and the free time available to work on this, and I made some progress toward writing a program that would generate cool looking roller coasters. Let's examine the parts of this program in turn.
Interacting with the Game
So let's say you have a program that can generate roller coasters. How do you actually put them in the game, or integrate them into your parks?
Fortunately, Roller Coaster Tycoon has a format for saving track layouts to disk. Even more amazingly, this format has been documented.
4B: departure control flags 4C number of trains 4D number of cars per train 4E: minimum wait time in seconds 4F: maximum wait time in seconds
Once you decode the ride data, it follows a format. Byte 0 stores the ride type - 00000010 is a suspended steel roller coaster, for example. Some bytes indicate the presence of flags - the 17th bit tells you whether the coaster can have a vertical loop. And so on, and so on.
To compress space, RCT used a cheap run-length encoding algorithm that would compress duplicates of the same byte. But once you encoded/decoded the file, it was super easy to get it running in the game.
So, great! I could write my coaster generator in any language I wanted, write out the file to disk, then load it from any of the parks.
Getting Track Data
There are a lot of track pieces in the game, and I needed to get a lot of data about each of them to be able to make assertions about generated roller coasters. As an example, if the track is currently banked left, which pieces are even possible to construct next?
A steep upward slope track piece increases the car height 4 units. A sharp left turn would advance the car 3 squares forward and 3 squares left, and also rotate the car's direction by 90 degrees. I had less than zero interest in doing this all by hand, and would probably make a mistake doing it. So I went looking for the source of truth in the game..
OpenRCT2
Literally the same week that I started looking at this, Ted John started decompiling the Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 source from x86 into C, and posting the results on Github. More importantly (for me), Ted and the source code actually showed how to read and decompile the source of the game.
The repository shipped with an EXE that would load the C sources before the x86 game code. From there, the C code could (and did, often) use assembler calls to jump back into the game source, for parts that hadn't been decompiled yet.
This also introduced me to the tools you use to decompile x86 into C. We used the reverse engineering tool IDA Pro to read the raw assembly, with a shared database that had information on subroutines that had been decompiled. Using IDA is probably as close as I will come to a profession in code-breaking and/or reverse engineering.
Most of the time with IDA involved reading, annotating the code, and then double checking your results against other parts of the code, the same way you might annotate a crossword puzzle. Other times I used guess and check - change a value in the code, then re-run the game and see what specifically had changed, or use debugging statements to see what went on.
So I started looking for the track data in the game. This turned out to be really, really difficult. You would have a hunch, or use the limited search capability in the game to search for something you thought should be there. Ultimately, I figured out where the strings "Too high!" and "Too low!" were being called in the engine, figuring that track height data would have been computed or used near those points.
This was only part of the solution - it turns out that track data is not stored in one big map but in several maps all around the code base. Some places store information about track bank, some store information about heights and it's tricky to compile it all together. Ultimately, I was able to figure it out by spending enough time with the code and testing different addresses to see if the values there lined up with the pre-determined track order.
Visualizing rides
With a genetic algorithm you are going to be generating a lot of roller coasters. I wanted a quick way to see whether those roller coasters were getting better or not by plotting them. So I used Go's image package to draw roller coasters. To start I didn't try for an isometric view, although that would be fun to draw. Instead I just plotted height change in one image and x/y changes in another image. Running this against existing roller coasters also revealed some flaws in my track data.
A fitness function
A good fitness function will have penalties/rewards for various pieces of behavior.
Is the ride complete?
Does the ride intersect itself at any points?
Does the ride respect gravity, e.g. will a car make it all the way around the track?
How exciting is the ride, per the in-game excitement meter?
How nauseating is the ride, per the in-game excitement meter?
The first two points on that list are easy; the last three are much more difficult. Finding the excitement data was very tricky. I eventually found it by getting the excitement for a "static" ride with no moving parts (the Crooked House) and searching for the actual numbers used in the game. Here's the function that computes excitement, nausea and intensity for a Crooked House ride.
sub_65C4D4 proc near or dword ptr [edi+1D0h], 2 or dword ptr [edi+1D0h], 8 mov byte ptr [edi+198h], 5 call sub_655FD6 mov ebx, 0D7h ; '' mov ecx, 3Eh ; '>' mov ebp, 22h ; '"' call sub_65E7A3 call sub_65E7FB mov [edi+140h], bx mov [edi+142h], cx mov [edi+144h], bp xor ecx, ecx call sub_65E621 mov dl, 7 shl dl, 5 and byte ptr [edi+114h], 1Fh or [edi+114h], dl retn sub_65C4D4 endp
Got that? In this case 0xD7 in hex is 215 in decimal, which is the ride's excitement rating. I got lucky that this value is static and not changed by anything, which meant I could search for it from outside the binary. This is then stored in the ride's location in memory (register edi ), at the offset 0x140 . In between there are a few subroutine calls, which shows that nothing is ever really easy when you are reading x86, as well as calls to functions that I have nothing besides hunches about.
Anyway, when you turn this into C, you get something like this:
void crooked_house_excitement(rct_ride *ride) { // Set lifecycle bits ride->lifecycle_flags |= RIDE_LIFECYCLE_TESTED; ride->lifecycle_flags |= RIDE_LIFECYCLE_NO_RAW_STATS; ride->var_198 = 5; sub_655FD6(ride); ride_rating excitement = RIDE_RATING(2,15); ride_rating intensity = RIDE_RATING(0,62); ride_rating nausea = RIDE_RATING(0,34); excitement = apply_intensity_penalty(excitement, intensity); rating_tuple tup = per_ride_rating_adjustments(ride, excitement, intensity, nausea); ride->excitement = tup.excitement; ride->intensity = tup.intensity; ride->nausea = tup.nausea; ride->upkeep_cost = compute_upkeep(ride); // Upkeep flag? or a dirtiness flag ride->var_14D |= 2; // clear all bits except lowest 5 ride->var_114 &= 0x1f; // set 6th,7th,8th bits ride->var_114 |= 0xE0; }
And we're lucky in this case that the function is relatively contained; many places in the code feature jumps and constructs that make following the code pretty tricky.
So this one wasn't too bad, but I got bogged down trying to compute excitement for a ride that had a track. The function gets orders of magnitude more complex than this. One positive is, as far as I can tell, excitement and nausea ratings are wholly functions of overall ride statistics like the vertical and lateral G-forces, and there's no accumulator per track segment.
Most of the computation involves multiplying a ride statistic by a constant, then bit shifting the value so it can't be too high/influence the final number by too much.
And sadly, this is where the project stalled. It was impossible to test the C code, because the track computation functions were buried four subroutines deep, and each of those subroutines had at least 500 lines of code. Decompiling each of these correctly, just to get to the code I wanted, was going to be a massive pain. There are ways around this, but ultimately I got back from vacation and had to focus on more pressing issues.
Conclusion
You can hack Roller Coaster Tycoon! There are a bunch of people doing interesting stuff with the game, including improving the peep UI, working on cross compilation (you can play it on Macs!), adding intrigues like the possibility of a worker strike, removing limitations based on the number of bytes (you can only have 255 rides, for example), and more.
It's been really fun having an utterly useless side project. I learned a lot about registers, calling conventions, bit shifting tricks, and other things that probably won't be useful at all, for anything.
I will definitely revisit this project at some point, hopefully when more of the game has been decompiled, or I might try to dig back into the x86/C more on my own.
Liked what you read? I am available for hire. | {
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MAVEN, NASA's newest Mars orbiter, is shown near the Red Planet in this artist's illustration. The spaceraft, which launched in November 2013, will arrive at Mars on Sept. 21, 2014.
Update for Monday, Sept. 22: NASA's MAVEN orbiter has successfully arrived at Mars. To see our arrival story, visit: NASA Spacecraft Arrives at Mars to Probe Mysteries of Red Planet's Air.
A NASA spacecraft built to study the atmosphere of Mars like never before will arrive at the Red Planet tonight (Sept. 21) and you can watch it live online.
After 10 months in deep-space, NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft is expected to enter orbit around Mars and begin a one-year mission studying the planet's upper atmosphere. The Mars arrival will cap a 442 million-mile (711 million kilometers) trek across the solar system.
This NASA graphic depicts how the agency's newest Mars orbiter MAVEN will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet on Sept. 21, 2014. (Image credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
You can watch the MAVEN spacecraft arrive at Mars on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV, in a live webcast that runs from 9:30 p.m. to 10:45 p.m. EDT (0130 to 0245 GMT). If all goes well, MAVEN will enter orbit around Mars at 9:50 p.m. EDT (0250 GMT), according to NASA officials.
"So far, so good with the performance of the spacecraft and payloads on the cruise to Mars," David Mitchell, NASA's MAVEN project manager at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "The team, the flight system, and all ground assets are ready for Mars orbit insertion."
The $671 million MAVEN spacecraft eight instruments to study the Martian atmosphere in detail. It is one of two missions that launched toward Mars last November and are making their arrival this month. The other probe is India's Mars Orbiter Mission, which launched just before MAVEN and will arrive at the Red Planet on Wednesday (Sept. 24).
The atmosphere of Mars
Maven will orbit Mars, looking for clues about what happened to the planet's once-thick atmosphere. (Image credit: by Karl Tate, Infographics Artist)
Mars' upper atmosphere is an escape zone for molecules floating dozens of miles from the planet's surface. Scientists think that, as the solar wind hits the atmosphere, the radiation strips away the lighter molecules and flings them into space forever. [NASA's MAVEN Spacecraft: 10 Surprising Facts]
"The MAVEN science mission focuses on answering questions about where did the water that was present on early Mars go, about where did the carbon dioxide go," said Bruce Jakosky, the mission's principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. "These are important questions for understanding the history of Mars, its climate, and its potential to support at least microbial life."
The upper atmosphere of Mars likely changes as the sun's activity increases and decreases, which is why MAVEN investigators hope to run the mission for longer than a year, they said. The sun is at the peak of its 11-year cycle of solar flares and particle emissions but will begin to quiet down as MAVEN enters a possible extended mission.
To make projections about how the Martian atmosphere changed over time, scientists need to understand what's happening now. One puzzle that researchers are struggling to solve is where all the water on Mars went, given there is evidence of water-soaked minerals and liquid-carved canyons on the planet's surface.
Although Mars is now too cold for flowing water, it might have had a thicker atmosphere in the past that warmed its surface and allowed the liquid to remain stable on the surface, scientists say. However, one complication is that the sun was about 30 percent less luminous four billion years ago than it is now, which means less solar radiation would have been striking and warming the Red Planet's atmosphere and surface.
"Obviously, we can't go back and sample the early sun, but we have other stars that are similar to our star — G-type stars, the classification scheme where our star fits — and we can measure what kind of solar radiation they put out," MAVEN mission scientist Steve Bougher told Space.com.
Bougher is a researcher at the University of Michigan who is studying how the atmospheres of Venus, Earth and Marscompare. All three planets are rocky and relatively close to the sun, but their environments are vastly different. Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect that boiled any surface liquids away, Mars is cold and has a thin atmosphere, and Earth is the only atmosphere known to host life.
Much of what scientists know about Mars' upper atmosphere comes from just a few minutes' worth of data from the two Viking landers that took measurements on their way to the Martian surface in the 1970s, Bougher said. While other NASA spacecraft have since supplemented that data somewhat, MAVEN scientists aim to gather much more.
Dust storms and solar activity
Mars 12 inch Globe Buy Here (Image credit: Space.com Store)
Bougher is interested in studying the speed at which ions (charged atoms) and neutral gases leave the atmosphere of Mars. This process could change with solar activity, and also as dust storms sweep the planet's surface. MAVEN will arrive just as the Martian storm season begins, Bougher said.
"If we are so fortunate as to get a global dust storm or a reasonable dust storm, the lower atmosphere will inflate like a balloon, and the upper atmosphere will inflate on top of that," he said. "The processes have not been studied well before."
Jakosky, MAVEN's lead researcher, is examining how stable isotopes (element types) of hydrogen and its heavier version, deuterium, changed over time. In theory, as the solar wind hit the Red Planet's atmosphere, the lighter hydrogen in the atmosphere should have been stripped away and decreased proportionally near Mars.
"One of the really overarching questions about Mars is whether there was ever life," Jakosky said in a NASA news conference Wednesday (Sept. 17).
"We're trying to understand the context in which life might have existed," Jakosky said. Any life on Mars would have interacted with its environment, so MAVEN could help with NASA's ongoing research into the "boundary conditions" for life, he added.
MAVEN will began making science measurements around Nov. 8, but the spacecraft will take a time-out from its commissioning phase to watch Comet Siding Spring pass close by on Oct. 19. So far, it looks like there won't be enough dust to hurt the spacecraft, but MAVEN will be maneuvered to minimize its exposure to the comet's dust as a safety precaution.
Visit Space.com tonight for complete coverage of NASA's MAVEN Mars orbiter arrival.
Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Originally published on Space.com. | {
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Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. Advertisement Five British soldiers have been shot dead in Helmand Province, in an attack the UK military blamed on a "rogue" Afghan policeman. The soldiers, three from the Grenadier Guards and two from the Royal Military Police, had been mentoring and living with the Afghan police in a compound. The officer opened fire, injuring eight others, before fleeing the compound. Gordon Brown told MPs the Taliban said they had carried out the attack and may have infiltrated Afghan police. Speaking in the Commons, the prime minister said evidence was being gathered and security would be stepped up after the shooting. But he added that training of Afghan police remained an "essential element" of the strategy in Afghanistan and would not be stopped as it was "what the Taliban fears most". Manhunt A total of 92 UK service personnel have now been killed this year, the highest annual figure since the Falklands War in 1982. Six British servicemen and two Afghan National Police officers were injured in the attack, in the Nad Ali district. An investigation is under way and the soldiers' next of kin have been informed of the deaths. A UK military spokesman said: "One individual Afghan National Policeman, possibly in conjunction with another, went rogue. "His motives and whereabouts are unknown at this time. Every effort is now being put into hunting down those responsible for this attack." BBC Kabul correspondent Ian Pannell said sources had indicated the attacker was a police officer called Gulbuddin who had fled the scene after the shooting. Map: Where the attack happened It appears he could have been involved in a dispute with his commander, but tribal sources have pointed to a link with the Taliban, our correspondent said. ANALYSIS Caroline Wyatt,
BBC defence correspondent
Training the Afghan police as well as the Afghan army is key to Nato's plans in Afghanistan, so they can ultimately take over security across the country, allowing British and American forces and their allies to gradually leave. However, recruiting and training the police and ensuring their loyalty to the Afghan government has long been extremely difficult. In Helmand especially, the police are proving less reliable - as well as more corrupt - than the Afghan Army. The Afghan police are relatively badly paid - earning rather less than a Taliban fighter - and are said to earn extra cash from taking bribes from ordinary Afghans at official or often unofficial checkpoints.
Latest Afghan deaths: Reaction Read your comments Lt Col Wakefield, spokesman for Task Force Helmand, said the men who were killed had been mentoring a number of Afghan police officers. He said they had worked and lived in the compound at a national police checkpoint for the past two weeks. The attack did not come as a result of any breakdown or fight between British and Afghan forces, he stressed. Col Wakefield said: "It is with the deepest sadness I must inform you that five British soldiers were shot and killed yesterday in Nad Ali district. "Five British soldiers, five of our own, shot down in the course of their duty. They will not be forgotten." Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the latest deaths were a "terrible loss". He said: "My thoughts, condolences and sympathies go to their families, loved ones and colleagues. I know that the whole country too will mourn their loss. "It is my highest priority to ensure our heroic troops have the best possible support and equipment - and the right strategy, backed by our international partners, and by a new Afghan government ready to play its part in confronting the challenges Afghanistan faces. "Our troops deserve nothing less. My commitment to them remains unshakeable." Worst incident Tory leader David Cameron said: "I pay tribute, as will the whole country, to their professionalism and their courage, and send my condolences to their families and their friends." Gen Stanley McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, said he had spoken to the Afghan Minister of Interior, Haneef Atmar, who shared his regret for the incident. "He gave me his assurance that this incident will be fully and transparently investigated," he said. Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play. "We will not let this event deter our resolve to build a partnership with the Afghan National Security Forces to provide for Afghanistan's future." A former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, Col Richard Kemp, said the shootings were a very worrying development. He said: "It will undermine trust, certainly in the short term, until we establish exactly what happened. And it wouldn't at all surprise me now if there aren't a lot of soldiers, British soldiers in Afghanistan, with their fingers very firmly on the trigger when they're around Afghan police and military." The British Military Police have launched an investigation. The local chief of the Afghan National Police (ANP) and the Afghan national director of security have also begun investigating at the scene. There was a similar incident involving the deaths of two US personnel in 2008. The British casualties were evacuated to the field hospital at Camp Bastion in Helmand by medical emergency response teams using Chinook and a US Black Hawk helicopters. The Grenadier Guards have been advising the ANP and the Afghan National Army in training, tactics and patrol methods. The deaths take the number of UK troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 to 229. This is the worst single incident in Helmand since 10 July, when five soldiers from 2 Rifles were killed by bombs near the town of Sangin.
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A major outbreak of whooping cough has struck a Michigan area where many people opted out of vaccinations against the disease.
At a single school in Grand Traverse County, which has the state’s highest rates of parents choosing not have their children vaccinated, there have been 151 confirmed and probable cases of whooping cough, reports local news outlet MLive.com.
“Nobody likes to be the person who says, ‘I told you so,’ but what’s unfolding now is exactly the scenario feared by those worried about the region’s low immunization numbers,” Bradley Goodwin, the president of the Grand Traverse County Medical Society, said.
Cases of whooping cough have been reported at more than 14 school buildings in the area, which has also reported several cases of the highly contagious measles.
Read more at MLive.com
Write to Noah Rayman at [email protected]. | {
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The oldest recorded alphabet may be Hebrew. According to a controversial new study by archaeologist and ancient inscription specialist Douglas Petrovich, Israelites in Egypt took 22 ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and turned them into the Hebrew alphabet over 3,800 years ago.
The discovery of this early Hebrew alphabet has proved controversial to scholars who dispute the dates Petrovich has for the Israelites’ stay in Egypt – 430 years to the very day, as recorded in Exodus 12:40-41, equaling 1876-1446 BC – arguing that Biblical dates are unreliable. Skeptics have also disputed the Hebrew identification, arguing the early alphabet could be any number of Semitic languages.
The road to Petrovich’s discovery started back in 2012, when he was researching hieroglyphic inscriptions online from an Egyptian stone slab dated 1842 B.C. The slab, known as Sinai 115, identified Joseph and his sons Ephraim and Manasseh– all figures from the Hebrew Bible, the latter of whom inscribed the hieroglyphs on the slab himself. Something in the text Manasseh wrote– translation “6 Levantines: Hebrews of Bethel, the beloved,” which referred to himself, his son, and four other Hebrews on a turquoise mining expedition– caught the eye of Petrovich. It was the world’s oldest letter, he says.
STAR OF BETHLEHEM MAY NOT HAVE BEEN A STAR AFTER ALL, SCIENTIST SAYS
“On this otherwise Middle Egyptian caption were a Canaanite syllabic and the world’s oldest attested proto-consonantal letter–‘B’, depicting a house for the Hebrew consonant bayit,” Petrovich told Foxnews.com. “It was this single proto-consonantal Hebrew letter that helped me to understand that the world’s oldest alphabet, the language of which has been unidentified for over 150 years of scholarship, is Hebrew.”
Petrovich, who currently teaches Ancient Egypt at Wilfred Laurier University, isn’t the first to identify Hebrew as the language of the world’s oldest alphabet. Back in the 1920’s, a German scholar named Hubert Grimme identified some of the inscriptions as Hebrew. However, unlike Petrovich, he was unable to identify all of the letters in the alphabet correctly. This led to failed translations and rejection by other scholars.
Putting together a complete alphabet, detailed in a soon–to–be–released book by Petrovich, was no easy task.
“I was translating Middle Egyptian and proto-consonantal Hebrew inscriptions that nobody ever had translated successfully before,” he said. “There were many ‘A-ha!’ moments along the way, because I was stumbling across biblical figures never attested before in the epigraphical record, or seeing connections that I had not understood before.”
ARCHAEOLOGISTS UNCOVER 'LOST CITY' IN EGYPT
Dividing words properly was also a hurdle because the letters all run together, without any spaces between them or punctuation.
After finally completing the alphabet, Petrovich was able to translate 16 Hebrew inscriptions from four different sites in Egypt and Sinai. In these inscriptions he found a number of distinctly Hebrew words, including the naming of 3 biblical figures: Asenath (the wife of Joseph), Ahisamach (the father of Oholiab, who was appointed to build the tabernacle in the desert), and Moses, who was credited by the Hebrew Bible as being the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt.
“I absolutely was surprised to find [the reference to] Moses, because he resided in Egypt for less than a year at the time of his provoking of astonishment there,” Petrovich recalled. “In fact, the Hebrew letters ‘M-Sh’ could have other meanings, and I had to examine every other possibility for those uses of Hebrew words with those letters. Only after realizing that every other possibility had to be eliminated, whether due to contextual or grammatical limitations, was I forced to admit that this word must be taken as a proper noun, and almost undoubtedly refers to the Moses who is credited with writing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Torah.”
The inscription with the Moses reference dates back to 1446 or 1447 B.C.– the final year of the Israelites’ stay in Egypt– and describes events written about in Exodus 1, such as the enslavement of Hebrews. In the inscription, Moses is depicted as a man who inspired awe in the Hebrew community, which would match well with the biblical events describing Moses’ encounters with the pharaoh.
EARLIEST-KNOWN TEN COMMANDMENTS TABLET SELLS AT AUCTION FOR $850,000
Petrovich hopes that skeptics, instead of coming to pre–conclusions about his claims, will study his new findings with an open mind and be objective.
“My discoveries are so controversial because if correct, they will rewrite the history books and undermine much of the assumptions and misconceptions about the ancient Hebrew people and the Bible that have become commonly accepted in the scholarly world and taught as factual in the world’s leading universities,” he said. “To my skeptics, I say, ‘Continue to be skeptical. Do not accept my conclusions until you are convinced they are correct.’ Truth is un–killable, so if I am correct, my findings will outlast scholarly scrutiny.”
Further details can be found in Petrovich’s book “The World’s Oldest Alphabet” (Carta Books), which will be available in the coming weeks. | {
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Anyone who has tried to tag a moving Cromwell B knows the true meaning of frustration! This highly mobile, quick reloading medium tank is one of the most effective in its class — especially in the hands of a tanker who can fire its 75 mm cannon accurately while on the move. All Cromwell B bundles come with a "zero-Skill" Crew with Brothers in Arms Perks and the vehicle has special exterior customization! | {
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Creative title as always :3I tried a quite different way of vectoring fo the eyes, that I really like. Only thing I'm complaining about is her Cutie Mark. It's inspired by * Brisineo picture of her, but I don't really like I placed it. Was the best I could now without Photoshop ;3;Now go ahead and use it for whatever you want <3Feedback is appreciated | {
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I love traveling; going to another place is a chance to experience another culture and connect with other people. Strangely though, most of my traveling has been outside of the United States rather than within it. Up until surprisingly recently (a couple years ago), I hadn’t even been west of western Maryland (despite having traveled internationally multiple times). But I’m planning on making my way around the US soon, and one city I know I want to stop in is New Orleans. Typically seen as a city of excess, yes (laissez les bon temps rouler), but also a city of people passionate about food and drink, two things very close to my heart. So this jambalaya (and my Cajun spice mix) is my first tentative connection to the city, my attempt to start connecting with the culture there before I can get there myself. I tried to keep this recipe relatively simple, and it comes together surprisingly fast. While modifying stock with shrimp shells (for some extra flavor), you sautee up andouille sausage and the Cajun holy trinity (onion, bell pepper, and celery), then combine the two with tomatoes and rice and pop it in the oven for a nice even heating. The result is very flavorful and (according to my boyfriend, who attended school in New Orleans) fairly authentic.
Shrimp and Sausage Jambalaya (adapted from Amateur Gourmet and Joelen’s Culinary Adventures)
Yield: 4 – 6 servings
Ingredients:
1 lb shrimp, shells on
1 large (28 – 32 oz) can diced tomatoes
3 1/2 cups stock
1/2 Tbsp + 1/2 Tbsp Cajun spice mix
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
8 – 10 oz andouille sausage, cut lengthwise then sliced into half moons
1 onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
1 rib celery, diced
5 – 6 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup long-grained rice
2 scallions, thinly sliced
salt and pepper, to taste
Method:
| {
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The South Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) announced in a press release that a 2.1 GW floating solar power plant will be built on a water surface close to the Saemangeum, an estuarine tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea.
The ministry said construction on the project will start in the second half of next year, after all relevant licenses and permits, including environmental impact assessment, will be secured.
The Korean government stressed the project will be 14 times larger than the world’s largest floating project, which is a 150 MW plant under construction located in Huainan City, in China’s Panji District. “It will also be 1.6 times more than the combined capacity of the global floating solar facilities for all of last year,” the ministry also stated
The government estimates that approximately 4.6 trillion won ($3.9 billion) of private funds will be invested in the project. It added that around 5 million PV modules will be needed for the plant construction, without providing more technical or financial information.
The Saemangeum was dammed by South Korean government in 2010 and it is the world’s longest man-made dyke.
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More ambitious targets
The huge floating project is part of the renewed efforts of the South Korean government to increase the share of renewable in the country’s energy mix. The MOTIE is currently working on an Energy Basic Plan, which is targeting to raise this share to up to 35% by 2040. Between 155 GW and 235 GW of solar and wind could be deployed on rooftops, as well as unused or low-quality agricultural land, the MOTIE said in April. Earlier in March, it announced three different programs to prioritize high-efficiency renewables projects that use equipment with a low carbon footprint and adhere to stricter Korean industry standards.
On the top of this, a 3 GW ground-mounted solar project was announced for the Saemangeum area by the South Korean President Moon Jae in November.
Under its current energy strategy, South Korean aims at generating 20% of its power from renewables by 2030. The country is working on installing 30.8 GW of solar PV by that date, with 9% of that capacity to be developed in Saemangeum. It had reached an installed PV capacity of 7.86 GW at the end of 2018, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). Last year, a bit more than 2 GW of solar power was deployed in the country. | {
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Cumhurbaşkanı Erdoğan, Lozan Anlaşması'nın imzalanmasının 94. yıldönümü vesilesiyle yayınladığı mesajda, "Türk Milleti, Lozan Anlaşması ile bu topraklardaki bin yıllık varlığını hedef alan Sevr'i yırtıp atmış, bağımsızlığından asla taviz vermeyeceğini tüm dünyaya kabul ettirmiştir" dedi.
Cumhurbaşkanı Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Lozan Barış Antlaşması'nın imzalanmasının 94. yıldönümü nedeniyle yayınladığı mesajda, "Bugün, Cumhuriyetimizin kurucu belgesi olan Lozan Barış Antlaşması'nın imzalanmasının 94. yıldönümünü kutluyoruz. Aziz milletimizin her türlü yokluğa, yoksulluğa ve imkânsızlıklara rağmen yazdığı istiklal destanı, Lozan Antlaşması ile diplomasi ve uluslararası hukuk alanında tescil edilmiştir. Türk Milleti, Lozan Anlaşması ile bu topraklardaki bin yıllık varlığını hedef alan Sevr'i yırtıp atmış, bağımsızlığından asla taviz vermeyeceğini tüm dünyaya kabul ettirmiştir. Ülkemiz, dün olduğu gibi bugün de varlığına kasteden çeşitli saldırılara karşı bir beka mücadelesi yürütmektedir" dedi.
'KANLI DARBE GİRİŞİMİNE DİRENİŞ, MİLLETİMİZİN NE KADAR KARARLI OLDUĞUNU BİR KEZ DAHA GÖSTERMİŞTİR'
Erdoğan, mesajına şöyle devam etti:
"Bu beka mücadelesinde en büyük güç kaynağımız, yaklaşık bir asır önce olduğu gibi kadını-erkeği, genci-yaşlısıyla milletimizin tamamının istiklal ve istikballerine olan sarsılmaz bağlılıklarıdır.
Geçtiğimiz hafta birinci yıldönümünü andığımız 15 Temmuz kanlı darbe girişimi karşısında sergilenen direniş, milletimizin ne kadar kararlı olduğunu; vatanı, bağımsızlığı ve iradesini korumak için neleri göze alabileceğini bir kez daha göstermiştir. Asker elbisesi giymiş teröristler eliyle gerçekleştirilmek istenen işgal teşebbüsüne karşı 80 milyonun bütün fertleri 'Tek devlet, tek millet, tek bayrak, tek vatan' ilkeleri etrafında birleşmiş, kenetlenmiştir. Türkiye, değerlerinden, ilkelerinden ve aziz milletimizin yiğitliğinden cesaret alarak hedefleri doğrultusunda ilerlemeyi sürdürecektir.
Lozan Barış Antlaşması'nın 94. yıldönümünde, Cumhuriyetimizin banisi Gazi Mustafa Kemal'i ve kahraman silah arkadaşlarını tazimle yad ediyor; vatanımız ve bağımsızlığımız için canlarını feda eden tüm şehitlerimize Allah'tan rahmet niyaz ediyorum." | {
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Congress prepares to override 9/11 veto Presented by Northrop Grumman
With Zach Montellaro, Connor O’Brien and Ellen Mitchell
DRIVING THE DAY — THE FIRST FALL DEBATE: It’s the show nearly everyone’s been eagerly awaiting — or dreading: Presidential debate No. 1 between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Read all of POLITICO’s coverage here, including this “false-claims-to-watch-for” story (Think war in Iraq.).
MEANWHILE, ON CAPITOL HILL, A SHOWDOWN LOOMS OVER THE SAUDI 9/11 BILL: President Barack Obama on Friday vetoed the bill to allow 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia, setting up a veto override showdown with Congress that’ll start playing out this week. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says the Senate will move to override the veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, before senators leave town for the November elections. And House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has said the House will also move to override, though its timing is not yet clear. The Senate will act first because the bill originated there.
— HASC LEADERS HEAD OPPOSITION TO THE BILL ON THE HILL: While the veto override almost certainly has the votes to succeed, the top Republican and Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee have both come out against the bill. Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to Republicans on Friday, while Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) sent one of his own to Democrats on Sunday. Both raised concern about the impact to U.S. military and intelligence personnel.
"My primary concern is that this bill increases the risk posed to American military and intelligence personnel, diplomats and others serving our country around the world," Thornberry wrote. In the letter obtained by POLITICO, Smith argued the legislation would put “U.S. personnel at risk” by “weakening the international protections that shield them against prosecution in civil and criminal courts around the world,” our colleague Seung Min Kim reports.
— OBAMA’S VETO MESSAGE: The president’s three-page letter to Congress explaining his veto is here.
BOMBINGS ESCALATE IN ALEPPO: The Wall Street Journal has more here: “Syria and its Russian allies pressed an assault on Aleppo amid what the United Nations called the most intense bombing in years of warfare there, and residents said hundreds of civilians have been killed since a cease-fire fell apart last week. The surge in deaths came as a spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon over the weekend cited reports of ‘bunker buster bombs.’
“The U.N. Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, told the Security Council on Sunday that he had seen videos and pictures of incendiary bombs ‘that create fireballs of such intensity that they light up the pitch darkness in eastern Aleppo, as though it was actually daylight.’ Rebels and opposition leaders blamed Russia, Syria’s key ally, for the bunker-buster bombs.”
— U.S., RUSSIA STILL TRADING VERBAL BLOWS, via Reuters: “The United States accused Russia of ‘barbarism’ in Syria on Sunday as warplanes supporting Syrian government forces pounded Aleppo and Moscow said ending the civil war was almost ‘impossible.’ A diplomatic solution to the fighting looked unlikely as U.S. and Russian diplomats disagreed at a U.N. Security Council meeting called to discuss the violence, which has escalated since a ceasefire collapsed last week.”
HAPPY MONDAY AND WELCOME TO MORNING DEFENSE, where we’re offering our condolences to young and old alike in the sports world, with the deaths Sunday of Arnold Palmer and Jose Fernandez. Keep the lookout for tips, pitches and feedback coming at [email protected], and follow on Twitter @jeremyherb, @morningdefense and @politicopro.
MORNING D TRIVIA: Matt Dunlay was the first to correctly answer that the three types of active Air Force bombers — the B-1, B-2 and B-52 — all deployed together for the first time in the Pacific in August, when they took off from Guam to send a signal to both North Korea and China. Check back Friday for our next question.
HAPPENING TODAY — CARTER TO NORTH DAKOTA FOR NUCLEAR SPEECH: Defense Secretary Ash Carter kicks off a weeklong domestic trip today at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, where he’ll discuss the “future of America’s nuclear capability,” according to the Pentagon. He’ll also be stopping in New Mexico, California and Hawaii, including hosting the U.S.-Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Defense Informal in Honolulu.
— CARTER’S A NUCLEAR WEAPONS EXPERT, BUT HE SAYS LITTLE ABOUT THEM, writes The Associated Press: “As defense secretary to a president who famously envisioned ‘a world without nuclear weapons,’ Ash Carter has said remarkably little about them. He has been quiet on a range of nuclear issues, including the Pentagon's $8 billion effort to correct an array of morale, training, discipline and resource problems in the Air Force nuclear missile corps, revealed by The Associated Press in the last three years.
“Nor has he publicly explained in detail the utility of nuclear weapons in an age of attacks by non-state actors like the Islamic State to build support for spending hundreds of billions on a new generation of them. … This is all the more notable because Carter, a physicist by training and policy wonk by reputation, cut his professional teeth on nuclear weapons during the Cold War. He probably knows more about them than any defense secretary since William Perry, a longtime nuclear expert, led the Pentagon a generation ago.”
ALSO THIS WEEK — CONGRESS TRIES TO AVOID A GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN: Congress has just a few days left to pass a stopgap spending measure before the end of the fiscal year at midnight Friday, and the White House raised the prospect of a veto on Friday. Things get moving again with a Senate procedural vote Tuesday afternoon. Our prediction: The continuing resolution will finally pass, and Congress will leave town to campaign without incident — but check back later this week.
A message from Northrop Grumman: At 50,000 feet, the ocean seems empty. But if you know what to look for, vast intelligence can be gathered. That’s why we built Triton. With its powerful sensors and integrated comms, Triton can scan thousands of miles in a single flight and relay data back to base. Learn more
HOW MEDICAL RESEARCH BECAME BIG BUSINESS AT THE PENTAGON: We report on the major growth in an obscure Pentagon program that funds medical research, which critics charge often has little to do with military needs: “It began as a $25 million earmark for breast cancer research tucked into the Pentagon budget. Now it’s a billion-dollar-a-year spigot, funding studies of dozens of diseases, that not even the Senate armed services chairman can kill — defended by an army of lobbyists and advocates representing universities, research hospitals and patients’ groups.
“The two-decade history of the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs is a prime example of how lawmakers get around spending caps by using the Defense Department’s $600 billion budget to fund their pet projects. It also highlights the near-impossibility of reining in a Pentagon program with a deeply rooted constituency — and shows just how swiftly a seed planted in the defense budget can grow. Of the $11 billion that the program has consumed since Congress created it in 1992, nearly three-quarters has gone to research with little direct bearing on military needs, according to an analysis by the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“Supporters of the Pentagon research grants — bolstered by a consortium of more than two-dozen advocacy groups — argue it is an invaluable avenue for medical research apart from the National Institutes of Health. They insist the program does, in fact, benefit service members, veterans and their families.”
AIR AND SPACE TURBULENCE — FOUR JSTARS GROUNDED: Four JSTARS surveillance aircraft have been grounded while the Air Force inspects the planes for flight safety issues after recent maintenance, the Air Force said Friday. The planes were grounded after they returned from a Northrop Grumman-led maintenance depot, and the service is conducting an independent inspection of the depot at Lake Charles, La. “Four JSTARS aircraft recently delivered from depot are being inspected for possible safety of flight issues,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanik said. “An independent review team is being assembled to inspect and validate quality assurance processes at the contractor's depot.”
— F-35 CATCHES FIRE IN IDAHO, reports Defense News: “An F-35A caught fire during an exercise at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, the Air Force confirmed to Defense News. The incident took place at around noon and involved an F-35A aircraft from the 61st Fighter Squadron located at Luke Air Force Base, the service said in a statement. No serious injuries seem to have been sustained by the pilot or nearby crew. ‘The pilot had to egress the aircraft during engine start due to a fire from the aft section of the aircraft,’ Air Force spokesman Capt. Mark Graff said in an email.”
— SPACEX ISOLATES CAUSE OF ROCKET EXPLOSION: SpaceX reports it’s isolated the cause of a launch pad explosion of its Falcon 9 rocket and a $200 million satellite and anticipates returning to flight as early as November. A SpaceX statement on Friday said a preliminary review of the blast at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station found the explosion was likely a "large breach in the cryogenic helium system of the second stage liquid oxygen tank."
GENERAL PROBLEMS — ARMY SUSPENDS 'BIG RED ONE' COMMANDER AT FORT RILEY: Major Gen. Wayne Grigsby is under "official investigation" and has been suspended as commander of the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kan., the Army announced Friday. The service did not detail the nature of the investigation. "Major General Wayne Grigsby has been suspended from duties as commander of 1st Infantry Division based at Fort Riley, Kan.," Army Col. Patrick Seiber said in a statement.
— GENERAL’S AFFAIR GROUNDS CAREER, reports USA Today: “An Army National Guard general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been fired from his job following an extramarital affair, and interviews and records show that he had also negotiated a job and lived rent-free in the home of a defense contractor, USA TODAY has found. Brig. Gen. Michael Bobeck has been the focus of an internal investigation into an extramarital affair — a violation of military law — and misuse of government resources, according to Defense Department officials.”
SPEED READ
— “From Paradise to Hell”: How an Aid Convoy in Syria Was Blown Apart: The New York Times
— North Korea is showing little interest in releasing two American prisoners: The Washington Post
— North Korea flies a remote-controlled model F-16 at an air show: AP
— Russia and China are spending big on aerospace in a bid to challenge U.S. superiority in the skies: WSJ
— Turkey wants to join the U.S. operation to remove the Islamic State from Raqqa: Reuters
The peace agreement between Colombia and Farc rebels is set to be signed today: The Guardian
— The Air Force is expected to be 1,000 pilots short in 2017: San Antonio Express-News
— Celebrity chef Robert Irvine is partnering with Sodexo, which provides food to dozens of military installations, to try to improve the chow: Military Times
Follow us on Twitter Dave Brown @dave_brown24
Bryan Bender @bryandbender
Connor O'Brien @connorobriennh
Jacqueline Feldscher @jacqklimas
Lara Seligman @laraseligman | {
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SEATTLE — Public opinion in the United States has welcomed with pleasure the news of the reestablishment of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. On the island, Cubans are expressing joy over what seems to be the beginning of a new era of relaxation between the two nations.
The U.S. Government is getting ready to amend or abolish many of the regulations created in the past, which were part of the policy of harassment designed for the island. These rules are still an obstacle for the normalization of ties between the two countries.
For its part, the government of Cuba should hasten to repeal archaic regulations that at present seem to make no practical or political sense.
One of the most frequent complaints about some of these regulations from members of the Cuban community in the United States deals with the existence of a requirement that says that native Cubans living abroad must obtain a Cuban passport to re-enter their homeland.
For Cuba, the requirement of such a passport is — in financial terms — counterproductive. While the country obtains some revenue from the bureaucratic paperwork required from those who are obligated to obtain that document, many U.S.-naturalized Cubans end up postponing a possible trip to the island (or deciding against it) because they don’t wish to deal with the complicated and expensive procedure.
Often, these people hold a U.S. passport and consider it unnecessary and excessive to have to obtain another travel document.
In financial terms, the obligatory need for the passport results in more disadvantages than benefits for Cuba, because it severely limits the visits of Cuban-born citizens to their homeland — and therefore the acquisition of hard currency from the travelers.
In Miami and other U.S. cities, Cuban natives often state that, were it not for the requirement of a Cuban passport, they would visit the island more frequently if they could use the U.S. passport they already hold.
The abolition of this requirement by Cuba would also be a fraternal and compassionate gesture toward those Cubans who live outside their native land.
Many of these émigrés are retired folks in the twilight of their lives who live on limited resources. They are unable to visit their homeland partly because of the difficult procedure to obtain the passport and the excessive price they must pay for the service.
Abolishing this requirement would be a humanitarian gesture and would have a positive effect on the relation between the nation and its émigrés. To eliminate this requirement could also have political repercussions in the United States.
According to surveys and the media, most of the Cubans who have emigrated to the U.S. in the past three decades favor the normalization of relations between the two countries. These people have no objection to return to Cuba as visitors once they obtain legal residence in the United States.
These émigrés generally espouse progressive points of view, counter to those of the hard-line Cubans who left the island in the 1960s. Today, tens of thousands of these recently-arrived Cubans are postponing, for one reason or another, the process of becoming U.S. citizens.
However, the possibility of traveling to Cuba expeditiously, with a U.S. passport, could be an incentive for thousands of these legal residents to become U.S. citizens.
Thus, these new citizens, at the time they vote in local or federal elections, would do so thinking about their interests and those of their families. In other words, they would vote for and elect representatives whose political agenda included the improvement of relations between Cuba and the U.S.
In conclusion, if the Cuban government allowed Cuban-Americans to travel to Cuba with a U.S. passport it would be promoting a human, intelligent and effective strategy toward its émigrés.
In addition, it would empower with greater political force a majority, moderate sector of its émigrés. In turn, these factors would have an exponential repercussion in the climate of improvement in the relations between the U.S. and Cuba and between the Cuban émigrés and their nation.
Carlos Lazo is a schoolteacher in the Seattle, Wash., area. During the Bush Jr. presidency, he became well known as the Cuban-American combat medic who served with distinction in Iraq but was barred from visiting his children in Cuba due to the restrictions on travel that the Bush administration was using to stop Cuban-Americans from visiting their families in Cuba. | {
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But Democrats hope Mr. Bush’s new high profile will help them frame the emerging Republican generation. Mark Mellman, a Democratic strategist, called Mr. Bush’s public tour “great news for Democrats.” He added: “The G.O.P. was lucky he was out of sight and out of mind through Tuesday. His reemergence on the national stage will reinforce voters’ already negative views of the G.O.P.”
With rare exception, like helping out with Haiti earthquake relief at Mr. Obama’s request, Mr. Bush has remained out of sight since leaving office, determined not to complicate his successor’s life with running commentary about current affairs. Even as he begins to promote his new book, “Decision Points,” to be published by Crown on Tuesday, he is avoiding any involvement in the political debate now consuming the country.
In the book, a copy of which was obtained last week by The New York Times, he has nothing but gracious things to say about Mr. Obama and makes little mention of his policy choices other than to praise him for sending more troops to Afghanistan. When Oprah Winfrey tried to get him to weigh in on Sarah Palin’s presidential chances in an interview to be aired later this week, Mr. Bush demurred. “You’re asking me to wade back into the swamp,” he said.
Until now, Mr. Bush has focused on writing the book, along with his ghostwriter and former White House speechwriter, Christopher Michel, as well as giving paid speeches, raising money for his presidential center and designing his public policy institute. After this week’s spurt of interviews with Ms. Winfrey, Matt Lauer and Candy Crowley, he will host a Nov. 16 groundbreaking ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
He says he is using the institute to influence policy in his own way. “He doesn’t want to be in the current debate, certainly not the political debate,” said James K. Glassman, executive director of the institute. “He wants to be involved in policy in a big way, but with projects that are very forward looking and long term.”
So will Mr. Bush’s reputation improve with time? Many presidents are viewed more generously in later eras, like Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Even Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon have experienced moments of reassessment, their failures in Vietnam and Watergate tempered by appreciation for the opening to China or the Great Society. Still, their disappointments seem indelibly marked in the history books. | {
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1 Family Practice (House).
Figure Metal hip prosthesis causing cobalt intoxication Show full caption Removed metal head with hole due to severe metal loss.
In May, 2012, a 55-year-old man was referred to our clinic for severe heart failure (New York Heart Association class IV). He had raised brain natriuretic peptide of 1053 ng/L (normal <55 ng/L) and his estimated ejection fraction by echocardiography was 25%. His medical history was mostly uneventful, apart from the fact that he had had both hips replaced by prostheses. Coronary artery disease had been excluded by heart catheterisation; cardiomyopathy was therefore regarded as the cause of heart failure. Additionally he was almost deaf and almost blind; furthermore he had fever of unknown origin, hypothyroidism, and reflux oesophagitis. His mediastinal lymph nodes as well as the lymph nodes at his left hip were enlarged. At this side he had had hip replacement surgery in November, 2010, when a metal-on-polyethylene prosthesis (head Zimmer CoCrMo Protasul, metal [Zimmer, Winterthur, Switzerland]; inlay Aesculap NH 413 Chirulen PE [Aesculap, Tuttlingen, Germany]) was implanted to replace a broken ceramic-on-ceramic hip prosthesis (implanted December, 2001: head Aesculap NK 561 Biolox forte, inlay Aesculap NH 103 Plasmacup). All symptoms appeared within the past year before his admission to our centre. Searching for the cause combining these symptoms—and remembering an episode of the TV series “House” which we used for teaching medical students (series seven/episode 11)—we suspected cobalt intoxication as the most likely reason. We did radiography of the hip and measured cobalt and chromium. The radiograph showed a myositis ossificans-like picture attributable to metal debris at the left-sided hip. The measurement of cobalt and chromium in the blood showed severe increase of these metals. In a heparin-blood sample the cobalt concentration was 15000 nmol/L (normal <15·3 nmol/L) and chromium was 942 nmol/L (normal <9·6 nmol/L). The cobalt concentration in 24 h urine was 6140 nmol/L (normal <17 nmol/L) and chromium urine concentration was 52300 nmol/L (normal <11·5 nmol/L). We initiated 2,3-dimercaptopropane-1-sulfonate treatment and referred the patient to his former orthopaedic clinic, where he received a new left ceramic hip prosthesis, and subsequently—because of the severe heart failure—an implanted cardioverter-defibrillator. Most likely because of remaining ceramic particles, the metal head of the hip replacement was severely damaged ( figure ). Shortly after the hip replacement, the patient's plasma cobalt and chromium concentrations decreased, and the patient stabilised and recovered slightly. In July, 2013 (14 months after removal of the metal hip), heparin-blood concentration of cobalt was 1460 nmol/L and chromium was 365 nmol/L. Cardiac function improved to 40% and there were no new episodes of fever or signs of oesophagitis. However, the patient's hearing and vision recovered only slightly. | {
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Mesut Ozil has told kicker that Arsenal are still in the Premier League title race and praised Arsene Wenger for giving him the "freedom on the pitch" he needs to be at his best.
Despite Arsenal sitting eight points behind league leaders Chelsea and facing a tough Champions League round-of-16 tie against Bayern Munich in February, Ozil, 28, said the club "can really achieve something this year."
Asked if Arsenal are already out of the title race, Ozil said: "Definitely not, the past has shown it. We led the league around a year ago, and more than a few thought we'd now go on and win the title. Chelsea are in that role now. We need to get on a roll, and you are nearing the top soon enough. I am convinced that we can still achieve our goal to be at the very top at the end."
Ozil also said Arsenal's summer signings have made the whole squad stronger, with "hungrier" players coming off the bench.
"We've got more potential with our new signings like Granit Xhaka or Shkodran Mustafi," he said. "And we have a better team spirit. In the past few years, there were always those players who felt aggrieved for being benched. Now those subbed in are hungrier. Everyone feels that we can really achieve something this year."
Ozil, who told kicker on Sunday that his own Arsenal future depends in part on whether Wenger stays at the club, also credited the Frenchman with his strong form this season.
He has netted nine goals for the campaign to go with six assists, which he attributed to playing in a free role as a No. 10 for the Gunners.
Mesut Ozil has been at Arsenal since joining from Real Madrid in 2013. John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images
"Many expected me to make more shots and score more goals," Ozil said. "And it worked out better than in the past years. I have not become more egoistic, but my running paths are a bit different. I don't collect balls from that deep, but instead wait a bit further up the field.
"I might have five minutes without any ball contact, but more chances in front of the goal. The most important thing for me: I need to have freedom on the pitch. That's what I need. And the coach grants me that freedom, that's why I am on a roll."
Some pundits questioned whether Ozil has too much freedom after back-to-back losses against Everton and Manchester City in December, when the playmaker's defensive work ethic was heavily criticised.
The Germany international, however, said such criticism only makes him stronger.
"The people always expect me to play well," he said. "If I show one bad match after 10 good matches, there's criticism straight away. If I were to believe everything which is written about me, I'd be crazy by now. But through my experience and my confidence I can cope with criticism, it only makes me stronger."
Ozil also said that Bayern should be considered favourites against Arsenal in the Champions League but added that the German champions "are not unbeatable, especially not this year."
And he reiterated his desire to take over the No. 10 shirt from Jack Wilshere, who is spending the season on loan at Bournemouth.
"I would love to wear the No. 10. I always wanted it, the club has known it from day one," he said. "When I came here in 2013, Jack Wilshere had the No. 10. The club said I'd get the number once it's free. Since Wilshere's departure last summer, the number's free, but I have yet to get it." | {
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With so many Chinese Android phones now available will THL’s flagship T100S offer enough to win over from its rivals? Keep reading for the full THL T100S review.
Since Mediatek launched their 8-core MT6592 processor the Chinese Android landscape has boiled over with new octa-core phones with their own unique styling and features. This brings us to the THL T100S which we have been testing over the past few weeks.
The THL T100S is one of the first 8-core Meditek phones to go on sale in China and one of only a few which can be ordered internationally, but it has plenty of rivals from the likes of Zopo, TCL, GooPhone, Huawei and others.
THL T100S Specifications
THL T100S Design
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The THL T100S has been designed from the ground up to replace the THL W11 aka Monkey King. The new phone features a few similar aspects with the older phone such as the 5-inch display and dual 13 mega-pixel cameras, but other than that this is a new phone.
Opening the packaging reveals the sleek black and wedge-like THL 100S. The design reminds us of an Oppo N1, or Sony Xperia phone with glass taking up almost the entire front of the phone with just a thin sliver of anodised metal above and below.
Just below the surface of the glass sits a 5-inch 1920 x 1080 IPS display, capitative touch buttons below the screen allow you to easily navigate though the preinstalled Android 4.2 OS, and finally there is a 13 mega-pixel front facing camera to the top.
Looking down from the front of the phone shows you just how sharp the corners are on the T100 when compared to the more rounded Samsung designs of previous THL phones. Those corners don’t translate to well in the comfort department , which brings us on to the sides of the phone.
Taking a look from the base of the phone shows that the T100S doesn’t have the traditional profile of phones seen in the past. Rather than having flat edges the sides of the THL jut out slightly to a point before curving around the back of the phone. The design is a unique one but again doesn’t feel all that great in the hand, and actually makes the phone feel a lot thicker than 8.4mm.
On to the back we have a Xiaomi Mi3 look. A simple rubberised black rear for added grip, THL logo external rear speaker at the bottom and 13 mega-pixel main camera on in the top left hand corner.
Up to the top of the phone we have a micro USB, plus a 3.5mm head phone jack.
Along the right there is a power button in a good position for use with your thumb (if you are right handed) and there is a volume rocker on the left. The physical buttons on the phone feel better than most Chinese phones we have tested, they aren’t loose at all and they feel solid in use.
For a 5-inch phone the dimensions 144.3 x 70.4 x 8.4mm aren’t the most svelte of phones, it is a little wider than most but our big concern is the length. The THL T100S is a much longer phone than other 5-inch models we have tested.
The last flagship THL phone had a built in battery, but THL have changed this for the T100S which features a removable rear panel allowing you to get at the replaceable 2300mAh battery, dual-SIM compartments and micro SD card reader.
The rear panel also holds the NFC antenna which can be used for file transfer, syncing with other hardware etc.
Build-quality is good, but nothing to shout about. The rear case flexes a little if squeezed the phone does bend under pressure, and the very lightweight doesn’t really give a premium feel, but the overall fit of the parts is good, and there are no creaks or rattles when in use.
THL T100S Display
Going to the 5-inch display of the THL T100S after using larger screen device seems very odd for me. Over the past month I have been using a 5.9-inch Oppo N1 and the 5.5-inch Zopo ZP998 and now the 5-inch panel on the T100S feels a little cramped in comparison.
But that is just personal preference and as far as 5-inch panels go the THL T100S has a very nice unit! As mentioned in the specifications the display is a 5-inch 1920 x 1080 FHD, IPS multitouch unit offering great all round visibility.
Most of the time I ran the display at around 1/4 of full brightness which was enough for indoor use, but outdoors on a sunny day might require you to boost it up to it’s full brightness.
Colours are bright and blacks are nice and black (as they should be). It’s a great display is what I’m saying, it’s not mind blowing (I suppose we will have to wait for 2K for that) but compated to other phones the THL certainly holds it’s own in the screen department.
THL T100S Performance
One of the main selling points of the T100S is it’s 8-core MT6592 processor from Mediatek. The chipset is a 1.7Ghz Cortex A7 set up with 8 x A7 cores running simultaneously. In comparison, the octa-core Exynos chip from Samsung uses big.LITTLE to run different processes depending on what you require the phone to do resulting in only a few of the cores running at the same time.
Although the Cortex A7 architecture is quite old compared to what other chipsets are now offering, the CPU still performance amazingly well and is capable of reaching benchmarks which would have only been possible on high-end Qualcomm phones just a few months ago!
As usual we ran Antutu, Nenamark 2, Quadrant and 3D Mark for review purposes on the THL T100S. Screen shots can be seen below, but the results are as follows:
Antutu: 26,664
Quadrant: 13,430
Nenamark: 50.4fps
3D Mark Ice storm: 5013
3D Mark Ice storm Extreme: 3512
Impressive benchmarks for a phone costing just $310!
As we all know though benchmarks don’t necessarily mean great real life user experience so how does the THL T100S perform in real world situations? Well moving from screen to screen is fast and fluid, and launching apps is responsive enough but it never feels ‘fast’.
Areas which really disappoint are opening the camera or gallery app. Rather than a fluid animation the app stutters open. I’m sure this is more to do with optimisation of the OS, however it makes the phone feel slow and laggy.
In all honesty I feel that there is very little difference in speed when compared to a good quality quad-core phone. Switching from the THL T100S to the JiaYu G5 with a 1.5Ghz Quad-core processor I notice very little difference in performance, and in reality the JiaYu feels more polished and nice to use. My quad-core Snapdragon S4 Xiaomi Mi2 still blows the THL away in terms of real life performance as does the Snapdragon 600 Oppo N1.
These criticisms aren’t to say the phone is slow, as it isn’t. but it isn’t as fast, fluid and responsive as I hoped an 8-core (octa-core) phone would be!
THL T100S Camera
Both camera’s on the THL T100S are 13 mega-pixel units. The main camera offers a 13 mega-pixel sensor with F2.0 aperture and LED flash, while the front ‘selfie’ camera has a similar 13 mega-pixel sensor also with an f2.0 aperture.
Starting at the front, any fan of ‘selfie’ photos is going to enjoy the quality of photos the THL T100S takes! For a front camera the images are great quality and capture enough light even during low-light indoor photo shoots.
The rear camera has the same specs as the front, but as a main camera it does’t impress quite as much! Photos taken with the rear camera in well lit conditions are good quality with nice colour replication and plenty of detail.
Indoor photos in lower light conditions look good on the surface but zooming a little shows too much noise.
THL T100S camera samples
Personally the idea of a good quality camera on a smartphone is for capturing photos at a moments notice. In my case this usually means a photo of my kids as they ride BMX at the local skatepark or of friends while mountain biking. In these situations the T100S fails to impress. The slow speed of the camera app to open, and slow image capture results in a missed photo of just a screen full of blurs. Even with the handy image tracking feature, photos of moving objects are still hit and miss.
If you are more likely to take photos of the scenery, statues and stationary group photos then the T100S will fit the bill quite well, but it isn’t as good as other phones on the market especially the more camera-centric options available.
THL T100S Battery
With a 5-inch FHD display, and 8-core processor you would have hoped that THL had been more generous in the battery department, but unfortunately we only get a single 2300mAh battery with the phone.
Thankfully the battery is removable so you can carry a spare with you if needed, but it would still have been better to see a 3000mAh unit (or larger) on a phone of this calibre. As it stands though we were able to get about 11 hours of use from the T100S on a single charge, about a work days’ worth under “ideal” conditions. Ideal being switching 3G on and off as needed, calls over 2G general web browsing, gaming during breaks and reading emails.
In reality though I rarely switch 3G off, I use GPS alot, take up to 100 photos a day, have emails on push (from 3 accounts) and browse the web frequently. Under these conditions the T100s struggled to last a full work day and need a top up by lunch time!
THL T100s Connectivity
The THL T100S has multiple connection options and we had no problems using any of the options throughout our test.
GSM 2G, WCDMA 3G worked fine with our China Unicom SIM card (it should also be ok in Europe but 3G won’t work in the U.S). Dual SIM means I can run 2 sims at once, a feature I never personally use, but a popular one with other users.
Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) worked flawlessly throughout the review and offered a good strong signal, ad did Bluetooth, and the NFC feature meant transferring photos between devices is fast and painless. GPS is better on the THL T100S than it is on most Mediatek powered phones. As usual the GPS was slow to get locked on at first but after that found a fix after a minute or so in previous tests.
THL T100S Conclusion and Cost
To some it up the THL T100S is a good phone with great benchmarks and good cameras, but that’s not what I was hoping for with the first octa-core THL phone! I wanted to test this phone and be blown away by it’s speed, I wanted the f2.0 rear camera to step things up a notch and in general hoped that this would truly be the phone to usher in the octa-core generation!
In reality there is little difference in general performance (CPU, usage, and camera) from the octa-core THL T100S than there is compared to a good quality quad-core Chinese Android smartphone which would cost less and will probably be much easier to buy.
I admire THL for their new deign philosophy, build-quality and for building a phone with so many features at such a low-price, but I believe a better phone could have been built if a little more development time had been taken.
If you compare the THL T100S with phones with similar levels of hardware this octa-core phone appears to be a bargain and if you are upgrading from an early quad-core phone then it could be worth considering. If however you have one of the more polished MT6589T phones launched later in 2013, I would recommend waiting to see what other 8-core phones launch before taking the plunge.
Thanks to Antelife who sent us this review THL T100S phone. Anteilfe currently have the THL T100S in stock and priced at $309.99, and are offering the phone with shipping from their Spanish warehouse to European customers.
[templatic_contentbox type=”normal” title=”Save $10 on the THL T100S Octacore”] Antelife are offering GizChina readers a $10 discount on the octacoreT100Sfrom today till 17th January. The discount code is: gizt100s [/templatic_contentbox] | {
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A Nationals MP's claim that the Land and Environment Court's decision to block a coal mine in his electorate reflected an "ideological position" and "smacked of judicial activism" has prompted a rival MP to accuse him of contempt of court.
After the court on Friday rejected Gloucester Resources' bid to open the Rocky Hill mine on the Mid North Coast because of "climate change impacts", Nationals MP for the Upper Hunter Michael Johnsen hopped on 2GB to vent his fury.
Nationals MP for Upper Hunter Michael Johnsen. Credit:Max Mason-Hubers
The show's host Chris Kenny said: "Here you have a judge in a NSW land and environment court saying that he's protecting the planet from global warming, from climate change".
Mr Johnsen replied: "They are taking an ideological position, again it smacks of judicial activism, and it has nothing to do with the merits of the proposal itself and I’m very, very disappointed." | {
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The twisted case of Jussie Smollett is depressing, infuriating — and should end with the maximum prison sentence. But I predict he’ll skate.
The reprehensible alleged actions of the gay, black fabulist who cried “MAGA” will be forgiven, excused and ultimately encouraged by sympathetic progressives — deemed justifiable Trumpicide.
And it will happen again. And again.
Smollett, who claimed he was attacked outdoors by a pair of racist, homophobic white Trumpsters on a frigid Jan. 29 in Chicago, transformed Wednesday from the purported target of a vicious hate crime to a lying, alleged felonious hoaxster.
But the fact that the assault seems not to have happened, at least not technically, is an insignificant detail to lefty Democratic presidential hopefuls, celebs and assorted fans, who tucked into the delicious outrage initially as if it were a three-course vegan meal.
Because Smollett has already set himself up with an alibi. He’s a marginalized person, a real-life victim of psychological assault in Donald Trump’s America.
Consider the initial reaction from the echo chamber. Both Sens. Cory Booker and Kamala Harris hysterically, and almost in unison, termed the fake drubbing of the 36-year-old “Empire’’ actor an “attempted modern-day lynching.’’
NAACP president Derrick Johnson tweeted, “The rise in hate crimes is directly linked to President Donald J. Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric.” Sen. Bernie Sanders. Ex-Vice President Joe Biden. Hillary Clinton. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Rosie O’Donnell. Rob Reiner. Ellen Page! Everyone with an agenda and a microphone should be embarrassed for saying they were shocked! shocked! that such intolerance could flourish in present-day America.
But to date, not one of these illustrious characters, and many more, who virtually jumped for joy at the chance to tar President Trump with the bashing-that-wasn’t has apologized publicly to the commander-in-chief.
Almost from the start, Smollett’s version of events seemed more like an episode of “Law & Order: SVU’’ than a genuine crime. But leftist pols and like-minded members of the news media, blinded to reality by this fellow hater, convinced themselves to ignore numerous red flags.
Trump foes couldn’t get enough of it because it confirmed everything they wanted to believe: that the president is somehow responsible for all prejudice and intolerance. Smollett might not have been speaking the precise truth, but it was close enough. He gave us truthiness.
Jussie Smollett tried his best to deepen the racial divide in this nation with false and reckless claims. But I believe he’ll end up with court-ordered counseling, perhaps pay a fine. He should not get away with it. But I think he will. | {
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Professor Alan Dershowitz joined FOX and Friends on New Year’s Day morning. During the discussion Professor Dershowitz was asked about the Deep State and Democrat Party’s intentions to impeach President Trump in 2019.
Dershowitz is the author of “The Case Against impeaching Trump.”
Alan Dershowitz: Well I think there will be some Democrats who will try to move toward impeachment but unless dramatic new evidence comes out that I don’t see happening I don’t think there will be an impeachment of this president. Certainly there will not be a removal of this president. he will end his term and then the question is will he get reelected.
Professor Dershowitz had this to say about President Trump’s chances of being impeached in 2019.
Via FOX and Friends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3NAJ4JKUAk | {
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The capsule was hoisted out of the water and placed on the deck of a recovery boat shortly before 10 a.m.
The mission comes at a precarious time for brash billionaire Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, who has come under fire for his sometimes erratic behavior.
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The reentry is one of the biggest tests of the Dragon and of SpaceX, the company founded by Musk in 2002 with the ultimate goal of flying humans to Earth’s orbit and beyond. If deemed a complete success, the mission would give NASA increased confidence in one of its prime contractors and propel the space agency a step closer to restoring human spaceflight from U.S. soil.
Since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, NASA has been unable to fly its astronauts. Instead, it has paid Russia for rides to the space station at an increasing price tag that now tops $80 million.
In 2014, NASA awarded contracts worth a combined $6.8 billion to SpaceX and Boeing to build spacecrafts capable of carrying NASA’s astronauts to the orbiting laboratory 250 miles above Earth. Since then, both companies have faced delays and setbacks. But now, SpaceX has taken a major leap forward and is poised to fly its first test mission with two NASA astronauts on board later this year.
Boeing is scheduled to fly its first uncrewed mission to the station by next month at the earliest, though that date is likely to slip, officials have said.
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SpaceX’s uncrewed mission began early Saturday, when its Falcon 9 rocket blasted off in the predawn darkness from a historic launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the crew of Apollo 11 began their journey to the lunar surface.
Once aloft, the SpaceX craft traveled to the space station, whizzing around Earth at 17,500 mph, catching up early the next morning. Before the mission, NASA officials had said the spacecraft’s ability to dock autonomously to the station would be one of the biggest tests of the vehicle.
Russia, one of NASA’s key partners on the space station, initially objected, citing concerns with SpaceX’s computer systems that would fly the vehicle toward the station.
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But like the launch, the docking was a success, and soon the three astronauts on board the station — NASA’s Anne McClain, Oleg Kononenko of Russia, and Canada’s David Saint-Jacques — were able to check out the first commercial space vehicle designed for human space flight ever to dock with the station.
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In a call with the astronauts on board the station Wednesday, Vice President Pence said, “It was inspiring to see the launch, and it was actually more inspiring to see the docking, and to see you all open that door and float into that spacecraft knowing that we’ll very soon have American astronauts arriving at the International Space Station in the same vehicle.”
The successful landing is a coup for SpaceX and a relief for Musk, who said he wouldn’t be able to relax until the spacecraft had landed safely.
Musk and his companies have been under scrutiny lately. The Securities and Exchange Commission fined him $20 million last year after it said he misled investors of his electric car company, Tesla, when he tweeted that he would take the company private. More recently, the SEC claimed he violated the terms of the settlement, which require an attorney to review tweets that could affect Tesla’s stock price.
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A judge in that case gave Musk until Monday to say why he should not be held in contempt for violating the terms of the settlement.
Musk has also faced trouble at SpaceX. The Air Force recently announced it was reviewing the certifications it had granted SpaceX that allow to launch national security payloads. After Musk smoked marijuana during a podcast appearance, NASA announced it was conducting a safety review of SpaceX and Boeing. And Bloomberg News reported Thursday that Musk’s marijuana use also prompted the Pentagon to review his security clearance.
Despite the distractions, Friday’s landing appeared to be another triumph for SpaceX, and validation of years of work.
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Leading up to the reentry, Musk had said he was worried about whether the spacecraft would end up in an uncontrollable spin.
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The Dragon is outfitted with abort thrusters that make the spacecraft asymmetrical, which he said “could potentially cause a roll.” But he said he thought it was “unlikely” since the company had run “simulations a thousand times.”
Still, he added “hypersonic reentry is probably my biggest concern." | {
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G20: SPD-Innensenator droht Demonstrant*innen mit Schusswaffengebrauch Im Vorfeld der Anti-G20-Proteste werden die Einschüchterungen gegen Demonstrant*innen immer stärker. Innensenator Andy Grote (SPD) drohte nun, dass Blockierer*innen damit zu rechnen hätten, vom Secret Service des US-Präsidenten erschossen zu werden.
Der SPD-geführte Hamburger Senat bereitet sich auf harte Repression gegen die Gipfelgegner*innen vor, die zum Protest gegen den G20-Gipfel in der Hafenstadt Anfang Juli anreisen werden. Nachdem in den vergangenen Monaten zwischenzeitlich von Demonstrationsverboten die Rede war, hat SPD-Innensenator Andy Grote am Dienstag noch schwerere Geschütze aufgefahren.
„Sollte es zu einer erfolgreichen Blockade kommen, würden sich die Teilnehmer beim Aufeinandertreffen mit der Kolonne in Gefahr bringen“, so Grote. Damit kündigt er zwei Dinge an: Zum einen würde der Personenschutz des US-Präsidenten Donald Trump, der Secret Service, den Stillstand von Trumps Fahrzeugkolonne als Ernstfall auffassen. Laut Informationen der Hamburger Morgenpost erteilt das BKA den Sicherheitskräften eine Waffentrageerlaubnis, sodass im “worst case” mit Schusswaffengebrauch zu rechnen ist.
Grote meint zum anderen aber auch, dass deshalb der Einsatz von Polizeikräften gegen Blockierer*innen geradezu ein Glücksfall für letztere sei: „Mit der Freihaltung der Protokollstrecken schützt die Polizei auch die Teilnehmer möglicher Blockade-Aktionen.“ Demonstrant*innen dürfen sich also freuen, wenn sie „nur“ von Polizeiknüppeln und Pfefferspray bearbeitet werden, anstelle davon, für die Teilnahme an Protesten gleich erschossen zu werden.
Emily Laquer, Sprecherin der Anti-G20-Großdemonstration am 8. Juli, reagierte entsprechend entrüstet: „Wir fordern Grote auf, Trump auszuladen, wenn er sein Personal als Gefahr für die Bevölkerung einstuft, anstatt unsere Sicherheit zu riskieren oder das Grundrecht auf Versammlungsfreiheit anzugreifen.“
Zwei Monate vor den Gipfelprotesten schiebt die SPD schon jetzt jegliche Schuld an staatlicher Gewalt gegen Demonstrant*innen auf die Blockierer*innen selbst. Laut dieser skandalösen Demagogie hat man jegliche Rechte verwirkt und darf nur noch zwischen Knüppel und Kugel wählen, wenn man sich zum Protest gegen Trump und Co. entschließt.
Damit offenbart die Sozialdemokratie nur noch einmal mehr ihre völlige Verfaultheit. Sie schürt mit diesem Diskurs Angst und Schrecken und wäscht gleichzeitig ihre Hände rein. | {
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Colombia deports Calabrian mafia boss Pannunzi to Italy Published duration 6 July 2013
image caption Pannunzi is expected to serve out more than 16 years of his sentence in Italy
Italian police have arrested mafia boss Roberto Pannunzi after he was deported back to Italy from Colombia.
He was detained in a shopping centre in Bogota on Friday in an joint operation carried out by the Colombian authorities and US anti-drug officials.
Pannunzi is alleged to be responsible for importing up to two tonnes of cocaine into Europe every month.
He is the alleged leader of the 'Ndrangheta crime network based in the southern Italian region of Calabria.
The Italian was detained on Friday with the help of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Colombian defence ministry said in a statement.
"When he was captured, Pannunzi identified himself with a fake Venezuelan identification card bearing the name Silvano Martino," Colombia's defence ministry said in a Twitter post
Less than 24 hours later, he was put on a plane from Bogota.
Pannunzi was arrested by Italian police upon his arrival at Rome's Fiumicino airport on Saturday evening.
'Not a mafioso'
Roberto Pannunzi, 65, is said to have organised huge shipments of cocaine from South America to Europe.
He collected the money from different criminal organisations and smuggled large scale, profitable drug smuggling operations.
"He is not a mafioso, not a killer, he is a broker," Roberto Saviano, an Italian investigative journalist told the AFP news agency.
Roberto Pannunzi, 65, was first detained in Colombia in 1994 and extradited to Italy but was released when his detention order expired.
He was re-arrested in 2004 and later convicted. But he staged an dramatic escape from a private hospital in Rome in 2010, where he was being treated for heart disease.
Italian authorities have described the 'Ndrangheta as the country's most dangerous and wealthiest crime syndicate, overtaking the Sicilian Mafia. | {
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Chris Poole. Kevin Abosch Before he was old enough to drink, Chris Poole controlled one of the most influential internet communities in history.
At 15, he founded the freewheeling online image board 4chan, which achieved notoriety early on for hatching memes among a stew of not-safe-for-work content, ranging from inventive pornography to stomach-turning gore.
Poole’s control of the site caused him to field phone calls from the FBI and appear in court, left him nearly bankrupt, and turned him into a human "punching bag."
For the young New York-born techie, it was a formative experience, one that forced Poole to reconcile his love for community and the benefits of anonymity with his contempt for some of the objectionable content on the site. And when he stepped down in 2015 and later sold the site, most assumed it was to escape into his own anonymity after the stress and the challenges that came with running the controversial forum.
As it turns out, Poole was just preparing for his next act. And in one of the most surprising moves in tech this year, Poole has resurfaced at Google, working on the internet company's fledgling entrepreneurship program. The one-time keeper of the memes is now punching the clock at one of the most respected companies in the world.
To succeed at his new role, Poole will need to shed the reputation that's stubbornly clung to him and his site for years. But if he pulls it off, he’ll have accomplished a feat as impressive as any Silicon Valley turnaround story: the chance to reclaim his own identity.
An unusual relationship
Poole agreed to answer questions from Business Insider by email and wrote that joining Google is a continuation of an important journey — "a chance to have entirely new and formative experiences, and grow in ways one simply cannot on their own."
After all, he'd been at it alone for a long time. Poole created 4chan in 2003, modeling it after his favorite Japanese anime site and going by the moniker "moot." Poole's parents had no idea it even existed for the first several years. His identity wasn’t public until his first press profiles in 2009. At that point, 4chan already had 5 million monthly users, with Poole as the sole admin.
Browsers of the site's more controversial boards or anyone aware only of 4chan's headline-grabbing hijinks (like attacking Scientology through Anonymous, the hacktivist group it spawned, or rigging a Time magazine poll), would picture Poole as this maniacal caricature of a human being.
"Once you meet him, Chris is the last guy you’d expect to have been the dude that founded 4chan,” says Drew Curtis, the founder of another early message board, Fark. Curtis considers himself a friend and adviser to Poole — the two met at a TED conference where Poole spoke in 2010.
Those who know him, including Curtis, describe Poole as kind, funny, incredibly bright, intensely private, and as someone who asks thoughtful questions.
Many 4chan users, on the other hand, would describe Poole a bit more … colorfully. Over the years, the shifting community’s relationship to Poole has bucked and dipped. They’ve sent him artwork, obsessed over his love life (he’s even dated a few 4channers), and playfully meme-fied any photo they can get their digital hands on.
But any change to the site would spur insults and death threats, lewd comments on everything from his sexuality to his physical appearance, with a fair number of complex theories on how he was in cahoots with the FBI or, after he banned GamerGate discussions, was in bed with "social justice warriors." Poole has said that their constant assault didn't make him angry (he makes it a point not to get angry at strangers on the internet), but could be draining.
"Sometimes he’d get really frustrated with us. It was a love-hate relationship with users,” Brett, an early 4channer, says. In the spirit of the site, he asked for his full name to remain anonymous. He’s the same age as Poole and joined the site back in 2004. He still visits it nearly every single day.
The face of 4chan
Chris Poole speaking about 4chan at the SHARE Conference. SHARE Conference
Whether 4chan's users appreciated it or not, Poole was a fierce defender of the community he created. And ironically, his protection of the anonymity of his users tied his own identity more closely to their exploits.
Even though he couldn’t really control the site beyond banning certain topics and reporting illegal content to authorities, he was the only one with any modicum of authority.
Poole himself describes 4Chan with pride, and a hint of ambivalence.
He can calmly describe some of the site’s more NSFW images and antics, adding that he’s not easily offended, and can clinically discuss how he fielded countless legal threats from actresses during the massive celebrity leak dubbed on 4chan as “The Fappening.”
“As much as we’ve had our detractors over the years as a community and as a site, I think 4chan has done far, far, far, far more good than bad,” he said during a final, eight-hour Q&A session with his community. “Hundreds of millions of people have used 4chan in some capacity, in some fashion, whether it’s minutes, hours, days, or whatever. There have at least been 100 million dedicated users over the past ten years. For a lot of people it kind of functions as their ‘Place.’”
Keeping that ‘Place’ open never made him money — in fact it almost bankrupted him. Its racy content made mainstream advertisers shrink away while servers and the occasional legal fee drained his bank account to the point where he was once $20,000 in debt.
Ultimately, he said in his final Q&A, he sees 4chan's upkeep over the years as a hobby and a labor of love, and that he did “truly feel very warmly about the community and everything that’s happened” despite “being a punching bag for millions and millions of people."
Although most associate Poole with 4chan, he's actually taken a stab at another projects.
He founded Canvas in 2011 as a network for remixing images, ultimately raising about $3 million from investors like USV and Andreessen Horowitz. In some ways, Canvas felt like a nicer version of 4chan: It enabled a similar kind of creative piggy-backing, without veering into the obscene.
In search of a business model, the app pivoted and its second iteration, DrawQuest, gave users daily illustration prompts. But Poole still couldn’t figure out how to make money. In 2014, Poole wrote a frank blog post declaring that it had to shut down. He describes the next few months as an “emotional roller coaster” and a “burden that took a few months to decompress from.”
Going Google
Google's Bradley Horowitz. Michael Seto
After selling the site last year, Poole fell off the map. No blog posts, few tweets.
“I spent just over two years away from the tech world. I used the time and distance to catch my bearings and recharge after four years of building Canvas and DrawQuest—but more importantly—to seek out new experiences and learn more about myself and the world,” he tells Business Insider.
He traveled, read, wrote. Ultimately, he reconnected with Google’s VP of Photos and Streams, Bradley Horowitz, whom he had met several years before.
4chan’s reputation didn’t faze Horowitz — the longtime Google executive, who once headed up Google's Apps business, had never been a frequent 4chan visitor. Impressions of Chris were based on their relationship, not 4chan's history.
“I've had the good fortune to work with some of the most creative and talented people in the industry. Yet even against that backdrop Chris stands out as a particularly gifted and astute thinker,” he says. “He has an uncanny ability to see through apparent complexities and simplify. It's a rare and valuable gift.”
When Horowitz started working on a new in-house startup incubator, dubbed Area 120, Poole was top of mind.
“I’d always hoped to work with Chris, but was waiting for the right circumstances to arise (both for us and for him), took a bit of patience,” he says. “We stayed in touch, and when Area 120 began to take shape, he was practically the first call I made. And fortunately, I caught him at the perfect moment.”
For Poole, joining Google, helping other people form their own businesses inside a huge company instead of launching out again on his own, feels like the right fit.
It’s been almost exactly one year since he set his churlish, beloved child free, and the 4chan site seems to be whirling along just fine without him. While he’s still best known for 4chan and as “moot,” the identity he picked at 15, those days are falling farther and farther behind him.
“I think 4chan will be a footnote in his biography,” Curtis says. “One day we’ll say, ‘Oh, of course he did this next thing. Look at what he was doing when he was 15.’ I think that’s what 4chan will be for him: just the beginning.” | {
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News coverage of the climate crisis can no longer rely on the false pretense of objectivity, writer and activist Naomi Klein said Tuesday.
"There is a confirmation bias among the largest chunk of journalists out there who really pride themselves on being centrists," Klein said Tuesday during a town hall at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. "There's an absolute fetish for centrism, for seriousness defined by splitting the difference—and not getting too excited about anything"
The mainstream media is "profoundly distrustful of people who are saying 'actually, the house is on fire,'" Klein said, citing the impulse among many journalists to remain objective and hear both sides.
"But guess what," said Klein. "The house is on fire."
The journalism school's publication, The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), is joining with The Nation to launch an initiative, #CoveringClimateNow, to change coverage of the climate crisis.
In an essay describing the initiative from April 22, Mark Hertsgaard, environmental correspondent for The Nation, and Kyle Pope, the publisher of CJR, described how they see the journalist's job in the climate crisis as one of sounding the alarm.
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"Instead of sleepwalking us toward disaster, the U.S. news media need to remember their Paul Revere responsibilities," wrote Hertsgaard and Pope, "to awaken, inform, and rouse the people to action."
Part of that mission, Klein said, is pushing back on conventional wisdom about the role of extractive technologies in furthering neoliberal economic development.
"You can't leave it all to the markets," Klein said, laying out a vision of the future that leaves neoliberalism behind.
"You have to plan," Klein added. "You have to regulate."
Further, said Klein, the entire project of neoliberalism "falls apart" if the climate crisis is reality.
Watch Klein's comments: | {
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Pasi Rilindja dështoi që të sillte ashtu sikurse pati premtuar një analizë nga një laborator ndërkombëtar, për të thënë se përgjimi i Babales qe një manipulim, ajo përdori skenarin “B”. Krijimin e një dëshmitari fals. E gjithë trimëria e Ramës nëpër studio dhe akuza e prokurorisë u vërvitën tek një personazh, të cilin e kishin paralajmëruar muaj më parë mediat pranë qeverisë, dhe që do pohonte se kishte marrë para, për të luajtur zërin e Agron Xhafës.
Fredi Alizoti u konsiderua nga mbështetësit e qeverisë në panelin e “Opinion” si njeriu që po nxirrte të vërtetën.
Lexo me tej:
Andi Bushati:“Hidhu nga ne”, rrëzimi i turpshëm i alibive të Ramës
Por, papritmas në emision ndodhi një kthesë e beftë: Salianji nxori videon ku Fredi Alizoti ishte takuar më shefin e policisë Ardi Veliu, dhe ai me dorën e tij e kishte çuar në prokurorinë e Arta Markut, ku do luante rolin e dëshmitarit të rremë. Alizoti i pranonte të gjitha këto me gojën e tij, me zë dhe figurë.
Pra tani nuk ka më asnjë dyshim se ka rënë edhe alibia e alibisë së alibisë, që mbështeste tezën e Ramës se videopërgjimi qe i manipuluar. Sepse pas kësaj videoje rezulton, në rastin më të keq, që i gjithë hetimi është fals, ndërsa në rastin më të mirë, se dëshmitari kryesor dhe i vetëm i akuzës është një njeri krejtësisht i pabesueshëm. Përpos Alizotit prokuroria nuk kishte asnjë fakt tjetër për të shpallur se audio-përgjimi i Agron Xhafajt është i manipuluar.
Dhe kjo ngjarje, nuk është thjeshtë nxjerrja e një gënjeshtre më shumë si ato për avionët e drogës, Dritan Zaganit, Xhisielës e me radhë.
Ajo është prova flagrante që tregon për një mafie që ka kapur shtetit, ku drejtori i policisë Ardi Veliu shtrembëron provat, ku prokuroria i bën fresk qeverisë dhe zbaton direktivat e saj, ku ai prokurori Gent Osmani, që i mbajnë si kosë në qafë vettingun, është i gatshëm të “besojë” çdo fabul.
Nëse deri tani ka pasur dyshime që në përgjim ishte kapur vëllai i ministrit të Brendshëm, tani kjo as që diskutohet më. Madje, po ta kthesh filmin nga pas, më mirë ta kishin pranuar në fillim që ishte zëri i Agron Xhafës, sesa të telendiseshin kështu duke i rënë alibitë njëra pas tjetrës.
©Lapsi.al | {
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Omaha police are investigating a shooting that left three people injured early Sunday morning. The victims told police they had been shot while at a house party.Police originally responded to the area of 55th and Sprague just before 2 a.m., after several callers reported hearing shots fired. Officers found a residence in the area that had been struck several times by gunfire, but they didn't find any victims there. Around 2:00 a.m. two people arrived at Creighton University Medical Center. Officers say they had been shot in the knees.Around the same time, a third shooting victim walked into CHI Health Immanuel.Officials report all three victims have non life-threatening injuries.The incident is still under investigation. The victims were not able to provide any description of a suspect. Three other homes in the area were also hit by gunfire. Anyone with information about what happened should call Crime Stoppers, 402-444-STOP.
Omaha police are investigating a shooting that left three people injured early Sunday morning. The victims told police they had been shot while at a house party.
Police originally responded to the area of 55th and Sprague just before 2 a.m., after several callers reported hearing shots fired. Officers found a residence in the area that had been struck several times by gunfire, but they didn't find any victims there.
Around 2:00 a.m. two people arrived at Creighton University Medical Center. Officers say they had been shot in the knees.
Around the same time, a third shooting victim walked into CHI Health Immanuel.
Officials report all three victims have non life-threatening injuries.
The incident is still under investigation. The victims were not able to provide any description of a suspect. Three other homes in the area were also hit by gunfire.
Anyone with information about what happened should call Crime Stoppers, 402-444-STOP. | {
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A popular American burger company surprised Kiwi fans with a brief pop-up store today.
In-N-Out burger fans were treated to limited classic California-style burgers, chips and drinks in Ponsonby, Auckland this afternoon.
Diners had to be in quick - the food ran out within 90 minutes and doors closed at 1.30pm.
Three In-N-Out staff were flown into Auckland to sell the burgers using New Zealand beef, but there are no further plans to open a permanent store here.
The pop-up was the 28th 'testing kitchen' done around the world in the last three years, event co-ordinator at Soiree Events, Holly Bidwell said.
The company is still focused on spreading its reach in the United States.
The Ponsonby pop-up attracted a flurry of interest after just one advertisement ran in the Auckland City Harbour News, Bidwell said.
Fast food fans took to Twitter to air their delight that an outlet was in town, and disappointment that it didn't last long.
"I am so upset. I had NO idea In-n-Out Burger was in Ponsonby today. #PleaseComeBack," Vanessa @nessleberry tweeted.
"This is a little crazy with the weather today I kind of feel like Im in LA 'In-N-Out Burger pop up store in Auckland", tweeted Abby Rose @byarose.
In-N-Out burger is known for its neopolitan shakes and home-style Secret Menu that includes three-pattie burgers and grilled cheese sandwiches. It also allegedly has a swathe of celebrity fans including the likes of Beyonce and Kim Kardashian.
Earlier this year Bloomberg reported the chain's 30-year-old owner and president is one of the worlds' youngest female billionaires, and refused to franchise to outside operators so as to retain control over the brand. | {
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Insidious 3
According to Deadline, Dermot Mulroney (the guy who is not Dylan McDermott) has been cast as the lead in Bunker Hill, CBS’ medical drama pilot about doctors who use computers. Mulroney’s character is Walter Wallace, a “veteran surgeon with a controversial past” who “might care a little too much about his patients,” and he’s been hired by a “young Silicon Valley tech titan” to help start a high-tech hospital that uses fancy gadgets to help people. Being an old person, Mulroney will probably try to resist this “new school” way of treating patients by grunting and frowning a lot, but people will still like him for some reason and then by the end of each episode he’ll come around and admit that technology is pretty cool. Presumably, this change will be inspired by him seeing a robot manage to surgically replace someone’s brain or a 3D printer that creates a perfect replica of a patient’s butt.
Bunker Hill comes from Parenthood’s Jason Katims, and it will also star Augustus Prew and Brenda Song. | {
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City Council Members in New York City and Los Angeles are calling for businesses to cut ties with companies responsible for the Amazon rainforest fires.
Fires burning in the Amazon have been linked to the beef industry; cattle ranchers often set fire to areas of the forest in order to clear land for their herds. There have been 41,000 recorded fire locations so far, according to the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research.
The fires are devastating for indigenous people and wild animals, but they also have a wider impact; Amazonian trees absorb carbon dioxide and are an extremely helpful resource in the fight against the climate crisis.
NYC City Council Members Costa Constantinides and Justin Brannan are co-sponsors of the new resolution, in partnership with Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. On the west coast, LA City Council Members Paul Koretz and David Ryu have put forward a similar resolution.
‘What We Eat Matters’
“We are facing a climate emergency,” said Adams in a statement. “We can’t continue business as usual while the planet burns.”
He continued, “today we urge both city agencies and local businesses to cut ties with any company linked to the multinational corporations responsible for the fires still raging throughout the Amazon rainforest.”
“Each individual consumer choice, each corporate decision, and each specific legislative policy must be geared toward making our planet more sustainable and habitable for generations to come,” he added.
NYC and LA are the two largest cities in the United States. City Council Members from both hope that they can lead by example. They want to inspire the other 35,000 cities in the country to join them and introduce similar resolutions.
Leaders also want city residents to consider reducing the number of animal products they consume. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, tackling meat consumption is the world’s most urgent environmental problem.
“What we eat matters,” said Adams, who follows a vegan diet. “Who we do business with matters. This resolution is a first step in opening a broader conversation about how we overcome one of the most significant challenges humanity has ever faced.” | {
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Perhaps like many of you, I’ve had to embrace the world of Bluetooth headphones and earbuds much sooner than I would’ve liked. Mobvoi makes some superb Wear OS smartwatches, but the IndieGoGo-backed TicPods Free finally give Android users a solid alternative to Apple AirPods.
While often as a reviewer you might take a jab at Apple or make a bold claim about a product being ‘X’s answer to Y’, the TicPods Free actually do genuinely offer up an exceptional alternative to the AirPods. Clearly, the design will be justified as ‘close-enough’ to the official Apple wireless earbuds to make them more appealing to those that don’t know any better.
Of course, the influence of the big fruit is all over these headphones. From the case to the shape, to the base color option, these reek of ‘Apple-ification’, but that doesn’t mean they are a by-the-numbers replica. In fact, they’re far from it. Mobvoi have created a pair of Bluetooth earbuds that not only stand up to the market leaders, they also beat them in a number of core ways.
Design
Copying a style icon
As I’ve said (and as you can see), the TicPods Free look like a cast off or prototype from the Apple design labs in Cupertino. The elongated antenna-like ear-prongs are almost indistinguishable from a distance, however, up close they do have a few unique design choices.
Let’s start with the headphone case. It’s a small, sarcophagus-style carry box that acts as both a home and charging dock for these earbuds. The lid does feel light and is my only concern with the entire package, as the mechanism lacks the rigidity I’d expect. That said, the lid is secure, locks into position and stays closed comfortably thanks to a magnetic clasp.
That worry is probably unfounded though, as even after dropping the case once or twice, my TicPods didn’t budge and neither did the lid. You can shake away vigorously and the lid won’t flop open — but in white you can see the LED lighting that blips to confirm your headphones are charging or disconnected from your device.
I like the ridged lid of the case as it gives a nice grippy surface but it also serves the dual purpose of me being able to tell which is the right way up when the TicPods are in my pocket or bag. It’s a little touch that might go unnoticed by many but I appreciate those neat extra thoughts during the design process.
On the side panel of the carry case you’ll see the only branding found on the packaging, the TicPods embossed logo is framed by two LEDs. These change color to indicate the battery level of the buds when opening the lid.
Like most wireless earbuds, the case needs a charge to keep the TicPods Free topped up when safely enclosed inside. There is one solitary micro USB port — which should be a USB Type-C at this point — found on the right side of the case which allows for charging.
The earbuds themselves feel like a slight upgrade over the AirPods thanks to the inclusion of the traditional rubber tip that sits better in your ear canal. The fit is snug but there are only one additional set of silicone tips in the box. That could be a problem if these buds don’t fit quite right with the included options — Mobvoi should definitely have included some more in the box.
I’ve yet to mention the color options, of which there are three: Navy, Lava and Ice. That will be blue, a sort of orange-red and white to everyone else. I tested the white version and I did receive plenty of comments asking if I had an iPhone now, prepare some witty replies and retorts for that exact situation.
Each pronged headphone has that same ridged design on each stem, this gives extra grip but also help with audio controls and general control — more on this later though.
Sound Quality
Almost exceptional
I’m in no way an audio snob or what some might call an audiophile. My listening preferences veer towards Podcasts more so than playlists nowadays. That said, I am impressed with the overall balance and despite the bass feeling a little weak at times, it’s more than acceptable for my eclectic musical tastes.
I found vocals to be clear even in muddy tracks, that said in bassy dance tracks the overall experience felt a little duller than I would normally wish for without that extra bassy oomph. It’s pretty much par for the course given the form factor, as the smaller size means drivers tend to have much less power. Of course, there are very few in-ear earbuds that will match the sound quality offered by over-ear headphones.
Almost all genres hold up well, and they are comparable to many other headphones priced in and around the same entry point. For avid podcast listeners, you will have no qualms with the sound quality.
I’ve used these buds for quite a few phone calls and video calls too and yes, people still do that. Call quality and microphone pickup were excellent, the active noise cancellation packed in is clearly helping when picking up speech.
Noise cancellation can be a misnomer though, as it doesn’t block ambient noise when wearing the earbuds. It simply blocks the microphones when making calls.
Controls
The TicPods respond to tap and swiping gestures, with the stem design actually working well for these kinds of swipe and tapping gestures. To increase volume you swipe up from the base of the prong while, naturally, swiping down decreases the volume.
Double tapping skips the track or skips forward in your podcast app of choice, while a single tap pauses the playing audio. This can be achieved by taking out the right earbud too as the TicPods Free automatically re-pair and resume playing when you place them back in your ears.
Holding your finger on the side of the stem activates Google Assistant, which I found useful for checking the time when out and about. Overall I found the controls really intuitive in theory but less so in practice. The volume controls worked without fail for me at least, but skipping and pausing tracks probably worked around 85% of the time.
Battery Life
Mobvoi claims that the battery on the TicPods Free can last up to 18 hours, however, that includes a couple of charges in the case. Initially, I thought that was a bold claim, but in practice I was getting at least 15 hours and by that point, I was automatically plugging in to charge the earbuds anyway.
The battery life is just that good. It doesn’t quite match the Apple AirPods but it gets damn close. What I will say is that these buds are way more comfortable than any Apple headphones when worn for a significant amount of time. .
Final thoughts
I cannot recommend the TicPods Free highly enough if you were looking for Apple AirPods alternatives that actually work well with an Android phone. The sound is great, not quite exceptional but there are quite a few more expensive wireless earbuds with comparably poorer sound quality than the TicPods.
When bought at RRP, the TicPods Free are still up to $30 cheaper than the Apple counterpart. They play nicely with Android and the controls — when they work — are arguably better than those on the AirPods on an Android smartphone.
Where to buy TicPods Free
Mobvoi
Amazon
US
UK
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: | {
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By
I make no secret about the fact that I’m a gamer geek who loves to play World of Warcraft. It’s an outlet for many things, including a place to go when coping with my depression, anxiety, or the mental and physical symptoms of a CFS flareup. But it’s also great for my creativity as a writer; my favorite fiction genre is fantasy, and that’s what World of Warcraft is. There’s an aspect of gameplay in World of Warcraft that has very little to do with the game’s mechanics and everything to do with the world-building the creators have done. Roleplaying is completely optional, but there are entire servers (called “realms”) that specialize in roleplay, and players on these servers can really get into their characters.
I’d like you to meet my main character, Carisse Dawnfire.
Carisse (kuh-REESE) is a Blood Elf mage. Back before the Catacylsm, and back before the Third War, she was Magistrix Carisse Dawnstar of Silvermoon City. But after the attack on the Sunwell that robbed her of her father and her sister, Carisse didn’t have the heart for politics anymore, and she took to traveling for a few years. Though she had a knack for it, the mercenary life was not for her. But that was how she met Elynxdria k’Shinar, known to friends as “Lynx,” and the two had remained friends even after leaving the merc company.
The decision to wander the newly discovered continent of Pandaria was an easy one for Carisse. Garrosh Hellscream was spilling the blood of his people like water, as if dead fighters were of no more consequence than insects squashed under foot. Maybe that was the military way of thinking, but he had burned through enlisted soldiers long ago and was now forcibly conscripting any member of the Horde he could get his hands on. Lor’themar Theron saw Garrosh for what he was, and setting up his own campaign in Pandaria while under the guise of working with the bloodthristy Warchief was a brilliant stroke. Carisse had been able to help Lor’themar’s cause while exploring on her own and learning all she could about this “new world.” These Pandaren were fascinating, with such a rich history. She was learning all she could, now, and thought she might be able to make her new home here.
Maybe. Mage gifted as she was, she could easily keep apartments in many cities in different parts of the world, choosing where to spend her time differently on a daily basis. But had she been moving around too much? Silvermoon had been her home for over a century. Could she really stay away? Her estranged mother was still there, true, but so were the graves of her father and her sister.
This was not the time to decide. This was the time for discovery.
World of Warcraft and its universe belong to Blizzard Entertainment. They are very supportive of fan-created works, and as a fan, I am grateful for the opportunity to immerse myself in their world. Carisse (me) and Lynx (Tom) play on the US-Emerald Dream server. Our guild is called Sapere Aude. If you are interested in starting a new World of Warcraft account, please leave a comment on this post, and I will send you a Recruit-a-Friend code for the free starter version of WoW.
Christina Gleason ( 974 Posts That’s me: Christina Gleason. I’m a professional copywriter, editor, and blogger. My company is called Phenomenal Content. (Hire me!) I'm a multiply disabled autistic woman doing my best in this world built for abled people. I’m a geek for grammar, fantasy, and select types of gaming, including Twitch Sings and Plants vs Zombies 2. I hate vegetables. I have an intense phone phobia, so I’ll happily conduct business over email or IM instead. | {
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"Lock her up for what? Because you disagree with her?"
A chorus of Albertans at a political rally chanting "Lock her up" about Premier Rachel Notley initially left communications professor Brian Gorman speechless.
"We have a long and ignoble history in Canada of aping the Americans — unfortunately not always in positive ways," Gorman said Sunday, referring to similar refrains from American voters keen to see Hillary Clinton behind bars.
More than 1,000 people crowded in front of Alberta's legislature building on Saturday for a rally hosted by the right-wing Rebel Media group.
The chant erupted in response to a speech from politician Chris Alexander, a federal Conservative leadership hopeful.
"There's an ugly tendency among the extreme right, and I suppose the extreme left as well ... to confuse any disagreement with something that must be eliminated," Gorman said.
He pointed to groups such as Breitbart News Network in the U.S. and Rebel Media in Canada. Neither strive for coverage that reflects both sides of a debate, said Gorman, a former journalist who now teaches at MacEwan University.
Brian Gorman, a communications professor at MacEwan University, said chants at a rally against Alberta's carbon tax left him speechless. (Zoe Todd/CBC)
"They see journalism as a struggle between opposing ideologies — and their aim is to win that struggle."
At Saturday's rally, Rebel Media leader Ezra Levant urged protesters not to engage with CBC employees covering the event. He decried them as extremists and activists, prone to causing scuffles.
Levant passed his microphone to speakers such as Wildrose leader Brian Jean, who vowed to tear up the carbon tax legislation if his party is elected.
Gorman described the speeches at Saturday's rally as a political power play, tapping into the anger and resentment of Albertans who feel ignored by their government.
"I think they're ripe for manipulation," he said.
"Politicians pay lip service to them and then get elected and then forget about them."
Alberta's current government, he added, shouldn't underestimate the vote of those left struggling and frustrated in the province.
"There are people with legitimate grievances and if we treat them as if they're an afterthought or irrelevant, the only weapon they have to employ is their sullenness and their anger." | {
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by Robert Herron
Sprint 4G Rollout Updates
Thursday, July 10, 2014 - 1:30 PM MDT
A few months back, Sprint announced new group partnerships with members of the CCA (Competitive Carriers Association) to expand the availability of Sprint LTE availability in many places across the country outside Sprint service areas. Additionally, Sprint has recently formed a subgroup of current/future LTE providers of the CCA that is referred to as the Rural Roaming Preferred Program (RRPP). Announcing such a deal with nTelos in May, and nearly another dozen in June.
Sprint is part of the over-arching CCA, and working with its large membership group to establish a national LTE roaming group. However, where the action is happening now is with the Rural Roaming Preferred Program. RRPP members are joining a specific Sprint alliance which gives them more direct access to Sprint, their vendors, technology, devices and most importantly…Sprint’s vast spectrum holdings.
As it has been explained to us, CCA members who are not a part of Sprint’s RRRP program are using their own spectrum and resources. Current disclosed members of the RRRP are regional and rural providers nTelos, C-Spire Wireless, SouthernLINC Wireless, Nex-Tech Wireless, Carolina West Wireless, VTel Wireless, Flat Wireless, MobileNation/SI Wireless, Inland Cellular, Illinois Valley Cellular, James Valley Telecommunications and Phoenix Wireless. There are more currently in discussion. Some speculate US Cellular will be announced soon, but we have not been able to confirm that.
The news of the CCA and RRPP partnerships was well received by Sprint customers and members of the S4GRU community. Our members have been stoked at this announcement for months. Craving more details. When is this going to happen? Where, exactly? And the most important question to our readers has been, ‘how will the service be treated…native or roaming?’
In press conferences, news releases and media coverage, it is often being referred to as “LTE roaming” deals. When people see the term roaming, they immediately conjure up ideas of monthly limits or added expenses. For instance, most Sprint postpaid plans currently limit their 1xRTT and 3G EVDO data roaming to only 100MB or 300MB per month. That’s not very much. So many of our members at S4GRU have wondered whether these “LTE roaming” deals would count against current very limited roaming allotments, or if something more generous would be provided on partner LTE networks. This has been the source of some anxiety to our members who want to be excited about this, but want to understand the full impact to their usage behaviors.
Drum roll, please…
We recently have received verification from a Sprint executive, who will remain anonymous, that the coverage with the RRPP providers will be treated as native. Fully native. When you are on these rural partner networks, it will be like you are on your Sprint LTE coverage and all your normal account usages will be allowed.
If you have a 1GB data plan with Sprint. Your usage on these other networks counts against your 1GB monthly allotment. And if you have an unlimited plan on Sprint, you can use unlimited smartphone data on these rural partner networks.
The executive said the point of these new coverages is to provide a seamless customer experience travelling from Sprint LTE coverage into these new rural partner coverage areas. To feel like they are on the Sprint network. And maybe even better in many instances given the lightly used rural nature of this additional coverage. They want Sprint customers, and in turn rural partner customers on the Sprint network, to enjoy a cohesive and expanded national LTE footprint. Something that makes them more competitive with the duopoly.
Some of these rural partners already have their own operating LTE networks on varied spectrum holdings. And others are counting on Sprint spectrum to host their LTE networks or supplement them. We are told that existing LTE networks from these RRPP members on frequencies that current Sprint LTE devices support should be open as soon as logistically possible. Maybe even this summer. They continue to work out some network bugs and billing/authentication issues. Additional LTE frequencies in Band 4 and Band 12 are anticipated to be added to new upcoming devices at the end of this year or early next year and will add even more mileage.
This is great news for Sprint customers. This will open up a lot more LTE coverage. Upon full implementation, the coverage will be quite expansive in square miles. When other CCA partner providers coverage comes online, Sprint should be able to handily eclipse AT&T’s LTE network coverage. Which has recently been purported to be mothballed by AT&T, with no timelines in place to restart. We currently do not know the details of VoLTE (Voice over LTE) on these partner networks. But a VTel Wireless executive did mention recently in a Fierce Wireless article that they were deploying VoLTE themselves. Sprint has been very mum on their VoLTE plans internally or through partners.
We currently do not know if the LTE coverage that is provided by CCA members outside the RRPP will be counted as native the same way. Though T-Mobile is a member of the CCA, they are not a member of Sprint’s RRPP. So Sprint and its customers may see some unique advantages in both off network usage being counted as native and the availability of many more spectrum bands and more coverage than other standard CCA members experience.
We excitedly watch and discuss the progress in S4GRU forums. Stay tuned. | {
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Camera
Panavision Millennium DXL2, Panavision C-, D- and E-Series Lenses
Red Monstro, Panavision C-, D- and E-Series Lenses | {
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Most Peruvian mummies come bundled in cloth, with their legs folded up to their chests and their arms around their knees. But the young boy we now know only as the Nasca Boy was buried in a position he probably occupied in life: on a contoured, cushioned adobe stool, with his lower legs tucked beneath his seat. It’s the only burial of its kind that archaeologists have ever seen, and it immediately suggests two very important things about this child: he lived with a disability that would have required additional care and resources, and he was well cared for and valued by the people around him, even during a period of their history when food was scarce and life was uncertain.
That’s the conclusion of a new study, which revisits the original 1973 research on the mummified remains of the young boy, who died around 700 CE. The original archaeologists, led by the late Marvin Allison, focused on identifying evidence of tuberculosis in the boy’s remains; they provided the first evidence that the disease had stalked South American populations long before Europeans arrived.
Archaeologist Lorna Tilley and her colleagues have taken a second look at that study in an effort to reconstruct details of the child’s experience with his illness and disability, the kind of care he probably received, and what that reveals about the culture in which he lived. “I rely on taking the information available from the work of other archaeologists and synthesizing it, hoping that I've understood their research results and providing copious references so that readers can go to the sources themselves,” Tilley told Ars Technica.
A short, difficult childhood
An autopsy in the early 1970s found evidence of tuberculosis infection in the Nasca Boy’s spine, a condition called Pott’s Disease. Allison and his colleagues suggested that the child's ordeal began as a mild respiratory infection when the boy was a year or two old. Tuberculosis bacteria in his bloodstream must have spread to his spine, where it eventually left a 5cm-wide abscess in his lower spine, having eaten away at several vertebrae and the discs between them.
Allison and his colleagues also found lesions (called tubercles) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria in the boy’s lungs, heart, liver, and right kidney. This widespread infection, called miliary tuberculosis, may have spread through his bloodstream from the abscess in his spine, and it probably killed him within weeks.
Tilley and her colleagues didn't do any new analysis of the boy’s remains. Their focus is on re-examining the work of earlier archaeologists, whose research often is directed at identifying signs of disease in ancient populations; Tilley and her colleagues comb that earlier research for overlooked clues about health care in past societies.
Caring for the Nasca Boy
The Nasca Boy probably lived with Pott’s disease for a few years before losing mobility in his legs, and it would have taken a heavy toll on his early childhood, forcing him to live with back and chest pain, fevers, weight loss, and fatigue. It’s likely that he would never have been able to keep up with his peers, either at play or in the work often expected of children in agricultural communities. Tilley and her colleagues compared the Nasca Boy’s case to studies of modern children facing chronic disease, and they speculate that he may also have dealt with depression, anxiety, and grief.
A child with such an illness would have needed additional care and support from his family members—sick children need to be comforted when they’re in pain, cooled when they’re feverish, and probably coaxed to eat.
When Pott’s disease left him immobilized, the Nasca Boy would have required an even higher level of care: help with bathing and personal hygiene, frequent massages and repositioning to help with circulation, and much closer supervision to make sure he was safe, hydrated, and getting enough nutrition. “Without massaging, repositioning, constant hygiene monitoring and maintenance, pressure sores are inevitable when a subject is immobilized, and if left untreated rapidly become infected,” Tilley told Ars Technica. “Similarly, when someone is effectively immobilized, their circulatory and respiratory (as well as other!) systems are very rapidly compromised.”
The fact that the Nasca Boy survived eight to ten years with such a serious illness is proof that he received the care he needed, and it seems he was cared for well; his skin, preserved by natural mummification for nearly 1,300 years, shows no sign of bedsores, which means he likely benefited from good hygiene and frequent position changes. And the stool itself tells a story.
“The stool speaks of an understanding and acceptance of the Nasca Boy’s needs and of the readiness to work around them,” wrote Tilley and her colleagues.
Medicine in the pre-Columbian Andes?
There’s no evidence of what sorts of medicines he might have taken for pain, fever, or digestive problems, because the 1973 study focused on looking for evidence of disease, not treatment.
“Allison et al. approached their subject’s remains with one objective in mind and perceived information extraneous to that as irrelevant,” wrote Tilley and her colleagues. But Tilley says the Nasca almost certainly had access to medicines, either locally or through trade, and biochemical analysis of his hair could yield some clues about whether his body metabolized certain chemical compounds, including alcohol, in his final months. Hair also contains cortisol, which can offer insights into a person’s stress levels, and stable isotopes of strontium and oxygen which could suggest what he ate. Those answers may not be forthcoming any time soon, though.
“While this would satisfy curiosity, I don't think it would be seen as a priority,” Tilley told Ars Technica.
Analysis of his gut contents also could produce evidence of medicinal plants or his last meals, but that opportunity may have been lost; it's not clear whether Allison and his colleagues removed and discarded the mummy's entire stomach and intestines in the 1970s.
It took a village
There’s no evidence of who would have cared for the Nasca Boy during his short, challenging life, but Tilley and her colleagues suggest it was probably a joint effort by his mother and some mixture of older siblings, elderly relatives, and possibly others. In a society where survival depended on crops and livestock, any time away from the work of growing food would have been a costly prospect for a family. That would have been especially true for the Late Nasca, living under the strain of drought and a fickle climate, which had troubled the region since around 640 CE.
The fact that the care happened despite these hardships may suggest something important about the Nasca. “The Nasca Boy’s survival suggests this particular child was sufficiently loved and prized for those responsible for looking after him to make this commitment,” wrote Tilley and her colleagues. “There is no reason to suppose that all children were not equally valued.
That is informed speculation at best, but it’s potentially the clearest insight we have into the family life of a culture that left behind almost no record of such things. All of the art the Nasca have left us has to do with religious or ritual matters—women show up only rarely, and children and daily life are completely absent.
“At this distance in time—over 1,200 years ago, and with no written evidence to fall back on—we can never be sure we're right in the fine detail of analysis,” Tilley told Ars Technica. “But at the broad-brush level, and focusing on the practical and emotional aspects of looking after a very sick child over an extended period in which their decline is obvious, we can surmise a society in which children were valued in their own right; recognized as individuals with individual needs; and supported by the use of possibly scarce resources in their maintenance.”
International Journal of Paleopathology, 2018. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijpp.2018.08.001 (About DOIs). | {
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This year, there has been a significant increase in regulation and compliance initiatives as the cryptocurrency market saw the fallout from initial coin offerings (ICOs), of which many were poorly disguised securities offerings and many more were outright scams. Earlier this year, Satis Group reported that 92 percent of ICOs were scams or have otherwise failed to list on exchanges, resulting in billions of dollars in losses for investors. Still, there are further billions wrapped up in non-compliant tokens and projects, all at risk of becoming the Securities and Exchange Commission’s next target. Airfox and Paragon will not be the only companies that face legal action, they are merely a signal fire to let everyone else know — the SEC is coming.
Now more than ever, it’s important to track the industry as it shifts its focus from ICOs to security token offerings (STOs). However, navigating these changes can be difficult as new companies, offerings, and compliance solutions appear by the month. Pink Sky has been working to prepare for these changes and would like to share our thoughts with you.
We want to initiate dialogue regarding various issuance platforms and financial instruments that are ripe for tokenization. To do this, we are releasing our Security Token Series—a collection of articles on new protocols, offerings, and assets as they pertain to current news events. In this article we will discuss Harbor’s asset tokenization, the platform’s usage in the real estate market, and their Regulated Token standard. | {
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Theresa May is to travel to Brussels on Wednesday evening to finalise the Brexit deal in a meeting with the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker.
With talk of a backbench coup against the prime minister fizzling out, No 10 said the prime minister would head for discussions with Juncker “as part of the ongoing negotiations over the future framework”.
Downing Street and the commission have a deal in principle on the withdrawal agreement concerning citizens’ rights, the £39bn divorce bill and the Irish border problem. Negotiations continue over a separate document about the future relationship.
May’s trip comes as the recent pressure on her position slightly eases, with speculation about an imminent leadership challenge fading as Brexiter rebels failed to amass the 48 letters of no confidence from Conservative MPs needed to trigger a challenge.
She does, however, face a parallel problem after the Democratic Unionist party, which keeps her in office, breached its confidence and supply deal with the Tories by failing to back the government on a series of budget votes on Monday night.
The full text of a political declaration on future EU-UK relations was meant to be published on Tuesday, but the timing is now up in the air. The commission’s chief spokesman declined to say whether the document would appear before or after May’s meeting with Juncker.
“The aim of the meeting is to prepare Sunday’s European council article 50 format [EU 27 leaders] and to ensure that we are in a position again, I repeat, to endorse the draft withdrawal agreement and approve the political declaration of the framework of the future relationship,” he said. “This is not a dinner, it is afternoon tea.”
The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, told MEPs in private that the political declaration would be circulated shortly to a restricted group and offered some hope to May that some of the demands from member states for the political declaration had been resisted.
Asked about the call for the UK to “dynamically align” on environmental, social and labour regulations, Barnier said the EU had to be realistic and could not seek from the UK the same standards outside the bloc as inside it, sources said.
He said he was also mindful to ensure any ambitious language in the document did not allow the Chequers proposals to come back in through the back window, with them having been widely rejected as an attempt at “a la carte membership of the single market”.
Earlier, the Spanish foreign minister, Josep Borrell, and the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, warned their country could withhold its support for the entire package unless there was an explicit statement that a future trade deal with the UK would only cover Gibraltar if it received Madrid’s consent.
“In the past 72 hours none of the documents have clarified something which is fundamental for us,” Sánchez said on Tuesday morning. “Gibraltar is not part of the UK … As it stands, the [Spanish] government will vote against the Brexit agreement.”
Borrell echoed his prime minister, saying: “Mrs May said that she will not agree with the withdrawal treaty ... without knowing the content of the political declaration about the future relationship.
“She has said she will not agree with one thing unless I know and agree with the other. Me too. I want to see both things.”
Borrell said Barnier was “trying to write a paper that fits everything together and makes [everybody] happy”.
He added: “We have always been working with one idea, an idea approved several times by the European council. On the future relations, it will not include Gibraltar. Gibraltar is something apart ... Spain has to agree … we want it to be clear one way or another.
“I don’t mind about the instrument but I want it to be clear the future will be negotiated about Gibraltar with the agreement of Spain.”
Borrell said the withdrawal agreement would still go through without Spain’s support, as it did not require unanimity.
He added, however, that the Brexit process had laid bare the fragility of the UK, and warned he could foresee Scotland becoming independent and joining the EU.
“Why not?”, Borrell told Politico in an interview on Tuesday morning. “If they leave Britain within the accordance of the internal regulations. If Westminster agrees, we are not going to be more Papist than the pope. If Westminster agrees, why would we be against it?”
The commission’s spokesman declined to comment on how it would handle Spain’s objections to the withdrawal agreement.
Despite the recent crisis in Catalonia prompted by the independence movement, Borrell said: “I am very much [more] worried about the unity of the United Kingdom than the unity of Spain. I think the United Kingdom will split apart before Spain.”
He warned against a second Brexit referendum, however, as proposed by his prime minister last week.
“I don’t like second referendums. In Europe, we have a record of people voting, voting something that was not what the authorities liked and then being convinced to vote again,” Borrell said.
“It was the case with the Irish at least twice and the Danish also. It is also something that doesn’t look very democratic.” | {
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IN 1962 Jacob Cohen, a psychologist at New York University, reported an alarming finding. He had analysed 70 articles published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and calculated their statistical “power” (a mathematical estimate of the probability that an experiment would detect a real effect). He reckoned most of the studies he looked at would actually have detected the effects their authors were looking for only about 20% of the time—yet, in fact, nearly all reported significant results. Scientists, Cohen surmised, were not reporting their unsuccessful research. No surprise there, perhaps. But his finding also suggested some of the papers were actually reporting false positives, in other words noise that looked like data. He urged researchers to boost the power of their studies by increasing the number of subjects in their experiments.
Wind the clock forward half a century and little has changed. In a new paper, this time published in Royal Society Open Science, two researchers, Paul Smaldino of the University of California, Merced, and Richard McElreath at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, show that published studies in psychology, neuroscience and medicine are little more powerful than in Cohen’s day.
They also offer an explanation of why scientists continue to publish such poor studies. Not only are dodgy methods that seem to produce results perpetuated because those who publish prodigiously prosper—something that might easily have been predicted. But worryingly, the process of replication, by which published results are tested anew, is incapable of correcting the situation no matter how rigorously it is pursued.
The preservation of favoured places
First, Dr Smaldino and Dr McElreath calculated that the average power of papers culled from 44 reviews published between 1960 and 2011 was about 24%. This is barely higher than Cohen reported, despite repeated calls in the scientific literature for researchers to do better. The pair then decided to apply the methods of science to the question of why this was the case, by modelling the way scientific institutions and practices reproduce and spread, to see if they could nail down what is going on.
They focused in particular on incentives within science that might lead even honest researchers to produce poor work unintentionally. To this end, they built an evolutionary computer model in which 100 laboratories competed for “pay-offs” representing prestige or funding that result from publications. They used the volume of publications to calculate these pay-offs because the length of a researcher’s CV is a known proxy of professional success. Labs that garnered more pay-offs were more likely to pass on their methods to other, newer labs (their “progeny”).
Some labs were better able to spot new results (and thus garner pay-offs) than others. Yet these labs also tended to produce more false positives—their methods were good at detecting signals in noisy data but also, as Cohen suggested, often mistook noise for a signal. More thorough labs took time to rule these false positives out, but that slowed down the rate at which they could test new hypotheses. This, in turn, meant they published fewer papers.
In each cycle of “reproduction”, all the laboratories in the model performed and published their experiments. Then one—the oldest of a randomly selected subset—“died” and was removed from the model. Next, the lab with the highest pay-off score from another randomly selected group was allowed to reproduce, creating a new lab with a similar aptitude for creating real or bogus science.
Sharp-eyed readers will notice that this process is similar to that of natural selection, as described by Charles Darwin, in “The Origin of Species”. And lo! (and unsurprisingly), when Dr Smaldino and Dr McElreath ran their simulation, they found that labs which expended the least effort to eliminate junk science prospered and spread their methods throughout the virtual scientific community.
Their next result, however, was surprising. Though more often honoured in the breach than in the execution, the process of replicating the work of people in other labs is supposed to be one of the things that keeps science on the straight and narrow. But the two researchers’ model suggests it may not do so, even in principle.
Replication has recently become all the rage in psychology. In 2015, for example, over 200 researchers in the field repeated 100 published studies to see if the results of these could be reproduced (only 36% could). Dr Smaldino and Dr McElreath therefore modified their model to simulate the effects of replication, by randomly selecting experiments from the “published” literature to be repeated.
A successful replication would boost the reputation of the lab that published the original result. Failure to replicate would result in a penalty. Worryingly, poor methods still won—albeit more slowly. This was true in even the most punitive version of the model, in which labs received a penalty 100 times the value of the original “pay-off” for a result that failed to replicate, and replication rates were high (half of all results were subject to replication efforts).
The researchers’ conclusion is therefore that when the ability to publish copiously in journals determines a lab’s success, then “top-performing laboratories will always be those who are able to cut corners”—and that is regardless of the supposedly corrective process of replication.
Ultimately, therefore, the way to end the proliferation of bad science is not to nag people to behave better, or even to encourage replication, but for universities and funding agencies to stop rewarding researchers who publish copiously over those who publish fewer, but perhaps higher-quality papers. This, Dr Smaldino concedes, is easier said than done. Yet his model amply demonstrates the consequences for science of not doing so. | {
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Check out our new site Makeup Addiction
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Asks girlfriend to have sex "yeah, after this game of halo." | {
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LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--MedMen Enterprises Inc. (“MedMen” or the “Company”) (CSE:MMEN) (OTCQB:MMNFF) is pleased to announce the appointment of Stacey Hallerman to its Board of Directors.
Hallerman is a business leader and C-suite executive who has been instrumental in growing companies for more than two decades, both at Richemont North America, Inc. – part of the global luxury conglomerate that owns iconic brands such as Cartier, Chloe, Van Cleef & Arpels and Montblanc – and at Pfizer, a world recognized pharmaceutical leader.
Most recently she was vice president, chief legal counsel and corporate secretary at Richemont North America, where she served as a strategic advisor and member of the board of directors. She brings her deep knowledge of the consumer goods industry with an expertise in building and sustaining brands. As an integral member of Richemont’s executive management team, she played a company-wide leadership role and helped transform the organization.
At Pfizer, she developed and managed Pfizer’s strategy for global brand protection, enforcement and litigation.
“Last fall, my husband and I decided to leave our lives in New York and hit the reset button,” said Hallerman, who added the move also allowed the couple to be closer to their two adult sons living in Los Angeles.
Hallerman said she began seeing the MedMen billboards around town shortly after the move. Intrigued, she visited one of the MedMen stores in Los Angeles to learn more about the brand.
“I was so impressed with the sophisticated retail experience and the professionalism of the staff,” she said.
Months later, by chance, Hallerman met a MedMen executive at a function and that evolved into an invitation to join the company’s Board of Directors.
“Stacey Hallerman embodies MedMen’s style of leadership,” said MedMen Co-founder and CEO Adam Bierman. “She is guided by principle and by a desire to make a difference. We are fortunate to have her and the breadth of experience and expertise she brings.”
Hallerman said she looks forward to bringing her 20 plus years of experience in fueling business growth strategy to support MedMen as the company continues to grow at a rapid pace.
“It is not often that you get a chance to help build a whole new industry,” said Hallerman. “I believe MedMen is the standard bearer of this new industry. I look forward to working closely with management and helping create value for its customers, employees and shareholders.”
Hallerman is a past Adjunct Professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and serves on the Board of Directors of Laureus USA, a charitable organization that changes the lives of youth and strengthens communities through the power of sports.
ABOUT MEDMEN:
MedMen Enterprises is the preeminent cannabis company in the U.S. with assets and operations nationwide. Based in Los Angeles, MedMen brings expertise and capital to the cannabis industry and is one of the nation’s largest financial supporters of progressive marijuana laws. Visit http://www.medmen.com
Source: MedMen Enterprises | {
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Hi everyone! Long time ago since last time I upload a file! But there is a good reason! I am making with LuxySims3 a collaboration (Autumm Set) and I am so exited! I had time also to make this dress! Hope you really like it :) (Not Recolorable) More information about the collaboration: Blog · Tumblr
Hola a todos! Hace mucho tiempo desde la ultima vez que subi un archivo, pero hay una buena razon! Estoy haciendo junto a LuxySims3 una colaboracion para un Set de tematica Otoñal y estoy muy emocionaa por el proyecto. Tambien tuve tiempo e hice este vestido, espero que os guste!! (No es recolorable :( ) Mas informacion sobre el proyecto: Blog · Tumblr
| {
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Photo credit: US Coast Guard
From Popular Mechanics
Molten lava that poured into the ocean during the Hawaiian volcano Kilauea’s 2018 eruption kicked off a massive algae bloom.
Unlike harmful red algal blooms , green algae forms the base of the ocean food chain and promotes growth in marine ecosystems.
Half of the world’s oxygen supply comes from algae, or phytoplankton.
Kilauea volcano’s 2018 eruption devastated Hawaii. Lava tore through neighborhoods and farms, destroying more than 700 homes and covering 13 square miles of land in slabs of dark volcanic rock. But when that lava poured into the ocean, it spurred a massive bloom of planktonic algae, or phytoplankton, which stretched hundreds of miles out into the Pacific Ocean.
So at least something good came from the destruction.
NASA satellites gave the phytoplankton away. Scientists studying the images noticed that the waters around Hawaii’s Big Island took on a greenish hue as lava poured into the sea, so they set out to investigate. When the researchers tested the waters, they found a number of natural fertilizers including iron, silicic acid, phosphate and high levels of nitrates, according to a study published today in Science.
"There was no reason for us to expect that an algae bloom like this would happen," geochemist Seth John, assistant professor of Earth sciences at USC Dornsife and an author of the study, said in a press release . "Lava doesn't contain any nitrate."
John and his colleagues believe the massive influx of piping hot lava into the ocean forced cold water to rise up from the deep ocean, bringing nitrogen and other fertilizing nutrients with it.
Green algae—different from harmful red algae —plays a vital role in the ocean ecosystem. It forms the base of the ocean’s food chain and is an important food source for zooplankton, fish, and crustaceans, which are quickly gobbled up by larger ocean-dwellers like sharks, seals, whales, and, of course, humans.
This isn’t the first time that volcanoes have spurred life in the oceans. A 2008 eruption in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands triggered a nearby algal bloom that revived ailing salmon populations.
Story continues
Scientists suspect there may be another benefit to the bloom: These microscopic marine plants also eat up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and supply more than half the world’s oxygen .
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Former Vice President Joe Biden falsely claimed he opposed increased funding for state prisons during a defense of the 1994 anti-crime bill that he wrote.
Biden, who has also given misleading statements about his vociferous opposition to mandatory busing, is having a similarly rough time defending the crime bill he shepherded through the Senate. Many Democrats now point to the 1994 legislation as a leading cause of mass incarceration, as well as racial disparities in sentencing.
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Speaking at an event in South Carolina on Saturday, Biden claimed that his record on the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was “grossly misrepresented” before misrepresenting it himself.
"I didn't support more money to build state prisons. I was against it. We should be building rehab centers and not prisons," Biden claimed.
It’s true that Biden did not want to spend as much on prisons as Republican senators did in the '90s. But he was quite adamant that he wanted to spend billions for new state prisons.
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During an August 1994 press conference, Biden said the $10 billion in funding that Republicans called for was “too much money on prisons” before adding, “I like the figure that I wrote in my bills: $6 billion."
He urged other Democrats to back his proposal to increase spending to build state prisons.
"We built prisons to keep pace with the number of federal prisoners," he told a congressional conference committee that was working on the legislation in June 1994. "States have fallen behind.”
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"They have too few cops, too few prison cells, too few programs to help our children avoid crime," he said. "We have not built new prisons to keep up with the increase in violent crime in America. We have not tried and failed — we haven't tried at a state level before. And this is partially our attempt to help the states and localities try.”
Asked by CNN about Biden’s false claim, campaign spokesman Andrew Bates insisted that Biden did not mean he had opposed all additional state prison spending, but rather the extra $4 billion that Republicans wanted. "Vice President Biden was referring to how Republicans wanted to provide more money for prison construction than he felt was right," Bates told the network.
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But in the years that followed the bill’s passage, Biden repeatedly bragged that the extra spending for state prisons was a good thing — even as mass incarceration continued to grow, disproportionately affecting African-American men.
In a 1997 speech, Biden touted “more prisons” as one of the “smart” policies the Senate had implemented.
"It was only a very few years ago when no one thought we could do anything about violent crime. But in 1994, we started getting smart. We did it all: more police, more prisons, more treatment and more prevention. And what was unthinkable just a few years ago has happened. Just look at the most recent FBI data: Murder has fallen to the lowest rate since 1970," he said.
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In a 1998 press release, Biden’s office touted his support for additional state prison funding.
"Delaware leads the nation with some of the toughest and longest sentences,” Biden said in the press release. “The Crime Law is backing up that tough talk on crime with the funding needed to help states keep criminals off the streets."
Biden's misleading defense of his support for state prison funding also undercuts his defense for writing a bill that expanded incarceration in America.
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Biden said at an event in May that the crime bill “did not generate mass incarceration” because most inmates end up in state prisons instead of federal ones. He failed to mention, just as he did on Saturday, that he supported billions to build new state prisons and backed a provision that required states to incarcerate people for longer periods if they wanted to get the funding.
It is true that the 1994 bill did not directly cause mass incarceration, which had been growing for the preceding two decades. But there is little doubt that the bill exacerbated the trend, and particularly impacted African Americans. Biden was also a key driver of other bills that made this problem worse.
In 1984, he co-sponsored a bill that imposed mandatory minimum sentences. In 2001, the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that "whites are more likely than non-whites to be sentenced below the applicable mandatory minimum."
In 1986, Biden co-sponsored a bill that imposed harsher penalties on crack cocaine users than on powdered cocaine users. After the bill imposed 100 times stricter penalties for crack cocaine than powdered cocaine, the Sentencing Commission found that "blacks accounted for 88.3% of federal crack cocaine distribution convictions in 1993."
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The African-American incarceration rate increased from 1,200 per 100,000 in 1985 to 2,450 per 100,000 in 2000 — and increased to 3,457 per 100,000 among black men. | {
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COURTSIDE LEGACY
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Celebrate the legacy of the G.O.A.T's, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan with our latest world exclusive drops with heat you can't get anywhere else. | {
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Mario Kart Arcade GP DX USA/Europe Version Gets It’s First Major Update arcadehero
When it was first announced, a unique aspect of Bandai Namco’s Mario Kart Arcade GP DX compared to previous entries in the series was the promise of ‘annual updates offered over the online network.’ In Japan they have already enjoyed 2 updates but where the International version came along later, the updates were also delayed. Namco has been quiet about those updates in the meantime while locations with the game have had to pay a monthly fee to help cover the costs of these future updates.
Apparently the update has now rolled out, as tipped to me by Blake Hess:
I work at an FEC (Main Event in Alpharetta GA) and our MK AC GP DX just got updated to version 1.04 EX yesterday. The update added most of the things Japan got last year: Metal Mario, Rosalina, mirror modes of all tracks, a new title screen, what seems like new vehicles and power ups, and improved drifting mechanics. The drifting can now give you a boost at the end much like the console MK games. There are 3 levels of boost depending on how long your drift lasts. IMO this addition makes the game feel way more like a “real” Mario Kart game.
The most recent update that Japan received included an online cross-site vs. location mode which I imagine might make it in the next annual update. That would likely increase a lot of renewed interest in the game as well, if they decide to implement it here.
Bandai Namco originally promised 5 years of major updates to keep the game fresh – new items, characters, tracks and modes. What do you want to see them add to the game?
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Friday morning, SpaceX was prepping for what should have been an otherwise routine launch — sending 10 satellites into orbit for longtime customer Iridium — when the company made a strange announcement. During the live stream leading up to the mission, a SpaceX employee explained that the company would have to cut off footage from the Falcon 9 rocket once the vehicle reached orbit. And the host said restrictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were to blame.
Viewers were immediately confused. SpaceX had cut off live streams early before, but only for national security reasons. Why was NOAA, an agency devoted to studying the Earth’s climate and oceans, getting involved in the launch of commercial communications satellites?
Why was NOAA, an agency devoted to studying the Earth’s climate and oceans, getting involved in the launch of commercial communications satellites?
NOAA had recently told the company to get a license for the cameras on the rocket, SpaceX said after the launch. The reason? The cameras take video of the Earth from orbit, and NOAA regulates imagery of Earth taken from space, thanks to a 26-year-old law. However, this was the first time SpaceX needed to get a license for its cameras. SpaceX filed a license application just four days before the launch, but NOAA couldn’t approve the use of the cameras in time. (Reviews can take up to 120 days, NOAA says.) So there was a blackout when the Falcon 9 reached orbit.
What changed? SpaceX and other rocket companies have been live-streaming their launches from orbit for years now, and practically all show Earth in the background. Well, it’s possible that SpaceX may be in NOAA’s crosshairs because of the company’s recent Falcon Heavy launch and famous Starman live stream. In February, SpaceX aired live footage of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Tesla in space for hours, with Earth prominently featured in the background. It got massive amounts of attention, and that may have triggered NOAA to reach out to SpaceX, requiring the company to get a license for its cameras, according to a report from SpacePolicyOnline.com.
However, SpaceX says it didn’t need to get a NOAA license for its most recent launch for NASA, which sent supplies to the International Space Station on Monday. Government launches — like the ones SpaceX does for NASA — are exempt from some of the regulations of a commercial mission. But SpaceX does lots of commercial missions, as does its rival the United Launch Alliance and other launch providers. And it looks like all of those launches will need a NOAA license in order to live stream. “Now that launch companies are putting video cameras on stage 2 rockets that reach an on-orbit status, all such launches will be held to the requirements of the law and its conditions,” NOAA said in a statement on March 30th.
“all such launches will be held to the requirements of the law and its conditions.”
NOAA must issue licenses for any commercial spacecraft that does “remote sensing” of the Earth — or basically any vehicle that takes pictures or video of the ground from space, thanks to a law passed by the US government in 1992. At the time, private companies were interested in launching Earth-imaging satellites to make money, but the US was worried that they might inadvertently snap pictures of, say, troop movements overseas, and then sell that data to a foreign government. So a licensing system was put in place under NOAA to make sure these companies didn’t improperly share any sensitive government information.
Of course, back in 1992, satellite imaging technology wasn’t very advanced and there weren’t that many companies that wanted to do it. Fast-forward to today, and new space companies are popping up everywhere to image the Earth from space. One company called Planet has hundreds of small satellites in orbit mapping the entire Earth’s surface every day. Companies are becoming more ambitious, too. Some want to do space-to-space remote sensing or use satellites to take pictures of other objects in space. Others want to observe Earth in infrared light from orbit.
“Originally when the law was put into place, that field was very much in its infancy.”
“Originally when the law was put into place, that field was very much in its infancy, and it was a positive step forward to enable it to happen at all,” Brian Weeden, a space expert at the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit that specializes in space security, tells The Verge. “But in the decade since, the technology has rapidly progressed and there are types of remote sensing that are being done that weren’t really envisioned in the law.”
Meanwhile, rocket launch live streams have become super popular — and common. In fact, it’s weird not to show footage from a vehicle that’s flying to space these days. However, the 1992 law doesn’t really address how to regulate cameras on rockets because that wasn’t envisioned when the law was written, Weeden says. Once companies started live-streaming from their rockets — showing views of Earth from orbit — that may have crossed the threshold into NOAA regulation territory. So it’s possible that SpaceX and other commercial rocket companies have needed licenses for the cameras on their rockets this whole time, and NOAA is just now noticing.
There’s still some confusion around the live stream saga, though. NOAA claims that SpaceX was the one to reach out to the agency about getting a license, not the other way around. “It was SpaceX that came to us,” Tahara Dawkins, the director of NOAA’s Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs Office said at a meeting Tuesday, according to Space News. “It wasn’t NOAA that went out to them and said, ‘Hey, stop, you’re going to need a license.’” SpaceX disagrees. A company spokesperson, speaking on background, says it only filed an application after NOAA said the cameras qualified as a “remote sensing space system” and needed a license. (We asked NOAA for further clarification and will update the story if we hear back.)
Plus, neither NOAA nor SpaceX will admit that the Falcon Heavy launch was what started this chain of events, but Weeden argues it’s the likeliest catalyst. “Starman probably attracted so much attention that someone at NOAA or someone at SpaceX realized they may have crossed that threshold to start thinking about that license,” he says. When asked during Tuesday’s meeting if SpaceX had broken the law with its past broadcasts from space, NOAA’s Dawkins said “she would not know without looking specifically at what took place,” according to SpacePolicyOnline.com.
NOAA says it will work with companies to make sure they are properly licensed to live stream from space
NOAA says it will work with companies to make sure they are properly licensed to live stream from space and that these broadcasts don’t hinder national security. However, Weeden argues this whole ordeal demonstrates why the laws surrounding remote sensing need an update. Rocket live streams are usually low resolution and don’t provide much detail of Earth. And the argument for protecting national security doesn’t quite work, either, since other countries have put their own Earth-imaging satellites into orbit — and they’re not obligated to get US licenses. “The minute that other satellites go up that don’t fall under US law, [the law] doesn’t really prevent adversaries from getting intelligence and it just hinders US industry,” says Weeden. “That’s the core public policy debate right now.”
This area of regulation is something that the current administration is trying to streamline, too. The National Space Council met in February to discuss reforming regulations surrounding the commercial space industry. One recommendation from the meeting was to update the framework for getting licenses for rockets and spacecraft. So it’s possible some changes to this process may be coming soon.
It’s not clear when those changes will come. SpaceX’s next commercial launch is scheduled for the end of April. The company declined to say if they’d filed to get licenses for cameras for that launch. | {
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A month ago the second costliest-storm in U.S. history wreaked havoc on the East Coast. New York is seeking $42 billion in federal aid, and New Jersey is seeking nearly $37 billion. While the federal government has distinct capabilities that are essential for disaster response and recovery, including disaster aid, it is also uniquely positioned to sponsor the research required to develop new technologies, strategies, and tactics to better deal with large-scale disasters.
One objective of the National Health Security Strategy of the United States of America is to ensure that all systems that support national health security are based on the best available science, evaluation, and quality improvement methods. A first step is to understand how research funds are currently being spent.
A new article in Health Affairs presents RAND's findings from the first-ever inventory of non-classified, civilian national health security research funded by the federal government.
Our analysis reveals that preparing for biological threats and bioterrorism dominates the U.S. government's portfolio of health security research. Of the 1,593 projects examined, 1,047 (66 percent) were directed towards biological threats. Fewer than 10 percent of the total pool of projects addressed natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. Eight of the 10 priorities identified in the National Health Security Strategy—including fostering informed, empowered individuals and communities and incorporating recovery into planning and response—receive scant attention.
Given the broad range of threats facing the United States, including those related to extreme weather, it is imperative that monies invested in enhancing health security be well spent. Biological threats certainly represent a risk to health security. But it is questionable whether these threats warrant more attention than all of the other threats combined.
To get more bang for the research buck, we recommend that priority setting be based on the nature of each threat, the probability that an incident will occur, the magnitude of damage it could inflict, and the availability of countermeasures to limit or reduce its consequences. We also recommend a voluntary process of information sharing between agencies to improve coordination, along with a shared approach to categorize research projects.
The resulting output would help government officials, researchers, and policymakers discern patterns of funding, track progress in the field, and avoid wasteful duplication of efforts. That, ultimately, could go a long way toward ensuring the nation's health security.
Shoshana Shelton is a project associate at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.
Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis. | {
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Brian Chilson
Scott Hardin of the Department of Finance and Administration reports the latest developments in the
The state ABC, which oversees marijuana cultivation and sale, has received three requests for final inspection from Fiddler’s Green in Mountain View, Native Green Wellness Center in Hensley and Greenlight Dispensary in Helena-West Helena. Dates haven’t been set yet for inspections.
Meanwhile, Arkansas Natural Products in Clinton was recently inspected by the ABC and Hardin said he anticipated approval for it to open early next week.
The Medical Marijuana Commission will meet next at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. | {
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In parts of Australia dogs are turning to hallucinogenic amphibians to get high, according to a film about cane toads in the country. The reasons for the usage is unclear but filmmaker Mark Lewis, who explored the subject of doggy psychedelics in his recent film "Cane Toads: The Conquest," told the Daily News some dogs are in need of interventions. | {
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By Printus LeBlanc
Paul Manafort is in a fight for his life, literally. He is currently facing up to 305 years in prison if he is convicted of all the crimes he is alleged to have committed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Manafort is currently in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day now as terrorists at GITMO are live better than he does. For what? Did this man murder, rape, or commit an act of violence? No. Surely, he is a mastermind behind a criminal organization spanning the globe? No.
Paul Manafort is in jail for one reason and one reason only, he worked for President Trump during his election campaign. The trial of Paul Manafort makes participation in the political process illegal.
The Mueller investigation has been tainted from the beginning. Robert Mueller staffed the investigation with over a dozen partisan lawyers and investigators. Many of the investigators also have disturbing conflicts of interests while others have horrendous records at the DOJ.
It is easy to call the investigation phony because Mueller’s team hasn’t investigated anything to do with Russia collusion. The team has not taken control of the DNC server to prove Russia hacked the server. The Russian lawyer working for Fusion GPS that had the meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Natalia Veselnitskaya, has yet to be interviewed by anyone from Mueller’s team let alone contacted.
And finally, there have been no media reports about Mueller or anyone from his hit squad attempting to interview Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. The entire premise of the Russia collusion story hinges on whether Assange got the emails from Russian government sources or not. One would think at least one of those leads should be followed up on if Russia collusion is the real purpose of the investigation. Maybe Mueller isn’t looking into Russia collusion because if he did and found none, that would mean his investigation might be terminated?
It has become crystal clear the probe has nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with going after political enemies, and the most recent filing by Mueller’s team in the case against Manafort should scare every American. The filing has turned the criminal case against Manafort into the most important criminal case in U.S. history.
For the last few weeks Manafort’s defense team has argued their client’s work for then-candidate Trump has no bearing on the current trial, stating, “Evidence or argument relating to Mr. Manafort’s work for then-candidate Trump’s campaign in 2016 or the Special Counsel’s investigation of the campaign’s alleged collusion with the Russian government is wholly irrelevant to whether Mr. Manafort’s personal income tax returns were false, whether he willfully failed to file reports of foreign accounts, and whether he conspired to commit, or committed, bank fraud.”
Mueller’s team agrees with the defense that the trial has nothing to do with Russia collusion, responding to Manafort’s lawyers, “The government does not intend to present at trial evidence or argument concerning collusion with the Russian government and, accordingly does not oppose the defendant’s motion in that respect.” But the Mueller team still argued the case has something to do with the President because when Manafort allegedly lied about his income on a loan application while he was working for then-candidate Trump.
Remember, the special counsel was set up to investigate Russia collusion and has now admitted it is investigating subjects that have nothing to do with Russia collusion. Why?
As Judge T.S. Ellis stated earlier in the trial, “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort. You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”
What the Mueller team is doing here should turn every American’s stomach. Mueller knows Northern Virginia and Washington D.C., the two venues for the Manafort trials, are virulently anti-Trump. Mueller is using the political hatred for the President to get a favorable verdict against Manafort. Is this justice?
If it is considered justice, the Department of Justice should change its name to DOP, the Department of Persecution. The latest moves by the Special Council has made it abundantly clear Paul Manafort is being prosecuted because of his political affiliations. If found guilty, Manafort will be perhaps the first political prisoner in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
Mueller, his henchman, and the DOJ should be extremely careful moving forward. The persecution of political enemies will destroy any confidence the American public has left in the justice system. The next defense lawyer going into court against a U.S. Attorney only has to bring up the political persecution of Manafort and claim the same thing for his or her client while making sure there is at least one Trump supporter on the jury. Instant hung jury. By making politics illegal, Mueller is in danger of making the DOJ and FBI irrelevant institutions.
Printus LeBlanc is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government. | {
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ORLANDO - A Florida man and woman convicted of having sex on a public beach in the presence of a child are facing up to 15 years in prison and having to register as sex offenders, their lawyer said on Tuesday.
Elissa Alvarez, 20, and Jose Caballero, 40, were arrested on Bradenton Beach in western Florida in July after other beachgoers, among them the mother of a 4-year-old who saw the activity, called police to complain.
A video taken by one of the witnesses, which shows Alvarez, a dental office assistant, moving suggestively atop Caballero, a personal trainer, was posted on YouTube and was widely viewed online.
Mobile users, click here
"They're devastated, absolutely devastated," said Ronald Kurpiers, the pair's attorney. "I don't think that what they did was meant for them to be called a sex offender."
A jury on Monday found the pair guilty of lewd or lascivious exhibition in front of a child, a second-degree felony, after deliberating for 15 minutes.
Prior to trial, the defendants rejected plea deals that would have limited Caballero's penalty to 2.5 years in prison and Alvarez's punishment to 90 days in jail, Kurpiers said, adding that his clients deny they had intercourse on the beach.
The deal would also have spared the pair from registering as sex offenders.
After the verdict was handed down, prosecutors said they would push for a harsher sentence for Caballero than for Alvarez, because he has a previous felony conviction for drug trafficking, the Bradenton Herald newspaper reported.
Prosecutors did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.
Registered sex offenders are restricted from living in some areas and must follow rules about visiting schools, parks and places where children gather. Their names, photographs and addresses are searchable on a sex offender public registry, often for life.
David Weinstein, a Miami-based criminal defense lawyer, said the prosecutors appears to have been highly aggressive in the case and that the jury's swift deliberation suggests it may not have properly studied the evidence, which could be grounds for an appeal.
"Talk about killing an ant with a sledgehammer," he said. | {
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LAPD Body Cam Footage Can't Be FOIA'ed; Used In Court Cases Only
from the and-this-fixes-what? dept
The Los Angeles Police Department is getting ready to deploy 7,000 body cameras. That's (mostly) good news. Body cams have the potential to deter bad behavior both by cops and by those they interact with. It's not a complete fix for police misconduct but it's far better than allowing things to continue to run as they have for so many years.
The first 800 cameras have been financed by private donors, including director Steven Spielberg and the Dodgers organization. While traditional public funding would likely have been available, this one-time fundraiser has allowed the process to move much faster than running it through the usual city channels.
This is also good news as 22 donors fronted $1.5 million, showing there's significant public interest in seeing police officers outfitted with body cameras. Now, here comes the bad news.
Privacy-minded groups like the ACLU -- while applauding the move towards greater accountability -- have expressed valid concerns about citizens being caught on camera. It's looking for the crafting of policies that will prevent the distribution of footage to "YouTube and TMZ," as well as safeguards against collected video being passed around departments for the amusement of police officers.
There are also unanswered questions concerning access within police departments. For instance: should officers have access to footage they've captured? -- Being allowed to do so may result in cops aligning their reports with their recordings. While that is a concern, there's no reason to believe officers shouldn't have access to applicable footage when writing reports -- but that does leave the door open for post-incident narrative-massaging. It will be up to those policing the police to determine whether the footage matches the story. That's part of the internal structure, unfortunately, and it's part of what keeps these cameras from being a better solution to the police misconduct problem. Independent reviews will be necessary, but there's been no indication yet that the LAPD is leaning that way.
The really bad news is the fact that the LAPD has opted to almost completely remove the public from the equation.
[LAPD Police Chief Charlie] Beck also said Tuesday that the footage would not be released to the public and would be available only through criminal and civil court proceedings.
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–The Techdirt Team
And there goes the accountability. It's likely this move was prompted by certain activists in other cities who have placed FOIA requests for all body cam footage in perpetuity . This is an understandable reaction, but there is a middle ground that doesn't seem to have been contemplated. Limitations could be amended into local Freedom of Information statutes that would prevent overly-broad requests such as these. (And, of course, this too has the potential for abuse...)As it stands now, body cam footage will only be viewed in a courtroom. This provides for almostaccountability. The deployment of 7,000 body cams loses its deterrent effect if officers know that footage won't be seen unless it's showing their side of the story (criminal cases) or working against them in civil suits. Civil suits obviouslya deterrent, considering how many have been filed, how often settlements have been paid and how often officers are grantedpartial immunity in civil cases.The LAPD may be ahead of the curve when it comes to full-blown body cam programs but if this doesn't change, the impact will be negligible.
Filed Under: body cams, foia, lapd, police, privacy | {
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by
Nate Kenyon writes thrillers, suspense and horror for Thomas Dunne Books. He also writes video game novelizations for Blizzard Entertainment in the worlds of StarCraft and Diablo. His novel, Bloodstone, was a Bram Stoker Award finalist and winner of the P&E Horror Novel of the Year. His novel, The Reach, was a Bram Stoker Award Finalist. His latest novel is the techno-thriller Day One (Thomas Dunne/St. Martins Press). Booklist gave it a starred review, calling it “exciting and inventive.” Library Journal called it a “must” and Kenyon’s “scariest to date.” Day One was also recently optioned for a film. Visit him at NateKenyon.com.
This is Part Two of Tim’s interview with Nate. Find Part One on SF Signal.
—————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Tim Ward: Your earlier work was pretty straight Horror, and there is a little bit of that in your thriller, DAY ONE. What’s your approach to writing across genres in a business that may have thought too long on whether authors should write across genres, and if they do, if they should write under the same name or use a pseudonym?
Nate Kenyon: I try not to think too much about genre. I want to write stories that interest me, under the assumption that if I’m interested, the reader will be, too. I’ve always considered myself a thriller writer in the most general sense–which simply means that I want to thrill readers with anything I write. My stories tend to turn dark and creepy, but not always. I leave the rest to the marketing people. I get why they feel the need to label writers and novels, although I have to say that I think we tend to do readers a disservice by doing it. Readers are smart enough to find good stories and recommend them to others, regardless of how they’re marked and packaged.
TW: What were some of the challenges writing DAY ONE?
NK: I wanted to bring traditional sci fi concepts to a contemporary thriller. I wanted this to feel like a present day novel, not one set in some future–even if it might be a few years away. So I was working with some constraints, although I obviously took a few liberties with what is possible today. But during my research I was shocked at how far we’ve come with artificial intelligence–many concepts in DAY ONE are much closer than most people think.
TW: How are you trying to improve on your craft and career right now, post-DAY ONE?
NK: I’m always working to improve my writing. Reading good novels is the best way I’ve found to get better. Good prose inspires me and makes me think about ways I can improve my own. I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately, preparing to start my next novel.
TW: We talked earlier about DAY ONE being a Science Fiction story geared more toward the everyman of our day, that as long as someone is aware of how social media works and current internet based technology, they’d have no problem slipping into your storyworld. It surely worked for me, as I was hooked right away and found it a very easy to read story.
NK: That’s great to hear. As I wrote above, I really wanted this to be an approachable story for most readers. Having an understanding and fondness for gadgets might help, but anyone should be able to enjoy DAY ONE, regardless of their knowledge of hacking, computers or AI. I think I’ve mostly succeeded in that, since I’ve heard from a number of readers who have told me they are far from “techies” and this isn’t their usual genre–but they still loved the story.
TW: Some Science Fiction authors have chosen other genres in order to boost their career toward full-time writing. I don’t know how much you concern yourself over choosing stories to write based on what might sell better, but your approach with DAY ONE seemed a wise one because it uses common enough technology that people who wouldn’t look for Science Fiction would be interested. Does it look like this more realistic scifi could be how Science Fiction writers may be able to write in this genre and sell well enough to stay?
NK: I hope there’s room for all sorts of writers to succeed, but your question is a practical one and makes some sense to consider. As writers we don’t often think long and hard about the size of our audience (at least not while we’re writing), but the fact of the matter is this is a business, and we’re selling a product at the end of the day. I wouldn’t want to compromise the story in search of the widest possible audience, but if we can find a way to make our stories more approachable, I think it makes sense to do that.
That said, I’ve read a lot of fairly hardcore sci fi novels that worked well for a wide range of readers. Ultimately, I think, it’s about the connection with the characters. If you love the characters in a story and you can relate to them, you’ll go along for the ride.
TW: Thank you for stopping by, Nate. I really enjoyed DAY ONE, and a large part of that was because of how much I empathized with the hero’s struggle to be a husband and father with the doubt that he just wasn’t good enough. The way this story forced him to fight for his family was truly memorable. Thank you for stopping by, Nate. I really enjoyed, and a large part of that was because of how much I empathized with the hero’s struggle to be a husband and father with the doubt that he just wasn’t good enough. The way this story forced him to fight for his family was truly memorable. My Goodreads review of DAY ONE
—————————————————————————————————————————————————
Timothy C. Ward
Executive Producer
Timothy C. Ward has been podcasting since 2010, first as AudioTim, and now with AISFP. His first publication, Cornhusker: Demon Gene (A Short Story) , is available on Kindle for $.99. His novel in progress, Kaimerus, is described as “Firefly crashes on Avatar and wakes up 28 Days Later.”
Subscribe to Adventures in SciFi Publishing podcast on: iTunes | Stitcher Radio (Android users) | RSS | Website RSS | {
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MSNBC host Rachel Maddow led her viewers through a timeline of Facebook’s role in the 2016 presidential campaign and how it points to senior White House advisor and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Maddow read a quote from McClatchy News reporting, “investigators at the House and Senate Intelligence committees and the Justice Department are examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation – overseen by Jared Kushner – helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
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“They cite several people familiar with the parallel inquiries,” Maddow explained. “Peter Stone and Greg Gordon reporting for McClatchy investigators are focusing on whether Trump’s campaign pointed Russian cyber operatives to certain voting jurisdictions, in key states — areas where Trump’s digital team and operatives were spotting weakness in voter support for Hillary Clinton.”
“In that article, crucially, McClatchy spoke with a guy who had just left his post as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia at the Pentagon,” Maddow noted. “So he’s the senior Pentagon official responsible for Russia during the Russian attack on our election.”
“There appears to have been significant cooperation between Russia’s online propaganda machine and individuals in the United States who were knowledgeable about where to target the disinformation,” Maddow read.
“So this would appear to be a key part of what Russia did to try to skew the election toward Donald Trump,” Maddow explained.
“This behavior by the Russians using American social media, specifically using Facebook, it’s a key component of if they had any American help in what they did,” Maddow said. “Whether any Americans knew what they were doing and let it go, or cheered them on, or even helped them do it.”
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“Now that Facebook is no longer denying it, now that everybody involved, except the Trump campaign, I think, admits to exactly what Russia did here, can we now look at what they did to see if they had help?” Maddow asked.
“Because now, there’s really no more disagreement about what happened here. The only question is whether there were American confederates involved, and now it’s a very investigatable thing,” Maddow noted. “You can’t spend foreign money to influence U.S. elections, even just on Facebook ads.
WATCH: | {
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Since our recent price analysis, where we have mentioned the triangle that was forming on the 4-hour chart, we did receive a Bitcoin breakout. However, to the pessimistic surprise, BTC broke up the triangle formation.
The breakout granted the coin the immediate target of previous resistance at $4050. This resistance was tested recently, just three days ago, and over the recent hours, BTC is consolidating around that level.
So the question is whether or not Bitcoin can maintain its value above the $4K mark. However, the issue should be not the $4k, rather targeting the critical $4200 area. Despite getting closer to it, Bitcoin couldn’t overcome the $4200 resistance mark since December 3rd, 2018.
This will be the fourth time Bitcoin will be facing the critical level. The $4200 is the (first) real test above the $4K. A breakout and the bulls can see $5K closer than ever.
Total Market Cap: $141.7 Billion
BTC Dominance: 50.8%
Looking at the 1-day & 4-hour charts
– Support/Resistance: As mentioned above, Bitcoin is now facing the $4050 resistance mark. A break-up and the next target will be the $4100 resistance, before the critical level of $4200. Further above are the $4400 and $4500 levels before the daily chart’s 200-days moving average line (marked in light green), which as of now hovering lies around $4750.
From below, the closest support is the resistance-turned-support area at $3930 – $3950, beneath are the $3850 and $3800 support levels, before reaching the $3700 zone which includes the 50 and 100 days moving average lines (on the daily chart).
– The daily chart’s RSI level: Following our previous BTC analysis, the 60 RSI level had supported the Bitcoin’s daily chart. As of now, the RSI seems strong around the bullish territories. Even though a correction should be reached sooner or later, this is healthy.
– The daily trading volume: We’ve pointed out that the green volume candles are much higher than the red ones, something that could tell on accumulation. However, we do need to see much more volume that will prove that the buyers are back.
– BitFinex open short positions: The short positions have decreased to 21.5K BTC open positions.
BTC/USD BitStamp 4-Hour Chart
BTC/USD BitStamp 1-Day Chart
The post Bitcoin Surpassed $4000, But Will It Hold There (This Time)? Bitcoin Price Analysis March.21 appeared first on CryptoPotato.
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With just a few thousand votes between the two candidates for governor, election night during the US midterms in Wisconsin could not have been more tense. The slender lead kept flipping between Republican and Democrat as various precincts reported their results. Then shortly before midnight a local news presenter suggested, almost as an aside, that there could be about 40,000 more votes yet to be counted from the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee. A week earlier, at a Republican event in nearby rural Kenosha, Milwaukee had been a punchline – an emblem of crime-ridden, multiracial, urban dysfunction. But they weren’t laughing now.
When the numbers were crunched, the Republicans were done. After eight years of austerity, occupations, demonstrations and a failed attempt to recall conservative governor Scott Walker, who was twice re-elected, Democrats took back the governor’s mansion.
In its margins the victory was narrow; in its character it was immense. Out went the Koch-friendly, union bashing, Trump-embracing Republicans. In came a Democratic team with an entirely different trajectory. The governor-elect, Tony Evers, is a former teacher and school superintendent; Mandela Barnes, a 31-year-old African American community organiser, will be his lieutenant governor; Josh Kaul, a former prosecutor and voting rights activists, was elected attorney general; and Sarah Godlewski, a veteran campaigner for fiscal accountability, will be the state treasurer. “These are not the traditional Capitol aides,” Nation magazine columnist and Wisconsin native John Nichols told me. “Gradually, they put together a new kind of politics.”
There is an intimate connection between those years of protest and the nature of this election victory that has national significance in the US. It provides a lesson about the connection between movements and parties, elections and politics, that the Democrats would do well to learn before the new Congress sits in January.
Some of the biggest demonstrations in US history have taken place in the past two years: the two largest were women’s marches while the third was a youth-inspired protest for gun control. Earlier this month, young people turned out to vote at a rate not seen in a quarter of a century. The election saw a record number of women, minorities and minority women sent to Congress.
A record number of women, minorities and minority women were elected to Congress. This was not a coincidence
This was not a coincidence. Nor is it a story that ends with the election of these candidates. What follows is a new chapter in which we will see whether those who were elected are willing and able to deliver.
The challenge is not a new one. There are many within the liberal establishment who struggle to understand politics beyond elections. If a political action is not geared, at least in part, to voting a certain way then they see limited, if any, value in it. “Simply being in a public place and voicing your opinion in and of itself doesn’t do anything politically,” said Congressman Barney Frank regarding the then-burgeoning Occupy Wall Street movement. That would be news to the suffragettes and movements for civil rights and trade unions, among others.
When President John F Kennedy tried to persuade civil rights leaders to call off the March on Washington in 1963, where Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech, he said it could damage important legislation he hoped to pass. “We want success in Congress,” he told them. “Not just a big show at the Capitol.” The African-American trade union leader A Philip Randolph warned him: “The Negroes are already in the streets. It is very likely impossible to get them off.” The march, and protests across the country, played a far bigger role in shaping the racial politics and civil rights legislation of the next few years than Kennedy’s bill ever could.
The connection between those in the streets and those at the ballot box is not always immediate and causal. Often it is a question of framing, inspiration and articulation – movements create space for conversations that elected officials are often too wary to have. They address issues too urgent for a timetable geared not around the needs of people but the re-election of candidates. Disparaging as Frank was about Occupy Wall Street, the Barack Obama White House believed it had a significant effect on his re-election prospects.
“I think it had a significant change in the overall climate in that it reframed the discussion nationally and it did two things,” Anita Dunn, White House communications director early in Obama’s presidency, told Dan Balz in his book Collision 2012. “One, it gave people permission to openly discuss something that had not really been openly discussed which was the growing inequalities and the unfairness. Two, it gave many members of the Democratic party much more confidence in going to those places in the criticism of the Republican policies.”
Not only that, but “Democrats respond when they’re pushed,” as Jesse Sharkey, now the leader of the Chicago Teachers Union, told me after Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012. “They’re much more a weather vane than Republicans. If the wind’s blowing hard enough they’ll move.”
There has been a gale afoot for some time now. The election of the most racially diverse and most female Congress ever is clearly a product of a moment in which #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, Women’s Marches, Fight for 15, immigrant rights, gun control and climate change have emerged or continued to surge. The election of a misogynist bigot to the White House has doubtless been a catalyst for women and minorities to stand for election too.
The Democratic party is an undeserving recipient of the energy and frustration generated over the past two years. It remains to be seen if it has the capacity and desire to become an adequate vessel for it. The fact remains that, electorally, it is also the only meaningful vessel available.
Thanks to movement politics, those in power look different and come from more radical traditions. The question now – indeed the perennial question when it comes to issues of representation and diversity – is will they act differently and honour the traditions that made their election possible?
• Gary Younge is a Guardian columnist | {
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The happy one: Mourinho says he loves working with his ‘special group of players’ at Old Trafford
“I manage big clubs, but I always find them in very similar situations. . . I get the giants, but the giants are difficult when they are in trouble.”
Jose Mourinho has a knack for perception-changing statements. A fortnight ago, just after his current giant extended their impressive Premier League opening, came some words that made you reconsider the challenges of his past three appointments: Real Madrid, Chelsea, Manchester United. One major reconstruction job after another.
When we sit down to talk football at Carrington, the first question selects itself. “Just how much trouble were Manchester United in when you arrived here?”
Mourinho starts his reply slowly, picking his words deliberately. He won’t stop speaking for another 10 minutes. “Well,” he says. “The story was | {
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Le Monde's story was shot down by Berlin and Paris, but there is little doubt that certain officials have been trying to build momentum for a rescue. It is clear that the EU family is split on the issue. Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, backs "assistance", with support of EU integrationists hoping to nudge the EU towards full fiscal union. | {
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The arrest in Ukraine of a Frenchman suspected of planning 15 attacks on French soil during Euro 2016 has revived fears over security during the tournament.
Ukraine’s security service the SBU says the 25-year-old detained last month near the Polish border had an arsenal of weapons and explosives, including rocket launchers and Kalashnikov assault rifles.
According to those who have questioned him he had ultra-nationalist views: angry at immigration, Islam and globalisation – and planned to attack a mosque, a synagogue and French tax offices.
French police have reportedly found a T-shirt with a far-right logo at his home – but no evidence so far of a terrorist plot. There appears to be no evidence the football tournament itself was being targeted.
An adviser to Ukrainian intelligence told euronews the young man had been in contact with forces fighting on Ukrainian territory and had received weapons training.
“He entered into the Ukrainian territory December last year, he contacted a serviceman of the Ukrainian forces, but the SBU already knew about it. He was in contact with someone from the forces that have been fighting for the integrity of Ukraine. He also had training with those weapons on Ukrainian territory,” said Yuri Tandid, who is an adviser to the head of the SBU.
There are fears that the conflict in the east could provide fertile ground for terrorists seeking cheap combat weapons.
“Twenty-five people from one of our neighbouring countries who wanted to enter the European Union were arrested on Ukrainian territory. They are alleged members of Islamist terrorist organisations,” Tandid added.
The Ukrainians say the arrest of the Frenchman followed months of surveillance. Reports say he could be extradited to France.
France is on high alert after militants killed one hundred and thirty people in a spate of shootings and suicide bombings in Paris last November.
Euronews correspondent Sergio Cantone reported from Kyiv:
“Throughout this operation, the Ukrainian security service and the Ukrainian authorities in general are showing the European Union that it can count on them when it comes to their own security. Of course, they’re doing that also in the framework of the negotiation concerning the conflict in the Donbas.” | {
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Know that feeling?
To cancel your Yellow Pages delivery:
1- Go on the website > https://www.directoryselect.com.au/action/home
2- Click on Cancel Book and enter your address. Then click on Find Available Books, and Cancel Book.
The cancellation might take a few months to take effect, but should last forever. If you move, you'll have to repeat the process.
It's a gesture that takes only a few seconds of your time, but that has a lasting positive effect on the environment.
Make sure to spread the word and let your friends and family know! | {
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‘I had to figure out what it meant to be a bridge builder.’’
Life in Somalia before the civil war was beautiful. When the war happened, I was 8 years old and at that stage of understanding the world in a different way. We fled to Kenya and ended up living in a refugee camp for four years. We arrived in the U.S. when I was 12.
My family called me the “why kid” growing up. I always needed to know why something is happening, why I had to do something, why whatever. I still am that way. I constantly question myself, I question those around me, I question policy and reasoning behind everything.
I talk a lot about the men in my family because my mother died when I was little and my grandmother died when my aunts were little, so we didn’t have those kinds of heads of household. But all the members of our household who were female were sort of living as equal, and as wise as the male figures in our family. We didn’t really grow up in a gendered environment. We didn’t have a hierarchy. My family is fearless. They truly believe that they have something to contribute to society and that it is an obligation as humans. I try to embed in my children that they have something to contribute. And that you give because you have to, not to be appreciated.
When we were going through the relocation process they do an orientation of what your new home country is going to look like. The America we were going to was very glossy and picturesque—the only things that existed were white picket fences and beautifully mowed lawns and everybody seemed to have everything that they need. When we arrived, our first experience was driving through Manhattan. There was graffiti everywhere. Trash everywhere. Panhandlers and people who were homeless sleeping on the streets. I remember looking to my dad for answers. I said, “This doesn’t look like the America you promised.” He said, “Well we haven’t gotten to our America yet, you just need to be patient.”
Photograph by Luisa Dörr for TIME
Somalia is a majority black Muslim country and so is the camp in Kenya. When you’re growing up in an environment where your faith and your race are not topics of conversation, it’s really hard to come to an environment where all of that means something. Being black in the U.S. means something. There’s a history. Being an immigrant, a refugee, Muslim—all of those things represent an otherness that is not typical or easily confined into the social fabric of this country. As someone who grew up never really having to feel less than, it’s a hard reality to wake up to when you’re 12. I had to figure out what it meant to be a bridge builder-—what it meant to forge relationships that really never existed becomes the backstory to how I ended up where I am.
People think of Minneapolis as a very liberal, progressive city. We have a lot of immigrants here. The incumbent I was running against was a trailblazer when it comes to women in politics, so you would think that my gender wouldn’t be a big issue. But everybody wanted to make that an issue. To her, people were excited to vote for me because I was pretty. To the Muslim and Somali communities, my gender was a problem because politics is supposed to be a man’s role. Then there was the typical stuff that women candidates deal with—as a mother, how irresponsible I must be to want to run and devote as much time out of the home. No one ever asks the male candidates who are also fathers how they expect to balance family life. Gender was a big thing.
People said I should be proud of myself if I got even 10% of the votes, but I’m pretty competitive. I wanted to keep going so I could prove them wrong. I ended up pushing all of the negative things aside because I kept thinking, regardless of whether we win or lose, this will shift the narrative about what is possible.
Omar was elected on Nov. 8, 2016, to represent Minneapolis’ District 60B in the Minnesota house of representatives. As of November 2018, Ilhan Omar is also the FIRST Somali American elected to the U.S. Congress. | {
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Your Ultimate Guide to the 2019 Night in Chinatown and Lunar New Year Parade
Celebrate Chinese New Year in Honolulu and ring in the Year of the Pig at Night in Chinatown on Feb. 2.
By Jayna Omaye
Update as of January 2020: There will be no Night in Chinatown and Lunar New Year Parade in 2020.
Photo: Brent Wong
A new year means new beginnings for the popular Night in Chinatown festival. The event was abruptly canceled last year due to a lack of funding and poor vendor turnout. But with help from grant money and a partnership with the city, the long-standing Chinese New Year event is back this year. So, if you missed watching lion dances while indulging in traditional Chinese food, see you on Feb. 2.
What It Is
Held since the 1970s, Night in Chinatown features a block party filled with food, games, live entertainment, prizes and cultural demonstrations. The nonprofit Chinatown Merchants Association, which organizes the festival, hopes to have about 100 vendors selling food and drinks and about 30,000 people attending this year. A highlight of the day is the Lunar New Year parade through Chinatown with about 80 performing groups.
SEE ALSO: How 5 Popular Ethnic Festivals in Honolulu Adapt While Keeping Traditions Alive
Photos: NIGHT IN CHINATOWN
When and Where
The free block party will be from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Smith, Maunakea and Pauahi streets. The parade will go from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m., from the state Capitol to Merchant Street and through Chinatown.
SEE ALSO: 8 Things You Can Only Find in Honolulu’s Chinatown
Where to Park
You can park in the municipal lots throughout downtown Honolulu and Chinatown. Or try to snag a spot on Vineyard Boulevard. But drivers be warned: There will be multiple street closures in the area throughout the day. For more information, click here. If you can, take the bus, walk or get dropped off. You could also bike to the festival—find the nearest Biki stations here.
What to Eat
Although there will be a spread of traditional Chinese food sold at the block party—jin dui and gau are the most popular—there will also be dishes from other cultures, including Thai, Vietnamese and Hawaiian.
SEE ALSO: The Inside Scoop on Where You Can Find Some of the Best Chinese Food in Chinatown
Entertainment
Catch live entertainment and traditional Chinese dances, as well as local artists and cultural demonstrations. Take your children to the kids zone for games and prizes. Don’t forget to bring a dollar for the Chinese lion dances (and be ready for popping firecrackers).
The parade will feature a colorful assortment of community groups from all walks of life, including those ever-present lion dancers, the Royal Hawaiian Band and Girl Scouts.
Check the festival’s website closer to the date of the event for an entertainment lineup.
If you can’t make it to the Lunar New Year parade, watch it on livestream here.
SEE ALSO: Chinatown’s Latest Revival is Putting it Back on the Map. But Will it Last?
Tips
Be prepared for crowds —the event is packed throughout most of the day. If you’re an early bird, head to the block party right when it opens—the crowds are likely to be smaller then. You’re also more likely to get fresh jin dui (the fried balls of dough aren’t as good when they’ve been sitting around).
Give yourself enough time to see all of the sights—at least two hours (not to mention extra time to find parking).
Portable toilets will be located throughout the block party.
Bring cash (we’re told only some vendors will accept cards).
While you’re in Chinatown, head to the Chinatown Cultural Plaza for more entertainment, food and crafts, along with an appearance by the 2019 Narcissus Queen and her court.
For more information, visit chinesenewyearinhawaii.com. | {
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Denali National Park officials say Wednesday morning, park rangers and wildlife staff euthanized a bear which had been rewarded with human food and had prompted the recent closures in the Savage River area of Denali National Park and Preserve.
According to a prss release Wednesday evening, the last time park management killed a bear conditioned to human food was during the summer of 1980.
Tuesday night, wildlife staff captured the bear using a helicopter and placed it in a culvert trap overnight. Wildlife staff initially planned to collar the bear and release it, in conjunction with aversive conditioning, in the Savage River parking lot.
Park officials say due to the bear’s physical condition park officials determined the best course of action was to destroy the bear.
“The bear was in terrible physical condition and had a deformity,” said Dave Schirokauer, Denali National Park Resources and Science Team Leader.
The National park Service says prior to its capture, the bear had sustained injuries including a broken and badly infected front left leg and a broken nose. In addition, the bear had a deformity; an extra upper-left canine tooth.
The bear was also severely underweight. Park officials say a typical healthy three year-old male grizzly should weigh about 200-250 pounds, but this bear weighed only 130 pounds.
Because the bear was so thin, wildlife staff could not properly fit the bear with a collar, and they determined it was unlikely a collar would have stayed on for long.
To release the bear, staff would have been required to collar it and subject it to strong aversive conditioning. The park’s wildlife biologists concluded hitting the bear with multiple aversive rounds as it was released would potentially have compromised the bear further and possibly resulted in additional injuries, given its poor condition and lack of fat.
National Park Service staff was first alerted to this bear’s behavior early in the week of June 20 when it was reported the bear had charged vehicles in the Primrose area and charged visitors in the Savage River area along the Denali Park Road.
On June 22, the bear approached and charged several hikers on the Savage Alpine Trail. After one of the hikers threw a daypack, hoping to distract it, the bear was rewarded with human food from the pack.
The area was closed and staff used aversive conditioning techniques, including shooting the bear with bean bags. The area reopened on July 1 when the bear had not been seen for five days.
The area was closed again that day when the bear bit and scratched a hiker on the Savage Alpine Trail. Two days later, the bear was observed in the Savage River Campground where wildlife staff hit it with bean bags. The bear ran from the area. Later that day it was discovered that the bear had damaged two tents in Savage River Campground and the campground was closed to tent camping.
When the bear had not been seen for two weeks, staff began implementing a “soft opening” plan on July 18. Several scheduled openings were delayed last week when staff received reports of a bear, or bears, in the area. Staff was not able to confirm whether or not these sightings were the problem bear, but they decided to be prudent and delay further openings. Then on Tuesday, park staff was able to positively identify this bear. A helicopter was called in and the bear was captured last night and euthanized this morning.
All areas previously closed as a result of this bear’s behavior are open.
However, NPS staff knows of at least seven other bears currently in the Mt. Healy, Savage River and Primrose Ridge areas. Park officials are asking everyone to continue to exercise caution and bear-safe practices while hiking in the park.
Park officials say decisions to kill wildlife are not made lightly in Denali National Park, or any other national park, and they say this series of events has impacted many of the staff involved.
“We are all emotionally impacted and physically and emotionally drained by this series of events,” said Schirokauer, “Denali wildlife staff and ranger(s)…pride themselves on managing the park in a manner that is least impactful to wildlife.”
He also said when an animal requires destruction due to people’s actions, it is very hard on park staff, and “we take the loss of the bear personally. We are also not accustomed to it; it’s been 36 years since the park has killed a food-conditioned bear.”
Park officials say the park’s landscape is lonelier with the bear gone; however, the NPS says human safety is paramount. Keeping bears wild and people safe is a fundamental goal in Denali National Park, according to officials. Unfortunately, when bears obtain human food or become bold or aggressive towards humans, park officials say that goal typically becomes unattainable. | {
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I dont abuse drugs I can't even figure out how to use drugs with my abs
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Jason MacDonald quitte son poste pour un emploi dans le secteur privé, a confirmé cette source vendredi.
À environ huit mois des élections fédérales, le premier ministre Stephen Harper perd son directeur des communications. Jason MacDonald a annoncé vendredi qu'il quittait son poste pour un emploi à la firme de lobbyistes Hill et Knowlton.
M. MacDonald, qui doit officiellement quitter ses fonctions la semaine prochaine, aura été le huitième directeur des communications de M. Harper. Il sera resté en poste environ 18 mois. L'entourage du premier ministre a signalé que son départ était prévu depuis un certain temps.
Il est le deuxième proche de Stephen Harper à quitter le navire en l'espace de quelques jours, après la démission surprise de John Baird, qui était ministre des Affaires étrangères.
Le gouvernement a confirmé rapidement qu'il serait remplacé par Rob Nicol, un haut dirigeant de Canadian Tire qui avait travaillé en étroite collaboration avec l'ex-premier ministre ontarien Mike Harris, de 2000 à 2002.
Après ce bref passage en politique, il s'était ensuite occupé des relations publiques et des communications pour l'autoroute à péage 407, en Ontario.
Selon Duncan Fulton, un vice-président de Canadian Tire, M. Nicol a annoncé sa démission vendredi. Il n'a pas tari d'éloges sur son ancien collègue. Celui-ci a gravi les échelons depuis son arrivée en 2010 en tant que vice-président associé, ayant tenu plus récemment le rôle de vice-président des relations avec le gouvernement, selon son curriculum vitae en ligne.
«Il est très intelligent et très stratégique. C'est une grande perte pour nous (...) C'est une des personnes les plus professionnelles et respectueuses avec qui j'ai eu l'occasion de travailler», a-t-il souligné.
Alors que M. Nicol démissionne, une ancienne directrice des communications de Stephen Harper, Sandra Buckler, s'est jointe à la direction de Canadian Tire récemment. | {
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A series of artillery shells exploded near the main street of a Syrian village close to the border with Turkey on Tuesday, sending a group of visiting international reporters running for cover and underscoring the limits of Syria's partial cease-fire.
The shelling came as Syrian President Bashar Assad said in an interview with German television that rebels who lay down their arms can expect a "full amnesty." Assad was asked in the interview with ARD television airing Tuesday what a moderate rebel could do to be accepted by him as a Syrian civilian again.
According to excerpts released by the channel, he replied: "Just to give up your armament, whether you want to join the political process or (are) not interested about the political process."
He added that the most important thing for him is that citizens can't hold machine guns and hurt people -- "This is the only thing that we ask. We don't ask for anything. As I said, we give them full amnesty."
Assad has made similar gestures in the past, but opposition and rebel groups have rejected such offers saying he has no role to play in the future of Syria.
The journalists were visiting the government-controlled village of Kinsibba, in the coastal province of Latakia, on a trip organized by Russia's defense and foreign ministries.
Russian defense ministry spokesman Maj.-Gen. Igor Konashenkov, who was on the trip, said the projectiles came from positions held by the Nusra Front, al-Qaida's branch in Syria, which is excluded from the Russian and U.S.-brokered cease-fire, along with Islamic State group.
The journalists were traveling in armored trucks provided by the Russian military, and were escorted by Russian special forces.
Reporters were walking across the village, which was seized in a recent government offensive, and talking to locals when the first shell struck a hillside a few hundred meters away. Russian officers yelled at journalists to lie down, and they ducked as more shells fell and landed closer to the group. A Russian armored personnel carrier rushed forward to screen the reporters from direct hits.
A couple of journalists suffered minor scratches as they ran for cover and were quickly treated by Russian military medics. No other casualties were reported.
Just after reporters left, more shells landed in the area, killing three Syrian troops and wounding eight others, Konashenkov said.
The partial cease-fire, which began at midnight Friday, has brought a notable reduction in hostilities for the first time in the five-year war that has killed more than 250,000 people and displaced half of Syria's population.
Yet the truce has remained fragile, with violations reported in many areas and the opposition and Syrian government blaming each other. Russia's defense ministry said on Tuesday the cease-fire has been violated 15 times in the past 24 hours.
Opposition activists and state media reported some violence in different parts of Syria, including the southern city of Daraa, where residential areas were shelled.
Before their trip to Kinsibba, the foreign reporters visited the nearby village of Ghunaymiyah, where residents recently began returning to their homes after the government last month captured the village from Nusra Front fighters.
Most of the buildings in Ghunaymiyah are just concrete shells, with windows and doors missing.
One resident, Musa Magardish, stood in shock in front of his ruined home. "I don't have any money for rebuilding my house, and I have no idea how I can do it," he said.
Just across the street from his house, dozens lined up in front of a Russian military truck to receive food aid including canned meat, beans and other staples.
"I have a big family, there are seven of us, we feel grateful for that," said Nabila Chine, as one of her daughters stood next to her, smiling.
Konashenkov said Russia has delivered around 580 tons of food aid to government-held areas since it began airstrikes in support of Syria's government in September 2015.
At the village's church, which was damaged in the fighting, a few people gathered to clean up the shards of glass and pieces of concrete littering the floor, before praying.
One of the parishioners, Farah Arijan, said Nusra Front militants badly damaged the church when they captured the village in 2012. "They also killed many of our people, one woman was killed when she was trying to flee," he said. | {
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Você sabe quem são esses setes rapazes que aparecem na foto?
Se você está pensando "Claro... são os integrantes do BTS!" e está prestes a dizer o nome de cada um, vai gostar de saber que fomos explorar o mundo deles.
Agora, se esses rostos e essas três letras não significam nada para você, fique sabendo que eles são parte de um fenômeno difícil de ignorar, conhecido como a "onda coreana", que está se transformando em um tsunami.
Para os não iniciados, apenas duas palavras: Gangnam Style.
O clipe da música Gangnam Style, do cantor sul-coreano PSY, foi o vídeo mais visto no YouTube do fim de 2012 até meados de 2017. E é apenas um dos elos de uma cadeia de sucessos que o K-pop tem acumulado em várias partes do mundo, da China ao Chile, da Ucrânia ao Brasil.
Mas a "onda coreana" não é apenas musical. As séries de televisão, conhecidas como K-dramas, também estão se expandindo mundo afora.
Qual será o segredo do sucesso?
Com o intuito de criar um guia de K-pop para iniciantes, procuramos Stacy Nam, uma americana-coreana que trabalha em Seul, com marketing internacional e relações públicas para a indústria da música.
"Eu ajudo os estrangeiros a se apaixonarem por artistas do K-pop e gastarem todo o seu dinheiro", diz ela, rindo.
"Algumas das maiores bandas atualmente são: BTS, claro, e EXO, que é um grupo da agência de entretenimento SM Entertainment. SM são as iniciais de Soo-Man, sobrenome do fundador, que era cantor antes de abrir sua própria agência. "
"Os nomes de muitas das principais agências na Coreia são as iniciais da pessoa que a fundou, como YG Entretainment e JYP Entretainment, ambas também de ex-cantores", explica.
Essas três empresas dominam a indústria. Embora isso não signifique que as outras não tenham chance. A agência do grupo BTS, por exemplo, é pequena e ainda conseguiu chegar ao topo da lista de sucessos nos Estados Unidos.
Qual o papel dessas empresas?
Segundo Nam, a indústria de entretenimento na Coreia do Sul é muito diferente da americana.
"Tomemos como exemplo alguém como Justin Bieber. Alguém o viu no YouTube, reconheceu seu talento e disse: 'quero fazer dele uma estrela'. Dali, foram para o estúdio. Ele não recebeu muito treinamento antes de lançar um álbum."
"No K-pop, se os candidatos são selecionados por uma empresa, ela cuida de tudo. Se você precisa de algum tipo de retoque - como melhorar os dentes, a pele ou até mesmo fazer uma cirurgia plástica - a empresa paga".
Além disso, as agências oferecem aulas de dança e teatro, ensinam como falar em programas de variedades e pagam cursos de idiomas.
"No momento em que os integrantes das bandas, que são chamados de ídolos, estreiam diante do público, um deles saberá falar inglês, outro chinês, outro japonês ...".
Em resumo, eles são treinados para fazer sucesso no mercado internacional.
"Quando eles estreiam, as empresas já investiram uma grande quantia de dinheiro para transformá-los no que são", conta Nam.
Antes e depois
A imagem é tão importante quanto a música... talvez mais. Isso significa que a idade não é apenas um número. Se você deseja ser um ídolo, deve ter entre 15 e 20 anos de idade.
Eles podem começar jovens, mas vão passar até nove anos se formando antes de finalmente serem apresentados ao público.
Durante esse período, espera-se que eles trabalhem por longas horas - em geral, morando em alojamentos oferecidos pela empresa.
Ah! E ter namorados ou namoradas? Claro que não... altamente contraindicado.
Uma imagem perfeita, um estilo de vida ditado pelos outros, uma vida privada restrita... será que é demais?
"Uma vez que você entra na empresa, você tem que provar seu valor e tem que vender. Se é isso que o público exige - um determinado corpo, um certo rosto - você deve fazê-lo", conta à BBC Kim Ye-seul, um aspirante a ídolo.
"Parece que, se você for selecionado, de alguma forma você se tornará propriedade da empresa para a qual você trabalha", sinalizamos para ele.
"Eu concordo com você. Mas não me meti nessa sem saber. Poucas pessoas entram nisso sem estarem cientes das circunstâncias, então eu acho que é algo que você tem que aceitar", respondeu.
Dado o espírito de submissão, talvez não seja surpreendente que a indústria do entretenimento na Coreia do Sul tenha recebido uma quantidade razoável de acusações de abuso.
Uma de suas estrelas cometeu suicídio, deixando para trás uma carta dizendo que seu agente a forçou a fazer sexo com mais de 20 VIPs.
E a arte?
Essas histórias não são suficientes para desencorajar milhares de aspirantes a artistas, nem seus pais. É o caso da família de Kim Ye-seul, que gasta até US$ 500 (cerca de R$ 2 mil) por mês em escolas de ídolos: estabelecimentos que preparam jovens que desejam ser selecionados pelas agências, que vão então treiná-los.
"Há muitas em Seul", conta Lee Sol-lim, diretor da escola frequentada por Kim Ye-seul.
"A indústria de ídolos da Coreia tem 20 anos e há muitas escolas que fazem coisas semelhantes. Agora, até as universidades estão abrindo cursos que ensinam como se tornar um ídolo. A indústria continuará crescendo", diz ele.
Muitas pessoas consideram que a música é essencialmente uma forma de arte, mas nesta indústria parece basicamente um negócio. É justo dizer que o K-pop é, antes de mais nada, um negócio?
"A música ídolo aqui é dominante, e nós a levamos a sério. A música ídolo é uma indústria musical planejada. É um negócio que envolve muita produção, muitas pessoas, então o que sucede é inevitável", responde.
Sucesso orgânico
O K-pop, na verdade, não é uma música de estilo coreano. Se parece mais com o pop britânico ou americano.
Kyunghee Hannah Choi trabalha para a Fundação Coreana para o Intercâmbio Cultural Internacional, que é financiada pelo Ministério da Cultura, Esporte e Turismo da Coreia do Sul.
Para ela, o apelo global do K-pop se deve à mistura da familiaridade com algo novo, e o sucesso da cultura pop sul-coreana como exportação tem sido orgânico, com o governo agindo apenas como um facilitador.
"Dizem que a 'onda coreana' é um sucesso sem design porque ninguém definiu o tipo de estratégia. O governo simplesmente tentou tornar o mercado estável, desenvolvendo políticas mais favoráveis ao mercado e esse tipo de coisa."
A organização em que Hannah Choi trabalha é responsável por contabilizar os rendimentos da "onda coreana", e os resultados mais recentes estão em um livro bem grosso. | {
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On Wednesday evening, neighbors in the Mount Carmel subdivision as well as authorities were searching for him after he was last seen near the Dollar General on Ryland Pike. | {
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DreamHack ZOWIE Open Austin team list finalized
DreamHack have finalized the list of eight teams that will be participating at the ZOWIE Open in Austin, Texas in early May.
The list of invited and qualified teams for DreamHack Zowie Open Austin has been finalized and it will be an all-American event as the top teams from North and South America battle it out for their share of the $100,000 prize pool. A pile up of events coming at teams in the next few months, along with the demanding travel schedule, saw many top-ranked European sides drop out of the event, paving the way for a full list of eight teams who play in the North American region.
The full list of participating teams at DreamHack ZOWIE Open Austin:
Luminosity Gaming
Tempo Storm
Counter Logic Gaming
Team Liquid
Cloud9
Selfless
Splyce
NRG
You can still buy tickets for the event here.
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QUICKPOLL Are you looking forward to DreamHack: Austin? Yes
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Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Lord Hunt: "This bill would have been very, very damaging to our police forces"
The government has suffered a surprise defeat in the House of Lords over its plans for directly elected police commissioners in England and Wales.
Peers backed a Lib Dem amendment, by 188 votes to 176, blocking the idea.
Critics had warned that the plans could do "irreparable damage" to the police service by putting too much power in the hands of one person.
The Home Office said the policy had been backed by both coalition partners and they would seek to proceed with it.
The plan for directly elected police and crime commissioners, which would replace elected police authorities in England and Wales - excluding London - is one of the government's flagship crime and policing policies.
'Lack of evidence'
Peers concerned about the plan had been expected to push for the idea to be piloted in a handful of areas rather than being introduced around the country at the same time.
But the Lords went further during Wednesday's debate, as Labour and Lib Dem rebels joined forces to remove clauses from the Police Reform Bill giving the go-ahead to the elected commissioners.
They argued commissioners should be chosen by a police and crime panel from among its members and not elected - a position supported by a majority of 12 in a vote at the end of the debate.
The consensus is that having single-elected commissioners who can just hire and fire chief constables at will would be a disaster Lord Hunt, Shadow home affairs spokesman Police reforms: Key pointsClegg: 'We do influence Tories'
Lib Dem peer Baroness Harris, who lead the opposition to the plans, said they posed "great risks to policing" and raised doubts about who would have the power to hire and fire chief constables.
"I am very concerned that the evidence base for making this change is incredibly thin and the consequences of implementing it have not been thoroughly researched or properly thought through," she said.
But Home Office minister Baroness Browning said: "The current model with police forces accountable to police authorities simply doesn't provide the public with the mechanism for holding their police service to account."
She said: "A singly elected representative means a responsive voice to local people, both visible and accountable - an elected individual charged with being the voice of some of the most vulnerable people, particularly those who are victims of crime.
"Somebody who ensures those voices are heard and acted upon at both the local and national level."
Among those voting against the government included former Liberal leader Lord Steel and former Metropolitan Police commissioners and now cross-bench peers Lord Blair and Lord Condon.
BBC political correspondent Sean Curran said the vote was a surprise and the government could now face a battle with the Lords as it seeks to reintroduce the clauses into the legislation, potentially having to make further concessions to do this.
However, it may wait until the legislation returns to the Commons before seeking to re-insert the proposals, he added.
'Lib Dem muscle'
The policy, although endorsed by the Conservatives and Lib Dems in their coalition agreement a year ago, has been a source of growing tension between the two parties in recent weeks.
Earlier on Wednesday, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg called for his party to be "more muscular" in standing up for his party's values in government and more assertive in key policy areas.
Ministers have acknowledged concerns about how the commissioners would be held to account and the role of the proposed police and crime panels designed to oversee their powers. They say adequate "checks and balances" will be put in place.
After Wednesday's defeat, the Home Office said the election of police commissioners was clearly set out in the coalition accord - the basis for the government's policy programme.
"So while we will consider the debate in the Lords, we will look to redress this in the Commons," a spokesman said.
But Labour said the "heart had been ripped" out of the proposals by the Lords defeat and urged the government to make an urgent statement on the future of the legislation - which they suggested could not survive in its current form.
"The consensus is that having single-elected commissioners who can just hire and fire chief constables at will would be a disaster," shadow home office spokesman Lord Hunt told the BBC.
"It would reduce public confidence, it would mean policeman having political labels. The Lords gave it due consideration and found the bill wanting and they have chucked out the worst bits of it." | {
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You’re a legendary NFL quarterback, a Super Bowl winner, with a sea of fans wearing your No. 12 jersey. Your name is synonymous with the cold-weather East Coast market you represent. QB to the sports world, and GQ to the celebrity scene, you finish your illustrious career in the other conference and under the swaying palms in a sunny corner of the country.
You’re Tom Brady.
And Joe Namath.
As Brady prepared Wednesday to leave New England for his new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Namath was at home in Southeastern Florida and could empathize with what the superstar quarterback likely was feeling.
“For me, I felt very sad, very awkward about leaving the people in the city, the people in New York, the fans, the guys I made buddies with throughout the years,” said Namath, 76, recalling when he left the New York Jets after 12 seasons to finish his career with the Los Angeles Rams.
Namath was one of three Super Bowl quarterbacks to speak to The Times about different aspects of Brady’s big transition.
Joe Namath can relate to what Tom Brady will be going through when the long-time Patriots quarterback joins the Buccaneers. (Michael Owens / Getty Images)
“If it hadn’t been for Chuck being there — maybe sort of like Bruce Arians being in Tampa Bay — I’m not sure I would have gone.” Joe Namath on Chuck Knox being head coach of Rams when he came to L.A.
Brad Johnson, the only quarterback to hoist the Lombardi Trophy for the Buccaneers, discussed the transition — and excitement — that awaits the Patriots icon.
Matt Hasselbeck, who was 40 in his final season with the Indianapolis Colts, understands the challenge of connecting with teammates who are nearly a generation younger. Brady will turn 43 in training camp.
Four decades separate the Hall of Fame careers of Brady and Namath, and the game has changed on and off the field. For instance, whereas Brady has a chain of TB12 stores, Broadway Joe had the nightclub Bachelors III.
“It was a different life when you were an athlete back in the ‘70s than it is today,” Namath said. “The support system from the organization today is like 24/7 as far as nutrition, training, all that stuff. The facility is almost open 24 hours a day to you. Back then, we had a normal routine of meetings, and, say, you’d spend four hours at the facility. The rest of the day you’d have studying or going out to socialize. It was a different life.”
But Namath and Brady knew when it was time to leave the franchise they knew so well. And both left to play for teams coached by men steeped in Pennsylvania football. For Brady, that’s Buccaneers coach Bruce Arians, raised in York, Pa. And for Namath, the coach was Chuck Knox, who was born and raised in Sewickley, Pa.
“Chuck and I first met when I was a junior high basketball player in Pennsylvania,” said Namath, who grew up in nearby Beaver Falls. “We maintained a relationship through the years and it was important. If it hadn’t been for Chuck being there — maybe sort of like Bruce Arians being in Tampa Bay — I’m not sure I would have gone. The relationship I had with Chuck was huge.”
For Brady, getting comfortable in Tampa as quickly as possible is going to be key. That’s how Johnson sees it, having played for five different franchises in his 16-year NFL career.
“The odd things for Tom will be, ‘Man, I’m wearing a different colored uniform. Where do I line up in the huddle? How do I get in the building? Where do I park? These shoes are different. Where do I live? How do I get to the game?’ ” Johnson said.
Brad Johnson won a Super Bowl with Tampa Bay in the 2002-03 season. (Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times)
“Tom’s a great guy, and he’s going to make himself available to everybody, but it’s going to be awkward for him.” Brad Johnson, on Tom Brady adjusting to life in Tampa Bay.
“I went through a move a few times in my career, and that’s what you need to get over real quick. He needs to get a media guide and find out who are the secretaries, who are the cooks, who are the equipment managers, who are the trainers? Just being comfortable. That’s the No. 1 thing.”
Likewise, Johnson said, people in the Buccaneers facility are going to have to get used to having a world-famous celebrity walking their halls. Brady, the only quarterback to win six Super Bowl rings, is no ordinary player.
“Everyone there is going to be star struck at some point,” Johnson said. “Like, ‘Here he comes.’ You can’t help it for someone coming in with that much weight. But Tom’s a great guy, and he’s going to make himself available to everybody, but it’s going to be awkward for him.”
Arians is regarded by many as one of the all-time great quarterback coaches, but Brady is different than the ones under his tutelage in recent years — players such as Ben Roethlisberger, Andrew Luck, Carson Palmer, and Jameis Winston, each of whom took a beating standing in the pocket and slinging it down the field.
“Tom’s a rhythm quarterback,” Johnson said. “He plants his feet, and that ball’s coming out.”
That’s not to suggest Brady lacks toughness. In fact, he’s remarkably durable.
“Playing quarterback, it’s like riding a bull in a rodeo; you’re going to get hit,” Johnson said. “That comes with it. But Tom’s pretty athletic in a weird way in the pocket. So he knows where his outlets are. He knows the weaknesses of protection schemes and being able to get into a better play. Trying not to waste plays. That’s why he’s lasted so long. He really hasn’t missed games.”
Johnson said Brady will supercharge the Buccaneers fan base the way that Jon Gruden did when he arrived as coach in 2002 and promptly won a Super Bowl.
“I remember when Gruden came to town,” he said. “That flag got raised. The excitement was there immediately.”
After news broke Tuesday that Brady was headed to Tampa, ticket sales spiked. The virtual line to buy tickets on the team’s website was more than 6,000 people long. But fan interest in the Buccaneers has risen and fallen dramatically over the years. Tampa isn’t Green Bay or Cleveland, where ticket sales aren’t so dependent on the team’s performance.
In that respect, it’s not always sunny in Tampa.
“When you win, they cheer,” Johnson said. “When you lose, they boo.”
Judging by his history, Brady is unwavering in his approach to the game. But in many ways, he’ll have to be flexible in his new environment.
“He’s like ‘The Terminator’ now,” Johnson said. “This is the way he’s done it. This is his schedule. This is the way [Patriots coach] Bill Belichick presented Mondays and Wednesday mornings, and how they did the installations. It’s going to be different. He’s going to be, ‘Well, why are we doing it this way?’ Some of the things aren’t going to make sense to him.
“To be able to deal with change, that’s the huge element.”
Some changes are inevitable no matter where you are. Brady for years has said he wants to play until he’s 45, but every year a new wave of players in their early 20s comes in. That age gap only grows, and outside interests and obligations change.
Matt Hasselbeck played 10 seasons in Seattle, and led the Seahawks to a Super Bowl, but also played for Green Bay, Tennessee and Indianapolis. (Scott Cohen / US Presswire)
“You’re real people, and these are real decisions based on more than Xs and O’s.” Matt Hasselbeck, on family issues when players decide to switch teams
“As you get older and you’re in your 40s, your kids are getting older too,” said Hasselbeck, who played 17 seasons — including reaching a Super Bowl with Seattle — and now is an ESPN analyst. “It almost becomes a family decision. Obviously, your wife is very involved in whatever decision, I don’t care what business you’re in. But as your kids are getting older, getting to the point where maybe they’re playing organized sports, or having an opinion.
“I remember my last year, I had an eighth grader. We were making decisions like, ‘OK, what sports are you good at? Where are we going to go to high school?’ I had two hockey players and three lacrosse players. You can’t do that everywhere.”
Brady is the same way. The fact his wife and children live in Manhattan factored into his team choice, and is believed to be one of the reasons he turned down the Chargers.
“Sometimes in the media or as fans, we talk about these players as if it’s fantasy football,” Hasselbeck said. “We forget about parents and grandparents, being close to family, and whatever those things are that appeal to some of these players.
“You’re real people, and these are real decisions based on more than Xs and O’s.”
And that generation gap is real too.
“In my last three years in Indy, Andrew Luck came over to my house,” Hasselbeck said. “It was the first time he came over. The adults were in the kitchen and the kids were in the family room. Andrew was in the family room more than he was in the kitchen. I made a joke, like, ‘Hey, why don’t you come hang out with the adults?’
“He clipped back at me in a real witty way, ‘The people in here are closer to my age than you are.’ And I did the math and thought, ‘Wait a second, that’s true.’ ”
Then again, Brady is seemingly ageless. That’s why Namath predicts a lot of smiling faces among the fans of the three AFC East teams that had to face Brady twice a season.
“Fans that grew to be Patriot haters because they were so successful over the years,” he said. “Those kinds of fans are more than likely all happy to see Tom get out of there, get away from that Patriot uniform.” | {
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The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Well, what do you know: In 1980, after reported differences in communications strategy and just before the New Hampshire primary, Ronald Reagan fired his press secretary, Jim Lake, along with two other senior staffers. Ronald Reagan, the seasoned conservative, was in a pitched battle with his party’s moderate, George H.W. Bush. The Reagan campaign was in debt and seemed not to have The Republican Establishment with him.
In that moment, the future “Great Communicator,” and arguably one of the best Commanders-in Chief the Nation has ever seen – who would later create 18 million American jobs with tax and spending cuts, rebuild the American military and bring down the Soviet Union, and then put Justices like Antonin Scalia on the US Supreme Court – regrouped. He made a tough call, at a tough time, refocusing his team on his personal vision. Suddenly, the gloves were off and the lights were on – It was “Morning in America.”
Wind the clock forward and one has to wonder, does history repeat itself? Despite winning Iowa and placing strongly in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Senator Ted Cruz fired his communications chief – for what he viewed as a lapse in judgment. Cruz put an instant stop to that Establishment media narrative that he does not care, and went further – reaffirming that his campaign tolerates only the highest standards when issuing external communications involving any other candidate. In effect, Cruz regrouped.
Where will this lead the rising Cruz campaign, to higher levels of public engagement, public trust and a clear, simple, credible message? We shall see. In any event, the decision was a tough call. It was made at a tough time – mid-campaign. Yet it was a good one. The call is a show of strength. While no one alleges malice, there have been too many slips. Sometimes enthusiasm and zealous support – and this goes for Trump and Rubio also – can cross an invisible line, where good intentions end up demonizing, unfairly diminishing, or personalizing a foe. Cruz said “enough.”
As a man, it is clear that Senator Ted Cruz lives by high standards. His ethical and duty-focused approach to life is evident in his career. No one has ever questioned his business or legal ethics, his priority on faith, family and intellectual honesty. He has methodically attended committee and floor votes and meetings, and even pushed up against the limit of human endurance in filibusters over Obamacare. Now, having seen enough freelancing, he has fired his communications director. Good job. That was a tough call, but the right one.
Who knows if making tough staff decisions will help advance the winner of Iowa to win big in the coming primaries, as Reagan did in 1980, but one has to tip the hat to Cruz.
Making such tough choices – which sails to raise and which to lower, which to lash and which to unfurl - mid -storm – is serious business, and a sign of real leadership. Wherever the Cruz campaign goes from here, the rudder is clearly well-held, the compass bearing well-kept, and now the message likely to stay tight to the candidate and his priorities. A similar course re-set was needed in 1980. Now, let’s see if the Cruz Campaign reaches the same destination that a re-set Reagan campaign did. | {
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It'll be the first time the Preds have been on the ice as a team since April, with rosters for both games set to have a mix of veteran skaters and those trying to prove themselves worthy of further opportunities as training camp rolls along. With 20 players dressed for each game - and 55 in total on the Nashville roster - a majority of the Preds will see action in one of the contests today in Nashville.
The Preds begin their preseason schedule today with their annual doubleheader against the Florida Panthers with contests - at 3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. CT - from Bridgestone Arena.
Predators hockey has returned to Nashville, and there's a double serving to start.
The preseason doubleheader just five days into training camp allows Predators coaches and management a chance to evaluate a majority of their players in a game situation relatively early on, a clear benefit of the schedule.
For those who will participate in one of the two outings today, it's simply a chance to get back the feel of the game after a long offseason - and a chance to collect a win in the process.
"It's just doing the little things," Preds forward Colin Blackwell said. "I know a lot of us haven't really played with each other in these mixed exhibition games, so it's going to be a lot of new faces, but it's the same game of hockey that we're trying to play. Just kind of doing the little things, the details they've been stressing, play really fast and hunt those pucks. If we do that, good things are going to happen."
Video: Irwin, Blackwell prepare for preseason
"For myself it's just keep getting better," Preds defenseman Matt Irwin said. "Executing plays while you're moving, realizing your first option is usually the good option, things like that, just getting back into game speed, game pace, be physical when it's important to and necessary."
Irwin and Blackwell will both participate in the 3:30 p.m. matchup today. Colton Sissons, Nick Bonino, Mattias Ekholm, Rem Pitlick, Rocco Grimaldi, Austin Watson and Philip Tomasino are also among those who will play in the early game.
Ryan Ellis, Kyle Turris, Craig Smith, Eeli Tolvanen, Dante Fabbro, Mikael Granlund, Egor Afanasyev and Juuse Saros are all scheduled to participate in the 7 p.m. contest.
Full Preds rosters for both games may be seen here.
Last Time Out:
The Preds hosted a Blue & Gold scrimmage on Sunday afternoon at Ford Ice Center, with the teams playing to a 2-2 draw. Defenseman Frederic Allard and forward Eeli Tolvanen tallied for Team Blue, while forward Rocco Grimaldi and defenseman Adam Smith were responsible for Team Gold's markers. Tolvanen and Grimaldi scored on penalty shots, and Juuse Saros was perfect in his half of the scrimmage for Team Blue.
Saros, Connor Ingram, Troy Grosenick and Ken Appleby all had solid showings in net for the Preds; each of them took one of the two 25-minute halves for their respective sides.
All-Time Meetings:
The Preds are 9-4-(3)-2 all-time in preseason play against the Panthers dating back to Nashville's inaugural season in 1998-99.
When You Go:
Today's preseason contests at Bridgestone Arena are part of a celebration as hockey returns for the 2019-20 season. A Plaza Party begins at 11 a.m. CT on the arena plaza, complete with live music and food trucks to enjoy during the lunchtime hours. Click here for more on the preseason celebration.
ESPN 102.5 The Game will be broadcasting live at Pete and Terry's Tavern at the SoBro entrance of the arena from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. CT as part of the festivities.
Arena doors open at 2 p.m. CT ahead of the first game at 3:30 p.m.
Please note the updated Bridgestone Arena bag policy for the Predators' 2019-20 season:
Clear, clutch or no bags grant guests access to our Express Lanes. Bags that are made of solid material that fit within the 12-inch-by-12-inch-by-6-inch size requirement will be placed through an X-ray scanner upon entry. Backpacks and large bags are prohibited from Bridgestone Arena. All items brought are subject to a security search. Diaper bags that fit within the guidelines of the approved bags will be permitted.
Watch & Listen:
Both games from Bridgestone Arena (3:30 p.m. and 7 p.m. CT) may be heard on 102.5 The Game and the Preds Radio Network with Pete Weber and Hal Gill on the call. In addition, fans in the Predators television viewing area may watch a live stream on NashvillePredators.com. If you're experiencing blackout issues, it's recommended to try a different IP address (usually through a mobile device on cellular data). | {
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Resources > Materials and Shaders | Resources | Resources > Sites and repositories | Resources > Textures
Rob Tuytel has launched Texture Haven, a completely free to use crowd-funded PBR texture site. All the materials come with bump, displacement, normal, specular, diffuse and roughness maps available under a CC0 public domain license. Assets can be downloaded without an account.
Textures are currently available as JPG or PNG files in up to 4k resolution. If the Patreon powered crowdfunding effort meets its current target of $300 per month, 8K textures will be added too with more rewards promised if the drive continues to be successful.
At the time of publication 50 materials are available in 7 categories. Find out more on the Texture Haven website. | {
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Govt.-Funded News Outlet Finds Most School Shootings in Fed Report Didn’t Occur
In an amusing story, a government-funded media outlet notorious for its liberal slant found that the overwhelming majority of school shootings listed in a federal report never occurred. The embarrassing blunder involves Department of Education (DOE) figures stating that schools around the U.S. reported an alarming 235 shootings in one year. National Public Radio (NPR) launched an investigation and actually contacted every one of the schools included in the DOE data, which was gathered by its Office for Civil Rights. The figures focus on the 2015-2016 school year and reveal that “nearly 240 schools…reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.”
Three months later, after every school was contacted by NPR, the stats changed drastically. More than two-thirds of the reported gun incidents never happened, according to the news outlet. “We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports,” the article states. “In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn’t confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn’t meet the government’s parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn’t respond to our inquiries.” A program director at the nonprofit research organization that assisted NPR in analyzing the bogus government data is quoted in the piece saying: “When we’re talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful.”
Even though the DOE is the agency responsible for disseminating the erroneous information, in typical government fashion, it shrugged it off as no big deal. When asked for comment by reporters, the agency said it relies on school districts to provide accurate information. Evidently, the federal agency doesn’t bother checking data before publishing it as fact. In the meantime, the DOE has no plans to correct the errors. The article points out that the confusion comes at a time when the need for clear data on school violence has never been more pressing. Dozens of school safety measures have been enacted nationwide on the heels of high-profile school shootings in Texas and Florida and public districts are allocating large sums to boost campus security. “Our reporting highlights just how difficult it can be to track school-related shootings and how researchers, educators and policymakers are hindered by a lack of data on gun violence,” the NPR piece reads.
This is hardly an isolated incident of government inefficiency, but the seriousness of the matter should inspire the feds to provide the public—and policy makers—with accurate information. Instead, the DOE, a typical bloated agency with a $59 billion budget, passed the buck to the so-called civil rights data collection division which apparently plays fast and loose with facts. In the report with the skewed stats, schools were asked: “Has there been at least one incident at your school that involved a shooting (regardless of whether anyone was hurt)?” The DOE should have known better than to blindly publish the information. All it had to do was check out the easily available figures provided by a reputable group that maintains a reliable gun safety database. For the same school year that the DOE listed 235 shootings, the group had only 29. “There is little overlap between this list and the government’s, with only seven schools appearing on both,” the NPR story says. | {
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The Colorado Mammoth secured its first victory of the season during an 8-7 overtime win while playing spoiler to the Calgary Roughnecks’ championship celebrations as the 2018-19 NLL league victors raised its championship banner Saturday night. The evening featured a scrappy, defensive battle and was headlined by career-first goals for forwards Will Malcom and Dylan Kinnear and Calgary native Brett Craig.
Calgary got off to a quick start when Curtis Dickson converted a shot from just inside the restriction line to open the scoring for the Roughnecks less than two minutes into the first period before Tyler Pace added a second goal three minutes later.
Jacob Ruest got the Mammoth on the board with six minutes to play in the first by converting a precise feed from Chris Wardle past the right leg of Roughnecks goaltender Christian Del Bianco. Dan Taylor increased Calgary’s lead to 3-1 with a late first quarter power-play conversion by diving into the crease and beating Dillon Ward.
Will Malcom sparked an offensive second quarter for the Mammoth by netting his first career goal at the 11:37 mark to bring Colorado back within one. Just over two minutes later, Malcom logged his second career marker with a quick strike from the right side to tie the game at 3-3.
“It was a great feeling to get my first one and I’m glad I was able to help out the team,” said rookie forward Will Malcom, reflecting on his first NLL goal. “We did a great job tonight taking the game shift-by-shift and staying active at both ends of the floor. We have a good amount of speed on the squad, so we’ll look to continue using that to our advantage next week in Georgia.”
Jacob Ruest established Colorado’s first lead of the contest with six minutes left in the second quarter by converting a rebound from a Ryan Lee shot for his second goal of the evening and team-high fifth goal. Dylan Kinnear kept the momentum in favor of Colorado after receiving a behind-the-back pass from Chris Wardle and blindly chucking the ball on net as he fell to the ground for the no-look conversion.
Roughnecks forward Marshall King brought Calgary back within a goal near the end of the second quarter after a quick pump fake and conversion over Ward’s left shoulder as physical tendencies continued to escalate on the turf as the half came to an end. Colorado headed to the locker room with a combined five goals and nine assists on 20 shots.
Roughnecks defenseman Eli Salama provided the lone third quarter goal with a speedy shot to beat Dillon Ward and tie the game at 5-5. Solid goaltending and defensive spacing were key for both teams, as the third period came to an end with only one goal allowed.
Brett Craig re-established Colorado’s lead five minutes into the fourth quarter with his first career goal by streaking down the field on a breakaway and bouncing a low, spinning shot past Calgary’s Christian Del Bianco to make the contest 6-5 in favor of the Mammoth.
Marshall King logged his second goal of the game less than three minutes later to knot the game at 6-6 with seven minutes in regulation remaining.
After holding the ball and surveying his options, Kyle Killen converted a diving goal from behind Del Bianco’s crease at the 10:08 mark before Calgary’s Dan Taylor provided yet another equalizer less than 30 seconds later to force overtime.
Following seven minutes of an intense, high-energy overtime session, Jordan Gilles scooped up a loose ball and sprinted down the field before providing the game-winning goal on a breakaway conversion past Del Bianco on the right side of the net.
The 8-7 overtime victory against the divisional opponent Roughnecks marks Colorado’s first road trip and first win for the 2019-20 campaign, bringing the team to a 1-1 record.
Led by Dillon Ward’s 46 saves, the goaltender picked up his first win of the season and has registered 100 total saves in his first two games, which ranks second in the league (Del Bianco ranks first with 104.)
“After dropping our first game by one goal, we wanted to come out and secure a win before the holidays – I think we executed our game plan and we got a good bounce at the end,” goaltender Dillon Ward said following the Mammoth’s road victory.
“I love how composed and confident our defense is playing right now – We’ve established a core defensively and have built around these guys and I think we’re going to do some great things this year defensively.”
Through two games, the competitive West Division boasts four teams with 1-1 records while the San Diego Seals sit at 0-2 through four weeks of league play.
Colorado will look to continue its consistent defensive efforts as the Mammoth travel to Georgia to face off with the Swarm at Infinite Energy Arena Dec. 28. Through two contests, forward Jacob Ruest leads the Mammoth in goals (5) and points (7) as Eli McLaughlin continues to pace Colorado players with four assists. Robert Hope’s 22 loose balls ties him for first overall in the league alongside San Diego’s Kyle Rubisch.
Tickets to Colorado’s Jan. 4 matchup against the Vancouver Warriors and all Mammoth home games can be purchased at AltitudeTickets.com. Mammoth road games can be streamed live via Bleacher Report Live. | {
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De esta forma le dio la razón a la Contraloría General de la República: el texto de la nueva ley del Sernac no debe contener las facultades sancionatorias.
La decisión fue adoptada de manera unánime por los ochos ministros presentes, aunque con distintas consideraciones.
El requerimiento del Ejecutivo se interpuso luego de que la Contraloría, el 27 de abril pasado, se negara a tomar razón del decreto promulgatorio del nuevo Sernac, argumentando que el texto contenía disposiciones, como las facultades sancionatorias, que habían sido declaradas inconstitucionales el 18 de enero por el TC, en el marco de un control de constitucionalidad preventivo.
El Mercurio". Conoce más detalles en "".
SANTIAGO.- El Tribunal Constitucional resolvió rechazar el requerimiento interpuesto por el Presidente de la República,, con el que se buscaba resolver el conflicto de constitucionalidad generado con la promulgación de la ley del(Sernac). | {
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"Guiding Brain Tumor Resection Using Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering Nanoparticles and a Hand-Held Raman Scanner"
ACS Nano
Cancerous brain tumors are notorious for growing back despite surgical attempts to remove them — and for leading to a dire prognosis for patients. But scientists are developing a new way to try to root out malignant cells during surgery so fewer or none get left behind to form new tumors. The method, reported in the journal ACS Nano, could someday vastly improve the outlook for patients.
Moritz F. Kircher and colleagues at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center point out that malignant brain tumors, particularly the kind known as glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), are among the toughest to beat. Although relatively rare, GBM is highly aggressive, and its cells multiply rapidly. Surgical removal is one of the main weapons doctors have to treat brain tumors. The problem is that currently, there’s no way to know if they have taken out all of the cancerous cells. And removing extra material “just in case” isn’t a good option in the brain, which controls so many critical processes. The techniques surgeons have at their disposal today are not accurate enough to identify all the cells that need to be excised. So Kircher’s team decided to develop a new method to fill that gap.
The researchers used a handheld device resembling a laser pointer that can detect “Raman nanoprobes” with very high accuracy. These nanoprobes are injected the day prior to the operation and go specifically to tumor cells, and not to normal brain cells. Using a handheld Raman scanner in a mouse model that mimics human GBM, the researchers successfully identified and removed all malignant cells in the rodents’ brains. Also, because the technique involves steps that have already made it to human testing for other purposes, the researchers conclude that it has the potential to move readily into clinical trials. Surgeons might be able to use the device in the future to treat other types of brain cancer, they say.
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Institutes of Health. | {
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Alaska Airlines is changing its look for the first time in 25 years.
The Seattle-based airline debuted its new plane paint scheme, or livery, and logo on a Boeing 737-800 in Seattle. It will install new branding overnight at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The refresh includes a new Alaska wordmark and color scheme, as well as a simplified version of its "Eskimo" logo, painted on the tail fin of its planes.
Alaska will take delivery of four new Boeing 737s featuring the new theme, and it will have 40 planes using it by the end of the year. The company said it will adopt the new scheme at its other airports by the end of the year.
-- Elliot Njus
[email protected]
503-294-5034
@enjus | {
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Tonight the UFC is back in the Conor McGregor business as the Featherweight champ moves up to welterweight to face Nate Diaz. The co-main event will feature Rousey-killer Holly Holm defending her women's bantamweight title against Miesha Tate.
The fights will air live on pay-per-view in the U.S. from MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nev. starting at 10 p.m. ET. There will be four preliminary fights on Fox Sports 1 at 8 p.m. ET and four more on the UFC's Fight Pass streaming service at 6:30 p.m. ET.
The five fight pay-per-view opens with women's bantamweights Amanda Nunes vs. Valentina Shevchenko, followed by a pair of light heavyweight bouts featuring Gian Villante vs. Ilir Latifi and Corey Anderson vs. Tom Lawlor.
The four fight Fox Sports 1 preliminaries are headlined by welterweights Brandon Thatch vs. Siyar Bahadurzada preceded by welterweights Erick Silva vs. Nordine Taleb, middleweights Vitor Miranda vs. Marcelo Guimaraes and featherweights Darren Elkins vs. Chas Skelly.
The Fight Pass prelims open the festivities with a pair of lightweight bouts featuring Diego Sanchez vs. Jim Miller and Justin Salas vs. Jason Saggo and card opener featherweights Julian Erosa vs. Teruto Ishihara.
No matter where in the world you are, here's how you can catch all the action from Las Vegas.
Online:
-- Fight Pass (early prelims), starting at 6:30 p.m. ET
-- UFC.TV (PPV main card), starting at 10 p.m. ET (excluding United Kingdom, Brazil and India)
-- YouTube (PPV main card), starting at 10 p.m. ET (United States and Canada only)
Cable/Satellite:
-- Fox Sports 1 (prelims), starting at 8 p.m.
-- DirecTV and Dish (PPV main card), starting at 10 p.m.
-- On your television (PPV main card), starting at 10 p.m. (see list of U.S. and international viewing options below)
Tablet/Mobile:
-- Android Market
-- App Store
Local Area:
-- Bar or restaurant (Joe Hand Promotions)
You can also watch UFC 196 through your television or set-top box, including Apple TV and Roku, as well as through a video game console such as PS3 or PS4.
Cable/Satellite Airings for the main UFC 196 card
North America
US -- Pay-Per-View
Canada -- Pay-Per-View
Central/South America
Brazil -- Combate
Mexico -- UFC Network
Argentina -- UFC Network
Chile -- UFC Network
Colombia -- UFC Network
Ecuador -- UFC Network
Nicaragua -- Channel 13
Panama -- UFC Network
Paraguay -- UFC Network
Peru -- UFC Network
Rep. Dominicana -- UFC Network
Venezuela -- UFC Network
Pacific Rim
Australia -- Main Event
New Zealand -- Sky TV
Brunei -- Fox South East Asia
Cambodia -- Fox South East Asia
China -- Fox South East Asia
China -- Guangdong TV
China -- LETV
China -- PPTV
Hong Kong -- Fox South East Asia
India -- Sony SIX SD, HD & KIK
Indonesia -- Fox South East Asia
Indonesia -- MNC/RCTI
Japan -- WoWoW
Macau -- Fox South East Asia
Malaysia -- Fox South East Asia (Delayed)
Micronesia -- Fox South East Asia
Mongolia -- Sansar HD
Myanmar -- Fox South East Asia
Palau -- Fox South East Asia
Papau New Guinea -- Fox South East Asia
Philippines -- Balls & ABS CBN Sports and Action
Singapore -- Fox South East Asia
South Korea -- Superaction SPOTV Plus
Thailand -- Fox South East Asia
Thailand -- RS Channel 8
Vietnam -- Fox South East Asia
Europe/Middle East/Africa | {
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Pluto TV announced today that they have added seven new channels to the service. The free ad-supported streaming service new slate includes VH1 Unscripted, VH1 Hip Hop Family, BET Her, BET Homecoming, VH1 Love & Hip Hop, VH1 Black Ink Crew, and VH1 RuPaul’s Drag Race.
Over the summer, the service added new channels that offered classic shows such as MTV Cribs, Wild n’ Out and also give you a chance to watch past VMAs, Comedy Central Roasts as well as Ridiculousness. In May, the free ad-supported streaming service, which now has 18 million monthly actives, launched 14 linear channels with classic content from Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon.
VH1 Unscripted
VH1’s Unscripted channel is a curated collection of classic reality hits featuring high-profile figures from the worlds of sports, music and entertainment. Whether they’re living the high life, reinventing themselves, hustling to the next level, or re-focusing on family, they’re all just trying to find their balance. Watch to follow along as they navigate relationships, careers, and a whole lot of drama!
VH1 Hip Hop Family
Hip hop has a new home. VH1’s Hip Hop Family channel brings two famous hip-hop families together under one roof. Watch T.I. & Tiny: The Family Hustle from the beginning, where the Harris family works together to navigate parenthood, their careers, and the next chapter of their lives. Run’s House chronicles the family life of Rev Run, legendary rapper from Run-DMC and hip hop pioneer.
BET Her
Welcome to the FIRST and ONLY channel for black women! Bringing you a first of its kind experience that celebrates, inspires and supports black women, BET Her is a destination that includes a mix of blockbuster hits, classic movies, music and original series; all featuring black women front and center. As the premiere destination for stories by and for black women, this channel promises you authenticity and a front row seat to the women leading the global influence in music, fashion, celebrity, and entertainment.
BET Homecoming
BET Homecoming is a channel dedicated to celebrating the legacies and culture of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Explore life on real and fictional historically black campuses though iconic TV Series, movies and music videos.
Love and Hip Hop
From the Big Apple to The A – watch hip hop stars in New York and Atlanta live, learn, and love as they navigate the music industry. VH1’s Love & Hip Hop New York follows the lives and relationships of artists making their mark on the city that never sleeps. In Love & Hip Hop Atlanta watch the A’s hip-hop elite work through the ups and downs of juggling their personal and professional lives on classic episodes. Two cities. One hustle. Together on Pluto TV.
Black Ink Crew
Ink runs deep with VH1’s Black Ink Crew: New York. On Black Ink Crew: New York, watch the origins of a tattoo empire as Ceaser and the OG Crew navigate their lives and relationships while working to put their brand on the map. In Black Ink Crew Chicago, the team at 9Mag brings more tats and more drama to The Windy City. Black Ink Crew New York and Black Ink Crew Chicago – united in ink on Pluto TV.
Ru Paul’s Drag Race
Get dragged into the phenomenon! Watch classic episodes of the Emmy® Award-winning sensation, RuPaul’s Drag Race, for all the style, fierce competition, and backstage drama. Queens compete in challenges, work the runway, and throw shade as they slay, sashay, and lip sync for their lives in a face off for the title of America’s Next Drag Superstar. Start from season 1 and see where this mega hit series began. | {
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People living in areas contaminated most by radioactive material released by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster two years ago in Japan have a higher risk of developing cancer over their lifetime, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.
The UN agency released a 200-page report on Thursday saying it "estimates that the lifetime risk for some cancers may be somewhat elevated above base-line rates in certain age and sex groups that were in the areas most affected".
A 9.0 magnitude earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, killed nearly 19,000 people and devastated the Daiichi nuclear plant, triggering meltdowns and spewing radiation. At least 160,000 people were forced to flee their homes.
"A breakdown of data, based on age, gender and proximity to the plant, does show a higher cancer risk for those located in the most contaminated parts," Maria Neira, WHO director for public health and environment, said in a statement.
In the most contaminated area, the WHO estimated that there was a 70 percent higher risk of females exposed as infants developing thyroid cancer over their lifetime.
The thyroid is the most exposed organ as radioactive iodine concentrates there and children are deemed especially vulnerable.
The report concluded that for the general population inside Japan, the predicted health risks were low, but that one-third of emergency workers were estimated to have increased risk.
But there was no discernible increase in health risks expected outside Japan, the WHO said in the report, which was based on a comprehensive assessment by international experts. | {
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Shuffletron is a nice music player for the terminal written in Common Lisp, “based on search and tagging”, that seduced me with its attention to details. Moreover, its author was very responsive to fix a couple issues.
The first time you launch it, it will ask for a music repository and will propose to scan it for id3 tags with the scanid3 command. It is optional, but it allows to print colored information:
The basic commands to know are the following:
search with / followed by your search terms. You’ll notice that your prompt changed from library to xy matches . You can refine the results by searching again. To enter a new query we have to go back to the library, with as many successive “enters” as needed.
to play songs: play . We can select which songs to play, using their index: comma-separated indexes of songs: 1,3,10 a selection with a dash and an optional end: 1-10 , 0- a combination of the two: 1,3-10 .
there are the obvious pause , shuffle , skip , next , seek , repeat ,…
now to show the currently playing song.
There is also a queue, id3 tags management, profiles to use an alternate library ( ./shuffletron --help ), and even an alarm clock feature which allows to program music with something like:
alarm at 7:45 am # \"at\" is optional and doesn't change the meaning alarm 7:45 am alarm 9 pm alarm 7 # If AM/PM not specified, assumes AM alarm in 5 minutes # Relative alarm times, in minutes or hours alarm in 10m # minutes, minute, mins, min, , m are synonyms alarm in 7 hours # hours, hour, hr, h are synonyms alarm in 8h alarm in 7:29 # h:mm format - seven hours, twenty-nine minutes alarm reset # off/never/delete/disable/cancel/clear/reset
I can see a use for a pomodoro-like technic :)
I’ll list the complete set of commands below (available on the sources), but first a note on installation.
Installation
Shuffletron doesn’t provide executables (yet ?). The procedure is now documented in the readme so you just have to
make shuffletron-bin # sbcl sudo make install ./shuffletron
This last line calls a script and it is actually important to use it, to link dependencies and to use rlwrap . There is room for improvement here.
To read Flac and Ogg files, you need those system dependencies:
apt install libflac-dev apt install libvorbis-dev
Finally, scanning my library failed for the first time, because of badly manually encoded ogg files coming from youtube. The mixalot library prefered to fail instead of showing error messages. If you encounter a similar problem, see this PR.
All commands
In the application, type help , and help commands to get this list:
Command list: /[query] Search library for [query]. show Print search matches, highlighting songs in queue. back Undo last search. [songs] Play list of songs. all Play all songs in selection (equivalent to \"0-\") +[songs] Append list of songs to queue. pre[songs] Prepend list of songs to queue. random Play a random song from the current selection. random QUERY Play a random song matching QUERY shuffle SONGS Play songs in random order. queue Print queue contents and current song playing. shuffle Randomize order of songs in queue. clear Clear the queue (current song continues playing) loop Toggle loop mode (loop through songs in queue) qdrop Remove last song from queue qdrop RANGES Remove songs from queue qtag TAGS Apply tags to all songs in queue fromqueue Transfer queue to selection toqueue Replace queue with selection now Print name of song currently playing. play Resume playing stop Stop playing (current song pushed to head of queue) pause Toggle paused/unpaused. skip Skip currently playing song. If looping is enabled, this song won't played again. next Advance to next song. If looping is enabled, the current song will be enqueued. repeat N Add N repetitions of currently playing song to head of queue. seek TIME Seek to time (in [h:]m:ss format, or a number in seconds) seek +TIME Seek forward seek -TIME Seek backward startat TIME Always start playback at a given time (to skip long intros) tag List tags of currently playing song. tag TAGS Add one or more textual tags to the current song. untag TAGS Remove the given tags from the currently playing song. tagged TAGS Search for files having any of specified tags. tags List all tags (and # occurrences) within current query. killtag TAGS Remove all occurances of the given tags tagall TAGS Apply tags to all selected songs untagall TAGS Remove given tags from all selected songs time Print current time alarm Set alarm (see \"help alarms\") scanid3 Scan new files for ID3 tags prescan Toggle file prescanning (useful if file IO is slow) exit Exit the program. help [topic] Help
See also
mpd, an interface to Music Player Daemon in CL.
other music players: | {
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It was the perfect juxtaposition.
Here were the Boston Bruins, energized since the switch to interim coach Bruce Cassidy, slicing through the Montreal Canadiens, who can't score, can't defend, can't stop the puck, and have begun process of circling the drain once over - in danger of wasting another sensational start under Michel Therrien.
Connecting these dots didn't require mental gymnastics.
Five weeks ago, when the Canadiens emerged from the holiday break with four wins and 10 points from their first six starts, they had the look of runaway champions in the Atlantic Division. They were 10 points ahead of Boston with a couple games in their pocket, and on the heels of Columbus for the NHL's best record.
They were a bit banged up, and Carey Price was uncharacteristically shaky, but they were winning. Life was grand.
And they've been in the doldrums ever since.
Montreal's attack, which averaged over three goals a game in the first half, has sunk to the league average; its defense has become readily permeable, having conceded a seismic shot total; its goalies are stopping pucks at a subverting .895 rate, on the hook the third-most goals allowed.
The result? Montreal's taken six wins from 18 starts over the last five weeks, and has fashioned a win rate that exceeds only the Avalanche.
Ottawa now owns the division's top points percentage.
Swept by the current
We often arrive at the decision that a coach needs to be axed far too easily. In many respects, it serves as default recourse for the simple reason that players and executives are simply far less vulnerable. But while Marc Bergevin's decision-making is subject to debate, the bottom line is that he has routinely handed Therrien capable rosters.
And the directive ends up failing them.
Therrien would fall short of being considered a brilliant tactical mind, and that resolute certainty the great coaches typically maintain isn't a quality most would assign to the Canadiens bench boss.
But while Therrien's record suggest he's been nothing short of a proficient head coach over the last decade, he's failed at one of the most critical aspects of the profession. His teams have commonly been unable to resist and manage the challenges that come up over the course of the year.
Once the fire starts, it burns uncontrollably.
This lack of resolve was most evident last season when Price was injured, and the house of cards fell. It was clear Therrien was without the ability to organize push back. But Bergevin passed the buck and spared his coach, resulting in another jeopardized season inside Montreal's window of opportunity.
The team has six games remaining before the trade deadline in the second-to-last season before the best netminder on the planet can write his own ticket in free agency.
Clock's ticking.
Bergevin can't let this linger. Either he stays with Therrien, issuing the coach another vote of confidence this week with conviction that he can finally get this team to dig in, or he introduces a new voice when the players return from their beach destinations at the end of the week.
A bump similar to the response Boston has provided its new coach will assist the Habs in the postseason chase. But they can't arrive at a determination on a whim; the immediate future is only half the equation.
Montreal must commit to a resolution now, because spring is far too important for the disruption that comes with indecision. | {
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Description
The one plugin you need to rock your account even more! A more hardcore version of the famous “Hello Dolly”. Displays meaningful and badass Metal & Rock lyrics in your WordPress Dashboard. This is a very simple plugin, just instal, activate and it will do all the magic by itself.
If this plugin gets some attention, I will add some cool features and a settings page for adjusting text position, size, color and so on, if you also have any ideas or you want to contribute, feel free to email me at: [email protected] or at Github.
For now, I will keep updating the lyrics regularly.
Have fun and Keep Rocking \m/ | {
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Subsets and Splits